From mstainsby at tao.ca  Fri Sep  1 01:01:54 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 00:01:54 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Part II
References: <F8tltaZVjZfkIQJmSG100004784@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <002b01c013e2$835e35e0$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

who was that Tom?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Warren" <tomzbox at hotmail.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 4:32 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Part II


> Don't worry Georges,
> 
> As his last admin act before going on hiatus, Mark unsubbed this guy for 
> hubris.
> 
> ... and blocked him, thankfully.
> 
> Tom
> 
> >From: Georges Drouet <gdrouet at brutele.be>
> >Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Subject: Re: [CrashList] Part II
> >Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:10:34 +0200
> >
> >Is this a very useful stuff to find a solution for the Crash?
> 
> _________________________________________________________________________
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> _______________________________________________
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> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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From aabdo at webtv.net  Fri Sep  1 03:51:17 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 04:51:17 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
In-Reply-To: "aaron hoffer" <hofferaaron@hotmail.com>'s message of Fri, 01 Sep 2000 01:26:45 GMT
Message-ID: <6168-39AF7C15-3407@storefull-235.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Aaron, I got to tell you, Man, this idea liberals have of being
pragmatists, while more revolution oriented activists are seen as
sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, is unbridled poppycock.

My argument with you, is against your idea of working via small
compromises with power, for small incremental changes.        That's a
road to obtaining zip, make that capital letter ZIP.

Don't work to weaken the system instead of working to beat the system.
Is that really all you want, changes in the system?      Change comes in
bursts. as the system is broken down, not in little granted-from-the-top
reforms.

So stop writing down your list of requests on the petition to hand to
the Czar, and get with the program of struggling for victory.

My apologies to all the list members for this overly abstract
discussion.      It's just that liberals awhine, should be slapped in
the face.     HARD.       Work with liberals, gasp))))..... do we have
to???

Tony 
________________________________



Tony, I agree completely that the capitalist system must go, lets get
that straight. What I don't agree with is that we all sit around with
are thumbs up our asses until the crash rips the foundations of
capitalism apart. That day may still be a ways off, and I personally
think we can do a lot of good, even if capitalism remains strong for
some time, although we should, and probably must, be working to weaken
the system even as we fight for changes within it. 
??????My argument with you is your all or nothing attitude,
which I see as self defeating. Why not work towards making a better
world now, this may mean collaboration with social dems, and (gasp!)
even liberals. And yes I do agree that many gains won will be attacked
immediately under our current system. However at the same time we will
be building a bigger, more effective mass movement that will be
essential if our goal is to get rid of this rotten system. 
??????Bye for now Tony, I need a drink, 
??????????????????Aaron.












From twood at uwc.ac.za  Fri Sep  1 03:56:15 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 1 Sep 2000 11:56:15 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <s9af998b.084@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Fri Sep  1 04:05:07 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 1 Sep 2000 12:05:07 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
Message-ID: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Fri Sep  1 10:42:43 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 16:42:43 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Part II
Message-ID: <F70WoBDyseVwrblZz0200000576@hotmail.com>



>From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby at tao.ca>
>Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
>To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
>Subject: Re: [CrashList] Part II
>Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 00:01:54 -0700
>
>who was that Tom?
>

The person who was posting all the King George and lonnggggggggg arcane 
stuff about how we colonists should get back under the control of the crown. 
  MacReady? .. somebody like that.

He's prolly lucky we don't take him up on it. Can you imagine 270 million 
americans suddenly clamoring for National Health, the Dole and etc etc from 
parliament?

Plus, if EYE returned I would want to cause a stink about the crown having 
given up the Acquitaine and Normandy ... but you know how us red-baiting 
imperialist apologists are. <G>

Best,
Tom
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From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Fri Sep  1 17:09:17 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 19:09:17 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <55.a652d89.26e1911d@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/01/2000 03:58:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
hofferaaron at hotmail.com writes:

<<    Tony, I agree completely that the capitalist system must go, lets get 
 that straight. What I don't agree with is that we all sit around with are 
 thumbs up our asses until the crash rips the foundations of capitalism 
 apart. That day may still be a ways off, and I personally think we can do a 
 lot of good, even if capitalism remains strong for some time, although we 
 should, and probably must, be working to weaken the system even as we fight 
 for changes within it.
 
    My argument with you is your all or nothing attitude, which I see as self 
 defeating. Why not work towards making a better world now, this may mean 
 collaboration with social dems, and (gasp!) even liberals. And yes I do 
 agree that many gains won will be attacked immediately under our current 
 system. However at the same time we will be building a bigger, more 
 effective mass movement that will be essential if our goal is to get rid of 
 this rotten system.
  >>

Thank you, Aaron. I struggled with trying to formulate an answer this 
succinct, and finally gave up. This is exactly what I was striving for.
Joan



From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Fri Sep  1 20:51:16 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 21:51:16 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
References: <6168-39AF7C15-3407@storefull-235.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <39B06B23.64EB10A9@ilstu.edu>

Tony Abdo wrote:

> Aaron, I got to tell you, Man, this idea liberals have of being
> pragmatists, while more revolution oriented activists are seen as
> sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, is unbridled poppycock.
>

I realized about 30 years ago that the chief weakness of reformism is its
utter failure
to achieve reforms. (One can learn this from Lenin -- but not by just or
even mostly
by reading his "big" works of theory. It emerges from reading page by page
in order
the first 10 to 15 volumes of his CW -- seeing him engaged in the daily
practice of
making sense of the struggle as it unfolded.) I mention here just three
points among
many that have to be taken into consideration in constructing tactics and
strategy.
First, we (however "we" is defined) are never going to have a majority --
and to win
our victories (small or large) must depend on the determination of the
masses who do
rally to the struggle. Secondly, voluntarism (the idea that by our
correctness we can
as it were force people into action) is utterly hopeless. In fact the
conditions that
generate popular resistance are almost never predictable. Rather we must be
ready to
respond to such upsurges when they occur (as they will) behind our backs as
it were.
And third -- it is always worthwhile, when possible, to strive to make life
a bit better for
those who suffer now. But those who aim only at that (as.apparently Aaron
does) will
achieve nothing, not even a few extra rations or vials of anti-biotic for
the dying.
Tony is certainly correct on the utter utopianism of "pragmatic" liberals.

Carrol





From kenfree at nettaxi.com  Fri Sep  1 21:42:24 2000
From: kenfree at nettaxi.com (kenfree at nettaxi.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 20:42:24 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Au revoir!
Message-ID: <200009020342.UAA08421@mail18.bigmailbox.com>

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From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Fri Sep  1 21:31:00 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 03:31:00 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd: [stop-imf] Moscow tries to calm IMF concerns over energy controls
Message-ID: <LAW-F139jrRZ1UbDBRA000000f8@hotmail.com>

  This article brings up an issue I haven't seen much about on this list. It 
seems to me that the U.S and maybe some of the larger EU countries will be 
able to obtain sufficient resources even when shortages are occurring 
elsewhere.

   NAFTA, for example, forbids either Canada or Mexico from curtailing the 
export of any commodity in times of shortage unless, they cut back an equal 
amount in their home countries. Next year there will be a big meeting in 
Quebec city to bring all countries in the hemisphere under these same trade 
rules. I would like to know what list members think the ramifications to  
the crash will be, if any, from these types of trade agreements, and 
conditional ties on loans. It seems to me that they buffer the U.S, at 
least, from feeling the full consequences of an energy shortage and would 
hence prolong U.S power.


>
>Moscow tries to calm IMF concerns over energy controls
>
>MOSCOW, Aug 30 (AFP) - Russian deputy prime minister Viktor Khristenko
>attempted to justify Moscow's decision to reimpose energy sector controls
>in talks Wednesday with International Monetary Fund and World Bank
>officials here.
>
>At a meeting with the IMF's Moscow representative Martin Gilman and World
>Bank representative Michael Carter, he said the measures were only
>temporary and aimed at preventing energy shortages during the coming
>winter, said ITAR-TASS news agency.
>
>The controls will force Russian oil companies to sell some of their
>product on the home market even though they could make more money through
>exporting.
>
>The restrictions were originally lifted in June on IMF insistence as part
>of structural reforms it demanded in return for loans.
>
>The IMF has already said that the reimposition could delay new agreements,
>Russian media reports said.
>
>Carter said that on September 12 the World Bank would be considering loans
>to Russia worth about 200 million dollars for its coal and timber sectors.
>
>The Russian budget for 2001 is counting on IMF loans worth 1.8 billion
>dollars and 900 million dollars from the World Bank.
>
>The IMF suspended loans to Russia in September last year because of the
>lack of progres sin economic reforms.

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From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Fri Sep  1 21:54:11 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 23:54:11 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Loren Goldner....
Message-ID: <f7.26723ad.26e1d3e3@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/1/00 6:27:18 PM Pacific Daylight Time, twood at uwc.ac.za 
writes:

<<but this man's work is just so rich and if I can't get any of you to go to 
his
 website I will have to keep posting snippets >>

You are right again. There is a goodly amount for me to chew on 
there--perhaps a weekend's worth; since it's raining here (hooray), I can use 
the weather to advantage.
Thank you.
Joan



From aabdo at webtv.net  Sat Sep  2 00:32:31 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 01:32:31 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Pollution Damages
Message-ID: <25340-39B09EFF-3428@storefull-233.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

  
Radar probes pollution damage

By environment correspondent Alex Kirby in Longyearben, Svalbard 

Scientists on an Arctic mountaintop studying pollution in the upper
atmosphere believe it may be changing the Earth's protective systems. 
But their leader says he cannot afford to run his sophisticated radar
array long enough to collect all the data that is needed. 

The radar is already obtaining data that could be collected nowhere else
on Earth. 
The array, on a peak near Longyearben in Svalbard, Norway's Arctic
archipelago, is part of Eiscat - the European Incoherent Scatter
Scientific Association. 

The technique relies on the scattering of radio waves from the
incoherent motions of the electrons in the ionosphere. 

Establishing trends 
Eiscat, whose members are Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Norway,
Sweden and the UK, has radar installations in several countries. 
The project's leader, its science director, Tony van Eyken, from the
United Kingdom, says his team needs to be able to amass enough data to
establish clear trends. 

The ESR mobile antenna
The Svalbard radar costs ?300,000 a year to run. Tony van Eyken told
BBC News Online: "If I had more cash, I'd run more. 
"We have all this equipment, and we run for 1,000 hours annually. I'd
run for 3,000 hours if I could, and it would be infinitely more useful. 

"In September I'll run the array 24 hours a day for 16 consecutive days,
the longest stretch ever. Running for longer gives you trends, not just
snapshots." 
Eiscat says: "There are indications that the upper atmosphere is very
sensitive to environmental changes resulting from man-made pollutants
transported upwards from the biosphere. 

"This could have an influence on the shielding properties of the upper
atmosphere. Consequently, there may be a feedback effect on the
biosphere." 

Echoes found 
Tony van Eyken says this refers to noctilucent clouds, which shine at
night and are found at up to 85 kms above the Earth: "Nobody understands
what causes them to form. 

"Probably they form around dust particles. But there's no record of them
being seen before the 1880s, although they are more visible than the
aurora, which is described in the records. 

"So the supposition is that they're the result of industrial pollution.
We're finding strong echoes close to where they are. 
"What we don't know is what effect they may be having there, and
possibly on the Earth's surface." 

Tony van Eyken wants to do more
The Eiscat Svalbard Radar, ESR, began work in 1996, making improved
measurements of the ionosphere and atmosphere at high latitudes in the
polar cap, as well as of the coupling with the magnetosphere and the
solar wind. 

Eiscat says the ESR's observations "will lead to major advances in the
understanding of the whole chain of solar-terrestrial relations". 

Svalbard is the ideal choice for the ESR. The sunward side of the
auroral oval, the region where the Northern Lights can be seen, and the
cusp in the Earth's magnetic wind are usually at magnetic latitudes
around 70 to 80 degrees. 

"Svalbard is at the optimum location for ground-based instrumentation to
study the magnetosphere-ionosphere interactions in this region." 

Beacon 
Tony van Eyken is proud of the sophistication of the ESR array, which
comprises a 32-metre mobile antenna and a 42 m fixed one. "They can
detect a Stealth aircraft-sized object at the distance the US is from
here," he says. 

"This is a very bright beacon for any civilisation that may be out
there. Switching it on is a bit like going out into the jungle and
making a lot of noise, and wondering who's going to come and eat you."
__________________________________

JAMES K. WYERMAN
 
Kids shoulder burden of dirty air
Asthma rates are expected to double every decade. 

Summertime is gone, and schooltime is here -- with children walking or
riding their bikes to school and participating in outdoor activities.

Unfortunately, summer has left us with killer heat waves, smoggy cities
and air-pollution alerts.

In cities, the hazards fall disproportionately on the poor and
minorities who are most likely to live next to highways and bus
stations.

This isn't just a matter of aesthetics and noise; it's downright
unhealthy, especially for kids. Children are highly vulnerable to air
pollution because their bodies are more sensitive and, being more
active, they inhale more pollutants.

Asthma rates are skyrocketing for kids, and are expected to double every
decade, unless we change the current trends.
The health impacts of dirty air are increasingly documented. Residents
of our nation's most polluted cities face a one-to-two-year shorter life
span than do residents of cleaner areas. More people die prematurely
from particulate-matter air pollution than in auto accidents, about
50,000 per year.

What's going on? Didn't Congress pass the Clean Air Act in the 1970s to
clean up air pollution? Yes, but most lobbyists know that the deal is
not done until the regulatory process ends and enforcement begins, often
decades later. Industry has been a master at delays, and without citizen
watchdogs, laws can sit on the books for years.

It is true that air in most of our major cities now is cleaner than in
the last century. New power plants are cleaner as are many industries.
Auto pollution is being reduced, thanks in part to the recently adopted
rule requiring SUVs to meet the same emission standards as passenger
cars.

Yet serious problems continue. Fuel-efficiency standards haven't changed
in 17 years, even though ``green-car?? technology is capable of
producing low-emission vehicles that get 50-70 miles per gallon. Older
power plants escape under a loophole. Global-warming pollutants persist
despite growing consensus that temperatures will rise two to six degrees
this century.

For the healthiest among us, coping with dirty air might mean not
jogging on a ``high-alert?? smog day. But for kids, seniors and
anyone with an impaired immune system, bad air can be deadly. Moderate
air pollution may trigger sudden death in people with existing heart
problems, according to new scientific studies.

The Environmental Protection Agency has just taken an important step to
cleaning up our air: It proposes tougher fuel and emissions standards
for diesel trucks and buses that would cut pollution by 90 percent. The
result will be cleaner air in our cities, suburbs and small towns.
Because diesel accounts for up to 70 percent of the cancers caused by
air pollution, the new rule is not debatable from a health perspective.
The public has had a chance to comment on the proposed ruling, and now
we wait for EPA's decision later this year. 

Meantime, there's still much for the public to do to clean up our
nation's air:

?Residents can urge their municipalities to buy low-pollution fleet
vehicles and take steps to reduce their own use of cars.

?Voters can elect candidates who pledge to work for clean air.

An industry lobbyist once said that on bad-air days ``asthmatic kids
need not go out and ride their bicycles.?? Let?s stop the
pollution instead of forcing people to stay indoors.

James K. Wyerman is the executive director of 20/20 Vision, a
grass-roots group in Washington, D.C












From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Fri Sep  1 23:05:29 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 05:05:29 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <LAW-F234aqSOc7wo95E00000769@hotmail.com>

   So this is abstract?

   Compared to what?

   Take a valium, I certainly didn't mean to imply that you were sitting 
around with your thumb up your butt.

    Aaron.


>
>My apologies to all the list members for this overly abstract
>discussion.      It's just that liberals awhine, should be slapped in
>the face.     HARD.       Work with liberals, gasp))))..... do we have
>to???
>
>Tony


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From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Sat Sep  2 00:33:00 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 06:33:00 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd: SEPTEMBER 26 CALL TO ACTION
Message-ID: <LAW-F228azUSxvjPkQT00005e3b@hotmail.com>




>
>
>
>SEPTEMBER 26 CALL TO ACTION
>
>Mark the IMF/WB Annual Meetings September 26:
>Localize the Fight for Global Justice!
>
>[Slightly modified from Jobs with Justice call to action. See contact
>information below.]
>
>The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will hold
>their  semi-annual joint meeting on September 26, 2000 in Prague,
>Czech Republic. The World Bank and the IMF, two of the cornerstones of
>the international  financial system, claim to be working to eliminate
>poverty, but their real purpose is to force developing nations to
>embrace corporate globalization.
>
>The result is rampant abuse of workers' rights and the environment and
>the further impoverishment of the very people the World Bank and IMF
>are supposedly there to help.
>
>Tens of thousands will take to the streets in Prague on September 26
>to protest these harmful institutions and their advance into Eastern
>Europe. In cities across the U.S., coalitions of labor, community,
>student and faith-based activists will organize actions against local
>targets to highlight the same issues that our sisters and brothers
>will be protesting in Prague. Here is what some are planning in the
>U.S. on September 26:
>
>* Confront a union-busting employer in your community who is ignoring
>his/her workers' right to organize.
>* Protest a local privatization plan in your city.
>* Hold a forum on canceling third world debt.
>* Target a toxic-waste dumper in your area.
>* Leaflet or protest at a Kohl's or Target outlet, to support
>sweatshop workers in Nicaragua who are resisting union-busting at the
>Chentex and Mil Colores factories.
>* Do a leafleting or protest at a store location or corporate
>headquarters of some other offensive corporation.
>* Do an action at a CitiBank branch to pressure them to stop
>purchasing World Bank bonds.
>
>On the occasion of the 55th annual meetings of the governing bodies of
>the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, we call for the
>immediate suspension of the policies and practices that have caused
>widespread poverty and suffering among the world's peoples and damage
>to the world's environment. We oppose those policies that have
>encouraged the suppression of basic human rights and freedoms,
>especially those specific to women, workers and the poor. We assert
>the responsibility of these institutions, together with the World
>Trade Organization and multi-national corporations,
>for an unjust world economic system.
>
>We issue this call in the name of global justice, in solidarity with
>the peoples of the Global South struggling for survival and dignity in
>the face of unjust economic policies. We seek to create just
>societies, where governments are accountable first and foremost to the
>will of their peoples for equitable economic development. Only when
>the coercive powers of the international financial institutions are
>rescinded can such a society exist. Only when international
>institutions are no longer controlled by the wealthiest governments
>for the purpose of dictating policy to the poorer ones shall all
>peoples and nations be able to forge bonds - economic and
>otherwise - based on mutual respect and their common needs. Only when
>the well-being of all, including the most vulnerable people and
>ecosystems, is given priority over corporate profits shall we achieve
>genuine sustainable development and create a world of justice,
>equality and peace.
>
>Endorsing Organizations Include: Jobs with Justice * 50 Years is
>Enough Network * International Brotherhood of Teamsters * Witness for
>Peace * AFL-CIO * Essential Action * Communications Workers of America
>* Center for Economic and Policy Research * Continental Direct Action
>Network * United Students Against Sweatshops * Alliance for Global
>Justice * Rainforest Action Network * Eighth Day Center for Justice *
>Just Act: Youth Action for Global Justice * Global Exchange * Center
>for Economic Justice * Nicaragua Network * Campaign for Labor Rights *
>Citizens Trade Campaign * United for a Fair Economy * Alliance for
>Democracy * Mexico Solidarity Network * The Shalom Center * Pride at
>Work AFL-CIO.
>
>Cities Planning Actions Include: Albany, NY * Asheville, NC * Atlanta,
>GA * Baltimore, MD * Blacksburg, VA * Bloomington, IN * Boston, MA *
>Buffalo, NY * Burlington, VT * Chapel Hill, NC * Chicago, IL *
>Cleveland, OH * Dallas, TX * Denver, CO * Detroit, MI * Durham, NC *
>Erie, PA * Greenville, SC * Helena, MT * Indianapolis, IN * Ithaca, NY
>* Knoxville, TN * Lancaster, PA * Los Angeles, CA * Louisville, KY *
>Miami, FL * Nashville, TN * New York, NY * Oakland, CA * Orange
>County, CA * Philadelphia, PA * Pittsburgh, PA * Portland, ME *
>Portland, OR * Providence, RI * Raleigh, NC * Richmond, VA *
>Salt Lake City, UT * San Diego, CA * San Fernando, CA * San Francisco,
>CA * Seattle, WA * Springfield, MA * Syracuse, NY * Trenton, NJ *
>Tucson, AZ * Washington, DC * Wilmington, DE.
>
>If you are organizing a local event for September 26 or if you would
>like to learn who in your community is organizing an event, contact
>Campaign for
>Labor Rights at 202/544-9355 or <CLRDC at afgj.org>.
>
>To receive a September 26 organizing packet, contact Jobs with Justice
>at 202/434-1106 or <lmcspedon at yahoo.com>. The Jobs with Justice web
>site <www.jwj.org> and the 50 Years Is Enough web site
><www.50years.org> have information on September 26 activities.
>
>Localize the Movement for Global Justice
>Issues we can all understand:
>
>UNION BUSTING: A constant IMF/World Bank prescription for countries
>where they operate is increasing "labor market flexibility."  In
>practice this means opposing increases in the minimum wage, weakening
>trade unions and workers' bargaining power and opposing any social
>protections that would make workers less willing to work for low
>wages.  In the U.S., working people face similar campaigns to erode
>their power. Thousands of workers are fired each year by American
>employers for joining together to organize unions.
>
>PRIVATIZATION: As a condition of lending money to poor countries, the
>World Bank and the IMF often demand that governments privatize
>state-run enterprises providing services such as university education,
>health care, electricity and water.  In Bolivia last year, the World
>Bank encouraged the government to privatize the water system, making
>water rates triple and making water unaffordable for many families.
>Local labor, student, community and indigenous groups fought back
>against the government's plan and reversed the privatization. The
>drive for the privatization of health care and social security in the
>U.S. reflects the same economic policies here at home.
>
>DEBT: The World Bank and the IMF continue to force poor countries to
>pay back their debt despite the fact that many lack the funds to
>properly care for their own people. The IMF/World Bank's control of
>the debt issue preserves their power to impose unpopular austerity
>policies.  Sub-Saharan African countries spend more on debt payment
>than on primary education and health care combined.
>
>HEALTH: Debt payments and neoliberal structural adjustment policies
>have a negative impact on health in both developing and developed
>countries.  In most Sub-Saharan African nations, governments spend
>four times as much on debt repayment as on health care, despite the
>frighteningly quick spread of HIV and AIDS.  In the U.S., 42 million
>Americans are without health care coverage.
>
>ENVIRONMENTAL ABUSE: Policies of the World Bank and the IMF have had a
>devastating impact on the environment. After granting Nicaragua a loan
>in 1994, the IMF supported the expansion of the logging industry,
>causing an increase in Nicaragua's already high rate of deforestation
>(370,000 acres/year).  At this rate, the few forests that remain in
>Nicaragua will disappear quickly. In the U.S., corporate toxic-waste
>dumpers benefit from similar policies.
>
>CORPORATE CONTROL: IMF/ World Bank policies have paved the way for
>U.S. corporations to exploit the human and ecological resources of
>developing countries.  The WB/IMF encourage "free trade zones," or
>"export processing zones," where a countries' tax and labor laws are
>suspended to attract foreign corporations. Companies like Nike and the
>Gap benefit enormously from such programs. Oil companies like
>ExxonMobil have benefitted from World Bank- sponsored pipeline
>projects that harm the environment and displace longtime residents.
>
>WORLD BANK BONDS: Universities, faith-based organizations, unions,
>governments and other institutions that we control buy the bonds that
>finance the World Bank.  The World Bank Bonds Boycott is an
>international campaign using grassroots economic power to demand an
>end to structural adjustment lending and other environmentally and
>socially destructive World Bank policies.
>
>WOMEN: Extensive data from around the world show that IMF-imposed
>austerity and economic reform programs have stripped many women of
>what meager health and education benefits were once available to them.
>Women's formal sector unemployment has increased due to IMF-induced
>recessions, privatizations and government cutbacks.
>
>_______________________________________________
>Iww-news mailing list
>Iww-news at iww.org
>http://iww.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/iww-news
>
>I N D U S T R I A L   W O R K E R S   O F   T H E   W O R L D
>
>		 FOR A WORLD WITHOUT BOSSES
>
>

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From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Fri Sep  1 22:46:35 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 04:46:35 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <LAW-F684DgI6bXmdMJO00000f5e@hotmail.com>

   I'll let my friends know that I'm a liberal, they would be suprised.

   One more time for those who I seem to have trouble communicating with 
effectively. I believe we need to be fighting battles on many fronts. Some 
of these battles will be  alongside those who do not think fundemental 
change is necessary. I WANT RADICAL FUNDEMENTAL CHANGE, but I am not 
comfortable waiting around for just the right set of circumstances to occur. 
A case in point would be the protests we've seen against powerful 
international organizations. Do you think we should not support these people 
just  because many of them are not {yet} at the point of saying that we 
should scrap the whole system? I choose to support actions that I believe 
will benefit our world now, BUT I also keep in mind that my ultimate goal is 
to see the end of capitalism.

    Aaron






>
>Tony Abdo wrote:
>
> > Aaron, I got to tell you, Man, this idea liberals have of being
> > pragmatists, while more revolution oriented activists are seen as
> > sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, is unbridled poppycock.
> >
>
>I realized about 30 years ago that the chief weakness of reformism is its
>utter failure
>to achieve reforms. (One can learn this from Lenin -- but not by just or
>even mostly
>by reading his "big" works of theory. It emerges from reading page by page
>in order
>the first 10 to 15 volumes of his CW -- seeing him engaged in the daily
>practice of
>making sense of the struggle as it unfolded.) I mention here just three
>points among
>many that have to be taken into consideration in constructing tactics and
>strategy.
>First, we (however "we" is defined) are never going to have a majority --
>and to win
>our victories (small or large) must depend on the determination of the
>masses who do
>rally to the struggle. Secondly, voluntarism (the idea that by our
>correctness we can
>as it were force people into action) is utterly hopeless. In fact the
>conditions that
>generate popular resistance are almost never predictable. Rather we must be
>ready to
>respond to such upsurges when they occur (as they will) behind our backs as
>it were.
>And third -- it is always worthwhile, when possible, to strive to make life
>a bit better for
>those who suffer now. But those who aim only at that (as.apparently Aaron
>does) will
>achieve nothing, not even a few extra rations or vials of anti-biotic for
>the dying.
>Tony is certainly correct on the utter utopianism of "pragmatic" liberals.
>
>Carrol
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
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From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Fri Sep  1 20:21:55 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 02:21:55 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <LAW-F167YrLvWQuh0PP0000064e@hotmail.com>


>
><<       Joan, I only wish I had a plan. >>
>
>Me, too, Aaron. I'm so tired I need a plan to get up tomorrow. And the next
>day.:)
>Actually, I am not a planner by nature. It is very difficult for me to look
>very far ahead, and much of what I do is spontaneous and process-oriented.
>Thus, my natural inclination regarding the crash is: gee, how interesting
>that's gonna be--I want to be sure to not miss anything. (You know I'm 
>tired
>when I let an admission like that slip out...).
>That's probably why I'm hoping one of you guys is going to get a 'big plan'
>brainstorm of whatever nature. Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?
>Joan
>
     Hi Joan, for me the real dilemma  is how to build the foundations to 
implement any plan big or small. I'm very much hoping that the activism we 
see around the WTO and IMF/WB is the beginnings of that foundation.

  Aaron.
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From JoeMosley at aol.com  Sat Sep  2 09:48:46 2000
From: JoeMosley at aol.com (JoeMosley at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 11:48:46 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] change me to daily digest!!
Message-ID: <6f.9fc6128.26e27b5e@aol.com>

In a message dated 8/2/00 2:40:33 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
crebello at antares.com.br writes:

<< Subj:     Re: [CrashList] change me to daily digest!!
 
 Me too, please! Digest me!
 
 JoeMosley at aol.com

 > Too many emails!!
 >
 > ________________________________________________________________________
 > Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
 >
 > _______________________________________________
 > Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
 > To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
 > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
 
 
 
 
 _______________________________________________
 Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
 To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
 http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
 
 



From aabdo at webtv.net  Sat Sep  2 12:06:51 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 13:06:51 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] : SEPTEMBER 26 CALL TO ACTION
In-Reply-To: "aaron hoffer" <hofferaaron@hotmail.com>'s message of Sat, 02 Sep 2000 06:33:00 GMT
Message-ID: <8754-39B141BB-4706@storefull-231.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Aaron, I think we are more together in our thinking than our exchanges
might seem to suggest.     Building the September 26 actions is exacly
something we agree on, and I have sent the information you posted to a
group of student activists in Monterrey connected with the Zapatista
current who are also planning a September 26 demonstration.       They
had been asking info about what is going on in the US.

So together in the struggle, Teamsters and Turtles, Communists and
Anarchists,  Liberals and those with their thumbs up somewhere high.....
And most of all, together in struggle, all of us that mostly fit
somewhere  in-between these categories above.     Solidarity together,
All!     The Movement is beginning to build.

Tony

      












From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Sat Sep  2 15:48:37 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 17:48:37 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <13.a4c6fce.26e2cfb5@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/2/00 12:40:29 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
hofferaaron at hotmail.com writes:

<<So this is abstract? Compared to what?>>

I think, Aaron, that to someone who thinks in binary terms (black and white), 
all the the greys and colors in-between are abstract (to them). It's simply a 
color-blindness of a sort. Sometimes it's simply a matter of being young... 
perhaps not just in age. It may be the emotional immaturity that seems to 
characterize much of our culture that conditions people to be impatient. It 
takes a lot of patience to learn to see all the 'colors'. (And there are some 
colors that our physical eyes cannot apprehend, but our minds do, and thus we 
have dreams in colors we cannot describe upon waking.) 
But before we can learn to see, we need to learn how to look. That was 
actually the subject of the first lecture I had in art school. But only the 
introduction to the subject, which was renewed with every instructor in every 
course. The college no longer exists, and I suspect that art is no longer 
taught in this fashion. Fashions change...
with the times.
If we looked at our times, and our century with a long lens, we could realize 
how great the changes have been in our lifetimes, more so than in those of 
our parents (who marvelled at changes, themselves). And how unprepared all of 
us have been for the changes of our own causing...and the results, bringing 
yet more change.
Truly the only constant. Impatience is unnecessary; it mainly serves to blur 
the vision.
Joan



From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Sat Sep  2 16:00:55 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 18:00:55 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <d.97bddb2.26e2d297@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/2/00 2:40:22 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
hofferaaron at hotmail.com writes:

<< for me the real dilemma  is how to build the foundations to 
 implement any plan big or small. I'm very much hoping that the activism we 
 see around the WTO and IMF/WB is the beginnings of that foundation.
  >>

Do you have in mind something like the sort of thing the religious right was 
using to organize grass-roots groups? Because they used local churches as a 
base, they had a safer and more focused staging mechanism. I say safer, 
because you will have a great number of persons who are motivated and on your 
side, but who also remember vividly the paranoia of the sixties and 
seventies, who stopped protesting because of the 'goons with cameras' 
everywhere they went. Also the harrassment in their homes...(Also my memory 
goes back to the McCarthy days, when people actually hid in their homes from 
their neighbors. The witch-hunting became a neighborhood sport. THAT was 
paranoia.)
You need a community focal point that offers this canopy of protection (well, 
somewhat) in order to get these folks out from in front of their toobs. 
Otherwise, they will lurk to watch you with the TV as an interface. 
Body-count is what will matter for you from the outset. And commitment. And 
some way to rouse it.

Joan



From aabdo at webtv.net  Sat Sep  2 16:25:49 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 17:25:49 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Black ad White, or in Living Color?
Message-ID: <25337-39B17E6D-7164@storefull-233.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

<<So this is abstract? Compared to what?>> 

In rely, Joan offers- 
<I think, Aaron, that to someone who thinks in binary terms (black and
white), all the the greys and colors in-between are abstract (to them).
It's simply a color-blindness of a sort. Sometimes it's simply a matter
of being young... perhaps not just in age. It may be the emotional
immaturity that seems to characterize much of our culture that
conditions people to be impatient. It takes a lot of patience to learn
to see all the 'colors'. (And there are some colors that our physical
eyes cannot apprehend, but our minds do, and thus we have dreams in
colors we cannot describe upon waking.) But before we can learn to see,
we need to learn how to look.>

Joan, I have a family member who attacks my politics in the same manner,
though a much ruder style yet.     I, in his view, am Mr. Black and
White, All or Nothing.     I just don't get how much difference there is
between Al and George W. like he does.    
And worse yet, I just don't understand how Clinton has done so much
progress.      To him, this is seeing the world in color, being mature
as opposed to immature.     You add yet another version, by referring to
non-reformism as being 'binary' and 'impatient'.

I always tell him that I feel so sad for him, as he ours over Bush and
Gore with a microscope, looking for differences.     Oh yes, he knows
how to look and imagine!

How sad and delusionary is the world of the reformist, liberal.     Your
mystical, and yet rude, out-lining of the mind set, does nothing to give
it a colorful glow, or change this world view that leads to constant
defeat.
  
Tony












From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Sat Sep  2 15:50:45 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 17:50:45 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <5d.2fdbc4.26e2d035@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/2/00 2:03:36 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
hofferaaron at hotmail.com writes:

<< BUT I also keep in mind that my ultimate goal is 
 to see the end of capitalism. >>

BUT: what do you visualize in its place?

Joan



From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Sat Sep  2 17:43:51 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 19:43:51 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Black ad White, or in Living Color?
Message-ID: <f5.26b151b.26e2eab7@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/2/00 3:26:41 PM Pacific Daylight Time, aabdo at webtv.net 
writes:

<<  by referring to
 non-reformism as being 'binary' and 'impatient'. >>

You are making an assumption, here, Tony. This is not what I am suggesting.

Part of what I wanted to say was that you will never, ever be satisfied with 
any progress at all if your goals are absolute, not incremental. And no one 
will ever agree with you completely, so you need to allow for differences in 
individual viewpoints. Otherwise, it will always seem to you like it's you 
against everyone else, and you can't even hope for cooperation, let alone 
being heard. This is an extremely tolerant forum, compared to many. 
So--rave on.
Joan



From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Sat Sep  2 12:56:24 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 18:56:24 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] change me to daily digest!!
Message-ID: <F76MKX9ssssGKeD59Ku00000fc3@hotmail.com>

Okay,

Here's the deal...

See this message? ------->  >  To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>  http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist

(It's at the bottom of each post to the list.)

Click on the link, load the page up, scroll down to the bottom of the page, 
put your email address in the empty box, and click on the "Edit Options" 
button. It works, it really does.

Please attempt to use this method first. Why? It makes MY life very much 
easier if you can try to do these things on your own. It makes Tahir's life 
easier too. Until I became co-moderator I never realized the number of these 
kinds of messages (along with bounces, unsubscribes and address changes)that 
Mark had to deal with daily. It's a lot.

If you go there and are unsuccessful in your attempts to use the system, 
then I will go in manually and make changes or unsubscribe you. It would be 
best if those requests came to me off list.

I thank you very much for your co-operation.

And please, think about trimming headers and not sending 2 gigs of copied 
message below your "Me too" reply.

Thank you very much in advance for your kind consideration in this 
housekeeping stuff.

Tom


Sincerely,
Tom


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From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Sat Sep  2 12:57:32 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 18:57:32 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Housekeeping
Message-ID: <F1918YkdavN3qljWwY000001515@hotmail.com>

Sorry for the duplicate message. It suddenly occurred to me that 99% of the 
list won't read it under the original title.


Okay,

Here's the deal...

See this message? ------->  >  To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>  http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist

(It's at the bottom of each post to the list.)

Click on the link, load the page up, scroll down to the bottom of the page, 
put your email address in the empty box, and click on the "Edit Options" 
button. It works, it really does.

Please attempt to use this method first. Why? It makes MY life very much 
easier if you can try to do these things on your own. It makes Tahir's life 
easier too. Until I became co-moderator I never realized the number of these 
kinds of messages (along with bounces, unsubscribes and address changes)that 
Mark had to deal with daily. It's a lot.

If you go there and are unsuccessful in your attempts to use the system, 
then I will go in manually and make changes or unsubscribe you. It would be 
best if those requests came to me off list.

I thank you very much for your co-operation.

And please, think about trimming headers and not sending 2 gigs of copied 
message below your "Me too" reply.

Thank you very much in advance for your kind consideration in this 
housekeeping stuff.

Tom


Sincerely,
Tom


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From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Sat Sep  2 20:42:47 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 02:42:47 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <LAW-F174c9NUpuabjKo00001055@hotmail.com>





>
><< BUT I also keep in mind that my ultimate goal is
>  to see the end of capitalism. >>
>
>BUT: what do you visualize in its place?
>
>Joan
>

     Joan, this is the question that I ask myself a lot. I, along with 
everyone else are so mired in our current system that it is very difficult 
to see past it.

     One of the reasons why I joined this list is, that I had never before 
taken into account the reality of the crash. I of course had been aware of 
the vast ecological damage we are doing to this planet, but somehow did not 
integrate it into any long term thinking I may have done. I just assumed we 
would be living in a world with more or less the same infrastructure and 
same energy capabilities as we have today. I still do not know if the crash 
changes any thing that much, because for me, any society that I would 
envision, deals with the values that the society  would promote, and those 
values would apply crash or no crash.

   What I do know is that capitalism thrives on humanities worst 
characteristics, the 7 deadly sins comes to mind, and striving to make 
society work in such a way that peoples better qualities are rewarded is 
what I support.

   As to exactly what that would look like I don't know. There are some 
things I think are important, such as, people having as much say in an issue 
as to which they are affected by it, Splitting up work in such a way that 
everyone does as much rewarding work and drudge work as another. And of 
course no way to make a profit off of property ownership. This of course 
deals only with the economic sphere and are not my ideas, they are from the 
work of Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert. There are so many other things to 
consider, so much so that it is overwhelming, and subject to where future 
events lead us. I am hardly qualified to know, in any detail, what is truly 
workable and what is not. All I can do is support movements that espouse 
values in which I agree. And also learn as much as possible from others 
along the way.

   I wish I could be more clear but I cannot.

   Sincerely, Aaron.
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From gdrouet at brutele.be  Sun Sep  3 08:59:17 2000
From: gdrouet at brutele.be (Georges Drouet)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 16:59:17 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Change the world
Message-ID: <v03007800b5d8177bcaf4@[212.68.237.75]>

Change the world is not an easy thing to do, nor is to create a new one in
a sustainable way, i.e. avoiding the historical trick of going to war and
start again because the only result of this kind of strategy is to provoke
pain and misery and fall again in the capitalistic system dominated by the
oligarchy who managed the war.

The first step is not to ask how will be that world we all want because is
not defined yet and it's impossible to do so... The first question to ask
for is "How to proceed?"

I think we must define our fields of action, i.e. economy, politics,
sciences, education, sociology, etc. We may use different sectors,
following the organizational chart of the UNO or the EC, and create teams
in each field depending on the interests and capacities of each of us...

How to compile this information?

Is not an easy thing because we must choose one place with a kind of data
desk in which everyone can download and pick-up the required information...

Another important point is to define the priorities of our action: do we
must act at a local level, a national one or, at least on a global way? I
believe we can act locally by our own, I suppose we all live in so-called
"democratic" countries and we can also change our politicians point of view
acting  through existing political parties, finally I'm convinced our
international action can be conducted through a common political programme
to be implemented worldwide. Concerning the last step, the global one, a
question arises: Is it necessary to create a world party to promote the new
vision of the society we are going to define? I think not, because that
will take to long and will require so huge efforts. In a sustainable point
of view, why should we create a new party if there is millions of them
around the world yet?

Thus, my proposal is to develop two different kind of actions, the
Reflexive Team could be a team in charge of the definition of the policies
we would implement in the nearest future as possible, and the second one,
the Partisan Team, could be made of the people in charge of lobbying the
current political parties to make them adopt a common politic able to
change the world.

How could we define the activities of each team?

The Reflexive Team could use a common virtual place to propose, compile and
synthetize the proposals sent by every participant in the process of
policies' definition. Internet is one of this tools, but it shouldn't be
the exclusive one, in fact most of the people requiring the real effects of
the change we are promoting don't have access to the Net, thus we should
complete our action using more widespread ways of communication as
television, radios and newspapers on a national and local level. Through
articles and free ads, we can ask people to express theirselves, thus
compile and classify that huge amount of information and draw a sustainable
world chart to be lobbyied by the Partisan Team.

The Partisan Team would be in charge of convincing existing political
parties to adopt the sustainable world chart. This actions should be
carried at three different levels:
- locally through meetings with our friends, conferences, personal
encounters with local political representatives, distributing leaflets,
writing articles, participating in radio and television interviews, etc
- nationally promoting policies as a people's concern on political meetings
- globally following the adoption of the policies in each country and
acting into international entities (UNO, EC and other internationl bodies)
through personal and official promotion, i.e. contacting people inside the
organisation (person to person contact) and using official sollicitudes
(entity to entity contact)

Which are the problems we should resolve first?

The most usual counter argument used by conservatives, and recently by left
parties also is if we implement a sustainable policy including the
necessary reforms to be effective, i.e. economical, environmental and
social reforms, the transnational companies will first threaten the daring
government and thus leave the country with their capital and jobs... The
definitive and practical solution in to proceed in two stages: first make
all the countries to adopt the policies without implementing them, thus in
a second stage implement the policies simultaneously in all the countries.

The second trouble is a question of time, the more we wait to change the
current system, the more we will face deeper troubles, e.g. the ozone
problem is not to be solve in one summer but, currently, will require
twenty to thirty years to be fixed... As the whole situation of world
problems is mathematically a exponential system, the more we wait to
applied alterations, the more this alteration should be important!
Remember, two years ago, a company making 15 percent more benefit one year
to the previous one was commended, now companies have to reach incredible
25 or 40 per cent increase in their year to year benefit to be respected...
This crazy race to nowhere is driving us to a faster depletion of natural
ressources and an increasing and insane poor countries workforce
exploitation, a neo-colonialism mixed with the implementation of local
future war points (Colombia, Sierra-Leone, Bosnia, etc) under the false
premise of world security...
The sooner we'll act, the easier (sic!) will be our work... This
consideration drive us to a contradiction in our calendar: do we have
enough time to ask the world population about its concerns, compile them,
analyse that huge amount of datas, synthetize the full stuff, draw the
policies and promote them?

I'm affraid not.

So let us be pragmatic.

Why don't we start from the root points, I mean promote first the basic
changes that have to be made to create a correct framework and use the two
teams concept.
- Partisan Team working on the terrain, convincing people, parties,
governments, ngos and corporations to adopt policies
- Reflexive Team defining policies to be adopted.

What can we do today?

Most of us are convinced that economical, environmental and social troubles
can be stabilized through few basic policies. Which are this proposals?
- Re-regulation of global financial market
- Cancellation of Third World debt
- Political stabilisation through abolition of private funding
- Precautionary principle in potentially dangerous new technologies
- Dismantling and banishment of nuclear and mass-destruction weapons

How can we cooperate on that?

Currently, there's only one proposal answering all the previous questions,
it's called Simultaneous Policy (SP). Many of us have been reading it on
our site, but may be not deeply enough. E.g. have you noticed the section
"Your Ideas" which goal is to compile people's concerns? Did you ask
yourself: Is there another alternative in the current political, social,
environmental world which could be as simple and efficient as SP is?

Six month ago, John contacted me through a e-list, I read his book once,
and then read it a second time and found no flaw on it. Was SP the panacea
I was waiting for? No, of course, but it's mainly the best existing
proposal I heard to change the world on a sustainable way... I think it's
important to propose a sustainable way of change to be constant in our
thoughts... How could we promote a sustainable world if we aren't
sustainable since the beginning of our action?

All this long post is made to convince you to think more precisely about SP
proposals. We are currently reshaping the site and translating it to
French, Spanish and German, but you can still adopt SP online and send your
proposals, everything is free. You can be a member of other organizations,
political parties, governments, you can be a student or a worker, a teacher
or an entrepreneur, woman, man, Swedish, South African, Peruvian, British,
Indian, Chinese or Belgium, whoever you are, you are living on this world
and the world is sick of a incorrect managment. On the behalf of all the
kids, and because it's the only world we can live on, we must change the
rules and we must be cautious in doing that change to avoid falling in the
usual wargame...

Take a look at http://www.simpol.org and may be you can define yourself
about adopting SP or even participate on one of the two teams, the
Partisans one or the Reflexive one...

See you on board!

------------------------------------------
Georges Drouet
28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
tel: 32-486 751 668
fax: 32-2 538 10 82

gdrouet at brutele.be





From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 07:44:49 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 14:44:49 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com>
Message-ID: <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer>

Aaron writes:
<<       Joan, I only wish I had a plan. >>

Joan writes:
> Me, too, Aaron. ...Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?

Sorry to push it yet again but a plan is available on www.simpol.org. To
date, no cogent argument has been made to show that a better one exists.
John





From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 09:33:27 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 16:33:27 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <006b01c015be$97587460$f65a87d4@oemcomputer>

Hello Tahir and thanks for the message.
I take it you are refering to the Simultaneous Policy (SP) proposal.
Regarding the point about a 'secure and responsible' transition from the
existing paradigm to the new one we all desire, first of all it should be
clear that there are no guarantees in life so no proposal or plan will ever
be 100% secure. What I wanted to draw attention to was that the ability of
capital and corporations to cross national borders at will forces nations to
compete with one another for investment and jobs. Since we have a more or
less global economy, what this really means is global competition. Now
competition is a funny thing because any player withdrawing from the
competition or who fails to compete as vigorously as the other players will
lose out. So our current predicament is one where political will/action for
substantive change to the system cannot be unilateral but must be global.
Furthermore, to provide maximum trust and security, any proposed change must
take place simultaneously to avoid the risk/danger of anyone losing out.
This is what SP proposes. It means that politicians can adopt SP without
risking their political positions because the measures of SP only get
implemented when adoption by all nations has been achieved. It also means
that just about anyone of any political leaning can also adopt it.

You ask "If we all on this list said that we
> back your proposals 100%, what would be the set of steps
> following just after that?"
1. Continue the back-breaking task of gathering adoption for SP as widely as
possible. This will take a long time but we have always to keep in mind:
"What is the alternative?". This lack of alternative, combined with the
impending crash, should act as a spur to encourage adoption worldwide. But
everyone who adopts SP needs to spread word of the idea and to promote it as
far as their time permits. We are right at the beginning but, as you know,
already have the support of some fairly eminent people.
2. To give you an idea of what might eventually occur, I forsee the UK
political system offering a good opportunity for SP to come to wider public
attention. Following is an extract from my book which illustrates how the
dynamics could work:
Quote:
SP's non-party political approach can, perhaps, best be illustrated if one
imagines a situation likely to occur in marginal constituencies in the
run-up to a UK General Election. In these constituencies, candidates quite
often become Members of Parliament by a margin of a mere handful of votes.
When adoption of SP develops in those constituencies to the point where a
critical number of voters - perhaps just a few hundred - had adopted and
were willing to vote for any candidate that adopts, one could imagine the
local SP organisation writing to each candidate in advance of the election
telling them of this fact and asking them to carefully consider whether
they, too, would like to adopt. In such circumstances, it is rather
difficult to see how any of the mainstream candidates could avoid doing so
and they would have to reply accordingly or face virtually certain defeat.
It would then only remain for the local SP organisation to advise all those
candidates that it will be delighted to confirm their adoption on the lawn
outside the House of Commons in the presence of the national media. One can
then imagine the newsworthiness and novelty of a policy that, perhaps for
the first time in history, has been adopted by every mainstream candidate,
if not by all candidates, across the entire political spectrum. News of such
a novel phenomenon is then likely not only to spread rapidly and generate a
vibrant national debate that focuses on SP, but it will also give added
impetus and encouragement to the adoption campaign elsewhere. Indeed, in
today's boring and vacuous political environment, I suggest this kind of
news will travel fast.
Unquote.
3. To really get a proper understanding of the dynamics of how the idea
could spread, you would need to see my book (which I'll gladly send you if
you wish). (By the way, Mark already has a copy and I'm waiting for his
comments which I would be happy for him to post on the list if you think it
appropriate.)

I realise the above probably raises more questions than it answers but, I'm
afraid, for those genuinely interested there is no real alternative to
reading the book.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to provide at least some
explanation.
best wishes
John




From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sun Sep  3 11:08:57 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 11:08:57 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn>

that 'plan' is flawed; - i.e.

1) it requires the voluntary compliance of millions against whose own best
interest it is to comply

2) there is insufficient time for mega-solutions to be executed before the
crash effects begin

3) the only 'solutions' are local : personal, individual, family, small
community; not mega-state or global;

4) the only effective 'plans' are those not published to the world via the
WWW

5) Joan writes:
> >  ...Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?

     it isn't .

sorry; won't work...

Perry


----- Original Message -----
From: John Bunzl <jbunzl at simpol.org>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 07:44
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???


> Aaron writes:
> <<       Joan, I only wish I had a plan. >>
>
> >
> Sorry to push it yet again but a plan is available on www.simpol.org. To
> date, no cogent argument has been made to show that a better one exists.
> John
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 14:11:39 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 21:11:39 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn>
Message-ID: <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer>

Hello Perry,
You wrote:
> "that 'plan' is flawed".

I take it you were referring to the Simultaneous Policy. Thank you for
visiting our website and I will respond to your points beneath each one in
capital letters for clarity:
>
> 1) it requires the voluntary compliance of millions against whose own best
> interest it is to comply
I DON'T BELIEVE THIS ASSERTION IS GENERALLY CORRECT. PLEASE SPECIFY
PRECISELY WHICH OF THE PROPOSED POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST THE BEST INTERESTS
OF THE MILLIONS EXPECTED TO ADOPT SP.
>
> 2) there is insufficient time for mega-solutions to be executed before the
> crash effects begin
YOU MAY BE RIGHT, BUT HAVE YOU ANY BETTER IDEA OR SHOULD WE JUST WAIT FOR
THE CRASH?
>
> 3) the only 'solutions' are local : personal, individual, family, small
> community; not mega-state or global;
I THINK THERE ARE SOLUTIONS AT EVERY LEVEL. I ALSO BELIEVE THAT A SOLUTION
AT ONE LEVEL DOES NOT NECESSARILY PRECLUDE SOLUTIONS AT OTHER LEVELS. I
THINK WE NEED TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND.
>
> 4) the only effective 'plans' are those not published to the world via the
> WWW
NOT QUITE SURE WHERE YOU'RE GOING HERE PERRY...
>
> 5) Joan writes:
> > >  ...Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?
>
>      it isn't .
>
> sorry; won't work...
I REALLY THINK WE ARE HARDLY GOING TO GET VERY FAR WITH SUCH GLIB
DISMISSALS. AS, REQUESTED ABOVE, PLEASE SPECIFY WHICH OF THE PROPOSED
POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THOSE WHO ARE EXPECTED TO ADOPT
SP. THEN LET'S HAVE A SENSIBLE DISCUSSION.
LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU.
BEST WISHES
JOHN.





From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Sun Sep  3 14:32:29 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 15:32:29 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu>

TAHIR WOOD wrote:

> >>> "John Bunzl" <jbunzl at simpol.org> 09/01 6:56 AM >>>
>  Changing the system means a) a vision of a new
> system as a target to aim for, and, b) a way of getting from
> the system we are in now to the target in a responsible and
> secure manner which everyone can understand and support.
> It's as 'simple' as that and that is what I suggest we
> mainly discuss.>>>

The following observations are more topic sentences than a developed
argument, but
they might be of some use. Marx (before he ad even himself became a
marxist) wrote
what remains the definitive comment on (a) above: "It is not our thing
to write recipes
for the cookshops of the future." Through our understanding of the
present we can
glimpse, in the vaguest terms, what *must be* if we (as a species or a
'civilization') are
to survive. But it is not from such glimpses that the concrete future
comes: that arises
within the struggle to destroy that which is destroying us. "Positive"
visions are at best
foolish -- at worst totalitarian nightmares.

For one thing, not one of us (or probably even our grandchildren) will
live in that future. Our
lives and the lives of generations to come must be lived out in the
midst of a struggle for a
world we will never see. It is a cruel mockery to pretend that that
future can be our "reward"
for the struggle. It also mocks the lives of all who have already died
in the struggle -- and those who are dying today.

That does not mean that Rosa Luxemburg was wrong in affirming (in
opposition to Bernstein) that 'The final goal is everything, the process
nothing,'
but in grasping her truth one must remember that she was a historical
materialist,
not a utopian dreamer. Marx observed that we can understand the ape
better
through knowing the human: put otherwise, what we know is history, and
to know
the present we must see the present as history, which is to look back on
the present
from the perspective of the future. (Bertell Ollman is very good on
this.) The final
goal is everything in that it is only by our (very general) grasp of
what must be,
from the perspective of the classless future, that we can understand,
make
sense of, and organize the present struggle. But as a target to aim for,
as the reward
as it were for struggle, that future is nothing.

John's (b), "a way of getting from the system we are in now to the
target,"
is incoherent. Such a way does not exist nor will it ever exist. Mao
noted that
Marxists have no crystal ball (and neither do anarchists or social
democrats)
-- and it would require a most amazing crystal ball indeed to map out
such a
route from a chaotic present to a distant and only vaguely grasped
future.

Napoleon said something to the effect that is military plan was to act
and then
see what happens. We can work out general principles of struggle (though
most have
long since been worked out, so it is more a matter of archaeology than
"new"
thinking), but revolution (or even major reform) cannot be planned in
advance.
The world is too contingent. Hence the demand that a plan be prepared
"in a
responsible and  secure manner which everyone can understand and
support"
is in fact a demand that the world never change. It accepts the present
capitalist
world as eternal -- history has indeed ended.

Carrol Cox




From aabdo at webtv.net  Sun Sep  3 15:00:24 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 16:00:24 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Speaking The Same Language?      Bilingual Education Does Work.
Message-ID: <28909-39B2BBE8-1371@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Below, I have placed an article from the San Antonio paper, that
contrasts bilingual education programs in Texas with those of
California.       What is core to the difference in results, is the
attitude of the different business communities.

Its not that Al Gore and George Bush both support bilingual education,
as is asserted in the article.    Since both are at best neutral to the
presence of these programs coming out of the communities.       But
neutral is better than outright hostile.       What is the difference
between California and Texas, then?

It has to do with the Texas business community seeing profit to be made
off of bi-national commerce, as being a primary goal.     Northeastern
Mexico is the industrial powerhouse of Mexico, whereas California has no
trading partner of similar status, sitting south of its border in
Tijuana.

Add to this, the fact that South Texas is predominantly
Mexican-American, and this is an even further incentive to back off from
overt opposition to bilingual education.       These communities can
design bilingual education programs run by the parents, not just a group
of 'bilingual specialists', like in the California schools.

And the parents use common sense to design the programs where Spanish
language kids, are placed in an EQUAL status with the Anglo kids.     In
other words, English is not given preferential status.

Guess what?      This system works.     And the big difference simply
being, that the economic eiltes here don't actively work to sabotage the
program.     There's money to be made by leaving it alone.

Tony Abdo 
__________________________________
Bilingual programs thriving
By Edmund S. Tijerina
Express-News Staff Writer

While opponents of bilingual education are basking in news from
California that appears to support them, a much quieter movement is
building in South Texas among affluent and low-income parents alike ?
to make sure their children know both English and Spanish.
 
Ana McDonald: Learning should be forever "The upper class has always
known and acknowledged the need for another language," said Ellen Riojas
Clark, a bicultural studies professor at the University of Texas at San
Antonio. "Now we're seeing other people realizing this."

In California, limited English speakers posted dramatically higher test
scores two years after bilingual education was curtailed. Opponents of
bilingual education say the test results only prove that children don't
need those programs. 
But others, including Texas educators, say California's numbers aren't
that clear-cut. 
And many Texas parents apparently support learning in two languages.

In districts as disparate as Alamo Heights ? with its Spanish
immersion program ? and Edgewood ? where students at Burleson
Elementary say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning twice, in English
and again as the juramento a la bandera ? dual-language programs are
emerging.
At Bonham Elementary School in the San Antonio School District, many
parents want the program to follow their kids into middle school.

The sentiment differs greatly from California. In 1998, voters approved
Proposition 227, a measure that dramatically curtailed bilingual
education. Instead, the state encouraged immersion in English. 

After that vote, bilingual education supporters had predicted that
Spanish-speaking children would perform miserably on state-mandated
standardized tests. They didn't. In some districts that abandoned
bilingual education, the scores went up.

Supporters dispute those figures.
"What is occurring in California gives Texans very little to learn,"
said Mar?a "Cuca" Robledo Montecel, executive director of the
Intercultural Development Research Association, a group that studies
education issues. "The state of California can learn a lot from the
state of Texas, in terms of developing good bilingual education that
helps students learn English and achieve academically."

But while California's action has spawned similar referendums in Arizona
and Colorado, movements to do away with bilingual education have not
sprouted here.

"I don't get the impression that bilingual programs in Texas are as bad
as they are in California," said Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley
entrepreneur behind the measure.
One obstacle for opponents is that Texas does not have a way for
residents to place measures on the ballot.

"In California, without the initiative process, nothing would have
happened," Unz said. "After what happened here, we would hope that the
politicians would find the courage to introduce it."

If Texas did have one, such a measure might very well succeed, said Joe
Bernal, former state legislator and current member of the State Board of
Education.
"An issue like that would bring out the worst in people rather than the
best," Bernal said.

On the other hand, politicians and businesses support knowing two
languages. Both Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore
support bilingual education.

In South Texas, businesses are expanding into northern Mexico and
advertising for bilingual workers. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce's
bilingual initiative, Imag?nate San Antonio, has wide support.

Beyond the boardrooms, the drive for children to grow up bilingual is
spreading. Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley
called for creating 1,000 dual-language immersion programs, where
students learn both English and another language, in the next five
years.

In addition to programs in Alamo Heights, Edgewood and San Antonio,
dual-language is operating in the South San Antonio, Pearsall and Ysleta
school districts. Next year, Northside is to start a dual-language pilot
program at two elementary schools in response to a "growing interest,"
said Pat Blattman, deputy superintendent for instruction.
North East offers only the more traditional bilingual focus, teaching
subjects in a native language while easing English into the lessons.

"While we're teaching them to read in Spanish, we're going to have a
strong English component," said Elmosa Herrera, a bilingual specialist
at Stahl Elementary. "You can't have a program where you do all Spanish
and then magically they're going to learn English."

In the dual-language programs, the ideal mix of students combines native
Spanish and English speakers. From pre-kindergarten to fifth grade, the
students go from having most of their lessons in Spanish to an equal mix
of both languages.

At Burleson Elementary, Principal Delma Luna said her kindergarten class
scored on the third-grade level in math and reading abilities.

"When they're young, our kids pass the TAAS (Texas Assessment of
Academic Skills) in Spanish," she said. "By fourth grade, they can pass
it in English or Spanish."

But ironically, the parents often most resistant to dual-language
efforts are those who speak Spanish as their first language. They
remember the days when their tongue was something shameful.

"We have parents who say, 'They already know Spanish,' but what they
know is conversational Spanish. They don't know the academic language,"
Luna said. "In December, we have a program where the children read to
their parents. They read a book in Spanish and then they read a book in
English. At that point, we don't have to sell it to the parents. They
sell it to each other."

etijerina at express-news.net
09/02/2000












From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sun Sep  3 15:00:05 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 15:00:05 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <002801c015e9$eff44420$1948adcf@perryarn>

Carrol,

some fresh thinking!

Perry




From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sun Sep  3 15:00:48 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 15:00:48 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn> <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn>

----- Original Message -----
From: John Bunzl <jbunzl at simpol.org>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 14:11
Subject: Re: [CrashList] the Plan


> Hello Perry,
> You wrote:
> > "that 'plan' is flawed".
>
> I take it you were referring to the Simultaneous Policy. Thank you for
> visiting our website and I will respond to your points beneath each one in
> capital letters for clarity:
> >
> > 1) it requires the voluntary compliance of millions against whose own
best
> > interest it is to comply
> I DON'T BELIEVE THIS ASSERTION IS GENERALLY CORRECT. PLEASE SPECIFY
> PRECISELY WHICH OF THE PROPOSED POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST THE BEST
INTERESTS
> OF THE MILLIONS EXPECTED TO ADOPT SP.
> >

'which proposal' doesn't matter;

what matters is whether one can get others to do his will - i.e. go along
with, or impliment his 'plan' ; and the only way that can happen, as Jay has
so well pointed out, is through politics :  persuasion,  coercion or
force...

people are not want to volitionally change their personal ingrained habits
for 'causes';  they do so for selfish personal benefit : food, security, sex
and power


> > 2) there is insufficient time for mega-solutions to be executed before
the
> > crash effects begin
> YOU MAY BE RIGHT, BUT HAVE YOU ANY BETTER IDEA OR SHOULD WE JUST WAIT FOR
> THE CRASH?

yes, #3 below;  what some fail to realize is that this snowball is already
rolling;  we can either lie down in front of it, get out of the way, or help
push it along

> >
> > 3) the only 'solutions' are local : personal, individual, family, small
> > community; not mega-state or global;
> . I  THINK WE NEED TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND.

agreed, so long as that 'open-mindedness' does not include wishful thinking
or false beliefs in the impossible or the unattainable
> >
> > 4) the only effective 'plans' are those not published to the world via
the
> > WWW
> NOT QUITE SURE WHERE YOU'RE GOING HERE PERRY...

anyone who has thought about this for longer than three years knows that
mass action is silly; that the only effective action is private action ; and
for that to be effective, it needs to be kept private...
> >
> > 5) Joan writes:
> > > >  ...Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?
> >
> >      it isn't .
> >
> > sorry; won't work...
> I REALLY THINK WE ARE HARDLY GOING TO GET VERY FAR WITH SUCH GLIB
> DISMISSALS.

where did you plan to go?

"GLIB"... do you mean  : short, sweet, concise, to the point?

while some are proposing to shout from the rooftops to change the world,
others are putting into motion their own carefully considered 'plans'; if
that is being 'glib', so be it!

this IS the 'crashlist' after all, not the 'false-hope list'...

I don't have to agree with everything that pops up on the Net; similarly, no
one has to agree with anything I offer ; that's called exercising one's
freedom to choose - and implies the use of critical thinking...


 AS, REQUESTED ABOVE, PLEASE SPECIFY WHICH OF THE PROPOSED
> POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THOSE WHO ARE EXPECTED TO ADOPT
> SP. THEN LET'S HAVE A SENSIBLE DISCUSSION.
> LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU.
> BEST WISHES
> JOHN.

...got wood to chop and water to carry -

Perry
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublis




From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 16:03:19 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 23:03:19 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <061b01c015f4$eed4c960$065a87d4@oemcomputer>

Thanks Carol for your message.
I don't pretend to have understood all of it but it does seem that your
comments are made without having checked out the SP website. If I am wrong
about that, I'd welcome your specific comments on it rather than the all too
familiar retreat behind the past observations of Marx, Mao or others,
however appropriate they may have been to the world predicament in their
time.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes
John




From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 16:11:16 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 23:11:16 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn> <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn>
Message-ID: <061c01c015f4$ef7ca220$065a87d4@oemcomputer>

Perry,
It is clear from your message that you have not taken the trouble to
consider the Simultaneous Policy proposal and unfortunate that, perhaps as a
result, you are unable to substantiate your earlier criticism. Quite apart
from that, if as you insist, the only actions worth taking are purely
private ones, I don't quite know why you are participating in this list.
all the best
John




From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Sun Sep  3 16:05:38 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 17:05:38 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu> <061b01c015f4$eed4c960$065a87d4@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <39B2CB32.651D8386@ilstu.edu>


John Bunzl wrote:

>  all too
> familiar retreat behind the past observations of Marx, Mao or others,
> however appropriate they may have been to the world predicament in their
> time.

You misunderstand. I don't think this because I admire Marx and Mao. I admire
Marx and Mao because they said it. It would be true even if they had not written

on the point. Abstract plans of a new world are *bad* -- they are destructive.
They help keep the world as it is rather than help change it. As long as we
believe
we need plans for the future we will be unable to struggle to bring that future
about.

The future (the quite unpredictable future) will be discovered in the process of
the
struggle to destroy that which is destroying us now.

There probably is a scattering of people around who were persuaded to socialism
(or to any kind of revolution) by glowing plans of what the world might be. But
in
my 70 years I have never met anyone like that. Rather I have encountered many
people who got into struggle against certain evils and in the process of
struggle
discovered that those specific evils were related to other evils -- and also in
the
process of struggle discovered the delight that comes from solidarity in the
struggle. Only at that point, usually, and this was my own case, did they at all

start to think about what the society of the future should be like. Those of us
who early realized that this planning was a mug's game stayed in the struggle.
Those who got mired in plans for the future eventually dropped out.

Carrol





From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sun Sep  3 16:22:48 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 16:22:48 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn> <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn> <061c01c015f4$ef7ca220$065a87d4@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <007801c015f5$7e344720$1948adcf@perryarn>

 > if as you insist, the only actions worth taking are purely
> private ones, I don't quite know why you are participating in this list.
> John

because  at 60, I am still 'actively' learning ( i.e. I have not yet stopped
thinking critically...);  and if I listen well,  say little, and have some
luck, I will learn something; - and maybe meet someone of like mind... (Hi,
Joan!)

Perry




From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 16:34:47 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 23:34:47 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <06a601c015f7$82784780$065a87d4@oemcomputer>

Carol,
Apologies for my previous reply to this message of yours. I was under the
misaprehension that it was made in response to the Simultaneous Policy
proposal which, I now see, it probably wasn't - sorry.
John

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
Cc: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>; <marxism at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 9:32 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about


> TAHIR WOOD wrote:
>
> > >>> "John Bunzl" <jbunzl at simpol.org> 09/01 6:56 AM >>>
> >  Changing the system means a) a vision of a new
> > system as a target to aim for, and, b) a way of getting from
> > the system we are in now to the target in a responsible and
> > secure manner which everyone can understand and support.
> > It's as 'simple' as that and that is what I suggest we
> > mainly discuss.>>>
>
> The following observations are more topic sentences than a developed
> argument, but
> they might be of some use. Marx (before he ad even himself became a
> marxist) wrote
> what remains the definitive comment on (a) above: "It is not our thing
> to write recipes
> for the cookshops of the future." Through our understanding of the
> present we can
> glimpse, in the vaguest terms, what *must be* if we (as a species or a
> 'civilization') are
> to survive. But it is not from such glimpses that the concrete future
> comes: that arises
> within the struggle to destroy that which is destroying us. "Positive"
> visions are at best
> foolish -- at worst totalitarian nightmares.
>
> For one thing, not one of us (or probably even our grandchildren) will
> live in that future. Our
> lives and the lives of generations to come must be lived out in the
> midst of a struggle for a
> world we will never see. It is a cruel mockery to pretend that that
> future can be our "reward"
> for the struggle. It also mocks the lives of all who have already died
> in the struggle -- and those who are dying today.
>
> That does not mean that Rosa Luxemburg was wrong in affirming (in
> opposition to Bernstein) that 'The final goal is everything, the process
> nothing,'
> but in grasping her truth one must remember that she was a historical
> materialist,
> not a utopian dreamer. Marx observed that we can understand the ape
> better
> through knowing the human: put otherwise, what we know is history, and
> to know
> the present we must see the present as history, which is to look back on
> the present
> from the perspective of the future. (Bertell Ollman is very good on
> this.) The final
> goal is everything in that it is only by our (very general) grasp of
> what must be,
> from the perspective of the classless future, that we can understand,
> make
> sense of, and organize the present struggle. But as a target to aim for,
> as the reward
> as it were for struggle, that future is nothing.
>
> John's (b), "a way of getting from the system we are in now to the
> target,"
> is incoherent. Such a way does not exist nor will it ever exist. Mao
> noted that
> Marxists have no crystal ball (and neither do anarchists or social
> democrats)
> -- and it would require a most amazing crystal ball indeed to map out
> such a
> route from a chaotic present to a distant and only vaguely grasped
> future.
>
> Napoleon said something to the effect that is military plan was to act
> and then
> see what happens. We can work out general principles of struggle (though
> most have
> long since been worked out, so it is more a matter of archaeology than
> "new"
> thinking), but revolution (or even major reform) cannot be planned in
> advance.
> The world is too contingent. Hence the demand that a plan be prepared
> "in a
> responsible and  secure manner which everyone can understand and
> support"
> is in fact a demand that the world never change. It accepts the present
> capitalist
> world as eternal -- history has indeed ended.
>
> Carrol Cox
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From gdrouet at brutele.be  Sun Sep  3 17:01:09 2000
From: gdrouet at brutele.be (Georges Drouet)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 01:01:09 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
In-Reply-To: <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu>
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <v03007800b5d87f9d65be@[212.68.237.75]>

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From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 16:59:01 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 23:59:01 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <39B2B55D.AA50A284@ilstu.edu> <061b01c015f4$eed4c960$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <39B2CB32.651D8386@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <000201c0162a$e808c420$3d5a87d4@oemcomputer>

Carol,
Thanks for your further message (which crossed with one of mine).
You wrote:
Abstract plans of a new world are *bad* -- they are destructive.
> They help keep the world as it is rather than help change it. As long as
we
> believe
> we need plans for the future we will be unable to struggle to bring that
future
> about.
>
> The future (the quite unpredictable future) will be discovered in the
process of
> the
> struggle to destroy that which is destroying us now.

My reply:
I think I see what you are getting at but, surely, 'struggling to destroy
that which is destroying us now' could be said to be both a plan and a
struggle; i.e. it is struggle to acheive an aim: to destroy that which is
destroying us now. The aim to do away with something is therefore also a
plan of sorts and certain beneficial future effects are envisaged.
I would agree with you if any plans were made without the struggle to
achieve them. After all, theory without practice is a waste of time. In the
case of the Simultaneous Policy proposal, both theory and practice are
present.
Of course the future or aim envisaged by any theory, plan or struggle may
well not turn out as expected.
best wishes
John





From jbunzl at simpol.org  Sun Sep  3 23:02:24 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 06:02:24 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn> <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn> <061c01c015f4$ef7ca220$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <007801c015f5$7e344720$1948adcf@perryarn>
Message-ID: <008101c0162e$0a6a01c0$3d5a87d4@oemcomputer>

Perry wrote:
> because  at 60, I am still 'actively' learning ( i.e. I have not yet
stopped
> thinking critically...);  and if I listen well,  say little, and have some
> luck, I will learn something; - and maybe meet someone of like mind...
(Hi,
> Joan!)

My reply:
Fair enough, but then is it really worth commenting on proposals you have'nt
taken the trouble to read/consider properly? That doesn't sound like
listening well, critical thinking or active learning to me.
best wishes
John





From durable at earthlink.net  Sun Sep  3 09:23:22 2000
From: durable at earthlink.net (Barry Brooks)
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 08:23:22 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Go on regardless?
Message-ID: <39B26CEA.FF80FFC5@earthlink.net>

Subject: Economic Repair

Dear people,
   We need to find what kind of economy can provide people's needs
without making too much pollution and without running out of resources
rapidly. Our present consumer economy has many nice features, yet it is
basically at odds with resource stewardship.
   Labor has been surplus relative to local natural  resources for a
long time. In today's crowded world migration can no longer provide an
escape from depleted local resources, and imported resources are no
longer abundant and cheap.  Even though we face a growing shortage of
resources we still pretend that labor shortage is limiting production.
Our fear of labor shortage is obsolete.  Since the dawn of the
industrial age it has been necessary to constantly find ways to increase
consumption in order maintain full employment.
   The left and the right agree that jobs are the only acceptable way to
dole out money to the masses.  Yet, when we create nearly full
employment our powerful technology and out large supply of workers will
always consume far too many resources for such hyper-activity to be
sustainable. Only in our dreams is there no conflict between expanding
the economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to conserve
resources.
   Our present views rarely include any awareness that wealth comes from
nature and inheritance more than from any work we do. To make our system
work under present conditions we must admit that human labor is no
longer scarce because machines with computer control can replace most
paid labor, even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence
from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces more human
labor. Our system already has unearned income, but for now it is only
for a few. Changing that is the key to becoming sustainable. Unearned
income can end our dependence on jobs and growth.
   Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking order or to help
improve the lives of the poor, we must have a sustainable system for
anything to really matter to anyone.  Excess growth is the cause of our
high consumption, and high consumption is the reason our economic system
is not sustainable.  Growth is the common problem of all classes!
   True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts production and that
cuts real paying jobs and profits. No one supports a sustainable
economy.  Without true conservation we can continue to squander scarce
resources to exercise all our surplus labor.  Without conservation we
can have our giant SUVs.  That is our plan, left or right.
   There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve resources:
increased efficiency, increased durability, recycling and by doing less.
Durability allows doing less without having less. Efficiency allows
using less in what we are doing.  We can make deep cuts in consumption
without sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life time,
efficiency and reparability.
   Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and pollution that
are making our economy unsustainable.  Because durability has been
neglected we have a lot to gain when we starting using durability to
conserve.
   Conservation of perishables using recycling and efficiency are
already our goals, but the use of durability to conserve has had little
notice. Yet, a stable population could use a general increase in
durability to cut its resource consumption to very low levels while
maintaining high living standards.
   If we could somehow accept unearned income for all classes then we
could adjust the dole to stabilize wages. (No more tight money.)  This
will provide a mechanism allowing us to match the labor force to the
real need for labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force,
regardless of the consequences.

Barry Brooks
durable at earthlink.net






From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon Sep  4 07:26:27 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 4 Sep 2000 15:26:27 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
Message-ID: <s9b3bf2f.076@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Sun Sep  3 21:26:24 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 03:26:24 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd: Chomsky replies re being reformist, etc....
Message-ID: <LAW-F293LA0sOVtShEH00006094@hotmail.com>

  Hello crash list members, I thought I would post a snippet of a quote from 
Noam Chomsky from the ZNet sustainer forums.


>If a "reformist" is someone who chooses to act to
>improve the lives of people, maybe people
>suffering severely, then any sane person is a
>"reformist." If it means someone who insists that
>we must go no further than that, while the current
>system of domination and authority must remain
>intact, then no one within this domain of
>discourse is a "reformist." Does it mean something
>else?  Then what?
>



_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.




From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Mon Sep  4 10:25:54 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 11:25:54 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd: Chomsky replies re being reformist, etc....
References: <LAW-F293LA0sOVtShEH00006094@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <39B3CD12.E9D811BB@ilstu.edu>


aaron hoffer wrote:

> >"...  If it means someone who insists that
> >we must go no further than that, while the current
> >system of domination and authority must remain
> >intact, then no one within this domain of
> >discourse is a "reformist." Does it mean something
> >else?  Then what?

Yes there is a third meaning -- that of classical social democracy when it
still claimed to be socialist: the claim that capitalist could be changed into
socialism through an accumulation of reforms. "The Parliamentary Road
to Socialism."

I think it is easier to work with those who are reformist in the sense of
wanting only to eliminate specific evils than it is to work with those who
believe those reforms can add up to socialism. The former are honest
both with themselves and with allies. Those who believe reforms can add
up to socialism are dishonest with themselves.

Carrol





From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Mon Sep  4 10:41:50 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 10:41:50 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn> <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn> <061c01c015f4$ef7ca220$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <007801c015f5$7e344720$1948adcf@perryarn> <008101c0162e$0a6a01c0$3d5a87d4@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <007b01c0168f$06a3b3e0$1748adcf@perryarn>

----- Original Message -----
From: John Bunzl <jbunzl at simpol.org>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 23:02
Subject: Re: [CrashList] the Plan


> Perry wrote:
> > because  at 60, I am still 'actively' learning ( i.e. I have not yet
> stopped
> > thinking critically...);  and if I listen well,  say little, and have
some
> > luck, I will learn something; - and maybe meet someone of like mind...
> (Hi,
> > Joan!)
>
> My reply:
> Fair enough, but then is it really worth commenting on proposals you
have'nt
> taken the trouble to read/consider properly?

oh, contrare';

I did read it - "properly";  enough to realize it is flawed;

because I read it but don't arrive at the same value as you do, suggests to
you that I have not read it?  c'mon, John... how silly

since this is the 'crashlist', and you asked for a  'plan' - let me suggest
this for a rudimentary beginning :

1) do your own homework - learn the truth - forget the psychobabble

2) 'steel' yourself mentally and emotionally for the probable events of the
near future; admittedly, not easy to do

3) research suitable sites for relocation - those that increase your odds
for survival

4) get the hell out of the city - better a year too early than 10 minutes
too late

5) acquire those survival skills you may not already have - i.e.
horticulture and animal husbandry, plumbing, sanitation, etc.

6) prepare to hunker down and ride out the storm - as well as you can, for
as long as you can

7) realize that the primary motivator for your own individual existence is
to pass on your own genes, and that anything that will promote that (if you
are awake) you will do, and anything that will hinder that, you will not
allow

8) realize, thus, that 'society' means little to your genes, but that being
well-fed and alive tommorrow means everything...

9) create the most 'luck' (good fortune) for yourself and your loved ones as
you can

10) plan for the worst, hope for the best

11) with any excess time you have left over, try to recruit others to your
'mega-utopian-social-ideals'

Good luck (we'll all need it) ,

Perry

That doesn't sound like
> listening well, critical thinking or active learning to me.
> best wishes
> John
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From jbunzl at simpol.org  Mon Sep  4 10:54:21 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 17:54:21 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <s9b3bf2f.076@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <003f01c01691$e2e98e40$e25a87d4@oemcomputer>

Ok  will do - sorry!
John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] the Plan


> John
> 
> Thanks for engaging with us further. I intend to go back to
> your website for another look as soon as I can clear my desk
> a little. In the meantime could I make one small request:
> please would you not reply in capitals like this? It is hell
> to read, at least on my eyes, and it is not hard at all to
> tell whose voice is coming through. If you need to signal
> who is speaking you can just put your name or initials in
> front of a colon, followed by your text, like this:
> 
> JB: .............
> 
> Thanks 
> 
> Tahir
> 
> 
> 
> >>> "John Bunzl" <jbunzl at simpol.org> 09/03 10:11 PM >>>
> Hello Perry,
> You wrote:
> > "that 'plan' is flawed".
> 
> I take it you were referring to the Simultaneous Policy.
> Thank you for
> visiting our website and I will respond to your points
> beneath each one in
> capital letters for clarity:
> >
> > 1) it requires the voluntary compliance of millions
> against whose own best
> > interest it is to comply
> I DON'T BELIEVE THIS ASSERTION IS GENERALLY CORRECT. PLEASE
> SPECIFY
> PRECISELY WHICH OF THE PROPOSED POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST
> THE BEST INTERESTS
> OF THE MILLIONS EXPECTED TO ADOPT SP.
> >
> > 2) there is insufficient time for mega-solutions to be
> executed before the
> > crash effects begin
> YOU MAY BE RIGHT, BUT HAVE YOU ANY BETTER IDEA OR SHOULD WE
> JUST WAIT FOR
> THE CRASH?
> >
> > 3) the only 'solutions' are local : personal, individual,
> family, small
> > community; not mega-state or global;
> I THINK THERE ARE SOLUTIONS AT EVERY LEVEL. I ALSO BELIEVE
> THAT A SOLUTION
> AT ONE LEVEL DOES NOT NECESSARILY PRECLUDE SOLUTIONS AT
> OTHER LEVELS. I
> THINK WE NEED TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND.
> >
> > 4) the only effective 'plans' are those not published to
> the world via the
> > WWW
> NOT QUITE SURE WHERE YOU'RE GOING HERE PERRY...
> >
> > 5) Joan writes:
> > > >  ...Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?
> >
> >      it isn't .
> >
> > sorry; won't work...
> I REALLY THINK WE ARE HARDLY GOING TO GET VERY FAR WITH SUCH
> GLIB
> DISMISSALS. AS, REQUESTED ABOVE, PLEASE SPECIFY WHICH OF THE
> PROPOSED
> POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THOSE WHO ARE
> EXPECTED TO ADOPT
> SP. THEN LET'S HAVE A SENSIBLE DISCUSSION.
> LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU.
> BEST WISHES
> JOHN.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base 
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>                                                             
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> 
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> 




From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 11:16:22 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 13:16:22 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <42.a479551.26e532e6@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/2/00 7:56:33 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
hofferaaron at hotmail.com writes:

<<    I just assumed we would be living in a world with more or less the same 
infrastructure and same energy capabilities as we have today. I still do not 
know if the crash changes any thing that much, because for me, any society 
that I would 
envision, deals with the values that the society would promote, and those 
values would apply crash or no crash.>>

I wish I could believe in that. That is what I would hope for. But what I 
fear will likely happen will be more along the lines of the Rodney King riots 
in LA, except the race line would be instead: that of 'who has what who 
wants'.
 
   <<What I do know is that capitalism thrives on humanities worst 
 characteristics, the 7 deadly sins comes to mind, and striving to make 
 society work in such a way that peoples better qualities are rewarded is 
 what I support.>>

People will take those 'seven deadlies', with them where ever they go, they 
seem to creep out of the shadows of even the best without much warning. We 
won't be outdistancing our physic goblins if the sky falls: we will be facing 
them down everywhere we look.
Can you imagine Lenin at some early point trying to figure out how to ensure 
that his followers actually followed his higher aspirations, and not their 
own lower inclinations? Must have driven him nuts knowing what they could do, 
but realizing that they would not. 
Morality and ethics will not be legislated; 'good behaviour' is much tougher 
to encourage without paying for it. Especially in a population raised in a 
constant barrage of media promises of instant gratification. 
How do you get people to behave better simply because it's better for them?
I've read the suggestions that behavioural conditioning is appropriate, but I 
am not a B F Skinner fan, and I think we put that one to bed decades ago. 
There is simply too much appetite for control over others in the human psyche.
 
   << As to exactly what that would look like I don't know. There are some 
 things I think are important, such as, people having as much say in an issue 
 as to which they are affected by it, Splitting up work in such a way that 
 everyone does as much rewarding work and drudge work as another. >>

Well, when you say this to a woman who has raised sons in a family in which 
only the women do housework, just how do you think they will receive this 
good news?
I'll tell you. They snort: Yeah, right. Everyone is equal, but some are more 
equal than others and they are the men, not the women. 
Some of my employees are women of southeastern asian cultures in which the 
women earn all the income and the men stay at home (as holy men...). 
I like your intentions, but I don't trust the execution of them by everyone 
else, left to their own inclinations... There are exceptions, but I don't 
know very many.

<<And of course no way to make a profit off of property ownership.>>

Oh boy. I just don't know where to go with this one. This country was 
originally inhabited by peoples firmly convinced that land cannot be owned by 
individuals.
And just look at it now. 
Another telling clue is that although the native peoples seemed to inhabit a 
literal paradise, most of them were continuously involved in inter-tribal 
strife, not over land ownership, but territory nonetheless.
The only contemporary societies I can think of that have the sort of 
structure you are thinking about are the ones deep in the rain forest that 
are being eradicated as I write this. They have no natural defenses against 
us except the rain forest: going, going.... way too quickly.
Sorry, I can't be more positive and upbeat around the future, but I'm not 
seeing (and I use that word in more than one sense) a whole lot of good stuff 
once the dominoes begin to topple. Not until the population is significantly 
reduced (VERY significantly), will there be the sort and amount of mutual 
cooperation for which you hope. 
Most of the die-off will be natural causes, but how 'natural' considering the 
mess we've been making in the biosphere is anybody's good guess. Then there 
will be the natural human impulses to genocide as a somewhat lesser factor. 
If there is any wildlife other than humans when the population reaches 
bottleneck, it will be some kind of major miracle. 
I see this within the next generation. I am not particularly sanguine about 
the outlook, but realistically, we have created 'Interesting Times' for 
ourselves.
We need to be prepared to deal with the unfolding circumstances with 
flexibility and resourcefulness.
Joan
 



From jbunzl at simpol.org  Mon Sep  4 12:34:09 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 19:34:09 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com> <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer> <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn> <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn> <061c01c015f4$ef7ca220$065a87d4@oemcomputer> <007801c015f5$7e344720$1948adcf@perryarn> <008101c0162e$0a6a01c0$3d5a87d4@oemcomputer> <007b01c0168f$06a3b3e0$1748adcf@perryarn>
Message-ID: <005c01c0169e$f67ced00$e25a87d4@oemcomputer>

>
> > Perry wrote:
> > > because  at 60, I am still 'actively' learning ( i.e. I have not yet
> > stopped
> > > thinking critically...);  and if I listen well,  say little, and have
> some
> > > luck, I will learn something; - and maybe meet someone of like mind...
> > (Hi,
> > > Joan!)
> >
> > My reply:
> > Fair enough, but then is it really worth commenting on proposals you
> have'nt
> > taken the trouble to read/consider properly?
>
Perry wrote:

> oh, contrare';
>
> I did read it - "properly";  enough to realize it is flawed;
>
> because I read it but don't arrive at the same value as you do, suggests
to
> you that I have not read it?  c'mon, John... how silly.

My reply:
Perry, you made a criticism of the SP proposal which is fine. I asked you to
substantiate it but instead of doing so, you duck the issue you yourself
raised and divert to something else.  It is your continued refusal to
substantiate that
criticism which leads me - and I think most reasonable people - to suspect
that you did not read it properly. You will understand that under the above
circumstances, it would be unreasonable for you to expect me to read or
respond to any proposals you might make. If, on the other hand, you care to
substantiate your criticism, I'll be glad to continue the discussion.
John





From aabdo at webtv.net  Mon Sep  4 12:30:55 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 13:30:55 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
In-Reply-To: INMOEMBRO@aol.com's message of Mon, 4 Sep 2000 13:16:22 EDT
Message-ID: <2614-39B3EA5F-3496@storefull-236.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Joan, Surprise!      I agree with your sentiments 100%.     Human nature
in capitalist society is a hard barrier to move aside, or do away with.
This question of how to move humankind forward to being what was called
by some, 'socialist man', is a question of how to create a society with
better people.

People are  products of their environment, even if a revolution has just
occurred.     People raised in an abusive environment are widely known
to be rather abusive themselves, not the other way around.

Conversely, people raised in a cooperative, supportive environment,
themselves tend to behave that way when they become adults.

Capitalism is a society that makes abusive, non- social behavior into a
virtue..... 'the virtue of selfishness'.      The job of humanity, Crash
or no Crash, is to turn desired societal human characteristics into the
opposite of what we have now.     Socio-biology wants to convince us
that it can't be done.

If societal behavior is not changed, then .....All Power to the
Cockroaches!

Tony












From gdrouet at brutele.be  Mon Sep  4 12:49:04 2000
From: gdrouet at brutele.be (Georges Drouet)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 20:49:04 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
In-Reply-To: <007b01c0168f$06a3b3e0$1748adcf@perryarn>
References: <18.1c100e4.26e09ddc@aol.com>
 <006601c015be$92b244e0$f65a87d4@oemcomputer>
 <001f01c015c9$a6a64c20$1748adcf@perryarn>
 <000b01c015e3$6c3a6660$065a87d4@oemcomputer>
 <002f01c015ea$0a143180$1948adcf@perryarn>
 <061c01c015f4$ef7ca220$065a87d4@oemcomputer>
 <007801c015f5$7e344720$1948adcf@perryarn>
 <008101c0162e$0a6a01c0$3d5a87d4@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <v03007809b5d990e91138@[212.68.237.75]>

Thank you Perry of being so positive, I will answer to this funny post on a
funny way, take it cool, thank you.

>1) do your own homework - learn the truth - forget the psychobabble

Do you believe in one lonely truth? Which one? Hippie one, let's go back to
the farms and broke tv, or may be the white occidental way of life with a
anti-atomic shield in the garden, or is it the huitcholes shamanic one with
great-eagle incantations, or what is it? A nihilistic truth?

>2) 'steel' yourself mentally and emotionally for the probable events of the
>near future; admittedly, not easy to do

I don't think it's necessary to suffer physically from any pain to
understand world suffering and despair. That's something coming from deep
inside, don't you feel it?

>3) research suitable sites for relocation - those that increase your odds
>for survival

Odds for survival? Do you mean to became a Arnold Schwartscamembert or a
Rambo or may be a James Blond? No, no, let me guess! Robinson Crusoe!

>4) get the hell out of the city - better a year too early than 10 minutes
>too late

Sorry, but to make things move on a right scale, we must live in the heart
of the main big entities, London, New-York, Paris, Brussels, because the
changes to be done must hit the right person in the governments, EC, UNO,
WB, IMF...

>5) acquire those survival skills you may not already have - i.e.
>horticulture and animal husbandry, plumbing, sanitation, etc.

John is a pretty good gardener and I'm a wooden boat builder -we might need
one to sail away if our sustainable revolution fails ; -)

>6) prepare to hunker down and ride out the storm - as well as you can, for
>as long as you can

World Crash will sadly start in the south countries, it's started yet some
years ago and just increase its path to global South war (Colombia is the
last South American Vietnam...)

What I don't understand is how you can be that blind... Don't you remember
swimming in rivers, runing in the beach, walking through mountains... Try
to find peaceful places like that in the South countries, it's almost
impossible yet: pollution, hunger, war, over-exploitation, guerrilla,
overpopulation, Aids and so on have destroyed huge parts of the world.
Well, it's easier to found sane trees in the so-called "natural" parks in
the West of the US, pay your fee and walk in free...

>7) realize that the primary motivator for your own individual existence is
>to pass on your own genes, and that anything that will promote that (if you
>are awake) you will do, and anything that will hinder that, you will not
>allow

This is the most "primitive" argument I ever heard. One question: do you
have kids? I mean by your own? That answer might help me to understand this
"basic instinct" of yours... I have four kids, one of them is living in
Mexico with my first wife, I have been living in Mexico myself during seven
years, in that time (81-92 with breaks) the life was pretty hard, but since
the structural adjustment implemented by the IMF and the WB, each one of my
friends there is obliged to work on two jobs to survive, pay the rent and
breathe smog...

>8) realize, thus, that 'society' means little to your genes, but that being
>well-fed and alive tommorrow means everything...

At least 75 percent of the world popultaion lives in cities, the concept of
tribe exists since the prehistoric times, our evolution drives us to
apreciate other basic things as freedom, compassion, love, arts,
friendship, not only food and sex...

>9) create the most 'luck' (good fortune) for yourself and your loved ones as
>you can

Our loved ones are the population of the world, our heart is big enough to
keep humanity at large. Is it innate? For me it is, my father is French and
helped jewish people to cross the German free line in France during the
Second World War (Joseph Kessel in between many others), my mother is
Spanish and suffer from Franco dictatorship. My first wife is Mexican and
fighting with the Zapatistas. My three first kids are both French Spanish
and Mexican. My second wife is Indian, from Madras, and our girl is a real
mix. My son's girl friend is African... So, when you have the world at
home, humanity is full of friends and keep care of them is just an
evidence...

>10) plan for the worst, hope for the best

We plan the worst: the Crash
We hope the best: avoid it
That the reason of the existence of SP

>11) with any excess time you have left over, try to recruit others to your
>'mega-utopian-social-ideals'

It's easier for us to take care of the world with millions of friends
working as thousands of ants against the current neo-liberal machine,
something called Marabounta!!, than for you to make your familly fit into
your atomic shield in the backyard somewhere in the mountains...

>Good luck (we'll all need it) ,

That's right and that's all

>
>Perry
>
>That doesn't sound like
>> listening well, critical thinking or active learning to me.
>> best wishes
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist


----------------------------------------------
Georges Drouet
----------------------------------------------
Visit our site: http://www.simpol.org
_____________
ISPO
United Kingdom
John Bunzl
P.O. Box 26547, London SE3 7YT
info at simpol.org
_____________
ISPO Belgique
Georges Drouet
28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
ispo.belgique at simpol.org






From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 12:40:29 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 14:40:29 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <94.915cf69.26e5469d@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/4/00 11:36:08 AM Pacific Daylight Time, aabdo at webtv.net 
writes:

<< If societal behavior is not changed, then .....All Power to the
 Cockroaches!
  >>

Well, I would vastly enjoy being a fly on the wall, watching the roaches 
construct a value system, that did not discriminate between the brown, green 
and yellow families. No problem, all species will have a go at it, if we 
leave them anything to eat.
Joan



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 18:25:27 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 20:25:27 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Public schools
Message-ID: <c0.8be5cda.26e59777@aol.com>

I was at a Labor Day picnic in one of our suburbs yesterday.  Two different 
professional women (one a school board member) said that the education system 
in California went to hell when proposition 13 passed.  This law was passed 
because people wanted old people to keep their homes and not be pushed out by 
high taxes.  The lie was that it also cut property tax burdens for big 
businesses like the phone company and P G and E.  The main, proponent, Howard 
Jarvis, was connected to the apartment owners association.  Property taxes 
were how we were funding our schools.  So, the public school crisis is 
economic and caused by capitalism.  



From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 17:21:05 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 19:21:05 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
Message-ID: <de.985b916.26e58861@aol.com>

Quoting Noam Chomsky, zapata at sezampro.yu writes:

<<  First, the facts are not accurate. The
 Milosevic regime has committed many crimes, but
 one cannot attribute the terrible conditions
 completely to its crimes.  >>

Not completely?  Generous but - what crimes?  Chomsky does not say.  In the 
past, he asserted without evidence that mass atrocities had occurred.  Now 
even the ICTY has retreated on the mass atrocities, so - what crimes?

By what license does Prof. Chomsky make statements, identical to those found 
in the mass media, without offering even a shred of supporting evidence  
while simultaneously presenting himself as the critic of media lies and even 
of the demonization of Milosevich, as he has done in past correspondence with 
me.

Best regards,
Jared Israel



From hofferaaron at hotmail.com  Mon Sep  4 19:03:56 2000
From: hofferaaron at hotmail.com (aaron hoffer)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 01:03:56 GMT
Subject: [CrashList]  Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <LAW-F103EANDg9RCbhe00001de9@hotmail.com>

  Joan wrote:

><<    I just assumed we would be living in a world with more or less the 
>same
>infrastructure and same energy capabilities as we have today. I still do 
>not
>know if the crash changes any thing that much, because for me, any society
>that I would
>envision, deals with the values that the society would promote, and those
>values would apply crash or no crash.>>
>
>I wish I could believe in that. That is what I would hope for. But what I
>fear will likely happen will be more along the lines of the Rodney King 
>riots
>in LA, except the race line would be instead: that of 'who has what who
>wants'.

   I'm afraid your probably right, and that is why I hope we are able to 
make significant changes before the crash occurs. Here in Canada, there 
seems to be the genesis of a debate as to what will happen as the worlds 
resources  become ever more scarce. Since Canada is a huge country with 
plentiful resources and a relatively small population, it seems likely that 
we will still have a surplus of resources when most of the rest of the world 
has run dry. Some fear the U.S coming in and taking what they want, others 
see it as an opportunity for massive profit, and still others think we 
should willingly share our resources with the most needy. If the crash were 
to happen tomorrow I'm pretty certain the result would be a combination of 
the first two.


>
>    <<What I do know is that capitalism thrives on humanities worst
>  characteristics, the 7 deadly sins comes to mind, and striving to make
>  society work in such a way that peoples better qualities are rewarded is
>  what I support.>>
>
>People will take those 'seven deadlies', with them where ever they go, they
>seem to creep out of the shadows of even the best without much warning. We
>won't be outdistancing our physic goblins if the sky falls: we will be 
>facing
>them down everywhere we look.
>Can you imagine Lenin at some early point trying to figure out how to 
>ensure
>that his followers actually followed his higher aspirations, and not their
>own lower inclinations? Must have driven him nuts knowing what they could 
>do,
>but realizing that they would not.
>Morality and ethics will not be legislated; 'good behaviour' is much 
>tougher
>to encourage without paying for it. Especially in a population raised in a
>constant barrage of media promises of instant gratification.
>How do you get people to behave better simply because it's better for them?
>I've read the suggestions that behavioural conditioning is appropriate, but 
>I
>am not a B F Skinner fan, and I think we put that one to bed decades ago.
>There is simply too much appetite for control over others in the human 
>psyche.

   There is a strain of thinking in psychology that says, everyone makes the 
best decision they possibly can in any given situation. This decision is 
based on complex factors, including life history, organic traits of that 
individual, and also societal cues, among others. If we could create a 
society that, at least, does not reward behaviors such as greed, vanity, 
etc, then we might find other human characteristics become more dominant.

   Of course we will always have a vast range of human behavior and there 
will always be conflict between those with differing views and interests. 
Personally I think this is a good thing, because otherwise life would be 
pretty boring.


>
>    << As to exactly what that would look like I don't know. There are some
>  things I think are important, such as, people having as much say in an 
>issue
>  as to which they are affected by it, Splitting up work in such a way that
>  everyone does as much rewarding work and drudge work as another. >>
>
>Well, when you say this to a woman who has raised sons in a family in which
>only the women do housework, just how do you think they will receive this
>good news?
>I'll tell you. They snort: Yeah, right. Everyone is equal, but some are 
>more
>equal than others and they are the men, not the women.
>Some of my employees are women of southeastern asian cultures in which the
>women earn all the income and the men stay at home (as holy men...).
>I like your intentions, but I don't trust the execution of them by everyone
>else, left to their own inclinations... There are exceptions, but I don't
>know very many.

   This type of thing seems like it would be dealt with outside of the 
economic structure. I am probably the least qualified person to discuss  
gender and kinship issues so I won't try.


>We need to be prepared to deal with the unfolding circumstances with
>flexibility and resourcefulness.

   This is the only certainty.

   Sincerely, Aaron.


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From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 23:03:05 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 01:03:05 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Reply to Sam Pawlett
Message-ID: <3f.9ddd330.26e5d889@aol.com>

The disillusioned Marxists really get me.  I finally cornered one with these 
questions:
Who should make decisions as to:
what gets produced?  What wars happen?  Who gets the surplus value?  Who gets 
what is produced?  Under what conditions are things produced and at what cost 
to the environment?
Who in their right mind would answer "I want a small group of white rich men 
(less than one per cent of the population) to make all of the important 
decisions for all of the world.  This group will include those who inherited 
and/or stole their money.  I want all of the rest of us to have NO input 
whatsoever to the decisions."



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 23:48:56 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 01:48:56 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Self Determination- Support It!
Message-ID: <21.858bd4.26e5e348@aol.com>

Now we are seeing the results of US interference in Afghanistan.  How many 
more women will die or commit suicide because of the group in power there now?



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Mon Sep  4 23:44:33 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 01:44:33 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] On mediation and contradiction (was self determination etc)
Message-ID: <18.1e14439.26e5e241@aol.com>

I want to correct a couple of things that were said.
Imperialism and Pot Pol.  If Kissinger and Nixon had not dragged neutral 
Cambodia into the war between Vietnamese resisting imperialism and the US, 
then there would have been no killings in Cambodia.  The blood of Cambodian's 
on all sides is on Kissinger's and Nixon's hands.  I agree with Monsour 
Farhang, who refused to shake hands with Henry saying "I don't shake hands 
with those who commit genocide."  William Shawcross has an excellent book out 
on this "Sideshow".
Imperialism and Iran.  Iran had a leader that the US didn't like.  So the US 
put in the Shah of Iran.  Through his secret police, Savak, he killed and 
tortured people in Iran and in the US.  Any revolutions and/or counter 
revolutions that happened afterward are the result of that interference.  The 
blood is on the hands of US imperialism.



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 00:11:03 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 02:11:03 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Public schools
Message-ID: <6e.2bee4b9.26e5e877@aol.com>

Joan, you are so right.  I know that superintendents are vastly over paid.  
Class room teachers are short changed as a result.  Plus, school districts 
have huge bureaucracies.  My school district spent a million dollars in a 
court suit to keep one disabled child out of main stream classes.  Another 
time, they hired a superintendent who asked for more money after he had 
already agreed to come.  There is so much corruption on the retirement 
amounts for superintendents that a government unit had to be formed just to 
lost for that kind of fraud. 



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 00:31:08 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 02:31:08 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Public schools vs. home schools
Message-ID: <54.8f249b9.26e5ed2c@aol.com>

Even though my spouse and I have post graduate college, we could not seem to 
teach it to our kids.  In fact, one counselor suggested that our educational 
level was so high that some of the kids were giving up as they felt that they 
couldn't compete.  This seemed amazing to us because we never insisted on 
college but usable skills.  
However, we know many many folks who are not educated enough to teach the 
needed skills to their kids.  We ran into this when we took in abused and 
neglected kids from the neighborhood.  One of my son's girlfriend's had never 
seen a napkin, and regularly had 2 colas for breakfast.  She could not 
remember what towns they had lived in so she could do a resume.  Many kids 
have no experience with using checking accounts instead of check cashing 
services.  They didn't know how to dress for job interviews or to fill out 
applications.  I had long arguments with foster sons that it was not "normal" 
to be evicted every month because the money was spent on drugs.  If everyone 
home schools, the elite will have an even greater advantage.  My mom is very 
well read and very intelligent.  But, she didn't finish high school till I 
was almost grown.  How could she have prepared me for a science degree in 
college?  My spouse and I got college educations because we worked our way 
through and in the 1960s and 1970 there used to programs for public education 
for the poor as part of the "war on poverty".  



From aabdo at webtv.net  Tue Sep  5 00:35:03 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 01:35:03 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Is It Not Slander Because It Is Said By Chomsky?
Message-ID: <6442-39B49417-11962@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Jared, while I agree with many of your criticisms of Chomsky, I cannot
understand why you are responding to zapata-sezampro.yu at the
CrashList, or marxism-list, since he is subbed at neither of these 2
lists. 

Further, Milosevic has committed many crimes. ? ? To mention this in
a sentence, saying that Milosevic is not solely to blame for the misery
in the Balkans, is hardly a great crime. ? ? If there was more said,
how can we know, since we only have this snippet from a conversation on
another list, entirely different from where your message has been read? 

This is hardly a great way to start a thread, discussing the merits or
defects of Chomsky on opposing US imperialist interventions. ? ?
Plus, nothing is really new here. ? ? So what brought about this
snap? 

Comradely, Tony












From INMOEMBRO at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 00:54:25 2000
From: INMOEMBRO at aol.com (INMOEMBRO at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 02:54:25 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Public schools vs. home schools
Message-ID: <c2.2cb5bb.26e5f2a1@aol.com>

Linda -
I completely agree with you on this. What we need for our kids--ALL our 
kids--is some pathway to education no matter where they have to start from. 
First, a way to identify the ones who really have the drive to learn, and 
Second, a way to get them onto that path. 
What we need is the means to find them. 
What they need is the access. 
Then we hope that some of the others, seeing that they are being left behind,
run alongside to catch up, because they are seeing the possibilities.
This is the way we can use carrots.
I hope.
Joan



From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 01:45:38 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 03:45:38 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Tony Aabdo's defense of Chomsky
Message-ID: <11.8c148a5.26e5fea2@aol.com>

Dear people,

In a message dated 09/05/2000 2:36:31 aabdo at webtv.net writes:

<< Jared, while I agree with many of your criticisms of Chomsky, I cannot
 understand why you are responding to zapata-sezampro.yu at the
 CrashList, or marxism-list, since he is subbed at neither of these 2
 lists >>

Apparently this is an attempt to make me look unfair or something. Fact is, I 
simply responded to Zapata's email, whose subject line read: "[CrashList] 
Vrlo Interesantno/Chomsky"  by hitting Reply to All. Then I added a letter to 
Chomsky, and that I sent to several lists.  I think it's about time these 
attacks were discussed publicly. Chomsky's statement - that Milosevich is a 
criminal - was not made in private email, after all.  He's made similar 
charges in influential publications.  They are serious accusations.  Isn't it 
reasonable to demand Chomsky substantiate them or apologize for the harm he's 
done?

Further on, Tony says: 

<< Further, Milosevic has committed many crimes. ?  To mention this in  a 
sentence, saying that Milosevic is not solely to blame for the misery  in the 
Balkans, is hardly a great crime. >>

Chomsky says Milosevich has committed many crimes, but provides no evidence.  
Chomsky's been saying that since last spring even though in a private email 
to me he agreed that the demonization of Milosevich in the press was beyond 
belief.  This email to me makes me wonder whether he in fact knows what he's 
saying publicly is untrue. Anyway, he offers no evidence.  For Chomsky, 
Serbian crimes are self-evident.

Chomsky has gotten away with these unsupported attacks because the mass media 
has pounded us all with anti-Yugoslav propaganda till we're gaga.  

So now I call Chomsky on making attacks without evidence, and Tony supports 
Chomsky, without evidence.  

When people like Chomsky (who says he is antiwar) and Aabdo (who says he 
supports Yugoslavia against NATO) agree that Milosevich is a criminal (the 
heart of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia) then this  tells the left: "See?  Even 
peaceniks and self-proclaimed Marxists have to admit that the charges are in 
large measure true." This strengthens NATO. How can anyone build a mass 
movement to defend  criminals? That will never happen.
 
Doesn't this constitute providing a left cover for NATO?  As for whether it 
is "criminal" -  in my letter to Chomsky I said it was "a tragedy."  
"Criminal" is Tony's word.  

Best regards,
Jared Israel



From JoeMosley at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 02:34:12 2000
From: JoeMosley at aol.com (JoeMosley at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 04:34:12 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Self Determination- Support It!
Message-ID: <80.467793.26e60a04@aol.com>

In a message dated 9/5/00 1:56:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
LROBERTS46 at aol.com writes:

<< Subj:     Re: [CrashList] Re:Self Determination- Support It!
 Date:  9/5/00 1:56:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time
 From:  LROBERTS46 at aol.com
 Sender:    crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
 Reply-to:  crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
 To:    crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
 
 Now we are seeing the results of US interference in Afghanistan.  How many 
 more women will die or commit suicide because of the group in power there 
now?
 
 _______________________________________________
 Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
 To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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  >>



From JoeMosley at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 03:05:21 2000
From: JoeMosley at aol.com (JoeMosley at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 05:05:21 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Self Determination- Support It!
Message-ID: <10.1e08fbc.26e61151@aol.com>

Please add to the list US interference in the Congo, I recently read an 
article that accuse Eisenhower of ordering the elimination of Lumumba. Mobutu 
was "our boy," look at the predicament of the Congo. In Panama, Torrijos died 
when his helicopter, flown by a substitute for his regular pilot, crashed and 
"our boy," Noriega, took over. Link this to Oliver North, the Nicaraguan 
Contras and the present so-called "drug-war" in Colombia.  Yes, I know! The 
list could go on and on... Just mentioned these two because of their effect 
on me.

JoeMosley

In a message dated 9/5/00 1:56:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
LROBERTS46 at aol.com writes:

 Now we are seeing the results of US interference in Afghanistan.  How many 
 more women will die or commit suicide because of the group in power there 
now?
 
 _______________________________________________
 Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
 To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
 http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
 
 



From mstainsby at tao.ca  Tue Sep  5 04:16:12 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 03:16:12 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Fw: WELCOME TO PRAGUE!  STOP THE IMF!
Message-ID: <004b01c01722$521e0580$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

----- Original Message -----
forwarded From: "heikki sipil? " <sipila at kominf.pp.fi>
To: <kominform at Lists.EUnet.fi>


 >From: New Worker Online <ncp at geocities.com>


I have had quite a few requests for the packet of info from our Czech
comrades. It seems that lots of New Worker readers will be there! :-)

Below is a copy of a special edition of Postmark Prague edited by our
comrade Ken Biggs who lives in Prague. It will be distributed to overseas
visitors by KCSM members.

Richard.

WELCOME TO PRAGUE!  STOP THE IMF!

POSTMARK PRAGUE No.316
Founded in Prague, Czechoslovakia, June 1991
Vol.10 No.7 * SEPTEMBER 2000

CAN THE IMF BE REFORMED?
The question of the day is: Can the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
the World Bank (WB) be reformed? Can they be transformed into
democratically controlled institutions serving the interests of the
majority of the world's people?

Young radicals like the Czech student Alice Dvorska, press spokesperson of
the Initiative against Economic Globalisation, are clear: "They are
unreformable institutions representing the interests of transnational
capital."

But some more established theoreticians on the Left (and also even on the
Right) are calling for reform of the world's financial institutions.
They're right to a certain extent: there's nothing in the world that can't
be changed. But the reformability of any kind of institution is limited by
the nature of its role.

If the role of the IMF and WB is to enforce global capital's domination,
then the only reforms possible are those which allow them to enforce its
dominance more effectively.

* Can a tiger be made into a vegetarian?
The most drastic forms of pauperisation can be modified on the principle
that you don't milk a milch cow dry. But that's all. Any attempt to
fundamentally change the character of these institutions - by  transforming
them into democratically controlled institutions serving the interests of
the majority of humanity - is like trying to turn a tiger into a
vegeterian.  It's just not on. The tiger's stomach simply can't cope with a
vegetable diet. Its organism is structured for hunting and meat-eating, and
if a tiger's a tiger, he has to have his meat.

For example, the IMF and the World Bank talk about "cancelling" the debts
of the poorest countries. But when we get down to the nitty-gritty, we find
that they will only agree to this if the usual IMF conditions are accepted:
more privatisation, including privatisation of public services, and more
cuts in public spending - i.e. further closures (in the poorest countries!)
of cash-strapped institutions providing health care and education etc.

* Private ownership
 The IMF's organism  is geared to maximising the profits of transnational
corporations which want the rest of the world completely privatised at
knock-down prices. For the IMF to be capable of behaving otherwise, it
would have to become a totally different organisation.

The deeper meaning of the struggle against the IMF, the World Bank and
globalisation is that it is a struggle against private ownership  which
inevitably leads to concentration of capital in the hands of transnational
corporations, on the one hand, and to mass poverty, on the other. The
leaders of the IMF won't agree to this, no matter how often they say they
want to help the poor.

*This is an abridged translation of an article by Norbert Stary which
appeared in the Czech left-wing daily Halo Noviny on August 23.

THE RICH GET RICHER, AND THE POOR.?

The Prague-based World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which represents
more than 400 million members, characterised the results of  IMF/World Bank
policies like this at its 14th Congress in New Delhi in March of this year:

As we enter a new century and a new millenium, the working people and their
trade unions all over the world are confronting a worsening world economic
and
social situation. Economic disparities between the rich and poor countries
as well as between rich and poor people within countries have vastly
increased.
The social consequences of the worsening economic crisis and financial
turmoil undermine economic security, social standards and basic human
rights.

? Millions have lost jobs and millions more are threatened with total
deprivation of their means of livelihood. One-third of the world labour
force is either unemployed of under-employed.

? Mass poverty is increasing everywhere and has become all the more
widespread as the financial crisis in East Asia and its worldwide
repercussions resulted in the cutting of global output by an estimated
2,000 billion dollars in 1998-2000. Sixty countries have been getting
steadily poorer since 1980.

? More than one billion people are unable to meet even their most basic
human needs. Over 800 million are under-nourished and hungry. Nearly 60 per
cent of the population of developing countries - more than 2.5 billion
people - have no access to basic sanitation and 30 per cent cannot get
safe, drinkable water.

As the Human Development Report 1999 issued by the UN Development Programme
points out, inequality within and between nations has been rising
drastically since the early 1980s.

? The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the
richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997 - up
from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960.

? By the late 1990s, the fifth of the world's people living in the highest
income countries had 86 per cent of world GDP, 82 per cent of world export
markets and 68 per cent of foreign direct investment, while the bottom
fifth had just one per cent in each case.

 The OECD countries, with 19 per cent of global population, have 71 per
cent of global trade in goods and services, 58 per cent of foreign direct
investment and 91 per cent of all internet users.

? The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the
four years to 1998 - to more than one trillion dollars.

The policies imposed through the IMF and the World Trade Organisation in
favour of the transnational corporations and financial groups have
destabilised national economies, worsening the problems of unequal trade
and economic relations and adding to the outflow of resources from
developing countries, besides affecting the sovereignty of nations, causing
job losses, problems of health and educational services, adversely
affecting the rights of women, etc.

The IMF and WTO totally ignore Commitment 8 of the 1995 Copenhagen World
Summit for Social Development "that when structural adjustment programmes
are agreed to they include social development goals, in particular
eradicating poverty, promoting full and productive employment, and
enhancing social integration."

"Have a globalised nice day!"
The Czech Republic's Social Democratic government has mobilised 11,000
police and 1,600 soldiers to help keep "law and order" during the IMF/World
Bank conference.

In addition to army-supplied armoured vehicles, helicopters and cranes (!),
6,000 Prague police - two-thirds of its total strength - will be on
conference-related duties, reinforced by 5,000 police brought into Prague
from all over the Czech Republic.

Since right-wing controlled borough councils in Prague are urging
pensioners,  schoolchildren (who've been given a week's holiday) and
anybody else who can to leave town during the conference, Prague's thriving
criminal community are looking forward to a bumper weekend. There will also
be gangs of pickpockets anxious to relieve demonstrators of their wallets
and purses on crowded public transport and during protest events.

Prague's theatres are being closed for the week, presumably as part of the
attempt to clear the streets and give the forces of "law and order" a clear
run at "foreign extremists".

* Media extremism
With more than a touch of irony (given its support for IMF/World Bank
extremism), it's the mostly foreign-owned media which has been busiest in
stirring up xenophobic hostility to the "tens of thousands of foreign
radicals" who will be in Prague for the IMF conference. Stories of an
advance guard of "foreign extremists" training local opponents of
capitalist globalisation in the use of Molotov cocktails and other weapons
have appeared in the press.
The government too has played its part in whipping up tension in the run-up
to the conference, with interior minister Stanislav Gross (a former "velvet
revolutionary") well to the fore. He has already publicly endorsed  the
action of his police in  brutally breaking up several peaceful anti-IMF
street protests this year, most notoriously on May Day.

And on August 31 there was a well-publicised "mock battle" involving riot
police, British-trained mounted police, police dogs and water cannon to
demonstrate their crowd control "skills".

A group of senior Czech police officers was sent on a course to the USA
earlier this year "to learn the lessons of Seattle" and other protests
against capitalist globalisation. The globalised FBI has recently opened an
office in Prague, and they and 600 other foreign "specialists" have been
involved in preparing the police for their "law and order" duties during
the IMF conference.

* Violence
There are those who would welcome violence in the streets of Prague during
the conference. They plan to use it against the Left in important regional
and Senate elections which take place shortly after the IMF conference (in
November) and to support the idea of a ban on left-wing and militant trade
union organisations. So beware of provocateurs!


This is a special IMF conference edition of Postmark Prague, a 16 page
monthly English-language review of political developments in the Czech and
Slovak Republics, which aims to promote international solidarity with Left,
working class and other social movements in these countries. For a free
sample copy, write to Postmark Prague, PO Box 42, 182 21 Prague 8, Czech
Republic. (e-mail: postmarkprague at cmail.cz) .
New Communist Party of Britain Homepage

http://www.newcommunistparty.org.uk

A news service for the Working Class!

Workers of all countries Unite!


================
Macdonald Stainsby.

Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
----------
http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international




From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep  5 06:55:36 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 14:55:36 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [exyualista] Tony Aabdo's defense of Chomsky
References: <11.8c148a5.26e5fea2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <01a001c01738$b51789c0$b5bd6ac2@k382>

Dear Jared,
I respect your work very much, as I have told you this several times. We,
from "Resistance web site",are publishing , with your kind permission many
of your articles, or articles coming from your site.
So, please read this as a friendly suggestion:
Milosevic is a criminal. Big time. I am living under his yoke, witnessing
his crimes everyday. He is a little ruthless dictator, with a mad wife, with
two idiotic kids.  He is privatizing everything, he has organized a perfect
cleptocracy for his family and his oligarchy, he had killed almost all of
the opposition press ( it's low quality notwithstanding, we are talking
about freedom of thought and expression); he have stolen the elections in
1996; his thugs are beating up kids in the middle of the day, his assassins
are killing or kidnapping people ( Ivan Stambolic is the most recent
example) - the list of his crimes in internal politics is endless. And, with
regards to his external politics, people form all over the world, good
people , are deceived with his leftist-anti imperialist mask: he is not a
leftist. He is haunting leftist, authentic radicals, in his own country. His
party is the richest party on this side of Colorado river. He is using every
opportunity, and every emotion, to preserve power and to stay on power.
Yugoslavia is a wonderful country. Yugoslav people deserve help and
protection from "antiserb racism" which we are all witnesses of. We should
fight back this idea of collective crime which is casted upon us.
 But Yugoslavia is not Milosevic. Fighting against imperialism, injustices
made to Yugoslavs, new wars which Imperial States of AmeriKKKa are
instigating on this soil, slowly but very skillfully, is possible without
attachment to Milosevic. He doesn't deserve it. I guess that my word isn't
enough, but please just acknowledge  that I am an insider, radical leftist
and a person who suffered a lot under foreign imperialism and under
Milosevic. I think that this opportunity gives me a chance to be as
objective as one could be , in complex situation like this.
 With regards to Chomsky, contrary to what you may believe, his books helped
radical leftist here to make a clearer picture about the nature of state
violence, nature of AmeriKKKan foreign politics, European Imperialism,
shaping of the mental images and representations, and to offer this picture
to the people here, with much success. Chomsky helped us a lot. His mistakes
notwithstanding. He made good deal of mistakes, yes. But who of us, involved
in a fight for social change, for a better and healthier society, didn't?
With respect, in solidarity,
                                 Andrej Grubacic






From johnwood at umich.edu  Tue Sep  5 07:30:38 2000
From: johnwood at umich.edu (John Woodford)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 09:30:38 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
References: <s9af9ba9.021@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <v03007800b5d87f9d65be@[212.68.237.75]>
Message-ID: <39B4F57E.B4BF20FC@umich.edu>

The thing is, this organizing by the U of Chi liberals and their runining dogs was and is a downhill organizing run---with the wind of the corporations etc. at their back., providing the fuel for the well-lubricated run.  It takes neither effort nor genius to do what they did. They merely stepped forward to give some new spins to bourgeois ideology. Cleverness, I'll grant them. But  who can stand in awe of the vehicle they set to running on the  academic/media courses? They were tune-up men..

From Susan George: "As I've argued in detail in the US quarterly journal Dissent, one explanation for this triumph of neo-liberalism and the economic, political, social and ecological disasters that go with it is that neo-liberals have bought and paid for their own vicious and regressive "Great Transformation". They
have understood, as progressives have not, that ideas have consequences. Starting from a tiny embryo at the University of Chicago with the philosopher-economist Friedrich von Hayek and his students like Milton Friedman at its nucleus, the neo-liberals and their funders have created a huge international
network of foundations, institutes, research centers, publications, scholars, writers and public relations hacks to develop, package and push their ideas and doctrine relentlessly.
They have built this highly efficient ideological cadre because they understand what the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was talking about when he developed the concept of cultural hegemony...."

Georges Drouet wrote:

> As you like historical references, let me use one quoted by Susan George:
>
> "As I've argued in detail in the US quarterly journal Dissent, one explanation for this triumph of neo-liberalism and the economic, political, social and ecological disasters that go with it is that neo-liberals have bought and paid for their own vicious and regressive "Great Transformation". They have understood, as progressives have not, that ideas have consequences. Starting from a tiny embryo at the University of Chicago with the philosopher-economist Friedrich von Hayek and his students like Milton Friedman at its nucleus, the neo-liberals and their funders have created a huge international network of foundations, institutes, research centers, publications, scholars, writers and public relations hacks to develop, package and push their ideas and doctrine relentlessly.
>
> They have built this highly efficient ideological cadre because they understand what the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was talking about when he developed the concept of cultural hegemony. If you can occupy peoples' heads, their hearts and their hands will follow. I do not have time to give you details here, but believe me, the ideological and promotional work of the right has been absolutely brilliant. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, but the result has been worth every penny to them because they have made neo-liberalism seem as if it were the natural and normal condition of humankind. No matter how many disasters of all kinds the neo-liberal system has visibly created, no matter what financial crises it may engender, no matter how many losers and outcasts it may create, it is still made to seem inevitable, like an act of God, the only possible economic and social order available to us.
>
> Let me stress how important it is to understand that this vast neo-liberal experiment we are all being forced to live under has been created by people with a purpose. Once you grasp this, once you understand that neo-liberalism is not a force like gravity but a totally artificial construct, you can also understand that what some people have created, other people can change. But they cannot change it without recognising the importance of ideas. I'm all for grassroots projects, but I also warn that these will collapse if the overall ideological climate is hostile to their goals.
>
> So, from a small, unpopular sect with virtually no influence, neo-liberalism has become the major world religion with its dogmatic doctrine, its priesthood, its law-giving institutions and perhaps most important of all, its hell for heathen and sinners who dare to contest the revealed truth."
>
> So, if neo-liberals were able to decide something to be applied in the future and succeeded, why can't we?
>
> Because we love spending time in remembering past thoughts? Are we walking to the future looking back to the past? Is that the way you imagine progress? Are we too old to shape our own world? Or is the nihilistic point of view of some dialectic professionals be enough conservative to consider the crash as an ineluctable event and admire it as the final bouquet of capitalistic history?
>
> Will you love seeing more exploitation, people starving and runing through bombs? Do you tolerate current situation of third world people or may be you consider that point as a theorical matter?
> No proposals, no risks! Is that your world?
>
> I'm affraid that I'm loosing my time here meanwhile millions of people are dying in the real world..
>
> So let say bye-bye to virtual games and reach tens of millions of people to change the world.
>
> Don't worry we will keep you informed, by e-mail from the street to your computer in a tiny house somewhere in a quiet first world country...
>
> ------------------------------------------
> Georges Drouet
> 28, place Morichar 1060 Bruxelles
> tel: 32-486 751 668
> fax: 32-2 538 10 82
>
> gdrouet at brutele.be
>
> _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist







From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep  5 07:23:18 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 09:23:18 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Abusive exploitive systems
Message-ID: <20000905.103233.-155035.3.juneo4@juno.com>

Joan & Tony, I agree with you, and those who saw "Survivor" on TV must
surely be in no doubt about that after  seeing our capitalist/corporate
destructive games played out in the form of 'entertainment'. So, since
what you have said (about abusive environments begetting more abuse)
points up root causes, it would behoove us to take a long deep hard look
at how to reverse the trend/revert to collaborative cooperative
sustainable behaviours and systems, and I belive this is where it begins.
The solution that is.  jo*    



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep  5 08:43:56 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 10:43:56 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [exyualista] Tony Aabdo's defense of Chomsky
Message-ID: <20000905.105341.-155035.5.juneo4@juno.com>

Andrej and in support of his response to Jared. I am so glad you and
relieved that you , an insider was able to take this up, to clarify SM's
role in the suffering (I am not excluding NATO's role ). I do not have
time to cite the many reports received from women we know suffering under
 his regime. jo* 

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000 14:55:36 +0200 "Andrej Grubacic" <zapata at sezampro.yu>
writes:
>Dear Jared,
>I respect your work very much, as I have told you this several times. 
>We,
>from "Resistance web site",are publishing , with your kind permission 
>many
>of your articles, or articles coming from your site.
>So, please read this as a friendly suggestion:
>Milosevic is a criminal. Big time. I am living under his yoke, 
>witnessing
>his crimes everyday. He is a little ruthless dictator, with a mad 
>wife, with
>two idiotic kids.  He is privatizing everything, he has organized a 
>perfect
>cleptocracy for his family and his oligarchy, he had killed almost all 
>of
>the opposition press ( it's low quality notwithstanding, we are 
>talking
>about freedom of thought and expression); he have stolen the elections 
>in
>1996; his thugs are beating up kids in the middle of the day, his 
>assassins
>are killing or kidnapping people ( Ivan Stambolic is the most recent
>example) - the list of his crimes in internal politics is endless. 
>And, with
>regards to his external politics, people form all over the world, 
>good
>people , are deceived with his leftist-anti imperialist mask: he is 
>not a
>leftist. He is haunting leftist, authentic radicals, in his own 
>country. His
>party is the richest party on this side of Colorado river. He is using 
>every
>opportunity, and every emotion, to preserve power and to stay on 
>power.
>Yugoslavia is a wonderful country. Yugoslav people deserve help and
>protection from "antiserb racism" which we are all witnesses of. We 
>should
>fight back this idea of collective crime which is casted upon us.
> But Yugoslavia is not Milosevic. Fighting against imperialism, 
>injustices
>made to Yugoslavs, new wars which Imperial States of AmeriKKKa are
>instigating on this soil, slowly but very skillfully, is possible 
>without
>attachment to Milosevic. He doesn't deserve it. I guess that my word 
>isn't
>enough, but please just acknowledge  that I am an insider, radical 
>leftist
>and a person who suffered a lot under foreign imperialism and under
>Milosevic. I think that this opportunity gives me a chance to be as
>objective as one could be , in complex situation like this.
> With regards to Chomsky, contrary to what you may believe, his books 
>helped
>radical leftist here to make a clearer picture about the nature of 
>state
>violence, nature of AmeriKKKan foreign politics, European 
>Imperialism,
>shaping of the mental images and representations, and to offer this 
>picture
>to the people here, with much success. Chomsky helped us a lot. His 
>mistakes
>notwithstanding. He made good deal of mistakes, yes. But who of us, 
>involved
>in a fight for social change, for a better and healthier society, 
>didn't?
>With respect, in solidarity,
>                                 Andrej Grubacic
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist



From twood at uwc.ac.za  Tue Sep  5 08:58:57 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 5 Sep 2000 16:58:57 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Tony Abdo's defense of Chomsky
Message-ID: <s9b52667.069@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep  5 09:27:58 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 17:27:58 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Tony Aabdo's defense of Chomsky
References: <11.8c148a5.26e5fea2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <002301c0174d$fce28c40$d9be6ac2@k382>

In addition to my suggestion to Jared that he should reconsider his position
on Milosevic and Chomsky, without a danger to forget the moment of US-Euro
imperialism and their crimes in the region- crimes which Yugoslavs are not
likely to forget- I am sending another Chomsky epistle- answer to some nerd
advocating new NATO intervention on ZNet forum. Chomsky is fighting this
line of argumentation masterly. And he is reminding us, again, that things
are never simple when it comes to this sort of situation, and that we
shouldn't choose "lesser evil" in political realm but fight every evil
instead. Difficult task? It is.
"Between two evils don't make me choose the lesser one!" Karl Kraus said.
Please don't make me choose between NATO and Milosevic, as my friend, young
anarchist, like to say!
In struggle,
                    Andrej
---------------------------------------
Reply from NC,

Since you've changed the issue, and misread the
last response, I'll add it below, for
clarification, and to save time instead of
repeating.

Your first point is that you: 'don't think the
question "Which way to democracy?" is an academic
one in this context.'

Nor do I. It's a highly relevant question. The
question that was "academic," however, was a
totally different one: whether we should "call
for NATO to bomb, invade, destroy what's left of
the society, and impose foreign rule," in response
to the popular will in Serbia, as you seemed to
be suggesting.

Putting the misstatement aside, you then proceed
to withdraw what seemed to be your suggestion.
You now say that what you meant to propose was:
"something that already exists: second-class
status of Yugoslavia in Europe, and a trade system
that doesn't exactly favor it" -- right or wrong,
but hardly "NATO colonialism."

Two questions then arise: (1) why do you propose
this as a furious challenge, since no one in the
forum, to my recollection, has raised the matter
or taken a position on it?: (2) now that you have
raised the question, in a manner that hardly
facilitated discussion of it, what position should
we take on it?

On (1), I'd suggest you might want to think about
it, but we can put that aside too.

Question (2) requires answers to a variety of
others. Some of them have to do with imposition
of sanctions. Among them are these. Should the
US impose sanctions on all countries that have
regimes as hostile to functioning democracy as
Milosevic's Serbia, or that have records as bad as
his? Or just in this case? And if only in this
case, then why is that singled out? And if there
is an answer to that, then what attitude should
we take towards yet another act of unilateralism
on the part of a great power with an ample record
of brutality and violence of its own, not only
in the past but right now? Should we support that
power when it adds yet another country to its
unilateral sanctions list? And more generally,
under what conditions, and in what form, are
sanctions a legitimate and appropriate measure,
whether imposed unilaterally (the overwhelming
majority, the US being the agent), or by NATO
(which means essentially the same thing, given US
dominance of NATO), the UN, or in some other way?

There are all fair questions, and there are many
considerations. Of course, the burden of proof is
always on those who call for some form of
intervention, sanctions in this case. That's
universally taken for granted. Assuming that, the
first task of the advocate of sanctions is to seek
to determine the attitude of the people against
whom they are directed. Often that's very
difficult; in this case it happens to be easier
than most, since by comparative standards there is
a fair amount of public expression. So the first
task faced by the advocate of sanctions is to show
that the population of Serbia favor that move:
they are pleading with the US (or NATO) to impose
sanctions. If so, that's certainly an argument
for doing so. If not, then the advocate of
sanctions has the task of showing that the move
should be taken over the objections of the
population we are seeking to help. When you've
dealt with these two questions, we can move on to
the next ones.

It could be that this procedure would lead to the
conclusion that things should be left as they are,
as you suggest. As I mentioned, I don't recall
the question being raised here before. But more
is needed than your insistence that it is right,
without even facing the most elementary
questions.

Other questions arise as well. Is maintaining
sanctions the best way to facilitate moves towards
internal democracy in Serbia? Or would it be more
effective to draw Serbia into the general
structure of Europe? Or something else? And what
do the people of the country feel about that?
Again, these are the questions to be faced by
someone who is serious about imposition of
sanctions.

Miranda Vickers is perhaps the leading historian
of Kosovo, and very strongly anti-Milosevic. I
quoted her conclusion on elections. Your
refutation of it is that you say she is wrong.
I'm afraid that is not very convincing.

As for the "original issue," it's a good one, and
I hope that you will be willing to face it,
particularly since you (rightly) feel strongly
about it. So far in this discussion you have
refused to face it -- which is OK, answers aren't
easy. As to how we should proceed to fact it
seriously, I've already commented. If you have
something new to add, I'll be more than pleased to
consider it, as I'm sure others will be as well.

Noam Chomsky



At 09:32 AM 9/3/00 +0100, you wrote:
>
>From: "Jerry Netuddki"
>
>Dear Professor,
>
>We have a regime that makes every effort to retain power,
>including murder (Curuvija, the Draskovic entourage, etc.)
>or sudden disappearance (Stambolic, etc) of opposition
>members. A regime that counters the will of the population
>with applied violence.
>
>I am not calling for NATO to repeat its last year's failure;
>they killed a bunch of people and left Milosevic in power.
>However, if (as we seek possible solutions to the question
>above) NATO does have a solution which can be targeted
>exclusively against Milosevic, the popular "Slobo, save
>Serbia, kill yourself!" slogan does seem to ring along this
>line.
>
>By NATO colonialism I meant something that already exists:
>second-class status of Yugoslavia in Europe, and a trade
>system that doesn't exactly favor it. Milosevic boasts he
>"protects the country from NATO colonialism", while he's
>actually exploiting it far worse, as his clique's private
>colony.
>
>On what grounds do I refute Vickers' observation that
>Milosevic would have been voted out if the Kosovar Albanians
>had not boycotted earlier elections? On the grounds that
>Milosevic would have stolen the elections just the same, it
>would meant just more ballot boxes to "work on".
>
>But, let's not digress. The original issue still remains:
>how to counter armed violence that thwarts attempts of
>democracy?
>
>

Reply from NC,
Let's accept your factual claims for the sake of
argument, though it would
be helpful if you would document them. On these
grounds, you advocate NATO
colonization of Yugoslavia: that is, an invasion
to conquer Serbia (or
what's left of it after an invasion) and institute
a colonial regime. Are
you suggesting that that would be welcomed by the
population? By the
various factions of the opposition, for example?
Can you refer us to the
popular demonstrations calling for NATO to bomb
and invade (there have been
plenty of anti-Milosevic demonstrations over the
years, and the Albanian
Kosovar Parliament -- illegal, but not barred by
force -- had openly
declared independence under Milosevic's rule)? Or
the calls for bombing,
invasion, and occupation by dissidents in the
West? As for the factions of
the opposition, they are far from united, and that
has been one of their
problems for years, something they themselves have
bewailed for a long time.
Suppose Milosevic steals the election. That's
surely not unlikely. In fact,
that he will try to do so is an almost inevitable
consequence of the war
crimes indictment, hence an expected consequence
(assuming rationality).
That he will necessarily succeed, whatever the
oppoisition does, is obvious
to you, but again it would be interesting to know
your grounds. For
example, on what grounds do you refute the
observation of historian Miranda
Vickers, hardly pro-Milosevic, that he would have
been voted out if the
Kosovar Albanians had not boycotted earlier
elections?

"Which way to democracy then?" The way to
democracy should respect the will
of the population. If they are calling for NATO to
bomb, invade, destroy
what's left of the society, and impose foreign
rule, as you seem to be
suggesting, then one would at least have to
consider that option. But the
question is academic, unless the claim can be
shown to be plausible.
Outsiders therefore have to seek different ways to
enhance the prospects
for democracy by encouraging and supporting
internal forces that are
committed to constructive socioeconomic and
political development. One
would hardly expect much from governments; their
policies are shaped by
different interests. People can act, however.
Acting to support
constructive developments somewhere else is never
easy. There are better
and worse ways. The worst that I can think of is
the one you suggest --
unless of course you provide firm evidence that
the population is pleading
to be invaded, in which case your proposal would
at least have to be
considered; and recall that always, the proposal
to bomb, invade, and
impose foreign military occupation must bear quite
a substantial burden of
proof. Perhaps that burden can be met, but not
simply by assertion.
Noam Chomsky







From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 09:43:42 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 11:43:42 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Response to Andrej in Belgrade on Chomsky
Message-ID: <32.9b97000.26e66eae@aol.com>

Dear Andrej,

Thanks for your kind words about my work and for re-posting texts from 
Emperor's Clothes. 

Replying to my criticisms of Chomsky: you wax poetic about your 'terrible' 
government, etc., etc., but this avoids my criticism of Chomsky, which have 
nothing to do with Yugoslavia's internal affairs which would undoubtedly 
improve in many ways if the United States were not trying, with all its 
power, to crush Yugoslavia. Being crushed is of course a distorting 
experience.  

I will address Chomsky first and after that I will comment on your remarks 
about Milosevich's allegedly dictatorial rule.

The Western media has continuously slandered Milosevich - and the Yugoslav 
Army - for alleged war crimes, particularly but not only in Kosovo. These 
include the phony massacre in Racak and the concocted stories about mass 
murder which were broadcast incessantly during the bombing. These charges, 
now admitted to have been lies, have been supported by Chomsky, time and 
again.   

While Chomsky has adjusted his position, his adjustments sometimes lag behind 
even what some elements of the media in NATO countries are saying at a given 
time. And Chomsky always lags way behind facts widely known within the 
antiwar movement.  

For example, during the bombing the antiwar movement publicized certain 
German court documents.  These documents, based on studies of claims made by 
Albanian refugees from Feb. 1998 to Feb. 1999, concluded that Yugoslav forces 
did not target Albanian civilians. Chomsky knew about these court documents 
as soon as the rest of us.  But Chomsky is still, over a year later,  writing 
that "By  summer [1998], the KLA had taken over about 40 per cent of the 
province, eliciting  a vicious reaction by Serb security forces and 
paramilitaries, TARGETING THE CIVILIAN POPULATION." (el Ahram, June 2000, my 
emphasis)  

Why does the man repeat these known lies? (It is especially vicious that he 
repeats them in an Arab intellectual journal - especially vicious since one 
of the tactics the West uses is to paint "the Serbs" as anti-Muslim.)

During the bombing Chomsky's key criticism of NATO was that by bombing "the 
Serbs" NATO guaranteed "the Serbs" would go on an anti-Albanian rampage.  In 
fact during that period the Yugoslav army was desperately trying to organize 
anti-KLA resistance among Albanians.  The KLA countered this by a) 
assassinating loyalist Albanians and b) calling in air strikes against 
anti-KLA Albanians, against refugees attempting to return home or who refused 
to leave Kosovo, as the KLA demanded they do, and so on.

Similarly, Chomsky knew, from email sent to him during the bombing, that the 
Rambouillet ultimatum included Appendix B which permitted the takeover of 
Yugoslavia by NATO.  But Chomsky ignored this information in material he 
published during that period.  He compared the Yugoslavs to muggers and NATO 
to a trigger happy cop who shoots the muggers (Serbs)  but also shoots the 
victims (ethnic Albanians). 

Even today he continues to suggest a moral equivalence between Milosevich and 
NATO. 

In the mid-90s, during the fighting in Bosnia he publicly argued that the 
Serbs were guilty as charged. 

Precisely because many people idolize Chomsky I ask: how has Chomsky used his 
influence to affect the antiwar struggle in the US and other Western 
countries? How has he, who wrote to me on May 12 1999 that he knows 
Milosevich is being demonized because, and I quote, '"demonization' of 
Milosevic was necessary in order to maintain public support for the bombing." 
 
  
How has he used his influence?

The answer is that he has supported NATO lies while criticizing NATO enough 
to maintain his credibility on the left.  His broad influence has helped 
prevent the formation of a  mass antiwar movement in the US and Europe 
because nobody is going to get passionate about supporting criminals. Even 
when he "adjusts" his positions, he does so without (to my knowledge) 
criticizing past positions - so the sludge of his past lies about Yugoslavia 
stays in his readers' minds, with new sludge, adjusted to the current stance 
of the NATO media, added.

Now, regarding your picture of Yugoslavia as the most repressive of states 
with the most corrupt government "this side of the Colorado" - hogwash. I am 
in close contact with a score of activist Serbs, some of whom disagree  
strongly with Milosevich about many things. One of their criticisms is that 
the Yugoslav government tolerates outrageous destabilization by US-financed 
"opposition" elements.

You ignore the most important fact about Yugoslavia internally: that the US 
and Western Europe are doing everything possible to distort its political 
life. That includes openly distributing $100,000,000 to opposition elements 
in Yugoslavia.  As the website editor of B292, whom I interviewed, told me 
(this is on tape) B292 is not the ONLY place that gets this US-Soros money. 
"There's a list." he said. "Everyone gets it." One hundred million dollars in 
Yugoslavia, an impoverished country with 4% of the US population and where 
$150 is a good MONTHLY salary, has the influence of a trillion dolalrs in the 
US.  

US officials openly discussed in the July 29, 1999 Senate hearings on 
destablizing Yugoslavia  (see 
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hearin.htm   ) the details of their 
use of the "democratic" opposition arguing that their manipulation of the 
"independent" opposition is just another part of the  attack on Yugoslavia, 
similar to the bombing of Serbian TV.  Check it out.  I am not exagerating..

Opposition elements funded by the US government and the Soros people, whether 
these elements call themselves leftists or rightists, are walking around 
free.  It is unbelievable that Yugoslavia has not arrested these people who 
are paid as part of a vicious campaign that combines military attack, 
economic strangulation and bribery, bribery  on a scale unprecedented in 
history.  Even today, the so-called 'democratic' opposition, funded by the 
US, is allowed to function.  Nowhere else would this be tolerated.  

I am sure, Andrej, that with a little effort you could get some of this cash, 
distributed like play money through NGOs all over Belgrade.  New computers, 
nice office space, whatever you wanted.  All you would have to do is attack 
Milosevich.  Only your integrity stands in the way of the best career in 
Serbia - working for US intelligence or for Soros, its private arm.  

Regards,
Jared 



From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep  5 09:34:12 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 17:34:12 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Tony Abdo's defense of Chomsky
References: <s9b52667.069@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <007401c01750$abaae4a0$d9be6ac2@k382>

Excellent point.
Friendly,
               Andrej Grubacic
   co-founder of www.resistancenet.org

I am a patriot. What is a patriot? Man who fights his own nationalism. Man
who demystifies, who deconstructs, the image of Hero.That is what patriotism
is".
          Gazi Kaplan, Albanian poet


----- Original Message -----
From: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 4:58 PM
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Tony Abdo's defense of Chomsky


> I think that what this debate reflects with wonderful
> clarity is what Fanon called the "pitfalls of the national
> consciousness". This is linked to the debate that some of us
> had just a little earlier. A purely national consciousnes
> rallies to defend the leadership of the "oppressed nation"
> as its bulwark against imperialism. But an anti-imperialism
> that is not thoroughly guided by anti-capitalist and
> anti-bourgeois radicalism simply becomes a defence of
> scoundrels, opportunists and tin-pot dictators. These latter
> are demagogues who know the political and rhetorical value
> of "anti-imperialism" only too well. But what is so
> deceiving is that their rhetoric always contains a grain of
> truth. My point is that we need so much more than this
> little nationalist grain of truth.
> Tahir






From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep  5 10:23:11 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 18:23:11 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Response to Andrej in Belgrade on Chomsky
References: <32.9b97000.26e66eae@aol.com>
Message-ID: <009601c01755$bbbc1b20$d9be6ac2@k382>

My dear Jared,
It is strange that you cannot recall our idea- my proposal - to write a book
about NATO war against Serbia. It was made in the middle of the war. We had
a long phone call, talking over 20 minutes, and I have told you that the
only condition for writing for this book was that facts, facts, facts and
facts are respected and that Milosevic shouldn't be presented as benefactor
and great antiimperialistic factor. You have rejected the proposal , with
the words that you have to write in favour of Milosevic because "the whole
campaign is being made on his demonization"; you have stayed on this same
line and I respect that- I admire your consistency. What buffles me is the
thing that you don't remember our rich correspondence , and good deal of it
was about  Sorosh, Yugoslav "Americanisms", pseudo-NGO's, US militarism and
interests in region and so forth. I made clear to you that I am against all
of these, that I have even a reputation in Belgrade as someone who is in
silent war with Sorosh and his community, because of their anti leftist,
anti libertarian , capitalist, pseudopfilantropist and , yes,
spy-organization role here. Ask around, I am sure that this "score of
activist Serb" do no my name and positions rather well.
 So, telling me this, is rather a waste of time:

You ignore the most important fact about Yugoslavia internally: that the US
> and Western Europe are doing everything possible to distort its political
> life. That includes openly distributing $100,000,000 to opposition
elements
> in Yugoslavia.  As the website editor of B292, whom I interviewed, told me
> (this is on tape) B292 is not the ONLY place that gets this US-Soros
money.
> "There's a list." he said. "Everyone gets it." One hundred million dollars
in
> Yugoslavia, an impoverished country with 4% of the US population and where
> $150 is a good MONTHLY salary, has the influence of a trillion dollars in
the
> US.
>
> US officials openly discussed in the July 29, 1999 Senate hearings on
> destabilizing Yugoslavia  (see
> http://www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hearin.htm   ) the details of
their
> use of the "democratic" opposition arguing that their manipulation of the
> "independent" opposition is just another part of the  attack on
Yugoslavia,
> similar to the bombing of Serbia TV.  Check it out.  I am not
exaggerating..
>
> Opposition elements funded by the US government and the Sores people,
whether
> these elements call themselves leftists or rightists, are walking around
> free.  It is unbelievable that Yugoslavia has not arrested these people
who
> are paid as part of a vicious campaign that combines military attack,
> economic strangulation and bribery,   on a scale unprecedented in
> history.  Even today, the so-called 'democratic' opposition, funded by the
> US, is allowed to function.  Nowhere else would this be tolerated.
>
> I am sure, Andrej, that with a little effort you could get some of this
cash,
> distributed like play money through Egos all over Belgrade.  New
computers,
> nice office space, whatever you wanted.  All you would have to do is
attack
> Milosevich.  Only your integrity stands in the way of the best career in
> Serbia - working for US intelligence or for Soros, its private arm.

I am not ignoring anything, I am very well aware of this, and I try to fight
it, best I can.
But, just like you, I am also on the same line: I am an ethical anarchist,
left libertarian, radical leftis who cannot feel support towards the State,
Government, nationalism...I know only too well how nationalism is being used
in class manipulation. And I am witnessing Milosevic crimes- I am not saying
that he is the most brutal dictator?- every day. He is not more brutal than
Salvadorian death squads or Turkish government, but where are those
comparisons taking us exactly? People are suffering under Milosevic booth.
This is enough for me.
 And I think that you should admit that Chomsky was also very consistent; he
made many mistakes, but he never did abandon his crucial principal: "Not
supporting the government but opposing foreign intervention". He never did
supported Vietnamese leaders. He opposed criminal war against Vietnam people
and their right to chose. Same for Nicaragua, Salvador , Columbia ( he is
very much against FARC as you know, of course)....
 So, in brief, I don't see that Chomsky did something harmful. Once again,
he was very useful to us, leftist community here, as someone who had
brilliantly demasked AmeriKKKan imperialism , media deceptions, State
violence per se......
 I cannot judge his usefulness to American anti war movement because I am
not
in America. So, i would like to ask you, in the name of courtesy,  to stop
explaining me Milosevic and his government. Fighting NATO and Milosevic is
much more admirable task, and  strongly advice you to re-think your
position.
I find this words, made by Mr. Wood, illuminating in this sense:

  "... I think that what this debate reflects with wonderful
clarity is what Fanon called the "pitfalls of the national
consciousness". This is linked to the debate that some of us
had just a little earlier. A purely national consciousnes
rallies to defend the leadership of the "oppressed nation"
as its bulwark against imperialism. But an anti-imperialism
that is not thoroughly guided by anti-capitalist and
anti-bourgeois radicalism simply becomes a defence of
scoundrels, opportunists and tin-pot dictators. These latter
are demagogues who know the political and rhetorical value
of "anti-imperialism" only too well. But what is so
deceiving is that their rhetoric always contains a grain of
truth. My point is that we need so much more than this
little nationalist grain of truth........."

  We must tolerate a great level of complexity here, but giving support to
Milosevic certainly isn't a best choice to fight US imperialism, i.e. to
help people in Yugoslavia.
Yours,

               Andrej Grubacic
   co-founder of www.resistancenet.org

I am a patriot. What is a patriot? Man who fights his own nationalism. Man
who demystifies, who deconstructs, the image of Hero.That is what patriotism
is".
          Gazi Kaplan, Albanian poet









From jbunzl at simpol.org  Tue Sep  5 07:20:43 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 14:20:43 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
References: <2614-39B3EA5F-3496@storefull-236.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <000701c01770$0a043dc0$e55a87d4@oemcomputer>

Tony,
You wrote:
Human nature
> in capitalist society is a hard barrier to move aside, or do away with.
> This question of how to move humankind forward to being what was called
> by some, 'socialist man', is a question of how to create a society with
> better people.
>
> People are  products of their environment, even if a revolution has just
> occurred.     People raised in an abusive environment are widely known
> to be rather abusive themselves, not the other way around.
>
> Conversely, people raised in a cooperative, supportive environment,
> themselves tend to behave that way when they become adults.
>
> Capitalism is a society that makes abusive, non- social behavior into a
> virtue..... 'the virtue of selfishness'.      The job of humanity, Crash
> or no Crash, is to turn desired societal human characteristics into the
> opposite of what we have now.
>
My response:
I agree fully with this. Our situation is, however, rather worse that just
selfishness because selfishness implies unilateral, self-centred action
independent of anyone else. What we actually have in today's global market
capitalism is competition. This is worse than pure selfishness because
competition provides a justification for that selfish behaviour. It also
means that anyone choosing to act unselfishly or uncompetitively, loses out.
So not only does it justify selfishness, it actually enforces it. That makes
getting from competition to cooperation doubly difficult. This, I suggest,
more or less sums up the world's current predicament as the Crash
approaches.
In such situations, the key problem is not so much what to do, but how to do
it. In other words, an appropriate basis for cooperation needs to be found
before the participants carry out the necessary action to solve the
problem. For example, take a group of 4 or 5 boys fighting over a packet of
sandwiches. None is strong enough on their own to win outright but, at the
same time, none can give up the fight for fear of losing the chance of a
bite because, if they did, they'd go hungry. Furthermore, if they carry on
fighting for too long, the sandwiches are going to get squashed and become
inedible. The 'what' part of the solution is clear: they need to stop
fighting and share the sandwiches. The 'how' part (i.e. finding the
appropriate basis for cooperation which will allow that to happen) is more
difficult. Any ideas??
best wishes
John







From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 12:33:11 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 14:33:11 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Apparently, there's no plausible defense of Chomsky's attacks on Yugolsavia.
Message-ID: <c7.30a93c.26e69667@aol.com>

Andrej writes: 
<< 
 It is strange that you cannot recall our idea - my proposal - to write a book
 about NATO war against Serbia. It was made in the middle of the war. We had
 a long phone call, talking over 20 minutes, and I have told you that the
 only condition for writing for this book was that facts, facts, facts and
 facts are respected and that Milosevic shouldn't be presented as benefactor
 and great antiimperialistic factor. You have rejected the proposa >>

Huh? Who said anything about books?  Are you writing (inaccurately) about our 
book discussion cause you can't think of anything to say in defense of 
Chomsky?
.
1) During the bombing you asked me to write a chapter of a book - I have the 
emails that passed between us and I said I would write about media lies. I 
had a suspicion from your writing that certain things would be expected of me 
- so before I got started I inquired: will I be required to attack 
Milosevich?  You wrote back: You will. 

Ahh,  what price publication! 

I replied that I wouldn't do that - that the demonization of Milosevich was 
part of US strategy. You then simply replied: that you were sorry we couldn't 
work together.

Your statements that "the whole campaign is being made on his [Milosevich's] 
demonization" is a paraphrase from a note from Chomsky, written to me on May 
12. I have the printout in front of me as I write.  It amazes me, how right 
Chomsky was - even more so today when the West' (through the ICG) has 
suggested a strategy of charging Milosevich with some atrocity concerning the 
current elections and then intervening.

As Chomsky's point suggests, Imperial American attacks people by demonizing 
leaders, in Yugoslavia and elsehwhere.

Why then does Chomsky play a leading role, on the left, in that demonization? 
 Why does he repeat fact lies and make attacks on "the Serbs" disguised as 
criticisms of NATO. ("NATO should have known that if they attacked the Serbs 
the Serbs would commit more atrocities" - or words to that effect.)

You offer no defense of Chomsky except that we all make mistakes.

What Chomsky has done is indefensible.

Jared



From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 12:33:37 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 14:33:37 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Response to Andrej in Belgrade on Chomsky
Message-ID: <48.a855090.26e69681@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/05/2000 12:40:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
zapata at sezampro.yu writes:

<< 
 It is strange that you cannot recall our idea- my proposal - to write a book
 about NATO war against Serbia. It was made in the middle of the war. We had
 a long phone call, talking over 20 minutes, and I have told you that the
 only condition for writing for this book was that facts, facts, facts and
 facts are respected and that Milosevic shouldn't be presented as benefactor
 and great antiimperialistic factor. You have rejected the proposa >>
Andrej writes: 
<< 
 It is strange that you cannot recall our idea - my proposal - to write a book
 about NATO war against Serbia. It was made in the middle of the war. We had
 a long phone call, talking over 20 minutes, and I have told you that the
 only condition for writing for this book was that facts, facts, facts and
 facts are respected and that Milosevic shouldn't be presented as benefactor
 and great antiimperialistic factor. You have rejected the proposa >>

Huh? Who said anything about books?  Are you writing (inaccurately) about our 
book discussion cause you can't think of anything to say in defense of 
Chomsky?
.
1) During the bombing you asked me to write a chapter of a book - I have the 
emails that passed between us and I said I would write about media lies. I 
had a suspicion from your writing that certain things would be expected of me 
- so before I got started I inquired: will I be required to attack 
Milosevich?  You wrote back: You will. 

Ahh,  what price publication! 

I replied that I wouldn't do that - that the demonization of Milosevich was 
part of US strategy. You then simply replied: that you were sorry we couldn't 
work together.

Your statements that "the whole campaign is being made on his [Milosevich's] 
demonization" is a paraphrase from a note from Chomsky, written to me on May 
12. I have the printout in front of me as I write.  It amazes me, how right 
Chomsky was - even more so today when the West' (through the ICG) has 
suggested a strategy of charging Milosevich with some atrocity concerning the 
current elections and then intervening.

As Chomsky's point suggests, Imperial American attacks people by demonizing 
leaders, in Yugoslavia and elsehwhere.

Why then does Chomsky play a leading role, on the left, in that demonization? 
 Why does he repeat fact lies and make attacks on "the Serbs" disguised as 
criticisms of NATO. ("NATO should have known that if they attacked the Serbs 
the Serbs would commit more atrocities" - or words to that effect.)

You offer no defense of Chomsky except that we all make mistakes.

What Chomsky has done is indefensible.

Jared



From aabdo at webtv.net  Tue Sep  5 14:46:06 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 15:46:06 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Tony Abdo's defense of Chomsky
In-Reply-To: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood@uwc.ac.za>'s message of 5 Sep 2000 16:58:57 +0200
Message-ID: <6451-39B55B8E-8936@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

I was strolling along minding my own business, when all of a sudden a
conversation from a list I was not subscribed to, came rolling in as a
personal email copy.     In an effort to clarify why posts were flying
between 3 different lists, all receiving only part of the dialog between
Andrej and Jared, I in turn was accused of coming to the defense of
Chomsky.

This is rather bizarre, because I happen to agree in large part with
what Jared is saying.    I am very critical of the role Chomsky has
played in demobilizing his supporters from ACTUALLY protesting against
NATO.   On the other hand, I am not in line to confer some sort of
sainthood on Milosevic, neither.      Apparently, Jared, this is not
enough?    I must admit to total admiration of Milosevic.

Let's look again at some of Jared's criticisms of Chomsky.....

<Even today he continues to suggest a moral equivalence between
Milosevich and NATO.>

Jared, I believe that there is a big element of truth here.     However,
he DOES say that NATO is the principle criminal element.     Then he
does little to actually mobilize protest in the imperialist countries to
protest agaiinst NATO.

<In the mid-90s, during the fighting in Bosnia he publicly argued that
the Serbs were guilty as charged.>

Guilty of what as charged?     The Serbs have been charged as having
done so many evil things, that it is not necessary to never see any evil
doings at any place or time by Serb forces, to disagree with this
demonization campaign.      Russians under Stalin's command were pretty
ruthless at times too.     Saying this, does not mean I am pro-Nazi.

<Precisely because many people idolize Chomsky I ask: how has Chomsky
used his influence to affect the antiwar struggle in the US and other
Western countries?>

Very poorly, Jared.   Very poorly.

<How has he, who wrote to me on May 12 1999 that he knows Milosevich is
being demonized because, and I quote, '"demonization' of Milosevic was
necessary in order to maintain public support for the bombing." 
How has he used his influence?>

He has written a lot, but not used his influence to build an antiwar
movement in the streets.      An intellectual, amongst a group of
intellectuals, that have refused to try to mobilize their followers to
go to the streets and protest against US military use elsewhere in the
world.
 
<The answer is that he has supported NATO lies while criticizing NATO
enough to maintain his credibility on the left. His broad influence has
helped prevent the formation of a mass antiwar movement in the US and
Europe because nobody is going to get passionate about supporting
criminals.>

True enough.     It is harder to mobilize people unless they see the
side they are defending as being saints.     So lets get the Pope on the
ball.      No!     Let's just criticize the Pope for urging inaction
because he doesn't like the victim that much, and start trying to build
an active antiwar movement in the US, without deifying Milosevic at the
same time.

<Even when he "adjusts" his positions, he does so without (to my
knowledge) criticizing past positions - so the sludge of his past lies
about Yugoslavia stays in his readers' minds, with new sludge, adjusted
to the current stance of the NATO media, added.>

True enough, again.     Chomsky has a long history of that, dating way
back from Khmer Rouge times.      Just like Milosevic, the Pope falls
somewhat less than being a saint, Jared.    He doesn't always admit his
previous errors, he just keeps moving on.

Several other comrades seem to have the position of moving Milosevic
towards sainthood, depending on what exact percentage of nationalized
state property they feel still exists in Yugoslavia.      This is the
Trotskyist theory of the sliding scale of sainthood and deification.

This approach, too, should be rejected.     Solidarity should not only
be given to Yugoslav self-determination, if a cheering squad of comrades
from the imperialist countries  can be gathered.      We should support
Yugoslav self-determination because it is under attack from the
imperialist countries.     Period.

Jared, I want you to understand that Andrej and I have each our own
point of view in this matter.     We do not speak with one voice.      I
do not know exactly how Andrej views Chomsky.     His viewpoint is from
Belgrade, while mine is from San Antonio, Tx.      So we are going to
see Chomsky from 2 very different perspectives.

Best wishes, Jared.

Tony















From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep  5 15:43:33 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 23:43:33 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Response to Andrej in Belgrade on Chomsky
References: <48.a855090.26e69681@aol.com>
Message-ID: <007f01c01782$835be940$e174fac3@k382>

Dear Jared,
I have to notice that there has been some confusion here: probably my
imperfect English is to be blame. Namely, I have never made this request:
> 1) During the bombing you asked me to write a chapter of a book - I have
the
> emails that passed between us and I said I would write about media lies. I
> had a suspicion from your writing that certain things would be expected of
me
> - so before I got started I inquired: will I be required to attack
> Milosevich?  You wrote back: You will.

I have never set this condition, and I am sure that other people from the
book team would confirm that.
I am an anarchist. I don't like to impose rules to people. Being a scientist
as well, there was one principle I have insisted upon: that your chapter
must be built on facts.
So, it is either
1. My bad English or, and I hope it isn't,
2. Activist disease of fighting for his opinion by every means possible.
 You are bringing me, constantly, in position to "defend" Chomsky; Chomsky
can defend himself if he wants.
I am saying that his books and interviews did help leftist in Yugoslavia to
convince people that capitalist democracies are not paradises on earth. It
is simple as that.
>
> You offer no defense of Chomsky except that we all make mistakes.
>
> What Chomsky has done is indefensible.
>
Again, I am not defending anyone. I admire Chomsky very much. And I think
that Chomsky made a mistake because he never was in Yugoslavia , a country
he has written a book about. This book, New Military Humanism, is full of
material mistakes. I am reproaching Noam because of his non scientific
attitude in this particular situation. I don't think that his behavior was
indefensible. Take Remsy Clark , for instance. I respect IAC very much. But
this gentleman was taking a lot of money- and I know this for certain- from
YU government.
Chomsky wanted to escape this. As I have said, Chomsky should be judged only
on the basis of consistency. I repeat:
...... And I think that you should admit that Chomsky was also very
consistent; he
made many mistakes, but he never did abandon his crucial principal: "Not
supporting the government but opposing foreign intervention". He never did
supported Vietnamese leaders. He opposed criminal war against Vietnam people
and their right to chose. Same for Nicaragua, Salvador , Columbia ( he is
very much against FARC as you know, of course)....
 So, in brief, I don't see that Chomsky did something harmful. Once again,
he was very useful to us, leftist community here, as someone who had
brilliantly demasked AmeriKKKan imperialism , media deceptions, State
violence per se......
 I cannot judge his usefulness to American anti war movement because I am
not
in America.............

With regards to Milosevic, I will write only this: today my friend was
hospitalized in Belgrade Clinical Center.
He is, and I am not, a member of Otpor. I am confronting Otpor organization
whenever I can. But I do not choose my friends on the basis of their
political beliefs. Police had beaten him up because he had Otpor!
T-shirt. Milosevic government is not oppressive? Ask him. He is without
conciseness, hospitalized in Pancevo hospital. Please, don't tell me that in
AmeriKKKA things are the same. I know that they are. And not only in
AmeriKKKa. Everywhere. Why are you insiston sanctifying politicians than? I
cannot follow you.
Is that "a pitfall of national consciousness" ?
".....A purely national consciousness
rallies to defend the leadership of the "oppressed nation"
as its bulwark against imperialism......"

Is that it? I cannot understand your positions, regardless how much I admire
your effortless fight against US militarism.
Best regards,
                       Andrej
                   www.resistancenet.org






From AlAdisa at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 14:15:46 2000
From: AlAdisa at aol.com (AlAdisa at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 16:15:46 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Public schools
Message-ID: <9a.94a24a8.26e6ae72@aol.com>

This is a national concern.  The same issues are affecting us in Detroit. 



From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 16:27:49 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 18:27:49 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] First of two interviews with Radio B292 (Belgrade)
Message-ID: <9a.94966bd.26e6cd65@aol.com>

Dear friends,

A couple of months ago the Yugoslav government closed Studio B in Belgrade. 
This resulted in "collateral damage" - namely, the closing of radio B292 
which had been given space in Studio B.  At the time  I tracked down B292's 
temporary office in Belgrade and interviewed two people, the Website editor 
and the news editor.  

The interview with B292 website editor Gordon Paunovic is below.

Jared: Why did the government shut down Studio B?

Gordan Paunovic: The main accusation was that they called for an armed 
response to overthrow the government

Jared: Is that true?

Paunovic: No, of course not. On the 13th of May you had a rally on a mountain 
over there and you had these people who shouted "Uprising! Uprising!" And 
they had coverage of both rallies.  So if you think that's a call for 
uprising -

[Note: Subsequently I learned from a Montengran student whose family has been 
involved in "upriings" for 200 years, that while the term "uprising" might be 
taken as radical chic in English, in Serbia it it associated with a bloody 
history of anti-Turkish rebellions, a history with which every Serbian child 
is familiar.  It is not a term used casually in Serbia.] 

Jared: Well the news report I read in the West said that guns were fired in 
the air and Vuk Draskovic said, "Save your bullets, we're going to need 
them." Doesn't that sound like a call for civil war and -

Paunovic: These are folklore events without any political weight which are 
happening every year.  It is the anniversary of the Chetniks' uprising 
against the Nazi's in the Second World War, on this mountain.  It's a 
completely folklore gathering. They always have guns. 

Jared: But his comment?  "Save your bullets we'll need them later?"

Paunovic: Well then let them arrest Draskovic.

Jared: Well, they closed his Studio B...Tell me, is radio B292 funded by 
George Soros?

Paunovic: Funded or founded?

Jared: Funded.  Given money - 

Paunovic: I think it happens quite often since 1992 but it's not the only 
source of money.  But I'm not the right  person to talk about this. 

Jared: Do you know anything about -

Paunovic: There is a list of international foundations, not only Soros who -

Jared: Like what else?

Paunovic: Press Now, from Holland, Royal Swedish Foundation or something, 
Royal Netherlands Foundation.

Jared: Any in the US?

Paunovic: I guess so.  I don't know the details.  Those things I know by 
chance. But Soros Foundation, yes, definitely, but much, these days in last 
year or two years much less than before.

Jared: Any money coming from foundations in the US?

Paunovic: Probably, but I don't know which Foundations.  I am pretty much 
pissed off in putting this kind of argumentation, like Soros equals B92.  
That really comes from people who are not in a position to see what we are 
doing.  We will take money from anyone. To make a good production on many 
levels, from radio, to TV and video productions to Internet, Books, music. 
You need money. 

Jared: I'll read you a statement from Gelbard.  You know who Gelbard is?

Paunovic:  US Special Envoy to the Balkans.

Jared: Exactly. [Jared's note: actually as of the end of 1999 Gelbard was 
moved to a new position, Ambassador to Indoensia...]  Do you know who Biden 
is?  Sen. Biden?  This an exchange from the July 29th hearings on supporting 
the so-called independent forces in Serbia. The hearings took place the day 
after the Senate voted to give $100,000,000 to dollars to the independent 
opposition.  This is Sen. Biden talking:
 "What can we do about inside Serbia?  For example Draskovic continues to 
deny access to Studio B, which is supposedly, as I understand it -- he's not?

MR. GELBARD: No, he's actually given access to Studio B -- excuse me; given 
access of Studio B to Radio B-92. And my understanding is that Radio B-92, 
one of the independent voices, has just reopened as Radio B-292. We want 
Draskovic to open up Studio B to the rest of the opposition, and that's a 
message that he'll be getting from us in the next few days."

{Jared resumes] That's how they talked about you.  Any comment?

Paunovic: Can you read it to me again?  

Jared: I'll read it slowly. (Reads again}

Paunovic:  Hmmm.  I think it's, I mean I'm not getting clear what do you want 
to point?  What do you want to ask me?  If you want to think B92 is the voice 
of Gelbard or the American administration, that has nothing to do with 
reality.

Jared: Well let me ask you, does it sound like an extraordinary situation for 
the government of a hostile country to be discussing in detail the use of 
studio facilities in the target country.  And discussing it in detail - 

Paunovic: Well, to make such a conclusion that would mean that you have a 
perfectly normal situation here.  What you have here is the most abnormal 
situation in the world which has nothing to do with the US government.

Jared: You think the situation has nothing to do with the  US - 

Paunovic: And another thing I don't like the way we are -  Like Robin Cook 
and Jamie Shea they made a huge damage to our image when Robin Cooke said in 
a Press Conference which was directly broadcast on CNN "You know we helped 
B92 to get satellite access" and things like that.  But you know I think they 
will obviously help anyone who is spreading serious criticism of the 
government.  So what are we going to do about it?  IF they want to do it they 
will. 

Jared: Do you feel uncomfortable with that statement [by Gelbard and Biden]?

Paunovic: I absolutely feel uncomfortable with anyone patronizing -

Jared: You said before that the United States had nothing do with the 
situation in Yugoslavia.  You don't think the United States is any part of 
the problem that you face in Yugoslavia?

Paunovic:  Well I don't say they are not part of the problem  They are a very 
big part of the problem because for nine years they saw Milosevich as a 
guarantor of peace and then completely changed their policy declaring him a 
war criminal.  If they needed the year 1999 to realize he is a war criminal I 
think they are very wrong. He is a war criminal and  a person who is 
seriously violating  for many years.  He came to power in a  completely 
illegal way.  He had a coup in the [former communist] party congress. 

Jared: You said the US has been responsible for problems because of its 
policy of backing Milosevich.  So that's the only thing the United States has 
done?  

Paunovic: Are you referring to the bombing?  I mean we can talk about these 
things for 24 hours. 

Jared: Well, it did happen. But anyway, you take money from the US government

Paunovic: (Laughs) I don't know about it. I didn't say that.  Did I say it?

Jared: They say it.

Paunovic: Who?

Jared: In these hearings they say it explicitly , they say we've been giving 
large sums of money to the 'independent' media. Now the main, the only name 
of 'independent' media they mention is yours.  They say we had to stop when 
the bombing started.  Since the bombing ended we've been able to start again 
and we're immediately going to get $10 million dollars in there.  And we have 
voted 100 million. That's what they say.

Paunovic: You know, I don't know. That help was not only for B92.  I mean you 
have a list, practically everyone, all media that exists in Serbia that is 
not controlled by the Serbian government is on that list.

Jared: Getting money from the US?

Paunovic: Exactly,.

Jared: So they're all getting it, not just B92?

Paunovic: You know it's not a question of morality or something like that 
because we're in an open war with the government.  We realized much before 
Washington realized we had to overthrow Milosevich

Jared: Let me ask you, I understand you're broadcasting on satellite.  What 
satellite is that?

Paunovic: I don't know.

Jared: Is that Eurosat?

Paunovic: I am not a technical expert on the satellite. I can tell you  about 
the Internet

Jared: Is there somebody who handles the radio I can talk to?

Paunovic: You can talk to me about it.

Jared; So do you know what satellite it is?

Paunovic:  Yes but I don't know.  I don't have anybody here who can help you 
about this.

Jared: IS there anybody I can call to find that out?

Paunovic: Before,  the way satellite operation was done I think in 
cooperation with BBC.

Jared: Ahh, so you do know. And so now?

Paunovic: Probably the same.

Jared: Have you protested the Serbian government's exclusion from Eurosat 
[the European Satellite TV link]

Paunovic: We protest all those things. Everything.

[At this point Paunovic instructed me to check on their website to see about 
the protest against Yugoslav exclusion from Eursat.  I checked while I was on 
the phone with him but I found no such protest against Yugoslav exclusion. He 
promised to send me the URL to that protest, and did in fact send an email in 
which he states his regrets that the URL for the protest against Yugoslav 
esclusion from the Eurosat is "unavailable")

End of interview
Jared Israel




From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:53:02 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:53:02 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a   "theater" near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro
References: <200007310219.TAA07136@mail4.bigmailbox.com>
Message-ID: <00ae01c0178b$f21f3b80$8aa5accf@amiribar>

We need to be "Up to Speed" about the principal contradiction in the world
today, viz. Imperialism vs The People! The New World Order is explicitly
moving imperialism Past its Reliance on Governments, except as
policepersons, explainers and accountants.
      The New Era in which we have entered is the stage where not even
Single Nation Monopoly can survive. (This is the lesson of the Bill Gates/
Microsoft charade....Microsoft "gives away" its Browser, so that is
Monopoly...meanwhile, EXXON-MOBILE: BMW=-CHRYSLER; AOL-TIME WARNER, &c and
these are Not monopolies!
    Imperialism is now able to run things through NON GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES,
e.g., WTO, IMF, NAFTA, WORLD BANK. The US has just about lost its national
sovereignty, that's why the good old boys are enraged! "SINGLE SUPERPOWER"
is Hype, for US role as principal Hitman for International Monopoly
Capitalism. Witness, they attack Iraq as UN  attack Kosovo as NATO, both
cat's paws on IMC..
    Russian tragedy was overthrow of USSR (which had degenerated  through
Revisionism  (e.g., even before Stalin's anti-Marxist statement in 16th
Congress that there were no more hostile classes in USSR) to Social
Imperialism. Rightist Coup in China icing the so called Gang of Four and
installing Deng (pronounced DUNG) Tsiao Peng to power was tragic victory for
the Right and has opened the doors to much more Bourgeois Imperialist
penetration. But Imperialism's address of national chauvinism, national
oppression, racism to Third World Countries is blunt enough (the bombing of
Chinese Embassy!...Please!) to make the sugar coated bullet tactic of
undermining the Chinese more difficult. There are still millions of actual
Marxist-Leninists in the C:PSU ....rendered more politically and
ideologically prepared by Mao's Cultural Revolution..
Which is what Lenin was so emphatic about in Better Fewer and the last works
Stalin ignored.
----- Original Message -----
From: <kenfree at nettaxi.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2000 10:19 PM
Subject: RE: RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a "theater"
near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro


>
> Yes, sad but true.  Point well taken
>
> Peace,
> Ken
> >From: "Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar>
> >To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 12:28:11 -0300
> >Subject: RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a
"theater" near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro
> >Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >
> >En relaci?n a RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon ,
> >el 29 Jul 00, a las 19:46, kenfree at nettaxi.com dijo:
> >
> >> This is a very valid criticism, however, both China and Russia have
> >> demonstrated a willingness to sell their silence in the past, and in
> >> the Russian case, with respect to Yugoslavia, and letting the "allies"
> >> have their way with her.  It is probably the urgency of the crisis of
> >> capital that will determine how unilaterally (eg NATO) vs.
> >> multilaterally this military effort might be perpetrated.  Certainly
> >> Russia and China have the power to stop it in either case, but they
> >> have not done so for Iraq, nor for Yugoslavia, and the beat goes on.
> >> Somehow, their threat to Western hegemony always seems to end up on
> >> the auction block well before it gets actually implemented.
> >>
> >> Peace,
> >> Ken
> >
> >Sad first precedent: Spain, 1936.
> >
> >
> >N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
> >gorojovsky at inea.com.ar
> >NUEVA DIRECCI?N ELECTR?NICA DESDE EL 10 DE JULIO DE 2000
> >NEW E-ADDRESS AS OF JULY 10, 2000
> >gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Crashlist mailing list
> >Crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Crashlist webpage: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> >
> >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Nettaxi.com in the News ((( Video by ON24 )))
>
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>
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)??b?(>?sSYsY?b???~????!-+-




From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:53:05 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:53:05 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a   "theater" near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro
References: <200007310219.TAA07136@mail4.bigmailbox.com>
Message-ID: <00af01c0178b$f3aa6f60$8aa5accf@amiribar>

----- Original Message -----
From: <kenfree at nettaxi.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2000 10:19 PM
Subject: RE: RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a "theater"
near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro


>
> Yes, sad but true.  Point well taken
>
> Peace,
> Ken
> >From: "Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar>
> >To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 12:28:11 -0300
> >Subject: RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a
"theater" near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro
> >Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >
> >En relaci?n a RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon ,
> >el 29 Jul 00, a las 19:46, kenfree at nettaxi.com dijo:
> >
> >> This is a very valid criticism, however, both China and Russia have
> >> demonstrated a willingness to sell their silence in the past, and in
> >> the Russian case, with respect to Yugoslavia, and letting the "allies"
> >> have their way with her.  It is probably the urgency of the crisis of
> >> capital that will determine how unilaterally (eg NATO) vs.
> >> multilaterally this military effort might be perpetrated.  Certainly
> >> Russia and China have the power to stop it in either case, but they
> >> have not done so for Iraq, nor for Yugoslavia, and the beat goes on.
> >> Somehow, their threat to Western hegemony always seems to end up on
> >> the auction block well before it gets actually implemented.
> >>
> >> Peace,
> >> Ken
> >
> >Sad first precedent: Spain, 1936.
> >
> >
> >N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
> >gorojovsky at inea.com.ar
> >NUEVA DIRECCI?N ELECTR?NICA DESDE EL 10 DE JULIO DE 2000
> >NEW E-ADDRESS AS OF JULY 10, 2000
> >gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Crashlist mailing list
> >Crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Crashlist webpage: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> >
> >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Nettaxi.com in the News ((( Video by ON24 )))
>
http://vuwin.on24.com/vuwindow/scripts/vuwin.asp?id=30279&type=av&ref=NTX&cb
=NTX
>
>
>
>
???X???????z?m?Y????S??Sw????????<?q?????r??????)?*'?S?z?>???m?(?^m?Y?-+-? 
)??b?(>?sSYsY?b???~????!-+-




From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:54:24 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:54:24 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] FWD: sign petition for Nader vs. "Lap Dogs"
References: <Pine.SUN.4.21.0007301543240.29712-100000@igc4>
Message-ID: <00b601c0178c$1ffe6580$8aa5accf@amiribar>

Imperialism vs The People is The Principal Contradiction in the world today.
The National Bourgeoisie in all countries is an article of unwilling
history. To scream insults at the CP is shallow and impotent. Would that the
BRC, the WE, wd try to Unite With The Many, including the CP, to defeat the
Few. And quit pontificating and profiling like constipated marionettes
Wish to Malcolm, We were engaged in as much anti-imperialist work as CPUSA.
AND NO! I AINT IN IT!! Amiri B
----- Original Message -----
From: Art McGee <amcgee at igc.org>
To: <brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca>
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2000 6:50 PM
Subject: RE: [BRC-DISC] FWD: sign petition for Nader vs. "Lap Dogs"


>
***************************************************************************
> This Message Is From: Art McGee <amcgee at igc.org>
>
***************************************************************************
>
> >If you recognize the capitalist class as the enemy, and
> >the Democratic Party its agent, then you must recognize
> >the CPUSA as its "lap dog."
>
> I don't really care about your explanations or
> justifications, or what Mao said, that's not
> the way we refer to comrades within the BRC.
>
> Keep it up, and you'll soon be out of here.
>
> The same applies to any other POU violations.
> You can explain what you meant all you want,
> but if you continue to violate the POU, you
> won't be participating on this list.
>
> Art McGee
> BRC-DISCUSS List Administrator
>
>
> [Cross-posting or publishing messages that appear on BRC-DISCUSS to a
> non-BRC medium is prohibited (except for articles, announcements, and
> press releases), without EXPLICIT permission from the message author]
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> BRC-DISCUSS: Black Radical Congress - General Discussion/Debate
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> --------------------------------------------------------------------------




From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:56:07 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:56:07 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
References: <390022436.966977188948.JavaMail.root@web649-wra> <39A2F122.529CA3DA@umich.edu>
Message-ID: <00c701c0178c$5c2a24e0$8aa5accf@amiribar>

THE NADIR OF SOCIAL- DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL POSTURING
    Weimar is recycling it's eerie presence , tightening around us today! Ralph Nader's feverish personal "campaign for president" is useful in the sense that in a general way, he raises some issues that , hopefully, like Bradley's gesture, moves the Gore wagon slightly to the Left. But for Nader to insist that his individualistic petty bourgeois  for a moral remaking of the Imperialist state is politically advanced as  the practical politics of our time place and condition,  is sad  and dangerous. Because, only the slowest among us can not see that if Nader takes his , in essence, politically solipsistic show all the way to the hoop, then he will quite simply help Bush get elected!
     The politics of individual moral cant is the "protest" politics of the petty bourgeois "loyal opposition" crying out because they think Imperialism can be cleaned up enough (consumer advocacy) for them & some of we, to be INCLUDED.
    First, Nader is not that much Left of Gore. His recent speeches, while trying to tighten up his "gap" vis a vis Blacks and oppressed nationalities, is still saccharin covered generality, in the main. Nader is a consumer advocate, at worst, quality control for imperialism's commodities.
    NADER CAN ONLY BE ULTIMATELY USEFUL TO THE PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE AGREES TO AGGRESSIVELY HELP CREATE A LEFT BLOC.. OF THE MAIN ANTI IMPERIALST ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS AND DEMAND CONCRETE CONCESSIONS FROM GORE!!----
     Some of the main groups that should be in such a bloc would be Marxist-Leninist Organizations, including the CPUSA, Freedom Socialists,  Committee of Correspondence, Social Democratic organizations like the DSA, SDA, , Puerto Rican Socialist Party (The Trots and Anarchists abhor the dirty bourgeois electoral arena, that's one characteristic of their objective Opposition to Revolutionary Democratic Struggle, the only real precursor and path to Socialism!) Anti Imperialist Organizations ...both multi national and national in form;  e.g., Black Latino, Asian, Native  Peoples groups, Trade Unions, Black Radical Congress, Black United Front, RNA, NAACP, Pan Africanist, Professional and Academic Organizations, Cultural and Arts Groups, Media Groups, Nation of Islam and American Muslim Mission, Independent Publications and Presses. Consumer Coops, Agricultural Coops, Advocacy Groups, particularly around Welfare, Immigration, Police Brutality. Police Control Boards, 
    The Congressional and State Legislative Black and Latino Caucuses, ABC LEO, Individual Politcal and Activist figures,and their organizations, e.g., Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, RAndall Robinson, Marable, Gates, West, Afro American, Latino Publishers Groups, Minority and Small Business Organizations, Church related groups, 
   
      The Black Radical Congress could put out a call for such a meeting. This letter is a CALL  FROM UNITY AND STRUGGLE NEWSPAPER 808 S.10THST NEWARK NEW JERSEY  973 242-1346  / 1509 FAX
    The CPUSA with other  influential groups could put out such a call. The Greens SHOULD join with this effort IMMEDIATELY. The Nation of Islam , because of its call for a Million Family March in October, and Sharpton because of his Aug 26 National Action Group led march on DC , have the public visibility to cooperate importantly in such a call.

     Such a meeting must produce A PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM, a multi-national mass document that could  forcefully project the key elements of an actual Anti Impeialist stance and demands on the Democratic party. More importantly, such unity would provide the material basis for a broad  People's Democratic United Front as the basis for the Revolutionary Democratic Workers Party that could begin to do the concrete practical work of creating an mass revolutioanry democratic alternative political structure , that could actually win local elections and create the intense propaganda and agitation network to educate, mobilize and organize the many, to defeat the few. 
 
    Either Nader and the Greens abandon the isolated glamour of moral pontification as a Loyal Opposition to Imperialism or they risk the Weimar replay of helping elect the far Right, BUSH 2. I know the choice is between a Murderer (B-2) and a Prostitute (Gore rimes with W....) but folks, that is literally where we are. Being serenaded by the dismally ignorant chorus of Trot-Anarchists, one of who said, "I bet you voted for Clinton". To which we say, I bet you voted (by non-voting)  for Bush. (Note to All  , read The Casebook on Weimar, Univ of Calif, to see how close we are to Weimar 2! Hitler came to power because of a split between Communists and Social Democrats!} Amiri Baraka
  From: John Woodford 
  To: brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca 
  Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 5:31 PM
  Subject: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything


  Michael Albert . promoting Nader, says " What seems missing on both sides, therefore, is recognition 
  that the most important impact of the Nader campaign will be 
  changing the political climate in the country by energizing 
  the left, and that our arguments need to take account of 
  this impact. Take the cases most often bandied about: .. 
  BUT big problem NAder has so far proved himself unable or unwilling to arouse or energize anyone or anything.   He acts more like a Trojan Horse--a sham gift to the erstwhile "left," one sparking no surge, no oomph, little of nothing. 
      A bigger point--one that shold have been the first of the three the author cited--is, if one votes for Gore under current circumstances, is one then accepting a peculiar American institution in which, under arguments 1 and 2 of the author, one will never see an end to this choice. Under our current model of politics, the perpetual motion machine of mediocrity serving symbolically as a democratic institution while serving in fact as fronts for the Moneybags and Fat Cats, can run on and on. 
    There will always be a Democrat somewhat like Gore--although it is hoped one cannot be found that is more like a Republican than he and his running mate and their policies (not stuff Gore has espoused but really policies he's supported and enacted--hardly "left"). And there will always be, a few shades more rightist or even further Fuehrer, depending on the era, there will be the Bu-shite. 
    And we would forever here that commandment: Thou must vote for Gore-tech, lest thou be ruled by Bu-shite. 
  Yet sometimes the Bu-shites win, and lo and behold , as we've seen, things are not much different than they have been or would be under the Gore-tech. 
    As uninspiring as Nader is, as weak and perhaps phony, if the Democrats conclude that the Gore-Lieberman Southern strategy fails, new folks will have to be installed to give the party access to the pork four years from now. 
  That leaves the left immobilized in an electoral politics swamp, forever mired, forever crying, Oh, Give Us the Lesser, Give Us the Lesser..  
       As for Cheney. He may be more likely to convert than Lieberman is. 

    *****
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From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:56:14 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:56:14 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
References: <390022436.966977188948.JavaMail.root@web649-wra> <39A2F122.529CA3DA@umich.edu>
Message-ID: <00c801c0178c$611b1900$8aa5accf@amiribar>

THE NADIR OF SOCIAL- DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL POSTURING
    Weimar is recycling it's eerie presence , tightening around us today! Ralph Nader's feverish personal "campaign for president" is useful in the sense that in a general way, he raises some issues that , hopefully, like Bradley's gesture, moves the Gore wagon slightly to the Left. But for Nader to insist that his individualistic petty bourgeois  for a moral remaking of the Imperialist state is politically advanced as  the practical politics of our time place and condition,  is sad  and dangerous. Because, only the slowest among us can not see that if Nader takes his , in essence, politically solipsistic show all the way to the hoop, then he will quite simply help Bush get elected!
     The politics of individual moral cant is the "protest" politics of the petty bourgeois "loyal opposition" crying out because they think Imperialism can be cleaned up enough (consumer advocacy) for them & some of we, to be INCLUDED.
    First, Nader is not that much Left of Gore. His recent speeches, while trying to tighten up his "gap" vis a vis Blacks and oppressed nationalities, is still saccharin covered generality, in the main. Nader is a consumer advocate, at worst, quality control for imperialism's commodities.
    NADER CAN ONLY BE ULTIMATELY USEFUL TO THE PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE AGREES TO AGGRESSIVELY HELP CREATE A LEFT BLOC.. OF THE MAIN ANTI IMPERIALST ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS AND DEMAND CONCRETE CONCESSIONS FROM GORE!!----
     Some of the main groups that should be in such a bloc would be Marxist-Leninist Organizations, including the CPUSA, Freedom Socialists,  Committee of Correspondence, Social Democratic organizations like the DSA, SDA, , Puerto Rican Socialist Party (The Trots and Anarchists abhor the dirty bourgeois electoral arena, that's one characteristic of their objective Opposition to Revolutionary Democratic Struggle, the only real precursor and path to Socialism!) Anti Imperialist Organizations ...both multi national and national in form;  e.g., Black Latino, Asian, Native  Peoples groups, Trade Unions, Black Radical Congress, Black United Front, RNA, NAACP, Pan Africanist, Professional and Academic Organizations, Cultural and Arts Groups, Media Groups, Nation of Islam and American Muslim Mission, Independent Publications and Presses. Consumer Coops, Agricultural Coops, Advocacy Groups, particularly around Welfare, Immigration, Police Brutality. Police Control Boards, 
    The Congressional and State Legislative Black and Latino Caucuses, ABC LEO, Individual Politcal and Activist figures,and their organizations, e.g., Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, RAndall Robinson, Marable, Gates, West, Afro American, Latino Publishers Groups, Minority and Small Business Organizations, Church related groups, 
   
      The Black Radical Congress could put out a call for such a meeting. This letter is a CALL  FROM UNITY AND STRUGGLE NEWSPAPER 808 S.10THST NEWARK NEW JERSEY  973 242-1346  / 1509 FAX
    The CPUSA with other  influential groups could put out such a call. The Greens SHOULD join with this effort IMMEDIATELY. The Nation of Islam , because of its call for a Million Family March in October, and Sharpton because of his Aug 26 National Action Group led march on DC , have the public visibility to cooperate importantly in such a call.

     Such a meeting must produce A PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM, a multi-national mass document that could  forcefully project the key elements of an actual Anti Impeialist stance and demands on the Democratic party. More importantly, such unity would provide the material basis for a broad  People's Democratic United Front as the basis for the Revolutionary Democratic Workers Party that could begin to do the concrete practical work of creating an mass revolutioanry democratic alternative political structure , that could actually win local elections and create the intense propaganda and agitation network to educate, mobilize and organize the many, to defeat the few. 
 
    Either Nader and the Greens abandon the isolated glamour of moral pontification as a Loyal Opposition to Imperialism or they risk the Weimar replay of helping elect the far Right, BUSH 2. I know the choice is between a Murderer (B-2) and a Prostitute (Gore rimes with W....) but folks, that is literally where we are. Being serenaded by the dismally ignorant chorus of Trot-Anarchists, one of who said, "I bet you voted for Clinton". To which we say, I bet you voted (by non-voting)  for Bush. (Note to All  , read The Casebook on Weimar, Univ of Calif, to see how close we are to Weimar 2! Hitler came to power because of a split between Communists and Social Democrats!} Amiri Baraka
  From: John Woodford 
  To: brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca 
  Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 5:31 PM
  Subject: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything


  Michael Albert . promoting Nader, says " What seems missing on both sides, therefore, is recognition 
  that the most important impact of the Nader campaign will be 
  changing the political climate in the country by energizing 
  the left, and that our arguments need to take account of 
  this impact. Take the cases most often bandied about: .. 
  BUT big problem NAder has so far proved himself unable or unwilling to arouse or energize anyone or anything.   He acts more like a Trojan Horse--a sham gift to the erstwhile "left," one sparking no surge, no oomph, little of nothing. 
      A bigger point--one that shold have been the first of the three the author cited--is, if one votes for Gore under current circumstances, is one then accepting a peculiar American institution in which, under arguments 1 and 2 of the author, one will never see an end to this choice. Under our current model of politics, the perpetual motion machine of mediocrity serving symbolically as a democratic institution while serving in fact as fronts for the Moneybags and Fat Cats, can run on and on. 
    There will always be a Democrat somewhat like Gore--although it is hoped one cannot be found that is more like a Republican than he and his running mate and their policies (not stuff Gore has espoused but really policies he's supported and enacted--hardly "left"). And there will always be, a few shades more rightist or even further Fuehrer, depending on the era, there will be the Bu-shite. 
    And we would forever here that commandment: Thou must vote for Gore-tech, lest thou be ruled by Bu-shite. 
  Yet sometimes the Bu-shites win, and lo and behold , as we've seen, things are not much different than they have been or would be under the Gore-tech. 
    As uninspiring as Nader is, as weak and perhaps phony, if the Democrats conclude that the Gore-Lieberman Southern strategy fails, new folks will have to be installed to give the party access to the pork four years from now. 
  That leaves the left immobilized in an electoral politics swamp, forever mired, forever crying, Oh, Give Us the Lesser, Give Us the Lesser..  
       As for Cheney. He may be more likely to convert than Lieberman is. 

    *****
-------------- next part --------------
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From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:56:58 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:56:58 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a   "theater" near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro
References: <200007310219.TAA07136@mail4.bigmailbox.com>
Message-ID: <00cd01c0178c$7e0cc400$8aa5accf@amiribar>

We need to be "Up to Speed" about the principal contradiction in the world
today, viz. Imperialism vs The People! The New World Order is explicitly
moving imperialism Past its Reliance on Governments, except as
policepersons, explainers and accountants.
      The New Era in which we have entered is the stage where not even
Single Nation Monopoly can survive. (This is the lesson of the Bill Gates/
Microsoft charade....Microsoft "gives away" its Browser, so that is
Monopoly...meanwhile, EXXON-MOBILE: BMW=-CHRYSLER; AOL-TIME WARNER, &c and
these are Not monopolies!
    Imperialism is now able to run things through NON GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES,
e.g., WTO, IMF, NAFTA, WORLD BANK. The US has just about lost its national
sovereignty, that's why the good old boys are enraged! "SINGLE SUPERPOWER"
is Hype, for US role as principal Hitman for International Monopoly
Capitalism. Witness, they attack Iraq as UN  attack Kosovo as NATO, both
cat's paws on IMC..
    Russian tragedy was overthrow of USSR (which had degenerated  through
Revisionism  (e.g., even before Stalin's anti-Marxist statement in 16th
Congress that there were no more hostile classes in USSR) to Social
Imperialism. Rightist Coup in China icing the so called Gang of Four and
installing Deng (pronounced DUNG) Tsiao Peng to power was tragic victory for
the Right and has opened the doors to much more Bourgeois Imperialist
penetration. But Imperialism's address of national chauvinism, national
oppression, racism to Third World Countries is blunt enough (the bombing of
Chinese Embassy!...Please!) to make the sugar coated bullet tactic of
undermining the Chinese more difficult. There are still millions of actual
Marxist-Leninists in the C:PSU ....rendered more politically and
ideologically prepared by Mao's Cultural Revolution..
Which is what Lenin was so emphatic about in Better Fewer and the last works
Stalin ignored.
----- Original Message -----
From: <kenfree at nettaxi.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2000 10:19 PM
Subject: RE: RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a "theater"
near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro


>
> Yes, sad but true.  Point well taken
>
> Peace,
> Ken
> >From: "Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar>
> >To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 12:28:11 -0300
> >Subject: RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon to a
"theater" near you: The next NATO aggression -- Montenegro
> >Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >
> >En relaci?n a RE: [CrashList] Re: [CrashList-talk] Coming soon ,
> >el 29 Jul 00, a las 19:46, kenfree at nettaxi.com dijo:
> >
> >> This is a very valid criticism, however, both China and Russia have
> >> demonstrated a willingness to sell their silence in the past, and in
> >> the Russian case, with respect to Yugoslavia, and letting the "allies"
> >> have their way with her.  It is probably the urgency of the crisis of
> >> capital that will determine how unilaterally (eg NATO) vs.
> >> multilaterally this military effort might be perpetrated.  Certainly
> >> Russia and China have the power to stop it in either case, but they
> >> have not done so for Iraq, nor for Yugoslavia, and the beat goes on.
> >> Somehow, their threat to Western hegemony always seems to end up on
> >> the auction block well before it gets actually implemented.
> >>
> >> Peace,
> >> Ken
> >
> >Sad first precedent: Spain, 1936.
> >
> >
> >N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
> >gorojovsky at inea.com.ar
> >NUEVA DIRECCI?N ELECTR?NICA DESDE EL 10 DE JULIO DE 2000
> >NEW E-ADDRESS AS OF JULY 10, 2000
> >gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Crashlist mailing list
> >Crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> >Crashlist webpage: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> >
> >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Nettaxi.com in the News ((( Video by ON24 )))
>
http://vuwin.on24.com/vuwindow/scripts/vuwin.asp?id=30279&type=av&ref=NTX&cb
=NTX
>
>
>
>
???X???????z?m?Y????S??Sw????????<?q?????r??????)?*'?S?z?>???m?(?^m?Y?-+-?
)??b?(>?sSYsY?b???~????!-+-





From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 16:57:16 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:57:16 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!
References: <F308kjeo4lB4BwOZxYS00000cf2@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <00d001c0178c$86fc0ee0$8aa5accf@amiribar>

No inevestigation , no right to speak!(Mao) Do us a favor ...read
"Dialectical & Historical Materialism" Lenin  also "Four Essays In
Philosophy" by Mao "The Weapon of Theory" Cabral
----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Warren <tomzbox at hotmail.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!


> Julien writes:
>
> >Marxists of course subscribe to a
> >kind of crude economic determinism which makes them often see economic
> >things as more important than they are (I'm going to be flamed for this
> >gross
> >oversimplification :-).
>
> Ahh,... just remind your detractors that you were talking "baby talk" to
me,
> in order to get me to understand what seems so obvious to them. Thanks for
> your patience in translating the concepts into gross oversimplifications
so
> that you could share them with me.
>
> It was also written and responded to:
>
> >U.S. activists must keep the
> > >government out of the political affairs of other people.  The U. S.
> > >government clearly means no good.
>
> Of course from everyone's standpoint except the US, it seems fairly clear
> that our "government clearly means no good." I would not dispute a large
> amount of our policy being catagorized that way. <--- please note I said
> that, ... please.
>
> However, those who demand the US out and back to our 200 years of
isolation
> must provide SOME intellectual honesty by presenting a more constructive
> pathway that plugs the "vacuum" left by keeping US out of "the political
> affairs of other people."  At the moment there is no realistic proposal on
> the table, beyond the vague hope that some socialist, altruistic force
will
> magically appear to solve the problems left over from the legacy of the
20th
> Century,(regardless of who created those problems: US idiots, Global
> Capitalists, butchering second & third-world thugs, somnambulent
> governments, or fanatic fundamentalist zealots) .
>
> I am going to risk a bit of "honesty" here, to see if we can move the list
> forward. I fully expect ONLY flames, namecalling, and some clever ways of
> turning "baby talk", and "naive" back against me, as well as some acerbic
> observations about my non-marxist parentage. Go ahead if you must, I am
> prepared.
>
> From my personal perspective(<--- please note I said "personal" there.)
here
> are some factors that stand in the way of keeping US out of "the political
> affairs of other people.":
>
> 1) It is true enough that I am selfish enough to want to be in control
> rather than trusting someone else to be. I see no more trustworthy persons
> on the horizon, although I am willing to examine the cause of anyone who
is
> willing to step forward and ask for that control. I do NOT see that
> willingness to examine other causes than their own from many other
Crashlist
> members at the moment.
>
> The idea of there being NO ONE in control is too mature for any of us as
> yet. Later ... maybe, after the Crash has demonstrated the folly of my
> position as well as those of others in opposition. (Let us try to remember
> that a certain amount of our attention should be given to the "Crash" in
> crashlist.)
>
> 2)Not ALL US policy is based upon capitalism, or even imperialism. Unless
> this is understood, there is little hope of a realistic understanding of
> alternatives. As bad as many of you hate it, we still tend to act
> occasionally from a sense of morality, as skewed and misapprehended as it
> seems. The most common mistake when looking at US foriegn policy from
> outside is to overlook that factor and attribute darker, capitalistic
> motives everywhere, even where they do not exist, although
> capitalists/imperialists may benefit from those policies.
>
> 3)In the US we no longer trust this "Go away and leave us alone"
> prescription for Europeans dealing with global issues that begin in Europe
> or are so provoked in asia. Simply ... we have been burned too many times
by
> doing so. The lessons we have drawn from the 20th century make us think
> presently that to withdraw from that particular world stage leads to mass
> graves, and it saddens us to keep sending forensic teams in to verify that
> the unmarked graves contain young innocents murdered simply for their
> genetic heritage. (It is allowable to say "Poor naive Americans, what do
we
> care for their sadness?" as long as you realize that our retaliation to
that
> cosmopolitain viewpoint is measured in smart-bombs, regardless of
> justification.) It only reinforces our resolve to hear others deny the
> existence of the graves or attempt to justify them. It does absolutely no
> good to point out either the irrationality or the cognitive dissonance of
> our viewpoint.
>
> Detractors may say this is me simply falling into line with the Zionist
> "Never Again" philosophy, but mine is a more fundamental objection.  It is
> simply true on the strategic/tactical levels that SOMEONE will fill the
> vacuum, at at the moment our experience of the last century leads us to
> believe in the haphazard collective security agreements of NATO and the UN
> -- rather than any other alternative or any other SOMEONE. Staying out of
> the "political affairs of other people" means that EVERYONE must do so,
and
> this will never happen. It is our hubris that we think we can do it
better.
> It is YOURS that you ignore that reality must creep into the conduct of
> nations from time to time. ALL OF US ARE AT FAULT THAT WE FIND LITTLE
COMMON
> GROUND TO COOPERATE.
>
> If we wish to examine the crash, understand it, and perhaps move together
to
> mitigate its effects, we must find that commonality here on the list,
don't
> you think?
>
> If any of you simply wish to bash me for being an uneducated
> swallower-of-imperialist-propaganda, that moves the list's discussion not
> one cm in any direction except toward hostility. Better to deal with the
> argument, not the name-calling, please. Return the respect I give others.
>
> However, feel free to flame away. ;-)
>
> Tom
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 16:06:43 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 18:06:43 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Neither "Saint" Nor "Criminal" - Just target of Imperial US
Message-ID: <d9.93d4b41.26e6c873@aol.com>

n a message dated 09/05/2000 4:50:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
aabdo at webtv.net writes:

<<  Several other comrades seem to have the position of moving Milosevic
 towards sainthood, depending on what exact percentage of nationalized
 state property they feel still exists in Yugoslavia.  >>

I'm sorry but this is simply another straw man.  The issue isn't whether 
Milosevich is a saint.  Who cares? The point is you cannot build an antiwar 
movement to support people you're attacking as criminals.  It's a pretty 
basic point. Were the Vietnamese saints?  They were targets of an unjust 
attack, that's all.  Same here. One focuses on opposing the Imperial power. 
And one uses common sense, taking with a grain of salt the various Western 
media attacks, realizing that there's a lot of money available to finance 
these slanders.  Common sense.  And a little humility, please.  The point 
about privatization is that obviously the Yugoslav government has resisted 
because the Western media has ATTACKED them for resisting.  And just 
recently, the US Commerce Department advertised for a coordinator to direct 
privatization of several hundred firms in Montenegro, run by Milosevich's 
deadly enemies. The Commerce people promise privatization will be immensely 
profitable, so there must be SOMETHING left to steal...

There is a reason that the Yugoslav government is much better than, say, the 
Islamist government in Sarajevo - the reason it, it was not organized by US 
intelligence using Diaspora fascists from around the world and recycling 
vicious race hate straight out of World War II combined with the new Western 
creation, Islamist fascism.  It was based on preserving the Yugoslav ideal.  
That is why there are hundreds of thousands of NON-Serbian refuges in Serbia. 
Ethnic unity is the passion of Milosevich and his wife, whom, by the way,  
Andrej rather disgustingly attacks.  It is NOT the stance of the Izetbegovic 
or the Croatian government.

(BTW - why is it OK to pour out such venom towards certain women, always 
women who are attacked in the Western media as being dragon ladies?)

Yugoslavia is a tiny  country.  It has stood up to the biggest tyrannosaurus 
and not capitulated.  This had a wonderful affect on the world.   The Yugo 
government is not racists.  They have superb relations with  Libya.  They 
have a military alliance with China and Iraq.  They have welcomed tens of 
thousands of Chinese immigrants. They remain pretty damned cool in the face 
of constant provocation.  Not bad for a a little country that used to be a 
virtual US colony run by a guy who used to be a banker in NY.

The Sainthood thing is just another of the straw men which Tony seems intent 
on raising.   

Jared



From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 17:20:45 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 19:20:45 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] The Simultaneous Policy
References: <s992e4a3.085@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <00dd01c0178f$d0af85a0$8aa5accf@amiribar>

See Mao's The Economic Policys of the New Democracy (Sel Works_ Lenin on The
"NEP", Du Bois on "TheNation within a Nation". (Du Bois Reader).
      Politics is always principal. The correct political and ideological
line determines everything. And   finally it is the relations of production,
the relations between people, that is what we seek fundamentally to
transform. If we think merely or Primarily about the Productive Forces, ie,
economic work, production, we will become economists (emphaizing trade
unionpolitics and leaving politics to the bougeoisie) and utltimately
opportunists. Mao's line was "Grasp Revolution  -Push Production"
----- Original Message -----
From: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 11:21 AM
Subject: RE: [CrashList] The Simultaneous Policy


> I think that people who wish to regulate the capitalist
> system in the way that is proposed on this website need > to
> answer the standard critique that is offered to this sort of
> proposal by leftists.

> The proposal assumes against the logic of the capitalist
> system itself that economics can be effectively subordinated
> to the essentially non-revolutionary politics of the ballot
> box. In those rare cases in history where politicians are
> elected to power who genuinely wish to curb some of the
> worst practices of large corporations (e.g. Allende in
> Chile; the Spanish 2nd Republic) the economic interests
> organise themselves into an alternative form of politics,
> namely the rightwing coup.
>
> The naivety seems to lie in the belief that those who
> control the economy are susceptible to purely rational and
> humane argumentation and that they can be swayed to bow to
> the will of the majority. But history has shown that if the
> will of the majority threatens their interests then
> 'politics as usual' comes to a swift end. The ruling class
> rules through consent as far as possible, but if that is not
> possible it is still determined to rule. Or does history
> provide us with counter-examples?
>
> So, while the Simultaneous Policy inititative is clearly
> benevolent in its aims and in its approach, it looks to me
> like the creation of sweet illusions.
>
> Tahir
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From ab11 at erols.com  Tue Sep  5 17:20:46 2000
From: ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 19:20:46 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Communist Internationalist PositiononImmigration and Travel
References: <s98eacb0.061@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <00de01c0178f$d1f60f60$8aa5accf@amiribar>

You think the US and intl imperialism is civilized? What a sado-masochistic
delusion!
----- Original Message -----
From: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.COM>
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2000 6:33 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Re: Communist Internationalist
PositiononImmigration and Travel


> >>> "Julien Pierrehumbert" <julp at crosswinds.net> 08/07 12:14
> PM >>>
> As to my definition of capitalism, it's obviously not
> "something like exploitation
> of thrid world workers" but it's not only "markets or buying
> and selling". Then
> nearly every civilized economic system would be capitalist.
>
> But this is precisely the point. Bravo! Every civilised
> economic system IS capitalist. And now that I see you have
> grasped this fundamental point you might just understand the
> enormity of what an "overthrow" of capitalism would entail.
> But what else is worth struggling for? Be explicit please
> (and see my other posts).
>
> Tahir
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep  5 18:30:21 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 02:30:21 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of Imperial US
References: <d9.93d4b41.26e6c873@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00d501c01799$e10af240$4574fac3@k382>

Dear fellow, what is exactly the problem here?
Why are you constantly attacking Tony about the things he isn't saying?
Why are you in constant need for opponents? Hey, we agree with you! What
seems to be the problem?
Who had denied this:
 >
> Yugoslavia is a tiny  country.  It has stood up to the biggest
tyrannosaurus
> and not capitulated.  This had a wonderful affect on the world.   The Yugo
> government is not racists.  They have superb relations with  Libya.  They
> have a military alliance with China and Iraq.  They have welcomed tens of
> thousands of Chinese immigrants. They remain pretty damned cool in the
face
> of constant provocation.  Not bad for a a little country that used to be a
> virtual US colony run by a guy who used to be a banker in NY.
>

I didn't? Tony did not. Tony was very astute in his defense of my countryman
in his discourse on this and many other lists.
What are we reproaching to you? You are abolishing YU Government from crimes
it committed and continue to commits. To make myself perfectly clear: I am
not saying that YU government is the worst thing in universe, quite far from
it, but it is a criminal organization with one thief and dictator , along
with his idiotic wife ( to put it mildly not "rather disgustingly") and who
needs serious medical attention ( I mean wife, her husband needs other kind
of attention)....Don't let me repeat all the crimes they've committed. And
please don't make from me, or Tony, an apologists for NATO lobby in
Yugoslavia! My dear friend, I went trough bombing and I'll never forget that
experience! I am target of Imperial US and not Milosevic! But it doesn't
mean that i should fall in love with one petty dictator because of it. Quite
the contrary, I'll fight USA - European militarism and imperialism, as well
as Milosevic misdoing.
 On the more practical level, I am sure that US is helping Milosevic to stay
on power; that there is a secret, tacit agreement between these two
political Mafiosi, your and mine government, to destroy Yugoslavia:
Milosevic for the sake of preserving power and US for the sake of
ideological, economical, geostrategical etc, etc, interests. Milosevic is
useful to them, like Saddam. As a negative of group portret. As an excuse
for Kynzian, Pentagon economy, ideological justifications, finishing
Yugoslavia by Montenegrian seccesion.
 Chomskyian balance again: Don't defend governments, defend people! Oppose
wars don't establish erotic relationship with the oppressed governments!
Comradely, Red and Black Regards,
                      Andrej
             www.resistancenet.org

----- Original Message -----
From: <Borba100 at aol.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Cc:<EX-YU-A-LISTA at zamir.net>; <alberto_24 at hotmail.com>;
<sophinet at netscape.net>; <fan at eunet.yu>; <delorca at club-internet.fr>;
<itrivo at eunet.yu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 12:06 AM
Subject: [CrashList] Neither "Saint" Nor "Criminal" - Just target of
Imperial US







From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep  5 21:15:16 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 23:15:16 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] We need Jewish signers for an ad against Lieberman
Message-ID: <22.ada3f6b.26e710c4@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/05/2000 8:57:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
zapata at sezampro.yu writes:

<< Hey, we agree with you! What
 seems to be the problem? >>

I am saying the spreading of lies (without a shred of evidence) that 
Milosevich is a war criminal has prevented the left from organizing an 
antiwar movment. I am saying Chomsky has led this process. If you agree, 
that's great, glad that's clarified, let's get on with the work!

For me, that means writing an ad attacking Vice Presidential candidate 
Lieberman's pro-KLA policy.  We would like to get Jewish signers for this.  
The ad would be limited to his stand on Kosovo.  Anyone interested - please 
write me. (You will of course get to comment on (etc) the draft.)

Best regards,
jared



From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Tue Sep  5 13:59:46 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 19:59:46 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Apparently, there's no plausible defense of Chomsky's attacks on Yugolsavia.
Message-ID: <F1170yki4jsGvs0Qzfu000035fd@hotmail.com>



>Huh? Who said anything about books?  Are you writing (inaccurately) about 
>our
>book discussion cause you can't think of anything to say in defense of
>Chomsky?

etc. etc.


Okay folks,

When the acrimony descends to this level, that's enough about Chomsky and 
this thread -- which was started by an accidental keystroke via a post meant 
for another list, remember????

Take it off list or back where it came from. No more.

Tom
(finger poised on the "block messages" button)
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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From durable at earthlink.net  Tue Sep  5 22:11:36 2000
From: durable at earthlink.net (Barry Brooks)
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 21:11:36 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
Message-ID: <39B5C3F8.B81C4B94@earthlink.net>

                                                                                                                                                                
   We need to find what kind of economy can provide people's needs without making too much pollution and without running out of resources rapidly. Our present consumer economy has many nice features, yet it is basically at odds with resource stewardship.
   Labor has been surplus relative to local natural  resources for a long time. In today's crowded world migration can no longer provide an escape from depleted local resources, and imported resources are no longer abundant and cheap.  Even though we face a growing shortage of resources we still pretend that labor shortage is limiting production.  Our fear of labor shortage is obsolete.  Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been necessary to constantly find ways to increase consumption in order maintain full employment.
   The left and the right agree that jobs are the only acceptable way to dole out money to the masses.  Yet, when we create nearly full employment our powerful technology and out large supply of workers will always consume far too many resources for such hyper-activity to be sustainable. Only in our dreams is there no conflict between expanding the economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to conserve resources.
   Our present views rarely include any awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance more than from any work we do. To make our system work under present conditions we must admit that human labor is no longer scarce because machines with computer control can replace most paid labor, even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces more human labor. Our system already has unearned income, but for now it is only for a few. Changing that is the key to becoming sustainable. Unearned income can end our dependence on jobs and growth.
   Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking order or to help improve the lives of the poor, we must have a sustainable system for anything to really matter to anyone.  Excess growth is the cause of our high consumption, and high consumption is the reason our economic system is not sustainable.  Growth is the common problem of all classes!
   True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts production and that cuts real paying jobs and profits. No one supports a sustainable economy.  Without true conservation we can continue to squander scarce resources to exercise all our surplus labor.  Without conservation we can have our giant SUVs.  That is our plan, left or right.
   There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve resources: increased efficiency, increased durability, recycling and by doing less. Durability allows doing less without having less. Efficiency allows using less in what we are doing.  We can make deep cuts in consumption without sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life time, efficiency and reparability.
   Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and pollution that are making our economy unsustainable.  Because durability has been neglected we have a lot to gain when we starting using durability to conserve.
   Conservation of perishables using recycling and efficiency are already our goals, but the use of durability to conserve has had little notice. Yet, a stable population could use a general increase in durability to cut its resource consumption to very low levels while maintaining high living standards.
   If we could somehow accept unearned income for all classes then we could adjust the dole to stabilize wages. (No more tight money.)  This will provide a mechanism allowing us to match the labor force to the real need for labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force, regardless of the consequences.

Barry Brooks
durable at earthlink.net


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From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Tue Sep  5 21:40:48 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 03:40:48 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!
Message-ID: <F833b2zrhQTZ9vmEP5T00005e99@hotmail.com>



>
>No inevestigation , no right to speak!(Mao) Do us a favor ...read
>"Dialectical & Historical Materialism" Lenin  also "Four Essays In
>Philosophy" by Mao "The Weapon of Theory" Cabral

Thanks for the recommendations Amiri. If I'm given any expectation that you 
would read something EYE would recommend, I'll return the favor.

However as far as right to speak goes, I retain that honor and priviledge, 
inalienable and subject to hardly anyone's approval, thank you very much. 
(unless of course Mao somehow manages to obtain a comoderator position on 
Crashlist.)

Tom



>----- Original Message -----
>From: Tom Warren <tomzbox at hotmail.com>
>To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
>Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 5:23 PM
>Subject: Re: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!
>
>
> > Julien writes:
> >
> > >Marxists of course subscribe to a
> > >kind of crude economic determinism which makes them often see economic
> > >things as more important than they are (I'm going to be flamed for this
> > >gross
> > >oversimplification :-).
> >
> > Ahh,... just remind your detractors that you were talking "baby talk" to
>me,
> > in order to get me to understand what seems so obvious to them. Thanks 
>for
> > your patience in translating the concepts into gross oversimplifications
>so
> > that you could share them with me.
> >
> > It was also written and responded to:
> >
> > >U.S. activists must keep the
> > > >government out of the political affairs of other people.  The U. S.
> > > >government clearly means no good.
> >
> > Of course from everyone's standpoint except the US, it seems fairly 
>clear
> > that our "government clearly means no good." I would not dispute a large
> > amount of our policy being catagorized that way. <--- please note I said
> > that, ... please.
> >
> > However, those who demand the US out and back to our 200 years of
>isolation
> > must provide SOME intellectual honesty by presenting a more constructive
> > pathway that plugs the "vacuum" left by keeping US out of "the political
> > affairs of other people."  At the moment there is no realistic proposal 
>on
> > the table, beyond the vague hope that some socialist, altruistic force
>will
> > magically appear to solve the problems left over from the legacy of the
>20th
> > Century,(regardless of who created those problems: US idiots, Global
> > Capitalists, butchering second & third-world thugs, somnambulent
> > governments, or fanatic fundamentalist zealots) .
> >
> > I am going to risk a bit of "honesty" here, to see if we can move the 
>list
> > forward. I fully expect ONLY flames, namecalling, and some clever ways 
>of
> > turning "baby talk", and "naive" back against me, as well as some 
>acerbic
> > observations about my non-marxist parentage. Go ahead if you must, I am
> > prepared.
> >
> > From my personal perspective(<--- please note I said "personal" there.)
>here
> > are some factors that stand in the way of keeping US out of "the 
>political
> > affairs of other people.":
> >
> > 1) It is true enough that I am selfish enough to want to be in control
> > rather than trusting someone else to be. I see no more trustworthy 
>persons
> > on the horizon, although I am willing to examine the cause of anyone who
>is
> > willing to step forward and ask for that control. I do NOT see that
> > willingness to examine other causes than their own from many other
>Crashlist
> > members at the moment.
> >
> > The idea of there being NO ONE in control is too mature for any of us as
> > yet. Later ... maybe, after the Crash has demonstrated the folly of my
> > position as well as those of others in opposition. (Let us try to 
>remember
> > that a certain amount of our attention should be given to the "Crash" in
> > crashlist.)
> >
> > 2)Not ALL US policy is based upon capitalism, or even imperialism. 
>Unless
> > this is understood, there is little hope of a realistic understanding of
> > alternatives. As bad as many of you hate it, we still tend to act
> > occasionally from a sense of morality, as skewed and misapprehended as 
>it
> > seems. The most common mistake when looking at US foriegn policy from
> > outside is to overlook that factor and attribute darker, capitalistic
> > motives everywhere, even where they do not exist, although
> > capitalists/imperialists may benefit from those policies.
> >
> > 3)In the US we no longer trust this "Go away and leave us alone"
> > prescription for Europeans dealing with global issues that begin in 
>Europe
> > or are so provoked in asia. Simply ... we have been burned too many 
>times
>by
> > doing so. The lessons we have drawn from the 20th century make us think
> > presently that to withdraw from that particular world stage leads to 
>mass
> > graves, and it saddens us to keep sending forensic teams in to verify 
>that
> > the unmarked graves contain young innocents murdered simply for their
> > genetic heritage. (It is allowable to say "Poor naive Americans, what do
>we
> > care for their sadness?" as long as you realize that our retaliation to
>that
> > cosmopolitain viewpoint is measured in smart-bombs, regardless of
> > justification.) It only reinforces our resolve to hear others deny the
> > existence of the graves or attempt to justify them. It does absolutely 
>no
> > good to point out either the irrationality or the cognitive dissonance 
>of
> > our viewpoint.
> >
> > Detractors may say this is me simply falling into line with the Zionist
> > "Never Again" philosophy, but mine is a more fundamental objection.  It 
>is
> > simply true on the strategic/tactical levels that SOMEONE will fill the
> > vacuum, at at the moment our experience of the last century leads us to
> > believe in the haphazard collective security agreements of NATO and the 
>UN
> > -- rather than any other alternative or any other SOMEONE. Staying out 
>of
> > the "political affairs of other people" means that EVERYONE must do so,
>and
> > this will never happen. It is our hubris that we think we can do it
>better.
> > It is YOURS that you ignore that reality must creep into the conduct of
> > nations from time to time. ALL OF US ARE AT FAULT THAT WE FIND LITTLE
>COMMON
> > GROUND TO COOPERATE.
> >
> > If we wish to examine the crash, understand it, and perhaps move 
>together
>to
> > mitigate its effects, we must find that commonality here on the list,
>don't
> > you think?
> >
> > If any of you simply wish to bash me for being an uneducated
> > swallower-of-imperialist-propaganda, that moves the list's discussion 
>not
> > one cm in any direction except toward hostility. Better to deal with the
> > argument, not the name-calling, please. Return the respect I give 
>others.
> >
> > However, feel free to flame away. ;-)
> >
> > Tom
> >
> > ________________________________________________________________________
> > Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> > To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> >
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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From aabdo at webtv.net  Wed Sep  6 00:47:18 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 01:47:18 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!
In-Reply-To: "Tom Warren" <tomzbox@hotmail.com>'s message of Wed, 06 Sep 2000 03:40:48 GMT
Message-ID: <6450-39B5E876-11767@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Chairman Tom writes-
<However as far as right to speak goes, I retain that honor and
priviledge, inalienable and subject to hardly anyone's approval, thank
you very much. (unless of course Mao somehow manages to obtain a
comoderator position on Crashlist.) 

Tom, may I suggest that you publish a little green book that all list
members might want to read, quote, and wave.     The above passage
should begin the work.      Also, you may want to consider a fashion
change while you are at it?
Some of us are already your loyal supporters!

Comradely behind The New Green Anti-Crash International, Tony












From embark at epud.net  Wed Sep  6 01:14:46 2000
From: embark at epud.net (Tom Warren)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 00:14:46 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!
References: <6450-39B5E876-11767@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <003401c017d6$0abd6b40$192b74d8@pavilion>

> Tom, may I suggest that you publish a little green book that all list
> members might want to read, quote, and wave.     The above passage
> should begin the work.      Also, you may want to consider a fashion
> change while you are at it?
> Some of us are already your loyal supporters!
>
> Comradely behind The New Green Anti-Crash International, Tony

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Tony, but until I can learn to
spell privileDge, I doubt that I can convince a publisher to print anything.

Seriously, one of my prize possessions is a Little Red Book given to me by a
neat lady who was in China about 90 days after that ping pong team visited.
(I can hear several muttering in the background "It's a shame he never read
it." ... but it's in Chinese.)  Mao said a couple of things about flowers
... perhaps there is already a little green book in hiding somewhere in all
that Marxist [stuff].

Tom
(slipping a nehru jacket over his Harley t-shirt)

PS Note email address, it's a new ISP just to handle all the crashlist admin
mail!




From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Tue Sep  5 22:30:29 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 01:30:29 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of Im
In-Reply-To: <00d501c01799$e10af240$4574fac3@k382>
Message-ID: <007e33331040690MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>

En relaci?n a Re: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Crimin, 
el 6 Sep 00, a las 2:30, Andrej Grubacic dijo:

>  On the more practical level, I am sure that US is helping Milosevic
>  to stay
> on power; that there is a secret, tacit agreement between these two
> political Mafiosi, your and mine government, to destroy Yugoslavia:
> Milosevic for the sake of preserving power and US for the sake of
> ideological, economical, geostrategical etc, etc, interests. Milosevic
> is useful to them, like Saddam.

Argentina 1950 again. This stuff was proposed by Nahuel Moreno, who 
explained that Per?n was a British Agent against the USA. Others, 
like Silvio Frondizi, explained that he was in agreement with the 
USA. None of these great Leftists was able to understand the local, 
national meaning of Per?n.

The road to hell is paved of good intentions.

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Tue Sep  5 22:30:29 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 01:30:29 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of Im
In-Reply-To: <00d501c01799$e10af240$4574fac3@k382>
Message-ID: <008fc3431040690MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>

En relaci?n a Re: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Crimin, 
el 6 Sep 00, a las 2:30, Andrej Grubacic dijo:

>  I am
> not saying that YU government is the worst thing in universe, quite
> far from it, but it is a criminal organization with one thief and
> dictator , along with his idiotic wife ( to put it mildly not "rather
> disgustingly") and who needs serious medical attention ( I mean wife,
> her husband needs other kind of attention)....

Change YU for AR, 2000 for 1950, and there you have the Argentinian 
petty bourgeois progressives preparing the ground for counter-
revolution. Sorry, Andrej, yours is a slippery way to tread on. Be 
careful.



N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From aieti at lix.intercom.es  Wed Sep  6 02:24:19 2000
From: aieti at lix.intercom.es (Aieti)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 10:24:19 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of Im
Message-ID: <002601c017db$dafa7e60$19ad42d4@aietiintercon>

Todos los d?as recibimos mensajes como este de crashlist, no bloquea el
correo y adem?s no tiene nada que ver con la actividad que realizamos.
Por favor no envien m?s correos. Gracias
-----Mensaje original-----
De: Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky <Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar>
Para: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Fecha: mi?rcoles, 06 de septiembre de 2000 9:51
Asunto: Re: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not
even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of Im


>En relaci?n a Re: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Crimin,
>el 6 Sep 00, a las 2:30, Andrej Grubacic dijo:
>
>>  On the more practical level, I am sure that US is helping Milosevic
>>  to stay
>> on power; that there is a secret, tacit agreement between these two
>> political Mafiosi, your and mine government, to destroy Yugoslavia:
>> Milosevic for the sake of preserving power and US for the sake of
>> ideological, economical, geostrategical etc, etc, interests. Milosevic
>> is useful to them, like Saddam.
>
>Argentina 1950 again. This stuff was proposed by Nahuel Moreno, who
>explained that Per?n was a British Agent against the USA. Others,
>like Silvio Frondizi, explained that he was in agreement with the
>USA. None of these great Leftists was able to understand the local,
>national meaning of Per?n.
>
>The road to hell is paved of good intentions.
>
>N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
>gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From twood at uwc.ac.za  Wed Sep  6 03:58:52 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 6 Sep 2000 11:58:52 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Apparently, there's no plausible defense of
	Chomsky's attacks on Yugolsavia.
Message-ID: <s9b6319d.081@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Wed Sep  6 05:15:23 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 6 Sep 2000 13:15:23 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <s9b64394.026@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From zapata at sezampro.yu  Wed Sep  6 07:04:29 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 15:04:29 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of Im
References: <008fc3431040690MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>
Message-ID: <00b601c01804$c5d0b8a0$3874fac3@k382>

Dear Nestor,
Thanx for your warning, but I think that historical analogies of this sort
are more dangerous than helpfull.
We are both comig from the field of social sciencies; I would be more
cautious when treating history in this way.
 On the other hand, you have a precious point there, on national context:
but, as in Argentina, you really had to be inside of argentina and not
infront of the computer to be able to smell this national context differnce.
Salud y anarquia,
                                 Andres

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:
the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbereable pity for the
suffering of the mankind"
              Bertrand Russell



----- Original Message -----
From: Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky <Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 6:30 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not
even sure in this: target of Imperial US- I am target of ImEn relaci?n a Re:
[CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Crimin,
el 6 Sep 00, a las 2:30, Andrej Grubacic dijo:

>  I am
> not saying that YU government is the worst thing in universe, quite
> far from it, but it is a criminal organization with one thief and
> dictator , along with his idiotic wife ( to put it mildly not "rather
> disgustingly") and who needs serious medical attention ( I mean wife,
> her husband needs other kind of attention)....

Change YU for AR, 2000 for 1950, and there you have the Argentinian
petty bourgeois progressives preparing the ground for counter-
revolution. Sorry, Andrej, yours is a slippery way to tread on. Be
careful.



N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar

_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist






From zapata at sezampro.yu  Wed Sep  6 07:16:19 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 15:16:19 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] We need Jewish signers for an ad against Lieberman
References: <22.ada3f6b.26e710c4@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00bb01c01804$cb372ae0$3874fac3@k382>

Well, I don't, frankly, because I do think that Clinton and Milosevic are
war criminals and I that Chomsky was a
great comfort to lerftist and progressices here. I dont know about the US. I
don't  like to talk about the things I am not well acquainted with.
 Jared, I want to thank you for this interesting exchange. I hope that we
have gave people ( and ourselves) some things to think about. You remember
the famous sentance that "You dont get harmony when everyone is singing the
same note".
In that name , respectfuly,
                       Andrej

In a message dated 09/05/2000 8:57:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
zapata at sezampro.yu writes:

<< Hey, we agree with you! What
 seems to be the problem? >>

I am saying the spreading of lies (without a shred of evidence) that
Milosevich is a war criminal has prevented the left from organizing an
antiwar movment. I am saying Chomsky has led this process. If you agree,
that's great, glad that's clarified, let's get on with the work!

For me, that means writing an ad attacking Vice Presidential candidate
Lieberman's pro-KLA policy.  We would like to get Jewish signers for this.
The ad would be limited to his stand on Kosovo.  Anyone interested - please
write me. (You will of course get to comment on (etc) the draft.)

Best regards,
jared

_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist






From johnwood at umich.edu  Wed Sep  6 08:23:54 2000
From: johnwood at umich.edu (John Woodford)
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 10:23:54 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
References: <390022436.966977188948.JavaMail.root@web649-wra> <39A2F122.529CA3DA@umich.edu> <00c701c0178c$5c2a24e0$8aa5accf@amiribar>
Message-ID: <39B6537A.8E055E06@umich.edu>

As far as Nader v. Gore vote goes, this is a convincing argument to
me--complete with on-target prescription for BRC action..
JW

Amiri Baraka wrote:

> THE NADIR OF SOCIAL- DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL POSTURING    Weimar is
> recycling it's eerie presence , tightening around us today! Ralph
> Nader's feverish personal "campaign for president" is useful in the
> sense that in a general way, he raises some issues that , hopefully,
> like Bradley's gesture, moves the Gore wagon slightly to the Left. But
> for Nader to insist that his individualistic petty bourgeois  for a
> moral remaking of the Imperialist state is politically advanced as
> the practical politics of our time place and condition,  is sad  and
> dangerous. Because, only the slowest among us can not see that if
> Nader takes his , in essence, politically solipsistic show all the way
> to the hoop, then he will quite simply help Bush get elected!     The
> politics of individual moral cant is the "protest" politics of the
> petty bourgeois "loyal opposition" crying out because they think
> Imperialism can be cleaned up enough (consumer advocacy) for them &
> some of we, to be INCLUDED.    First, Nader is not that much Left of
> Gore. His recent speeches, while trying to tighten up his "gap" vis a
> vis Blacks and oppressed nationalities, is still saccharin covered
> generality, in the main. Nader is a consumer advocate, at worst,
> quality control for imperialism's commodities.    NADER CAN ONLY BE
> ULTIMATELY USEFUL TO THE PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE
> AGREES TO AGGRESSIVELY HELP CREATE A LEFT BLOC.. OF THE MAIN ANTI
> IMPERIALST ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS AND DEMAND CONCRETE
> CONCESSIONS FROM GORE!!----     Some of the main groups that should be
> in such a bloc would be Marxist-Leninist Organizations, including the
> CPUSA, Freedom Socialists,  Committee of Correspondence, Social
> Democratic organizations like the DSA, SDA, , Puerto Rican Socialist
> Party (The Trots and Anarchists abhor the dirty bourgeois electoral
> arena, that's one characteristic of their objective Opposition to
> Revolutionary Democratic Struggle, the only real precursor and path to
> Socialism!) Anti Imperialist Organizations ...both multi national and
> national in form;  e.g., Black Latino, Asian, Native  Peoples groups,
> Trade Unions, Black Radical Congress, Black United Front, RNA, NAACP,
> Pan Africanist, Professional and Academic Organizations, Cultural and
> Arts Groups, Media Groups, Nation of Islam and American Muslim
> Mission, Independent Publications and Presses. Consumer Coops,
> Agricultural Coops, Advocacy Groups, particularly around Welfare,
> Immigration, Police Brutality. Police Control Boards,    The
> Congressional and State Legislative Black and Latino Caucuses, ABC
> LEO, Individual Politcal and Activist figures,and their organizations,
> e.g., Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, RAndall Robinson, Marable, Gates,
> West, Afro American, Latino Publishers Groups, Minority and Small
> Business Organizations, Church related groups,       The Black Radical
> Congress could put out a call for such a meeting. This letter is a
> CALL  FROM UNITY AND STRUGGLE NEWSPAPER 808 S.10THST NEWARK NEW
> JERSEY  973 242-1346  / 1509 FAX    The CPUSA with other  influential
> groups could put out such a call. The Greens SHOULD join with this
> effort IMMEDIATELY. The Nation of Islam , because of its call for a
> Million Family March in October, and Sharpton because of his Aug 26
> National Action Group led march on DC , have the public visibility to
> cooperate importantly in such a call.      Such a meeting must produce
> A PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM, a multi-national mass document that
> could  forcefully project the key elements of an actual Anti
> Impeialist stance and demands on the Democratic party. More
> importantly, such unity would provide the material basis for a broad
> People's Democratic United Front as the basis for the Revolutionary
> Democratic Workers Party that could begin to do the concrete practical
> work of creating an mass revolutioanry democratic alternative
> political structure , that could actually win local elections and
> create the intense propaganda and agitation network to educate,
> mobilize and organize the many, to defeat the few.     Either Nader
> and the Greens abandon the isolated glamour of moral pontification as
> a Loyal Opposition to Imperialism or they risk the Weimar replay of
> helping elect the far Right, BUSH 2. I know the choice is between a
> Murderer (B-2) and a Prostitute (Gore rimes with W....) but folks,
> that is literally where we are. Being serenaded by the dismally
> ignorant chorus of Trot-Anarchists, one of who said, "I bet you voted
> for Clinton". To which we say, I bet you voted (by non-voting)  for
> Bush. (Note to All  , read The Casebook on Weimar, Univ of Calif, to
> see how close we are to Weimar 2! Hitler came to power because of a
> split between Communists and Social Democrats!} Amiri Baraka
>
>      From: John Woodford
>      To: brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca
>      Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 5:31 PM
>      Subject: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
>       Michael Albert . promoting Nader, says " What seems missing
>      on both sides, therefore, is recognition
>      that the most important impact of the Nader campaign will be
>
>      changing the political climate in the country by energizing
>      the left, and that our arguments need to take account of
>      this impact. Take the cases most often bandied about: ..
>
>      BUT big problem NAder has so far proved himself unable or
>      unwilling to arouse or energize anyone or anything.   He
>      acts more like a Trojan Horse--a sham gift to the erstwhile
>      "left," one sparking no surge, no oomph, little of nothing.
>          A bigger point--one that shold have been the first of
>      the three the author cited--is, if one votes for Gore under
>      current circumstances, is one then accepting a peculiar
>      American institution in which, under arguments 1 and 2 of
>      the author, one will never see an end to this choice. Under
>      our current model of politics, the perpetual motion machine
>      of mediocrity serving symbolically as a democratic
>      institution while serving in fact as fronts for the
>      Moneybags and Fat Cats, can run on and on.
>        There will always be a Democrat somewhat like
>      Gore--although it is hoped one cannot be found that is more
>      like a Republican than he and his running mate and their
>      policies (not stuff Gore has espoused but really policies
>      he's supported and enacted--hardly "left"). And there will
>      always be, a few shades more rightist or even further
>      Fuehrer, depending on the era, there will be the Bu-shite.
>        And we would forever here that commandment: Thou must vote
>      for Gore-tech, lest thou be ruled by Bu-shite.
>      Yet sometimes the Bu-shites win, and lo and behold , as
>      we've seen, things are not much different than they have
>      been or would be under the Gore-tech.
>        As uninspiring as Nader is, as weak and perhaps phony, if
>      the Democrats conclude that the Gore-Lieberman Southern
>      strategy fails, new folks will have to be installed to give
>      the party access to the pork four years from now.
>      That leaves the left immobilized in an electoral politics
>      swamp, forever mired, forever crying, Oh, Give Us the
>      Lesser, Give Us the Lesser..
>           As for Cheney. He may be more likely to convert than
>      Lieberman is.
>
>     > *****
>
--

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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Wed Sep  6 09:37:29 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 6 Sep 2000 17:37:29 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
Message-ID: <s9b680ef.078@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From aieti at lix.intercom.es  Wed Sep  6 09:53:48 2000
From: aieti at lix.intercom.es (Aieti)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 17:53:48 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] no mas mensajes
Message-ID: <004601c0181a$a68dc8a0$6fad42d4@aietiintercon>

POR FAVOR NO SIGAN MANDANDO MENSAJES.
SE LO RUEGO
gRACIAS.
aieti-direcci?n
-----Mensaje original-----
De: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
Para: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Fecha: mi?rcoles, 06 de septiembre de 2000 17:42
Asunto: Re: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?


