From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu May 1 00:55:22 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 23:55:22 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Saddam's letter References: <000501c30f99$7dafec00$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <008701c30fae$a31d5300$20fa5718@comintern> Bob: Can you supply us with an url? Macdonald From bobenoch at shaw.ca Thu May 1 01:17:00 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 00:17:00 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Saddam's letter References: <000501c30f99$7dafec00$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> <008701c30fae$a31d5300$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <000d01c30fb1$a95d5500$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> http://www.freearabvoice.org/Iraq/Report/report09.html From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 1 02:02:06 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:02:06 +0100 Subject: [A-List] welcome to Sabri Message-ID: <003b01c30fb7$f5584360$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 1 02:08:31 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:08:31 +0100 Subject: [A-List] welcome to Sabri Message-ID: <004b01c30fb8$dab1a460$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> Dear Sabri May Day greetings in the spirit of Yunus Emre, and welcome as co-moderator of A-list. James PS slip of the finger! From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 1 11:34:47 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 13:34:47 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Speed is King Message-ID: <3EB15AB7.6080409@mindspring.com> There is a war brewing for sometime now between established exchanges, such as NYSE, and elctronic trading networks. Despite modernization, the NYSE still requires 21 seconds to execute an order, while the latest electronic system can do it in one tenth of a second. This is of great significant for program trading and arbitrageurs. Fortune can be won and lost in a couple of seconds. In the War on Iraq, it took some 15 minutes from the time a target was identified to its being hit by cruise missiles, and it missed the target twice. The day will come when interest will be calculated and compounded in intervals of seconds rather than days. Already electronic bill-paying is taking away the advantage of floats. Henry C.K. Liu From annewilliamson at msn.com Thu May 1 07:11:33 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:11:33 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Argentina: Presidential Elections Run-Off References: <004b01c30e50$2a4f04a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <01b301c30e60$a7688500$c9b7fea9@anne> <004401c30f7a$d2f368a0$6d0f38d2@k6n2c2> Message-ID: <012901c30fe3$30c7d020$c9b7fea9@anne> ================================================================= STRATFOR'S GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT http://www.stratfor.com 30 April 2003 ================================================================= .................................................................. Today's Featured Analysis Two Peronist Candidates Go Head-to-Head in Argentine Runoff Summary Former President Carlos Menem may be the political underdog in Argentina's May 18 presidential elections, although he won the first-round election with 24.6 percent of the vote. His biggest problem is that 70 percent of Argentine voters dislike him intensely, equating his previous governments with widespread corruption and what is commonly perceived as the destruction of the country's economy with free-market policies that did not help most Argentines. Analysis Former President Carlos Menem won the most votes in Argentina's first-round presidential elections on April 27, but he may be the political underdog in the May 18 runoff election against Nestor Kirchner. Although Menem won 24.6 percent of the vote compared with Kirchner's 22 percent, the former president's negative ratings among voters top 70 percent while Kirchner's are in single digits, according to some recent surveys. This lopsidedness between two Justicialist Party (PJ) members -- who call themselves "peronists" -- suggest that Menem may have to campaign very hard in the next two weeks to win more votes. Menem already has shaken up his campaign team, announced a proposed Cabinet that would include many "new faces" in Argentine politics, and has said he will focus on foreign policy, the economy and security issues to define sharp differences between himself and Kirchner, according to Stratfor sources in Buenos Aires. However, Kirchner's low negative ratings among voters suggest that he has considerable room to raise his share of the runoff vote by leveraging widespread dislike for Menem to his advantage and persuading independent voters that his economic policies would be sound. Kirchner also is counting on the strong support of current President Eduardo Duhalde's government to put him over the top on May 18. This support gives Kirchner a strong base in the wealthy province of Buenos Aires, which is Duhalde's political stronghold. Menem and Kirchner also are reaching out to peronist provincial governors in an effort to build political alliances in regions where they fared poorly in the first round vote. Both are courting former San Luis provincial governor Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, and each has offered jobs in their respective future governments to leading peronist governors like Carlos Reutemann of Santa Fe and Eduardo Fellner of Jujuy province, who would be interior minister in Kirchner's government. Menem, who is 72, has pledged to structure a Cabinet that would include many political newcomers; he likely will announce the nominations this week. So far, he has confirmed the appointment of Carlos Melconian, an economist who has written a best-selling book on how to rebuild Argentina, as his pick for economy minister. Menem also named pro-U.S. veteran journalist Jorge Castro as foreign minister. Menem's proposals also unabashedly seek greater economic and political engagement with the United States. Kirchner has promised a Cabinet that would mix honesty, experience and fresh blood in the government. However, his core officials would include current Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, who would continue in that role, and several other officials currently serving in Duhalde's government. In fact, Duhalde appears to have considerable political influence over Kirchner's proposed ministers, judging by the many officials that would be carried over into the new administration if Kirchner is elected. Kirchner describes his association with Duhalde as a political alliance, but many peronists in Duhalde's faction claim privately that their support for Kirchner is "strongly conditional" to his maintaining good relations with Duhalde. This suggests that Duhalde expects to continue playing a powerful role behind the scenes in Kirchner's government, which likely would lead quickly to political disagreements between the two men. Such tensions could weaken the Argentine government -- which would confront a fragmented Congress in any event. If Kirchner wins the May runoff, Argentina's core economic policies under Duhalde would not undergo significant change. With Lavagna still at the helm of the Economy Ministry, Buenos Aires likely would continue to work with the International Monetary Fund, but progress in restructuring the country's external debt and domestic banking system would plod forward slowly. Menem's economic and security proposals are bolder than Kirchner's and openly pro-market. In effect, Menem represents the most reformist wing of the Peronist Party on economic and trade policy issues. For instance, he has proposed adopting the U.S. dollar as Argentina's national currency, securing a free trade agreement with the United States as quickly as possible and rebuilding close political linkages between the two countries that largely were dissolved under Duhalde. In practical terms, this means that Argentina under Menem would align itself with Washington on every major foreign policy issue of concern to the United States. Menem's closest political allies realize their candidate is at a disadvantage in terms of popularity: He is perceived as having presided over two successive corrupt governments that stole and wasted billions of dollars. However, they are gambling that many voters -- especially in the middle class, which was nearly destroyed by the country's economic collapse in the past several years -- may be persuaded to set aside their personal dislike for Menem and buy into his optimistic vision that Argentina will recapture its lost prosperity if voters elect him president a third time. .................................................................. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6856 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Thu May 1 09:27:54 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 11:27:54 -0400 Subject: Fw: [A-List] Saddam's letter Message-ID: <001001c3101a$f062b260$d1029ad8@computer> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Enoch" To: Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2003 12:23 AM Subject: [A-List] Saddam's letter > > Iraqi Resistance Report IX - April 30, 2003 > =========================================== > The following letter, declared to be written by Saddam > Hussein, was published in today's Al Quds Al Arabi: > > -------------------------------------------------- > Al-Quds al-Arabi, London, Wednesday, 30 April 2003 > > Text of a hand written letter from Saddam Hussein. > > > > In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Mercy-giving. > > "They had sworn to God previously that they would not > turn their backs, and an oath to God must be answered > for." [al-Quran, 33:15] > > Iraq, 28 April 2003. > > To the people of great Iraq, to the sons and daughters > of the Arab Nation and Islamic World Community, and to > honorable people everywhere, > > Peace be upon you and the mercy of God and His > blessings! > > As Hulagu entered Baghdad, the criminal Bush has > entered her, causing me great bitter torment, nay more > than my bitter torment. > > They were not victorious over you, you who reject > occupation and humiliation, who hold Arabism and Islam > in your hearts and minds, they were not victorious > over you except by treachery. > > And by God it is not a victory so long as the > resistance remains in your hearts. > > Now what we used to talk about has come to pass. We > do not live in peace and security so long as that > monstrosity the Zionist entity is on our Arab land. > For this reason, there can be no dissociating the > parts of the one united Arab struggle. > > Sons and daughters of our great people! > > Rise in intifada against the occupier! Do not believe > those who talk about Sunni and Shii. The only thing > that the homeland, your great Iraq, lives through now > is the occupation. > > There are no priorities other than expelling the > cowardly, murdering, criminal infidel occupier, to > whom no honorable person has extended a hand to shake. > No, only the hands of the traitors and lackeys have > been extended. > > I say to you that all the states surrounding you are > against your resistance. But God is with you, because > you are fighting unbelief and defending your rights. > > The traitors have permitted themselves to voice their > treason out loud, although it is a disgrace. So voice > your rejection of the occupier out loud, for the sake > of great Iraq, the Arab Nation, Islam, and humanity! > > Iraq will win, and with it the sons and daughters of > the Arab Nation, and all honorable people. We shall > get back the antiquities that they have stolen. We > will rebuild the Iraq that they want to cut up into > little pieces, may God humiliate them! > > Saddam did not have property in his own name, and I > challenge any person to prove that the palaces were in > any name other than that of the Iraqi State. I had > left them a long time ago to go to live in a small > house. > > Forget everything and resist the occupation, for it is > the beginning of a crime if there are priorities other > than the occupier and his expulsion. Remember that > they are bent on bringing out rival sides to fight > each other so that your Iraq will remain weak, so they > can plunder it as they used to. > > It is a sufficient honor for your party, the Arab > Baath Socialist Party, that it did not extend its hand > to the Zionist enemy, and did not make concessions to > a cowardly American or British aggressor. > > Those who stood against Iraq and plotted against it, > will never be treated to peace at the hand of America. > > Greetings to everyone who resists, to every honorable > Iraqi citizen, to every woman, child, and elderly > person in our great Iraq. > > Unite, and the enemy and the traitors who came in > along with them will flee. > > And know that he who brought invasion forces with him, > whose airplanes took off to kill you, will never be > sending you anything but poison. > > By the grace of God, the day will come of liberation > and victory for ourselves, for the Arab Nation, and > for Islam before everything. And this time, as with > every time in which right triumphs, the coming days > will be more beautiful. > > Preserve your property, your offices, your schools. > Boycott the occupier. Boycott him! This is the > obligation of Islam, of religion, and the homeland. > > Long live great Iraq and its people! > > Long live Palestine, free and Arab, from the Jordan > River to the Sea! > > God is greatest! > > And may the despicable be despised! > > [signed] Saddam Hussein > > 26 Safar 1424 H. > 28 April 2003. > > > > From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Thu May 1 17:28:52 2003 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (Jorge Figueiredo) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 00:28:52 +0100 Subject: [A-List] letter to Lula, Brazilian President Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030502002647.029ead48@mail.telepac.pt> Letter to President LULA Dear Mr. President This letter is addressed to you by persons who hold you in esteem, admire your political trajectory and wish to give you total support so that you can live up to the enormous hopes that your victory has awakened in the Brazilian people, Aware of the economic-financial situation of the country, we have a clear perception of the internal and external difficulties that have led the government to take measures restricting spending and raising taxes. We know also that globalization has provoked substantial changes in the world economy and that it will be very difficult to develop the country without participating in some way in the international financial community. Nevertheless, these constraints cannot mean the renunciation of our sovereignty. Two measures are particularly worrisome in relationship to this matter: the negotiations on the FTAA and the intended autonomy of the Central Bank. The first, as some of us have already argued in extensive and repeated pleadings, will expose our industrial, agricultural, and service producers to absolutely unequal competition, whose primary consequence will be an even greater de-nationalizing of our productive space. And by its reach that surpasses commercial agreements, but involves agriculture, investments, state purchases, currency, and services, leaves clear the intention of the U.S. Government to re-colonize the continent in accord with its interests. The second involves handing over control of our currency to external capital and therefore the renunciation of the national project. It cannot be hidden that with the most dynamic sectors of our economy in the hands of foreign corporations, the autonomy of the Central Bank means transferring to them the power to set the value of our currency. For these reasons, we made the decision to send you this letter. In our understanding, the FTAA as well as the autonomy of the Central Bank are non-negotiable matters, given that they involve the untouchability of the nation?s sovereignty. A decision of such magnitude must made by the owner of this sovereignty--the Brazilian people. Thus, each Brazilian man and woman must be called on to have their say about both questions in a plebiscite convoked for this express goal. The plebiscite would be the occasion for a great national debate about the two topics, thus laying the groundwork for a truly democratic decision. We are convinced that a firm attitude of Brazil will change the posture of the forces that are pressuring us and will open up a path so that we can build, in an autonomous way, the paths that are most appropriate for our development. However, if this does not happen, and the government finds itself placed in the situation of breaking with the forces that are pressuring it, please believe, Mr. President, that the retaliation will not be insupportable. Our economy is already sufficiently strong to resist them and our people sufficiently politicized to give you the necessary support for this confrontation. Brazil, March 2003 Alfredo Bosi. Literary critic and member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters Ana Maria Freire, educator, widow of Paulo Freire Ana Maria Castro, educator, daughter of Josue de Castro Ariovaldo Umbelino de Oliveira, geographer from University of S?o Paulo Augusto Boal, theater director Benedito Mariano, researcher Bernardete de Oliveira, anthropologist from State University of S?o Paulo Carlos Nelson Coutinho, political scientist and philosopher Chico Buarque, composer and writer Dom Demetrio Valentini, bishop Dom Paulo Arns, cardinal Dom Pedro Casaldaliga, bishop Dom Tomas Balduino, bishop Emir Sader, political scientist Fabio Konder Comparato, jurist Fernando Morais, writer Francisco de Oliveira, social scientist Haroldo Campos, poet and translator Joanna Fomm, actress Leonardo Boff, theologian, philosopher, and writer Luis Fernando Verissimo, writer Margarida Genovois, human rights activist Maria Adelia de Souza, geographer, researcher with Miltom Santos Manuel Correia de Andrade, geographer, specialist in Northeast Brazil Marilena Chau?, philosopher Nilo Batista, jurist Pastor Ervino Schmidt, pastor of the Lutheran Church and director of National Council of Christian Churches Pl?nio Arruda Sampaio, consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on agrarian questions, periodical director Oscar Niemeyer, architect Ricardo Antunes, political scientist Sergio Haddad, educator and president of the Brazilian Association of NGOs Sergio Ferolla, brigadier-general Tatau Godinho, feminist Valton Miranda, psychiatrist -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6101 bytes Desc: not available URL: From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 1 18:21:42 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 17:21:42 -0700 Subject: [A-List] welcome to Sabri Message-ID: > Dear Sabri > > May Day greetings in the spirit of Yunus Emre, and welcome as > co-moderator of A-list. > > James Thanks and likewise. Happy May Day to all! Sabri From william at palfreman.com Thu May 1 18:39:41 2003 From: william at palfreman.com (William Palfreman) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 01:39:41 +0100 (BST) Subject: [A-List] UK Labour Party: Propaganda Matrix article In-Reply-To: <20030501235558.H309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> References: <20030501235558.H309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> Message-ID: <20030501235746.R309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> I saw this trawling through Google recently. I'd like to correct a few issues. ------ Original Message ------ > * From: "Michael Keaney" > * Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:38:56 +0200 > _________________________________________________________________ > > According to Mike James: > > The rumours and allegations concerning Lord Robertson's ties to > Hamilton, and the possibility that the American intelligence services > may be blackmailing Tony Blair into continued support for a U.S. > invasion of Iraq, have been given fire by internet investigator and > intelligence expert Michael Keaney: Well they shouldn't have. They are rubbish, even if I did naively start one of them in 1999. > Aside from making no claims to intelligence expertise, I have not in > any way touched the story concerning the Dunblane massacre, as a quick > trawl through the archives would confirm. Therefore it is not accurate > to say that I have "given fire" to specifically those rumours and > allegations. In fact the connection between the two stories was one I > had not made, and one that I would be extremely sceptical of. That > does not mean that there does not exist some kind of organised effort > to smear Robertson, whose tenure at NATO has hardly been successful > and who has managed to ruffle the feathers of those at the Pentagon he > thought he was obediently serving. The blackmail possibility I have > raised, specifically in connection with the Sunday Herald article of > 19 January. But the more that "emerges" on this subject leaves an even > stronger bad taste, and serious analysts would be better basing their > analyses on more solid ground than unattributable sources cited in > newspaper reports. With four years extra maturity on an issue I hoped had been forgotten about, I can't find a single thing that any of them are supposed to have done wrong. > Meanwhile: > > "I have come to the considered conclusion," says a correspondent of > Keaney, William Palfreman, "that the events surrounding the Dunblane > massacre, and > the subsequent submissions to the Cullen enquiry that have been put under to > 100 years of secrecy, far out weigh in political significance issues such as > our opposition to the EU [and] what it entails. ... > > ----- > > Firstly, I have no idea who "William Palfreman" is, or that we were > corresponding. This is what I picked up on using Google. I have certainly never had correspondence with Michael Keaney. It's just made up. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Mike James, I'd appreciate it if he'd take it down, especially as the whole thing is teenage bullshit from me. > Secondly, based on what he is quoted as saying above, I would > be highly unlikely to have anything to do with him. Aside from stating the > obvious -- that his and others' opposition to the EU is outweighed in terms > of its significance by something else (most everything else, probably) -- Might have been true then. Isn't today. > the fact that this position is regarded as a defining feature of his > politics means that already I am convinced I share little, if anything, in > common with him. In fact, as a quick trawl of the internet reveals, > Palfreman is involved with organised euroscepticism, having participated in > rabid anti-EU online discussion for some years and being involved in an > outfit called Youth for a Free Europe, whose homepage can be found at > > http://www.free-europe.org.uk/ Yup, was run by a friend of mine called John Courouble then, and by Stuart Coster today. I haven't been involved in anything to do with them since 2000. I'm quite annoyed to see myself on the contacts list for them. > While attracting some unreconstructed national Keynesians within the Labour > Party and elsewhere on the left, the most enthusiastic participants are the > usual punk Thatcherite suspects. Maybe then. I don't think people like that even exist today. > This sort of sensationalist and inaccurate reportage does not help us to > understand better what is going on. I agree. What I wrote in 1999 is shocking to see today. What a pathetic pile of teenage conspiracy-theorising! The problem was that I was a student, with not a lot to do, and I was on this mailinglist with whole lot of like minded people, many who I'm still in touch with as friends. Even then, the guy who gave the erroneous talk, Greg LW, was pretty well beyond the pale, spamming thousands of people with semi-literate junk, and pushing this conspiracy or that. But the trouble is, in person he is a very convincing guy - proper magnetic personality, very plausible and a superb salesman. Today I'm much more cautious about taking things at face value, but then I was completely convinced, basically on zero evidence. Pretty soon it became clear to me that there wasn't a shred of evidence behind _any_ of these conspiracy theories. Ultimately they all rely on some very unpleasant premises. People who put about conspiracy theories ultimately do not believe in free association, or the right of privacy for anyone other than themselves. Also, I have to say, most conspiracy theories boil down to anti-semitism. Not within the one I was conned into putting about, obviously; but in general, conspiracy theories always like to blame a certain groups of people, supposedly operating in "secret", who are supposedly "pulling the strings" and plotting in a huge choreographed conspiracy, to do down "simple, common man". It's exactly the same stuff they were putting about in the 1930s, and very weak, brainwise. Such theories fail every logical test out there. They assume people are not self interested, they assume that cartels work, when every one of them breaks down in the long run - something proved by John Nash's game theory discoveries. They're rubbish, and every time you see one you see some scumbag using exactly the same conspiracy theory as a vehicle for anti-semitism. Underlying it all is the principle that someone can make an assertion, and it is up to the victim to prove him wrong. That's very wrong. > It is better understood as the manifestation of a right wing political > tendency that will stop at nothing to unseat Blair the europhile > "socialist" and to replace him with some unreconstructed empire > loyalist relic. Again, I don't believe such people are around anymore - not within my lifetime. I'd say the last time that represented a significant point of view was 1975. > It is easily manipulated by intelligence officers planting stories in > the media (including internet discussion forums hosted by newspapers) > calculated to excite such sensationalism. US libertarians who swallow > this stuff beware. Yeah, well I never saw any reason to think this particular rubbish story (one long dead until recently) ever had any origin other than Greg LW's fevered imagination, and lapped up by gullible people present. I'm certainly a lot less easily convinced today. Regards, William Palfreman. From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 1 23:13:14 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 22:13:14 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: The aftermath Message-ID: http://www.atimes.com Middle East Crunch time for Kurds By Jean-Christophe Peuch PRAGUE - As the United States works toward restoring a semblance of central authority in Iraq, various ethnic, tribal, social, and religious groups are jockeying for representation in a future Iraqi government. Shi'ite clerics from the south, Sunni Arabs from the central regions, Kurds from the northern mountains, tribal leaders and exiled politicians gathered in Baghdad on Monday to attend a US-sponsored meeting aimed at discussing possible post-Saddam Hussein strategies. As in Nasiriyah two weeks ago, Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Mas'ud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) were represented in Baghdad, but not at the level of party leaders. The two Kurdish groups have in effect been running northern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War. Barzani and Talabani reportedly viewed both meetings as low-profile forums not authoritative enough to justify their presence. It is a crucial time for the Kurds, who have been struggling for their cultural and political rights for most of the past century and represent the largest armed force in Iraq. David McDowall, a British historian of Kurdish nationalism, believes Iraq's 4 million to 6 million Kurds - who supported the US-led war - are in the best position since the demise of the Ottoman Empire to achieve their decades-long dream of self-determination. "The most important thing to bear in mind [when assessing the current situation] is that this is the biggest opportunity the Kurds of Iraq have had since 1918 to actually configure their position in relation to Mesopotamia in the way that they want," McDowall said. "There is no regime at the moment in Baghdad, and when there is one, it will be very weak, and their principal concern will be Turkey." The Kurds make no secret that they would like to see a federal state emerge from the rubble of Saddam's regime - a scenario that is likely to gain some support among Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority. The Shi'ites complain that they have lived under the thumb of Sunni Arabs since the end of Ottoman rule. Although US President George W Bush has reportedly said he envisages a federation made up of Iraq's major ethnic groups, Washington has apparently not committed to any layout for a future government. Talking to reporters in Baghdad on April 22 on his return from the north, the US civil administrator for Iraq, retired General Jay Garner, even denied that Kurdish leaders were considering federalism as an option. "I spent the last two days with Mr Talabani and Mr Barzani, and they never used that term one time," Garner said. "They both talked about a democratic process and that they were going to have a democracy, which was a mosaic of all of Iraq, [which] would include all the ethnic groups, [which] would include the tribes, [which] would include the cultures, [which] would include the religions, [which] would include the professions. [But] they never mentioned federalism one time." Some commentators have interpreted that statement as an attempt to allay the concerns of northern Iraq's minority groups. While apparently pouring cold water on the Kurds' demands for recognition of their de facto autonomy, Garner last week praised their 12-year-old rule in the north as a possible model for Iraq. He also reportedly described the northern city of Kirkuk as "Kurdish". This remark triggered a swift reaction from Ankara, which reminded the United States of an alleged earlier promise that Kirkuk would not fall into Kurdish hands. Turkey fears that northern Iraq's vast hydrocarbon reserves might sustain Kurdish autonomy and insists that Kirkuk and other regional oil-rich cities remain under Baghdad's jurisdiction. Martin van Bruinessen is an expert on Kurdish affairs who teaches at Utrecht University's Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures in the Netherlands. He says Garner's contradicting remarks reflect the Bush administration's lack of clear vision about Iraq's future and US uneasiness before North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member Turkey. Ankara fears that an economically self-sufficient Kurdish entity in northern Iraq might impact its own Kurdish minority. Van Bruinessen said, "I think the US, in a sense, is walking on a tightrope. I think it is not so much the other ethnic groups they are worried about as Turkey. Turkey is strongly opposed to any federal settlement in Iraq. [The Turks] have repeatedly threatened with [military] intervention because they feel that their vital interests [would be] threatened if Iraq becomes a federal state. So I guess the Americans are telling Turkey not to worry and, at the same time, they are trying to keep the Kurds happy by - like Garner did the other day - telling them that Kirkuk is Kurdish." Kirkuk surrendered to Kurdish Peshmergas (fighters) almost without a fight shortly after Baghdad fell to coalition forces. The Kurds then started expelling settlers brought into the city in the 1970s under Saddam's forced "Arabization" policy. Inter-community clashes erupted, leaving at least 20 dead and 200 wounded. Unrest was also reported in Mosul to the northeast and in Khanaqin near the Iranian border. Like Kirkuk, both oil-rich cities are claimed by Iraqi Kurds. In a bid to ease inter-ethnic tensions, thousands of American soldiers last week moved into Kirkuk and Mosul to disarm Kurdish militiamen. Ankara is suspected of seeking to foster ethnic unrest in the area in an effort to trigger a peacekeeping intervention under the pretext that northern Iraq's sizable Turkoman minority needs protection from the Kurds. Last week, US soldiers reportedly arrested Turkish soldiers clad in civilian clothes who were escorting a cargo of weapons hidden in an aid convoy meant for Kirkuk. Ankara denied sending any troops to the area. The incident is symptomatic of tensions that exists in the north and bodes ill, especially if a federal settlement is reached for Iraq. Like Turkey, both Iran and Syria are concerned at the prospect of northern Iraq officially achieving autonomy for fear that this would set an example for their own Kurdish minorities. Regional experts believe that all three countries may be tempted to return to a longtime policy of interference in Iraqi Kurdish affairs. McDowall believes this is especially true of Iran and Syria, which view a US military presence in the region as a threat. "Before Saddam was removed, the Iraqi regime was viewed by Iran as an unpleasant one that, although it had fought a bloody war [with Tehran in 1980-88], was not viewed as dangerous simply because at the end it was perfectly clear by the ceasefire signed in July 1988 that Iraq would not dream of attacking Iran again. But now you have a situation where the Americans would like to set up military bases in Iraq and the only conceivable purpose for those bases is to act against Iran or Syria. And so, suddenly, Iran has been given a compelling reason to seek to undermine any pro-Western government that is formed in Baghdad, and I am sure they will do everything they can to sabotage [such a government]." Turkey, Iran and Syria have considered the troubled region of Kurdistan as a major lever to protect their own strategic interests in the region. As they have done in the past, all three countries could now be tempted to exploit the mosaic of Iraq's ethnic, religious, and tribal communities to achieve their goals. Utrecht University's van Bruinessen said, "The Turks have their proxies, the Iranians have their proxies, and the Syrians have their proxies among Iraqis. The Iranians have the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution [in Iraq], which consists of Iraqi Shi'ites. Turkey has its proxies among one of the Turkoman parties, [the Iraqi Turkoman Front], and [it] may try to use also certain Kurdish tribal chieftains as its representatives. Syria has had for a long time dissident factions of [Iraq's former ruling] Ba'ath Party that listened to it, and it has also had a strong influence on the PUK, the Kurdish party." But foreign interference is not the only risk facing Iraqi Kurdistan. The disappearance of the Ba'ath regime - the greatest threat to the Kurds - may further weaken already loose intertribal ties and reignite the traditional rivalry between Barzani and Talabani as each of the two leaders tries to pose as the most influential regional leader. McDowall believes this rivalry may play into the hands of any government in Baghdad, which could be tempted to exploit it to reassert its control over Kurdistan. "Since the KDP and the PUK are basically rivals, the prospect, I think, is that their rivalry will become - now that the danger to them from Saddam has ceased to be - a major feature of Iraqi Kurdistan and, maybe, a major feature over the way a Kurdish federal state relates to Baghdad," McDowall said. "Just imagine, if you are in Baghdad and you are not very strong, you would do everything you can to play off Barzani against Talabani, knowing that they loathe each other." Since the emergence of the PUK as a splinter group of the KDP in the mid-1970s, both parties have fought intermittent wars that claimed thousands of lives. In their struggle for influence, Barzani and Talabani have relied on political or military support offered alternately by Baghdad, Tehran, Ankara and Damascus. In the late 1990s, a US-brokered agreement led to local elections that ended in a dead heat for both parties, which each garnered some 45 percent of the seats in a regional parliament. Experts believe new elections including Kirkuk - in case the city is included in a federal Kurdistan - would not affect the political balance of forces and might therefore lead to military confrontation between the two groups. As van Bruinessen puts it, "The military aspect of the [US-led] war was relatively simple, but the aftermath is where the biggest risks are. There are so many conflicting interests in Iraq - especially in the Kirkuk, Mosul and Khanaqin areas - that I find it hard to imagine a stable situation any time soon." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EE02Ak02.html From cburford at gn.apc.org Fri May 2 01:01:01 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 08:01:01 +0100 Subject: [A-List] some punishment for Labour Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030502075805.03bc0e40@pop3.norton.antivirus> It looks as if Labour has lost control of Birmingham and Bolton because of a backlash, and under the proportional representation system in the Scottish Parliament the Scottish Socialist Party looks as if it is doing well. Chris Burford London From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Fri May 2 02:30:20 2003 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (Jorge Figueiredo) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 09:30:20 +0100 Subject: [A-List] 1st May, Fidel Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030502092905.029d7d68@mail.telepac.pt> Speech given by the Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, at the May Day rally held in Revolution Square. Havana, May 1, 2003 Distinguished guests; Dear fellow Cubans: CUBA AND THE NAZI-FASCISM Our heroic people have struggled for 44 years from this small Caribbean island just a few miles away from the most formidable imperial power ever known by mankind. In so doing, they have written an unprecedented chapter in history. Never has the world witnessed such an unequal fight. Some may have believed that the rise of the empire to the status of the sole superpower, with a military and technological might with no balancing pole anywhere in the world, would frighten or dishearten the Cuban people. Yet, today they have no choice but to watch in amazement the enhanced courage of this valiant people. On a day like today, this glorious international workers? day, which commemorates the death of the five martyrs of Chicago, I declare, on behalf of the one million Cubans gathered here, that we will face up to any threats, we will not yield to any pressures, and that we are prepared to defend our homeland and our Revolution with ideas and with weapons to our last drop of blood. What is Cuba?s sin? What honest person has any reason to attack her? With their own blood and the weapons seized from the enemy, the Cuban people overthrew a cruel tyranny with 80,000 men under arms, imposed by the U.S. government. Cuba was the first territory free from imperialist domination in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the only country in the hemisphere, throughout post-colonial history, where the torturers, murderers and war criminals that took the lives of tens of thousands of people were exemplarily punished. All of the country?s land was recovered and turned over to the peasants and agricultural workers. The natural resources, industries and basic services were placed in the hands of their only true owner: the Cuban nation. In less than 72 hours, fighting ceaselessly, day and night, Cuba crushed the Bay of Pigs mercenary invasion organized by a U.S. administration, thereby preventing a direct military intervention by this country and a war of incalculable consequences. The Revolution already had the Rebel Army, over 400,000 weapons and hundreds of thousands of militia members. In 1962, Cuba confronted with honor, and without a single concession, the risk of being attacked with dozens of nuclear weapons. It defeated the dirty war that spread throughout the entire country, at a cost in human lives even greater than that of the war of liberation. It stoically endured thousands of acts of sabotage and terrorist attacks organized by the U.S. government. It thwarted hundreds of assassination plots against the leaders of the Revolution. While under a rigorous blockade and economic warfare that have lasted for almost half a century, Cuba was able to eradicate in just one year the illiteracy that has still not been overcome in the course of more than four decades by the rest of the countries of Latin America, or the United States itself. It has brought free education to 100% of the country?s children. It has the highest school retention rate ?over 99% between kindergarten and ninth grade? of all of the nations in the hemisphere. Its elementary school students rank first worldwide in the knowledge of their mother language and mathematics. The country also ranks first worldwide with the highest number of teachers per capita and the lowest number of students per classroom. All children with physical or mental challenges are enrolled in special schools. Computer education and the use of audiovisual methods now extend to all of the country?s children, adolescents and youth, in both the cities and the countryside. For the first time in the world, all young people between the ages of 17 and 30, who were previously neither in school nor employed, have been given the opportunity to resume their studies while receiving an allowance. All citizens have the possibility of undertaking studies that will take them from kindergarten to a doctoral degree without spending a penny. Today, the country has 30 university graduates, intellectuals and professional artists for every one there was before the Revolution. The average Cuban citizen today has at the very least a ninth-grade level of education. Not even functional illiteracy exists in Cuba. There are schools for the training of artists and art instructors throughout all of the country?s provinces, where over 20,000 young people are currently studying and developing their talent and vocation. Tens of thousands more are doing the same at vocational schools, and many of these then go on to undertake professional studies. University campuses are progressively spreading to all of the country?s municipalities. Never in any other part of the world has such a colossal educational and cultural revolution taken place as this that will turn Cuba, by far, into the country with the highest degree of knowledge and culture in the world, faithful to Mart??s profound conviction that "no freedom is possible without culture." Infant mortality has been reduced from 60 per 1000 live births to a rate that fluctuates between 6 and 6.5, which is the lowest in the hemisphere, from the United States to Patagonia. Life expectancy has increased by 15 years. Infectious and contagious diseases like polio, malaria, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough and dengue have been eradicated; others like tetanus, meningococcal meningitis, hepatitis B, leprosy, hemophilus meningitis and tuberculosis are fully controlled. Today, in our country, people die of the same causes as in the most highly developed countries: cardiovascular diseases, cancer, accidents, and others, but with a much lower incidence. A profound revolution is underway to bring medical services closer to the population, in order to facilitate access to health care centers, save lives and alleviate suffering. In-depth research is being carried out to break the chain, mitigate or reduce to a minimum the problems that result from genetic, prenatal or childbirth-related causes. Cuba is today the country with the highest number of doctors per capita in the world, with almost twice as many as those that follow closer. Our scientific centers are working relentlessly to find preventive or therapeutic solutions for the most serious diseases. Cubans will have the best healthcare system in the world, and will continue to receive all services absolutely free of charge. Social security covers 100% of the country?s citizens. In Cuba, 85% of the people own their homes and they pay no property taxes on them whatsoever. The remaining 15% pay a wholly symbolic rent, which is only 10% of their salary. Illegal drug use involves a negligible percentage of the population, and is being resolutely combated. Lottery and other forms of gambling have been banned since the first years of the Revolution to ensure that no one pins their hopes of progress on luck. There is no commercial advertising on Cuban television and radio or in our printed publications. Instead, these feature public service announcements concerning health, education, culture, physical education, sports, recreation, environmental protection, and the fight against drugs, accidents and other social problems. Our media educate, they do not poison or alienate. They do not worship or exalt the values of decadent consumer societies. There is no cult of personality around any living revolutionary, in the form of statues, official photographs, or the names of streets or institutions. The leaders of this country are human beings, not gods. In our country there are no paramilitary forces or death squads, nor has violence ever been used against the people; there are no extrajudicial executions or torture. The people have always massively supported the activities of the Revolution. This rally today is proof of that. Light years separate our society from what has prevailed until today in the rest of the world. We cultivate brotherhood and solidarity among individuals and peoples both in the country and abroad. The new generations and the entire people are being educated about the need to protect the environment. The media are used to build environmental awareness. Our country steadfastly defends its cultural identity, assimilating the best of other cultures while resolutely combating everything that distorts, alienates and degrades. The development of wholesome, non-professional sports has raised our people to the highest ranks worldwide in medals and honors. Scientific research, at the service of our people and all humanity, has increased several-hundredfold. As a result of these efforts, important medications are saving lives in Cuba and other countries. Cuba has never undertaken research or development of a single biological weapon, because this would be in total contradiction with the principles and philosophy underlying the education of our scientific personnel, past and present. In no other people has the spirit of international solidarity become so deeply rooted. Our country supported the Algerian patriots in their struggle against French colonialism, at the cost of damaging political and economic relations with such an important European country as France. We sent weapons and troops to defend Algeria from Moroccan expansionism, when the king of this country sought to take control of the iron mines of Gara Djebilet, near the city of Tindouf, in southwest Algeria. At the request of the Arab nation of Syria, a full tank brigade stood guard between 1973 and 1975 alongside the Golan Heights, when this territory was unjustly seized from that country. The leader of the Republic of Congo when it first achieved independence, Patrice Lumumba, who was harassed from abroad, received our political support. When he was assassinated by the colonial powers in January of 1961, we lent assistance to his followers. Four years later, in 1965, Cuban blood was shed in the western region of Lake Tanganyika, where Che Guevara and more than 100 Cuban instructors supported the Congolese rebels who were fighting against white mercenaries in the service of the man supported by the West, that is, Mobutu whose 40 billion dollars, the same that he stole, nobody knows what European banks they are kept in, or in whose power. The blood of Cuban instructors was shed while training and supporting the combatants of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, who fought under the command of Amilcar Cabral for the liberation of these former Portuguese colonies. The same was true during the ten years that Cuba supported Agostinho Neto?s MPLA in the struggle for the independence of Angola. After independence was achieved, and over the course of 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers participated in defending Angola from the attacks of racist South African troops that in complicity with the United States, and using dirty war tactics, planted millions of mines, wiped out entire villages, and murdered more than half a million Angolan men, women and children. In Cuito Cuanavale and on the Namibian border, to the southwest of Angola, Angolan and Namibian forces together with 40,000 Cuban troops dealt the final blow to the South African troops. This resulted in the immediate liberation of Namibia and speeded up the end of apartheid by perhaps 20 to 25 years. At the time, the South Africans had seven nuclear warheads that Israel had supplied to them or helped them to produce, with the full knowledge and complicity of the U.S. government. Throughout the course of almost 15 years, Cuba had a place of honor in its solidarity with the heroic people of Viet Nam, caught up in a barbaric and brutal war with the United States. That war killed four million Vietnamese, in addition to all those left wounded and mutilated, not to mention the fact that the country was inundated with chemical compounds that continue to cause incalculable damage. The pretext: Viet Nam, a poor and underdeveloped country located 20,000 kilometers away, constituted a threat to the national security of the United States. Cuban blood was shed together with that of citizens of numerous Latin American countries, and together with the Cuban and Latin American blood of Che Guevara, murdered on instructions from U.S. agents in Bolivia, when he was wounded and being held prisoner after his weapon had been rendered useless by a shot received in battle. The blood of Cuban construction workers, that were nearing completion of an international airport vital for the economy of a tiny island fully dependent on tourism, was shed fighting in defense of Grenada, invaded by the United States under cynical pretexts. Cuban blood was shed in Nicaragua, when instructors from our Armed Forces were training the brave Nicaraguan soldiers confronting the dirty war organized and armed by the United States against the Sandinista revolution. And there are even more examples. Over 2000 heroic Cuban internationalist combatants gave their lives fulfilling the sacred duty of supporting the liberation struggles for the independence of other sister nations. However, there is not one single Cuban property in any of those countries. No other country in our era has exhibited such sincere and selfless solidarity. Cuba has always preached by example. It has never given in. It has never sold out the cause of another people. It has never made concessions. It has never betrayed its principles. There must be some reason why, just 48 hours ago, it was reelected by acclamation in the United Nations Economic and Social Council to another three years in the Commission on Human Rights, of which it has now been a member for 15 straight years. More than half a million Cubans have carried out internationalist missions as combatants, as teachers, as technicians or as doctors and health care workers. Tens of thousands of the latter have provided their services and saved millions of lives over the course of more than 40 years. There are currently 3000 specialists in Comprehensive General Medicine and other healthcare personnel working in the most isolated regions of 18 Third World countries. Through preventive and therapeutic methods they save hundreds of thousands of lives every year, and maintain or restore the health of millions of people, without charging a penny for their services. Without the Cuban doctors offered to the United Nations in the event that the necessary funds are obtained ?without which entire nations and even whole regions of sub-Saharan Africa face the risk of perishing? the crucial programs urgently needed to fight AIDS would be impossible to carry out. The developed capitalist world has created abundant financial capital, but it has not in any way created the human capital that the Third World desperately needs. Cuba has developed techniques to teach reading and writing by radio, with accompanying texts now available in five languages ?Haitian Creole, Portuguese, French, English and Spanish? that are already being used in numerous countries. It is nearing completion of a similar program in Spanish, of exceptionally high quality, to teach literacy by television. These are programs that were developed in Cuba and are genuinely Cuban. We are not interested in patents and exclusive copyrights. We are willing to offer them to all of the countries of the Third World, where most of the world?s illiterates are concentrated, without charging a penny. In five years, the 800 million illiterate people in the world could be reduced by 80%, at a minimal cost. After the demise of the USSR and the socialist bloc, nobody would have bet a dime on the survival of the Cuban Revolution. The United States tightened the blockade. The Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts were adopted, the latter extraterritorial in nature. We abruptly lost our main markets and supplies sources. The population?s average calorie and protein consumption was reduced by almost half. But our country withstood the pressures and even advanced considerably in the social field. Today, it has largely recovered with regard to nutritional requirements and is rapidly progressing in other fields. Even in these conditions, the work undertaken and the consciousness built throughout the years succeeded in working miracles. Why have we endured? Because the Revolution has always had, as it still does and always will to an ever-greater degree, the support of the people, an intelligent people, increasingly united, educated and combative. Cuba was the first country to extend its solidarity to the people of the United States on September 11, 2001. It was also the first to warn of the neo-fascist nature of the policy that the extreme right in the United States, which fraudulently came to power in November of 2000, was planning to impose on the rest of the world. This policy did not emerge as a response to the atrocious terrorist attack perpetrated against the people of the United States by members of a fanatical organization that had served other U.S. administrations in the past. It was coldly and carefully conceived and developed, which explains the country?s military build-up and enormous spending on weapons at a time when the Cold War was already over, and long before September 11, 2001. The fateful events of that day served as an ideal pretext for the implementation of such policy. On September 20 of that year, President Bush openly expressed this before a Congress shaken by the tragic events of nine days earlier. Using bizarre terminology, he spoke of "infinite justice" as the goal of a war that would apparently be infinite as well. "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen." "We will use every necessary weapon of war." "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." "I've called the Armed Forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act." "This is civilization's fight." " the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time --now depends on us." "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain and we know that God is not neutral." Did a statesman or an unbridled fanatic speak these words? Two days later, on September 22, Cuba denounced this speech as the blueprint for the idea of a global military dictatorship imposed through brute force, without international laws or institutions of any kind. "The United Nations Organization, simply ignored in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one law." Several months later, on the 200th anniversary of West Point Military Academy, at the graduation exercise for 958 cadets on June 3, 2002, President Bush further elaborated on this line of thinking in a fiery harangue to the young soldiers graduating that day, in which he put forward his fundamental fixed ideas: "Our security will require transforming the military you will lead -- a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives." "We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries " " we will send you, our soldiers, where you're needed." "We will not leave the safety of America and the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world." "Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it." In the speech I delivered at a rally held in General Antonio Maceo Square in Santiago de Cuba, on June 8, 2002, before half a million people of Santiago, I said: "As you can see, he doesn?t mention once in his speech (at West Point) the United Nations Organization. Nor is there a phrase about every people?s right to safety and peace, or about the need for a world ruled by principles and norms." "Hardly two thirds of a century has passed since humanity went through the bitter experience of Nazism. Fear was Hitler?s inseparable ally against his adversaries Later, his fearful military force [led to] the outbreak of a war that would inflame the whole world. The lack of vision and the cowardice of the statesmen in the strongest European powers of the time opened the way to a great tragedy. "I don?t think that a fascist regime can be established in the United States. Serious mistakes have been made and injustices committed in the framework of its political system --many of them still persist-- but the American people still have a number of institutions and traditions, as well as educational, cultural and ethical values that would hardly allow that to happen. The risk exists in the international arena. The power and prerogatives of that country?s president are so extensive, and the economic, technological and military power network in that nation is so pervasive that due to circumstances that fully escape the will of the American people, the world is coming under the rule of Nazi concepts and methods." "The miserable insects that live in 60 or more countries of the world chosen by him and his closest assistants --and in the case of Cuba by his Miami friends-- are completely irrelevant. They are the ?dark corners of the world? that may become the targets of their unannounced and ?preemptive? attacks. Not only is Cuba one of those countries, but it has also been included among those that sponsor terror." I mentioned the idea of a world tyranny for the first time exactly one year, three months and 19 days before the attack on Iraq. In the days prior to the beginning of the war, President Bush repeated once again that the United States would use, if necessary, any means within its arsenal, in other words, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons. The attack on and occupation of Afghanistan had already taken place. Today the so-called "dissidents", actually mercenaries on the payroll of the Bush?s Hitler-like government, are betraying not only their homeland, but all of humanity as well. In the face of the sinister plans against our country on the part of the neo-fascist extreme right and its allies in the Miami terrorist mob that ensured its victory through electoral fraud, I wonder how many of those individuals with supposedly leftist and humanistic stances who have attacked our people over the legal measures we were forced to adopt as a legitimate defense against the aggressive plans of the superpower, located just a few miles off our coasts and with a military base on our own territory, have been able to read these words. We wonder how many have recognized, denounced and condemned the policy announced in the speeches by Mr. Bush that I have quoted, which reveal a sinister Nazi-fascist international policy on the part of the leader of the country with the most powerful military force ever imagined, whose weapons could destroy the defenseless humanity ten times over. The entire world has been mobilized by the terrifying images of cities destroyed and burned by brutal bombing, images of maimed children and the shattered corpses of innocent people. Leaving aside the blatantly opportunistic, demagogic and petty political groups we know all too well, I am now going to refer fundamentally to those who were friends of Cuba and respected fighters in the struggle. We would not want those who have, in our opinion, attacked Cuba unjustly, due to disinformation or a lack of careful and profound analysis, to have to suffer the infinite sorrow they will feel if one day our cities are destroyed and our children and mothers, women and men, young and old, are torn apart by the bombs of Nazi-fascism, and they realize that their declarations were shamelessly manipulated by the aggressors to justify a military attack on Cuba. Solely the numbers of children murdered and mutilated cannot be the measure of the human damage but also the millions of children and mothers, women and men, young and old, who remain traumatized for the rest of their lives. We fully respect the opinions of those who oppose capital punishment for religious, philosophical and humanitarian reasons. We Cuban revolutionaries also abhor capital punishment, for much more profound reasons than those addressed by the social sciences with regard to crime, currently under study in our country. The day will come when we can accede to the wishes for the abolition of such penalty so nobly expressed here by Reverend Lucius Walker in his brilliant speech. The special concern over this issue is easily understood when you know that the majority of the people executed in the United States are African American and Hispanic, and not infrequently they are innocent, especially in Texas, the champion of death sentences, where President Bush was formerly the governor, and not a single life has ever been pardoned. The Cuban Revolution was placed in the dilemma of either protecting the lives of millions of Cubans by using the legally established death penalty to punish the three main hijackers of a passenger ferry or sitting back and doing nothing. The U.S. government, which incites common criminals to assault boats or airplanes with passengers on board, encourages these people gravely endangering the lives of innocents and creating the ideal conditions for an attack on Cuba. A wave of hijackings had been unleashed and was already in full development; it had to be stopped. We cannot ever hesitate when it is a question of protecting the lives of the sons and daughters of a people determined to fight until the end, arresting the mercenaries who serve the aggressors and applying the most severe sanctions against terrorists who hijack passenger boats or planes or commit similarly serious acts, who will be punished by the courts in accordance with the laws in force. Not even Jesus Christ, who drove the traders out of the temple with a whip, would fail to opt for the defense of the people. I feel sincere and profound respect for His Holiness Pope John Paul II. I understand and admire his noble struggle for life and peace. Nobody opposed the war in Iraq as much and as tenaciously as he did. I am absolutely certain that he would have never counseled the Shiites and Sunni Muslims to let them be killed without defending themselves. He would not counsel the Cubans to do such a thing, either. He knows perfectly well that this is not a problem between Cubans. This is a problem between the people of Cuba and the government of the United States. The policy of the U.S. government is so brazenly provocative that on April 25, Mr. Kevin Whitaker, chief of the Cuban Bureau at the State Department, informed the head of our Interests Section in Washington that the National Security Council?s Department of Homeland Security considered the continued hijackings from Cuba a serious threat to the national security of the United States, and requested that the Cuban government adopt all of the necessary measures to prevent such acts. He said this as if they were not the ones who provoke and encourage these hijackings, and as if we were not the ones who adopt drastic measures to prevent them, in order to protect the lives and safety of passengers, and being fully aware for some time now of the criminal plans of the fascist extreme right against Cuba. When news of this contact on the 25 was leaked, it stirred up the Miami terrorist mob. They still do not understand that their direct or indirect threats against Cuba do not frighten anyone in this country. The hypocrisy of Western politicians and a large group of mediocre leaders is so huge that it would not fit in the Atlantic Ocean. Any measure that Cuba adopts for the purposes of its legitimate defense is reported among the top stories in almost all of the media. On the other hand, when we pointed out that during the term in office of a Spanish head of government, dozens of ETA members were executed without trial, without anyone protesting or denouncing it before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, or that another Spanish head of government, at a difficult moment in the war in Kosovo, advised the U.S. president to step up the war, increase the bombing and attack civilian targets, thus causing the deaths of hundreds of innocent people and tremendous suffering for millions of people, the headlines merely stated, "Castro attacks Felipe and Aznar". Not a word was said about the real content. In Miami and Washington they are now discussing where, how and when Cuba will be attacked or the problem of the Revolution will be solved. For the moment, there is talk of economic measures that will further intensify the brutal blockade, but they still do not know which to choose, who they will resign themselves to alienating, and how effective these measures may be. There are very few left for them to choose from. They have already used up almost all of them. A shameless scoundrel with the poorly chosen first name Lincoln, and the last name D?az-Balart, an intimate friend and advisor of President Bush, has made this enigmatic statement to a Miami TV station: "I can?t go into details, but we?re trying to break this vicious cycle." What methods are they considering to deal with this vicious cycle? Physically eliminating me with the sophisticated modern means they have developed, as Mr. Bush promised them in Texas before the elections? Or attacking Cuba the way they attacked Iraq? If it were the former, it does not worry me in the least. The ideas for which I have fought all my life will not die, and they will live on for a long time. If the solution were to attack Cuba like Iraq, I would suffer greatly because of the cost in lives and the enormous destruction it would bring on Cuba. But, it might turn out to be the last of this Administration?s fascist attacks, because the struggle would last a very long time. The aggressors would not merely be facing an army, but rather thousands of armies that would constantly reproduce themselves and make the enemy pay such a high cost in casualties that it would far exceed the cost in lives of its sons and daughters that the American people would be willing to pay for the adventures and ideas of President Bush. Today, he enjoys majority support, but it is dropping, and tomorrow it could be reduced to zero. The American people, the millions of highly cultivated individuals who reason and think, their basic ethical principles, the tens of millions of computers with which to communicate, hundreds of times more than at the end of the Viet Nam war, will show that you cannot fool all of the people, and perhaps not even part of the people, all of the time. One day they will put a straightjacket on those who need it before they manage to annihilate life on the planet. On behalf of the one million people gathered here this May Day, I want to convey a message to the world and the American people: We do not want the blood of Cubans and Americans to be shed in a war. We do not want a countless number of lives of people who could be friends to be lost in an armed conflict. But never has a people had such sacred things to defend, or such profound convictions to fight for, to such a degree that they would rather be obliterated from the face of the Earth than abandon the noble and generous work for which so many generations of Cubans have paid the high cost of the lives of many of their finest sons and daughters. We are sustained by the deepest conviction that ideas are worth more than weapons, no matter how sophisticated and powerful those weapons may be. Let us say like Che Guevara when he bid us farewell: Ever onward to victory! From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 02:22:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 11:22:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: SSP gains Message-ID: <000901c31084$07037360$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This is terrific news. It really should act as a wake-up call to the left in England -- put aside your differences and work together. Nevertheless Sheridan and co. should be prepared for an intensified assault on the party. Wendy Alexander is not worth losing sleep over, but there is little question that the emergence of a clearly Marxist party as a serious political contender will exercise minds in Whitehall, Westminster, Edinburgh and various news media outlets. Blair's friends in Washington will also have something to say about this. ----- Sheridan's Socialists now a countrywide force CATHERINE MACLEOD, Political Editor The Herald, 2 May 2003 THE Scottish Socialists returned two Glasgow MSPs to parliament last night with an electoral success establishing the youthful party firmly on the Scottish political landscape. Although Tommy Sheridan, the flamboyant leader of the SSP, failed to win outright in the Glasgow Pollok constituency, he was returned along with Rosie Kane on the Glasgow regional list. Mr Sheridan, who was beaten by over 3000 votes by Labour's Johann Lamont, hailed the SSP's performance as "the best result in Scotland". In an impassioned speech at the Pollok count, Mr Sheridan looked forward to extending the appeal of the SSP. He said: "A new political force has been established in Scotland. That new force believes the wealth of Scotland belongs to the people of Scotland. Tonight I think we can confidently predict we will have the best result in Scotland. "We will have attracted more new voters than any other parties in Scotland and we will have attracted voters in every part of Scotland. We started with a target of four seats and we were ridiculed, rubbished and ignored by the tabloid press. I am confident that we will meet that target and if we get any more than four seats, it will be a spectacular result." Ms Kane, who stood for election in the Glasgow Shettleston constituency, came third after Labour and the SNP with 2403 votes (14.52%). She pushed the Tories and Liberal Democrats into fourth and fifth places respectively while increasing her 1999 vote by 763 votes. Mr Sheridan attributes the success of the SSP to their grassroots allegiance. Earlier this week, Mr Sheridan told The Herald's Alf Young: "We started off at a conference in February 1999 and we had no members. We had big ideas, we had big visions of how we wanted to improve Scotland. We had a lot of honesty and lot of integrity but we had few positions." On both the east and west of Scotland, the SSP won between 4% and 10% of the vote, even in seats where they had never before fielded a candidate. In Cunninghame South, for example, Rosemary Byrne, the SSP's new candidate polled 2677 (11.76%). The first-past-the-post results showed the SSP, which for the first time had candidates standing in every seat in Scotland, causing the SNP most electoral damage while also denting the Labour vote in almost every Scottish constituency. Mr Sheridan, who hoped the SSP would return four MSPs to Holyrood, could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of having five MSPs, which would give the SSP group status in the Scottish Parliament, and a say in the running of the Scottish parliament. In the Glasgow Pollok constituency Mr Sheridan polled 6016 votes (27.9%), representing a poll increase of 6.42%. In Jack McConnell's Motherwell and Wishaw constituency, the SSP polled 1961 votes, mostly taken from the SNP, whose vote dropped by 12% in the first-past-the-post poll vote. Mr McConnell, the first minister, increased Labour's vote by 8%, hailed by the Labour hierarchy as "a great personal victory for Mr McConnell". In Hamilton South, the first constituency to declare its result, the SSP polled 1893 votes (9.23%). In Greenock and Inverclyde, Tricia McCafferty polled 2338 votes (an increase of 6.84%) In another remarkable SSP result, Malcolm Wilson, in Glasgow Cathcart, polled 2819 votes (12.64%) in a seat held by Labour's Mike Watson, the minister for culture and sport. The result demonstrated a 1.5% SNP swing to Labour, but David Ritchie saw the SNP's share of the vote reduced by 11.87% while Mr Watson's vote was reduced by 8.88%.In Dunfermline East, the SSP took 1537 votes, or 6.64%. In Rutherglen, Bill Bonnar, the SSP candidate, polled 2259 (9.5%) of the vote, an increase of 1427 votes from last year. The SSP won 1301 votes (4.37%) in Angus where Andrew Welsh was returned as the first SNP success of the night. In Kirkcaldy, the SSP's Rudi Vogels took 1544 votes (7.04%). In Cunninghame South, the SSP took 2677 votes (11.76%), again squeezing the SNP to a greater extent than Labour. In Fife North East, a LibDem hold, the SSP won 1366 votes (4.66%). In East Lothian, Hugh Kerr, the SSP's press officer, and former Labour MEP, took 1380 votes (4.42%). In Fife Central, the seat formerly held by Henry McLeish, the former first minister, the SSP took 1391 votes (5.43%). Christine May, the former convener of Fife council comfortably held the seat for Labour. In Inverness East, Nairn and Lochaber, Steve Arnott, the SSP candidate, gained 1661 votes in a seat comfortably held by the SNP's Fergus Ewing. Wendy Alexander, who retained her Paisley North seat, immediately condemned the SSP's success. Claiming Mr Sheridan was guilty of misleading the electorate, she said: "I've known Tommy Sheridan for a long time and one of the worst things that you can do to working people is promise that which you can't deliver, and that's something which his whole political life has been about." ----- Socialists set for gains Friday, 2 May, 2003, 03:45 GMT 04:45 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/2994421.stm The Scottish Socialist Party believes it will be a "new political force" in the second Holyrood parliament. The left-wingers, led by Tommy Sheridan, have been tipped to take up to 10 regional list seats. If the BBC Scotland prediction is correct then that represents a massive assault on establishment politics north of the border. Mr Sheridan was the party's lone representative following the election four years ago when he became an MSP for the region of Glasgow. The 39-year-old political firebrand is the national convener of the party which was formed only a matter of months before the 1999 poll. As the story of Scotland's 2003 election unfolded, Mr Sheridan declared: "What's happened tonight in Scotland is that a new political force has been formed - and that force believes that the wealth of Scotland belongs to the people of Scotland. SSP SEATS SO FAR Tommy Sheridan - Glasgow list Rosie Kane - Glasgow list Frances Curran - West of Scotland "The people of Scotland are demanding this democratically. "We have got lots of money, the top 100 richest people in Scotland have ?10,000m between them. We already have massive wealth in this country and we should be able to redistribute that wealth." He added: "We were ridiculed and scoffed at by the media at the beginning of this campaign for saying we would make gains. "I said we would get four and if we get that, that will be great, if we get more, then that will be a spectacular advance." Changing establishment One party with a relatively small number of MSPs in 1999 played its part during the first parliament. When the Liberal Democrats won 12 seats in 1999 they became the coalition partners of the Labour Party, which had the largest number of MSPs but failed to have enough to take overall control. Mr Sheridan, who retained his list seat this time, said after winning four years ago "sometimes you have to join the establishment in order to change it". The former Labour Party member caused a stir from the start, when he swore the oath of allegiance to the Queen, required of all MSPs, with a clenched fist raised in order to signal his protest. And he did that only after declaring that "supreme sovereignty lies with the people of Scotland rather than an unelected monarchy". At the end of 2000 his campaign to have warrant sales and poindings abolished paid off when his members' bill made it through parliament. But other parliamentary efforts failed. In June last year, Mr Sheridan - who has been jailed three times in the name of various campaigns - was "furious" after MSPs on the all-party education committee rejected his plans for free school meals for every pupil in Scotland. The SSP will not find out its total number of representatives until later on Friday when the all of the regional list votes are declared. From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri May 2 02:29:17 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 01:29:17 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Taking Stock on Mayday Message-ID: <00ea01c31084$edb07d80$20fa5718@comintern> ProletarianNews http://www.utopia2000.org Macdonald Stainsby. 30 April 2003. Taking Stock on Mayday. May Day is always the best time for a revolutionary to take stock of what has happened over the last year, and to determine what can be done better for the next. I personally have been rather distraught politically for the last while. The conquering of Iraq fast and with a betrayal by the Republican Guard, "short and humanitarian" though many say that might be, is the worst case scenario that could have come out of that theatre of the Christian-Zionist "war on Terror." Further, the state terror assault continues on Palestine, complete with more "facts on the ground" trying to eliminate the possibility of sovereignty over huge new swaths of the 1967 territorial boundaries (see image of the "new map": http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/images/map1_eng.gif). The Israeli Occupation Forces are also using direct murder to attempt to scare off the international presence brought about by the International Solidarity Movement. Even a non-violent-declared movement of primarily first world youth is now coming under military assault on the front lines of this war. This, as the conquest of Iraq is declared over. I suppose that is the key to it, to notice the word 'declare.' What else is going on, undeclared? Well, the movement begun with the DC demonstration April 20, 2002 against the attacks on Palestine escalated sharply during the sabre-rattling against Iraq. It has not gone anywhere. There have been multiple peoples and groups who are looking for the shortest way to the biggest speed bump. Some have blocked the economic corridors of Canada and the United States, blocking the border crossing or the consulate doors to raise the economic costs and demonstrate rejection. But perhaps the most heartening thing has been the response to the killing of the Internationals inside of Palestinian territory. Brian Avery has had his face blasted open while both Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie have passed on into North American martyrs against the 'New American Century' of the Christian Zionists like Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle. What has become of this? The truth is that the history of the First World left has been over-all one of stagnancy for decades, despite the remarkable tirelessness of individuals and certain groups. It should say a lot for the health of our resistance to the war on one end at least, when the ISM in Palestine can report that the murders of anti-occupation activists has spurned more activists and volunteers to the call. This flies in the face of the usual pattern of retreats and surrender by "solidarity" activists, and not a moment too soon. The movement, as per usual, splits along two basic lines at a political juncture of great confusion (such as "official" bombing being ended in Iraq): Many propose to scale things back in terms of action, re-address the basics and try to win over more converts, to create a large mass movement for the usual social democratic approach. Simplifying the message is a key to this. It remains loyal-oppositional in essence, to whatever the headlines of the day are and not much more. It posits that more than this will alienate, and that other forms of resistance are "adventurous" and an irresponsible attack on the credibility of all who are currently "anti-war." This attitude, which has utter contempt for notions of solidarity, must be resisted. It appears that Cuba might be the next target, so the "other" tendency of the anti-war camp appropriately can be explained by quoting out of Abbie Hoffman's "Revolution for the Hell Of It" when he quoted Fidel: There are those who believe that it is necessary for ideas to triumph among the greatest part of the masses before initiating action, and there are others who understand that action is one of the most efficient instruments for bringing about the triumph of ideas among the masses. Whoever hesitates while waiting for ideas to triumph among the masses before initiating revolutionary action will never be a revolutionary. Stemming from this, today's resistance movement need not look at things as desperate, but stagnant. It needs a good, swift kick-start. Remember, to put something into the realm of possibility it needs to have been done. Let's redouble our efforts around this strategy, but never lose sight of taking a proper thought-out target first. Who makes the weapons of war, and why are we letting them stay open in our communities? How will we shut them down? The truth of consciousness is viewable by talking to people you don't already know. The war is known to be irredeemable; it's the pointlessness of the current charade that gets to a lot of erstwhile anti-war folk. So, rather than fall into the trap of attacking the social democratic "movement builders"-- the point isn't that they are wrong, but only wrong when they exercise monopoly on tactics-- affinity groups of flashlights need to be dispersed in your city. Some people, at a point of great darkness, need to see a light coming on. Or, if you like, the spark has to be lit. I see a time soon where people will get inspiration from one-another's actions. There will not be an isolating of those who resist, but an embrace of the need. We'll hear real discussion among friends and comrades taking place in the basements and coffee shops. Action leading to analysis, and back again. Praxis, and more than all else: solidarity and trust. Sparks start flying and the whole planet is brittle and dry. Imperialism will end and this is only the beginning of history. We shall not go gently into that good night. Mayday has, for far too long, been a small event inside North American cities. Mayday was started as a holiday in solidarity with the killing of American revolutionaries. It's therefore been doubly a statement to our weakness that only here, in Canada and the USA, is Mayday not a holiday that we have defended. We can start to take it back and do so with our compatriots in the Occupied Territories: The territories of the Guantanamo Bay naval base, Palestine, Iraq and indeed North America itself: all occupied indigenous lands to be liberated. Or as simply as the slogan plainly states it: "Globalize the Intifada!" ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 03:54:06 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 12:54:06 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: punk Thatcherism References: <20030501235558.H309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> <20030501235746.R309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> Message-ID: <004101c31090$c54563e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> William Palfreman writes: > While attracting some unreconstructed national Keynesians within the Labour > Party and elsewhere on the left, the most enthusiastic participants are the > usual punk Thatcherite suspects. Maybe then. I don't think people like that even exist today. Again, I don't believe such people are around anymore - not within my lifetime. I'd say the last time that represented a significant point of view was 1975. ----- Firstly, thanks to William for climbing aboard the list to clarify certain points. We are both agreed that the article in question is a farrago of supposition, misquotation and conspiratorialism. With respect to the presumed death of punk Thatcherism, I would preach caution here. The issue of Northern Ireland is something that we follow here, and recent events show just how difficult it is for certain elements within the British state and their allies/mouthpieces in "civil society" to let go. That MI5 and Special Branch are implicated in the leaking of telephone conversations involving Mo Mowlam and Martin McGuinness, aimed ultimately at preventing the enactment of the GFA, tells us a lot about the resilience of these elements. That they are in decline is true -- that they are effectively dead is not. Ever since the mid-1970s there has been a growing current, incorporating parts of MI6, that has promoted a policy of gradual disengagement by the British state from Northern Ireland. The vast majority of MI5 was against this from the get-go. Not surprising, given MI5's history as the security service for the colonies. Having lost most of these, all they had left to worry over (apart from Harold Wilson, the "KGB agent") was Northern Ireland, which they proceeded to turn into an organised bloodbath once they had been given the authority to take over security operations there. One of the best sources on this is "Who Framed Colin Wallace?" by Paul Foot, published in 1990. Also worth checking is "The Wilson Plot" by David Leigh (Heinemann, 1988) and "Smear! Wilson and the Secret State" by Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay (Grafton, 1991). Also, if you can find a copy, try out Robert Fisk, "The Point of No Return", published in 1975 about the Ulster Workers' Council strike. Meanwhile, the recent work of BBC journalist Peter Taylor, particularly "Brits", makes it clear that MI6 took various peace initiatives throughout the times of the Troubles. While Taylor himself is not the most spotless source (see his treatment of the Stalker affair), there is little doubting this particular aspect of his narrative. The people involved in this promotion of state terrorism (the McWhirter brothers, George Kennedy Young, Airey Neave, Michael Hanley, "Lord" Ralph Harris of High Cross, William Rees Mogg etc.) were also responsible for the rise of Thatcher in the first place, and while certain empire loyalists were unhappy about what they considered to be an overly diluted approach to "correcting" the problems of Britain (e.g. Gerald James, whose "In the National Interest", published in 1995, contains a good account of this), the vast majority were happy to be aligned with Thatcher as she set about attacking organised labour via orchestrated state violence and economic vandalism. In so doing she created a new more powerful stratum of petty bourgeois types, encompassing entrepreneurs and office workers, all supported by an increasingly sophisticated ideological apparatus (hence the high profile war of attrition against the BBC, involving Rees-Mogg, Norman Tebbit, "Sir" James Goldsmith, Neil Hamilton and Gerald Howarth, among others). This altered the political complexion of Britain irrevocably. The irony of all this is that Thatcher herself outlived her usefulness, as in her rampant europhobia, which alienated key constituents of her support base, hence the in-house putsch that toppled her in 1990. The Major governments of 1990-97 are the story of a messy transition, as one state party declined to be overtaken by a completely new one, New Labour, whose time had well and truly come. Major began many of the things which Blair et al. are now implementing with even greater speed. Not only intensified privatisation, but also with respect to the European re-orientation that key sections of British capital demanded, but which Major was unable to accomplish because his political base would simply not allow it. Blair's did, hence his usefulness to the hegemonic bloc now in the ascendant. The implosion of the Conservative Party is as a result of a lingering attachment to punk Thatcherism -- despite his best efforts, William Hague was forced to turn right because, in "democratising" his party, he had made himself more vulnerable to the demands of the partisan bigots that form the hard core of that party. Thus the succession of IDS, and the continuing hero-worship of Thatcher. But they remain important because of their command of parts of the ideological apparatus, not least the Telegraph newspapers and the Murdoch media empire. And linked to this is the support that they get from those in the US with strong links to the Bush administration. A check of the archives here will highlight some of these links, including Thatcher arranging for IDS to meet Donald Rumsfeld before the actual defence secretary, Geoff Hoon. One way to understand Blair's frenzied approach to foreign policy is to accept the blackmail hypothesis but to steer it away from the lurid to the more straightforward -- he knows that the current administration could cause a lot of trouble for New Labour if he does not play ball, so, within certain limits, he can afford to advocate alternative policies and stake out a "British" position, but the price of that is unwavering support of the main elements of US imperialism. The alternative is a manufactured balance of payments crisis of the kind precipitated in 1974 and resulting in the intervention of the IMF in 1976, sealing Britain's Thatcherite fate. The euro tendency within the British state, of which Blair is the figurehead, is merely the continuation of one of the two main strands of Thatcherism, whose main accomplishments were the destruction of the British working class, the restoration of British state authority (contrary to "rolling back" its frontiers) and the further incorporation into the anti-Soviet bulwark that was the European Economic Community. With the end of the Cold War, Europe's political functionality has ceased to exist from a US strategic perspective, whilst its potential as a strategic rival has grown. The other strand of Thatcherism ("punk") sees its future as part of an Anglified white world bloc, led by the US but with a special place for John Bull British nationalism and devoted to a miserably misunderstood conception of "free trade". Thus the irony of Blair -- the most euro-enthusiast PM since Edward Heath, poised to seal Britain's future by leading it into the eurozone, now forced to manage as best he can the difficulties of a hostile Bush administration and a bizarre domestic coalition of petty bourgeois nationalist bigots and labour aristocracy relics, reinforced by powerful media interests controlled by Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, whose links to the Bush administration are very close indeed. Most of this is a rehashing of stuff written earlier, and which can be found in the archives. What is new is that this history, it is becoming clearer day by day, is far from past, and that there remains an intense struggle within the British state over its future trajectory. That punk Thatcherism cannot be regarded as a serious political alternative to New Labour is less important than the recognition that it can be used to cause severe domestic difficulty for Blair should he step out of line. Michael Keaney From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:02:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:02:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: election downside Message-ID: <005a01c3109a$5b395d80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The loss of John McAllion is a blow to left politics in Scotland. I'm pleased that this journalist is making public the very likely true rumours that the Labour Party was involved in efforts to sabotage its own. Given McAllion's staunch opposition to the Iraq war and consistent campaigning for left goals, it is not surprising that the should have been loathed by many within his party. It was a miracle that he made it past the selection panel way back in 1998, when another left stalwart, Dennis Canavan, was deselected by the thought police installed by Gordon Brown and Donald Dewar. Now McAllion will have to consider the alternatives. Since the only other likely options for him politically both embrace Scottish independence, he will presumably have to rethink his attitude towards "Britain". But his political demise (however temporary) is yet another reminder (as if it were needed) that there is no place in New Labour for old socialists. Interestingly McAllion was closely involved with George Galloway in establishing "Scotland United" in 1987, a radical campaigning outfit within the Labour Party geared towards securing autonomy for Scotland within the UK state. What made them different was that they were, at the time, prepared to contemplate outright independence should the British state prove unbending. ----- Rebel McAllion is finally out in the cold ROBBIE DINWOODIE, Scottish Political Correspondent The Herald, 2 May 2003 THE fiery left winger, John McAllion, lost his Dundee East seat to the SNP after two recounts. Shona Robison took the constituency by just 70 votes. There were dark rumours during the final days of the election campaign that the Labour party nationally was not doing all that it might to help Mr McAllion hang on to his constituency. He made some of the finest speeches in the last term of the parliament, particularly in his passionate criticism of the war in Iraq. However, it did not require a conspiracy theorist to suspect that the man who was so often a critic of Tony Blair's leadership might not get the full backing of the party machine. Mr McAllion was seen as popular in his constituency and the Scottish Socialists stood aside to give him a clear run. It is not clear, however, whether this did him any favours. He took the seat from the SNP in 1987 at a time when many in Labour did not consider it to be winnable. His reputation within the party was of a staunch socialist with nationalist tendencies. When he won his way into the Scottish parliament, Donald Dewar could have decided to make use of his experience and bring the maverick inside the tent. Instead he was overlooked and became convener of the petitions committee. >From the back benches he continued to be resolutely Old Labour, frequently collaborating with his former Westminster colleague, Dennis Canavan, the independent MSP and with Tommy Sheridan, the Socialist party leader, on issues such as abolishing poindings and warrants sales, or campaigning for free school meals. But it was the looming war in Iraq which caused a serious rift with the party. He took part in a peace campaign which aimed to raise money to indict the prime minister for war crimes and he personally moved an anti-war motion in the parliament in defiance of his colleagues. Speaking to The Herald at the height of the campaign he talked of the strain and loneliness of being so estranged from his parliamentary colleagues. Now he is out, and the suspicion will be that his party did little to save him. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:10:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:10:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: weapons of mass instruction Message-ID: <006301c3109b$6faa1a60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Weapons of mass distortion The concept of WMD is dishonest. When they are in friendly hands we call them defence forces Geoffrey Wheatcroft Friday May 2, 2003 The Guardian If the first casualty of war is truth, then language itself sustains the heaviest collateral damage, as Orwell used to point out (before "collateral damage" proved his point by entering the vocabulary of poisonous euphemism). The Iraq war has produced its own rich crop of Newspeak, but the choicest of all is the phrase "weapons of mass destruction". Even the most credulous supporters of Tony Blair's war are beginning to see they were sold a pup. MPs angrily demand evidence of the WMDs, which they, in their innocence, believed were the reason for the war, rather than its flimsy pretext, while the prime minister insists that WMDs will be found. But what are they anyway? The very phrase "weapons of mass destruction" is of recent coinage, and a specious one. It replaced "ABC weapons", for atomic, biological and chemical, which was neater, although already misleading as it conflated types of weaponry quite different in kind and in destructive capacity. WMD is even more empty and dishonest as a concept. By definition atomic and hydrogen bombs cause mass destruction. Ever since they were first built and used in war (by the US, in case anyone has forgotten), they have cast a peculiar thrall of horror, although this is not entirely logical. The quarter-million dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been preceded by nearly a million German and Japanese civilians killed by "conventional" bombing, whose conventionality was small consolation for the victims. Even supposing that nuclear weapons are uniquely horrible, the Iraq war and its aftermath have only served to confirm what Hans Blix learned, and what the International Institute for Strategic Studies said last summer: that Saddam had no fissile material to build atomic warheads. Nor did he have (for all the shockingly mendacious propaganda) the wherewithal for acquiring such material. Had he possessed warheads, he never had the means of striking London, let alone New York. And if he had ever been tempted to lob one at Israel, he would have been constrained by the certain knowledge that Baghdad would have been nuked minutes later. Certainly he possessed the biological and chemical material in ABC, although here again the "W" in WMD is notably misleading: "weaponised" was just what this material was not, a fact which makes the pretext for war even more phoney. And certainly Saddam had used biological and chemical weapons against Iran as well as the Kurds. Very nasty they are, but that does not make them mass-destructive in the same sense as nuclear warheads. A height of absurdity was reached with the claim that one of Saddam's WMDs was mustard gas - a weapon we were using in 1917, and which British politicians at the time defended as comparatively humane beside high-explosive artillery and machine-gun fire. Even terrorism isn't always more dangerous because of access to toxic substances, and doesn't need a dictator like Saddam to provide them anyway. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman have written about biological and chemical weapons in their book, A Higher Form of Killing. Harris has pointed out that "a reasonably competent chemist could produce nerve agent on a kitchen table". In 1995, a terrorist religious cult in Japan did just that, thereby providing an illuminating comparison. Those cultists released sarin nerve gas - another of Saddam's alleged WMDs - into the Tokyo metro during rush hour. Last February in the South Korean city of Daegu, an underground train was attacked, with a milk carton containing inflammable liquid. Twelve people died in the "WMD" attack; old-fashioned arson killed 120. Soon after September 11, a number of letters containing anthrax spores were posted in America. In the overwrought climate of the moment, it was claimed that this batch of "WMD" could kill the American population many times over, and that may have been true according to some abstract calculation. In the event, five people died. While terrorism is murderous, it mostly remains technologically primitive. Three people were killed in Tel Aviv on Tuesday by a suicide bomber's belt of explosive and metal scraps, and the IRA have shown how bloodthirsty "spectaculars" can be mounted with nothing more than fertiliser, sugar, and condoms for the timers. As for the greatest spectacular of all, Blair has repeatedly linked September 11 with the threat of WMDs. But the 3,000 victims in New York weren't killed by WMDs of any kind, they were murdered by a dozen fanatics armed with box cutters. Although it has been irritating subsequently to have the contents of one's sponge bag confiscated at the airport in the name of security, that scarcely makes a pair of nail scissors a WMD. The truth is that "weapons of mass destruction" is a concept defined by the person using it. "I like a drink, you are a drunk, he is an alcoholic," runs the old conjugation. Now there's another: "We have defence forces, you have dangerous arms, he has weapons of mass destruction." As usual, it depends who you are. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:12:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:12:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <006b01c3109b$baed6040$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Two held over Ulster phone tap leak Rosie Cowan, Ireland correspondent Friday May 2, 2003 The Guardian Detectives investigating the leaking of transcripts of telephone calls between Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein and Jonathan Powell, the prime minister's chief of staff, arrested a Sunday Times journalist and his wife yesterday. Officers also seized documents at the home of the journalist, Liam Clarke, the Sunday Times Northern Ireland editor, who co-wrote a biography of Mr McGuinness with his wife, Kathryn Johnston. The updated version of the book, entitled Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government, included transcripts of phone calls allegedly bugged by M15. They were made by Mr McGuinness to Mr Powell and to the former Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam and the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams. Police arrested a 48-year-old retired special branch officer and seized a computer and disks during a house search on Wednesday, when the Times published extracts from the transcripts, which featured calls made in 1999 and 2001. The bugging was allegedly part of an operation known as Narcotic1, which started in 1997 and was still running. In one call, in August 1999, Mr Powell described Willie Thompson, then an Ulster Unionist MP who opposed the Good Friday agreement, as an "ass". In another, Ms Mowlam apparently told Mr McGuinness that she was going to see Tony Blair and was "fighting like fuck" to keep her post in Northern Ireland. Asked in the Commons about the bugging, Mr Blair refused to comment on "any matters related to security". Mr McGuinness is the Mid-Ulster MP at Westminster, and the education minister in the Stormont government, which was put on ice last October amid allegations of an IRA spy ring. He described the phone taps as "disgraceful". "The war is not over for securocrats," he said. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:14:45 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:14:45 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Zimbabwe: Mugabe support crumbling? Message-ID: <007301c3109c$09458740$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Knives out for Mugabe as party loyalty fades Power struggle brews within Zanu-PF amid growing dismay over Zimbabwe's collapse Andrew Meldrum in Harare Friday May 2, 2003 The Guardian Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, is battling against a whispering campaign within his Zanu-PF party begun by some of his deputies and lieutenants vying to succeed him. The Guardian revealed yesterday that Mr Mugabe faced unprecedented pressure from fellow African leaders to retire, and the presidents of South Africa and Nigeria, Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo, were due in Harare on Monday to urge him to end his 23-year rule. But even as the 79-year-old leader struggles with Zimbabwe's severe famine, fuel and power shortages, economic collapse and international criticism, he is also confronted by growing pressure from ambitious officials in his own party. Interviews with senior members of Zanu-PF show that substantial elements of the party think it is time for Mr Mugabe to go. But it is bitterly divided over who should succeed him and remains at a loss for a strategy for pulling the country out of its most severe economic freefall and famine ever. "The party is fully aware they have lost the population," a former Zanu-PF member of parliament said. "Cabinet ministers and party officials sit over beers and admit the party has failed the country. But when Mugabe comes into the room they all sit up and tell the president what he wants to hear. They are all afraid." They fear that Mr Mugabe will cut them out of the party's inner circle of wealth and power. They are also afraid of Mr Mugabe's revenge. Some cabinet ministers privately say they are unhappy with the situation but are frightened of violent retribution if they resign. "Zanu-PF is not just a political party, it is a liberation movement that fought a bitter and bloody war to gain power," said Wilfred Mhanda, a prominent war veteran, now director of the Zimbabwe Liberators Platform, a group critical of Mr Mugabe. "That violent struggle 30 years ago shaped Robert Mugabe and many others in the party. They are committed to keeping power, not to democracy. They are not afraid to spill blood now to keep power." Mr Mugabe's use of the army, police, war veterans and youth militia frightens many people, but he cannot intimidate an economy back to prosperity or win back popularity. "There are several in Zanu-PF who have been waiting for years to succeed Mugabe and now they fear they are losing their chance," said a former ambassador. "They fear Mugabe will drag the party down with him and they won't have a chance of power. That is why they want Mugabe to step down now." The most prominent faction became public in January when the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, revealed that he had been approached by the parliamentary speaker, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the chief of staff of the armed forces, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, who asked him if he would join a "transitional government" if they got Mr Mugabe to retire. Mr Mnangagwa, a former defence minister, is widely considered to be Mr Mugabe's likely successor. "They are powerful men, but their weakness is that they are not popular," said a Zanu-PF MP. "Mnangagwa cannot even win an election within the party, not to mention a parliamentary seat. How could he lead the nation?" Party leaders can rattle off other factions vying to succeed Mr Mugabe, but virtually all of the various challengers are devoid of any new economic policies to reverse Zimbabwe's decline. The one Zanu-PF contender who is an exception is Simba Makoni, a former finance minister. He has spoken out for rational economic policies and avoided associating with the more lawless side of the party. He told the Guardian that Zimbabwe's daunting problems demanded a national effort in which all Zimbabwean parties and civic organisations worked together. "We are faced with a crisis, both economic and social, that calls for a national effort that cuts across party lines," Mr Makoni said. "The governing party and the opposition party must work together, with civil society and professional bodies. Only that way can we mobilise all our resources to find a way out of this crisis. We need to get Zimbabweans to work together again." Mr Makoni's statements are earth-shaking, particularly coming from within Mr Mugabe's often belligerent ruling party. "It is a hallmark of democracy that the different political parties can work together. Anyone who suggests that our problems can be solved by an exclusively partisan approach from any one party is suggesting a path that will be longer and more painful," said Mr Makoni. "And to work with our regional and international partners would also be beneficial." A Zanu-PF member of parliament said: "Moderates within Zanu-PF are comfortable with Makoni and even the general public likes him. He is not tainted by corruption. But he does not have a proven constituency, he does not have an elected seat." Another party member said: "Makoni is outside the inner circle but he could well come to power with a bit of support from South Africa." South Africa's economic pressure and President Mbeki are the most decisive factors influencing Mr Mugabe. "South Africa's key strategy in dealing with Zimbabwe is to try to get Zanu-PF to make an internal change in leadership. If they finish up the land redistribution, that could allow Mugabe to retire as a hero and get a successor," said Ivor Jenkins, director of the International Democratic Alternative for South Africa. He said Mr Makoni appeared to have "the least baggage in terms of allegations of corruption and human rights abuses". There is also growing speculation that Mr Mbeki is looking to Mr Makoni. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:18:46 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:18:46 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Zimbabwe: US-British interference Message-ID: <007b01c3109c$9940a8c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US plots to oust Mugabe with African nations' help By Basildon Peta in Johannesburg and Andrew Grice The Independent 02 May 2003 The United States - backed by Britain - is pushing for "regime change" in Zimbabwe that would see President Robert Mugabe replaced by a member of the ruling Zanu-PF party. The new president would then call a constitutional conference and organise elections to be monitored by the international community. President George Bush is sending Walter Kansteiner, his special adviser on Africa, to the region next week. The US is persuading African leaders to back its strategy to use regional pressure to bring about the regime change. Rather than demand an immediate re-run of the March 2002 presidential election, which international observers accused Mr Mugabe of rigging, the US is pushing a so-called "Palestinian strategy". This refers to the sidelining of Yasser Arafat in favour of the new Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas. America, Britain and South Africa have indicated that the country's former finance minister Simba Makoni is a suitable interim figure to take over from Mr Mugabe. Mr Makoni is untainted by the worst excesses of the Mugabe regime and has publicly denounced the chaotic land seizures that have driven the country to the edge of disaster. Tony Blair and Mr Bush have not discussed the Zimbabwe situation in their many conversations over the recent months. But Mr Blair wants the issue raised at next month's G8 summit in Evian, France. "I would like to see a bigger focus by the international community on Zimbabwe," he told the Financial Times this week. "Now there's a limit to what you can do but I have never had a difficulty with the concept of intervention. It doesn't necessarily mean ... armed intervention, it can be diplomatic." British ministers denied that the US plan was a payback for Mr Blair's support over Iraq. One Government source said: "If there was a quid pro quo, it was on the Middle East peace process and the publication of the road-map." African leaders, including South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, have openly supported Mr Mugabe despite widespread international condemnation. They have also succeeded in undermining British attempts to isolate his regime internationally, most recently insisting that he be invited to the Franco-Africa summit organised by President Jacques Chirac. Over the past three months Mr Mbeki's views on regime change have changed, according to Mr Kansteiner. South Africa now acceptsMr Mugabe should be edged aside, he said. Other influential African countries including Botswana, Mozambique, Senegal, Ghana agree that Mr Mugabe's removal from power is the only realistic step towards resolving the deepening crisis in Zimbabwe, which threatens to plunge the region into humanitarian and economic chaos. Mr Mbeki believes it would be easier to lobby international support for Zimbabwe with a new leader. Mr Mbeki, Nigerian leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Malawi's President, Bakili Muluzi, arrive in Zimbabwe on Monday for talks with Mr Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:19:32 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:19:32 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: New Europe Message-ID: <008301c3109c$b44b9260$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> More US forces will be based in eastern Europe By Stephen Castle in Brussels The Independent 02 May 2003 A dramatic shift of American military forces from bases in Germany to locations in "new" Europe, including Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Hungary, is being brought forward after the war in Iraq. According to reports in the US, the 17,000-strong 1st Armoured Division, most of which was sent to Iraq from Germany, will not return there. Meanwhile, Romania's Defence Minister, Ioan Mircea Pascu, has announced that talks will begin shortly with Washington on the deployment of more American forces to bases in his country. The decision to scale down American forces in Germany, as well as Pentagon plans to remove troops from Saudi Arabia, underlines the extent to which the Iraq war has changed Washington's military priorities. The aftermath of the conflict is being used to help reshape the international security framework and mount the biggest US military reshuffle since the Second World War. Europe is used to playing host to more than 112,000 American troops, 80 per cent of whom have been based in Germany. But with the German and French governments singled out for criticism by Washington for their opposition to the war in Iraq, the Pentagon seems intent on shifting many of its forces eastwards. Former communist countries which have been accepted into Nato's ranks not only offered political support for Washington's war effort but can provide strategic bases. The pattern likely to emerge is of a dispersal of limited numbers of American troops to several, smaller-scale centres in Eastern Europe, with some soldiers returning home. That would fit with the objective of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, of creating leaner, more mobile and faster forces. The senior US commander in Europe, General James Jones, has called for the creation of a "family of bases" that can go "from being cold to warm to hot if you need them". This blueprint would permit the periodic expansion of forces when necessary while averting a political problem with Moscow. As part of its deal with Russia over the expansion of Nato, Washington agreed not to set up new military bases in the former communist countries. At a meeting this week at Nato headquarters in Brussels the Americans said they will honour this commitment and that any deployments to the former Soviet bloc would require only minimal improvements to existing infrastructure. The purpose would be to allow joint training exercises, a senior American official said. Diplomats say some of the bases which are likely to play host to US troops have already been upgraded as a condition of entry into Nato, and could accommodate more troops. European diplomats do not expect the US entirely to abandon its German bases, keeping a presence, for example, at Ramstein near Frankfurt. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:22:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:22:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Italy: Berlusconi loses battle Message-ID: <008b01c3109d$0dc48a40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Berlusconi's lawyer convicted of bribery By Peter Popham in Rome The Independent 01 May 2003 Silvio Berlusconi's carefully laid plans to escape the judgment of Milan were in ruins yesterday after the Italian Prime Minister's friend, lawyer and political colleague Cesare Previti was sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment for bribing judges. The culmination of a trial that lasted nearly three years, dogged at every step by the frantic attempts of Mr Berlusconi and Previti to derail it, came at 11.10pm on Tuesday. After deliberating for more than seven hours, the judges convicted all but one of the six accused, all formerly high-flying judges and lawyers, to jail terms ranging from four years to 13. The defendants were accused of giving and receiving bribes amounting to 67bn lira (?24m) to encourage judges in Rome's appeal courts to award ownership of two business conglomerates, including Italy's biggest publisher, Mondadori, to Mr Berlusconi's company, Fininvest. The Prime Minister was originally one of the accused, but dropped off the list under the statute of limitations because the charges against him were less serious. His office responded to the sentencing of Previti, a senator in Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, harshly. "This is an ugly day for Italian justice," his spokesman said. Mr Berlusconi added: "The politicisation of certain magistrates, which has come to condition our political life, is a problem that must be resolved for the good of the country, of the institutions and of Italian citizens." Mr Berlusconi had devoted his political energy to preventing yesterday's embarrassment. Against angry opposition protests, he rammed through a law allowing cases to be transformed to a different judiciary if "legitimate suspicion" that the judges are biased could be proved. But when Previti used the new law to try to get his case switched from Milan, Italy's highest court of appeal turned him down. The sentencing of Previti was seen as a humiliation for Mr Berlusconi, "at least embarrassing", said Giuseppe D'Avanzo of La Repubblica newspaper, "for a man who, as proprietor of Mondadori, was the direct benefactor of this corrupt act". But it was not expected to weaken his grip on power. Francesco Perfetti, professor of politics at Rome's University of Luiss, said: "I rule out the possibility that the conviction will have an immediate impact on the stability of the government." A corruption scandal that broke during Mr Berlusconi's previous term as Prime Minister, in 1994, hastened the downfall of that government. But this time his coalition appears more robust, while the centre-left opposition is in disarray. Previti, who like the other defendants was not present in court for the judgment, declared angrily: "[The judges] have brought to a conclusion what they had decided to do in advance ... I have been persecuted by the 'red togas'. It's a political sentence. I will appeal." The verdicts and the sentences vindicated the painstaking prosecution of Ilda Boccassini, who tracked for the court what one commentator called the "whirling circuits of money". Huge sums vanished from accounts held by the lawyers and popped up in accounts owned by the judges. This is a dark culmination for Mr Berlusconi, but it is also just the beginning - the verdict in a case in which he stands accused of bribing judges to gain control of a food company, is expected in the summer. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 05:48:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 14:48:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Japan: touting for inward investment Message-ID: <00af01c310a0$c545bec0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The following statement was released today by JETRO NY. Please let us know if you have any questions, if you do not wish to receive similar releases in the future or if we can be of help in any way. Thank you for your interest and cooperation. ================================================== Japan Seeks to Double Foreign Direct Investment in Japan within Five Years NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 30, 2003--The Japan External Trade Organization New York (JETRO NY) released a newsletter today highlighting new measures to increase foreign direct investment (FDI) in Japan. It can be viewed at: http://www.jetro.org/newyork/focusnewsletter/focus24.html . As part of an ongoing initiative to accelerate FDI, the Expert Committee of the Japan Investment Council (JIC) recently released a number of important recommendations. In a related development, Prime Minister Koizumi announced in a major January 31st policy speech Japan's determination to double the cumulative amount of FDI in Japan within five years. Over the past decade, Japan has come to understand FDI is essential to introducing new capital, resources, know-how and technologies. Nevertheless, FDI inflows remain low. According to UNCTAD, Japan's Inward FDI Potential Index is 14th among 140 countries although its Performance Index is 131st. To address this severe undervaluation, measures must be initiated to enhance Japan's investment attractiveness. This includes: * Welcoming FDI into Japan: Disseminating Information in Japan and Abroad New investment should be welcomed regardless of capital origin and the importance of FDI shown to the Japanese people. Information also must be disseminated internationally to showcase Japan's economic potential. * Smoother Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A): Preparing the Business Environment Today, cross-border investment often takes the form of M&A, rather than new business development. Therefore, it is essential to facilitate the M&A process. * Clear, Simple and Fast Administrative Procedures: Facilitating Regulatory Approvals and Constraints To make administrative procedures better than other countries, user-oriented ways of thinking need to be adopted. * Securing Necessary Human Resources: Improve Employment and Living Environment Human resources help to drive industrial growth and are essential to develop dynamic businesses. * Local Government Creativity and Ideas: Enlarging the Role of Local Governments Competition of ideas among local governments will help enhance, and demonstrate, the potential of their particular regions. The Expert Committee of the JIC believes the following five points are vital to increase FDI into Japan: * Promoting Public Knowledge of Japan's Attractiveness and Desire for FDI Actively inform international audiences of Japan's desire to welcome FDI; and Seek the understanding of the Japanese people on the importance of FDI. * Improving Japan's Business Environment Improve rules and regulations to facilitate M&A; Enhance transparency and reliability of corporate information; Facilitate new business development; Maximize use of resources of foreign companies; and Improve access to services that support FDI in Japan. * Reviewing Administrative and Regulatory Processes and Procedures Make information available in one-stop form, Simplify and accelerate administrative procedures; and Promote no-action-letter and public comment systems. * Creating a Favorable Employment System and Living Environments Step up reform of Japanese labor market; Improve visa and immigration systems; Improve environment for international education; and Increase ability of foreign doctors to practice in Japan. * Improving Local and National Government Structures and Systems Help local governments to attract foreign investment; Develop designated special zones for structural reform; and Improve national structure for FDI promotion. CONTACT: JETRO New York Satoshi Miyamoto Tel: 212/997-0416 Fax: 212/997-0464 E-mail: Satoshi_Miyamoto at jetro.go.jp Focus is published and disseminated by JETRO New York, in coordination with KWR International, Inc., New York, NY 10023, Tel: 212-532-3005, Fax: 212-799-0517, E-mail: kwrintl at kwrintl.com . JETRO New York is registered as an agent of the Japan External Trade Organization, Tokyo, Japan and KWR International, Inc. is registered on behalf of JETRO New York. This material is filed with the Department of Justice where the required registration statement is available for public viewing. From kaliyuga at humboldt1.com Fri May 2 06:59:48 2003 From: kaliyuga at humboldt1.com (viveka) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 05:59:48 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Patriot Act II - JUST SAY NO! Message-ID: <004f01c310aa$b90fa1c0$202664d8@com.humboldt1.com> A small town in Northern California proves we CAN say no! For those of us frustrated or uncertain about what to do next, here's an act of resistance that has garnered national attention. My dear friend, David Meserve, drafted and helped pass the ordinance below in little old Arcata, California and has received non-stop invitations to be on nationally televised talk shows. His appearances have run the spectrum from Pat Buchanan to Pacifica's WBAI - from Al Jazeera to Sam Donaldson! He is happy to talk to anyone about this, if you're interested in passing such legislation in your city (the list is growing) or if you have a connection for him on a radio or TV spot. Give him my hame if you call. 707-822-1469. Here's a brief summary of the ordinance, the full text follows: "The ordinance instructs management employees of the city not to engage in or permit any unconstitutional detentions or profiling, not to voluntarily cooperate with investigations or arrests in violation of individuals' civil rights or liberties, and to report to the city manager and city council any requests for information or assistance that may be in violation of the Bill of Rights or the Fourteenth Amendment." Maggie AN ORDINANCE OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF ARCATA AMENDING THE ARCATA MUNICIPAL CODE TO DEFEND THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES The City Council of the City of Arcata does ordain as follows: Section 1: Title II: Administration, Chapter 2: Officers and Employees, Article 5: Defending Civil rights and liberties, Sections 2190 - 2194 are hereby added to the Municipal Code as follows: SEC. 2190: Purposes. The purposes of this ordinance are as follows: A. To protect the civil rights and civil liberties for all and to affirm the City's commitment to embody democracy, and to embrace, defend and uphold the inalienable rights and fundamental liberties granted under the United States and the California Constitutions, as set forth in Resolution 023-32, A Resolution of the City Council of the City of Arcata to Defend the Bill of Rights and Civil Liberties, adopted by the Council on January 15, 2003; and B. To ensure that local law enforcement continues to preserve and uphold residents' freedom of speech, assembly, association, and privacy, the right to counsel and due process in judicial proceedings, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, even if requested or authorized to infringe upon such rights by federal or state law enforcement agencies acting under new powers created by the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56), Homeland Security Act (Public Law 107-296), or related Executive Orders, or by future enacted laws, executive orders or regulations. SEC. 2191: No Unconstitutional Detentions or Profiling. No management employee of the City shall officially engage in or permit unlawful detentions or profiling based on race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or political or religious association that are in violation of individuals' civil rights or civil liberties as specified in the Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. SEC. 2192: No Unconstitutional Voluntary Cooperation. No management employee of the City shall officially assist or voluntarily cooperate with investigations, interrogations, or arrest procedures, public or clandestine, that are in violation of individuals' civil rights or civil liberties as specified in the Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. SEC. 2193: Notification. Management employees of the City shall promptly notify the City Manager when, in the course of City employment, the following occurs: A management employee of the City is contacted by another law enforcement agency and asked to cooperate or assist with an investigation, interrogation, or arrest procedure under provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56), Homeland Security Act (Public Law 107-296), or related Executive Orders, or future enacted law, executive order or regulation, where such procedure is in violation of an individual's civil rights or civil liberties as specified in the Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Upon such notification from a management employee, the City Manager shall promptly report to the City Council, specifying the law enforcement agency seeking cooperation or assistance and the actions requested of the management employee. SEC. 2194: Defense. The City shall provide legal defense to any management employee who is criminally charged by another entity for his or her actions in compliance with this Ordinance. SEC. 2195: Severability. If any section or sections of the ordinance is or are held to be invalid or unenforceable, all other sections shall nevertheless continue in full force and remain in effect. Section 2: This ordinance will take effect thirty (30) days after the date of its adoption. Dated: April 2, 2003. ATTESTED: APPROVED: City Clerk, City of Arcata Mayor, City of Arcata Clerk's Certification I hereby certify that the foregoing is a true and correct copy of ordinance No. 1339, passed and adopted at a regular meeting of the City council of the City of Arcata, Humboldt County, California, on the second day of April, 2003, by the following vote: AYES: 4 NOES: 1 ABSENT: 0 City Clerk, City of Arcata From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 2 07:15:09 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 16:15:09 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US state: Council on Foreign Relations leftists Message-ID: <011a01c310ac$db736ce0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Forwarded from Louis Proyect: In my Swans article, I mentioned that Joanne Landy, author of Cuba petition #2, had been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations 10 years ago on the prompting of Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation Magazine, a liberal publication with over 100,000 subscribers which also yielded a number of signatories for petition number one, including Marc Cooper, Kathe Pollitt (in an ecumenical spirit, she also signed Landy's petition) and Eric Alterman. I neglected to mention that Vanden Heuvel *remains* on the Council of Foreign Relations for reasons that are all too depressingly obvious. If your goal is to apply cosmetic improvements to American capitalism rather than eliminating it and replacing it with something more rational, naturally you would want to seek out positions of power and influence close to the heart of the system. One wonders if Vanden Heuvel was in attendance at Niall Ferguson's talk at the CFR recently that received these biting comments from Maureen Dowd, who has lately--along with Paul Krugman--the only voice of reason at the newspaper of record. >>"America is the empire that dare not speak its name," Niall Ferguson, the Oxford professor who wrote "Empire," told a crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations here on Monday. He believes that America is so invested in its "creation myth," breaking away from a wicked empire, that Americans will always be self-deceiving ? and even self-defeating ? imperialists. "The great thing about the American empire is that so many Americans disbelieve in its existence," he said. "Ever since the annexation of Texas and invasion of the Philippines, the U.S. has systematically pursued an imperial policy. "It's simply a suspension of disbelief by Americans. They think they're so different that when they have bases in foreign territories, it's not an empire. When they invade sovereign territory, it's not an empire." Asked in an interview about Viceroy Jay Garner's promise that U.S. military overlords would "leave fairly rapidly," Mr. Ferguson replied: "I'm hoping he's lying. Successful empires must be based on hypocrisy. The Americans can say they're doing things in the name of freedom, liberty and apple pie. But they must build a civil society and revive the economy before they have elections. "From 1882 until 1922, the British promised the international community 66 times that they would leave Egypt, but they never did. If they leave Iraq to its own devices, the whole thing will blow up." Afghanistan offers cautionary lessons. It was the abandonment by the U.S. after Afghanistan's war in 1989 with the Soviet Union that stoked the fury of Al Qaeda. The regime of the American puppet Hamid Karzai is still perilously fragile.<< full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/30/opinion/30DOWD.html That's what the CFR is about, advising the US ruling class how to administer an empire effectively. We on the left, who have our own agenda, have to figure out in the coming years as the US ruling class becomes ever more bellicose, to make clear lines of distinction between those who want to destroy empire and those who want to tame it. From soncu at pacbell.net Fri May 2 10:14:22 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 09:14:22 -0700 Subject: [A-List] (Forward from Nestor) Stratfor on Argentina Message-ID: My dear friend Anne Williamson forwarded (in the hope, I guess, that I could provide some details) what follows, by Stratfor. These are my comments: Stratfor: Two Peronist Candidates Go Head-to-Head in Argentine Runoff Me: Misleading and old-fashioned. Not Peronists, but at most, of "Peronist origin". The core of the situation is that the traditional anti-Peronist mass party, Radicalism, has disappeared (probably for ever, since its social constituency -the relatively well to do middle classes of Buenos Aires and the Pampa region- has largely disappeared first). And, as a logic consequence (because social forces need to find some expression), what used to be called Peronism has split, most probably without return, into three distinct formations. Menemism is the clearest representation of the fractions of the ruling classes who gave up the decades old attempt by peronism to build up a self-centered capitalism in our country, and threw the whole lot of Argentina with the new global hegemon; they also cater for some vote from the lowest ranks of our society, among others due to long entrenched hatred from the dispossessed regions in the Inland country against the most prosperous Pampa region. Engineer Alvaro Alsogaray, an "olive oil" pure oligarch, has very aptly explained that Menemism was not Peronism any more, as early as 1990. Duhaldism (the branch of Peronism behind Kirchner) is the representation of a kneeling down bourgeoisie and its teams of technocrats, a fraction of the civilian State bureaucracy, etc. Many workers support them, but they have given up the kernel of "Per?n?s Peronism" as it is known here. Kirchner, Duhalde?s candidate, was elected mostly due to a strong campaign of fear which involved media attacks on the population so as to brainwash us with the "fear from Menem + L?pez Murphy" tenet. Nothing of "Peronism" here, either. The third party of the split, Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?, is the only one that more clearly raises the historic banners of Peronism. But he lost the elections. Stratfor: Summary Former President Carlos Menem may be the political underdog in Argentina's May 18 presidential elections, although he won the first-round election with 24.6 percent of the vote. His biggest problem is that 70 percent of Argentine voters dislike him intensely, equating his previous governments with widespread corruption and what is commonly perceived as the destruction of the country's economy with free-market policies that did not help most Argentines. Me: a good summary, indeed. Stratfor: Analysis [...] Menem [...] announced a proposed Cabinet that would include many "new faces" in Argentine politics, and has said he will focus on foreign policy, the economy and security issues to define sharp differences between himself and Kirchner, according to Stratfor sources in Buenos Aires. Me: Bad sources. Maybe Stratfor could pay some money for good info, instead. No new faces at all. All of them are a bunch of roguish children of a bitch. Menem?s tactics has been very clear: "I am the devil, vote me!". In fact, they expected to get enough votes in the first round not to go to a second one. And they had printed Victory Advertisements which ran, literally, "Los hijos de puta hemos vuelto!" (We, the motherf*rs, are back!). Stratfor: However, Kirchner's low negative ratings among voters suggest that he has considerable room to raise his share of the runoff vote by leveraging widespread dislike for Menem to his advantage and persuading independent voters that his economic policies would be sound. Kirchner also is counting on the strong support of current President Eduardo Duhalde's government to put him over the top on May 18. This support gives Kirchner a strong base in the wealthy province of Buenos Aires, which is Duhalde's political stronghold. Me: Of course Kirchner will leverage widespread dislike for Menem. At least, these elections must serve to have him out of politics for ever. Most probably, he will end his life in Torremolinos, just another retired tropical tyrant (albeit with "democratic" credentials) who sold out his own country. As to the soundness of Kirchner?s economic policies: this is a misinterpretation. What counts here is that the great power of Duhalde has helped to convince Argentineans that the only thing we can do is to kneel down for the time being. The Iraqi defeat may have had a greater impact than many imagine. As to the "wealthy" province of Buenos Aires, this is outrageous. Though it is "wealthier" than most provinces, its landscape is that of an industrial graveyard slowly recovering under the protection of Duhalde?s hyper-high exchange rate. Stratfor: Menem and Kirchner also are reaching out to peronist provincial governors in an effort to build political alliances in regions where they fared poorly in the first round vote. Both are courting former San Luis provincial governor Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, and each has offered jobs in their respective future governments to leading peronist governors like Carlos Reutemann of Santa Fe and Eduardo Fellner of Jujuy province, who would be interior minister in Kirchner's government. Me: Rodr?guez Sa?, at best (from Menem?s point of view), will give suport to none. He is courted because although he lost the election he collected a sizable 14% of the vote. But he does not own that vote. He has convened a national meeting of the Higher Command of his Movement tomorrow. The decission will be made by the Command, who will most probably split over the issue since many want to call for a vote to Kirchner, while there is a minority who would vote Menem. He represents something different from Menem or Kirchner. Most probably, he will give freedom to his voters to make their choice, which will probably mean that 8 out of 10 will vote Kirchner, 1 will vote Menem, and 1 in 10 will vote blank / not vote. Reutemann is a political dead, and at any rate he will not support Menem because he smells other people?s cadaverine very well. Province governors depend strongly on Central Government funds, thus they are not very independent un less they adopt a policy such as that by Rodr?guez Sa?, which is excluded by definition in the case of Reutemann. So, they take their bearings very carefully and try to smell the air and to see who is going to be the winner. In this case, Kirchner. Stratfor: Menem, who is 72, has pledged to structure a Cabinet that would include many political newcomers; he likely will announce the nominations this week. So far, he has confirmed the appointment of Carlos Melconian, an economist who has written a best-selling book on how to rebuild Argentina, as his pick for economy minister. Menem also named pro-U.S. veteran journalist Jorge Castro as foreign minister. Menem's proposals also unabashedly seek greater economic and political engagement with the United States. Me: Melconian is as new as stale wine, same with Castro. His "best-selling" book is simply a rehash of neoliberal crap. Castro is a former ultra-leftist who derived towards Peronism and then to Menemism, and a swindler, by the way. If Stratfor believes that these are "new faces" then they are quite misled. If by "new" you mean "people unknown to the mass of the population", then you may well say that most "candidates" are "new". Stratfor: Kirchner has promised a Cabinet that would mix honesty, experience and fresh blood in the government. However, his core officials would include current Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, who would continue in that role, and several other officials currently serving in Duhalde's government. In fact, Duhalde appears to have considerable political influence over Kirchner's proposed ministers, judging by the many officials that would be carried over into the new administration if Kirchner is elected. Me: There is a joke here on future newspaper headlines ("Kirchner declares himself completely independent from the Ministers that Duhalde has imposed on him"). But the scenario will be an interesting one, with Kirchner trying to impose himself on Duhalde from Presidency. Kirchner is the representation of the State bureaucrats who are not neoliberals, such as Lavagna. Duhalde is the representation of the social layer that the Lavagnas express, the petty factory and workshop owners in the outskirts of the large cities, mediated through a heavy and hard-fisted scheme of local bosses. There will, of necessity, be secondary contradictions between both wings of Duhaldism, which most probably will render the country out of control. Stratfor is insightful here: [...] Duhalde expects to continue playing a powerful role behind the scenes in Kirchner's government, which likely would lead quickly to political disagreements between the two men. Such tensions could weaken the Argentine government -- which would confront a fragmented Congress in any event. If Kirchner wins the May runoff, Argentina's core economic policies under Duhalde would not undergo significant change. With Lavagna still at the helm of the Economy Ministry, Buenos Aires likely would continue to work with the International Monetary Fund, but progress in restructuring the country's external debt and domestic banking system would plod forward slowly. Me: This is the largest difference with Rodr?guez Sa?, and with Peronism at large. Per?n would NOT have worked with the IMF while Argentinean children die from hunger (physicians in Tucum?n were horrified when they discovered that there were cases of Kwashiorkor in food-plenty Argentina!). The problem lies in that until the Argentinean foreign debt is not denounced as the swindle it is, no reasonable (that is, people-feeding, not more than that) policy can be launched. This will be Kirchner?s main problem in the House of Government. Lavagna has "stabilized" the situation, but now he must show good results FOR THE PEOPLE. This he will most probably fail to achieve. Stratfor: Menem's economic and security proposals are bolder than Kirchner's and openly pro-market. In effect, Menem represents the most reformist wing of the Peronist Party on economic and trade policy issues. Me: Please translate "bolder" as "criminal": Menem proposes to bring the Armed Forces to protect "security" on the streets. His economic proposals are straightforward subjection to the US (this is what should be understood by "pro-market", since no Peronist is against the market. "Reformist wing" should be read as "Quisling") Stratfor: For instance, he has proposed adopting the U.S. dollar as Argentina's national currency, securing a free trade agreement with the United States as quickly as possible and rebuilding close political linkages between the two countries that largely were dissolved under Duhalde. In practical terms, this means that Argentina under Menem would align itself with Washington on every major foreign policy issue of concern to the United States. Me: Stratfor seems to believe that this has meant nothing to Argentinean voters, and explains away Menem?s low popularity by the battered drum of "corruption" (see following paragraph). This is a serious mistake. Argentineans would have accepted corruption if Menem?s policies had been of national defense and not of subjection to imperialism. Stratfor: Menem's closest political allies realize their candidate is at a disadvantage in terms of popularity: He is perceived as having presided over two successive corrupt governments that stole and wasted billions of dollars. However, they are gambling that many voters -- especially in the middle class, which was nearly destroyed by the country's economic collapse in the past several years -- may be persuaded to set aside their personal dislike for Menem and buy into his optimistic vision that Argentina will recapture its lost prosperity if voters elect him president a third time. Me: Survivors of the Titanic, clinging to a straw while their limbs freeze painfully. December 19 / 20 put an end to all that. From bar at idirect.com Fri May 2 09:37:18 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 11:37:18 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: New ME Order--order bodybags, order coffins, order more ammo Message-ID: <017c01c310c1$a1621c80$2a099ad8@computer> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mick Collins" To: "John Steppling" ; "Yana Collins" ; "Gilles Troude" ; "Alexis Troude" ; "Bogdan Manojlovic" ; "Anton Jarvis" ; "Louis Dalmas" ; "Lou Olker" ; "Antoine Colonna" ; "Danise Delgado" ; "Kathi Montgomery" ; "Bob Locke" ; "John O'Connell" ; "joseph goodrich" ; "Alan Mandell" ; "Christopher Black" ; "Paul Davidson" ; "Rana Bose" ; "Jon Volkmer" Sent: Friday, May 02, 2003 4:56 AM Subject: New ME Order--order bodybags, order coffins, order more ammo Is this what Kerry was talking about when he praised the Commander and Chump for his handling of the war in Iraq? Shades of the Ariel & The Intifadas! This is exactly what the junta had in mind as the New ME Order. Mick ______________________________________________ Two Killed In New Iraq Demo Shooting >From Chris Hughes London Daily Mirror Thursday 1 May 2003 Al-Tallulah -- It started when a young boy hurled a sandal at a US jeep - it ended with two Iraqis dead and 16 seriously injured. I watched in horror as American troops opened fire on a crowd of 1,000 unarmed people here yesterday. Many, including children, were cut down by a 20-second burst of automatic gunfire during a demonstration against the killing of 13 protesters at the Al-Kaahd school on Monday. They had been whipped into a frenzy by religious leaders. The crowd were facing down a military compound of tanks and machine-gun posts. The youngster had apparently lobbed his shoe at the jeep - with a M2 heavy machine gun post on the back - as it drove past in a convoy of other vehicles. A soldier operating the weapon suddenly ducked, raised it on its pivot then pressed his thumb on the trigger. Mirror photographer Julian Andrews and I were standing about six feet from the vehicle when the first shots rang out, without warning. We dived for cover under the compound wall as troops within the crowd opened fire. The convoy accelerated away from the scene. Iraqis in the line of fire dived for cover, hugging the dust to escape being hit. We could hear the bullets screaming over our heads. Explosions of sand erupted from the ground - if the rounds failed to hit a demonstrator first. Seconds later the shooting stopped and the screaming and wailing began. One of the dead, a young man, lay face up, half his head missing, first black blood, then red spilling into the dirt. His friends screamed at us in anger, then looked at the grim sight in disbelief. A boy of 11 lay shouting in agony before being carted off in a car to a hospital already jam-packed with Iraqis hurt in Monday's incident. Cars pulled up like taxis to take the dead and injured to hospital, as if they had been waiting for this to happen. A man dressed like a sheik took off his headcloth to wave and direct traffic around the injured. The sickening scenes of death and pain were the culmination of a day of tension in Al-Fallujah sparked by Monday's killings. The baying crowd had marched 500 yards from the school to a local Ba'ath party HQ. We joined them, asking questions and taking pictures, as Apache helicopters circled above. The crowd waved their fists at the gunships angrily and shouted: "Go home America, go home America." We rounded a corner and saw edgy-looking soldiers lined up along the street in between a dozen armoured vehicles. All of them had automatic weapons pointing in the firing position. As the crowd - 10 deep and about 100 yards long - marched towards the US positions, chanting "Allah is great, go home Americans", the troops reversed into the compound. On the roof of the two-storey fortress, ringed by a seven-foot high brick wall, razor wire and with several tanks inside, around 20 soldiers ran to the edge and took up positions. A machine gun post at one of the corners swivelled round, taking aim at the crowd which pulled to a halt. We heard no warning to disperse and saw no guns or knives among the Iraqis whose religious and tribal leaders kept shouting through loud hailers to remain peaceful. In the baking heat and with the deafening noise of helicopters the tension reached breaking point. Julian and I ran towards the compound to get away from the crowd as dozens of troops started taking aim at them, others peering at them through binoculars. Tribal leaders struggled to contain the mob which was reaching a frenzy. A dozen ran through the cordon of elders, several hurling what appeared to be rocks at troops. Some of the stones just reached the compound walls. Many threw sandals - a popular Iraqi insult. A convoy of Bradley military jeeps passed by, the Iraqis hurling insults at them, slapping the sides of the vehicles with their sandals, tribal leaders begging them to retreat. The main body of demonstrators jeered the passing US troops pointing their thumbs down to mock them. Then came the gunfire - and the death and the agony. After the shootings the American soldiers looked at the appalling scene through their binoculars and set up new positions, still training their guns at us. An angry mob battered an Arab TV crew van, pulling out recording equipment and hurling it at the compound. Those left standing - now apparently insane with anger - ran at the fortress battering its walls with their fists. Many had tears pouring down their faces. Still no shots from the Iraqis and still no sign of the man with the AK47 who the US later claimed had let off a shot at the convoy. I counted at least four or five soldiers with binoculars staring at the crowd for weapons but we saw no guns amongst the injured or dropped on the ground. A local told us the crowd would turn on foreigners so we left and went to the hospital. There, half an hour later, another chanting mob was carrying an open coffin of one of the dead, chanting "Islam, Islam, Islam, death to the Americans". We left when we were spat at by a wailing woman dressed in black robes. US troops had been accused of a bloody massacre over the killings of the 13 Iraqis outside the school on Monday. Three of the dead were said to be boys under 11. At least 75 locals were injured in a 30-minute gun battle after soldiers claimed they were shot at by protesters. Demonstrators claimed they were trying to reclaim the school from the Americans who had occupied it as a military HQ. The crowd had defied a night-time curfew to carry out the protest. From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 2 10:28:07 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 12:28:07 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Inflation Targeting Message-ID: <3EB29C97.80101@mindspring.com> Lucas formed what came to be called a theory of "rational expectations". In essence, the "rational expectations" theory shows how expectations about the future influence the economic decisions made by individuals, households and companies. Using complex mathematical models, Lucas showed statistically that the average individual would anticipate - and thus could easily undermine - the impact of a government's economic policy. Rational expectation theory was embraced by the Reagan White House during its first term, but the doctrine worked against the Reagan voodoo economic plan instead of with it. It is interesting to note that Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" can actually be a validation of the Lucas' "rational expectation". One can rationally expect to benefit from irrational expectation and hope to exit before the burst of the bubble. Thus rational expectation can actually prolong, if not produce, irrational exuberance. Now Pimco, the nations largest bond fund, having recently prononced a negative view on GE bonds, is rooting for inflation targeting. In an earlier post : Fed vs White House, I drew the lists' attention to Fed economist Thomas Laubach who is a recognized inflation targeter, part of the Princton gang that includes Taylor of the Taylor Rule, Bernanke, the money printer of late. (Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience by Ben S. Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic S. Mishkin, Adam S. Posen). This is all part of the Taylor rule movement that we discussed a long while back on PKT (John B. Taylor. Currently on leave from Stanford University, serving as Under Secretary for International Affairs) There is another issue pushing for inflation targeting. The NY Times reports on May 1, 2003: Peter R. Fisher, the Treasury's under secretary for domestic finance, (who put together the LTCM rescue) suggested a new approach that would more closely match the dates each company's employees would retire with the maturities of the assets in that company's pension portfolio. "Making pensions more secure requires a more precise measurement of pension liabilities," he said. A drastic weakening of the pension system, which is forcing many companies to make big contributions, was also outlined in testimony before a Congressional panel yesterday. While there is general agreement among various groups that some steps need to be taken, the business community has advocated change of a different sort in recent months. Apparently to ease the transition for businesses, Mr. Fisher suggested keeping the current rules in place for two more years. But the business community responded with hostility. "It's unacceptable," said Mark J. Ugoretz, president of the Erisa Industry Committee, a Washington advocacy group that represents large companies that sponsor traditional pension plans. Even with the two-year lag, he said the proposal would be akin to a bank announcing all 30-year mortgages would have to be paid off in 5 years. At issue in these discussions is the discount rate that companies use to measure the value, in today's dollars, of their future obligations to retirees. This discount rate is supposed to reflect the rate at which a pension fund's assets can be expected to grow before its beneficiaries retire. In general, companies prefer to use a higher discount rate because it supposes that their pension assets will grow quickly, making their obligations look smaller. Since 1987, companies have used a discount rate tied to the 30-year Treasury bond. But that rate has been challenged since November 2001, when the government stopped issuing the 30-year bond. As 30-year bonds have grown scarcer, their price has gone up, which in turn has driven their yield down. This chain of events has caused the discount rate to magnify the size of corporate pension obligations ? artificially, some business groups say. To get their pension numbers back under control, business groups like the Erisa Industry Committee have been urging Congress to adopt an increase in the discount rate. A bill recently introduced in the House would do that, changing from the 30-year Treasury rate to a rate based on high-quality corporate bonds. The business organizations responded to yesterday's testimony by reiterating their support for the House bill, which is sponsored by Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, and Benjamin L. Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. Mr. Fisher agreed in part with the business community's assessment, telling the select revenue measures subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee that using a corporate bond rate "could improve the accuracy of measuring pension liabilities. But instead of using a single discount rate, as companies now do, he wants each company to use a blend of corporate bond rates of various durations, which would be matched to the maturity of each company's workers. In addition, Mr. Fisher said he questioned the validity of the "smoothing" techniques now used to reduce the volatility in calculations. He said this smoothing appeared to blur the condition of pension funds to an unacceptable degree. He said that for some companies, these changes would create new funding obligations, and said that he favored some form of "transition relief" in addition to the two-year extension of the current rules." Corporate profit now comes not only from waged reduction and layoffs, but from shrinking from pension obligations and liabilities. The pension problem worldwide is a real time bomb. PIMCO Fed Focus Paul McCulley | May 2003 I Have Become An Inflation Targeter In my twenty years in this business, I have never favored the Fed adopting an explicit inflation target. I do now, as discussed last week in an essay co-authored with Goldman?s Bill Dudley, and published in the Financial Times.1 As Bill and I wrote: ?The Fed should commit to keeping its federal funds rate at or below the current 1? per cent until core inflation climbs back to, say, 2? percent or higher on a year-on-year basis. The current reading of about 1 per cent (on Mr. Greenspan?s preferred measure, the core PCE deflator) is right in the middle of the 1-2 percent range that Ben Bernanke, Fed governor, recently suggested as the working definition of price stability.? What made me change my mind, after a career of just saying no to explicit inflation targeting? The simple answer is the Fed?s secular war against inflation, commenced by Paul Volcker in 1979, has been won. We are now living in the promised land of price stability, and this neighborhood requires that the Fed build some anti-deflation credibility. An explicit inflation target, higher than the prevailing inflation rate, would be a very useful means towards that end. The Fed Needs Both Anti-Inflation & Anti-Deflation Credibility Me and Inflation Targeting During the Fed?s anti-inflation campaign, I never favored an explicit inflation target, because I knew that if one were to be established, it would be set below the prevailing inflation rate. I thought that configuration would have been inconsistent with the Fed?s strategy of ?opportunistic disflation,? in which it didn?t induce recessions to lower inflation, but welcomed them for their disinflationary dividends?kind of like losing 10 pounds opportunistically when hit with food poisoning. To my way of thinking, setting an explicit inflation target below the prevailing inflation would have implied a commitment to hit the target on some definable horizon, not just ?opportunistically.? Consequently, while the war against inflation was being fought, and in the context of the Fed?s legislated dual objectives of fostering price stability and full employment, I thought that an inflation target could/would cause more harm than good: it would beg questions about timing that could not be ?opportunistically? answered, and would also imply that the goal of price stability dominated the goal of full employment. Thus, I thought that it would be wrong for the Fed to adopt an explicit inflation targeting regime. Don?t commit unless you are willing to deliver! Anti-inflation credibility must be earned through deeds. And the Fed earned it during the 1980s and 1990s: opportunistically ?taking? recessions when fate begot them, welcoming their disinflationary dividends, and then ?locking in? those dividends via preemptive tightening in ensuing recoveries. The Fed delivered, and it did it Greenspan?s way, without an explicit inflation target, avoiding the negative externalities that are presently bedeviling the inflation-targeting European Central Bank. I was especially critical of explicit inflation targeting as victory neared in the war against inflation, because success in that campaign was fostering bubbles in equity valuation, business investment and corporate leverage (irrational exuberance running on infectious greed, if you will). A bursting of those bubbles, just as the war against inflation was concluding, would open deflationary risk, I feared, and an explicit inflation target could/would be a straitjacket preventing aggressive, purposeful Fed reflation. The Bernanke Put: The Wind Beneath Corporate Bond Wings Enter Ben Bernanke Thus, I was a naysayer in 1999 when Fed Governor Ben Bernanke ? then Professor Bernanke of Princeton University, and one of the world?s leading academic advocates of explicit inflation targeting ? presented a widely-touted paper (co-written with Mark Gertler of New York University) at the Fed?s celebrated Jackson Hole confab.2 Ben argued that an explicit (but flexible!) inflation-targeting regime was not only the right approach for the Fed in controlling inflation, but also that such a regime would obviate any need/reason to address directly the potential for asset bubbles: do nothing explicitly about them, he preached, because an inflation-targeting regime would automatically lead the Fed to lean against both the inflationary wind of inflating bubbles and the disinflationary whirlwind of deflating bubbles. I thought this ?let them be? approach to bubbles was particularly dangerous, turbo-charging my resistance to the notion of the Fed adopting an explicit inflation target. I believed then, and believe to this day, that bubbles and their bursting reflect not just human nature, which is given to fits of both irrational exuberance and irrational gloom, but also to policy mistakes. Ironically, however, I did agree with Professor Bernanke back in 1999 that the Fed should not explicitly hike its main macroeconomic policy tool, the Fed funds rate, in an explicit attempt to prick the self-feeding bubbles of equity valuation, business investment and corporate leverage. I advocated that the Fed use its regulatory tools, notably its power to limit/prohibit buying stocks on margin. So, there was indeed a common thread in Bernanke?s view and mine: don?t use a macro tool to address a micro problem. A wise bartender doesn?t raise prices for the whole saloon to discipline a few rowdy drunks; he cuts them off! As it turned out, of course, there were more than a few rambunctious souls intoxicated with New Age Economy hooch, mindlessly investing with mind-boggling leverage. While all that investing was going on, it was stimulating aggregate demand relative to aggregate supply, notably of labor, pushing down the unemployment rate ? to and through the Fed?s presumption as to the NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). So, the Fed tightened in 1999 and early 2000; the tightening was not, however, explicitly aimed at bursting the bubbles. Rather, it was consistent with what Professor Bernanke had advocated in August 99 at Jackson Hole: target inflation, and tighten if aggregate demand pushes unemployment below NAIRU (driving the ?output gap? negative, in Taylor Rule formulation), without regard to whether a bubble is, or is not, propelling the ?excess? aggregate demand. Excess Demand Morphs Into Excess Supply In the fullness of time, it did matter what was propelling ?excess? aggregate demand, which was generating the ?excess? demand for labor that had the Fed wrapped ?round the inflation-risk axle. An investment boom is a source of aggregate demand while it is unfolding, but becomes a source of aggregate supply when it busts. In the end, an investment bubble is a deflationary shock, even though it appears, through a ?conventional? Phillips Curve lens, to be the opposite while it is bubbling. To Mr. Greenspan?s credit, indeed to the whole FOMC?s credit, the Fed recognized that the bursting investment bubble was a deflationary shock, and turned on a dime in late 2000 from a bias to tighten to a bias to ease, and then eased massively in 2001. It was the right thing to do. Whether or not the FOMC would have hesitated within an explicit inflation-targeting regime, we will never know. I suspect not, but I?m glad that the FOMC never even had to consider where the actual inflation rate was relative to some ?billboard? inflation target. The Fed?s anti-inflation credibility was golden; it was time to start building some anti-deflation credibility! Massive easing in 2001 spoke very loudly in this regard. But not loudly enough in 2002, as the full scope of the deflationary shock became visible, spooking both banks and the corporate bond market into freezing credit access to companies in the lower rungs of the investment grade universe. The Fed?s anti-deflation credibility was being called into question, and the Fed responded, in both deed and word: a 50-basis point cut in the Fed funds rate to a stunningly low 1%, and a full-blown rhetorical campaign as to the availability of ?unconventional? weapons to attack the deflationary beast ? and the Fed?s willingness to use them! In a wonderful twist of fate, it was Ben Bernanke, newly confirmed as a Fed governor, who fired the rhetorical cannon heard ?round the world ? his November 21 speech, ?Deflation: Making Sure ?It? Doesn?t Happen Here?.3 The speech followed on the heels of the Fed?s November 6 easing action, and Chairman Greenspan?s testimony before Congress on November 13 that the Fed had made the move in the context of wider ?risk spreads on both investment-grade and non-investment-grade securities.? Governor Bernanke?s ?It? speech was the coup de gr?ce: ??the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.? If a central banker wants to establish/re-establish anti-deflation credibility, bragging about his printing press is a very nice place to start! It was a masterful speech, and gave birth to what I dubbed the Bernanke Put:4 ?If lowering yields on longer-dated Treasury securities proved insufficient to restart spending, however, the Fed might next consider attempting to influence directly the yields on privately issued securities. Unlike some central banks, and barring changes to current law, the Fed is relatively restricted in its ability to buy private securities directly. However, the Fed does have broad powers to lend to the private sector indirectly via banks, through the discount window. Therefore a second policy option, complementary to operating in the markets for Treasury and agency debt, would be for the Fed to offer fixed-term loans to banks at low or zero interest, with a wide range of private assets (including, among others, corporate bonds, commercial paper, bank loans, and mortgages) deemed eligible as collateral. For example, the Fed might make 90-day or 180-day zero-interest loans to banks, taking corporate commercial paper of the same maturity as collateral. Pursued aggressively, such a program could significantly reduce liquidity and term premiums on the assets used as collateral. Reductions in these premiums would lower the cost of capital both to banks and the nonbank private sector, over and above the beneficial effect already conferred by lower interest rates on government securities. It was a delicious moment: Ben, who had pounded the table against targeting asset prices at Jackson Hole in August 1999, preaching the doctrine of inflation-targeting as both necessary and sufficient to lean the right way against both bubbles and bursting bubbles, openly embraced targeting private sector debt prices, if necessary, to arrest deflationary pressures. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, Emerson told us a long time ago, and Ben Bernanke has got a big brain. If/when the Fed?s problem is a lack of anti-deflation credibility, threatening/promising to use the printing press to ?influence directly the yields on privately issued securities? is the right thing to do. Indeed, if the threat/promise is ?credible,? then the Fed never has to ever actually use the printing press for that purpose! Bottom Line So far, the Bernanke Put has worked: it was a clarion call to buy corporate bonds, which haven?t looked back since, as shown in Figure 2 (not that Ben deserves all the credit!). The Fed?s anti-deflation credibility is now in a bull market. The Fed would be wise to solidify and strengthen that anti-deflation credibility by ? you guessed it! ? adopting an explicit inflation target that is higher than today?s inflation rate. In our Financial Times essay, Bill Dudley and I suggested ?2% or higher? for the core PCE deflator, up from the current 1?% annual running rate. (Letting the cat out of the bag, Bill wrote ?2%?; I wrote ?or higher.?) I don?t look for the Fed to adopt an explicit inflation target anytime soon, even though I believe firmly that the FOMC stealthily plans to ?let? the inflation rate rise to 2% or higher, before it considers tightening policy. My hope is that Chairman Greenspan uses his last few years to come ?round to Governor Bernanke?s advocacy of quantifying just what ?price stability? means, leaving behind a Fed rich in both anti-inflation and anti-deflation credibility. If so, I?ll be pounding the table for putting Mr. Greenspan?s name on the building! Paul A. McCulley Managing Director April 29, 2003 mcculley at pimco.com 1 http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFTFullStoryFT&cid=1048313970428&p=1012571727088 2 http://www.kc.frb.org/PUBLICAT/SYMPOS/1994/4q99bern.pdf 3 http://www.federalreserve.gov./boarddocs/speeches/2003/20021121default.htm 4 "Necking In The Mezzanine", December 2002. http://www.pimco.com/ca/bonds_commentary_fed_focus_1202.htm From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 2 11:14:44 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 13:14:44 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Illegal Income Tax Message-ID: <3EB2A784.8040603@mindspring.com> My Jewish friend told me abouth the notion of hutspah (spelling?) which describe tha gall of a defending found guilty of murdering his parents pleading mercy on the ground os his orphan status. Now, companies like Enron, WorldCom, which have been found guilty of inflating earnings by fraudulent accounting, is demanding a tax refund from the IRS, a demmand that indirectly puts the IRS in a position of beiing an unwitting partner in crime, notwithstanding the fact that much of the offshore deals were tax avoidance schemes. Now, Al Capone was convicted on tax evasion, after the prosecution failed to charge him with other crimes. He went to jail for not paying taxes on income from criminal activities which the government was unable to prove he received or even commmitted the alleged crimes. Capone hired the wrong lawyers. If he had hire a Wall Street firm, he could have argued that since the government forfeited all his assets, he could not have been guilty of tax evasion since he then would owe no tax. The IRS taxes gambling wins, but does not allow deduction from gamling losses. There is also the issue of self incrimination. Since Capone did not want the feds to know he was committing crimes, would paying taxes violate his 5th Amendment right of self incrimination. What goes around, comes around. Henry C.K. Liu From soncu at pacbell.net Fri May 2 12:43:13 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 11:43:13 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Turkey: Political Economy of an Earthquake Message-ID: As many of you might have heard, an earthquake hit the city of Bingol in Eastern Turkey about two days ago. The death tool is 118 and rising. Below are two articles from NTVMSNBC on the aftermath of the earthquake. For your information, Bingol is a mostly Kurdish city, whose mayor is from the Kurdish dominated party DEHAP, whereas the Governor is appointed by Ankara. Other reports indicate a "non-cooperative" game between the two, among other things. Sabri ************ http://ntvmsnbc.com/news/213716.asp Upheaval in Bingol Demonstrators in Bingol, earthquake-hit town of Eastern Turkey, criticize the lack of government aid at the diseaster site. May 2- After 34 hours of the deadly earthquake, emergency relief materials from Kizilay (Red Crescent) has yet to meet the needy victims. Citing delays in emergency aid, furious crowds rushed to the Governer?s Office, demanding the resignation of the government, threw stones at the police baricade. Policemen fired at air in response with automatic guns. No wounded recorded as yet. One police panzer sped straight into the crowd, causing further anger. Minor clashes in the streets are being kept under control as several demonstrators are arrested. Bingol police chief has been removed from duty, in his stead, Diyarbakir police chief resumes duty today. ********** http://ntvmsnbc.com/news/213737.asp Bingol police chief suspended after riot The demonstration was fuelled by anger by Bingol residents who felt the state had not done enough to ease the suffering of quake survivors. May 2? The chief of police in the earthquake ravaged eastern Turkish city of Bing?l has been suspended after local police fired shots over the heads of protestors demanding a stepping up of relief efforts. Osman Nuri ?zdemir, the head of Bingol?s police force, was removed from office mid-Friday after demonstrations outside a mosque and the office of the Bingol governor got out of hand and then was broken up by armed forces. Police officers fired bursts of gunfire over the heads of the crowd for up to two minutes, after having stones thrown at them by demonstrators. Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdo?an confirmed that Ozdemir had been suspended at a news conference early Friday afternoon. Erdoan blamed the protests and resulting violence on a small group of provocateurs and called on the people of Bingol to remain patient. "According to intelligence reports, there were serious activities directed at provocation," the Prime Minister said. "I call on the people of Bingol to be more calm and sensitive." From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 3 08:14:52 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 10:14:52 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Bush's Left Right-Hand Men Message-ID: <3EB3CEDC.8080909@mindspring.com> Copyright 2001 The National Journal, Inc. The National Journal May 5, 2001 HEADLINE: Bush's Left Right-Hand Men BYLINE: Julie Kosterlitz HIGHLIGHT: George W. Bush never cared much for the ferment of the 1960s and '70s, but he has surrounded himself with former radicals and Lefties from that era who are now the truest-blue conservatives. BODY: Black Panther patron. Communist Party member. McGovern organizer. Lifelong Democrat. Scion of a prominent liberal family. Those aren't the sort of entries one expects to find on the resumes of advisers and appointees to a conservative Administration. But each describes a facet of the lives of the team members assembled to help craft and carry out President Bush's governing philosophy. "Compassionate conservatism" just wouldn't be the same without them. Indeed, it might not exist at all. Marvin Olasky, 50, the one-time Communist and now Bush adviser, is an evangelical Christian scholar who largely conceived the idea and yywho all but coined the term. But Olasky is joined by at least five other top Bush lieutenants who have marched across the political battlefields from Left to Right: * David Horowitz, 62, is the former 1960s editor of the New Left journal, Ramparts, and one-time acolyte of Black Panther leader Huey Newton. Horowitz counseled candidate Bush on campaign strategy and garnered a glowing cover blurb, for his recent political playbook, from top Bush aide Karl Rove. * Larry Lindsey, 46, Bush's top economic adviser and the chief architect of the Administration's mega-tax-cut plan, was a campus organizer for anti-war presidential candidate George McGovern. * John DiIulio, 42, the maverick Princeton University don whom Bush chose to lead the controversial White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives-remembers his grandmother lighting a daily candle in memory of "Mr. Roosevelt," and says he'll leave this world the way he entered it-as a Democrat. * White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 40, was steeped in the liberal politics of his family of "dedicated, principled Democrats." * David Frum, 40, Bush's economic speechwriter, is the son of one of Canada's most famous broadcast journalists, and grew up imbibing the "trendy," liberal views of his parents. This isn't the first time in the nation's recent history that a flotilla of leftward-listing intellectuals has Righted itself. It was the midcentury journey of the New York Intellectuals-Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, et al.-from Trotskyite communism to liberal anti-communism, and finally, to conservatism, that gave rise to the term "neoconservative." (Originally a derisive epithet, it was later adopted by the principals themselves as a brand of distinction.) Nor is this the first time in recent history that a conservative Administration has offered safe harbor to one-time Lefties. The intellectual heirs of Kristol and Podhoretz permeated the Reagan Administration's foreign policy apparatus: Cold Warriors such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and a few Culture Warriors, such as William J. Bennett, Reagan's Education Secretary and later drug czar for the first Bush Administration. The refugees from the New Left who have turned up on George W. Bush's doorstep aren't officially neoconservatives. That earlier group "was as much a club as an ideology," says Abrams, now chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. "Everybody knew each other. There is a network. It still exists, and (these newcomers) are not a part of it." Besides, Abrams notes, with the end of the Cold War, the neoconservatives themselves have all but abandoned the term in favor of plain old "conservatism." "Neoconservatism happened at particular time and place; it lived, and it died. It's like saying, 'I'm an abolitionist,' or 'I'm a Whig.' It doesn't have meaning, because the historical situation is different." The new crop of converts is also, for the most part, younger than the original neoconservatives. Most of the younger group came of political age during the waxing-or, in some cases, the waning-of the anti-war movement, the New Left, and the counterculture. And, unlike the Reagan Administration's Cold Warriors, they have, by and large, pursued careers in domestic, rather than foreign, policy. Yet some interesting echoes of the earlier movement reverberate in this later one. In many instances, foreign policy and national security concerns provided the impetus for the political conversion of the Bush aides. And like the original neoconservatives, they tend to show a flare for the intellectual and the iconoclastic. So, call them "neo-compassionates," or "neo-neo-cons." Whatever the label, these political pilgrims are clearly having a critical impact on the conservatism of the new Bush Administration-not in spite of their lefty histories, but because of them. They are helping to construct a new, more inclusive addition to the House of Reagan and Gingrich. But are they adding a new floor, or just a new facade? Horowitz and the Panthers How did these neo-neo-cons get from their lefty points of departure-whether Moscow or McGovern-to Bush's front door? The short answer is, they turned right during the mid-to- late 1970s. For the older members of this crowd, Horowitz and Olasky, the disenchantment with the doctrinaire politics they had embraced as youths came swiftly and brutally. Horowitz inherited the radicalism of his parents, 1930s Communists of the card-carrying, cell member variety. In 1959, he went to the University of California (Berkeley) as a graduate student in search of a political utopia. Later, after several years in England, studying, writing, and absorbing a genteel socialism, he returned in 1968 to a Berkeley that was becoming the mecca and breeding ground for a proliferation of more- strident and suddenly fashionable radical movements. At Ramparts, the glossy muckraking monthly that published groundbreaking exposes on CIA outrages and other scandals of the Vietnam War era, Horowitz helped chronicle and promote various causes of the emerging New Left-including the Black Panthers. Horowitz would later say that he was increasingly unnerved by the violent, anarchic turn taken by a younger generation of Lefties. But, unlike most refugees from the Left, he can pinpoint the single event that triggered a cascading series of disillusionments. It was the 1975 death of the magazine's bookkeeper, whom Horowitz had recommended for the job and who, he and other reporters later came to believe, was murdered by the Panthers after she began turning up irregularities in their finances. Shocked and remorseful, Horowitz says the event shattered his rose-colored vision of the world and his romance with radicalism. He began re-examining the basic assumptions of his worldview-and finding nothing but contradictions, smugness, and hypocrisy. At the same time, his personal life was in turmoil and his marriage was unraveling. So profound was his disillusionment and disorientation that he retreated from politics altogether for nearly a decade, before announcing his support for the re- election of Ronald Reagan in 1984-when he became an instant pariah in his former social circle. But once the pain of conversion subsided, the role of pariah turned out to be one that Horowitz relished. He became a professional provocateur and polemicist in the service of a new cause: conservatism. Over time, he has created a network of organizations and publications-often with generous support from private foundations-and put out a series of books to spread his message: The Left is not merely misguided but dangerous, and conservatives must take its members seriously and fight them mercilessly. A Higher Whisper Like Horowitz, Marvin Olasky is an all-or-nothing kind of guy. Raised Jewish, he became an atheist at 14. As a Yale undergraduate, he didn't merely protest various injustices, he engaged in a five-day hunger strike on behalf of striking campus cafeteria workers. After college, Olasky spurned a job offer at The Boston Globe and biked cross-country to Oregon-drawn by the brooding beauty described in a Ken Kesey novel. He then took a reporting job at the rural Bend Bulletin in central Oregon and, as he would later write, "I would proceed to educate the residents of Deschutes County on the way things ought to be." Unlike Horowitz, Olasky preferred his socialism unadorned-without the fringed leather and all the other counterculture trappings-so he joined the passe Communist Party in the early 1970s. "Instead of listening to the Grateful Dead, we listened to Paul Robeson," he recalls. He even hopped a Soviet freighter across the Pacific to make a pilgrimage to the socialist motherland and ride the rails. Olasky, too, can date the unraveling of his worldview to a specific time and place: on a November day in 1973 as he began graduate school in film studies at the University of Michigan. "I was reading Lenin's famous essay, 'Socialism and Religion,' in which he wrote, 'We must combat religion-this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism,' " Olasky explains in a treatise on his Web site, olasky.com. "At that point, God changed my worldview, not through thunder or a whirlwind, but by means of a small whisper that became a repeated, resounding question in my brain: 'What if Lenin is wrong? What if there is a God?' " For both Horowitz and Olasky, revelation was followed by profound soul-searching and progressive disillusionment with their past lives and beliefs. And, for both men, political upheaval was intertwined with personal upheaval: Disillusion followed hard on the heels of the dissolution of their first marriages. And, for Olasky and Horowitz, the shedding of one extreme seemed only to invite another. By 1976, Olasky, the Jewish-boy-turned-atheist-adolescent, had become an evangelical Christian and a devout conservative. And, as it had for Horowitz, the Left that Olasky left behind began to figure in his thinking and writing as the cause of America's political and social ills. In 1992, he wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion, which argued essentially that an impersonal and indiscriminate welfare state of the 20th century had supplanted the more intimate and value-laden charity of the late 19th century-to the detriment of the poor. The book drew the attention of leading conservatives, including William J. Bennett, future House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Karl Rove, who added it to the syllabus of candidate- in-the-making George W. Bush. Lindsey's Way For those who came later, the conversions were less dramatic but no less real. Having journeyed less far to the left, they did not have as far back to travel, once their philosophical bags were packed. Larry Lindsey didn't have to work too hard to shed the fairly apolitical Republicanism of his Westchester County, N.Y., upbringing for the idealism of the civil rights and anti-war movements at Bowdoin College in Maine. His politics, then, as now, he says, followed a common inclination. "Abuse of power really bothers me," Lindsey said in an interview. "One couldn't help but look at Bull Connor"-the rabid police commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who turned fire hoses and unleashed dogs on civil rights demonstrators-"and not see abuse of power. And probably the same was true of how the United States was conducting the war as well. It was easy to perceive Richard Nixon as abusing power... That's probably why" he moved to the left, he says. At Bowdoin, Lindsey participated in marches-"peaceful," he is careful to add. And, after his first-choice candidate, Maine's Sen. Edmund Muskie, dropped out of the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries, he became a campus organizer for then- Sen. George McGovern, polling and cajoling the residents of his dorm to support the South Dakotan. But Lindsey's views began shifting as the decade progressed-not in an epiphany, but with the accumulation of nagging events. There was the time the local restaurateur in Bath, Maine, tried to use the cumbersome state licensing system to keep Lindsey and a friend from opening a competing hotdog stand (they persisted and stayed in business). There were his studies in economics, "which said you should make a decision based on a cost-benefit analysis ... that there's a rational way to make a public choice and not just, 'I feel this way,' which is kind of what politics is based on," he said. What proved perhaps most unforgettable and, eventually, unforgivable, for Lindsey-as it would for other younger neo-neo- cons-was the specter of human misery offered by the "boat people," who fled South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. "You could still maintain that the United States was well intended, but that we shouldn't have (been fighting the war)," Lindsey said. "But any illusions you had about the niceness of the people on the other side certainly had to disappear, for anyone who was paying attention." Lindsey remained a reflexive Democrat for a little longer-even contributing money to Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign. But by 1980, he was voting for maverick-Republican- turned-independent John Anderson-"kind of an in-between," Lindsey says-before being won over decisively by Ronald Reagan. In 1981, as an all-but-dissertation Ph.D. candidate in economics fresh out of Harvard, Lindsey headed to Washington to join the staff of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. But he fretted over it. "I hadn't voted for him, and I was a little bit nervous about the whole thing... I'd never met a conservative-a real conservative," he said. "I had such a funny view of them that turned out to be false." He remembers that he began to see the high marginal tax rates of the day as government abuse of power. And he remembers how, at one dinner, even as a liberal economist dismissed Lindsey's argument that lower tax rates needn't reduce government revenues (since taxpayers would have less incentive to cheat), the economist's wife was telling him about all the creative schemes they used to avoid paying such high taxes. "I began to be exposed to conservative thinking for the first time, and so, having been shown quite clearly that the Left was: a) wrong, and b) somewhat hypocritical, I haven't looked back since." Philadelphia Freedom Born to a Catholic working-class family of FDR Democrats in urban Philadelphia, John DiIulio says that it was the Democratic Party that left him, rather than the other way around. From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, "the Democratic Party went off on this hiccupping jag, and made pretend it was the Young Socialists' convention. And it got away from the spoken word and the lived philosophies of the Franklin Roosevelts, and the Hubert Humphreys, and the Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jacksons-and the Bobby Kennedys, for that matter." He blames the party's shift on the changes in the presidential nominating rules after the 1968 convention, which he says "radically disempowered traditional leaders and radically empowered amateur Democrats, if you will, who were driven purely by ideology-ideology often bereft of any real understanding or real experience in the low-income communities which they claimed to represent." Son of a sheriff's deputy and a department store clerk, DiIulio entered the realm of the intellectual elite by a fluke: A recruiter from the prestigious Haverford School, in search of new football fodder, thought DiIulio could be trained in the ways of the gridiron. His football career did not last more than a year, but Haverford led him to the equally prestigious University of Pennsylvania, and ultimately to graduate study in political science at Harvard. There he sought out eminent neoconservative social scientist James Q. Wilson, whose writings on police practices DiIulio admired. Wilson, famous for his insistence on rigorously empirical social science and a belief in the importance of morality in the discussion of public policy, became DiIulio's mentor. Armed with a Ph.D. by age 27 and a full professorship at Princeton by age 32, DiIulio has made a reputation for being an intellectual brawler as much as a scholar. His hard-line positions on crime-and-punishment issues, and his pithy, if provocative, turns of phrase (as when he wrote about young "superpredators") drew the attention and plaudits of conservatives, including Bennett, with whom DiIulio co-authored a book in 1996. But he is also an inveterate iconoclast (opposing the 1996 welfare reform bill as too draconian, for example), and his willingness to change some of his positions (on the wisdom of tough mandatory sentences for drug offenders, for example) has earned him a reputation as a fearless empiricist in some circles, and as a political opportunist in others. In the late 1990s, he became impressed with the work that he saw religious groups performing on the front lines of urban war zones, and with statistics showing a correlation between religious observance and positive social behaviors. He turned his academic attention to investigating the possibilities of religion as a force for social good. And in 1996, he renewed a commitment to Catholicism in his personal life. Though DiIulio's law-and-order positions and his frank embrace of religion are at odds with the prevailing currents in the Democratic Party, he remains committed. "For me, it's just a story of constancy," he said. "Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a very simple philosophy-that government ought to help average men, women, and children lead peaceful and productive, if not uniformly prosperous, lives." The party of FDR, embodied perhaps most recently by Hubert Humphrey, was for equality of opportunity, not equality of results, DiIulio says. Such Democrats "were not opposed to a free-market system. They did not believe society was responsible for every individual's problem. They believed in both individual and collective responsibility." He calls himself a "New Democrat," but he says he does not mind being called a compassionate conservative either, in part because he believes strongly in the view Bush put forth in one of his earliest campaign speeches: "While government cannot be replaced by charities, it should welcome them as partners, not view them as rivals." 970s Malaise By the time the tail end of the baby boom reached college, political conversions were part of a broader political realignment in America. For David Frum and Ari Fleischer, who entered college just a few years after Lindsey left, shedding liberalism was a quicker and less complicated affair. Their liberalism, after all, was a matter of family and upbringing, rather than something found, like Lindsey's, in the first blossoming of independence. Frum's mother, Barbara, one of Canada's most popular broadcast journalists before her death in 1992, and his father, a wealthy developer, were "politically liberal and quite (trendy) in their views," during his childhood, Frum said. Ari Fleischer remembers the anti-Nixon fervor of his liberal parents-a father in the textile industry and a mother who would go on to work for IBM-in the affluent New York City suburb of Pound Ridge. The political state of affairs in 1978 and 1979 made the college experience for incoming freshmen, such as Frum and Fleischer, vastly different from what it had been even for those newly graduated, such as Lindsey. "There was inflation, unemployment, disaster abroad ... family breakdown was very important. When I was in college, it was like the Angel of Death was passing through the corridors, as one student after another, their parents' marriages would split up as soon as the kids were gone," said Frum, who started at Yale in 1978. "If you were of an impressionable age ... there was a sense that everything was going wrong. Everything that people took for granted was producing disastrous results. We needed something new." Unlike intellectuals of the 1950s, who "had to think their way through a lot of prejudices in order to reach conservatism," Frum said, "in the 1970s, all you had to do was keep your eyes open. It was hard to miss." For Frum, as for Lindsey, the image of the Vietnamese boat people was indelible: Frum calls it the "first and most important" element in his disillusionment. Whereas Lindsey had experienced the national and personal misgivings over America's role in Vietnam firsthand, however, Frum remembers mainly the sorry denouement. Of his youth in Canada, he says, "I have no memory of the war, until it was lost, and then I was angry." Most of his parents' friends, he says, had been against the war, "often in quite extreme ways." But Frum, who spent the summer of his freshman year in college volunteering with a group to try to find sponsors for would-be Canadian immigrants among the Vietnamese refugees, said he "was never willing after that experience to be convinced that there was anything moral" about the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. For Fleischer, ensconced at Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont, political awakening was spurred by his new awareness of current events. Soviet domination of Eastern Europe had special resonance for him, because he had relatives in Hungary, whom he had visited as a child. "It wasn't very complicated... I just thought that the Soviet Union was wrong and that freedom was right. The people in Hungary weren't free, and I blamed the Soviet Union. People were blaming America, and I thought, we shouldn't be blaming America ... we should blame the Soviets." The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 not only reinforced Fleischer's views, it inspired him to register for the draft and even to write a letter to The New York Times (never published) saying "how proud I was to be able to register." He remembers the pall cast over the 1980 Olympics by the Soviet invasion, the U.S. decision to boycott the Summer Games in the USSR, and then the thrilling upset victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Soviet team at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. "I was 19, and I remember people chanting 'USA! USA!' That felt so good. That felt so right. It was really an explosion of patriotism." Then there was Ronald Reagan's upbeat candidacy, putting the lie to Carter's lament over national malaise. "Ronald Reagan's view was that we weren't in malaise," according to Fleischer, "but we were a fantastically optimistic country. We just needed a leader to express it." After college, Fleischer embarked on a career as a spokesman for a series of increasingly prominent Republican political candidates. They included the senior Bush, in 1992, as well as members of Congress-culminating with then-Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, when he was House Ways and Means Committee chairman. Fleischer was spokesman for the short-lived presidential campaign of Elizabeth Dole last year, when he caught the eye of Karen P. Hughes, then-candidate George W. Bush's praetorian communications director. After Fleischer had resigned and Dole had dropped out of the race, Fleischer joined Bush's campaign. The rest is history-in-the-making. Bush's Brain Trust At first blush, there is a certain irony to the alliance between George W. Bush and these former Lefties. Bush, after all, is a baby boomer (born on July 6, 1946) who, in the standard retelling, rather famously sat out the defining political and cultural movements of his generation in the 1960s and 1970s. But, in fact, Bush didn't so much "sit out" those two decades as react against them. "Clinton was identified by the Right with all the excesses of the '60s. Now he's being followed by another baby boom President, whose intellectual moment was rebellion against the '60s," says Marshall Wittmann, of the conservative Hudson Institute. As The Washington Post's Hanna Rosin put it in a profile during the 2000 campaign, Bush actually defines "himself and much of his agenda as the Republican presidential nominee by what he saw then and didn't much like." She wrote that Bush, and campaign strategist Karl Rove-now senior adviser to the President-began a dialogue stretching over the seven years leading up to the campaign that "systematically refined those resentments into a political philosophy." If so, Bush's affinity for the new neoconservatives may have a lot to do with vindication. These intellectuals can confirm and articulate the wisdom of the instincts that Bush felt some 30 years ago, and frame them in light of their own disillusionment. But Olasky says that Bush may also personally identify with these prodigal sons of the 1960s and 1970s. "All of us have 'holes in our souls,' " Olasky says, paraphrasing a saying of a Christian anti-drug program for teens that he admires. "People fill those holes with different things. Some used alcohol and drugs, while other people, like myself, filled that hole with leftist ideology... I was drunk on Marxism." Bush "went through a personal change, a sharp break," with his past, just as Olasky himself had. "He was, by his own admission, drinking too heavily at times. And he changed," Olasky says. "He understands-this may be a bit of a stretch-the way people can become inebriated (with an idea)." Either way, Bush has had a tendency to soft-pedal his critiques of the 1960s. Unlike earlier conservatives, who have used the excesses of the '60s as a wedge to divide people, Bush uses his critique as a "healing device," to reach out to a generation who only grew up when they began having children of their own, says Wittmann, who himself turned away from the left- wing and labor politics of his earlier years. "Bush's explicit message to boomers: 'It's all right to be faithful. You can forget the crazy things you did. I did some, too.' " "Compassionate conservatism," likewise, is a phrase and philosophy that emphasizes fusion, not fission: Taking classic conservative themes-less government, more self-reliance, and strong social norms-and linking them with some of the passions and the language of the '60s and '70s, such as combating poverty and championing civil rights. Instead of demonizing government, Bush emphasizes that there is a federal role for helping the poor. He promotes religious charity, not as an alternative to government, but as a partner. He makes overt gestures to the black community-which did not give much support to his election-in part through a promise to funnel money through black churches to inner cities. And he has made a social issue-education-his calling card. Bush is, in short, doing his utmost to recast the Republican Party as the party of caring. To this end, he is benefiting from the views, skills, and experience of the neo-neo- cons. In effect, they serve as cultural interpreters in his bid to end America's internal, societal Cold War peacefully, civilly- but still decisively for Republicans. Horowitz, for example, has made reshaping the Republican Party practically his raison d'etre in recent years-and he brings to it the crusading zeal and guerrilla tactics he once used in service of the Left. "We are in the midst of a huge political transition," he says, summarizing the message he gives Republican candidates in his political handbooks and lectures. "The parties really have the wrong names and identifying labels. The conservative party-the party who has been trying to conserve for 20 years the welfare state and the whole apparatus-is the Democratic Party; (and) Democrats are becoming the party for the wealthy. The Republican Party is the party of innovations in every area, the one that fought for and got welfare reform, that fought for and got deregulation and restructuring of the economy, the one with the innovative ideas in education." Rove and Bush met a few times with Horowitz as they prepared for the presidential race. And other GOP leaders consult with him, too. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, arranged to have Horowitz's book, The Art of Political War, sent to Republican candidates in the 2000 election, and DeLay features Horowitz's political advice column on one of his Web sites. "It doesn't matter what Republicans call their strategy to (win over independent voters)-'compassionate conservatism,' or something else," Horowitz writes in his latest pamphlet. "For Republicans to win, it is necessary to compete with Democrats on the caring issues." Although Horowitz is interested in capturing the "caring" label for the GOP, other neo-neo-cons say they are more interested in making policy that synthesizes the best of their old liberal ideals and their newer conservative views. Even a free-marketeer such as Lindsey, while on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, worked to promote the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to make loans to credit-worthy low-income people in poor neighborhoods-a law that other conservatives and libertarians, such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, R-Texas, have sought to limit. It is, Lindsey says, a corollary to his antipathy to abuses of power: "a need to be more enlightened about things." DiIulio, who had a grandmother who relied on federal relief during the Great Depression, family members educated by the G.I. Bill, and his own federally subsidized student loans as a college student, has never doubted a role for government. And today, he preaches the social philosophy of some Catholic thinkers known as "subsidiarity." He says: "It is always best, both in prudential-practical-terms, as well as in moral terms, to deliver such help and such hope as you can up close and personal"-from family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members. "Make the local call first," he advises, "but if the local call is not answered, don't be afraid to make a long- distance call. If there is a problem or set of problems that cannot be effectively addressed at the individual, personal, spiritual, common-community level, there is no shame-and in fact there is obligation-to seek help from larger entities, and broader communities," including the federal government. Subsidiarity, as embodied in Bush's "compassionate conservatism," transcends party labels, DiIulio says. "Pointing fingers isn't important... What matters is 'How do we get there from here?' and 'How do we get there together?' " This conciliatory tone also comes naturally to Bush spokesman Fleischer. "You know, Bush talks about changing the tone" of politics in Washington, he says. "It's easy for me. I think that one of my secret weapons in this business is that I grew up in such a Democratic family, and I have such respect for my family. We're so close that it teaches me not to take this business personally. It's not a personal business. These are good people who have different ideas." Lefties Respond So what do liberals, or left-leaning intellectuals, make of their departed brethren and the "compassionate conservatism" they are bringing to the nation? The question itself is fraught with squabbling over political labels: Scarcely anyone wanting a serious hearing in the marketplace of ideas claims to be a liberal or a leftist these days. But even a small sampling of views from somewhat left-of-center thinkers reveals a few common reactions. The neo-neo-cons, in some ways, are battling chimeras from the 1960s of their own invention, say their critics. Stephanie Coontz is a history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and was prominent in the anti-war movement as a graduate student at the University of Washington (Seattle). She said that some of the 1960s activists were genuinely excessive. They later turned that excessiveness into intense self-criticism during their transformational phase, and then finally turned that criticism against their ideological beginnings. "The vast majority of us were involved in peaceful, legal protest, had a strong work ethic, and never got the news coverage of those who committed excesses," she said. "Most of us grew without abandoning our values. Those who were most extreme and naive about how social change occurs discovered what most of us have been telling them: 'Life is more complicated.' " The Left is no longer allergic to the idea of value- driven or faith-based programs to tackle poverty and social problems-but still believes the underlying hurdles are mainly economic. "As someone who works with families, I am extremely open to experimenting with many different ways of helping people at the community, personal, and economic level," says Coontz, sounding something like DiIulio. Coontz has written several books on the evolution of families in the United States. "But you can't make bricks without straw. If there are not jobs to go to," she says, or no way to get to them, and no one to watch the kids, "you can preach to (the poor) as much as you like, but they will eventually get demoralized," she said. Moreover, the large-scale effects of national economic policies pushed by conservatives, argue those on the left, are bound to swamp any good that comes from the small-scale efforts that exemplify "compassionate conservatism." "It's right to point to some of the pathologies (of welfare p rograms), but wrong to think they can be replaced with a combination of an unfettered market economy and local charity," said Theda Skocpol, a professor of political science and sociology at Harvard University. "(Conservatives) have given us a society of increasing inequality ... that most of them seem blind to," she added. Or, put another way, compassionate conservatism is "all hat and no cattle," said writer Michael Lind, recycling the popular saying of his native Texas. "There's no money. There will be lectures on single motherhood and keeping your virginity until marriage, but at the end of day, there will still be working poor, people working 40 hours a week, with incomes below the poverty line. It's a fraud. It's half of a program. What's missing is the economic half. "The Republicans use these emigres (from the Left) to teach them how to speak this language, using words like 'empowerment'-a left-wing word, which Jack Kemp then steals-or 'community,' " Lind said. "But when you read the fine print, they're cutting the money." Indeed, Lind, who once edited The Public Interest, the house organ of the original neoconservative movement, and was an acolyte of its co-founder, Irving Kristol, says he split with the neoconservatives over what he considers their abandonment of economic justice. "The price that successful neo-cons paid was to give up their economic views, at least in public. They were welcome when they were denouncing single parenthood, or racial preferences, but they couldn't speak about the declining value of the minimum wage, or the shrinking of health insurance as benefits are cut back by business." If they had, "then they would have been cut out." Now, at the ripe old age of 39, Lind says he finds himself at home on neither the right nor the left. As a senior fellow at the heterodox New America Foundation, which seeks to promote "policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum," he hopes to give thinkers of his generation a place to seek the truth, unconstrained by the dictates of either ideology. His fledgling effort is a challenge, he says, adding with understatement: "The intellectual world tends to be very polarized." David Horowitz Age: 62 Past life: Son of Communist Party members, editor of New Left monthly Ramparts, patron and adviser to Black Panther leader Huey Newton Right turn: 1975, when Black Panthers may have killed an associate Current life: President, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, umbrella group for a variety of conservative causes, best-selling author, Republican political strategist, agent provocateur In his own words: "My agenda is to change the culture of the Republican Party-they have to be much more aggressive, and identify with the cause of the underdog ... the Republican Party has liberated millions of people (from welfare), given them a chance to get jobs and have power over their own lives." Marvin Olasky Age: 51 Past life: Atheist, campus activist at Yale University. Joined Communist Party USA Right turn: 1973, as a graduate student, when he renounced atheism Current life: Senior fellow Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, evangelical Christian scholar, author, and journalism professor In his own words: "All of us have 'holes in our souls'. ... People fill those holes with different things. Some used alcohol and drugs, while other people, like myself, filled that hole with leftist ideology... I was drunk on Marxism." John DiIulio Age: 42 Past life: From a family of FDR Democrats Right turn: None, he says: The Democratic Party turned left after 1968 Current life: Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, previously Princeton University professor, criminologist, author In his own words: "The Democratic Party went off on this hiccupping jag, and made pretend it was the Young Socialists' convention. And it got away from the spoken word and the lived philosophies of the Franklin Roosevelts and the Hubert Humphreys, and the Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jacksons-and the Bobby Kennedys, for that matter." Lawrence B. Lindsey Age: 46 Past life: Campus organizer for Democrat George McGovern's 1972 presidential bid Right turn: Mid-to-late 1970s, struck by plight of South Vietnamese boat people, his experience as a small businessman, and his study of economics Current life: Director of the National Economic Council, top economic adviser to President Bush In his own words: "It's easy for us to forget that the crowd that thought America was wrong ... were dominating the Left, the Democrats' point of view. I think I came around to my father's reasoning that America really was the last best hope of mankind, which was also Ronald Reagan's saying." David Frum Age: 40 Past life: Son of prominent liberal parents from Canada: developer Murray Frum and the late Barbara Frum, a popular broadcast journalist Right turn: Late 1970s, at Yale University, witnessing plight of South Vietnamese boat people, stagflation, and impact of divorce on the families of classmates Current life: White House speechwriter, conservative commentator In his own words: "We've done two big experiments: One with liberal ideas in the '60s and '70s, and one with conservative ideas in the '80s and '90s. And Tide beat Brand X." Ari Fleischer Age: 40 Past life: Raised in family of politically active Democrats Right turn: Late 1970s, at Middlebury College, with a growing awareness of Communist repression abroad Current life: White House spokesman In his own words: "I thought the whole notion of a nuclear freeze was dangerous... The Soviets had missiles in Europe. I felt that we should respond. You look weak if you don't. My party was saying, 'If we respond, we'll engage in a dangerous arms race.' And I remember thinking, 'So your answer is just to let the Soviets do it?' And I thought, 'No, the Soviets need to know, if they do it, we'll do it. End of subject.'" From bar at idirect.com Sat May 3 10:46:11 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Sat, 3 May 2003 12:46:11 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Diana Johnstone About Cuba Message-ID: <009701c31194$34c40740$7a0e9ad8@computer> Diana Johnstone: About Cuba home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Liberation Four Years After: Iraqis Should Look to Serbia to Find Out What "Freedom" Will Be Like; Unfolding Nightmare: Inside the Humanitarian Disaster in Post-War Iraq; Good News, Bad News: Countering the Flood of Propaganda; You Want Victory?: Return to Vieques; Iraq's War Message to Latin America: You Could be Next. 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Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 Recent Stories April 30, 2003 Ashley Smith Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History of Washington's Occupations Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 4/30 Gary Leupp Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre Robert Jensen Fighting Alienation in the USA Wayne Madsen The Four Horsemen of Propaganda Ahmad Faruqui Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East Gabriel Kolko Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition Adolfo Perez Esquivel A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush: "You Talk of Freedom; You Detest Freedom" April 29, 2003 Gary Leupp Disorder and Opportunity: the Results of the Iraq War Uri Avnery Don't Envy Abu-Mazen Anthony Gancarski Brush with the Law Mickey Z. POWs: Then and Now CounterPunch Wire How to Spin Israel on the Hill: Internal Lobbying Documents Robert Fisk Did the US Murder Journalists? 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Gould Iraq After the War Steve Perry War Web Log 4/17 Hot Stories Elaine Cassel Civil Liberties Watch Michel Guerrin Embedded Photographer Says: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians" Uzma Aslam Khan The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go Paul de Rooij Arrogant Propaganda Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories. Subscribe Online Search CounterPunch May Day Edition May 1, 2003 What About Guantanamo? About Cuba By DIANA JOHNSTONE The so-called "Casey Letter" protesting repression in Cuba has received numerous signatures and aroused considerable controversy. I would like to explain here, with line by line comments, why I would not sign this letter. (Full text of the letter at the end of my commentary.) "We are women and men of the democratic left, united by our commitment to human rights, democratic government and social justice, in our own nations and around the world. In solidarity with the people of Cuba, ..." This is the sort of beginning that inevitably tempts me to say, "So what?" It smacks of pious self-congratulations. If the trials in Cuba are unjust, one doesn't need to display "politically correct" credentials to criticize them. But perhaps all that is left to an ever more ineffectual "left" is to claim the right to define who is "left" and who is not. "...we condemn the Cuban state's current repression of independent thinkers and writers, human rights activists and democrats." Again, what allows these Americans to define who is "independent" and who is a "democrat"? In the Cuban context, this may be somewhat ambiguous. But again, if the trials are truly unjust, it doesn't matter whether the thinkers are "independent democrats" or not. Procedure is procedure. "For 'crimes' such as the authorship of essays critical of the government and meeting with delegations of foreign political leaders, some 80 non-violent political dissidents have been arrested, summarily tried in a closed court, without adequate notice or counsel, convicted, and given cruel, harsh sentences of decades of imprisonment." Summarily trying anybody in a closed court without adequate notice or counsel, etc., is bad practice, period. But I don't see how it is possible to know so much about what went on since the court was closed. Was it all simply about innocent meetings with delegations of foreign political leaders? Not with CIA agents perhaps? As for "non-violent", I have written another note on that, pointing out that the United States, with its vast wealth and power, is able to use all methods, those of the powerful and those of the weak, including "non-violence" (U.S. agents taught "non-violence" to the well-subsidized "Otpor" movement in Serbia to get rid of Milosevic... which did not preclude using violent groups as well). Considering the Bush administration's campaign of "regime change" (by no means "non-violent", as illustrated in Iraq), one may assume that the Cuban authorities have reason to worry about subversion in their country, possibly in preparation for invasion. One may also worry that Cuban authorities may be rattled and make serious mistakes. And it is perfectly reasonable to point out that principles of justice should be respected even in dire circumstances. "These are violations of the most elementary norms of due process of law, reminiscent of the Moscow trials of the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin." Why this particular analogy? Do people today really know so much about the Moscow trials that this comparison is enlightening? History is full of violations of due process of law, and although the professional human rights defenders seem not to notice, a current example is going on right now in The Hague. And right in Cuba, there is Guantanamo, but the Cubans have no say in what goes on there... "The democratic left worldwide has opposed the US embargo on Cuba as counterproductive, more harmful to the interests of the Cuban people than helpful to political democratization." Now wait a minute! "Counterproductive"? But that depends on the purpose. Did the "democratic left" enact the sanctions for its own (as declared above) noble purposes? In that case, perhaps one could call them "counterproductive". Or were the sanctions enacted by a U.S. government whose purpose, on the contrary, was to please and eventually return to power the same largely corrupt "business class" that has moved to Miami where it exerts disproportionate influence as a political lobby? In that case, the sanctions have not been altogether "counterproductive", because they have caused considerable hardships to the Cuban population, hardships which can be blamed on the "regime". Such sanctions (as has been shown already in Serbia or Iraq) cause rising disaffection and a desire to do whatever is required in order to become a "normal" country. The "counterproductive" argument is one that assumes that the purposes (of sanctions, in this case) are laudable, but misguided. It is hard to understand the nature of a "democratic left" which entertains such an illusion. "The Cuban state's current repression of political dissidents amounts to collaboration with the most reactionary elements of the US administration in their efforts to maintain sanctions and to institute even more punitive measures against Cuba." Well, excuse me, but one could say that this precise protest at this precise time "amounts to collaboration with the most reactionary elements of the US administration"... in their efforts "to institute more punitive measures against Cuba." Why not instead express concern that the Cuban repression (never mind of whom...) risks being "counterproductive" by giving the Bush administration a fresh pretext to engineer "regime change"? Such an argument would render more convincing the claim that the signatories are "in solidarity with the Cuban people"... "The only conclusion that we can draw from this brute repression is that Cuban government does not trust the Cuban people to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from disinformation." Is this really the ONLY conclusion? A little more effort of the imagination is called for here... "A government of the left must have the support of the people: it must guarantee human rights and champion the widest possible democracy, including the right to dissent, as well as promote social justice. By its actions, the Cuban state declares that it is not a government of the left, despite its claims of social progress in education and health care, but just one more dictatorship, concerned with maintaining its monopoly of power above all else." It is understandable that a "democratic left", terminally remote from any exercise of power, or even influence in its own society, can take upon itself the privilege of excommunicating from such a "democratic left" a besieged attempt at social revolution such as the one in Cuba. If "left" means total powerlessness, any government at all fails to qualify. But we might ask: if it is "just one more dictatorship", why has the United States government made such an exceptional effort for over forty years to destroy it? Because it fails to achieve the standards of the "democratic left"? Permit me to doubt that. And if the social progress in education and health care are mere "claims", what of all the dictatorships which fail to make such "claims" and are never subjected to sanctions? Fidel Castro has committed the terrible impurity of managing to keep a left government in power for forty-four years. To be pure, he should have kept to the standards of the "democratic left"... following the example of the democratically elected Guatemalan reformist Jacobo Arbenz, forced to resign after three years in office by a U.S.