>Barry, I was very interested to read your post below,
>because it is challenging, but also because it is in a way
>diametrically opposed to what I have been emphasising
>(basically "each according to his/her work). I don't have
>much time to respond right now, but I do hope that you will
>continue the engagement nevertheless.
>
>I think many people on this list would agree that there is a
>labour surplus, but without necessarily agreeing with the
>conclusions that you derive from this. For example, I find
>it hard to regard as a 'solution' your radical separation of
>production from distribution. The idea of dividing humanity
>into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
>while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
>productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
>solution to me. Instead of focusing on the productive and
>creative powers of humanity as part of the solution, it
>reckons that a small group of productive and creative
>individuals will design the life support for the majority
>who will then play no further role in the production
>process. They will simply be the recipients of a certain
>distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
>of society? In such a radical division of humanity what
>sorts of consciousness will define the doers and the
>receivers? Will it be egalitarian in any way? This is hard
>to imagine.
>
>Sentences such as the following seem curiously to take
>certain historical phenomena as given, whereas there surely
>is some basis for questioning them: " when we create nearly
>full employment our powerful technology and out large supply
>of workers will always consume far too many resources for
>such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
>some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
>determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
>something that we can create and control?
>
>Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
>value. What sort of economic theory supports statements such
>as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
>awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance more
>than from any work we do."
>
>But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
>income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
>can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
>of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
>position on population is strange, because if you are
>assuming a static population, against the current and
>empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
>something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
>achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be a
>more direct and more coherent way of addressing your problem
>of economic growth and labour surplus, no? If you are
>putting so much stress on highly productive technology,
>which is somehow taken as an extra-human given, why don't
>you look at the technology of reproduction? In both cases
>they are matters of human choice and agency. Neither the
>population level nor the level of productivity is an
>external fact of nature - they are effects of human
>relations and actions.
>
>Tahir
>
>
>
>>>> "Barry Brooks" <durable at earthlink.net> 09/06 6:11 AM >>>
>
>
>
>   We need to find what kind of economy can provide people's
>needs without making too much pollution and without running
>out of resources rapidly. Our present consumer economy has
>many nice features, yet it is basically at odds with
>resource stewardship.
>   Labor has been surplus relative to local natural
>resources for a long time. In today's crowded world
>migration can no longer provide an escape from depleted
>local resources, and imported resources are no longer
>abundant and cheap.  Even though we face a growing shortage
>of resources we still pretend that labor shortage is
>limiting production.  Our fear of labor shortage is
>obsolete.  Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been
>necessary to constantly find ways to increase consumption in
>order maintain full employment.
>   The left and the right agree that jobs are the only
>acceptable way to dole out money to the masses.  Yet, when
>we create nearly full employment our powerful technology and
>out large supply of workers will always consume far too many
>resources for such hyper-activity to be sustainable. Only in
>our dreams is there no conflict between expanding the
>economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to conserve
>resources.
>   Our present views rarely include any awareness that
>wealth comes from nature and inheritance more than from any
>work we do. To make our system work under present conditions
>we must admit that human labor is no longer scarce because
>machines with computer control can replace most paid labor,
>even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence
>from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces
>more human labor. Our system already has unearned income,
>but for now it is only for a few. Changing that is the key
>to becoming sustainable. Unearned income can end our
>dependence on jobs and growth.
>   Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking order
>or to help improve the lives of the poor, we must have a
>sustainable system for anything to really matter to anyone.
>Excess growth is the cause of our high consumption, and high
>consumption is the reason our economic system is not
>sustainable.  Growth is the common problem of all classes!
>   True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts
>production and that cuts real paying jobs and profits. No
>one supports a sustainable economy.  Without true
>conservation we can continue to squander scarce resources to
>exercise all our surplus labor.  Without conservation we can
>have our giant SUVs.  That is our plan, left or right.
>   There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve
>resources: increased efficiency, increased durability,
>recycling and by doing less. Durability allows doing less
>without having less. Efficiency allows using less in what we
>are doing.  We can make deep cuts in consumption without
>sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life
>time, efficiency and reparability.
>   Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and
>pollution that are making our economy unsustainable.
>Because durability has been neglected we have a lot to gain
>when we starting using durability to conserve.
>   Conservation of perishables using recycling and
>efficiency are already our goals, but the use of durability
>to conserve has had little notice. Yet, a stable population
>could use a general increase in durability to cut its
>resource consumption to very low levels while maintaining
>high living standards.
>   If we could somehow accept unearned income for all
>classes then we could adjust the dole to stabilize wages.
>(No more tight money.)  This will provide a mechanism
>allowing us to match the labor force to the real need for
>labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force,
>regardless of the consequences.
>
>Barry Brooks
>durable at earthlink.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From aabdo at webtv.net  Wed Sep  6 10:23:09 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 11:23:09 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] INS Causes Envronmental Damage And Kills Immigrants by Dehydration
Message-ID: <28387-39B66F6D-345@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

The area being discussed below is an area that is 50-70 miles north of
the Mexican Border.       Yet it is a highly militarized area with La
Migra's intimidating presence constantly felt.    It is a semi-war zone
of sorts, and always a depressing experience to drive through as one
leaves the Border northward to Corpus Christi, and onwards toward
Houston.

The constant presence of high tech sensoring equipment mounted high
above the highways, and the use of local police all over the highway as
auxiliary to immigration agents is part of the scene.    But hidden away
from view to most people, is the actual environmental damage that INS
does in sensitive wildlife zones, and also even in the ranches where the
land is already partially degraded.

And of course, there is the constant murder of immigrants as they try to
make their way north through dangerous terrain.    Immigration makes
that terrain just enough more inhospitable, that pushes some over the
margin of being able to survive.

Tony 
________________________________     INS still weighing ranch's proposal
By Alison Gregor
Express-News Rio Grande Bureau

A feud that got the Border Patrol banned from the sprawling Kenedy Ranch
by owners still seethes with no resolution on the sun-baked horizon.

Six weeks ago, the John G. and Marie Stella Kenedy Memorial Foundation,
which owns half of the 400,000-acre ranch, extended terms for an
agreement to let the Border Patrol back on its isolated grazing lands to
search for undocumented immigrants. 
The Border Patrol has not officially responded to the demands.

"They're apparently trying to put restrictions on us, and that's not
something we'll accept," said Ramiro De Anda, a spokesman for the Border
Patrol's McAllen Sector.

Among others, the restrictions include limiting patrols to established
ranch roads and reimbursing the foundation for a grass fire blamed for
$30,000 in damage.
Tim Counts, an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in
Dallas, said negotiations with the Kenedy foundation are ongoing.

The Corpus Christi-based foundation banned the Border Patrol from its
ranchland in March after, in separate incidents, two men were struck by
agency vehicles while crouching in the long grass.
Undocumented immigrants heading north from the U.S.-Mexico border use
the ranch's empty stretches to skirt an immigration checkpoint just
south of Sarita. 
Undocumented immigrants die every year in Kenedy County because of
dehydration, snakebites and other hazards.

Border Patrol agents maintain they are saving lives by searching the
forbidding terrain, but foundation members complain of human rights
violations and property destruction. The federal agency was kicked off
the ranch temporarily four years ago because of fires and other damage
attributed to its agents.

A memorandum of agreement eventually enabled the Border Patrol to start
patrolling again. Foundation lawyer Richard Leshin said the same type of
agreement was extended to the Border Patrol six weeks ago, but he
wouldn't reveal the terms.

"Things have not changed, but what we have put on the table is a
proposal to the Border Patrol, and if they accept it, they will be
allowed back on," he said.
In any case, the Border Patrol has the right to go on the ranchland in
instances where suspected undocumented immigrants flee onto the
property, De Anda said. Whether the Border Patrol ever begins patrolling
again, that access will continue, he said.

Entry to the ranch was negotiated because under the law the government
can patrol open lands within 25 miles of a U.S. boundary. The Border
Patrol argues the Gulf Coast is such a boundary, giving it access to the
Kenedy Ranch.

Several months ago, the federal government warned that the foundation's
lands could be seized if agents weren't permitted back on the ranch,
said Leshin, who added, "We dispute that."

De Anda said there has been no movement to seize the ranch, but the FBI
contacted the foundation regarding the matter. He said the Border Patrol
has tried to work with the Kenedy foundation and will continue to do so.

"The agents try to stay on the established roads," he said. "They don't
go cross-country. ... At one time, we were using diesel vehicles to keep
the catalytic converters from starting grass fires."

For now, the Kenedy County sheriff and ranching tenants are keeping
watch over the Kenedy Ranch. Fears of a flood of undocumented immigrants
onto the Kenedy Ranch have not been borne out, though apprehensions at
the Sarita checkpoint are down 28 percent.

That may be due to the Border Patrol's Operation Rio Grande, an all-out
effort to throttle undocumented immigration south of the ranch, De Anda
said.

"Apprehensions in the entire McAllen Sector are down 20 percent, and in
Harlingen, they're down 42 percent," he said.

One ironic twist may be fewer dehydration deaths on the ranch, Leshin
said.
"What we have noticed is that the illegal aliens are traveling more
along the water troughs and wells," he said. "So they're able to get
access to the water, while they were not able to prior to this time,
because the Border Patrol was out there."

So far this year, seven undocumented immigrants have died crossing
Kenedy County. Last year, 12 immigrants were found dead in its brush
lands












From AlAdisa at aol.com  Wed Sep  6 11:57:25 2000
From: AlAdisa at aol.com (AlAdisa at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 13:57:25 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Publication
Message-ID: <ce.a43d2ff.26e7df85@aol.com>

Freedom Schooling 
By Grace Lee Boggs 

Michigan Citizen Newspaper, 8/20/2000

At the June meeting of the Black Radical Congress in Detroit, conferees 
delegates decided to launch a campaign for ?Education, not Incarceration.? 

That means we have to redefine what we mean by Education. We can?t possibly 
mean the present system which is widely recognized as responsible for so many 
of our young people ending up in prison. 

For example, at the Back to Basics Community Convention held in Detroit on 
Saturday, May 6, the Education Task Force passed the following resolution: 

WHEREAS the current educational system has been organized to fail 50% of our 
                  young people, many of whom end up in prison, and 

WHEREAS the current system does not develop critical thinking or build 
community. 

BE IT RESOLVED 

1. That we create a community curriculum that will empower our children to 
    recognize the truth from untruth and develop the ability to assess 
information for 
    the best possible solution for themselves and for the community; and 

2. That we develop tutorial programs that will implement a community 
curriculum that 
    includes remediation but emphasizes critical thinking and empowering 
children to 
    make a difference. 

Today?s schools build addicts and prepare our children for prison because 
they teach passivity whereas what our children need most is a sense of 
themselves as change agents and decision makers. Our children need not only 
academics but character building. 

To appreciate their neighborhoods and understand their environment. 

To be developed as whole persons with manual, mental, social and 
environmental skills. 

To become resourceful and independent thinkers. 

To see themselves in the context of community and practice what enhances 
community life. 

To recognize their worth because their input makes a difference. 

To work together to change the community. 

In the 1960s Movement activists had to create Freedom Schools in the South 
because the existing school system had been organized to produce subjects, 
not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be 
empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. To bring about a kind of 
?mental revolution,? reading, writing and speaking skills were taught 
through the discussion of black history, the power structure and building a 
Movement to struggle against it. Everyone took this basic ?civics? course 
and then chose from more academic subjects, like algebra and chemistry. 

All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns 
and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of 
children and adults through this community curriculum. 

This is the kind of Freedom Schooling that we need today. 

<<http://www.boggscenter.org/>>




From mstainsby at tao.ca  Wed Sep  6 14:41:01 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 13:41:01 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
References: <s9b64394.026@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <000701c01842$c5866000$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

----- Original Message -----
From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> The best solution is the one that can base itself most
> firmly on this principle and on this principle only: Each
> according to his or her work.
>
> When we have developed a better type of human being we can
> take it further from there.
>
> Tahir
>
While I'm not a Trotskyist by any means, I provide this and a link for
further speculation:

Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed":

The first section, entitled "Social Structure", concludes with these words:
"In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each
according to his abilities to each according to his work." This inwardly
contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or
not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated
text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete
lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with
which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It
is not difficult to guess the origin of the new "principle." To characterize
the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: "From each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The two parts
of this formula are inseparable. "From each according to his abilities," in
the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be
an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use
for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work.
Working "according to their ability" -- that is, in accord with their
physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the
members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill
up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all
"according to their needs," without humiliating control. This two-sided but
indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an
all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.

[full portion of the article available at:]

http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Other/Trotsky/Archive/1936-Rev/ch10.htm#ch1
0-1

================
Macdonald Stainsby.

Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
----------
http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international







From johnwood at umich.edu  Wed Sep  6 14:55:55 2000
From: johnwood at umich.edu (John Woodford)
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 16:55:55 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
References: <s9b64394.026@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <000701c01842$c5866000$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>
Message-ID: <39B6AF5B.6E31667F@umich.edu>

Yeah, fine. . But Lenin was interested in dealing with the question:  How do we
get therer from here?
And put another way, as far as Trotsky's case goes, "Everybody talkin' 'bout
Heaven ain't going there."

Macdonald Stainsby wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> > The best solution is the one that can base itself most
> > firmly on this principle and on this principle only: Each
> > according to his or her work.
> >
> > When we have developed a better type of human being we can
> > take it further from there.
> >
> > Tahir
> >
> While I'm not a Trotskyist by any means, I provide this and a link for
> further speculation:
>
> Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed":
>
> The first section, entitled "Social Structure", concludes with these words:
> "In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each
> according to his abilities to each according to his work." This inwardly
> contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or
> not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated
> text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete
> lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with
> which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It
> is not difficult to guess the origin of the new "principle." To characterize
> the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: "From each
> according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The two parts
> of this formula are inseparable. "From each according to his abilities," in
> the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be
> an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use
> for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work.
> Working "according to their ability" -- that is, in accord with their
> physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the
> members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill
> up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all
> "according to their needs," without humiliating control. This two-sided but
> indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an
> all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.
>
> [full portion of the article available at:]
>
> http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Other/Trotsky/Archive/1936-Rev/ch10.htm#ch1
> 0-1
>
> ================
> Macdonald Stainsby.
>
> Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
> http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
> rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
> ----------
> http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist

--





From mstainsby at tao.ca  Wed Sep  6 18:47:23 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 17:47:23 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
References: <s9b64394.026@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <000701c01842$c5866000$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com> <39B6AF5B.6E31667F@umich.edu>
Message-ID: <003301c01865$301dd980$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

Well, I stuck that in for a bit of flavour. Honestly, considering the
eco-dynamic of the crash, this "how do we get there" will be the main
question we must be able to deal with when "we" have *grasped the power* to
be able to determine a new course. In the mean time, my vague hypotheses
include a non-industrial model for building up the productive forces as
needed, but that all these matters can only take place globally, since the
"periphery" can no longer industrialise sanely. With that dynamic, power
becomes the key.

So how do we do that?
THE question.

Macdonald

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Woodford" <johnwood at umich.edu>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2000 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short


> Yeah, fine. . But Lenin was interested in dealing with the question:  How
do we
> get therer from here?
> And put another way, as far as Trotsky's case goes, "Everybody talkin'
'bout
> Heaven ain't going there."
>
> Macdonald Stainsby wrote:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> > > The best solution is the one that can base itself most
> > > firmly on this principle and on this principle only: Each
> > > according to his or her work.
> > >
> > > When we have developed a better type of human being we can
> > > take it further from there.
> > >
> > > Tahir
> > >
> > While I'm not a Trotskyist by any means, I provide this and a link for
> > further speculation:
> >
> > Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed":
> >
> > The first section, entitled "Social Structure", concludes with these
words:
> > "In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each
> > according to his abilities to each according to his work." This inwardly
> > contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it
or
> > not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully
deliberated
> > text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a
complete
> > lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with
> > which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is
imbued. It
> > is not difficult to guess the origin of the new "principle." To
characterize
> > the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: "From each
> > according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The two
parts
> > of this formula are inseparable. "From each according to his abilities,"
in
> > the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to
be
> > an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further
use
> > for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work.
> > Working "according to their ability" -- that is, in accord with their
> > physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the
> > members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently
fill
> > up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and
all
> > "according to their needs," without humiliating control. This two-sided
but
> > indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an
> > all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.
> >
> > [full portion of the article available at:]
> >
> >
http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Other/Trotsky/Archive/1936-Rev/ch10.htm#ch1
> > 0-1
> >
> > ================
> > Macdonald Stainsby.
> >
> > Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
> > http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
> > rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
> > ----------
> > http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/
> > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> > To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
> --
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Wed Sep  6 21:40:34 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 23:40:34 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
Message-ID: <15.8e40f38.26e86832@aol.com>

Do we really have a labor surplus?  Our roads need fixing, our schools need 
rebuilding, there is a health care professional shortage, a child care 
provider shortage, thousands of children need foster care, we need drug 
alcohol treatment centers, we need to replant the forests, we must clean up 
pollution, we need to build housing, develop and test vaccines, provide 
health eduction, we need organically grown food, etc.  There is plenty of 
labor that needs to be done.  We must make those that have the gold expend 
the resources to pay for the work to be done.  We must quit spending the 
money on B1 bombers, "smart bombs", prisons, and the "war on drugs" , etc.  



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Wed Sep  6 22:42:09 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 00:42:09 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change 2of2
Message-ID: <42.a651618.26e876a1@aol.com>

It is precisely as a biologist that I use a class analysis.  The point is not 
the survival of the individual but the survival of the species.  Capitalism 
selects the wrong folks.  Capitalism allows the weakest, most childish, least 
cooperative, least diverse, and most useless members to survive, to reproduce 
(sometimes by extreme measures), and to florish at the expence of the 
stronger, smarter, more diverse, more social, and most useful members of the 
species.  Ignorant, inbred and stupid feudal lords lived and created heirs 
while their hard working, skillful servants starved.  Whole populations died 
while the rich struggled over material wealth.  The inventor and craftperson 
struggles along while the person who owns patents and factories accumulates 
power and money.  Useless folks (e.g. Donald Trump, George W Bush) make 
decisions that effect everyone. 



From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  7 00:28:53 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 01:28:53 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] [Fwd: [PEN-L:1375] (Fwd) Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All - The
 ManchesterGuardian]
Message-ID: <39B735A5.47C02682@ilstu.edu>


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PEN-L:1375] (Fwd) Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All - The
ManchesterGuardian
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 23:22:20 -0500
From: phillp2 at Ms.UManitoba.CA
Reply-To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu


------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Tue, 05 Sep 2000 12:41:35 -0700
To:             	(Recipient list suppressed)
From:           	Sid Shniad <shniad at sfu.ca>
Subject:        	Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All - The Manchester Guardian
(UK)

The Manchester Guardian (UK) 					August 24, 2000
   
Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All
   
	by George Monbiot
    
	The advice could scarcely have come from a more surprising source. 
"If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a 
director of the world's biggest biotechnology company, Novartis,
insisted, 
"tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and
financial will 
- it's not about production and distribution." 
	Mr Smith was voicing a truth which most of his colleagues in 
biotechnology companies have gone to great lengths to deny. On a 
planet wallowing in surfeit, people starve because they have neither the 
land on which to grow food for themselves nor the money with which to 
buy it. There is no question that, as the population increases, the
world 
will have to grow more, but if this task is left to the rich and
powerful -
big 
farmers and big business - then, irrespective of how much is grown, 
people will become progressively hungrier. Only a redistribution of land 
and wealth can save the world from mass starvation. 
	But in one respect Mr Smith is wrong. It is, in part, about production. 
A series of remarkable experiments has shown that the growing 
techniques which his company and many others have sought to impose 
upon the world are, in contradiction to everything we have been brought 
up to believe, actually less productive than some of the methods 
developed by traditional farmers over the past 10,000 years. 
	Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the 
biggest agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese 
scientists had tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting
a 
single, hi-tech variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much
older 
technique (planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the 
astonishment of the farmers who had been drilled for years in the 
benefits of "monoculture", that reverting to the old method resulted in 
spectacular increases in yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which 
normally requires repeated applications of poison to control - decreased 
by 94%. The farmers planting a mixture of strains were able to stop 
applying their poisons altogether, while producing 18% more rice per 
acre than they were growing before. 
	Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that 
yields of organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with 
fertilisers and pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields 
dramatically improves. In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with 
manure has produced higher yields for the past 150 years than wheat 
grown with artificial nutrients. 
	Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in 
India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled 
their yields by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study 
in the US reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can 
produce 10 times as much money per acre as big farms growing single 
crops. Cuba, forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has 
now adopted this as policy, having discovered that it improves both the 
productivity and the quality of its crops. 
	Hi-tech farming, by contrast, is sowing ever graver problems. This 
year, food production in Punjab and Haryana, the Indian states long 
celebrated as the great success stories of modern, intensive
cultivation, 
has all but collapsed. The new crops the farmers there have been 
encouraged to grow demand far more water and nutrients than the old 
ones, with the result that, in many places, both the ground water and
the 
soil have been exhausted. 
	We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has 
been stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive 
than monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive. 
Organic cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for 
the simple reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by 
any farmer anywhere, without the help of multinational companies. 
Though it is more productive to grow several species or several
varieties 
of crops in one field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in 
order to make money, leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase 
their most profitable seeds. This is why they have spent the last 10
years 
buying up seed breeding institutes and lobbying governments to do what 
ours has done: banning the sale of any seed which has not been 
officially - and expensively - registered and approved. 
	All this requires an unrelenting propaganda war against the tried and 
tested techniques of traditional farming, as the big companies and their 
scientists dismiss them as unproductive, unsophisticated and unsafe. 
The truth, so effectively suppressed that it is now almost impossible to 
believe, is that organic farming is the key to feeding the world. 

------- End of forwarded message -------



From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Wed Sep  6 12:59:05 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 18:59:05 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Economic theories
Message-ID: <F150WXWzRPTNZStgLzh00004f22@hotmail.com>

Tahir writes:
>What sort of economic theory supports statements such
>as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
>awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance more
>than from any work we do."

I don't want to tread on Barry's response when it comes, but let me say that
I think this is a perfect way to get back to a discussion of the Crash. ( I
would not defend "inheritance" in this context, however.)

Let me ask a few questions, as open as I can make them. I am hoping these
don't seem "argumentative" or pejorative

1. I hope that we can all agree that /some/ wealth comes from nature. If so,
shouldn't an economic theory recognize natural wealth or ... value ? If so,
is that unacceptable to the "labor theory of value"? ... or should the labor
theory of value be adjusted to include nature? Can we assume any flexibility
in such an economic theory? If any theory (including capitalism) ignores
nature, is the theory relevant to mitigating the Crash?

2. Are economic theories to be seen as being immune from the non-economic
rules and forces of the biosphere? (example: I am not sure that global
population increase can fit wholly into economic theories in any way that is
applicable to reality.) ... or are economic theories in some way larger and
more powerful than nature? If so ... how?

3. I don't know how to ask the third set of questions except by a personal
statement: As many on the list have observed, I have some trouble (!)
reconciling a Marxist viewpoint with my own "neo-malthusian" green Doomer
viewpoint, basically because I accept a different set of fundamental
assumptions. I'm still searching for common ground, and building bridges.
That's why I remain.

These questions just echo Tahir's statement: "but I do hope that you will
continue the engagement nevertheless."

Thanks,

Tom

"The Earth is not dying - she is being killed. And those who are killing her
have names
and addresses."    -Utah Phillips







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From Nmarsh1 at aol.com  Thu Sep  7 06:29:22 2000
From: Nmarsh1 at aol.com (Nmarsh1 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 08:29:22 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Not "Saint" but certainly "Criminal" - and I am not even sure...
Message-ID: <22.ae712ff.26e8e422@aol.com>

please unsubscribe me from the list. thank you.

nmarsh1 at aol.com



From carob at dynamite.com.au  Thu Sep  7 08:29:02 2000
From: carob at dynamite.com.au (Rob Schaap)
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 00:29:02 +1000
Subject: [CrashList] Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and
	 Cultural Change 2of2
Message-ID: <200009071327.AAA01849@m0.dynamite.com.au>

>It is precisely as a biologist that I use a class analysis.  The point is
not 
>the survival of the individual but the survival of the species.  Capitalism

>selects the wrong folks.  

I'm not sure we'd have much evidence for the notion that the spawn of the
successful acquisitive capitalist is genetically any the worse for its
origins.  Mum and Dad were, like the rest of us, primarily the way they were
because of the relations in which they developed (rather than their genes). 
And, even if that were not so, isn't it true that most of the world's
better-off have fewer offspring than their poorer countrparts? 
Individualist acquisitiveness is effectively selected against because the
having of children represents a significant opportunity cost to homo
economicus, eh?  

What's more, isn't the difference so profound that even the staggering
mortality rates among most 'undeveloped' communities are not enough to wipe
out that difference?  I mean, you only have to live to see thirty-five to
rear a few live 'uns, eh?  So I'd need a bit of convincing about this strain
of class-based biology.

That said, the few who do issue from the loins of the rich live lives which
cost disproportionately more in terms of the world-system's matter/energy (I
seem to remember a ratio in the hundreds between the environmental cost of
one of us compared to, say, a Togoan villager or an Ethiopian peasant).

Cheers,
Rob.





From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  7 08:47:29 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 09:47:29 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Economic theories
References: <F150WXWzRPTNZStgLzh00004f22@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <39B7AA80.105EC4@ilstu.edu>


Tom Warren wrote:

>
> 1. I hope that we can all agree that /some/ wealth comes from nature.

One sure route to utter confusion and political futility is creating false
debates.
*All* wealth comes from nature. There is no other conceivable source of
wealth. BUT *all* of that wealth, to become *human* wealth must be
transformed by human labor. Any argument over whether wealth comes
from nature or labor  is as stupid as to argue whether the numerator or
the denominator of a fraction is more important. It is such an ignorant
argument that it is hard to believe that those who propose it are acting
in good faith. If you are ignorant enough to think Marx argued that all
wealth comes form labor, I suggest you read the *Critique of the Gotha
Programme*>

> If so,
> shouldn't an economic theory recognize natural wealth or ... value ?

Value is a social relation, not a thing. You can analyze an object from
here to eternity in all the chemistry and physics laboratories on earth
and you will never find a speck of value. There is absolute nothing
about the physical features of, say, an automobile and a toothpick
to indicate the value of either. Value is a social relationship. It is
NOT a feature of things. Another way of putting it, perhaps, for those
who want to get their Marx from the air they breathe or from licking
lollipops is that in the sense of "economic theory" implied here Marx
was not an economist.

> If so,
> is that unacceptable to the "labor theory of value"?

It is has nothing whatever to do, one way or the other, with the labor
theory of value. Value is a social relation. The marxist-anarchist Fredy
[one 'D] Perlman offers a partial insight with his statement that Political
Economy is essentially a study of culture. The question it asks and
answer has nothing to do, for example, with the question economists
pose of "How are prices set?" Rather, it asks how, under given historical
conditions, living human activity is allocated.

I won't go further, because it is impossible to discuss anything when the
discussion begins with such meaningless questions as these. Marx did
not produce an economic theory. He produced a critique of Political
Economy. So under the Subject line of this post there is nothing for a
marxist to discuss.

Carrol Cox




From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Thu Sep  7 10:28:30 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 16:28:30 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Crashlist digest, Vol 1 #77 - 5 msgs
Message-ID: <F2852VqKwRPQIWDO3hR00006009@hotmail.com>



>I won't go further, because it is impossible to discuss anything when the
>discussion begins with such meaningless questions as these. Marx did
>not produce an economic theory. He produced a critique of Political
>Economy. So under the Subject line of this post there is nothing for a
>marxist to discuss.
>
>Carrol Cox


Thanks, Carrol, for your reasoned and civil response.

I assume from the above statement that marxism therefore is of no practical 
value in addressing the impeding problems of the crash, other than perhaps 
producing a nice little watertight critique of the Political Economy that 
got us to the edge of the abyss? Ahhh yes, well your response DOES confirm 
my suspicions of the parochial nature of Socialism.

Anyone else?

Tom
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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Thu Sep  7 02:37:12 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 7 Sep 2000 10:37:12 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] no mas mensajes
Message-ID: <s9b77b99.081@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

I would appreciate it if someone could translate this for
me, since it appears to be asking something of me, but I
don't know enough Spanish to understand what exactly.

Thanks

Tahir

>>> "Aieti" <aieti at lix.intercom.es> 09/06 5:53 PM >>>
POR FAVOR NO SIGAN MANDANDO MENSAJES.
SE LO RUEGO
gRACIAS.
aieti-direcci?n
-----Mensaje original-----
De: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
Para: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
<crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Fecha: mi?rcoles, 06 de septiembre de 2000 17:42
Asunto: Re: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?


>Barry, I was very interested to read your post below,
>because it is challenging, but also because it is in a way
>diametrically opposed to what I have been emphasising
>(basically "each according to his/her work). I don't have
>much time to respond right now, but I do hope that you will
>continue the engagement nevertheless.
>
>I think many people on this list would agree that there is
a
>labour surplus, but without necessarily agreeing with the
>conclusions that you derive from this. For example, I find
>it hard to regard as a 'solution' your radical separation
of
>production from distribution. The idea of dividing humanity
>into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
>while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
>productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
>solution to me. Instead of focusing on the productive and
>creative powers of humanity as part of the solution, it
>reckons that a small group of productive and creative
>individuals will design the life support for the majority
>who will then play no further role in the production
>process. They will simply be the recipients of a certain
>distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
>of society? In such a radical division of humanity what
>sorts of consciousness will define the doers and the
>receivers? Will it be egalitarian in any way? This is hard
>to imagine.
>
>Sentences such as the following seem curiously to take
>certain historical phenomena as given, whereas there surely
>is some basis for questioning them: " when we create nearly
>full employment our powerful technology and out large
supply
>of workers will always consume far too many resources for
>such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
>some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
>determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
>something that we can create and control?
>
>Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
>value. What sort of economic theory supports statements
such
>as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
>awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance
more
>than from any work we do."
>
>But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
>income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
>can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
>of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
>position on population is strange, because if you are
>assuming a static population, against the current and
>empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
>something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
>achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be
a
>more direct and more coherent way of addressing your
problem
>of economic growth and labour surplus, no? If you are
>putting so much stress on highly productive technology,
>which is somehow taken as an extra-human given, why don't
>you look at the technology of reproduction? In both cases
>they are matters of human choice and agency. Neither the
>population level nor the level of productivity is an
>external fact of nature - they are effects of human
>relations and actions.
>
>Tahir
>
>
>
>>>> "Barry Brooks" <durable at earthlink.net> 09/06 6:11 AM
>>>
>
>
>
>   We need to find what kind of economy can provide
people's
>needs without making too much pollution and without running
>out of resources rapidly. Our present consumer economy has
>many nice features, yet it is basically at odds with
>resource stewardship.
>   Labor has been surplus relative to local natural
>resources for a long time. In today's crowded world
>migration can no longer provide an escape from depleted
>local resources, and imported resources are no longer
>abundant and cheap.  Even though we face a growing shortage
>of resources we still pretend that labor shortage is
>limiting production.  Our fear of labor shortage is
>obsolete.  Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been
>necessary to constantly find ways to increase consumption
in
>order maintain full employment.
>   The left and the right agree that jobs are the only
>acceptable way to dole out money to the masses.  Yet, when
>we create nearly full employment our powerful technology
and
>out large supply of workers will always consume far too
many
>resources for such hyper-activity to be sustainable. Only
in
>our dreams is there no conflict between expanding the
>economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to
conserve
>resources.
>   Our present views rarely include any awareness that
>wealth comes from nature and inheritance more than from any
>work we do. To make our system work under present
conditions
>we must admit that human labor is no longer scarce because
>machines with computer control can replace most paid labor,
>even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence
>from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces
>more human labor. Our system already has unearned income,
>but for now it is only for a few. Changing that is the key
>to becoming sustainable. Unearned income can end our
>dependence on jobs and growth.
>   Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking
order
>or to help improve the lives of the poor, we must have a
>sustainable system for anything to really matter to anyone.
>Excess growth is the cause of our high consumption, and
high
>consumption is the reason our economic system is not
>sustainable.  Growth is the common problem of all classes!
>   True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts
>production and that cuts real paying jobs and profits. No
>one supports a sustainable economy.  Without true
>conservation we can continue to squander scarce resources
to
>exercise all our surplus labor.  Without conservation we
can
>have our giant SUVs.  That is our plan, left or right.
>   There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve
>resources: increased efficiency, increased durability,
>recycling and by doing less. Durability allows doing less
>without having less. Efficiency allows using less in what
we
>are doing.  We can make deep cuts in consumption without
>sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life
>time, efficiency and reparability.
>   Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and
>pollution that are making our economy unsustainable.
>Because durability has been neglected we have a lot to gain
>when we starting using durability to conserve.
>   Conservation of perishables using recycling and
>efficiency are already our goals, but the use of durability
>to conserve has had little notice. Yet, a stable population
>could use a general increase in durability to cut its
>resource consumption to very low levels while maintaining
>high living standards.
>   If we could somehow accept unearned income for all
>classes then we could adjust the dole to stabilize wages.
>(No more tight money.)  This will provide a mechanism
>allowing us to match the labor force to the real need for
>labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force,
>regardless of the consequences.
>
>Barry Brooks
>durable at earthlink.net 
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources:
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base 
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist 
>


_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources:
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base 
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Thu Sep  7 09:42:06 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 7 Sep 2000 17:42:06 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Non-industrial model
Message-ID: <s9b7d38f.084@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
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URL: <http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20000907/7b083b72/attachment.ksh>

From jbunzl at simpol.org  Thu Sep  7 07:02:34 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 14:02:34 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Simultaneous Policy
References: <s992e4a3.085@itsnw.uwc.ac.za> <00dd01c0178f$d0af85a0$8aa5accf@amiribar>
Message-ID: <000401c018f0$d5fcb520$8e5a87d4@oemcomputer>

Amiri Baraka wrote:

> See Mao's The Economic Policys of the New Democracy (Sel Works_ Lenin on
The
> "NEP", Du Bois on "TheNation within a Nation". (Du Bois Reader).
>       Politics is always principal. The correct political and ideological
> line determines everything. And   finally it is the relations of
production,
> the relations between people, that is what we seek fundamentally to
> transform. If we think merely or Primarily about the Productive Forces,
ie,
> economic work, production, we will become economists (emphaizing trade
> unionpolitics and leaving politics to the bougeoisie) and utltimately
> opportunists. Mao's line was "Grasp Revolution  -Push Production"

This was apparently in response to:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 11:21 AM
> Subject: RE: [CrashList] The Simultaneous Policy
>
>
> > I think that people who wish to regulate the capitalist
> > system in the way that is proposed on this website need > to
> > answer the standard critique that is offered to this sort of
> > proposal by leftists......(snipped)

I have no idea whether Amiri Baraka's message was made in response to
Tahir's above message (to which I have already replied) or to the
Simultaneous Policy proposal on www.simpol.org or both. If it responds to
the Simultaneous Policy proposal, forgive me but I don't see
how it relates to that proposal and would be happy to be enlightened!
best wishes
John






From jbunzl at simpol.org  Thu Sep  7 10:14:33 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 17:14:33 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Abusive exploitive systems
References: <20000905.103233.-155035.3.juneo4@juno.com>
Message-ID: <003701c018f1$384c8de0$8e5a87d4@oemcomputer>

jo* wrote:
So, since
> what you have said (about abusive environments begetting more abuse)
> points up root causes, it would behoove us to take a long deep hard look
> at how to reverse the trend/revert to collaborative cooperative
> sustainable behaviours and systems, and I belive this is where it begins.
> The solution that is.  jo*

My reply:
I agree. Would it therefore be appropriate to sum up the challenge we face
as 'How do we get from competition to cooperation?' If so, how do we do
that? Are there any game theorists out there who might help?
John




From silviaa at servidor.unam.mx  Thu Sep  7 11:48:07 2000
From: silviaa at servidor.unam.mx (Silvia Almanza Marquez)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 12:48:07 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] no mas mensajes
References: <s9b77b99.081@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <001a01c018f3$cb72ecc0$f799f884@iingen.unam.mx>

"No more mesages"
----- Original Message -----
From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 3:37 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] no mas mensajes


> I would appreciate it if someone could translate this for
> me, since it appears to be asking something of me, but I
> don't know enough Spanish to understand what exactly.
>
> Thanks
>
> Tahir
>
> >>> "Aieti" <aieti at lix.intercom.es> 09/06 5:53 PM >>>
> POR FAVOR NO SIGAN MANDANDO MENSAJES.
> SE LO RUEGO
> gRACIAS.
> aieti-direcci?n
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> Para: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> Fecha: mi?rcoles, 06 de septiembre de 2000 17:42
> Asunto: Re: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
>
>
> >Barry, I was very interested to read your post below,
> >because it is challenging, but also because it is in a way
> >diametrically opposed to what I have been emphasising
> >(basically "each according to his/her work). I don't have
> >much time to respond right now, but I do hope that you will
> >continue the engagement nevertheless.
> >
> >I think many people on this list would agree that there is
> a
> >labour surplus, but without necessarily agreeing with the
> >conclusions that you derive from this. For example, I find
> >it hard to regard as a 'solution' your radical separation
> of
> >production from distribution. The idea of dividing humanity
> >into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
> >while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
> >productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
> >solution to me. Instead of focusing on the productive and
> >creative powers of humanity as part of the solution, it
> >reckons that a small group of productive and creative
> >individuals will design the life support for the majority
> >who will then play no further role in the production
> >process. They will simply be the recipients of a certain
> >distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
> >of society? In such a radical division of humanity what
> >sorts of consciousness will define the doers and the
> >receivers? Will it be egalitarian in any way? This is hard
> >to imagine.
> >
> >Sentences such as the following seem curiously to take
> >certain historical phenomena as given, whereas there surely
> >is some basis for questioning them: " when we create nearly
> >full employment our powerful technology and out large
> supply
> >of workers will always consume far too many resources for
> >such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
> >some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
> >determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
> >something that we can create and control?
> >
> >Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
> >value. What sort of economic theory supports statements
> such
> >as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
> >awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance
> more
> >than from any work we do."
> >
> >But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
> >income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
> >can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
> >of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
> >position on population is strange, because if you are
> >assuming a static population, against the current and
> >empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
> >something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
> >achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be
> a
> >more direct and more coherent way of addressing your
> problem
> >of economic growth and labour surplus, no? If you are
> >putting so much stress on highly productive technology,
> >which is somehow taken as an extra-human given, why don't
> >you look at the technology of reproduction? In both cases
> >they are matters of human choice and agency. Neither the
> >population level nor the level of productivity is an
> >external fact of nature - they are effects of human
> >relations and actions.
> >
> >Tahir
> >
> >
> >
> >>>> "Barry Brooks" <durable at earthlink.net> 09/06 6:11 AM
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
> >   We need to find what kind of economy can provide
> people's
> >needs without making too much pollution and without running
> >out of resources rapidly. Our present consumer economy has
> >many nice features, yet it is basically at odds with
> >resource stewardship.
> >   Labor has been surplus relative to local natural
> >resources for a long time. In today's crowded world
> >migration can no longer provide an escape from depleted
> >local resources, and imported resources are no longer
> >abundant and cheap.  Even though we face a growing shortage
> >of resources we still pretend that labor shortage is
> >limiting production.  Our fear of labor shortage is
> >obsolete.  Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been
> >necessary to constantly find ways to increase consumption
> in
> >order maintain full employment.
> >   The left and the right agree that jobs are the only
> >acceptable way to dole out money to the masses.  Yet, when
> >we create nearly full employment our powerful technology
> and
> >out large supply of workers will always consume far too
> many
> >resources for such hyper-activity to be sustainable. Only
> in
> >our dreams is there no conflict between expanding the
> >economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to
> conserve
> >resources.
> >   Our present views rarely include any awareness that
> >wealth comes from nature and inheritance more than from any
> >work we do. To make our system work under present
> conditions
> >we must admit that human labor is no longer scarce because
> >machines with computer control can replace most paid labor,
> >even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence
> >from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces
> >more human labor. Our system already has unearned income,
> >but for now it is only for a few. Changing that is the key
> >to becoming sustainable. Unearned income can end our
> >dependence on jobs and growth.
> >   Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking
> order
> >or to help improve the lives of the poor, we must have a
> >sustainable system for anything to really matter to anyone.
> >Excess growth is the cause of our high consumption, and
> high
> >consumption is the reason our economic system is not
> >sustainable.  Growth is the common problem of all classes!
> >   True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts
> >production and that cuts real paying jobs and profits. No
> >one supports a sustainable economy.  Without true
> >conservation we can continue to squander scarce resources
> to
> >exercise all our surplus labor.  Without conservation we
> can
> >have our giant SUVs.  That is our plan, left or right.
> >   There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve
> >resources: increased efficiency, increased durability,
> >recycling and by doing less. Durability allows doing less
> >without having less. Efficiency allows using less in what
> we
> >are doing.  We can make deep cuts in consumption without
> >sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life
> >time, efficiency and reparability.
> >   Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and
> >pollution that are making our economy unsustainable.
> >Because durability has been neglected we have a lot to gain
> >when we starting using durability to conserve.
> >   Conservation of perishables using recycling and
> >efficiency are already our goals, but the use of durability
> >to conserve has had little notice. Yet, a stable population
> >could use a general increase in durability to cut its
> >resource consumption to very low levels while maintaining
> >high living standards.
> >   If we could somehow accept unearned income for all
> >classes then we could adjust the dole to stabilize wages.
> >(No more tight money.)  This will provide a mechanism
> >allowing us to match the labor force to the real need for
> >labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force,
> >regardless of the consequences.
> >
> >Barry Brooks
> >durable at earthlink.net
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Crashlist resources:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
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> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From silviaa at servidor.unam.mx  Thu Sep  7 11:50:28 2000
From: silviaa at servidor.unam.mx (Silvia Almanza Marquez)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 12:50:28 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] no mas mensajes
References: <s9b77b99.081@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <001f01c018f4$1c3e36a0$f799f884@iingen.unam.mx>

"Please, do not send more mesages, I beg you.  Thank you"
----- Original Message -----
From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 3:37 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] no mas mensajes


> I would appreciate it if someone could translate this for
> me, since it appears to be asking something of me, but I
> don't know enough Spanish to understand what exactly.
>
> Thanks
>
> Tahir
>
> >>> "Aieti" <aieti at lix.intercom.es> 09/06 5:53 PM >>>
> POR FAVOR NO SIGAN MANDANDO MENSAJES.
> SE LO RUEGO
> gRACIAS.
> aieti-direcci?n
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> Para: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> Fecha: mi?rcoles, 06 de septiembre de 2000 17:42
> Asunto: Re: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
>
>
> >Barry, I was very interested to read your post below,
> >because it is challenging, but also because it is in a way
> >diametrically opposed to what I have been emphasising
> >(basically "each according to his/her work). I don't have
> >much time to respond right now, but I do hope that you will
> >continue the engagement nevertheless.
> >
> >I think many people on this list would agree that there is
> a
> >labour surplus, but without necessarily agreeing with the
> >conclusions that you derive from this. For example, I find
> >it hard to regard as a 'solution' your radical separation
> of
> >production from distribution. The idea of dividing humanity
> >into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
> >while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
> >productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
> >solution to me. Instead of focusing on the productive and
> >creative powers of humanity as part of the solution, it
> >reckons that a small group of productive and creative
> >individuals will design the life support for the majority
> >who will then play no further role in the production
> >process. They will simply be the recipients of a certain
> >distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
> >of society? In such a radical division of humanity what
> >sorts of consciousness will define the doers and the
> >receivers? Will it be egalitarian in any way? This is hard
> >to imagine.
> >
> >Sentences such as the following seem curiously to take
> >certain historical phenomena as given, whereas there surely
> >is some basis for questioning them: " when we create nearly
> >full employment our powerful technology and out large
> supply
> >of workers will always consume far too many resources for
> >such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
> >some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
> >determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
> >something that we can create and control?
> >
> >Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
> >value. What sort of economic theory supports statements
> such
> >as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
> >awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance
> more
> >than from any work we do."
> >
> >But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
> >income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
> >can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
> >of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
> >position on population is strange, because if you are
> >assuming a static population, against the current and
> >empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
> >something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
> >achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be
> a
> >more direct and more coherent way of addressing your
> problem
> >of economic growth and labour surplus, no? If you are
> >putting so much stress on highly productive technology,
> >which is somehow taken as an extra-human given, why don't
> >you look at the technology of reproduction? In both cases
> >they are matters of human choice and agency. Neither the
> >population level nor the level of productivity is an
> >external fact of nature - they are effects of human
> >relations and actions.
> >
> >Tahir
> >
> >
> >
> >>>> "Barry Brooks" <durable at earthlink.net> 09/06 6:11 AM
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
> >   We need to find what kind of economy can provide
> people's
> >needs without making too much pollution and without running
> >out of resources rapidly. Our present consumer economy has
> >many nice features, yet it is basically at odds with
> >resource stewardship.
> >   Labor has been surplus relative to local natural
> >resources for a long time. In today's crowded world
> >migration can no longer provide an escape from depleted
> >local resources, and imported resources are no longer
> >abundant and cheap.  Even though we face a growing shortage
> >of resources we still pretend that labor shortage is
> >limiting production.  Our fear of labor shortage is
> >obsolete.  Since the dawn of the industrial age it has been
> >necessary to constantly find ways to increase consumption
> in
> >order maintain full employment.
> >   The left and the right agree that jobs are the only
> >acceptable way to dole out money to the masses.  Yet, when
> >we create nearly full employment our powerful technology
> and
> >out large supply of workers will always consume far too
> many
> >resources for such hyper-activity to be sustainable. Only
> in
> >our dreams is there no conflict between expanding the
> >economy to make jobs and contracting the economy to
> conserve
> >resources.
> >   Our present views rarely include any awareness that
> >wealth comes from nature and inheritance more than from any
> >work we do. To make our system work under present
> conditions
> >we must admit that human labor is no longer scarce because
> >machines with computer control can replace most paid labor,
> >even in services. We should expect to shift our dependence
> >from wages toward unearned income as automation replaces
> >more human labor. Our system already has unearned income,
> >but for now it is only for a few. Changing that is the key
> >to becoming sustainable. Unearned income can end our
> >dependence on jobs and growth.
> >   Whether our goal is to preserve the present pecking
> order
> >or to help improve the lives of the poor, we must have a
> >sustainable system for anything to really matter to anyone.
> >Excess growth is the cause of our high consumption, and
> high
> >consumption is the reason our economic system is not
> >sustainable.  Growth is the common problem of all classes!
> >   True conservation cuts consumption and that cuts
> >production and that cuts real paying jobs and profits. No
> >one supports a sustainable economy.  Without true
> >conservation we can continue to squander scarce resources
> to
> >exercise all our surplus labor.  Without conservation we
> can
> >have our giant SUVs.  That is our plan, left or right.
> >   There are four basic ways, I can think of, to conserve
> >resources: increased efficiency, increased durability,
> >recycling and by doing less. Durability allows doing less
> >without having less. Efficiency allows using less in what
> we
> >are doing.  We can make deep cuts in consumption without
> >sacrifice by designing new products to maximize their life
> >time, efficiency and reparability.
> >   Durability will make it possible to stop the waste and
> >pollution that are making our economy unsustainable.
> >Because durability has been neglected we have a lot to gain
> >when we starting using durability to conserve.
> >   Conservation of perishables using recycling and
> >efficiency are already our goals, but the use of durability
> >to conserve has had little notice. Yet, a stable population
> >could use a general increase in durability to cut its
> >resource consumption to very low levels while maintaining
> >high living standards.
> >   If we could somehow accept unearned income for all
> >classes then we could adjust the dole to stabilize wages.
> >(No more tight money.)  This will provide a mechanism
> >allowing us to match the labor force to the real need for
> >labor, instead of making jobs to match the labor force,
> >regardless of the consequences.
> >
> >Barry Brooks
> >durable at earthlink.net
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Crashlist resources:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
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> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep  7 11:18:22 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 18:18:22 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Fw: Worldoil.com: Oil prices scale new peak amid scepticism about OPEC plans
Message-ID: <000901c018ef$9fc1c320$d5298cd4@mjones>

 7-Sep-2000
1:26:31 PM


07 Sep 2000 07:55:10



LONDON, Sept 7 (AFP) - Oil prices scaled new peaks on Thursday morning,
soaring to 34.50 dollars a barrel, amid growing scepticism that OPEC will,
or can, increase output enough to cool an overheating market.

The price of North Sea Brent reference crude for October delivery spiked
upwards from an opening value of 34.35 dollars, before easing back to 34.20
dollars by late morning.

Oil prices have now more than tripled in the past 18 months, topping levels
not seen since the 1990 Gulf war.

The surge in prices has threatened inflation in industrialised and
developing nations across the world, and prompted stern requests from Europe
and the United States for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) to pump more crude to the market.

Asian nations joined the chorus of concern on Thursday, when officials from
the 21-nation APEC grouping warned that rising energy prices could trigger
inflation and hamper the recovery of countries hurt in the 1997 regional
economic crisis.

Europe, suffering from widespread protests over soaring fuel prices, has
already called on OPEC to take action.

The United States added its voice late on Wednesday, calling for
"reasonable" oil prices.

"We have made clear to OPEC that we think there needs to be a balance
between producing countries and consuming countries so that we can see oil
at a fair price and meet the global demand," he added.

But the 11 OPEC nations, due to discuss output quotas at a Vienna meeting on
Sunday, may have neither the political will nor the industrial capacity to
increase output sufficiently to cool the market, analysts said here
Thursday.

Top Venezuelan oil officials have said as much.

Venezuelan oil minister and OPEC president Ali Rodriguez has warned that
output increases alone would not bring prices down, while Hector Ciavaldini,
president of state-run company Petroleos de Venezuela, said in New York that
his government saw no need for increased OPEC production.

"There is a balance in offer and demand and we are surprised that prices go
high," Ciavaldini said.

Analysts have noted that most OPEC countries are already producing at full
capacity, and in any case feel strongly that they should bear no
responsibility for prices.

Only Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have spare capacity,
and the other eight countries are expected to dig in for fear that
production increases will bring down prices, and lose them revenue as well
as market share.

"I think OPEC can increase output, but whether they will is another matter,
" said Philip Oxley, an oil market analyst with Credit Lyonnais Rouse.
"Smaller countries which can''t produce much more are worried that they will
lose out from an increase in output."

"If they increase output by 500,00 barrels a day, it won''t do very much,"
he told AFP. "Even if they increase by one million barrels, it might not
have much of an effect. We could see prices up to 40 dollars before too
long, because I can''t see them doing anything drastic."

Market watchers also warn that with winter looming and time lags likely to
delay any quota increase, prices are set to remain high for months to come.
Any output increase would take weeks to be transported to market, by which
time the increased winter demand would already have kicked in.

"Even if an increase is decided for the OPEC meeting, it will take time
before it has impact on the prices," said Salomon Smith Barney analyst Peter
Young.

But not everyone believes oil prices will remain high through the long term.

The Norwegian statistics bureau forecast on Thursday that the price of oil
would fall to an average of 25.7 dollars a barrel this year, 21.0 dollars a
barrel in 2001 and 18.5 dollars in 2002.





From aabdo at webtv.net  Thu Sep  7 13:28:35 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 14:28:35 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] The Garden of Eden
In-Reply-To: "Tom Warren" <tomzbox@hotmail.com>'s message of Thu, 07 Sep 2000 16:28:30 GMT
Message-ID: <27904-39B7EC63-1579@storefull-238.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Relax, Tom.     Carrol Cox is not the only and LAST word on.... What is
marxism?    Carrol writes-

<One sure route to utter confusion and political futility is creating
false debates. 
*All* wealth comes from nature. There is no other conceivable source of
wealth. BUT *all* of that wealth, to become *human* wealth must be
transformed by human labor. Any argument over whether wealth comes from
nature or labor is as stupid as to argue whether the numerator or the
denominator of a fraction is more important.

This is pure B.S. Carrol.     Human hands don't have to touch nature at
all for it to be human wealth.     That's why capitalism is so adept at
robbing society.     They destroy OUR nature.      Nature is wealth for
animals and humans alike, and generally becomes less so the more inanely
and incompetently  human hands go about 'transforming' it (your word,
Carrol-  TRANSFORM, though it comes from the marxist Bible).

That's ONE GREAT reason we seek to end capitalism, not reform it.
So, Tom, don't be so hot to trot every time one of us marxists spout
some sort of line.     I know.     I feel the same way when Christians
come around.     But some of them really are OK in their beliefs.

Carrol, don't you believe in the garden of Eden?

Tony
 












From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  7 13:50:26 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 14:50:26 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Crashlist digest, Vol 1 #77 - 5 msgs
References: <F2852VqKwRPQIWDO3hR00006009@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <39B7F182.D6811382@ilstu.edu>


Tom Warren wrote:

>
> Thanks, Carrol, for your reasoned and civil response.

I apoligize for my loss of temper, but it seems that marxists must
(in contexts where other participants pretend to a certain level of
sophistication) forever debate ghosts. "Economics" as popularly
conceived (and as conceived by the professional economists) can
provide more or less (mostly less) useful technical advice to
capitalists and it can provide morale-building justification for
capitalists' trust in the eternal truth of TINA.

A note on political activity. Most posters on this list seem to me to
be expressions of voluntarism -- the conviction that there exists
some policy which, if activists adopt it, will enable them to force the
movement of history. This can have various repercussions, but one
of them is a tendency to endless hand wringing over "what should
we do, *now*, to make things moves. Voluntarism exhibits a total
inability to honor the sheer contingency of life. I am not arguing for
mere passivity; there is usually a good number of things to do, and
I am attaching at the end of this post a recent post on the m-fem
maillist from Yoshie Furuhashi which exhibits that. But I am arguing
that the occasions on which history *moves*, and on which our
actions (and our ideas) can make a tremendous difference, are few
and far between, occur behind our back and in utterly unpredictable
ways, and cannot be forced, no matter how anguished our attempts
to force them. Someone once told me (though I know no actual
source for this, it rings true to my sense of Lenin) that Lenin once
observed that there are three revolutionary virtues: patience, patience,
and patience.

Before going further, let me note that "reasoned and civil response" is
only half correct in its description of my post. Uncivil I may have been
but if you think it was not carefully reasoned you are blinded by your
own (understandable but intellectually stultifying) irritation at the
incivility.

You write:


> I assume from the above statement that marxism therefore is of no practical
> value in addressing the impeding problems of the crash,

This exhibits what I call dogmatism -- the belief that there must be a direct
relationship between theory and practice. One kind of [un]marxist dogmatism,
for example, operates as follows. Marx says (this kind of Marxist hasn't
read Marx either <g>) that class is central to understanding the movement
of history, therefore in organizing this struggle to stop a Hog Farm in
McLean County we must not become distracted by trivial concerns over
gender or sexuality." That is, this sort of Marxist (who, incidentally, is
far more rare than anti-marxist mythology holds, but does exist) assumes
that there must be a direct relationship between the fundamental analytic
category of class and whatever tactical or strategic situation is immediately
involved. (Unfortunately, incidentally, my example is purely fictional. No
battle, well or badly organized, is being waged against the proliferation of
Hog Farms in McLean County.)

This sort of dogmatism is often but not always closely intertwined with
various forms of voluntarism. The right ideas *must* lead to the right
action *must* lead to success. But very seriously, you will plan badly,
even in local activities, if you haven't granted (at least parenthetically and
in the back of your mind) that we may finally fail, fail completely, and
Rosa Luxemburg's "or" (barbarism, depopulation, utter wretchedness)
will cover the earth. Only Summer Soldiers and Sunshine Patriots believe
that success either is or can be guaranteed.

(I'm not going to argue this point, but your post seems to imply that
"economics" has to be of use, and that since Marx is not, at least
in your or Martin Feldstein's sense of the word, an economist, he
and marxists can be of little use. I can't condense the literature and
history of 200 years into a post, so I won't try, but I urge you to
at least keep in the back of your mind the possibility that economics
is of no use to those who want to change the world. This isn't true,
but it ontly ceases to be false after you have granted its truth to
begin with. If you begin with hope in economics, you sill spin
futilely in one spot forever. Are you so utterly uninterested in
humans and their activity that you believe that an understanding
of how, under given historical conditions, that activity is shaped
can be of no use to anyone?)

> other than perhaps
> producing a nice little watertight critique of the Political Economy

You don't know what Political Economy is -- and you don't know what
a Critique is. I have, in the past, been not wholly unsuccessful in giving
various people some sense of the content of these terms. Perhaps even
at the age of 70 I might help a few more in the next decade or so, but
I can't do it on a maillist and I'm not going to try. It does seems to me
that having at leas a shadowy understanding of the forces operative in
the greatest transformation of human history since the neolithic revolution
might be of some general interest to anyone hoping to be part, however
small, of a transformation which will probably prove rather more
difficult than either the neolithic or the capitalist revolutions -- and as
many on this list have emphasized, the stakes of that wished-for
necessary transformation are rather high.

> that
> got us to the edge of the abyss? Ahhh yes, well your response DOES confirm

It wasn't "Political Economy" that got us into anything. It was that huge
transformation
of the world called capitalism. Classical Poltical Economy (Quesnay, Smith,
Ricardo)
was an honest and superb effort to understand from the inside that
transformation, and
to understand from the inside is to deny history. Lurking in even the greatest
and noblest
of the efforts of bourgeois culture, including Political Economy, is the silent
assumptioin:
There has been history but there no longer is any. Marx's critique (to use a
gross bu
essentially accurate simplification) reintroduced history. Economics as we know
it
arose within the threats and triumphs of late 19th century capitalism as an
essentially
apologetic discipline, which tried to isolate the "economy" as a watertight
compartment
of human life, into which all other concerns could be regarded as an
illegitimate
intrusion. Hence such bizarre propositons as those that speak of political
interference
with the economy -- which is something like speaking of the brain's
interference in
the nervous system. A hundred years of "economics" (by which in the bourgeois
soul
the dread news brought by both implicitly by Political Economy and explicitly
by
the Critique of Political Economy -- the dread news that we live in history --
could
be concealed, and the lackeys of capitalism could proclaim TINA (almost
everyone),
Society does not exist, only individuals and their families (Margaret
Thatcher),
The End of History (Fukuyama), and The New Economy (almost everyone). Only
from the perspective offered by the Critique of Political Economy can the
insane vulgarity of those slogans be fully revealed.

History isn't over, and it is I think worthwhile to understand, in other than a

sloganeering way, *why* history isn't over. And people still struggle. Very
rarely, and for reasons we cannot predict in advance and in ways or occasions
that are equally unpredictable, those struggles coalesce around some issue
that people, not we, select, and larger struggles explode. These usually,
incidentally, come in periods *not* of crash but in periods of improvement,
as was the case of both the French and Russian revolutions, and was actually
the case even in the decade of "The Great Depression." Mere misery
individualizes and suppresses struggle.

An ancient Chinese general whose name I forget is frequently quoted by
Mao: Know your enemy and know yourself and you will fight a hundred
battles without defeat. That, I believe, is overoptimistic. You can do
everything right and still lose if the enemy is stronger. (Mao also points
this out.) Marx's critique of political economy provides the framework (but
only the framework) within which it becomes possible to understand our
enemy (and not only the enemy "out there" but the enemy "inside" in so
far as the common sense emerging from the daily experience of living
inside capitalism engenders in us the spontaneous assumptions which
empower the enemy.

One final suggestion. The greatest barrier to the recruitment and growth
of a force to fight capital is male supremacy within progressive movements
and the working class as a whole. If you want to do something about
global warming, I suggest you put front and center in your concerns
the struggle against male supremacy. Otherwise you will never raise
the army you need to change the world.

>
> my suspicions of the parochial nature of Socialism.

Who said anything about socialism? I think I posted just the other day
on the futility of spinning recipes for the cookshops of the future (quoting
Marx).

Here is the m-fem post I mentioned above. At the end I have placed
some brief remarks linking it to the concerns of this post.

=================

Subject: Re: FW: Skepticism & Obscurantism (was Re: Radical Feminism)
       Date:  Thu, 07 Sep 2000 03:07:46 -0400
      From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
   Reply-To: m-fem at csf.colorado.edu
        To: M-Fem at csf.colorado.edu
 References: 1

>what always amazes me is how quickly and arrogantly people on this list
>are to size people up and write them off for the sake of winning an
>argument.yu wouldn't last five minutes trying to organize talking to people
>like that, and i'm sure yu don't, so why do it on this list bb

Instead of fantasizing about snuff films, I'm active in the local
political scene, and we (in Columbus, Ohio) are currently organizing
a large protest (scheduled on September 28, at the statehouse in
Columbus) against the prison industrial complex, and the protest is
led by the Prisoners' Advocacy Network & joined by other political
activists, including unionists, Greens, anti-sweatshop student
activists, etc.  Lots of us are going to participate in the September
9 rally in Mansfield, Ohio in support of locked-out steelworkers of
AK Steel.  There will be a rally against TANF time limits & sanctions
("Stop the Clock") in Columbus, organized by welfare rights activists
(on September 12).  What are you guys doing?

One thing that relieves me is that, whatever fantasies you, Margaret,
& Diane are spouting on this list with regard to the ghosts of snuff
films, I'm certain that *none* of you is doing anything like hunting
down ghostly snuff film producers.  You *can't*, because they *don't*
exist.

Do some real political work, for change, instead of buying into
fantasies promulgated by the Law & Order crowd like "Citizens for
Decency Through Law."

Yoshie

=================

The important point for present purposes is to emphasize (a) that
whenever possible it is essential to engage in such struggles as Yoshie
describes, which most directly do not change the world but contribute
to learning the enemy and to raising at least the cadre of future larger
struggles, and (b) that there is no guarantee whatsoever that anything
whatsoever will come from these struggles. The second point is
crucial because it involves respecting the huge contingency of human
history, its resistance to encapsulation within any one "plan." Activists
in such a period as the present, when the enemy seems and to some
extent is all powerful, is to train ourselve, to learn to understand how
history moves (that contingency is not mere shapelessness -- but
that is another question), to probe the enemy wherever possible,
because we do not know where or on what grounds "The Old
Mole" as Marx described the working class, will suddenly explode
again. I would recommend you read the little pamphlet from which
the titanic struggles of the Chinese Revolution grew. Mao, "A Report
on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan." Mao was
not in the leadership of the CCP at that time, and this pamphlet is
as it were a begging note: LOOK! Look what is happening. Don't
just follow your textbooks. Here is history in motion and we must
honor it.

Incidentally, I don't know what you know about Amiri Baraka, but
I suggest you don't let differences of rhetoric or other preconceptions
blind you. He may or may not be right on specific points at specific
times, but any progressive who ignores Baraka is a fool.

Carrol





From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Thu Sep  7 14:18:09 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 15:18:09 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] The Garden of Eden
References: <27904-39B7EC63-1579@storefull-238.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <39B7F801.359309C5@ilstu.edu>


Tony Abdo wrote:

>
> This is pure B.S. Carrol.     Human hands don't have to touch nature at
> all for it to be human wealth.

There may be some confusion around what we mean by the term "wealth,"
the material content of wealth or the social relations which constitute it
inside capitalism. But assuming the sense I have been assuming, would you
please explain to me how fish in the sea can become food in my stomach
(or articles for sale in my meat counter) unless human hands affect them
somehow along the line?

Or, approaching it from the other hand, how would any amount of human
activity place food in my stomach unless it had something (ultimately from
nature: fish, peas, etc.)

Carrol





From aabdo at webtv.net  Thu Sep  7 14:54:41 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 15:54:41 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: The Garden of Eden
In-Reply-To: Carrol Cox <cbcox@ilstu.edu>'s message of Thu, 07 Sep 2000
	15:18:09 -0500
Message-ID: <27906-39B80091-963@storefull-238.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Carrol, there is a lot of confusion about what is wealth, and Marx was
very confused hmself on this subject.

Wealth is not just 'what can you put in your stomach?', though it might
have seemed that way in Marx's time.

Nature is wealth....Period.     As an example, think about the air you
breathe.     No human hand has done anything to produce it.     Yet, if
you are living in a city like Mexcio City, you would not find anyone not
hoping to have the wealth of pure air again, a part of nature erased
there, by captalist production methods.

Yes, clean air is wealth.     Having a nature full of the entire variety
of animals and plant life that we once had is also wealth.

Marx never concentrated on the actual destruction of wealth by
capitalism.     He did not notice this so much at the time.    So his
mechanistic, and overly economist studies of capitalist structure, have
some major defects in their analysis.

That's what this list should be about, helping people gain a better
understanding of just how capitalism has destroyed natural wealth.
And helping UPDATE marxist theory.    Nature IS wealth.      Let's not
keep marxists being the only people on the planet still blind to this
elemental truth.

Tony
________________________________
Carrol wrote-
<There may be some confusion around what we mean by the term "wealth,"
the material content of wealth or the social relations which constitute
it inside capitalism. But assuming the sense I have been assuming, would
you please explain to me how fish in the sea can become food in my
stomach (or articles for sale in my meat counter) unless human hands
affect them somehow along the line? 

Or, approaching it from the other hand, how would any amount of human
activity place food in my stomach unless it had something (ultimately
from nature: fish, peas, etc.)>












From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep  7 11:15:44 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 18:15:44 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Ecological Impact of New Russian Oil, Gas Fields Assessed
Message-ID: <000701c018ef$4191d2e0$d5298cd4@mjones>

Vremya MN
30 August 2000
[translation for personal use only]
Article by Marina Sokolovskaya:  "After Us, the Deluge" 

The oil companies are destroying Russian nature 

The 1st International Practical Conference, SRP-2000 (agreement on 
developing Russian oil and gas deposits with the participation of foreign 
investors who receive their share of the extracted products) is to take 
place at the beginning of September in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.   Vladimir 
Putin and Bill Richardson, U.S. Secretary of Energy, are expected to 
attend. 

Much has been said in the last few years about the fact that the SRP 
[production-sharing agreement] mechanism is not developed in Russia, and 
foreign companies therefore do not want to work in our country.   The 
country is losing billions of dollars as a result. 

But the developments of new oil and gas deposits and the increase in the 
volumes of oil transport by sea may turn out to have unforeseen 
ecological consequences for Russia. 

There are four principal projects today -- they are already extracting 
oil on the Sakhalin shelf and transporting it through the Sea of Okhotsk 
to Japan and the United States.   Next on the list is the development of 
deposits in the Barents and Karsk seas.   Great hopes are linked with the 
export of oil supplied by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (KTK) through 
the Black Sea, and by the Baltic Pipeline System, correspondingly through 
the Baltic.   The plans are to transport 30-60 million tonnes of oil a 
year along Russia's Black, Okhotsk and North seas. 

In the euphoria of big money expectations, however, an extremely 
important circumstance is being overlooked.   Not a single country is 
insured against oil spills, even in planned operations.   Neither the 
level of personnel training nor the newest technology provide full 
guarantees.   It is even calculated that 0.02 to 0.03 percent of the oil 
transported in the world yearly ends up in the sea during extraction and 
transport.   This is not counting major accidents.   For example, 30,000 
tonnes of oil were spilled on the shore of France last year as the result 
of an accident to the tanker Erik.   And 40,000 tonnes, in the 
catastrophe of the American tanker, Exxon Valdiz, in Alaska in 1989.   
The damage that time was $5 billion.   In striving to secure themselves 
to the maximum, many Western countries have passed laws in which all 
procedures connected with the extraction and transport of oil are 
prescribed in detail. 

Russia has no such laws. 

A Love for Bankruptcies 

The extraction of oil in accordance with the Sakhalin-2 project began 
last summer on the Northeastern shelf of Sakhalin.   The Sakhalin Energy 
Investment Company Limited (SEIK) was the operator of the project.   We 
cannot help but say a few words about the prehistory of the development 
of this deposit. 

In 1992, a government commission chaired by Vladimir Danilov-Danilyan 
summed up the results of the announced competition of proposals of 
foreign firms to develop the oil and gas resources of the Sakhalin shelf. 
  Leading world companies took part in the tender, including Shell and 
Exxon.   But the winner of the competition was a consortium consisting of 
the MacDermott, Mitsui and Marathon Oil corporations (MMM).   The 
government commission gave as the reasoning for its choice the fact that 
the consortium "has most completely fulfilled the requirements of the 
Russian side, has experience in developing deposits under Arctic 
conditions and possesses sufficient financial potentials to put the 
project into effect."   It is surprising that the company's financial 
condition did not put the members of the commission on guard.   At the 
moment of completing this "successful transaction," MacDermott had losses 
of $400 million, and Marathon -- of $70 million. 

MacDermott has been going to ruin for several years.   Marathon is 
leaving the project right behind it.   But joining in as a partner there 
appears, not even a "daughter," but a "granddaughter" company -- 
Shell-SEIK, registered in the Bahamas by three British nationals.   Its 
charter capital is $100 million. 

Economical Foreigners 

One of the most important conditions of the Sakhalin-2 tender that was 
won was, as entered in the decision of the commission, the "satisfaction 
of the needs of Russia's Far Eastern region for gas and oil."   Supplies 
of gas on the domestic market were to have begun in 1995.   But SEIK is 
retracting its promises to build a reliable ecological security system, 
and is beginning to extract oil.   According to Vitaliy Gorokhov, 
corresponding member of the RAYeN [Russian Academy of Natural Sciences] 
and expert of the Ekoyuris Institute of Ecological-Legal problems, the 
company was completing its building and equipping at the same time that 
the fish were spawning.   Some 523,000 cubic meters of earth were moved 
when the Molikpak platform was installed.   The materials of the state 
ecological expert appraisal indicated that this could harm or disturb the 
migratory route of salmon.   SEIK, however, was little worried about the 
fate of the salmon.   All the ecologists' reprimands were ignored. 

The next ecological problem was the dumping of drilling liquids, 
interstitial waters and drill cuttings (sludge) into the sea.   In 
accordance with world technology, these burials are carried out at 
special refuse sites.   But this would have required substantial 
expenditures from the developers or the deposits.   SEIK and ENL decided 
to economize.   Knowing that Russian water legislation prohibits dumping 
waters of this sort into the sea, they lobbied for their interests as 
much as they could.   And they got their way.   In the summer of last 
year, Sergey Stepashin, who was at that time chairman of the government, 
signed an order which permitted wastes to be dumped into all the seas of 
the Far East.   In so doing, he failed to take into consideration the 
fact that it is in the Sea of Okhotsk that 65 percent of the Russian sea 
products are caught.   It was then that public ecology organizations 
complained to the Supreme Court, which recognized the order as illegal. 

The total extraction of oil for the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 projects 
should be 30 million tonnes.   The plans are for the oil to go along 
pipelines to the south of the peninsula, to the Prigorodnoye settlement.  
 Moreover, they intend to lay the company's oil pipeline through spawning 
rivers, earthquake-prone sections and forests.   According to Vitaliy 
Gorokhov, projects of this sort are in operation in the world, for 
example, in Alaska.   But there the companies are supplied with 
legislation within a strict framework and are forced to protect nature to 
the maximum.   The pipelines are therefore removed from the ground and 
installed on special supports in earthquake-prone places, places where 
fish spawn and even where deer roam.   Naturally, this sort of pipeline 
installation is extremely expensive. 

Sakhalinrybvoda has repeatedly stated that the route would cross 463 
streams and 65 very important salmon rivers, which provide up to 73 
percent of the humpback salmon.   And in 1993, the State Ecological 
Expert Appraisal evaluated the Sakhalin-2 project and gave the decision 
that "developing oil and gas deposits on the Sakhalin shelf, with a 
surface pipeline laid to the south of the island, was fraught with 
irreversible consequences for the fish industry, which is a priority 
sector in the oblast's economy....   Not enough attention was paid to the 
methods and periods of the pipelines' passing through numerous rivers and 
to a guarantee that the spawning grounds and the purity of the water 
would be preserved."   This had no effect on the foreigners, however.   
The plans to build the pipeline may soon begin to be realized. 

A Cabal Agreement 

It is, essentially, extremely difficult to stop the damage being done by 
Western entrepreneurs.   First of all, because there is powerful support 
within the country for the activity of the oil companies.   The State 
Ecological Expert Appraisal gave a negative decision on the Sakhalin-1 
project.   According to Russian legislation, the work was to be 
discontinued.   But it goes on as if nothing had happened.   Moreover, 
the Russian government concurred with a cabal agreement in accordance 
with which all the debatable questions (including ecological) are removed 
from Russian jurisprudence.   The agreements will be interpreted in 
accordance with English law (the Sakhalin-1 project) and in accordance 
with the legislation of the state of New York (Sakhalin-2).   In the 
opinion of Vitaliy Gorokhov, with the appearance of the arbitration 
investigation, the Russian side is virtually doomed to lose the case.   
Last year, for example, the action of the Sakhalin Oblast State Ecology 
brought against the defendant -- the company, Esson Oil and Gas Limited 
-- concerning compensation for the damage done to the natural 
environment, was dismissed because the company demanded that the case be 
transferred to the arbitration court of the Stockholm Chamber of 
Commerce.   At that time, the mass death of fish, within a range of from 
907.2 to 1,111.6 tonnes, was recorded by the SAKHNIRO Institute.   But 
neither the environmental protection prosecutor's office nor the oblast 
committee to protect the environment could take the matter to court.   
The companies, in response to all the claims, handed over taunting 
dispatches, the sense of which boiled down to the fact that the 
entrepreneurs would not be responsible for stupid fish, which eat God 
knows what. 

Vera Mishchenko, president of the Ekoyuris Institute of Ecological-Legal 
Problems, told us that it is difficult to find the truth when the 
consistent squandering of natural resources goes on in the country.   
Licenses for an activity, particularly in the sphere of oil extraction, 
are issued to anyone you like.   Two years ago, ecologists, accusing 
state officials of what was going on in Sakhalin, sent materials to the 
General Prosecutor.   There however, in the best Soviet tradition, they 
sent the papers on to the Sakhalin prosecutor's office, which justly 
replied that it was not competent to monitor the activity of state 
officials at the federal level. 



From Borba100 at aol.com  Thu Sep  7 16:45:31 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 18:45:31 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] CHOMSKY REPLIES TO CRITICISMS
Message-ID: <73.694645c.26e9748b@aol.com>

On Wednesday I wrote an open letter to Noam Chomsky concerning his statements 
that the Serbian government has committed war crimes,  and the effect of 
these attacks, which,  I think, merely parrot media lies, on the potential 
antiwar movement.  This criticism has generated debate on various email 
lists. The debate has been posted widely outside those lists.

Yesterday Noam Chomsky responded.  I answered. He replied to my answer last 
night and I wrote back today.  I believe these issues are most important for 
the antiwar movement.  

FIRST REPLY FROM NOAM CHOMSKY

Subj:    Re: Fwd: Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
Date:   09/05/2000 3:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   chomsky at MIT.EDU (Noam Chomsky)
To: JaredI at aol.com (by way of Noam Chomsky <JaredI at aol.com>)

Dear Jared,

I think you are aware of the fact that in the past 10 years the Milosevic
regime has committed many crimes.

The statement you quote is from a forum, where I rejected the charges made
by a questioner against the Milosevic regime.  In that context there is no
need whatsoever to add an essay documenting every factual statement that is
made.

Noam

FIRST ANSWER BY JARED ISRAEL
Subj:   Re: Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
Date:   09/06/2000 3:15:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   <A HREF="mailto:JaredI">JaredI</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:chomsky at MIT.EDU">chomsky at MIT.EDU</A>

Dear Noam,

In a message dated 09/05/2000 3:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time, you wrote:

<< 
 I think you are aware of the fact that in the past 10 years the Milosevic
 regime has committed many crimes.
  >>

"The fact that"?  Who said it was a fact?  You construct a sentence that 
asserts as given the truth of the very thing which in my note I said was a 
lie.  Clever.

Noam, I have been reading your stuff for a long time and I am not a dope.  I 
am "aware of the fact" that you have repeatedly charged Milosevich AND "The 
Serbs" with criminal actions, e.g., atrocities against civilians. Your 
sentences are routinely constructed so as to assert the truth of your 
charges, despite no proof. Your writing has "in fact" had a negative effect 
on the left, such as it is, cooling antiwar passions and hindering the 
creation of a serious antiwar movement.

The burden of proof cannot be escaped by tricky wording or sloppiness. 

I repeat, what crimes has Milosevich committed in Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia?  
Date or dates, place or places.  Details.  Prove the credibility of your 
sources.  I think you just parrot what's written in the mass media.

Jared 

SECOND REPLY FROM NOAM CHOMSKY

Subj:    Re: Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
Date:   09/06/2000 9:28:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   chomsky at MIT.EDU (Noam Chomsky)
To: JaredI at aol.com (by way of Noam Chomsky <JaredI at aol.com>)

Dear Jared,

Apologies.  I didn't realize you thought that Milosevic's regime was alone
in the world in not having committed many crimes.

If you think I'm going to take time to discuss this topic with you, think
again.  There are serious things to do.

Noam

SECOND REPLY FROM JARED ISRAEL

Subj:   Regarding your unserious note, Noam
Date:   09/07/2000 6:18:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   <A HREF="mailto:JaredI">JaredI</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:chomsky at MIT.EDU">chomsky at MIT.EDU</A>

Dear Noam,

Yesterday you wrote me:

<<  Apologies.  I didn't realize you thought that Milosevic's regime was alone
 in the world in not having committed many crimes.  >>

What's the point of the sarcasm, Noam? You cannot avoid the serious questions 
I and others have raised about your writing on Yugoslavia by resorting to 
mockery. 

Your writing is full of explicit accusations such as: ""By  summer [1998], 
the KLA had taken over about 40 per cent of the province, eliciting  a 
vicious reaction by Serb security forces and paramilitaries, TARGETING THE 
CIVILIAN POPULATION." (el Ahram, June 2000, my emphasis) 

Obviously you are not talking about every government in the world. You are 
claiming that the Yugoslav government made certain choices.  That is, faced 
with an isolated terrorist group (which the KLA was until after the onset of 
NATO bombing convinced key Albanian clan leaders that the KLA had the full 
support of NATO)  - given that the Yugoslavs were faced with an isolated 
terrorist gang the Yugoslavs could a) do everything possible to avoid 
civilian casualties or b) take it out on civilians, thus guaranteeing support 
for the KLA.

The Yugoslav Army has an unusual history.  It's doctrine is based on the 
expectation of conducting a mass-based resistance to a new attack from the 
West, an attack which they anticipated for 50 years. This army studied the 
tactics of conducting a war of resistance. 

Now whether one likes or dislikes armies per se, this particular army grasps 
the key role played by popular support (and antagonism!)  in warfare.  Why 
would they make such a stupid mistake as to target the civilian population 
when they were fighting a (then)  isolated gang of dope smuggling fascists?

Moreover, as you have known for a year, the antiwar movement possesses a 
number of documents from the German Courts and Foreign Ministry, documents 
produced in response to the requests by Kosovo Albanians to receive the 
status of political refugees.  The German courts studied the situation in 
Kosovo and ruled in every case that there was no evidence - none - that the 
Yugoslav Army targeted civilians.  The Humanitarian Crisis was manufactured 
by Western officials and the mass media to justify Western demands that the 
Yugoslav special troops leave Kosovo - Yugoslav territory.

All this was known to you a year ago.  Every website that opposed the bombing 
of Yugoslavia featured those documents.  I believe that even the Z website, 
stronghold of Serb bashing within the antiwar movement, posted those 
documents.  Why then, a year after the end of the war, after Carla Del Ponte 
admitted in mid November that they had found a grand total of 2108 bodies 
whose identities were unknown - that is, that these bodies, which they 
allegedly found, could be anyone - why did you write in June, 2000 that the 
Yugoslav Army targeted Albanian civilians?  This is not a trivial matter, 
Noam.

And this is only one of the times you made statements which uncritically 
parroted what we have been told by the Western media.  This particular 
statement was written in an Arab publication - particularly harmful since the 
Western media tries to convince Arabs of the lie that "the Serbs" are 
anti-Muslim bigots. 

You say: <<If you think I'm going to take time to discuss this topic with 
you, think
again.  There are serious things to do.>>. 

What could be more serious than whether Yugoslavia has  committed serious 
crimes of war?  What could be more serious then whether you have, in fact, 
publicly lied with the effect of discouraging action by antiwar activists?

A year ago you sent me the following email post:

Date:   5/12/99 10:40:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   chomsky at MIT.EDU
To: JaredI at AOL.COM
CC: chomsky at MIT.EDU
Dear Jared,
I guess I feel I've known you for many years, even if we haven't
actually met (so you tell me; I would have guessed otherwise).

Thanks for the text of the speech [I had sent you Milosevic's speech, made in 
1989 at Kosovo Field], which I'd never seen. 
Interesting.  On the "demonization," it's actually been conceded. 
An article in the Times a few weeks ago, which I'm sure I kept,
observed that "demonization" of Milosevic was necessary in order
to maintain public support for the bombing.
Noam

[End of last year's email from Noam to Jared]

Now Noam, if you knew way back then that demonizing Milosevich is critical in 
order to maintain public support for the attack on Yugoslavia, why have you 
persistently demonized him and the Serbian people and Yugoslav army?

For example, during the bombing you wrote:

"The bombing was then undertaken under the rational expectation that KILLING 
and refugee generation would ESCALATE as a result, as indeed happened, even 
if the scale may have come as a surprise to some, though apparently not the 
commanding general. " (This is from a piece you wrote and posted in May, 1999 
on the Z website, my emphasis)

I have done text analysis of several of your articles about Yugoslavia and 
the above excerpt demonstrates a technique you employ over and over. In 
brief, you attack the Yugoslavs in the guise of either defending them or 
attacking NATO.  

Thus, here you say that the NATO commanding general obviously knew how 
terribly the Serbs would react.  Posing your point in this form seems to be a 
criticism of NATO; this lends it credibility on the left.  But what you are 
really doing is taking the "commanding general's" statement - that the 
bombing DID precipitate escalated Serbian atrocities - as axiomatic: true 
without requirement of proof.  Indeed, you assert the truth of NATO's charge 
in passing, using it as the basis of your false 
criticism of NATO.

Now, your claim to fame is media criticism.  You opposed the Vietnam War.  
Why does an antiwar activist, who studies the media, and who knows - who has 
told me he knows - that demonization "is critical in order to maintain public 
support for" the attack on Yugoslavia - why does such a person fail to even 
question - even question! - the anti-Yugoslav news reports?  Why?  Why, 
during the bombing and since, have your statements even at times lagged 
behind what we are reading in some of the mass publication newspapers? (This 
is the case with the El Ahram article which was contradicted by the German 
Court and Foreign Ministry documents over a year ago!)

If these are trivial questions then what is serious?

Jared



From durable at earthlink.net  Thu Sep  7 17:31:04 2000
From: durable at earthlink.net (Barry Brooks)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 16:31:04 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
References: <s9b680ef.078@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <39B82538.C10E0818@earthlink.net>

Tahir,
Thanks for your post below.  I need to clarify a few point in
my essay to avoid misunderstanding.
Barry


TAHIR WOOD wrote:

> .... The idea of dividing humanity
> into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
> while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
> productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
> solution to me.

Those who study and become qualified for a job can compete
for available paid work. They will get paid for their work, just
as is done today.  The difference would be that those who
can't compete wouldn't still have some income.  There would
be turnover and individual variation and control. Yet, life is always
going to be unbalanced.   Is a balanced diet half junk-food?

> They will simply be the recipients of a certain
> distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
> of society?

Thank you god/nature/society for the gift of this food?  ...As
opposed to the arrogant pretense that we have earned what
we have really just taken.

> " when we create nearly
> full employment our powerful technology and out large supply
> of workers will always consume far too many resources for
> such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
> some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
> determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
> something that we can create and control?

Well technology helps us with our work and increases hourly output,
we could use technology to impede production, but why?  Just to feel
in control?  The control is in admitting that machine are supposed to
replace human labor, that's what they are for!  Now let's take a vacation!

> Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
> value. What sort of economic theory supports statements such
> as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
> awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance more
> than from any work we do."

For many years I didn't understand the labor theory of value, but
now I see that prices reflect human(wage/profit) costs only, because we
can never pay nature for what we take.  God has no bank account.
Wealth/value is not the same thing as prices/money.

And, by the way, using high prices to limit consumption causes suffering
and povery.  Policyies to support need changes, to replace wasteful systems, are
much better.  Then demands can be cut after needs are cut.

> But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
> income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
> can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
> of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
> position on population is strange, because if you are
> assuming a static population, against the current and
> empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
> something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
> achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be a
> more direct and more coherent way of addressing your problem
> of economic growth and labour surplus, no?

What ever the population level, keeping people busy as wages-slaves
is not my idea of a good society.  If we don't stop our hyper-active
economy very soon the population is going to go down whatever
we may think about it, and in an unpleasant way.

Barry Brooks







From durable at earthlink.net  Thu Sep  7 18:47:19 2000
From: durable at earthlink.net (Barry Brooks)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 17:47:19 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Go ahead regardless?
References: <15.8e40f38.26e86832@aol.com>
Message-ID: <39B83717.89AD8368@earthlink.net>


Dear L.,

I like your message!(see below)  Yes, there is an infinite amount of work to do.  The problem is that much of the work we have neglected is the work that does not pay.  Investment in infrastructure doen't pay.  (Well, the contractor may get rich... But, government that pays makes no profit.)  It doesn't pay, that' s why unearned income will be the key to getting the unpaid work work of  love done.  I'm glad my mom wasn't a hooker/day-care/for money/etc... For sale.

I did say very clearly ...scarce relative to resources.  Caring for old/young etc. it not a high consumption activity, and it is an economic cost to be avoided in the market system; not paid.  It doesn't rip off mother nature, so no real profit.  The work of stewardship and the work of love is the work that we can catch up of when we have unearned income!

Barry Brooks


LROBERTS46 at aol.com wrote:

> Do we really have a labor surplus?  Our roads need fixing, our schools need
> rebuilding, there is a health care professional shortage, a child care
> provider shortage, thousands of children need foster care, we need drug
> alcohol treatment centers, we need to replant the forests, we must clean up
> pollution, we need to build housing, develop and test vaccines, provide
> health eduction, we need organically grown food, etc.  There is plenty of
> labor that needs to be done.  We must make those that have the gold expend
> the resources to pay for the work to be done.  We must quit spending the
> money on B1 bombers, "smart bombs", prisons, and the "war on drugs" , etc.
>
>
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From zapata at sezampro.yu  Thu Sep  7 19:09:22 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 03:09:22 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re:CHOMSKY REPLIES TO CRITICISMS
Message-ID: <006001c01931$8a11fb20$77bd6ac2@k382>

Jared,
please send my message along ( including Noam) because I am not subbed to
all of these lists.
I don't know what your intentions are. I am puzzled. What Chomsky is saying,
and what I am saying and what I have been saying for ten years, is that you
cannot build antiwar movement on the category of support but only on the
concept of resistance. Our web organization, Resistance, is built exactly on
this fundament.
You are not helping Serbian civilians, if you are intending to do so, as I
hope, by supporting this little dictator. Oppose American interventionism,
if you want to help us! Opposing interventionism and blatant imperialism is
a moment coherent enough for building worldwide antiwar movement. Your
continuing defense of Milosevic, Hussein, Quadafi etc isn't helpful, it is
harmful, misleading and it creates confusion amongst anti war movement.
You want to attack global power structures and their politic towards my
country from an angle of
supposed Milosevic purity, which is both, a looser approach and a false
assumption.
 It seems to me that international leftist antiwar camp is divided between
two "fractions": that support to suffering civilians must be in the same
time support for their leaders, and the other, according to which support
for suffering civilians must be based on resistance and opposition to
militarism and imperialism per se, without idolizing the leaders. Frankly I
don't understand your stubbornness. But obviously you are not lonely in this
opinion and that's why I am writing back to you. I think that strategy of
people like you , Remsy Clark and others from this camp is dangerous. I
think that this strategy prevents making of strong antiwar movement.
Only a consistent opposition towards *imperialism* and not idolization of
people who are using superbly the situation people are in, only this kind of
opposition could be fruitful. Leave americanist NGO's and Sorosh to us to
fight with them: we are not that passive. Belgrade Libertarian Group is
doing exactly this. With much success. If you want to be of some help,
please concentrate on "opposition", rather than to "support", and avoid this
peculiar attacks on people who have confirmed their loyalty to the ideas of
truth, humanism, anti-imperialism long ago. Work with them instead.
 This is a friendly mail. Please, do accept it as such. I am just suggesting
a change in perception and strategy of examining Yugoslav, Latin American,
Iraqi situation. You'll have to admit that your strategy of supporting
dictators and disregarding the facts hasn't been very productive insofar.
Perhaps it is time for some serious reconsideration's.
Yours,
             Andrej Grubacic
          www.resistancenet.org



----- Original Message -----
From: <Borba100 at aol.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Cc: <marxism at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 12:45 AM
Subject: [CrashList] CHOMSKY REPLIES TO CRITICISMS


> On Wednesday I wrote an open letter to Noam Chomsky concerning his
statements
> that the Serbian government has committed war crimes,  and the effect of
> these attacks, which,  I think, merely parrot media lies, on the potential
> antiwar movement.  This criticism has generated debate on various email
> lists. The debate has been posted widely outside those lists.
>
> Yesterday Noam Chomsky responded.  I answered. He replied to my answer
last
> night and I wrote back today.  I believe these issues are most important
for
> the antiwar movement.
>
> FIRST REPLY FROM NOAM CHOMSKY
>
> Subj:    Re: Fwd: Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
> Date:   09/05/2000 3:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
> From:   chomsky at MIT.EDU (Noam Chomsky)
> To: JaredI at aol.com (by way of Noam Chomsky <JaredI at aol.com>)
>
> Dear Jared,
>
> I think you are aware of the fact that in the past 10 years the Milosevic
> regime has committed many crimes.
>
> The statement you quote is from a forum, where I rejected the charges made
> by a questioner against the Milosevic regime.  In that context there is no

> need whatsoever to add an essay documenting every factual statement that
is
> made.
>
> Noam
>
> FIRST ANSWER BY JARED ISRAEL
> Subj:   Re: Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
> Date:   09/06/2000 3:15:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time
> From:   <A HREF="mailto:JaredI">JaredI</A>
> To: <A HREF="mailto:chomsky at MIT.EDU">chomsky at MIT.EDU</A>
>
> Dear Noam,
>
> In a message dated 09/05/2000 3:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time, you wrote:
>
> <<
>  I think you are aware of the fact that in the past 10 years the Milosevic
>  regime has committed many crimes.
>   >>
>
> "The fact that"?  Who said it was a fact?  You construct a sentence that
> asserts as given the truth of the very thing which in my note I said was a
> lie.  Clever.
>
> Noam, I have been reading your stuff for a long time and I am not a dope.
I
> am "aware of the fact" that you have repeatedly charged Milosevich AND
"The
> Serbs" with criminal actions, e.g., atrocities against civilians. Your
> sentences are routinely constructed so as to assert the truth of your
> charges, despite no proof. Your writing has "in fact" had a negative
effect
> on the left, such as it is, cooling antiwar passions and hindering the
> creation of a serious antiwar movement.
>
> The burden of proof cannot be escaped by tricky wording or sloppiness.
>
> I repeat, what crimes has Milosevich committed in Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia?
> Date or dates, place or places.  Details.  Prove the credibility of your
> sources.  I think you just parrot what's written in the mass media.
>
> Jared
>
> SECOND REPLY FROM NOAM CHOMSKY
>
> Subj:    Re: Is it not slander because it is said by Chomsky?
> Date:   09/06/2000 9:28:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time
> From:   chomsky at MIT.EDU (Noam Chomsky)
> To: JaredI at aol.com (by way of Noam Chomsky <JaredI at aol.com>)
>
> Dear Jared,
>
> Apologies.  I didn't realize you thought that Milosevic's regime was alone
> in the world in not having committed many crimes.
>
> If you think I'm going to take time to discuss this topic with you, think
> again.  There are serious things to do.
>
> Noam
>
> SECOND REPLY FROM JARED ISRAEL
>
> Subj:   Regarding your unserious note, Noam
> Date:   09/07/2000 6:18:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time
> From:   <A HREF="mailto:JaredI">JaredI</A>
> To: <A HREF="mailto:chomsky at MIT.EDU">chomsky at MIT.EDU</A>
>
> Dear Noam,
>
> Yesterday you wrote me:
>
> <<  Apologies.  I didn't realize you thought that Milosevic's regime was
alone
>  in the world in not having committed many crimes.  >>
>
> What's the point of the sarcasm, Noam? You cannot avoid the serious
questions
> I and others have raised about your writing on Yugoslavia by resorting to
> mockery.
>
> Your writing is full of explicit accusations such as: ""By  summer [1998],
> the KLA had taken over about 40 per cent of the province, eliciting  a
> vicious reaction by Serb security forces and paramilitaries, TARGETING THE
> CIVILIAN POPULATION." (el Ahram, June 2000, my emphasis)
>
> Obviously you are not talking about every government in the world. You are
> claiming that the Yugoslav government made certain choices.  That is,
faced
> with an isolated terrorist group (which the KLA was until after the onset
of
> NATO bombing convinced key Albanian clan leaders that the KLA had the full
> support of NATO)  - given that the Yugoslavs were faced with an isolated
> terrorist gang the Yugoslavs could a) do everything possible to avoid
> civilian casualties or b) take it out on civilians, thus guaranteeing
support
> for the KLA.
>
> The Yugoslav Army has an unusual history.  It's doctrine is based on the
> expectation of conducting a mass-based resistance to a new attack from the
> West, an attack which they anticipated for 50 years. This army studied the
> tactics of conducting a war of resistance.
>
> Now whether one likes or dislikes armies per se, this particular army
grasps
> the key role played by popular support (and antagonism!)  in warfare.  Why
> would they make such a stupid mistake as to target the civilian population
> when they were fighting a (then)  isolated gang of dope smuggling
fascists?
>
> Moreover, as you have known for a year, the antiwar movement possesses a
> number of documents from the German Courts and Foreign Ministry, documents
> produced in response to the requests by Kosovo Albanians to receive the
> status of political refugees.  The German courts studied the situation in
> Kosovo and ruled in every case that there was no evidence - none - that
the
> Yugoslav Army targeted civilians.  The Humanitarian Crisis was
manufactured
> by Western officials and the mass media to justify Western demands that
the
> Yugoslav special troops leave Kosovo - Yugoslav territory.
>
> All this was known to you a year ago.  Every website that opposed the
bombing
> of Yugoslavia featured those documents.  I believe that even the Z
website,
> stronghold of Serb bashing within the antiwar movement, posted those
> documents.  Why then, a year after the end of the war, after Carla Del
Ponte
> admitted in mid November that they had found a grand total of 2108 bodies
> whose identities were unknown - that is, that these bodies, which they
> allegedly found, could be anyone - why did you write in June, 2000 that
the
> Yugoslav Army targeted Albanian civilians?  This is not a trivial matter,
> Noam.
>
> And this is only one of the times you made statements which uncritically
> parroted what we have been told by the Western media.  This particular
> statement was written in an Arab publication - particularly harmful since
the
> Western media tries to convince Arabs of the lie that "the Serbs" are
> anti-Muslim bigots.
>
> You say: <<If you think I'm going to take time to discuss this topic with
> you, think
> again.  There are serious things to do.>>.
>
> What could be more serious than whether Yugoslavia has  committed serious
> crimes of war?  What could be more serious then whether you have, in fact,
> publicly lied with the effect of discouraging action by antiwar activists?
>
> A year ago you sent me the following email post:
>
> Date:   5/12/99 10:40:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time
> From:   chomsky at MIT.EDU
> To: JaredI at AOL.COM
> CC: chomsky at MIT.EDU
> Dear Jared,
> I guess I feel I've known you for many years, even if we haven't
> actually met (so you tell me; I would have guessed otherwise).
>
> Thanks for the text of the speech [I had sent you Milosevic's speech, made
in
> 1989 at Kosovo Field], which I'd never seen.
> Interesting.  On the "demonization," it's actually been conceded.
> An article in the Times a few weeks ago, which I'm sure I kept,
> observed that "demonization" of Milosevic was necessary in order
> to maintain public support for the bombing.
> Noam
>
> [End of last year's email from Noam to Jared]
>
> Now Noam, if you knew way back then that demonizing Milosevich is critical
in
> order to maintain public support for the attack on Yugoslavia, why have
you
> persistently demonized him and the Serbian people and Yugoslav army?
>
> For example, during the bombing you wrote:
>
> "The bombing was then undertaken under the rational expectation that
KILLING
> and refugee generation would ESCALATE as a result, as indeed happened,
even
> if the scale may have come as a surprise to some, though apparently not
the
> commanding general. " (This is from a piece you wrote and posted in May,
1999
> on the Z website, my emphasis)
>
> I have done text analysis of several of your articles about Yugoslavia and
> the above excerpt demonstrates a technique you employ over and over. In
> brief, you attack the Yugoslavs in the guise of either defending them or
> attacking NATO.
>
> Thus, here you say that the NATO commanding general obviously knew how
> terribly the Serbs would react.  Posing your point in this form seems to
be a
> criticism of NATO; this lends it credibility on the left.  But what you
are
> really doing is taking the "commanding general's" statement - that the
> bombing DID precipitate escalated Serbian atrocities - as axiomatic: true
> without requirement of proof.  Indeed, you assert the truth of NATO's
charge
> in passing, using it as the basis of your false
> criticism of NATO.
>
> Now, your claim to fame is media criticism.  You opposed the Vietnam War.
> Why does an antiwar activist, who studies the media, and who knows - who
has
> told me he knows - that demonization "is critical in order to maintain
public
> support for" the attack on Yugoslavia - why does such a person fail to
even
> question - even question! - the anti-Yugoslav news reports?  Why?  Why,
> during the bombing and since, have your statements even at times lagged
> behind what we are reading in some of the mass publication newspapers?
(This
> is the case with the El Ahram article which was contradicted by the German
> Court and Foreign Ministry documents over a year ago!)
>
> If these are trivial questions then what is serious?
>
> Jared
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>

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From Borba100 at aol.com  Thu Sep  7 19:49:32 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 21:49:32 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re:CHOMSKY REPLIES TO CRITICISMS
Message-ID: <c5.904cfcf.26e99fac@aol.com>

Dear Andrej,

I am unsure why you seem to avoid the issues I am raising.  Chomsky has lied 
and continues to lie about the actions of the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo.  
Before that he lied about the actions of Yugoslav forces in Bosnia.  He 
repeated the lies made in the Western media that the Yugsolav forces 
committed atrocities against civilians. 

That is the issue.  If you agree with him - that the Yugoslav army targeted 
civilians in Kosovo - than what can I say?  If  you don't then I say: your 
disputes with Milosevich are not the issue.  When the Western press says 
Milosevich is a monster they are mainly talking about what Chomsky has been 
writing about - namely that he and his forces (i.e. the Serbian people) 
committed lots of atrocities and they got worse during the bombing.  
ATRCOTIES.  MURDERS.  TARGETING OF CIVILIANS>  These are Chomsky's charges.  
Did you read my email exchange?  Nothing there about INTERNAL policies.  

I am not talking about your gripes about life in Serbia.  That is a matter to 
be resolved by the Serbian people, not by me.  The people on these lists can 
have no effect on Serbia.  So the effect of all your attacks is to play into 
the main argument we are getting in the press: that the Serbs commit 
atrocities.

I am interested in the lies about Serbia's actions in Kosovo, etc., that are 
used by the West to justify attack.  These lies are pushed by Chomsky.

Please, Andrej, what about what I have said is unclear???

Jared



From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Thu Sep  7 16:06:41 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 22:06:41 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: The Garden of Eden
Message-ID: <F212PmcarcR4ZDgC81T0000a30b@hotmail.com>

>That's what this list should be about, helping people gain a better
>understanding of just how capitalism has destroyed natural wealth.
>And helping UPDATE marxist theory.    Nature IS wealth.      Let's not
>keep marxists being the only people on the planet still blind to this
>elemental truth.
>
>Tony


Well said, sir.

In that spirit:

[Tony]
>>That's ONE GREAT reason we seek to end capitalism, not reform it.
So, Tom, don't be so hot to trot every time one of us marxists spout
some sort of line.

Nah. I am only as "hot" to respond as are the attacks mounted against me. 
(Zhukov)


[Tony]
>I know. I feel the same way when Christians
come around. But some of them really are OK in their beliefs.

Yes, and both X-tians and Marxists have many sects, it seems. (Of course us 
neo-malthusians have sole possession of the single truth. ...)

[Carrol]
>>I apoligize for my loss of temper, but it seems that marxists must
(in contexts where other participants pretend to a certain level of
sophistication) forever debate ghosts. <<

So must green doomers, Carrol. I appreciate you extending your remarks, I 
know it takes time and effort. It gives me hope as well of achieving a 
genuine level of sophistication rather than pretense to one.

[Carrol]
>>A note on political activity. .. the conviction that there exists
some policy which, if activists adopt it, will enable them to force the
movement of history? can have various repercussions, but one
of them is a tendency to endless hand wringing over "what should
we do, *now*, to make things moves. ? I am not arguing for
mere passivity; there is usually a good number of things to do? But I am 
arguing
that the occasions on which history *moves*, and on which our
actions (and our ideas) can make a tremendous difference, are few
and far between, occur behind our back and in utterly unpredictable
ways, and cannot be forced, no matter how anguished our attempts
to force them.<<

I certainly agree with this.

[Carrol]>>
>>This exhibits what I call dogmatism ?but your post seems to imply 
>>that"economics" has to be of use, and that since Marx is not, at least
in your or Martin Feldstein's sense of the word, an economist, he
and marxists can be of little use. ? but I urge you to
at least keep in the back of your mind the possibility that economics
is of no use to those who want to change the world. This isn't true,
but it ontly ceases to be false after you have granted its truth to
begin with. If you begin with hope in economics, you sill spin
futilely in one spot forever. Are you so utterly uninterested in
humans and their activity that you believe that an understanding
of how, under given historical conditions, that activity is shaped
can be of no use to anyone?)<< [all 'snips" for brevity only]

[Tom]
I am too disconcerted for words that this is the image of my views that you 
perceive. I would be angry at such a fellow as I appear to you. Hell, I AM 
pissed off at me merely on the strength of your characterization of me! Damn 
me!  I am speechless at the prospect of trying to unwind the 
misunderstandings, I will not try. Perhaps over the next weeks you will get 
to know me a bit better and perhaps discover that I do not entertain those 
beliefs projected onto me.

[Carrol]
>>You don't know what Political Economy is -- and you don't know what
a Critique is.

Apparently not. I am returning to the bursar?s office to ask for the money 
back I paid for my MS in Political Science.

[Carrol]
>>Incidentally, I don't know what you know about Amiri Baraka, but
I suggest you don't let differences of rhetoric or other preconceptions
blind you. He may or may not be right on specific points at specific
times, but any progressive who ignores Baraka is a fool.<<

Anyone who attempts to verbally abuse others on the list in that particular 
way the chomsky posters did is a fool, as well.

[Carrol] to Tony in the Garden of Eden:

>>But assuming the sense I have been assuming, would you
please explain to me how fish in the sea can become food in my stomach
(or articles for sale in my meat counter) unless human hands affect them
somehow along the line?

Or, approaching it from the other hand, how would any amount of human
activity place food in my stomach unless it had something (ultimately from
nature: fish, peas, etc.)<<

The answer to that is the point we are trying to teach you after your 70 
years, Carrol, and I hope your receiver is still operating, not just your 
transmitter, regardless of your alloted decade to impart a little more 
wisdom:

Anthropocentrism and the ?Man is the measure of all things? argument holds 
for VERY many scenarios, but reorganizing the nature of reality is not one 
of them. All the systems under discussion here in relation to the crash ? be 
they capitalist, marxist or Roman Catholic ? start from one common, flawed 
assumption: that the ?theory? in question can avoid the consequences of the 
rape of the planet -- that somehow a political, social or economic scheme 
can mitigate the actions of 6 billion people all failing to realize that 
control ultimately rests within the rules of the biosphere we must exist 
within. If Marxisim recognizes this, then I will continue to carry my party 
card when Tony faxes it.

But Ricardo, Adam Smith, Marx, Lenin, Greenspan, Bill Gates, Jesus nor you 
and I can redefine or change those natural rules in such a way as to render 
them ineffective.  Any one who lulls himself into believing otherwise is ? 
[insert pejorative of choice.]

Thanks,
Tom

"We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion-year-old carbon. And we've 
gotto get ourselves back to the Garden."---Joni Mitchell

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From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 01:19:05 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 08:19:05 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Ft.com: Profits caught in oil-euro squeeze
Message-ID: <000801c01965$12793ae0$c42c8cd4@mjones>


By Philip Coggan in London and Adrian Michaels in New York
Published: September 7 2000 20:44GMT | Last Updated: September 8 2000
07:06GMT



Fears about the impact of the soaring price of oil and the plunging euro
spread on Thursday as companies warned investors to expect lower profits.

Chemicals group DuPont blamed substantially higher oil prices for increasing
its costs and said a weak euro was hitting its revenues as it issued a
profits warning.

Investors forced Dupont shares down 11 per cent to $41.19 on Wall Street,
triggering a decline in shares of its competitors as concerns spread through
the chemical sector about the oil-euro squeeze. Dow Chemical fell 7.5 per
cent to $25.38 and ICI of the UK and Germany's BASF and Bayer all fell about
2.5 per cent. Electrical group Invensys also issued a profit warnings,
citing the weak euro, sluggish capital goods markets and a drop in US
housing starts. The shares fell 93.25?p, or 35.7 per cent, to 167?p.

"My concern is that the oil price rise will cause a much
sharper-than-expected economic slowdown," said Trevor Greetham, global
strategist at Merrill Lynch.

Peter Oppenheimer, global strategist at HSBC, added that "higher oil prices
are likely to push up interest rates in Europe, cause economies to slow and
prompt more profit warnings and downgrades".

Thursday oil notched a 10 year-high when October Brent crude closed at
$34.55 a barrel. Earlier it fell to $33.95 on reports that Saudi Arabia had
told President Clinton that Opec was planning to raise production by 700,000
barrels a day. Opec ministers meet in Vienna on Sunday.

The euro rebounded off its all-time lows on Thursday as investors showed
caution ahead of a meeting of European finance ministers Friday. Traders are
concerned that central banks might intervene to support the currency and the
euro closed at 87.1 cents in London trading. Profits growth in the US and
Europe has been generally buoyant this year thanks to strong economic growth
in the first six months.

But in recent weeks there have been signs of a slowdown in the US and UK
manufacturing sectors while the German Ifo survey of business sentiment has
shown that confidence has started to slip. Higher oil prices push up the
costs of big corporate users, such as chemical and transport companies,
while at the same time prompting central banks to raise interest rates to
head off inflationary pressures.

While the weak euro helps European exporters, it exacerbates the problem of
higher raw materials prices because oil and other commodities are priced in
dollars. This adds to inflationary pressures. The European Central Bank
raised interest rates last week while the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of
England left them unchanged at their most recent meetings. In the US, DuPont
said the high oil price and weak euro would cost it more than a $1bn in
pre-tax profit for the full year.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 01:20:14 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 08:20:14 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT.com: Iran backs Saudi on need to raise Opec output
Message-ID: <000901c01965$3b96be20$c42c8cd4@mjones>


By Carola Hoyos and Stephen Fidler in New York
Published: September 7 2000 19:09GMT | Last Updated: September 8 2000
07:12GMT



Mohammed Khatami, Iran's president, said on Thursday Iran would support a
rise in oil production by Opec, the oil cartel, when its members meet in
Vienna this weekend.

But a production increase of 700,000 b/d rumoured to be backed by Saudi
Arabia, may be "on the high side for Iran", according to a close adviser to
the president.

"In principle we are not against an output rise in proportion to the rise in
global demand in oil," Mr Khatami said, adding that statistics forecast oil
demand to increase in the next four months.

Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia this week told President Bill Clinton
that he expected Opec to agree to a rise in output.

The increase in world oil prices - October Brent blend closed on Wednesday
at another 10-year-high of 34.28 a barrel - dipped to $33.89 on news of the
apparent Saudi proposal.

Although the cartel seems to be moving to a consensus over the need for an
output increase, the size of the increase will be hotly debated in the
Sunday meeting.

Venezuela, one of the US's biggest suppliers of crude oil, and a country
whose economy is highly dependent on the price of oil, does not expect any
decision by Opec this weekend to stabilise the price.

Hector Ciavaldini, president of PDVSA, Venezuela's state oil company, said
in an interview on Thursday that he expected Opec to agree a token increase
but that the measure would be unlikely reduce prices below $30 per barrel.

Oil inventories will not increase before November and December, when demand
will increase due to rising heating oil consumption, he said. He admitted
that the US has put extreme pressure on Venezuela to increase output, but
said that Opec was not responsible for the upward trend.

Instead, he echoed comments also made by Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia's oil
minister, and Mr Khatami, that oil consuming countries must reconsider their
taxes and the environmental standards they dictate for their gasoline.

Mr Clinton met Crown Prince Abdullah this week to push for Opec to increase
oil output. "I told him that I was very concerned that the price of oil was
too high, not just for America, but for the world, that if it's a cause of
recession in any part of the world, that would hurt the oil producing
countries. He agreed with that," Mr Clinton said after the meeting.

Earlier, the Saudi crown prince stressed that his country was doing all it
can to stabilise prices. "Saudi Arabia will continue to make every effort to
ensure equilibrium in the oil markets and to stabilise prices," he said.





From ssandron at hotmail.com  Thu Sep  7 19:00:26 2000
From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky)
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 01:00:26 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] MICHAEL PERELMAN TO TALK ABOUT THE INFORMATION AGE AT THE MARXIST SCHOOL OF SACR
Message-ID: <F68QtgTIFprhMOgRGkQ0000591d@hotmail.com>

Hi CrashListers,

Seth Sandronsky here.  If you're in Sacramento on September 20, come hear 
Michael Perelman, a Marxist economics professor, talk on capitalism and the 
Information Age.  See the news release below for more details.

Seth Sandronsky

September 7, 2000			For more information:
News Release				Call John Rowntree 916-446-1758

MICHAEL PERELMAN TO TALK ABOUT THE INFORMATION AGE AT THE MARXIST SCHOOL OF 
SACRAMENTO

Michael Perelman, professor of economics at California State University, 
Chico and author of 12 books, will deliver a talk on ?The Information Age: 
New Technologies, Same Old Capitalism,? on Wednesday, September 20 at 7 p.m. 
at the Green Room in the Sierra 2 Center, 2791 24th Street, Sacramento, CA.
Perelman?s talk will launch Point of View, Challenging Perspectives on 
Current Issues, a speaker series sponsored by The Marxist School of 
Sacramento.
?Despite the overblown hype about the so-called new economy, the way that 
the capitalist market is exploiting high technology will mean deeper 
divisions between classes, a more intrusive state, and a slowdown in the 
rate of technical change,? said Perelman.
He will show how the optimal development of high technology is incompatible 
with a market economy.  There will be a question-and-answer period after 
Perelman?s lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.  Donations are welcome.  For more 
information call John Rowntree at 916-446-1758

                               ###

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 03:18:51 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 10:18:51 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Clinton wins oil pledge
Message-ID: <000c01c01975$cdbc1f60$c42c8cd4@mjones>

Saudis to raise production as revolt on prices brings France to a halt

Larry Elliott, Charlotte Denny and Jon Henley in Paris
Friday September 8, 2000

Bill Clinton last night won a pledge from the world's biggest oil producer,
Saudi Arabia, to halt the relentless rise in the price of crude which
yesterday brought France to a halt and prompted fears of a global recession.
As UK petrol firms responded to the 10-year-high in oil prices by putting up
fuel prices by 2p a litre, crown prince Abdullah said Saudi Arabia would
raise production by 700,000 barrels a day in an effort to ease pressure on
the west.

However, oil experts said the 3% increase in output would not be enough to
bring crude oil prices to below $30 a barrel and motoring organisations
warned that British drivers could soon expect to pay ?4 for a gallon of
petrol.

Speaking at the UN millennium summit in New York, President Clinton said he
had put pressure on Saudi Arabia to take action ahead of Sunday's meeting of
Opec - the 11-member oil producers' cartel.

"I told him I was very concerned that the price of oil is too high, not just
for America but for the world," said Mr Clinton after his meeting with the
crown prince. "If it was to cause a recession in any part of the world that
would hurt the oil producing countries."

Large parts of France ran out of fuel yesterday as hauliers and farmers,
more determined than ever to win big fuel tax cuts from the government,
continued their four-day blockade of oil refineries and depots.

Angry farmers, already active on most of the 120 blockades up and down the
country, successfully blocked the entrance to the Channel tunnel with their
tractors, triggering scuffles with British tourists.

Around 50 British holidaymakers mounted a counter-blockade by blocking a
lane being used by the authorities to allow French cars to trickle past the
barricades, and threatened to cut off the main A16 motorway if they were not
allowed to get through the blockade and go home. Under police escort, a
convoy of British cars and coaches was eventually allowed through in the
late afternoon.

A British police sergeant, who was part of the convoy but asked not to be
named, said: "It seems we managed to outmanoeuvre them with a bit of British
courage and some cunning. We played them at their own game and it worked. In
the end it was quite a fun victory for all."

Another convoy member, Frank Davidson, 49, said: "This was as sweet a
victory as Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo. They didn't like it when we
put up a fight."

While talks resumed late in the afternoon between the French transport
minister, Jean-Claude Gayssot, and the two main hauliers' federations, the
government reiterated that it would go no further than the 15% tax cut,
worth ?100m, it offered on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the European commission
threatened legal action if the free movement of goods within the EU was
disrupted.

As the protest spread, the hauliers, farmers, ambulance drivers and coach
firms were joined by thousands of taxi drivers in massed "go-slow"
processions that brought traffic to a halt in a dozen cities and caused
motorway tailbacks.

At least three regional airports reported they would be out of aviation fuel
by this morning. Wholesalers at the main Rungis market outside Paris said
supplies of fresh fruit and vegetable were beginning to be affected and 80%
of the country's petrol stations were either dry, subject to rationing of
?15 per vehicle, or had been requisitioned for emergency service use only.

In the financial markets yesterday, the price of a barrel of crude oil eased
back from a peak of $34.50 to $33.91. However, dealers said that most of the
Saudi production increase had been anticipated by the markets and that
prices were not likely to fall markedly.

They said Saudi Arabia was the key player in the crisis because it was the
only Opec nation with the spare capacity to pump the extra oil needed to
bring prices under control. But it can expect opposition from other Opec
members who are enjoying extra revenues from the price surge from under $10
a barrel at the start of last year.

Lawrence Eagles, oil analyst at the City firm GNI Securities, said a harsh
winter could boost demand by an extra 500,000 barrels a day, pushing prices
still higher."You can't rule out $40 a barrel if Opec aren't prepared to
act," he said.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 08:16:14 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 15:16:14 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] OGJ: UK offshore to thrive with cost-cutting, new technology
Message-ID: <000e01c0199f$58f32c80$c42c8cd4@mjones>

[Really? This story is NOT about the thriving 
UK offshore, it is about declining production 
hidden behind optimistic headlines, with big 
reservoirs like Forties a thing of 
the past, and marginal high-entropy fields 
brought into production by the Expro  
life-support system.

North Sea oil + gas is another tombstone over Big Oil. Mark]

from Oil & Gas Journal Online's Upstream This Week 
Friday, Sept. 8, 2000 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
Malcolm Brinded, managing director of Shell Exploration 
& Production PLC, recently revealed a confident vision 
of a UK North Sea oil industry prolonging its 
productive life through new technology and further 
cost-cutting. The Shell Expro chief tipped reservoir- 
optimizing 4D seismic,"smart wells," expandable 
tubulars, and sand screens, as well as Shell's own gas 
separation "Twister" system, as technologies that would 
help "get the most value out of what we've already got" 
in the North Sea. 

Brinded said North Sea companies would have to leverage 
their technologies along with "what they had going for 
them" -- existing infrastructure, a "quality" service 
sector, and ready-made gas market -- to answer the 
rigors of the region's "maturity, small field size, and 
global competition." 

Given the "small but many" untapped reservoirs on the 
UK Continental Shelf, further cost reduction could 
widen the net so that many of the most marginal central 
North Sea's fields could be exploited economically as 
subsea tiebacks. The pan-industry "change in behavior" 
required, however, he added, is a fundamental hurdle in 
a mature basin such as the UKCS. 



From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 09:31:34 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 16:31:34 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] life after the Soviet Union
Message-ID: <000f01c019a9$def15820$c42c8cd4@mjones>

Moscow Times
September 8, 2000
EDITORIAL: No Safety For Moscow Prostitutes

You've seen them. The hundreds of women that gather nightly on Moscow's
busiest thoroughfares, in courtyards, alleyways and even the quietest nooks
of the city's more peaceful neighborhoods. Cars skim past, headlights
shining, and deals are quickly brokered. Like Chechen arrest quotas and
random document checks, prostitution has become such an intrinsic element of
the Moscow city tableau that it's easy to forget what a miserable business
it
is.

Occasionally there are reminders. Take Thursday's early morning attack on a
group of prostitutes gathered on the northern end of the Garden Ring Road.
The grenade attack left 16 people injured, eight seriously enough to be
hospitalized. Apart from one Muscovite, the victims were from the Tula and
Ivanovo regions, Moldova and Ukraine.

Bomb-tossing is an increasingly frequent gesture in this violent city; a
quick fix for what irks you. The casual attitude is all the worse for being
commercially driven. Moscow's bustling sex trade f 70,000 women reportedly
work as prostitutes f has already reduced women to a dispensable commodity.
Thursday's incident strips them of their humanity altogether.

Police have not yet ruled out the latest motive du jour, Chechen-sponsored
terrorism. But what seems far likelier is that the attack was a simple chess
move in the city's ongoing turf warfare over the prostitution business.

Moscow's sex trade is such a success that it has several spin-off
enterprises
as well f including roadside service for travelers heading in from
Sheremetyevo Airport and a citywide network of old women who stand just down
the road from the prostitutes, holding signs saying they will rent out their
apartments for nightly trysts. It is a dirty business, like anywhere, that
thrives on a steady supply of impoverished and desperate young women. And in
Russia, it is given an extra boost by the country's absolute lack of
protective legislation and a society that continues to put women low on the
food chain.

The majority of Moscow's prostitutes are reportedly from the regions and
neighboring countries, driven to Russia's capital city out of aching poverty
and then literally enslaved, earning next to nothing while being exposed
every day to abuse and the very real dangers of life on the street. People
can dismiss Thursday's attack as something that could never happen to them f
as a less morally outrageous crime than last month's underpass bombing, for
example f but that only skirts the terrible truth that Moscow's most
miserable job just got worse.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 12:03:00 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 19:03:00 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
Message-ID: <001501c019bf$067431a0$c42c8cd4@mjones>

ask one million French workers on the streets today.



From jbunzl at simpol.org  Fri Sep  8 14:18:01 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 21:18:01 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] the Plan
References: <s9b3bf2f.076@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <006d01c019d1$ec6560a0$875a87d4@oemcomputer>

Tahir,
I look forward to hearing from you further in due course concerning SP.
Meantime, please unsubscribe me from the Crash List. I hope to return in the
not too distant future.
best wishes
John Bunzl

----- Original Message -----
From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] the Plan


> John
>
> Thanks for engaging with us further. I intend to go back to
> your website for another look as soon as I can clear my desk
> a little. In the meantime could I make one small request:
> please would you not reply in capitals like this? It is hell
> to read, at least on my eyes, and it is not hard at all to
> tell whose voice is coming through. If you need to signal
> who is speaking you can just put your name or initials in
> front of a colon, followed by your text, like this:
>
> JB: .............
>
> Thanks
>
> Tahir
>
>
>
> >>> "John Bunzl" <jbunzl at simpol.org> 09/03 10:11 PM >>>
> Hello Perry,
> You wrote:
> > "that 'plan' is flawed".
>
> I take it you were referring to the Simultaneous Policy.
> Thank you for
> visiting our website and I will respond to your points
> beneath each one in
> capital letters for clarity:
> >
> > 1) it requires the voluntary compliance of millions
> against whose own best
> > interest it is to comply
> I DON'T BELIEVE THIS ASSERTION IS GENERALLY CORRECT. PLEASE
> SPECIFY
> PRECISELY WHICH OF THE PROPOSED POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST
> THE BEST INTERESTS
> OF THE MILLIONS EXPECTED TO ADOPT SP.
> >
> > 2) there is insufficient time for mega-solutions to be
> executed before the
> > crash effects begin
> YOU MAY BE RIGHT, BUT HAVE YOU ANY BETTER IDEA OR SHOULD WE
> JUST WAIT FOR
> THE CRASH?
> >
> > 3) the only 'solutions' are local : personal, individual,
> family, small
> > community; not mega-state or global;
> I THINK THERE ARE SOLUTIONS AT EVERY LEVEL. I ALSO BELIEVE
> THAT A SOLUTION
> AT ONE LEVEL DOES NOT NECESSARILY PRECLUDE SOLUTIONS AT
> OTHER LEVELS. I
> THINK WE NEED TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND.
> >
> > 4) the only effective 'plans' are those not published to
> the world via the
> > WWW
> NOT QUITE SURE WHERE YOU'RE GOING HERE PERRY...
> >
> > 5) Joan writes:
> > > >  ...Any plan is better than no plan, or is it?
> >
> >      it isn't .
> >
> > sorry; won't work...
> I REALLY THINK WE ARE HARDLY GOING TO GET VERY FAR WITH SUCH
> GLIB
> DISMISSALS. AS, REQUESTED ABOVE, PLEASE SPECIFY WHICH OF THE
> PROPOSED
> POLICIES WOULD BE AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THOSE WHO ARE
> EXPECTED TO ADOPT
> SP. THEN LET'S HAVE A SENSIBLE DISCUSSION.
> LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU.
> BEST WISHES
> JOHN.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep  8 14:52:13 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 21:52:13 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Shostakovich 7th (Leningrad) Symphony
Message-ID: <000001c019d6$aa7d2d80$de0b063e@mjones>

Tonight I went to hear Dmitry Shostakovich's 7th Symphony performed
as part of the BBC Promenade Concerts, by what was essentially an
ad hoc orchestra conducted by the great Russian conductor, Vladimir
Gergiev (who immediately after his tumultuous reception at the Royal
Albert Hall, went to a Mayfair restaurant to eat blinis and caviar).

Shostakovich is now rightly popular. His deeply contradictory,
angst-ridden music, suffused with patriotic ardour, but also anguish
at the human price paid for socialism's successes, strikes a
chord with contemporary audiences. Perhaps because of
his current popularity, there is a perverse but well-funded fashion for
derogating Shostakovich's life commitments: thus it is argued that
even the glorious Seventh, written in Leningrad in 1942 at the height
of the Nazi seige of that city, which claimed more than two million lives,
was actually not a lyrical paean to the Soviet Motherland, but an anti-
Bolshevik musical diatribe. That is absurd, of course. Whatever
they may say, Dmitry Shostakovich lived and died a paid-up member
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Shostakovich's political commitment is rooted in the dynamic reality of
Soviet cultural life. This dynamism is evident in literature and painting
as well as in music.

Critics of Stalinist policy towards the arts have difficulty admitting what
is actually obvious: that despite the supposed philistinism,
bloodthirstiness, stupidity, evil-mindedness and malice of Stalin and his
'henchmen', the Soviet Thirties saw the greatest outpouring of works of art,
theatre, literature, film, music, sculpture and architecture in Russian
history. This takes some explaining: the tally of major 20th century works
in any field of culture (symphonic works, novels, paintings, films etc)
shows a high number of works created in the Soviet Union under High
Stalinism.

It is said that under the rubric of Socialist Realism Stalin inflicted a
cruel and stultefying regime on the fine arts, which engendered
easel-painting and sculpture of generally second-rate dullness and awful,
servile conformity. These defects are said to be matters of principle and
outweigh any conceivable theoretical gains which in any case are lacking in
the fine arts (compared to cinematography etc). It is usually added that it
is no excuse to point out that actually some of the stuff was rather good:
since we do not applaud the Borgias because their rule happened to coincide
with the flowering of Renaissance art, we should not indulge Stalin's
excesses either. In civilised (bourgeois) society artists and the consumers
of their work are each allowed to do their thing in serenity and personal
security. Stalin's 'Terror' did not permit this. The Party stood between
artist and viewer, subjecting both to its baleful gaze.

Stalin's policy towards the arts is therefore to be opposed on two general
grounds. First, no-one (least of all a jackbooted commissar personifying the
absolute state) has the right to mediate between the artist and his/her
viewer. Second, the sovereignty of the individual and the right to live free
from fear in a law-governed society, is more fundamental even than the right
of the state to survive. Stalinist repression and policing of the arts is
'barbaric' and 'unconscionable' [but one justification for Stalin's policy
towards Russian artists might lie in comparing it with Hitler's and then
trying to judge whether Stalin's policy helped or hindered the Soviet state
in its attempt to prevent Hitler carrying _his_ policy out].

It is not just a matter of the Stalinist liquidation of the avant-garde and
their substitution by the alleged aridities of socialist-realism. The real
issue is more serious and universal: freedom of expression versus the
interests and rights of the state. The Bolsheviks arrogated the right to
subordinate art to politics, meaning, to the creation of their dictatorship.
Still more heroically, Lenin even wanted not merely to use art for his own
purposes but to insist theoretically that art could not even be art unless
it served those purposes.

If you grant that art is a class question and must be subordinated to a
class politics, then you take your stand with Lenin's frankly 'totalitarian'
subordination of art to political life and the interests of the state. Art
has no more autonomy than any other sphere of life. The proletarian
dictatorship insists on its subjugation. It is clear too that Stalin was the
executor of Lenin's behests, and you cannot separate Lenin's policy from
Stalin's. If Lenin was wrong, so was Stalin. If both were wrong then we have
to admit that the socialist revolutionary project contains a radical defect
and cannot be the instrument of human freedom. So the question is important.

Ironically, both Lenin and Stalin turned out to be conservators of bourgeois
cultural forms. Lenin destroyed the Proletkult and called instead for the
preservation of the finest achievements of bourgois culture, and for making
them accessible to the masses. Stalin in his time purged the avant-garde,
accusing it of 'formalism' and even drove Mayakovsky to his grave. However
in terms of the principled question it would not have mattered if the Party
had done things the other way round, ie, purged the Socialist Realists and
the Victorian novelists and made the practitioners of Proletkult into
honoured representatives of official Soviet art. The issue would still be,
does the Party have the right to decide which art and which artists shall
survive and prosper, and which shall be silenced and purged?

As the anti-stalinist Aleksandr Sidorov of the USSR (now Russian) Academy of
Arts put it, under the Bolsheviks 'Man, and especially 'simple' Soviet man,
was thought of exclusively as a viewer, but by no means a consumer or
possible possessor, of decorative art works, and at best he had to be
content with a mere reproduction, copy or album of an artist's work. This
circumstance is indissolubly linked to the following four processes.
Firstly, public awareness was transformed into the object of demagogic
manipulations and speculations. Secondly, aesthetic requirements were
depersonalised, and the interests of the individual were completely
dissolved in ideological and artistic programmes imposed by the State.
Thirdly, leaders appeared who acted as mediators of culture and invariably
took up a position above the viewer, reader or listener and knew better than
others what to teach, how to educate, what the people must know and what
they must not know, what the people needed and what was contrary to their
needs, what was 'good' and what was 'bad'. And fourthly, art criticism was
reduced to a concrete exposition of ideas sent down from on high; it played
the role of a priest of a new belief who explained the postulates of that
belief to the parishioners of the church of socialist realism.' (Matthew
Cullerne Brown, 'Art Under Stalin', (1991) pp 12-13). [Sidorov is worth
debating even if it seems unfair to blame the Bolsheviks for flooding the
country with cheap editions of colour prints of the fina arts, which they
did.]

Related to this totalitarian Bolshevik intent is the Stalinist notion that
art, like society itself, can make progress, and that since socialism is 'a
higher stage', socialist art too must be higher, must be 'the most forward
looking and progressive of all the artistic methods that have ever existed.'
(ibid). All these assumptions, needless to say, have been falsified by
events. Or have they?

The decay of Soviet culture under Brezhnev, its progressive atrophy,
fissiparousness and lack of direction, and the growing cynicism of official
circles towards its products, the growing public indifference to
socialist-realist art and the hypocrisy of its practitioners and apologists,
and the growth of 'dissident' oppositional art, might seem all the evidence
we need that the goals of Stalinist High Art were absurd and self-defeating:
as Sidorov says (or seems to), only the market, with its purveyors and
possessors, can clean up the arts.

In Stalin's own time, such cynicism and hypocrisy was largely absent.
Officially-sanctioned art was also the art consumed privately by leading
officials, including Stalin himself, who was a great admirer of the works of
socialist-realists like Sergei Gerasimov, Oganes Zardaryan, Martinos Sarayan
and Aleksandr Laktionov. The belief in the unfailing superiority of
socialist methods, and in the certain victory of socialism and decline of
capitalism, was genuine and widely held. By the time of Brezhnev, such
'naivete' was openly mocked within the ruling circles, whose corruption was
almost boundless, as was their contempt for the stupidity, helplessness and
vulgarity of the masses. Thus official attacks on the avant-garde coincided
with growing immorality and debauchery in the ruling circles, such that
Brezhnev's own daughter held up banks at gunpoint - aided by her husband
(the chief of police!) in order to fund her jewelry acquisitions; and every
high official had his 'own' private collections of forbidden Western art,
literarture, and pornography. Sovietart was soon divided into sinned-aganst
and sinners; most execrated were the portrait-painters of Stalin himself;
they and their works (irony!) were purged from the historical record and
Stalin's once-ubiquitous image was effaced from public spaces.

Since 1991 there has been a reversal of attitudes. The bourgeois collector
has decided in his counting-house of a soul that works of Socialist Realism
are high-value items. Of course! What else could you expect, given the way
of the art world?

However, it was unexpected. The first Sotheby auctions, held in Moscow
during the era of Peretsroika, showed formerly forbidden avant garde (often
openly anti-soviet) works. The history of those works and of these auctions
was curious: they did not fetch the prices hoped for, and these first
attempts to stimulate and profit from, anti-soviet and post-soviet painting
in Russia, did not lead anywhere. But Socialist Realism, on the contrary,
has powered on from strength to strength. Socialist Realist paintings,
especially from the era of High Stalinism, proved highly collectible and now
fetch extravagant prices in auctions. That such political works should end
up as prized commodities seems odd. I am not aware that the same posterity
obtained for Nazi High Art, so it cannot be a question of the general
collectibility of alleged totalitarian art forms.

Of course, despite everything there is no reason why Socialist Realist works
should not prove to be art. After all it is no disqualification of any
artwork that it was produced to state order, or according to an ideological
plan of some kind. Western art began out of church and state patronage, or
out of fawning depictions of the persons, families and possessions of
powerful and wealthy men.

The issue for Sidorov and for us is still therefore not whether works
produced for supposedly bad reasons or under difficult circumstances can be
art but whether or not socialists who hold state power acquire a right to
decide the content of art and the style it is produced in.

In any case, Sidorov's prioritising of the relationship between the artwork
and the viewer, in a solipsistic and private discourse, also makes little
sense. In capitalism, artworks make the same uncertain journey of
realisation as do all other commodities and in the process become the
bearers of social relations. Under socialism, artworks may enjoy a different
modality, which subverts their existence qua commodities. But in either case
it remains true that any work submitted for public scrutiny enters the
social world and is subject to the conventions, controls and internalised
censoriousness which exist in all cultures, times and places and arguably
provide not a straitjacket but the *form* of a representation without which
it would be impossible for the artist to create anything meaningful. While
for art to be art the epiphanic relationship to the viewer must exist and be
real, it is useless to deny the social context.

The moment of repression/internalisation of normative categories is also the
moment of creation. This is literally so. Not for nothing was the Stalinist
1930s characterised BOTH by the fierce and relentless struggle against
formalism in music, literature and the arts that ended careers and even
lives, AND by a torrential outpouring of new work. The famous Pravda attack
on Shostakovich in 1934 put an end to musical adventures like Lady Macbeth
of Mtsensk, but also led to the towering achievements of Shostakovich's
middle years. The arts were to not merely prefigure socialism but also to
serve the goal of 'communist education'. In a society of total mobilisation,
art  too was mobilised.

Even when railing against the patronising, authoritarian state, Aleksandr
Sidorov (quoted above) is certainly aware that the issue is thus more
complicated than it seems (he ends his tirade with these words: 'I may have
thrown too negative a light on the range of art in the Stalinist period, and
perhaps I have paid too much attention to the 'extreme' manifestations of
that art. But, as the Russian saying has it, things are seen more clearly
when observed from one side.')

Socialist Realism was meant to take art beyond capitalist commodity
production. Just as the avant-garde of the Twenties strove to push beyond
the limits of the frame of the picture (its conceptual, formal, technical or
expressive frame; and even the 'frame' itself) so, too, did the
anti-formalist 'Realism' of the Thirties actually have the same avowed goal:
to push art beyond the boundary of its commoditised frame of perceptual
reference, of social signing or emblematage, and even of the picture's
physical frame which encapsulates it, marks it off from the world, and makes
of it a potential commodity. Realism inducted the viewer thru the frame and
beyond it into a world of concrete objectivity, of limitless possibility and
boundless growth.

Socialist realism is art precisely because it was the strict opposite of
'realist socialism', ie, the unvarnished depiction of actual (blemished,
faulty, dysfunctional, warped) Soviet reality, the socialism of the everyday
world of overwork, shortage, ennui, of private feuding and conspiracy.
Socialist realism was a confabulation of impossible opposites, an explosive
equilibrium founded on the concrete-objectivity of the form of
representation of allegedly normal, everyday events, scenes and contexts
which are actually unreal, hyperreal, or simply fabulous. That is why when
one contemplates them now, these paintings often have a mirage-like quality,
a hallucinatory, iconic, narrative substance which can arouse intense
feelings, which can wound the observer, and all this of course sharply
contradicts the technical realism of the specific representation. It is as
if all of them: Stalin, his politburo, the stern-faced captains of the
Workers and Peasants Red Army and the masses themselves: the miners,
railwaymen, aviators and constructors, the collective farmworkers, the
plump, well-found, ruddy-cheeked maidens in their banya - creamy-skinned,
full-bodied women holding infants, in images so violently real that the
intense scents of birch leaves and pine resin, the steam hissing from the
furnace, the sound of gaiety and laughter, almost overwhelm the viewer - or
labour-scenes, with tanned, lithe men working a lathe or scything a field,
or the shining-eyed masses at a factory-committee meeting, an avuncular bust
of Lenin beaming impishly on -- all are part of a landscape of pure dreams,
which we can behold with a kind of nostalgic languor, with feelings of
desire which seem to have neither a source within ourselves nor in the
object-field of the painting.

I am just now examining an image of a painting by Aleksandr Samokhvalov
entitled 'Woman Metro Builder with Penumatic Drill', (1937, from the Russian
State Museum collections). This shows a woman shock-worker briefly resting
from excavating the tunnel for the Moscow Metro. In reality it is a
Palladian scene; classical and statuesque, there is a stillness about her
face, which is strongly illuminated from the front, and as she gazes into
the bright light, we almost see the socialist Arcadia she is seeing, the
disclosed/hidden, future/past utopia. One half-clenched hand, plump and
dainty, unmarked by labour, rests upon a rock; she has tied her jacket round
her waist and the effect is of a classicial, robed piece of statuary that
seems to have emerged from the living rock; the face is youthful, plastic,
inquisitive, robustly beautiful and determined: there is defiance in her
eyes. Whatever this painting is of, it is not of a woman metro builder (but
there were tens of thousands of women volunteers, often office workers, who
did help dig the tunnels, even during lunch-breaks; it is them the painting
celebrates, not as they are but as they should be).

As the magazine Sovietskoe Isskustvo (Soviet Arts) said in 1935, Moscow was
to become 'a city of happiness,' which would inspire 'feelings of harmony
and well-being'. This was not so much socialist town-planning as a kind of
delirium. And only it was only a year before that Zhdanov officially
declared to the writers' congress, the policy of 'socialist-realism'.

There are not many art historians writing much about socialist realism. Two
are Brandon Taylor and Matthew Cullerne Brown, whose 1998 book 'Socialist
Realist Painting' is a resplendent, coffee-table edition and highly
recommended; it is glorious feast of 'art of Stalin's time [that is] full of
purpose - always ready, as it were, to die with its boots on' (Cullerne
Brown, Art Under Stalin, (1991) p277). Importantly, Cullerne Brown locates
the origins of Socialist Realism in the prerevolutionary history of Russian
iconography, and of the peredvizhniki, the 19th century Itinerants who
celebrated everyday life. He does not manage to answer Sidorov's questions,
but perhaps they are unanswerable anyway. Brandon Taylor's two-volume work
on Soviet art which Pluto published in I think 1992-93 have this market
pretty much to themselves.

If all art is socially conditioned (as well as conventionally constrained)
then at least Leninist-Stalinist policy has the merits of transparency,
openness and honest partisanship, expressed in the idea that artists, like
everyone else, shall be driven by what was known as partiinost', that is,
the over-riding commitment to the Party and its principles and endeavours.
These were about generalising to the masses the promise of bourgeois
civilisation, and increasing the education, health, welfare and life
opportunities of the common woman/man. The Party strove to make art a mass
and not just an elite activity and was proud of its achievement, announcing
in the late Thirties, in the style of High Stalinist statistics, that 80
percent of Soviet artists hailed from the working class and the peasantry.
According to the party, that made them part of the new ruling class's
(proletarian) intelligenstia. This is shaky Marxism, but anyway this is not
the real achievement of Soviet Socialist Realism: which is that actually it
DOES fulfil Sidorov's requirements: because at its best it is art that
communicates in an immediate, epiphanic, and thaumaturgic way.

But even this fact (subversive of 'bourgeois' critiques) is not the real
reason for acclaiming Socialist Realism. More radically, it is because
Socialist Realism really did point beyond the 'framing' of art within the
commoditised object world of reified social relationships. Far from being a
step backwards, of being the expression of the (non-existent) 'Stalinist
Thermidor', Socialist Realism was a step into a different world, a
de-technicised, de-fetishised world of representations that made it the true
successor/displacer of the avant-garde movements of the first quarter of
this century. Socialist Realism tried to portray a postcapitalist universe
of transparently human intersubjectivity based on what Gorky called 'the
true data of our socialist society'. In striving to do so, it actually
created a mythical back-projection of heroic grandeur onto the drab face of
Soviet reality. But so what? Compared to this the West could only show the
dementia of Jackson Pollocks' CIA-expressionism, or Warhol's pathetic
juvenilia, or the empty scatologies of postmodernism.




From Borba100 at aol.com  Fri Sep  8 16:34:02 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2000 18:34:02 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Otpor: An American Tragedy, by Jared Israel
Message-ID: <c.a67b474.26eac35a@aol.com>

URL for this article is www.emperors-clothes.com/news/cialectures.htm

Is the Balkans the new Latin America?
Bulgarian paper says: 'CIA is tutoring Serbian group, Otpor' 

>From the Bulgarian newspaper, "The Monitor"
Translated by Blagovesta Doncheva
(Posted 9-8-00)

Commentary by Jared Israel follows "The Monitor' article.

www.tenc.net 
[Emperor's Clothes]

Introductory note: The following article from the Bulgarian newspaper, 'The 
Monitor' raises serious charges about the Yugoslav 'opposition' group, Otpor. 
My commentary, 'Otpor: the Message Ain't hidden Any more', follows 'The 
Monitor' piece. Please let me make two things clear. 

First, I think Yugoslavia, like every country, needs a viable opposition. If 
only one view is heard, or even if only one view is credible, decay sets in. 
Second, I do not think Americans should meddle in Yugoslavia's internal 
affairs. I do not think Americans should meddle in the internal affairs of 
any other country. Period.

But the US is already meddling; that presents a problem. The meddling must be 
addressed by US citizens even though it involves a sort of interference in 
Yugoslavia's internal affairs.

The US has poured vast sums into destabilizing Yugoslavia. No one knows 
exactly how much; surely it is over $100,000,000. (1) The intent is to 
corrupt. How can this help but distort the Yugoslav political process, 
especially since draconian sanctions, imposed on Serbia by the US, have 
greatly multiplied the value of US dollars. Absent this bribe money and an 
honest opposition could develop. There could be real debate. The Yugoslavs 
would gain. But in the presence of vast sums, dangled to lure people, 
especially young people, to treason, how can there be productive political 
struggle? This is a crime, no less than NATO's 78 day bombing campaign.
 -- Jared Israel

>From 'The Monitor' 

"I hate to be first!" This Bruce Willis line applies to everything we at 'The 
Monitor' have said about the US presence in the Balkans in general and in 
Bulgaria in particular. 

Several times we've published the truth about US intrusions. We've noticed 
that following our exposes, events seem to proceed in a prediabt4le fashion.. 

In the first stage those in power deny that anything is happening. 

In the second stage they make a few admissions, though painfully. 

This was the case when the Yankees demanded bases in Bulgaria. While one 
member of the ruling "elite" denied it, another had already admitted it. In 
the end everything we said proved true.. 

It was the same with the CIA center in Sofia, whose existence we exposed last 
year. And it was the same in with the meetings between Yugoslav 'opposition' 
activists and Ambassador Miles and his covert agents, a meeting that took 
place last year, in the Sheraton Hotel in Sofia. 

"No such thing happened," Ambassador Miles said at first. He was of course 
lying. Later he had to admit he had shared a meal with Yugoslavs. 

Now our warning, announced while US CIA head Tenet was still in Sofia, has 
proved true as well. 

All the pretentious analyses about the reasons for the CIA boss's visit are 
reduced to (and exposed as) just another brutal order to today's Bulgarian 
rulers - to keep selling our country's sovereignty, providing another 
country's spy organizations with a center for operations against a 
neighboring country. Yugoslavia. 

The latest admission comes in the BBC report that a ten-day special course 
starts in Sofia today (August 28). 

In that course U.S. spies will lecture and instruct Serb activists from the 
group "Otpor." 

Lecture and instruct in what? 

Will they tell them how to create the appearance of a mass movement by 
banging pots and pans? A CIA trade mark, accompanying its coups, this was 
used in Brazil in 1961, in Chili in 1973, and in Bulgaria in 1990. Or, maybe, 
the Serbs will be taught how to destroy and set fire to a Parliament 
building? That was tried in Sofia in 1997. There are many ways to destabilize 
a Balkan country, but the specialists from beyond the ocean don't rack their 
brains uselessly or rely on imagination. They strictly follow tried and true 
methods - it's all modular, plug and play.. If it worked before, use it 
again. This style of work is a matter of principle with the Great Spies. 

It seems that for the U.S.A., Latin America has moved to the Balkans. And 
Bulgaria's ruling men and women are now no more than puppets of the same type 
as those colonels whom Washington used with such gusto when they colonized 
south of the Panama Canal. The sad thing is that both our rulers and we 
ourselves know full well what lies in store for those who serve as puppets 
and go-betweens in the US elite's dirty game... 

-- 'The Monitor' 8-28-00

Otpor: The Message Isn't Hidden Anymore

According to the Bulgarian nesspaper, 'Monitor', the Yugoslav group, Otpor, 
is being trained by the CIA to provoke and destabilize Yugoslavia.

What exactly is this Otpor? What are its beliefs? Does it have a program?

Otpor lists some demands on its website: "Free University; Free elections; 
Free media." These demands suggest Otpor opposes the Yugoslav status quo. But 
what does Otpor stand for?

Clicking on "Who we are" doesn't help. Other than attacking Slobodan 
Milosevich, the closest Otpor gets to a position statement is a discussion of 
its cartoon-like symbol: 

"The symbol of the student RESISTANCE is the clenched fist.. The fist itself 
is conceived as the symbol of individual initiative, that the time and energy 
of every single person should be invested to bring about change. This symbol 
of personal courage was born with the first public manifestation of 
RESISTANCE, a leaflet called "Bite the System". (our emphasis)

Where's the beef?

Aside from a vaguely free market-ish reference to "every single person" being 
"invested to bring about change" - what's the program? 

The stenciled image of a clenched fist was first produced during the Harvard 
Strike of 1969. I was a student activist at Harvard. The fist was drawn by 
kids at the Graduate School of Design. It appeared on posters with a very 
clear list of demands: Strike to get the Reserve Officer Training Corps off 
campus; Strike to stop the expansion of the Harvard Medical School into 
working class neighborhoods. (Harvard was evicting people from their homes.) 
And so on. You could agree or disagree, but there was no ambiguity.

Does Otpor merely posture, imitating symbols of student protests past? Or is 
there a hidden message?

Sometimes you can find the message hidden in the details. Otpor's outlook 
emerges clearly when it describes its actions. The title of one of their web 
pages is: "Hey, Chief, when are you going to Hague?" 

'The Hague' refers to the War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia. The 'Chief', of 
course, is Milosevich.

Here's the text:

"On August 8th, 1999 OTPOR! activists in Nis held a birthday 'celebration' 
for president Slobodan Milosevic. The protesters (over 2000 citizens of Nis) 
had a chance to write down their birthday wishes on a big birthday-card 
located next to the main stage. One of the OTPOR! Activists received presents 
on behalf of president Milosevic. The presents included a one way ticket to 
Hague, prisoner cover-all's, books written by Mira Markovic (his wife), 
handcuffs, and a big red-star shaped cake. The cake was later given away to 
the protestors."

Ahh, now we're getting somewhere. 

The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the ICTY (War Crimes Tribunal) is 
based on claims that Yugoslav forces under his command committed war crimes 
in Kosovo. This of course is the heart of NATO's justification for the 78 
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. We have argued that these accusations 
are lies. We awaiting refutation. We have asked one of the accusers, Noam 
Chomsky, to provide evidence. We grow older; we wait.

We at Emperor's Clothes have studied the evidence and we conclude: it was 
NATO, not Yugoslavia which committed war crimes in Kosovo. We conclude: the 
ICTY's purpose is to blame the victim and thereby blunt opposition to NATO. 
If someone can prove we're wrong, we'll drop the issue. We defend truth, not 
war criminals.

It is impossible (or at least grotesquely unprincipled) to support the 
indictment of Milosevich unless one also supports the justification for that 
indictment, NATO's claim that Serbian forces deliberately murdered civilians 
in the village of Racak and elsewhere.

Indeed, the indictment was brought in order to provide the Western mass media 
with talking points to justify the attack on Yugoslavia.

Given Otpor's support for the War Crimes Tribunal, which is truly hated in 
Yugoslavia for its Star Chamber methods, (2) it's clearly anti-Serb purpose 
and its open control by and dependence on NATO (3), how much support could 
Otpor have in Yugoslavia?

I would suggest Otpor has precious little support inside Yugoslavia, but it 
is looked at with misty eyes by some people in the Serbian Diaspora, who are 
torn between opposition to NATO and to Milosevich, and also by certain 
non-Serbs, such as the editors of Z magazine, who profess opposition to NATO 
policy while arguing that Yugoslavia is guilty of war crimes.

Otpor appeals to these rather different groups precisely because it combines 
symbols of rebellion with vagueness of demands and ambiguity about who is 
guilty in Yugoslavia - the West and its proxy forces or "the Milosevich 
regime". 

By the way, why is the Yugoslav government more of a 'regime' than any other 
government? Yugoslav political life certainly allows a greater divergence of 
opinion than, for example, the US where neither of the two main candidates 
for President seems to be aware that the US bombed a sovereign country for 78 
days, or that the US is sponsoring the slaughter of civilians in Colombia. 
What major newspaper in the US has allowed the antiwar opposition to publish 
its side? Indeed, the percentage of Yugoslavs who voted for the different 
parties in Yugoslavia's governing coalition is probably as high as or higher 
than the percentage of US voters who vote for anyone in US presidential 
elections. But nobody talks about 'the Clinton regime' do they?

Getting back to Otpor, what kind of people would help the bombers of their 
country divert blame to their country's leaders and people? Because clearly, 
if Milosevich is a new Hitler, as Mr. Clinton wants us to believe, then 
wouldn't that make the Serbs the new Nazis? What is the word for someone who 
betrays his own people while they are under attack?

Perhaps the fact that the CIA is apparently training Otpor in Sofia will 
clarify things for people who are fooled by Otpor's image. Hopefully they 
will realize that Otpor's purpose is to take provocative actions in concert 
with US covert agents inside and outside Yugoslavia, especially around the 
upcoming elections. All the better if this forces the Yugoslav government to 
crack down. Such a crackdown, no matter if justified, could be portrayed by 
the Western media as proof that "the Milosevich regime" is dictatorial. The 
aim: to weaken antiwar feeling among ordinary people and to confuse some 
members of the Serbian Diaspora and some non-Serbs in the antiwar movement. 
The intended effect: toprevent organized opposition to NATO attacks on 
Yugoslavia. 

It is most important that the antiwar movement expose this game. The CIA is 
apparently once more illegally meddling in Yugoslavia's internal affairs. 
These misguided young people are being used as a foil.

Or perhaps they are being used as a decoy. Maybe the CIA is training Otpor to 
be a good, wooden decoy, constructed to ambush a duck.

Maybe the hunter is NATO. Let's expose the trap.

- Jared Israel, 9-8-00

Further reading:

(1) On July 29, 1999 the US Senate held hearings on how to most effectively 
use the Serbian 'opposition' to effect US plans in Yugoslavia. Go to 
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hearin.htm

(2) 'Back to the dark ages?' at 
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/bac.htm

An Impartial Tribunal? Really? at 
http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/Impartial.htm

If you find emperors-clothes useful, we can use your help... 

(The Soros Foundation does NOT fund Emperors Clothes.) 

We rely on volunteer labor and donations. Our expenses include: Internet 
fees, Lexis, our Internet research tool, and phone bills. We use the phone a 
lot for interviews and to discuss editorial changes. 

Every month hundreds of thousands of people read articles from Emperor's 
Clothes. By making a contribution you will be helping to spread the word.

To make a donation, please mail a check to Emperor's Clothes, P.O. Box 
610-321, Newton, MA 02461-0321. (USA) 

Thanks for reading and for helping! 

www.tenc.net
[Emperor's Clothes]



From Postmaster at altcity.com  Fri Sep  8 16:03:17 2000
From: Postmaster at altcity.com (Postmaster at altcity.com)
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Subject: [CrashList] [BLACK-LEFT] Publication
Message-ID: <E13XWEv-0007V3-00@lists.wwpublish.com>

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-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~>
BTW: Did you buy that new car yet?
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Freedom Schooling=20
By Grace Lee Boggs=20

Michigan Citizen Newspaper, 8/20/2000

At the June meeting of the Black Radical Congress in Detroit, conferees=20
delegates decided to launch a campaign for =E2=80=9CEducation, not Incarcer=
ation.=E2=80=9D=20

That means we have to redefine what we mean by Education. We can=E2=80=99t =
possibly=20
mean the present system which is widely recognized as responsible for so ma=
ny=20
of our young people ending up in prison.=20

For example, at the Back to Basics Community Convention held in Detroit on=
=20
Saturday, May 6, the Education Task Force passed the following resolution:=
=20

WHEREAS the current educational system has been organized to fail 50% of ou=
r=20
young people, many of whom end up in prison, and=20

WHEREAS the current system does not develop critical thinking or build=20
community.=20

BE IT RESOLVED=20

1. That we create a community curriculum that will empower our children to=
=20
recognize the truth from untruth and develop the ability to assess=20
information for=20
the best possible solution for themselves and for the community; and=20

2. That we develop tutorial programs that will implement a community=20
curriculum that=20
includes remediation but emphasizes critical thinking and empowering=20
children to=20
make a difference.=20

Today=E2=80=99s schools build addicts and prepare our children for prison b=
ecause=20
they teach passivity whereas what our children need most is a sense of=20
themselves as change agents and decision makers. Our children need not only=
=20
academics but character building.=20

To appreciate their neighborhoods and understand their environment.=20

To be developed as whole persons with manual, mental, social and=20
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To become resourceful and independent thinkers.=20

To see themselves in the context of community and practice what enhances=20
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To recognize their worth because their input makes a difference.=20

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=20
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be=20
empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. To bring about a kind =
of=20
=E2=80=9Cmental revolution,=E2=80=9D reading, writing and speaking skills w=
ere taught=20
through the discussion of black history, the power structure and building a=
=20
Movement to struggle against it. Everyone took this basic =E2=80=9Ccivics=
=E2=80=9D course=20
and then chose from more academic subjects, like algebra and chemistry.=20

All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns=
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This is the kind of Freedom Schooling that we need today.=20

<<http://www.boggscenter.org/>>


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From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep  9 00:26:10 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 07:26:10 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Ted Trainer essay 1of2
Message-ID: <003b01c01a26$dfe3c6a0$c3348cd4@ngjones>

WE MUST MOVE TO

THE  SIMPLER WAY:

  AN OUTLINE OF THE GLOBAL SITUATION, THE SUSTAINABLE ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY,
AND THE TRANSITION TO IT.


       Ted Trainer
           Faculty of Arts, University of N.S.W.


Increasing numbers of people recognise that our industrial-affluent-consumer
society is riddled with problems.  It is  unjust and above all it is
ecologically unsustainable.    Just about all social and economic problems
are getting worse and measures show that the quality of life is falling now.
The argument below is that these problems cannot be solved in  a society
that is driven by obsession with high rates of production and consumption,
affluent living standards, market forces, the profit motive and economic
growth.  A sustainable and just world order cannot be achieved until we
undertake radical change in our lifestyles, values and systems, especially
in our economic system.  There are now many people in many groups around the
world working for a  transition to The Simpler Way.

   CONSIDER THE PROBLEMS FACING US

 - Inequality is extreme and getting worse. One-fifth of the world's  people
receive 86% of all income while one-fifth receive only  1.5%.   Even in the
rich world there is rapid polarisation now towards a small  rich class and a
large poor class.  Many in the middle classes are  being  squeezed by work
stress,  downsizing and insecurity and the  high costs of housing, medicine,
law etc.

 - Debt throughout the world is alarmingly high, and has been  increasing at
three times the rate at which our capacity to pay it off is  increasing!
(Clairmont, 1996, p. 29.)  The total American debt in the  late 1990s is
around $15,000,000,000,000.  Rising even faster than  debt are the interest
payments due on debt.  One-fifth of the American  GDP is now required to pay
interest on debt; i.e., Americans now work  about one day in five just to
pay interest to the  very few who lend  money. (In America about half the
capital is owned by .5% of the  people. )  Such debt trends cannot continue
for very long.

 - Rural decline is a vast tragedy in most countries.  This economy  does
not need many people on the land.  It is cheaper to produce food  on
automated agribusiness farms, or in Third World plantations for   dirt cheap
wages.  Country  towns are dying.   Australia's rural debt  multiplied by
about 10 in the 1980s.

 - Foreign ownership of the Australian economy is now extreme.  It
multiplied by 6 in the 1980s.

 - The Australian Foreign Debt is huge, and growing.  It multiplied by 6  in
the 1980.

 - Unemployment in Australia would probably be double the official rate  if
properly measured.

 - Public services and enterprises are being lost.   We are rapidly
becoming  much poorer with respect to our schools, railways,  libraries,
aged care, health services, welfare systems etc., because  governments are
drastically cutting their spending in these areas.

 - Conditions and hours of work are deteriorating.  The average work  week
is rising, many are working long periods of overtime (much of it  without
pay), and workers rights and conditions are being driven  back.  There has
been a large increase in the number of  casual jobs.

 - Even real wages are falling.   The real wage for 80% of American  workers
has been falling for 20 years.

 - Social problems are getting worse.  Twenty years ago virtually all
social problems were much less serious; consider drug abuse,  homelessness,
stress and depression, violence, insecurity and    mental illness.  The
suicide rate for young males in Australia has   doubled in a generation.

 - The Third World problem is immense and getting worse.  The  poorest one
third of the world's  people  are actually getting poorer.  (U.N., 1996.

 - The global environmental problem is getting worse.  This is a direct
consequence of the affluent lifestyles and the obsession with  economic
growth that are built into the foundations of our society.

 -  We work far too hard!    We produce much more than would be   necessary
to provide  a high quality of life for all, yet we are driven all  the time
to be more productive and efficient and competitive.  We have  worked harder
and increased productivity and national wealth...but we  are getting poorer!

 - Measures of the quality of life are falling.    Measures such as the
"Genuine Progress Indicator"  are falling in Australia and Britain, and  in
the US have fallen for 20 years.

 - The decline of civic culture.  A generation ago there was more  concern
with things like the public good, social justice, a  fair go, public
service, the  welfare of all and   maintaining  the standards  essential for
a good society.  Now the emphasis is on insecure  individuals  striving to
advance their own welfare, in competition with  each other.   This is the
cultural damage the emphasis on the free  market economic ideology has
caused.   It is now a  more mean,  selfish, greedy, callous and competitive
culture than it was a  generation ago.  Not only is the emphasis on making
it as an  individual, there is  declining sympathy for those who do not make
it.   In fact the unemployed and the poor are attacked and punished rather
than seen as victims suffering social injustice.

This all adds to a far from a satisfactory situation.  Our society does not
provide well for all.  In fact it probably  only serves 40% of people in the
rich countries.  (Fotopoulos, 1997.)  We have a socio-economic system that
is not providing well for more than about 10% of the people in the world,
and is reducing the real living standards and the quality of life of many
even within the richest countries.  It has condemned the poorest one-third
of humanity to terrible conditions, which cause the death of 30,000 children
every day.

THE CAUSES; THE BASIC MISTAKES.

The argument  below is that there are two major faults built into our
society which are causing the  main problems facing us.  The first is
allowing competition within the market to be the major determinant of what
is done in our society.  The second and even more important mistake is the
obsession with affluent living standards and economic growth; i.e., the
insistence on high and ever-increasing levels of production and consumption.

            Fault 1:  THE MARKET.

Markets do some things  well  and in a satisfactory and sustainable society
there could be a considerable role for them, but only if carefully
controlled.  It is easily shown that the market system is responsible for
most of the deprivation and suffering in the world.  The basic mechanisms
are most clearly seen when we consider what is happening in the Third World.

The enormous amount of poverty and suffering in the Third World is not due
to lack of resources.  There is for instance sufficient food and land to
provide for all.  The problem is that these resources are not distributed at
all well.  Why not?  The answer is that this is the way the market economy
inevitably works.

The global economy is a market system and in a market scarce things always
go mostly to the rich, e.g. to those who can bid most for them.  That's why
we in rich countries get most of the oil produced.  It is also why more than
500 million tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year,
over one-third of total world grain production while perhaps 1 billion
people are malnourished.

Even more important is the fact that the market system inevitably brings
about inappropriate development in the Third World, i.e., development of the
wrong industries.  It will lead to the development of the most profitable
industries, as distinct from those that are most necessary or appropriate.
As a result there has been much development of plantations and factories in
the Third World that will produce things for local rich people or for export
to rich countries.  Their cities have freeways and international airports.
But there is little or no development of the industries that are most needed
by the poorest 80% of their people.  The third World's productive capacity,
its land and labour, are drawn into producing for the benefit of others.

These are inevitable consequences of an economic system in which what it
done is whatever is most profitable to the few who own capital, as distinct
from what is most needed by people or their ecosystems.  The Third World
problem will never be solved as long as we allow these economic principles
to determine development and to deliver most of the world's wealth to the
rich.  The development taking place is mostly development in the interests
of the transnational corporations, the Third World rich, and consumers in
rich world supermarkets.  Consequently conventional Third World development
can be seen as a form of legitimised plunder. ( Goldsmith, 1997,
Chussudowsky, 1997, Rist, 1997, Swhwarz and Schwarz, 1998.)

Rich countries could not have their high living standards if the global
economy was not enabling them to take far more than their fair share of
world wealth and to deprive Third world people.  We can go to supermarkets
to buy the coffee from land that should have been producing food for Third
World people.  Rich countries support many repressive regimes willing to
keep their countries to policies that benefit the rich countries and the
ruling classes in poor countries.  (For an outline of contemporary
imperialism, see Trainer, 1989, Chapter 6.)

Since 1980 the most powerful mechanism gearing the Third World to the
interests of the rich have been the Structural Adjustment Packages of the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  When Third World countries
get into impossible debt problems these agencies agree to grant new loans
etc, but only on condition that they accept fundamental changes.  These are
conventional economic strategies designed to cut costs and increase income
and therefore "get the economy going again and become more able to pay off
the debt.  The changes enforced are delightful for the corporations and
banks of the rich countries, e.g., increasing freedom for market forces and
access for rich world corporations to the country's resources and labour,
devaluing its currency and therefore reducing export prices and increasing
import prices, settling more favourable conditions for foreign investors,
especially enabling them to buy up the country's bankrupt firms.  The
consequences for most people are devastating.  Most are pushed into much
worse conditions than they had before.  The economy is literally dismantled,
and reassembled largely in the hands of foreign corporations.

It is likely that the Third World will accelerate into squalor and chaos
from here on.  The progress made between 1950 and 1980 is now being
reversed.  The United Nations concluded that 1.6 billion people, one third
of all the world's people, are getting poorer. (U.N., 1996.)  The market
system is now giving the corporations and banks much more freedom and power
than ever before to develop in the Third World only those industries that
will maximise their profits. Poor countries will have to compete more
fiercely against each other to sell their commodities or labour, and many
countries will simply be ignored and dumped.  (For example most of Africa
and the Pacific countries have no possibility of competing against the rest
to win any export markets.)

 Thus the Third World problem shows how grossly unsatisfactory and unjust
the world market system is.  It allows investment, jobs, incomes etc to flow
to where the most profit can be made, it ignores the rest, it draws the
productive capacity the poor once had into producing for the rich, it uses
up Third World forests etc at negligible benefit to Third World people, and
it devastates the environment.  There is no possibility of satisfactory
Third World development until the rich countries stop hogging far more than
their fair share of the world's resources, until development and
distribution cease to be determined by market forces, and therefore until we
develop a very different global economic system.

The same mechanisms are the basic causes of the main social problems of the
richest countries, although the effects are less glaring than in the Third
World.  An economy driven by profit within the market is greatly enriching
the few and depriving increasing numbers.


   Market relations destroy social relations

The government's top priority is to stimulate more production for sale;
i.e., to do to  whatever will enable businesses to sell more. This means
that  relatively few resources are devoted to building supportive
communities, and providing well for less skilled or able people.  Many  who
can't compete well are dumped into poverty and despair, which has damaging
effects on social cohesion.

More importantly,  the more attention that is given to economic goals the
more that  the values and concerns that are crucial for a good society are
driven out.  There cannot be a satisfactory society unless people put
considerable value on things like the public good, the welfare of all,
social justice and the situation of less fortunate people.  However in a
market situation you have to be concerned only with your own advantage;
i.e., with self interest.  There is no incentive to think and behave
cooperatively or to focus on what is good for society.  The more we
commercialise all aspects of life, the more space buying and selling take up
in our lives, the more we have to deal in a market place to get what we
want, then the less attention we give to social values, such as concern for
the welfare of others or for the public good. We should not be surprised
that our society is more selfish, competitive, mean, indifferent and callous
than it was a generation ago, nor that the goal for many is to get what they
can rather than to contribute.

The economic historian Polanyi  stressed how misguided it is for a society
to allow the market to be as dominant as it is in our society.  (Dalton,
1968)  No society previous to ours has done this.  Polanyi insisted that
unless market forces are under tight social control they will destroy
society and its ecosystems; everything will be open to sale for maximum
profit.


   Fault 2: THE LIMITS TO GROWTH

There is an even more important and alarming mistake built into the
foundations of our society.  This is the  commitment to an
affluent-industrial-consumer lifestyle and to an economy that must have
constant and limitless growth in output.  Our levels of production and
consumption are far too high to be kept up for very long and could never be
extended to all people.  We are rapidly depleting resources and damaging the
environment.  We can only achieve present "living standards" because we few
in rich countries are grabbing most of the resources produced and therefore
depriving most of the world's people of a fair share.  Because we consume so
much we cause huge ecological damage.  Our way of life is grossly
unsustainable.

Yet we are obsessed with economic growth, i.e., with increasing production
and consumption, as much as possible and without limit!

If this "limits to growth" analysis is valid we must work for eventual
transition to ways of life and to an economy that will enable all to have a
high quality of life on far lower levels of resource consumption.  (It will
be argued below that such ways are available, and attractive, and easily
developed if enough of us want to adopt them.)

Following are some of the main points that support limits to growth
conclusions. (For more detail see Trainer, 1995a, 1998, 1999.)

Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world's people, are consuming
about three quarters of the world's resource production.  Our per capita
consumption is about 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the world's
people.   World population will probably stabilise around 10 billion,
somewhere after 2060.  If all those people were to have Australian per
capita resource consumption, then world production of all resources would
have to be 8 to 10 times as great as it is now.   If we tried to raise
present world production to that level by 2060 we would by then have
completely exhausted all probably recoverable resources of one third of the
basic mineral items we use.  All probably recoverable resources of coal,
oil, gas, tar sand and shale oil, and uranium (via burner reactors) would
have been exhausted by 2045.

Petroleum is especially limited.  The recent Petroconsultants Report
(Campbell, 1994.)   concludes that world oil supply will probably peak by
2010 and be down to half that level by 2025, with big price increases soon
after the peak.  If all the people we will have on earth by 2025 were to
have Australia's present per capita oil consumption world oil production
would have to be 15 times what it will probably be then.

If all 1o billion people were to use timber at the rich world per capita
rate we would need 3.5 times the world's present forest area.  If all 10
billion were to have a rich world diet, which takes about 1 ha of land to
produce, we would need 10 billion ha of food producing land.  But there is
only 1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today and this is not likely to
increase.

Recent "Footprint" analysis estimates that it takes at least 4.5-5 ha of
productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one
person living in a rich world city.  (Wachernagel and Rees, 1995.)   So if
10 billion people were to live as we do in Sydney we would need about 50
billion ha of productive land.  But that is 7 times all the productive land
on the planet.

These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the
conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to the living
standards we take for granted today in rich countries like Australia.  We
can only live like this because we are taking and using up most of the
scarce resources, and preventing most of the world's people from having
anything like a fair share.  Therefore we can't morally endorse our way of
life.  We must accept the need to move to far simpler and less
resource-expensive ways.

But what about nuclear energy?

If you think we can solve these problems using nuclear energy then you are
assuming about 1000 times the world's present reactor capacity (before fusio
n power can be developed, assuming that's possible.)  They would mostly have
to be breeder reactors, with about 1 million tonnes of Plutonium in
circulation, and more than 25 worn out reactors to be buried every day.  In
any case reactors only produce electricity and that only makes up 17% of
rich world energy use.

What about solar and wind energy?

We must eventually move from fossil fuels to the use of renewable energy,
but it is not likely that we can all live in energy affluent ways on those
energy forms.  (For the detail see Trainer, 1995c.) This is because there
are large energy losses in converting sunlight into electricity and then
into a storable form, such as hydrogen, in transporting the energy to cold
northern American or European countries, and then converting it back to
electricity.  At present efficiencies less than 5% of the solar energy
collected in Sahara desert solar plants would be delivered as electricity in
northern Europe in winter.  The cost of a solar plant would probably be 50
times as much as a coal fired plant in Europe that would deliver the same
amount of electricity (and twice that when interest charges on the money
borrowed to build the plant is taken into account).

There are similar problems with wind energy, especially the fact that there
is always a probability that at some point in time all mills will be idle.
This limits this source even in high wind areas to providing only about
one-quarter of the electricity needed. (Grubb and Meyer, 1993.)

There is far too little available biomass to provide liquid fuel for the
world's present car fleet.  If 10 billion people were to have cars at the
American per capita rate, 10 times as much fuel would be needed.  To produce
fuel for one car would take as much land as would feed 9 people. (Pimentel,
et al., 1984.)

Certainly we should be developing renewable energy sources as fast as we
can, but more important is developing ways of living well on per capita
levels of energy use that are a small fraction of those we have now.

The environment problem

The reason why we have an environment problem is simply because  there is
far too much producing and consuming going on.  (For the detailed argument
see Trainer, 1998.)

Our way of life involves  the consumption of huge amounts of materials.
More than 20 tonnes of new materials are used by each American every year.
To produce one tonne of materials can involve moving or using up 15 tonnes
of water, earth or air.   (For gold the multiple is 350,000 to 1!).  All
this must be taken from nature and most of it is immediately dumped back as
waste and pollution.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that in order to
stop the carbon content of the atmosphere from rising any further we must
reduce the use of fossil fuels by 60-80%.  If we did cut it by 60% and
shared the remaining energy among 11 billion people, each of us would get
only 1/18 of the amount we now use in Australia per capita.  Most people
have no idea of how far beyond sustainable levels we are, and how big the
reductions will have to be.

The Worldwatch Institute's annual figures seem to show that we are reaching
plateaus in many indices of biological and agricultural productivity,
including world grain production, cropland area, irrigated land,
experimental farm yields, and fertiliser use.  World fish catch seems to be
going down.  Even a decade ago they concluded that "The biological
productivity of the planet is declining now."  (Brown, 1990, p. 7.)  Yet we
are feeding only 1 billion people well, and will probably soon have to feed
11 billion.

One of the most serious environmental problems is the extinction of plants
and animal species.  This is due to the destruction of habitats.  Now
remember the footprint concept mentioned above;  if all people living on
earth today were to have rich world "living standards" humans would have to
use three times all the productive land on the planet.  Clearly our resource
intensive lifestyles , which require so much land, are the basic cause of
the loss of habitats and the extinction of species.

Agriculture

Some of the most unsustainable aspects of our society are to do with our
agriculture.  It is dependent on heavy inputs of energy.  It loses soil to
erosion (5 tonnes lost per person per year, about 15 times the weight of
the food we eat).  It damages the soil through the use of chemicals and
pesticides, and it fails to recycle nutrients back to the soil.  Many
civilisations have collapsed because they depleted their soils.  We cannot
recycle nutrients unless we have a localised agriculture, in which food is
grown very close to where people live.  In other words industrialised
agriculture is not sustainable.

Conflict

If all nations go on trying to increase their wealth, production,
consumption and "living standards" without limit in a world of limited
resources, then  we must expect increasing conflict.  Our affluent
lifestyles require us to be heavily armed and aggressive, in order to guard
the empires from which we draw  more than our fair share of resources.  We
cannot expect to achieve a peaceful world until we achieve a just world, and
we cannot do that until rich countries change to much less extravagant
living standards.







From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep  9 00:34:59 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 07:34:59 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: US presses Opec to increase oil output
Message-ID: <006301c01a28$1ab298a0$c3348cd4@ngjones>

By Gerard Baker in Washington and Philip Coggan in London
Published: September 8 2000 18:43GMT | Last Updated: September 8 2000
23:30GMT



The US has stepped up pressure on OPEC to deliver a large increase in oil
output at Sunday's meeting of ministers of the petroleum exporting countries
with a warning that it was "ready to exercise all options" if there was no
agreement.
[so much for market forces then]

Bill Richardson, energy secretary, said the world needed lower oil prices
and warned OPEC leaders that President Bill Clinton was prepared to act to
help bring them about.

But the energy secretary declined to say whether the Clinton administration
would release oil from the 570m barrel US strategic reserve in an effort to
depress prices should the meeting in Vienna fail to produce a significant
increase in production quotas.

Congress has been pressing the administration to lend oil from the reserve
but administration officials have so far refused on the grounds that it
would be a misuse of the supply, which is intended only for genuine
strategic emergencies. Mr Richardson's open-ended threat on Friday was
clearly an attempt to turn up the heat on OPEC without committing to such a
controversial move.

The oil price slipped back on Friday as Opec ministers gathering in Vienna
made reassuring noises about the cartel's willingness to increase
production. October Brent crude dropped more than a dollar to $33.19 by
mid-afternoon in London.

Traders remain cautious, however, about the scope for oil to fall back to
Opec's target range of $22-$28 a barrel given low stock levels and the
delays involved in getting extra production to the key US market.

Protests in Europe gathered pace as farmers and truckers in Britain copied
some of the tactics used in France during the dispute. A Shell oil refinery
in northwest England was picketed while farmers and hauliers in south west
Wales were preparing to mount a copycat protest at refineries run by Texaco
and Total Fina at Milford Haven.

In France, the dispute rumbled on. While the government appeared to have
persuaded truckers' leaders to accept a deal based on limited cuts in fuel
taxes and a compensation system to offset future price rises, many truckers
vowed to continue the conflict. Only a handful of blockades were reported to
have been lifted by the evening.

In the US, high prices for petrol and home heating fuel have become an issue
of growing importance in the presidential election campaign. Al Gore, the
vice president and Democratic candidate, has attacked petroleum companies
and his Republican opponent, George W Bush, for his connections to the oil
industry.

The Republicans meanwhile have criticised the administration for failing to
tackle OPEC's production squeeze last year. Their attacks have been blunted
somewhat, however by the fact that Dick Cheney, the party's vice
presidential candidate, called for sharp reductions in oil production last
year while he was chief executive of Halliburton, the energy services
company.

Equity markets continued their sell-off in part because of fears that higher
oil prices would hit corporate profits. The CAC 40 in Paris fell 1.9 per
cent, the DAX in Frankfurt was 1.6 per cent lower in late trading and in
London the FTSE 100 fell 88.5, or 1.3 per cent, to 6,600.7. The US equity
market also lost ground in early trading in the face of profit warnings from
automotive group TRW and semiconductor equipment maker SpeedFam-Ipec.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep  9 00:25:57 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 07:25:57 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Ted Trainer essay 2of2
Message-ID: <003801c01a26$dc0701a0$c3348cd4@ngjones>


The absurdly impossible implications of economic growth.

The foregoing argument has been that the present levels of production and
consumption are quite unsustainable.  They are too  high to be kept going
for long or to be extended to all people.  But we are determined to increase
present living standards and levels of output and consumption, as much as
possible and without any end in sight.  Few people seem to recognise the
absurdly impossible consequences of pursing economic growth.

 If we have a 3% p.a. increase in output, by 2060 we will be producing 8
times as much every year.  (For 4% growth the multiple is 16.)  If by then
all 10 billion  people expected had risen to the living standards we would
have then, the total world economic output would be more than 100 times what
it is today!  Yet the present level is unsustainable.  (For a 4% p.a. growth
rate the multiple is 220.  In the 1980s Australia had a 3.2% p.a. growth
rate, which was not sufficient to prevent virtually all our problems
becoming worse.)


    Globalisation

We have entered a period in which all these problems will rapidly
accelerate, because of the globalisation of the economy.  Since 1970 the
world economic system has run into crisis.  It has become much more
difficult for corporations and banks to invest their constantly accumulating
volumes of capital profitably.  One consequence has been the rise of "casino
capitalism"; frantic speculative investment gambling on stock markets,
takeovers, futures and derivatives.

Thus the big corporations and banks are now pushing through a massive
restructuring of the global economy, the development of a unified system in
which they have swept away all the arrangements which previously hindered
their access to increased business opportunities, markets, resources and
cheap labour.  The pressure is on governments to remove the protection,
tariffs and controls which they once used to manage, regulate, stimulate and
protect their economies, and to sell government enterprises to the
corporations, to cut government services, to reduce taxes on corporations,
and above all to increase the freedom for market forces; i.e., the freedom
for corporations to operate.  These changes are enabling the transnational
corporations to come in and take advantage of more business opportunities.
The dominant neo-liberal ideology asserts that it is supremely important to
"free market forces.  The emphasis is therefore on deregulation, freeing
trade and investment, privatising and reducing government activity.

 A huge critical literature now explains how these changes are devastating
the lives of millions of people, especially in the Third World, and their
economies and ecosystems, but they are a delight to the corporations and
banks. The changes eliminate the arrangements which used to ensure that many
little people could sell and work and trade, and that local resources such
as land  would produce things they needkl.  Now the corporations are able to
take over all those opportunities to increase their sales.  Globalisation is
basically a gigantic takeover of economic activity by the big corporation s
and banks.  It can reduce csts of goods bought by consumers in rich
countries, but it is impoverishing millions of peple and preventing
governments from controlling development.  Develpment is now  little more
what the corporations want developed.

Why do governments willingly go along with these "economic rationalist"
policies? They have no choice if they are to survive in a globalised
economy.  Governments must seek to cut production costs, free corporations
to do more business, make national exports cheaper and more competitive, and
attract more foreign investment in order to "get the economy going again."
If the  government doesn't do these things the country will not survive in
the increasingly open and competitive global economic.  It will not attract
foreign investment; its credit rating will be dropped so the cost of
borrowing capital will rise, and its exports will not be able to compete in
the global market.

The corporations' most powerful weopen is their mobility.  If a country
tries to tax or control them they will  leave and invest somewhere else.
Thus countries compete against each other in a "race to the bottom" to
attract corporate foreign investment.


Globalisation will  oblige Australian workers to compete against the lowest
paid workers in the world.  Because the freedom of trade is now of supreme
importance, governments will not be able to ban imports of goods produced in
environmentally unacceptable ways or unsafe conditions, or goods containing
pesticides, or to make woodchip companies pay for replanting, because these
steps would be regarded as infringements on the sacred freedom of trade.
Governments are increasingly unable to govern, because the real control over
economic affairs and conditions is in the hands of transnational
corporations and banks and World Trade Organisation officials.

Corporations are able to minimise their tax payments.  They avoid much tax
through "transfer payments".  Governments must lower taxes on corporations
or the corporations will locate their plants in some other country.  (Half
the transnational corporations with branches in Australia pay no tax at
all!)  Therefore governments have drastically cut state spending; they can't
collect much tax from corporations and if they try to the corporations will
take their investment somewhere else.  Tax burdens are being shifted from
corporations to workers, and state spending on welflare, education, health
etc., is being dramatically reduced.

Globalisation constitutes a crushing triumph for the corporations, the banks
and the rich.  Inequality is rapidly worsening; a few are becoming much
richer, the poor are becoming poorer and even the middle classes of the rich
countries are being hollowed out.  The new rules the World Trade
Organisation is trying to bring in to guarantee freedom of investment  are
almost the final blatant grab that will deliver just about everything that's
left to the corporations and banks.  The prospect is alarming; we are
rapidly heading towards a world run by a few corporations, doing only
whatever suits their shareholders.

Hence we have the absurd situation where Australia could be running its own
economy at a relaxed pace to give all people a high quality of life,
importing only a few necessities and securely in control of our own fate,
but instead we must work harder, accept reduced wages and the takeover of
our economy by foreign firms, and complete more furiously to export ...
while all other countries are locked into the same frantic struggle.

Bodies like the World Trade organisation are now trying to build these
powers into the rules of world trade and investment, binding all nations.
At present a corporation has great power to force a country to accept the
conditions it wants in its specific negotiations with that country, but what
they are pushing for now are rules which all countries must follow, giving
corporations almost complete freedom to do what they like without having to
negotiate with each country in turn.  The proposals include few if any rules
restricting the ability of corporations to disadvantage workers, damage the
environment, distort regional development or contravene  human rights.

Globalisation is literally the corporate take over of the planet, to be run
in the interests oft he corporations.  Note that some aspects of
globalisation, such as the internet, are desirable, but the limits to growth
analysis shows that a sustainable world order cannot be highly globalised
economically; there will not be sufficient energy and resources or all that
transport and trade.

    The Social Effects.

Because of this corporate presure to reduce the power and activity of
government, and the power to avoid paying tax governments are drasically
cutting their spending on welfare, which is  increasing the deprivation and
suffering of large numbers of poorer people.  Governments no longer have
full employment as an important  goal.  The main role of government now is
to provide the conditions for business prosperity.  Consequently we are
seeing  increasing social breakdown, stress, drug abuse, suicide, decay of
communities, rural decline and loss of social cohesion.  Attitudes to the
poor, homelss and umeployed are hardening. All must focus on competing to
succeed as a self-interested aggressive entrepreneur, and not to expect much
assistance from the state.  Public institutions like museums and even
universities are are expected to operate like corporations that must sell to
customers and make a profit.  This is seriously damaging public spirit and
social solidarity.

It has become a winner-take-all society.  The rich, including the
upper-middle class which does the top managerial and legal work for the
corporations , and the professionals, are rapidly increasing their wealth
and have no interest in calling for change.  Inequality and polarisation are
accelerating.  The state has ceased to be concerned with redistribution of
wealth.  The outrageous looting evident in bank fees, corporate executive
salaries, legal and professional fees, cheap sell-offs of public assets,
take place with little complaint.

All this is sociologically appalling.  You cannot have a satisfactory
society made up of competitive, self-intereted individuals!  In a
satisfactory society here must be considerable concern for the public good
and the welfare of all, and there must be considerable collective social
control and regulation and provision, to make sure all are looked after, and
to reinforce the sense of social solidarity whereby all feel willing to
contribute to the good of all.

Yet there is no dissent!  Captalism has never been more secure from threat.
There is no opposition to what is happening from the working class or the
middle class.  These have been seduced into docility and willing compliance
in consumer society by the promise of ever-rising "living standards".  There
is discontent, there is grumbling, but there is no focused resistance let
alone pressure for system change.  The media's obsession with trivia,
spectacles and sport distract and eliminate any capacity to focus on what
really matters and thereby maintains the massive stupification that leaves
the nelo-liberal agenda unhindered.

The self-indulgent acdemic and "intellectual" ranks have more or less
refused to concern themselves with the massive global injustice that
underwrites their priveleges, nor the limits to growth that will soon
terminate them.  Overall consumer society shows a complete inability to
respond to the terrible challenges now facing it.  The ants go diligently to
work each day, dressed in their impeccable new clothes, oblivious to the
30,000 Third World children who will die from deprivation that day, or to
their own grim prospects within 20 years when the oil begins to dry up.
Governments refuse to give any attention to the possibility of limits to
growth.  The lack of awareness and the irrationality are impossible to
comprehend.


        Conclusions on our situation.

What we have seen in the last 20 years is a stunningly successful grab  by
the rich.  Their share of national income is rapidly increasing.  They have
routed the working class.  The Left has been eliminated as a political
force.  Above all they have crushingly won the ideological battle.  The
collapse of communism has been taken to have established that there can be
no sensible alternative to free market capitalism, and that the fundamental,
indeed sole considerations are now "efficiency", individualism and
competition, getting richer, and freedm for market forces.

It should be obvious that the present socio-economic system is extremely
unsatisfactory and cannot solve our problems.  There is no possibility of
having a just and morally satisfactory or ecologically sustainable society
if we allow the economy to be driven by market forces, the profit motive and
economic growth.  In a satisfactory economy the needs of people, society and
the environment would determine what is done, not profit.  (We could have
markets and private enterprise in a good society; see below.)  These
economic faults cannot be remedied without radical change in values and
world views, away from individualistic competition, greed and selfishness.

The present economy gears most productive capacity primarily to the
interests of the rich.  Look at our abundant productive capacity and ask who
is benefiting most from all the work being done and from all  the production
and development.  Ask what is being developed?  Why for example do none of
the resources used to produce houses go into making very cheap but adequate
houses for the thousands of Australians who would like a house of their own.
Ask yourself what developments would make your neighbourhood into a very
pleasant place to live, or make the lives of aged or mentally ill people
more enjoyable, or enable unemployed people to have a worthwhile role?
These are not the things that are being developed.  What is being
developed?  Mostly things that are likely to maximise the income of
corporations and banks, because they are the ones who control and invest
most of the capital and they only invest in the most profitable ventures,
and those are always ventures which produce what richer people want.

 We let what happens in our society be determined by the few who own most of
the capital.  From here on such an economic system will inevitably lead to
more polarisation and more deprivation for the majority, and to more
destruction of the environment.  We cannot achieve a sane, peaceful, just or
sustainable world unless present economic theory and practice are almost
completely scrapped.

We have allowed ourselves to be misled into thinking that we need more
production, more efficiency, more GNP, more science and technology and
harder work.  But we already produce far more than would be necessary to
give a high  quality of life to all, and we work much harder than is
necessary.  We could easily develop a society in which we do much less work
and producing and have much more time to enjoy life, without stress and
insecurity, and knowing that we are not damaging the environment or
depriving the Third World.  We do not need better technology or more GDP to
solve our problems.

Above all it must be stressed how far beyond sustainable levels of
production and consumption we are.  The foregoing  figures show that we must
develop ways of living in which we can have a good quality of life on per
capita resource rates that are a small  fraction of today's rates.

THE ALTERNATIVE: THE SIMPLER WAY

There are now many books and articles dealing with the general form that a
sustainable society must take.  If the foregoing limits to growth analysis
is basically valid some of the key principles for a sustainable society are
clear' and indisputable.  (For a detailed discussion see The Conserver
Society,  Ted Trainer, 1995.)

? Material living standards must be much less affluent.   In a
sustainable society per capita rates of use of resources must   be     a
small fraction of those in Australia today.

? There must be small scale highly self-sufficient local economies.

? There must be mostly   cooperative and participatory local
systems whereby small communities control their own affairs,
independent of the international and global economies.

? There must be much use of alternative technologies, which minimise     the
use of resources.

? A very different economic system must be developed, one not      driven by
market forces or the profit motive, and in which there is no     growth.

The alternative way is The Simpler Way; we can and must all live well with a
much smaller amount of production, consumption, work, resource use, trade,
investment and GNP a than there is now.  This will allow us to escape the
economic treadmill and devote our lives to more important things than
producing and consuming.

    Simpler lifestyles

Living more simply does not mean deprivation or hardship.  It means focusing
on what is sufficient for comfort, hygiene, efficiency etc.  Most of our
basic needs can be met  by quite simple and resource-cheap devices and ways,
compared with those taken for granted and idolised in consumer society.  A
wardrobe sufficient for comfort and acceptable appearance is far less dollar
and resource expensive than one typical of a rich world person.  Compare a
modern car with one that might have been designed to minimise resource use
and to  be repairable, safe and durable.  Modern houses are often palatial.
The more we simplify our ways the more we avoid unnecessary work,
production, resource use and environmental impact.

Living in ways that minimise resource use should not be seen as an irksome
effort that must be made in order to save the planet.  These ways can and
must become important sources of life satisfaction.  We have to come to see
as enjoyable many activities such as  living frugally, recycling, growing
food, making rather than buying, composting, repairing, bottling fruit,
giving old things to others, making things last, and running a relatively
self-sufficient household economy.  The Buddhist goal is a life "simple in
means but rich in ends."

           Local self-sufficiency

We must develop as much self-sufficiency as we reasonably can at the
national level, meaning less trade, at the household level, and especially
at the neighbourhood, suburban, town and local regional level.  We need to
convert our presently barren suburbs into thriving regional economies which
produce most of what they need from local resources.  They would contain
many small enterprises such as the local bakery.  Some of these could be
decentralised branches of existing firms, enabling most of us to get to work
by bicycle or on foot.  Much of our honey, eggs, crockery, vegetables,
furniture, fruit, fish and poultry could come from households and  backyard
businesses engaged in craft and hobby production.  It is much more
satisfying to produce most things in craft ways rather than in industrial
factories.  However it would make sense to  retain some larger  mass
production factories.

Many market gardens could be located throughout the suburbs and cities, e.g.
on derelict factory sites and beside railway lines.  This would reduce the
cost of food by 70%, especially by cutting its transport costs.  More
importantly, having food produced close to where people live would enable
nutrients to be recycled back to the soil through compost heaps and garbage
gas units.

We should convert one house on each block to become a neighbourhood
workshop, recycling store, meeting place, surplus exchange and library.
Because there will be far less need for transport, we could dig up many
roads, greatly increasing city land area available for community  gardens,
workshops, ponds, forests etc.  Most of your neighbourhood could become a
Permaculture jungle, an "edible landscape" crammed with long-lived, largely
self-maintaining productive plants such as fruit and nut trees. Especially
important will be achieving a high level of local energy self-sufficiency,
through use of alternative technologies and renewable energy sources such as
the sun and the wind.

There would also be many varieties of animals living in our neighbourhoods,
including an entire fishing industry based on tanks and ponds.  In addition
many materials can come from the communal woodlots, fruit trees, bamboo
clumps, ponds, meadows, etc.  These would provide many free goods. Thus we
will develop the "commons", the community land and resources from which all
can take  food and materials.  Many areas could easily supply themselves
with the clay to produce all the crockery needed.  Similarly, just about all
the cabinet making wood needed could come from those forests, via one small
sawbench located in what used to be a car port.

One of the most important ways in which we will be very self-sufficient will
be in finance.  Virtually all neighbourhoods have all the capital they need
to develop those things that would most enrich them, yet this never happens
when our savings are put into conventional banks.  We will form many small
town banks from which our savings will only be lent to firms and projects
that will improve our town.  Many neighbourhoods and towns are now starting
their own banks and moneyless trading systems.

It would be a leisure-rich environment.  Suburbs at present are leisure
deserts; there is not much to do.  The alternative neighbourhood would be
full of interesting things to do, familiar people, small businesses, common
projects, animals, gardens, forests and alternative technologies.
Consequently, people would be less inclined to go away at weekends and
holidays, which would  reduce national energy consumption.

Local economic self-sufficiency is crucial if we are to reduce overall
resource use because it cuts travel, transport and packaging costs, and the
need to build freeways, ships and airports etc.  It also enables communities
to become independent of the global economy.

More Communal and Cooperative ways.

The third essential characteristic of the alternative way is that it must be
much more communal and cooperative.  We must share more things.  We could
have a few stepladders, electric drills, etc., in the neighbourhood
workshop, as distinct from one in every house.  We would be on various
voluntary rosters,  committees and working bees to carry out most of the
child minding, nursing, basic educating and care of aged and handicapped
people in our area, as well as to perform most of the functions councils now
carry out for us, such as maintaining our own parks and streets.  We would
therefore need far fewer bureaucrats and professionals, reducing the amount
of income we would need to earn to pay taxes and for services.

Especially important would be the regular voluntary community working bees.
Just imaging how rich your neighbourhood would now be if every Saturday
afternoon for the past five years there had been a voluntary working bee
doing something that would make it a more pleasant place for all to live.

There would be far more community than there is now.  People would know each
other and be interacting on communal projects.  One would certainly predict
a huge decrease in the incidence of social problems and their dollar and
social costs.  The new neighbourhood  would surely be a much healthier and
happier place to live, especially for old people.

There would be genuine participatory democracy.  Most of our local policies
and programs could be worked out by elected non-paid committees and we could
all vote on the important decisions concerning our small area at regular
town meetings.  There would still be some functions for state and national
governments, but relatively few.

The new economy

There is no chance of making these changes while we retain the present
economic system.   The fundamental concern in a satisfactory economy would
simply be to apply the available productive capacity to producing what all
people need for a good life, with as little bother and waste and work as
possible.  Our present economy operates on totally different principles.  It
lets profit maximisation for the few who own most capital determine what is
done, it does not meet the needs of most people and it now condemns us all
to becoming more and more productive while actually becoming poorer.

Market forces and the profit motive could have a place in an acceptable
alternative economy, but they cannot be allowed to continue as major
determinants of economic affairs.  The basic economic priorities must be
decided according to what is socially desirable (democratically decided,
mostly at the local level, not dictated by huge and distant state
bureaucracies -- what we do not want is centralised, bureaucratic big-state
socialism).  However, much of the economy could remain as a (carefully
monitored) form of private enterprise carried on by small firms, households
and cooperatives, so long as their goals were not profit maximisation and
growth.  Market forces could operate in carefully regulated sectors.  For
example local market days could be important, enabling individuals and
families to sell small amounts of garden and craft produce.

The new economy would have a number of overlapping sectors.  One would still
use cash.  In another market forces would be allowed to operate.  One sector
would be fully planned.  One would be run by cooperatives.  One large sector
would be cashless, involving barter, working bees  and gifts (i.e., just
giving away surpluses), and  totally free goods (e.g., from the commons,
such as the roadside fruit and nut trees.)

Unemployment and poverty could easily be eliminated.  (There are none in the
Israeli Kibbutz settlements).  We would have neighbourhood work coordination
committees who would make sure that all who wanted work had a share of the
work that needed doing.  Far less work would need to be done than at
present.

Above all in the new economy there would be no economic growth. In fact we
would always be looking for ways of reducing the amount of work, production
and resource use.

When we eliminate all that unnecessary production, and shift much of the
remainder to backyards and local small business and cooperatives and into
the non-cash sector of the economy, most of us will need to go to work for
money in an office or a mass production factory only 1 or 2 days a week.  In
other words it will become possible to live well on a very low cash income.
We could spend the other 5 or 6 days working/playing around the
neighbourhood doing many varied and interesting and useful things everyday.

The biggest changes will have to be in values.  The present desire for
affluent-consumer living standards must be replaced by a concern to live
more simply and self-sufficiently

People working for the alternative way have no doubt that the quality of
life for most of us would be much higher than it is now.  We would have
fewer material things and would have much lower monetary incomes but there
would be many less obvious sources of life satisfaction, including a much
more relaxed pace, having to spend relatively little time working for money,
having varied, enjoyable and worthwhile work to do, experiencing a
supportive community, growing some of one's own food, keeping old clothes
and devices in use, running a resource-cheap and efficient household,
practising  arts and crafts, participating in community activities, being
involved in governing one's area, living in a nice environment, and
especially knowing that you are not contributing to global problems through
overconsumption.

A step backwards?

We would have all the high tech and modern ways that made sense, e.g., in
medicine, windmill design, public transport and household appliances.  We
would still have national systems for some things, such as railways,
telecommunications and taxes, but on nothing like the present scale.  We
would have far more resources for science and research, and for education
and the arts than we do now because we would have ceased wasting vast
quantities of resources on the production of unnecessary items, including
arms.  We could go on living in private houses with our different amounts of
private wealth.  We could move to a different place to live whenever we
wanted to.  We would not be confined to unstimulating, closed villages
because there would be many cultural activities in our localities, and we
would have easy access by public transport to (small) cities and cultural
centres.

It must be emphasised here that if the limits to growth analysis is
basically correct, then we have no choice but to work for the sort of
alternative society outlined here.  In rich and poor countries a sustainable
society can only be conceived in terms of simpler lifestyles mostly in
highly self-sufficient and participatory settlements, and zero growth or
steady state economic systems.


   The transition to a sustainable society.

In the last 20 years a Global Ecovillage Movement has  developed, in which
many people all around the world are building, living in and experimenting
with new settlements of the kind sketched above.  The Directory of
Eco-villages in Europe lists 57 settlements.  (Grindheim and Kennedy, 1998.)
Some of the most promising developments are in Australia, including the
Crystal Waters and Jarlanbah Permaculture villages and the town of Maleny.
(Reviews are given by Douthwaite, 1996, and Swhwarz and Schwarz, 1998.)

The transition will not be assisted most by people attempting now to change
their personal lifestyles in conserver society directions.  "Voluntary
simplicity" etc. is important, but the transition can't get far until we can
eventually make vast changes in our society's structures and systems, e.g.,
unless we dig up lots of roads, take control of the market system, locate
market gardens in cities, phase out whole industries etc. so that it becomes
easy for many people to live more simply and self-sufficiently.  Such
changes can only come when the majority of people understand why the simpler
way is necessary and understand how satisfying it could be.  The most
important thing to be done therefore is not to change one's own lifestyle,
but to help us with the huge task of public education about the need for
transition.

By far the most valuable contribution one can make is to help us to
establish inspiring examples of alternative settlements, so that more people
in the mainstream will be able to see that The Simpler Way is viable and
attractive.  However not all of us are in a position to do that.  What we
can all do though is talk; i.e., we must explain to as many people as we can
that the consumer society is grossly unsustainable and that there is a
Simpler Way.






Brown, L. R., (1990), Vital Signs, Washington, Worldwatch Institute.

Campbell, C. J.,  (1994), The World's Endowment of Conventional Oil and  its
Depletion,  Geneva, Petroconsultants.

Dalton, G., (1968),  Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies; Essays of Karl
Polanyi,  Boston, Beacon Press.

Daly, H. E. and J. Cobb, (1989), For the Common Good, London, Greenprint.

Douthwaite, R., (1996), Short Circuit, Dublin, Lilliput.

Fotopoulos, T., (1997), Towards an Inclusive Democracy, London, Cassel.

Grubb, M. J and N. I. Meyer, (1993), "Wind energy resources, systems and
regional strategies" in T. B. Johansson, et al., Eds., Renewable Energy,
Washington, Island Press.

Pimentel, D., et al., (1984),  "The social and biological costs of biomass
energy production", Bioscience.

Rist, G., (1997), The History of Development, London, Zed Books.

Schwarz, W., and Schwarz, D., (1998), Living Lightly, London, Jon Carpenter.

Trainer, T. (F. E.), (1989), Developed to Death, London, Green Print.

Trainer, T. (F. E.), (1995a), The Conserver Society:   Alternatives for
Sustainability, London, Zed Books.
Trainer, T.  (F. E.), (1995b), Towards a Sustainable Economy, Sydney,
Envirobooks.
Trainer; F. E. (T.), (1995c),  "Can renewable energy save industrial
society?",  Energy Policy, 23, 12, 1009-1026.
Trainer, F. E. (T.), (1998),  Saving the Environment: What it will take,
Sydney, University of N.S.W. Press.
Trainer, F. E.  (T.),  (1999), "The limits to growth case in the 1990s",
The Environmentalist, 19, 329 -339.
United Nations, (1996), Human Development Report, New York.
Wachernagel, N., and W. Rees, (1995),  Our Ecological Footprint,
 Philadelphia, New Society.









From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep  9 01:24:43 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 08:24:43 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BREAKING NEWS FROM THE TIMES
Message-ID: <00a801c01a2f$0fbfff80$c3348cd4@ngjones>

Last update: 0753 BST September 9



Hundreds of people gathered at Britain's third largest oil refinery today
(Saturday) in the latest protest over high fuel prices. Police said a convoy
of around 50 lorries had been joined at the Texaco refinery at Milford
Haven, Pembrokeshire, by members of the public, farmers, taxi drivers and
bus operators. Access to the plant had not been blocked and production
remained unaffected because most of the distribution is through pipelines
and by sea. In Cheshire two men were arrested after an incident at a picket
line as farmers and lorry drivers turned out for the second night in a row
to demonstrate at the Shell Oil Refinery near Ellesmere Port. Police said
there was an incident involving a tanker driver and a number of pickets. A
driver, 35, from Merseyside was held for attempted assault and a man, 21,
from Denbighshire was arrested for damaging the tanker. (0730 BST)
Times Online special: petrol war

http://www.the-times.co.uk/onlinespecials/britain/petrol/

-----------------------------------------------------------------

French hauliers refuse to end protests

FROM CHARLES BREMNER IN PARIS



THE French fuel crisis deepened last night after thousands of lorry owners
defied orders from hauliers' leaders to call off their blockade of oil
depots after winning new concessions from the Government of Lionel Jospin.
Petrol supplies were running low around the country as the blockade ended
its fifth day amid signs that the revolt over fuel prices could run out of
control, threatening the economy and the fortunes of the Socialist-led
Government.

http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/09/09/timfgneur01007.html

---------------------------------------------------------------
Petrol pumps will run dry, says Shell

BY RUSSELL JENKINS, ARTHUR LEATHLEY AND VALERIE ELLIOTT



HUNDREDS of petrol stations will start drying up today after a protest
outside one of Britain's biggest refineries forced oil company executives to
abandon fuel deliveries yesterday.
Hauliers and farmers angered by fuel price rises issued a warning last night
that they will intensify their demonstrations, which also brought chaos to
the A1 in the North as lorry drivers blocked all lanes.
 http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/09/09/timnwsnws01028.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Leading Article from the London Times [see how fantasy has begun to crash
into reality at last]

THE PRICE OF OIL


This has become a combustible political issue again


Twenty years ago President Jimmy Carter accused those oil-exporting nations
that had engineered a tripling of crude oil prices of the "moral equivalent
to war". If so, the protests of French, and now British, truckers and
farmers over the past few days might be described as a late-night pub brawl.
>From the White House to the blockaded streets around British oil refineries
yesterday, oil has once again become a combustible political issue.

The surge in crude oil prices to nearly $35 a barrel, and predictions that
petrol at British pumps will soon cost ?4 a gallon, are beginning to rattle
not just consumers but their governments. Talk of a third oil shock is rife
and, as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries convenes for its
40th anniversary celebrations in Vienna, pressure at the highest level is
being exerted. The signs are that Opec will be led by Saudi Arabia to oblige
with a boost to production; but nobody should rely on oil prices coming down
soon.

The current crisis was born of an unfortunate coincidence of limited supply
and booming demand. It was only two years ago when crude prices languished
at $10 a barrel, making it unprofitable to develop new oil and gas fields.
There has been scant evidence so far that investment plans have been stepped
up in response to the recovery in prices. Non-Opec countries have been slow
to develop new deepwater fields in West Africa, Brazil and the Gulf of
Mexico. Within Opec, it is estimated that eight out of 10 of the cartel's
members are at or near capacity limits. Only Saudi Arabia and, to a far more
limited degree, the United Arab Emirates are able to raise production
substantially.

At the same time, demand is booming with all major economic blocs enjoying
upswings in growth at the same time. In America, oil stocks stand at a
24-year low and winter is coming, along with a presidential election.
President Clinton gave warning this week that, barring a significant fall in
oil prices, America's long economic boom could come to a premature end. The
oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, with inflation triggering higher interest rates
and a sharp slowdown in growth, suggest that Mr Clinton is right to call in
favours from Saudi Arabia; but he would be ill-advised to take the Western
arm-twisting of Opec's birthday revellers too far.

Risk-laden the current situation may be, but it is not incapable of rescue.
In real terms, oil prices are still one third of their level in 1990 when
Iraq invaded Kuwait and, although developing countries remain vulnerable,
industrialised economies are half as dependent on oil as they were in the
1970s, thanks to a move from manufacturing to services, improved energy
efficiency and a switch to different fuel sources. The economic impact of
the current oil price is still not inconsiderable but governments have
policy options available.

A cut in fuel duties could be delivered in a fiscally painless way and
cushion consumers and business from higher costs and the economy from
increased inflation. A more radical option is available which could even net
taxpayers a profit. Oil-importing governments have strategic stockpiles of
an estimated 1.2 billion barrels of crude and oil products. Some barrels
could be dumped on the market under the same kind of swap arrangements used
by central bankers in which stocks are bought back in the future - at a
lower price, if the strategy worked. In the longer term, governments should
reinvigorate their efforts to cut oil dependency and develop environmentally
sustainable alternatives. Low oil prices caused complacency. High prices -
which may be here for some time - must now prick governments into action.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eleven million square miles - the ozone hole is getting bigger

BY NIGEL HAWKES

The largest ozone hole ever seen has opened up over Antarctica, an expanse
of blue covering 11 million square miles and stretching to the southern tip
of South America, as levels of ozone-destroying chemicals continue to
increase
Photograph: REUTERS/NASA
THE biggest ozone hole ever seen has opened up over Antarctica, scientists
from the US space agency Nasa say.
It covers the whole of Antarctica and the southern tip of Latin America, an
area of 11 million square miles - three times larger than the area of the
US.

Its size is graphic evidence that ozone-destroying chemicals are continuing
to increase in the stratosphere, where the hole forms. Production of the
chemicals has been reduced by international agreement, but the effects will
take years to show up.

The hole has also formed earlier than before. "It is remarkable to find
these low ozone values so early in September, perhaps one or two weeks
earlier than in any previous year," a spokesman for the World Meteorological
Organisation said.

Paul Newman of Goddard Space Flight Centre, who is responsible for the
satellite-borne instrument that measures ozone levels, said a big hole had
been expected this year, but not this big. "We expect to see the ozone hole
every single year; we will be very old people when we actually see the ozone
hole disappear," he said.

"What's unexpected is how big it is this year. We expect some variation from
year to year, but it has really started early and it is considerably larger
than we expected."

The monster hole may have been caused by a change in high-level air currents
over Antarctica, which swirl around the Pole like a whirlpool, trapping air
and allowing the hole to form.

This year, the vortex extends farther north than it has in the past. "We're
not really sure why that happened," Dr Newman said.

The closest the hole has ever come to this size was in 1998, when it reached
10.5 million square miles. The Antarctic ozone hole, first spotted by
British scientists in 1985, is caused by the depletion of Earth-shielding
ozone by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Even though they were banned in 1987, they still remain in the atmosphere
and will continue to do so for years. The peak years for the ozone hole will
continue until 2010 or so, Dr Newman said.

 -------------------------------------------------------------
The UK is at the mercy of inadequate markets and a weak and divided oil
cartel, says Carl Mortished

Petrol price ignites fuel crisis for Britons




THE world oil market has sparked two global crises in the past 30 years. One
was the 1973 oil price shock when the Arabs first set out to show the West
who was boss. The second was the Gulf War.
British holidaymakers caught up in this week's protests in France were left
in no doubt that the world, once again, is in the grip of a fuel-induced
crisis. With UK petrol prices set to rise to nearly ?4 a gallon over the
next few weeks, British motorists are being treated to an unpalatable lesson
in the workings of a cartel. There is a reminder, too, as with cigarettes,
of the extent to which tax bumps up the price. Each 10p a gallon rise in
petrol nets the Treasury an extra ?270 million in VAT.

The rebellious French farmers and lorry drivers reckon they have found the
weak link in the price chain, and may yet force their Government to cut
petrol taxes. The phlegmatic British appear to have no such option. The UK
is at the mercy of the weather, of inadequate markets and a weak and divided
oil cartel.



We have been on this rollercoaster before. In December 1998, the price of a
barrel of crude oil was about $10, less than a third of this week's price
peak of $34.50. Then, the consumer was in clover. All but the most efficient
oil companies were spending more to get oil out of the North Sea than it was
fetching at Rotterdam refineries. In the Middle East, Opec's least solvent
members were having trouble paying the bills. Even the Saudis were forced to
raise emergency loans.

The oil companies overreacted, sacking staff and abandoning production.
Budgets were slashed, and producers turned their back on the high-cost North
Sea. Even The Economist abandoned its usual cynicism and pronounced that oil
would slip further. In the end, the great future of cheap oil was just a
cyclical trough.

The oil market and its two great financial exchanges, London's International
Petroleum Exchange and the Nymex commodity exchange in New York, are built
on a myth. There is no global crude oil market. Instead, there are various
oils with different markets. This summer, while motorists in America howled
in protest at the cost of petrol, the Saudis were protesting that they could
not find buyers for their cargoes. Shortage? they said. What shortage?

What was not said was that the Saudi oil was flowing the other way. The
Saudis sell a heavier and dirtier crude that is ill-suited for refineries
producing petrol for US motor cars. It is true that Saudi Arabia is the
biggest producer of crude oil, speaking for more than 10 per cent of world
demand. But contrary to popular belief, its natural market is not Europe and
the US but the Far East, where the heavier crude is used in power stations
and factories.

As Leo Drollas, of the Centre for Global Energy Studies, puts it: "There is
no global shortage of oil. There is a shortage of the right kind of oil
product in the right place."

Petrol may be petrol, wherever you fill up, but oil is not oil. Brent blend
is not Arab light and Venezuelan crude does not fetch as good a price as
West Texas Intermediate.

Refineries seek specific oils to produce different products: gasoline for
motor cars or middle distillates such as diesel or heating oil. Timing
matters. In the summer Northern Hemisphere refineries want light low sulphur
crudes to make gasoline for the driving season and in the autumn they build
up supplies of heating oil.

But the different oils do not have their own marketplaces. The two financial
exchanges act as global benchmarks for "global oil" - windsocks that warn
investors which way the trade in oil is moving or which way the speculators
like to think it is moving. Markets are about supply and demand. But they
are also about perception.

Nymex and the IPE are inverted pyramids. The IPE daily trade averages about
70,000 contracts, each representing 1,000 barrels of Brent crude oil. Those
70 million barrels are, as it happens, almost equal to daily worldwide oil
production, but the futures market is nothing to do with real oil.

It is a theoretical construct used by people to hedge their energy risk or
just to make speculative bets. And over the past few months the speculators
have been very active. Underlying the theoretical Brent futures contract is
a small, but real, daily market of just 400,000 barrels - a tanker load -
from the Brent fields in the North Sea.

Bonny Light from Nigeria or Urals crude from Russia, not to mention Arab
Light from Saudi Arabia, are produced in much bigger volumes than Brent and
serve a multitude of different markets. For all that, their prices are
benchmarked off movements in the price of Brent. The tail seems to be
wagging the dog.

Such volatility is curious in a long-term business. A new oilfield takes
years to bring into production. Seismic data must be gathered, wells
drilled, production platforms built and pipelines laid.

If oil companies are planning, not for next year but for the next decade,
why are we suffering a three-year boom and bust? The 1998 trough caused an
investment blip and we are now reaping the thin harvest of low stocks and
high prices. The oil companies are spending again, but this is little
consolation to hard-pressed motorists.

Violent booms and busts were a feature of the last century. Companies wanted
a quick return on investment so they pumped oilfields dry as fast as
possible, accelerating a build-up of oil stocks. Falling prices led to an
investment famine and oil shortages only to send the price roaring up again.

When Rockefeller's empire was smashed by the courts in 1911, the tycoon's
progeny, "the seven sisters", recreated a cartel that attempted to reduce
volatility.

Then Opec arrived on the scene. The world's top oil producers attempted to
stop the volatility by controlling surplus production. But their failure to
manage excess capacity is clear for all to see. Before the end of the coming
winter, speculators will be shorting Brent and WTI futures in expectation of
a future bust.

Markets are about perception, not reality. Oil traders care little about
today's price for a cargo of Arab light in Bombay. What matters is the price
in six weeks' time.

Oil tankers from the Gulf take many weeks to reach Rotterdam refineries and
tanker rates are rising. The increase is a particular concern for the Saudis
who are finding that their crude is not selling at the usual discount to
Brent.

Logically, this global energy market needs to be freed up. Saudi Arabia
needs to put its oil cargos out to tender, not benchmark them against the
Brent/WTI system. With so much oil being exported from the Gulf, it is
extraordinary that the region lacks a proper market and the biggest producer
is able to peg its price artificially to that of another commodity in
another part of the world.

Opec exporters want to keep a grip on the sale of their only asset, but they
have shown themselves incapable of playing the useful role of Rockefeller to
the contemporary energy market. Saudi Arabia knows that the current oil
price is unsustainable. Given its appalling record at managing the market,
the Kingdom could do us all a favour by allowing the world to put a real
price on its product.






From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Sat Sep  9 08:35:53 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 09:35:53 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
References: <001501c019bf$067431a0$c42c8cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <39BA4AC9.8D4888E1@ilstu.edu>

Mark is one of those who believe that we only have to establish
the *reasons* for revolution and make enough people aware
of those reasons, and revolution will come. It seems to follow
from such a perspective, at least for many, that a crash of the
capitalist system (or, focusing on oil, of the industrial system)
will demonstrate those reasons, and revolution will follow.
The very name of this maillist seems to carry that assumption.

But only capitalist investors are moved by visions of the future.
Resistance to capitalism must be driven by resistance to the
*present*, not hope for or fear of the future. Obsession with
the future, whether in hope or in fear, individualizes, and that
is why Crash always brings not resistance but reaction. It is
in the stage of *recovery* from the Crash that resistance
becomes possible. Mass struggles (whether or not they rise
to the level of revolution) occur when the world (at least in
appearance) seems to be improving. The CIO did not arise
from 1930-1935, when all seemed utterly hopeless. It was
in those years when a manager at Republic Steel stood on
a platform behind a high fence and threw twenty-five bright
new quarters to the mob of men outside the gate. The 25
men who came out of the resulting scramble clutching one
of those quarters was hired. Resistance does not come
from workers fighting each other for quarters tossed out
by Capital. In the years after 1934 there *seemed* at
least to be hope of recovery (there was limited recovery
before the recession of 1938), and mass resistance rose.

Revolution, if it is ever to come, must come *before* the kind
of crash Mark foresees. We need a revolution of rising
expectations -- not visions of disaster -- to bring about
successful resistance to capital.

Carrol

Mark Jones wrote:

> ask one million French workers on the streets today.




From cburford at gn.apc.org  Sat Sep  9 08:56:51 2000
From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford)
Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 15:56:51 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Ozone hole larger
In-Reply-To: <00a801c01a2f$0fbfff80$c3348cd4@ngjones>
Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20000909154900.00be1200@pop.gn.apc.org>

The Guardian and the Times in England both feature the beautiful blue, 
colour-enhanced, photograph of the enlarged ozone hole over the Antarctic.

Although the story comes from Nasa I cannot see that US media like CNN or 
the International Herald Tribune, give it such prominence. I am not sure if 
this is complacency about the problem extending to the northern hemisphere.

The scientists seem vague in their reassurance that large findings for the 
size of the ozone hole will continue till 2010, but that the surge this 
year is for random causes, and supposedly part of natural variation.  CFC's 
were banned in 1987 but continue breaking down ozone for decades.

There is little room for greater tolerance in the margins of these 
predictions. Economic production is nearing its global rate-limiting steps.

Chris Burford

London




From aabdo at webtv.net  Sat Sep  9 13:24:09 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 14:24:09 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Is Chomsky The Problem?
Message-ID: <21319-39BA8E59-4903@storefull-233.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Jared Israel wants to attack Noam Chomsky as being a liar about events
in The Balkans.       And at the core of his attack, is a disagreement
about the nature of Milosevic.      Jared states that no defense of
Yugoslav self-determination is possible if Milosevic is labeled a
monster.     Therefore, Jared wants to deny that Milosevic has ever done
anything other than defend the socialist patria.

On his side, there are a group of comrades that are convinced that
Yugoslavia remains a socialized economy.   These marxists come from a
tendency of thought that will admit no errors nor reactionary attributes
of any kind, once they have decided that a leadership is playing this
progressive role.

The history of air brush in this wing of communist thought has a long,
sad, and totally discredited history.....from Stalin to Lenin, Marx to
Borge, Trotsky to Fidel, and countless other 'leaders' and 'leaderships'
posted on banners with their faces shining as they look into the
distance; this is the flip side of the comment that a 'monster' cannot
be defended.

Chomsky is without a doubt the most prominent of the intellectuals in
the Western imperialist countries.      Therefore, it is important to
examine his role in The Movement as a whole.     This much is to Jared's
credit, his not fearing to take the big man- head on.   Has Chomsky
hindered or hurt Movement building at the current stage?

Chomsky definitely played a highly positive role for the Movement in the
harsh days of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher years.      He
mobilized the demobilized and beaten back dominions of the Left, who
turned out to hear his lectures in the thousands.        In some ways,
his talks were demonstrations of a sort, often when no other Left
demonstrations were to be found.

That is the reason for so much hardened support for Chomsky from younger
activists.     It is not necessarily his brilliance as an analyst today.
In fact, his sermon-like analyses grow tiresome even for the faithful,
when repeated time after time.

It is not Chomsky's specifics on any one political question that make
him more a tool for inaction, rather than action.     It is the fact
that his group of Libertarian Socialists and intellectuals of varied
stripes have no plan to mobilize anyone, beyond a kind of pasting
themselves to a Socialist Democratic program moved by the broad herd.

Their rhetoric is far to the left of what they are actually doing, which
borders on a form of mass inactivity.       Luckily, a form of inchoate
radicalism is emerging from alternate forms of radical Anarchist, Green,
and Marxist leadership, that is principally bypassing in the streets
what the Znet intellectuals are not doing from their individual offices. 

It is this abdication of leadership duties to mobilize one's followers,
that most characterizeas the Chomsky and Albert brand of Anarchism.
Both of these leaders refuse to lead people into actual street
mobilization against the US war machine, wherever it is being used, and
not just in the case of the US sponsored terror in The Balkans.

As long as it is... analyses in abstractions, and criticisms up and down
the line of US government policies, these two are supreme.         But
they are not going to lead in building demonstrations of any kind,
whether it be building unions, rallies against police brutality, or
antiwar actions against NATO, or Plan Colombia.

But, Jared, why focus on the anarchists?     Is it not the wings of the
marxist Radical Left that are the principle demobilizers and
immobilized?        Nobody forces these comrades to tag along after
Nader and Chomsky, and do it in the name of advancing the labor movement
and/or supposed future 'alternative' electoral possiblities for the
marxist Left.

You are a marxist, and even the marxist currents that support you do
little to struggle against the US military in general.       It's not
the followers of Chomsky and crowd that are holding things back, it is
the lack of engagement of the marxist currents in opposing Hispanic and
Black support for the military, that is.

Do you think that taking on Chomsky in a battle over determining the
character of Milosevic is central to the tasks that the US Left needs to
do?        How are we going to build a movement against the US war
machine in the working class communities, if we marxists refuse to even
try to struggle to build a movement there?

Most of the Black community believes that US military presence is a good
thing in Africa.        Most of the Hispanic community supports US
military solutions to problems in Mexico and South America.    We have
to convince them otherwise.

Chomsky and his supporters, both Anarchist and Marxist, should be called
to task for not building a movement in support of African and Latin
American self-determination, all the time wringing their hands about the
self-determination of grouplets of US supported nationalist movements
elsewhere.     But the Marxist Left is just as guilty.

Yes, a 'monster' can be defended, but only if the public is generally
mobilized against the true Frankenstein loose in the World today.
And that monster is the US  capitalist military.         Counterpose
this simple concept of what is to be done, to the obscurantist pibble of
Michael Albert talking about "Team Change' below.      Is he Zig Zigler,
or what?

________________________________     The Stickiness Problem
By Michael Albert

Toward the end of last Summer I spoke at a National Green gathering
about "movement building." My initial idea was to discuss the
progressive and left community's outreach problem. We try to reach
potential allies in society and to "reel them in" to full participation.
Not enough ?people hear us. Our outreach problem involves our
organizing methods, campaigns, and demands and how they appeal to
people, but also our need for "a megaphone" loud enough to reach beyond
audiences already seeking us out?our own progressive mass media. 

But as I thought about movement building, I realized there was another
problem that was even worse than outreach because it was more
debilitating and we had less excuse for it. Think of the
progressive/left community as a team, if you will, fighting against both
apathy and outright support for the status quo. Call it Team Change. 

Size isn't the only variable affecting Team Change's strength, for sure,
but without numbers we aren't going far so we must reach out more
widely. But as we do reach out and get people's attention or
involvement, do we then keep them committed? Call this the "Stickiness
Problem." 

To win fundamental change, and that is our purpose, not solely to play
well, Team Change needs a force field that draws potential team members
steadily leftward ever more strongly the closer it attracts them. First
a person hears about some facet of Team Change. There is an attraction,
however slight. As the person is drawn closer the attraction must
increase to offset counter pressures from society to avoid Team Change
lest the person get away. Once a person joins Team Change, the
attraction should sustain permanent membership. 

Do we have this kind of community seeking change? To decide, we can look
at (1) the historical experience that Team Change has had with potential
recruits in the past, and (2) the characteristics of Team Change to see
whether its attractive force escalates as people get closer to steady
involvement.

Consider the past 30 years. How many people have heard about, come into
contact with, worked with, or become part of Team Change who no longer
have anything much to do with it? The number, I think, is in the
millions, perhaps ten million. Remember this includes folks from the
Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the women's
movement. It includes those who have been No Nukers, in green movements,
and in student movements. It includes everyone who has worked in truly
progressive local projects and struggles of all kinds and in various
left electoral campaigns. Anyone who has taken a course from a radical
faculty person, read a left book, or been part of the anti Gulf War
movement, the anti-apartheid movement, or the various Latin American
solidarity movements counts. So do those who have been in gay and
lesbian movements, in pro choice campaigns, in community and consumer
movements, and in union organizing campaigns, labor struggles,
anti-racist campaigns, strikes and boycotts, and also people who have
gone to talks or demonstrations, listened to progressive radio or read
progressive periodicals. Ten million is conservative. And of all these
millions of people how many are still an active part of Team Change?

When I faced up to this gap between those reached and those actively
involved, while preparing my talk for a very small Green National
Convention, I was shocked. If you think in terms of a year or two, the
left's outreach problem seems paramount. How do we get beyond the choir?
But if you think about a decade orr two, the left's stickiness problem
demands attention. I'm being a little cute with the analogy and labels,
yes, but this gap between possibility and actuality is at the heart of
our prospects for social change. 

Let's come at it from another angle. Why should someone, once attracted
to the logic, dynamics, behaviors, and programs of the progressive/left
community, stick to it? Conversely, why do people feel steadily less
attachment as time passes, only to finally return to the mainstream?

Well, think of a person getting more and more involved with progressive
ideas and activity. Does this person merge into a growing community of
people who make him feel more secure and appreciated? 

Does she get a growing sense of personal worth and of contribution to
something valuable? Does he enjoy a sense of accomplishment? Does she
have her needs better met than before? Does his life get better? Does it
seem that she is making a contribution to improving others lives, as
well?

Or, conversely, does this person meet a lot of other people who
continually question his motives and behaviors, making him feel insecure
and constantly criticized? Does she feel diminishing personal worth and
doubt that what she is doing is making a difference for anyone? 

Does he suspect there is little accomplished, and no daily, weekly, or
monthly evidence of progress? Does she have needs that were previously
met, now unmet, and few new ones addressed? Is his life getting more
frustrating, less enjoyable? Does it seem she is only bothering other
people, rarely doing anything meaningful on their behalf? Does he find
himself ever less aware of what "the left" is or stands for, repulsed by
its vague, or bitter attributes rather than attracted to its clariety,
insights, and success?

You might ask different questions than I have, but I think the point is
clear enough. The stickiness problem is graphically defined.

Let's stretch the Team Change analogy. Imagine a football, baseball,
basketball, or soccer team. Whether it is high school, college, or
professional doesn't matter. 
Suppose it doesn't improve its results as time passes. At some point the
coach looks at the choices made, the strategies used, the norms employed
and says, hold on, we have to make some corrections. 

Okay, our Team Change has no coach and it needs to be participatory and
democratic, so being self-critical is everyone's responsibility. But
Team Change must also play to win if it is concerned with more than mere
posturing. 
And that means we need to reassess how we organize ourselves, the
culture of our movements, what we learn as we become more committed, how
we interrelate, and what benefits and responsibilities we have due to
our political involvement. The alternative to doing much better
regarding "movement stickiness" is another long losing season
two or
three decades worth, I think, which, unlike for inflexible high school,
college, and professional ball clubs, means hundreds of millions of
lives unnecessarily ended for want of our greater success and final
victory. 

Let me put it this way. Being right about what's wrong with society and
why it is wrong, and even being able to convey all this to wide
audiences, just isn't enough. 

Movements must be clear about goals and strategy to retain a sense of
purpose, confidence, identity, and integrity in the face of critique.
They have to be structured and function in ways that not only enlarge
but retain membership, and that not only contribute to change but do so
clearly in all members' eyes. They have to not only attack problems, but
to meet needs for members and populations more broadly, and they have to
win victories that meet needs but also create the conditions for still
more victories to follow. The absence of all this is our stickiness
problem. 

I have my own notions about the causes of the problem having to do with
our lack of compelling guiding vision and strategy, our unclear class
allegiances, and our continuing inability to combine respect for
desirable autonomies and for essential solidarities both in a single
encompassing movement. Others will have different notions. Can we at
least agree that a priority is to enumerate the possibilities, assess
them, and then develop clear plans for how to do better in the coming
years? If we don't manage this much, I fear we will be running in ever
narrowing circles with a movement of diehards rather than astute social
critics.???

Michael Albert, co-editor of Z, is the author of numerous books on
economics, vision, and strategy.












From ssandron at hotmail.com  Sat Sep  9 08:46:49 2000
From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky)
Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 14:46:49 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] World oil consumption
Message-ID: <F123ebzb1oh2knP1zvF00006ab6@hotmail.com>

CrashListers,

Item from The Sacramento Bee website:

OPEC boost in oil output not expected to cool prices
By BRUCE STANLEY, Associated Press

(clip)

LONDON (September 8, 2000 2:28 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) -
Analysts predict that OPEC will agree to raise its official output by no 
more than 800,000 barrels a day -- 3 percent of each member's production 
quota. They say such an increase would do little if anything to rein in oil 
prices, which have more than tripled during the past 20 months and have 
continued rising this week to new post-Gulf War highs.

Well, yes.  But the Sac. Bee article and the articles Mark Jones posted to 
Crashlist from the official sources deftly omit one big part of the global 
oil production story: World consumption of oil was 76 million barrels a day 
during January-April 2000, an increase of eight million barrels a day since 
1990, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).  And the US?  Its 
oil consumption was a mere 19 million barrels per day during January-April 
2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990, according to the IEA.

Seems that concrete reality is a bit much for the official sources to report 
to the public, eh?

Seth Sandronsky



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From JoeMosley at aol.com  Sat Sep  9 18:33:28 2000
From: JoeMosley at aol.com (JoeMosley at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 20:33:28 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
Message-ID: <54.924678f.26ec30d8@aol.com>

Response to Amiri Baraka's post from JoeMosley.

Subj:    [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
Date:   9/5/00 6:58:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Sender: crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
Reply-to:   crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
To: brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca
CC: WISEALJ at HOTMAIL.COM, dexta at mindspring.com, crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com, 
amcgee at igc.org (Art McGee)

THE NADIR OF SOCIAL- DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL POSTURING
    Weimar is recycling it's eerie presence , tightening around us today! 
Ralph Nader's feverish personal "campaign for president" is useful in the 
sense that in a general way, he raises some issues that , hopefully, like 
Bradley's gesture, moves the Gore wagon slightly to the Left. But for Nader 
to insist that his individualistic petty bourgeois  for a moral remaking of 
the Imperialist state is politically advanced as  the practical politics of 
our time place and condition,  is sad  and dangerous. Because, only the 
slowest among us can not see that if Nader takes his , in essence, 
politically solipsistic show all the way to the hoop, then he will quite 
simply help Bush get elected!

JoeMosley - So what, would that be the end of the world? We survived Nixon 
and Bush, we have Clinton, now you hope that we will "move the Gore wagon 
slightly to the left." Is that what you would call progress? I don't! I 
believe that the progressive members of our society have treated Clinton and 
will treat Gore as how a teenager who has been sodomized by her boy-friend, 
is hurt, disturbed and ambivalent, but does not make a fuss because she 
believes that he loves her. While if she was penetrated by another, she would 
scream rape and seek reprisals. If a Republican was in the White House, 
progressives would not forgive and forget: the sordid Lewinski affair; the 
"three strikes and you are out" mandatory judicial sentencing; the mandatory 
punitive sentences for "minor" crack violations compared to the "slap on the 
wrist" for "minor" cocaine violations; the unfair implementation of  "welfare 
to work-fare" reforms; and the list could go on...

     The politics of individual moral cant is the "protest" politics of the 
petty bourgeois "loyal opposition" crying out because they think Imperialism 
can be cleaned up enough (consumer advocacy) for them & some of we, to be 
INCLUDED.
    First, Nader is not that much Left of Gore. His recent speeches, while 
trying to tighten up his "gap" vis a vis Blacks and oppressed nationalities, 
is still saccharin covered generality, in the main. Nader is a consumer 
advocate, at worst, quality control for imperialism's commodities.

JoeMosley - Please tread carefully Mr. Baraka, in your zeal to trivialize 
Nader, your bias is showing. You conveniently fail to recognize that Ralph 
Nader and Winona LaDuke were nominated by the Association of State Green 
Parties, they were drafted by the ASGP and they are running on the ASGP 
platform. They are also building a party that is free from the corrupting 
influence of greedy corporations, a party that is challenging the hegemony of 
the corporate controlled Democratic and Republican parties. Win or lose, the 
Green Party will change the political paradigm, detain the creeping 
plutocracy (what I believe you call Imperialism) that is perverting our 
democratic institutions and facilitate the emergence of other political 
parties.
    NADER CAN ONLY BE ULTIMATELY USEFUL TO THE PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL 
POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE AGREES TO AGGRESSIVELY HELP CREATE A LEFT BLOC.. OF 
THE MAIN ANTI IMPERIALST ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS AND DEMAND CONCRETE 
CONCESSIONS FROM GORE!!----

JoeMosley - There is a very important kernel of wisdom in this statement, Mr 
Baraka, but I would phrase it differently, i.e., NADER CAN BE USEFUL TO THE 
PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE AGREES TO AND SUCCEEDS IN 
HELPING TO CREATE A BLOC OF ANTI-PLUTOCRACY ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS TO 
DEFEAT BOTH GORE AND BUSH. Please be consistent Mr. Baraka, in one sentence 
you belittle those who think they can clean up "Imperialism" and in another 
sentence you want to create a bloc to demand concessions from the "High 
Priest" of the "Imperialists." You cannot have it both ways Sir!

     Some of the main groups that should be in such a bloc would be 
Marxist-Leninist Organizations, including the CPUSA, Freedom Socialists,  
Committee of Correspondence, Social Democratic organizations like the DSA, 
SDA, , Puerto Rican Socialist Party (The Trots and Anarchists abhor the dirty 
bourgeois electoral arena, that's one characteristic of their objective 
Opposition to Revolutionary Democratic Struggle, the only real precursor and 
path to Socialism!) Anti Imperialist Organizations ...both multi national and 
national in form;  e.g., Black Latino, Asian, Native  Peoples groups, Trade 
Unions, Black Radical Congress, Black United Front, RNA, NAACP, Pan 
Africanist, Professional and Academic Organizations, Cultural and Arts 
Groups, Media Groups, Nation of Islam and American Muslim Mission, 
Independent Publications and Presses. Consumer Coops, Agricultural Coops, 
Advocacy Groups, particularly around Welfare, Immigration, Police Brutality. 
Police Control Boards, 
    The Congressional and State Legislative Black and Latino Caucuses, ABC 
LEO, Individual Politcal and Activist figures,and their organizations, e.g., 
Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, RAndall Robinson, Marable, Gates, West, Afro 
American, Latino Publishers Groups, Minority and Small Business 
Organizations, Church related groups, 

JoeMosley - I would "give my right arm" to see a cohesive bloc of these 
organizations, but their potential would be wasted "demanding concrete 
concessions from Gore. In my opinion, a bloc of this magnitude could propel 
Nader into the White House and exact concrete concessions from his 
administration.
   
      The Black Radical Congress could put out a call for such a meeting. 
This letter is a CALL  FROM UNITY AND STRUGGLE NEWSPAPER 808 S.10THST NEWARK 
NEW JERSEY  973 242-1346  / 1509 FAX
    The CPUSA with other  influential groups could put out such a call. The 
Greens SHOULD join with this effort IMMEDIATELY. The Nation of Islam , 
because of its call for a Million Family March in October, and Sharpton 
because of his Aug 26 National Action Group led march on DC , have the public 
visibility to cooperate importantly in such a call.

     Such a meeting must produce A PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM, a 
multi-national mass document that could  forcefully project the key elements 
of an actual Anti Impeialist stance and demands on the Democratic party. More 
importantly, such unity would provide the material basis for a broad  
People's Democratic United Front as the basis for the Revolutionary 
Democratic Workers Party that could begin to do the concrete practical work 
of creating an mass revolutioanry democratic alternative political structure 
, that could actually win local elections and create the intense propaganda 
and agitation network to educate, mobilize and organize the many, to defeat 
the few. 

JoeMosley - I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but I perceive in this 
statement the effect of what I choose to call "the crabs in a bucket 
syndrome." Put a bunch of crabs in a bucket and they will try to claw their 
way out but they only succeed in dragging each other back into the bucket. 
Eventually very few, if any, manage to escape. Their action may not be 
malicious, none-the-less, the effect is devastating.

JoeMosley -  Nader and the ASGP have a platform, Min. Farrakhan and the 
Nation of Islam has a National Agenda, The National Coalition of Blacks for 
Reparations in America (N'COBRA) have a plan. Surprisingly, there is no 
dichotomy between these initiatives. Each of these organizations could adopt 
the documents of the others without making major changes in their own 
document. How many of the organizations that you mention are in the same 
situation?  Instead of trying to derail the Nader campaign why not support 
this effort as a first step in a movement to dismantle the "duopoly" and 
create a level playing field for all parties?
 
    Either Nader and the Greens abandon the isolated glamour of moral 
pontification as a Loyal Opposition to Imperialism or they risk the Weimar 
replay of helping elect the far Right, BUSH 2. I know the choice is between a 
Murderer (B-2) and a Prostitute (Gore rimes with W....) but folks, that is 
literally where we are. Being serenaded by the dismally ignorant chorus of 
Trot-Anarchists, one of who said, "I bet you voted for Clinton". To which we 
say, I bet you voted (by non-voting)  for Bush. (Note to All  , read The 
Casebook on Weimar, Univ of Calif, to see how close we are to Weimar 2! 
Hitler came to power because of a split between Communists and Social 
Democrats!} Amiri Baraka

JoeMosley - Mr. Baraka, I believe your Weimar analogy is a bit off base. In 
Weimar, the Communists and Social Democrats had the upper-hand which they 
lost because of the split. Today Democrats and Republicans have the 
upper-hand, we have nothing. What can we lose? In conclusion, why vote for 
the lesser of two evils when there is a better choice?



From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Sat Sep  9 19:35:03 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 21:35:03 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
Message-ID: <b5.5772d8.26ec3f47@aol.com>

Dear Joe Mosley,
I liked your analogies of how we react to Gore et al?
Ask Amiri if he knows what a prima donna is?
lr



From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Sat Sep  9 11:40:53 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2000 17:40:53 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
Message-ID: <F300pneeFUtLch9wPiy00007b61@hotmail.com>

>From: Carrol Cox

>But only capitalist investors are moved by visions of the future.

"Only?"  This is so absolutist and looney as to be laughable were it not so 
dangerously into denial.

>Resistance to capitalism must be driven by resistance to the
>*present*, not hope for or fear of the future.

Says who? Some stale old book written 100 years before the perception of 
ecological issues? Resistance is driven by MANY factors. You might as well 
be an X-tian, Carrol, and begin quoting us scripture. Start with Jeremiah.

>Revolution, if it is ever to come, must come *before* the kind
>of crash Mark foresees. We need a revolution of rising
>expectations -- not visions of disaster -- to bring about
>successful resistance to capital.
>
>Carrol

Then "revolution" will NOT come. Period. You have too few years left to come 
to some dim understanding that it is not JUST capitalism that threatens you, 
but the effects of 6 billion people eating up the planet. Have you even 
OPENED Mark's just-posted Ted Trainer piece?

We live not in a static world where you can indulge yourself in the luxury 
of waiting for things to get better as your head-in the-sand pronouncements 
and recommendations imply. Ignoring change, the nature of change and the 
rate of change going on all around your world is another reiteration of the 
very same "vison of the future" you are castigating Mark over. Change is 
occurring in the present. I seem to remember you just posting something 
about the nature of *events* in history. Apparently this one is too large 
for you to perceive.

Of COURSE opposing capitalism is necessary, but your single note of 
"resistance to capital", even if it were played until it came to fruition, 
is but a single element of a far larger issue. There is no one right 
approach, and focusing solely on a small piece of ideology to the exclusion 
of other approaches and other visions is not just foolish, it is insane.

Tom
(grinding the axe, Mark.)
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.




From Borba100 at aol.com  Sat Sep  9 21:07:37 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 23:07:37 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] The issue isn't socialism, it's opposing racist lies used to sell colonial war!
Message-ID: <4b.9d1bfb.26ec54f9@aol.com>

Tony AAabdo writes:

<<  Jared states that no defense of
 Yugoslav self-determination is possible if Milosevic is labeled a
 monster.     Therefore, Jared wants to deny that Milosevic has ever done
 anything other than defend the socialist patria. >>

Aabdo, why do you persist in misportraying what I am saying? 

Whether Milosevich has defended the socialist patria or not the key issue. 
The US and Germany (in cooperation and competition) are attempting to remake 
most of the world into the worst colonial prison.  Yugoslavia is one of the 
key, if not THE key, focuses of resistance.  To facilitate the attack on 
Yugoslavia they demonize the Serbian people and their leader.  If this 
demonization were accurate it would be a terrible tragedy.  Fortunatly, it is 
a lie.

The question of what kind of socialist Milosevich is is a question to be 
resolved by the Yugoslav people.  But the attack made on him by the Western 
media  IS THAT HE IS A WAR CRIMINAL.  Sorry for the caps, but now perhaps you 
will get it.  WAR CRIMINAL.  He and 'his' army. 

Aabdo sayds "Jared is a Marxist",  

Am I a Marxist? I'm with Marx on that one.

I did not consult Marx to discover that this is a lie.  I read tons of 
Western newspaper articles (I read the stuff 5-6 hours a day, have been doing 
it for a couple of years; before that I read about Yugoslavia, but less) and 
benefit from the privilege (!!) of being in contact with all sorts of people 
who know this situation intimately. The Website I started at Lou's suggestion 
has become a focus of resistance and is fed information from all over.  What 
an honor.

Based on what I have learned I know the Western media is lying.  It is 
because the media is lying that I want to build an antiwar movement - not 
because of my politics, whatever they are.  I was retired from politics.  
Bitter. But still I couldn't help following what was being done to Yugoslavia 
from 1990 to 1998. I knew from the newspapers that the West was slandering 
the Serbs.  In October of '98 it got to be too much for me to take.  I hate 
these racist liars, these slanderers of their colonial prey.  They slander 
black people in the US.  They mock black men, they try to crush their 
spirit..  All around the world they slander the people they screw.  They 
slander the Irish, they slander women who have the audacity to think and 
stand up to them. They slander Koreans. Tthey slander the Serbs, the Black 
men of the Balkans.  

Chomsky says, in his writings, and his associates like Shalom and others 
repeat it, "Milosevic is a thug and that Serbs have done terrible things." 
(That's from a Chomsky associate)

They pump the toxin of this lie into the blood of the left: that the Serbs 
are monsters.  Not that they are anti-socialist but that they are Nazis.  

I have criticized Chomsky and the Z people NOT because they are anarchist.  I 
work closely with some people from antiwar.com and they are libertarians(! )  
I work with intensely religious people.  I'm an atheist.  So what?  When you 
organize a union (a process with which I have had some experience) you sure 
don't make certain politics a prerequisite.  I work closely with a union 
rebel who "doesn't believe (!) in evolution".  So what?

Chomsky and Z have staked out a position that is, objectively, NATO's 
position within the antiwar movement. Even though some may put it forward 
with good intentions, it is STILL objectively NATO's position for those who 
need to hear criticisms of NATO in order to ALSO listen to attacks on NATO's 
victims.

These attacks are lies which curb the passion of opposition.  All NATO needs 
is a dispirited left that will not fight against war, that  will not go out 
to the people because it believes the victims are almost as bad as the 
aggressors. I urge everyone to ask yourself - what are you doing to expose 
these lies to ordinary people?  Emperor's Clothes has 300 articles, many of 
which are quite useful.  Take them, rewrite them, steal them -  make this 
information the property of ordinary people.

That union rebel who "doesn't believe in evolution" and who used to refuse to 
hear a harsh word about Clinton has been reading www.tenc.net ( Emperor's 
Clothes) and now she says: "The only reason working people tolerate these 
wars is they don't know the facts."

The " Racak massacre" is a lie.  The "Serbian policy of targeting civilians" 
(Chomsky's phrase) is a lie.  The notion that "bombing increased the level of 
Serbian atrocities" (Chomsky, Zinn, Shalom etc.) is a lie.  It's all there in 
Emperor's clothes. (www.tenc.net)   Use the search engine.  Check out 
articles by title or author. We're going to reorganize the site to make it 
more useful - but it's there.  This isn't my work, it's the work of 50 people 
around the world.  Some of this knowledge was gained by them in heroic 
resistance.

You know, when the US and Germany launched the first stage of their  campaign 
against Yugoslavia in 1986-91, the Serbs were mainly fooled about US 
intentions.  They have learned the hard way.  Their resistance has changed 
the entire world situation - two years ago, the US elite had won.  But not 
today. Not anymore.

Jared Israel
www.tenc.net






From Borba100 at aol.com  Sat Sep  9 21:24:35 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 23:24:35 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] CORRECTION!!  oy vey
Message-ID: <5f.a40c3f5.26ec58f3@aol.com>

I wrote: "
"Whether Milosevich has defended the socialist patria or not the key issue. "

I meant to write: "IS NOT  the key issue. "

"Whether Milosevich has defended the socialist patria is not the key issue."  

Sorry

Jared



From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 00:13:52 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 07:13:52 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] World oil consumption
References: <F123ebzb1oh2knP1zvF00006ab6@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <004601c01aef$416c5ae0$f0348cd4@ngjones>

Seth wrote:


> the articles Mark Jones posted to
> Crashlist from the official sources deftly omit one big part of the global
> oil production story: World consumption of oil was 76 million barrels a
day
> during January-April 2000, an increase of eight million barrels a day
since
> 1990, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).  And the US?
Its
> oil consumption was a mere 19 million barrels per day during January-April
> 2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990, according to the
IEA.
>
> Seems that concrete reality is a bit much for the official sources to
report
> to the public, eh?
>

Not only am I not "deftly omitting *rising* oil consumption", that's my
whole point! In article after article over many years, I've been arguing
that there is NO SUCH THING as 'virtualisation' of the economy, NO SUCH
THING as the so-called 'New Economy', Internet etc, actually REDUCING energy
consumption. We have been told time after time that energy is 'no longer
important' because it takes 'too small a percentage share of GDP to matter
any more'; we have been told that capitalist economies have become
'energy-efficient' and that energy input costs have become 'decoupled' from
economic growth and that energy is a 'declining part of each dollar unit of
GDP' etc. All lies! For a long time it was impossible even to get a hearing
(but people like Doug Henwood and Carrol Cox are now more clearly revealed
as ostriches). The truth was that (a) oil was AND IS indispensable to modern
economies, (b) oil is a highly finite resource; (c) oil is irreplaceable,
and the so-called 'alternatives' (wind, PVs, biomass etc) are just hoaxes;
(d) oil supply would start to peak and decline after 2000.

And the truth WAS AND IS that capitalism cannot exist WITHOUT GROWTH: it is
a grow-or-die society, and that too is what I've repeatedly been saying, and
I've been pointing to the simple fact that when energy deficits bite,
capitalism will almost INSTANTLY  enter crisis, and depending on what happen
s next, that crisis can be final, ie, can result in a catatsrophic economic
slump, followed by wars, mass dieoffs and more besides.

I believe that the PEAK IS HERE and that the true situation is far worse
than the public is told. This means quite simply that the populations of the
advances countries are being led like sheep to the slaughter. As for the 3rd
world, the situation in many places is aleady completely catastrophic; they
will become simply the battlegrounds of world war 3, the war fought for
energy (as also world war 2 was fought for energy).

I lived through the collapse of Soviet oil and I see many, manyh
similarities with what is happening today in the West. I expect world oil
production top decline so fast that it will quickly throw the entire global
energy system into profound and irreversible crisis. Industrial collapse
will collapse, there will be unprecedented mass unamployment: and that is
JUST THE BEGINNING of what will be the blackest two or three decades in the
history if industrial capitalism.

What ought to worry you most of all is that there is one other set of people
who HAVE long known the truth: I mean the ruling class, the veiled world of
mega-corps. big Government, of massive and baroque armed forces. They have
known and they have KEPT SILENT about this calamity which wil costs tens of
millions and hundreds of millions of lives.

Why are they silent?

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 00:49:30 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 07:49:30 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Sunday Times on oil
Message-ID: <006e01c01af3$56b743c0$f0348cd4@ngjones>

[the following article also discusses Colin Campbell's now widely-accepted
view that world oil production will peake "by 2005". But Campbell is a
geologist, not an economist, and whatever some people may think, there IS a
place for economics in analysing such matters. While the theoretical oil
peak given what we know about (a) extraction rates and (by) the size of
recoverable reserves, may happen in 2005, it is almost useless simply
extrapolating current trends this way. An economic recession resulting from
high oil prices will precisely impact high-energy consuming industries and
markets hardest. Thus demand for oil may fall sharply and almost certainly
will. From the 'geologists's' point of view, reduced demand NOW might mean
deferring the final peak until later. But in reality, what all this more
likely adds up to is that THIS IS ALREADY THE PEAK.  Because which big corp,
in the fields of transport, avionics, auto manufacture, electrical
enginnerring, shipbuilding, is EVER AGAIN going to embark on big investment
programmes in new plant, equipment and facilities with 10-20 year paybacks,
when the main lesson that everyone has learned is that oil production is an
inurmountable constraint on economic growth?The world is already awash with
underutilised production facilities. One of the few sectors which has been
UNDERINVESTED in recent years is porecisly OIL: few new tankers, pipelines,
refineries etc, and why? Because the oil corps new damn well the oil would
run out long before they got the money back. This is why the present crisis
has aspects of so-called 'distribution' difficulties, and Opec spokesmen are
hiding behind the fact that there is no spare refinery capacity etc. But
which oil CEO now will ever authorise investment in new refinery capacity?
The truth is, the world is not short of refineries etc. It i short of OIL,
the fundamental input into transport, agriculture, and manyh other
industries.

This is one reason why Shaikh Yamani is not the fool some people say, when
he argues that most of the oil will just stay in the ground: 'the Stone Age
didn't end because we ran out of stones'. And he's right: economic collapse
will begin BEFORE the 'theoretical' peak hits. In fact, the End of Big Oil
began inm 1973, got worse after the collapse of Soviet oil production, and
is now entering its final phase. Capitalism will colapse without ever
producing more than a percentage of the THEORETICALLY available reserves.
Mark]

>From the Sunday Times:
The West's boom is built on economies being neither 'too hot nor too cold'.
Do soaring oil prices threaten this Goldilocks prosperity? David Smith
reports




Photograph: Goldilocks image Val Biro/OUP







Stretched along the motorway it made a bizarre sight: a 100- strong convoy
of tractors, lorries and juggernauts, two abreast, were conducting what the
French call Op?rations Escargots.
The snail's-pace parade during the rush hour was designed to draw attention
to the escalating price of fuel and represented a classic display of
French-style direct action.

Except that this was not France but England - the A1 on Tyneside. At the
head of this army of HGVs were Andrew Spence, a farmer, and Craig Eley, a
haulier, representing the alliance importing the techniques that last week
brought France to a standstill.

For them the West's long boom, driven by the Goldilocks economy - neither
too hot, nor too cold - has turned sour. What has sparked their anger is
rising fuel prices.

"We are leading the way for our industries," said Spence. "We are both young
lads but I don't see a future in farming and Craig doesn't see a future in
haulage. We have simply had enough of a government that doesn't listen to
us."

Eley, 29, has built up his small haulage firm, based in Gateshead, over the
past 11 years but has seen his profit margins disappear in the space of 12
months. Spence's family farm, near Consett, was hit first by the BSE crisis,
then by the slump in agriculture and now by the cost of fuel.

They had joined forces on Thursday night, when Farmers for Action descended
on Shell's oil refinery at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. More than 150
protesters arrived from north Wales, driving four tractors across the main
access road to prevent lorries entering the site. A further two entrances
were also blocked.

 By Friday morning another blockade had begun at Hemel Hempstead, in
Hertfordshire, and that night farmers and lorry drivers decided to lay siege
to Pembroke dock in Wales.

The tide of protest showed no signs of abating yesterday with refineries in
both north and south Wales being picketed. At Ellesmere Port two protesters
were arrested.

So far the demonstrations have not approached the scale of those in France,
where blockades have closed some main roads and many petrol stations. But it
will not take much to escalate Britain's problems. Shell has given a warning
of serious shortages at petrol stations if the Ellesmere Port blockade
continues.

For governments, faced with bigger popular protests than during the oil
crises in the 1970s, one solution is to cut petrol taxes. Gordon Brown, the
chancellor, has made it clear he will not do so. The other solution is to
pray for help from the oil producers.

Yesterday the large black Mercedes limousines shuttling between the luxury
hotels around Vienna's Ringstrasse could mean only one thing: the oil
sheikhs were back in town. When they gather at the headquarters of the
Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), close to the Danube
canal, the world will be watching.

The decisions taken today by the oil-producing countries could mean the
difference between the continuation of an unprecedented era of global
prosperity and a slide into recession.

CAN the Goldilocks phenomenon, which has seen countries chalk up their
longest-ever periods of expansion, survive a trebling of oil prices? Equally
worrying, could a failure by Opec to boost output at today's meeting see oil
prices, at present $33 (?22.95) a barrel, rise to $40 or $50 over the
winter?

On three previous occasions - in the mid-1970s, the early 1980s and at the
time of the Gulf war in 1990 - a sharp rise in oil prices sent the world
economy diving.

Most economists insist that this time it will be different. The West's
service-based economies use about half the amount of oil to produce a given
amount of gross domestic product than they did in the 1970s. The "new"
economy, harnessing technology to drive impressive productivity gains, need
not skid on oil.

"I think if anything people are pleased about it, particularly in the
American case where they see it as a tax on the consumer that will help to
slow the economy," said John Llewellyn, an economist with the investment
bank Lehman Brothers.

An analysis by Oxford Economic Forecasting, a consultancy, shows that while
dearer oil could slow world economic growth it is unlikely to add
significantly to inflation - which was the problem in earlier crises. Tough
global competition means that firms are unable to pass rising costs on to
consumers.

Other analysts worry whether this year's oil shock might cause a worldwide
stock market crash or send the dollar tumbling by exposing America's record
trade gap, possibly then provoking further crises. On Friday stock markets
were hit by fears that dearer oil would carve a deep hole in company
profits. At the United Nations millennium summit in New York, President Bill
Clinton warned Crown Prince Abdullah, a member of the ruling Saudi Arabian
royal family, that high oil prices could bring recession.

In Europe the tumbling euro has helped the cost of oil imports to more than
quadruple over the past 18 months. In response, Europe's central bank has
raised interest rates several times, damaging the prospects for a financial
upturn on the Continent where economies have yet to achieve full steam
ahead.


FOUNDED 40 years ago this weekend by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and
Venezuela, Opec first sent shock waves through the world economy in 1973 by
announcing a 70% rise in oil prices and cutting output.

The effects were immediate. Within a month there were petrol shortages in
Britain. Motorists queued for hundreds of yards. The government issued
petrol ration books, although formal rationing was never implemented. In
December, faced with a simultaneous miners' strike, the government put the
country on a three-day week, ended television transmissions at 10.30pm and
ordered shops to turn off display lights at night.

With Opec's production cuts pushing oil prices yet higher - by January 1974
they had quadrupled - Britain's slide into recession was on the way. As
inflation topped 25% in 1975 and the economy sank deeper in the mire, the
stock market lost two-thirds of its value, the banking system came close to
collapse and fortunes were lost. A second oil "shock" in 1979, when oil
prices jumped again in the wake of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran,
appeared to confirm Opec's power.

Then, equally quickly, it fell away. North Sea oil came on stream. So did
other areas, where production would have been uneconomic in the pre-1973
cheap oil era. Opec was put in its place.

Two years ago oil prices plunged to under $10 a barrel and appeared to be
heading for $5. Opec, which now has 11 members, was in disarray, seemingly
unable to halt the slide.

Three things came to its rescue. Economic recovery in Asia meant a rise in
demand for oil. Low prices had resulted in widespread investment cutbacks
throughout the oil industry. And, perhaps most remarkably of all, Opec got
its act together. Members agreed to cuts in production quotas and stuck to
them.

The question for today's meeting is whether Opec can, by increasing output,
get prices down. Nobody is sure.

Some people believe that after its brief return to the spotlight, Opec's
influence will be short-lived. Sheikh Yamani, the former spokesman for Opec,
said: "The stone age came to an end, but not for a lack of stones; the oil
age will end, but not for a lack of oil."

He believes new technology and alternative sources of energy will diminish
the demand for oil and render Opec irrelevant. "Longer term it is horrible
for Opec," he said.

Others disagree strongly. Professor Colin Campbell, a distinguished
geologist, has claimed for years that the world has been living in a fool's
paradise when it comes to oil. At the start of this year he wrote an article
predicting in precise terms how this year's oil shock would occur.

In the longer term he is even more gloomy. In five years world oil output
will peak, he said, and in 10 years the West will be relying on Opec for 50%
of its oil. "The truth is that there is virtually no spare oil capacity in
the world today," he said, "and in the markets that dreadful perception has
begun to sink in.

"There is, of course, a huge amount that can be done in terms of energy
saving. But it does imply some fundamental discontinuities in the way the
world lives."

Most pundits believe oil prices will fall after the winter, settling at $20
a barrel, and that the world economy will sail on relatively untroubled. But
nerves are jangling and uncertainty is rife.

As Professor Colin Robinson, an energy expert at the Institute of Economic
Affairs, said: "People are very bad at predicting. All the great turning
points in prices have been missed by the experts."

Additional reporting: Adam Luck and Susan Bell











From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 02:12:00 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 09:12:00 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Observer: Panic as petrol supplies run dry
Message-ID: <004701c01afe$d38ca880$1b358cd4@ngjones>




Jason Burke
Sunday September 10, 2000

Dozens of petrol stations across Britain ran out of unleaded fuel yesterday
as fears rose that protesters against high prices could cause a nationwide
fuel crisis.
Panic-buying was reported in Merseyside as motorists filled up their tanks
as news of a shortage spread. 'Demand has gone through the roof,' said one
major petrol retailer.

Shell reported that 30 of its petrol stations in the North-west were
expected to be out of unleaded fuel by late last night and BP said five of
its stations had already run dry. Supplies in the region have been disrupted
by a blockade of Stanlow oil refinery, in Cheshire, by farmers and lorry
drivers demanding a cut in fuel taxes. A demonstrator was arrested yesterday
after scuffles broke out. The protest has trapped tankers on which 400 Shell
and BP petrol stations rely.

European finance ministers meeting in France yesterday called on the Opec
oil-producing countries to raise production in order to reduce the price of
oil.

-----------------
The Observer "explains" oil price hikes which it says are only "temporary":

Petrol price rises

Soaring energy prices are triggering protests in several countries,
particularly in France, where truckers' protests threaten to paralyse the
country. Julian Glover explains why the cost of filling up a tank has
spiralled.

Thursday September 7, 2000

What is happening?
Drivers are getting restless as petrol prices continue to climb. Nineteen
months ago, a litre of unleaded fuel cost British motorists around 63p. Now
the ?1 litre (or the ?4 gallon) is almost upon us - the average price in
London is around 90p. That puts the cost of a full tank of petrol well above
that of a bottle of good champagne. The price rise has caught the oil
companies unawares. Most of their pumps can charge a maximum of 99.9p per
litre; new systems will have to be installed if the price rises further.

Why has the price gone up?
Two reasons. The first is that the cost of crude oil has climbed steeply
over the last year. Less than two years ago the oil price had tumbled to
just $9.90 a barrel. Now the same quantity costs $31 - partly because
Middle-Eastern oil producers have restricted their output and partly because
the booming world economy has increased demand. The oil companies have
passed this rise on to drivers.

But that's not the real reason for rises in the UK, is it?
No. The cost of oil makes up only a proportion of the price that British
drivers pay for their petrol. Most of the bill is down to tax - and it's tax
increases which really seem to have pushed up prices in the last few years.
It's all because of something called the "fuel price escalator," brought in
by the last Conservative government and kept in place by Labour. This pushes
up the tax on petrol ahead of inflation each year - mainly for environmental
reasons - although the government finds the extra money it makes comes in
handy, too.


What are drivers doing about this?
Ask any taxi driver and you'll discover that motorists are feeling hard done
by. Although last month's "dump the pump" proved a damp squib, protests are
picking up in France. First, French fishermen blockaded Channel ports and
squeezed concessions from the government. Now, truckers are getting into the
act and blockading oil depots and refineries. If they keep up their
protests, they could paralyse the country.

Do the French have a point?
Britain has some of the world's highest petrol taxes, so it's hard to feel
too much sympathy for foreign drivers. Americans are in shock at being asked
to pay $2 a gallon: but that's still not much more than British drivers pay
for a litre. A litre is 10p cheaper in France and 30p less in Germany.

Is it all bad news?
Not at all. Plenty of organisations, including the Treasury, think that
cheap petrol encourages wasteful energy use and that, within reason, price
rises are no bad thing. Beyond that, world oil supplies are limited - future
generations won't thank us for wasting a limited resource in gas-guzzling
cars. And a more hard-headed reason to feel cheerful is that, as an oil
producer, Britain does well when the cost of crude oil is high.


And will prices keep climbing?
Probably not. Analysts seem to agree that in the next few months the price
of crude oil will begin to fall - it's already slipped off its peak. Brent
crude, produced in the North Sea, looks set to fall to around $25 a barrel.
If that happens, expect petrol prices to dip too. But not by much: last time
oil prices fell, petrol companies were accused of pocketing the savings
rather than passing them on to drivers. This time, motorists will be keeping
an eye out to make sure they don't do it again.









From ssandron at hotmail.com  Sun Sep 10 09:30:24 2000
From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 15:30:24 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] My unclarity
Message-ID: <F199W6OnHef2b0Jpc05000072bd@hotmail.com>

Mark,

Apologies for my unclarity.
I was noting that the corporate press--not you--are ignoring the system's 
ever-climbing oil consumption versus OPEC's proposed drop-in-the-barrel 
production increase of 800,000 b/d.

Comradely,
Seth

To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Subject: Re: [CrashList] World oil consumption
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 07:13:52 +0100
charset="Windows-1252"
Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com


Seth wrote:


>the articles Mark Jones posted to
>Crashlist from the official sources deftly omit one big part of the global
>oil production story: World consumption of oil was 76 million barrels a
day
>during January-April 2000, an increase of eight million barrels a day
since
>1990, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).  And the US?
Its
>oil consumption was a mere 19 million barrels per day during January-April
>2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990, according to the
IEA.
>
>Seems that concrete reality is a bit much for the official sources to
report
>to the public, eh?
>

Not only am I not "deftly omitting *rising* oil consumption", that's my
whole point! In article after article over many years, I've been arguing
that there is NO SUCH THING as 'virtualisation' of the economy, NO SUCH
THING as the so-called 'New Economy', Internet etc, actually REDUCING energy
consumption. We have been told time after time that energy is 'no longer
important' because it takes 'too small a percentage share of GDP to matter
any more'; we have been told that capitalist economies have become
'energy-efficient' and that energy input costs have become 'decoupled' from
economic growth and that energy is a 'declining part of each dollar unit of
GDP' etc. All lies! For a long time it was impossible even to get a hearing
(but people like Doug Henwood and Carrol Cox are now more clearly revealed
as ostriches). The truth was that (a) oil was AND IS indispensable to modern
economies, (b) oil is a highly finite resource; (c) oil is irreplaceable,
and the so-called 'alternatives' (wind, PVs, biomass etc) are just hoaxes;
(d) oil supply would start to peak and decline after 2000.

And the truth WAS AND IS that capitalism cannot exist WITHOUT GROWTH: it is
a grow-or-die society, and that too is what I've repeatedly been saying, and
I've been pointing to the simple fact that when energy deficits bite,
capitalism will almost INSTANTLY  enter crisis, and depending on what happen
s next, that crisis can be final, ie, can result in a catatsrophic economic
slump, followed by wars, mass dieoffs and more besides.

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.




From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Sat Sep  9 10:01:32 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 13:01:32 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] To the moderators / A los moderadores
Message-ID: <04fbe3602160990MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>

Moderators / Moderadores,

Will you please unsub me or set my account "nomail" until Mon, Sept 
18th.

Por favor, desuscribanme o pongan mi cuenta en la opci?n "nomail" 
hasta el 18 de setiembre.

Macdonald: same runs for Rad-Green.

Won't be at Buenos Aires next week / No estar? en Buenos Aires la 
semana pr?xima.

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Sun Sep 10 12:21:40 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 13:21:40 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
References: <F300pneeFUtLch9wPiy00007b61@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <39BBD134.D37DD7E9@ilstu.edu>


Tom Warren wrote:

>
>
> Says who? Some stale old book written 100 years before the perception of
> ecological issues? Resistance is driven by MANY factors. You might as well
> be an X-tian, Carrol, and begin quoting us scripture. Start with Jeremiah.

No book says so as far as I know -- which is unfortunate, since were someone
to write a book developing it we might be able to understand it more deeply than

we do. It is based mostly on empirical observation. People get involved in mass
action when they have experienced some lightening of the load, some escape
from a world in which action seems hopeless. Crash, on the other hand (as in
the early stages of the Great Depression, feels too much like an act of nature,
a flood or hurricane or earthquake, from which one can only seek individual
shelter.

The slump of 1974-75 was the final blow to the various movements of the
1950s and 1960s. The great pre-war struggles occurred *late* in the '30s
when (subjectively more than objectively) more hope of achievements
through collective action opened up.

Once a mass movement (of the working class or large sectors of it) takes
hold, participants in it and even "onlookers" begin to see the futre as open,
and they can become very concerned about the future even of their
distant descendants.

You, I think, are in denial. You are so blinded by the disaster you see coming
(correctly as far as I know) that you act like the protagonist of one of the
more
obnoxious film/TV cliches: the hero sees how horrible the crime was and demands
that something be done. Those around him inform him that anything done now
will just complicate the pursuit. So he begins scraming and throwing chairs
and breaking china to show how much more sensitive he is than those who
are arguing that it might be well to use their heads.

If you want to stop those disasters you are so worried about, you need political

power. That political power will only come from a mass movement. That mass
movement, once underway, can learn to confront those environmental damages
and can become concerned about the future of humanity. But screaming about
the oil running out or the eastern seaboard flooding or 3 billion people
starving
in 2035 won't distract people from the very complicated and frustrating problems

of just staying alive and having a little fun day to day.

Screaming simply is not a very effective political strategy.

Carrol

P.S.Ezra Pound tried to excuse Hitler by comparing him to those whose vision
blinds them "Adolph, furious from perception / But there are those whose
blindness comes from inside." That is also the content of the film cliches I
object to. The cliche is not so common in drama or in prose fiction -- because
such responses would seem merely silly in real rather than electronic bodies,
and in the slow movement of prose they are too absurd for the most
mechanical and melodramatic of writers.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 12:49:37 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 19:49:37 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] My unclarity
In-Reply-To: <F199W6OnHef2b0Jpc05000072bd@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <000a01c01b57$de4d81a0$662a8cd4@mjones>

I guessed as much, but had already written my overly-intemperate response,
so sorry in return...

Mark

> -----Original Message-----
> From: crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
> [mailto:crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com]On Behalf Of Seth Sandronsky
> Sent: 10 September 2000 16:30
> To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> Subject: [CrashList] My unclarity
>
>
> Mark,
>
> Apologies for my unclarity.
> I was noting that the corporate press--not you--are ignoring the system's
> ever-climbing oil consumption versus OPEC's proposed drop-in-the-barrel
> production increase of 800,000 b/d.
>
> Comradely,
> Seth
>
> To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> Subject: Re: [CrashList] World oil consumption
> Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 07:13:52 +0100
> charset="Windows-1252"
> Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
>
>
> Seth wrote:
>
>
> >the articles Mark Jones posted to
> >Crashlist from the official sources deftly omit one big part of
> the global
> >oil production story: World consumption of oil was 76 million barrels a
> day
> >during January-April 2000, an increase of eight million barrels a day
> since
> >1990, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).  And the US?
> Its
> >oil consumption was a mere 19 million barrels per day during
> January-April
> >2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990, according to the
> IEA.
> >
> >Seems that concrete reality is a bit much for the official sources to
> report
> >to the public, eh?
> >
>
> Not only am I not "deftly omitting *rising* oil consumption", that's my
> whole point! In article after article over many years, I've been arguing
> that there is NO SUCH THING as 'virtualisation' of the economy, NO SUCH
> THING as the so-called 'New Economy', Internet etc, actually
> REDUCING energy
> consumption. We have been told time after time that energy is 'no longer
> important' because it takes 'too small a percentage share of GDP to matter
> any more'; we have been told that capitalist economies have become
> 'energy-efficient' and that energy input costs have become
> 'decoupled' from
> economic growth and that energy is a 'declining part of each
> dollar unit of
> GDP' etc. All lies! For a long time it was impossible even to get
> a hearing
> (but people like Doug Henwood and Carrol Cox are now more clearly revealed
> as ostriches). The truth was that (a) oil was AND IS
> indispensable to modern
> economies, (b) oil is a highly finite resource; (c) oil is irreplaceable,
> and the so-called 'alternatives' (wind, PVs, biomass etc) are just hoaxes;
> (d) oil supply would start to peak and decline after 2000.
>
> And the truth WAS AND IS that capitalism cannot exist WITHOUT
> GROWTH: it is
> a grow-or-die society, and that too is what I've repeatedly been
> saying, and
> I've been pointing to the simple fact that when energy deficits bite,
> capitalism will almost INSTANTLY  enter crisis, and depending on
> what happen
> s next, that crisis can be final, ie, can result in a
> catatsrophic economic
> slump, followed by wars, mass dieoffs and more besides.
>
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
>
> Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
> http://profiles.msn.com.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 14:23:24 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:23:24 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Skip Hobbs' Senate testimony on future gas supplies
Message-ID: <000101c01b64$f8af6e20$04048cd4@mjones>

The United States Has Abundant

Natural Gas Resources:

It Lacks Only the Public Will to Develop Them

By

G. Warfield Hobbs IV

President, Division of Professional Affairs

American Association of Petroleum Geologists

Testimony Presented to the

UNITED STATES SENATE

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES

July 26, 2000

     Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is G. Warfield "Skip" Hobbs. I am an
independent petroleum geologist from New Canaan, Connecticut. I am also
President of the Division of Professional Affairs of the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), an international professional
organization composed of more than 29,000 geologists, including 22,000
petroleum geologists in the United States. We are the scientists whose job
it is to find the oil and natural gas, coal and other energy mineral
resources that our nation depends on to fuel its economy.

     The AAPG, founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1917, was chartered to serve
the geoscience profession through the identification and application of new
science and technology for the discovery and production of hydrocarbon
resources. The application of new exploration and development concepts and
technologies has led to more efficient practices that have lowered the cost
of produced energy, and significantly reduced the environmental consequences
of energy production. The membership of AAPG is proud of their contributions
in supplying the world with reliable and inexpensive energy, in developing
new ways to do that job better, and in the education of new geoscientists to
carry on the tradition.

     I would also like to note that the AAPG is affiliated with the American
Geological Institute. The AGI is an umbrella organization headquartered in
Alexandria, Virginia that represents over 100,000 geoscience professionals.
I want to acknowledge their assistance in preparing this testimony.

     You did hear me correctly. I am not from Texas, and I do not work for
"Big Oil". I am a bona fide New Englander - raised in Connecticut, and
educated at Yale College. This gives me a slightly different perspective
than most oil industry spokesmen.  It is perhaps because I live in New
England, at the end of the energy supply line, that I especially welcome the
opportunity to testify here this morning.

Why We Have Convened Today

     This hearing has been convened to address an issue that directly
impacts the continued economic well being and security of the United States.

     Natural gas presently supplies about 25% of the nation's domestic
energy requirements. Last year, gas consumption in the United States was
approximately 22 Trillion cubic feet (TCF). According to the Department of
Energy Information Agency (EIA), proven domestic gas reserves as of December
31, 1999 were 164 trillion cubic feet (TCF). At a consumption rate of 22
TCF/year, proved reserves represent only a 7.4-year supply. Gas demand is
skyrocketing, particularly as a "clean" fuel for electric power generation.
Recent studies by the EIA, Gas Research Institute, and the National
Petroleum Council (NPC), indicate annual demand will grow to as much as 32
TCF over the next 15 to 20 years. In its 1999 study, the National Petroleum
Council projected annual demand to reach 29 TCF as early as 2010. At 32
TCF/year consumption, currently proven reserves represent only a five-year
supply.

     Proven gas reserves in the United States have dropped 43% during the
past 30 years, from 290 TCF at year-end 1970, to only 164 TCF now. In a
report issued in late May, the EIA forecast that the nation's proved
reserves would decline a further 2% during 2000, due to increased demand,
and the very low drilling levels of the past few years.

     This summer, instead of being injected at a normal seasonal rate into
local storage sites in the Northern States for winter use, natural gas is
firing electric power plants in the torrid Gulf Coast and Southwest to run
air conditioners. Storage levels are well below where they should be this
time of year. There may be no margin now for extended cold weather demand,
or any significant gas production or deliverability disruption next winter.

     The dynamics of the current supply/demand equation for natural gas have
resulted in surging natural gas prices. Last year, the average NYMEX spot
price at the Henry Hub was $2.25/MMBTU. This year, the Henry Hub spot market
price has soared over $4.50/MMBTU. The NYMEX 12 and 24-month futures prices
indicate that industrial gas consumers and traders alike believe that strong
demand will continue to keep pressure on supply for the foreseeable future.

     Some market analysts are predicting that a cold winter this year could
result in a gas price spike over $7.00/MMBTU. At current prices, residential
gas consumers can expect a $200 to $300 increase in their winter gas-heating
bill; and some can ill afford that cost.

     The public must be made aware of the seriousness of the situation, and
prepared for significant price increases and possible regional gas
curtailments.

Gas Supply

     The Senate Energy Committee's principal question today is, do we have
enough natural gas to meet future demand, and where will we get this gas?

     As the spokesman for the geologists who assess the nation's fossil fuel
resources, I can unequivocally answer in the affirmative. Yes, the United
States has abundant natural gas resources to fuel the country well into the
21st Century.

     It is my understanding that the Senate Energy Committee has received
copies of the most recent resource assessments of the US Geological Survey
(USGS), Minerals Management Service (MMS), EIA, and the National Petroleum
Council. The AAPG has not made a recent independent natural gas resource
assessment of its own. I would like to point out however, that many of the
geoscience professionals that prepared the resource reports for the
organizations just cited, are members of the AAPG. For example, the Director
of the United States Geological Survey, Chip Groat, is a long-standing, and
highly respected AAPG member. The AAPG Committee on Resource Evaluation was
formed specifically to assist the USGS and MMS in the assessment of the
undiscovered oil and gas resources of the United States. Our Resource
Committee has recommended and evaluated methodologies, identified experts
for each sedimentary basin, and has reviewed the resource estimates of the
USGS and MMS.

     The 1999 National Petroleum Council (NPC) study concluded that the
United States has a remaining gas resource base in the Lower 48 States of
1,466 TCF. It should be noted that only 157 TCF, or just 10% of the
identified resource, is considered proven. There are an additional 313 TCF
in Alaska; however, this gas is useless without a pipeline to the Lower 48
markets. The total identified USA gas resource, including Alaska, is a
whopping 1,779 TCF. Even at 32 TCF/year consumption, there is more than a
50-year supply. Cumulative domestic production over the past hundred plus
years is estimated to be about 890 TCF.

Where is the Gas?

     There are significant remaining known gas resources in the traditional
onshore gas producing areas of the Gulf Coast, West Texas and in the
Mid-Continent. However, these areas are now intensely drilled and blanketed
with 3-D seismic, and are not yielding the large new discoveries required to
replace the nation's depleting proven gas reserves. Major oil companies and
large independents are exiting onshore exploration and moving their
operations into the sparsely drilled waters of the Deep Gulf of Mexico, and
overseas.

     Many small oil and gas companies, and the majority of the independent
prospect originators, many of whom are AAPG members, are having trouble
finding partners, as well as the capital, to drill the smaller reserve
exploratory prospects that remain in the traditional gas producing areas.
Higher oil and gas prices have significantly increased the drilling rig
count; however, over 90% of the current drilling activity is to develop
known reserves.

     The AAPG concurs with the 1999 NPC report conclusion that the most
prospective areas for major new gas discoveries are on public lands in the
Rocky Mountain sedimentary basins, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, in the
Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and on the Atlantic and Pacific OCS. Despite the
huge potential of these areas, Federal law presently prohibits exploration
on the Atlantic and Pacific OCS, and in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. Access
to much of the remaining resource potential of the Rocky Mountain basins is
restricted or closed.

     Exhibit 1 is a map from the NPC report that shows the resource
potential of the Lower 48 public lands that are closed and/or subject to
severe restrictions. The total estimated gas resource of these areas is 213
TCF, or a nine-year supply at current rates of gas consumption. It is likely
that with further exploration, these resource figures would increase
significantly.

     The total area of the U.S. Federal offshore, including Alaska, to the
200-mile economic limit, is about 2 billion acres. Only 2 percent has been
leased. In its 1995 study, the Minerals Management Service assessed a mean
undiscovered recoverable resource of 46 billion barrels of oil and 268
trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Federal OCS. This is 2.5 times the
offshore reserves found to date.

     The NPC map does not include Alaska. In its 1995 National Oil and Gas
Assessment of Onshore Federal Lands, the USGS estimated that the Northern
Alaska province accounts for more than half of the of the undiscovered
conventional gas assessed on onshore Federal lands. As previously stated,
Alaska's total gas resources were cited in the NPC report as 313 TCF. This
represents a 14-year supply!

     There is a huge domestic gas resource, yet access to much of this
remaining resource is either closed, or so restricted that development is
not economic.

     Chevron Corporation, for example, has a 1 TCF dry gas discovery in the
Eastern Gulf offshore Florida. The company has been prohibited from
developing this giant gas field by federal and Florida State regulators.

     Not included in the gas resource figures, is the potential of shallow
gas hydrates on the Outer Continental Shelf. Although we do not presently
have the technology to recover them, gas hydrates are another major future
potential energy resource. In its 1995 assessment of gas hydrate resources
for the Atlantic OCS, the USGS estimated a potential resource in the range
of 6,000 to over 100,000 TCF. These figures dwarf the NPC conventional
resource estimate. Coalbed methane, another unconventional gas resource,
which was included in the NPC study, has risen from nil to about 6% of
domestic gas supply over the past 15 years. I firmly believe that gas
hydrates will, like coal seam methane, also be commercialized, probably
within a decade.

The Need to Provide Access to Gas Resources on Public Lands

     Natural gas is cited as a cleaner, more environmentally benign, energy
resource to fuel our economy. However, the public has not had the will to
permit access to the huge gas potential of its undeveloped public lands.
Additionally, a federal regulatory maze has been created that discourages
domestic petroleum exploration operations and investment.

     As a result of more than a decade of US neglect in implementing a
comprehensive National Energy Supply Policy, and the environmental
protection priority of the public, gas demand has finally caught up with,
and probably overtaken, peak demand supply. This situation cannot be blamed
on "Big Oil and Gas", nor the distribution companies.

     The United States cannot depend on gas imports from OPEC to meet rising
demand. Natural gas is a North American commodity that is locked into a
pipeline infrastructure. As much as 14% of supply will come from Canada over
the next 15 years. Imports from Mexico will be minimal. The 1999 NPC study
projected LNG imports of less than 1% of supply through 2015. Accordingly,
the United States must develop its own gas resources to meet future demand.
This requires access to the public lands that are deemed most prospective
for natural gas.

     Conservation and renewable energy resources are cited by the opponents
of access to public lands as the solution to our energy requirements. They
are out of touch with reality. Energy conservation has been effective in
certain areas, particularly in regard to increased mileage per gallon for
automotive engines. Nevertheless, demand for transportation fuels continues
to rise. Despite DOE expenditures of over $9 billion since FY 1980 on solar
and other renewable energy research, these alternative energy resources
still provided only 0.08% of primary energy supply in 1999, exclusive of
traditional hydroelectric power (4.5%). Research must continue on alternate
energy resources. The fact is, however, that our economy will continue to
depend on fossil fuels for the majority of the nation's primary energy
requirements for many more decades.

     Improving access to natural gas-prospective public lands, is the most
practical way to assure that the nation has the natural gas it requires to
fuel our economy, and to keep its citizens warm in the winter and cool in
the summer.

Environmentally Responsible Resource Development

     It is the firm belief of the AAPG that development of the natural gas
resources in environmentally sensitive areas of the Rocky Mountains, the
North Slope of Alaska, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and
Atlantic OCS, can be done in an environmentally responsible manner, with no
lasting harm.

     To illustrate that drilling and production can take place in a safe and
environmentally sensitive manner; we can look to the East Coast of Canada.
For more than thirty years, offshore exploration, and now production, have
calmly co-existed in the Canadian Maritimes with tourism and commercial
fishing, in a cooperative, and even supportive environment, for the
betterment of all concerned communities. More than 300 exploratory wells
have been drilled within the offshore outer continental shelf waters of the
Canadian Atlantic. At least 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 2
billion barrels of oil have been discovered so far. More than 125,000
barrels of oil and 400 million cubic feet (MMcf) of natural gas are being
produced per day within the prime commercial fishing waters and the pristine
tourist coastlines of Eastern Canada. Much of this new gas is now flowing to
New England.

     There is a major new deep Jurassic Age reef trend discovery offshore
Nova Scotia. If successfully delineated, this new field alone could add an
additional 400 MMcf/day gas production. Incidentally, a former executive
officer of the AAPG, a Canadian, originated the new gas discovery.

     Petroleum geologists of the AAPG believe that the same types of oil and
gas accumulations that exist in the Eastern Canadian offshore, may extend
south along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, from George's Banks to the Carolina
Trough, a distance of almost 1,000 miles

     The Canadians have also successfully developed and have been producing
natural gas from their portion of Lake Erie since the 1950's. The US portion
of Lake Erie has a thicker sedimentary section, and would likely be more
productive. New Yorkers could use the gas. United States law, however,
prohibits exploration in the Great Lakes.

     Brazil is successfully exploiting its substantial Atlantic OCS
petroleum resources in an environmentally responsible manner. In doing so,
it has become the world leader in ultra-deep water production technology.

     New technologies also now permit oil and gas development in a way that
minimizes onshore surface disruption in environmentally sensitive areas. The
British, for example, who are even more fussy about open spaces then we are,
agreed to develop the giant Wytch Farm Oil Field under Poole Harbour, smack
in the middle of the most heavily visited coastal zone of the South of
England. At the Wytch Farm development, long reach deviated wells are
drilled in a radial pattern from a camouflaged central well pad onshore, to
locations up to seven miles out into scenic Poole Bay.

    Opponents to petroleum development cite old operating practices, and
prior environmental abuses, that are simply out of touch with modern
reality. Just like the Canadians, British, Brazilians, Norwegians, Qataris,
Thais, Australians, and many other petroleum producing nations, Americans
likewise can develop their offshore and onshore energy resources in
environmentally sensitive areas in a safe and rational manner. To believe
otherwise is simply inconsistent with what is being done every day all over
the world.

     As someone who vacations on the New England coast, and loves to sail
and fish in Long Island Sound, and in the Gulf of Maine, I have a vested
interest in the environmental consequences of petroleum operations in the
Atlantic OCS. I can truthfully testify that I have no fears, and am
confident that the environmental risks of exploring for oil and gas offshore
New England are minimal, and acceptable. Experience in the Gulf of Mexico
has demonstrated the best fishing is actually right around the artificial
reefs created by offshore oil and gas production platforms.

GAS SUPPY POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

OF THE AAPG

     The petroleum industry can and will be able to provide the gas supplies
needed to maintain the economic stability and security of the United States.
However, to do so, the nation must address three critical issues. These are:
1) Improved access to public lands; 2) Reform of the regulatory process; and
3), Fairer tax treatment to stimulate capital formation and investment.

1. Public Lands Access

     In regard to the public lands access issue, the AAPG recommends the
following:

* Lifting of the Moratorium on OCS Exploration and Development in areas
where it exists today.

* Opening of the Eastern Gulf and Atlantic Margin OCS to Area-wide Leasing.

* Reform of the Dept. of Interior Policy regarding access to public lands in
the Rockies.

* Opening the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to
Exploration.

* Amendment of the Federal Antiquities Act to prevent its misuse in
restricting access to public lands.

* Balancing the needs of all stakeholders in shaping public lands policy.

* Assurance that there is no net loss of state and private land in creating
new land restrictions.

2. Regulatory Reform

     Reforms are needed to streamline the federal petroleum regulatory and
permitting process to stimulate natural gas exploration and production.
Rules and regulations must be based on scientific reality, not on popular
environmental misconceptions. The practical economic impact of all
regulations must be considered. In this regard, the AAPG recommends the
following:

* Reform the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Acts, especially those
sections that pertain to wetlands.

* Reform the procedures used by the Department of the Interior in managing
energy resources on public lands in the Rocky Mountain region and elsewhere.

* Limitation of the extensive delays of the permitting process.

* Limitation of the ability of the EPA to regulate drilling muds and
hydraulic frac fluids as "hazardous wastes".

3. Tax Reform

     The independent petroleum industry has historically drilled over 80% of
the nation's oil and gas wells. However, over the past 15 years, low oil and
gas prices, changes in the tax code, and the attraction of alternative
higher yielding investment opportunities, has resulted in capital starvation
for independents. Petroleum exploration and production are extremely capital
intensive and high risk. In order to get the independents back to work
finding and developing the nation's gas resources; we must stimulate capital
formation.

     Technology and dot.com stocks have peaked. With high gas prices,
investors in New York and elsewhere are now beginning to look for direct
investment opportunities in natural gas. However, most non-industry
investors are deterred by the liability exposure of a direct working
interest in a gas well. They would prefer to be limited partners, and be
rewarded through tax benefits for assuming exploration risk to drill for a
depleting asset.

     The role of taxation is critically important to the development of oil
and gas resources. However, the U.S. Tax Code currently contains provisions
that serve as major disincentives to petroleum investment. While we
currently enjoy significant budget surpluses, Congress can afford to reform
the tax code.

     The AAPG recommends the following tax reform legislation to stimulate
the investment needed to increase domestic natural gas supply.

* Restoration of the write-off of intangible drilling costs for the passive
investor. This tax deduction was eliminated by the Tax Reform Act of 1986,
and effectively wiped out the major source of drilling capital for small
independent oil and gas exploration companies. Billions of dollars of new
drilling capital would quickly become available to the industry through
restoration of the Intangible Drilling Cost (IDC) tax deduction for passive
limited partnership investors.

* Elimination of the onerous Alternative Minimum Tax.

* Allow expensing of delay rentals in the year incurred, not capitalizing
them as currently required.

*Allow expensing of geological and geophysical costs in the year when the
costs are incurred.

* Make permanent the suspension of the net income limit for percentage
depletion on marginal properties.

* Raise the depletion allowance provision to previous levels.

CONCLUSION

     The United States has abundant natural gas resources. However, absent
access to these resources on public lands, and regulatory relief and tax
incentives to stimulate domestic petroleum exploration and development, the
nation will face a serious gas supply shortage.

     The AAPG recommends that Congress focus its attention on the energy
issue without further delay. Presidential candidates also need to respond
realistically to the energy crunch, because high prices and supply
disruptions will be front-page news in November. Politicians must also
realize that kicking the petroleum industry in the shins and shaking fists
at OPEC, makes for good press, but is no solution to the pending natural gas
supply crunch.

     A National Energy Policy that balances the interests of all
stakeholders, should be developed and implemented as quickly as possible. If
this is not done, and soon, some Americans will truly run the risk of
"freezing in the dark". Time is running out! The proverbial "doo doo" is
hitting the fan as we speak.

     Thank you for giving the American Association of Petroleum Geologists
the opportunity to present to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural
Resources, the views of the professionals whose job it is to find the
nation's natural gas resources. The full text of the Position Papers of the
AAPG on energy supply and public land withdrawal policy are attached as
exhibits to this testimony.

* * * *

About the Speaker:

     G. Warfield "Skip" Hobbs is the Managing Partner of Ammonite Resources,
a petroleum consulting firm that Hobbs founded in 1982 in New Canaan,
Connecticut. He received his BS. Degree in Geology from Yale College in
1969, and an MSc. Degree in Petroleum Geology from the Royal School of
Mines, Imperial College, London. Prior to forming his consulting company,
Hobbs worked internationally as an exploration geologist for Texaco and
Amerada Hess. Mr. Hobbs was the 1993-1995 Secretary of the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists, and is the current president of the
AAPG Division of Professional Affairs.

     Any questions or comments regarding this testimony can be directed to
SkipHobbs through his firm's website at: www.ammoniteresources.com.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 12:49:25 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 19:49:25 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Yamani: OPEC Speeding End of the Oil Era
Message-ID: <000901c01b57$d74c9940$662a8cd4@mjones>

Monday September 4 7:16 AM ET



By Richard Mably

LONDON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani is in little
doubt -- petroleum prices now spiralling out of control will prove a last
hoorah for OPEC oil power.

For the former Saudi oil minister, the return to $30 a barrel crude has only
hastened the day when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
will be left staring at untouched fuel reserves, marking the end of the oil
era.

``OPEC has a very short memory. It will pay a heavy price for not acting in
1999 to control oil prices. Now it is too late,'' he said in an interview
with Reuters.

``The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will
end, but not for a lack of oil.''

As Saudi oil minister from 1962 to 1986, Yamani, now 70, was the embodiment
of Arab oil power.

The architect of a dramatic upheaval in the world's economic order during
the 1970s' oil price explosions, his name became synonymous with OPEC.

The cartel this weekend marks the 40th anniversary of its birth in Baghdad
on September 10, 1960. Petroleum ministers meet on Sunday to decide output
policy for this winter.

Yamani says it is too late now for OPEC to refill petroleum product tanks in
the West where inventories of heating oil are running short for the northern
hemisphere's cold months.

``I think prices might go a bit higher this winter but further ahead in 2001
prices will start to come down and longer term it is horrible for OPEC,'' he
said.

Technology To Squeeze Opec

Within 20 years, he predicts, technology will have cut deep into demand for
transport fuels.

Crude will slump even more heavily than the single-digit prices seen during
the last glut, in 1998.

This year's oil price scare will feed rival non-OPEC production, suppress
demand and, most damagingly for OPEC, breed new fuel technologies.

He sees hybrid engines for automobiles and hydrogen fuel-cells drastically
cutting the consumption of gasoline while big new finds lift crude flows
from non-OPEC nations.

``Technology is a real enemy for OPEC. Technology will reduce consumption
and increase production from areas outside OPEC.''

``The real victims will be countries like Saudi Arabia with huge reserves
which they can do nothing with -- the oil will stay in the ground for
ever.''

OPEC, said Yamani, had failed to learn the lessons of the series of gluts
and shortages which have marked its turbulent history.

Its leading negotiator during the oil price rises of OPEC's heyday, Yamani
says his warnings against pushing crude too high went unheeded.

``I will never forget. It was 1979. I was in Caracas and I said that at this
price -- it was $28 a barrel at the time -- OPEC production will drop, OPEC
countries will fight each other. I said production has to be raised to lower
prices. They said I was crazy.''

While Saudi Arabia, sitting on 100 years of reserves, now favors prices no
higher than $25 a barrel, fellow OPEC members remain keen to squeeze their
customers for as much short-term revenue as possible.

``There are some members in OPEC who always tried to resist extra
production -- like Venezuela, Iran, Libya. In OPEC, from day one that has
not changed,'' said Yamani.

Leading Role In Producer Sovereignty

Yamani remains proud of his role in wresting power over petroleum revenues
from the oil majors, the assertion of OPEC's central objective --
sovereignty by the exporting countries over their resources.

He cites the Tehran Agreement of February 1971, when the oil companies
abandoned their long-standing 50-50 share of revenues to cede the Gulf
producers a majority return of 55 percent.

``That was a big step forward for OPEC,'' he said.

And then on October 16, 1973 just days after the start of the Arab-Israeli
war, Yamani and five other Gulf OPEC petroleum ministers took charge for the
first time of the price of oil.

Unilaterally they lifted posted crude prices, previously set by the oil
companies, by 70 percent to over $5 a barrel.

``Prices were now fixed by producers. Now we were masters of our own
resources,'' remembers Yamani.

The following day Saudi King Faisal sanctioned the Arab oil embargo to
punish the West for its support of Israel.

Within months oil prices had trebled and the industrialized world was tipped
into the sort of recession which some economists fear could be repeated
again if oil prices do not ease soon.

Carlos The Jackal

Yamani, born in Mecca in 1930, remains a devout Muslim despite daunting
personal experience.

He was present in 1975 when an assassin shot his mentor, Saudi King Faisal.

Later that year he was among ministers taken hostage and held to ransom at
OPEC headquarters in Vienna by the guerrilla Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias
Carlos 'the Jackal'.

Taken on flights to Algiers, Tripoli and then back to Algiers Yamani was
told that he and the Iranian oil minister irrevocably had been sentenced to
death.

``Carlos told me I would die. I was sure I would die. I wrote my will. I was
prepared.''

Famed for his softly-spoken negotiating skills, Yamani also was a favorite
with the press.

``Often they knew more about OPEC affairs then the ministers they were
questioning,'' he said.




From aabdo at webtv.net  Sun Sep 10 15:28:54 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 16:28:54 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Is Chomsky The Problem?
In-Reply-To: Borba100@aol.com's message of Sun, 10 Sep 2000 03:27:45 EDT
Message-ID: <639-39BBFD16-5118@storefull-236.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

In answer to several comments by Jared-

<Aabdo everyone is brutal in war. That's true by definition, so isn't it
irrelevant?>

How can it be irrelevant when people are trying to judge the relative
brutality of Milosevic versus Clinton and Blair and others?

The big lie is that Milosevic is the big thug, whereas the leaders of
the imperialist countries are just a group of do-gooders with no axe to
grind.     So many want to accept this B.S., and your site has done an
excellent job of giving some real perspective in the debate.

But Milosevic has been behind some very brutal programs, and trying to
deny this is a case of overstating Yugoslavia's defense.      People get
very suspicious when they think that you are overstating a defense.
So why do it?

More of the same here.....
<Our antiwar movement will never grow unless organizers go to the people
and expose the lies told about the Serbs because the key to NATO's
ability to attack Yugoslavia is Serb-baiting. It's as simple as that.
The key to the Vietnam war was anti-communism - but now the key is
racism against Serbs.>

First of all, Yugoslavia does not occupy the total centrality to the
movement that Vietnam did.     What differentiates our world from the
world of the Vietnam era, is just the shear numbers of low-intensity
conflicts that the US is engaged in, all at one time.     The US is
truly now at war with the entire Third World, from Colombia to Russia to
Iraq to Palestine to Yugoslavia to China to the South Pacific to
throughout Africa.

The 'key' to all of this is not 'racism against Serbs'.      You have
gone and seriously overstated your case again.    There is a lot of
racism flowing in all directions in the US, but racism against Serbs is
so unprevalent, as to be almost non-measurable.

I say that, fully realizing that there is a tiny group of
liberal-radicals that have become phobic on The Balkan issue.     They
see Serb racism everywhere, and their phobia about it almost borders on
being anti-Serb racism.    But the general population harbors no racist
ill-will against Serbs.

I mentioned in my last email about how the Black community had become
convinced that US interventionism in Africa is a positive.     And how
the Tex-Mex and other US Hispanics also saw most US interventionism in
Latin America in a positive light,  too.     And I mentioned the
negative role of Nader and the trade union leadership, as well as the Z
crowd, in hindering building an antiwar consciousness.

It is wrong to go mislabelling the cause of inaction on the antiwar
front, as being Americans moved by anti-Serb racism.    The reason that
The Movement is doing so little to mobilize against all the US wars, is
the lack of desire of US marxist and socialist groups to do their duty,
and defend the international working class from the backwardness of
their own native US working class.

Instead, a program of US trade union building is counterposed to
actively working to build international solidarity to defend Third World
self-determination.

Tony Abdo












From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Sun Sep 10 15:30:57 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 16:30:57 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Raising a mass movement, was  . . ."obsessed with oil"
References: <F300pneeFUtLch9wPiy00007b61@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <39BBFD91.7A6804C6@ilstu.edu>

Tom Warren wrote:

>
> Of COURSE opposing capitalism is necessary, but your single note of
> "resistance to capital", even if it were played until it came to fruition,
> is but a single element of a far larger issue. There is no one right
> approach, and focusing solely on a small piece of ideology to the exclusion
> of other approaches and other visions is not just foolish, it is insane.

A couple preliminary points. (1) Does each post in a maillist have to cover the
universe, or is a "single note" per post perhaps acceptable? (2) *Are* we in
agreement that (however we define the issues) the resolution of those
issues must take the form of a mass movement? (I do not specify a
*revolutionary* mass movement, though some of us may think that.)

Now, unless the answer is "Yes" to the second question, I'm not sure what
we have to discuss. So I will assume that answer until informed otherwise.

Now Tom's sneering reference to "small piece of ideology" I am going to
interpret as claiming that unless we can do everything at once we can not
do anything at all. That is, that it is better to scream against the darkness
than to sit down and take thought. I shall assume, on the other hand, the
need for some analysis of reality -- the complex reality of actual social
relations under capitalism, not the simple-minded mechanical reality that so
obsesses Tom. (Note -- I don't say it is not a reality, and a deadly serious
one, but it is a mechanical one, and does not in itself suggest any course
of action.) The goal of that analysis, presumably, is to link where we
(humanity) are now, who are the forces among us who might be
mobilized into that necessary mass movement, and (since this is a
maillist, that is a realm of pure discourse) what kind of thinking needs
to be done.

I'll stop there for now.

Carrol







From Borba100 at aol.com  Sun Sep 10 15:41:51 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 17:41:51 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] WHAT crimes?
Message-ID: <ab.614510.26ed5a1f@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/10/2000 5:29:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
aabdo at webtv.net writes:

<< 
 But Milosevic has been behind some very brutal programs, and trying to
 deny this is a case of overstating Yugoslavia's defense.      People get
 very suspicious when they think that you are overstating a defense.
 So why do it? >>

What very "brutal polcies" ?.The statement is simply untrue.  If anything, 
Milsoevich has been too gentle.  A little of US Grant would go a long way.  
Now he seems a bit tougher.  Excellent.

 The "brutal polciies" argument relies on the impression given by the 
newspapers. Of course, when when challenges impressions created by the media, 
one upsets people.  Who said it would be easy?  Aabdo asks, why do it?  
Because these "impressions: are used to neutralize opposition to war.   

Chomsky's articles on Yugoslavia rely on those impressions - he never clearly 
states what "crimes" he is talking about  because "everyone knows".  Aaabdo 
does likewise. I said to Chomsky: either present evidence of these terrible 
policies, or apologize and stop doing it.  Ditto Aabdo.

Jared



From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 10 14:23:40 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:23:40 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
In-Reply-To: <39BBD134.D37DD7E9@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <000201c01b65$0215bdc0$04048cd4@mjones>

Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>  It is based mostly on empirical observation. People get
> involved in mass
> action when they have experienced some lightening of the load, some escape
> from a world in which action seems hopeless. Crash, on the other
> hand (as in
> the early stages of the Great Depression, feels too much like an
> act of nature,
> a flood or hurricane or earthquake, from which one can only seek
> individual
> shelter.

Your politics is simply wishful thinking. The Crash is happening. Stop
hoping for better times.

>
> Screaming simply is not a very effective political strategy.

Nobody is screaming here. Considering how bad it is, people are being very
polite. Industrial capitalism has wrecked the planet. It is important to
tell people what is happening, because they still don't really know and
therefore cannot understand. I just culled the following from another list.
This is what the carbon *already* released has done; but do Bore/Gush know
or care? Now enormous pressure is being put on the US government to open up
the wildernesses + Alaska to oil +gas production; that is an inevitable and
predictable response to the energy crisis. And do you think that Al Gore
(the great environmentalist) will RESIST those pressures, in the face of
public outcry over cold homes + gasoline lines, when he's president?

Now read on.

Mark

-----------------------------

>>>>>>>>>>>From the U.S. national news programs this
Sunday morning,  the biggest
problem for the U.S. politicians is to decide what to do with the huge
U.S. surplus.

The INCENTIVES INITIATIVE to reduce transportation is THE PRIORITY ISSUE
for the U.S. Presidential Election.   The Incentives Initiative will slow
the destruction of the atmosphere.    Saving the atmosphere is the goal.

There is no time to waste.   Everyone on Earth needs to do whatever they
can to promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.    It is a
known fact that the atmosphere is being destroyed by greenhouse gas
emissions.   Human produced greenhouse gas emissions have already
triggered the global warming feedback loops (thawing of the permafrost,
reduced albedo due to reduced ice and snow,  increased water vapor).

The ocean ice within the northern hemisphere is minimal, unbelievable!
Do people  understand the significance of that fact?  Do they care?   Do
they understand that the  surface temperature on Venus is over 800
degrees Fahrenheit, and that could happen here on Earth, unless we are
careful.   That statement was made on Public Radio this summer by a well
respected professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota.
Many other very knowledgeable scientists at many universities and
government agencies are making similar statements.   There statements are
not driven by the profit or motive or politics.    These are honest, well
informed conclusions.

The major U.S. agencies (NOAA, EPA, Department of the Interior, others)
have confirmed the fact that global warming is accelerating, and they are
trying to get the message out to the American people.

The American politicians are ignoring the warming,  clouding the facts,
and not bringing this critical issue of all time up for serious
discussion and action.

THE INCENTIVE INITIATIVE  for the IGNORING OF THE WARMING  is  THE
PRIORITY ISSUE for the U.S. Presidential Election.

The need for an incentive program to reduce transportation in
indisputable.  It must happen, and will happen.   The positive nature of
human being will see that it does happen,  and hopefully in time to save
the atmosphere from burning up.

The huge U.S. surplus must be used, along with the cost savings of
reduced highways and airports,   to provide financial incentives for
people to reduce travel and transportation of products.

The money should go to the people, not the big companies and corporations
who's actions are the primary reason that the atmosphere is being
destroyed.

Jesse Venture talked about his new book this morning on one of the
national news programs.   He brought up his initiative of the benefits
for Minnesotans of an expanded Minnesota-China trade.  He's planning five
trips to Mexico in October to promote Minnesota-Mexico trade.  Who will
pay for the irreversible damage being done to the atmosphere by Jesse
Ventura and the greed of others in Minnesota?     Jesse is leaving a very
big footprint during his stay on this Earth.   Shouldn't we all be
concerned with that injustice to us, others, other species, and our
ancestors?

There are immense tasks to be done to begin efforts to stop destroying
the Earth's atmosphere.    It is not enough to say that there is little
or nothing that can be done.  We must try to save Earth's atmosphere.

On my home VCR,  I taped the program "Warning from the Wild" from PBS TV,
shown in Minnesota on 9/2/00.

Here is my listing of  important statements made by the scientists and
observers that spoke on the PBS program.    Clearly,  with so many
scientific observation, all over the world - land, sea, and air - there
is no longer any doubt.

THE PRIORITY ISSUE for the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election is the
Incentives Initiative to  slow the destruction of the atmosphere,  and
the huge surplus must be used to support that purpose.   Please the
following direct quotes from the - " Warning from the Wild" -  carefully
and with an open and unselfish mind.

1.  Dr. Ian Stirling,  Canadian Wildlife Service,  western Hudson Bay
near Churchill
"What we found in the last few years is that in fact the climate seems to
have been warming, and one of the things that that has caused is that it
makes the ice break up a little bit earlier, so that over the last 20
years we now have the breakup of the Bay on the western side, on the
average, 1 and a half to 2 weeks earlier than it used to be 20 years ago,
and what that means in terms of Polar Bears is   ...  bears in poorer
condition."

2.  Narrator of PBS program on Antarctic
Penguins in Antarctic have declined by one third in the last 20 years.

3.  Dr. Walter Oechel, San Diego State University, comments on the Tundra
"a deep organic layer that actually world wide is about 300 billion
metric tons of carbon and that's been stored over thousands of years and
as recently as the 60s and 70s was still storing carbon.
Narrator:   "The warming has made the system go into reverse."  "It is a
vicious cycle."

4.  Dr. Terry Root, University of Michigan,  bird observations,  southern
Michigan.
On Sand Hill Cranes,:  "Because Fall is warmer now, there is a tendency
for them to be leaving about 20 days later in fall."

Elizabeth Losey:  "I've been watching birds practically all my life."
Dr. Terry Root:  "She gave me 30 years of these data, and now the data
has shown that the birds are arriving quite a bit earlier."

5.  Charles Baxter, Hopkins Marine Station,  Monterey Bay California
"Climate change has been one of the things that I always hoped wasn't
happening but was sort of afraid that it was."

Rafe Sagarian, University of California Santa Barbara, on Monterey Bay
"...fit this pattern of southern species increasing in abundance and
northern species decreasing in abundance."

6.  Dr. Stephen Schneider, Standford University, California
"...  likely that these are not just random events of nature but
connected to this pattern of increasing temperature which is likely to be
connected to what we're doing when we use the atmosphere as a free sewer
to dump our wastes."

7.  Dr. Alan Pounds,  Monte Verde Cloud Forest in Middle America, Costa
Rica
     Dr. Stephen Schneider, Standford University, California, birds of
Cloud Forests
     John Cambell,  kept daily weather  records,  near Cloud Forests

Since the 1980s, Dr. Pounds has not been able to find a single Golden
Toad.
This "missing species" is "probably globally extinct".   Many amphibian
and reptile species are  also decreasing, eliminating fungus or disease
as a suspect in the disappearance of the Golden Toad.

John Cambell temperature records indicate warming.  During the same
period of study,  Dr Schneider observed birds moving up the mountain
slopes.

Dr. Pounds,  ..."strongly suggests that climate is that common
denominator."
Both Dr. Pounds and Dr. Schneider, independently concluded that, as a
result of temperatures increasing, the "cloud banks shifted upward".

Independent conclusions by scientists:
The cloud banks shift upwards resulted in the birds moving up the
mountain slopes and the disappearance of the Golden Toad.

8.  Dr. Mark Spalding, World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge,
     William Allison,   ... near Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean
Dr. Mark Spalding  "..corrals that we get on corral reefs are highly
sensitive to temperature.  Even a deviation of 1 or 2 degrees centigrade
for a matter of a few weeks is enough to drive corrals into a stressed
state."

William Allison   saw  "pale corrals, nothing that I'd call bleaching,
and 5 days later it was a winter wonderland, it was completely white."

9.  Dr. Tom Goreau,  Global Corral Reef Alliance
"In 1998 we saw corrals 1000 years old that had survived 100s of El Ninos
in the past, die."
"El Nino is introducing these temperature oscillation in some places, but
the baseline of global warming on which those oscillations are being
superimposed is resulting in each El Nino being just a bit higher than
the one before, and so even in those places where the El Nino is the
approximate cause of high temperature we have to say that global warming
is the ultimate cause."

"Half the reefs of the world have already suffered catastrophic mortality
in the last year, so we're already at that point."

10.  Narrator of PBS Warming of the Wild:
"The term climate change is too bland a concept for what is happening to
planet Earth today."   "The whole biosphere is altering."   "The warnings
from the wild are a reminder to mankind of our ever growing destructive
powers, and the urgent need to curb them."

THE INCENTIVE INITIATIVE to reduce travel to stop the IGNORING OF THE
WARMING  is  THE PRIORITY ISSUE for the U.S. Presidential Election.

For specific information on THE INCENTIVE INITIATIVE to reduce travel,
please ask for specific information from Mike Neuman at:
mtneuman at juno.com.

Pat Neuman
Chanhassen
npat1 at juno.com<<<<<<<<<





From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Sun Sep 10 18:20:39 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:20:39 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Is Chomsky The Problem?
In-Reply-To: <639-39BBFD16-5118@storefull-236.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
References: Borba100@aol.com's message of Sun, 10 Sep 2000 03:27:45 EDT
Message-ID: <0e4d04221000b90MAIL1@mail1.arnet.com.ar>

En relaci?n a [CrashList] Re: Is Chomsky The Problem?, 
el 10 Sep 00, a las 16:28, Tony Abdo dijo:

> In answer to several comments by Jared-
> 
> <Aabdo everyone is brutal in war. That's true by definition, so isn't
> it irrelevant?>
> 
> How can it be irrelevant when people are trying to judge the relative
> brutality of Milosevic versus Clinton and Blair and others?

The question, Tony, is WHAT people are doing that. No revolutionary 
should even think of such a question. Clinton, Blair, Jospin, they 
are all BY DEFINITION more brutal than any head of a non-imperialist 
state. It is not a matter of personal moral contexture, it is a 
matter of concrete historic standing. The United States, Britain, 
France and Germany are (and will always be while imperialism exists) 
"more brutal" than Qadaffi, Hussein, Khomeini, or Milosevic. Even 
that this son of a bitch Putin. Even than Menem (and this is a long 
way into brutality).

This is just the ABC for a Marxist. Of the revolutionary brand, I 
mean.

> 
> The big lie is that Milosevic is the big thug, whereas the leaders of
> the imperialist countries are just a group of do-gooders with no axe
> to grind.     So many want to accept this B.S., and your site has done
> an excellent job of giving some real perspective in the debate.
> 
> But Milosevic has been behind some very brutal programs, and trying to
> deny this is a case of overstating Yugoslavia's defense.

This is what you cannot see: it is impossible, absolutely impossible, 
to "overstate" Yugoslavia's defense. All the tremendous crimes that 
have apparently set the Serbs apart of humankind have been, to my 
knowledge, demonstrated to be lies. Their opponents have been shown 
to be at least equally brutal, and generally more criminal than them. 
This is not a moment for careful sifting, dear Tony, this is a moment 
for embattled warfare. Yugoslavia is under an operation to overthrow 
Milosevic in the next elections. This is also WAR. We are witnessing 
the second phase of the bombings.

>       People
> get very suspicious when they think that you are overstating a
> defense. So why do it?

I get very suspicious myself when an imperialist campaign of slander 
is downplayed. You know very well the ways of imperialism in Latin 
America, dear Tony. Please think of it twice.
[...]

I agree with you, Tony, in that

> 
>  What differentiates our world from the
> world of the Vietnam era, is just the shear numbers of low-intensity
> conflicts that the US is engaged in, all at one time.     The US is
> truly now at war with the entire Third World, from Colombia to Russia
> to Iraq to Palestine to Yugoslavia to China to the South Pacific to
> throughout Africa.

Anyway, I believe it can be shown that many of those places were also 
attacked, though by different means, by the imperialist nations. I 
however agree that the panorama is still more murderous today. But 
even thus, I cannot see how is it that you do not grasp the 
importance of this attack on Yugoslavia. If the USA succeed in 
overthrowing Milo, then they will be strengthened the world over, AND 
THEY HAVE GOOD CHANCES TO OVERTHROW HIM THIS TIME. Each one of us 
counts this time.

[...]

I find your position most amazing, then, when I see that you can 
watch

> 
>  how the Black community had become
> convinced that US interventionism in Africa is a positive.     And how
> the Tex-Mex and other US Hispanics also saw most US interventionism in
> Latin America in a positive light,  too.

How can't you see, then, that the idea is to convince the Serbs that 
US interventionism (by a middleman, this opponent to Milo) will be 
positive?



N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Sun Sep 10 18:20:40 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:20:40 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
Message-ID: <0e4035321000b90MAIL1@mail1.arnet.com.ar>

This posting is intended to be sent to the Marxism mailing list.as 
well as to the L-I and Crash lists Please, Lou Pr, resend it. 


Dear comrades,

I am leaving Buenos Aires tomorrow, and I have already unsubbed of 
the Marxism list for a while. As a final goodbye, I gave a reading to 
the list's archives and, to my amazement, I see that we have a 
wonderful piece of racist rant here, emitted by a hitherto unknown 
list member (being a lurker is no sin, but first impression must be 
carefully prepared ALWAYS)  on the noble Serbian people. Yes, I wrote 
the NOBLE Serbian people, and I want proof that they are not. 

In fact, I intended to write a good humored "see you later", but I 
simply can't. There is something particularly sinister in that mail, 
something that brings to my mind the worst collections of the history 
of imperialism and racism in South America, something I can simply 
not let pass through unchallenged. I know that, since I am unsubbed, 
I will not be able to reply to the answers that this piece will most 
probably receive. A pity. But this is a matter of revolutionary 
morality, not less than that. And I have always been true to this 
kind of things.

That piece attacks the Serbs, as if they were Blacks in the deep 
South and the sender a new Ku Klux Klan member.  The Serbs! Yes, 
those perverted Serbs who are  the only Balkan people who _massively_ 
took care of the Jews during the Nazi invasion, the only Balkan 
people who never surrendered to Germany, the only Balkan people who 
still dreams with a unified Yugoslavia, the only Balkan people who 
managed to step back from privatization programmes, the Balkan people 
that has suffered in silence the most repugnant programme of 
intervention in internal affairs, the Balkan people that is still 
receiving hundreds of thousands of displaced people from all over 
former Yugoslavia without asking for the nationality, the only Balkan 
people that has been able to confront succesfully an attempt at 
invasion. Yes, those are the Serbs.

I find the attitude displayed on that mail as something absolutely 
incompatible not with being a Marxist, which can be understood, but 
with being a honest and decent person. This mail is a stab not only 
against the Serbs, it is a stab directly placed in the middle of the 
chest of every oppressed people on planet Earth.  

And with a bleeding heart I will add that this attitude is produced 
by what cannot be understood but as a concocted and organized 
campaign that has coopted even heroes of my youth such as the (up to 
now) great Noam Chomsky. I think that Jared Israel has made us a 
great service in disclosing this unbelievable attitude of our former 
(at least my former) intellectual and moral hero. I have a book by 
Chomsky lurking somewhere in my messy library, the book that opened 
up my eyes on the drama of Viet Nam. This book is called _At war with 
Asia_, and on this book Chomsky explained that the differences 
between the "doves" and "hawks" in relation to Viet Nam were 
bullshit. He said that both "doves" and "hawks" were in agreement as 
to the essential morality and justification of the criminal American 
intervention in Viet Nam. 

The Chomsky of 1970 proclaimed to the world that this was a perverted 
position, because what really mattered, the only thing that really 
mattered in fact, was that the United States of America, the most 
powerful and terrible monster that human history had constructed, was 
waging an unjust colonial war against a people that was struggling 
for national unity and revolution. He stood up there against those 
who considered the war "just" on the American side, that is those who 
were eager to accept the slanderous campaign against the Vietnamese 
(exactly in the same way rightists in Argentina say, when speaking of 
the "disappeared" that "something evil they must have done"), and 
whose only worry was how many American GIs would die (who cares about 
the millions dead among the enemies of American imperialism, ever?). 
He shouted at them that the duty of a revolutionary was to oppose the 
war, oppose intervention, and support with all her or his powers the 
Viet Namese people, not because the Viet Namese had done anything 
wrong (which he was bold enough to demonstrate a fabrication, BTW), 
but because intervention in foreign affairs is unacceptable for a 
revolutionary in a First World country.

Today, Chomsky acts like his enemies of yore. He shares in the 
demonization campaign against the Serbs, a campaign that says that is 
demonizing only Milosevic and his party. Thus, he pays a good service 
to the imperialist bourgeoisie he (or let us say it THE OTHER 
CHOMSKY) once fought against.

Comradas and friends, the current situation in Yugoslavia is 
extremely serious. Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav government, are 
subject to a campaign of slander and delusion that proclaims enormous 
amounts of lies as if they were uncontested truth (and 
_uncontestable_ truth). This campaign is fueled within Yugoslavia 
proper, by coopting and corrupting  elements of the progressive 
groups, and putting them to work -wittingly or unwittingly- against 
their best interests. The imperialists could not break down 
Yugoslavia by military means. Now they're lavishly funding a movement 
within the country that, under cloak of "opposition against 
Milosevic" will bring on the Yugoslavs the worst consequences.

This story is a very well known one here in South America. The 
Paraguay war of the late 1860s, which laid Paraguay bare of males 
older than 14, was also waged in the name of the "destruction of the 
repugnant criminal Francisco Solano L?pez". The final consequences of 
that war were that Paraguay, a country whose spinal chord was an 
independent and fierce peasantry (just like Yugoslavia), the most 
advanced country in South America, the only one that had no 
latifundia, no foreign debt, no slavery, and had built the first 
blast furnace and was operating the first railroad in South America, 
that country (or what remained of it) saw the land given to foreign 
and local great landowners, the first foreign debt contracted, and 
the beginning of an ordeal that lasts to this day bring them into 
"civilization". 

In my own country, the political climate in the 1950s was identical 
to that of Yugoslavia today. The petty bourgeoisie, the 
"intelligentsia", were all convinced that we had a blood stained 
tyrant in power; foreign funds and funds provided by the local 
oligarchy freely flowed to support everyone who would have a saying 
against Per?n; the Argentinian working class, the militant working 
class that had supported the Bonapartist regime which had turned 
Argentinian capitalism upside down and attempted the adventure of 
becoming an independent, just, free and sovereign nation, was 
demonized as a bunch of Fascist lumpenproletarians.  Most "Leftists" 
were at the vanguard of this reactionary campaign.  The Communist 
Party boomed against Fascists, most of the Trotskyist sects accused 
Per?n of being either a British or an American agent, the Socialists 
spoke of graft and state terror... 

A vast array of complicities and perverted links was established 
between the managers of the whole plan and the mostly unwitting -but 
many on the payroll- middle class intellectuals. Some were awarded 
interesting prizes after Per?n was overthrown. Some were given posts 
as translators in the United Nations (Cort?zar), others were turned 
into icons of scientific endeavour (Houssay), still others were put 
at the head of the new Universities.

My people, my folkspeople, began by the same stroke a road towards 
disaster that has brought Argentina to the brink of dissolution.

As a brother in my soul and in my beliefs of the Yugoslav people, I 
here want to clearly state that the continuous repetition of the 
motto "the Serbians are criminals, Milosevic is a criminal" serves 
the imperialists in the best of ways. I, for one, won't remain silent 
while self-appointed Marxists share in this orgy of lies and slander. 

I am sick at what I see. I am sick and honestly would not have 
imagined such a thing to happen on our lists. I hereby give my full 
support to the heroic and embattled Serbian working class, because 
they seriously risk to be defeated by the manoeuver of isolation that 
Mr. Soros is funding and the CIA must certainly be backing. When, 
forty years in the future, the files of this agency of evil are 
declassified, we shall see the dark, thick, mucky and miserable chain 
of complicities, cross-interests, and funds that has been flowing 
into Yugoslavia to wage a final, electoral battle against the Serbian 
people. Where shall we say that we stood on that moment? I prefer to 
be as proud tomorrow as convinced I am today.

My party has been awarded, by the mass of anti-Peronist Leftists, the 
badge of "Red whores of Per?n" in the 50s. I thought that 
civilization had finally prevailed. This kind of stupid optimism is, 
I reckon now, unworthy of a revolutionary. Civilization will prevail 
when we, the "red whores of the besieged rulers of the Third World", 
come to power. Not before. I give my most wholehearted support to the 
Yugoslav working class that supports the JUL, even though I am not a 
partisan of the JUL. I know where my duty is.

It is against those who, from the "Left", apply to the Serbs the Jim 
Crow law, in words at least.

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From mstainsby at tao.ca  Sun Sep 10 22:01:06 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 21:01:06 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Protesters, cops, clash at Australian economic summit
Message-ID: <01b601c01ba4$eacc06c0$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

Sunday, September 10, 2000
Protesters, cops, clash at Australian economic summit


 MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Thousands of protesters who threatened to
disrupt an economic summit in southern Australia gathered near the venue
Monday, blocking traffic and waving anti-globalization placards.

 Scuffles broke out at least one entrance to the Crown Casino as police
tried to clear an access path, Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio
reported. For the most part, however, the protest was peaceful and most
entrances to the venue remained open. Police have turned the casino into
a virtual fortress, erecting a steel fence around it patrolling it.

 About two hours before the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit was due to
begin, protesters gathered at sites around the casino, watched by police
in boats which patrolling the nearby Yarra river and a helicopter which
buzzed overhead.

 Dozens of senior business executives and government leaders including
Microsoft's Bill Gates are expected to attend the summit to discuss
future economic developments in Asia.

 The three-day event is organized by the Switzerland-based World
Economic Forum, a group that brings together business and government
heads to discuss the global economy.

 Kristen Bartram, who runs a Melbourne computer consultancy, said she
plans to join Monday's protest, which organizers said aims to shut down
the summit.

 "I suppose my major concern about the corporations is that they don't
seem to take into consideration what they are actually doing to the
planet globally," she said.

 As an example of corporate greed, she cited claims sportswear maker
Nike runs sweatshops in Indonesia -- an accusation denied last week by
Nike executives.

 But fearing it would be targeted by violent protests similar to those
that marred last year's World Trade Organization talks in Seattle, Nike
closed its flagship Melbourne store Sunday and boarded up the windows.

 Bartram said she will not resort to violence Monday and police said
they believe the majority of up to 15,000 protesters will be peaceful.
But authorities have prepared for the worst, drafting in extra officers
from rural areas and freeing up police cells.

 Spokesman Claude Smadja said the summit is the wrong target for
opponents of globalization.

 "This protest is completely misplaced," Smadja told Australian
Broadcasting Corp. radio.

 "The aim is not to promote globalization. The aim is to discuss the
issues raised by globalization"

 One group inconvenienced by Monday's protest was the U.S. women's
basketball team for the Sydney Olympics, which missed a 9 a.m. training
session after being stranded in the casino hotel lobby because its bus
could not penetrate the protest cordon.

 "We realize that there are bigger things going on in the world than our
practice, so we've pretty much learned to just be flexible," said Carol
Callan, a team spokeswoman.

 The team is in Melbourne to play exhibition matches before the Sept.
15-Oct.1 games.

 Dozens of groups, from pupils at an exclusive girls' college to
homosexuals claiming they are exploited by corporate greed to Green
legislators, plan to march Monday under the S11 banner -- the name taken
from the date, Sept. 11.

 Senator Bob Brown of the Australian Green party met other Green
legislators Sunday to discuss the protests.

 Brown said the Greens are opposed to the growth of a new aristocracy
among multinational corporate bodies who are becoming a de-facto,
undemocratic world government.

 "We're also concerned about the impoverished people of the world not
having a voice," he said.

 His concerns were echoed by protesters at Treasury Gardens, many of
whom wore pins with the words, "Smash corporate tyranny."

 "I really just want to send a message to the corporations of the world
that they really have no right to be the world government," said
protester Chris Fletcher.




================
Macdonald Stainsby.

Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
----------
http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/ 
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 01:05:02 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 08:05:02 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT:  Editorial comment: Opec's help is not enough
Message-ID: <000601c01bbe$9b267960$e42a8cd4@mjones>


Published: September 10 2000 20:34GMT | Last Updated: September 10 2000
20:57GMT



There are two conclusions to be drawn from Opec's decision to raise its
output ceiling by 800,000 barrels a day. Only one of them is reassuring for
the west.

The good news is that Opec is really trying to avoid a damaging run-up in
oil prices this winter. The speed with which oil ministers reached their
decision, the apparent lack of dissent, the fact that the figure is the
highest credible level of extra output that Opec is capable of pumping - all
this emphasises that the organisation has no desire to push prices up to
unsustainable levels.

The bad news is that between them, Opec and the oil companies have managed
to create an unstable oil industry, in which slight misjudgments of the
demand for output are capable of causing worrying bursts of price
acceleration and outbursts of public anger. Pumping an extra 300,000 barrels
a day - the likely amount of "new oil" that Opec will now produce, given
previous concealed over-production - will do no more than dampen the
hysteria. Modest action earlier in the year to increase the ceiling and to
get spare capacity in Saudi Arabia ready for use would most likely have
prevented it entirely.

But the misjudgment is by no means only on Opec's side. The industry has
been so focused on cost-cutting and consolidation in recent years that it
has left itself with inflexible refineries and a permanent vulnerability to
shortages of specific oil products.

Meanwhile, western governments have failed to persuade the public of the
environmental case for high levels of energy taxation. Probably such
high-minded arguments would always cut little ice with the energy-dependent
small business people - farmers, road hauliers, fishermen - for whom rising
oil prices are a desperate blow. But by making the case to a wider public,
governments would be in a stronger position to override illegal blockades.

One risk now is that what would have been a manageable mismatch between
demand and supply of crude this autumn turns into a serious crisis if
blockades spread and individual motorists rush to fill their cars as a
precautionary measure. Such a move would rapidly exhaust the stocks in the
distribution system, causing panic pricing and localised fuel shortages.
Governments must prevent this scenario unfolding by ending blockades and
undermining public sympathy for the protestors.

A second risk, though, is to the long-standing western policy of ensuring
that the economic rent arising from oil shortages accrues to
developed-country treasuries rather than Opec. The policy has been a great
success; governments must not allow public discontent with this autumn's
price rises to undermine it.










From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Sun Sep 10 21:09:20 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 03:09:20 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
Message-ID: <F315kMUVfNIJWNDIT6b00008c74@hotmail.com>

From: Carrol Cox

People get involved in mass
>action when they have experienced some lightening of the load, some escape
>from a world in which action seems hopeless. Crash, on the other hand (as 
>in
>the early stages of the Great Depression, feels too much like an act of 
>nature,
>a flood or hurricane or earthquake, from which one can only seek individual
>shelter.


I can think of several instances where folks with their backs to the wall 
resorted to mass action beyond hope. (Palestinian resistance comes to mind) 
However, I think we've exhausted our debate on this issue. I am content to 
let it lie here. Aren't you? List denizens will make up their own minds.

>You, I think, are in denial.

Perhaps. I deny it, but  ... perhaps.

>Screaming simply is not a very effective political strategy.
>
>Carrol

Sorry that this seems like screaming to you. It looked more like "flaming" 
when I wrote it. <G>

Pax. (?)


>P.S.Ezra Pound tried to excuse Hitler ...

Ooops. That's close to the outer boundary. I'm invoking the Thumper Rule, 
Carrol, and leaving the battlefield for a few beers ... and a chance to 
catch this big ol' bass that lives in the creek behind my dwelling place 
....

Best Regards,
Tom
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 01:55:02 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 08:55:02 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
In-Reply-To: <0e4035321000b90MAIL1@mail1.arnet.com.ar>
Message-ID: <003e01c01bc5$973df060$e42a8cd4@mjones>

Nestor wrote:
>
> This posting is intended to be sent to the Marxism mailing list.as
> well as to the L-I and Crash lists Please, Lou Pr, resend it.

Louis Proyect is not a member of the Crashlist and I am not a member of
Lou's list, maybe someone else will oblige.

On Chomsky, why is anyone surprised? He worked at MIT all his life and one
of his best friends is a former CIA director. Gimme a break, what ELSE did
you expect?

Mark




From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon Sep 11 02:16:44 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 11 Sep 2000 10:16:44 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
Message-ID: <s9bcb353.008@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon Sep 11 02:47:32 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 11 Sep 2000 10:47:32 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
Message-ID: <s9bcb86f.037@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 01:36:46 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 08:36:46 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Raising a mass movement, was  . . ."obsessed with oil"
In-Reply-To: <39BBFD91.7A6804C6@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <003c01c01bc3$0a0bebe0$e42a8cd4@mjones>

Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>*Are* we in
> agreement that (however we define the issues) the resolution of those
> issues must take the form of a mass movement?

Carrol, does it occur to you that of all the e-lists you are on, possibly
NONE is so completely in tune as the Crashlist, with the only MASS movement
which has brought tens of thousands of people out onto the streets in
spontaneous protests in many Western cities in the past weeks? And that this
CrashList has consistently shown WHY this would happen, and has consistently
argued that the ONLY issues which matter are the issues which also brought
people into the streets in Seattle, in Washington, and soon in Prague? Do
you think that is an accident?

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 01:08:30 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 08:08:30 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: Opec to increase oil output in bid to cool prices
Message-ID: <000701c01bbf$16bc0c20$e42a8cd4@mjones>


By Robert Corzine in Vienna
Published: September 10 2000 19:47GMT | Last Updated: September 11 2000
06:31GMT



The world's leading oil exporters agreed on Sunday to boost output in an
attempt to stave off further price rises that petroleum consuming countries
fear could threaten the world's economic stability.

Oil ministers from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed
to raise output by 800,000 barrels a day. It will be the third Opec
production increase this year, and is seen as the last chance for the cartel
to take some speculative steam out of world oil markets before the northern
hemisphere's peak winter demand.

In recent weeks oil prices have surged to fresh 10-year highs of around $35
a barrel as reports of continuing low inventories of crude oil and refined
products in the US, the world's biggest single oil market, raised the
spectre of winter supply shortages.

Oil ministers meeting in Vienna said on Sunday they wanted to see prices
within the $22-$28 a barrel price band set by the group earlier this year.
However, analysts say it is unlikely that the latest production increase
will do much to force prices below $30 a barrel, at least in the short term.

Given Opec's current over-production, some analysts believe the number of
"new" barrels reaching the world oil market as a result of Sunday's
agreement could be as few as 325,000 barrels per day. In addition it will
take at least seven weeks for much of the new oil to be shipped from the
Gulf to the US.

Although the latest increase may not prove decisive in capping the oil
market buoyancy, much will depend on how those markets view the
determination of Saudi Arabia - Opec's dominant member and the member state
most wary of high oil prices - eventually to push prices below the
politically sensitive $30 level.

Over the past week Saudi officials have adopted an unusually high public
profile in an effort to talk down prices. The US, the world's biggest oil
importer, called the agreement "a step in the right direction". But a White
House official added: "Whether this will be effective and will be enough to
stabilise the market remains to be seen."

Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi Arabian oil minister, and the leading figure in the
Opec deliberations, said he was "happy" with the agreement, even though the
kingdom had been reported to be advocating an increase of around 1m barrels
a day or more.

He said the agreement had been built around a consensus within the cartel.
Later, Saudi Arabian officials confirmed that Opec is "prepared to do more
if necessary" to ensure that there is adequate oil on the world market to
dampen price pressures. The next opportunity to increase production could
come in late October. Much of the discussions in Vienna centred around the
amount of spare capacity that Opec has. Although most countries are said to
be close to capacity, Saudi Arabia is thought to have between 1.6m and 1.7m
barrels a day in surplus capacity even after the quota increase.

The finance ministry of France, which holds the rotating presidency of the
European Union, also said the increase was a step in the right direction,
although a final verdict would depend on its impact on the oil prices.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 01:02:54 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 08:02:54 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Ice retreats to open North-west Passage
Message-ID: <000501c01bbe$4e938200$e42a8cd4@mjones>


Mariners have been seeking the fabled route to the Orient for 500 years. But
is its opening a sign of impending environmental catastrophe?
Special report: the weather

Martin Kettle in Washington
Monday September 11, 2000

Global warming in the Arctic may have finally achieved something that
generations of explorers from Tudor times to the present day failed to
accomplish - the opening up one of the world's most fabled trade routes to
international commerce.
Sixty years ago, the St Roch, a ship belonging to the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police (RCMP) battled its way through the pack ice of two winters at the top
of the world to complete the first west to east journey through the
North-west Passage after 27 months at sea.

This year, another RCMP ship, named the St Roch II in honour of its 1940
predecessor, completed the same voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic in
just over a month, finally emerging into Baffin Bay, west of Greenland, last
week.

At no point in its journey across the Arctic ocean north of Canada did the
St Roch II encounter any of the pack ice which defeated so many of its
predecessors in the search for a westerly sea route from Europe to the
Pacific Spice Islands.

"Concern should be registered with the fact that we didn't see any ice," the
vessel's skipper Sgt Ken Burton reported last week. "There were some bergs,
but nothing to cause any anxiety. We saw some ribbons of multi-year ice
floes, all small and fragmented, and we were able to steer around them."

As so often, though, one man's environmental concern is another's financial
opportunity. The success of the St Roch II's summer crossing opens up the
possibility that commercial shipping may eventually begin to use the route -
shortening the journey between Europe and Asia by around 5,000 miles and
sharply reducing competitive costs.

"It is still a risky venture, but the day of the famed North-west Passage,
the shortcut to the Orient, may be just around the corner," Sgt Burton said.

That possibility has raised fears among conservationists that the regular
use of the Arctic ocean by large commercial ships could cause some of the
environmental damage that has already been done to Alaskan waters and
coastlines by increased shipping, including cruise ships.

At least two other ships apart from the St Roch II have cruised in the
Northwest Passage this summer, one from the United States and the other from
New Zealand. The growth of maritime traffic this year is a sign of things to
come, the conservationists believe.

Environmental fears


The St Roch II's voyage is another dramatic sign that the temperature of the
Arctic ocean could be rising to a point at which existing assumptions about
the once Frozen North may need to be rethought - though the causes of the
change are still fiercely debated.

Comparison of submarine sonar probes beneath the Arctic ice suggest that the
thickness of the polar cap is now less than 60% of what it was less than
half a century ago. Satellite photographs show that the size of the Arctic
ice cap in the midsummer months is now some 6% smaller than it was in 1980.
Last month it was reported that clear water had been found at the North
Pole, though subsequent reports have called into question whether this was
as unique as it was first claimed.

"We don't know enough about the Arctic to know if this is global warming,
climate change, or maybe we were just plain lucky," Sgt Burton said.

The St Roch II left Vancouver on July 1 on its journey around the north of
the North American land mass, aiming to reach Halifax, Nova Scotia, by
October 10, before sailing on to New York. Its voyage through the normally
frozen area from Tuktoyaktuk near the Alaskan border to Baffin Bay could
have been accomplished even more quickly had it not been for a number of
land visits which the St Roch II made to isolated outposts along the route.

For more than 500 years, sailors have tried to find a western sea route
linking Europe with China and Japan. From John Cabot in the 1490s, to Martin
Frobisher in the 1570s, to Roald Amundsen in the early 1900s, some of the
most famous explorers in history have struggled to find the elusive
North-west Passage.

During his voyage, Sgt Burton and his crew found further evidence of one of
the most famous earlier expeditions, when an Inuk hunter led them to a
series of graves and an abandoned camp thought to belong to Sir John
Franklin's lost expedition of 1845. The expedition, which included two ships
and 128 men, was last spotted frozen in the Arctic ice in 1847. More than 30
subsequent expeditions have failed to adequately answer the questions about
the fate of Franklin and his party.




From gpn at techie.com  Mon Sep 11 02:18:09 2000
From: gpn at techie.com (Gary Novosielski)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 04:18:09 -0400
Subject: [gpnj-members] [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't
  arousing anything
In-Reply-To: <54.924678f.26ec30d8@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.20000911041809.00831db0@mailbox.bellatlantic.net>

At 20:33 9/9/00 EDT, Joe Mosley wrote:
>Please be consistent Mr. Baraka, in one sentence 
>you belittle those who think they can clean up "Imperialism" and in another 
>sentence you want to create a bloc to demand concessions from the "High 
>Priest" of the "Imperialists." You cannot have it both ways Sir!


Joe,

Outstanding response, as usual.

Colleen managed to get on the air when Baraka was on Clayton Reilly's
Saturday radio show on WBAI, and tried to make that very point, but it was
hard to get a word in edgewise.  She also pointed out that Ralph was
running to help build the Green party and not to further his own career,
which does not need help.

Baraka's response was somewhat rambling, and made the astounding claim that
the environment is not an important issue to most people!  Beyond the fact
that he knew that the Green Party had something to do with the environment,
and that Ralph Nader was an advocate for consumers (which he tried to paint
as an advocate in favor of over-consumption!), he seemed to actually know
very little about the positions or history of the Green Party.
Nevertheless, he felt qualified to hold forth at length about what was
"wrong" with it, getting almost every detail wrong.

What's worse is that he should know better, having had numerous contacts
with Joe Fortunato, and Larry Hamm, so he would have to try very hard to
get it so wrong.

It is pretty clear that Baraka is no longer a part of the solution.
Determining what, therefore, he *is* a part of is left as an exercise for
the reader.



From farmelantj at juno.com  Mon Sep 11 05:53:46 2000
From: farmelantj at juno.com (James Farmelant)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 07:53:46 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
Message-ID: <385689676.968673227059.JavaMail.root@web340-wra.mail.com>

I think the following post from the Marxism List
succintly makes Carrol's point concerning the
relationship between economic good times and
resistance to oppression.

Jim F.

------Original Message------
From: John Edmundson <jwe21 at cantva.canterbury.ac.nz>
To: marxism at lists.panix.com
Sent: September 11, 2000 10:17:07 AM GMT
Subject: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc


Phil F wrote:

>  Oppression and misery, which Marv suggests
> the working class in the West has to go through before socialists will
> have a shot, is just as likely to breed apathy and demoralisation as
> to breed militancy.

I was just looking at historical sociologists E Shorter and C Tilly's
"Strikes in France 1830-1968". Their research makes this exact
point:

"in general dislocation and severe deprivation tend to reduce the
propensity of workers to strike - except in the important case
where they touch groups which already have a high degree of
solidarity and internal organisation. Our reasoning is threefold: (1)
dislocation and deprivation fix the attention of workers on survival
from day to day, leaving them little disposed to risky collective
action; (2) dislocation and deprivation reduce the resources
available for any sort of collective action; (3) for a number of
different reasons...dislocation and deprivation generally go along
with an unfavourable bargaining position for workers."

I used to hold to the idea that when things got bad enough, we'd
finally see things start to happen. I'm no longer convinced that that
will be the case.
Cheers,
John E






From zapata at sezampro.yu  Mon Sep 11 05:59:53 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 13:59:53 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
References: <s9bcb353.008@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <001f01c01be7$e96cf080$dfbd6ac2@k382>

Good point, as usual.
What is the core of this dispute? I wont react on rather childish "CIA
connections" conspiracy theories of Chomsky and his oeuvre, but I will go
directly on some more general issues. Why is Tony posting these messages and
why is Jared Israel replying in such a manner? Because there is a
fundamental disagreement in building antiwar, antimilitarist movement, not
just in US, but in great number of other countries. Our web organization ,
Resistance (www.resistancenet.org ) has, in our manifesto and our program,
one very important moment: that antiwar movement can be built only, I repeat
only, on the category of the resistance; going back to what is fundamental,
as Regis Debray likes to say. And this means, translated in more practical
terms, in relation with the creation of unified antimilitarist movement,
that we must abandon the category of "support" and move the tenant from
"oppressed government" to which we are providing help, to "oppressed
civilians" which choice we are supporting. This is very important. Unlike
Jared Israel, to use Jared only as example, we are of the opinion that only
acting in this way, and not by giving undeserved support to Beloved and
Respected Comrade Leaders Milosevic, Qadafi, Saddam et al, we can "criticize
the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and
independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the
political violence which
has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that
one can fight against them" (M. Foucault); otherwise, we are doomed to
failure and finding ourselves in situation in which  we are not helping
people- and this is, I hope you all agree, the only important thing- but,
instead, doing exactly what establishment wants us to do: quarrel among
ourselves and unwisely support States instead of resisting imperialism and
NATO militarism.
 So, our "political philosophy" is very simple, summed up in four words:
organize, educate, emancipate & resist!
Only this approach to this new reality we are living and experiencing,
acknowledging the flexibility of capitalist democracies, State violence and
imperialism, can help us confront these challenges.
Please be so kind and patient to read our manifesto and program. So, this
disagreement really address "the issues of a more general relevance"; I
think, moreover, that they are of crucial relevance.
       With respect,
                                  Andrej Grubacic
                             www.resistancenet.org


----- Original Message -----
From: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: RE: [CrashList] What's all this??????


> Where can the Chomsky vs. Milosevic, crimes/ what crimes
> wrangle still go on this list? I think the onus now rests on
> the protagonists to show the rest of us that something is
> going to be achieved by continuing this thread indefinitely
> and I think this will only happen if it moves away from the
> specific individuals to issues of a more general relevance,
> don't you think?
>
> Tahir
>
>On Chomsky, why is anyone surprised? He worked at MIT all his life and one
>of his best friends is a former CIA director. Gimme a break, what ELSE did
>you expect?

Mark








From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Mon Sep 11 07:20:57 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 08:20:57 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
References: <F315kMUVfNIJWNDIT6b00008c74@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <39BCDC39.EC62A197@ilstu.edu>

I had no sooner pushed the send button than I realized that
my last observation would be misunderstood. The point is
this: Pound's *general* observation is true -- it was his
application of it to Adolph which was false. Men and
women *can* become blind from perception -- and I
believe it is in fact rather common that this happens. And
I'm arguing that many who emphasize the Crash, whether
economic or environmental, are so blinded. It is an honorable
blindness, but it is blindness nevertheless.

Those whose sight is blinded by their perception of global
wamring or the exhaustion of energy sources become blind
to the realities of organizing political resistance.

Carrol

Tom Warren wrote:

> >P.S.Ezra Pound tried to excuse Hitler ...
>
> Ooops. That's close to the outer boundary. I'm invoking the Thumper Rule,
> Carrol, and leaving the battlefield for a few beers ... and a chance to
> catch this big ol' bass that lives in the creek behind my dwelling place
> ....
>
> Best Regards,
> Tom
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
>
> Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
> http://profiles.msn.com.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon Sep 11 07:39:30 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 11 Sep 2000 15:39:30 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Why am I "obsessed with oil", asked Carrol Cox
Message-ID: <s9bcfd60.092@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 07:50:54 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:50:54 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
In-Reply-To: <385689676.968673227059.JavaMail.root@web340-wra.mail.com>
Message-ID: <000001c01bf7$4e29acc0$cd6c8cd4@mjones>

James Farmelant wrote:


> I used to hold to the idea that when things got bad enough, we'd
> finally see things start to happen. I'm no longer convinced that that
> will be the case.


Wishing for good times won't make them happen if they aren't *going* to
happen. Is it your argument that there is no energy crisis, no global
warming, no ecocide, or that these three phenomena are not interrelated? If
not then what is your point?

The Crashlist is not a forum for wishful thinking. If you want to pray for
rain, or vote for Gore in the hope of 'good times', nobody prevents you. Do
whatever you like. But what we are doing *here* is analyse events with as
much data and as logical rigour as possible, not whistle in the dark or
stick our heads in the sand.

"Survival from day to day" may not *even* be an option for many people.
That's the point you should start from.

Mark




From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Mon Sep 11 07:06:30 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 10:06:30 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Please unsub me for a week
In-Reply-To: <001f01c01be7$e96cf080$dfbd6ac2@k382>
Message-ID: <032a53007130b90MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>

Dear moderators,

I am leaving B.A. right now. Could you please not forget to unsub me 
for a week?

Thank you, and sorry for disruption with this unsavoury Balkan issue. 
The fact is I am very concerned, worried and even anguished for the 
people there and for those I came to consider a part of my own 
extended family during the war.



N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 07:50:57 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:50:57 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
In-Reply-To: <001f01c01be7$e96cf080$dfbd6ac2@k382>
Message-ID: <000101c01bf7$4f795e40$cd6c8cd4@mjones>

 Andrej Grubacic:
> our manifesto and our program,
> one very important moment: that antiwar movement can be built
> only, I repeat
> only, on the category of the resistance;

Actually, nothing separates your thinking from that of the Vlassovites who
wanted a Russia free from Stalin's oppression and therefore thought it
logical to fight for Hitler. You are Fifth Columnists, nothing more. Behind
the squalid veil of cant and hypocrisy with which you "equally" condemn
"all" the war criminals, is the simple fact that you are supporters of Nato
and enemies of your own people. As Stalin properly said, in some cases four
walls is three too many.


Mark




From farmelantj at juno.com  Mon Sep 11 08:59:54 2000
From: farmelantj at juno.com (James Farmelant)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 10:59:54 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
Message-ID: <385030528.968684395561.JavaMail.root@web340-wra.mail.com>

Mark,

I think you miss the point of both the post that I
forwarded to this list as well as the point that
Carrol has been attempting to make here for some time
now.  And that is that we cannot expect to see such
problems the energy crisis, global warming, or ecocide
dealt with in a progressive manner unless there is
in place a mass movement that is dedicated to resisting
the ruling classes.  And such a movement is most likely
to appear under conditions of relative economic
prosperity when it possible for workers to resist
capital from a relatively favorable position.

Unless, a mass movement is in place, I think we can
pretty much guarantee that when problems like the energy
crisis, global warming, and/or ecocide come to a head,
it will be our bourgeois ruling classes that will
dictate how these problems will be handled, with
all of the negative consequences that this implies.
In other words the best time for us to deal with
the Crash is before it happens.  To expect that
a progressive social movement will arise after it
occurs to take the inititiative is to my mind
wishful thinking.

Jim F.

------Original Message------
From: "Mark Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net>
To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
Sent: September 11, 2000 1:50:54 PM GMT
Subject: RE: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc


James Farmelant wrote:


> I used to hold to the idea that when things got bad enough, we'd
> finally see things start to happen. I'm no longer convinced that that
> will be the case.


Wishing for good times won't make them happen if they aren't *going* to
happen. Is it your argument that there is no energy crisis, no global
warming, no ecocide, or that these three phenomena are not interrelated? If
not then what is your point?

The Crashlist is not a forum for wishful thinking. If you want to pray for
rain, or vote for Gore in the hope of 'good times', nobody prevents you. Do
whatever you like. But what we are doing *here* is analyse events with as
much data and as logical rigour as possible, not whistle in the dark or
stick our heads in the sand.

"Survival from day to day" may not *even* be an option for many people.
That's the point you should start from.

Mark


_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist






From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon Sep 11 09:17:57 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 11 Sep 2000 17:17:57 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
Message-ID: <s9bd13dd.076@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon Sep 11 09:36:51 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 11 Sep 2000 17:36:51 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
Message-ID: <s9bd1852.001@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

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From zapata at sezampro.yu  Mon Sep 11 09:29:39 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 17:29:39 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
References: <000101c01bf7$4f795e40$cd6c8cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <006701c01c05$3d231f20$b874fac3@k382>

Well, this attacks are rather scary for a man who is devotionally fighting
against the anti-socialist heritage of Soviet Terror and bloody October.
Nothing separates my thinking from the thinking of Emma Goldman, Alexander
Berkman and Bertrand Russell, if you want to trace influences or models of
behavior in the past. OH, I do like sweet and comfortable bolshevik
simplicity but I prefer
the truth. It is not intellectually elegant to criticize someone before you
have read Manifesto he has written. Or before getting to know his
weltanschauung better. Who said that Milosevic is a war criminal? I said
that he is a criminal. If you want to be consequent, than we 'd agree that
almost every head of state is a war criminal.
   You are not attacking just me here, you are attacking
International Resistance Web Organization, because principles written in my
mail are principles we are fighting for. Why do you think that it is a
hypocritical program? I am the only person from Yugoslavia on board ( except
our web master)? So were are we fifth column exactly? In relation to...?
I am enemy of my own people? My dear fellow, whilst you were organizing a
world revolution from your armchair infront of your fancy computer, your own
people were throwing bombs on my people? Is this Zulu, Ius Talionis,
language you want to talk in? My people, your people, my tribe, your tribe,
traitors? During the war I fought with my whole heart against NATO - you
have watched it on TV, between speculations about crash economy and virtues
Latin-American litterateur. And still, you preach me, with real Stalinist
rhetoric's, about my country, my people, my dead or molested friends, about
"bombardment experience"? Interesting moral constitution. I never felt so
scared than while I was listening to "your countryman" Shea, talking on one
of those conferences. Reading your quote of Stalin reminded me on that
moment. I felt scared. Sick, bloodthirsty, old and mentally disturbed
imperialists and Bolsheviks. This later , people like you, because they have
a pretense of
"being on the left", are even more dangerous. You are a sick man, my dear
friend, and until your generation of  USSR nostalgists and caviar
revolutionaries
is not done with, we don't have any chance to fight for social justice, just
world order and tolerance.
Warm anarchist regards,
Against Bolshevism and Imperialism,
                       Andrej G.
                 www.resistancenet.org


----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Jones <jones118 at lineone.net>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 3:50 PM
Subject: RE: RE: [CrashList] What's all this??????


> Andrej Grubacic:
> > our manifesto and our program,
> > one very important moment: that antiwar movement can be built
> > only, I repeat
> > only, on the category of the resistance;
>
> Actually, nothing separates your thinking from that of the Vlassovites who
> wanted a Russia free from Stalin's oppression and therefore thought it
> logical to fight for Hitler. You are Fifth Columnists, nothing more.
Behind
> the squalid veil of cant and hypocrisy with which you "equally" condemn
> "all" the war criminals, is the simple fact that you are supporters of
Nato
> and enemies of your own people. As Stalin properly said, in some cases
four
> walls is three too many.
>
>
> Mark
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>






From aabdo at webtv.net  Mon Sep 11 09:41:58 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 10:41:58 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] RE: What's all this??????
In-Reply-To: "Mark Jones" <jones118@lineone.net>'s message of Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:50:57 +0100
Message-ID: <4708-39BCFD46-8948@storefull-231.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Mark Jones attacks Andrej as follows-
<Behind the squalid veil of cant and hypocrisy with which you "equally"
condemn "all" the war criminals, is the simple fact that you are
supporters of Nato and enemies of your own people.>

I rather think that is untrue, Mark.    I don't hear Andrej EQUALLY
attacking both sides.      Far from this, he has gone out of his way to
establish contacts across Europe to the US and Mexico, and to many other
countries, also.     And his effort is not to attack Milosevic, but
rather to attack the imperialist countries.      Andrej concentrates on
the bigger criminals at largein the world. 

Is this is not enough for the Leftists in the imperialist countries?
Must Andrej give a big bear hug to Milosevic while he is at it?

Interestingly, none of these cheerleader marxist types have addressed
the issue that Andrej keeps raising in his broken English.      That is
the issue of Resistance versus Support.      What does he mean by this?

The radical left has a long history of the negative politics of groupie
cheerleaders of one regime or another.      I can think back to the
group that only wanted to chant.....Ho,Ho, Ho Chi Minh, VietCong is
going to Win......     They never organized more than themselves.
Those that organized under.... US Out Now... were resisting, not
supporting.... and they organized millions.

Further, is the negative experence of Solidarity Groups throughout the
'80s.    Solidarity with Guatemala, Solidarity with El Salvador,
Solidarity with Cuba, Solidarity with Nicaragua, Solidarity with Bosnia,
Solidarity with East Tumor, and so on and on......     And yet we are
left with an imperialist bloc without any organized antiwar movement.

If we are to talk about a Fifth Column here,  I would start with all
those marxists that abandoned the effort to organize an antiwar movement
that had already been organized, and then went scurrying to organize
trade unions.     Except ever so often, to organize cheering squads for
the international flavor of the month.

Resistance, Not Support.      It seems like a simple enough concept for
all those people embedded constantly in historical theorizing.     Yet
they seem to just miss what Andrej is saying entirely.      They want to
cheer, not resist.

Adding a quote in from Stalin brings back nostalgic memories.
Remember those supportive banners of Stalin gazing into the distance
(the near socialist future) with a slight smile and solid confidence.
Don't support this type of imagery.....     Please.

Resistance, Not Support.     Resist NATO and The US War Machine.

Tony Abdo
_________________________________












From zapata at sezampro.yu  Mon Sep 11 09:34:48 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 17:34:48 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
References: <s9bd13dd.076@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <007301c01c05$f92f1340$b874fac3@k382>

I agree with Tahir. Not just with his most intelligent mail, but with his
call if you know "something about these people that I don't, in which case
maybe you should come out with it"......
 I ask Mark, in the name of basic decency, to come out with the facts about
me and my friends from www.resistancenet.org  ..........
Your move.
                     @.


----- Original Message -----
From: TAHIR WOOD <twood at uwc.ac.za>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 5:17 PM
Subject: Re: RE: RE: [CrashList] What's all this??????


>
>
> >>> "Mark Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net> 09/11 3:50 PM >>>
> nothing separates your thinking from that of the Vlassovites
> who
> wanted a Russia free from Stalin's oppression and therefore
> thought it
> logical to fight for Hitler. You are Fifth Columnists,
> nothing more.
>
> Mark, you may know something about these people that I
> don't, in which case maybe you should come out with it, but
> the logic you use here is simplistic in the extreme and
> leaves me cold. There is nothing 'logical' in fighting for
> Hitler because one is opposed to the oppression of Stalin.
> One could just as easily argue (and with logic just as
> simplistic) that in fighting for Stalin one was ultimately
> fighting for the capitalism of US and Britain and therefore
> even for the eventual establishment of NATO. Or that if one
> condemned the Chinese government actions in Tiannemen Square
> that one was pro-Western imperialism. Or that if one said
> that Saddam was an oppressor of his own people that one then
> justified the starving of Iraqi children or something. If I
> had spoken against Idi Amin around the time of Entebe, would
> I have been a Zionist?
>
> I have found myself arguing quite passionately while in
> Europe recently against the role of NATO and anti-Slav
> racism, which is so much a part of European history, but it
> would never have even occurred to me that I was arguing FOR
> Milosevic. I would think that the Serbian people would be
> better judges of him. I would like to know what they do
> think, but the answer to this question cannot be given
> simply by reference to imperialism.
>
> Tahir
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>





From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 09:59:15 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 16:59:15 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
In-Reply-To: <385030528.968684395561.JavaMail.root@web340-wra.mail.com>
Message-ID: <000201c01c09$3c04ba00$cd6c8cd4@mjones>

James Farmelant wrote:
>
> Mark,
>
> I think you miss the point of both the post that I
> forwarded to this list as well as the point that
> Carrol has been attempting to make here for some time
> now.  And that is that we cannot expect to see such
> problems the energy crisis, global warming, or ecocide
> dealt with in a progressive manner unless there is
> in place a mass movement that is dedicated to resisting
> the ruling classes.  And such a movement is most likely
> to appear under conditions of relative economic
> prosperity when it possible for workers to resist
> capital from a relatively favorable position.

This is just daydreaming. Capitalism has entered its most serious crisis.
Nothing in history prepares it or us for what is about to happen, and is
already happening. Imagine the worst thing that can happen, imagine the most
grievous loss you might know, imagine the face of the one you love best, and
understand that you have *already* lost it and lost them.

Generations of workers + peasants knew such loss, in war and revolution
throughout the last century. But at least they also knew there would be
people left behind who could celebrate their lives and deeds in word and
song. Now understand that even *that* is a forlorn hope; the planet is
burning. There will be no one left. This is now not just thinkable (not
*even* thinkable), it is an attestable scientific probability, and you above
all know this. Now tell me, in what dreamworld do you wait for the
reappearance of naive hopefulness and wishful thinking on a mass scale, ie,
for the rebirth of the mass movements of the past, for the millions of
lonely footfalls which echo through our ghostly history like your own dying
heartbeat?

>  we can
> pretty much guarantee that when problems like the energy
> crisis, global warming, and/or ecocide come to a head,
> it will be our bourgeois ruling classes that will
> dictate how these problems will be handled,

But *they* are doomed too, don't you get it? What *do* you think runaway
warming means? What *do* you think it means that, in my adult lifetime,
since around 1970, 30% of the planetary biosphere has been wrecked: ie, 1%
per annum?

Open your eyes and look up, look overhead. The atmosphere is six miles
thick. Above that is unknowing emptiness. That is as far as, say, from
Trafalgar Square to where I live in east London. That's all there is, and
we've wrecked it.

Mark





From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Mon Sep 11 10:33:46 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 11:33:46 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
References: <000201c01c09$3c04ba00$cd6c8cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <39BD0969.950C24C3@ilstu.edu>


Mark Jones wrote:

> James Farmelant wrote:
> >
> > Mark,
> >
> > I think you miss the point of both the post that I
> > forwarded to this list as well as the point that
> > Carrol has been attempting to make here for some time
> > now.  And that is that we cannot expect to see such
> > problems the energy crisis, global warming, or ecocide
> > dealt with in a progressive manner unless there is
> > in place a mass movement that is dedicated to resisting
> > the ruling classes.  And such a movement is most likely
> > to appear under conditions of relative economic
> > prosperity when it possible for workers to resist
> > capital from a relatively favorable position.
>
> This is just daydreaming. Capitalism has entered its most serious crisis.

Mark, the daydreamers are those who think we can get to socialism on
a rocking chair -- which is what this touching faith in the sheer political
magic of crash amounts to. Crisis is simply the name of the process
through which capitalism renews itself.

Mao: If we don't hit it, it won't fall. And it takes a huge mass movement
to do the hitting.

I too hope for great things from the Seattle movement -- but it won't
happen automatically (that movement was too dominated by anarchists
on the one hand and racist labor bureaucrats on the other), and whatever
happens has to be well underway (and have roots in broader segments
of the population) before disaster of one sort or another destroys the
will to resist.

Carrol





From farmelantj at juno.com  Mon Sep 11 10:45:00 2000
From: farmelantj at juno.com (James Farmelant)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 12:45:00 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
Message-ID: <389823941.968690701649.JavaMail.root@web114-wra.mail.com>

------Original Message------
From: "Mark Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net>
To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
Sent: September 11, 2000 3:59:15 PM GMT
Subject: RE: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc



>But *they* are doomed too, don't you get it?

You won't get a quarrel from me on that score.
Marx back in the Communist Manifesto in describing
the class conflicts between patricians and plebeians
in the Roman Empire wrote of them as ending in the
common ruin of the contending classes.  There is my
opinion no grounds for thinking that the proletariat
must inevitably triumph against the bourgeoisie.  On the contrary, it may
very well be the case that the
proletariat  will not
perceive the necessity for overthrowing the bourgeoisie
until it is too late.  That is why I think that to
wait for the Crash for such a movement to appear
is self-defeating.  By then it will be too late.
The bourgeoisie will attempt to deal with the energy
crisis, global warming, ecocide etc. in their own
way with the consequence of placing the survival of
humanity into doubt.

Early in the 20th century Rosa Luxemburg argued that
mankind was faced with choosing between socialism
or barbarism.  And the history of the 20th century
gave us a good taste of what modern barbarism looks
like. It may well be the case that people in the
21st century will be called upon to choose between
socialism and extinction.  Again, I don't think
that the outcome is by any means certain.






From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Mon Sep 11 10:44:00 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 11:44:00 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
References: <s9bd1852.001@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>
Message-ID: <39BD0BD0.EBE2074C@ilstu.edu>


TAHIR WOOD wrote:

>  But actually the
> more decisive events, e.g. Russia, China, Vietnam, have
> occurred when conditions were pretty bad for the people.
> This was also true of the French revolution, by the way.

Tahir, you confuse "pretty bad conditions" with the *direction*
of change in conditions. In all these revolutions I think you will
find that they gathered momentum at a time when conservatives
(who also think mere bad conditions explain revolution) would
afterwards whine something to the effect, "Why did people
revolt just when things were getting better." Objectively,
conditions may have been worse in the U.S. in the second
half of the '30s than in the first half, at least no better, but
there was a half-hearted recovery during Roosevelt's first
term, his rhetoric was wonderful, and that faint difference may
be said to have powered the upsurge of the CIO and of
the CPUSA at that time.

Carrol




From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 11 11:14:59 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 13:14:59 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Lying about Slovenian Secession in 1991
Message-ID: <97.a859e9d.26ee6d13@aol.com>

>From the forthcoming Emperor's Clothes book, "Ten years of lies that fooled 
the world" -

Lying about Slovenian Secession in 1991

by Petar Makara (9-10-00)

www.tenc.net
[Emperor's Clothes]

In June, 1991 Slovenia announced it had seceded from Yugoslavia and proceeded 
to seize Yugoslav customs stations. The Western media then broadcast news of 
a barbaric attack by vicious Yugoslav troops, beaten back by brave 
Slovenians. But those stories were pure fiction. There was no such attack. 
Total casualties in this war were: 3 dead Slovenian irregulars and 33 
Yugoslav soldiers, executed after they surrendered. The Yugoslav troops in 
Slovenia had not been issued live ammunition, and this was public knowledge 
at the time.

Only one mainstream Western source admitted the stories were lies. That was 
the 'European' in its July 19-21, 1991. Note the date: barely one month after 
Slovenia declared their intention to secede, thus starting the first Yugoslav 
war of secession. The title of the story was: "Lies win Balkan war of words." 
It was written by Simon Freeman. Emperor's Clothes has a photo copy of the 
original. This is fortunate, for the article cannot be found on the Internet 
using either the Lexis or Google search engines.

The article is worth reading carefully because it at once exposes how lies 
were used early on to demonize the Serbs and at the same time implicitly 
supports some of the propaganda it is exposing.

The article has this subtitle:

"Yugoslavia has rediscovered the old adage that truth is the first casualty 
of war. Simon Freeman reports from Zagreb [Croatia] and Ljubljana [Slovenia] 
where the protagonists are involved in fierce fight to capture the attention 
of the world's media." 

It begins by talking about the Croat government's understanding of the value 
of propaganda:. 

[Quote] "The Croats' strategy today is clear. They are bombarding the world 
with information, which is usually so petty that it seems that it must be 
true. But this is an illusion; it is impossible to check most of these 
reports precisely because the clashes were so minor that, even if they 
happened, they left no mark. And, in between the recital of these so-called 
facts, the Croats toss quite incredible allegations; this week's favourite is 
to claim, straight-faced, that the Serbs have hired assassins from the 
Romanian Securitate. 

[Quote continued] "Zagreb has launched this propaganda blitz after carefully 
analysing how the Slovenians managed to outmanoeuvre Belgrade in the fight 
for international sympathy. The Croats realised that the decisive 
engagements, which virtually guaranteed Slovenia's independence, took place 
in the pages of the foreign media and, even more important, in the news 
bulletins of the major television networks." [End quote.]

In fact, the Croatian leaders 'realised' nothing at all, nor did the Slovenes 
'outmaneuver' Belgrade. The secession of these countries was planned and 
coordinated by the US and German elites, working through various agencies, 
including the CIA and BND. They trained their proxy forces in Croatia and 
Slovenia and then opened the pages of the mass media which they controlled to 
accept their proxies' propaganda.

How much maneuvering is required to win a media war when the Slovenes and the 
mass media are controlled by the same forces?

The Western conquerors divided the job of getting out misinformation. The 
proxies in Slovenia and Croatia were to craft lies, as best they could. The 
Western media was to bring the lies to market. 

The article goes on to say that "the Serbs" (meaning, the Yugoslav 
Federation) are learning the lesson that you have to use the Western media 
but that they are slow students: 

[Quote] "They have a leader, Slobodan Milosevic, whose brand of stubborn 
nationalism and hardline marxism is a public relations disaster.'' [End quote]

Note the propaganda hidden in this sentence. In the early stages of the 
breakup of Yugoslavia, the West tarred the Serbs with being "the last 
Communists on Planet Earth." This particular propaganda slogan was launched 
by the Croatian Catholic Church. 

Then the article talks about the "cleverness" of the Slovene propagandists:

[Quote] "The Slovenes cleverly portrayed themselves as clean-limbed, tanned 
churchgoers who only wanted to live peacefully and democratically in their 
Alpine idyll of mountains, lakes and meadows

[Quote] "The Serbs, on the other hand, the Slovenes suggested [and the West 
readily published], were ruthless communists. They were dirty, unshaven 
brutes who dropped cluster bombs on innocent civilians. They came from the 
east, which had always sought to inflict its intolerance, religious 
fanaticism and alphabet of squiggly lines on Europe. 

[Quote] "These were grotesque caricatures, of course, but, thanks to the 
brilliant propaganda campaign in Ljubljana [capital of Slovenia], they have 
taken hold of the public imagination in the West, turning a complex struggle 
into a straightforward battle between the forces of light (Slovenes and 
Croats) and darkness (Serbs). The nerve-centre of this propaganda operation 
was an underground conference complex deep below the streets of Ljubljana. 
Here, a few dozen officials from the Slovenian Ministry of Information, 
backed up by young, multilingual patriot volunteers, worked tirelessly to 
service more than 1,000 journalists. 

[Quote] "Inside this bunker the information flowed fast and efficiently in an 
atmosphere oddly similar to that found in a press centre at an Olympic Games; 
the results - thanks hit, shots fired, prisoners taken - were given every 
hour. The Slovenes needed a bloody, dramatic conflict to ensure the world did 
not loose interest. So they showered the media with details of battles that 
had often never taken place. 

[Quote] Sometimes the Slovenes would enliven the day with revelations which 
were either fictious or irrelevant... 

[Quote] "...It was possible to report the war without ever venturing above 
the ground. Indeed, since it required an honours degree in orienteering to 
negotiate the labyrinth of roadblocks, many journalists opted [or were 
ordered?] to remain underground. But, for those who did venture into the 
sunlight, the bunker war often seemed a fantacy. For example, the world heard 
of a major battle at Jezersko, a small border post an the frontier with 
Austria. This greatly surprised the Slovene militiamen at Jezersko, who told 
me a few days later that the army had fired a few shots, taken the post and 
then, faced with Slovene reinforcement, retreated happily down the mountain. 
No one was hurt" [End quote]

Olympic Games indeed. The author counts on Olympian ignorance among his 
readers. Some thoughts on this excerpt:

1) He is telling us that Slovenes, for the first time in the history of 
warfare, have discovered that it is good to present themselves positively and 
the enemy negatively. This is astonishing. Even Hitler tried to present 
himself positively - thus he launched World War II by staging an incident 
which made it appear that Polish border guards had attacked Germany. And 
Hitler said he was fighting unshaven, dirty communists also. 
2) WHY did Western reporters sit in secessionists bunker and present only the 
secessionist side of the story when in fact the media of the Federal 
Government of Yugoslavia was also issuing daily news reports, and accurate 
ones (i.e. that the st4ories abut fighting were lies). Why didn't Western 
reporters go out and investigate to see who was telling the truth? Why did 
these reporters happen to take the side of secessionists who described 
themselves in terms painfully similar to those used by WWII Nazis? Why did 
they refuse to give fair hearing to the news of a recognized, sovereign 
country, one of the founders of the United Nations, a country which had been 
on friendly terms with the West for many years? 
3) Since when do Western reporters sit in a bunker while reporting on a war? 
Haven't they gone out and reported far tougher situations? The war in 
Slovenia was feeble. The end count of casualties was 3 dead Slovenian 
irregulars and 33 executed Yugoslav Federal Army soldiers who had no 
ammunitions (!) and surrendered. A total of 36 people dead. Some war! The 
casualty level of a bus accident. What happened to so called Western 
"investigative journalism" ? 
4) The article says: "It required an honours degree in orienteering to 
negotiate the labyrinth of roadblocks [in Slovenia]" Baloney. Go and try to 
find Slovenia on the map. Hard isn't it? A country smaller than Connecticut. 
I guess these journalists, with their true "interest" in events, would be get 
lost in their Slovenian hotel. With all those great and terrible roadblocks 
and savage obstacles they wouldn't find a bathroom. 
5) Did ONLY the Slovenes have "young multilingual patriot volunteers" ready 
to spread their view of events? See how the image of clean-limbed young 
Slovenes is presented even here, where it is supposedly debunked! Are Serbs 
never multilingual? Are they never beautiful? 
The author then presents his moral, which appears in the pages of the 
'European' in large type:

[Quote] "Exaggerations will do nothing to heal the divisions which are 
ripping the country appart." [End quote]

Upside down and backwards, because in fact it is precisely the exaggerations 
put forth by the Western media which were the instrument for allowing Western 
involvement in Yugoslavia - justifying economic and military support for the 
secessionists, sanctions against multiethnic Yugoslavia, expulsions of Serbs, 
moderate Muslims and others who wanted to hold it together, the 
reintroduction of huge numbers of expatriate Croatian Ustashe fascists, the 
disarming of Yugoslav loyalists through introduction of UN troops, and the 
bombing of loyalist forces, in Bosnia and later Serbia and Montenegro.

Savagery was introduced from the West. Without the West, the Slovenian and 
Croatian fascists would never have had a chance in Yugoslavia.

***

Further reading....

1) "Germany and the US in the Balkans- a Careful Coincidence of National 
Policies?" by T.W. Carr at 
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/carr/carr.html

2) "What Does NATO Want in Yugoslavia?" by Sean Gervasi at 
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/gervasi/why.htm

If you find emperors-clothes useful, we can use your help... 

(The Soros Foundation does NOT fund Emperors Clothes.) 

We rely on volunteer labor and donations. Our expenses include: Internet 
fees, Lexis, our Internet research tool, and phone bills. We use the phone a 
lot for interviews and to discuss editorial changes. 

Every month hundreds of thousands of people read articles from Emperor's 
Clothes. By making a contribution you will be helping to spread the word.

To make a donation, please mail a check to Emperor's Clothes, P.O. Box 
610-321, Newton, MA 02461-0321. (USA) 

Thanks for reading and for helping! 

www.tenc.net
[Emperor's Clothes



From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 11 12:06:41 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 19:06:41 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Oil blocks hitting hard in Europe
Message-ID: <000a01c01c1b$09d19a00$871a063e@mjones>


PARIS
Tuesday 12 September 2000

Protests over high fuel prices continued to hit several European countries,
as ministers of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries approve an
800,000-barrel-a-day increase in global crude oil production.

Truck drivers in Britain blockaded oil depots on Sunday, cutting off the
supply to the country's filling stations, as France returned to normal after
a week of similar action by truckers and farmers.

Shell said 90 of its 100 service stations in north-west England were out of
fuel, and warned that disruption could spread if the blockade of its
Ellesmere Port refinery, the largest in Europe, continued.

In Scotland, truck drivers joined farmers and announced a series of
roadblocks on main routes on Sunday.


Scottish Secretary John Reid said that Britons would not follow the hardline
stance of the French truckers and farmers. "The people of this country do
not resort to the French way of doing things, which causes massive
disruption and inconvenience for their fellow citizens," he said.

France is slowly returning to normal after truckers' federations and other
professions reached agreements with the government that were expected to
ease the financial burden on professional drivers.

French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius said the cost of the protest, which
brought the country to a standstill last week, was likely to reach three
billion francs ($A719.2 million).

In Belgium, truck and bus companies and taxis blocked the centre of Brussels
on Saturday, organisers said. A procession of vehicles began winding through
the capital, with horns blaring, and blocked the city with trucks at 3pm,
said Marcel Delsemme, the president of the UPTR, a main trucking
association.

About 1700 vehicles were in the protest, of which 300 were still trying to
block central Brussels late on Sunday.

Organisers called Sunday's protest a "first warning" and said they were
prepared for further action.

AFP




From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Mon Sep 11 12:15:06 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 13:15:06 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
References: <000001c01bf7$4e29acc0$cd6c8cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <39BD212A.9830758A@ilstu.edu>


Mark Jones wrote:

> James Farmelant wrote:
>
> > I used to hold to the idea that when things got bad enough, we'd
> > finally see things start to happen. I'm no longer convinced that that
> > will be the case.
>
> Wishing for good times won't make them happen if they aren't *going* to
> happen. Is it your argument that there is no energy crisis, no global
> warming, no ecocide, or that these three phenomena are not interrelated? If
> not then what is your point?
>
> The Crashlist is not a forum for wishful thinking.

Mark, I'm not the only one who has told you over and over again
that we agree with you on your technical arguments. So it is absurd
to write, "Is it your argument that there is no energy crisis, no global
warming, no ecocide?" Of course that is not our argument.

It is our argument that you are engaged in wishful thinking to keep
repeating this point without seeming to realize that there exist real
political problems in doing anything about it. Tom misunderstood
what I mean by "screaming" the other day. I did not accuse him
of screaming at me. I accused both him and you of thinking that by
screaming at the world you were accomplishing anything.

Disaster is coming. Disaster is coming. Disaster is coming. You and
Tom repeat that over and over again and seem to think that in doing
so you are making a political point.

Some of us are saying, "Damn yes, disaster is coming, and unless we
can raise a political army *before* the disaster comes, there will be
no way to deal with it when it comes."

You and Tom are engaging in wishful thinking. You seem to think that
disaster automatically prevents disaster.

Carrol







From mstainsby at tao.ca  Mon Sep 11 18:07:04 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 17:07:04 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Red Scare rumours in Philadelphia
Message-ID: <000c01c01c4d$6264b300$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

===========================
Rumors had troopers seeing Reds during the GOP convention

State police based their suspicions of protesters on information supplied by
a right-wing group.

By Craig R. McCoy and Linda K. Harris
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

The cold war is long over but Pennsylvania State Police were still on the
lookout for communists and Soviet sympathizers among the demonstrators
protesting last month's Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

In state police affidavits justifying a raid on a West Philadelphia
warehouse
used by convention protesters, troopers alleged that communists were behind
the demonstrations.

"Funds allegedly originate with Communist and leftist parties and from
sympathetic trade unions," the state police declared in the affidavits.
"Other funds reportedly come from the former Soviet-allied World Federation
of Trade Unions."

The language left critics, including demonstrators and civil-liberties
lawyers, both a little amused and a lot indignant. They said it seemed like
something out of a musty red-baiting periodical of the 1950s - Red Channels
and the like.

The allegations - passed to state police by a private group funded by
conservative multimillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife - did not belong in
government affidavits seeking judicial approval for a search warrant that
led
to 75 arrests, they said.

"It's McCarthyite. It's tarring people," said David Kairys, a law professor
at Temple University. "It's reminiscent of the worst of the '50s."

The allegations of communist money made up only a small part of the 23-page
affidavits in support of search warrants for three vehicles and the
warehouse, at 4100 Haverford Ave. The affidavits, made public Wednesday
after
having been sealed for more than a month, relied most heavily on the direct
observations of undercover troopers who infiltrated the warehouse.

Known as "the puppet warehouse," police called it a center of illegal
activity; activists said it was a workshop in which they made more than 100
puppets and a large satirical float, "Corpzilla."

The documents were the first public acknowledgement that police had
infiltrated groups planning to protest during last month's Republican
National Convention.

Without elaboration, the affidavits stated that the allegations of communist
funding had come from the little-known Maldon Institute.

Asked last week about the Maldon Institute, Jack Lewis, a state police
spokesman, seemed a little unsure.

"Our people said they believed this institute is based in the United
Kingdom," he said.

The Maldon Institute - named after an obscure battle in England in the 10th
century - is based in Baltimore and has a mailing address in Washington,
D.C.

Lewis added: "I'm told by our intelligence people that the Maldon Institute
is a private organization that provides intelligence information to police
departments.

"We have found in the past that the Maldon Institute generally presents
reliable information."

Lewis said that state police and other police departments "routinely receive
information from the Maldon Institute at no cost, via e-mail. The department
did not solicit this information."

Asked whether state police had attended Maldon Institute conferences, Lewis
responded: "State police personnel have had contact in the U.S. with
representatives of the institute."

According to public records, the institute is funded, at least in part, by
Scaife, the Pittsburgh political philanthropist best known for his financial
support of several private investigations of President Clinton in recent
years.

Financial forms for Scaife's Carthage Foundation show it provided Maldon
with
$250,000 in 1998.

Institute documents show that board members have included D. James Kennedy,
a
Florida televangelist who is cofounder of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral
Majority; and Robert Moss, a journalist and novelist who in the 1980s wrote
that the KGB used Western media to manipulate public opinion.

The institute's officials did not return repeated telephone calls seeking
comment Friday.

In an interview last week, Chip Berlet, who studies conservative and
far-right groups, said a key figure within the 15-year-old institute has
been
John H. Rees, a British-born contributor to the John Birch Society and
publisher of a newsletter devoted to intelligence-gathering and distributed
to police.

In the 1970s, Rees published the Information Digest, which gave details
gathered after he infiltrated left-leaning groups under a false name, the
Baltimore Sun reported in 1988.

Just this year, Rees, as director of the Maldon Institute, helped organize
an
invitation-only conference in New York City on terrorism that drew FBI
agents
and police, according to conference sponsors.

Berlet said state police erred in using the institute as a basis for police
action.

"It issues monographs and monitors cults and terrorist groups and left-wing
groups," said Berlet, senior analyst with the left-leaning Political
Research
Associates, based in Massachusetts. "It does so from an old-fashioned
counter-subversion perspective that is obsessed with finding reds under
every
bed."

Berlet said police needed to distinguish protesters who were engaged in
nonviolent and legal protest from those breaking the law.

"You're never going to draw those appropriate distinctions if you're relying
on these kind of scurrilous, McCarthyite allegations," he said.

Lewis, the state police spokesman, noted that the affidavit drew from "a
wide
variety of sources" and did not rely solely on the Maldon Institute's work.
The affidavits drew most heavily on information developed by troopers who
had
infiltrated the warehouse.

The affidavits, in alleging communist links to the protest, cited
specifically a Maldon Institute research report dated April 7. Lewis said
the
state police would not release that report.

"The department does not believe it has an obligation to provide the public
with all information it receives as part of its intelligence-gathering
operation, whether or not the department pays for that information," he
said.

The affidavit's specific allegation is that communist money flowed to a
protest group called the Pennsylvania Consumer Action Network through its
supposed ties to People's Global Action, an anti-capitalist group formed in
Switzerland two years ago.

All of this astounded Mike Morrill, a leader of the Pennsylvania Consumer
Action Network. His group organized a peaceful march for July 30 - one
permitted by the city.

Morrill last week released his group's donor list. It showed that the group
raised about $48,000 for the Republican convention protests, with the
largest
contributions coming from well-known city labor unions. Of the total, $200
came from the Communist Party of Eastern Pennsylvania, the only communist
group listed.

Morrill said he took no part in the Aug. 1 street blockades that disrupted
city traffic.

"Imagine my surprise when I found out my organization was awash in money,
funded by Soviet-era organizations and communist-inspired groups from around
the world," Morrill said.

"Were it so, I'd probably have a better wardrobe and live in a nicer house."
============
Michael Morrill
PA Consumer Action Network
529 Court St., #509
Reading, PA 19601
1-610-478-7888








From embark at epud.net  Mon Sep 11 19:28:55 2000
From: embark at epud.net (Tom&Molly/Embarkadero)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 18:28:55 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
References: <000001c01bf7$4e29acc0$cd6c8cd4@mjones> <39BD212A.9830758A@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <000801c01c58$d599cc60$112b74d8@pavilion>

Looks like my hotmail account is screwed up, so I am using this alternate
again.

Writes Carrol Cox:

>I accused both him and you of thinking that by
> screaming at the world you were accomplishing anything.

> Disaster is coming. Disaster is coming. Disaster is coming. You and
> Tom repeat that over and over again and seem to think that in doing
> so you are making a political point.

Nah, political points are small potatoes. You can have them all Carrol. Not
so many people as you think have perceived that disaster is coming. The
repetition does indeed have a point. Until you integrate it into your
thinking you are a) defenseless b) not part of the solution.

> Some of us are saying, "Damn yes, disaster is coming, and unless we
> can raise a political army *before* the disaster comes, there will be
> no way to deal with it when it comes."

See? This is why we keep singing the same note. The disaster is not just
coming Carrol. It is here now. You need to raise an army alright, but not
just a"political" one. You need to do it much quicker than you perceive.
That's why this irritating single note "disaster is coming" keeps echoing in
you ears. You don't seem to be hearing it yet. As long as you keep your
solutions in the theoretical and tightly bound to a single ideology, you
reamin with your head in the sand.

So, gang where does that leave us? Ostriches and Chicken Littles, once
again.

{sigh}

At least it's becoming clear that there is some dim perception of the abyss
at hand.

Progress!

Tom

"The Earth is not dying - she is being killed. And those who are killing her
have names
and addresses."    -Utah Phillips


>
> You and Tom are engaging in wishful thinking. You seem to think that
> disaster automatically prevents disaster.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From smith_robert_a99 at hotmail.com  Tue Sep 12 09:42:20 2000
From: smith_robert_a99 at hotmail.com (Robert . A Smith)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 10:42:20 EST
Subject: [CrashList] WHAT crimes?
Message-ID: <LAW2-F291gnw5XnMwgj000079ee@hotmail.com>

  What crimes? are you kidding?, I suppose all of those dead body's in the 
mass graves we have all seen were "tricks of the media" or in fact they were 
poor serbs murdered by the KLA. I have no doubt that you will come up with 
some sort of bull shit to further your liking of that mass murderer so you 
can receive your next pay check from his govt. If its the political ideology 
that you agree with that's fine ( each to there own) but please don't stand 
up for a man that is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of 
people in a war he knew he could not win.    BTW i will not respond to any 
responce you may come up with due to i have read your other post's regarding 
this matter and i know that nothing i could say here would change your mind 
so it would be  pointless for me to waste anymore time on this topic.

                        With some regard.

                        Robert.


>
>In a message dated 09/10/2000 5:29:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>aabdo at webtv.net writes:
>
><<
>  But Milosevic has been behind some very brutal programs, and trying to
>  deny this is a case of overstating Yugoslavia's defense.      People get
>  very suspicious when they think that you are overstating a defense.
>  So why do it? >>
>
>What very "brutal polcies" ?.The statement is simply untrue.  If anything,
>Milsoevich has been too gentle.  A little of US Grant would go a long way.
>Now he seems a bit tougher.  Excellent.
>
>  The "brutal polciies" argument relies on the impression given by the
>newspapers. Of course, when when challenges impressions created by the 
>media,
>one upsets people.  Who said it would be easy?  Aabdo asks, why do it?
>Because these "impressions: are used to neutralize opposition to war.
>
>Chomsky's articles on Yugoslavia rely on those impressions - he never 
>clearly
>states what "crimes" he is talking about  because "everyone knows".  Aaabdo
>does likewise. I said to Chomsky: either present evidence of these terrible
>policies, or apologize and stop doing it.  Ditto Aabdo.
>
>Jared
>
>_______________________________________________
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From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 11 22:07:08 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 00:07:08 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Privatizers for Montenegro Sought by US Commerce Dep't (!)
Message-ID: <40.b711f9.26ef05ec@aol.com>

Document: Commerce Department Recruits Montenegro Privatizers 

www.tenc.net 
[Emperor's Clothes]

Compiled and provided by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bosnia/Balkan Task 
Force, part of the Central and Eastern Europe Business Information Center 
(CEEBIC). 

A weekly update of commercial information and opportunities for U.S. firms 
interested in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, Kosovo and the 
Balkans. 

Compiled and provided by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bosnia/Balkan Task 
Force, part of the Central and Eastern Europe Business Information Center 
(CEEBIC). 

Montenegro: Seeks Privatization Fund Manager Date: 08/28/2000 6:00:33 PM 
Eastern Daylight Time From: CEEBIC at ita.doc.gov (CEEBIC) 

Introduction 

Montenegro will begin a privatization program which will return formerly 
nationalized companies to the private sector. USAID is providing technical 
support to Montenegro during the privatization process. 

Montenegro has developed legislation and regulations for the privatization 
process. Under Montenegrin legislation foreign and domestic investors receive 
equal treatment. Foreign investors may convert local currency into foreign 
currency. Foreign investors may repatriate profits and capital to their 
country of origin and will enjoy a five year tax holiday on corporate 
profits. 

Privatization 

The privatization program will have two phases. In the first, 419,000 
Montenegrin adults will receive vouchers from the government. These vouchers, 
which repesent the national patrimony, will permit these citizens to bid for 
shares of companies being privatized during an auction which will constitute 
the second phase. A total of 222 small and medium sized companies will be 
auctioned off in the second phase as will 19 large ones. The nominal book 
value of the entire privatization program will be 2.3 billion DM. 

Instead of bidding for shares directly many Montenegrins may prefer to turn 
over their vouchers to privatization funds which will bid for shares, 
creating a diversified portfolio of stocks. The voucher holders will receive 
units of the fund in exchange for these vouchers. 

The government of the Republic of Monetenegro is seeking experienced 
portfolio managers to manage these funds. Applicants should be prepared to 
demonstrate a record of prior fund managements and present a 3 year business 
plan. Successful applicants are required to invest a minimum of 250,000 DM in 
the management company. 

The Montenegrin government expects that managing the privatization funds 
should be quite profitable. The management fee is up to 5 of assets under 
management. The fund will play an active role in restructuring companies in 
their portfolios. Many of the companies will need to be upgraded in terms of 
management and financing. By restructuring these companies privatization 
funds should be able to add value to the portfolio over the long term thus 
greatly enhancing its market value. 

To find out additional information about this project, please contact Mr. 
Fletcher Hodges via e-mail at: FHodgesIII at aol.com 

***

If you find emperors-clothes useful, we can use your help... 

(The Soros Foundation does NOT fund Emperors Clothes.) 

We rely on volunteer labor and donations. Our expenses include: Internet 
fees, Lexis, our Internet research tool, and phone bills. We use the phone a 
lot for interviews and to discuss editorial changes. 

Every month hundreds of thousands of people read articles from Emperor's 
Clothes. By making a contribution you will be helping to spread the word.

To make a donation, please mail a check to Emperor's Clothes, P.O. Box 
610-321, Newton, MA 02461-0321. (USA) 

Thanks for reading and for helping! 

www.tenc.net
[Emperor's Clothes]




From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 11 21:41:41 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 23:41:41 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Yugo Pres. Candidate Kostunica's program (excerpts)
Message-ID: <98.a00d691.26eefff5@aol.com>

Below are the introduction to and key passages from the program written by 
G17 and adopted by the "Democratic Opposition" in Serbia (DOS) and their 
candidate, Kostunica. 

G17 is the neoliberal NGO/think tank in Belgrade.

I urge people to read it carefully.  For example, # 30 reads as follows:

"30. Solutions based on direct foreign investment (privatization of 
government-owned companies and industry)."

Note what G17 has put in parenthesis!

Best regards, 
Jared Israel
www.tenc.net  [emperor's clothes]

***

INTRO AND KEY PASSAGES

Democratic Opposition of Serbia 
PROGRAMME FOR DEMOCRATIC SERBIA

The Non-governmental Organization G17 made the Programme of economic and 
constitutional-legal reforms required by the new authorities, in case they 
come victorious out of the September federal parliamentary and presidential 
elections, in order to initiate democratic changes of the Yugoslav state and 
society. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) was offered the Programme 
only after the parties had been united and presented a common presidential 
candidate. Eighteen parties or coalitions within the DOS acknowledged the 
Programme as their electoral platform. The DOS candidate for president Dr. 
Vojislav Kostunica did the same. It will be presented for public debate to 
all citizens of Serbia. 


FIRST, we shall adopt the Declaration on urgent preparations for the 
introduction of the new Constitution with purpose of eliminating the existing 
coinstitutional chaos. The new constitutional and legal stipulations will be 
accorded with modern legal and civilization standards, particularly regarding 
the spheres of human liberties, protection of civil and minority rights, 
parliamentarism, accountability of authorities and rule of law. The 
Declaration will acknowledge the necessity for the decentralization of the 
state, particularly in regards to the regionalization of Serbia and 
affirmation of autonomies of Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohija...

SECOND, we shall adopt the Resolution to abolish the present economic and 
political blockade of Montenegro, and obligate the highest state bodies to 
start negotiations immediately with the legally elected leadership of 
Montenegro on the character and functions of a future state community between 
Serbia and Montenegro. 

THIRD, we shall require of the future Government to promptly submit a 
programme of concrete measures to the UN Security Council which would enable 
a consistent implementation of the Resolution 1244 on Kosovo, preserve the 
territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia, guarantee the right to 
peaceful and secure living to all inhabitants of Kosovo, and stimulate its 
integration with new democratic state institutions. We shall particularly 
insist on urgent solution of the matters concerning the kidnapped and 
murdered persons after the KFOR had been deployed. 

FIRST 100 Days

Collection of Reform Economy Laws 

Laws to immediately enable the reform of the monetary system and initiate 
reform of the fiscal system will be proposed, this including the proposal of 
law on balanced budget. The present law on privatization will be 
substantially revised. A law on social care and relief of poor will be 
proposed. The law on foreign trade will be changed, thus enabling 
considerable cut and balance of customs.... 

The First Year of the New Government

The Reintegration of Yugoslavia and Serbia into the International Community

1. The inclusion into all relevant international institutions that would 
secure the immediate withdrawal of all sanctions, including the so-called 
?outside wall? sanctions. 

2. The immediate inclusion of Yugoslavia and Serbia into the Pact for 
Stability of Southeastern Europe and accessibility to financial means for 
reconstruction and Yugoslavia?s economic recovery, secured by way of 
international donators.

3. The reinstitution of Yugoslavia?s membership into the world?s most 
significant financial organizations (namely IBRD and the IMF), that will give 
our country access to world capital markets and create means for foreign 
investment imperative to the country?s economic reconstruction.

4. The prompt resolution of succession questions with ex-Yugoslav republics 
and, on that basis, the acquisition of necessary financial means that will 
make possible membership in the European Union.

5. The integration into all regional political and economic activity, with an 
emphasis on free trade.

6. The application of modern economic ideology to the Yugoslav economy.

7. Radical economic reforms.

8. Balancing of the federal budget and initiation of fiscal reform.

9. Meaningful reduction of taxes and elimination of the resulting incentive 
not to pay them (tax reduction will augment tax revenue).

10. The increase of public revenue through legalization of the transactions 
of the ?gray economy.?

11. Growth of revenue based on taxation of products that were intentionally 
pushed into the ?black market? by the government (cigarettes, coffee, 
gasoline, etc.)

12. Reduction in public spending

13. Demilitarization (elimination of spending caused by unnecessary tension 
between the international community and Yugoslavia, represented by a 
government repressive to its people). 

14. Rationalization of public administrations by elimination of unnecessary 
ministries, federal economic chambers, and other aspects of inefficient 
public spending; assigning of new priorities and discipline in budget 
spending (priorities: health, education, judicial system, unemployment, their 
training and new employment, social protection, culture, retired workers, 
farmer subsidies/incentives, reformed police)

15. Radical and timely simplification of the taxation system (will be based 
on fewer tax brackets, as opposed to the current system shaped by 250

16. The reform of tax administration and the creation of a tax code. 

17. The initiation of a tax system reform that will emphasize the institution 
of the ?value added tax? (VAT).

18. Reform in directing public spending, including establishing a Treasury 
and a system of public acquisition.

19. Establishing elements of an integrated information system in the fiscal 
sphere by securing electronic registries. 

20. Establishing of a stable currency.

Option 1: Establishing a fluctuating exchange rate system accompanied by an 
emission of a new convertible currency (assuming foreign hard currency 
reserves are granted to aid the central bank in keeping the exchange rate 
stable). 

Option 2: Establishing a two-currency system, in other words legalizing 
commerce in German Marks. 

21. Restoring of confidence in the financial system and bank reform.

22. The complete integration of the Yugoslav banking system into the 
international financial system.

23. The beginning of reform of domestic banks and the freedom of foreign 
banking institutions with good reputations to enter the Yugoslavian banking 
industry.

24. The beginning of repaying the hard currency debt to the people and 
restoring domestic savings.

25. Crediting producers and population in general.

26. The immediate modification of administrative interest rate policy based 
on affirmation of market conditions and criteria. 

27. Financial support to initiate macroeconomic reform.

28. A foundation for macroeconomic stabilization of Yugoslavia (the 
stabilization of currency and overcoming of budget difficulties).

29. Direct financial aid from abroad (financial acquisition from donator 
conferences, credit obtained from international financial institutions) that 
would enable the new government to, from its inception, carry out economic 
reform in a stable manner. 

30. Solutions based on direct foreign investment (privatization of 
government-owned companies and industry).

31. Solutions based on the legalization of the ?gray economy? and activation 
of domestic savings, following the legalization of currency exchange and 
banking system reform. 

32. Price liberalization (controlled prices provide an unnecessary protection 
of all categories of the population).

33. The gradual withdrawal of prices that ?subsidize? the poor, created by 
the current government in an attempt to hide the social implications of its 
policies. 

34. The reprogramming of foreign debt.

35. The request for reasonable expectations in the repayment of the foreign 
debt.

36. The request for a partial elimination of the foreign debt. 

37. Liberalization of the inter-republic and international trade policy.

38. The withdrawal of all conditional quotas on imports and exports (except 
for agriculture), and their replacement with tariff rates.

39. A meaningful decrease in the level of customs tariffs so that their value 
is equal, accompanied by relevant budget compensations from the European 
Union. 

40. The securing of preferred products for export to the European Union.

41. The elimination and withdrawal of all factors limiting trade with 
neighboring countries.

42. The liberalization of legal and administrative regulative mechanisms for 
exports and imports.

43. Privatization:

Privatization must be carried out relatively quickly in order to close the 
enormous gap between Yugoslavia and other countries in transition. 
Privatization will be mandatory.
The privatization process must be transparent.
Privatization will mainly be done through direct sale of government property, 
keeping in mind the huge public debt that must be remedied.
Privatization will stimulate the development of the capital market.
44. New agrarian policy:

Considering the fact that Serbia is naturally tied to agriculture, the 
government will prioritize renewing and restoring confidence in its 
relationship with farmers (which was lost when the current government failed 
to pay its debt after taking over the production of certain products). 
Economically stimulating agricultural production while at the same time 
placing an emphasis on protection from foreign competition. 
A stable system that provides a guaranteed price index, that will, in case of 
low market prices, adequately compensate producers from a specially formed 
agrarian budget.
New mechanisms for crediting the agriculture from real sources (commercial 
bank credits, investment of organizations that specialize in the processing 
and transportation of agricultural products, term contracting, ?futures? 
transactions on goods, insurance programs), that will enable farmer 
acquisition of modern agricultural equipment, the renewal of agricultural 
funds, and the introduction of new technology in production.
45. Ensuring social and health security for the people.

46. The transformation and meaningful strengthening of the fund for children 
in order to remedy the disturbing reduction in birth rates. 

47. Citizens most affected by the tragic occurrences of the past ten years 
(refugees, unemployed, retired workers, the poor) must be socially insured 
from a special fund.

48. The fund will also be used for short-term improvement of health services, 
until gross domestic product is high enough to enable the country?s own 
health service system imperative to the biological survival and future 
prosperity of the nation. 

49. This one-year fund for overcoming budget difficulties will partly be 
formed from the sale of government-owned capital, but mostly from foreign 
contributions and credit provided by international financial institutions.

50. Without securing such a fund at the beginning of the new government?s 
term, there is little chance that economic reform would achieve success, as 
social and political pressure would arise, resulting in public distress with 
the reform process and the impossibility of normal governmental functioning.

51. The introduction of big investment into the infrastructure.

52. The renewal and modernization of the electric and energy infrastructure.

53. The construction of major transportation networks, including highways, 
rail systems, and gas and oil pipes.

54. The rehabilitation of canal networks and other water systems in the 
agricultural plains.

55. The development of a telecommunications network.

56. The realization of the most significant local infrastructure projects.
 
 



From tomzbox at hotmail.com  Mon Sep 11 18:58:21 2000
From: tomzbox at hotmail.com (Tom Warren)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 00:58:21 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] FWD: Re: Barnesites, revolutionary parties etc
Message-ID: <F286PeLjCdclVXOK7S8000096d0@hotmail.com>

Just a couple of points about Jim?s and Carrol?s stance:

[Jim]> I think you miss the point of both the post that I
>forwarded to this list as well as the point that
>Carrol has been attempting to make here for some time
>now. And that is that we cannot expect to see such
>problems the energy crisis, global warming, or ecocide
>dealt with in a progressive manner unless there is
>in place a mass movement that is dedicated to resisting
>the ruling classes. And such a movement is most likely
>to appear under conditions of relative economic
>prosperity when it possible for workers to resist
>capital from a relatively favorable position.

There is too much qualification in the above statement for me to accept it. 
I am wary of how you and Carrol would define ?progressive?. ?Resisting the 
ruling classes? is a fine theoretical stance, but in the last 100 years just 
defining how that resistance is to be concretized has hamstrung any real 
movement toward the idea of ?dealing with?  ?such problems the energy 
crisis, global warming, or ecocide.? So the point you two miss is that if 
you are waiting for that, you will be left behind in the movementS that are 
springing up all around you.

[Jim]> Unless, a mass movement is in place, I think we can
>pretty much guarantee that when problems like the energy
>crisis, global warming, and/or ecocide come to a head,
>it will be our bourgeois ruling classes that will
>dictate how these problems will be handled, with
>all of the negative consequences that this implies.

Your prescription places all the eggs in one basket, and it?s a forlorn hope 
as well. While you and perhaps Carrol  see this as a call to a particular 
mass movement that must meet a variety of criteria, I see this as a call to 
acquire a larger consciousness about the issue, not so much to avert the 
Crash (can?t do it) but to minimize the ?negative consequences?. Yes, the 
?bourgeois ruling classes? will dictate SOME of the response. Deal with it.

[Jim]In other words the best time for us to deal with the Crash is before it 
happens.

Too late! You have missed the point Mark has been trying to show you in a 
dozen posts of factual information. The Crash is here. You are much deeper 
into it than you realize. If you are waiting for your organized mass 
movement, you are waiting in line for a place against the wall. You must now 
adapt to a VARIETY of approaches ? all compromises ? each having a piece of 
the puzzle that merely mitigates the consequences of the appetites of 6 
billion humans. (neo-malthusian, green doom, <G>) Start by organizing your 
local watershed.

>To expect that
>a progressive social movement will arise after it
>occurs to take the inititiative is to my mind
>wishful thinking.
>
>Jim F.

Yes, of course.  If you attribute that sort of fantasy to me, you have again 
misread me.  ?After it occurs? will result in a scenario where ?progressive? 
and ?social? are unknown concepts.

[Carrol] I too hope for great things from the Seattle movement -- but it 
won't
happen automatically (that movement was too dominated by anarchists
on the one hand and racist labor bureaucrats on the other), and whatever
happens has to be well underway (and have roots in broader segments
of the population) before disaster of one sort or another destroys the
will to resist.

You have ? if you can accept Mark?s posted articles -- until 2025 to save 
even a part of  the biosphere. The disaster is already well under way. Got a 
plan to minimize its effects? Got a plan to do anything in the next 25 
years? How long until you organize your ?progressive social? mass movement 
attempt?

Do not mistake my questions, I am not expecting a plan via the internet. Our 
purpose here should be ?consciousness raising?.  I am not calling for 
?action? as has been attributed to me, I think.  It is my quixotic 
aspiration to get you to see the forest through the trees.

Tom

PS why the Marxist derision about Anarchists and other ?leftists??  It is 
exactly that kind of parochialism that spells the doom of your ?movement?. 
Here in Eugene, my Anarchist friends LIKE you guys.







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From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 00:35:20 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 07:35:20 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Guardian: Panic as oil blockade bites
Message-ID: <000b01c01c83$9f458200$4f09063e@mjones>

Ministers warned Britain faces paralysis in days as police and firms are
urged to break protests

Special report: The petrol war

Peter Hetherington, Patrick Wintour and Charlotte Denny
Tuesday September 12, 2000

Ministers were last night pressing police and oil companies to break the
blockade of refineries and fuel distribution depots by road hauliers and
farmers as Britain faced its worst picketing crisis since the miners' strike
15 years ago.
With panic-buying closing hundreds of filling stations around Britain,
rationing in force in many areas and emergency services restricting all but
essential calls, Tony Blair hardened his line by calling on the home
secretary, Jack Straw, to ensure that extra police will be available.

Rejecting calls from petrol retailers for a reduction in fuel duty, Downing
Street made clear that additional forces were necessary to protect delivery
drivers from intimidation and keep supplies running to station forecourts.

But hopes that the world price of oil would soon fall were dealt a blow last
night. Even higher prices could be in store soon after world markets ignored
a weekend promise by oil producers to pump more crude oil into the system.

As the big oil companies warned that Britain faced paralysis within a few
days, the prime minister set his face against meeting militant farmers,
drivers, or their lobbying organisations. He is determined not to follow his
French counterpart Lionel Jospin, who has caved in to protests.

Mr Blair believes that with vigorous policing there are sufficient
refineries and exits from them to overcome the blockades. Ministers seem to
believe that in practice fewer refineries are being blocked that reported in
the media.

But Roy Holloway, director of the Petrol Retailers' Association, warned last
night that the government's hard line is playing into the hands of the
protesters. "It is in danger of getting the motorist to fall in behind the
protesters," he said. "I think politicians saying they are not going to do
anything about the problem is really very likely to swing public opinion
firmly behind the protests."

He warned that in the next 48 hours ministers would have to make some
positive moves to restore supplies, particularly for emergency supplies
"because the industry was not prepared for this crisis".

He joined Downing Street in calling for the oil companies to consider taking
legal action against protesters, but the large producers - notably Shell,
and BP - appeared cool about escalating the dispute. Shell, first hit by the
blockade at its Stanlow refinery in Cheshire, said it would not resort to
the law.

Police have a variety of powers - but none under the last government's trade
union laws because this is not classed as a union dispute. Nevertheless,
under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1994 they could arrest
individuals causing harm to people and property or unlawfully blocking the
highway. And under the Public Order Act of 1986 they have the power to
arrest protesters for threatening or abusive behaviour or harassment.

Around the country, from Scotland to Cornwall, motorists formed long queues
at filling stations. Many were turned away. Police had to be called to
disperse angry motorists at one filling station in Derby which had doubled
the price of fuel.

Repercussions spread far beyond the forecourt. Liverpool taxi drivers
brought the city to a standstill. Anglesey council in North Wales said
rubbish collections will stop today because fuel has dried up. West Sussex
had stopped all non-emergency use of fire engines.

Matthew Aitkin, a haulage contractor protesting outside BP's Grangemouth
refinery in Scotland summed up the mood of defiance. "We would like to stop
all the tankers coming out of Grangemouth so I'm afraid Joe Public is going
suffer - the only thing that will move the government is Joe Public
suffering."

The CBI, meanwhile, urged the Government to cut duty on diesel. "They have
an opportunity to demonstrate to business that it recognises the pressure
business is under."

Union leaders at the TUC in Glasgow showed signs of supporting the
protesters. Roger Lyons, of the MSF, said: "The inaction of Opec is
unsatisfactory and given the action of the French government last week in
making concessions on fuel duty, when the French rates were lower than in
Britain, the increasing cost in Britain of oil based products is looking
more and more like highway robbery."

Running on empty:
? Texaco A third of 957 garages nationwide are close to empty or dry. Four
of its 12 oil terminals (Avonmouth, Cardiff, Manchester and Poole) are at a
standstill

? Esso 350 out of its 1,600 outlets are dry. There are protests at four
depots (Manchester, Bristol, Hythe, near Southampton, and Purfleet, Essex)

? BP 600 out of 1,500 filling stations are empty or close to empty. All
garages in Wales are dry. Protesters are trying to close Scotland's only oil
refinery in Grangemouth, near Falkirk

? Shell 350 out of 1,100 garages have run out of fuel or are running dry.
Refinery at Kingsbury, Warwickshire, closed but ones at Buncefield in
Hertfordshire and Plymouth still operating

? TotalFinaElf 30-40% of its 1,400 petrol stations close to empty or dry.
Both refineries, at Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire and Killingholme in
north Lincolnshire, are closed

? Sainsbury's 20% of its 223 petrol stations have now run dry




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 00:35:15 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 07:35:15 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] capitalism and immigration
Message-ID: <000901c01c83$9c8f3ba0$4f09063e@mjones>

[from the Financial Times]

City backs immigration plan
By Brian Groom, Political Editor
Published: September 11 2000 19:06GMT | Last Updated: September 12 2000
00:27GMT



The City of London reacted with delight, and business organisations with
cautious approval, on Monday as the government raised the prospect of
relaxing immigration controls to attract skilled workers.

Barbara Roche, Home Office minister, called for debate about the benefits of
"managed migration" to fill the skills gap and put Britain ahead in the
scramble for entrepreneurs, scientists and high-technology specialists.

Emphasising the contribution past waves of immigrants had made to the
economy, she said migration was becoming a central feature of the global
economy and immigration policy "cannot be static".

Migration could help Britain cope with an ageing workforce and address skill
shortages in sectors from information technology to healthcare, she said.

The government was interested in enhancing the "flexible and market-driven
aspects" of the current work permit system, recently speeded up to attract
immigrants with specialist training.

"One approach would be to make the system even more market-based by making a
work permit contingent primarily on a job offer at a sufficiently high
level, rather than seeking to identify employment sectors with shortages,"
she told the Institute for Public Policy Research. Judith Mayhew, chairman
of the Corporation of London's policy committee, said: "We are suffering
skill shortages in various areas and we welcome anything she can do."

The Confederation of British Industry, British Chambers of Commerce,
Institute of Directors and Federation of Small Businesses welcomed the
debate as long as it did not distract from the need to improve UK workers'
skills.





From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Mon Sep 11 09:38:23 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 11:38:23 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] U.S. Poverty
Message-ID: <s9bcf241.028@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

It takes mass struggle to end poverty

(from the Peoples Weekly World)

By Greg Godwin

A recent study entitled "Does a Rising Tide

Lift All Boats?" discredits the widely held belief that the highly celebrated economic growth of the last decade has benefited working people as well as the rich. 

Released at the end of June, this new report was commissioned by the Con-ference Board, a group that "strives to be the leading global business membership organization that enables senior executives from all industries to explore and exchange ideas that impact on business policy and practices." Despite its avowed pro-corporate, management-oriented bias, the Conference Board paper depicts an economic system that miserably fails working people, even in what appears to be the best of economic times.

These results destroy the myths that buttressed the destruction of the welfare system. Politicians contended that welfare recipients would be forced to find jobs and rise out of poverty. Instead, more people are working and more workers are poor. The number of full-time workers in poverty actually increased between 1997 and 1998.

The study estimates that nearly five million workers and their dependents are now poor despite the fact that the percentage of full time workers in the work force has increased from 61 to 66 since 1990. While unemployment has fallen and more people have found jobs, more workers have been forced into jobs that fail to lift them from poverty.

Critics have argued that the impact of poverty on low-income workers has been blunted by Earned Income Tax Credits. Gene Sperling, the head of the White House National Economic Council, is quoted by The Wall Street Journal (June 29) faulting the study for ignoring the Earned Income Tax Credit. Sperling, maintains that the program "has helped push a few million people above the poverty line."

The Conference Board research refutes this claim, however, citing the regressive impact of changes in Federal Income and Social Security taxes on low-income workers. The increasing tax burden on the poor has more than offset the benefits of the tax credit. The Conference Board study cites a 1995 paper by the National Research Council that found that balancing tax credits against higher taxes actually left more low-income workers in poverty than the official government figures.

The author of the study, Linda Barrington, is one of the leading authorities on poverty measurement, co-editing the poverty statistics for the millennium edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. These credentials make the results of her examination of these trends over the last forty years even more striking. She found that since the early '70s there has been little relief from the grinding poverty afflicting low-income workers. In other words, the expansion or contraction of the economy over the last 30 years has neither reduced nor increased the level of poverty for low-income workers.

This is a startling result since it implies that the cherished belief of conservatives and neoliberals, the belief that economic growth will dissolve poverty, is simply false. Commenting on this study in The Wall Street Journal (June 29), University of Michigan poverty expert, Sheldon Danzinger, added "the average wage for a full-time worker without any college education was 8 percent less last year than it was in 1972."

On the other hand, Barrington notes that the degree of poverty among working people dropped dramatically from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Paradoxically, she attributes this sharp decline to the economic boom of the 1960s. She coolly notes that "Subsequent expansions have not been strongly associated with a reduction in poverty among full-time workers."

Perhaps because of shortsightedness, perhaps because of editorial pressure, Barrington fails to mention the great mass movements of the '60s that provoked some of the sharpest assaults upon poverty since the New Deal. In truth, it was not the war based economic expansion that ameliorated poverty in this period, but the upsurge of popular struggle for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War that forced a "War on Poverty" upon the U.S. ruling class. 

The reason * and the only reason * that poverty declined during the '60s was the powerful mass movements that forced U.S. elites to allocate federal funds to improvements in social benefits directed to the poorest and neediest citizens. It is these very programs that have been targeted by politicians in recent years. 

Inadvertently, Barrington acknowledges their success in reducing poverty. As a result of these programs, poverty among full-time, working families was reduced by more than half from 1966 until 1973. No significant reduction has occurred since, and, indeed, we now see poverty rising in spite of strong economic growth.

Barrington's study confirms that non-white full-time workers suffer greater poverty than their white counterparts. Nonetheless, the anti-poverty policies of the '60s were remarkably effective in reducing poverty among minority full-time workers, and succeeded in reducing the 1973 poverty rate to less than one-fourth of what non-white workers experienced in 1966. This gives the lie to the view that these programs are ineffective. It also destroys the racist, demagogic charge that only chronically unemployed, welfare recipients were benefited by the programs own in the 1960s.

But, minority workers have been "lifted" even less than their write counterparts by the economic expansion of the 1990s. When Dr. Barrington looked at regional data, she noted that poverty among full-time non-white workers has been rising sharply in the Northeast, with over half of the gains made in the sixties wiped out by 1998. 

The rise in non-white poverty is even sharper in the Midwest, doubling between 1994 and 1998. The South, too, shows a higher incidence of non-white poverty, with an increase during this so-called economic boom. Oddly, the Conference Board study shows a decline of non-white poverty in the West against the rising trend of poverty among all full-time workers, both white and non-white. 

In addition to the sharper growth in poverty, minority full-time workers experience greater fluctuations in and out of poverty. Barrington claims that these changes * what she calls "economic turbulence" * is at least two times greater for non-white full time workers than workers taken as a whole. This means that it is even more difficult for non-white workers to save and plan for education, retirement, and familial support. This "turbulence" suggests that the legacy of employment discrimination, of "last hired, first fired," remains for minority workers.

Why are people working full-time at greater risk of falling into poverty? The Conference Board study reveals a clear and distinct answer: High and middle paying jobs are disappearing in the U.S. only to be replaced with low paying jobs. 

There is no great mystery here. In 1963, high and middle paying jobs accounted for 65 percent of all non-supervisory and production jobs. In 1998, that percentage had fallen to 37 percent. Low paying jobs now (1998 figures) account for 63 percent of all workers. Production workers have fallen from 30 percent in 1963 to 15 percent of all non-supervisory and production workers in 1998.

This development has sometimes been described as "the export of high paying jobs to other countries." While the work may shift to other areas, this characterization is misleading. The "high pay" is not exported, but destroyed. And therein lies the essence of the New Economy: an increase in profits at the expense of working people, an increase in the rate of exploitation.

The erosion of the minimum wage only worsens the poverty experienced by low-income workers. In a report on the Conference Board paper, The Wall Street Journal (June 29) estimates that the federal minimum wage in 1969 was equivalent to about $7.00/hour in today's dollars. This is nearly 36 percent above the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. Is it any surprise that low-wage, poverty level jobs are increasing?

The promise of prosperity held out by globalization rests on the faulty premise that promoting economic growth will benefit everyone. Workers have been asked to accept NAFTA and other free-market schemes because these policies are believed to stimulate growth, and thus, raise everyone's standard of living. Nearly every bourgeois political party in the developed countries now accepts this thinking as dogma * economic growth is the surest road to economic justice. 

But the Conference Board study demonstrates that growth does not deliver the goods to poor and working people. Their examination of tends over the last 40 years affirms that the working class only gets what it wins.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 00:35:18 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 07:35:18 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Chavez and FARC?
Message-ID: <000a01c01c83$9de68e40$4f09063e@mjones>

[from the Financial Times]


Farc shares Venezuelan thinking
By Andy Webb-Vidal
Published: September 11 2000 19:00GMT | Last Updated: September 11 2000
23:41GMT



There is no agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(Farc), the country's biggest guerrilla movement, and the Venezuelan
government, according to a regional Farc commander. But relations between
the two are far from hostile.

The Venezuelan media has speculated in recent weeks that a formal accord
exists between the government of left-leaning President Hugo Chavez and the
Farc. In return for a pledge to cease kidnappings and extortion in
Venezuela, it is suggested, a blind eye is being turned to retreats by the
Farc on to Venezuelan soil for rest and recuperation.

"As far as state policy is concerned there has been a change in attitude and
there have been gestures from the Venezuelan government," said Commander
Ruben Zamora, who leads the Farc's 33 Front in the Catatumbo district.

"But we have not made any agreement in terms of mutual respect in the border
area between the Farc and the Venezuelan armed forces," Mr Zamora said. "We
are guided by the same Bolivarian thinking. We admire the democratic process
of change that is taking place in Venezuela."

Commander Zamora, aged 38 and a Farc guerrilla for the past 14 years, said
he has no doubt that the conflict in Colombia will intensify as a result of
Plan Colombia, and that large numbers of refugees will flow into
neighbouring Venezuela and Ecuador.

"We are preparing ourselves for the battle against US intervention," he
said. "All wars leave displacements and refugees. We estimate that through
the 150km border stretch between Cucuta and Catatumbo there could pass as
many as 60,000 refugees."

While claiming that the Venezuelan army had shown "solidarity" with the
refugees, and saying that Mr Chavez's humanitarian stance towards the
displaced Colombians on the border was laudable, Mr Zamora also said that
the National Guard had been responsible for occasional mistreatment of
refugees.

"There have been cases of extortion and the theft of food and livestock, but
Mr Chavez can't be held responsible for the arbitrariness of some of the
lower ranking National Guardsmen," he said.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 01:24:52 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 08:24:52 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] U.S. Poverty
In-Reply-To: <s9bcf241.028@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Message-ID: <000e01c01c8a$8a81c980$4f09063e@mjones>

 Charles Brown wrote:
>
>
> It takes mass struggle to end poverty
>
> (from the Peoples Weekly World)
>
> By Greg Godwin
>
> A recent study entitled "Does a Rising Tide
>
> Lift All Boats?" discredits the widely held belief that the
> highly celebrated economic growth of the last decade has
> benefited working people as well as the rich.

Unfortunately, the only rising tide is the world, which is expected to rise
at least 20 cms in the next 3 decades.

Mark




From aabdo at webtv.net  Tue Sep 12 02:34:41 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 03:34:41 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] The Tail End of Tail Ending The Movement
In-Reply-To: "Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@bellsouth.net>'s message of Sun, 10 Sep 2000 18:36:25 -0400
Message-ID: <21315-39BDEAA1-11978@storefull-233.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Many readers of the lists might have no idea what would possess
ex-comrades of the SWP, to masochistically reminisce about their sad
experiences.     It should clearly be stated, that it is because the US
Socialist Workers Party once stood forward in a victorious alliance of
American, Vietnamese, and World activists, that delivered a stunning set
back to the American government.

As a result, The leadership of the SWP had a certain amount of authority
within a World Trotskyist Movement that appeared to be a viable vehicle
for opposition to the capitalist system.     How did both the World
Trotskyist Movement, and the SWP, get to be so totally marginalized on
the world scene as they are today?     One has to go back to the second
half of the '70s decade to see why.

One of the lines used to oppose the organizational methods of the SWP
back then, was to accuse the organization of 'tail ending the Mass
Movements'.    I , like almost all the ex-SWPers who have written,
rejected that accusation at the time, as being incorrect.    It was
clear to us, that the SWP was LEADING the movement, and not following
it.

In fact, we saw the other tendences that voiced this accusation as being
nothing more than people that tail ended us, the real leadership of the
Mass Movements (for social change, as the rhetoric went at the time).
We were leading, not tail-ending, or so we thought.

But then we won....... the US pulled out.      So what exactly did this
organization at its peek (pun intended) of success do?     The rug was
pulled out of the social movements that had exploded around us.    We
had gained 'victories' against the ruling class.

Then, the truth is, that the ENTIRE organization proved that the taunt
of the others had been true, after all.     We were an organization that
only knew how to tail end others.     A movement that could not lead
others, against the grain, for what was clearly STILL the right politics
at the time, that of building an anti-imperialist organization.
Instead, we were an organization that would feel powerless and
disoriented, unless we could immediatey latch on to another social
movement, of some sort.

Thus, the leadership was opposed by nobody,except those who voted with
their feet.     Jose, has stated it as it was.... EXACTLY.
<There was not then, nor was there ever, as far as I know, even a single
vote cast at a plenum, convention, branch or fraction meeting against
that 1978 "turn" in defense of its predecessor.>

Here is where I disagree, though, with Jose.      The turn of 1978 was
not something essentially different than the previous turn to 'the
communities'.     Rather than being different, it was just an extension.
And this is how we were suckered into supporting both 'turns' at the
time. 

Both 'turns' were nothing more than an effort to find a new Movement to
tail end to, as done in the years before.    So it seemed natural to
both the leadership and to the cadre at the time.    Though of course,
it was the cadre that would most rapidly feel the results of making a
turn, when no turn was called for.

All the various spin-offs of SWP/ Trotskyist thought today, continue to
try to find that elusive Movement to tail end to.     And almost all, to
total accord, have decided that that 'Movement' has to be the 'trade
union Movement'.

So what is the difference between providing leadership, and just tail
ending.....tail gating?     It has to do with differentiating, and
seeing what makes one's own country or locale, different and distinct
from the rest.    A tail ender, will try to borrow a schema from another
country, or another epoch, and then try to duplicate it once again.

Now, we can begin to see what happened to the SWP, a party that only
wanted to continue tail ending the social movements once again.
This is a party that did not fully realize the distinctive and different
situation that faced building an American Left.

Unlike other countries, the US is the military center of maintaining the
imperialist system whole.      This obliges the US Left to
oppositionally counter the use of the military  against other national
working classes around the world.     A position of revolutionary
defeatism is absolutely necessary against the American capitalist class. 

The Left here, has to want to see its military defeated, and to not let
up the pressure until the war against the generals is won for good and
all.     But that's not what the SWP did.     It let up the pressure,
and made a 'turn'.

That's what all these 'turns' are really about.     The SWP decided as
an organization, to let up the pressure to have its own military
defeated.     Instead of knucking under and biding through the short
time of antiwar lull, it decided that its own national struggle was more
important than the battle on the side of the world working class.

The SWP started to worry about building socialism in one country, rather
than struggling to build a world socialist society.    All in the desire
to tail end, rather than to lead.    Leading was to actually have to
counter the majority of oe's own working class.      It was just too
hard to do.

When Andrej talks about Resist, Not Support...... he is talking about
Lead, Don't Tail End.     All these ex-SWPers and Lamenting Left
Trotskyists that are rallying around Jared's campaign to improve
Milosevic's image, are wanting to tail end, and to cheer for, rather
than to lead in building an antiwar movement.

That's what they learned from the SWP, to cheer Cuba (tail end Cuba), to
cheer Nicaragua (tail end others, again).    They just cannot do antiwar
agitation straight on.     They will not do that, even though it is the
internationalist socialist program to do so.

What the World Trotskyist Movement is undergoing, as it disintegrates
into irrelevancy, is a split between one wing that is sliding towards
Social Democratic positioning, and the other smaller wing, that is
adapting to Stalinoid attitudes.

Both wings share one common attribute, they both seek salvation in tail
ending the national working class, rather than leading the international
working class.  The international working class wants a revolutionary
leadership that will construct an antiwar movement capable of defeating
the US capitalist military.

This cannot be done, by either equalizing the defects of the official
'enemies' with those of the US imperialist regime, or with an effort to
tail end the efforts of others outside the US, with individual
'solidarity' campaigns.

The Vietnam Movement was not built on 'solidarity' with the official
enemy.    It was built on opposition to the violation of Vietnamese self
determination by US imperialist forces.     It was built on the idea,
that the US government had no right to tell others what to do all the
way on the other side of the world.

An effort to image build Milosevic, should examine how successful image
building for Stalin was, in World War Two.     It fooled nobody, not
even hardly, those people most engaged in the effort.     Even image
building Fidel, is not that successful.     But people don't want Cuba
picked on.

Resistance must be built against the US interventionism everywhere, and
activists should not distract themselves with individual 'solidarity'
campaigns of cheerleading one 'official' enemy, or the other.

We do this because we are for the defeat of US imperialism, not just in
favor of a this or that, here and there in the world.     An Antiwar
Movement is a vehicle that must span 'solidarity' camaigns.

The lesson to be learned from the SWP debacle, is don't just build your
Antiwar Movement on 'Solidarity' alone.     Even if you win (as in the
case of Vietnam 'solidarity'), you lose.    US antiwar work must be
continuous,and without letup,  not until final victory.

Lead, don't tail end the Mass Movement on the other side of the horizon,
or tail end the supposed commie good guys, with the guns in other
countries far away.
Resist, don't support.

Tony Abdo












From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 01:26:58 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 08:26:58 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] U.S. Poverty [corrected]
Message-ID: <000f01c01c8a$d6115aa0$4f09063e@mjones>

 Charles Brown wrote:
>
>
> It takes mass struggle to end poverty
>
> (from the Peoples Weekly World)
>
> By Greg Godwin
>
> A recent study entitled "Does a Rising Tide
>
> Lift All Boats?" discredits the widely held belief that the
> highly celebrated economic growth of the last decade has
> benefited working people as well as the rich.

Unfortunately, the only rising tide is the world ocean which is expected to
rise at least 20 cms in the next 3 decades.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 02:41:41 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 09:41:41 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Russian dieoff accelerates
Message-ID: <001001c01c95$45ec6900$4f09063e@mjones>

"WORST-CASE SCENARIO" FOR RUSSIAN DEMOGRAPHY
Interfax

Moscow, 11th September: Russian State Statistics Committee reports indicate
that the demographic situation in the country is unfolding according to the
worst of the expected scenarios.

Interfax experts drew this conclusion on the basis of statistical reports
and
forecasts made in the first half of 1998.

Experts composed three scenarios of the development of the demographic
situation until the year 2015. The favourable scenario relied on a slight
rise in the birth rate, a slowdown of the death rate and growing migration
encouraged by economic recovery. In this case at the end of 2000 Russia was
expected to have a population of 146.2m and in 2015 - 147.2m.

The second scenario implied birth and death rates remaining at the 1997
level
and a slight rise in migration. In this case at the end of 2000 the country
was expected to have a population of 145.6m and in 2015 - 138.1m.

The most pessimistic scenario was based on an expectation of a new rise in
the death rate and a simultaneous fall in the birth rate and in migration,
including migration from rural to urban areas, until 2015. In such
circumstances in 2000 Russia would have a population of 144.7m and at the
end
of 2015 - 130.3m.

The latest statistical reports say that at the beginning of July 2000 Russia
had a population of 145.1m, falling by 425,000 in the first half of the
year.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 12 03:22:51 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 10:22:51 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Tail End of Tail Ending The Movement
In-Reply-To: <21315-39BDEAA1-11978@storefull-233.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <001201c01c9b$05e55c80$4f09063e@mjones>

 Tony Abdo wrote:
>
> Many readers of the lists might have no idea what would possess
> ex-comrades of the SWP, to masochistically reminisce about their sad
> experiences.     It should clearly be stated, that it is because the US
> Socialist Workers Party once stood forward in a victorious alliance of
> American, Vietnamese, and World activists, that delivered a stunning set
> back to the American government.

Tony this disucssion is not for the Crashlist. You are way off-topic, and in
any case the ins and outs of the SWP is as about as appetising as the ins
and outs of a cat's backside.

Mark




From twood at uwc.ac.za  Tue Sep 12 05:28:40 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 12 Sep 2000 13:28:40 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Petrol protests
Message-ID: <s9be4c47.030@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
URL: <http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20000912/8b0f0653/attachment.ksh>

From jcraven at clark.edu  Tue Sep 12 11:50:46 2000
From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 10:50:46 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Indian Affairs Head [Lackey]  Makes [Obscene] "Apology"
Message-ID: <32BED4965D43D411978E00C00D00E832550F92@exch.clark.edu>

When I read this obscene cover-up masquerading as an "apology" (see below)
the first thing that flashed into my mind was Theresienstadt. That was the
showcase concentration camp in Czechoslovakia that the nazis used for Swiss
Red Cross Inspections. The would kill off half the inhabitants rushing them
out to Auschwitz on "blitz transfers", paint the place up, put on operas
sung by the remaining children (only 100 of some 10,000 survived) even issue
camp-specific "currency" in which the "workers" were being paid to give the
illusion of paid workers. Of course the usual "Arbeit Macht Frei" was
painted over the entrance; the Cremetorium was portrayed as a means to
insure hygience and sanitary disposal of any "unfortunate deaths."

This is truly sick. It reminds me of something my mother used to tell me as
a child: There are more white trash [and their apple minions] (wearing
three-piece suits) on Wall Street and in Washington DC than in the trailer
parks of America.

Nuremberg was the major force for the origination and adoption of the 1948
UN Convention on Genocide (this word is never mentioned in this bullshit
"apology") and of course the U.S. was the major force at Nuremberg (despite
allowing US companies-J.P. Morgan, Standard Oil, Texaco, GM, Brown Brothers
Harriman etc--and individuals like George Herbert Walker and Prescott
Bush--grandfathers of George W. Bush--to trade with the Japanese, German and
Italian fascists throughout World War II and putting wanted nazi war
criminals on the CIA/U.S. Government payrolls) yet the U.S. refused to sign
the UN Convention on Genocide until 1988 and even then claimed a
[Helms/Lugar/Hatch] "Sovereignty Exemption" that U.S. law would trump the UN
Convention in the event of any contradiction (in violation of Article VI
Section 2 of the US Consitution itself).

This is so typical. Those who plunder then consolidate their positions and
then want those who have been plundered to just "get over it." While they
keep their power, ill-gotten wealth and system for continuing to plunder.
Notice the reference below to the percentage of "Indians" at BIA. Yet Eugene
Johnson, (see comments below) A Siletz Indian  who worked for a
subcontractor of the BIA was let go for "failure to pass a security check"
(required by all BIA employees so no "radicals" can get in.) After a FOIA
request, the agency supposedly giving the security check claimed to have
nothing on him. So much for what kind of "Indians" the BIA has working for
them. No mention of the fact that the BIA still clings to the 25%
blood-quantum rule and arrogates the "right" to define who and what an
Indian is the clear intention of which is revealed in the following quote
from a BIA Document:

          "Set the blood-quantum at one-quanrter, hold to it as a rigid   
           definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed...and eventually
           Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens,the
           federal government will finally be freed from its persistent
           Indian problem." (Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Legacy of
           Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West" p. 338)
           

No apology, a sinple "fuck you" is better than this kind of insulting
"apology/cover-up designed mainly to keep the BIA in existence. So below
Eugene's comments I have added some of what was not included in this
cover-up apology.
A final comment: Indian Nations are sovereign by any criteria and
international law that legitimates/protects the U.S. or Canada as Sovereign
Nations. Nations do not make treaties with their own "citizens" and in the
case of Canada, "subjects" do not make treaties with fellow "subjects" of
the Crown. We do not need permission or recognition of our sovereignty or
nation status; we need only continue to assert them and point out the
hypocrisy and intentions of those bent on our extinction (genocide).

Jim Craven
Member, Blackfoot Nation


James Craven
Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd.
Vancouver, WA. 98663
(360) 992-2283; Fax: (360) 992-2863
blkfoot5 at earthlink.net
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~blkfoot5
*My Employer Has No Association With My Private/Protected
Opinion*
"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language;
but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth,
and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No!
Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;
tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the
ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from
the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use 
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I 
will not equivocate--I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single
inch--and I will be heard."
(William Lloyd Garrison, Abolitionist, on Slavery, 1831)



-----Original Message-----
From: Eugene Johnson [mailto:hewholaughsalot at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2000 4:21 AM
To: Alaine Cossette; Jana Coyote; Karen Cravatt; Jim Craven,; Max
Defender
Cc: Ian Drake,; Mary Kay Eaglestaff; Susan Esparolini;
Fernando?and?Marlene Divina,; Delores Doyle,
Subject: Fwd: Fw: Indian Affairs Head Makes Apology


Three things bother me about this apology.

1) Kevin Gover is Indian. It's like having a black
official in the U.S. government apologize to the black
populace for slavery, Rosewood, the KKK, etc. It's
like having a Jew apologize to the Jewish populace for
Nazi attrocities enacted during WWII. His apology is
more offensive to me than anything else. It reminds me
of when the Methodists apologized for Chivington's
massacre of the Cheyennes at Sand Creek. Then I found
out that it was Indian Methodists who were
apologizing.

2) Who are these Indian leaders? Were they the leaders
of the Indian Reorganization Act tribal council
governments who are mostly corrupt and people who
would gladly sell their people off to the highest
bidders, or were they traditionalists? Most likely
they were IRA leaders. The U.S. government does it's
best to avoid the traditional leaders because they
can't get them in their pocket.

3) Nothing will come from this apology. It means
nothing and business will continue as usual. The
Indian people will get screwed as the U.S. and IRA
governments get fatter off the money exchanges.
Business as usual.

This apology is offensive to me.

Eugene
(He Who Laughs A Lot)

 
 
  ANOTHER VICTORY : )))))

 Indian Affairs Head Makes Apology
 
  By MATT KELLEY

 .c The Associated Press
 
 WASHINGTON (AP) - The head of the federal Bureau of
 Indian Affairs apologized  Friday for the agency's ``legacy of 
 racism and inhumanity'' that included massacres, 
 forced relocations of tribes and attempts to wipe out Indian 
 languages and cultures. [use of Indians for medical experiments, forced
sterilizations, objects of chemical/biological warfare etc] 

 
 By accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility 
 of putting things right,'' Kevin Gover, a Pawnee Indian, said in an 
 emotional speech marking the agency's 175th anniversary. 

 Gover said he was apologizing on behalf of the BIA,
 not the federal government as a whole. Still, he is the
 highest-ranking U.S. official ever to make such a statement 
 regarding the treatment of American Indians. 

 The audience of about 300 tribal leaders, BIA employees and 
 federal officials stood and cheered as a teary-eyed Gover finished 
 the speech. 

 ``I thought it was a very heroic and historic
 moment,'' said Susan Masten, chairwoman of California's Yurok 
 tribe and president of the National Congress of American Indians. 
 ``For us, there was a lot of emotion in that apology. 

 It's important for us to begin to heal from what has
 been done since  non-Indian contact.'' [Reparations? Redressing broken 
treaties?] 

 Lloyd Tortalita, the governor of New Mexico's Acoma
 Pueblo tribe, welcomed the apology but said, ``If we could get 
 an apology from the whole government, that would be better.''
[but still far from enough] 

 Although Gover's statement did not come from the White House, 
 President Clinton's chief adviser on Indian issues, Lynn Cutler, 
 said Gover sent her a copy of his speech late Thursday and the 
 White House did not object to it. 
 
 Canada's government has formally apologized for
 abuses in government-run boarding schools for Indians but has 
 rejected calls for a broader apology. [and like the U.S. Government 
 and the apoplogizing "churches" refused to use the term/concept "genocide"]


 Australian Prime Minister John Howard also has rebuffed repeated 
 calls for an apology to that country's Aboriginal population for
 similar abuses there. 
 
 Gover recited a litany of wrongs the BIA inflicted
 on Indians since its creation as the Indian Office of the War Department.
 Estimates vary widely, but the agency is believed responsible for the
 deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indians. 

 ``This agency participated in the ethnic cleansing
 that befell the Western tribes,'' Gover said. ``It must be acknowledged 
 that the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison 
 herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the 
 cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so 
 ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence 
 of the clash of competing ways of life.'' 

 The misery continued [accelerated] after the BIA became part of the
Interior Department in 1849, Gover said. Children were [are still today]
brutalized in 
BIA-run boarding schools, Indian languages and religious practices were
banned 
and traditional tribal governments were eliminated, he said. The high rates
 of alcoholism, suicide and violence in Indian communities today are the
 result, he said. ``Poverty, ignorance and disease have been the
 product of this agency's  work,'' Gover said. 

 Now, 90 percent of the BIA's 10,000 employees are ["security-check-cleared"
Indian and the agency has changed into an advocate [?] for tribal
governments. 

``Never again will we attack your religions, your languages, your rituals, 
 or any of your tribal ways,'' Gover promised. ``Never again will we seize 
 your children, nor teach them to be ashamed of who they are. Never again.''

 [using the old crude methods, future methods will be a lot slicker]

[ Estimated $3 billion "missing" in BIA accounts plus interest, where is it?
Estimated $6 billion in royalties owned to Indian Nations plus interest,
where is it? Lost monies mean lost lives. Reparations?] 

 On the Net: 
 
 Bureau of Indian Affairs:
 http://www.doi.gov/bureau-indian-affairs.html 
 
 National Congress of American Indians:
 http://www.ncai.org/ 
  AP-NY-09-08-00 1530EDT
 Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.
 
 Holding the vision of all misqualified and
 miscreated energy being transformed right here and
 right now. 
 
Phyllis ~ White Wolf Woman ~ Shunk Manitu Ska ~
ICQ#2505539.
 


=====
Eugene Johnson
(He Who Laughs A Lot)

Copyright ?2000 Eugene D. Johnson. All rights reserved. Permission is
granted to redistribute this message, with this proviso attached. Written
permission of the author is required to distribute this message through any
medium other than the internet.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/




From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 11:20:06 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 13:20:06 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.7.juneo4@juno.com>

Resonating: where is it that this has been done? I forget, but a simple
effective imaginative solution right? jo*


>p.s. We should add free bikes at every Light Rail stop and major bus 
>stop.
>Have them painted bright green, or some distictive color, for RT 
>passengers.
>
>



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 11:26:17 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 13:26:17 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.8.juneo4@juno.com>

YES. With daily citizenry( Ralph Nader) we must initiate and keep the
'elite Systems'. ( that is not 'elitist systems', of course, it is
sustainable sytems we need to develop and initiate)jo* .

. *Elites do what they have to in order to maintain 
>power, 
> even if that means making life better for others. Of course they also 
>will 
> take these things back when they perceive the threat to be over.*



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 12:43:03 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 14:43:03 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:CrashLimericks
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.10.juneo4@juno.com>

Joan, Apart from the tone of your handsome apology, which is a delight, (
great  example for all of us)  I have enjoyed the rest of this post as
educational for me(so I will follow up, thank you) because I am very
interested in the vital importance of early childhood education. jo*  

>I eat my words regarding Theodore Giesel. I had no idea he had any 
>life other 
>than the Dr.Seuss books that the public schools adopted with such 
>enthusiasm, 
 
>was 
>reading Mary Shelley, and the like to us while we were still very 
>young. 



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 07:08:51 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 09:08:51 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] What's all this??????
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.0.juneo4@juno.com>

Agree.jo*

On 11 Sep 2000 10:16:44 +0200 "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za> writes:
>Where can the Chomsky vs. Milosevic, crimes/ what crimes
>wrangle still go on this list? I think the onus now rests on
>the protagonists to show the rest of us that something is
>going to be achieved by continuing this thread indefinitely
>and I think this will only happen if it moves away from the
>specific individuals to issues of a more general relevance,
>don't you think?
>
>Tahir
> 
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 11:17:33 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 13:17:33 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.6.juneo4@juno.com>

Responding to the post below, scroll down:

Question: I need to know of some examples where Marxism is working, and
how it is working sustainably,  please Anyone? 
An example of a 'new' marxist leader of a 'new' nation (as in  recent
times), namely  Zimbabwe, seems to me not to be one example? 

With billions of dollars changing  hands in a nanosecond (e-commerce) the
dynamics of the World as weKnowIt, Surely, must have changed dramatically
in the past decade and demand more "imaginative" (to quote Tahir)
theories ( to avoid or mitigate the Crash)? 

Simple practical sustainable activities, ( solutions, such as 'staa jabu'
put forward on this list) that can be put into practice, immediately, by
millions would change dynamics!?  While  furturists develop their visions
for the rest of us, we can with our  everyday choices and actions, surely
surely become co-creators (Barbara Marx Hubbard) of a better world, thus
being part of the Solutions and the Problems, right? 

Fred E Katz demonstrates( "Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil") evil
is incremental, (and compounded?) so why can we not envision that
'postive sustainable compassionate Caring'  would incrementally dismantle
dysfuctional systems?   jo*     

I am not particularly
>interested in the finer points of Marxist (or any other) theory or 
>theology.
>They would only be of value if they could offer a demonstrable and 
>practical
>way of avoiding the crash - which, although it sometimes seems most
>contributors have forgotten - is the whole point of this group (as far 
>as I
>know).
>
>



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 12:46:02 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 14:46:02 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.11.juneo4@juno.com>

I think this is a great suggestion and I look forward to the outcome.jo*

. May I make an arogant suggestion:
>1. Unsub from the Crash list and any other lists you are on.
>2. Take some time to write an in-depth proposal - a kind of 
>feasibility
>study - on your idea for opposing the US war machine showing how it 
>relates
>to the current world predicament; why it would solve the problem; and 
>most
>importantly, explain step by step how it would change the system for 
>the
>better; do so in a way that Mr. Average can understand, feel inspired 
>by,
>and feel reasonably comfortable with signing up to it.
>3. Since, like me, I guess you are a 'nobody', send out as many copies 
>to as
>many eminent people around the world from all walks of life as you can 
>to
>get their comments and criticisms. Refine your work accodingly. (This 
>will
>take time and commitment since 9 times out of 10, your work will be 
>filed in
>the bin.)
>4. Build a list of favourable comments for your proposal from people 
>who are
>highly regarded.
>5. Start to put it into practice to test it.
>6. Get back to me and the list. I guarantee you I for one will then be 
>happy
>to carefully read, consider and comment on your proposal positively 
>and
>constructively. Whether some other contributors to the List will do 
>so, I
>leave you to guess.
>Good luck with it,
>best, John.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 11:33:37 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 13:33:37 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.9.juneo4@juno.com>

 Agree with Georges post here. Participatory politics, and eduaction can
be fun, 'let's develop these concepts further'? jo* 

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000 00:12:56 +0200 Georges Drouet <gdrouet at brutele.be>
writes:
>Right, other proposals:
>
>
>Tax the car of people living outside the city when they came to town, 
>then
>give them free public transportation inside the town... Plus a 
>special
>discount in their anual car tax if they use free public 
>transportation.
>
>At school, teach history of the present since the very first years of
>Primary level, special emphasis in international relations and 
>current
>political systems...
>
>Introduction to Prospective Science also from the first years of 
>school...
>
>Teach Geography on a worlwide dimension, introducing in the very 
>firsts
>yaears the concept of multicultural humanity and respect of other
>traditions to improve tolerance and fraternity...
>
>Courses in civics at Primary level to train political involvment
>
>Combine intelectual knowledge with handcraft activities and artistic
>expression (computing, carpentry and music; biology, gardening and
>photography; philosophy, home-appliance repairing and dance, and so 
>on)
>mente sana en corpo sano...
>
>Allow kids to
>- choose in between several three months courses
>- take breaks of threee or more month between each leg of each 
>courses
>- change courses as many times as they want until they study 
>everything
>they want
>
>Promote visits to real factories and hard working places, take 
>holidays in
>developement projects
>
>Facilitation and incentives to make people work in several distinct 
>sectors
>of activity through their life, more than ten years in the same job is 
>the
>best way to drive mad anyone!!
>
>Adopt SP !!(I HAVE YET TO REDA THIS website thoughtfully) 
>
>Super high taxes on alcohol, cigarettes and known carcinogenic 
>products.
>
>Development of participatory managment since the local level...
>



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 10:39:50 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 12:39:50 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.5.juneo4@juno.com>

Great practical suggestions jo*

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:55:11 -0700 (PDT) staa jabu <staajabu at yahoo.com>
writes:
>
>
>Write your city officials and request monitored
>walking routes to all major areas and offices.  This
>means that "public saftey officers" would patrol those
>routes and that they would be well lit, marked,
>maintained and patroled at night.
>
>Lobby for more businesses to support public
>transportation by contributing to the cost of their
>employee's monthly pass.
>
>Complain and discourage the glamorization of
>automobiles, especially the ads that make driving look
>like a heavenly out of body experience instead of a
>method to get from point A to point B.
>
>Encourage people to walk by making it a normal
>activity, not something you need special clothes,
>shoes 
>or gear to accomplish.
>
>Make biking classes available to all free.  
>
>Make bike maintenance classes available to everyone
>free.
>
>Make busses and trains more bike user friendly.
>
>Encourage people to take trains and busses, if more
>people used them they would more likely be better
>maintained, better scheduled, and more comfortable.
>
>Teach your family the importance of walking or
>running, for a healthy body and a healthy planet.
>
>We are looking for suggestions on how to avoid the
>crash, true?
>
>Peace!
>
>
>
>
>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
>http://mail.yahoo.com/
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist



From juneo4 at juno.com  Tue Sep 12 10:32:27 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 12:32:27 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] reply to Linda
Message-ID: <20000912.154151.-165879.4.juneo4@juno.com>

AS I do a clearout rediscovered this post and delicious comment!: 
Lest OTHERS miss the point! (not anyone on this list?) where and how we
spend our earned hard dollars is a very practical way to 'vote' for
change, to prevent  the Crash, dismantle unsustainable systems and put
our money where our mouth is! HAhaha!!  We have choices everyday to
support what we believe in, in very practical ways.Says I, while
preparing   my concepts to change the world from the bottom up, into a
proposal. jo* 

On 28 Aug 2000 16:44:52 +0200 "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za> writes:
>I think this digression into shopping is too delightful!
>Tahir
>
>>>> <INMOEMBRO at aol.com> 08/27 9:17 PM >>>Linda -
>You are too right. It is tough to find what you really need
>amongst all the 
>dreck you don't need, and that is what takes all the extra
>time and energy. 
>Even if you aren't even thinking Green (not$). One thing
>that makes it a 
>little easier is once you get your supply lines set up, you
>can make a bee 
>line for your own special thing and ignore the rest. Unless,
>of course, they 
>are out of it or have discontinued it altogether. Then you
>start all over 
>again. I commiserate, I do. I work about 70 hours a week and
>have to get my 
>supplies on the way home (no crowds then), so no time or
>energy to do 
>anything not on the program.
>Just plug away at it item by item, and you'll get it sorted
>in time. Guilt is 
>a waste of everything you can't afford to spend.
>Joan
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources:
>http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base 
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                            
>                                                           
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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From aabdo at webtv.net  Tue Sep 12 14:00:24 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 15:00:24 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Berserk Beavers
Message-ID: <24445-39BE8B58-9173@storefull-234.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

OK, Mark and Jo.     You guys are demanding that we stay pointedly to
topic.    So to retaliate, I am posting a Molly Ivins column.      Mark,
you will be glad to know that she is in general agreement with your
positions.

And I agree with her that we are, in fact, a species that has been
acting like a group of berserk beavers.      It was 111 degrees in San
Antonio last week.      It is now clear that we are going to hell at low
water.

We need to stop using so much water on the lawns in the rich
communities.      Plus, we need to take their air conditioners away from
them until they decide to behave.     No more gas guzzlers, either.
Why are the rich so stinky?

Sincerely,
A Concerned, Democratic Green- Tony
_________________________________
The Warming Of A World In Deep Denial
by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, TEXAS - Let's all take a long step back and then look at this
again: Is the human race just another species in the long history of
Earth that's too dumb to adapt and survive? 

We clever upright primates have so far outstripped everyone save the
cockroaches, but we seem to be forgetting what knocked off so many of
the other major species: climate change. And if we're not smart enough
to learn from that, it's our turn to go extinct.

Nothing like a couple of days of 110-degree heat to remind us that
global warming has nothing to do with the end of the Cold War. According
to the fossilologists, the Big Ones, like the Ice Age, may have had a
proximate cause -- meteor hit, giant volcano eruption blotted out sun
... something happened. But in your relatively short tens of thousands
of years, all you get is a more or less cyclical back-and-forth. Now
coral reefs in the Pacific that are a thousand years old are dying. This
is not cyclical.

But aren't there some scientists who deny that any of this is happening,
or at least that it means global warming is taking place? Yes, about
seven of them, and in a remarkable act of journalistic irresponsibility,
it took the media years to report that most of them are directly or
indirectly in the pay of the oil companies. You can put the combined
weight of climatologists around the globe against that.

But don't some scientists say this will be a good thing? That Minnesota
will grow palm trees, Canada will become tropical, and they won't have
to eat oatmeal up there anymore?

A certain amount of don't-worry-be-happy is advisable in life, but we
are in such full-throttle denial about global warming that you can
barely get anyone to pay attention. It's all very well to swan through
life on the cheerful assumption that it's all part of God's Plan, but
God gave us brains so we could use them. And global warming is not God's
Deal -- it is mankind's.

We are the berserk beavers of the world, changing our own environment,
often for the worse even for us. Eventually everyone who listens finally
gets it, and the next reaction is often a whiny, "Well, what do you
expect me to do about it?"
The First Rule of Holes is: When you are in one, stop digging.

The still-unratified Kyoto treaty would require the United States to cut
its greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide and methane, to 7
percent below 1990 levels. That is not a solution, but it is a step.

Speaking of small steps, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation
Commission -- a pathetic thing, but the only EPA we've got here -- has
just opened its marble heart and agreed to study the situation. This is
another happy side effect of having Gov. George W. Bush run for
president -- it would look so dumb if his three environmental
commissioners were still denying the existence of global warming.

Since Texas emits more greenhouse gases than any other state, doing
something about it here would be a real contribution. Not that the TNRCC
is actually doing anything, but it has ordered up a big study, for which
we are all devoutly grateful.

One always appreciates those editorial voices of sweet reason saying,
"Now, let's not get hysterical here -- we're not doomed." No, we're not.
This is very likely fixable. The only reason to panic is the projection
studies on what will happen if we do nothing or let this get worse.
Major climate shifts can come quickly, within a few decades. The effects
of global warming are becoming so apparent that one can foresee the
congressional hearing in a few years -- like the Firestone tire comedy
last week -- with elected officials indignantly demanding: "Who knew
about this? Why didn't they tell us? Off with their heads!"

There may actually be more good news than bad news on global warming
lately, despite the ominous stats. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist
who has been helpful on global warming before, has a new study
suggesting a cheaper way out. Rather than concentrating on carbon
dioxide, which comes from burning fossil fuels, if we concentrate on
getting rid of the five other greenhouse gases (especially methane) it
could do as much good overall as cutting carbon dioxide from fossil
fuels.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.












From johnwood at umich.edu  Tue Sep 12 15:15:33 2000
From: johnwood at umich.edu (John Woodford)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 17:15:33 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
References: <20000912.154151.-165879.6.juneo4@juno.com>
Message-ID: <39BE9CF5.B08BC7EE@umich.edu>

Mugabe is no "Marxist" and never has been one. He is among a pack the CIA
termed "national communists," which basically meant nationalist opportunists
who could use some Marxist verbiage demagogically while serving the economic
and strategic interests of the imperialists.  The Afghan leader overthrown by
Barbak Karmal (his name slips me now), Ceaucescu, Pol Pot and various others
of were so categorized and were aided by the CIA. They were
pseudorevolutionaries who resisted internal changes that might challenge the
wealthy local sellouts.

juneo4 at juno.com wrote:

> Responding to the post below, scroll down:
>
> Question: I need to know of some examples where Marxism is working, and
> how it is working sustainably,  please Anyone?
> An example of a 'new' marxist leader of a 'new' nation (as in  recent
> times), namely  Zimbabwe, seems to me not to be one example?
>
> With billions of dollars changing  hands in a nanosecond (e-commerce) the
> dynamics of the World as weKnowIt, Surely, must have changed dramatically
> in the past decade and demand more "imaginative" (to quote Tahir)
> theories ( to avoid or mitigate the Crash)?
>
> Simple practical sustainable activities, ( solutions, such as 'staa jabu'
> put forward on this list) that can be put into practice, immediately, by
> millions would change dynamics!?  While  furturists develop their visions
> for the rest of us, we can with our  everyday choices and actions, surely
> surely become co-creators (Barbara Marx Hubbard) of a better world, thus
> being part of the Solutions and the Problems, right?
>
> Fred E Katz demonstrates( "Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil") evil
> is incremental, (and compounded?) so why can we not envision that
> 'postive sustainable compassionate Caring'  would incrementally dismantle
> dysfuctional systems?   jo*
>
> I am not particularly
> >interested in the finer points of Marxist (or any other) theory or
> >theology.
> >They would only be of value if they could offer a demonstrable and
> >practical
> >way of avoiding the crash - which, although it sometimes seems most
> >contributors have forgotten - is the whole point of this group (as far
> >as I
> >know).
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist







From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Tue Sep 12 15:48:02 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 16:48:02 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
References: <20000912.154151.-165879.6.juneo4@juno.com>
Message-ID: <39BEA491.7C32BDAE@ilstu.edu>

juneo4 at juno.com wrote:

> Responding to the post below, scroll down:
>
> Question: I need to know of some examples where Marxism is working, and
> how it is working sustainably,  please Anyone?

Jo, Marxism is not something that "works" or "doesn't work," so literally
your question makes no sense. You probably think that Marxism is a
plan for the future. It is *not*. It is an analysis of *capitalism*. Marx did
not
entitle his major work *Socialism* -- he entitled it *Capital: A Critique
of Political Economy.* So here are the places where marxism is working
perfectly:

United States
European Union
Japan
Russia (capitalism is very efficiently destroying millions of people there,
so you
    might say that Marxism is working even better there than most marxists
    ever expected it to. Rosa Luxemburg did speak of barbarianism, and her
    prediction has certainly come true)
All of Latin America (except Cuba & perhaps Venezuela) (though here you
    need to consult Lenin as well as Marx to see how capitalism as described
    by Marx works in the nations dominated by the core capitalist nations)
All of Asia
All of Africa
All of Eastern Europe

It is still a matter of struggle whether marxism (that is capitalism as
described by
marx) is working in China, Vietnam, Laos

Carrol





From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Tue Sep 12 16:34:59 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 17:34:59 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] [Fwd: electrical storm hits New Economy]
Message-ID: <39BEAF93.41263EC1@ilstu.edu>


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: electrical storm hits New Economy
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 17:01:37 -0400
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>

TheStandard.com - September 12, 2000

Electrical Storm Hits New Economy
Faced with energy shortfalls and an aging power grid, Internet 
Economy companies search for solutions.
By Mark Boslet

It was a long, hot summer in the United States. Not only did record 
heat waves parch much of the nation, but a mini-energy crisis struck 
both coasts.

In San Diego, utility bills doubled as electricity supplies tightened 
and the cost of power skyrocketed. During a mid-June heat wave, 
rolling blackouts hit San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Politicians 
felt the heat, too, as public anger boiled over. Finally, in early 
September, California Gov. Gray Davis stepped in to cut San Diegans' 
electricity rates.

Meanwhile, hot weather in the Northeast pushed New England and New 
Jersey to the brink of brownouts. Many New Yorkers' summer 
electricity bills jumped 40 percent; for a few days in early August, 
New York's Con Edison even cut back service to business customers 
such as Chase Manhattan.

In the Northwest, where cheap hydropower has historically kept 
utility bills low, anemic river flows this summer have pushed up 
rates. Many sawmill and mine workers lost their jobs when companies 
chose to shut down rather than pay rising electric costs.

Now, with natural-gas prices high and heating oil for homes in short 
supply in the East, energy prices could also soar this winter.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Energy deregulation promised to 
lead smoothly to market-driven prices and investments in new plants 
and technology. Instead, it's resulted in price hikes, blackouts and 
dwindling reserves. It has also spurred a frantic push for new plants 
in states that for the past decade have added little new generating 
capacity.

The Internet Economy is peculiarly vulnerable to shrinking power 
surpluses. Digital businesses require not only massive quantities of 
power, but also reliable systems: An interruption in power as 
instantaneous as one-sixtieth of a second won't cause the lights to 
flicker - but it will crash a computer.

Already, U.S. companies lose $50 billion in productivity each year 
due to power interruptions, according to the Electric Power Research 
Institute, an industry-financed research organization based in Palo 
Alto, Calif. To ensure power supplies, some companies are considering 
building their own generating capacity, bypassing regional power 
grids altogether and evading the chaos that will likely persist for 
several more years.

The climate for many companies, in short, has grown "very fearful," 
says California state Sen. Byron Sher, who represents part of Silicon 
Valley. "This is a new issue for them."

The new-millennium energy crisis in the U.S. can be traced to the 
effects of deregulation, a lack of new generating capacity in recent 
years, and an antiquated distribution system - not to mention the 
unanticipated demands of the Internet Economy. An average office 
building with a computer on every desk but no significant network 
facility uses between 4 and 5 watts of electricity per square foot, 
according to Ed Quiroz, a regulatory analyst at California's Public 
Utilities Commission. If that building has a server farm and a 
network operations center, it sucks from 90 watts to 100 watts of 
energy a square foot or more. Or consider this: According to Mark 
Mills, an energy researcher with ties to the utilty industry, a Palm 
handheld device connected wirelessly to the Internet has the appetite 
of a refrigerator, consuming 1,000 kilowatt hours a year.

But estimates of the Net economy's power requirements vary. The fact 
is, no one knows for sure how much demand for energy will climb in 
coming years. Mills and colleague Peter Huber estimate that 
businesses that rely on digital equipment - personal computers, 
networking equipment, plants that produce high-tech gear and 
telecommunications networks - consume 13 percent of U.S. electric 
power. That figure will rise to between 30 percent and 50 percent of 
the nation's energy needs by 2020.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Jonathan Koomey says 
those numbers are too high. According to his calculations, the 
Internet Economy accounts for about 3 percent of total electricity 
consumption in the United States.

Whatever the actual number, demand "is clearly going up faster than 
most people predicted several years ago," says Mark Bernstein, 
director at Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, Rand Corp. "I 
think we're still underestimating it. We can expect the unexpected."

Also unexpected were the aftershocks of deregulation, which gathered 
steam in the mid 1990s as legislatures moved to equalize broad 
electric pricing disparities across the country. In the last five 
years, 26 states have opened or taken steps to open some of their 
markets to competition.

Unfortunately, deregulation has helped create an atmosphere of 
uncertainty in the energy industry. New plant construction has slowed 
as investors doubted whether they could get favorable returns on new 
facilities.

What's more, the U.S. power grid, built in the 1950s and 1960s, was 
not designed with the kind of reliability that the new silicon-based 
economy requires.

Over the past decade, electricity-generating capacity rose 30 
percent, but transmission capacity grew only 15 percent, according to 
figures from the Electric Power Research Institute. A typical 
business customer can depend on 99.9 percent reliability. That 
translates to nine hours a year of electricity interruptions - far 
too high a risk for companies that depend on the Internet or internal 
networks. Internet Economy companies, the rule goes, need "six 9s": 
99.9999 percent reliability.

It could get worse. Projections for the next 10 years show power 
generation growing between 20 percent and 25 percent, but the 
transmission grid expanding only 4 percent. It doesn't matter how 
many megawatts you pump out if electricity can't flow to where it's 
needed.

Some high-tech companies have taken heed. At software giant Oracle, 
energy director Jeff Byron has installed a diesel generator to run 
the company's worldwide data center during blackouts and to power 
emergency lights, elevators and fire equipment. Oracle also has a 
private transmission system with a separate power substation to 
improve reliability. Byron says the company is even considering 
developing its own power plant.

Web site host Exodus Communications has five facilities loaded with 
high-end, energy-sucking servers in Silicon Valley and 23 around the 
world. Each facility has dual lines to utility substations, backup 
diesel generators and batteries to prevent power disruptions. Exodus 
also is "looking very closely'' at generating its own power, 
according to Jim Stoddart, senior VP of operations.

Energy shortfalls are focusing more attention on new power 
technologies, such as smarter power meters that alert users to the 
times of the day when power is less expensive, and "micro turbines" - 
small natural- gas-fueled engines designed for individual buildings. 
Also under development are hockey-puck-size silicon chips that 
increase the capacity of transmission lines by as much as 40 percent. 
Online exchanges could also ease power burdens by freely shifting 
resources to areas of greatest demand.

Ultimately, however, the economy is growing faster than the nation's 
ability to produce electricity. That means the long, hot summer of 
2000 could be only a foretaste.



From KAdams at delta.org  Tue Sep 12 17:14:59 2000
From: KAdams at delta.org (Ken Adams DNET)
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 16:14:59 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] [Fwd: electrical storm hits New Economy]
Message-ID: <3B6515784BA4D211BA2600A0C9DB1B0101176693@sac-nts-msgx01.delta.org>

My company use to use a diesel generator when this area (Sacramento,
California) used nuclear power to help with 'irregularities' in the power
supply. The big problem was that it cost them $50,000 every time they fired
it up because it violated the Clean Air Act and they had to get a variance.
I forsee that companies will really start screaming about the Clean Air Act
and trying to overturn these fines. Which will only increase the global
warming problem if they are successful. Which as we see further impacts the
electrical grid. This is the treadmill effect, the faster you go, the faster
you have to go to keep up. Maybe it's time to slow down.

Ken Adams
-----Original Message-----
From: Carrol Cox [mailto:cbcox at ilstu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 3:35 PM
To: crl
Subject: [CrashList] [Fwd: electrical storm hits New Economy]




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: electrical storm hits New Economy
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 17:01:37 -0400
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>

TheStandard.com - September 12, 2000

Electrical Storm Hits New Economy
Faced with energy shortfalls and an aging power grid, Internet 
Economy companies search for solutions.
By Mark Boslet

It was a long, hot summer in the United States. Not only did record 
heat waves parch much of the nation, but a mini-energy crisis struck 
both coasts.

In San Diego, utility bills doubled as electricity supplies tightened 
and the cost of power skyrocketed. During a mid-June heat wave, 
rolling blackouts hit San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Politicians 
felt the heat, too, as public anger boiled over. Finally, in early 
September, California Gov. Gray Davis stepped in to cut San Diegans' 
electricity rates.

Meanwhile, hot weather in the Northeast pushed New England and New 
Jersey to the brink of brownouts. Many New Yorkers' summer 
electricity bills jumped 40 percent; for a few days in early August, 
New York's Con Edison even cut back service to business customers 
such as Chase Manhattan.

In the Northwest, where cheap hydropower has historically kept 
utility bills low, anemic river flows this summer have pushed up 
rates. Many sawmill and mine workers lost their jobs when companies 
chose to shut down rather than pay rising electric costs.

Now, with natural-gas prices high and heating oil for homes in short 
supply in the East, energy prices could also soar this winter.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Energy deregulation promised to 
lead smoothly to market-driven prices and investments in new plants 
and technology. Instead, it's resulted in price hikes, blackouts and 
dwindling reserves. It has also spurred a frantic push for new plants 
in states that for the past decade have added little new generating 
capacity.

The Internet Economy is peculiarly vulnerable to shrinking power 
surpluses. Digital businesses require not only massive quantities of 
power, but also reliable systems: An interruption in power as 
instantaneous as one-sixtieth of a second won't cause the lights to 
flicker - but it will crash a computer.

Already, U.S. companies lose $50 billion in productivity each year 
due to power interruptions, according to the Electric Power Research 
Institute, an industry-financed research organization based in Palo 
Alto, Calif. To ensure power supplies, some companies are considering 
building their own generating capacity, bypassing regional power 
grids altogether and evading the chaos that will likely persist for 
several more years.

The climate for many companies, in short, has grown "very fearful," 
says California state Sen. Byron Sher, who represents part of Silicon 
Valley. "This is a new issue for them."

The new-millennium energy crisis in the U.S. can be traced to the 
effects of deregulation, a lack of new generating capacity in recent 
years, and an antiquated distribution system - not to mention the 
unanticipated demands of the Internet Economy. An average office 
building with a computer on every desk but no significant network 
facility uses between 4 and 5 watts of electricity per square foot, 
according to Ed Quiroz, a regulatory analyst at California's Public 
Utilities Commission. If that building has a server farm and a 
network operations center, it sucks from 90 watts to 100 watts of 
energy a square foot or more. Or consider this: According to Mark 
Mills, an energy researcher with ties to the utilty industry, a Palm 
handheld device connected wirelessly to the Internet has the appetite 
of a refrigerator, consuming 1,000 kilowatt hours a year.

But estimates of the Net economy's power requirements vary. The fact 
is, no one knows for sure how much demand for energy will climb in 
coming years. Mills and colleague Peter Huber estimate that 
businesses that rely on digital equipment - personal computers, 
networking equipment, plants that produce high-tech gear and 
telecommunications networks - consume 13 percent of U.S. electric 
power. That figure will rise to between 30 percent and 50 percent of 
the nation's energy needs by 2020.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Jonathan Koomey says 
those numbers are too high. According to his calculations, the 
Internet Economy accounts for about 3 percent of total electricity 
consumption in the United States.

Whatever the actual number, demand "is clearly going up faster than 
most people predicted several years ago," says Mark Bernstein, 
director at Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, Rand Corp. "I 
think we're still underestimating it. We can expect the unexpected."

Also unexpected were the aftershocks of deregulation, which gathered 
steam in the mid 1990s as legislatures moved to equalize broad 
electric pricing disparities across the country. In the last five 
years, 26 states have opened or taken steps to open some of their 
markets to competition.

Unfortunately, deregulation has helped create an atmosphere of 
uncertainty in the energy industry. New plant construction has slowed 
as investors doubted whether they could get favorable returns on new 
facilities.

What's more, the U.S. power grid, built in the 1950s and 1960s, was 
not designed with the kind of reliability that the new silicon-based 
economy requires.

Over the past decade, electricity-generating capacity rose 30 
percent, but transmission capacity grew only 15 percent, according to 
figures from the Electric Power Research Institute. A typical 
business customer can depend on 99.9 percent reliability. That 
translates to nine hours a year of electricity interruptions - far 
too high a risk for companies that depend on the Internet or internal 
networks. Internet Economy companies, the rule goes, need "six 9s": 
99.9999 percent reliability.

It could get worse. Projections for the next 10 years show power 
generation growing between 20 percent and 25 percent, but the 
transmission grid expanding only 4 percent. It doesn't matter how 
many megawatts you pump out if electricity can't flow to where it's 
needed.

Some high-tech companies have taken heed. At software giant Oracle, 
energy director Jeff Byron has installed a diesel generator to run 
the company's worldwide data center during blackouts and to power 
emergency lights, elevators and fire equipment. Oracle also has a 
private transmission system with a separate power substation to 
improve reliability. Byron says the company is even considering 
developing its own power plant.

Web site host Exodus Communications has five facilities loaded with 
high-end, energy-sucking servers in Silicon Valley and 23 around the 
world. Each facility has dual lines to utility substations, backup 
diesel generators and batteries to prevent power disruptions. Exodus 
also is "looking very closely'' at generating its own power, 
according to Jim Stoddart, senior VP of operations.

Energy shortfalls are focusing more attention on new power 
technologies, such as smarter power meters that alert users to the 
times of the day when power is less expensive, and "micro turbines" - 
small natural- gas-fueled engines designed for individual buildings. 
Also under development are hockey-puck-size silicon chips that 
increase the capacity of transmission lines by as much as 40 percent. 
Online exchanges could also ease power burdens by freely shifting 
resources to areas of greatest demand.

Ultimately, however, the economy is growing faster than the nation's 
ability to produce electricity. That means the long, hot summer of 
2000 could be only a foretaste.

_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
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From ab11 at erols.net  Sun Sep 10 20:51:14 2000
From: ab11 at erols.net (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 22:51:14 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <01C01CD4.4F05D280@207-172-188-132.s132.tnt2.nywnj.ny.dialup.rcn.com>

Ironically, Trotsky& Stalin were not that far apart theoretically. Both still had the imprint of 19th c European social democracy. Trotsky belittled the democratic struggle hence did not understand that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was a Strategic Alliance , firstly of the Working Class and the Peasantry. 
His idea of "Permanent Revolution" was not new, it was a distortion of Marx, who first put forward that concept. But Trotsky did not understand the fundamental concept of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, i.e., Uneven Development. So in pushing his interpretation of Permanent Revolution, he put it in Antagonistic Contradiction to the real political process whereby there can be socialism in one country, as a term of revolutionary development. Hence either there was to be World Revolution or there could be none.
	Stalin, on the other hand, took the dialectical fact of uneven relationship and apotheosized the National characteristic of the Russian Revolution, and so the elimination of the Communist International and the privileging of State to State relations over Party to Party Relations.
	Trotsky's "Left" errors compliment Stalin's right errors. Remember Trotsky was not expelled from the party by Lenin. It was only after Lenin's death that Stalin, in what was a crass power struggle, ousted Trotsky ( and whoever seemed to challenge Stalin for a dominant political or ideological line, e.g., the purges.)
`	But Trotsky's belittling of the National Question and the Worker Peasant Alliance, and Democratic Struggle in general....( he actually wanted The Unions under an authoritarian military structure) is a continuum of his dismissal of the achievement of socialism in one country.
	Trotsky thought , as well, that there could be no Proletarian Culture. That Culture was essentially Bourgeois, not understanding that as the revolution unfolds we move from a Revolutionary Democratic i.e. Anti Imperialist Culture toward the creation of a Proletarian Culture as the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production mature. So neither he nor Stalin understood Mao's profound confirmation of Leninism , The Cultural Revolution (See Lenin, "Better Fewer.."
	  Neither understood it is The Class that must take the mantle of power not the Party! The Cultural Revolution is the only method of educating the revolutionary masses to the fundamental understating of revolution, classes, class struggle and the difference between United Front Government (Dictatorship of Workers and Peasants) and Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
	Likewise neither understood Lenin's New Economic Program (nor Mao's The Economics of New Democracy. They thought "War Communism", with its authoritarian strict Party domination of post revolutionary society was correct. In the USSR this led to the creation of a new bureaucratic bourgeoisie of technicians and party officials and revisionism Stalin's declaration in the 16th Congress re the elimination of Hostile Classes is an actual declaration of Revisionism.
	What is so important is that as consistently incorrect as Trotsky was, Lenin saw that it was better to struggle, wage polemics, than try to destroy him. Stalin, who although he wrote a brilliant paper on the national question .... went to Georgia and actually slapped a minority nationality comrade and opposed self determination for the autonomous republics in USSR, opposed Lenin's last great theoretical works re the necessary elimination of War Communism as a "Left" error , which in Stalin's regime became a Rightist trend which led us all the way to Putin,
	Trotskyism, now<  is in the main a petty bourgeois trend diseasing the universities and urban intellectual circles.
-----Original Message-----
From:	John Woodford [SMTP:johnwood at umich.edu]
Sent:	Wednesday, September 06, 2000 4:56 PM
To:	crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
Subject:	Re: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short

Yeah, fine. . But Lenin was interested in dealing with the question:  How do we
get therer from here?
And put another way, as far as Trotsky's case goes, "Everybody talkin' 'bout
Heaven ain't going there."