-backed putsch, or Salvador Allende, murdered by a U.S.-backed putsch. The "democratic left" was unable to save those leaders, but it still has the self-confidence to condemn the survivor for displaying such tenacity. Surrender, Castro! Then perhaps you may gain the approval of the "democratic left". Diana Johnstone is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe's Role in America's World and FOOLS' CRUSADE Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at: DianaJohnstone at compuserve.com Today's Features Ashley Smith Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History of Washington's Occupations Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 4/30 Gary Leupp Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre Robert Jensen Fighting Alienation in the USA Wayne Madsen The Four Horsemen of Propaganda Ahmad Faruqui Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East Gabriel Kolko Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition Adolfo Perez Esquivel A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush: "You Talk of Freedom; You Detest Freedom" Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 52850 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: cpheader6.gif Type: image/gif Size: 10566 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: globalizesolidarity.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 6747 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Sat May 3 11:17:02 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 14:17:02 -0300 Subject: [A-List] En Chile, los "socialistas" son menemistas Message-ID: <3EB3CF5E.19198.667CA5@localhost> Una declaraci?n del CEDECH. COMIT? DE DEFENSA DEL PATRIMONIO Y CULTURA NACIONAL . Bases Fundamentales para la Defensa del Patrimonio y la Cultura Nacionales "Tenemos que servir a los valores en los que realmente creemos, aunque solo lo podamos hacer en un ?mbito peque??simo". Hermann Hesse. 1. Toda Instituci?n P?blica ha sido creada con una concepci?n humanista y con un esp?ritu solidario. Su prop?sito ha sido responder a determinadas necesidades de los habitantes de nuestro pa?s, para mejorar sus condiciones de vida, especialmente para quienes tienen menos recursos econ?micos. Su prop?sito esencial es servir. A pesar de ello, en la actualidad, la mayor parte se autofinancian y aportan sus utilidades al Estado. Es falso que todo lo p?blico es ineficiente y que todo lo privado es eficiente. 2. Las Instituciones P?blicas son el producto del conocimiento y el esfuerzo de muchas generaciones de ciudadanos, que desde hace m?s de un siglo, las han gestado y mantenido. Todos, de una u otra manera, hemos contribuido a su desarrollo y nos pertenecen a todos. 3. Desde hace 29 a?os, en nuestro pa?s, el n?mero de instituciones y empresas del Estado ha disminuido, se han vendido o han desaparecido. Eran cerca de 600 , en la actualidad son alrededor de 81 . No se les han dado medios para invertir, ni siquiera para reinvertir sus propias utilidades. No se les ha permitido extender sus actividades o sus servicios. 4. Todos los funcionarios de las Empresas e Instituciones del Estado y del Gobierno son servidores p?blicos. Deben estar muy bien capacitados, con amplio conocimiento en el rubro de la entidad correspondiente. Las funciones deben ser realizadas con probidad. Esto implica el empleo eficaz e id?neo de los recursos y un recto ejercicio de su autoridad. No deben vender las empresas p?blicas sin la autorizaci?n de sus propietarios. Tienen el deber de informar completamente de las remuneraciones, gesti?n y administraci?n de la instituci?n p?blica que les corresponde. Todo ello sobre la base del privilegio del bien com?n. 5. El Estado cuenta con un sector de empresas rentables que no son excesivas y no constituyen carga para el erario fiscal. La producci?n en nuestro pa?s es generada en el 80 % por el sector privado y s?lo el 20 % por el sector p?blico. Chile es uno de los pa?ses que tiene un Estado m?s peque?o. 6. La incidencia e influencia del sector p?blico en los pa?ses desarrollados es fundamental. Se les protege y perfecciona. Se protege y se promueven las actividades art?sticas y cient?ficas en forma descentralizada, en todo el territorio de cada pa?s. El Estado se reserva numerosas empresas para desarrollar una pol?tica social o por ser vitales, monop?licas y estrat?gicas para su progreso. Ello es causa y efecto del mayor desarrollo y mejores condiciones de vida. 7. No es posible la venta o privatizaci?n de Instituciones como la Universidad de Chile, Banco del Estado, Institutos T?cnicos , Liceos, Escuelas, Entidades que proporcionan los Servicios de Salud, Empresa Nacional de Miner?a, CODELCO, ENAP, C?rceles, Empresas de Abastecimiento de Zonas Aisladas, Empresas Portuarias, Televisi?n Nacional, Diario La Naci?n, el Metro, Ferrocarriles, Correos, Empresas de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado, Parques Nacionales... Todas ellas son parte de la Cultura y el Patrimonio Nacional. 8. Es necesario proteger el Medio Ambiente, la Naturaleza, nuestros r?os, el mar , la tierra, el aire, la fauna, el bosque nativo... Con una visi?n de futuro. Debemos proteger y promover el arte y el trabajo de nuestros artistas, investigadores, cient?ficos... Por ejemplo, no se protege nuestro arte ni nuestra identidad cuando se privilegia, en los medios de comunicaci?n, lo extranjero. Debe suprimirse el IVA al libro... 9. No solamente al vender o privatizar se da?a el patrimonio nacional. Tambi?n se afecta al disminuir sus inversiones, su importancia y sus actividades. Otro procedimiento es favorecer el desarrollo de iniciativas privadas paralelas que compiten con el Estado en condiciones m?s favorables que las empresas p?blicas. Es el caso del Cobre, de acuerdo a datos de Cochilco, en 1990 la producci?n estatal de este metal era el 84,3 % del total y la privada el 15,7 %. En el a?o 2.000, habiendo aumentado en t?rminos absolutos, la producci?n estatal cambia al 30 % del total y 70 % la privada. A pesar de ello CODELCO aporta al Estado mucho m?s que las empresas privadas del Cobre. 10. En Chile cada vez m?s se concentra el poder econ?mico y monop?lico. En tal magnitud que en muchas ocasiones se independiza o influye sobre las pol?ticas de gobierno. En ocasiones tienen m?s poder que las estructuras del Estado. Ejemplos: Cinco cadenas de Farmacias controlan el 85 % del mercado de F?rmacos. Las Empresas del Agua Potable privatizadas (europeas) controlan el 83 % de todos los usuarios de Chile. Dos empresas de generaci?n el?ctricas, el 80% del mercado. Cuatro Holding de Salud Privada controlan el 75 % . Cinco A.F.P. m?s del 90 % de los Fondos de Pensiones. Similar situaci?n se produce con los Supermercados, Seguros, Tel?fonos, Empresas de Auditor?as, Mercado Lechero, Empresas Forestales, de Celulosas y Papel, los Medios de Comunicaci?n, etc. 11. Manteniendo el Estado el control mayoritario de sus empresas, y por tanto su influencia en las decisiones determinantes, existe la posibilidad de incorporar capitales privados a trav?s de otros procedimientos. Debe ser una iniciativa fundamental del Estado y sus Gobiernos apoyar y promover a las Micro, Peque?as y Medianas Empresas Privadas, tanto rurales como urbanas, MIPYME, que proporcionan mas del 80 % de los puestos de trabajo de Chile. En la actualidad los chilenos gastan cerca del 60% de su ingreso en bienes importados. Debe ser una pol?tica permanente del Estado, sus gobiernos y de todos los ciudadanos proteger y promover la industria y los productos chilenos tanto de la ciudad como del campo. 12. Debe ser iniciativa fundamental del Estado apoyar y promover una Cultura Solidaria, la Investigaci?n, la Ciencia y las Artes de nuestra naci?n. No solo en Santiago, tambi?n debe realizarse a lo largo de todo el pa?s, considerando la diversidad de las etnias y de todos sus habitantes. Asimismo, los gobiernos deben promover la participaci?n ciudadana en la formulaci?n de las pol?ticas p?blicas, su ejecuci?n y fiscalizaci?n. 13. El prop?sito de este Comit? Nacional es defender nuestras instituciones p?blicas, nuestras riquezas naturales y todas las expresiones de la cultura, de manera democr?tica , respetuosa y tolerante. Defenderlas con la participaci?n activa de los ciudadanos. Un ejemplo lo constituye el Plebiscito o Consulta Ciudadana sobre el intento de privatizar el Agua Potable, realizado en la Regi?n del B?o- B?o donde participaron 136.783 personas. Creemos que con ello se interpretar? el sentir de las grandes mayor?as del pa?s, que se informan una vez consumadas las ventas y privatizaciones y que carecen de toda participaci?n en estas decisiones. TODOS LOS CIUDADANOS SOMOS DUE?OS DE LA RIQUEZA NATURAL Y DE LAS INSTITUCIONES QUE CONSTITUYEN EL PATRIMONIO Y CULTURA NACIONALES. TODOS LOS CIUDADANOS DEBEN DECIDIR QUE SE HACE CON SU PROPIEDAD. NO SE TRATA SOLO DE UN DESARROLLO ECONOMICO SINO ESENCIALMENTE DE UN DESARROLLO HUMANO COMITE DE DEFENSA DEL PATRIMONIO Y CULTURA NACIONALES ? Enrique Accorsi Opazo Presidente Asociaci?n M?dica Mundial ? Jos? Aldunate Lyon S.J. Profesor de Moral ? Rub?n Andino Maldonado Periodista ? Eduardo Aquevedo Soto Pdte. Asociaci?n Latinoamericana de Sociolog?a ? Fernando Arizt?a Ruiz Obispo ? Neftal? Aravena Bravo Obispo Iglesia Metodista ? Andr?s Aylwin Az?car Abogado ? Jos? Balmes Parramon Premio Nacional de Arte ? Gracia Barrios Rivadeneira Pintora ? Roser Bru Llop Pintora ? Patricio Bunster Brice?o Core?grafo ? Carlos Camus Larenas Obispo de Linares ? Mar?a C?nepa Pesce Premio Nacional de Arte ? Juan Pablo C?rdenas Director Radio Universidad de Chile ? Fernando Castillo Velasco Premio Nacional de Arquitectura ? Jaime Castillo Velasco Abogado ? Pedro Castillo Y?nez Profesor Universitario ? Silvio Caiozzi Garc?a Director de Cine ? HildaCid Araneda Premio Municipal de Ciencia, Concepci?n ? Ciudadanos por Valpara?so Premio Nacional de Conservaci?n Monumentos Nacionales ? Francisco Coloane C?rdenas Premio Nacional de Literatura Q. E. P. D ? Edgardo Condeza Vaccaro Profesor Universitario ? Ren? Cort?zar Sagarminaga Premio Nacional de Ciencias ? Jacques Chonchol Chait Profesor Em?rito Universidad de la Sorbonne, Paris ? Ariel Dorfman Escritor ? Humberto Duvauchelle Concha Actor ? Mar?a Elena Duvauchelle Concha Actriz ? Antonio Elizalde Hevia Rector Universidad Bolivariana ? Orietta Esc?mez Carrasco Actriz ? Hugo Fazio Rigazzi Economista ? Emilio Filippi Muratto Periodista ? Hernol Flores Dirigente Sindical. ? Jaime Godoy Jorquera Rector Universidad de Antofagasta ? Alejandro Goic Karmelic Obispo de Osorno ? Mario G?mez Ram?rez Periodista ? Mario G?mez L?pez ? Sergio Gonz?lez Espinoza Secretario General del Colegio de Arquitectos ? Tom?s Gonz?lez Morales Obispo de Punta Arenas ? Victor Gubbins Browne Premio Nacional de Arquitectura ? Isa?as Gutierrez Vallejos Obispo (E) Metodista, Presidente A. Latina/Caribe ? Alejandro Hales Jamarne Abogado. Q.E.P.D. ? Carmen Hertz Cadiz Abogado ? Jorge Hourton Poisson Obispo Auxiliar de Temuco ? Ram?n Huidobro Dom?nguez Abogado ? Inti Illimani Grupo Musical. ? Jorge Kaplan Meyer M?dico ? Ricardo Larra?n Pinedo Director de Cine ? Beatriz Levi Premio Nacional de Geolog?a ? Miguel Littin Cucumides Director de Cine ? Pablo Lorenzini Buzzo Diputado ? Humberto Maturana Romecin Premio Nacional de Ciencias ? Manfred Max Neff Premio N?bel Alternativo ? Carlos Merino Pinochet Rector Universidad Arturo Prat de Iquique ? Sara Nieto Mosto Bailarina ? Juan Pablo Orrego Silva Premio Nobel Alternativo ? Jorge Pavez Presidente Nacional del Colegio de Profesores ? Benito Rodr?guez PHD en Qu?mica ? Ervaldo Rodr?guez Theodor General (R ) de Ej?rcito ? Gonzalo Rojas Pizarro Premio Nacional de Literatura ? Igor Saavedra Premio Nacional de Ciencias ? Nelson Saavedra Guzm?n Profesor Em?rito Universidad de Concepci?n ? Danilo Salcedo Vodnizza Soci?logo ? Jos? Manuel Santos Ascarza Arzobispo Em?rito de la Sant?sima Concepci?n ? Jacobo Schatan Weitzman Economista ? Ram?n Silva Ulloa Abogado ? Miguel Angel Solar Silva M?dico ? Yolanda Soto Gonz?lez Presidenta Regional MEMCH (V Regi?n) ? Roberto Vega Fern?ndez Pdte. ASEXMA Regi?n del Bio Bio ? Carlos Villaroel Machuca Dirigente Nacional del Colegio M?dico ? Luis Vitale Historiador ? Hern?n Vodanovic Schnacke Abogado ? Eduardo Yentzen Director Peri?dico El Utopista Pragm?tico ? Juan Luis Ysern Obispo de Ancud Si a usted le interpreta este documento, atentamente, le pedimos su colaboraci?n para difundirlo. Si desea suscribirlo puede comunicarse con cualquiera de las personas arriba mencionadas o con: Dr.Edgardo Condeza Vaccaro Presidente 41-913664 Tele/Fax 41-913663 econdeza at entelchile.net O?Higgins 1210. Concepci?n. Chile. COMIT? DE DEFENSA DEL PATRIMONIO Y LA CULTURA NACIONAL ?Vivir es Participar? Antoine de Saint-Exupery ------- End of forwarded message ------- N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat May 3 15:19:03 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 14:19:03 -0700 Subject: [A-List] George Galloway (The UK MP) and Sadam Hussain - The truth! Message-ID: <002501c311bb$3466ba50$20fa5718@comintern> George Galloway (The UK MP) and Sadam Hussain - The truth! George Galloway enjoyed three-in-a-bed orgies with devil worshipping pimp from the Special Republican Guard Documents unearthed in Baghdad brothel prove depths of MP's carnal depravity by Lester Haines Rogue MP George Galloway is set for further disgrace today, as we can exclusively reveal that the bum-chum of former Iraqi dicatator Saddam Hussein enjoyed special "favours" from the Iraqi regime in return for selling out his country to that murderous tyrant. Indeed, papers have come into our possession which show beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only did "Baghdad George" receive more than 86 BILLION DOLLARS from his Iraqi paymasters, but that a laughing Galloway EXECUTED Kurdish women and children in a Basra torture room, KICKED old ladies into the road during "fact-finding" tours of Tikrit and ENJOYED nights of depraved lust with Uday Hussein during which the two men PLEASURED each other and members of the Special Republican Guard while drinking the blood of Iranian virgins supplied by the North Korean secret police. Readers may find these allegations incredible, shocking even, but we are prepared to put our journalistic careers on the line to defend our assertion that the dossier of filth we have assembled is nothing less than the whole, fantastic truth about George Galloway and his international network of money-laundering paedophiles. As Galloway tonight cowers in his luxury 100-bedroom Portuguese mansion, financed and built by Libyan "contractors" on the payroll of Colonel Gaddaffi's feared "Ministry of Public Works", he continues to protest his innocence. Indeed, we at The Rockall Times this morning received notice from Galloway's lawyers that publication of any material regarding their client's so-called "charitable activities" would be actionable. Well, Mr Galloway, while you're sitting by your solid-gold pool this morning tucking into champagne and caviar at the tax payers' expense while naked Yemeni serving girls pleasure themselves for your amusement, let's see if this improves your appetite: From: Saddam Hussein Baghdad Dear George, Please find enclosed the cheque for $100 million as promised for your "Iraqi leukaemia kiddie appeal". Nice one, me and the lads had a good laugh about that. Uday sends his regards and says thanks very much for the gold-plated AK-47 you sent him on your last trip to Havana. I hope Fidel is well. He does seem a bit frail these days, and it's going to be a bit difficult getting a suitable base for a nuclear strike against the American infidels once he's popped his clogs. Anyway, the weather here is fine. The North Korean ambassador nipped round yesterday for a chat. The old dog's 74-years-old and still managed to deflower 16 Kurdish virgins before battering to death a butler with his walking stick. Poor bloke had apparently put the fish knife on the wrong side of the plate. I said to him afterwards: "I really wish you wouldn't murder my staff - that's Uday's job." We nearly pissed ourselves laughing. Later, we went over to the Ba'ath party headquarters and tortured my cousin Mohammed for half an hour or so. You remember, the one who forgot my wife's birthday. He won't do that again in a hurry. Nearly forgot: I'll need a receipt for that money, preferably on House of Commons headed notepaper. It's for the tax people, you understand. And please make sure you itemise the stuff we discussed, otherwise I can't claim back the VAT. Look forward to speaking soon. Tell Osama I send my regards when you see him next week. Yours, Saddam Here is Galloway's damning reply, printed here in full: George Galloway MP Houses of Parliament London My dearest most excellent Saddam, Lord of the Tigris and Rising Sun over the Euphrates, Your majesty must accept my humble thanks for the donation which will be wisely spent in furthering the cause of the "Iraqi leukaemia kiddie appeal". Your Imperial Highness honours me with his attention, and it is with humility and respect that I attach the following itemised receipt, as requested: To: Saddam Hussein al-Tikrit PLC The Palace Baghdad Received from the above the sum of $100 million for the following services: To further the cause of Iraq and its government around the world To travel first-class to any state sympathetic to our common cause of the overthrow of western democracy To sell out the British forces in any military action against Iraq by supplying valuable intelligence about British capabilities, logistics and troop movements To maintain a luxury 100-room mansion in Portugal for use of the donor in the event of any such military action taking a turn for the worse To forward a Fortnum and Mason's picnic hamper each month to a Royal Palace to be specified by coded advertisement in the Times. I reckon that just about covers it. I've left out the stuff about buying mustard gas and nuclear bombs to use against Israel, just in case this letter ever falls into the hands of the British press. Sounds silly, but stranger things have happened. Keep your chin up, George Given this damning correspondence, it seems incredible that Galloway still maintains that he is nothing more than a rebel Member of Parliament with strongly-held anti-war beliefs. We concede that many among the British electorate may share his revulsion at armed conflict, but what will they say after they have read this incredible written confession, supplied by Tariq Aziz to the CIA as part of his surrender deal?: George Galloway The 100-bedroom luxury mansion Portugal Dear Tariq, I can't tell you how's it's been since I left my beloved Uday. I've never known a night like it: the jasmine-scented air wafting over the Tigris, the stars blazing like anti-aircraft fire over the enchanted city of Baghdad. You know, our eyes first met over that war cabinet table. It ws an instant, animal attraction. We called a cab to go to his palace but we didn't even make it down the ceremonial entrance corridor. We ripped our clothes off in a frenzy of animal lust. We explored each others' bodies for what seemed an age. Uday has a fantastic physique by the way. It's clear that he works out a lot - probably beating political prisoners to death. He satisfied me completely as a man. After a 10-minute break for tea, we were joined by one on Uday's favourites from the Special Republican Guard. Let me just say, as soon as I pulled down his boxers I could see why they call them special! When it was all over we just cuddled and kissed and watched the dawn together. Oh God! The pain of separation is unbearable! George PS. Did you get the plans for the top-secret rocket project I sent you? I reckon you'll be able to hit Tel-Aviv with that, no problem. I didn't mention it on the phone the other day because you never know when the British press are listening in. Better to be safe than sorry, eh? If this ever got out I'd be in a right royal pickle, wouldn't I? Yes you would, Mr Galloway, yes you would. Next week: How Galloway financed purchase of Bangkok paedophile short-stay hotel by selling the organs of murdered kiddies on a Russian Lolitas website ----------------- http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/2003/04/28/george-galloway.html ----------------- ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun May 4 02:09:25 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 04:09:25 EDT Subject: [A-List] About Cuba: social-imperialist thuggery Message-ID: <177.19fbb900.2be624b5@aol.com> Comment The imperial - not simply bourgeois, and largely chauvinistic culture of American society is very much expressed in a certain attitude of our national body politic, regardless of political persuasion. "We" have the "right" and must respond to and adopt an "official position" concerning events in Cuba in respect to the execution of high jackers and the imprisonment of political opponents of the regime. The need to discuss Cuba is brought to the fore in International politics at this time, not simply because of its revolution and socialist construction. Our imperialist bourgeoisie has made the "Cuban Question" a priority or at any rate placed it high on its agenda of urgent tasks in the international arena. Very little is said and petitions are not circulated concerning the four and a half year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has taken more lives than any other since World War II. Since August 1998, when the war erupted, through November 2002 at least 3.3 million people died in excess of what would normally be expected during this time, according to a survey undertaken by the International Rescue Committee. The point is not to question anyone's sincerity but rather to point out that the various individuals and political groupings to step forward in condemning how the government of Cuba defends itself in the 40 year war our government has waged against the people of Cuba, do so on behalf of our imperialist bourgeoisie. Even the discussion here on Marxline (not the A-list) - a couple of weeks ago on Cuba, and the attempts to unravel the specific content of its economic programs and policies in the world wide web of the value producing system, contained a line of thought that is no more than imperial banditry, extreme national chauvinism and white chauvinism, hiding under the cloak of socialist sounding phrases. But screams our bourgeois imperial scoundrels "one can take a principled position on the logic of Cuban economic development, political forms and whether or not this is a healthy workers democracy - from the bottom up, and be critical of their government and specific policies and remain true to the cause of social revolution." Well, our bourgeois imperial scoundrels like to pretend to be detached objective observers of the historical process, champions of democratic rights in all countries regardless of economic and political systems, and by doing so reveal their contempt for the world masses and outright genuflecting to the murderous schemes of our own bourgeoisie. These social-imperialists align themselves in real time with the practical program of our bourgeoisie in its attempt to overthrow the government of Cuba. Further, these imperial scoundrels fail to understand the law-dialectic of revolution that states that the vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next and have no framework to assess revolutionary Cuba. It is one thing to disagree with a theoretical formulation and I have on occasion published disagreement with various statements from the Cuban government describing this current state in the development of imperial capital as "Neo-liberal." I have reframed from entering a realm of partial criticism of partial policies of the people of Cuba, as their will is expressed through their government - the executor of the political authority of a class, because such practice aligns one with the imperialist in the world of real politics and in real time. Democracy in its essential feature is a class phenomenon. There is no such thing as a democratic form or democratic institutions that are not embodiments of class authority and wealth formation, because the bottom line definition of democracy is "the will of the people." The "people" are divided into classes as the fundamental social division in society. The Cuban revolution is an objective, historically evolved social process that has traveled from one point or set of circumstances to another. The Cuban revolution expressed and continues to express the will of its people to be free of American imperialism. Historically, Cuba was a brutal slave society and the color question was and is a real social and political problem, confronting the life of that society and any leaders, no matter what their particular body of ideas and politics. Before the revolution Cuban society was roughly 30% black and today 70% of the population is black. This means that an estimate of the state of democracy in Cuba can be determined and compared with - in relationship to, the state of democracy in America. In my opinion any other approach aligns one with the imperial bourgeoisie, no matter how one dresses up their "democratic arguments." "Well, I do not believe that Cuba is a socialist society," say the wiseacres. In my neighborhood, what one is told who does not know is, "you better ask somebody." Ask the imperial bourgeoisie if Cuba is a socialist country! Ask leaders of the banking community if Cuba is socialist on the basis of how capital is controlled and invested. "You better ask somebody." Socialism and democracy, is a social process of class authority that evolves on the basis of the preexisting economic, cultural, social and political forms and institutions in a given society. Any other approach to socialism and democracy is outright metaphysics and idealism, and reduces understanding to frameworks within the interior of the mind. Who in America can take the high ground of moral authority? Based on what - formal democracy and the interior of ones mind? Formal democracy - and the language that articulates this concept as an idea, expresses bourgeois property relations as they evolved in a given area. Formal democracy and real democracy as it impact the individual in real time, cannot be separated from property relations and class factors. The American Constitution proclaims the rights of men as being created equal and endowed with certain characteristics that are universal and demand a standardized set of laws, regulations and ethics as the basis of interactivity with individuals. What is called laws and democracy in America is not in fact "laws" or an independent law system of motion governing the movement of society but "rights." "Rights" are the abstract expression of the individual assertion without regard to community standing, sex, race or color. This "abstract expression of the individual assertion," takes place within a real material environment and oscillates within the framework of the dominant property relations of a given society and the sum total of its cultural history and legacy. One can properly speak of "bourgeois right" or bourgeois rights and bourgeois democratic rights, as they evolved from the political shell of landed property relations. In America one can speak of bourgeois democratic rights as they evolved since the colonization of our country, the War of Independence and the destruction of the system of slavery. Rights or bourgeois rights or bourgeois democratic rights - American style, are not "laws" as such or a law system of political motion that bestows an inherently superior code of conduct on the individual. The most visible or widely articulated law system governing the societal motion was formulated by Marx and Engels and simply state that humanity is organized around how it reproduces itself on the basis of a given state of development of the productive forces. To state this is to be accused of reducing economic logic to individual acts. The rub is that nothing abstract exists, by definition. "Rights" are more than less an abstraction, until one examines all the material factors of life that allows the individual or social group to exercise and utilize "rights" as a social force. My argument is that the existence of a one party state system is not sufficient grounds to declare that a country is not democratic and the citizen's lack "rights," as compared with American bourgeois democracy. Further, the idea that American bourgeoisie democracy is a higher form of democracy and worth replicating is being challenged. Anyone that analysis the data concerning the actual lived experience of the peoples of America will conclude that Cuban society is more democratic and has traveled further down the road of democracy than American society. Everyone in American society knows that corporations have more rights than the individual. Everyone in American society knows that wealthier people and the ruling class have more rights than the individual. Everyone in American society knows that the Anglo-American people have more rights than the African American people, the people of historic Mexican ancestry and everybody know about Mississippi - or rather the Native Bands of people, goddamn. Everyone "deals with the reality" of "the law," - the class content of America bourgeois democracy, on one level or another as an aspect of living in America. What individuals, social strata, and social classes (no matter how one defines "class") are confronted with is the authenticity of actuality. Thomas Jefferson - a slaveholder, is credited with writing lengthy proclamations concerning the rights of man and the individual, but he was a slaveholder. The authenticity of Mr. Jefferson's actuality - the materiality of his real life social interactions as an individual and member of a privilege class, has to the arbiter in deciphering the meaning of his "meaning" - the "democratic tradition." This standpoint applies not simply to the US Constitution but all political structures that evolve more than less on the basis of a complex of interactivity, made sensible when discussed from the vantage point of the economic underpinning of an entire historical epoch. There is an unnoticed dialectic of social development and democratic assertion - political revolution, which seems to operate on the principle that the democratic striving and revolutionary vision of a revolution - embodied in its proclamations, becomes the practical program of the next political revolution. One of the features of revolution in the US and elsewhere is that each revolution creates the conditions for the next one. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution - July 28, 1868, in part states: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; not shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law, not deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." One does not have the "right" to remain silent if you are getting the crap beat out of you by the police or live under in an environment of police violence. One is entitled to a jury of their peers as an aspect of our bourgeois democracy. For the overwhelming majority of American history this right has never been accessible to the majority of African American convicted and judged because the judicial system is not - in the main, composed of their peers. This does not apply to just African Americans. At various stages in the evolution of American bourgeois democracy the Irish, Italian and Slavic communities have faced this lack of "rights." This is to say that American bourgeois democracy as is Cuban socialist democracy a social process involving from "some where to some where else." Let's attack this dialect of one revolution laying the basis for the next from another side. The cause of the Revolutionary War was independence. The vision was stated in the Declaration of Independence. Since that vision was not fulfilled, another revolution was inevitable. The cause in the Civil War was to preserve the Union. Implicitly that meant union under the Northern industrialist with a free labor system. By definition the free labor system meant overthrowing the system of slavery, which could not be done without militarily defeating the slave oligarchy. This in turn could not be done without emancipating the slaves. The vision as stated by Lincoln was a Nation (not a union) conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The changing economic base that created the revolution, or rather the changing economic base on which arose Lincoln's stated vision had not yet been sufficiently developed for the revolution to realize its vision. The slave was politically emancipated but remained in the same social position of the economic structure of Southern society. Freed but not free, as freedom existed in the period between 1865 and roughly 1945. The battle must then be waged again to achieve the vision. One hundred years later - the 1965 Voting Rights Act is a good point of reference, the descendants of slaves more than less achieved the "right" to vote and had been liberated from their social position in the old agricultural society. We know what happened in Florida and across many Southern States, which of course proves that the vote was more than less won! The vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next. The distance that the people of Cuba have traveled in the past 40 years is greater than the distance traveled by the black population of America in the same time frame. The vision of the Cuban revolution cannot be fully implemented without another revolution and this is a law of social development. The distance traveled by Cuban in virtually every sphere of social life is greater than virtually every country in the Western hemisphere. Cuba is certainly more democratic than all the countries of "Latin America." In as much as the social imperialist have petitioned on the basis of opposing the death penalty, the execution of high jackers and long sentences given to persons convicted of crime, these categories are the framework of measurement. Legal, illegal and extra-legal executions of citizens in our country have long ago become distinguishing features of our bourgeois democracy. Compare every category of social life in America. Infant mortality rates, health care, literacy, home ownership, access to government officials, incarceration rates, judgment by peers, crime rates, respect for the environment as practical policy, voting rights, individual rights, the right to marry outside ones peer group, police violence and police murder, executions of those convicted of crime, etc. Democracy as an expression of the will of the people also means creating the social institutions to alleviate social problems like drug use, teenage pregnancy, random violence, violence directed towards women as a class of citizens and this expresses the will of government as the executor of a class. Democracy in the real world means one's ability to manifest their rights to housing, medical care, fresh water supply, transportation, education, an environment increasingly free of random violence, higher education, literature, music and the pursuit of culture and not simply the specific state of development of the judicial system. Cuba's one party system has traveled down the road of democracy further than America in all matters of grave concern to the majority of people in our country. Why is the execution of 3 criminals important - theirs was not a political crime, to a country whose internal and international policies condemn millions to death for no other reason than being "broke" - lacking money. The petition against the government of Cuba on the basis of judicial ruling against 3 people is imperial thuggery and political hooliganism. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 15955 bytes Desc: not available URL: From soncu at pacbell.net Sun May 4 12:09:50 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 11:09:50 -0700 Subject: [A-List] The Economist: A place for capital controls Message-ID: May I invite you to a round of applause for our great friends at the Economist! This survey article also may be of interest and definitely deserves its own round of applause: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1730317 Sabri +++++++++++ Global finance A place for capital controls May 1st 2003 From The Economist print edition For many developing countries, unrestricted inflows of capital are an avoidable danger IF ANY cause commands the unswerving support of The Economist, it is that of liberal trade. For as long as it has existed, this newspaper has championed freedom of commerce across borders. Liberal trade, we have always argued, advances prosperity, encourages peace among nations and is an indispensable part of individual liberty. It seems natural to suppose that what goes for trade in goods must go for trade in capital, in which case capital controls would offend us as violently as, say, an import quota on bananas. The issues have much in common, but they are not the same. Untidy as it may be, economic liberals should acknowledge that capital controls?of a certain restricted sort, and in certain cases?have a role. Why is trade in capital different from trade in goods? For two main reasons. First, international markets in capital are prone to error, whereas international markets in goods are not. Second, the punishment for big financial mistakes can be draconian, and tends to hurt innocent bystanders as much as borrowers and lenders. Recent decades, and the 1990s most of all, drove these points home with terrible clarity. Great tides of foreign capital surged into East Asia and Latin America, and then abruptly reversed. At a moment's notice, hitherto-successful economies were plunged deep into recession. These experiences served only to underline the lesson of previous financial debacles. Yet it is a lesson that governments remain decidedly reluctant to learn. Big inflows of foreign capital present developing countries with a nearly irresistible opportunity to accelerate their economic development. Where those flows are of foreign direct investment, they are all to the good. But in other cases, disaster beckons unless a series of demanding preconditions are met first (see our survey). A flood of capital into an economy with immature and poorly regulated financial institutions can do more harm than good. Unquestionably, developing countries should strive to improve their financial systems so that foreign capital can be successfully absorbed. Good government, sophisticated financial firms, and regulators who are honest and competent cannot eliminate the risk of financial calamity altogether, but they can reduce it to bearable proportions. At that point a liberal regime for international capital makes sense. The trouble is, many developing countries are nowhere near that point. Rich-country governments and, until recently, the International Monetary Fund have often seemed reluctant to endorse this notion. One might say the same of The Economist. This reluctance is defensible. Often, indeed typically, governments have abused capital controls in ways that oppress their citizens and do grave economic harm. It seems safer to frown on any and all controls?and, in those cases where they have been used intelligently and successfully, to acknowledge any success very grudgingly. But this is dishonest. It is better to face up to the case for such rules in some circumstances, and think hard about how to use them sensibly, with restraint. In from the cold Experience suggests some rules. Refrain from blocking capital outflows (tempting as this might be at times of crisis). Such measures are usually oppressive, and deter future inflows of all kinds. Poor countries need all the foreign direct investment they can get: let inflows of FDI be unconfined. Other long-term inflows also pose little threat to stability. The chief danger lies with heavy inflows of short-term capital, bank lending above all. These can be difficult to stem, but many developing countries would do well to emulate the successful experience of Chile, which has imposed taxes on such inflows, with the rate of tax varying according to the holding period. In negotiating new free-trade arrangements with Chile (and with Singapore), the United States has recently sought assurances of complete capital-account liberalisation. Bitter experience suggests that such demands are a mistake. It is past time to revise economic orthodoxy on this subject. Article at: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=1748890 From bar at idirect.com Sun May 4 13:02:16 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 15:02:16 -0400 Subject: [A-List] About Cuba: social-imperialist thuggery References: <177.19fbb900.2be624b5@aol.com> Message-ID: <00c301c31270$9c5ec700$f7049ad8@computer> Melvin Thanks for this. It is very good. I am having a debate here in Canada within the Communist Party about the death peanlty and Cuba. I support the Cuban position as do others. But some take the position that even in these circumstances the death penalty is a breach of socialist morality in some way ad is unforgiveable. I think your analysis hits the nail on ther head. If you dont mind I want to post your analysis on our Party discussion site. Thanks, Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Waistline2 at aol.com To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 4:09 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] About Cuba: social-imperialist thuggery Comment The imperial - not simply bourgeois, and largely chauvinistic culture of American society is very much expressed in a certain attitude of our national body politic, regardless of political persuasion. "We" have the "right" and must respond to and adopt an "official position" concerning events in Cuba in respect to the execution of high jackers and the imprisonment of political opponents of the regime. The need to discuss Cuba is brought to the fore in International politics at this time, not simply because of its revolution and socialist construction. Our imperialist bourgeoisie has made the "Cuban Question" a priority or at any rate placed it high on its agenda of urgent tasks in the international arena. Very little is said and petitions are not circulated concerning the four and a half year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has taken more lives than any other since World War II. Since August 1998, when the war erupted, through November 2002 at least 3.3 million people died in excess of what would normally be expected during this time, according to a survey undertaken by the International Rescue Committee. The point is not to question anyone's sincerity but rather to point out that the various individuals and political groupings to step forward in condemning how the government of Cuba defends itself in the 40 year war our government has waged against the people of Cuba, do so on behalf of our imperialist bourgeoisie. Even the discussion here on Marxline (not the A-list) - a couple of weeks ago on Cuba, and the attempts to unravel the specific content of its economic programs and policies in the world wide web of the value producing system, contained a line of thought that is no more than imperial banditry, extreme national chauvinism and white chauvinism, hiding under the cloak of socialist sounding phrases. But screams our bourgeois imperial scoundrels "one can take a principled position on the logic of Cuban economic development, political forms and whether or not this is a healthy workers democracy - from the bottom up, and be critical of their government and specific policies and remain true to the cause of social revolution." Well, our bourgeois imperial scoundrels like to pretend to be detached objective observers of the historical process, champions of democratic rights in all countries regardless of economic and political systems, and by doing so reveal their contempt for the world masses and outright genuflecting to the murderous schemes of our own bourgeoisie. These social-imperialists align themselves in real time with the practical program of our bourgeoisie in its attempt to overthrow the government of Cuba. Further, these imperial scoundrels fail to understand the law-dialectic of revolution that states that the vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next and have no framework to assess revolutionary Cuba. It is one thing to disagree with a theoretical formulation and I have on occasion published disagreement with various statements from the Cuban government describing this current state in the development of imperial capital as "Neo-liberal." I have reframed from entering a realm of partial criticism of partial policies of the people of Cuba, as their will is expressed through their government - the executor of the political authority of a class, because such practice aligns one with the imperialist in the world of real politics and in real time. Democracy in its essential feature is a class phenomenon. There is no such thing as a democratic form or democratic institutions that are not embodiments of class authority and wealth formation, because the bottom line definition of democracy is "the will of the people." The "people" are divided into classes as the fundamental social division in society. The Cuban revolution is an objective, historically evolved social process that has traveled from one point or set of circumstances to another. The Cuban revolution expressed and continues to express the will of its people to be free of American imperialism. Historically, Cuba was a brutal slave society and the color question was and is a real social and political problem, confronting the life of that society and any leaders, no matter what their particular body of ideas and politics. Before the revolution Cuban society was roughly 30% black and today 70% of the population is black. This means that an estimate of the state of democracy in Cuba can be determined and compared with - in relationship to, the state of democracy in America. In my opinion any other approach aligns one with the imperial bourgeoisie, no matter how one dresses up their "democratic arguments." "Well, I do not believe that Cuba is a socialist society," say the wiseacres. In my neighborhood, what one is told who does not know is, "you better ask somebody." Ask the imperial bourgeoisie if Cuba is a socialist country! Ask leaders of the banking community if Cuba is socialist on the basis of how capital is controlled and invested. "You better ask somebody." Socialism and democracy, is a social process of class authority that evolves on the basis of the preexisting economic, cultural, social and political forms and institutions in a given society. Any other approach to socialism and democracy is outright metaphysics and idealism, and reduces understanding to frameworks within the interior of the mind. Who in America can take the high ground of moral authority? Based on what - formal democracy and the interior of ones mind? Formal democracy - and the language that articulates this concept as an idea, expresses bourgeois property relations as they evolved in a given area. Formal democracy and real democracy as it impact the individual in real time, cannot be separated from property relations and class factors. The American Constitution proclaims the rights of men as being created equal and endowed with certain characteristics that are universal and demand a standardized set of laws, regulations and ethics as the basis of interactivity with individuals. What is called laws and democracy in America is not in fact "laws" or an independent law system of motion governing the movement of society but "rights." "Rights" are the abstract expression of the individual assertion without regard to community standing, sex, race or color. This "abstract expression of the individual assertion," takes place within a real material environment and oscillates within the framework of the dominant property relations of a given society and the sum total of its cultural history and legacy. One can properly speak of "bourgeois right" or bourgeois rights and bourgeois democratic rights, as they evolved from the political shell of landed property relations. In America one can speak of bourgeois democratic rights as they evolved since the colonization of our country, the War of Independence and the destruction of the system of slavery. Rights or bourgeois rights or bourgeois democratic rights - American style, are not "laws" as such or a law system of political motion that bestows an inherently superior code of conduct on the individual. The most visible or widely articulated law system governing the societal motion was formulated by Marx and Engels and simply state that humanity is organized around how it reproduces itself on the basis of a given state of development of the productive forces. To state this is to be accused of reducing economic logic to individual acts. The rub is that nothing abstract exists, by definition. "Rights" are more than less an abstraction, until one examines all the material factors of life that allows the individual or social group to exercise and utilize "rights" as a social force. My argument is that the existence of a one party state system is not sufficient grounds to declare that a country is not democratic and the citizen's lack "rights," as compared with American bourgeois democracy. Further, the idea that American bourgeoisie democracy is a higher form of democracy and worth replicating is being challenged. Anyone that analysis the data concerning the actual lived experience of the peoples of America will conclude that Cuban society is more democratic and has traveled further down the road of democracy than American society. Everyone in American society knows that corporations have more rights than the individual. Everyone in American society knows that wealthier people and the ruling class have more rights than the individual. Everyone in American society knows that the Anglo-American people have more rights than the African American people, the people of historic Mexican ancestry and everybody know about Mississippi - or rather the Native Bands of people, goddamn. Everyone "deals with the reality" of "the law," - the class content of America bourgeois democracy, on one level or another as an aspect of living in America. What individuals, social strata, and social classes (no matter how one defines "class") are confronted with is the authenticity of actuality. Thomas Jefferson - a slaveholder, is credited with writing lengthy proclamations concerning the rights of man and the individual, but he was a slaveholder. The authenticity of Mr. Jefferson's actuality - the materiality of his real life social interactions as an individual and member of a privilege class, has to the arbiter in deciphering the meaning of his "meaning" - the "democratic tradition." This standpoint applies not simply to the US Constitution but all political structures that evolve more than less on the basis of a complex of interactivity, made sensible when discussed from the vantage point of the economic underpinning of an entire historical epoch. There is an unnoticed dialectic of social development and democratic assertion - political revolution, which seems to operate on the principle that the democratic striving and revolutionary vision of a revolution - embodied in its proclamations, becomes the practical program of the next political revolution. One of the features of revolution in the US and elsewhere is that each revolution creates the conditions for the next one. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution - July 28, 1868, in part states: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; not shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law, not deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." One does not have the "right" to remain silent if you are getting the crap beat out of you by the police or live under in an environment of police violence. One is entitled to a jury of their peers as an aspect of our bourgeois democracy. For the overwhelming majority of American history this right has never been accessible to the majority of African American convicted and judged because the judicial system is not - in the main, composed of their peers. This does not apply to just African Americans. At various stages in the evolution of American bourgeois democracy the Irish, Italian and Slavic communities have faced this lack of "rights." This is to say that American bourgeois democracy as is Cuban socialist democracy a social process involving from "some where to some where else." Let's attack this dialect of one revolution laying the basis for the next from another side. The cause of the Revolutionary War was independence. The vision was stated in the Declaration of Independence. Since that vision was not fulfilled, another revolution was inevitable. The cause in the Civil War was to preserve the Union. Implicitly that meant union under the Northern industrialist with a free labor system. By definition the free labor system meant overthrowing the system of slavery, which could not be done without militarily defeating the slave oligarchy. This in turn could not be done without emancipating the slaves. The vision as stated by Lincoln was a Nation (not a union) conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The changing economic base that created the revolution, or rather the changing economic base on which arose Lincoln's stated vision had not yet been sufficiently developed for the revolution to realize its vision. The slave was politically emancipated but remained in the same social position of the economic structure of Southern society. Freed but not free, as freedom existed in the period between 1865 and roughly 1945. The battle must then be waged again to achieve the vision. One hundred years later - the 1965 Voting Rights Act is a good point of reference, the descendants of slaves more than less achieved the "right" to vote and had been liberated from their social position in the old agricultural society. We know what happened in Florida and across many Southern States, which of course proves that the vote was more than less won! The vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next. The distance that the people of Cuba have traveled in the past 40 years is greater than the distance traveled by the black population of America in the same time frame. The vision of the Cuban revolution cannot be fully implemented without another revolution and this is a law of social development. The distance traveled by Cuban in virtually every sphere of social life is greater than virtually every country in the Western hemisphere. Cuba is certainly more democratic than all the countries of "Latin America." In as much as the social imperialist have petitioned on the basis of opposing the death penalty, the execution of high jackers and long sentences given to persons convicted of crime, these categories are the framework of measurement. Legal, illegal and extra-legal executions of citizens in our country have long ago become distinguishing features of our bourgeois democracy. Compare every category of social life in America. Infant mortality rates, health care, literacy, home ownership, access to government officials, incarceration rates, judgment by peers, crime rates, respect for the environment as practical policy, voting rights, individual rights, the right to marry outside ones peer group, police violence and police murder, executions of those convicted of crime, etc. Democracy as an expression of the will of the people also means creating the social institutions to alleviate social problems like drug use, teenage pregnancy, random violence, violence directed towards women as a class of citizens and this expresses the will of government as the executor of a class. Democracy in the real world means one's ability to manifest their rights to housing, medical care, fresh water supply, transportation, education, an environment increasingly free of random violence, higher education, literature, music and the pursuit of culture and not simply the specific state of development of the judicial system. Cuba's one party system has traveled down the road of democracy further than America in all matters of grave concern to the majority of people in our country. Why is the execution of 3 criminals important - theirs was not a political crime, to a country whose internal and international policies condemn millions to death for no other reason than being "broke" - lacking money. The petition against the government of Cuba on the basis of judicial ruling against 3 people is imperial thuggery and political hooliganism. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 18326 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Sun May 4 13:05:38 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 15:05:38 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: COMPARTY: death penalty Message-ID: <00c501c31270$aace74c0$f7049ad8@computer> Melvin, Thought this might add something to the discussion. ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2003 10:40 PM Subject: COMPARTY: death penalty Lenin submited the following draft clause to the Russian Penal Code on May 17, 1922: "Propaganda or agitation, or membership of, or assistance given to organizations the object of which (propaganda and agitation) is to assist that section of the international bourgeoisie which refuses to recognise the rights of the communist system of ownership that is superseding capitalism, and is striving to overthrow that system by violence, either by means of foreign intervention or blockade, or by espionage, financing the press, and similar means, is an offence punishable by death, which, if mitigating circumstances are proved, may be commuted to deprivation of liberty, or deportation." - V.I. Lenin -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1506 bytes Desc: not available URL: From annewilliamson at msn.com Sun May 4 13:37:03 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 15:37:03 -0400 Subject: [A-List] (Forward from Nestor) Stratfor on Argentina References: Message-ID: <041801c31274$8ac6da60$c9b7fea9@anne> Dear Nestor, Thanks so much for your illuminating response to the Stratfor report - the detail is most helpful. I was quite alarmed by the potential for any Menem victory in the runoff. Fully aware of the alternative, Kirchner now seems a mixed blessing, at best, though earlier I confess - after reading he advocated a gold-backed peso - I was guilty of thinking that as a consequence he must surely have a full program of useful economic policies. By your report I gather that - even if he did - his situation vis a vis Duhalde will leave him dependent, and therefore cripple any truly fresh initiatives he may have up his sleeve. (Hope dies slowly, Nestor, very slowly, especially for us gold standard folk.) Of course, I can only agree that Menem must lose, and drummed out of Argentinean politics forever. But a bit of intelligence I picked up the other night indicates that no matter who wins the runoff, enormous US pressure is soon to be applied for Argentina to get on board the USS Imperialism and start swabbing the decks: Thursday evening I attended the Spring Dinner of the Committee on Monetary Education and Reform (CMRE), a "sound money" organization of considerable standing and prestige here in the States (I append below an email report written by another attendee, David Lifschultz, for those interested in issues the evening's speakers addressed.) Due to a scheduling glitch, a speaker based in London had to withdraw. Larry Kudlow of CNBC's "Kudlow and Cramer" was the last minute replacement. Most probably A-Listers not residing in the US have no idea who this gentleman is. Briefly, he is a many times "fallen" former bright young thing (cocaine scandals, lost jobs, divorce, conversion to Catholicism, at least two "miraculous" come-backs, etc.) who was, and is, one of the most prominent "easy money" bubble economy enthusiasts. IOWs, a Bubblevision "star." Earlier, standing as a supply sider economist fresh out of Princeton at a time when that particular economic cult was fashionable assisted him in snagging a medium-level job in the Reagan administration, which Larry has milked so thoroughly through the ensuing years that today an innocent individual listening to him would think he was among Reagan's closest advisers and confidants. In short, he is an ever-eager snake oil salesman and all-around regime apologist, who is now working only nominally for CNBC. In reality, he's Dubya's man all the way, and without question is privy to the thinking of White House staff and the neo-con cabal. Now, as to his "bomblet." In long, rambling remarks amounting to economic nonsense (see below), he turned to the future direction of US geopolitical initiatives. After assuring the audience that "Donald Rumsfeld is a wonderful human being, just wonderful," and saluting the US's "victory for freedom" in Iraq, Kudlow allowed, "Unfortunately, we are probably going to have to go into Syria, Iran, North Korea, and eventually," here he paused for effect, "Latin America." (This is okay in Larry's view, since the US is "spreading freedom.") The idea of intervening in Latin America stunned the audience, yet follow-up questions focused on Colombia, where we have already massively intervened militarily. I think the focus on Colombia was a consequence of the audience's unconscious denial of what they'd just heard. More intervention? Another continent? Our own? No, no, couldn't be.....unless it's one of those spots where we are already.......... Argentina's attitude towards the IMF has been entirely too casual from the administration's POV; after all, the IMF is a key institution of US imperialism. No nation can be allowed such relaxed negilgence, much less default - even if billions more are needed in loans. So, now that Mr. Bush thinks he's got enough fresh collateral under the dollar thanks to getting control over our oil (which was mistakenly trapped under the sands of Iraq by - can you comprehend the magnitude of the error? - the Lord Almighty's own hand), it's time to re-model the multinational institutions to suit American needs clearly and entirely. The Bushies have suffered enough of foreigners' confusion on exactly how the world is to work, thank you. Alas, Mr. Kirchner, should he prevail, will soon come under assault, once the Bushies can get around to dealing with it. They've got an election to win, after all, and one can expect only so much at a time. How much better it would be for the Bushies if the Argentineans would simply elect the correct man - Menem - in the first place! Pre-runoff Argentina must be as peppered with CIA agents as an old dog's hide is with fleas. It's enough to make a girl cry. Thanks for the expert guidance, Nestor. Anne ***************************************************************** David Lifschultz: External shocks to bring down the United States economy? The Committee for Monetary Research and Education run by that angel from the right, Mrs. Elizabeth Currier, held court on Thursday night in Manhattan with a group of illustrious speakers, and the group is recommended for membership which can be obtained by calling them at 704-598-3717. Ambassador William Middendorf was the host to part of the program, and following his teacher of many decades ago at Harvard, Joseph Schumpeter, sought to find for the audience in his brief and wise presentation those external shocks that might demolish the economy. First, the Ambassador raised the disturbing observation that 20% of the consumer demand was being created by the refinancing of homes at lower rates of interest, and that additional loans were being taken out on the same homes as the housing prices rose to increase consumer purchasing. While one of the speakers rebutted this point by saying that every debt has a corresponding loan in the society, as though to say that this had no significance, the fact that this is true does not take away from the observation as the new credit created by the banking system supported by the housing market's rise in value is a major reason for the continued strength of consumer spending. For example, the base for new credit is the creation of new credit by the Federal Reserve. As it creates credit in the banking system, the entire aggregate of credit cannot rise significantly unless there are borrowers who will make it rise, thereby creating the multiplier effect of the fractional reserve banking system. Otherwise, the Federal Reserve is pushing on a string. The fact that the housing market is rising, and home owners are borrowing more money, enables the Federal Reserve to achieve credit growth in the economy. Larry Kudlow, of Kudlow and Cramer fame, understood this clearly in his remarks when he said let the Federal Reserve rip. He meant by this that he wanted the Federal Reserve to drive gold to 388.00 an ounce, and the economy to five percent growth, by the Federal Reserve buying Treasury bonds through new credit creation until that happened. I pointed out that this new credit could leak into the foreign exchange market causing the dollar to fall, and increasing the current account deficit by increasing demand for foreign goods. Those foreign goods were cheap as the central banks in Asia were buying dollar credits in their corrupt dirty float operations to implement their predatory pricing activities against our domestic industries, which our treasonous officials will do nothing about, and converting them to Treasuries and other securities which have risen from 463 billion for Asia alone in 1999 to 706 billion in Dec. 2002, though Mr. Kudlow denied that this was factually so. For evidence of this fact, see page A 46 of the April, 2003 Federal Reserve Bulletin. Mr. Kudlow did acknowledge that there was a severe problem in lack of savings and said the Bush Administration had a number of tax incentives to create savings to offset this problem, though any increase in savings would decrease consumer spending, which would be offset by the expansionary monetary of Mr. Kudlow. Mr. Kudlow sought to deny the reality of the trade deficit saying that the exports of small companies were not calculated in the export statistics, nor the activity of American manufacturing companies whose manufacturing facilities are abroad who are really part of the domestic economy by extension whose "exports" would put us in current account surplus, and that these 1750 accounting practices should be ignored. But I countered that this "theory" conflicts with the "international accounts" reality, that they were in deficit, and that each central bank of the Asian countries was showing increased dollar credit holdings showing in reality there was a current account problem. Mr. Kudlow replied that was an error of confusing composition of dollar credits which remain relatively constant with a false sense of real growth and thus an illusion, as best as I can understand him. What he was saying here was that the actual dollar credits in the United States system grow very slowly, and thus are relatively constant, and therefore I was referring to a mirage. But that confuses aggregates of dollar credits with composition or ownership of those assets. For example, the credit system of the United States is a closed system. If there is a current account defict, none of this credit for the most part leaves the United States but is merely a credit at a bank in the banking system of the United States for a foreign bank. That credit grow a certain percentage per year on average. Therefore, if the credit system shows 8.5 trillion dollars in M-3 that Mr. Kudlow could not remember, and treating that as the bank credit figure which it is not as it includes non-bank amounts such as money funds, Mr. Kudlow is saying that that amount does not change much per year, and that is true, but the ownership of that credit can change. This can be most clearly seen in the net deficit position of the United States international accounts which used to be significantly in the black in 1973, when we were the world's largest creditor nation, but which is now in the red to the tune of around three trillion dollars making us the world's greatest creditor nation. The ownership of American is moving from domestic American ownership to foreign ownership, which was my point. Mr. Kudlow is dealing in fallacies which work well on television. A distinguished former banker, H. David Willey, presented the view that there was not enough gold to fund the short-term liabilities of the United States, and therefore the return to the gold standard was impossible. He also maintained that the Central Banks were not coordinating the gold price. If I heard him correctly, he said that if gold were massively devalued against the dollar to make it work, that it would be destabilizing. There is much that is of interest here in these comments, and a major self-contradiction in stated Keynesian logic that gold is a barbaric logic. For example, it is of course impossible to underpin a banking system whose credit grows far in excess of gold production as any run on the banks would find them with insufficient gold to pay the depositors. That is why the gold standard went bankrupt. At the rate of dollar credit expansion in the past century, it would take a gold price of over $20,000.00 an ounce to cover all credit in creation in the United States system. Mr. Wiley is correct, though, in saying that the rise of gold to 4,000.00 an ounce or $20,000.00 an ounce would be destabilizing, as it would create a run on the dollar, and potentially destroy the United States economic system. That is if I heard him correctly. The self-contradiction is that Keynes and contemporary central bankers are saying they are selling their gold as it is a useless asset that earns nothing, and yet if it were to rise excessively they recognize that it is not so useless as it could destroy their international financial system. This should lead us to suspect that these contemporary gold sales are being made to stabilize the gold price as these central banks in reality are there to maintain the value of their currencies as best they can, and not allow a crash, and construe such "coordination" at their monthly meetings at the BIS as being fully responsible. Yes, they supervise the gold price, and they have to, and this has been admitted to me by central bankers. Ambassador Middendorf then went on to discuss more potential external shocks to the system. One would be the launch against Manhattan of a weapon of mass destruction by a terrorist group which he thought was very possible. There are 10,000 containers that come into New York City each day from abroad, and the police have the ability to inspect only 100. It is, therefore, very easy to sneak such weapons into the United States. If it were a bacteriological weapon, and it killed hundreds of thousands of people, we can see, he said, the horrendous national panic that would ensue just by looking at the SARS outbreak. He discussed North Korea as a potential shock, but said that their missiles cannot reach the United States, and if some could, the anti-missile systems that he created when Secretary of the Navy should protect the United States from these missiles. Therefore, this shakedown for aid from of the United States was really more a problem for Japan and China. There was more, but this should cover most of the important topics. From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Sun May 4 16:55:03 2003 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (Jorge Figueiredo) Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 23:55:03 +0100 Subject: [A-List] "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030504235101.028abb98@mail.telepac.pt> "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" http://www.chavezthefilm.com/index_ex.htm Documentary - U.S. Premiere Director/Photographers - Kim Bartley & Donnacha O'Briain Possibly the most important documentary of 2003, though the only place you'll see it in this country is most likely to be film festivals, as there isn't a studio in the United States with the balls to release it, or the willingness to draw the steam and fire they'd get from the Bush Administration and his supporters for marketing or distributing it. Nor is there a major television network that'll broadcast it. It isn't artistic censorship, but it is political & more importantly a result of economic censorship. What is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised? It is perhaps the best and most remarkable at the time of history documentary I have ever seen. Capturing every side of a remarkable coup that occurred in Venezuela where the democratically elected President Hugo Chavez, a true man of the people of Venezuela, was captured and came very close to disappearing from the face of the planet, due to his attacks on the Bush Administration's collateral damage in Afghanistan in his War On Terrorism. And two, his position on the oil supply of Venezuela (3rd Largest Producer of Oil in the World!), so that the wealth of Venezuela would help to bring education, medicine and enlightenment to the peoples of his country. You see, Chavez is hugely popular in Venezuela where he has a weekly television program and radio program where the citizens of his country can call in and talk with their President. He listens to their problems, tries to explain the government to them and takes notes. He teaches the people of Venezuela to learn about their constitution, that it is 'the people's book' and rights given in there are guaranteed to all men and women no matter of their place in society. He believes in the system of government that elected him and is a full supporter of it. Now I'll admit quite pointedly that I am a liberal by nature with some conservative streaks through me. I look for 'the rest of the story' that isn't coming from the 'one time liberal media' of this country, which is now mainly owned by arch-conservative corporate powers today. Finding out who is getting the contracts to 'rebuild' Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries that we are going after. Noticing headlines that are deliberately created to provoke instant reactions and being disgusted with it all. Much of my disgust comes from me trying to piece together stories that are related, though never connected, or rarely connected, in the newspapers. Something I learned from reading Woodward & Bernstein's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. However, this documentary isn't about theories, isn't about going back after something has happened and trying to piece it together. Oh no. Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain were making a huge documentary on President Hugo Chavez and the current state of Venezuela in the first half of 2002. They were given total access to his presidency, him and his people. They also had free reign to interview folks on the street, the opposition. Essentially to take a snap shot of what Venezuela was at that time. The first part of the documentary shows that Chavez is very much being considered the Washington of Venezuela, the man that is returning power and giving hope and education to the people of his country. The poor believe in him and the rich seemingly loathe him. In the middle of their 4th month of coverage. When suddenly the powers that be rose against him and took him away. This documentary captures live on tape everything that happened, all the information as it was coming in. It shows how Chavez knowing about the capabilities of the oil and media powers in Venezuela and their tactics, uses his one channel to the people- Channel 8 - State Television, to give his side of what is happening. Meanwhile the conservatives controlled 5 'private stations' in the country that were constantly calling him a communist, the next Castro, essentially demonizing him. The leader of the opposition flew to Washington to meet with President Bush and his advisors. Upon returning from that meeting a renewed vehemence against Chavez began. Calling for a march on the State Oil area in Caracas, Venezuela. The people of Venezuela in response to this gathering decided to gather in front of the Presidential Palace to voice their support of the President and his policies. Meanwhile at the other meeting, they began to FIRE UP the gathers to 'Go Get Chavez Out Of The Palace.' Chavez's people on State Television begin pleading with the opposition party not to do this, because of the 10s of thousands of supporters in front of his palace and how this action was irresponsible and liable to provoke a tragedy. Chavez had a small number of Army types that were attempting to keep the two sides from actual clashing. All of this being captured by the 'Private' media as well as the 'State' media and of course there was also the cameras of Kim Bartley and Donnacio O'Briain. Snipers from over a half mile away begin firing upon the heads of the opposition demonstrators. Killing 10 and the panic caused over a hundred injuries. The 'Private' media edits the footage to show Chavez's supporters firing handguns over a bridge wall off camera, then edit that together with the carnage of the slain, claiming that Chavez's supporters were gunning down the Opposition's 'Peaceful' demonstration. Using this footage and lining a few pockets, the Opposition gains the support of a few army generals and the head of Venezuela's Navy. The Coup is set in motion. First, the State Television was taken over. Suddenly on Private Television they begin announcing that the murderous Chavez has been ousted. We're in the palace watching this footage with the Heads of State as they see the Coup taking shape. To save the lives of the people in the Palace- Department heads, secretaries, the vice-president, the camera crew shooting this- He is taken away by the generals, and nobody knows what happened to him. Suddenly, just a run of the mill documentary on the life of a South American President was becoming a floor plan and blueprint for how the United States uses and manipulates foreign powers into overthrowing any leader- be it Democratically elected or not. Solely to protect its own interest instead of those of the indigenous peoples from whom the materials we desire are to be taken. I won't spoil the rest of the documentary, but it simply must be seen. It plays this Saturday night here in Austin, Texas at the Paramount Theater. I'll be watching it again. It is simply the most amazing and infuriating documentary I've ever seen. This isn't like Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, which while being a documentary in presentation, actually comes across as more of a persuasive speech by Michael Moore, and violates some of the rules of the documentary form, but was an excellent film despite that. This Documentary covers all sides. Presents evidence captured, but never shown by our media, never discussed in our newspapers, and wholly ignored by Colin Powell and the State Department. Do they tell us that the man that assumed power of Venezuela, the man that had met with President Bush and was involved at the top of the Oil industry in Venezuela, that his first act as the 'democratic' self- appointed leader of Venezuela was to announce on television that he was disbanding the Grand Assembly (Congress), the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and all the other bastions of a Democracy, replacing it with a Dictatorship? This was the man that just days before was in the White House of our country, discussing the future of Venezuela with OUR current President. This same man is now living in Florida. If you ever saw WACO: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, this- this is far more clear, because imagine if one of the documentary people or two, had been inside the Branch Davidian Compound. Imagine it was all being laid bare- and everything we were led to believe was false for a fact, not supposition, but actual real tangible evidence. And once you see this Documentary, which has been shown in other countries- ahem- Looking at Colin Powell and trusting him, well, it just kind of becomes impossible. Believing anyone from this administration, it's just too much to ask. What they attempted to do in Venezuela is a shame. And any true American that watches this documentary and watches the case as both sides live it- you just. You can not imagine how disgusting it makes one feel. We're not about colonialism, that's why we founded the United States of America, was to fight that, right? To get free of powers that tax and control our country without elected representation, yet here- here clearly we are defying EVERYTHING on which this country was founded. Colin Powell has the audacity in this documentary to say that he does not believe President Chavez has the best interests of the United States as his most important Priority. God forbid he care for his own country first! All of this was for the sake of oil. Back in the days of the original King George, it had to do with spices, hemp, cotton and foods. If you get a chance to see this film, do not miss it. Not one person in the 200 or so I've talked to today that have seen it have called it anything less than brilliant. Even the conservative silver-haired lady I talked to today, who was Republican felt disgusted by what she saw. Unfortunately, THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED isn't bloody likely of being televised in this country anytime soon, so watch your local film festivals and pray that one day we'll be in a country that will put a documentary like this in theaters everywhere. Filmmaking rarely does the three magic things that film can do. Inform, Persuade and ENTERTAIN. This movie does! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 12288 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bobenoch at shaw.ca Mon May 5 00:38:25 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 23:38:25 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Fw: [R-G] Re: elections Message-ID: <001d01c312d0$ee8384c0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 7:51 PM Subject: [R-G] Re: elections : << Peter Coyote Senator Barbara Boxer 112 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Dear Barbara, I'm writing to you about a situation of the greatest urgency. Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist Greg Palast (currently writing for the London Guardian). This film documents the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now been revised to 91,000. Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential election and Democrats need to be prepared. The recent elections of Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, the loss in Georgia of Max Cleland, wildly popular Vietnam vet, and the victory of Alabama Governor Bob Riley, along with a handful of other Republican victories, (all predicted to have been losers by straw polls which our nation has refined to a high-art) points to an ominous source corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machine, recording and tabulating ballots. You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens, rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts. You'd be wrong. The Washington, DC publication The Hill (www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska. When Democrat,Charlie Matulka requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel, his request was denied because Nebraska had a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel. When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee,( the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete), asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job. Hagel's surprise victory is a trial-run for the presidential election. Election 'reform' laws are now prohibiting paper ballots (no trail) and exit polls, effectively removing all trace and record of votes, making prosecution of voter fraud virtually impossible. For whatever reasons, the Democrats decided not to pursue the issue of fraudulence in the last Presidential election. The three Supreme Court Justices who should have recused themselves (Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor) were allowed to stand unchallenged and pass a bizarre one-time only ruling. That they were in place long before the election demonstrates how clearly the end-game of such moves was thought out. Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of national importance, not only is it highly probably that Democrats will lose again and again, but eventually voters will "sense" even if they cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this issue. >> _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From bobenoch at shaw.ca Mon May 5 00:34:05 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 23:34:05 -0700 Subject: [A-List] "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030504235101.028abb98@mail.telepac.pt> Message-ID: <001501c312d0$53db89e0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> I saw this on CBC Newsworld, here in Canada. CBC is , as perhaps you know, a publicly owned network, although its' funding has been progressively slashed over the last generation or so. For the most part, it provides solid bourgeois coverage, but it still provides a few moments which remind one of its' history as an alternative to US broadcasting. During the 24/7 coverage in Iraq, they ran a doc on the Patriot missile during GW1, showing not only its total ineffectiveness, but also the campaign by which the US Media created the myth of its' omnipotence. They also screened a quite good doc on the oil industry's "investment" in the future of Iraqs' oilfields. I was very pleased to see the Chavez film make it to air here, it is gripping, and excellent "TV" as well as being truthful. I guess it is nearly time for more budget cuts at CBC. Bob -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2120 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon May 5 04:24:44 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 03:24:44 -0700 Subject: [A-List] An anarchist march through Montreal's most affluent neighborhood Message-ID: <030d01c312f0$c10531e0$20fa5718@comintern> > From: CLAC logement @ TOUR OF WESTMOUNT: THEY ARE RICH BECAUSE WE ARE POOR! An anarchist march through Montreal's most affluent neighborhood ===> Time: 6:30 PM ===> Date: Saturday, May 17th, 2003 ===> Meet: The green-space by Lionel Groulx Metro Just up the hill from the traditionally-working-class-but-rapidly-gentrifying neighborhoods of St-Henri and Little Burgundy -- the location of this years' Montreal Anarchist Bookfair -- lies Westmount, renown as one of Montreal's most affluent enclaves. The verdant hills of Westmount are home to some of the most distinctive figures of the Canadian bourgeoisie, including Brian Mulroney, Jean Charest and the Bronfman family. On Saturday, May 17th, CLAC Logement invites you to join us for "@ Tour of Westmount: They are rich because we are poor." This anarchist march through Westmount will allow the presence of anarchists and anti-authoritarians to be experienced not only by Bookfair attendees but also by Montreal's political and economic elite as they relax at home. Bring your flags and your banners of resistance! And bring your running boots and your water bottles too, cause it's going to be a long walk uphill! For more info: claclogement at yahoo.ca or 514.409.2049. And don't miss the following events, also on Saturday, May 17th... ===> The Fourth Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair The Fourth Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair will take place earlier on Saturday, May 17th at CEDA, 2515, rue Delisle (Metro Lionel-Groulx), from 10AM-6PM. The Bookfair will bring together more than 50 booksellers, collectives and distributors from all over North America as well as the Federation Anarchiste from France. Workshops, films and more! Open to anarchists and non-anarchists alike! Free! ===> CLAC Logement Workshop: "Resisting Gentrifying Forces: Past and Present Anarchist Struggles for the Right to Decent Housing". During the day, members of CLAC Logement will be facilitating a workshop entitled "Resisting Gentrifying Forces: Past and Present Anarchist Struggles for the Right to Decent Housing". It will include a walking tour of the neighborhood of St-Henri, a traditionally poor and working class neighborhood in the throes of gentrification, situated below Westmount. All are welcome to participate! Meet at CEDA, 2515, rue Delisle at 2 PM. For information about the Festival of Anarchy and the Anarchist Bookfair: http://www.tao.ca/~lombrenoire bookfair2003 at ziplip.com * 514-844-3207. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:08:42 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:08:42 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: coalition carve-up Message-ID: <006501c31307$73e397a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Allies carve up Iraq but sideline UN By James Cusick, Westminster Editor The Sunday Herald, 4 May 2003 Progress on giving the United Nations the 'vital' role in Iraq promised by the United States and Britain was described last night by a source close to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as proceeding at a 'glacial pace'. Instead, the US announced this weekend that post-war Iraq will be divided into three parts that will come under British, Polish and US command, with six European countries among the 10 nations contributing troops for the 'international stability force'. The first troops in the new force could be on the ground later this month, according to the Polish foreign ministry. The prospect that the UN may play no role inside Iraq 'for months' as the Foreign Office source suggested, will dismay aid agencies who believe that, unless the UN is brought in quickly, the humanitarian crisis inside Iraq will deteriorate. Oxfam, along with eight other aid organisations, have signed a joint demand for the UN to be given a central role in overseeing and managing Iraq's transition to a new government. Unesco officials in Iraq say that basic services such as sewage and waste disposal are not being provided, resulting in outbreaks of disease. Tony Blair is understood to be pressing the US into recognising that, without highly visible UN involvement , the coalition's peace-keeping efforts will be regarded as a failure. One government source suggested Blair was facing 'a struggle without reward' and added: 'The Prime Minister, along with other cabinet ministers, is pushing for the UN. But progress has been minimal.' Although Britain and the US are said to be in the early stages of preparing a resolution that would give the UN a humanitarian role in Iraq, the source close to Straw was not optimistic. He said: 'It will be weeks before anything is written down and months before anything is on the ground.' Despite schools in Iraq opening yesterday for the first time since Saddam Hussein's fall from power three weeks ago, any appearance of normality is tempered by the power vacuum the US-led military authority under Jay Garner failed to fill. There is also growing concern over Shia-led political groups attempting to deliver their own form of civil stability -- especially in Baghdad. It is feared that the longer the UN stays out, the more confident the until-now oppressed fundamentalist Shia majority will become of gaining overall control of Iraq when legitimate elections finally arrive. That prospect is something Garner's replacement, Paul Bremner, will need to address when he takes the Iraqi helm and presides over both the occupied country's reconstruction authority and directs the selection of the post-Saddam transitional Iraqi government. The tough message on terrorism delivered yesterday at the end of his Middle East tour by US Secretary of State Colin Powell will have chimed perfectly with Bremner's view of the risks the US still faces from the region. Powell made it clear to states such as Syria and the Lebanon that it should take measures to halt the activities of groups such as Hezbollah. He said the 'new strategic situation' following the fall of Saddam in Iraq, and the publication of the 'road map' for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, offered new opportunities to resolve long-standing issues which had encouraged terrorism and prevented stability in the region. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:09:51 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:09:51 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: no Iraqi WMDs after all Message-ID: <006d01c31307$9ccec040$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction' By Neil Mackay The Sunday Herald, 4 May 2003 The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction. Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq. According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq. Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America. Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.' The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified. The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed. This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security. Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:12:15 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:12:15 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <007501c31307$f32cbc80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Agent to hit out by naming top IRA mole Former soldier makes threat after MoD backtracks on pay-off deal By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor The Sunday Herald, 4 May 2003 THE IRA and the UK's intelligence services are in crisis this morning following threats by a rogue British agent to expose the identity of the army's most highly placed mole inside the ranks of the Provos. The British government and the intelligence services have been warned that the true identity of Stakeknife, the codename for Britain's key double-agent at the heart of the IRA and Sinn Fein, will be blown in one week. The threats have been made by Kevin Fulton, a cover name for a former British soldier who worked as an agent inside the IRA for the army's Force Research Unit (FRU), an ultra-secret intelligence wing. Fulton is threatening to expose the identity of Stakeknife because he claims the Ministry of Defence have not honoured a promise to provide him with a relocation package after his cover was blown in Ulster. Fulton posed as an IRA volunteer for a number of years, passing information on republican military plans to his handlers in British intelligence. However, when his cover was blown the army failed to provide him with a new home, a new identity, a new job and a sizeable pay-off. Fulton has been demanding a full relocation package for a number of years. Cut adrift , his life is in clear danger from IRA gunmen who may wish to settle scores for Fulton's years working as an informer. The security forces have told Fulton that they believe his life is not in danger and he doesn't need a full relocation package. Intelligence sources unofficially say this analysis is 'utter rubbish'. One added: 'The Provos would be delighted to take out Fulton. If he doesn't have protection then he's a dead man walking.' He has already made himself a huge thorn in the side of British intelligence. Fulton played a key role in revealing the true events behind the Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people in 1998. Without Fulton, it would never have been established that the RUC had prior warning that the bomb plot was in the offing. It has been claimed that the RUC allowed the bomb to be placed in Omagh in order to protect an agent in the Real IRA. The RUC, it is said, did not want to cause loss of life, but mixed-up telephone warnings resulted in Saturday shoppers being shepherded into the path of the explosion rather than away from the blast site. Given the havoc that Fulton has previously wrought within the intelligence community, the British establishment is taking his threat to name Stakeknife very seriously. Friends of Fulton say the relocation package had been agreed by the British government earlier this year but was withdrawn in the past few weeks. 'It infuriated him when they welched on the deal,' one said. 'That may account for his current tactics.' Stakeknife is described as one of the IRA's biggest hitters. As an agent for British intelligence he provided top-grade information on both IRA military operations and political manoeuvrings by Sinn Fein in return for huge payments into an offshore bank account. He is known to have been close to Gerry Adams and was one of the leading military figures in the Provos. As an agent for the British, Stakeknife was allowed to carry out terrorist operations with impunity to preserve his cover. One intelligence source said: 'If he hadn't been murdering people, then he would have been rumbled as an agent in no time.' Stakeknife has killed soldiers, police officers, civilians and fellow republicans. The number of his murder victims is believed to run into double figures. One British intelligence source described Fulton's threat as 'the biggest security headache I can remember'. Fulton, who is not speaking to the press, is said to have named his plan 'Operation Dinner-Out'. Fulton has written affidavits which he has given to his lawyer outlining the life and crimes of Stakeknife. He has also given a sealed letter containing the name of Stakeknife to his lawyer, who has been ordered to open it and make the name public in the event of Fulton's death. A British intelligence source said: 'Fulton has made clear that he knows Stakeknife's identity and he is threatening to name him unless his life is safeguarded and he gets what he wants from the MoD. There are now grave consequences facing British intelligence operations in Ulster.' Another added: 'Fulton has upped the ante considerably by threatening to make these revelations. Everything is up in the air . The government could either think that he's bluffing or they could cave in and give him what he wants. If he isn't bluffing then we have a dreadful situation on our hands. 'Either way, I predict we will see agents in Northern Ireland moving around pretty quickly in the coming days. This is putting people's lives at risk.' Stakeknife would be immediately executed by the IRA's internal security unit -- the so-called 'Nutting Squad' -- if his identity was revealed. The information he has passed to the British has compromised countless IRA operations and led to the deaths and imprisonment of leading Provos. A friend of Fulton's said: 'Kevin believes his life is in imminent danger. He doesn't want to do this, but if he doesn't get what he wants from the British then he will be left with no alternative but to expose Stakeknife.' Fulton is known to have telephoned senior intelligence officials last week and told them Stakeknife's real name to prove he was serious about his threats. An intelligence source said: 'This man appears not to be kidding. If Stakeknife's name gets out it will be devastating. Stakeknife's handlers knew that he was killing security force personnel and civilians in order to keep his cover inside the IRA so he could continue passing us information. It would be a public relations nuclear meltdown.' The British government has previously threatened to interdict any newspaper which identifies Stakeknife, claiming that exposure would lead to his death and massively compromise national security. The Republicans are now frantically trying to work out who Stakeknife is before the mounting pressure leads to the double-agent fleeing Northern Ireland . One republican source said: 'At first, Stakeknife was thought to be a myth -- a piece of black propaganda designed by the British to keep us on our toes. Then we thought he might be an amalgam of a number of high-up touts. Now it appears, it really is just one man. If he's named, he will be killed.' The revelations about Stakeknife follow a month of serious knocks to the British intelligence community in Ulster. In mid-April, Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir John Stevens, released his report on alleged collusion between British security forces and terrorists in Northern Ireland. As a result of Stevens's work nine members of the FRU, including Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the Aberdonian army officer who led the unit, could now face prosecution. Up to 14 civilians may have been killed because of state collusion with paramilitaries, including Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. Fulton was also handled by the FRU at one point during his career as a spy in Ulster. Stakeknife is still in the province and is still handled by members of the shadowy Force Research Unit. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:13:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:13:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK economy: social inclusion miracle Message-ID: <007d01c31308$1ddd14c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> One in five doesn't know how they will afford to live after retirement By James Hamilton The Sunday Herald, 4 May 2003 One in seven Britons have made no pension provision, while 21% do not know how they will survive financially when they retire, according to research by Help the Aged. The charity found that a further 40% of people thought they would have to cut back on a lot of things when they stopped working, although a third still expect to be better off than pensioners are today. Among those who have started paying into a pension, 24% are not confident the measures they have taken will be sufficient, while half of those who have not started saving do not know how they will get by when they stop work. More alarmingly, a third of people with no retirement savings expect to be better off than ever when they stop work, while 52% do not plan to start a pension in the future. While 45% said they did not understand the state pension system, just 11% think the government will provide them with a decent pension when they retire. The research also found that 70% of people do not trust the government to provide unbiased information on pensions, while 39% do not trust financial firms and 37% do not trust their employers. Mervyn Kohler, head of public affairs at Help the Aged, said: 'The government is losing the trust of the public when it comes to pension provision . We urge the government to take on board the urgent task of delivering adequate and sustainable pension policies, and its particular responsibility to educate and inform people of the very real crisis facing them as they get older.' Help the Aged is calling on the government to set the state pension at a'decent and acceptable' level -- one that lifts most pensioners out of means testing. The group also wants pensions to be simplified, with more information provided to help people understand their options and make adequate provisions. And, as part of their anti-age-discrimination campaign, Help the Aged is calling on the public to send a 50th birthday e-card to Tony Blair, welcoming him to 'the scrapheap' of society. The charity aims to remind the Prime Minister in time for his birthday on May 6 that people over 50 suffer discrimination in work and healthcare. The e-card can be sent from the Help the Aged website. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:31:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:31:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: election analysis Message-ID: <008501c3130a$9800dd20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Here's a very mainstream but nonetheless objective take on the parliamentary elections. Swinney's rightward turn is coming under a lot of fire, and the suggestion here is that the SNP could, maybe should, consider adopting a Catalan approach to nationalism -- not "Independence in Europe", but "Freedom within the Union". My comment: there can be no such thing as "freedom within the Union" -- the Union exists to prevent its very possibility. Which is not to say that Curtice's serious suggestion will not have some takers within the party, whose left flank is being gobbled up by the SSP. A more detailed analysis of the media's role in the defeat of the SNP is required, and will hopefully be forthcoming in the not-too-distant future. Weakening a pro-independence party from the left in order to weaken it from the right by gradually co-opting it seems to be emerging as the UK state strategy of choice, in which the SNP finally settles down to becoming HM Loyal Opposition of Scotland to New Labour's state party, with a little light Liberal legitimation thrown in. This makes the high profile party resignations of the likes of Margo Macdonald even more indefensible as a means of furthering the Scottish independence that she supposedly stands for. Instead it allows a few ramshackle narcissists "of independent mind" to posture in full view of the media and earn the affection of news editors and their target markets while the cause of independence gets politically sidelined, to be identified increasingly with the "extremism" of the SSP. Clever stuff, if it works out. Swinney, meanwhile, is the sacrificial lamb, who must either "do a Kinnock" and "transform" his party, or make way for someone even less well-known. Assuming, of course, that Alex Salmond does not return, which would upset a few applecarts. It's hard not to feel sorry for Swinney, who must surely be an awful performer if he is truly perceived to be less than the ideal First Minister that Jack McConnell supposedly represents. Shades of Kinnock once again, as his personal failings were exploited ruthlessly by the Murdoch media in the run-up to the 1992 UK general election. As mentioned above, the role of the news media in this requires a closer examination. ------ Voters didn't reject nationalism ... just the SNP The biggest loser: John Swinney faces some hard questions after appalling election results ... not least his own leadership. By John Curtice The Sunday Herald, 4 May 2003 It is hardly possible to imagine a worse set of results for the SNP. Its share of the vote fell by five points on the first vote and by seven points on the second. Just one in five of those who voted supported the Nationalists on the second vote. This was no more than did so at the last UK general election, even though people are more inclined to vote nationalist in a devolved election than in a Commons contest. Gains from Labour in Aberdeen North, Dundee East and Ochil may have lightened the gloom, but given the way the electoral system works, they did nothing to stop the party paying the full price for the drop in its share of the party list vote -- a net loss of eight seats. So where now for the SNP? This, after all, was a very different SNP campaign from its predecessors -- nationalist lite, designed not to give you bad dreams at night. No longer were voters invited to vote for independence but only for a referendum on independence, an idea which a Mori poll suggested is backed by seven in 10 Scots. No longer were Scots being invited to dream of an oil-rich, high-spending independent Scotland with a Scandinavian-style welfare state, but rather a low-tax, business-friendly Scotland that would emulate the Irish Celtic tiger. And no longer were voters being asked to vote for a bunch of idealistic dreamers, but a group of practical politicians whose first priority was to put more police on the streets and who could fight a slick professional election campaign. Yet none of this did the Nationalists one jot of good. The prospect that the party might one day lead Scotland to independence appears to be as remote as ever. Devolution may, after all, be putting the nationalist genie back in the bottle as some of its more unionist advocates intended. Of course, it can be argued that support for independence has not declined, just support for the SNP. Both the SSP and the Greens favour independence and between them they won another 13% of the second vote. So, in practice, a third of those who voted backed parties supporting independence, much the same proportion that did so four years ago. Trouble is, the SNP are a political party, not a pressure group, and the aim of parties is to win votes for themselves. That the SNP did not do on Thursday. There are two alternatives that now face the SNP. The first is to revert to a more fundamentalist message. A vote for the SNP is a vote for independence. This, it can be argued, will open up some clear tartan water between the SNP and their opponents and inject the kind of passion into Scottish politics that was so badly lacking during much of the election campaign. However, this strategy faces one important barrier. Scots still have to be convinced of the economic case for independence. As this newspaper revealed during the campaign, just 18% of Scots believe they would be better off in an independent Scotland, while 33% believe that they would be worse off. Moreover, those figures have changed little in recent years. The SNP's business-friendly, low-tax, high-growth message either failed to persuade or did not get across to voters. Yet until independence is thought to be economically neutral in its consequences, it seems unlikely that Scots can be persuaded to back it. So any fundamentalist strategy must be one that can convince voters that there is an economically coherent case for independence. If this seems difficult, there is an alternative. This election underlined, if nothing else, the indifference -- if not disillusion -- with which Scots now greet their devolved parliament. Yet if the survey evidence is correct, this is not so much disenchantment with devolution in principle as with devolution in practice, a feeling that the parliament is not powerful enough to make a difference, and thus not important enough to be worth voting for. This creates an opportunity for a party that is willing to renegotiate the devolution settlement to provide for a more powerful Scottish Parliament but not necessarily to make Scotland another member of the United Nations. Freedom within the Union, rather than Independence in Europe, would be its slogan, while fiscal autonomy for the Scottish parliament would be its key policy proposal. It is a message that Labour in particular shows no inclination at all to take up, and one that the Conservatives have considered but so far ducked. Adopting such a message would of course be a considerable wrench for the SNP. It implies adopting the Catalan path of nationalism, looking to increase the powers of the Scottish Parliament gradually and focusing the party's appeal on their ability to stand up for Scotland rather than change Scotland's constitutional status. Whether the party can possibly bear to depart so far from their original raison d'?tre remains to be seen. The success or otherwise of political parties rests, however, not just on the strategies they adopt but the people who attempt to implement them. The SNP lost two skilled lieutenants on Thursday in Michael Russell and Andrew Wilson. They will not be easy to replace. But the party will also have to think about who should be at their helm for the next four years. John Swinney has now led his party through two election campaigns, giving him plenty of opportunity to sell himself to the public and for the public to form a judgment about him. Alas for Mr Swinney, all of the campaign polls -- including one conducted for this paper -- indicated that he has so far failed to persuade the public that he has the qualities they are looking for in a First Minister. And whatever strategy the SNP adopts, it needs to be sold by someone of whom voters will take notice. John Curtice is professor of politics, Strathclyde University From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:43:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:43:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: election analysis Message-ID: <009f01c3130c$4fffb800$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Another objective analysis from the consistently reliable Iain MacWhirter. Again the SNP is coming under fire, and Swinney in particular looks bad. However MacWhirter points out a number of facts that would make even a Salmond resurrection problematic. But he also highlights just how singularly pointless is "Big Margo's" "independence", since it is now the stick most likely to be used against the party that, up to now, was likely to be the main vehicle towards that goal -- one that Margo supposedly supports. Instead, Margo is going to be concentrating on highlighting the spiralling costs of the Scottish parliament building, undoubtedly a fiasco but one which dangerously serves to further undermine the entire legitimacy of the Scottish parliament itself. In other words, she is a gift to Unionism. Scottish A-listers, and maybe English and Welsh ones too, can look forward to many hours of television coverage and acres of newspaper coverage of Margo's "exploits" in the parliamentary term to come. There's a lot to be said for expatriate status. ----- Swinney's Judgement Day Has Arrived Powerplay: Iain MacWhirter says even Alex Salmond may be unable to rescue the nationalists The Sunday Herald, 4 May 2003 IS this the end of the line for the SNP? Has Scottish nationalism finally been 'killed stone dead' by devolution, as George Robertson famously predicted? Not quite. But after this disastrous election, serious questions must be asked about whether the SNP, as it is today, is capable of winning an election in the foreseeable future. It is judgement day for John Swinney. His long-term tenure at the head of the SNP is now in serious doubt. Losing a quarter of your seats is bad enough. Losing some of your ablest figures, like the education and culture spokesman Mike Russell and finance spokesman Andrew Wilson, added insult to injury. But the worst condemnation of Swinney's leadership is that the SNP failed to benefit from a massive protest vote against establishment politics. If the SNP can't attract the votes of the disaffected and the alienated, you wonder what it is in politics for. The SNP is an inspirational party or it is nothing. A nationalist party has to fire the imagination of the people, express and legitimise their grievances, promise a new dawn. The SNP offered, well, a little of what everyone else was offering. Not so much a brighter tomorrow as a duller yesterday. Their headline policy was a promise not to introduce independence without the Scottish people supporting it in a referendum. This is not something likely to ignite the heather. Without independence, the nationalists have no coherent world view, and they are now being challenged by parties that do have them. Indeed, the irony is that the SNP is now outflanked by two new independence parties -- the Scottish Socialists and the Greens -- and by Margo MacDonald, who is still probably the best-known face of Scottish nationalism. The SNP's monopoly has been broken. The Greens have successfully tapped into a strand of environmental consciousness that has long existed in Scotland but has never before found proper political expression. Tommy Sheridan's Scottish Socialists have revived a dormant socialist egalitarianism, an evangelical passion for social justice, which was silenced by New Labour but is on the march again. The SNP's timing has been doubly unfortunate. It sought to emulate New Labour and create a tartan version of synthetic media politics just at the moment when the voters had had enough of it. They staged a good campaign -- everyone said so. Professional, slick, media-savvy. But unfortunately the people are now somewhere else. They've already got one Jack McConnell, and they don't see the need for another one. The SNP has modernised just as modernism became old-fashioned. The SNP campaign had no theme and precious little content. Their policy agenda was reduced to a few police here and a few nurses there, with some smaller class sizes in between. It may seem blindingly obvious, but a party wishing to replace a sitting government has to offer something radically different, or at any rate appear to. The SNP were saying basically what both Labour and the Liberal Democrats were saying. So why should anyone vote for them? The SNP face so many political problems now that you hardly know where to begin. They have to find leadership for a start. John Swinney is a capable political organiser, and a tough politician. But he lacks the charisma and wit to be an inspirational leader. He would never have been installed as leader in the first place, had it not been for the precipitate departure of Alex Salmond in 2000. One of the best politicians of his generation, Salmond was driven out of Holyrood by weariness, not at the constant attacks from Labour, but at the petty niggling and back-biting within his own party. There is, frankly, a mean streak in the SNP. A petty-minded suspicion of politicians who have wit, intelligence and charisma. Politicians, in short, who get above themselves. Mike Russell, another first-class politician, was resented apparently because he doesn't sound Scottish enough and has a big personality. He was dumped down the candidates' list by the wee Nats. Andrew Wilson's main offence was being too clever, too young and too energetic. Really, any party which voluntarily dispenses with the services of people of the calibre of Russell and Wilson, deserves everything it gets. The party will now have to look itself in the face and deal with its own narrow-minded parochialism. But in the end, it probably wasn't the leadership or the petty-minded tendency in the party that did for the SNP at this watershed election, but the policy of independence itself. This election confirms there is, currently, no demand for further constitutional change in Scotland. The anger and frustration at devolution is palpable enough. People expected great things of Holyrood and have rightly been angered at its failure to deliver. But the voters have not drawn the conclusion that Scotland needs to undertake some further constitutional adventure. They don't want a Scottish army, consular apparatus, a Scottish treasury, currency and all the paraphernalia of formal independence. They have enough on their plates right now with the stagnant economy. More powers for Holyrood, certainly, fiscal freedom possibly, but not separation. It was intriguing that the SNP chose to downplay the Independence In Europe slogan during this campaign. Could this be because they realise that actual independence in Europe is becoming increasingly difficult to define, in the age of European monetary and economic convergence and a common European defence and foreign policy? It is difficult to explain to ordinary voters what independence means in the age of ever-closer European union. But hiding the policy won't help. So the SNP's problems are serious: 2003 marks its greatest political and organisational crisis in nearly 25 years, since the days of the '79 group and the expulsion of the socialists. Of course, the SNP isn't going to fade away overnight. It is a big organisation, with a long history and a dedicated activist base. But it is going to have to do some radical thinking in future if it is to get back into the race for power. Already there is speculation that Alex Salmond, the king over the water, will return to revive the SNP in its hour of need. That the local MSP Stewart Stevenson might resign and force a by-election portal through which Salmond could return . Certainly, the former leader is on record as saying he would like to return before 2007 -- the anniversary of the Treaty of Union. Salmond would be young enough and able enough to do the job. However, he is liable to find that you cannot step in the same river twice. Were he to return, he would find the political environment would be very different. The people he used to have around him -- Mike Russell, Andrew Wilson, Kevin Pringle -- will be elsewhere. Many of the new intake of SNP MSPs will regard him as a carpetbagger. Jack McConnell, his mandate renewed, is going to be a much tougher target than in the past. And Salmond will be outflanked by Tommy Sheridan, Margo and the Greens. Scotland, as Salmond himself remarked on election night TV, is now a six-party system. And on top of all that, Salmond redux would have to refashion nationalism for the 21st century. A tall order. But the real crisis for the SNP, the real measure of the party's failure over the last four years, is that there is probably nobody else in the party, other than Alex Salmond, who could come anywhere near meeting the challenge. We could be entering the twilight of Scottish nationalism. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 07:56:32 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:56:32 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Israel lobby Message-ID: <00a701c3130e$229eacc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> It's a rare event when I take exception to Tam Dalyell's criticisms of the British government, but on this occasion he has taken us one step forward, two steps backward. One forward, because he has helped to highlight a very real and influential component of New Labour -- the Israel lobby. We've covered that here recently, when discussing George Galloway's plight. See http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w16/msg00052.htm I forgot to mention there that, on becoming an MP in 1983, one of Tony Blair's first acts was to join "Labour Friends of Israel". And it is this organisation, and the paid-for trips to Israel by a succession of Labour MPs that ought to be the subject of closer investigation, at the very least to highlight the hypocrisy of those accusers of Galloway who decry his supposed personal enrichment courtesy of Saddam Hussein's regime. Nevertheless, Dalyell's choice of words is most unfortunate, and allows him to be painted as a typical, old-fashioned establishmentarian anti-semite. He may be, for all I know, but by allowing, so carelessly, Blair et al off the hook in such a way, he denies credibility to an issue that deserves a much deeper analysis than that normally provided in the mainstream and even left media. Instead it will be the far right that jumps all over this with glee. ----- Labour gives warning to Dalyell CATHERINE MacLEOD The Herald, 5 May 2003 LABOUR may have to deal with Tam Dalyell in the same way as it plans to tackle George Galloway after Mr Dalyell's claims about "a cabal of Jewish advisers" influencing Tony Blair, according to a senior party source. Complaints about the veteran MP's comments could prompt disciplinary proceedings, but Mr Dalyell, the father of the Commons, was unapologetic last night, vehemently denying he was anti-Semitic. However, a senior Labour party figure said: "Normally Tam is regarded simply as a bit of a maverick. Colleagues have a soft spot for him, and there's been no interest or talk about disciplining him. "His latest remarks are quite different. They are anti-Semitic and are quite unacceptable for a Labour MP. . . . Even people who agree with Tam's anti-war position will find his attack on people's ethnic and religious background offensive." Speaking from his home yesterday, Mr Dalyell, said: "The idea of me being anti-Semitic is total rubbish. I have Jewish friends, I have been on holiday in Israel, and I have written endless affectionate obituaries for Jewish people. The idea I'm anti-Semitic is preposterous. "The trouble is that anyone who dares criticise the Zionist operation is immediately labelled anti-Semitic." Mr Dalyell, the MP for Linlithgow, is convinced the US wants to attack Syria in spite of assurances by the prime minister and President Bush. In an article in Vanity Fair, Mr Dalyell cited a number of senior Labour figures: Lord Levy, the prime minister's personal envoy on the Middle East, Peter Mandelson, whose father was Jewish, and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, who has Jewish ancestry. Mr Dalyell, who adopted a robust anti-war stance, believes the prime minister was unduly influenced by Jewish sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic, including Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser, Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary. He said: "They have very much captured the ear of the US president. I said to (Vanity Fair) I thought that Blair was very sympathetic to them. I cannot understand why." Brian Fairley, Mr Dalyell's constituency agent, was unaware of Mr Dalyell's remarks yesterday but predicted that officials in the constituency would not be "having a go at Tam" since that was the nature of their relationship. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 08:00:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 17:00:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: now out for Dalyell Message-ID: <00b701c3130e$c0726c20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Dalyell may face race hatred inquiry Nicholas Watt, political correspondent Monday May 5, 2003 The Guardian Tam Dalyell, the veteran Labour MP and opponent of countless wars, faces an investigation for inciting racial hatred after he accused Tony Blair of being unduly influenced by Jewish ministers and officials. As leading British Jews criticised Mr Dalyell for his "misguided" remarks, a former Labour MP said he would refer the father of the Commons to the commission for racial equality. Professor Eric Moonman, president of the Zionist Federation, who was a Labour MP from 1966 to 1979, said he was seeking advice on whether there was a case for referral. "I believe there is," he said. "I will be distressed to do it because of a relationship with a man I admire enormously," Prof Moonman said. "But he made the statements and he knew what he was doing." The row started when Mr Dalyell, who for 20 years has opposed every war involving British soldiers, told Vanity Fair magazine that Mr Blair relied too much on Jewish figures in Britain and the US. Mr Dalyell named the former cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and the prime minister's Middle East envoy, Lord Levy. Only Lord Levy is Jewish. Mr Mandelson's father was Jewish and Mr Straw had a Jewish grandfather. Mr Dalyell said: "I am worried about my country being led up the garden path on a Likudnik, [Ariel] Sharon agenda", adding that "Straw, Mandelson and co" were leading "a tremendous drive to sort out the Middle East". Mr Dalyell's critics took exception after it was claimed that he felt Mr Blair was influenced by a "cabal" of Jewish advisers. But Mr Dalyell said he used the word cabal only in reference to the Bush administration, not Downing Street. "The cabal that I referred to was in the US," he said. "That is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. I was thinking of [Paul] Wolfowitz, [deputy defence secretary], [Richard] Perle, [John] Bolton, assistant secretary of state, [Douglas] Feith, [Ken] Adelman, [Elliott] Abrams and [Ari] Fleischer, [Mr Bush's press secretary.] Those people drive this policy." But Jewish figures were furious. David Garfinkel, the editor in chief of the London Jewish News, said: "Coming a few days after the BNP won council seats in the north of England this is the kind of menacing candour which the country certainly does not need." Ministers were also aghast. One said: "Quite apart from how offensive his remarks are, Tam is wrong. Tony and Jack have faced strong criticism in Israel because of their pressure for the road map to be published." Mr Dalyell denied he was anti-semitic. "If I were anti-semitic I would not have spent a holiday in Israel, I would not have gone as a young man to stay on a kibbutz. To say I am anti-semitic is preposterous." He also said he had been parliamentary private secretary to former cabinet minister Dick Crossman, who was something of a hero in Israel. Crossman became close to Chaim Weizman, who was Israel's first president. "Would Dick Crossman have had an anti-semitic gentile as his PPS? I identify with the Weizman tradition. This is not about being anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 5 08:02:39 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 17:02:39 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK corporate state: unhealthy accumulation Message-ID: <00bf01c3130e$fcfb3fa0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> NHS is being railroaded Larry Elliott Monday May 5, 2003 The Guardian In 1995, there were plenty of Cassandras warning that privatisation of the railways would be a disaster. Reluctant to accept the Conservative argument that the problem was one of structure rather than financial starvation, the left said that breaking up British Rail would lead to fragmentation, a poorer service and financial trouble. Those concerns proved to be well founded. Privatisation of the railways was an act of sabotage that the government is now seeking to remedy by renationalisation (in all but name) plus the promise (as yet unfulfilled) of extra resources to fund improvements to services. The experience of Railtrack helps to explain why so many Labour backbenchers are concerned about foundation hospitals. Many are unconvinced by the government's assertions that they are just a sprucing up of Bevan's 1948 edifice for a world of consumer choice. They do not want to look back in five years' time and see that giving reluctant support to this policy led down a long and slippery slope to the same sort of fragmentation that crippled the railways. The fact that the right's objection to the government's plans is that they do not go far enough has only served to stoke these anxieties. Many mainstream Labour MPs are worried when they hear that there is a thirst for more radical policies at the heart of government because they see this as shorthand for moving policy to the right. In the new lexicon of politics, to be conservative means spending more money on public services, to be radical involves off-balance sheet borrowing, co-payments, top-up fees and vouchers. Labour's entire focus is now on delivery, inviting voters to judge whether the money being spent on public services has made a difference. Politically, this is dangerous, as last week's local elections showed, because it invites all the other parties to run against the government on the basis that it is not delivering. Liberal Democrats can say it is because not enough is being spent, Conservatives can say extra money is pointless without changes to structures, and so on. This is particularly true of the health service, where there is ill-disguised - and premature - panic that the extra billions being pumped in have not yet transformed the NHS. A more sensible approach would be to invite the public to choose which sort of NHS it wants, a Labour one or a Tory one. Devolved locally Alan Milburn says all the fears are groundless. The NHS will remain a service funded by the taxpayer and free at the point of delivery. All that will happen is that foundation hospitals will be given greater freedom to offer the sort of service patients want. It is ridiculous, he adds, to have a command and control system run from the Department of Health for an organisation that has 1.3m staff. The NHS needs to see power devolved locally in order to do its job better, and the idea that this will create a two-tier health service ignores the fact that we already have a two-tier health service, to the detriment of the poorest groups. Few would disagree with any of that, provided that there is no hidden agenda and no risk of the law of unintended consequences delivering outcomes that would horrify Labour supporters. The unions certainly think there might be. Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary said last week that unions were not convinced that foundation hospitals would "deliver the improvements we all want to see. Instead these proposals have provoked powerful fears that a coherent NHS will be undermined by the injection of more market processes that will exacerbate rather than diminish inequalities in health provision." One area of special interest to those with misgivings about the bill due to be debated on Wednesday is the role of the regulator for foundation hospitals. The idea of a watchdog arose early on, when there was pressure for foundation hospitals to be allowed to borrow off-balance sheet, with the money repaid by an expansion in private work. This debate ended with victory for the Treasury, with off-balance sheet borrowing prevented and a cap put on private work. This should have removed the need for the regulator, but the post is still crucial to the bill. This is no sinecure but a job with considerable and largely unaccountable powers. What does the regulator do? Put simply, he or she will have powers to set services, sanction borrowing and allow sale of assets in every foundation hospital. Between them, a foundation hospital and the regulator would agree a licence setting out which core services must be provided and the amounts the hospital would be allowed to borrow from the private sector. The regulator will also decide how big a slice of the NHS's capital budget each foundation hospital receives. All this may be innocuous. The regulator's role may be limited to policing the licence to ensure the foundation hospital is doing what was agreed, to prevent poaching of staff, to give the go-ahead to sell off car parks and other bits of unwanted land, and to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of the investment spewing out of the Treasury. If so, fine. Another possibility, however, is that the health regulator will be "captured" by the foundation hospitals in the way that the rail regulator will be captured by Railtrack. The concern is that the role will be seen as lobbying the Treasury for extra cash for foundation hospitals at the expense of non-foundation hospitals. In addition, the regulator has the scope to change the boundaries between monopoly and non-monopoly NHS services, opening the door to greater competition with the private sector. Nor is the power to distinguish which assets can be sold off quite as straightforward as it seems. If hip replacements are open to competition, should the hip unit be a regulated asset (which could not be sold off to the private sector) or a non-regulated asset (which could)? Foundation hospitals have an incentive to classify their assets as non-regulated, because they are able to borrow against these. Staging post It is unclear how this will work in practice. There are enough grey areas to suggest that the role of the regulator, to put it mildly, needs to be scrutinised carefully if and when the bill gets to committee stage. There is all the difference in the world, the health secretary says, between the limited autonomy he is offering and the sort of vision put forward by Liam Fox for the Conservatives. It is not difficult, however, to see this as an early staging post on the road to a system where every hospital is a foundation hospital, every patient has a voucher and top-up fees are allowed for those who want something other than basic public provision. Something like this system is already in place for dentistry, and there are plenty in Labour's ranks who fear that the whole NHS is heading down the same route. It is premature to call foundation hospitals Railtrack on the wards, but as one said last week: "Once you take the first step down the road, where do you go next?" From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Mon May 5 13:16:49 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:16:49 -0300 Subject: [A-List] EL PROYECTO LIBERTADOR DEL MNyP/ Un articulo de Walter Moore Message-ID: <4132-22003515191649840@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98122003-05-05T18:47:00Z2003-05-05T18:49:00Z7328818743win15637230179.3821 21 EL PROYECTO LIBERTADOR DEL MNyP ( Nota recomendada para progresistas, comunistas y socialistas a la violeta que creen que los muertos de la represi?n, los desaparecidos y el exilio los pusieron ellos y no los peronistas, como fue en realidad, empezando por los dirigentes sindicales que cosecharon la mayor de las bajas durante el Proceso de Videla, Massera y Agosti). EL LIDERAZGO POLITICO DE ADOLFO RODRIGUEZ SA? PROPONE UNA DEFENSA EFECTIVA DE LA ARGENTINA ANTE LAS AMENAZAS DE LA GLOBALIZACI?N Por Walter A. Moore (*) LA ESTRUCTURA DE DOMINACI?N GLOBAL EN MARCHA El Proyecto Imperial de Gobierno Mundial impulsado por la coalici?n anglonorteamericana es m?s amplio que la invasi?n directa, que es s?lo un recurso de ?ltima instancia, pues conocen ? perfectamente el costo en desprestigio internacional que conlleva esta forma de dominaci?n. Las apremiantes necesidades que llevaron a esta acci?n en Irak son aclaradas por el profesor norteamericano de la Universidad de Columbia, Jeffery D. Sachs, publicado antes de la invasi?n a Irak en la p?gina 15 de La Naci?n del 2 de febrero de 2003, luego comprobadas por los hechos, donde, entre otros datos, menciona: ?Algunos documentos clave, escritos por y para el gobierno de Bush antes del 11 de setiembre de 2001, cuando el an?lisis del Medio Oriente estaba mucho menos inficionado de los temores actuales, abren una buena ventana hacia la pol?tica norteamericana de posguerra en Irak. El m?s interesante es, quiz?s, un estudio titulado ?Desaf?os del siglo XXI a la pol?tica estrat?gico en materia de Energ?a?, elaborado en forma conjunta por el Instituto James Baker III de Pol?tica P?blica de la Universidad Rice, en Texas, y el Consejo de Relaciones Exteriores (CFR). ?El estudio deja claro dos puntos. Primero: Irak es vital para el flujo de petr?leo desde el Medio Oriente, porque se asienta sobre la segunda reserva en el mundo (en volumen). Los autores del estudio se angustian porque, de hecho, Estado Unidos necesita el petr?leo iraqu? por razones de seguridad econ?mica, pero no puede permitir que Saddam Hussein lo explote por razones de seguridad militar. La inferencia parece obvia: Estados Unidos necesita un cambio de r?gimen en Irak por motivos de seguridad energ?tica. En todo el estudio no figura ni una sola vez la palabra ?democracia?. El Consejo de Relaciones Exteriores es, nada m?s y nada menos, que la organizaci?n que designa a ? los principales dirigentes que ocupan los niveles decisorios de la pol?tica de Estados Unidos, tanto en el gobierno como en las grandes corporaciones. El CFR es uno de los c?rculos m?s exclusivo que tiene aparici?n p?blica, (de los que detentan el Poder Global), desde el cual se dan a conocer las instrucciones estrat?gicas del Imperio destinadas a instalar un Gobierno Mundial elegido por las elites dominantes anglonorteamericanas. Este proyecto se basa principalmente en cinco estrategias sin?rgicas: ? 1.) El control mundial de las monedas y los activos financieros, 2.) La subordinaci?n de toda la producci?n a las necesidades del capital concentrado mundial, en especial la producci?n de commodities y la de alta tecnolog?a, 3.) El manejo de los medios de difusi?n y los sistemas de comunicaci?n, 4.) La diminuci?n de las capacidades de la poblaci?n de los pa?ses a controlar (inclusive la poblaci?n de sus propios pa?ses) y 5.) El control territorial, tanto por medios econ?micos como b?licos, variante que se ha aplicado ahora en Irak, y de la cual prometen una expansi?n a todo el planeta. Veamos cada una de estas estrategias globales con un poco de mayor detalle: Estrategia 1.) EL CONTROL MONETARIO Y FINANCIERO: El Fondo Monetario Internacional es el organismo responsable de subordinar todas las monedas locales al d?lar y generar el endeudamiento permanente con el sistema bancario mundial. La primera variante de esta estrategia fue un motivo principal de la reciente invasi?n, para imponer definitivamente a los petrod?lares sobre los petroeuros que usaba Irak en su programa ?Petr?leo por alimentos?. Batalla que reci?n comienza, y produce una alineaci?n en dos modelos diferentes del modelo de Gobierno Mundial: el modelo ?republicano? que busca la participaci?n de las Naciones Unidas, impulsada por Europa continental y el modelo ?imperial? impulsado por la coalici?n angloparlante. La segunda variante la padecemos en la Argentina y en toda Sudam?rica, implementada por el control de la emisi?n, la circulaci?n monetaria y la tasa de cambio de nuestras monedas con respecto al d?lar, actividad que est? a cargo de los Bancos Centrales locales, cuyos funcionarios son designados indefectiblemente entre empleados de empresas de Wall Street. Estos se ocupan de limitar la cantidad de moneda nacional en circulaci?n para convertir al dinero en un bien escaso que paga tasas de inter?s del 40% anual, o m?s, mientras los pa?ses industrializados pagan tasas de referencia del 1,5% anual, y que establecen las continuas devaluaciones de nuestras monedas para revalorizar un d?lar que no tiene respaldo real ? . Estrategia 2.) APROPIACI?N PRODUCTIVA: Jeffrey Sachs explic? lo que sucede con el petr?leo, este mismo razonamiento puede aplicarse a todas las principales actividades productivas, comenzando por los commodities (cereales, gas, carne, acero, algod?n, etc.) y siguiendo por cualquier tipo de producci?n industrial. Esto se logra mediante el control de las exportaciones e importaciones que tienen los grupos externos de capital concentrado, la corrupci?n aduanera y legislativa. Cuando no se abren las aduanas al dumping internacional, se elimina el cr?dito a la producci?n y se hacen quebrar a las empresas mediante un costo del financiamiento que devora cualquier utilidad y capacidad de inversi?n empresaria. En los pa?ses sometidos, adem?s, se procura que los recursos se vuelquen a actividades improductivas, como el pago de intereses, la asignaci?n presupuestaria a la corrupci?n estructural, el incremento de la burocracia, las actividades de beneficencia (subsidios al desempleo, a las actividades improductivas, etc.) entre otras medidas destinadas a generar desempleo, pobreza y marginalidad. Estrategia 3.) CONTROL PSICOL?GICO: El manejo de los medios de difusi?n contra nuestros propios intereses es cada vez m?s desembozado. Hoy vemos como la prensa argentina impulsa un candidato a presidente perfeccionado en la Universidad de Chicago, a pesar de que fue expulsado como ministro de econom?a del gobierno fracasado de De la Rua por la reacci?n de la poblaci?n argentina ante sus medidas destructoras de la econom?a nacional. El control de estos medios por el Gobierno Global permite que los medios de difusi?n (televisi?n, medios gr?ficos, radios, etc.) propagandicen un sistema social degradado por la falta de valores y el nihilismo (o sea de la falta de una conciencia del bien com?n), donde los ciudadanos son progresivamente incapacitados para pensar en cuales son sus propios intereses, al mismo tiempo que se propicia una creciente degradaci?n de las costumbres, estableciendo como un ideal la decadencia general. Esta pol?tica alcanza tambi?n a todos los sistemas de comunicaciones bidireccionales (telefon?a, Internet, etc.), los cuales mediante una pol?tica de ?privatizaciones? (l?ase extranjerizaci?n) se ponen en manos de sociedades an?nimas extranjeras, y si esto no es posible, se controlan mediante la dosificaci?n de la tecnolog?a, en especial de las disponibilidades satelitales. Estrategia 4.) DEBILITAR LAS POBLACIONES: Este manejo de los medios de difusi?n es esencial para disminuir tanto el crecimiento de las poblaciones (mediante medidas de control de natalidad, incremento de la mortalidad, imposibilidad de constituir familias estables, etc.) y la disminuci?n progresiva de sus capacidades f?sicas, mentales y espirituales, empezando por la poblaci?n de sus propios pa?ses, a las que tienen que convencer para que vayan a matar y morir en las guerras, pues esta no es una tarea que hagan, precisamente, los miembros del CFR. Para esto es necesario convencerlos sobre los peligros que corren, como el Mal los acecha porque los pobres del mundo est?n envidiosos de sus riquezas y por eso les atacan las Torres Gemelas y otras estupideces por el estilo. Otra forma de debilitamiento espiritual es una educaci?n mecanicista, que no forma sino que informa. Tambi?n se ocupan de instalar una inestabilidad econ?mica que impide concentrarse cualquier actividad creativa, sobre todo si esta puede cambiar alguna estructura funcional para la dominaci?n. Utilizan formas de ataque constante a nuestra autoestima, por ejemplo, haci?ndonos los responsables de nuestros propios males, entre otras muchas formas destinadas a disminuir las capacidades de nuestros pueblos. El ?pensamiento ?nico? o postmoderno impulsado por el neoliberalismo nos ?Alerta sobre los desastres que trae consigo el ?populismo? y se lleva al extremo de presentar casi como ventajas que la gente pase hambre, que no se trabaje en un continente donde todo est? por hacerse, que los chicos est?n desnutridos en un pa?s que produce alimentos para nutrir a 10 veces su poblaci?n, a los que se agrega un estruendoso silencio sobre un conjunto de temas vitales de los que ?no se habla?, acallando las conciencias c?mplices por omisi?n mediante un modesto espacio para la ?protesta?, ya sea en forma de denuncias, de expresiones de deseo o de declaraciones que no generan acci?n. Estrategia 5.) CONTROL TERRITORIAL: El proyecto de separar la Patagonia de la Argentina (y tal vez de Chile), de crear ?nuevas banderas? dividiendo a nuestros pa?ses, es una medida que? requiere una estrategia de largo plazo, y que comienza con el proceso de instalar la idea. Un par de a?os despu?s los medios inventar?n algo que hace aparecer a esta idea como algo ?razonable y conveniente?, y luego pondr?n en marcha el ej?rcito de cipayos (comprados por un plato de lentejas) que apoyar?n el proyecto. Esta es una estrategia extrema, como la ocupaci?n militar de Malvinas, existen otras m?s sigilosas, como la compra de millones de hect?reas por ?inversionistas extranjeros? y la apropiaci?n, por los bancos que forman la trama central del Imperio Global, de otros bancos nacionales que poseen carteras con enormes cantidades de inmuebles hipotecados, generalmente con intereses impagables. Para asegurarse que no existir? una resistencia importante en ?el momento de la verdad?, es decir cuando el virrey imperial se haga cargo, es necesario que se desprestigien primero y se destruyan despu?s, nuestras fuerzas armadas, para lo cual se llevan a cabo intensas actividades de guerra psicol?gica a nivel mundial, que hagan ?razonable? imponer un bloqueo, seguido de un desarme y un desmantelamiento de la capacidad productiva f?sica, tal como hicieron Irak, pa?s en el cual, Naciones Unidas mediante, lograron desarmarlos y debilitarlos durante 10 a?os, para despu?s? exterminarlos con p?rdidas aceptables para el mercado interno norteamericano. EL PROYECTO LIBERADOR Con el Plan de 125 medidas para los 100 primeros d?as (o sea antes de que las fuerzas imperiales organicen a sus aliados locales como para impedir todo cambio), Rodr?guez Sa? se opone en forma sistem?tica estos cinco vectores estrat?gicos imperiales mediante cinco formas de contramedidas, a saber: Contramedida 1.) Instalar una moneda nacional fuerte y una moneda continental m?s fuerte a?n. Reducir el peso econ?mico de la Deuda Externa, separando la deuda real de la mentira contable, suprimir las aduanas interiores en toda Sudam?rica, con lo cual la necesidad de divisas para el intercambio internacional es m?nima. Y la ?nica manera de tener una moneda fuerte es que los intereses sean muy bajos y la moneda abundante de manera que todo el circuito productor de riqueza (demanda ? producci?n ? empleo ? ingresos ? demanda) funcione, reactivando el 90% de la econom?a que, tradicionalmente, pertenece al mercado interno, ampliado as? a 350 millones de sudamericanos. Contramedida 2.) Impulsar un fuerte desarrollo del sistema productivo, empezando por la obra p?blica y la creaci?n de puestos de trabajo en lugar de ?Planes descansar? que generan una miseria creciente. Dar prioridad al desarrollo de grandes proyectos con la aplicaci?n de los recursos nacionales disponibles al eliminar la corrupci?n estructural, concentrar el apoyo crediticio en el sector productivo y limitar las cargas hipotecarias que este soporta. Un enorme mercado interno demandante es un im?n para empresas productoras con grandes capacidades ociosas, lo cual permite impulsar un fuerte desarrollo industrial que puede prescindir casi completamente del la famosa ?invarsi?n extranjera?, que s?lo gener? desfalcos ?privatizados?, concesiones a cambio de nada, etc. Contramedida 3.) Revisar las privatizaciones y extranjerizaciones, como una primera medida para recuperar la capacidad de decisi?n nacional en temas centrales como los medios de difusi?n, las telecomunicaciones, la energ?a y los transportes. A esto debemos agregar la puesta en marcha de las abandonadas y prestigiosas industrias culturales argentinas, poniendo en marcha un Plan que tiene previsto la asignaci?n de los recursos para los trabajadores de la cultura y no a la actual burocracia de los ?agentes culturales?. La previsible explosi?n creativa de estas medidas permite prever un cambio sustancial en todos nuestros medios de expresi?n, en el cual no quedar? lugar para las actividades de promoci?n de las estrategias de nuestros enemigos. Contramedida 4.) Trabajo y m?s trabajo. Un pueblo que trabaja es un pueblo que necesita educarse permanentemente para seguir el ritmo de los vertiginosos cambios ? que ocurren en todo el planeta, tanto en el campo tecnol?gico como cultural. Un pueblo que trabaja es un pueblo que se alimenta bien, que tiene sus viviendas donde puede crecer su familia, que se integra a una comunidad dejando atr?s la marginaci?n. La ?nica forma de crear riqueza es el trabajo productivo en el campo de la econom?a f?sica, creando bienes, servicios y conocimientos, y esta idea atraviesa a todas las medidas del proyecto de Rodr?guez Sa?. Contramedida 5.) La garant?a de integridad territorial de la Argentina. En la actual situaci?n mundial de avance imperial, esta integridad s?lo puede lograrse mediante la integraci?n regional. La propuesta de constituir una Naci?n Sudamericana, con su propia Constituci?n, moneda, Banco Central, Aduana externa com?n y con grandes proyectos de integraci?n, tanto de nuestros pueblos como de los recursos f?sicos y productivos son la mejor garant?a para preservar la integridad territorial de nuestro pa?s. La propuesta para construir un promedio de 150.000 viviendas cada seis meses, equivale a crear mensualmente en la Argentina una ciudad de 100.000 habitantes. No se trata solo de una propuesta para suplir el horroroso d?ficit de viviendas que ha crecido durante un cuarto de siglo, sino de? refundar un pa?s con un equilibrio poblacional completamente distinto al actual modelo de concentraci?n urbana, un interminable suburbio que crece mientras genera una creciente degradaci?n de la calidad de la vida de sus habitantes. (*). Walter Moore es escritor, autor de los siguientes libros: La Ecodemocracia,. La Cuarta Guerra Mundial y El Proyecto Sudam?rica. Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP, deben suscribirse en :< altasmnyp at argentina.com > y altasmnyp at mnyp.org . Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en los barrios. La mesa de mujeres Adolfo Presidente nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos < mujeresbsas at argentina.com y mujeresbsas at mnyp.org En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a < bajasmnyp at argentina.com y bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista, con las debidas disculpas. PARA UN ARGENTINO, NO DEBE HABER NADA MEJOR QUE OTRO ARGENTINO. Mayo de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa? . Nuestras paginas web son: www.institutofederal.org http://www.mnyp.org/ www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA , y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 125 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presento el 7 de marzo de 2003, en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, que Ud. puede pedir por mail al MNyP < mnyp at ciudad.com.ar > , personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486 Por decision del Dr. Adolfo Rodriguez Saa manifestada en la reunion del Comando Superior del MNyP en Buenos Aires el martes 10 de septiembre de 2002, no se recibe ni se permiten recibir aportes economicos empresarios a los gastos de campa?a de manera encubierta o desmedida salvo de las pymes que acuden a nuestras cenas organizadas por el Comite Recaudador de Fondos para recaudar aportes genuinos del esfuerzo que hacen nuestros amigos que ganan bien y han estado pagando una cuota mensual para sumar al esfuerzo. Esto es asi porque se desea llegar al gobierno nacional con las manos libres para poder hacer efectiva la revolucion nacional y popular sin ningun compromiso con los factores de poder. El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. El Comando Superior Nacional esta compuesto por: Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?, Adrian Morales, Alberto Hensel, Alberto Rodriguez Sa?, Alberto Turcato, Aldo Rico, Alfredo Allende, Alfredo Reto, Amparo Cueto, Ana Savignano, Andres Poggi, Andres Castillo, Arturo Negri, Oscar B?nica, Bold?, Carlos Sergnese, Catalina Pantuso, Coqui Catal?n, Cristina Guzm?n, Daniel Barberis, Daniel Carbonetto, Domingo Moreira, Dorita Lucero, Eduardo Avila, Eduardo Berchot, Enrique Basualdo Enrique Rodriguez, Enrique Vignolo, Eugenia Trigo, Federico Godio, Gerardo Alzamora, Gerardo Vallejo, Gilda Caro, Gisela Vartalitis, Giuliano, Gustavo Casas, Gustavo Valenzuela, Hector Mart?n, Horacio Ghilini, Horacio Obregon Cano, Hugo Moyano, Jeronimo Martoccia, Jes?s Mar?a Tito Plaza, Jorge Benalcazar, Jorge Cravero, Jorge Garcia, Jorge Huidobro, Jorge Enea Spilimbergo, Jorge Rachid, Jorge Varela, Jose Rodr?guez, Juan Garcia, Juan Manuel Palacios, Julian Licastro, Julio Casavelos, Juanchi Moreyra, Julio Diaz Lozano, Julio Piumato, Liliana Finocciaro, Leon Guinzburg, Luis Luco, Luis Lusqui?os, Marcos Garcia, Maria Alejandra Ungaro, Maria Alicia Lemme, Maria Angelica Torrontegui, Maria Berganini, Maria Goniel, Marino Fredes, Mario Alvarez, Martin Garcia, Melchor Posse, Miriam Benedetto, Mirta Videla, N?lida Beatriz Morales, Nestor Zapata, Norberto Hubeli, Pablo Challu, Pablo Moyano, Pascual Rampi, Patricia P?rez, Pedro Raitieri, Ricardo Basualdo, Ricardo Jorge, Roberto Basualdo, Roberto Roitman, Rosa Carrasco, Santiago Julio, Sofia Gonzalez, Soledad Sampaolesi, Victor Novillo, Walter Gomez. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP< mnyp at ciudad.com.ar , < mnypnacional at argentina.com La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . El Area de Participaci?n Nacional del Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina invita a todos los amigos a visitar la P?gina web del IFRA que es http://www.institutofederal.org /y la del IFRA Chubut. cuya direcci?n es : http://www.geocities.com/ifrachubut En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 51179 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon May 5 13:52:46 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 12:52:46 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Fw: [R-G] Re: elections References: <001d01c312d0$ee8384c0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <00a901c3133f$e6d65760$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Enoch" . > You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open > and > their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think > there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and > audited > if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with > computerized vote counts. > > You'd be wrong. I would like to ask A-Listers what they think the information contained in this email means to our analysis of A) "2004" B) what we need to do about this. If this is true, does it not mean everything else is at least *partially* subordinate? Can we please engage this elephant in the living room? Macdonald From soncu at pacbell.net Mon May 5 15:14:59 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 14:14:59 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Netherlands: Attempted coup to topple CNN Message-ID: Attempted coup to topple CNN unsuccessful in the Netherlands 05/05/2003, europemedia.net Editor: David Minto Programming Councils in two of the Netherlands northern most provinces ? Groningen and Drenthe ? attempted to launch a broadcasting coup at the end of last week by advising cable company Essent to drop CNN from its standard TV package. The councils maintained that CNN, Essent's international news broadcaster of choice, was too 'pro-American' and had failed to report objectively during the recent conflict in Iraq. They suggested the cable operator instead switch to EuroNews, the pan-European and multilingual news channel that, free of territorial dependence, claims also to be without political or religious bias. According to Expatica.com, Essent issued an immediate response to the councils' assertion saying that its current broadcast package with CNN is sufficiently balanced. "Earlier studies have not shown that EuroNews and BBC World are more highly valued than CNN," Essent said. Many European and international commentators, however, have been vociferous in their criticism of American network coverage of the Iraq conflict, with CNN's employment of retired Generals as commentators and its minimal representation anti-war voices drawing much of the wrath. Though CNN Europe has different, and many would say more balanced, editorial content than its American counterpart, resistance in Europe to acknowledging it as a primary international news source is still strong in many quarters. Amsterdam viewers, for instance, also have access to BBC World and EuroNews through their cable services, networks currently denied to their Essent subscribing northern countrymen. Article at: http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16169 From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 5 15:13:48 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 17:13:48 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: [R-G] Re: elections References: <001d01c312d0$ee8384c0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> <00a901c3133f$e6d65760$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <003c01c3134b$39837fa0$c9b7fea9@anne> This doesn't directly address Macdonald's query of "what do we do about it [the elephant]," i.e. rigged electronic voting in the next election. But I found this piece quite interesting, and there's some information that might be useful in thinking about opposition candidates and strategy. -A. The Non-Clinton by Christopher Manion As W strutted across the carrier deck in the Mayday twilight, it occurred to me that he had broken more campaign promises more profoundly than any American president since FDR in 1932. No one cares. The reason why should not be forgotten. W was not elected for his promises. He was elected as the non-Clinton. Cast your memory back, if you can stand it, to 1998, and the painful, endless saga of Monica, of impeachment, of Hillary pretty in pink. In my favorite phrase coined by Pat Buchanan, it made you want to throw up your hands - or just throw up. In the midst of all this national indigestion, heavyweight Republicans resolved to find an antidote. Already in 1998, major money was looking for a winner. By 1999 it had decided on W. Unity was absolutely indispensable to victory. Alan Keyes and Orrin Hatch and Gary whatshisname were just window-dressing, there to help W rehearse. The fact that W didn't emerge head and shoulders above the rest in their frequent and dispiriting encounters did bring some pause, even cringes, but the die was cast. There was no turning back. All during 1999, planeloads of potential potentates flew to Austin. W met with foreign policy experts, economic experts, profamily experts, lobbyists for every possible cause, and, of course, donors, donors, and more donors. The key role of donors cannot be ignored. Huge money was looking for a winning alternative to our long national nightmare. The money men had their own purposes, as revealed in W's subsequent explosion of the federal budget with so many of his supporters and their favorite causes receiving millions, even billions. But W's flacks knew they could win only if their man could find resonance with the national mood. So the idea men and the issue men and the money men descended on Austin. W held endless meetings, where everyone got his turn, W asked questions. Karl and Karen kept score. Several of those graced with such an audience came back to Washington and called everybody they knew. I assume this because several of them even called me. "Chris, I think W's going to be the guy, and, if you decide to support him, I'd appreciate your giving your donation through me." Such "bundling" the nation had never seen before. Like the voice of Gatsby's Daisy, W's campaign was full of money. Real conservatives stood on the sidelines, trembling at the prospects. W had no anchor, no lodestar, no sure grasp of principle. He sat in Austin like a thimble inundated by waterfalls - special interests, ideas and policies pouring in and spilling out. No one knew, when the "real" W emerged, whose agendas those few drops he managed to retain would reflect. Big money watched and cringed at "fuzzy math" and "Christ." Silently they wondered, would their issues survive? They didn't know. But the die was cast. Why? W was the non-Clinton. Clinton was pompous. W was humble. Gauleiter Gore was a policy geek who couldn't shut up; W would stumble into silence between glib blurted phrases. A cavalier Clinton had sent troops and rockets worldwide. W. pledged a "humble," not an "arrogant," America. W, the non-Clinton, could win. Not all of this pleased the money men. They knew their agendas required a forceful, even arrogant president when it came to their private agendas. They feared that W, like the last Texan president, had a huge inferiority complex. As LBJ's fellow Democrat Senator, Eugene McCarthy, told me, "Lyndon was afraid Jack's brain trust would desert him after Dallas. He begged me, and everybody else in the Senate, to persuade them to stay on." Cheney, officially the staff man in charge of VP candidates, perceived W's inferiority problem, and eventually came to realize he had to rescue him. He quietly played to W's fears, at the same time oozing assurance and affability. By that fateful weekend in July 2000, the deadline for picking a veep, Cheney suddenly became the only candidate. W could relax. By the way, this weakness wrought plenty of "collateral damage." The Cheney do-se-do explains the Waco whitewash issued by the "independent" commission the same weekend. Jack Danforth, all along insisting he did not want to be veep, nonetheless hastily issued his Waco whitewash on Friday afternoon so he could use the weekend to finish putting together the exhaustive financial reports that Cheney required from all the potentials. Danforth knew that a tough report would put him out of the running. So Cheney, who had no stomach for the Waco wackos, had deftly killed two birds with one stone (i.e., Danforth and the rest of us). Until that point in the campaign, W was an empty suit. There is a reason, after all, why Bill Kristol supported McCain, and not W, in the primaries. Like virtually everyone else, he had no idea where W would finally come on the key issues (in Kristol's case, Israel). W was a big, cash-laden question mark. Cheney quickly began running things - as he has ever since. Now W is riding high. Liberals like David Broder praise him for leadership and neocons like Krauthammer applaud his "deep understanding" - but only because he has systematically expanded government power to pursue their favorite goals, and has broken his campaign promises big-time - something else liberals always like in a Republican. So W smirked at the world, with the setting sun and the sea-weary sailors behind him on the carrier deck. He had beaten Clinton as a humble man who knew his limitations and who distrusted the way things work in Washington. Now he has cast aside his humility, forgotten his limitations (even as we have come to know them all too well), and succumbed to the way things work in Washington. He sent the message of endless war to the world, flexing his fighter-bomber muscles on prime-time TV. The American government's power has no peer, and no limits. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings." If W's luck holds up, he'll be running against Hillary in 2004. If he does, the "non-Clinton" will win again. If the Democrats do not serve up that gift horse (so to speak), the country might be faced with a race between W and a "non-Bush." At that point, if W stumbles, he might see all those fawning supporters suddenly disappear, as they flit off to settle on a fresh horse. Karl Rove will have to take a quiet moment and explain that W's "supporters of convenience " were only summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, who do not believe in permanent alliances, political or otherwise. They have their own agendas, after all. In other words, one misstep, and they will turn on him at the drop of a dime. I'm told that W is a prayerful man. Perhaps he believes in miracles. May 5, 2003 Christopher Manion writes from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Copyright ? 2003 LewRockwell.com From bar at idirect.com Mon May 5 14:31:19 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:31:19 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Film exposing Pentagon war crimes premieres in US Message-ID: <012c01c31350$8f0cd480$c70a9ad8@computer> ----- Original Message ----- From: Kamal at Sympatico To: gilak at sympatico.ca Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 8:19 PM Subject: Film exposing Pentagon war crimes premieres in US http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/afgh-f12_prn.shtml Afghan Massacre?Convoy of Death available on video Film exposing Pentagon war crimes premieres in US By Bill Vann 12 February 2003 A powerful film exposing the US role in the massacre of thousands of unarmed prisoners of war in Afghanistan was shown for the first time in the United States February 6. The US premiere of Afghan Massacre?Convoy of Death was held at American University before a largely student audience. Made by Irish documentary filmmaker Jamie Doran, who was present for the premiere, Afghan Massacre has already been broadcast on national television in Britain, Germany, Australia and Italy, and rights to broadcast it have been sold to networks in a total of 24 countries. Afghan Massacre is now available on video and can be purchased at the web site of Doran?s film company, Atlantic Celtic Film Corporation at www.acftv.net . Brief video excerpts from the film are posted on Oneworld TV at After a rough cut of the film was screened before the European Parliament last year, it became the subject of articles and commentaries in virtually every major newspaper in Europe, prompting demands by human rights organizations and lawyers for an official investigation. In the US, however, the film has been subjected to a near-total blackout by the media and unremitting hostility from the Bush administration, which unsuccessfully pressured the German government to stop its broadcast in that country. Official Washington?s hostility is well founded. Doran?s film provides irrefutable evidence that US forces in Afghanistan carried out a massive war crime. Working as a reporter for Japanese television, Doran covered the US-led siege of the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, where hundreds of captured Taliban prisoners were killed. Footage from the fortress included in the film presents the images sanitized out of US coverage of the event: the broken corpses of young Afghans killed by US air strikes and automatic weapons fire littering the grounds of the fortress?many of them with their arms still tied behind their backs. The film reveals what took place after this assault. As Doran notes, while the US and most of the world media was focused on the death of a CIA agent and the capture of the so-called "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, who barely survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, little attention was paid to the fate of the other prisoners. Some 8,000 Taliban fighters had given themselves up to General Abdul Rashid Dostum?s Northern Alliance, which functioned as a proxy army for the US during the Afghan invasion. Some 3,000 of them were crammed into private container trucks commandeered by Doshtum?s forces. During a 20-hour drive to the Sheberghan prison, most of these prisoners died from suffocation in the airless containers. Witnesses interviewed in the film described how soldiers fired into the containers when the prisoners screamed for air and water. Others reported seeing blood dripping from the trucks. Witnesses: US forces present at massacre Several witnesses recounted that US soldiers were present as the prisoners were loaded into the trucks and also when the container doors were opened at Sheberghan and hundreds of dead bodies spilled out. One soldier said that US troops in charge of the operation told their Afghan allies to "get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken." The final stage of this grisly operation was the transport of the dead and wounded prisoners to a barren stretch of desert 10 minutes up the road, called Dasht-i-Leili, where the bodies were unloaded and several hundred prisoners who were still alive were shot to death. Again, witnesses said US Special Forces troops were present during these executions and when bulldozers pushed the corpses into a mass grave. The film begins and ends with the hideous scenes of this burial site, as well as a second one nearby, where the ground is littered with human bones, bits of clothing and shell casings. Doran has repeatedly demanded a speedy investigation into the massacre and action by the United Nations to protect the gravesites against an attempt to destroy the evidence. Human rights experts have given great weight to the diversity of the witnesses interviewed in the film, including soldiers, truck drivers and other civilians representing a wide range of Afghanistan?s disparate ethnic communities. Dostum?s forces, however, have already murdered two of these witnesses, while others have been imprisoned and tortured. The Word Socialist Web Site interviewed the film?s director, who came to the premiere in Washington direct from Afghanistan, where he had attempted to gain critical new material for a sequel to Afghan Massacre that he is preparing. Doran was to meet a courier across Afghanistan?s northeast border to purchase a videotape that includes footage of US troops at the scene of the mass killings. Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who collaborated with Doran on Afghan Massacre, was abducted and nearly beaten to death in an earlier attempt to obtain the tape. The filmmaker speculates that General Dostum is intent on keeping the tape as an "insurance policy," threatening to use it to expose the US role in the killings if Washington and the regime it backs in Kabul should attempt to deprive him of his power. Doran said that the courier was detained by Uzbek militiamen who had told people in the area that they were searching for a man with a videotape. He has reportedly been tortured. "How many more people will have to die before the government in this country admits what happened?" asked Doran. He stressed that it is a priority to protect the mass grave sites and establish a witness protection program for those who have testified as eyewitnesses to the war crimes. "If this country can propose to fly 500 Iraqi scientists and their families to Cyprus, then presumably they could bring 25 truck drivers out of Afghanistan," he said. "As high as Rumsfeld?s office" Doran said that the evidence he has gathered, and which he will use in his upcoming sequel to Afghan Massacre, indicates that the responsibility for the war crimes in Afghanistan goes "as high as [US Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld?s office." Within the US media, government efforts to suppress Afghan Massacre have thus far produced the desired results. Doran described the role of the American media as "pretty tragic." He added that one American journalist who was following up the story recounted a conversation with a senior State Department spokesman. Asked why the story had yet to run in any major national daily, the spokesman replied, "You have to understand, we are in touch with the nationals on a daily basis. It just won?t run, even if it?s true." Doran said he was hopeful the film would soon be broadcast on US television and that in the meantime he was working on a deal that would bring it to at least 25 movie theaters around the country. Up to now, however, he has been repeatedly rebuffed by US broadcast media representatives, who told him that "the timing was not right" for the film. "First it was post-September 11, and then it was pre-Iraq," he said. The 46-year-old filmmaker, who has produced previous documentaries on subjects ranging from the disappeared in Chile to a retrospective on Stanley Kubrick?s film 2001, stressed that he was not driven by political motives when he made Afghan Massacre. "I?m really not political, but they?ve tried to say I?m a communist and used McCarthyite tactics to try to make the story go away," he said of the official reaction in the US. "But it won?t," he added. He said he was well aware of the significance of the film getting a wide audience in the US on the eve of another war. "I didn?t do the film because of what is happening in Iraq," he said. "But the fact that it is now breaking into the American market may play a role in making American forces think twice before they are involved in anything similar in Iraq." Newsweek?s whitewash Also present at the film premiere was Roy Gutman, Newsweek?s diplomatic correspondent and co-author of a story published last August covering the same incidents detailed in Doran?s film. This piece put the number of Afghan prisoners killed at less than a third the number reported by witnesses in the film and essentially whitewashed the role played by US forces in the massacre. "Nothing that Newsweek learned suggests that American forces had advance knowledge of the killings, witnessed the prisoners being stuffed into the unventilated trucks or were in a position to prevent that," the magazine reported. It followed up this statement with a series of hypothetical alibis for the Special Forces elements present at the scene, claiming that they must have heard "stories" about the killings, but "may have thought them exaggerated," and that they "may have believed that the dead were war casualties." [See "Newsweek expos? of war crimes in Afghanistan whitewashes US role <../../2002/sep2002/news-s04.shtml>"] In a discussion period after the film showing, Gutman defended the Newsweek story, claiming that reports of American involvement in the massacre were "in a gray zone, extremely difficult to prove ... and when you?re not sure of the facts you have to put them in a special category." He insisted that Newsweek?s policy was to make sure "every factoid" was completely verified before publishing. After facing challenges from both Doran and the audience, he fell back on the defense that his editors were ultimately responsible, adding that writing a magazine article was much like "making sausage." He went on to criticize Doran?s film as overly "polemical." It is worth noting that Gutman rose to prominence in journalistic and government circles by applying a markedly different standard when, as a reporter for Newsday, he helped initiate the story about Serb-run "death camps" in Bosnia. For that coverage, Gutman relied heavily on second-hand witnesses and handouts from the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim regimes. As he told the magazine Foreign Affairs in 1993, he "consciously tried to move policy" with his stories, promoting a US intervention in the former Yugoslavia. For Gutman and Newsweek, journalistic standards are highly elastic, depending upon whether it is the US that is accused of a war crime, or whether Washington is making use of war crime allegations to prepare military intervention against another country. In the course of the discussion, Doran said that Newsweek had spent an entire day interviewing him and had called back to check facts the week before Gutman?s story ran, but in the end made no mention of him or his film. He also revealed that, after agreeing to give a copy of his film?s script to Newsweek?s correspondent in Afghanistan for "research purposes," he discovered that the document had been copied and handed over to General Dostum shortly before he and his crew had returned to Afghanistan, placing their lives in danger. Gutman acknowledged that he had been given a copy of the script, saying it had raised "a number of red flags" for him. Despite the attempts of the government and the media in the US to suppress his film, Doran expressed confidence that it will find an American audience. "They want this story to go away," he said. "But it won?t until those American commanders responsible stand trial." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 13184 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Mon May 5 14:32:31 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:32:31 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: COMPARTY: Communists not invited to Iraqi leadership meeting Message-ID: <012d01c31350$aed7de40$c70a9ad8@computer> ----- Original Message ----- From: CPC To: COMPARTY Mailing List Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 7:59 PM Subject: COMPARTY: Communists not invited to Iraqi leadership meeting Dear comrades, Some interesting stories on the ICP. What is especially noteworthy is the fact that the international (bourgeois) press feel compelled to report the ICP's exclusion from the U.S.-sponsored 'leadership meeting'. If the ICP was small, weak and of no political consequence, they would not even 'waste ink' on the story. Comradely, miguel/ *************** Communists not invited to Iraqi leadership meeting http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/04/30/iraq_communists030430 BAGHDAD - Iraq's Communist party, one of the oldest in the country, wasn't invited to a meeting involving U.S. administrators and Iraqi political, religious and ethnic leaders. A leading member of the party, banned under Saddam Hussein's regime, says the U.S. has already failed the first test of its promise to bring real democracy to the country. Jasem al-Helfi says the Americans have ignored one of Iraq's most respected parties and instead brought in their own group of political imports. "They brought their own parties, external parties. No one knows them. No one know what they're doing," al- Helfi said. Al-Helfi says he's not interested in the U.S. interim administration or the consultation process. He says the Communist party is looking ahead to the first free elections, about two years away. His confidence could be warranted if activity around the party's headquarters is any indication. People are stopping by to pick up information, posters and the party newspaper. The more spacious headquarters of the Iraqi National Accord, made up of U.S.-backed returned exiles, is virtually deserted. ___________ Financial Times May 1, 2003 Communists seek to join the Iraqi revival By James Drummond in Baghdad The US-led administration in Iraq is realising that bringing political freedom to the country may produce unexpected results. First, Shia religious leaders called for a theocracy; now the Communist party is staging one of the first organised party political demonstrations of the post-Saddam era. The Iraqi Communist party will take to the streets of Baghdad for its first May Day demonstration in years. The march is likely to be modest, but a sign that well- worn ideologies can flourish amid the country's new freedoms. The communists are one of Iraq's oldest political opposition movements, but the party was mercilessly repressed by Mr Hussein's regime. Among the marchers will be Jassim al-Hilfi, who was sentenced to death at the age of 18 for political activity. Now 43, he returned to Baghdad three weeks ago after a life of exile in Kurdistan and Sweden. "We reviewed the fall of communism in eastern Europe and we learned lessons from that," he says. In acountry where many favour an Islamic republic, the Communist party represents a secular alternative. But it has not been embraced by the US. In an effort to ease communication in Iraq, the US administration has been handing out Thuraya satellite telephones to those Iraqis whom it deems worthy of attending its get-togethers. The communists have not benefited from this largesse, nor been invited to the meetings. The party has set up headquarters in a former Iraqi military building in central Baghdad. On the wall is a banner showing a clenched fist bearing an olive branch and the slogan: "The Iraqi Communist party: 1934-2003. 69 years of struggle." Under the new dispensation, the struggle is likely to continue. ******** Communist Party of Canada 290A Danforth Ave., Toronto, Ontario M4K 1N6 tel: 416-469-2446 fax: 416-469-4063 www.communist-party.ca -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 41893 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Mon May 5 14:46:23 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 16:46:23 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: COMPARTY: [Fwd: Fw: The Role of Intellectuals --James Petras] Message-ID: <012e01c31350$d2c149e0$c70a9ad8@computer> Must be read! James Petras Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Lorch" To: "COMPARTY Mailing List" Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 9:11 PM Subject: COMPARTY: [Fwd: Fw: The Role of Intellectuals --James Petras] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Fw: The Role of Intellectuals --James Petras Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 18:27:40 -0500 From: Jos? Altshuler Reply-To: Jos? Altshuler To: ----- Original Message ----- From: Karen Wald Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 11:42 AMSubject: The Role of Intellectuals --James Petras THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INTELLECTUALS: CUBA, THE U.S. AND HUMAN RIGHTS by James Petras - May 1, 2003 Once again the intellectuals have entered into the center of a debate - this time over the issues of U.S. imperialism and human rights in Cuba. "How important is the role of the intellectuals?", I asked myself as we walked past the Puerta del Sol in Madrid on a sunny Saturday afternoon ( April 26, 2003 ) and heard the anti-Castro slogans of a few hundred protestors echoing through the near empty plaza. Despite a dozen articles and opinion columns by well known intellectuals in the leading Madrid newspapers, and hours of television and radio propaganda and endorsements by the major trade union bureaucrats and party bosses, only 700-800, mostly Cuban exiles turned up to attack Cuba. "Clearly," I thought, "the anti-'Cuban intellectuals have little or no power of convocation, at least in Spain." But the political impotence of the anti-Castro writers does not mean that intellectuals in general do not play an important role; nor does the lack of a popular audience mean that they are without resources, especially if they do have the backing of the U.S. war and propaganda machine, amplifying and disseminating their word throughout the world. In order to come to reason about the debate raging between intellectuals on the issues of human rights in Cuba and U.S. imperialism it is important to step back and consider the role of the intellectuals, the context and major issues that frame the U.S.-Cuba conflict. THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUALS The role of the intellectuals is to clarify the major issues and define the major threats to peace, social justice, national independence and freedom in each historical period as well as to identify and support the principal defenders of the same principles. Intellectuals have a responsibility to distinguish between the defensive measures taken by countries and peoples under imperial attack and the offensive methods of imperial powers bent on conquest. It is the height of cant and hypocrisy to engage in moral equivalences between the violence and repression of imperial countries bent on conquest with that of Third World countries under military and terrorist attacks. Responsible intellectuals critically examine the political context and analyze the relationships between imperial power and their paid local functionaries who they describe as "dissidents" - they do not issue moral fiats according to their dim lights and their political imperatives. Committed intellectuals who claim to speak with moral authority, especially those who lay claim to being critics of imperialism, have a political responsibility to demystify power and state and media manipulation particularly in relation to imperial rhetoric of human rights violations by independent Third World states. We have in recent times seen too many self-styled "progressive" Western intellectuals supporting or silent on the U.S. destruction of Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing of over 250,000 Serbs, gypsies and others in Kosovo, buying into the U.S. propaganda of a "humanitarian intervention". All the U.S. intellectuals (Chomsky, Zinn, Wallerstein etc.) supported the U.S.-financed violent fundamentalist uprising in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed secular government in Afghanistan - under the pretext that the Soviet Union "invaded" Afghanistan and the fundamentalist fanatics entering the country from all over the world were the "dissidents" defending "self-determination" - an admitted propaganda ploy successfully executed by the boastful former National Security Adviser, Zbig Bryzinski. Then and now prestigious intellectuals brandish their past credentials as "critics" of U.S. foreign policy to give credibility to their uninformed denunciation of alleged Cuban moral transgressions, equating Cuba's arrest of paid functionaries of the U.S. State Department and the execution of three terrorist kidnapers with the genocidal war crimes of U.S. imperialism. The practitioners of moral equivalents apply a microscope to Cuba and a telescope to U.S. crimes - which gives them a certain acceptability among the liberal sectors of the empire. MORAL IMPERATIVES AND CUBAN REALITIES: MORALITY AS DISHONESTY Intellectuals are divided on the U.S.-Cuba conflict: Benedetti, Sastre, Petras, Sanchez-Vazquez and Pablo Gonzalez Casanova and scores of others defend Cuba; right-wing intellectuals including Vargas Llosa, Savater, and Carlos Fuentes have predictably issued their usual diatribes against Cuba; and a small army of otherwise progressive intellectuals - Chomsky, Saramago, Sontag, Zinn and Wallerstein - have joined the chorus condemning Cuba, waving their past critical postures in an effort to distinguish themselves from the right-wing/State Department Cuban opponents. It is the latter "progressive" group which has caused the greatest harm among the burgeoning anti-imperialist movement and it is to them that these critical remarks are directed. Morality based on propaganda is a deadly mix - particularly when the moral judgements come from prestigious leftist intellectuals and the propaganda emanates from the far-right Bush administration. Many of the "progressive" critics of Cuba acknowledge, in passing and in a general way, that the U.S. has been a hostile aggressor against Cuba, and they "generously" grant Cuba the right to self-determination - and then launch into a series of unsubstantiated charges and misrepresentations devoid of any special context that might serve to clarify the issues and provide a reasoned basis for ."moral imperatives". It is best to begin with the most fundamental facts. The left critics, based on U.S. State Department labeling, denounce the Cuban government's repression of individuals, dissidents, including journalists, owners of private libraries and members of political parties engaged in non-violent political activity trying to exercise their democratic rights. What the "progressives" fail to recognize or are unwilling to acknowledge is that those arrested were paid functionaries of the U.S. government. According to the Agency of International Development (AID), the principal U.S. federal agency implementing U.S. grants and loans in pursuit of U.S. foreign policy, under USAID's Cuba Program ( resulting from the Helms-Burton Act of 1996) AID has channeled over $8.5 million dollars to Cuban opponents of the Castro regime since 1997 to publish, meet, propagandize in favor of the overthrow of the Cuban government in co-ordination with a variety of U.S. NGO's, universities, foundations and other front groups. (Profile of the USAID Cuba Program - on the AID web site ). The U.S.AID program, unlike its usual practice, does not channel payments to the Cuban government but directly to its Cuban "dissident" clients. The criteria for funding are clearly stated - the recipients of payments and grants must have demonstrated a clear commitment to U.S. directed "regime change" toward "free markets" and "democracy" - no doubt similar to the U.S. colonial dictatorship in Iraq. The Helms-Burton legislation, the U.S.AID Cuba Program and their paid Cuban functionaries, like the U.S. progressive manifesto, " condemn Cuba's lack of freedom, jailing of innocent dissidents, and call for a democratic change of regime in Cuba". Strange coincidences that require some analyses. Cuban journalists who have received $280,000 from a Cuba Free Press -AID front- are not dissidents they are paid functionaries. Cuban "Human Rights" groups who receive $775,000 from CIA front "Freedom House" are not dissidents - particularly when their mission is to promote a "transition" (overthrow) of the Cuban regime. The list of grants and funding to Cuban "dissidents" (functionaries) by the U.S. government in pursuit of the U.S. policy is long and detailed and accessible to all the progressive moral critics. The point is that the jailed opponents of the Cuban government were paid functionaries of the U.S. government, paid to implement the goals of the Helms-Burton Act in accordance with the criteria of the U.S.AID and under the guidance and direction of the head of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana. Between September 2, 2002 and March 2003 James Cason, head of the US Interest Section, held dozens of meetings with his Cuban "dissidents" at his home and office, providing them with instructions and guidelines on what to write, how to recruit, while publicly haranging against the Cuban government in the most undiplomatic manner. Washington's Cuban functionaries were supplied with electronic and other communication equipment by USAID, books and other propaganda and money to fund pro-U.S. "trade unions" via the U.S. front, the "American Center for International Labor Solidarity". These are not well-meaning "dissidents" unaware of their paymaster and their role as U.S. agents, since the USAID report states ( under the section entitled "The US Institutional Context"), "The Cuba Program is funded through Economic Support Fund, which is designed to support the economic and political foreign policy interests of the US by providing financial assistance to allies (sic) and countries in transition to democracy". No country in the world tolerates or labels domestic citizens paid by and working for a foreign power to act for its imperial interests as "dissidents". This is especially true of the U.S. where under Title 18 ,Section 951 of the U.S. Code , "anyone who agrees to operate within the United States subject to the direction or control of a foreign government or official would be subjected to criminal prosecution and a 10 year prison sentence". Unless , of course, they register as a paid foreign agent or are working for the Israeli government. The U.S. "progressive" intellectuals abdicate their responsibilities as analysts and critics and accept at face value the State Department characterization of the U.S. paid functionaries as dissidents striving for "freedom". Some defenders of the U.S. agent-dissidents claim that the functionaries received "scandalously long sentences". Once again empirical myopia compounds mendacious moralizing. Cuba is on a war footing. The Bush government has declared that Cuba is on the list of military targets subject to mass destruction and war. And in case our moralistic intellectuals don't know it : What Bush, Rumsfeld and the war-mongering Zionists in the Administration say -- they do. The total lack of seriousness in Chomsky, Zinn, Sontag, Wallerstein's moral dictates is that they fail to acknowledge the imminent and massive threat of a U.S. war with weapons of mass destruction, announced in advance. This is particularly onerous given the fact that many of Cuba's detractors live in the U.S., read the U.S. press and are aware of how quickly militaristic pronouncements are followed by genocidal actions. But our moralists are not bothered by context, by U.S. threats to Cuba immediate or proximate, they are eager to ignore it all to demonstrate to the State Department that they not only oppose U.S. foreign policy but also condemn every independent country, system and leader who opposes the U.S. In other words, Mr. Ashcroft, when you crack down on the "apologists" for Cuban "terror", remember that we are different, we too condemned Cuba, we too called for a change of regime. The critics of Cuba ignore the fact that the U.S. has a two-pronged military-political strategy to take over Cuba that is already operative. Washington provides asylum for terrorist air pirates, encouraging efforts to destabilize Cuba's tourist-based economy; it works closely with the terrorist Cuban American Foundation engaging in attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders. New U.S. military bases have been established in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, El Salvador and there is an expanding concentration camp in Guantanomo - all to facilitate an invasion. The U.S. embargo is in the process of being tightened with the support of the right-wing Berlusconi and Aznar regimes in Italy and Spain. The aggressive and openly political activity of James Cason of the Interest Section in line with his Cuban followers among the paid functionaries/ "dissidents" is part of the inside strategy designed to undermine Cuban loyalties to the regime and the revolution. The inter-connection between the two tactics and their strategic convergence is ignored by our prestigious intellectual critics who prefer the luxury of issuing moral imperatives about freedom everywhere for everyone, even when a psychotic Washington puts the knife to Cuba's throat. No thanks, Chomsky, Sontag, Wallerstein - Cuba is justified in giving its attackers a kick in the balls and sending them to cut sugar cane to earn an honest living. The death penalty for three ferry boat terrorists is harsh treatment - but so was the threat to the lives of forty Cuban passengers who faced death at the hands of the hijackers. Again our moralists forgot to discuss the rash acts of air piracy and the plots of others uncovered in time. The moralists failed to understand why these terrorists desperadoes are seeking illegal means to leave Cuba. Bush's Administration has practically eliminated the visa program for Cuban emigrants wishing to leave. Visa grants have declined from 9000 for the first four months of 2002 to 700 in 2003. This is a clever tactic to encourage terrorist acts in Cuba and then denounce the harsh sentences, evoking the chorus of 'yea' sayers in the 'Amen' corner of the progressive U.S. and European intellectual establishment. Is it simply ignorance which informs these moral pronouncements against Cuba or is it something else besides - moral blackmail? , to force their Cuban counterparts to turn against their regime, their people or face the opprobrium of the prestigious intellectuals - to become further isolated and stigmatized as "apologists of Castro". Explicit threats by Saramago to abandon his Cuban friends and embrace the cause of U.S. paid functionaries. Implicit threats of no longer visiting Cuba and to boycott conferences. Is it moral cowardice to pick up the cudgels for the empire and pick on Cuba when it faces the threat of mass destruction over the freedom of paid agents, subject to prosecution by any country in the world? What is eminently dishonest is to totally ignore the vast accomplishments of the revolution in employment, education, health, equality, and Cuba's heroic and principled opposition to imperial wars - the only country to so declare - and its capacity to resist almost 50 years of invasions. That counts for nothing for the U.S. intellectuals - that is scandalous!! That is a disgrace, a retreat in search of respectability after "daring" to oppose the U.S. war along with 30 million other people in the world. It is not time to "balance" things out - by condemning Cuba, by calling for a regime change, by supporting the cause of the "market oriented" Cuban functionary-dissidents. Let us remember the same progressive intellectuals supported "dissidents" in Eastern Europe and Russia who were bankrolled by Soros and the U.S. State Department. The "dissidents" turned the country over to the Russian mafia, life expectancy declined five years ( over 10 million Russians died prematurely with the sacking of the national health system), while in Eastern Europe "dissidents" closed the shipyards of Gdansk , enrolled in NATO and provided mercenaries for the U.S. conquest of Iraq. And never among these current supporters of Cuban "dissidents" is there any critical reflection on the catastrophic outcomes resulting from their anti-communist diatribes and their manifestos in favor of the 'dissidents' who have become the soldiers of the U.S. Middle Eastern and Central European empire. Our U.S. moralists never, I repeat, never, ever reflected critically on their moral failures, past or present because, you see, they are for "freedom everywhere", even when the "wrong" people get into power and the "other" empire takes over, and the millions die from curable diseases and white slavery rings expand. The reply is always the same: "That's not what we wanted - we were for an independent, free and just society - it just happened that in calling for regime change, support for dissidents, we never suspected that the Empire would 'take it all', would become the only superpower, and engage in colonizing the world." The moral intellectuals must accept political responsibility for the consequences and not hide behind abstract moral platitudes, neither for their past complicity with empire building nor their present scandalous pronouncements against Cuba. They cannot claim they don't know the repercussions of what they are saying and doing. They cannot pretend innocence after all they we have seen and read and heard about U.S. war plans against Cuba. The principal author and promoter of the anti-Cuban declaration in the United States (signed by Chomsky, Zinn and Wallerstein) was Joanne Landy, a self-declared "democratic socialist", and lifelong advocate of the violent overthrow of the Cuban government - for the past 40 years. She is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the major institutions advising the U.S. government on imperial policies for over a half century. Landy supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and the Albanian terrorist group, the KLA - calling publicly for overt military support - responsible for the murder of 2000 Serbs and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and others in Kosova. It is no surprise that the statement authored by this chameleon right-wing extremist contained no mention of Cuba's social accomplishments and opposition to imperialism. For the record, it should be noted, that Landy was a visceral opponent of the Chinese, Vietnamese and other social revolutions in her climb to positions of influence in the CFR. For all their vaunted critical intellect, the "progressive" intellectuals overlooked the unsavory politics of the author who promoted the anti-Cuba diatribe. THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUAL TODAY Many critics of Cuba speak of "principles" as if there were only one set of principles applicable to all situations independent of who is involved and what are the consequences. Asserting "principles" like "freedom" for those involved in plotting the overthrow of the Cuban government in complicity with the State Department would turn Cuba into another Chile - where Allende was overthrown by Pinochet - and lead to a reversal of the popular gains of the revolution. There are principles that are more basic than freedom for U.S. Cuban functionaries , that is , national security and popular sovereignty. There is, particularly among the U.S. progressive left, a certain attraction to Third World victims, those who suffer defeats ,and an aversion for successful revolutionaries. It seems that the U.S. progressive intellectuals always find an alibi to avoid a commitment to a revolution. For some it is the old refrain "Stalinism" - if the state plays a major role in the economy; or it can be mass mobilizations - that they dub "plebicitary dictatorships", or it can be security agencies which successfully prevent terrorist activity which they call a "repressive police state". Living in the least politicized nation in the world with one of the most servile and corrupt trade union apparatus in the West, with virtually no practical political influence outside a few university towns, the practical intellectuals in the U.S. have no practical knowledge or experience of the everyday threats and violence which hangs over revolutionary governments and activists in Latin America. Their political conceptions, the yardsticks they pull out to condemn or approve of any political activity, exists nowhere except in their heads, in their congenial, progressive, university settings where they enjoy all the privileges of capitalist freedom and none of the risks which Third World revolutionaries have to defend themselves against. A little modesty, dear prestigious, critical, freedom preaching intellectuals. Look deep inside and ask yourself if you would like to be pirated by a Miami-based terrorist organization. Ask yourself if you would enjoy sitting in a caf? in a major tourist hotel in Havana when a deadly bomb goes off - greetings from the terrorists taking a beer with the President's brother, Jeb. Think about living in a country which is on the top of the hit list of the most violent imperial regime since Nazi Germany - and then perhaps your moral sensibilities might awaken to the need to temper your condemnations of Cuban security policies and contextualize your moral fiats. I want to conclude by establishing my own "moral imperatives" - for the critical intellectuals. 1. The first duty of Euro-U.S. intellectuals is to oppose their own imperial rulers set on conquering the world. 2. The second duty is to clarify the moral issues involved in the struggle between imperial militarists and popular/national resistance and reject the hypocritical posture that equates the mass terror of one with the justified if at times excessive security constraints of the other. 3. To establish standards of political and personal integrity with regards to the facts and issues before making moral judgements. 4. Resist the temptation to become a "moral hero of the empire" by refusing to support victorious popular struggles and revolutionary regimes which are not perfect which lack all the freedoms available to impotent intellectuals unable to threaten power and therefore tolerated to meet, discuss and criticize. 5. Refuse to set themselves as Judge, Prosecutor and Jury condemning progressives who have the courage to defend revolutionaries. The most appalling instance is Susan Sontag'sscurrilous attack on Colombian Nobel Prize winning novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who she accused of lacking integrity and being an apologist of Cuban terror (sic). Sontag made her blood libelous accusations in Bogota, Colombia. The Colombian death squads working with the regime and the military kill more trade unionists and journalists than any place in the world, and do so, for far less than being an "apologist" of the Castro regime. This is the same Sontag who was an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. imperial invasion and bombing of Yugoslavia, apologist for the fundamentalist Bosnian regime and who was a silent witness to the killing and ethnic cleansing of Serbs and others in Kosovo. Moral integrity indeed! The precious sense of moral superiority found among New York intellectuals allow Sontag to finger Marquez for the death squads and feel that she has made a great moral statement. U.S.-European intellectuals should not confuse their own political futility and inconsequential position with that of their counterparts among committed Latin American intellectuals. There is a place for constructive dialogue and debate but never personal assaults that demean individuals facing daily threats to their lives. It is easy for critical intellectuals to be a "friend of Cuba" in good times at celebrations and invited conferences in times of lesser threats. It is much harder to be a "friend of Cuba" when a totalitarian empire threatens the heroic island and puts heavy hands on its defenders. It is in times like this - of permanent wars, genocide and military aggression, when Cuba needs the solidarity of critical intellectuals, which they are receiving from all over Europe and particularly Latin America. Isn't it time that we, in the United States, with our illustrious and prestigious progressive intellectuals with all our majestic moral sensibilities recognize that there is a vital, heroic revolution struggling to defend itself against the U.S. juggernaut and that we modestly set aside our self-important declarations, support that revolution and join the one million Cubans celebrating May Day with their leader Fidel Castro? --- COMPARTY From blackmore at balcab.ch Mon May 5 16:16:48 2003 From: blackmore at balcab.ch (Salaam Blackmore) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 00:16:48 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Fw: [R-G] Re: elections References: <001d01c312d0$ee8384c0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> <00a901c3133f$e6d65760$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <006201c31354$06c2b4b0$d50fc8d5@salaamo1rw4n2e> There have been queries over the probity of the electoral system in the UK long before electronic voting When I last lived in London - I am a third-generation Londoner - I did a little campaigning and was also chair of the mediation centre of the borough in which I lived. As a result, I had occasion to study the register of electors. There were curious anomalies. For example, two people I knew personally appeared on the register of a marginal ward about six months before they actually moved to the address given. Equally curious was the fact that I could not find anyone, apart from myself, who considered this anomaly interesting enough to pursue... I was assured that there was no need for concern, since the electoral process was conducted by local authority staff. "So you have nothing to worry about," I was told, although my interlocutor did allow himself half a wink - and if you know London boroughs, you will know why... Three-monkey country Salaam ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 9:52 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Fw: [R-G] Re: elections > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Bob Enoch" > . > > You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open > > and > > their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think > > there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and > > audited > > if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with > > computerized vote counts. > > > > You'd be wrong. > > I would like to ask A-Listers what they think the information contained in > this email means to our analysis of > A) "2004" > B) what we need to do about this. If this is true, does it not mean > everything else is at least *partially* subordinate? Can we please engage > this elephant in the living room? > > Macdonald > > > > From michele at maui.net Mon May 5 17:10:13 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 13:10:13 -1000 Subject: [A-List] Air Force laser target testing to begin 6000' over Kihei, Maui Message-ID: <001201c3135b$81cc2fe0$119d4b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> There are now 20,000 residents in Kihei, and growing. Joined: 23 Feb 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Maui, Hawai`i Posted: Thu May 01, 2003 3:36 pm Post subject: Air Force Surveillance Testing on Maui ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Air Force contractor Textron Systems, long associated with Maui through military facilities on Haleakala, is developing a laser/infrared system for day/night imaging surveillance called the Standoff Intelligence Detector (SID.) Notice of an Environmental Assessment (EA) was recently published in the Maui News. The SID EA project pertains to 50 flights of a Twin Otter aircraft equipped with the developing system. The flights will take place at around 6,000 feet altitude -- the plane will circle an area in Kihei testing the system by looking at targets about 12 lateral miles away. The illuminating laser is described as eye safe and invisible, with a small visible targeting laser also being used. The illuminating laser is visible to the infrared spectrum, and the scheme is to illuminate a target from a distance without being noticed. A copy of the draft EA can be seen by clicking here. Comments on the EA should be sent soon to: AFRL/DEOS 3550 Aberdeen Dr. SE Kirtland AFB, NM 87117-5776 Maui has been spared the militarization that is so prevalent on Oahu. Personally, I like that. A military presence may be a necessity in some instances, but I like the fact that it has not been actively necessary on Maui for many, many years. Assuming the laser is indeed safe, there probably is not a very strong substantive basis for objecting to the EA. If the laser is not safe, it is unlikely that anyone injured by it would (a) immediately realize they had suffered harm or (b) be able to identify the cause of any harm they realized. Therefore, it may never be known whether the laser is truly safe. However, there is this interesting admission on EA page 1 (after the roman numeral introduction pages), it says, "Performing the flight tests at White Sands Missile Range instead of Maui presents logistics and cost problems for the contractor who has developed the imaging system in Maui. In addition, the contractor has no significant presence in New Mexico, and the climate at White Sands Missile Range would be too ideal (dry summer conditions) instead of the challenging and more scientifically important marine environment that Maui offers. Performing tests in Massachusetts where atmospheric conditions provide a marine environment and the contractor has a greater presence was considered. However, this location would be difficult to accomplish due to lack of facilities and aircraft support." Thus, the choice of flying over Maui is made for the somewhat contrived convenience of the contractor -- I say somewhat contrived because it is difficult to imagine that Textron's home state of Massachusetts really lacks facilities and aircraft support. For that reason -- being the mere convenience of the contractor -- this further step in the use of Maui for militarized purposes is objectionable. The testing is plainly intended to develop battlefield equipment that will help military forces wipe out opponents. Had the recent demonstration of wiping out large numbers of the conscripts and oppressed subjects of a political opponent in Iraq not been initiated so objectionably (objectionable to me, for example, by being in unilateral defiance of such principles of international conduct as the inhibition of pre-emptive attacks, as expressed in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, or the advancement of international diplomacy through the UN), the sense that developing battlefield equipment on Maui is objectionable might not be so strong. Changing Maui from a generally non-militarized place to a place for developing battlefield equipment is especially objectionable when there are recognized alternative locations -- such as White Sands Missile Range where developing battlefield equipment is a well-established activity -- and the alternative locations are rejected simply for the convenience of the contractor. Back to top From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Mon May 5 15:38:04 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 18:38:04 -0300 Subject: [A-List] SE QUIEREN ROBAR UNA MINA DE ORO EN ESQUEL Message-ID: <4132-2200351521384120@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin982332003-05-05T21:12:00Z2003-05-05T21:12:00Z317459949win8219122189.3821 21 Queridos Nac&Pop Por favor les pido que lean ?ste mail que me env?a mi amigo Rafael desde Chubut.....Es muy importante. S.O.S. Argentina se roban Esquel......Patrimonio de la Humanidad. Alberto Surra Gentileza de Rafael Malerba Martes 29Abril, 2003 9:42 AM Naguales Existe una mina de oro y plata en Esquel ( se la quieren robar) Existe una mina de oro y plata en Esquel que debe ser trabajada a cielo abierto. Existe una multinacional con sede en USA que est? interesada en explotarla, prometiendo trabajo para 300 obreros. Un grupo de vecinos concientes y preocupados por la ecolog?a, ya que el oro debe ser separado mediante cianuro y la plata mediante ars?nico? (venenos potentes si los hay) y temiendo por la infiltraci?n de residuos a rios y napas de agua decidi? agruparse en una Asamblea para impedir la instalaci?n de tal mina Mediante protestas pac?ficas lograron que el Intendente y el Consejo Deliberante llamaran a un plebiscito Mina s?... Mina no La citada multinacional ofreci? asados, zapatillas y montones de regalos para convencer a la gente que votaran por el s?... al mejor estilo duhaldista-menemista Los habitantes se comieron los asados, aceptaron las zapatillas y otros regalos y fueron a votar Vot? el 75% del padr?n municipal (cifra de presentismo no alcanzada en ninguna otra elecci?n). No a la mina obtuvo 81% de los sufragios Con lo cual no debi? haberse hablado m?s del tema -Un pueblo que no se vende no puede ser comprado, dijo ayer en el programa un habitante de Esquel, pero siempre hay un pero los d?lares pesan y m?s cuando son muchos... y hay para repartir entre pol?ticos y sindicalistas corruptos? (siempre la misma mierda antipatria) Resulta que ahora los dirigentes de la Asamblea Vecinal han empezado a recibir amenazas de muerte, de parte de patoteros de la UOCRA reci?n llegados de Buenos Aires que portan armas... Entonces, los habitantes de Esquel se han comenzado a hacer preguntas acerca de qu? intereses han tocado... Y de la investigaci?n resulta que: 1) La empresa ha presentado un plan de trabajos que pretende extraer de la mina el equivalente en oro a 2.500.000.000 de d?lares en 10 a?os (s?, dos mil quinientos millones de d?lares) sin contar lo extra?do en plata.- 2) Sucede tambi?n que una ley sancionada por Carlos y su corrupto Congreso Nacional dice que el Estado Nacional no puede explotar las riquezas del subsuelo sino por intermedio de empresas privadas a las que les cobrar? un ?nico c?non equivalente a un m?ximo del 3% del valor del metal extra?do en boca de mina (el cual es m?s bajo que el precio internacional del metal) 3) Eso, t?l como est? , y haciendo n?meros redondos, suponiendo que el valor del oro extraido en boca de mina fuera de 2000 millones en 10 a?os, le dejar?a al Estado o sea a nosotros, 60 millones de d?lares; pero, como la Ley nacional dice que se cobrar? un c?non del 3% como m?ximo, la Ley del Chubut estableci? un m?ximo del 2% o sea que en vez de 60 millones esto se reduce a 40 millones. 4) Pero hay otra ley nacional establecida por nuestros plecaros y patri?ticos representantes del pueblo... Esta ley dice que para favorecer las exportaciones realizadas desde puertos de la Patagonia, el Estado Nacional, o sea nosotros, retribuir? con un 5% del valor de tales exportaciones a las empresas que las realicen... O sea, que la susodicha multinacional yankee exportar? en diez a?os desde puertos patag?nicos 2.500 millones de d?lares (estos s? a precio internacional) con lo cual el estado Nacional o sea nosotros deberemos retribuirles con 125 millones de d?lares... 5) 125 millones que pagaremos de impuestos los maestros, los carpinteros, los comerciantes, los plomeros, los electricistas, los lustrabotas etc, argentinos, menos 40 millones que recibir? la Provincia de Chubut.. Significa que vamos a pagarles 85 millones de d?lares para que ellos se lleven 2.500 millones de d?lares en oro y nos dejen el cianuro y el ars?nico residual envenenando nuestras tierras ?Alguien tiene un poquito de cianuro o ars?nico para hac?rselos tragar a los que votan las leyes? me tengo que sacar el sombrero ante los piratas yankees ! ? Realmente son lo m?s grande que hay ! Antes, al menos Col?n les cambiaba a los indios el oro por espejitos y cuentas de colores pero ahora es como si Col?n les pidiera a los indios que le pagaran para llevarse el oro al menos los ingleses se llevaban nuestro trigo, nuestras vacas, nuestros quebrachos y nuestra lana... Pero nos pagaban con libras y cuando no pudieron nos pagaron con nuestros bienamados ferrocarriles argentinos pero ahora es como si los ingleses nos pidieran plata para llevarse nuestro trigo, vacas, quebracho y lanas...yankees maestros !!! Teachers !!! ??Y NOSOTROS QUE NOS CRE?AMOS VIVOS !!! ?? LES VAMOS A PAGAR PARA QUE SE LLEVEN EL ORO Y LA PLATA QUE NOS QUEDA !!! ?? QUE CAPOS QUE SOMOS !!! Ayer, un art?culo en un diario norteamericano Titulaba: La resistencia de un pueblo impide el desarrollo minero de Argentina...por favor de verdad, por favor les pido si todav?a quieren colgarse una cinta celeste y blanca en la solapa un par de veces al a?o..., entonces hagan circular esta carta ( o algunos argentinos seguir?n choreandos? los tohallones de los hoteles de europa y crey?ndose "vivos" mientras que los yankees nos har?n pagar 85 millones de d?lares para poder dejarnos sin dos mil quinientos millones de d?lares en oro)... SE?ORES DIPUTADOS Y SENADORES Representantes del coimero Carlos Por favor, si tienen un m?nimo de verg?enza, en honor a Belgrano y a Brown, a todos los que se jugaron la vida por este pa?s...p?guense un tiro en los huevos o h?ganselos cortar... Mas vale que se los corten ustedes antes que se los cortemos nosotros EL VIEJO LUIS Luis Victor Kahn Mendoza, Argentina MOVIMIENTO PUMAS POR UNA MAGN?FICA AM?RICA SOLIDARIA pumas-alta at eListas.net Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. La NAC & POP se envia y se recibe gracias a la actitud valiente, activa y decisiva de los suscriptores que la defiendieron cuando fue necesario y determinante ya que, frente a todo tipo de filtro, bloqueo o censura actuo firmemente cuando debio hacerlo en defensa de sus derechos, el derecho a la libertad de expresion, el derecho a la informacion y el derecho a la comunicacion ante quien correspondiera, actuando como si fuera uno solo en una epopeya de miles de correos electronicos , llamados telefonicos y organizacion de futuros actos callejeros de protesta que, si bien, algunos no llegaron a concretarse -porque no hizo falta- mostraron la calidad de sus integrantes y la fuerza de el estar unidos en la defensa de su comun dignidad. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La Nac.