Macdonald Stainsby wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> > The best solution is the one that can base itself most
> > firmly on this principle and on this principle only: Each
> > according to his or her work.
> >
> > When we have developed a better type of human being we can
> > take it further from there.
> >
> > Tahir
> >
> While I'm not a Trotskyist by any means, I provide this and a link for
> further speculation:
>
> Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed":
>
> The first section, entitled "Social Structure", concludes with these words:
> "In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each
> according to his abilities to each according to his work." This inwardly
> contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or
> not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated
> text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete
> lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with
> which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It
> is not difficult to guess the origin of the new "principle." To characterize
> the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: "From each
> according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The two parts
> of this formula are inseparable. "From each according to his abilities," in
> the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be
> an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use
> for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work.
> Working "according to their ability" -- that is, in accord with their
> physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the
> members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill
> up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all
> "according to their needs," without humiliating control. This two-sided but
> indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an
> all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.
>
> [full portion of the article available at:]
>
> http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Other/Trotsky/Archive/1936-Rev/ch10.htm#ch1
> 0-1
>
> ================
> Macdonald Stainsby.
>
> Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
> http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
> rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
> ----------
> http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist

--



_______________________________________________
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From gdrouet at brutele.be  Wed Sep 13 00:57:31 2000
From: gdrouet at brutele.be (Georges Drouet)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 08:57:31 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Tous ensemble (in French)
Message-ID: <v03007801b5e4d5b026cd@[212.68.237.75]>

Chers amis et amies, merci pour vos commentaires tres positifs.

La simplicite est si efficace qu'il ne sert a rien de compliquer les choses....

Mais parfois les theoriciens emberlificotent leurs idees dans la rethorique
et ne saisissent plus l'importance de l'action immediate, comme disait
Pablo Neruda apres que Pinochet ait pris puis domine le pouvoir au Chili:
"Tanto hablamos de la Revolucion, que cuando nos levantamos era demasiado
tarde", c'est a dire: Nous avons tant parle de la Revolution, que lorsque
nous nous sommes leves, il etait trop tard...

En effet, notre societe s'empresse vers une catastrophe sociale, economique
et environnementale qui fait craindre une modification complete de notre
mode de vie, une modification reductrice de libertes, de richesses
culturelles et de beaute.

SP n'est pas une panacee, mais bien la solution pratique qui existe
aujourd'hui, et meme si le projet est jeune, le support qu'il recoit est
encourageant et extremement large. Le concept meme de SP permet de
developper une collaboration entre des politiques politiciennes qui,
jusqu'a present au moins, n'ont cesse de s'affornter, laissant le champs
libre au developpement de strategies veritablement nocives. Je veux dire
par la, qu'a force de discutailler, dialectiques partisanes, les veritables
pouvoirs financiers ont profite de ces dissensions pour croitre
demesurement, prenant ainsi une telle avance concrete, sur le terrain,
qu'ils ont penetre des territoires ou aucune legislation les guide, ou les
forces puissantes et triviales qu'ils utilisent les depassent, ils se sont
perdus dans un univers sans coeur ni esprit. Aprentis sorciers, leur
alchimie les a depasse...

SP pose les bases d'un systeme regule, le bon sens y regne. L'originalite
c'est qu'il ne s'agit ni d'un retour en arriere, ni d'attendre que la crise
s'aiguise et nous entraine dans un maelstrom de desastres ou encore que
nous devions revenir a un age cavernicole et rejeter ce que la science et
la technologie nous ont apporte comme veritable progres...

Non, la chose est, comme vous le dites, simple. La cooperation remplace la
competition.

Et c'est la que s'ouvre un univers de reflexion, il ne s'agit pas d'une
idee toute prete, pre-emballee a consommer. Non! Nous devons reflechir et
proposer, nous devons creer les articulations de ce monde a venir, en
definir les rouages de la partie technique et remettre a jour les espaces
de liberte qui ont fait de l'humanite un univers libre pour l'expression
personnelle et un lieu ethique et equitable pour la vie commune.

Nous voila face au temps, comme lors de chaque veritable changement
historique. A nous de ne pas tomber dans le piege sanglant d'une revolution
inhumaine, faite d'armes et de mort. D'abord parceque les gagnants en sont
toujours ceux qui vendent et donc vivent des armes mais aussi parceque nous
sommes arrives a un tel etat d'entropie planetaire que tout affrontement,
meme dans le coin le plus perdu de la planete, ne peut qu'avoir des
repercussions negatives sur le reste de l'humanite... Nous accedons, en
partie a cause de l'acceleration des technologies de communication, a une
conscience planetaire. Il s'agit d'eviter de devenir tous les esclaves de
quelques uns. Il s'agit d'offrir a tous, meme a ceux qui sont partis sur de
mauvaises pistes, la possibilite, la chance, de creer les bases d'un
developpement durable.

 A nous de faire briller nos intelligences, de combiner la purete de nos
enfants, la sagesse de nos anciens, la force de notre age...

Alors SP est la, c'est un outil pose devant nous tous, il nous attend. John
l'a decouvert, comme lui-meme le dit il ne l'a pas invente. Pour utiliser
SP, il faut reflechir. Et notre societe de developpement basee sur
l'engloutissement de matiere est plutot a l'oppose de la creation
intelligente (sic!) mais il n'est jamais trop tard pour reflechir, meme si
aujourd'hui il est franchement temps de s'y mettre!!

Alors nous proposons quelques bases de reflexion, nous comptons sur vous
pour les elargir, les fortifier, les developper et nous en ferons tous
ensemble une strategie coherente et genereuse pour l'humanite consideree
dans sa multiplicite politique, culturelle, intellectuelle et
philosophique.

En visitant le site de SP, vous avez surement decouvert, en anglais pour
l'instant, en francais, espagnol et allemand dans quelques jours,  les
pages qui presentent les mesures que SP propose, les motivations des
promoteurs de SP (c'est a dire vous et nous, nous tous en fait), une page
qui vous permet de presenter et faire connaitre vos idees (ce n'est pas
habituel, alors autant en profiter : -)) et une page d'adoption de SP
(c'est gratuit et donne de l'energie au mouvement).

Alors, refaites un tour sur http://www.simpol.org , adoptez SP et laissez
votre creativite s'exprimer. C'est pas tous les jours que l'on peut dire
comment on envisage le futur de l'humanite, c'est encore moins frequent de
savoir que ces propositions seront lues avec attention et que le Conseil de
Prospective de SP les imbriquera dans la dynamique generale du changement
qui se met en place.

Alors? Prets pour cette aventure?

Prets pour l'aventure de l'humanite!


>Bonjour ? tous,
>
>Apr?s un tour sur simpol.org j'ai constat? que les meilleures id?es semblent
>?tre les plus simples.
>Avec un syst?me comme celui-l?, pas moyen de se d?filer pour les
>gouvernements.
>Toutes les excuses tombent. C'est un syst?me qui peut permettre de d?masquer
>tous ceux qui se cachent derri?re des impossibilit?s th?oriques.
>J'ai h?te de voir la suite.
>Bien jou? simpol.
>
>Jackie Navarro Attac-Qu?bec

------------------------------------------
Georges Drouet
28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
tel: 32-486 751 668
fax: 32-2 538 10 82

gdrouet at brutele.be





From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 13 01:55:48 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 08:55:48 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] A new energy crisis : when will we ever learn ?
Message-ID: <00b401c01d5e$c40d2120$cb688cd4@ngjones>

By C.J.Campbell, September 12, 2000
Archived at http://dieoff.com/page202.htm

The French fishermen led the revolt, but it soon spread across the Channel.
Everyone is up in arms about the high price of fuel. Understandably they are
confused and look for someone to blame, finding ready candidates in a greedy
Chancellor or the OPEC sheikhs.  They are right to blame the Government: not
for the high price of oil but for their record of denial and obfuscation in
facing up to the reality of oil depletion. Had the people been better
informed, they would have devoted their energies not into blockades but to
finding viable long-term solutions.


The world is now entering a new oil crisis. The roots of it have been
evident for a long time to those analysts who give due weight to the
endowment of oil in nature, its distribution and above all its depletion.
Others, with a blind faith in technology and market forces, have failed to
read the signals.


Oil has to be found before it can be produced, meaning that there is an
obvious relationship between discovery and production.  It follows that the
peak of discovery in the 1960s, which is now an historical fact, has to be
followed by a corresponding peak of production.  When the numbers are added
up, the evidence indicates that such a peak for conventional oil will arrive
around 2005, and about five years later for all hydrocarbons, assuming no
radical change in demand.

Oil is most unevenly distributed for geological reasons, with about half the
remaining conventional oil, lying in just five Middle East countries.
Furthermore, the expropriations of the 1970s distorted the normal economic
pattern of depletion. It forced the industry to explore and exploit the
relatively difficult and expensive places like the North Sea or Alaska as
fast as possible, leaving the principal OPEC countries with control of the
relatively cheap and easy oil, found long ago. This predictably led to price
volatility.

The oil industry has suffered throughout its history from "boom and bust",
which is inherent in the very nature of finding and producing a liquid
resource, concentrated by Nature into a few preferred places.  The industry
has accordingly always needed a degree of overall control that runs in the
face of free market capitalism.  Such control has been exercised variously
by Standard Oil, the Texas Railroad Commission, the major oil companies and
finally OPEC itself. Up until now, such regulation has sought to limit
excess production to support price in an environment of surplus capacity.
The fundamental nature of the regulation however changes at peak production
when the need is to produce more not less. The Texas Railroad Commission
ceased US pro-rationing when that country peaked in 1970. North Sea
production is at peak now and set to fall at a high rate. The FSU peaked in
1988, and non-Gulf OPEC countries have also peaked.  It means that the
control of the supply of world oil rests squarely with the five Middle East
countries.

This seems so obvious, yet it is not widely understood.  Even the OPEC
governments themselves fail to fully grasp the strength of the position that
has been forced upon them. They have a misplaced fear that rising prices
will encourage non-Middle East production, spurred by new technology and
market forces. They fear that high prices will prompt a move to alternative
fuels, including gas, coal and nuclear power, as well as energy savings and
eventually renewable energy..


In reality, non Middle East production is inexorably set to decline through
natural depletion.  Production in the North Sea will halve in about ten
years.  Accordingly, the share of conventional oil production coming from
the five Middle East countries is set to rise. It was 38% in 1973 at the
time of the first oil shock, but  had fallen to 18% in 1985, as already
found new provinces in Alaska, the North Sea and elsewhere delivered flush
production from giant fields. They are always found early in the exploration
process. Share has been rising since 1985 to reach 30% to-day. This time, it
is set to continue to rise because there are no major new conventional
provinces ready to deliver, or indeed in sight. By 2010, it is likely that
the Middle East will be asked to supply 50% given that demand can be held
steady by rising prices.


The world has huge deposits of non-conventional oil in the form of heavy
oil, bitumen, oil shale, polar and deepwater oil but it is perforce a slow
and expensive business, carrying environmental costs. It cannot accordingly
have any material impact on peak,


Spare capacity can mean many things. A shut-in Middle East well can be
re-opened to provide an instant high rate of flow, but infill drilling,
enhanced recovery techniques and exploration can deliover less, taking much
investment, work and above all time. The OPEC producers have to run ever
faster to stand still, as they desperately seek to offset the natural
decline of their old fields, which hold most of their oil.  90% of the world
's oil comes from fields more than twenty years old, and 70% from fields
more that thirty years old.


It transpires that there are very few shut-in wells anywhere. The world is
just about out of operational spare capacity and.  An improvident draw on
stocks has left them at a 24 year low.


OPEC has no good reason for raising production when its revenues increase by
not doing so.  The Western consuming countries also have no good reason to
press OPEC to increase production. It would merely mean that the inevitable
global peak becomes higher and the subsequent decline steeper.  While
increased production would solve a temporary price surge, it offers no
long-term solution to the West.


OPEC now finds itself in a dilemma as it begins to question its fundamental
role. Is its traditional function of rationing production to support price
giving way to a new policy of having to exert pressure on its members to
increase production to meet the consuming nation's demands and possibly
threats, even military threats?  It is ironic that Britain and the USA
continue to bomb Iraq, whose oil they now desperately need.


You do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand the simple concept of
depletion.  Think of a glass of beer. The first sip tastes good, but your
brow creases when the glass is half  empty and you realise that you have
drunk more than remains. When the glass is empty, all you can do is ask for
another unless it is closing time. It is the same with oil. Peak comes more
or less at the midpoint of depletion, when the glass is half empty.


The reason why people don't understand the situation better is that the
public data on reserves is grossly unreliable, subject to lax definition and
poor reporting practices. The industry has systematically under-reported the
size of discoveries for good regulatory and commercial reasons.
Accordingly, the reported reserves have appeared to grow over time, giving
the misleading impression that more was being found than was the case. In
fact, the world consumes four barrels of conventional oil for every one it
finds.  The upward revision is mistakenly attributed to advances in
technology when it is simply in the reporting. Technology holds production
as high as possible for as long as possible,  which increases profit, but
has little impact on the reserves themselves. A field contains what it
contains because it was filled in the geological past.


BP wins the prize for the most oblique reference to the depletion of oil,
its principal asset, when it changes its logo to a sunflower and says that
BP stands for Beyond Petroleum.


Th world faces an oil crisis. Oil production is at peak. We depend on it for
transport and agriculture. World trade depends on transport.  We are not
running out of oil, but we are facing the natural peak of the fuel that has
driven our economy and prosperity for most of the last Century.  What should
we do about it?  The first step is to satisfy ourselves as to the facts, and
then face them head on. The second step is to use the oil we have
intelligently to help us over the transition as a matter of urgency and
priority as we find new ways of using less. We have only to look at our
traffic choked streets to see how wasteful we are.


The message for government is clear. Get off your knees and stop begging
OPEC for help. Face the situation squarely. Inform the people honestly so
that they will support the measures to be taken, however draconian, and then
get to work on a new direction. Think of 1940.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 13 02:49:41 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 09:49:41 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: rain in Japan
Message-ID: <00cd01c01d5f$9524f620$cb688cd4@ngjones>

Seven dead as record rainfall devastates central Japan

Special report: the weather

Jonathan Watts in Tokyo
Wednesday September 13, 2000

Seven people were killed and 360,000 advised to evacuate yesterday as
central Japan was lashed with the heaviest downpour the country has seen in
more than 100 years.
At its peak, the storm, which came in the vanguard of typhoon Saomai, dumped
97mm (3.8in) of rain on Nagoya, Japan's fourth biggest city, in the space of
an hour.

A third of the city's average annual rainfall fell in just 24 hours.

The meteorological agency said it was the most torrential downpour since
records began in Japan.

Streets were turned into rivers, houses were buried by landslides and
factories and stations were forced to close.

The prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, set up an emergency headquarters in his
official residence and ordered thousands of troops to help the 12,000
families whose homes were flooded.

"We must do everything in our power to help those affected," he told
reporters.

News broadcasts showed stranded residents escaping from the floodwaters in
boats.

"This is unbelievable. I never dreamed I would ever be leaving my home in a
dinghy," a woman said on television.

To some the help came too late. An elderly couple were killed in Komaki,
just outside of Nagoya, when a mudslide engulfed their house.

A young girl died after falling into an open drain, and a firefighter trying
to help rescue her was swept to his death by flood water. Dozens were
injured and at least one person is missing.

Japan's famously punctual transport systems were severely disrupted. About
50,000 commuters spent an uncomfortable night shut into railway carriages
when power was cut on the bullet train line from Tokyo to Osaka, stopping
the service for a record 18 hours. More than 100 flights were cancelled,
inconveniencing 85,000 passengers.

The economic cost is still to be counted, but is likely to run into many
millions of pounds, since the area around Nagoya is one of Japan's
industrial heartlands.

Toyota, which has its headquarters in the region, had to shut down 11
factories, delaying the production of 10,000 vehicles. Mitsubishi Motors
also closed one of its plants.

The centre of typhoon Saomai battered Okinawa, the southernmost main island
in the Japanese archipelago, yesterday with winds of 55mph.

It is forecast to dump more rain on large swaths of the country today.


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  That sinking feeling The North Pole is under water. Could it be East
Anglia next?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
The heat is on

When a group of American tourists turned up at the North Pole on board an
icebreaker earlier this month, they found no ice to break. It had all
melted. Is this yet another example of the global warming that has caused
flooding in Bangladesh and the deserts to expand in Africa? James Meek
reports on

Special report: the weather

Wednesday August 23, 2000

Had there been anyone there to watch, they would have thought that some
gigantic, terrible sea creature was trying to break through the ice. There,
at the North Pole, on March 17, 1959, a wind-scoured expanse of flat snow
and hummocks was being broken into from below. With an eerie lack of sound,
a huge black shape burst through the ice and settled, long, featureless and
menacing, in the wasteland.
That was the day that Commander James Calvert and his men, the crew of the
US nuclear submarine Skate, made history by being the first to test the
thickness of the ice at the top of the world in the most dramatic way
possible, with the hull of the boat they relied on to get them back home.

Since then, scores of submarines, including many from Britain, have visited
the pole this way. A long, sometimes anxious, often boring, cruise under the
ice; the search for a way up: a crack in the ice, known as a lead, an area
of open water - a polynya - or a stretch where the frozen layer between
water and sky is thin enough to break; the call to action stations; and the
careful easing of the vessel up to the surface, sometimes with
heart-stopping sounds of cracking and straining as the ice yields. And then,
for the Royal Navy at least, a spot of football at the pole. Or, as has been
known, the best cricket playable in three layers of clothing and Arctic
mittens.

These cruises were for the sake of apocalyptic wars to come. The measuring
of the thickness of the ice by sonar as the submarines hummed through the
dark waters was just a by-product. But as scientists began to analyse the
results of these measurements, they noticed a curious thing: year after
year, the ice was becoming thinner. Amid fears of global warming, with the
cold war gone, it starts to look as if the main legacy of those under-ice
voyages will be the warning of a completely different apocalypse, equally
man-made and equally destructive - the floods and famines of a world grilled
under a blanket of greenhouse gases.

Earlier this month, a group of American tourists were startled, when they
reached the North Pole on board a Russian icebreaker, to find that there was
no ice to break. The pole, in our imaginations a flat white sheet scoured by
twisting lines of wind-blown snow, was open water. Gulls flew overhead. The
nearest stretch of ice capable of bearing the weight of the tour party was
six miles away.

"There was a sense of alarm," said Dr James McCarthy, an oceanographer and
one of the tourists. "Global warming was real, and we were seeing its
effects for the first time that far north."

Arctic specialists read fearful media accounts of the icebreaker tour with
mixed feelings. On one hand, they knew that open water at the North Pole is
not, in fact, unusual - as the repeated submarine surfacings there show.
Even in winter, the winds which keep the ice constantly moving across the
sea of the Arctic basin cause cracks, ridges and large polynyas to appear.
The Skate surfaced in 1959 through a lead of open water which had recently
frozen over.

Yet they knew, too, that the tourists had witnessed something new - the
thinness of the ice across the whole Arctic region, where historically it
has been up to 3m thick. The evidence is mounting. The US Navy has provided
its data, the Royal Navy has just released its last classified figures for
analysis, and the Russians are rumoured to be preparing to put their
information on the market. From 1300km up, satellites are able to measure
ice thickness with incredible accuracy - to within 10cm. All the signs are
that the sea ice over the Arctic is melting, and in 50 years' time, in
summer, there could be no ice there at all.

"The average ice thickness in summer has decreased by 40% between the 1970s
and now," said Peter Wadhams of the Cambridge-based Scott Polar Research
Institute, who is a veteran of Arctic submarine voyages. "That's a pretty
major decrease. And we're looking at satellite images showing the area of
ice to be shrinking too - that's been going down by 5% a decade. At that
rate, it will have vanished in 50 years."

An ice-free Arctic. Should we care? If all the sea ice melts, it won't
affect sea levels: an ice cube melting in a drink does not make the drink
overflow. Merchant ships would be able to cut almost 5,000 miles off the
Europe-Japan sea route by zipping across the North Pole. Oil prospectors and
trawlers would move in. Siberians and Canadians would cash in. But it would
spell disaster for creatures such as the polar bear; it would mean the end
of one of the world's last true wildernesses. And for humankind, it could be
the beginning of a great climatic catastrophe.

The North Pole has always inspired passion in scientists. The passion to get
there first, and the passion to be right about what is happening in the
remotest and most mysterious of places. The man long accepted as the first
to have reached the pole, Robert Peary, turned out to have wanted the honour
so passionately that he lied - it now seems likely that he never got closer
than 100 miles from the pole. The first to make it was probably a Soviet
airman, Ivan Papanin, and he didn't make it until 1937.

The current debate about the causes of Arctic ice-thinning is,
appropriately, one of the fiercest and most keenly watched in the whole
field of climate change. Computer models of the world's climate predict that
if changes take place, they will take place in the Arctic earlier and faster
than anywhere else on the planet. The question under dispute is simple: is
global warming to blame for the watery pole, or is it part of a separate
weather cycle, whereby the ice shrinks and thickens in a regular way over
decades?

Johnny Johannessen, of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre in
Bergen, Norway - where scientists have predicted the demise of the Arctic
summer sea ice in 50 years - said: "It's a challenge to be able to pin down
how much ice thickness is changing as a result of global warming and how
much is due to atmospheric conditions which, we know, undergo huge changes
in the Arctic from decade to decade."

Dr Wadhams said he was convinced that global warming was the cause. In
particular, the ice was being undermined from below by warmer seas. The idea
that a change in the winds which shift the sea ice would simply "flip" the
cycle back to a rethickening of the ice was, he said, unconvincing. "The
balance of probability is that this is a real global-warming effect. It's
not going to go back."

If global warming really is found to be responsible for the melting of the
Arctic, it has two sets of consequences - one direct, the other
demonstrative. If scientists can point to a shrinking skein of ice floes
where valiant explorers once walked with huskies, it will help them to wake
up the world to the powerful changes that man-made climate change is capable
of making to all our lives.

Directly, the disappearance of the shiny white ice at the pole means the
loss, for the planet, of a huge reflector, beaming the sun's heat back at
it. Open water is darker and absorbs heat better. In other words, the loss
of the ice would add to the rise in global temperatures.

Another direct consequence is a particularly ugly one for Britain. Global
warming is predicted to mean steadily rising temperatures for our islands,
bringing Mediterranean balm to the south. But within 100 years, this could
change. With the melting of the Arctic ice, some models say, the existing
circulation of cold and hot, fresh and salt water in the Atlantic would be
dramatically violated. The gulf stream, the current of warm water which
keeps our temperatures higher than they should be so far north, would falter
and be turned back south of Ireland. Temperatures would sink till they were
lower than they are now.

As a first, early sign of how global warming can bring real, swift and
disturbing change to the world we grew up in, the thinning of the Arctic ice
appears as an early warning light, closer to home and bigger than the
inundation of little island nations, more clear-cut than the doubtful
premise that global warming means more storms.

The melting Arctic will not bring flooding directly. But it looks like a
sign that melting glaciers in the ancient, kilometres-thick ice caps of
Greenland and AntArctica will. Sea levels are predicted to rise by 70cm in
the coming century, putting the people of low-lying countries like
Bangladesh at ever greater risk of disaster. Rising temperatures will render
swathes of semi-arid African land desert, and lead to increased rainfall
elsewhere, meaning greater floods.

Sceptics of global warming point to the lack of reliable weather records
going back more than a century, arguing that it is impossible to distinguish
between natural cycles in the weather and man-made changes. Yet examination
of ice and sediment samples going back hundreds of thousands of years
suggests that, in fact, the recent rises in temperatures are an aberration.

Accepted theories about the wobbles in the Earth's orbit, which are thought
to cause ice ages, suggest that we can expect our next ice age in 25,000
years time, and that we are approaching the peak of natural warmth in the
ice-age cycle. The difference in average global temperature between getting
vineyards in Yorkshire and getting glaciers in Scottish glens is very
small - only four degrees celsius. In other words, by adding a few degrees
to the planet's natural temperature at the time when it is peaking anyway,
we are moving into wholly unpredictable territory.

Politically and - some scientists fear - practically, there may be little we
can do but try to help protect developing countries, which are likely to
suffer the hardest, from the consequences of global warming. For the next
few generations at least, western Europe and North America are set to
experience climate change that is dramatic enough to notice but not
dangerous enough to be beyond management, making it still possible to ignore
the plight of nations and ecosystems which are more at risk.

Not that the changes won't be brought home to our shores in painful ways.
"The 1953 floods on the east coast of England were caused by storm surges,"
said Wadhams. "If there are higher sea levels to begin with, it will be
worse. The chances are there are going to be some disastrous floods on the
east coast in the next few years. If I were living near the coast in Suffolk
or Essex, I'd really be a bit worried."

Global warning:What will happen if the world keeps getting hotter

* Increased risk of flooding in Bangladesh: already ravaged by periodic
floods, loss of life and property gets worse as the sea level rises. Nile
delta also at risk.

* Famine in Africa: semi-arid regions in sub-Saharan Africa turn to desert,
making the food situation for some of the world's poorest countries worse.

* Disease moves north: mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow
fever, dengue fever and encephalitis spread into new territories.

* Trouble in New York: ferocious storms become a regular occurrence. Parts
of Manhattan experience frequent floods.

* The map changes: the Florida everglades are inundated, changing the shape
of the US.

* Danger in England: rising sea levels combine with storm surges to overcome
the sea defences on the east coast.

* Birds die: an estimated 24m geese, sandpipers, dunlins and stints have to
find new breeding grounds or perish, due to forestation of the Arctic
tundra.

* Polar bears starve: as global warming melts the Arctic ice, the bears have
less chance to fatten up on the seals they catch through the ice - their
weight plummets and cubs starve. Additional research by Alison George.











  Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000










From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 13 02:46:39 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 09:46:39 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Anger spreads across continent
Message-ID: <00cc01c01d5f$93ef3540$cb688cd4@ngjones>


Lorry drivers paralyse EU capitals
Special report: The petrol war

Ian Black in Brussels
Wednesday September 13, 2000

Blocked roads, wildcat action and frayed nerves tested the patience of
commuters and consumers across continental Europe again yesterday as anger
over the price of petrol spread - hitting Germany for the first time.
In the centre of the Belgian capital Brussels lorries sealed off all exits
to the Rond Point Schuman - considered the symbolic heart of Europe - as
talks between the Belgian government and militant hauliers continued for a
second day.

Further afield, Polish drivers and fishermen were reported to be considering
blockades against the country's fuel depots, refineries and ports.

The European commission said it was powerless to act against blockades
unless the movement of goods across EU frontiers was affected. But
ambassadors of the 15 member states agreed to hold an emergency meeting of
their transport ministers next week.

France's controversial deci sion to concede fuel tax cuts after six days of
protests and blockades by truckers and farmers has, however, made it hard
for other European governments to hold the line.

Also in Brussels, motoring organisations from five countries, including the
British RAC, called on governments to negotiate with Opec - the cartel of
oil-producing countries - whose announcement of increased production to
lower pump prices last week has done nothing to end protests, or to convince
governments to reduce fuel taxes.

"Governments should not give tax concessions to minority special interest
groups taking direct action," the RAC said. "Rather they should defend the
public interest and secure the right to mobility at an affordable price."

Protests continued in the Netherlands, with blockades slowing traffic on
motorways surrounding Rotterdam, the capital Amsterdam and its airport at
Schipol.

In Germany, truckers threatened to disrupt the country's transport network
from tomorrow. Farmers in Hamburg said they would join the country's
transport and taxi strike to press the government to cut diesel taxes and
postpone plans to introduce an ecological tax on fuel.

Police said that about 100 trucks were joined by bus and taxi drivers for a
protest at Saarbr?cken. The German finance minister, Hans Eichel, repeated
that scrapping the country's new energy tax would mean a rise in pension
contributions.

Belgian truckers mounted their third day of blockades, vowing to stay put
for weeks unless the government met their demands for lower diesel prices.
Action spread to the southern cities of Charleroi and Nivelles.

"One week, 15 days, three weeks - no problem," said lorry driver Jean Bury.

Lorry drivers in Ireland have also vowed to take action from Friday unless
their similar demands are met, though the Dublin government has said it will
not act outside its budget framework.

Angry Spanish farmers were reportedly planning a series of protests after
talks with the government in Madrid failed to reach a deal on how to
compensate them for rising transport costs.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 13 02:36:36 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 09:36:36 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Down to the last drop
Message-ID: <00b501c01d5e$c8b1ca00$cb688cd4@ngjones>


.Blair tells oil firms to resume deliveries
.Police promise to protect tanker drivers
.90% of petrol stations out of fuel
.Buses, trains and schools affected
.NHS faces crisis, operations cancelled
Special report: The petrol war

Patrick Wintour
Wednesday September 13, 2000

Tony Blair was at the centre of an extraordinary attempt to prevent the
British economy collapsing into total paralysis last night when he made a
series of personal pleas to oil bosses to instruct their tanker drivers to
restore exhausted supplies to the country's petrol stations.
But with Britain's car- and road-based economy less than 48 hours from total
shutdown, endangering hospital operations and food supplies, there was no
immediate sign that the majority of tanker drivers would respond.

Mr Blair promised the oil companies that the police would provide complete
protection to drivers, including escorts.

The tanker drivers, many of them sympathetic to the road hauliers'
complaints, say they are too frightened to drive out of the refineries and
oil depots.

But, giving the first indication that the police will get tough with the
protesters, an order was served on 20 pickets last night to leave private
property to stop blocking refineries in Colwick, Nottinghamshire.

The Police Superintendents' Association said officers would have no choice
but to make sure that tankers were able to leave depots and deliver their
fuel if oil companies decided to send them out.

A spokeswoman for BP said the company planned to move petrol once
"assurances" had been given about drivers' safety.

It was "speculation" to say that drivers might refuse to cross the protest
lines, and might take strike action if forced to do so.

Last night tankers taking petrol to empty filling stations left Purfleet
refinery, in Essex: the first sign that the crisis might be easing.

A police officer sat beside the driver of each tanker and police cars drove
alongside as an escort.

In Downing Street the government's civil contingencies committee was
monitoring movements.

By the time Mr Blair spoke, the petrol companies were predicting that 90% of
their stations would have run out of fuel by this morning.

The monumental scale of the crisis yesterday hit the transport system, the
health service, food supplies, schools and businesses.

A dramatic day started with the Prime Minister abandoning a visit to
Yorkshire and rushing back to Downing Street to take personal charge of a
round of crisis meetings.

Despite further panic buying and continuing public support for the protests,
Mr Blair gave an early evening press conference vowing that he would not
buckle.

He insisted that the government could not change tax policy between budgets
in response "to blockades, illegal pickets and direct action".

"Legitimate protest is one thing. Trying to bring the country to a halt is
quite another," he said.

Raising already impossibly high stakes, Mr Blair said: "Were we to yield to
that pressure it would run counter to every democratic principle this
country believes in, and what is more, if the government was to decide its
policy on taxes in response to such behaviour, the credibility of economic
policy vital to any country would be severely damaged.

"I will simply not allow that to happen."

In a frantic attempt to prevent Britain descending into total chaos, Mr
Blair spent the afternoon on the phone urging the chairmen and chief
executives of the five big oil companies to force their tanker drivers to
recommence supplies.

There has been suspicion in the government for some time that the oil
companies have been sitting on their hands, either because they would like
to see fuel duty cut or because their employees are sympathetic towards the
road hauliers.

Ministers acknowledge that they have been urging greater coordination
between the oil companies and the police for 48 hours, with little sign that
the drivers are willing to break the blockades and restore the deliveries of
non-essential supplies.

After his round of phone calls to the oil bosses, Mr Blair said: "We have
made the necessary emergency order of council. The oil companies are agreed
that they must move supplies."

The police had agreed to do "all that is necessary" to protect against
intimidation.

"The main union concerned has issued a strong statement urging members to
work normally.

"Everything is now in place to get the tankers moving. We hope in the next
24 hours to have the situation on the way back to normal. It will take
longer than that to be fully back to normal."

If there is no significant breakthrough, Mr Blair will be forced to invoke
emergency powers and send in the army to take over the distribution of
petrol.

Exposing the deep fears in the cabinet about the political implications of
this crisis, the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, became the first
minister to draw open parallels with the Winter of Discontent of 1979-80,
saying: "We are all bound by our history and remember the 'Crisis? What
crisis'."

At a round of meetings of the civil contingency committee yesterday, plans
were laid for designating 150 petrol stations around the country for the
exclusive supply of petrol to the emergency services. Meetings were held at
the Department of Trade and Industry with the petrol retailers to organise
supplies.

The only sign of a political concession by Mr Blair were some hints that he
would be willing to cut petrol duty in the Budget, or the pre-budget report
in November.

He said: "The proper time to make proper budget judgments is at the time of
the budget, when the year can be looked at as a whole."

Mr Blair was hoping that a strong plea to the tanker drivers from Bill
Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, would
have some influence on the tanker drivers.

Mr Morris warned the drivers that they had to go back to work, saying: "The
campaign has crossed the line from democracy and into anarchy."

Other union leaders called on the pickets to be hauled in front of the
courts, just as striking miners were in the 80s.

However, many of the drivers are not members of the TGWU, and even more are
unlikely to be moved by Mr Morris's instructions.








From iinkster at innocent.com  Wed Sep 13 03:54:58 2000
From: iinkster at innocent.com (Ian Inkster)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 10:54:58 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] A Plea for Technology, Institutions and the 18thC
Message-ID: <39BF4EF1.40C6871@innocent.com>

Dear All,

The major contribution of the California School, embracing Gunder Frank,
must surely now be seen as both 1) the establishment of some long-term
equivalence between Europe and China (poss the West and the Rest) on
major overall indicators, 2) the estab of the notion that large areas of
Asia etc esp China were at least equivalent on many items to advanced
areas of Europe over the long swing and 3) that Europe then enjoyed
advantages derived from the Rest, in silver, slavery, cotton etc,
through colonialism, trade or otherwise which created a 19thc gulf
between Europe and the Rest. The recent book by Ken Pomeranz gioves much
of the quantitative and logistical weight required of the Frankian
position.

So far so good. But there is much sliding around here. The indicators
vary, are often romantic in the extreme, and I do not see how they
uncompromisingly identify circa 1800 as the turning-point. I favour, for
good non_landes reasons, the eighteeth century as being Europe's period
of advancem,ent, and to illustrate this with reference to institutions
of information diffusion and sites of skill, new urban locations and
sites of social experiment, which together provide supply-side, often
uncosted, factors that then fed into new forms of industrial
manufacturing production. Stimulants may well have been short-term and
Pomeranz-like, but response at low price was some function of
institutions and technologies, which were changing rapidly during the
18thc in Europe, but not elsewhere. I do not seek or require a
Landes-type long-term cultural argument to get to that result.

Doeas the group remain convinced of the 1800 turning point or does it
not?
May we really measure average incomes, calorie intakes etc between
massive and complex systems over long time back into a quite disctant
past?
How does any average exert itself at a particular point against another
system - perhaps a system arriving with good sailing ships, manouvers
and accurate fire-power to areas not of the most developed in Asia etc,
that is , direct entries were being made in small coastal locations by
western packages of extreme advancement.that is western armaments were
only periodically tested against the real might of China or anywhere
else, it is this which leads to advancement over others, cvolonial gains
etc all useful to the industrialisation of europe a la Pomeranz.

Basically the Calif School seem to agree that silver, slaves, cotton etc
were all important inputs to the euro-turn (although I note some
differences within that group on this) and then the importance of the
19thc switch from wood etc to coal, steam etc. But both were built in
the 18thc and stemmed from technique applications and diffusions -
colonial silver, slaves etc were only inputs via technique, and this is
more true of the wood-coal switch. Added demands merely yield bottle
necks, other paths, or price rises in the absence of supply-side
improving factors. My contention is that the latter arose in the 18thc
in europe and were in no way logical consequences of a long-term
european cultural advantage or superiority.
Something Happened, but it did so in the 18thC.

Ian Inkster at iinkster at innocent.com





From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Wed Sep 13 09:38:26 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 11:38:26 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] U.S. Poverty [corrected]
Message-ID: <s9bf674b.061@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

How dry I am.
How wet I'll be.
If we don't do
What Mark knows true.

CB


>>> jones118 at lineone.net 09/12/00 03:26AM >>>
 Charles Brown wrote:
>
>
> It takes mass struggle to end poverty
>
> (from the Peoples Weekly World)
>
> By Greg Godwin
>
> A recent study entitled "Does a Rising Tide
>
> Lift All Boats?" discredits the widely held belief that the
> highly celebrated economic growth of the last decade has
> benefited working people as well as the rich.

Unfortunately, the only rising tide is the world ocean which is expected to
rise at least 20 cms in the next 3 decades.

Mark


_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base 
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 13 11:06:48 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:06:48 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] From JRL: Sexual Trafficking in Russia
Message-ID: <000801c01da5$00c08440$eb6a8cd4@mjones>

Fwd:  "Juliette M. Engel, MD" <jengel at miramed.com>


International Sexual Trafficking of Russian Girls as a Factor in Declining
Population
By  Juliette M. Engel, MD
MiraMed  Institute, Founding Director
Moscow, Russia trafficking at miramed.com

David:  I have been watching the flurry of  articles on the accellerating
decline in the Russian population with great  interest and would like to
add the results of my own research on the growing  international organized
criminal business of sexual trafficking of young women  and girls from the
former CIS and suggest that the precipitous loss of  child-bearing aged
women from the population pool is an obvious and overlooked  factor which
must be addressed both inside of Russia and  internationally.  I have
included a summary portion of a report I  prepared in November of 1998 for
the United Nations Development Fund for Women as background material to JRL
readers.

UNWITTING RECRUITMENT OF RUSSIAN WOMEN AND GIRLS INTO INTERNATIONAL SEXUAL
SLAVERY

According to the Organization for Security and Cooperation  in Europe
(OSCE) and the United States State Department, over 500,000 women and
girls from the former Soviet Union, mainly from the Russian Federation,
have  been lured into seeking work oversees by organized criminal gangs
posing as  legitimate, legally registered job recruiters. As soon as these
women cross  the border, their passports are confiscated by the traffickers
and the women are  sold into slavery as prostitutes. These women are
currently being trafficked to  more than 40 receiving countries documented
by the Global Survival Network   including the U.S. and Canada. We know
from our experience that trafficking from  the Yaroslavl Oblast, the
surrounding regions of Novgorod, Moscovsky oblast,  Leningradsky Oblast,
the Ural regions, Buryatia and Karelia is particularly  severe. At present,
Russia has no enforceable laws relating to the trade in  human beings so
traffickers cannot be effectively prosecuted. Free to operate  without
fear, traffickers simply set up legitimate businesses and then openly
advertise for girls. In economically depressed rural towns and villages,
the  lure of good jobs at high pay with no experience is hard to resist.

Social and Psychological Factors Contributing to Current  Problem:

1) Idealized View of Foreign Life

During the Cold War it was impossible for Russian citizens to travel or
work  abroad. Access to information beyond the borders was government
controlled.  Russians learned to distrust their government, i.e. Moscow,
and extreme  censorship paradoxically created an idealized vision of life
abroad.

The sudden opening of the country to an onslaught of media, entertainment,
and foreign goods during Perestroika in the late 1980s coincided with the
easing of restrictions on international travel. To villagers viewing the
world  beyond their borders for the first time on television, it seemed a
glittering  place filled with hope and opportunity. Television programs
imported from the  United States such as Dallas, Dynasty, Santa Barbara and
Crime Story,  were dubbed crudely into Russian and have topped the national
ratings  since their introduction in the early 1990s.

Casinos and nightclubs seemed to sprout up overnight in every city, town
and  village. While some Russians adapted quickly to their new economic and
social  freedom, many others who were eager to profit from the wealth they
suddenly saw  around them became easy targets for get rich quick schemes.
Millions of  Russians, including thousands of urbane Moscovites, for
example, lost millions  of rubles, lining up for days to invest their
savings in an infamous MMM  pyramid scheme even after it had been exposed
as a fraud and its perpetrators  were languishing in jail.

2) Economic Crisis and Loss of Social Safety Net

By the early 1990s, even as the heady era of get rich quick schemes and
dazzling images of an easy and prosperous life just across the border were
reaching ever deeper into the rural fabric of Russian life, a new reality
struck  home: The collapse of Communism and privatization had led to a
collapse of the  internal economy and the social support system. Widespread
corruption fueled  this boom or bust atmosphere as average Russians
struggled make ends meet.  Hundreds of unregulated banks, seeing an
opportunity to make millions  speculating on an inherently weak currency,
offered unsuspecting citizens  spectacular interest rates. As a result,
millions of Russians saw their savings  evaporate as banks folded overnight.

Unable to support its currency, the government fell further and further
behind in payments to pensioners, government-supported institutions such as
 hospitals, schools, orphanages and government-supported industries such as
coal  mining and defense.

However flawed, the Soviet system had for decades provided pensions, health
 care, education for all citizens (including orphans), day care and
hundreds of  other benefits which made life possible for students,
pensioners and people at  the lowest end of the government pay scale --
usually women. These benefits  included free education, free bus and metro
passes, free day care, reduced train  and plane fares and reduced prices
for consumer goods in special co-operative  stores. Today, most of these
benefits have been abolished.

The high number of unemployed women, the concentration of women in low
paying  jobs -- though not necessarily the least skilled jobs -- and the
reliance of  women on a failed social support system, has profoundly
effected their economic  status and future prospects. According to the
Ministry of Labor of the Russian  Federation, at the beginning of 1993, 63%
of the total number of unemployed in  Russia were women. By 1997, that
figure had risen to nearly 80%. Among young  people 29 years of age and
younger, women constitute 70% of the unemployed.  Women make up more than
80% of single-parent, single-income heads of families  raising underage
children and among that population group, over 80% are  unemployed.

Faced with this economic impoverishment and decreasing access to
educational  and job opportunities in Russia; bombarded on television with
the glittering  images of easy money and a glamorous life just across the
border, young women  are easy prey for sexual traffickers.

3) Risk-free Environment for Traffickers

Ludmila Zavadskaya, former Deputy Minister of Justice of the Russian
Federation acknowledges that although the Ministry of Justice is aware of
this  criminal trafficking, Russia lacks effective tools in its criminal
code that  would enable its justice system to prosecute traffickers.
Zavadskaya states,  There is no definition of trafficking in Russian
criminal codes.

Without a definition of trafficking as a crime, even women who survive
their  exploitation and return to Russia are unable to prosecute leaving
traffickers  operating freely in their villages. Survivors are not able to
return home for  fear of death or retribution to their family. They live in
hiding, powerless to  protect themselves or prosecute their oppressors.

Olga Samarina, Deputy Director of the Department of the Matters of the
Family, Women and Children of the Ministry of Labor of Russia states that
another key reason that the government has resisted dealing with the
problem of  trafficking is that it is a not a crime which is committed in
Russia.  Women are recruited by legitimate registered Russian businesses
who take them  across borders with their documents in order. This makes
trafficking very  difficult to prove in Russian courts despite verifiable
accounts of physical  violence, rape and enslavement which occur abroad.

Zavadskaya cites the lack of international treaties which would allow
Russia  to investigate criminal activity, such as enslavement, against its
citizens in  other countries. Also, the lack of interagency cooperation
within the Russian  government impedes the flow of information between such
critical agencies as the  Ministry of Justice and the Consular Service
(under the Foreign Ministry)
she reports.

Without reciprocal agreements against trafficking with other countries, and
 without a legal definition of trafficking as a crime, the Russian
Government has  no legal obligation to monitor the whereabouts of Russian
women and girls  abroad, their types of employment or exploitation. These
loopholes also release  the Russian Consular Service from the obligation to
help women who escape and  flee to their embassies for help.

4) Criminalization of the Trafficking Victim

Once Russian women have crossed the border, they have lost any  legal
recourse. If they escape from the traffickers and reach a Russian
consulate in a foreign country, trafficked women are usually turned away.
They  are considered to be in a foreign country illegally, having violated
the terms  of their visas by working as prostitutes and they are without
their passports  which have been confiscated by the traffickers and pimps.
As illegal  immigrants, trafficked women have no legal standing.

This victim as criminal scenario is exploited by traffickers and puts women
 even more in the power of their recruiters, pimps and brothel owners.

6) Mob Intimidation, Sophisticated Deception, Poverty and  Isolation
Renders Russian NGOs Ineffective:

According to Dianne Post, Gender Specialist for the American Bar
Association  ABACEELI Project in Moscow, there is extreme resistance on the
part of Russian  parliament, Russian courts and the police to even address
making changes to the  Russian criminal code which would address
trafficking.

According to Ludmila Zavadskaya, former Deputy Minister of Justice, instead
 of counting on governmental advocacy, womens NGOs must lead the way in the
 struggle to end sexual trafficking.

Relying on struggling womens NGOs to lead the battle against multi-billion
dollar criminal trafficking is completely unrealistic and dangerous. NGOs
are  intimidated by the very real threat of mob violence -particularly in
villages.  Although some NGOs have begun to organize in Moscow and St.
Petersburg by  gathering data about trafficking and seeking funding from
foreign organizations  to help survivors, their efforts are highly secret
and for their own protection  even their telephone hotline numbers are not
publicized.

A) Intimidation of NGOs by Traffickers:

According to the Foundation Against Trafficking in Women(STV) which was
founded in the Netherlands in 1987, there has been a steady increase in the
 number of women trafficked from the former Soviet Bloc since 1989. Similar
 trends have been noted by NGOs in other West European countries. STV data
show  that this traffic is mainly controlled by Eastern European and
Russian criminal  groups operating in the recruiting as well as in the
receiving destination  countries. These groups are highly organized,
extremely violent, and  often engaged in a variety of criminal activities.

Russian television news features daily broadcast programs showing the
murdered and mutilated victims of mob violence in graphic detail. Even in
village environments, local mafias operate violent rings of extortion,
illegal  liquor sales, drugs. The general public is well educated on the
constant threat  of mob violence. They are also generally aware that
organized crime is involved  in prostitution but have less specific
knowledge about mob-controlled  trafficking. NGOs working on violence
issues and beginning to work on  trafficking keep a very low profile and
are constantly fearful of the threat of  violence.

B) Sophisticated Deception:

Trafficking is a highly sophisticated criminal activity involving
recruitment  through legitimate registered fronts that need advertising,
offices, local  personnel, visas, international travel and co-conspirators
in the Russian and  foreign governments.

Girls are recruited through a series of events, interviews, photosessions
--  a complex process of deception which plays on her desire to find good
work, to  travel abroad and to help her family. Families usually
participate in the  process -- attending recruiting sessions, helping pay
for photographs, reviewing  contracts. With no information to make them
suspect the truth, and with a  relative media blackout on the subject of
trafficking, girls and their families  become eager and unwitting victims
-- leaving NGOs in a state of confusion as  to what constitutes a
legitimate business and who is actually fronting for  traffickers.

C) Lack of NGO Funding in Rural Russia

During Soviet times, a network of NGO-like government supported
organizations  helped maintain the social safety net -- providing health
care, day care,  social, charitable and cultural support. The remnants of
some of these  organizations still function to some degree today and form
the basis of the  fledgling rural NGO movement in Russia. Virtually all
funding to these  organizations has ceased. Those that continue to function
do so on a voluntary  basis or with some support from their local municipal
townships. Their lack of  resources renders them ineffectual for sustained
advocacy work.

Much of Russias population is rural or concentrated in small industrial
towns. Once outside Russias few main urban centers, the country rapidly
dissolves into a meshwork of disconnected, isolated small villages and
medium  sized towns. These economically impoverished locales have suffered
the most  severe deprivation following the collapse of the Soviet system
and provide  sexual traffickers a rich harvest of young women and girls.
Also scattered  throughout these regions, are thousands orphanages housing
an estimated two  million children which, according to the Russian
Orphanage Association, are  primary targets of traffickers. Government
support of orphanages has steadily  declined, dropping 30% in 1998 alone.
With decreasing access to jobs, education  and even the basic necessities
of survival, orphaned girls are only too willing  to respond to promises of
work and a new life abroad.

D) Russia's Internal Isolation -- Physical and Cultural:

It cannot be overemphasized that in dealing with Russian organizations and
non-urban organizations in particular, there is little history of coalition
 building or cooperation. Centuries of oppression have left villages
suspicious  of one another. Organizations rarely share resources or
information and do not  initiate communication with other organizations.
Community outreach is not a  functioning concept and many organizations are
even reluctant to give out their  telephone number to another Russian
group. There is a deep mistrust and dislike  of Moscow. The idea of
anything outside the local oblast has an almost mystical  albeit suspicious
air.

Compounding their deep-rooted mistrust of one another is their physical
isolation. Telephone service throughout Russia is poor. Calls from village
to  village must be made at the post office. Postal service is slow and
unreliable  and many regions lack reliable electricity. Transportation is
difficult and  arduous. As a result, villagers, who comprise the greatest
number of inhabitants  of Russia, live in virtual isolation except for
access to radio and  television.




From M.EDWARDS at FORDFOUND.ORG  Wed Sep 13 13:40:32 2000
From: M.EDWARDS at FORDFOUND.ORG (Edwards, Michael)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 12:40:32 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] FUTURE POSITIVE
Message-ID:  <4A341D4635A0D311B34B0000F6B2F75E01EE2D3A@ffnyc-nt1.nyc.fordfound.org>

NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

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From ab11 at erols.net  Wed Sep 13 15:16:50 2000
From: ab11 at erols.net (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 17:16:50 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short
Message-ID: <01C01DA6.9A628B60@207-172-179-19.s527.tnt1.nywnj.ny.dialup.rcn.com>



-----Original Message-----
From:	Amiri Baraka [SMTP:ab11 at erols.net]
Sent:	Sunday, September 10, 2000 10:51 PM
To:	'crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com'
Subject:	RE: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short

Ironically, Trotsky& Stalin were not that far apart theoretically. Both still had the imprint of 19th c European social democracy. Trotsky belittled the democratic struggle hence did not understand that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was a Strategic Alliance , firstly of the Working Class and the Peasantry. 
His idea of "Permanent Revolution" was not new, it was a distortion of Marx, who first put forward that concept. But Trotsky did not understand the fundamental concept of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, i.e., Uneven Development. So in pushing his interpretation of Permanent Revolution, he put it in Antagonistic Contradiction to the real political process whereby there can be socialism in one country, as a term of revolutionary development. Hence either there was to be World Revolution or there could be none.
	Stalin, on the other hand, took the dialectical fact of uneven relationship and apotheosized the National characteristic of the Russian Revolution, and so the elimination of the Communist International and the privileging of State to State relations over Party to Party Relations.
	Trotsky's "Left" errors compliment Stalin's right errors. Remember Trotsky was not expelled from the party by Lenin. It was only after Lenin's death that Stalin, in what was a crass power struggle, ousted Trotsky ( and whoever seemed to challenge Stalin for a dominant political or ideological line, e.g., the purges.)
`	But Trotsky's belittling of the National Question and the Worker Peasant Alliance, and Democratic Struggle in general....( he actually wanted The Unions under an authoritarian military structure) is a continuum of his dismissal of the achievement of socialism in one country.
	Trotsky thought , as well, that there could be no Proletarian Culture. That Culture was essentially Bourgeois, not understanding that as the revolution unfolds we move from a Revolutionary Democratic i.e. Anti Imperialist Culture toward the creation of a Proletarian Culture as the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production mature. So neither he nor Stalin understood Mao's profound confirmation of Leninism , The Cultural Revolution (See Lenin, "Better Fewer.."
	  Neither understood it is The Class that must take the mantle of power not the Party! The Cultural Revolution is the only method of educating the revolutionary masses to the fundamental understanding of revolution, classes, class struggle and the difference between United Front Government (Dictatorship of Workers and Peasants) and Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
	Likewise neither understood Lenin's New Economic Program (nor Mao's The Economics of New Democracy. They thought "War Communism", with its authoritarian strict Party domination of post revolutionary society was correct. In the USSR this led to the creation of a new bureaucratic bourgeoisie of technicians and party officials and revisionism Stalin's declaration in the 16th Congress re the elimination of Hostile Classes is an actual declaration of Revisionism.
	What is so important is that as consistently incorrect as Trotsky was, Lenin saw that it was better to struggle, wage polemics, than try to destroy him. Stalin, who although he wrote a brilliant paper on the national question .... went to Georgia and actually slapped a minority nationality comrade and opposed self determination for the autonomous republics in USSR, opposed Lenin's last great theoretical works re the necessary elimination of War Communism as a "Left" error , which in Stalin's regime became a Rightist trend which led us all the way to Putin,
	Trotskyism, now<  is in the main a petty bourgeois trend diseasing the universities and urban intellectual circles.
-----Original Message-----
From:	John Woodford [SMTP:johnwood at umich.edu]
Sent:	Wednesday, September 06, 2000 4:56 PM
To:	crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
Subject:	Re: [CrashList] Re: Reforms and falling short

Yeah, fine. . But Lenin was interested in dealing with the question:  How do we
get therer from here?
And put another way, as far as Trotsky's case goes, "Everybody talkin' 'bout
Heaven ain't going there."

Macdonald Stainsby wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "TAHIR WOOD" <twood at uwc.ac.za>
> > The best solution is the one that can base itself most
> > firmly on this principle and on this principle only: Each
> > according to his or her work.
> >
> > When we have developed a better type of human being we can
> > take it further from there.
> >
> > Tahir
> >
> While I'm not a Trotskyist by any means, I provide this and a link for
> further speculation:
>
> Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed":
>
> The first section, entitled "Social Structure", concludes with these words:
> "In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each
> according to his abilities to each according to his work." This inwardly
> contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or
> not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated
> text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete
> lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with
> which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It
> is not difficult to guess the origin of the new "principle." To characterize
> the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: "From each
> according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The two parts
> of this formula are inseparable. "From each according to his abilities," in
> the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be
> an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use
> for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work.
> Working "according to their ability" -- that is, in accord with their
> physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the
> members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill
> up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all
> "according to their needs," without humiliating control. This two-sided but
> indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an
> all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.
>
> [full portion of the article available at:]
>
> http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Other/Trotsky/Archive/1936-Rev/ch10.htm#ch1
> 0-1
>
> ================
> Macdonald Stainsby.
>
> Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
> http://www.egroups.com/group/rad-green
> rad-green-subscribe at egroups.com
> ----------
> http://www.geocities.com/leninist_international/
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
>
> _______________________________________________
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From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Wed Sep 13 20:44:46 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 22:44:46 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] CHOMSKY REPLIES TO CRITICISMS
Message-ID: <69.a66cb61.26f1959e@aol.com>

Michael Parenti gave an excellent speech, in Sacramento, on "genocide" in the 
Eastern Europe.  It seemed very factual and was clear about the western media 
misstating the facts to give an excuse for US intervention.  There is an 
excellent show on the History Channel about Hitler creating films of weeping 
refugees to use as an excuse for invading Czechoslovakia.  I am suspicious of 
such charges till I have proof.  
The answer, as many on the list have stated, is to oppose US intervention.  
We need to correct US human rights abuses HERE.
Several friends and coworkers of mine have gone to Mexico to observe the 
genocide against the poor especially los indios.  Their first hand accounts 
make it clear that US intervention and military aid is causing the suffering 
and massacres.  NAFTA is a killer.



From aabdo at webtv.net  Wed Sep 13 22:42:58 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:42:58 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: CHOMSKY REPLIES TO CRITICISMS
In-Reply-To: LROBERTS46@aol.com's message of Wed, 13 Sep 2000 22:44:46 EDT
Message-ID: <8009-39C05752-1019@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Michael Parenti provides an execellent example of HOW TO assess The
Balkans intervention of the US and allies.    How refreshing to not have
this false 'evenness' of commentary that Z and Chomsky have provided
constantly in the last decade.

The genocide is the act of pushing the consequences of eco-destruction
first onto the Third World, as industrialized imperialism sends us all
down the drain.    These lies are important to expose.     That's why I
have contributed in the past to The Emperor's Clothes site of Jared
Israel.      and i may well contrbute again.

I have stated that I thought his recent commentary was over-stating the
case in too aggressive a manner.    But his opponents are usually much
worse in overstating the case against him.

As for about NAFTA?      This is a drop in the tank of the
destructiveness of imperial policies South of The Border.      I
remember the heavy cloud of Central America and Mexico burning, the
previous summer.    This thick cloud of gray smoke sat over Texas for
several weeks, burning our eyes and irritating our respiratory tracts
with the smell of burnt fields and woods that had drifted across the
Gulf of Mexico.

Tony Abdo
_______________________________
LROBERTS wrote-
<Michael Parenti gave an excellent speech, in Sacramento, on "genocide"
in the Eastern Europe. It seemed very factual and was clear about the
western media misstating the facts to give an excuse for US
intervention. There is an excellent show on the History Channel about
Hitler creating films of weeping refugees to use as an excuse for
invading Czechoslovakia. I am suspicious of such charges till I have
proof.....>












From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 14 00:09:12 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 07:09:12 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] VIOLENCEFLARES IN LONDON
Message-ID: <009e01c01e12$51faa800$4a2c8cd4@ngjones>

Fuel crisis: Standstill Britain - Petrol Stations Pressure increases as the nation's needle flickers towards empty
Source: The Independent - London
Publication date: 2000-09-13

VIOLENCE FLARED yesterday as motorists queued to get petrol at filling stations still open for business.

Queues of up to a mile were reported at some petrol stations, and the main oil companies reported that between half and 90 per cent of their outlets had run out by midday. BP said two-thirds of its 1,500 stations were out of fuel and TotalFinaElf said nearly all its outlets would be dry by the end of the day. Tesco said all its garages in England and Wales were shut.

A fight broke out at a Shell station in Leeds when the driver of a works van and a businessman reached for a pump at the same time. Christopher Priestley, a cleaner at the petrol station on Kirkstall Road, said: "The two men pulled up at a super unleaded pump. One was punched as they battled to get there first. It has become a tragic situation - fighting over petrol." Another employee added: "The bloke in the van just grabbed the pump and the other retaliated by throwing a punch."

Police in Bristol were called to a Texaco outlet to deal with a confrontation between two women motorists, and there were similar incidents in Southampton, Newcastle and Manchester.

In Greater Manchester, one garage operator shut his business after being abused and threatened with violence. Bob Wharton, 55, who runs an independent petrol station near Oldham, said: "I couldn't describe the abuse I've received ... I've closed up even though we've got petrol left. I don't want any more aggravation."

Evidence that motorists are willing to pay whatever is asked to get petrol emerged as a number of filling stations raised prices to pounds 2.50 for a litre of diesel or lead replacement petrol.

Clare Barnett, manager of the Bridge Garage in Marlborough, Wiltshire, which was charging pounds 11.37 for a gallon of diesel, said: "Most people drive in here on empty and are relieved to have found some fuel."

http://cnniw.yellowbrix.com/pages/cnniw/Story.nsp?story_id=13738995&ID=cnniw&scategory=Energy%3AOil

--------------------------------

TIME MAGAZINE -- January 14, 1974
It looked like a hand grenade, so the Albany, N.Y., station operator played it safe and assumed that it was a hand grenade.  He gave the man who was toting it all the gas he wanted.  Attendants elsewhere last week faced curses and threats of violence, sometimes backed by suspicious bulges in the pockets of jackets.  When a huge bear of a man warned a Springfield, Mass., dealer,  "You are going to give me gas or I will kill you," the dealer squeezed his parched pumps to find some.  "Better a live coward than a dead hero," he said.

Such incidents were not exactly common last week, but they occurred often enough, especially in the Northeast, to indicate an outbreak of a kind of gasoline madness.  The New Year's weekend was the first time that many drivers became really desperate for gas.  Many stations ran out of their monthly allotments as the weekend started and closed until they could get new deliveries after the holiday.  Those that stayed open backed up long lines of drivers whose tempers sometimes exploded -- especially if they found the pumps dry when they finally got to them.

The gas shortage is sparking other types of deviant behavior.  Flouting of the law is on the rise.  In New York City, two gasoline tanks trucks, each loaded with 3,000 gallons, were hijacked within a week.  Price gouging by station owners has become distressingly common.  Miamians complain of having to pay $1 a gallon or being charged a $2 "service fee" before a station attendant will wait on them.

At best, many gas station owners and attendants have become unapproachable to strangers; they will wait only on longtime customers.  Some issue window stickers to the regulars; others sell by appointment only.  Oregon Governor Tom McCall last week rolled into a Union 76 station only to be told by the manager:  "Sorry, Governor, we're only selling to our regular customers."

So the Governor meekly drove to the end of the line at a nearby station that was taking all comers.



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From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 14 01:08:51 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 08:08:51 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Nation: Cohen/American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy
Message-ID: <00dd01c01e1a$bfe1c080$4a2c8cd4@ngjones>

This article is adapted from Stephen Cohen's new book,
Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia,
which is being published this month by W.W. Norton.

The Nation
October 2, 2000
American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy
By Stephen F. Cohen

With only a few exceptions, America's professional
Russia-watchers-policy-makers, financial advisers, scholars and, not least,
journalists-committed malpractice throughout the nineties. They claimed to
know the cure for what ailed Russia after the Soviet breakup in 1991, gave
regular assurances about the ongoing treatment and, while noting occasional
relapses, predicted a full recovery.

Their prescriptions, reports and prognoses have turned out to be completely
wrong. Nearly a decade later, Russia is afflicted by the worst economic
depression in modern history, corruption so extensive that capital flight
far exceeds all foreign loans and investment, and a demographic catastrophe
unprecedented in peacetime. The result has been a massive human tragedy.

Among other calamities, some 75 percent of Russians now live below or
barely above the poverty line; 50-80 percent of school-age children are
classified as having a physical or mental defect; and male life-expectancy
has plunged to less than sixty years. And, ominously, a fully nuclearized
country and its devices of mass destruction have, for the first time in
history, been seriously destabilized, the Kursk submarine disaster in
August being yet another example.

Underlying all the American misreporting and false analyses of the nineties
was an enthusiastic embrace of the Clinton Administration's ill-conceived
policy-a virtual crusade to transform post-Communist Russia under President
Boris Yeltsin into a replica of America through US-sponsored "reforms,"
first and foremost economic "shock therapy." The crusade was (and remains)
an official project, but it also captivated investors, academics and
journalists, who in their respective professional (or unprofessional) ways
became its missionaries.

Reporters, editorialists and columnists played an especially lamentable
role. Accepting the Administration's premise that "Yeltsin represents the
direction toward the kind of Russia we want,"1 they made that nation's
purported "transition to free-market capitalism and democracy," as the
process of conversion was termed, the guiding concept, prism and basic
narrative of their coverage, with little, if any, concern for its impact on
the people or the country's stability. As the missionary chorus of the
American crusade, they helped obscure Russia's unfolding tragedy and
abetted the worst US foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. It was, and in
significant ways continues to be, a bleak chapter in the history of
American journalism.

Journalists had long been forewarned. At the birth of Communist Russia,
Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published an analysis of the US press
coverage of the 1917 Revolution and the ensuing civil war between Reds and
Whites that became a celebrated textbook case study of journalistic
malpractice. Lippmann and Merz found that in terms of professional
standards the reporting was "nothing short of a disaster" and that the "net
effect was almost always misleading." The main reason, they concluded, was
that US correspondents and editors believed fervently in their government's
anti-Red crusade and had thus seen "not what was, but what men wished to
see."2

Seven decades later, it happened again. Most journalists writing for
influential US newspapers and newsmagazines believed in the Clinton
Administration's crusade to remake post-Communist Russia. Like a Washington
Post columnist, they quickly "converted to Yeltsin's side." Like Business
Week's Moscow correspondent, they "hoped for the liberal alternative" and
believed in the "job that Yeltsin and his liberal reformers had begun."
Like the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, they were certain Russia
needed the "same basic model" that America had. And with that newspaper's
correspondent, they worried constantly that Russia might opt instead for a
"path of its own confused devising." Some were even more embattled. For a
longtime Washington Post correspondent still in Moscow today, the
post-Communist crusade was another chapter in a "Cold WarSnot yet really
won."3

Leaving aside a plethora of factual errors, the first casualty, as Lippmann
and Merz had warned, was professional objectivity. Moscow correspondents,
according to a 1996 survey, tended to look at events there "through the
prism of their own expectations and beliefs." Three years later, a reviewer
of a book by a former correspondent concluded that the author's
"spectacularly wrong projections" arose out of her personal hopes for
Russia, "which prompted her to accept appearances for reality and desire
for fact."4

Such hopes and fears produced a US media narrative of post-Communist Russia
that was manichean and based largely on accounts propounded by US
officials. On the side of good were President Yeltsin and his succession of
crusading "young reformers," sometimes called "democratic giants"-notably,
Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Kiriyenko. On the
side of darkness was the unfailingly antireform horde of Communist,
nationalist and other political dragons ensconced in its malevolent
parliamentary cave. Chapter by chapter, the story was reported over and
again for nearly a decade, always from the perspective of the "reformers"
and their Western supporters. It was, a leading Russian journalist thought,
a "deception."5

Yeltsin and his team were, it seemed, the only worthy political figures in
all the vastness of Russia. Most Russians saw his economic shock therapy,
which had cost tens of millions of ordinary citizens their life savings and
plunged them into poverty, and related political measures as extremist, but
for the US press Yeltsin was the sole bulwark against "extremists of both
left and right."6 There was little if any room for non-Yeltsin reformers.
When one, Grigory Yavlinsky, ran against Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential
campaign, he was pilloried in US dispatches and editorials: "History will
remember who was the spoiler if things go bad for democracy." On the other
hand, whomever Yeltsin appointed, however unsavory his political biography,
invariably turned out to have "clean hands" and to be "one of the
democrats" and a "reformer," including Yeltsin's eventual designated
successor, Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer.7

More generally, affirming that all Yeltsin backers were invariably
"reformers" resulted in odd reasoning on the part of US journalists. Thus,
Moscow's mayor could be "a democrat" while being "an autocratic ruler." A
Washington Post correspondent even included rapacious insider-oligarchs
because "they bankrolled Yeltsin's presidential campaign against his
Communist rivalSand they generally favor the country's rocky transition to
a free-market democracy, which has made them fabulously wealthy." His
Newsweek counterpart knew who could not be a "reformer"-anyone "generally
antipathetic to US interests in Russia."8

Sustaining such a manichean narrative in the face of so many conflicting
realities turned American journalists into boosters for US policy and
cheerleaders for Yeltsin's Kremlin. As early as 1993, even a pro-American
Russian thought the US coverage of his country was "media propaganda." An
independent New York press critic made a similar point in 1996, complaining
that newspaper reporting was a "mirror of State Department double-think."
For a senior US scholar, the media's pro-Yeltsinism even "recalls the
pro-Communist fellow-travelling of the 1930s," though the "ideological
positions are reversed."9

American journalists created, for example, cults of those Russian
politicians whom the US government had chosen to embody its policy. The
extraordinary Yeltsin cult of the early 1990s-"as Yeltsin goes, so goes the
nation," in Time's formulation-was eventually eroded by his policy failures
and personal behavior. But as late as 1999 he remained, according to the
New York Times, the "key defender of Russia's hard-won democratic reforms"
and "an enormous asset for the U.S."10

As for Yeltsin's "young reformers," no matter how failed their policies or
dubious their conduct, their reputations hardly suffered at all, at least
not for long. Consider Chubais, whom US officials regarded as a "demigod"
and head of an "economic dream team."11 Even after he was widely suspected
of having ordered a cover-up of a Kremlin financial crime by his aides (an
allegation later confirmed), a New York Times correspondent informed
readers that "Chubais is plotting how to carry out the next stage of
Russia's democratic revolution." And long after he was known to have
personally profited from the privatization programs he administered, in
part by rigging market transactions, he remained, according to another
Times correspondent, a "free-market crusader," indeed the "Eliot Ness of
free-market reform."12 Nor was the Times alone in such reporting. A 1999
study by two American journalists published in The Nation concluded that
the Wall Street Journal's Moscow bureau had been "little more than a PR
conduit for a corrupt regime."13

There were even worse malpractices at the expense of professed American
values. In 1993 US columnists and editorialists followed the Clinton
Administration almost in unison in loudly encouraging Yeltsin's
unconstitutional shutdown of Russia's Parliament and then in cheering his
armed assault on that popularly elected body. The reasons given were
uninformed and ethically specious. Insisting that "it would be not just
expedient but right to support undemocratic measures," journalists even
rehabilitated the ends-justify-the-means apologia long associated with and
thoroughly discredited by Soviet Communists themselves: "One can't make an
omelette without breaking eggs."14 Even the next Parliament, the Duma,
elected under Yeltsin's own superpresidential constitution, became a target
of US media abuse, as though Russia would be more democratic without a
legislature, ruled only by the president and his appointees.15

Another example highlights the irrelevance, even cold indifference, of much
US reporting on post-Communist Russia, where (even according to a
semiofficial Moscow newspaper) most people were "being exploited" and
impoverished in unprecedented ways. Discussing the brutal impact of
economic shock therapy on ordinary citizens, another pro-Western Russian
complained that US correspondents had "no desire to look Russia's tragic
reality straight in the eye." A Reuters journalist later made the same
observation: "The pain is edited out."16

Poverty and health crises were, of course, reported, but usually as
sidebars to the main story of Russia's "transition" and as legacies of the
Communist past. Virtually all US correspondents and editorial writers were
contemptuous of any Russian proposals for a gradual, "somehow less painful
reform," whether by Yeltsin's own vice president in 1993 or Prime Minister
Yevgeny Primakov in 1998 and 1999. Indeed, they seemed to think, following
US officials and economists whose policies had already failed disastrously,
that more shock therapy was needed, such as eliminating the housing and
utilities subsidies that sustained millions of impoverished families,
perhaps half the nation or more.17

Like old-time Soviet journalists, their latter-day US counterparts pardoned
present deprivations in the name of a bright future that did not come.
There was, for example, this astonishing but not unrepresentative assurance
published by an especially influential US journalist in 1997: "While it is
undoubtedly true that daily life in Russia today suffers from a painful
economic, political, and social transition, the Russian prospect over the
coming years and decades is more promising than ever before in its
history."18 The following year Moscow's fraudulent financial system
collapsed and the "prospect" for tens of millions of Russians became even
more "painful."

As Russia sank ever deeper into economic depression and poverty, US
journalists continued to parrot Kremlin and Washington assertions that
economic stability and takeoff, which still have not really come, were just
around the corner. (Vice President Al Gore is quoted as having said in
March 1998, "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar
with what is going on in Russia.") On the eve of its 1998 financial
meltdown (and even after), they still found ways to assure readers that
Russia was "a remarkable success story."19 Not even Putin's subsequent
admission that "poverty exists on an unusually large scale in the country"
would make it a focus of US reporting.

Many American correspondents clearly did not like "doom-and-gloom" stories
about unpaid wages and pensions, malnutrition and abandoned provinces,
where, a Russian journalist tells us, "desperation touches everyone."
(Newsweek's correspondent advised the poor to continue living on bread:
"They could do worse.")20 Nor did they report more than a very few of the
desperate acts of protest taking place around the country, and virtually
none of the ways the "reform" government deprived workers of whatever
rights and protection they once had in the Soviet system. American
journalists preferred other "metaphors for Russia's
metamorphosis"21-usually in the tiny segment of Moscow society that had
prospered, from financial oligarchs to yuppies spawned by the temporary
proliferation of Western enterprises.

Thus, for a Washington Post columnist who had recently been a
correspondent, an especially successful insider beneficiary of state assets
was a progressive "baby billionaire" and, for the Wall Street Journal, a
"Russian Bill Gates."22 For others, including a New York Times editorial
writer and also former Moscow correspondent, "one of the best seats for
observing the new Russia is on the terrace outside the cavernous McDonald's
[that] serves as a mecca for affluent young Muscovites. They arrive in Jeep
Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, cell phones in hand."23 In the new
Russia at that time, the average monthly wage, when actually paid, was
about $60, and falling.

No wonder few readers of the US press were prepared for Russia's economic
collapse and financial scandals of the late nineties. Those who relied on
the New York Times, for example, must have been startled to learn-from an
investigative reporter, not a Russia-watcher-that contrary to its prior
reporting and editorials, "The whole political struggle in Russia between
1992 and 1998 was between different groups trying to take control of state
assets. It was not about democracy or market reform."24

Facts may be stubborn things, but in this case no more so than many US
journalists. In 1999 the Yeltsin era and Russia's purported "transition" to
prosperity, stability and democracy ended not only in economic collapse and
human misery but also in the first civil war in a nuclear country and with
a career KGB officer in the Kremlin. A few US journalists spoke of "lost
illusions"-though almost never their own25-but most merely updated the
media's fictitious narrative of the nineties. Thus, on the occasion of
Putin's election this past March, top editors of both the New York Times
and Washington Post wrote apologias for the entire Yeltsin period and by
implication their papers' coverage of the Russian nineties.26

Certainly there has been no media (or official) reconsideration of the
arrogant, intrusive and dangerously counterproductive US crusade to
transform a different civilization. In late 1999 the Post's chief Moscow
correspondent extolled the "great Russian transition," marveling that
"Russians have accomplished much of what we asked." An editor of the New
York Times Book Review, presumably in a position to know, reassured readers
of "the desirability of remaking the former Soviet Union in a Western
image." And like those of other influential papers, the Post's editors
remain unrepentantly missionary: "Yes, meddle in Russian affairs."27

Nor has there been any real acknowledgment of the crusade's calamitous
impact on the Russian people, whose fate the US government and media so
lamented when they were the Soviet people. The "Great Transition
Depression," as a UN study properly calls it, is almost never mentioned and
the nation's massive poverty only euphemistically, as in "Russians who have
benefited little."28 By the late nineties, according to a Moscow writer
admired in America, the "pitiful ruins of the Russian economy stuck out on
the bared sandbars as if after a shipwreck." But to a visiting high-level
Washington Post expert, "Russia looks terrific." Similarly, for Business
Week's ranking specialist, the insider privatization that most Russians
equate with plundering and impoverishment remains "one of the most
successful reforms of the Yeltsin era."29

Even the economic happy talk of the pre-1998 meltdown is back. US press
accounts, parroting as they did in the nineties self-serving assurances by
Western bankers and investment firms, are again reporting that Russia's
half-dead economy is actually "booming."30 But Russian authorities from
economists to President Putin have warned that the modest spurt of
industrial output since 1999 is the result of artificial and temporary
factors and has done little if anything to benefit capital investment or
ordinary citizens. (Capital flight may even have increased during this
period.)

Coverage of Putin himself, the little-known head of the KGB's successor
agency only a year ago, has been more mixed. He became president thanks to
a nearly genocidal war in Chechnya and an electoral process manipulated by
Kremlin insiders hoping for a post-Yeltsin praetorian to protect their
power and ill-gotten wealth. Predictably, the Clinton Administration
immediately anointed him "one of the leading reformers" and his political
rise a "genuine democratic transition." Until it finally acknowledged last
month that the new Russian leader is "the un-Boris," the Administration
tried to make Putin its Yeltsin of the twenty-first century in order to
justify its failed policies of the nineties.

Some US journalists did the same. According to the lead New York Times
correspondent, to take perhaps the most influential example, Putin occupied
the Kremlin through "a democratic transfer of executive power" and "clearly
has an intellectual grasp of democracy," even a "seemingly emotional
commitment to building a democracy."31 (A six-month investigation by the
Moscow Times, an expatriate paper, has just concluded that "falsification"
was "decisive" in Putin's March electoral victory.)

When the American press turned sharply against Putin in August over his
perceived handling of the Kursk tragedy, the extraordinarily voluminous
coverage was no less ideological and sermonizing. It seemed as though the
US government had never lost a nuclear submarine and its crew, put "great
power" interests above those of victims and their families, concealed
strategic information in the name of national security and now has more
right to prowl the Barents Sea than does Russia. Indeed, much of the
coverage suggested that our former superpower rival should immediately
disarm unilaterally. Nor, of course, did the commentary point out how much
Yeltsin's US-sponsored "reforms" had done to erode Russia's maintenance and
control of its nuclear weapons.

But most of the press still has nothing but enthusiasm for the "excellent"
economic program being attributed to Putin-a new dose of severe, admittedly
"painful" shock therapy that could only further victimize the poor and
profit the rich. In addition to a regressive 13 percent flat tax, it would
slash remaining social guarantees, including the housing and utilities
subsidies that barely sustain most Russians, raise basic consumer prices
and endanger already meager pensions. It is, a US correspondent joyfully
points out, "considerably bolder than almost any plans that most Western
nations have ever tried to push past suspicious voters."32

The mainstream US press may be indifferent to the fate of Russia's
impoverished majority but not to that of its handful of "much maligned"
oligarchs who were allowed under Yeltsin to "privatize" hundreds of
billions of dollars of Soviet state assets for a fraction of their value.
The country's economic recovery requires some degree of renationalization,
as even the former chief economist of the World Bank argues. But when Putin
began to crack down on oligarchical asset-stripping, tax evasion and
illegal capital export this summer-steps approved by 75 percent of Russians
surveyed-the Washington Post sternly warned him against "revisiting the
privatization deals" and the Wall Street Journal, against even
"antagonizing" the tycoons.33

All this suggests that many American journalists, like Western investors,
the US government and the kleptocrats themselves, would hardly object if
Putin becomes a Russian Pinochet in order to safeguard Yeltsin's "reforms"
and impose his own "excellent program." Thus, a Los Angeles Times
correspondent reports, apparently in full agreement, the growing Western
view that "a little authoritarianism might be just what Russia needs."34 If
influential US journalists and the institutions they represent now share
this opinion, we are left with nearly a decade of not only empirical but
also ethical malpractice.

The following abbreviations are used: Business Week (BW); Johnson Russia
List, e-mail (JRL); Los Angeles Times (LAT); The New Republic (NR); New
York Times (NYT); Washington Post (WP); and Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Considerably more evidence and examples appear in my Failed Crusade:
America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York, 2000).
1. Quoted by Daniel Williams in WP, March 13, 1993.
2. "A Test of the News," supplement to NR, Aug. 4, 1920.
3. Jim Hoagland in WP, Nov. 6, 1992; Rose Brady, Kapitalizm (New Haven,
1999), pp. 242-43; Thomas Friedman in NYT, Oct. 24, 1999; Steven Erlanger,
ibid., July 28, 1993; David Hoffman in WP, Sept. 19, 1999.
4. Ellen Shearer and Frank Starr, "Through a Prism Darkly," American
Journalism Review, Sept. 1996, p. 37; Anthony Olcott in WP Book World, June
27, 1999, p. 6. For a general indictment of press coverage, see Matt Bivens
and Jonas Bernstein, "The Russia You Never Met," Demokratizatsiya, Fall
1998, pp. 613-47; and Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, The eXile (New York,
2000). For references to factual errors, see my Failed Crusade, p. 252, n.
17 and p. 264, n. 92.
5. Leonid Krutakov interviewed by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames in JRL, Oct.
23, 1999. For "giants," see Lee Hockstader in WP, Jan. 1, 1995. For
examples of sourcing, see Steven Erlanger in NYT, April 9, Dec. 4, 1993;
Fred Hiatt in WP, March 26, 1995, Dec. 10, 1996; and David Hoffman, ibid.,
Dec. 13, 1997. On the other hand, Russia's many opposition politicians and
economists were rarely quoted or interviewed, except to be dismissed. Still
worse, there is little evidence in the coverage that US correspondents in
Moscow read the Russian press.
6. NYT editorial, Dec. 14, 1993. Similarly, see David Hoffman in WP, Oct.
1, 1995.
7. For Yavlinsky, see Michael Specter quoting Michael McFaul approvingly in
NYT, May 5, 1996; and similarly the NYT editorial on May 1, 1996, and
Specter's dispatch on May 18, 1996. For "clean hands," see Michael Wines on
Sergei Stepashin, ibid., May 13, 1999; and, similarly, Michael Gordon's
promotion of the inexperienced and inept Sergei Kiriyenko, ibid., April 12,
1998.
8. Alessandra Stanley in NYT, June 10, 1997; David Hoffman in WP, Jan. 10,
1997; and Carroll Bogert in Newsweek, March 21, 1994, p. 51.
9. Vladimir Kvint in NYT, Jan. 24, 1993; James Ledbetter in Village Voice,
May 28, 1996; Robert V. Daniels, Russia's Transformation (Lanham, Md.,
1998), p. 193.
10. John Kohan in Time, Dec. 7, 1992; Celestine Bohlen and Thomas Friedman
in NYT, April 15, 16, 1999, and similarly the editorial, June 6, 1999.
11. Bivens and Bernstein, p. 620.
12. Michael Gordon and Alessandra Stanley in NYT, Oct. 17, 1996, Nov. 17,
1997. Similarly, see David Hoffman in WP, Sept. 9, 1997; Paul Quinn-Judge
in Time, Dec. 15, 1997; and Carol Williams in LAT, March 25, 1998.
13. Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, "The Journal's Russia Scandal," The Nation,
Oct. 4, 1999, p. 20.
14. Charles Krauthammer and Jim Hoagland in WP, March 19, 1993. For
omelettes, see also David Remnick on Charlie Rose, PBS, Oct. 4, 1993. For
voices in unison, see A.M. Rosenthal, the editorial and Leslie Gelb in NYT,
March 16, 22, 28, April 29, 1993; George Will in WP, March 25, 1993; and
editorials in Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1993, and NR, April 12, 1993.
15. See, e.g., Alessandra Stanley in NYT, Jan. 19, 1997; Chicago Tribune
editorial, May 9, 1998; and Jim Hoagland in WP, Dec. 16, 1999.
16. Oleg Bogomolov in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Feb. 8, 1994; and John Morrison
cited in Shearer and Starr, p. 39. For exploitation, see Iraida Semenova
and Aleksei Podymov in Rossisskaia Gazeta, Jan. 24, 2000.
17. See Steven Erlanger in NYT, April 24, 1993; for more shock therapy, see
WP, editorial, March 12, 1997; Michael Gordon in NYT, July 13, 1997; and
below, note 32.
18. David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (New York,
1997), p. 362.
19. See, e.g., Steven Erlanger, the editorials and Richard Stevenson in
NYT, Aug. 22, 1994, July 16, Sept. 25, 1995, May 24, 1996; Fred Hiatt,
Margaret Shapiro, Michael Dobbs and the editorial in WP, April 2, July 30,
1995, March 19, 1997; Carol Williams in LAT, Dec. 2, 1997; Steve Liesman in
WSJ, Jan. 28, 1998; and Hiatt in WP, July 12, 1998. For Gore, see Mark
Egan, Reuters dispatch, JRL, Oct. 8, 1999.
20. Carroll Bogert in Newsweek, May 31, 1993, p. 12. For more impatience
with "doom and gloom," see Steve Liesman in WSJ, Sept. 26, 1996. For the
provinces, Leonid Krutakov cited above, note 5.
21. Ann Hulbert in NR, Oct. 2, 1995.
22. Fred Hiatt in WP, March 9, 1998; WSJ quoted in Bivens and Bernstein,
p. 631. Similarly, see Richard Stevenson's enthusiasm for the
Russian-American investor Boris Jordan in NYT, Sept. 20, 1995, in light of
the expos? of Jordan's activities by David Filipov and Matt Taibbi in the
Boston Globe, Oct. 22, 1997.
23. Philip Taubman in NYT, June 21, 1998. Similarly, see Steven Erlanger
and Michael Specter, ibid., July 23, Oct. 12, 1995; Carol Williams in LAT,
Dec. 24, 1997; David Hoffman in WP, Sept. 16, 1999.
24. Timothy O'Brien quoting Nodari Simonia in NYT, Sept. 5, 1999.
25. Michael Dobbs and Paul Blustein in WP, Sept. 12, 1999. Similarly, see
Fred Hiatt, ibid., Aug. 29, 1999; John Lloyd in NYT Magazine, Aug. 15,
1999, pp. 34-41, 52, 61, 64.
26. Bill Keller in NYT Book Review, March 19, 2000, pp. 1, 6; Fred Hiatt in
WP, March 23, 2000. Similarly, see David Hoffman's defense of Vice
President Gore's role in the crusade, ibid., June 4, 2000.
27. David Hoffman, ibid., Sept. 19, 1999; Barry Gewen in NYT Book Review,
Oct. 31, 1999, p. 34; WP editorial, June 1, 2000.
28. Human Development Report for Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS
1999 (New York, 1999), p. 15; Paul Quinn-Judge in Time, July 3, 2000, p. 41.
29. Tatyana Tolstaya in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 19, 1998, p. 6;
Robert Kaiser, Charlie Rose, PBS, Sept. 10, 1999; Rose Brady in BW, March
13, 2000, p. 14E12.
30. Michael Sesit in WSJ Europe, July 7-8, 2000. Similarly, see Reuters
dispatch, JRL, Feb. 19, 1999; Michael Wines in NYT, June 2, 2000; and James
Cox in USA Today, July 21, 2000.
31. Michael Wines in NYT, May 8, Feb. 20, July 9, 2000. For other pro-Putin
pieces, see John Lloyd in NYT Magazine, March 19, 2000, pp. 62, 64-67; and
David Hoffman's minimizing of Putin's role in the Chechen war, in WP, March
20, 2000.
32. Michael Wines in NYT, June 29, 2000. For similar enthusiasm, see David
Hoffman in WP, July 7, 2000; Paul Hofheinz (who calls it an "excellent
program") in WSJ Europe, July 5, 2000; and the NYT editorial on the flat
tax, May 28, 2000.
33. WP editorial, July 22, 2000; Paul Hofheinz in WSJ Europe, July 5, 2000.
Similarly, see David Ignatius in WP, July 23, 2000. For whitewashing the
"much maligned" Boris Berezovsky, widely considered the most rapacious
oligarch, see Michael Wines in NYT, July 15, 2000; and the way Berezovsky
is presented, or allowed to present himself, by David Hoffman in WP, July
18 and 20, 2000; and Paul Quinn-Judge in Time Europe, July 17, 2000. For
the survey, see Vedomosti, Aug. 3, 2000.
34. Maura Reynolds in LAT, March 24, 2000. Similarly, see Michael Wines in
NYT, Feb. 20, 2000; and David Hoffman in WP, March 25, 2000.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 14 01:16:05 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 08:16:05 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: Bangladesh's poisoning risk
Message-ID: <00f901c01e1b$ab1b0980$4a2c8cd4@ngjones>

By Frances Williams in Geneva
Published: September 13 2000 18:05GMT | Last Updated: September 13 2000
23:38GMT



More than half the population of Bangladesh may be at risk of chronic
arsenic poisoning from contaminated drinking water, in what health experts
are describing as "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history".

Allan Smith, epidemiology professor at Berkeley, University of California,
says between 35m and 77m of Bangladesh's 125m people are exposed to
naturally occurring arsenic in water supplies, which will eventually provoke
an epidemic of cancers and other fatal diseases.

Writing in the September bulletin of the World Health Organisation, Prof
Smith says the impoverished south Asian nation is grappling with an
environmental disaster of unprecedented scale, surpassing the chemical
accident at Bhopal, India, in 1984 and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl,
Ukraine, in 1986.

Studies in other countries where arsenic has been found in ground water,
such as Argentina, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand and the US,
show that one in 10 people drinking contaminated water will die of cancer of
the bladder, kidney, lung or skin.

Long-term arsenic poisoning also causes neurological problems, heart and
lung diseases and diabetes, as well as debilitating skin lesions that have
already emerged in Bangladesh, affecting at least 100,000.

Prof Smith says arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh should be declared a public
health emergency, with immediate provision of arsenic-free water the
priority.

The catastrophe stems from the creation in the past 20 years of millions of
small tube wells, many intended to give access to safe drinking water. At
that time, however, arsenic contamination was not picked up by water-testing
procedures.

Arsenic-induced skin lesions were first identified in 1983 in West Bengal in
India, where more than 1.5m people may have been exposed to contaminated
water, with 200,000 cases of arsenic poisoning.






From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Thu Sep 14 07:28:11 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 09:28:11 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] A forward
Message-ID: <s9c09a3c.031@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

 Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >As capitalism crashes,
> >people are bound to enter struggle. They may have illusions to begin with
> >but those will change under the rod of reality
>
> Right.
>


If it doesn't crash (which seems to be your premise) then, yes, people won't
struggle.

If it DOES crash, they may still not struggle much, enough, or for the right
reasons or the most rational (however defined) goals. So we shall get
fascism and barbarism or worse - not socialism.

I think we shall not succeed and so I'm pessimistic, increasingly so what's
more. So we agree! A Crash may produce nothing good. I do not yearn for it,
but I do think that it is inevitable and it doesn't matter what any of us
says or doesn't say for or against it. We're just bystanders. So my
pessimism and your seeming optimism add up to the same thing.

But there is no meeting of minds and no dialogue. When we speak of the Crash
we mean different things. I mean the loss of biodiversity, ecocide, and the
terrible dangers posed by global warming. You mean, the fate of the Dow.
Continued "prosperity" and "bountifulness" as it is now often and inanely
described, make *my* kind of Crash *more* not *less* likely. The higher the
Dow goes, the more fossil is burnt, and the more crazed are the dances of
the sacristans of Mammon around the flickering pyres heaped with other
species and biomes, with rainforests and ocean ecosystems. Economic "bounty"
= disaster. This is the ecolate view.

The other day I posted to the Crashlist the recent Senate testimony of
leading American petrogeologist, "Skip" Hobbs. This articulate maniac
enthused to a hushed audience about the limitless supplies of natural gas
locked up in subsea methane hydrates. He told the Senators: "As the
spokesman for the geologists who assess the nation's fossil fuel resources,
I can unequivocally answer in the affirmative. Yes, the United States has
abundant natural gas resources to fuel the country well into the 21st
Century."

You bet it has.

In old English, "Hobbs" is another name for Satan ("Old Nick"). Perhaps
"Skip" Hobbs really is Old Nick come a-visiting. Many people think that
attempts to extract gas from hydrates will result in runaway warming, ie the
planetary atmosphere will quite literally catch fire. I have posted chapter
and verse on the science about this, and will do again if even fleetingly
encouraged. There is *as yet* no known technology for extracting gas from
hydrates, but don't let that fool anyone, because when you see the gleam in
the eye of "Skip" Hobbs you realise with sickening certainty that nothing
can stop these guys. No power is bigger than this kind of greed.

It therefore does not console me much that perhaps you are right and there
may indeed be a huge new economic upwave a la Anwar Shaikh. Perhaps, indeed,
there is a great deal more fossil hydrocarbon left to extract and burn.
Frankly it intrigues me that this dreadful possibility *does* seem to be a
source of reassurance and comfort for the panglossians, whose remorseless
optimism is to many of us, self-evidently suicidal. They exult, they are
gleeful, they have found not one but six bullets to play Russian roulette
with! Bountiful US economy!

I know now that I am too poor a student of human nature to understand how
such strange things can be. So I don't worry about it any more. Either you
are right, Mr Henwood, and capitalism will power on from strength to
strength, in which case the ultimate Crash (it's already happening,
actually) will just be so much the more devastating and final, and will
likely result in runaway warming, but will certainly result in a mass
extinction of mammalian species and much more besides. Or *I* am right, and
the capitalist system will implode, in which case we shall endure a collapse
of civilisation (a hiatus, disjuncture) and human megadeaths but at least
the biosphere may possibly be saved, in part anyway. I still think that on
balance you will be shown to be wrong about the economics and that my
longstanding argument that the system will implode primarily because of the
socioeconomic effects of resource and energy constraints (there is no
shortage of energy, but there is agrowing shortage of realisable, utilisable
energy) -- this argument will be shown to be correct. I think there is a
little *too* much desperation about the techno-optimism of people like Mr
Skip Hobbs.

At the time of the Asian meltdown I thought that the knock-on effects would
drag down Wall St too, and burst the bubble. It did not happen, and the Dow
has moved sideways for some time. But I also argued that the unexpected
Asian debacle might produce a short-term oil glut which might help keep the
show on the road until demand picked up again. We've all of us got familiar
with the ways in which the West benefited from the Asian collapse, and one
of the most important ways was in reducing demand for oil.

I argued this in August 1998. I was wrong about the Dow, but I think I'm
doing much better in my central prediction about the Fourth and Final Oil
Shock, don't you? Of course, you think it's just short-term. But it isn't.

best wishes

Mark


> Doug
>
> ----
>
> New York Press - September 6, 2000
>
> Connoisseurs of Catastrophe
> By Doug Henwood
>
> The other week in this paper, Peter Eavis wrote about James Grant,
> proprietor of an eponymous newsletter covering the credit markets.
> Grant, one of the few remaining bears in these bullish times, is
> tireless in uncovering reasons to be gloomy. Back in 1994, he even
> invited me to speak at one of his semiannual conferences to terrify
> attendees with tales of an imminent anticapitalist revolution.
>
> Anyone who's stuck with a bearish strategy since the bull market's
> birth*1981 for bonds, 1982 for stocks*would be lucky to be solvent
> today. (Grant acknowledges this with characteristic humor; the badge
> given to conference attendees was decorated with a picture of a bear
> wearing a barrel.) But he survives because he's a smart guy and a
> stylish, witty writer, and there's always a reliably populated bears'
> den on Wall Street. Why any Wall Streeter should be bearish in an era
> when pretty much the entire world has been transformed into a
> free-fire zone for capital is a mystery I'll return to in a bit.
> First I'd like to take a look at why so many people on my end of the
> spectrum are expecting, even rooting for, doom.
>
> In his Aug. 16 "Wild Justice" column in this paper, Alexander
> Cockburn speculated that Bill Clinton was looking forward to "four
> years of economic depression under the supervision of George W.
> Bush." Not long ago, Cockburn's Nation sparring partner Katha Pollitt
> told me that she thought there could be no revival of the American
> left without a depression. In a mid-August interview with Salon, Gore
> Vidal said: "I've spent my life studying American history and
> politics. I know how the country's run. There will be an opportunity
> to get rid of this system. And the opportunity will come from the
> total collapse of the economy, which I think is on the horizon. The
> Dow Jones, the Nasdaq, will collapse and the people will be very
> angry. At that moment you can make big changes."
>
> What is it with this leftie lust for disaster, this embarrassing
> habit of predicting disasters that never quite arrive? Now I'd be the
> last to argue that some kind of neo-depression is impossible.
> Throughout its long and charming history, capitalism has been through
> many crackups. Much of the Third World has been in some kind of
> depression for 20 years. But it seems highly unlikely that a First
> World economy could experience a rerun of 1929-'33, when real GDP
> fell by 27 percent, and the unemployment rate soared from 3 percent
> to 25 percent. Look at Japan, where the consequences of their
> bubble-pricking has been a decade of near-zero growth, but no
> outright collapse.
>
> But since many of these predictions of collapse include no small
> amount of wish-fulfillment, I've got to ask: What friend of the
> working class would long for 30 million layoffs (today's equivalent
> of a 30s-style collapse)? Tight labor markets are good. The best
> thing that Alan Greenspan has done in his vastly overpraised reign*a
> period that includes the 1987 stock market crash, the S&L debacle,
> the leveraging mania, the credit crunch of the early 1990s and the
> Mexican and Asian crises*has been to let the unemployment rate fall
> to 4 percent and stay there. The lowest jobless rate in 30 years has
> helped bring about the lowest black poverty rate ever, the lowest
> level of violent crime in the history of the government's
> victimization survey, and real wage gains across the entire
> distribution. It's also contributed to a new and imaginative protest
> movement and signs of imagination and militancy among American
> unions*with students and labor working together, in contrast with the
> fabled 1960s. These are all excellent things.
>
> When people think it's relatively easy to find or keep a job, they're
> more likely to kick up a fuss. Yes, it's true there was all kinds of
> political ferment in the 1930s*though in places like Germany and
> Italy it took a rather uncongenial form. More likely than that kind
> of depression is something like the 1970s and 1980s, when
> unemployment was high enough to make people nervous, but not high
> enough to make them think about plant occupations*or some place like
> Japan today, which is hardly a crucible of interesting political
> ferment.
>
> The major reason a rerun of the 1930s is so unlikely is that state
> bailout managers have learned how to contain a financial panic and
> keep it from turning into a deflationary collapse. Which brings me
> back to the Wall Street bears. Lefties who imagine, or even long for,
> disaster often do so because they find capitalism a repellent system
> and hope that some break might bring about its end, or at least its
> reform. Hoping for collapse is a lot easier than organizing and
> persuading the masses.
>
> But you have to wonder why Wall Streeters, who have been raking it in
> like never before for nearly two decades, would be so itchy for a
> collapse. I think there's a kind of perverse wish-fulfillment working
> there too. The Street's permabears are mostly libertarians who find
> the whole apparatus of modern capitalism, with its developed and
> indulgent state underpinning, to be theoretically offensive. They
> often overlook the degree to which they depend on that indulgence.
> Like Western libertarians who denounce the gummint, forgetting that
> their region would be barely habitable without massive federal water
> projects, and cyberlibertarians who excoriate Washington, forgetting
> that their computers and Internet wouldn't exist without decades of
> federal subsidy, Wall Street libertarians kvetch about state
> intervention, forgetting that capitalism would have collapsed long
> ago without lenders of last resort and big spending programs. The
> permabears, Hayek in hand*or a few thirdhand snippets from The Master
> in their heads*just know that state intervention sullies the market's
> perfect beauties, and can't work over the long term. So the collapse
> has to come. And if it doesn't come tomorrow, then we're just
> postponing the inevitable, and so it will come, worser than ever, the
> day after tomorrow.
>
> But of course, I find myself occasionally wishing for a killer bear
> market to drive all the assholes out of town.
>
> [Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer. His book, A New Economy?,
> will appear late this year from Verso.]
>
> _______________________________________________
> Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
> Marxism-Thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com 
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis 
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 14 10:18:49 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 17:18:49 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FW: Protestors May Use Nerve Gas!: a jaundiced view of s11.
Message-ID: <000001c01e67$7785dc20$59308cd4@mjones>


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-deep-ecology at igc.apc.org
[mailto:owner-deep-ecology at igc.apc.org] On Behalf Of nonni at green.net.au
Sent: 14 September 2000 13:56
To: Greens-activist at altnews.com.au
Subject: Protestors May Use Nerve Gas!: a jaundiced view of s11.


Hi,
This is a personal and opinionated collection of observations
on the s11/WEF events. If you don't like a section read
another - they are all self contained and in random order. 
In each snippet I do try to make points worth further
consideration and debate.
Jon

(Thursday 14-09-00 Latest News: Apparently the Trades Hall
Council has said that their information is that the increase
in police aggression was the result of a threat from the WEF
that they would cancel the last two days of the Forum unless
security and access was beefed up - we came so close! )
______________________________________________
Protestors May Use Nerve Gas!: a jaundiced view of s11.
Jon Sumby

The Unions:
*************
They came, they posed, they clocked off in time to get home
and watch Neighbours. The right-wing newspaper, the Herald-Sun
was delighted. In the two page spread called 'A Salute to Our
Brave [police] Force', the union demo was praised: 'They
marched peacefully under their union banners, made speeches
from the platform, marched past the casino - and then
disappeared having made their point.' Their leader, Leigh
Hubbard from Trades Hall, then appeared on the news making
self-serving comments showing the global industrialists and
the Government that, really, the unions are on their side and
will roll over.

About the only direct thing the union demonstrators did was to
help the police break the protest picket line to let casino
employees in to serve the WEF delegates. 'We seized the
entrance and we sent the s11 people away and got the workers
in', said union organiser Brian Boyd. About the only result of
their effort was a few more cigarette butts on the street - I
doubt the WEF delegates were even aware they were there.

Security
*********
I went every day and checked out the Crown compound perimeter.
Psychologically the compound was designed to look imposing
being built from waist high, car length long, concrete blocks
linked and topped by a seven foot high outward bending steel
mesh fence. Closer examination revealed multiple weak points
not requiring mechanical assistance to breach. To the
protestors credit, or ignorance, these were not targeted. 
The police aren't very good planners.

Bob Brown
*************
Bob Brown was great! I saw him speak and he was a voice of
clarity, ideals, and humanity. He refused to accept any of the
globalists agenda and pointed out the reality behind the
rhetoric. The whispers are that his very idealism and vision
is becoming an irritant to some of the more 'pragmatic'
members of the Australian Greens, but if he is ever eased out
of the Greens then they will lose their integrity and become
nothing more than another power hungry political machine.

Vandana Shiva
******************
Vandana Shiva addressed the forum directly and was the only
person of integrity there. She read out a statement from the
protest. The WEF has always had token environmentalists and
human rights workers attending but she was a true voice of
dissent. The public speech she gave to a capacity audience on
the Sunday prior was regularly interrupted by applause.

During a WEF discussion group Sharon Burrow, the president of
the peak Australian union group, the ACTU, apparently
advocated increased debt relief, increased aid, taxation on
the movement of capital and a code of conduct for
multinationals, but none of her proposals were formally
discussed by the WEF. 

The Media
*************
The media played their role superbly. They supported the WEF
agenda very ably. There was a sustained build up of
scaremongering about s11 - culminating in warnings for people
to avoid coming into town if at all possible. There was very
shallow analysis of the issues surrounding the WEF/ WTO / IMF
axis and implications. The right wing rag the Herald-Sun
excelled itself, running a quarter page story that beat up the
story that the protestors may be planning to use sarin nerve
gas. 

The scare campaign was totally beating up the danger the
protestors faced to the good citizens of Victoria and I think
the s11 Alliance found it hard to break away from this focus.

During the campaign the slant continued with words like
'delegates escape route', 'violent protestors', 'valiant
police'. Headlines like 'City Under Siege', 'Police Tough on
Protest Thugs', were the regular. The newspaper pictures were
chosen to play up the mob and show calm police at the ready,
the few shots I saw of the police in action showed no baton
beatings, only hand to hand grappling and shoving. 


Riot Police
*************
Several times during the s11 blockade up to 300 vicious thugs
using clubs rampaged into the peaceful demonstration. No one
can be sure who they are but the Victoria Police Deputy
Commissioner, Neil O'Loughlin, asserts they were police. 
When asked why these supposedly highly trained, disciplined,
and professional officers were not wearing badges he replied,
'I've spoken to people about putting their nametags on and I'm
aware that they were... were... stolen.'

What a lie! Not wearing nametags is a deliberate psychological
tactic to increase fear and unease in the targets. In the UK,
anti-road campaigners were confronted by ranks of uniformed
police without identification badges and who were also wearing
black full face balaclavas. O'Loughlin knew exactly what was
going on or he is incompetent. His brief was to apply pain,
fear, and physical violence to any degree required to clear a
path for the delegates. 

He has also said he has seen the footage of the police
beatings and says that it was all appropriate behaviour.
The Police Commissioner backs him up by saying he has no
regrets about the decisions made. The Victorian Premier says
the police, 'acted appropriately right through' the forum. 

Appropriate action obviously means not observing and
respecting the law but doing anything to clear a path through
the peasant rabble to allow the rich and influential to go to
dinner. 

Any inquiry of any merit, if one occurs, will undoubtedly by
stymied by being unable to bring specific police before them -
though a sacrificial offer to appease the inquiry may be made.

Its a familiar pattern, as typified by the Richmond High
School protests. The police claim they will act appropriately,
use any and all means necessary, their objective set is met.
Outrage and inquiries and lawsuits follow, the police thugs
melt back into the ranks, the issue sinks into public
obscurity.

The Outcome
***************
Despite the passion and effort of all who organised and
attended, the protest did not achieve its aim. Klaus Schwab,
founder and president of the WEF, said he favours a return to
Melbourne. The organiser, Mr Smadja, said the forum had raised
the 'esprit de corp' of delegates and WEF members. The WEF is
more tightly bonded and ready to continue its agenda with
vigour. The protest was appropriately managed and Seattle
probably now seems like a half remembered bad dream.

The right wing national lobby group, the National Farmer's
Federation, has already called on the Government to invite the
WTO to hold its next meeting in Melbourne. The Government has
hosed this down, saying it is hosting other international
conventions at that time.

A lot of the people I met after the protest were ebullient,
saying, 'We won!, We won!', but I thought I saw a hint in
their eyes that said, 'We didn't but its uncool to admit it.'
I didn't go to any of the post-s11 celebrations.


The Prime Minister, John Howard
***************************************
The Australian Prime Minister is an economic rationalist cut
from the cloth of Thatcher. He eagerly pursues privatisation,
outsourcing, deregulation, and cuts to welfare programs
(except for private, full fee paying schools, that have had
Government funding greatly increased.)

He is aware that Australia is a small country, with a small
economy, in an economically unstable area. Australia has a
real chance of being put into the 'have-not' basket and cut
out of the new global economy. So he was desperate to pump up
Australia's willingness to play along with the WEF and so
pilloried the protestors as 'un-Australian'.

Given that Australia's economy has been very healthy just
recently while, mysteriously, the dollar has devalued to
record lows means he may have something to fear. 
The Age newspaper told it all in the headline, 'Battered
dollar defies good economic trends.'


The Left Wing
****************
The s11 protest was hampered by the presence of the left wing.
The protest failed to bring in the presence of mainstream
groups like the ACF or Amnesty. At Seattle and Davos, there
was a large community presence from a broad spectrum of
groups, human rights groups, environmental groups had stalls
and a visible presence.

At s11 the overwhelming postering was from groups like the
International Socialist Organisation and Resistance. They set
the agenda and the tone. I think they put off involvement by
more mainstream groups, who should have been directly involved
to show middle Australia that this is an issue critical to
everyone, not just the radical left.

I am increasingly coming across greenies who dislike the
presence of these groups. It seems that whenever a positive
energy develops around an issue the various
socialist-communist groups race in to seize this and turn it
towards the creating the 'revolution'. The Jabiluka campaign
is a case in point. The gossip is that at the s11 alliance
meets, Resistance stacked the meetings and voted up
resolutions as a block.

At the protest I looked around for basic WEF/WTO information
sheets to hand to the delegates sneaking out  into Spencer
Street. All I could find were reams of material like 'Yankee
Go Home!' produced by the Communist party of Australia
(Marxist - Leninist) and 'Target Global Capital' produced by
Worker's Liberty (Marxist).

This may be fine but its not me. As Vandana Shiva pointed out,
Capitalism and democracy are empty fictions. So too is the
doctrinaire left. Both are empty, anthropocentric, economic
ideologies that hold no promise for the future. 

This grab for political power by Marxist - Leninist -
Stalinist - Trotskyist - Communist - Socialist groups using
the passion and energy generated by environmental campaigns is
something that must be addressed by the environmental
movement. If it continues support for environmental issues
will rapidly drop off, be marginalised and greenies will
become even more legitimate targets.

If environmental issues become linked with communism etc. then
failure is the future. The environment transcends politics.
Capitalism is fucked but so is Marxism.

The Victorian Premier, Steve Bracks
******************************************
What a complete sell-out! He sided with the Liberals and other
social regressives in calling the protestors un-Australian and
applauding the police for their work. He has rewarded the
police who worked the s11 protest with a day off and a
reception for police and their families.

He was positively salivating at the prospect of stitching up
business deals at the conference - possibly forgetting that he
was dealing with business leaders who specialise in parasitic,
abusive, business arrangements and that they will operate to
damage Victoria, socially and economically. He used the word
'un-Australian', to dehumanise the protestors and to reassure
the WEF industrialists that, really, he is co-operative to
their agenda and will roll over.

Unfortunately, it is a buyers market in Australia and States
will bid for transnational industries - the state that offers
the best package of tax breaks, exemption from planning and
environmental laws, and the most broken and compliant
workforce is graced with the presence of these industries...
as long as it suits them. With lap dogs like Steve Bracks they
will fare well in Victoria.

The Police
*************
The police performed as I expected. 
They did their job and are being rewarded 
by the appropriate people.

The Public
************
On the whole middle Australia did not identify with the
protest, the expressed concerns centred about the possible
threat to shopping, transport disruption, and the inability to
gamble at the casino complex. 

A very common comment was that they respected the right of the
protestors to demonstrate but they opposed any action that
obstructed business or their lifestyle. This attitude has
become increasingly prevalent and is repeated by politicians.
It presents a difficulty for protest actions that should be
examined and addressed as, to me it indicates 'cause fatigue',
similar to compassion fatigue. The purpose of protest is to
break people out of complacency, to disrupt and force the
attention of the powers to the needs of the protestors. That
acceptance has been replaced with a rejection of any personal
inconvenience. This diminishes the power and relevance of
demonstration, which is why it encouraged by the people in
power. Overcoming this attitude is problematical.

At s11 I saw physical struggles between protestors picketing
and punters demanding their 'right' to enter the casinos and
gamble. They expected the police to help them but the cops
wouldn't let them in either 


Naomi Robson
******************
Just after the protest ended the current affairs show 'Today
Tonight', which actually steers clear of any real news was
advertising with the hook along the lines of, 'You thought our
police were being to tough?, we'll show you the terror tools
of the protestors!!" The anchor, Naomi Robson, a puff TV
expert looked serious and displayed a self tapping wood screw
of about an inch and what looked like five wheelnuts. These,
she alleged, had been thrown at the police.

Dropping her voice even lower and looking shocked and
conspiratorial she held out her hand to display a palm full of
marbles, which she said had been 'confiscated' from a
protestor that Wednesday afternoon.

This was the best hack job she could do - three days of
protests involving thousands of people and there are some
marbles taken from a protestor on the last afternoon! Other
acts of violence that justified the police putting 13 people
in hospital included  an alleged cup of urine being poured on
two officers and people spitting at the police. The Chief of
Police called these acts 'disgusting'. Hmmm, maybe I should
mention the cops who hoiked spit at me from the Kings Way
overpass as I walked under them? What does that make the
police? Filth?


The Protestors
*****************
What can I say - a great bunch of people. It was hard and
difficult work, but the protestors triumphed over great odds
and kept their spirit and commitment. The WEF may have had a
successful meeting but a spirit was kindled at the protest. As
the Resistance slogan goes; When injustice is law, resistance
is duty.'

The Aftermath
****************
The WEF and the WTO are likely to try and slither back into
the shadows. They may replace the grandiose international
gatherings with low key tiers of regional summits that may
send delegates to a small round table forum. The more light is
cast on their agenda the less it is accepted so the more
backroom they get the better - I just guess after 31 or so
years of organising the new world order in unknown backroom
dealings  they thought they could come out and roar in
triumph.

The WEF and corporate morality.
**************************************
It was business as usual for the global free trade idealogues.
Gates said that the only way to raise the entire population of
the world to Western standards was to liberalise trade. 

Nestle VP Michael Garret said the only way to feed the world
was by rushing GMO crops into use. 

Andy Stoler, deputy director general of the WTO said the WTO
was not about free trade but about fair trade.

In 31 years the WEF has thinktanked the global marketplace and
has never managed to include the poor, the environment, and
sustainable strategies in its recommendations. Oh, you'll find
the rhetoric there  but no substance. The WEF has worked to
ensure that the people benefiting and enjoying power remain
and in power and reap the benefits. There is no interest in
anything else. The scale is being ramped up to the level of
nations. Australia is jostling to be included as part of the
'rich'.

But the final word went to an anonymous WEF delegate, who
brought out the time honoured Nuremburg Defence. Reported in
the Age newspaper, the delegate 'played down the capacity of
corporations to make bold moves, saying they were ultimately
beholden to their shareholders.'

Same old tired excuse for why forests are butchered, mines
ripped into pristine lands, people killed off and displaced,
pollution unchecked. 'The shareholders expect us to maximise
profit.'

END




From Borba100 at aol.com  Thu Sep 14 13:35:54 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 15:35:54 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] BIG STAKES IN YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS
Message-ID: <76.2ffd714.26f2829a@aol.com>

URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/kostunic.htm
.
Kostunica & the Yugoslav Election
Written by Jared Israel after consultation with people who write for 
Emperor's Clothes 
(9-14-00)

www.tenc.net 
[Emperor's Clothes]


Some Serbs, and some in the Serbian Diaspora, support the candidacy of  
Vojislav Kostunica for President in the Yugoslav election. The outcome of 
that election is quite important, not only to Yugoslavs but to people 
everywhere. The outrageous attack by NATO on that brave country, the people's 
unwillingness to give in, their ability to rebuild, have moved the world and 
inspired a new spirit of resistance. Who would have expected a small country 
to show such power or purpose and to act with such dignity as these people, 
bombed by the West, driven from their homes, demonized in the press, but not 
broken.

The supporters of Kostunica argue, to themselves and others, that if 
Kostunica could only "beat Milosevich", then maybe the West would stop 
attacking Yugoslavia and the lives of ordinary people would improve. Is this 
true? Or is Kostunica's candidacy a focus for the latest Western intrigue 
against Yugoslavia?

Recently, a friend of ours commented favorably about Kostunica, writing: "If 
Kostunica were to win [the Yugoslav elections] he would not owe this victory 
to anybody but himself and the voters."

A careful examination of the facts leads to a very different conclusion.

The US government has given millions of dollars to the Serbian "democratic 
opposition." If we include Montenegrin leader Milo Djukanovic, the bribery 
figure must be near (or over) the $100,000,000 voted last year by the US 
Congress to support these "independent" elements. (Isn't it amazing that 
'independence' is defined as taking money from a foreign government trying to 
shatter your country?)

$100,000,000 is a vast sum in Yugoslavia.

The Western press pictures Kostunica as a "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" kind 
of guy. In fact he is the candidate of a coalition that includes most of 
those who take $$millions from the US government. Whatever Kostunica may 
wish, he is dependent on these people and he can be cast aside in a moment by 
his "allies."

Kostunica Picks (or is picked by) His Allies

On July 26, the leader of the Democratic Party, Zoran Djindjic, said:

"As far as a joint candidate for federal elections is concerned, there are 
two things we have to decide if we agree to fight those elections. First, to 
agree to lend our support to one candidate, and, second, to check thoroughly 
and see which candidate stands the greatest chances of winning. This should 
be the only criterion." ['Agence France Presse', 8-1-00)

Djindjic, notorious for being on the US payroll, was a key force in 
establishing Kostunica's candidacy. On August 2, 'Agence France Presse' 
reported that the two men attended a closed-door meeting in Montenegro. 
Together, Djindjic and Kostunica tried to persuade Montenegro's pro-NATO 
government to support the "democratic opposition" candidate:

"The Serbian delegation, including Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party and 
Vojislav Kostunica of the Democratic Movement for Serbia (DSS) -- the most 
likely Milosevic challenger.

"The meeting took place a day after US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright 
met Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic in Rome and urged Yugoslavia's 
opposition groups to drop threats to boycott the elections and unite to 
defeat Milosevic. ..." [end quote] ( August 2, 2000, "Agence France Press")

Concerning Albright's trip to Rome:

"As the presumptive opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica, appeals for 
support...In addition to election issues Albright said she had discussed with 
Djukanovic ways in which to increase assistance to Montenegro which is in the 
throes of an economic crisis. ("Agence France Presse," Aug. 1, 2000, my 
emphasis)

In other words, Albright offered to bribe Djukanovic to support Kostunica.

However, Djukanovic still held out, and Kostunica criticized him ('AP', 8-15) 
but finally, on September 11th, we read that Djukanovic came around. He has 
endorsed Kostunica. Did Albright finally meet his price?

Surely, one aspect of that price is for Djukanovic's party to get lots of 
plums in a Kostunica government. No aid is free.

Which brings us to the question: what does it mean for Kostunica to woo 
Djukanovic? Saying Kostunica "is just trying to win" avoids the issue. 
Because whatever Kostunica seems to be, whatever impression he has made IN 
THE PAST, he DEFINES HIMSELF in the present by what he does. And the key 
thing a politician does to define himself is: he appeals for support. By 
judging where he goes for support, by judging what it is those people want, 
you can discern where he stands, better than by his words. 

Djukanovic's core base of support is pro-secessionist Albanians and 
pro-fascist ethnic Croatians. Within Yugoslavia, Kostunica has wooed and 
gained the support of pro-secessionists in the Sandjak region, in southern 
Serbia. And of course he is the official candidate of the US-dominated 
"democratic opposition." Whatever he used to be, this tells us what he ''is" 
now.

A few weeks ago, Kostunica attacked an ostentatious display of US 
interference in Yugoslavia's affairs. (More recently he actually praised 
Madeline Albright for restraining herself and not being so showy about who 
she supported!) Meanwhile, he woos Milo Djukanovic whose survival depends on 
US mercy - both because the US pours millions into Djukanovic's coffers and 
because the Italian police have the goods on his government for cigarette 
smuggling. If ever he should displease the US, he'd get the Noriega 
treatment.(1)

Kostunica Endorses G17 Principles

Meanwhile, Kostunica and his "democratic opposition" have signed onto a 
platform presented by the neoliberal Belgrade think tank, G17. The program is 
a nightmare. We will post key provisions with detailed comments on Emperor's 
clothes ASAP. We will also post an interview just finished with Prof. Michel 
Chossudovsky who knows a few things about G17. But meanwhile, here is a 
summary of the main features of this plan, endorsed by Kostunica and his 
coalition members. Frankly, the thing is so awful it's hard to know where to 
start.

!) It calls for the "option" of using the German mark as one of two forms of 
Yugoslav currency; the entry of foreign banks into Yugoslavia; the 
integration of the Yugoslav bank into the world banking system. These 
measures would strip the Yugoslav government of its ability to determine 
prices and wages, specifically wages of poor people, and would put Yugoslavia 
at the mercy of the NATO powers, particularly the US, which has vividly 
demonstrated in Kosovo what it would like to do to all of Serbia. 

2) It calls for introducing the economic reforms which have devastated 
formerly socialist countries, e.g., Bulgaria. These measures do not 
constitute "going from socialism to capitalism." Yugoslavia is not a pure 
socialist economy by a long shot. It is a mixed economy. Introduction of 
extreme economic reforms will produce the same results as in Russia: the 
devastation of national industries, the impoverishment of millions. And of 
course, with increasing poverty, ethnic fighting.

3) It states that after a one year grace period for the poorest and most 
disadvantaged, complete free market principles would be imposed. The working 
people, including a million refugees whose conditions are already difficult, 
would entirely lose the social safety net. They would be buying food at 
European prices in an economy at a Third World level. They would be cast onto 
the 'playing fields of the world economy' - unprecedented in brutality - with 
predictable results. (We have seen it all in Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, 
Central America, etc. How many times does it have to happen?) 

"Free markets" are not free when the market is dominated by superrich 
financial giants from the US and Germany, etc. It's no level playing field. 
Sort of like putting a champion heavyweight boxer in the ring with a talented 
welterweight who, moreover, has been ill (from sanctions!) and then telling 
them: "Now compete fair and square, boys!"- "Compete freely!"

How would the auto workers in the bombed Kraujavac factory compete with 
automated factories in Detroit and Stuttgart after Kostunica's team imposes 
the G17 program of "integration into all regional political and economic 
activity, with an emphasis on free trade"?

These auto workers would soon be starving, just as factory workers now starve 
in Bulgaria. 

4) It calls for the imposition of the International Monetary Fund, with its 
rat's nest of discredited economic remedies, which have ruined the lives of 
millions of people in Russia, Indonesia, South Korea - just for starters.

5) It doesn't mention the responsibility of the US and Europe for the 
billions of dollars of destruction and human suffering caused by last year's 
78 day bombing. It disregards the criminal conduct of the US and NATO in 
Kosovo and Montenegro. The West is now training snipers in Montenegro to 
assassinate Yugoslav army officers - a fact admitted by the British paper, 
the "Independent." Yet the plan that Kostunica has endorsed talks of 
Montenegro, a Republic whose government is in multiple violation of the 
Yugoslav constitution (e.g., by refusing to take part in the common defense) 
as if it were the abused party and Serbia's government the abuser.

6) It advocates a new constitution which would legalize autonomy for Kosovo 
and Vojvodina and the federalization of Serbia, meaning the weakening of 
central government. Thus the picking-off of pieces of Serbia, e.g., the 
Sandjak region in the south, would be facilitated.

The US and Germany have been working all out to destroy Yugoslavia for ten 
years. This was made vividly clear in the interview with then US Ambassador 
to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman, given to a Croatian newspaper in the early 
days of 1992. (3)

But let us for the moment put aside this fact, that the US and Germany have 
launched a ten year attack on Yugoslavia. Forget that, and consider what 
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky has said about the effect of IMF-type measures, 
when imposed on any country. Remember, the plan is full of IMF-type measures 
- and it also endorses entering the IMF economic orbit, adopting IMF 
"reforms" in order to get loans. 

Chossudovsky points out that the imposition of these IMF/World Bank 
conditions on national states leads to their falling apart and sliding into 
ethnic warfare. Now, imagine how much worse this could be in Yugoslavia, 
where the West has been pushing ethnic group hostility for ten years. 
Clearly, the weakening of central power plus the economic nation-busting 
methods of the IMF (described by Chossudovsky below) plus the covert actions 
of the US and Germany and their agents, who riddle the coalition Kostunica 
represents and who would riddle his administration - all these would combine 
to produce a state of war which would bring horrendous suffering. This could 
happen quite apart from any wishes of Kostunica. He would be a weak force, 
easily cast aside, dependent for his political strength on a coalition 
riddled with people receiving US government cash, gangsters (the Montenegrin 
leadership and Djindjic) who also take US cash, and secessionists who would 
become far more aggressive when "their" side won the election.

Here's Chossudovsky on the splintering effects of IMF reforms:

[Quote] "- they destabilize the country because in order to have a country 
there must be fiscal coherence, a system of fiscal transfers. So in a place 
like Indonesia, each of these islands becomes a small state. And of course 
now the idea of going it alone becomes far more attractive to the many 
different ethnic groups. Of course they [that is, the planners] are fully 
aware of this - they have made it happen time and again. It took place in 
Yugoslavia [My note: does it have to take place AGAIN?] ; it took place in 
Brazil; it took place in the former Soviet Union where the regions are left 
to their own devices because Moscow doesn't transfer any money." [End quote] 
(From "The IMF and World Bank, Two of Several Instruments of National 
Destruction" www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/instru.htm )

What about 'Yugoslavia'? The program barely mentions the "Y" word. It calls 
for "The prompt resolution of succession questions with ex-Yugoslav republics 
and, on that basis, the acquisition of necessary financial means that will 
make possible membership in the European Union."

What does this really mean? There has been an eight year long freeze on 
solving these questions. The War Party says "you are a brand new country." 
The Yugoslavs say: "we are the successor state; the other five guys left." 

What can "prompt resolution" possibly mean except the acceptance of US 
Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke's conditions: agreement that 
Yugoslavia no longer exists, with the resulting loss of $20 billion in assets 
including embassies, the Yugoslav navy, the air force, a ship that is 
presently being held by the US, and so on.

Having a tiny party, Kostunica has to use his partners, the US-funded 
opposition, for the organization and personnel to conduct an election. 
Remember, Djindjic said "WE" have to run one candidate. Has Djindjic become a 
charity service? Is his attitude: "Let's all us guys help Kostunica and ask 
for nothing in return!" - ?

More likely: "Ask for everything in return!"

Zoran Djindjic and the other US-dominated forces would expect to get, and 
they would get, the dominant positions in a Kostunica government. That's how 
politics works.

Let's consider this matter of government staffing a bit more. Some see the 
smallness of Mr. Kostunica's party as a virtue. It's part of the "he's 
untainted" argument - he's got a tiny group because he never got his hands 
dirty, etc. Perhaps. But his smallness makes him unable to provide the forces 
needed to run Yugoslavia. 

Mr. Kostunica is hardly a charismatic figure; he can't inspire mass 
participation on a grass roots level. But the US-paid opposition with which 
he is allied, which cosigned with him the G17 program for giving away 
Yugoslavia, and who provide the manpower for his election campaign, has the 
numbers to provide government staffing. Moreover, their US paymasters want 
them to staff the government.

Vuk Draskovic's party is running independently on the first ballot. All the 
worse. It will almost surely support Kostunica in a runoff with Milosevich - 
but at a price. The price is lots of government positions, on all levels. 
Thus Kostunica would, if elected, be in a very weak position even if, and 
this is a heck of an 'if', he had the nerve to resist the US goals called for 
in the G17 program. And remember, he has endorsed the program. So why would 
he fight it?

And so the entire network of US-controlled NGO's (non-governmental 
organizations) fake-independent media, student organizations trained by the 
CIA (like Otpor) would of necessity provide the personnel for his 
administration. The US would then be in a position, for the first time, to 
infiltrate its "independent democratic forces" into high government 
positions. What a vindication for Clinton! (2)

And remember, this would take place in the context of a) the devastation 
caused by the G17 economic program, with its resulting ethnic strife and b) 
the "federalization" of the state. We would see the destruction of national 
coherence and the unleashing of even worse ethnic conflict than we have 
already seen. With results potentially genocidal in proportions. This is what 
the US elite wants in Yugoslavia. They want to prove to other countries, who 
may be inspired by the Yugoslav resistance, that such resistance leads to 
absolute misery and ethnic strife. To achieve that result the US government 
must install some of its paid operatives (who abound in Belgrade, in 
political parties, in NGOs and in "independent" media subsidized by Soros and 
owned by Western elite institutions) in the Yugoslav administration. 

Some people say the US needs to keep Milosevich in power because they've 
demonized him. In fact, over the past two or three years the Milosevich 
government has become a major pain the neck for the US. It has not fallen for 
provocations. It handled Rambouillet brilliantly. It is a symbol of the 
possibility of resistance. It is infinitely better for the US elite to have 
their own direct agents in power. Then they can play both ends - creating 
ethnic provocations while destroying the economy and thus producing tension 
and fighting, thus allowing the constant intervention of NATO troops, hunting 
of Serb "war criminals", massacres of troublesome Serbs and other Yugoslav 
loyalists by the KLA (who would make their way all over Serbia soon after the 
ascension to power of US agents.)  Kostunica's pro-secessionist supporters in 
the Sandjak would be pushed further into bed with the KLA because the 
increasing US power within Yugoslavia would increase the prestige of US proxy 
force. NATO (perhaps including Croatian forces, since Croatia has now joined 
up as Junior NATO) could hunt down non-Serbian refugees (loyalist Muslims 
from Bosnia, loyalists Croats and loyalist Albanians and others from Kosovo) 
as war crimes suspects whose names would miraculously appear on a "secret 
list" whenever the US/NATO wished to remove them from the scene. (As happens 
in Bosnia). And so on. Dante's Hell.

All this is so much easier if the US government can get its already-paid 
people into power. Finally these guys would have to produce for their 
millions! Milo Djukanovic in Montenegro is relying on secessionist Albanians 
and pro-fascist Croatians for much of his political base. Why would it be any 
different if the "opposition" which is intimately tied to Djukanovic gets 
into power all over Yugoslavia? These are precisely the types of forces who 
would rise to the top under a government which had Kostunica as its initial 
fig leaf. Exactly as they rose to the top in Kosovo. Everyone kept expecting 
the "good guy" Rugova to take over, yet we still have the KLA. 

Some say: "All of Serbia's political leaders have discredited themselves in 
this past difficult decade -- except Kostunica. Unlike the others, Kostunica 
is considered patriotic, honest and serious."

There are two different statements here. On the second - yes, Kostunica is 
considered by many Serbs to be "patriotic honest and serious." But that 
doesn't mean his deeds have not IN PRACTICE tainted him. By running as the 
candidate of the US-funded "opposition" what has Kostunica done? He has lent 
his respected name to provide cover to people who would otherwise be totally 
discredited - and discredited for good reason. He has made the classic error 
of the isolated intellectual. Like Goethe's hero, Faust, he has signed a deal 
with the Devil (the US elite). Perhaps he fools himself that he is still 
independent. The Devil will collect all the same.

The Western media says that Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic and Milo 
Djukanovic have a bad image. No! It's not an "image"! It's a bad FACT. They 
have taken millions of dollars from the US and are doing what US covert 
agencies tell them to do. That being the case, of course this united 
candidacy was planned in Washington.

Why hasn't Kostunica denounced his coalition allies for taking US dollars? 
When the US announced it was setting up an office in Budapest to aid the 
Yugoslav "opposition", Kostunica attacked the US for supposedly trying to 
discredit him and his allies by this ostentatious display of assistance. Huh? 
Was this the first time the US aided these guys? This was a pimple on a 
mountain of US aid. The US has given these guys a tenth of a billion dollars 
- a fortune in Yugoslavia. Was this money all given to discredit the 
opposition? In other words, does the US give people money because it wants 
them to lose (Kostunica's allies) and attack them mercilessly cause it wants 
them to win (Milosevich)? 

That is preposterous. The truth, as usual, is simple. The US has given money 
to the "opposition" figures because it needs to buy their loyalty. Absent the 
money and these guys would tell the US to get lost. And they have to do it 
ostentatiously because they do not run Yugoslavia. So they need to set up 
organizations, hold meetings outside the country, and so on. It's hard to 
pump 100 million dollars into a small, poor country and do it in secret.

This lavish use of money is linked to what could be called a Janissary 
strategy. The old Ottoman Empire used this strategy to control the Serbs. 
They would kidnap Serbian children, bring them to Turkey at a young age, 
raise him as Muslims, and then send them  back as part of an elite army of 
Janissaries. 

It happens today, though of course the appearance is somewhat different. It 
is in essence what the US elite does with young people from all over the 
world, especially Yugoslavia. They are literally (or figuratively, by means 
of TV and movies) brought to the US and other Western capitals and dazzled 
with glamour and glitz, with superficiality made into a virtue - and then 
sent back to dumb old Yugoslavia. You can see these young Yugoslavs at elite 
US universities - aloof, super cool, ashamed of their country. Ashamed of 
dumb old Yugoslavia that has more richness of culture than all Western Europe 
and the US put together. Full of grubby farmers and outmoded economic notions 
etc. etc. In Belgrade these Janissaries flock to institutions such as "free" 
radio B292. I interviewed two staff members from B292. The interviews are 
posted on Emperor's Clothes. These young people have the attitude of smug 
treason. Consider this exchange with Gordan Paunovic:

" Jared: [Are you getting any] money coming from foundations in the US? 

"Paunovic: Probably, but I don't know which Foundations. I am pretty much 
pissed off in putting this kind of argumentation, like Soros equals B92. That 
really comes from people who are not in a position to see what we are doing. 
We will take money from anyone. To make a good production on many levels, 
from radio, to TV and video productions to Internet, Books, music. You need 
money." 

Elsewhere he says:

" Paunovic: And another thing I don't like the way we are - Like Robin Cook 
and Jamie Shea they made a huge damage to our image when Robin Cooke said in 
a Press Conference which was directly broadcast on CNN "You know we helped 
B92 to get satellite access" and things like that."

But then he and the news editor, whom I also interviewed, admitted it was 
true. It was true they were getting time on the BBC satellite - the BBC, 
which supported the bombing of Yugoslavia. But Gordan scorns those who think 
there's anything shameful about this. After all, one needs money to do 
glamorous things. 

This Janissary mentality, contemptuous of the ordinary people of Yugoslavia, 
must be supplied with money. Absent money and it fails. The new global 
culture is just money and a paint job. 

And because they loathe the backward (i.e. truly cultured) soul of their 
country they are useful tools. Hooked on the most superficial aspects of 
Western life, in their hearts they can justify anything. No price is too high 
for other people to pay for "modernizing" (i.e. subjugating) their country. 

The plain fact is, the base of the three parties in power - the JUL, the 
Socialist Party and the Radical party - are the people most strongly opposed 
to the US attempt to destroy the Serbian people as a political force. There's 
just no way around that fact. Some people picture this elections as left vs. 
right. I think that's mistaken. The JUL is left and the Radical Party is 
right. They are both for defending Yugoslav sovereignty! That is the basis of 
their unity, despite many differences. The other side has no real politics 
except the dollar - all is up for purchase. They can be liberal, they can be 
conservative, they can be socialist - who cares? It's all image, created with 
smoke and mirrors. "All is money; all is garbage."

The issue here is not Mr. Kostunica vs. Mr. Milosevich. It is rather, which 
political forces can defend Yugoslav sovereignty? Milosevich's allies and 
base, including for example the splendid negotiating team at Rambouillet, is, 
in fact, the core of resistance to NATO. These are the people that have made 
astounding progress rebuilding Serbia after the 78 day bombing campaign. 
Diaspora Serbs who have recently visited their country are amazed at the 
extent of reconstruction. IF these forces were to lose power, for it is they, 
not one man, Milosevich, who are in power, if they were to be replaced with 
the Janissary-mentality, US-purchased "democratic opposition" for which Mr. 
Kostunica has tragically provided a veneer, disaster could follow.

Because the US is not after Milosevich. It wishes to remove from the scene, 
once and for all, the soul of Serbian resistance. In order to remove this 
militant core, USA covert agents need to get their hands on governmental 
positions in Serbia. Then they can manipulate events far more effectively 
than from outside. They can stage convincing provocations. They can stage 
political theater, controlling the troublemakers AND the police! 'Events' can 
easily be created to overcome the current resistance of European public 
opinion to bombing Yugoslavia or the stationing NATO forces not only in 
Kosovo, but in the rest of Serbia as well. (This process would be aided by 
the G17 program, which demands the cutting of Yugoslavia's relatively small 
military budget. In any event, the military would be hobbled by the 
deteriorating economic situation and the demand, made in Kostunica's program, 
for a balanced budget - a demand that is absurd in the context of 
Yugoslavia's economy. ) 

With US-dominated forces in the Yugoslav administration, a weakened and 
confused army under command of quislings, massive infiltration of the country 
by KLA elements, the possible stationing of Croatian government troops (as 
part of Croatia's new role as part of Junior NATO) - all this would enable 
internal strife and great suffering.

And it would discourage us all, it would discourage the hundreds of millions 
(or perhaps several billion) people, throughout the world, for whom little 
Yugoslavia has provided the example, the evidence that we need not let the 
new US-German Empire of Greed crush our own cultures and our sovereignty.

***

(1) 'Gangsters & other democrats' at 
www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/strange.htm 

(2) 'Otpor is an American Tragedy' at 
www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/otpor.htm 

(3) 'Nothing is Forever' at 
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/nothing.htm 

If you find emperors-clothes useful, we can use your help... 

(The Soros Foundation does NOT fund Emperors Clothes.) 

We rely on volunteer labor and donations. Our expenses include: Internet 
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[Emperor's Clothes]
 
 




From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Thu Sep 14 14:51:16 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 16:51:16 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] FW: Protestors May Use Nerve Gas!: a jaundiced
	view of s11.
Message-ID: <s9c10221.098@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 14, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
IRAQ: IS WASHINGTON SETTING STAGE FOR ANOTHER ASSAULT?

By Pat Chin

The Clinton administration is threatening Iraq and setting
the stage for a massive military attack on that sovereign
country.

On Sept. 1 the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon
had alerted an air defense artillery brigade in Germany to
be prepared for possible deployment to Israel over White
House "concern" that Iraq might attack Israel during the
U.S. presidential campaign.

National Security Adviser Samuel Berger admits that the
United States knows of no threat against Israel from Iraq.
But the brigade was still activated. Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Barak dismissed the report, saying that Israelis
shouldn't be distracted or alarmed by it.

A month before the Washington Post piece appeared, the New
York Times ran an article headlined, "Flight Tests Show Iraq
Has Resumed A Missile Program." It claimed the Iraqis had
tested eight short-range ballistic missiles "that could
carry conventional explosives or the chemical and biological
weapons that Iraq is still suspected of hiding."

The missile tests were given extensive coverage even though
they did not violate restrictions imposed on Iraq by the
imperialist-controlled United Nations Security Council after
the 1991 Gulf War. The source of information was Clinton's
Defense Department.

On the day the Washington Post broke the "news" about the
anti-missile alert, Thomas E. Kelsch quit his position as
civilian editor of Stars and Stripes, a military publication
distributed to U.S. troops abroad.

Kelsch resigned, according to the Associated Press, "to
protest what he called Pentagon pressure to kill a news
story." Kelsch had been forbidden from printing basically
the same report that appeared in the Washington Post due to
"national security interests."

The Clinton administration's saber rattling against Iraq
comes during the election campaign season and against a backdrop of growing
international and domestic opposition to the murderous
sanctions slapped on Iraq after the Gulf War.

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush has accused
Clinton of not doing enough to "remove" Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein from office--a thinly veiled euphemism for
assassination.

ANTI-SANCTIONS MOVEMENT GROWS

Meanwhile, the anti-sanctions movement continues to grow.

On Aug. 10, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez boldly defied
U.S. efforts to isolate and economically strangle Iraq when
he crossed the Iranian border into Iraq for a meeting with
Hussein on OPEC oil production.

Eight days later, the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and
Protection of Human Rights, in a report, called for an end
to the economic and trade embargo that has "condemned an
innocent people to hunger, disease, ignorance and even
death."

Moreover, the UN oil-for-food program, which has allowed
Iraq to sell limited quantities of its oil since 1996 for
food and other essentials, has met "only part of the vital
needs of the population," said the report.

Sanctions have killed more than 1.5 million people since
1990, according to Iraqi estimates.

Other events in August also challenged Washington's attempts
to crush Iraq.

There was a rally of over 1,000 protestors outside the
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, which took place
despite a massive police presence. People demanded an end to
the blockade and the almost daily U.S. and British air
strikes against Iraq, many of them on civilian targets.

The latest was on Sept. 3, when U.S. jets bombed southern
Iraq. Since the air attacks started in 1998, 311 civilians
have been killed and 927 wounded, according to Iraqi
government figures.

Meanwhile, representatives for UN Security Council members
Russia and France are also taking on the United States over
Iraqi reparations to Kuwaiti oil companies. The Kuwait
Petroleum Corporation, for example, has asked for $21.6
billion in war damages, a sum that is grossly inflated,
according to oil industry experts. The award was blocked
after Russia and France challenged the amount.

"The disagreement," said the Aug. 23 New York Times, "adds
another irritant to an already frayed Security Council
consensus on how to deal with the government of President
Saddam Hussein as economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after
its invasion of Kuwait a decade ago drag on.

"As a critical moment approaches in the efforts of the
United Nations to return arms inspectors to Iraq--a key to
lifting the embargo--the new dispute over war reparations
reopens another divisive debate in a second important area,
the oil-for-food program."

Iraq has rejected inspection of its defense and military
facilities, and the latest team put together by the UN, as a
violation of its sovereignty.

The Clinton administration has blocked every effort at the
UN to lift sanctions on Iraq. But that hasn't stopped a
worldwide grassroots movement in support of that beleaguered
nation.

As if that weren't enough, Clinton now has to deal with
international leaders like Chavez, who openly defied the
U.S. by visiting Iraq. And there's resistance from
imperialist allies like France, who--along with Russia--are
also challenging the U.S. chokehold on Iraq.

Chavez and Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid have both
spoken out against sanctions.

Yugoslavia, another country now being victimized by
imperialist sanctions, recently broadened relations with
Iraq. And a Russian-Belarusian oil company signed a deal
with Baghdad in late August that will go into effect once
the blockade has been lifted.

With all of the above and November's elections fast
approaching, is it any wonder that the Iraqi missile tests
and the Clinton administration's rush to "defend" Israel
have been sensationalized in the big-business media?

Anti-sanctions activists and their allies should remain on
alert. This is but the latest set-up to justify blistering
Iraq with an even bigger military attack for resisting
imperialist domination and neo-colonial plunder.

- END -






From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Thu Sep 14 10:28:38 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:28:38 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Forward
Message-ID: <s9c0c496.054@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

Hi Doug,

>Hasn't it always been, or at least for a very long time? Certainly 
>financiers drove the U.S. merger boom at the turn of the last 
>century, and financial operators were in the driver's seat until the 
>'29 crash.

Er, that's what I was trying to say; that it took forty years for us to get
back to high capitalism's default setting: one of finance priorities
trumping all others, to the medium-to-long term disadvantage of all.  The
producers of 1893 and 1929 bring us 2001, sorta thing.  And that's not a
million miles from what I thought Chris was saying.

>But in the early years after WW II, everything went pretty 
>swimmingly, so there was no need for the financiers to intervene. 
>Profits were high, class relations were relatively peaceful, and the 
>stock market rose nicely. Come the 1970s, though, and the U.S. lost a 
>war (or seemed to - hard to describe Vietnam as the winner of much of 
>anything today), there were folks in the streets, wildcat strikes and 
>industrial sabotage were rampant, profitability was in the tank, and 
>inflation was high. That's when the financiers asserted themselves - 
>because they weren't raking it in like they were, and the world 
>needed some disciplining.

Again, that was what I hoped I was saying.  This bodes ill, no?  If
capitalism is to prevent a whopper of a crisis, must we not return to an
institutional setting whereby more medium-to-long-term strategies are
encouraged, or at least tolerated?  I tend to read most of the anti-WTO
feeling as just this sort of sensibility - there being nothing in the WTO
prescriptions to prevent the rule of finance capital - not just to
ecological and social disadvantage - but to inevitable economic disadvantage
in the very terms of economists themselves (there being no such thing as
efficient markets; there being too great a [credit-conjuring but
allocation-distorting] stress on the short-term welfare of shareholders;
there being too great an entrenched agglomeration of the information
advantage [high-value-yielding enterprise in the core of the core driving
everyone else backwards]; and too many things getting counted in dollars
when that just ain't the best way to evaluate their significance [eg. oil
may be a smaller proportion of 'northern' GDP than it used to be, but that
only hides the fact that the economies depend as much on ever more of the
stuff as they ever did].)

I don't always find myself in agreement with Mark, but I think he was wrong
for the right reasons on Wall Street's fortunes, and may well be right for
the right reasons on environmental concerns (water problems, establishment
clues as to serious problems with oil, wide-spread weather phenomena
consistent with the global-warming thesis, and ozone holes giving me a skin
cancer on my bald spot - all smell suddenly urgent to me - and, as The Club
of Rome [who may themselves have been wrong for the right reasons] pointed
out thirty years back, the system can feel fine even though we've already
poured enough shit into it to destroy it - it just takes a couple of decades
to manifest, is all]).

And, anyway, there's so much pride about, there just has to be a fall! 
These WEF types just KNEW anyone who'd pose such questions was an
ill-informed thug - and said so a thousand times.  There is NO critical
thinking happening in the mahogany halls, mate - decades of hegemonic
divinity and privilege, combined with the reassuring aphorisms of a
thirty-year-old theory of finance has fenced off their intellectual paddock,
and they're idly flinging quoits on the Titanic.

So, yeah, if nail my colours I must, I too feel obliged to nail 'em to the
'millenarian' mast.  

We got trouble.

Cheers,
Rob.



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From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 15 01:50:32 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 08:50:32 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Economist: Oils taxing times
Message-ID: <000e01c01ee9$9ffc4fe0$e70c063e@mjones>

[Who's to blame? Surpise, surprise, it's OK - but also "market forces" (!).
Two years ago the Economist told us we were 'drowing in oil' and predicted
the price would fall to $5/bbl.]




Protesters outraged by high petrol taxes brought parts of Europe to a halt
this week. But are taxes really the root cause of the oil crisis?

 IF IT had not really happened, it might seem absurd: one of the world?s big
oil producers, a developed country with a well-diversified economy, almost
grinds to a halt because many of its petrol stations run out of stock. Yet
that is precisely what happened this week in Britain, a country
self-sufficient in oil thanks to its North Sea fields, as well as across
several other European countries.

Protesters blame their governments for excessive petrol taxes. Politicians
in turn blame oil firms for not doing enough to distribute fuel. Others hint
at collusion by the oil firms to keep prices high. Oilmen grumble that they
are being unfairly attacked; they blame governments for imposing taxes and
the OPEC cartel for production cutbacks. Completing the circle, OPEC blames
western governments for excessive taxation.

So who?s really at fault? The culprit that the protesters have latched on
to, fuel taxation, is undoubtedly the easiest target. After all, well over
half of what most European consumers pay at the pump goes to their
governments, not to oil firms or to OPEC; in Britain, four-fifths goes as
tax. Even more irksome, no doubt, is the fact that petrol taxes in Europe
are far higher than in America.

Except in France, politicians have so far stood firm in the face of
blackmail from protesters. But their resolve may not last: Europe?s
transport ministers have arranged to meet next week to discuss taxation. If
Europe?s politicians do slash petrol taxes, the move would be rich in irony.
That is because taxes are not the cause of the recent volatility and price
spikes in the oil market. Taxes are indeed the reason European drivers pay
much more for fuel than Americans, but this has been true for many years.

It is also the case that European governments have grown fond of the
receipts from these taxes, which were originally introduced to promote
energy efficiency, reduce congestion and so forth. That was also true two
years ago, however, when Europe saw no such protests. What is different
today is that the crude-oil price has more than tripled to over $30 a
barrel, and the rise has passed through to the retail price.

If anything, Europe?s higher petrol taxes have protected consumers from wild
crude-oil price swings, while America?s tax regime has left its consumers
more painfully exposed to the whims of OPEC. The tripling of crude prices
has led to far sharper retail-price increases in America than in Europe.

This was no accidental by-product of politicians? greed. In the wake of the
oil shocks of the 1970s, policymakers in Europe and Japan took deliberate
steps that made it harder for OPEC to hurt their economies. The cartel, too,
is well aware that taxes have caused it to lose much economic power to
consumer economies. This is why its officials complain so loudly about
unfair taxation.

Such grumbling also conveniently deflects attention from the real reason
that oil prices are so high and volatile: OPEC itself. It was the cartel?s
botched effort to manage prices through production cuts that sent oil
soaring uncontrollably past $30 a barrel in the first place. The cartel?s
gathering last weekend in Vienna offered further evidence of bungling.
Ministers had gathered with the self-professed aim of bringing stability and
lower prices. What the overheated market needs is lots of new oil, now. All
OPEC came up with was a confused announcement about a quota increase of
800,000 barrels a day: Saudi Arabia says that figure represents fresh
barrels, but others fear that it will merely legitimise current cheating on
quotas, and will produce little genuine new oil.

Ministers have also confused traders with talk of a half-baked price-band
mechanism that was meant to keep crude oil between $22 and $28 a barrel.
Adding to the confusion, the latest production increase will not kick in
until October 1st, and will last only two months, not the six months typical
of previous cartel agreements. Ali Rodriguez, Venezuela?s oil minister, did
not help by asserting this week that OPEC stands ready to increase output by
2m barrels per day?an implausible claim.

Surprise, surprise


All these are signs of the cartel?s murkiness and incoherence, the key
drivers of oil?s volatility. Another example is the surprise announcement
that ministers will hold yet another meeting in November. Nobody is clear
about how they will meddle in the markets then, or at their heads-of-state
summit on September 27th-28th. Robert Priddle, head of the International
Energy Agency, a quasi-governmental body representing rich countries, says
that it is foolish for OPEC to strive for stability through unilateral
market management?it has achieved the opposite.
Such fuzzy signals muddle any good that the cartel?s quota increase might
have done to reassure markets. This uncertainty is likely to keep prices
high. If that happens, it might provoke another sort of government
intervention: the United States is likely to release oil from its Strategic
Petroleum Reserve to cool the market. Already, President Bill Clinton has
authorised the build-up of a new heating-oil reserve for America?s
north-eastern states, which are most vulnerable to an early winter freeze.
Traders say this move might make the squeeze worse, if the government
competes for oil in the already tight market to fill that reserve.

To be fair, OPEC is not the only culprit. Perversely, the rise of market
forces (in what remains a highly flawed market) has also contributed to the
recent volatility. For example, recent consolidation and tightness in the
oil-storage and tanker-shipping businesses have both made the market
jumpier. These may act as production constraints: Vahan Zanoyan of the
Petroleum Finance Company argues that, even if OPEC decides to produce lots
more oil, it will struggle to get it to market quickly.

Another factor contributing to volatility has been the oil giants? move
towards just-in-time management of stocks and deliveries. Firms are keeping
far lower inventories than they might have done at this time of year a
decade ago. This is good for shareholders, as their capital is no longer
tied up in excess stocks. But it may also mean that the industry loses a
valuable buffer. Philip Verleger of the Brattle Group, a consultancy, argues
that OPEC itself has also embraced this low-inventory approach since last
year. The cartel may have been inspired by Mobil?s successful cost-reduction
campaign before its acquisition by Exxon, known as KILL: Keep Inventories
Low and Lean.

Also keeping prices high is the fact that $30-plus oil has not produced the
response seen during past upswings in the oil cycle: an orgy of upstream
spending by firms not linked to OPEC that would temper crude prices. This is
because the oil business has been undergoing a radical transformation over
the past few years, away from a fixation on volume and market size and
towards financial targets such as returns on capital.

Prompted in part by the collapse in oil prices to $10, a wave of mergers
swept through the industry, producing such giants as Exxon Mobil and BP
Amoco (now BP). The new mantra of Big Oil is financial prudence; indeed, the
biggest firms are awash in cash (see chart). Exxon Mobil spent only $2.4
billion on exploration and production in the second quarter of this year,
against $3.5 billion in the same period last year.






The most powerful force fuelling oil?s volatility, as this week?s ructions
showed, is the black stuff?s paramount importance in transport. During
earlier shocks, developed economies were grossly inefficient in their use of
oil; since then, governments have used such tools as energy taxes to make
their economies more efficient and less reliant on oil. They have largely
succeeded, except in transport?where, despite soaring petrol taxes, oil
remains king because the alternatives are expensive and impractical. Most of
OPEC?s oil now goes to a sector that cannot at present live without it.

The upshot of all this may be that, even after all the lessons learned by
rich countries from earlier shocks, oil still has the ability to humiliate
western leaders and batter their economies. That will add to the misery of
European leaders enduring this week?s petrol crisis.

Still, they might find some perverse comfort in news that the tables are
about to be turned on their tormentors. This week, it was Britain that was
brought to its knees. Soon, it might be a pillar of OPEC: Venezuela?s
biggest petrol-workers? union is now threatening to stage a crippling strike
during OPEC?s grand heads-of-state gathering. Oil can be a double-edged
sword.






From juneo4 at juno.com  Fri Sep 15 11:15:57 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 13:15:57 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000915.153359.-261617.4.juneo4@juno.com>

Thankyou Carrol, for your response.   I will mull on the ramifications of
this information. Under its self proclaimed marxist leader, I wearied of
the daily impact of how marxism 'was'/'worked',  in my part of Africa.
Sustainable, I think not.  jo*

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000 16:48:02 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>juneo4 at juno.com wrote:
>
>> Responding to the post below, scroll down:
>>
>> Question: I need to know of some examples where Marxism is working, 
>and
>> how it is working sustainably,  please Anyone?
>
>Jo, Marxism is not something that "works" or "doesn't work," so 
>literally
>your question makes no sense. You probably think that Marxism is a
>plan for the future. It is *not*. It is an analysis of *capitalism*. 
>Marx did
>not
>entitle his major work *Socialism* -- he entitled it *Capital: A 
>Critique
>of Political Economy.* So here are the places where marxism is 
>working
>perfectly:
>
>United States
>European Union
>Japan
>Russia (capitalism is very efficiently destroying millions of people 
>there,
>so you
>    might say that Marxism is working even better there than most 
>marxists
>    ever expected it to. Rosa Luxemburg did speak of barbarianism, and 
>her
>    prediction has certainly come true)
>All of Latin America (except Cuba & perhaps Venezuela) (though here 
>you
>    need to consult Lenin as well as Marx to see how capitalism as 
>described
>    by Marx works in the nations dominated by the core capitalist 
>nations)
>All of Asia
>All of Africa
>All of Eastern Europe
>
>It is still a matter of struggle whether marxism (that is capitalism 
>as
>described by
>marx) is working in China, Vietnam, Laos
>
>Carrol
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Fri Sep 15 14:31:23 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:31:23 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
References: <20000915.153359.-261617.4.juneo4@juno.com>
Message-ID: <39C2871B.9BF5CAA@ilstu.edu>


juneo4 at juno.com wrote:

> Thankyou Carrol, for your response.   I will mull on the ramifications of
> this information. Under its self proclaimed marxist leader, I wearied of
> the daily impact of how marxism 'was'/'worked',  in my part of Africa.
> Sustainable, I think not.  jo*

There is a statement Marx made late in life to a reporter that also helps
to get a grip on the core of marxism. At the end of the interview, the
reporter, probably half joking, asked, "What is?"

After a long pause, Marx answered: "Struggle."

Out of Marx's analysis of capitalism comes a recognition of the
necessity of socialism (in Rosa Luxemburg's framework: socialism
or barbarianism"), but Marx offered no recipes, no blueprints for
the future. Socialism is not a "system" installed the way you install
a new operating system in your computer. It is a field of struggle.
What it is can only be determined in the process of struggle to
overcome capitalism and in continual struggle (with no guarantees
of the outcome) to build socialism concretely. Marxists have
no crystal balls (Mao said that).

Carrol





From ssandron at hotmail.com  Fri Sep 15 12:58:36 2000
From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 18:58:36 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Capitalism and Marxism
Message-ID: <F238Iq10h3aNtBmVwop0000baa9@hotmail.com>

re Jon?s collection of S11 observations:

?Capitalism is fucked but so is Marxism.?

Is s11 the evidence for linking the condition of the latter to the condition 
of the former?  If so, the lack of a long-term view is most underwhelming, I 
must say.

Seth Sandronsky



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From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Fri Sep 15 15:12:00 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 17:12:00 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <s9c25878.063@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>


>>> cbcox at ilstu.edu 09/15/00 04:31PM >>>



There is a statement Marx made late in life to a reporter that also helps
to get a grip on the core of marxism. At the end of the interview, the
reporter, probably half joking, asked, "What is?"

After a long pause, Marx answered: "Struggle."

Out of Marx's analysis of capitalism comes a recognition of the
necessity of socialism (in Rosa Luxemburg's framework: socialism
or barbarianism"), but Marx offered no recipes, no blueprints for
the future. Socialism is not a "system" installed the way you install
a new operating system in your computer. It is a field of struggle.
What it is can only be determined in the process of struggle to
overcome capitalism and in continual struggle (with no guarantees
of the outcome) to build socialism concretely. Marxists have
no crystal balls (Mao said that).

(((((((((((((((

CB: A field of struggle, perhaps more like and electro-magnetic field than an operating system.

However, Marx was not , in the interview answering the question "What is socialism ? "  So, it might be that socialism is "struggle + some foresight". It is well said that Marx and Engels emphasized no blueprint for socialism. But when one examines their works , there are quite a few helpful hints, especially negations, such as abolition of private property.

But even more, since Marx , the world's proletariat has had enormous experience in building socialism concretely, exactly as Carrol requires. That concrete struggle does not evaporate in thin air in relation to future , more successful socialism. It is a wealth of theory , BUILT CONCRETELY IN STRUGGLE, trial and error, that now must guide our action in building socialism. The history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Korea , Angola, etc.,  is a main source of our plan and strategy now.

We would not want to fall into the idea that the movement is everything and the goal nothing, a la Bernstein.




From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Fri Sep 15 22:39:38 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 00:39:38 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] How US Health Care Treats The Immigrant
Message-ID: <15.941e3f9.26f4538a@aol.com>

SB480 is a short term struggle for health care for all in Ca.



From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 16 08:00:48 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 15:00:48 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Suffering under Uncle Sam
Message-ID: <000401c01fe6$83fe63c0$ac0a8cd4@mjones>


The US has done, is doing and will do more damage to this planet than Nazi
Germany, fascist Japan and David Baddiel put together

Julie Burchill
Saturday September 16, 2000

Poor Sacha Distel. Not only did people hate him enough already for being one
of the few men alive to have had full penetrative sex with the young
Brigitte Bardot, but now he's in the merde with his fellow Frenchies for
claiming last week that English is a far better language to sing in than
French.
Then the fantastically brilliant American-born writer Bonnie Greer revealed
in last Saturday's Guardian that, when travelling back to her adopted
homeland from the US, she habitually begs airlines to let her sit near the
front of the plane, so that she may be all the quicker on to her beloved
British soil.

Meanwhile, the very sexy model and singer Caprice, who was born and bred in
California, sighed to OK! magazine from her LA condo that she considers
England to be her real home: "Living there has made me a much better person,
a lot more cultured and sophisticated... the education system is better, so
you get a different kind of character." Gee whiz, Caprice!

Knowing that I'm approved of by Sacha, Bonnie and the beauteous Miss Bourret
makes me feel even better about the recent nasty comments from Martin Amis,
Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson about how they're planning to leg it
to America because this country is going to the dogs - ie, not buying their
rotten books in anything like the quantities they used to. Go on, be honest:
which trio would you rather go down the pub with? I thought so.

And, of course, once more it is naked self-interest attempting to cloak its
dank and shameful crevices in the watered silk of artistic stimulation. As
sumptuous banquets of hypocrisy go, it's the 80s Bad Boy actors thing all
over again - you remember, when every week there would be an interview with
Tim Roth or Gary Oldman ranting on about how they couldn't breathe any more
in Thatcher's rotten, repressive, rightwing Britain. So, for the good of
their health and their art, they were moving to... Cuba? Sweden? No,
actually: they were moving to kind, enlightened, liberal Reagan's America!

You couldn't help but snigger when the turkeys started trotting. Like
Michael Caine before them, who made such gems as Alfie, The Ipcress File and
Get Carter in boring old Britain before abandoning us for Hollywood where,
apparently, the real work was - in his case Blame It On Rio, Jaws: The
Revenge and The Swarm IV.

No, when Brits move to America - be they actors, writers or stupid
sportsmen-turned- movie-tough-guys with mouths like little cats' anuses who
are managing to pass off silence as wisdom rather than cretinism - they move
there for one of two reasons, both of which have nothing to do with art.
They move there because they are rich and greedy for more, or because,
unconsciously, they worship evil.

Yes, I said evil. You need only read or own dear George Monbiot's excellent
new book to understand that the US has done, is doing and will do more
damage to this planet and its people than Nazi Germany, fascist Japan and
David Baddiel put together. In the face of this, the rest of the world seems
somehow to have reverted to the state of impressionable native - and instead
of waving shiny beads in our faces, the Americans now wave shiny Starbucks,
Seinfeld and Britney Spears instead.

And this voodoo works. All around you, you can hear people choosing to
ignore the fact that America is greatly responsible for turning the earth
into an open sewer - culturally, morally and physically - and harping on
instead about American "energy" and "can-do". Of course, nine times out of
10, that energy is the energy of the vandal, psychotic or manic depressive,
fuelling acts of barbarism and destruction from My Lai to Eminem; and it's a
shame that that legendary can-do usually translates as can-do crime, can-do
imperialism and can-do poisoning the seas. But Frasier's dead funny, so
never mind!

If you want to worship evil and cosy up in the belly of the beast, you're
perfectly free to do so, but please don't dress it up as love of art. The
fact is that Britain has always attracted sexy, brilliant Americans such as
Ava Gardner, Stanley Kubrick and numerous blacks who cannot believe the lack
of racial segregation that exists here.

You could see this in the true-life scene from John Schlesinger's film,
Yanks, when the English girls, horrified by the white GIs' contempt for
their black colleagues, grab the black men and drag them on to the
dancefloor, leaving the white Americans as wallflowers. When I was in the
music business, I was always being told by black musicians how amazed they
were by the sexual and social freedom extended to them here. Most
touchingly, I'll never forget a black teenager from a Boston boy band
whispering to me, "You can go anywhere you like in England! Where I come
from, there's always someone telling you you can't come in."

And every so often, you meet black Americans called Devon - never white
ones: "It's because my grandpa was there during the war," an American black
lady told me recently. "The people were so nice to him, he always dreamed of
going back. But it never happened. So my dad was Devon, and I'm Devon, too."

Preferring Britain to the US, despite all our faults, means that you respect
tolerance, kindness and a refusal to judge people merely on how far they
have made it up the dung heap we call capitalism. Preferring the US to
Britain, on the other hand, reveals a person to be a blind worshipper of
power, money and those crazy go-to-hell golf slacks. It makes you dirty, but
not in a sexy way.

Any Briton who goes to live in America has the clammy mentality of that
creepy kid in every class who, while never actually caught bullying
vulnerable kids himself, is always there on lookout, always enjoying the
show, yet not possessing the guts to get embroiled himself. In short, any
Briton who emigrates to America is a pathetic, traitorous little sneak, a
disgrace to the human race that is currently suffering under the studded
cowboy boot of Uncle Sam, and as such deserves to be stripped of their
British citizenship - which could then be given to some nice, appreciative
refugee - and never allowed back on this sceptred isle again.

Go on, Mart, Salman, Jeanette: enjoy all the nylons and chewing gum you can
get, while there is still time. For soon there will be a mighty day of
reckoning, when the free world will break loose of the American yoke, and
all the Great Satan's whores and quislings will dangle from the nearest
lamp-posts. On that day, don't come looking for me to bail you out - because
I'll be down the pub with Caprice.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 16 07:59:19 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 14:59:19 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: James Lovelock's Gaia theory
Message-ID: <000301c01fe6$4ef51e80$ac0a8cd4@mjones>

The whole world in our hands

James Lovelock's Gaia theory inspired the Green movement. But as fossil
fuels begin, literally, to cost the earth, he argues that nuclear power
could save the planet. Tim Radford reports

Saturday September 16, 2000

Life is not just a force for good, it is a force for its own good. Life has
a way of managing things in favour of more life. And in the course of doing
so, life manages a whole planet. It makes an atmosphere to breathe, and
water to drink, and food to eat and then it recycles its own detritus. It
hijacks sunlight and passes it around to the next user in digestible,
shrink-wrapped form. Having done that, it disposes of itself, directly as
nutrient for some other creature, or indirectly as a strata of phosphate or
a layer of chalk or fossil limestone, or as energy to burn 1bn years later.
Earlier this month, Austrian scientists detected bacteria, living
comfortably in high clouds, reproducing themselves and - some think -
serving the world by playing rainmaker, acting as "seeds" around which water
vapour could become raindrops.

But this heavenly host of living things surprised no one. Life has been
turning up in improbable places for years. People who drilled a mile deep
into the basalt of the ocean floor found tiny microbes living on a diet of
warmth and rock. Submarine explorers have found huge colonies of strange
creatures basking in a kind of chemical cornucopia at the bottom of the
ocean's depths, far from any sunlight. Microbes have been found in acid
flows, in lakes of soda, down the vents of volcanoes and on the underside of
the polar ice, organising the planet for the rest of creation.

Might things have got a little hot when carbon dioxide levels built up
dangerously at the dawn of the Eocene, 55m years ago? Fear not. The rapid
response team was on hand. An Anglo-American team of scientists reported on
Thursday that plankton bloomed, the oceans became a garden and greedily
mopped up the excess carbon, cooling the greenhouse world to acceptable
levels. Not for the first time, nor the last, the biosphere had risen to the
challenge, and adjusted itself.

It is more than 30 years since James Lovelock, a freelance chemist with a
background in medical research and a gift for devising sensitive detectors,
worked for Nasa on the Mars exploration programme. While doing so, he began
to form the idea of the biosphere as a self-regulating entity, of life and
the planet as a kind of sensitive organism, not sensitive to any particular
form of life, just to the principle of life. He called it the Gaia
hypothesis. The novelist William Golding, a friend and neighbour, suggested
the name. Gaia was the Earth goddess, the Greeks' Mother Nature.

Touchingly, Lovelock reports in his latest book that he originally thought
Golding had suggested calling it the Gyre hypothesis, after the gyres or
vortexes that drive ocean and atmospheric circulation. The idea of Gaia
caught the imagination of people everywhere. Gaia is a kind of metaphor for
a very subtle lesson in the physiology of a planet. But Gaia became a
reality, too, for the Greens, particularly those inclined to mysticism.
Lovelock doesn't mind. He finds things to marvel at in Gaia, too. "Some very
distinguished scientist, I have forgotten his name, told me when I was quite
young that the one thing you have got to keep right through your life or
right up to your dotage is a sense of childlike wonder and once it goes,
stop doing science," he says.

He is fond of individual Greens, but he doesn't have much patience for some
Green thinking, and in particular the Green attitude to nuclear power. Never
mind the British government's little local difficulty with fuel prices,
fossil fuels are literally beginning to cost the earth and meanwhile the
Green campaigners are rejecting at least one easy answer to the great
problem of how to power an economy without shutting down the biosphere with
polluting greenhouse gases.

This answer, Lovelock says, is ecologically clean and tidy and has a very
bad press. It is nuclear power. "I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when
the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back
and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and
say: 'if those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations
we wouldn't be in this mess'. And I think it is true. The real dangers to
humanity and the ecosystems of the earth from nuclear power are almost
negligible. You get things like Chernobyl but what happens? Thirty-odd brave
firemen died who needn't have died but its general effect on the world
population is almost negligible.

"What has it done to wild life? All around Chernobyl, where people are not
allowed to go because the ground is too radioactive, well, the wildlife
doesn't care about radiation. It has come flooding in. It is one of the
richest ecosystems in the region. And then they say: what shall we do with
nuclear waste?" Lovelock has an answer for that, too. Stick it in some
precious wilderness, he says. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of
rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers
out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the
animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the
mutations. Life would go on.

"I have told the BNFL, or whoever it was, that I would happily take the full
output of one of their big power stations. I think the high-level waste is a
stainless steel cube of about a metre in size and I would be very happy to
have a concrete pit that they would dig - I wouldn't dig it - that they
would put it in." He says he would use the waste for two purposes. "One
would be home heating. You would get free home heat from it. And the other
would be to sterilise the stuff from the supermarket, the chicken and
whatnot, full of salmonella. Just drop it down through a hole. I'm not
saying this tongue-in-cheek. I am quite serious," he says. "They would be
welcome to take pictures of my grandchildren sitting on top of it."

Lovelock regards himself as an eccentric, and a radical, and he enjoys being
a member of the awkward squad. The Gaia hypothesis was a huge delight to
some, but it was a huge provocation to others. It also plunged Lovelock into
a war of metaphors. Most of the battle was with the biologists, who had a
different set of metaphors to defend. Some scientists, for example, call the
Earth the Goldilocks planet, because Venus, hot enough to melt lead, was too
warm and Mars, the frozen desert, was too cold, but Earth was just right for
life. So in their view, the planet manages life, not the other way around.

Another group thinks of the fullness and richness of biodiversity as the
outcome of "selfish genes", hectically competing to replicate themselves. So
for them, life is a battle for tenure rather than an invitation to the
dance. And then along came Lovelock, a non-biologist who proposes something
disconcerting: that the earth is fit for life because life made it that way.
The battle was brisk, because life is the great mystery. There are three
great stories that science has to tell: one of these is where the universe
came from, one is where life came from and the third is where humans came
from. The first and the last are being sorted out right now. Cosmologists
think, for instance, that they have the story of creation figured out,
except for the first 1,000th of a second. Anthropologists have settled on a
consensus that modern humans emerged in Africa about 250,000 years ago, the
latest and only survivors in a line of hominids.

But the origin of life is a puzzle. Think of it as a kind of reverse murder
mystery. The bringing-to-life happened in a locked room in a strange world
3.4 bn years ago. There is no surviving scene of the not-crime. There are no
footprints, no strewn clues. The evidence was destroyed by the very
creatures that rose from original experiments in fashioning the living
chemistry from non-living chemicals. Whatever conditions made life possible
were promptly erased by the action of life itself. The last surviving
universal common ancestor went round eliminating all chances of new rivals
emerging.

Life came into a planet with an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, and began to
alter it, producing as waste a dangerous, reactive gas called oxygen which
could ultimately have brought the whole experiment to a halt. So life's -
and Gaia's - next step was to favour a balancing set of creatures that
consumed oxygen and breathed out carbon dioxide. But once that was done, the
original atmosphere was gone, and water and nitrogen cycles were wiping away
any evidence that might have been left in the rocks.

Lovelock began thinking of such things three decades ago when he worked on
Nasa's search for evidence of life on another planet. He proposed in effect
that you could tell that the earth was alive from a million miles away. Its
atmospheric chemistry would shout of life. He proposed that the 70s Mars
probe instruments could confirm the presence of life on the red planet by
detecting an atmosphere of dynamic disequilibrium.

If there had been life on Mars, it would have been a very different planet.
The atmosphere of Mars is 98% carbon dioxide and very stable. Venus is 98%
carbon dioxide and a very nasty example of a runaway greenhouse effect. The
earth no doubt started at 98% carbon dioxide too but today's atmosphere is a
mixture of inflammable oxygen and reactive nitrogen with just a touch of
carbon dioxide, and something is definitely keeping this explosive mixture
primed.

He says Nasa ignored his proposal at the time but the future search for life
on planets outside the solar system will be based entirely on Lovelock
principles. At some future point, fleets of spacecraft working in exquisite
unison will focus on little specks of light reflected from parent stars,
looking for the spectral signatures of telltale gases such as oxygen and
water vapour and methane.

You couldn't imagine oxygen and methane surviving together for very long in
the same atmosphere. So if you spotted these in the gleam from a planet 30
light years away you'd start to wonder. "If there is a lot of methane,
oxygen won't rise by accident. So you have to postulate a process on the
surface that is producing gigatonnes if not teratonnes of both of those
gases all the time and not only that but regulating them, because if you
didn't regulate them you would be in danger of making an inflammable
atmosphere or something like that. So that then becomes conclusive evidence
of life," he says.

The American enthusiasm for possible life on Mars amuses him. "I think it is
all part of the American frontier mentality. This Mars is the ultimate
place, we can go there when we have screwed up the earth. We have the
technology, we can fix it. The national legend of America is very tied up
with Star Trek and if you go to scientific meetings you hear Star Trek
metaphors paraded around all the time and to them it no longer is a kind of
story, it is reality and there is a great danger in their thinking."

Lovelock is now 81. He and his wife Sandy - his first wife, Helen, the
mother of his children, died after a long illness - have completed the
600-miles coastal walk from Poole, Dorset to Minehead , Somerset. He has
pursued a long career as a kind of freelance scientist and he says big
corporations are not for him, although he is happy to sell them his
inventions. He doesn't care for science run by bureaucracies. He lives in an
idyllic corner of Devon, on a 35-acre farm, on which he has planted 25,000
trees.

He takes the long view of eco-hazards, he says. He isn't bothered by the
menace of industrial chemicals like PCBs or agricultural fertilisers in the
way that Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth are. A chemist from the start,
he points out that according to a Royal Society of Chemistry survey,
chemists live longer than most scientists. The big threat to the planet, he
says, is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning
too much oil.

"It's the people that count and the only message I would have to give is to
stop fretting, stop looking for scapegoats, people are to blame for the
condition of the earth. It is me, you, all of us that are to blame and if we
are going to do anything about it we have to tackle it individually, not
expect anybody to take the load off us and do it. If you are a housewife in
Balham you are not, probably, doing anywhere near as much to damage the
planet as suburbanites and exurbanites living around here, using their cars
wholly unnecessarily in huge numbers of journeys and burning far more fuel.
The more money you have, the more damage you can do."

His new book is a hymn to science, and to Gaia and to the other makers of
his great idea, and to the forces that made him choose to swim upstream, to
stay independent, to be free to follow his nose. He grew up with Quaker
principles, and became a conscientious objector in the second world war. He
spent 20 years at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill,
a lab with 100 scientists and six Nobel prizewinners, and then he started
pleasing himself, usually by devising instruments that pleased big business,
or Nasa, or the Ministry of Defence.

He built a detector so sensitive it could trace seemingly infinitesimally
small concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. Famously, he
remarked that such low levels could do no harm. He should have written no
toxic harm, he says. They were, of course, the chemicals that began to
demolish the ozone layer. He thinks the big dangers to the planet are the
greenhouse effect and the spread of humanity. Humans, just by their
fecundity, and their economic demands, have begun to affect habitat and
biodiversity so furiously that it might be that one day Gaia might not be
able to step in and adjust the conditions to secure her own reign. The
planetary regulator might not regulate so efficiently.

In that sense, biodiversity was a kind of insurance, a spreading of bets to
allow life to survive the kind of catastrophes - from outer space, or from
volcanoes - that have seriously interrupted evolution at least five times in
the last 600m years. Meanwhile, humans could get their comeuppance in some
quite mundane but unexpected way.

"Every few hundred years or less, there is a natural geological disaster,
like a big volcano. Tambora was the last, in 1815, and the one before that
was Laki in 1783. Both of those were followed by two years without any
harvest. Now in those days, people survived. There were famines, but people
survived. What would happen now?" he asks. He was speaking before the
British pickets began their fuel blockade, and before panic-stricken
consumers began clearing supermarket shelves. He was speaking long before
word began to leak of UK government statement to be made on Monday about
research into the possibility of some future collision with a large
asteroid, an event which would darken the sky, shake continents, shut down
agriculture and certainly clear the supermarket shelves the world over.

He was simply taking, as he has done all his life, the long view. "Two years
without a harvest? It would probably bust civilisation. People would survive
all right. It really would cut us back, and that is the sort of thing nobody
really prepares for. It's not some ecological poison or GM foods or nuclear
that is going to get us, it is going to be some perfectly ordinary natural
event."





From ssandron at hotmail.com  Sat Sep 16 07:17:30 2000
From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 13:17:30 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] One Contradiction of Capitalism: Fossil Fuels and the Environment
Message-ID: <F46kKlMJr0nSrGpeuDm0000d015@hotmail.com>

(CrashListers, An earlier version of this piece is in the September/October 
2000 issue of Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper. 
Seth)


One Contradiction of Capitalism: Fossil Fuels and the Environment


Under capitalism, we live in a world of many contradictions.  One capitalist 
contradiction is the consumption of gas and oil (fossil fuels) and the 
destruction of the environment.  Such a view is blocked from the US 
mainstream media, owned and controlled by a few.

At the same time, trucks and vans powered by fossil fuels bring us food from 
the fields and factories to the grocery stores.  From high- to low-income 
neighborhoods, cars and vans powered by fossil fuels take us between home 
and school and work.  Jets use fossil fuels to fly people and products to 
and from many points every day.  Electronics, fertilizers and plastics also 
use fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels have been and are the driving force for capitalism?pro-duction 
and distribution to create ever greater wealth for the super rich and 
corporations.  They call this ?prosperity? today.  The vast majority of 
people whose lives are becoming more precarious might disagree.

Meanwhile, our reliance on fossil fuels is also fouling the air, land and 
water.  ?Bad air days? during the summer when car smog blankets my hometown 
of Sacramento are a case in point.  This poor air quality is in big part a 
result of Sacramento?s location in a valley surrounded by mountains, plus a 
growing population that depends greatly on cars.

More people than ever are driving cars.  World consumption of oil was 76 
million barrels a day during January-April 2000, an increase of eight 
million barrels a day since 1990, according to the International Energy 
Agency (IEA).

The IEA was formed in 1974 by the rich nations after the price of oil 
quadrupled in 1973 [www.iea.org].  Later that decade, the rich nations lent 
money from the increased oil prices to the poor nations.  Their indebtedness 
has grown sharply since then.

At any rate, in 1996 the IEA forecast that, ?World demand is pro-jected to 
rise from 70 million barrels at present to between 92 and 97 million barrels 
of oil per day in 2010.?  This exponential growth in the use of fossil fuels 
is worth careful deliberation and reflection.

Here?s why.  In 1998 the IEA reported, ?Fossil fuels are expected to meet 
95% of additional global energy demand from 1995 to 2020.?

In other words, future energy alternatives to fossil fuels will be no 
alternative under capitalism for the next 20 years.  The IEA report doesn?t 
come out and say this, of course, but there it is.

The 1996 IEA report continued: ?Rising fossil fuel consumption im-plies 
rising greenhouse gas emissions [mainly carbon dioxide].  By 2010, world 
carbon emissions could be between 36 and 49 percent above their 1990 level.?

Using fossil fuel for energy creates greenhouse gas emissions.  This 
process, in turn, traps the Sun?s heat near the Earth.  The result is global 
warming.

?The warming trend in global-mean surface temperature observations during 
the past 20 years is undoubtedly real and is substantially greater than the 
average rate of warming during the twentieth century,? (Reconciling 
Observations of Global Temperature Change, US Commission on Geosciences, 
Environment and Resources, 1999 [a free book at  
http://books.nap.edu/books/0309068916/html/3.html#pagetop]).  During the 
past 100 years of capitalist industrialization, the Earth?s surface 
temperature has climbed about 0.4 degrees Celsius from 0.7 to 1.4 degrees, 
reported the National Research Council (1-12-00).

In brief, global warming has potential catastrophic results.  They in-clude 
melting Arctic ice cover, rising sea levels, and increasing droughts, 
famines, floods and crop failures.

The heating up of the planet is already underway, with effects that are 
plain to see.

?As is noticeable in Europe and elsewhere, the seasons have slipped out of 
synch with the calendar, because of anthropogenic (man-made) global 
warming,? notes historian and writer Mark Jones (6-19-00, 
jones118 at lineone.net).

?You don?t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows,? sang Bob 
Dylan during the active 1960s.  That was true then and now.  However, 
today?s winds are blowing hotter than ever.

?Global warming appears to be heating not just the air but the ocean 
waters-?and it is the thermal energy of the water that sparks storms,? adds 
Leslie Logan.  ?Scientists are warning us that with such warming, the 
twenty-first century may introduce us not only to more storms, but furious 
storms of unimaginable magnitude? (Native Americas, www.nativeamericas.com, 
Spring 2000).

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew devastated sections of Florida and Louisi-ana, the 
most expensive natural disaster in US history.  Last year Hurricane Floyd 
forced three million people to flee inland from coastal Florida.

A super-storm hit Sacramento, which barely escaped severe flooding in 1986.  
(The Sacramento and American rivers run through the city.)  Then in 1997, 
the amount of rainfall in Sacramento nearly matched 1986?s downpour.  
Sacramento?s 1986 and 1997 storms dropped 60% more rain than storms in the 
1956-1985 period (Sacramento Business Journal, 7-28-00).
Sacramento flood control projects are in part a response to global warming, 
without mentioning it as a cause.

In the meantime, with 5% of the world?s population, guess which na-tion 
emits the most greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels?  That 
would be the US, ?which accounts for 25% of the world?s production of 
carbon" (The Guardian [London], 9-20-99).

Each year, six billion tons of carbon dioxide is dumped into the at-mosphere 
worldwide.  The US contributes 1.5 billion tons of carbon emis-sion to that 
total.  US oil consumption was 19 million barrels per day during 
January-April 2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990.  We?re 
number one in oil consumption and carbon emission.

Meanwhile, the US mainstream media turns Americans? eyes away from this 
capitalist contradiction.  That?s information power.

To spur short-term corporate profits, the US mainstream media pro-motes the 
use of fossil fuels (through car ads) like there?s no tomorrow.  As you 
read, capitalism is carbonizing the environment.  This deadly process is 
becoming clearer to more and more people as the air, land and water is 
dirtied.  Much depends on their self-liberation from this capitalist 
contradiction.  The recent demonstrations for social change at the 
Republican and Democratic presidential nomination conventions are steps in 
that direction.

                           ###

Seth Sandronsky
Sacramento
ssandron at hotmail.com


_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

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From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 16 09:30:23 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 16:30:23 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FW Target of the petrol tax revolt
Message-ID: <000601c01ff3$0796a100$ac0a8cd4@mjones>


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Jones [mailto:jones118 at lineone.net]
Sent: 16 September 2000 15:26
To: marxism-thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com
Subject: RE: [Marxism-Thaxis] Target of the petrol tax revolt


Responding to Chris B. (below).

The reason for public sympathy for the pickets was because of the notorious
overweighting of regressive indirect taxes, the fuel tax in particular. The
UK tax burden on corporations and the wealthy is low compared to Europe, the
top rate is only 40%. In times of severe stress such as shortages of
essential commodities, or war, etc, governments often find it necessary to
be more redistributive and as and when energy shortages do take their toll,
unemployment rises etc, it will be politically unavoidable in low-tax states
like the UK and the US; they will have to tax wealth more or face civil
unrest, sikple as that. So much for one of the main alleged comptitive
advantages of the Anglo-American system.

As far as who is prole + who is petit-bourgeois is concerned, this whole
discussion has to be located in the context that only around 15% of UK
workers are actually in "productive" ie surplus-value producing
manufacturing industry; there are probably only 400 million "true
proletarians" employed in internationally-competitive manufacturing
*worldwide*. A vast number of newly-marginalised, semi-employed, unemployed
and underemployed semi-proletarians, semi-petit bourgoies etc consttitues
the bulk of the working class, the reserve army of labour, and the hapless
and dispossessed peasantry/petit bourgeoisie - probably 3 billion people or
perhaps far more in this bleak lumpen hinterland.

Obviously the recent protests in the UK were fanned by Big Oil for its own
reasons (lower taxes = higher profits) and by right wing anti-Labour
newspapers (why they should be anti-labour beats me). And obviously on the
face of it, supporting workers' demands for cheaper fossil fuel doesn't look
very green. But the point is that the urban populations of most of the
world, and the workers of advanced countries, have simply been made
political and social hostages to fossil-fuel based capitalism. Equally
obviously, as energy famines really start to bite, the demand will no longer
be for *lower taxes* per se but for *alternatives* to fossil.

The "the energy politics of international finance capital" are to continue
to plunder the planet's fossil fuel "resources" until they "unexpectedly"
and to the evident surprise and discomfort of "experts" like Doug Henwood,
"run out"; and their polituics after that will be to try to avoid the lynch
mobs who will come calling. Millions will die because of this "policy",
whose roots go back more than a century and which has formed the political
bedrock of imperialism.

"when petrol plays a smaller part in the > capitalist system" will also be
when the capitalist system itself collapses, and if experience of what
happened in the USSR is any guide, that can happen with devastating speed
and suddenness.

Do not forget that only two years ago "The Economist" said oil was gonna
cost $5/bbl or less and we were "drowning in it". The Economist's coverage
of the present crisis has been abysmal, utter gibberish, blind denialism.
But what else can you expect from such deluded people? The elites and their
scribbling classes (including most of the so-called "Marxist" left)  are
politically completely irresponsible and now they are in collective denial.
Check the recent archives of  Doug Henwood's own list Lbo-talk for similar
evidence of almost wilful denialism and of discussion which is so frivolous
that it really does resemble playing quoits on the deck of the Titanic.

Mark


> -----Original Message-----
> From: marxism-thaxis-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
> [mailto:marxism-thaxis-admin at lists.wwpublish.com]On Behalf Of Chris
> Burford
> Sent: 16 September 2000 09:52
> To: marxism-thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com
> Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Target of the petrol tax revolt
>
>
> At 09:58 14/09/00 +0100,
>
> Mark wrote: (title S11)
>
> >Chris Burford wrote:
> >
> > > The leaders of the activisit network are bourgeois and petty
> bourgeois.
> >The
> > > man closest to being a leader is Brynle Williams, a North
> Wales farmer. No
> > > way a finance capitalist.
> >
> >I'm not at the right pc and can't locate the stats, but I seem
> to recollect
> >a recent DoE/Treasury report which shows that marginal hill farmers like
> >Brynle
> >earned less than UKP8,000 p.a. in the past 4 years. This puts
> their average
> >wage not only below the mean but often, below social security benefit
> >levels.
> >
> > >
> > > If you accept my earlier class and ideological analysis of
> this movement
> >it
> > > is reactionary.
> >
> >Why is it reactionary? It is anything but reactionary. It is a frontal
> >attack (based on a widespread public feeling that we've all been
> deceived)
> >on the energy politics of international finance capital.
>
> [and]
>
> >As for Brynle Williams, far from being a petty-bourgeois
> reactionary, he is
> >someone driven by intense anger and even desperation to commit acts
> >which in any more or less normal circumstances would be absolutely
> >unthinkable. There will be many more people like him and we should
> >do what we can to tell the truth, at last. They have been made fools of
> >by a corrupt and cynical ruling class which does not care if they live or
> >die.
>
>
> I did not just want to rattle off a reply which might lead to a scrappy
> argument rather than an important debate. But I appreciate Mark's
> challenge.
>
> We often see struggle going on in front of our very eyes, to
> allude to the
> Communist Manifesto, and there is a problem of how to analyse it at a
> deeper level.
>
> To remind other readers, I was replying to Doug's challenge about my
> proposition that the target of the global protests should be defined as
> global finance capital. I used the petrol tax revolt to illustrate.
>
> My point was not to denounce someone like Brynle Williams, who
> has clearly
> been courageous and also thought of the wider democratic interest and not
> just his own immediate problems. I agree with Mark's point about the
> desperate position of marginal farmers who are being severely squeezed
> between the overproduction of food and more efficient larger
> capitalist and
> finance capitalist systems of production.
>
> Neverthelesss in marxist terms Williams is almost certainly
> petty-bourgois,
> exploiting himself, with perhaps as few as 3 or 4 other employees whom he
> exploits in his capacity as a small bourgeois.
>
> There is no mechanical and automatic link between ideology and material
> class position but there is a general probabilistic link.
> Williams is only
> one of perhaps many thousands of people in his class position who
> have been
> involved in some sort of action. His individual name has emerged more to
> the forefront perhaps because of qualities that stand out a little in
> comparison with his peers.
>
> Nevertheless he and others illustrate that the class basis for the
> *activists* in this tax revolt has been petty bourgeois and small
> bourgeois, squeezed between competition with larger bourgois systems of
> production, and a tightening of the market for raw materials,
> namely fuel,
> and the market for the sale of their products.
>
> We should not dismiss him and his peers because they are not true
> proletarians. Nor should we jump on the populist bandwagon. It is
> necessary
> to have a dialectical analysis that sees them both from their progressive
> and their reactionary perspective.
>
> To avoid a moralistic tone to this point, I am happy to
> substitute the term
> "reactive" instead of "reactionary". Many, perhaps most struggles, are in
> some sense reactive. Only when combined in a wider movement with
> progressive goals do they have the opportunity of becoming progressive.
>
> But it should be one of the missions of communists to see these links, if
> we take the Communist Manifesto seriously.
>
> This brings me up to the main and very interesting point I wanted to
> respond to in Mark's comments: how to define the target of a particular
> campaign.
>
> I really have difficulty with Mark's formulation and I hope
> others may come
> in on this question of formulation:
>
> >It is a frontal
> >attack (based on a widespread public feeling that we've all been
> deceived)
> >on the energy politics of international finance capital.
>
> Can I suggest we consider this from the point of view of
>
> a) the subjective target of the attack - what or whom is seen as
> the target
> by the activists and sympathisers, and
>
> b) what is the "objective" target of the attack - what a superior
> materialist class analysis suggests is "objectively" the target.
>
> Unless I am missing some statements specifically made by Brynle
> Williams or
> his peers, I do not assume Mark is claiming that the energy politics of
> international finance capital were the subjective target of the attack.
> Most of the placards attacked the government for taking such a high
> percentage of the pump price in the form of tax, and by
> implication for not
> cushioning users of petrol against the recent oil price increases. Blair
> was roundly accused of being out of touch, and the Conservative press
> fanned this perception.
>
> The overwhelming popular sympathy with those who used petrol for their
> business, came from motorists who used petrol for personal
> consumption. The
> oil companies had no desire to distance themselves from those
> feelings, and
> did little to order their drivers to cross non-violent picket lines. When
> some supplies were let through for emergency services by
> agreement with the
> picketers, the pcicketers applauded.
>
> This suddenly all came together in a massive national demonstration to
> force the deaf, uncaring government to listen. The subjective
> target of the
> action was the government.
>
> I assume however that Mark's formula was deliberately intended to
> go beyond
> the subjective target and to identify the objective target of the attack.
>
> He wrote it was an "attack (based on a widespread public feeling
> that we've
> all been deceived)
> on the energy politics of international finance capital".
>
> These formulas are tricky to get right without careful thought and
> discussion and a lot of evidence.
>
> Mark indicates by his comments in parenthesis the subjective feeling by
> which the attack had as its objective target
>
> >the energy politics of international finance capital
>
>
> I am aware from the Crash List that Mark has done a lot of work
> on oil, but
> I would request a one sentence formulation of what these energy
> politics are.
>
> Clearly I have areas in common with Mark in that I wanted to formulate
> "global finance capital" as the target of the chain of demonstrations
> against the IMF, and Mark talks about the energy politics of
> international
> finance capital. But I suppose I think the connections between different
> sectors of capital and global capital, as an concentration of all
> the most
> hegemonic elements of capital, are complex, and also riddled with
> contadictions.
>
> (This is a far from purely philosophical exercise in the relationship
> between the concrete and the abstract.)
>
> To take one concrete example, a company like BP has played around with
> suggesting that its name might also mean "Beyond Petroleum", suggesting
> that only for the highest motives of the public good (of course), it will
> be finding ways of shifting its capital into areas of exploitation of
> labour that do not involve the production or distribution of oil. BP took
> the subtlest and most progressive role of the petrol companies in the
> recent petrol tax revolt crisis.
>
> Furthermore, the nature of the crisis has rapidly emerged as one of the
> global management of the capital tied up in the oil industry, as direct
> action has cascaded across western Europe. Significantly the OPEC
> countries
> who have kindly agreed to an increase in production, are negotiating hard
> for compensation when petrol plays a smaller part in the
> capitalist system.
>
> So what, concisely - in one sentence so it can be useful for a
> formulation
> -  are
>
> >the energy politics of international finance capital?
>
>
> (And will this formula suggest how at least subconsciously or
> objectively,
> the petrol tax activists were attacking it?)
>
>
>
> Chris Burford
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
> Marxism-Thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
>




From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Sat Sep 16 09:43:00 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 11:43:00 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] One Contradiction of Capitalism: Fossil Fuels and the Environ...
Message-ID: <94.98fb5ff.26f4ef04@aol.com>

This reliance on fossil fuels leads to real waste and silliness.  A trucker 
friend of mine complained that he was hired to take Oregon strawberries to 
Cal. and California strawberries to Oregon.  Suburbs get farther and farther 
from the jobs as white racists and upper income folks struggle to get status. 
 These folks are more likely to get the jobs in the city as the bosses are 
usually folks like themselves.  The light rail system in Sacramento does not 
go south at all where the poor people live and one of the major developments. 
 The traffic on 99 south is unbelievable.  We now have the 4th worse 
pollution in the state.  



From ssandron at hotmail.com  Sat Sep 16 10:44:09 2000
From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 16:44:09 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] "Cars and Cities"
Message-ID: <F130WwY0VnkB4ltFlmm0000cd93@hotmail.com>

Linda,

See the "Cars and Cities" article by Paul Sweezy in the April 2000 issue of 
Monthly Review.  Sweezy's article was originally published in the April 1973 
Monthly Review, but it could have been written today.

Seth
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 16 12:34:12 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 19:34:12 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] OGL: EIA study accesses effects of depletion on future oil and gas supplies
Message-ID: <000001c0200c$b63077e0$4d0a8cd4@mjones>

Future production more difficult
Recent interest in the effects of depletion follows reports suggesting that
future production may be more difficult than previously thought. Several
reports have highlighted the sharp change in the decline rate for wells on
the continental shelf in the US Gulf of Mexico. While natural gas wells
drilled in 1972 declined from their peak at an average rate of 17% per year,
natural gas wells drilled in 1996 have been declining at an annual rate of
49%.
http://www.oilandgasonline.com/content/news/article.asp?DocID={F816E98E-888A
-11D4-8C5F-009027DE0829}&VNETCOOKIE=NO




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 02:31:19 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 09:31:19 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] RE: Target of the petrol tax revolt
In-Reply-To: <000501c01fe9$fbb10fa0$ac0a8cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <000001c02081$a7641d00$4c138cd4@mjones>

A personal note. It's 8 am in London and I just got back from walking to the
shop to buy Sunday papers (The Observer, Independent, Sunday Times and...
Sunday Sport). The Total/Fina filling station next to the Pakistani-owned
late-night grocery is still dry: this part of North London (7 miles from
Trafalgar Square) has been without petrol for almost a week. The cashier, a
Filipino I know by sight, stares nervously back at me thru the plate glass
window which has been shattered by angry customers. This is the week when
New Labour slipped behind the Tories in the polls for the first time since
Tony Blair's electoral landslide in May 1997. Big Oil and the govt aren't
even talking any more. Scary stuff, huh? What will happen next? Ask any two
economists and get three different scenarios: (a) oil will slip below
$18/bbl by next April (Sunday Times, today); (b) oil spot prices may hit
$40/bbl in November and even top out at $70/bbl (The Economist on Friday;
the Times on Friday). (c) Prices will be held 'within the $22-28/bbl target
range' (Opec last week).

Watch this space.

Mark





From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 03:38:35 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 10:38:35 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Heavy Rain in Guatemala Kills 20
Message-ID: <001201c0208b$0d846fa0$4c138cd4@mjones>

The Observer
Sunday September 17, 2000  2:50 am


GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Floods and mudslides from four days of torrential
rains have wrecked buildings and bridges and swept through villages in
Guatemala, leaving at least 20 people dead and dozens injured, officials
said Saturday.

Authorities have evacuated more than 200 families, while collapsed bridges
have caused dozens of injuries. Major highways were flooded and more than 50
homes have been destroyed throughout the country.

Crews rescued three people Saturday from a school that collapsed under the
weight of heavy rains in Zacapa, 70 miles northwest of Guatemala City.

In the tiny mountain hamlet of Teleman, 125 miles north of the capital,
crews Saturday recovered the bodies of 15 people swept away Wednesday by
strong currents while trying to push a pickup truck across a river. Nine
others in the truck survived.

On Friday, a mudslide demolished a home on the southwestern outskirts of
Guatemala City, killing an 8-year-old girl.

That same day, the Concepcion River overflowed its banks after officials
opened the flood gates of a dangerously full dam, flooding at least 20 homes
and injuring 10 people in Escuintla, 30 miles south of Guatemala City.

On Thursday, mudslides buried two poor communities on the hillsides outside
the Guatemalan capital, killing three children and one woman.

Authorities evacuated two dozen other families from the same area early
Saturday before more falling mud engulfed their homes. One person remained
missing, authorities said.

Heavy rains also forced the evacuation of more than 100 people from mountain
villages in three other northern Guatemalan states, authorities said.

Forecasters expected the rains to continue.

Guatemalan Health Minister Mario Bolanos said the tragedies have occurred in
areas where people have been warned of the dangers but have refused to move.

``People say they aren't afraid and choose to live in areas that during the
rainy season are always hit with mudslides and floods,'' Bolanos said. ``The
tragedies we are seeing now are in areas that everyone knew were unsafe.''




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 03:38:40 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 10:38:40 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Observer: Milosevic fights dirty to survive
Message-ID: <001301c0208b$0f9c0500$4c138cd4@mjones>

An opposition united behind one candidate has its best chance in a decade to
oust the Yugoslav President amid intimidation and fears of electoral fraud

Special report: Serbia


Gillian Sandford in Belgrade and agencies
Sunday September 17, 2000

President Slobodan Milosevic is fighting for his political survival as he
enters the last week of a vicious presidential campaign tainted by
intimidation and haunted by fears of electoral fraud.
Faced for the first time in a decade by an opposition united behind a single
candidate, Milosevic is trailing in every opinion poll. But observers fear
his defeat, which would bring a political sea change in Yugoslavia, will be
followed by repression and bloodshed.

Tensions rose last week when a gang of men in civilian clothes stormed the
Belgrade offices of the get-out-and-vote campaign on Friday.

They entered the office of the group, known as Vreme Je (It Is Time),
locking the youngsters working there in a room and taking computers,
documents and other equipment. The Vreme Je workers were sighted in
handcuffs being offloaded from a van at Belgrade police station, said lawyer
and opposition politician Gaso Knezavic.

Last weekend police moved on the headquarters of the student-based
resistance group Otpor, leaving a small group of youngsters badly shaken
after being roughed-up but not seriously injured.

The regime has refused to allow observers from allegedly hostile countries
and organisations to monitor the elections. And opposition activists across
Serbia have been hauled into police stations for 'informative talks'.

Last week the regime campaign switched into high gear. Milosevic made two
rare personal appearances. Last Tuesday he opened a new hydro-electric dam
and on Friday the Zastava car plant in Kragujevac. His speech was plastered
across the front of the state newspaper, Politika, and dominated state
television news, which played on the regime's campaign theme:
reconstruction. 'This generation really has something to leave to the
generation to come - a 10-year-old resistance to violence, strongly
expressed national solidarity and courageous ability to cope in difficult
times,' he said.

But, Veselin Simonevic, editor of the popular non-government newspaper Blic,
says this time it won't wash. 'In the short and long term, Milosevic is a
loser. To a large number of citizens, he is finished.'

Last summer, when Milosevic changed the constitution and made the position
of president directly electable, it seemed a brilliant ruse, enabling him to
hold power for a further two terms. He believed egocentric opposition
leaders would continue their wars of vanity 'and in this he miscalculated',
says Simonevic.

According to opinion polls, the politician most people would vote for as a
presidential candidate was the leader of one of the smaller parties, Dr
Vojislav Kostunica, who is little known in the West. His candidacy has
turned the presidential poll into a serious race for high stakes.

In two weeks Kostunica has criss-crossed the country, drumming up support
from the eastern border towns to the west, and even made a dangerous trip to
Kosovo, when the Nato-led protection force had to intervene with riot squads
to separate warring pro- and anti-Milosevic Serbs.

Kostunica's aim is to mobilise disillusioned voters. He offers what many say
they seek: 'changes' and 'a normal life'. Analysts say if Milosevic were
defeated 'it would destroy the decade-long myth of invincibility'.

'Milosevic did not count on Kostunica,' says Simonevic. 'He counted that the
leaders of the opposition parties who always struggle between themselves
will do so again and that he would be able to win.

'Many citizens are not for Milosevic and have not been for a long time,' he
says, but explains that the opposition split the anti-Milosevic vote. This
time this is not happening. 'This is why Kostunica has a real chance.'

Every opinion poll pub lished shows Kostunica ahead of Milosevic. The least
optimistic showed Milosevic with 26 per cent and Kostunica with 29 per cent.
But other polls have shown the opposition contender steaming ahead. Such a
result would force a second round of voting - a run-off between Milosevic
and Kostunica. No publicly released poll has shown Milosevic winning that.

Former Socialist Party member Milovan Drecun, a former war reporter with
state television who recently left to form his own opposition party,
strongly asserts there will be voting fraud.

According to Drecun, who still has many contacts in the Socialist Party
(SPS): 'Milosevic wants to win the poll with 2.5 million votes in the first
round. No second round is planned.

'There will be manipulation and if the manipulation leads to protests, he is
preparing anti-riot police squads. He has well-trained units in the police
for breaking protests.' Drecun says electoral fraud will focus on Kosovo and
the two electoral districts in southern Serbia that encompass the province:
Prokopulje and Vranje.

The other area ripe for fraud, says Drecun, is Serbia's sister state in the
federation, Montenegro, where the pro-West opposition government of Milo
Djukanovic is boycotting the poll.

Simonevic also believes that there will be fraud: 'They are prepared to
steal as many votes as possible to avoid the second round,' he says.

'Many people expect a lot from these elections and from that a rebellion
over fraud can be born. If that happens, Milosevic will try to make a brutal
attack and use shock action.'




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 03:41:16 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 10:41:16 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Observer: Nuclear disaster averted
Message-ID: <001601c0208b$6d041160$4c138cd4@mjones>

Russian power plant workers praised for 'heroic' operation to cool reactors

Special report: Russia

Amelia Gentleman in Moscow
Sunday September 17, 2000

A nuclear catastrophe - triggered by a fault in Russia's ageing electrical
grid - was averted last week thanks to a 'heroic' emergency operation by
power station workers.
Details of how one of Russia's main nuclear plants and the country's largest
plutonium-processing centre came close to disaster emerged slowly, prompting
new alarm in a country still reeling from a string of disasters.

Nuclear experts said 'courageous' workers at the Beloyarsk power station and
the Mayak reprocessing plant had managed to prevent a Chernobyl-style
accident. Environmental campaigners warned that the crumbling state of
Russia's infrastructure meant such close escapes could be expected with
growing frequency.

Preliminary investigations showed that a short circuit in the regional
electricity system caused a sudden blackout in three nuclear reactors in the
Urals. Its cause remains unclear, although it has been widely attributed to
a fault in the poorly maintained network.

Unexpected power cuts at nuclear plants, which are designed to work
ceaselessly, pose a severe risk. There was controversy yesterday over
whether built-in emergency electricity systems took over as they should have
done. Minatom, Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, insisted that all back-up
systems at both sites began working in the seconds after the accident, but
environmental activists reported that the standby electricity generators of
at least one of the reactors had failed to start.

These sources say a technical hitch at the Beloyarsk plant, in the
Sverdlovsk region, meant that the diesel generators built into the reactor
failed to start automatically. Without a separate supply of electricity, the
cooling system at the heart of the plant allegedly stopped working - causing
the temperature in the core reactor to soar to dangerous levels, as workers
lost control over the chain reactions occurring within.

'The problem was that the diesel generators were in poor condition and so
the staff on the plant needed 36 minutes to repair them to get them
started,' said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of the Ecodefence organisation,
which has spent the past week gathering information about the mishap. 'It
was up to the personnel on the plant to avert a serious nuclear accident.
They worked heroically.'

Alexei Yablokov of the Centre for Ecological Problems of Russia endorsed
this view: 'We were just half an hour from another Chernobyl - had it not
been for the professionalism of the plant staff.'

At around lunchtime on Saturday last weekend, a crash echoed from within the
walls of the Beloyarsk compound. Local residents - many of whom were
celebrating the annual town festival - listened in horror. Most of the
people who live in Zarechny, the settlement which has grown up around the
plant, are either current or former employees - so were well equipped to
judge the gravity of the noise.

The precise cause of the sound remains unclear. Unconfirmed sources suggest
that while technicians struggled to get the diesel generators working, they
were forced to shut down the reactor manually. Residents may have heard
steam spurting suddenly from the cooling plant, as pressure in the system
mounted.

One of the immediate results of the shutdown at Beloyarsk was a power
failure at the nearby Mayak processing plant in the Chelyabinsk region,
where two reactors were in operation.

The potential consequences of malfunction at the vast, high-security Mayak
plant are no less alarming. Scientists there take spent nuclear fuel from
all over the former Soviet Union and convert it into weapons-grade plutonium
and high-level waste. The site is estimated to contain 120 million curies of
radioactive waste - much of it held in liquid form in vast tanks - including
seven times the amount of strontium-90 and caesium-137 that was released in
Chernobyl.

Mayak was without power for 45 minutes and the reactors were automatically
shut down. The head of the plant, Vitaliy Sadovnikov, told a local newspaper
that this was the worst blackout the station had faced and it was only his
staff's 'near-military discipline' which prevented a serious accident.

He said the back-up electricity provider, designed to cool down the reactors
in the event of such an emergency, had only been started up 30 minutes after
the plant was brought to a halt.

But yesterday Bulat Nigmatulin, a Deputy Minister at Minatom, said these
reports were lies. 'This unpleasant situation came about because for the
first time there was a breakdown in the local energy system,' he said.

'The atomic installations at Beloyarsk and Mayak are protected against this
kind of accident, and on this occasion everything went exactly according to
plan, with on-site emergency electricity sources starting up immediately.'

He said 30-minute delays would have led to explosions in the reactors.

Officials at both plants report there was no radiation contamination as a
result of the emergency shutdowns. Environmental activists in the region
continue to test the site, but are so far satisfied that this is the case.

Although a crisis was averted, analysts agree that both mishaps are sobering
examples of the ease with which a disaster could be sparked.

'The fact that the grid was down for 45 minutes is extremely alarming,
because it means that control was temporarily lost in these crucial nuclear
installations,' said Tobias Muenchmeyer, atomic energy expert with
Greenpeace.

Some commentators linked the initial power cut to the campaign by Russia's
electricity monopoly to cut off those customers with outstanding debts. They
speculated that by suddenly switching off one area of the grid, Unified
Energy Systems might have precipitated the short circuit. UES officials deny
this, and a government commission has been set up to investigate.

State officials are eager to promote atomic energy as a means of heating and
powering their vast country. A strategy document published by Minatom in May
advocated that Russia should radically increase its nuclear capacity over
the next 20 years, building up to 24 new reactors.

Independent experts affirm that over the past five years the number of
emergency shutdowns in Russian reactors has dropped fourfold, and over the
past two years financing of safety monitoring has increased. But the memory
of the Chernobyl disaster 14 years ago remains uncomfortably fresh.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 03:39:00 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 10:39:00 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian on oil
Message-ID: <001501c0208b$1bd28ba0$4c138cd4@mjones>

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/petrol/



From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 05:05:08 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 12:05:08 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] from Complexity Digest
Message-ID: <000001c02097$24726080$41678cd4@mjones>

Human Population And The Future Of Biodiversity, UCS

Excerpt: For the first time, human activities are affecting species of all
types and habits, at all points of the globe, and pushing many toward
extinction. Scientists project that at least half of all living species
could ultimately disappear due to habitat loss alone, creating a mass
extinction on a scale comparable to those that have ended past geologic
eras.

Apart from habitat loss, other agents of human-caused extinction are now at
work. Even more species could disappear as a result of pollution,
overhunting, overfishing and inadvertent introduction of exotic species into
weakened ecosystems. Hanging over the future of all life is the puzzle of
how global climate will change in coming centuries as a result of human
influences, and how these changes will affect ecosystems and the species
they support.

Not all species are at risk, however. Evolution is resilient. A small
percentage of species?from pigeons, to weeds, to microbial parasites?have
proliferated beyond their pre-human numbers or ranges. Rapidly evolving
pests and disease-causing organisms could swell their ranks. Humanity
itself, with more than 30 times the population density it ever could have
achieved without agriculture, now appears to have become the central
organizing reality around which non-human life will evolve.
 see: www.comdig.de
?






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 03:38:47 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 10:38:47 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
Message-ID: <001401c0208b$13d5de20$4c138cd4@mjones>

It is said frequently and often nowadays that the future economy will be
'hydrogen-driven'. Most of what is written on the subject shows signs  of
being untouched by the human mind. For one thing, hydrogen is an
energy-carrier, not an energy-source. You have to *manufacture* hydrogen,
and it is an energy-intensive process, requiring huge amounts of
electricity. Where will the electricity come from? One answer is natural
gas, which in itself is hardly a real answer if you're talking about moving
beyond fossil fuels that pour greenhouse gas into the air. And where will
the natural gas come from? According to some petrogeologists, there is no
shortage of natural gas, particularly in the USA. Eminent member of the
American Association of Petroleum Geologists, "Skip" Hobbs recently assured
the US Senate that the US has plenty of natural gas (his testimony is in the
Crashlist message archive). But the reality is that existing gas reserves
are depleting at an alarming, and unexpected rate; meanwhile the US
Department of Energy assumes that a supply of 35 quads of natural gas p.a.
will be found to meet expected demand by the year 2020; that is almost
double existing US natural gas consumption. Most analysts think the target
is unreachable. In short, natural gas will be (a) scarce and (b) much more
expensive than it is today. Natural gas supplies 20 per cent of world energy
(25% in the US). But to replace petroleum as the prime transportation fuel
will mean finding *double* that amount: in the US it would mean finding
perhaps 70 quads a year, and even Skip Hobbs isn't suggesting that is
feasible.  But if all the yhpe and public optimism about fuel-cells is on
track, that is exactly what WOULD have to be found. So someone is lying
somewhere.

Maybe the hydrogen can be found using *alternatives* to produce the
necessary electricity? The alternatives comprise: nuclear, photovoltaics,
wind and biomass. Together these alternatives today provide less than 5% of
total US energy. Can they be ramped up?
If alternatives CAN fill the gap left by declining oil, then both capitalism
and the biosphere might be saved.

In this scenario, hydrogen-driven fuel cells will be the motive-power source
of the future; you'll even plug them into your home and power domestic
electricity with them, so goes the hype which is repeated even by
responsible and well respected people, for example people like legendary
James Hansen, the Nasa scientist who practically invented the term 'global
warming'. His most recent paper, "Global warming in the twenty-first
century: An alternative scenario" (James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy,
Andrew Lacis, and Valdar Oinas) (available from www.pnas.org for $5 or for
free by writing offlist to me). This paper, published in August 2000, is
already notorious because in it Hansen seems to backtrack on earlier
global-warming doom-mongering. He is optimistic about reducing atmospheric
CO2, mostly because of a new-found enthusiasm for technology. Hansen now
beliecves that fuel cells and similar innovations will save the day:
"Investments in technology to improve energy efficiency and develop
nonfossil energy sources are also needed to slow the growth of CO2 emissions
and expand future policy options," Hansen writes.

Hansen is employed by NASA, which practically invented the things, but it is
clear that when it comes to fuel-cells he doesn't know what he is talking
about, and his new-found techno-optimism is misplaced: natural-gas (or
methanol) powered fuel-cells cannot replace gasoline engines, and unluss
there is some other way out, the 'hydrogen economy' is likely to be
still-born, even assuming fuel-cells can *ever* be manufactured cheaply and
in volume, which remains unproven.

Enthusiasm for alternatives, borne largely of desperation, is widespread
these days. Even James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that
nuclear power is a possible, and necessary, alternative to fossil fuel, to
judge from recent remarks of his (archived in the Crashlist).

To replace the world's existing petroleum-based transportation fleets with
hydrogen-powered systems (assuming this was technically or financially
possible) will require the construction of around 25,000 new nuclear
reactors. Oil demand today is about 75 million barrels per day, a power
equivalent of 5 trillion watts. Supposing the nuclear plants were 40 percent
efficient in transferring nuclear energy to gaseous hydrogen, that requires
12.5 terawatts of electrciity-genertaing capacity. But hydrogen must be
condensed somehow, and this raises the input power by, in the representative
case of cooling hydrogen until it liquefies at ambient pressure, a factor
close enough to 2. This entails an extra global capacity of 25 terawatts, ie
about 25k conventional pressurised water reactors of 1 Gw output.

Unfortunately, there is already a world shortage of exploitable uranium.
Absent viable fusion technologies, such a massive increase in nuclear power
generation is not feasible in resource terms (let alone safety terms).
Whether such a massive construction of new nuclear power stations would be
socially acceptable and/or politically feasible is a separate and
interesting question.


Others argue for photovoltaics. Actually we can take photovoltaics and
biomass together, because both entail using available land (and possibly
ocean) surface areas to capture solar energy fluxes. So far no technology
exists (either by plant-based photosynthesis or silicon-based or other
photovoltaic technology) which is capable of capturing enough solar energy
to substitute for more than about 10 percent of today's use of fossil fuels.
This leaves wind-power and some other mnore exotic methods (subsea turbines,
geothermal). In all cases even the massive application of known technologies
will provide orders of magnitude less energy than we get today from fossil
fuels. In short, there is no way to make the transition to a non-fossil
economy without massive social and economic upheaval and dislocation, even
in the *best* case.

Mark





From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 14:47:38 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 21:47:38 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Russia's Place in World Oil Market Commented On in Context of OPEC
Message-ID: <000001c020e8$83ee2de0$6a168cd4@mjones>

Rossiyskaya Gazeta [Russian governmental newspaper]

September 12, 2000
[translation for personal use only]
Article by Aleksey Chichkin under the "Topic of the Day" rubric:
"Oil as a Political Category"

   The current fantastic world prices for oil are such
that they could perfectly well provoke an energy crisis in the countries
of the West similar to that which occurred in the mid-seventies.
    Therefore, the industrial world, which advocates the so-called free
market, craves just one thing -- stable price by any means.   The
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is capable of doing this.
Although not on its own, but only if other major exporters and, in
particular, Russia go along with its decisions.
    And this is understandable:   Russia has a 15% share of the world oil
market and, in terms of world extraction,   produces roughly one-fifth of
the oil.   The "Russian factor" is becoming increasingly important.
    We should remember that the USSR did not support OPEC in the second
half of the seventies, dramatically increasing its oil exports at low
prices at the time, which literally saved many Western countries from the
current fate of our long-suffering northern territories, which are
freezing without fuel.
    But since 1991 Russia has become far more sympathetic to OPEC's
ideas, if only because this organization establishes price bands for all
oil.   And -- what is no less important -- the quotas for the extraction
and export of oil and the prices for it are determined (unlike in
previous decades) during consultations with the leading Western
oil-importing countries and companies.
    Another thing is also obvious.   The current world situation, which
has already raised world prices to $31-32 a barrel, is extremely
advantageous to Russia.   It is this factor which has enabled the
government to build up sufficient foreign currency reserves.   But there
is no point at all in driving our Western partners into an energy crisis.
  This is also disadvantageous to the majority of OPEC countries and
other supplier countries.
    Particularly as the world oil situation depends to a decreasing
extent on purely economic categories -- the balance of supply and demand.
  This is an extremely politicized sphere.   Conflicts involving Russian
tankers in the Persian Gulf, the bombing of Iraq, the growing separatism
in oil-exporting countries and regions, Islamist terror in Algeria,
and... even reports about Saddam Husayn's incurable illness -- these
events dramatically boost oil prices.
    Russia spoke of the need to collaborate with OPEC for the first time
in 1998:   Sergey Generalov, the then Russian Federation minister of fuel
and energy, supported on the government's behalf the idea of our
participating in OPEC's work as an associate member (six countries,
incidentally, have enjoyed this status since 1970).   And then Russia for
the first time supported measures to restrain exports and particularly
extraction in order to "return" the plummeting oil prices to their former
level.     The next minister, Viktor Kalyuzhnyy, enabled our country, while
not formally party to quotas or other OPEC instructions, to support the
measures to raise world oil prices (notably introducing export
restrictions, particularly on supplies to the market involved in
relatively cheap, nonrecurring deals).   Other countries not
participating in OPEC -- Mexico, Norway, and a number of Arab, South
American, and African states -- acted likewise.   As a result, the prices
this fall have reached a record level -- the highest in the last 15 years.
    But it is this "record" which threatens to backfire on all sides.
The United States and other Western countries have even been forced to
announce that they will imminently "release" oil (their own imported oil)
on to the market if the suppliers themselves will not do so.   According
to certain estimates, this will cause prices to fall by $8-10 a barrel.
This means that the execution of the 2001 Russian budget, which has a
$21-a-barrel price "factored" into it, could become difficult.
Although, according to the OECD (26 industrialized countries), a range of
$19-26 would suit Western countries.   In short, the lower it is the more
reliable.     In this situation Russia and other associate partners of OPEC
supported the decision the day before yesterday (10 September) to
increase the extraction of oil designed for export by 800,000 barrels a
day from 1 October, thereby warding off the threat of not only a collapse
of the world market but the freezing of many Western capitals.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 17 14:51:29 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 21:51:29 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Does BP mean 'Burning the Planet'?
Message-ID: <000101c020e9$0d871800$6a168cd4@mjones>

By Geoffrey Lean and Amy Anderson

Independent
3 September 2000

BP ? the oil giant that is expensively rebranding itself as a green
company ? is financing the election campaigns of most of the US congressmen
with the worst environmental records, an investigation by the Independent on
Sunday reveals.

It has contributed money over the past four years to two-thirds of the
senators and members of the House of Representatives who have voted against
every key green measure that has come before them, and failed to help most
of the legislators who have supported them.

The revelation will gravely embarrass the BP chairman, Sir John Browne ? who
has become something of a green hero over the past three years ? and add
fuel to the flames of a growing controversy about the rebranding exercise,
perhaps the most ambitious ever undertaken by a British company. The new
image will cost the company $100m (?69m) a year, not far short of what it
will be spending on solar power, the most striking of the new initiatives
that it is advertising.

Gone is the shield that the company has used as its symbol since the 1930s.
In its place is the so-called Helios mark, "a vibrant sunburst of green,
white and yellow" named after "the sun god of ancient Greece". But opponents
denounce the new emblem, which will gradually be introduced at the company's
28,000 service stations worldwide over the next four years, as a symbol of
hypocrisy and hype.

Even its critics admit that BP has a far better environmental record than
almost any other big oil company and is now undertaking a range of
pioneering green initiatives. But they point out that it is still increasing
oil exploration and production, and is heavily involved in exploiting two of
the world's most sensitive fields, in the Arctic and in the Atlantic west of
the Shetlands. Greenpeace says that its new slogan, Beyond Petroleum, should
instead be Burning the Planet.

The Independent on Sunday's revelations are being made despite obstruction
from BP, which refused to supply a list of the contributions it makes to US
politicians, although they have to be made public by law. "Why should I want
to do that?" said Yusuf Ibrahim, BP's spokesman in America, when asked to
provide the information early last week. Why indeed? The details, obtained
instead from the Federal Election Commission ? and compared with voting
records compiled by the League of Conservation Voters ? show that the
company's contributions conflict sharply with its squeaky-green image.

Over the last four years, it contributed to the election campaigns of 22 of
the 36 senators and 37 of the 55 representatives who achieved a zero per
cent rating from the league last year for voting against all the
environmental legislation that it monitored. By contrast, the company has
supported only two of the 38 representatives and two of the 11 senators who
scored a 100 per cent rating by voting in favour of all the measures in
1999.

Further analysis shows that three-quarters of the congressmen whose
campaigns have received the most money from BP over the last four years have
ratings of less than 11 per cent, and that most of them were scored at zero.
Among them are Senator Frank Murkowski, the Chairman of the Senate's Energy
and Natural Resources Committee, who has received $7000 despite having had a
zero per cent record every year since 1994, and Representative Don Young,
Chairman of the House Committee on Resources, who has had over $11,000,
though he has scored less than 10 per cent in every year over the same
period. Both Congressmen are from Alaska and are pressing for legislation to
open up the state's protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ? known as
America's Serengeti for the richness of its wildlife ? to drilling by oil
companies, including BP. The company has contributed similar sums to Senator
Trent Lott, the republican leader in the Senate, and Senator Don Nickles,
the chairman of its Energy Research, Development, Production and Regulation
Subcommittee. Lott has zero scores for six consecutive years and Nickles for
three, and both voted for opening up the wildlife refuge.

Analysis of voting on other specific issues reveals a similar pattern: BP
has contributed to the campaigns of 33 of the senators who voted against
increasing funding for renewable energy, and only 11 of those who voted for
it; it has helped 34 of those who blocked reforms to the way oil companies
receive royalties, and only nine of those who supported the
environmentalists' position.

Perhaps most strikingly, the company has helped to finance the campaigns of
34 of the 65 senators who successfully introduced a motion in 1997 to reject
any international agree- ment to combat global warming, though Sir John
Browne and BP have led industry attempts to persuade politicians to tackle
the the problem.

BP's spokesman in America refused even to hear the results of the
Independent on Sunday's investigation. "I have nothing to say about that,"
Mr Ibrahim interjected. "We are financing according to American law and we
are happy with what we are doing."

The revelations ? and BP's response to them ? will undermine the rebranding
exercise and genuine green initiatives that are being taken by the company.
Last month Sir John announced that BP would double its investment in solar
power to $500m over the next three years and aimed to make this a $1bn
business by 2007. It already has almost 20 per cent of the global market.

It is fitting 200 of its service stations with solar panels and will equip
all its new ones with them. It has promised to cut its own emissions of the
pollution that causes global warming by 10 per cent by 2010 and aims to sell
cleaner petrol in more than 40 cities around the world by the end of this
year.

Three years ago Sir John accepted the dangers of global warming and made his
company the first to break ranks with the oil industry's united front
against cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil
fuels. In April he joined leading environmentalists in giving one of this
year's Reith lectures. "The enlightened company," he said, "increasingly
recognises that there are good commercial reasons for being ahead of the
pack when it comes to issues to do with the environment."

But Greenpeace points out that Sir John also announced that he expected BP's
oil production to increase by 4 to 5 per cent per year, and gas production
by twice as much. And capital expenditure on fossil fuel exploration and
production will rise to $8bn a year, double what was spent in 1999.

BP is the only company taking oil from one of the world's most controversial
areas, the Atlantic Frontier, 100 miles west of the Shetlands. It is also
planning to become the first company to extract oil in the even more
sensitive Arctic Ocean, off the northern coast of Alaska, as well as backing
efforts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Rob Gueterbock, Greenpeace's climate and energy campaigner, says: "BP's
rebranding is a triumph of style over substance. At best it is misleading
its shareholders and customers; at worst it is engaged in blatant
hypocrisy."

BP responds: "The world still wants petroleum and we still aim to provide
it. But we are looking at the future, to a world that wants cleaner fuels
and solar power. 'Beyond Petroleum' describes not where we are now but where
we are looking to be."




From cburford at gn.apc.org  Mon Sep 18 00:33:44 2000
From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 07:33:44 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Russia's Place in World Oil Market Commented
  On in Context of OPEC
In-Reply-To: <000001c020e8$83ee2de0$6a168cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20000918073136.060ed4b0@pop.gn.apc.org>

At 21:47 17/09/00 +0100, you wrote:

>Rossiyskaya Gazeta [Russian governmental newspaper]
>
>September 12, 2000
>[translation for personal use only]
>Article by Aleksey Chichkin under the "Topic of the Day" rubric:
>"Oil as a Political Category"
>
>    The current fantastic world prices for oil are such
>that they could perfectly well provoke an energy crisis in the countries
>of the West similar to that which occurred in the mid-seventies.
>     Therefore, the industrial world, which advocates the so-called free
>market, craves just one thing -- stable price by any means.   The
>Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is capable of doing this.
>Although not on its own, but only if other major exporters and, in
>particular, Russia go along with its decisions.


OPEC countries are currently skirmishing with the west about what financial 
arrangement will compensate them for the time when oil supplies are 
exhausted. China backs this.

It is another factor over which Russia would have a common interest with OPEC.

Chris Burford

London




From shmage at pipeline.com  Sun Sep 17 22:41:55 2000
From: shmage at pipeline.com (Shane Mage)
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 23:41:55 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
Message-ID: <v01540b02b5eb4d15bbb6@[165.247.25.162]>

The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many refutations
of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:


                      " Device ups hydrogen energy from sunlight

                       Peter Weiss

                       Here's a recipe for a cleaner, healthier planet:
Take some water, add solar energy, extract
                       hydrogen, and use it to power fuel cells for running
cars and other machines. Then, collect their
                       water emissions and start the procedure again.

                       One look at the list of ingredients in today's fuel
cells, however, shows that this ideal isn't yet
                       being followed. Because processes that use sunlight
to extract hydrogen remain costly and
                       inefficient, fossil fuels still supply the hydrogen
in most fuel cells.

                       Hoping to break the fossil fuel habit, a team of
Israeli, German, and Japanese scientists has
                       created a device that boosts the efficiency of
solar-powered hydrogen extraction by 50 percent.

                       The group placed a photovoltaic cell on top of two
flat, finger-long electrodes. The combination
                       "is very efficient in converting solar energy [into
an electric current] but also provides nearly the
                       ideal voltage for splitting water" into hydrogen and
oxygen, says team leader Stuart Licht of the
                       Technion in Haifa, Israel. A water molecule splits,
or undergoes electrolysis, at only 1.23 volts.

                       Licht and his colleagues describe their device in
the Sept. 14 Journal of Physical Chemistry B.
                       The gadget converts sunlight to an electrolysis
current with 18.3 percent efficiency. In turn, the
                       current creates hydrogen gas as it passes through
acidic water.

                       The device is "showing the pathway towards higher
efficiencies for direct solar-to-hydrogen
                       production," comments John A. Turner of the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in
                       Golden, Colo. The newly achieved efficiency may
already be high enough for commercial
                       hydrogen generators to be feasible. "That still
needs to be figured out," Turner says.

                       In 1998, he and Oscar Khaselev, then also of NREL,
demonstrated a novel apparatus for
                       solar-to-hydrogen conversion (SN: 4/18/98, p. 246).
To achieve unprecedented efficiency, the
                       device used multiple layers of semiconductor
materials. The researchers arranged the layers to
                       form two active regions, or junctions, that would
absorb solar photons that dislodge electrons.
                       Some of the less energetic photons weren't captured
in the first junction but passed to the
                       second, where they generated more current.

                       The design gained an energy advantage by combining
solar electricity and water splitting into one
                       unit. Their cell's 12.4 percent efficiency-nearly
twice that of any previous solar-to-hydrogen
                       device-has held as the record until now.

                       Licht and his colleagues have improved upon that
pioneering effort in several crucial ways. In one
                       sense, the NREL device was all wet: It had to be
completely immersed in water to operate. That
                       feature forced the researchers to select
semiconductors that wouldn't break down in solution.

                       By keeping their stack of semiconductor layers high
and dry, Licht and his group were free to
                       optimize them for both converting sunlight to
electricity and water splitting. Their design permits a
                       low electrolysis current, which also reduces energy
waste.

                       Licht and his coworkers say that besides besting the
solar-to-hydrogen conversion record, their
                       work opens the way to efficiencies not considered
possible before. Using measured
                       photoelectric efficiencies of seven semiconductor
combinations not yet tested in hydrogen
                       generation, they predict maximum solar-to-hydrogen
conversion efficiencies of up to 31 percent.

                       Thermodynamics theory says the maximum could range
above 40 percent for a two-junction
                       converter, but no one has previously predicted
better than 24 percent performance for practical
                       devices, Turner says. Experimentally achieving the
new prediction "would be an accomplishment
                       indeed!" he adds."

Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you.....?

>It is said frequently and often nowadays that the future economy will be
>'hydrogen-driven'. Most of what is written on the subject shows signs  of
>being untouched by the human mind. For one thing, hydrogen is an
>energy-carrier, not an energy-source. You have to *manufacture* hydrogen,
>and it is an energy-intensive process, requiring huge amounts of
>electricity. Where will the electricity come from? One answer is natural
>gas, which in itself is hardly a real answer if you're talking about moving
>beyond fossil fuels that pour greenhouse gas into the air. And where will
>the natural gas come from? According to some petrogeologists, there is no
>shortage of natural gas, particularly in the USA. Eminent member of the
>American Association of Petroleum Geologists, "Skip" Hobbs recently assured
>the US Senate that the US has plenty of natural gas (his testimony is in the
>Crashlist message archive). But the reality is that existing gas reserves
>are depleting at an alarming, and unexpected rate; meanwhile the US
>Department of Energy assumes that a supply of 35 quads of natural gas p.a.
>will be found to meet expected demand by the year 2020; that is almost
>double existing US natural gas consumption. Most analysts think the target
>is unreachable. In short, natural gas will be (a) scarce and (b) much more
>expensive than it is today. Natural gas supplies 20 per cent of world energy
>(25% in the US). But to replace petroleum as the prime transportation fuel
>will mean finding *double* that amount: in the US it would mean finding
>perhaps 70 quads a year, and even Skip Hobbs isn't suggesting that is
>feasible.  But if all the yhpe and public optimism about fuel-cells is on
>track, that is exactly what WOULD have to be found. So someone is lying
>somewhere.
>
>Maybe the hydrogen can be found using *alternatives* to produce the
>necessary electricity? The alternatives comprise: nuclear, photovoltaics,
>wind and biomass. Together these alternatives today provide less than 5% of
>total US energy. Can they be ramped up?
>If alternatives CAN fill the gap left by declining oil, then both capitalism
>and the biosphere might be saved.
>
>In this scenario, hydrogen-driven fuel cells will be the motive-power source
>of the future; you'll even plug them into your home and power domestic
>electricity with them, so goes the hype which is repeated even by
>responsible and well respected people, for example people like legendary
>James Hansen, the Nasa scientist who practically invented the term 'global
>warming'. His most recent paper, "Global warming in the twenty-first
>century: An alternative scenario" (James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy,
>Andrew Lacis, and Valdar Oinas) (available from www.pnas.org for $5 or for
>free by writing offlist to me). This paper, published in August 2000, is
>already notorious because in it Hansen seems to backtrack on earlier
>global-warming doom-mongering. He is optimistic about reducing atmospheric
>CO2, mostly because of a new-found enthusiasm for technology. Hansen now
>beliecves that fuel cells and similar innovations will save the day:
>"Investments in technology to improve energy efficiency and develop
>nonfossil energy sources are also needed to slow the growth of CO2 emissions
>and expand future policy options," Hansen writes.
>
>Hansen is employed by NASA, which practically invented the things, but it is
>clear that when it comes to fuel-cells he doesn't know what he is talking
>about, and his new-found techno-optimism is misplaced: natural-gas (or
>methanol) powered fuel-cells cannot replace gasoline engines, and unluss
>there is some other way out, the 'hydrogen economy' is likely to be
>still-born, even assuming fuel-cells can *ever* be manufactured cheaply and
>in volume, which remains unproven.
>
>Enthusiasm for alternatives, borne largely of desperation, is widespread
>these days. Even James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that
>nuclear power is a possible, and necessary, alternative to fossil fuel, to
>judge from recent remarks of his (archived in the Crashlist).
>
>To replace the world's existing petroleum-based transportation fleets with
>hydrogen-powered systems (assuming this was technically or financially
>possible) will require the construction of around 25,000 new nuclear
>reactors. Oil demand today is about 75 million barrels per day, a power
>equivalent of 5 trillion watts. Supposing the nuclear plants were 40 percent
>efficient in transferring nuclear energy to gaseous hydrogen, that requires
>12.5 terawatts of electrciity-genertaing capacity. But hydrogen must be
>condensed somehow, and this raises the input power by, in the representative
>case of cooling hydrogen until it liquefies at ambient pressure, a factor
>close enough to 2. This entails an extra global capacity of 25 terawatts, ie
>about 25k conventional pressurised water reactors of 1 Gw output.
>
>Unfortunately, there is already a world shortage of exploitable uranium.
>Absent viable fusion technologies, such a massive increase in nuclear power
>generation is not feasible in resource terms (let alone safety terms).
>Whether such a massive construction of new nuclear power stations would be
>socially acceptable and/or politically feasible is a separate and
>interesting question.
>
>
>Others argue for photovoltaics. Actually we can take photovoltaics and
>biomass together, because both entail using available land (and possibly
>ocean) surface areas to capture solar energy fluxes. So far no technology
>exists (either by plant-based photosynthesis or silicon-based or other
>photovoltaic technology) which is capable of capturing enough solar energy
>to substitute for more than about 10 percent of today's use of fossil fuels.
>This leaves wind-power and some other mnore exotic methods (subsea turbines,
>geothermal). In all cases even the massive application of known technologies
>will provide orders of magnitude less energy than we get today from fossil
>fuels. In short, there is no way to make the transition to a non-fossil
>economy without massive social and economic upheaval and dislocation, even
>in the *best* case.
>
>Mark
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
>Marxism-Thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com
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From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 18 00:48:31 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 07:48:31 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] from Ed Yardeni
Message-ID: <000801c0213c$74fbfe80$490b063e@mjones>

http://www.yardeni.com

Excerpt From Latest GLOBAL PORTFOLIO STRATEGY:

POCKETS OF DEFLATION. With oil prices soaring and labor markets so tight, no
one seems to be concerned about deflation anymore. This was a concern during
the summer and fall of 1998, when the global financial crisis pushed Asia
into a severe recession and the price of oil fell close to $10 a barrel.
However, the forces of deflation have not been defeated completely. They are
still out there and may be quietly regrouping and gaining strength. We may
see them launch another assault on the global economy as soon as next year.
Clearly, Asia's amazing recovery last year and the global economic boom so
far this year averted deflation. This is most obvious in the performance of
the bond market, where 30-year Treasury yields fell to a low of 4.7% during
October 5, 1998, but then rebounded to6.8% earlier this year, during January
18. The bond yield is back down to 5.8% currently, but this is hardly a
solid indication that investors see a deflation risk again.

But aren't soaring oil prices inflationary? Won't the latest oil price shock
trigger reflation? In my opinion, the answer is no. Higher oil prices have
both an inflationary impact and a deflationary one. If globally competitive
markets make it difficult to pass through cost increases, then higher oil
prices act like a tax hike on consumer incomes and business earnings. US
consumers are currently paying $60 billion more, at an annual rate, for
their gasoline than at the start of last year. It's worse in Europe, where
government taxes on gasoline are already extremely high, and the euro price
of crude oil has quadrupled thanks to a tripling in the dollar price of oil
and 25% depreciation in the dollar value of the euro. No wonder the natives
are restless in Europe and gasoline tax revolts have spread spontaneously
throughout the region.

Yet, as I observed last week, despite the energy/euro shock in Euroland,
domestic price inflation remains remarkably tame in Euroland. The latest
data for August show the CPI inflation rates, on a year-over-year basis,
rising only 1.8% in both France and Germany. In Germany, domestic prices as
measured by the GDP price deflator were actually down 0.5% from a year ago
during the second quarter. It is competition and deregulation that have
unleashed the forces of deflation in Germany.

I have often in the past identified China as the epicenter of global
deflationary forces. A story in the September 11, 2000 issue of The Wall
Street Journal supports my view. It is titled "Japan Fights Domestic Price
Competition By Widely Expanding Trade With China." Product markets are
becoming more competitive faster than labor markets in Japan. Japan's GDP
price deflator is down1.8% from a year ago. So, Japanese businesses are
scrambling to lower their labor costs by producing more in China, where
labor costs are much lower. The US is also becoming increasingly hooked on
China. Indeed, our trade deficit with the Chinese is up from zero in 1988 to
$75 billion over the past 12 months through June. This nearly matches our
$80 billion trade deficit with Japan. These two countries account for40% of
our trade deficit. In Europe, competition and deregulation are keeping
inflation subdued in the face of a weak euro and soaring energy prices. In
the US, a strong dollar and soaring non-oil imports are keeping a lid on
inflation. So are falling US unit labor costs, as productivity gains surpass
compensation increases.

What about the inflationary consequences of soaring oil prices? Is the worst
over, or just ahead? I believe that market forces will work. Higher prices
are likely to boost production. OPEC is close to capacity constraints, but
could probably pump another3 million barrels a day. If they don't boost
production, high crude oil prices are bound to stimulate more non-OPEC
output, which even now exceeds OPEC's output by 10 million barrels a day.
Contrary to popular myth, OPEC does not have a monopoly on the production of
crude oil.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 18 00:46:27 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 07:46:27 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] RE: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
In-Reply-To: <v01540b01b5eb4c8198d6@[165.247.25.162]>
Message-ID: <000701c0213c$2b393e20$490b063e@mjones>

Shane Mage wrote:
>
>
> The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many refutations
> of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:

There is no evidence that this system even pays back the fossil energy used
to manufacture it (let alone develop it). Without more detail it's hard to
judge but these efficiencies suggest it is still a net energy sink (not
source).

If you think this is the answer, tell BP, who plan to spend $500m on
alternatives each year (less than their forecourt publicty budget) but $8bn
researching new ways of extracting the last oil.

Photovoltaics, for well-known reasons, still do not offer an alternative to
fossil. If they did, people who read this sort of article and believed it
would see the greatest marketing opportunity in the history of the world,
give up their day jobs and soon be the Rockefellers of the future.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 18 01:34:14 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 08:34:14 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] other views
Message-ID: <000901c02142$d87b6ee0$490b063e@mjones>

One or two people on Doug Henwood's LBO-talk list have begun to notice that
something happened last week. (The 'LBO' stands for 'Left Business
Observer', a newsletter published by Henwood, so you might reasonably expect
them to be aware of things like Opec and oil prices. Mostly, you would be
disappointed.)

Here is a comment from LBO-talk on my own remarks about alternatives, which
was crossposted to LBO.



Subject: Alternative Fuels
From: Michael Ferro (mferro at seanet.com)
Date: Sun Sep 17 2000 - 17:02:59 EDT


sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Next message: Tom Lehman: "Re: Fwd: Look for the Union Label"
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Carrol Cox wrote:


>Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 11:27:24 -0500
>From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>Subject: [Fwd: [CrashList] Why 'alternatives' are no alternative]


>Mark's extended study of and commentary on the energy
>problem are of immense importance. I think the following post on
>alternative energy sources is worth careful consideration.


>Carrol


>- -------- Original Message --------
>Subject: [CrashList] Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
>Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 10:38:47 +0100
>From: Mark Jones <jones118 at lineone.net>
>Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
>To: crl <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>,"Marxism-Thaxis at Lists.
>wpublish. Com" <marxism-thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com>

>>>>>>beginquote
>It is said frequently and often nowadays that the future economy will be
>'hydrogen-driven'. Most of what is written on the subject shows signs
>of
>being untouched by the human mind. For one thing, hydrogen is an
>energy-carrier, not an energy-source. You have to *manufacture*
>hydrogen,
>and it is an energy-intensive process, requiring huge amounts of
>electricity. Where will the electricity come from?


Unmentioned in this discussion is the potential for using energy much more
efficiently than at present. There are countless examples of this potential,
but for illustrative purposes consider the single-occupant of the Ford
Expedition SUV traveling the usual two-mile trip in a vehicle other than the
5000 lb. 300 hp. Expedition: to wit, something more like a covered
wheelchair powered by an efficient weed-eater motor.


On the West Coast there was over twenty years ago at least one outstanding
example of this increased-efficiency thinking. Utilities were forced to buy
insulating covers for their customers rather than build new power plants.
Some partly-built nuclear plants were abandoned as a result of
this thinking.


I was involved several years ago in a similar effort regarding
transportation in the four-county region abutting Puget Sound (near
Seattle). Our econometrician was the same guy who did the model for the
utility-oriented effort mentioned above. Our least-cost/full-cost model
suggested that the best use of a billion transportation dollars was in
building bike paths in every town in four counties. An "energy-efficient"
public transit system was way behind. <<endquote

Now, I didn't discuss efficiency because we were talking about the alleged
'alternatives' to fossil (PV's and the like) and 'efficiency' is not
strictly speaking an alternative. In fact, this is actually a much bigger
topic than 'alternatives' if only because the so-called 'alternatives' are
mostly pie-in-the-sky, whereas looking for more efficiency and better
conservation are actually basic to what capitalism has *always* been doing.
Today, Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute are continuing the
process and thera are many appraoched to taking the energy and raw material
content out of production.
[for more see www.natcap.org ]


Efficiency gains are not tangential to what capitalism does, they are the
heart of accumulation whose main motor is increased factory productivity. So
the idea that there is something 'new' to discuss here, misses the point.
And equally, the idea that 'efficiency gains' and conservation could save
capitalism from the effects of energy shortages, is also wrong. The question
of whether there will be *energy deficits* is also a separate one. According
to Doug Henwood and other economists such as Morris Adelman, there is no
shortage of oil and there never will be a shortage of oil; LBO-talk's own
former oil economist, Greg Nowell, even assured me that 'depletion theories'
(such as the Hubbert Peak theory) are 'junk'. (Shortly afterwards, Greg
changed his career-path and is no longer answering questions about oil).

Like I say, increased efficiency is an old game. Energy inputs per unit of
GDP have fallen continuously since the Industrial Revolution began in
England in the 1750s. But overall growth of population, energy-consumption
and the world-economy have continuously outstripped increased efficiency.
Today's attempts at 'dematerialising' production and 'virtualising' the
system, substituting networks for much of traditional economic activity, are
only twists in an old saga. Today's economies are orders of magnitude more
energy efficient than even 30 years ago. But the net result is that today's
American uses more energy per capita than ever before. There is great scope
for improvement; the US is energy profligate and could easily reduce
consumption by half without noticing too many lifestyle changes.

But even if the US did cut energy use by half that won't solve the energy
crisis.

The world's original endowment of oil is smaller than people suppose. To get
an idea just how small, try to visualise it as follows. If all the
recoverable oil could be formed into a cube, its edges would be a little
over four miles long. The cube will contain somewhere between 230 and 350
trillion tonnes . It took more than 100 million years to create, and we
shall have used it up in two centuries. Oil is important not just because
the size of its contribution (it provides 38 percent of marketed energy),
but also because of its convenient form and high caloric value.

Much is made of how economies become more energy efficient, the supposition
being that economic growth has somehow become 'delinked' from energy use.
Thus in 1961 it took the US economy 180kg of oil-equivalent  to produce $100
of GNP. By 1991 the energy requirement for $100 GNP had fallen to only 36kg
oil-equivalent. In Japan the figues are 145 kg (1961) and 13 kg (1991). In
the core EU the energy-input per $100/GNP fell from 165 to 19 in the same
period. But in 1991 Poland still required 155kg of oil-equivalent to produce
$100 of GNP. This was partly because of inefficienct communist economic
management, but mostly because Poland used low-grade brwon coal. It is true
that in general we have learned to use energy better, but the idea that this
means that 'technology will always provide an answer', that what the
econiomists call 'substitutability' will apply, and that we shall easily
escape from looming energy deficits, is wholly false.  Increases in energy
efficiency have mostly come about because we have had access to better kinds
of energy. The improvement in energy/GDP ratios is mostly due to the
transition from coal to oil.

The fallacy which had led to public over-optimism about the energy future
was pointed out at the time of the first oil shock by the economist,
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Writing in 1975, Georgescu-Roegen said that:

"economic history confirms a rather elementary fact -- the fact that the
great strides in technological progress have generally been touched off by a
discovery of how to use a new kind of accessible energy. On the other hand,
a great stride in technological progress cannot materialize unless the
corresponding innovation is followed by a great mineralogical expansion.
Even a substantial increase in the efficiency of the use of gasoline as fuel
would pale in comparison with a manifold increase of the known, rich oil
fields.

"This sort of expansion is what has happened during the last one hundred
years. We have struck oil and discovered new coal and gas deposits in a far
greater proportion than we could use  during the same period. Still more
important, all mineralogical discoveries have included a substantial
proportion of easily accessible resources. This exceptional bonanza by
itself has sufficed to lower the real cost of bringing mineral resources in
situ to the surface. Energy of mineral source thus becoming cheaper,
substitution innovations have caused the ratio of labor to net output to
decline. Capital also must have evolved toward forms which cost less but use
more energy to achieve the same result. What has happened during this period
is a modification of the cost structure, the flow factors being increased
and the fund factors decreased. By examining, therefore, only the relative
variations of the fund factors during a period of exceptional mineral
bonanza, we cannot prove either that the unitary total cost will always
follow a declining trend or that the continuous progress of technology
renders accessible resources almost inexhaustible."

But economics has indeed restricted itself to the 'fund factors' and assumed
that the flows will be inexhaustible. They will not.
"Little doubt is thus left about the fact that the theses examined in this
section are anchored in a deep-lying belief in mankind's immortality,"
Georgescu-Roegen continued.  The act of faith which we are required to have
in science and technology displays irrational anxiety and religious escapism
in the face of looming disaster.  I should put it into some kind of context
by referring to the more commonly understood "pathetic fallacy." This is a
literary technique which invests in non-living objects human behavior or
feelings. For example:

O hear my prayers, harvest moon
Return to me my girl-friend June
Or else at you I will throw my deadly harpoon

Blind faith in humankind's ability to escape the inviolable circumstances of
life and death is a form of the pathetic fallacy, in which we arrogate to
ourselves the superhuman attributes we perceive in natural forces.
Unfortunately we cannot escape the laws of physics so easily. Our ability to
make use of the resource-bonanza of the past two centuries has created an
economy which is adapted to doing to doing more of the same, and
particularly ill-adapted to coping with the reverse situation, when the
resources run out.

Today the oil industry has entered a heroic, final, stage of exploration.
Financial reorganisation and market deregulation has gone hand in hand with
high technology. Expro teams now mount nuclear magnetic resonance imagers on
the drillbits, which snake around under the ground like serpents sniffing
out every last dreg of oil. And they are able to do this in extreme
conditions such as force 10 storms off the Shetland Isles in the North
Atlantic oil frontier, or in the Russian Arctic's ferocious storms.  But
this technological heroism is financed in energy-terms by a cross-subsidy of
oil costing a few cents a barrle and coming from the vast but declining
Persian Gulf fields. In turn, this expensive energy from inaccessible and
difficult offshore fields, is used to glut markets and force Persian Guld
prices to new historica lows.  In turn, this expensive energy from
inaccessible and difficult offshore fields, is used to glut markets and
force Persian Gulf prices to new historica lows. The last horizon of oil is
an Alice-in-Wonderland mirror, where the accelerating race towards final
depletion takes the surreal form of price-collapse and glutted markets
alternating with sudden price spikes.

The financial press reports bullishly that oil is plentiful, but the truth
is different and the oil corps know it is. Temporary low prices should fool
no-one. They always go with economic crisis. The $10/bbl of 1997 went with
the Asian meltdown. Future lows will happen because of much wrose
recessions - not because oil has suddenly become 'plentiful'.

The modern oil industry is a far cry from its early origins among the
wildcatters of Texas and Baku. The days are long gone when a couple of
roustabouts could fall out of a Houston bar and find oil with little more
than a shovel. Meanwhile, the market continues to grow, and oilmen must find
seventy five million barrels a day to fill it.


Mark Jones




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 18 04:22:58 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 11:22:58 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Doug Henwood's new book.
Message-ID: <000b01c0215a$6ae15760$490b063e@mjones>

If any Lister has got a preview copy of Henwood's new book 'A New Economy?'
I should be grateful for the chance to see it, please write me offlist.

Mark Jones




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 18 04:22:42 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 11:22:42 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Martha Gimenez
Message-ID: <000a01c0215a$60ed1fa0$490b063e@mjones>

[I did a serious disservice to Martha Gimenez recently. In a quite
unpardonable way I subjected her to an ad hominem attack - that it was
during a heated debate was no excuse - and I refused to take her work
seriously. I am glad to take this opportunity to apologise publicly to
Martha Gimenez, who is an outstanding Marxist and feminist thinker and
activist. This latest essay of Gimenez shows why I was wrong.

We are going to be talking about gender issues in relation to the Crash.

Mark Jones]


          MARXIST FEMINISM/MATERIALIST FEMINISM

     It was possible, in the heady days of the Women's Liberation
Movement, to identify four main currents within feminist thought;
Liberal (concerned with attaining economic and political equality
within the context of capitalism); Radical (focused on men and
patriarchy as the main causes of the oppression of women);
Socialist (critical of capitalism and Marxism,  so much so that
avoidance of Marxism's alleged reductionisms resulted in dual
systems theories postulating various forms of interaction between
capitalism and patriarchy); and Marxist Feminism (a theoretical
position held by relatively few feminists in the U. S. -- myself
included -- which sought to develop the potential of Marxist theory
to understand the capitalist sources of the oppression of women).

     These are, of course, oversimplified descriptions of a rich
and complex body of literature which, however, reflected important
theoretical, political and social cleavages among women that
continue to this date. Divisions in feminist thought multiplied  as
the effects of post-structuralist and post-modern theorizing merged
with grass roots challenges to a feminism perceived as the
expression of the needs and concerns of middle and upper middle
class white, "First World" women.  In the process, the subject of
feminism became increasingly difficult to define, as the post-
modern critique of "woman" as an essentialist category  together
with critiques grounded in racial, ethnic, sexual preference and
national origin differences resulted in a seemingly never ending
proliferation of "subject positions," "identities," and "voices."
Cultural and identity politics replaced the early focus on
capitalism and (among Marxist feminists primarily) class divisions
among women;  today class has been reduced to another "ism;" i.e.,
to another form oppression which, together with gender and race
integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to
include in theorizing and research though, to my knowledge,
theorizing about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g.,
interweaving, interaction, interconnection etc.).

     It was, therefore, very interesting to me to read a call for
papers for an edited book on Materialist Feminism.  The description
of Materialist Feminism put forth by the editors, Chrys Ingraham
and Rosemary Hennessy, was to me indistinguishable from Marxist
Feminism.  This seemed such a promising development in feminist
theory that I proceeded to invite the editors to join me in
creating an electronic discussion list on Materialist Feminism,
MatFem.  Initially, I thought that Materialist Feminism was simply
another way of referring to Marxist Feminism, but I was mistaken;
the two are, to some extent, distinct forms of feminist theorizing.
There is, however, such similarities between Materialist and
Marxist Feminist thought in some feminists' work that some degree
of confusion between the two is to be expected.

     My goal, in this short introduction (short response to Andy's
question) is simply to explore the differences and the similarities
between these two important currents within feminist theory. This
is not an easy task;  theorists who self-identify as materialist or
as marxist feminists differ in their understanding of what those
descriptive labels mean and, consequently, the kind of knowledges
they produce.  And, depending on their theoretical allegiances and
self-understanding within the field, feminists may differ in their
classification of other feminists works, so that clear lines of
theoretical demarcation between and within these two umbrella terms
are somewhat difficult to establish.  Take, for example, Lise
Vogel's work.  I always considered her a Marxist Feminist because,
unlike Socialist Feminists (whose avoidance of Marx's alleged
reductionisms led them to postulate ahistorical theories of
patriarchy), she took Marxism seriously and developed her analysis
of reproduction as a basis for the oppression of women firmly
within the Marxist tradition.  But her recent book's subtitle (a
collection of previously published essays), is "Essays for a
Materialist Feminism;"  self-identifying as a socialist feminist,
she states that socialist feminists "sought to replace the
socialist tradition's theorizing about the woman question with a
'materialist' understanding of women's oppression" (Vogel, 1995, p.
xi). This is certainly news to me; Socialist Feminism's rejection
of Marx's and Marxism's "reductionism" lead to the deliberate
effort to ground "patriarchy" outside the mode of production and,
consequently and from the standpoint of Marxist theory, outside
history.  Materialism, Vogel tells us,  was used to highlight the
key role of production, including domestic production, in
understanding the conditions leading to the oppression of women.
(But wasn't Engels' analysis materialist? and didn't Marxist
Feminists [Margaret Benston and Peggy Morton dome to mind) explore
the ways production -- public and domestic -- oppressed and
exploited women?)  Materialism was also used as "a flag," to
situate Socialist Feminism within feminist thought and within the
left;  materialist feminism, consequently cannot be reduced to a
trend in cultural studies, as some literary critics would prefer
(Vogel, 1995, xii).

     These brief comments about Vogel's understanding of
Materialist Feminism highlight some of its problematic aspects  as
a term intended to identify a specific trend within feminist
theory.  It can blur, as it does in this instance,  the qualitative
differences that existed and continue to exist between Socialist
Feminism, the dominant strand of feminist thought in the U.S.
during the late 1960s and 1970s, and the marginalized Marxist
Feminism.  I am not imputing such motivations to Lise Vogel;  I am
pointing out the effects of such an interpretation of U.S.
Socialist Feminism which, despite the use of Marxist terms and
references to capitalism, developed, theoretically, as a sort of
feminist abstract negation of Marxism.  Other feminists, for
different reasons, would also disagree with Vogel's interpretation;
for example, for Toril Moi and Janice Radway, the relationship
between Socialist Feminism and Materialist Feminism "is far from
clear" (Moi and Radway, 1994: 749).  Acknowledging the problematic
nature of the term, in a special issue of The South Atlantic
Quarterly dedicated to this topic they do not offer a theory of
Materialist Feminism, nor a clear definition of the term.
Presumably, the articles included in this issue will give the
reader the elements necessary to define the term for herself
because all the authors "share a commitment to concrete historical
and cultural analysis, and to feminism understood as an
'emancipatory narrative'"(Moi and Radway, 1994:750).  One of these
authors, Jennifer Wicke, defines it as follows: "a feminism that
insists on examining the material conditions under which social
arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop...
materialist feminism avoids seeing this (gender hierarchy) as the
effect of a singular....patriarchy and instead gauges the web of
social and psychic relations that make up a material, historical
moment" (Wicke, 1994: 751);"...materialist feminism argues that
material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in the social
production of gender and assays the different ways in which women
collaborate and participate in these productions"... "there are
areas of material interest in the fact hat women can bear
children... Materialist feminism... is less likely than social
constructionism to be embarrassed by the occasional material
importance of sex differences.."(Wicke, 1994: 758-759).

     Insistence on the importance of material conditions, the
material historical moments as a complex of social relations which
include and influence gender hierarchy, the materiality of the body
and its sexual, reproductive and other biological functions remain,
however, abstract pronouncements which unavoidably lead to an
empiricist focus on the immediately given.  There is no theory of
history or of social relations or of the production of gender
hierarchies that could give guidance about the meaning of whatever
it is observed in a given "material historical moment."

     Landry and MacLean, authors of MATERIALIST FEMINISMS (1993),
tell us that theirs is a book "about feminism and Marxism" in which
they examine the debates between feminism and Marxism in the U.S.
and Britain and explore the implications of those debates for
literary and cultural theory.  The terrain of those early debates,
which were aimed at a possible integration or synthesis between
Marxism and feminism, shifted due to the emergence of identity
politics,  concern with postcolonialism, sexuality, race,
nationalism, etc.,  and the impact of postmodernism and post-
structuralism. The new terrain has to do with the "construction of
a materialist analysis of culture informed by and responsive to the
concerns of women, as well as people of color and other
marginalized groups" (Landry and MacLean, 1993: ix-x).  For Landry
and Maclean, Materialist Feminism is a "critical reading
practice...the critical investigation, or reading in the strong
sense, of the artifacts of culture and social history, including
literary and artistic texts, archival documents, and works of
theory... (is) a potential site of political contestation through
critique, not through the constant reiteration of home-truths"
(ibid, pp. x-xi).  Theirs is a "deconstructive materialist feminist
perspective" (ibid, p. xiii).  But what, precisely, does
materialist mean in this context?  What theory of history and what
politics inform this critique?  Although they define materialism in
a philosophical and moral sense, and bring up the difference
between mechanical or "vulgar"materialism and historical
materialism, there is no definition of what materialism means when
linked to feminism.  Cultural materialism, as developed in Raymond
William's work, is presented as a remedy or supplement to Marx's
historical materialism. There is, according to Williams, an
"indissoluble connection between material production, political and
cultural institutions and activity, and consciousness ... Language
is practical consciousness, a way of thinking and acting in the
world that has material consequences (ibid, p. 5). Williams, they
point out, "strives to put human subjects as agents of culture back
into materialist debate" (ibid, p. 5).

     The implications of these statements is that "humans as agents
of culture" are not present in historical materialism and that
Marx's views on the relationship between material conditions,
language, and consciousness are insufficient.  But anyone familiar
with Marx's work knows that this is not the case.  In fact, it is
Marx who wrote that "language is practical consciousness" and
posited language as the matter that burdens "spirit" from the very
start, for consciousness is always and from the very first a social
product (Marx, [1845-46] 1994, p.117).

     Landry and Maclean present an account of the development of
feminist thought from the late 1960s to the present divided in
three moments:  the encounters and debates between marxism and
feminism in Britain and the U.S.; the institutionalization and
commodification of feminism; and "deconstructive materialist
feminism." These are "three moments of materialist feminism" (ibid,
p.15), a very interesting statement that suggest that Materialist
Feminism -- a rather problematic and elusive concept which
reflects, in my view, postmodern sensibilities about culture and
about the subject of feminism -- had always been there, from the
very beginning, just waiting to be discovered.  Is that really the
case?  If so,  what is this materialism that lurked under the
variety of feminist theories produced on both sides of the Atlantic
since the late 1960s?  Does reference to "material conditions" in
general or to "the material conditions of the oppression of women"
suffice as a basis for constructing a new theoretical framework,
qualitatively different from a Marxist Feminism? If so, how?  The
authors argue that feminist theories focused exclusively on gender
and dual systems theories that bring together gender and class
analysis face methodological and political problems that
"deconstructive reading practices can help solve;" they propose
"the articulation of discontinuous movements, materialism and
feminism, an articulation that takes the political claims of
deconstruction seriously... deconstruction as tool of political
critique (ibid, p. 12-13).  But isn't the linking
between deconstruction and Marxism what gives it its critical edge?
It is in the conclusion that the authors, aiming to demonstrate
that materialism is not an alias for Marxism,  outline the
difference between Marxist Feminism and Materialist Feminism
as follows:

"Marxist feminism holds class contradictions and class analysis
central, and has tried various ways of working an analysis of
gender oppression around this central contradiction. In addition to
class contradictions and contradictions within gender ideology...
we are arguing that materialist feminism should recognize as
material other contradictions as well. These contradictions also
have histories, operate in ideologies, and are grounded in material
bases and effects.... they should be granted material weight in
social and literary analysis calling itself materialist.... these
categories would include...ideologies of race, sexuality,
imperialism and colonialism and anthropocentrism, with their
accompanying radical critiques" (ibid, p. 229).

     While this is helpful to understand what self-identified
materialist feminists mean when they refer to their framework,
it does not shed light on the meaning of material base, material
effect, material weight.  The main concept, materialism, remains
undefined and references to ideologies, exploitation, imperialism,
oppression, colonialism, etc. confirm precisely that which the
authors intended to dispel:  materialism would seem to be an alias
for Marxism.

     Rosemary Hennessy (1993) traces the origins of Materialist
Feminism in the work of British and French feminists who preferred
the term materialist feminism to Marxist feminism because, in their
view, Marxism had to be transformed to be able to explain the
sexual division of labor (Beechey, 1977: 61, cited in Kuhn and
Wolpe, 1978: 8). In the 1970s, Hennessy states, Marxism was
inadequate to the task because of its class bias and focus on
production, while feminism was also problematic due to its
essentialist and idealist concept of woman; this is why materialist
feminism emerged as a positive alternative both to Marxism and
feminism (Hennessy, 1993: xii).  The combined effects of the
postmodern critique of the empirical self and the criticisms voiced
by women who did not see themselves included in the generic woman
subject of academic feminist theorizing resulted, in the 1990s, in
materialist feminist analyses that "problematize 'woman' as an
obvious and homogeneous empirical entity in order to explore how
'woman' as a discursive category is historically constructed and
traversed by more than one differential axis" (Hennessy, 1993:
xii).  Furthermore, Hennessy argues, despite the postmodern
rejection of totalities and theoretical analyses of social systems,
materialist feminists need to hold on to the critique of the
totalities which affect women's lives: patriarchy and capitalism.
Women's lives are every where affected by world capitalism and
patriarchy and it would be politically self-defeating to replace
that critique with localized, fragmented political strategies and
a perception of social reality as characterized by a logic of
contingency.

     Hennessy's views on the characteristics of Materislist
Feminism emerge through her critical engagement with the works of
Laclau and Mouffe, Foucault, Kristeva and other theorists of the
postmodern.  Materialist Feminism is a "way of reading" that
rejects the dominant pluralist paradigms and logics of contingency
and seeks to establish the connections between the discursively
constructed differentiated subjectivities that have replaced the
generic "woman" in feminist theorizing, and the hierarchies of
inequality that exploit and oppress women.  Subjectivities, in
other words, cannot be understood in isolation from systemically
organized totalities.   Materialist Feminism, as a reading
practice, is also a way of explaining or re-writing and making
sense of the world and, as such, influences reality through the
knowledges it produces about the subject and her social context.
Discourse and knowledge have materiality in their effects; one of
the material effects of discourse is the construction of the
subject but this subject is traversed by differences grounded in
hierarchies of inequality which are not local or contingent but
historical and systemic, such as patriarchy and capitalism.
Difference, consequently, is not mere plurality but inequality.
The problem of the material relationship between language,
discourse, and the social or between the discursive (feminist
theory) and the non-discursive (women's lives divided by
exploitative and oppressive social relations) can be resolved
through the conceptualization of discourse as ideology . A theory
of ideology presupposes a theory of the social and this theory,
which informs Hennessy's critical reading of postmodern theories of
the subject, discourse, positionality, language, etc., is what she
calls a "global analytic" which, in light of her references to
multinational capitalism, the international division of labor,
overdetermined economic, political and cultural practices, etc, is
at the very least a kind of postmodern Marxism.  But references to
historical materialism, and Althusser's theory of ideology and the
notion of symptomatic reading are so important in the development
of her arguments that one wonders about her hesitation to name Marx
and historical materialism as the theory of the social underlying
her critique of the postmodern logic of contingency; i.e., the
theory of capitalism, the totality she so often mentions together
with patriarchy as sources of the exploitation and oppression of
women and as the basis for the "axis of differences" that traverse
the discursive category "woman."  To sum up, Hennessy's version of
Materialist Feminism is a blend of post-marxism and postmodern
theories of the subject and a source of "readings" and "re-
writings" which rescue postmodern categories of analysis (subject,
discourse, difference) from the conservative limbo of contingency,
localism and pluralism to historicize them or contextualizing them
by connecting them to their systemic material basis in capitalism
and patriarchy.  This is made possible by understanding discourse
as ideology and linking ideology to its material base in the
"global analytic."

     In Hennessy's analysis, historical materialism seems like an
ever present but muted shadow, latent under terms such as totality,
systemic, and global analytic. However, in the introduction to
MATERIALIST FEMINISM: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's
Lives (1997), written with her co-editor, Chrys Ingraham, there is
a clear, unambiguous return to historical materialism, a
recognition of its irreplaceable importance for feminist theory and
politics. This introduction, entitled "Reclaiming Anticapitalist
Feminism," is a critique of the dominant feminist concern with
culture, identity and difference considered in isolation from any
systemic understanding of the social forces that affect women's
lives, and a critique of an academic feminism that has marginalized
and disparaged the knowledges produced by the engagement of
feminists with Marxism and their contributions to feminist
scholarship and to the political mobilization of women.  More
importantly, this introduction is a celebration of Marxist Feminism
whose premises and insights have been consistently "misread,
distorted, or buried under the weight of a flourishing postmodern
cultural politics" (ibid, p.5).  They point out that, whatever the
name of the product of feminists efforts to grapple with historical
materialism (marxist feminism, socialist feminism or materialist
feminism), these are names that signal theoretical differences and
emphases but which together indicate the recognition of historical
materialism as the source of emancipatory knowledge required for
the success of the feminist project.  In this introduction,
materialist feminism becomes a term used interchangeably with
marxist feminism, with the latter being the most prominently
displayed.  The authors draw a clear line between the cultural
materialism that characterizes the work of post-marxist feminists
who, having rejected historical materialism,  analyze cultural,
ideological and political practices in isolation from their
material base in capitalism, and materialist feminism (i.e.,
marxist or socialist feminism) which is firmly grounded in
historical materialism and links the success of feminist struggles
to the success of anticapitalist struggles; "unlike cultural
feminists, materialist, socialist and marxist feminists do not see
culture as the whole of social life but rather as only one arena of
social production and therefore as only one area of feminist
struggle" (ibid, p. 7).  The authors differentiate materialist
feminism from marxist feminism by indicating that it is the end
result of several discourses (historical materialism, marxist and
radical feminism, and postmodern and psychoanalytic theories of
meaning and subjectivity) among which the postmodern input, in
their view, is the source of its defining characteristics.
Nevertheless, in the last paragraphs of the introduction there is
a return to the discussion of marxist feminism, its critiques of
the idealist features of postmodernism and the differences between
the postmodern and the historical materialist or marxist analyses
of representations of identity.  But, they point out, theoretical
conflicts do not occur in isolation from class conflicts and the
latter affect the divisions among professional feminists and their
class allegiances.  Feminists are divided in their attitudes
towards capitalism and their understanding of the material
conditions of oppression;  to be a feminist is not necessarily to
be anticapitalist and to be a materialist feminist is not
equivalent to being socialist or even critical of the status quo.
In fact, "work that claims the signature "materialist feminism"
shares much in common with cultural feminism, in that it does not
set out to explain or change the material realities that link
women's oppression to class" (ibid, p.9).  Marxist feminism, on the
other hand, does make the connection between the oppression of
women and capitalism and this is why the purpose of their book,
according to the authors, is "to reinsert into materialist feminism
-- especially in those overdeveloped sectors where this collection
will be most widely read -- those (untimely) marxist feminist
knowledges that the drift to cultural politics in postmodern
feminism has suppressed.  It is our hope that in so doing this
project will contribute to the emergence of feminisms' third wave
and its revival as a critical force for transformative social
change (ibid, p. 9).

     In light of the above, given the inherent ambiguity of the
term Materialist Feminism, shouldn't it be more theoretically
adequate and politically fruitful to return to Marxist Feminism?
Is the effort of struggling to redefine Materialist Feminism by
reinserting Marxist Feminist knowledges a worthwhile endeavor?
How important is it to broaden the notion of Materialist Feminism
to include Marxist Feminist contents?  Perhaps the political
climate inside and outside the academy is one where Marxism is so
discredited that Marxist Feminists are likely to find more
acceptance and legitimacy by claiming Materialist Feminism as their
theoretical orientation.  I do not in anyway impute this motivation
to Ingraham and Hennessy whose introduction to their book is openly
Marxist.  In fact, after I read it and looked over the table of
contents I thought a more adequate title for the book would have
been Marxist Feminism.  And anyone familiar with historical
materialism can appreciate the sophisticated Marxist foundation of
Hennessy's superbly argued book.  In my view, as the ruthlessness
of the world market intensifies the exploitation of all working
people among which women are the most vulnerable and the most
oppressed, the time has come not just to retrieve the Marxist
heritage in feminist thought but to expand Marxist Feminist theory
in ways that both incorporate and transcend the  contributions of
postmodern theorizing.

     The justification for using Materialist Feminism rather than
Marxist Feminism is the alleged insufficiency of Marxist Theory for
adequately explaining the oppression of women.  Lurking behind the
repeated statements about the the shortcomings of Marxism there is
an economistic and undialectical understanding of Marx and Marxist
theory.  That Marx may not have addressed issues that 20th century
feminists consider important is not a sufficient condition to
invalidate Marx's methodology as well as the potential of his
theory of capitalism to help us understand the conditions that
oppress women. But regardless of those pronouncements, it is
fascinating, in retrospect, to read the theory produced by self-
defined Materialist Feminists and realize that they are actually
using and developing Marxist theory in ways that belie statements
about its inherent shortcomings.  And it is important to know how
Kuhn and Wolpe, authors of FEMINISM AND MATERIALISM (1978) define
the term materialism;  they adopted Engels' definition of the term:
     "According to the materialist conception, the determining
     factor in history is, in the final instance, the production
     and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a
     twofold character:  on the one side, the production of the
     means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the
     tools necessary for that production;  on the other side,
     the production of human beings themselves, the propagation
     of the species" (Engels, [1883] 1972,   p.71)(Kuhn and Wolpe,
     1978: 7).
Kuhn, Wolpe and the contributors to their book in various ways
expanded the scope of historical materialism to produce new
knowledges about the oppression of women under capitalism. But
materialist feminism, a term which may have been useful in the past
might have lost its effectivity today.  How useful is it to broaden
the meaning of Materialist Feminism today to encompass Marxist
Feminism if, at the same time,  the term is claimed by cultural
materialists whose views are profoundly anti-marxist?  How will the
new generations learn about the theoretical and political
importance of historical materialism for women if historical
materialist analysis is subsumed under the Materialist Feminist
label?  Doesn't this situation contribute to the marginalization of
scholars who continue to self-identify as Marxist Feminists?  I
understand Marxist Feminism as the body of theory produced by
feminists who, adopting the logic of analysis of historical
materialism, expand the scope of the theory while critically
incorporating useful insights and knowledges from non-marxist
theorizing, just as Marx grappled with the discoveries of the
classical economists and their shortcomings. Why should this
theoretical enterprise present itself under a different name,
especially one likely to elicit some degree of confusion among the
younger generations of feminists? Furthermore, the political cost
of doing, essentially, Marxist theorizing under the banner of
Materialist Feminism is likely to be exceedingly high. Why?
Because,  by overstressing the "materialist" aspect in historical
materialism it can contribute justify the dominant stereotypes
about Marxism: its materialism, meaning its alleged anti-agency,
anti-human, deterministic, reductionist limitations.

     The answers to these questions are political and will come
from feminists practices and dialogue and from the effects of the
intensification of capitalist rule upon both first and third world
peoples.  In the meantime, it is important to know that Marxist and
some works within Materialist Feminism share fundamental
theoretical assumptions and political goals.

References

Rosemary Hennessy, MATERIALIST FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF
     DISCOURSE. Routledge, 1993.

Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds., MATERIALIST FEMINISM.
     A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives. Routledge,
     1997.

Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds., FEMINISM AND MATERIALISM.
     Women and Modes of Production. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, MATERIALIST FEMINISMS. Blackwell,
     1993.

Karl Marx, SELECTED WRITINGS (L. H. Simon, ed.). Hackett Publishing
     Co., 1995.

Toril Moi and Janice Radway, "Editors' Note." The South Atlantic
     Quarterly (Fall, 1994): 749.

Lise Vogel, WOMAN QUESTIONS. Essays for a Materialist Feminism.
     Routledge, 1995.

Jennifer Wicke, "Celebrety Material: Materialist Feminism and the
     Culture of Celebrety." The South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall,
     1994): 751-78.


Martha E. Gimenez
Department of Sociology
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://csf.colorado.edu/gimenez/






From embark at epud.net  Mon Sep 18 05:59:07 2000
From: embark at epud.net (embarkadero)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 04:59:07 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
References: <v01540b02b5eb4d15bbb6@[165.247.25.162]>
Message-ID: <005001c02167$e1cc8900$1a2b74d8@pavilion>

From: Shane Mage

> The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many refutations
> of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:

This is no refutation at all, being yet another Pollyanna dream state in the
scientism of denial. The evidence is all around you, and such pejoratives as
"manic doomsday pessimism" only serve to demonstrate that you haven't
investigated the issue seriously, but have only searched for some
superficial evidence to support your wishful thinking.

Here are a couple of points for you to consider before rejecting the crash:

1) Start with Weiss's apt observation: "Because processes that use sunlight
to extract hydrogen remain costly and inefficient, fossil fuels still supply
the hydrogen in most fuel cells."

Now relinquish your denial long enough to actually calculate the process
that would replace "costly and inefficient, fossil fuels " with Stuart Licht
's process.  How much energy is required to produce enough of those fuel
cell systems to replace fossil fuel? Where does THAT energy come from? Where
does that energy come from in competiton with fossil fuel demand for everday
uses?  Now ...calculate the number of Licht-based systems required to
totally replace the demand currently filled by fossil fuels. Then ... add
the additional demand projected by the time your Licht systems are in place.
(You must have all systems in the world converted by 2025.) Don't fudge,
please, and don't invoke the deus ex machina of "science will save us ...
somehow". Just do the actual real-time calculations of your projected
changeover. Really do the calculations, be honest.

Use your own research and sources, that way you can avoid suspicion that
Mark's or mine are skewed toward chicken little.

Then see if your think Mark's statement is manic ... or unduly pessimistic.

2) Explain what the small percentage of fossil fuels that are currently
devoted to petrochemical fertilizers will be replaced with. Calculate the
effect that withdrawing petrochemical fertilizer from word agriculture will
have upon population. Don't just guess, please. Be honest and seriously
examine the issue. Again ... research your own sources.

Tom







From earthrts at pa.net  Tue Sep 19 14:53:11 2000
From: earthrts at pa.net (Alanna Hartzok)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 13:53:11 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
In-Reply-To: <005001c02167$e1cc8900$1a2b74d8@pavilion>
Message-ID: <B5ED2046.5E7%earthrts@pa.net>

re. energy issues, you may want to check out www.blacklightpower.com

> From: "embarkadero" <embark at epud.net>
> Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 04:59:07 -0700
> To: "crashlist" <Crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> Cc: <shmage at pipeline.com>
> Subject: Re: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
> 
> 
> From: Shane Mage
> 
>> The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many refutations
>> of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:
> 
> This is no refutation at all, being yet another Pollyanna dream state in the
> scientism of denial. The evidence is all around you, and such pejoratives as
> "manic doomsday pessimism" only serve to demonstrate that you haven't
> investigated the issue seriously, but have only searched for some
> superficial evidence to support your wishful thinking.
> 
> Here are a couple of points for you to consider before rejecting the crash:
> 
> 1) Start with Weiss's apt observation: "Because processes that use sunlight
> to extract hydrogen remain costly and inefficient, fossil fuels still supply
> the hydrogen in most fuel cells."
> 
> Now relinquish your denial long enough to actually calculate the process
> that would replace "costly and inefficient, fossil fuels " with Stuart Licht
> 's process.  How much energy is required to produce enough of those fuel
> cell systems to replace fossil fuel? Where does THAT energy come from? Where
> does that energy come from in competiton with fossil fuel demand for everday
> uses?  Now ...calculate the number of Licht-based systems required to
> totally replace the demand currently filled by fossil fuels. Then ... add
> the additional demand projected by the time your Licht systems are in place.
> (You must have all systems in the world converted by 2025.) Don't fudge,
> please, and don't invoke the deus ex machina of "science will save us ...
> somehow". Just do the actual real-time calculations of your projected
> changeover. Really do the calculations, be honest.
> 
> Use your own research and sources, that way you can avoid suspicion that
> Mark's or mine are skewed toward chicken little.
> 
> Then see if your think Mark's statement is manic ... or unduly pessimistic.
> 
> 2) Explain what the small percentage of fossil fuels that are currently
> devoted to petrochemical fertilizers will be replaced with. Calculate the
> effect that withdrawing petrochemical fertilizer from word agriculture will
> have upon population. Don't just guess, please. Be honest and seriously
> examine the issue. Again ... research your own sources.
> 
> Tom
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> 




From juneo4 at juno.com  Mon Sep 18 11:26:53 2000
From: juneo4 at juno.com (juneo4 at juno.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 13:26:53 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <20000918.173241.-181877.2.juneo4@juno.com>

Carrol, 
Thank you for further clarification on marxism. 
I now realise clearly  it seems to me to encourage more involvement in
theorising, pontificating, and diatribes than either my personality or
(my) llife has time for. I am drawn to new language new perspectives. In
a vein of thought. 

I am done with and have done the  'narrative' of  my life (raising, 
feeding, parenting,  caring-taking, of specific individuals in the
world's population, those  I  (re)produced or who produced me). I 
dedicate my time for the rest of my life to designing or modeling
sustainable solutions. Facilitating the implementation of better-systems,
and supporting those systems that are already seen to be working,
(sustainable) as part of my day to day comittment to be being part of the
solution and not part of the problem.. 
 
As to the Struggle and the Crash, I prefer to WORK with the  Struggle. I
would rather see tired worn out systems fall away, being dismantled,  as
new and better ones burgeon simultaneously,  than the destruction of a
dam wall that surely  washes away much more than what is  undesirable.  I
am personally done with the  talk, (unless it is new and "imaginative") 
it is time for the walk. There is an urgency to finding  the  paths,
routes and roads to be walked. Being aware of crashes,  and  sensing a
Crash, implies that  Recovery plans are needed for the latter yes, and
preventitive/healing systems for the former situations? If we are not
motivated by the urgency (for solutions),  then are we not  merely
'talkers'? 'How much talk does  it take to change a plan? A Plan?'
(rhetoric only) .

Or are we seeking to Inspire  the New and Imaginative? To inspire or
attract someone, like the inventor of the web or internet, ( my apologies
for not recalling or mentioning his name, help someone?) to come up with
a powerfully positive creative concept that has  the qualities of
complexity , simplicity and immediacy of the information highway? (Hah!
who said the Atlanteans were destoyed by their own technolgy?) 
 
( I suspect that when I do get to reading the simpol website I may  find
some examples  of what I have in mind... simultaneous actions)

With the impact on  global dynamics of   billions of dollars changing 
hands in  nanoseconds, (on e commerce) there is an urgent need for new
and imaginative thinking as the antidote and the safety net? Right?

We need to develop and spread the 'infintely' small actions that likewise
will create global  dynamics ( we too have this tool for sharing the
thought in nanoseconds).   Like a counter-acting virus! A
healing-in-action!

We need Inspired Thought. What would be conducive to more of the new and
inspirational on a  list? CyberBrainstorming? 

I thank you again Caroll for helping me to clarify at least where I stand
within this  crash discussion!  (I have nothing particular against
crystal balls, but in their absence give me compassionate action any
day)jo* 

 
Thank you also for reminding me of  Rosa Luxemburg  and giving her credit
. The winter day I first learned of this remarkable woman I had an
accident. Friends were astonished to see me  arrive,  with a cane and a
limp  at a movie on her life,  thinking I was assuming her gait
deliberately. I now refer to that significant winter as my 'Rosa
Luxemburg winter', continually and painfully  reminded as I was, for
months, of her life, her work, and her assasination. jo* 

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 15:31:23 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
>juneo4 at juno.com wrote:
>
>> Thankyou Carrol, for your response.   I will mull on the 
>ramifications of
>> this information. Under its self proclaimed marxist leader, I 
>wearied of
>> the daily impact of how marxism 'was'/'worked',  in my part of 
>Africa.
>> Sustainable, I think not.  jo*
>
>There is a statement Marx made late in life to a reporter that also 
>helps
>to get a grip on the core of marxism. At the end of the interview, 
>the
>reporter, probably half joking, asked, "What is?"
>
>After a long pause, Marx answered: "Struggle."
>
>Out of Marx's analysis of capitalism comes a recognition of the
>necessity of socialism (in Rosa Luxemburg's framework: socialism
>or barbarianism"), but Marx offered no recipes, no blueprints for
>the future. Socialism is not a "system" installed the way you install
>a new operating system in your computer. It is a field of struggle.
>What it is can only be determined in the process of struggle to
>overcome capitalism and in continual struggle (with no guarantees
>of the outcome) to build socialism concretely. Marxists have
>no crystal balls (Mao said that).
>
>Carrol
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist



From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 18 13:23:26 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 20:23:26 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
In-Reply-To: <B5ED2046.5E7%earthrts@pa.net>
Message-ID: <000e01c021a5$eb0d1f00$6c058cd4@mjones>

This is another and quite well-known example of a perpetual motion machine.
It was the same thing in the first oil-shock in 1973: suddenly all kinds of
weird inventors appeared with their patents-applied-for. What it shows is
subliminal mass desperation (the font of gullibility). Actually, it's not us
who are the millenarians, the true chiliasts are those who are in denial.
Looking for perpetual motion machiens is one form of denial. Saying a la
Greg Nowell or Morry Adelman 'oil is a renewable energy source' or a la Doug
Henwood 'there's plenty of oil', without seriously investigating the
question, is another.

Mark

> -----Original Message-----
> From: crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
> [mailto:crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com]On Behalf Of Alanna Hartzok
> Sent: 19 September 2000 21:53
> To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> Cc: shmage at pipeline.com
> Subject: Re: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
>
>
> re. energy issues, you may want to check out www.blacklightpower.com
>
> > From: "embarkadero" <embark at epud.net>
> > Reply-To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> > Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 04:59:07 -0700
> > To: "crashlist" <Crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> > Cc: <shmage at pipeline.com>
> > Subject: Re: [CrashList] Re: Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
> >
> >
> > From: Shane Mage
> >
> >> The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many
> refutations
> >> of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:
> >
> > This is no refutation at all, being yet another Pollyanna dream
> state in the
> > scientism of denial. The evidence is all around you, and such
> pejoratives as
> > "manic doomsday pessimism" only serve to demonstrate that you haven't
> > investigated the issue seriously, but have only searched for some
> > superficial evidence to support your wishful thinking.
> >
> > Here are a couple of points for you to consider before
> rejecting the crash:
> >
> > 1) Start with Weiss's apt observation: "Because processes that
> use sunlight
> > to extract hydrogen remain costly and inefficient, fossil fuels
> still supply
> > the hydrogen in most fuel cells."
> >
> > Now relinquish your denial long enough to actually calculate the process
> > that would replace "costly and inefficient, fossil fuels " with
> Stuart Licht
> > 's process.  How much energy is required to produce enough of those fuel
> > cell systems to replace fossil fuel? Where does THAT energy
> come from? Where
> > does that energy come from in competiton with fossil fuel
> demand for everday
> > uses?  Now ...calculate the number of Licht-based systems required to
> > totally replace the demand currently filled by fossil fuels.
> Then ... add
> > the additional demand projected by the time your Licht systems
> are in place.
> > (You must have all systems in the world converted by 2025.) Don't fudge,
> > please, and don't invoke the deus ex machina of "science will
> save us ...
> > somehow". Just do the actual real-time calculations of your projected
> > changeover. Really do the calculations, be honest.
> >
> > Use your own research and sources, that way you can avoid suspicion that
> > Mark's or mine are skewed toward chicken little.
> >
> > Then see if your think Mark's statement is manic ... or unduly
> pessimistic.
> >
> > 2) Explain what the small percentage of fossil fuels that are currently
> > devoted to petrochemical fertilizers will be replaced with.
> Calculate the
> > effect that withdrawing petrochemical fertilizer from word
> agriculture will
> > have upon population. Don't just guess, please. Be honest and seriously
> > examine the issue. Again ... research your own sources.
> >
> > Tom
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> > To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 06:23:07 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 13:23:07 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] photovoltaics
Message-ID: <001a01c022fd$889dff20$b3228cd4@mjones>

[following is from the US govt DoE report on photovoltaic business in 1999.
77 peak mW were shipped. This is less than five percent  of the conventional
(ie fossil-fuelled) generating capacity installed in the same period. Given
that PVs average 20% or less of their peak potential (the sun doesn't always
shine, even in PV-land), this means that PV's still have a vanishingly small
market-share. Note that according to the US DoE, US utilities plan to
install 52 000 mW of new capacity by 2007. Of this the total amount of
solar-powered plant is less than 10 megawatts, and the total amount of
planned windpower is slightly more than ten megawatts. In the Mojave desert,
80 mW of new capacity will be installed ... all powered by natural gas.
Mark]

Annual Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic Manufacturing Activities Tables, 1999



Highlights
Shipments of photovoltaic modules and cells reported by U.S. manufacturers
in 1999 reached a record level of 77 thousand peak kilowatts, up 52 percent
from 1998. This marked the fourteenth consecutive annual increase in
photovoltaic shipments. Photovoltaic devices directly convert the sun?s
energy to electricity. Peak kilowatts refer to the maximum electric power
output of the cells and modules.
The growth in shipments is due largely to a strong export market, which
accounted for 72 percent of the shipments in 1999. Photovoltaic use in the
U.S. has traditionally been for stand-alone units to provide electricity at
remote areas. In 1999, however, shipments of photovoltaics for connection to
the electric power grid increased 75-percent over 1998 levels.

Equally significant was the decrease in the average price of cells and
modules. Average PV cell prices dropped one third between 1998 and 1999 to
$2.01 per peak watt. Module prices also declined, from $3.94 per peak watt
in 1998 to $3.62 in 1999. The net impact of higher shipments and lower
prices was to increase the value of shipments 21 percent in 1999 to $224
million.

Shipments of solar thermal collectors increased by 11 percent (as measured
by square feet) between 1998 and 1999. The value of these shipments
decreased from $28 million to $26 million, because of a 17-percent decrease
in the average per square foot price of solar collectors. More than 90
percent of solar thermal collector shipments were to the residential sector
for use as swimming pool heaters. Solar thermal collectors use the sun?s
energy to heat a working fluid (often water) for heating or generating
electricity.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/solar/solarphoto_tab.html




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 05:36:55 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:36:55 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] THE END OF CHEAP OIL
Message-ID: <000601c022f7$145bc940$b3228cd4@mjones>

(Murray Duffin, July 2000)
Abstract
In this paper I will try to summarize & organize the salient information
from a great many source papers, to make the key points readily accessible.
First I will present conclusions, followed by definitions, data, commentary
on the data and arguments. Finally the key source papers are referenced,
with Internet addresses, for those who wish to dig deeper own their own. The
following is derived from two years and many hours of research.
1.0 Conclusions
The end of the era of cheap oil is at hand. It began in 1999 with the
resurgence of oil prices from a very uncharacteristic low, in essence a
bottom. We are not running out of oil, in fact far from it. However, we are
at the point where demand has caught up with supply, and given the huge
investment required, it will be 2- 3 years before slack supply is available
again, if ever. We are only a few years away from the time when 50% of all
of the originally recoverable conventional oil in the earth's crust will
have been exhausted. After that point (termed the Hubbert Peak), supply will
begin to decline, regardless of investment and the gap between supply and
demand will open.
OPEC is now, again, the world dominant supplier, and in a few years will
control more than 50% of the world's oil supply. Given OPEC control and
natural self interest, near term demand equal to or greater than supply,
medium term demand growing while supply diminishes and no readily available
alternatives, the price of oil is set to rise inexorably, possibly
punctuated by a few brief respites.
The next substantial price rise is likely to be as soon as Q4
2000. What will that do to the stock market and our economic boom? We must
adjust to (temporary?) shortages with high and increasing prices immediately
and to permanent shortages within a decade.
No one is to blame. A finite source will eventually get harder to produce
from and will yield at a lower rate. Less extravagant consumption could have
delayed, but not prevented this outcome. The economists who reassure us that
there is no foreseeable problem, and the politicians who listen to them have
got it wrong.
There is one other conclusion that I would like to note that is not directly
related to nor derived from this research. There is a great deal we can do
to reduce oil consumption, with only neutral or positive impact on the
economy. The know-how and technology already exist. Unfortunately, without
knowledge on the part of the people, and political will on the part of our
leaders, we are unlikely to act until prices and shortages really bite.
Dependence on oil could easily be cut by a factor of 4 per unit of GDP in
less than 20 years, without economic or environmental sacrifice.
2.0 Definitions (Terminology) and Explanations
Several of the definitions are accompanied by necessary elaborations, so
that the reader can understand the sources of disagreement and confusion
relative to the subject of petroleum supply.
2.1 First - some relationships

a) - Cumulative production (total from the first oil recovery to the
present)

b) - Reserves - oil that has been discovered, but not yet recovered

c) - Estimated Ultimately Recoverable (or Ultimate Recovery) EUR - how much
will have been produced when no further recovery is possible.
d) - Discovered-to-date - a) + b)
e) - Yet-to-find c) - d)
f) - Yet-to-produce c)-a) or d)+e)

2.2 Resources - Traditionally taken to be "total oil in the ground"
regardless of recoverability. Ivanhoe12 refers to it as "oil available with
someone else's money". Resources reflect the geologist's estimate based on
interpretation of exploration (usually seismic) data, prior to any drilling.
The geologist was motivated to "find" a lot of oil, in order to secure
financing. In early days (circa 70 years ago) resources could be as much as
10xEUR. Since the mid `70's with development of robust computer models,
extensive data bases, and digital 3D mapping, resource estimates are much
more accurate, about equal to EUR.
Ivanhoe notes that government agencies, academics and economists tend to
estimate resources (oil companies report reserves). They then assume that
"oil-in-the-ground" will someday be recoverable with improving technology,
when in fact much of it was never there in the first place. Be very wary of
any analysis or conclusions based on "resource" estimates.

2.3) Reserves - initial reserves are the estimate of oil available after
drilling. They usually reflect the engineer's conservative opinion of
recoverable in a known time, with a known technique and cost. Ivanhoe refers
to reserves as "oil available with our money".
With improved analytic techniques reserves are usually revised upwards.
Nearly all discoveries prior to the mid 70's have been back adjusted, so
reserves appear to grow, when in fact it is a result of refining originally
conservative estimates. Reserves can also "grow" because of reporting
regulations (SEC requires reporting of proven reserves), or for political
reasons - e.g. OPEC allocation of quotas based on reserves.
To add to the confusion there are 3 commonly used estimates:
Proven - i.e. 90% probability that EUR will be equal or higher
Proven + probable - i.e. 50% probability - the most likely case

Proven + probable + possible - i.e. 10% probability; very unlikely to be
realized.
Further, sometimes natural gas liquids (NGL) or non- conventional (also
termed unconventional) oil are reported as reserves.
The result is that summing reserves from all of the world's countries or oil
provinces, without critical analysis, will almost certainly lead to a too
high total. The detailed data needed to do the critical analysis resides in
closely held data bases (e.g. Petroconsult in Geneva) and is not available
to most economists, or even to the USGS Delphi participants. Economists and
the USGS therefore systematically overstate reserves.
It has been assumed that improved recovery techniques also cause reserve
growth. Evidence indicates that such new technology increases recovery rate
but has little or no impact on EUR. It does accelerate depletion. Current
reserves of course are c) - a) - e), EUR minus cumulative production, minus
yet-to-find.

2.4) Discoveries - New fields found through surveys and exploration.
Discoveries add to reserves. In a given "province" (e.g. - North Sea), the
large fields are the easiest to recognize from survey data, and are
therefore the first to be discovered. Subsequent discoveries tend to be
sequentially smaller.

2.5) Conventional Oil - Normally refineable crude oil, recoverable with
current or confidently planned technology and tools.

2.6) Non-conventional (Unconventional) Oil - Venezuela (Orinoco) bitumen,
Athabasca tar sands, shale oil and very very deep water offshore oil. Not
recoverable &/or refineable by conventional means

2.7) Economically recoverable - recoverable with a positive payback on
exploration + development + recovery costs, at a given price. Economically
recoverable may increase as price increases.

2.8) Energetically recoverable - recoverable with a net energy yield, when
burned as fuel, in excess of the energy used to build the equipment, supply
the material, drill the well and pump and transport the oil. A couple of
small North Sea fields have been exhausted only 2 years after being drilled.
It is possible (probable?) that they were economically but not energetically
recoverable, unless they were drilled with a used (energetically paid for)
oil platform.

2.9) Gb - One billion barrels or 109 barrels equals 1000Mb or one thousand
million barrels. Resources and reserves are normally expressed in Gb or Mb.

2.10) NGL - Natural Gas Liquids or gas condensate. Sometimes included in
reserves or EUR.

2.11) R/P - Reserves to Production Ratio - the number of years to total
exhaustion of reserves at the most recent year's production rate.
3) Data

3.1 EUR c) Variously estimated from as low as 500 Gb in the 1940's based on
poor data, to 3500 Gb in the 1960's based on anticipated impact of
technology that hasn't panned out. Estimates over the past 20 years have
converged on 2000 Gb20.
Woodward - review of 40 estimates - mean 2000 Gb, median near 2200Gb
Rand Corporation - between 1600 and 2000 Gb OPEC 2138 Gb
Petroconsult - 1800 Gb (plus 200 Gb NGL)
The author will use 2000Gb.

3.2 Cumulative Production a) Generally accepted as about 820 Gb at end
1999.

3.3 Yet-to-find e) Ranges from a low of about 150Gb for Campbell
(Petroconsult) to 600Gb for the USGS (United States Geological Survey). Both
the recently low and declining discovery rate, and Laherrere's parabolic 9
fractal analysis would support the lower number. The USGS number derives
from a Delphi exercise rather than analysis of hard data. The knowledge,
motivation of and influence on the Delphi participants are not known. The
author, being an optimist, has used 200Gb.
3.4 Reserves c) - e) - a)
While the reserves by country or province are subject to considerable
disagreement, the total tends to be accepted as near 1000Gb. Late 1995
published data will illustrator the range of disagreement - all in Gb17.
Region/Source OAJ WO Petro USGS
N. America                 77  77   64   100
S. American                78  85   51    74
Europe                     16   31  30    37
FSU (Former Soviet Union)  59  191  76   121
Africa                     73   79  53    72
Middle East (ME)          660  590 439   583
Far East                   42   51  38    62
Other                       2    4   3     4
Total 1007 1108 754 1053
OGJ - Oil & Gas Journal, Petro - Petroconsult, WO - World Oil Journal,
USGS - US Geologic Survey
NOTES: . In 1987/88/89 ME reserves jumped by near 280 Gb without new
discoveries and with little new drilling. Some of the increase may have been
new analysis, but timing would suggest political motivation to influence
OPEC quota allocations.

ME-stated reserves have remained constant for several years, despite annual
production and lack of discovery.

FSU - has been strongly overstated in the past (10% probability numbers?).

Given the geography it could be expected to be substantially greater than
North America. Petroconsult discounts ME and FSU strongly (too much?) for
the above reasons.
The author goes with c) - e) -a) = 980 Gb.
3.5 Reserves Growth 17
 Published reserves 1973   577 Gb
 Published reserves 1996  1062 Gb
 Production `73 - `96      513 Gb
 Discoveries `73 - `96     520 Gb
 Reserves "growth"`73 -`96 424 Gb
During 23 years reserves grew by nearly 40% of the sum of starting reserves
plus discoveries. However, it is likely that at least 130 Gb was political
(See 3.4) Real growth due to drilling and improved mapping and analysis may
have been 30% or about 13Gb/yr average. (It may have been much lower, also.
Notes: As new technology has now been applied to most old discoveries (Odell
17 notes a major effort on enhancing known fields during this period), and
as new discoveries were more accurate to start with, little further reserve
growth should be expected. Perhaps 3 to 4 Gb/yr will be realized during the
next decade.
3.6 Discovery
1945 - 1960 Averaged 35 Gb/yr - mainly due to ME
1970 - 1990 Averaged 23 Gb/yr - influenced by oil crises
1990 - 1999 Averaged 6 Gb/yr
NOTES: Discovery peaked in 1962/63 and the rate of decline since has been
accelerating. Campbell has noted that discoveries per dollar spent on
exploration was much lower in the `90's than in the `70's. The time from
discovery peak to production peak was 35 years in the lower
48,and 15 years in the FSU. World production is expected to peak 40-45 years
after the discovery peak. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists
has forecast a discovery rate of 8Gb/year from 2000 to 200919. They must
anticipate a huge increase in exploration which might happen given rising
oil prices.
3.7 Consumption in Gb/yr 17,23
1990 23.8 1995 24.9
1991 23.7 1996 25.4
1992 23.9 1997 26.1
1993 23.7 1998 26.2
1994 24.3 1999 26.7
2000 28.1 (projected)
NOTES . Discovery is now running less than 25% of consumption. Stock draw
down from Oct. `99 through Feb. 2000 was about 250 Mb6, or 4 months of the 3
recent OPEC increases. (16 months of the first increase)
3.8 What is a large discovery?
The largest field ever discovered was 90Gb - in Saudi Arabia. That is 3
years world supply in 2002 terms, assuming it is all recoverable. It isonly
1.5 years to the Hubbert Peak and declining recovery, if it was the sole
source.
- Today a big field would be 0.5 Gb
- The Caspian Sea referred to as a major find has an EUR of 30 Gb, enough to
postpone the Hubbert Peak about 6 months.
- 60 to 70% of known oil is in 300+ "Giant" fields
- 94% of known oil is in 1311 "Major" & "Giant" fields
- Of 17000+ (excluding 15000 termed insignificant) known fields worldwide,
the 2000 smallest contain a total of 50M bbl of oil - 6/10 of a day supply.
NOTES:
Of 17000 plus known significant fields, 7500+ are in North America. With
32000 fields worldwide (including insignificant) 20 it is unlikely that any
major finds have been overlooked. It is likely that no few of the smallest
2000, especially in deep water, have a negative net energy return.
3.9 When can we expect the Hubbert peak?
1999 Reserves 980 Gb
Possible reserve growth to 2020 70 Gb
Yet to find 200 Gb
Cumulative production 820 Gb
Initial resources 2070 Gb
50% depletion 1040 Gb
Already depleted 820 Gb
Remaining to Hubbert Peak 220 Gb

Average annual consumption 2000- 2010 - 31 Gb/yr
Hubbert Peak in 220/31 = 7 years - ie 2007
NOTES: - The author is a self-proclaimed optimist. For a much more
scientific analysis see Duncan and Youngquist 22 , who place the peak in
2006.
3.10 How rapid will the decline be after the peak?
The lower 48 production dropped by 50% in 37 years, about 1.8% per year.
North Sea fields that are already in decline are down 36% in 6 years for
Norway and 65% in 15 years for the UK, or about 6% per year 14. Campbell and
Laherrere project about 2.5 to 4% per year.
NOTES: If a demand growth of 1.5%/yr bumps into a supply decline of
3.5%/yr we will have a major problem. Energy efficiencies of greater than
2%/yr are probably achievable. Energy substitutions of 2% per year may be
possible. Allocation of the available supply will need to be addressed -
will market mechanisims serve?, which ones?. What if the decline is 6% per
year?
3.11) How about unconventional oil?
Unconventional "resource " estimates, vary from about 1300 -
4000 Gb (100 years' supply.? - No, only about 1/6 of it is considered to be
energetically recoverable.) However, the resources are meaningless for
purposes of this paper. What counts is the rate of recovery projected over
the next 20 years. In spite of nearly 30 years and several billion dollars
no successful technology has been developed to recover shale oil, and
efforts have largely been abandoned. Orinoco bitumen is already producing
(Orimulsion), and tar sands may be attractive at about $50.00 per barrel. It
is estimated that, with sufficient investment (billions of dollars) bitumen
and tar sand production could be brought to 2Mb/day in 2010 (about 2% of
needs) and 7 Mb/day in 2020. This addition would reduce the rate of decline
after the Hubbert Peak slightly.
Notes: One can imagine an energy efficient world in which North America
would need less than 10 Mb/day by 2050 and it could all come from tar sands,
at a high enough price.
3.12 What about year 2000? 16
                        Q1     Q2     Q3     Q4
 Demand   (Mb/day)    75.7   75.1   76.6   78.7
 Supply non-OPEC      45.9   45.6   45.7   46.4
 Supply   OPEC        29.4   30.6   31.3   31.6
 Supply TOTAL         75.3   76.2   77.0   78.0
NOTES: Excess supply in Q2 and Q3 does not make up prior destock. The swing
supplier is Iraq. They have no reason to help and have already announced
production problems. Total supply is above 98% of capacity in Q4, - no room
for problems.
3.13 What's wrong with R/P?
BP/Amoco statistics show that we have about 38.5 years of reserves at the
1998 production rate. This ratio is essentially a meaningless number as it
assumes implicitly that oil can be produced at a constant rate, until the
last drop is recovered, and then recovery will drop instantly to zero. The
real world doesn't work that way.
4.0 The Arguments
4.1 The Economists and Academics
The two perhaps most optimistic contributors are P. R. Odell and Michael
Lynch.
4.1.1 Odell 17
- Assumes that reserves growth in the future will be at least as high as in
1973-96, (very unlikely-see 3.5) but doesn't say how quickly. (It would have
to bequicker than in the reference 23 years to do much good.)
- Takes the USGS number for yet-to-be-discovered, the most optimistic
number,and ignores discovery rate.
- Assumes 35 Gb/yr production by 2020, but gives no detail on how we get
there from here.
- Doesn't discuss who controls the oil wells.
- Simply invents numbers for total non-conventional oil reserves with
noreference to credible sources & no consideration of costs or rate of
recovery.
- Assumes fairly explicitly that technology will take care of the details,
with no mention of what technology, or how quickly, or reference to past
progress. With this set of assumptions he concludes that there is no problem
in the foreseeable future.
4.1.2 Lynch 21
-In a 1998 paper Lynch tackles Campbell (the most profilic and often cited
geologist) head on. He notes that they both forecast the future in 1989 and
Lynch got it right. He points out that Campbell in 1989 and in subsequent
forecasts was consistently pessimistic, and has had to regularly raise his
reserve estimates and push out his day of reckoning.
-Bases his own arguments on the fact that reserves have always grown (up to
1998) (See 3.5) without questioning that they do this independent of
consumption and discoveries.
-Totally ignores the rapid decline in discovery rate, and seems to asume
that reserves will grow forever.
-States untapped resources as greater than 2000 Gb without citing sources.
He can only get to such a number by including the bulk of unconventional oil
and misusing "resources" (See 2.2) while ignoring issues of costs and rate
of recovery.
The not quite stated conclusion is that Campbell was wrong in the past and
must therefore be wrong in the future, while Lynch was right in the past and
must therefore be right in the future.
Lynch also concludes that there is no forseeable problem with the ongoing
availability of cheap oil.
His 1998 paper was published before prices tripled, so he may be a little
more cautious now.
4.2 The Geologists
The key references are Campbell, Laherrere, and Ivanhoe. They have all held
senior positions with major oil companies, they all have access to
considerable very specific data and they all understand the technology of
exploration, development and recovery. They seem to be unanimous on three
points:

- the world has been thoroughly surveyed and largely explored. There are no
major new surprises waiting to be discovered.

- big fields get discovered first. Anything not yet discovered is also not
big.
- the Hubbert Peak will be reached before 2010.
4.2.1 Campbell 1-5
-Is the most published, the most often cited, the most definite and probably
the most pessimistic; (or maybe realistic).
-Admits to being guilty as charged by Lynch, stating simply that as he gets
more or better data he revises his conclusions. The time frame may shift a
little, but the problem won't go away and won't be long postponed.
-Has probably been intentionally pessimistic, trying to get an uncaring
world to pay attention before it is too late, and has thus put himself in
the position of "crying wolf".
-Bases his argument mainly on discovery. If we are using oil 4-5 times
faster than we discover it, and if discovery per dollar of exploration is
declining rapidly, then we face a very finite limit on our supply.
-Along with Laherrere was the first to publish a Hubbert Peak analysis for
the world, and emphasizes that running out of oil is not the issue; it is
the declining production after the peak, when 50% of the oil is still in the
ground, that is the problem. It is the end of cheap oil that he warns us of.
-Also questions the declared reserves, noting: FSU reserves were exaggerated
under Communism for political reasons. FSU fields are in disarray, in
declining production, and won't help in the next years even if their
reserves are higher. ME reserves grew about 280 Bbbl from 1987-89 without
significant new drilling or exploration, probably because OPEC quotas were
pro-rated on reserves. ME reserves have not declined in the past 10 years
regardless of production and no new discoveries. Campbell declares reserves
at the low end of all estimates and thus positions the Hubbert Peak earlier.
4.2.2 Laherrere 7-11
-Is the most analytic and possibly the most interesting contributor. Of
particular interest is his analysis of the parabolic fractal distribution of
petroleum in the earth's crust. This analysis is probably the most telling
argument against major new discoveries.
-Also provides an excellent analysis of why the optimistic USGS numbers are
probably wrong.
4.2.3 Ivanhoe 12
-Provides some very useful clarification of terms and difficulties, and
otherwise largely agrees with Campbell.
4.3 Others
4.3.1 Riva 18
-Has major problems with arithmetic that leads him to some unsupportably
optimistic conclusions. Regretably he briefed Congress in 1998, and it is
most unlikely that any representatives caught the errors.
-Projects a demand of 94M bbl/day by 2010 or 34.8 B bbl/yeaar. Such a growth
rate would pull in the Hubbert Peak by about one year. It seems most
unlikely that such a high demand could be satisfied - so something has to
give.
4.3.2 Fleay 6
-Has published a recent (Feb. 2000) and very detailed paper, illuminating
the present supply/demand and price situation. This paper is a "must read".
4.3.3 Simmons 15,16
-Provides a comparison of 2000 vs 1973 and an analysis of 2000 with a
projection of the fourth quarter that is very alarming. Also a "must read".
5.0 What is to be done?
5.1 Immediately
- Start to accept with equanimity that higher gasoline and heating oil
prices are not going to go away, but indeed will continue to rise, and
adjust life styles accordingly.
-Stop looking for someone to blame.
-Stop looking for easy outs. As Peter Senge has noted "the easy way out
leadsback in".
-Communicate the facts to our fellow citizens and our political leaders.
5.2 Near term
-Declining oil availability poses a real threat to the economy, unless we
start preparing now. We can do 2 things:
-make the economy much more energy efficient;
-develop alternative (renewable) energy sources.
If we started now, in earnest, enough could be achieved before 2007 to avert
a crisis. Details of what can be done would require another paper.
REFERENCES

1) Campbell - Evolution of Oil asessments 3/23/2000
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/assessments.htm

2) Campbell - Myth of Spare Capacity 3/20/2000
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/mythcap.htm

3) Campbell - Letter to the Editor-Foreign Affairs 1/8/2000
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/foreignaffairs200001.htm

4) Campbell - The Imminent Peakof World Oil Production (Presentation to the
UK House of Commons 7/7/99

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/commons.htm

5) Campbell & Laherrere - The End of Cheap Oil - Scientific American v278/3
1996

http://www.dieoff.org/page140.htm

6) Fleay, Brian J - Oil Supply: The Crunch Has Arrived 3/13/2000
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/fleay/crunch.htm

7) Laherrere - Is USGS 2000 Assessment Reliable? 5/2/2000
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/laherrere/usgs2000/
8) Laherrere - Technological Progress or Bad Reporting and Bad
Arithmetic?  -  Geopolitics of Energy 22/4  4/16/99
  http://www.dieoff.org/page176.htm
9) Laherrere - Parabolic Fractal Distributions in Nature French
Academy of Science 4/4/96
   http://www.hubbertpeak.com/laherrere/fractal.htm
10) Laherrere -Multi-Hubbert Modeling - 7/97
   http://www.hubbertpeak.com/laherrere/multihub.htm
11) Laherrere - Future Sources of Crude Oil Supply and Quality
Considerations 6/12/97
   http://www.hubbertpeak.com/laherrere/supply.htm

12) Ivanhoe - Get Ready for Another Oil Shock - The Futurist Jan/Feb. `97
http://www.dieoff.org/page90.htm

13) Youngquist - Spending Our Great Inheritance - Then What? Geotimes 7/98
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/youngquist/geotimes.htm

14) Blanchard - The Impact of Declining Major North Sea Oil Fields upon
North Sea Production Jan 2000

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/blanchard

15) Simmons - The Oil World 1973 Compared to 2000 - Oil and Gas Journal
4/2000

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/web/downloads/whitepaper.pdf

16) Simmons- The Energy Markets in 2000 - Running on Empty? Speech 5/24/00
http://www.simmonco-intl.com/web/downloads/whitepaper.pdf

17) Odell - A Guide to Oil Reserves and Resources
http://www.greenpeace.org/~climate/arctic99//reports/odell317.html

18) Riva - World Oil Production After Year 2000 - Business as Usual or
Crisis 8/18/95; Congressional Briefing

http://www.crie.org/n/e/eng-3.html

19) Shirley - Discoveries Are Getting Smaller - Explorer Jan 2000
http://www.aapg.org/explorer/archives/01_00/global_look.html

20) McKenzie, WRI - Estimated Ultimately Recoverable (EUR) Oil 3/96
http://www.wri.org/wri/climate/finitoil/eur-oil.html
http://dieoff.com/eur.htm

21)Lynch - Crying Wolf: Warnings About Oil Supply 3/98
http://www.stanford.edu/sep/jon/world-oil.dir/lynch/worldoil.html

22)Duncan and Youngquist - The World Petroleum Life Cycle 10/22/98
http://www.dieoff.com/page133.pdf

23)BPAmoco Energy Statistics
http://www.bpamoco.com/worldenergy/oil/index.htm




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 19 04:07:21 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 11:07:21 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] more nonsense on alternatives
Message-ID: <001101c02221$667b5dc0$e755893e@mjones>

This exchange is from Shane Mage and Yoshie Furuhashi on lbo-talk (for some
reason, can't imagine what, Mr Mage doesn't want to expose his arguments to
the rigours of this list). Unfortunately, Mr Mage is evidently still not
able to do better than (as Tom says) the "Pollyanna dream state in the
scientism of denial."

Here are very simple questions for Mr Mage to think about: what is the
energy efficiency and net energy cost of the most efficient forms of
conversion of hydrogen to electricity? Are they more or less efficient than
the energy efficiency of gasoline engines? And (finaly, the question Mr Mage
never answers) where is the electricity coming from to convert water to
hydrogen? If the answer is 'photovoltaics', what will be the capital cost of
building enough PV arrays to substitute for fossil fuels, and what kind of
conversion efficiency will such PVs have to have, if the transition is to be
successful?

Mark



> >Shane Mage says:
> >
> >> The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many
> >> refutations of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:
> >
> >how does this refute mark's post? this Science News abstract describes
> >something in a lab, a cool result the way they've sandwiched the
> >layers of photo-electricity and conversion to hydrogen together, but
> >how does this relate to the issues mark jone's raises? whats at stake
> >is not simply what can be produced in a laboratory and reported in a
> >technical journal, but what can be deployed now or soon that will make
> >a sizeable difference in energy budgets and anthropgenic climate
> >forcing. you're arguments have to be more forceful than bob dylan song
> >snippets ...
> >
> >what will they think of next???
>
>The point of course is the speed with which science and technology are
>proving the practicality of the hydrogen economy. What has been
demonstrated
>in the lab will soon, historically speaking, be the basis for material
>production. This report came just on the heels of Mr. Jones's rant.
>Technological
>progress is ongoing over a much wider front. The time scale of the
>crisis is still
>measured in decades. Two decades is plenty for full growth of what
>is now a fledgling
>--no longer incubating--fuel cell technology based on renewable
>energy sources.
>Existing hydrocarbon sources will last much longer than that and can be
>phased out before irreversible climatic deterioration strikes most of the
>world's surface.
>
>Shane Mage
>
>"L'intendance suivra"--Napol?on


What is technically possible, however, does not always go into
practice. It was technically possible to create densely populated
cities mainly served by mass public transportation in America (and
American cities were indeed so served before the rise of highways &
suburbia). Instead, we have what we have -- under-populated cities,
suburban sprawls, & longer commutes dependent upon individually-owned
automobiles. Politics, not technical feasibility, is what matters
most. Can we create political conditions for radical transformation
of social relations & then productive forces necessary for the
"hydrogen economy" in a matter of decades?


Yoshie






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 02:50:09 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:50:09 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Oil-quake rumbles on
Message-ID: <009501c022df$dc62fca0$43178cd4@ngjones>

Guardian: Sense of crisis as Labour's worries grow

In the bunker
Special report: New Labour in power

Patrick Wintour, chief political correspondent
Wednesday September 20, 2000

Already shell-shocked by the petrol crisis that had brought the country
close to paralysis, ministers were braced for a hit in the weekend polls.
None, however, had foreseen the scale of the turnaround, or that the
position would worsen on Monday night with the Guardian's ICM poll. One
minister said: "The public is incredibly difficult to read at the moment. We
seem to be going through one of those collective outpourings."
Tony Blair's aides yesterday tried to protect the prime minister from the
sense of crisis, leaving him alone as much as possible at Chequers to focus
on writing next week's conference speech, probably his most important since
he became leader six years ago.

But the political atmosphere worsened with the claims in a book by the
journalist Andrew Rawnsley that Mr Blair and the chancellor, Gordon Brown,
had lied over their handling of the Ecclestone affair.

Margaret Beckett, the leader of the house, was wheeled out to discuss the
fuel crisis and the Guardian poll on Radio 4's Today programme, only to find
herself being questioned over the Rawnsley allegations.

She claimed she knew nothing of the claims and had not read the newspapers,
dismissing the affair as an old story.

As the day wore on, Labour's rebuttal team worked on knocking down the
Rawnsley allegations point by point, producing detailed transcripts and
original letters, and challenging the veracity of his unsourced quotes.

But inside the beleaguered Treasury, the mood darkened as Mr Brown
recognised he had to admit he had discussed the Ecclestone donations with
the prime minister. Meanwhile, at yesterday's meeting of Labour's national
executive committee, anxious members expressed concern that the sudden
reversal in the opinion polls is not just a short-term blip.

The warnings did not just come from the usual leftwingers, such as Dennis
Skinner and Mark Seddon, the editor of Tribune. They also came from normally
loyalist union stalwarts, such as Diana Jeudah from the shopworkers' union
Usdaw, Jeremy Beecham, Labour's senior figure in local government, and Derek
Hodgson, general secretary of the Communication Workers' Union.

The party leadership was told bluntly that last week's crisis over fuel
revealed a gathering disaffection with the government on other issues,
including pensions. Mr Skinner argued passionately that an announcement
restoring the pensions link with earnings would change the climate. He
warned that some of the party's difficulties stemmed from the perception
that "this government is still sitting on a war chest which makes contending
groups in society believe there is money to be had".

Overall, the NEC members made it clear that if extra cash is to be dispensed
the priority has to be pensioners rather than cuts in fuel duty.

However, inside Downing Street there is equal alarm about fuel duties.
Ministers are seriously at odds over how to make concessions on duties and
the speed with which they need to be made. With the Conservatives today set
to announce a proposed specific cut in fuel duty and the Liberal Democrats
already pledged to a five-year freeze, the government is in danger of being
left behind. There is also a fear that if the government digs in its heels,
only to make concessions later, William Hague?s current fragile poll lead
might harden, and even grow.

"The longer we delay the inevitable the worse it will be for us, one
participant said. One proposal being floated yesterday was for the
chancellor to make a clear indication, perhaps in November, that he will cut
petrol duties in the Budget in March if oil prices do not fall
substantially.

But some Labour MPs with a European perspective were also pointing to the
dangers of concessions. They point to the salutary lesson of the French
socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin.

Mr Jospin is still being punished by his electorate, even though he bowed to
the demands of the farmers and truck drivers.

In the long term, it is argued, Mr Blair will benefit from being seen to
stick to his principles. These views, naturally enough, are most strongly
heard inside the Treasury and some of the big spending departments. The
chancellor would like to use next week's conference as the moment in which
to launch the fightback and open a challenging debate on the funding of
public services.

However, this is partly a matter of striking the right tone. Mr Brown feels
passionately he is right and that, at the same time, he is upholding the
democratic process by insisting he will not make changes outside the budget
cycle.

Downing Street is now trying to reopen lines of communication with the
established road haulage groups such as the Road Haulage Association and the
Freight Transport Association.

David Green, the director general of the FTA, met the deputy prime minister,
John Prescott, last week and will meet transport ministers again tomorrow.

Mr Blair's aides know he needs to do more to highlight the international
nature of the oil crisis. He needs to be able to show that this is a crisis
made in Opec, and not in Downing Street.

Paradoxically, the international rise in the price of oil will increase the
anger of the truckers, but reduce Mr Blair's personal responsibility. With
protests breaking out all over Europe, the European commission has called an
emergency meeting of European transport ministers.

There are also fears that Iraq will use the crisis to cut back production,
or even provoke another military confrontation with Kuwait. Iraq exports
about 2.3m barrels a day of crude oil into a world market desperate to cut
prices.

A cutback by Iraq could push the price up to $40 a barrel. If that happens,
Mr Blair's current problems would be dwarfed.







From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 02:42:25 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:42:25 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: Politics not economics drive the oil price
Message-ID: <008101c022de$c132f440$43178cd4@ngjones>

By Peter Odell, Professor Emeritus of Erasmus University at Rotterdam
Published: September 19 2000 13:13GMT | Last Updated: September 19 2000
18:50GMT



Oil supply and price remains an issue of power politics, rather than of
economics, let alone of reserves and resources awaiting development.

Claims that current high prices indicate a world running out of oil have no
credibility. On the contrary, it is running into it. The US Geological
Service estimates that over 2,000bn barrels of conventional oil remains to
be used, compared with only 800bn used to date. Including the still almost
untouched non-conventional reserves, world oil production can go on
expanding at 2 per cent per annum until after 2050.

This reflects the most recent dramatic improvements in upstream oil
technology: not only enhancing discoveries and production, but generating
large cost savings, especially in more challenging environments, such as
deep offshore waters;and in enhanced production techniques (now expected to
enable up to 85 per cent of oil in place to be recovered).

These developments reduce the long-run supply price for oil, so if economics
were the main variable, prices would not have increased since 1998.

It is politics that have caused price increases. The US wanted higher prices
to counter a serious threat to the global economy from loss of revenues by
oil-dependent producing countries, particularly Russia, and exerted pressure
to achieve them.

But since the price upturn in March 1999, the US and its G7 allies have
simply failed to take appropriate additional policy steps to stop the price
going too high. Rather, they have allowed market forces to operate in the
context of serious disinformation over supply potentials, stock volumes and
demand developments.

First, additional production potential has been understated, not regarding
OPEC output, but also that of companies with equity oil, not least in the
North Sea. Yet there has been no hint of any government pressure on the
companies concerned to boost their output.

Second, stocks held by OECD countries are not at "their lowest levels since
the 1970s". Quite the contrary: they are close to an all-time record high.
There are currently some 3.750bn barrels of oil in stock, making a drawdown
of one million barrels per day eminently possible.

Third, demand for oil has not been booming. Since 1998 the global use of oil
has grown by only 2 per cent in response to higher oil prices and to the
higher taxes on that oil. The latter are an important tool in so
constraining demand; and thus not only in controlling price levels, but also
in limiting CO emissions.

In these respects, the UK has a bad record. Taxes on domestic, commercial
and industrial oil use range from zero to a maximum of under 25 per cent:
compared with tax rates of 5-150 per cent in Europe's other five main
oil-consuming countries. Indeed, if one also takes taxes on gas and
electricity into account, the UK has by far the lowest energy tax regime of
the six countries; and thus makes the least contribution to restraining use
and to keeping down the price of oil.

In other words, UK policy more closely reflects its role as an oil and gas
producer and exporter. Public debate on the issues involved would be
improved were this policy choice to be made explicit.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 02:44:30 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:44:30 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: Caspian reserves assessed
Message-ID: <008b01c022df$0261f740$43178cd4@ngjones>

Published: September 19 2000 15:02GMT | Last Updated: September 19 2000
15:03GMT



Iran's location naturally means that Tehran figures prominently in any
discussion of current or future energy exports from the Caspian, but Iran's
own potential as a Caspian producer is only just beginning to be assessed.
The Iranians announced in August that an estimated 3bn bbl of recoverable
reserves lie in their Caspian sector. While this figure is useful
(equivalent to around half of the UK's proven North Sea reserves), that
amount is only marginal by comparison with the country's 90bn bbl of proven
reserves in and around the Gulf. Moreover, as the government has emphasised,
Iran lacks indigenous resources to develop more accessible hydrocarbon
reserves in the Gulf, much less its Caspian prospects.

The deputy head of the National Iranian Oil Company, Mehdi Mir-Moezzi, has
declared that "preliminary seismic studies show that we have 10bn bbl of
in-place crude in our 20% of the Caspian Sea, of which 2.5-3bn bbl are
recoverable." Royal Dutch/Shell and the UK's Lasmo carried out these
preliminary studies during the last two years under an agreement which
grants the companies exclusive rights to four development blocks should oil
be discovered. So far, however, the preliminary results remain based on
seismic studies, not drilling.

Mir-Moezzi confused the Caspian question with his reference to Iran's 20%
share of the sea's resources. Iran, at present, does not control anything
like this volume of the Caspian, although it insists that any partition of
Caspian sub-sea oil and gas resources should guarantee Tehran one-fifth of
the sub-sea area. The old Iranian-Soviet frontier, drawn as a straight line
between the border posts on the eastern and western sides of the sea, left
some 12% of Caspian waters on the southern, Iranian, side of this de facto
maritime boundary. However, were Tehran to agree to base future boundary
agreements with its new neighbours Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan on widely
accepted principles of a median line division, then Iran might be expected
to secure around 16% of the Caspian's waters or (if the waters themselves
were to remain international) of the Caspian's sub-sea resources. East
European Energy Report understands that Shell and Lasmo have confined their
surveys to essentially uncontested waters.

The Caspian volumes discovered also lag behind the country's recent gas
finds. The new Homa discovery, announced in August, is officially said to
contain about 6.7trillion ft3 (around 1980bn m3) of natural gas and 82m bbl
of liquid gas, with recoverable reserves put at 133.1bn m3 and 58m bbl
respectively. In effect, recoverable reserves amount to the equivalent of
around 900m bbl of crude - and Homa is only one of several gas finds
announced in recent months.

On 28 August, Iran announced it had discovered 5.34bn bbl of crude and 28.7
trillion ft3 (820bn m3) of gas over the last three years. It was not
immediately clear whether this included the Caspian oil reserves (which
would not normally be reported as discoveries until confirmed by drilling)
or the Homa gasfield. On 27 August, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh listed
proven reserves as totalling 96bn bbl of crude and 26 trillion ft3 of gas
(including 12 trillion ft3 in the giant South Pars offshore field), against
previous government estimates of 92 bbl and 22 trillion ft3.

Zanganeh used the upgraded reserve estimates to underline Iran's
attractiveness to foreign investors. The minister said Iran needed to draw
in foreign investment to develop oil and gas fields - and made it clear that
Iran lacks the cash necessary even to maintain output at current levels, let
alone to increase output significantly.

"Our private sector does not have the big money needed to invest in upstream
energy projects," Zanganeh said. "If we lose our share in OPEC, we will
suffer great economic losses. We have to raise our capacity to 5m b/d as
soon as possible. This requires big investment."

East European Energy Report






From embark at epud.net  Mon Sep 18 21:00:39 2000
From: embark at epud.net (embarkadero)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 20:00:39 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Another little piece of manic doom pessimism
Message-ID: <003601c021e5$ceec6480$4a2b74d8@pavilion>

GERMANY: August 21, 2000 BERLIN - Governments must embrace high-tech farming and remove trade barriers so the Earth can feed its growing population, agricultural economists said at an international conference on Friday. "Both the land and the individual farmers can greatly profit from the two great future technologies - biotechnology and information technology," Joachim von Braun, the new president of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE), said in his concluding remarks at the IAAE's 24th congress. "But the politics must be right for that." The congress, attended by over 1,000 participants from more than 80 countries, focused on blueprints for the future development of global agriculture, with most experts agreeing that a radical shift from past patterns was needed. "Traditional breeding has already captured most of the (production) increase potential," Harald von Witzke, professor at Berlin's Humboldt University and chairman of the local organizing committee, told Reuters. He said that with the world's population expected to grow to well over 8.5 billion by the year 2025 from the current six billion, agriculture will need to find ways of feeding them from the same land base being used today. "There are no major land reserves left: the best land is already being farmed," Witzke said. "We need to increase food production...(but) we don't know how that's going to be possible." "We hope that gene technology is going to make a difference." Witzke also predicted an end to what he calls the "agricultural treadmill", the phonomenon whereby in the past 130 years food supply growth has continuously exceeded the growth in demand. "Farmers have run faster and faster (by becoming more productive) but economically they have not got anywhere because the income effect of productivity growth has been eroded by declining prices," he said, adding that population and per capita income growth in the future would reverse that trend. "In the decades ahead, agriculture will be a growth industry," he said. "And it will become a high-tech industry." But governments should also commit more resources to agricultural research, education and counselling, he said. In addition, poor countries need to be supported with technology transfer to help them keep pace with developments in a more capital-intensive and training-intensive industry. Witzke also warned that national food standards introduced in recent years in response to growing environmental and food safety concerns can easily be misused for protectionism. "We need innovations on the social science and political side," he said, but added that although scientists in Germany were beginning to get their message across, more immediate political concerns often prevailed in the European Union. "When push comes to shove, local farmers still have more lobbying power," he said. The IAAE conference in Berlin coincides with the five-day Crop Science Congress which started in Hamburg on Thursday. Its organisers aim to draft a declaration on genetically modified foods by August 22. Story by Denes Albert REUTERS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 



Catch that? World population expected to grow to 8.5 Billion by 2025. 

Can you say "Malthus lives" boys and girls?   



... I thought you could. 



Tom

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From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 19 02:45:18 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 09:45:18 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] who predicted what
Message-ID: <000801c02215$f03a8b00$e755893e@mjones>

["Only a significant fall in IEA's expected world oil consumption for 2000
can reduce the risk of a supply shortfall later this year, and then only if
OPEC substantially or completely lifts its production quotas in March." 
This is what Fleay wrote in March this year. Was he right or wrong?
Was there a supply shortfall recently, all you economists? 
Was Colin Campbell right or wrong to predict major shortfalls in the
the year 2000 (he made the prediction in 1998)? Check for
yourselves. Take the energy-deficit problematique seriously
and then start thinking about the future. Mark]


OIL  SUPPLY:  THE  CRUNCH  HAS  ARRIVED!!
By  Brian J Fleay
13  March 2000

BACKGROUND
In December 1997 the Asian Financial Meltdown began to bite ending over 20
years of high economic growth there.  The Organisation of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) also increased their production quotas,
responding to the highest consumption growth in 1996-97 since the 1970's
while the UN Security Council increased Iraq's so-called oil-for-food
quota.  The 1997-98 northern hemisphere winter was mild and demand for
heating oil was low.  Consequently 1998 saw a fall in Asian oil consumption
ending years of high growth with world consumption the same as in 1997
while production expanded.

Oil prices fell from US$23 a barrel in December 1997 to US$10 a barrel in
February 1999, nearly equalling in real terms the lowest prices ever.  OPEC
countries faced severe financial crises with the threat of political
unrest.  Falling cash flow forced western oil companies to cut back
exploration and development work and shed experienced staff, weakening even
further their capacity to operate in upstream oil.  In many areas
production costs exceeded the price of oil, wells were shut down with some
never to be turned on again, especially 'stripper wells' in the USA.  Many
of the investment cut backs were for development work to counter falling
output from ageing oil fields.  Running fast to just stand still became
running backwards.

To counter this financial disaster the OPEC cartel in March 1999 further
reduced its production "quotas" to a total cut back of 4.32 million barrels
per day (m.bbls/d).  Oil prices began to rise in April and most oil
analysts predicted OPEC discipline would not hold and forecast low prices
to continue for at least three years.  The more perceptive analysts, aware
of how tight supply was and of the looming spectre of depletion, predicted
the opposite.


WHY  WERE  THE  ANALYSTS  WRONG?
Consumption rebounds
Firstly, OPEC quota discipline held at around 90% through 1999.  Prices
continued to rise and were over US$20 a barrel by August.

Secondly, from mid-1999 Asian economies began to recover sooner and more
quickly than everyone expected, and with it their oil consumption.  Oil was
the principal fuel powering the "Asian Tigers" economic growth.  A booming
US economy was also fuelling higher oil consumption,  and both impacts
resonated around the world.  Oil consumption rose by 1.6% to 75.2 m.bbls/d
in 1999 with the increase gathering pace as the year progressed.

By October consumption was exceeding supply, according to the International
Energy Agency (IEA), with stock draw downs of 0.7 m.bbls/d in October,  1.6
m.bbls/d in November, 4.7 m.bbls/d in December, 0.5 m.bbls/d in January and
continuing into February while OPEC quota compliance fell to 75%.  In other
words the OPEC "shut-in" production is down to about 3.2-3.3 m.bbls/d and
the falling inventories of crude and petroleum product are starting to
encroach upon that required for secure operation of the supply system which
is becoming increasingly vulnerable to minor disturbances.  Oil prices have
risen to over US$30 a barrel.

Non-Persian  Gulf  oil  is  peaking
Thirdly, there is a growing consensus in the oil industry and among other
analysts that oil production outside the Persian Gulf will peak in 2000
through 2001.  North Sea oil will peak this year according to the London
based Petroleum Review of February 2000.  Mexico's largest oil field,
offshore Cantarell, has a gigantic $1 billion nitrogen injection project
about to be commissioned to re-pressurise the field to offset decline and
requiring a further 12 year $9 billion investment to keep the pressure up.
The enforced investment cut backs of 1998-9 are now showing themselves as
faster production declines in North America, the North Sea and possibly
Venezuela which faces a similar situation to Mexico. African producers and
China face similar prospects over the next two years.

Non-Persian Gulf oil will peak at about 55-56 m.bbls/d with about 10
m.bbls/d of this coming from OPEC producers.  The IEA forecasts consumption
of 77 m.bbls/d in 2000, an increase of 2.4% on 1999 with consumption in the
successive four quarters of 77.2, 75.4, 76.6 and 78.8 m.bbls/d
respectively.  That means Persian Gulf producers have to supply 21-22
m.bbls/d average for the year and 22.8 m.bbls/d in the fourth quarter.
Their output in 4Q 1999 was 19 m.bbls/d and the maximum is about 23
m.bbls/d.  However, it is not possible to operate such a supply system at
or near 100% capacity all the time, there are always supply hiccups.

The 2Q is normally the time stocks are replenished following the northern
hemisphere peak and in preparation for the summer driving season and
subsequent winter peak.  However, in the absence of an increase in OPEC
production this will be difficult.  OPEC meets in March to review quotas.
It looks as though quotas will be partially lifted.  But there are signs
that OPEC members are looking backwards at the price falls that have
accompanied past quota rises and will be wary about ending quotas.  It
would be June before such increases could come into full effect as it takes
two months for oil to move from the exporters shipping terminal to the
petrol bowser.

If the IEA's consumption expectations are fulfilled, even with OPEC quotas
lifted in March, supply will be extremely tight in the second half of 2000.


POST  2000  SUPPLY  SHORTFALL
Mid 1990's forecasts
Oil supply analysts like Colin Campbell have for many years forecast that
non-Persian Gulf oil would peak around 2000,  Persian Gulf production would
peak about 2011-12 and the world as a whole between 2006-08.  The latter
forecasts have always assumed that the needed investment in exploration and
oil field development would occur in time on the scale required, especially
in the Persian Gulf.  What is the true position?

A series of articles in the US Oil & Gas Journal around 1994-96 discussed
the prospects for OPEC as a whole and the Persian Gulf producers to meet
expected production in 2000 and 2005.  Around $100 billion was seen as
necessary by 2005 with just under half in the Persian Gulf countries who
would provide 75% of the net production increase, indeed the only area in
the world where significant increases are possible at low cost.  Oil
consumption in 2000 is at the higher end of these forecasts and non-Persian
Gulf production a bit higher.

The bulk of non-Persian Gulf investment was required to sustain production
from ageing oil fields - with 60% of the Persian Gulf investment needed for
the same purpose.  There is a substantial backlog of such investment.  Such
rehabilitation investment is particularly needed in Iraq and Iran where the
consequences of war and sanctions have taken their toll.  Several producers
maximum production is now below levels attainable in the1970's.

It is difficult to get reliable information on the physical status of these
oil fields and the level of investment to date.  But one thing is certain
there is a substantial backlog of Persian Gulf investment needed to meet
expected post-2000 oil consumption growth, in the order of tens of billions
of dollars.  Once the barriers to such investment are removed it will take
about two to four years for this to translate into oil production.

So it will be 2003-04 before meaningful expansion of world oil production
beyond the 2000 level is possible!!  Remember by then non-Persian Gulf
production falls will be very visible, particularly in the North Sea.  The
scale of the investment is beyond the internal financial  and technical
resources of these countries.  This may not have been the case if sustained
investment had begun five years ago.

Barriers  to  Persian  Gulf  oil  investment
What are the main obstacles to Persian Gulf oil investment?

Firstly there is a lack of awareness of the realities of oil depletion,
over-optimistic expectations of the gains to be made by technology and
inconsistencies in the statistics for production and reserves and there
interpretation, factors that together create a false optimism and lack of
awareness of how tight supply is becoming.

Secondly, low oil prices have inhibited investment, and until recently the
large excess of supply over consumption which was mostly concentrated in
the Persian Gulf.  Growing populations and low oil prices have
substantially reduced the per capita income of these countries who now have
to import  food on a substantial scale to feed their populations.  Along
with welfare (for the elite as well as the masses) and the military, little
has been left in budgets for oil investment.

Thirdly, and the most important are the political constraints to
investment.  Iraq and Iran have the most urgent need to upgrade
infrastructure.  US inspired sanctions effectively prohibit this,
sanctions that now seriously threaten the political and economic stability
of the world.  These are unlikely to be lifted before the US Presidential
elections and what happens after that may depend on who is President and
the composition of congress.

The scale and speed of outside investment and technical support needed is a
sensitive internal political issue for the countries concerned where their
is considerable criticism of the extravagances of the ruling elites
compounded by a generation change.  Iran has over 6o million people and
over half are under the age of 25.

It is not in the long term interests of these countries to blow there oil
quickly, but rather ration it out at high prices, but not at a level that
damages the world economy.

The March and September 2000 meetings of OPEC will be critical in this
regard as will the interactions with the US Presidential elections and
six-monthly re-negotiating of the UN's so-called oil-for-food agreement
with Iraq, due in May and November.s

CONCLUSION
Only a significant fall in IEA's expected world oil consumption for 2000
can reduce the risk of a supply shortfall later this year, and then only if
OPEC substantially or completely lifts its production quotas in March.

Supply shortfalls are inevitable after 2000 to at least 2003 due to the
lack of appropriate investment in the Persian Gulf countries.  If the
political obstacles to this investment are delayed unduly then the supply
shortfalls will last longer.

As a consequence the peaking of non-Persian Gulf oil production in
2000-01will merge with the previously anticipated  2006-09 world peak into
one decade long peaking event.

Australia's oil self -sufficiency is expected to deteriorate rapidly next
decade.  Oil imports were approximately A$1.2 billion in 1999 and could
reach A$10 billion by 2010 at current oil prices and exchange rate for
business-as -usual consumption, half that by 2003.  The annual trade
deficit is under A$10 billion at present.  Business will not be "as usual".

A better appreciation will be possible after 10 April when th IEA publishes
its quarterly report on www.iea.org



From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 04:41:52 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 11:41:52 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] RE: Politics not economics drive the oil price
In-Reply-To: <008101c022de$c132f440$43178cd4@ngjones>
Message-ID: <000501c022ef$63e8c060$b3228cd4@mjones>

 Peter Odell's article in the Financial Times of September 19 is a
particularly upbeat and optimistic assessment of oil reserves. According to
Odell, the world is running into oil, not running out of it: "world oil
production can go on expanding at 2 per cent per annum until after 2050,"
Odell says. "Claims that current high prices indicate a world running out of
oil have no credibility."

How much credibility does Odell have?

Peter Odell is an eminent oil and energy economist. His credentials seem
impeccable. He was even hired by Greenpeace to prepare a survery of world
oil. In that 1997 report [archived at
<http://www.greenpeace.org/~climate/arctic99//index.html> ] Odell took the
same optimistic view: there is no shortage of oil. Any shortages which do
appear are the result of political machinations or the notorious 'short-term
market fluctuation' so beloved by Doug Henwood and other economists.

In the same report, made for Greenpeace, Odell took issue with those who
argue that oil production will peak sooner rather than later. In particular,
he denounced PetroConsultants (for whom both Colin Campbell and Jean
Laherrere, the oil industry's most famous doomsayers, worked as analysts).
Petroconsultants higly pessimistic take (they think world oil production
will peak any time now) was dimissed by Odell, who said their "data is an
'outlier' from th[e general] concensus for reasons which are impossible to
evaluate, given the private and inaccessible nature of the study and,
indeed, of the organisation itself."

But Odell's own approach has its critics, including Colin Campbell himself,
who told the energyresources elist on 24 Jone 200 that "It is ironic that
Green Peace in its legitimate concern for the environment uses flawed data
to suggest that the world has such an abundance of oil that the industry has
no need to explore offshore areas. The Climate Lobby too tends to fear that
an imminent peak of oil production might take the wind out of its sails."
Thus Campbell argued that Greenpeace had allied itself with the devil for
its own purposes.

Another commentator, Murray Duffin, later criticised Odell's findings
thusly, saying  Odell:
- Assumes that reserves growth in the future will be at least as high as in
1973-96, (very unlikely-see 3.5) but doesn't say how quickly. (It would have
to bequicker than in the reference 23 years to do much good.)
- Takes the USGS number for yet-to-be-discovered, the most optimistic
number,and ignores discovery rate.
- Assumes 35 Gb/yr production by 2020, but gives no detail on how we get
there from here.
- Doesn't discuss who controls the oil wells.
- Simply invents numbers for total non-conventional oil reserves with
noreference to credible sources & no consideration of costs or rate of
recovery.
- Assumes fairly explicitly that technology will take care of the details,
with no mention of what technology, or how quickly, or reference to past
progress. With this set of assumptions he concludes that there is no problem
in the foreseeable future.

[energyresources elist, 16 July 2000].

I'll post Duffin's paper separately.

The USGS [United States Geological Service] has produced highly-optimistic
assessments of remaining oil, which have also been widely criticised.
Interestingly, the USGS itself now seems to have come round to the
Petroconsultant/Colin Campbell view that the Peak is imminent, to judge from
one of their own recent publications:
<http://geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/open-file/of00-320/of00-320.pdf>


Mark




From webmaster at globalcircle.net  Wed Sep 20 08:10:43 2000
From: webmaster at globalcircle.net (Paul)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 08:10:43 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] THE END OF CHEAP OIL
In-Reply-To: <000601c022f7$145bc940$b3228cd4@mjones>
References: <000601c022f7$145bc940$b3228cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <200009200810430900.0153E058@mail.globalcircle.net>

I see the references at tthe bottom, but is this paper itself on a web page
somewhere? Thanks.

--paul prior webmaster http://globalcircle.net
networking for nonviolence, ecology, justice
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 9/20/00 at 12:36 PM Mark Jones wrote:

>(Murray Duffin, July 2000)
>Abstract
>In this paper I will try to summarize & organize the salient information
>from a great many source papers, to make the key points readily
accessible.
>First I will present conclusions, followed by definitions, data,
commentary
>on the data and arguments. Finally the key source papers are referenced,
>with Internet addresses, for those who wish to dig deeper own their own.
The
>following is derived from two years and many hours of research.
>1.0 Conclusions

quoting deleted





From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 19 01:12:53 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 08:12:53 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] short-term movements
Message-ID: <000901c02209$06e38d00$d8188cd4@mjones>

FT:
Iraq pushes crude oil prices to 10-year high
By Robert Corzine in London
Published: September 18 2000 19:24GMT | Last Updated: September 19 2000
06:53GMT



Oil prices surged to fresh 10-year highs on Monday after President Saddam
Hussein of Iraq warned fellow oil exporters not to bow to pressure from
"superpowers" to lower petroleum prices.

In morning trading in New York the Nymex October oil futures contract soared
$1.18 to $37.10 a barrel - the highest level since October 1990, when Iraq
was occupying Kuwait.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3A2Y3JADC&liv
e=true&tagid=ZZZGEKAOD0C




From twood at uwc.ac.za  Tue Sep 19 01:06:08 2000
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (TAHIR WOOD)
Date: 19 Sep 2000 09:06:08 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <s9c731fc.030@itsnw.uwc.ac.za>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
URL: <http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20000919/4e28f966/attachment.ksh>

From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 19 04:26:37 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 11:26:37 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FW: more nonsense on alternatives (corrected)
Message-ID: <001201c02224$17c92880$e755893e@mjones>

I meant, the conversion of water to hydrogen (+ oxygen) by means of
electricity (obviously).

The point is that the system Mage describes is actually less efficient than
contemporary gasoline engines. So we are being invited to invest a huge
portion of social capital + labour in alternatives which are no more
efficient that what we have already, and which ultimately still depend on
fossil fuels -- show us, Mr Mage,  one PV manufacturing facility which is in
operation now or which is planned or which is even a gleam in anyone's eye,
which (a) is not built by means of fossil-fuel energy inputs and (b) which
will not use fossil-generated electricity in its manufacturing process.  It
is simply, nonsense to say that PV's can substitute for fossil, they cannot.
PV's are not going to replace fossil fuel. PV's + windpower + biomass +
nuclear can not (for well known reasons) supply even theoretically, more
than about 20% of current total world energy consumption. PV's etc cannot
substitute for petrochemical feedstocks into industry and agriculture on
which all our food and most everyday production items, todays depends. Even
if it is theoretically possible to reduce US energy consumption by 70% (is
it? How?) this will not do more than *slow down the global increase in
fossil fuel consumption*. This is because of the conversion lead times
involved (first) and (second) the fact that the remaining 95% of the human
population who live outside the US and who consume far smaller amounts of
energy pro rata (the USA alone consumes 25% of fossil fuel) will still be
catching up. This is exactly what happened after 1973: energy per unit of
GDP fell in the West, but overall energy consumption continued to rise, more
slowly than before, but still fast enough to get us to where we are now, ie,
facing energy-famines and a global economic meltdown.

World oil production is peaking. The US now imports around 70% of its oil.
Opec is already at full capacity. Nopec production is generally declining.
What will happen will be severe and debilittaing shocks to the world system,
followed by economic catastrophe and worse. What the post-capitalist world
will inherit will be (a) a destabilised climate and (b) an energy famine and
(c) a wrecked biosphere.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Jones [mailto:jones118 at lineone.net]
Sent: 19 September 2000 11:07
To:
Subject: more nonsense on alternatives


This exchange is from Shane Mage and Yoshie Furuhashi on lbo-talk (for some
reason, can't imagine what, Mr Mage doesn't want to expose his arguments to
the rigours of this list). Unfortunately, Mr Mage is evidently still not
able to do better than (as Tom says) the "Pollyanna dream state in the
scientism of denial."

Here are very simple questions for Mr Mage to think about: what is the
energy efficiency and net energy cost of the most efficient forms of
conversion of hydrogen to electricity? Are they more or less efficient than
the energy efficiency of gasoline engines? And (finaly, the question Mr Mage
never answers) where is the electricity coming from to convert water to
hydrogen? If the answer is 'photovoltaics', what will be the capital cost of
building enough PV arrays to substitute for fossil fuels, and what kind of
conversion efficiency will such PVs have to have, if the transition is to be
successful?

Mark



> >Shane Mage says:
> >
> >> The following, from the 16/9 Science News, is only one of many
> >> refutations of the manic doomsday pessimism of Mr. Jones:
> >
> >how does this refute mark's post? this Science News abstract describes
> >something in a lab, a cool result the way they've sandwiched the
> >layers of photo-electricity and conversion to hydrogen together, but
> >how does this relate to the issues mark jone's raises? whats at stake
> >is not simply what can be produced in a laboratory and reported in a
> >technical journal, but what can be deployed now or soon that will make
> >a sizeable difference in energy budgets and anthropgenic climate
> >forcing. you're arguments have to be more forceful than bob dylan song
> >snippets ...
> >
> >what will they think of next???
>
>The point of course is the speed with which science and technology are
>proving the practicality of the hydrogen economy. What has been
demonstrated
>in the lab will soon, historically speaking, be the basis for material
>production. This report came just on the heels of Mr. Jones's rant.
>Technological
>progress is ongoing over a much wider front. The time scale of the
>crisis is still
>measured in decades. Two decades is plenty for full growth of what
>is now a fledgling
>--no longer incubating--fuel cell technology based on renewable
>energy sources.
>Existing hydrocarbon sources will last much longer than that and can be
>phased out before irreversible climatic deterioration strikes most of the
>world's surface.
>
>Shane Mage
>
>"L'intendance suivra"--Napol?on


What is technically possible, however, does not always go into
practice. It was technically possible to create densely populated
cities mainly served by mass public transportation in America (and
American cities were indeed so served before the rise of highways &
suburbia). Instead, we have what we have -- under-populated cities,
suburban sprawls, & longer commutes dependent upon individually-owned
automobiles. Politics, not technical feasibility, is what matters
most. Can we create political conditions for radical transformation
of social relations & then productive forces necessary for the
"hydrogen economy" in a matter of decades?


Yoshie






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 09:46:06 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 16:46:06 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FW: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
Message-ID: <000e01c02319$e3d02f00$dc158cd4@mjones>

So the price of oil has risen because of big oil profiteering by withholding
supplies? [see original message below]

But only the other day, Doug Henwood was posting about how the world was
awash with oil which apparently no-one wants to buy.
So which is the truth? It would be nice if people followed a line for more
than a few days at a time; on the other hand, if all that is required by way
of refutation is to repost what Doug said three days ago, it does make
things easier I suppose.

Doug Henwood (an economist) thinks 'there is plenty of oil' and it's just a
question of supply and demand. The truth is that there is plenty of oil but
not plenty of CHEAP oil. $11/bbl wellhead price is NOT cheap by historical
standards. If that is the marker price for what the oil patch now calls
'conventional oil' then it is a sign of coming economic distress.

I am seriously glad if Doug Henwood is researching the subject (at last!)
but it is no good just reading economists (although reading Daniel Yergin's
or even Greg Nowell's books is a useful beginning). 'Avoiding boom-bust' has
been the precise definition of the oil industry ever since the 1860s when
John D Rockefeller drove the Pennsylvanian wildcatters from the market by
cornering the railroad supply system. But the question of supply is
fundamentally determined by GEOLOGY not by economic cycles or market-actor
behaviour.

I am posting extensively about this on the Crashlist, and the Crashlist
archive is open. The url is:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist

Mark

> -----Original Message-----
> From: marxism-thaxis-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
> [mailto:marxism-thaxis-admin at lists.wwpublish.com]On Behalf Of Rob Schaap
> Sent: 19 September 2000 09:33
> To: marxism-thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com
> Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why 'alternatives' are no alternative
>
>
> G'day Thaxists,
>
> In the interests of balance, I've pinched this from Doug.  The depletion
> emergency / technological replacement crisis angle has been well put
> already.  Here's the dominance-of-finance angle.  Itself pretty damned
> scary, I reckon ...
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.
>
> Business Week - September 25, 2000
>
>
> Commentary: Big Oil's Priority: Pump Up the Stock Price
> By Christopher Palmeri
>
>
> It has been the problem that won't go away: the skyrocketing price of
> oil. Already three times this year, OPEC has increased its oil
> production quotas in an effort to alleviate the pressure.
>
>
> So what about the major non-OPEC oil companies, who, along with a
> number of non-OPEC nations, collectively produce more than half of
> the world's crude? Surprisingly, while OPEC is pumping harder than it
> has in decades, some of the world's largest oil companies are
> actually producing less. BP (BPA) slashed its production by 4% and
> midsize producers such as Texaco Inc. (TX) and Occidental Petroleum
> Corp. (OXY) have been even less active. Both saw their worldwide oil
> output slide 7% in the first half of this year. Together, ten of the
> largest reduced their output by 0.4% in the first half of this year,
> according to a recent report from Merrill Lynch & Co. ''The lack of a
> production increase from non-OPEC sources is a big reason why prices
> remain high,'' says Merrill Lynch analyst Steven A. Pfeifer.
>
>
> Many longtime industry watchers say that's because a new reality has
> set in among the world's oil titans. Wall Street has demanded that
> companies like ExxonMobil Corp. (XOM) and the Royal Dutch/Shell Group
> (RD) increase profits to buttress their long-languishing stock prices
> and avoid the boom-and-bust cycles that once defined the industry.
> Daniel J. Rice, manager of the $800 million State Street Global
> Natural Resources fund, is one of many money managers who, under
> threat of selling off shares, has continually pressured oil company
> executives not to overspend in the pursuit of production increases.
> ''We give them money, they produce a lot more, and the price goes
> down,'' he says.
>
>
> The focus on profits has only been excacerbated as oil companies on
> Wall Street have had to compete for capital with technology companies
> and other outperforming stocks. As a result, the majors have reacted
> to the current crude price runup by being ultraconservative in
> pursuing new fields. ''The major oil companies are not responding to
> the high prices with significantly increased exploration and
> production spending,'' explains Pfeifer.
>
>
> Consequently, last year, while prices were on the rise, oil companies
> replaced just 92% of their production through new discoveries. That
> was below their three-year average replacement rate of 95%, according
> to Arthur Andersen.
>
>
> To be sure, the world's oil companies are not asleep at the well.
> This year, Merrill Lynch is expecting exploration and production
> spending at the companies it follows to rebound by 16% to nearly $34
> billion. Unfortunately for the world's energy consumers, most of that
> spending is coming in the second half of the year and won't translate
> into new oil supplies for many months.
>
>
> And not everyone is opening their spigots. Exxon and Royal Dutch
> slashed their oil exploration and production budgets by more than 30%
> in the first half of this year. At Chevron Corp. (CHV), the cuts were
> less severe, but a still hefty 8% drop.
>
>
> But with oil now bouncing around the mid-$30s, how do these producers
> continue to rationalize such tightfistedness? Many cite the fact that
> it was a scant two years ago that overproduction in the face of
> weakening demand from Asia caused the price of oil to fall to a
> meager $10 a barrel. Producers are naturally wary of a repeat. ''We
> take the long view of oil and gas prices,'' says Chevron Corp.
> Chairman and Chief Executive David J. O'Reilly. ''It's
> counterproductive to overreact to prices that are either atypically
> low or high.''
>
>
> STIFF CRITERIA. Recent statements by some of the men who run the
> major oil companies reveal just how conservative they have become
> regarding their pricing forecasts and their production investment
> decisions. The key in determining new spending these days is not how
> high oil is--it's how far it could fall. BP Amoco PLC Chairman John
> Browne put out a press release in July that said his company only
> invests in projects that will be profitable at prices as low as $11 a
> barrel. ExxonMobil Chairman Lee Raymond told analysts much the same
> thing in August: ''All projects must meet our return-on-capital
> requirements in a low-price environment.''
>
>
> Given such stringent investment criteria for new wells, it's no
> wonder that high prices have left the major oil companies gushing
> profits. At the ten large companies tracked by Merrill Lynch, net
> income more than doubled in the first half of this year, to $26.4
> billion. ''The new mantra at the oil giants is conservative and
> cynical,'' says Arthur L. Smith, chairman of oil company researcher
> John S. Herold Inc. ''After years of being bludgeoned by
> institutional investors about their low returns on capital, they are
> out to prove they can make money.'' Faced with a choice between
> making Wall Street happy or pleasing the world's energy consumers,
> the major oil companies have clearly chosen sides.
>
>
> Palmeri covers the oil industry from Los Angeles.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
> Marxism-Thaxis at lists.wwpublish.com
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 09:16:48 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 16:16:48 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] new at the website
Message-ID: <000d01c02315$cbb38880$dc158cd4@mjones>

New at the Crashlist website: Global Economic Crisis A View from South
Africa by Patrick Bond (Word97 format)

+ a photo of yours truly + partner, elk-hunting in Siberia

http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base


Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 08:48:38 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:48:38 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] server problems; digest alternatives
Message-ID: <000701c02311$dc69a0a0$dc158cd4@mjones>

1. The server has been down for about 24 hours, but is now up and running
again thanks to the efforts of the redoubtable Gary Wilson, the technical
genie at wwpublish.com
2. I'm converting the digest from MIME to the more readable plain text
version.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 20 08:48:48 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:48:48 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] THE END OF CHEAP OIL
In-Reply-To: <200009200810430900.0153E058@mail.globalcircle.net>
Message-ID: <000901c02311$e2704a80$dc158cd4@mjones>


> -----Original Message-----
> From: crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
> [mailto:crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com]On Behalf Of Paul
> Sent: 20 September 2000 15:11
> To: crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> Subject: Re: [CrashList] THE END OF CHEAP OIL
> 
> 
> 
> I see the references at tthe bottom, but is this paper itself on 
> a web page
> somewhere? Thanks.

It may be archived at dieoff.org.

Mark 



From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:04 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:04 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Tensions rise as Milosevic faces defeat
Message-ID: <000701c0239d$7b22f4e0$de678cd4@mjones>

Guardian:

US navy sends reinforcements to Adriatic ahead of poll

Special report: Serbia


Jonathan Steele
Thursday September 21, 2000

The Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, flew to an army base in
Montenegro yesterday to denounce his opponents as "rabbits, rats and
even hyenas" and warn the west not to interfere in elections on
Sunday, which the opinion polls indicate that he cannot win.
Scores of Mr Milosevic's critics have been detained and with tension
rising the chief opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, has warned
that the president could use fraud to stay in power. Western
governments fear he will use the army to crush protests if he is
declared the winner. A US aircraft carrier is being sent to the
Adriatic.

It was Mr Milosevic's first visit to Montenegro - which with Serbia
makes up Yugoslavia - since he became federal president three years
ago. His helicopter brought him to the rally near the town of Berane,
within 15 miles of Kosovo, where Nato-led troops could have arrested
him on war crimes charges brought by the Hague tribunal last year.

The republic of Montenegro is deeply divided and its pro-western
government, led by Milo Djukanovic, is boycotting the Yugoslav
election. A former Serbian information minister, Aleksandar Tijanic,
warned that Mr Milosevic was preparing to arrest the Montenegrin
president.

Mr Djukanovic said last night that Montenegro would defend itself if
Mr Milosevic provoked a military clash. Speaking to Russian
television, he said: "If Milosevic decides to provoke a military
conflict with Montenegro, we would have no choice but to defend our
freedom."

A US navy spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that the aircraft carrier
George Washington would arrive in the Adriatic from the Persian Gulf
on about September 30. "This is much the normal tour of duty," the
spokeswoman said. "There hasn't been a carrier in the Adriatic for
about three or four months and the George Washington is on its way
back to the Atlantic."

Mr Milosevic yesterday told a crowd of 10,000 supporters bussed in
from nearby towns: "Our country is the focus of much attention from
the world's strongest nations, as if mankind has no other worries but
how ... Serbs and Montenegrins will govern their joint state." Many in
the crowd shouted "Slobo, Slobo" and "We are all Yugoslavia".

He has clamped down on the independent media and ordered police to
confiscate computers and other material from Serbian election
monitoring groups. Under the law, independent observers have no right
to enter polling stations or attend the count.

Despite the pressures, the opposition has done remarkably well by
uniting behind Mr Kostunica, a Belgrade lawyer, Only the maverick
Serbian Renewal Movement is running a separate candidate. An opinion
poll by the Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing agency gave Mr
Kostunica 32.5% of the vote to Mr Milosevic's 26.6%. The Centre for
Policy Studies gave Mr Kostunica 41% to Mr Milosevic's 20%.

Mr Milosevic has support in rural areas and has manipulated the
campaign through control of state television. State controls on the
price of staple goods have also cushioned the realities of a weak
economy. But years of war and corruption at the top have disillusioned
many urban voters.

Warning of vote rigging, Mr Kostunica told a rally at the weekend:
"They are bullies, liars and thieves and have stolen years of our
lives and dignity. Now they are preparing to steal the elections".

Mr Milosevic could cheat by falsifying votes from Kosovo. The UN has
allowed the poll to go ahead there but will not be running or
supervising it. In the last Serbian presidential elections as many as
200,000 Albanians supposedly voted for Mr Milosevic's right-hand man.
Because of the boycott in Montenegro, Mr Milosevic can also steal
votes which are cast in army camps and town halls run by the
pro-Belgrade party.

The EU has offered to lift sanctions if the election "leads to
democratic change". The wording was chosen with care as the Yugoslav
constitution is so ambiguous it could allow Mr Milosevic to serve out
his term until next July, even if the opposition wins. But most
observers believe he is more likely simply to declare victory and hope
to ride out - or shoot out - any protests.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:28 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:28 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BBC: Alternatives to oil
Message-ID: <000d01c0239d$89358e80$de678cd4@mjones>

Renewable energy could become more important

by BBC News Online's Environment Correspondent Alex Kirby
The industrialised world stands aghast at the prospect of rising oil
prices.

Paying more for oil means increases in the price of almost everything
that drives the rich economies.

The possibility that oil prices could continue to rise appals the
Northern countries, who see no other way to fuel their growth.

But they have little room for manoeuvre, because they cannot determine
the prices. In the grip of a crisis, it is hard to argue that there
may be a silver lining.

But the benefit of the present oil price hikes could be to focus
attention on the possibility of a world far less dependent on oil.

Environmental groups have for years been arguing that we shall all
have to live radically different lives when the oil reserves are
finally exhausted.

The truth is that they probably never will be. Oil will simply become
too expensive to compete with other fuels.

Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is fond of reminding
audiences: "The stone age didn't end because the stone ran out, and
the oil age will be just the same."

The Age of Coal

Before oil's supremacy, coal was king.

It was the bedrock of the industrial revolution in Europe and North
America, and it still has a role to play.

There are enormous reserves of coal available, but it does give off
large quantities of the gases which are causing climate change,
especially carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2).

Technology can help, up to a point, with improvements like fluidised
bed technology, which burns coal much more efficiently and results in
much less pollution.

But it seems highly unlikely that coal will ever recover its
once-dominant position.

Nuclear puzzle

Some people still pin their hopes on nuclear power, which makes far
less of a contribution to global warming (though it is not entirely
neutral).

But in half a century the world's nuclear industry has had at least
three serious accidents. Windscale (UK, 1957), Three Mile Island (US,
1979) and Chernobyl (USSR, 1986) are names etched into the global
memory, synonyms for horrific brushes with catastrophe.

Many people therefore reject new nuclear plants in the belief that
more accidents are inevitable.

And apart from that, the industry still shows no sign of being able to
get rid of its waste in safety.

Renewable fuels

A third category of fuel comes under the heading of renewables.

Some are tried and tested, like hydro-electric power, and many
countries, for instance Norway, are already exploiting them to the
full.

Wind and wave power have promise, as does biomass - crops like willow
which grow quickly and are increasingly being used for fuel. Transport
fuel based on renewable oilseed crops such as soybeans and rapeseed
also has potential.

Solar power is coming on by leaps and bounds. There are already
photo-voltaic cells which will provide power on a cloudy British
winter's day, or even by moonlight.

They are expensive, but a lot cheaper than similar cells were a few
years ago.

For vehicles, many motor manufacturers believe the future lies in fuel
cells, which will power cars as effectively as now, but without
relying on oil.

They foresee a change from an oil-based economy to one based on
hydrogen.

Conservation

And there is what its supporters are fond of calling "the fifth
fuel" - energy conservation.

Most of us still waste fuel on a prodigious scale, and the savings we
could make by greater efficiency, and by just switching off, are
immense.

The environment minister of an eastern European country told me in the
early 1990s: "In the Soviet days, we did have thermostats in our homes
and factories. When we got too hot, we just opened the windows."

Rising oil prices are the perfect excuse for second thoughts.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:01 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:01 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Iraq: Kuwait Is Stealing Oil
Message-ID: <000601c0239d$7923c980$de678cd4@mjones>

Thursday September 21, 2000  2:30 am


BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraq on Wednesday renewed its accusation that
Kuwait has been stealing its oil, a charge that in the past week has
heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf region with its echoes of the
prelude to the 1990-1991 war.

The ruling Baath party newspaper, Al-Thawra, said in a front-page
editorial that Kuwaiti officials have ``implicitly'' acknowledged they
are stealing Iraqi oil by drilling wells that may stretch horizontally
to reach Iraqi reservoirs close to the border, ``depleting (Iraqi)
crude via this vicious method.''

``This (theft) cannot but be part of a series of provocations Kuwaiti
rulers have been practicing against Iraq,'' the paper said in the
editorial signed by editor-in-chief Sami Mehdi.

Kuwait has rejected the charges as an attempt by Iraq to destablilize
in the region.

Iraq's Oil Ministry officials, speaking on condition of anonymity,
claimed Wednesday that about 300,000 barrels of oil per day are
illegally pumped by Kuwait from Iraqi reservoirs through the practice
of horizontal drilling. At current prices, the volume should be worth
more than $3 billion a year.

Kuwaiti Oil Minister Sheik Saud Nasser al-Sabah said in a statement
that Kuwait would welcome independent experts to inspect its oil
operations in the border area with Iraq ``so that the falsity of the
allegations by the Iraqi regime can be revealed.''

In the same statement, Information Minister Saad Bin Tafla al-Ajmi
said Kuwait did not have the equipment needed for horizontal drilling.

Kuwait's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Abulhasan, denied
any oil theft in letters sent to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the
Security Council and circulated Wednesday.

Abulhasan, responding to accuations Iraq made Sept. 14, accused
Baghdad of ``trying to provoke crises and create an atmosphere of
tension and instability in the region'' and urged to world body to
enforce resolutions promising to ``to prevent Iraq from resorting to
threats and intimidation of its neighbors.''

Theft of Iraqi oil was one of the reasons Iraq gave for invading
Kuwait in 1990; a U.S.-led coalition force drove Iraq out seven months
later in the Persian Gulf War. Iraq resurrected the 10-year-old
complaint last week, along with a warning that it will take proper
measures to stop its neighbor's actions.

In addition to the oil theft charges, Mehdi accused Kuwait of allowing
the United States to conduct military exercises close to Iraqi borders
and providing refuge and financial help to Baghdad opponents.

Mehdi said Iraq cannot remain silent when faced with what he described
as Kuwait's ``flagrant aggressive actions.''

Meanwhile, the United Nations, which monitors Iraqi oil sales and
controls the income under the oil-for-food plan, said Iraq has
collected $5.1 billion since June 9, the start of the current oil
phase, which ends Dec. 5.

The U.N.-monitored program, renewed at six months intervals, permits
Iraq unlimited oil sales, enabling it to earn billions of dollars to
rebuild an economy devastated by wars and U.N. trade sanctions imposed
for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:11 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:11 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Tropical Storm Forms in Mexico
Message-ID: <000901c0239d$7f1082c0$de678cd4@mjones>

Thursday September 21, 2000  5:00 am


MEXICO CITY (AP) - Tropical storm Norman formed in the Pacific on
Wednesday, dumping heavy rains on portions of Mexico's southwest coast
that left nine dead in flooding and mudslides as it headed toward
land.

Tropical storm warnings were in effect for a 186-mile stretch of the
southwest coast from Zihuatanejo north to Manzanillo, according to the
National Hurricane Center in Miami. Zihuatanejo is located about 110
miles north of Acapulco.

Torrential rains already affecting the southwest coast were expected
to continue, with accumulations of 8-12 inches forecast for the storm
warning areas as well as farther north and south along the coast, and
well inland.

In Chiapas, four people were killed Tuesday night when they were
buried in a landslide in the coastal city of Tapachula, civil
protection officials said. A fifth drowned in the Chiapas municipality
of Concordia.

In Acapulco, four others were killed Wednesday, the government news
agency Notimex reported. Two were swept away by river currents. One
man was knocked off his roof by the storm's 45 mph winds. Another man
was killed when a tree fell onto his car.

Heavy rains flooded streets and homes, brought down trees, and caused
some dividing walls to collapse onto homes in southwestern Mexico,
authorities there said.

Authorities set up 200 shelters along the coast, Notimex reported.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:42 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:42 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] French win concessions but Britain stands firm
Message-ID: <001001c0239d$91661d40$de678cd4@mjones>

Guardian: Special report: the petrol war

Andrew Osborn in Brussels and Jon Henley in Paris
Thursday September 21, 2000

Britain last night refused to consider harmonising fuel tax across the
EU but came under renewed pressure to cut duty at home as France
announced more concessions.
The French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, said he would introduce new
fuel tax compensation measures next month.

The unexpected announcement makes it even more difficult for Tony
Blair to refuse to review fuel tax in the light of last week's
protests.

There was little progress, however, at an emergency meeting of EU
transport ministers in Luxembourg attended by the transport minister,
Lord Macdonald.

The European commission was pushing for some kind of EU-wide fuel tax
but Lord Macdonald was unwilling even to discuss the matter.

"This meeting is about transport policy and not taxation," he said
before talks began.

The meeting was called by France at the height of the fuel protests
but it looked unlikely last night that it would produce any kind of
significant agreement and many ministers said they thought it had been
convened too late.

The European commission has launched an inquiry to see whether
concessions granted by Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands
breach EU state aid rules.

If they do, tax breaks and payments of state aid to truckers and
others across Europe in recent weeks will have to be cancelled and
repayment demanded.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:08 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:08 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Oil price hits 10-year high
Message-ID: <000801c0239d$7d7dadc0$de678cd4@mjones>

Guardian:

French demand Opec summit as IMF warns over price surge

Special report: the petrol war

Larry Elliott, economics editor
Thursday September 21, 2000

Fresh waves of intense speculation drove oil prices to a 10-year-high
of almost $38 a barrel in New York last night, prompting calls for an
emergency summit between western nations and the oil cartel Opec to
cap the cost of energy.
Amid fears that the surge in the price of crude could harm the world
economy, France is to urge that this weekend's meeting of G7 finance
ministers in the Czech capital Prague convene special talks involving
the EU, the US and the 11-nation oil producers' cartel.

Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister, said last night: "This is
where we should start to set out the terms of dialogue with the
producer countries."

A meeting between oil producing and oil consuming nations to discuss
the near-quadrupling of prices since early 1999 is already scheduled
for November in Saudi Arabia. But the early gathering suggested by
France before next week's summit of Opec heads of state looks
impossible. Opec officials said ministers would be travelling this
weekend to a summit in Venezuela.

However, Europe-wide fuel protests have prompted calls for Opec to do
more to bring down prices. Optimism that its decision 10 days ago to
boost production by 800,000 barrels a day would help lower the price
to around $25 a barrel has been dampened by fears that a hard winter
in the west will leave countries short of oil.

Oil dealers yesterday sent New York crude futures racing to the
highest level since 1990. US light crude for October hit a peak of
$37.80 - a rise of $1.30 on the day. In the City, the price of Brent
crude from the North sea for November delivery reached $34.55.

The latest price spike drew an International Monetary Fund warning
that rising costs are casting a shadow over the economy. "The balance
of risks for the world economy has become a bit less favourable but
there is no need to dramatise or panic," said IMF managing director
Hoerst Koehler.

Opec said yesterday that it stood ready to raise production again. "We
have increased production by over 3.2m barrels a day in six months.
That should do the job," its secretary general, Rilwanu Lukman said.
"If prices remain high, we don't need a meeting, we'll act."




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:35 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:35 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BBC: UK fuel tax: The facts (1 UK pound = ap US $1.50)
Message-ID: <000e01c0239d$8d803080$de678cd4@mjones>

The price of fuel in the UK is a complicated business and it changes
month to month as the cost of crude oil rises and falls with
international demand.
British drivers also pay two taxes on the petrol they buy at the pump:
Fuel Duty and VAT. Of these, fuel duty remains by far the most
significant - and remains the most controversial.

Fuel Duty

If a litre of unleaded petrol costs 85p, 21.7p will be the production
costs and profit, 12.5p will be VAT on this and around 51p will be
duty going straight to the Treasury.


According to figures released with the 2000 Budget, the Government
forecasts that fuel duties will continue to rise rapidly from a
?21.6bn in the 1998-99 financial year to ?23.3bn by the end of the
2000-01 financial year.

It's a lot of tax, but the Institute of Fiscal Studies, an independent
think tank, says that the large rises in fuel duty began as far back
as 1979.

Fuel Escalator

The major change in petrol taxation came under the Conservatives in
1993 with the introduction of the Fuel Price Escalator.

The escalator was designed as a means both to raise money and
discourage car use on environmental grounds.

At the time, British fuel was the third-cheapest in Europe. It is now
the most expensive.

The annual fuel escalator was set in 1993 at 3% above the rate of
inflation.

On its introduction it added three pence to a litre of fuel and raised
the tax burden on unleaded petrol to 72.8% of the total cost.

When the Conservatives left office in 1997, the escalator was at 5%
and had contributed a 11.1 pence rise to the cost of unleaded fuel.
Tax as a proportion of total cost stood at 76.3%.

Labour's record

On taking office, the new chancellor Gordon Brown increased the fuel
escalator further and put three pence onto a litre of petrol in his
first Budget - pushing the tax burden up to 81.5%.

While duty rose by two pence a litre as part of the 2000 Budget,
Gordon Brown also scrapped the fuel price escalator, saying that
future increases would be decided on the basis of the "due Budget
process".

At the time, and perhaps rather ironically given current events, the
AA said that it was the first budget in seven years in which "drivers
can take some heart".

According to the Tories this isn't good enough.

They say that since Labour came to office, the petrol pump price of
unleaded petrol has risen by around 71%.

And while there have been large jumps in the price of oil, the party
blames what it says is Labour's 16p per litre rise in taxes.

But figures from the Institute of Fiscal Studies tell a slightly
different story. The Conservative figure of 16p per litre appears to
be a combination of duty and VAT.

Leaving aside VAT, fuel duty increases under Labour amount to 12 pence
per litre - just slightly more than the rise caused by the escalator
under the Conservatives.

Because of the rise in world oil prices, the proportion of the total
fuel cost that is tax has fallen from 85% (March 1998) to 72.3%
today - still one of the highest levels in the world.

With the Tories pledging a three pence a litre cut should they come to
power, the question is whether the Government should cut fuel duty -
and whether the counry can afford it.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:39 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:39 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BBC: Oil companies: Heroes or villains?
Message-ID: <000f01c0239d$8f9024c0$de678cd4@mjones>

Police open supply lines at Stanlow refinery, Cheshire

As the tankers begin to roll again at Britain's oil refineries, the
big oil companies stand accused of siding with protesters who have
brought the country grinding to a halt.
Shell, BP and the other high street fuel giants are thought to have
put little pressure on their drivers to leave depots for the first
four days of the crisis.

Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested that the companies' reluctance to
break picket lines without police backing allowed the blockade to
escalate.The oil companies say their drivers have been at risk of
attack by protesters.

But many on the picket lines believed the companies were secretly
backing their cause - and had as much to gain from the protests as
they did.

'Completely unhelpful'

The oil companies have been reluctant to talk about their role in the
crisis.

Dr Chris Gibson-Smith, BP's managing director, told the BBC's
Newsnight that allegations of collusion were 'completely unhelpful'.

"It's not in our interests and we would never do it. It's not what we
want," he said.

Dr Gibson-Smith said tanker drivers had been concerned for their
safety as pickets assembled outside refineries at the end of last
week - and that was why they avoided any confrontation.

A Shell spokesman echoed this view: "There has been a real safety
issue since this protest started on Thursday night."

Another oil industry insider suggests that the "carnival atmosphere"
reported by many protesters is not the whole picture.

"There have been various incidents throughout this dispute which have
not necessarily been reported.

"There have been threats and intimidation," he said.



Protesting Welsh farmers take a break from the picket line at Stanlow

But the protesters who were at the depot gates tell a different story.

Stuart Butterworth, operations director of road haulage company TDS
Morgan Freight, who was part of the protest at Shell's Stanlow plant
in Cheshire, is in no doubt which side the oil giant was on.

"I think Shell are secretly behind us.

"Their general attitude towards us has been very good.

"They invited the police on the site, but they have not put any
pressure on them to take action.

"After all, the oil companies are losing out as much as we are. They
are taxed on the oil from the minute it comes out of the ground right
through to the petrol station forecourt."

'Government could make life difficult'

But industry analysts believe the big oil companies have little to
gain from a cut in fuel duty.



"I think Shell are secretly behind us. Their general attitude towards
us has been very good

Fuel protester
Tessa Kohn-Speyer, an oil analyst with Barclays stockbrokers, said
that gains would be minimal: "If the price at the pump drops from 80
pence to 78 pence a litre, the oil companies will still receive 20%."

The oil companies have resisted the temptation to cast themselves as
the consumer's champion in the battle over petrol tax.

Ms Kohn-Speyer says: "They know that the Government could make life
difficult for them if they did."

A Shell spokesman says: "We find ourselves in the unenviable position
of being caught between a disparate group of protesters on the one
hand, and the Government on the other."




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:22 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:22 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BBC: Oil markets explained
Message-ID: <000c01c0239d$85bd7ec0$de678cd4@mjones>

The recent rise in the price of oil has focused attention on the
markets where the "black gold" is traded. But what exactly is being
traded, where and how? BBC News Online has the bluffer's guide to
world oil markets.
Crude oil, also known as petroleum, is the world's most actively
traded commodity.

The largest markets are in London, New York and Singapore but crude
oil and refined products - such as gasoline (petrol) and heating oil -
are bought and sold all over the world.

Crude oil comes in many varieties and qualities, depending on its
specific gravity and sulphur content which depend on where it has been
pumped from.

If no other information is given, an oil price appearing in UK and
other European media reports will probably refer to the price of a
barrel of Brent blend crude oil from the North Sea sold at London's
International Petroleum Exchange (IPE).

Futures contract

This would commonly be in a futures contract for delivery in the
following month.

In this type of transaction, the buyer agrees to take delivery and the
seller agrees to provide a fixed amount of oil at a pre-arranged price
at a specified location.

Futures contracts are only traded on regulated exchanges and are
settled (paid) daily, based on their current value in the marketplace.

The minimum purchase is 1,000 barrels.

World benchmark

Because there are so many different varieties and grades of crude oil,
buyers and sellers have found it easier to refer to a limited number
of reference, or benchmark, crude oils. Other varieties are then
priced at a discount or premium, according to their quality.

Brent is generally accepted to be the world benchmark, although sales
volumes of Brent itself are far below those of, for example, some
Saudi Arabian crude oils.

According to the IPE, Brent is used to price two thirds of the world's
internationally traded crude oil supplies.

In the Gulf, Dubai crude is used as a benchmark to price sales of
other regional crudes into Asia.

This is not because there are more supplies of Dubai crude oil than of
any other grade - there are not - but because it is one of the few
Gulf crudes available in single, on the spot, sales as opposed to long
term supply contracts.

However, if supplies became extremely limited and price swings became
exaggerated, a new benchmark would have to be found.

US benchmark

In the United States, the benchmark is West Texas Intermediate (WTI).

This means that crude oil sales into the US are usually priced in
relation to WTI.

However, crude prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange generally
refer to 'light, sweet crude'.

This may be any of a number of US domestic or foreign crudes but all
will have a specific gravity and sulphur content within a certain
range.

'Sweet' crude is defined as having a sulphur content of less than
0.5%.

Oil containing more than 2.5% sulphur by weight is said to be 'sour'.

Opec's basket price is an average of the prices for:
Saudi Arabia's Arab Light
The United Arab Emirates's Dubai
Nigeria's Bonny Light
Algeria's Saharan Blend
Indonesia's Minas
Venezuela's Tia Juana Light
and Mexico's Isthmus.
Slightly confusingly, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (Opec) - a cartel of some of the world's leading producers -
has its own reference.

Opec basket

Known as the Opec basket price, this is an average of seven - always
the same seven - crudes.

Six of these are produced by Opec members while the seventh, Isthmus,
is from Mexico.

When Opec says it wants oil prices to remain in a range of $22-28 a
barrel, it is referring to this basket price.

In practice, the price differences between Brent, WTI and the Opec
basket are not large. Crude prices also correlate closely with each
other.

At the close of trade on 30 August, IPE Brent futures stood at $31.98
a barrel.

Nymex light, sweet crude was at $33.32 a barrel while the Opec basket
price was $31.70 a barrel.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:17 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:17 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BBC: IMF pushes for debt relief
Message-ID: <000b01c0239d$8280f160$de678cd4@mjones>

The new head of the International Monetary Fund has said he wants to
bring debt relief to as many of the world's poorest countries as
possible, as quickly as possible.
Horst K?hler also defended the IMF's role in resolving global crises,
but said he recognised many of the worries about globalisation.

Mr K?hler told the BBC that he would be listening to the protesters,
but he would be telling them that globalisation has also brought the
benefits of economic growth.



Horst K?hler: Calling for action to help poor countries

He said that the international community faced two big challenges -
making sure that the risks as well as the benefits of global capital
markets were taken into account, and ensuring that globalisation
worked for all, especially for the poor.

Mr K?hler is attending his first annual meeting of the IMF in Prague,
where widespread protests about the impact of globalisation are
expected at the weekend.

Debt relief

Many of the protests will be about the slow pace of debt relief for
the very poorest countries, who are no longer able to pay.



He said that the most concrete expression of the new concern by the
IMF and the World Bank was its plan to speed debt relief, with 20
countries out of 41 eligible receiving a decision by the end of the
year.

But many non-governmental organisations say that the IMF has still not
committed enough of its own resources for debt relief, and argue that
the process of relief is still too uncertain.

Oxfam's Tony Burdon told the BBC he feared that the IMF would not make
any further concessions, having already failed to meet its original
targets.

Mr K?hler said, however, that debt relief was not the quick road to
poverty reduction some people wanted.

Big gap

Mr K?hler went out of his way to emphasise the downside as well as the
benefits of the global economy.



The Jubilee 2000 international pressure group wants debt relief
pledges to be honoured

He said the biggest challenge for the world was bridging the huge
inequality gap between those areas which had been left out of global
growth, and those which had seen an unprecedented increase in income
and productivity.

Mr K?hler also warned that the growth of massive private capital flows
to developing countries, while ultimately beneficial, carried some
real risks of a bigger financial crisis when those funds were suddenly
withdrawn.

Defending the euro

The IMF managing director also went even further than his chief
economist in stating that the euro was "massively undervalued" on
international currency markets and that the subject of intervention
should not be "taboo".

He said that the IMF had to pay attention to the exchange rate, and
should not be afraid to speak its mind.

On Tuesday the IMF warned that a sharp adjustment in the exchange rate
of the euro could pose a big threat to the world economy.

But currency markets were sceptical about any intervention by the
major industrial countries ahead of the US presidential election in
November.

The euro continued to fall to record lows on international currency
markets.

Action by rich countries

Mr K?hler also called for action by rich countries to help the poor,
especially by opening their markets to developing countries' products,
and also by providing more government aid.




But he said the oil crisis could have its biggest impact on developing
countries.
In a BBC interview, he said that the oil price rise "cast a shadow"
over the bright prospects for economic growth in the next two years.

While there was no need to panic, it was the non-oil developing
countries who would suffer the most if oil prices stayed high.

He called on developing countries to ensure good governance and an end
to corruption as crucial pre-conditions for progress on ending
poverty.

Private sector role

Separately, the IMF executive board has issued a statement saying it
is satisfied with plans for the private sector to play a greater role
in reform, but said it was up to individual countries to negotiate
individually with creditors.

"There has been welcome progress towards a convergence of views
concerning the circumstances in which the use of IMF resources would
be conditioned on action to secure private sector involvement," it
said.

The IMF aims to provide financial support to crisis-hit governments.

But it has been criticised for encouraging unwise lending by private
banks who feel secure in the knowledge that the IMF will always bail
out a country in financial difficulties.

Mr K?hler, the first German to hold the post of IMF managing director,
was selected after an acrimonious process earlier in the year which
caused the post to be vacant for several months.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 01:28:13 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:28:13 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] George Monbiot: Helping the poorest to get poorer
Message-ID: <000a01c0239d$802dd9a0$de678cd4@mjones>

Guardian:
The World Bank and the IMF are beyond reform. Shut them down

Special report: debt relief


Thursday September 21, 2000

A few months ago I used this column to argue that the World Bank was
destroying health and education in the developing world.
In Zambia, for example, the conditions the bank had attached to its
loans - cuts in state spending and the privatisation of services - had
contributed to a 25% increase in infant mortality since 1980 and, as
parents now have to pay to have their children educated, a disastrous
decline in school enrolment.

The bank, oddly enough, didn't seem to be too happy about my analysis.
"It is simply false," Mats Karlsson, one of its vice-presidents wrote,
"to claim that the World Bank is further impoverishing people." It
was, he insisted, lending developing countries more money for health,
education and poverty reduction than ever before.

This is perfectly true. This year, for example, the World Bank will be
handing out some $1.9bn for schools in poor countries. It will also be
destroying schooling worth many times this amount by continuing to
insist that countries put debt repayments ahead of public spending. It
has yet to explain why on earth it is making dollar loans for schools
in the first place, when nearly all their costs are incurred in local
currencies. Only if local provision is to be replaced by foreign
contractors, or if children are to be given computers before they are
taught to read or write, does lending hard currency for basic
education make sense. First they break your legs, then, by way of
compensation, they offer you a pedicure.

At their grand summit in Prague at the end of this week, the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund will insist, as the IMF's
former managing director has claimed, that they are now "the best
friends of the poor". The bad old days of "structural
adjustment" -forcing all the countries they deal with to accept
precisely the same neoliberal prescriptions - are over. Instead of
being obliged to accept policies imposed by the first world, debtor
nations will now be allowed to devise their own "poverty-reduction
strategies".

This sounds fine, until you discover that, as the World Development
Movement has documented, the recipient countries can request whatever
they want as long as it's neoliberalism. As one senior bank official
pointed out, the new scheme is a "compulsory programme, so that those
with the money can tell those without the money what they need in
order to get the money".

To me, the abiding mystery surrounding the World Bank and the IMF is
why anyone still believes that they are capable of reform. The New
Economics Foundation concludes its devastating critique of the two
bodies by suggesting only that they should "undergo democratic
overhauls". Even the Guardian's usually far-sighted economics editor,
Larry Elliott, has argued that those who believe the World Bank and
IMF are inherently corrupt "are not only wrong, but are giving succour
to extremists on the right who oppose all but minimalist government
and despise internationalism". There is, most commentators agree, no
alternative to the existing global financial system.

This is not a consensus that John Maynard Keynes would have joined. In
1944, he warned that a financial system which imposed penalties and
strictures on debtor nations but not creditor nations would ensure
that the rich became richer and the poor became poorer. He proposed a
global financial institution which would charge interest on both debt
and credit. Creditor nations would thus be encouraged to spend their
surpluses in debtor nations, automatically correcting imbalances in
trade.

The US proposed an alternative system. Help for debtor nations would
be confined to a fund and a bank which lent them money when they got
into trouble. These would both be based in Washington and effectively
controlled by the creditors. As Keynes foresaw, the US proposal would
ensure both that debtor nations fell further into debt and that
creditors - the US in particular - could exercise ever-greater
economic and political power over them. But the US told Britain that
if we didn't accept its proposal, we wouldn't get our war loan.

The World Bank and the IMF, in other words, were conceived as the
policemen for a coercive and grossly unbalanced world order. The idea
that they could deliver anything but disaster for the world's poor is
laughable. If, as they will claim in Prague, they want to help build a
fairer world, then they must start by closing themselves down.

? George Monbiot's new book, Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of
Britain, is published today by Macmillan

g.monbiot at zetnet.co.uk





From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 02:40:45 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:40:45 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] debating the World Bank
Message-ID: <001301c023a7$a22f66e0$de678cd4@mjones>

[Follows an email exchange between Henry Liu and xxxx, followed
by Doug Henwood's recent article in "The Nation". The subject-matter
is the fate of the World Bank's "World Development Report". Kanbur got
pushed out because his draft report was too controversial for World
Bank panjandrums. As Henwood says, " Ravi Kanbur, an outside economist
whom Stiglitz brought aboard to supervise the writing of the bank's
annual World Development Report, resigned "in anger" (as the New York
Times put it) in June when he was ordered to revise the document to
conform to the party line that growth is the highest good of economic
policy."

There are two issues here (at least): when is the continuing evidence
of chaos and ideological decay in Washington, symbolised by the
collapse of the "Washington Consensus".  This is the reality behind
the triumphalist neo-liberal cry of TINA "There Is No Alternative".
There all too obviously ARE alternatives to the IMF/Washington gospel
of enforced "structural adjustment" programmes, global integration,
closure of public services etc.

It is important to remember that the world deflationary crisis now
lapping at the feet of the Great and the Good in London,l Paris and
Washington has been a lived reality for most of the world's poor for
decades: at least since the FIRST (1973) oil-crisis which put paid to
any hopes of 3rd World development. Now the Fourth and Final Oil-Shock
has begun. For people in the rich west the flood water can rise a long
way before they hurt too much; for the peasants in Asia (quite
literally in today's flood-stricken Mekong Delta or flood-stricken
Bangladesh), who are already up to their necks in water, a single
ripple is enough to drown them. But the Oil-Shock is not a ripple, it
is an economic Tsunami of devastating force.

So something has gotta give. The Washington Consensus is already a
thing of the past, but this huge, tempestuous new crisis which is
about to crash down on the capitalist world-system, will also be the
final nail in the coffin of the Neoliberal social experiment.

The second point about this exchange is the insight it once again
provides into the intellectual and political corruption of the US
liberal-left.

Mark]


[Fwd: FWD: Henwood on Kanbur and Stiglitz]
From: Henry C.K.Liu <hliu at mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 21:42:49 -0400

    Comments on Ravi Kanbur's resignation
    "The tussle about what the WDR [World Development Report] should
and should not emphasize demonstrates that there are forces inside and
outside the World Bank hostile to even a modest modification of the
dominant paradigm on development. The Bank may want to signal that it
is turning into a caring organization but, like a leopard and its
spots, it cannot change even if it wants to." The Hindu, 26 June, 2000
    "Everyone is shocked and deeply saddened that Ravi left. Many of
us see this as a real blow to the empowerment agenda; and if I've
learned anything from my work it's about the powerlessness of being
poor." World Bank source
    "Ravi Kanbur has recently decided to leave his position as Staff
Director of the World Development Report "Attacking Poverty." Ravi's
decision is a source of regret for the Report's team, for colleagues
in the Bank and for many people outside the Bank who have been working
on the WDR. In leaving Ravi said he had some reservations on the
emphasis of the main messages that were likely to emerge in the final
version of the Report. We believe these reservations to be unfounded."
Jo Ritzen, Vice President, Development Economics, World Bank
    "The Washington Consensus has emerged from the Asia Crisis with
its faith in free markets only slightly shaken. Poverty eradication is
now the menu, but the main dish is still growth and market
liberalisation, with social safety nets added as a side dish, and
social capital scattered over it as a relish. The overall implication
of the resignation is fairly clear. The US does not want the World
Bank to stray too far from its agenda of economic growth and market
liberalisation. Ravi Kanbur's draft has raised a few too many doubts
about this agenda, and strayed too much towards politics." The Nation,
Bangkok, 5 July, 2000
    "To keep the Bank afloat Wolfensohn has to steer between two major
constituencies. The first are the critics, the second is the US
Treasury. You don't need to be a World Bank economist to do the cost
benefit analysis. To save the Bank, and his own reputation, it is
essential that the Bank's policies and public pronouncements do not
err too far from its main shareholder and political protector, the US
Treasury." Focus on Trade, Number 51, June 2000
    "A rare individual has the courage to resign, but what about the
thousands who don't? We need to question all reports and documents and
data coming from the World Bank which the media and others use as
their source of truth about the South. This is the tip of the iceberg
of the reports that are produced under such intense politicization"
Michael Goldman, editor Privatising Nature, Political Struggles for
the Global Commons
    "At the World Bank, the high church of development economics, a
widening schism over how to fight poverty is sending ripples around
the world. Ravi Kanbur, a top Cornell economist and the man hired by
the bank to oversee the writing of its World Development Report,
resigned in anger recently when he was ordered to rewrite his staff's
draft. The report is extremely influential among economists, and Mr.
Kanbur's version questioned how well developing countries adapt to
capitalism. In fact, it questioned whether the West's standard
prescription for reform does enough to help the poor." Joseph Kahn,
New York Times, 25 June, 2000
  http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/update/18/18a.html#2

xxxx Aysen xxxx wrote:
* This piece has emerged on the _International Political Economy_
listserv today, and originally appeared in the _Nation_ magazine,
where the author of the article presents an overly positive view of
the former chief economists of the World Bank, Stiglitz and Kanbur,
and praise them for being "humane reformers who sincerely care about
the world's poor". I am posting the article as an evidence of the left
liberal position on international affairs and "humanist imperialism"
of the World Bank. This is evidently a pro-system journalism, so I am
telling _in advance_ to avoid another _Business Week_ friction. Since
this is the trendy position among the left in the US today, It is
always important to be updated about their views.
* xxxx Aysen xxxx
* PhD Student
* Department of Political Science
* SUNY at Albany
* Nelson A. Rockefeller College
* 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
* Albany, NY 12222
*  -------------------------------------------------------------------
-----

Subject: FWD: Henwood on Kanbur and Stiglitz Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000
*
*  This article presents one view of the policies at the WB and IMF.
*
* The Nation - October 2, 2000
*
Stiglitz and the Limits of 'Reform' Doug Henwood
It's global protest time again. When Bill Gates and other members of
the global elite gathered in mid-September for the World Economic
Forum in Melbourne, Australia, thousands of union members and
activists filled the streets to protest the effects of unfettered free
trade. The next opportunity to trouble a convocation of the world's
bigwigs is in Prague at the end of September, when the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund hold their annual meetings. In April,
their midyear meetings brought thousands to Washington and shut down
the city
There's a long-standing split among those who protest and criticize
these institutions - and their close relative, the World Trade
Organization - between those who'd reform them and those who'd prefer
to shut them down. Two forced departures from the World Bank have made
the limits of reform irrefutably clear.
The first was the exit of former chief economist Joseph Stiglitz at
the end of 1999. Stiglitz had made one too many public criticisms of
the economic policies preferred by the bank and its ultimate master,
the US government. And more recently, Ravi Kanbur, an outside
economist whom Stiglitz brought aboard to supervise the writing of the
bank's annual World Development Report, resigned "in anger" (as the
New York Times put it) in June when he was ordered to revise the
document to conform to the party line that growth is the highest good
of economic policy.
Stiglitz was appointed to his World Bank post in December 1996. Long
regarded as one of the leading theorists in his field - and frequently
tipped as a future Nobelist - he served on Bill Clinton's Council of
Economic Advisers from 1993 until his move over to the bank. Despite
this respectable pedigree, Stiglitz started causing trouble almost
from the first.
He attracted worldwide notice with a January 1998 lecture in Helsinki
in which he criticized the "Washington consensus" - the austerity,
privatization and deregulation agenda that had become the standard
policy prescription for much of the world - as misguided and often
disastrous. He pointed out that the historically unprecedented rapid
economic growth in East Asia - and with it the increases in life
expectancy, literacy and other social indicators - was the result of
the sort of state intervention that the bank frowns on. He also
pointed out that the 1997 financial crisis that interrupted that
growth was in large part the result of the reckless decisions of
private investors. But instead of drawing the proper conclusions,
Stiglitz noted, market ideologues were using the crisis to discredit
state intervention and promote more market liberalization. He further
argued that moderate inflation is pretty harmless, budget deficits
aren't necessarily evil, privatization isn't a panacea and
deregulation of domestic and international financial markets can do
serious harm. For a senior World Bank official to say these things is
a bit like a Pope denying the Virgin birth.
As his tenure progressed, Stiglitz elaborated on these themes. He
publicly rued the fact that workers and small businesses were "getting
screwed" because they were inadequately represented in
decision-making. He criticized the IMF - without mentioning it by
name - for making the Asia crisis worse by imposing austerity programs
instead of stimulating imploding economies and shoring up social
safety nets. He proposed that restricting the freedom of global
capital movements could make the world less crisis-prone. He mused
that the disastrous results of economic reform in Russia were "not
just due to sound policies being poorly implemented" but to "a
misunderstanding of the foundations of a market economy"earning him a
public rebuke from World Bank president James Wolfensohn.
The accumulation of sacrileges became too much, and Stiglitz's
"resignation" was announced last November, an occasion that led
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to praise Stiglitz as a "major
creative and intellectual force." The Clinton Administration said it
had played no role in the exit. In fact, according to World Bank
insiders Summers informed Wolfensohn that if he wanted another term as
World Bank president, Stiglitz had to go - so Stiglitz went.
Stiglitz was kept on as a consultant, but his contract was terminated
in May. It's said the last straw was an article he wrote for The New
Republic that, aside from reiterating his policy criticisms, contained
this, passage: "The older men who staff the fund ... act as if they
are shouldering Rudyard Kipling's white man's burden. IMF experts
believe they are brighter, more educated, and less politically
motivated than the economists in the countries they visit. In fact,
the economic leaders from those countries are ... brighter or
better-educated than the IMF staff, which frequently consists of
third-rank students from first-rate universities." Policy disputes are
one thing, but this was just too harsh a truth to utter in public.
Ravi Kanbur was an inconvenient leftover from the Stiglitz days.
Together they had opened up the drafting of the World Bank's annual
World Development Report, its flagship document. A draft was posted on
the web, and public comments were actively sought, Its drift was that
contrary to standard development doctrine, growth wasn't enough to
lift the poor out of poverty - policy had to be actively tilted in
their favor. (It should be remembered that we're not talking about
people who skip a meal now and then: The bank's definition of poverty
is an income of less than $1 a day, a ration on which 1.2 billion of
the world's people subsist.) This openness was a departure from past
practice, in which the reports were written by staff economists under
the supervision of elite journalists on loan from The Economist or the
Financial Times.
The US government, in the person of Summers, was outraged by Kanbur &
Co.'s draft. As one participant in the process put it, the Clinton
Administration had essentially embraced the trickle-down economics
that Democrats had run against for decades. Kanbur was ordered to
rewrite the report to be more "pro-growth." He resigned instead. In
the final version, among other changes, discussion of the importance
of income distribution to poverty reduction largely disappeared.
A lot of bank staffers were upset by the departures of Stiglitz and
Kanbur (though even Stiglitz's supporters concede he was a poor
manager), but the public executions were a clear warning to any future
dissenters. None of the sources for this article, for example, wanted
to be quoted by name, even though the bank's mission statement swears
that it is an institution based on an ethic of "personal honesty,
integrity, commitment; working together in teams - with openness and
trust; empowering others and respecting differences."
Though ostensibly multilateral institutions, and formally part of the
United Nations, the World Bank and IMF are essentially run by the US
government. As MIT economist Rudiger Dombusch put it a few years ago,
"The IMF is a tool of the United States to pursue its economic policy
offshore." The bank has a reputation for being a bit softer than its
neighbor across Washington's 19th Street; it is, by its mission and by
the preferences of many of its staffers, devoted to poverty reduction
and economic development, while the IMF is the guardian of financial
stability and political orthodoxy. There are some good people with
good intentions working for the bank; the fund is staffed mainly by
disciplinarians. But the fates of Stiglitz and Kanbur make it clear
that there are severe limits on how much good can be talked about,
much less done, by the World Bank.
Treasury Secretary Summers, who purged Stiglitz and Kanbur, was
himself chief economist at the World Bank from 1991 to 1993. In that
role, Summers made headlines when a memo attributed to him -
suggesting that Africa was "vastly under-polluted" and that "the
economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage
country is impeccable" - was leaked to the press. This past April,
when I asked Summers whether Africa was still vastly underpolluted, he
said, after conceding that this was a "fair if not friendly question,"
that it's long established that he was merely being ironic and
provocative. He also praised the 'moral energy" of the protesters
who'd come to Washington to complain about the World Bank and the IMF,
unaware that I'd overheard him just an hour earlier celebrating the
"proactive" arrest of hundreds of them who hadn't committed any crime.
Neither Stiglitz nor Kanbur is a radical by any standard; both are
humane reformers who sincerely care about the world's poor. But even
that was too much for the World Bank and the IMF. The impeccable logic
by which they operate will hear no appeals; their decisions are final.
----
Doug Henwood, a Nation contributing editor edits the Left Business
Observer. His latest book, A New Economy?, is due out late this year
from Verso.
_______________________________________________
stop-imf mailing list stop-imf at lists.essential.org
http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/stop-imf

*




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 21 07:25:07 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 14:25:07 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: US trade gap breaks record
Message-ID: <000301c023cf$5c5a5440$9c008cd4@mjones>

By Peronet Despeignes in Washington
Published: September 20 2000 13:34GMT | Last Updated: September 21
2000 00:21GMT



The monthly US trade deficit hit a record high in July as exports fell
and imports continued to rise, according to new data out on Wednesday.

The Department of Commerce said the monthly deficit in goods and
services - the difference between what the US buys from and sells to
the rest of the world - grew to about $31.9 bn in July from a revised
$29.8bn in June.

Sales of industrial supplies, consumer goods, cars, car parts and
other exports fell 1.4 per cent to $89.7bn and imports inched up 0.6
per cent to $121.5 as money spent on oil imports soared.

Bilateral deficits widened to new records with China and Japan, also
rising with Korea and Taiwan. Deficit in the US' trade with western
Europe grew 66 per cent month-on-month to 7.2bn, as the sliding euro
raised the cost of US exports in Europe and reduced the cost of
European imports in the US.

With downard revisions made to second-quarter data, the July report
marks a new record and the second time in five months that the monthly
US trade gap has exceeded $30 billion.

"The US economy is now running a trade deficit of about a billion
dollars a day," said David Ingram, an economist with Economy.com, a
Pennsylvania consultancy firm.

The willingness of foreigners to lend to and invest in the US has made
it possible and allowed the dollar to strengthen despite the widening
deficit.

Foreign ownership of stocks, bonds and other assets in the US
increased by $222.7bn in the second quarter, according to Commerce,
following an increase of $236.5bn in the first. "As long as the dollar
remains strong, and foreigners find the US a superior investment
environment, the trade deficit will continue to set new records,"
Ingram said.

But the trade report contained clear evidence of a slowdown in US
consumer spending beyond the headline figure.

While imports grew from June to July, the growth, unlike the expansion
of exports, continued to slow on a year-on-year basis. In March,
imports were up 23 per cent year-on-year, but in July only 17.1 per
higher - a result inflated by the renewed surge in oil prices through
the summer.

Another sign of slowing growth in the US came in the Federal Reserve's
survey on regional economic conditions, widely known as the "beige
book."

It noted "further signs of slowing growth in several districts" across
the Southeast and Midwest through August and early September.

The report cited softening home sales and construction and "sluggish"
retail sales growth, but most districts continued to cite "strong"
overall conditions, with "tight" labour markets, "upbeat" expectations
and "widespread" reports of wage increases.

Higher labour costs were "an increasing problem," the beige book said,
but showed few signs of "being passed through to consumers as higher
productivity and competitive pressures held firms' prices in check."

But several districts said recent sharp increases in health care and
energy costs "might eventually be passed through to consumers."





From embark at epud.net  Thu Sep 21 18:54:04 2000
From: embark at epud.net (embarkadero)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 17:54:04 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd: UN attacks Europe's fuel policies
Message-ID: <000201c02430$080eed40$492b74d8@pavilion>

Thursday, 21 September, 2000, 02:42 GMT 03:42 UK 
UN attacks Europe's fuel policies

By UN correspondent Mark Devenport 

One of the United Nations' most senior officials has warned that the battle for clean air and sustainable energy is in danger of being lost as a result of the public backlash against high oil prices. 

Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the UN Development Programme, was speaking at the launch of a UN-sponsored assessment of world energy trends. 

He said environmental concerns were noticably lacking during the current protests in western Europe over high fuel prices. 

"You didn't hear the British Government or its counterparts in continental Europe saying that the basis for high fuel prices was environmental concerns for clean air," he said. 

"Rather they stressed law and order and resisting direct action and the need to have government tax revenues to spend on health care and education and other goals," he added. 

Increased demand 

The authors of the report believe the world's consumption of energy will double over the next 35 years. 

Richer countries are becoming more efficient at using energy, but developing countries' consumption will more than outweigh this. 

Their demand is increasing by more than 4% every year. 

The report acknowledges that the world's energy resources will not run out in the next 50-100 years, but it argues that there remains a need to use energy far more efficiently in order to limit negative consequences such as global warming. 

Mr Malloch Brown says that 10 years after world governments focused on global warming at the Rio summit, there is a real risk that the battle for clean air and sustainable energy might be lost. 

He argues for what he calls "smart energy policies" which encompass extending more modern forms of energy to the two billion people in poorer nations who don't have access to electricity. 

He would like to promote greater use of renewable energy sources such as wind, water and solar power. 

The UN report suggests these energy sources could be made more competitive by reducing subsidies on fossil fuels and making sure the environmental cost of burning oil or coal is fully included in their price. 

http://envirolink.netforchange.com/frame.html?page=search.html%3Fcatid%3D10%26sourcetype%3Dnews

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From rsp at uniserve.com  Thu Sep 21 23:03:32 2000
From: rsp at uniserve.com (Sam Pawlett)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 22:03:32 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] out of oil
Message-ID: <39CAE824.27231CC0@uniserve.com>




The following article is from The Vancouver Sun newspaper in Vancouver
BC, one of Canada's most respected dailies.  Its website is at
http://www.vancouversun.com.

Sam:I almost jumped out of bus seat when I read this is my daily Conrad
Black owned rag. Gwynne Dyer is a well known talking head-blowhard type
from the CBC TV news. Interestingly, about half way through he mentions
the word Crash and yes capitalized. Mark or Tom or whoever is
administrating  is this guy subbed to the Crash list. Maybe the good
denizens of the crash list are making progress. There are some poor
parts of this articles like taking Paul Krugman seriously. 

Oil's precarious future

Motorists, truckers and farmers protest as global oil stocks dwindle and
Third World industrialization sends demand soaring. The need for further
development of conservation measures and alternative energy is urgent.

Gwynne Dyer Vancouver Sun

A barrel of crude oil still costs less than a barrel of Coke or a barrel
of Perrier water, as the website of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) helpfully points out.
For all the screams of anguish about the recent steep rise in price, oil
is actually selling at the moment for around its average price over the
past 30 years. But the next 30 years are going to be very different,
because we will soon be running out of the stuff.
Three years ago, geologist Craig Bond Hatfield of the University of
Toledo calculated that even if global oil consumption remained steady,
worldwide oil production would go into absolute decline by 2036. But it
isn't remaining steady; it's going up each year, so the deadline is a
lot closer than that.

There has been some progress in the West in economizing on the use of
oil, mainly because the "new economy" gets a lot of its growth in areas
that don't use large amounts of energy. American economist Paul Krugman
estimates that the U.S. burns only half as much oil per dollar of gross
domestic product as it did in the early 1970s. But Western oil
consumption hasn't actually fallen, and elsewhere it's soaring.

The surge of economic growth in industrializing Third World countries
means that global oil consumption has risen from 59.7 million barrels a
day in 1985 to 69 million b/d in 1995, and 75 million b/d this year.
When you factor in this continuing growth in consumption, according to
Hatfield, the date when total world production peaks moves up to 2011.

No doubt there is more oil still to be discovered, but the trendline is
undeniable. Since 1985, each year's newly discovered oil reserves have
amounted to only about 40 per cent of that year's global oil
consumption. By now it's down to 25 per cent.
Even the conservative International Energy Agency agrees with Hatfield's
figures, estimating that somewhere between 2009 and 2012 global oil
production, after rising steadily for 140 years, will peak and start
down again. By 2020, about one-fifth of the predicted consumption will
have to come from "unidentified unconventional" sources (i.e. they have
no idea where it's coming from).

 By 2040, according to other studies, total global oil production may be
down to less than half what it is now.
What will this do to the global industrial economy that we have built
largely on oil over the past century and a half? Well, if we don't have
time to develop and put into place alternatives sources of energy to
carry the load that is now borne by oil, it will simply crash in ruins.

Alternative energy sources can be developed. We even have a good idea
what sorts of technologies would be involved, from solar power to fuel
cells. But we will need a very long time to shift an entire world's
industrial plant and transportation system over from oil.
So if we are not to have the Crash of all time in 10 or 15 years, two
things must start happening soon: serious oil conservation measures, to
give us more time for the transition, and a big push to get the
alternative technologies out of the labs and on to the streets.

In a market-driven economy, that means the price of oil needs to go up,
and stay up. No more wild fluctuations between $8 and $35 a barrel
within an 18-month period; just a steady rise towards, say $40 a barrel
by late next year, and then further gradual rises towards about $60 per
barrel by 2005. Is this break with the traditional pattern possible?

Yes, because power is moving back towards OPEC, whose long-term interest
is in sustainable higher prices.
What has driven the huge gyrations of oil prices over the past three
decades has been the fact that whenever OPEC's deliberate strategy or
incidents like the Iranian revolution or the Gulf War drove them up, the
industrialized countries would invest more in their own (higher-cost)
oilfields. Increased non-OPEC production, together with a recession
caused by the high oil prices, would then cause a world glut of oil and
bring prices back down.
But there are no more North Seas and Alaskan North Slopes waiting to be
developed. The West can pull off this trick at most once more -- and
maybe not at all.

OPEC's share of the world's remaining proven reserves has gone up from
67 per cent to 78 per cent in the past 10 years. Moreover, even within
OPEC, power is shifting toward the big Middle Eastern oil producers with
relatively small populations. At the moment, OPEC as a whole supplies 41
per cent of the world's oil. By 2010, its Middle Eastern members alone
will account for half the world's production.

Unlike OPEC members like Venezuela, Nigeria and Indonesia, who need
every dollar they can squeeze out right away, the cartel's Middle
Eastern members (with the exception of Iran) are countries that can
afford to restrict production in the short term in order to push prices
up. It's wonderful when the world's long-term best interest coincides
with your own self-interest, so they probably will.
And will these higher prices slow down the growth of the world's
industrial economies? Of course they will -- but it's generally a good
idea to slow down when you're driving straight towards the edge of a
cliff.
Gwynne Dyer Canadian journalist on international affairs based in
London.


The article you just read is from The Vancouver Sun newspaper in
Vancouver BC. Looking for a job in Vancouver? Try our Careerclick site
at http://www.careerclick.com/bc.  Canucks fan? Follow the team at
http://www.thecanucks.com.



From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 01:03:33 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 08:03:33 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Charles Secrett on the GM Trial
Message-ID: <000601c02463$38eb97a0$c51a063e@mjones>

Guardian: Success has its own dangers, too

GM trials may be under threat but democracy must not be forgotten
Special report: GM debate

Charles Secrett
Friday September 22, 2000

Direct action protesters have never had it so good. A handful of
truckers and farmers bring the country to its knees simply by standing
outside Britain's oil refineries and telling tanker drivers to stay
put. Then, the acquittal of the Greenpeace defendants in their GM
crop- trashing case deals a knock-out blow to the government's farm
testing programme.
Peaceful direct action carried out by people who take responsibility
for their actions must be allowed to shape what happens in a mature
democracy. Britain has a long and honourable tradition of civil
disobedience. Sometimes the law is an ass, and needs to be challenged
outside parliament. The Greenpeace defendants belong to that
tradition. I hope the oil blockaders would have had the courage to
risk the high court's judgment if the police had followed usual
procedure and charged them.

In an age where conventional politics is as bland and flatulent as
processed beans, it is not surprising that activists from all walks of
life find other ways to advance their cause. This is especially true
when, as in the case of fuel prices and GM crops, the government is
seen as arrogant, out-of-touch and wrong. (I believe high prices on
polluting fuels are right, as well as good for the economy and
environment, but that's another story). I wonder when we'll see the
first attacks launched against the dome?

The Greenpeace ruling must worry the government on two counts. First,
a jury has decided that the GM trials pose an unacceptable threat to
neighbouring farms and the environment. Second, they appear to have
given the green light to any sincere protester who rips up a GM crop
which is about to pollinate. The defendants argued that they had a
lawful reason for their actions under the Criminal Damage Act, which
allows people to protect land and livelihoods from other damaging
intrusions, if the court is convinced that such altruism is the
genuine motive. Empirical studies have proven that GM contaminated
pollen will be spread by the wind at least 4.5km beyond a pollinating
crop. In Britain's crowded countryside, all GM trials thus present the
same threat to neighbouring conventional and organic farmers as this
site at Lyng in Norfolk.

The government has only one option now - stop the field trials before
more damage is done, and go back to the safety of a secure laboratory.
Having been defeated on scientific, economic and moral grounds, the
government has lost its one remaining legal justification. It should
admit honourable defeat.

What a victory that would be for the campaign against GM. But let's
not get carried away. Honourable and peaceful direct action is
democratic. But it is also fraught with danger and risk. For a start,
it is game that anyone can play. Last week's confrontation may have
been taken by desperate farmers or concerned environmentalists.

This week's action may be taken by people paranoid about paedophiles,
or petrol heads who don't care about the climate destabilising,
health-threatening pollution they inflict on everyone else. Most
liberals do not possess 44-tonne articulated lorries which they can
park on top of the nation's fuel supplies. It is a fine line between
legitimately challenging the state, or corporations accused of acting
against the common good, and simply shoving due process and the rule
of law to one side to get your own selfish way. A society in which
conventional politics is seen as having little useful role holds
dangers for us all.

The state has many ways of fighting back against protesters, sometimes
with good cause, sometimes not. Tony Blair advocates GM crops and
foods. He may well decide that all prosecutions should now take place
in much less sympathetic magistrates courts. We may well see Jack
Straw using his exciting new anti-terrorism powers to target crop
trashers, or spy on established campaigning organisations.

The other danger posed by direct action is that such actions are
difficult to control. Public sympathy for the cause withers in the
face of aggression. The state introduces more restrictive laws and
tougher policing. Democracy narrows, and the rights of active, aware
citizens are curtailed. Mr Straw's anti-terrorist legislation is a
case in point. Partly in response to the May Day riot, it has been
deliberately drafted loosely. Now the Home Office has more powers to
limit the legitimate activities of awkward pressure groups.

Information is power. The first responsibility of pressure groups is
to present the facts and arguments for ordinary citizens. Next, we can
create opportunities for constituents or taxpayers, shareholders or
consumers, to challenge governments and corporations. This type of
citizen action works, as Monsanto found to its cost. And, by using due
process, it strengthens not weakens democracy.

Charles Secrett is director of Friends of the Earth.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 01:03:41 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 08:03:41 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Times: Gore oil appeal paints Clinton into a corner
Message-ID: <000801c02463$3d3ddac0$c51a063e@mjones>

FROM BEN MACINTYRE IN HOLLYWOOD, MARYLAND



AL GORE sought to head off a looming threat to his presidential
campaign yesterday with a call for President Clinton to ease
spiralling oil prices by tapping into America's huge oil reserves, a
policy that puts him on a collision course with some of the
Administration's top economic advisers.
The rocketing cost of home-heating oil could provoke a backlash
against the White House with a knock-on effect on the Vice-President's
electoral chances, particularly in the oil-dependent northeastern and
midwestern states.

Speaking at an oil distribution depot in Maryland, Mr Gore proposed
releasing "batches" of five million barrels of oil from America's
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the world's largest emergency stockpile
containing 570 million barrels of crude oil. The White House said that
the proposal was among several options being considered, but Mr Gore's
statement makes it virtually inevitable that President Clinton will
now take the controversial step of releasing extra oil.

But Laurence Summers, the US Treasury Secretary, has vigorously
rejected such a move. In a sharp memo to Mr Clinton written earlier
this month and obtained by The Wall Street Journal, he gave a warning
that any attempt to drive down prices by opening up the oil reserve to
increase supply "would be a substantial policy mistake".

He added that Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve
revered as a prime architect of America's boom, agreed with this view.

Mr Summers, who has been tipped to continue in his job if Mr Gore
wins, said that it would "set a dangerous precedent" if the strategic
reserve was used to "manipulate prices" instead of its original
purpose, as a stockpile to tackle sudden shortages.

George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, countered that America
should lean on foreign suppliers to provide more oil. "We need to use
our strong hand in diplomatic circles to make it clear to our friends
overseas that we don't want them holding our nation and our consumers
hostage," he said.

Mr Gore also challenged oil companies to stop profiteering, urged Opec
to honour their agreement to increase oil production and portrayed
himself as the defender of middle-class consumers against rising oil
and petrol prices.

"Crude oil prices are at a ten-year high, while the big oil companies
have seen their profits increase by two to three times in the past
year," Mr Gore said. "One of the central choices we face in this
election is whether we will have a President who's willing to stand up
to big oil interests and fight for our families. That's the sort of
President I intend to be." The Vice-President has repeatedly depicted
Mr Bush and his running-mate Dick Cheney as wealthy former oil company
executives in hock to "big oil".

Mr Gore proposed several "swaps" of oil from the reserve, with more
releases if prices do not stabilise. Under this system oil from the
reserve would be released to the oil companies, which would eventually
repay in oil, plus interest, also in kind.

The reserve, stored in four, vast, underground containers in Louisiana
and Texas, was created in the 1970s to prevent any future disruption
to the US oil supply after the Arab oil embargo. The US has sold oil
from its reserve only once, during the Gulf War. Bill Richardson, the
Energy Secretary, said the price of crude oil, which is nearly $38
(?27) a barrel for the first time in a decade, was "dangerously high".

Mr Bush has opposed using the reserve to "alleviate political
pressure" and congressional Republicans attacked the White House for
its failure to prepare for the current crisis.

Heating oil is already 50 per cent more expensive in the US than it
was one year ago.

Some of the swing states in the election, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio
and Michigan, are also northern and cold, and if millions of families
face soaring heating bills this winter the effect on the race may be
dramatic.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 01:03:38 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 08:03:38 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT: Yugoslavia opposition expect poll manipulation
Message-ID: <000701c02463$3bab05c0$c51a063e@mjones>

By Irena Guzelova in Belgrade
Published: September 21 2000 16:52GMT | Last Updated: September 21
2000 23:52GMT



Yugoslavia's opposition leaders appear to be ready to concede publicly
that they do not believe President Slobodan Milosevic will relinquish
power voluntarily after the country votes on Sunday.

The opposition parties, ahead in opinion polls, are confident about
winning the elections but expect widespread manipulation of results.
They have called the public out on to the streets to await the results
on Sunday night, and recognise that their success depends on people's
willingness to protest.

The government has dismissed opinion polls putting opposition
candidate Vojislav Kostunica comfortably ahead by between 6 and 20
percentage points as western propaganda portrayed the race as a choice
between "patriotism and treachery".

Veteran observers say the government may decide to ignore any protests
on Sunday and calculate that they will die down. Or they may order the
police to disperse the crowd with batons and tear gas, as they did
during demonstrations in May. A third scenario is for the authorities
to send in the army, with orders to put an end to the protests.

There is a sense of foreboding among many people in Serbia. They
recognise the importance of these elections, but are not sure how far
to go to protect their votes. Many fear the opposition's success could
trigger a harsher police crackdown.

The opposition is keen to prevent bloodshed. It has appealed to the
army and police to respect the will of the people and hopes to limit
Mr Milosevic's use of force. In the event of violence, they have
indicated they would back down. Their next strategy would be to
present themselves as the only credible force at next year's elections
for a Serbian parliament and president.

Diplomats who witnessed the collapse of communism in eastern Europe
say the first five days or so after the elections will be a crucial
indicator of what to expect.

The campaign has been marred by intimidation. Nebojsa Pavkovic, army
chief of staff, has referred to Sunday as "D-day" and said his troops
would prevent any attempt at "taking power in the street".

The opposition hopes that its appeal among middle and lower-ranking
officials in the ruling coalition will limit the scope for violence.

Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, says that
between May and September police detained more than 2,500 opposition
members and members of pressure groups.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 07:48:21 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:48:21 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] How did an earlier generation deal with an Oil Shock?
Message-ID: <000101c0249b$c5553380$a7018cd4@mjones>

The first Oil Shock happened in 1973. Oil prices quadrupled, and the
shock waves permanently altered the political landscape, reshaped
geopolitical strategies, set in train the events which led to the
collapse of the USSR, ushered in a new era of mass unemployment and of
so-called 'stagflation', and hammered living standards for more than a
generation. Above all, the first Oil Shock put an end forever to hopes
of true development in the recently-decolonialised Third World.

There are important differences between now and then. But there are
also many similarities. So how did contemporary thinkers and analysts
understand what was happening?

Oil is the only essential commodity, and it is basic to the world
energy system, which is why all energy prices tend to rise in the wake
of an oil price spike. This affects international financial and
economic relations in a big way. Oil is paid for in dollars; any
country wishing to buy oil from Saudi Arabia must first earn enough
dollars to do so (usually but not always by exporting to the USA).

This fact is so fundamental: that oil is denominated in dollars: that
one of the immediate effects of an oil shock is therefore to
strengthen the USA. For the US is the only country which merely has to
print more dollar bills in order to buy the energy it imports.  After
1973, manipulating the value of the dollar became a key way that the
US used to restore its strategic hegemony in the world and to overcome
some of its own problems, principally a serious balance of payments
deficit.

As always when there is a big shake-up, there are some winners as well
as many losers.

How did contemporaries understand the unprecedented events unleashed
by the first Oil Shock?

I'll be posting more on this, including excerpts from a book first
published in Paris in 1976 and later published in English in 1980:
"The World Economic Crisis" by Yann Fitt et al. I have posted the key
sections on petrodollars, dollar seignorage and US hegemony at the
website: The Reign of the Dollar: Hegemony and Decline by Alexandre
Faire (Word97 format):

http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/vigier.doc

The style is a wooden and jargon-laden, but the analysis stands up.

It is curious that although much has changed since the 1970s, much is
still the same. Despite all talk of a New Economy, the US today is
again afflicted by a balance of payment deficit which this year may
rise to almost a trillion dollars: around 10% of GNP. This represents
a massive, destabilising imbalance at the heart of the world economy.
High oil prices are more dangerous to the US today than in 1973, since
its dependence on imported energy has increased substantially. Oil at
$35/bbl is still less than half the high points the oil price spiked
to in the 1970s. Yet even at this level, the so-called 'weightless
economies' of the West are showing their frailty. What will happen if
oil rises to $70/bb this winter?

Watch this space.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 07:47:57 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:47:57 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FT news roundup
Message-ID: <000001c0249b$b794ffa0$a7018cd4@mjones>

FT: Venezuela plans Cuba oil deal
By Pascal Fletcher in Havana
Published: September 21 2000 21:10GMT | Last Updated: September 21
2000 22:55GMT



Venezuela, whose President Hugo Ch?vez has extended a hand of
friendship to Fidel Castro's Cuba, is drawing up a new preferential
oil supply agreement for Central American and Caribbean states that
will include the communist-ruled island.

"There is an initial draft of the agreement. . . it should be signed
in October," Venezuela's new ambassador to Havana, Julio Montes, told
foreign reporters.

Mr Montes said the new oil deal was intended to complement, but not
replace, the existing San Jose pact, under which Venezuela and Mexico
have been supplying crude oil and refined products under favourable
terms to 11 Central American and Caribbean nations, not including
Cuba.

"The new accord will improve the San Jose pact by incorporating Cuba,"
Mr Montes said. Mexico has so far resisted the idea of allowing Cuba
into the existing San Jose agreement.

Membership of the proposed "Caracas pact" would allow Havana to buy
Venezuelan oil directly under preferential terms.

Another difference from the existing San Jose pact would be that
beneficiary states would be able to repay the oil supplies not just in
hard currency but also in trade and services. This would suit Cuba,
which is short of hard currency and starved of credits because of its
recent economic recession and the long-running US trade embargo.

Cuba, which buys 30,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan crude through
international traders, is feeling the squeeze of high oil prices. But
Mr Montes said phasing in direct Cuban oil purchases from Venezuela
would have to be gradual to allow Havana to settle outstanding debts
to oil traders.

Another possibility for oil industry co-operation between Caracas and
Havana included a project under study to modernise and reactivate a
Soviet-built oil refinery at Cienfuegos in Cuba.

Mr Montes said this project could involve, besides the Cuban and
Venezuelan state oil companies, Cupet and PdVSA, foreign partners such
as Spain's Repsol and Petrobras of Brazil.

Petrobras' possible involvement in the Cuban refinery would depend on
the success of the Brazilian company's continuing oil exploration
efforts in an offshore block north of Cuba's central coast.

Mr Montes said Cuba's participation in a regional oil supply pact
brokered by Venezuela could also be linked to a settlement on Cuba's
$69.3m outstanding debt to Venezuela. It could be used to help
refinance the Cuban debt, he added.
-------------------
FT: Ch?vez takes big risk with Opec
By Andy Webb-Vidal
Published: September 21 2000 17:39GMT | Last Updated: September 21
2000 22:23GMT



Drive down the pot-holed streets of downtown Caracas this weekend and
you could be forgiven for thinking a coup d'etat has just taken place.
Hundreds of edgy-looking troops stand guard on the main thoroughfares,
and sectors near the centre are out of bounds.

But the atmosphere is calm, cut only by the pungent smells of
freshly-laid asphalt and paint, a sign that preparations are taking
place for something unusual.

President Hugo Ch?vez failed in his coup attempt in 1992. But now,
buoyed by his landslide re-election victory in July, Mr Ch?vez is
gambling on what could be his most important diplomatic coup to date:
hosting next week's summit of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (Opec).

Only the second ever in Opec's 40-year history, and 25 years after the
first in Algeria, the summit is essentially being billed as
celebratory and ceremonial.

Yet with angry protests over fuel prices in Europe, and deepening
concerns in the US that once again rising oil prices threaten to stunt
global economic growth, the event is expected to draw widespread
attention.

Equally, the spotlight will focus closely on Mr Ch?vez and Ali
Rodriguez, Venezuela's energy minister and current president of Opec,
given their prominent roles in helping resurrect this fractious and
virtually moribund organisation.

Observers are warning that Mr Ch?vez will have to tread carefully.

"The success of the summit will depend on two key factors," said
Humberto Calderon, a former oil minister and head of Petroleos de
Venezuela, the state oil company. "That the big producers are
sufficiently represented, and what will be on Opec's agenda."

Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and Libya's Colonel Muammer Gadaffi,
as expected, declined their invitations for security reasons. But most
of the other eight heads of state are scheduled to attend. Saudi
Arabia will be represented by Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, and
Kuwait by Crown Prince Saad Al-Abdullah Al-Salem.

Opec output levels are not officially on the agenda, but there is
little doubt they will be discussed informally. Closer commercial ties
between members, and the strengthening of relations with non-Opec oil
exporters, such as Mexico and Russia, are also expected to be
proposed.

But perhaps the most important message to emerge next week, Venezuelan
government officials say, will be an attempt by Opec to deflect blame
for any threat to world economic health.

Fuel prices, Mr Rodriguez argues, are at current levels not because of
Opec's supply restraint, but because of excessively high taxes in
Europe, insufficient refining capacity in the US, and speculation on
futures markets in London and New York.

"Consumers are tired of seeing oil exporting nations as the scapegoat,
they are becoming aware that taxes are behind the exorbitant prices,"
said Mazhar Al-Shereidah, a Venezuela-based oil consultant. "This
constitutes the platform for Opec to make a call for the stabilisation
of a market in which each actor must accept responsibility."

Despite calls for increased output from Opec, the US has hitherto
stopped short of singling out any member state for resisting or for
defending the group's new-found unity.

But in July Mr Ch?vez sailed Venezuela perilously close to the wind,
arousing US criticism with his visit to Baghdad to personally invite
the Iraqi president to the summit. Still, Opec and rising oil prices
have served to contain Mr Ch?vez's wider ambitions as a self-styled
defender of poorer nations from US hegemony, analysts say.

Advisers are said also to be warning Mr Ch?vez that his rhetoric could
pose a greater danger to Opec's delicate internal political balances
than to its relations with the US. Mr Ch?vez, prone to long,
confrontational speeches, has in recent months toyed with personally
claiming credit for the trippling in oil prices during the past 18
months.

"It has been said that Venezuela is now leading Opec, that sort of
thing does not go down well with the other countries," Mr Calderon
said. "If Mr Ch?vez launches into the type of speech that Venezuelans
are used to, rather than benefiting Venezuela's interests, it will
damage them."

As far as winning political points at home is concerned, though,
analysts are sceptical of the benefits of the summit. If anything, Mr
Ch?vez is following the steps of former president Carlos Andres Perez,
who in the 1970s promoted himself as a Third World statesman but led
Venezuela into an ill-fated oil-financed spending binge.

"He's tracing the same route that Perez took, an attempt to gain
domestic prestige through the promotion of his international image,"
said Angel Alvarez, a political analyst.

"Because of the contradictions inherent in Opec, oil prices could fall
at any moment," Mr Alvarez said. "Mr Ch?vez is playing a dangerous
game as he doesn't have all the cards in his hands. This is exactly
what Carlos Andres Perez did, and he paid a high price for it."
 ---------------
FT: Dazed and confused by protest
The [British] government's choices broadly reflect those of the
electorate. But it has never learnt the importance of humility
Published: September 21 2000 19:13GMT | Last Updated: September 21
2000 19:19GMT



We had better get used to street politics. Last week Britain was held
to ransom by road hauliers and farmers. This weekend, an altogether
different set of protestors in Prague make another stand against the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and all things global.
Direct action is back in fashion. The politicians are confused, and
not a little frightened.

It is all so inchoate. Britain was brought to a standstill in the
less-than-noble cause of lower petrol prices. In Prague, the
environmentalists want us to burn less, not more, atmosphere-polluting
fossil fuel. Public opinion in Britain seems to be on the side of the
demonstrators' demand for lower fuel taxes. Yet that same opinion
heartily endorses the decision of Tony Blair's government to put
public investment over tax cuts. As for the critics of globalisation,
half of them accuse the Fund of economic imperialism while the rest
want western governments to impose new standards - environmental and
labour - on their poorer cousins in the developing world.

These are obstinate contradictions. Reason and emotion are colliding
all over the place. There is a genuine confusion out there about where
politicians can and should draw the boundaries between government and
the market. People want the freedom and prosperity that come with
market economics. They also want to be sheltered from its colder
winds. They want to fill up their cars with cheap fuel. They also want
clean air, low income taxes and decent hospitals and schools.

There are one or two threads to be drawn through this tangle of
conflicting impulses. At a mundane level, we can see how technological
advance has empowered the disenchanted, whether they be hauliers in
Britain or France or class warriors in Prague. Mobile phones, the
internet and 24-hour television are now the most potent weapons in the
protesters' arsenal.

Beyond the technical, it is possible to detect a shared cynicism among
the angry middle classes and the anarchists. It is directed at
politicians and political institutions - national and global - and has
become an enduring feature of the post -cold war era. The fracturing
of old ideological allegiances robbed politics of a compass. The
present generation of political leaders, less wedded than most to
principle, must shoulder much of the blame for a deepening popular
indifference and mistrust. Some people take to the streets to vent
their frustrations; many more simply do not bother to vote.

We should not, though, overwork the parallels. Mr Blair's problems
reflect a fusion of the general with the particular, the global with
the local. There have been protests all over Europe about petrol
prices. But those in Britain have been singularly unnerving.

The fuel is now flowing again, but the polls say that Mr Blair is
still getting the blame. Labour lags behind the Conservatives for the
first time in nearly a decade. The temptation is to say there has been
a sudden seismic shift in British politics which might yet see Mr
Blair turned out of office at the next election.

Such instant judgments are for the over-excitable. It is far too early
to say the spasm over fuel prices has permanently changed the
political landscape. The worst of the three (relatively) bad opinion
polls shows Mr Blair five points behind. Margaret Thatcher regularly
climbed out of far deeper holes.

True, William Hague's Conservatives have sought to capitalise on the
public mood by offering a reduction in petrol excise duties. But that
is a pledge made in a vacuum, disconnected from any coherent strategy
for taxation and spending. It reeks of shallow opportunism. No wonder
the whisper among senior Conservatives is that Michael Portillo, the
serious politician in the shadow cabinet, was less than enthusiastic
about Mr Hague's wheeze.

In any event, the strategic initiative lies with Gordon Brown, the
chancellor. The government, not the opposition, will mark out the
terrain on which the election is fought. The Treasury's coffers are
overflowing with the revenues of economic growth. And Mr Brown has at
least one more Budget in which to frame the debate over how it can be
spent. Having refused to give in to blackmail, he can now weigh
objectively the protesters' claim to a rebate from the public purse. I
would be surprised if he had nothing to offer by the time of next
spring's Budget.

What is more, all the evidence is that Mr Brown's basic strategy -
fiscal rigour alongside substantial increases in the funding of the
public services people care about - is on the right side of the real
political argument. Government is about choices. And the fuel price
storm notwithstanding, the government's choices broadly reflect those
of the electorate.

That said, Mr Blair's administration is at present dazed and confused.
This is its first encounter with real public hostility. It did the
right thing in refusing to be cowed by the blockades. And we should
not forget that the protesters gave way. But then it somehow lost it.

The return to the front pages of all those stories about cabinet
infighting is a reminder of how disfigured the government has been by
personal rivalries and petty jealousies. Mr Brown has not been at his
best in his public defence of his position over fuel taxes. His
brooding intransigence is legendary. And few politicians contrive to
sound as stubborn. But the glee with which cabinet colleagues have
kicked the chancellor conjures up images of children brawling in the
playground.

It is a symptom of a bigger problem. From the start this government
has had too much of a swagger about it. Perhaps that comes with an
impregnable parliamentary majority. Either way, many of those now
telling the pollsters they intend to back Mr Hague have no fundamental
argument with Mr Blair. Of course, they want to pay less at the petrol
pump. What really angers them, though, is the feeling that the
government is arrogantly indifferent to their concerns. It is smug
them, and neglected us.

Focus groups are not the answer. Politicians who bow and bend with
every gust in public opinion earn only contempt. But people want to be
treated with respect. They want open dialogue. What is wrong, after
all, in explaining that taxes have been piled on petrol to pay down
the national debt and so make room for decent increases in public
spending? One of the great puzzles about a government as politically
attuned as this one is why it has never understood the worth of
humility.

There is no magic formula for leaders to seize on when faced with the
politics of angry protest. It is their role to mediate between the
sectional interests in society. To give in to the threats of the
strongest is to betray the weakest. The best politicians can do is to
seek to earn people's trust. As Mr Blair can attest, they pay a heavy
price when they lose it.
 --------------------------
FT: G7 governments unlikely to release oil stocks
By Matthew Jones
Published: September 21 2000 14:33GMT | Last Updated: September 22
2000 00:17GMT



Governments meeting at the G7 summit in Prague this weekend are likely
to rule out a collective move to release strategic petroleum reserves,
despite oil prices surging to 10-year highs.

On Thursday, Bill Clinton, the US president, was expected to be urged
by Al Gore, vice-president, to tap into the national oil stocks as a
way of stabilising prices. Analysts had predicted any such move would
lead to calls for a wider release of strategic stocks in the G7
countries.

However, Bill Ramsay, deputy executive director of the OECD's
International Energy Agency, charged with ensuring security of energy
supplies, said the G7 nations were still a "long way" from reaching
consensus on a co-ordinated release.

"I don't believe, from what I am hearing from our member countries,
that a collective draw-down is on the cards," he said.

OECD governments control more than 1.2bn barrels of oil held in tanks
and pipelines as a back-up reserve for use during national
emergencies. Releases of national stocks are extremely rare - the last
time the IEA authorised a draw-down was during the Iraq-Kuwait crisis
a decade ago.

Oil prices have continued to rise over the last 10 days, despite a
decision by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to lift
headline production by another 800,000 barrels a day. In morning
trading on Thursday the November contract for benchmark Brent crude
eased 95 cents to $32.80, but remained obstinately above the $22-$28
price band considered desirable by economists and officially targeted
by Opec.

While government-controlled stocks have remained largely constant over
the last 18 months, industry-held stocks have fallen from 2.7bn
barrels of oil to 2.5bn. In the past three months production increases
by Opec have allowed total industry stocks to recover by 80m barrels
of oil, but experts are still concerned about imbalances of certain
products such as gasoline and heating oil.

Some analysts believe the strategic petroleum reserves should be used
to head off inflationary pressures and growing social unrest caused by
high energy costs.

Peter Odell, professor emeritus of Erasmus University in Rotterdam,
said a decision by the G7 nations to use their stocks would ease fears
of a winter heating oil shortage.

"Instead of just putting pressure on Opec to increase its production,
the western world should be playing every card at its disposal. There
is no shortage of oil in the world, all that is needed is a decision
to release some of these stocks," he said.

Professor Odell said countries like the UK and Norway, which are net
exporters of oil from the North Sea, should take the lead in releasing
stocks and persuading oil companies to increase production.

"It is ridiculous that Britain holds 90 days worth of oil stocks when
it can more than meet its own needs from domestic output," he said.

However, Mr Ramsay insisted that strategic reserves had been built and
paid for by taxpayers to cope with supply interruptions and should not
be used by governments to swing world commodity prices.

"Governments should not meddle in commodity markets - if they did
where would it stop and at what price?", he said.







From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 07:48:25 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:48:25 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Links page
Message-ID: <000201c0249b$c803d8c0$a7018cd4@mjones>

There is now and interactive Links page on the website with around 250
links to sites of interest:
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/links1.doc





From gmayer at ms4.hinet.net  Fri Sep 22 08:06:38 2000
From: gmayer at ms4.hinet.net (Gottfried J. Mayer)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 22:06:38 +0800 (CST)
Subject: [CrashList] Links page
In-Reply-To: <000201c0249b$c803d8c0$a7018cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.1000922220446.12595A-100000@ms4>

Mark,

 I didn't find a link to:

         Complexity Digest http://www.comdig.org 

on your list.

Best,
	Gottfried


On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Mark Jones wrote:

> There is now and interactive Links page on the website with around 250
> links to sites of interest:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/links1.doc
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> 



From carob at dynamite.com.au  Fri Sep 22 09:24:24 2000
From: carob at dynamite.com.au (Rob Schaap)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 01:24:24 +1000
Subject: [CrashList] How did an earlier generation deal with an Oil
	 Shock?
Message-ID: <200009221421.AAA04507@dynamite.com.au>

G'day Mark,

Just in case it's useful, here's one I sent to Thaxis on the '73 shock. 
It'd be interesting to see how close Yann Fitt's analysis of the time was to
 Kubursi & Mansur's twenty years later.

>>Blaming it on an oil cartel amounts to more hogwash
>>since this argument, if you can call it this, fails to identify the cause 
>>of the cartel being able to hike up prices now.
>
>Hear hear! And this is why blaming OPEC for the 1970's crisis is also 
>hogwash, and both have an anti-semitic tinge to boot...

Depends who you mean by oil cartel, I s'pose.  Sure, you could mean a bunch
of ministers from oil producing countries (not all of whom hail from the
middle east, anyway), but you could also be referring to oil companies - who
managed to make a very tight-knit community out of themselves earlier in the
century (and are intent on making it tighter still) - and who have enjoyed
the political clout of, primarily, the US government in furthering their
interests - which they do not always correctly perceive.

Witness Kissinger's desperate and ultimately dangerous attempts to keep the
middle-eastern states from becoming too cohesive and independent a political
bloc.  Furthermore. the US government's political goals were also about
attacking the rapidly advancing economies of Europe and Japan.  It was State
Department policy wonk James Akins who first demanded that prices increase,
after all, to which US Treasury under-secretary William Simon responded that
making OPEC a bit richer would be fine, as the proceeds would eventually be
'recycled' through US finance institutions, anyway.  Europe and Japan,
unlike the US, were not oil producers.  So their production costs would go
up without compensation, whilst US costs would be compensated by increased
returns on its own oil production.

And the big oil companies were big beneficiaries of higher prices for a good
produced at very low marginal cost but also of very low price elasticity -
and their CEOs were very close to Nixon, too (see Kubursi and Mansur's
article in Stubbs et al's *PE and the changing Global Order*).

Cheers,
Rob.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Fri Sep 22 09:15:57 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:15:57 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Links page
In-Reply-To: <000201c0249b$c803d8c0$a7018cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <000b01c024a8$02706580$a7018cd4@mjones>

I gave the wrong url. This should work:

http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/bookmark.htm

Mark



From mstainsby at tao.ca  Fri Sep 22 16:11:37 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 15:11:37 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Links page
References: <000201c0249b$c803d8c0$a7018cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <004301c024e2$1422aec0$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

must be the wrong link.

Macdonald

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net>
To: "crl" <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 6:48 AM
Subject: [CrashList] Links page


> There is now and interactive Links page on the website with around 250
> links to sites of interest:
> http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/links1.doc
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From mstainsby at tao.ca  Fri Sep 22 16:33:47 2000
From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 15:33:47 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Links page
References: <000201c0249b$c803d8c0$a7018cd4@mjones> <004301c024e2$1422aec0$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>
Message-ID: <00cf01c024e5$2c75c400$395a7318@rct1.bc.wave.home.com>

nevermind :-)

Macdonald

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby at tao.ca>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 3:11 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Links page


> must be the wrong link.
> 
> Macdonald
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Mark Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net>
> To: "crl" <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
> Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 6:48 AM
> Subject: [CrashList] Links page
> 
> 
> > There is now and interactive Links page on the website with around 250
> > links to sites of interest:
> > http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/links1.doc
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> > To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From gdrouet at brutele.be  Thu Sep 21 15:35:49 2000
From: gdrouet at brutele.be (Georges Drouet)
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 23:35:49 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] [women-csd] George Monbiot
Message-ID: <v03007807b5f02e1113ae@[212.68.237.75]>

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An interesting article in the Guardian about World Bank:
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,370975,00.html


Helping the poorest to get  poorer

                                                                   The
World Bank and the IMF are beyond
                                                                   reform.
Shut them down

                                                                   Special
report: debt relief

                                                                   George
Monbiot
                                                                   Thursday
September 21, 2000

                                                                   A few
months ago I used this column to argue that
                                                                   the
World Bank was destroying health and

education in the developing world.

                                                                   In
Zambia, for example, the conditions the bank
                                                                   had
attached to its loans - cuts in state spending
                                                                   and the
privatisation of services - had

contributed to a 25% increase in infant mortality
                                                                   since
1980 and, as parents now have to pay to
                                                                   have
their children educated, a disastrous decline
                                                                   in
school enrolment.

                                                                   The
bank, oddly enough, didn't seem to be too
                                                                   happy
about my analysis. "It is simply false,"
                                                                   Mats
Karlsson, one of its vice-presidents wrote,
                                                                   "to
claim that the World Bank is further

impoverishing people." It was, he insisted,
                                                                   lending
developing countries more money for
                                                                   health,
education and poverty reduction than ever
                                                                   before.

                                                                   This is
perfectly true. This year, for example, the
                                                                   World
Bank will be handing out some $1.9bn for
                                                                   schools
in poor countries. It will also be

destroying schooling worth many times this
                                                                   amount
by continuing to insist that countries put
                                                                   debt
repayments ahead of public spending. It has
                                                                   yet to
explain why on earth it is making dollar
                                                                   loans
for schools in the first place, when nearly
                                                                   all
their costs are incurred in local currencies.
                                                                   Only if
local provision is to be replaced by foreign

contractors, or if children are to be given

computers before they are taught to read or
                                                                   write,
does lending hard currency for basic

education make sense. First they break your legs,
                                                                   then, by
way of compensation, they offer you a
                                                                   pedicure.

                                                                   At their
grand summit in Prague at the end of this
                                                                   week,
the World Bank and the International
                                                                   Monetary
Fund will insist, as the IMF's former
                                                                   managing
director has claimed, that they are now
                                                                   "the
best friends of the poor". The bad old days of

"structural adjustment" -forcing all the

countries they deal with to accept precisely the
                                                                   same
neoliberal prescriptions - are over. Instead
                                                                   of being
obliged to accept policies imposed by the
                                                                   first
world, debtor nations will now be allowed to
                                                                   devise
their own "poverty-reduction strategies".

                                                                   This
sounds fine, until you discover that, as the
                                                                   World
Development Movement has documented,
                                                                   the
recipient countries can request whatever they
                                                                   want as
long as it's neoliberalism. As one senior
                                                                   bank
official pointed out, the new scheme is a

"compulsory programme, so that those with the
                                                                   money
can tell those without the money what they
                                                                   need in
order to get the money".

                                                                   To me,
the abiding mystery surrounding the
                                                                   World
Bank and the IMF is why anyone still
                                                                   believes
that they are capable of reform. The New

Economics Foundation concludes its devastating
                                                                   critique
of the two bodies by suggesting only that
                                                                   they
should "undergo democratic overhauls". Even
                                                                   the
Guardian's usually far-sighted economics
                                                                   editor,
Larry Elliott, has argued that those who
                                                                   believe
the World Bank and IMF are inherently
                                                                   corrupt
"are not only wrong, but are giving
                                                                   succour
to extremists on the right who oppose all
                                                                   but
minimalist government and despise

internationalism". There is, most commentators
                                                                   agree,
no alternative to the existing global

financial system.

                                                                   This is
not a consensus that John Maynard Keynes
                                                                   would
have joined. In 1944, he warned that a

financial system which imposed penalties and

strictures on debtor nations but not creditor
                                                                   nations
would ensure that the rich became richer
                                                                   and the
poor became poorer. He proposed a global

financial institution which would charge interest
                                                                   on both
debt and credit. Creditor nations would
                                                                   thus be
encouraged to spend their surpluses in
                                                                   debtor
nations, automatically correcting

imbalances in trade.

                                                                   The US
proposed an alternative system. Help for
                                                                   debtor
nations would be confined to a fund and a
                                                                   bank
which lent them money when they got into
                                                                   trouble.
These would both be based in Washington
                                                                   and
effectively controlled by the creditors. As
                                                                   Keynes
foresaw, the US proposal would ensure
                                                                   both
that debtor nations fell further into debt and
                                                                   that
creditors - the US in particular - could
                                                                   exercise
ever-greater economic and political
                                                                   power
over them. But the US told Britain that if
                                                                   we
didn't accept its proposal, we wouldn't get our
                                                                   war loan.

                                                                   The
World Bank and the IMF, in other words,
                                                                   were
conceived as the policemen for a coercive
                                                                   and
grossly unbalanced world order. The idea that
                                                                   they
could deliver anything but disaster for the
                                                                   world's
poor is laughable. If, as they will claim in
                                                                   Prague,
they want to help build a fairer world,
                                                                   then
they must start by closing themselves down.

                                                                   * George
Monbiot's new book, Captive State: the

Corporate Takeover of Britain, is published today
                                                                   by
Macmillan


g.monbiot at zetnet.co.uk

----------------------------------------------
Georges Drouet
----------------------------------------------
Visit our site: http://www.simpol.org
_____________
ISPO
United Kingdom
John Bunzl
P.O. Box 26547, London SE3 7YT
info at simpol.org
_____________
ISPO Belgique
Georges Drouet
28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
ispo.belgique at simpol.org








From jbunzl at simpol.org  Fri Sep 22 15:39:25 2000
From: jbunzl at simpol.org (John Bunzl)
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 23:39:25 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Your Guardian Article: Helping the poorest to get  poorer
Message-ID: <v03007808b5f18058b48e@[212.68.237.75]>

    Hello George, Interesting article but surely the reason the IMF/WB
continue  to get away with SAPs or some 'spun' version of the same thing is
because of the  over-arching paradigm of global economic competition over
which no nation nor  group of nations has control ( i.e. the ability of
capital and corporations to  move freely across national borders and
nations' inability to re-regualte them  for fear of capital/corporate
flight. A predicament which forces nations to  compete with one another for
capital and jobs.) For if the free movement of  capital and corporations
cannot be controlled, the effects of this are that both  those ostensibly
'in control' (IMF/WB/WTO) and those who oppose them are locked  into a kind
of endless loop of excuses and protest with neither side able to  find a
way out because they are both, effectively, subject to a paradigm neither
can influence. This allows the IMF/WB to claim that SAPs (or whatever they
now call them) alleviate poverty and, further, to claim that if they have
not  worked, it is only because poor-country governments are either corrupt
or didn't  apply the SAPs rigorously enough or both. The protesters,
meanwhile, also can't do much else but protest  because they have no
alternative paradigm to offer. (And if they do have one,  they offer no
secure and responsible method for getting from the destructive one  we are
now in to the new one.) So it's a kind of stalemate; a stalemate which the
book I sent  you some time ago ("The Simultaneous Policy - An Insider's
Guide to Saving  Humanity and the Planet") offers a potential solution for.
A list of  endorsements so far received follows at the end of this message.
In case you  need a fresh copy, I'll gladly send one (free of charge). It
will be published  early next year by New European Publications.  On
another matter, you might be interested in a letter I sent  a few days ago
to The Ecologist in response to your debate with J. Porritt which  I copy
here in case they don't publish it: Dear Editor, George Monbiot's and
Jonathan Porritt's exchange is a  microcosm of the dilemmas faced by both
sides of the green movement. In their  confusion, both largely fail to
identify the flaws in each others'  arguments. George is only partly right
in identifying the corporate duty  to 'act in the best interests of the
company' as the key driver behind  environmental degradation and other
ills. For this ignores the real driver which  is competition. By and large,
a corporation can only be as  environmentally or socially responsible as
its most irresponsible competitor.  For failure to do so will ultimately
put it out of business. But that is also  why Jonathan's willingness to
engage&nbsp; individual corporations in a bid to  improve their
environmental performance is no solution at all. So our key problem, in
fact, is global competition which not  only corporations are subject to,
but also governments as they compete with one  another in a progressive
down-levelling of social and environmental regulation  in a bid to remain
competitive and attractive to internationally mobile capital.  What we must
realise, above all, therefore, is that global competition is now  beyond
the control individual or even groups of nations; it is a vicious circle
in which, one way or another, we are all locked; a competition which both
justifies and buttresses selfish and destructive behaviour; a kind of
global  dictatorship no one is in control of. Capital and corporations
therefore need to be re-regulated to  restore environmental and labour
protection and democratic accountability. But  in a global economy, secure
and responsible re-regulation which avoids the risk  of capital/corporate
flight could, logically, only be implemented globally  by all nations
simultaneously. And that requires unprecedented  co-operation. Indeed, our
primary task in our quest for sustainability is to  find a way of getting
from global competition to global cooperation.  That, for humanity, is the
true meaning and challenge of  globalisation. End of letter.  I hope you'll
have time to read my book and to comment on it.  You may also like to check
out the Simultaneous Policy campaign website. Look  forward to hearing from
you. Meantime, all the best John Bunzl.  List of book endorsements follow:
"I thought your proposal was an elegant idea of how change  could occur.
Itreflects the core ideas of how to create consensus around  change. This
isthe biggest challenge that we have"Ed  MayoExecutive Director, New
Economics Foundation"Is it a  good idea? My answer is: Maybe it could prove
to be."James  RobertsonFormer cabinet policy maker and author ofSchumacher
Briefing 1 - Transforming Economic Life"It is a good idea. What we need  is
politicians who will give this issue ahigh priority."Polly  ToynbeeThe
Guardian"Your idea for a simultaneous policy is  excellent. . Lets hope
that peoplestart to listen to this important  message."Helena
Norberg-HodgeFounder of the  International Forum on Globalisationand
Director of the International  Society for Ecology & Culture"It's ambitious
and provocative. Can it  work? Certainly worth a serioustry."Noam
Chomsky".the basic concept is excellent. . Let me know what
develops!"Jakob von UexkullFounder and Chairman - Right  Livelihood Award
Foundation".well argued and well thought out. It goes  against our bias for
the humanscale but may be  necessary."Nicholas AlberyChairman - The
Institute for  Social Inventions".compelling and provocative. The structure
and  progression of the [book]fit your argument perfectly."Moises
NaimEditor-in-Chief - Foreign Policy. USA"Your main theme  is a crucial one
and I hope it will be heeded. .yourapproach is unusual  because most
authors concentrate on 'what' first andleave 'how' as a  secondary
consideration - or duck it altogether."David  GriffithsAuthor of All This
and Unemployment Too.".I  believe [the Simultaneous Policy] offers a
prophetic and practicalapproach  to the global politico-economic problems
of our generation. .Certainly it is  one which would appeal to
Quakers."Stephen  WhitingQuaker Peace and Service - London."Bunzl is, I
feel,  the first writer on the 'sustainable society' to advancebeyond
rhetoric and  grapple with the problem of how such a society might
beachieved."Dr. Aidan Rankin'New European'  (European Business Review) -
UK."Your [book] eloquently describes the  crucial problems facing the
worldtoday. It explores the inadequacy of the  nation state in dealing with
theseproblems and the inability of the United  Nations to move beyond its
currentconstraints.Simultaneous Policy is an  elegant theory which takes
many ideas fromdifferent places. We must all work  to bring these ideas
from theory intopractice."Simon  BurallExecutive Director, One World
Trust(in his personal  capacity).".the financial world order has become
quite cancerous to both  people andthe planet and what is needed are
intelligent and creative  solutionsappropriate to the situation. Your
proposal to create a level  playing fieldfor all that incorporates
environmentally sustainable policies  is just sucha creative
solution."Richard St.  GeorgeDirector, the Schumacher Society(in his
personal  capacity)".we concur with your comprehensive and insightful
analysis of  the challengebefore us. We also agree that social and
environmental  programmes are beingsubordinated to the demands of the
global economy and  that, if there is ameaningful remedy to hand, yours is
as constructive as  any we've seen todate."Roger DoudnaInternational
Programme Officer, Restore The Earth Project - Scotland.".the great  merit
of your [book] is its proposal for a plausible solution tothe many
questions, whose urgency much of the left seems prepared  toignore."Dorothy
FriedmannGreen Socialist  Network - London."Wishing you God speed in your
endeavours to progress  our humankind with theSimultaneous Policy!"Godric
BaderLife President - Scott Bader Commonwealth Ltd.".the  best ideas are
the simplest. With a system like this, there's no wayfor  governments to
wriggle out. All excuses evaporate. It's a system  whichunmasks all those
seeking to hide behind theoretical impossibilites. I  can'twait to see what
follows. Well done SP!"Jackie  NavarroATTAC - Qu?bec, Canada.".a fantastic
idea.a  realistic and subtle mixing of sociology, economics
andpolitics."Georges DrouetAuthor of  Non-consommation Contre
Neo-colonisation"In a time where so many urgent  symptoms claim our
attention, it seems thereis not enough courage nor time  to address the
fundamental roots of globalpresent problems and viable roads  to face them.
The Simultaneous Policy is asimple, peaceful, low-risk and  clear
invitation for humankind to jump - intwo steps - from a present spiral
headed toward auto-destruction, intoanother one oriented toward life,
cooperation and spiritual growth. To shareis to live."Emilio  Jos?
Chaves".the SP proposal is a practical means of moving  toward global
governance.It should be an effective means of achieving  cooperation where
anyindividual government that behaves cooperatively will  be disadvantaged
untilall other governments also do so. .I wish you the best  of luck with
yourimportant work."John StewartAuthor  of 'Evolution's Arrow: the
direction ofevolution and the future of  humanity.'". most original and
well-constructed . a great  achievement."Barbara PanvelSecurity Studies
Network -  UK"I am sure that The Simultaneous Policy is likely to be of
great  interest[as] a way of striving for an alternative whilst being
integrated in  thecurrent economic system..."Suzanne  IsmailEconomic Issues
Programme Co-ordinatorQuaker Peace &  Service - London, UKA comment passed
on to me:"Isn't John Bunzl's  Simultaneous Policy good stuff?"Lucy
StorrsWorld Voices  UK".an essential contribution to the debate that is
taking place at this  timeof transition and rapid change in
society."Dominic  DibbleWorld Goodwill - London John Bunzl -
DirectorInternational Simultaneous Policy  Organisation
(ISPO)<http://www.simpol.org> www.simpol.org  e-mail:
jbunzl at simpol.org--------------Georges  Drouet - DirectorISPO
Belgiqueispo.belgique at simpol.org





From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:02:15 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:02:15 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] world media 23.09.00
Message-ID: <000b01c02534$967745a0$71258cd4@mjones>

FT: US to release 30m barrels of reserve oil

Bill Richardson, the US energy secretary, said that US President Bill
Clinton had authorised the release of a limited amount of oil from the
US government's emergency reserves, in order to force the price of
crude oil lower.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3RWCWBG
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

FT: Euro's decline prompts world's banks to step in

The world's main central banks took financial markets by surprise day
with a co-ordinated intervention aimed at ending the euro's relentless
decline against other major currencies.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3UHPU8G
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

FT: Milosevic 'plans to retain power'

A senior Yugoslav official has given a clear warning that President
Slobodan Milosevic intends to remain in power even if he loses this
Sunday's elections.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT31SLC4G
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

FT: South Korea to inject $45bn to aid banks

South Korea has said it will inject a further $45bn into the ailing
banking sector to calm market fears about a new financial crisis.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3Q7C23G
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

FT: Schroeder plan to offset oil price rises

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany announced a DM2.9bn
(E1.48bn, $1.28bn) compensation package to offset soaring oil prices
as
opinion polls showed support for his government tumbling.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3I5P38G
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Times:
World banks launch euro rescue mission

FROM LEA PATERSON IN PRAGUE, PHILIP WEBSTER AND JANET BUSH

THE world's most powerful nations yesterday stunned the financial
markets by throwing billions of pounds into a high-risk rescue
operation for the crisis-ridden euro.
Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, sanctioned the use of tens of millions
of pounds in a co- ordinated international effort to prop up the value
of the ailing single currency. The total from Britain is understood to
be less than ?100 million; the Chancellor gave approval in response to
a request from the European Central Bank, believing the move to be
justified on the grounds of promoting world economic stability.

In Britain the Conservatives did not oppose the intervention, which,
if successful, would help British exporters.

But it revived memories of the events, eight years ago to the month,
when billions of pounds of taxpayers' money was poured into an
ill-fated attempt to keep Britain in the exchange-rate mechanism.

Michael Portillo, the Shadow Chancellor, said that for it to have
happened at all was a big vote of no confidence in the euro and the
economic fundamentals behind it. "Whether it will work or not remains
to be seen - though the history of currency interventions like this is
far from encouraging."

Central banks of members of the Group of Seven industrialised nations
(G7) bought billions of pounds of euros on foreign exchanges as fears
grew that the currency's disastrous performance since its launch last
year was jeopardising world economic growth.

Preliminary signs last night were that the G7's risky move had met
with limited success. The euro initially surged when central banks
began intervening in the market a little after midday, but this mini-
recovery proved short-lived. In late European trade, the currency sank
back to 88 cents to the US dollar, just over half a cent above the
level before the banks began to act. In London the euro closed at
60.30p compared with 59.97p on Thursday. The Treasury confirmed that
it had asked the Bank of England to use some of the Government's $40
billion foreign exchange reserves before a G7 summit in Prague today.

Times:
Milosevic harnesses one-horse towns
RICHARD BEESTON IN SMEDEREVO


IF ONLY the rest of Serbia were as loyal as this drab industrial town
on the Danube, then President Milosevic could comfortably put his feet
up and cruise to a landslide re-election victory tomorrow.

Smederevo, 30 miles southeast of Belgrade, is a one-factory town, with
a tradition of voting for the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS),
whose inhabitants, through conviction and sometimes fear, believe that
they need Mr Milosevic as much as he needs them in the closing days of
his flagging campaign.

With only one day to go before the polls open, the Serb leader is
depending on the ordinary workers, in towns and villages where his
support is still strong, to come out and save him in the greatest
political test he has faced since coming to power more than a decade
ago.

Mladen, a painter-decorator wearing a communist-era black leather cap,
looked surprised when asked who he would be voting for, as though
there was little choice in the matter.

"Slobodan Milosevic, of course. A vote for anyone else means voting
for our enemies, it means our destruction," he said, politely noting
that only last year Nato aircraft knocked out the town's bridge and
oil depot.

"The world, apart from the Russians, hates us because we are Orthodox.
If Milosevic is no longer there to defend us, we will lose Montenegro,
then [the Hungarian region of] Vojvodino and then [the Muslim region
of] Sandzak," he said emphatically.

His opinion was not the ranting of some paranoid ultra-nationalist but
the conviction shared by many ordinary Serbs, who have been fed on a
steady diet of anti-Western propaganda and sincerely believe that the
nation state faces an existential challenge.

While the nationalist theme certainly has popular backing - with all
four main presidential candidates espousing the Serb cause - there are
also far more practical means of ensuring that this town, and many
others across the country, votes the way the Milosevic regime wants.

The main employer here is the Sartid metalworks factory, a state-owned
enterprise, run by Dusan Matkovic, one the main figures in the SPS
hierarchy. Workers claimed that they had been instructed to vote for
Mr Milosevic and were warned that without him the factory would most
likely collapse - and with it the town's future.

The story can be heard repeatedly across Serbia. Although the
country's economy has been in sharp decline caused by a decade of
wars, refugees and economic sanctions, workers who do still have jobs
in state enterprises cling to their jobs even more tightly.

"Why go and muck everything up?" asked Snejen, a retired worker. "The
present is not perfect but it gives enough for people to survive. The
alternative could be much worse."

Although Mr Milosevic has projected his rule in a nationalist guise,
he remains at heart a product of the Yugoslav Communist Party he
served in the 1980s before rising to become President of Serbia in
1989.

While communist ideology has largely been discredited and state
controls dismantled across the former Soviet bloc, the hybrid form
still lives on in Serbia, where the economy, the media and the
security forces remain under tight central control.

Television news usually consists of coverage of party meetings, the
opening of bridges and the inspection of factories, with the only
foreign news usually concentrating on bad news from the West, like
terrorist attacks, natural disasters and political scandals.

The big test now for Mr Milosevic is whether his obsolete system of
government, already swept aside throughout the Balkans, can survive
what is in effect a national referendum.

It has remained intact through a decade of turmoil and the state
apparatus will use all its considerable power to make sure that it is
still in place on Monday morning.

It is clear that the system will remain intact in Smederevo and other
Milosevic strongholds, but this time that may not be enough to save
him.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:44:26 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:44:26 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Gobal Fat Cats: who earns what
Message-ID: <000d01c0253a$7abfe0a0$71258cd4@mjones>

[Economist]

 WHAT will be the hot topic at the cocktail parties during the annual
meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Prague? Oil prices, the
euro? Neither: the serious gossip will be about the pay of top
policymakers and in how much luxury they travelled to the meeting.

For this blame (or applaud) the IMF. In a new spirit of openness the
Fund has for the first time published the salaries of its top
executives in its annual report. Horst K?hler, the IMF?s managing
director, earns a total package (including allowances) of $364,000.
Oh, and that is tax-free. James Wolfensohn, the president of the World
Bank, earns slightly more.

The IMF?s annual report also notes that there has been an increase in
?excessive work-related stress?. Is this because all staff apart from
Mr K?hler (who flew to Prague first class) now have to rough it in
business class?along with Larry Summers, America?s treasury secretary?
Mr Summers earns a more modest (and taxable) $157,000. Alan Greenspan,
the chairman of the Fed?and arguably the most important man in the
financial world?earns only $141,000.

Transparency is now supposedly the buzzword of all international
organisations. Yet two of the institutions that we asked said at first
that the salary of their bosses was confidential; only grudgingly did
they divulge this information.

League tables of pay need to be handled with care. For many of the
bosses of international organisations, not only is their salary tax
free, but they often get extra perks. For instance Donald Johnston,
the secretary-general at the OECD, and the lowest paid (before, but
not after tax) in our table, gets a Parisian apartment with a rental
value of perhaps $50,000 a year.

It is no coincidence that pay tends to be better at the World Bank,
the IMF, and the Bank for International Settlements. None need have
their annual spending plans approved by governments. This leaves
rather more room for extravagance.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:44:20 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:44:20 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Economist: Kosovo - Still pretty nasty
Message-ID: <000c01c0253a$77370800$71258cd4@mjones>

Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia?s strongman, is hoping that democracy will
fail to take root in Kosovo. So far, that grim hope is being fulfilled


 WHICH place will become a decent democracy first?Kosovo or Serbia
proper? The answer will greatly affect the outcome of the unresolved
battle between the Serbs, who hope the breakaway province will remain
within their orbit, at least notionally, and Kosovo?s ethnic-Albanian
leaders, who demand independence.

If Kosovo looks incapable of becoming a decent, law-governed state,
even under western tutelage, its leaders? case for a final break with
the Yugoslav federation will weaken?especially if Serbia itself
becomes more democratic after this weekend?s presidential and
parliamentary poll in Serbia and, more contentiously, in Montenegro.

That may be one reason why Yugoslavia?s masters have in recent weeks
been trying harder than usual to destabilise Kosovo, and make life
difficult for its international administrators, who are preparing to
hold local elections?arguably the first above-board test of Kosovar
opinion ever conducted?in late October.

So far, things have been going quite well for Yugoslavia?s sitting
president, Slobodan Milosevic, and other would-be wreckers. The
foreigners running the province of Kosovo?the United Nations, NATO and
the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe?have been
struggling against mounting odds to maintain a minimum of stability
and open political debate.

Early this month, Mr Milosevic cunningly sent a delegation from his
Socialist party to the southern province, to urge the 100,000 or so
ethnic Serbs still living there to vote in the Yugoslav elections.
That put Bernard Kouchner, the Frenchman who runs Kosovo for the UN,
on the spot. Should he allow the Serbs to cast votes in what is still,
under the terms of UN resolutions, their own country? Or should he
risk seeming weak or unfair by insisting that, because of security
problems, no residents of Kosovo could take part in Yugoslav ballot?

In the end, he came up with a fudge. While denouncing the Belgrade-run
contest as hopelessly flawed, he agreed that local Serbs could take
part?and promised that NATO would do its best to let them do so in
secure conditions. But neither NATO nor the pro-Milosevic camp is
saying anything in advance about how exactly they expect voting to be
conducted in Kosovo?s highly abnormal conditions. If Serbs are
attacked by Albanians on the way to vote, that will be a blow to the
credibility of NATO?as the supposed guarantor of safety for all Kosovo
?s residents?and a boost, paradoxically, for Serb nationalist
propaganda.

With tension rising steadily, NATO troops this week raided a Serb
enclave and arrested some former and serving members of the Yugoslav
army who had infiltrated from Serbia on a mission to blow up targets
in Kosovo. Meanwhile an ethnic-Albanian group trying to seize power in
part of southern Serbia said it had lost three men in a gun-battle.

As well as coping with the Serbs, Kosovo?s international protectors
have picked up some worrying and contradictory signals from the
province?s Albanian politicians. Privately, at least, many of them
confide that they would prefer Mr Milosevic to remain in power; that
way Serbia will remain a pariah.

More specifically, some Kosovars fear that a post-Milosevic Serbia
would compete with their province for a finite pool of international
assistance. So, in a bid to allay these fears, the EU has assured them
that the province will receive at least euro360m ($306m) next year,
whatever happens in Belgrade.

But these Machiavellian arguments are not the ones that Kosovar
politicians use in public. Instead, Hashim Thaci, the ex-commander of
the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas who now heads a political party,
has been stressing that the Yugoslav election is illegitimate and that
no voting for Belgrade institutions should be taking place on Kosovar
soil. To some ears, this may sound like a thinly-veiled call to his
supporters to stop Serbs, by force, from voting.

Nor is it only the Serbs who feel intimidated by the two parties which
have sprung out of the ethnic-Albanian guerrilla movement. (In
addition to Mr Thaci?s PDK, there is a rival group, headed by his
erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Ramush Haradinaj.)

Opinion polls suggest that the most popular politician among the
Kosovars is still Ibrahim Rugova, the pacifist leader who led the
province?s shadow administration when it was still under direct Serb
control. But the UN fears that supporters of Mr Rugova who do well in
the forthcoming local elections could then be attacked by the ex-KLA
parties.

If Kosovo?s internal politics are shown to be dominated by the bullet
rather than the ballet box, the western governments who keep troops
and administrators in the province will find it harder to justify the
outlay. Dr Kouchner has said that any party in Kosovo that uses force
will be banned from taking part in the election. But it is hard to
prove the links between acts of violence and their ultimate sponsors;
nor is it likely that the UN and NATO could cope with the uproar which
would ensue if an ex-KLA party was banned.

So what is the most the Frenchman can hope to do? His best chance lies
in persuading the Kosovars to switch their attention away from
Machiavellian games, and even from the long-term aim of independence,
and concentrate instead on convincing the world that they are proper
democrats. Otherwise Serbia may even beat them to it.







From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:44:41 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:44:41 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Economist on Prague demos
Message-ID: <001001c0253a$840c3fa0$71258cd4@mjones>

Angry and effective
W A S H I N G T O N ,   D C







The threat of renewed demonstrations against global capitalism hangs
over next week?s annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank. This new
kind of protest is more than a mere nuisance: it is getting its way



   Debt and development


  Search
archive

  Links
 N30, A16, S11, S26. If you are part of the anti-capitalist
resistance, these terms will need no explaining. Each denotes a day of
protest against ?corporate-led globalisation?. First came the World
Trade Organisation?s ill-fated ministerial meeting in Seattle in
November 1999; then the spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF
in April this year; next, the World Economic Forum?s gathering in
Melbourne on September 11th; and, coming to Prague next week, the main
annual meetings of the Bank and the Fund. Each term also connects you
to a website where the plans for the demos, and other useful
information for would-be protesters, are posted.

The approach is the same every time. A variety of ill-defined and
sometimes spontaneous ?radical? groups?environmentalists, feminists,
anarchists, neo-communists, and assorted non-aligned malcontents, to
name only some?join to march on the streets. A ?convergence centre? is
proposed, usually a disused warehouse. (As The Economist went to
press, the Prague venue had not been announced.) This is where
protesters are housed and fed (vegan food preferred); and where they
receive medical and legal advice, plus training in ?non-violent? civil
protest.

The lack of hierarchy is ostentatious. The protesters have no leaders.
They join small ?affinity groups?. Despite this, the events are well
organised. Possible activities include colourful puppets, street
theatre, catchy slogans and lots of noise, and for some (to quote the
S26 site) ?pickets, occupations of offices, blockades and shutdowns,
appropriating and disposing of luxury consumer goods, sabotaging,
wrecking or interfering with capitalist infrastructure, [and]
appropriating capitalist wealth and returning it to the working
 people?. The immediate aim is to shut down, or at least badly
disrupt, the meetings of the global elite. Afterwards, the movement
evaporates into cyberspace.

Seattle saw both the birth and, to date, the high point of this new
mode of activism. There had been isolated days of anti-corporate
protest before, notably in Britain, but the disruption of the WTO
gathering, amid street scenes reminiscent of the 1960s, confirmed
Seattle?s standing as the birthplace of the ?backlash against
globalisation?.

Onward and eastward


If the protest websites and the elite?s contingency planners can be
believed, Prague may not be far behind. Organised almost exclusively
by European activists?the Ruckus Society and other veterans of America
?s protests do not plan to attend?demos there could prove more
disruptive and more violent than anything so far. There will be around
18,000 delegates, financiers and assorted hangers-on; the Czech
interior ministry is expecting some 20,000-25,000 protesters (other
estimates say 5,000-10,000). Many would-be protesters have already
been denied entry at the border. Even so, this could be the biggest
invasion of foreigners since the Russian army arrived in 1968. All
these elitists and anti-elitists will be crammed together into Prague?
s warren of narrow winding streets?a tricky situation for the
authorities.
The Czech police have been co-operating with the FBI and the British
police. Not noted for restraint, they are inexperienced at dealing
peacefully with large-scale protest. Some errant officers have
reportedly sent death threats to protest organisers. Meanwhile, some
of the organising websites sound an ominous note. One of them,
www.destroyIMF.org, promises a ?mass working-class protest?,
dismissing Seattle as a ?passive ideological showpiece?. Neo-Nazi
skinheads may turn up as well, to fight on one side or the other.

As a result the town is preparing for siege. Schools and theatres have
been told to close. Officials have advised those without business in
Prague, as well as the old and those with small children, to leave.
Hospital beds have been set aside. One bank has asked its top people
to declare their blood group. Other bigwigs have been advised to leave
their spouses at home (usually the annual meetings are an occasion for
heavy-duty socialising). Many bankers have just decided to give this
year?s gathering a miss.

Even if all this preparation and anxiety turn out to be overdone, this
is far from business as usual?so, whatever happens, the protesters
have won a kind of victory. Protest groups are already planning next
year?s events. These include action in April against the Summit of the
Americas gathering in Quebec; a global May Day rally (codeword,
M12K01); and, yet again, protests at the next IMF/World Bank annual
meetings, this time in Washington in September 2001.

What, if anything, does all this signify? Is it, as some claim, the
start of a global citizen-activist movement? (If you took that view,
you might see Europe?s current fuel-tax ?revolt? as part of the trend,
despite its anti-green, middle-class character.) Or is it, in the
words of Naomi Klein, an anti-corporate sympathiser and author of a
recent book deploring the power of corporate brands, merely ?a
movement of meeting-stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if
they were the Grateful Dead??

The protesters are certainly not part of an intellectually coherent
movement. They represent a diverse set of groups, often with very
differing agendas, and sometimes with mutually contradictory ones.
Almost all they have in common is a loathing of the established
economic order, and of the institutions?the IMF, the World Bank and
the WTO?which they regard as either running it or serving it. The
League for a Revolutionary Communist International sums up the
all-encompassing disaffection pretty well in a 19-page manifesto
demanding an end to debt, poverty and capitalist exploitation; for
good measure, it also wants to liberate advances in genetics and
pharmaceuticals from the tyranny of patent rights and to ?eliminate
the meaningless and harmful marketing of useless products?.

Blinkered, as yet


Many of the protesters know little about the organisations they are
attacking?but not all of them, by any means, are in it merely to vent
incoherent rage or have a fun day out. The more thoughtful among them
recognise that street protests are only a convenient tactic in a
larger war, and that if their movement is to grow it will need a
vision?positive proposals, that is, as well as a list of things it
hates. So far, this vision is lacking, though a few ambitious types
are working on it.
The International Forum on Globalisation, based in San Francisco, has
been preparing a document that it hopes will win the support of a wide
range of activist groups. According to John Cavanagh, head of the
Institute for Policy Studies, a radical think-tank based in
Washington, DC, this manifesto would outline a new ?global democracy?
based on human rights and ecological sustainability. It would also
define new rules for globalisation. (For instance, certain goods and
services, such as bulk water and living things, should not be subject
to patents and trade rules.) And it would demand new bodies. The Fund,
the Bank and the WTO should be shrunk or shut down. The UN?which is
deemed more accountable and democratic?should be souped up.

Whether any agenda, even one so general, could be adopted by such a
rag-bag of protesters is unclear. An effort by Vaclav Havel earlier
this year to broker a meeting between the protesters and the boss of
the World Bank foundered because the activists could not agree on
whether such negotiations were a good idea: in fact, they had no way
of actually making any decision. Who should represent a disparate
collection of websites, all of which take pride in their lack of
leaders? (Mr Havel has since managed to set up a forum on September
23rd that will be attended by Bank and Fund officials and by assorted
opponents of globalisation.)

Nonetheless, it would be a big mistake to dismiss this global militant
tendency as nothing more than a public nuisance, with little potential
to change things. It already has changed things?and not just the
cocktail schedule for the upcoming meetings. Protests organised
through the Internet succeeded in scuttling the OECD?s planned
Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998; then came the greater
victory in Seattle, where the hoped-for launch of global trade talks
was aborted. It is still unclear when, or whether, that round will
start.

Also, many of the groups have already swayed the decisions of firms
and official institutions. Global Exchange, for instance, is an outfit
of 40 people based in San Francisco, and an avid believer in street
protest. It reckons it bullied Starbucks into promising to sell ?fair
trade? coffee beans in its caf?s, starting next month. (?Fair trade?
coffee is supposedly bought at a price that offers peasant producers a
?living wage?, rather than at the ?exploitative? price paid for
commercial coffee.) Starbucks says it had been thinking about doing
this anyway.

Similarly, ?anti-sweatshop? campaigns, mostly in America and mostly
student-led, have had effects well beyond the university campus. A
coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), student groups and
UNITE, the textile workers? union, for instance, recently sued
clothing importers, including Calvin Klein and Gap, over working
conditions in the American commonwealth of Saipan in the Pacific.
Faced with litigation and extended public campaigns against their
brands, 17 companies settled (others, including Gap, are still
fighting the case). The deal includes promises to improve working
conditions. The factories will be monitored by yet another group,
Verit?, based in Massachusetts, and part of a growing industry of
organisations dedicated to inspecting labour conditions in third-world
factories.

Activist groups have been just as successful in causing big
international agencies to bend. A World Bank project in China, which
involved moving poor ethnic Chinese into lands that were traditionally
Tibetan, was abandoned after a political furore led by a relatively
small group of influential pro-Tibetan activists. Similarly, the Bank
had a tough fight to fund an oil pipeline through Cameroon because of
activists? efforts.

Technology of complaint


The Internet has proved a crucial tool in organising these groups for
protest; it has also directly furnished the protesters, once
organised, with a potent weapon. E-mail makes it much easier not only
to gather activists and disseminate information, but also to bombard a
target with protests from around the world. As Debra Spar of the
Harvard Business School points out, the activists have globalised
faster than the firms they target. Global Exchange?s online anti-Gap
campus-organising kit has pro forma letters to send to the company,
anti-Gap flyers and suggested slogans and chants. All are easily
downloaded. It is hardly surprising that firms are often wrong-footed.
The activists have also raised the profile of ?backlash?
issues?notably, labour and environmental conditions in trade, and debt
relief for the poorest countries. This has dramatically increased the
influence of mainstream NGOs, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature
and Oxfam. Such groups have traditionally had some say (albeit less
than they would have wished) in policymaking. Assaulted by unruly
protesters, firms and governments are suddenly eager to do business
with the respectable face of dissent.

In the Bretton Woods institutions, in particular, the shift is
striking. Public protest has accelerated change on several fronts,
notably debt relief. The rallies, human chains and petitions for debt
cancellation organised by the Jubilee 2000 campaign applied enormous
political pressure for debt write-downs. As a result, groups such as
Oxfam were all but co-opted into designing the debt-relief strategies.
Next week is likely to see more measures announced to speed up the
process, so that governments can say they will keep the promise they
made in 1999 that at least 20 poor countries will see their debt
burdens lifted this year.

The IMF, long regarded as impermeable to outsiders, now runs seminars
to teach NGOs the nuts and bolts of country-programme design, so that
they can better monitor what the Fund is doing and (presumably)
understand the rationale for the Fund?s loan conditions. Horst K?hler,
the IMF?s new boss, has been courting NGOs. Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank?s
boss, has long fawned in their direction, but in the Bank too the pace
of bowing down has been stepped up.

In Prague this year a programme of meetings has been designed for
non-government, non-corporate groups. At last count well over 300 had
signed up. This raises the interesting possibility that radical groups
will try to prevent slightly less radical groups from attending their
meetings. Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator of the United Nations
Development Programme, has gone further. He has a board of NGOs
(including some fairly radical ones) to advise him, and he explicitly
wants to position UNDP as an honest broker, arbitrating the interests
of firms, government and civil society in individual developing
countries.

Presuming too much?


The increasing clout of NGOs, respectable and not so respectable,
raises an important question: who elected Oxfam, or, for that matter,
the League for a Revolutionary Communist International? Bodies such as
these are, to varying degrees, extorting admissions of fault from
law-abiding companies and changes in policy from democratically
elected governments. They may claim to be acting in the interests of
the people?but then so do the objects of their criticism, governments
and the despised international institutions. In the West, governments
and their agencies are, in the end, accountable to voters. Who holds
the activists accountable?
Some politicians are beginning to press this point. The Foreign Policy
Centre, a think-tank sponsored by the British government, recently
proposed a code of conduct for NGOs that would include certification
by a regulator. For now, though, governments and international
institutions would rather bend at least part of the way to the NGOs?
demands than question their credentials.

There could be no objection, of course, to the influence of NGOs and
protesters if they were merely stating their case. Many protesters are
out to do more than that?up to and including ?sabotaging, wrecking or
interfering with capitalist infrastructure?. When they get their way,
that looks likes a defeat for democracy rather than a victory. Then
again, even this might be all right if the concessions won by
protesters genuinely advanced the cause of the world?s poor, whose
interests most protesters claim to defend. This too is very much in
doubt.

Forcing higher labour standards on factories in Saipan, for instance,
may simply cause the ?sweatshops? to move on, leaving the workers
without jobs. Poor countries cannot afford rich-country standards of
labour regulation; people in poor countries will bear the cost of
denying this fact. Similarly, the furore over Tibet simply led China
to withdraw its loan request. The Chinese decided to fund the project
themselves, presumably with less regard for the environment and human
rights. Even debt relief is capable of doing more harm than good?as
when it channels new capital to countries whose economic policies are
in disarray.

A more complicated issue is the World Bank?s thinking on poverty and
development. Recently, the organisation has undergone a pronounced
shift, clearly visible in its latest World Development Report, the
Bank?s flagship publication. Poverty is now described as a
?multidimensional? problem that includes powerlessness, voicelessness,
vulnerability and fear?as well as mere lack of food, shelter and other
economic necessities. Combating poverty therefore requires not only
economic growth, it is argued, but also ?security? and ?empowerment?.

Empowering poor people, says the Bank, means strengthening their
ability to shape decisions that affect their lives?by removing
discrimination, promoting equity (for instance, between the sexes) and
ensuring that government institutions are more open, accountable and
oriented towards the poor. The Bank reckons it should no longer impose
reform strategies on its clients. They should be designed mainly by
poor countries themselves on the basis of a national dialogue with
various civil groups.

In part this ?fuller? account of development reflects a shift in
thinking that was under way before the backlash began. Some economists
were already becoming more sympathetic to the view, almost universal
before the 1980s, that growth by itself is not enough to reduce
third-world poverty; and a consensus (broader than the one on growth
and poverty) was already forming around the idea that the Bank?s
traditional lending conditions are not the best way to promote
economic reform. But the NGO critics, scores of whom were invited to
discuss the new report while it was in preparation, gave these
intellectual tendencies a mighty push.

Again, whether the developing countries will benefit is very much in
doubt. Empowerment, supposing the idea is taken seriously, may
distract governments and the Bank alike from the simpler pro-growth
tasks that they already appear to find impossibly difficult. And it
seems odd for the Bank to demand that third-world governments, often
these days democratically elected, should design their reforms
alongside civil groups that are unelected, unaccountable and very
often unrepresentative.

But these are not points to worry the protesters as long as they enjoy
the sympathy of many people in the West, as they appear to. Many of
the issues they raise reflect popular concern about the hard edges of
globalisation?fears, genuine if muddled, about leaving the poor
behind, harming the environment, caring about profits more than
people, unleashing dubious genetically modified foods, and the rest.
The radicals on the streets are voicing an organised and extremist
expression of these widely shared anxieties. Along with mainstream
NGOs, the protesters are prevailing over firms, international
institutions and governments partly because, for now, they do reflect
that broader mood. If their continuing success stimulates rather than
satisfies their appetite for power, global economic integration may be
at greater risk than many suppose.


 Links to sites mentioned (the Ruckus Society, the League for a
Revolutionary Communist International, the International Forum on
Globalization and Global Exchange. Or visit the raucous public protest
sites: A16 and S11):
http://ruckus.org/
http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/lrci.html
http://www.ifg.org/
http://www.a16.org/
http://www.s11.org/




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:45:04 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:45:04 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Economist leader: Globalisation is Good
Message-ID: <001101c0253a$913563a0$71258cd4@mjones>

The case for globalisation


THE anti-capitalist protesters who wrecked the Seattle trade talks
last year, and who hope to make a great nuisance of themselves in
Prague next week when the city hosts this year?s annual meeting of the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are wrong about most
things. However, they are right on two matters, and the importance of
these points would be difficult to exaggerate. The protesters are
right that the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of
our time is third-world poverty. And they are right that the tide of
?globalisation?, powerful as the engines driving it may be, can be
turned back. The fact that both these things are true is what makes
the protesters?and, crucially, the strand of popular opinion that
sympathises with them?so terribly dangerous.

International economic integration is not an ineluctable process, as
many of its most enthusiastic advocates appear to believe. It is only
one, the best, of many possible futures for the world economy; others
may be chosen, and are even coming to seem more likely. Governments,
and through them their electorates, will have a far bigger say in
deciding this future than most people appear to think. The protesters
are right that governments and companies?if only they can be moved by
force of argument, or just by force?have it within their power to slow
and even reverse the economic trends of the past 20 years.

Now this would not be, as the protesters and their tacit supporters
must reckon, a victory for the poor or for the human spirit. It would
be just the opposite: an unparalleled catastrophe for the planet?s
most desperate people, and something that could be achieved, by the
way, only by trampling down individual liberty on a daunting scale.
Yet none of this means it could never happen. The danger that it will
come to pass deserves to be taken much more seriously than it has been
so far.

Pandering as they go


The mighty forces driving globalisation are surely, you might think,
impervious to the petty aggravation of street protesters wearing silly
costumes. Certainly, one would have hoped so, but it is proving
otherwise. Street protests did in fact succeed in shutting down the
Seattle trade talks last year. More generally, governments and their
international agencies?which means the IMF and the World Bank, among
others?are these days mindful that public opinion is anything but
squarely behind them. They are not merely listening to the activists
but increasingly are pandering to them, adjusting both their policies
and the way these policies are presented to the public at large (see
article). Companies too are bending to the pressure, modest as it
might seem, and are conceding to the anti-capitalists not just
specific changes in corporate policy but also large parts of the
dissenters? specious argument.
These outbreaks of anti-capitalist sentiment are meeting next to no
intellectual resistance from official quarters. Governments are
apologising for globalisation and promising to civilise it. Instead,
if they had any regard for the plight of the poor, they would be
accelerating it, celebrating it, exulting in it?and if all that were
too much for the public they would at least be trying to explain it.

Lately, technology has been the main driver of globalisation. The
advances achieved in computing and telecommunications in the West
offer enormous, indeed unprecedented, scope for raising living
standards in the third world (see our survey). New technologies
promise not just big improvements in local efficiency, but also the
further and potentially bigger gains that flow from an infinitely
denser network of connections, electronic and otherwise, with the
developed world.

The ?gains? just referred to are not, or not only, the profits of
western and third-world corporations but productive employment and
higher incomes for the world?s poor. That is what
growth-through-integration has meant for all the developing countries
that have achieved it so far. In terms of relieving want,
?globalisation? is the difference between South Korea and North Korea,
between Malaysia and Myanmar, even (switching timespan) between Europe
and Africa. It is in fact the difference between North and South.
Globalisation is a moral issue, all right.

If technological progress were the only driver of global integration,
the anti-capitalist threat would be less worrying. Technological
progress, and (it should follow) increasing global integration, are in
some ways natural and self-fuelling processes, depending chiefly on
human ingenuity and ambition: it would be hard (though, as history
shows, not impossible) to call a halt to innovation. But it is easier
to block the effects of technological progress on economic
integration, because integration also requires economic freedom.

The state of the developing countries is itself proof of this. The
world is still very far from being a single economy. Even the rich
industrialised economies, taken as a group, by no means function as an
integrated whole. And this is chiefly because governments have
arranged things that way. Economic opportunities in the third world
would be far greater, and poverty therefore vastly reduced, right now
except for barriers to trade?that is, restrictions on economic
freedom?erected by rich- and poor-country governments alike. Again,
the protesters are absolutely right: governments are not powerless.
Raising new barriers is as easy as lowering existing ones. Trade
ministers threaten to do so on an almost daily basis.

The likelihood of further restrictions has increased markedly of late.
Rich-country governments have all but decided that rules ostensibly to
protect labour and the environment will be added to the international
trading regime. If this comes about, it will be over the objections of
developing-country governments?because most such governments have come
round to the idea that trade (read globalisation) is good. Europe and
the United States are saying, in effect, that now that the poor
countries have decided they would like to reduce poverty as quickly as
possible, they can?t be allowed to, because this will inconvenience
the West.

If that reason were true, it would be a crime to act on it. But it isn
?t true, or even all that plausible. Rich-country governments know
very well that the supposed ?adjustment problems? of expanded trade
are greatly exaggerated: how convincing is it to blame accelerating
globalisation for the migration of jobs from North to South, when
America has an unemployment rate of less than 4% and real wages are
growing right across the spectrum? Yet even under these wonderful
circumstances, politicians in Europe and America (leftists,
conservatives, Democrats and Republicans alike) are wringing their
hands about the perils of globalisation, abdicating their duty to
explain the facts to voters, and equipping the anti-capitalists with
weapons to use in the next fight.

It would be naive to think that governments could let integration
proceed mainly under its own steam, trusting to technological progress
and economic freedom, desirable as that would be. Politics could never
be like that. But is defending globalisation boldly on its merits as a
truly moral cause?against a mere rabble of exuberant irrationalists on
the streets, and in the face of a mild public scepticism that is open
to persuasion?entirely out of the question? If it is, as it seems to
be, that is dismal news for the world?s poor.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:45:10 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:45:10 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Times: Serb batallion ready to strike in Montenegro
Message-ID: <001201c0253a$94f83800$71258cd4@mjones>


BY JANINE DI GIOVANNI IN BERANE



CORPORAL DINO has a killer's eyes. Cold, impassive, the 22-year-old
soldier with the Yugoslav Army's 7th Battalion declares that he is
prepared to do whatever is necessary to keep Montenegro from gaining
independence.
"Montenegro is the land of Serbian forefathers," he said, echoing his
hero Slobodan Milosevic's words. The President considers the tiny
republic to be Yugoslavia's last stand. Corporal Dino said: "It
belongs to Yugoslavia. If they try to leave, it will be violent, and
the time is coming, the time is now."

The fear of residents in Podgorica, Montenegro's capital, that the 7th
Battalion and paramilitary groups will trigger violence after Sunday's
presidential elections appears to be borne out by the attitude and
action of Corporal Dino. Last night he and his friends started taking
up posts, some of them inside the capital.

He described the situation as "hot, we're in something like red
alert". Even if President Milosevic is re-elected - which seems likely
given his determination to cling to power - Corporal Dino admits that
"something will still happen". He said: "We are not happy with
Djukanovic [the Montenegrin President] being in power, there is a
60-40 chance that we will act."

Officials in Podgorica believe the ultimate goal of the battalion is
to split the town, surround the presidential palace, cut off water,
electricity, television and telephone, and fend off attacks from Nato
as well as President Djukanovic's loyal military police.

Corporal Dino's outfit, the 7th Battalion of the Yugoslav Military
Police Army, to give its full title, is a shadowy group formed after
the Nato bombing last year. Operating from a headquarters in Berane,
many members are former criminals and the most brutal veterans of the
war in Kosovo.

Although Corporal Dino says that they are officially led by General
Milorad Obradovic, head of the Yugoslav Second Army, they are in
reality a paramilitary force, according to Radomir Sekulovic, a senior
adviser to the Montenegro Government. He said: "They are not recruited
in the normal way - conscripted by the law in Yugoslavia. They are
also paid more for their work than members of similar army structures.
They can do whatever they want."

Many of the men are former members of paramilitary groups, such as the
Tigers led by the late Arkan in the Bosnian war, the Wolves and
Frenki's - the group led by Frenki Simatovic - which inflicted some of
the horrific atrocities in Kosovo.

Since early summer, as President Djukanovic got closer to the West,
their numbers have increased, with estimates of between 1,200 and
2,000 men. Corporal Dino said their numbers were closer to 2,000.

All of them are heavily armed and highly trained. They train for 12
hours a day from 6 am to 6 pm. "My unit has been getting special
training from some of Frenki's guys," said Corporal Dino, describing
them as "really good instructors".

The soldier is not supposed to talk to outsiders, and very few have
come in contact with anyone from the 7th Battalion. But he came
forward because he wanted to explain himself. Although he was not
wearing his army fatigues - so as to make himself inconspicuous during
the secret meeting - his posture and his expression were still
menacing.

He was not ashamed to admit what he and his friends - who have joined
him here in Montenegro - did during the Kosovo war. "I did kill
people," he said, focusing his icy stare. "Yes I did. It's like having
sex, the first time, you don't know what to do, the second time, it's
better. Afterwards you know what to do."

The Kosovo war was a good time for him. As an infantry soldier in
Prizren, he burnt houses and shot Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers and
those he claimed were "spies". At close range? "Yes, at close range,"
he snapped.

He bristled at the mention of the civilians killed. "Just because
someone is wearing street clothes doesn't mean they are civilians," he
stated defensively. "There were spies everywhere."

When the Serb forces withdrew he felt angry because he believed that
the Serbs had won the war and the politicians were making them leave
Kosovo. He was also furious because he could no longer vent his
frustration.

On returning home to Belgrade he began working as a bodyguard to an
underworld personality, whom he would not name. A friend from his
military days then told the soldier about joining the 7th Battalion.
He said that when he was a child, he yearned to be a pilot like Tom
Cruise in Top Gun, but he failed the test because of his poor teeth so
he was lured to Kosovo and now to Montenegro. He said he was being
paid DM400 (?122) a month.

The repeat of a Sarajevo-like siege in which civilians become targets
is a terrifying vision for many Montenegrins, who want to distance
themselves as much as possible from Belgrade. But here in the north of
Montenegro the people are hard and unrelenting and intent on keeping
Montenegro a part of the Yugoslav Federation.

This is the town where President Milosevic, their hero, rallied last
week. This is a poor region, a world away from the semi-sophistication
of Podgorica, which has a languid Mediterranean air and prides itself
on its imported - often smuggled - Italian clothes and cars.

Corporal Dino's parting words carried an edge of menace. "I'm telling
you, to be polite," he said. "Get out of Podgorica. It may not happen
right away, but it will. And you don't want to be here when it
happens."






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:52:14 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:52:14 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] how anthropologists massacred the Yanomami
Message-ID: <001401c0253b$9183b540$71258cd4@mjones>

Guardian:
Scientist 'killed Amazon indians to test race theory'

Geneticist accused of letting thousands die in rainforest

Paul Brown, Environment correspondent
Saturday September 23, 2000

Thousands of South American indians were infected with measles,
killing hundreds, in order to for US scientists to study the effects
on primitive societies of natural selection, according to a book out
next month.
The astonishing story of genetic research on humans, which took 10
years to uncover, is likely to shake the world of anthropology to its
core, according to Professor Terry Turner of Cornell University, who
has read the proofs.

"In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it
is unparalleled in the history of anthropology," Prof Turner says in a
warning letter to Louise Lamphere, the president of the American
Anthropology Association (AAA).

The book accuses James Neel, the geneticist who headed a long-term
project to study the Yanomami people of Venezuela in the mid-60s, of
using a virulent measles vaccine to spark off an epidemic which killed
hundreds and probably thousands.

Once the epidemic was under way, according to the book, the research
team "refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying
Yanomami, on explicit order from Neel. He insisted to his colleagues
that they were only there to observe and record the epidemic, and that
they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not provide
medical help".

The book, Darkness in El Dorado by the investigative journalist
Patrick Tierney, is due to be published on October 1. Prof Turner,
whose letter was co-signed by fellow anthropologist Leslie Sponsel of
the University of Hawaii, was trying to warn the AAA of the impending
scandal so the profession could defend itself.

Although Neel died last February, many of his associates, some of them
authors of classic anthropology texts, are still alive.

The accusations will be the main focus of the AAA's AGM in November,
when the surviving scientists have been invited to defend their work.
None have commented publicly, but they are asking colleagues to come
to their defence.

One of the most controversial aspects of the research which allegedly
culminated in the epidemic is that it was funded by the US atomic
energy commission, which was anxious to discover what might happen to
communities when large numbers were wiped out by nuclear war.

While there is no "smoking gun" in the form of texts or recorded
speeches by Neel explaining his conduct, Prof Turner believes the only
explanation is that he was trying to test controversial eugenic
theories like the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele.

He quotes another anthropologist who read the manuscript as saying:
"Mr. Tierney's analysis is a case study of the dangers in science of
the uncontrolled ego, of lack of respect for life, and of greed and
self-indulgence. It is a further extraordinary revelation of malicious
and perverted work conducted under the aegis of the atomic energy
commission."

Prof Turner says Neel and his group used a virulent vaccine called
Edmonson B on the Yanomani, which was known to produce symptoms
virtually indistinguishable from cases of measles.

"Medical experts, when informed that Neel and his group used the
vaccine in question on the Yanomami, typically refuse to believe it at
first, then say that it is incredible that they could have done it,
and are at a loss to explain why they would have chosen such an
inappropriate and dangerous vaccine," he writes.

"There is no record that Neel sought any medical advice before
applying the vaccine. He never informed the appropriate organs of the
Venezuelan government that his group was planning to carry out a
vaccination campaign, as he was legally required to do.

Fatalities


"Neither he nor any other member of the expedition has ever explained
why that vaccine was used, despite the evidence that it actually
caused or, at a minimum, greatly exacerbated the fatal epidemic."

Prof Turner says that Neel held the view that "natural" human society,
as seen before the advent of large-scale agriculture, consists of
small, genetically isolated groups in which dominant genes -
specifically a gene he believed existed for "leadership" or "innate
ability" - have a selective advantage.

In such an environment, male carriers of this gene would gain access
to a disproportionate number of females, reproducing their genes more
frequently than less "innately able" males. The result would
supposedly be a continual upgrading of the human genetic stock.

He says Neel believed that in modern societies "superior leadership
genes would be swamped by mass genetic mediocrity".

"The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that
society should be reorganised into small breeding isolates in which
genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or
subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and
women, and amassing harems of brood females." Prof Turner adds.

In the memo he says: "One of Tierney's more startling revelations is
that the whole Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of
the atomic energy commission's secret programme of experiments on
human subjects.

"Neel, the originator of the project, was part of the medical and
genetic research team attached to the atomic energy commission since
the days of the Manhattan Project."

James Neel was well-known for his research into the effects of
radiation on human subjects and personally headed the team that
investigated the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on
survivors and their children.

According to Prof Turner, the same group also secretly carried out
experiments on human subjects in the US. These included injecting
people with radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or
permission.

Nightmarish


"This nightmarish story - a real anthropological heart of darkness
beyond the imagining of even a Joseph Conrad (though not, perhaps, a
Josef Mengele) - will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as
well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on
trial," he says.

"This book should... cause the field to understand how the corrupt and
depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while
they were accorded great respect throughout the western world... This
should never be allowed to happen again."

Yesterday Professor Turner told the Guardian it was unfortunate that
the confidential memo had been leaked, but it had accomplished its
original purpose in getting a full response from the AAA.

A public forum would be held at its AGM in November to discuss the
book its revelations and courses of action.

In a statement yesterday the association said "The AAA is extremely
concerned about these allegations. If proven true they would
constitute a serious violation of Yanomami human rights and our code
of ethics. Until there is a full and impartial review and discussion
of the issues raised in the book, it would be unfair to express a
judgment about the specific allegations against individuals that are
contained in it.

"The association is anticipating conducting an open forum during our
annual meeting to provide an opportunity for our members to review and
discuss the issues and allegations raised in the book."




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:54:59 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:54:59 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Engine of growth runs low on fuel
Message-ID: <001501c0253b$f416b180$71258cd4@mjones>

Edmond Warner the inside view: Don't blame Opec for a slowdown that
comes straight out of the economics textbooks

Special report: the petrol war

Saturday September 23, 2000

The seismic plates of the world economy have shifted, and not only to
the advantage of the owners of its raw materials. The providers of
labour - you and I - are also gaining at the expense of the owners of
capital. No surprise then that share prices are falling.
It is difficult to find a Middle Englander, or indeed a Middle
Worlder, who is not now aware that crude oil prices have tripled from
their recent low. Politicians are seeking scapegoats. Those in power,
most recently Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schr?der, point accusatory
fingers at the major oil companies. Those out of power, most volubly
perhaps William Hague, point at those in power.

However, much they would like to, few dare directly accuse the
producers' cartel Opec, for fear of reactivating tensions that in the
past only meant still higher crude prices.

Anyway, the real culprits are the users of oil, not the suppliers.
That means all of us, however green our individual credentials.

As in any market, the oil price is set by the marginal buyer and
seller. Opec's traditional price-smoothing activities aside, supply of
oil is notoriously inelastic: it can only respond slowly to price
changes. Demand, however, is driven directly by general economic
activity. The result is high volatility.

It is no wonder the oil price has surged, for the global economy has
enjoyed a sustained upswing. Its engine has been a US economy that is
now in its 10th year of uninterrupted expansion, placing strain on all
raw resources - particularly labour. A rise in input prices is one of
the economy's self-correcting mechanisms. Higher costs feed through to
a combination of lower profit margins and higher output prices. Both
have the effect of cooling activity, in turn easing demand for raw
materials.

Governments typically attempt to make this circle more vicious by
raising interest rates and cutting their own spending so as to take
the heat out of the economy. Such attempts often backfire, but usually
because complex economic circumstances have been misread, not because
the theory is wrong.

Shifting balance


An economy's spoils are shared between four parties: the providers of
raw materials, labour and capital as well as government. The last is
principally a redistributor between the other three but, depending on
the state of its own finances and its tactics, it can alter the total
accruing to the others.

Leaving the showboating about fuel taxes where it belongs - to one
side - the current debate about economic management clearly
illustrates the shifting of the economic balance away from capital.

The minutes of the September meeting of the monetary policy committee
revealed a marginal vote in favour of leaving interest rates at 6%.
The resolutely hawkish minority in favour of dearer money fears - yes,
you guessed it - the effect of higher wages and more expensive oil.

The chancellor finds hordes of under-employed and insecure Labour
backbenchers rooting around in his supposed war chest. The rosy state
of the country's finances is only secondarily the result of his
much-vaunted prudence. Primarily it is a natural consequence of the
economic upswing.

The US election is being fought over the issue of how to spend the
"growth bounty" generated by the American economy over the past 10
years. The British election will see much of the same.

Just when the economic barbecue should be dampened, politicians with
low security of tenure are about to squirt it with lighter fuel. There
could not be a better advertisement for a command economy. Or, failing
that, proportional representation.

Workers of every collar colour might be forgiven for asking why the
tightening labour market is not working for them. It is, but the
fluidity of modern working practices has introduced permanent job
insecurity for all.

Western economies are moving closer and closer to full employment.
Companies worry increasingly about the availability of labour. The
trick for employers and government is to ensure that, through
training, workers are recycled to mitigate the general inflationary
consequences.

America has performed this trick on a sustained basis throughout its
upswing. Europe lacks the cultural characteristics of the American
people, which have facilitated its seemingly miraculous growth. A
frontier spirit has encouraged labour mobility across US state
boundaries and across its industries to a degree as yet alien to the
United States of Europe.

>From the perspective of the providers of capital - investors - the
emerging labour market problem has been containable, because overall
activity has been expanding. Running plants faster and sweating
employees harder has overcome the rise in the cost of individual
workers.

Just too tough


With general inflation in the economy low, profits have been driven
ahead by volume growth and a focus on efficiency. But the rise in oil
prices has upset the delicate balance. There is one ball too many for
the corporate jugglers to keep aloft.

September has been marked by profit warnings from companies around the
globe. The reasons cited are specific to the companies concerned but
collectively they give the impression that corporate life is just too
tough right now. Which is what the economic textbooks would predict.

It is difficult to see a renewed upturn in profits growth, short of a
swift reversal in oil prices and the surprise discovery of a
generation of highly trained young workers hidden in a remote mountain
state.

While share prices do not always follow profit announcements -
expectations are the key - the current wave of gloomy tidings has
washed away investors' late summer confidence.

So share prices are falling, down 7% in Britain so far this month,
taking the FTSE 100 to 7% below its level at the start of the year.
Worse before better, I'd guess.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:55:52 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:55:52 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guadrian: Intel chills the silicon world
Message-ID: <001601c0253c$13cf6bc0$71258cd4@mjones>

A day of turmoil After profits shock, only intervention to support
euro pulls markets back from brink

Net news

Andrew Clark in New York
Saturday September 23, 2000

A shock profits warning from Intel, the world's biggest maker of
microchips, caused turmoil on financial markets around the world
yesterday as investors feared an end to the long-term boom in the
computer industry.
Only the unexpected intervention by the world's central banks to
support the struggling euro pulled the markets out of their nosedive.

Technology stocks led the way down as shares dived in New York, Europe
and throughout Asia in the wake of the Intel warning.

The FTSE 100 index fell 124 points at one point before the euro news
helped it recover to close up 3.5 at 62070.7.

California-based Intel revealed that its revenue for the third quarter
of the year would be up just 3% to 5%, well below forecasts of 9% to
12% growth.

It said this $300m shortfall was "primarily due to weaker demand in
Europe".

The news stunned the technology world - Intel's chips are used by most
major manufacturers of computers and mobile phones. Intel's news was
seen as a clear indication that hi-tech industries are tightening
their belts.

There was immediate speculation that the weak euro was to blame -
computers are priced in dollars, and currency fluctuations have made
them more expensive.

Others blamed disappointment with Microsoft's latest operating system,
Windows 2000, which had been seen as a trigger for users to upgrade
their systems.

Ashok Kumar, an analyst at the New York stockbroker USBancorp Piper
Jaffray, said: "This is a world slowdown phenomenon. The demand
profile was very strong at the start of the quarter but it's basically
fallen off a cliff."

He said a 15% slide in the euro this year was not enough to explain a
dive in Intel's growth rate from 28% in the second quarter to 5% since
July.

"I don't think currency is the main factor behind that - it's a drop
off in demand," he said.

Dan Scovel of research firm Needham & Co said: "There was a lot of
hope that Windows 2000 would contribute to a big push in PCs but it's
come out to pretty lukewarm reviews."

He added that "transitory issues" with the big European mobile phone
makers could be a factor in the fall. Ericsson, for example, has
suffered two profit warnings and the departure of its chief executive.

Intel's shares fell 21% to $48 yesterday morning, following five years
of almost unbroken upward momentum. The slump wiped $65bn off the
group's market value.

Other big losers included Dell, Microsoft and Cisco. In London, ARM
Holdings, Misys and Freeserve were among the fallers.

Intel has a market share of 85% in microchips and is known for its
slogan "Intel Inside". The group is headed by Hungarian-born Andy
Grove. He co-founded Intel in 1968 and has amassed a personal fortune
of more than ?300m. He is known as the father of the computer
industry.

Although Intel cited Europe as its main area of weakness, analysts
believe other regions have slowed. Mr Kumar forecast third-quarter
growth of 30% in Asia, against 60% in the second quarter, with the
rate in America slowing from 30% to 10%.

A series of American companies have warned on profits recently, citing
the weak euro. Amng the worst hit have been Gillette, Colgate and
automo tive components firm Rockwell.

?Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steel group, yesterday warned that planned
price increases were under threat and its UK operations under
continued pressure because of the euro weakness, writes David Gow.

Corus is cutting 3,800 British jobs, with a question mark still
hanging over the future of Llanwern strip plant.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:44:33 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:44:33 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Economist on war in Congo
Message-ID: <000f01c0253a$7f22eca0$71258cd4@mjones>

In Congo, war gets serious

 HIS name was Kabwanga Makengo. Born Lubumbashi, June 3rd 1980.
Private, 2nd Brigade of the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Catholic. Unmarried. The photograph shows a baby face startled by the
camera.

Makengo?s muddied?or bloodied?identity card lay in the trench where he
is buried, next to a smashed anti-aircraft gun. When the rebels of the
Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) took this tiny trading post
on the Ubangi river on September 7th, they put the 34 dead government
soldiers in the trenches and covered them over.

This war has suddenly become more serious. Usually, self-preservation
overcomes valour, and towns and villages fall without a fight. But at
Dongo the battle lasted five days. Two days after surrendering, the
government commander committed suicide.

Two years ago, Rwanda flew its troops across Congo to attack the
capital, Kinshasa, and overthrow President Laurent Kabila?the man
Rwanda had put into power in 1997. The Rwandans and their Ugandan
allies also launched an anti-Kabila rebellion in eastern Congo. The
attack on the capital failed when Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent
troops to defend Mr Kabila. The rebel movement in the east split, with
Uganda and Rwanda backing different sides.

     Uganda launched a third rebel movement, the MLC, in northern
Congo, training its soldiers, supplying fuel, ammunition and weapons,
and manning the heavy artillery. As a result the MLC has had
considerable success, pushing southwards and westwards towards the
capital. It claims to be retaking territory lost to Mr Kabila?s forces
since a peace agreement was signed in Lusaka a year ago; but neither
side is in the mood for peace.

According to the attackers, Dongo was heavily defended by 3,000-4,000
troops. They had dug a system of trenches and, on the promontory
overlooking the river, had installed four Korean-made anti-aircraft
guns pointing at the forest. (Most African armies use such guns
against infantry forces.) After the battle, the trenches were carpeted
with thousands of spent cartridges. Nearby was a huge stockpile of
weapons and ammunition.




Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, once called this
Africa?s first world war. It is nothing like that. The armies?with the
exception of the Congolese government?s?are small, none of them over
20,000 strong, and they are spread out over a sparsely-populated area
the size of Western Europe, much of it covered in jungle. Since there
are no passable roads in Congo, this war is fought by air and water.
The aim is to control the airstrips attached to small towns, and the
rivers which are the main transport routes. Every gun, bullet and drop
of fuel must be flown in from Uganda and then taken by river to Dongo,
or wherever the next target may be. The troops move by dug-out canoe
or walk the forest paths.

Victory at Dongo has given the MLC rebels a huge boost, even
though?reluctant as they are to admit it?the battle was won by Ugandan
artillery. They have captured a treasure-trove of weapons and about 20
prisoners, who will be ?re-educated? and turned into MLC fighters.

The rebels can now move on to the junction of the Ubangi and Congo
rivers to cut off the town of Mbandaka and, more important, its
airport, a base for bombers that have been giving the MLC problems.
>From there, the rebels could float down the river to Kinshasa. But
that would be going further than the territory the MLC held when the
Lusaka agreement was signed last year.

The next few weeks will decide whether that peace agreement lives or
dies. At present, it looks fatally wounded. The Ugandans may decide,
once they have regained the territory lost since July last year, that
it would be wiser to pause and give Mr Kabila a chance to negotiate.

Jean-Pierre Bemba, the MLC leader, stresses that he is committed to
the Lusaka agreement. But he will not be drawn on whether he will stop
fighting when the lost territory is reclaimed. He says it is up to Mr
Kabila to show his commitment to peace by allowing a national
conference to go ahead and permitting the deployment of UN
peacekeepers.

Mr Kabila has been ambiguous. He has rejected the agreed mediator,
Ketumile Masire, the former president of Botswana, and now wants the
whole Lusaka agreement renegotiated. He is unlikely to accept the MLC?
s advances without reacting. There are already signs of panic in his
army.

Evidence of that can be found in Dongo. At the back of a low hill, in
a small brick-built house, a brown-black trail of blood leads from a
back room to a patch of recently dug earth in front of the house.
According to one survivor, Popo Mulebe, Mr Kabila?s soldiers found him
and about 50 other civilians from the village hiding in the forest
nearby. They were kept in the house for a few days and then told to
dig a pit to bury the bodies of soldiers killed in the fighting. That
done, the soldiers took them, 12 on one day and 34 on another, shot
them in the house and dragged their bodies to the pit. Some of the
women are still missing.








From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 02:44:28 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 09:44:28 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Economist: Effect of oil prices on growth
Message-ID: <000e01c0253a$7c173340$71258cd4@mjones>

How shocking?


 THE outlook for the global economy seems too good to be true. In its
World Economic Outlook, published this week, the IMF forecasts that
the world economy will grow by 4.7% this year and 4.2% next year?the
fastest two consecutive years of growth since the mid-1980s. The IMF
expects the rich industrial economies to slow from 3.9% to a still
robust 3.0%, as America experiences (fingers crossed) a soft landing.
What might upset this rosy picture? The most likely candidate is oil.

In America this week, the price of oil hit almost $38 a barrel, more
than three times its level at the end of 1998. The northern hemisphere
is now moving towards winter with oil stocks at historically low
levels, so there is a strong risk that prices could yet spike above
$40 a barrel. European road hauliers are up in arms, but how worried
should we be about the impact of higher oil prices on the world
economy?

The IMF?s latest forecasts assume that oil prices average $26.50 a
barrel this year and $23 in 2001. Suppose that oil prices drop back a
bit, but still average $30 a barrel next year. Using the IMF?s
oil-price ready-reckoner, this 30% rise in oil prices from the base
forecast would reduce GDP growth in the rich economies by little more
than 0.3 of a percentage point; inflation would rise by 0.6%. Growth
in oil-importing emerging economies, notably in Asia, would fall more
sharply because they use more oil per dollar of GDP. All in all,
global growth rates would be dented by around half a point next year.
The apparent conclusion is that even if oil prices stay high, there is
little to worry about.

The OECD appears to be even more relaxed about the impact of oil
prices. It suggests that even a $10 (or roughly 50%) increase from the
level assumed in its base forecast, would reduce growth in the rich
economies by around only a quarter of a percentage point.

However, as with all economic forecasting, there is no magic formula
which automatically calculates the impact of changes in oil prices.
Economists have at least progressed since the first oil shock in 1974,
when many were perplexed by the whole notion of stagflation. How could
a rise in oil prices be both inflationary (raising prices) and
deflationary (reducing demand)? Today, they understand better the
various channels through which oil prices affect the economy.

? An increase in the oil price delivers a ?negative supply-side shock?
to the economy?the exact opposite of the ?positive supply-side shock?
that information technology is said to deliver. Higher oil prices
increase firms? input costs, so they produce less at any given price.
If aggregate demand is unchanged, this means that prices rise and
output falls.

? Higher oil prices transfer income from oil-importing economies to
oil exporters. This reduces the spending power of consumers and hence
growth in output in oil-importing economies. The actual impact on
global demand depends on whether oil exporters save their windfall or
spend it on imports.

? Headline inflation is boosted by higher fuel prices almost
immediately. If higher inflation then pushes up wage settlements, the
core, or underlying, rate of inflation will also rise.


Assume a can-opener
Economists may have better models than a quarter of a century ago for
analysing the impact of oil prices on economies, but their forecasts
are only as good as the assumptions on which they are built. One
crucial assumption is how quickly the oil-exporting economies recycle
their extra oil revenues by importing more from the rest of the world.
The OECD ambitiously assumes that OPEC members spend 80-90% of their
windfall on foreign imports within two years. That may be too
optimistic (the IMF assumes a lower figure), because many oil
exporters have budget and current-account deficits and so will be wary
of embarking on a spending spree.

A second assumption concerns whether higher headline inflation feeds
through into wages. This depends both upon the tightness of labour
markets and their flexibility. The more flexible real wages are, the
less will be the impact of oil prices on core inflation. The good news
is that labour markets in most rich economies are now more flexible
than two decades ago.

This, in turn, is linked to a third key assumption: how will central
banks respond? If they leave interest rates unchanged, allowing real
interest rates to fall, this will cushion the initial impact on
output, but at a possible risk of higher inflation later, and hence
eventually a sharper slowdown. If, as the IMF and the OECD assume,
central banks instead refuse to accommodate higher oil prices and
raise interest rates in tandem with inflation, then there will be a
bigger short-term fall in output.

Last but not least, most oil-price ready-reckoners assume no change in
financial markets. However, if worries about oil prices and profits
caused overvalued stockmarkets to tumble, households and firms would
reduce their spending, exacerbating the slowdown in growth.

The actual impact of oil prices is sensitive to any of these four
assumptions. No wonder economists have consistently underestimated the
impact of each of the previous three oil-price hikes.

Some analysts even argue that the rise in oil prices is good news, not
bad, because it will reduce consumer purchasing power and so help to
slow the American economy without the need for higher interest rates.
This view not only ignores the likely increase in America?s trade
deficit, which rose to record levels in July, but it also assumes that
higher headline inflation will not push up wages. Yet in a squeaky
tight labour market (which is precisely why a slowdown in growth might
be good news) that smacks of wishful thinking.

The economic impact of higher oil prices will almost certainly be less
this time than it was in the past. The rich industrial economies use
only half as much oil per dollar of GDP as they did in the early
1970s. And even after the recent increase, the real price of crude oil
today is still less than half its level in 1980.

The oil-price hikes in 1974 and 1980 both transferred from oil
importers to OPEC economies the equivalent of around 2% of GDP. This
time, if prices averaged around $30 a barrel, the income loss to rich
industrial economies might be equivalent to just over 0.5% of GDP. To
trigger a repeat of the 1970s oil crisis, the price would have to rise
to $70 a barrel. Now that would be a shock.








From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 03:23:07 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 10:23:07 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] hard or soft landing?
Message-ID: <001901c0253f$e22951e0$71258cd4@mjones>

[from The Australian Financial Review]

This fragile engine

By Peter Hartcher


The lovers at twilight are sharing a drink on a clifftop terrace
overlooking the Mediterranean. But something is deeply wrong. The
camera takes us closer. She turns to him, beautiful but angry. "If you
don't understand asset allocation, you don't understand me," she cries
in an American accent.

Frustrated beyond words, she throws her drink in her lover's face and
flounces off. Too late, her darkly handsome man calls after her in a
Meditteranean lilt: "But wait ? I love you." It makes no difference.
He watches, uncomprehending, as she leaves him forever.

This advertisement for a money management firm, now showing on
American network TV, captures some essential truths about the state of
the union circa 2000.

The stockmarket is no longer just important to the health of the US,
it is central ? and not just for its economy. It is also a more
important personal, sociological, political and geopolitical
phenomenon than at any time in at least half a century.

The country's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, calls the US
"the indispensible power". And the ineluctable foundation of the
indispensible power is the stockmarket.

"At no time in the post-World War II period has the economic wellbeing
of the US and the rest of the world hinged so importantly on the
performance of the American stockmarket," writes one of Wall Street's
best-known gurus, Henry Kaufman, also known as Dr Doom, in his
just-published memoirs.

For the last 60 years the value of the stockmarket has averaged half
the size of the national economy. Today the market has blown out so
that it is worth not half but one-and-a-half times as much as the
total economy. And stockmarkets are not noted for their serene
stability. It is not the steadiest foundation for empire.

Jim Grant, the publisher of a contrarian Wall Street newsletter,
Grant's Interest Rate Observer, puts it this way: "It's like a filing
cabinet suspended over our heads by a single strand of dental floss."
He frets in particular over the Nasdaq index, the measure of
technology company stock prices.

Yet after the experience of the great bull market of the 1990s,
"Americans have come to expect rising stock prices as their right.
It's extraordinary. Everything is perfect and yet improving," Grants
quips.

The state of the market has had a powerful effect on the nation's
wealth. Individual investors harvested half a trillion US dollars'
worth of profits from their shareholdings last year alone, a sum equal
to the size of the output of the entire Australian economy. It also
has a strong influence over the national mood: "American arrogance
exists in proportion to the movement of the Nasdaq index," says the
author, academic and prophet Francis Fukuyama.

And, as the drink-dashing heroine of the TV ad demonstrates, personal
investment in stocks has become a very serious issue for the Americans
who own shares ? as half of them now do. This compares with just 5 per
cent in the 1950s and 19 per cent in the mid-1980s.

Deadly serious, in fact. An analyst who dares go public to predict a
Wall Street crash can expect to receive death threats from angry
investors.

Alexis de Tocqueville said it more than 150 years ago. This sharp-eyed
French social historian visited the US and announced: "I know of no
country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on
the affections of men."

It's not a new sentiment, but the stockmarket is now the main channel
for indulging it. Ten years ago Americans held one dollar in every
seven of their personal wealth in the form of stocks; today it is one
dollar in three.

It has reached the point where Americans now have more money in stocks
than real estate, according to Federal Reserve data.

Stock investing has spread like a fever and no corner of society has
been untouched. In 1969 a group of Black Power student radicals
campaigning for a black separatist state took over the Willard
Straight Hall on the campus of Cornell University at gunpoint. Today
their leader runs a staff stockmarket investment fund.

Stock funds for children have boomed. Six years ago the Stein Roe
Young Investors mutual fund had 4,000 account holders. Today it has
231,000 and the average age of investors is 11.

A survey by a Boston firm, Liberty Financial, found that 55 per cent
of high school students had bought stocks or bonds. The comparable
figure in 1993 was 14 per cent.

The stockmarket was once the preserve of the wealthy and the
financially sophisticated. Now cab drivers and construction workers
talk knowledgeably about their portfolios and the latest hot tip. CNBC
broadcasts a TV channel dedicated wholly to the stockmarket 24 hours a
day.

The strength of the market has been a powerful advantage for the US
economy. It has channelled savings from households to companies on an
unprecedented scale. And much of these savings went to finance
technology firms and new start-ups ? to renovate the US industrial
structure.

In the last 20 years, technology companies have raised about $US400
billion ($744 billion) from American stockmarket investors. The
companies were happy and the upgrading of the US economy to a higher
technological plane was under way.

But the investors were even happier. Their cumulative capital profits
on those $US400 billion worth of investments stood at $US3.7 trillion
by the beginning of this year. How did this happen? Booms always begin
with low interest rates and easy money.

"The experience of the US in the 1920s and Japan in the 1980s was that
if you have easy money and it's not reflected in the cost of living ?
that is, it doesn't cause price inflation ? then it flows into asset
prices," explains one of the wise heads of Wall Street, Albert
Wojnilower, who started on the street as a Fed economist in 1953 and
is now senior economic adviser to the Clipper Group.

"We've certainly had easy money this time round, and it's flowed into
asset prices, but it's been pretty much limited to stocks."

By last year this enormous pool of money from US households which had
poured into the stockmarket, chiefly through the funnel of mutual
funds, had reached a total cumulative value of $US6 trillion. This was
more than just an astonishing number, being bigger than the annual
output of the Japanese economy. It was also a threshold because, for
the first time, mutual funds had more assets than the US banking
system, as David Hale of the Zurich Group points out. (The banks'
assets stood at $US5.6 trillion).

This money pursued technology stocks with mounting determination over
the course of the 1990s. It was great for the technology sector, and
specifically the information technology sector. And as IT spread
throughout the economy, it seemed to expand the growth and
productivity of the US economy endlessly. This promised to deliver
ever better returns to investors.

Companies exploited the allure of the market by issuing little slices
of its dazzling potential in lieu of paying people cash. These slices
were stock options, bits of paper that allow the holder to buy a share
in a company at a future date at a fixed price.

Are they a gamble? Sure, but the market has been so strong for so
long ? the Dow Jones average rose 11-fold between 1982 and this year,
and the Nasdaq took off later but even more spectacularly ? that they
proved irresistible.

A single company, Cisco Systems, turned 6,000 of its staff into
millionaires just by issuing them options in the company. Options
became America's de facto second currency. It was a kind of alchemy,
turning pieces of paper into real value. Companies paid their staff
with options. Start-up firms lacking the cash to pay their suppliers
simply issued options instead. And it was great for the issuing
companies because when they transfer options, they transfer tax
liability too. That's the main reason why Microsoft paid no corporate
taxes last year.

In June this year, American investors had outstanding options for
stock that they would be free to take up by paying $US323 billion,
according to the investment bank UBS Warburg. But those investors
would then be the proud owners of shares worth $US893 billion ? that
is, they would make a profit of $US570 billion or 76 per cent.

The longer this virtuous cycle of US expansion continued, the more
anxious foreigners became to join the fun. The US has long depended on
foreigners to finance its growth, as it runs a chronic current account
deficit. And that deficit has been quietly growing, doubling from 2
per cent of America's gross domestic product to 4 per cent in the last
few years and still mounting.

To finance it, foreign investors must put another $US1.5 billion into
the US every working day of the year. But the US market has been so
attractive for so long that foreigners have been more than happy to
oblige. A leading Wall Street economist, Ed Hyman of International
Strategy and Investment, puts it succinctly: "The economy is the
stockmarket."

In the 1980s the world came to depend on Japanese growth. Japan's
financial system was so dependent on land values as the core
collateral for its banks that Euromoney magazine declared that the
world had moved on to a "Japanese real estate standard". Today it
could be said that the world has become so reliant on US growth, and
the US system so heavily dependent on the stockmarket, that the world
has now moved onto a Nasdaq standard.

The fusion of a strong stockmarket and a strong economy with a
thriving new technology sector has had a striking effect on American
society. Francis Fukuyama says: "Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the
Vanities to describe the bond traders of the 1980s, and he touched a
nerve because there was a really unpleasant side to the materialism
and ambition.

"I think it's just moved over to this other sector. It's not the bond
traders now that are the masters of the universe, because the bond
market has been stagnant for a decade, it's all the
self-congratulatory people in the IT sector. They think they walk on
water. Their arrogance is summed up in this phrase, it's one of my
favourites: 'You just don't get it'." And even though he is a
pro-market, pro-capital conservative, Fukuyama is troubled by the
influence of the new prosperity. "There are all these things going on
in the class structure now that people are only dimly comprehending.
One of the more revealing ones was a story in The New York Times about
a year ago about a butler school in Colorado . . . because so many
Americans are wealthy enough to have servants now. You see all these
people who got rich on the stockmarket building these enormous houses
with 10 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. It's disgusting.

"All I can say is, it's not the America I thought I understood. I read
about these kids at Palo Alto high school. One of them is driving a
Mercedes and another one is in a Lexus and they have an accident in
the school parking lot. But when it gets to court their parents are
too busy making money in their dot com start-ups to make an appearance
for their kids."

While all this is going on, many social problems remain unsolved.
While millions of children play the market, one in five American
children lives in poverty. Inequalities have become aggravated, and
affluence is not necessarily a matter of deserved personal reward.

Hubris is invariably followed by nemesis. And upturn must eventually
yield to downturn. The virtuous circle that has generated America's
great boom is susceptible to reversal.

There are several key vulnerabilities. The US has actually produced
very few companies that have generated consistently stellar earnings
performances.

Of the 10,000 publicly traded companies in the US, the number that
have produced growth in earnings per share of 20 per cent or higher in
each of the last five years is exactly 11 (this is not a misprint),
according to the Bank Credit Analyst research group.

Many stock prices have performed as well or better than this, but only
because of the volumes of money bidding their prices up, not because
it accurately reflected their underlying earnings. So the market's
stunning performance has more to do with easy money and liquidity,
rather than actual corporate earnings. This means that the market is
keenly vulnerable to changes in monetary conditions.

And as we know, the Federal Reserve's chairman, Alan Greenspan, has
started to tighten monetary conditions for fear of inflation, and the
ready flows of money into mutual funds have started to falter. As a
result, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq are both down so far this year.

Further inflationary threats are possible, the oil price foremost
among them. If they are realised then further monetary tightenings
beckon, and a more emphatic stockmarket downturn is in prospect. Many
investors have put their faith in the power of technology to ward off
financial distress. They may need their faith because the technology
will not suffice to save them.

The internet and IT revolutions are important, but they can no more
immunise the stockmarket against downturn than the ?hot' technologies
of 1929, the automobile and the wireless, could prevent the Great
Crash.

Historically, the internet is actually rather ordinary as
technological revolutions go. The US National Academy of Engineering
recently asked its members to rank the greatest technological
innovations of the 20th century, and they ranked the internet in 13th
place after electrification, the automobile, the aeroplane, water
supply, electronics, farm mechanisation and refrigeration, among
others.

A productivity expert and internet sceptic, Professor Bob Gordon of
Northwestern University in Chicago, was slightly more generous. He
ranked the internet 11th in his list of the century's most important
enhancers of productivity.

And of course, once a stockmarket downturn takes hold, the virtuous
circle can go into reverse. Stock options are no longer attractive.
Employees will want cash, and suppliers too. Companies, no longer able
to transfer the tax liability with the options, will face bigger tax
bills. The de facto second currency is suddenly valueless.

And if the fat returns are no longer so fat, foreigners will be less
inclined to supply the daily $US1.5 billion to finance the US current
account deficit.

This could lead to a further unravelling as the US dollar weakens, in
turn exerting an inflationary impulse on US prices and inviting
Greenspan to increase interest rates again.

Indeed, the World Bank's president, Jim Wolfensohn, who hosts his old
friend Alan Greenspan at his Jackson Hole ranch every year for the big
central bankers' conference, gave us an insight into this last week.
He said that the Fed's chairman, in private while staying with him on
the ranch a few weeks ago, had been preoccupied with the problem of
the ever-increasing current account deficit.

Both mighty and fragile, the stockmarket, like the empire it supports,
is in desperate need of the gentlest of soft landings. But as Albert
Wojnilower says: "I've never been through a soft landing that felt
soft while I was going through it."




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 03:01:16 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 10:01:16 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Guardian: Three strikes to save single currency
Message-ID: <001701c0253c$d4f70d80$71258cd4@mjones>

[yesterday saw two related desions by world leaders (a) to release 30m
bbls from US strategic oil reserves (a move apparently ruled out by
the International Energy Authority, the body set up in the 1970s to
defend the west against Opec price hikes) and (b) to make concerted
efforts to support the flagging value of the Euro, which has falled by
more than a third since its launch last year.

This is the first stage of attempts to engineer a soft landing for the
world economy in the wake of recent oil and commodity price rises.
Analysing policy formation in this very early stage of a profound
crisis will yield clues as to the likely progress of events: Watch
this space. Mark]


Special report: Economic and Monetary Union

Larry Elliott and Charlotte Denny in Prague
Saturday September 23, 2000

A teleconference early yesterday morning between finance ministers and
central bankers from the world's most powerful nations was the trigger
for the long-awaited attempt to rescue the ailing euro.
Talks had been going on for 48 hours after the European Central Bank
decided that the fall in the single currency had gone too far and
started to canvas support for intervention in the foreign exchange
markets.

The key was securing the agreement of the Americans, whom the markets
believed would not be prepared to drive down the value of the dollar
ahead of the US presidential elections in November. But once it was
clear that Washington was prepared to play ball, the ECB could prepare
its trap for the speculators.

All that was left was to find the right moment to strike, and that
came yesterday when the euro was already up against the dollar as a
result of the weakening in the oil price and the disappointing figures
from Intel, which suggested that the booming US economy might be
slowing down rapidly.

Intervention only really works when it is co-ordinated and goes with
the grain of the market.

With both conditions fulfilled, the first move was made at noon, with
concerted purchases of euros and sales of dollars.

The message was rammed home with a second bout of action 30 minutes
later, and a third around 3pm.

Markets were taken by surprise. It had been assumed that today's
meeting in Prague of central bank governors and finance ministers from
the seven leading industrialised nations would discuss the plight of
the euro but offer only warm words rather than action.

With less than 50 days to go before the presidential election, traders
believed that the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan would
not go it alone.

In fact, as the finance ministers packed their bags yesterday morning,
they were preparing the strike. Central banks from all the G7
countries were involved - the first time since 1995 that they have
coordinated an attack on the markets.

"It gives them a justification to come to Prague and scoff lobster,"
said Nick Parsons, a currency expert at Commerzbank in London.

Mr Parsons believe that Intel was the straw which broke the dollar's
back. The announcement of its profits warning on Thursday night had
wiped more than $100bn (?68bn) off its worth by midday yesterday and
helped convince the markets that a strong dollar was no longer good
for corporate America and the US economy. Over the past few weeks,
there have been warnings from a host of big US firms that are seeing
their export earnings to Europe severely hit by the strength of the
dollar. While the US authorities were not prepared simply to help the
euro, it was a completely different story once it was clear that
America itself stood to gain from a weaker dollar.

The risks are now twofold. On the one hand, the intervention might
work too well, with a plunging dollar bringing down the US stock
market and having knock-on effects around the globe. On the other, the
intervention might be a red rag to the markets, tempting them to take
on the authorities in a fight over the euro's value. The Bank of
England knows all too well what can happen to a currency if you take
on the markets and lose.





From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 03:57:35 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 10:57:35 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] new from WRI
Message-ID: <001b01c02544$b2c913e0$71258cd4@mjones>

Landmark report urges new approach to stem widespread decline in
world's ecosystems


BERGEN, Norway, September 15, 2000 -- A landmark assessment released
today during a meeting of the world's top environment officials called
for a new approach to managing ecosystems in order to stem the
widespread decline of the processes that sustain life on earth.

"Every measure used by scientists to assess the health of the world's
ecosystems tells us that we are drawing on them more than ever and
degrading them at an accelerating pace," said Dr. Klaus T?pfer,
Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. "We
depend on ecosystems to sustain us, and their continued good health
depends, in turn, on how we take care of them."



The report, World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems, The
Fraying Web of Life, was released today by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), UNEP, the World Bank and the World
Resources Institute (WRI). Over 175 scientists contributed to this
global research effort, which took more than two years to complete.

http://www.wri.org/wr2000/wr2000-nr02.html

-----------------------

Pollution and waste increasing in five countries despite more
efficient use of resources
WASHINGTON, DC, September 20, 2000 ? A new report released today by
the World Resources Institute (WRI) reveals that the total output of
wastes and pollutants in Austria, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and
the USA has increased by as much as 28 percent since 1975 despite
their increasing efficiency in using natural resources.

The report also reveals that from one-half to three-quarters of the
annual resource inputs used in these five countries are returned to
the environment as wastes within one year.

"The resource efficiency gains brought about by the rise of e-commerce
and the shift from heavy industries toward knowledge- and
service-based industries have been more than offset by the tremendous
scale of economic growth and consumer choices that favor energy- and
material-intensive lifestyles," said Emily Matthews of WRI and lead
author of The weight of nations: Material outflows from industrial
economies

http://www.wri.org/press/weightofnations.html

---------------------------------------

Trial by fire: Forest fires and forestry policy in Indonesia's era of
crisis and reform

http://www.wri.org/forests/trialbyfire.html




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 05:05:16 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 12:05:16 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] MEES: OPEC In The Eye Of The Storm
Message-ID: <001c01c0254e$273f23a0$71258cd4@mjones>

[according to this report from the Middle East Economic Survey,
production increases may bring " huge inventory builds of between
2.2mn and 3.6mn b/d in the second quarter" of 2001, which would bring
prices to the reference case ($22/bbl). Mark]

18 September 2000
Ian Seymour and Walid Khadduri of MEES Report on the Outcome of OPEC?s
10-11 September Ministerial Conference in Vienna.

Only three times before in its 40-year history has OPEC been caught in
the center of an international storm of such magnitude as the current
oil price imbroglio. The first was in 1973-74 when a tight oil supply
situation was compounded by the outbreak of the October Arab-Israeli
war; the second in 1979-81 when oil price explosions were set in
motion by the Iranian revolution and the onset of the Iraq-Iran war;
and the third in 1990-91 at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
and the ensuing Gulf war.

However, unlike its predecessors, the current oil crisis - arising
from the tripling of crude prices since early 1999 - is not in any way
linked to wars or political upheavals. Its concerns are concentrated
on economic problems: spiraling oil prices, output volumes of crude
and products, and the availability of sufficient production capacity
to meet present and future demand. On the production side, OPEC has
this year put in place output quota increases of 1.7mn b/d in April
and 700,000 b/d in July. These have now been followed by the decision
of the OPEC Oil Ministers to raise quotas by a further 800,000 b/d
with effect from 1 October. As a reaction to this latest move, crude
prices have moved down a little from their previous highs of around
$35/B, but still remain stubbornly well above the $30/B danger mark.
Meanwhile, consumers - both on the governmental and public opinion
levels - continue to voice strong protests against excessively high
oil prices.

OPEC?s essential problem lies in the over-achievement of the targets
of its program to raise prices from unacceptably low levels by means
of supply management. Its task now is to create a soft landing on the
price front at a level of, say, $25/B - the midway point of the
OPEC-agreed $22-28/B price band - without precipitating any new price
collapse in the process. But OPEC has only one instrument to
accomplish this goal: boosting crude supply when the price is too high
and cutting it when the price falls too low. However, crude supply in
itself is only part of the problem. There are many other complex
facets of the present crisis which are beyond OPEC?s power to control.
Let us therefore conduct a brief review of the main causal
constituents of the crisis:


Consumers have been subjected to a double blow as regards oil prices:
firstly the tripling of crude prices in US dollar terms from $10/B in
early 1999 to over $30/B now; and secondly the fact that most world
currencies (except the Yen) have registered sharp declines against the
dollar in recent times. Thus the financial burden of the oil price
rise has been particularly onerous for the developing countries.
Calling for increased pressure on OPEC to bring down oil prices, India
?s Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha said on 13 September: ?As far as
developing countries are concerned, and especially India because we
depend on oil imports to a very large extent, it is putting an
unnecessary and almost unbearable burden on our resources.? In Europe,
the problem has also been compounded by the high levels of excise
taxes levied on oil products which oblige European consumers to pay
twice as much for a gallon of gasoline as in the US. This issue of
high taxes levied on gasoline by their own governments has, of course,
been the focus of the widespread popular protests about fuel prices in
Europe, rather than indignation against OPEC.

Stocks of crude oil and products are at historical lows at present,
particularly in the US, and need to be replenished if proper
equilibrium is to be restored in the market. But buyers are reluctant
to purchase crude supplies for restocking in current conditions, not
only because of the high prices but more particularly because the
present steep backwardation in the futures markets (i.e., prices for
prompt deliveries being higher than those for future months) makes it
uneconomic. In order to give buyers a proper incentive to replenish
and hold stocks, the markets need to move over into a state of
contango; but it is difficult to see how this could be achieved in a
short time. Possibly the collapse in the last few days of the
unprecedented premium of $3/B for Dated Brent over first month could
be a harbinger of some movement in that direction, as well as of an
alleviation of market manipulation by the big players.

Making substantial volumes of fresh crude supply available for sale is
one thing. To ensure, in the face of reluctance on the part of the
customers to buy at high prices, that the supplies reach the market
swiftly is quite another. Price discounting by the producers would no
doubt help to speed up crude sales for inventories as well as
refining, but this - not surprisingly - is something of a taboo
subject within OPEC.

Low stocks of crude and key products such as heating oil represent
only one of the multiple complications afflicting the US market.
Another is a shortage of refining capacity (US refineries are
operating at over 98% of capacity at present), together with supply
constraints on crudes of appropriate qualities. Yet another stems from
the widespread emergence in the US of stringent quality specifications
for various petroleum products, thereby causing further problems for
refiners as well as making it difficult to offset any shortages by
means of imports from elsewhere. Moreover, if there were to be a
severe winter, the situation could be exacerbated by shortfalls in
heating oil and natural gas supplies. It seems that, to head off
potential crises in oil supplies and prices, the US administration is
seriously considering allowing the withdrawal of some crude from the
country?s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) which currently holds
around 560mn barrels.
In such a complex set of mega problems, there are obviously many
faults and bottlenecks which cannot be laid at the door of OPEC. In
its press communique after the Vienna conference (for full text see
page A4), OPEC points out that, even in advance of its new 800,000 b/d
quota increase as from October, the level of supply to the market
already exceeds anticipated demand and goes on to point the finger of
blame elsewhere in the following terms: ?In this connection the
conference emphasized that the confusion in the oil market is
basically as a result of shortages in the products? markets caused by
bottlenecks in the refining industry, speculation in the futures
market, manipulation of the Brent market due to the dwindling volumes
of this crude, and widening differentials between light sweet and
heavy sour crudes.?



In order to review this highly volatile situation, the OPEC Ministers
agreed to meet again in Vienna in two months? time, on 12 November. It
has also been indicated that, if necessary, further supply
adjustments, up or down, could be made either at that time or before
if the price band mechanism is activated.

As indicated in the detailed analysis of the numbers involved later
on, it would seem that on current supply/demand projections the
present OPEC crude supply arrangements - which should result in OPEC?s
total output rising to around 29.5mn b/d as from October - would be
enough, or if anything rather more than enough, to meet demand for
both consumption and stocks through the next three quarterly periods.
In fact, it could be that OPEC might be obliged to consider a cut in
production for the second quarter of next year.

However, it could be that the prevailing market malaise and the
persistence of high prices also stems from something rather deeper
than the concern about immediate supply availability - namely a
perception that the level of spare producing capacity in OPEC (and
therefore the world system as a whole) has now reached a dangerously
low point. There would be some justification for such a perception giv
en that, according to MEES estimates, total spare capacity within OPEC
(after the latest 800,000 b/d quota increase) will stand at no more
than 1.5mn b/d, of which roughly two-thirds is located in Saudi
Arabia. Of course, particularly with the current high prices, the
capacity problem can be rectified without much difficulty through
expansions both inside and outside OPEC. But this will take time, and
meanwhile for the next couple of years or so a tight market will be
the order of the day - unless, of course, there is significant erosion
on the demand side.

How Many New New Barrels In OPEC Latest Increase?

At the Vienna conference, the decision to raise quotas by a total of
800,000 b/d distributed pro-rata between the 10 OPEC countries
concerned (excluding Iraq) was taken with remarkably little
difficulty. Saudi Arabia took the high road with a proposal for 1mn
b/d, with Iran and some others opting for 500,000 b/d. A compromise on
800,000 b/d was thereupon arrived at expeditiously. The only question
remaining in people?s minds, and particularly the minds of the
markets, was: how many barrels of actual incremental supply would this
new agreement bring to the market, given the fact that some countries
have already reached their capacity limits.

According to MEES estimates, the volume of new supply under the latest
OPEC agreement is likely to be in the region of 600,000 b/d. This
assumes, among other things, that the new Saudi quota increase of
259,200 b/d (under the 800,000 b/d OPEC tranche) will be produced
incrementally on top of the 400,000 b/d output boost made
independently by the Saudis as from August.

Taking the August OPEC production of 28.9mn b/d (see story on page A5)
as a base, this 600,000 b/d increment is calculated to raise OPEC
production (including 3mn b/d for Iraq) to around 29.5mn b/d for
October onwards. The table on page A4 shows the potential for stock
change if this OPEC production level of 29.5mn b/d were to be
maintained until the middle of next year - projected according to the
differing forecasts for the demand call on OPEC crude supply by OPEC?s
Economic Commission Board (ECB), the International Energy Agency
(IEA), the US Department of Energy?s Energy Information Administration
(EIA), and the Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES). Although these
forecasts differ quite widely, particularly for the first half of next
year, they all show stockbuild potential for all the quarterly periods
under review, ending up with huge inventory builds of between 2.2mn
and 3.6mn b/d in the second quarter. Hence the perception that a
cutback in OPEC output may well be needed by then.

As regards the price band mechanism - providing for a 500,000 b/d
supply increase if the OPEC basket price exceeds $28/B for 20
consecutive days and a 500,000 b/d decrease if the price falls below
$22/B for 10 consecutive days (for full details of the mechanism see
MEES, 26 June, page A2) - it was agreed that this should operate
unchanged during the periods between OPEC ministerial meetings, but
that at these meetings ministers would naturally be at liberty to take
different decisions according to the prevailing circumstances. In the
connection, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi is understood to have
given his OPEC counterparts assurances that Saudi Arabia would be
fully prepared to cut its production in the event prices were to drop
below $22/B.

The conference decided to postpone a decision regarding the
appointment of a new OPEC Secretary General in place of Dr Rilwanu
Lukman of Nigeria, whose term of office expires at the end of this
year, until the next ministerial conference on 12 November.



http://www.mees.com/news/a43n38a01.htm
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 11:03:28 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 18:03:28 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Greenspan argues for LESS bank regulation
Message-ID: <000801c02580$316c5a00$f0168cd4@mjones>

Federal Reserve Board eptember 18, 2000


----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------


Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
Banking supervision
Before the American Bankers Association, Washington, D.C.



It is a pleasure to join you this morning to share in the celebration
of the 125th anniversary of the American Bankers Association. Your
association has a long and distinguished history, and I always look
forward to an opportunity to contribute to your discussions.

The financial world is a far different one from that at the founding
of the ABA in 1875. But even the 1870s had been preceded by a rapid
pace of change. The United States had come out of an antebellum period
of so-called wild cat banking--which incidentally was far less wild
than some historic lore would have it--and the safety of the nation's
money was on the minds of both bankers and regulators as our financial
system matured.

Perhaps Hugh McCulloch, our first Comptroller of the Currency, may
have been somewhat over the edge, in this regard, when in 1863 he
proposed that the National Bank Act "be so amended that the failure of
a national bank be declared prima facie fraudulent, and that the
officers and directors, under whose administration such insolvency
shall occur, be made personally liable for the debts of the bank, and
be punished criminally, unless it shall appear, upon investigation,
that its affairs were honestly administered." So much for moral
hazard. And surely, here we observe the intellectual origins of prompt
corrective action.

The safety concerns to which I referred were clearly on the minds of
founders of the ABA when in 1891, according to your annals, a Standing
Protective Committee was created to "control all actions looking to
the detection, prosecution, and punishment of persons attempting to
cause or causing loss, by crime, to any member of the Association."
The ABA then announced that it would pursue those who committed crimes
against its members, and apparently did so with good result. By
1896-97 the only successful robbery was of a member who failed to
prominently display his ABA membership sign. It was thus no wonder
that between 1894 and 1898 membership in the association almost
doubled, to more than 3,300.

At the turn of the century the ABA utilized the services of the
Pinkertons to keep track of professional criminals and forewarn
members of their movements. Under contract to the ABA and others, the
Pinkertons went after the bank robbers who became known in Western
legend as the "Wild Bunch" gang. By 1902 the detectives thought that
only three members of the gang were alive, including Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid--last allegedly seen in South America out of range of
the Pinkertons and especially the ABA's safe and sound banking policy.

Protecting the nation's money has, of course, become far more
sophisticated in the twenty-first century, but not nearly so
interesting. But in the twenty-first as in the nineteenth century,
facilitating the soundness of finance and its contribution to economic
growth and prosperity is what banking has been about.

Many of the benefits that banks provide to modern societies derive
from their willingness to take risks and from their use of a
relatively high degree of financial leverage. Through leverage, in the
form principally of taking deposits but increasingly of other forms of
borrowing as well, banks perform a critical role in the financial
intermediation process; you provide savers with additional investment
choices and borrowers with a greater range of sources of credit,
thereby facilitating a more efficient allocation of resources and
contributing importantly to greater economic growth. Indeed, it has
been the evident value of intermediation and leverage that has shaped
the development of our financial systems from the earliest
times--certainly since Colonial bankers learned that the issuance of
notes on a fractional specie base was feasible and profitable. But it
is also that very same leverage that makes banks so sensitive to the
risks they take and aligns the stability of the economy with the
critical role of supervision, not only by supervisors but also by
management and by the market.

At the very beginning of our banking history, American banks, like
banks in virtually every other nation, were, in fact, supervised by
the market. Government regulation and supervision of early American
banks were modest and appear to have been intended primarily to ensure
that banks had adequate specie reserves to meet their debt
obligations, especially obligations on their circulating notes.

When confidence was lacking in a bank, its notes tended to exchange at
a discount to par and to the rates of other, more creditworthy, banks.
Well before the ABA was founded, private money brokers seem to have
appeared. These brokers, our early arbitrageurs, purchased bank notes
at a discount and transported them to the issuing bank, where they
demanded par redemption. Moreover, the Suffolk Bank, chartered in 1818
in Massachusetts, entered the business of collecting country bank
notes in 1819 and created the first regional clearing system. By doing
so, in effect by demanding specie if excessive note issuance created
adverse clearings, it constrained the supply of notes by individual
banks to prudential levels. As a result, the notes of all of its
associated banks could and did circulate consistently at face value.

Throughout the so-called free banking era before the Civil War, the
effectiveness of market prices for notes, and their associated impact
on the cost of funds, imparted an increased market discipline. Perhaps
this was because technological change--particularly the telegraph and
the railroad--made monitoring of banks by money brokers and
counterparties more effective and reduced the time required to send a
note home for redemption. Following the crisis of 1837 through the
advent of the Civil War the discounts on notes came to correspond more
closely to objective measures of the riskiness of individual banks.
Banks competed for reputation and advertised high capital ratios to
attract depositors. Capital-to-asset ratios in those days often
exceeded one-third.

During the same period, part of this reduction in riskiness reflected
improvement in state regulation and supervision. But the greatest
impact was the private market regulation just described, working in an
environment before depositors and note holders were protected by a
safety net.

In the early decades of the ABA, both the economy and our banking
system grew rapidly. A fully functioning gold standard governed
monetary expansion and was perceived to provide an "automatic"
stabilizing policy. Only with the emergence of periodic credit crises
late in the nineteenth century, and especially in 1907, did the
creation of a central bank, previously perceived as a threat to states
rights, finally gain support.

These crises were seen largely as a consequence of the inelastic
currency engendered by the National Bank Act, which required full
collateralization of bank notes by U.S. government securities. But
even with the advent of the Federal Reserve in 1913, monetary policy
through the 1920s was largely governed by the gold standard rules.
When the efforts of the Federal Reserve failed to prevent the bank
collapse of the 1930s, the Banking Act of 1933 created federal deposit
insurance.

The subsequent evidence appears persuasive that the combination of a
lender of last resort (the Federal Reserve) and federal deposit
insurance have contributed significantly to financial stability and
have accordingly achieved wide support within the Congress. As has
often been the case in our long financial history, such significant
government intervention has not been without cost. The federal safety
net for banks, which clearly diminishes both the incentive for, and
the effectiveness of, private market regulation, creates perverse
incentives for some banks to take excessive risk. Indeed, the safety
net has required that we substitute more government supervision and
regulation for the market discipline that played such an important
role through much of our banking history.

Although the safety net necessitates greater government oversight, in
recent years rapidly changing technology has begun to render obsolete
much of the bank examination regime established in earlier decades.
Bank regulators are perforce being pressed to depend increasingly on
greater and more sophisticated private market discipline, the still
most effective form of regulation. Indeed, these developments
reinforce the truth of a key lesson from our banking history--that
private counterparty supervision remains the first line of regulatory
defense. This is certainly the case for the rapidly expanding bank
options and swaps markets and other off-balance-sheet transactions.
The speed of transactions and the growing complexities of these
instruments have required federal and state examiners to focus
supervision more on risk-management procedures than on actual
portfolios. Indeed, I would characterize recent examination
innovations and proposals as attempting both to harness and to
simulate market forces in the supervision of banks.

The impact of technology on financial services and therefore, of
necessity, the way it will affect supervision and regulation as we
move into the twenty-first century is the critical issue that frames
the supervisory agenda now before us. The acceleration in the growth
of technology that has so greatly affected our economy in general has
also profoundly expanded the scope and utility of financial products
over, say, the past fifteen years. The substantial increase in our
calculation capabilities has resulted in a variety of products and
ways to unbundle risk. What is particularly impressive is that there
is no sign that this process of acceleration in financial innovation
is approaching an end. We continue to move at an exceptionally rapid
pace, fueled by both computing and telecommunications capabilities.

How should the Federal Reserve, as the functional regulator of
state-chartered member banks and, more importantly, as an umbrella
supervisor of both bank holding companies and the financial holding
companies forming under the Financial Modernization Act, react to this
ongoing wave of innovation? The ability to answer that question rests
on an understanding of how information technology has changed the
nature of your business.

The explosion in the quantity and quality of information is reducing
uncertainty, and that is particularly important because the banker's
stock in trade, the basis of an institution's franchise value, is
information. The knowledge of the potential viability of their
customers is all that prevents bankers from the equivalent of lending
on the outcome of a roulette wheel's spin.

To the extent that the newer technologies have opened up vast new
areas of information, the banker's knowledge of the borrower's
capacity to repay a loan is significantly enhanced. Risk premiums,
internal risk classifications and modeling, and credit scoring are
becoming ever more finely tuned.

But the same advances in information innovation and communication are
available to all of a banker's competitors as well. Thus, although
increased information lowers the risk of lending, competition inhibits
those advantages from translating into longer-run enhanced profit
margins.

Moreover, the quickened pace of market adjustments resulting from the
newer technologies has significantly shortened the interval over which
a debt can move from investment grade to default. This delimits the
capacity of a bank to adjust its exposure to a failing borrower before
the bank is confronted with default.

Uncertainty is the creator of risk premiums, the creator of higher
funding costs throughout the financial system and indeed throughout
the economy generally. The increasing availability of accurate and
relevant real-time information, by reducing uncertainty, is over time
reducing the cost of capital. That is important to financial holding
companies and financial institutions generally in their roles of both
lender and borrower.

It is important in their role as borrower because their funding costs
are critically tied to the perceived level of uncertainty about their
condition. It is important in their role as lender because a dramatic
decline in uncertainty as a consequence of a large increase in
real-time information availability engenders a reduction in
proprietary information.

One of the major reasons that financial intermediation worked well in
years past, in addition to the values of diversification, was that
financial institutions possessed information others did not have. This
asymmetry of information was capitalized in fairly significant rates
of return. But this advantage is rapidly dissipating, as any bank
lender will testify. We are going to real-time systems, not only with
transactions but with knowledge as well. The continued success of
banking organizations, as at the time of the ABA's founding, is
dependent upon their ability to reinvent themselves by providing new
and different services and creating new and different ways to lend and
to manage assets.

Financial institutions can endeavor to preserve the old way of doing
business by keeping information, especially adverse information, away
from the funders of their liabilities. But that, I submit, would be
unwise. Inevitably and increasingly it will become more difficult to
do. And, when it becomes clear that the information coming out of an
institution is somehow questionable, that institution will pay an
uncertainty premium, perhaps a costly one. It is well worthwhile
remembering that stock prices almost invariably go up when companies
write off investment mistakes. The reason is the removal of
uncertainty and the elimination of a shadow on the companies'
credibility.

What does all this mean for supervision and regulation in the
twenty-first century? If the supervisory system is to effectively
enhance the capacity of the country's financial systems to function,
it must adjust to the changing structure of that system. There is no
frozen fix on supervision and regulation. We are always changing and
moving forward, endeavoring to adjust in a manner that facilitates
innovation.

We are in a dynamic system that requires not just us but also our
colleagues in the Group of Ten to adjust. Today's products and rapidly
changing structures of finance mean that supervisors are backing off
from detail-oriented supervision, which no longer can be implemented
effectively. We are moving toward a system in which we judge how well
your internal risk models are functioning and whether the risk thus
measured is being appropriately managed and offset with capital. And
we are moving toward a system in which public disclosure and market
discipline are going to play increasing roles, especially at our large
institutions, as a necessity to avoid expansion of invasive and
burdensome supervision and regulation. We have a long way to go, but
this is where competitive pressures and the underlying economic forces
are pushing both you and the supervisory system.

The Financial Modernization Act is only a flag on the way to future
changes. It is a piece of legislation that will bring major changes
for the good, I trust, in all respects. During the transition, the
Federal Reserve and other supervisors must work through the issues of
how to blend functional regulation and umbrella supervision. Creating
that blend will not be easy. And it must be done substantially right
the first time because, with the financial system changing so rapidly,
we do not have the luxury of reversing course and going in a wholly
different direction.

In closing, let me return to the fact that you are celebrating the
ABA's 125th birthday. In 1875, the American economy and its banking
industry stood on the threshold of a profound technological revolution
that would challenge and enrich our nation in unimaginable ways. I
believe that in the year 2000 we may well be on the cusp of a similar
revolution. The bankers of the nineteenth century met their many
challenges and kept the banking industry a vibrant and critical part
of the U.S. economy. I am confident that the bankers of the
twenty-first century, though no less challenged, will prove no less
capable.









From nerajov at EUnet.yu  Sat Sep 23 12:30:56 2000
From: nerajov at EUnet.yu (Mrs. Jela Jovanovic, Secretary General)
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 20:30:56 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] American Puppets vs. Slobodan Milosevic, A Genuine Leader
Message-ID: <003e01c0258f$76165520$5601f0d5@Pc56.phy.bg.ac.yu>




American Puppets vs. Slobodan Milosevic, A Genuine Leader
September 22, 2000

By George Szamuely
www.emperors-clothes.com

"These elections are a sort of referendum at which it will be decided
whether
we continue to live as a free state and a free country" thus Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic the other day. He is right. The United States
has poured millions of dollars into the country to try to get Milosevic out.
It has bankrolled politicians, political parties, magazines, radio and TV
stations, publishing houses, printing presses, student organizations, street
demonstrators, think-tanks, trade unions, polling organizations, lawyers'
lobbies, human rights groups, and, no doubt, chess clubs and
stamp-collectors' associations too. In the last three years alone, over $75
million of US taxpayers' money has ended up in "opposition" bank accounts.
And still, Milosevic could well pull off an election victory. The US
Government is taking no chances on Sunday's elections. It has already
declared Milosevic the victor the consequence of ballot rigging, needless
to say. According to James O'Brien, described in the press rather sinisterly
as "special Balkans democracy adviser to the President and the Secretary of
State," Milosevic will steal the election by "printing pre-marked ballots,
manipulating voting districts, intimidating opponents and planning to claim
votes from UN-controlled Kosovo."

O'Brien offered no evidence for his claims. It would be a little hard to do
so, since the events he is talking about have yet to take place. His firm
prediction is but preliminary to his real message, directed at the Serbs:
vote the wrong way and you risk US military action. Milosevic "does not have
a free hand" to rig the vote, O'Brien warned. The United States is willing
"to stand up for the stability of the region." Since the US Government has
already stated that a Milosevic victory is only possible in the event of
vote
rigging, his threat is as unambiguous as it is crude. A US-led bombing
onslaught on Yugoslavia to ensure a "democratic transition" looks to be on
the cards. Already the papers are filled with laughably absurd stories of
British troops foiling alleged plots by Serb special forces to launch bomb
attacks in Kosovo to during the elections.

In the United States, it is illegal for political parties to receive money
from foreign sources, let alone foreign governments. A US organization
funded
by a foreign government has to register as a foreign agent. Yet the Clinton
Administration thinks it perfectly reasonable to corrupt the entire
political
system of another country by flooding it with vast sums of foreign money.
The
"civil society" we are allegedly fostering is total fraud, with no genuine
roots among the people and entirely dependent on US Government largesse.

On July 29, 1999 during Hearings before the European Affairs Subcommittee of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Gelbard, US Special Envoy to
the Balkans, outlined the extraordinary scope of US interference in the life
of Yugoslavia. There were, first, the opposition parties. They are "best
served," he explained somewhat condescendingly, "if we provide them with
technical assistance and first-class political advice, the kinds that may
seem commonplace to us but represent a whole different way of thinking to
them." Then there are the "youth and student organizations, as well as
independent labor unionsundoubtedlyimportant sources of mobilization in
the future." Gelbard then spoke of something US policymakers refer to as
"independent media" paid agents of the US Government touting the US
Government line: "What we're trying to dois support an alternative
indigenous voice for the Serbian people through mechanisms such as ANEM, the
Network of Independent Radio and Television." The use of the word
"indigenous" is priceless. One wonders if he managed to keep a straight face
as he said it.

Fashioning a Yugoslav "opposition" made to order for Washington has been a
major preoccupation for some years. Paul B. McCarthy of the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) testifying to the Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe that "the West should help the democratic political
opposition develop a concrete program which offers positive alternatives to
the destructive policies of the Milosevic regime. Democratic think tanks,
independent research organizations and expert groups should be supported to
develop these alternative policy recommendations. Furthermore, dissemination
of this new democratic thinking to the broad public must be encouraged by
fostering close cooperation among the think tanks, opposition parties and
the
independent media." Note the way the NED does not for one moment doubt its
right to reorganize Yugoslav civil and political life for the sake of US
interests.

One of the organizations receiving money from the NED is the International
Republican Institute (IRI). Starting in 1997, the IRI has been bankrolling
political parties and student organizations in Yugoslavia. The IRI claims
that it has "supported pro-reform political parties and student
organizations
through technical support programs that training and consultations to
strengthen and enlarge the parties' grassroots organizations and help them
devise communication and coalition building strategies that would solidify
their combined support. Opinion polls taken during this period suggested
that
a substantial majority of the electorate did not support the coalition of
Serbian governing parties controlled by Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic. Only 20 percent of Serbs supported the coalition's lead party,
the
Socialists." Note that the language the US Government to describe the
"opposition" is almost always identical. Everyone is continually being
enjoined to unite to oust Milosevic. Disagreements, however important
essential one would have thought to the very "pluralism" the United States
likes to lecture others about must be set aside for the sake of the of the
common good, as determined by Washington. Moreover, the 20 percent figure is
illuminating. The recent opinion polls being trumpeted to show how badly
Milosevic is trailing all repeat the 20 percent figure. Not 15 percent, not
30 percent always 20 percent. Apparently, no departures from the official
script are to be permitted.

The IRI boasts also of having "worked with opposition leaders to devise ways
of increasing their voter identification and ability to influence the
national political agenda." In other words, US funds were going towards
providing free propaganda for US-approved politicians. As for the
much-vaunted Otpor, a favorite of the Western media circles, here is what
the
IRI says: "In the fall of 1999, the student resistance movement OTPOR began
to organize protests against crackdowns on media and academic freedoms.
OTPOR
is currently preparing plans, with IRI's technical support, for a
Get-Out-The-Vote campaign for elections in 2000."

Not surprisingly perhaps, Otpor sounds very much like an organization run
from Washington. Yugoslavia must undertake "full cooperation with The Hague
Tribunal For War Crimes." There is to be "full protection of private
ownership rights, proceeded by compulsory and fair privatization, the
establishment of a free market economy, and the opening of the economy to
international financial organizations and international investment." This
stuff is straight out of the IMF playbook. Needless to say, Otpor also urges
the formation of "a unified block of all relevant democratic forces in
Serbia
with the principal objective of replacing Milosevic and his government"
all
entirely in accordance with the official US Government line.

The NED funds the G-17 group of "independent economists" which, we are
happily informed, is "conducting a research program to identify barriers to
private sector development at the local and federal levels." The G-17 ideas
about the future of Yugoslavia are apparent in the "Proposal to the
Stability
Pact for South East Europe to Organize a Regional Funding Conference for the
Reconstruction of Post-Milosevic Serbia," put forward by Serbia's Democratic
Opposition with, we are told, "assistance from G17 PLUS." The program
pledges
that "privatization is our great concern and a commitment to swift and
efficient privatization is crucial for economic reconstruction." However, it
goes on, the "first political priority for the new reformist government will
be to address the issue of the fiscal deficit. That will require the change
of both the current tax and public expenditure policies. Fiscal reform is a
prerequisite for monetary stability and the renewal of Serbian international
credibility. Radical fiscal reform will demand hard political decisions for
the reduction of expenditures, changing the priority in public spending and
measures to increase the effectiveness of tax collection. We, the
democratic
opposition of Serbia, are willing to explain the significance of these
reforms to our political public. We are also ready to undertake this
political risk as we deeply believe that fiscal changes within a general
reform of the state and its apparatus are critical to the country's future
and its speedy development." Note that a statement such as this does not
even
pretend to address the people of Yugoslavia. It offers nothing to ordinary
voters. Why on earth would anyone vote for a political group that promises
to
cut public expenditure, close down so-called "inefficient" industries, and
open up the country to predatory foreign investors hunting for bargains? The
pledge of the so-called "Democratic Opposition" is directed entirely towards
the Governments of the United States, the European Union, foreign investors
and bankers, the IMF and the World Bank evidently the only constituency
worth considering. Hilariously, the NED also boasts of funding trade unions
in Yugoslavia such as UGS Nezavisnost described as "a multiethnic trade
union
confederation which opposes the Milosevic regime." One wonders if this
"trade
union" is also obligated to support the goals of "market democracy,"
"privatization" and "debt reduction." The mind boggles at how much
grassroots
support it must enjoy.

The NED is an ardent promoter of "independent media" in Yugoslavia, which
are
to "break the stranglehold of government-dominated media in Serbia by
strengthening influential sources of objective information." "Independent"
and "objective," of course, are used to describe voices that parrot US
Government policy. NED has given money to newspapers Nasa Borba, Vreme, and
Danas, the news agency BETA, as well as Radio B-92 and TV Negotin.

"Independent media" are a favorite of USAID as well. One recipient of USAID
funds is Internews. This is a film production company whose self-proclaimed
goal in Yugoslavia "is to overcome the political propaganda and hate speech
that have been promulgated for years on government television." To that end
it "supports the efforts of independent stations in Serbia to create a
viable
alternative television network to balance the power of the
government-influenced media." Just to show that it has the US Government
script down pat, it talks of supporting "the emerging new democratic
broadcasting and producing companies in the reformed Republic of
Montenegro."
It talks of "stirring debate on sensitive issues such as ethnic tolerance,
economic reform, and government corruption." It produces a weekly program
called "Kosovo: A View from Inside," with the aim of allowing Albanians to
"show their real-life dilemmas in an intimate and direct way and to get
those
messages to viewers in Serbia/Montenegro via local television stations." The
goal is "confidence-building, reconciliation and conflict prevention." Note
the tendentious spelling of Kosovo. The show may not appeal much to Serbs,
but it pleases the producers' US patrons, which is all that really matters.

Another major recipient of US taxpayer dollars is Montenegrin President Milo
Djukanovic. Larry Gelbard told the Senators that he used to meet Djukanovic
regularly, even before he was elected President of Montenegro. Evidently, US
bribery long predated his electoral victory itself almost certainly the
product of US chicanery. In January USAID announced the award of a $7
million
grant to Montenegro. This money was to serve as budget support by paying off
the pension obligations of the Government of Montenegro. "This action,"
USAID
announced, is the last "grant for Montenegro from Fiscal Year 1999 funds,
completing a program that totaled $44 million." The United States, of
course,
is great champion of free markets, free trade and balanced budgets. While
the
US Government insists that any indebted country must undertake painful
austerity measures to balance its books, it happily whips out its checkbook
several times a year to and wipes clean Montenegro's financial obligations.
It certainly pays to be a "strategic partner" albeit of an extremely
minuscule kind of the United States.

Sunday's election is between a genuine leader of Yugoslavia and an
"opposition" movement, which is entirely a dependency of the United States.
The choice is not exactly a difficult one.

***
George Szamuely was born in Budapest, Hungary, educated in England, and has
worked as an editorial writer for The Times (London), The Spectator
(London),
and the Times Literary Supplement (London). In America, he has been equally
busy: as an associate at the Manhattan Institute, editor at Freedom House,
film critic for Insight, research consultant at the Hudson Institute, and as
a weekly columnist for the New York Press. Szamuely has contributed to
innumerable publications including Commentary, American Spectator, National
Review, the Wall Street Journal, National Interest, American Scholar, Orbis,
Daily Telegraph, the Times of London, the Sunday Telegraph, and The New
Criterion.







From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 23:53:36 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 06:53:36 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] They were wrong: Richard Dawkins on Greenpeace
Message-ID: <008b01c025eb$cbfd6ee0$08678cd4@ngjones>

Greenpeace's action was vandalism and inhibited the need for scientific
research

Special report: GM debate

Richard Dawkins
Sunday September 24, 2000

Defence counsel for the Greenpeace vandals reassured the court that his
clients were 'the sort of people you may expect to find sitting on a jury'.
He was right, of course, with a vengeance. But far from being a character
reference for the defendants, it is an indictment of the jury system. I am
not in the least surprised to read that after the trial members of the jury
were seen 'congratulating defendants'.
What sort of signal has been sent out by this verdict? Is it, as some have
said, a charter for burglars, arsonists and telephone box vandals? Can we
now freely commit crimes on the assumption that a jury of Big
Brother -watching Sun -readers will reach a verdict uncontaminated by the
facts of the case? It hasn't quite come to that. But it is close. This,
emphatically, is not to be compared with the sort of civil disobedience that
can be justified on genuinely thoughtful grounds.

Lord Melchett is no Gandhi, no Mandela, taking direct action as the only
possible recourse against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, he and
his friends are probably not as sinister as their 'decontamination suit'
uniforms suggest. On balance, Lord Melchett is more airheaded wally than
Mosleyite stormtrooper.

The air force general in Dr Strangelove who took devastating direct action
in defence of 'our precious bodily fluids', is fiction... just. Popular
misconceptions about GM foods are well up in the 'precious bodily fluids'
class. If you pick 12 people at random, the majority might well think that
GM is a substance, like DDT. Or that if they are 'contaminated' by GM they
will undergo some Frankensteinian transmogrification. Or they wouldn't
understand what is funny about the protesters' slogan: 'We don't want DNA in
our tomatoes.' Aren't there some beliefs too daft for 'sincerity' to be an
excuse?

Many of us believe the News of the World is an affront to decent humanity.
Are we now free to torch its editorial offices? Many people sincerely think
abortion is legalised murder. Will the Greenpeace verdict signal open season
on doctors and clinics, as happens in some parts of America?

Some people sincerely believe that their private opinions on petrol prices
entitle them to take unilateral action and blockade the country's vital
supplies. Presumably, Greenpeace would oppose them, since high petrol taxes
help to reduce pollution. We don't have to project our imaginations far into
the future to envision Greenpeace warriors storming the barricades of
fuel-protesting lorry drivers. If there are casualties and damage, should
the jury acquit both sides, on the grounds that both sincerely believed
their (opposite and incompatible) doctrines?

Is this really the sort of country we want to live in? Is this how we want
to decide policy? That is where the Greenpeace verdict seems to be leading
us.

The Government may be ruefully wondering whether it has been hoist by its
own petard. Was it wise to encourage those outbursts of mindless 'feeling'
and all that hysterical caterwauling over the 'People's Princess'? Has
feeling become the new thinking? If so, the Government may bear some
indirect responsibility.

The late Carl Sagan was once asked a question to which he didn't know the
answer and he firmly said so. The questioner persisted: 'But what is your
gut feeling?' Sagan's reply is never to be forgotten: 'But I try not to
think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking
with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to
get me into trouble. It's OK to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.'

I genuinely don't know what to think about genetically modified crops, and
nor should anyone else. The evidence is not yet in. Particular kinds of
genetic modification may be a very bad idea. Or they may be a very good
idea. It is precisely because we don't know that we have to find out. That
is the purpose of experimental trials such as the one sabotaged by
Greenpeace. Scientists do not know all the answers and should not claim to.
Science is not a testament of doctrines; rather, it is a method of finding
out. It is the only method that works by definition, since if a better
method comes along, science will incorporate it. If we are not allowed to do
experimental trials on genetically modified crops, we shall never know the
bad things or the good things about them.

We now know that strong doses of X-rays are very dangerous. They can induce
mutations and cause cancers. But if used carefully and in moderation, X-rays
are a priceless diagnostic tool. We can all be thankful that predecessor of
Greenpeace did not sabotage Roentgen's experiments on X-rays or Muller's
investigations of mutagenesis.

We depend on scientific research to predict both the good and bad
consequences of innovation. It is a reasonable guess (not a gut feeling)
that genetically modified crops will also turn out to have both bad and good
aspects. Certainly, it will be possible to modify plants to our benefit. And
certainly it would be possible to modify plants in deliberately malevolent
directions.

Very likely, as in the case of X-rays, even the good modifications may turn
out to have some bad side-effects. It would be better to discover these now,
in carefully controlled trials, rather than let them emerge later. With
hindsight, it is a pity more research was not done earlier on the dangers of
X-rays. If it had been, children of my generation would not have been
allowed to play with X-ray machines in shoe shops.

We need more research, not less. And if we are to have activists protesting
about dangerous crops, let us draw their zealous attention to those crops
whose evil effects are already known because the necessary research was
allowed to be done. Like tobacco.

Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of
Science, Oxford

Guardian 24.09.00











From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 23:36:11 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 06:36:11 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Anti-capitalist protest thwarted at border
Message-ID: <008301c025eb$590adbc0$08678cd4@ngjones>

Amelia Hill, Prague
Sunday September 24, 2000

Britons were yesterday among the thousands of protesters turned away from
the Czech border by police determined to minimise the extent of Tuesday's
anti-capitalism protest, organisers said.
About 30,000 demonstrators from across Europe are heading towards Prague
this week, determined to disrupt the 55th Annual Meeting of the World Bank
Group and the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But instead of taking part in today's mass celebration, a warm-up before the
main day of action next week, many demonstrators have spent the weekend
camping at border crossings in pouring rain.

Some have managed to complete their journeys by complaining to their embassy
or by appealing to legal observers waiting behind the border controls. But
thousands of others - at least one in every 50 demonstrators - are spending
days travelling from one border crossing to another, unsuccessfully trying
to find a weak link in the police line, before being forced to return home.

'Czech border police are not making illegal demands on those attempting to
enter the country, but they are sticking to the letter of the law with
absolute rigidity,' said Karlos, a legal observer working for the Initiative
Against Economic Globalisation, an umbrella group known by its Czech
initials, Inpeg, created to coordinate this week's demonstrations.

More than 70 protesters have been denied access to the Czech Republic from
the border crossing at Zinnwald alone, in what organisers claim is a total
contradiction of state rhetoric.

'Nine-hour waits at the borders are now routine because police are searching
exhaustively for ways of banning everyone they possibly can,' said Karlos.
'Occasionally they cross over and violate a human right, but on the whole
they stay a hair's breadth away from actual violation.'

Many activists have been caught by obscure legislation. 'I'm shaking with
anger, but I'm not leaving. l'll find some way of getting through, even if
it takes all week,' said Anya, a 35-year-old activist who spent more than 24
hours driving from Brighton to Prague in her 35ft van, only to be blocked at
Zinnwald after Czech police found a slight irregularity in her vehicle
registration papers.

'I've travelled all over the world with exactly the same papers I gave the
police here,' she said. 'I even came to Prague last year. They let me in
then and now suddenly the same papers aren't good enough.' But Anya's case
does not surprise Karlos, a legal observer on the other side of the
crossing. 'Cases like this show how little truth there was in the words of
the Czech government when it said we had a political right to protest
against the IMF meeting. This entire demonstra tion has shown how determined
the Czech government really is to deny the right to free speech and
political protest,' he said, as he rang around trying to order the papers
Anya needed.

'They see this meeting as a method of entry into the serious world of
big-boy politics and are prepared to deny the right the public has to
express a plurality of political views.'

Border police are using information from the FBI and Scotland Yard on known
activists to prevent people entering the country, including activists from
Seattle and Ya Basta!, a pressure group from Italy .

Despite the difficulties, thousands of activists have successfully got in: a
camp for 20,000 people on the outskirts of the city is already busy and most
hostels and cheap hotels are booked up for the entire week. But police hope
that, by flexing their muscles now, they will curb protesters' plans to
disrupt the conference later in the week.

Their plan appears to have worked: yesterday's nine peaceful demonstrations
are being heralded by the police as proof that their months of preparation
have been a success, although today's mass celebration will test that claim.

Nevertheless, tension in Prague has escalated over the past few days in
anticipation of Tuesday's demonstration. About 11,000 police, most of them
in riot units trained to deal with violent fights rather than peaceful
demonstrations, have been mobilised. They have admitted that tear gas and
water cannon will be used if necessary.

Six armoured personnel carriers, six troop trucks, two fire engines, two
Mi-17 helicopters and two W-3A Sokol helicopters are on standby, according
to the Prague Post .

'We know there are many protesters coming here with the intention of
sabotaging the conference,' said a spokesman for the Czech police. 'Of
course, we're nervous - this is the first major demonstration we have had to
cope with, but if people complain we're too strict, well, rather that than a
repeat of the devastation caused by the Seattle riots last November.'

Prague, a Communist citadel for four decades until 1989, has reverted to a
Soviet-era bunker mentality, closing more than 1,000 public schools and
running a three-month series of alarmist advertisements on television and in
the press, warning of the devastation which could hit the city this week.

Many of Prague's 1.2 million citizens have responded by deserting the city
but, keen to avoid a repetition of last year's much-criticised May Day riots
in Prague, police have agreed to work with 100 volunteer legal observers
stationed around the city who will report any violation of human rights. A
hotline has also been set up by Inpeg for protesters to report incidents of
abuse.

There are tentative signs that the week could pass off smoothly: a
right-wing dem-onstration against globalisation that many feared would act
as a catalyst for the latent violence lurking here passed off smoothly
yesterday, and police attendance was attentive but hands-off.

Even so, protesters are unlikely to find support among older Czechs, said
Danielle, 24, a member of the first free generation in the region for 50
years.

'There is practically no one in our parents' generation who has sympathy for
this demonstration,' she said. 'The government has emphasised again and
again over the past few months how awful it will be here during the
conference, but they have not explained the reason why we feel the need to
protest.'


Guardian 24.09.00




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 23 23:24:27 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 06:24:27 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] a letter to the IMF
Message-ID: <007b01c025e7$bbccad00$08678cd4@ngjones>

This is the text of a letter scripted by the Bretton Woods Project - an
IMF/World Bank watchdog - and sent to the President of the World Bank, James
Wolfensohn, expressing concerns about a new World Bank web project

Wednesday September 20, 2000

James Wolfensohn President World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington DC 20433,
USA

20 September 2000

Dear Mr Wolfensohn,

The Bank, under your direction, is developing a major new internet
initiative which aims to become "the premier web entry point for information
about poverty and sustainable development". To achieve this it would need to
include all shades of opinion and be a broad, multi-stakeholder initiative,
including civil society. Many civil society groups, including many of the
undersigned, have held discussions with the Bank and among themselves about
the Gateway.

We are writing to inform you that many of the major issues we have raised
have not been addressed. It seems, especially from the report "Global
Development Gateway Issues Identified During Consultations" recently
produced by the Bank's Gateway team, that you and the Bank's Board may have
been misinformed about the extent and nature of civil society concerns and
our disappointment in the Bank's response.

These concerns are serious both in relation to the opportunities missed by
the Gateway, and because they have the potential to confuse potential
funders, people asked to be Topic Guides, site visitors, and many others. It
is not the case, as hinted in the above report of the consultations, that
these views are only held by opponents of the World Bank or groups based in
Europe. In fact a wide range of NGOs, academics and also officials are
extremely sceptical about the initiative.

Among the key problems identified with the Bank's Gateway plans are:

1) insufficient independence of Gateway governance. The Gateway's global and
national governance structures do not adequately protect civil society
interests. Whilst an independent foundation has been established, the
constitution of the Board and Advisory Committee do not give grounds for
confidence that the Gateway will be truly independent of the Bank, national
governments and big business. Particular concerns are the role of the Bank
in making appointments relating to the Global Gateway, governments' leading
roles in Country Gateways and companies' ability to buy Gateway Board
membership (and "co-branding" opportunities) with annual payments of a
million dollars. Creating a nominally independent entity has thus not solved
the acute accountability issues around the Gateway, issues which are very
sensitive in portal development, essentially an editorial activity similar
to publishing newspapers.

2) alternative design options rejected. Very early in discussions about the
Gateway a number of civil society groups suggested an alternative design
approach which would use the latest spidering software to allow distributed,
user-driven topic aggregation. This would overcome the difficulties of the
chosen Gateway design which gives power and impossible judgements to
individual editors, and empower groups across the world to post and group
information according to their needs. Yet the Gateway still favours a
vertical, edited approach which will cause many problems of credibility and
useability.

3) communication/consultation insufficient. Whilst there have been a number
of consultation exercises, it appears that the Bank has overemphasised the
production of pilot sites and fundraising rather than communicating with
diverse audiences about the GDG's intentions and what might best meet their
needs. Many important groups still know nothing about the Gateway and many
who do have tabled questions which have not been answered.

4) overambition and unfair competition; The Gateway, whilst based on good
intentions to increase coordination of web activity, is too ambitious and
cannot meet all of its goals. At the same time its huge budget (60 million
dollars over three years) and marketing reach are likely to have huge
opportunity costs for the many existing and planned portal ventures in this
area. It is not appropriate for the heavily subsidized Gateway to compete
with these (for profit and non-profit) initiatives, including in many of the
"pilot" countries. This approach clearly contradicts normal World Bank
policy advice.

At present, because of the above concerns and others, it is unlikely that a
Civil Society Committee for the Gateway will be formed soon, despite two
months of discussion about it. In fact a large number of civil society
groups are likely to continue with independent initiatives to improve
electronic information coordination rather than join the Gateway.

We ask you to provide full responses to the above points as soon as
possible.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Wilks, Bretton Woods Project, UK






From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 24 02:21:39 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 09:21:39 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] fwd from Chris Burford
Message-ID: <000301c02600$768a3b40$61268cd4@mjones>

Mark made another important point in his post of 14 Sept (S11) which I
wanted to come back to. (The intensity of Mark's posts and the quality
of
his information makes it difficult to keep up, but the problems of the
global economy will not go away anyway, so here goes.)

I accept the broad case Mark argues, for example in his persuasive
piece "A
New Energy Crisis" of 13th Sept. Also the Crash List has been pursuing
this
theme, and among other things I have picked up from there, I agree the
arguments first presented by Hubbert, and now called the Hubbert
Curve,
about the peak of oil production.

www.hubbertpeak.com

However the point I wanted to come back to seems to be not quite right
from
a marxist point of view, or if it is right, it raises some interesting
questions about how to apply the marxist theory of crises to the
present
phenomena.

Mark wrote:

>to anyone who's done their
>homework this cannot hide the fact that (since 1973 at least)
>energy-shortages have been behind economic cycles, have
>led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and to
>3 mideast wars, and are now resulting in the Fourth and Final Oil
Shock

Now the marxist theory of capitalist crises, as I understand it,
describes
the endless tendency for surplus value to accumulate more surplus
value, to
the business cycle accelerating until it reaches its rate- limiting
step in
the

contradiction between capitalist accumulation and the limited
purchasing
power of the masses of working people.

There are sub-phases to this as stocks of overproduced commodities
accumulate, which usually first trigger a financial crisis, before a
general economic crisis ensues, with the destruction of a significant
amount of capital, living and dead.

This theory of crises depends on exploitation of labour power. Marx
recognises exploitation of resources too, but his theory of capitalist
crises is not dependent on them.

Mark's point above is compelling enough in that a short supply of a
basic
commodity like oil may imperil the profitability of certain sectors of
the
economy short of a general economic crisis of capitalism. But it would
be
theoretically risky to substitute important ecological arguments for
the
marxian theory of crises.

That theory is independent of what technology is used by capitalism.
Indeed
it presumes constant revolutionising of the means of production under
capitalism.

  Mark is persuasive about the arguments that the human race is coming
up
against the finite limits of extractable oil.  But that does not
necessarily unfortunately mean the end of capitalism.

Capitalism wobble as a result. But if you don't push it, it won't
fall.


Chris Burford

[forwarded from Thaxis, which I had to unsub from because of pressure
of work. I'll try to respond. Mark]




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 24 03:59:26 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 10:59:26 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] RE: fwd from Chris Burford
Message-ID: <001601c0260e$1f86cee0$61268cd4@mjones>

Chris, right now I am trying to digest an immense mass of material
from the media, lists, academic sources etc and to reflect to the List
the most potent, pertinent or pungent from all this.

It is obvious that the world-system has just passed thru a key
inflection-point,  a more radical lurch into crisis than the 1997-98
Asia Meltdown. I want the List archive to be a resource which people
can use after the dust has settled a little. Incidentally, the
membership of the CrashList has increased significantly in recent
weeks, and this is because our focus and concerns have acquired more
immediacy and perceived relevance than heretofore.

Now, here is my Thought for Sunday: what if World Oil has *just passed
thru its production peak*?

In other words, what if annual production in the year 2000 - of around
78m bbls - turns out to be a high point *which is never subsequently
surpassed*? This is a distinct possibility.

Note that there have been previous downswings in oil and energy
production, notably in the late 1980s when production and prices fell
for several years in a row. The great American Boom of the 1990s
finally led to a marked upswing in production, which is now (most
people agree) pressing against spare capacity: possibly only Iraq and
Saudi have much spare capacity right now.

There are various scenarios about what can happen next. Optimists
(Doug Henwood) say that this is all just 'short-term fluctuations',
there is 'gobs of oil out there', and longterm oil production will
continue to increase at 2-3% p.a. for another few decades. This is no
longer credible. We have reached a turning-point.

It is possible that a recession will now take the heat out of the
supply situation. Opec itself now expects there to be a glut of oil in
a year's time. If the recession turns nasty and the US bubble bursts,
oil prices will dive thru the Opec floor and can head back to $10/bbl.
My guess is that Opec and Big Oil do indeed expect something like
this, and that is why there is such deep reluctance to commit major
resources to upstream investment. But without that upstream
investment, long term oil production CANNOT increase. Nopec is already
peaking: North Sea, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia and the US oil basins
are mostly in steep decline. Only massive investment of half a
trillion or more dollars, in the old but still productive Persian Gulf
fields, and in the Caspian and some deep sea horizons, can boost up
production again. But it may already be too late to find the money to
invest in those former super-giant fields like Ghawar which are
already severely depleted.

And this investment may never happen, because *there will never be
sufficient demand*. This is what Shaikh Yamani means when he says "The
Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones, and the Oil Age
will not end because we run out of oil".

This failure on investment and onset of persistent production declines
will happen because the capitalist world economy will have entered a
prolonged slump or trough, from which endogenous growth potentials
will only emerge slowly if at all; and absent exogenous shocks (world
war, the discovery of massive new cheap energy sources etc), such a
trough can continue for decades (it did after 1973); in other words,
the growth trendline will be permanently inflected downwards. Since
oil prices will remain low for several years there will be no rush for
energy efficiency or alternatives.

But after 3-5 years there will be another inflection-point (other
things being equal), because the continued lack of oilfield investment
will show up in an accelerated overall decline in production, as older
fields are shut in and as lack of capital replacement suddenly bites.
Thus, the present oil shock can trigger other, successive oil shocks
in coming years *EACH TIME WITH GLOBAL PRODUCTION LOWER THAN BEFORE*.
This is the key thing: we are talking now about how the downside of
the Hubbert Curve appears in practice, as world oil production comes
down off its present rocky plateau.

Each successive oil shock can only progressively weaken the world
economy, thinning out its technical systems, scientific
superstructures and cades, narrowing the complexity, depth and
diversity of society's capital base, which is the essential
springboard for future technical and productivity advances to occur.

Of course, the geopolitical fallout from such a long term secular
decline is hard to foretell, but the important thing to recognise is
that world capitalism has at last bumped against an external
constraint (energy shortage) which it will struggle against, but which
actually decides all its future options, one way or another. The epoch
of boundless growth is over. It is already quite clear that we have to
adapt to a new historical horizon, distinctly different from any we
have known. Those who believe "science will always find an answer" are
simply cargo-cultists who don't get what is happening.

There are the related questions of social and environmental justice,
wealth and income distribution patterns, and of long term human
population growth. Although the rate of growth has been falling for
thirty years, the inertial momentum still built into the world's
demography means that other things being equal the population will
still rise to 7-9 billion even if it falls thereafter (after about
2050). So the reality is that there will be little or no future growth
in production or resources, while there will still be another 203
billion people to feed, clothe, house etc.

The only possibilities left for growth come in the form of efficiency
savings, alternatives etc. For reasons discussed here ad nauseam,
these possibilities are less than generally supposed. It is said for
instance that Americans can enjoy their present lifestyle while using
70% less energy. It is true that they will have to use much less
energy, but not so certain that that nothing else will change. On the
contrary, there will be massive upheaval on a world scale.

One more thing: everyone has their scenarios stuffed in their back
pocket, and I have mine. This is the *best case*. I believe that
another distinct possibility is that the World Hubbert Curve may
follow a different path: oil and energy production in general (ie all
forms of energy production) may not gently decline, but may collapse.
This is what happened in the USSR, where oil production in 1987 was
600m tonness and in 1991  around 300m tonnes, and is still falling.
The collapse of Soviet industry and society was the immediate, direct
result of the collapse of the Soviet energy-base. Public health,
medicine, social services and education also collapsed, as did public
and private morality.

If that kind of Hubbert decline happens on a world scale, obviously
outcomes in general will be quite different.

A remark about your comments:

 Chris wrote:

>the marxist theory of capitalist crises, as I
> understand it, describes
> the endless tendency for surplus value to accumulate more
> surplus value, to
> the business cycle accelerating until it reaches its rate-
> limiting step in
> the
>
> contradiction between capitalist accumulation and the
> limited purchasing
> power of the masses of working people.
>
> There are sub-phases to this as stocks of overproduced commodities
> accumulate, which usually first trigger a financial crisis,
> before a
> general economic crisis ensues, with the destruction of a
> significant
> amount of capital, living and dead.
>
> This theory of crises depends on exploitation of labour power. Marx
> recognises exploitation of resources too, but his theory of
> capitalist
> crises is not dependent on them.
>
> Mark's point above is compelling enough in that a short
> supply of a basic
> commodity like oil may imperil the profitability of certain
> sectors of the
> economy short of a general economic crisis of capitalism.
> But it would be
> theoretically risky to substitute important ecological
> arguments for the
> marxian theory of crises.
>
> That theory is independent of what technology is used by
> capitalism. Indeed
> it presumes constant revolutionising of the means of
> production under
> capitalism.
>
>   Mark is persuasive about the arguments that the human
> race is coming up
> against the finite limits of extractable oil.  But that does not
> necessarily unfortunately mean the end of capitalism.
>
> Capitalism wobble as a result. But if you don't push it, it
> won't fall.

 In your polite and kindly way, you are accusing me of being a
Ricardian or worse, a Physiocrat, ie, someone who believes that
physical limits condition available wealth. This is a very good
criticism to make. My answer (one of several possible answers) might
be that whatever kind of capitalism comes after, what we are living
thru *now* is the closing period of the era of Industrial Capitalism.
If human societies continue to be ruled by commodity exchange, wealth
will continue to accumulate, there will be large and differentiated
markets, and there will be commercial capitalism, mercantile
capitalism etc, as there was among the Advanced Organic Societies
which preceded Industrial Capitalism, ie before 1750. But these will
not be capitalism on the world scale, capitalism of accumulation, as
*we* have known it because there will be no technical basis, no
energetic basis, for accumulation.

Industrial Capitalism *itself* arose because of determined attempts to
overcome energy and resource scarcities. The technologies of steam and
iron arose out of learning how to use plentiful coal in place of
scarce wood (not because some budding financier read Karl Marx and
said "Eureka!"). Maybe some unforeseen discovery is just around the
corner. But if it's going to happen, it better happen fast if it is to
make a difference.

Absent some scientific deus ex machina, there might also be attempts
at reinventing feudalism and slavery. When capital and land become
expensive (which they will, after the Crash) labour will become very
cheap indeed. People will be quite dispensable. People will have to
leave the cities and work on the land, and it won't be easy. There
almost certainly will be (I suppose) attempts at communalism of
different kinds. Many will die. 8 million people have died above
demographic trendline in the USSR since 1991, a quiet holocaust.


Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Sun Sep 24 04:05:03 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 11:05:03 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] a tiny correction
Message-ID: <001901c0260e$e847ef80$61268cd4@mjones>

Before the anoraks notice I said "what if annual production in the
year 2000 - of around
78m bbls - turns out to be a high point *which is never subsequently
surpassed*?", allow me to correct myself.

In fact of course, 78m bbls is the world *daily* production (according
to some estimates.

Annual oil production is now about 28 billion barrels of oil.

Mark




From nerajov at EUnet.yu  Sun Sep 24 06:05:20 2000
From: nerajov at EUnet.yu (Mrs. Jela Jovanovic, Secretary General)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 14:05:20 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Fw: Bulgaria Meddles in Yugoslavia: A letter from Blagovesta Doncheva in Bulgaria
Message-ID: <009301c0261f$ea034b60$d701f0d5@Pc56.phy.bg.ac.yu>


>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: JaredI at aol.com <JaredI at aol.com>
>To: JaredI at aol.com <JaredI at aol.com>
>Date: Sunday, September 24, 2000 10:46 AM
>Subject: Bulgaria Meddles in Yugoslavia: A letter from Blagovesta Doncheva
>in Bulgaria
>
>
>>http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/electionday.htm
>>
>>Election Day Meddling
>>A letter from Blagovesta Doncheva in Sofia, Bulgaria
>>(9-24-2000)
>>
>>Dear friends,
>>
>>Enclosed is the rough translation of an interesting, informative article,
>>published in 'Monitor.'
>>
>>Here's my opinion about the "parallel vote counting" dioscussed in the
>>article. They have repeatedly carried it out here. It is a way to
>manipulate
>>people on the day of the elections! What do they do? All day long they
give
>>figures and graphics. In most cases deliberately wrong figures and
>graphics.
>>And thereby manipulate people most blatantly! (They are usually very
active
>>in the afternoon hours of the election day, which is logical.) What will
>they
>>do now? They will deliberately announce that Kostunica leads with, for
>>instance., 20-30%. They might even insist that he is nearing the 50 %.
They
>>will quote towns and whole regions. They will give graphics. Some people
>who
>>would vote for Milosevich will say to themselves: "What's the use of
>voting?
>>The other one is already elected!" And they will stay at home. Others will
>>stay at home out of sheer fear. "They have already elected the other one.
>It
>>is better to lie low now." Etc.
>>
>>Some words about some names quoted in Monitor article.
>>
>>Velko Valkanov is a Bulgarian Socialist party (BSP) MP but he is not a
>member
>>of BSP. He is firmly at anti-NATO position (a kind of inner opposition
>inside
>>the BSP Parliamentary group.) I don't know what to make of him: if he is
so
>>very much against the pro-NATO orientation of BSP, why is he still in the
>BSP
>>group? But in this one he is right.
>>
>>Evgeni Dainov - is the most faithful Bulgarian US-government flunkey and a
>>totally amoral ass. Money is his God, his morals, his ethics, his love and
>>his hate. Good is every cause that spews Money. Bad is every one that does
>>not pour fresh Money or especially if it threatens his own Money. If his
>>mother is still alive, and his Money Masters tell him to cut her into
>pieces,
>>then fry them and last give them to the street dogs against a certain sum
>(or
>>a position that goes with a nice package of money!), Evgeni the Rat will
do
>>it without hesitation. In his comment he reveals that he has given cell
>>phones to the "kids" from Otpor but that monster Milosevich's people have
>>taken them at the boundary. (There was an information that the Yugoslav
>>Customs have confiscated 20 (!) cell phones from Otpor 'activists' on
their
>>way back from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia.)
>>
>>It is the Election Day.
>>
>>God help the Serbs..
>>
>>God help us all..
>>
>>Blagovesta Doncheva Sofia, Bulgaria
>>
>>[The 'Monitor' article follows]
>>URL for this article is
>>http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/doncheva/bulgmed.htm
>>
>>www.tenc.net
>>[Emperor's Clothes]
>>
>>Bulgaria Meddles in Yugoslav Vote
>>
>>'Monitor,' [Bulgaria] September 22, p. 1-2-3
>>
>>Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marin Raikov, is behind an unprecedented
>>plan for parallel Yugoslav vote counting from Sofia. Kostov threatens
>>Milosevic with "categorical/decisive actions" if he 'manipulates' the vote
>on
>>Sunday.
>>Yugoslav charge d?affaires, Danko Protic, warns that the elections are
>>"exclusively an internal problem."
>>By a Monitor Team
>>Translated by Blagovesta Doncheva
>>
>>Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marin Raikov, is most probably behind a
>>plan for parallel Yugoslav President vote counting from Sofia, [Bulgaria,]
>a
>>high level governmental official told 'Monitor.'
>>
>>"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has nothing to do with it. Those are NGO
>>activities," the Foreign Affairs Ministry Speaker, Raiko Vlaikov,
declared.
>>On Sunday the UDF Political Academy and the U.S. organisation, "Freedom
>>House," will organise parallel Yugoslav vote counting. The single
>Information
>>Centre outside Yugoslavia will be in Hall 4 of the National Culture Centre
>>and will closely observe the vote counting.
>>
>>Meantime, in a special statement for Monitor, the Yugoslav charge d?
>affaires
>>Danko Protic warned about the increased external pressure on his country:
>>
>>"Those who are intervening in our inner affairs, keep talking about unrest
>in
>>Yugoslavia if the opposition lose and are repeating the fabrications about
>an
>>armed conflict between Serbia and Montenegro, increase additionally the
>>pressure on Yugoslavia, and an alibi is thereby created for fresh
>>interference in our internal affairs," the diplomat declared.
>>Premier Ivan Kostov, broadcast yesterday "the government position" on the
>>Yugoslav election after a lunch in the Embassy of Germany with the NATO
>>countries? ambassadors in Sofia. The premier warned President Slobodan
>>Molisevic in his Statement not to falsify the Yugoslav citizens? vote.
>>
>>Kostov?s Threats
>>
>>Premier Kostov threatened that "there will be very strong reactions on the
>>part of all the European governments in case of election
manipulation....In
>>case they are not honest, I admit that the actions will be very
>categorical,"
>>Kostov added. But he did not say if Bulgaria would take part in those
>>"decisive actions". "Let?s see what will happen," the Premier said in the
>>German Embassy building in Sofia. Together with the German Ambassador in
>>Sofia, Ursula Zeiler-Albring [sp?], he made a statement after a luncheon
>>meeting with the other NATO countries? Ambassadors.
>>
>>"We share the worries and misgivings about possible manipulations while
the
>>Yugoslav elections are going on. My misgivings do not include the
>possibility
>>for a civil war there, but it is a fact that all of us in the region,
>>including the NATO countries? ambassadors, are debating those problems,
are
>>interested in them, and we will watch the day September 24 very
>attentively.
>>Lots of things will depend on it,' Kostov added.
>>Official Belgrade Misgivings
>>
>>"When we talk about the elections in Yugoslavia, we have to underline that
>we
>>are witnesses of unprecedented pressure with the aim of ensuring results
>>which will be in the USA and NATO countries' interests. That fact
>>additionally is destabilising our country," Danko Protic said. According
to
>>him, "it is not by chance that the European Union declared from Brussels
>just
>>before the elections that it will lift the sanctions against Yugoslavia
>only
>>if the opposition wins at the elections. Besides, those in Brussels are
>>constantly repeating their unprecedented undemocratic position that the
>>elections will not be recognised if the Yugoslav President wins," the
>>Yugoslav charge d?affaires continued. According to him, "insinuations are
>>constantly being made that election stealing is being prepared in
Belgrade,
>>and in that way conditions are created for explaining the opposition?s
>defeat
>>by charging election manipulations on the basis of some untrue public
>opinion
>>inquiries, giving great advantage of the opposition parties."
>>
>>"The elections in all sovereign countries are exclusively inner affair
>>because it is expected that the citizens express at them their will and
>their
>>position on the different parties' policies and on some persons who want
to
>>take part in ruling their countries," Danko Protic sates.
>>[Here there is a photo, not reproduced. The caption is in bold]
>>
>>[Photo Caption:] Premier Ivan Kostov enters the Embassy of Germany in
Sofia
>>from where he threatened once again Yugoslav President, Slobodan
Mulosevic.
>>
>>[Caption:] After having had lunch with the NATO countries? Ambassadors in
>>Bulgaria, Premier Ivan Kostov threatened with "sharp reaction" the
Yugoslav
>>President Slobodan Milosevic if he falsifies the Sunday elections. The
>German
>>ambassadress Ursula Zeiler-Albring stayed behind him. [End of caption]
>>
>>The Blue (UDF) Academy and Freedom House commission
>>"scrutineers"[scrutinisers?]
>>
>>"The parallel vote counting is a mutual project of the Political Academy
>for
>>Central and Southeastern Europe and of the U.S. NGO, "Freedom House," with
>>which we have very close contacts", Orfei Duevski, explained to 'Monitor'.
>He
>>is an MP from the UDF and the head of the Political Academy. According to
>>some high-placed UDF officials, he has headed that organisation's Board of
>>Directors thanks to Hristo Biserov?s support; Bisserov is the UDF's First
>>Secretary. The Board of Directors consists of two more MPs from the UDF,
>>three Americans from the International Republican Institute, and the
>>specialists in policy sciences, Evgeni Dainov and Ognjan Minchev. The
>>Republican Institute had been that Academy's main sponsor last year. It
>still
>>is its main sponsor. (1)
>>
>>"I want to explicitly underline that it is not a UDF project. It is a
>project
>>of the Academy, mainly of its expert members. The ideas come entirely from
>>the experts and they are being realised with the help of their colleagues
>>from Belgrade", Duevski claims. The Academy has sent to Belgrade Vassil
>>Zanov, the head of the mathematicians? group at the Sofia Central Election
>>Commission. His team is to send from Belgrade the raw election results,
>which
>>will be reworked by the people in the Faculty of Mathematics at "Clement
>>Ohridski," the Sofia University. Zanov is a professor there. The data will
>be
>>sent to Sofia via E-mail.
>>
>>On Election day Mr. Zanov will work in the office of the Centre for Free
>>Elections and Democracy in Belgrade. "That is an analogue organisation to
>the
>>Bulgarian Society for Honest Elections on the territory of Yugoslavia",
the
>>head of the Political Academy explained. According to an official press
>>release of the Academy, the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy in
>>Belgrade supports Voislav Kostunica, Milosevic?s opponent.
>>
>>Unprecedented vote counting
>>
>>"They have no experience in the parallel vote counting in Yugoslavia. That
>is
>>why we, with the assistance of Mr. Zanov, have decided to help the Centre
>for
>>Free Elections and Democracy in Belgrade" Orfei Duevski told. But he could
>>not explain what will be the interaction between 'our' specialists and the
>>official Yugoslavian power and if the Bulgarians have an official
>>authorisation for the elections on September 24.
>>
>>"I hope that the official authorities in Belgrade would co-operate with
>such
>>initiative which might disprove the accusations from everywhere that the
>>Yugoslav elections will be manipulated", Duevski would only say.
>>
>>However, experts in that field claim that the parallel vote counting will
>be
>>unprecedented if the Bulgarians are not authorised by the official
>>authorities in Belgrade.
>>
>>According to an official information of the BTA (Bulgarian Telegraph
>Agency),
>>quoting the Bulgarian Society for Honest Elections, "60 of its activists
>will
>>take part as scrutineers of the presidential election in Yugoslavia".
>>Together with the Yugoslavian Centre for Free Elections and Democracy in
>>Belgrade they had to form Vassil Zanov team according to the Political
>>Academy.
>>
>>"We will not send any data from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria and we even do not
>>know if we will be allowed to go there", Anton Hidgov said. He is the head
>of
>>the Bulgarian Society for Honest Elections. "We will be only international
>>scrutineers there. I do not want any information to come out from my name
>>that might be used against us and we might not be authorised," Hidgov
>added.
>>Last week the Bulgarian Society for Honest Elections had sent an official
>>note to Belgrade to be authorised as scrutineers for the elections. The
>>Yugoslav Mission in Sofia says that such a demand for authorisation has
not
>>passed through them.
>>
>>Who pays
>>
>>"The parallel vote counting project is financed by Freedom House," Duevski
>>explained.
>>
>>It is an American NGO and its members are Republicans and Democrats alike,
>>influential businessmen, Trade Union leaders, experts on foreign policy
and
>>former administration employees. Zbignev Bzezinski, Kenet Adelman and Pol
>>Volfovitz are among the more well-known names in the Freedom House
>Directors?
>>Board.
>>
>>"I have offered projects of mine many times to the Freedom House, but they
>>react now for the first time", Evgeni Dainov, the member of the Director
>>Board of the Political Academy said yesterday. He thinks though that "the
>>money is not enough". "I am almost certain that we will spend more,"
Dainov
>>added.
>>
>>Raikov?s Role
>>
>>"The Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs has very good contacts with the Serb
>>opposition and it is very probable he offered "parallel vote counting" at
>>some of his confidential meetings with the Serb opposition leaders,"
>>'Monitor'?s source from the Government explained. He could not specify
>though
>>when exactly Raikov had launched his idea.
>>
>>In the middle of July our Ambassador in Belgrade Ivailo Trifonov
personally
>>engaged himself as a translator for the opposition Serb mayors, who were
>>called in Sofia to receive instructions by Sofia Mayor, Stephan Sofianski.
>>
>>Marin Raikov is responsible for the Balkans in the Ministry of Foreign
>>Affairs. Some years ago he was a First Secretary in our Embassy in
>Belgrade.
>>He is a Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a son of
Raiko
>>Nickolov, Bulgarian first diplomat in Yugoslavia for years on a run. Marin
>>Raikov accompanied Kostov at all the meetings that year with the
>>representatives of the Serbs and the Albanians from Kosovo, although they
>had
>>taken part in the UDF Party building at "Rakovska" 134.
>>
>>Comments
>>
>>An MP commented on the parallel vote counting from Sofia:
>>
>>VelkoValkanov, BSP
>>
>>The parallel vote counting is a drastic and incorrect interference in
>>Yugoslavia internal affairs. There is even a greater manipulation than
that
>>one. The West promises to lift all the sanctions and to pour the horn of
>>plenty over the Serbs if they vote against Milosevic. Isn?t that an
attempt
>>at buying a whole people, isn?t that the most disgusting manipulation ever
>>known? Our government and the ruling party join to that policy of
>>manipulation. I will be very pleased indeed if the Serb people box the
ears
>>of both those Western politicians and our pro Western ones, and vote for
>>Milosevic, refusing to be bought out. A centre of diversion/sabotage in
>>relation to Yugoslavia is being created here, and that press-centre is
only
>>the beginning.
>>
>>***
>>
>>1) The International Republican Institute has offices in 15 lands
including
>>Albania, Angola, Nicaragua, Russia, Yugoslavia and South Africa. It is one
>of
>>the "core institutes" of the National Endowment for Democracy and
therefore
>>part of the network of US government agencies which recruit local
activists
>>and set up front groups with the goal of exercising indirect colonial rule
>in
>>the guise of building what is called "civil society" (which amazingly
>refers
>>to the groups they set up and fund!) and "Democratic institutions".
>>"Democracy" is here not defined as something the people choose (as one
>might
>>think) but rather as being aligned with the Establishments in the NATO
>>countries. A rather partisan definition.
>>
>>The Monitor article notes that this particular civil society group (the
>>"Political Academy for Central and Southeastern Europe") works closely
with
>>Freedom House, a US NGO, receives funding from the International
Republican
>>Institute, and plans to coordinate its "monitoring" with the Centre for
>Free
>>Elections and Democracy in Belgrade, which, in turn, supports the
candidate
>>of the "democratic" coalition in Yugoslavia. Both the Centre for Fair
>>Elections and the Yugoslav "democratic" opposition receive funding and
>>training from US and NATO-country government agencies.
>>
>>For more on how the U.S. is fostering indirect colonial rule in the guise
>of
>>building "civil society" and "democracy" go to
>>http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/scam.htm
>>
>>
>
>




From Borba100 at aol.com  Sun Sep 24 08:54:06 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 10:54:06 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] A Canadian Election Observer in Yugoslavia
Message-ID: <65.a1778b5.26ff6f8e@aol.com>

URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/canadian.htm

Report of Canadian Election Observer in Yugoslavia 
by Antoinette Martens [9-24-2000]

www.tenc.net
[Emperor's Clothes]

[Ms. Martens is a Canadian election observer reporting from Belgrade, 
Yugoslavia.]

The international observers of the Yugoslav presidential and parliamentary 
elections have arrived in Belgrade - some 200 of them from (so far) from 54 
countries. 

Contrary to the reports that "they have not been allowed in," there are 
registered observers from the following Western European countries: Belgium, 
Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden and UK. 
(So far, the single American observer is an active senior participant in the 
Gore presidential campaign.) Among the observers are parliamentarians, 
delegates from political parties and organizations, as well as independents 
like the two participants from Canada. 

The Canadian delegates have attended political rallies of the three major 
presidential candidates, in Belgrade and Novi Sad. These events were noisy 
and lively affairs, without any observable disturbances and any noticeable 
police presence. Literature was freely distributed and received at these 
events, in a way no different from political rallies in Canada. 

One of us (Marjaleena Repo) has paid particular attention to election posters 
as she has been involved in the long standing and not-yet-finished fight for 
the right to poster in Canada. And she can report that posters are everywhere 
in the street scene, accompanied by graffiti and the defacing of each others 
posters even-steven fashion, it seems. 

Repo has seen posters at work in downtown Belgrade, with posters urging women 
to vote, on top of other election messages! She had a chance to discuss this 
contradiction with five English-speaking Yugoslavian youth, with their 
buckets and sponges. 

Unlike in Canadian cities, the posters appear not to be scraped down by city 
workers, but live to suffer the indignities from competing political parties. 
In addition, there are huge billboards advertising the three major 
presidential candidates all around the Belgrade cityscape. All in all, 
Belgrade has all the appearance of democracy in action... 

While the Canadian and other Western media have already declared the election 
to be "rigged" (without any evidence, of course), we believe that the actual 
evidence for rigging and distorting the Yugoslav election results has been 
found in the once-democratic countries of U.S. and the European Union, who in 
an wholly illegal and undemocratic fashion are interfering in the domestic 
affairs of a sovereign country. This, of course, must be condemned by all 
true democrats, be they individuals, organizations or nations. 

www.tenc.net 
[Emperor's Clothes]
 
 



From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Sun Sep 24 14:25:09 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 16:25:09 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: U.S. and Allies Meet to Debate Global Economic Goals
References: <39CD35C1.33A37030@earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <39CE6324.4AFE288D@netzero.net>

The world leaders are organizing to rescue global capitalism--Mine

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/world/24FUND.html

--
xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



____________NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_________
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From dardsa at hotmail.com  Sun Sep 24 09:51:41 2000
From: dardsa at hotmail.com (Darryl d'Sa)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 15:51:41 GMT
Subject: [CrashList] Why Big Oil backed the fuel protests in Europe
Message-ID: <F106JB1ndcx3Vp20N3900001e47@hotmail.com>

Why Big Oil backed the fuel protests in Europe

NAOMI KLEIN
http://archives.theglobeandmail.com
The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
Wednesday, September 20, 2000

When I arrived in London on Sunday, the city was
like a jittery heroin junkie who had just shot up.
The panic that gripped Britain when a coalition of
truckers and farmers blockaded the nation's oil
refineries had been replaced with an unreal calm.
The gas was flowing again and, at the stations,
dazed customers injected their tanks with rivers of
unleaded.

As is the case with any powerful addiction, the
fuel crisis hasn't disappeared; it has been,
momentarily, sated. Protests against oil taxes are
cropping up across Europe and they may well
return to Britain after the moratorium called by the
truck drivers expires in two months. Canadian
truckers are even threatening to mount copycat
actions.

Watched from a distance, the oil blockades in
Britain look like spontaneous popular uprisings:
regular working folk, frightened for their
livelihoods, getting together to say, "Enough's
enough." But before this David and Goliath story
goes any further, it deserves a closer reading.

There's no doubt that the fuel protests began when
a couple hundred farmers and truckers formed
blockades outside the oil refineries. But the
protests became effective only when the
multinational oil companies that run those
refineries decided to treat those rather small
barricades as immovable obstacles, preventing
them from delivering oil to gas stations.

The companies -- Shell, BP, Texaco et al. --
claimed they wouldn't ask their tanker drivers to
drive past the blockades because they feared for
their "safety." The claim is bizarre. First, no
violence was reported. Second, these oil
companies have no problem drilling pipelines
through contested lands in Colombia and political
revolts directed against them in Nigeria. When it
comes to extracting oil from the earth, there seems
to be no danger, including warfare, that oil
multinationals are unwilling to risk. Third, the
truckers' "pickets" were illegal blockades since
the protesters were not members of trade unions --
unlike the cases in which union members form
legal pickets and companies hire scabs to cross
them anyway.

So why would the oil companies tacitly
co-operate with anti-oil protesters? Easy. So long
as attention is focused on high oil taxes, rather
than on soaring oil prices, the pressure is off the
multinationals and the OPEC cartel. The focus is
also on access to oil -- as opposed to the more
threatening issue of access to less polluting, more
sustainable energy sources than oil.

Furthermore, the oil companies know that, if the
truckers get their tax cut, as they did in France, oil
will be cheaper for consumers to buy, which will
mean more oil will be sold. In other words, Big
Oil stands to increase its profits by taking money
out of the public purse -- money now spent, in
part, on dealing with the problems created by Big
Oil.

More mysterious has been the government
response to the illegal trucker protests. While
Tony Blair has not caved in to demands for lower
taxes (yet), he didn't clear the roads either, a fact
all the more striking considering the swift police
crackdowns against other direct-action protests in
Britain and around the world.

The oil blockades in Britain and France were
enormously costly. Final figures aren't in, but the
protests likely caused more real economic damage
than every Earth First!, Greenpeace and anti-free
trade protest combined. And yet, on Britain's
roads last week, there was none of the pepper
spray, batons or rubber bullets now used when
labour, human-rights and environmental activists
stage roadblocks that cause only a small fraction
of the fuel protest's disruption. "We need to
maintain the rule of law," the police invariably
say as they clear the roadways, stifling the
protesters' messages while painting them as
threats to our collective safety.

Not this time. William Hague, leader of Britain's
Conservative Party, characterized the men who
closed Britain's rural schools and partially
immobilized its hospitals as "fine upstanding
citizens." Perhaps the only "upstanding" way to
protest these days is not out of concern for the
broader good but out of pure self-interest.

What happened last week was a tax revolt on the
roadway. The participants wanted a break on their
taxes and happened to park big pieces of
machinery in the middle of the road. That's not
political activism. It's vigilante capitalism.
**********End
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From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Sun Sep 24 21:19:39 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 23:19:39 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] BRENNER AND CRISIS: A CRITIQUE
Message-ID: <39CEC44A.6FD62B80@netzero.net>


http://www.internationalsocialist.org/pubs/isj.html

Issue 82 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM, quarterly journal of the Socialist
Workers Party (Britain)

Published March 1999 Copyright ? International Socialism

Spring 1999

BRENNER AND CRISIS: A CRITIQUE: A review of Robert Brenner, The
Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy
1950-98 (New Left Review 229, May/June 1998), ?8 paperback, ?20 hardback

Rob Hoveman

The mood prevailing among the world ruling class has swung between
despair and euphoria since the July 1997 devaluation of the Thai baht
began the current economic crisis. Until August 1998 the collapse of the
Tiger economies was considered a local crisis that would ease
inflationary pressures on the West. But after the devaluation of the
rouble and the default on the Russian government's debts, Bill Clinton
acknowledged that the world faced the most serious economic and
financial crisis since the Second World War. Then the crisis seemed to
pass and the ruling class breathed a sigh of relief. The financial
markets recovered some of their nerve and began to chase the United
States stock market up to ever dizzier levels. But just as they thought
they were through the worst, the support operation for the Brazilian
currency collapsed in the face of a further massive flight of capital
out of the country. The financial markets, Western governments, central
banks and the media have shown a schizophrenia which reveals the
superficiality of their understanding of the dynamics of the economic
system from which they benefit.

Robert Brenner's major history of the development of post-war Western
capitalism, and particularly of the changing relationships between the
three major Western economies, the US, West Germany (and later united
Germany) and Japan, is therefore very timely.1 In an analysis clearly
influenced by Marxism, Brenner has sought to provide an analysis of the
transition from the long boom through to the period of instability ('the
long downturn' as he calls it) which set in at the end of the 1960s. He
also outlines an explanation for why this period of instability has
persisted for so long. Whilst his explanation for the transition is
flawed and inadequate, there is much empirical detail from which anyone
seeking to develop an understanding of the crisis of world capitalism
will benefit.

Brenner's historical account

Brenner locates his explanation for the crisis ridden nature of the last
25 years in the fall of profitability in, above all, the manufacturing
sector:

Between 1970 and 1990 the manufacturing rate of profit for the G7
economies [the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Japan]
taken together was, on average, 40 percent lower than between 1950 and
1970. In 1990 it remained about 27 percent below its level in 1973 and
about 45 percent below its peak in 1965.2

Brenner argues that the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) enjoyed a
very considerable advantage over other advanced industrialised economies
immediately after the war, both in productivity and productive capacity.
West Germany and Japan had higher rates of capital accumulation but much
lower productivity and productive capacity initially. However, their
high rates of capital accumulation enabled them to begin to challenge
the dominance of US capital in the world market by the 1960s, one
indicator of which was a growing US balance of payments deficit.

The challenge posed by lower cost producers in West Germany and Japan to
the higher cost producers in the US pushed down the rate of profit
overall. As declining profitability heralded economic slowdown in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, the US government sought to offset the
pressure on US capital through a looser fiscal and monetary policy?ie
bigger budget deficits and lower interest rates.

The post-war economic settlement amongst the Western economies was based
on the Bretton Woods agreement which included pegging exchange rates to
the value of the US dollar. It was intended that this exchange rate
regime would provide stability for international trade and prevent the
competitive devaluations of currencies which was one aspect of the great
economic crisis of the 1930s. The chronic balance of payments deficit
(excess of imports over exports) that emerged in the US in the 1960s,
combined with the reflationary policies of lower interest rates and
bigger budget deficits, undermined confidence in the dollar. In 1971 the
dollar was devalued and the Bretton Woods agreement then collapsed
altogether with exchange rates beginning to float against one another.
The devaluation of the dollar put pressure on West German and Japanese
exports as US exports became relatively cheaper and West German and
Japanese exports relatively more expensive. The West German and Japanese
governments then also sought to alleviate the pressure on their
industries through more accommodating fiscal and monetary policies. The
result was much higher inflation as the bosses took advantage of
increased demand by raising prices rather than increasing investment and
output. The oil price hike in early 1974 then pushed up inflation
further.

Western governments sought to cap and push down inflation by raising
interest rates and by trying to reduce their budget deficits,
precipitating recession. After a weak stagflationary recovery in the
second half of the 1970s, in which economic growth was almost stagnant
whilst general price levels still rose significantly, a further
recession, starting in 1979, was followed by the adoption of much less
accommodating policies, particularly on the monetary side with higher
real interest rates, the purpose of which was to bear down on inflation.
This put pressure on US industry to restructure production to raise
productivity and improve competitiveness.

In 1985 the Plaza Accord saw the US and Japan agree to push down the
value of the dollar and push up the value of the yen to improve the
relative competitiveness of US capital. Japan also adopted a loose
monetary policy which deliberately produced the 'bubble economy', the
rapid inflation of property and stock exchange prices at the end of the
1980s, the intention of which was to stimulate domestic consumption to
help rectify Japan's chronic trade surplus with the US.

A further recession then followed in 1990 as the Japanese state sought
to deflate the bubble which had got out of control (and the deregulated
US financial system, which had been on a mad lending splurge, suffered a
credit crunch?a fact not mentioned by Brenner who simply refers to the
US suffering a 'cyclical downturn'). In the 1990s the profit rate of
Japanese manufacturing failed to recover significantly and was further
squeezed by the high value of the yen (until 1995 when it went into
precipitous decline) and the general stagnation of the Japanese economy
weighed down by the bad debt burden of the banks, which followed the
bursting of the asset price bubble.

Brenner concludes his historic account (written in early 1998) by
arguing that both the US manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors had
made very significant gains in profitability by 1996. This was the
product of a rise in exploitation, significant restructuring of industry
over the preceding decade, and the boost to exports from the devalued
dollar. He speculates that US strength could be the basis of a worldwide
recovery with increases in productivity and output not seen since the
long post-war upturn. In addition he sees the possibility that the US's
chief trading rivals, benefiting from the redundancies and restructuring
brought about by the 1990s downturn, could provide cheaper goods for the
US and world market, while soaking up ever greater quantities of US
exports in a virtuous circle.

On the other hand, he believes it more probable that the attempt by the
major industrialised countries to grow through an export led strategy
whilst restricting their internal spending will lead to 'the
perpetuation and exacerbation of longer term trends toward international
over-capacity and overproduction',3 a trend that is even more likely to
develop in the wake of the South East Asian crisis.

Brenner's theory of crisis

There is little in Brenner's account to disagree with. The principal
problems with Brenner's account lie in its theoretical framework and
its  distorting effect on his historical framework.

Brenner explains the fall in profitability in the late 1960s as a
consequence of capitalist competition and the uneven development that
characterises capitalism. As capitalism has developed, more and more
capital has been sunk into enormous quantities of fixed capital, ie
factories, machines etc. This rise in what Marx called the technical
composition of capital, a trend visible over the history of capitalism,
has been the result of a process of competition for markets in which
every capitalist is under pressure to raise productivity and thereby
lower their costs of production in order to compete more effectively.
Unlike Marx, Brenner sees no problem arising for the rate of profit from
this fact alone. Indeed, according to Brenner, rising productivity in
the economy should imply both a rising mass of profit and a rising, not
falling, rate of profit.

The problem comes, according to Brenner, when new, lower cost producers
'enter the line' and begin to compete for markets with the older, higher
cost producers. Were investment in fixed capital relatively low, the
higher cost firms could simply replace their old machines with new ones
or else abandon that area of production. But in the real world of huge
investments in machinery etc, such scrapping or 'exiting' is not
feasible. Existing higher cost producers will rather seek to compete
with the lower cost producers by lowering prices. They will suffer a
reduction in their profits but will survive as long as they firstly,
continue to make a profit on what Brenner calls their circulating
capital, ie their purchases of labour, raw materials etc, and secondly,
are able to cover their interest payments on loans that may still be
outstanding on their investment in fixed capital. However, the
consequence will be a reduced overall rate of profit for the economy as
a whole provided the savings to the rest of the economy from lower cost
production in this area do not accrue entirely to the profits of other
companies using this lower cost production as inputs.

Higher cost production may survive for an extended period of time,
Brenner contends, provided that relatively high cost businesses have
access to credit which will allow them to increase investment and
therefore competitiveness or just to hold on in the hope that the market
will improve. 'But, precisely by facilitating the survival of low-profit
firms...it [credit] tends to exacerbate over-capacity and
over-production, and to slow the restoration of profitability,
increasing instability and vulnerability to economic disruption'.4

Why does Brenner reject Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit
to fall? His own theory would, after all, appear to be a distant
cousin.5 Brenner rejects profit squeeze/supply side theories which
locate the decline in the rate of profit in the excessive growth or
maintenance of wages and the declining growth of productivity due to
worker resistance. Marx's theory too, according to Brenner, 'posits a
decline in profitability as resulting from declining productivity'.6
This is an extraordinary argument. Marx's theory is the exact
opposite?the rate of profit falls because of measures taken by the
capitalist class to increase productivity in order to compete more
effectively against their rivals. 'The progressive tendency of the
general rate of profit to fall is, therefore, just an expression
peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive
development of the social productivity of labour'.7

Competitive pressure forces capitalists to invest at least part of their
profits back into improving productivity. Improving the productivity of
the workforce enables bosses to cut the costs of production and thereby
reap a larger profit by maintaining or expanding sales at the previously
prevailing prices or by gaining additional market share and profit by
undercutting less productive rivals. To raise productivity, more and
more investment is put into plant and machinery and less into the
employment of labour. So more and more sophisticated machines are
introduced to displace labour. However, the exploitation of labour,
paying workers less than the value of the goods they produce, is the
source of surplus value, which in turn underpins profit. If more is
being invested on constant capital or dead labour, as Marx called
machines, and less on variable capital, the current workforce, then the
rate of return on investment provided by the surplus value pumped out of
the existing workforce will fall. What is rational and necessary for
each capitalist to do in order to compete effectively has the
consequence of undermining the rate of profit as a whole and thus
creates the conditions for economic crisis.

Brenner ignores the labour theory of value and rejects the law of the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall. His principal argument in doing
so

is to refer to the Okishio theorem. This purports to prove that any
investment undertaken to improve productivity in the pursuit of higher
profits will in fact lead to profits rising rather than falling. Indeed,
capitalists would simply be acting irrationally to undertake investment
that would lead to a lower rate of profit.

However, there have already been many convincing critiques of Okishio,
most of which Brenner ignores.8 The most compelling response to Okishio
is that of course no capitalist invests to raise productivity in order
to see his rate of profit fall. The first capitalist to improve his
technology and displace labour in the process will indeed attract into
his hands a bigger share of the pool of surplus value available, thereby
seeing his profits increase at the expense of his rivals. However, the
increased profit of the first innovator will decline as more and more of
his competitors follow suit. Each will in turn attract more surplus
value as they introduce the more productive technology, compared to the
profit they were making when they were less competitive. That is why
they are forced to improve their technology. The end result, however,
will be that the overall rate of profit will decline for all capitals
once the new technology is in place across the industry because less
surplus value is being created by the direct producers, the workforce,
relative to the total investment that has been made.

This tendency for the rate of profit to fall does not mean that there
has been a continuous and inexorable decline in the rate of profit as
capitalism has developed the forces of production, the technological
capacity of the economy. Marx clearly argued that the tendency for the
rate of profit to fall had to be understood in the context of a number
of countervailing factors whose operation can prevent the rate of profit
actually falling or help to restore the rate of profit after it has
fallen and a crisis has set in. One such factor is increasing the
exploitation of the working class in order to try to squeeze out more
surplus value from the workers. If the rate of exploitation could be
raised sufficiently, there would be no fall in the rate of profit. A
second counter-tendency is the lowering of the costs of constant capital
itself through a rise in the productivity in the production of machines,
etc. A third counter-tendency is any systemic leakage of investment out
of the circuit of the production of the means of production and
consumption. Arms spending can be such a leak and had a stabilising
effect on the post-war Western economies at least up until the late
1960s.

How effective these counter-tendencies are in sustaining higher rates of
profit and for how long depends on the circumstances. In a recession it
may become easier to raise the rate of exploitation as increased
unemployment reduces workers' confidence to fight. Recessions may also
lead to the devaluation and even destruction of capital. When companies
go bankrupt, their factories and machinery may be sold off at 'fire
sale' prices to be picked up by those who are still making profits.
Moreover, competitive pressures may be eased and market share and
profits boosted as rivals are forced out of business.

But there will also be profound problems in the countervailing
tendencies smoothly restoring health to the system. For example,
resistance from the working class will limit how far the increase in
exploitation can be taken, and anyway there are finite physical limits
to how long and hard workers can work and for how little reward. And as
the units of capital become ever bigger, it becomes more and more
difficult for businesses and the state to accept the clearout of the
excess capital in the system, a clearout needed to raise profit rates
significantly.

Brenner is right when he says that such is the scale of investment that
companies will prefer to take lower profits than seek wholesale
rationalisation and restructuring of their businesses. The growth of the
credit markets has been important, as Brenner emphasises, in both
stimulating spending and allowing big businesses in particular to
weather the storm by increasing, rolling over (renewing) and even
renegotiating their debts. Brenner brings out well how the financial
system, underwritten by the state, has played a very significant role in
propping up heavily invested business enterprises even at the cost of
lower profits, ultimately, both for the businesses and for the banks.
The alternative appears to be a potentially devastating collapse. Such a
collapse might destroy enough capital to bring down the organic
composition of capital and restore the rate of profit, but in the
meantime many of the government's most fervent and closest supporters
within the ruling class may suffer economic catastrophe and the seeds of
social disorder and even insurgency may have been sown.

Brenner is also right that profits will be depressed by higher cost
producers trying to compete with lower cost producers, rather than
scrapping their higher cost plant. In effect their original investments
are devalued by the introduction of lower cost technology by their
competitors. This is a problem which in some areas of production, where
technological innovation is occurring very rapidly, has worsened
significantly. This devaluation might ultimately lower the organic
composition but there will be no smooth transition here. Competition
will be intensified and profitability undermined. Some sections of
capital could take severe losses in the process, which in turn could
precipitate severe crisis. This is all perfectly compatible with
Brenner's theory and runs against Okishio's analysis, but Brenner's
theory should be seen as a fragment of Marx's and makes better sense
when integrated into the latter as we shall see below.

Brenner does not provide any new or compelling arguments to abandon
Marx's theory of crisis in favour of his own theory, and his own theory
has substantial weaknesses. Firstly, whilst it is true that older,
higher cost businesses will lose out on profit to newer lower cost
producers, why should this reduce the overall rate of profit rather than
redistribute profit from the higher cost producers to the lower cost?
Brenner's answer is this: 'Rather than merely replacing at the
established price the output hitherto but no longer produced by a higher
cost firm which has used up some of its means of production...real world
cost-cutting firms, by virtue of their reduced costs, will reduce the
price of their output and expand their output at the expense of the
higher cost competitors, while still maintaining for themselves the
established rate of profit'.9

This begs the question why the lower cost producers should only maintain
the 'established rate of profit'. Brenner seems to be responding to this
question in a footnote in which he says 'I assume here that the cost
cutting firms compete amongst themselves, as well as with the higher
cost firms, to drive down the rate of profit to its already established
level.' But this will not do at all. Why should competition amongst the
lower cost producers result in any particular rate of profit, as long as
the rate of profit is higher than that of the higher cost producers? In
other words, where does this 'already established level' come from?
Brenner assumes that the rate of profit is established through
competition but fails to explain what establishes one rate of profit
rather than another.10

For Marxists there is an explanation for the rate of profit. The rate of
profit certainly results from the process of competition but its level
is determined by the amount of surplus value pumped out of the direct
producers in relation to total investment on both machines and labour.
The labour theory of value provides a quantitative explanation of what
that rate of profit will be.11

Brenner also fails to explain why over time businesses cannot write down
their older higher cost investments and then invest to update and
restructure their production. There is after all some evidence of
exactly this happening over the last ten to 15 years in the face of
stiffer competition and a less supportive state and yet the world
economy is even more unstable than at any time in the last 25 years. The
fact is that despite this restructuring (and the increased exploitation
that has gone along with it) profit levels remain well below the levels
that prevailed during the long boom. The explanation for this is that
effective competition at the international level in major areas of
production requires a high organic composition of capital with the
effect of continuing downward pressure on the overall rate of profit.

The profit squeeze theory

A major target of Brenner's account is the profit squeeze theory, which
has been popular amongst some left economists over the last 25 years,
and its cousin on the right, the supply side theory. These theories
blame crises primarily on rising wages and falling productivity. Rising
wages and falling productivity are themselves blamed on worker militancy
and resistance to change. The policy prescription which follows from
this profit squeeze/supply side analysis is for the ruling class to try
to weaken trade union organisation to effect wage cuts, speed ups,
redundancies and the rationalisation and restructuring of industry.
Difficult though this might prove for the ruling class, if the profit
squeeze theorists are right the contradictions of capitalism are not as
fundamental as they would appear to be. It would not be unreasonable to
assume that the last 25 years of sustained assaults on the working class
ought to have restored the rate of profit to the levels of the 1950s and
1960s.

Brenner provides strong evidence in his historical account that the
profit squeeze theory does not explain the onset of instability in the
early 1970s or why this period of instability has continued for so long.
However, his general theoretical arguments against profit squeeze
theories seem to me less valid.

Brenner accepts that capital accumulation can produce a tight labour
market (ie full employment or at least shortages of labour with the
required skills) which will push up wages through competition between
capitals to attract and retain labour and through the enhanced
combativity of a more confident workforce. Excessive increases in wage
costs cut into profits and falling profits then precipitate an economic
downturn.

Other costs, however, are also pushed up as a boom develops. Bosses
confident about expanding markets and rising profits increase
investment. But that investment is unplanned overall and not
co-ordinated to stay in line with the expansion of the supply of raw
materials and machinery, as well as the supply of suitably skilled
labour. Costs are pushed up, but when the new production from that
investment comes on stream, again unplanned overall to match the likely
demand for those goods, overproduction for the market pushes prices
down. Higher costs that cannot then be passed on in higher prices
squeeze profits. This is one of the explanations for at least some of
the boom/bust cycles which have afflicted capitalism throughout its
history.12

Brenner makes two arguments against this analysis. Firstly, he argues
that whilst profit squeezes may explain local crises, they cannot
explain the onset of generalised system-wide crisis.

Victories by labour in economic conflicts tend to be relatively
localised; reductions in profitability resulting from the successful
exertion of workers' power tend therefore to be correspondingly
localised; nevertheless, there is a generalised, system-wide pressure on
employers to make the average rate of profit on pain of extinction. To
the extent therefore that workers' gains reduce their employers' rate of
profit below the average, they undercut capital accumulation, creating
the conditions, in the medium run, for their own eradication.13

Now it has to be said that for all one's sympathies with Brenner's
ultimate objective, his arguments here are weak. He states as fact the
inevitably localised nature of workers' confidence and militancy. This
is not an absolute truth but rather a pessimistic picture of class
struggle and the contagious effects of victory. But even given that
there was considerable unevenness in the combativity of the working
class as we moved into the economic downturn 25 years ago, Brenner
ignores the fact that a generalised investment boom can cause shortages
of labour in many countries thereby forcing wages up. Moreover the late
1960s and early 1970s did see a generalised rise in class struggle which
did exert an upward pressure on wages. This did not cause the crisis?on
the contrary, it was already existing pressures on profitability which
led employers to mount the attacks which helped to spark these
struggles?but it did reflect the effect of full employment on workers'
strength and confidence, and it presented a major obstacle to capital's
ability to overcome the crisis.

Brenner's argument against the profit squeeze theory also ignores the
way other costs will also rise and cause difficulties for profitability
as overproduction sets in. Just because some capitalists may benefit
hugely from sudden price rises in the commodities they own does not mean
that huge transfers of wealth within the capitalist class cannot have
highly disruptive effects on the world economy. This, after all, is
surely the lesson of the oil price hikes in 1974 and again in 1979.

Finally his argument ignores the transmission mechanisms that lead to a
localised fall in profitability and therefore economic downturn in one
country or region, transferring to other countries and regions and
ultimately across the world economy as a whole. International trade will
mean a fall off in exports to countries in recession, profits on
investments in those countries by multinationals may also be hit and, as
the financial contagion from South East Asia has confirmed, the
financial effects of a downturn in one part of the world economy can
have dramatic repercussions in other parts. How dramatic the effects of
such a downturn in a national or regional economy are will depend on
such factors as the relative size of the economy, the proportion of
world trade it accounts for, international financial exposure to the
economy and the general rate of profit prevailing across the world
economy. Brenner's argument against profit squeeze theories of the onset
of crisis therefore dismisses some of the elements needed to provide an
analysis of the boom/bust cycle.

The real point here is not that profit squeeze theories do not have some
validity in the analysis of crises, but rather why in certain
circumstances downturns are relatively mild and capitalism can recover
from them relatively quickly and in other circumstances they are much
more severe and it is much more difficult to restore high levels of
profitability and growth to the system. In other words we need a theory
of longer term and more ineradicable trends in the capitalist system and
a theory of the boom/bust trade cycle.

Here Brenner's  principal argument against the supply siders has more
relevance. His argument is that the long downturn could not have been so
severe and continued for so long if the profit squeeze/supply side
theories provide the principal explanation for the crisis of
profitability over the last 25 years. Workers 'price themselves out of
jobs', weakening confidence of other workers to resist speed up, wage
cuts, etc. States vary in their ability to secure such increased
exploitation but sooner or later will succeed. For example, there has,
as Brenner argues, undoubtedly been a significant rise in the rate of
exploitation in the US as wages have stagnated and even fallen from the
early 1980s through to the last couple of years. Capitalists can also
shift production, at least over the medium term, to parts of the country
or to other countries where wage costs are lower and the workforce more
'flexible'.

Brenner's argument clearly has some cogency, but profit squeeze
theorists might reasonably retort that such is the scale of investment
in plant and machinery (a fact Brenner himself uses in articulating his
own theory), and such are the links between particular capitals and
particular states that productive capital is much less mobile even in
the medium term than Brenner suggests. Indeed, this is an important
argument against the wilder flights of imagination of theorists of
'globalisation'.14 But if this is so, then the burden of reversing the
decline in profits will fall solely on pushing down wages, downsizing
workforces etc, within the social and historical constraints of the
society in which the capital has been invested, and this could take much
longer than Brenner allows for.

The problem here is that Brenner is again vulnerable to those
statistical studies which have purported to show that the profit squeeze
theory is correct. These studies have looked at national income
statistics broken down in two ways: firstly to provide a picture of
capital/output ratios (taken by some to represent the organic
composition of capital) and secondly, the profit share (the distribution
of income between labour and capital, taken as a measure of the rate of
exploitation). Such studies claim that it is changes in the latter and
not the former which are correlated with a decline in profit rates.15
Brenner provides no serious challenge to them. Challenges do, however,
exist in, for example, work by Fred Moseley, Anwar Shaikh and E Ahmet
Tonak, and Tom Weisskopf.16 The work of Moseley, and Shaikh and Tonak in
particular, use the labour theory of value to recalculate the raw
statistics that profit squeeze theorists content themselves with. This
reinterpretation shows that the fall in the rate of profit in the US has
been due largely to the rise in the organic composition of capital (and
to the growth of unproductive, non-surplus value producing labour).

Arms spending and uneven development

Brenner accepts that arms spending had a stabilising effect on the US
and the world economy for a period of time after the war.

During the second half of the [1950s], as the US economy lost
steam...the hugely increased government spending of the post-war
epoch?military spending in particular?was obviously critical for
maintaining economic stability, not only within the US but in the world
economy as a whole... During the 1950s approximately 10 percent of GNP
went to military spending and, according to one major study of US
industrial growth conducted in the latter part of the decade, 'military
demand had been the major and almost exclusive dynamic growth factor in
recent years.' Military production had a major advantage for existing
capitals: its output did not compete for their markets.17

It is a virtue of Brenner's argument here that he sees arms spending not
only as a Keynesian style demand boost to the economy, counteracting
declines in the rate of private capital accumulation, but also as having
a special role to play in alleviating downward pressures on the rate of
profit arising out of the process of competitive accumulation itself,
because armaments are not in general thrown back onto the market.

However, the analysis would be strengthened in two ways if he were to
accept the analysis established by Cliff, Kidron and Harman. Firstly,
arms spending offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the
long boom because it represented a diversion of investment away from the
production of the means of production and of consumption. Arms spending
failed to feed back into the productive circuit of capital. It therefore
did not depress the rate of profit by raising the organic composition of
capital.

Secondly, although Brenner is right to see that the erosion of US
competitiveness by German and Japanese capital put downward pressure on
the rate of profit, he ignores the fact that the concentration of arms
spending in the US and the UK allowed Germany and Japan, limited in
their arms investment as a result of the post-war settlement, to gain
that competitive advantage which in turn forced the US and UK to reduce
arms investment. This fits so neatly into Brenner's uneven development
account of the crisis that it is surprising he does not see its
pertinence.

The fall in arms spending did release funds for productive investment,
encouraged by the need of US and UK capital to fight off German and
Japanese competition. And this began to push down the rate of profit as
the organic composition of capital began to rise on a world scale.

The great strength of the theory of the permanent arms economy was that
it provided a theory of why capitalism had entered the long boom and
also identified why that long boom could not persist forever. It is a
theory that was crucially connected to a certain view of how the
concentration and centralisation of capital had changed the role of the
state, ushering in an era of state capitalism in which economic
competition was increasingly accompanied and even displaced by military
competition. This change in the nature of world capitalism in the 20th
century provides an explanation for the two massively destructive world
wars and the unprecedented levels of peacetime arms spending that took
place during the Cold War.18

Brenner does not provide any of this framework and, although he has an
analysis of why the long boom came to an end, there is no indication in
his general theory, or his empirical description, of how the theory of
crisis would apply in different periods. For example, is the Great
Depression of the 1930s explicable in terms of Brenner's theory and if
so how did capitalism get out of it and bring about the long boom? And
what of the crises of the 19th century?

The state and internationalisation

Brenner's historical account concentrates on three blocs of capital, the
US, West Germany and Japan, and their interrelations. He does not
provide a broader theorisation of the changing relationship of capital
and state and fails to theorise the growing internationalisation of
trade, production and finance.19 This internationalisation has meant
greater limits being placed on individual states' room for manoeuvre;
limits on the ability to reflate the economy, to manipulate its exchange
rate and to control its interest rates. This is not to say that states
have lost all power and we now live in a completely laissez faire world.
However, Brenner's account excessively concentrates on the three blocs
as though they constituted cohesive units of capital, where states have
relative freedom of action in relation to the other blocs.

Brenner's failure to theorise these complex and contradictory
relationships is most in evidence in his failure to give an adequate
account of the growth and the internationalisation of the financial
system. Naturally, we should not fall into the illusion that the
travails of world capitalism are the product of an ideologically driven
deregulation of the financial system which has turned world capitalism
into a casino. We are on Brenner's side in emphasising how the fall in
the rate of profit in the productive sector has been fundamental to the
instability of the last 25 years. However, the financial system is an
integral part of any capitalist system and developments in recent years
have brought into existence far greater forces of instability. Although
Brenner makes limited reference to the financial system, particularly in
relation to exchange rates between the three major blocs, his account
suffers from analysing exchange rates only in terms of state management.
More fundamentally, he does not provide an adequate explanation of the
globalisation of financial capital and the implications of it for the
instability of world capitalism. No analysis of the current crisis can
afford to omit an account of the destabilising effects of the
international financial system, of the power of the state to prop the
system up and the limits on that power posed by internationalisation and
deregulation.20

Brenner's conclusion

Finishing his account in early 1998, Brenner left open the question of
whether there would be a new boom or the continuation of the instability
brought on by overproduction and overcapacity and the attendant
depressed profit rates. In his 'optimistic' scenario of a new boom
Brenner ends up by implying that, now the US has restructured so
successfully, there may be sunny uplands ahead if only major states
abandoned policies which were depressing domestic spending, originally
necessary to effect restructuring, and now adopted more expansionary
policies to boost domestic consumption. Such policies could produce once
again a virtuous circle of higher profits and higher growth.

But this is the most naive Keynesianism which ignores the ongoing
contradictions in the process of competition and the production of an
adequate rate of profit. Firstly, Brenner exaggerates the recovery of
profitability in the US. Joel Geier and Ahmed Shawki have demonstrated
that profit rates in manufacturing industry in the US in the 1990s have
only risen to levels comparable to those prevailing just before the
onset of the serious recession of 1974.21

Secondly, he provides little evidence that the unevenness in the
development of capitalist productivity, which is at the heart of his
theory of crisis, has in any way diminished in the last few years. There
would appear to have been significant shifts in the balance of advantage
between Japan, Germany and the US over the last few years, but Brenner
provides no evidence that this has diminished the imbalance between
higher and lower cost producers which he believes is the primary cause
of lower profit rates. Brenner may have been misled here by his
excessively nationally oriented analysis. Even though the balance of
advantage may have shifted between national economies and may have
changed on an aggregate basis, this does not mean that in particular
industries both within and between countries, the imbalance between
higher and lower cost producers does not persist. Difference in
investment rates constantly renew such imbalances. Japan's rate of
productive investment in export oriented industries has held up at
relatively high rates at least until the last couple of years. And the
enormous investment boom in South East Asia in the 1990s, only some of
which spilled over into speculation, has meant a very significant growth
of lower cost production in areas of internationally tradable goods,
putting pressure on the profitability of producers in the advanced
industrialised countries. Moreover, the speed with which costs have
fallen in particular industries in recent years as a result of
technological innovation can give even greater advantages to 'late'
entry producers.

Brenner fails to identify a further element which should counter the
idea that any such uplands are around the corner. The US may have had
some success in both restructuring capital to raise productivity and the
pressures of recession and stagnation in the German and Japanese
economies may have produced some similar if even more limited successes
there. We should therefore avoid the idea that world capitalism is
simply stuck in stagnation as states seek to avoid the potentially
cataclysmic consequences of clearing out the excess capital which is
holding profit rates down. Capitalism is not a static system. The
instability of the last 25 years has been a history of sharp crises and
recessions followed by some recovery in growth and profit rates.

Those recoveries have, however, been limited and contradictory
demonstrating the limited success the ruling class has had in restoring
profit rates on a sustainable basis. Moreover, the revival of investment
in the last three or four years in the US, the high levels of productive
investment in Japan even up until 1996, despite domestic stagnation and
an incipient banking crisis, and the very high levels of productive
investment in the Tigers at least until their collapse, are all
indicators of strong potential upward pressure on the organic
composition of capital worldwide, and therefore downward pressure on the
rate of profit, despite higher rates of exploitation and
restructuring.22

With profit rates still relatively low worldwide, with financial markets
continuing to show high levels of volatility, which lower interest rates
may not be sufficient, in the short term anyway, to counter, the
prospects are not for a new boom but rather for an unfolding crisis
which it will be very difficult for the ruling class to contain. This
conclusion, which was foreshadowed in this journal in spring 199823 and
which has grown out of Marx's theory of crisis applied to the
contemporary world, seems much closer to the mark than Brenner's.

The labour theory of value is fundamental in identifying that
exploitation is the source of profit in the system, that there is a
fundamental conflict of interest between the capital and labour and in
providing the framework in which Marx's law of the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall makes sense. And the falling rate of profit theory is
vital in understanding why crises occur under capitalism, why they have
become so intractable and why there is no alternative to the needless
destruction and barbarism of capitalism short of socialism?a socialism
in which those who produce the wealth in society, the working class,
collectively plan that production to meet need rather than profit.

Notes

1     Brenner has given his name to a major debate on the left over the
transition from feudalism to capitalism. His analysis of that transition
focused on the class struggle to the detriment of an acknowledgement of
the key role played by the gradual development of the forces of
production which, when fettered by the relations of production,
generated the era of revolution out of which capitalism finally emerged.
For a clear exposition and convincing critique of Brenner's position on
the transition from feudalism to capitalism, see C Harman, Marxism and
History (London, 1998), ch1.

2     R Brenner, New Left Review 229, May/June 1998, p7.

3     Ibid, p261.

4     Ibid, p34.

5     Brenner, in fact, absurdly suggests that Marx's theory shares a
Malthusian character with the profit squeeze/supply side theories to
which he is strongly opposed. Malthus argued that economic crisis was
the product of the tendency of the population to grow more quickly than
any improvement in the productivity of agriculture. The connection
between Malthus and profit squeeze/supply side theories is that the
latter argue that in certain conditions productivity growth will fail to
keep pace with wage growth thereby cutting profits. In other words
economic crisis is the result of a 'secular tendency to the declining
growth of labour productivity.' Ibid, p10.

6     R Brenner, op cit, p11.

7     K Marx, Capital, vol 3, ch 13 (London, 1981), p213.

8     Responses to Okishio are to be found, for example, in C Harman,
Explaining the Crisis (London, 1983), ch 1; J Weeks, Capital and
Exploitation (London, 1981), ch 8; J Weeks, 'Equilibrium, Uneven
Development and the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall', Capital and
Class 16 (1982); P N Junankar, Marx's Economics (Oxford, 1982),
pp99-101; D Foley, Understanding Capital (Cambridge, 1986), pp136-139; G
Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy (London, 1991), pp140-141; and
E Mandel and A Freeman (eds), Ricardo, Marx and Sraffa (London, 1984),
passim. Foley has demonstrated that Okishio's theorem is only valid on
the assumption that the real wage (the basket of consumption goods that
a worker can afford to buy) remains constant. This in turn implies that
all of the benefits of an increase in the productivity of labour will
accrue to the capitalist class. A much more realistic assumption would
be that some of the benefits of higher productivity will accrue to the
working class in the form of higher living standards, ie a higher real
wage. This is, of course, perfectly compatible with a fall in the value
of labour power and a rising rate of exploitation, as Marx pointed out.

9     R Brenner, op cit, p25.

10     In this he seems to be rather perversely following Adam Smith's
theory of profit.

11     To put the point algebraically, let the value of constant capital
(machines etc) = c, the value of variable capital (labour) = v and
surplus value (the basis of profit) = s. The organic composition of
capital is represented by the ratio of constant capital to variable
capital, c/v. A rising organic composition of capital therefore occurs
when c increases relative to v. The rate of profit is defined as the
return on the whole of the capital invested. The return may be equated
to the surplus value that is produced and realised. The total investment
is equivalent to the sum of the constant capital and variable capital.
The rate of profit is therefore given by s/c + v. The rate of
exploitation is defined as the ratio of surplus value to the variable
capital (wages) or s/v. If c rises more quickly relative to v, which it
is likely to do in the pursuit of competitive advantage from higher
productivity, then the rate of profit s/c + v will fall unless s
increases significantly as a result of increased exploitation.

12     It is worth noting that, in the model of the business cycle Marx
develops in Capital, vol 1, pt 7 (London, 1976), he makes fluctuations
in wages an important determinant of overall fluctuations in the
economy, and in Capital, vol 3 (London, 1981), he dismisses the
underconsumptionist theory of crisis pointing out that wages tend to
rise at the peak of the cycle. I owe these points to Alex Callinicos.

13     R Brenner, op cit, p21.

14     See in particular C Harman, 'Globalisation: a Critique of a New
Orthodoxy', International Socialism 73 (1996).

15     Studies of this kind include A Glyn and B Sutcliffe, British
Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Squeeze (London, 1972); A Glyn, J
Harrison and P Armstrong, World Capitalism Since 1945 (London, 1991);
and T Weisskopf, 'Marxian Crisis Theory and the Rate of Profit in the
Post-War US Economy', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3(1), March 1979.

16     See F Moseley, The Falling Rate of Profit in the Post-War United
States Economy (London, 1991); A Shaikh and E A Tonak, Measuring the
Wealth of Nations (Cambridge, 1994); and T Weisskopf, 'A Comparative
Analysis of Profitability Trends in the Advanced Capitalist Economies',
in F Moseley and E Wolff, International Perspectives on Profitability
and Accumulation (Aldershot, 1992).

17     R Brenner, op cit, p56. Brenner refers to R DeGrasse, Military
Expansion, Economic Decline (New York, 1983), pp20-21; and S H Robock,
Changing Regional Economies (Midwest Research Institute, 1957); MRI-252,
quoted in M Wiedenbaum, 'Some Economic Aspects of Military Procurement',
Current Economic Comment (November 1960), p10. He ignores the extensive
literature on the effects of the permanent arms economy in, for example,
M Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War (London, 1970), and C Harman,
Explaining the Crisis (London, 1984).

18     The pioneering analysis of the permanent arms economy is to be
found in T Cliff, 'Perspectives for the Permanent War Economy' in
Neither Washington Nor Moscow (London, 1982), pp101-107. It was then
developed by M Kidron in  Western Capitalism since the War, op cit, and
C Harman in Explaining the Crisis, op cit. The relevance of the theory
of state capitalism, first established in relation to Russia in T Cliff,
State Capitalism in Russia (London, 1988), is demonstrated in T Cliff,
Trotskyism after Trotsky (London, 1999), and in many other writings
including C Harman, Explaining the Crisis, op cit, and 'The State and
Capitalism Today', International Socialism 51 (1991).

19     See C Harman, ibid.

20     For more on this see R Hoveman, 'Financial Crises and the Real
Economy',  International Socialism 78 (1998), pp55-76.

21     See J Geier and A Shawki, 'Contradictions of the "Miracle"
Economy', International Socialist Review 2, Fall 1997, p7.

22     I may be accused of making a priori assumptions here myself. In
response I would say that, if one accepts the cogency of Marx's theory
of crisis, then intensified worldwide competition and the reinvestment
this will force should, other things being equal, raise the organic
competition of capital and push down the rate of profit. However, to
prove that other things have been equal, detailed empirical work and
analysis is much needed.

23     See International Socialism 78, 79 and 81 (all 1998).

--

xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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From aabdo at webtv.net  Sun Sep 24 21:30:36 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 22:30:36 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] The Yugoslav Election
Message-ID: <14500-39CEC6DC-1324@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

It is clear that the Yugoslav government of Milosevic has been backed
into the same corner that the Sandinistas found themselves in,  in 1990.
They called elections in the midst of a war with the United States.

In addition, it appears that both leaderships misread their own
populations dominant sentiment of being desirous above all else, of
avoiding any continued military conflict with a vastly superior, US led
force.      The elections were seen by the Yugoslav population, as an
opportunity to try to bailout of being further bashed, in a conflict
where victory would be impossible to achieve.    It is as simple as
that.

Unfortunately, now we have to listen to the imperialist propaganda that
will maintain that the vote was a 'free' outpouring of sentiment against
those that spoke up for national independence and autonomy.      Like it
could really be possible to achieve any true democracy  in a situation
of a dominant power terrorizing a much smaller nation.

Just like with the Nicaraguan
 elections, US money was pumped into the coffers of 'opposition'
candidates.     And the threat of a renewed, and enlarged war, more
impoverishing yet than the previous bloodshed, was held over the heads
of an entire nation.      This hallmark of a brutish, bullying
super-power using its brute military power to terrorize, is now standard
US policy throughout the world.     Ask the Colombians, Palestinians,
and the Iraqis.

And thus closes this latest chapter, in a misguided Left effort to
support something it called, 'self determination' in The Balkans.     A
truly ugly picture emerges of this reformist pseudo- reform 'socialism',
allied with NGOs of dubious financing from imperialist coffers.
Together, they prepped the way for imperialist intervention, without
significant home opposition.      The intellectual leaders of this
trend, were all busy analyzing the defects of the official enemy.

An oppostion to further US state terrorism has to be built on the basis
of directly confronting the current solid worker support for the US
military.      It is a mistake to just go about our business in the
imperialist countries, until maybe, just maybe, somewhere else outside
our national boundaries, a strong enough Movement can be built to defeat
militarily, all alone, our governments' armed forces.

Activists must mobilize a vanguard current, that can build a movement
that will initially be totally unpopular amongst our own national
working classes.      The Green parties won't do it, the Social
Democratic 'labor' parties won't do it, and quite frankly, the majority
of the Anarchist and Communist parties won't do it either.     Yet it
must be done.      The world working class demands it of us.

Tony Abdo












From zapata at sezampro.yu  Mon Sep 25 05:45:22 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 13:45:22 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] The Yugoslav Election
References: <14500-39CEC6DC-1324@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>
Message-ID: <00f701c026ed$062b9cc0$ccbe6ac2@k382>

This depiction of Kostunica as hardliner and die hard nationalist is true
enough - he was pictured with a rifle on Kosovo few years ago and he always
had considered himself as "US-hater" and "2 die for Serbia" type of national
extremist.
     @g
 Stratfor.com's Weekly Global Intelligence Update - 25 September
2000


Checkmate in Yugoslavia?
25 September 2000


On their face, the Yugoslav elections appear to have failed in
clarifying the country's political situation. Slobodan Milosevic is
still president, has succeeded at least in postponing a day of
reckoning and the West's crafty old enemy sits, for the moment, in
Belgrade.

But in reality, a clarifying moment is unfolding. Amidst the riot
police, the fights and the mixed results another round of voting in
two weeks an important change has occurred. Milosevic may be
replaced, but by another hard-line Serbian nationalist, Vojislav
Kostunica. Kostunica will not necessarily be the easy ally
Washington and London have hoped for, but he is most likely too
strong for Milosevic to defeat.

The run-up to the voting created tremendous problems for Milosevic.
Seeking to dispel the notion that he is not a democratic leader, he
called an early election and quickly trailed in public opinion
polls by Beografiti, Beta and Strategic Marketing. The accuracy of
polling in the Balkans is questionable. But the impact was not.
Even if Milosevic had managed to honestly rustle up enough votes to
win on Sunday, the polls made it impossible for him to claim that
he had done so fairly.

Even now in Yugoslavia and abroad, the fact that Milosevic trailed
but didn't lose outright is being shrewdly turned against him. In
effect, it has become impossible for Milosevic to again lay claim
to being democratically elected even if he wins next month. He can
govern if the police and military continue to back him, but he
cannot extract what he wanted from the elections a new stamp of
authority.

How did Milosevic, as crafty a politician as there is, allow
himself to get boxed in? The answer goes back over a year ago, to
the campaign waged by the West in general and the United States in
particular since the end of the Kosovo war. Washington hoped that
the loss of Kosovo would topple Milosevic and his regime.

As a result, the Clinton administration supported a range of his
opponents, labeling them democratic alternatives when in fact they
comprised a mixed bag of ideologies and interests, linked only by
opposition to the president. The campaign ended earlier this year
in abysmal failure. Regardless of their view on Milosevic, Serbs
hated NATO and the United States; the support of either was the
kiss of death. And the West's favorites were, in fact, a crew of
losers who wasted precious time jockeying for position against one
another.
But something changed in Western capitals a few months ago. Instead
of seeking to overthrow the entire Milosevic regime including
friends and supporters the Clinton administration signaled a shift,
claiming it wanted to get rid of Milosevic only. Subsequent offers
by the European Union echoed this, suggesting that certain Serb-
owned companies might do business with the EU, while those with
nefarious ties to the regime might not. Most likely, the U.S.
government realized that to extricate itself from the morass in
Kosovo, the only choice was to deal with the faction around
Milosevic.

In months since, the real tension in Belgrade has not been between
democrats and the oligarchs of the regime, but within the circle of
oligarchs itself. There have been two camps. In one are members of
the elite who have decided to end the impasse and protect their
positions. In the other is Milosevic, who decided to play the
nationalist card one more time with the election and bring
followers in the Socialist Party of Serbia back into his camp.

But Milosevic may have miscalculated. He did not count on the
emergence of a nationalist like himself as the main challenger.
Vojislav Kostunica derives his popularity from a track record that
reflects Milosevic's own. Kostunica is a hard-line Serbian
nationalist and a committed opponent of the West. He condemned last
year's war and labeled NATO's prosecution of the air campaign as a
series of criminal acts.  He has said that he would not cooperate
with the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. And
Kostunica has flatly stated he would not turn in Milosevic,
according to the Yugoslav press.

Most importantly, Kostunica draws his own popularity from the same
well as Milosevic. Kostunica has gone out of his way to clarify
that, unlike the rest of the opposition, he has accepted no money
from the United States; a top U.S. official has confirmed the
claim. To some degree, Kostunica spells trouble for Washington. If
he wins, he will not take orders or transform Yugoslavia into a
portrait of Western hopes, all neatly fulfilled.

But more immediately, it appears Milosevic has walked into a trap.
He called an election nine months before the constitution required,
saw unreliable polls constructed into iron-clad arguments against
him and watched as his own circle of followers considered their
futures independent of his.

The West, too, may have lent a helping hand, albeit indirectly. The
United Nations announced it would allow Serbs in Kosovo to vote,
for example, but peacekeeping troops would neither escort Serbs to
the polls nor safeguard polling stations and ballot boxes. Finally,
the EU's promise to lift economic sanctions if Milosevic is
defeated sweetens the deal for members of the Serb elite.

After years of bumbling, it appears the West has trapped Milosevic.
An important discussion will now take place within the Serbian
political elite: Will Kostunica protect them if he wins, cleaning
out only those closest to Milosevic? The elite is likely posing the
same self-interested questions to Washington.

If the right answers are delivered to the right people, the trap
will finally be closed. Even if Milosevic moves to stage a coup,
the people he will need the most will be ready to turn on him.

----- Original Message -----
From: Tony Abdo <aabdo at webtv.net>
To: <leninist-international at lists.wwpublish.com>;
<crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>; <sldrty-l at igc.topica.com>
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2000 5:30 AM
Subject: [CrashList] The Yugoslav Election





From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 25 08:08:07 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 15:08:07 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] BBC: Oil prices fall sharply
Message-ID: <002401c026fa$07c7fbc0$256b8cd4@mjones>

Monday, 25 September, 2000, 12:01 GMT 13:01 UK

World oil prices have started to tumble, following Friday's
announcement by the United States government that it would release
supplies from its emergency reserves.
In London, Brent crude for November delivery dropped to $29.30 a
barrel before recovering to $30.32 by 1100 GMT, down 93 cents on the
day. Last week, prices had peaked at $34.98 a barrel.

The latest price falls came as the European Commission president
Romano Prodi was due to meet senior executives from Europe's largest
oil companies and a top Saudi official reiterated a call for
governments to cut taxes on oil products.

A week ago, oil prices had hit a 10-year high amid mounting tension in
the Middle East - prompting the US administration to announce it would
dip into its vast reserves for the first time since the 1991 Gulf war.

EU under pressure

Analysts said the European Union was now likely to come under pressure
to release some of its own reserves, to maintain the momentum of the
price falls.

An EU spokesman said the commission did not intend "for the moment" to
use the reserves but confirmed that discussions on the issue were
continuing among EU member states.

At 1400 GMT, Mr Prodi was in Brussels due to meet executives from
TotalFinaElf, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco, ENI, Norsk Hydro, Repsol
and Statoil to discuss market developments.

Speaking earlier in Prague at the IMF/World Bank annual meeting, the
head of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (Sama - central bank)
Hamad al-Sayyari called on Western countries to cut taxes on refined
products.

He said that Saudi Arabia "has continued to spearhead the effort to
stabilise oil prices" although the price of oil "today in real terms
is still less than half its level in 1980, despite its recent rebound.

"It is imperative now that the major oil consuming countries,
especially those with excessive taxes on petroleum products, play
their part in ensuring stable market conditions. They can do so by
reducing the tax burden on consumers."

More expected

US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced on Friday that 30m
barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be
released during October.

Mr Richardson denied that the move was designed to ease oil prices -
but rather to ensure that American consumers had enough heating oil to
see them through the winter.

President Bill Clinton has not ruled a further release of reserves
ahead of November's presidential elections. He says he will assess the
situation in 30 days.

On Monday, Spain's El Pais newspaper suggested the Spanish government
will put pressure on France, which currently holds the EU presidency,
to tap into the union's oil reserves.

The falling price of oil price has hit fuel company share prices on
the FTSE 100. BP Amoco fell 17 pence to 592, while Shell fell 10p to
557.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Mon Sep 25 07:20:08 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 14:20:08 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Why Big Oil backed the fuel protests in Europe
In-Reply-To: <F106JB1ndcx3Vp20N3900001e47@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <002001c026f3$5341bf20$256b8cd4@mjones>

 Darryl d'Sa wrote
>
>
> Why Big Oil backed the fuel protests in Europe
>
> NAOMI KLEIN
> http://archives.theglobeandmail.com
> The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
> Wednesday, September 20, 2000
>
> When I arrived in London on Sunday, the city was
> like a jittery heroin junkie who had just shot up.

Hmmm. I live here, and it is true the atmosphere got mometarily
unpleasant and jittery. But the reason was not so much because people
were afraid that petrol would run out, but that they *expected* it to
run out and *wanted* it to run out. This is because *everyone* has an
immediate personal interest in getting fuel taxes reduced. The
refinery pickets were popular, their action received massive albeit
passive popular support.

This does not mean that ordinary people are anti-Green (they are not)
and it does not mean that there is a sinister plot between William
Hague, Big Oil, the CIA and the truckers to destabilise Tony Blair, as
Guardian conspiracy-theorists seemed to be arguing, using the example
of how Allende was toppled: that is a simply absurd historical and
logical non sequitur.


>
> The companies -- Shell, BP, Texaco et al. --
> claimed they wouldn't ask their tanker drivers to
> drive past the blockades because they feared for
> their "safety." The claim is bizarre.

As a matter of fact, it is not bizarre at all, if only because the
tanker drivers and the picketers were often personally known to one
another. The tanker drivers are mostly on short-term contracts and owe
no loyalty to the oil firms. It seems unlikely that the oil firms
*could* have made them cross the picket lines even if they'd tried.
The devil is in the detail.

> the
> truckers' "pickets" were illegal blockades since
> the protesters were not members of trade unions --

No, they weren't, actually, and precisely *because* their action was
not organised officially (and nor did they commit trespass or build
barricades to physically obstruict access to the highway). It's
important to get the detail right if you plan to draw big conclusions.

> So why would the oil companies tacitly
> co-operate with anti-oil protesters? Easy. So long
> as attention is focused on high oil taxes, rather
> than on soaring oil prices, the pressure is off the
> multinationals and the OPEC cartel. The focus is
> also on access to oil -- as opposed to the more
> threatening issue of access to less polluting, more
> sustainable energy sources than oil.

What "more> sustainable energy sources" than oil? The whole problem is
that there *are* no realistic alternatives to oil, *especially* for
transportation. Only in Disneyland will wishing make it so. Of course
it is true that oil producers think their product is comparatively
over-taxed, and so it is. That does not mean that oil production can
be increased whatever level of tax is levied, because oil production
is at or near its peak. Opec countries in particular (but also,
Russia, UK, Norway...) are not able to increase output because they
are already producing to capacity.

>
> the
> protests likely caused more real economic damage
> than every Earth First!, Greenpeace and anti-free
> trade protest combined. And yet, on Britain's
> roads last week, there was none of the pepper
> spray, batons or rubber bullets now used when
> labour, human-rights and environmental activists
> stage roadblocks that cause only a small fraction
> of the fuel protest's disruption. "We need to
> maintain the rule of law," the police invariably
> say as they clear the roadways, stifling the
> protesters' messages while painting them as
> threats to our collective safety.

Is it argued that the British police are taking orders from Opposition
leader Hague, and are themselves undermining law and order in order to
destroy Blair?

We need to ground ourselves in reality. If the police had taken
draconian action, there almost certainly would have been widespread
civil disturbances in Britain. That is the reason why they were
seemingly inactive. If the pickets had persisted and volatile public
moods swung against them, there would certainly have been instant
police reprisals.

When protests are the lightning rod for generalised and often
inarticulate popular dissatisfaction, they serve an important and
well-understood political purpose. This was also true of the Poll-tax
riots which so undermined Mrs Thatcher's government. It was also true
of the British coalminers' strike of 1974, which won widespread
popular support. It was enough for miners to raise their banner on a
bridge over a railway, for passing trains to come to a stop -- because
the traindriver recognised the men on the bridge overhead as a 'picket
line'; and then too, the police did not intervene much. In that case,
it was a Tory government which was destroyed, and a Labour Government
which was elected. In that case too, the underlying cause of mass
protest was an inflationary hike in oil prices (which quickly fed thru
into dramtically increased grain prices: and shortage of bread has
always been a prime cause of popular mobilisations, from ancient Rome
to 1789 to 1917 to 1974; and may be so again, despite today's
seemingly glutted world grain markets).

Conspiracy theory does not make good history.

Mark




From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 25 18:29:53 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 20:29:53 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Red-baiting to split the antiwar movement on antiwar.com
Message-ID: <56.111f75e.27014801@aol.com>

Dear people,

The following appeared on antiwar.com today.

Best regards,
Jared Israel

 
The Reality Check is in the Mail
by Thomas Fleming
Editor, Chronicles Magazine
9/25/00
 

What in the world has got into George Szamuely? In writing about the 
forthcoming Yugoslav elections, his brilliant cynicism appears to have 
deserted him, and in supporting Milosevic he has fallen into the trap that 
has been so carefully prepared by leftists who are pining for the good old 
days when good guys like Stalin and Tito were running their respective shows. 
Maybe he has been reading too much Jared Israel. 

Of course the American empire is trying to control events in the Balkans, and 
it may even be true that the US State Department and its satellite agencies 
have finally given up on the New Hitler they have kept in power so long as 
the man we love to hate. Milosevic has served US purposes all too well, in 
brokering the Dayton Accords, in provoking the conflict over Kosovo, in 
justifying the brutal sanctions whose principal effect is to keep Milosevic 
and his stooges in power and luxury. Perhaps the Albrights and Gelbards have 
decided to bid a reluctant farewell to their best friend Slobo, but that does 
not mean they are embracing his opponent Vojslav Kostunica.

In fact, the State Department hates Kostunica. You can tell this both from a 
long series of official statements about his "extreme nationalism" and from 
the negative opinions expressed by the constellation of Washington think 
tanks that follow the State Department line. When I discussed Kostunica with 
several Balkans experts from the department, they were openly contemptuous: 
He was too anti-American, too nationalistic, and ? above all ? too honest. 
They did not think he would take their money, even if funneled through the 
usual sources ? or would he? I had to tell them the bad news that he would 
not.

Yes, Zoran Djingic among others has been on the take from the Americans, and 
yes, in the desperate circumstances in which his country finds itself, Dr. 
Kostunica has welcomed Djingic?s political support. Either in the Balkans or 
in the enlightened neighborhoods of Manhattan where George devotes himself to 
reading good books, this is not called treason, it is called politics. 

When the usual assorted leftists and crazies attack Kostunica, they can give 
only minimal aid to Milosevic and his charming wife. Unfortunately, George 
Szamuely is perhaps the first credible American commentator to have given his 
support to the corrupt and repressive Milosevic regime. I don?t know how 
often he has been to Yugoslavia in recent years, but I can tell him that what 
the Serbs are going through is no joke, and in making a last ditch effort to 
save the last Communist dictator in Europe, Mr. Milosevic?s American 
supporters are playing the same role that the Clinton administration 
performed in the Winter of 96-97, when they told the hundreds of thousands of 
protesting Serbs that it was not time to change the regime in Yugoslavia. 
Come back to reality, George. Your friends need you.
 



From zapata at sezampro.yu  Mon Sep 25 19:36:20 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 03:36:20 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Red-baiting to split the antiwar movement on antiwar.com
References: <56.111f75e.27014801@aol.com>
Message-ID: <005101c0275a$49b4cee0$7cbd6ac2@k382>

Very inteligent article. Remarks are insightfull, true and persuasive.
For a radical leftist- insider, at least.
Red and Black Regards,
Resistance, not Support,
                                Andrej G.
                          www.resistancenet.org
PS My congratulations to Tony A. on his brilliant observations about anti
war movement and must-read suggestions how it should be organized
 "Yugoslav Elections" mail)......

----- Original Message -----
From: <Borba100 at aol.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 2:29 AM
Subject: [CrashList] Red-baiting to split the antiwar movement on
antiwar.com


Dear people,

The following appeared on antiwar.com today.

Best regards,
Jared Israel


The Reality Check is in the Mail
by Thomas Fleming
Editor, Chronicles Magazine
9/25/00







From aabdo at webtv.net  Mon Sep 25 19:44:45 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 20:44:45 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Put Out The Flames!     Can It Really Be Done, Jared?
Message-ID: <13558-39CFFF8D-371@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Put out the flames!     This was the title of a plea by Eric Garris and
Jared Israel 5 days ago, on antiwar.com.     It was in response to a
growing split over how to interpret the looming Yugoslav elections.
The red baiting that started the flare-up, was not the rather sedate
commentary that Jared just posted.

No.    It was a much nastier and sexist piece, written by Justin
Raimondo, entitled 'The Gloria La Riva Syndrome: In Answer to Jared
Israel'.     This phoney copycat Rightist, whose trademark style is to
imitate pictorally, Matt Drudge- Right Wing superstar, launched into a
shrill abuse of the Workers World Party vice-presidential candidate, as
he tried to paint a picture of both Jared and Gloria as being some sort
of neo-Mao duo. 

Jared Israel and Alex Cockburn are just 2 of the many Leftists that have
tried to work with the Rightist Libertarian element that inhabits the
realm of antiwar.com.     The fact that they do so, is an act of
desperation stemming from the inactivity and refusal to mobilize forces,
that characterizes the majority sector of the US Left.     Especially
the trade union and Green Party sectors, but also including many other
groups, further still to the left.

It is becoming clear, that the US elections and the Yugoslav elections,
will both contribute to the complete breakup of this desperate effort to
fashion some sort of antiwar activity from the scratch of Nader-like
enertia.      Antiwar.com does not represent a dependible antiwar
tendency.     The problem is... neither does the Green Party.

Now might be the time for a Left effort to coalesce some sort of antiwar
coalition, centered on opposition to US interventionism in Colombia.
All those crowds going to go hear Nader.... where will they be after
November when Gore continues the Clintonist program of neo-liberalism,
with a gun and a smirk?      Where will Nader be?      He'll probably be
talking about tires and campaign finance reform.

Now is the time to make the effort to unite all LEFT tendencies willing
to mobilize in the streets.       Redbaiting is to be expected by
Rightists, Jared.     This, they will do.

<According to people in Yugoslavia the vote situation is rather good.
Don't believe what you read in the papers.> 
Jared Israel

Jared, a fairly evenly split vote while under attack as Yugoslavia is,
is a terrible sign of non-support for the Milosevic group.     Yugoslavs
were offered the chance to jettison Milosevic to not get the Iraqi
treatment, and a huge percentage went for it.      There is no
overwhelming desire to fight on alone, while the European and US Left
turns it back on giving them solidarity.

Tony Abdo












From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 25 21:04:29 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 23:04:29 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
Message-ID: <50.b4ae69f.27016c3d@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/25/2000 9:37:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
zapata at sezampro.yu writes about Thomas Fleming's attempt at red baitinwhich I 
posted:

<< Very inteligent article. Remarks are insightfull, true and persuasive.
 For a radical leftist- insider, at least.
 Red and Black Regards,
 Resistance, not Support,
                                 Andrej G. >>

Amazing.  Andre G. reveals himself. 1) Just for the record, Fleming is the 
extreme  right wing Chornicles rejects the whole idea of Yugoslavia, finds 
nothing but fault in Tito's Yugoslavia, lumps all Muslims together as 
monsters, sees the problem in the West as loss of religion, moral decay of 
leadership - this all has the scent of fascism and indeed friends in 
Yugoslavia say Otpor gets daily more fascist-like in style.  2) In this 
article Fleming parrots Clinton's line: Milosevich (which means the Serbs) 
started the trouble in ksKosovo, Milosevich justifies by his actions 
sanctions, it is ok to take millions of CIA dollars to bring Western 
controlled organizations to power,   3)  Fleming makes the crazy assertion 
that the West is not supporting Kostunica.  RIght.  That's why every Western 
funded quisling has backed his campaign except Draskovic - who has apologized 
for not doing so.  That's why the TV/radio/nespaapers have made a hero of 
him.  Fleming's proof: som,e of this State Department friends said they 
didn';t like Kostunica at some time in the past.  Right.

Wondrous to see that Andre supports Felming.  So we have the 
"leftist-insider", whoever he is, allied with the semi-fascist American, 
allied with with the hysterical Buchananite (Raimondo).  

Medanwhile the IMF/World Bank has been mae a mass issue in Yugoslavia.  US 
ARROGANCE AND YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS, which I had the honor to co-author, has 
been seen or read by millions in the Balkans. So, the Yugoslav government 
broadcasts the anti-IMF position and the other side has the G-17 , led by 
important officials of the IMF/World Bank, as their brain trust.  

Best regards,
jared



From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 25 21:12:01 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 23:12:01 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Put Out The Flames!     Can It Really Be Done, Jared?
Message-ID: <a9.b7cf0a2.27016e01@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/25/2000 9:48:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
aabdo at webtv.net writes:

<< 
 Jared, a fairly evenly split vote while under attack as Yugoslavia is,
 is a terrible sign of non-support for the Milosevic group.    >>

1) The SP-JUL coalition has now won , according to DOS exit polls, an 
absolute majority in parliament.  Yugo has a system like Israel.  Nobody 
knows who will be president, but the parliament is key

2) It is amazing that with the mixture of threats and bribes the Yugoslavs 
have not handed opver Milosevic's head on a plate.    

The fact that the majority has voted for SP-JUL parliamentary candidates FOR 
THE FIRST TIME is a wonderful statement for the rest of the world.  Maybe it 
doesn't impress some of us, but it sure means something to the wretched of 
the earth.,

3) Tony's remarks about antiar.com and so on miss the poitn entirely.  In 
fact, Raimondo and Fleming have extremely little support - hence their 
hysteria.  Whatever happens with antiwar.com (i.e., if they succeed in 
destroying it since their blame-the-victim style of anti-interventionism has 
virutally NO support - if theuy succeed in destroying antiwar.com another 
internet expression of the broad coalition antiwar.com has represented will 
come forard.  Count on it.

Aabdo simply does not understand mass work: the sectarian mentality.  The 
point isn't to incesently label people so that you are "working with 
libertarians and rightists" the poiint is to work with people on issues of 
agreement and of course one has the right to try to change their minds.  Some 
wonderful people work on antiwar.com, plus there are destructive types like 
Justin Raimondo - it takes all kinds.  Interestingly, Justin's position is 
not all that different from Chomsky's which is not all that different from 
Albright's - because in the end, there are only two sides, even if neither is 
a "perfect statement" statment (cause this is a MMATERIAL world, not Platonic.

The Response from antiwar.com readers to Justin and Fleming's not very 
intelligent attacks is very strongly to defend Szamuely, me, Petar Makara and 
others who have raised the key point: that the US has once again attempted to 
interfere in another nation's internal life.  It is remarkable to see how 
quickly some people (e.,g. Riamondo, Fleming, CHomsky) can slide into 
semi-support for US intervention.

Best regards,
Jared



From aabdo at webtv.net  Mon Sep 25 21:14:12 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 22:14:12 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Put Out The Flames! Can It Really Be Done, Jared?
Message-ID: <13556-39D01484-759@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Put out the flames!     This was the title of a plea by Eric Garris and
Jared Israel 5 days ago, on antiwar.com. ? ? It was in response to a
growing split over how to interpret the looming Yugoslav elections. The
red baiting that started the flare-up, was not the rather sedate
commentary that Jared just posted. 

No. ? It was a much nastier and sexist piece, written by Justin
Raimondo, entitled 'The Gloria La Riva Syndrome: In Answer to Jared
Israel'. ? ? This phoney copycat Rightist, whose trademark style is
to imitate pictorally, Matt Drudge- Right Wing superstar, launched into
a shrill abuse of the Workers World Party vice-presidential candidate,
as he tried to paint a picture of both Jared and Gloria as being some
sort of neo-Mao duo. 

Jared Israel and Alex Cockburn are just 2 of the many Leftists that have
tried to work with the Rightist Libertarian element that inhabits the
realm of antiwar.com. ? ? The fact that they do so, is an act of
desperation stemming from the inactivity and refusal to mobilize forces,
that characterizes the majority sector of the US Left. ? ?
Especially the trade union and Green Party sectors, but also including
many other groups, further still to the left. 

It is becoming clear, that the US elections and the Yugoslav elections,
will both contribute to the complete breakup of this desperate effort to
fashion some sort of antiwar activity from the scratch of Nader-like
enertia. ? ? Antiwar.com does not represent a dependible antiwar
tendency. ? ? The problem is... neither does the Green Party. 

Now might be the time for a Left effort to coalesce some sort of antiwar
coalition, centered on opposition to US interventionism in Colombia. All
those crowds going to go hear Nader.... where will they be after
November when Gore continues the Clintonist program of neo-liberalism,
with a gun and a smirk? ? ? Where will Nader be? ? ? He'll
probably be talking about tires and campaign finance reform. 

Now is the time to make the effort to unite all LEFT tendencies willing
to mobilize in the streets. ? ? ? Redbaiting is to be expected by
Rightists, Jared. ? ? This, they will do. 

<According to people in Yugoslavia the vote situation is rather good.
Don't believe what you read in the papers.> Jared Israel 
Jared, a fairly evenly split vote while under attack as Yugoslavia is,
is a terrible sign of non-support for the Milosevic group. ? ?
Yugoslavs were offered the chance to jettison Milosevic to not get the
Iraqi treatment, and a huge percentage went for it. ? ? There is no
overwhelming desire to fight on alone, while the European and US Left
turns it back on giving them solidarity. 

Tony Abdo 












From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Mon Sep 25 21:28:31 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 23:28:31 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Review: "Midnight Oil"
Message-ID: <39D017DE.E26614F6@netzero.net>

Came across as I was reviewing the literature on Marxist theories of
economic crisis last night.  It outlines two competing views on Gulf
War:--Autonomism against Lenin's theory of imperialism-- and sides with
the former albeit critically. The article attacks at Leninism as being
"outdated" and defines its position as focusing on the centrality of
"working class struggle".  Good intro to pundits' views on Gulf War for
critics.

revolutionary cheers,

Mine


http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/Aufheben/auf3midoil2.htm

_______________________________________________________

Review: "Midnight Oil"

(Work, Energy, War, 1973-92). Midnight Notes. Autonomedia. Brooklyn
1992. ?9.95. ISBN 0-936756-96-9.

_______________________________________________________

Introduction

Midnight Oil is a collection of articles produced by the Zerowork
(1974-79) and Midnight Notes (1979-) collectives, having as its focus a
thorough analysis of the recent Gulf war. There are a number of reasons
why the publication of this book should be welcomed. For a start the
making available of texts from the autonomist tradition, which have
previously been available to few people, can only have a positive impact
on revolutionaries in this country who, with notable exceptions, have
tended either to regurgitate orthodoxy or dismiss theory as academic
contemplation. It is also reassuring to find that despite the setbacks
experienced by the US working class over the last couple of decades some
US theorists are still capable of attempting to analyse contemporary
events - not everyone has responded to these defeats by seeking to
conjure the future out of some
mythical past like Zerzan or Perlman.

Coming after the Gulf-War Midnight Oil provides a pertinent
counter-point to the orthodox Marxist theories which reduced the war to
merely an inter-imperialist conflict. However, whilst we are sympathetic
to aspects of Midnight Notes'/autonomist analysis, and appreciate it as
a weapon against orthodox Leninist conceptions, we can not remain
entirely uncritical. Indeed, while at first sight the broad sweep of
analysis in Midnight Oil is impressive, on closer inspection we find
that it has fundamental weaknesses. A hint of such problems become
apparent if we remember Midnight Notes's predictions before the
Gulf War in the pamphlet When Crusaders and Assassins Unite. This
pamphlet, published in November 1990, in an attempt to provide a class
analysis for the US anti-war movement, argued that there would be no war
as there were no fundamental disagreements between US and Iraqi capital
as both wanted higher oil prices :

These differences over oil pricing control and debt policy can be
mediated, though this mediation process might very well include the use
of marginal military force. However, U.S. Crusaders are not in the
Arabian Peninsula to fight a large-scale, conventional shooting war with
the Iraqi Assassins, as frequently envisioned. For U.S. troops are not
in the Arabian Peninsula to fight the soldiers of a government that
plays the game of collective capital. A game that the Saddam Hussein
regime has shown itself perfectly willing and able to play. The U.S.
invasion of the Persian Gulf, therefore, is not like the war in Vietnam
where the U.S. military was sent to crush a directly anti-capitalist,
revolutionary armed movement. It is more like the post-W.W.II U.S.
occupation of Western Europe, whose main function was not to fight a
Soviet invasion, but rather to repress the rise of any revolutionary
forces within Western Europe itself.

Midnight Notes, and No War But The Class War (NWBTCW) in Britain,
attempted to move beyond Leninist analyses of the war to emphasise the
class war, but we have to recognise their limitations if we are to move
beyond them. Perhaps unsurprisingly 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite'
and its predictions go unmentioned in Midnight Oil. However what is
important for us is not so much that Midnight Notes got it wrong but why
they got it wrong. When we test their analysis against the litmus of the
Gulf War the loose ends of their theory rapidly unravel. It is not
merely that Midnight Oil is inconsistent, as is
only to be expected from a collective project developing over 20 years,
rather it is that we find its underlying theory incoherent.

Leninism and the theory of imperialism

To understand the significance of Midnight Oil we have to put it into
the context of its opposition to the dominant Marxist explanations for
the Gulf War. In Britain the anti-war movement was dominated by the
left-liberal pacifism of CND which advocated sanctions to starve the
Iraqi's into submission instead of bombing them into the middle ages.
The immediate response of the 'revolutionary left' was simply to 'trot
out' the old anti-imperialism position of 'supporting the weaker country
against imperialist aggression' which refuses any real class analysis of
the war. However, in the case of Iraq the sheer absurdity of this
position became apparent. How could so called revolutionaries back a
fascist dictatorship with a proven record of butchering its own working
class? In the case of the SWP their knee jerk reaction of backing Iraq
was soon dropped as opportunism led them to change their line and
tail-end the peace movement in the hope of picking up new recruits
whilst the RCP maintained an unrelenting support for the Iraqi state. In
both cases a rigid adherence to the discredited Leninist theory of
imperialism led these groups to fail to grasp the initiative from
left-liberalism/pacifism in the anti-war movement.

Lenin's Theory of imperialism

The Leninist theory of imperialism owes its origins to Lenin's
Imperialism. Lenin's Imperialism was based on Bukharin's work which in
turn had developed out of the orthodox theory of the Second
International, as exemplified by Hilferding's Finance Capital. It argued
that since the 1870's the world had seen the concentration and
centralization of production into huge monopolies and cartels that
dominated national markets. This had brought about a new era of monopoly
capitalism which, for Lenin at least, was the last stage of capitalism.
In monopoly capitalism the huge monopolies tended to merge with banking
capital and because of the national importance of these huge capitals
they became increasingly regulated and protected by the state. Since
these huge capitals, organised in cartels, dominated the market they
could plan production and set prices. No longer was there an anarchy of
the market. The preconditions for a centralized and planned socialist
economy
were all but there. All that was needed was for the working class to
take power and nationalize the big monopolies and banks!!

But to make monopoly profits the big monopolies restricted domestic
production to push domestic prices up. Restricted production limited
investment which meant that there was both a tendency for
surplus-production and surplus-capital to be invested abroad. This meant
a drive for foreign markets and imperialism under the protection of the
state, but this brought each imperialist power into conflict with others
as its rivals. The orthodox/centrist Kautsky thought that this
imperialist conflict would ultimately be resolved peacefully through
ultra-imperialism. Lenin said it could only be resolved through war and
revolution. A point he thought vindicated by World War One.

Problems of Lenin's theory

Firstly his analysis is out of date when applied to the current
situation. Hilferding's work, which Lenin's analysis is largely based on
and relates to the era of monopoly capitalism at the turn of the
century, particularly to the situation in Germany. But with the
development and establishment of Fordism the division of the world is no
longer based on super-exploited colonies, rather the Third World appears
as marginalized economies within the world market that capital is unable
to fully exploit.

Perhaps more importantly Lenin's theory of imperialism is crippled by
its assumption of working class passivity. The working class is the
least developed aspect of Lenin's Imperialism as the dynamic to war and
the possibility of planning are derived
entirely from the relations between capitals. Thus the working class is
seen as passive, needing the objective conditions to mature before being
forced to take decisive action. This is particularly clear in Lenin's
conception of the labour aristocracy in terms of workers being 'bought
off' rather than in terms of them winning concessions that force the
monopolies to push prices higher. Therefore the result of Lenin's
Imperialism, with its assumption of working class passivity, is to
locate the movement towards communism in the contradictions of capital
as an objective economic system rather than in the revolutionary
self-activity of the working class.

Autonomism against Leninist theories of Imperialism

If the inadequacy of Lenin's Imperialism, as applied to the Gulf-War, is
its focus on the 'objective', i.e. capital, can we combat this by using
Midnight Notes' autonomist analysis to bring in the 'subjective', i.e.
class struggle? The great strength of Midnight
Notes and other autonomist-Marxists is their focus on the centrality of
class struggle. Through their focus on working class composition,
especially the notion of the mass worker, Midnight Notes' and other
autonomists grasp the need to go beyond
the era of monopoly capitalism described by Hilferding. By focusing on
the working class as an autonomous power within and against capital the
autonomists were able to account for Fordism and the resistance to it.
Therefore both technology and working class organization reflect a
particular division of power produced as an outcome of past struggles.
This makes trade unions, social democratic, and Leninist parties
historically specific organizational forms.

Midnight Oil's great strength is its focus on class struggle whether it
be of migrant oil workers, Iraqi deserters, striking autoworkers,
wildcat coal miners, or Italian rent strikers. But whilst this focus on
working class self-activity is Midnight Oil's greatest strength it is
also its greatest weakness. The problem with Midnight Notes however, is
not simply that they overemphasize class struggle, rather it is their
inadequate understanding of modern capitalism. By concentrating so much
on struggles they tend to reduce the workings of the world market to
merely a question of power, one where capital collectively
manipulates prices in order to attack the working class.

Value and the Apocalypse

For Marx capitalism is not the latest incarnation of the omniscient
megamachine that comes to dominate humanity, nor is it a simple means
through which the capitalist class consciously conspires to exploit us.
Rather capital is a social relation through
which human activity returns as an alien and objective force which
subsumes human will and purposes to its own ceaseless drive towards its
own quantitative expansion. As such, for Marx, capitalism is very far
from being a consciously regulated system. As a totality capital is a
process that must continually reconstitute itself out of the conflicting
actions and purposes both between disassociated individuals and
antagonistic classes. Of course this is not to say that there are not
conscious attempts to plan nor of some forms of social co-operation,
e.g. the state, but that these are only moments subsumed within capital
as an unconscious subject and only arise from given conditions of
conflict and competition between individuals and classes.

Despite different political perspectives, both Midnight Notes and the
orthodox Marxism of Lenin and Kautsky see a fundamental change in
capitalism from that described by Marx in Capital - modern capitalism is
seen as moving towards a consciously regulated system. This is linked
with the notion of us entering the transitional stage to
socialism/communism. For orthodox Marxism this is seen primarily in
terms of inter-capitalist relations in the form of growing state
intervention and the
growth of monopolies, both of which lead to the planning of production
and exchange rather than regulation through the anarchy of the market,
i.e. the supersession of the law of value. For Midnight Notes/autonomism
the supersession of the law of value is seen more in terms of the
separation of labour from capital with the automation of production.

The fragments on machines

The theoretical basis for Midnight Notes' argument that the law of value
has been superseded is the now famous passage from the Grundrisse that
has become known as the fragments on machines. In these passages Marx
vividly describes how capital in
its drive to increase the social productivity of labour through the
mechanisation and eventual automation of production makes production
increasingly disproportionate to the labour employed. But since capital
is nothing but the expansion of alienated
labour, this tendency drives capital beyond its own foundation. Hence
crisis and apocalypse. As Marx notes:

As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great
well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its
measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be a measure] of use
value. ...Capital itself is the moving contradiction , [in] that it
presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time,
on the other side, as sole
measure and source of wealth...On the one side, then, it calls to life
all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of
social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent
(relatively) of the labor time employed in it. On the other side, it
wants to use labor time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces
thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to
maintain the already created value as value.

The notion that there is a tendency for the law of value to be
superseded is central to Midnight Notes' analysis of oil pricing. It
allows them to argue that, since value is no longer a necessary
measure/regulator of capital work has become merely a form of social
discipline. Hence the refusal of work is no longer a utopian demand.
Also, to the extent that labour is separated from capital and no longer
mediated by value we have only two antagonistic classes each with its
own distinct strategy. Therefore the collective capitalist seeks to
preserve its power through the imposition of work and the collective
worker seeks to resist and refuse this work.

In Midnight Oil, Midnight Notes seek to unilaterally apply this tendency
as if it was a long term historical tendency that is now at the point of
realisation. But in doing so they run into severe problems. If this
tendency has been realised then capital steps beyond its own substance.
If capital is not the self expansion of value what is it? Capital
disappears! Unedited by objective categories of value and capital we are
left with two antagonistic subjects, the 'capitalist' class and the
'working' class locked in an apocalyptic life and death struggle. Have
we reached such an era? Is the continuing existence of capitalist
competition and markets merely an illusion left over from the past?
Midnight Notes staring into the abyss see the consequences of such a
conclusion and recoil from them:

If capital can, at will, change and manipulate energy and industrial
prices on the basis of multinational corporate power , i.e., independent
of the amount of work that goes into the production of commodities, then
we must abandon work and surplus value (exploitation) as our basic
analytical categories. Marx would be an honored but dead dog. We would
have to accept the position of Sweezy and Marcuse that monopoly
organization and technological development have made capital independent
of the 'law of value,' (viz., that prices, profits, costs and the other
numerology of accounting are rooted in (and explained by) the work-time
gone into the production of the commodities and reproduction of the
relevant worker). Capital it would seem can break its own rules, the
class struggle is now to be played on a pure level of power, 'will to
domination,' force against force and prices become part of the equation
of violence, arbitrarily decided like the pulling of a trigger.

Instead they try and get around the problems that flow from abandoning
the law of value by arguing that only certain sectors have escaped
labour, but these sectors - oil and food - are basic commodities whose
price determines all other prices and thus can be used as a weapon
through which capitalism as a global system can be organised against the
working class. In several articles, most notably the Notes on the
International Crisis, they take political control of oil as self
evident, but in The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse they try and
explain it in terms of differing organic compositions of capital.

Using Marx, The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse argues that the
equalisation of the rate of profit means that prices must diverge from
labour-values due to differences in the ratio of living to dead labour
across various branches of industry. Since surplus-value can only be
expropriated from living labour, those industries employing a large
amount of labour relative to their employment of means of production
(i.e. those with a low organic composition of capital (OCC)) will be
able to produce relatively more surplus-value than those capitals
invested in industries that are highly mechanised (i.e. those that have
a high
OCC). An equalisation of the rate of profit arises through the transfer
surplus-value from those capitals invested in industries with a low OCC
to those with high OCC. For this to occur prices must be higher than
values in industries with a high organic composition of capital (OCC)
and lower than values in those with a low OCC.

>From this Midnight Notes then attempt to invert Marx by asserting that
this proves that prices can be disconnected from values in high OCC
industries like food or energy. Yet Marx was attempting to show the very
opposite, i.e. how despite variations in prices and values, values still
regulate production and exchange. It is through this very analysis of
the formation of a general rate of profit, and the formation of
production prices that systematically diverge from values, that Marx
shows how, through the competition between individual capitals, the 'law
of value' ensures that each individual capital is obliged to act as if
it simply a particular part of capital-in-general, despite any conscious
intentions on the part of the capitalist themselves.

So even if we accepted that energy and food were necessarily high OCC
industries, which we do not, The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse
fails to provide an adequate theoretical grounding. Indeed Midnight
Notes even admit this themselves when they concede that capitalists only
have 'apparent freedom' when it comes to setting oil prices independent
of the labour that goes into the production of oil. However it is only
through considering Midnight Notes' view of history that the importance
of these theoretical inadequacies becomes apparent.

Oil as history

Is it true, as Midnight Notes contend, that the history of post-war
capitalism is the history of oil price changes?

As is well known, by the late 1960s working class struggles broke the
wage-productivity deal of Keynesianism. Workers demanded 'more money -
less work' resulting in a steep decline in profits. Midnight Notes argue
that in response to this offensive 'capital' (in the guise of the USA)
engineered the 'energy crisis' by forcing up oil prices, which resulted
in a
restructuring of capital and cuts in real wages. Thus the quadrupling of
the oil price in 1973-74 resulted in huge profits for the energy
companies and oil producing countries which were then recycled as
petrodollars, allowing massive investment in the
automation of factories and a shift of production to the 'Newly
Industrialising Countries' where labour was cheaper.

After capital has jacked the price of oil right up, Midnight Notes then
argue that it has to bring it back down again; because by the mid 1970s
oil producing states in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean
had succumbed to popular demands and 'squandered' the increased oil
revenues on higher wages and social spending. Not only did this rise in
oil prices lead to the oil proletariat demanding higher wages but, in
countries like Iran, it also encouraged them to overthrow their rulers
in an attempt to gain control of the wealth they produced.

Therefore Midnight Notes argue that, in the 1980s capital abandons its
high energy price strategy and imposes austerity. This necessarily
involves cutting the price of oil in order to attack the oil
proletariat. Thus the US Federal Reserve Bank engineers a global
slowdown by constricting the money supply, which results in a steep
climb in interest rates, and when combined with a loss of export
revenues triggers off the debt crisis. As chief enforcer for capital the
IMF prescribes austerity for debtor nations, i.e. a more favourable
investment climate and production for export. However Midnight Notes
argue that working class
resistance to austerity leads to a threatened default on Third World
debts which forces the US to devalue the dollar by half, thus halving
the debt (which it is calculated in US dollars) in order to save the
global banking system.

As expected this extension of austerity was met with fierce working
class resistance, which leads Midnight Notes to argue that by the late
1980s capital had decided that its austerity program had failed, and
that it was planning a massive expansion with huge new areas like Russia
and China to be opened up. The idea being that the cheap labour and raw
materials of the socialist bloc could be used to undermine the wages of
western workers. But, given the world wide recession, investment was in
short supply, thus oil prices were to be used as the motor to create
surplus funds for a general restructuring of global accumulation.
This restructuring was to centre on the reorganization of the oil
industry, particularly in those areas where it had been nationalised.
International capital was hoping to force open these areas as a result
of falling oil prices, but when the IMF tried to force oil states like
Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria and Morocco to cut welfare and wages there
were mass uprisings. Therefore Midnight Notes argue that if oil prices
were to be raised there would have to be a massive increase in
repression to prevent the proles appropriating a slice of the planned
oil revenue as had happened throughout the 70s and 80s.

Thus Midnight Notes argue that the Gulf War emerged out of the process
of recolonization in the late 1980s following the collapse of the
socialist bloc. If the oil fields in the Eastern bloc, Mexico, and
Nigeria were to be opened up there would need to be a whole new wave of
investment to make them profitable. But the regimes might be forced to
give some of the increased revenues to the proles. For Midnight Notes
the Gulf war was needed as an example to terrorize the proles into
accepting a life of extreme poverty amid vast accumulations of wealth.
Therefore;

the re-organization of workers in the planet's most important
oil-producing region was not an accidental by-product of the war, but
rather a central objective, and one shared, despite some disputes, by
the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi, European and US ruling classes. As the oil
industry in the Mideast (and internationally) was preparing for its
largest expansion in fifteen years, it needed both to recompose and
terrorize an increasingly rebellious oil-producing proletariat. In the
environment of an 'international intifada' against IMF austerity plans,
any new attempt to vastly debase workers' lives amidst new accumulations

of wealth based on oil price increase was going to require a leap in the
level of militarization.

Down the slippery slope to conspiracy

The central problem of Midnight Oil is that their attempt to reduce the
history of capitalism to the history of oil price fluctuations tends to
lead to a conspiratorial analysis where a unified capital manipulates
energy prices in order to attack the working class. No one denies the
impact of oil prices, nor their role in the restructuring of capital
after the working class offensive of the 1960/70s, but Midnight Notes'
analysis completely ignores the importance of the development of global
finance capital. Because it is beyond the control of any government,
global finance capital completely undermines Midnight Notes' notion of a
unified capital exercising conscious control.

Also Midnight Notes' fail to show anywhere in Midnight Oil how and by
whom oil prices are manipulated. Who decides 'capital's strategy'?
Furthermore the 'documentation' they cite showing the USA conspired with
OPEC to triple oil prices does not support their case. It merely shows
that, with the tripling of oil production and exploration costs in the
USA, the American oil industry was able to influence the US government
not to intervene when first Libya and then the other states took the
opportunity of the crisis in the oil industry to push prices up to
levels determined by the marginal producers in the USA. The oil crises
of 1973,1979 and 1986 could be better explained as critical conjunctures
in the development of the oil industry away from the conscious and
planned regulation of production and exchange by the big seven oil
companies, backed by the US and British governments, to a unified global
oil market which to a large extent escapes conscious control of
governments and monopolies.

The limitations of Midnight Notes' method and analysis are starkly
exposed in the articles Oil, Guns and Money and Rambo on the Barbary
Shore. Although Rambo on the Barbary Shore appears ostensibly to concern
Saudi Arabia's doubling of oil production in 1985-86 and its relation to
the US bombing of Libya, it in fact encapsulates Midnight Notes'
conception of how capital manipulates the market. The argument is
summarised in Oil, Guns and Money where, referring to the devaluation of
the US dollar by one half in 1985, they argue that:

This manoeuvre, in one stroke, lowered the value of debt held by
countries from Mexico to Poland by one half. But this was no charity. If
the lowering of interest rates in 1983 had been prompted by Mexico's
moratorium, the dollar devaluation was prompted by South Africa's
moratorium on payments to foreign banks in August 1985. The potential of
South African capital to succumb to black workers struggles within the
country and to provoke other governments around the world to similarly
halt loan payments was enough to force western capital to change the
terms of global debt. In this manipulation of monetary values
we see capitalist planning at its most abstract and reified levels,
where decisions seemingly removed from the labors on the shop floor or
in the kitchen ultimately entail the most profound effects. One of the
most important consequences of the dollar's devaluation, for example,
was the simultaneous devaluation of oil. As the dollar was taking a free
fall in the market, Saudi Arabia doubled its production within nine
months and thereby halved the price of oil. The US government arranged
this oil devaluation to keep the US import bill from skyrocketing. With
a dollar half of what it was worth before, imports, particularly
oil, would have doubled in cost. The US was already becoming the largest
debtor nation in the world and there was the fear that the dollar
devaluation, if taken alone, would have thrown the US over the edge of
solvency. These twin manoeuvres of 1985-86 - the dollar and oil
devaluations - exhibit how the international market is consciously
structured by capital.

This whole analysis is riddled with errors which are symptomatic of
Midnight Notes' theoretical inadequacies. Firstly the US dollar was not
devalued unilaterally at a stroke. The devaluation of the dollar that
followed the Plaza Accord took nearly two years and required concerted
intervention of the central banksof the major industrial powers armed
with reserve funds that were only a fraction of the huge flows of
capital surging around the international money markets. Secondly the
devaluation does not necessarily halve the debt, particularly if the
debt is denominated in US dollars and the exporter, e.g. Mexico, is
trading mainly with the US. It is true that resistance to debt forced
rescheduling under the Baker plan and simultaneously limited the US
government's strategy of using interest rates to indefinitely defend an
overvalued dollar, forcing them towards international co-operation to
devalue the dollar in 1985. But we can not simply explain fluctuations
in the US dollar in terms of oil pricing as Midnight Notes are prone to
do. Halving the dollar does not mean that oil prices have to be halved
to prevent the US' import bill doubling since oil is denominated in
dollars. Consequently the twin manoeuvres of 1985-86 do not show how
the international market is structured by capital, on the contrary they
show how attempts to consciously regulate international markets are
highly circumscribed!

Conspiracy at Midnight?

Overall Midnight Oil is an important work because its unrelenting focus
on working class struggles provides an important corrective to the
objectivism of Lenin's Imperialism and its defenders. However Midnight
Oil is fatally undermined by Midnight Notes' tendency to ascribe
outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified capital. Throughout
Midnight Oil
Midnight Notes fail to show how capital constitutes itself. They imply
that the US state formulates capital's strategy, but then fail to
explain how US policy is formulated. The problem is that Midnight Notes
conception of a unified capital results in them conflating capitalism
with the actions of individual capitalists. Capitalism does not have a
strategy, although capitalists pursue different strategies. Capitalism
as a totality is mediated by the world market and emerges from the
conflict between and within different capitals and the working class.

Even if capital has a strategy, which it does not, Midnight Notes fail
to show how it is organized and by whom. Given that Midnight Notes see
capital as an undifferentiated unity imposing an agreed strategy on the
working class, we would expect to find them focusing on organizations
like the UN, the IMF, G7 etc. However there is little analysis of those
organizations which could be seen as arenas for hammering out 'capital's
strategy'. Such an omission can not simply be a mistake by Midnight
Notes, rather it is a consequence of their method which does not look at
capitalist divisions because their theory has assumed
these divisions away.

When their conception of a unified capital is applied to concrete events
its inadequacies are glaring. For example Midnight Notes saw the Gulf
War as a collective capital imposing an agreed strategy of increasing
oil prices. Initially this caused them to
take the position, in 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite', that there
would be no war, or at most token skirmishing. After all, why should
there be a war if there are no fundamental disagreements between Iraq
and the US? However, when they are forced by events to admit there was a
war then they merely reduce it to collective capital militarizing oil
production. This results in them tending to argue that Iraq and the US
colluded in the invasion of Kuwait, via April Glaspie, as part of a
co-ordinated strategy of increasing oil prices. Whilst the invasion of
Kuwait was a consequence of the Ba'athists inability to impose austerity

on their own working class, it is not the case that it was part of a
co-ordinated global plan for militarizing the world's oil industry, as
the disarray of the US government's response clearly illustrates.

By imposing a pre-defined conception of a unified capital onto events
Midnight Notes are able to change their position on the Gulf War from
seeing it as a 'phoney war' to seeing it as a method for the Iraqi
regime to impose austerity. This culminatesin them arguing that the
Iraqi state did not believe the US would intervene and even if it did
that it would be in the Ba'athists interests. It is true that the main
targets of the UN bombing were civilians, infrastructure, and retreating
troops who were the main force of revolt within Iraq, but from this
Midnight Notes argue that the war was in the Ba'athist's interests
because it finally enabled them to impose austerity on the Iraqi working
class.

However, the triumph of the Ba'athist state over the working class
uprisings was by no means guaranteed. Also it is not the case that the
Iraqi state sought saturation bombing, resulting in massive destruction
of productive capital, and the risk of overthrow, because it thought it
might possibly improve its ability to impose austerity. Excepting the
decimated oil industries of Iraq and Kuwait, Midnight Notes fail to show
that oil production is more militarized after the Gulf War than it was
before. Even with civil war raging in Yemen oil prices are only $16 a
barrel, the level they were prior to the Gulf War. This is hardly
the mass increase in oil prices that Midnight Notes expected as the
result of collective capital militarizing oil production through the
Gulf War. With oil prices predicted to settle down to $13-14 a barrel
for the forseeable future we can conclude that either
capital does not have a high oil price strategy atall, or that it has
been incapable of imposing one. It is clear that oil prices are not
operating as the motor for a new phase of accumulation to pull the world
out of recession.

Finally when we apply Midnight Notes' theory to other conflicts like
Somalia and Yugoslavia we find that their method breaks down. The war in
the former Yugoslavia provides a perfect example of the disunity and
divisions among the various capitals. Whilst the Leninists see the
conflict as an imperialist war fought out by proxies, autonomist
analyses tend to see it as a conspiracy by a unified capital using
nationalism and war to divide and subjugate a combative working class.
These two positions represent the opposing flipsides of the same
undialectical coin. Theorising conflicts such as these is only possible
if we can understand how the class struggle is mediated by competition,
and vice versa. The autonomists' antipathy to dialectical thinking means
that whilst they can provide a corrective to the diatribes of the
anti-imperialists they cannot supersede them.

Return to Aufheben home page

--

xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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From aabdo at webtv.net  Mon Sep 25 21:53:36 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 22:53:36 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Put Out The Flames!     Can It Really Be Done, Jared?
In-Reply-To: Borba100@aol.com's message of Mon, 25 Sep 2000 23:12:01 EDT
Message-ID: <13556-39D01DC0-791@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Jared writes-
<Aabdo simply does not understand mass work: the sectarian mentality.
The point isn't to incesently label people so that you are "working with
libertarians and rightists" the poiint is to work with people on issues
of agreement and of course one has the right to try to change their
minds.>

No, Jared, it is you who doesn't understand 'mass work'.     Antiwar.com
and the forces it represents will NEVER do mass work.      But they will
talk up a storm.      Mass work consists of building street opposition
to capitalist rule.     But antiwar.com supports capitalist rule, and
hates people who demonstrate and who would like to do yet more than just
that, to overthrow capitalism.     Were you planning to trick people
like Eric Garris?.

Jared again-
<2) It is amazing that with the mixture of threats and bribes the
Yugoslavs have not handed over Milosevic's head on a plate.>

Which raises the question of just why did Milosevic call for elections
in the midst of a war with NATO?    Strange behavior, indeed.     Can
you imagine Stalin holding an election in the middle of World War Two?!
Or any intelligent leadership under the gun, with a power like the US
mobilized against them, taking time out to go to the polls?

There can only be a couple of possible explanations.
1)  Milosevic was forced to do it anyway, because his support was so
weak that he would have no choice to do otherwise.
2) He was delusional, and thought that his popularity was greater than
it really is.      And that he could out propaganidize the
pro-imperialist press!
3) It was precisely to find a manuever that might possibly keep his head
from being served on a platter with absolute certainty.

I suggest to Jared, that answers one and three are the correct answers.
An election in the middle of a war is only an intelligent thing to do,
if you can overwhelmingly and without doubt anywhere, win it by a
gigantic margin of victory.    Of course in that case, a leader really
does not even need to call for an election in a war setting.     And it
is stupid to do so.

Despite all the supposed intransigence on all sides,  it is most
believable that Milosevic is merely negociating a surrender of an army
well defeated.     Or more to the point, he is negociating the surrender
of a not so popular Commander-in-Chief, himself.

Jared, it is impolite to mention Raimondo and Chomsky in the same
breath.      Though I share many of your feelings about the role of
Chomsky in today's political struggle, it is as alienating to reality if
I was to compare your anti-Clintonism in the same breath, as that
anti-Clintonism of Rush. 

Tony












From Borba100 at aol.com  Mon Sep 25 22:41:28 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 00:41:28 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Put Out The Flames!     Can It Really Be Done, Jared?
Message-ID: <2d.159ff33.270182f8@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/25/2000 11:54:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
aabdo at webtv.net writes:

<< He was delusional, and thought that his popularity was greater than
 it really is.      And that he could out propaganidize the
 pro-imperialist press! >>

Or perhaps the Yugoslav government, not being of Aabdo's wannabe-Bonapartist 
mind set, actually is trying to have a mass discussion of which way the 
country should go.  True, Stalin would never have done such a thing.  has 
Stalin the measure of excellence?

Jared



From carob at dynamite.com.au  Tue Sep 26 00:57:27 2000
From: carob at dynamite.com.au (Rob Schaap)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 16:57:27 +1000
Subject: [CrashList] Speculatingon the world economy
Message-ID: <200009260554.PAA10833@dynamite.com.au>

G'day all,

Some thoughts I've just tried out on the Progressive Economists' List, to
no response.  Are they just being polite?

>MP: Am I wrong to believe that the various warning signs are starting to
>cluster closer and closer together?

Me: Nope.

>Worries about energy prices.

Me:   Well, this seems to cut both ways, I reckon.  Are people
underestimating
the role of crisis-minimised import costs on US growth?  We've heard before
that the crisis that most of the rest of the world has been copping has
actually been, in the near term at least, a boon for the US economy.  Just
mebbe, for instance, the manufacturing sector's return to seemingly
promising profitability (which, for Geier and Shawki have only just reached
levels normal in the years immediately prior to the 1974 dip) is a function
of low costs of production?  Trouble is, the initial foreign currency crisis
ain't a long-term boon at all.  The US advantage builds the greenback up
such that the US balance of payments cops a thrashing in a world of toilet
paper currencies (like ours).   And it makes domestic labour cocky, too. 
And there goes another source of what profitability there has been, I
submit.

But the other side is that the US have large (short term) reserves of oil,
and it's bought and sold in greenbacks.  Perhaps high OPEC prices suits the
US economy just fine!  As it did back when the likes of State Department
policy wonk James Akins first recommended increased prices back in '73.  His
point then was that the rapidly threatening Japanese and European economies
didn't have any oil, meaning higher prices would hit them harder than it'd
hit the States.  And, as US Treasury under-secretary William Simon said at
the time, making OPEC a bit richer would be fine, as the proceeds would
eventually be 'recycled' through US finance institutions, anyway.  I mean,
ya got all these SE Asian countries, brand new technology (courtesy of the
pre-'97 investment boom) driving their manufacturing sectors' costs down,
and their low currencies threatening US market share and and US national
accounts.  Whack oil up a few notches, and the threat goes away.  

As long as you don't wanna sell anything overseas, of course ... trouble is,
the US needs that advantage so much right now (absolutely everything
depending on their stock markets, and a lot of foreign money on those
markets, as it does), it's prepared to dump Europe and Asia down the
shit-chute to get it.  

Even though they might end up having to support their victims' currencies if
the trick works too well ... so even the other side has an other side ...

>MP: A lack of confidence about the future world order -- suggested by the
>way the World Bank is pretending to listen.

Me:  America is on the nose everywhere - from Tokyo to Berlin and all
points south of Miami.  That might yet force 'em to pursue their interests
in ever more obvious and unpleasant ways.

>MP:  Warnings about bad quality loans.  Worries about credit in general.
>
>The ongoing increases in the balance of payments deficit.

Yeah, and both keep getting worse.  To quote prudentbeardotcom, "...
defaulted corporate American debt rose to $15 billion for the first half of
this year, and if the Moody's estimates prove accurate, the current rate of
default should ensure that last year's record $23.5 billion is easily
broken."  Same in Japan.  And then there's unprecedented credit-card debt. 
Oh, and America has doubled its current account deficit in less than a
decade (two to four per cent of GDP).

And then there's this from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:  "The U.S.
trade deficit 
soared to a record $31.9 billion in July as oil prices climbed to a 10-year
high, the
Commerce Department reported yesterday.  The country had record deficits in
trade with China, Japan, Western Europe and Canada.  The department said the
July deficit was 6.9 percent higher than a revised $29.8 billion imbalance
in June.  It surpassed the old record of $30.4 billion, set in March."

It all depends on the foreigners, doesn't it?  They have to keep pumping 1.5
billion dollars into the American markets every single day to keep your CAD
funded, your currency safe, your markets stable, your baby-boomers'
retirements funded, and a world economy with someone to sell its stuff to.  
There's quite a menu of things that might happen to turn that tap off, I
reckon.  
And when it does, a
chain-reaction-debt-crisis-replete-with-economy-stopping-credit-squeeze 
is well on the cards.  

Any thoughts, fellow Crashees?

Cheers,
Rob.



From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep 26 00:32:57 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 02:32:57 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Put Out The Flames!     Can It Really Be Done, Jared?
Message-ID: <70.354d2c4.27019d19@aol.com>

In a message dated 09/26/2000 1:50:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
aabdo at webtv.net writes:

<<  But antiwar.com
 supports capitalist rule, and hates people who demonstrate and who would
 like to do yet more than just that, to overthrow capitalism. ? ?
 Were you planning to trick people like Eric Garris?. 
  >>
Please, this is just posturing.  Garris has published some excellent material 
on antiwar.com.  It is precisely the fact that very good material was being 
published that seems to have triggered Raimondo's hysteria.  Maybe he will 
succeed in destroying antiwar.com.  On the other hand, maybe he will fail, or 
maybe he will change.  We'll see.  But remember, Raimondo helped create  the 
only website which provided information (admittedly mixed) for hundreds of 
thousands around the world, many of them involved in serious antiwar 
struggle.  It has had material effect.  The range of disagreement, up until 
now, has itself been a strength, for disagreement prompts thought.  

If people are going to be involved in real struggle, whether intellectual 
struggle or various kinds of practical organizing (or intellectual work 
geared to serving the needs of practical organizers, which is how I view my 
work at emperors clothes) then one has to work with people with all sorts of 
ideas with which one might disagree.  Maybe they'll change their ideas.  
Maybe you'll learn something new.  It's a lot healthier than pretending that 
"the left" is going to organize an antiwar movement all by its lonesome.

Best regards,
Jared





From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 03:04:15 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 10:04:15 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Jonathan Steele: A slap for Slobo
Message-ID: <000101c02798$bea26580$030b063e@mjones>

[Guardian]

Milosevic might not admit it, but Serbs have clearly voted for a
return to sanity
Special report: Serbia


Tuesday September 26, 2000

Few people in the west have spent more time with Slobodan Milosevic
than Richard Holbrooke, currently the US ambassador at the United
Nations. Holbrooke's autobiography even has an index entry for
"Milosevic: charm of". There are six separate page-references. On his
first encounter with the Yugoslav president, the word is that
Milosevic was "smart, charming, and evasive". On another occasion we
read of Milosevic being "at his most charming, lighting up a huge
Monte Cristo cigar". The climax to this adulation came at a hunting
lodge outside Belgrade where, over copious amounts of alcohol, the
Americans were negotiating Bosnia's future. One of Holbrooke's team
described the 12-hour session with the Serbian leader as "bonding with
the godfather".
Evil strongmen have always exercised an inordinate fascination on
those who deal with them, particularly on foreigners who cannot fully
understand their culture and are safe from their clutches. Holbrooke
is no fool as a negotiator and - certainly for a man who has long
hoped to be secretary of state in a Gore administration - he is not
unguarded enough in his autobiography to suggest he made any
concessions to Milosevic. But it was Holbrooke who personified more
than any other diplomat the west's willingness to do business with
Milosevic, first over Croatia, then Bosnia and finally Kosovo.

Holbrooke and the west continued to hope for a face-saving deal until
the last moment, before Milosevic's intransigence made intervention in
Kosovo inevitable in March last year. When the international criminal
tribunal in the Hague indicted Milosevic for war crimes two months
later, in full conformity with the west's new view of the man they had
accepted as a legitimate partner for so long, western governments were
relieved. Now their fragile consciences had the crutch of an
externally imposed defence against future temptation. However much
they might secretly crave one last chance to sup with him, they knew
Milosevic was no longer a fit companion.

On Sunday Serbian voters came to the same conclusion. The enormity of
their choice has surprised everyone, including the man they have
rejected. It may yet be that he still claims victory. Alternatively,
he may admit he lost this round and throw the election into a run-off
in two weeks' time - with the hope of splitting the opposition through
threats or bribes or, if that fails, organising a better
ballot-rigging exercise in the next round.

For the moment two things stand out. For the first time in over a
decade Milosevic has lost the initiative. Instead of being three moves
ahead of every other player, whether they be envoys of foreign powers
or his domestic critics, he is on the back foot, desperately playing
for time and looking for manoeuvres to escape. This new role will do
wonders for the silent opposition within his own ranks. Dictators
thrive on their image of invincibility. Once the colossus begins to
wobble, the henchmen start to look for their own way out. Secret
contacts with the opposition may have begun already. They are certain
to grow over the coming days.

The second conclusion is that, however the final count goes, Milosevic
has been repudiated by the most important section of the Serbian
electorate. The younger generation, urban voters, the better educated,
and those Serbs who have the closest contact with the huge diaspora of
Serbs abroad, many of whom are refugees from the Milosevic years,
turned out against him. They too now see he is a man with whom no
legitimate business can be done. They understand that more Milosevic
means more penury and more isolation.

It is a change of historic proportions. In world terms Milosevic's
defeat sends an encouraging signal. Those who come to power by the
sword usually perish by the sword. Here is almost the first case of a
dictator who came to power by the ballot perishing by the ballot.
Milosevic was not originally a nationalist. But like many other rulers
in the epoch of communism's collapse he used the instrument of
nationalism to "re-badge" himself and stay in power, in the process
betraying those in the Communist Party who had promoted him. Once
enthroned, he caught the nationalist fever, projecting himself through
the monopoly over the state media which he inherited from the
Communist Party as the only true defender of Serbia's interests. While
everywhere else in the communist world democratic institutions were
gradually emerging, Milosevic in Serbia stifled them. What had in
Tito's time been the least closed of communist societies became under
Milosevic the least open. The media, the universities and the
judiciary were all repressed.

Latinka Perovic, the distinguished historian of modern Serbia who led
the reformist wing of the League of Communists in Serbia in the early
1970s until she was sacked by Tito, described recently how Milosevic
"developed to the highest degree the most negative features of the
previous system: wilfulness, the absence of competition,
totalitarianism". Other Serb intellectuals have pointed out that
Serbs, like Russians, have long been torn between the westernising
tendencies of the enlightenment and slavophilia. In Serbia's case the
romantic nationalism which started in the 19th century as the Ottoman
empire first began to weaken turned into a pipe-dream of trying to
restore the medieval Serbian state. This was the imperial mirage of
Greater Serbia which Milosevic co-opted.

Sadly, part of the Serbian academic community went along with
Milosevic, as did the leadership of the Orthodox church. They forgave
him his communism because of his nationalist pretensions. Over the
years they have all abandoned him - from Dobrisa Cosic, the doyen of
the intellectual chauvinists, to Serbia's Patriarch Pavle. Even the
army high command has lost faith in Milosevic, with many of the
generals who backed him in his wars in Croatia and Bosnia now with the
opposition. Milosevic no longer represents anyone outside a tiny
coterie of cronies. Few Serbs have put it more starkly than Obrad
Savic, the philosopher-president of the Belgrade Circle, who was
dismissed from his university post in May. "Serbia", he said in July,
"is a non-transparent, non-cooperative, disconnected society full of
brutality, aggression, narrow-mindedness and egoism, a totally
fragmented and riven society, living in a million parallel worlds".

Faced with this legacy, it was perhaps inevitable that, at some
moment, Serbs of many different political persuasions would unite in
the name of the most basic patriotism to rescue their state from the
great usurper. Probably only an opposition candidate who was himself a
nationalist should have led the final resistance. Vojislav Kostunica
is a lifelong anti-communist who subscribes to the imperial ideology
and the myths of Serb victimhood. His attraction was, and is, his
financial honesty, his lack of political ambition and the fact that he
has never been part of the Milosevic regime.

He describes himself as a transitional figure, and seems to mean it.
No society can recover quickly from the intellectual and moral
corruption that the Milosevic regime produced. The debate between a
liberal, modernising Serbia and those who still cling to nationalist
delusions will go on. But whatever happens in the next week or two,
Serbia is on the road back to sanity at last.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 05:36:57 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 12:36:57 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Speculatingon the world economy
In-Reply-To: <200009260554.PAA10833@dynamite.com.au>
Message-ID: <000c01c027ae$13ea7860$030b063e@mjones>

 Rob Schaap wrote:

>
> Some thoughts I've just tried out on the Progressive
> Economists' List, to
> no response.  Are they just being polite?

Rob, the premise of the CrashList is that four interactive and adverse
processes combine to make world capitalism highly unsustainable, and
they are: energy deficits, climate destabilisation, biosphere
degradation, and human population growth.

We still know very little about any of these processes, and there is
no general agreement about the extent of the dangers any of them
presents. We know even less about the interactions between them, or
the extent to which their effects compound in positive feedback loops
or cancel each other out thru the chaotic and possibly intrinsically
unknowable and unpredictable effects of counter-tendencies. In the
circumstances, given that we still know relatively little about the
factors involved in the Crash, there is plenty of scope for
complacency in any of the relevant disciplines and scope for
ridiculing as 'Cassandra-ism', 'catastrophism' etc, attempts to
understand these processes holistically,  or even as a form of
misanthropy, as Doug Henwood accused me of recently.

Nevertheless, it is possible to not only seek common cause with people
from many different backgrounds and disciplines, it is also possible
to start drawing some lines in the sand -- and necessary and timely to
do so. It is possible to say that we DO know enough by now about all
of these processes, to suggest that too much complacency is a form of
denial. Many people are in denial because it is psychologically
difficult to accept what the consequences will be, for our own lives
and the wider society, if the doomsayers turn out to be right. And
there have always been doomsayers, but here we all still are, and life
goes on.

This kind of attitude looks increasingly a vocation in itself. People
spend more time defending themselves against accusations of
complacency in the face of what to many of us seem obvious and
manifest threats to our well-being. The greater the proximity to the
telescope, the greater the perceived disinclination to peek thru it in
case that the moons do indeed move. So do not get disheartened. The
more denialism you run into, the more you should keep banging away
asking you're questions: that's my gratuitous advice.

> >Worries about energy prices.
>
> Me:   Well, this seems to cut both ways, I reckon.  Are people
> underestimating
> the role of crisis-minimised import costs on US growth?

Dollar hegemony has resulted in savage deflationary pressures in the
world economy outside the US. The result has been to drain off capital
from the rest of the world, now at the rate of $1.5bn dollars per day,
as you point out. The story of the 1980s was the huge rise in dollar
debt and the collapse of development hopes in much of Latin America,
Africa and elsewhere. This was a direct result of the first Oil Shock
and the measures the US took to safeguard its position thereafter.

The story of the 1990s has been the pauperisation of the former
Eastern Bloc, the further impoverishing of South America, Asia and
Africa and a new tidal wave of wealth sucked in from those places, by
US capitalism, fuelling its most sustained boom. The two things are
yin and yang: the present 'bountiful' US economy has been bought at
the price of stagnation in Europe and Japan, and a holocaust of lives
and hopes in many other parts of the world. The huge increase in
income and wealth inequality this has produced *is the immediate
result of fundamental constraints on the capitalist growth model', in
particular, energy-shortage. If oil had been truly cheap and plentiful
(as it was briefly after 1945) economc growth would have been far more
general and its effects more widespread: there might have been real
development in the Third World. But energy has not been plentiful
since at least 1973, and therefore growth has been a mirage for most
of the world. Growth in social production has been unable to keep up
with inertial demographic growth. Most people have got worse off. 3
billion people live on less than $1000 p.a. They are not properly
housed, have no education or health services, no or inadequate running
water, no public transport, no life and no hope. Even in the US,
surface prosperity barely conceals all kinds of social evils. At the
same time, the preservation of US capitalism's hegemony and its
material, social and political bases, has made this phenomenal
inequality, gargantuan wastefulness and ecosphere-threatening
over-production, another inevitable by-product of these fundamental
limitations (primarily, the shortage of energy) on world capitalism.
There are powerful positive feedback loops here. Perhaps 70 percent of
US energy consumption is waste, as is argued for eg by Amory Lovins et
al in "Natural Capitalism" [available on the web at:
http://www.naturalcapitalism.org/sitepages/pid5.asp ]

But that is only if you calculate waste in terms of social utility or
objective human need. It is not waste in terms of the overarching
imperatives of the reproduction of capital. This is a primary reason
why US capitalism is such a roadblock on the way to a safer future. It
cannot be transformed, it can only be demolished and removed.

There is no doubt that the US is trying to buy up other people's oil
reserves on the cheap, using dollars it will subsequently devalue,
thus dishonouring the debt. That is what happened in the 1970s. See
Alexandre Faire's contemporary article, archived at:
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/vigier.doc


> But the other side is that the US have large (short term)
> reserves of oil,
> and it's bought and sold in greenbacks.  Perhaps high OPEC
> prices suits the
> US economy just fine!  As it did back when the likes of
> State Department
> policy wonk James Akins first recommended increased prices
> back in '73.  His
> point then was that the rapidly threatening Japanese and
> European economies
> didn't have any oil, meaning higher prices would hit them
> harder than it'd
> hit the States.  And, as US Treasury under-secretary
> William Simon said at
> the time, making OPEC a bit richer would be fine, as the
> proceeds would
> eventually be 'recycled' through US finance institutions,
> anyway.


When oil prices rise, some US reserves will become profitable to
extract. However, this is not a boon to the US economy, since higher
energy prices reduce overall profitability and increase the tendency
to stagflation (stagnation+inflation), as well as impoverishing the
masses. What will happen is a new race to the bottom, as also happened
in the 1970s. The US will aggressively use the Oil Shock to push its
nearest rivals still further down the food chain, but the price of
preserving US hegemony will be paid by everyone including the people
of the USA themselves. The big difference is that this time there will
be no second-coming for oil. In 1973 World Oil was still not at its
peak, but now it is. Oil production is set to decline. This means that
absent some miraculous and so far totally unknown source of cheap
energy, the world economy is now set for irreversible decline. What
will be the implications of this decline? How will it work out
politically? That's what we have to think about. Decline in oil
production can take different forms in different oil-provinces. It can
slope off gradually (umbrella-curve) or collapse almost overnight
(umbrella-handle or J-curve). In the USSR decline took the form of a
J-curve and the results were socially and economically catatsrophic.
There are many signs that the same thing will now happen on a world
scale: production is being pushed to maximum capacity in every major
oil province. At the first sign of a setback, it si likely to fall off
a cliff, as overstained infrastructures collapse or turn out to be
impossible to restart once shut off. I think it is possible for world
oil production to fall by a quarter or more in the space of two or
three years. If this happens, it will be economic doomsday for world
capitalism.

I mean,
> ya got all these SE Asian countries, brand new technology
> (courtesy of the
> pre-'97 investment boom) driving their manufacturing
> sectors' costs down,
> and their low currencies threatening US market share and
> and US national
> accounts.  Whack oil up a few notches, and the threat goes away.

Of course it is possible that SE Asia will go into another slump and
there is now much evidence of renewed fiscal weakness in Asian states
which suggests this will happen. Since this time there will be no
obvious path out of the economic morass, crisis-resolution is sure to
take an immediate and unassailable political form (revolutions,
state-collapse, fascism, authoritarianism, militarised state-renewal,
forms of autarky etc). Is it conceivable that such ruptures can occur
on the surface of the world system without having knock on effects on
Wall Street, for example? The Dow has moved sideways along a precipice
for more than a year now. A combination of factors are at work to drag
it off, including the effects on the dollar of high oil prices and a
higher payments deficit. Where are the net benefits to the US in all
this? What is the future going to be except a slump of the US domestic
economy more deeper, lasting and dangerous than the 1930s?

And what will happen in the Middle East? If dollar hegemony is
compromised, why should China and Japan (not to speak of Europe)
continue to support the dollar-denominated world energy market? I can
think of no reason why they would continue to accept dollar hegemony
OTHER THAN US control of the sealanes, the US 7th Fleet. And how long
does anyone suppose that US control of the Persian Gulf can be
maintained by military power alone? 5 years? 10?

No, it will not work, it is not a solution.



Mark




From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Tue Sep 26 09:01:20 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 11:01:20 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] The Theory of State Capitalism
Message-ID: <39D0BA3F.896C1775@netzero.net>


I don't know much about the author though, Mine:)

The Theory of State Capitalism Without Substance as Capitalism
Marxist Critique of Tony Cliff's Theory of "Bureaucratic State
Capitalism"

by Ken-ichi Suzuki.

http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~swp/english/etheory/sc/sc6-2.htm

Introduction

Tony Cliff's "State Capitalism in Russia" 1 is one of the pioneering
works which exposed the non-socialist nature of the USSR under the
Stalin regime. As is well known, in this work he defines the Stalin
regime as state capitalist (or more correctly, "bureaucratic state
capitalist", according to him). As far as this is concerned, he is in
accord with us. Based on the analysis of the relations of production in
the USSR, we also have defined the regime as state capitalist.

However, an accordance in terminology doesn't necessarily mean an
accordance in concept or content. If you examine his theory carefully,
you would understand that it is totally different from ours both in
methodology and in content. In this short work, we roughly introduce
Cliff's theory first and examine its pioneering significance and its
limit.

--

xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



____________NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_________
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From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep 26 08:52:57 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 16:52:57 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
References: <50.b4ae69f.27016c3d@aol.com>
Message-ID: <007b01c027ca$d3abc2a0$f0be6ac2@k382>

I had expected some insults & arguments ad hominem. Well....
It seems that my dear friend Noam was right ( once again...) when he wrote
to me that "I shouldn't be wasting time with Israel"....You are , really ,
worse than "not helpful and completely beyond any rational discussion".
I used to admire your energy while we were fighting togehter against NATO
during bombings- on LM, Nonviolence, "Z" and on many other places. I used to
think that your energy rests on authenthic leftist sentiment, altruism,
free-mindness.....But now it is obvious, for me at least, that you are
interested only in self-promotion and that you are not helping people but
only yourself. In different ways, not only in psychological one. Don't make
me elaborate this.
 It is strange, really: I was kicked out recently from an ameriKKKan
mailling list because I was " a Serbian nationalist"....And this was a list
dedicated to the man who is almost an icon of free speach, one of the
greatest radicals of our time. Here, on the contrary, I am being accused of
being "traitor to my own people" and "semi-fascist"........Amazing nad
amuzing. Is it a sample of anglo-ameriKKKan radical mindset? Or it is just
me, being unable to collaborate with extremists who are placing their own
ideological constructions before the lives of real people?
 In any case, my final regards to Marxville and to MR. Israel. Please,
remove me from this list.
Salud y anarquia,
                            Andrej Grubacic
                        Belgrade Libertarian Group
                          BLG/IWA/IWW/AIT
                        Resistance International
                         www.resistancenet.org

When you cannot change small minds,
 you have to leave them behind.
                                       (Chumbawamba)


----- Original Message -----
From: <Borba100 at aol.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 5:04 AM
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks


> In a message dated 09/25/2000 9:37:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> zapata at sezampro.yu writes about Thomas Fleming's attempt at red
baitinwhich I
> posted:
>
>





From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 10:25:14 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 17:25:14 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Review: "Midnight Oil"
In-Reply-To: <39D017DE.E26614F6@netzero.net>
Message-ID: <001c01c027d6$597ca740$030b063e@mjones>


> -----Original Message-----
> From: crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
> [mailto:crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com]On Behalf Of Mine Aysen
> xxxx
> Sent: 26 September 2000 04:29
> To: marxism at lists.panix.com; crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
> Subject: [CrashList] Review: "Midnight Oil"
>
>
>
> Came across as I was reviewing the literature on Marxist theories of
> economic crisis last night.

I think this is useful. What will happen to the dollar? This is again
a key issue.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 10:25:16 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 17:25:16 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
In-Reply-To: <007b01c027ca$d3abc2a0$f0be6ac2@k382>
Message-ID: <001d01c027d6$5aa19f40$030b063e@mjones>

 Andrej Grubacic wrote
>
>
> I had expected some insults & arguments ad hominem.

I hope Andrej does not leave. We need to know more about Yugoslavia,
and he knows much.
Let's discuss it rationally, folks.

Mark




From cbcox at ilstu.edu  Tue Sep 26 11:38:52 2000
From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 12:38:52 -0500
Subject: [CrashList] Re: clarifications
References: <39CFE5EF.CD7E838A@netzero.net>
	 <3.0.1.32.20000925131713.00fbf9cc@popserver.panix.com>
	 <v04210108b5f56cdb03f0@[140.254.113.208]> <39CFE5EF.CD7E838A@netzero.net> <3.0.1.32.20000926115558.00fd66fc@popserver.panix.com>
Message-ID: <39D0DF2C.8DEC0591@ilstu.edu>


Louis Proyect wrote:

> >I probably should resist getting dragged into this but: 1) I am
> >[split]
> >Doug
>
> Doug, Mine can (and I am sure will) speak for herself, but it occurs to me
> to pose the question what a "humane liberal" would be doing taking a job to
> head up the World Bank to begin with? The World Health Organization I can
> understand, but the World Bank?

As Lou knows, I and Yoshie have been conducting more or less
open warfare with Doug Henwood on a number of issues on
lbo-talk for nearly two years. It is a conflict that has sometimes
exploded into open flame war. No doubt it will again in the future.

But Doug Henwood is not a fool and he is not an apologist for
capitalism. He knows perfectly well, for example,  that physical
capital exists and is of fundamental importance -- and Mine's
posts on this illustrate either a real inability to read *or* a
delusion that procaiming one's marxist purity on mailists is
a revolutionary act. And in this post, Lou, you are being a
perfect asshole, letting your personal feud with Doug corrupt
your intelligence. You pose  "the question what a "humane
liberal" would be doing taking a job to head up the World
Bank to begin with?" What in the fuck do you think a humane
liberal is? That is *exactly* where one would expect to find
one. Whatever Doug's political errors (and he shares with
you and Mark Jones the very serious political error of
voluntarism) being soft on humane liberals is not one of them
and he has made quite clear his belief that politics so described
are toothless. The enemy is the World Bank -- and by your
silly little personal feud with Doug you are blurring the
attack on that enemy.

And you are not doing this maillist any good by encouraging
Mine's incredible misreadings of Doug, for which there is no
possible excuse (nor is ther any for her serious distortions of
Yoshie's relationship to "libertarianism") and if you were not
blinded (I hope temporarily) by personal  animosity in this case
that would be clear to you. Were any other name but "Doug
Henwood" attached to his presentation to the marxism 2000
conference you would have been the first to recognize that
it is a fine savaging of the concept of a "new economy," as all
the *marxists* as well as the "post-marxists" in the audience
recognized.

Doug seriously underestimates the strength of the capitalism
in general and of u.s. capital in particular. That leads him to
his error of believing there are alternative routes to socialism.
But you make the same basic error, and you share with
Doug the delusion (perhaps fatal delusion) that the defeats
of the left are to be ascribed primarily to errors of the left.
(Mao's essay on where do correct ideas come from should
have be appled equally to incorrect ideas, which do not fall
from heaven either.) Thus neither of you is able to ask the
simple question, Why, in the decade following the 1973 slump,
did so many committed and intelligent people follow Avakian
into RCP or follow Laclau and Mouffe into radical democracy?

I suspect neither of you has ever thought of putting Avakian
and Laclau into the same sentence?! Try it. There has been
some discussion lately about the demonization of Milosevic,
which led to a few remarks in some post (I forget whose)
on whether the whole process of demonization wasn't
wrong. Perhaps the easy demonization of Avakian and of
Laclau and Mouffe has obscurred more important matters.
And perhaps your joint demonization of each other is
just as unwise.

The amount of damage your personal quarrel is doing the
movement is in precise relation to the importance of the
marxism and the lbo lists. If they are trivial, quarrel away.
Otherwise, stop and think.

Carrol

P.S. U.S. capital will destroy the human species before it
allows itself to be voted out of power. It is either violent
socialist revolution or Rosa's barbarianism. If insurrection
is permanently impossible, then the only question facing us
is how to best limp through to our personal deaths.

P.S. 2. Oil Shortages, economic disaster, and global waming
will never produce the forces necessary for insurrection. If
we don't have time to build a revolutionary force without
that appeal, then the only question facing us is how to best
limp through to our personal deaths.




From aabdo at webtv.net  Tue Sep 26 11:51:29 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 12:51:29 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Yugoslavia
In-Reply-To: Borba100@aol.com's message of Tue, 26 Sep 2000 02:32:57 EDT
Message-ID: <21701-39D0E221-1165@storefull-235.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

I would like to make a few scattered comments in regard to the events
and discussion relating to the Yugoslav elections.

First, I too encourage Andrej to keep us informed with his opinions of
the developments occurring inside Yugoslavia at this time.      Also,
the commentary by Jonathan Steele that Mark posted, was very educational
in a sense, in that it gave a picture of some of the detail of the
internal imagery that Milosevic has maintained inside of Yugoslavia, and
how that is now crumbling.

Now, let me jump over to a brief commentary about antiwar.com, working
with the Right, as opposed to the Left, etc...

This is what Jared wrote....
<If people are going to be involved in real struggle, whether
intellectual struggle or various kinds of practical organizing (or
intellectual work geared to serving the needs of practical organizers,
which is how I view my work at emperors clothes) then one has to work
with people with all sorts of ideas with which one might disagree. Maybe
they'll change their ideas. Maybe you'll learn something new. It's a lot
healthier than pretending that "the left" is going to organize an
antiwar movement all by its lonesome.>

It's this last sentence I want to respond most to.     Jared, it is not
pretense to believe that "the left" is going to organize an antiwar
movement all by its lonesome.     It is pure reality.     The Right will
not substitute itself to the Left, in this regard.

It was not the Right that organized a movement in opposition to the
Vietnam War.     It was the liberal-Left element now sitting on its butt
at Nader rallies, or engaging in Znet parecon debates with Albert and
Chomsky.      These are the peple that have to be activated, not the
minions tuned into antiwar.com.

Organizing the antiwar movement in the imperialist countries is the most
key political task for the Left in the world.     The way it was done in
the past, was to give acceptable forms of organization to these
liberal-Left types that are now currently, totally disengaged.

It is commendable that 'The Emperors Clothes' and International Action
Center are making the effort, while others are seeking to 'turn out the
vote'.    But it is important to ask whether either of these two
POSITIVE examples of effort, are taking the best approach to providing a
vehicle to activate opposition to US world terrorism?

I would politely suggest, that neither IAC nor your own organization
have been very successful in chipping away against the inactivism of the
Znet, Social Democratic, and liberal crowd.      There still is no
counter form of antiwar alliance and organization, that can provide an
avenue for mobilization.      A mobilization that will be against the
will of the professional 'anarchist' commentators, and those imbedded in
the arses of the labor leadership.

There is nothing wrong with Emperors Clothes working with antiwar.com
and the Right Wing crowd in areas of common interests.      But what
happened is that Emerors Clothes stopped being an all round vehicle to
mobilize against US sponsored war, but became a sort of semi-official
support organization for the Yugoslav government.

I feel that it may be way too late to reverse course at your site,
Jared.     You carry too much baggage now.     Still, you should make
the effort.      If you were to succeed, it would be a big victory for
Left antiwar organizing.

Comradely, Tony












From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Tue Sep 26 12:01:49 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 14:01:49 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: clarifications
Message-ID: <s9d0ac5f.085@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>


>>> cbcox at ilstu.edu 09/26/00 01:38PM >>>
P.S. U.S. capital will destroy the human species before it
allows itself to be voted out of power. It is either violent
socialist revolution or Rosa's barbarianism. If insurrection
is permanently impossible, then the only question facing us
is how to best limp through to our personal deaths.

P.S. 2. Oil Shortages, economic disaster, and global waming
will never produce the forces necessary for insurrection. If
we don't have time to build a revolutionary force without
that appeal, then the only question facing us is how to best
limp through to our personal deaths.

((((((((((((

CB: I think Carrol's wisdom is showing in his advice in  this post.

However, a slight disagreement with P.S. 2.  Oil shortages, economic disaster and global warming ( caused by the capitalist system) ALONE will not produce insurrection. However, if capitalism didn't do something horrible like these things, there would be no reason to get rid of it.  So, these shortages and disasters are necessary but not sufficient to insurrection and revolution. Their negative effects on people are fundamentally necessary to making people turn against the system and to making abolition of capitalism rational. 

Reference to some kinds of serious problems must be part of the appeal for revolution.




From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Tue Sep 26 13:58:40 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 15:58:40 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Business downturn drives labor to the streets
Message-ID: <39D0FFEF.F2188297@netzero.net>

http://www.metimes.com/2K/issue2000-20/methaus.htm

Business downturn drives labor to the streets

Rasha Mehyar Middle East Times staff

As the Egyptian economy experiences its first serious downturn in over a
decade, the private sector is downsizing a labor force left exposed to
the changing economic landscape.

Companies owned by once high-flying flamboyant regime businessmen like
Ghabbour, Guinedy and Ahmed Bahgat have recently made it to the
headlines of the nation's opposition press for quietly letting go of
hundreds of employees.

But the phenomenon is also spreading to the small and medium-sized
manufacturing sector.

"Workers at Shanti Modern Plastics Industries [SMPI] came to us
complaining that they  had not received their salaries for the past six
months and that they were forced to resign," said Yasser Farag, head of
the Economic and Social program at the Egyptian Center for Human Rights
(ECHR).

Farag explained that when Osama Youssef Al Shanti, chairman of SMPI
located in Tenth of Ramadan City, found himself unable to pay off bank
loans and staff salaries, he fled the country, leaving behind 250 angry
factory workers. Since then the workers have staged a two-month-long
sit-in demanding their back pay.

However, the plight of the SMPI staff is merely a microcosm of
large-scale dismissals at factories in Egypt's new industrial cities.
ECHR reported that the lack of funds to pay employee salaries has driven
15 factories to close their doors in the Sixth of October and Tenth of
Ramadan industrial cities.

Though Al Shanti fled the country leaving his problems behind, other
employers are facing their troubles head on by downsizing their labor
force by as much as 50  percent.

 "If I do not have the money to pay the salaries of the people who work
for me, then why should they stay? I had no choice but to fire them,"
says Mounir Soliman, chairman of United Architecture Industries
Establishment, a wood furniture  manufacturer.

Soliman's cash-flow problems forced him to dismiss 50 percent of his
staff. "I produce furniture that does not sell on the market and as a
result I am not getting a steady income that will allow me to pay my
employees or to pay off my debt to the bank," he explained.

As the downturn in the economy takes its toll on businesses around the
country even multinational banks operating in Egypt are feeling the
heat, with Barclays International asking 46 employees in the check
clearance department to resign by May 27.

"It's a shame, most of the employees who were forced to resign without
getting the proper compensation are in their twenties and early
thirties. All they were offered was a month's salary for every year of
service," an anonymous source working at the Barclays branch in
Alexandria told the Middle East Times. However, they were offered
alternative employment at Middle East Company, a newly set-up check
clearing firm.

When it comes to dismissing employees, multinationals have a variety of
weapons to choose from in their well-heeled techniques of labor
exploitation. As Coca-Cola was about to relocate its bottling plant in
the Cairo suburb of Doqqi last December, employees complained of alleged
management harassment in the form of cutting telephone lines between the
company and the outside world. After several sit-ins, the workers ended
up getting the compensation of one month's salary for every year of
service they were legally entitled to.

Those employed with a clear compensation clause in their contracts
become the real targets of the management's legal harassment techniques
in case of dismissal.

"Employers simply do not give workers annual raises due to them [in the
clauses]. They also force them to take unpaid open-ended holidays," said
a head hunter, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Legal protection for workers against arbitrary management action is
available in the form of Labor Law 137/1981. The law stipulates that
employees can take their complaints to a tripartite consultative
committee formed from the labor department, a business representative
and a labor representative. The tripartite consultative committee would
than pass a ruling on how the employee should be compensated in case of
dismissal.

When workers at a multinational chocolate manufacturer in Tenth of
Ramadan City were forced to resign, they appealed to the tripartite
committee. After hearing their case, the committee referred the issue to
the court which awarded six months' salary to every employee.

In this case, those employees, other than the 220 who promptly accepted
the company's offer of paying the equivalent of a month's salary for
every year of service, lost out as many of them had been in the company
for many years.

But even the law is no guarantor of workers' rights, leaving them
exposed to the nation's shifting economic conditions.

Article 71 of the Labor Law stipulates that businesses that experience
economic difficulties can terminate the terms of the contract with their
employees any time they wish without providing them with compensation.

"As long as the word 'compensation' is not mentioned in the contract the
employer can fire whenever he likes. The private sector is currently
following that particular clause in the Labor Law. There is no strict
definition of the kind of economic difficulty that the company could be
passing through, therefore the contract can end at any time," Mustafa
Muhammad Mustafa, a lawyer at Kamel law firm, lamented.


--

xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



_____NetZero Free Internet Access and Email______
   http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html



From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 13:09:38 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:09:38 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] new at the website
Message-ID: <001f01c027ed$51390e40$030b063e@mjones>

New at the website, an important new paper by Patrick Bond, Ilya
Prigogine's Letter about the Club of Rome, papers on energy,
geopolitics  and crisis, and more.

http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/bonds.doc The Production,
Reproduction and Politics of the Southern African Working Class:
Economic Crisis and Regional Class Struggle by Patrick Bond, Darlene
Miller and Greg Ruiters  (Word97 format)
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/prigogine.htm Ilya Prigogine
on the Club of Rome
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/windpv.zip (European Union
plans for windpower and photovoltaics. The EC expects Europe to
install 100,000 Mw of windpower capacity by 2020.)
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/OilNotes.htm (collection of
earlier postings)
http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/rand.zip (2 RAND papers on
oil and Nato)
 http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/417.pdf (Mikhail
Budyko:Climate catastrophes)

The CrashList website is at:
 http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base



Also highly recommended, is Matthew R. Simmons White Paper, of which
Policy Pete said:

"Everyone thinks they understand the oil markets, but few really do.
It
takes more than a terminal into NYMEX and this week's API inventory
data.
One person with a relatively good claim is M. Simmons from Simmons &
Co.
He's been a significant industry analyst for a long time and Pete
finds some
of his more recent papers really interesting, even though his clients
in the
oil fields services business would certainly benefit if he's right.

Unfortunately, many of the interesting bits* are buried in 50 pages of
this
or that.  So follow the title link to a comparison between 1973 and
today:
[http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/web/downloads/whitepaper.pdf]
Read the history if you don't know it, but pay particular attention to
his
analysis of the present (pp. 42 et seq.). "The reality of the world?s
oil
production base as we begin the 21st century is that all the super
giant
fields are now very old with high water cuts and steep decline curves
absent
extensive drilling / secondary recovery programs. The industry found
no
super giant fields post 1967/68 and only a handful of giant fields
post
1973.  Moreover, most of these giant fields are now mere pygmies
through
rising decline rates. .... [Exploding demand] leads to a world needing
an
additional 40 million barrels of oil equivalent ("BOE") by 2010, plus
a
probable 80 million BOE per day to replace the oil and gas production
lost
by an estimated 10% per annum natural decline rate ..." Simmons
answers the
title question in the affirmative.  His view is that prices are going
to
continue to rise. "

*He also covers the notable, compound errors in IEA data that helped
convince observers that a glut existed 18 months ago. (See p. 39)

The simmons paper is at:

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/web/downloads/whitepaper.pdf

Policy Pete (indispensable) is ate:
 [http://qv3.com/policypete/


Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 13:09:22 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:09:22 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd: James Robbins on Caspian Oil and Yugoslavia
Message-ID: <001e01c027ed$4787fa00$030b063e@mjones>

----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------

Causes of war
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------




Sirs:

I recently found a useful article explaining the Caspian oil
connection to the war against the FRY by Sean Gervasi titled "Why is
NATO in Yugoslavia?". The report was delivered at the Conference on
the Enlargement of NATO in Prague on January 13-14, 1996 and can be
found at http://www.mclink.it/assoc/fondpasti/nato/.

I have since updated the institutional theory provided in the article
with additional evidence from a variety of sources. My hope was to
connect the dots that led to this tragedy; describe it in terms of
current system theory; and suggest how such wars could be avoided in
the future.

I do hope it will at least provides useful information to you and can
in some way contribute to an overall understanding of the cause of all
this suffering. The writing style may be too heavily descriptive as I
am an environmental analytical soil and water chemist and not a
professional writer.

Sincerely,
James Robbins





Wagons east - International trade and the FRY-NATO war US President
Bill Clinton has admitted that the war against The Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (FRY) by NATO and French Eurocorps forces is about the
global economy, stupid! Clinton's exact words were "If we're going to
have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell
around the world, Europe has got to be a key.... That's what this
Kosovo thing is all about."(1) In other words, NATO must pacify
Yugoslavia so that transnational oil companies in coordination with
the Bretton Woods Institutions, can secure the oil transportation
route from the Caspian Sea into Central Europe. Globalism and the New
Silk Road oil route Sean Gervasi in his paper "Why is NATO in
Yugoslavia" described the main globalistic objective of NATO as
control of the Danube Canal in the FRY to ensure a continuous trade
route to the East block and increase trade with Eastern Europe, Russia
and the Commonwealth of Independent States.(2) This action would
create a NATO administered European inland waterway between the Black
Sea and the North Sea via the Rhine-Main-Danube canal. More
importantly this canal would serve as the means for transnational
corporations to transport oil and petroleum products from the Caspian
Sea into Central Europe. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated
the low sulfur Caspian oil reserves to be up to 200 billion barrels
(Gbo), which is about twice the 94 Gbo of oil recaptured from Iraq in
the Kuwait war.(3) Proven natural gas reserves stand at about 5 to 8
trillion cubic meters, on par with those of the United States, with
estimated recoverable reserves three times larger.(4) According to
William Ramsay, deputy assistant secretary of state for energy,
sanctions and commodities, "these Caspian reserves are crucial to the
world energy balance over the next 25 years". He also said "the
Caspian can provide one-third of the expected increase in energy
demand by 2010 -- and will play a decisive role in powering world
development over the next three decades."(5) Clinton's war goals and
Gervasi's institutional theory support Ramsey's vision that, "There
already exists a kind of outline of a new Silk Road running through
the Caucasus and beyond the Caspian. We think oil and gas pipelines,
roads, railways and fiber optics can make this 21st century Silk Road
a superhighway linking Europe and Central Asia." (5) Recent analysis
of world oil reserves indicate that all oil estimates by the
transnational oil companies and the USGS significantly overestimates
the global oil reserves, however, this would add even more urgency to
extracting Caspian Sea oil. (6) Ramsey was further quoted as saying
that U.S. Energy Secretary Pena stressed, on his visit to the Caucasus
region in November 1997 "that the next 12 to 18 months are a crucial
period in Caspian development."(5) Coincidentally, the first secure
pipeline from the Azerbaijan Caspian Sea port of Baku to the Georgian
Black Sea port of Sapsa was ceremonial opened in December 1998 and the
first oil tanker destined for Spain was loaded in March of 1999.
Numerous wars for control of this oil, including the Georgia-Abkhazia,
Albania-Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karbakh), North Ossetian-Ingush, and
Chechnya-Russia wars, make other pipeline routes unreliable.
Unfortunately, the Strait of Bosporus is already overcrowded with
tanker traffic, and Turkey further limits oil tankers in the Bosporus
fearing an Exxon Valdez type oil disaster. (7) Solutions to getting
the oil to market include alternate oil pipelines planned between
Bulgaria-Greece, Bulgaria-Macedonia-Albania, and Azerbaijan-Southern
Turkey. However, none of these routes solves the problem of how to
economically transport oil to Germany and the surrounding Northern
European countries and finished products to markets in the former
Soviet Union. The reopening of the Danube canal following the
1991-1995 UN sanctions against Yugoslavia and the recent completion of
the Rhine-Main-Danube canal would allow the bulk transport of oil and
refined petroleum products to Austria, Germany, Poland, and Belgium.
This waterway is being expanded by channeling most of the major rivers
of Europe, including a Rhine-Rhone canal into France.(8) The canal
system is already the most economical trade route for most of Western
Europe, supporting both freighter and barge train traffic. The
Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta would serve as a transshipment
point from and to the Silk Road. This European "TRACECA" (Transport
Corridor Europe Caucasus Asia) corridor VII would also support oil
pipeline along the Danube.(9) Constanta has large oil refineries which
could provide secondary petroleum products to western markets.(10) The
opportunity for resumption of Ukrainian iron and coal imports is also
a significant factor in the trade equation. The TRACECA program was
implemented at Baku September 8, 1998 to provide sustainable access to
Trans-European and Trans-Asian transport networks for the land-locked
Caucasian and Central Asian countries.(9) The subsequent Silk Road
Declaration of April 24, 1999 is designed to "promote the effective
use of the international transport corridor Europe - the
Caucasus".(11) The European Union has recently created the INOGATE
program that is designed to promote the security of energy supplies.
An INOGATE Summit Meeting will be organized in Kiev (Ukraine) on July
22, 1999, in order to proceed with the final signature of the
"Umbrella Agreement" Careful reading of all these European Union
programs show that they are designed to protect the investment of
transnational corporations.(12) Yugoslavia as a NATO security threat
With this eastward expansion of the European Union and the
corresponding NATO security alliance, the independent FRY has become a
perceived threat to globalistic economic interests. The fact that the
FRY was not a NATO or UN combined with 1998 talks on the proposed
formation of a Russia, Belarus, and Yugoslavia federation threatened
their plans. The recent Balkan wars underscored to NATO that the
region was unstable and that further pacification was needed to ensure
a safe economic climate for Western investors! Ironically, the
Canadian economist Michael Chossudovsky, has shown that the IMF
ordered restructuring of the Yugoslavia economy during the late 1980s,
and administered by reformist bankers such as Milosevic, contributed
to the Balkan wars during the 1990s. The massive economic crisis from
these economic policies, including the loss of approximately two
million jobs by the end of 1980, had ignited ethnic hatreds,
exacerbated by authoritarian leaders, leading to brutal wars of ethnic
cleansing by Serb, Croat, and Muslim forces beginning in 1991.(13) The
reverend Jesse Jackson once remarked that "They no longer use bullets
and ropes. They use the World Bank and the IMF."(14). Most people in
the region never realized that the true "butchers of the Balkans" of
the late 20th Century were the IMF and World Bank leaders who
inflicted pain and suffering with a pen The recent completion of the
Baku-Supsa pipeline has undoubtedly added pressure on the European
political system to resolve the FRY problem and get on with the oil
rush. Social unrest and drastic economic downturns in Romania,
Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, caused by the failed policies of
economic "Structural Adjustment" engineering by the IMF, is of great
concern to the European Union security. Thus the desperate need for
the European Union to show that capitalism bears fruit in Eastern
Europe has accentuated the NATO perception that the FRY posed a
security threat to trade. NATO's slogan has thus became, "NATO: Out of
Area or Out of Business".(15) Lessons from Dayton The success of the
1995 Dayton Accords allowed NATO to pacify Bosnia-Hertzogovenia with
some 60,000 troops equipped with armor and backed by superior air and
naval forces. This NATO deployment was unique in that it was the first
major NATO operation and it was staged outside NATO boundaries.
Undoubtedly, Clinton mistook the willingness of the Slobodan
Milosovic's government to negotiate at the Dayton Accords, following a
short NATO bombing campaign against the Republic of Serbia forces, for
weakness. The added ease of which Franjo Tudjman's US and German
trained Croat army was able to capture Krijana, kill approximately
10,000 Serbs and ethnically cleanse some 750,000 Serbs from Croatia,
added to this misconception. Clinton's Bluff Anyone who bothered to
read Appendix B of the Rambouillet ultimatum noticed that it required
Yugoslavia to submit to occupation by 30,000 NATO troops, not only in
Kosovo and Metahuji (Kosmet), but also throughout Serbia and
Vojvodina. The FRY Ambassador Vladislav Jovanovic drew the parallel
that "what happened at Rambouillet was the same thing that Hitler had
done with Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland: If Prague does not
agree, Germany will attack." The expected refusal of the Serbs to
relinquish sovereignty provided the justification needed for the
immediate coalition bombing campaign! Jesse Jackson later remarked
that "a diplomacy with no diplomacy is no diplomacy; that bombing and
forcing an enemy to capitulate with no other dialogue is wrong."
Apparently the bombing campaign was expected to result in the
immediate capitulation of Yugoslavia rather than face the most
powerful air force in world history. NATO commander General Wesley
Clark went so far as to tell US Rep. Randy `Duke' Cunningham of the
51st Congressional District that "Duke, NATO only wanted to bomb one
day and quit (16)". Unfortunately, Clinton and his advisors did not
consider the law of unexpected consequences, as Milosovic failed to
capitulate as expected. One would have thought that at least General
Clark would have been acutely aware of this principle following his
fateful planning of the Waco, Texas assault on the Branch Davidian
Compound (17). Serbian strategy After the NATO political leaders had
their bluff called in their high stakes poker game with the FRY, the
NATO generals were either too stupid, or more likely too afraid, to
let the political leaders know that this was not the Kuwait oil war! A
good analysis of the FRY strategy was recently published in the
STRATFOR Journal (11) and reveals that the FRY would use a strategy
similar to what Switzerland used to deter Germany in WWII, that is,
the threat to inflict a pyrrhic victory. A brutal, but necessary,
component of this defensive strategy is the ethnic cleansing of a
majority of Kosovar Albanian citizens and approximately half million
illegal Albanian aliens. This action serves to tie up NATO resources,
create a defendable border, and eliminate rear guard attacks from KLA
terrorists within Kosmet. Humanitarian smokescreens To cover the
failed bluff, NATO has lied when it claims that the massive
deportations Albanians and the ethnic cleansing of Kosavar Albanians
from Kosmet was the justification for bombing. The FRY military and
police only started their defensive depopulation of the battlefield
once the bombing attack began. While the Serbian deportation and
ethnic cleansing strategy cannot be condoned, neither can the ethnic
cleansing of Serbs from Croatia in 1995 or of Palestinians from Israel
in the 1947-1949 war. (19) In each of these three cases, the history
of hundreds of years of injustices by both sides of the conflict led
to deportation and ethnic cleansing. The NATO political propaganda has
justified the subsequent deaths of about 2,000 civilians and the
wounding of another 6,000, including Kosovar Albanians, as collateral
damage in a war to protect Kosavar Albanians. To deflect attention
from NATO geopolitical goals, they repeat the Balkan war propaganda,
that the Serbian people are subhuman neo-fascists who deserve what
they get in order. In reality, atrocities attributable in the Balkan
wars, by Serb, Croat, and Muslim forces were approximately
proportional to their respective populations and had their roots in
IMF policy. The Clinton Administration is even more amnesic in failing
to acknowledge the genocidal wars against native Americans and the
many instances of ethnic cleansing, such as the Trail of Tears, the
forced removals of Navajo (Dine) and Apache from Arizona, and the
Ojibwe from Wisconsin, to mention only a few. Appeals to prevent and
reverse the widespread illegal acquisition of tribal lands within
Sovereign Indian Nations by non-Indians are routinely blocked by the
US Congress. This latter land grab policy makes America and Israel the
only two nations in the world that do not have clearly defined
borders. Spoils of war The key tactical objective of the current air
war seems to be the deindustrialization of Serbia and Vojvodina, by
the destruction of key national refinery, communication and
transportation assets in day and night bombardment. John Broder has
recently quoted Clinton as saying that "Europeans would...pay most of
the cost of rebuilding Yugoslavia" after the war. It is more likely
that this help will come in the form of IMF arranged privatization of
these economic sectors of Serbia by transnational corporations at fire
sale prices. The control of oil fields in Vojvodina, approximately
five billion in mineral deposits and the second largest European
deposit of lignite coal (17 billion tons) in Kosmet, are just
secondary prizes. All evidence points to partitioning the FRY into at
least the provinces of Kosova, Serbia and by giving the ethnic
Hungarian portion of Vojvodina to Hungary. Such goals would require a
long-term military occupation by a large NATO army until compliant
leaders can be identified and placed in administrative positions and
internal security policing established. Wagons East Once the FRY is
secured the NATO military alliance can turn its attention the
Caucasus. Ariel Cohen, a scholar in Russian and Eurasian Studies, at
the Heritage Foundation, has recently stated of that "It is in Western
interests to have that region pacified."(20). To stabilize Georgia, it
was made an Associate of the European Union in April 1999 and an
Associate member of NATO on May 31, 1999, and for starters it is being
provided with 10 American helicopter gunships and German police
advisors. This aid combined with recent joint military exercises
between the US 82nd Airborne and Azerbaijan, are meant to protect the
crucial pipelines from rebel groups. Major NATO efforts will also be
required in Turkey to control a part of Kurdistan's 65 Gbo of oil
reserves and the oil pipeline from the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk
to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The planned major oil and
gas pipelines between Azerbaijan to the port of Ceyhan will require
additional security. There are also plans to extend this gas pipeline
to Israel, which may explain recent joint Turkey and Israel military
exercises. The need to protect this new pipeline will eventually be
used to justify an aggressive new NATO pacification action against the
Kurdish people. The new 30 billion-five year agreement to
modernization of Turkey's military by US arms merchants seems to bear
out this possibility. Turkey has already killed thousands of Kurds,
destroyed some 3,000 villages, and created about two million refugees
in the last 14 years! What will happen when Turkey really gets serious
about pipeline security! This eastward NATO expansion vision into the
Caucasus can be sold to the American and European Union citizens
through the powerful subliminal combination of the "American conquest
of the frontier" and the "European crusade" myths. However, these
myths avoid the question: what happens when the "Indians or Infidels"
in these regions resist being pacified and moved to reservations? Fear
of the big stick It is obvious that this "Big Stick" war against the
FRY is an ecological, social and economic disaster to the Balkans and
ultimately may threaten European Union access to the Caspian Sea oil
that it thinks it so desperately needs. Alexander Solzhenytsin stated
on June 3, 1999, that "NATO wants to enforce the New World Order and
it needs Yugoslavia to set an example." "We will punish Yugoslavia,
and the rest of the planet will tremble", and that "it can bring the
dictatorship of NATO, and the tyranny of NATO over the rest of the
planet". Solzhenytsin added that, "he does not see any difference at
all between NATO and Hitler". This typical response from Russia and
many members of the Commonwealth of Independent States has convinced
most of these countries that they need to keep, or acquire, nuclear
weapons to protect their people against NATO attacks. The recent
Russian military buildup in Daghestan and Armenia due to their fears
of being cut out of the oil rush should be carefully considered by
NATO. Canary in the mine shaft The NATO war against the FRY has shown
that the IMF can destroy European countries just as it can those in
the third world. US Rep. Bernie Sanders has argued that such IMF
administered policies result in: "a few world-class billionaires,
economic collapse, soaring debt, mass unemployment, grinding poverty,
and unpaid wages and pensions." Unfortunately, the media only shows
acute suffering and not the chronic death by a thousand cuts that the
IMF dispenses. There is now alarming evidence that the IMF and NATO
destruction of Yugoslavia will be replayed in the Caspian Sea region.
IMF policies in the Caspian Sea region are already causing widespread
suffering and may result in conflicts to numerous to count.(21, 22)
Western powers are also failing to deal with the socioeconomic
disruption that comes with sudden oil wealth (23). Who within the EU
media will dare announce that many have died for the IMF and many more
will follow? FRY-NATO war solution. The FRY parliament approved G8
agreement for meaningful self-rule and sovereignty and territorial
integrity of the FRY suggests a Kosova-Kosmet model similar to the
Belgium federal monarchy. In Belgium, there are distinct Flemish,
Walloon and German communities and decisions affecting each community
culture are made within the respective culture as much as possible.
Ultimately, it is doubtful that anything less than a
Czechoslovak-style divorce would work, no matter how many peacekeepers
are present. In the Kosova-Kosmet there would also be the impossible
task of separating the Kosavar Albanians factions to keep them from
killing each other. There is also the question of whether anyone would
want to return to a destroyed land that is littered with mines, bomb
fragments, cluster bombs, toxic spills and dusted with depleted
uranium. Given the extensive damage in all of the FRY one would expect
many refugees of all ethnic groups to try to make a new start
elsewhere in the EU, if possible. According to the United Nations High
Commission on Refugees, of 1 million Bosnians who fled during the
1990s fighting, only 321,000 have returned home in the four years
since the peace agreements were signed. The peace plan will allow both
the Clinton (NATO) and Milosovic governments to be able to give the
appearance of not losing the war. The reality is that, almost everyone
involved lost and will continue to lose for many decades to come.
System engineering causes for the war The fundamental lesson from the
war was that no one recognized that it arose for the following
shifting the burden model:


(1) completion of the Caucusus pipeline led to;

(2) a need to intimidate the FRY into submitting to loss of
sovereignty which;

(3) led to the tactic of intimidation of the FRY for a failing
balancing loop between Albanians and Serbs that;

(4) resulted in quick fix NATO war against the FRY which;

(5) caused the unintended consequences of refugees, deaths, suffering,
and mass destruction and;

(6) addiction loops where the EU community and UN troops will have to
keep solving the problems of their intervention for decades which;

(7) cause additional problems that lead to more quick fix solutions
and;

(8) ultimately create numerous other system theory archetype problems.
(28) In retrospect, the money wasted on this war could have been used
in the late 1980s to create a prosperous and just society in the
multiethnic Balkan region that would not have posed a perceived
threat. New directions As this bloody century closes it is critical
that the peoples of the European Union reflect on their historical
failures. It is time that Europe addresses the root economic causes to
social discord come up with alternatives to the classical large Nation
State or the reductionist New World Order. Fortunately, many
economists have clearly described the bribe, divide, and conquer
strategies of the New World Order and have suggested alternative ways
to conduct a more civil and environmentally sound society.(24, 25, 26)
Such changes will require a radical change from the current Newtonian
world view of crisis, chaos, pollution and decay to a entropy world
view which emphasizes the reduction of disorder in all aspects of
society.(27) Care must also be taken to avoid tactical quick fix
solutions to socioeconomic problems. This will require thoughtful
consideration of strategic system theory principles before engineering
cultural changes.(28) Europeans must carefully consider such
alternative voices in the wilderness or the next century will even
more tragic!

Bibliography :



(1) U.S. President Bill Clinton In a speech delivered the day before
his televised address to the American people about the crisis in
Kosovo, Quoted in "The Case Against Intervention in Kosovo", by
Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, The Nation Magazine, April 19,
1999 issue.


(2) Sean Gervasi, "Why is NATO in Yugoslavia" presented at the 1996
Prague Conference on the Enlargement of NATO.


(3) Caspian Sea: U.S. Experts Say Oil Reserves Are Huge By Charles
Fenyvesi Washington, 5 May 1998 (RFE/RL)


(4) US and EU scrambling to tap the natural resources of the Caspian
region by Ivan Vlahov
http://www.onlinebg.com/sofiaecho/se36-98/business/gas.htm


(5) Pipeline Superhighway Replaces The Silk Road By Stuart Parrott
London, 19 November 1997 (RFE/RL)


(6) Campbell, C.J. and Laherrere, J. H. 1998. The End of Cheap Oil.
Scientific American March, 1998. pp78-84.


(7) Bosphorus Straits Regulation and Central Asian Oil. At
http://gurukul.ucc.american.edu/ted / BOSPORUS.htm.


(8) Arnould, M. and Epple, R. France Moves to Channelize the Rhone,
World Rivers Review, February 1997


(9) The Basic Multilateral Agreement on International Transport for
Development of the Europe - the Caucasus - Asia Corridor" Baku 8th
September 1998 http://www.azembassy.com/traceca/browse.htm


(10) Gross, A. Inches close to the deal of the century: Will the Oil
Road cross Romania. IR Magazine 7.
(http://www.investromania.ro/magazine/archive/ir7/7caspian.html)


(11) Silk Road Declaration. Declaration between Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan. April 24, 1999 http://www.azembassy.com/traceca/browse.htm


(12) U.S.-EU statement on caspian energy. May 18, 1998
http://www.usis-israel.org.il/publish/econews/1998/may/eco0519b.html


(13) Chossudovsky, M. "The Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF
and World Bank Reforms" (1997, Zed Books).


(14) Jackson, J. Presentation to eleven African heads of state,
Liberville, Gabon, May 27, 1993.


(15) Senator Richard Lugar. "NATO: Out of Area or Out of Business",
Remarks Delivered to the Open Forum of the US State Department, August
2, 1993, Washington, D.C.


(16) US Representative Randy `Duke' Cunningham, 51st Congressional
District. KOSOVO (House of Representatives - May 05, 1999) [[Page:
H2785] [TIME: 2045]]


(17) Cockburn, A and St Clair, J. 1999. Clark at Waco?
counterpunch at counterpunch.org


(18) STRATFOR. Analysis of NATO's ground invasion options. April 14,
1999.


(19) Mattlage, A. A chronology of the Zionist-Arab conflict. Dept. of
Philosophy. St. Cloud State Univ. St. Cloud, MN 56301 (online).


(20) Cohen, A. in Analyst says west has stake in NIS oil development
by Rose, W. USIS Staff Writer Daily Washington File. 11/02/95


(21) Starr, S. F. Gloomy thoughts: scenario for a meltdown in central
Asia and the Caucasus. Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, SAIS. notes.
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the John
Hopkins University May 1999


(22) Cohen, A. Ethnic conflicts threaten u.s. interests in the
Caucasus The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No.1222. September 25,
1998


(23) Starr, S. F. Being rich will not be enough oil and policy in
central Asia and the Caucasus. briefing paper Central Asia-Caucasus
Institute, SAIS. The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies of the John Hopkins University


(24) Korten, D. 1995. "When Corporations Rule the World" Kumarian
Press, Inc. and Berrett-Kohler Publishers, Inc.


(25) The End of Work. 1995. The Decline of the Global Labor Force and
the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. G.P. Putnam's Sons


(26) Chomsky, N. 1999. Profit over people:Neoliberalism and Global
Order. Seven Stories.


(27) Rifkin, J. 1980. Entropy A New World View. Foundation on Economic
Trends. Viking Press


(28) Senge, P. 1990. The Fifth Discipline. The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization. A Currency Book.











From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 14:31:52 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 21:31:52 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Re: clarifications
In-Reply-To: <39D0DF2C.8DEC0591@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <002001c027f8$ce2863a0$030b063e@mjones>

Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > >I probably should resist getting dragged into this but: 1) I am
> > >[split]
> > >Doug
> >

I definitely do not want the Crashlist to get dragged into this. I
read Henwood's Amherst speech (it  is archived at:
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/1226.html
if anyone is interested).

It doesn't do anything to define the New Economy or deconstruct the
notion either, that I can see. It simply doesn't add anything to what
we are doing here. I hope his new book is more substantial. But this
speech is just irrelevant. So let us get back on topic. There are a
dozen lists where you and Doug and Lou and Yoshie can beat each other
to death. This isn't one of them. The more I look at what's going on,
the more I see energy decline taking the form of a J-curve. The
symptoms are there, in gas and oil particularly. This is going to
result in economic catastrophe. I am not interested in analysing why
Doug are anyone is in denial. I'm interested in analysing how the
Crash will play out in the next 6 months or two years. As Jay Hanson
put it, billions of innocent people are walking around unaware of the
fact that their death-warrants have already been made out. That is the
issue. There is an ongoing dieoff, in the fSU, in parts of Africa and
South Asia and elsewhere. And the process has barely begun.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Tue Sep 26 14:43:33 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 21:43:33 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] The Relative Real Price of Oil
Message-ID: <002301c027fa$6fc40b00$030b063e@mjones>

[from Policy Pete, http://qv3.com/PolicyPete/policypete.htm ]

It is common these days to run into the argument that the current oil
and gas price level is not that high because a time series that
discounts from nominal to real prices will show that prices in the
late 70s were much higher.  But these arguments, while literally
correct depending on which deflator is used, can be misleading because
so many of the relative indicators of the price level have changed so
much.  In 1980 the price of gold was more than three times the current
price, so measured as a percent of the price of gold, current oil
prices are high indeed, especially after years of fighting inflation
instead of promoting it.  Here is a quote, written just after oil
prices first achieved unprecedented highs, to give you perspective
when thinking about the real oil price and the prospects for
inflation:

          At the time of the first OPEC price increase, in 1973, the
United States had tangible capital assets with a value of about $3.5
trillion -- more than two and a half times that years gross national
product and more than fifteen that year's very high level of
expenditure for new physical assets.  These capital goods ... had all
been built, designed and located on the assumption that, regardless of
overall price inflation, a barrel of oil would be worth one or two
bushels of wheat, or one hundredth of a ton of steel, or less than
half an hour of skilled labor.  However, a barrel of oil today is
worth eight or nine bushels of wheat, one fifteenth of a ton of steel,
and more than two hours of skilled labor.   These changes have made it
uneconomical to operate much of 1973's physical plant the way it was
intended to be, or, in some cases, to operate it at all; much capital
and labor goes unemployed or malemployed.  OPEC's price increase is
thus a principal explanation for the high levels of unemployment that
we have experienced since 1973.   And unemployment leads to more
inflation.  Government policy becomes more expansive to combat
unemployment, and succeeds, in part, by inflating the prices of
everything else, so that the 1,000% increase in the dollar price of
oil becomes "only" a 500% increase relative to the price of steel or
labor.  Another inflationary impulse comes from the interruption of
productivity growth caused by sudden shifts in the relative price of
oil....  When the anticipated increases in output per worker do not
materialize, employers can maintain profitability only by increasing
prices.

Robert Zevin, "A Plan for Controlling Inflation"  1981.   (Then Senior
VP, US Trust Co. of Boston)




From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Tue Sep 26 15:14:43 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 15:14:43 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] Prelude to the Crash
References: <002001c027f8$ce2863a0$030b063e@mjones>
Message-ID: <00a201c027fe$cae733a0$1448adcf@perryarn>

Mark,

great thoughts!

did you get the latest from Duncan? copied below

Perry

...from energyresources list :

=========
Congratulations to Lise Maring, Bruce Thomson, and Kendrick Holder for their
bold and clear thinking.

I think most readers will agree that it's best to be realistic when
navigating the treacherous Strait of Messina (between the rock of Energy
Depletion and the of whirlpool Overpopulation). Realism is crucial. So is
the optimism (i.e. confidence) that you can be a Darwinian survivor. In that
regard, Bruce Thomson's scenario (i.e. Message #4, Digest #214, copied
below) is, IMO, realistic and fully consistent with Jay Hanson's dieoff and
my Olduvai Theory.

My presentation to the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council, "Crude Oil
Production and Prices: A Look Ahead at OPEC Decision Making Process," last
Friday in Bakersfield, California ended with a Prelude to the Olduvai crash
(pages 12-14, the scenario pasted below):

------------------------
BEGIN EXCERPT OF PTTC PRESENTATION:
>
>  12. THE ROAD AHEAD
>
> The Road Ahead, based on the information in sections 2-11 above, IMO,
leads
> directly to war in the Middle East < in a matter of months, not years. Oil
> prices will skyrocket. Chaos will spread far and wide. Desperate leaders
> will take desperate measures. The following scenario, of course, is 100%
> fiction < but it does convey the magnitude of the problems we face.
>
> Scenario: Early 2001. War breaks out in the Middle East when an agreement
> for the sovereignty of Al Quds (East Jerusalem) fails for the umpteenth
> time. Terror strikes Jerusalem. The police are overwhelmed. The
> conflagration jumps to Tel Aviv and Amman < then sweeps westward. Athens
> and Rome erupt. Moscow too. Explosions rip Berlin, Madrid, Paris and
> London. Dublin is not spared. Then it leaps across the Atlantic to New
York
> and Washington DC. Even Seattle forgets the WTO riots. Meanwhile oil
prices
> go ballistic < $100 plus per barrel. Gas stations, supermarkets and stores
> are looted. World leaders panic. "UN" stealth bombers strike "suspected
> terrorist sites" in Tripoli and Baghdad. It's stealth bombers versus
> "stealth bombers", but the latter quickly gain the upper hand. The Sixth
> and Seventh Fleets join the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. "UN"
> paratroopers occupy all of the oil fields and refineries in the Middle
> East. Banks of Patriot missiles ring Jerusalem. Helicopter gunships hit
> Gaza and Jericho. Israeli "peacekeepers" secure Palestine. Wall Street
> plummets 70% in one day. CUT
>
> Complete speculation, but it could happen.

>  13. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

[snip ]

> ... Regarding 'spare capacity': OPEC Chairman
> Ali Rodriquez on 11 September 2000 emphasized, "World oil production
> capacity is reaching its limit." Regarding oil prices: Dr. Walter
> Youngquist on 10 September 2000 encapsulated the consensus of several
> experts, "It's going to be a seller's market from now on. With
> firm-to-higher prices and steady demand for all the oil that can be
> produced." Agreed, World oil production is near its limit and prices will
> rise. In a more dramatic scenario, however, I believe that the World oil
> data, the oil forecasts and OPEC's hegemony of World oil exports <
combined
> with the "key-to-peace-and-war" deadlock over East Jerusalem < all
indicate
> that war is imminent in the Middle East. Consequently oil prices will be
> highly volatile < perhaps hitting $100 or more per barrel< during the
> coming months.

> Bottom line: The Road Ahead, IMO, leads directly to war in the Middle East
> and beyond < causing severe shortages of oil and staggering prices for oil
> and oil products.

END EXCERPT.
-------------------------

COMMENTS:

1. Nobody in the PTTC audience disagreed with the War in the M.E. scenario
and highly volatile oil prices, as pasted above.

2. In fact, an Arab-born man (a petroleum professional) in the audience
completely agreed, saying, "Yes. The path the US and UN are on definitely
leads to war in the Middle East. But I don't think it will spread worldwide
as you suggest."

3. The tales of woe from the "small independent producers" were heart
rending indeed. For example, to forestall the inexorable depletion of the
their oil wells it was proposed (1) to increase the efficiency of the use of
electricity at the well sites (a BIG $ problem now in S. Calif.), (2) to
"wash" the aging bore holes with [sic]  4,200 gallons of hydrochloric acid
per hole to clean out the "gunk" that's blocking the flow of oil. So-called
"Acid Stimulation Treatment to Sustain Production", (3) "DOE's Cost Share
Program", (4) "Reservoir Simulation", (5) "Oil Well Wireless Monitoring",
(6) "Short Radius Lateral Drilling", and other desperate (and costly and
temporary) measures.

4. But there was good news too. The higher prices for oil should keep the
small independents in business for a few years longer.

5. A Clinton & Gore Funny: One PTTC speaker cited a study that put the cost
of 1 barrel of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) at $60 per
barrel (i.e. purchase price + storage + maintenance costs). So Clinton &
Gore are going to bring down the present price of $34 per barrel oil by
selling 30 million barrels of oil that cost the US Government $60 per
barrel. Ho! Ho! Ho! The oilmen roared.

6. My keynote presentation to the Geological Society of America "Summit
2000" (Reno, 13 November) will feature World oil Forecast #5 and the Olduvai
Theory. All I can say for now is that -- SURPRISE -- the proximate cause of
the Thomson-Dieoff-Olduvai crash will neither the oil crisis nor
overpopulation. Tune in tomorrow .........

Meanwhile: Take care, avoid stress, and have fun.

Rich Duncan

-------------------------------------------
FROM DIGEST #214:
>
> Message: 4
>    Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 22:23:40 -0400
>    From: Bruce Thomson <bruce at sympatico.ca>
> Subject: Re: Digest Number 210
>
> At 02:30 AM 9/22/2000 +0000, you wrote:
>>.  Seems to me we
>>need to start thinking in new ways to meet this challenge.  Either that,
or
>>we just sit back, let it all crash, and start all over again........which,
>>come to think of it, might not be a bad idea either.
>>Lise
>
> Lise, my dear pen pal...
>
> Only if you forget to imagine the sickening, degrading horror of the
coming
> holocaust of energy crash can you be fatalistic or casual about just
> letting it crash without acting against it.
>
> Here's some concepts that might make us more sober and diligent. These
> things are not to be accepted, but must be foreseen, resisted, fought hard
> now and delayed:
>
> - Millions of Americans and Canadians shocked, out of work, hopeless and
> depressed.
> - Thousands freezing to death in gloomy homes, thousands dying in
> unrelieved city heat.
> - Unlit, dangerous streets. Boarded up shops. Beggars, bodies. White
> Calcutta everywhere.
> - Day and night terror of murder, home invasions, organized criminals,
> protection rackets.
> - Martial law: Fake media, casual speech dangerous, authoritarian torture,
> murder of family/friends
> - All today's elegant shops neglected, dim, shabby caves, bare of goods,
> sparse people. Queues.
> - Squalid parks full of hopeless, dirty, sick, bored people, including
> people we know, and maybe us.
> - Crammed hospitals with no resources. Unrelieved sickness, infections,
> excruciating pain.
> - Stinking air pollution as the public burns even park trees, fences,
> benches, used oil, for warmth.
> - Destruction of forests, bushes, anything burnable. Same for wildlife,
> anything edible.
> - Dilapidated buildings, roads.
>
> It's real.
> It's coming.
> Let's make our lives meaningful by fighting  it with everything we've got,
> to at least delay it.
>
> BT
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Bruce Thomson   bruce at sympatico.ca
> 777 Craven Road, Toronto ON Canada
> (416) 778-7799
> -----------------------------------------------------------------

>
> Message: 21
>    Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 11:30:31 EDT
>    From: KHo33333 at aol.com
> Subject: Re: Digest Number 210
>
> To:  Bruce Thompson
>      I  cannot disagree with you regarding your graphic description of the
> "die-off".  In the face of this catastrophe I think the industrialized
nations
> of the world will likely turn to their last resort:  Nuclear Power.  Nukes
> are
> dangerous (reactor safety), produced tons of dangerous waste and
> inevitably lead to more nuclear weapons (proliferation).  Solar Farms
> appear to be prohibitively expensive (Solar Two produced electricity at
> 12-14 cents per kwh before the cost of conversion to hydrogen and
> transmission by special pipelines - special thick pipelines are required
> for hydrogen).  Everyone likes solar.  It is clean and safe but it does
not
> appear to be economically feasible.  Nuclear power is reasonably
> economical and can be sited where it is needed.  When people are
> starving and freezing to death in the dark they are not going to worry
> very much about nuclear safety.         Kendrick Holder
>
> P.S.  I have always been opposed to nuclear power.
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------
FROM DIGEST #210:
>
> Message: 24
>    Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:51:39 EDT
>    From: "Lise Maring" <lonewolf1366 at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: The dieoff
>
> Just an observation from a sporadic contributor, and some pre-coffee
> ramblings that might trigger some ideas from the engineering folks out
> there.
>
> I get the feeling that this list is changing and starting to look more
like
> the Running on Empty list.  Is it true then, that all possible energy
> sources have been analyzed and rejected as replacements for fossil fuels?
> If so, it would appear that the main work of this list has been
> accomplished, and the final analysis is not good news for the human race?
>
> So, okay, are we saying that there is no energy source that will totally
> (globally)and seamlessly replace fossil fuel so a change-over will be
> 'invisible to the user'?  What, then, is the next possibility?  Maybe have
> regional energy sources?  We know wind energy works in some areas,
> hydroelectric is in place in others. Coal might still be the way to go in
> other places.  Should we be thinking locally instead of globally?  Should
we
> be thinking about setting up cores of energy sources that we can expand
> from?  What would it take to power NYC alone, for example.  Could the
> smaller towns have their own sources?  I keep thinking of that book "Small
> is Beautiful" by E.F. Schumacher.
>
> Well, I'm not an energy source expert nor an engineer.  So, just consider
> these the rantings of an 'uneducated' person but, seems to me, there must
be
> some middle ground, assuming there's time to do it, between having to have
a
> global source and a world where its everyone for themselves.  Seems to me
we
> need to start thinking in new ways to meet this challenge.  Either that,
or
> we just sit back, let it all crash, and start all over again........which,
> come to think of it, might not be a bad idea either.
>
> Lise
>


. The more I look at what's going on,
> the more I see energy decline taking the form of a J-curve. The
> symptoms are there, in gas and oil particularly. This is going to
> result in economic catastrophe. I am not interested in analysing why
> Doug are anyone is in denial. I'm interested in analysing how the
> Crash will play out in the next 6 months or two years. As Jay Hanson
> put it, billions of innocent people are walking around unaware of the
> fact that their death-warrants have already been made out. That is the
> issue. There is an ongoing dieoff, in the fSU, in parts of Africa and
> South Asia and elsewhere. And the process has barely begun.
>
> Mark
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From julp at freesurf.ch  Tue Sep 26 15:19:00 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 23:19:00 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Speculatingon the world economy
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.26.jrdtmcji@computer>

[Juilen is coming back to answer Rob and Mark... over economics not history I 
reassure you]

Rob,

>It all depends on the foreigners, doesn't it?  They have to keep pumping 1.5
>billion dollars into the American markets every single day to keep your CAD
>funded, your currency safe, your markets stable, your baby-boomers'
>retirements funded, and a world economy with someone to sell its stuff to.  
>There's quite a menu of things that might happen to turn that tap off, I
>reckon. And when it does, a chain-reaction-debt-crisis-replete-with-economy-
>stopping-credit-squeeze is well on the cards.  

That concerted intervention Friday plus the paper hinting at a devaluation of 
the dollar by 40% from the Fed makes me think that the Fed is a lot closer to 
accept to let the dollar fall than six monthes ago. What's the last time they 
raised rates, BTW? I guess I'm standing with Mark and Alexandre Faire here 
(I did not read him, though). 
Which means? If it's also ready to let inflation develop (instead of trying to limit 
the decline once it has started by hinking rates to the sky and putting many 
financial institutions out of business) while the dollar goes down, this could well 
solve both the trade/current account deficit and credit quality/overindebtement 
problem. Of course this would hurt the average american's net worth a lot but 
do we care about averages? More importantly, that would leave a heavy 
energy bill for the USA. Of course these issues would not be solved in favour 
of the creditors and this is why this is an unlikely scenario but why can't they 
accept a setback after these tremendous gains they made these last 
decades?

Happy to see that you re-use my quotations, BTW.
 
 
Mark,

>Dollar hegemony has resulted in savage deflationary pressures in the
>world economy outside the US. 

That is if you think that the world has not been truely globalized. I would agree 
with that but I thought that you thought it had actually been globalized. Sorry if I 
confuse you with someone else. 
If the world was globalized, a strong dollar would been inflation not deflation in 
the non-dollar countries as 1) stronger US demand for goods would bring non-
US exports' non-dollar prices up and as 2) US exports' non-dollar prices 
would go up too as a direct result of the strong dollar. 
Thus I disagree when you say:

>The two things are
>yin and yang: the present 'bountiful' US economy has been bought at
>the price of stagnation in Europe and Japan, and a holocaust of lives
>and hopes in many other parts of the world. 

First, the differences between the USA and Europe are partly statistical 
artifacts (once again, remember Gordon?). Second and more importantly, I do 
think that the US has been the engine of the world economy lately. 
But, and this is a big but the current situation over oil changes this. Especially if 
oil goes up more in a few months, the US will be actually taking other's energy 
from their "mouth". The US waste has lately been a good things for the other 
world economies incapable of producing a decent endogenous growth. But 
scarcities may change this.

>The huge increase in
>income and wealth inequality this has produced *is the immediate
>result of fundamental constraints on the capitalist growth model', in
>particular, energy-shortage. ...

Mark, you have a good case for physical limits beign the main economic 
factor NOW. My opinion is that you spoil your credibility by saying that it was 
so in the past (with the exception of a few years at the end of the seventies, 
maybe). Was 10 or 20 dollars a baril expensive? I mean, a baril is something 
big. Compare it to the price of milk, f.ex.! But anyway I have argued enough 
with you, bringing forward data, about this.

>But energy has not been plentiful
>since at least 1973, and therefore growth has been a mirage for most
>of the world. Growth in social production has been unable to keep up
>with inertial demographic growth. Most people have got worse off. 3
>billion people live on less than $1000 p.a. They are not properly
>housed, have no education or health services, no or inadequate running
>water, no public transport, no life and no hope.

I will not discuss economic growth or $ p.a. since this is useless stats. If you 
want to find a plausible physical cause for the real problems, you'd have a 
better case in the limits of availability of good land and water p.a. IMO. 
Anyway, all these problems are the results of policies as much as if not more 
than energy availability. F.ex., how do you explain Algeria with your theories?

>there is now much evidence of renewed fiscal weakness in Asian states
>which suggests this will happen

Another point as to the importance of policies: Seen the spread between 
Malaysian vs. US/EU bond rates? Not much financial weakness there, it 
seems.

>The Dow has moved sideways along a precipice
>for more than a year now. A combination of factors are at work to drag
>it off, including the effects on the dollar of high oil prices and a
>higher payments deficit. Where are the net benefits to the US in all
>this? What is the future going to be except a slump of the US domestic
>economy more deeper, lasting and dangerous than the 1930s?

First, stop to use that index. Why not use the S&P or the Wilshire? Second and 
more importantly, the scenario of the 1930s is not likely to be reproduced 
because Greenspan has already demonstrated that he's not ready to raise 
rates when a crisis hits but he will instead cut them aggressively and set up 
bailouts, japanese style.




From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep 26 15:24:03 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 23:24:03 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
References: <001d01c027d6$5aa19f40$030b063e@mjones>
Message-ID: <006501c02802$a1393360$85bd6ac2@k382>

Thank you for a nice letter.
I will stay on this list if namecalling is suspended.
Cordially,
                 Andrej
  
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Mark Jones <jones118 at lineone.net>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 6:25 PM
Subject: RE: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks








From zapata at sezampro.yu  Tue Sep 26 15:40:32 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 23:40:32 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Fw: Izvestaj Savezne izborne komisije - preliminarni
Message-ID: <006801c02802$b18e1be0$85bd6ac2@k382>

Izvestaj Savezne izborne komisije  This is a preliminary report from Milosevic's Federal Electoral Comission:
You can see the results below. All govermental medias had admited that Kostunica had won but they are suggesting - on the basis of the SIC results- that it is going to be a second round. Opposition is objecting because they claime that Kostunica has 55%; Radical Party is supporting this statement, as well as SPO of Vuk Draskovic. Our anarchist network was watching ( not voting) electoral process troughout Serbia and we do have informations that opposition really smashed SPS/JUL into pieces. DOS doesnt want to go for a second round because it is a fraud- our reports are confirming their beliefs. Kostunica is the ( legal) president of Yugoslavia. People in Belgrade are celebrating on the streets ( 95% Belgredians is supporting the opposition, and JUL SPS- they have admited this- lost almost all places on local level), same goes for other larger cities.
There is a fear- well justified- that Milosevic is not going to retriete and leave power peacefully. Insisting on the second round would be an ouvertire to serious civil strifes. Or, worse, Milosevic can provoke new NATO intervention. People are afraid, but as far as I can see, very determinated not to let Milosevic get away with a fraud ( hypothetical- there is still a possibility, not very probable though, that he is going to admit electoral defeat).....
 Regards,
                    Andrej 




              
     
      Na osnovu do sada prispelih i obra?enih podataka sa 10.153 bira?kih mesta, Savezna izborna komisija je u prilici da saop?ti prve privremene rezultate predsedni?kih izbora odr?anih u Saveznoj Republici Jugoslaviji. 

      Od ukupno 7.848.818 upisanih bira?a, glasalo je njih 5.036.478 ili 64,16%. Od tog broja predsedni?ki kandidati su dobili slede?i broj glasova: 

                  - Miroljub Vidojkovi? 40.765 ili 0,80% 

                  - Vojislav Ko?tunica 2.428.714 ili 48,22 % 

                  - Slobodan Milo?evi? 2.026.478 ili 40,23 % 

                  - Vojislav Mihajlovi? 130.598 ili 2,59 % 

                  - Tomislav Nikoli? 256.876 ili 5,10 % 

                  Neva?e?ih listi?a je bilo 3,03%. 

      Imaju?i ove podatke u vidu, mo?e  da se zaklju?i da ?e se odr?ati drugi krug predsedni?kih izbora. 

      Tako?e, prema privremenim rezultatima izbora za savezne poslanike u Ve?u gra?ana i Ve?u republika Savezne skup?tine, rezultati su slede?i: 

                  VECE GRA?ANA: 

                  - DOS: 59 mandata 

                  - SPS-JUL: 44 mandata 

                  - SNP: 28 mandata 

                  - SRS: 3 mandata 

                  - SNS: 2 mandata 

      Dva mandata, prema izve?tajima, podeli?e SPO, DZVM ili SSJ, zavisno od kona?nih rezultata. 

                   VECE REPUBLIKA: 

                  - DOS: 10 mandata 

                  - SPS-JUL: 7 mandata 

                  - SNP: 19 mandata 

                  - SRS: 2 mandata 

                  - SPO: 1 mandat 

                  - SNS: 1 mandat 

      Kona?ne rezultate predsedni?kih i parlamentarnih  izbora  Savezna izborna komisija saop?ti?e u Zakonom propisanom roku. 

        

      SAVEZNA IZBORNA KOMISIJA 

     
           
     

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From julp at freesurf.ch  Tue Sep 26 16:16:05 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 00:16:05 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] The Relative Real Price of Oil
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.27.cjrlbhnq@computer>

Mark, sorry for the bashing that will follow but do we really need more of the 
crap economics? And do you realize what kind of people you're quoting? The 
VP of some corp.! Am I dreaming?
 
 
Says "Policy Pete":

>But these arguments, while literally
>correct depending on which deflator is used, can be misleading because
>so many of the relative indicators of the price level have changed so
>much.

Good, good. (I had to insert one positive comment.)

>In 1980 the price of gold was more than three times the current
>price, so measured as a percent of the price of gold, current oil
>prices are high indeed, especially after years of fighting inflation
>instead of promoting it.

Vade Retro, gold maniacs! 
What importance does the price of gold have? Even if I reason with a gold 
fan's logic, one should say that it's low PRECISELY because inflation has 
been fought. OTOH, with another logic you could simply argue that supply is 
strong, that central banks are dumping it, etc. 
So I officially declare this worthless. The oil situation is serious enough without 
making fools of oneself making it up as worse than it is.
 
 
As to the quotation:

>At the time of the first OPEC price increase, in 1973, the
>United States had tangible capital assets with a value of about $3.5
>trillion -- more than two and a half times that years gross national
>product

Wow! Capital assets/GNP! Can one imagine a more meaningless statistic 
made out of more arbitrary factors?

>These capital goods ... had all
>been built, designed and located on the assumption that, regardless of
>overall price inflation, a barrel of oil would be worth one or two
>bushels of wheat, or one hundredth of a ton of steel, or less than
>half an hour of skilled labor.

This is false or a twisted truth depending on how you look at it. What proportion 
of the capital stock (production cost? actual value? marxian value? whatever?) 
would be turned unprofitable by a change in oil prices? Come on... conditions 
change all the time and capitalists know it!

>These changes have made it
>uneconomical to operate much of 1973's physical plant the way it was
>intended to be, or, in some cases, to operate it at all; much capital
>and labor goes unemployed or malemployed. OPEC's price increase is
>thus a principal explanation for the high levels of unemployment that
>we have experienced since 1973.

As if the only factor in the "economicality" of operating capital was relative 
commodity prices... Gimme a break! What was the level of interest rates in 
1981? And does this guy know that you don't redeem loans by giving back the 
capital you bought at the price of purchase anyway? And he probably doesn't 
know that in some countries sacking people will get you penalties. 
To unemployment there is only two causes: bad policies and class war.

>And unemployment leads to more
>inflation.  Government policy becomes more expansive to combat
>unemployment, and succeeds, in part, by inflating the prices of
>everything else ...

An expansive policy? I guess that an expansive policy is driving interest rates 
through the roof like Volker did? Until now unemployment has been thought to 
be deflationary, but with this rocket scientists we obviously need to change 
theories. And I'm impressed at how the government was able to raise all 
commodity prices except oil with an expansionary policy. This man should 
give advice to the current governments. What a joke!




From Borba100 at aol.com  Tue Sep 26 16:40:02 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 18:40:02 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
Message-ID: <40.14e7b75.27027fc2@aol.com>

There is nothing AD HOMINEM  about pointing out the political implications of 
people's remarks.  Andrej states that he agrees with Fleming's statement on 
antiwar.com.  Fleming blames the war in Kosovo on  Milosevich, i.e., the 
Serbian people (since Milosevich could hardly have done it himself) refers to 
Milosevich as the "new Hitler" (making the Serbs the new Nazis) and approves 
US funding for the Serbian "democratic" oppostion. Thus he takes what is in 
essence the US government posiktion.  When an American does that it is bad 
enough.  Isn't it worse when a Yugoslav agrees?

Andrej accuses me of making ad hominem remarks because I draw out the meaning 
of what he has actually said - that he supports Fleming.  Then he suggest my 
comments are "a sample of anglo-ameriKKKan radical mindset? "  

Andrej, I have spent my life fighting anti-black racism, so comparing me to 
the KKK is simnply ridiculous.   But you are supporting the statement of a 
man, Thomas Fleming, who has slandered the Serbs.

And that has nothing to do with Marxism.  The vast majority of Yugoslavs 
would agree with my response to a Yugoslav who backs what Fleming has said.  

Jared



From embark at epud.net  Tue Sep 26 20:46:14 2000
From: embark at epud.net (embarkadero)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 19:46:14 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
References: <001d01c027d6$5aa19f40$030b063e@mjones> <006501c02802$a1393360$85bd6ac2@k382>
Message-ID: <000c01c0282f$58bc8e20$252b74d8@pavilion>

Andrej,

Most of those buttheads are addicted to name-calling and will not stop even
when it is counterproductive to their positions.  ... stay anyway.

Stay because you can be assured your words are reaching many who hunger for
them.

Tom


----- Original Message -----
From: Andrej Grubacic <zapata at sezampro.yu>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks


> Thank you for a nice letter.
> I will stay on this list if namecalling is suspended.
> Cordially,
>                  Andrej






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 00:30:49 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 07:30:49 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Inequity is higher on the agenda. But that's about it
Message-ID: <005c01c0284c$815f35e0$37028cd4@ngjones>

[Guardian]

Anti-globalisation protests have succeeded - up to a point

Special report: the IMF and World Bank in Prague

Larry Elliott in Prague
Wednesday September 27, 2000

It was business as usual on both sides of the barricades in Prague
yesterday. Out in the streets there was the clatter of teargas rounds being
fired, the whoosh of water cannons and the injured being carted off in
ambulances. In the conference centre, where one of eastern Europe's nastiest
communist parties used to meet in conclave, Horst Kohler of the
International Monetary Fund and James Wolfensohn of the World Bank were
applauded politely as they talked of the challenges ahead for globalisation.
Kohler quoted Karl Popper as he talked of how his vision was for the IMF to
make the world "a little better". Wolfensohn said he "shared the passion" of
the protesters, and in a series of bullet points expressed views that the
protesters themselves make - that there is something wrong about a world
where the richest 20% of the world's population receive more than 80% of
global incomes, where 1.2bn people live on less than a dollar a day and
where the average income in the wealthiest countries is 37 times that in the
poorest 20.

Wolfensohn and Kohler cannot understand why they remain figures of hate when
they have changed their message and now talk the language of fairness and
inclusion.

They hold seminars with debt campaigners, they fund bio-diversity
programmes, they accept that there can be dangers from liberalising capital
flows too rapidly. And yet they - and the institutions they head - are still
loathed by the protesters, who see the fund and the bank as part of the
problem rather than part of the solution. The problem being, of course,
globalisation.

As far as the protesters advocating direct and violent action are concerned,
it is clear that crunch time is fast approaching. They need to think hard
about what to do next, because demonstration fatigue is already setting in.

The street riots in Seattle were effective not only because they had a
novelty value but because they appeared to cause the collapse of attempts to
launch a new round of trade talks. In fact, while there was a lot of sound
and fury on the streets, the real problem was inside the conference centre,
where the poor countries refused to be rolled over by the United States. Had
the European Union and the United States been able to persuade a few of the
bigger developing countries to come on board, there would have been a deal
in Seattle, protests or not.

Neither the protests at the spring meetings of the bank and fund in April,
nor those intended to disrupt the annual meetings in Prague, have had the
same impact.

The demonstrators have not been able to stop the meetings from taking place,
let alone achieve their wider objective of rolling back globalisation. Far
from it. According to the fund's forecasts, global capitalism is enjoying
its best year of growth for more than a decade. All the laptops and mobile
phones that have been bought by the demonstrators to coordinate their
protests are doing wonders for the profits of Microsoft, Intel and Nokia.

Yet from one perspective, the current state of the global economy is a total
irrelevance. Globalisation, it is said, will be brought down by its own
internal contradictions, just as Marx predicted more than a century ago, and
direct action will be the handmaiden of the revolution.

This is a perfectly acceptable view of the world, and it may even be right.
It has to be said, however, that industrial capitalism has proved to be a
far more durable opponent than its enemies have expected. It also needs to
be acknowledged that direct action is something of a double-edged sword,
which can be used by the forces of reaction - as in the recent fuel protests
in Britain - as well as by the forces of progress.

History suggests that protest groups only turn into successful mass
movements when they tap into widespread discontent and offer a feasible
alternative. So far, there is no real evidence that the anti-globalisation
protesters have achieved either. "I know what they are against," said Trevor
Manuel, the finance minister of South Africa, yesterday. "But I don't know
what they are for."

This, then, is the dilemma for the anti-globalisation protests. Their action
has been a limited success to the extent that it has forced many of the
problems of globalisation - the inequity, the instability of the financial
system, the threat to the environment, the importance of human rights -
higher up the political agenda at a time when the failures of neo-
liberalism and the financial crises of the late 90s were already
contributing to a mood in which those at the apex of globalisation are
willing to talk and debate the need for reform. But Seattle, Washington and
now Prague have certainly concentrated minds and created space for the
moderate wing of anti-globalisation to push for more generous debt relief
and universal primary education.

But dialogue and debate do not provide the same buzz, the same instant
gratification, as chucking a Molotov cocktail or throwing a smokebomb. If
you're an idealistic student, the idea of cutting a deal with Jim Wolfensohn
is far less attractive than calling him a fascist or a mass murderer. Jim
Morrison of the Doors used to send his audience wild with ecstasy in the 60s
when he bellowed "We want the world and we want it now", and, in truth,
little has changed since. The grotesque imbalances - in both power and
wealth - that have become ever more apparent as globalisation has developed
makes the desire for instant results understandable. Foot-dragging on debt
relief is costing lives in Africa every day.

The alternative to violent action is a hard slog, to persuade rich countries
to speed up debt relief, to give smaller countries a bigger say in the
running of the fund and the bank, to campaign for a world environment
organisation with the same clout as that wielded by the world trade
organisation, and to make the case for new controls on global capital.

But this will be messy, because the democratic route is always messy. Those
who advocate it can be accused of lacking ideological purity or of lacking
the stomach for a fight. What's more, their way may not work either.

Yet the experience of the 60s protests is instructive. As today, they
emerged from a period in which the global economy - and the American economy
in particular - was doing well. The desire to protest diminished when times
got tough, and instead of 20 years of togetherness following a revolutionary
golden dawn, we got 20 years of Thatcherism instead.

In the meantime, once the leaders of the 60s generation realised that
capitalism was not about to collapse, they found a job, settled down and
moved to the suburbs.

larry.elliott at guardian.co.uk





From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 00:20:17 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 07:20:17 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Crashlist server problem
Message-ID: <004d01c0284b$278ec4a0$37028cd4@ngjones>

There has been a small server glitch which may result in some messages not
appearing. Please repost messages which fail to turn up.

Mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 00:19:24 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 07:19:24 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] response to Julien
Message-ID: <004c01c0284b$26a3c860$37028cd4@ngjones>

Julien wrote:
>
> Mark, sorry for the bashing that will follow

That's all right, I was missing it.

> >In 1980 the price of gold was more than three times the current
> >price,

Central Banks have bee dumping their gold stocks for a long while now.
Is it a good startegy, and can gold monetised, especially in an
inflationary crisis?


> As to the quotation:
>
> >At the time of the first OPEC price increase, in 1973, the
> >United States had tangible capital assets with a value of
> about $3.5
> >trillion -- more than two and a half times that years
> gross national
> >product
>
> Wow! Capital assets/GNP! Can one imagine a more meaningless
> statistic
> made out of more arbitrary factors?

Well, I can see his logic. He's talking like a banker would about
devalorisation which happens especially with primary energy price
hikes, which depress profit rates across the board and also impoverish
the masses. Incidentally, what is the ratio of assets/GNP today? I
heard it's been going down in the US, as aconsequence of the New
Economy? What is it in Japan, any idea?

> >These changes have made it
> >uneconomical to operate much of 1973's physical plant the
> way it was
> >intended to be, or, in some cases, to operate it at all;

But HUGE amounts of fixed plant and machinery were retired in the
1970s. Detroit and Birmingham were ghost towns. That was when the word
'deindustrialisation' came in vogue.

Mark






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 00:21:12 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 07:21:12 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] 2nd reply to Julien
Message-ID: <004e01c0284b$28ac1b80$37028cd4@ngjones>

Julien wrote:

> >Dollar hegemony has resulted in savage deflationary
> pressures in the
> >world economy outside the US.
>
> That is if you think that the world has not been truely
> globalized. I would agree
> with that but I thought that you thought it had actually
> been globalized.

What does 'truly globalised'mean in this context?

> confuse you with someone else.
> If the world was globalized, a strong dollar would been
> inflation not deflation in
> the non-dollar countries as 1) stronger US demand for goods
> would bring non-
> US exports' non-dollar prices up and as 2) US exports'
> non-dollar prices
> would go up too as a direct result of the strong dollar.

Surely there 2 (at least) strong deflationary consequences of the
strong dollar: 1 is that is induces a tidal wave of dollars hoarded
elsewhere to flow back to the US to buy bonds and even assets,
reducing available pool of capital elsehwere and 2, you're righ, a
strong dollar puts inflationary pressure on weaker countries which
they precisely countreact by strong *deflationary* internal social
anf=d fiscal policies, to keep their own currency strong.

> I do
> think that the US has been the engine of the world economy lately.

That's surely been a deflationary factor elsewhere, since most of the
dollar profits have not been retained or have been using to invest in
maquilador type operations which actually may not benefit local
ecopnomies are counteract internal deflationary forces.

> >The huge increase in
> >income and wealth inequality this has produced *is the immediate
> >result of fundamental constraints on the capitalist growth
> model', in
> >particular, energy-shortage. ...
>
> Mark, you have a good case for physical limits beign the
> main economic
> factor NOW. My opinion is that you spoil your credibility
> by saying that it was
> so in the past (with the exception of a few years at the
> end of the seventies,
> maybe). Was 10 or 20 dollars a baril expensive? I mean, a
> baril is something
> big. Compare it to the price of milk, f.ex.! But anyway I
> have argued enough
> with you, bringing forward data, about this.

This is hard to grasp only if you do not grasp the estent to which
there has been no true market-set price for oil for a very long time
(maybe not since the 1890s).

> I will not discuss economic growth or $ p.a. since this is
> useless stats. If you
> want to find a plausible physical cause for the real
> problems, you'd have a
> better case in the limits of availability of good land and
> water p.a. IMO.

They might also be factors, let us dig up some stats.

> Anyway, all these problems are the results of policies as
> much as if not more
> than energy availability. F.ex., how do you explain Algeria
> with your theories?

What about Algeria? It's been a 'high absorber' affliicted by low oil
and gas prices for its principal exports for a while now.

> Another point as to the importance of policies: Seen the
> spread between
> Malaysian vs. US/EU bond rates? Not much financial weakness
> there, it
> seems.

Don't get this. What about Thailand, Hiong Kong and Japan again?

>

> First, stop to use that index. Why not use the S&P or the
> Wilshire?

Why?

Yes, I agree that the parallels with the 1930s are misleading.

Mark






From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 00:46:33 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (M A Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 07:46:33 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Opec in the dock as West passes the buck on oil price rebellion
Message-ID: <000201c02859$59f36e60$ca178cd4@ngjones>

The Times: Crisis looms again for the cartel as it celebrates its 40th
anniversary


FROM the elegance of Prague to the slums of Caracas there is a distance to
travel and the measure is not just geography. A sombre Group of Seven (G7)
industrial nations met in the Central European capital last week and berated
oil producers for creating the conditions for an inflationary slump.

In Caracas, the meeting of the Opec heads of state will put on a brave front
of back-slapping and kisses. It is the 40th anniversary of the oil
producer's cartel, an achievement of some significance for such a collection
of squabbling and unstable nations. The 11 Opec members are celebrating at a
critical juncture. A winter energy crisis of shortages and high prices looms
but Opec is worried about an oil glut.

Opec member states are currently in clover; an unprecedented show of
solidarity by the cartel rescued the oil price and several Opec countries
from disaster in 1998.

So successful were the three production cuts that followed oil's $10 per
barrel trough that the commodity is now being fingered as the biggest risk
for the world economy. Energydependent companies in the US and in Europe are
issuing profits warnings; enormous political pressure is being brought to
bear on Opec to bring the price down. Widely perceived two years ago as
washed-up, Opec is almost back to enjoying its 1970's caricature of public
enemy number one.

Or is it? The price is certainly high but it has been much higher. In real
terms - priced in today's dollars - a barrel of crude oil costs about the
same as it did in 1973-74, when Opec first used its production clout as a
political weapon. Discounting inflation, oil reached its peak in 1981-82 at
$50 per barrel but since then the spending power of Opec's currency has been
in more or less steady decline.

It could decline fairly rapidly next spring. According to Deutsche Bank,
crude oil inventories are set to rise sharply next year. JJ Traynor,
Deutsche bank's oil analyst, is expecting a weak crude price in the second
quarter and he reckons the organisation will resist pressure for further
production increases. "They want a $25 oil price and Opec can see clearly
that this industry is investing more upstream than anywhere else."

The spending surge is alarming to the oil cartel. The big oil companies cut
expenditure in 1999 as their revenue accounts turned red. But lured by high
prices, the industry is spending again. According to Salomon Smith Barney's
survey of producers, global spending on exploration and production will
increase 18.6 per cent this year, with an even sharper 23 per cent rise in
investment by US oil companies.

Much of the investment is aimed at delivering quick barrels that can profit
from the recent price gains. Without a two million barrels-per-day cut in
Opec's quota early next year, prices could be heading back to $13 per barrel
by the end of next year.

The view from Caracas is less pretty than in Prague. Venezuela exports some
three million barrels per day but appalling economic mismanagement has left
the country mired in debt. Nigeria, producing two million barrels, is in
worse shape and there is probably no Opec producer, not even Saudi Arabia,
that is not smarting from the recent impact of $10 oil. At the peak of the
crisis, the Kingdom was forced to raise emergency loans from Abu Dhabi to
ease its cashflow.

Not surprising that Opec is angry about the posturing of American and
European politicians. As politicians faced consumer rebellion over petrol
prices, they cynically revived the image of the greedy oil sheikh. "We need
to put pressure on Opec," insisted Tony Blair to the impromptu mob of
truckers and farmers demonstrating about fuel taxes.

Opec has been protesting for the past year that consumers are overtaxed,
noting that they earn just 16 per cent of the price of a barrel of refined
oil, while Western governments take 68 per cent. But the battle to wrest
control of the rent in a barrel of oil has been waged by Opec for 40 years.
If the enemy has switched from British Petroleum to Gordon Brown, there is
little evidence to suggest that Opec is winning.

In 1960, Abdullah Tariki was angry about falling oil revenues. The son of a
camel owner, the "Red Sheikh" studied geology in Texas and shaped Saudi oil
policy at a time when producers were at the mercy of Standard Oil and BP.

The market price of crude was then falling, due to increased supplies from
the Soviet Union and, in an attempt to protect their margins, oil companies
cut the "official price" on which the producer's 50 per cent profit share
was pegged.

Standard Oil cut Middle Eastern crude prices by 7 per cent and Tariki
contacted Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan minister of mines.
Between them, they hatched the framework for an organisation that would
defend the oil price and regulate production.

They have had mixed success, not least because the oil price is today driven
not by the numbers of crude tanker liftings in the Gulf but by stocks of
gasoline and heating oil in Rotterdam and New Jersey. It is an irony
troubling to Saudis that while President Clinton threatened to release US
strategic supplies, cargoes of Arab Light were going begging in the Gulf.
Refineries in America, seeking to comply with environmental legislation, do
not care for the heavy, high-sulphur Arabian product.

Threatened with an impending glut and facing an oil market that is
fragmenting, Opec's celebrations could be short-lived. Their consolation is
that consumers no longer believe that the sheikhs are to blame.









From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Tue Sep 26 17:23:37 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:23:37 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] A few data on Argentina under the hoof of imperialists today (Spanish)
Message-ID: <04e604024231a90MAIL1@mail1.arnet.com.ar>

Encuesta de Artemio Lopez (set.00)

En el ultimo a?o como fueron sus ingresos:
71% empeoro
7.4% mejoro
Oportunidades laborales
82%: menos oprtunidades
11%: + oprtunidades
Posibilidades de pagar aportes previsionales en el futuro
80% no podra pagar aportes
Brecha entre riqueza y pobreza
entre el 10% + rico y el 10% + pobre: 25 veces

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 04:11:47 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 11:11:47 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Sir Ghillean Prance: "Caring For Creation"
Message-ID: <000101c0286b$5824eac0$c00c063e@mjones>

talk (sermon?)delivered at Hinde Street Methodist Church, London, on
23rd May 2000

following the Friends Annual General Meeting


[Sir Ghillean Prance (a committed Methodist)is a former Director of
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and is now a Scientific Director of
the Eden Project. The irony of his passionate concern for biodiversity
lies in the fact that few human institutions have intervened more in
natural evolutionary processes than has the Kew Gardens, which in the
hey-day of British imperialism laboured mightily to mix-and-match
species between biomes and continents, radically and irreversibly
altering evolution in all the major continents. Mark]


Thank you very much for your introduction. I may disappoint you. I'm
going to say more about the real Garden of Eden than the Eden Project,
I think, tonight. It is, first of all, a great privilege to be here
and have this opportunity to speak to you. It is so important to
support this Mission, the sorts of things this Mission is doing. So,
I'm sure they appreciate the work of the Friends. I congratulate you
too on such a brief AGM, that's the sort I like. I wish some of the
other organisations I was on had AGM's so rapidly! It wastes a lot of
my time, these meetings.

I think its very appropriate to talk on the topic David asked me to
talk on - Caring for Creation - here, because the sorts of things the
Mission is doing are partly, and very closely linked to the
environment too. Some of them are because of the result of the
environmental problems that there are in the world today. And tonight
I basically want to talk to you about three different things. First of
all, to ask the question - what are we doing to creation? And give you
some answers of what I think we are doing to God's creation. Then,
secondly, what is our response, what is the Christian response to
this? And thirdly, how can we respond as individuals to the
environmental problem?

Now, I, in my job as a tropical Botanist have had the chance to travel
all over the world so forgive me for using a few examples from the
various places I've been. Last October, I was accompanying my wife,
who is Chairman of a charity called Impact, working on the prevention
of disability, and we were in Bangladesh. We flew over Bangladesh
quite a lot because we went to several different sites where Impact is
working. I've never seen quite so much water covering what is meant to
be land. There were enormous floods. So, I began to make enquiries
about this. 'Is this normal?' And they said 'Well it's pretty normal
nowadays. We get many floods. We didn't used to get nearly such heavy
flooding.' And Bangladesh is flooding because they are cutting down
the forests further up in Nepal, and the neighbouring countries, and
it's wonderful how forest holds the water of the rain and storms and
releases it gradually. But you cut that down and then the rain just
runs straight off into the rivers and you get enormous floods. And
then as I was leaving Bangladesh, they were very nervous because a
typhoon had been forecast and it was coming towards Bangladesh. In
actual fact that typhoon didn't hit Bangladesh but it went straight
into the coasts of Orissa in India and there was terrible devastation.
You probably read in the paper about the devastation there where about
10,000 people died in the storm.

Well one of the things that would have prevented that would have been
if there had been Mangrove forest, which is a tropical forest that
grows around coastlands and it would have deadened the storm. But
Orissa has cut down all those forests had been cut down. And how are
these things linked? I don't know about Orissa but I do know that
2



much of the mangrove forest around the world which has been cut down
has been cut down to make charcoal for barbecues in America and in
Europe. So, buy sustained British produced charcoal, not from tropical
rainforest.

In September of last year I was in Brazil, and my wife and I were on a
tour in the State of Mato Grosso in the Brazil and I've never seen so
much flames and smoke as the place was being burnt. And our daughter,
who works for Oxfam in Brazil, was going to travel to meet me in the
city of Manaus in the Amazon. And she was in another State of Brazil,
the state of Acre, and she couldn't fly on the day she wanted to or
the next day, because the forests of Acre were burning, and the
airport was closed in Rio Branco in Acre. So she was two days later
than she had intended to be.

Twenty-nine thousand square kilometres of the Amazon rainforest was
burnt down last year. We've just got the figures from satellite data,
so we know how bad the fires were last year. And what distresses me as
I go all over different places in creation I see this sort of thing. I
went to Antarctica once and that is the most beautiful part of God's
creation. You can't believe the beauty of the different colours of the
ice, the icebergs, the mountains, the penguins and the seals. And we
visited various scientific research stations, and there, what were the
scientists working on over their long winters in Antarctica? In one
station they were working on atmospheric pollution, and that was
because pollutants were coming in from the industries of Sao Paulo and
other places in Brazil and blowing over to Antarctica. In another
station we visited, they were working on penguins and they were
picking up things like lead, heavy metals and other nasty things in
the blood of the penguins. One of the things that tells us is that the
whole world is linked together in the environment. What we do affects
people elsewhere. What another country does affects us, and that's
what the environment is about. It all linked together. And we're
beginning to see that more and more so now.

At Kew Gardens, one of our Botanists, Nigel Hepper, has kept records
of the flowering of plants over the last 35 years. And today, the
things are flowering 12 days earlier than they were 30 years ago. And
I was recently in Washington in America and someone gave me a paper to
publish in a journal I edit about the flowers in Washington. And that
was a paper about the flowers in Washington flowering 10 to l2 days
earlier. Now, something's happening. The climate is beginning to
change. And global warming and climate change is something real. Why
is this happening, though?

What are the reasons? Well, one of them is de-forestation and the
burning up of the rainforest, and the other is all the fossil fuel we
burn, and all the cars we drive, all the coal we burn. And this is
puffing carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere and that and other gases
act rather like the panes of a green house, and so not all the heat of
the sun gets reflected back that used to. So, the climate is getting
warmer. More alarming is not just the simple change, but the fact that
the predictions of climate change are that storms will become commoner
and more violent, and that is a cause for alarm.

In 1972, I made a visit to Costa Rica, and one of the most remarkable
things I remember in the Cloud Forest there was a little toad, bright
orangish-golden colour. Very striking. You couldn't mistake it. It
wasn't very large but it was just so striking in its colour. And I was
fascinated by those toads in the Monte Verde Cloud Forest Reserve.
When I went back earlier this year I was told that the golden toad is
now extinct in Costa Rica, and that confirmed what scientists are
saying in many parts of the world. That frogs and amphibia are dying
out. It wasn't just that one, but its fifteen
5


species in Costa Rica that are no longer there that used to be about
30 years ago. They are finding the same with frogs and amphibia in
Australia. Somewhere that couldn't really be further away from Costa
Rica. This is happening in many parts of the world. In South America.
In Chile. Why? We don't really know yet why, but it is obviously
something to do with the changing environment. Perhaps the increased
radiation of ultra violet light with the Ozone layer getting thinner,
because frogs and amphibia are very sensitive to ultra violet
radiation. Maybe this is like the miners' canary, that the miners used
to take down into the mines and if the canary fainted, died, they knew
that there was poisonous gas there and they evacuated the mine
quickly. Now, perhaps those frogs are telling us something. Perhaps
the other thing that's been in the papers the last few weeks, about
sparrows disappearing throughout this Country is saying something. I
remember there being hundreds of sparrows on every farmhouse around in
the area I grew up, and now they are becoming rare. Who would ever
have thought that the sparrow would become a rare bird? Perhaps again
that is another symbol that the environment is not quite right.

So, those are some of the things we are doing to creation. I could go
on giving many other. You read about these quite often in the
Newspapers, see it on the TV, and they're doing quite a good job of
giving us the bad news. But I'd like to challenge you a bit more about
what we should be doing about it rather than just depressing you
tonight on a night when we should be celebrating the work of this
Mission.

One of the interesting things about the environmental crisis that's
amazed me recently, is rather like what was said about prophecy
earlier this evening. A lot of the secular world is beginning to make
prophecies about the environment, but in them, they're beginning to
say that it's not just science which will solve the environmental
problem, but that it is such a deep moral and ethical and spiritual
crisis that it needs moral spiritual and ethical solutions. Larry
Hamilton, who is director of the East West Institute in Hawaii, in a
book that is a secular book about the environment, says in his
introduction, that it is not the ecologists, the economists or
scientists who will save space ship earth, but the poets, priests,
artists and philosophers. And he goes on in that book to say several
times, that the environmental crisis is an ethical one.

Some years ago, there was an earth summit in Rio de Janeiro when heads
of State came together to discuss climate change and Bio-diversity.
The man who organised that is a man called Morris strong, a Canadian.
I invited him to come to Kew the next year and to give a lecture on
Rio de Janeiro, Earth Summit - One Year After. He gave a good
explanation of what he thought the conference had achieved and what it
hadn't achieved and about what we need to do in the future. And I want
to quote to you his concluding words. Now this was not in a church,
this was in the auditorium of the Joderel laboratory in the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew, to an audience of scientists, politicians,
conservationists, etc. And he said
'in the final analysis, our economic and social behaviour is rooted in
our deepest, moral and spiritual motivations. We cannot expect to make
the fundamental changes needed in our economic life unless they're
based on the highest and the best of our moral, spiritual and ethical
traditions. A reverence for life, a respect for each other, and a
commitment to responsible stewardship of the earth are essential. The
transition to a sustainable society must be undergirded by a moral,
ethical, and spiritual resolution which places their values at the
centre of our individual and societal lives.
4



Now there, if ever there was, is a prophet speaking. What more do we
stand for as Christians than a reverence for life, a respect for each
other, and a commitment to responsible stewardship of the earth. But
his message is that this must be undergirded by spiritual resolution
to reconsider our values. Now, what I would ask tonight is how has the
church really responded to this?

Some years ago I gave a talk in Hong Kong on 'The Environmental
Crisis - A Moral Issue.' And I gathered together a whole series of
quotes from different secular environmentalists that were all along
those lines. I don't want to quote lots of things to you tonight, but
all are saying that the environmental crisis needed a new ethic, and
were calling on the religions of the world to respond. Now I think we
are actually being very slow to respond. Yet, I've seen other
religions respond in various ways.

My very first trip to the rain forest. I went to the country of
Surinam, former Dutch Guyana, at the top of South America. We flew
into a jungle air strip. Then we went two days in dug out canoes, and
then we walked six hours to the base camp and there I met colleagues
from New York Botanical Gardens with whom I was going to go on the
expedition. As I walked into the camp the leader of the expedition
said 'You did your thesis on the plant family crisabalinasy?' and I
said 'Yes, I did.' And he said, 'Well that tree over there is one.'
And I got very excited seeing the individual tree of the group that
I'd been working on in laboratories for the last three years for my
doctoral thesis. And I said' We must collect that,' and he said 'Yes,
I'll get one of the local people who are helping us to collect it.'
There was only one local person in the camp at that time because the
rest were out with the other expedition members collecting. He asked
this man, Frederick, the cook, to cut down the tree, and Frederick
said 'No.' Then Howard started arguing with him in the Creole language
and they had a good chat. I caught a few words because it's a funny
language, it's a mixture of English, Spanish, Dutch, African words, so
I understood a few words out of it, but didn't get the gist of what it
was all about. And then it calmed down and Howard said that Frederick
will cut down the tree in half and hour. I said 'Well, why in half an
hour, why not now?' I thought perhaps he's got to cook the lunch, or
something, but no it was because he had to appease the bushy Mamma,
his God, so that he makes sure that the blame for cutting this tree
down so stupidly goes on the white man and not on him.

Now, that was the chaos I caused within half an hour of landing in the
rainforest for the first time, and I have never forgotten that
experience for many reasons. First of all, it was the first time of
many that I saw the respect that many of the indigenous people's have
for the environment around them, and usually linked to some spiritual
animist religion belief of some sort, or some sort of taboo. But
nevertheless it protects the environment. So, I began to think about
that experience a bit. Now, what would a young Christian, as I was at
that time, react to that. Well, you might think, well, here's a good
religion, it protects the environment. But what I've actually done
over the years is asked the question 'What does my own religion say
about care of God's creation? And I've found that the Bib]e is so rich
in this and it is so much part of the Christian faith but it is part
of the teaching of the church that we have tended to neglect. That's
why I put together that little booklet that David advertised earlier
on about this sort of thing. And its very important to think about
what the Bible says about stewardship of creation, because many people
today in the secular world, do take on beliefs various religions.
That's what the new age is all about. And we want to make sure that we
can defend ourselves against that and we know what our own scriptures
say about the care
5


of creation. One of the verses of the Bible I really really love, is
Genesis, chapter 2, verse 9. 'And the Lord God made all kinds of tree
grow out of the ground. Trees that were pleasant to the eye, and good
for food.' That's very interesting because it's telling us two things
about the reason for the trees around us. And the first one is
pleasant to the eye. We're getting disconnected from creation today
and it's very easy to if you live in the city. But, the trees around
us, the trees in the city parks too are 'pleasant to the eye.' The
aesthetic, to be enjoyed. And, they it says, are good for food. First
of all the aesthetic and then the utilitarian. We would not have made
such a mess of the environment if we didn't put the use, the
utilitarian first. Greed - we must use it. There are so many examples
in the world of where there has been a biological resource and people
use it till the last one and it goes extinct. Instead of enjoying it
and then managing it fish species in the North Sea are becoming
extinct because we over use them. The people of Easter Island cut down
every last tree. I don't know if you saw a programme recently by David
Attenborough about a carving from the last Torromiro Trees that were
there. Well fortunately Thor Heyerdahl kept the seeds from the last
tree, gave them to Gotoburgh Botanic Garden and they sent some to Kew
and that tree survived. But more seriously, the population of Easter
Island crashed because they destroyed all the forest. The things that
were most useful to them, the wood they made their carving from, the
fruit they eat, every last tree being destroyed and then their
population went down to the remnant that was there.

And there are many examples of that and it is probably because we just
don't listen to that good word. The Lord God made all kinds of tree to
grow out of the ground. Trees were pleasant to sight. A respect for
them. Then, straight after that, later on in Genesis Chapter 2, it
says 'The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to
till it and keep it.' Till and Keep are the words in this translation,
Hebrew words Shamar and Hava, which really literally mean to serve and
to preserve. Now here again another good instruction to the first
people in the second chapter of Genesis - not just to abuse the land,
but to till it, to serve it, to preserve it, to take care of the land.
One of the real problems in the environmental crisis today is just the
opposite of that -the way we're destroying the soils. The top soils
are disappearing in the most alarming rate in some parts of the world,
especially in countries like the United States and India, and this is
another thing that is abusing it, and not taking care of it. Not
thinking about the future because one wants to make a profit, just in
the present. So, much of this is motivated by greed. Exodus Chapter 23
Verse 10 says 'For six years you are to sow your field and to harvest
your crop, but during the seventh year let the land lie unploughed and
unused that the poor among your people may get food from it and the
wild animals may eat what they leave.'

Now, there are several places in Exodus and Leviticus that say a
similar thing. Leaving the land fallow for the sixth year. In other
words the land too needs a Sabbath rest. Now, why does it say it needs
it here? Its not only that the land needs it to recover but it is
linked here with the poor among your people, that they can get food
from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. How much linked
to the sorts of things that are going on here and helping the people
who have been less fortunate than we have. Very similar is the
sentiment that is expressed here.

I think of the Aymara Indians in the Andes. They own land, each
individual family has plots of land, but they don't decide what they
are going to cultivate. All the landowners meet together with the
council. The village council says to one you plant potatoes this year,
you plant amaran, you plant ochre, you plant kinowa, that are
6



various crops that they grow there. And so they do, but then they say
to one family, you leave your field uncultivated this year, actually
they say this to several families in most villages, they are not
cultivating anything that year. Do they starve? No they don't because
everyone else brings in their first fruits and they probably do better
in the year that their land is left fallow. So they had a system very
similar to this in Exodus. But the Bolivian Government was in a very
bad way some years ago and the balance of payments was terrible, and
the debt of the country was terrible and the Minister of Agriculture
had a good idea - 'Look at all that wasted land in Aymara territory.'
And so they sent in agents, sometimes with guns to force the Indians
to cultivate the land that was lying fallow because they said there we
can increase our agricultural exports by using all this land. Well,
the interesting thing was that the productivity did not soar up but
gradually went down and it would have been a real environmental
disaster for the Aymara if a coalition of different church
missionaries that were there had not intervened and seen what was
happening and pleaded with the government to let the Indians go back
to their traditional system. I think it was a mixture of Catholics,
Mennonites and Methodists that actually got together to do that. The
Church intervened in that case and helped them to go back to their
traditional system.

So, leave the land fallow that the poor among your people may yet food
from it. Proverbs 29, verse 7 says 'The righteous care about justice
for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.'' An important
verse, one of the many that talk about the cause of the poor. 1 John,
Chapter 3, verse 17, 'If anyone has material possessions and sees his
brother in need, but has no pity beyond him, how can the love of God
be in him'?'

The issues of justice and the issues of the environment are so closely
linked, and so the sorts of things that the Mission here is doing are
so closely linked to the environment and much of the Christian reason
for doing it come out of the same texts in the Bible. I have studied
over the last years, many different parts of the whole Bible, really
for what it says about Stewardship, and I can't go through all of it
in one evening. But what I just want to say is that as one goes
through it I have seen such a wonderful call to stewardship of
creation. One of the parts of the Bible I really love is the Book of
Job, Chapters 38, till the end. Do you remember that God came to Job
after he had been comforted by his friends who didn't do much good,
but finally God spoke to him out of a storm and what does God do? He
didn't just say Job repent, but there is a wonderful four chapters
about the glories of creation, and talking about how wonderful
creation is. Then the Lord answered Job out of the world wind, 'Who is
this that darkens council by words without knowledge? Gird up your
loins like a man, I will question you. Were you there when I laid the
foundation of the earth?' And it goes on to talk about the physical
and the biological part of creation. We read about the wild goats and
their habits, the ostrich leaving its eggs, and saying it's a careless
animal, the eagle soaring and bringing in food to its young. We read
about the whales, leviathan, beamot, the hippopotamus, etc, etc. All
there. So what God is doing to show Job how great he is is just
showing his revelation through creation. The Psalms are just full of
praise for creation as well. We could read many songs of creation in
the psalms, 'Oh Lord our sovereign, how majestic is your name, in all
the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens,' etc, Psalm 8.
So I think there is no doubt that as Christians, we have a
responsibility to take care of the environment.

Now, I've talked about the environment of exotic places that I've
travelled in. Bangladesh, and Brazil and other places like that. But
we need to take care of the environment and we can take care of it and
help a little bit as one couple I met on
7


holiday recently. When we arrived at the hotel I noticed as we walked
in that the trees and the grounds of the hotel were labelled. They had
their names of the trees in Spanish, and in Latin, and as we walked to
dinner on our first evening, I said to Ann "That tree there is not a
Cordi, that's a fig, they've got the label wrong. And so we went in
and there the owner of the hotel was to greet his guests for dinner
and so I politely after chatting to him for a few minutes said 'Do you
know that one of those trees there has the wrong label on it?' And he
said 'How do you know?' I said 'Well, I'm a Botanist.' and so then the
owner said 'Oh my wife would love to meet you because she wants to
make this whole ground into a Botanic Garden and she'll be
disappointed that they've got the name wrong on one of those trees.
Would you walk round with her in the morning and make sure that all
the other labels are right?' So I did, and I'm very glad I did because
I found someone, a couple, who were really trying to integrate their
environmental behaviour into their lives. I ended up having tours of
the kitchen, of the recycling bins, of the purification plant of the
swimming pool because it didn't use any chlorine in it, just used UV
light. I saw a solar heating system to heat the water when people were
taking showers, I saw that all the waste was separated into four
different bins, and the green waste, the organic waste, was taken and
tipped into little pits beside the coffee bushes, and the coffee
bushes on their property were so much more vigorous and better than on
a neighbouring farm because they got that extra fertilisation. Little
compost heaps beside each bush. Then in the bedroom I saw that there
was a notice on the bed - 'If you want your sheets changed, put this
notice on your pillow when you leave the room.' But you know that
changing your sheets every day uses an unnecessary amount of water and
detergents. 'And if you want a clean towel leave it on the floor, but
if you put it on the rack we'll assume that you don't need a clean
towel today.' How often in hotels that I go to you're not given that
choice? Such a simple thing, we certainly don't need clean sheets or
towels every day. We certainly don't have it at home, so why do we
need it when we're in a hotel? And they were growing organic
vegetables and getting them from an organic supply very near by. The
owner took me to see an organic and vegetable herb farm of her
neighbours. We just hit quite by chance on somewhere that was really
integrated into the environment.

Now, I think the challenge for us is that where ever we are, whether
we are out in the country, in where was it, in Whitney I think, or
whether we are in central London, there are things that we can do to
be better environmentalists. But not just for secular reasons, because
we are frightened about climate change or something, but because of
our Christian faith, because the Bible tells us that we are to be
carers of creation, stewards of the earth, and that to me is a central
reason why I feel I should be so involved in environmental issues,
because it is God's creation, and because God has said that creation
is good, he's said that it's very good, and he has asked the human
race to take care of it. Instead greed has dominated, we don't listen
to the prophets who are saying what is happening. We don't listen to
our own secular prophets who are saying "Please church, please
religion, respond to this." And so I hope that you will respond.
You'll think about how you're treating the environment. And do it
because you are a Christian steward of God's creation.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 04:12:42 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 11:12:42 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Humans destroying the natural world
Message-ID: <000401c0286b$79242ec0$c00c063e@mjones>

by  Paul Brown
Guardian 8/10/98


 HUMANS have destroyed more than 30 per cent of the natural world
since 1970
 with serious depletion of the forest, freshwater and marine systems
on which life
 depends.

 Consumption pressure from increasing affluence has doubled in the
past 25 years
 and continues to accelerate, according to a ground-breaking report
from the World
 Wide Fund for Nature, the New Economics Foundation, and the World
 Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge.

 The Living Planet Report says that the acceleration in environmental
destruction
 shows that politicians who have been paying lip service to
sustainable development
 have done little to promote it. "Time is running out for us to change
the way we
 live if we are to leave future generations a living planet," Nick
Mabey, WWF's
 economic policy officer, said at the launch of the report in London
last week. "We
 knew it was bad, but until we did this report we did not realise how
bad."

 One of the most serious problems revealed for the first time is the
depletion of
 freshwater resources with half of the accessible supplies being used
by humans -
 double the amount of 1960. The rate of decline of freshwater
eco-systems is
 running at 6 per cent a year, threatening to dry up many wetlands,
and push the
 species of those habitats to extinction.

 The report says that governments should increase the efficiency of
their water use,
 and stop wasteful irrigation schemes where water losses are highest.

 Carbon dioxide emissions have doubled in the same period, and, being
far in excess
 of the natural world's ability to absorb them, are accelerating
global warming.

 Global consumption of wood and paper has increased by two-thirds, and
most
 forests are managed unsustainably. In the same period, marine fish
consumption
 has also more than doubled, and most of the world's fish resources
are either fully
 exploited or in decline.

 Although Western countries have high consumption rates, some of the
developing
 countries are depleting their natural resources at an alarming rate.
The people of
 Taiwan, the United States and Singapore are singled out as the
world's most
 voracious consumers, responsible for depleting the Earth's resources
faster than
 other countries. Britain comes 41st in the list of more than 130
countries.

 The report says that though governments are failing to take action to
protect
 croplands and resources, every individual bears a responsibility for
being careless
 with the world's resources.

 Dr Norman Myers, of Green College, Oxford, said: "As the world
becomes
 economically richer, it becomes environmentally poorer. Many people
have known
 this for a long time, but they have sometimes lacked evidence of a
comprehensive
 and compelling sort. More power then to WWF for documenting our
declining
 prospect in such fine grain detail."

 Although the report says that a growing population is part of the
problem, increased
 consumption has been the main problem. The average North American or
Japanese
 consumes 10 times as much of the world's resources as the average
Bangladeshi.
 Japan and Bangladesh have the same populations but have a vastly
different effect
 on the world's eco-systems, particularly in timber and fish
consumption.

 The average North American resident consumes fives times as much as
an African
 and three times as much as an Asian. However, in total Asia takes
more of the
 Earth's resources because there are 3.2 billion Asians compared with
only 0.3
 billion North Americans.

 The Swiss billionaire industrialist Dr Stephan Schidheiny, who is
president of the
 Avina Foundation, said: "This index indicates a serious decline in
the health of the
 Earth's ecological balance sheet, which reflects our imprudent and
inefficient use of
 natural resources. To restore its ecological health, we must ensure
that our
 consumption and production of food, water, materials and energy are
within the
 Earth's carrying capacity now, and in the future."

 He said people could help save the planet and save themselves money
through
 energy efficiency, reducing waste, using water sparingly and not
contaminating it,
 and by avoiding unnecessary trips in vehicles.

 Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Health Organisation, said:
"This
 quantifies for the first time a scary decline in the health of the
world's forest,
 freshwater and marine ecosystems. It shows we have lost nearly a
third of the
 Earth's natural wealth since 1970."

 Sir Ghillian Prance, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew,
said: "The
 index presents a warning which we should all take most seriously
because it charts
 an alarming decline in the health of natural forest, freshwater and
marine
 ecosystems over the past 30 years.

 "The conservation of natural ecosystems is not a luxury which only
the rich can
 afford, but is essential to ensure the maintenance of the vital
ecological functions of
 our planet upon which we all depend for our survival."


--------------------

April 9, 1998

Plant Survey Reveals Many Species Threatened With Extinction

By WILLIAM K. STEVENS

At least one of every eight plant species in the world -- and nearly
one of
three in the United States -- is under threat of extinction, according
to
the first comprehensive worldwide assessment of plant endangerment.

The assessment, which required more than 20 years of work by botanists
and
conservationists around the globe, added nearly 34,000 plant species
to the
World Conservation Union's growing Red List of imperiled organisms.
The
survey was made public Wednesday in Washington.

Among the plants most at risk, the survey found, are 14 percent of
rose
species, 32 percent of lilies, 32 percent of irises, 14 percent of
cherry
species and 29 percent of palms. Coniferous trees as a group, and many
species found in island nations, were also judged especially
vulnerable.

While endangered mammals and birds have commanded more public
attention, it
is plants, scientists say, that are more fundamental to nature's
functioning. They undergird most of the rest of life, including human
life,
by converting sunlight into food. They provide the raw material for
many
medicines and the genetic stock from which agricultural strains of
plants
are developed. And they constitute the very warp and woof of the
natural
landscape, the framework within which everything else happens.

The census of imperiled plants should be taken not as an exact measure
of
the situation, leaders of the survey said, but rather as a first,
rough
approximation.

And some acknowledged that the majority of species were "secure and
widespread," in the words of Dr. Bruce Stein, a botanist who is a
senior
scientist with the Nature Conservancy, one of nine scientific and
conservation organizations that participated in drawing up the list.
Furthermore, Stein said, some plants were placed on the list simply
because
they are rare, not because their numbers are declining or their
habitat is
threatened.

Nevertheless, of the world's 270,000 known species of plants, the 12.5
percent found to be at risk is a huge proportion, said David Brackett
of
Ottawa, chairman of the World Conservation Union's Species Survival
Commission. Moreover, he said, the figure is probably an
underestimate,
since data from most places in the world -- including some
species-rich
tropical nations where the countryside is being rapidly cleared -- are
fragmentary.

The list of imperiled plants fills more than 750 pages of a large
red-bound
book. Nine of every ten plants on the list are found in only one
country,
making them especially vulnerable to national or local economic and
social
conditions. Many species are found only on a few islands, and
countries
like Mauritius, the Seychelles and Jamaica consequently have
disproportionately high numbers of threatened plants.

Scientists generally cite two main reasons why plants become
endangered:
destruction of large swatches of wild countryside by agriculture,
logging
or development, and invasions of plants from one part of the world
that run
riot and crowd out native species in another part.

The new listing of endangered plants is one more piece of evidence
that "a
whole chunk of creation is at risk," said Dr. Stuart Pimm, an
ecologist at
the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in producing
Wednesday's
report. While 1 plant in 8 might not seem like much, he said, "that's
what's threatened now, as a consequence of what we've done so far; but
all
the evidence is that the destruction is continuing at an accelerating
pace."

The United States' situation looks comparatively grim, said Stein,
because
plants are probably better surveyed here than elsewhere. With 4,669
species
judged to be threatened to one degree or another, the United States
ranked
first, by far, among the nations of the world in total number of
plants at
risk. That is 29 percent of the country's 16,108 plant species.

"I don't believe the U.S. is worse off than other countries," said
Stein.
"If anything, I think the U.S. has taken a more active interest in
plant
conservation."

Stein's group, the Nature Conservancy, maintains what is widely
regarded as
one of North America's most comprehensive databases on endangered
plants.
Other major American participants in drawing up the Red List were the
New
York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Institution's National
Museum of
Natural History.

The conservation union, also called the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, is based in Gland, Switzerland. Many
governments and scientific organizations are among its members. Since
1960,
it has been maintaining and adding to its Red List of threatened
species.
The list has no official effect but is widely regarded as an
influential
guide for conservation policy makers.

Two years ago, the union placed nearly a quarter of all known mammal
species and 11 percent of birds on the list. It also added a number of
marine species for the first time.

The Red List establishes five categories of organisms: species not
seen in
the wild in 50 years and presumed extinct; species suspected of having
recently become extinct; endangered species, those likely to become
extinct
if the causes of endangerment continue; vulnerable species, those
likely to
become endangered if the causes continue; and rare species, those with
small worldwide populations not yet endangered or vulnerable. Of the
total
number of plants on the Red List, 43 percent are classified as rare,
24
percent as vulnerable and 20 percent as endangered.

These categories are different from those established under the United
States' Endangered Species Act, and cannot be compared with them. The
American categories, in descending order of seriousness, are called
endangered and threatened.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

------------------------------------

Our Genetic Resource
All methods of increasing food production are essentially "tinkering"
with Earth's ecosystem, and "[t]o save every cog and wheel," wrote the
great American naturalist Aldo Leopold, "is the first precaution of
intelligent tinkering." [18] We are not saving every cog and wheel. We
are throwing away the parts of the ecosystem left and right, as
illustrated in Figure 14. By early in the 21st century, species will
be vanishing forever at a rate of hundreds per day.
A species that becomes extinct, that disappears forever, can easily be
seen as a "nonproblem," since it just vanishes and we hear no more
about it. But the rapidly increasing losses of species is a very
serious problem. Species are valuable for many reasons.

First and foremost, the community of all life is like a sky full of
stars, and it is the whole sky full of stars, not human technology,
that allows life on Earth to continue. We humans have been making our
star to shine brighter and brighter, not even noticing that the other
lights in the sky are being eclipsed. Each time we crowd out another
species, it is an aesthetic and spiritual loss for all of us. Children
born today will have no opportunity to see a third of the species that
were here during the lives of their parents and grandparents.

There are pragmatic reasons for concern, too. Both conventional and
biotechnical methods of increasing yields require diversity in the
germplasm for major crops, but the diversity of available germplasm is
declining daily. The wild races and strains of crop plants on which
plant breeders depend will largely be lost over the next few decades
as more and more marginal land is brought into cultivation.


Dr. Peter H. Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a
world-renowned expert on the diversity of Earth's species, summarizes
the practical concerns as follows:



In fact, the loss of biological diversity is important to us for many
reasons. Only about 150 kinds of food plants are used extensively;
only about 5,000 have ever been used. Three species of plants -- rice,
wheat and corn -- supply more than half of all human energy
requirements. However, there may be tens of thousands of additional
kinds of plants that could provide human food if their properties were
fully explored and brought into cultivation. Many of these plants come
to us from the tropics.
Further, there are numerous uses for tropical plants other than for
food. Oral contraceptives for many years were produced from Mexican
yams; muscle relaxants used in surgery come from an Amazonian vine
traditionally used to poison darts; the cure for Hodgkin's disease
comes from the rosy periwinkle, a native of Madagascar; and the gene
pool of corn has recently been enriched by the discovery, in a small
area of the mountains of Mexico, of a wild, perennial relative. Among
the undiscovered or poorly known plants are doubtless many possible
sources of medicines, oils, waxes, fibers and other useful commodities
for our modern industrial society.

Furthermore, as genetic engineering expands the possibilities for the
transfer of genes from one kind of organism to another -- indeed, as
our scientific techniques become even more sophisticated -- we could
come to depend even more heavily on biological diversity than we do
now. [20]

One particularly dangerous false and popular notion current today is
that with a collection of seeds from endangered species, biologists
can restore the ecosystems containing these species, should we ever
need them. Scientists cannot recreate lost species, and even if they
had all the species, biologists would have no idea, even with billions
of dollars and thousands of scientists, how to recreate, for example,
a tropical rainforest. [21]




From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 04:11:36 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 11:11:36 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Joel Mokyr's Review of _Guns, Germs and Steel_ by Jared Diamond
Message-ID: <000001c0286b$52616460$c00c063e@mjones>

Published by EH.NET  (May 1998)
Jared  Diamond,  _Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies_. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.  480 pp.  $27.50 (cloth),
ISBN: 0-393-31755-2.
Reviewed  for  EH.NET by  Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and
History, Northwestern University.  <j-mokyr at nwu.edu>


 Jared  Diamond  is a physiologist and evolutionary biologist with a
passion for  archaeology  and linguistics. That, by itself, should
seem to make him irrelevant  to  economic  history.  Yet  his widely
read and admired recent book,  honored  last  month  with  a  Pulitzer
Prize,  is  one of the more important  contributions  to  long-term
economic  history  and  is  simply mandatory  to  anyone  who
purports to engage Big Questions in the area of long-term  global
history.  He  starts  off his account with what he calls "Yali's
question."  Yali is a New Guinea notable, who one day poses to the
author  the  question  why  white  people  have  so  much  'cargo'
(western manufactured  goods  desired  by  New Guineans), but New
Guinea produces no cargo that Westerners are interested in.

Indeed,  the  question  of  questions.  Diamond  joins such
heavyweights in economic  history   as  Eric  Jones,  Douglass North,
Nathan Rosenberg, and recently  David  Landes  in  asking  why "we"
are so rich and "they" are so poor.  Is  it institutions? Culture?
Technology? Religion? Diamond does not reject  any  of  these answers
altogether, but instead formulates models in which  they become
endogenous variables.  The real exogenous variable, when all  is  said
and  done,  is  geography.  Diamond, to put it bluntly, is a
geographical  determinist.  The  shape  and  location of continents,
flora, fauna,  microbes,  water,  climate,  topography, all are truly
exogenous to history. The rest is endogenous.

Geography  has  of  course  a terrible reputation. David Landes, in
_Wealth  and  Poverty of Nations_ (New York, 1998) starts off by
recounting how  geography  departments  were closed around the country
without a tear, and   notes   that  "no  other  discipline  has  been
so  depreciated  and disparaged."  Simple  models  that  submit  that
"Britain had an Industrial Revolution  because  it  had  coal" have
long been abandoned. Yet before we dismiss  this  as  another
simplistic model, we have to face the fact that Diamond knows his
stuff inside out, to the point where any thought of using the
adjective "crude" (traditionally preceding "determinist") evaporates
as we  turn  the  pages. Diamond fires off a barrage of facts and
observations based  on  half  a  dozen disciplines most economic
historians this side of Eric   Jones   are   unschooled   in:
archaeology,  botany,  linguistics, anthropology among them. The story
he tells is one of a trajectory in which the  world's  population
bifurcated  for  geographical  reasons.  Once  on different  paths,
Africa,  America,  and  "Eurasia" diverged more and more through
positive feedback effects, in which geography fed into technology,
technology  fed  into  power  structures  and  culture,  feeding  back
into technology  and  growth  until we got a world of Western economic
hegemony. Such "autocatalytic" models which view economic history as a
disequilibrium process  once were shunned by the neoclassical
cliometric orthodoxy. Today, thanks  to  the  efforts  of scholars as
diverse as Douglass North and Paul David,  we  are  getting  used  to
them,  and  the  intellectual gains are substantial.

What, then, are the geographical factors that Diamond thinks
determined the course  of economic history? Above all, it is that
human wealth and success depends  on  interaction with the
environment. Economic history in his view is  a  game  against
nature,  not primarily a social process. Production-- especially  in
agriculture-- depends on the geographical hand we have been dealt.
Yet  Diamond's emphasis is not on soil fertility and minerals as in
the  writings  of  most  geographers, but on the ability of homo
sapiens to domesticate plants and animals. His view is that all
societies and cultures have  approximately  similar  abilities  to
manipulate nature, but the raw materials with which they had to work
were different. Diamond points out in his witty prose that domestic
animals are much like Tolstoy's view of happy marriages:  all  happy
marriages  are  the  same, each unhappy marriage is different  in its
own way. Domesticable animals are all domesticable in the same  way,
but  recalcitrant  animals  are all different. To exploit large
animals for food, energy, or other services, domesticable wild animals
need to  exist,  a  condition that did not obtain in Precolumbian
America (where the  arrival  of  homo sapiens 13,000 years ago had led
apparently to their extinction).  But  even  if  they  existed,  they
needed  to  satisfy some conditions  such as being able to breed in
captivity, safe for children and other  living beings, and so on. He
argues, with great conviction, that the hippos and giraffes of Africa,
the jaguars of the Amazon, and the kangaroos of  Australia  did  not
meet  those  conditions.  The domesticated llamas, turkeys,  and dogs
of America could not pull it off either. Eurasia, on the other  hand,
was  lucky enough to have had the wild animals from which our cows,
sheep,  horses  and  chickens could be bred. This gave the Europeans
huge  advantages,  not only in terms of the development of technology
(e.g. mixed  farming and wheeled transport) but also in providing them
eventually with  immunity against infectious diseases caused by the
proximity of these animals.  When they then established sudden contact
with non-Europeans, the "Plagues and Peoples" effect simply
overwhelmed the unprepared victims.

A  similar  and  perhaps  less  well-known  effect occurred with
respect to domesticable  plants.  Eurasia  was  simply  lucky  in that
its environment provided   a   much   larger  stock  of  plants  that
lent  themselves  to domestication, and plants that had better quality
in terms of the nutrients supplied,  resistance  to disease, ease of
cultivation and so on. Botanical wealth, constrained by the local
flora, determined agriculture, agriculture determined everything else,
says Diamond. Eurasia won because the supply of wild  plants that
provided the gene pool for domesticated crops was larger, richer,  and
better.  If  you feel that this is a bit simplistic, read his chapters
on  "How  to  Make  an  Almond" and "Apples and Indians." It is a
serious,  informed, and well-thought out argument, and if in the end
we are not  wholly convinced, thinking of how to refute Diamond will
make us wiser and better informed.

Diamond's  argument  makes  serious use of counterfactuals, to the
point of wondering  in  the  last chapter what would have happened if
a German truck driver  in  1930 would have hit his brakes a second
later and killed Hitler in  a head-on collision. But in the chapters
on agriculture his imagination abandons  him.  How  much  of  the
performance of non-Europeans was really constrained  by  their
environment  and  how  much  their  own  making? In Diamond's  view,
the answer is "all and nothing." Yet one can imagine crops that   were
manipulated  and  selected  to  produce  crops  that  are  as
unimaginable to us as poodles and sweet corn would have seemed 10,000
years ago.  Take  one example: among the disadvantages that the
indigenous plants of  what  is now the Eastern U.S. suffered from is a
lack of founder crops. Yet  he  does  concede  that  some  of  them on
the surface could have done nicely,  such as a flower named sumpweed,
"a nutritionist's ultimate dream" with 32 percent protein. Sumpweed,
Diamond explains, did not make it to the rank  of corn, potatoes, and
rye because it causes hayfever, does not smell good,  and  handling
it  can cause skin irritation (p. 151). Are we really sure  that these
vices could not have been bred out of them? After all, all
domesticated plants had originally undesirable characteristics, but
through deliberate  and  lucky  selection mechanisms they eventually
got over them. Wheat,  rye,  and maize, which feed much of the world's
population, all had humble  beginnings.  Diamond points out that much
of our ability to improve plants  depended  on  whether  certain
characteristics  were the result of epistatic  effects,  that  is,
caused  by more than one gene. People could select  for  a particular
trait as long as it was caused by one of very few genes;  if  it  was
controlled  by  many  genes,  breeding  specimens that displayed  the
traits  would  be unlikely to fix it in the population. But apart
from  a  few examples, Diamond does not persuade us that this lay at
the heart of the geographically challenged societies.

A  somewhat  similar problem exists with Diamond's view of technology.
In a chapter cleverly named "Necessity's Mother" he notes the many
links between geographical constraints and technical options. Why
would a society produce wheels if it had no horses or oxen to pull
them? Wheelbarrows and rickshaws might  have  been  an  option,  but
maybe draft animals came first. Not all questions  can be answered
that way: some indigenous populations in America might  have built
seaworthy ships, or managed to develop some technology we cannot
imagine  today.  If  they  did  not, is this because they tried but
failed, or because they never tried?

Yet  Diamond  points  out  two  elements  that  suggest  that links
between geography  and  technological  progress  may  be  significant.
One is that geography  constrains  mobility of knowledge. Assume,
somewhat implausibly, that  the idea of a wheelbarrow only occurred to
one person in history, but that  it  spread  to people seeing their
neighbors use. If this happened in Central  Asia,  it  may  well have
reached China, France and Yemen in a few centuries,  but  before  1500
it  would never get to America or Australia. Agricultural  technology,
he notes, also diffuses easier from East to West than  from  North  to
South, as changing longitude has a stronger effect on climate   and
seasonality  than  changing  latitude--  giving  Eurasia  an advantage
over America and Africa. Furthermore, Diamond resurrects the late
Julian  Simon's  argument  that technological success depends on
population density  and  the  ability  of  a  society  to  produce  a
surplus  beyond subsistence,  so  that  there  are  resources
available  for  thinking and experimenting.  Maximum  population
density  was largely a function of the ability  of  the environment to
feed the population. Writing, for instance, required   large   and
dense   settlements   with   complex  hierarchical institutions, much
different from hunting and gathering tribes.
The  notion  that  much economic history is a game against nature, in
which people  form  certain  views  about  its  regularities  and  use
these  to manipulate them to improve material conditions is a powerful
one. Diamond's insight  is  that  nature  differs  from  place  to
place and that certain environments  are  easier to manipulate than
others. The economic historian must  add  two  qualifications  to
this.  One  is that environments can be manipulated  or  abandoned.
While Diamond describes in detail pre-historic population  movements
(which he deduces from linguistic evidence), he does not  realize
that he tells the story of regions, not necessarily of people who
always  had  the  option to move to a more generous and flexible area.
Secondly, it could be argued that much technology emerges precisely
because the  environment is not generous and requires hard work and
ingenuity. What is  the  partial  derivative  of  technological
creativity with respect to initial  geographical  endowment?  In  the
final  analysis,  this is still unknown.

The book is full of other clever arguments about writing, language,
path dependence and so on. It is brimming with wisdom and knowledge,
and it is the kind of knowledge economic historian have always loved
and admired. If you teach economic history, any kind of economic
history, go read this book. Or else you are taking a serious risk that
a clever undergraduate who has read it will ask you a question you
don't know the answer to. Nothing worse is imaginable, short of
organizing a world conference and canceling at the last moment.

Joel Mokyr Departments of Economics and History Northwestern
University
Joel Mokyr is author of _The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity
and Economic Progress_ (Oxford University Press, 1990).
Copyright (c) 1998 by EH.NET and H-Net.  All rights reserved.  This
work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is
given to the author and the list.  For other permission, please
contact the EH.NET Administrator. (administrator at eh.net, Telephone:
513-529-2850; Fax: 513-529-6992)

============ FOOTER TO EH.RES POSTING ============ For information,
send the message "info EH.RES" to lists at eh.net.







From zapata at sezampro.yu  Wed Sep 27 05:57:14 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 13:57:14 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
References: <001d01c027d6$5aa19f40$030b063e@mjones> <006501c02802$a1393360$85bd6ac2@k382> <000c01c0282f$58bc8e20$252b74d8@pavilion>
Message-ID: <009b01c02882$e8225ec0$abbd6ac2@k382>

Thanx for this mail. It means a lot in a crazy situation I am living in.
Yours,
            Andrej

----- Original Message -----
From: embarkadero <embark at epud.net>
To: crashlist <Crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 4:46 AM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks


> Andrej,
>
> Most of those buttheads are addicted to name-calling and will not stop
even
> when it is counterproductive to their positions.  ... stay anyway.
>
> Stay because you can be assured your words are reaching many who hunger
for
> them.
>
> Tom
>






From zapata at sezampro.yu  Wed Sep 27 05:55:19 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 13:55:19 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Regarding Andre's revealing remarks
References: <40.14e7b75.27027fc2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <009a01c02882$e77a8600$abbd6ac2@k382>

My dear friend,
Please, concentrate on my point that you are beyond any rational disscusion
instead; and please, stop harrasing me with your biased pro Milosevic mails.
It is enough I have to read them on the lists(s).
Ok?
Good bye.
                   Andrej
              BLG/IWW/IWA/AIT

> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>





From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Wed Sep 27 09:16:10 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 11:16:10 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Economic malpractice suit
Message-ID: <s9d1d8cc.068@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

[full article http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/27/national/27HARV.html ]

September 27, 2000


U.S. Seeks Millions in Suit Against Advisers to Russia
By CAREY GOLDBERG
BOSTON, Sept. 26 ? Federal prosecutors today filed a civil suit contending
that two Harvard University advisers who helped mold Russia's economic
reforms in the mid-1990's misused their government-financed positions in
pursuit of personal gain for themselves and their wives.

The two advisers, Andrei Shleifer, a prize-winning economics star and
tenured Harvard professor, and Jonathan Hay, a former Harvard legal expert,
deny any wrongdoing. Harvard University, too, rejects the accusation that it
failed in its obligation to supervise the advisers.

Today the univerity's general counsel called the request for damages ? up to
$120 million from Harvard and the defendants ? far out of proportion to any
harm possibly done.

The case, which has been under investigation for more than three years,
concerns advisers who worked for the Harvard Institute for International
Development, which spearheaded American efforts to help Russia make the
transition from Communism to a market economy in the 1990's, and received
more than $40 million in government grants to finance its efforts.

United States Attorney Donald K. Stern, who announced the suit today, said
in a statement: "The United States paid Harvard for impartial and unbiased
economic advice, both in fact and in appearance. Despite clear prohibitions
against investing in Russia, Harvard advisers abused their positions and
attempted to tip the playing field to their own private financial
advantage."

The main accusations concern the advisers and their wives ? Nancy Zimmerman,
Mr. Shleifer's wife, and Elizabeth Hebert, who was then Mr. Hay's girlfriend
and is now his wife. Both women are financial professionals and were
actively working on investments and funds in Russia.

The four are accused of making prohibited purchases that include investments
of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Russian companies and the creation of
a real estate company. Prosecutors also accuse the advisers of using the
staff and offices financed by the United States Agency for International
Development money to make private investments.

Mr. Hay's lawyer, David M. Zornow, issued a statement on Mr. Hay's behalf
today, saying: "Mr. Hay's actions were lawful and proper. Indeed, at the
time Harvard's program was in effect, the highest levels of the U.S.
government recognized that it was enormously successful."

In fact, prosecutors are not asserting that the Harvard advice given the
Russians was bad. But, Mr. Stern said today, the situation was something
like an investment counselor who has promised a client unbiased advice and
then pushes stock in a company in which he owns shares. The client may make
money, but a contract has been broken.

Harvard's general counsel, Anne Taylor, emphasized today that the advisers
did not simply have a contract from the aid agency; they were working in
cooperation with it, and under its supervision as well.

In any case, "all the services the government contracted for were
delivered," Ms. Taylor said. "The government's own evaluation of the project
over the years rated it extremely highly."

Furthermore, Ms. Taylor said, the government's complaint against the
advisers said they worked to conceal their private investing, adding: "If
there's active concealment, it seems to us unreasonable to expect that we
could have caught this. Nobody with administrative authority knew about
this. Nobody."

Professor Shleifer appears to be taking a different tack in his defense; his
lawyer, Earl H. Nemser, issued a statement today saying that Dr. Shleifer
and his wife were glad the matter was finally going to court and that the
accusations against them "are meritless as a matter in law."

"In the main," it said, "the complaint proceeds from the false premise that
Professor Shleifer and his wife were prohibited from investing in Russia."
But "as a consultant to the project, as opposed to an employee of the
project, Professor Shleifer had a specific consulting contract which did not
restrict his investment activities or those of his wife."

Though prosecutors are not criticizing the Harvard advice given Russia, it
does seem clear that the accusations, which were first publicly raised by
American officials in 1997, harmed both the image of American aid in Russia
and the reformers whom the Americans were trying to help.

"When the accusations were first made, there were Russians who said, `You
see, the Americans said they would come and be a big help and be selfless,
and here they were just like everybody else, dipping in the pot,' " said
Marshall Goldman, associate director of the Center for Russian Studies at
Harvard, who has also challenged the wisdom of the substantive advice that
the Shleifer team gave. "That has caused deep harm."

Early this year, Harvard decided to disband the Harvard Institute for
International Development, which had 159 employees and provided technical
assistance around the world, saying it had strayed too far from the
university's central missions of teaching and research. The Russian case was
not a central reason, Harvard officials say, but was illustrative of
problems the institute raised.

Previous talks about a settlement between Harvard and the federal government
failed, but the prospect for a settlement remains.

"We are always amenable to reasonable discourse with the government," Ms.
Taylor said.




From julp at freesurf.ch  Wed Sep 27 09:12:12 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 17:12:12 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] physical capital and energy price hikes (was: response to Julien)
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.27.gplosrli@computer>

>Well, I can see his logic. He's talking like a banker would about
>devalorisation which happens especially with primary energy price
>hikes, which depress profit rates across the board and also impoverish
>the masses.

You forgot: IF the policies don't adapt or adapt badly. Sure, unless the 
regulators are willing to hide the effects of the hikes with net subventions, there 
is going to be pressures and maybe dislocation in some sectors, but profit 
rates across the board can be preserved. You are nevertheless right that 
profits and/or the masses will have to suffer a bit unless a redistributive 
strategy is launched. The question is whether this bit is more or less important 
than the bit caused by other factors than the price hikes. 
As to your banker analogy, the banker is concerned because he sees the 
loan he made as fixed and a devalorisation of the capital buyed with his loan 
would make a bankruptcy a much uglier process from his perspective. But 
where is the loan in the assets/GNP ratio? It seems obvious to me your 
analogy is not relevant to that ratio but to another one like loans/assets. 
Anyway, an economy is more than an aggregate of lenders and borrowers. In 
other words your banker is concerned because the guy he lent money to 
doesn't have a personal central banker to back him in case of trouble. A 
whole economy can get out of banking troubles with good policies.

>Incidentally, what is the ratio of assets/GNP today? I
>heard it's been going down in the US, as aconsequence of the New
>Economy? What is it in Japan, any idea?

I repeat: What can this statistic even mean? I understand devalorisation but I 
don't understand how it will be different is the ratio of assets/GNP is high or 
low. And I don't even know how he/you price the assets in fact. Depending on 
how you price them, the "New Economy" could have increased or decreased 
the ratio. And if the "New Economy" affected the ratio, so what?

>But HUGE amounts of fixed plant and machinery were retired in the
>1970s. Detroit and Birmingham were ghost towns. That was when the word
>'deindustrialisation' came in vogue.

Sure, but are "huge amounts" the same thing as the "much of" the guy you 
quoted talks about? Maybe I'm again misunderstanding English subtelties. 
Anyway, that huge amounts were retired doesn't say why. The price of oil isn't 
the only factor in the profitability equation. Interest rates f.ex. play a very 
important role, both directly and indirectly.




From julp at freesurf.ch  Wed Sep 27 09:11:33 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 17:11:33 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] economic consequences of the strong dollar and oil prices (was: 2nd reply to Julien)
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.27.seoshchm@computer>

>>>Dollar hegemony has resulted in savage deflationary
>>>pressures in theworld economy outside the US.
>>...
>What does 'truly globalised'mean in this context?

It means that there is actually such a thing as a world market for most 
commodities and that the prices in national and world markets are very close 
and move in the same directions. If this is true, then what we're discussing 
lower is irrelevant because whatever happens the prices in non-dollar 
economies would rise as the result of arbitrage when the dollar rises.

>Surely there 2 (at least) strong deflationary consequences of the
>strong dollar: 1 is that is induces a tidal wave of dollars hoarded
>elsewhere to flow back to the US to buy bonds and even assets,
>reducing available pool of capital elsehwere and 2, you're righ, a
>strong dollar puts inflationary pressure on weaker countries which
>they precisely countreact by strong *deflationary* internal social
>anf=d fiscal policies, to keep their own currency strong.

1 - I don't think it's relevant. Hoarded money doesn't have much influence on 
real economies and money flows doesn't affect pools of nonfinancial capital. If 
there was a currency exchange at some point, you could argue about the 
effects on exchange rates, but here you're talking of dollars only. 
2 - There, I follow you. This is very plausible, but not mechanic. Some 
countries will let their currency fall and not play the dealtionary game (current 
example: Europe, which actually seems to get out of a deflationary situation 
thanks to the weak euro).

>> I do
>> think that the US has been the engine of the world economy lately.
>
>That's surely been a deflationary factor elsewhere, since most of the
>dollar profits have not been retained or have been using to invest in
>maquilador type operations which actually may not benefit local
>ecopnomies are counteract internal deflationary forces.

Actually, there is a simpler issue than what is done with profits and investment. 
This is important when you're out of a crisis. The trouble now is that we have 
been in one lately if not since 15 or more years. Look at the prices of 
commodities (except oil, but even this is a recent development). Look at the 
unused capacity and unemployment everywhere. We have become used to 
this but those are normally the symtom of a crisis. Don't you think that the 
problem was indebtment, excessive dependance on the world markets, and a 
lack of demand? The US demand was the only strong one on the world 
market, and was driving the whole thing IMO. 
Anyway, these investment flows issues in practice come down to whether the 
country of which money flows out accepts its currency to fall or not. If the 
government accepts it, the flows will not be deflationary and if it refuses the fall 
they will.

>>>The huge increase in
>>>income and wealth inequality this has produced *is the immediate
>>>result of fundamental constraints on the capitalist growth model', in
>>>particular, energy-shortage.
>>...
>This is hard to grasp only if you do not grasp the estent to which
>there has been no true market-set price for oil for a very long time
>(maybe not since the 1890s).

If the oil price has not been the product of a market, so what? Many prices are 
not the product of an unrigged market. How can the nature of the market and 
not the price of the commodity be the cause of poverty, inequality, etc.?

>> Anyway, all these problems are the results of policies as
>> much as if not more than energy availability. F.ex., how do you explain
>> Algeria with your theories?
>
>What about Algeria? It's been a 'high absorber' affliicted by low oil
>and gas prices for its principal exports for a while now.

Algeria is a mess but it has plentiful energy. Not so long ago this country 
exported no fossil fuel and was probably in a better state then and in some 
time it will probably export none again. If it's the low prices which caused it's 
problems one wonders how it will even survive when their oil will run out. But 
compare this country with neighboring countries afflicted by zero fossil fuel 
exports which do nevertheless survive. There seems to be an issue about 
how it uses the rent, isn't it? You see my point?

>> Another point as to the importance of policies: Seen the
>> spread between
>> Malaysian vs. US/EU bond rates? Not much financial weakness
>> there, it
>> seems.
>
>Don't get this. What about Thailand, Hiong Kong and Japan again?

I mean: the interest rate on the debt of the Malaysian government is close to 
the one on the debt of most western governments. This is not indicative of 
financial weakness (in the contrary). As to Thailand and HK I don't know but 
they are certainly lots of countries in the region which don't enjoy the stability of 
Malaysia despite having the same "energy profile" a Malaysia. As to Japan, 
it's debt has a abnormaly low interest rate which is not exactly a sign of 
extreme financial stability but rather the consequence of a governmental fiat. In 
other words the Japanese debt market is rigged and not dependent on 
foreign capital. Krugman and Keynes would say it's the consequence of a 
"liquidity trap". Hope that answers your vague question.

>> First, stop to use that index. Why not use the S&P or the
>> Wilshire?
>
>Why?

Because the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a selection of 30 stocks which 
are not very representative. Because the DJIA is not price-weighted so that 
the movements are not representative of the market capitalisation but of the 
value of individual shares (which is not important at all). And because the DJIA 
is not good for historical comparaisons (like the S&P for that matter) because 
the stocks go in and out of it in an arbitrary fashion. The S&P500 is a broader 
and price-weighted index. The Wilshire is broad enough so that it doesn't 
matter which stocks are in or out and so that it's really representative of the 
whole market but the disadvantage is that it's not reported everywhere like the 
Dow or the S&P. Please stock-market maniacs correct me if my memory is 
playing tricks on me.




From aabdo at webtv.net  Wed Sep 27 12:55:33 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 13:55:33 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] S-26, Elections, and Resistance
Message-ID: <15843-39D242A5-346@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

On this CrashList, we have two subscribers battling away at each other
over elections being stolen BEFORE the election.     One, an American
marxist, is correctly upset that the US government is stealing an
election in Yugoslavia,  by a combination of threat of war, and paying
for the 'opposition'.

The other subscriber is a European anarchist, who has seen the theft of
many a previous election by an entrenched government 'socialist'
bureaucracy, that uses state assets to maintan its clique in power.
This radical speaks of the need to resist, and not to support
(Milosevic). 

Clinton's most current lie... as of this morning....
''It certainly appears from a distance that they had a free election and
somebody's trying to take it away from them,'' Clinton said at the White
House.

I print this to show that there is another way still, of seeing the
slogan 'resist, not support' (Clinton).      From the US, Jared has been
a model for resistance, while others refused all action.     Emperor's
Clothes was created precisely because no other English language source
was trying to expose the US lies, similar to that of Clinton's latest
disingenuous fib, just read.

As we write, anarchists like Andrej are involved in street actions in
Prague against capitalism.      And Rightists at antiwar.com are the
only semi-decent news source in the US, about what is happening in the
current standoff between the US and the crumbling government of
Milosevic.      But will these Rightists try to mobilize against the
capitalist system?   No..... they won't.

I want to use this moment to express unequivocally to Jared, my
solidarity with his efforts to RESIST.     We should stand with him in
solidarity when he takes on the Raimondo's and Flemings of the world.
However, we have to take quite a different view, when he launches
attacks on people like Andrej or Noam, in the effort to build support
for a Milosevic, as opposed to an effort to mobilize against US
imperialism.

Below, is an article for Jared to consider, with a slight change in
title to.... Capitalism and Communism Look Equally Bad in Belgrade....
It's off todays Common Dreams site ( a site that did not resist much,
the bombing of your country, Andrej).
__________________________________
Capitalism And Communism Look Equally Bad In Prague
by Naomi Klein

?What seems to most enrage the delegates to the meeting of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Prague this week is the idea
that they even have to discuss the basic benefits of free-market
globalization. 

That discussion was supposed to have stopped in 1989, when the Wall fell
and history ended. Only here they all are -- old people, young people,
thousands of them -- literally storming the barricades of their
extremely important summit.

And as the delegates peer over the side of their ill-protected fortress
at the crowds below, scanning signs that say "Capitalism Kills," they
look terribly confused. Didn't these strange people get the memo? Don't
they understand that we all already decided that free-market capitalism
was the last, best system? 

Sure, it's not perfect, and everyone inside the meeting is awfully
concerned about all those poor people and the environmental mess, but
it's not like there's a choice -- is there?

For the longest time, it seemed as if there were only two political
models: Western capitalism and Soviet communism. When the USSR
collapsed, that left only one alternative, or so it seemed. Institutions
like the World Bank and IMF have been busily "adjusting" economies in
Eastern Europe and Asia to help them get with the program: privatizing
services, relaxing regulation of foreign corporations, building huge
export industries.

All this is why it is so significant that yesterday's head-on attack
against the ideology ruling the World Bank and the IMF happened here, in
the Czech Republic. This is a country that has lived through both
economic orthodoxies, where the Lenin busts have been replaced by Pepsi
logos and McDonald's arches.

Many of the young Czechs I met this week say that their direct
experience with communism and capitalism has taught them that the two
systems have something in common: They both treat people as if they are
less than fully human. Where communism saw them only as potential
producers, capitalism sees them only as potential consumers; where
communism starved their beautiful capital, capitalism has overfed it,
turning Prague into a Velvet Revolution theme park.

The experience of growing up disillusioned with both systems helps
explain why so many of the activists behind this week's protests call
themselves "anarchists." Anarchism is an ideology that defines itself by
being fiercely non-ideological. It rejects externally imposed rules and
argues that we are impoverished, as individuals and as communities, by
overwork and overconsumption.

Most of us carry a mess of negative biases about anarchists. But the
truth is that most are less interested in hurling projectiles than in
finding ways to lead simple, autonomous lives. They call it "freedom."

So what do the lifestyle choices of a small (but growing) radical
subculture have to do with the allegations being made against the World
Bank and the IMF? Everything.

Far from simply demanding debt relief, the mass protests against the
Bank and Fund are now driven by more fundamental demands: the
elimination of both institutions, and of the economic beliefs that drive
their every decision.

Over the past decade, a critical mass of communities in poor countries
have questioned the Bank's belief that large-scale "development" always
equals "improvement."

The people coming forward have been displaced by World-Bank-funded
mega-dams and had their water systems polluted by World-Bank-funded
mines.

Are these people Communists? A few. But most aren't capitalists either.
They are tapping into something different, and much older. The young
anarchists in Prague, also gathered here from around the world, have
tapped into it too.

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy put it best, writing about her crusade
against a World-Bank-funded dam: "Perhaps what the 21st century has in
store for us is the dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big
heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small."












From jones118 at lineone.net  Wed Sep 27 12:00:01 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 19:00:01 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FW: [Climateconcern] forests, climate crisis, end energy crisis-- --and the article by fred singer for the herald tribune
Message-ID: <000301c028ac$c1a3d740$de0b063e@mjones>


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Jones [mailto:jones118 at lineone.net]
Sent: 27 September 2000 18:58
To: Climateconcern at egroups.com
Subject: RE: [Climateconcern] forests, climate crisis, end energy
crisis-- --and the article by fred singer for the herald tribune


 Paul Williamson wrote:
>
>
> I agree, "There is nothing wrong with economically-based energy
> conservation;

Unfortunately capitalism does not work like this. It is a grow-or-die
system and the elites who personify it (character-masks of capital)
are not only not interested in making the kind of radical changes that
are needed, they are not even capable of seeing the need for such
changes. Even when they are deeply interested in the problems posed by
global warming, even when they have spent a lifetime in the apparently
disinterested pursuit of scientific knowledge about human imapcts on
the ecosphere, even when they are people of sincere religious
conviction, they are not capable of doing more than utter helpless
prayers to the Almighty when faced with incontrovertible evdience of
looming disaster. It is utopian and pointless to expect that appeals
to reason will achieve anything. The 'know' much better than the
average ingorant layperson, just how serious is the impasse capitalism
has enetered; they 'know', they are perfectly clear, that industrial
capitalism has created a mass extinction of species for which there
are few parallels even in geological time. But they are not capable of
registering this information or of mobilising around it. They are too
embedded in the creature-comforts which their own elite lifestyles
endow them with. All talk of reforms are, in context, playing quoits
on the deck of the Titanic. It is wishful thinking to suppose that you
can persuade those with power over you to do anything which runs
against their immediate self-interest or which imperils their social
position. They will not do it.

As Karl Marx said, he whom you seek to persuade, you acknowledge
master of the situation. It is *worse* than wishful thinking to try to
ingratiate them by proposing schemes for making 'the markets' work to
correct the catastrophe which the markets themselves have created.

Human society dominates the natural world; its material throughputs
exceed nature's. Human society is trapped between demographic inertial
momentum, climate destabilisation, energy famines, and mass species
extinction. Do not hope for justice, equity or reform. It will not
happen. 3 billion people live on less than three dollars a day. They
will be joined by at least 2 billion more in the next 30 years. To
give them 'Western' living standards would mean creating 10 more US
economies. It obviously cannot happen. Therefore at least 5 billion
humans are doomed to lives without security, proper housing,
education, health and welfare, without modern transport systems and
urban infrastructure. And *this* is assuming things continue as they
are; but they will not. They will get worse. We face water and energy
famines. Oil production in the USA has declined continuously for 16
years (for 30 years in the Lower 48). Even Texas is now an net energy
*importer*. World oil and gas production has peaked and the future
will get worse, before it gets worse again.  Population overburden and
ecocide go hand in hand with capital shortages, energy famines and the
collapse of agriculture. These things are already inevitable, even in
the best case and whatever reforms people of good will try to
implement if they come to political power (they won't).

All the rainforest that can be hewn down, will be. All the fossil that
can be burnt, will be. All the aquifers that can be pumped dry, will
be. All the biomes that can be plundered, will be. No efforts will be
made to reverse greenhouse emissions, on the contrary, they will
accelerate. Billions of innocent people are walking around today, not
knowing that their death certificates have already been made out.
Start from this.

Mark




From staajabu at yahoo.com  Wed Sep 27 15:39:29 2000
From: staajabu at yahoo.com (staa jabu)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 14:39:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Humans destroying the natural world
Message-ID: <20000927213929.27124.qmail@web4004.mail.yahoo.com>

With all the research going on has there never been a
serious study on greed?  Greed is the sickness that is
killing our planet.  It's a contagious, debilitating,
crippling disease that effects us all.  Seems that
only humans suffer from this ailment and they appear
to be unable to accurately diagnose it and incapable
of curing themselves.  Maybe NIH would fund us if we
wrote a very enticing proposal.  Yeah right!

--- Mark Jones <jones118 at lineone.net> wrote:
> by  Paul Brown
> Guardian 8/10/98
> 
> 
>  HUMANS have destroyed more than 30 per cent of the
> natural world
> since 1970
>  with serious depletion of the forest, freshwater
> and marine systems
> on which life
>  depends.
> 
>  Consumption pressure from increasing affluence has
> doubled in the
> past 25 years
>  and continues to accelerate, according to a
> ground-breaking report
> from the World
>  Wide Fund for Nature, the New Economics Foundation,
> and the World
>  Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge.
> 
>  The Living Planet Report says that the acceleration
> in environmental
> destruction
>  shows that politicians who have been paying lip
> service to
> sustainable development
>  have done little to promote it. "Time is running
> out for us to change
> the way we
>  live if we are to leave future generations a living
> planet," Nick
> Mabey, WWF's
>  economic policy officer, said at the launch of the
> report in London
> last week. "We
>  knew it was bad, but until we did this report we
> did not realise how
> bad."
> 
>  One of the most serious problems revealed for the
> first time is the
> depletion of
>  freshwater resources with half of the accessible
> supplies being used
> by humans -
>  double the amount of 1960. The rate of decline of
> freshwater
> eco-systems is
>  running at 6 per cent a year, threatening to dry up
> many wetlands,
> and push the
>  species of those habitats to extinction.
> 
>  The report says that governments should increase
> the efficiency of
> their water use,
>  and stop wasteful irrigation schemes where water
> losses are highest.
> 
>  Carbon dioxide emissions have doubled in the same
> period, and, being
> far in excess
>  of the natural world's ability to absorb them, are
> accelerating
> global warming.
> 
>  Global consumption of wood and paper has increased
> by two-thirds, and
> most
>  forests are managed unsustainably. In the same
> period, marine fish
> consumption
>  has also more than doubled, and most of the world's
> fish resources
> are either fully
>  exploited or in decline.
> 
>  Although Western countries have high consumption
> rates, some of the
> developing
>  countries are depleting their natural resources at
> an alarming rate.
> The people of
>  Taiwan, the United States and Singapore are singled
> out as the
> world's most
>  voracious consumers, responsible for depleting the
> Earth's resources
> faster than
>  other countries. Britain comes 41st in the list of
> more than 130
> countries.
> 
>  The report says that though governments are failing
> to take action to
> protect
>  croplands and resources, every individual bears a
> responsibility for
> being careless
>  with the world's resources.
> 
>  Dr Norman Myers, of Green College, Oxford, said:
> "As the world
> becomes
>  economically richer, it becomes environmentally
> poorer. Many people
> have known
>  this for a long time, but they have sometimes
> lacked evidence of a
> comprehensive
>  and compelling sort. More power then to WWF for
> documenting our
> declining
>  prospect in such fine grain detail."
> 
>  Although the report says that a growing population
> is part of the
> problem, increased
>  consumption has been the main problem. The average
> North American or
> Japanese
>  consumes 10 times as much of the world's resources
> as the average
> Bangladeshi.
>  Japan and Bangladesh have the same populations but
> have a vastly
> different effect
>  on the world's eco-systems, particularly in timber
> and fish
> consumption.
> 
>  The average North American resident consumes fives
> times as much as
> an African
>  and three times as much as an Asian. However, in
> total Asia takes
> more of the
>  Earth's resources because there are 3.2 billion
> Asians compared with
> only 0.3
>  billion North Americans.
> 
>  The Swiss billionaire industrialist Dr Stephan
> Schidheiny, who is
> president of the
>  Avina Foundation, said: "This index indicates a
> serious decline in
> the health of the
>  Earth's ecological balance sheet, which reflects
> our imprudent and
> inefficient use of
>  natural resources. To restore its ecological
> health, we must ensure
> that our
>  consumption and production of food, water,
> materials and energy are
> within the
>  Earth's carrying capacity now, and in the future."
> 
>  He said people could help save the planet and save
> themselves money
> through
>  energy efficiency, reducing waste, using water
> sparingly and not
> contaminating it,
>  and by avoiding unnecessary trips in vehicles.
> 
>  Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Health
> Organisation, said:
> "This
>  quantifies for the first time a scary decline in
> the health of the
> world's forest,
>  freshwater and marine ecosystems. It shows we have
> lost nearly a
> third of the
>  Earth's natural wealth since 1970."
> 
>  Sir Ghillian Prance, director of the Royal
> Botanical Gardens at Kew,
> said: "The
>  index presents a warning which we should all take
> most seriously
> because it charts
>  an alarming decline in the health of natural
> forest, freshwater and
> marine
>  ecosystems over the past 30 years.
> 
>  "The conservation of natural ecosystems is not a
> luxury which only
> the rich can
>  afford, but is essential to ensure the maintenance
> of the vital
> ecological functions of
>  our planet upon which we all depend for our
> survival."
> 
> 
> 
=== message truncated ===


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From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Wed Sep 27 15:41:52 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 15:41:52 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] Straight Talk
References: <000301c028ac$c1a3d740$de0b063e@mjones>
Message-ID: <00c501c028cb$c05bfce0$0c48adcf@perryarn>

Mark,

again, superbly stated! Especially : 

 It is wishful thinking to suppose that you
> can persuade those with power over you to do anything which runs
> against their immediate self-interest or which imperils their social
> position. They will not do it.

and :

> All the rainforest that can be hewn down, will be. All the fossil that
> can be burnt, will be. All the aquifers that can be pumped dry, will
> be. All the biomes that can be plundered, will be. No efforts will be
> made to reverse greenhouse emissions, on the contrary, they will
> accelerate. Billions of innocent people are walking around today, not
> knowing that their death certificates have already been made out.
> Start from this.

powerful stuff!  thanks;

folks:  if the shoe fits, wear it...

Perry




From Borba100 at aol.com  Wed Sep 27 19:41:18 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 21:41:18 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Yugoslav Election Results: Big Defeat for U.S. Fifth Column Tactics
Message-ID: <66.7cc9547.2703fbbe@aol.com>

The URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/elec.htm

Yugoslav Election Results: Big Defeat for U.S. Fifth Column Tactics

Commentary 
by Jared Israel (9-26-2000)

Below we have reprinted the preliminary Election Commission returns, as 
posted by Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency. The amazing thing is that despite 
every sort of meddling, the U.S. has failed to bring down the Yugoslav 
government. The hard core of Yugoslav resistance held firm. Indeed, the 
government coalition now has a majority in both houses of Parliament, which 
governYugoslavia.

This election has been quite something. Everyone admits that the "democratic" 
opposition is massively funded by US government agencies. The only difference 
between this funding and what the CIA used to do in the 1950s, 1960s and 
1970s is that in this case some of the funding is open. But some of it is not 
so open, with money smuggled into Yugoslavia in suitcases full of cash.(1)

The U.S. has subjected the Yugoslav people to the most extreme kind of 
intimidation. The 6th fleet is off the shore of Croatia conducting 
"maneuvers". Remember, Yugoslavia has been subjected to attacks by the U.S. 
and its allies and proxy forces for ten years, including 78 days of bombing. 
So the people have reason to be concerned about the 6th fleet. Indeed, while 
the 6th Fleet was maneuvering in the Adriatic, the US was preparing to 
conduct maneuvers (I believe they are to begin on the 28th) in Bulgaria and 
Rumania. Thus the Yugoslav people voted while a vise of Imperial threat 
embraced their country.

While holding this military stick over Yugoslav heads, the West has also 
waved a carrot, promising to lift sanctions and embrace Yugoslavia, if only 
the Yugoslavs get rid of Milosevich. This is a false promise. Several recent 
articles on Emperor's Clothes ( www.tenc.net ) deal with the punitive 
treatment Yugoslavia must expect if the US government gets its local agents 
in power. 

Today, the US House of Representatives voted to give the "independent 
democratic" opposition $105 MILLION to continue what the U.S. press is now 
calling its "populist" struggle. Not bad. They get to be populists plus 
millions of dollars to line their pockets because note that this money is not 
going to solve the problems of ordinary Yugoslavs, it is going to reward 
"democratic" opposition organizations and individuals. It is bribe money. The 
U.S. Establishment likes to get something for its bribes, in this case 
political control.

$105 million is a lot of money in Yugoslavia. First of all, it's a small 
country with 1/25th of the U.S. population. And it is very poor, compared to 
the U.S. $150 (US) a month is an OK salary in Yugoslavia; you can live on 
$150 about as well as someone making $2000 in the U.S. 

So to get an idea of the effect of $105 million in U.S. terms, multiply by 25 
(for population) and 13.333 (for salary.) This means that in equivalent US 
dollars, Congress just voted to pay $35 BILLION to the "independent" 
opposition. 

So the U.S. government is holding out a big (though entirely deceptive) 
carrot and a big stick. What a spirit of resistance, that under these 
circumstances the Yugoslavs would give a majority of seats in both houses of 
Parliament to the parties the U.S .wants them to dump. This spirit of 
resistance is what the U.S. and Germany have been trying to destroy for ten 
long years. Indeed, Germany has been trying to break the Serbian spirit for a 
hundred years, if not more.

Parliamentary Returns

The most important elections are those for the two houses of Parliament. 
There, the Government Coalition of the Socialist Party, the JUL and 
Montenegrin SNP have gained an absolute majority in Parliament. 

Presidential Returns Give Kostunica a Plurality, Requiring a Runoff Election

In the Presidential race, the Election Commission returns give both 
Milosevich and Kostunica 40% and 48% respectively. Since both are under 50%, 
a run-off is required.

But a run-off would be bad for the DOS. Milosevich will most likely fare 
better in a run-off than he did in round one. Why? For one thing, he will get 
most of the Radical Party vote. More important, many of the more nationalist 
Serbs didn't vote in round one because they didn't want to vote for 
Milosevich, but they will vote for him in round two because they see 
Kostunica's coalition as tied to the U.S. Kostunica's absolute numbers may go 
up, but his percentage of the total could well go down.

The U.S. has a problem. Even if Kostunica were to win the Presidential vote, 
the government is controlled by Parliament, and Parliament is solidly in the 
hands of the Governing coalition. Therefore the US is using its "democratic" 
opposition to try and destabilize the situation and bring the government 
down. 

Djindjic Attacks Official Returns, Followed by Kostunica

At approximately 3:00 Eastern U.S. time Democratic Party leader Zoran 
Djindjic publicly attacked the Election Commission returns, claiming they 
were false. He provided no evidence. This is consistent, of course. Prior to 
the elections, Djindjic and the State Department and Robin Cook and every 
Western newsman assured us that Milosevich would "steal" the elections, but 
never indicated how, so why provide evidence now that "the deed has been 
done"?

Djindjic said his coalition would demand to see the official returns and 
"compare them with ours, one by one if necessary" and that they would reject 
a runoff because "we will respect the result that was registered on September 
24." ('Reuters, 9-26-2000, 3.08 PM)

An hour later, the official candidate of the "democratic" coalition spoke up. 
Vojislav Kostunica followed Djindjic's lead, echoing the charges of fraud and 
the refusal to participate in the runoff. ('Reuters, 9-26-2000, 4.10 PM)

Kostunica was picked to be the "democratic" coalition's candidate because he 
had not been discredited (like Mr. Djindjic) as an agent of the U.S. 
government. But as we have pointed out, (2) Kostunica's character is not the 
issue because Kostunica is not the master of his fate. He relies on the DOS 
coalition and various "democratic" organizations, like the Group of 17 
economists. They in turn rely on the U.S. government. How can Kostunica buck 
these forces? They have the U.S. money; they have the organizations; and they 
have the media. He has Kostunica and a tiny political party. 

The Golden Rule: He Who Has the Gold Makes The Rules

The U.S. has given tens of millions of dollars to the "democratic" 
opposition. Kostunica says he has taken none of this money. If this is true, 
then Zoran Djindjic and the other "independent" democrats are getting it all. 
Djindjic has an organization able to smuggle cash across the border ("in 
suitcases" according to the N.Y. Times) (1) And the G-17 economists, a 
leading component of the US-funded opposition, has the ties to the 
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

So Zoran Djindjic speaks at 3pm and Vojislav Kostunica echoes him at 4. There 
you have it: a small example but one that reflects the true relation of 
forces. Whatever Mr. Kostunica really is, whatever he really wants, whatever 
he has convinced himself he is doing, he is only the tail. The dog is Zoran 
Djindjic, the G-17 economists, Vesna Pesic, Radio B292 and the rest of the 
independent democratic civil society peace activist opposition, and they all 
work for the USA

Below is the Election Report from Tanjug.

***

BELGRADE, Sep 26 (Tanjug).- The Federal Electoral Commission held a session 
Tuesday chaired by Borivoje Vukicevic and announced the first preliminary 
results of Yugoslav presidential election on the basis of results processed 
so far for 10,153 polling stations. 

Turnout was 64.16 percent, or 5,036,478 out of the total electorate of 
7,848,818. The five presidential candidates won the following number of 
votes: 

- Miroljub Vidojkovic 40,765 or 0.80 percent 

- Vojislav Kostunica 2,428,714 or 48.22 percent 

- Slobodan Milosevic 2,026,478 or 40.23 percent 

- Vojislav Mihailovic 130,598 or 2.59 percent 

- Tomislav Nikolic 256,876 or 5.10 percent 

Invalid ballots - 3.03 percent 

According to these figures, a runoff presidential election is expected to be 
held. 

According to the preliminary results of the federal parliamentary elections, 
the distribution of seats is as follows: 

Chamber of Citizens 

- DOS (Democratic Opposition of Serbia) - 59 

- SPS-JUL (Socialist Party of Serbia, Yugoslav Left) - 44 

- SNP (Socialist National Party) - 28 

- SRS (Serbian Radical Party) - 3 

- SNS (Serbian People's Party) - 2 

Two seats will go to SPO, DZVM or SSJ, depending on final 

results. 

Chamber of the Republics 

- DOS (Democratic Opposition of Serbia) - 10 

- SPS-JUL (Socialist Party of Serbia, Yugoslav Left) - 7 

- SRS (Serbian Radical Party) - 2 

- SPO (Serbian Renewal Movement) - 1 

- SNS (Serbian People's Party) - 1 

The final results will be made public within the deadline set by the law, the 
Commission said. 

(end)

(1) Here is the quote from the 'NY Times' on how "democratic" opposition 
money gets into Yugoslavia:

"The money from the West is going to most of the institutions that the 
government attacks for receiving it - sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in 
indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in 
suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or 
Serbia and Montenegro. Most of those organizations and news media could not 
exist without foreign aid." ('N.Y. Times', 9-20-2000. 

For the complete 'N.Y. Times' story and a commentary from Emperor's Clothes, 
see "'NY Times' Confirms Charge: U.S. Gov't Meddles in Yugoslavia" at 
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/erlang.htm 

(2) See 'US ARROGANCE AND YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS' at 
http://emperors-clothes.com/engl.htm 

www.tenc.net 
[Emperor's Clothes]
 



From ncfs at islandnet.com  Wed Sep 27 17:31:02 2000
From: ncfs at islandnet.com (Networking for a Common Future in Sustainability)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 16:31:02 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Straight Talk
In-Reply-To: <00c501c028cb$c05bfce0$0c48adcf@perryarn>
References: <000301c028ac$c1a3d740$de0b063e@mjones>
Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20000927162559.00ac36f0@pop.islandnet.com>

At 03:41 PM 27/09/00 -0600, Perry  Arnett wrote: in response to Mark Jones' 
: " It is wishful thinking to suppose that you  can persuade those with 
power over you to do anything which runs  against their immediate 
self-interest or which imperils their social  position. They will not do 
it."... and :" All the rainforest that can be hewn down, will be. All the 
fossil that can be burnt, will be. All the aquifers that can be pumped dry, 
will be. All the biomes that can be plundered, will be. No efforts will be 
made to reverse greenhouse emissions, on the contrary, they will 
accelerate. Billions of innocent people are walking around today, 
not  knowing that their death certificates have already been made 
out.  Start from this."
"..powerful stuff!  thanks; folks:  if the shoe fits, wear it...   "

My comment: We know that at current rate and in current system with current 
players playing by current "rules", this is it. Then, what? What do you 
propose to do? How? when? where? with whom? with what means? how directly? 
Where do you start?


Best

Yves Bajard




>Perry
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From aabdo at webtv.net  Thu Sep 28 00:09:14 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 01:09:14 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] US Out of The Balkans!
Message-ID: <15356-39D2E08A-874@storefull-231.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

I'm posting this, because the two Left forces that have done more to
oppose US interventionism in The Balkans, Emperors Clothes and the
Workers World Party, deserve to have their voices heard.     One senses
a certain overriding guilty shame, in the silence of the rest of the
Left.

Tony Abdo
______________________________
U.S./NATO STEAL YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS
Soft Money and hard threats 
By Sara Flounders 

On Sept. 26 the State Election Commission in Yugoslavia announced the
results of the Sept. 24 elections. The candidate backed by the U.S.
government and the European Union, Vojislav Kostunica, received 48
percent of the vote to President Slobodan Milosevic's 40 percent. 

Since neither candidate received more than 50 percent, a run- off
election has been set for Oct. 8. 

Kostunica's immediate reaction was to reject participation in a run-off
election and demand that Milosevic concede defeat. Bill Clinton,
Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and other NATO leaders who bombed
Yugoslavia in 1999 also demanded Milosevic concede. 

The first point for the whole international movement that opposed NATO's
war against Yugoslavia to keep in mind is that the Yugoslav elections
were not "free and fair." Imperialism stole the election through its
blatant pressure, bribery and interference. 

The elections raise a vital question. Will Yugoslavia be turned over to
the Western banks and corporations? Will the assets of industrial
enterprises be broken up and sold off, as they have been in every other
country in Eastern Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Republics? Will
the majority of the population be relegated to living below the poverty
line? 

The Sept. 24 elections involved three layers of voting. Besides the
presidential vote, there were also municipal elections, in which the
U.S.-backed opposition won many cities and towns. 

There was also an election for the Yugoslav Federal Parliament. The
coalition of the United Left, the Socialist Party and the SP's sister
party in Montenegro won a strong majority of both houses. In Montenegro
it was unopposed, as the pro-Western government abstained from the
election. Under Yugoslav law, Parliament has more rights than the
president and directs the government, electing the prime minister. 

But a setback for Milosevic in the presidential election puts more at
risk than the future of one individual. He was the main target of the
war carried out by U.S. and NATO--the imperialist world powers--and
because of that he has come to symbolize Yugoslav resistance. In
addition, he was at the center of the coalition of forces that led
Yugoslavia during the 78 days of bombing. 

All the social gains of an independent country that had broken free of
imperialist enslavement and held out during years of encirclement and
war are now endangered. 

WESTERN INTERFERENCE DISTORTED ELECTIONS 
In this election the U.S. and European Union governments used every
possible dirty trick, corrupt practice and payoff, and then bragged
about them. Threats of bombing, promises to end nine years of sanctions,
intimidation and military maneuvers heightened the tension. 

On election day the Pentagon and Croatia held their largest joint
military exercises ever--a joint landing on an island in the Adriatic
near Montenegro, part of Yugoslavia, to simulate an invasion. Fifteen
British war ships have now moved into the Mediterranean. A U.S. aircraft
carrier in the Adriatic Sea has moved closer to Montenegro. 

The major media here--the New York Times on Sept. 20 and the Washington
Post on Sept. 19--have described in detail the exact amounts funneled
into the opposition parties, radio and TV stations and newspapers. The
U.S. Congress publicly voted on $77 million in open interference. Then
on Sept. 25, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to send
another $105 million to aid anti-Milosevic forces in Serbia and
Montenegro. 

These articles describe suitcases of cash handed over at the border,
endless supplies of computers, fax machines, cell phones and the
trainers to use them. These goods have been passed to the opposition
through front organizations, NGOs and media outlets. 

Weeks before the election, Western-funded polling organizations
announced that Kostunica would win a sweeping victory. For the West's
media monopoly beaming into Yugoslavia, there were only two options.
Either Milosevic would lose or there would be massive fraud. 

The U.S. State Department announced that even if Milosevic won by
overwhelming odds, Washington would refuse to accept the results. 

HOW SOULD MOVEMENT EVALUATE THESE EVENTS? 
Those who opposed NATO bombing in 1999 and all the militant activists
who have taken on the International Monetary Fund, World Bank,
globalization and sweatshops have a stake in what happens next in
Yugoslavia. 

Are they ready to stand in solidarity with whatever steps are necessary
to keep another country from being forced under the boot of the IMF and
World Bank? 
Washington, London, Paris and Berlin have openly intervened and bragged
of it. In the face of these admissions, those in office in Yugoslavia
have every right to void the elections and disqualify the opposition. 

In the United States, France, Britain or Germany, would such an election
have been allowed to continue? In the United States no political
organization is permitted to accept funds from another government for
political purposes unless it publicly registers as an agent of a foreign
power. The U.S. ruling class is determined that only it should control
the electoral process. 

Any U.S. politician found accepting contributions, bribes or payments of
any kind from a foreign government is disgraced, attacked and could face
criminal indictment. 

Just the allegation that the Clinton administration accepted a
contribution from an ethnically Chinese businessperson who might have
had contact with China sent every politician running for cover. 

CORRUPTION AND TREASON 
It is important to recognize that the Yugoslav government has the moral
right to nullify this election on the basis of outrageous outside
interference. It has every right to refuse to proceed with further
elections under conditions of war, sanctions and occupation. 

The Parliament has every right to establish a criminal inquiry into the
funding sources of the opposition. Government prosecutors have every
right to indict and jail the politicians and publications that have
corrupted the election process. 

The masses have every right to go into the streets and denounce the
opposition parties and publications as agents of a foreign power. 

Kostunica, until now a minor politician considered a Serb nationalist
with a long history of anti-Communism, consistently maintains that he
has not accepted any money from the West. He has even criticized the
NATO bombing and sanctions. No Yugoslav politician could win significant
votes if seen as a NATO stooge. 

It may be true that he personally has not pocketed any money. But
Kostunica has surrounded himself with political parties and
organizations that are toadies to the NATO countries. His whole campaign
has been publicized by radio and television stations and newspapers
wholly and openly financed by grants from Washington and Berlin. 

He is supported by the U.S. and European imperialist powers because his
political program, even if it criticizes NATO, embraces the very
policies that NATO is demanding. He is the easiest of the politicians to
make into a pawn because he has no personal base. He is the candidate of
a bloc of 18 small feuding political parties that have no common
interests or ideology. They are united only by opposition to the
government and their willingness to accept foreign funds. 

U.S. ENGINEERED COUPS AND COUNTERREVOLUTIONS 
The big U.S. monopolies and banks and Washington itself have never
accepted an election as "free and fair" if it put their class interests
in danger or brought the masses onto the scene. Since the end of World
War II the U.S. has organized the overthrow of more than 50 governments. 
In Chile in 1973 the CIA organized a military coup to drown the
progressive legally elected government in blood. It did the same in Iran
in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954. 

In 1990 the U.S. orchestrated the overthrow of the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua. Washington had cobbled together a 20-party coalition whose
only aim was to overthrow the government and restore the old propertied
class. It promised to end the "Contra" war and sanctions and provide
massive aid if the popular Sandinistas were defeated. 

In this situation, much like the one today in Yugoslavia, Washington
succeeded in manipulating the election to drive out the Sandinistas. But
the U.S. never came through with the aid, and now some of the
lowest-paid sweatshops in the world operate in the Trade Zones" of
Nicaragua. 
'FREE ELECTIONS' IN A COUNTRY UNDER SIEGE? 
Yugoslavia, like Nicaragua, illustrates the dangers of holding an
election in the midst of an unrelenting war, sanctions and occupation of
part of the country by foreign armies. With their dominance of the world
media, the lure of material goods, the bribes and the threat of further
punishment, these powers were able to reach right into the country. 

President Milosevic was trying to get a mandate by calling a vote when
the opposition seemed divided, weak, discredited. But the imperialists
quickly strengthened them using tactics refined over decades of
interventions. 

Yugoslavia, a small, beleaguered country maneuvering to survive, has
allowed dozens of openly pro-imperialist parties to maintain offices,
staff, publish newspapers, organize and to participate in elections.
These concessions have only further emboldened the enemies of the
Yugoslav workers. 

Even though the imperialists complained that they were not allowed to
monitor the elections, hundreds of foreigners did come in as election
observers and certified that they were "free and fair"--that the
government honestly and legally abided by all election procedures. But
this shifted attention from the actual fraud taking place: the massive
intervention and intimidation by imperialism. 

The political opposition was allowed to engage in practically
unrestrained acceptance of foreign assistance, advice and media hype.
The whole process was corrupted by an army of Western advisers and
pollsters. 

WILL U.S./NATO FORCES SUCCEED? 
Reports from election observers and even the big-business media show
there is a hard core of working-class support for Milosevic from those
who see him as a defender of the country against NATO. Even among those
who naively voted for Kostunica out of anger against Milosevic, there
are many who want to resist Western imperialism. 

The question facing the Yugoslav masses now is will the Western
multinationals, on the basis of this election distorted by intervention,
be able to capture the state apparatus and open the door to
super-exploitation? 

Will the enemy that failed to break Yugoslavia's resistance with 78 days
of bombing be able to take over by manipulation of an election--or will
the government be able to resist? 
If the left organizations and patriotic parties in Yugoslavia resist,
will the progressive and working-class and anti-war movements in the
West defend them against an inevitable propaganda blitz from the West
and a possible new 
military campaign? 

WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
One contribution to this effort could be a Commission of Inquiry to
examine the corrupting role that the U.S. government, the European
Union, their NATO military arm and their international financial
organizations played in the Yugoslav election. 

This Inquiry could gather and publicize information on these
institutions' efforts to subvert and overthrow the Yugoslav government.
It could also gather information on the open and secret funding of
political parties, organizations and publications by U.S. government
agencies. 

The Inquiry could deepen international understanding of Yugoslavia's
problem by incorporating testimony and reports on U.S. intervention in
the internal affairs of other governments. This would include the
overthrow of other popular governments in Guatemala, Panama, Chile, Iran
and Indonesia and also intervention in elections in Italy, Haiti,
Nicaragua, Guyana and others. 

Activists in other NATO countries could organize their own Commissions
of Inquiry and public hearings to examine how this latest intervention
violated their laws. Similar information came to light earlier when
hearings and tribunals in many countries put U.S. and NATO leaders on
trial for war crimes against Yugoslavia. 

The importance of international solidarity should never be
underestimated. Yugoslavia must not stand alone.












From gdrouet at brutele.be  Wed Sep 27 17:33:42 2000
From: gdrouet at brutele.be (Georges Drouet)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 01:33:42 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague
In-Reply-To: <026201c01e45$0d625a20$9128a6d4@vincentlejeune>
Message-ID: <v03007800b5f822a56aeb@[212.68.216.17]>

Cher Vincent, pas de reaction a ces incidents de Prague car, soyons francs,
il y a deux types de comportement face a ce genre de situation: ceux qui
vont la-bas et ceux qui restent chez eux.

Parmis ceux qui vont sur place, un pourcentage, qui se reduira chaque fois
davantage, est constitue de veritables defenseur de l'ethique humaine du
developpement.

Mais la machine des puissant est tout sauf stupide et travaille avec les
meilleurs publicitaires et faiseurs d'opinion du monde... Deux strategies
sont donc en cours, et particulierement notable depuis les manifs de
Londres:
- d'abord un terme a ete accole a ces manifestations anti-FMI/WB/OMC, celui
d'anti-globalisation. Or ce terme generique englobe tout a fait autre chose
que ce que nous pretendons. Il me semble en effet que nous ne sommes pas
contre les echanges culturels internationaux, ni contre la renconbtre des
peuples, encore moins contre un developpement durable equitablement reparti
entre toutes les nations du monde... Pourtant tout cela est englobe dans le
terme d'anti-globalisation. Par contre, il a ete facile de berner nos
manifestants hardis en leur collant une etiquette qu'ils se sont laisser
appliquee, car, c'est vrai, nous sommes contre une globalisation inhumaine,
vicieuse et neo-coloniale comme arme de conquete du libre capitalisme
sauvage. Point. Si je me fais bien comprendre, on nous colle une etiquette
qui englobe ce contre quoi nous sommes, mais qui englobe aussi des pensees
et des strategies qui n'ont rien a voir avec ce monde futur que nous
desirons pour nos enfants, un monde de paix et d'harmonie dans un cadre
respectueux de l'humanite et de la nature. Meme si ces termes sont
forcement vagues, le travail est encore a faire, ils ne se dirigent en
aucun cas vers cet espece d'isolationisme nationaliste dans lequel nous
sommes maintenant, apres trois rounds de bataille, conceptuellement
enfermes...
Grace a cette strategie, aimablement reprise par les journaux au service du
grand pouvoir de l'ombre et de la pensee unique, nous voila ridiculises
alors que nous n'avons meme pas encore dit ce que nous voulions faire,
d'une part parceque l'on nous a colle une etiquette de reactionnaires face
a l'evolution planetaire (il suffit d'ecouter le discours de Wolfensohn
pour en etre convaincus et qui utilise la l'outil qu'on lui a confectionne
a souhait) et d'autre part parceque personne ne s'est donne la peine, de
notre cote, d'indiquer clairement et concretement ce que nous voulions...
Nous voila en train d'aboyer aux basques des maitres du monde et quand les
habitants de la planete se demandent ce que nous avons a proposer,... alors
la nous sommes muets!
Car a force d'etre contre on en oublie ce pour quoi on est!
Donc contre les grandes institutions, contre le capitalisme sauvage, contre
l'exageration des mouvements speculatifs, contre l'exploitation des
enfants, contre le tourisme sexuel, contre le blanchiment d'argent, contre
les centrales et les bombes nucleaires, contre le changement climatique et
contre encore mille choses... Alors qu'en face ils sont pour le libre
marche, pour la croissance, pour la liberte d'investissement, pour la
consommation, pour ainsi des millions de petites choses qui remplissent les
levres des televisions, les verbes des journaux, les gresillemant des
radios et les filtres des hackers...
On a l'air de reacs alors que c'est le systeme en place qui nous bouffe la
vie, le temps, l'espoir , la beaute de la surprise... Ces rapaces englues
dans leurs piege mortel se glorifient et se pavanent d'etre positivistes.
Ils ont vite fait de negativiser notre mouvement.

Deuxieme point, il suffit de quelques dizaines d'amis muscles, bien
entraines et equipes, pour foutre un bordel monstre dans ce genre de
manifestation qui ressemblent plus a des batailles urbaines ou, plus
ringard encore, a des fins de match de coupe de football ou les hooligans
s'en donnent a coeur joie... Quelque pros grassement payes auquels on
autorise un dechainement de leurs plus basses pulsions reduisent en miettes
toute tentative de controle de ce genre de rencontre.

Et le tableau est maintenant pret:
les anti-globalisateurs viennent casser des villes tranquilles, dans des
pays democratiques, car ils ne sont finalement que des reactionnaires qui
refusent de voir le monde avancer... et en plus c'est des betes de violence
qui blessent, cassent et detruisent tout ce qui se presente devant eux...
On a l'air con ou pas?

Et puis il y a ceux qui restent. Soient parcequ'ils doivent travailler,
soit parceque deja ecrases par la machine au fond de leur etre solitaire
dans la foule anonyme, ils pleurent des amertumes seches...

Mais il y en a encore d'autres, qui considerent que les projets doivent se
construire en avancant, sans detruire et en incluant tous les participants,
qui voient plus loin qu'un champs de bataille qui ne laissera meme pas de
souvenirs autre qu'une retrouvaille avec l'esprit soixante-huitard et le
babacoolisme qui nous a tranquilement amene a la situation d'aujourd'hui.
Je ne dis pas qu'il s'agisse de regretter ce qui a ete fait, dans le passe,
ni meme a Prague, mais qu'il serait temps d'arreter de jouer au cowboy, ou
plutot aux gendarmes et aux voleurs car le role que la presse controlee
nous a etiquete c'est celui des voleurs, les gendarmes travaillant pour
ceux d'en face, d'en haut... pour etre precis.

Alors meme si j'apprecie Attac et son concept de fond, je subodore
l'urgence d'une totale redefinition de notre action. Aller gaspiller son
temps, son argent, ses poumons et peut-etre perdre un oeil, pour montrer
que nous sommes decides a changer le monde en bousillant des rues, des
batiment et les cars des CRS locaux ne me semble pas la meilleure
alternative, et je l'ai deja dit dans cette liste sans que cela souleve le
moindre commentaire... On s'y fait!

Oui, mais le projet d'Attac, dans la capitale meme du pays ou il est ne,
avec au pouvoir un parti qui pourrait, ou du moins devrait lui etre
favorable, vient de se prendre une grande claque (cf mon message Taxe Tobin
pas jouable) pendant qu'en meme temps, les manifestants n'ont plus comme
echo que celui de violences, leurs message, si bien entendu dans les
plaines du grand chef Sioux Seattle, a perdu sa magie, il est devenu banal,
pire, inaudible derriere le bruit des casseurs et des grenades
lacrymogenes...

C'est un esprit de cooperation, avec une saine gestion des quelques sous
que nous accumulons, une strategie totalement dirigee vers une
collaboration constructive plutot qu'une debauche destructive qu'il nous
faut.

Car, sombre harpie, la fin d'une revolution est dans l'oeuf meme qui lui a
donne le jour. La claque de Fabius fera jurisprudence dans le jugement qui
est porte sur la campagne de la Taxe Tobin et nos enfantillages de cour de
recreation ne feront que ternir notre image de femmes et d'hommes
responsables d'un avenir, compromis certes, mais qui est celui de nos
enfants, de nos amis et amies et de nous-meme, au moins pour un temps
encore...

Cooperation, pas facile hein?

Pourtant c'est ecrit sur le site... Et en francais en plus depuis quelques
jours (meme si il y a encore deux ou trois points a regler techniquement).

Peut-etre que maintenant il y aura de l'echo???  He... Ho!!  Hehehehe Ho...

http:www//simpol.org

c'est la que vous trouverez l'idee simple et efficace, alors pourquoi aller
faire complique?

A+


>    Je suis tr?s ?tonn? de ne&nbsp;trouver sur ce forum aucune r?action
>sur le  comportement violent des manifestants ? Prague. Pourquoi ce
>silence ? Vincent <mailto:vincent.lejeune at swing.be>
>vincent.lejeune at swing.be    PS : ci-dessous, un communiqu? de l'AFP  :
>ATS / AFP
>
>PRAGUE : SOMMET ANNUEL DU FMI ET DE LA BANQUE MONDIALE
>
>Les manifs anti-mondialisation d?g?n?rent en combats de rue
>
>Des milliers de manifestants venus protester contre "la terreur
>?conomique"  ont transform? la capitale tch?que en champ de bataille.
>Douze policiers ont d?  ?tre hospitalis?s.
>
>La manifestation anti-mondialisation mardi ? Prague s'est sold?e par un
>violent face-?-face avec la police tch?que. Pr?s d'une centaine de
>bless?s, dont  une cinquantaine de policiers, ont ?t? d?nombr?s pour
>l'ouverture officielle de  la r?union du FMI et de la Banque mondiale.
>
>Selon l'agence tch?que CTK, 54 policiers ont ?t? bless?s - dont 12
>hospitalis?s - ainsi que des dizaines de manifestants. Les journalistes
>pr?sents  estimaient pour leur part que les victimes des heurts pourraient
>?tre plus  nombreuses. La police a proc?d? ? nombre d'arrestations
>muscl?es, a constat?  l'ATS.
>
>Les chiffres sur le nombre de manifestants restaient approximatifs en fin
>de  soir?e: ils ?taient 11 000 selon la police mais l'INPEG (Initiative
>contre la  Mondialisation Economique) avan?ait de son c?t? le chiffre de
>20.000  manifestants. La police tch?que s'est d'ailleurs montr?e surprise
>par la  violence des contacts.
>
>Renforts appel?s
>
>Les 11 000 policiers mobilis?s ont fait appel dans la journ?e ? des
>renforts  venus de Boh?me centrale, occidentale et de l'est, en raison de
>la violence des  heurts. Un porte-parole de la police a d?clar? que "les
>forces de l'ordre  avaient ?t? surprises par l'agressivit? des
>protestataires". Les plus agressifs  ont ?t? interpell?s, mais le
>porte-parole n'a pu indiquer leur nombre. Les  manifestants,
>essentiellement europ?ens - surtout italiens, espagnols, grecs,  belges,
>fran?ais et scandinaves, mais aussi am?ricains - ont converg? vers la
>capitale aux premi?res heures de la matin?e.
>
>Bravant les moyens impressionnants - blind?s, canons ? eau, h?licopt?res,
>grenades lacrymog?nes - dont ?taient ?quip?s les unit?s anti-?meute,
>plusieurs  milliers de militants contre la mondialisation sont parvenus ?
>quelques  centaines de m?tres du Palais des congr?s, suppos? inaccessible.
>
>Ces derniers se sont violemment oppos?s aux barrages policiers, utilisant
>pav?s, b?tons et divers projectiles contre les policiers qui prot?geaient
>le  p?rim?tre de s?curit? ? coups de grenades lacrymog?nes et jets de
>canons ? eau.  Une dizaine de barricades, certaines en feu, avaient ?t?
>dress?es dans les rues  avoisinantes.
>
>Des centaines de militants ont m?me acc?d? aux portes du Centre des
>congr?s  transform? en forteresse sous le regard int?ress? des d?l?gu?s du
>Fonds  mon?taire international (FMI) et de la Banque Mondiale (BM) r?unis
>sur les  terrasses du palais. La police ? d? inviter ces derniers ? plus
>de discr?tion  afin d'?viter de provoquer les protestataires.
>
>Mouvement irr?versible
>
>Les d?l?gu?s du FMI-BM, confin?s dans le centre - apr?s la fin des travaux
>-  par mesure de s?curit?, ont ?t? ?vacu?s par une rame de m?tro sp?ciale
>de la  station situ?e sous le Palais, sous forte protection polici?re. La
>d?l?gation  suisse, conduite par Kaspar Villiger avec Hans Meyer et
>Jean-Pierre Roth de la  BNS, a aussi pu quitter les lieux.
>
>Pris ? partie dans la rue, les responsables du FMI et de la BM ont fait
>valoir devant l'assembl?e annuelle combien leurs institutions, si
>critiqu?es,  ?taient n?cessaires aux pays les plus pauvres. Le pr?sident
>de la BM James  Wolfensohn a ainsi soulign? que la mondialisation honnie
>des manifestants ?tait  irr?versible. "Nous ne pouvons pas revenir en
>arri?re", a-t-il lanc? aux  repr?sentants des 182 pays membres des deux
>institutions, r?unis au si?ge de  l'ancien si?ge du parti communiste.
>


------------------------------------------
Georges Drouet
28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
tel: 32-486 751 668
fax: 32-2 538 10 82

gdrouet at brutele.be





From Borba100 at aol.com  Wed Sep 27 19:37:50 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 21:37:50 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Washington Votes to Finance Yugoslav Runoff Election
Message-ID: <1e.b4089c4.2703faee@aol.com>

URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/wash.htm


Washington Votes to Finance Yugoslav Runoff Election
by Professor Michel Chossudovsky (9-27-2000)

Washington is preparing for the run-off election in Yugoslavia. More money is 
scheduled to be wired to opposition groups to their bank accounts in Budapest 
with fresh and "clean" dollar bills to be transported in suitcases across the 
border. And this time it's big bucks: 500 million US dollars... 

Perfect timing. On the day after the Presidential election, the US House of 
Representatives approved a bill: 

"authorizing financial aid for opposition groups in Serbia. The bill 
authorizes $500 million to help finance democratic forces in Serbia and 
Montenegro, ... including $ 50 million to fund the activities of 
pro-democracy and dissident groups.". ('Los Angeles Times,' September 26, 
2000). 

In an ironic twist, while the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) receives 
big bucks from the bombers, it has committed itself in its electoral platform 
to adopting "new laws" on the financing of political parties. These laws are 
to be:

"in accordance with the generally accepted standards of democratic societies. 
Republican parliaments will be advised to adjust their legislation according 
to these principles." (Election manifesto of "Democratic Opposition of 
Serbia" , 5 September 2000). 

With opposition political parties on the enemy's payroll, the Western media 
has casually accused the Yugoslav authorities of electoral fraud. In any 
other country, receiving cash from a foreign government would lead to the 
immediate indictment of the political parties concerned. Their bank accounts 
would be frozen. This has not happened yet in Yugoslavia. Yet the media 
accuses the Yugoslav government of mistreating the "democratic" opposition. 
In the US, taking money from an unfriendly foreign power, especially a 
hostile one, to finance campaign expenses would quite understandably be 
considered "un-American". But in Belgrade opposition forces say that they are 
patriotic. For them it is not "un-Yugoslav" to accept 500 million dollars 
from the bombers of their country... 

Michel Chossudovsky 

Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N6N5 Voice box: 
1-613-562-5800, ext. 1415, Fax: 1-514-425-6224 E-Mail: 
chossudovsky at videotron.ca; (Altern. E-mail: chossudovsky at sprint.ca) 

Recent articles on Yugoslavia 

"NATO Willfully Triggered an Environmental Disaster 
"http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/willful.htm

"UN Appoints Alleged War Criminal in Kosovo" 
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/unandthe.htm 

"Opening Kosovo to Foreign Capital" 
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/opening.htm 

"NATO's Claim of Ethnic Cleansing Challenged" 
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/nato.htm 

NATO's Reign of Terror in Kosovo 
http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/yugo_archive/19990816mcpaper.htm
 



From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 04:29:22 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 11:29:22 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] economic consequences of the strong dollar and oil prices (was: 2nd reply to Julien)
In-Reply-To: <SAK.2000.09.27.seoshchm@computer>
Message-ID: <000a01c02936$f796c580$9e078cd4@mjones>

Julien wrote
>
>
>  whatever happens the prices in
> non-dollar
> economies would rise as the result of arbitrage when the
> dollar rises.

What about seignorage? Being banker/lender of last resort gives the US
the ability to devalue/revalue the dollar without paying the customary
price other national currencies do: so arbitrage is always on their
terms, no?


> 1 - I don't think it's relevant. Hoarded money doesn't have
> much influence on
> real economies

But it's nice for the US which can print money, buy things, and know
that some at least of this money will simply never be used, will sit
under beds and the net effect is that a portion of US imports is
cost-free (ie, is plunder or an imperial tax on the rest of the
world).

> If the oil price has not been the product of a market, so
> what? Many prices are
> not the product of an unrigged market. How can the nature
> of the market and
> not the price of the commodity be the cause of poverty,
> inequality, etc.?

I'm saying that oil prices are not just artifical, they are a special
case of monopoly and that, as Simon Bromley argues in 'American
Hegemony and world Oil ' (Polity Press, 1992), oil is the single key
commodity around control of which US hegemony is actually organised.

>
> >> Anyway, all these problems are the results of policies as
> >> much as if not more than energy availability. F.ex., how
> do you explain
> >> Algeria with your theories?

> Algeria is a mess but it has plentiful energy. Not so long
> ago this country
> exported no fossil fuel and was probably in a better state
> then and in some
> time it will probably export none again. If it's the low
> prices which caused it's
> problems one wonders how it will even survive when their
> oil will run out. But
> compare this country with neighboring countries afflicted
> by zero fossil fuel
> exports which do nevertheless survive. There seems to be an
> issue about
> how it uses the rent, isn't it? You see my point?

Yes, I do: resource-poor countries often do well (Japan) and
resource-rich countries (Congo, Russia) do badly.

> I mean: the interest rate on the debt of the Malaysian
> government is close to
> the one on the debt of most western governments. This is
> not indicative of
> financial weakness (in the contrary). As to Thailand and HK
> I don't know but
> they are certainly lots of countries in the region which
> don't enjoy the stability of
> Malaysia despite having the same "energy profile" a
> Malaysia. As to Japan,
> it's debt has a abnormaly low interest rate which is not
> exactly a sign of
> extreme financial stability but rather the consequence of a
> governmental fiat. In
> other words the Japanese debt market is rigged and not dependent on
> foreign capital. Krugman and Keynes would say it's the
> consequence of a
> "liquidity trap". Hope that answers your vague question.


Don't know enough about Malaysia to comment.


mark




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 04:29:27 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 11:29:27 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] physical capital and energy price hikes (was: response to Julien)
In-Reply-To: <SAK.2000.09.27.gplosrli@computer>
Message-ID: <000b01c02936$fabae8e0$9e078cd4@mjones>

Julien wrote:
> 
 
> >Incidentally, what is the ratio of assets/GNP today? I
> >heard it's been going down in the US, as aconsequence of the New
> >Economy? What is it in Japan, any idea?
> 
> I repeat: What can this statistic even mean? I understand 
> devalorisation but I 
> don't understand how it will be different is the ratio of 
> assets/GNP is high or 
> low. And I don't even know how he/you price the assets in 
> fact. Depending on 
> how you price them, the "New Economy" could have increased 
> or decreased 
> the ratio. And if the "New Economy" affected the ratio, so what?

Have to factor in capital-saving effects of new technology.

mark 



From zapata at sezampro.yu  Thu Sep 28 05:11:17 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 13:11:17 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] -->Launch of Southeast Europe Equity Fund
Message-ID: <007001c0293d$192d0aa0$3274fac3@k382>


                           Samuel R. Berger, George Mu?oz, and George Soros
                           Launch of Southeast Europe Equity Fund
                           Press Release, Overseas Private Investment
Corporation
                           Washington, DC, July 26, 2000



                Samuel R. Berger, Assistant to the President for National
Security Affairs,
                George Mu?oz, President and CEO of the Overseas Private
Investment
                Corporation (OPIC), and George Soros, organizer of Soros
Private Funds
                Management (SPFM), today launched the Southeast Europe
Equity Fund, a
                $150 million fund to provide new business development,
expansion,
                restructuring, and privatization in the region.

                At a ceremony in the Old Executive Office Building at the
White House
                marking the one-year anniversary of the Stability Pact for
Southeast Europe,
                Mu?oz and Soros signed an agreement on basic terms under
which SPFM is
                prepared to manage, and OPIC is prepared to provide
financing for, the
                fund.

                "A year ago, after NATO won the war in Kosovo, more than 40
leaders
                came together in Sarajevo determined to win the peace,"
Berger said. "With
                the Stability Pact Summit, we launched a new partnership
between
                Southeast Europe and the international community to reverse
the habits of
                history, de-Balkanize the Balkans and work toward a peaceful
and stable
                region. We made clear that the nations of Southeast Europe
must undertake
                reforms to attract investment, and that they must work
together. Our efforts
                are working."

                Berger noted that economic growth is accelerating throughout
the region and
                that the OPIC fund is one of a number of steps the United
States has taken
                over the past year to promote trade, investment, and
economic growth in
                Southeast Europe, as promised by President Clinton at the
Stability Pact
                Summit Pact last July. Berger said the United States will
continue to
                provide strong support, particularly for initiatives to
strengthen democracy
                and create sustainable economic growth.

                Mu?oz said, "I am pleased that we are taking another
significant step in
                demonstrating that Southeast Europe is an important region
on which we
                should focus our efforts, to enable it to rebuild and enter
the global
                marketplace as a full partner. The Southeast Europe Equity
Fund is an ideal
                vehicle to connect American institutional capital with
European
                entrepreneurs eager to help Americans tap their growing
markets. OPIC is
                pleased that Soros Private Funds Management has chosen to
send a strong,
                positive signal that Southeast Europe is open for business."

                Soros said, "After all the horror and destruction wrought by
the Milosevic
                regime, the United States and the European Union are deeply
committed to
                ensuring a better future for the region. This creates
investment opportunities
                and private investment in turn can make an important
contribution to the
                region. OPIC is rendering a real service by providing
financing for this fund
                and I am happy to put my money where they are putting
theirs."

                Congressman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-NY), Chairman of the House
                International Relations Committee, said, "I am very pleased
that this new
                fund of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation will be
able to play a
                key role in mobilizing private sector support for the future
development of
                Southeast Europe. The Fund's creation is as much a
recognition of the
                importance of this region's vibrant new markets for U.S.
products as it is a
                reflection of our long-term support to its emerging market
economies. With
                the financial commitments of the Fund's management team
already in place,
                it should quickly be able to raise the capital needed to
promote those
                projects demonstrating the best corporate governance
practices."

                The fund will serve Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Croatia,
                the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Romania,
Slovenia,
                Montenegro, and Turkey -- an emerging consumer market of 112
million
                people. Its primary purpose will be to provide capital for
new business
                development, expansion, restructuring, and privatization.

                Soros Private Funds Management was selected as fund manager
by the
                OPIC Board of Directors in June, concluding a transparent,
seven-month
                selection process by OPIC management. A Soros affiliate will
commit $50
                million in private equity, while OPIC will commit to provide
a $100
                million loan guaranty. Interests in the fund will not be
offered to the public.

                OPIC currently provides more than $65 million in financing
and insurance
                for projects in Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. Other
OPIC-supported funds
                have invested more than $30 million in the region.

                "OPIC has taken a leadership role in responding to the
Clinton
                Administration's Southeast Europe initiative to stabilize
and integrate the
                countries of southeast Europe into the transatlantic
community," Mu?*oz
                said. "OPIC opened a southeast Europe regional office in
Zagreb last
                February, to serve as a focal point for establishing potenti
al joint venture
                partnerships between U.S. and regional businesses. We will
continue to
                support and encourage U.S. investment in the region."

_______________________________________________
Ex-yu-a-lista mailing list
Ex-yu-a-lista at zamir.net
http://inje.iskon.hr/mailman/listinfo/ex-yu-a-lista






From aftalion at mail.retina.ar  Thu Sep 28 06:13:10 2000
From: aftalion at mail.retina.ar (MARCELO AFTALION)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 09:13:10 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague
Message-ID: <006e01c02948$65160560$2bca0ac8@marcelo>

Cher George,
Peux-je vous recommender de lire "The Functions of Social Conflict", par
Lewis Coser?
Crois-tu que les seigneurs du BM/FMI ne sont pas t?rrifi?s apr?s Prague? ?a
commence a changer.
Marcelo Aftalion
-----Mensaje original-----
De: Georges Drouet <gdrouet at brutele.be>
Para: Vincent Lejeune <vincent.lejeune at swing.be>; an.kestens at angelfire.com
<an.kestens at angelfire.com>; nila_achmad at yahoo.fr <nila_achmad at yahoo.fr>;
icorten at arcadis.be <icorten at arcadis.be>; ronnie at nirvanet.net
<ronnie at nirvanet.net>; notabene at skynet.be <notabene at skynet.be>;
va-nu-pieds.va at lemel.fr <va-nu-pieds.va at lemel.fr>; talk at attac.org
<talk at attac.org>
CC: citerre at wanadoo.fr <citerre at wanadoo.fr>; sjeu159725 at aol.com
<sjeu159725 at aol.com>; marielauredrouet at yahoo.com
<marielauredrouet at yahoo.com>; denis at switchon.com <denis at switchon.com>;
elisabeth.drevet at euronet.be <elisabeth.drevet at euronet.be>;
eric.pinet at libertysurf.fr <eric.pinet at libertysurf.fr>; isa.p at tpp.be
<isa.p at tpp.be>; studio.etc at chello.be <studio.etc at chello.be>;
ksa at stratigraphics.net <ksa at stratigraphics.net>; nas at nirvanet.net
<nas at nirvanet.net>; m.m at skynet.be <m.m at skynet.be>; swazie at rocketmail.com
<swazie at rocketmail.com>; chavesej at hotmail.com <chavesej at hotmail.com>;
info at simpol.org <info at simpol.org>; ajh at wanadoo.fr <ajh at wanadoo.fr>;
cpagnoulle at ulg.ac.be <cpagnoulle at ulg.ac.be>;
benedetti_albertina at euroclear.com <benedetti_albertina at euroclear.com>;
pfranck at be.packardbell.org <pfranck at be.packardbell.org>;
francois.hubert at euronet.be <francois.hubert at euronet.be>;
gilles.reboux at wanadoo.fr <gilles.reboux at wanadoo.fr>;
greta.alegre at freebel.net <greta.alegre at freebel.net>; effares at aol.com
<effares at aol.com>; mriv at rtbf.be <mriv at rtbf.be>; art-consult at linkline.be
<art-consult at linkline.be>; wsn-owner at csf.colorado.edu
<wsn-owner at csf.colorado.edu>; crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
<crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>; rezo.fr at liste.netacces.com
<rezo.fr at liste.netacces.com>; stop-imf at venice.essential.org
<stop-imf at venice.essential.org>; Transnational at egroups.fr
<Transnational at egroups.fr>; izaplana at green-global.net
<izaplana at green-global.net>; gdrouet at brutele.be <gdrouet at brutele.be>
Fecha: Jueves, 28 de Septiembre de 2000 03:56 a.m.
Asunto: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague


>Cher Vincent, pas de reaction a ces incidents de Prague car, soyons francs,
>il y a deux types de comportement face a ce genre de situation: ceux qui
>vont la-bas et ceux qui restent chez eux.
>
>Parmis ceux qui vont sur place, un pourcentage, qui se reduira chaque fois
>davantage, est constitue de veritables defenseur de l'ethique humaine du
>developpement.
>
>Mais la machine des puissant est tout sauf stupide et travaille avec les
>meilleurs publicitaires et faiseurs d'opinion du monde... Deux strategies
>sont donc en cours, et particulierement notable depuis les manifs de
>Londres:
>- d'abord un terme a ete accole a ces manifestations anti-FMI/WB/OMC, celui
>d'anti-globalisation. Or ce terme generique englobe tout a fait autre chose
>que ce que nous pretendons. Il me semble en effet que nous ne sommes pas
>contre les echanges culturels internationaux, ni contre la renconbtre des
>peuples, encore moins contre un developpement durable equitablement reparti
>entre toutes les nations du monde... Pourtant tout cela est englobe dans le
>terme d'anti-globalisation. Par contre, il a ete facile de berner nos
>manifestants hardis en leur collant une etiquette qu'ils se sont laisser
>appliquee, car, c'est vrai, nous sommes contre une globalisation inhumaine,
>vicieuse et neo-coloniale comme arme de conquete du libre capitalisme
>sauvage. Point. Si je me fais bien comprendre, on nous colle une etiquette
>qui englobe ce contre quoi nous sommes, mais qui englobe aussi des pensees
>et des strategies qui n'ont rien a voir avec ce monde futur que nous
>desirons pour nos enfants, un monde de paix et d'harmonie dans un cadre
>respectueux de l'humanite et de la nature. Meme si ces termes sont
>forcement vagues, le travail est encore a faire, ils ne se dirigent en
>aucun cas vers cet espece d'isolationisme nationaliste dans lequel nous
>sommes maintenant, apres trois rounds de bataille, conceptuellement
>enfermes...
>Grace a cette strategie, aimablement reprise par les journaux au service du
>grand pouvoir de l'ombre et de la pensee unique, nous voila ridiculises
>alors que nous n'avons meme pas encore dit ce que nous voulions faire,
>d'une part parceque l'on nous a colle une etiquette de reactionnaires face
>a l'evolution planetaire (il suffit d'ecouter le discours de Wolfensohn
>pour en etre convaincus et qui utilise la l'outil qu'on lui a confectionne
>a souhait) et d'autre part parceque personne ne s'est donne la peine, de
>notre cote, d'indiquer clairement et concretement ce que nous voulions...
>Nous voila en train d'aboyer aux basques des maitres du monde et quand les
>habitants de la planete se demandent ce que nous avons a proposer,... alors
>la nous sommes muets!
>Car a force d'etre contre on en oublie ce pour quoi on est!
>Donc contre les grandes institutions, contre le capitalisme sauvage, contre
>l'exageration des mouvements speculatifs, contre l'exploitation des
>enfants, contre le tourisme sexuel, contre le blanchiment d'argent, contre
>les centrales et les bombes nucleaires, contre le changement climatique et
>contre encore mille choses... Alors qu'en face ils sont pour le libre
>marche, pour la croissance, pour la liberte d'investissement, pour la
>consommation, pour ainsi des millions de petites choses qui remplissent les
>levres des televisions, les verbes des journaux, les gresillemant des
>radios et les filtres des hackers...
>On a l'air de reacs alors que c'est le systeme en place qui nous bouffe la
>vie, le temps, l'espoir , la beaute de la surprise... Ces rapaces englues
>dans leurs piege mortel se glorifient et se pavanent d'etre positivistes.
>Ils ont vite fait de negativiser notre mouvement.
>
>Deuxieme point, il suffit de quelques dizaines d'amis muscles, bien
>entraines et equipes, pour foutre un bordel monstre dans ce genre de
>manifestation qui ressemblent plus a des batailles urbaines ou, plus
>ringard encore, a des fins de match de coupe de football ou les hooligans
>s'en donnent a coeur joie... Quelque pros grassement payes auquels on
>autorise un dechainement de leurs plus basses pulsions reduisent en miettes
>toute tentative de controle de ce genre de rencontre.
>
>Et le tableau est maintenant pret:
>les anti-globalisateurs viennent casser des villes tranquilles, dans des
>pays democratiques, car ils ne sont finalement que des reactionnaires qui
>refusent de voir le monde avancer... et en plus c'est des betes de violence
>qui blessent, cassent et detruisent tout ce qui se presente devant eux...
>On a l'air con ou pas?
>
>Et puis il y a ceux qui restent. Soient parcequ'ils doivent travailler,
>soit parceque deja ecrases par la machine au fond de leur etre solitaire
>dans la foule anonyme, ils pleurent des amertumes seches...
>
>Mais il y en a encore d'autres, qui considerent que les projets doivent se
>construire en avancant, sans detruire et en incluant tous les participants,
>qui voient plus loin qu'un champs de bataille qui ne laissera meme pas de
>souvenirs autre qu'une retrouvaille avec l'esprit soixante-huitard et le
>babacoolisme qui nous a tranquilement amene a la situation d'aujourd'hui.
>Je ne dis pas qu'il s'agisse de regretter ce qui a ete fait, dans le passe,
>ni meme a Prague, mais qu'il serait temps d'arreter de jouer au cowboy, ou
>plutot aux gendarmes et aux voleurs car le role que la presse controlee
>nous a etiquete c'est celui des voleurs, les gendarmes travaillant pour
>ceux d'en face, d'en haut... pour etre precis.
>
>Alors meme si j'apprecie Attac et son concept de fond, je subodore
>l'urgence d'une totale redefinition de notre action. Aller gaspiller son
>temps, son argent, ses poumons et peut-etre perdre un oeil, pour montrer
>que nous sommes decides a changer le monde en bousillant des rues, des
>batiment et les cars des CRS locaux ne me semble pas la meilleure
>alternative, et je l'ai deja dit dans cette liste sans que cela souleve le
>moindre commentaire... On s'y fait!
>
>Oui, mais le projet d'Attac, dans la capitale meme du pays ou il est ne,
>avec au pouvoir un parti qui pourrait, ou du moins devrait lui etre
>favorable, vient de se prendre une grande claque (cf mon message Taxe Tobin
>pas jouable) pendant qu'en meme temps, les manifestants n'ont plus comme
>echo que celui de violences, leurs message, si bien entendu dans les
>plaines du grand chef Sioux Seattle, a perdu sa magie, il est devenu banal,
>pire, inaudible derriere le bruit des casseurs et des grenades
>lacrymogenes...
>
>C'est un esprit de cooperation, avec une saine gestion des quelques sous
>que nous accumulons, une strategie totalement dirigee vers une
>collaboration constructive plutot qu'une debauche destructive qu'il nous
>faut.
>
>Car, sombre harpie, la fin d'une revolution est dans l'oeuf meme qui lui a
>donne le jour. La claque de Fabius fera jurisprudence dans le jugement qui
>est porte sur la campagne de la Taxe Tobin et nos enfantillages de cour de
>recreation ne feront que ternir notre image de femmes et d'hommes
>responsables d'un avenir, compromis certes, mais qui est celui de nos
>enfants, de nos amis et amies et de nous-meme, au moins pour un temps
>encore...
>
>Cooperation, pas facile hein?
>
>Pourtant c'est ecrit sur le site... Et en francais en plus depuis quelques
>jours (meme si il y a encore deux ou trois points a regler techniquement).
>
>Peut-etre que maintenant il y aura de l'echo???  He... Ho!!  Hehehehe Ho...
>
>http:www//simpol.org
>
>c'est la que vous trouverez l'idee simple et efficace, alors pourquoi aller
>faire complique?
>
>A+
>
>
>>    Je suis tr?s ?tonn? de ne&nbsp;trouver sur ce forum aucune r?action
>>sur le  comportement violent des manifestants ? Prague. Pourquoi ce
>>silence ? Vincent <mailto:vincent.lejeune at swing.be>
>>vincent.lejeune at swing.be    PS : ci-dessous, un communiqu? de l'AFP  :
>>ATS / AFP
>>
>>PRAGUE : SOMMET ANNUEL DU FMI ET DE LA BANQUE MONDIALE
>>
>>Les manifs anti-mondialisation d?g?n?rent en combats de rue
>>
>>Des milliers de manifestants venus protester contre "la terreur
>>?conomique"  ont transform? la capitale tch?que en champ de bataille.
>>Douze policiers ont d?  ?tre hospitalis?s.
>>
>>La manifestation anti-mondialisation mardi ? Prague s'est sold?e par un
>>violent face-?-face avec la police tch?que. Pr?s d'une centaine de
>>bless?s, dont  une cinquantaine de policiers, ont ?t? d?nombr?s pour
>>l'ouverture officielle de  la r?union du FMI et de la Banque mondiale.
>>
>>Selon l'agence tch?que CTK, 54 policiers ont ?t? bless?s - dont 12
>>hospitalis?s - ainsi que des dizaines de manifestants. Les journalistes
>>pr?sents  estimaient pour leur part que les victimes des heurts pourraient
>>?tre plus  nombreuses. La police a proc?d? ? nombre d'arrestations
>>muscl?es, a constat?  l'ATS.
>>
>>Les chiffres sur le nombre de manifestants restaient approximatifs en fin
>>de  soir?e: ils ?taient 11 000 selon la police mais l'INPEG (Initiative
>>contre la  Mondialisation Economique) avan?ait de son c?t? le chiffre de
>>20.000  manifestants. La police tch?que s'est d'ailleurs montr?e surprise
>>par la  violence des contacts.
>>
>>Renforts appel?s
>>
>>Les 11 000 policiers mobilis?s ont fait appel dans la journ?e ? des
>>renforts  venus de Boh?me centrale, occidentale et de l'est, en raison de
>>la violence des  heurts. Un porte-parole de la police a d?clar? que "les
>>forces de l'ordre  avaient ?t? surprises par l'agressivit? des
>>protestataires". Les plus agressifs  ont ?t? interpell?s, mais le
>>porte-parole n'a pu indiquer leur nombre. Les  manifestants,
>>essentiellement europ?ens - surtout italiens, espagnols, grecs,  belges,
>>fran?ais et scandinaves, mais aussi am?ricains - ont converg? vers la
>>capitale aux premi?res heures de la matin?e.
>>
>>Bravant les moyens impressionnants - blind?s, canons ? eau, h?licopt?res,
>>grenades lacrymog?nes - dont ?taient ?quip?s les unit?s anti-?meute,
>>plusieurs  milliers de militants contre la mondialisation sont parvenus ?
>>quelques  centaines de m?tres du Palais des congr?s, suppos? inaccessible.
>>
>>Ces derniers se sont violemment oppos?s aux barrages policiers, utilisant
>>pav?s, b?tons et divers projectiles contre les policiers qui prot?geaient
>>le  p?rim?tre de s?curit? ? coups de grenades lacrymog?nes et jets de
>>canons ? eau.  Une dizaine de barricades, certaines en feu, avaient ?t?
>>dress?es dans les rues  avoisinantes.
>>
>>Des centaines de militants ont m?me acc?d? aux portes du Centre des
>>congr?s  transform? en forteresse sous le regard int?ress? des d?l?gu?s du
>>Fonds  mon?taire international (FMI) et de la Banque Mondiale (BM) r?unis
>>sur les  terrasses du palais. La police ? d? inviter ces derniers ? plus
>>de discr?tion  afin d'?viter de provoquer les protestataires.
>>
>>Mouvement irr?versible
>>
>>Les d?l?gu?s du FMI-BM, confin?s dans le centre - apr?s la fin des travaux
>>-  par mesure de s?curit?, ont ?t? ?vacu?s par une rame de m?tro sp?ciale
>>de la  station situ?e sous le Palais, sous forte protection polici?re. La
>>d?l?gation  suisse, conduite par Kaspar Villiger avec Hans Meyer et
>>Jean-Pierre Roth de la  BNS, a aussi pu quitter les lieux.
>>
>>Pris ? partie dans la rue, les responsables du FMI et de la BM ont fait
>>valoir devant l'assembl?e annuelle combien leurs institutions, si
>>critiqu?es,  ?taient n?cessaires aux pays les plus pauvres. Le pr?sident
>>de la BM James  Wolfensohn a ainsi soulign? que la mondialisation honnie
>>des manifestants ?tait  irr?versible. "Nous ne pouvons pas revenir en
>>arri?re", a-t-il lanc? aux  repr?sentants des 182 pays membres des deux
>>institutions, r?unis au si?ge de  l'ancien si?ge du parti communiste.
>>
>
>
>------------------------------------------
>Georges Drouet
>28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
>tel: 32-486 751 668
>fax: 32-2 538 10 82
>
>gdrouet at brutele.be
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 06:42:41 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 13:42:41 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] hi-tech employment *falling*?
Message-ID: <000c01c02949$97c38ae0$9e078cd4@mjones>

from Keith Smith: What is the ?knowledge economy??

>>>>>>>
Before moving to a discussion of knowledge in industry, it is
necessary to make a
diversion via the concept of ?high-technology?. In much policy
analysis it is common
to use the terms 'high-technology' or 'knowledge intensive industries'
in a somewhat
loose way, as though in fact they are both meaningful and
interchangeable terms. But
we ought to remember that the term ?high technology? is a rather
recent invention,
and that its meaning is far from clear.
The standard approach in this area rests on a classification developed
by the OECD
in the mid-1980s.12 The OECD distinguished between industries in terms
of R&D
intensities, with those (such as ICT or pharmaceuticals) spending more
than 4% of
turnover being classified as high-technology, those spending between
1% and 4% of
turnover (such as vehicles or chemicals) being classified as
medium-tech, and those
spending less than 1% (such as textiles or food) as 'low tech'. In
fact the OECD
discussion of this classification was rather careful, and offered many
qualifications.
Chief among these is the point that direct R&D is but one indicator of
knowledge
content, and that technology intensity is not mapped solely by R&D.
Unfortunately
the qualifications were forgotten in practice, and this classification
has taken on a life
of its own; it is widely used, both in policy circles and in the
press, as a basis for
talking about knowledge-intensive as opposed to traditional or
non-knowledge-intensive
industries.
This is a serious problem, since the OECD classification as it is used
rests on only
one indicator, namely intramural R&D. This is open to two important
objections.
First, it is by no means the only measure of knowledge-creating
activities. Second, it
ignores the fact that the knowledge that is relevant to an industry
may be distributed
across many sectors or agents: thus a low-R&D industry may well be an
major user
of knowledge generated elsewhere. This issue will be discussed in a
more empirical
manner below.

Even so it is not clear that this classification helps us, even in a
limited analysis of
trends. One great problem is that in fact the high-tech sector thus
defined is small,
and there are therefore some difficulties in arguing that it is
driving the growth
process. In the OECD, for example, the USA has the largest share of
high-tech in
manufacturing, but this is only 15.8% of manufacturing output, which
in turn is only
18.5% of GDP. So the high-tech sector is less than 3% of GDP. It is
hard to see how
either the direct or indirect impacts of such a small component of
output could have a
significant effect on overall economic growth. Most discussions of the
role of high-tech
are conducted in terms of share analyses, or even share-of-share
analyses. This
can easily confuse matters. In virtually all of the OECD economies the
share of high-tech
in total manufacturing has risen in the longer term, and this is
widely used as an
argument for the claim that such industries are central to growth.
However this is
complicated by the fact that that the share of manufacturing in total
output has been
in long-term decline. So between 1980 and 1995, the high-tech share of
US
manufacturing increased from 10.5% to 15.8%, while the share of
manufacturing in
GNP decreased from 21.6% to 18.5%; what this actually implies is that
the share of
high-tech manufacturing in total GNP rose over fifteen years by well
under one
percentage point.13 It is not uncommon to see quite sweeping claims
made for the
high-tech sector which are not supported by available evidence. For
example,
OECD?s ?Knowledge based Economy? claims that ?Output and employment
are
expanding fastest in high-technology industries, such as computers,
electronics and
aerospace?.14 But the OECD?s own ?Scoreboard of Indicators? actually
shows long-term
negative growth rates of employment in high-tech manufacturing in
eleven of
fifteen OECD countries for which data are presented (including the
USA, where
high-tech employment declined at a faster rate than manufacturing
employment
generally).
Such problems have not led to any questioning of the
high-tech/low-tech distinction.
On the contrary, the high-medium-low-tech approach has recently been
extended, to
divide the medium-tech category into medium-high and medium-low
technology
industries. Such classificatory manoeuvres cannot, however, alter the
fundamental
limitations of the category, and ought to cause us to question the
identification of
knowledge intensive and high-tech industries.

notes:
12
See OECD, OECD Science and Technology Indicators, No 2: R&D,
Innovation and
Competitiveness, (OECD:Paris), pp. 58-61.
13
All of the data here is drawn from OECD, Science, Technology and
Industry,
Scoreboard of Indicators, 1997.<<<<<<

----------
Keith Smith: What is the ?knowledge economy?? Knowledge-intensive
industries
and distributed knowledge bases.
Abstract
The economics of innovation has always focused on learning, just as
public policies
for science, technology and innovation have always been aimed
primarily at creating
and diffusing knowledge. In recent years such policies have attracted
increased
attention as a result of claims that knowledge-intensive industries
are now at the core
of growth, and that we are now entering a new type of knowledge-driven
economy or
even a completely new form of ?knowledge society?. But what do we mean
by
?knowledge?, and what does it mean to speak of a ?knowledge-intensive?
industry or a
?knowledge-based? economy? The objectives of this paper are firstly to
examine what
various authors mean by the concept of a knowledge economy or learning
economy.
Four broad approaches are outlined and assessed. They are:
? the belief that knowledge is quantitatively and in some sense
qualitatively more
important as an input to production.
? the idea that knowledge is in some way more important as a product
than it has
been hitherto - that we are seeing the rise of new forms of activity
based on the
trading of knowledge products.
? the view that codified knowledge (as opposed to tacit,
person-incorporated skills)
is in some ways more significant as a component of
economically-relevant
knowledge bases.
? the idea that the ICT revolution implies a fundamentally new role
for knowledge
in economic processes.
The paper then uses CIS data to describe some empirical dimensions of
knowledge
creation in Europe, and then turns to concepts and a methodology for
mapping the
knowledge base of an economic activity, with a view to a more nuanced
understanding of the meaning of 'knowledge intensity' in production.
The paper
argues that it is important to turn from direct indicators of
knowledge intensity in
production, to an approach based on what the paper terms ?distributed
knowledge
bases? which have a more systemic and institutionally diffuse
location. Knowledge
for many key activities is distributed among agents, institutions and
knowledge
fields, and the problem is to understand the embodied and disembodied
knowledge
flows between them. Empirical examples of such knowledge bases are
described, in
the offshore oil and gas sector and the food processing industries.
The paper
concludes by discussing how such ?distributed knowledge bases? might
affect our
conceptions of the knowledge economy (and the roles of ICTs within
it), and links
this to current policy challenges.

[archived at:
http://www.business.auc.dk/druid/summer2000/Welcome.html ]




From zapata at sezampro.yu  Thu Sep 28 07:07:55 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 15:07:55 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] News from Belgrade
Message-ID: <001901c0294f$4e4d0700$cfbd6ac2@k382>

Here are some news from both sides in the electoral conflict. I was observing yesterday's meeting of the neoliberal opposition formation with my anarchist friend from Germany, and it was well visited; it is my impression that it  couple of hundred thousand people were there; Bregovic ( "Underground" movie if someone had watched it) was playing on a concert which was a part of the opposition celebration.

 My impression, based on facts presented by both sides, and observations made by our anarchist network observers, is that neoliberal opposition really won the elections ( presidential).  Rumors about Sainovic and Mira Markovic nervous breakdown are not serious and should be considered as such- this is a part of opposition propaganda. Milosevic and his gang are, on the other hand, trying to do the impossible: to manipulate with 600 000 votes; My guess is that M. has only one choice: to introduce open dictatorship. People here, from opposition and people who are for SPS, are talking about some barging and Milosevic asylum in Hong Kong where his son Marko already is. I don't know, of course, is this speculation true. Frankly, I don't believe it. From this point, general strike and mass civil disobedience seem to be more than probable.

In Struggle,

                   Andrej

PS Wonderful news from Prague: great successes of anti capitalist demonstrations. Recommended source: 
 http://praha.indymedia.org/ 

Holy Synod appeals to Kostunica 
  Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church on Thursday called "on Dr Vojislav Kostunica, the elected Yugoslav president, and all his electees, to take over the management of the state, its parliament and municipalities, in a peaceful and dignified manner, just as the presidential, parliamentary and local September 24 elections ended in a peaceful and dignified manner". The message was signed by the President of the Holy Synod Patriarch Pavle, Fonet reported. 





Sainovic wants to deal on second round: Vijesti ( Djukanovic papers) 
Podgorica daily Vijesti on Thursday wrote that the Socialist senior official Nikola Sainovic on Wednesday once again wanted to strike a deal with the opposition representatives on the second round of presidential elections, but that such an offer was categorically refused. "Why don't you agree? You will win the second round as well, and in the meantime, we will calm down the people from the Yugoslav Left," Sainovic said, Vijesti reported, quoting sources from the Democratic Opposition of Serbia headquarters. The paper claims that Sainovic had tried to "acquire a time out for Milosevic" twice already. 

No second round: Batic ( demochristian party, right winger from DOS) 
"There is no second round," one of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia leaders Vladan Batic said in a reaction to the Federal Election Commission's decision. "To the well-intentioned warnings from the DOS, the regime is responding with violence that has no legal foundation," Batic told B2-92 and added, "This is a forgery of the citizens' election will. We cannot accept a second round, because despite the fact that the elections were unfair and undemocratic, we have participated in such elections and have won them. We cannot bargain with these things, we are not on a cattle market but in a history. People from that Commission could certainly find themselves accused very soon, because they could be initiators of grave problems, conflicts, violence, repression and terror. Therefore, there is no second round, there are only calls on citizens to defend their political will. We will have to call on citizens to demand recognition of their will and I don't see a force that can oppose that," Batic said. 



Election Commission confirms second round 
The Federal Election Commission has confirmed the final results of elections for the president of Yugoslavia and ruled that a second round of voting will be held. According to the final results from 10,673 polling stations, of a total of 7,249,831 registered voters, 5,053, 428, or 69.7 per cent, cast votes. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, received 2,474,392 votes or 48.96 per cent; Slobodan Milosevic 1,951,761 or 38.62 per cent, Serbian Radical Party candidate Tomislav Nikolic received 292,759 or 5.79 per cent of votes, the Serbian Renewal Movement's Vojislav Mihailovic 146,585 or 2.90 per cent and the remaining candidate, Miodrag Vidojkovic, 46,421 or 0.92 per cent. The Commission announced that no objections had been lodged with regard to the presidential election and that a second round would be held on October 8. 

The meeting of the Commission at which the final results of the presidential elections were announced was held at about midnight last night, Radio B2-92 learnt from the Democratic Opposition of Serbia's representative on the Commission, Sinisa Nikolic. Nikolic told B2-92 that a meeting had originally been scheduled for 8.00 p.m. but Commission members were told that the chairman's wife had been taken ill. The chairman eventually appeared at the meeting at about 11.30 p.m., shortly after the opposition rally on Republic Square ended, carrying a single sheet of A4 paper on which were data from the Federal Bureau of Statistics. The paper did not carry the signature of the Institute's director. The Bureau noted that the final results showed 600,000 less voters than the figure announced by the Commission prior to the elections. Nikolic said that the Bureau also noted that about three hundred local election commissions had not presented documentation and so the number of voters had been reduced accordingly. 

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From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Thu Sep 28 07:33:17 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 09:33:17 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Marxist valuation
Message-ID: <s9d3107f.033@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

This article in part treats certain important commodiities in simple commodity relation to each other , a la Chapter 1 of _Capital_ as a way of estimating current Values.

Mark points out to me that the above is unclear to anyone who has not been on a thread I was on on another list recently ( and maybe even to those who were on the thread). 

It was an impressionistic thought actually. The article below reminded me of Marx's analysis of bartering, or direct exchange of commodities as a way of determining value in Chapter One of Capital. I thought it was a clever way to show a Marxist approach to value in contrast with the methods of bourgeois economists, with all the confusion about inflation etc.

C. Brown

____________




[from Policy Pete, http://qv3.com/PolicyPete/policypete.htm ]

It is common these days to run into the argument that the current oil
and gas price level is not that high because a time series that
discounts from nominal to real prices will show that prices in the
late 70s were much higher.  But these arguments, while literally
correct depending on which deflator is used, can be misleading because
so many of the relative indicators of the price level have changed so
much.  In 1980 the price of gold was more than three times the cu




From th.adam at wanadoo.fr  Thu Sep 28 07:26:30 2000
From: th.adam at wanadoo.fr (adam)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 15:26:30 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Re: Violences a Prague
References: <v03007800b5f822a56aeb@[212.68.216.17]>
Message-ID: <39D34705.A45FEC70@wanadoo.fr>

Sur les violences de Pragues.

J'ai quitt? Pragues dans la nuit de mardi ? mercredi au milieu du bordel
g?n?ral, des jets de pierre, du bruit sourd des h?lico et des
arrestations dans une ambiance d?l?t?re d'?meute. 

Je voudrais apporter deux pr?cision par rapport ? la couverture
m?diatique. 
Tout d'abord, d'apr?s ce que j'ai vu de la journ?e du 26, sur 2 des
cort?ges sur 3 (60? 80 % des manifestants) il n'y a eut aucun
affrontements violents. Les m?dias se sont ax?s sur les sp?ctaculaires
et tr?s violentes confrontations du cort?ge bleu qui devait bloquer
l'acc?s ouest du palais des congres.

Ensuite, les actions de rues de la nuit n'avaient pas n'importe qu'elles
cibles (saccage des 4 Mcdo, de banques, blocages de vois rapides et de
rues), certaines ?taient pr?par?es de longue date et avaient pour but de
semer la confusion totale dans Prague afin d'emp?cher que le sommet
puisse correctement se tenir.

Cela dit cet objectif ? totalement echou?. Le sommet s'est tenu le
mercredi sans  aucun emp?chement alors qu'aucune manifestation n'a pu se
tenir et que tout rassemblement ?tait interdit et se soldait par des
arrestations massives. Quant ? la couverture m?diatique, elle ? bon ton
de d?nigr? un mouvement en l'associant ? une forme stupide et
irreponsable de lutte bas?e sur la violence et la destruction
syst?matique et de l'opposer ? mi mot ? l'ouverture d?mocratique des
institutions financi?res (aupr?s de la soci?t? civile ? travers le
dialogue avec certaines ONG) et ? leur pr?tendu changement de politique.

Je regrette personnelement le recours ? la violence pour 4 raisons:
	Elle ne correpondait pas ? la plate-forme non violente de l'INPEG et
montre l'absence de consensus sur la forme d'action, l'impossibilt? de
pouvoir d?cider collectivement si ce recours doit ?tre employ? ou non.
	La violence ?loigne beaucoup trop de monde ? l'heure ou les
rassemblements contre la mondialisation ?conomique doivent ?tre massifs
pour peser sur l'?volution structurelle des institutions
internationales.
	Elle est suceptible de manipulation, tant en interne par des
provocations de personnes infiltr?es (comme on l'a vu en france), qu'au
niveau de la couverture m?diatique qui en est faite.
	Enfin elle gaspille beaucoup trop d'?nergie et de temps pour finalement
peu de chose hormis la satisfaction assez l?g?re d'avoir "sem? la zone"

Pour le moment l'urgence est de se pr?occupper des centaines de
personnes arr?tes (500 mercredi d'apr?s les personnes sur place et sans
doute encore plus aujourd'hui) et qui subissent de multiples violences
dans les lieux ou elles sont incarc?r?es et qui risquent jusqu'? 6 mois
d'emprisonnement.
Et pariculi?rement 5 fran?ais (Jean-Philippe Joseph, Xavier
Nouhlianne,C?dric Bertaud, Pascal Luneau, Abel Durand) emprisonn?s pour
avoir particip? ? un "sit in" pacifique (ce que je peux assurer, vu que
j'?tais aveceux toute la journ?e qu'il ne se sont livr? ? aucune action
violente).

Un rassemblement esr pr?vu aujourd'hui ? partir de 17 h devant
l'ambassade de la rep. tch?que ? Paris, 15 avenue charles Floquet (Paris
7) M? La motte Picquet 


Pour le moyen terme, en pr?vision du prochain sommet qui devrait se
tenir ? Milan, il est n?cessaire de mettre tout le monde d'accord 
sur le mode de r?sistance le plus efficace. Celui retenu ? Seattle a eut
un impact consid?rable parcequ'il associait d?termination, efficacit? et
non violence.



From aftalion at mail.retina.ar  Thu Sep 28 09:52:04 2000
From: aftalion at mail.retina.ar (MARCELO AFTALION)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 12:52:04 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague
Message-ID: <001801c02964$0e3fbb20$2dca0ac8@marcelo>

Cher George,
Peux-je vous recommender de lire "The Functions of Social Conflict", par
Lewis Coser?
Crois-tu que les seigneurs du BM/FMI ne sont pas t?rrifi?s apr?s Prague? ?a
commence a changer.
Marcelo Aftalion
-----Mensaje original-----
De: Georges Drouet <gdrouet at brutele.be>
Para: Vincent Lejeune <vincent.lejeune at swing.be>; an.kestens at angelfire.com
<an.kestens at angelfire.com>; nila_achmad at yahoo.fr <nila_achmad at yahoo.fr>;
icorten at arcadis.be <icorten at arcadis.be>; ronnie at nirvanet.net
<ronnie at nirvanet.net>; notabene at skynet.be <notabene at skynet.be>;
va-nu-pieds.va at lemel.fr <va-nu-pieds.va at lemel.fr>; talk at attac.org
<talk at attac.org>
CC: citerre at wanadoo.fr <citerre at wanadoo.fr>; sjeu159725 at aol.com
<sjeu159725 at aol.com>; marielauredrouet at yahoo.com
<marielauredrouet at yahoo.com>; denis at switchon.com <denis at switchon.com>;
elisabeth.drevet at euronet.be <elisabeth.drevet at euronet.be>;
eric.pinet at libertysurf.fr <eric.pinet at libertysurf.fr>; isa.p at tpp.be
<isa.p at tpp.be>; studio.etc at chello.be <studio.etc at chello.be>;
ksa at stratigraphics.net <ksa at stratigraphics.net>; nas at nirvanet.net
<nas at nirvanet.net>; m.m at skynet.be <m.m at skynet.be>; swazie at rocketmail.com
<swazie at rocketmail.com>; chavesej at hotmail.com <chavesej at hotmail.com>;
info at simpol.org <info at simpol.org>; ajh at wanadoo.fr <ajh at wanadoo.fr>;
cpagnoulle at ulg.ac.be <cpagnoulle at ulg.ac.be>;
benedetti_albertina at euroclear.com <benedetti_albertina at euroclear.com>;
pfranck at be.packardbell.org <pfranck at be.packardbell.org>;
francois.hubert at euronet.be <francois.hubert at euronet.be>;
gilles.reboux at wanadoo.fr <gilles.reboux at wanadoo.fr>;
greta.alegre at freebel.net <greta.alegre at freebel.net>; effares at aol.com
<effares at aol.com>; mriv at rtbf.be <mriv at rtbf.be>; art-consult at linkline.be
<art-consult at linkline.be>; wsn-owner at csf.colorado.edu
<wsn-owner at csf.colorado.edu>; crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
<crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>; rezo.fr at liste.netacces.com
<rezo.fr at liste.netacces.com>; stop-imf at venice.essential.org
<stop-imf at venice.essential.org>; Transnational at egroups.fr
<Transnational at egroups.fr>; izaplana at green-global.net
<izaplana at green-global.net>; gdrouet at brutele.be <gdrouet at brutele.be>
Fecha: Jueves, 28 de Septiembre de 2000 03:56 a.m.
Asunto: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague


>Cher Vincent, pas de reaction a ces incidents de Prague car, soyons francs,
>il y a deux types de comportement face a ce genre de situation: ceux qui
>vont la-bas et ceux qui restent chez eux.
>
>Parmis ceux qui vont sur place, un pourcentage, qui se reduira chaque fois
>davantage, est constitue de veritables defenseur de l'ethique humaine du
>developpement.
>
>Mais la machine des puissant est tout sauf stupide et travaille avec les
>meilleurs publicitaires et faiseurs d'opinion du monde... Deux strategies
>sont donc en cours, et particulierement notable depuis les manifs de
>Londres:
>- d'abord un terme a ete accole a ces manifestations anti-FMI/WB/OMC, celui
>d'anti-globalisation. Or ce terme generique englobe tout a fait autre chose
>que ce que nous pretendons. Il me semble en effet que nous ne sommes pas
>contre les echanges culturels internationaux, ni contre la renconbtre des
>peuples, encore moins contre un developpement durable equitablement reparti
>entre toutes les nations du monde... Pourtant tout cela est englobe dans le
>terme d'anti-globalisation. Par contre, il a ete facile de berner nos
>manifestants hardis en leur collant une etiquette qu'ils se sont laisser
>appliquee, car, c'est vrai, nous sommes contre une globalisation inhumaine,
>vicieuse et neo-coloniale comme arme de conquete du libre capitalisme
>sauvage. Point. Si je me fais bien comprendre, on nous colle une etiquette
>qui englobe ce contre quoi nous sommes, mais qui englobe aussi des pensees
>et des strategies qui n'ont rien a voir avec ce monde futur que nous
>desirons pour nos enfants, un monde de paix et d'harmonie dans un cadre
>respectueux de l'humanite et de la nature. Meme si ces termes sont
>forcement vagues, le travail est encore a faire, ils ne se dirigent en
>aucun cas vers cet espece d'isolationisme nationaliste dans lequel nous
>sommes maintenant, apres trois rounds de bataille, conceptuellement
>enfermes...
>Grace a cette strategie, aimablement reprise par les journaux au service du
>grand pouvoir de l'ombre et de la pensee unique, nous voila ridiculises
>alors que nous n'avons meme pas encore dit ce que nous voulions faire,
>d'une part parceque l'on nous a colle une etiquette de reactionnaires face
>a l'evolution planetaire (il suffit d'ecouter le discours de Wolfensohn
>pour en etre convaincus et qui utilise la l'outil qu'on lui a confectionne
>a souhait) et d'autre part parceque personne ne s'est donne la peine, de
>notre cote, d'indiquer clairement et concretement ce que nous voulions...
>Nous voila en train d'aboyer aux basques des maitres du monde et quand les
>habitants de la planete se demandent ce que nous avons a proposer,... alors
>la nous sommes muets!
>Car a force d'etre contre on en oublie ce pour quoi on est!
>Donc contre les grandes institutions, contre le capitalisme sauvage, contre
>l'exageration des mouvements speculatifs, contre l'exploitation des
>enfants, contre le tourisme sexuel, contre le blanchiment d'argent, contre
>les centrales et les bombes nucleaires, contre le changement climatique et
>contre encore mille choses... Alors qu'en face ils sont pour le libre
>marche, pour la croissance, pour la liberte d'investissement, pour la
>consommation, pour ainsi des millions de petites choses qui remplissent les
>levres des televisions, les verbes des journaux, les gresillemant des
>radios et les filtres des hackers...
>On a l'air de reacs alors que c'est le systeme en place qui nous bouffe la
>vie, le temps, l'espoir , la beaute de la surprise... Ces rapaces englues
>dans leurs piege mortel se glorifient et se pavanent d'etre positivistes.
>Ils ont vite fait de negativiser notre mouvement.
>
>Deuxieme point, il suffit de quelques dizaines d'amis muscles, bien
>entraines et equipes, pour foutre un bordel monstre dans ce genre de
>manifestation qui ressemblent plus a des batailles urbaines ou, plus
>ringard encore, a des fins de match de coupe de football ou les hooligans
>s'en donnent a coeur joie... Quelque pros grassement payes auquels on
>autorise un dechainement de leurs plus basses pulsions reduisent en miettes
>toute tentative de controle de ce genre de rencontre.
>
>Et le tableau est maintenant pret:
>les anti-globalisateurs viennent casser des villes tranquilles, dans des
>pays democratiques, car ils ne sont finalement que des reactionnaires qui
>refusent de voir le monde avancer... et en plus c'est des betes de violence
>qui blessent, cassent et detruisent tout ce qui se presente devant eux...
>On a l'air con ou pas?
>
>Et puis il y a ceux qui restent. Soient parcequ'ils doivent travailler,
>soit parceque deja ecrases par la machine au fond de leur etre solitaire
>dans la foule anonyme, ils pleurent des amertumes seches...
>
>Mais il y en a encore d'autres, qui considerent que les projets doivent se
>construire en avancant, sans detruire et en incluant tous les participants,
>qui voient plus loin qu'un champs de bataille qui ne laissera meme pas de
>souvenirs autre qu'une retrouvaille avec l'esprit soixante-huitard et le
>babacoolisme qui nous a tranquilement amene a la situation d'aujourd'hui.
>Je ne dis pas qu'il s'agisse de regretter ce qui a ete fait, dans le passe,
>ni meme a Prague, mais qu'il serait temps d'arreter de jouer au cowboy, ou
>plutot aux gendarmes et aux voleurs car le role que la presse controlee
>nous a etiquete c'est celui des voleurs, les gendarmes travaillant pour
>ceux d'en face, d'en haut... pour etre precis.
>
>Alors meme si j'apprecie Attac et son concept de fond, je subodore
>l'urgence d'une totale redefinition de notre action. Aller gaspiller son
>temps, son argent, ses poumons et peut-etre perdre un oeil, pour montrer
>que nous sommes decides a changer le monde en bousillant des rues, des
>batiment et les cars des CRS locaux ne me semble pas la meilleure
>alternative, et je l'ai deja dit dans cette liste sans que cela souleve le
>moindre commentaire... On s'y fait!
>
>Oui, mais le projet d'Attac, dans la capitale meme du pays ou il est ne,
>avec au pouvoir un parti qui pourrait, ou du moins devrait lui etre
>favorable, vient de se prendre une grande claque (cf mon message Taxe Tobin
>pas jouable) pendant qu'en meme temps, les manifestants n'ont plus comme
>echo que celui de violences, leurs message, si bien entendu dans les
>plaines du grand chef Sioux Seattle, a perdu sa magie, il est devenu banal,
>pire, inaudible derriere le bruit des casseurs et des grenades
>lacrymogenes...
>
>C'est un esprit de cooperation, avec une saine gestion des quelques sous
>que nous accumulons, une strategie totalement dirigee vers une
>collaboration constructive plutot qu'une debauche destructive qu'il nous
>faut.
>
>Car, sombre harpie, la fin d'une revolution est dans l'oeuf meme qui lui a
>donne le jour. La claque de Fabius fera jurisprudence dans le jugement qui
>est porte sur la campagne de la Taxe Tobin et nos enfantillages de cour de
>recreation ne feront que ternir notre image de femmes et d'hommes
>responsables d'un avenir, compromis certes, mais qui est celui de nos
>enfants, de nos amis et amies et de nous-meme, au moins pour un temps
>encore...
>
>Cooperation, pas facile hein?
>
>Pourtant c'est ecrit sur le site... Et en francais en plus depuis quelques
>jours (meme si il y a encore deux ou trois points a regler techniquement).
>
>Peut-etre que maintenant il y aura de l'echo???  He... Ho!!  Hehehehe Ho...
>
>http:www//simpol.org
>
>c'est la que vous trouverez l'idee simple et efficace, alors pourquoi aller
>faire complique?
>
>A+
>
>
>>    Je suis tr?s ?tonn? de ne&nbsp;trouver sur ce forum aucune r?action
>>sur le  comportement violent des manifestants ? Prague. Pourquoi ce
>>silence ? Vincent <mailto:vincent.lejeune at swing.be>
>>vincent.lejeune at swing.be    PS : ci-dessous, un communiqu? de l'AFP  :
>>ATS / AFP
>>
>>PRAGUE : SOMMET ANNUEL DU FMI ET DE LA BANQUE MONDIALE
>>
>>Les manifs anti-mondialisation d?g?n?rent en combats de rue
>>
>>Des milliers de manifestants venus protester contre "la terreur
>>?conomique"  ont transform? la capitale tch?que en champ de bataille.
>>Douze policiers ont d?  ?tre hospitalis?s.
>>
>>La manifestation anti-mondialisation mardi ? Prague s'est sold?e par un
>>violent face-?-face avec la police tch?que. Pr?s d'une centaine de
>>bless?s, dont  une cinquantaine de policiers, ont ?t? d?nombr?s pour
>>l'ouverture officielle de  la r?union du FMI et de la Banque mondiale.
>>
>>Selon l'agence tch?que CTK, 54 policiers ont ?t? bless?s - dont 12
>>hospitalis?s - ainsi que des dizaines de manifestants. Les journalistes
>>pr?sents  estimaient pour leur part que les victimes des heurts pourraient
>>?tre plus  nombreuses. La police a proc?d? ? nombre d'arrestations
>>muscl?es, a constat?  l'ATS.
>>
>>Les chiffres sur le nombre de manifestants restaient approximatifs en fin
>>de  soir?e: ils ?taient 11 000 selon la police mais l'INPEG (Initiative
>>contre la  Mondialisation Economique) avan?ait de son c?t? le chiffre de
>>20.000  manifestants. La police tch?que s'est d'ailleurs montr?e surprise
>>par la  violence des contacts.
>>
>>Renforts appel?s
>>
>>Les 11 000 policiers mobilis?s ont fait appel dans la journ?e ? des
>>renforts  venus de Boh?me centrale, occidentale et de l'est, en raison de
>>la violence des  heurts. Un porte-parole de la police a d?clar? que "les
>>forces de l'ordre  avaient ?t? surprises par l'agressivit? des
>>protestataires". Les plus agressifs  ont ?t? interpell?s, mais le
>>porte-parole n'a pu indiquer leur nombre. Les  manifestants,
>>essentiellement europ?ens - surtout italiens, espagnols, grecs,  belges,
>>fran?ais et scandinaves, mais aussi am?ricains - ont converg? vers la
>>capitale aux premi?res heures de la matin?e.
>>
>>Bravant les moyens impressionnants - blind?s, canons ? eau, h?licopt?res,
>>grenades lacrymog?nes - dont ?taient ?quip?s les unit?s anti-?meute,
>>plusieurs  milliers de militants contre la mondialisation sont parvenus ?
>>quelques  centaines de m?tres du Palais des congr?s, suppos? inaccessible.
>>
>>Ces derniers se sont violemment oppos?s aux barrages policiers, utilisant
>>pav?s, b?tons et divers projectiles contre les policiers qui prot?geaient
>>le  p?rim?tre de s?curit? ? coups de grenades lacrymog?nes et jets de
>>canons ? eau.  Une dizaine de barricades, certaines en feu, avaient ?t?
>>dress?es dans les rues  avoisinantes.
>>
>>Des centaines de militants ont m?me acc?d? aux portes du Centre des
>>congr?s  transform? en forteresse sous le regard int?ress? des d?l?gu?s du
>>Fonds  mon?taire international (FMI) et de la Banque Mondiale (BM) r?unis
>>sur les  terrasses du palais. La police ? d? inviter ces derniers ? plus
>>de discr?tion  afin d'?viter de provoquer les protestataires.
>>
>>Mouvement irr?versible
>>
>>Les d?l?gu?s du FMI-BM, confin?s dans le centre - apr?s la fin des travaux
>>-  par mesure de s?curit?, ont ?t? ?vacu?s par une rame de m?tro sp?ciale
>>de la  station situ?e sous le Palais, sous forte protection polici?re. La
>>d?l?gation  suisse, conduite par Kaspar Villiger avec Hans Meyer et
>>Jean-Pierre Roth de la  BNS, a aussi pu quitter les lieux.
>>
>>Pris ? partie dans la rue, les responsables du FMI et de la BM ont fait
>>valoir devant l'assembl?e annuelle combien leurs institutions, si
>>critiqu?es,  ?taient n?cessaires aux pays les plus pauvres. Le pr?sident
>>de la BM James  Wolfensohn a ainsi soulign? que la mondialisation honnie
>>des manifestants ?tait  irr?versible. "Nous ne pouvons pas revenir en
>>arri?re", a-t-il lanc? aux  repr?sentants des 182 pays membres des deux
>>institutions, r?unis au si?ge de  l'ancien si?ge du parti communiste.
>>
>
>
>------------------------------------------
>Georges Drouet
>28, place Morichar  1060 Bruxelles
>tel: 32-486 751 668
>fax: 32-2 538 10 82
>
>gdrouet at brutele.be
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>






From julp at freesurf.ch  Thu Sep 28 09:58:35 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 17:58:35 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] economic consequences of the strong dollar and oil prices (was: 2nd reply to Julien)
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.28.dpafaocq@computer>

>What about seignorage? Being banker/lender of last resort gives the US
>the ability to devalue/revalue the dollar without paying the customary
>price other national currencies do: ...

I'm not sure of what you mean about the US beign the banker/lender of last 
resort. The importance of the dollar certainly gives the US special capabilities 
like extracting more seignorage and more importantly creating credit more 
painlessly. But how is it capable to better or less painfully control the price of 
the dollar relative to other currencies? Any country can make the price of its 
currency sink. Making it go high is harder and the US seems to have a worse 
position than other rich countries there because of the huge number of dollars 
around: the "markets" can react much more strongly to a strong dollar policy 
than to a strong yen policy f.ex. because there's so much more dollars out 
there that can be sold if the dollar is seen as overvalued. 

>... so arbitrage is always on their terms, no?

I don't understand what you mean at all.

>> 1 - I don't think it's relevant. Hoarded money doesn't have
>> much influence on real economies
>
>But it's nice for the US which can print money, buy things, and know
>that some at least of this money will simply never be used, will sit
>under beds and the net effect is that a portion of US imports is
>cost-free (ie, is plunder or an imperial tax on the rest of the
>world).

Yes. However you were talking about hoarded money beign put back into 
circulation as a result of a flow of money towards the US. The US benefits 
through seignorage from the opposite process.

>I'm saying that oil prices are not just artifical, they are a special
>case of monopoly and that, as Simon Bromley argues in 'American
>Hegemony and world Oil ' (Polity Press, 1992), oil is the single key
>commodity around control of which US hegemony is actually organised.

Well... 
If you have the time and the desire to do so, please post a summary of some 
kind of this theory (written by you or someone else). It would be nice if it was 
sensible and coherent rather than an outraged rant at no more than a part of 
the corporate world.




From julp at freesurf.ch  Thu Sep 28 10:51:20 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 18:51:20 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Marxist valuation + RE: physical capital and energy price hikes
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.28.mlmjipds@computer>

[Julien to Charles and then Mark]

>This article in part treats certain important commodiities in simple commodity
>relation to each other , a la Chapter 1 of  Capital  as a way of estimating
>current Values.
>...
>I thought it was a clever way to
>show a Marxist approach to value in contrast with the methods of bourgeois 
>economists, with all the confusion about inflation etc.

Charles, I also think that all attempts until now to make market price 
comparisons across time failed while trying to take inflation into account, 
resulting in confusion. Therefore, we indeed need other ways of thinking about 
these things. 
However, the article does not look at commodities in relation to each other, but 
to certain market prices of those commodities in relation to each other. 
Comparing market prices of different commodities can certainly be more 
uselful than to use deflators and stuff but... This article clearly not to compare 
commodity prices but to replace the mainstream deflator by the price of gold 
to exagerate the price of oil. Is that in any way marxist? And note the quote of a 
VP of some corp from a plan to control inflation! Is that marxist??? 
Instead of trying to find a better deflator than the mainstream one, why don't we 
look at relation between the market prices of actual commodities (not precious 
metals) depending on what we want ot investigate? F.ex., the price of oil to the 
price of the wheat bushel might be an interesting index to look at historically 
indeed if we want to look at agriculture and oil. 
Or better still, why don't we look behind the prices. Mark and others continually 
refer to the world oil production not in dollars or in pounds of gold but in barils. 
This is a very good thing to do. We could look at a historical chart of 
oil_consumption/population for the world or for countries. My little suggestion 
for the moment is that, if we want to grasp the effect of the oil price hike, a good 
statistic to peek at would be oil consumption per inhabitant for poor countries 
vs. oil production per inhabitant for rich countries. When we see both diverge a 
lot in a short period of time, then we will be able to say (whatever the market 
price for oil is) that this is a time of great stress and scramble for scarce oil 
which will have serious economic consequences. If someone knows where to 
gather this kind of data (oil consumption per country), please tell me.
 
 
>Have to factor in capital-saving effects of new technology.

Mark, I should probably have stopped the thread following such a short and 
vague answer but... 
Historically, new technologies have rather increased the capital base of our 
economies rather than shrank it. Now, the financial bubble enabled capital 
spending to go through the roof so I doubt there's been much capital-saving. 
Has the capital goods production sector been in a crisis lately? If there's been 
any shrinking of the capital base of "western" economies, it's probably rather 
because of delocalization of more capital intensive stuff than in the past. 
But I don't even know how you measure capital in this sentence and how it 
relates to the energy price hikes, so I may have missed your point.




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 08:51:09 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 15:51:09 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Straight Talk
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20000927162559.00ac36f0@pop.islandnet.com>
Message-ID: <000301c0295b$898daca0$c9278cd4@mjones>

Yves Bajard wrote:
>
> My comment: We know that at current rate and in current
> system with current
> players playing by current "rules", this is it. Then, what?
> What do you
> propose to do? How? when? where? with whom? with what
> means? how directly?
> Where do you start?
>

Yves, any scheme you come up with has got to address the fundamental
problem or else it's just utopian, and therefore, part of the problem.

Also, not that the system is not self-regulating any more. It's
completely out of control. Take just the example of oil. When prices
balloon, there is always a recession + moves towards substitution.
This happened in the mid-1980s when world oil production fell by 10%,
prices fell, and Opec output fell by *over 40%*. This was a direct
result of the Iran-Iraq War and the price hike of 1979-80. The death
of Opec was hailed. Oil prices collapsed again after the Asian
Meltdown of 1997-98. The oil price may slump again next year. Each
time the death of Opec is announced; each time the underlying secular
trend reasserts itself with even more commanding force. US production
declines faster. Western dependency on Opec only increases. Each
boom-bust cycle pushes the whole system towards a stepchange. It is
inevitable; nothing can stop it. The stepchange will happen when oil
production falls 10 % but then doesn't recover, just doesn't stop
falling, and doesn't recover even when prices hike to $70/bbl or
$100/bbl or $1000/bbl. That moment is coming and when it does all the
talk about the 'weightless economy' will die overnight. Then we shall
discover that the 'weightless economy' was just a way of closing down
previously self-sufficient subsystems: families, communities,
extra-market forms of social solidarity. All the things which were
commoditised and turned into 'serve inductries' so that big capital
could proclaim that 'industry' no longer matters and is less than 20%
of GNP, as if people don't eat as much, or live in houses, or mover
around as much any more. We shall have forgotten the histories of all
the everyday products we need just to survive, as Wendell Berry says.
We shall have forgotten *how* to survive except as small cogs in the
big machine. All those service industries, the malls, the
entertainment 'industry', will disappear and leave nothing behind
except tens of millions of helpless, unemployed individuals. Their
skills will be useless and will have to be unlearnt.

The self-regulating market will not have found substitutes for fossil
hydrocarbon and the form that self-regulation will take will be
economic and social collapse. The same thing applies to ecosystems.
They absorb huge punishment without showing much sign of stress; then
one day they collapse, there are dieoffs, and nothing can put them
back together again. Lost biodiversity is lost forever. Same thing
with climate change. It is like holding a brick away from your face
with an elastic band. For a long time nothing happens. The oceans
absorb massive amounts of carbon. They become dilute carbonic acid;
the coral reefs die but other changes are slow; water that is
upwelling today has been in the deep ocean for many decades, and so
has been kept cool. But at some point, this water can be expected to
get warmer, diminishing the chilling effect. The deep ocean
circulation which holds the climate together can stall, and when
climate stepchange does come it can be practically overnight. Nothing
can stop it. The global warming denialists, the speculators about
sunspots and increased insolation, will fall silent overnight, but it
will be too late.



Mark




From zapata at sezampro.yu  Fri Sep 29 09:43:37 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 17:43:37 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Dear friends, could you do me
Message-ID: <000a01c02a2c$25dde2c0$89bd6ac2@k382>

A favour? It seems to me that - reservatio reservandis, this could be a wrong evaluation, of course- Milosevic is finished with. If he doesn't introduce open dictatorship ( it is a probability, yes) , than after some "technical measures" he is going to be removed and some serious precomposition of forces, inside the country, is going to take place. So now it is time to prepare for a fight against neoliberal opposition-government. I would like you to send me all articles, essays, sources, evaluations and analyses you have about US-Euro military and financial interventionism in Africa. I hope that, if some more tolerant climate is introduced, we ( left radicals form Yugoslavia) will be able to start publishing serious political magazine ( we were unable to do that, so far); further on, I have participated in founding of African Support Network ( it is devoted to African culture, music, society / politics) few days ago; so I need some more serious materials.  I am very anxious to go on with a creation of Latin American Support Network in Yugoslavia and Anti-Neoliberal Action in Yugoslavia, in coordination with other international groups of this orientation. 
 So, please, if you have some time and knowledge about this subject, I would appreciate all materials you have on post Cold War African political & economical situation. On my private address of course, in order to escape overburdening the list.
Resistance, not support,
                              Andrej Grubacic
                         www.resistancenet.org

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From ncfs at islandnet.com  Fri Sep 29 17:23:20 2000
From: ncfs at islandnet.com (NCFS (Yves Bajard))
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 16:23:20 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Marxist valuation + RE: physical capital and
  energy price hikes
In-Reply-To: <SAK.2000.09.28.mlmjipds@computer>
Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20000929161106.00adf430@pop.islandnet.com>

At 06:51 PM 28/09/00 +0200, Julien wrote to the list (among other things), 
in reply  to Charles and then Mark: ]

".....Or better still, why don't we look behind the prices. Mark and others 
continually refer to the world oil production not in dollars or in pounds 
of gold but in barils. This is a very good thing to do. We could look at a 
historical chart of oil_consumption/ population for the world or for 
countries. My little suggestion for the moment is that, if we want to grasp 
the effect of the oil price hike, a good statistic to peek at would be oil 
consumption per inhabitant for poor countries vs. oil production per 
inhabitant for rich countries. When we see both diverge a lot in a short 
period of time, then we will be able to say (whatever the market price for 
oil is) that this is a time of great stress and scramble for scarce oil 
which will have serious economic consequences. If someone knows where to 
gather this kind of data (oil consumption per country), please tell me...."

This, I think, is an excellent idea. I would propose some compounding with 
the evolution with time of the energy mobilized to extract a barrel of oil.

The two sets of evolution curves ( energy mobilized vs energy extracted as 
a function of time, and energy mobilized for use/waste/destruction in the 
affluent parts of the world vs energy used by people in non-affluent part 
of the world as a function of time) would bring two excellent, 
complementary indicators of the evolution of stress on the system.

I have a few ideas of where to find some data, but think that before that, 
we should develop a viable expression of these two sets of evolution 
curves. Rather than doing this as part of the crashlist (which would be 
cumbersome), I would propose that this be inserted as part of the Global 
Problematique-focused learning process we are setting up at the NCFS. 
Persons interested are invited to reply to me personally at 
ncfs at islandnet.com. I'll give them more info about what we are doing.

This is not a hijacking at all. What we will do would remain very 
accessible to crashlist member and anyone who wants could participate.

Best

Yves Bajard


>
>
> >Have to factor in capital-saving effects of new technology.
>
>Mark, I should probably have stopped the thread following such a short and
>vague answer but...
>Historically, new technologies have rather increased the capital base of our
>economies rather than shrank it. Now, the financial bubble enabled capital
>spending to go through the roof so I doubt there's been much capital-saving.
>Has the capital goods production sector been in a crisis lately? If 
>there's been
>any shrinking of the capital base of "western" economies, it's probably 
>rather
>because of delocalization of more capital intensive stuff than in the past.
>But I don't even know how you measure capital in this sentence and how it
>relates to the energy price hikes, so I may have missed your point.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From zapata at sezampro.yu  Fri Sep 29 12:26:48 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 20:26:48 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] / Sept 27 / Diana Johnstone / Yugoslav Elections
Message-ID: <008701c02a42$ef6118e0$c6bd6ac2@k382>

This is exactly the thing I was writting on internet for the whole time. It
is
not related with Resistance versus Support debate inside antiwar movement,
but this article is impressively intelligent, balanced and factual.
US out of Balkans! tghis slogan doesn't presuppose eternization of Milosevic
as new anti-imperialist
messiah; it is simple as that: US out of Balkans- and nothing more.
 @.

====



BEFORE AND AFTER YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS
by Diana Johnston

(This was prepared a couple of weeks ago.should have gone
out sooner.my apologies.)

The first round of voting to elect the next President of
Yugoslavia Presidential is to be held on September 24. If no
candidate wins an absolute majority, there will be a runoff
two weeks later. Because of the boycott by Montenegro, this
will essentially be a Serbian election. There seems to be a
real possibility that the center right opposition candidate,
Vojislav Kostunica, might defeat Slobodan Milosevic. This
election is being held under extremely difficult conditions
due to the aftermath of NATO bombing and ongoing
interference by the Western powers in Yugoslavia's internal
affairs.

The United States is watching like a hawk, from a new office
conspicuously set up in nearby Budapest "to assist
democratic forces in Serbia" and from warships in the
Adriatic, not to mention the spy network that is certainly
in place throughout the region. For months, the West has
been encouraging Montenegro's pro-dollar and pro-Deutschmark
(the term is "pro-Western") president Milan Djukanovic to
secede from Yugoslavia so that NATO can settle in on
Montenegro's Adriatic coastline and complete the
strangulation of landlocked Serbia. The United States has
ostentatiously thrown millions of dollars at the Serbian
"democratic opposition" -- the word "democratic" signifying
above all willingness to take the proferred dollars.
Alongside these carrots for the "democratic opposition,"
there is the big stick of NATO intervention in the civil war
that could be made to break out in case the voters fail to
get rid of Milosevic. The European Union is also trying to
interfere by promising economic aid to Serbia if, and only
if, Milosevic is defeated.

Alongside such massive foreign interference in a domestic
election, charges that Milosevic is going to cheat are
almost laughable. Free and fair elections -- in Serbia as
elsewhere -- have never unduly impressed the United States
government when "the wrong" candidate won them.

In short, the United States is blatantly giving this proud
and stubborn little Balkan nation the banana republic
treatment. The mixture of support to armed rebels (Contras
in one case, "Kosovo Liberation Army" thugs in the other)
and hints of economic salvation aid recalls the measures
used to defeat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Since the
United States appears ready to stop at nothing to get rid of
Milosevic, some prominent American and European opponents of
NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia feel honor-bound to
support Milosevic and oppose Kostunica. It is certain that
the defeat of Milosevic would be heralded as a victory by
NATO, and this cynical triumphalism on the part of the very
powers that have systematically destroyed the country would
be hard to swallow.

NATO propaganda has so long reduced the country to one man,
Milosevic, pretending that it was bombing "his" bridges,
factories, power plants and so on, that from the outside,
this one man may look much bigger and more important than he
really is. With or without Milosevic as president, the
people of Yugoslavia will still be there and will not change
over night.

In any case, it makes little sense to fight out the Yugoslav
election between Western adversaries of NATO aggression. We
have pathetically little influence (not to say none at all)
on elections in our own country, much less on elections in
Yugoslavia. We have to keep fighting lies and injustice with
or without the help of the victims. By resisting 78 days of
NATO bombing and years of isolation and sanctions, the
Yugoslav people have already done as much as we can decently
expect of them. If they capitulate now, we can't blame them.
But there is no reason to consider the election of Mr.
Kostunica a capitulation. And this becomes evident if we try
to imagine what may happen after the election, if he should
manage to win.

First of all, should Mr. Kostunica actually be elected
President, his prestige at home, with his own people, will
be immense. Whereas a Milosevic victory would be tainted by
suspicion of vote rigging (because of control of the state
apparatus), a Kostunica victory would be above suspicion. He
would not owe this victory to anybody but himself and the
voters. This is a factor worth taking into account.
Kostunica's victory would be above parties -- first of all,
because his own Democratic Party of Serbia is very small,
and secondly, because the other "bourgeois" (to use the apt
Scandinavian term) opposition parties supporting him don't
amount to much either. Having lost credibility at home as
they courted German media or Madeleine Albright, neither of
the opposition leaders familiar in the West, Zoran Djindjic
or Vuk Draskovic, dared run for president. In a spoiling
action, Draskovic fielded his own candidate, Belgrade mayor
Vojislav Mihailovic, whose only asset is his politically
mixed heritage: his grandfather was the royalist anti-Nazi
resistance leader General Draza Mihailovic, executed by Tito
after World War II, while his father belonged to Tito's
Partisans. Nobody thinks he can win.

In reality, all of Serbia's political leaders have
discredited themselves in this past difficult decade --
except Kostunica. Unlike the others, Kostunica is considered
patriotic, honest, and serious. In the past he was
considered "too intellectual," but that reproach seems to
have been forgotten. He is highly appreciated by the middle
class Serbian diaspora. Having stayed out of the endless
infighting that discredited the opposition, Kostunica is
like the prince in the last act of a Shakespearean play who
walks onto a stage littered with corpses to announce a
bright new future.

However, as President of Yugoslavia he would be faced with a
sea of troubles, as he is perfectly aware. The fate of
Kosovo is a top concern, as well as international sanctions,
and foreign-backed secessionist movements in Montenegro,
Voivodina, and the Sanjak region of Serbia. As for economic
policy, the fact that the bourgeois opposition favors
privatization is meaningless, inasmuch as everybody,
including Milosevic, has favored privatization for years.
The real question is how it would be done and what national
assets could be saved from hostile foreign takeover. This is
impossible to predict. It should perhaps be noted that
although Kostunica represents "bourgeois" parties, the
Serbian bourgeoisie is a matter of professional people,
essentially, without major property interests comparable to
those of the bourgeoisie in rich capitalist countries. This
being the case, the critical factor is their civic sense and
honesty: will they manage public affairs in the public
interest, or rip off whatever they can in the style of the
Russian "oligarchs"? There is reason to hope that Kostunica
would lean toward the first choice. Coming from a
conservative family of jurists, his personal political
movement has been from right to left, at a time when very
many former communists have been moving opportunistically
from left to right.

Time will tell. Certainly, if Kostunica failed to perform as
desired in Washington, he might be subjected to the same
"demonization" treatment given other Serbian leaders. But
this would be difficult, and Europeans increasingly worried
by close U.S. links to criminal Albanian extremists might
not go along. Kostunica would thus have an automatic
advantage over Milosevic in dealing with the outside world.

The "democratic opposition" supporting Kostunica has
endorsed an economic "reform" program that appears to have
been ghost-written by a branch of the
U.S.-government-financed "National Endowment for Democracy".
It is signed by a group called the "G17". That "G17"
economic program is indeed dreadful, a recipe for the "shock
treatment" that has brought mass unemployment, debt
dependency and misery to other countries of Eastern Europe.
Despite his undoubted patriotism, Kostunica is a jurist with
conservative leanings, who seems largely unaware of the
implications of the G17 economic program for social and
national cohesion. He campaigns on other issues, more apt to
win votes. Still, a victory of Kostunica would not in itself
be a victory for "shock treatment", even though it would be
a dangerous step in that direction. The Yugoslav presidency
is actually very weak, and has appeared strong only because
occupied by Milosevic. Yugoslavia is a federation of two
republics, Montenegro and Serbia, which would both retain
their own governments. The Republic elections in Serbia next
year will probably be more decisive for economic policy and
distribution of power than the federal presidential
election.

Kostunica's own party is very small. His election would
precipitate changes in the Serbian Socialist Party. There
would have to be a political realignment to create a new
majority. It would be this new majority, and not the "G17",
that would finally define economic policy.

Therefore, a key political question would concern relations
between a President Kostunica and a post-Milosevic Serbian
Socialist Party, which would still be the largest single
political party in the country, with many competent
administrators. If the Socialist Party could manage a smooth
reorganization after the defeat of Milosevic, and work out a
modus vivendi with Kostunica, then the country would be able
to confront its problems and the outside world more unified
and stronger than in the past.

There is good reason to expect that the United States will
continue to focus attention on Milosevic as "indicted war
criminal" and intensifying pressure on Kostunica to turn his
predecessor over to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. If
Kostunica gave in to such pressure, that would shatter the
possibility to build national unity and catapult him into
dependence on forces allied with Washington.

Here it is important to note that cheating in Yugoslav
elections is not very easy or likely. All parties send
controllers to the polling stations, where they jointly
count the votes and sign the final result. There is a
procedure for appeal to the electoral committee, where all
parties are represented, and from there to the courts. The
greatest irregularity surrounding these elections is the
extraordinary outside pressure being exercised by the West,
including millions of U.S. dollars poured into a range of
takers, described as "civil society". Kostunica has
complained that the ostentatious U.S. "support" to the
opposition actually helps Milosevic, thanks to the "kiss of
death" effect. Whatever the actual effect on voters'
choices, the blatant interference prepares the NATO powers
to claim an opposition victory as their own, which is in
itself an unseemly interference in democratic process.

Many in Serbia believe that Milosevic is clinging to office
precisely because of fear of being sent to The Hague -- to a
Tribunal of no return. If so, the best way to ensure a
peaceful transition in Serbia would be to drop the charges
against Milosevic, but this is most unlikely to happen.

Moreover, in her zeal to support the NATO war effort during
the bombing, ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour indicted not only
Milosevic but several other top Yugoslav officials,
including Serbian President Milan Milutinovic. These
indictments rest on nothing more solid than the assumption
that massacres which may or may not have occurred in Kosovo
during the civil war were directly ordered by top officials
as part of a deliberate plan of "genocide" -- an allegation
for which there is no solid evidence. However, the ICTY is a
court where defendants arrive already convicted and
condemned by the media and Western officials, and sometimes
already dead (NATO forces have killed a couple of their
suspects during arrest).

Kostunica is a constitutional lawyer who bases his program
on democratic constitutional reform and early elections
under a new improved system. If left alone, Yugoslavia is
perfectly capable of developing democratically and of
running a judicial system as fair as most, and certainly far
more so than the strange institution set up at U.S.
instigation by the UN Security Council to judge Yugoslavs.

Whatever the outcome of the Yugoslav presidential elections,
the United States is going to raise the hue and cry to
arrest "the indicted war criminal" Milosevic as a pretext to
continue and intensify destructive pressure on Yugoslavia. I
would suggest that the first priority of those who are
trying to defend peace, justice, and truth is to call for
abolition of the kangaroo court in The Hague as an obstacle
to peaceful reconciliation and the development of democratic
institutions in Yugoslavia.







________________________________________________________
                           1stUp.com - Free the Web
   Get your free Internet access at http://www.1stUp.com







From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 16:44:26 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 23:44:26 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] modern slavery and Mr Henwood
Message-ID: <000001c0299d$a84878e0$78168cd4@mjones>

"What's so hard about saying the system sucks, yeah, but it sucks less
for a lot of people than it did a few years ago." -- Doug Henwood,
28.09.00
---------------------------------

7 Million children die each year
as a result of the debt crisis
5169045 children have died
since the start of the year 2000.
OVER 20 MILLION PEOPLE ARE SLAVES TODAY
http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/

25 September 2000

'It is an international disgrace that over 20 million people are
working as slaves in the world today, ' Mike Dottridge, Director of
Anti-Slavery International said.

Poverty and the growing demand for cheap, expendable labour is
expanding slavery to every continent requiring the fight against this
human rights abuse to take new forms.

Women from eastern Europe are trafficked to the west as prostitutes;
men in India are forced into bonded labour giving their labour in
return for a debt for which they have no record; and children are sold
for their labour in West Africa. Most people do not believe that
slavery still exits in the 21st century.

One of our biggest challenges is convincing the public that slavery
exists on a massive scale and that we all have a role to play in
eradicating it. Anti-Slavery's website, www.antislavery.org, provides
information on all forms of slavery today.

Anti-Slavery is the world's oldest international human rights
organisation and is the only organisation in the UK that works
exclusively for the elimination of all forms of slavery around the
world.

 Violence and complicity
Past and present

 http://www.channel4.com/

Several factors converged after the Second World War to give birth to
new kinds of slavery. One was population growth: from around two
billion people in 1945, the world population exploded to six billion.
Most of this growth was in the developing world.

Meanwhile, the economic growth that should have been improving the
lives of these growing millions was actually pushing them towards
slavery. Whole populations were driven from stable poverty into
destitution.

The evidence for this is clear in the vast shanty towns that surround
the major cities of the developing world. About half of Mexico City?s
population of 20 million, for instance, live under cardboard and scrap
wood without basic services. For the most part these families used to
be subsistence farmers. They were dispossessed of their land as
governments (in turn often under pressure from ?global? institutions
such as the World Bank and the IMF) pushed for large-scale ?cash crop?
economies.

Theirs is a tough situation, but poverty on its own doesn?t make
people slaves. To turn the poor into slaves requires violence.


Violence and complicity
To enslave people you must keep them beyond the protection of the law.
In some cases this means locking them up. But in many parts of the
world a simple payment to the local police allows someone to use
violence without fear of arrest. In Western Europe, Canada, and the
United States, slavery mostly happens in spite of the efforts of law
enforcement, but in many countries slavery grows with the connivance
of the police.

Around the world people are brutalised and reduced to slavery through
violence. Their free will is taken away. Their labour, their minds and
their lives are consumed by someone else?s greed. It is not about
legal ownership, it is not about buying and selling people, and it is
not about race or colour. Slavery today may include any of these
things, but they are not essential to enslavement.

For the film Slavery and for this website, the definition of a slave
is someone who is:

unpaid;
controlled by violence or the threat of violence;
unable to leave.


Past and present
Slavery exists in many different forms around the world. But these
forms share two key characteristics that distinguish them from slavery
in the past: slaves today are cheap and they are disposable. This new
kind of slavery arrived in the late 20th century.

Slaves are cheaper than they have ever been. The fall in their price
has been so dramatic that the basic economy of slavery has changed. An
average slave in the American South in 1850 cost the equivalent of
?40,000; today a slave costs only about ?60. When the price of
anything drops so much, supply and demand change as well. Today there
is a glut of potential slaves on the market, and that means they are
worth very little. This in turn means that a slave does not require
special care as a major investment, and it means slaves are easily
replaced. If slaves get ill, are injured, outlive their usefulness or
become troublesome to the slaveholder, they are dumped or worse.






From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 16:44:32 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 23:44:32 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] SAPs and Mr Henwood
Message-ID: <000101c0299d$ab1a3680$78168cd4@mjones>

"What's so hard about saying the system sucks, yeah, but it sucks less
for a lot of people than it did a few years ago." -- Doug Henwood,
28.09.00

-----------------------------------

 World Development Movement Report
Jessica Woodroffe and Mark Ellis-Jones
September 2000
www.wdm.org
States of unrest: Resistance to IMF policies in poor countries


Introduction
Since Seattle last year, the media has heralded the dawn of a new
movement in Europe and America, epitomised by protests aimed at the
WTO, IMF and the World Bank.

However, this 'new movement', portrayed by the media as students and
anarchists from the rich and prosperous global north, is just the tip
of the iceberg. In the global south, a far deeper and wide-ranging
movement has been developing for years, largely ignored by the media.

What follows is a summary of protests and demonstrations organised by
the southern poor. They are aimed at policies that hurt their
livelihoods and, in some cases, undermine the democratic foundations
of their countries. This 'hidden' movement has a global reach and
signals a deep unease at economic policies that keep the poor in
poverty.


Southern protest
All of the developing countries detailed in this report have
experienced civil unrest in the past year.

Teachers, civil servants, priests, farmers, students, doctors,
trade-union activists, indigenous peoples and women's groups have
called on their governments to halt the introduction of economic
reforms which have by-passed their national democratic institutions,
and have been foisted on them by the IMF and World Bank. These are
poor people, in a desperate situation, who are striving for respect,
dignity and a sense of pride in their lives and countries. Their
voices deserve to be heard.

But they're not. Developing countries are still locked into a
dependant relationship with the international financial institutions
and donor governments. Despite the rhetoric of poverty reduction, debt
relief and economic stabilisation, these countries must still
implement liberalisation policies which hurt the poor. This report
shows how deeply the poor oppose them.


The Gatekeeper
The IMF has unprecedented power over these vulnerable countries and is
often referred to as the 'Gatekeeper' because it determines whether to
open or shut the 'gate' between a borrowing government and its
creditors. Unless the IMF gives its 'seal of approval', signifying
that a government's policies are 'adequate', the government may be
unable to access credit and attract foreign investment. The only way
these countries have been able to gain the IMF's 'seal of approval' is
by introducing a package of reforms called a Structural Adjustment
Programme (SAP). These reforms often involve the following common
elements:

? Reducing government expenditure, by making public-sector
redundancies, freezing salaries, and making cuts in health, education
and social welfare services;

? The privatisation of state-run industries, leading to massive
lay-offs with no social security provision and the loss of inefficient
services to remote or poor areas;

? Currency devaluation and export promotion, leading to the soaring
cost of imports, land use changed for cash crops, and reliance on
international commodity markets;

? Raising interest rates to tackle inflation, putting small companies
out of business;

? Removal of price controls, leading to rapid price rises for basic
goods and services.

In 1999, these notorious SAPs underwent a transformation following
criticism of their content and undemocratic nature. At last year's
Annual Meetings, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF),
responsible for providing loans to up to 80 countries, was renamed the
Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). In addition, Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), which must be drawn up in
consultation with civil society, were introduced to meet fears that
governments lacked 'ownership' of SAPs. But early evidence suggests
that PRGF conditions are almost identical to the old ESAF conditions,
and that PRSPs will closely resemble SAPs. The names may have changed
but the economics has stayed the same.

For countries outside the remit of the PRGF, the IMF remains as
inflexible as ever. Loans from the IMF are always conditional on the
implementation of structural reforms, and countries seeking the IMF's
international 'seal of approval' are always 'encouraged' to continue
with SAP-style policies.

All these policies hurt the poor. Developing countries have few
choices - either implement policies ill-suited to their country or
risk economic isolation. Most governments, seeking to retain power and
be accepted internationally, choose the IMF over their own people.


Demolishing democracy
One of the objectives of IMF and World Bank conditions is to leave
economies well governed and increase stability. Instead, SAPs have
undermined the ability of democratic governments to set their own
priorities and policy objectives; instead, they often rush through
economic reforms without adequate legislative or democratic processes.
While governments are held responsible for the social and economic
upheaval which results, the IMF and World Bank escape largely
unscathed.

These institutions have little accountability to any electorate, and
remain forever at arm's length. At best, they offer advice to the
governments 'to continue building the necessary political support for
reforms', and at worst distance themselves completely from failed
programmes, blaming inadequate political will or corruption.

SAPs, which cut back the role of the state, ignore the basic function
of governments - to provide social services to their citizens. If
governments are unable to provide these services because of budget
cuts or debt servicing, governments lose their legitimacy in the eyes
of their citizens.

It would be wrong to suggest that developing countries have no
responsibility. Some have embraced the proposals willingly, others
have been guilty of corruption. But our point is that civil society's
attempt to democratise their own governments is made substantially
more difficult, if not impossible, by the imposition of IMF
conditions. There is no room for flexibility in negotiations with the
IMF.

This is compounded by the current revamp which seeks to dress SAPs up
in the rhetoric of PRSPs, which could make matters much worse. The
policies will stay the same, but instead of being explicitly
prescribed by the IMF, they will be covertly pushed on government
officials by 'IMF advisors'. In the long run, PRSPs will only help the
IMF pass the buck when things go wrong.

When democracy is undermined and governments are unable to act in the
interests of their electorate, one of the only channels left is for
citizens to demonstrate. Civil unrest, demonstrations and strikes
should indicate to governments, law-makers and the international
community that policies are not working.


Country reports

Argentina

IMF overview
In March 2000, the IMF approves a US$7.2 billion three-year stand-by
credit on the condition that the Government continues with key fiscal
and structural reforms. Within the agreement, there is specific
reference to the importance of "the proposed labour market reform and
deregulation", and to "the further reform of the social security
system".

December 1999
A wave of strikes hits the newly elected centre-left Government as it
tries to introduce reforms of its labour laws in response to
discussions with the IMF. The reforms will dilute the trade-union
movement and reduce the rights of workers. Mr Montoya, one of the
leaders of Argentina's biggest union umbrella group, the General
Confederation of Labour (CGT), has already likened the strikes to the
ones which caused economic and social chaos in 1983-89, leading to the
downfall of the then President, Raul Alfonsin. Montoya says that Mr De
la Rue, Argentina's current President is "committing the same error as
Alfonsin".

27 April 2000
The package of labour reforms is passed by the Senate, while thousands
of demonstrators picket Congress, leading to violent clashes with the
police in which more than 30 people are injured and about 50 arrested.

May 2000
IMF-prescribed Government cuts in the social security system lead to
violent demonstrations in the Salta region. Peaceful protests erupt
into violence after demands for unemployment benefits and severance
pay are ignored by local officials who can no longer provide them. The
protesters set fire to public offices before being subdued by armed
riot police, leaving dozens injured and many arrested. Rural
communities in a similar situation block roads and organise protests
to disrupt visiting government officials in an effort to voice their
concerns about the increasing deterioration of social provisions.

31 May 2000
Protests against the IMF austerity plan, which will raise taxes,
reduce social spending and cut salaries, culminate with 80,000 people
taking to the streets. The protest is called by the three largest
trade unions, the Catholic Church (usually too conservative to support
such actions) and politicians, from both the governing Alianza
coalition and opposition parties. Protesters likened the IMF to a
'financial dictatorship' and promised 'fiscal disobedience' by
refusing to pay their taxes, which have jumped from 8 to 22 per cent.
One of the 14 dissident members of the Alianza coalition states that
"we want to insist that the Government apply the programme for which
it was elected and not this series of adjustments that only serve to
shrink the internal market and create a recession". Guillermo Garcia
Canedo, the secretary of the Social Pastoral Argentine Episcopate of
the Catholic Church, backs the march to uphold the recommendations of
Pope John Paul II, who wants the IMF and World Bank reformed. Canedo
says, "It is essential to create unity among social sectors in order
to firmly tell the IMF we have had enough of its adjustment policy."

In a survey by the Argentina-based Centre for Public Opinion Studies,
70 per cent of those polled identify the IMF as responsible for budget
adjustments, 65 per cent believe its policies are not successful, and
88 per cent maintain that the Government should place limits on the
IMF's requirements. In a separate poll, the approval ratings for the
Government's economic policy fall from 35 per cent in January to 13
per cent in July.

9 June 2000
In continued defiance of the new IMF-prescribed labour laws, a 24-hour
general strike is supported by more than 7.2 million workers. The
President, Fernado de la Rua, is reported as saying that the
Government has no choice but to meet targets set by the IMF. The
report continues that the Government and the workers are in deadlock,
and more strikes and disruptions are inevitable.

29 August 2000
Teachers and scientists go on a one-day strike to protest against a 12
per cent cut in wages. These wage cuts are in line with IMF austerity
measures.

In August, the Financial Times reports how "a wave of discontent is
sweeping across Argentina, eroding the government's political capital
and prompting it to adopt desperate measures to create jobs and
kick-start the economy. But the measures may have backfired and put
the brakes on the economy [and] even supporters of the governing
Alliance will be looking to distance themselves from an unpopular
government." The FT fails to mention the IMF's complicity in the
Argentina's social turmoil and the Government's failed programme of
reforms.

The Argentine courts find the IMF directly responsible for Argentina's
debt. In an unprecedented judicial ruling, condemning the illegitimate
origins of the country's debt amassed during the military dictatorship
of 1976-83, Judge Jorge Ballestro says that the outstanding debt is
part of "a damaging economic policy that forced [Argentina] on its
knees through various methods, and which tended to benefit and support
private companies - national and foreign - to the detriment of
society." The ruling specifically cities the IMF as being responsible
and states that "it could not pass unnoticed among the IMF authorities
who were supervising the economic negotiations". As the hearing
concludes, more than 5,000 people gather outside the congressional
building in the capital to demonstrate their support.


Bolivia

IMF overview
Bolivia has been working with the IMF since 1985, and received an ESAF
loan for US$138 million in September 1998, which set out "plans to
privatise all remaining public enterprises", including the water
industry. In February 2000, the IMF grants another US$46.1 million
PRGF loan in addition to US$1.3 billion in debt relief under the
Enhanced HIPC Initiative. These are granted on the condition of
Bolivia's continued "progress in the implementation of structural
reforms."

December 1999/January 2000
IMF structural adjustment reforms lead to water prices in Cochabamba,
Bolivia's third largest city, rising by as much as 200 per cent,
provoking widespread protests. The average water bill is estimated to
equal 22 per cent of a monthly wage of a self-employed man and 27 per
cent for a woman. In January, an alliance of factory workers, farmers,
students and environmentalists protest against the continued high
price of water in the city. After the protesters shut down the city
for four days, the Government promises to reverse the rate increase.

February 2000
The Government cannot act on its promises due to the IMF conditions.
More than 1,000 protesters take to the streets and are confronted by a
similar number of riot police and soldiers, who disperse them with
baton charges and tear gas. More than 175 people are injured and two
are blinded. The Government again responds by promising a price freeze
until November when they promise to re-open negotiations.

April 2000
Water prices still do not change. Exasperated by the Government's lack
of commitment to alleviating the situation, more protesters take to
the streets, this time joined by more than 1,000 rural peasants
fighting the privatisation of rural water supplies. Protesters block
roads and demonstrations explode into violence. The town hall is
stormed.

The President, Hugo Banzer, declares a state of emergency, restricting
civil liberties. Protest leaders are arrested. Rubber bullets are
replaced by real ones. Bolivian television shows an army captain
firing into an unarmed crowd. Only then does the Government revoke the
concession of the multinational controlling the city's water. Reports
claim that as many as eight people are dead, including two farmers,
two soldiers, one police officer and three protesters.

In La Paz, there are also scattered protests in which 30 people are
injured and 11 students arrested. In a separate incident, hundreds of
police officers go on strike in the capital, demanding salary
increases.

An Inter Press Service report claims that the protests are the
President's "lowest point in his two years and eight months in office
because it deepened existing conflicts and created a general feeling
of contempt for the government". It also suggests that the failure of
the Government to deal with the protests democratically is an
expression of disenchantment with Bolivia's democracy. Erick Torrici
of the Andean Community of Nations and an expert at the Andean
University says, "Such as it stands, democracy is reaching its limits.
The content of recent demonstrations responds to a situation that
reveals the inadequacies of a merely electoral democracy." Maria
Teresa Segada, a specialist from the Higher University of Sans Andres,
explains further how "when the neoliberal economic model was
implemented in 1985, [with the beginning of SAPs] government leaders
asked the Bolivian people for patience and sacrifice, but now, 15
years later, patience has run out because the model did not meet
expectations."

While the country is in turmoil, however, the National Forum on
Poverty Reduction, organised by Jubilee 2000 in La Paz, undertakes the
largest public consultation exercise in the country's history,
involving 429 participants, including 90 departmental delegates, 275
representatives from 114 organisations and 64 international
representatives. The aim of the forum is to assess key areas for
poverty reduction in the country, and runs alongside the government's
National Dialogue, which is part of its PRSP consultation exercise.
Liana Cisneros from the Latin America Jubilee 2000 Network says, "The
creditors' response to Bolivia's debt crisis has consistently been
inadequate. Poverty levels in Bolivia remain devastating. The IMF
would do well to study the findings of the Forum for ideas on how to
reduce poverty."


Brazil

IMF overview
In November 1998, the IMF offers Brazil a US$18 billion stand-by loan.
Conducting their fifth review of the agreement the IMF "noted with
satisfaction" the success of the Brazilian economy, although it
"encouraged the Brazilian authorities to press ahead with their
privatisation efforts and the further liberalisation of external
trade".

April 2000
A Tribunal on Foreign Debt in Rio de Janeiro claims that "the policies
of the IMF have proved disastrous and have increased the foreign debt
even more, while imposing the endless moratorium on social spending.
Those who must pay the debt are children, workers in rural areas and
the countryside, black people, indigenous people and the environment."
The Tribunal, organised by Jubilee 2000, includes Dr Luiz Cernichiaro,
Minister of the Supreme Court, Federal Judge Dra Maccalos and other
prominent lawyers. It has the backing of trade unions, the Catholic
Church and the Landless Movement.

September 2000
A referendum asking whether Brazil should discontinue IMF reforms is
backed by more than a million people. Organised by the National
Council of Bishops and Jubilee 2000, the 'unofficial' referendum is a
marked success. On the 7 September, to mark the end of six days of
voting and Brazil's Independence Day, a demonstration draws thousands
of protesters under the banner of Cry of the Excluded. All the main
cities in Brazil are "crammed", say reports, with more than 100,000
people in Sao Paulo. The Government had previously called the
referendum "stupid" and an isolated project undertaken by
"minorities".


Colombia

IMF overview
In September 1999, the IMF approves a three-year credit worth US$2.7
billion in support of "the government's structural reform agenda",
which includes policies to "downsize the public sector, mainly through
privatisation, and reduce public sector spending". In the annual
review of this agreement, the IMF "welcomed the continuation of the
recovery of Colombia's economic activity, despite the challenges posed
by the political and security situation", and describes the importance
of dealing with the programme's "social fall-out" if private and
foreign investment is to continue.

3 August 2000
About 15,000 workers go on a 24-hour general strike to protest against
IMF-imposed austerity measures being implemented by President Andres
Pastrana. Colombia has the highest unemployment rate in Latin America,
with 20 per cent of the population without work. The recent 2001
budget is announced by the Finance Minister as the budget of "sweat
and tears", with 5,000 public sector jobs to go and wage increases to
be kept below the rate of inflation. There will be little compensation
of workers as the Government continues its cutbacks on social security
provision. The conditions laid out in the US$2.7 billion IMF loan
require Colombia to further open its economy, privatise public
companies and cut back spending.


Costa Rica

IMF overview
In 1995, Costa Rica was granted an IMF stand-by credit for US$78
million on the condition that "private sector participation in areas
previously reserved for the public sector is increased" and "a far
greater role by foreign investors in areas such as electricity
generation, insurance and banking" is provided for. In the 1999 annual
review of Costa Rica's economic programme, the IMF urges the "prompt
approval of the draft legislation to open up electricity generation,
telecommunications, and the insurance sector to private sector
participation as essential."

Often known as the Switzerland of the Americas, Costa Rica has a sound
reputation for democracy, peace and good welfare provision. The Costa
Ricans have managed to by-pass much of the internal conflict and
strife which has racked their neighbours. As The Economist points out,
"Costa Rica has other advantages, rare in the region. These include a
democratic tradition, respect for the rule of law and a well-educated
workforce."

However, market reforms, bolstered by the IMF, seem to threaten this
previously peaceful and democratic nation. Since Congress passed a law
allowing the state telecommunications company, the Costa Rican
Electricity Institute (ICE) to be privatised, there have been a series
of strikes and demonstrations. ICE stands as a national symbol of the
welfare state and many believe this is the beginning of further
measures to privatise Costa Rica's assets. The fate of other reforms
hinge on the success or failure of the ICE privatisation - the
Government already has plans for the state banks and private
insurance.

March 2000
The introduction of a bill outlining the IMF-prescribed privatisation
of ICE leads to widespread protests. During protests on 16 March, one
person is killed in Ochomogo, five are wounded, and several injured,
including 30 police officers, as riot police clash with demonstrators.
At least 50 student protesters are arrested. Television images show
police beating youths who are trying to run away. In Perez Zeledon,
five demonstrators are wounded by police gunfire, 30 police officers
are hit with stones, and 50 students are arrested. Police report that
40 protests have taken place on 21 March all around the country. On 23
March, 10,000 marchers descend on the presidential residence demanding
the withdrawal of the bill. In a clash with university students in a
San Jose suburb, police beat demonstrators and arrest 52 students.

April 2000
A protest is met with "unaccustomed brutality by riot police". Rodolfo
Cerdas, a political analyst, says that "these protests are a struggle
to elevate the quality of Costa Rican democracy. We have a politics of
ivory towers. People think politicians only have their own interests
in mind." Opinion polls support his views. A University of Costa Rica
survey finds that 53 per cent oppose the ICE reform while only 20 per
cent support it; 92 per cent say they should have been consulted and
84 per cent believe there should be a referendum.


Ecuador

IMF overview
In April 2000, the IMF grants a stand-by loan worth US$304 million
which will mobilise over $1.7 billion in additional resources from
other creditors. The agreement notes that "the programme [of reforms]
is very demanding and successful implementation will require firm
resolve on the part of the authorities, and the support of the
Congress and the public at large". The reforms include the
dollarisation of the economy, wage restraint, the removal of subsidies
and "for important structural reforms in the labour market, the oil
sector, and privatisation". In the first review of this agreement, the
"directors were encouraged by the steps taken to inject more
flexibility in the labour market, increase private sector
participation in the economy, as well as the commitment to phase out
price regulations on domestic fuels and electricity. It was also noted
that a more liberal trade regime would complement these reforms."

7 January 2000
Delays in negotiations with the IMF leave the Government without the
means to reactivate the economy. The deepening economic crisis, and
the social instability it causes, results in the elected President,
Jamil Mahaud, declaring a state of emergency to contain growing
protests. The crisis, which has been escalating for a year, leads to
consumer prices rising by more than 60 per cent and a 7 per cent
decline in economic growth. Confidence in the Government falls
sharply, with the national currency, the sucre, losing 21 per cent of
its value. The state of emergency allows the administration to avert
demonstrations which it believes are "interested in destabilising the
government", preventing groups from congregating and giving the
authorities power of dispersal.

10 January 2000
Lawrence Summers, US Treasury Secretary, pledges full support for
Ecuador, saying that Bill Clinton has phoned Mahaud to offer his
support in the growing climate of instability. Summers says that the
"achievement of stability and confidence in Ecuador was very much in
the interests of the US" and that the IMF is likely to send a team of
delegates to the country.

In Quito, military chiefs publicly throw their support behind the
President, dispelling international fears of a coup attempt. They
reject "any attempt to break the legal order" and call for a solution
"within the constitutional and democratic framework".

15 January 2000
Organised by the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples, 40,000 Indians
plan a week of protests, including a march on Quito and other major
cities, against the Government's IMF-prescribed policy reforms.
Ecuador's Government deploys 35,000 soldiers and police to control the
situation.

The protesters call for the President's resignation, an end to the
reforms urged by the IMF, including the dollarisation of the economy,
and for an end to economic instability. Blanca Chancosa, one of the
leaders, says that the President "has not had the political will to
fix the country. He does not have the capacity. Let him step aside so
that the people can designate other persons more honest and with a
will to carry out a new form of government."

22 January 2000
About 3,000 protesters occupy Ecuador's Congress building while more
than 10,000 protest outside. The involvement of military guards, which
allow the protesters inside, fuels speculation of a possible coup
attempt despite reassurances from Carlos Mendoza, head of the armed
forces. Protesters also surrounded the supreme court despite police
attempts to disperse them with tear gas. In Guayaquil, Ecuador's
second largest city, demonstrations become violent, leading to several
injuries. Protesters claim that the Government's plan to scrap the
national currency and adopt the dollar will further impoverish the
country. A statement from the White House rejects "the actions of
those who have occupied the Ecuadorian National Congress and are
seeking to establish an unconstitutional regime". Other nations across
the continent also condemn the actions of protesters claiming that
they are tantamount to an attempted military coup.

Mahaud flees the Presidential Palace and the military take power. With
an armed guard of troops loyal to him, Mahaud goes into hiding after a
week of demonstrations and a retraction of Mendoza's previous
statement in support of the government.

23 January 2000
Mahaud's vice-president, Gustavo Noboa, becomes the new President in a
special session of Congress in which the military junta hands back
power. However, leaders of the protest movement oppose Noboa's
succession, saying he is in the pockets of the IMF and the US. Antonio
Vargas, one of the indigenous leaders, denounces Mendoza for betraying
the protesters, who want to create a new form of government to target
corruption and poverty. He also says that Noboa has only been
installed after pressure from Washington.

Noboa confirms that he will continue with the IMF-advised reforms and
hopes to bring the country back to stability, especially with the
backing of the military. The Financial Times suggests that Noboa will
enjoy more support from Congress and from business, especially after
the "country's brief flirtation with a return to a dictatorship after
20 years". However, the report says that unless the new President wins
the support of the protesters, who oppose the IMF reforms, he too will
face a rough ride.

March 2000
In order to qualify for an IMF loan, the Government introduces a
package of new laws to reform the labour market and the financial
sector, increase privatisation efforts, provide oil pipeline permits
and, controversially, dollarise the economy.

May 2000
The National Educators Union goes on strike for five weeks over the
proposed IMF cuts in spending and salaries. Noboa says he will take a
tough stance: "I'm willing to go all the way with this. If they want
to strike for a year, let them do it. We're not going to back down."
Protests by teachers in Quito are dispersed by riot police using tear
gas.

June 2000
Noboa grants an amnesty for all civilians and military personnel who
took part in the military coup in January. He explains that the
amnesty is an effort to keep the peace in Ecuador. The Government
removes fuel price subsidies in line with their IMF agreement,
resulting in the rise of petrol prices. Noboa tries to explain to
critics that "we did the best we could for all the Ecuadorian people,
and in accordance with the IMF".

15 June 2000
Ecuador's new President faces his first general strike, organised by
trade unions and church groups, against continued IMF economic
reforms. Wilson Alverez, president of the Workers United Front, a
union umbrella group, says, "We're going to take to the streets to
reject the economic package, reject the miserable increases in
salaries and the hikes in fuel and electricity costs." Among those
striking are more than 30,000 doctors, who stage a 72-hour sit-down
protest, as well as teachers, oil workers, and other public sector
workers.

In Quito, protesters who try to march on the government palace are met
with tear gas and riot police. One passer-by receives a bullet wound.
In Guayaquil, a bomb explodes outside Citibank and demonstrators are
dispersed with tear gas.

On a trip to London, Nina Pacari Vega, the Pachakutic leader (the
political party set up by indigenous groups), says that the economic
reforms are unconstitutional and have triggered sharp price increases.
"Dollarisation isn't the most viable way to bring about economic
recovery."

26 June 2000
The Financial Times reports that Noboa was recently visited by Thomas
Pickering, the US state department number three, and by Cesar Gaviria,
the head of the Organisation of American States, who both call on the
armed forces to uphold the constitution, and for certain military
officers to face discipline after January's events. The report also
outlines how the President is trying to win political support for the
IMF-imposed economic reforms, promising consultation with indigenous
groups and highlighting the benefits reforms will bring to the
country. But opponents of the reforms remain entrenched and want plans
for dollarisation and privatisation scrapped. Noboa sees an 8 per cent
drop in the polls, with only 43 per cent of the population backing his
Government.

7 August 2000
Passage of the IMF dollarisation bill through Congress continues to
provoke controversy and results in violent exchanges and physical
fighting in the Congress chamber. The bill causes great rifts within
parties and between members of Congress.

10 August 2000
Noboa fails to gain military support to dissolve Congress and end
political wrangling about the IMF reforms. Although military leaders
reject the plan to dissolve Congress, the attempt by Noboa shows he is
increasingly worried by political and economic instability. In a
separate move, however, Noboa wins collective agreement for his
cabinet's resignation.

29 August 2000
The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples (Conaie), which was
instrumental in the downfall of the last President, calls for a
popular uprising against Noboa. Condemning the IMF reforms, and saying
that Ecuador will become a colony of the US, the organisation plans a
series of strikes.

9 September 2000
Ecuador formally adopts the dollar as its currency. The IMF states
that "dollarisation has proceeded rapidly and has calmed the financial
markets".

12 September 2000
Ecuador's transition to the dollar turns into chaos as, due to bad
planning, many people are left without the means to buy or sell.
Although trading is now meant to be in dollars, many small shops and
stall-holders have been left without coins to exchange. Roberto
Aguirre, an economist, says that the Government has rushed
dollarisation and has not planned the switch thoroughly enough. "There
has been a lack of foresight by the Government in not providing coins
in time and in sufficient amounts."


Honduras

IMF overview
The IMF grants a US$21 million loan on 7 June 2000 under the PRGF. The
IMF urges the Honduras authorities "to proceed quickly with structural
reforms, especially the privatisation of telecommunications and
electricity distribution and the reform of the social security and
pension system". On 10 July 2000, Honduras receives US$900 million in
debt relief under the Enhanced HIPC Initiative in "recognition by the
international community of the country's progress in implementing
reforms in macroeconomic, structural and social policies".

May - July 2000
A series of strikes hit the country, demanding an end to IMF public
service cuts. On 12 May, 8,000 hospital workers strike to demand a
pay-rise, affecting 28 hospitals and 500 clinics. Riot police are
deployed in and around public hospitals to maintain order. On 26 June,
thousands of workers take part in a national strike demanding an
increase in the minimum wage. Protesters block main roads and the
state-run port company, and a number of banana plantations are closed.
On 27 July, thousands of secondary school teachers go on strike over
unpaid wages, affecting about one million pupils. Teachers have not
been paid since February.

August 2000
A 24-hour general strike on the 24 August opposes IMF backed economic
reforms. The Government's plans to privatise state-owned electricity,
telecommunications and social security sectors to comply with IMF
requirements cause disruption to education, transport and health
services. Organised by the Popular Bloc, and comprising farmers,
workers and students, the protest closes universities, affecting
60,000 students, and blocks services at hospitals and major highways.


Kenya

IMF overview
On the 28 July 2000, the IMF resumes lending to Kenya with a US$198
million PRGF loan. The loan is in recognition of the Government's
renewed programme to address the causes of financial instability and
low growth, namely "stop-go macroeconomic policies [and] slow
structural reform". These policies include "macroeconomic and
structural reforms civil service reform [and] privatisation".

April-May 2000
A peaceful demonstration calling for debt relief and an end to IMF
conditions ends in violence and arrests of church leaders; 63
protesters, including 13 nuns and 2 priests, are arrested at a debt
cancellation march in Nairobi. The march, organised by the Kenyan Debt
Relief Network (KENDREN), a network of church groups, human rights
organisations and the Green Belt Movement, was peacefully making its
way to the offices of the World Bank's Representative to present a
letter to end Kenya's debt. Riot police arrive at the end of the march
and "broke up the protest with clubs and tear gas, violently hauling
marchers into a waiting vehicle". There are several injuries,
including children and an Islamic sheik (priest). Spokespersons among
the group say it is the first time the Kenyan authorities have dared
to jail a Roman Catholic priest and nuns. The protesters are
eventually released on bail and, at their court hearing on the 22 May,
the charges are dropped.

Brother Andre of the Divine Word Missionaries, one of the arrested
marchers, says in a recent letter, "The IMF and World Bank have power
over the financial decisions of poor countries. Often poor countries
have totally lost their autonomy. They are often recolonised, with the
powerful countries dictating the terms."

The Stakeholders Support Group (SSG), formed by Kenyan opposition
party members, lawyers and NGOs, protests against the IMF's resumption
of lending to the Government, saying the administration has not made
the necessary reforms to stamp out corruption. The Government claims
it has made all the reforms required by the IMF and World Bank, but
the SSG wants any new aid tied to constitutional reform. There are
fears that President Daniel Arap Moi will try to hold on to power
after his term of office runs out in 2002, and the SSG accuses the
British government of pressuring the IMF to resume lending in order to
keep him in power.

August 2000
President Daniel Arap Moi complains that the conditions imposed by the
IMF and World Bank for their new aid programme to Kenya are too harsh:
"We have been paying our debts for the past nine years but have not
received anything in return. Our economic growth will definitely slow
down as a result of the conditions. These conditions are the toughest
ever imposed on Kenya."

The IMF senior advisor for Africa, Jose Fajgenbaum, defends the terms
of the loan approved by the IMF in late July. He says, "Complaints
that the loan conditions infringed on Kenya's sovereignty were an
exaggeration", adding that "the reporting requirements attached to the
aid package were normal. They were the same as had been expected of
Kenya as part of previous IMF aid programmes."


Malawi

IMF overview
The IMF grants US$10.6 million credit on 25 October 1999 under ESAF.
The Malawi government is warned in the agreement that "structural
reforms will be critical in achieving success and in accelerating the
mobilisation of committed external assistance. Directors [of the IMF]
urge the [Malawi] authorities to accelerate the pace of structural
reforms."

15 May 2000
Protests opposing IMF conditions end in violence. Trade unionists and
human-rights activists try to march to the New State House, where a
Consultative Group of western donor countries are meeting government
officials. The protesters, carrying placards protesting against the
effects of SAPs, are stopped by police. They are then dispersed by
tear gas.


Nigeria

IMF overview
On 4 August 2000, the IMF approves a stand-by credit worth US$1,031
million for Nigeria's 2000-01 economic programme. The IMF notes "An
acceleration of the implementation of structural reforms is urgently
needed, including to tackle serious deficiencies in the provision of
power, telecommunications and petroleum that are obstacles to growth."
While stressing the need for an adequate privatisation framework, they
urge that "there should be no delays in this urgent task". They warn
that this "will require diligence and resolute efforts by the
authorities to overcome evident weaknesses in institutional capacity".

Despite the democratic elections in May 1999 of Nigeria's new
President, Olusegen Obasanjo, the country has continued to experience
protests and riots calling for an end to IMF-induced fuel price rises.

December 1999-January 2000
Civil society groups show dismay that their elected president is
continuing with the unpopular IMF-advised policies. Nigerian
newspapers report the "same old story", with Obasanjo planning to
deregulate the oil sector and raise petrol prices.

M Arigbede, national co-ordinator of the Nigerian Poverty Eradication
Forum, says that Obasanjo is succumbing to IMF and World Bank pressure
to implement the policy: "Obasanjo is pretending that he is taking a
decision in the interest of the people. That is deceitful.
Deregulation is going to compound the poverty situation
immensely."Adams Oshiomhole, a union leader, says, "We are on a
mission to rescue the president [who has] been hijacked by the IMF and
the World Bank. This country belongs to Nigerians."

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) takes 5,000 workers on a march to
show their opposition to the deregulation of the oil sector. They
march on Aso Rock, where they are attacked by armed police. Gani
Fawehimi, a lawyer and human rights activist, says, "It is sad and
ironic that Obasanjo's regime, which was brought into power by
democratic process, is now unleashing autocratic violence on the
representatives of labour who are protesting against the plan of the
regime to increase petroleum from January 2000. The employment of
force by the Nigerian Police, which is directly under the president,
against unarmed protesters, amounted to a violation of the
constitution of this country, particularly the fundamental rights of
peaceful protesters."

Previously, the National Economic Intelligence Committee warned that
deregulating the oil sector "may compound rather than relieve the
situation" and suggested a number of measures to prevent "importers
making huge profits at the expense of the country and its ordinary
citizens". These include consultation with labour representatives and
the passing of an appropriate legislative framework to channel
benefits of deregulation back into the country. It stresses that
raising the price of oil will aggravate an already volatile situation.

June 2000
The Government continues with the IMF-advised fuel price hike, and in
response Nigeria is crippled by the most serious general strike since
the end of military rule. Oil workers are joined by public sector and
transport staff while Lagos port and highways are blockaded, and both
international and domestic flights disrupted, and all petrol stations
closed. Sporadic violence is reported across Nigeria's cities, leading
to several deaths. In Abuja, two police stations are burned down.

Kwesi Owusu, Head of the Jubilee 2000 Africa Initiative, says,
"Popular outrage alone does not change the minds of governments under
such tremendous pressure from the IMF to implement stringent measures
that are at odds with what this country and its people desperately
need." He adds that "they [the IMF] are now hell bent on squeezing the
last drop of blood out of a new democratic government that is
struggling to restore social and economic stability".

July 2000
The Nigerian House of Representatives adopts a non-binding motion
urging the federal government to suspend all activities in respect to
the IMF loan. The speaker, Umar Ghali Na'Abba, calls for a full
disclosure of information about the IMF and its relationship with
Nigeria: "It is only then that we can be properly equipped to delve
into these things."

16 August 2000
Despite securing the IMF loan, the Nigerian Assembly is concerned
about further IMF-advised privatisation. The Assembly starts a
"privatisation consultation", stating that the previous privatisation
programme was inadequate due to the "absence of a complete and
properly attuned legal framework". Nze Chidi Duru, the chairman of the
House Committee on Privatisation, also observes that "the stringent
opposition to privatisation was generally from workers and the labour
unions [but] today the array of complaints has broadened to include
many other shares of opinion including estate surveyors and valuers,
engineers, shareholders and many others". In a linked venture, the
Assembly introduces a bill to repeal the previous privatisation laws
and "for the suspension of the privatisation exercise until an
adequate legal framework was provided".

James Mutethia, a Nigerian journalist, notes that "African countries
are being asked to impose austerity measures on the populations, to
sell state-owned enterprises to foreign multinationals and give up
more and more of their political independence - those who accept the
conditions are offered more loans and shown as good examples to the
rest. Those who do not are subjected to more subtle economic
pressure." The report continues, "In order to qualify for more aid and
loans, the governments in these countries have implemented one
austerity measure after another. The governments have only refused to
implement more measures when it became politically explosive with
workers organising protests and strikes. Yet the IMF has argued that
they have not done enough. The upshot of the austerity measures has
been that these governments have diverted money from development and
expenditure on social services to debt repayments."


Paraguay

IMF overview
In last year's annual review of Paraguay's economic programme and
performance, the IMF expresses its disappointment at the Government's
"lacklustre performance" resulting from "the failure to implement
needed structural reforms". They offer the following advice:
"Directors underscored the importance of sequencing structural reforms
appropriately while proceeding with the necessary changes in the civil
service and the social security system. They also expressed concern
over the high level of the minimum wage vis-a-vis Paraguay's major
trading partners, and noted that the rigidities embodied in present
labour market arrangements would become more evident as the economy
opened itself to world trade. Directors therefore urged the
authorities to proceed with the necessary labour reforms."

28 September 1999
In an address to the IMF and World Bank, Federico Antonio Zayas
Chirife, Governor of the Bank for Paraguay, states how "we [Paraguay]
wish to reaffirm here today that the Paraguayan people are committed
to defending our Republic's democracy and its institutions and are
willing to undertake a successful structural transformation of our
society and national economy."

June 2000
Protesters clash with police in demonstrations against
'non-negotiable' IMF reforms. Protesters call a 48-hour general strike
against the Government's plans to privatise its telephone, water and
railroad companies. In Asuncion, over 20 people are injured and five
arrested as riot police attack them with truncheons. In a linked
protest in the east district, 300 protesters are dispersed with water
canons while two buses are set on fire at the bus terminal. Nearly
half of the capital's shops are closed and residents are transported
in military vehicles as protesters block public transport routes. A
presidential spokesperson says that the policies were 'non-negotiable'
because the Government needs to meet IMF targets to access up to $400
million in loans from the World Bank.


South Africa

IMF overview
In this year's annual review of South Africa's economic policies, the
IMF notes "the extremely high level of unemployment" and urges the
Government to accelerate "structural reforms, increase domestic
investment, attract foreign investment, and enhance efficiency". This
challenge will require "faster and deeper implementation of the
reforms, most notably in the areas of labour market reform, trade
liberalisation, and privatisation."

1 February 2000
The Congress of South African trade unions (COSATU) begins a programme
of mass actions to protest against rising unemployment and labour
market reforms. The strikes are planned to stretch over five weeks and
be staggered over different sectors, beginning with automobile,
textile, metal and leather industries and followed by the public
sector. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, COSATU has helped
introduce labour laws which protect the right of workers. But recent
attempts by the Government, encouraged by the IMF, to implement wage
restraint and labour flexibility - in order to attract foreign
investment - have meet widespread opposition. The unions believe that
the Government is liberalising the economy too quickly without making
adequate provision for redundancies and job maximisation.

Gerrie Bezuidenhout, policy executive at SACOB, the South African
Chamber of Business, says, "The government is sticking to what is
generally seen as sound economic policy but the improvement in the
economy has not translated into jobs." Unemployment is estimated at 35
per cent.

Recent Government reforms have been praised by the IMF but have put
increasing pressure on the alliance between COSATU, the ruling ANC
party and the South African Communist Party, risking its continued
stability. Government plans include the amending of labour laws, which
the ruling alliance has spent the last five years putting in place,
saying they are too "worker-friendly" and discourage investment and
employment. Opposition leaders believe that President Mbeki's hard
line on leftwing labour activists, his support for inflation targeting
and his plans to accelerate the restructuring of state assets will
jeopardise "the glue that holds together the alliance of the ANC".

16 April 2000
Protest outside the meeting of IMF and government officials. One of
the protesters, Trevor Ngwane, a city councillor from the Soweto
township, says, "Many of those debts were used to buy weapons and
suppress the people during apartheid. So we are paying twice for it -
once with our lives, and now with an inability to fund critical social
services. Instead of building health clinics the Government is selling
off zoos and libraries to stay in the good graces of the IMF."

August 2000
South Africa's Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel, says that the main
challenge for developing countries is to create an alternative model
to global trade and financial institutions such as the World Bank and
IMF. Manuel is chair of the 2000 Annual Meetings in Prague and says he
will use the opportunity to help the cause of developing countries.
But he also notes that "no one has come up with an alternative model
so far", and until developing countries suggest ways of reforming the
institutions, they shouldn't "whinge".


Zambia
IMF overview
The IMF grants a three-year ESAF loan worth US$349 million on 26 March
1999 on the condition that "the Government will increase reforms in
the areas of privatisation, public service, and monetary and banking
supervision". On 27 July 2000, the IMF approves an additional US$13.2
million PRGF loan. The agreement affirms that "the [Zambian]
authorities intend to pursue a prudent monetary policy and to limit
the credit to public enterprises [and] complete the transition to a
private-led economy, including the privatisation of the remaining
public utilities and the operations of the oil sector."

9 February 2000
Zambia's President, Frederick Chiluba, blames the IMF for the economic
problems of his country, stating that reforms which were meant to
bring prosperity to the country have only brought unemployment and a
rise in poverty levels. He says that western countries have told
Zambia "to do certain things" to help the economy, which would lead to
increased economic stability. He adds, "Then we are told, No, No, No,
Africa needs to embrace the spirit of partnership with NGOs, but where
I come from, ZCTU also wants increased wages. And then the IMF says do
not give them, we do not know which way to go. The problem we have in
Africa is that we are rushing reforms as if that is the only panacea
to the problems." He says that if reforms are rushed and not
understood by the people, they may not help at all.

26 April 2000
Scores of protesters, demanding an end to IMF SAPs, are dispersed by
armed riot police in Lusaka, Zambia's capital, after trying to picket
the hotel were IMF and government officials are meeting. Organised by
a leading civil society group, Women for Change (WfC), the protesters
blame the IMF and World Bank for continued poverty in their country.
"The IMF are killing us, especially women and children," says Emily
Sikazwe of WfC. In a separate report, Sikazwe explains, "If you want
to see the impact of structural adjustment on Zambia go to the
University Teaching Hospital", the capital's largest hospital. The
conditions are awful, she says, and the wards are full of BIDs
(Brought In Dead). She goes on to explain how IMF and World Bank
privatisation policies have resulted in more than 60,000 people losing
their jobs and 420,000 falling into destitution. She says that "SAPs
cause poverty".

August 2000
The IMF urges Zambia to put economy ahead of politics. IMF First
Deputy Managing Director, Stanley Fischer, says that Zambia faces hard
decisions ahead of next year's elections and urges the Government not
to put politics ahead of economic sense. "I leave Zambia optimistic
but cautious. It is hard to take bold economic decisions in an
election year. It is easy to throw away what you have built in five
years to achieve short-term gain when the long run needs are very
clear."


Further information

Introduction

'Unwrapping the PRSP: can the IMF deliver its poverty reduction
promises?', World Development Movement, June 2000.

'Still Sapping the poor: a critique of IMF poverty reduction
strategies', World Development Movement, June 2000.

Argentina
'IMF approves US$7.2 billion three-year stand-by credit for
Argentina', IMF Press Release, 10 March 2000.

'Argentina memorandum of economic policies', IMF Press Release, 14
February 2000.

'Argentina leader gets tough on unions', Financial Times, 20 January
2000.

'Argentina's labour reform laws passed', Financial Times, 28 April
2000.

'Urgent social demands weigh upon new president', IPS, 17 May 2000.

'Argentine unions call for strike to protest IMF austerity plan', AFP,
31 May 2000.

'Government adjustments trigger massive protest', IPS, 31 May 2000.

'Argentina swept by wave of despair over economy', Financial Times, 17
August 2000.

'Massive support for Argentine general strike', BBC News Online, 9
June 2000.

'Argentine teachers and scientists strike', BBC News Online, 29 August
2000.

'Landmark court ruling condemns Argentina's illegitimate debt',
Jubilee 2000, 7 August 2000.

Bolivia
'IMF approves three-year arrangement under the ESAF for Bolivia', IMF
Press Release, 18 September 1998.

'IMF approves second annual PRGF loan for Bolivia', IMF Press Release,
7 February 2000.

'IMF and IDA support US$1.3 billion debt service relief eligibility
for Bolivia under enhanced HIPC', IMF Press Release, 8 February 2000.

'IMF approves second annual PRGF loan for Bolivia', IMF Press Release,
7 February 2000.

'Cochabamba - water war', Public Services International Research Unit
Reports, June 2000.

'Clashes in Bolivia', BBC News Online, 5 February 2000.

'Scattered protests in Bolivia', BBC News Online, 12 April 2000.

'Bolivia protests claim further lives', BBC News Online, 10 April
2000.

'Banzar, the siege and the market', IPS, 21 April 2000.

'Bolivian civil society asserts demand for involvement in fight for
debt cancellation and poverty reduction', Jubilee 2000, 16 May 2000.

Brazil
'Letter of intent from Brazil', IMF Press Release, 20 April 2000.

'IMF completes Brazil Fifth Review', IMF Press Release, 31 May 2000.

'Brazil says: take the creditors to court for causing the debt
crisis', Jubilee 2000, 29 April 2000.

'One million vote on debt in Brazil', Jubilee 2000, 8 September 2000.

'Brazilian campaigners hold referendum on debt', Jubilee 2000, 1
September 2000.

Colombia
'IMF approves three-year extended fund facility for Colombia', IMF
Press Release, 20 December 1999.

'IMF completes first Colombia review', IMF Press Release, 7 September
2000.

Costa Rica
'IMF approves stand-by credit for Costa Rica', IMF Press Release, 29
November 1995.

'IMF concludes Article IV consultation with Costa Rica', IMF Press
Release, 26 October 1999.

'Chip shop afire in Costa Rica', The Economist, 8 January 2000.

'Costa Rica divided as market reforms do what wars could not,'
Financial Times, 6 April 2000.

Ecuador
'IMF approves stand-by credit for Ecuador', IMF Press Release, 19
April 2000.

'IMF completes first Ecuador review', IMF Press Release, 28 August
2000.

'Ecuador president imposes state of emergency', Financial Times, 7
January 2000.

'Summers promises help for Ecuador', Financial Times, 10 January 2000.

'Ecuador Indians planning massive protests', Financial Times, 15
January 2000

'Ecuador Congress overrun as Indian protests mounts', Financial Times,
22 January 2000.

'Ecuador's president flees palace amid riots', Financial Times, 22
January 2000.

'Ecuador Indians angry at betrayal', BBC News Online, 23 January 2000.

'Ecuador leader pledges stability', Financial Times, 25 January 2000.

'IMF loan to Ecuador', SAP Alert, Globalisation Challenge Initiative,
20 June 2000.

'Noboa adopts tough stance', Financial Times, 6 June 2000.

'Ecuador faces new economic protests', BBC News Online, 15 June 2000.

'Strike against dollarization and IMF', Weekly News Update, Nicaragua
Solidarity Network New York, 18 June 2000.

'Ecuador Indians fight dollarisation', Financial Times, 14 June 2000.

'Noboa urges compromise', Financial Times, 26 June 2000.

'Key Ecuador Bill under the gun', Financial Times, 7 August 2000.

'Ecuador military thwarts Noboa', Financial Times, 10 August 2000.

'Ecuador's Indians call for uprising', BBC News Online, 29 August
2000.

'Ecuador switches to US dollar', BBC New Online, 9 September 2000.

'Coin shortage as Ecuador adopts dollar', BBC News Online, 12
September 2000.

Honduras
'IMF completes second Honduras review and approves US$21 million
loan', IMF Press Release, 7 June 2000.

'IMF and World Bank support debt relief for Honduras', IMF Press
Release, 10 July 2000.

'National Strike protests IMF privatisation demands', AFP, 29 August
2000.

Kenya
'IMF approves poverty reduction and growth facility loan for Kenya',
IMF, 28 July 2000.

'Jubilee 2000 campaigns protest trial of Kenyan debt campaigners',
Jubilee 2000, 18 May 2000.

'Kenyan debt demonstrators rejoice as charges for 'illegal' march are
dropped', Jubilee 2000, 25 May 2000.

'Kenyans reject new World Bank and IMF lending', News Updates, Bretton
Woods Project, April 2000.

'How African politics consumes its children', The East African
(Nairobi), 30 August 2000.

'World Bank pushes Kenya to privatise power companies', The East
African, 30 August 2000.

Malawi
'IMF completes review and approves US$10.6 million credit tranche for
Malawi', IMF Press Release, 25 October 1999.

'Jubilee 2000 campaigners meet donors in Malawi as protesters face
tear gas', Jubilee 2000, 26 May 2000.

Nigeria
'IMF approves stand-by credit for Nigeria', IMF Press Release, 4
August 2000.

'A matter of time', Newswatch Nigeria, 12 January 2000.

'IMF oil price increase fuels protests', News Updates, Bretton Woods
Project, April 2000.

'The oil price hike blunder', Newswatch Nigeria, 22 January 2000.

'Nigeria in grip of general strike', Financial Times, 10 June 2000.

'The People of Nigeria resist the IMF', Stop-IMF email list, 19 June
2000.

'Nigerian parliament rejects IMF', News Updates, Bretton Woods
Project, August 2000.

'National Assembly initiates, debates new privatisation bill', Nigeria
Guardian, 16 August 2000.

'Africa and globalisation', Nigeria Guardian, 15 August 2000.

Paraguay
'IMF concludes Article IV consultation with Paraguay', IMF Press
Release, 29 January 1999.

'Statement by the Hon Federico Antonio Zayas Chirife, Governor of the
Bank for Paraguay', Joint Annual Discussion of the Board of Governors,
28-30 September 1999.

'Violence against strikers protesting IMF privatisation', Stop-IMF
email list, 25 June 2000.

South Africa
'IMF concludes Article IV consultation with South Africa', IMF Press
Release, 10 March 2000.

'South African unions in unemployment protest,' Financial Times, 1
February 2000.

'Mbeki shifts the emphasis to business', Financial Times, 1 February
2000.

'South African bitterly criticizes IMF policies', Chicago Tribune, 14
April 2000.

'Searching for a workable solution', IPS, 29 August 2000.

Zambia
'IMF approves ESAF loan for Zambia', IMF Press Release, 26 March 1999.

'IMF completes first review of Zambia under PRGF-supported programme
and approves US$13.2 million disbursement', IMF Press Release, 27 July
2000.

'IMF reforms have brought poverty', The Post of Zambia, 9 February
2000.

'IMF faces new round of protests', One World News Service, 26 April
2000.

'Letter from Zambia', The Nation, 14 February 2000.

'IMF urges Zambia to put economics before politics', Development News,
World Bank, 7 August 2000.







From zapata at sezampro.yu  Fri Sep 29 08:46:20 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 16:46:20 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Fw:      [CHOMSKY] Herman on Yugo Elections
Message-ID: <000801c02a24$77179f80$b2bd6ac2@k382>

> ====
> 
> UNCLE CHUTZPAH AND HIS MEDIA MINIONS ON  THE YUGOSLAV AND
> OTHER ELECTIONS
> By Edward S. Herman
> 
> There is no better place than foreign elections to observe
> the brazenness of U.S. interventionism abroad, its crude
> double standard as between targets and client states, and
> the mainstream media's propaganda service in support of
> their country's imperial policies. One feature of this
> service is the media's rush to focus attention on elections
> that officials declare important. Thus when the Reagan
> administration was trying to validate its intervention in El
> Salvador by an election to demonstrate that Salvadorans
> approved our local political instrument, some 700
> journalists attended that election in 1982; and attention to
> Salvadoran elections only ended after the United States had
> accomplished its purpose there of ending a radical threat
> and installing a neoliberal regime. With the leadership of
> Yugoslavia now a target of U.S. destabilization policies,
> once again the media jump to attention.
> Of critical importance, also, is the fact that not only is
> the direction of attention determined by the official
> agenda, that agenda also dictates the character and specific
> content of media coverage. As their government assumes the
> right to intervene in foreign elections, the media also take
> this as a given, and rarely if ever mention the fact that
> foreign money pumped into U.S. election campaigns is
> prohibited by U.S. law. This was never discussed during the
> intensive U.S. intervention in the Nicaraguan elections in
> the 1980s, nor has it been mentioned in connection with the
> open expenditure of at least $77 million in the Yugoslavian
> election this month. This silence represents a media
> internalization of official imperial arrogance and
> privelege.
> 
> Both the EU and United States have promised that sanctions
> would be eliminated if Slobodan Milosevic is ousted by
> Yugoslav voters. The United States and Nato have also
> engaged in sabre rattling, with reinforcement of military
> forces in the Mediterranean and troop exercises in
> neighboring states like Croatia. This is justified on the
> ground of the threat of an unlevel playing field and
> possible fraud by Milosevic, but of course these
> interventions could be said to make the playing field
> unlevel, and the policy of conditioning the removal of
> sanctions on a specific election result is a form of
> blackmail. When George Bush did the same in 1990, promising
> to lift sanctions and call off the contras only if
> Nicaraguan voters voted the Sandinistas out of office in
> favor of the U.S. choice, the mainstream media never once
> suggested that this threat was blackmail and perhaps immoral
> and vicious. And here again in the case of the Yugoslavian
> election, a blackmail threat and other forms of intervention
> are seen as perfectly reasonable.
> 
> In covering the Yugoslavian election the U.S. mainstream
> media have repeatedly voiced the fear of U.S. officials and
> opponents of Milosevic that the election was being rigged
> and that the demonized leader threatened to steal the
> election by fraud (e.g., Erlanger, "Fears Deepen Milosevic
> Will Rig Vote," NYT, Sept. 24; Fleishman, "Under the world's
> scrutiny, Yugoslavs go to the polls: Some fear Milosevic
> will try stealing the election," Phila. Inquirer, Sept. 24).
> This is a possibility, but was based on no evidence offered
> in the media or on the scene in Yugoslavia. Two Canadian
> observer delegates found the electoral conditions there as
> open and free of any police interference as in any Western
> elections, and delegate observers were free to visit any
> polling places and representatives of all parties were
> active at such polling places. The basic conditions of a
> free election were much more closely met in Yugoslavia than
> in El Salvador in 1982 or 1984 or in Russia in 1996 and
> 2000. In El Salvador, transparent voting boxes and the need
> to sign in for numbered ballots compromised ballot secrecy
> in a society where the army was killing 800 civilians a
> month, and the left was off the ballot by virtue of
> straightforward state terror and death threats--but the U.S.
> mainstream media never noticed, and found these elections a
> "step toward democracy."
> 
> The case of Russia is equally revealing. The Yeltsin victory
> of 1996 was accomplished by serious violations of the rules
> on campaign spending, bribery of journalists, media bias and
> one- sidedness favoring the incumbent far more serious than
> anything in Yugoslavia, and possible fraud in counting. But
> in this case Western intervention was on the side of the
> incumbent, so the mainstream media here never spoke of fraud
> and rigging and found once again that this was "A Victory
> for Russian Democracy" (NYT ed., July 6, 1996). The same
> happened in Putin's election in 2000. As the appointed heir
> of Yeltsin and a "reformer" (in the special Western
> meaning--favoring market openings and privatization at
> whatever social cost) he was approved by the United States
> and its allies. The fact that he was a former KGB operative
> and had achieved his popularity by killing many more Chechen
> civilians than Milosevic did Albanians in Kosovo was
> therefore irrelevant. Once again, therefore, the U.S. media
> did not get agitated over either the ethnic cleansing or the
> dubious features of the electoral process--no headlines
> about the threat of rigging or fraud. This was a "reformer"!
> 
> On September 9, 2000, the Moscow Times published a massive
> expose of the Putin election triumph based on a six-month
> investigative effort ("And the Winner Is?"). Their reporters
> traveled through the provinces talking to officials and
> comparing official voting figures with those released by the
> federal government. In a number of cases this yielded solid
> prima facie evidence of fraud, which was supplemented by
> much anecdotal evidence of stuffed and destroyed ballots.
> They noted a 1.3 million inflation of voters within a few
> months just prior to the election, a set of voters they
> termed "Dead Souls" after Gogol's famous story, but they
> noted that Gogol's were real though dead people, whereas
> Putin's were just imaginery. This sensational article was
> reported only in the Los Angeles Times, which did so under
> the revealing title "Russia Election Chief Rejects Fraud
> Claims in Presidential Vote." In other words, the paper does
> not put the findings of this detailed study first, it gives
> priority to an official Russian disclaimer. But this was the
> relatively honest paper--the others that had found Putin's
> election another step toward democracy preferred the black
> hole treatment for this inconvenient news.
> 
> As one relevant sidelight, the Organization for Security and
> Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had sent several hundred
> observers to watch both the Yeltsin victory of 1996 and the
> Putin election contest, both of which they declared free and
> fair, although imperfect, and in the case of the Putin
> election they asked Russian authorities to look into the
> possible flaws! The Russian media the OSCE found
> "pluralistic and diverse." Matt Taibbi points out in his
> "OSCE--The Organization for Sanctioning Corrupt Elections"
> (The Exile, Issue #18/99, Sept. 14-28, 2000), that the OSCE
> even issued apologetics for the December 1999 Uzbeck
> parliamentary election, with its 93 percent vote in favor of
> the state parties, a 98 percent turnout, and a "genuinely
> Soviet statistical profile" (Taibbi), but which OSCE found
> "fell short" (not "fell far short") of democratic standards.
> 
> On the other hand, the OSCE found that the Serb election of
> 1997 was "fundamentally flawed," and that State TV there
> showed a "clear and consistent bias," although "there was a
> commendable effort to provide all the candidates with free
> political advertising, in proportion with their
> representation in parliament," and an opposition radio and
> TV stations did exist. On the OSCE contention that "the
> media in the Russian federation remain pluralistic and
> diverse," Taibbi comments that "If you lived here in Russia
> during the past year and a half or so, you know that state
> television and radio programming not only campaigned
> exclusively in favor of the Putin regime, but actively
> assassinated its political opponents..." Furthermore, "there
> was no 'commendable effort' of any kind to provide other
> candidates with free political advertising." In fact, these
> candidates were kept hidden. And outside of the big cities
> "the press in the Russian regions could hardly be farther
> from being 'diverse and pluralistic.'"
> 
> Taibbi notes also that in discussing the Serb election of
> 1997, OSCE was much focused on discrepancies in the vote
> count. No such concern was displayed in its report on the
> Putin election, and the numerous obvious fraudulent elements
> disclosed in the Moscow Times report entirely escaped them.
> Looking at their treatment of the 1997 Serb election and
> Putin's election, Taibbi says "it's hard to come to any
> conclusion that does not involve a conscious effort on the
> OSCE's part to whitewash a dirty election."
> 
> In short, the pattern of systematic bias and propaganda
> service applicable to the U.S. mainstream media in dealing
> with foreign elections like those in Yugoslavia and Russia
> also characterizes the U.S. and Nato dominated OSCE, which
> with the aid of William Walker, the U.S.-appointed head of
> the Kosovo Verification Mission, who in early 1999 helped
> create the ground for the Nato bombing war and arranged for
> KLA-Nato liaison and cooperative operations during the
> bombing that ensued.
> 
> *************************************************
> Alternative Press Review  -  www.altpr.org
> Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
> PO Box 4710  -  Arlington, VA 22204
> 
> Mid-Atlantic Infoshop  -  www.infoshop.org
> Infoshop News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/news.html
> 
> "Our first work must be the annihilation of everything
> as it now exists."  -  Mikhail Bakunin
> 
> "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed,
> debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own."  -  No.6
> 





From p_bhatta at yahoo.com  Fri Sep 29 05:05:54 2000
From: p_bhatta at yahoo.com (Partha Bhattacharya)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 04:05:54 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CrashList] temporary Unsubscribe
Message-ID: <20000929110554.8245.qmail@web109.yahoomail.com>

Please unsubscribe me from the mailing list till 9th
October 2000.
Thank you
PArtha Bhattacharya

__________________________________________________
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From zapata at sezampro.yu  Fri Sep 29 12:07:39 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 20:07:39 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Fw: article
Message-ID: <004901c02a41$23a30160$c6bd6ac2@k382>

 'Serbian-style solipsism' - interesting imperialist lengauge games


Another Country

The Guardian Unlimited


September 17, 2000

You probably think the Olympic Games is a vastly important event for all of
us
Australians, a huge national rite that will "put us on the map" - the same
map, presumably, on which the last Australian Olympics, in Melbourne in
1956,
failed to inscribe us. Actually, despite our traditional obsession with
sports, despite the coercive drumming of pre-Olympics hype, some of us don't
care that much about the Olympics. We think we matter for other reasons. We
suspect we're on the map already.

     Australians tend to be natural pagans. Everything favours this: the
delicious climate of the coasts; the dramatic and seductive landscapes of
pounding surf and golden sand; the tanned bodies strutting; the food (some
of
the finest in the world); and the wines, which are superb. In such a
setting,
Australians have evolved a natural ethos as pleasure seekers in all areas of
life. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of
ourselves
as hedonists, because that would be too self-conscious. Australian culture
is
for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is no
longer
"provincial", a distant and nervous response to norms generated in imperial
centres. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social
revolution
conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more
complex, shook off its sense of derivative Englishness and its fear of
American domination, and learned to trust its own talents.

     But a reasonable equipoise is with us only some of the time. Jingoism
still disfigures the lowbrow end of our journalism. "One of the ways in
which
we have matured is that we don't give a stuff about what other people
think,"
blustered the columnist Susan Mitchell in the Australian, a national daily,
last month. "We no longer feel we have to explain ourselves to anyone but
ourselves."

     This dismal, Serbian-style solipsism was actually meant as self-praise.
But on some levels it is, alas, true. One sees it, for instance, in the
bristling posture of denial that the Australian government recently took
against UN criticism of its flouting of the human rights of aborigines.
Australians still tend to be worried about what outsiders think, keep asking
and then get furious if the answer is even fractionally less than
flattering.


     Australia is often seen, especially in the US, as the last stand of the
wild west, the place and ethos that were buried in America a century ago: a
celluloid fiction, reinvented with kangaroos. In reality, Australians are
among the most urbanised people on earth. They have seen their national
animal, the kangaroo, only in a zoo or as roadkill on the highway. Nearly
90%
of Australians live on the coast, not in the outback, wherever that elusive
place may be. Our country towns are in decline. Their inhabitants keep
moving
to the coast. Because Australia has no fertile centre, there is no place for
them in that immense, empty outback.

     So the "typical Australian" is not, as foreigners once thought, a
bushman. He is a slightly worried guy with a tan, a bald spot, a mortgage, a
mower and two kids, whose Australian dream is a double-front brick bungalow
on
a quarter-acre lot in the suburbs less than 30 minutes' drive from the
nearest
beach, with two other nice, two-kid, one-PC families on either side of him.

     And yet there are traits that do, indisputably, come down to modern
Australia from the vanished days of the bush, and even from the convict era.
They are wound tightly into our social history. One of these is the value
set
on "mateship". Essentially male bonding, mateship began in the harsh world
of
the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of
labour that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands and
shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that mate was to be a
scab, less than a man; such was the hard calculus of colonial life, and its
traces are very much alive in Australia today.

     A less admirable trait is the Australian fetish of anti-elitism. If you
want to nuke an enemy, call them an elitist, especially if they are an
intellectual. The word is empty, since no society has ever been able to
function without elites of skill, intelligence and ordinary competence. Yet
Australians can rarely bring themselves to say they value human superiority.
It sounds undemocratic.

     The one field of exception to this unseemly prejudice is sport, the
real
religion of down under. The idea of non-elitist sport is, of course, an
absurdity. No Australian would waste their time watching a football match in
which nobody was better than anyone else, or a horse race in which every nag
plunked along at exactly the same speed. And, of course, Australians find no
contradiction in that. Ours is the meritocracy that dare not speak its name.

     Some Australians will tell you they have a classless society. This is
the
merest fantasy. We began with the most ironbound of all class distinctions,
between prisoners and the free. The freeborn (the "sterling") were bitterly
opposed to giving up their social placement above the ex-convicts and their
children (the "currency"). But the "lower orders" fiercely resented the
pretensions of the nobs and were well aware that in a pioneer environment
lady
luck was a more powerful queen than Victoria Regina. Today's Australians may
be more sophisticated than the 19th-century digger with his pockets full of
gold dust, but at root the dot.com millionaires of the late 90s are not so
different from their mining ancestors. The metaphor of all wealth production
is gambling, and Australians are among the most shamefully obsessed gamblers
in the world. We have 20 times as many "pokies" - poker machines - per
person
as the Americans. Our styles of wealth production enforce the belief that
superiority is luck and only luck: no moral lessons apply.

     We are poor at symbolising ourselves. Many of us would like to snip the
union jack off our flag, but no one can agree on a new design. Our official
Olympic mascots and emblems are kitsch, climaxing last month in the Great
Medal Screwup. It turned out that all the Olympic medals had been designed
to
feature not the Parthenon in Athens, not even the Temple of Zeus at Olympia,
but the Colosseum in Rome, less noted for Olympic-style friendship than for
gladiatorial butchery. What the hell, the officials of the Sydney organising
committee of the Olympic Games apparently reasoned; it's still the ancient
world, right? Then it befell some luckless Socog flunky to claim it wasn't
meant to be the Colosseum, just a colosseum. Nice try, kid. It was too late
to
make new medals.

     Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials,
Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock,
the
most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier
Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous
structures, both in Sydney: the harbour bridge and the opera house, the
latter
a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the
world's most beautiful sites, a headland in Sydney Harbour, and surrounded
on
three sides by sapphire water, this great building was never seen in
completion by its architect. He resigned under stress and never came back to
Sydney, so that the promise of those lovely tiled arcs and shells is not
fulfilled by the interior, awkwardly finished by a local designer.

     Where it counts - which is more in production than interpretation -
Australia has a vigorous cultural life. The list of first-rank Australian
novelists, headed up by Murray Bail, Peter Carey and David Malouf - writers
of
exceptional power and social insight - is a considerable one. It has also
produced a brilliant biographer and diagnostician of past culture in Peter
Conrad, an erudite and dark-minded expatriate from Tasmania. Books, of
course,
circulate everywhere, whereas paintings and buildings do not. Consequently
major architects such as Glenn Murcutt and Philip Cox are little known
outside
Australia. This is a pity, and even worse is the general ignorance of
Australian contemporary painting. It is bizarre that artists as excellent as
John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Tim Storrier and Mike Parr aren't the world
figures they deserve to be. The only Australian art that attracts much
overseas attention is contemporary aboriginal art, which varies enormously
in
quality.

     The clarity of Australian cultural achievement is often muddied by our
most irksome cultural shortcoming: a peevishly insecure hatred of "tall
poppies", people distinguished by their achievements in any area. Australia
has never honoured its artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians as
fully
as its sports figures; there is always an undertow of resentment, of the
lowbrows' residual suspicion that the highbrow is conning them. Everyone
bitches about this; nobody does anything about it. It is hardwired into us,
a
proof of "toughness".

     Under valued culturally, Australia is also politically obscure. Why?
Because we're so well behaved. We are not the mouse that roared.
Historically,
we have rarely even contemplated roaring. As the former prime minister Paul
Keating has pointed out, Australia has always been short of the defining
value
systems that are gained through conflict. We have never had a civil war or a
revolution. We have never been invaded - though we nearly were during the
second world war, by the Japanese. Nobody has ever called us a Great Satan
or
even a little one. We tend to like Americans more than most nations do,
although we do not have the least desire to be like them.

     Historically, Australia felt little resentment about its colonial
control
by Britain and its sovereign. Its population was heavy with Irishmen and
Irishwomen, but the resentments their ancestors had brought with them soon
mellowed into ineffectuality in the antipodean sun. As a colony we were
content to fulfil our destiny, which was to supply Britain with cheap wheat,
wool and (when required) cannon fodder for wars against the Boers or the
Huns.


     In these, we had little or no stake of our own. Britain, with grim
enthusiasm, condemned us to assist in the creation of dead colonial heroes.
In
the first world war, Australia lost 59,258 young men out of a total of
330,000
sent abroad. Both as a proportion of troops killed or missing and as a
proportion of the national population, this was the highest figure for any
allied state.

     It left us in the 20s as a psychologically devastated nation of widows,
spinsters and orphans. This enormous death toll was rationalised as a
cleansing, an erasure of the inherited stain of the convict era. Winston
Churchill, who sent our grandfathers to die on the implacable slopes of
Gallipoli, was by no means the only Englishman to think they came from
"tainted" stock.

     Australia still had a largely colonial mentality when I was born, in
1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics
is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be
the country's head of state. That role is reserved for the king or queen of
England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected one: the office
of
the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small
clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsors. This narrows the
field of talent.

     According to the Australian constitution - a document written for us by
the British at the turn of the century - it is ultimately the British
monarch
who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the governor-general. This
official may be Australian or may not. They may, on behalf of the King or
Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out
the government and call for new elections. Or they may not. In practice they
almost never do. The last and only time they did was in 1975, when the
governor-general, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government led by Gough
Whitlam.

     This caused shock and resentment. Millions of Australians felt that
Whitlam, their hero, the great reformer of government policy in the domains
of
race, immigration, foreign policy and the arts, had been stolen from them.
There are still plenty of people around who regard this as not far from a
coup
d'?tat.

     The firing of Whitlam made many Australians sit up with a jerk. It had
never occurred to them before that the Queen had the raw constitutional
power
to do such a thing. It cranked up the long-dormant impulse toward
republicanism. Until the 70s this had been an issue only for intellectuals
and
a few leftwing workers whose vehemence earned them an undeserved reputation
as
ratbags (obsessed eccentrics). The problem was democratising the republican
issue while detaching it from the ownership of the Australian left. And it
did
slowly broaden, though its main political instrument, the Australian
Republican Movement (ARM), didn't come into existence until the 80s.

     The growth of republican feeling in Australia coincided with, and was
strongly encouraged by, the prime ministership (1991-96) of Keating, a
brilliant and abrasive Laborite much feared for his insults ("pansies" and
"unrepresentative swill" were among the milder epithets he launched at his
foes in parliamentary debate) and greatly misunderstood for his tastes:
given
his passions for antique French clocks and Georgian furniture, Keating was
the
most cultivated Australian ever to serve as prime minister. The ARM's chief
unelected backer was a formidable young merchant banker named Malcolm
Turnbull. (Full disclosure obliges me to say that Turnbull is married to my
niece Lucy, herself the deputy lord mayor of Sydney.) Despite Keating's
defeat
in the 1996 elections, Turnbull and his fellow republicans were able to
bring
the republic issue to a nationwide vote last year.

     The result was a triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake
populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters
(55%
to 45%) decided that to have an Australian president appointed by a
democratically-elected government was elitist and unsafe, whereas to have an
immensely rich hereditary monarch as their head of state was somehow
democratic.

     The monarchists won the referendum, not because Australians were
devoted
to the Queen and her successors but because feuding republicans couldn't
agree
on which model of republic to uphold. Should the new-style head of state, an
Australian president, be appointed by parliament? Or should they be elected
in
a national campaign, in the American manner? The ARM wanted the former, but
Australians hated the idea of an American-style republic - or American-style
anything - in their public life. This split the republican vote, to the
boundless relief of the monarchists, who could never have carried the issue
on
their own.

     Soon after the referendum, the Queen and her cold fish of a consort,
Prince Philip, toured Australia. The crowds were small and more curious than
enthusiastic; the media polite but indifferent. The romantic, near-mystical
queen worship that had surrounded her tour in 1954 was gone forever. Being
smarter than the monarchists, the Queen could easily read the signs. She
openly acknowledged the possibility of a stable republic in Australia.

     The current prime minister, John Howard, is an obdurate monarchist. But
the next in line as head of his conservative Liberal party, Peter Costello,
is
a republican. The Australian Labor party is republican through and through.
It
is only a matter of time before the less reactionary and nostalgic Liberal
politicians come out of the closet, and then the monarchy in Australia will
be
finished.

     It is hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia
for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our
national anti-elitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to
admire. "If we don't have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the
frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you
don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens,
wasn't
much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not
only
of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity but also of shared folk
heroes. You can count them on the fingers of two hands. Two are alive - the
great cricketer Sir Donald Bradman, now 91, and the swimming champion Dawn
Fraser. The veterans of Gallipoli, a few of whom still live, are invested
with
a collective heroism. The other heroes are dead. They include a racehorse,
Phar Lap; and a criminal, the bushranger, Irish nationalist and
proto-republican Ned Kelly, hanged for theft and murder in Melbourne in
1880.


     Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease
about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure"
Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine
half
a century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British
descent
and could feel themselves to be, as the then prime minister Robert Menzies
would later put it, "British to the boot heels". But today the picture of
exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia,
has
almost faded away. The white Australia policy, that disgraceful provision
whereby no one of Asian or black descent could settle in Australia, was
abandoned in the 60s, never to be revived. Whole suburbs, such as Cabramatta
in western Sydney, have become south-east Asian enclaves. Though Australia
admits only some 85,000 legal immigrants a year, the Asian component is very
visible and it excites xenophobia. The role of the Queen as head of state
has
a calming effect, suggesting that the "old" Anglo-Australia is still
notionally within reach.

     Compared with their older selves, Australians - especially the younger
ones - are a tolerant people. We are one of the world's most successful
multicultural democracies, and this is a triumph of no small consequence.
Australians on the whole realise that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly
bureaucratic polysyllable responsible for so much hot air, really means
learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of
one's own. They realise, quite naturally, that the desire to "give people a
fair go", which is one of the traditional moral imperatives of Australian
life, also applies to immigrants.

     This does not, however, mean that Australia's road to multi-culturalism
has been stoneless. Translated into government policy, multi-culturalism in
the 80s became, its critics say, not just a neutral recognition of diversity
but a pork barrel for buying the temporary loyalties of ethnic groups.

     Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work.
It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the
dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British empire
has gone. The Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive
linkage
between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined Britain as a
foreign country. Australia's economic links to Britain, though not
insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties
to
the near north, once known as the far east.

     Britain is in the EU and will act in accordance with its interests
there,
giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British
because
they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer
"be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two nations are
too
far apart.

     . A longer version of this article appears in this week's Time
magazine.
Robert Hughes is presenting Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore on BBC2 on
Sundays at 8pm

     Hughes who: an art critic's life

     Full name: Robert Studley Forrest Hughes.

     Born: 1938, in Sydney.

     Status: Senior art critic for Time Magazine in the US, where he has
worked since 1970.

     Education: Studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney.
Art
critic of the Sydney Observer (1958-59) and the Nation (1960-64). Was based
in
London in the mid-60s and wrote for many UK newspapers, including the
Observer
and the Sunday Times.

     Books: The Art of Australia (1966); The Shock of the New (1980), an
idiosyncratic guide to 20th century art based on his BBC series; The Fatal
Shore (1987), a history of deportation to Australia; Barcelona (1992);
Culture
of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993), which attacks the shallowness
of
American life and the obsession with political correctness; and American
Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997).

     Return to Oz: While in Australia last year to film the current BBC
series, Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore, he was involved in a car crash
which almost killed him. He was in a coma for five weeks and is still
recuperating.

     To see more of the Guardian Unlimited network of sites go to
http://www.guardian.co.uk.

Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000


http://www.resistancenet.org

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From aabdo at webtv.net  Fri Sep 29 19:39:24 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 20:39:24 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] Re: Launch of Southeast Europe Equity Fund/ The New Whiteman's
 Burden?
Message-ID: <26973-39D5444C-952@storefull-232.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

Andrej wrote about the Olympics coverage in the imperialist media.....

<'Serbian-style solipsism' - interesting imperialist lengauge games>

Yes, and how about the comment about US plans to 'de-Balkanize the
Balkans' made by Samuel Berger on behalf of the Clinton team!     Is
this kind of like delousing a dog..... in imperial lingo?

Tony Abdo
_______________________________
"A year ago, after NATO won the war in Kosovo, more than 40 leaders came
together in Sarajevo determined to win the peace," Berger said.    "With
the Stability Pact Summit, we launched a new partnership between
Southeast Europe and the international community to reverse the habits
of history, de-Balkanize the Balkans and work toward a peaceful
and stable region. We made clear that the nations of Southeast Europe
must undertake reforms to attract investment, and that they must work
together. Our efforts are working."












From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 13:19:20 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 20:19:20 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] U.S. Productivity Gains Driven By Changes in Machine Tools
Message-ID: <000001c02981$00fa5660$950d8cd4@mjones>

 By STEVE LIESMAN  Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL  Many
analysts may have overlooked one of the main drivers of the
productivity gains of the past five years: machine tools.  The report,
which was conducted by Joel Popkin  Co. of Washington and will  be
released Thursday, suggests that consumers have saved billions of
dollars over the past five years because of technological, material
and  process advances in the machines that help make everything from
cars to air  conditioners to airplanes.  Among the conclusions of the
study -- conducted for the trade group, the  Association for
Manufacturing Technology -- advances in machine tools have  helped
drive down the costs and enhance the quality and energy efficiency  of
durable goods like refrigerators and automobiles. Flat durable-goods
prices between 1996 and 1999 have saved consumers over $101 billion,
the  study said, while increased productivity in durable-goods
manufacturing has  added $618 billion to gross domestic product
between 1992 and 1998.  "Manufacturing has been reinvented," the study
said. "This is the result of  a combination of factors but
fundamentally has been a product of  improvements in manufacturing
technologies."  Greater precision in machine tools, the study argues,
has helped cut the  energy use of air conditioners by 10% between 1990
and 1997. The major  advance was the introduction in the late 1980s of
a new kind of compressor  whose manufacture required machine tools
with a precision down to 10  microns, or 10-millionths of a meter.  In
part, the productivity gains from machine tools have come from
technological breakthroughs. This has been propelled by the move to
open  architecture, in which a common language is used to program the
machines.  Because of the programming, machine tools now perform a
variety of milling,  grinding or cutting operations at one time,
reducing the need to stop the  machine to change tools, shortening the
production cycle and slashing  inventories. "It takes less time to
produce something and consumers benefit  form those products now
sooner rather than later," Mr. Popkin said in an  interview.  Other
improvements have come from new materials, such as ceramics, that
allow the machine tools to operate at faster speeds, or from new
processes,  like using lasers to cut materials.  While some of the
gains are picked up in government statistics, some remain  unmeasured.
For example, the consumer price index, which measures  inflation,
might register a price increase for automobile repair. But it  would
be unable to measure the reduction in money paid to the service
stations overall by consumers, because their cars are more reliable
and  they are making fewer trips to the service stations. In other
words, one  trip to the service station may cost more, but drivers are
making fewer  trips. Indeed, one of the principal reasons for more
reliable transmissions  is that machine tools now finish metals with
far greater precision.  Such potentially unmeasured gains suggest to
Don Carlson, president of the  association, that the Federal Reserve
could have been mistaken in its  recent efforts to raise interest
rates. If productivity is higher than  measured, then the economy can
grow faster than thought without fear of  inflation, he said. "There
needs to be a recognition that manufacturing and  machine tools are
driving productivity, and we need to have public policy  that
recognizes that," he said in an interview.  Two academic studies of
recent productivity gains have found that more than  half of the
increase has occurred outside the computers, software and
telecommunications sectors. A co-author of one of those studies,
Harvard  University Professor Dale Jorgenson, said in an interview
that Mr. Popkin's  work is consistent with his own and other academic
studies.  Although he hasn't seen the Popkin report, Prof. Jorgenson
said that a  sizable amount of productivity gains has yet to be
explained in the economy  and that the manufacturing sector, of which
machine tools are a critical  part, has probably been a substantial
contributor.  Write to Steve Liesman at steve.liesman at wsj.com
<mailto:steve.liesman at wsj.com>




From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 12:07:52 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:07:52 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Danes vote NO?
Message-ID: <000401c02977$0502f1e0$c9278cd4@mjones>

1900 GMT
Exit polls say the Danes have rejected joining the Euro and abolishing
their national currency, the krone. If so, today's Danish referendum
result is a potentially devastating blow to the Euro and probably also
puts paid to Tony Blair's chances of abolishing the pound sterling and
taking Britain into Euroland.

Mark




From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Fri Sep 29 20:01:17 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 22:01:17 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] SERBIA OPPOSES PRIVATIZATION, SAYS POLL
Message-ID: <39D5496D.772A3765@netzero.net>


>From a bourgeois source, Mine:)

--
http://www.suc.org/news/flash/archive_e/nov98/11_17_98_1.html

SERBIA OPPOSES PRIVATIZATION, SAYS POLL

BELGRADE, Nov. 17, 1998 -- (Reuters) - A poll of some 300 companies
here  indicated on Monday that there was no enthusiasm for Serbia to
start privatization. Privatization is unwanted by the state, company
managers and workers and the status quo suits both the state and the
private sector, the head of IZIT Institute for Market Research, Jovo
Todorovic, told the Serbian Chamber of Commerce. "The most frequent
impression is that the state itself is not interested in privatization
as any change in the ownership structure would inevitably modify the
structure of its electorate," Todorovic told the Chamber's board of
directors. "State-run companies are prisoners of the political
establishment and their managers work either for the state or a
political party," he added. Private firms were also opposed to
privatization because they had developed close business ties with the
state-run sector, while workers feared privatization would lead to mass
layoffs, he said. So far, no company has been privatized under Serbia's
new 12-month-old ownership transformation law. Under the law, firms must
first distribute up to 60 percent of their capital free of charge in the
form of shares to their workers and the rest can be sold to cash
investors. Todorovic's criticism came amidst fresh complaints by top
Serbian managers that the business climate was not right for
privatization. They cited unfavorable conditions and problems including
surplus labor and huge debts to banks in the last non-privatized economy
in Europe. The vice-president of the Chamber's board of directors,
Milivoje Miletic, said any delay in privatization would lead to further
capital meltdown in non-privatized firms. "To avoid that, it is vital to
create a strategy of economic development and attract foreign capital
through tax and other incentives... Only a clear ownership structure can
secure inflow of domestic and foreign capital needed for better
performance and development of local firms," he said. After hearing all
the complaints, Serbian privatization minister Jorgovanka Tabakovic said
the law was not perfect but represented no major obstacle to practical
privatization. "Instead of criticizing the government, you should read
the law and use your imagination to get the process started," she told
the managers. (end note)



Copyright ? 1997 Flash News, Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska

--

xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222


_______________________________________________
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NetZero provides FREE Internet Access and Email
http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html



From jones118 at lineone.net  Thu Sep 28 13:54:46 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 20:54:46 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] economic consequences of the strong dollar and oil prices (was: 2nd reply to Julien)
In-Reply-To: <SAK.2000.09.28.dpafaocq@computer>
Message-ID: <000001c02985$f42309a0$1b0a063e@mjones>

Julien wrote
>
> I'm not sure of what you mean about the US beign the
> banker/lender of last
> resort.

Bceause the dollar is the principal world rserve currency (something
incidentally which depends precisely on the USA being a *debtor*
state, in the same way that when the pound sterling was principal
reserve currency during the 19th C Pax Britannica, Britain too was
then a recipient of large net inflows on both capital and current
accounts, ran a permanent balance of payments deficit, and was a net
debtor: and this has to be so, for if the hegemonic power is not
purchasing imported goods and services with its paper money, then how
can other countries accumulate its currency in the first place? Only a
hegemonic debtor can become a source of international reserves. This
is one reason why the euro caould not become and international reserve
currency any more than the yen or the D-Mark could; because Germany
and Japan are traditionally balance of payments surplus countries,
trading goods and servcies for dollars. What *they* hope is that by
this means they will perhaps one day be able to reverse the verdict of
history in the World War 2, and by accumulating vast US debt, get a
stranglehold on the US economy and eventually destroy all its
competitive advantages. They have come close to doing this several
times, notably in the early 1970s, but have now surely lost the battle
decisively (once the US won the Cold War, it was easily able to
destroy all competitive advantages of Germany and Japan, and has done
so).

The importance of the dollar certainly gives the US
> special capabilities
> like extracting more seignorage and more importantly
> creating credit more
> painlessly. But how is it capable to better or less
> painfully control the price of
> the dollar relative to other currencies?

Precisely because it is 'lender of last resort' and its curency is the
principal international means of payment. Nota bene: only since the
collapse of communism, have the great capitalist states finally
abandoned gold as a reserve medium. The reasons for extensive Central
Bank gold sales do not get as much attention as they should: it is a
sure sign of final and complete capitulation of Germany-led Europe and
Japan-led Asia to US hegemony in the guise of the 'new global
economy'. Since they have surrenedered monetary sovereignty, they no
longer need gold and are content to hoard paper dollars, knowing full
well that a dollar crisis and dollar devaluation is simply inevitable.
This is paradoxical but true: it means that the criminals understand
that they must either hang together or hang separately. This is the
essence of neoliberal globalism as a strategy for continues domination
of the West under US tutelage.

> Any country can
> make the price of its
> currency sink. Making it go high is harder and the US seems
> to have a worse
> position than other rich countries there because of the
> huge number of dollars
> around: the "markets" can react much more strongly to a
> strong dollar policy
> than to a strong yen policy f.ex. because there's so much
> more dollars out
> there that can be sold if the dollar is seen as overvalued.

I think the opposite is true. The US is the unchallenged hegemon, and
its ability to make other states accept its potentially-worthless
paper money in exchange for their real goods and real services, is an
index of US power. As Rob Schaap pointed out, the rest of the world
finances the US boom to the tune of $1.5 bn per day.


>
> Well...
> If you have the time and the desire to do so, please post a
> summary of some
> kind of this theory (written by you or someone else).

I've been manning to scan in some key chapters of Bromley's important
book and put it on the website but haven't got round to it. I will.

I hope Rob will add his insights to this.

Mark




From julp at freesurf.ch  Fri Sep 29 22:34:24 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 06:34:24 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Dear friends, could you do me
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.30.hsqnftjt@computer>

Hi Andrej,

I know very little of what happend in postwar Africa. But I have a few leads...

First, be sure to check the writings of Patrick Bond. Mark posted some stuff 
from him. Look at the "ressource base" of the list. He's a contributor to LBO-
talk, I recall.

I noticed on your website (I only looked briefly at it) that there's a French 
version. So maybe you'll be able to take advantage of the great ressource on 
this that the "Monde diplomatique" could be. The articles in themselves might 
not be of great help, but some authors sure put links to great dope in their 
footnotes. I also remember that they have foreign language editions (don't 
know if they're complete, though). Anyway, look at their website. And if you're 
interested, I could send you a big archive with all their articles in French on 
Africa+Neoliberalism from a database CD which I have. I don't have the most 
recent version and others have CDs with more issues of the paper on it and 
maybe in English, but if I'm the only one with such a CD you know...

Still in French, look for the writings of Eric Toussaint. You should find papers 
from him on ATTAC's site among other places.
This is one of the sites of his publisher: http://www.cetim.fr/cetim_e/homee.htm 
You might find various informations and links there. It's the kind of publisher 
who loves to print anti-IMF/WB reports.

Another author which could be an interest is A.G.Frank. As you may know, he 
published systemic analysis of the world economy, obviously including the 
place of Africa in it. He's a historian but also has stuff to say on the postwar 
system. Other writers from the world-system/world system school might have 
produced relevant works.

Julien

>I would like you to send me all articles,
>essays, sources, evaluations and analyses you have about US-Euro military 
>and financial interventionism in Africa. I hope that, if some more tolerant 
>climate is introduced, we ( left radicals form Yugoslavia) will be able to start 
>publishing serious political magazine ( we were unable to do that, so far); 
>further on, I have participated in founding of African Support Network ( it is 
>devoted to African culture, music, society / politics) few days ago; so I need 
>some more serious materials.  I am very anxious to go on with a creation of 
>Latin American Support Network in Yugoslavia and Anti-Neoliberal Action in 
>Yugoslavia, in coordination with other international groups of this orientation. 
> So, please, if you have some time and knowledge about this subject, I would 
>appreciate all materials you have on post Cold War African political & 
>economical situation. On my private address of course, in order to escape 
>overburdening the list.




From julp at freesurf.ch  Fri Sep 29 22:35:38 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 06:35:38 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Rumor: Rubin leaked last week's intervention to a hedge fund
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.30.hpejrbno@computer>

U.S. Hedge Fund Supposedly Knew About Intervention
By Claus Tigges

FRANKFURT. The intention of the European Central Bank to intervene in 
favor of the euro, along with other leading central banks, was apparently 
known several hours before the actual price-supporting currency purchases 
were carried out last Friday, according to market sources in Frankfurt. 

Supposedly, there was a leak in one of the participating central banks not in 
the euro-zone. On hearing about the impending intervention, Citibank, one 
of the leading currency traders worldwide, began buying up euros in large 
volumes for a U.S. hedge fund company, according to the rumor. 

The price of the euro had risen slightly against the dollar to more than $0.86 
on Friday morning. According to sources at banks in Frankfurt, the 
suspected purchases and subsequent sales of currency by Citibank were 
ostensibly the reason that the euro did not climb to $0.90 following the 
intervention, which took place at 1 p.m. CET. 

A possible connection between the hedge-fund company, the bank and the 
central bank has been found in the person of former U.S. Finance Minister 
Robert Rubin, who is currently co-chairman of Citigroup. 

[...]




From julp at freesurf.ch  Fri Sep 29 22:35:49 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 06:35:49 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Mutual Fund data seems to disprove a quantity theory of stock prices, Rob
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.30.chetapci@computer>

Please accept my excuses, folks. This is a followup to an arcane debate we 
began nearly 6 monthes ago.

Witness the amounts in the funds going in opposite direction of the prices... 
Any idea about a more important outflow of money supporting Rob's theory?

Bloomberg: 
U.S. mutual funds are on track to pull in $211 billion this year, a 43 percent 
increase over 1999, according to Financial Research Corp.
The Boston-based research firm said a net $14 billion was invested in stock 
and bond funds in August. That brought the figure for the first eight months 
to $140.6 billion, almost equal to last year's full-year total of $148 billion, 
though all U.S. benchmark indexes have declined.
"For the past four or five years, investors have seen every dip or flat period 
as a buying opportunity, and for the most part they've been right," said Burt 
Greenwald, a Philadelphia-based fund consultant. He said the rise of 401(k) 
programs has drawn money into funds.
Large cap growth funds attracted $6.5 billion, just ahead of mid-cap growth 
funds, which pulled in $5 billion. Investors put $2.3 billion into international 
and global funds last month. Bond funds continued to lose assets.

[...]




From CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us  Wed Sep 27 12:28:52 2000
From: CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown)
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 14:28:52 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd from PEN-L on warning signs
Message-ID: <s9d2042b.032@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>

This thread has drifted away a bit from the signs to the portent.

Some signs:

today's paper says that 13 major cities are in danger of overbuilding
commercial real estate.

today's paper says that for PG&E and So. Calif. Edison, two of the
largest corporations in the world, the deficits from this summer's Calif
electricity crisis now equal half their net worth and technical
insolvancy is possible by next year if things aren't fixed.  (For
"fixed" read "the burden passed to customers.")

Cummins diesel the other day reported financial woes because heavy truck
sales have sagged.  Why would they weaken in a permanent boom?

Technology sales are flattening

The Dow has been flat for almost two years -- where is all the profit
that supposedly been holding up consumer spending?

Consumers squeezed by debt and facing very large jumps in home heating
and electricity costs in the weeks ahead.  Commuting costs way up.

Junk bonds losing favor and corporate debt quite high.

No soft landing, more like the Concorde on Firestone tires, it seems to
me.

Actually the Firestone reference appeals to me.  You are roaring along
in your SUV, tailgaiting the weaker folks in the fast lane, the CD
playing and the stock prices coming in on you cell phone.  Suddenly you
are upside down in the ditch, lucky to have survived.

And Air France is suing Continental for dropping a part of a plane on
the runway.  The part had fallen off a DC 10 and nobody noticed for a
few weeks.  Didn't need that part anyway.  Maybe it isn't the tires,
maybe it is debris in the road.

Gene Coyle




From pbond at wn.apc.org  Sat Sep 30 01:47:33 2000
From: pbond at wn.apc.org (Patrick Bond)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 07:47:33 +0000
Subject: [CrashList] Dear friends, could you do me
In-Reply-To: <SAK.2000.09.30.hsqnftjt@computer>
Message-ID: <200009300549.HAA03797@worknet.sangonet.org.za>

> From:          Julien Pierrehumbert <julp at freesurf.ch>
> First, be sure to check the writings of Patrick Bond. Mark posted some stuff 
> from him. Look at the "ressource base" of the list. He's a contributor to LBO-
> talk, I recall.

And a lurker here. You're too kind, comrade.

Our SA-based Africa connections are still firming up (my main 
affiliation is to a thinktank, the Alternative Information and 
Development Centre, http://aidc.org.za ). To give a hint of these 
growing relationships, I'll append below something written hurriedly 
last week (with mistaken crit of Chomsky, for there's really no 
niggling needed), which gives a few outlines of at least the 
social-movement intelligentsia's argumentation. I spent the last week 
in Harare where the Southern African Political Economic Series 
(http://www.sapes.co.zw  I THINK) hosted an interesting conference 
bringing radical Africans from all over the place to talk about the 
"region" as a unit of analysis. The really key place to find radical 
African intellectuals is CODESRIA in Dakar.

There are too many critiques of African Structural Adjustment 
Programmes to begin to list, but a superb book by Thandike Mkandwarie 
and Charles Soludo (Our Continent, Our Future; Trenton, Africa World 
Press) has a new summary; Africa World Press does lots of good poli 
econ publishing aimed at discrediting the Wash Con 
(http://www.africanworld.com )...

Cheers,
Patrick

***

South-South-North alliances:
With the people, not the waBenzis

It's not sacrilege to take issue with Noam Chomsky on
ZNet, is it?

Here are two sentences in the concluding paragraph of
Chomsky's September 17 ZNet Commentary (`Summits'), in
which he champions the Havana South-South Summit of
`G77' country leaders that took place in April:

     African leaders pointed out that the `voices
     in the street' in the West are repeating what
     `the developing countries have been saying
     for many years in various international fora
     with little success.' Several suggested that
     `an alliance was possible.'

(We must return with a mixed answer as to whether
African leaders are listening to `voices in the street
in AFRICA,' given a remarkable upsurge in activism
recently, but will wait until next month's ZNet
Commentary to do so, and today just focus on `voices'
in the form of critical analysis.)

Chomsky's not alone, drawing as he does upon
interpretations by a prominent advocacy group--Third
World Network, based in Penang, Malaysia--which builds
relations between civil society and nationalist
governments throughout the South. Likewise, a longish
list of signatories, including internationalist
organisations I admire enormously (like Ruckus and
Global Exchange from San Francisco), concluded after
the Havana meeting that left-popular alliances with
Southern rulers are possible and desirable:

     With regard to the fundamental debt
     cancellation and fair trade issues, the G77
     summit in Havana once again confirmed the
     accordance between the views of the G77 and
     the new worldwide anti-globalization movement
     that protested WTO/IMF/WB in Seattle and
     Washington. A cooperation between the two
     parties therefore would seem appropriate in
     order to achieve our common goals in the most
     efficient and speedy way. (Letter to Nigerian
     president and G77 leader Olusegun Obasanjo,
     16 June 2000,
     http://www.unitedpeoples.net/engelsk/univers
     iel/FRAME_break.html)

But what if cooperation is not appropriate, under
prevailing circumstances? Setting aside the
controversial Obasanjo for now, the most vociferous
anti-IMF campaigner from Third World officialdom
remains Zimbabwe's authoritarian ruler Robert Mugabe.
Earlier this month Mugabe inexplicably received
generous applause at a Harlem public meeting, and
praise on the otherwise discerning Democracy Now radio
program produced at NY's WBAI, notwithstanding the
intensifying brutality of his regime.

(An important footnote: last Friday, the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change headquarters in Harare
was raided by cops, in the wake of a grenade attack
the previous week which blew out the office windows
but fortunately injured no one. Over the weekend,
Zimbabwe police photocopied a truckload of MDC
documents and backed up the party's computer hard-
drives--i.e., its entire database--all the better to
intimidate MDC members in future. On Monday, five
Zimbabwe spies were reportedly fired because they had
not predicted the opposition's capture of nearly half
the parliamentary seats contested in the June
election. What democrat wants cooperation with
Mugabe?)

The best case for allying with Third World nationalist
rulers against global elites is probably the African
National Congress government in Pretoria. But a month
ago, in a ZNet contribution called `Can Thabo Mbeki
Change the World?,' I briefly summarised why even the
most sophisticated backroom dealmaking by South
African president Mbeki, finance minister Trevor
Manuel and trade minister Alec Erwin is already
flopping (http://www.marxmail.org/patrick_bond.htm).

Manuel, who is chair of the World Bank/IMF board of
governors, is giving the opening speech at the
organisations' annual meetings in Prague next week,
and will join a debating panel with the superb
Filippino political-economist Walden Bello, Bank
president James Wolfensohn, and host Vaclav Havel.
Erwin is busy trying to put a `G5' of leaders from
Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil and India, to restart the WTO
negotiations that were derailed in Seattle.

The three South Africans are big guys, with a big
agenda--but they are fundamentally misguided and they
will fail. The reform project suffers from inaccurate
analysis (e.g., attributing globalization mainly to
technology), insufficient strategies (minor reforms of
the Bretton Woods Institutions and WTO), incompetent
tactics (generally reduced to begging and scraping),
and inappropriate alliances (e.g., SA's coddling of
bad Southern leaders like Indonesia's Suharto until
the moment he fell and the Burmese junta still today,
and occasionally even US multinational corporations,
while for all practical purposes dissing the social
movements).

I want to explore this position further, by asserting
the exhaustion of the Third World nationalist, `talk-
left, act-right' project represented by the likes of
Mbeki, Mugabe or Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad (also
a brutal anti-democrat, even if his anti-IMF stance
and imposition of capital controls attract our
admiration). Thus, I'll argue, the real allies of
Chomsky, Third World Network, Ruckus and GX, Harlem
African-Americans and any other progressives looking
for a global critique are not to be found in Pretoria,
Harare or Kuala Lumpur state houses, in G77 meetings,
or in any finance ministries I am familiar with. They
are, instead, in the poverty-stricken communities,
streets, factories, mines, fields, churches, hospices,
clinics, creches, schools and homes.

This, to be fair, Chomsky explicitly confirms in
closing his article, by observing that South-South
alliances worth supporting have indeed `been taking
shape at the grassroots level, an impressive
development, rich in opportunity and promise, and
surely causing no little concern in high places.'

Across Africa, there's plenty going on to distinguish
genuine grassroots allies from the comprador `waBenzi'
(named after their favourite auto) now ruling all
Africa's four-dozen nation-states. (And if I knew more
about the rest of the world I would generalise this
beyond Africa.) 

For by looking more closely, it quickly emerges that
what `the developing countries have been saying for
many years in various international fora with little
success' is actually in contradiction to the messages
from Seattle and DC, not to mention many of the best
grassroots programs in the South. Third World
nationalist rulers generally want IN to the global
capitalist economy, on better terms, particularly
through reforms of the Bank/IMF/WTO. Like Erwin, many
use neoliberal rhetoric to this end, citing
protectionist barriers in the north as evidence of
hypocrisy, while demanding (as does Erwin) the
extinction of `dinosaur industries' like Northern
agriculture and even manufacturing.

Increasingly, in contrast, the protesting masses are
fed up with reforms and are trying to shut the
institutions down, in part so as to one day allow more
space for protecting potentially radical socio-
economic programs from the vagaries, volatilities,
vulnerabilities and hostilities of world markets. The
strategic differences between the two camps are
enormous--and make alliance-building foolhardy and
potentially fatal at this juncture.

Some examples document the need for putting the people
first, and only later giving credence to nationalist
rulers, once grassroots power is more firmly
established. Consider the `Lusaka Declaration' signed
in May 1999 by the leading African social movement and
church organisations working on debt,(from Burkina
Faso, Lesotho, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria,
Cameroon, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, South
Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe). 

The Lusaka Declaration captures the suspicion that
many activists feel about their nationalist leaders,
for they view the demand for

     the cancellation of debt as part of a broader
     struggle to fundamentally transform the
     current world economic order and transfer
     power from the political leadership of the
     rich countries and the economic power of
     Transnational Corporations an international
     financiers, and their instruments, notably
     the International Monetary Fund, World Bank
     and World Trade Organisation. Likewise, these
     forces have instruments in the South, namely
     some of our own technocratic, political and
     commercial elite who are in the tiny minority
     of Africans who continue to promote the
     Washington Consensus.

Lusaka built upon similar regional meetings in Accra,
Lome and Gauteng in 1998-99, and led to the launching
of a mass-popular `Africa People's Consensus' drafting
process to transcend the development orthodoxy of the
Washington Consensus and the slightly reformed--but
now collapsed--Post-Washington Consensus.

A similar initiative in West Africa is known as the
`Dakar 2000' Coordinating Committee, which is
supported by groups like the Association des Femmes
Africaines pour la Recherche et le D?veloppement as
well as numerous West and Central African social
movements and NGOs (and on the Northern end of
solidarity, by the excellent Paris-based Association
pour la Taxation des Transactions financiFres pour
l'Aide aux Cityens, and the ComitQ pour l'Annulation
de la Dette du Tiers Monde in Brussels). Dakar 2000
took on more momentum in a Yaound? conference in
January this year, and by May the Dakar Committee
condemned the existing debt `relief' schemes: `Like
all previous gestures, the initiatives taken in
Cologne [G8 reforms in June 1999] and in Cairo
[African and EU elites in April 2000] do not offer any
actual solution.'

The need to stop coddling nationalists was also
explicitly recognised last month in Namibia, when
cross-border radical activists and strategists
condemned the failure of the `old boys' club' in
Southern African Development Community countries
(SADC). While SADC elites met and slapped each others'
backs in Windhoek, a declaration was drafted by the
Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network, which
includes the Alternative Information and Development
Center, Associacao para Desenvolvimento Rural de
Angola, Council of Churches/Ecumenical Institute
(Namibia), Ecumencial Support Services (ESS-Zimbabwe),
Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU-South Africa),
Gender and Trade Network (Southern Africa), Jubilee
2000 (chapters from Angola, Malawi, South Africa,
Zambia), Ledikasyon pu Travayer (Workers Education-
Mauritius), Mineworkers Development Agency (Lesotho),
Mwelekeo wa NGO (Southern Africa), Namibian Food and
Allied Workers Union, South African NGO Coalition,
Swaziland Youth Congress and the Zimbabwe Coalition on
Debt and Development. Their `Declaration to the
Governmental Summit of the Southern African
Development Community' resolved that 

     the governments of our countries

     * have for long mainly engaged in rhetorical
     declarations about national development, and
     development cooperation and regional
     integration, with few effective achievements;
     
     * are mainly concerned with preserving and
     promoting their own individual and group
     status, power and privileges, and their
     personal and aspirant-class appropriation of
     our nations' resources; and, for these
     reasons, are frequently engaged in divisive
     competition and even dangerous conflicts
     amongst themselves at the expense of the
     interests of the people at national and
     regional levels;
     
     * are, at the same time, committed to
     supporting and defending each other whenever
     the interests and power of the ruling elites
     come into conflict with the human rights, and
     the democratic and development aspirations of
     their own populations; and are using SADC as
     a self-serving `old boys' club' for such
     mutual support; and
     
     * are increasingly responsive and subordinate
     to external inducements and pressures from
     governmental agencies in the richest
     industrialised countries, and their global
     corporations, banks and other financial
     organisations, and the `multilateral'
     institutions dominated and used by them.

The Network went on to demand that the elites

     desist from their collaboration and collusion
     with national and international political and
     economic forces and neo-liberal agencies,
     particularly the IMF and World Bank, to turn
     SADC into an `open region' of free trade,
     free capital movements and investment rights,
     to the benefit of international traders,
     transnational corporations and financial
     speculators--this runs counter to the
     potential for full and effective,
     internally-generated and rooted national and
     regional development... Whether or not our
     governments accept and act on the above
     vitally important demands, we as members of
     people's organisations from the whole of
     Southern Africa will continue to pursue these
     aims and deepen our work in and with existing
     and emerging mass movements to challenge and
     change our governments' policies and
     strategies; and--if that fails--to change our
     governments. (http://www.aidc.org.za--also,
     don't miss the Jubilee South site hosted by
     my AIDC friends.) 

Dear ZNet readers, these are the declarations and
summits which deserve a bit more publicity and
consideration--at the very least, prior to fragile
alliance bids with the G77, G24, NonAligned Movement,
G5 and whatever other configuration of Southern elites
comes together in Prague next week to talk-left/act-
right.

(Next month I'll look beyond Seattle, Washington,
London, Melbourne and Prague, to the dozens of other
sites of anti-neoliberal rebellion, to show that Our
Team is not merely doing armchair resolution-writing,
but is hitting the streets with more people and more
militancy than you may have guessed.)
Patrick Bond (pbond at wn.apc.org)
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
phone:  (2711) 614-8088
work:  University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
work email:  bond.p at pdm.wits.ac.za
work phone:  (2711) 717-3917
work fax:  (2711) 484-2729
cellphone:  (27) 83-633-5548



From zapata at sezampro.yu  Sat Sep 30 08:55:40 2000
From: zapata at sezampro.yu (Andrej Grubacic)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 16:55:40 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Dear friends.....
References: <200009300549.HAA03797@worknet.sangonet.org.za>
Message-ID: <017a01c02aee$de5884a0$5c74fac3@k382>

Thank you for your kind responses. I'll try to make a best use possible of
the links you've suggested.
Red &Black Regards,
            Andrej
www.resistancenet.org


----- Original Message -----
From: Patrick Bond <pbond at wn.apc.org>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>; <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2000 9:47 AM
Subject: Re:[CrashList] Dear friends, could you do me


> From:          Julien Pierrehumbert <julp at freesurf.ch>
> First, be sure to check the writings of Patrick Bond. Mark posted some
stuff
> from him. Look at the "ressource base" of the list. He's a contributor to
LBO-
> talk, I recall.






From aabdo at webtv.net  Thu Sep 28 21:14:20 2000
From: aabdo at webtv.net (Tony Abdo)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 22:14:20 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [CrashList] More 'Democracy' Launched From Washington
Message-ID: <15847-39D4090C-1396@storefull-237.iap.bryant.webtv.net>

FORTIFICATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS-

They put 'em in, they take 'em out.      But it's got to be done right,
with an official US sponsored election.      Get Jimmy ready, so that
there's no fraud this time around.    It's time to play.... Imperialism
with a Happy Face. 

Funny how the State Department is against a coup.       They are Soooo
progressive there, with Clinton in office.     I'm beginning to see the
difference between Bush and Gore.      One would be a benevolent God,
and the other, a compassionate, conservative God.

Will Milosevic respect the will of 'the people' as Fujimori is doing?
Fujimori is Washington's model boy for Milosevic to follow.      It's
time to fortify democracy!    
Tony
_________________________________
Peru's Fujimori Arrives in D.C.
by GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP)-- As Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori arrived for
talks on easing his country's political crisis Thursday, the State
Department called for a ''peaceful, democratic and constitutional
transition of power'' in Peru.

With rumors of a military coup rampant back home, Fujimori met Thursday
evening with Organization of American States Secretary General Cesar
Gaviria. The OAS has assumed a central role in attempting to forge a
consensus among Peru's political groups on how to restore political
stability in the South American nation.

Efforts also were being made for Fujimori to meet with senior State
Department officials.

Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the administration will
emphasize during the discussions ''our support for a peaceful,
democratic and constitutional transition of power, and for the
continuation of OAS dialogue that has been going on.''

Fujimori was inaugurated for a third term just two months ago, but
political developments since then have weakened him to the point where
he plans to arrange for new elections next year, four years ahead of
schedule. He has said he will not be a candidate.

Hours before Fujimori's 2 a.m. departure Thursday from Lima, an
opposition congressman who had defected to Fujimori's ranks, charged
that the army high command was pressuring lawmakers to provoke a coup
within 20 days.

The congressman, Miguel Mendoza, warned that the army was plotting to
restore power to Fujimori's deposed spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos. The
comment put Peruvians on edge just when it appeared that the
OAS-sponsored political dialogue was helping to repair the country's
damaged democracy.

The purpose, Mendoza said, ''would be to promote disorder within
Congress and throughout the country to unleash generalized chaos and
carry out a coup d'etat within 20 days, which would allow the return of
... Montesinos.''

The army's information office dismissed the allegations of Mendoza, as
''absolutely false.''

Eduardo LaTorre, the OAS' permanent secretary in Peru, met with Fujimori
for nearly two hours in the government palace shortly after the
congressman's announcement. LaTorre downplayed the congressman's charge,
saying it had been mentioned in passing during the meeting with
Fujimori. LaTorre said Fujimori planned to discuss with Gaviria ''the
fortification of the democratic process here in Peru.''

A meeting between government and opposition representatives was
suspended soon after Mendoza made his allegation.
Montesinos, who fled the country for Panama on Sunday amid a corruption
scandal, hand-picked the top commanders of the army, who are believed to
be loyal to him. Montesinos had been caught on videotape apparently
bribing an opposition congressman to defect to Fujimori's ranks.

At least 10 lawmakers from Fujimori's Peru 2000 political alliance have
abandoned the party since the scandal broke. As of Wednesday, Fujimori's
legislative bloc held only 54 seats in the 120-member Congress,
eliminating the control he maintained during the last eight years of his
10-year presidency.

Congressman Moises Wolfenson, one of the lawmakers who quit Peru 2000 on
Monday, said his decision was not influenced by any outside forces.
''There was no type of pressure, as (Mendoza) has alleged,'' he said.












From xxxx25.1 at netzero.net  Sat Sep 30 10:05:16 2000
From: xxxx25.1 at netzero.net (xxxx Aysen xxxx)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 12:05:16 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Rumor: Rubin leaked last week's intervention to a hedge 
 fund
References: <SAK.2000.09.30.hpejrbno@computer>
Message-ID: <39D60F3B.3F2E8ACB@netzero.net>

Julien, where was this published? and the exact date please..

thanks,

Mine

Julien Pierrehumbert wrote:

> U.S. Hedge Fund Supposedly Knew About Intervention
> By Claus Tigges
>
> FRANKFURT. The intention of the European Central Bank to intervene in
> favor of the euro, along with other leading central banks, was apparently
> known several hours before the actual price-supporting currency purchases
> were carried out last Friday, according to market sources in Frankfurt.
>
> Supposedly, there was a leak in one of the participating central banks not in
> the euro-zone. On hearing about the impending intervention, Citibank, one
> of the leading currency traders worldwide, began buying up euros in large
> volumes for a U.S. hedge fund company, according to the rumor.
>
> The price of the euro had risen slightly against the dollar to more than $0.86
> on Friday morning. According to sources at banks in Frankfurt, the
> suspected purchases and subsequent sales of currency by Citibank were
> ostensibly the reason that the euro did not climb to $0.90 following the
> intervention, which took place at 1 p.m. CET.
>
> A possible connection between the hedge-fund company, the bank and the
> central bank has been found in the person of former U.S. Finance Minister
> Robert Rubin, who is currently co-chairman of Citigroup.
>
> [...]
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist

--

xxxx Aysen xxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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From jones118 at lineone.net  Sat Sep 30 09:21:30 2000
From: jones118 at lineone.net (Mark Jones)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 16:21:30 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] FW: FT.com FT in Brief (World News & Comment)
Message-ID: <000301c02af2$1c340f80$37068cd4@mjones>


-----Original Message-----
From: FT.com in Brief - World News and Comment
[mailto:t_in_brief_wnc at newsbyemail.ft.com]
Sent: 30 September 2000 06:49
To: jones118 at lineone.net
Subject: FT.com FT in Brief (World News & Comment)


ft in brief (world news and comment) - Text Newsletter
a News By E-mail service from ft.com

**********************************************************************

Look no further than FT.com
If you need business information that gives you the edge 24
hours a day, you need FT.com. Tap into FT.com for instant
access to a wealth of business information - the news, the
markets and all the background you need on companies,
industries and issues. Comprehensive, accurate and
up-to-the-minute, FT.com is the indispensable resource for
anyone in business.
http://www.ft.com

**********************************************************************


Energy and foreign oil dominate presidential campaign

High energy prices and increasing US reliance on foreign oil dominated
the presidential campaign on Friday as Al Gore and George W. Bush
traded blows ahead of next week's first head-to-head debate.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3H5L68Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Milosevic digs in as opposition fills streets

Serbia's opposition launched a marathon campaign of public protest in
a
bid to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to recognise defeat
in last Sunday's elections.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3KELFAQ
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Four killed in Jerusalem riots

The stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations has taken its
toll as the old city of Jerusalem was plunged into violence, riots
broke out in the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip remained extremely
volatile.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT33BGS6Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

EU oil stocks talks stall

EU finance ministers held inconclusive discussions on Friday about the
possibility of a co-ordinated release of emergency oil stocks to try
to
nudge prices lower, similar to a move announced by the US earlier this
month.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3TGBT9Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Finance ministers put brave face on Denmark's euro vote

EU finance ministers and Wim Duisenberg, European Central Bank chief,
have insisted it is business as usual for the euro following Denmark's
referendum vote against joining the beleaguered currency.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3L16DHP
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

US puts 'e-signatures' into law

>From Sunday, a simple click of a computer mouse will be enough to
make
documents legally binding in the US, as the new national digital
signature law takes effect.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT30MWM9Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Opec bank still possible, says Ch?vez

Leading oil exporting nations agreed to strengthen financial
cooperation in energy-related projects, Venezuela?s president Hugo
Ch?vez said, although they fell short of settling on the creation of a
development bank.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3U3032P
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Fujimori seeks US backing on handover

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori has met US officials in Washington
in an effort to reassure domestic opponents that he retains
international support for his plan to hand over power to an elected
successor.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3N1Z28Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Chretien hints at early election

Jean Chretien, Canada's prime minister, may think it is better to go
to
the polls while the economy is unarguably strong.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3BRCEEQ
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Opec's insight on odd bedfellows

The recent Opec meeting in Caracas has focused the world's attention
on
perhaps the most disparate grouping of countries and the diversity of
its leaders.

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3KP638Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C

Editorial comment: Pouring oil on troubled markets

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT366TN7Q
DC&live=true&tagid=ZZZU2IUKJ0C


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? Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2000. "FT" and
"Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times.




From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sat Sep 30 09:58:18 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 09:58:18 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd from PEN-L on warning signs
References: <s9d2042b.032@mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Message-ID: <002101c02af7$413d50c0$1448adcf@perryarn>

and the 52% drop for Apple yesterday...in one day!

has it begun?

Perry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Charles Brown <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 12:28
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd from PEN-L on warning signs


This thread has drifted away a bit from the signs to the portent.

Some signs:

today's paper says that 13 major cities are in danger of overbuilding
commercial real estate.

today's paper says that for PG&E and So. Calif. Edison, two of the
largest corporations in the world, the deficits from this summer's Calif
electricity crisis now equal half their net worth and technical
insolvancy is possible by next year if things aren't fixed.  (For
"fixed" read "the burden passed to customers.")

Cummins diesel the other day reported financial woes because heavy truck
sales have sagged.  Why would they weaken in a permanent boom?

Technology sales are flattening

The Dow has been flat for almost two years -- where is all the profit
that supposedly been holding up consumer spending?

Consumers squeezed by debt and facing very large jumps in home heating
and electricity costs in the weeks ahead.  Commuting costs way up.

Junk bonds losing favor and corporate debt quite high.

No soft landing, more like the Concorde on Firestone tires, it seems to
me.

Actually the Firestone reference appeals to me.  You are roaring along
in your SUV, tailgaiting the weaker folks in the fast lane, the CD
playing and the stock prices coming in on you cell phone.  Suddenly you
are upside down in the ditch, lucky to have survived.

And Air France is suing Continental for dropping a part of a plane on
the runway.  The part had fallen off a DC 10 and nobody noticed for a
few weeks.  Didn't need that part anyway.  Maybe it isn't the tires,
maybe it is debris in the road.

Gene Coyle


_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sat Sep 30 10:21:54 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 10:21:54 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] Straight Talk
References: <000301c028ac$c1a3d740$de0b063e@mjones> <4.3.2.7.2.20000927162559.00ac36f0@pop.islandnet.com>
Message-ID: <003901c02afa$8cf79400$1448adcf@perryarn>

Then, what?

What do you
> propose to do? How? when? where? with whom? with what means? how directly?
> Where do you start?
Yves


Yves,

I would suggest you start with the following  :

1) inventory who you are

2) determine for yourself what life means and what is important to you

2.1) determine what you stand for and what principles are worth your
standing up for

2.2) determine what the terms "value" and "precious" and "enough" mean to
you

3) detemine if life is important to you, and if so, on what terms

4) realize that if you are like most of the rest of us, the physical
essentials of life involve secure sources of breathable air, clean water,
nutritious food, shelter from the elements, etc...

5) begin by researching how many of those items are 'secure' for you now,
where you are,  [i.e., if they were suddenly disrupted, how would that
affect your life? - how vulnerable are you?];  and if they are not, what you
can do about them becoming so

6) now  is the time; some believe there may be barely enough time for one to
get his act together before things being to unravel or implode i.e.
2003-2007

7) obviously, being with someone you trust and care for deeply might help

8) only you can determine whether your life is worth cashing out your
investments and doing something so contrary to what your family and friends
would have you do - but in the end, it is, after all, your own life; for the
moment, at least, you are sovereign; you can make these decisions...

holler if I can be of further help

Perry

----- Original Message -----
From: Networking for a Common Future in Sustainability <ncfs at islandnet.com>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 17:31
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Straight Talk


> At 03:41 PM 27/09/00 -0600, Perry  Arnett wrote: in response to Mark
Jones'
> : " It is wishful thinking to suppose that you  can persuade those with
> power over you to do anything which runs  against their immediate
> self-interest or which imperils their social  position. They will not do
> it."... and :" All the rainforest that can be hewn down, will be. All the
> fossil that can be burnt, will be. All the aquifers that can be pumped
dry,
> will be. All the biomes that can be plundered, will be. No efforts will be
> made to reverse greenhouse emissions, on the contrary, they will
> accelerate. Billions of innocent people are walking around today,
> not  knowing that their death certificates have already been made
> out.  Start from this."
> "..powerful stuff!  thanks; folks:  if the shoe fits, wear it...   "
>
> My comment: We know that at current rate and in current system with
current
> players playing by current "rules", this is it. >
>
> Best
>
> Yves Bajard
>
>
>
>
> >Perry
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From julp at freesurf.ch  Sat Sep 30 12:13:29 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 20:13:29 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Rumor: Rubin leaked last week's intervention to a hedge fund
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.30.shleiosp@computer>

Yeah, I should have taken the time to add the source. It's:

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sep.27 2000
That is... unless faz.com is a spoof. :-) 

You can look at the whole article there:

http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/archive.asp?doc={23FD3F07-9474-
11D4-B997-009027BA226C}

Don't know if this weird URL is still valid. It's the one I have in my cache.


>Julien, where was this published? and the exact date please..
>
>thanks,
>
>Mine




From LROBERTS46 at aol.com  Sat Sep 30 13:00:56 2000
From: LROBERTS46 at aol.com (LROBERTS46 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 15:00:56 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd from PEN-L on warning signs
Message-ID: <1e.b62861b.27079268@aol.com>

Our city, Sacramento, has over built commercial property for over 20 years.  
We have empty offices all over town.  But we have homeless folks living in 
cars and 6 derelict houses on my block alone.  It is much easier to get a 
bank loan for a business development than for a used home.  I think this is 
true all over the US.



From julp at freesurf.ch  Sat Sep 30 14:56:14 2000
From: julp at freesurf.ch (Julien Pierrehumbert)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 22:56:14 +0200
Subject: [CrashList] Fwd from PEN-L on warning signs
Message-ID: <SAK.2000.09.30.lcmmiimd@computer>

>and the 52% drop for Apple yesterday...in one day!

Why did they warn at the end of the quarter? Anyway, a little perspective, 
Perry? Even if the stock was over 70$ 6 monthes ago, a year ago the stock 
was at 30$ and now it's at 25$. Is it a big deal? It's only one company, and a 
company which is in a peculiar competitive postition (people don't know what 
to think about it). 
Another interesting stock is CMGI: The company has been losing 40 cents per 
share per month for the past twelve monthes. In March, the stock was worth 
more than 160 dollars and it's now worth a bit more than 25, the level at which it 
was in around 20 monthes ago. But it's still up more than 4000% over the last 5 
years (compare with around +450% for Intel and Microsoft and +150% for the 
S&P500)! Two years ago, it was still worth less than 10 dollars...

>has it begun?

I have been consitently wrong in the past. Everytime I thought "it" had begun, it 
has been the start of a huge rally. ;-) 
Nevertheless, my opinion is that despite the fact that the imbalances (what a 
smart word :-) are near all-time highs, they are not as severe as they had been 
and, more importantly, the momentum is currently not towards a worsening of 
the situation as it has been during several periods this year. Of course, it could 
change ANY DAY... 
As to obscure indicators, it seems that the TED spread closed above 75 BPs 
for two days in a row while utilities rose... for six days in a row (from 366 to 398 
on the DJUA)!

BTW, what's "it" for you? If it's THE crash and not simple a financial crash, I 
suspect you may be thinking that the stock market is more important than it is. 
THE crash will not be annouced by a drop in the share price of Apple.

Julien




From pjarnett at pdqnet.net  Sat Sep 30 15:06:38 2000
From: pjarnett at pdqnet.net (perry arnett)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 15:06:38 -0600
Subject: [CrashList] on warning signs
References: <SAK.2000.09.30.lcmmiimd@computer>
Message-ID: <00cb01c02b22$54194ac0$1448adcf@perryarn>

I guess, like flying an airplane, I like to "cross-check the instruments"
from time to time; while no one indicator may 'signal' a trend,  a number of
indicators in consort may ;  that's all!

 - and a 52% dive by Apple in one day is significant, if only, that it
happened;  [if YOU owned Apple it would be VERY significant - I don't];  but
taken in the context of a 22% dive by Intel a few days earlier, begins to
tell a story (maybe)...

can't say what "it" is, in fact; I just hope I'll know it when I see it!
maybe that's why I keep looking...

Perry

----- Original Message -----
From: Julien Pierrehumbert <julp at freesurf.ch>
To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2000 14:56
Subject: Re: [CrashList] Fwd from PEN-L on warning signs


> >and the 52% drop for Apple yesterday...in one day!
>
> Why did they warn at the end of the quarter? Anyway, a little perspective,
> Perry? Even if the stock was over 70$ 6 monthes ago, a year ago the stock
> was at 30$ and now it's at 25$. Is it a big deal? It's only one company,
and a
> company which is in a peculiar competitive postition (people don't know
what
> to think about it).
> Another interesting stock is CMGI: The company has been losing 40 cents
per
> share per month for the past twelve monthes. In March, the stock was worth
> more than 160 dollars and it's now worth a bit more than 25, the level at
which it
> was in around 20 monthes ago. But it's still up more than 4000% over the
last 5
> years (compare with around +450% for Intel and Microsoft and +150% for the
> S&P500)! Two years ago, it was still worth less than 10 dollars...
>
> >has it begun?
>
> I have been consitently wrong in the past. Everytime I thought "it" had
begun, it
> has been the start of a huge rally. ;-)
> Nevertheless, my opinion is that despite the fact that the imbalances
(what a
> smart word :-) are near all-time highs, they are not as severe as they had
been
> and, more importantly, the momentum is currently not towards a worsening
of
> the situation as it has been during several periods this year. Of course,
it could
> change ANY DAY...
> As to obscure indicators, it seems that the TED spread closed above 75 BPs
> for two days in a row while utilities rose... for six days in a row (from
366 to 398
> on the DJUA)!
>
> BTW, what's "it" for you? If it's THE crash and not simple a financial
crash, I
> suspect you may be thinking that the stock market is more important than
it is.
> THE crash will not be annouced by a drop in the share price of Apple.
>
> Julien
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From ncfs at islandnet.com  Sat Sep 30 14:35:58 2000
From: ncfs at islandnet.com (NCFS (Yves Bajard))
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 13:35:58 -0700
Subject: [CrashList] Straight Talk
In-Reply-To: <003901c02afa$8cf79400$1448adcf@perryarn>
References: <000301c028ac$c1a3d740$de0b063e@mjones>
 <4.3.2.7.2.20000927162559.00ac36f0@pop.islandnet.com>
Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20000930133144.00ae1440@pop.islandnet.com>

To Perry Arnett et al.:


What you propose, I did long ago. It is essentially directed at the self. 
There is more to do that that. Because, as you say in your first sentence: 
Then, what?

BTW, I am not asking for assistance, but for cooperation.

Best regards,


Yves Bajard




At 10:21 AM 30/09/00 -0600, perry arnett wrote:
>Then, what?
>
>What do you
> > propose to do? How? when? where? with whom? with what means? how directly?
> > Where do you start?
>Yves
>
>
>Yves,
>
>I would suggest you start with the following  :
>
>1) inventory who you are
>
>2) determine for yourself what life means and what is important to you
>
>2.1) determine what you stand for and what principles are worth your
>standing up for
>
>2.2) determine what the terms "value" and "precious" and "enough" mean to
>you
>
>3) detemine if life is important to you, and if so, on what terms
>
>4) realize that if you are like most of the rest of us, the physical
>essentials of life involve secure sources of breathable air, clean water,
>nutritious food, shelter from the elements, etc...
>
>5) begin by researching how many of those items are 'secure' for you now,
>where you are,  [i.e., if they were suddenly disrupted, how would that
>affect your life? - how vulnerable are you?];  and if they are not, what you
>can do about them becoming so
>
>6) now  is the time; some believe there may be barely enough time for one to
>get his act together before things being to unravel or implode i.e.
>2003-2007
>
>7) obviously, being with someone you trust and care for deeply might help
>
>8) only you can determine whether your life is worth cashing out your
>investments and doing something so contrary to what your family and friends
>would have you do - but in the end, it is, after all, your own life; for the
>moment, at least, you are sovereign; you can make these decisions...
>
>holler if I can be of further help
>
>Perry
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Networking for a Common Future in Sustainability <ncfs at islandnet.com>
>To: <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
>Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 17:31
>Subject: Re: [CrashList] Straight Talk
>
>
> > At 03:41 PM 27/09/00 -0600, Perry  Arnett wrote: in response to Mark
>Jones'
> > : " It is wishful thinking to suppose that you  can persuade those with
> > power over you to do anything which runs  against their immediate
> > self-interest or which imperils their social  position. They will not do
> > it."... and :" All the rainforest that can be hewn down, will be. All the
> > fossil that can be burnt, will be. All the aquifers that can be pumped
>dry,
> > will be. All the biomes that can be plundered, will be. No efforts will be
> > made to reverse greenhouse emissions, on the contrary, they will
> > accelerate. Billions of innocent people are walking around today,
> > not  knowing that their death certificates have already been made
> > out.  Start from this."
> > "..powerful stuff!  thanks; folks:  if the shoe fits, wear it...   "
> >
> > My comment: We know that at current rate and in current system with
>current
> > players playing by current "rules", this is it. >
> >
> > Best
> >
> > Yves Bajard
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > >Perry
> > >
> > >
> > >_______________________________________________
> > >Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> > >To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> > >http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
> > To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> > http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
>http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist




From Borba100 at aol.com  Sat Sep 30 22:41:19 2000
From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2000 00:41:19 EDT
Subject: [CrashList] Kostunica says some backers "unconsciously work for American imperial goals"
Message-ID: <e3.a6c7687.27081a6f@aol.com>

URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/news/erlang.htm

Kostunica says some backers "unconsciously work for American imperial goals"

'NY Times' article with commentary by Jared Israel and Max Sinclair 

www.tenc.net 
[Emperor's Clothes]

Below are excerpts from an important 'NY Times'article. In it, the reporter, 
Steven Erlanger, concedes that the charges we and many other people have 
raised about US meddling in Yugoslavia are true. Indeed Erlanger adds 
information we had no way of knowing. For example, he reports that "suitcases 
full of cash" are sent across the borders into Yugoslavia to fund the 
"democratic opposition". 

Note that despite his shocking evidence to the contrary, Mr. Erlanger still 
calls this US-funded opposition "independent":

"Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by American aid 
officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that plenty 
more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgeable aid worker. Others in the 
opposition complain that the Americans are clumsy, sending e-mails from 
"state.gov" - the State Department's address - summoning people to impolitic 
meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or Dubrovnik, 
Croatia."( NY Times, 9-20-2000)

Mr. Erlanger's article includes various attacks on the Yugoslav government in 
general and Mr. Milosevich in particular. As usual, these attacks include no 
supporting evidence. The trick here is repetition: make an accusation a 
thousand times and people think "Yeah, I remember him. He's that dictator." 
The image colors the man, no matter whether it is true or false. 

Because repetition is key, every "news" story about Yugoslavia is required to 
include a number of attacks on the Serbs and their government. 

"When speaking of the Serbs it is considered proper to say something 
negative. More than one thing is optional. But one is obligatory." (From 'The 
Obligatory Bash' at emperors-clothes.com/analysis/obligato.htm )

In his article, Mr. Erlanger quotes a report on US meddling in Yugoslavia 
that appeared in the Yugoslav paper, 'Politika'. What he is actually quoting 
is a statement that a number of U.S., Canadian and Dutch antiwar activists 
signed, which was published on Emperor's Clothes and picked up by Politika . 
(1) 

Notice that Erlanger quotes Vojislav Kostunica admitting that our charges are 
true. Actually, at first Kostunica denies our charges. He says they represent 
the "ravings of the regime." (Why do people refer to the elected government 
of Yugoslavia as a 'Regime'?). In any case, we did not get our information 
from the Yugoslav government, we got it from documents that we discovered 
while doing research on the Internet.

After denying the charge that the "democratic" opposition takes US money, 
Kostunica makes an about-face. He says that "nongovernmental" organizations 
that take American money "are even unconsciously working for American 
imperial goals." 

What does it mean to "unconsciously" take millions of US dollars and work for 
American Imperial goals? What's the practical mechanism at work? Do these 
people get "suitcases full of cash," receive instructions from their 
paymasters, and then carry out political actions that serve "American 
imperial goals," all unconsciously? Do they have a mental disease? 

Everybody says Mr. Kostunica is a super-untarnished man and it is unfortunate 
to have to question a man like that, but common sense suggests that people do 
notice when they are handed a suitcase full of cash. Perhaps Mr. Kostunica is 
mistaken. Perhaps these people are fully conscious when the US operative give 
them their money. Tthey go back to their hotel and open the suitcase. They 
look at the money. Tthey dump the money on the bed. And it is only then, as 
they roll around amidst the thousand dollar bills, that they slip into a 
stupor. 

It is good that Mr. Kostunica has admitted this, although keep in mind, he 
only admitted it to Erlanger, not to the Yugoslav people. Shouldn't he tell 
them too? 

Moreover, he does not appear to grasp the implications. The people he is 
talking about, who take the U.S. government money, are not from Mars. They 
are Yugoslavs. They are not his enemies. They are the organizations that back 
him. Otpor that puts up his posters and hands out his fliers and goes to his 
demonstrations; Vesna Pesic with her US-paid Women in Black; the economists 
at G-17 Plus, funded by the U.S. Congress, who wrote his International 
Monetary Fund takeover plan; Radio B292, the US-financed rdio station; his 
own campaign manager, chief spokesman and strategist, Zoran Djindjic. His 
whole organization, the people who would staff a Kostunica government, they 
are the ones "unconsciously" taking U.S. money and "working for American 
Imperial goals."

Mr. Kostunica is like a man sinking into a swamp. Already he is up to his 
neck in people who "unconsciously work for American Imperial goals;" yet he 
professes not to notice the smell of the U.S. State Department.. 

What has the government of my country done to this world? What a spectacle, 
that this Washington, which bombed the good people of Yugoslavia, that blocks 
medicine from entering that country, that blocks Yugoslavia from importing 
spare parts to fix the bridges and hospitals the US bombed last year; that 
has put racist gangsters in charge of Kosovo - what a spectacle that this 
Washington now tries to bribe and coerce its way into controlling Yugoslavia. 
And once in control, what would Washington do to the Yugoslav people, who 
have been resisting Washington for ten years? Kosovo is the US government's 
model.

Washington, with its "democratic" this and its "independent" that, and all 
the time they want to buy people, especially young people, corrupt them with 
the lure of gold. 

When, and it will happen, the decent people of America learn that they have 
been lied to, when they learn what crimes are being committed in their name, 
may God help the U.S. State Department. 

***.

The following is from 'The New York Times', September 20, 2000 * Reprinted 
for fair use only - (C) 'NY Times'

Milosevic, Trailing in Polls, Rails Against NATO
By STEVEN ERLANGER 

BELGRADE, Serbia, Sept. 19 - In his race for re-election, President Slobodan 
Milosevic of Yugoslavia is running against NATO and the United States, not 
against his democratic opposition. 

He is not entirely mistaken to do so. The United States and its European 
allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they have 
spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done. 

Portraying himself as the defender of Yugoslavia's sovereignty against a 
hostile, hegemonic West led by Washington, Mr. Milosevic and his government 
argue that opposition leaders are merely the paid, traitorous tools of 
enemies who are continuing their war against him by other means. In March 
1999, NATO began a 78-day bombing campaign to drive Serbian forces out of 
Kosovo. 

The Yugoslav elections are on Sunday, but there has hardly been a day since 
the bombing began that state television news has not railed against "NATO 
aggressors." 

With the campaign at its height, the government has spread its attacks to 
include all opposition political parties, independent newspapers, magazines 
and electronic media, the student organization known as Otpor - or Resistance 
- and any nongovernmental organization working to promote democracy, human 
rights or even economic reforms. 

While Mr. Milosevic is trailing the main opposition leader, Vojislav 
Kostunica, in opinion polls, the anti- Western campaign is having an impact. 
The money from the West is going to most of the institutions that the 
government attacks for receiving it - sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in 
indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in 
suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or 
Serbia and Montenegro. Most of those organizations and news media (3) could 
not exist without foreign aid in this society, which is poor and repressive 
and whose market is distorted by foreign economic sanctions. [Comment by 
Emperor's clothes - if Yugoslavia is so repressive why haven't they arrested 
these people who are financed by an enemy power?] (4) and (5) 

Even with foreign aid, government restrictions on newsprint supplies and high 
and repeated fines after suspiciously quick court cases make it hard for the 
independent news media to reach their natural market. 

As for the opinion polls that show Mr. Kostunica in the lead, the information 
minister, Goran Matic, charges that the polls are orchestrated and 
manipulated by the Americans and the Central Intelligence Agency, who help 
pay for them. According to Mr. Matic, Mr. Milosevic is actually far ahead of 
Mr. Kostunica, and the polls simply serve as a vehicle for the opposition to 
claim that the government stole the election once Mr. Milosevic wins. 

Mr. Matic asserts that the Atlantic alliance has come up with various 
scenarios, such as infiltrating soldiers wearing Yugoslav Army and police 
uniforms, to make it possible for the opposition to start civil unrest in the 
streets after the election while claiming that the police and the army are 
actually on their side. 

Mr. Matic has attacked various nongovernmental organizations, including the 
Center for Free Elections and Democracy, which is trying to monitor the 
fairness of the election, as paid instruments of American and alliance 
policy. Many such organizations have been raided by the police, who 
confiscate computer files and also appear to be gathering evidence about 
foreign payments. 

"President Milosevic will win this election," said Ljubisa Ristic, the 
president of the Yugoslav United Left party, founded by Mr. Milosevic's wife, 
Mirjana Markovic. "This is not Hollywood." Washington and the West, she said, 
"are like little kids, wanting something to happen so much they're fooling 
themselves." 

Mr. Ristic said the alliance's war produced a new solidarity among Yugoslavs 
and "killed many illusions people had about the West and about their own 
opposition leaders, who went to the countries that were bombing us to seek 
their support." 

The issues, Mr. Ristic said, are clear now. "It's a decisive time," he said. 
"This is not an election so much as a referendum, a decision on being an 
independent country or a colony. People see what's happened in Kosovo, what 
happens when NATO troops enter the country, and they are not going to allow 
the alliance's hand- picked candidates to win." 

Even before the Kosovo war, the United States was spending up to $10 million 
a year to back opposition parties, independent news media and other 
institutions opposed to Mr. Milosevic. The war itself cost billions of 
dollars. This fiscal year, through September, the administration is spending 
$25 million to support Serbian "democratization," with an unknown amount of 
money spent covertly to help the failed rallies of last year, which did not 
bring down Mr. Milosevic, or to influence the current election. For next 
year, the administration is requesting $41.5 million in open aid to Serbian 
democratization, though Congress is likely to cut that request. 

Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by American aid 
officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that plenty 
more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgable aid worker. Others in the 
opposition complain that the Americans are clumsy, sending e-mails from 
"state.gov" - the State Department's address - summoning people to impolitic 
meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or Dubrovnik, 
Croatia. 

But there is little effort to disguise the fact that Western money pays for 
much of the polling, advertising, printing and other costs of the opposition 
political campaign - one way, to be sure, to give opposition leaders a better 
chance to get their message across in a quasi-authoritarian system where 
television in particular is in the firm hands of the government. 

While that spending allows the opposition to be heard more broadly, deepening 
the opposition to Mr. Milosevic, it also allows the government here to argue 
that it has real enemies, and that the Serbian opposition is in league with 
them. 

Just today, in the state-run newspaper Politika, a long article used public 
information from the United States - including Congressional testimony and 
Web site material - to show that the United States is financing the 
opposition. 

" `Independent,' `nongovernmental' and `democratic' are the standard phrases 
the C.I.A. uses to describe organizations established all over the world to 
destroy the governments and the societies that the U.S. government wants to 
colonize and control," the paper wrote. 

The Congressional testimony, from July 29, 1999, cited American officials 
then involved with Yugoslav policy, like Robert Gelbard and James Pardew, 
telling Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware about their projects. They describe 
the creation of a "ring around Serbia" of radio stations broadcasting into 
Serbia from Bosnia and Montenegro, the spending of $16.5 million in the 
previous two years to support "democratization in Serbia," and another $20 
million to support Montenegro's president, Milo Djukanovic, who broke away 
from Mr. Milosevic in 1998. 

The testimony listed some of the recipients of American aid here, including 
various newspapers, magazines, news agencies and broadcasters opposed to Mr. 
Milosevic, as well as various nongovernmental organizations engaged in legal 
defense and human rights and projects to bring promising Yugoslav journalists 
to the United States for professional training. 

All such projects are portrayed by Politika and state television as a way to 
undermine the legal government, and the recipients are labeled traitors to 
their country. 

Opposition leaders like Mr. Kostunica regard such tactics by the government 
as crass propaganda, but even he is skeptical of American intentions in 
paying for nongovernmental organizations, some of whom, he believes, are even 
unconsciously working for American imperial goals and not necessarily Serbian 
values. 

Other democratic leaders, like Zoran Djindjic and Zarko Korac, regard such 
attacks as an indication of Mr. Milosevic's desperation and anxiety on the 
eve of the first election he is likely to lose in his entire political 
career. Given the stakes for Mr. Milosevic, they believe that he will do all 
he can, including the wholesale stealing of votes, to ensure a victory in the 
first round of voting. 

"The stakes are fundamental for Milosevic," Mr. Korac said. "These elections 
are crucial, not necessarily for the immediate handover of power, but because 
for the first time Mr. Milosevic will be delegitimized in the eyes of his own 
people. He was an elected dictator, with popular and legal legitimacy. But 
from now on he's a true dictator, and he will only be able to rule by force - 
that's a big step for Serbia." 

[Comment by Emperor's Clothes: What is an "elected dictator"? Is democracy 
something that exists independent of real life so that a person is DEFINED as 
being democratic if he gets US approval and DEFINED as undemocratic if he 
does not, and therefore if someone who does not get US approval wins an 
election, then that election is by definition undemocratic and the elected 
official is a dictator? ]

Copywright (c) NY Times. Reprinted For Fair Use Only.

Footnote:

(1) 'How the U.S. has Created a Corrupt Opposition in Serbia'
http://emperors-clothes.com/engl.htm 

(2) See "Statement by Paul B. McCarthy, National Endowment for Democracy to 
the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe". It can be read at ( 
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/ned-1.htm 

(3) "Emperor's Clothes Interviews Radio B292 at 
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/emperor.htm 

(4) Erlanger calls the money that the U.S. government spends to bribe 
Yugoslavs "foreign aid". Foreign aid? Isn't foreign aid money that one 
country gives another to help with some project? Not any more. This change in 
definition is part of a whole New World Order dictionary in which 
"democratic" means "US government approved" and "civil society" means 
"organizations set up by the US government and its front groups" and "peace 
activist" means "someone who tries to prevent the population from resisting 
attacks by US-financed terrorists" and "election monitor" means "someone who 
works to destabilize a country by destroying the people's confidence in its 
institutions" and "independent media" means "paid by the U.S. government to 
support those groups and individuals who are also paid by the U.S." A fair 
election is one that the US-backed side wins.

(5) Erlanger justifies the US practice of giving bribe money to Yugoslav 
organizations on the grounds that these organizations are poor and need the 
money. Never mind that the quantities of money are immense. Never mind that 
using the "I'm poor" argument one could justify any crime. Erlanger goes on 
to comment that one of the reasons these organizations are poor is that the 
Yugoslav "market is distorted by foreign economic sanctions." Let's stick 
with that for a moment. The sanctions were imposed by the United States 
government and its allies. They have badly hurt the Yugoslav economy. They 
have increased poverty and therefore made US money much more attractive. So 
first the US government impoverishes people and then it seduces them with 
monetary bribes which are attractive because...they are poor. Makes perfect 
sense.

www.tenc.net 

[Emperor's Clothes]
 



From bill at wispsal.fsnet.co.uk  Sat Sep 30 19:48:15 2000
From: bill at wispsal.fsnet.co.uk (Bill Howard)
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2000 02:48:15 +0100
Subject: [CrashList] Danes vote NO?
References: <000401c02977$0502f1e0$c9278cd4@mjones>
Message-ID: <000501c02be8$040de380$2f97893e@pc01>

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Mark Jones <jones118 at lineone.net>
To: crl <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 7:07 PM
Subject: [CrashList] Danes vote NO?

          There appears to be an escalating battle between
           the two great capitalist currencies - the Euro and 
           the Dollar - wonder wihich will triumph over the other?
        
          I thought Tony Blairs best friend was Bill Clinton
          - and the Mighty Dollar?               Bill.





1900 GMT
Exit polls say the Danes have rejected joining the Euro and abolishing
their national currency, the krone. If so, today's Danish referendum
result is a potentially devastating blow to the Euro and probably also
puts paid to Tony Blair's chances of abolishing the pound sterling and
taking Britain into Euroland.

Mark








From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Thu Sep 28 20:37:44 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 23:37:44 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague
In-Reply-To: <006e01c02948$65160560$2bca0ac8@marcelo>
Message-ID: <05df01839021d90MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>

En relaci?n a RE: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Pra, 
el 28 Sep 00, a las 9:13, MARCELO AFTALION dijo:

Querido Marcelo,

Podr?as decirme

(a) cu?l es tu v?nculo con el Aftali?n de "Aftali?n y Mora",

(b) porqu? mandaste copia de este correo a la embajada de Francia en 
Buenos Aires?

Pura curiosidad mal?vola.

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Thu Sep 28 20:37:44 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 23:37:44 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Prague
In-Reply-To: <001801c02964$0e3fbb20$2dca0ac8@marcelo>
Message-ID: <05b045938021d90MAIL2@mail2.arnet.com.ar>

En relaci?n a RE: [CrashList] Re: [FORUM ATTAC] Violences a Pra, 
el 28 Sep 00, a las 12:52, MARCELO AFTALION dijo:

> Cher George,
> Peux-je vous recommender de lire "The Functions of Social Conflict",
> par Lewis Coser? Crois-tu que les seigneurs du BM/FMI ne sont pas
> t?rrifi?s apr?s Prague? ?a commence a changer. Marcelo Aftalion

Souhaitons que Marcelo (h?l?s, un autre Argentin ici!) ne soit pas 
tort...

Mais on devrait consid?rer la possibilit? que cette Grande Peur ne 
nous d?clenche une nouvelle vague de fascisme sur le dos.

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar  Tue Sep 26 17:23:37 2000
From: Gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar (Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky)
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 20:23:37 -0300
Subject: [CrashList] A few data on Argentina under the hoof of imperialists today (Spanish)
Message-ID: <04e604024231a90MAIL1@mail1.arnet.com.ar>

Encuesta de Artemio Lopez (set.00)

En el ultimo a?o como fueron sus ingresos:
71% empeoro
7.4% mejoro
Oportunidades laborales
82%: menos oprtunidades
11%: + oprtunidades
Posibilidades de pagar aportes previsionales en el futuro
80% no podra pagar aportes
Brecha entre riqueza y pobreza
entre el 10% + rico y el 10% + pobre: 25 veces

N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky at arnet.com.ar



From ab11 at erols.net  Fri Sep 15 17:58:05 2000
From: ab11 at erols.net (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 19:58:05 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
Message-ID: <01C02E69.645045C0@207-172-165-58.s58.tnt1.nywnj.ny.dialup.rcn.com>



-----Original Message-----
From:	LROBERTS46 at aol.com [SMTP:LROBERTS46 at aol.com]
Sent:	Saturday, September 09, 2000 9:35 PM
To:	crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
Subject:	Re: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything

Dear Joe Mosley,
I liked your analogies of how we react to Gore et al?
Ask Amiri if he knows what a prima donna is?
Is that like Belladonna or ? Donna e  mobile?
lr

_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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From ab11 at erols.net  Fri Sep 15 18:25:01 2000
From: ab11 at erols.net (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 20:25:01 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn't arousing anything
Message-ID: <01C02E69.6A894A40@207-172-165-58.s58.tnt1.nywnj.ny.dialup.rcn.com>

The split between the Social Democrats and Spartacists & other Communist fractions was the basis for Hindenburg then Hitler. And all, then trade unionists, Jews, Gypsies, were wasted. 
	The "upper hand" they had vanished based on wht Lenin called Otzovism and Liquidationism. One group too revolutionary to Unite, the other making opportunist submission to the right. 
	We have no upper hand or not much of a hand at all because we are SPLIT now. Nader's one man band whereby, read the platform, he wants to do quality control on imperialism at best can move the prostitute a trifle to the Left, which is good. Though the dangs have let Buchanan emerge, with a "colored" woman v.p. on the ticket to move the electorate back rightward. Thus , they feel, neutralizing the Democrat'x Lieberman move, maent to reunify the split Black-Jewish political affinity of the Civil Rights days. Feeling that perhaps  that they can pull the feminist trend with the Blacks, plus the foflks who can believe the bs "Populist" tip smeared like mayonaise over Buchanan's  the cold right essence of Buch's line.
	As I said previously, Nadir's "campaign", can only have positive meaning in practical politics if it is one aspect of  a national anti-imperialist  electoral (and with practice around other key issues) United Front, Lenin's Left Bloc, if you will. "March Separately , Strike Together!". Otherwise it is merely petty bourgeois grandstanding. Another sectarian "get rich quick" scheme!
Neither an essentially Consumer Advocacy based campaign or Environmentalism, both largely petty bourgeois priorities,  are at the cutting edge of mass democratic struggle, but joined with a broad spectrum of other anti-imperialist organizations and movements, we can begin the arduous process of principled Unity and even at this point force some vital concessions from the Democrats. To "go it alone" is more likely  to be the Texas Cheney-Saw murderer's enabler.  

-----Original Message-----
From:	JoeMosley at aol.com [SMTP:JoeMosley at aol.com]
Sent:	Saturday, September 09, 2000 8:33 PM
To:	crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com; brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca
Cc:	gpnj-members at egroups.com; asgp-coo-owner at greens.org
Subject:	[CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:Nader isn't arousing anything

Response to Amiri Baraka's post from JoeMosley.

Subj:    [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:Nader isn't arousing anything
Date:   9/5/00 6:58:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:   ab11 at erols.com (Amiri Baraka)
Sender: crashlist-admin at lists.wwpublish.com
Reply-to:   crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
To: brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca
CC: WISEALJ at HOTMAIL.COM, dexta at mindspring.com, crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com, 
amcgee at igc.org (Art McGee)

THE NADIR OF SOCIAL- DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL POSTURING
    Weimar is recycling it's eerie presence , tightening around us today! 
Ralph Nader's feverish personal "campaign for president" is useful in the 
sense that in a general way, he raises some issues that , hopefully, like 
Bradley's gesture, moves the Gore wagon slightly to the Left. But for Nader 
to insist that his individualistic petty bourgeois  for a moral remaking of 
the Imperialist state is politically advanced as  the practical politics of 
our time place and condition,  is sad  and dangerous. Because, only the 
slowest among us can not see that if Nader takes his , in essence, 
politically solipsistic show all the way to the hoop, then he will quite 
simply help Bush get elected!

JoeMosley - So what, would that be the end of the world? We survived Nixon 
and Bush, we have Clinton, now you hope that we will "move the Gore wagon 
slightly to the left." Is that what you would call progress? I don't! I 
believe that the progressive members of our society have treated Clinton and 
will treat Gore as how a teenager who has been sodomized by her boy-friend, 
is hurt, disturbed and ambivalent, but does not make a fuss because she 
believes that he loves her. While if she was penetrated by another, she would 
scream rape and seek reprisals. If a Republican was in the White House, 
progressives would not forgive and forget: the sordid Lewinski affair; the 
"three strikes and you are out" mandatory judicial sentencing; the mandatory 
punitive sentences for "minor" crack violations compared to the "slap on the 
wrist" for "minor" cocaine violations; the unfair implementation of  "welfare 
to work-fare" reforms; and the list could go on...

     The politics of individual moral cant is the "protest" politics of the 
petty bourgeois "loyal opposition" crying out because they think Imperialism 
can be cleaned up enough (consumer advocacy) for them & some of we, to be 
INCLUDED.
    First, Nader is not that much Left of Gore. His recent speeches, while 
trying to tighten up his "gap" vis a vis Blacks and oppressed nationalities, 
is still saccharin covered generality, in the main. Nader is a consumer 
advocate, at worst, quality control for imperialism's commodities.

JoeMosley - Please tread carefully Mr. Baraka, in your zeal to trivialize 
Nader, your bias is showing. You conveniently fail to recognize that Ralph 
Nader and Winona LaDuke were nominated by the Association of State Green 
Parties, they were drafted by the ASGP and they are running on the ASGP 
platform. They are also building a party that is free from the corrupting 
influence of greedy corporations, a party that is challenging the hegemony of 
the corporate controlled Democratic and Republican parties. Win or lose, the 
Green Party will change the political paradigm, detain the creeping 
plutocracy (what I believe you call Imperialism) that is perverting our 
democratic institutions and facilitate the emergence of other political 
parties.
    NADER CAN ONLY BE ULTIMATELY USEFUL TO THE PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL 
POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE AGREES TO AGGRESSIVELY HELP CREATE A LEFT BLOC.. OF 
THE MAIN ANTI IMPERIALST ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS AND DEMAND CONCRETE 
CONCESSIONS FROM GORE!!----

JoeMosley - There is a very important kernel of wisdom in this statement, Mr 
Baraka, but I would phrase it differently, i.e., NADER CAN BE USEFUL TO THE 
PEOPLE, IN A PRACTICAL POLITICAL SENSE, IF HE AGREES TO AND SUCCEEDS IN 
HELPING TO CREATE A BLOC OF ANTI-PLUTOCRACY ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS TO 
DEFEAT BOTH GORE AND BUSH. Please be consistent Mr. Baraka, in one sentence 
you belittle those who think they can clean up "Imperialism" and in another 
sentence you want to create a bloc to demand concessions from the "High 
Priest" of the "Imperialists." You cannot have it both ways Sir!

     Some of the main groups that should be in such a bloc would be 
Marxist-Leninist Organizations, including the CPUSA, Freedom Socialists,  
Committee of Correspondence, Social Democratic organizations like the DSA, 
SDA, , Puerto Rican Socialist Party (The Trots and Anarchists abhor the dirty 
bourgeois electoral arena, that's one characteristic of their objective 
Opposition to Revolutionary Democratic Struggle, the only real precursor and 
path to Socialism!) Anti Imperialist Organizations ...both multi national and 
national in form;  e.g., Black Latino, Asian, Native  Peoples groups, Trade 
Unions, Black Radical Congress, Black United Front, RNA, NAACP, Pan 
Africanist, Professional and Academic Organizations, Cultural and Arts 
Groups, Media Groups, Nation of Islam and American Muslim Mission, 
Independent Publications and Presses. Consumer Coops, Agricultural Coops, 
Advocacy Groups, particularly around Welfare, Immigration, Police Brutality. 
Police Control Boards, 
    The Congressional and State Legislative Black and Latino Caucuses, ABC 
LEO, Individual Politcal and Activist figures,and their organizations, e.g., 
Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, RAndall Robinson, Marable, Gates, West, Afro 
American, Latino Publishers Groups, Minority and Small Business 
Organizations, Church related groups, 

JoeMosley - I would "give my right arm" to see a cohesive bloc of these 
organizations, but their potential would be wasted "demanding concrete 
concessions from Gore. In my opinion, a bloc of this magnitude could ese organizations could adopt 
the documents of the others without making major changes in their own 
document. How many of the organizations that you mention are in the same 
situation?  Instead of trying to derail the Nader campaign why not support 
this effort as a first step in a movement to dismantle the "duopoly" and 
create a level playing field for all parties?
 
    Either Nader and the Greens abandon the isolated glamour of moral 
pontification as a Loyal Opposition to Imperialism or they risk the Weimar 
replay of helping elect the far Right, BUSH 2. I know the choice is between a 
Murderer (B-2) and a Prostitute (Gore rimes with W....) but folks, that is 
literally where we are. Being serenaded by the dismally ignorant chorus of 
Trot-Anarchists, one of who said, "I bet you voted for Clinton". To which we 
say, I bet you voted (by non-voting)  for Bush. (Note to All  , read The 
Casebook on Weimar, Univ of Calif, to see how close we are to Weimar 2! 
Hitler came to power because of a split between Communists and Social 
Democrats!} Amiri Baraka

JoeMosley - Mr. Baraka, I believe your Weimar analogy is a bit off base. In 
Weimar, the Communists and Social Democrats had the upper-hand which they 
lost because of the split. Today Democrats and Republicans have the 
upper-hand, we have nothing. What can we lose? In conclusion, why vote for 
the lesser of two evils when there is a better choice?

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From ab11 at erols.net  Wed Sep 20 16:33:35 2000
From: ab11 at erols.net (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 18:33:35 -0400
Subject: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???
Message-ID: <01C02E69.86C0CD00@207-172-165-58.s58.tnt1.nywnj.ny.dialup.rcn.com>

Brother, these kinds of charges need references...

-----Original Message-----
From:	John Woodford [SMTP:johnwood at umich.edu]
Sent:	Tuesday, September 12, 2000 5:16 PM
To:	crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com
Subject:	Re: [CrashList] Re:Will Anyone Take Any Notice???

Mugabe is no "Marxist" and never has been one. He is among a pack the CIA
termed "national communists," which basically meant nationalist opportunists
who could use some Marxist verbiage demagogically while serving the economic
and strategic interests of the imperialists.  The Afghan leader overthrown by
Barbak Karmal (his name slips me now), Ceaucescu, Pol Pot and various others
of were so categorized and were aided by the CIA. They were
pseudorevolutionaries who resisted internal changes that might challenge the
wealthy local sellouts.

juneo4 at juno.com wrote:

> Responding to the post below, scroll down:
>
> Question: I need to know of some examples where Marxism is working, and
> how it is working sustainably,  please Anyone?
> An example of a 'new' marxist leader of a 'new' nation (as in  recent
> times), namely  Zimbabwe, seems to me not to be one example?
>
> With billions of dollars changing  hands in a nanosecond (e-commerce) the
> dynamics of the World as weKnowIt, Surely, must have changed dramatically
> in the past decade and demand more "imaginative" (to quote Tahir)
> theories ( to avoid or mitigate the Crash)?
>
> Simple practical sustainable activities, ( solutions, such as 'staa jabu'
> put forward on this list) that can be put into practice, immediately, by
> millions would change dynamics!?  While  furturists develop their visions
> for the rest of us, we can with our  everyday choices and actions, surely
> surely become co-creators (Barbara Marx Hubbard) of a better world, thus
> being part of the Solutions and the Problems, right?
>
> Fred E Katz demonstrates( "Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil") evil
> is incremental, (and compounded?) so why can we not envision that
> 'postive sustainable compassionate Caring'  would incrementally dismantle
> dysfuctional systems?   jo*
>
> I am not particularly
> >interested in the finer points of Marxist (or any other) theory or
> >theology.
> >They would only be of value if they could offer a demonstrable and
> >practical
> >way of avoiding the crash - which, although it sometimes seems most
> >contributors have forgotten - is the whole point of this group (as far
> >as I
> >know).
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
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From ab11 at erols.net  Wed Sep 20 16:42:12 2000
From: ab11 at erols.net (Amiri Baraka)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 18:42:12 -0400
Subject: [gpnj-members] [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn'tarousing anything
Message-ID: <01C02E69.890C43A0@207-172-165-58.s58.tnt1.nywnj.ny.dialup.rcn.com>

Don't confuse the practical Need to demand, from the forceful presence of Left Bloc, concessions from the Democrats, and Nader's solipsistic "talent show", which offers nothing practically.. We are talking about organizing a consistent political presence that extends past now,  not just  some "feel good" stunting for the similarly confused.

-----Original Message-----
From:	Gary Novosielski [SMTP:gpn at techie.com]
Sent:	Monday, September 11, 2000 4:18 AM
To:	gpnj-members at egroups.com
Cc:	crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com; brc-discuss at lists.tao.ca; gpnj-members at egroups.com; asgp-coo-owner at greens.org
Subject:	Re: [gpnj-members] [CrashList] Re: [BRC-DISC] Re:NAder isn'tarousing anything

At 20:33 9/9/00 EDT, Joe Mosley wrote:
>Please be consistent Mr. Baraka, in one sentence 
>you belittle those who think they can clean up "Imperialism" and in another 
>sentence you want to create a bloc to demand concessions from the "High 
>Priest" of the "Imperialists." You cannot have it both ways Sir!


Joe,

Outstanding response, as usual.

Colleen managed to get on the air when Baraka was on Clayton Reilly's
Saturday radio show on WBAI, and tried to make that very point, but it was
hard to get a word in edgewise.  She also pointed out that Ralph was
running to help build the Green party and not to further his own career,
which does not need help.

Baraka's response was somewhat rambling, and made the astounding claim that
the environment is not an important issue to most people!  Beyond the fact
that he knew that the Green Party had something to do with the environment,
and that Ralph Nader was an advocate for consumers (which he tried to paint
as an advocate in favor of over-consumption!), he seemed to actually know
very little about the positions or history of the Green Party.
Nevertheless, he felt qualified to hold forth at length about what was
"wrong" with it, getting almost every detail wrong.

What's worse is that he should know better, having had numerous contacts
with Joe Fortunato, and Larry Hamm, so he would have to try very hard to
get it so wrong.

It is pretty clear that Baraka is no longer a part of the solution.
Determining what, therefore, he *is* a part of is left as an exercise for
the reader.

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