& Pop. no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ----------------------------------------- - EN OCTUBRE 2001 LA CAMARA DE DIPUTADOS DE ARGENTINA VOTO UNA LEY PARA CERRAR LAS FM Y LOS CANALES LIBRES Y COMUNITARIOS Y ENVIAR A LA CARCEL A LOS RADIODIFUSORES DE LA DEMOCRACIA MANTENIENDO COMO LEGALES LAS RADIOS Y CANALES DE TV DE LA DICTADURA DEL PROCESO. LO HIZO APROVECHANDO LA IMAGEN DE LOS AVIONES ESTRELLANDOSE CONTRA LAS TORRES GEMELAS, UN MES DESPUES DEL ATENTADO ALEGANDO UN PELIGRO PARA LOS AEROPUERTOS QUE LUEGO SE DEMOSTRO QUE ERA PRODUCIDO POR LAS RADIOS LEGALES. EN OCTUBRE 2002 LO APROBO EL SENADO GRACIAS A LA ENORME PRESION DE LOS LOBBYS DE ATA Y ARPA - LAS MULTINACIONALES ENQUISTADAS DETRAS DE LOS MEDIOS EN ARGENTINA COMO LA JP MORGAN-LA CALIFICADORA DE RIESGO-PAIS, LAS EMPRESAS MULTIMEDIOS COMO CLARIN, LA AQUIESCENCIA DE SENADORES DE DUDOSA HONORABILIDAD COMO JENEFES Y GIOJA Y ANTES, CON LA REPUGNANTE ACTITUD DE LOS DIPUTADOS FONDEVILA, DUMON, LARRABURU Y BRANDONI, SERVILES, ESTOS DIPUTADOS Y SENADORES, HAN DESCUBIERTO LA NUEVA FORMULA DE LOS POLITICOS FRACASADOS: DUROS CON EL PUEBLO, ALFOMBRA CON LOS PODEROSOS...ASI LES VA. AHORA EN EL 2003, VUELVE A DIPUTADOS POR ALGUNOS CAMBIOS INTRODUCIDOS POR LOS COMPA?EROS Y COMIENZA LA BATALLA DEFINITIVA : PUEBLO O ESTABLISHMENT, PATRIA O COLONIA, LIBERTAD O MONOPOLIOS, COMUNIDAD ORGANIZADA O COMUNIDAD SOJUZGADA. LOS LEGISLADORES DEBEN OPTAR. ----------------------------------------- VISITE www.abuelas.org.ar www.agua-mansa.com> www.antiescualidos.com/indexnew.html www.ar.geocities.com/publicidadpolitica www.asamblea.arg.net.ar www.asovic.org> www.ate.org.ar www.caracas.jotaceve.org> www.cels.org.ar/ www.clasemediaenpositivozulia.org> www.cnanoticias.com/ ?www.ctabsas.org.ar / www.documentalistas.org.ar/ www.eldescamisado.org www.espacioautogestionario.com www.excluidos.org/ www.farco.org.ar www.florestaporjusticia.8m.com/ www.forointergeneracional.freeservers.com/ www.foronacional.gov.ve www.frenteparaelcambio.org www.galeon.hispavista.com/anarcoperonismo1111/ www.geocities.com/bsasnegro/index.html / www.geocities.com/cipayoscom www.geocities.com/fub_usb> www.geocities.com/pmavl/> www.geocities.com/proyectoemancipacion www.geocities.com/revistatizon/arg.html www.geocities.com/walshrodolfo www.hijoslucha.netfirms.com www.hijos-rosario.org.ar / www.inquilinos.org.ar/ www.jdperon.gov.ar / www.ladeudaexterna.com www.lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular www.losocial.com.ar www.lucheyvuelve.com.ar www.madres.org www.madres-lineafundadora.org www.mnyp.org www.movimientomontonero.org www.mr-jsm.com.ar www.mundoamateur.com.ar www.nodo50.org/venezuela-unida/> www.parlamentoperonista.cjb.net / www.patrialibre.org.ar www.pjn.gov.ar/ www.pochormiga.com.ar> www.polemicadigital.com.ar www.porlavida.abuelas.org.ar www.procesobolivariano.8k.com> www.radioataque.org> www.rebelion.org> www.redbolivariana.com/> www.red-vertice.com/anv/index.html www.revistalinea.com ?www.rt-a.com www.sinolvido.org/ www.soberania.info> www.sutebalamatanza.org.ar/ www.todosjuntos.foros.org www.unasolapatria.org/inicio.html ?www.villacrespomibarrio.com.ar -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 24289 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Mon May 5 18:17:40 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 21:17:40 -0300 Subject: [A-List] VUELVEN LOS PERIODISTAS CAIDOS EN IRAK Message-ID: <4135-2200352601740550@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98152003-05-05T23:48:00Z2003-05-05T23:53:00Z513447662win631594099.3821 21 LA RED DE LA COMUNICACION UTPBA |||LA RED DE UTPBA LLEGAN LOS RESTOS DE LOS PERIODISTAS MUERTOS EN IRAK LLEGAN LOS RESTOS DELOS PERIODISTAS MUERTOS EN IRAK Ma?ana martes arribar?n al pa?slos restos de Mario Podest? y Ver?nica Cabrera, los periodistas argentinosmuertos a ra?z de un accidente en el veh?culo en el que viajaban de Jordaniaa Irak, en la carretera de Amman. Mario Podest?, quien se desempe?aba como corresponsal de Am?rica TV en Irak yVer?nica Cabrera, camar?grafa que lo acompa?aba, son dos v?ctimas m?s de lainvasi?n de Estados Unidos a Irak que dej? como saldo miles de muertos yheridos, entre ellos catorce periodistas. El martes 6 de mayo los restos arribar?n al aeropuerto de Ezeiza a las 9.30horas y ser?n llevados -acompa?ados por una caravana- a la Iglesia del Pilar,en donde se oficiar? una misa a las 14.00 horas en homenaje a losperiodistas, para luego ser trasladados al cementerio de la Recoleta a las15.00 horas. Estos hechos fueron denunciados y repudiados oportunamente por la Uni?n deTrabajadores de Prensa de Buenos Aires, al igual que el car?cter criminal ygenocida de esta guerra. Secretaria de Preansa 5 de mayo de 2003 LOS MARTES ESCUCHA "SIN ZAPPING" "SinZapping" es el programa que el Centro de Capacitaci?n y Comunicaci?n dela Utpba realiza todos los martes de 22 a 24 por Radio Nacional Faro, FM87.9. El espacio aporta una mirada desde los trabajadores de prensa sobre larealidad de los medios y analiza la actualidad, con la participaci?n dedistintas personalidades de la cultura, las ciencias y la pol?tica. AGENCIANACIONAL DE COMUNICACION (ANC) Informaci?nsobre: Periodismo. Medios de Comunicaci?n. Concentraci?n Medi?tica.Agresiones. Censura. Capacitaci?n Profesional. Los periodistas del Interior.Conflictos laborales. Etica Period?stica. Los Periodistas en el Mundo. NuevasTecnolog?as. Los Periodistas en Internet . Telecomunicaciones. Radios de BajaPotencia. Los periodistas del Gran Buenos Aires. Informes Especiales y m?s. El servicio deANC puede recibirse completo en forma personalizada y gratuita por correoelectr?nico. Solic?telo a agenciaanc at infovia.com.ar,cccutpba at ciudad.com.ar , lared at infovia.com.ar Centro de Cultura y Capacitaci?n Utpba, ObservatorioPol?tico y Social de Medios Alsina 779 - Ciudad de Buenos Aires Rep?blica Argentina Tel: 5218-2840al 2845 www.utpba.com.ar e-mail: agenciaanc at infovia.com.ar Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias)porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nicopertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad quenos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est?incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual dondese comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientosy la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores delpueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias,practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Culturay la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico eInstitucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de laPatria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos lospueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones yeventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, lasoberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestadde su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa delos Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como unhumilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en laconformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve ala victoria. La NAC & POP se enviay se recibe gracias a la actitud valiente, activa y decisiva de lossuscriptores que la defiendieron cuando fue necesario y determinante ya que,frente a todo tipo de filtro, bloqueo o censura actuo firmemente cuando debiohacerlo en defensa de sus derechos, el derecho a la libertad de expresion, elderecho a la informacion y el derecho a la comunicacion ante quiencorrespondiera, actuando como si fuera uno solo en una epopeya de miles decorreos electronicos , llamados telefonicos y organizacion de futuros actoscallejeros de protesta que, si bien, algunos no llegaron a concretarse-porque no hizo falta- mostraron la calidad de sus integrantes y la fuerza deel estar unidos en la defensa de su comun dignidad. Si quiere dar de BAJA sudirecci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n denoticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos yespect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La Nac.& Pop. no se haceresponsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan poresta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulopersonal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ----------------------------------------- - EN OCTUBRE 2001 LA CAMARA DE DIPUTADOS DE ARGENTINA VOTO UNA LEY PARACERRAR LAS FM Y LOS CANALES LIBRES Y COMUNITARIOS Y ENVIAR A LA CARCEL A LOSRADIODIFUSORES DE LA DEMOCRACIA MANTENIENDO COMO LEGALES LAS RADIOS Y CANALESDE TV DE LA DICTADURA DEL PROCESO. LO HIZO APROVECHANDO LA IMAGEN DE LOSAVIONES ESTRELLANDOSE CONTRA LAS TORRES GEMELAS, UN MES DESPUES DEL ATENTADOALEGANDO UN PELIGRO PARA LOS AEROPUERTOS QUE LUEGO SE DEMOSTRO QUE ERAPRODUCIDO POR LAS RADIOS LEGALES. EN OCTUBRE 2002 LO APROBO ELSENADO GRACIAS A LA ENORME PRESION DE LOS LOBBYS DE ATA Y ARPA - LASMULTINACIONALES ENQUISTADAS DETRAS DE LOS MEDIOS EN ARGENTINA COMO LA JPMORGAN-LA CALIFICADORA DE RIESGO-PAIS, LAS EMPRESAS MULTIMEDIOS COMO CLARIN, LAAQUIESCENCIA DE SENADORES DE DUDOSAHONORABILIDAD COMO JENEFES Y GIOJA Y ANTES,CON LA REPUGNANTE ACTITUD DE LOS DIPUTADOS FONDEVILA,DUMON, LARRABURU Y BRANDONI, SERVILES, ESTOS DIPUTADOSY SENADORES, HAN DESCUBIERTO LA NUEVA FORMULA DE LOS POLITICOS FRACASADOS:DUROS CON EL PUEBLO, ALFOMBRA CON LOS PODEROSOS...ASI LES VA. AHORA EN EL 2003, VUELVE A DIPUTADOS POR ALGUNOS CAMBIOS INTRODUCIDOS POR LOS COMPA?EROS Y COMIENZA LA BATALLA DEFINITIVA : PUEBLO OESTABLISHMENT, PATRIA O COLONIA, LIBERTAD O MONOPOLIOS, COMUNIDAD ORGANIZADAO COMUNIDAD SOJUZGADA. LOS LEGISLADORES DEBEN OPTAR. ----------------------------------------- VISITE www.abuelas.org.ar www.agua-mansa.com> www.antiescualidos.com/indexnew.html www.ar.geocities.com/publicidadpolitica www.asamblea.arg.net.ar www.asovic.org> www.ate.org.ar www.caracas.jotaceve.org> www.cels.org.ar/ www.clasemediaenpositivozulia.org> www.cnanoticias.com/ www.conadolfo.com www.ctabsas.org.ar / www.documentalistas.org.ar/ www.eldescamisado.org www.espacioautogestionario.com www.excluidos.org/ www.farco.org.ar www.florestaporjusticia.8m.com/ www.forointergeneracional.freeservers.com/ www.foronacional.gov.ve www.frenteparaelcambio.org www.galeon.hispavista.com/anarcoperonismo1111/ www.geocities.com/bsasnegro/index.html / www.geocities.com/cipayoscom www.geocities.com/fub_usb> www.geocities.com/pmavl/> www.geocities.com/proyectoemancipacion www.geocities.com/revistatizon/arg.html www.geocities.com/walshrodolfo www.hijoslucha.netfirms.com www.hijos-rosario.org.ar / www.inquilinos.org.ar/ www.jdperon.gov.ar / www.ladeudaexterna.com www.lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular www.losocial.com.ar www.lucheyvuelve.com.ar www.madres.org www.madres-lineafundadora.org www.mnyp.org www.movimientomontonero.org www.mr-jsm.com.ar www.mundoamateur.com.ar www.nodo50.org/venezuela-unida/> www.parlamentoperonista.cjb.net / www.patrialibre.org.ar www.pjn.gov.ar/ www.pochormiga.com.ar> www.polemicadigital.com.ar www.porlavida.abuelas.org.ar www.procesobolivariano.8k.com> www.radioataque.org> www.rebelion.org> www.redbolivariana.com/> www.red-vertice.com/anv/index.html www.revistalinea.com www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net/ www.rt-a.com www.sinolvido.org/ www.soberania.info> www.sutebalamatanza.org.ar/ www.todosjuntos.foros.org www.unasolapatria.org/inicio.htm> www.venezuela-en-videos.com/> www.villacrespomibarrio.com.ar -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: image003.gif URL: From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 00:46:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 09:46:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] George Galloway Message-ID: <000701c3139b$3e8b96e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Galloway pelted with eggs at May Day rally MP appeals for donations to fight press 'smear campaign' MICHAEL SETTLE The Herald, 6 May 2003 GEORGE Galloway dodged a volley of eggs yesterday as he spoke at a workers' May Day rally, condemning the war on Iraq and the "smear campaign" being waged against him by sections of the press. Last night, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin hinted that his libel action against the Daily Telegraph and the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor might only be the beginning of his legal battle against the media. Stressing that he would seek the advice of his lawyers, he said of other newspapers that had published allegations against him: "I hope to deal with them one day also." After his speech at the rally, he revealed he intended to sue the Sunday Telegraph, which last weekend ran an interview with his former chauffeur. "That is the subject of legal action. I will be adding the Sunday Telegraph's name to the writ," he said. In Wallasey on Merseyside, Mr Galloway was addressing an audience of about 200 people when two eggs were thrown by a man who shouted: "That's for being up Saddam's a***." Nimbly, the back bench MP ducked and the eggs missed their target. "I'm a Scotsman. You have to get up pretty early to hit me with an egg," quipped the politician, who claimed the culprit was a member of the far right British National party. The egg-thrower was arrested by police to prevent a breach of the peace. He gave his name as David Anson, 41, a local unemployed builder. "I don't agree with him going to Saddam. I have got friends who have been out there and a few who have died," he added. Merseyside Police said a 16-year-old youth was also arrested in connection with the incident. After the egg attack, Mr Galloway continued with his 15-minute speech, in which he repeatedly condemned the war on Iraq. "This war," he argued, "slaughtered thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi people who had committed no crime against anyone and those deaths came on top of one of the greatest crimes in all international history - the crime of sanctions against Iraq which killed more than one million Iraqi children over 10 years." He added: "Those crimes will be judged at the bar of history, and I believe that the blood on the hands of the British and American governments will never be extinguished and will follow them to the grave and beyond." Mr Galloway also used his speech to repeat his denial of allegations that he was on Saddam Hussein's payroll. He described the allegations as "smears" and compared them to previous accusations made against left-wing figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson, and Arthur Scargill. After the speech, the MP appealed for donations to his legal fighting fund. He said that, according to his lawyer, the "cheques are flowing in". He told The Herald: "The indications are it's going very well." Mr Galloway explained that, if his libel action did go to court, the whole process could take a year to complete. As regards the prospect of several parallel inquiries by the Labour party, the Charities Commission, and the parliamentary commissioner for standards, the back bencher was adamant that any investigation had to be put on hold while his court battle was on-going. "It would be absolutely unjust to seek to try a matter that's going to be tried in court. I don't expect that will happen," he said. He suggested that he was in big demand for public appearances, speaking this week alone in Lewisham, Manchester, and Blackburn, Jack Straw's constituency. Claiming he had growing support for his battle against an orchestrated press smear campaign - including that of Michael Foot, the former Labour leader - Mr Galloway insisted it would all be material for a book he is writing on his experiences in the Middle East. "It will be a blockbuster," said the MP. Its title? George In The Wars." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 00:52:37 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 09:52:37 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Saddam preparing resistance campaign Message-ID: <001f01c3139c$14638c00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This forwarded from Jay Moore via Marxmail: Iraqi Resistance Report X - May 5, 2003 ========================================= 1 May 2003 American Report: Saddam prepares for guerrilla warfare with 40,000 fighters. Paris  Muhit An intelligence report received by the American Central Intelligence Agency has disclosed on the authority of their secret sources that the deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is still alive and has formed a new secret leadership in preparation for waging a Vietnam-style guerrilla war against American forces to be launched next 17 July with 40,000 fighters. The force is to be led by his cousin 'Ali Hasan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali", Taha Yasin Ramadan, and the Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad. The magazine al-Watan al-'Arabi in its issue coming out tomorrow said that the date for the beginning of the guerrilla war coincides with the anniversary of the Baathist revolution and seizure of power, and the anniversary of Saddam Hussein's ascension to the Iraqi presidency in 1979 as the successor of Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. Until now, no one has conclusive proof as to the fate of Saddam Hussein and his two sons. It is said that he was killed during an air raid on a place where he was meeting with his commanders in the Baghdad district of al-Mansour. But there were sightings of him after that, in the A'zamiyyah district of the Iraqi capital on the same day that American forces entered Baghdad airport. Rumors have circulated that he attended Friday congregational prayer in the Mosque of Abu Hanifa an-Nu'man, and that he promised the worshippers there a surprise. There are also rumors that he had appeared elsewhere too, but there is no proof of the truth of any of these rumors. Intelligence sources confirm information that Saddam Hussein and his two sons are still alive, still in Iraq, and that the forces that are still loyal to Saddam Hussein number 40,000 fighters. They are deployed throughout various regions of the country. The President, who is still in hiding, still has power and specific means at his command, and he has kept secret hiding places where he can disappear in a number of provinces. In addition he controls secret hiding places that contain weapons and ammunition, military supplies, foodstuffs, and other necessities. The contents of these secret storehouses is sufficient for waging a long and bitter war. The great surprise that the message disclosed is that Saddam Hussein and his group of supporters who represent a secret leadership not composed of the familiar military and Baath Party personalities, are busily engaged in putting the finishing touches on a plan for a great confrontation with the Anglo-American forces deployed on Iraqi territory. The UAE newspaper "al-Bayan" reported on the authority of information that has reached "al-Watan al-'Arabi" that Saddam Hussein has designated 17 July of this year as the date on which the great jihad will begin. In addition to the symbolic significance of this date, preparations should be completed by that time. In addition, Iraqi citizens will have come to understand the what the presence of foreign forces on their soil means. They will have come to understand the extent of changes that will take place in their way of life, contrary to their social, cultural, and religious heritage. Some of the considerations that justify putting off the date by about three months until July are likelihood that ethnic and sectarian fighting might erupt in the country by then, and the struggles of the different aspirants for power should have risen to the surface. This is likely to create an unbalanced situation in Iraq, keeping the occupation forces busy, and giving the forces loyal to Saddam Hussein an opportunity to score major breakthroughs in enemy security by waging Vietnam-style guerrilla warfare with "hit-and-run" tactics. The leaked information also discloses the make-up of the group that has gathered around Saddam Hussein and his two sons. It is composed of 'Abd Hammoud and 'Ali Hasan al-Majid who succeeded in escaping from Basra and disappearing, of Taha Yasin Ramadan, of the Defence Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad, and Latif Nasif Jasem. Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri, who headed the northern sector, has disappeared, as has the commander of the Middle Euphrates sector Mazban Khidr Hadi. The group surrounding Saddam now comprises elements from Tikrit, Samarra, and Mosul. The intelligence report does not exclude the possibility that the new group around Saddam Hussein was the source of the leaked information that led to the arrest or surrender of certain former officials, because their roles had come to an end and there was no place for them in the new plan, and in order to keep the Americans occupied with interrogating them about events in the past, diverting the Americans' attention from planning for what is to happen in the near future. The information suggests that Saddam Hussein still has bases located in the cities, towns, and villages of Iraq, where the fighters look like ordinary citizens, but are waiting to carry out the orders that they will be given, and are meanwhile carrying out reconnaissance and observation of the enemy and bringing information and intelligence from the leadership to the base. The intelligence information also confirms that the locations where Saddam and his new aides are located are very well protected and surrounded in total secrecy which no spying or detection devices, however advanced, can penetrate. Also noteworthy is the presence of retired Russian experts in some of these locations, men practiced in guerrilla warfare with great expertise in this field. Strangely, the intelligence report discloses the precise details, known to the American intelligence agencies in Baghdad, of a meeting ostensibly held by Saddam Hussein with his aides on 7 April, the day that American forces entered the environs of Baghdad. The details of the meeting include the fact that Saddam Hussein confirmed at the opening of the meeting, which was held in a secret and protected location, that a great betrayal had taken place in the Republican Guard and Special Forces. He spoke of a high-ranking military personality with deep hatred, and said that this person had known all the secrets, the methods of issuing orders, and their secret codes. This person was the one who led the act of treachery and issued the orders for the forces to withdraw, as if they had come from Saddam Hussein personally. It was in this way that immediate and sudden withdrawals took place from all positions at one stroke, their weapons being taken away. The withdrawal covered the Republican Guard, the Special Forces, and all the regular and semi-regular forces, leaving no one to defend Baghdad except a few hundred Arab volunteers who were not included in those orders and who were not integrated into the leadership's chain of command. The intelligence report indicated that Saddam said that those persons think that they will occupy important positions under the American administration of Iraq. The message that they used said that Saddam Hussein had been killed with his commanders and that there was no longer any hope of resistance. The person who stands at the head of the betrayal knew the secret password and was thus able to issue the orders to retire from the battle. The sources reported Saddam as saying during the meeting that the date 9 April is the day of treachery and treason in Baghdad, (which confirms that the meeting took place after that date), the date of shame and humiliation for those traitors who sold out Arabism, and sold out Baghdad for some derisory sum. It was a great betrayal in which high-ranking officers of an Arab army were involved, an army that we had thought had regained its senses and returned to its Arab Nationalist position, that we had considered a loyal friend that had opened the door to jihad together with us. But it stabbed us in the back. Saddam added: "we have done our sums, and we still have great potential. We are accustomed to the most difficult conditions. We have experience in secret resistance from before the revolutions of 1963 and 1968, and we have the ability to wage battle and we are prepared for the confrontation and have the wherewithal to carry on for years." After that, according to the intelligence information, Saddam Hussein returned to the topic of the betrayal and treachery and spoke with bitterness of the husband of his youngest daughter Halla, Jamal Mustafa al-'Umar, who surrendered to American forces, a fact indicating his involvement in the treason. Saddam added, "We had prepared for a great battle against the Americans in Baghdad. Our planning was excellent. We had prepared a pincer attack. What sadness I have for those youth. What sadness I have for those traitorous scoundrels who forsook Iraq, and Arabism, and Islam. They did not forsake Saddam Hussein. And now we have become the survivors. We are the elite of the Iraqi people, and the historical responsibility for liberating our people has fallen on us. You will discover that the way is open before us, We will make America pay the price, God willing, albeit belatedly. We have grown used to struggle. We have lived it, and will continue to do so. The reports you have heard about chaos in the streets of Iraq today will mark the important beginning of the revolution." He continued saying: "Our date is in July. That is a historic date that has its own aims, significance, and associations that we will use in the fight. You need to be aware that the members of the Bedouin tribes and federations have not been treacherous. They have not turned traitor. When I determined what those contemptible officers had done, I wrote to the tribes to tell them to be calm and await the appointed day. And I asked some of them to go along with the American invader for the sake of our noble goal." Saddam Hussein said, "And to those who talk about the Shi'a, I say that the Shi'a will prove to everyone in our coming battle that they are the noble vanguard, and the battles of liberation will be waged in an-Najaf, and Karbala and the queen of cities Umm Qasr." Saddam Hussein, had called on the Iraqi people to rise up in intifada against the American occupation forces, saying that it is the foreign occupation and not Sunni or Shi'i that is the "only issue that your great Iraq is living through," as he put it. This call came in a hand-written letter from Saddam to the Iraqi people and the sons and daughters of the Arab Nation and the Islamic world community, and to honorable people everywhere. Dated 28 April, his birthday, the message was obtained by the London-based al-Quds al-'Arabi newspaper. Sources close to Saddam confirmed the authenticity of the handwriting and the signature, pointing out that the conditions of his underground existence do not currently permit anything more than sending hand-written letters, due to security considerations. The Leadership of the Resistance and Liberation of Iraq had stressed the day before yesterday in an exclusive letter sent to al-Quds al-'Arabi that Saddam Hussein had survived the bombing and that he would deliver an address to Iraqis and the Arab Nation within 72 hours. In the letter, Saddam accused the countries surrounding Iraq of working against the resistance and said that the traitors had allowed themselves to speak out loud about their treachery, despite its being a disgrace, in a reference taken to refer to Kuwait. Saddam said that treason lay behind the fall of Baghdad, saying "the enemy was not victorious over you, you who reject occupation and humiliation, you who have Arabism and Islam in your hearts and minds, it was not victorious over you except by means of treason." See http://www.freearabvoice.org/Iraq/Report/report10.htm From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 00:54:21 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 09:54:21 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Dalyell vs. Israel lobby Message-ID: <002701c3139c$52a86760$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Dalyell steps up attack on Levy Michael White, political editor Tuesday May 6, 2003 The Guardian The Labour MP Tam Dalyell yesterday scornfully brushed aside accusations of anti-semitism but stood by the allegation that has landed him in political trouble, that "there is far too much Jewish influence in the United States" and one over-influential Jew in Tony Blair's entourage. Faced with threats to take "inflammatory remarks" to the commission for racial equality, the MP for Linlithgow raised the stakes significantly by criticising Lord Levy, the music mogul turned Blair fundraiser and tennis partner, whose intimate contacts across the region have made him No 10's envoy to the Middle East. "I believe his influence has been very important on the prime minister and has led to what I see as this awful war and the sack of Baghdad," said Mr Dalyell, who has long been a critic of Israeli expansionism and insists that many Jews are also "desperately unhappy about it'.' The father of the Commons, an MP for 41 years and a pillar of the "awkward squad" for most of them, Mr Dalyell qualified his criticisms only to the extent of saying he was not attacking Jewish influence as such, but what he called the "Sharon-Likudnik agenda" of the hardliners - led by Ariel Sharon's Likud party - who dominate Israeli politics. After Mr Dalyell was indirectly reported by Vanity Fair magazine as criticising "a cabal of Jewish advisers" driving US-UK policy towards Iraq - and now Syria - there were protests, and Professor Eric Moonman, a Labour MP 20 years ago, started legal consultations over a complaint to the CRE. But Mr Dalyell may be the MP least likely to buckle to pressure. Questioned on Radio 4's World at One, he said: "The cabal I referred to was American," and named seven hawkish advisers to President George Bush - six of them Jewish - as urging a strike against Syria. "It's the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs combined with neo-Christian fundamentalists. I think a lot of it is Likudnik, Mr Sharon's agenda, and when it comes to an attack on Syria this is a very serious matter." Pressed further, the MP conceded he had "picked out one person [in Britain] about whom I am extremely concerned and I have to be blunt about it. That is Lord Levy, Mr Blair's official representative in the Middle East. This has two questions: first, should not this be done by the Foreign Office; second, are special representatives to be accountable or not?" Downing Street has often been forced to defend Lord Levy, both over aggressive fundraising and as an envoy - welcome in Arab capitals, including Damascus, as well as Tel Aviv - who cannot be questioned by MPs. Mr Dalyell's career includes a close alliance with the late Richard Crossman, a passionate Zionist who, with characteristic perversity, believed that all gentiles - including himself - are anti-semitic at some level. The claim won him the friendship of Chaim Weizman, a president of Israel. Prof Moonman, president of the Zionist Federation, said: "I do not believe Tam is anti-semitic," but said his "old friend" had used inflammatory language which could support that view. Whatever the precise extent of Lord Levy's influence, Mr Dalyell and his detractors yesterday appeared to make no acknowledgement of the defence lodged by Mr Blair's allies. They constantly point out that No 10 has helped persuade the White House to promote the latest "road map" version of the Middle East peace plan in the teeth of Israeli opposition. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 00:55:14 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 09:55:14 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: dilemmas all round Message-ID: <002f01c3139c$721dfe20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> What's it to be - the euro, or yet more wasted years? Blair and Brown must take a great leap forward on the single currency Hugo Young Tuesday May 6, 2003 The Guardian Deciding to go for the euro presents the British government with a perilous choice. As an advocate of entry, I understand that perfectly. Though I argued last week that failing to hold a referendum soon would begin the reversion of Britain into a country distancing itself from the whole EU project, I do see that the price of ducking out of a decision is matched by a risk entailed in ducking into one. The people, after all, could go the wrong way. Britain's uniqueness arises not just from the offshore history, but from the timing. The founder members saw the euro as the fulfilment of a vision. It was unthinkable that any of them should fail to join the construct Mitterrand, Kohl and Delors had shaped. And they didn't have to consult their people in a referendum. For Britain and other non-joiners, any visionary impulse is now superseded by hard evidence, not all of it helpful. Empirical data provide an endless supply of food for scepticism, especially when so many Brits seem that way inclined already. A further difficulty is that so little of the ground has been prepared. People say there has been a great debate here. There hasn't. Far from the steady drip of pro-euro propaganda, as eurosceptics claim, government has created an arid wasteland of non-argument. It set up a campaign group, Britain in Europe, but for several years forbade it to mention the euro. The chancellor has spread his glowering scepticism across the entire scene, issuing diktats against any colleague who dared to contradict him, which most of them pitifully failed to do. So the propaganda has been exclusively from one side. Not a single government minister has ever given a speech, let alone been part of a campaign, making an unambiguous case for the euro. The sceptics have had a free ride to parade their distortions as well as their uncomfortable questions, backed by a relentless press determined to score an anti-Europe victory going far beyond the currency. The most amazing product of this lopsided environment is that 30-35% of voters still want to join the euro if the economic tests are passed. But most observers agree on a different consequence: that a referendum any time soon is out of the question. Now we await the verdict on the tests. The economic case, as I've argued for years, will never satisfy everyone. There are some risks both ways. Today the best case for entry, meticulously addressing the costs of non-entry, is published by a group of distinguished international economists. On jobs, on investment, on trade, on national prosperity over the long term, I find it far more persuasive than debating points about the present state of the eurozone economy. But for the purpose of the political decision that's about to be made, the two most relevant truths about the tests have become blindingly clear. First, they are indeed subjective. The thousands of pages and zillions of economists' man hours we hear the Treasury has devoted to their scrutiny are either a case of Brown becoming unhinged in some delusion about the existence of objective truth, or an elaborate con, supporting a departmental scepticism about Europe that the Treasury has favoured ever since the EEC was invented. Whatever the truth about that, no one with any savvy believes the verdict will merit the awed submission the chancellor seems to be expecting. Second, most economists now agree that few, if any, of the tests are likely to spring from ambiguity to clarity in the foreseeable future. If the case about investment, financial services, convergence or stability is uncertain now, it will be no more certain in four years' time. The chimera of future economic certainty is being used as cover for present political retreat, by a group of politicians who want to persuade both us and themselves that, while running away from a referendum, they continue to embrace the EU with deathless passion. Meanwhile, however, other things will have become clearer. The British economic agonising could continue inconclusively for years, but the EU will not stand still. Both the union and the euro-zone will develop, in the hands of the members most fully committed to them. While we sit here demanding that the central bank and finance ministers change their rules before we deign to join them - and some changes are essential - they will ask themselves who we think we are. When the EU develops its own new constitution to cope with the new entrants, it is sure to ask itself how intently it should listen to a major member that has chosen to remain outside its most cementing project. Their scepticism will go further. We seem to imagine that the choice of entry will remain ours alone for ever. But whenever the moment comes, there has to be a negotiation. Germany and France could make things hard for us. This will not be 1972, when they both implored Ted Heath to come in, and negotiated accordingly. Yet another phase of self-exclusion, with sterling manipulated to secure trade benefits against the euro, and UK diplomacy continuing to be locked into a preference for American options, will not have made the eurozone any easier to enter than it is today. It will in my judgment be much more difficult. A fair number of important people would welcome this. The articulation of the "never" point of view is becoming more open, along with more brazen questioning of the very concept of an extended and therefore more federalistic EU. Nobody in the government wants any such hostilities to start to prevail in the public mood. My case is that they should recognise the imminent danger of them becoming more potent. Ministers should stop pretending that retreat from a referendum is an easy option, to be painlessly reviewed any time we feel like it. My better case is that the coming statement from Brown and Blair needs to take a great leap forward. As a minimum, it should make a formal commitment to entry, and declare for a referendum within the next 12 months, other things being equal. This would decisively alter expectations, send a message to business and Europe, and compel the government to abandon the fence on which it sits with such sour self-destruction. It is the only way to prepare, and the only prelude to a victory that lies, among an indifferent and persuadable electorate, entirely within its grasp. The alternative is more ambiguity. No pledge to a referendum. A paper-thin promise to look at things again next year, which nobody would believe. A statement, in effect, that the strongest government in Europe was backing away. A tragic misdirection of this country back into the Thatcherite vortex. All in the name of a pretence that, with just a little bit more time passing, all obstacles will miraculously recede. They won't. If we don't do it now, another decade will pass before another government pleads to bring sterling in, crawling on its knees. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 00:59:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 09:59:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: New Labour damage limitation Message-ID: <003701c3139d$091b8ea0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> With the very prickly issue of "foundation hospitals" threatening to give Blair more rebellion troubles, here's a carefully set aside bombshell ready to be brought out at just such a moment. This news has been well known for years -- to imagine that Legg's role in the administration of "Dame" Shirley Porter is somehow "news" is rubbish, but it does highlight the incompetence of Iain Duncan Smith as Conservative Party leader. Once again the Guardian to the rescue. ----- Tory chief's role in housing scandal revealed David Hencke and Rob Evans Tuesday May 6, 2003 The Guardian The new chief executive of the Conservative Party, Barry Legg, allegedly played a key part in a scandal that saw homeless families placed in asbestos-riddled London tower blocks. His role was revealed during an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Radio 4's Today programme on his conduct in public life and business. The allegations, which centre on his role as a senior member of Westminster council in the 1980s at a time when he was also involved in the so-called "homes for votes scandal" at the council, have prompted Conservative MP Derek Conway to call for his possible resignation. Mr Legg, a former MP, was appointed to his post running Conservative central office in February by Iain Duncan Smith. His arrival as chief executive and chief of staff sparked controversy among the 17-member Conservative board and with party chairman Theresa May, neither of whom were consulted over the new role. The board is likely to ask Mr Duncan Smith to strip him of his role of party chief executive. An official investigation into the Westminster "homes-for votes scandal found that, as chief whip in the 1980s, Mr Legg was part of a trio, including Dame Shirley Porter, which was behind an "unlawful, disgraceful and improper" scheme to gerrymander the local elections. He was later cleared of having to pay the surcharge for the unlawful scam, now at ?40 million. Not so well known is that Mr Legg also bears direct responsibility for another Westminster council scandal putting more than 200 tenants in two high rise blocks, Hermes and Chantry Point, which were known to be full of asbestos, for seven years. This decision was criticised as "very disturbing" by John Barratt, a local government expert, in an official inquiry. Documents seen by the Guardian show that Mr Legg chaired the secret meeting of Tory councillors which took the decision in 1989. Mr Barratt discovered that it was "abundantly clear" that senior councillors knew that the tower blocks were in bad condition, with asbestos problems. Derek Conway, the Conservative MP for Old Bexley, said that if Mr Legg has not told the Conservative party board about his past, he should go. "If he does not offer his resignation then they should take action themselves". The investigation also revealed Mr Legg's role in a ?18 million raid on a company pension fund which was condemned by the pensions ombudsman, Julian Farrand, for "maladministration and a breach of trust". The episode followed the take-over of a meat company, FMC, by Hillsdown Holdings, a food conglomerate of which Mr Legg was a director and company secretary. Mr Legg was also a trustee of the FMC pension fund. This fund had a substantial surplus, but also had specific provisions stipulating that the money in the fund had to stay there and not be used for other purposes. Nevertheless the ?18 million surplus was transferred in 1989 to Hillsdown Holdings, without the knowledge of the pensioners. When they found out, more than 50 pensioners took Hillsdown to the ombudsman who ruled in 1995 that the money had to be paid back by the company with interest, bringing the total to ?30 million. Hillsdown appealed to the high court, but lost. Mr Legg told the Guardian: "As both the ombudsman and the judge make clear, the trustees were right to be seeking to secure a greater proportion of the surplus for scheme members than the company was willing to offer." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 01:48:35 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 10:48:35 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: trade policy References: Message-ID: <005b01c313a3$e6222420$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Sabri wrote: Subject: [A-List] The Economist: A place for capital controls May I invite you to a round of applause for our great friends at the Economist! ----- The Economist has long prided itself on its advocacy of free trade, so this qualified support for capital controls looks out of character. However it chimes with recent alarm bells being rung by free trade par excellence Jagdhish Bhagwati, who berates the US for its overly ideological approach (to use his phrase) to trade policy in the article below. Clearly even free trade's most vociferous advocates recognise the severe damage being done to the legitimacy of their neoliberal cause by the unilaterialism of the Bush administration. A point worth remembering with respect to Stiglitz also. A ban on capital controls is a bad trade-off By Jagdish Bhagwati and Daniel Tarullo Financial Times, March 17 2003 The US Congress will next month hold hearings on the free trade agreements recently negotiated by the US with Chile and Singapore. There is little overall political opposition to these bilateral agreements. The hearings, though, will focus on a matter of great importance: the inclusion of restrictions on the use of capital controls. Chile and Singapore, both models of sound economic policy management by emerging market countries, resisted an obligation not to use capital controls under any circumstances. But in the end, they compromised. We believe their objections were sound; the compromises are not. The restrictions are bad financial policy, bad trade policy, and bad foreign policy. There are parallels between the unrestricted flow of capital and free trade: interference with either leads to the loss of economic efficiency and constraints on economic freedom. And capital controls, like trade restrictions, can be a crutch that substitutes for necessary policy changes. But there are important differences. Although liberalised trade can create adjustment problems for import-competing industries, the likelihood of these being serious is low, and they can be remedied through relatively modest programmes of assistance. In any case, increased trade itself boosts economic growth, helping a country to adjust to new competition. Free flows of capital, however, can bring panic and crashing markets and currencies, particularly in developing countries. Because developing countries have relatively small financial markets and do much of their borrowing in dollars or euros, they are vulnerable to rapid financial outflows if creditors suspect difficulties in repayment. As money is withdrawn, the country's currency depreciates rapidly, which can lead to more investors pulling out in an effort to avoid losses. Meanwhile, import prices soar, spurring inflation. This vicious circle spells calamity for the country's economy: capital flows can be, and have often been, perilous. This difference between free trade and free capital flows has long been known to economists. But persistent lobbying by some financial interests and the swing away from interventionism to greater use of markets combined to induce amnesia at the International Monetary Fund about the need for emerging markets to exercise prudence in freeing capital flows. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, involving massive panic-driven outflows of capital, was a painful medicine for this memory loss. The IMF has since changed its thinking and acknowledged the need for careful policies that monitor and, in some cases, regulate capital flows. Yet now, just as the world has become saner in these matters, the Bush administration has insisted that the free trade areas for Chile and Singapore include provisions penalising them for the use of any controls on capital. This short-sighted view marks a discouraging triumph of ideology over experience and good sense. The inclusion of a rigid rule against capital controls in a trade agreement makes things even worse. If controls were imposed, even in the midst of a financial crisis and with the approval of the IMF, American investors would have to be compensated. A decision on damages would be made by trade arbitrators, whose macroeconomic expertise is not exactly compelling. Experience under the North American Free Trade Agreement has revealed the limitations of "trade" arbitrators in issues requiring a broader economic perspective. The intention of the Bush adminstration to use these two agreements as "templates" for other trade agreements, possibly including the Doha round, means that acceptance of the capital control provisions could engender a trade policy that causes far-reaching damage. The prohibition on capital controls has the makings of a US foreign policy debacle. Imagine that a government imposes short-term capital controls in order to manage financial problems. Compensation will ensue, but only for American investors. The citizens of the developing country will then see a rich US corporation or individual being indemnified while everyone else in the country suffers from the crisis. One would be hard-pressed to think of a better prescription for anti-American outrage. American unilateralism has become a pressing global concern even when the White House purports to act in pursuit of universal values. So the use of US muscle to advance the administration's narrow, ideologically driven aims is hardly in the interests of America, let alone the rest of the world. The writers are respectively professor of economics at Columbia University and professor of law at Georgetown University. From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue May 6 03:05:02 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 05:05:02 EDT Subject: [A-List] Cuba/imperial thuggery/blacks and socialism Message-ID: <14c.1ef6cf22.2be8d4be@aol.com> >The repression by the Castro regime virtually erased a small but growing civic opposition. Following an island-wide dragnet, which led to summary trials and jail terms of six to 28 years for the activists, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice solicited memos from several senior Bush administration officials for options on U.S. action. The internal debate has been spirited, according to several officials. < Comment Here is the squabble with the social imperialist sector and intellectual thugs of the bourgeois intelligencia. The core of the "civic opposition" was not political activist with great debating skills but people accepting money and means to organize revolt against the Cuban government and the way it has organized ownership rights in Cuba. Agents of the US government have acknowledged that they have given and the "civic opposition" accepted money and means from agencies of the US government. I do not advocate or pretend to know what period of incarceration is "reasonable" for such an offense, but do believe that the "civic opposition" should have been convicted of being stupid minimally. I am personally a part of a "growing civic opposition" in my own country - America, and subscribe to the theory of communism as outlined by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in many of their major writings. I do not under any circumstances seek, ask for or will accept any money or means from foreign governments, individuals working on behalf of foreign governments or any agency of a foreign government seeking the overthrow of this government, to alter its constitutional authority, to lobby businesses in America, to cut deals with various corporations or to get the best seats at a Prince concert. Nothing . . . . Nada! I have my own beefs with the American political system and can get angry on my own without the help of any foreign government. Given the state of affairs with city government and civic society where I live, what the Cuban government has accomplished in the past 40 years is nothing short of a miracle. It's not like the capitalist want to establish a national health plan in Cuba, build low cost housing, improve and expand their welfare system, fix the potholes in the street, ensure the working people have a good pension plan or superb school system. Nor does there exist any historical evidence that our government is willing to extend to other what they will not extend to our own working class. Regime change begins at home. Further, Cuba is about 70% black and basically white capitalist types run our government, who do not have a good track record with treating blacks fairly, Why on earth would the average Cuban want the US government running anything in Cuban. Plus I have noticed - but wasn't going to say anything about it because people are sensitive, that most of these anti-Cuban type Cubans in Florida and boat people look like Ricky Ricardo and are not mostly black? At least the people the media giants put on television. What? You think we did not notice that in Detroit? Hey, I am as crazy about "I Love Lucy" as the next person, but come on. Now the only masses of black people I know trying to swim to America is the Haitians and I be wanting to pay for a boat to help out. Plus, I believe the campaign against Cuban socialism is to destroy their system so that my own ignorant capitalist can sell gyms shoes, Pepsi and Coke - both kinds ;), and set up Casino's and make money and put all them black people in Cuba into little tiny Liberty cities like in Florida. Why is it that places with names like "Liberty" is the areas where they kick African American ass the hardest and these anti-Castro types in Florida are the ones kicking ass the hardest. It's that Mr. O "1984" thing with the double reverse inside out - fooled you, thing. The two places I swore I would never visit 25 years ago were South Africa and Florida. And Stalin's Soviet union? Hey I would have joined the party and been a "yes man." Comrade Stalin . . . My man . . . what's up." Nothing you join in Florida can save that black ass from the Cuban/Bush mob and you are going to have a problem trying to vote for their candidate. All Fidel has to do is dig up the history of Liberty City Florida, pass the information out to everyone in Cuba and then tell the Cuban people Bush and the anti-Castor crew want to turn Cuba in to another Liberty City or Detroit and expose the "civic opposition" for what they really represent - stool pigeons for chauvinistic imperial thugs. Now, it is my understanding that if one accepts money and means - communications equipment and publishing equipment, from a foreign government or any agency of a foreign government seeking the overthrow of your government, and in meetings with agents of the said foreign government you discuss plans for "growing civic opposition," that is also called spying because you are giving reports to the agents of the foreign government. I am personally a part of a "growing civic opposition" in my own country - America, and write articles about my interpretation of events in America and forward none of them to agents or agencies of foreign governments. I cannot be convicted of spying - only "telling." What I tell is things like, "Bush wants to turn Cuba into another Liberty City where they beat black people down." "Bush plans on taking away your health care plans and system and setting things up for very rich white peoples - not the poor white peoples." "The government whiskey you get . . . forget about it, Bush will take that away." "The poor houses you live in . . . forget it . . . Bush will take that away put your ass into the streets as homeless and then say it is your own fault, after he tears the houses down and build mansion for rich white people and the eight rich blacks they keep around to say they are integrated ." Now, when I decide to join some new organizations it will be done on the basis of submitting to the leading bodies a short statement signed by myself that says I join with the understanding that this organization is in not way affiliated with any foreign government because I do not support spying - only "telling." Melvin P From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:34:23 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:34:23 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Iran jet deal Message-ID: <007f01c313c3$71a69980$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> That the Observer (nowadays the "Sunday Guardian") is running with this is interesting, given the Guardian's role as New Labour supporter-in-chief. However legitimacy is enhanced by the inclusion of critical voices, such as Paul Foot and John Pilger. Barnett is a longstanding Charter 88 campaigner -- constitutional reform for Britain being his main preoccupation. He is a close friend of Tom Nairn, who shares a strong interest in constitutional reform, albeit from a Scottish separatist perspective. Thus Barnett is a good vehicle for broadcasting this sort of stuff, guaranteed to fan the flames of fair-playing-liberals' outrage. But Mills has been a soft target for some time, having already attracted the attention of Private Eye for his links to Berlusconi. And were Jowell to resign, it would hardly be fatal to the government. Like Estelle Morris and Harriet Harman, she is a lightweight whose loyalty to Blair can be counted upon and whose public recognition factor is zilch in any case -- perfect material for the cabinet of "President" Blair. ----- Favours row hits Minister over Iran jet deal ? Minister's husband used 'privileged access' in Iran deal ? Opposition MPs demand disclosure of UK embassy link Antony Barnett, public affairs editor Sunday May 4, 2003 The Observer The husband of a senior Cabinet Minister used his 'privileged access' to another member of Labour's inner circle to try to strike a multi-million pound deal with Iran, The Observer can reveal. The affair, which was dubbed a 'favours-for-friends' scandal by opposition MPs last night, involved the husband of Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, asking her colleague Baroness Symons for advice on the sale of aircraft to Iran, one of three countries described by America as part of President George W. Bush's 'axis of evil'. Symons agreed to assist Jowell's husband, David Mills, after they sat next to each other at a dinner party in Oxford last summer. Mills, who now runs the British arm of a private Iranian trading firm, had been trying to buy British planes for an Iranian airline. He was having problems because the transaction risked falling foul of America, which has a strict embargo on such deals, claiming that Iran finances Islamic terror groups in the Middle East and is acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The Iranians wanted to buy BAe Systems' RJ146 passenger jets, but, because they are fitted with US engines, the deal would not have been allowed under US laws. Any British party that sold the aircraft would face stiff penalties in the US. Mills, who was trying to work a way round the problem, spoke to Symons, a Foreign Office Minister, at the dinner party about his difficulties. Symons, a long-term friend of both Jowell and Mills, agreed to help. Following the party, Mills wrote to Symons, who contacted the British embassy in Washington to see if there was any way in which the deal could go ahead. The advice was that the US would not approve it. While there is no suggestion that either Mills, Symons or the Iranians intended to breach sanctions, the fact that a Minister's husband was able to obtain such high-level help has led to charges of 'favours for friends'. It has also prompted calls for a register of Ministers' spouses' interests. Under the ministerial code, Jowell should have told her department's permanent secretary of Mills's business dealings if they 'might be thought to give rise to a conflict'. Jowell has never done this. Amid calls from opposition MPs for a full disclosure of the correspondence between Mills and Symons, it also emerged last night that Jowell decided to decline an invitation to Iran because of her husband's business interests there. Mills told The Observer : 'I can't help the fact that I know her [Symons]. It is perfectly true that I have a privileged access ... I am married to a member of the Cabinet and I therefore know a lot of these people. If I write to them, they will open the letter. That is absolutely true.' However, Mills stressed that he never had abused that privilege: 'She kindly agreed to find out from our embassy in Washington what they thought the attitude of the American government was on the embargo ... There was no way round it, because they regard an export as being determined by simply the physical presence of the aeroplane, so it doesn't matter how you dress it up contractually.' But opposition MPs claimed last night that the affair reignites their claims of New Labour cronyism and 'favours for friends'. Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram demanded that the Foreign Office release all the correspondence between Symons and Mills, saying: 'This has all the whiff of cronyism operating at the highest levels of the Labour Government. If these allegations are true, then it is a very serious matter and the Government must come clean.' Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: 'Once again, we have Labour Ministers going the extra mile for friends, as they have done in the past for party donors. How many other businessmen would get such access or help? This is favours for friends at the highest level. I want to know whether he has received other help from the Foreign Office or other Ministers because of his connections.' In a statement to The Observer, Jowell said: 'My husband has acted for Iranian clients since early 2002 and is now working with them full time. On my appointment as Secretary of State, my husband disclosed to my permanent secretary all relevant business interests and provided an update in March of this year. 'In this and all my previous ministerial posts, I have sought advice on the general application of the ministerial code, and I have always acted within its letter and spirit. In my judgment, my husband's business dealings with Iranian clients do not pose an actual or potential conflict of interest with my position as Culture Secretary. 'My husband told me after the event that he had mentioned to Baroness Symons a possible British export order he was dealing with. As she suggested, he wrote to her and it was dealt with in the usual way. He has received no spe cial consideration from any Minister or civil servant acting on their behalf.' Symons declined to be interviewed, but a spokeswoman said: 'David Mills wrote in, the letter was processed in the normal way. Her response was based on the response she received from officials and it was handled through the usual channels.' After the BAe deal fell through, Mills went on to help arrange a another deal for Mahan Air to buy three second-hand Airbuses from Turkish Airlines, which, being built before 1995, escaped US sanctions. But some MPs are concerned by any trade with a Middle East state still linked to terror groups. Labour MP Louise Ellman said : 'I have grave concerns about encouraging trade with a country that is actively supporting terror groups committed to destroying the Middle East peace process.' This is not the first time Mills's business affairs have caused controversy for Jowell. In 1997, when she was Public Health Minister involved in the Ecclestone scandal it emerged Mills had worked for a Formula One racing team. Mills is also being investigated by the Italian authorities over his work for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:35:39 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:35:39 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Iran jet deal Message-ID: <008701c313c3$9ecb9b40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The lawyer, the Minister and the ?125m Iran deal Tehran's efforts to buy a fleet of BAe jets has raised fresh questions about New Labour's links to business. Antony Barnett and Thomas Reilly Sunday May 4, 2003 The Observer The celebrations had just died down after Labour's historic second election victory in June 2001. Tessa Jowell had been made Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. No sooner had she taken up her new job than one of the first invitations dropped on her desk. It was from the Iranian government, inviting the new Cabinet Minister on a cultural visit. With Britain's emerging policy of engagement with Iran, such an offer might have been tempting. But Jowell declined the invitation. The full reasons for her refusal were not known at the time. But an investigation by The Observer can reveal links between Jowell's husband, David Mills, and a private Iranian trading company with headquarters in Tehran. Mills used his position at the heart of New Labour to push for a controversial trade deal with Iran. It has emerged that Foreign Office Minister Baroness Symons helped Mills in his attempts to clinch a $200 million aircraft deal with the Middle East state. The sale was in danger of falling foul of US sanctions, and Mills asked her to check if there was a way of getting the deal through. So why did Jowell not go to Iran? According to Mills, he told his wife it would be best for her not to go in case it was 'construed as promoting my interests'. The story of how two Ministers and one of their husbands became entangled in this Iranian affair is one that critics have seized on as showing how they think favours are done for those in New Labour's inner circle. Just across the road from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square sit the plush offices of Mayfair solicitors Gordon Dadds, where Mills is a partner. His profile on the law firm's website says his area of expertise includes aviation and trade finance. It also lists his hobbies as playing golf and mentions the fact he is married to an MP. But, like much of Mills's colourful history, this is only a fraction of the story. His wife is a loyal Blairite, a member of the Prime Minister's inner circle. Mills,who plays the clarinet and is an art lover, is also a golfing partner of Alastair Campbell, the Number 10 communications supremo. By his own account, at the time of the deal Mills had been having a difficult time and had lost his appetite for the law. This was largely due to his controversial dealings with the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whom he had helped to set up a network of offshore companies. In 1995 the Italian authorities finally caught up with Berlusconi and Mills had become a key figure into investigations concerning alleged fraud and corruption. But Mills was about to be offered an opportunity that he believed would allow him to leave the Italian scandals behind. He had been working as the principal adviser to a secretive Iranian trading group, ILTC. The Iranian directors wanted somebody to head a British arm in London and they turned to Mills, who set it up with a registered business address of the Mayfair headquarters of Gordon Dadds. ILTC is believed to be a private company with interests in oil, construction and aviation. But last summer it was the aircraft business that was the directors' prime concern. ILTC has a major shareholding in an Iranian airline called Mahan Air, which was desperate to purchase new aircraft. But the Iranians had a problem. Since 1995 the US has enforced a strict sanctions regime on Iran, a country the US claims is acquiring weapons of mass destruction and is a major sponsor of Islamic terror groups in the Middle East. The main aim of the sanctions was to starve Iran of funds to prevent it acquiring weapons and financing groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbollah. It is for these reasons that President George W. Bush included the country in his axis of evil, saying: 'Iran aggressively pursues these weapons [of mass destruction] and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.' The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, introduced in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, not only outlawed trading between US firms and Iran, but also made clear that non-US firms dealing with Iran would face penalties in America. The sanctions regime was particularly rigorous when it came to aircraft. Not only could US-manufactured planes such as Boeings not be exported to Iran, but neither could any aircraft that had more than 10 per cent of its components from US companies. This in effect banned Iran from buying any European-made aircraft such as Airbus, which relies on US parts. European firms such as aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce, which fear being put on a US blacklist if they sell aviation equipment to Iran, have steered clear of this market. The problem for companies such as Mills's clients is that its aircraft fleet is very old, with many planes predating the 1979 Islamic revolution. The country has suffered a number of fatal air crashes as a result of the age of its planes and is desperately trying to get the US embargo lifted or find legal ways around the sanctions. Mills believed he might have the answer. He helped arrange a $200m deal with British Aerospace for Mahan Air to buy a fleet of RJ146 passenger jets, worth about $10m a piece. These are 100-seater aircraft and can fly up to 1,500 miles. Yet the deal hit the buffers when it emerged that the planes had Honeywell engines that were manufactured in America and so fell foul of US regulations. For most other lawyers, this would perhaps be the end of it. But Mills, as we reveal, is not like most normal lawyers. During the late summer, Mills attended a dinner party in Oxford and was seated next to Baroness Symons of Vernon Dean - the Foreign Office Minister in charge of trade and investment. Symons has known both Mills and Jowell for a long time. Her husband, Philip Bassett, is also a member of the Blair inner circle, as one of the Prime Minister's top policy advisers in Downing Street. At one stage during the meal, Mills began discussing Iran with Symons and explained the difficulties he was having. Here was a $200m export deal that would be good for a British firm and safeguard jobs, but the US's attitude to Iran was blocking this lucrative transaction. Mills, however, is unlikely to have told Symons that the deal would also have been good for his and Jowell's bank account. Mills stood to gain considerably if the deal went ahead. As a partner in a London law firm, he could charge his Iranian clients around ?200 an hour and, as the future managing director of the Iranian company, there would no doubt have been other benefits. One expert in the aviation industry said that commission and consultancy fees on a $200m deal would have been more than ?500,000. There is no suggestion that Mills would get commission on the deal, but his legal fees would certainly amount to thousands of pounds. Although there was no intention of breaching the sanctions, Mills asked Symons if there was any way she could help. Following the Oxford dinner, Mills wrote to Symons at the Foreign Office asking for her help. After receiving the letter, Symons contacted the British Embassy in Washington on behalf of Mills. She then wrote to Mills telling him that the US would not allow the deal. Mills said: 'She kindly agreed to find out from our embassy in Washington what they thought the attitude of the American government was on the embargo and whether it was something they took seriously or not ... It was quite clear the Americans took the embargo seriously ... there was no way round it because they regard an export as being determined by simply the physical presence of the aeroplane, so it doesn't matter how you dress it up contractually.' While on the surface it might appear that this was simply a case of a Minister offering legitimate help in the normal way to a British exporter seeking a substantial order, the disclosure of such an exchange raises a number of awkward questions. Did Baroness Symons go out of her way to help Mills because she was dealing with a friend and the husband of a Cabinet Minister? What contacts did the British Embassy in Washington make with its US counterparts over this deal? Has Symons since lobbied for US sanctions on air craft deals to be eased? Neither Mills nor the Foreign Office would release correspondence between the parties after being contacted by The Observer. But what is clear is that Mills was able to use his New Labour connections in an effort to get Symons to intervene. For Opposition MPs, this could rank as a 'favours-for-friends' scandal of the worst kind. Norman Baker, frontbench spokesman of the Liberal Democrats, said last night: 'Once again we have Labour Ministers going the extra mile for friends like they have done in the past for party donors. How many other businessmen would get such access or help? This is favours for friends at the highest level. I want to know whether he has received other help from the Foreign Office or other Ministers because of his connections.' Michael Ancram, the shadow Foreign Secretary, demanded release of all correspondence between the Minister and Mills, saying the revelations had 'all the smell of a culture of cronyism'. A spokeswoman for Baroness Symons said: 'David Mills wrote in, the letter was processed in the normal way. Her response was based on the response she received from officials and it was handled through the usual channels.' But this does not quite gel with Mills's view. He cheerfully admits to obtaining privileged access. He said: 'I can't help the fact that I know her. It is perfectly true that I have a privileged access ... I am married to a member of the Cabinet and I therefore know a lot of these people . If I write to them, they will open the letter. That is absolutely true.' Mills has since gone on to help Mahan buy three secondhand Airbuses from Turkish Airlines, but because these were manufactured before 1995 they escaped the US sanctions. While this deal does not raise any legal issues, for critics of Iran's foreign policy and its support of terror groups it raises ethical issues. Labour MP Louise Ellman said: 'I have grave concern about a policy that encourages sales to Iran. This is a country that is known to fund terrorist organisations that are out to destroy the Middle East peace process.' Such criticism does not perturb Mills. He said: 'Britain has diplomatic relations with Iran and its policy is to trade and engage. Jack Straw has been out there.We have a completely different attitude to Iran than the Americans. We don't have any embargoes against them and we are encouraging trade. So everything that I am doing is entirely in line with government policy.' Ellman would not comment on the involvement of Jowell's husband with Iran, but said : 'In such a sensitive area, I hope that the ministerial code is being strictly observed.' Ellman's question raises an interesting issue. According to the ministerial code, Ministers have to provide their department's permanent secretary 'with a full list in writing of all interests that might be thought to give rise to conflict. The list should cover not only the Minister's personal interests, but also those of a spouse or a partner.' Mills confirmed that he has discussed his Iranian job with Jowell, so she was aware of his work. So has she told her permanent secretary that her husband is managing director of an Iranian company? When contacted by The Observer, Mills claimed this had been done, but he later admitted that this was not the case. He said: 'I have checked... I have not disclosed the fact that I work for an Iranian group... because it doesn't infringe on her department at all. If anything ever came along that did, then obviously I would declare it.' The revelation that Jowell did not visit Iran because of her husband's financial dealings with the country shows that such an issue did come up. But the question is, were the Minister's officials aware of her reasons for not going? Mills said: 'The subject came up of her going to Iran on a cultural visit and I said I don't think she could, as it might be construed as promoting my interests. She and I are highly sensitive to these issues.' From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:40:50 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:40:50 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the blowback accumulates Message-ID: <008f01c313c4$581fc260$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Operation Support Garner The Pentagon's one-size-fits-all 'liberation' is a disaster in Iraq Jonathan Steele in Baghdad Tuesday May 6, 2003 The Guardian American efforts to foist new rulers on the people of Iraq are becoming increasingly grotesque. In some cities US troops have sparked demonstrations by imposing officials from the old Saddam Hussein regime. In others they have evicted new anti-Saddam administrators who have local backing. They have mishandled religious leaders as well as politicians. In the Shia suburbs of Baghdad, they arrested a powerful cleric, Mohammed Fartousi al-Sadr, who had criticised the US presence. In Falluja, an overwhelmingly Sunni town, they detained two popular imams. All three men were released within days, but local people saw the detentions as a warning that Iraqis should submit to the US will. The Pentagon's General Jay Garner has taken an equally biased line in his plans for Iraq's government. He held a conference of 300 Iraqis in Baghdad last week and excluded almost every group which has an organised following. In a Freudian slip at a recent press conference, Donald Rumsfeld smugly explained democracy as a competition in which rival politicians try to "garner support". His message in Iraq looks like the opposite - Operation Support Garner. Otherwise, you are cut out. Washington's failure to hold broad-based consultations at central and local levels is provoking resistance, sometimes armed. In response, US troops have used excessive force, further raising tensions. Ten people died in Mosul when soldiers fired at crowds of protesters on successive days in mid-April. In Falluja the death toll from American shootings over two days last week was at least 16. The massacre in Falluja was symptomatic. The town was quiet for two weeks after Iraqi troops and local Ba'ath party leaders fled. The imams halted the looting and got much of the stolen property returned. A new mayor arranged for schools to re-open and persuaded police to return to work. Then the Americans arrived, arrested imams, put up roadblocks and occupied a school - all without prior discussion with local leaders. They seemed to be working from a one-size-fits-all Pentagon textbook. First "liberate", then move in and provide policing whether people want it or not. In Baghdad there were indeed security problems after Saddam's forces vanished, and many residents asked why US forces did so little to halt the looting of key buildings. Having failed initially there, the US over-compensated elsewhere. It came down too hard in Falluja and other cities where people did not want a US hand. The contrast with Afghanistan is sharp. For months Afghans pleaded for the US to deploy international peacekeepers beyond Kabul to cities where warlords held sway or were fighting for power. The US refused, either for fear of taking casualties or because of lack of interest in a poor country once its anti-western regime was toppled. In Iraq, where there are no warlords and people feel they have the expertise to run the country themselves, the US insists on moving in and staying. It has excluded Iraq's best-known forces from consultations on forming a central government. The Islamic Da'wa party, which was founded in 1957 and suffered repression under Saddam in the early 1980s, was not invited. Nor was the Iraqi Communist party, which also lost thousands of its activists in the old regime's prisons. Both opposed the US attack. The communists are weaker than they once were, as a result of decades of propaganda that they reject Islam. But they are part of the Iraqi spectrum which needs to be recognised. Washington's biggest omission is its refusal to make overtures to Iraq's clergy. The Shia Muslims in particular are enjoying a strong revival and cannot be pushed aside. There are family and other rivalries between the main groups. The al-Hakim family, which founded the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq after escaping to Iran 20 years ago, now faces criticism for going into exile. It has a volatile policy towards the US, sometimes meeting officials, sometimes denouncing them. The al-Sadr family, which stayed in the sacred city of Najaf, is gaining ground. Both groups must be brought into discussions on the future. It is not too late for the UN to play a role. There is no need for foreign troops. Iraqis have shown a high degree of post-war unity and can provide their own security. The much-predicted clashes of Sunnis v Shi'ites, or Kurds v Arabs have not happened. But the UN should come in, with a short-term mandate, to convene a genuinely representative conference of Iraqis which would choose an interim government and an assembly to draft a constitution. Only the UN can give legitimacy and impartiality to this process. Instead of supporting Washington as Mike O'Brien, the Foreign Office minister, did when he joined Gen Garner in co-chairing last week's highly selective meeting of Iraqi politicians, Britain should work with the security council to give the UN the same kind of government-brokering role as it had in post-war Afghanistan. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:45:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:45:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: pressure builds Message-ID: <009701c313c4$ed25c8a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> With both Mandelson and Cook leading the charge for euro membership within New Labour, pressure is building on Brown as never before. As with Thatcher and Major, this will be the defining issue of Blair's government, not Iraq (unfortunately). ------ Robin Cook: The Government should set a date to join the euro A decision to postpone membership indefinitely would compound the penalties of being out of the single currency The Independent 06 May 2003 Pro-Europeanism was one of the defining issues of the project to modernise the Labour Party. It was a key policy change that symbolised the shift to a New Labour Party, younger, forward looking and in touch with the modern world. Gordon Brown will be aware of the wider totemic significance of the decision he is about to take on the euro. He was part of the leadership of modernisation at all its stages. He knows his decision will be seen not just as a matter of processing technical criteria but as a demonstration of whether New Labour is still the pro-European party. In the six years since Gordon Brown set out the Government's position on the euro, the economic arguments have tilted further in favour of joining. If he needs convincing, he need only read the authoritative analysis published today by Professor David Begg and 10 other European and US economists. Since the creation of the euro, foreign direct investment in the UK has dropped so dramatically that our share within the EU has more than halved. Companies that collectively invest billions of dollars in fixed plant do not see why they should saddle themselves with the penalties of exchange rate uncertainty and transaction costs that come with investing outside the eurozone. Moreover, the single currency has stimulated a faster growth in trade between the members of the euro- zone than in trade between the UK and the eurozone. To the extent that the currency barrier limits growth in UK trade, it also limits investment, competition and productivity. And while the case for joining the euro has strengthened, the obstacles to membership have weakened. UK inflation and long-term interest rates have substantially converged with those of the eurozone; and the pound has depreciated by over 10 per cent against the euro over the past year, bringing it close to a reasonable parity at which to join. It is touching that some Tories still cling to a separate currency as a symbol of independence. But it is a hopelessly confused attitude from politicians who like to proclaim the supremacy of market economics. It is the financial markets not the national politicians who now settle currency rates. A trillion dollars a day are traded over foreign exchange markets. No single government has the resources to take on speculation on the contemporary scale. The only hope of guaranteeing price stability to our exporters is by a single currency with the European markets that purchase the clear majority of our exports. The economic case for joining the euro is now compelling. Perversely, over the same period in which the economic advantages have strengthened, the political barrier has got higher. A year ago, I warned Tony Blair that he could not follow George Bush into Iraq and at the same time ask the British people to follow him into the euro. The opinion polls confirm that the predictable public rift with France and Germany has made it more challenging to ask Britain to vote for greater integration with those partners. We have pursued a US political priority in Iraq at a cost to British interests in Europe. Yet a decision to postpone membership indefinitely would compound the penalties of being outside the eurozone. Throughout the lifetime of the euro it has been widely assumed that Britain would join when the time was right. A failure now to commit ourselves to membership would lose Britain its unique status as a pre-in and reduce us to a definite out. At that point our partners will stop wedging the door open for us. Those partners are about to conduct major renovation of the architecture of the euro. The stability and growth pact, which was intended as a basis for monetary and fiscal discipline within the eurozone, is a prime candidate for reconstruction. Gordon Brown has much to contribute to the process, but no member of the eurozone is going to listen to our Chancellor if the Government has just ruled out Britain becoming a member. If Gordon Brown does rise in Parliament to announce that this is not yet the perfect time for Britain to join the euro, what will be crucial is the next paragraph about our future intentions. It needs to send a positive message to investors, to domestic supporters and to European partners that this Labour government is the one that will put Britain at the core of Europe. The best solution would be to adopt an option outlined by the Treasury Select Committee, and announce a fixed date in the future when the UK will join the euro. Gordon Brown could say something like this: "This Government understands that Britain's economic prosperity and political standing would be best served by membership of the euro. We therefore commit ourselves to making it possible for Britain to join the euro in January 2007. To the extent that our economic tests are not met today we undertake to make it a priority of our economic strategy to ensure that they are met by then. We will put the case for the euro with vigour and conviction to the British people in a referendum before that date.'' Such a statement would redress the negative impact of announcing that we cannot proceed now because one-and-a-half or so of the fabled five tests have not been met. It was the Prime Minister, who will be sitting next to Gordon Brown on the Treasury bench, who once promised that we are at our best when we are at our boldest. Now is the time for the Government to be bold on the euro. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:49:15 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:49:15 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK police state: further centralisation Message-ID: <009f01c313c5$84a07860$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> David Lock is the former arch-Blairite MP who tried to censor Allyson Pollock's criticisms of health service privatisation, and who lost his parliamentary seat to an independent doctor protesting at the "rationalisation" of hospitals in Kidderminster. He was subsequently appointed to the positions he now occupies. As you can see, he has been busy. ----- Plans to create British 'FBI' shelved until after election By Jason Bennetto and Robert Verkaik The Independent 06 May 2003 Plans to form a British "FBI" by merging three national crime squads have been shelved until after the next general election. Security chiefs considered joining the National Crime Squad (NCS), parts of Customs and Excise and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) to form one elite force responsible for combating organised criminals, including drug barons. Downing Street ordered the review of the national crime-fighting forces amid concerns that their ability to tackle serious and organised crime was being damaged by rivalry, inefficiency and overlap between the agencies. The idea is understood to have been championed by John Birt, a former director general of the BBC, when he was advising Tony Blair on crime issues in 2000. But despite finding evidence that agencies did not always share information with each other and that a merger could improve crime fighting and be cheaper in the long term, any plans for an FBI-style organisation have been put on hold. Sources have indicated that Whitehall has not abandoned the issue of a single super-agency and is likely to review it after the next election. Ministers feared that cultural differences in the new agency would lead to friction in the initial period of the merger and senior officers would want to protect their patches or engage in empire-building. This, said the source, would inevitably hamper investigations and reduce police intelligence effectiveness while the new force was bedding down. "The police forces and Customs already achieve a great deal on their own and it's not clear that the sum of their parts would be a more effective single law enforcement agency," a senior security source said. For this reason ministers were not prepared to suffer the short-term political consequences of an under-achieving national crime-fighting force, the source added. The NCIS, which has an annual budget of ?93m and a staff of 1,200, draws up intelligence packages and assessments on different types of organised crime as well as information on Britain's top criminals. This information is passed on to Britain's police forces. The NCS has a budget of ?130m for 1,330 detectives and 420 support staff. The NCS concentrates on serious and organised criminals and spends three quarters of its time in operations against drug traffickers. Customs and Excise has a ?1bn budget that includes about 350 officers in the National Intelligence Division, which gathers information on drug-dealers and traffickers, and 1,500 operational officers belonging to the National Investigation Service. A small number of criminal intelligence officers from MI5, the Security Service, also work with the three agencies. David Lock, chairman of the service authorities for the NCIS and the NCS, which oversee the running of the organisations, said: "This is a decision for ministers, not those of us in the agencies. The key to tackling serious crime is to continue making greater use of people's specialities by getting them to work together more rather than fighting turf wars or trying to redesign a perfect new agency. There is still room for improvement but the NCIS, National Crime Squad, Customs and the larger police forces are more joined up and are more focused than ever before and are having a greater impact in disrupting and dismantling serious and organised criminal businesses." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:53:22 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:53:22 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the blowback accumulates Message-ID: <00a701c313c6$1836c200$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Senior Iraqi technocrat chosen to head oil ministry By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad The Independent 05 May 2003 The American-led reconstruction body for Iraq has named a senior Iraqi technocrat to run the country's vital oil industry amid growing unease at the number of former officials of the Baathist regime securing key posts in the post-war administration. Although the Oil Ministry's new chief executive, Thamir Abbas Ghadban, will be advised by several outsiders, including Philip Carroll, the former head of Royal Dutch Shell in the US, his appointment comes at a time of increasingly fierce debate at many levels of Iraqi society on the future role of those who worked for the deposed regime. An oil ministry official said Mr Ghadban could be considered "minister for oil." The appointment by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance came less than a week after senior sources at the Office proclaimed their success in developing agreements with leading officials just below ministerial rank in several pre-existing government departments. The day-to-day running of the Ministry of Health, for example, is likely to be in the hands of many of its former administrators and regional directors. The ultra-pragmatic approach to the Health Ministry was described yesterday by Zaab Sethna, a senior aide to Dr Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of the Iraqi National Congress as a "bad mistake". Mr Sethna said America and Britain were leaning too far "in the interests of expediency" towards appointing those associated with the former Baathist regime to key jobs. Dr Chalabi is one of six leading former opposition figures responsible for setting up a conference to pick a transitional government. Mr Sethna's complaints partly echoed those of doctors in Basra and parts of Baghdad who have already openly, and in the former case successfully, revolted against attempts to restore local medical administrators from the former regime to their previous jobs. Several senior American and British military and civilian officials have argued that it is sensible to harness the talents of those who belonged to the Baath party simply to use their professional skills. But Mr Sethna said: "People forget that there is a whole group of people who were forced to stop doing their jobs because they refused to join the Baath party." He said that the INC had recently been visited by a delegation of 25 former judges and senior police officers who had quit their post in the late Seventies and early Eighties for just that reason. Mr Sethna said that some 30,000 senior Baathist officials from the old regime should be regarded as having no future in Iraqi public life. But the party's other 1 million-plus members should be vetted, preferably by an independent commission, once a transitional government was established. Those who had simply "made a mistake in their youth" by joining the party and had subsequently led relatively blameless lives would have a fresh start. But those who had clearly acted in corrupt and repressive ways would not. He added: "De-Baathification is not about individuals but about institutional reform... about how do you reform an education curriculum corrupted by our past, how you remake a judicial system, which had no independence." The INC approach is already sparking a debate over whether the Baath party would be allowed to re-form in a fully democratic Iraq. Mr Sethna said it should not, citing the continued illegality of the Nazis in Germany. But Shakr al-Dujaily, a senior official of the Iraqi Communist Party, which was brutally suppressed by Saddam Hussein after 1979, said yesterday that in its uncontaminated form the party had a social platform and should be allowed to exist again. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 05:58:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:58:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: financial globalisation Message-ID: <00af01c313c6$daf8d9e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> ICGN calls for voting overhaul By Florian Gimbel Financial Times FTfm: May 6 2003 A powerful group of investors is calling on regulators in Europe and Asia to remove legal and procedural obstacles to overseas shareholder voting. The International Corporate Governance Network, which represents investors with $10,000bn (?6,400bn) of assets, has completed a study into cross-border proxy voting - a system that connects companies with overseas shareholders. The report*, to be published this week, shows that companies in Japan and Italy offer overseas investors little chance to exercise their basic shareholder rights. Obstacles were also found in the UK and Germany. John Wilcox, vice-chairman of Georgeson Shareholder Communications, a US proxy voting consultancy, said: "Global standards of corporate governance have gained widespread acceptance in recent years, but the mechanics of governance have not kept pace." The report shows that overseas equities accounted for 32 per cent of UK equity portfolios in 2001, up from 4 per cent in 1981. The proportion of foreign stocks in US portfolios rose from 1 per cent in 1980 to 12 per cent in 2001. Mr Wilcox, who chairs the ICGN's committee on cross-border voting practices, said there was an urgent need for a "concerted effort" by companies, regulators and stock exchanges. The report, which was conducted by Institutional Design, a London-based corporate governance consultancy, highlights the "fragmentation" and legal complexity of the system. The length of the proxy voting chain means that investors often have too little time to cast their vote. Mr Wilcox points to annual meetings in Japan, where companies are required to release convening notices only 14 days in advance. "In practice, most companies wait until exactly 14 days before the meeting and use regular mail services," he said. "This means that [overseas] investors must process the vote in what amounts to a 24-hour time period." The report also highlights concerns about "share blocking" in Italy and Germany. This practice requires investors to deposit their shares and refrain from trading for several days before the annual meeting. Another "disincentive" to cross-border voting was found in the UK, where it is common practice for votes to be taken on a show of hands. ICGN includes, among others, the California Public Employees Retirement System, the world's largest fund;ABP, Europe's largest; and BT Group's pension fund, the UK's largest. Cross Border Proxy Voting, by ICGN. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 06:03:51 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:03:51 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Poland: surprise Iraq role Message-ID: <00b701c313c7$8f208a80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Warsaw's role in postwar Iraq surprises EU - and the Poles By Judy Dempsey in Kastellorizo, Greece Financial Times: May 5 2003 Washington's announcement that Poland is to take charge of one of three postwar sectors in Iraq seems to have taken Poles almost as much by surprise as the other European Union and applicant nations attending an informal meeting of foreign ministers in Greece at the weekend. Poland was among the US's strongest supporters in toppling Saddam Hussein, and contributed combat troops to the US-led coalition, despite strong domestic opposition to the war. It emerged at the weekend that it would also take the lead in stabilising one of three sectors into which Iraq is being divided - the other two falling under US and British command. Troops from at least seven other countries will also be involved. Nevertheless, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, Polish foreign minister, had to do some explaining to his EU counterparts. He said the US announcement had first to be discussed by the Sejm, or Polish parliament. It needed a legal basis and it required considerable financing. Some diplomats said Germany and other EU countries might find it difficult to justify allocating to Poland significant structural (development) funds as well as generous agricultural subsidies while Warsaw could find money to send thousands of troops to Iraq. Poland is expected to join the EU in May 2004. Diplomats said they had no objections to Poland playing a stabilisation role in Iraq. However, the EU has been trying to dissuade current and future members from taking actions that would further undermine its common, foreign and security or perpetuate divisions in Europe. Dominique de Villepin, French foreign minister, played down the issue. Diplomats said Paris was unwilling to open up a new and divisive debate over what Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, described as "old" Europe, with France and Germany as leaders of the anti-war coalition and the pro-US "new" Europe, led by the former communist countries. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 06:11:14 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:11:14 +0300 Subject: [A-List] George Galloway appeal fund Message-ID: <00c301c313c8$96dda180$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> George Galloway's legal appeal fund is being organised via his lawyers, Davenport Lyons. To contribute, send a cheque (drawn on a UK bank) or international money order payable to "George Galloway Legal Fund" and address it FAO Kevin Bays (Galloway Fund) Davenport Lyons 1 Old Burlington Street London United Kingdom W1S 3NL From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 06:13:18 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:13:18 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues Message-ID: <00cb01c313c8$e0fd7600$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Afghanistan: Launchpad for terror By Syed Saleem Shahzad Asia Times, May 3 2003 KARACHI - Even as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared this week in Kabul that an end to military operations in Afghanistan is in sight, indications on the ground paint a somewhat different picture. On a brief visit to the capital, Rumsfeld said that the "bulk of the country is now secure ... we have concluded that we're at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities". However, as reported in Asia Times Online (Afghanistan, once more the melting pot - May 1) the country can expect escalated guerrilla activity over the coming months. And further, the International Islamic Front, a grouping of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and several other terrorist networks dedicated to jihad against America, is increasingly using Afghanistan as a base. Asia Times Online has learned that new cells are in place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and they will be responsible for carrying out attacks - including suicide attacks - against United States interests in a number of regions. This will be the new face of al-Qaeda, which will emerge soon with a new name and under new command. The US State Department confirmed on Thursday that new attacks by al-Qaeda are likely, and that there is a danger that the network and its Taliban backers will re-emerge in Afghanistan. In its annual report on global terrorism, the US agency also said that militants were proving resilient in the face of efforts by East Asian nations to crush them, and it labeled North Korean efforts to curb terrorism as disappointing. Every al-Qaeda operations officer captured to date had been involved in some stage of preparation for a terrorist attack at the time of arrest, the department said, without giving details of where or when the attacks might occur. "These threats must be regarded with utmost seriousness. Additional attacks are likely," said the report. On Wednesday, a Pakistani Interior Ministry spokesman announced the arrest of Khalid bin al-Atash in Karachi, along with some Afghanis and one Pakistani. Asia Times Online has reported on Khalid's movements (Afghanistan, once more the melting pot ) showing that the one-legged al-Qaeda operations chief was very much back in business. Despite the claims of the Interior Ministry, intelligence sources have confirmed to Asia Times Online that Khalid was in fact arrested on Tuesday near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Balochistan. Khalid was said to be in the process of hiring local men to carry out an attack on Jacobad's Shehbaz airbase, which is used by the US Air Force. Khalid was arrested by members of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pakistani law enforcers along with a few of his Afghani guards and a Pakistani Baloch, who was to be involved in the attack on the airport. Khalid was then taken to Karachi, where he was revealed to the press. The reason for this was that the Kabul government had recently made renewed charges of the infiltration of terrorists into Afghanistan from the Balochistan border areas, and the Pakistanis didn't want the arrest to lend credibility to the accusations. Khalid has been connected to the Sheraton hotel bomb blast in Karachi last year in which several French engineers were killed. He had narrowly escaped arrest on several occasions, notably in Karachi and Quetta. He recently entered Afghanistan and made some border towns near Pakistan his base. In the past few months, a number of people like Khalid have entered Afghanistan, including from Palestine, Lebanon and Kashmir, united in their desire to strike against American targets. The driver of this new international brigade is the Egyptian Jamaat al-Jehad, led by Dr Aiman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right hand man. (This group merged with al-Qaeda, but it has an independent following in Egypt). In the context of the war in Iraq, Jamaat's leaders have redirected the energies of militants to concentrate purely on US targets, saying that it is the real enemy. Aiman's whereabouts are unknown, but recent reports have placed him in Yemen and Afghanistan. Wherever he is, though, he is the mastermind behind restructuring the International Islamic Front, given that al-Qaeda has been badly fractured. The emphasis will be on small operations with a nexus of local groups, and its main tool will be suicide attacks. This new face will be unveiled sooner rather later, but it will be identified more by its actions than by its name. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 06:34:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:34:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US/Russia rivalry: Central Asia Message-ID: <010d01c313cb$dc3ed520$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Central Asia: Rotten lemons? Make lemonade By Pavel Ivanov Asia Times, May 3 2003 In mid-April, Russian President Vladimir Putin met Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Siberian City of Omsk, right on the border between the two former Soviet republics. The summit was given very little publicity in Russia and Kazakhstan - the sides released a short communique saying that the presidents "considered ways of further deepening border area economic and trade cooperation" - and passed practically unnoticed by the world media. That's a pity. The summit (by the way, the third one during the past three months) signifies Russia's recent active steps to reassert its shattered influence in the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, at a time that the United States is busy in the Middle East and world attention has been focused on that part of the world. One might say that there is nothing new in Russia's efforts in Central Asia. Moscow historically, and also since the breakup of the Soviet Union, has tried to exert maximum influence there. But there is something new this time around: the great majority of the Central Asian countries appear to be welcoming Russia's renewed attention. There are several reasons for turning them into a receptive audience for Russian plans. After the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Central Asian regimes felt relieved from the threat of the fundamentalist Islamic movements, which used to have a safe haven across the Amu-Darya River. However, having assisted the US in the Taliban ouster, the countries are now deeply disappointed by Washington's apparent neglect. The governments in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and even Uzbekistan feel betrayed: they expected flows of direct American investment, economic aid, new loans from the International Monetary Fund, as well as public American support for their regimes. But nothing of the sort has happened. After the completion of the active military phase of the operations in Afghanistan, the White House seems to have lost interest in the Central Asian republics and has dramatically diminished its presence in the region. Moreover, instead of support for the regimes, Washington started to be more and more critical about human rights and has stepped up promotion of democracy in those countries. That's the last thing the Central Asian regimes wanted to see. In the time since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, all five Central Asian republics have managed to develop quite solid totalitarian political systems with a distinctive flavor of "Oriental despotism", not surprising since the new rulers were bred and raised inside the apparatus of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. So now American human rights and democracy campaigns are driving them right back into the arms of Mother Russia. Moscow has always been tolerant of "Central Asian democratic governments". Indeed, for the Kremlin, it is much easier to deal with selected personalities who are known quantities rather than with unknown people of popular choice. Moscow realizes very clearly that after the withdrawal of much of the US presence and support, the Central Asian leaders feel most uncomfortable facing their own peoples, impoverished and deprived of basic rights and freedoms. Having watched US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, they cannot be sure at all that - as a next step - Washington will not demand liberalization of their governments, serious concessions to opposition forces and an end to political repression. On the other hand, they know for sure that Moscow will never demand such unacceptable moves. Hence, bending to Russian political and military superiority and accepting Moscow as a guarantor of the political status quo in Central Asia is by far the lesser evil. For the ruling elites, this is a minor price to pay for the "bright future" Russia is promising them and their children. For energy resources-rich Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, the economic factor plays an important role, too. Expectations of their leaders to turn their countries into new Saudi Arabias have completely failed. US and Western oil majors have been withdrawing from these two countries, particularly from lucrative pipeline projects, because of the intolerable investment climate and overwhelming corruption of local officials. To export their hydrocarbons, they have only one way to go - via Russian territory, through the Russian export pipeline network. Certainly, it puts Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan into a very dependent position, but it brings real and very big money, not vague Western promises. Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Saparmurat Niyazov are ready to pay the price. Russia, too, is now much more eager to develop closer ties in the energy sector with the Central Asian republics, looking for new opportunities with its traditional partners. Moscow realizes that it is highly unlikely that the US-installed new Iraqi government will confirm Russian oil contracts made with Saddam Hussein. So the Russian leadership believes that the timing is exactly right to make a major push to reassert itself in Central Asia. The recent steps in this direction speak for themselves: a 25-year contract on the export of Turkmen gas, inclusion of Kazakhstan into the Joint Economic Space (Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine), opening of bases for Russian-led rapid-reaction forces for the Commonwealth of Independent States - all coming at the end of President Vladimir Putin's later April visit to Tajikistan. As one senior-ranking Russian diplomat put it in private conversation, "You see, while Americans are stuck in Iraq, the Palestinian issue and so forth, we have a perfect opportunity to clean up our backyard ... We lost in Iraq, but we are much better off in Central Asia." So, at least the American advisors who flooded Russia during the early years of Boris Yeltsin's administration did not waste their time completely: They taught Russians an American saying: "When lemons get rotten, make lemonade." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 6 06:40:45 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:40:45 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU-China linkages: Galileo Message-ID: <011501c313cc$b6a48fc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Continuing our occasional series in the objective convergence of EU, Chinese, Japanese and Russian interests against US imperialism, here is another under-reported dimension: GPS, Galileo and the China factor By John Berthelsen Asia Times, May 2 2003 Does Europe need to spend US$3 billion to duplicate the United States' 28-satellite Global Positioning System, the satellite system that is designed to tell anyone with the right receiver exactly where he is located on Earth? Apparently so, to the manifest irritation of the US government. That irritation is starting to ratchet up with word that the European Union is asking the Chinese government for help in creating its system, called Galileo. The Chinese are weighing various options, but it is widely believed that they will join the Europeans in creating Galileo, which would by 2008 loft a constellation of 30 satellites 23,000 kilometers into the sky to give Europe its own satellite navigation network. "It's national pride, it is nothing but national pride," fumed an aide to US Representative Dave Weldon, a Republican congressman who oversees the funding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). "The Europeans feel they are vassals of the United States in respect to space power." Both the Chinese and the Europeans see Galileo as yet another counterweight, no matter how small, to the overwhelming technological superiority of the United States. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there has been no remotely comparable force. US aerospace, sea and land power seem unassailable, with the United States alone now spending more money on defense than the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations plus Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined. An EU spokesman also said Galileo has been designed and developed as a non-military application, unlike the US system. And, unlike GPS, which was in essence designed for military use, he said, Galileo provides a "possibly higher degree of precision" as required by modern business, something that causes US officials to snort with derision. They point out that GPS, used in the recent Iraq war by the military to locate targets, among other functions, performed well beyond the needs of nearly any commercial system. The Europeans have long sought to counter US technological supremacy in aerospace, through the French Ariane space program, for instance, since the 1960s. That evolved into the European Space Research Organization (ESRO), the precursor of the European Space Agency, partly to combat the so-called "brain drain" of scientists from Europe owing to the explosive development of science in the United States. European pride was on the line even then, with the French threatening to quit the ESRO in 1970 unless it reduced its purely scientific programs in favor of developing an applications satellite program. As long ago as 1984, the United States' space budget was already six times that of France, 11 times of that of Germany and 11 times that of Japan. Likewise, Airbus Industrie, which now threatens Boeing for world dominance in the aircraft industry, was set up by France, Germany and England to offset US supremacy in air transport. In 1960, there were 17 manufacturers of commercial aircraft in the West. By the late 1980s, there were three - Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Airbus. Today, there are two, with both the Europeans and the Americans complaining that the other side is subsidizing aircraft production through various hidden means. The Europeans have also spent decades and billions of dollars in various attempts to counter US jet-fighter superiority. The European Union, in a news release dated March 26, said that if Galileo were to go forward, it would approve the project "strictly as a civilian enterprise", a reference to the fact that GPS was originally developed by the US as a military system. Others indicated it would ensure that if the US GPS system were disabled by a terrorist attack, Galileo could fill in. Some EU officials, however, have privately characterized Galileo as a thinly veiled attempt to subsidize Europe's aerospace industry further. For its part, the US government says it sees "no compelling need" for Galileo because GPS should be able to meet the needs of the global user community for the foreseeable future. The government, according to Ralph Braibanti, director of the State Department's Space and Advanced Technology Staff, continues to operate, maintain and provide GPS signals free of user fees for civilian use across the world. "It's not immediately obvious why users in Europe and elsewhere would pay voluntarily for Galileo services when they can get the GPS signals for free," Braibanti said in a written statement. "Galileo's basis positioning service (Open Signal) will offer the same capabilities as GPS today and will also be free of charge," the EU spokesman countered. "Added-value service, especially for areas where human lives are at stake such as in aviation, will have to be paid for. Today's GPS cannot be used for these kinds of applications. Moreover, there is no guarantee that GPS, or a modernized GPS, will remain free of charge for all times." Presumably through clenched teeth, the Americans have proposed an agreement on GPS-Galileo cooperation. In a news release in February, Braibanti said that if Europe goes ahead with Galileo, the United States "would be interested in cooperating with Europe to ensure that it is interoperable with GPS". The US government has held a virtual monopoly on space positioning since it developed GPS as a military device. It has since developed into a commercial vehicle for surveying as well as keeping track of vehicles, aircraft, ships, or even herds of cattle. Satellite radio navigation enables any individual to determine his precise position down to one meter. Other commercial uses are speed control, aid for the disabled and elderly, public works, customs services for the location of suspects and border controls, and search and rescue. The EU says it has recognized the commercial possibilities, inviting more than 500 industry leaders from across the world to an EU briefing in Brussels on March 18 as potential investors and users. "The business case is questionable," said the Weldon aide. "It is a jobs program, a high-tech jobs program. They are going to charge when GPS is already up there for free. The US government is picking up the tab for GPS because the military paid for it. It was not envisioned as a civilian system. When it was opened up for civilian applications, it had already been bought and paid for." Certainly, EU member governments had threatened to balk in December because of the cost of Galileo. Unanimous backing is necessary. At a meeting in Brussels, a majority of the 15 EU ministers said they needed another three months to decide whether to spend the 450 million euros ($495 million) needed as seed funding. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany have expressed reservations for various reasons. France and Italy are fervent backers. However, the EU leaders have been reluctant to finance the project without guarantees of private backing. Even after it is up and running, it will cost an estimated 220 million euros a year to run it. Enter the Chinese, who have been asked to come up with an estimated $200 million to help defray costs. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, declined comment on the issue. "We know negotiations are going forward," he said. "But we don't have much information at this point." Nonetheless, then-premier Zhu Rongji as long as two years ago said China would like to become involved on a variety of levels, including for satellite navigation in non-transport areas such as geodetic surveying, agriculture and fisheries. A working group between the EU and China was set up in 2001. China's minister of science and technology, Xu Guanhua, met German Transportation Minister Kurt Bodewig in Berlin in August, and other officials have met since. "The Chinese are involved because they could benefit from a lot of technological knowledge the Europeans have and the Europeans benefit because the Chinese have got the money," said the Weldon aide. "They will have a hand in it, they are a fledgling space power, they will learn a lot." However, China will not have equal rights with Europe in respect to Galileo's planned Public Regulated Services, according to Spacenews, a Washington, DC-based publication devoted to aerospace and technology. The service is an encrypted signal to be used by government authorities for both military and civil purposes. Originally, the Public Regulated Services unit was to be placed on a part of the radio spectrum that was planned for the GPS military code, which angered US officials concerned that it was a threat to future US and NATO military operations. The Europeans have since settled the issue with international frequency regulators. The Europeans argue that the US still has the right to jam GPS frequencies, and perhaps Galileo frequencies as well, during time of war to prevent enemy use of satellite navigation for weapons guidance or troop navigation. "I don't think that is a real concern," said Weldon's aide. "Would we deny a NATO ally use of the service during time of war? We would be helping to defend an ally." From jsommers at ngcsu.edu Tue May 6 08:38:22 2003 From: jsommers at ngcsu.edu (Jeffrey Sommers) Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 10:38:22 -0400 Subject: [A-List] question Message-ID: I recall, I think, seeing a reference on the A-List to a new edition of Michael Hudson's _Global Fracture_ being published. Does anyone having info on this? Thanks, Jeff Jeffrey Sommers, Assistant Professor Department of History North Georgia College & State University Dahlonega, GA 30597 Ph.: 706-864-1913 or 1903 Fax: 706-864-1873 Email: jsommers at fulbrightweb.org Research Associate, World History Center Northeastern University, Boston Url: www.whc.neu.edu From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 6 09:52:40 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 11:52:40 -0400 Subject: [A-List] question References: Message-ID: <3EB7DA48.7030708@mindspring.com> Do you mean Super Imperialism? http://styluspub.com/books/book6127.html Michael is a member of Gang8. How America will get Europe to finance its 2002-03 Oil War with Iraq Michael Hudson In the 1991 Gulf War, America got its allies to bear most of the costs voluntarily. After all, U.S. diplomats asked, wasn't the war fought to protect Kuwait and the next petro-domino, Saudi Arabia, from Iraqi attack - and in the process to protect Europe's oil and gas supplies from an aggressive grabber? Wasn't it therefore fair to ask the Kuwaitis and Saudis, along with the Germans, British and other countries, to bear the lion's share of the cost of the oil war? Europe and the Near East agreed to pay, and their central banks turned over some of the U.S. Treasury bonds they had accumulated by running trade and payments surpluses year after year with America. But as matters stood it did not really matter whether they wanted to finance America's wars or not. The international financial system gave them little choice but to do so. The Treasury-bond standard of international finance has enabled the United States to obtain the largest free lunch in history. Whereas the world's financial system formerly rested on gold, central bank reserves now are held in the form of U.S. Treasury IOUs that can be run up without limit. America has been buying up Europe, Asia and other regions with paper credit that it has informed the world it has little intention of ever paying off. That is the essence of today's "paper gold," and there is little Europe or Asia can do about the situation except reject the dollar and create their own alternative financial system. What makes today's Super Imperialism different from past "private enterprise" imperialism Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance explains how forcing the dollar off gold in 1971 obliged the world's central banks to finance the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit by using their surplus dollars to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, whose volume now exceeds America's ability or willingness to pay. These payments finance the U.S. Government's domestic budget as well. The larger America's balance-of-payments deficit grows, the more dollars end up in the hands of European, Asian and Near Eastern central banks, and the more money they must recycle back to the United States by buying its Treasury bonds, whose interest rates have fallen steadily. Over the past decade American savers have been net sellers of these bonds, putting their own money into the higher yielding stock market, real estate and corporate bonds. Past studies of imperialism have focused on how companies invest in other countries to extract profits and interest. This phenomenon occurs largely via private investors and exporters, and any nation can play this game. But today's newest form of financial imperialism occurs between the U.S. Government and the central banks of nations running balance-of-payments surpluses. The larger their surpluses grow, the more U.S. Treasury securities they are obliged to buy. The new imperialism occurs on inter-governmental account. How the United States makes other countries pay for its wars Since Europe's Middle Ages and Renaissance, going to war has left nations with heavy public debts. Two centuries ago Adam Smith gave a list of how each new war borrowing in Britain had led to a new tax being imposed to pay its interest charges. Belligerent nations became highly indebted, high-tax and high-cost economies. When foreign funds could not be borrowed, countries had to pay gold to defray the costs of their military spending, or go off gold to print money freely and see their currencies depreciate. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 and again after World War I, Britain and other countries imposed deflationary policies lead to trade depression until prices fell to a point where the currency achieved its prewar gold price. Such economies were sacrificed to save creditors from suffering a loss of their capital as measured in gold. At first America's war in Vietnam seemed to follow this time-honored scenario. U.S. overseas military spending ended up in the hands of foreign central banks, which cashed in their surplus dollars for gold almost on a monthly basis from the 1965 troop buildup onward. Germany did on a quiet scale what General de Gaulle did with great fanfare in cashing in the dollars sent from France's former colonies in Indo-China. By 1971 the dollar's gold cover - legally 25 percent for Federal Reserve currency - was nearly depleted, forcing America to withdraw from the London Gold Pool. The dollar no longer could be redeemed for gold at $35 an ounce. It seemed that the Vietnam War had cost America its world financial position, just as World War I had stripped Britain and its Allies of their financial leadership as a result of their arms debts to the United States. In going off gold, however, the United States inaugurated a new of system of international finance. It was a double standard, a dollar-debt standard whose consequences have drained Europe and Asia of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of output and property. Today the Near East and Moslem world have announced their opposition to a new U.S. oil war, and popular opinion throughout Europe also has turned against American adventurism. At first glance it might appear that America will have to finance its war alone. And indeed it would if today's global financial system were what it was before 1971. In that bygone era it seemed that no country ever again could go to war without seeing its international reserves depleted and its currency collapse, forcing its interest rates to rise and its economy to fall into depression. Yet in all the argument over the coming U.S.-Islamic war, Europeans have not seen that it is they that will have to bear the U.S. military costs, and to do so without limit. Almost without anyone noticing, central banks have been left with only one asset to hold: U.S. Treasury bonds of dubious value. Central banks do not buy stocks, real estate or other tangible assets. When Saudi Arabia and Iran proposed to use their oil dollars to buy American companies after 1972, U.S. officials let it be known that this would be viewed as an act of war. OPEC was told that it could raise oil prices all it wanted, as long as it used the proceeds to buy U.S. Government bonds or small minority positions in U.S. companies via the stock market, creating a nice boomlet for U.S. investors to ride. This enabled Americans to pay for oil in their own currency, not in gold or other "money of the world." Oil exports to the United States, as well as German and Japanese autos and sales by other countries, were bought with paper dollars that could be created ad infinitim. Imagine if third world countries, Europe or Asia could do this. It would mean the end of austerity and a new era of affluence. But under today's international financial system this option is available only to America. America's free lunch as Europe's and Asia's expense After World War I and during World War II, U.S. diplomats forced Britain and other countries to pay their arms debts and other military expenditures by selling off their gold and turning over their major companies to U.S. investors. But this is not what American officials are willing to do today, now that the balance-of-payments tables have turned. The world economy now operates on a double standard that enables America to spend internationally without limit, following whatever economic and military policies it wishes to without facing any international constraint. U.S. officials claim that the world's dollar glut has become the "engine" driving the international economy. Where would Europe and Asia be, they ask, without the U.S. import demand? Do not dollar purchases help other countries employ labor that otherwise would stand idle? This kind of rhetorical question fails to acknowledge the degree to which America imports foreign goods, buys foreign assets and pumps dollars into the world economy without providing any quid pro quo. The important question to be asked is why European and Asian central banks don't create their own domestic credit to expand their markets. Why can't they increase their consumption and investment levels rather than relying on the U.S. economy to buy their consumer goods and capital goods for surplus dollars that have no better use than to accumulate in the world's central banking system as excess reserves? The answer is that Europe and Asia suffer from a set of economic blinders known as the Washington Consensus. It is a cover story to perpetuate America's free ride at global expense by pretending that the Treasury bill standard is something other than an exploitative free ride. The idea is to block other countries from creating their own credit, while enabling the United States to do so at will. Toward debtor countries American diplomats work through the World Bank and IMF to demand that debtors raise their interest rates and impose taxes and austerity programs to keep their wages low, sell off their public domain to pay their foreign debts, and deregulate their economy so as to enable foreign investors to privatize local electricity, telephone services and other infrastructure formerly provided at subsidized rates to help these economies grow. Toward creditor nations, however, America relates as the world's most Highly Indebted Military Power by refusing to raise its own interest rates or taxes, or to permit key U.S. industries to be sold off. Super-Imperialism explains how this double standard came about. Hudson's narrative begins with World War I, showing how unforgiving America was of Europe's arms debts. Its stance was in sharp contrast to France's forgiveness of America's own Revolutionary War debt, and also to America's insistence today that Europe and Asia agree to finance present and future U.S. wars or trade deficits with unlimited lines of credit. The United States used Britain as its Trojan Horse within Europe after World Wars I and II by getting Britain to acquiesce in relinquishing its world economic power to America instead of trying to go it alone. In both wars America and Britain than confronted the rest of Europe with a fait accompli on harsh U.S. terms. It looks as if little has changed today. Prof. Hudson began writing Super Imperialism while serving as the balance-of-payments economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Anderson in 1964-69, and completed it in 1972 while teaching international finance at The New School in New York. (He is now Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.) His book was soon translated into Spanish, Japanese, Russian and Arabic, and a new and revised edition was republished in Japan earlier this year before being published in Britain by Pluto Press. This book was the first to explain how America has obliged other countries to finance its payments deficit, including its foreign military spending and its corporate buyouts of European and Asian companies. The Treasury-bill standard enables America to import goods far beyond its ability to export, providing the United States with a unique form of affluence achieved by getting a free ride from Europe, Asia and other regions. When British exporters (or the owners of companies or real estate being sold for dollars) receive more dollars, for instance, the recipients turn these payments over to the Bank of England for sterling. The Bank of England in turn invests these dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds, receiving a relatively small interest rate. There is no alternative for how to spend these dollars now that the gold option has been closed. America has found a way to make the rest of the world pay for its imports, and indeed pay for its takeover of foreign companies, and most imminently to pay for its new war in the Middle East. In effect, America has devised a new means to tax Europe and Asia via their central banks' willingness to accept unlimited sums of dollars. Super Imperialism reviews how the British and Germans, Japanese and Chinese, and even the central banks of France and Russia are about to finance the war in Iraq indirectly, by absorb the dollars that will be thrown off by America's military adventurism. The burden on Europe and Asia is not felt directly as a tax, but works indirectly through their payments surpluses with the United States. Michael can be reached at: hudsonmi at aol.com and Plutobooks at: simon at plutobooks.com Henry C.K. Liu Jeffrey Sommers wrote: > I recall, I think, seeing a reference on the A-List to a new edition of > Michael Hudson's _Global Fracture_ being published. Does anyone having > info on this? > > Thanks, > > Jeff > > Jeffrey Sommers, Assistant Professor > Department of History > North Georgia College & State University > Dahlonega, GA 30597 > Ph.: 706-864-1913 or 1903 > Fax: 706-864-1873 > Email: jsommers at fulbrightweb.org > > Research Associate, World History Center > Northeastern University, Boston > Url: www.whc.neu.edu > > From jcraven at clark.edu Tue May 6 09:17:33 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 08:17:33 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: [Denver-ANA] FW: Say No to Pipes Campaign Message-ID: For ANA? Val D. Phillips American Friends Service Committee Colorado Area Office 901 W. 14th Ave., Suite 7 Denver, CO 80204 303-623-3464 www.afsc.org/colorado The Say No to Pipes Campaign http://www.say-no-to-pipes.org =================== Copy Stop the Nomination of Daniel Pipes to the US Institute of Peace (USIP) The SAY NO TO PIPES! CAMPAIGN Dear Ed, You are being sent this request for action at the suggestion of Sandra Sanchez who just signed a letter that is being sent to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions asking them to reject the nomination of extremist Daniel Pipes to the US Institute of Peace, or at least hold full open public hearings so the American people can know the positions and policies of the nominee. Mr. Pipes' views are widely held to be racist, undemocratic, and contrary to the notion of peaceful negotiations, free speech, and the civil liberties that have made our country great. Mr. Pipes is perhaps best known recently for launching Campus Watch, a campus surveillance network and website reminiscent of the McCarthy era which, as one national publication put it, is "a showcase for the signature distortions on which Pipes has built his twenty-five-year career", and works to silence free speech on college campuses. Mr. Pipes has further distinguished himself by being widely considered to be a leading anti-Arab propagandist and "Muslim basher" . At the very time our country is dealing with the view of much of the rest of the world that it is anti-Arab or anti-Muslim this, as the Washington Post has put it in their call for a rejection of the nomination, is only "salt in the wound." Finally, the US Institute of Peace is committed in its mission statement to the resolution of conflicts through negotiations and peaceful means rather than violence. Mr. Pipes, who in regularly written tracts favors force and fear, holds views are specifically inimical to the stated goals of the Institute. Urgent Call: Time is limited. The Committee may act very soon and it is imperative that this nomination not go through. For the sake of our democracy, please help turn back the creeping racism, McCarthyism, or, as one Yale professor recently put it,the "waft" of "neo-Stalinism", that has already gone way too far in this country. As the Washington Post also accurately reported, when many people heard about this nomination they thought it was joke. Unfortunately it is not, and there is nothing funny about it. PLEASE take a moment to sign the letter at http://www.say-no-to-pipes.org (where you can also read more if you want to), and then send it on to as many people as you can. Thank you! The SAY NO TO PIPES! CAMPAIGN http://www.say-to-pipes.org From: Sandra Sanchez ssanchez at afsc.org Des Moines, Iowa, 5-312 From cburford at gn.apc.org Tue May 6 13:42:41 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 20:42:41 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Galloway on disobeying illegal orders Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030506203308.03557590@pop3.norton.antivirus> On Channel 4 News tonight George Galloway gave another spirited reply to the announcement that the Labour Party is suspending his membership. On the allegation that he had called on British troops to disobey orders he emphasised that what he called on them to do was to obey illegal orders - which has been the case since Nuremburg. In fact that is consistent with the statement of the outgoing chief of the Defence Staff on Newsnight on 30 April. As I posted to PEN-L the following day >Admiral Sir Michael Boyce showed no signs of embarrassment or conflict in >going on the record just ahead of his retirement as Chief of the UK >Defence Staff. ... >..... > >He deflected a question about whether it would have been easier for >British forces if the UK had not signed up to the international criminal >court, by stressing that it was part of his responsibility anyway to >ensure that he was given lawful orders and that troops down the line would >receive his orders as lawful. He referred to the Nuremburg trials. Particularly if no weapons of mass destruction are found, George Galloway's libel action could be of considerable legal and political importance, if his enemies choose to fight on this question. Chris Burford London From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue May 6 14:40:52 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 13:40:52 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Cuba/imperial thuggery/blacks and socialism References: <14c.1ef6cf22.2be8d4be@aol.com> Message-ID: <00dd01c3140f$c995f9a0$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: > I have my own beefs with the American political system and can get angry on > my own without the help of any foreign government. Given the state of affairs > with city government and civic society where I live, what the Cuban > government has accomplished in the past 40 years is nothing short of a > miracle. > Hear hear! Macdonald From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Tue May 6 17:12:39 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 01:12:39 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Welsh Assembly Election Analysis Message-ID: <3EB84167.DA48BADD@usuarios.retecal.es> MURKY BROWN WATER Exploding the Myths Surrounding the Welsh Assembly Elections All elections generate their own mythology, and those for the Welsh Assembly of 1 May have proved to be no exception. There are at present circulating a number of interpretations of what happened that day, apparently held to be incontrovertibly true within the greater part of Welsh Labour, and, by a curious process of inverse logic, by many within Plaid Cymru too. But each of them is false. Myth Number One: This was a night of triumph for Labour. Or, as Peter Hain put it, 'We won three-quarters of the constituency seats which by normal general election standards would be a landslide. This is the best result for Labour in the elections anywhere in Britain.' (Independent, 3 May) Labour did indeed win enough seats to give it the promise of a working majority in the new Assembly - although Hain's evident disdain for the brave new world of proportionality is clear - but, as Table 1 shows clearly, there is little other comfort Labour can draw from the election. Looking at total votes cast in all Welsh elections since 1997 - the last British state general election to be held before the establishment of the Assembly - it can be seen that this was Labour's worst performance in this period, excepting the European elections of 1999. Of course, that the Labour turnout stood a fraction of its performance in British general elections was to be expected: no, the really telling fact - one curiously scarcely picked up on by the mainstream media - is that across Wales Labour's performance on 1 May was actually worse, 11.5 per cent worse, than its showing in the 1999 Assembly elections; elections, remember, generally held as an unmitigated disaster for the Welsh party. In fact, as Table 2 shows, Labour only managed to increase its vote - measured in total votes cast - in nine constituencies: The Rhondda, Islwyn, Torfaen, Cynon Valley, Pontypridd, The Vale of Glamorgan, Gower, Bridgend and Merthyr; and, excepting the first three constituencies in this list (where Labour pulled out all the stops in an attempt to get its vote out in order to prevent a repeat of the embarrassments of 1999), only marginally. In every other constituency, Labour's vote was down on 1999. Myth Number Two: The elections were a disaster for Plaid. On the face of it, Plaid's return does indeed look poor: the promise of 1999 appears to have been unfulfilled. 'A terrible night for nationalists,' as the ubiquitous Peter Hain put it (referring, of course, to Welsh nationalists, not the British nationalists of increasingly jingoistic New Labour). But again surface appearances are deceptive. Table 1 shows that Plaid's 2003 performance is indeed well down on its 1999 showing, but that it compares favourably with Plaid's long term performance: excepting the exceptional results of the 1999 elections, Plaid's 180,000 votes in the 2003 constituency ballot ranks as its second highest poll in history, marginally topped only by the 2001 general election (where the ripple of 1999 still made itself felt). There is a long term trend at work here, and 2003 has only confirmed it. But it does merit asking why Plaid did poll lower in 2003 than in 1999. Now, although organisational factors undoubtedly played a role, something rather belatedly acknowledged by Ieuan Wyn Jones himself (Western Mail, 6 May), fundamentally the explanation has to be a political one. Marginal reasons will surely include a disillusionment in the operation of the Assembly, felt most strongly among those who had most hopes of the body in the first place. In addition, a relatively (and I emphasise the word 'relatively') resurgent Conservative Party must have partially awakened barely dormant fears of a future possible Tory government in Westminster - a factor that perennially increases Labour's vote at the expense of parties who will never have the possibility of governing in London. But most decisive has to be the role played by Welsh Labour's conscious distancing of itself from Blairism. As Adam Price acknowledged: 'Rhodri Morgan's [11 September] speech, ditching New Labour and declaring henceforth that there would be "clear red water" between Cardiff Bay and Downing Street, is massively significant. Not just for Welsh politics, but for all of us who believe in restoring democratic socialism as the animating principle of the Left.' (Western Mail, 5 May) But it is not the case, as Jon Osmond has argued, that 'Plaid Cymru's underlying failure in the election was that as a nationalist party it did not manage to capture any clear or distinctive national themes. Instead, it chose to concentrate on bread-and-butter health and education issues and service delivery, in a way that failed to distinguish itself from the Labour Party.' (Western Mail, 5 May) Rather, the relationship is the reverse: with 'clear red water' (CRW) Welsh Labour moved closer to Plaid, and, in the short term, Plaid has suffered (although, as we have seen, the suffering is only relative) as a result. But this is not to say, as Osmond seems to imply, that Plaid should now retreat to its traditional base in rural Wales. As we shall see below, this would be to refuse to pick up the gauntlet that history has thrown down. For CRW is but a temporary measure: an electoral finger in the breech. If Plaid wants really to present itself as the Party of Wales, it needs to ask this question: what does CRW mean for the people of Wales if, one, Westminster is so hostile to it, and, two, the very Welsh Assembly itself still lacks the powers to implement it in any meaningful way? That would be the concrete way in which Plaid would be able address the 'clear and distinctive national themes' that Osmond wants them to address without effecting a forced retreat to their historical rural redoubt. Myth Number Three: Labour voters 'came home'. As Rhodri Morgan himself rather arrogantly put it: 'I do not really think we have to worry about the other parties. Our lead over them is so large because Wales has come back to Labour.' (Western Mail, May 3) But this is precisely, as both Table 1 and Table 2 show, what did not happen. It is worth reminding ourselves of what happened in 1999. Then, traditional Labour voters, especially in the Labour heartlands of the south Wales coalfield, did two things. First, massively, they abstained. Second, in smaller numbers, they voted Plaid. [1] What happened in 2003? >From Tables 1 and 2 it is clear that the first part of this particular double whammy was not reversed: outside of the Rhondda, Islwyn and Torfaen, Labour voters barely returned to Labour; and outside of the further exceptions of Cynon Valley, Pontypridd, the Vale of Glamorgan, Gower, Bridgend and Merthyr they actually stayed away in even greater numbers. Very concretely, we are now in a position to offer an explanation of 1 May: the Labour voters who abstained in 1999 abstained (with the limited exceptions noted above) - frequently in greater numbers - in 2003 as well; the Labour voters who voted Plaid in 1999 did not vote Plaid in 2003. (Why this second feature occurred has already been addressed above.) Myth Number Four: Plaid's bubble has burst. Or, to put it another way, as spinmeister Hain gloated: 'Plaid Cymru's fantasy of an independent Wales has been buried for ever.' (Guardian 3 May) Now, aside from the real status of the project of an independent Wales in Plaid's strategy, and without going into the fantastic (in both senses of the word) nature of the notion, I am sure that the thinkers behind Welsh Labour would want this to be true, but, away from such wishful thinking and the triumphalist insobriety intended for public consumption, it is clear that they are clever enough to know that it is not. Table 3 is probably the most interesting of all: here we can see the relative shift of Plaid's vote (again, looking at total votes cast) from the 1997 general election (the last to be held before the establishment of the Assembly) to 1 May. And a very curious picture emerges. Plaid's total vote in Wales increased slightly over this period, by some 11.2 per cent. But this rise has by no means been even. Plaid has in fact lost heavily in those areas commonly denominated as its traditional heartlands, Welsh-speaking, rural Wales (in part this would account for the rise in the Tory vote in these areas: frankly, this is Plaid's gain); but has increased spectacularly were it has historically been weak - precisely in urban, Welsh-speaking as well as English-speaking, Wales. And this, long term, is what is happening: as New Labour moves to the right, many in traditional areas are prepared to see Plaid as a better means of defending what they see as traditional 'Old Labour' values. This is what fundamentally happened in 1999: but what happened in 1999 in the south Wales Valleys was so esxtreme that the longer term process was lost sight of. There is a structural shift taking place in the consciusness of the Weslh working class, of which 1999 was but one reflection. Yet this is a long term process, which is underway but nowhere near compelted (and which does not even have an ienvitable conclusion). Fundamnenatlly, this shift reflects the fact that a section of the Welsh people, at this stage a reletively small section, have been forced to look politically elsewhere: it is not that the Welsh working class is turning nationalist - Plaid gains in these areas where it does not specifically run a 'nationalst' campaign - nor is it the case that the Welsh working class is becoming less social-democratic: it is that it has increasingly to look for its social democracy elsewhere, since it seems that it is increasingly unable to fibnd it in Welsh Labour. This is the dynamic that Jon Osmond is addressing in his Western Mail artickle of 5 May. [2] He comments: Plaid 'faces the challenge of blending much more effectively the different character and interests of rural Wales with the Valleys, a challenge that it avoided in May.' But this would be having your cake and eating it. Effectively Plaid finds itself at an historical crossroads, for the choice now is as clear as this: it can fight to win back its rural conservative base, now defecting to the Tories, or it can move forward to be a real party of (all) Wales. In this choice fear of not differentiating itself sufficiently from Welsh Labour must not act as a dterrent to Plaid moving to consolidate itself in urban Wales. CRW is effectively a chimera. As Daniel Morrissey perceptively noted in a recent edition of the journal Workers' Action: 'But the danger of a repeat of Labour's poor showing in 1999 - or even worse - seems to have strengthened Rhodri's nerve and pushed him into revealing himself in all his glory as "a socialist of the Welsh stripe". In order to carry this through convincingly, however, he has to be able to show that he has something new to offer for the second term, rather than simply recapitulating the story so far. [...] Part of the problem is that many of the levers of economic policy are beyond the reach of the devolved administration - yet Rhodri now dismisses the debate over further powers as the preserve of "the narrow circles of political anorakism."' This maps the contours of the next period of Welsh politics. Plaid (and every socialist in Wales) has to decide whether it wants to be a part of this history, or be swept away by it. The chouice is as clear as that. Le?n: 6 May, 2003 Statistical Appendix ------------------------ TABLE 1: All-Wales Elections 1997-2003: Total Votes [3] for Labour and Plaid Compared 1997 1999 1999 1999 2001 2003 2003 (G) (A-C) (A-L) (E) (G) (A-C) (A-L) Lab 886,935 384,671 361,657 199,690 666,956 340,515 310,658 Plaid 162,030 290,572 312,048 185,235 195,893 180,185 167,653 ------------------------ Key: G = British-state General Election; A-C = Assembly Election Constituency Vote; A-L = Assembly Election Party List Top-up Vote; E = European Election Sources: 1997: Beti Jones, Etholiadau'r Ganrif - Welsh Elections (Talybont, 1999); 1999 Assembly Election: Barn (May 1999); 1999 European Election: Welsh Agenda (Summer 1999); 2001: ; 2003: calculated from raw data from ------------------------ TABLE 2: 1999 and 2003 Compared: Change in Total Votes Cast for Labour by Constituency (Constituencies Ordered by Size of Change) Constituency % change [4] 1999-2003 ** Rhondda 25.7 ** Islwyn 19.2 ** Torfaen 11.8 ** Cynon Valley 9.7 ** Pontypridd 7.7 Vale Of Glam 7.2 * Gower 5.3 Bridgend 1.8 ** Merthyr T & Rh 1.1 Vale Of Clwyd -1.2 Clwyd West -1.7 ** Ogmore -5.1 ** Caerphilly -5.6 * Aberavon -6.7 ** Neath -7.4 Caernarfon -10.9 * Llanelli -12.1 Meirionnydd -12.2 Newport West -12.9 * Swansea East -13.4 ** Blaenau Gwent -13.6 Swansea West -14.5 Cardiff North -14.6 Carmarthen W -15.2 Ynys Mon -16.1 Cardiff South -18.8 Preseli Pem -19.1 Carmarthen E -19.3 * Newport East -19.8 Conwy -20.9 Montgomery -22.7 Clwyd South -25.9 Monmouth -26.9 Cardiff West -27.2 Alyn & Deeside -28.0 Ceredigion -34.0 Delyn -38.9 Brecon & Rad. -39.4 Wrexham -39.8 Cardiff Cen -47.2 ------------------------ Key: 'Coalfield' constituencies are marked ** and 'semi-coalfield' constituencies *. [5] Methodology: The percentage change in the party vote is established by: (100(V2-V1))/V1, where V1 = number of votes cast in 1999 and V2 = number of votes cast in 2003. Minor diferences in size of electorate betwen the two elections have been ignored. Sources: 1999: ; 2003: calculated from raw data from: . ------------------------ TABLE 3: Percentage Change in the Plaid Vote 1997-2003 by Constituency Constituency % Change 1997-2003 Vale Of Glam 181.5 Monmouth 162.6 Newport West 159.0 Conwy 124.9 Cardiff N 123.1 Newport East 115.7 Brecon & Rad 113.7 ** Torfaen 100.8 Preseli Pem 94.8 ** Neath 91.0 Cardiff South 87.2 ** Pontypridd 77.6 ** Islwyn 72.8 Swansea West 66.8 * Swansea East 70.0 Delyn 66.1 ** Caerphilly 57.9 Clwyd South 56.9 * Aberavon 59.2 * Gower 57.3 Alyn & Deeside 57.2 Cardiff West 46.7 Carmarthen W 45.7 * Llanelli 26.7 ** Ogmore 25.8 ** Merthyr 28.0 Bridgend 17.6 Cardiff Cen 19.3 Montgomery 19.3 Wrexham 13.6 ** Rhondda 14.1 Vale Of Clwyd 9.3 ** Cynon Valley 4.8 ** Blaenau Gwent -8.8 Carmarthen E -10.3 Clwyd West -13.0 Caernarfon -33.7 Ceredigion -29.0 Meirionnydd -30.1 Ynys Mon -40.0 ------------------------ Key: 'Coalfield' constituencies are marked ** and 'semi-coalfield' constituencies *. [5] Methodology: The percentage change in the party vote is established by: (100(V2-V1))/V1, where V1 = number of votes cast in 1997 and V2 = number of votes cast in 2003. Minor diferences in size of electorate betwen the two elections have been ignored. Sources: 1997: ; 2003: calculated from raw data from: . Bibliographical Note By far the most satisfying and incisive political analysis currently coming out of Wales at present is that coming from the pen (or probably keyboard) of Daniel Morrissey in the British journal Workers' Action. Although this journal is not available online, Morrisey's penultimate article, 'Welsh Politics after Four Years of the Assembly' is, and can be read at: and . The pamphlet by Ceri Evans and Ed George Swings and Roundabouts: What Really Happened on May 6 (Cardiff, 1999), can now be read at . Notes [1] This is an issue that is explored in detail in Ceri Evans and Ed George, Swings and Roundabouts: What Really Happened on May 6 (Cardiff, 1999). See the bibliographical note above. [2] Osmond's article can be read online at: . [3] The resoning behind the concentration of the base statistic of total votes cast (and votes cast as a persentage of the elctorate, rather than as a percentage of votes cast) to be found here is developed in Swings and Roundabouts. [4] For ease of formatting the names of the constituencies have been abbreviated. Their full names are, in alphabetical order: Aberavon, Alyn and Deeside, Blaenau Gwent, Brecon and Radnorshire, Bridgend, Caernarfon, Caerphilly, Cardiff Central, Cardiff North, Cardiff South and Penarth, Cardiff West, Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Carmarthen West and Pembrokeshire South, Ceredigion, Clwyd South, Clwyd West, Conwy, Cynon Valley, Delyn, Gower, Islwyn, Llanelli, Meirionnydd Nant Conwy, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, Monmouth, Montgomeryshire, Neath, Newport East, Newport West, Ogmore, Pontypridd, Preseli Pembrokeshire, Rhondda, Swansea East, Swansea West, Torfaen, Vale Of Clwyd, Vale Of Glamorgan, Wrexham, Ynys Mon. To see where these places are, the BBC's results page has a geographically useful if politically uninformative interactive map. Go to: [5] By 'semi-coalfield' constituency, what is referred to is either a constituency immediately adjacent to the south Wales coalfield itself which incorporates a part of the coalfield within its territory (e.g. Gower), or a constituency immediately adjacent to the coalfield which is notably similar in socio-economic profile (e.g. Swansea East). From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 6 14:25:34 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 17:25:34 -0300 Subject: [A-List] DEUDA EXTERNA Y SALUD / GALASSO/ FERRARA/ ESCUDERO Message-ID: <4149-22003526202534630@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98262003-05-06T19:58:00Z2003-05-06T19:58:00Z311416504win541379879.3821 21 Gentileza del Centro Cultural Enrique Santos Disc?polo Mesa Redonda DEUDA EXTERNA Y SALUD - 9 de Mayo - Centro Cultural "Enrique S. Disc?polo" Ciclo: RADIOGRAF?A DE LA ARGENTINA ACTUAL Saber como somos para proponer y concretar las transformaciones necesarias VIERNES 9 DE MAYO - 20 hs. Avda. La Plata 2193 MESA REDONDA DEUDA EXTERNA Y SALUD Hablan: NORBERTO GALASSO FLOREAL FERRARA JOS? CARLOS ESCUDERO Coordina: RODOLFO A. ALZUGARAY Centro Cultural "Enrique S. Disc?polo" Avda. La Plata 2193 (1250) Ciudad de Buenos Aires - Argentina Tel/fax: (+54-11) 4923-2994 info at discepolo.org.ar Http://www.discepolo.org.ar Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 27600 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 6 14:25:34 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 17:25:34 -0300 Subject: [A-List] DEUDA EXTERNA Y SALUD / GALASSO/ FERRARA/ ESCUDERO Message-ID: <4149-22003526202534630@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98262003-05-06T19:58:00Z2003-05-06T19:58:00Z311416504win541379879.3821 21 Gentileza del Centro Cultural Enrique Santos Disc?polo Mesa Redonda DEUDA EXTERNA Y SALUD - 9 de Mayo - Centro Cultural "Enrique S. Disc?polo" Ciclo: RADIOGRAF?A DE LA ARGENTINA ACTUAL Saber como somos para proponer y concretar las transformaciones necesarias VIERNES 9 DE MAYO - 20 hs. Avda. La Plata 2193 MESA REDONDA DEUDA EXTERNA Y SALUD Hablan: NORBERTO GALASSO FLOREAL FERRARA JOS? CARLOS ESCUDERO Coordina: RODOLFO A. ALZUGARAY Centro Cultural "Enrique S. Disc?polo" Avda. La Plata 2193 (1250) Ciudad de Buenos Aires - Argentina Tel/fax: (+54-11) 4923-2994 info at discepolo.org.ar Http://www.discepolo.org.ar Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 27600 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 6 18:10:47 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 21:10:47 -0300 Subject: [A-List] CUADRO DE SITUACION AL 6 DE MAYO DE 2003 Message-ID: <4134-2200353701047400@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98132003-05-06T23:39:00Z2003-05-06T23:42:00Z5258914761win12329181279.3821 21 N? 44 Al 6 de mayo de 2003 INTERNACIONAL EL MUNDO La econom?a norteamericana sigue sin dar se?ales de recuperaci?n. En los ?ltimos d?as se public? el ?ndice de desempleo que ya alcanz? el 6%. En ese contexto y pensando en su reelecci?n, el Sr. Bush acent?a su autoasignado rol de ?gendarme del mundo?, que parece agradar a la mayor?a de los estadounidenses, e ignora cada vez m?s la existencia de la ONU y la vigencia de cualquier orden internacional ajeno a su voluntad. Esta semana, el pent?gono anunci? que Irak ser? dividida en tres partes, a? cargo de EEUU, Gran Breta?a y ??Polonia!!. Por su parte el Secretario de Estado Powell declar? que ?por ahora? su pa?s no usar? la fuerza contra Cuba, pero advirti? a Siria de que puede ?sufrir consecuencias? si no se alinea con EEUU. ? Pero ninguna noticia da cuenta tan claramente de la verdadera esencia de la guerra y de la pol?tica exterior norteamericana, como la que informa de la designaci?n de Philip Carroll, ex presidente y gerente general de la multinacional Shell, al frente del consejo consultivo del Ministerio iraqu? de Petr?leo. AMERICA LATINA Y EL MERCOSUR : El gobierno de Lula sigue dando se?ales de la importancia que le asigna al Mercosur y a la integraci?n de la econom?a Argentina y Brasile?a. Esta semana anunci? la apertura de una l?nea de cr?ditos para empresas argentinas por U$S 1.000 millones, para financiar exportaciones a cualquier pa?s del mundo.? Asimismo, acord? con el gobierno argentino la creaci?n de un billete Mercosur para las exportaciones y el turismo (las 100 MEDIDAS del MNYP conten?an una propuesta muy similar), que evitar?a el uso del d?lar en el comercio entre ambos pa?ses. Por otra parte, ha? causado cierta preocupaci?n en Brasil la reforma jubilatoria propuesta por Lula, que si bien es respaldada por la oposici?n y los gobernadores, ha generado rechazo en sectores de su propio partido. NACIONAL POLITICA Las encuestas y estudios publicados en los ?ltimos d?as estar?an indicando que la mayor?a de los electores que no votaron por Menem o Kirchner en la primera vuelta, en estos momentos se estar?an inclinando por el candidato del oficialismo, fuertemente apoyado por el aparato del Estado y los principales medios de prensa. Esta definici?n estar?a motivada m?s por el rechazo que genera una posible nueva gesti?n de Menem - que cada d?a parece fugar m?s hacia la derecha - en amplios segmentos de la sociedad, que por el entusiasmo que despierta N?stor Kirchner, raz?n por la cual resulta claro que un futuro gobierno de este ?ltimo, nacer?a hu?rfano de un aut?ntico y entusiasta respaldo popular. En otras palabras, el voto de la mayor?a del electorado por Kirchner, no contendr?a un respaldo a sus propuestas, sino que se originar?a en ?el espanto? que despierta un posible tercer gobierno de Menem y sus propuestas en materia de pol?tica exterior, interior y econ?mica. No es un voto a Kirchner y mucho menos a Lavagna o Duhalde, sino que fundamentalmente es un voto anti-Menem. ECONOMICA Repasando las principales novedades econ?micas de la semana (la recaudaci?n sube pero est? en el nivel m?s bajo en 7 a?os, el BCRA le pide autorizaci?n al FMI para emitir $3.000 millones hasta fin de a?o y destinarlos a comprar d?lares para evitar que siga cayendo su cotizaci?n, con el corral?n abierto en abril se perdieron dep?sitos por $1.545 millones, la deuda p?blica creci? en 11.000 millones de d?lares durante el a?o 2002, la suba de las exportaciones por ahora no impacta en el nivel de empleo, desde diciembre de 2001 cerraron 332 sucursales bancarias y despidieron a 10.000 trabajadores bancarios, el FMI comenz? a revisar las cuentas argentinas, etc.) queda nuevamente en claro que ?haciendo la plancha? no se resuelven los grandes problemas nacionales y que resulta imperioso aplicar un programa econ?mico transformador (como el propuesto en las 100 MEDIDAS) para rescatar a nuestro pa?s de su actual decadencia. SOCIAL Los expertos han se?alado que las graves inundaciones que afectan a la provincia de Santa Fe, con su terrible secuela de muertos y bienes destruidos, podr?a haberse evitado o haberse minimizado si se hubieran ? tomado las medidas adecuadas. Incluso, aunque Reutemann lo niega sin mucha convicci?n, t?cnicos del INTA y de la Universidad afirman que alertaron al gobierno de Santa Fe sobre la cat?strofe que se avecinaba. Lamentablemente, estas noticias ponen una vez m?s en evidencia la importancia de las propuestas hidroel?ctricas y en materia de inundaciones formuladas por el MNYP, que permitir?an no s?lo generar millones de puestos de trabajo y recuperar o incorporar millones de hect?reas a la producci?n, sino que tambi?n permitir?an regular el nivel de las aguas, evitando desastres como el que est? ocurriendo en estos momentos con el R?o Salado en Santa Fe. DEL MOVIMIENTO NACIONAL Y POPULAR Desde el d?a siguiente de las elecciones, los grandes multimedios nacionales ligados al establishment y al Pacto de Olivos lanzaron una fuerte ofensiva contra el MNYP y EL ADOLFO.? A pesar que este no hab?a accedido al ballottage, les preocupaba los casi 3.000.000 de votos que hab?an apoyado una propuesta que cambiaba de ra?z las formas de hacer pol?tica en la Argentina y se propon?a terminar con la corrupci?n estructural y los acuerdos pol?ticos, sociales y econ?micos espurios, que en gran parte han originado la actual decadencia nacional. El eje de esa ofensiva pasa hoy por forzar una definici?n del MNYP frente a la segunda vuelta del 18 de mayo. ? Pero los referentes del MNYP de ninguna manera van a entrar en este juego, ya que resulta inaceptable que su agenda sea fijada por los grandes medios de prensa y por los poderosos. Los programas de los dos candidatos que accedieron al ballottage son sustancialmente diferentes a los puntos contenidos en las 100 MEDIDAS y ninguno de ellos se muestra dispuesto a acordar un nuevo programa que incorpore los puntos fundamentales de las mismas. Por lo tanto, fieles a los argentinos que se jugaron con su voto por un proyecto transformador, el MNYP y EL ADOLFO fijar?n su posici?n en el momento oportuno, priorizando la unidad y el consenso dentro del MNYP y defendiendo consecuentemente los intereses del pueblo y las banderas del movimiento nacional. El MNYP no es un aparato que se agota en el plano electoral, sino una herramienta que agrupa a dirigentes pol?ticos y referentes sociales de todo el pa?s, que quieren refundar la Argentina. Desde que se constituy? las decisiones, a?n las m?s dif?ciles, siempre se han tomado por consenso. En su seno cohabitan compa?eros que enfrentan en sus provincias o en sus lugares de inserci?n distintas realidades, que los puede llevar en la segunda vuelta a inclinarse por uno u otro candidato. Por ello, en esta oportunidad m?s que nunca, la posici?n del movimiento no puede adoptarse por mayor?a, sino que debe reflejar el consenso de todos sus integrantes, para mantener su unidad y despu?s del 18 de mayo seguir luchando por el bien de nuestro pueblo y nuestra Patria. Recorriendo este camino, el viernes 2 de mayo EL ADOLFO se reuni?, primero por separado y luego en un plenario conjunto, con los referentes del MNYP de la regi?n de Cuyo (San Juan, Mendoza y San Luis), en donde el 27 de abril EL ADOLFO recibi? un amplio respaldo popular. En la misma se acord?? realizar todos los esfuerzos necesarios para ganar las pr?ximas elecciones para gobernador en Mendoza y San Juan (en San Luis EL ALBERTO, candidato del MNYP, fue elegido como pr?ximo gobernador por m?s del 90% de sus comprovincianos). Si el MNYP, como todo lo estar?a indicando, comienza a gobernar todas las provincias de Cuyo, se puede llevar a cabo una gesti?n en bloque que permitir?a mejorar la calidad de vida de los habitantes de las tres provincias. De esta manera, se podr?a llevar a cabo en la zona, como sucedi? hasta ahora en San Luis , una gesti?n que demuestre en la pr?ctica que una Argentina distinta es posible, convirtiendo a la regi?n en un espejo en el que se pueda mirar el resto de la Argentina. El s?bado 3 de mayo se llev? a cabo una reuni?n con referentes de todo el pa?s. Luego de un interesante intercambio de ideas entre los presentes, se acord? que? la etapa fundacional del movimiento ya termin? y que a partir de ahora se debe consolidar la organizaci?n, para lo cual el MNYP debe constituir sus estructuras electorales en todas las provincias y presentarse en cuanta elecci?n se realice. En lo que se refiere a las elecciones del 18 de Mayo,? se reafirm? que el MNYP no se? constituy? para enfrentar una elecci?n, sino para liderar una revoluci?n pac?fica en la Argentina, raz?n por la cual acordaron no precipitarse a fijar posici?n sobre el rol del movimiento en la segunda vuelta de la elecci?n presidencial y postergar la definici?n hasta el jueves 15 de mayo, en que se reunir? un nuevo plenario en la localidad de Luj?n (San Luis). Esto no significa que en esa oportunidad se defina alg?n tipo de apoyo a uno de los candidatos, ya que esta posibilidad qued? condicionada a la posici?n que los dos postulantes adopten acerca de las 100 MEDIDAS. Por su parte, EL ADOLFO se?al?: " Menem y Kirchner, si tienen inter?s en que los integrantes del MNYP opinemos sobre la segunda vuelta,? antes se tendr?n que pronunciar sobre cuestiones claves, como el tratamiento de la deuda externa; el aumento de las jubilaciones; el salario m?nimo, vital y m?vil; la soluci?n para el drama de las inundaciones y la eliminaci?n de la corrupci?n estructural. Nosotros no vamos a comprometer los principios que nos llevaron a fundar el MNYP por cuestiones de corte netamente electoralistas. Por eso sostenemos que nuestra discusi?n, en defensa de la bandera que enarbolamos, pasa por el debate de las ideas, los programas, las propuestas y no por la politiquer?a como quiere imponer la vieja pol?tica". En lo que se refiere al rol futuro del movimiento, EL ADOLFO ? agreg?: ? Seremos la oposici?n en el orden nacional, porque el programa que pregonan Menem y el oficialismo, es antag?nico al que nosotros elaboramos y propagandizamos a lo largo y ancho del pa?s en nuestra campa?a proselitista". A PASO DE VENCEDORES MOVIMIENTO NACIONAL Y POPULAR ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ANDRES CASTILLO ?????????? andrescastillomnyp at infovia.com.ar -------------------------------------- Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP, deben suscribirse en :< altasmnyp at argentina.com> y altasmnyp at mnyp.org. Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en los barrios. La mesa de mujeres Adolfo Presidente nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos < mujeresbsas at argentina.com y mujeresbsas at mnyp.org En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a < bajasmnyp at argentina.com y bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista, con las debidas disculpas. PARA UN ARGENTINO, NO DEBE HABER NADA MEJOR QUE OTRO ARGENTINO. Mayo de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?. Nuestras paginas web son: www.institutofederal.org http://www.mnyp.org/ www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com// www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA, y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 100 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presentara el ultimo 7 de marzo en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, que Ud. puede pedir por mail al MNyP , personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486 Por decision del Dr. Adolfo Rodriguez Saa manifestada en la reunion del Comando Superior del MNyP en Buenos Aires el martes 10 de septiembre de 2002, no se recibe ni se permiten recibir aportes economicos empresarios a los gastos de campa?a de manera encubierta o desmedida salvo de las pymes que acuden a nuestras cenas organizadas por la Comision de Fondos, justamente para recaudar fondos y el esfuerzo que hacen nuestros amigos que ganan bien y han estado pagando una cuota mensual para sumar al esfuerzo. Esto es asi porque se desea llegar al gobierno nacional cuando el pueblo lo decida, con las manos libres para poder hacer efectiva la revolucion nacional y popular sin ningun compromiso con los factores de poder. El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. El Comando Superior Nacional esta compuesto por: Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?, Adrian Morales, Alberto Hensel, Alberto Rodriguez Sa?, Alberto Turcato, Aldo Rico, Alejandro Amor, Alfredo Allende, Alfredo Reto, Amparo Cueto, Ana Savignano, Andres Poggi, Andres Castillo, Arturo Negri, Oscar B?nica, Bold?, Carlos Sergnese, Catalina Pantuso, Coqui Catal?n, Cristina Guzm?n, Daniel Barberis, Daniel Carbonetto, Domingo Moreira, Dorita Lucero, Eduardo Avila, Eduardo Berchot, Enrique Basualdo Enrique Rodriguez, Enrique Vignolo, Eugenia Trigo, Federico Godio, Gerardo Alzamora, Gerardo Vallejo, Gilda Caro, Gisela Vartalitis, Giuliano, Gustavo Casas, Gustavo Valenzuela, Hector Mart?n, Horacio Ghilini, Horacio Obregon Cano, Hugo Moyano, Jeronimo Martoccia, Jes?s Mar?a Tito Plaza, Jorge Benalcazar, Jorge Cravero, Jorge Garcia, Jorge Huidobro, Jorge Enea Spilimbergo, Jorge Rachid, Jorge Varela, Jose Rodr?guez, Juan Garcia, Juan Manuel Palacios, Julian Licastro, Julio Casavelos, Juanchi Moreyra, Julio Diaz Lozano, Julio Piumato, Liliana Finocciaro, Leon Guinzburg, Luis Luco, Luis Lusqui?os, Marcos Garcia, Maria Alejandra Ungaro, Maria Alicia Lemme, Maria Angelica Torrontegui, Maria Berganini, Maria Goniel, Marino Fredes, Mario Alvarez, Martin Garcia, Melchor Posse, Miriam Benedetto, Mirta Videla, N?lida Beatriz Morales, Nestor Zapata, Norberto Hubeli, Pablo Challu, Pablo Moyano, Pascual Rampi, Patricia P?rez, Pedro Raitieri, Ricardo Basualdo, Ricardo Jorge, Roberto Basualdo, Roberto Roitman, Rosa Carrasco, Santiago Julio, Sofia Gonzalez, Soledad Sampaolesi, Victor NoVillo, Walter Gomez. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP< mnyp at ciudad.com.ar , < mnypnacional at argentina.com La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . El Area de Participaci?n Nacional del Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina invita a todos los amigos a visitar la P?gina web del IFRA que es http://www.institutofederal.org /y la del IFRA Chubut. cuya direcci?n es : http://www.geocities.com/ifrachubut En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 51455 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 3170 bytes Desc: image003.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5663 bytes Desc: image004.gif URL: From william at palfreman.com Tue May 6 23:04:09 2003 From: william at palfreman.com (William Palfreman) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 06:04:09 +0100 (BST) Subject: [A-List] Galloway on disobeying illegal orders In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20030506203308.03557590@pop3.norton.antivirus> References: <4.3.2.7.1.20030506203308.03557590@pop3.norton.antivirus> Message-ID: <20030507054012.V309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> On Tue, 6 May 2003, Chris Burford wrote: > Particularly if no weapons of mass destruction are found, George > Galloway's libel action could be of considerable legal and political > importance, if his enemies choose to fight on this question. Nah. Any number of unlikely types have said the documents seem genuine. Most significantly that Anglican cleric, who said the documents recovered about himself were accurate, and that as Galloway was the most regular British visitor it was inconceivable that he hadn't been dealing with the Iraqi intelligence. Plus there's Ted Heath, saying that near identical documents about him were accurate, and he remembered the events described. Those two are hardly government stool-pigeons. The Telegraph Group only has to prove there were reasonable grounds for believing the accuracy of the document (see above), or that they were of public interest. Galloway doesn't stand a chance. My guess is that even in the current patriotic fervour, New Labour won't actually do him for treason. But he'll probably go to jail as stuff about his "charitable" work comes out, and then the Inland revenue will do him for millions in back taxes. -- W. Palfreman. I'm looking for a job. Read my CV at: Tel: 0771 355 0354 www.palfreman.com/william/cv-wfp2.html From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 02:22:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 11:22:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Galloway on disobeying illegal orders References: <4.3.2.7.1.20030506203308.03557590@pop3.norton.antivirus> <20030507054012.V309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> Message-ID: <003001c31471$d4ebf7c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> William Palfreman writes: as Galloway was the most regular British visitor it was inconceivable that he hadn't been dealing with the Iraqi intelligence. ----- Exactly. It's a bit like complaining that someone under arrest would be in regular communication with police personnel. This is what makes the idea that we should be somehow shocked at Galloway's "treachery" ridiculous. That he was a far more regular visitor than anyone else (Tam Dalyell, Tony Benn, Ted Heath) means that he will have been more likely to form regular contacts. Big deal. The libel itself concerns the charge that he financially benefited from Saddam Hussein's regime. And, given the English libel laws, the onus is upon the Telegraph to rake through all of Galloway's personal finances in order to locate evidence backing this charge. That many acres of news space have been devoted to portraying Galloway as a champagne socialist is merely intended to give the charge a wider credibility. As other articles have attested, he has won enough in libel damages over the years to have financed his Algarve home. And if any enterprising journalist really wants to level the playing field a bit, we might start asking questions of those Labour MPs, including Tony Blair, who have had paid-for trips to Israel, not to mention Blair's holidaying in Egypt and Italy. The difference, of course, is that Galloway did his travelling without the blessing of the British state, so he gets trashed for it, regardless of his financial probity which, as we know, is the one area most likely to cause lasting damage to his reputation, even if the smears themselves, years later, are proven false. Robert Maxwell, ironically enough, understood that. You continue: My guess is that even in the current patriotic fervour, New Labour won't actually do him for treason. But he'll probably go to jail as stuff about his "charitable" work comes out, and then the Inland revenue will do him for millions in back taxes. ------ "Treason" would be very difficult to "prove", even in as loaded a court as they could muster. It would also suffer from a problem of legitimacy, since, for all the patriotic fervour, Iraq was no Soviet Union, perceived as being capable of undermining the very fabric of "Britain". As you say, better to get him on the financial side, where sleaze is much easier to "identify". Nevertheless, having been through this before, courtesy of Robert Maxwell, Joe Haines, Alistair Campbell and Helen Liddell, Galloway is likely to have been careful in his accounting. And the prosecution's own achilles heel is its reliance upon the documents of a regime that, under other circumstances, could not be trusted to produce reliable documents. Square that circle. Michael Keaney From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 02:38:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 11:38:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] George Galloway Message-ID: <003e01c31473$f8fe0f20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> How many staunch Old Labourites must be queasy at the idea of an anti-war Labour MP "bringing the party into disrepute" for opposing the policies of a warmongering Labour leader? They are in an ever-decreasing minority, if we are to believe the idea that "grassroots" Labour MPs are the ones who led the charge against Galloway. But now the problem of selecting the official candidate for Glasgow Central has been removed, and it does not matter if Galloway does eventually clear his name. Some of the damage will stick, but even if he emerges spotless, he will no longer be an MP. That is the assumption of the Labour Party bigwigs, who must now work even harder to chip away at Galloway's credibility to deny him the chance of running as a credible independent option. And how instructive to see, yet again, the name of Peter Hain pop up. Galloway might have been naive to imagine that Hain, the former poster-boy of the anti-apartheid movement, would have stood by him, but it is nevertheless revealing of just how far Hain has gone politically. ----- Labour cuts Galloway adrift CATHERINE MacLEOD and VICKY COLLINS The Herald, 7 May 2003 Labour dispatched George Galloway into the political wilderness yesterday while its hierarchy decides whether he has brought the party into disrepute. David Triesman, the general secretary of the Labour party, wrote to the Glasgow Kelvin MP to tell him he was immediately suspended "pending the outcome of internal party investigations". The widely expected move came after party chiefs received a series of complaints about remarks Mr Galloway made in an interview to an Arab television station, in which he described Tony Blair, the prime minister, and George Bush, the US president, as "wolves" who had attacked Iraq. The suspension was imposed as it was confirmed that the parliamentary standards commissioner is to begin inquiries into allegations made by the Daily Telegraph that Mr Galloway received money from Saddam Hussein's regime. The Charity Commission is also looking into the allegations, which Mr Galloway denies and has said he will contest in a libel action against the newspaper. Mr Galloway last night called the suspension "completely unjust" and said he had been "silenced and politically destroyed" for speaking out against the war. His constituency party is standing by him. The interview that led to his suspension was broadcast on Abu Dhabi TV on March 28 as British and US troops were fighting in Iraq. In it Mr Galloway said: "Iraq is fighting for all the Arabs. Where are the Arab armies? We wonder when the Arab leaders will wake up. When are they going to stand by the Iraqi people?" Of Mr Bush and Mr Blair he said: "They attacked Iraq like wolves. They attacked civilians." Mr Galloway also urged British soldiers to refuse to obey "illegal orders". It is alleged that his remarks brought "the Labour party into disrepute by behaviour that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the party". There were complaints about similar remarks Mr Galloway made in an interview to the ITV News channel on April 1. Mr Galloway is now suspended from holding office as an MP or representing the party in any way. The suspension will remain in place until Chris Lennie, the Labour party's deputy general secretary, reports to the national constitution committee (NCC), who will eventually decided if there is a case to answer. Labour sources revealed last night that the formal NCC hearing might take a "longer rather than shorter" time, which could inflame an already tricky situation in Scotland. Under the boundary review Mr Galloway's Glasgow Kelvin constituency will disappear to become part of the newly-drawn Glasgow Central. As a sitting MP Mr Galloway should automatically be considered for the new seat but suspension will eliminate him from the selection process. He learned of his suspension in a letter from Mr Triesman yesterday afternoon. Mr Galloway immediately condemned the decision, claiming that Mr Blair wanted "free speech in Baghdad but not in Britain". He described the decision as "completely unjust" and "prejudicial" to his libel action against the Daily Telegraph and Christian Science Monitor. He added: "The suspension from the Labour party after 35 years of membership is particularly hard to bear. It is tantamount to political exile." Mr Galloway also said he stood by "every word" of his interview with Abu Dhabi TV. He told Channel 4 News: "I don't believe that the Labour party is Tony Blair's personal fiefdom. I was in it long before he was and I suspect I love it rather more than he does. It's really come to something when you are being witch-hunted because of words that you spoke, because of ideas that you have. "I am not asking people to support my views, but do we really want a parliament of yes men? A parliament of pagers, where people are told what to say and told what to do? Isn't that the kind of parliament they used to have in Baghdad? "I didn't call on British soldiers to disobey orders but to disobey illegal orders. That's actually a legal obligation on all armies and all governments since Nuremberg. I didn't call on anyone to rise up and kill British soldiers. They (the Labour party) know exactly what I said and I stand by every word that I said." Mark Craig, the Glasgow Kelvin constituency party chairman, said they stood by Mr Galloway. He said: "There were serious allegations made about George in the Telegraph. Those had to be investigated. "I don't believe it's right to suspend him, though. Very many of George's remarks are controversial (but) he's not been suspended in the past." Labour MPs will officially consider Mr Galloway's position in the parliamentary party next week and are likely to demand the withdrawal of the parliamentary whip. Labour's parliamentary committee will consider Mr Galloway's position today before making a recommendation to the PLP. Tam Dalyell, whose own position will be considered by the Labour party "in due course" for making allegedly anti-Semitic remarks, said the Labour party should have waited until the outcome of "Galloway v Telegraph Newspapers and Galloway v the Christian Science Monitor" before they chose to suspend Mr Galloway. Grass-roots Labour MPs have demanded that the party leadership deal with Mr Galloway. While Mr Blair believes he is not worth bothering about, the majority of Labour MPs insist he brings the party into disrepute and has been allowed to do so for too long. Even former supporters insist that "this time he has gone too far". In another blow for Mr Galloway, Peter Hain, the former foreign office minister, has denied asking him to act as a go-between with Saddam. Mr Galloway suggested in an interview with the Sunday Herald two weeks ago that he had told Mr Hain privately that he could "open a channel of dialogue as a means of resolving the Iraq crisis" after a Christmas visit to Iraq in 1999. He told the paper that "Hain agreed that we should start such a dialogue" but then went on to brief against him. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:26:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:26:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Saddam speaks Message-ID: <007d01c31483$0f8128e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> 9.45am update Australian newspaper handed 'Saddam tape' Guardian Online George Wright and agencies Wednesday May 7, 2003 An Australian newspaper claims it has been handed a two-day-old tape recording of Saddam Hussein calling on Iraqis to launch a "secret war" against US and British forces in the country. The Sydney Morning Herald said the tape was handed to its correspondent in Baghdad on Monday and that it would pass on the recording to US authorities today. In a 15-minute monologue, a weary-sounding voice, interspersed with coughs, calls on Iraq's people to come together in a revolt against the occupying forces. "I don't want to talk in details about the occupation and why and how, and I am going to focus instead on how to face these invaders and kick them out from Iraq," it says. "... It sounds as if we have to go back to the secret style of struggle that we began our life with. Through this secret means, I am talking to you from inside great Iraq and I say to you, the main task for you, Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni, Muslim and Christian and the whole Iraqi people of all religions, your main task is to kick the enemy out from our country." The newspaper says it played the recording to more than a dozen Iraqis, including a judge, a law professor and a former acquaintance of Saddam in exile, and the "overwhelming opinion" was that the voice and rhetoric were very similar, or identical, to those of Saddam. An Australian linguistics expert also said the tape was genuine, according to the report in today's Herald. "Certainly it's him," the paper quotes an unnamed judge from a Baghdad criminal court as saying. "I am 100% certain. I deal with physical evidence all the time." Talib al Shar'aa, a law professor at Baghdad University, told the Herald: "We are not experts. We have known many many similar voices to Saddam Hussein to appear in the past few years, and similar faces as well. "But this speech sounded very realistically like Saddam Hussein. This is the first time he has admitted the reality of the occupation. He focuses on the word occupation, and he admits to being in hiding and working by secret means. And it sounds to me like this speech is new because he mentioned the Iraqi people celebrating his birthday on April 28, 2003." The Herald report said that two men who had the tape approached its staff after spotting their clearly marked press car near the Palestine hotel on Monday. One of the men, who seemed nervous, asked for directions to the offices of Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya TV while his companion waited behind the wheel of a taxi. "When he was directed to the main television base in the Palestine hotel - guarded by a security cordon of United States troops - he appeared to lose heart and returned to the car," the newspaper said. "The Herald's interpreter, Kifah Hameed Mehdi, went after him to ask why he wanted to talk to the media and the driver of the car handed over a tape, saying it was a copy of Saddam's most recent speech, made that morning." The tape will fuel speculation over the fate of the deposed Iraqi leader. There have been several reported sightings and television broadcasts of him since the US targeted his palaces with "decapitation" strikes at the start of the war, but none have been accepted as proof that he is alive. A letter, supposedly written by Saddam and dated April 28, was published a week ago in the London-based Al-Quds newspaper. Meanwhile, the US military said a regional commander of Saddam Hussein's Baath party on the list of most-wanted Iraqis had been taken into custody. US central command said in a statement that Ghazi Hamud al-Adib, number 32 on its list, "is now in coalition custody", but gave no details of where he was taken, if he was caught, or if turned himself in. The number of people on the list known to have surrendered or been captured now stands at 19. ------ Press play for the voice of Saddam Sydney Morning Herald May 7 2003 An audiotape has been handed to the Herald in Baghdad, with this tantalising claim: it is the voice of Saddam Hussein only two days ago, Ed O'Loughlin reports. A tired-sounding voice calls on Iraq's people to stand together in a new underground war against the occupying forces. "I don't want to talk in details about the occupation and why and how, and I am going to focus instead on how to face these invaders and kick them out from Iraq," it says, pausing to cough. "... It sounds as if we have to go back to the secret style of struggle that we began our life with. Through this secret means, I am talking to you from inside Great Iraq and I say to you, the main task for you, Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni, Muslim and Christian and the whole Iraqi people of all religions, your main task is to kick the enemy out from our country." The Herald played the tape, allegedly recorded two days ago, to more than a dozen Iraqis from various walks of life, including a judge, a law professor and a former acquaintance of Saddam in exile. The overwhelming opinion was that the voice and rhetoric were very similar, or identical, to those of Saddam. "Certainly it's him," said a judge from a Baghdad criminal court, who asked not to be named. "I am 100 per cent certain. I deal with physical evidence all the time." Two men gave the tape to the Herald on Monday, only after they failed to deliver it to correspondents for the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera. Baghdad is still without effective administrative authorities, and at this point there is no way of verifying whether the voice is Saddam's. "We are not experts," said Talib al Shar'aa, a law professor at Baghdad University. "We have known many many similar voices to Saddam Hussein to appear in the past few years, and similar faces as well. "But this speech sounded very realistically like Saddam Hussein. This is the first time he has admitted the reality of the occupation. He focuses on the word occupation, and he admits to being in hiding and working by secret means. And it sounds to me like this speech is new because he mentioned the Iraqi people celebrating his birthday on April 28, 2003." Su'ad Jasim, a native of Tikrit, Saddam's home town, said she clearly recognised the accent on the tape as that of her own area. Two of the groups the Herald played the tape to listened to it sitting outside in their gardens. On both occasions, neighbours came to the fence to ask what radio channel Saddam was making his speech on. The two men who had the tape approached the Herald after spotting our clearly marked press car near the Palestine Hotel on Monday. One of the men, who seemed nervous, came and asked for directions to the offices of Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya TV while his companion waited behind the wheel of a taxi. When he was directed to the main television base in the Palestine Hotel - guarded by a security cordon of United States troops - he appeared to lose heart and returned to the car. The Herald's interpreter, Kifah Hameed Mehdi, went after him to ask why he wanted to talk to the media and the driver of the car handed over a tape, saying it was a copy of Saddam's most recent speech, made that morning. As an Iraqi, Mr Mehdi should make sure it was broadcast for the sake of Iraq, the men said, before driving hurriedly away. Mr Mehdi said the men spoke with the distinctive accents of Saddam's Tikrit region. The voice on the tape refers several times to the post-Baath occupation, and accuses US forces of looting the Iraqi National Museum. It also refers to the Iraqi people celebrating Saddam's birthday - possibly a reference to US claims that a crowd of demonstrators fired on by US soldiers in Falluja, killing 15, were celebrating the birthday. The voice on the tape speaks of previous attempts to communicate with the Iraqi people. "I addressed some messages before, many messages before," it says. "Some of them were by my voice and some were addressed to the mass media, but we know and you know very well the mass media in the whole world is controlled by the Zionists, and especially by their headquarters in the White House." Some, however, were sceptical. "We know the ability of the West to change voices and to mislead people," said Fellah Hameed, a sports instructor. "I can't say it's him but maybe that's because it's a next-generation tape. I'm not convinced." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:27:23 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:27:23 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Polish backtracking Message-ID: <008d01c31483$3fd375c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Poland puts Iraq carve-up in doubt London meeting hit by insistence on UN mandate for multinational stabilisation force Giles Tremlett in Madrid and Julian Borger in Washington Wednesday May 7, 2003 The Guardian Plans to deploy a multinational stabilisation force in Iraq were thrown in doubt yesterday when Poland, one of the expected key troop contributors, insisted that the force required a UN mandate. The demand throws a shadow over a meeting in London tomorrow aimed at securing pledges of troop deployments for the British zone of control. The Polish foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, presented his position after talks in Washington with the US secretary of state, Colin Powell. "We believe that we need that kind of resolution. I understand that in days ahead there will be some initiatives opening the way to have such a resolution," he said. The US is preparing to present a comprehensive UN resolution to the UN security council covering the division of responsibilities and powers in postwar Iraq, but it is likely to meet stiff resistance from France, Russia and China. A drawn-out debate over the resolution could delay the deployment of at least some of the stabilisation force. Poland was expected to be a key contributor, sending about 1,500 troops and commanding one of up to four zones of control. Some diplomatic sources suggested they would be sent to the port of Umm Qasr. British forces would be based in Basra, commanding a multinational brigade including Spanish troops, and a mix of forces from other European and Latin American states. Tomorrow's meeting will focus on shaping that brigade. American troops would control Baghdad, and Poland would be responsible for central Iraq. Mr Cimoszewicz has proposed a meeting on May 22 in Warsaw to finalise pledges of troop commitments. A fourth zone could be carved out in the north or west, but it is unclear which country would run it. As negotiations over the stabilisation force continued in Washington yesterday, President George Bush appointed a new civilian administrator for Iraq. Paul Bremer, a diplomat specialising in counter-terrorism, will be in charge of the Pentagon's envoy for reconstruction and humanitarian assistance, Jay Garner, a former general. The Spanish defence minister, Federico Trillo, said 1,500 of his country's troops would operate in the British area that he defined as "zone 4 south". Mr Cimoszewicz said it was intended "to have all the countries ready to engage" in Iraq by the end of this month. After meeting Mr Powell, he urged Germany and other European states to contribute to Iraq's stabilisation and reconstruction. "Success or failure will have broad international consequences," he said. Spanish newspapers quoted defence ministry officials yesterday saying that Honduras and Nicaragua had offered troops for the "Spanish brigade" only if Spain paid for them. Chile and Argentina had said they would take part in a UN force only, the reports said. The odd assortment of nations being consulted reflects the difficulties Washington has faced trying to gain support for its occupation of postwar Iraq. Few countries with experience in the Middle East are on board, and no Islamic countries have offered troops. Most of the willing are relatively impoverished states eager to enhance their relationship with the US but unable to pay their way. The Polish defence minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, said he had received an assurance from his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, that the US would help raise money from international donors to cover the cost of about 1,500 Polish troops and a headquarters staff. Mr Szmajdzinski estimated the cost at $50m for six months. Poland's deputy defence minister, Janusz Zemke, said that the Polish troops could be initially stationed in Iraq for a year and then rotated every six months. He said they would play an important role protecting energy facilities, telecommunication hubs and transport arteries. Troops from a chemical defence regiment have already been mobilised and are expected to leave for Iraq soon. Mr Zemke said that up to 11 European countries had expressed an interest in taking part. "We are also getting signs that certain Asian countries, for example India, Pakistan and the Philippines, would be prepared to send troops," Mr Zemke said. Most of the potential contributors are anxious to ensure their soldiers avoid conflict. Spain has stated that it does not want to have to intervene in demonstrations. "We want somewhere that is as calm as possible," said a government official quoted by El Mundo newspaper yesterday. A senior US official said the US sector would be patrolled by 20,000 troops remaining separate from the 135,000 combat troops already in Iraq. Bulgaria's defence minister, Nikolai Svinarov, said his country would send 450 soldiers to Iraq. However, Bulgaria, like Poland, wants the US to help find funds to finance its contribution. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:26:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:26:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK corporate state: unhealthy accumulation Message-ID: <008501c31483$27ecaf80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Foundation hospitals will kill the NHS Don't be fooled by the rhetoric: this is about privatisation Allyson Pollock Wednesday May 7, 2003 The Guardian At its launch, Alan Milburn described the foundation hospitals bill as "true to our traditions of solidarity, community and fairness". The Labour party chairman, Ian McCartney, even called it leftwing. But this did not satisfy Labour stalwarts: 130 backbench Labour MPs signed a motion opposing the bill because of fears about privatisation, an anxiety echoed by many outside parliament, including the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing. So now the media are being fed another story. The foundation proposal, we are being told, is only rhetoric; in reality, the reform changes nothing very much. Foundation hospitals will not be businesses but not-for-profit "mutuals", NHS pay rates will apply and private practice will be capped. New Labour is simply tweaking some hoary NHS institutions while spinning the changes to undermine the Conservatives. This is untrue, as a close reading of the health and social care bill demonstrates. Foundation hospitals are not bound by the bill to nationally agreed pay rates and they can subcontract clinical services to private firms, where NHS rates need not apply. Under the proposed legislation NHS hospital trusts and private sector bodies can apply to become "public benefit corporations" or foundation trusts - a new form of mutual company that does not have shareholders on the board. However, this is simply a fig leaf for privatisation below board level. The bill allows any private sector body - from Bupa to Boots - to apply to be a foundation trust and run NHS services. Furthermore, the board can contract out clinical services directly to the private sector - in which case shareholders of those private companies will make a claim on scarce NHS resources. Foundation hospitals will have increased responsibility for generating surpluses to cover the costs of new investments in services. Each trust will operate like a private business with limited liability, a board of directors and ownership of its assets - as well as freedom to sell any of them with the permission of an unelected independent regulator. Thus foundation status will take hospitals out of the public accountability loop. Crucial decisions about what is provided where, when, and how will not lie with the local community, the department of health or parliament. Because there is so much potential for privatisation, Milburn has stressed that the bill contains an equity guarantee safeguarding the principles of universality and free services at the point of delivery. But the bill does not once refer to equity and the sole public duty of a foundation trust is to exercise its func tions "efficiently, effectively and economically". It is the notorious section 17 that thoroughly undermines the claim that foundation hospitals will keep services in the NHS with local accountability and control. It is here that foundation hospitals are given unlimited powers to enter into joint ventures with the private sector, either through raising private finance or through contracting with private companies for the provision of clinical services. The department of health is lining up the private sector to take over so-called "failing hospitals". Companies such as Bupa and those already involved in PPPs are waiting in the wings; fiercely predatory American corporations such as Kaiser and United Healthcare are also hovering. These firms specialise in patient charges and private health insurance, and restrict access to care. Their presence will blur the boundary between what is free care and what is paid for. Foundation status is part of a broader pattern of health service privatisation under New Labour. The govern ment's commitment to private clinical services is already explicit. It has invited Boots to apply for contracts in eye surgery and has recently contracted with United Healthcare to advise NHS trusts on the provision of services for older people. But profits erode clinical care. Take the controversial PFI initiative, under which more than 50 NHS hospitals are being handed over to companies such as Jarvis, Tarmac, Siemens, Rentokil, and Initial to run. Across all the first 15 British PFI hospitals, the number of hospital beds has been reduced by a third. Before 1948, access to healthcare was on the basis of what the local community and the individual could afford. The result was that 50% of the population had no access to healthcare. Nye Bevan's vision of the NHS was one of "freedom from fear" of the costs of healthcare, and for more than 40 years politicians from all parties have defended this achievement. Today MPs will vote on a bill, which, if passed, will effectively privatise NHS hospitals. Let's hope that politicians will once again cast aside their political differences and unite to vote against the further break-up of the NHS. ? Professor Allyson Pollock is head of health policy at University College London From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:31:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:31:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK news media: The Guardian Message-ID: <009501c31483$c21f2c40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> You can trust Jonathan Freedland to take umbrage at Tam Dalyell's unfortunately phrased outburst, and to do so with the full cooperation of the editor. The Guardian's relationship with the Israel lobby is worthy of an investigation by itself, but this is typical of its earnest "political correctness" as it seeks to police the left in the service of New Labour. ----- That is a racist slur Tam Dalyell's belief that a 'cabal' of neoconservative Jews controls Bush is gaining currency in liberal circles Jonathan Freedland Wednesday May 7, 2003 The Guardian The good news is that Tam Dalyell's outburst to Vanity Fair - in which he suggested Tony Blair was unduly influenced by a Jewish cabal - has not been ignored. His remarks made all the papers, proof that anti-semitism is no longer an uncontroversial part of public conversation. That's welcome. If there is bad news it's that Dalyell has been treated as a naughty boy - "incorrigible," said Peter Mandelson - rather than as a man who has uttered a racist slur. Bad news, too, that so far much of the condemnation has come from Jews rather than Dalyell's comrades in Labour and on the left -who one might have hoped would be queueing up to denounce such a whiskery old prejudice in their own ranks. In a way, this episode is a test for Britain. American journalists covering the Dalyell story say the same comments would be a career-ender in Washington - much as Republican Trent Lott's expression of nostalgic sympathy for racial segregation recently cost him his place at the helm of the US Senate. Admittedly Dalyell does not hold leadership rank in Labour, but it seems Britain's intolerance for intolerance is not quite as advanced as America's. We needn't detain ourselves too long consigning the errant MP's argument to the dustpile where it belongs. For one thing, his is not even a well-informed rant. Two of his sinister troika - Mandelson, Jack Straw and Middle East envoy Lord Levy -do not identify as Jews at all. (Indeed, only the Linlithgow MP and Hitler's Nuremberg laws would count Straw and Mandelson as Jewish.) The three men certainly do not operate together. And they are anything but advocates of a "Likudnik, Sharon agenda": Mandelson and Straw have publicly advocated serious territorial compromise by Israel, while Levy was reported last year to have clashed loudly with Sharon over Palestinian rights. Most important of all, it is Britain which has taken the international lead demanding progress on Middle East peace and the creation of a Palestinian state - hardly proof of a Blair government somehow tricked into doing Sharon's bidding. Even if Dalyell's aim had been more accurate, it would not have made his salvo any more forgivable. The whole business of "naming names" and "claiming the courage to speak out" reeks of McCarthyism - at the very least. It would be good if Labour and British society in general found a way to demonstrate that it holds no place for such poison. The MP's defence is that the cabal he really has in mind is in Washington where, he says, a group of neoconservative Jews - the familiar roll call of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith et al - have won the ear of the president. This perhaps deserves more attention than his muddle-headed theories about Britain, if only because versions of this idea are gaining currency in liberal circles. First, it's worth doing a reality check. As it happens, George Bush's cabinet is the first in decades not to include a single Jewish member. The result is that those bent on sniffing out Jewish influence have to go to the second, third and fourth rungs of the administration to find it. Among the neocons the heavyweights are not Jewish: they are Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. So it pays to be clear, when one hears casual references to "the tiny group of men who surround the president", who they are and who they are not. Worthwhile, too, to realise that the umbrella labels don't always fit: superhawk Wolfowitz, for example, seems to harbour some un-Sharonite views. Earlier this year, he told the Washington Post the case for a Palestinian state was getting more, not less, urgent and that he preferred "concrete steps" - for example tackling Jewish settlements in the occupied territories- to endless diplomatic process. Second, this group is not and does not operate like a "cabal", with its connotations of secrecy and ulterior motives. On the contrary, it is explicit about its aim: a world dominated by American power and made safe for western-friendly democracy. Crucially, this is an American aim pursued for American reasons. The people urging it are dedicated proponents of US might - the Jews among them included. They do not construct these grand designs for Israel's sake, but for America's. It just so happens that in some cases - though not all - those strategic goals are consonant with Israel's. Where they differ - as in Ronald Reagan's sale of Awacs aviation technology to Saudi Arabia - the hawks always choose the US over Israel. Even when they meddle in Israeli politics, it is to serve US ends. Is there any connection between the Jewish neocons and their Jewishness? Perhaps a good university dissertation could be written on that, drawing on the Jewish tradition of seeking to change the world - from Christ to Marx. But any such thesis would also have to explain the consistent Jewish presence on the left, out of all proportion to their numbers. Maybe Jews are found sitting around the neocon table, but they are also found organising today's anti-war movement - to say nothing of the white ranks of both the anti-apartheid struggle and the 1960s campaign for civil rights in the US. Real anti-semites are not troubled by that contradiction: they just say that Jews are behind everything. The Nazis used to depict the Jew as the master Bolshevik and master capitalist - often in the same sentence. But this kind of warped logic can have no place among liberals or the left. The 19th century German socialist August Bebel called anti-semitism the socialism of fools, the belief that the world can be understood by looking for the hidden hand that makes everything happen. But the real world is not like that. It's more complex, and no amount of conspiracy theories will make it easier to understand. Tam Dalyell would have us believe that Bush stands against Yasser Arafat because the Jews made him do it - when the reality is that Bush has his own post-9/11 reasons for seeing all terrorism as an indivisible phenomenon that the US can never again indulge. There is a wider lesson to draw from this sorry episode. In a way Dalyell is an easy case, because he presented his views so baldly. He did not completely hide behind "Zionist" or "Likudnik" euphemisms, but spoke instead about Jews. In so doing he clearly crossed the line between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism and made himself easy to condemn. But not all such anti-Jewish feeling expresses itself so directly. A search of the BNP's own musings shows that even they - the fascists and racists of our age - do not call themselves anti-semites. They too claim merely to be anti-Zionists. Now of course anti-semitism and anti-Zionism can be neatly distinguished, and many learned minds do so all the time. But it's worth wondering if that distinction cuts much ice at street level - where anti-Jewish incidents in Britain have gone up by 75% compared with the equivalent period last year. If Zionists are constantly accused of having dual loyalties, of wielding untold power, of pursuing a secret agenda to reshape the world, all classic charges long hurled at the Jews, then one has to wonder whether one is hearing the same racist slur now voiced by Tam Dalyell - just expressed less openly. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:33:28 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:33:28 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: more dubious documents, dubious detectives Message-ID: <009d01c31484$193d6b40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Chalabi threatens to lift lid on Saddam links Owen Bowcott Wednesday May 7, 2003 The Guardian Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled financier promoted by the Pentagon as a leader of postwar Iraq, claims to have obtained 25 tonnes of intelligence documents detailing Saddam Hussein's relationship with foreign governments and Arab leaders. The files, seized by his Iraqi National Congress supporters from Ba'ath party offices and secret police stations, may fuel a fresh round of recriminations and score-settling as politicians meeting in Baghdad struggle to agree the terms of an interim administration. In interviews with Abu Dhabi television and Newsweek magazine, Mr Chalabi has already threatened to use the papers to damage the Jordanian royal family and the satellite television service al-Jazeera - organisations with which he has had long-running disputes. Some of the documents may be published, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) offices in London said yesterday but other Iraqi political groups, and the Foreign Office, called for the files to be returned to the authorities. The papers were collected from abandoned buildings used by Saddam's Special Security Organisation and the mukhabarat intelligence service, from Ba'ath party offices, and from the Iraqi army. "The SSO was the organisation closest to the regime," said a spokesman for the INC in London. "Its members were those running the country and their bodyguards. Some of the documents will be used in the interests of Iraq; some kept for the future government. "In the case of al-Jazeera, for example, it has been bombarding Arabs and Iraqis with false news for so long. Now we can put things right. Likewise the Jordanian [royal family] has been leading the campaign against Iraqi opposition politicians. But I don't think there's a plan to go after any other person or country." Mr Chalabi has repeatedly been accused of being a creature of the US government and was blamed for the collapse of the Petra bank, which he headed in Jordan in the 1980s. The Amman authorities convicted him of fraud and theft. Speaking on Abu Dhabi television, Mr Chalabi read from documents which he claimed showed a number of reporters for the Qatar-based al-Jazeera were working for Iraqi intelligence. "We will not allow this channel to continue its destructive work, which might lead to civil war in Iraq, through their lies and the spreading of rumours," Mr Chalabi said. In the latest issue of Newsweek Mr Chalabi targeted the Jordanians, declaring: "Some of the files are very damning." King Abdullah, who has ruled Jordan since 1999, "is worried about his relationship with Saddam. He's worried about what might come out". The Jordanian government has not yet replied to the threats or to the suggestion that the royal family privately profited from its dealings with Saddam. Al-Jazeera said it had not seen the details and could not therefore comment on the allegations. A spokesman for the Foreign Office observed: "There are regrettably still incidents of theft and looting. Those in possession of documents/property should return them to the appropriate authorities." Dilshad Miran, the London head of the Kurdistan Democratic party, one of the organisations involved in negotiations to form the interim administration, said: "It's not for different political parties to keep these documents. They are the property of the new government." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:42:46 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:42:46 +0300 Subject: [A-List] John Pilger Message-ID: <00a501c31485$6576db80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Pilger wins Norwegian honour Sydney Morning Herald May 7 2003 Oslo: Australian journalist John Pilger was today awarded the 2003 Sophie Prize, a Norwegian award honouring environmental or development efforts, for his work which helped the public examine the real causes of the war in Iraq. "Pilger has over the last 30 years contributed to uncovering the lies and propaganda of the powerful, especially as they relate to wars, conflict of interests and economic exploitation of people and natural resources," the jury said in its citation. The panel highlighted Pilger's coverage of the Vietnam War and a recent documentary on the Palestinian situation which "shocked and provoked debate". In addition, "during the US and British invasion of Iraq he assisted the public in critically assessing the true motives for the war. Thus the public was capable of asking crucial questions as to the legitimacy of war," the jury said. "In his most recent book, The New Rulers of the World, he shows the nature of modern imperialism after September 11. He stresses that war is terrorism and that war does not contribute to fighting terrorism," the panel added. The Sophie Prize was founded in 1997 by Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder, author of the bestselling philosophical novel Sophie's World. The prize comes with a $US100,000 ($A157,730) cheque. Last year, the prize went to Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I. Pilger, who is based in Britain and writes for several publications, will formally receive the award from Norwegian Environment Minister Boerge Brende at a ceremony in Oslo on June 12. AFP From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:45:30 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:45:30 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: constitutional deform Message-ID: <00ad01c31485$c79d8160$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> North to vote on London-style regional bodies Peter Hetherington, regional affairs editor Wednesday May 7, 2003 The Guardian The government is setting out a timetable for elected assemblies for northern regions of England, planning the first referendums in 18 months' time. The deputy prime minister, John Prescott, is expected to announce next month that the north-east, and possibly Yorkshire and the Humber, have been selected to pilot regional government with powers similar to those of the Greater London authority. A deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the Lords has ensured the passage of the regional assemblies (preparations) bill, which is due to get the royal assent on Thursday. Undaunted by widespread indifference in the elections in Scotland and Wales last week, the regions minister, Nick Raynsford, said yesterday that the government was honouring a manifesto pledge to deliver elected assemblies, subject to referendum approval. With a budget of under ?1bn, a north-east assembly would oversee transport, planning, housing, economic development and environmental protection, and have some control over rural policy. Like the GLA, assemblies will fund their work with a precept on council taxes. Next month the electoral commission is to examine councils in the north-east and Yorkshire in the light of Tony Blair's insistence that a single lower tier of unitary authorities must be the price of elected assemblies. This had been taken as a threat to Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire county councils. But the deal in the Lords will ensure that electors in these areas with two existing tiers can decide in the referendum which kind of unitary structure they prefer: district-based councils, as Berkshire was given when the county council was scrapped in the mid-90s, or a retained county council with additional local powers. Downing Street has been anxious to defuse Tory criticism that elected assemblies will lead to more bureaucracy through an extra tier of government. Mr Raynsford said that unitary authorities answered that argument. He stressed that there would be no change to the local government structure in most of England's eight regions, where ministers believe there is so far little appetite for devolution. He added: "Unitary local government would still only be introduced if the region [selected for a referendum] voted in favour of establishing an elected assembly." Mr Blair, widely recognised as a devolution sceptic, is expected to decide which regions will hold the first referendums after discussion by the cabinet's committee of nations and regions, chaired by John Prescott, over the next few weeks. Other sceptical ministers are aware that a series of referendums next year, after local and European elections, could rebound on the government as the Tories continue to repeat their claim that Labour is bent on breaking up England. A "yes" vote in any region will need further legislation to create elected assemblies. That is unlikely until after the next general election. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 04:48:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:48:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU integration struggles: arms industry victory Message-ID: <00b501c31486$3ddd6ac0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US loses out to Europe in ?2.4bn defence contract David Gow Wednesday May 7, 2003 The Guardian Eads, the European aerospace and defence contractor, last night gave a substantial boost to the continent's aero-engine industry, including Rolls-Royce, by choosing a European consortium to power the new Airbus A400M military transporter. In a last-minute change of heart, Eads awarded the $3.9bn (?2.4bn) contract to the four-strong EPI consortium over a US rival. It was expected to opt for Pratt & Whitney, partly to repair relations with the US which had been damaged by France and Germany's stance over Iraq and to ease the group's entry to the lucrative US defence market. This unanimous board decision came after EPI more than halved its premium over the US bid to below 10%, enabling Eads to drive down the overall costs of a much delayed programme that could reach more than ?12bn. Britain and a range of European countries have ordered 180 of the transporters which are challenging US supremacy in the field and are due to enter service in 2008. Eads earlier disclosed bigger than expected first quarter losses because of fewer deliveries of Airbus civilian planes and the mounting costs of developing the superjumbo A380. The group, which owns 80% of Airbus, said its net loss was 93m euros (?65m) compared with 25m euros a year ago. It delivered 65 Airbus planes compared with 72 a year ago and its research budget rose to 445m euros from 320m euros, mainly to finance the 550-seater A380. Eads, which made 130m euros pre-tax profit in the first three months, brushed aside doubts about this year's performance as the civil aviation slump, aggravated by the Sars epidemic, lengthens. "We continue to closely monitor the possible impact of Sars on the aviation market and the general economic slowdown, but there is no reason for changing our forecast," Philippe Camus and Rainer Hertrich, Eads co-chiefs, said. Eads said full-year earnings would be "in the same range" as in 2002 as it reaffirmed, against the odds, its forecast of 300 Airbus deliveries this year. This is the first time it will have surpassed Boeing which is forecasting 280 deliveries. From annewilliamson at msn.com Wed May 7 05:28:23 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 07:28:23 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: Not by Force Alone References: <4.3.2.7.1.20030506203308.03557590@pop3.norton.antivirus> <20030507054012.V309@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> <003001c31471$d4ebf7c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <017601c3148b$c5ef2660$c9b7fea9@anne> Rule By Force Alone by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. It is now clear that the US government faces immense difficulties in Iraq. As bizarre as it seems, it would appear that the Bush administration knew nothing about the political demographics in this country before it decided to smash its state. Apparently, the administration failed to consider the implications of the fact that this country is 2/3 Shiite, and that its status as a liberal/secular regime, by regional standards, was highly tenuous. Now, I'm the last one to shed a tear for the crushing of any state, but even a libertarian extremist like me understands that there are prudential considerations involved in the decision to overthrow a government. It is wildly irresponsible not to think through what will replace the state. In Iraq, absent a mass ideological conversion to Rothbardianism, it seems there are two emerging choices: Islamic dictatorship (like the one the US overthrew last season in Afghanistan) or some form of US military dictatorship (but that's not really viable for reasons I'll explain below). This is a country where democracy would be a one-time fling, and could easily result in an Islamic theocracy. Saddam understood this too, and it appears obvious in retrospect that his dictatorship sought to keep such a theocracy at bay. As with all states everywhere, of course, its main aim was to retain and expand power and pelf, which means, as always and everywhere, not law and order generally (much less the enforcement of rights), but keeping the competition pacified, mollified, or suppressed. The more a state is threatened by competition, the more we can expect it to exercise despotic power. But despotic power is never enough to control a country. Saddam, like even the most ruthless dictator, existed within a complicated political balance. As a minority Sunni and a Bedouin ruling a primarily Arab and Shiite country, he had to form coalitions with other minorities like the Christians even as he faced unrelenting pressure to make life livable for the Shiite majority that stood ready to overthrow the regime. This requires the use of force, certainly, but also, and more subtly, payoffs, exchanges, logrolling, illusion strategies, and, ideally, a foreign threat to deflect attention (the US obliged him on this last point). The second front of possible political competition, aside from organized opposition, is the general population itself, which is always a majority relative to the minority government. Revolution always threatens. This is why all governments everywhere seek consent in order to retain power. Force alone is not enough. People must be satisfied with their lot to some extent, or at least they must fear that life without the regime might be worst than the present plight. Here again, foreign enemies are highly useful. When the US overthrew Saddam, they didn't just get rid of the sword of his state but also the entire panoply of mechanisms that kept revolution from happening and the theocrats from taking charge. Faced with the prospect of Islamic rule, the US has only one arrow in its quiver: force. As a senior administration official told the New York Times, "it's clear we are going to have to step in a little more forcefully." Thus did the US issue an astounding proclamation in the name of freedom. Quoting the Times: "Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, issued a proclamation putting Iraq's politicians on notice, saying, 'The coalition alone retains absolute authority within Iraq.' He warned that anyone challenging the American-led authority would be subject to arrest." Ah, the sweet sound of liberation! And how long will martial law by a foreign occupation military have to last? General Jay Garner has two conditions: "long enough to start a democratic government" and "long enough to get their economy going." Thus do we see the absurdities into which US foreign policy has sunk: Democracy via military dictatorship, and economic growth at the point of a gun. This is essentially no different from the old Soviet claim that it too was a democracy that fostered economic growth, that it too ruled in order to liberate. In what respect is the US government's military dictatorship different from every other in the history of the world? The old Soviet claims were essentially frauds, and everyone knew it. Those issuing these statements from the US might actually believe what they are saying. Because they have immense firepower and a string of recent military successes, US military bureaucrats might actually believe that coercion alone is enough to rule a country. Because it might not be self-evident to everyone why this cannot be so, let me spell it out. Consider the case of the typical prison, a place where everyone is a slave and where human choice is limited to the most extreme extent possible. Here, everyone sleeps behind bars. Everyone eats at appointed times and places and only what they are permitted to eat. Work, leisure, and associations are managed from the top down. It is the ultimate controlled society. And yet anyone who knows about prison life can tell you that coercion and force are not the dominating means of order, nor are the wardens the main authority for day-to-day operations. Every prison includes a vast hierarchy that is informally organized, a structure of government in which wardens and prisoners trade decision-making power. There are leaders and followers, and wheels within wheels of these authority arrangements. What's true for the structure of government in prison is also true for the prison economy, which is active and complicated, where the smallest items and services serve as money, and informal structures of saving, credit, investment, and consumption take root in a funhouse mirror reflection of commercial society in the outside world. If force alone were to replace informal networks of authority and exchange, the result would be rioting and chaos, followed by destruction and death. Because humans are by their nature not amoebas but choosing, creative, ratio nal, and complicated, the only way to rule by force alone is via extermination. If this is true in prison, it is all the more true in society. Power is not a substitute for consent. Those wielding the power in every society are in the minority while those obeying are in the majority. That the majority does not overthrow the minority is the great puzzle of political philosophy, addressed most famously by ?tienne de la Bo?tie. Rothbard explains as follows: "[His] fundamental insight was that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent." US foreign-policy planners show no evidence that they understand this. Before the war, they believed in the super-simple model that Saddam ruled by force alone. It is as simple as replacing his guns with our guns! Believing this, they have assumed that force alone would be enough to rule in his absence. But in a whole host of areas, from control of even the central district of Baghdad, they have come to find out that they cannot. The prisoners are rioting and threaten a total takeover. This is possible even when the wardens are much more heavily armed. Americans recently have found themselves mesmerized by the ability of military force to accomplish amazing things. Certainly the military is impressed with itself. But it is now discovering that the mystery of political obedience is a bit more complicated. Governments only know force, but force alone can never be the basis for the viability of government. Revolution always threatens every regime, and some more than others. Whether the Iraqis are living under Saddam or foreign military occupation, the words of La Bo?tie ring true: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces." April 25, 2003 Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of http://www.LewRockwell.com. Copyright 2003 LewRockwell.com From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:09:09 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:09:09 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Destructive creation: Monsanto Message-ID: <00de01c31491$77430440$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Monsanto 'may face disaster' Paul Brown A report on the prospects for the genetic engineering giant Monsanto, which has 91% of the world's market in GM seeds, says the company "could be another financial disaster waiting to happen".Innovest, specialists in environmental, social and strategic governance based in New York, says the company may not be able to obtain insurance against risks of contamination of food and other farm products, which might result in big compensation claims. The report, which was commissioned by Greenpeace, says the company's prospects for expansion are limited because of increasing rejection of GM. One of Monsanto's latest products, GM wheat, might be a "costly failure" because of market rejection and could cost the US large grain exports, the report says. Monsanto dismissed the report and reacted angrily to being given a CCC environmental rating, the lowest possible score. It said the report coincided with an assessment from the Bank of America suggesting Monsanto stock was undervalued and it was time to buy. In a statement Monsanto said: "The report is highly biased and cherry-picks information about plant biotechnology and Monsanto in order to further a political agenda." The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0508, page 21 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:14:19 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:14:19 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Saudi Arabia: next on US list? Message-ID: <00f301c31492$30001b80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Saudis fear they are next targets in hawks' sights Kingdom's rulers caught between Islamists and US David Hirst in Riyadh You won't find the newly published Hatred's Kingdom in Saudi Arabian bookshops, but it is so much in demand among Saudi high officials that the government has brought out a reprint of its own. Its author, Dore Gold, is a hardline Israeli spokesman. He argues that the "hatred" in the title is rooted in Saudi Arabia's austere brand of Islam, Wahhabism, which found its most horrific climax in the atrocities of September 11.The book has further fuelled a Saudi obsession and Arab guessing game known as "who is next?" The next candidate, that is, for the "reform" or "regime change" the Bush administration's hawks - in their drive to reshape the Middle East - will demand now that Saddam Hussein is ousted. Syria and Iran are likelier targets. But the Saudis see good reasons why they too might be targeted, chief among them being the Israeli factor - their conviction that a rightwing Israeli agenda is built into the American one. "As America's key ally," said Crown Prince Abdullah bin Faisal, "we were Israel's only serious Arab competitor on Palestine's behalf for the ear of American administrations. September 11 gave them the opportunity to break that - to portray us as the kernel of evil and fount of terror." Last week the US announced that all but a handful of its troops would be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, in a dramatic reshaping of its presence in the Gulf region. A withdrawal from the kingdom has long been one of the demands of Osama bin Laden, but the Pentagon is following its own post-Iraq strategy. The decision highlights how critical for the House of Saud the Saudi rulers deem the nature of their links with America to be. They have long been caught between a dependence on the US and a deeply anti-American Saudi public. The Iraq war brought this contradiction to a head. While both rulers and ruled share the same fear of what the US might have in store, the rulers' response to the war was dangerously different from what the mass of Saudis would have liked. The regime sought, as far as it dared, to assist Washington. It did not permit US aircraft to use the Prince Sultan airbase near Riyadh for combat missions, but the command and control centre there effectively directed the air war. It was the culmination of the deference which Saudi Arabia has shown towards the US since September 11, submitting to pressures for "cultural" reform in such sensitive areas as "hate-breeding" religious textbooks, or urging more tolerance from a ferociously orthodox clergy. With the war over and the hated Saddam gone, the House of Saud clearly decided the time was ripe to conciliate its own public, and in conditions which do not further antagonise Washington. It feared a continued US presence would become a growing source of trouble. For the Saudis fear that what comes after the war could be as bad as the war itself - that the more exploitative and colonial American suzerainty over Iraq turns out to be, the more Iraqis will seek to liberate themselves from their "liberators". "I fear a far graver Arab Afghanistan ahead, and ourselves right next to it," an economist, Abdul Aziz Dakheel, said. A regime that sided with a US occupier in conflict with an Iraq without Saddam would be very unpopular. Popular solidarity with Iraq could well take a violent, religious form. Bin Ladenist sentiment has declined since September 11, but the war gave it a new lease of life. "From the militant Islamists' standpoint, it is time for jihad against the infidel aggressor," said Abdul Aziz Qasim, a lawyer close to the militants. "All depends on how the Iraqi situation evolves," said another Islamist, Muhsin Awaji. "The extrem ists are a volcano ready to erupt, and I fear they will target any Westerners." And they would send guerrillas into Iraq itself. Any such jihad would, in effect, be aimed at the Saudi government. For it is not just religious zeal and anti-Americanism that wins militants sympathy among a wider public that would otherwise oppose their violence. It is a generalised discontent with the government. By getting rid of US forces, al-Qaida's key demand, the Saudi regime is stealing some of its thunder. Yet, bases or no bases, the regime's dilemma will endure so long as Palestinian and Iraqi miseries do. And with them, Arab hatred of Amer ica. The dilemma for the House of Saud is that jihadist militancy is doctrinally justified by the self-same Wahhabism which promotes the notion of absolute loyalty to the Islamically approved ruler. It is hard for it to combat one manifestation of Wahhabism without undermining the other - and ultimately its own legitimacy. "So it simply must reform and build its legitimacy on a whole new foundation: democracy," said Tawfiq al-Sugahiry, a moderate Islamist. Crown Prince Abdullah has clear reformist inclinations, but he is blocked by a rival clan around the mentally incapacitated King Fahd, the leading members of which seem to fear that any serious change will lead to the demise of the regime. The increased popularity the crown prince will derive from the removal of US forces will strengthen his reformist hand. If things go well, that will rob the neoconservatives in the Bush administration of their key interventionist pretext. If things go badly, removal of US forces will make no difference to America's will or ability to intervene in the kingdom. The question that the Saudis don't know the answer to is whether it would intervene to protect the regime, or sacrifice it on the altar of its grand, unfolding, Israel-friendly, Middle Eastern design. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0508, page 7 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:15:40 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:15:40 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US corporate state: extraterritorial policing Message-ID: <00f901c31492$6007a3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Firm in Florida ballot fiasco gathers data on foreigners Oliver Burkeman in Washington and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained.US government purchasing documents show that ChoicePoint received at least $11m from the US department of justice last year to supply data - mainly on Latin Americans - including names, addresses, occupations, dates of birth, passport numbers and "physical description". Even tax records and blood groups are reportedly included. The Nicaraguan police have raided two offices suspected of providing the information. The revelations threaten to shatter public trust in electoral institutions, especially in Mexico, where the government has begun an investigation. ChoicePoint's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, so that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. They might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes. Legal experts in the US and Mexico said ChoicePoint could be liable for prosecution if those who supplied it with the personal information could be proven to have broken local laws. That raises the possibility that any person with data accessible to American officials could take legal action against the US government. "Anybody who felt they were affected by this could take the US government to court," said Julio Tellez, an expert in Mexican information legislation. "We could all do it . . . We are not prepared to sell our intimacies for a fistful of dollars." How the US is using the information remains unclear, but its focus on Latin America suggests obvious applications in targeting illegal immigrants. The commitment to ChoicePoint is long-term: last year's $11m payment was part of a contract worth $67m that runs until 2005. ChoicePoint has denied breaking any laws. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0508, page 4 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:21:59 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:21:59 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Destructive creation: GM crops in India Message-ID: <010401c31493$42161f80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post / India harvests first biotech cotton / Rama Lakshmi in Warangal India harvests first biotech cotton Controversy remains as nation takes its first cautious steps in GM agriculture Rama Lakshmi in Warangal In the early morning buzz of a busy market, hundreds of cotton farmers arrive on tractors and bullock carts with sacks full of their harvest of "white gold." But this season some crops are attracting more attention than others.Farmers have planted India's first approved crop of genetically engineered cotton, known as Bt for the soil organism that is toxic to some plant pests. The new seed, developed by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. and approved by the government after four years of opposition, is hailed by some as the solution to a vicious cycle of devastation by pests, heavy pesticide use and soil depletion that has trapped Indian farmers for decades. "I heard it is a miracle seed that will free me from the bondage of pesticide spraying," said Lone Srinivas, 26, as he lounged atop his neatly piled sacks of genetically modified cotton here in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. "Last season, every time I saw pests I panicked," Srinivas said. "I sprayed pesticides on my cotton crop about 20 times. This season, with the new seed, I sprayed only three times." About 55,000 farmers across seven states, roughly 2 percent of India's cotton growers, sowed the genetically engineered Bollgard cotton seed, which Monsanto describes as resistant to one of the most formidable cotton pests, the bollworm. But anxiety about long-term effects of using modified seed - the fear of "Frankencrops" - and concern among nationalists, who worry that Indian farmers could find themselves tied to Western companies, have slowed India's march toward biotech farming. "GM [genetically modified] crop is not a solution to pest attacks. New pests will become active and resistant to Bt cotton, and Indian farmers would again get into the same pesticide treadmill," said Afsar Jafri of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, an advocacy group that spearheads the anti-biotechnology campaign and encourages organic farming. "A handful of Western companies want to control the agricultural foundations of the Third World nations by robbing the farmers economically. Indian farmers may lose their sovereignty." Agriculture poses the biggest challenge for policymakers seeking to make this nation of 1 billion people a player in world markets. More than two-thirds of Indians depend on agriculture, making it politically sensitive in a democracy steeped in populism and socialist rhetoric. Cotton cultivation is woefully inefficient. India has more land under cotton cultivation than any country in the world, yet ranks lowest in productivity, according to Agriculture Minister Ajit Singh. A recent World Bank report said the biggest obstacle to higher yields in Indian cotton is the increasing frequency of pest attacks, leading to a level of pesticide use that depleted the soil and strained water resources. Moreover, pests develop immunity to the chemicals. Genetically modified cotton was proposed as a solution. "India is an importer of cotton today," said Sekhar Natarajan, head of Monsanto India. "But with Bt cotton, like China, it can become a major player in the international cotton market in the next five years." However, opponents claimed that the environmental impact of genetically modified crops amounted to "bioterrorism." Ecologists said altered genes may enter the food chain, as many Indian villagers use cottonseed oil in their cooking. Still others said Bollgard seeds cost four times as much as regular seeds, and suggested the cotton harvested from them would fetch a lower price. Singh, the agriculture minister, said: "We would be foolish to turn away from biotechnology. But the stakes are much higher in this new science. So much is still unknown about the effects of GM crop. We have to take one step at a time." The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0508, page 28 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:25:44 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:25:44 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: an OPEC view Message-ID: <010a01c31493$c7e30d80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Le Monde / Now that war is over, the battle for Iraqi oil begins / Now that war is over, the battle for Iraqi oil begins Youssef Ibrahim, director of the press group Energy Intelligence, talks to Veronique Maurus and Jean-Pierre Tuquoi about the future of the industry Was the war in Iraq all about oil? The United States didn't send 250,000 troops to the part of the world where two-thirds of the globe's oil reserves are located without oil entering into the equation. The US consumes 40% of world output and imports half its oil needs. In recent years its long-standing hegemony in the Gulf region had been threatened by the rise of "rogue" states like Iraq and Islamists in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Getting rid of that threat was undoubtedly part of its "grand design". What was the grand design? One needs to go back to 1945, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a historic agreement with King Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, which boiled down to the Americans saying: we'll protect you if you sell us the cheap oil we need. That resulted in American companies taking complete control of Saudi oil for 20 years, which helped the US to become an extraordinary economic power. That's the idyllic situation that US super-hawks like Paul Wolfowitz would like to restore. The first blow to the supremacy of the oil "majors" was the setting up of Opec in the 1960s, which challenged the system of imposed oil prices. The nationalisation of oil in Iraq and Algeria meant that the majors no longer owned oil reserves there, yet the Americans continued to wield great influence, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf emirates. The second serious blow to the American order was the Iranian revolution of 1979: the first thing Ayatollah Khomeini did was to cause oil prices to triple and the world to move into crisis. The third shock, which triggered the neo-conservatism now influential in Washington, was the first Gulf war. Saddam Hussein had not only invaded Kuwait, but was threatening Saudi Arabia. Sanctions hit Iraq hard, but he continued to thumb his nose at the Americans. Hence the strategic decision to take control. That was the grand design. What does that involve with respect to oil? The aim is to impose American political and, especially, economic values, to eliminate state companies and to privatise oil. Iraq will serve as a model. A puppet government will be set up whose first task will be to privatise oil. That will make it possible to raise loans of about $150bn guaranteed by Iraq's 70bn barrels of oil reserves. The loans will finance the development of the oilfields by private companies, American if possible -the market won't be available to such "traitors" as France, Russia or China. In a second phase, American values will be used to neutralise Opec. The Saudis will be faced with a fait accompli: with private companies, it is impossible to gear output to the state of the market in order to control prices. The Saudis will have no choice but to denationalise their oilfields and welcome back the American majors. According to sources in the US Department of Energy, Washington plans to run the Iraqi oil industry directly until it has been renovated and production resumes, and then to hand over its management to the new Iraqi government. It has not yet been decided how long the Americans will keep actual control of the industry, Iraq's only foreign currency earner. Legal questions are beginning to loom: what right, for example, do the Americans have to decide how much oil Iraq can sell, and what use will be made of its oil revenues? The US claims that as an occupying force it has the right to act in Iraq's interest. Security council members Russia, and France are worried that, if the United Nations is brought into the process, that will be tantamount to legalising the US-led war in Iraq. They are bound to oppose the US plan. That plan will only confirm Arab suspicions that the Americans in fact aim to control Arab oil resources. Did private economic interests play a role in the war? Before Baghdad even fell, Energy Intelligence's Eye on Iraq series of publications revealed that the [US] state department had already signed up with the companies that had put out the oil fires in Kuwait 12 years ago. Of the $74.7bn voted by Congress for the war, about $500m has been earmarked for the repair of Iraqi oilfields, and some 100 US companies are already in the running for the job. The Americans say that Iraqi oil is for the Iraqis, but, for the time being at least, it is for US companies. What can prevent a US takeover? US plans will run up against a key factor: Iraqi nationalism. The appointment of an American general to head the government and of two American company bosses to run the production and sale of Iraqi oil is in theory feasible. But is it tenable? The occupying force will have to contend with some 60,000 Iraqi oil technocrats, who will never accept American hegemony and will sabotage the plan if necessary. Those technocrats, who are technically very skilled, protected the oil wells instead of blowing them up as Saddam had ordered. France acted shrewdly when it established links with them, because in the end they are the people who will run the oil industry. Iraq is a nationalist country which is not going to destroy its national resources, but which won't hand them over to foreigners either. In this respect the real battle for oil is now on. The American plan will also be fiercely contested by all Opec members. The US's image has been badly dented. It is now perceived as an old-style colonialist power that colonises one country and then threatens to colonise others. Iran will combat a permanent US military presence on its border, particularly as it has been singled out as one of the next targets of the grand design. Similar feelings are perceptible in Saudi Arabia. The Opec countries, including Iraq, will probably pull together rather than squabble among themselves. No people, be it Iraqi, Iranian or Saudi, will accept an American diktat. April 13-14 The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0508, page 26 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:27:30 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:27:30 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Russia: oil and political intrigue Message-ID: <011001c31494$072b4f20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Le Monde / Russian oil money fuels political bids / Marie-Pierre Subtil in Moscow Russian oil money fuels political bids Merger will create power base as well as corporate giant Marie-Pierre Subtil in Moscow At a 15-minute press conference last week in Moscow, it was announced that by the end of the year Russia's second-largest oil company, Yukos, will merge with Sibneft, the fifth largest corporation in the sector. Thirty-nine-year-old Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who owns 36% of Yukos and was last year rated by Forbes Magazine as the world's second-wealthiest citizen under 40, beamed throughout the press conference - as well he might: the announcement that his holdings would shortly merge with part of oligarch Roman Abramovich's empire meant he would move up one rung of the country's power ladder. The new entity, Yukos-Sibneft, which Khodorkovsky will head, is set to become the world's fourth-largest oil company.During the proceedings Abramovich adopted a very low profile, mingling with the crowd of journalists - almost as if Sibneft were not part of his empire and he were no longer interested in that kind of activity now that he has gone into politics (he got himself elected governor of Chukotka). After the news of the merger broke, the oligarch made no comment on the operation, which robs him of as much power as it gives Khodorkovsky. This is just one of the mysteries of the scheduled merger, which was almost certainly approved in the highest places. Admittedly Sibneft had let it be known that an operation of that kind was on the cards. But there was talk of an agreement with one of the international "majors". Two months after British Petroleum's record investment (of $6.75bn) in TNK, Russia's third-largest private oil company, it could well be that the merger between Yukos and Sibneft was aimed to pull the rug out from under the feet of Royal Dutch/Shell, ExxonMobil or Total, which were rumoured to be in the running. Did the Kremlin prompt Khodorkovsky to intervene in order to prevent Sibnef t from falling into foreign hands? That is far from unlikely, given the reaction of the government. The prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, and the finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, welcomed news of the merger: Kasyanov talked of a "a new flagship for the Russia economy", and Kudrin described the move as "a very positive step" from which "other Russian companies could learn a lot". The creation of a Russian major is liable to attract the international loans that the oil sector needs - always supposing that the state agrees to give up its monopolistic control of pipelines. Specialists reckon that the new entity's output will increase by 20% a year. Although the merger makes economic sense, it raises some serious political questions. Back in January 1998 Yukos and Sibneft had already announced plans for a merger. The Russian press noted that the new entity, at that time called Yuksi, could play a "decisive role" in funding the subsequent election campaign. Yuksi survived for five months - on paper. An agreement had been concluded between Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, the founder of Sibneft and at the time very much in favour with the Kremlin. But in the end Berezovsky and his partner Abramovich opposed the merger. This time round, observers have stressed the imminence of important elections (a general election in December 2003 and a presidential election in March 2004). Given the role traditionally played by financial and industrial groups at election time, and the tensions that still exist between President Vladimir Putin and those same groups, there could well be some surprises in store during the election campaign. As a result of the merger agreement, and always supposing it is confirmed, Khodorkovsky will find himself running Russia's largest private company, with annual revenues put at $15bn. It will prove to be a power base without parallel in Russia, and an extraordinary lever for a man who is believed to nurse political ambitions. "The merger is so huge that it clearly represents an attempt on Khodorkovsky's part to play a major political role in this country," notes the political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky. Sibneft will receive $3bn in exchange for 20% of its shares. It is unclear in whose hands the cash will end up because, unlike Yukos, Sibneft prefers to shroud its activities in a cloud of opaqueness. Does its founder Berezovsky - the former "grey cardinal" of the Kremlin who is no longer in Putin's good books - still hold shares in the company? Berezovsky himself says he does. He could therefore lay claim to a share in the future Yukos-Sibneft and to a slice of the $3bn that will change hands when the actual merger takes place. According to the daily Moscow Times, quoting "a source close to Millhouse Capital", a finance company that is part of Abramovich's empire, Berezovsky is in a hurry to raise funds with a view to setting up a party that will oppose Putin at the coming elections. April 30 The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0508, page 25 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 7 06:34:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:34:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Welsh Assembly Election Analysis References: <3EB84167.DA48BADD@usuarios.retecal.es> Message-ID: <011801c31495$0e6b46e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> 'A terrible night for nationalists,' as the ubiquitous Peter Hain put it (referring, of course, to Welsh nationalists, not the British nationalists of increasingly jingoistic New Labour). ------ Ed, many thanks for this very useful analysis. More information regarding Wales and its position vis a vis the continuing disintegration of "Britain" is always welcome. It would be useful to learn more of Hain's role in Wales. Prior to reading your analysis I had not appreciated his prominence locally. Scots rarely hear of Helen Liddell, despite her formal designation as Secretary of State for Scotland. Lucky Scots, by the way. However, with the Assembly having less autonomy than the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Office will retain more influence. So, some questions: (1) is Hain there because he is such an effective performer locally? Or, even if not because, is he an effective performer? (2) is Hain there to keep an eye on the untrustworthy Rhodri Morgan and perform a more hands-on hegemony over the local party apparatus of the kind exercised from a distance by Gordon Brown in Scotland? (3) is Hain there as part of an effort by New Labour bigwigs to put him out to pasture? Michael From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Wed May 7 12:13:08 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:13:08 -0300 Subject: [A-List] DOMINGO 11/ DESFILE DE MURGAS POR CARLOS MUGICA Message-ID: <4132-2200353718138610@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin982192003-05-07T17:28:00Z2003-05-07T17:47:00Z317499974win8319122489.3821 21 Gentileza de "INFOR-MET" < rmermet at yahoo.com.ar> Envio de "recepcion" < Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu> ?[R-P] HOMENAJE MURGUERO AL PADRE MUJICA - Domingo 11 de Mayo de 2003 MARCHA MURGUERA EN HOMENAJE AL PADRE MUGICA ?Queridos amigos! Los Guardianes de Mugica es una murga que naci? en la Villa 31, en Retiro. El 11 de mayo de todos los a?os (domingo en este caso), conmemoran la? muerte del Padre Mugica asesinado en 1974, con un desfile de murgas. ESTAN TODOS INVITADOS. Mas abajo van a encontrar: a.. Un resumen de quienes son b.. La invitaci?n al evento, con horarios etc. c.. Y quienes organizan y adhieren. CENTRO MURGA "LOS GUARDIANES DE MUGICA" DE LA VILLA 31 DE RETIRO "Los Guardianes de Mugica" es, oficialmente, la primer murga del barrio ?de Retiro. Se empez? a formar a mediados de octubre de 1999, con un grupo de j?venes que, conmovidos por el reciente traslado de los restos ?mortales del querido padre Carlos Mugica a su hogar: la capilla "Cristo Obrero", donde viviera y trabajara defendiendo el derecho de los villeros a una vivienda ?digna quisieron homenajear al "cura de los pobres" con la creaci?n de un cuerpo de murga. Quienes nos embarcamos en la creaci?n de esta murga, creemos por igual que el sentido de esta murga va mas all? de la misi?n del murguero de ?llevar el esp?ritu carnavalesco de la alegr?a por donde vaya; tambi?n estamos convencidos de que conceptos como libertad, justicia, derechos ?humanos, paz, amor y solidaridad deben estar presentes en nuestras voces y en la bandera que nos gu?a, puesto que con el nombre que nos identifica, no podr?a ser de otra forma. La primera presentaci?n del grupo fue el 14 de mayo de 2000, con motivo del recordatorio del aniversario 26 de la muerte del padre, luego de un enorme trabajo por parte de los casi 60 chicos (y sus padres), organizando rifas, bingos y ventas de empanadas, entre otros emprendimientos, ?para recaudar fondos y proveer as? a la murga de trajes e instrumentos que m?nimamente se necesitan para realizar este tipo de actividades. ?Autogesti?n y autonom?a son conceptos vitales en nuestra forma de manejarnos y financiarnos, ya que nos movemos de manera aut?noma con ?respecto a la iglesia y los partidos pol?ticos buscando promover, en nuestras relaciones, el ?trabajo y la libertad, en contraposici?n con las practicas asistencialistas que solo siembran la dependencia e impiden el desarrollo de los ?individuos y de la comunidad. Desde la murga y otras actividades relacionadas con la educaci?n art?stica y popular que realizamos trabajamos por el crecimiento desde lo ?cultural, adem?s de tener un medio de expresi?n que le permita al barrio mostrar su identidad y promover la resistencia cultural a trav?s de la memoria. LOS INVITAMOS A LA CONMEMORACION DEL 29o ANIVERSARIO DE LA MUERTE DEL PADRE CARLOS MUGICA, PATRONO DE LA VILLA 31 DE RETIRO, COINCIDENTE CON EL CUMPLEANOS No 3 DE LA MURGA DEL BARRIO, "LOS GUARDIANES DE MUGICA".? PARA TAL ACONTECIMIENTO, CADA ANO SE REALIZA UNA MARCHA DE MURGAS CON MOTIVO DE HOMENAJEAR LA VIDA Y LUCHA DEL CURA ASESINADO EL 11 DE MAYO DE 1974. DESDE EL A?O 2000, LAS MURGAS SE ENCUENTRAN EN LA CALLE 4 Y 5 FRENTE A LA TERMINAL DE OMNIBUS DE RETIRO, ESTE ANO, EL RECORRIDO DE LA MARCHA ? DE MURGAS ARRANCARA A LAS 11 A.M. DESDE AHI POR EL BARRIO, HASTA LA CAPILLA CRISTO OBRERO, QUE ES DONDEESTAN LOS RESTOS DEL PADRE CARLOS MUGICA. MURGAS INVITADAS: ? LOS DESCONOCIDOS DE SIEMPRE DE ALMAGRO ? VIVA LA PEPA ?CACHENGUE Y SUDOR ?LOS PIBES DE LA ESQUINA ?LOS PIANTADOS DEL ARRABAL ?LOS MAREADOS DE PIEDRABUENA ?FRENTE MURGUERO 12:00 hs. Llegada de la marcha murguera la capilla Cristo obrero. PRESENTACION DE LAS MURGAS 13:00 hs. ACTUACION DE CONJUNTOS FOLCLORICOS DEL BARRIO 14:00 hs. REFRIGERIO (a cargo de padres de la? murga Los Guardianes de Mugica) ORGANIZA: ASOCIACION CIVIL Y CENTRO MURGA "LOS GUARDIANES DE MUGICA" ADHIEREN: -ASOCIACION CIVIL "VECINOS HISTORICOS, VILLA31 DE RETIRO" ?-GUARDERIA "PADRE MUGICA" ?-COMEDOR "NUESTROS DERECHOS" -ASOCIACION CIVIL "AYUDAME A AYUDAR" ?-CUERPO DE DELEGADOS DE LA VILLA 31 -ORGANIZACION DEPORTIVA FUTBOL INFANTIL DEL BARRIO (COMUNICACIONES, GUEMES E YPF) -AGRUPACION "LA DIGNIDAD REBELDE" ------------ Para suscribirse o borrarse por v?a Internet, visite http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular. Para suscribirse o borrarse por correo electr?nico, env?e un mensaje escribiendo 'help' en el asunto o en el cuerpo, a reconquista-popular-request at lists.econ.utah.edu Para comunicarse con la persona que administra la lista, env?e correo electr?nico a reconquista-popular admin at lists.econ.utah.edu_______________________________________________ Lista de correo electr?nico Reconquista-popular ? Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu ? http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular ----------------------- Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 31350 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 7 13:18:46 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 12:18:46 -0700 Subject: [A-List] TERRORISTS!!! Do we have your attention now? Message-ID: <00d501c314cd$8d7a7590$20fa5718@comintern> International Solidarity Movement (ISM-Vancouver) Box 38 - 16 W. Hastings St, Vancouver, BC V6B 1G4 Voice mail: 604-682-3269 Ext. 6197 Email: Web: For immediate release: May 7, 2003 TERRORISTS!!! Do we have your attention now? ISM-Vancouver wonders why the Israeli army's shooting and killing of international human rights volunteers and journalists is so much less newsworthy than their insinuations about a "connection" between ISM and the so-called "British suicide bombers?" For the past several days, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have attempted to conjure up a connection between the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the alleged British suicide bombers using crude innuendo and unsubstantiated rumours. These insinuations have been parroted in front page stories by irresponsible reporters who either slavishly accept the sensational pronouncements of a military renowned for its disinformation or who willfully seek to slander the international peace and human rights activists working in Occupied Palestine. The IOF have a long history of brutality and abuse of fundamental human rights during their illegal military occupation of Palestine. They have killed more than 2000 Palestinian civilians and demolished more than 3000 civilian homes and shops since September 2000. The ISM has supported the Palestinian non-violent resistance to the occupation and has toiled tirelessly to draw attention to the forgotten plight of Palestinians. IOF practices in Occupied Palestine are so racist and so far outside international law that even the IOF realizes that its propaganda branch and array of international apologists are not enough to defend Israeli Apartheid while the world is watching. The only way it can continue the oppression unnoticed is to remove any remaining international presence from the West Bank and Gaza. For more than a year, the IOF have actively been trying to prevent the work of ISM peace and human rights activists - at least fifty have been arrested and deported in that period and hundreds more have been denied entry at the border. On April 16 - more than two weeks before the Tel Aviv suicide bombing - Israeli Army Chief of Staff, Lt. General Moshe Yaalon announced that he had given the order to "take the ISM out" because they "injure [the] freedom of action" of his troops. Consequently, reports that the suicide bombers gained easy access to Israel "posing as peace activists" are laughable. Such a "cover story" would have only resulted in their immediate arrest and deportation. Despite the constant threat of arrest and deportation, ISM activists have continued their important work of accompanying Palestinian ambulances, students and teachers (who are constantly harassed by soldiers), opposing home demolitions, delivering food and medicine, as well as documenting the many human rights abuses by the IOF. Because the ISM were not cowed by the army's intimidation tactics, the IOF has recently escalated their campaign to include the maiming and killing the international volunteers. The IOF disregard for Palestinian life is now being applied to international civilians. On March 16 2003, American Rachel Corrie of ISM was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah when she attempted to stop it from demolishing a civilian home. She and seven other activists had been blocking bulldozers at the scene for several hours, so the driver was well aware of their presence. Rachel was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket and was in full view of the bulldozer driver when he drove over her. In Jenin on April 5 2003, another ISM volunteer, Brian Avery of New Mexico, was shot in the face by a heavy machine gun mounted on an Israeli Armed Personnel Carrier. He too was wearing a high visibility vest and, according to witnesses, had his hands raised when he was shot at without warning. He sustained serious injuries in the attack and is currently in hospital. On April 11, 2003 a third ISM volunteer, Tom Hurndall from Great Britain, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in a Rafah guard tower when he attempted to help two young Palestinian children to move out of the line of fire. He was wearing a high visibility jacket and the Israeli regional military command had been made aware of his presence in the area by the British Embassy. He has been declared brain dead. In the last three weeks the IOF has also killed two international journalists in the West Bank and Gaza -- both were clearly identifiable by clothing emblazoned with PRESS and TV. And just yesterday in Gaza, Israeli soldiers fired on, and held up at gunpoint, a convoy of British diplomatic vehicles carrying the parents of Tom Hurndall as they travelled to the spot where their son was critically injured. The relentless attacking and murdering of aid workers, peace activists and journalists have brought some attention and mild censure to the IOF from foreign governments. In order to shift the spotlight from its war crimes, the IOF has launched this outrageous smear campaign against the very people who are protecting human rights in Occupied Palestine. We call on the Israeli military establishment to take a good look in the mirror. This military occupation is a tragedy of errors and baseless attacks on peace activists will only hasten the speed with which your own brutality is coming into focus for the international community. We call on the media and the international community to hold the IOF to account for its appalling and criminal attacks on Palestinian civilians, international human rights observers and journalists. ISM-Vancouver volunteers Jean McLaren, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Gordon Murray and Drew Penland have recently returned from the war zone in Palestine. For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact Gordon Murray, ISM-Vancouver spokesperson, at 604.722.4517 or Reem Alnuweiri, Coordinator of ISM-Vancouver, at 604.461.8409. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 7 14:36:35 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 13:36:35 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Saddam speaks References: <007d01c31483$0f8128e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <01e701c314d9$3e8ca7d0$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" > Australian newspaper handed 'Saddam tape' > Guardian Online Full text of tape: "In the name of God most gracious most merciful we praise our messen gers and their followers in life. In the next life they will have justice "Iraqi people, great Iraqi people, women and men, and the Iraqi armed forces and all people who want to change their attitude about their enemies, peace be upon you all. "I don't want to talk in details about the occupation and why and how, and I am going to focus on how to face these invaders and kick them out from Iraq [coughs] I addressed some messages before, many messages before. "Some of them were by my voice and some were addressed to the mass media, but we know and you know very well the mass media in the whole world is controlled by the Zionists, and especially by its headquarters in the White House. "Therefore we have tried hard to address our messages by many many ways, and some of them reached you people in the Iraqi governates, and some will reach them sooner. "In any case, it sounds as if we have to go back to the secret style of struggle that we began our life with. "Through this secret means I am talking to you from inside Great Iraq and I say to you, the main task for you, Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni, Muslim and Christian and the whole Iraqi people of all religions, your main task is to kick the enemy out from our country. "You have to believe that he who is working with the foreigners is working against you. He is not only a servant for foreigners, he is an enemy of God and an enemy of the people as well. "Reject these people and reject anything that will divide you, Iraqi people. Be united all under your flag, under the Iraqi flag, under the slogan Allahu Akhbar, all in one trench. The Iraqi people must keep their own civilisation in which they are one country, one people, as they are now. "Your enemy came to Iraq and they thought that the Iraqi people would receive them with flowers but they were surprised. Some people now are changing their minds about the Americans and the occupation. "We have no option but to struggle and satisfy God and high principles and ourselves as well. "Now, some people who supported the Americans and the occupiers are now changing their minds, step by step. Now everyone is going to change their minds, and they know what is best for them and their family. Their familiy is Iraq. "But they will not understand everything unless they know the whole truth about themselves. "The Iraqi people challenged the whole world by celebrating the 28th of April (Saddam's birthday) and asserted that this festivity was not forced on them by Saddam Hussein or by the authorities, It was an Iraqi decision, because they consider Saddam Hussein as a brother or as a father to them. "And this is just to express of their free will that nobody forced them to do it or to live in any way against their will. It is their true attitude towards Saddam Hussein. "The Iraqis want to challenge the occupation and say to all humanity, yes, the occupiers could occupy Iraq, but they will never be able to change the Iraqi heart's love for Saddam Hussein and their country. "Some of these people admired the west and described it as the free world, but it is not. And genuine people would never care about the western media, because it is controlled by Zionists. "Especially the two administrations in Washington and London, which are controlled by the Zioinist media. They tell many, many lies, and you Iraqi people have won your moral battle because the Americans destroyed Iraq and stole Iraq's ancient archaeology by destroying the Iraqi National Museum. "This time we are standing against America, a tryant power that rules the world. You Iraqi people will shame the Americans as the Palestinians shame the Zionists. "The Zionists are baffled how to fight the Palestiniain people and you the Iraqi people, men and women, stand together against the invasion and show your stance as much as you can by writing on walls, or making positive demonstrations or not selling them anything or buying anything from them, or by shooting them with your rifles and trying to destroy their cannons and tanks. "The most import ant thing is that each Iraqi man or woman has his own duty, child or older person, which he must do, and if they miss anything they have to make up for it the next day, and if they miss a week they have to make up for it the following week. "Don't let the Americans settle in Iraq. "Each day and every day you must express how you resist the occupation, and the eye of God will be on you and on all people who take a stand against the occu pation. "And god will honour his people, and god will love the people who redeem themselves, and we must not be sad and helpless, and God will love he who works for victory. Victory is coming, God willing, and you have to satisfy your God before yourself. "Then victory will come from the love of god. And of course God will ease our task because there is no victory without the support of God. "Work hard, work hard through this to win paradise and then victory will be visible. Work hard for God, Iraqi people, Iraqi women, Iraqi men, and we are with you. We are working with you. "Victory is coming, God willing. They want to extinguish the light of God by their tongues but God will complete his victory. Allahu akbhar, Allah is the greatest, and shame on the American government and a curse on them until judgement day." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From soncu at pacbell.net Wed May 7 16:13:43 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 15:13:43 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Alert: Perle coming to Istanbul Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: "ayse berktay" Sent: Tue, 6 May 2003 15:32:24 +0300 Subject: Alert: Perle coming to Istanbul Richard Perle is coming to Istanbul. We have learned that Richard Perle has been invited to come to Istanbul on May 9, as a speaker in an annual series of expensive conferences organized by "Forum Istanbul" - a mixed group of industrialists, academicians, journalists. The Peace Initiative of Turkey has initiated a press campaign to expose the situation & to alert the public. We have also been contacting the organizers via faxes, letters, telephones making them aware of our protest, telling them to cancel the invitation. It will be of great help if you all, and especially those from the US can send e-mails to the two e-mail addresses and fax given below, telling them what Perle represents in the US and the world, how low he rates in the public opinion as a dirty-dealer etc. Ask them not to promote and revive the image of this war profiteering expert who had to resign in the US once his dirty dealings were exposed. The greater the number of e-mails arriving in these mailboxes, the greater its impact will be. Act now. And please circulate this appeal. Ayse Berktay Peace Initiative of Turkey SEND E-MAILS TO: Yavuz CANEVI : Chairman ycanevi at teb.com.tr Forum Istanbul : info at forumistanbul.com Fax Forum Istanbul: 90-212-2276144 You can find information in English about the group at: http://www.forumistanbul.com Conference program as well as information on the session, "Session IV: The Search For Collaboration Toward Permanent Strategic Stability, At The Triangle Of The Balkans, Caucasus And The Middle East" at which Perle will speak can also be found there. From hliu at mindspring.com Wed May 7 22:44:14 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 00:44:14 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The Ins and Outs of DPRK-US-China Talks Message-ID: <3EB9E09E.8040607@mindspring.com> The Ins and Outs of DPRK-US-China Talks The tripartite (DPRK, US, China) Beijing talks concluded on April 25 in the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. The important diplomatic action taken by China this time leaves a profound impression on the people. However, since the action has all along been carried out secretly, it is difficult for the public to know the ins and outs of the matter. Basing himself on the various statements issued recently by Korea, the United States and China as well as related parties, spokesmen's talks, and answers to reporters' questions, this writer attempts to draw an outline for the readers who are concerned about the matter. Complicated Issue The nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula has been long-standing, it had cropped up in the 90s of the last century. Later, through Korean-US negotiations that lasted for one and a half years, a compromise was finally reached in October 1994, resulting in the signing of a framework agreement between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States. After the Bush administration came to power, it reexamined the Clinton administration's policy toward Korea. Early last year, in his State of the Union Message Bush designated Korea as one of the three "axis of evil" countries, according to media revelation, in its internal report, the US Defense Department defined Korea as one of the target countries on which the United States could launch "preemptive" nuclear attack. Korea was shocked at the news and immediately it openly and severely condemed the United States. Between October 3-5, Kelly, the envoy of the US government, i.e., head of the US Delegation participating in the tripartite talks, and assistant secretary of state who is in charge of Asia-Pacific affairs, visited Pyongyang. Subsequent reports disclosed that during the talks Kelly censured Korea for failing to perform the Korea-US framework agreement and had been consistently carrying out nuclear development of highly enriched uranium, and demanded Korea to immediately stop nuclear development. The Korean side indicated that it has the right to possess nuclear weapons and even more powerful weapons, it called for solving the problem through direct negotiation with the United States. The United States made public this matter in a dozen days after Kelly returned home, this caused a public outcry among the world opinions and led to a second outbreak of the Koran nuclear issue after an interval of 10 years. For more than half a year afterwards, both Korea and the United States took a series of actions, thus gradually escalating the situation. The situation of the Korean Peninsula centering around the nuclear problem suddenly became intense. For a while, Russia, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Indonesia, Australia and the United Nations and organizations sent out special envoys to visit Pyongyang, hoping to get some direct information about Korea's thinking, and set forward their plans and ideas for solutions in an attempt to ease contradictions and the tense situation. US President George W. Bush and State Secretary Colin Powell have time and again openly made known their attitudes, demanding that Korea first give up nuclear development, and then it would conduct dialogs with Korea, saying that the United States was willing to seek peaceful solution to the question. The US side also concretely put forward its "5+5" proposal (the five UN Security Council permanent member countries plus the DPRK, the ROK, Japan, Australia and the EU. The Korean side categorically rejected the proposal. Wise Decision As its neighboring country, any sign of disturbance in the Korean Peninsula would directly affect China's national interests, so it is hard for China to remain indifferent to the major issue concerning the Korean Peninsula. China has from the very beginning actively got involved in and exert influence on this event, changing its method used in handling other affairs, known as striking only after being attacked. Judged from the current situation already disclosed, in the early period of its involvement, the Chinese side mainly passed on messages between the United States and Korea, playing the role as a bridge linking up the two sides. According to a ROK media report, China sent ranking officials in March to pay a special trip to Korea, putting forward to the Korean side its proposal concerning talks. Perhaps this is the inception of the tripartite Beijing talks. The Chinese government's dispatch of ranking officials to pay a special visit to Korea is undoubtedly a decision made by the top leaders of China. The reason for this is self-evident. First, no matter whether Korea really develops nuclear weapons or plays a nuclear card, the United States, Japan and the ROK will adopt countermeasures, this will inevitably exacerbate the tense situation in the Korean Peninsula and directly affect peace and stability in China's surrounding areas. Second, China and the DPRK have time-honored relations. China paid greater attention to its neighboring countries after the 16th CPC National Congress, China has defined its diplomatic policy of taking its neighbors as partners and friends. With regard to the affairs of Korea, its important traditional neighbor, whether from the subjective or objective point of view, China will not and cannot sit idly by. Third, the international community has strongly appealed to China to play its roles. With regard to the just concluded Beijing talks, world opinions generally hold that representatives of Korea and the United States sat at the negotiating table for the first time in Beijing half a year after the outbreak of the nuclear problem, this, in itself, is a terrific achievement of China's diplomacy. China took the lead in accomplishing this great event which is very favorable to various parties, a matter which many countries had wanted to do but failed, this demonstrates China's unique role and advantageous position in the affairs of the Korean Peninsula. It is the unanimous view of world mainstream media that the Beijing talks have relaxed the tense atmosphere that has prevailed for sometime in the Korean Peninsula, it is a good beginning for the peaceful solution of the Korean nuclear issue. Proper Planning The start up of Beijing talks has experienced twists and turns. First, on April 6, the Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson issued a statement in response to the Security Council's announcement that the Security Council would discuss the Korean nuclear problem, declaring that Korea would not accept any resolutions passed by the Security Council. In the same statement, Korea also indicated that one lesson to be drawn from the Iraq War is that only by possessing "physical containment capabilities" and absolutely superior military containment capability capable of repulsing any sophisticated weapons attacks, is it possible to stop war and defend national security. If the Security Council played into the hands of the US policy of hostility toward Korea, Korea would bear no responsibility for damaged dialog efforts and the seriously intensified situation, and would be forced to mobilize all potentials to possess the ability to curb war. Then on April 12, the Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson switched the topic of conversation, indicating that if the United States intends to boldly change its policy toward Korea for solving the nuclear issue, then Korea will not stick to the form of dialogs. The key to solving the problem lies in the real intention of the United States. World media gave extensive reports on this, prominently publicized that Korea does not care about the form of talks. Some media organizations claimed that this move of Korea indicated that it was frightened by the Iraq War, This actually gives Korea a new irritation. Finally on April 18, the Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced that the DPRK-US talks designed to solve the nuke issue would soon be held in Beijing. The Iraq War showed that only with "powerful physical containment capabilities" is it possible to stop war and defend national security. Korea has successfully made after-treatment of 8,000 corroding fuel rods (notes: in line with the 1994 Korean-US framework agreement, the Korean side should seal up these corroding fuel rods for safekeeping. Conducting after-treatment makes it possible to extract plutonium capable of producing two to four nuclear weapons), and in early March Korea had notified the United States about this. Each action taken by the Korean side would attract the great attention and strong reaction of the US side, especially military personages. If Korea and the United States kept on mutually raising things to a higher plane of principle, the Peninsular situation would deteriorate rapidly, not to say that convocation of Beijing talks would be impossible. But the talks did have been held in Beijing, and it seemed that it had gone on fairly well, besides the reason that both sides had the intention to exercise restraint and cherished expectations of starting the Beijing talks, it seems there is the need to find out other reasons from the third party-the Chinese side. It is disclosed that on the evening of April 18, the Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned the Korean and US ambassadors to China for an urgent meeting, persuading the two countries to send delegations to participate in the Beijing talks on schedule, thus rescuing the Beijing talks. As to the concrete situation, it is still unknown, but analyzed from the results of the talks, the Chinese government has made great determination to promote a peaceful solution of the Korean nuke problem, at the same time, Chinese diplomats' work to make peace and promote talks should be regarded as very fruitful. It is said that participating in the Beijing talks this time is Fu Ying, director of the Asian Department of the Foreign Ministry who is head of the Chinese Delegation, participating in and guiding the talks on the front and back stages were also Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the newly appointed Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing. It can be said that they are the key personages who have done concrete work in planning and organizing the talks. Task Heavy and Road Ahead Long A summary of the foreign ministry spokesman's talks and reports of foreign news agencies shows the main agenda of the three-day Beijing talks is roughly as follows: The talks opened on April 23 on the fifth floor of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, two rounds of talks were conducted among the three parties of China, Korea and the United States in the morning and the afternoon. At the meetings, each side made an all-round explanation of their respective stands and propositions on the Korean nuke issue, they all expressed their desires and plans for solving the issue by peaceful means. It is reported that the Chinese side made a comprehensive and systematic exposition of its viewpoint, and stressed that nuclear weapons should not appear in the Korean Peninsula, and that Korea's security concern should be resolved. That evening, Vice-foreign Minister Wang Yi gave a banquet in honor of the three delegations. That same evening, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing specially had a phone conversation with his US counterpart Colin Powell concerning the talks. On April 24, the Chinese Delegation conducted several rounds of small-scale meetings with Korean and US delegations and had in-depth discussions on matters of concern to them and carried out mediation work in various forms. On the morning of April 25, a short but significant closing ceremony on the Beijing talks was held on the 12th floor of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and Vice-minister Wang Yi had cordial talks with the heads of the three delegations. Li said the Beijing talks represented a good beginning, it received the attention and welcome from the international community. I hope that the various parties would continue their efforts for the peaceful solution of the Korean nuclear issue. Heads of the three delegations smilingly held each other's hands together. Heads of the Korean and US delegations shook hands in farewell, both sides expressed their thanks for the Chinese side for its arrangement and organization of the talks. World opinions originally did not place too high expectations of the talks and did not count on major breakthroughs to be made at the meeting. That the Beijing talks had come to such an extent is quite good. The Korean nuclear problem is very complicated and sensitive, there are many speculations and concerns worldwide about whether Korea has possessed nuclear weapons. Just as Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said: the Beijing talks "represents a good beginning", it is only the first step taken in the arduous Long March toward the solution of this issue. But human effort is the decisive factor, so long as various parties concerned exhibit their sincerity, proceed from long-term interests, persist in solving the problem by peaceful means, I believe a win-win program can definitely be found out, which can serve to maintain peace and stability of the Peninsula and finally ensure that the Peninsula is nuclear-free. On the evening of April 26, President Hu Jintao had a telephone conversation with US President Bush, the two leaders had an exchange of opinions on the Korean nuclear issue. Bush thanked the Chinese side for the active efforts it had made for the Beijing talks and indicated that he agreed to continue this process, solving the Korean nuclear issue through diplomatic channels. Hu Jintao indicated that the Beijing talks has made a good beginning for peacefully solving the Korean nuclear issue, the Chinese side will continue to exert its effort for promoting the peaceful solution of the Korean nuclear problem. By People's Daily Online People's Daily Online --- http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/ From hliu at mindspring.com Wed May 7 23:32:18 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 01:32:18 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The forefathers of imperialism Message-ID: <3EB9EBE2.1020905@mindspring.com> Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times Sunday, January 5, 2003 The forefathers of imperialism Walter Russell Mead Walter Russell Mead is senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World." First Great Triumph How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power Warren Zimmermann Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 562 pp., $30 * Warren Zimmermann's "First Great Triumph," an account of the imperialist era in American foreign policy at the turn of the 20th century, is one of the most readable and important books on American foreign policy in recent years. Zimmermann, a distinguished U.S. diplomat who did his best to warn the world about the looming Yugoslav wars, combines formidable scholarship with a sense of narrative drama and a firsthand knowledge of the politics of American foreign policy. With Iraq, Afghanistan and a war on terror preoccupying United States foreign policy, Zimmermann's book is a timely and gripping account of another critical period in American history that leaves readers better prepared to understand the dangers that face us. Zimmermann's basic approach to his material is reminiscent of the way African gamekeepers have identified a "big five" group of animals for tourists to look out for on safari (the big five are lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos and buffalo). Zimmermann's big five are the men who made America an imperial power 100 years ago. Leading his group is Theodore Roosevelt, who shot and stuffed many specimens of the African big five and is one of the most famous figures in American history. The other four, though somewhat less well known, all played key roles in American and world history. Henry Cabot Lodge, who defeated Woodrow Wilson and blocked Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles to keep America out of the League of Nations, is shown rising from a young Boston politician to a national leader of the imperialist movement. The group also includes John Hay, Abraham Lincoln's confidential assistant and later ambassador to Britain and secretary of State, and Elihu Root, the New York lawyer who succeeded Hay as secretary of State and later helped to start the Carnegie Endowment and the Council on Foreign Relations. In highlighting Root's role, Zimmermann does justice to an important historical figure who is almost entirely forgotten by nonspecialists today. The final place in this core group belongs to Rear Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose 1890 book, "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783," is the most important work of strategic thought ever written by an American. Zimmermann sets himself the demanding task of combining short biographical studies of these men with two broader areas of concentration: a general history of the imperialistic foreign policy they struggled to shape and an intellectual and cultural history of the imperialist movement in American foreign policy. Americans like being powerful but mostly do not like to think of their country as an empire. Zimmermann's big five set themselves against that taboo, proudly and openly advocating that the United States had both the right and the duty to conquer foreign lands and to impose American rule on other people. They grounded their call for imperial expansion in a rhetoric of racial superiority that, although normal for American discourse of the time, makes for grim reading today. It is disconcerting to be reminded just how racist the American public rhetoric of the imperial period was; Zimmermann does a commendable job of differentiating the degrees of racism among the big five without either concealing or sensationalizing racial prejudice in their work. Racism aside, of course, it is amazing how little has changed in the American foreign policy debate since 1900. We no longer call for the annexation of foreign territory, but Americans are still divided between those who passionately believe that it is our right and even our duty to impose some kind of civilized order on poorly governed parts of the world and those who believe that this kind of imperialistic adventure constitutes a fundamental betrayal of our basic moral principles. Zimmermann's history takes us through capsule biographies of each man and into the global political crises of the late 19th century that gave rise to the first American overseas empire. The decline of Great Britain, the continued weakness of non-European states like China, the scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia and growing U.S. trade and investment overseas led Americans to think more about the strategic dimension to their country's interest. Mahan's brilliant treatise on the importance of British sea power in the wars of 18th century Europe provided a firm intellectual basis for the idea that the United States would need, soon, to acquire more bases and territories in the Pacific. The geopolitical situation the United States faced was a mixture of opportunity and threat. The decline in Britain's economic power and the growing threat of Germany led the British to drop their longtime opposition to U.S. expansion in the Caribbean and Central America. This part of the world had once been the jewel in Britain's imperial crown, with the sugar islands of the Caribbean its richest possessions. But because of the decline of the Caribbean sugar industry and Britain's preoccupation with Germany, the British were willing to see the United States become the paramount power in the region. After years of opposing U.S. designs on Cuba, Britain supported the U.S. in the Spanish-American War and yielded its treaty-based right to share control of what became the Panama Canal. Farther east, Britain's weakness in the face of the growing power of Russia, Japan and Germany meant that Britain could no longer hope to keep those powers out of China on its own, much less absorb China into its empire the way it had once absorbed India. This meant that British interests in the Far East were harmonized with Washington's; both English-speaking powers wanted to prevent the division of China. Hay's "Open Door" policy toward China, with British support, put an end to the scramble and prevented the kind of partition of China that Africa had recently experienced at the hand of rapacious European powers. But if Britain's newfound need for American friendship created opportunities for the Americans, it also created new threats. Germany, whose rulers had also read Mahan on the importance of sea power, was turning itself into a global naval power. Japan had imitated Western powers by building modern industries and a fleet; now it wanted to also acquire colonial possessions. If the U.S. had failed to take the Philippines after defeating Spain, Germany or Japan might well have moved in. This was a very different international situation from the relative calm that had prevailed after the fall of Napoleon. >From 1815 forward, British power had threatened America; but it had also policed the world and kept the other European powers mostly bottled up. Britain's decline, increasingly evident from the 1890s on, caused Americans to rethink most of their strategic doctrines. Zimmermann's big five, and their anti-imperialist opponents like journalist Carl Schurz and author Mark Twain, opened up a debate over America's role in the world that resonated throughout the 20th century. Britain's inability to defeat Germany in World War I caused Americans to make the same kind of choice: Were we willing to let Germany establish itself as the predominant power in Europe or would we support the enfeebled British lion to maintain the European balance of power? The same question was faced more acutely in 1941, when Germany had defeated Britain and its allies on the mainland of Europe and Japan was poised to smash the British Empire in Asia. Once again, Americans concluded that their national interest (especially after Pearl Harbor) demanded that they defeat Britain's enemies. Since 1945, with British power in ruins, the United States has in effect had to "play Britain." Economically, politically and militarily, the United States has replaced Britain as what Wilson confidant Col. Edward House called the gyroscope of world order. This was essentially the course that Roosevelt and his fellow imperialists proposed in 1900: that American power should fill the vacuum that Britain's decline threatened to create. Today, as American military power has risen to new heights and as new and troubling threats have appeared, we are once again debating basic questions of national strategy. How far-reaching are American interests? How strong do our military forces need to be? Does America's international financial hegemony serve the interests of ordinary American families? In very different circumstances, the imperialists and their opponents discussed these questions 100 years ago. The answers they found in large part determined the course of American and world history through the 20th century. As we enter a new era, Americans need to reflect once again on these questions. Those who want to help shape these new debates will want to prepare themselves by reading this powerful, clear and fascinating book. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:18:51 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:18:51 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: the absurdity of the Union Message-ID: <000701c31542$d7197320$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Trish Godman was involved, back in the early 90s, in efforts to deselect George Galloway in the local constituency Labour Party. Otherwise, good to see increasing numbers of MSPs refuse to pledge allegiance to the Queen without registering their protest. ----- A day of drama and high jinks at Holyrood ROBBIE DINWOODIE The Herald, 8 May 2003 THE Scottish Socialist party's new MSPs yesterday lived up to their promise to bring "madness and craziness" to Holyrood as the Scottish Parliament's second four-year term began. In a day of drama and high jinks, all 129 MSPs were sworn in and George Reid, the SNP MSP, was elected presiding officer, replacing Sir David Steel, who retired from Holyrood. Also yesterday, Jim Wallace, the Liberal Democrat leader, accused Labour of throwing coalition talks into disarray by leaking details of the secret negotiations to the press. Mr Wallace condemned "Labour spinning" and dismissed reports that his party had made major concessions on education during the first day of talks on Tuesday. It had been hoped that the formal swearing-in of the 129 MSPs would be an incident-free process. However, Tommy Sheridan and his five new SSP colleagues in the parliament used their moment in the spotlight to voice their anger at having to swear allegiance to the Queen. Mr Sheridan set the tone by pledging to fight for "an independent socialist republic" before being sworn in. With his left fist clenched and held aloft - duplicating his swearing-in in 1999 - he said: "I and my party colleagues were elected on the clear, honest commitment to an independent socialist Scotland - a socialist republic, a Scotland of citizens, not a Scotland of subjects." However, his new colleague, Rosie Kane, Glasgow list SSP MSP, who had already shocked seasoned politicians by wearing jeans to parliament, stole the show when she held up her right arm and opened the palm of her hand to reveal the message: "My oath is to the people." She added: "Like my comrades before me and increasing numbers of MSPs in this parliament, I take this oath under very strong protest. A government that asks firefighters to modernise should really think about modernising itself." Colin Fox, the SSP's MSP for the Lothians region, was rebuked after he began singing Robert Burns's egalitarian classic A Man's A Man For A' That as he took the oath. Sheena Wellington, the singer, sang it officially four years ago at the opening ceremony. Sir David, on his final day before retirement, told him: "If you are not prepared to take the oath, you will have to wait until the end of the queue." A number of Nationalists, Greens, Labour's Elaine Smith, and the independent Dennis Canavan also made clear that they were pledging allegiance to the monarch only under protest. John Swinney, the SNP leader, recorded his dissent about the affirmation of loyalty to the Queen on behalf of his party, and 12 other SNP members made their own individual protests, insisting on the sovereignty of the Scottish people. Two of the seven Greens protested - Robin Harper against the royalist principle and Eleanor Scott against the requirement that an oath in Gaelic had to be repeated in English. Five members repeated the oath in Gaelic. First to be sworn in was Jack McConnell, the first minister, who made the declaration of allegiance by affirmation rather than by oath. He "solemnly, sincerely, and truly" declared and affirmed he would be faithful and bear "true allegiance" to the Queen and her successors according to law. A total of 72 members swore the oath and 57 chose to affirm. After the swearing-in ceremony was complete, Mr Reid, a veteran Nationalist, was elected as the new presiding officer. Mr Reid, who was Sir David's deputy in the last parliament, was unopposed and received the backing of 113 MSPs in a secret ballot. A clearly emotional Sir David paid tribute to Mr Reid before handing him the reins. Mr McConnell led the tributes for Mr Reid, and said that he would have the full backing of the Scottish Executive and Labour MSPs. Labour back bencher Trish Godman and Tory MSP Murray Tosh were elected as Mr Reid's two deputies for the next four years. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:20:30 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:20:30 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Europe/US rivalry: trade wars Message-ID: <000f01c31543$11cdd4c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US faces threat of ?2.6bn trade war Deadline in row over exports, writes DAVID MONTGOMERY The Herald, 8 May 2003 THE prospect of a trade war between the world's two largest economic powerhouses heightened yesterday after the European Commission threatened the United States with up to ?2.6bn in sanctions. If the US fails to change disputed tax break laws for major corporations by an autumn deadline then it faces the threat of the multi-billion pound penalties. The long-running row over an export scheme for giant US companies such as Boeing and Microsoft is one of a series of EU-US trade spats that re-emerged days after the two pledged to work together to boost stalled global trade talks. Pascal Lamy, the European trade commissioner, speaking after the Geneva-based World Trade Organisation (WTO) yesterday gave the EU clearance to impose the sanctions, said the commission would review the situation in the autumn. He added: "If there is no sign that compliance is on the way at that time, it (the commission) would then start the legislative procedure for the adoption of counter-measures by January 1, 2004." The US has been discussing ways it can comply with the WTO rulings against the system of tax breaks, known as the Foreign Sales Corporation, and two bills have been introduced in Congress in recent months. Mr Lamy said the EU was encouraged by the determination of Congress and the US administration to change the law. But he has also said in the past that EU patience is not infinite. The row over FSC goes back to 1998 and the level of the punitive duties was set according to the annual loss in earnings claimed by EU companies. The sum of ?2.6bn set by the WTO was a record for retaliation allowed by the trade body. The ruling means the EU can set duties up to 100% on hundreds of US imports, including live animals, aluminium and copper goods, cereals and nuclear reactor parts. The tax dispute is one of a number of spats involving the world's two biggest economic blocs and both Brussels and Washington are anxious not to stoke tensions. A danger of transatlantic trade disputes is that they develop into tit-for-tat trade wars, with other sectors finding themselves affected. This happened in the last transatlantic trade dispute - over bananas - when thousands of jobs in the Scottish Borders cashmere industry were threatened when exports from the area became targets of US tariffs. In March, the WTO determined that the US broke international rules by imposing steel tariffs on imports just over a year ago. The American tariffs of up to 30% were imposed in March 2002. Apart from the risk that sanctions could trigger a trade war, many economists argue that their use could be counter-productive. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:26:04 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:26:04 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: constitutional deform Message-ID: <001701c31543$d8e22fc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This highlights the constitutional mess that is Britain, when MPs representing constituencies unaffected by legislation nevertheless vote to impose it upon those who will be. The move towards English regional assemblies will counter this to some extent, but in the meantime the unravelling of legitimacy that is eating away at the heart of "Britain" proceeds apace. Scottish leftists should be working hard to expose those Scottish Labour MPs who voted with government to inflict health care privatisation upon England, in solidarity with their English comrades. ------ Scots MPs help beat health plan rebellion Blair limits damage over foundation hospitals vote, writes CATHERINE MacLEOD The Herald, 8 May 2003 TONY Blair successfully limited a potentially disastrous Labour rebellion over government plans to create foundation hospitals within the NHS last night with the overwhelming support of Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs. A total of 65 MPs including two tellers rebelled against the government's health and social care bill, far short of the 134 MPs who condemned the proposals in an early day motion last winter but still a significant rebellion. The government won both votes. The government won the main vote on its policy by 304 votes to 230, and defeated the rebel amendment, which was also supported by the Liberal Democrats, by 297 votes to 117. The rebellion is the largest domestic rebellion since the general election of 2001 and only two short of the largest rebellion since 1997 when 67 Labour MPs voted against the government over its plans to cut disability allowance. The prime minister personally spearheaded an intense lobbying operation yesterday afternoon in the House of Commons, phoning and meeting potential rebels to persuade them to back the government. Gordon Brown, who is understood to have had reservations about the proposals, surprised some colleagues by adding his weight to the prime minister's efforts to defend the legislation. Last night sources close to Mr Brown denied he was against foundation hospitals and had been happy to ask MPs to support the legislation. David Hinchliffe, the chair of the health select committee and an arch opponent of the legislation, immediately complained that the government had won the legislation with the help of Scottish, Welsh and Irish MPs. Amongst the Scots Labour MPs only Michael Connarty, Falkirk East; Ian Davidson, Glasgow Pollok; and Malcolm Savidge, Aberdeen North, voted against the government on the rebel amendment. Only Mr Connarty and Mr Davidson voted against the government's motion. The majority of Scottish MPs supported the government, much to the dismay of the Tories who questioned why Scots MPs should be allowed to vote on English matters when English MPs have no say on issues decided by the Scottish Parliament. Ahead of the vote, during prime minister's question time, Mr Blair championed the case for foundation hospitals. He said: "As a result of the additional investment we are putting in, the largest ever investment in the health service, we are going to be increasing the number of staff working in the health service, the number of beds, the number of GP premises, the number of hospital refurbishments and indeed entirely new hospitals." Charles Kennedy, maintaining the LibDem opposition, said: "The genuine case for local decision-making and decentralisation within the health service is a valid one. But this proposal for foundation hospitals inevitably is going to create two-tierism in the NHS." Last night the Labour rebels appeared to accept defeat, saying they would not oppose the bill when it reached committee stage, but warned the issue of foundation hospitals would continue to be a "major source of strife" for Labour. Frank Dobson, the former health secretary and one of the leading sponsors of the rebel amendment, said: "This is now going to be a running sore in the health service, the Labour party and the trade unions." The Tories accused Mr Brown of "systematically emasculating" the reforms. Liam Fox, the shadow health spokesman said: "They will still be subject to suffocating government targets through the star rating system, the emasculating of borrowing powers will create a dog-eat-dog culture within the system." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:29:34 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:29:34 +0300 Subject: [A-List] British justice Message-ID: <001f01c31544$5687b6c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> >From the letters page of The Herald, 8 May 2003 The people who make Labour disreputable Life is full of ironies. The individual who threw eggs at George Galloway has been released without charge. In contrast, Mr Galloway, Tommy Sheridan, and others engaged in non-violent protest against Trident (Mr Blair's favourite weapons system of mass destruction) have been fined or sent to prison for refusal to pay fines. Meanwhile, Mr Galloway is suspended from the organisation formerly known as the Labour Party for allegedly bringing it into disrepute. Tony Blair took the UK into an illegal invasion on the basis of the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links with al Qaeda. Despite the dissolution of the regime, no such weaponry has been found, no "supergrass" has come forward with information on such systems (despite the willingness of the US to pay well for it), nor evidently have senior Iraqi figures in detention yielded such information. The prime minister's claims of links between al Qaeda and Iraq were refuted by security documents leaked to the BBC. Amazingly, however, documents implying such links and others suggesting that Mr Galloway was in the pay of Saddam Hussein have surfaced from the ruins of Baghdad. The clear lack of evidence to justify the invasion makes it clear that Mr Blair repeatedly misled the British people. Though the majority of us didn't believe him, the sorry rabble populating the Commons disengaged their brains to line up behind the messiah. It is beyond me how anyone could make New Labour any more disreputable than the prime minister and the MPs who supported him. The fact that New Labour's vote in Scotland fell from 1,283,353 in 1997 to 908,392 last Thursday (an astonishing loss of 374,961 votes) indicates that even if other parties have yet to dent New Labour's effective hegemony in Scotland, New Labour is already in disrepute with the Scottish people. David Stevenson From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:37:05 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:37:05 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: New Labour hegemony Message-ID: <002701c31545$634fb280$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> It is pointless to file such articles under "political realignment" any more -- the Conservative Party is so marginal that its plight is simply all about the maintenance of New Labour hegemony. Realignment will involve the LibDems and/or the creation of a new centre right party. Of course there is always the possibility of a revitalised left, but listers are advised not to hold their collective breath. Instead this particular episode shows just what a gift Iain Duncan Smith has been to Blair in terms of his complete inability to make a correct decision, particularly in this case where anyone with half a brain could have seen a disaster waiting to happen. The evidence concerning his activities in the 1980s is years old -- all the Guardian had to do was dig up old copies of Private Eye and John Magill's district auditor report into the scandalous Westminster council administration of "Dame" Shirley Porter, the renegade from British justice now holed up in Israel. The nice thing about this is that Legg, in true Thatcherite fashion, is haggling over his golden handshake, which he will get despite having been an unmitigated disaster. Just in time for all the furore over executive pay, in addition to the long-running campaign orchestrated with the connivance of the Guardian in favour of New Labour. One wonders if IDS was appointed by Tony himself. ----- Tories oust Duncan Smith aide ? New blow to Conservative leader as party glosses over furious row ? MPs planned 'ambush' over chief executive Nicholas Watt and David Hencke Thursday May 8, 2003 The Guardian Iain Duncan Smith faced a fresh blow to his authority last night when a key aide was ousted from Tory Central Office after a revolt by MPs and senior members of the party's governing board. Barry Legg, who was the subject of damaging new allegations in the Guardian about his role in the Tory homes-for-votes scandal of the 1980s, left the Tory headquarters last night after a "strategic review" by the party's high command. In a terse statement, Mr Duncan Smith announced that Mr Legg was resigning with immediate effect as chief executive after the party decided to abolish his post. He will also stand down as Mr Duncan Smith's chief of staff with a reduced pay-off, after MPs balked at his demand for ?160,000. "I would like to thank Barry for his work over the past three months and am sorry that the reorganisation means that he will now be leaving," the Conservative leader said. Mr Legg said: "I am sorry to be leaving so soon and do so regretting that I have not been able to do more. I wish the party every success for the future." Their statements glossed over a furious internal battle which ended in a victory for MPs and members of the party's board who have been gunning for Mr Legg since his appointment in February. Senior members of the board, who were furious after he was appointed over their heads, threatened to resign at their annual meeting next week unless he was removed as chief executive. Mr Legg's position was further undermined this week when the Guardian revealed that in the 1980s, as a member of Westminster city council, he was involved in housing homeless families in a tower block riddled with asbestos. Hopes of a compromise, in which Mr Legg would have remained as chief of staff after being stripped of his position as chief executive, fell apart when he said that he would leave unless he remained in both posts. MPs from across the party, who said they had no confidence in Mr Legg, were planning to ambush Mr Duncan Smith at this weekend's bonding session at a Buckinghamshire hotel. The failure of the Conservative leader to protect such a close ally shows that he is struggling to assert his authority over the party, even after last week's local election results in England. The timing was also a disaster for Mr Duncan Smith, who had hoped that today's newspapers would be dominated by the rebellion by Labour MPs over foundation hospitals. Moments before the Commons vote, a grim faced Tory official distributed Mr Duncan Smith's statement. However, there were encouraging signs for Mr Duncan Smith last night. Tory MPs from across the party, who were delighted to have gained such a significant scalp, said the departure of Mr Legg may ease the pressure on the Conservative leader. Derek Conway, who led the charge against Mr Legg, said: "I think Iain Duncan Smith has taken the right decision. He was right not to allow this to go on and on, because it was not going to go away _ the evidence was overwhelming. "Leaders are entitled to make mistakes over friends, like Mr Blair has with Mr Mandelson, but they should always remember that their posts are leasehold, not fiefdoms." Days of intensive discussion with Mr Legg are believed to have focused on his payoff. He is believed to have demanded two years' pay, amounting to ?160,000. Mark MacGregor was given a year's salary of ?80,000 after he was removed as chief executive in February. Sir Stanley Kalms, the Tory treasurer, was adamant that Mr Legg should not receive a larger payout. An arrange-ment was being negotiated to finance his settlement without involving party finances. The party is now expected to recruit a powerful finance director as it gears up for the general election. The recruit is likely to take the chief executive's seat on the Tory board. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:38:55 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:38:55 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Zimbabwe: order collapsing Message-ID: <002f01c31545$a4f433a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Thriving city becomes the capital of chaos and misrule Harare's citizens at the mercy of food and fuel shortages and brutal police Andrew Meldrum in Harare Thursday May 8, 2003 The Guardian In Harare these days you never know where you are going to end up when you take a taxi. A dozen passengers crammed into a taxi van recently complained angrily among themselves about Zimbabwe's high inflation, critical fuel shortages and the police who shoved them when they were stopped at roadblocks. When one man tried to defend the police, a woman retorted: "The police are just Mugabe's dogs." The rest of the passengers cheered. When the taxi stopped, the man jumped out and ran to some nearby police officers. He identified himself as an off-duty policeman and ordered them to arrest the passengers. They were jailed overnight and charged for insulting police, a crime under the Public Order and Security Act. For many months horror stories have been emerging from Zimbabwe about the suffering inflicted by President Robert Mugabe. Newspapers have been filled with accounts of political corruption, rapes and beatings. But behind these stories lie the daily hardships felt by the capital's 1.7 million people. What was once a thriving city has descended into a place of empty supermarkets, petrol queues and blackouts. In the past week the longstanding fuel shortages have taken a turn for the worse. Hundreds of vehicles spend entire days and nights in fuel queues in Harare. "We used to laugh at Zambians because of all the shortages they had. Now they are laughing at us because it is much worse here," said a salesman. "We never thought it would get this bad." A few months ago Mr Mugabe's motorcade of more than 20 vehicles, including two trucks full of armed soldiers, passed a fuel queue on Samora Machel Avenue in downtown Harare. The president was met by jeers and hoots of derision. Some people threw empty cans. The soldiers later returned and beat up many of those in the queue. A law has also been passed declaring it illegal to make derogatory comments or gestures to the presidential motorcade. Harare's new mayor, Elias Mudzuri, tried to improve city services; garbage collections were organised and crews sent out to fill potholes. But Mr Mudzuri, elected by nearly 80% of Harare's voters, belongs to the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Last week the Mugabe government sacked him, accusing him of incompetence and corruption. Mr Mudzuri has been barred from his office and has gone into hiding after receiving threats. At first glance, the supermarket in central Harare appears well-stocked and busy. But on closer inspection, rows and rows of toilet paper are displayed. "That is where there should be salt and that is where there should be sugar, but those items are out of stock so they put up toilet paper," said Idah Mandaza. "And mealie meal [maize meal, Zimbabwe's staple food] and cooking oil and soap, they have all been replaced with toilet paper. But we can't eat loo paper. Either basic things are not available or I can't afford them. I never thought it would come to this." For Mrs Mandaza, Zimbabwe's inflation of 228% and 12% decline in GDP are not dry economic statistics. They are the harsh facts of life that she, her family and everyone in Zimbabwe grapple with daily. Mrs Mandaza, 53, is proud of her job as the assistant production manager in a Harare factory. But by the time she pays for travel to and from work and her rent for a small two-roomed house, more than half of her salary is gone. "I'm lucky, I have two sons and they both have jobs. But I still must be very careful when I shop. I support my mother and my sister, plus I help my brothers in the rural areas. There is just not enough money," she said. Zimbabwe's once thriving middle-class is struggling to get by, but the poor are desperate. Growing numbers are begging and rummaging through rubbish bins. The disparity in wealth has widened after two years of economic crisis. "In 40 years working as a doctor, I have never seen so many cases of malnutrition, particularly among children," said a general practitioner. "It used to be that I would only see signs of kwashiorkor [a form of malnutrition caused by inadequate protein intake] in children from the rural areas. Now I see it in city children." The United Nations estimates that nearly 1 million urban Zimbabweans do not have enough food. In total, more than 7 million of the country's 12 million people are threatened with starvation, according to the government. Just a few years ago Zimbabwe was extolled as the breadbasket of Africa. An unruly commotion erupts in the supermarket as people rush to the bakery section where bread is put on the shelves. After a few minutes of shoving and grabbing, the bread is gone. One woman was knocked down in the scuffle. There used to be a similar rush when milk and other fresh dairy products were delivered. But for two weeks there have not been any milk deliveries. A dairy farm that supplied 40% of Harare's milk has been overrun by Mr Mugabe's supporters, according to local newspaper reports. The supermarket no longer puts its rare deliveries of maize meal or other scarce items on sale in the store. After some mini-riots in which shelves were knocked down, the scarce goods are sold at the back of the store where deliveries are made. People queue there for hours. Zimbabwe's once respected police are now widely feared for arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture. In the past two months 10 high-profile Zimbabweans, including three members of parliament and one lawyer, have accused police of torturing them with electric shocks. Medical examinations have confirmed injuries consistent with their harrowing accounts. Most were released without charges. Last month more than 250 opposition supporters were forced to go into hospital after men dressed in army uniforms raided their homes and beat them. But not everyone is gloomy and depressed. "The worse things get, the sooner we will have a change," said one motorist queuing for fuel. "The more angry people get, the sooner they will press Mugabe to go." He pointed to the visit to Harare on Monday of South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki and his Nigerian equivalent Olusegun Obasanjo. "Do you think they came to congratulate Mugabe on doing such a good job? No, they came to tell Mugabe he must go. The pressure is mounting and change is in the air. I can feel it." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:40:59 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:40:59 +0300 Subject: [A-List] George Galloway & Arthur Scargill Message-ID: <003701c31545$eeadcc40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This campaign is an affront to justice and free speech The Galloway saga has eerie echoes of the Scargill affair of 1990 Roy Greenslade Thursday May 8, 2003 The Guardian A bell rings faintly somewhere in the back of my mind. King Arthur and Gorgeous George. Scargill and Galloway. Both larger-than-life leftwingers, guys who stand out from the crowd, controversial, iconoclastic, with a gift for rhetoric, a talent to amuse, enemies of the status quo. Galloway is accused of taking funds from a pariah Arab regime. He immediately suspects that the documentary evidence, having fallen so fortuitously into the hands of a newspaper, is forged. Is he the victim of a plot by the secret services? Now the bell won't stop and it is getting louder, prompting memories of 1990 when I was editor of the Daily Mirror. It accused Scargill of using miners' strike funds - allegedly donated by a pariah Arab regime - to pay off his mortgage. Despite Scargill's vehement denials, I was convinced we had the evidence. Sue us, Arthur, I said. But look out, you're about to be covered in buckets of manure while you make up your mind. The Libyan money is only the start. What about the supposed misuse of funds from Soviet miners and money switched through Swiss and Irish banks? What happened to the overflowing bags of cash collected by trades unionists across Britain during the 1984-85 strike? It was open season on the president of the National Union of Mineworkers for weeks afterwards. Papers could, and did, say whatever they liked. Within two days, the Mirror's owner, Robert Maxwell, was musing to me over whether we had been "used" by the secret services in a plot to discredit Scargill. I later wondered whether the duplicitous Maxwell had been only too happy to oblige. Indeed, was he in on the plot himself? Clang! Back to 2003 and Galloway issues a blunt denial of the allegation that he has received ?375,000 from Saddam Hussein's government. The documents are either forged, doctored or part of a deliberate misuse of his name by someone else, he says, and announces he will sue the Daily Telegraph for libel. OK George, counters the paper, our lawyers will be only too happy to receive the writ and, meanwhile, here are more allegations. Like Scargill before him, the floodgates open and suddenly Galloway is caught in the wash as newspapers compete to drown him in sewage. The bell is ringing clearly and consistently now. After our Mirror story, Scargill - who refused to sue - was subjected to a whole slew of official investigations to see if there was, after all, any credence to the trial by media. If only he had sued, we told ourselves, then he would have put a stop to the wilder speculative stories. In fact, none of the inquiries laid a hand on Scargill, though his main accuser, the former NUM chief executive, Roger Windsor, was found by a French court to have lied and, in all probability, been guilty of forgery. But Galloway has sued and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference. Libel writs are not covered by contempt of court rules until the case is due for trial, whereas when people are prosecuted in criminal cases further press coverage is inhibited. He remains fair game for journalists to dig up more alleged filth. It would appear that anyone can say what they like about the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin now. There isn't an instant rebuttal service large or swift enough to cope with the stuff being thrown at him. Meanwhile, Galloway faces an internal Labour party investigation into whether he has brought the party into disrepute, a charity commission inquiry into his Mariam Appeal fund, and an inquiry by the parliamentary commissioner for standards about whether he correctly registered all his Iraqi sanctions campaign-related interests. The bell rings once more. One of Scargill's main accusers was his one-time driver who told my Mirror reporters lurid tales of ferrying bags of cash across Britain in twilight runs which ended up in Scargill's headquarters. This time around, up pops Galloway's former driver - a man who, by his own account, attempted to defraud an insurance company over the hire of Galloway's car - to make claims about being paid in allegedly strange ways. The similarities between the Scargill and Galloway cases are so pronounced it's impossible not to believe that the next stage in the Galloway saga, even if it takes place long into the future, will eventually end up echoing the Scargill affair. Last year, after years of mounting concern that I had been wrong about Scargill, I finally apologised to him for the Mirror's accusations. I had come to believe that the cloak-and-dagger tales I had published were untrue and that, just as Maxwell had suggested (probably disingenuously), we had been misled. One key witness changed his mind within a couple of weeks and another was ordered by the French courts to repay a debt to the NUM which he had previously accused Scargill of stealing. The whole case against Arthur gradually unravelled and gave credence to the belief that we had been duped by a secret service plot. Despite his denials, our chief accuser Windsor was named in parliament as an MI5 agent - and I was doubly convinced when the former head of MI5 said so ambiguously that he "was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine". Regardless of whether Galloway is the victim of a similar plot, there is one obvious difference between him and Scargill. He was supported by his union (after an initial wobble) and went on running the NUM. Galloway has been abandoned by his party which has suspended him. Wilting under the media pressure, Labour has chosen to throw Galloway overboard. He must sink or swim without the aid of the party he has belonged to for 35 years and represented in parliament since 1987. Worse is the mealy-mouthed reasoning behind the party's decision. We are asked to believe that the suspension is due to Galloway's anti-war remarks on television. According to Labour's general secretary, David Triesman, a party inquiry will concentrate on his references to Tony Blair and President George Bush as "wolves" for invading Iraq. Apart from the obvious point that, in suspending Galloway before an inquiry, the rules of British justice about being innocent until proven guilty are being ignored, there is a more profound concern. Galloway, unlike previous party miscreants, is being traduced for nothing more than stating an opinion. Labour is trampling on the rights of one of its own MPs to speak his mind at a crucial moment. Moreover, given the huge anti-war demonstrations and consistent anti-war poll majorities until the fighting began, he was clearly expressing the views of a major proportion of the public. That bell rings again. Scargill was effectively marginalised after 1990. Is the Labour movement prepared to allow Galloway to suffer the same fate? ? Roy Greenslade is professor of journalism at City University and the Guardian's media commentator From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 03:44:51 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:44:51 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK economy: sterling crisis? Message-ID: <003f01c31546$7920e9c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Just as pressure builds for euro entry, the pound falls. Good for euro entry, very bad for the balance of payments. If a crisis does ensue, how long before a US-authored solution is imposed? Or will eurozone entry solve it in a stroke? ------ Pound tumbles to six-year low Prospect of economy-boosting interest rate cut prompts waves of selling on foreign exchanges Larry Elliott, economics editor Thursday May 8, 2003 The Guardian The pound tumbled last night to its lowest level since before Labour came to power six years ago, as the prospect of a cut in interest rates to boost the flagging economy prompted waves of selling on the foreign exchanges. On the eve of the Bank of England's monthly decision on borrowing costs, sterling suffered its biggest one-day fall in more than a year to end down, across the board, against the dollar, the yen and the euro. Dealers said the pound had been under pressure since February's surprise reduction in interest rates to a 48-year-low of 3.75%, and the possibility of a further easing to 3.5% had discouraged investors from holding UK assets. City economists were last night evenly split on whether the Bank's monetary policy committee will cut rates today, with some arguing that the recent hefty fall in the value of the pound may be the decisive factor in keeping borrowing costs on hold. The chances of a cut in UK rates were considered to be higher than a move today from the European Central Bank, which has set a 2.5% rate for the eurozone. In a volatile day's trading yesterday, sterling's trade-weighted exchange rate against a basket of global currencies fell from 98.9% of its 1990 value to 97.3%, a level last seen in March 1997. The pound lost five yen against the Japanese currency, 1% of its value against the US dollar, and finished the day close to its lowest level in the four years since the launch of the euro. Analysts said that measured against the now defunct German mark, sterling was now trading well below the DM2.7780 level - the bottom of its permitted band during the two-year spell inside the exchange rate mechanism that ended on Black Wednesday in September 1992. Nick Parsons, a currency economist with Commerzbank, said: "It's ironic that a decade ago, the government was raising interest rates to 15% in order to defend the pound at these levels, and now there's talk of rates being cut to 3.5%. It shows how much better the management of the economy is now." Despite falling almost 10% against the euro since the start of the year, Mr Parsons said there was no sense of a "sterling crisis" in the City and that he expected a cut in rates from both the MPC and the ECB. Some members of the MPC may be reluctant to cut rates for fear that the sharp fall in sterling will push up the cost of imports and trigger claims for higher wages in compensation, thereby putting at risk the government's 2.5% inflation target. Last night the pound finished just off its lows against the single currency, at about 71.20p per euro, within half a penny of the record low reached shortly after the euro's launch in January 1999. While much of sterling's recent weakness against the euro has been driven by the single currency's rampant gains against the dollar, the pound's two cent slide to $1.5905 against the greenback yesterday suggested to dealers that there were specific, British-related factors behind sterling's weakness. Elsewhere on the foreign exchanges, the euro paused for breath after its recent strong rise against the dollar, which has left it within four cents of the $1.17 rate at which it began trading in 1999. Dealers believe that hints from the Federal Reserve that US interest rates may have further to fall will lead to a resumption of the dollar's fall. America's central bank left US interest rates on hold at a four-decade low of 1.25% on Tuesday, but signalled that it is concerned about the risks of inflation. Investors took that as a signal that rates will come down even further, possibly at the Fed meeting in June. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 04:30:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 13:30:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US corporate state: Halliburton and Iraq Message-ID: <006501c3154c$e94c5ee0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Cheney oil firm widens Iraq role Oliver Burkeman in Washington Thursday May 8, 2003 The Guardian Halliburton, the company formerly run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, has been granted a far broader role in Iraq than previously disclosed and is already operating oilfields in the country, the US army admitted yesterday. Kellogg Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is pumping up oil despite earlier claims that its contract with the American government was for fighting oil fires, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers told the Guardian. The bigger role, said corps spokesman Scott Saunders, was being exercised "due to the needs of the Iraqi people". About 125,000 barrels a day were produced, he said, for domestic purposes only. The revelation came after Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman, published correspondence in which the army said KBR's emergency contract allowed for its involvement in "operation of facilities and distribution of products". The existence of the contract, awarded with no competition before the war, was made public only in March. But General Robert Flowers' letter also disclosed that similar terms could be included in a follow-up contract, reported to be worth $600m (?375m). Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said the company had made the scope of the contract clear in March. Yesterday she added: "We are proud to help restore Iraq's oil infrastructure." But Mr Waxman wrote that he was puzzled a solicitation was being prepared for a long-term contract on Iraqi oil that seemed to contradict a view that "the oilfields belong to the people of Iraq". ? President Bush yesterday urged the nations on the UN security council to lift sanctions against Iraq, saying no country should use sanctions "to hold back the hopes of the Iraqi people." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 04:59:10 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 13:59:10 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: Parliament swearing in Message-ID: <006d01c31550$dabea500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> SSP warned to behave in 'civilised' fashion DAVID SCOTT SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT EDITOR The Scotsman, 8 May 2003 GEORGE Reid was elected unopposed yesterday as the Scottish Parliament's new Presiding Officer - and immediately warned the group of six Scottish Socialist MSPs to behave in a "civilised" fashion in the chamber. The SSP protests at taking an oath of allegiance to the Queen ranged from clenched fists to a rendering of the Burns song, A Man's a Man for A' That, by Colin Fox. The SSP, Greens and a number of SNP MSPs preceded their taking the oath of allegiance with statements declaring that their loyalty lay with the people of Scotland. When Mr Fox gave a rendition of Burns's egalitarian classic, Sir David Steel, presiding for the final time before handing over to Mr Reid and retiring from politics, intervened and ordered the Lothian list MSP to the "back of the queue" before taking the oath. Fist tightly clenched, Tommy Sheridan, the SSP leader, said he and his party colleagues were elected on the clear, honest commitment to an independent socialist Scotland - "a socialist republic, a Scotland of citizens, not a Scotland of subjects". Rosie Kane, dressed in a colourful off-the-shoulder top and tight jeans, held up her up her right arm, and then the palm of her hand to reveal the message: "My oath is to the people". Another SSP MSP, Rosemary Byrne, declared: "We are all Jock Tamson's bairns, we are all equal, and we should not need to be taking oaths." Last night, Mr Reid, the veteran nationalist, delivered a diplomatic warning to the SSP. He said while it was inevitable that there would be boisterous behaviour on the first day of a new parliament, he hoped parties would work constructively and in a "civilised, decent fashion". Donald Gorrie, the Liberal Democrat MSP, called for a review of the rules on the oath of allegiance, saying a short statement of protest was acceptable, "but song and dance is not". He also warned the SSP that its members would find it counterproductive to "trespass" on the patience of other MSPs, but added that there could be a case for looking at another form of swearing-in system. Annabel Goldie, the deputy leader of the Scottish Tories, said if politicians wished to be taken seriously, they had to take the job and the institution seriously. She said: "You don't change an institution or change legislation by infantile behaviour but by grown-up politics." Meanwhile, the talks aimed at forming a new coalition Executive ran into trouble yesterday, with Jim Wallace, the Lib Dem leader, accusing Labour of using spin to suggest his party had made major concessions on education. ----- Citizen Kane has the oath on hand ROBERT MCNEIL The Scotsman, 8 May 2003 SOME were loath to take the oath, some crossed their fingers behind their backs, and one even burst into song. Oh yes, disruptive elements arrived in Parliament yesterday. But enough of the press gallery, what about the Scottish Socialists, who'd threatened to bring "madness" to the chamber? Certainly, one of their number brought disturbingly different clothing. Rosie "Citizen" Kane wore a crazily-patterned, off-the-shoulder number and tight jeans. The latter, in particular, caused apoplexy among the sartorially-correct in their farty suits. True, the Greens too wore suits, but these tended to be of linen, looking like they'd been home-knitted on looms. To add to the general gaiety of the scene, they also wore yellow flowers on their lapels. Indeed, their leader, Robin Harper, had bludgeoned an entire allotment to his jacket. They smiled a lot, as they do, but deep down they were nearly as unhappy as the Socialists at this swearing-in palaver. The cause of all the grief was the need for MSPs to swear allegiance to Her Majesty, a Queen. It's all jolly feudal and, yesterday, so many took the oath under protest that it was rendered ridiculous. There is, though, no getting out of taking the oath. If you don't, you don't get to represent the proletariat in Parliament. So, despite the protests, everybody had to buckle down eventually and pay obeisance to the gal in the tiara. The format is that a chap or bird, with all eyes upon them, waddles down the aisle and approaches a table where a clerk asks if they want to swear or affirm (depending on whether they worship God, a deity). Then they hold up one hand (or fist, in the case of the Socialists), read the offending words from a white card, and sign the Holy Book of Wibble. And that's it. They're in and are fully entitled to caper around for four years at the grumpy taxpayer's expense. Jack McConnell, grand wazoo of the Caledonian nation, was first to leap on stage yesterday, performing in a no-nonsense, business-like manner, though even he raised a few eyebrows with his mauve off-the-shoulder halter. How horribly it clashed with his emerald green shoes. John Swinney, leader of the increasingly obscure Nationalist sect, was first to protest, though he did so in a dull but dignified manner, saying his party's prime loyalty was to the people of Scotland, who were sovereign, even though they did not know this. Unfortunately, the dramatic effect of John's constitutional declaration was dented by the portable telephone of Dennis Canavan (Canavan Unity Party) erupting half-way through. The aforementioned Robin the Green said his party's priority would be to serve the people, "who are sovereign within our land". Yes, yes, we get the message. Then, down the gangway in a light-grey suit loped Tommy Sheridan, the Socialist leader, whose raised fist four years ago became such an iconic image. He told the assembled mob that he'd been elected to create a socialist republic, "a Scotland of citizens, not a Scotland of subjects". Four years ago, similar sentiments caused a hullabaloo. Four years on and, compared to what was to come from his comrades, he sounded like an elder statesman. His fraternal-style sister, Rosemary Byrne, done up in a grey bird's suit and red top, said she was making her affirmation under duress. "We are all Jock Tamson's bairns," she claimed (does the Child Support Agency know about this?) "We are all equal" - I'm not - "and we should not need to be taking oaths." Rosemary then raised a limp, girly fist and spewed out the oath because "the law requires me to go through this ritual". Frances Curran, another of Tommy's Trots, said democrats should not be forced to swear allegiance to unelected monarchs. Then she mumbled the oath so inaudibly that she might have been saying, "I'm a pink toothbrush, you're a blue toothbrush." The cabaret continued when all-singing, all-chancing Colin Fox skidded to a halt before the clerk, picked his ear (his own ear, not the clerk's) and started belting out A Man's A Man For A' That, the classic hymn to equality by Rabbie Burns. As Colin warbled happily, Dame Pantaloon Steel, the outgoing presiding orifice, intervened: "No singing in the Parliament." However, Colin was determined to stand by his man's-a-man, and carried on crooning. Dame Pantaloon, exasperated in the extreme, warned: "I'm sorry, if you are not prepared to take the oath, you will have to go to the end of the queue." But Colin ululated unabashed. It wasn't Sheena Wellington, but it wasn't bad either. Unfortunately, he didn't stop at one verse, prompting Dame Pantaloon to holler: "You will have to go to the end of the queue now." And off the Red Fox sauntered, with his tail between his legs. Now, some people will complain that all this tomfoolery was guaranteed to give these dangerous lefties much publicity. It's a fair point and, to prove it, here's some more: Red Rosie took the affirmation "under very strong protest", noting that a government wanting to modernise the fire service might think about modernising itself first. Then, she mumbled the oath, raising her right arm and opening her palm to reveal the words: "My oath is to the people." Carolyn Leckie bowled down the aisle and complained about pledging allegiance to the Queen. "Apart from anything else, I don't even know the wummin," she said, adding: "But I apologise to my mother, who is actually a great fan of hers." With her fingers crossed behind her back, Carolyn poured Head 'n' Shoulders over the oath, promising allegiance to Her Majesty's "hairs and successors. But it wasn't just the Socialists who were at it yesterday. Around half the Nats made protests. Typical was Christine Grahame, who said: "I make this affirmation under duress believing that sovereignty lies with the Scottish people and the Scottish people alone." Rob Gibson (SNP) was first to burst into Gaelic and, later, his missus, Eleanor Scott (Green) did the same, after first protesting about the need to do it in English as well. Needless to say, there were no protests from Labour, the party that checks in its principles at the door. They swore away like snoopers. The only hope was for a faux pas, but even Helen Eadie managed to carry off her oath without referring to Her Majesty the Bean. Gordon "Two jobs" Jackson rose majestically to saunter down to the front, where his eyes darted about like guppies, as he watched the idle mob. He had enemies, but the main thing was that he was back. And two jobs means two salaries. For the Lib Dems, rumbling Ross Finnie's voice was so deep it sent Richter readings off the scale around the world while his colleague, Keith Raffan, had a gofer at his scrotum. This was part of his kiltie ensemble. There's always one, isn't there? The Conservatives, of course, were deeply loyal. Indeed, Bill Aitken held his hand up so high, he looked like a one-armed man surrendering. But the show belonged to the Socialists. They'll get panned, of course, but they won't care. And neither will your sketch-writer. The shock on the faces of the Establishment-minded was a joy to behold: "What, people with principles! How dare they! So childish!" The same folk who complained about the place being boring were now complaining that it had become interesting. If this way madness lies, lead on. Socialism is never going to happen, but at least these folk are trying. And as Longaville said in Love's Labour Lost: "What fool is not so wise/To lose an oath to win a paradise." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 05:00:06 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 14:00:06 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Basra cholera outbreak Message-ID: <007501c31550$fc336720$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Basra suffers cholera outbreak FOREIGN STAFF The Scotsman, 8 May 2003 HEALTH officials fear a cholera epidemic has broken out in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, caused by a shortage of clean water and sanitation. Two hospitals have reported 17 confirmed cases of the disease, which causes severe diarrhoea and vomiting and can kill if untreated. But the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday it fears far more cases have gone unreported. "An outbreak of cholera, affecting probably several hundreds of people, is occurring," warned Fadela Chaib of the UN agency, which dispatched a team to Basra this week. Initial cases were seen in children aged under four from the northern part of the city. No deaths have been reported so far. Health officials said they feared the problem is reaching epidemic proportions. "If we're seeing 17 confirmed cases, you can expect ten times more within the larger population," said Dr Denis Coulombier, a WHO epidemiologist. Health experts have been warning of the potential for a cholera outbreak, given the lack of clean water and sanitation in southern Iraq. Local hospitals have been reporting increasing numbers of patients admitted with diarrhoea and other gastrointestinal complaints. Basra's water treatment system was shut down during the war after coalition air strikes damaged the electric grid that powers the water plant. Residents in the city of 2 million went for several weeks without running water. Many collected their drinking water from the Shatt al-Arab river or pilfered water from working pipelines. To relieve the water shortages, British forces and aid agencies continue to send water tankers through the city and surrounding towns daily. British engineers have succeeded in restoring about 80 per cent of the water system, but the lack of security in the city remains a major problem. Although British forces conduct regular patrols in the city, they do not have the manpower to provide 24-hour guards. "Not enough is being done," said a UN humanitarian spokesman, David Wimhurst. "Unless it's brought under control, this situation will continue. The end result could be catastrophic." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 05:10:51 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 14:10:51 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Argentina-Brazil tie-up Message-ID: <007d01c31552$7c72b660$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Brazil and Argentina study economic tie-up By Raymond Colitt in S?o Paulo and Adam Thomson Financial Times: May 8 2003 With Brazil and Argentina gradually emerging from financial crisis, South America's two largest economies are relaunching ambitious plans for economic integration. Ahead of Thursday's visit to Brazil by N?stor Kirchner, the favourite in Argentina's presidential race, the Brazilian government announced plans to create a $1bn fund to finance bilateral trade. There is also renewed talk of a common currency and both sides have set up a negotiating framework to move in that direction. Though few analysts expect immediate progress, the efforts signal a break from two years of tense relations. Bilateral trade dropped from more than $13bn in 2000 to $7bn last year, largely as a result of Argentina's debt default and subsequent currency devaluation in January 2002. Trade has begun to recover, rising 24 per cent for the first quarter compared with last year. Behind the rapprochement is a growing political affinity between Mr Kirchner and Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president. They both espouse centre-left economic policies and advocate a stronger Mercosur, the South American trade bloc. Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr Kirchner has praised Mr Lula da Silva's social policies and suggested his anti-famine programme, Zero Hunger, could produce positive results in Argentina as well. "Lula showed that it is possible to create a different, rational and responsible model," Mr Kirchner told the newspaper O Estado de S?o Paulo on Wednesday. "If I'm elected, I want to work closely with Lula." Mr Kirchner sees Brazil as a fundamental ally in consolidating export-led economic growth. He even advocates the free movement of citizens, and eventually, integrated systems of transport, energy and communications between both countries. Prospects for restarting economic integration look brighter than they have for years. Both countries now have a floating currency and are seeking export-led growth. If Mr Kirchner wins, they would also both be led by like-minded centre-left governments. Brazil's governing leftwing Workers' party has been highly critical of the free-market and pro-US stance of Carlos Menem, the centre-right ex-president trailing in Argentina's election contest. The bilateral investment fund is to be financed largely by the BNDES, Brazil's huge state development bank. It would promote not only Brazilian but also Argentine exports. Loans would be backed by central bank guarantees, BNDES officials said. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 05:13:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 14:13:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Carlyle Group Message-ID: <008501c31552$eb456100$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Book review: A probe into 'access capitalism' By Peter Smith Financial Times: May 8 2003 In the secretive world of private equity, getting under the skin of a large buy-out house is a difficult task at the best of times. Writing an unauthorised account of Carlyle, whose roster of high-profile political and intelligence figures has made it more secretive than most, was always going to be uphill task. Dan Briody, a journalist who fell foul of Carlyle after an article on the group for Red Herring magazine, has a fair stab at explaining its role in The Iron Triangle. Coined as a phrase by Dwight D. Eisenhower as a warning against the dangers of a "military-industrial complex", its choice for the title casts a sinister shadow. Briody accuses Carlyle, based in Washington DC, of questionable connections with the heart of the US administration and alleges corporate cronyism, war profiteering, CIA cover-ups and secret arms deals. The roles of George Bush, former US president, and Frank Carlucci, former secretary of defence, former deputy director of the CIA and old friend of Donald Rumsfeld, current secretary of defence, come under scrutiny. John Major, the former prime minister, and James Baker, former secretary of state in the first Bush administration, also figure. Although Briody sets the scene for dramatic tension, building the reader's expectations for top-level conspiracy and corruption, he often fails to establish clearly a link. He could be on to something, but the reader remains unconvinced. For instance, he looks at United Defense, bought by Carlyle in 1997 with a "low-ball bid" of $850m (?530m) after General Dynamics, a much higher bidder, was apparently forced out of the auction by rumours of antitrust issues. Following the attacks of September 11 2001, United Defense won a $665m contract for its Crusader artillery system. Soon after, Carlyle floated it on the market, reaping a substantial profit. "All the time spent lobbying the government officials, calling on old friends, and greasing the palms of congressmen had finally paid off," Briody claims in a sweeping comment. However, he does also pick out points that do not put Carlyle in the most favourable light: the lobbying efforts paid for by Carlyle when Crusader's future seemed doubtful and a political action committee at United Defense to "funnel contributions to key lawmakers", for example. "It was uncanny how United Defense planned to build manufacturing facilities for the Crusader in the backyards of key members of the arms committees. These are the kinds of things that get politicians re-elected, and get businesses what they want," says the author. The book has two parts: the years following Carlyle's foundation by Stephen Norris, David Rubenstein, Daniel D'Aniello and William Conway, and the period after Norris was forced out "by his fellow co-founders in an acrimonious conflict". As a key source, Norris provides a fascinating insight into the group from its beginnings in the late 1980s until he left in 1995. But Carlyle's more recent years are less well documented and the book appears vulnerable to accusations by Carlyle that it is little more than a cuttings job. There is a 24-page biblio- graphy, while the body of the book barely runs to 150 pages. Space is devoted to already well-known links, now broken, with the bin Laden family as investors in Carlyle's funds. There are also unnecessary digressions into US telecommunications regulation, George Soros's opportunistic shorting of the pound, and the recount in Florida at the last US election. They add little to the Carlyle story. Briody, however, does provide plenty of insights into Carlyle's particular brand of "access capitalism". He is right to point out that Carlyle deserves closer examination and, if nothing else, this attempt is unlikely to be the last. From joanne.gullion at shell.com Thu May 8 06:18:45 2003 From: joanne.gullion at shell.com (Gullion, Joanne O SDPR) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 07:18:45 -0500 Subject: [A-List] DOMINGO 11/ DESFILE DE MURGAS POR CARLOS MUGICA Message-ID: <064E83A9FC5F494C8E54251690FDA98B0CFD62@houic-s-347.americas.shell.com> Sorry I don't speak Spanish. Do you have any of these announcements in English? If not I guess you should stop sending them to me since I can't read them. Thanks, Joanne -----Original Message----- From: NAC&POP [mailto:nacypop at ciudad.com.ar] Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 1:13 PM To: NACIONAL Y POPULAR 3 Subject: [A-List] DOMINGO 11/ DESFILE DE MURGAS POR CARLOS MUGICA Gentileza de "INFOR-MET" < rmermet at yahoo.com.ar> Envio de "recepcion" < Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu> [R-P] HOMENAJE MURGUERO AL PADRE MUJICA - Domingo 11 de Mayo de 2003 MARCHA MURGUERA EN HOMENAJE AL PADRE MUGICA ?Queridos amigos! Los Guardianes de Mugica es una murga que naci? en la Villa 31, en Retiro. El 11 de mayo de todos los a?os (domingo en este caso), conmemoran la muerte del Padre Mugica asesinado en 1974, con un desfile de murgas. ESTAN TODOS INVITADOS. Mas abajo van a encontrar: a.. Un resumen de quienes son b.. La invitaci?n al evento, con horarios etc. c.. Y quienes organizan y adhieren. CENTRO MURGA "LOS GUARDIANES DE MUGICA" DE LA VILLA 31 DE RETIRO "Los Guardianes de Mugica" es, oficialmente, la primer murga del barrio de Retiro. Se empez? a formar a mediados de octubre de 1999, con un grupo de j?venes que, conmovidos por el reciente traslado de los restos mortales del querido padre Carlos Mugica a su hogar: la capilla "Cristo Obrero", donde viviera y trabajara defendiendo el derecho de los villeros a una vivienda digna quisieron homenajear al "cura de los pobres" con la creaci?n de un cuerpo de murga. Quienes nos embarcamos en la creaci?n de esta murga, creemos por igual que el sentido de esta murga va mas all? de la misi?n del murguero de llevar el esp?ritu carnavalesco de la alegr?a por donde vaya; tambi?n estamos convencidos de que conceptos como libertad, justicia, derechos humanos, paz, amor y solidaridad deben estar presentes en nuestras voces y en la bandera que nos gu?a, puesto que con el nombre que nos identifica, no podr?a ser de otra forma. La primera presentaci?n del grupo fue el 14 de mayo de 2000, con motivo del recordatorio del aniversario 26 de la muerte del padre, luego de un enorme trabajo por parte de los casi 60 chicos (y sus padres), organizando rifas, bingos y ventas de empanadas, entre otros emprendimientos, para recaudar fondos y proveer as? a la murga de trajes e instrumentos que m?nimamente se necesitan para realizar este tipo de actividades. Autogesti?n y autonom?a son conceptos vitales en nuestra forma de manejarnos y financiarnos, ya que nos movemos de manera aut?noma con respecto a la iglesia y los partidos pol?ticos buscando promover, en nuestras relaciones, el trabajo y la libertad, en contraposici?n con las practicas asistencialistas que solo siembran la dependencia e impiden el desarrollo de los individuos y de la comunidad. Desde la murga y otras actividades relacionadas con la educaci?n art?stica y popular que realizamos trabajamos por el crecimiento desde lo cultural, adem?s de tener un medio de expresi?n que le permita al barrio mostrar su identidad y promover la resistencia cultural a trav?s de la memoria. LOS INVITAMOS A LA CONMEMORACION DEL 29o ANIVERSARIO DE LA MUERTE DEL PADRE CARLOS MUGICA, PATRONO DE LA VILLA 31 DE RETIRO, COINCIDENTE CON EL CUMPLEANOS No 3 DE LA MURGA DEL BARRIO, "LOS GUARDIANES DE MUGICA". PARA TAL ACONTECIMIENTO, CADA ANO SE REALIZA UNA MARCHA DE MURGAS CON MOTIVO DE HOMENAJEAR LA VIDA Y LUCHA DEL CURA ASESINADO EL 11 DE MAYO DE 1974. DESDE EL A?O 2000, LAS MURGAS SE ENCUENTRAN EN LA CALLE 4 Y 5 FRENTE A LA TERMINAL DE OMNIBUS DE RETIRO, ESTE ANO, EL RECORRIDO DE LA MARCHA DE MURGAS ARRANCARA A LAS 11 A.M. DESDE AHI POR EL BARRIO, HASTA LA CAPILLA CRISTO OBRERO, QUE ES DONDEESTAN LOS RESTOS DEL PADRE CARLOS MUGICA. MURGAS INVITADAS: LOS DESCONOCIDOS DE SIEMPRE DE ALMAGRO VIVA LA PEPA CACHENGUE Y SUDOR LOS PIBES DE LA ESQUINA LOS PIANTADOS DEL ARRABAL LOS MAREADOS DE PIEDRABUENA FRENTE MURGUERO 12:00 hs. Llegada de la marcha murguera la capilla Cristo obrero. PRESENTACION DE LAS MURGAS 13:00 hs. ACTUACION DE CONJUNTOS FOLCLORICOS DEL BARRIO 14:00 hs. REFRIGERIO (a cargo de padres de la murga Los Guardianes de Mugica) ORGANIZA: ASOCIACION CIVIL Y CENTRO MURGA "LOS GUARDIANES DE MUGICA" ADHIEREN: -ASOCIACION CIVIL "VECINOS HISTORICOS, VILLA31 DE RETIRO" -GUARDERIA "PADRE MUGICA" -COMEDOR "NUESTROS DERECHOS" -ASOCIACION CIVIL "AYUDAME A AYUDAR" -CUERPO DE DELEGADOS DE LA VILLA 31 -ORGANIZACION DEPORTIVA FUTBOL INFANTIL DEL BARRIO (COMUNICACIONES, GUEMES E YPF) -AGRUPACION "LA DIGNIDAD REBELDE" ------------ Para suscribirse o borrarse por v?a Internet, visite http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular. Para suscribirse o borrarse por correo electr?nico, env?e un mensaje escribiendo 'help' en el asunto o en el cuerpo, a reconquista-popular-request at lists.econ.utah.edu Para comunicarse con la persona que administra la lista, env?e correo electr?nico a reconquista-popular admin at lists.econ.utah.edu_______________________________________________ Lista de correo electr?nico Reconquista-popular Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular ----------------------- Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) -Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) -La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! (Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". (Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. (Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo (20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... (Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 33428 bytes Desc: not available URL: From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 8 06:39:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 15:39:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Moderator's note Message-ID: <00bb01c3155e$ccf7b200$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Sorry I don't speak Spanish. Do you have any of these announcements in English? If not I guess you should stop sending them to me since I can't read them. Thanks, Joanne ------ The messages are forwarded from what I understand to be an associate of the Rodriguez Sa? campaign in Argentina. Since there have been no howls of protest about them, I assumed that they served some purpose here. This is especially because list member N?stor Gorojovsky has argued strongly in favour of supporting Rodriguez Sa? from an anti-imperialist standpoint. We have a multilingual subscriber base, including many Spanish-speaking members. Since I have always wanted to encourage as internationally broad-based a membership as possible, this sort of thing is likely to occur from time to time, unless of course list members think that specific contributions do not belong, as with the Brazilian conservative catholic posting that I misguidedly forwarded some months ago. Otherwise the occasional non-English post is a small price to pay for an internationalist list. Michael Keaney From joanne.gullion at shell.com Thu May 8 07:04:07 2003 From: joanne.gullion at shell.com (Gullion, Joanne O SDPR) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 08:04:07 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Moderator's note Message-ID: <064E83A9FC5F494C8E54251690FDA98B0CFD64@houic-s-347.americas.shell.com> Sorry again. I didn't know this was coming from the A-list. The address on the post I received was Nacional Y Popular 3. Which I am not familiar with. But please carry on. Joanne -----Original Message----- From: Michael Keaney [mailto:michael.keaney at mbs.fi] Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 7:39 AM To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: [A-List] Moderator's note Sorry I don't speak Spanish. Do you have any of these announcements in English? If not I guess you should stop sending them to me since I can't read them. Thanks, Joanne ------ The messages are forwarded from what I understand to be an associate of the Rodriguez Sa? campaign in Argentina. Since there have been no howls of protest about them, I assumed that they served some purpose here. This is especially because list member N?stor Gorojovsky has argued strongly in favour of supporting Rodriguez Sa? from an anti-imperialist standpoint. We have a multilingual subscriber base, including many Spanish-speaking members. Since I have always wanted to encourage as internationally broad-based a membership as possible, this sort of thing is likely to occur from time to time, unless of course list members think that specific contributions do not belong, as with the Brazilian conservative catholic posting that I misguidedly forwarded some months ago. Otherwise the occasional non-English post is a small price to pay for an internationalist list. Michael Keaney From jcraven at clark.edu Thu May 8 11:07:32 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 10:07:32 -0700 Subject: [A-List] RE: Missing Mark Jones Message-ID: "All men [sic] must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said 'Though death befalls all men [sic] alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.' To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather." (Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, "Serve the People", Selected Works, Vol III, p. 227). Jim C. From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 8 11:40:21 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 10:40:21 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Bush, Blair Nominated for Nobel Prize for Iraq War Message-ID: This is not a joke. This is real. You can search http://news.yahoo.com for to get this story. Sabri +++++++++++ Bush, Blair Nominated for Nobel Prize for Iraq War Thu May 8,10:28 AM ET By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated President Bush (news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) for the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, praising them for winning the war in Iraq (news - web sites). 'Sometimes it's necessary to use a small and effective war to prevent a much more dangerous war in the future,' Jan Simonsen, a right-wing independent in Norway's parliament, told Reuters. 'If nobody acted then Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) could have produced weapons of mass destruction and, in five or 10 years, could have used them against Israel,' he said. An award to Bush and Blair would be a U-turn after the Nobel Committee awarded the 2002 prize to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter last October. At the time, the committee chairman called it a kick in the shins to Bush's Iraq policies as Carter had been calling for a diplomatic solution. Simonsen said the war had 'made it possible to create democracy and respect for human rights in a country which for so many years has been ruled by one of the worst dictators in modern times.' However, Geir Lundestad, the director of the Nobel Institute where the five-member committee meets, said Simonsen's proposal would have to wait for the 2004 award because the deadline for nominations for 2003 passed on February 1. The secretive five-member committee names the annual winner in mid-October. More than 160 people and organizations have been nominated for the 2003 prize, including Pope John Paul (news - web sites), Irish rock star Bono and Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya. 'I'm not especially optimistic that Bush and Blair will win but I think it's worth a try,' Simonsen said. He said he would encourage like-minded parliamentarians in other countries to also nominate Bush and Blair. Nobel committees have frequently honored the United Nations (news - web sites) instead of unilateral action by member states. The United Nations did not give an explicit mandate for the war amid opposition from countries including France, Germany and Russia. The 2001 Nobel Peace Prize went to the United Nations and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites). Thousands of people around the world, including members of national parliaments, professors of history, law and politics and former laureates can make nominations for the prize. The nomination process is secret, but people sometimes publicize their choice. From alanmaki at hotmail.com Thu May 8 12:15:37 2003 From: alanmaki at hotmail.com (Alan Maki) Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 13:15:37 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Minnesota Attorney General begings investigation into Johnson home foreclosure- Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 7637 bytes Desc: not available URL: From william at palfreman.com Thu May 8 18:29:06 2003 From: william at palfreman.com (William Palfreman) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 01:29:06 +0100 (BST) Subject: [A-List] Minnesota Attorney General begings investigation into Johnson home foreclosure- In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20030509000545.J79934@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> All right Alan, I'll bite. Who is foreclosing - is it the bank where the Johnson family have a mortgage on their home? If so, is the bank foreclosing because they haven't kept up payments? If that's so as well, what is _the reason_ why they haven't been able to keep up payments? If this is one of the all-too-common hardship stories that have been around since time immemorial, have you or this trade union actually raised them any money, and had a whip-round to see if a few mortgage payments can't be met while they get themselves bank on their feet? Similarly, if the problem is civil corruption, there're bound to be some concerned lawyers take the case on pro bono simply for the prestige of uncovering corruption. Problem lawyers? I thought there were no-win-no-fee lawyers by the ton in the US? Unless you are actually doing all of those things, all this "werkers of the werld" stuff rings a bit hollow, especially if it the cause of them losing their house unnecessarily. Bill. On Thu, 8 May 2003, Alan Maki wrote: > [html stripped] > > Some good news!!!!!!! > > In response to a request from Minnesota State Senator, David > Tomassoni--- Ken Peterson of the Minnesota Attorney General's Office > called me today and said he has begun an investigation into the > foreclosure proceedings now in progress against Janet Johnson and her > children. He said he could make no promises, but he promised a > thorough investigation. > > We can not let up the pressure now. From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 8 22:00:08 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 00:00:08 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Indonesia to Rovoke IMF Contracts Message-ID: <3EBB27C8.1080307@mindspring.com> Minister Urges Indonesia Govt to Revoke Contracts With IMF JAKARTA, April 23 Asia Pulse/Antara - A cabinet minister yesterday urged the goverment not to hesitate in immediately revoking its contracts with the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. "We don't need to spend too much time on making the decision because the sooner we make it, the sooner we will enjoy the advantages. So, we don't need to worry about how we do it," State Minister of National Development Planning Kwik Kian Gie said. He argued that even the People's Consultative Assembly [MPR], Indonesia's highest law-making body, had decided that Indonesia's contracts with the IMF should be discontinued some time later this year. There was no point in waiting until year's end as it would be more advantageous to cut off relations with the IMF forthwith, Kwik said, adding that Indonesia's ties with the IMF were only disturbing the Indonesian economy. By discontinuing cooperation with the IMF, Kwik said the government would be able to reduce the amount of its debts to the IMF, which currently stood at US$8 billion. The loans given by the IMF have reached US$12 billion and Indonesia has paid back about US$4 billion since the first quarter of year 2001. The government has also paid the interest on the loans which amounted US$1.7 billion. He said the IMF loans had never been used as they were only meant to add to the country's foreign exchange reserves. The IMF loans were supposed to be used only when the reserves were depleted but actually Indonesia had been recording surplus reserves so that the country was able to gain US$22 billion without the help of IMF loans, he said. "So, what's the use of continuing the contracts with the IMF," said Kwik, who is also head of the National Planning Board (Bappenas). Kwik said IMF's study on Indonesia's five-year economic development plan was not better compared to the one made by Bappenas. The five-year plan drawn up by Bappenas, he said, was more comprehensive and realistic than the IMF's plan as set forth in Letters of Intent. A spokesman of the Finance Ministry, Anggito Abimanyu, said the government had not yet decided to abandon its contracts with the IMF. The decision on those questions, he said, would be made by a cabinet meeting. From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 9 00:00:07 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 02:00:07 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Holbrook on Zimmermann's First Great Triumph Message-ID: <3EBB43E7.3010504@mindspring.com> Holbrook is the Democrat's Wolfowitz. Foreign Affairs November 2002 - December 2002 HEADLINE: In the Beginning BYLINE: Richard Holbrooke BODY: Review Essay In the Beginning A Fresh Look at the Early Years of American Empire Richard Holbrooke First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. by warren zimmermann. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002, 544 pp. $30.00. During the Cold War, political scientists and foreign policy theorists largely ignored historical events before 1945 when searching for the underlying roots of American foreign policy. Those earlier periods, with the occasional exception of the failed foreign policy efforts of Woodrow Wilson, were ignored or treated as colorful sideshows. Analysis was focused on the Cold War, which often was presented as if it had sprung without historical context directly out of the Truman administration's response to the Soviet challenge right after World War II. American foreign policy was viewed simply as the sum of its Cold War components. Events before World War II were reserved for specialists and historians, something that hardly existed for most Americans -- without relevance to the modern era. As it turns out -- and as many historians knew all along -- the United States always had a foreign policy, with underlying themes and motives that grew organically out of the domestic American experience. American foreign policy did not start in 1945, or even 1917. A central political struggle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson concerned relations with Britain and France, as both David McCullough and Joseph Ellis reminded us. There had been the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War, several near-wars with the British, the annexation of Hawaii, the conquest of the Philippines, the Open Door policy toward China, and much more. To be sure, these events were all part of any basic American history course. But too few Americans study history, and in any case, these events were usually presented merely as a sideshow to the grand sweep of America's domestic history. Now a number of new books and studies have started to reexamine American foreign policy within a more historical framework. By looking at American history and events prior to and outside the mainstream of the Cold War, these works are beginning to help Americans rethink the complexity of the national experience outside their own borders. Freed from the intellectual straitjacket of the Cold War, they look beyond such sterile labels as "realists" and "idealists," or hawks and doves, to reveal enduring trends and strains in America's relationship with the world. Any serious student of American foreign policy should look carefully at these books -- and hope for more in the near future. Max Boot, for example, has shown recently in The Savage Wars of Peace that, contrary to the "Powell Doctrine" and the views of the current leaders of the American military, the United States has conducted endless small military interventions with success throughout its history. Walter Russell Mead, in Special Providence, has identified four different themes in American foreign policy and found continuity stretching back to the founding of the republic. Looking at events that straddled the Cold War but from a wholly post-Cold War perspective, Samantha Power has offered up "A Problem from Hell," her wholly original examination of consistent American failure to act in the face of recurring cases of genocide. And Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command is a somewhat different sort of book: a study of four historical events designed to prove the indisputable thesis that war is still too important to leave to the generals. In the present phase of history, however, when the American military has acquired an unprecedented role in the conduct of foreign policy, it also carries a contemporary relevance. And in Paris 1919, already published to much acclaim in the United Kingdom, Margaret MacMillan has produced the most detailed study in decades of the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath, including a masterful portrait of Woodrow Wilson. She shows how many of the roots of modern crises (Yugoslavia, Iraq, the Kurdish question, and others) came out of the messy "peace to end all wars." (MacMillan's book is best read in conjunction with an earlier entry in this field, David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace, which is indispensable.) THE GROUP The books by Boot, Power, Mead, and Cohen all appeared over the past year; MacMillan's will be published in November. Now Warren Zimmermann joins this distinguished list with First Great Triumph, a riveting reexamination of the period between 1898 and 1903, when America became an imperial power, acquiring Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone, and, for a while, Cuba. Much of this story was once well known to Americans, who viewed the period and its central figure, Theodore Roosevelt, as heroic. Revisiting it through modern eyes gives it new importance. With knowledge of how history would later unfold, these events take on different meaning. Zimmermann's device is to retell this story through the eyes of five men who often worked together and were, by and large, unabashed imperialists. He freely acknowledges that he was inspired by The Wise Men, the 1989 account by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas of the Cold War, as told through the interrelationship between six of its major figures. At the center of Zimmermann's story is Theodore Roosevelt -- the man, in Zimmermann's view, even more important than Woodrow Wilson for starting America on the path toward global engagement. The other four men in Zimmermann's book all played major roles in American foreign policy. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, later Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee (at the same time!), was Roosevelt's best friend -- and ultimately Woodrow Wilson's most dangerous enemy. Throughout Roosevelt's career, the wily Lodge promoted and guided the impulsive "Rough Rider." They both believed passionately in a global role for the United States, focusing on Central America and the Pacific. Denying the Pacific to the British was often part of their worldview, although that was not a major consideration for the most Anglophile of the five men, John Hay. Lodge was also an out-and-out racist, even by the standards of the time. John Hay and Elihu Root would both serve as secretary of state for Roosevelt, but they were very different sorts of men. Root was a thoughtful and brilliant lawyer, the very epitome of the New York establishment, and by far the most modern of the five. Hay, who became a success despite his ambivalent and uneven professional performance, was forever accorded special treatment because he had been Abraham Lincoln's private secretary as a very young man. Although both Hay and Root played important roles in the implementation of foreign policy, they would not rise to the same level of influence over core events as did Roosevelt, Lodge, and, strangely enough, the last and most unusual of Zimmermann's five, Alfred T. Mahan. Mahan was a naval officer going nowhere inside the Navy when, in 1886, he obtained an assignment as an instructor at the new Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. There he gave a series of lectures outlining his belief in the supremacy of naval power as an instrument of state. In his second year at the Naval War College, he invited as a guest lecturer a man who, in a book on the War of 1812, had expressed a similar point of view about seapower. Thus did Mahan meet for the first time Theodore Roosevelt. It is Zimmermann's thesis that the interaction of these five men turned "manifest destiny" from a phrase into a full-bodied imperial policy just as the United States reached its natural continental limits. It is one of the strengths of this immensely enjoyable book that Zimmermann neither glorifies nor denigrates the people and the events he describes. For the most part, the story tells itself, even though Zimmermann is careful to point out some of the appalling actions that led to the annexation of Hawaii and the colonial period in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Some of this detachedness comes from the nature of the author. Zimmermann is no ordinary historian or journalist. In fact, he is, in the tradition of the great George Kennan himself, a former diplomat who has turned to writing history informed by a practitioner's eye. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that, in Kennan's famous American Foreign Policy 1900-1950, the first two chapters are on the Spanish-American War and the Open Door policy, issues covered in some detailby Zimmermann.) NOW AND THEN The story Zimmermann tells is essential background for anyone interested in how the United States arrived at its present place in the world. But it is not simply its direct relevance to today's headlines that makes First Great Triumph such a significant book. The story of America's internal debate, including the bureaucratic politics and press manipulation that are surprisingly similar to today, carries with it an important reminder that things are not quite as different today as they may seem. A century ago Americans were already confronting many of the issues on today's agenda, with much the same internal divisions. As the nation debates the appropriate U.S. role in nation building in Afghanistan or "pre-emptive action" in Iraq, Zimmermann shows surprisingly similar debates a century ago over Cuba, which he describes as the first American humanitarian intervention, as well as over Puerto Rico. There is a well-established rule in international affairs: the unintended consequence. No one could foresee a century ago that Hawaii, then regarded as an island of primitive people that had to be denied to the British, would become the nation's most multiracial state. The Philippines, where the United States fought a brutal guerrilla war, is now an independent democracy. Puerto Rico has become a permanent part of the United States, whose exact status is still under dispute. Cuba remains a constant adversary as well as a major domestic political issue. And, of course, this story is far from finished. As Zimmermann brings it back to life, the nation is debating whether to embark on a new quasi-imperial age, taking on responsibilities even further from its home shores. No one can predict what will come of these efforts -- there are sure to be more unintended consequences -- but one lesson seems clear: an informed and supportive public must back foreign engagement once it is embarked upon. The executive branch may have the power to send troops overseas almost at will, as Boot's book demonstrates. But to achieve their mission, such deployments must have national backing, starting with Congress. The legacy of these five Americans, Zimmermann believes, went further than "a fragile Hispanic commonwealth, an economically weak though independent Asian country, a far-flung state of the union, and a failed Caribbean protectorate." The author also sees these men as having created "an authentic American imperialism that was confident in its objectives but modest in its application." They prepared the United States to be a great power, produced "the first comprehensive assertion of U.S. security interests abroad," and created two new foreign policy priorities: human rights and stability. These priorities, he notes, "have remained in tension with each other ever since." Finally, Zimmermann writes, the imperial impulse led directly into the strong presidency that reached it height under Theodore Roosevelt's distant cousin Franklin 30 years later. Zimmermann also takes apart the distinction that Henry Kissinger has made between Theodore Roosevelt's realism and Woodrow Wilson's idealism in his book Diplomacy. In fact, Zimmermann concludes, each had strong elements of both strands in his makeup, as they were "both pragmatists and visionaries." Zimmermann's book can be read as a cautionary tale with modern relevance or simply as a fascinating visit to an era that has received far too little attention in recent years. Either way, it belongs on the short shelf of books that can give modern policymakers much-needed insight into the roots of today's policies and problems. It will not guarantee better policies, but it could help. Richard Holbrooke is former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 00:44:50 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 09:44:50 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Minnesota Attorney General begings investigation into Johnson home foreclosure- References: Message-ID: <000401c315f6$7d527580$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Alan Maki writes: We now need to inform the general population on the Range to the facts in this case. At the same time we need to inform people across the state. ------ If listers are serious about inviting other listers to get involved in local struggles, then at the very least they should provide adequate background information regarding these. Otherwise this is just the equivalent of spam. You need to inform the A-list about the facts in this case if listers are to make sense of it at all. More generally, while I am not opposed to learning about actual concrete struggles on the list, using the list as some kind of clearing house for circulars, press releases and the like is not part of its remit. There are plenty of distribution lists for that. This list is devoted primarily to analysis within the parameters set on the A-list's homepage: See http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/a-list Please respect these. Michael Keaney From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 9 01:00:31 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 03:00:31 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Getting It on the Dark Side of the Moon Message-ID: <3EBB520F.9070407@mindspring.com> The Senate Banking Committee held hearings on May 7, 2003 on the $1.4 billion settlement with 10 Wall Street firms accused of issuing self-serving stock research to unsuspecting investors. The general conclusion of the hearing was the the high profile agreement did not go far enough, and it did not change the culture of the Street to prevent future abuses. Senator Paul Sarbanes, Democrat from Maryland, said: "Some CEO on Wall Street just don't get it," referring to Morgan Stanley CEO Phillip Purcell who made public statement to the effect that Morgan Stanley will not be affeccted by the research pact, and to Stan O'Neal, CEO of Merrill Lynch warning that excessive regulation on free enterprise risk taking would lead to economic stagnation. Former investment banker Wiiliam Donaldson, new head of the SEC to replace Harvey Pitt, responded: "We are not going to assume they do "get it." Dick Grasso, Chairman of NYSE, who took in a cool $10 million in pay in 2002, while investors lost 50% of their investments, said: "If people fail to 'get it', they won't be in the busines. Robert Glauber, new head of NASD who replace Frank Zarb, said flippingly: "Those who don't 'get it' are going to 'get it'." Apparently 'getting it' is rather painless. Jack Gruman of Smith Barney of CitiGroup and Henry Blodgett of Merrill Lynch were fined $20 million each and barred permananently from the security bsuiness. No big deal to these two men who had been taking in $60 million a years for some time. And as for the 10 firms, there is insurance coverage and tax deductions and write offs to sushion the fines. The hero of the settlement was Elliot Spitzer, newly elected MY Attorney General said that regulators would have to have been on the dark side of the moon to not notice the abuse. Self-regulation failed, he pronounced. Self regulation is of course the slogan of the small government, free enterprise movement. The market will keep participants honest, they say. Harvey Pitt was appointed by Bush to promote self regulation. Spitzer also suggested that Congress caved to Wall Street lobbists (read campaign contributions) to limit resources of the SEC to properly perform its duty. No one mentioned the word corruption. Well, the fact is that everybody knew what was happening. It was not the lack of inspectors, even though that was a true shortcoming. What went wrong was not that these deals were not open secrets, what went wrong was nobody thought they were illegal, until investors started to lose money. The real problem remains with the research anyayses that through "reform" will be labeled "honest" and "trust worthy" while in fact they continue to be no better than the blatantly illegal ones. Analysts who hyped a stock on behalf of a single bank client is no worse than raging bulls who hype the whole economy on behalf of the whole security industry. The only difference is that the former are now criminals, and the latter are still patriots who believe in America. Henry C.K. Liu From soncu at pacbell.net Fri May 9 01:26:10 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 00:26:10 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Minnesota Attorney General begings investigation into Johnson home foreclosure- Message-ID: Bill, You should know that Alan Maki is not a subscriber of the A-List. The list does not automatically accept non-subscriber posts so such posts come to the moderators first. I approved Alan's post without paying much attention to the contents of his mail because I remember him from the global organizational list for May Day 2000 and used to think that he was a decent fellow. If you want a response to your post, I am afraid, you need to write to him directly. My apologies, Sabri From Waistline2 at aol.com Fri May 9 01:31:56 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 03:31:56 EDT Subject: [A-List] The Ins and Outs of DPRK-US-China Talks Message-ID: <134.1f7f15e5.2becb36c@aol.com> In a message dated 5/7/03 9:46:03 PM Pacific Daylight Time, hliu at mindspring.com writes: On the evening of April 26, President Hu Jintao had a telephone conversation with US President Bush, the two leaders had an exchange of opinions on the Korean nuclear issue. Bush thanked the Chinese side for the active efforts it had made for the Beijing talks and indicated that he agreed to continue this process, solving the Korean nuclear issue through diplomatic channels. Hu Jintao indicated that the Beijing talks has made a good beginning for peacefully solving the Korean nuclear issue, the Chinese side will continue to exert its effort for promoting the peaceful solution of the Korean nuclear problem. By People's Daily Online The question of peace, prosperity, nuclear disarmament and defining this question in respect to North Korea as "the Korean nuclear problem" is dangerous to world peace. The historical record reveals that since the emergence of Wall Street imperialism in the aftermath of the Civil War in America (1865), the multinational state of the United States of North America has been the international hangmen of revolution and the enemy of the majority of the people of earth. To surrender to the madcap schemes of USNA imperialism is to go the way of Iraq. Imperialism long ago adopted as its official political stance, "that the world peoples and countries have no rights they are bound to respect." No agreement with USNA imperialism is worth the paper it is written on unless one has a military deterrence. There is no "Korean nuclear problem" as such - unless one is imperialist. Melvin P From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 9 02:06:03 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 04:06:03 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The Ins and Outs of DPRK-US-China Talks References: <134.1f7f15e5.2becb36c@aol.com> Message-ID: <3EBB616B.7050208@mindspring.com> I am greatly comforted that there is no Korea nuclear problem. Now we can all get back to discussing revolution on the internet. Henry C.K. Liu Waistline2 at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 5/7/03 9:46:03 PM Pacific Daylight Time, > hliu at mindspring.com writes: > > > On the evening of April 26, President Hu Jintao had a telephone > conversation with US President Bush, the two leaders had an exchange of > opinions on the Korean nuclear issue. Bush thanked the Chinese side for > the active efforts it had made for the Beijing talks and indicated that > he agreed to continue this process, solving the Korean nuclear issue > through diplomatic channels. Hu Jintao indicated that the Beijing talks > has made a good beginning for peacefully solving the Korean nuclear > issue, the Chinese side will continue to exert its effort for promoting > the peaceful solution of the Korean nuclear problem. > > By People's Daily Online > > > > The question of peace, prosperity, nuclear disarmament and defining this > question in respect to North Korea as "the Korean nuclear problem" is > dangerous to world peace. > > The historical record reveals that since the emergence of Wall Street > imperialism in the aftermath of the Civil War in America (1865), the > multinational state of the United States of North America has been the > international hangmen of revolution and the enemy of the majority of the > people of earth. > > To surrender to the madcap schemes of USNA imperialism is to go the way of > Iraq. Imperialism long ago adopted as its official political stance, "that > the world peoples and countries have no rights they are bound to respect." > > No agreement with USNA imperialism is worth the paper it is written on unless > one has a military deterrence. > > There is no "Korean nuclear problem" as such - unless one is imperialist. > > > Melvin P > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri May 9 03:03:58 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 02:03:58 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Stealing 2004: Op-Ed from MLK III and Greg Palast Message-ID: <02c201c31609$eff84d90$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Johansen" To: Jim Crow Revived in Cyberspace By Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast (Martin Luther King III is head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Greg Palast is the author of the bestseller "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Originally published May 8, 2003 Baltimore Sun: http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/ BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Astonishingly, and sadly, four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Birmingham, we must ask again, "Do African-Americans have the unimpeded right to vote in the United States?" In 1963, Dr. King's determined and courageous band faced water hoses and police attack dogs to call attention to the thicket of Jim Crow laws -- including poll taxes and so-called "literacy" tests -- that stood in the way of black Americans' right to have their ballots cast and counted. Today, there is a new and real threat to minority voters, this time from cyberspace: computerized purges of voter rolls. The menace first appeared in Florida in the November 2000 presidential election. While the media chased butterfly ballots and hanging chads, a much more sinister and devastating attack on voting rights went almost undetected. In the two years before the elections, the Florida secretary of state's office quietly ordered the removal of 94,000 voters from the registries. Supposedly, these were convicted felons who may not vote in Florida. Instead, the overwhelming majority were innocent of any crime, though just over half were black or Hispanic. We are not guessing about the race of the disenfranchised: A voter's color is listed next to his or her name in most Southern states. (Ironically, this racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a King legacy.) How did mass expulsion of legal voters occur? At the heart of the ethnic purge of voting rights was the creation of a central voter file for Florida placed in the hands of an elected, and therefore partisan, official. Computerization and a 1998 "reform" law meant to prevent voter fraud allowed for a politically and racially biased purge of thousands of registered voters on the flimsiest of grounds. Voters whose name, birth date and gender loosely matched that of a felon anywhere in America were targeted for removal. And so one Thomas Butler (of several in Florida) was tagged because a "Thomas Butler Cooper Jr." of Ohio was convicted of a crime. The legacy of slavery -- commonality of black names -- aided the racial bias of the "scrub list." Florida was the first state to create, computerize and purge lists of allegedly "ineligible" voters. Meant as a reform, in the hands of partisan officials it became a weapon of mass voting rights destruction. (The fact that Mr. Cooper's conviction date is shown on state files as "1/30/2007" underscores other dangers of computerizing our democracy.) You'd think that Congress and President Bush would run from imitating Florida's disastrous system. Astonishingly, Congress adopted the absurdly named "Help America Vote Act," which requires every state to replicate Florida's system of centralized, computerized voter files before the 2004 election. The controls on the 50 secretaries of state are few -- and the temptation to purge voters of the opposition party enormous. African-Americans, whose vote concentrates in one party, are an easy and obvious target. The act also lays a minefield of other impediments to black voters: an effective rollback of the easy voter registration methods of the Motor Voter Act; new identification requirements at polling stations; and perilous incentives for fault-prone and fraud-susceptible touch-screen voting machines. No, we are not rehashing the who-really-won fight from the 2000 presidential election. But we have no intention of "getting over it." We are moving on, but on to a new nationwide call and petition drive to restore and protect the rights of all Americans and monitor the implementation of frighteningly ill-conceived new state and federal voting "reform" laws. And so on Sunday in Birmingham we marched again as our fathers and mothers did 40 years ago, this time demanding security against the dangerous "Floridation" of our nation's voting methods through computerization of voter rolls. Four decades ago, the opposition to the civil right to vote was easy to identify: night riders wearing white sheets and burning crosses. Today, the threat comes from partisan politicians wearing pinstripe suits and clutching laptops. Jim Crow has moved into cyberspace -- harder to detect, craftier in operation, shifting shape into the electronic guardian of a new electoral segregation. Martin Luther King III is president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and his investigation of computer purges of black voters appeared in Harper's Magazine. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 05:46:40 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 14:46:40 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Getting It on the Dark Side of the Moon References: <3EBB520F.9070407@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <001e01c31620$a79c2aa0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Henry writes: The real problem remains with the research anyayses that through "reform" will be labeled "honest" and "trust worthy" while in fact they continue to be no better than the blatantly illegal ones. Analysts who hyped a stock on behalf of a single bank client is no worse than raging bulls who hype the whole economy on behalf of the whole security industry. The only difference is that the former are now criminals, and the latter are still patriots who believe in America. ------ Brilliant stuff, Henry. Keep it up. It always struck me as "interesting" that, in the aftermath of the twin towers attacks, US citizens were being exhorted to greater patriotic fervour by making themselves further indebted in order to maintain unsustainable consumption levels. This, after Bush had changed the law such that consumers who default on credit payments lose what legal protections they once had. When the shit hits the fan, there will be plenty "getting it". Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:00:04 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:00:04 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: constitutional deform Message-ID: <005f01c31622$86ff8e20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Here's a combination of our "unhealthy accumulation" series with that on UK "constitutional deform". It's a fine illustration of just what those Labour Party scumbags, representing Scottish constituencies and nominally unaffected by the "foundation hospital" legislation, have nevertheless guaranteed that health care arrangements in Scotland will be affected by a "brain drain" as the commercialisation of English health care proceeds apace. ----- Health service fractured by finance Rich Newcastle hospital may attract staff from Edinburgh, writes ALAN MacDERMID The Herald, 9 May 2003 A TWO-hour drive down the A1 separates Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle. Both do transplants - livers in Edinburgh, hearts in Newcastle. However, from April next year, human traffic of a different kind could be causing headaches for Scottish NHS employers. The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hospitals Trust, with its coveted three-star rating, is likely to be in the first wave of foundation trusts, the local co-operatives being set up by the Department of Health in an effort to loosen its own apron strings. The freedoms the new hospitals will enjoy include the right to offer top-ups on nationally-agreed pay scales. Among other perks are new opportunities for staff - a cloud on the horizon for hospitals which cannot match the premium rates. The cultural difference in attitude to financial reward is already in place. Andrew Walker, a health economist with Glasgow University, observed it when he worked for the health service in Tyneside. He said: "Up here in Scotland the health service tends to look to people's professionalism, sense of duty and readiness to work an extra hour to get more done - whereas down south they wanted to pay for that. "Will a hospital like the Freeman in Newcastle be able to poach skilled staff - consultants, nurses, theatre staff, and other professionals - from Scotland by paying them more? It must be a worry, especially if we are depending on a touching faith in human nature to keep them here." England will have its own have-nots when the reforms of Alan Milburn, the health secretary, take shape. Hospitals that do not make the grade could find themselves starved of resources and ultimately franchised off to outside organisations. Private health care providers, some of them foreign, are already on a Department of Health approved list for this carve-up. This has fuelled fears that a two-tier service will result, with foundation hospitals grabbing the quick-turnaround, high tariff work, leaving the rest to pick up the less glamorous work. Dr Walker also pointed out another difference. The performance ratings system in England judges hospitals as a whole across a range of standards. The Clinical Standards Board in Scotland looks at standards disease by disease. Dr Walker said: "In Holyrood they are reluctant to put information into the public domain . . . We don't have the same open system for sending someone in and saying: 'Is the trust doing a good or bad job?' "There will be little sympathy up here for the sort of changes they are planning down south, neither politically - other than in the Tory party - nor in the NHS. I am not convinced foundation hospitals are right for Scotland." The Scottish NHS Confederation, the umbrella body representing trusts and NHS boards, is also apprehensive about the prospect of its staff being poached. Susan Aitken, policy officer, said: "There is a danger of staff being lured away, not only in Scotland but for other hospitals in England. In large parts of the country they could be left to wither on the vine. "How much that will cross over into Scotland I don't know, but it is a worry when opportunities arise elsewhere for staff we would like to keep. It means we have to be exemplary as employers." For Donald McNeill it all has a familiar ring. As chief executive at Ayr Hospital he was in at the birth of the NHS trust system launched by Margaret Thatcher 13 years ago, and eagerly embraced the new system. He was soon to be disappointed. Now Scottish secretary of the Institute for Healthcare Management - representing the managers themselves - he said: "The freedoms that were promised then were illusory. There is still a great degree of command and control. "I don't think there is any yearning here for foundation hospitals. There are big issues about the shortage of nursing staff, and I have no doubt that if nurses are offered better terms and conditions and a better workplace they will take it. That is why we are losing nurses to the US and Australia. "The minister is doing his damnedest to get them back, but there is a real shortage looming in nursing - a lot of it nothing to do with terms and conditions." However, Mary Scanlon, the Tory health spokesman in the Scottish Parliament, said that foundation hospitals were central to their manifesto plans in last week's Scottish Parliament elections: foundation status would be open to all. "We want quality standards and management standards to be set for hospitals - cleanliness, financial management, quality of care," she said. "We would be setting these standards and we would aspire to every hospital becoming a foundation hospital." Bill O'Neill, Scottish secretary of the British Medical Association, said: "What they are introducing is an internal market by another name. Although they say that other hospitals in the same area as foundation hospitals will be protected, these assurances are shallow." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:04:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:04:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: pressure builds Message-ID: <006701c31623$24aa1aa0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Another reminder why what remains of the British "left" is hopelessly out of touch on this issue. The arguments rehearsed are precisely those used by the likes of John Redwood and the punk Thatcherites, albeit from a "trade union" perspective. Davidson did the right thing and voted against the foundation hospitals, but living in a 1970s fantasy world will not save you from making this sort of absolutely fundamental error. ----- Top economists say UK should join the euro CATHERINE MacLEOD The Herald, 9 May 2003 MORE than 300 economists, including a former governor of the Bank of England and a former managing director of the International Monetary Fund yesterday signalled their support for early British entry to the single currency. It came as MPs on both sides of the euro argument have stepped up the pressure on Tony Blair to ensure that the announcement by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, on a referendum, expected in two weeks, comes down in their favour. The pro-euro lobby, heartened by the prime minister's reported determination to join the euro zone and resist Treasury pressure to delay a referendum till after the general election, is now fighting a rearguard action to win a referendum in this parliament. Philippe Legrain, Britain in Europe's chief economist, said: "With only days to go until the government announces the result of its five economic tests, it is clear that not only is the economic evidence overwhelmingly in favour of euro entry, so is the opinion of the economics profession. "In the light of this evidence, a negative assessment of the five tests would be greeted with scepticism, even disbelief, by economists. "Short-term political considerations must not be allowed to take precedence over the overwhelming economic case for euro entry." While Gordon Brown is understood to believe that the path to monetary union will not be achieved for several years, the prime minister is said to have sympathy for those who argue that there are strong economic reasons why "we may want to go in a year's time". Ian Davidson, Pollok MP and chairman of Labour against the euro, yesterday condemned the idea of joining the single currency for purely political reasons. Reacting to a pro-euro intervention from more than 200 constituency officials, Mr Davidson said: "A majority of Labour voters and trades unionists are against the euro. It's not surprising - the eurozone has suffered from high unemployment, slow growth, rising prices and cuts in public spending. "The government should ignore the euro-obsessives and concentrate on delivering real issues like schools and hospitals." Mr Davidson's comments follow the unexpected intervention of Labour activists who urged the government "to examine the economic case for a referendum in this parliament and to resist the demands from Iain Duncan Smith, Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black to rule out British entry". The pro-euro statement was published as 330 economists were named as members of the new Economic Council of Britain in Europe, launched to provide a body of experts to argue the pro-euro case. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:16:48 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:16:48 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: Parliament opening reaction Message-ID: <006f01c31624$dd279b60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Apart from the one opening letter strongly supporting the actions of the SSP MSPs at the Parliament opening ceremony this week, the rest are unanimous in their criticism. The SSP is going to have be careful about this, not least because what they stand for is deadly serious and should not be left open to ridicule in any way, shape or form, wherever possible. Previously I have criticised the tendency in the party towards a personality cult of Tommy Sheridan. However, his presence was almost completely overlooked as he was effectively upstaged by the antics of Rosie Kane and Colin Fox. Kane in particular has apparently promised to bring "craziness" and "something different" to the Parliament, and I'm afraid that the correspondent who refers to "infantile antics" of "self-centred" people is targeting a very vulnerable spot, and Sheridan and the leadership will need all their political nous to ensure that there is sufficient discipline within the ranks. Sheridan himself has matured into a very accomplished performer who knows his constituency well but who can also reach out beyond, without in the least selling out. His comrades should learn from him, lest the SSP's credibility, very hard won, be thrown away by what is in reality sheer narcissism. For that would be a bitter betrayal of the working class. ----- >From today's Herald letters page, 9 May 2003: The dreadful woman who dared to wear jeans I hear there are mutterings in the Scottish Parliament canteen (the equivalent of the Westminster tearoom) about that dreadful woman, Rosie Kane, who dared to wear jeans to the opening of the parliament. Whatever next! We may even have MSPs who want to be representative of the people who elected them. I further understand, however, that most of these complaints came from the women of the Labour Party: you know, the ones who dazzled us all with their red suits or jackets or roses. May I presume to give them all a bit of well-intentioned advice? First of all, Rosie, keep on wearing your jeans. If it's good enough for the majority of your electorate, it's good enough for the Scottish Parliament. To the ladies of New Labour - grow up. You cannot reclaim socialism by wearing red. You have to live, eat, and breathe socialism. Instead of criticising Rosie Kane, why not learn by her example? Norma Anderson. WE have just seen how very rapidly gesture politics and promises to introduce "madness and craziness" to the Scottish Parliament can degenerate into puerile attention-seeking. The problem with such a course of action is that the next cantrip must cause an even greater stushie than the past one. After messages scrawled on the palm of the hand and being sent to the back of the line for singing out of turn, what comes next? Shall we hear anonymous humming round the debating chamber; perhaps ink pellets will be flicked at speakers who offend the Scottish Socialist sensibilities of Comrades Kane and Fox? Who knows, we might even witness Jim Wallace's chair being pulled from under him just as he is about to sit down or, in the spirit of political ecumenism, it could quite easily be the chairs of Messrs McConnell, McLetchie, or Swinney. Such conduct very quickly ceases to be amusing. It seldom causes lasting outrage or offence. It merely becomes tedious and lays those who have decided to follow this path open to richly merited derision. The butts of such derision then find it virtually impossible to be taken seriously when the day finally dawns when they have something worthwhile to contribute to the work of our parliament. John W Elliott. THE pathetic AmDram shenanigans of the SSP during the swearing in of the new Holyrood intake got the party what it really wanted - namely their faces in the papers - but we have to ask ourselves whether this sort of behaviour is what we, the Scottish people, really want? I find it hard to believe that we would wish other nations around the world to look upon our parliamentary representatives with Biro scrawled all over their hands, dolled up like they are off to a club, or singing tunelessly with an earring in. If we were as opposed to the concept of monarchy as much as the SSP seems to think, we would have voted for them and got rid of it. We could even have voted for the SNP, which promised us a referendum on the future of the monarchy in an independent Scotland; mind you, that was before it stopped talking about an independent Scotland, and before the electorate ditched it en masse. The fact is that whether Scotland becomes a republic or not is far down the list on most people's priorities behind better schools and hospitals, employment, and education; the issue of Scottish republicanism only ever seems to set the heather alight on the political fringes. What was more disturbing was your editorial (May 8), which seemed to condone these antics as a means of persuading that ever elusive tribe - "the young" - to go out and vote. While the SSP may have distinctly Orwellian policies, the Scottish Parliament should not be transformed into a Big Brother of the Channel 4 variety, just so that more people will watch it. It's time for Holyrood to be allowed to grow up - Wednesday's Carry On Oath-swearing routine did not suggest that the SSP would play its part in helping this maturation process. If these sort of antics continue, the SSP will become a joke and will be treated as such come 2007. Fraser Crawford. Having just seen the infantile antics of some of our elected MSPs during the swearing-in ceremony, between singing (?) and gesturing, I have only one thing to say - may God help us - because these self-centred representatives will not. John Callaghan. Several MSPs refused to swear allegiance to the crown, but no doubt are willing to take the Queen's shilling and all the privileges that go with being an elected member of parliament. Tom Affleck. HAS cutting-edge radical politics in Scotland finally found the ultimate weapon in karaoke? John Reynolds. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:18:48 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:18:48 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US corporate state: Donald Rumsfeld Message-ID: <008701c31625$24d13fc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The two faces of Rumsfeld 2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea 2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change Randeep Ramesh Friday May 9, 2003 The Guardian Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons. Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (?125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration. The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime to positively engage with the west. The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government. The company also opened an office in the country's capital, Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld's office said that the de fence secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time". In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors". Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton, saying he did not trust North Korea, and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente, halted. By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea's leader] Kim Jong-il." The success of campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the status of Mr Rumsfeld in Washington. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime _ teetering on the verge of collapse" and which is on the verge of becoming a proliferator of nuclear weapons. During a bout of diplomatic activity over Christmas he warned that the US could fight two wars at once - a reference to the forthcoming conflict with Iraq. After Baghdad fell, Mr Rumsfeld said Pyongyang should draw the "appropriate lesson". Critics of the administration's bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not "speak up against it". "One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation," said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington. Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton's plans, saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department's number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser. One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB. The Clinton package sought to defuse tensions on the Ko rean peninsula by offering supplies of oil and new light water nuclear reactors in return for access by inspectors to Pyongyang's atomic facilities and a dismantling of its heavy water reactors which produce weapons grade plutonium. Light water reactors are known as "proliferation-resistant" but, in the words of one expert, they are not "proliferation-proof". The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear bomb factories". North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB's reactor project going. North Korea is thought to have offered to scrap its nuclear facilities and missile pro gramme and to allow international nuclear inspectors into the country. But Pyongyang demanded that security guarantees and aid from the US must come first. Mr Bush now insists that he will only negotiate a new deal with Pyongyang after the nuclear programme is scrapped. Washington believes that offering inducements would reward Pyongyang's "blackmail" and encourage other "rogue" states to develop weapons of mass destruction. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:19:37 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:19:37 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: cluster bomb body count Message-ID: <008f01c31625$4259faa0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> 10.45am update Pentagon challenged over cluster bomb deaths Guardian Online Mark Oliver Friday May 9, 2003 Iraq Body Count, a group that monitors the numbers of civilian deaths in the recent war and its aftermath, is challenging the Pentagon's claim that only one civilian was killed by a cluster bomb. The group, which keeps track of reports of fatalities on its website, said this week that at least 200 civilians had been killed by this type of weapon and castigated last month's Pentagon statement as prompting "widespread incredulity". Cluster bombs - which scatter "bomblets" the size of a Coke can over a wide area - are a constant danger to civilians because the unexploded munitions can create de facto minefields. The US military's chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, said on April 25 that of almost 1,500 cluster bombs that were dropped from the air, only 26 came within 1,500 feet of a civilian area. He added that "there's only been one recorded case of collateral damage from cluster munitions noted so far". Last night a Pentagon spokesman said that Gen Myers had been referring only to the reports of fatalities that he knew of and that the media often knew of "collateral damage" reports ahead of the military. Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch group, said that to claim cluster bombs did "virtually no harm to Iraqi civilians is highly disingenuous". Missing from Gen Myers's statement was any reference to ground-launched or artillery cluster bombs, which were more numerous and killed more civilians, say IBC and Humans Rights Watch. Culling data from international media reports, IBC has compiled a list of 372 possible Iraqi civilian deaths from cluster munitions, and says that of these, 147 were caused by unexploded or "dud" bombs. In a statement, IBC researchers John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan said: "Public concern about the possible misuse of these savagely indiscriminate weapons is rapidly mounting. "Our research reveals the shocking disparity between what the world's press has already reported and what the Pentagon is prepared to admit. Those who are genuinely concerned with civilian casualties, and interested in minimising them, can no longer plead ignorance." The Ministry of Defence has said that the British army fired more than 2,000 cluster munitions from artillery pieces in the battle for Basra, which Landmine Action criticised as an "appalling" amount used in a heavily populated area. The British army has new kinds of shells and MoD said that the failure rate was between 2-5% and that it was important not to confuse cluster bombs with landmines, which the British army does not use. The MoD said some of the cluster weapons had been designed to become non-explosive after a limited time, so they would not in effect be mines. In a statement yesterday on cluster bombs, the MoD said: "Cluster bombs are a legitimate weapon which fulfil a legitimate military role that cannot be performed by other munitions. They are not indiscriminate weapons. "The UK has used cluster bombs in a responsible way that is fully consistent with ... international law. The UK has played a leading role in discussions to find a way to minimise the risk to civilians from unexploded ordinance including unexploded cluster bomblets." The MoD added that it was committed to clearing areas hit by cluster bombs and was seeking a multilateral international accord to stop using them, although it said it would not endanger British troops by withdrawing them in any combat theatre where the enemy might use them. In the Commons on Wednesday, Clare Short, the international development secretary, agreed that there were reports of serious accidents from unexploded bombs. She said that mapping is taking place and that the UN would be involved. Responding to a written question about the bombs, Ms Short said: "There are reports of lots of serious accidents, and of lots of children losing limbs and being injured by explosions from unexploded ordnance. "The UN is trying to map the locations of such ordnance in the country and to give priority to beginning the removal process, starting with the most dangerous areas. The return of the UN should speed up that work. However, the situation is very urgent, and we must do better." Amnesty International has called for an independent inquiry into the US and British coalition's use of cluster munitions, and a spokesperson at its London office said the "UK should declare an immediate moratorium on their use". The Amnesty spokesperson said: "It is difficult to assess exactly how many civilians have been killed by cluster munitions, both during and after the conflict in Iraq. "Sadly the number is likely to rise every week as more are killed by unexploded 'bomblets'. What is clear is that these indiscriminate weapons leave a deadly legacy of de facto landmines that will kill and maim innocent civilians for years to come." Amnesty said its workers in Basra had reported seeing munitions lying on the ground. One worker said: "Visible landmines that had not been removed were seen immediately next to the houses of university staff which were still inhabited. Children were seen playing around them." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:20:16 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:20:16 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU stability & growth pact: Stiglitz critique Message-ID: <009701c31625$59543e00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Don't trust the bankers' homilies The EU stability pact destabilises by cutting spending in a downturn Joseph Stiglitz Friday May 9, 2003 The Guardian France, Portugal and Germany are all flagrantly flouting the stability pact, the agreement among eurozone members to keep their deficits below a critical threshold (3% of GDP today, but lower, supposedly, in the future). France's prime minister, Pierre Raffarin, defends his government's position by saying that France was not prepared to impose austerity on its own people. If France will not, other European leaders must wonder, why should they? Mr Raffarin was right to say that austerity would result if France obeyed the pact's strictures, but in debates over economic policy, the truth is seldom appreciated. There is a long list of central bankers' homilies that are not supposed to be questioned. Do so and you are exiled from the circle of those who supposedly know how the world "really" works. Here are three: An independent central bank is necessary for sound macroeconomic policy. The truth: countries that do not have an independent central bank, such as India, manage to contain inflation as effectively as those with independent central banks. In Russia, an independent central banker, Viktor Gerashencko, could not be removed for years, though he tolerated both inflation and corruption. Generally, there is little evidence that countries with independent central banks grow faster, have higher wages, or generate higher incomes - indeed, that they perform better in any real sense than those that do not. Once inflation starts, it increases at a faster and faster rate, and the costs of reversing it are high. The truth: there is no evidence of an inflation precipice, or that the costs of reversing inflation (in terms, say, of pushing unemployment to high levels) are any greater than the benefits from inflation (in terms, say, of allowing unemployment to fall to low levels). Inflation is bad for growth and productivity. The truth: below a critical th reshold - a threshold far beyond the levels of inflation that now prevail in Europe and North America - there is no evidence of significant adverse effects from inflation. On the contrary, recent research by Nobel laureate economist George Akerlof and his colleagues suggests that pushing inflation too low may impede growth, and that the critical threshold is higher for countries, such as the post-communist transition economies, engaged in large structural changes. When an economy faces a downturn, one should engage in expansionary fiscal policies. But in a downturn tax revenues fall. Thus, debt must increase. But the EU's stability pact, as commonly interpreted, requires either that tax rates be raised (always difficult, especially in a recession) or that expenditures be cut. Either way, such policies will exacerbate the downturn. The stability pact put into place an automatic economic destabiliser. But the EU - indeed, every country - should seek stabilisers, policies that automatically boost the economy in a downturn. The US is facing, albeit in a weaker form, a similar problem. Most of America's 50 states have constitutional amendments that effectively impose a balanced budget. As tax revenues drop due to the economic downturn, the states are cutting back on expenditures, exacerbating America's slump - and the world's. I warned of this problem more than a year ago, and I suggested that the federal government pick up the tab for the shortfall in state tax revenue, because the states did not cause the country's slowdown. At the time, there was some disagreement about how long the downturn would last (I was a pessimist, and unfortunately I have been proved right). But I argued that this was irrelevant: making up the states' shortfall would cost the government nothing if the optimists turned out to be right, but it would be just the right medicine if pessimists like me were correct. Instead, the Bush administration pushed ahead with tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts that were not designed to stimulate the economy and that, no surprise, have failed to stimulate the economy. The lesson for Europe is clear: the EU should redefine its stability pact in terms of the structural or full employment deficit - what the fiscal deficit would be if the economy were performing at full employment. To do otherwise is irresponsible. There does need to be a commitment to fiscal responsibility. In the long run, governments should run balanced budgets, with surpluses in good years making up for deficits in bad years. But to insist on an arbitrary budgetary position in an economic downturn is to ignore everything we have learned about economics in the past 70 years, risking the well-being of millions who are thrown out of employment. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:24:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:24:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US corporate state: Halliburton & Nigeria Message-ID: <009f01c31625$e02618e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Cheney firm paid millions in bribes to Nigerian official Oliver Burkeman in Washington Friday May 9, 2003 The Guardian The reputation of Halliburton, the oil industry giant once run by Vice-President Dick Cheney, took a new blow yesterday when it admitted one of its subsidiaries had paid millions of dollars to a Nigerian official in return for tax breaks. The company said it had informed the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) of about $2.4m (?1.5m) in improper payments to the official, who had posed as a tax consultant, it claimed. The payments emerged during an audit. Halliburton said they "clearly violated" the company's code of conduct and "several" employees had been fired. The SEC is investigating, and the firm could face a tax bill of up to $5m in Nigeria. It is the second controversy involving the firm within a week. Earlier, army officials acknowledged that the company's subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root had a far broader role in the Iraqi oil industry than previously disclosed, encompassing not just fighting fires but operating oilfields. Meanwhile Richard Perle, an influential Pentagon adviser, was accused of a new conflict of interests after it was revealed that he had briefed investors on how to profit from a potential war with Iraq or North Korea after attending a classified intelligence meeting on the two countries. The defence policy board, of which Mr Perle was then chairman, received the information from the defence intelligence agency in February. Three weeks later he gave a talk to Goldman Sachs investors, delivered as part of a conference call, titled Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next? A source who was at the defence intelligence agency briefing told the Los Angeles Times: "That bothered me because the title of the talk made it sound like he had the inside track on what we were going to do." The Los Angeles Times broke the story. Mr Perle, who declined to comment yesterday, resigned as chairman of the board in March after bad publicity concerning his links with the failed telecoms firm Global Crossing, which was seeking a favourable ruling from the Pentagon; his directorship of the UK intelligence firm Autonomy; and his meeting with Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer, and another businessman who wanted to influence Washington's Iraq policies. He remains a member of the defence policy board, a group of private citizens whose nominations are approved by Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence. At the same classified meeting, on February 27, the board received a presentation about military communications systems, the LA Times reported. Mr Perle's venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, has been exploring this area for possible investments. The revelations will increase the pressure on Mr Perle. But Helmut Sonnenfeldt, another board member, said nothing he heard at the February briefing would have given Mr Perle any advantage in his commercial activities. He told the LA Times: "To make a hard and fast connection between Perle hearing something at the briefing and using it to further his commercial interests is a jump I wouldn't want to make." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:25:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:25:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Iran Message-ID: <00a701c31626$13b4f320$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Iranians enriching uranium, US says Julian Borger in Washington and Dan De Luce in Tehran Friday May 9, 2003 The Guardian The Bush administration is calling for the UN's nuclear agency to declare Iran in violation of the non-proliferation treaty amid suspicions that it is secretly enriching uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is due to issue a report next month on Iranian compliance following a visit by its director, Mohamed ElBaradei. If Tehran is found to have misled the IAEA in its claim not to have enriched uranium, it could face sanctions. The state department was reported yesterday to be lobbying other nations on the IAEA board to produce a guilty verdict. Washington's alarm was sparked by the discovery of a uranium enrichment plant under construction at Natanz, central Iran. The site, which surprised Dr ElBaradei with its sophistication, includes a pilot plant with 160 functioning centrifuges, used in the enrichment process. Dr ElBaradei's team saw components for another 1,000 machines. The Iranians are also building an underground site nearby which will be able to house tens of thousands of centrifuges and withstand aerial attack. Tehran insists that the plant is being built to produce fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but it has so far failed to agree to give the IAEA greater powers to investigate undeclared nuclear activities. A US official told the New York Times: "It's not just that Iran is speeding up its nuclear plans. It's also that we've only recently learned some things about their programme that have been going on for two years. There's also a lot of hammering from the Israelis for us to take this problem seriously." The US military's proximity in Iraq will enable it to gather detailed intelligence about Iran's nuclear programme, increasing the possibility of an American military strike against a nuclear facility. Yesterday, Iran's atomic energy chief told the IAEA that Iran had no clandestine weapons programme and that its activities were "peaceful". From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:26:09 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:26:09 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Saddam's lingering presence Message-ID: <00af01c31626$2bd5b520$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Baghdad waits in fear for rebuilding to start A month after the symbolic toppling of Saddam's statue, the optimism of that day has all but gone Ewen MacAskill in Baghdad Friday May 9, 2003 The Guardian Rafid Hamid, who makes his living selling tea on the pavements of Baghdad, helped topple Saddam Hussein last month. Seeing his neighbours struggle to climb on to Saddam's statue in Paradise Square, he fetched a ladder from his lock-up, allowing his friends to clamber up. The destruction of the statue, relayed around the world by crews encamped in the Palestine Hotel opposite, provided the most symbolically important moment of the war and sent a signal to the Iraqi people that Saddam had lost power. Mr Hamid, 24, remains euphoric. He hauls the ladder out together with a T-shirt he was wearing that day. It bears the letters USA, his own private welcome to the US tanks. "I hated Saddam. Two of my uncles were imprisoned by him in 1979 and I have not seen them since," he says. But the euphoria has long been lost on others in the crowd that day and throughout Iraq. The US-led reconstruction of Iraq is foundering. Washington prepared thoroughly for war but not for its aftermath. George Bush's appointment of the former lieutenant-general, Jay Garner, to run Iraq has proved disastrous and he is to be replaced next month. The rigid police state of Saddam Hussein has given way to lawlessness on a grand scale, stretching the length of the country. Looting persists and criminal gangs make travel risky. In Paradise Square, street traders sell Kalashnikovs for $75 within feet of one of the few police cars on duty in the capital. While US soldiers tally the number of illegal weapons they manage to confiscate each night on patrol, hundreds more are being sold to Baghdad residents desperate for weapons to protect their homes. Crime tops the list of Iraqi complaints, but they also grumble about a severe electricity shortage that leaves most of Baghdad in total darkness night after night. Beginning to run out of money, they worry too about when - or if - they will get their old jobs back. The pedestal on which the Saddam statue stood now has a message to the US in red letters: "All Done, Go Home". Many Iraqis are happy for America to stay on while lawlessness is rampant, but not for too long. The danger for the US is that the various Iraqi grievances will congeal into resentment directed at the American forces. There are frequent warning signs for the Americans of what might lie ahead. Almost every day, US forces trade fire with Iraqis throughout the country. In Baghdad yesterday, a US soldier was killed in a bold daylight attack on one of the bridges over the Tigris. An Iraqi walked up to him with a pistol and opened fire. The previous day, two Iraqis fired at a reconnaissance patrol of the 3rd Infantry Division with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades north of Baghdad. An Iraqi was killed. On the same day, near the northern town of Baiji, a convoy from the 4th Infantry Division came under fire from Iraqis with rifles and machine guns. It is very different from the welcome the US soldiers received in Paradise Square a month ago. Adnam Mohammed Sayeed, a former Iraqi Airlines pilot, whose schoolboy son was the first into Paradise Square that day to hammer at the base of the statue, said "We can't wait two months, or one month, or even next week for the US to sort things out. The weather is getting hotter. We can't go on living like this." Mr Sayeed translated for the crowd that day, asking the US for a rope and the horsepower to drag the statue down. He now regrets his and his son's participation and described the event as "unpleasant". Iraqis were among the best-educated people in the Middle East until stifled by Saddam and there is determination among them that, after a totalitarian regime, three wars and being impoverished by sanctions, to grab this opportunity for change. But the US performance so far has not instilled confidence. They are unimpressed by the provisional government Washington is cobbling together, scheduled to be announced next week. That government, dominated by exile groups, could prove shortlived. Power now lies elsewhere, with the majority Shia Muslims, who were suppressed by Saddam. Many of them have a different agenda from Washington. The US and British administration lodging in Saddam's presidential palace by the Tigris issues regular upbeat statements that life is fast returning to normal, that there are more police on the streets, that the education, health and other ministries will soon be up and running, and that full electricity and other basic services will be restored. But the gap between such pronouncements and the daily lives of Iraqis is enormous. As the US-British administration told university teachers and students yesterday they should return to their campuses to resume their studies on May 17, the ministry of education building in central Baghdad, already severely damaged by looters a month ago, was burning, with columns of thick, black smoke pouring from its upper floors. In a country with the second biggest oil reserves in the world, queues miles-long form each morning outside petrol stations. Many have to wait in line half a day or more. Sitting in his car in a queue in Baghdad, Abdul Wahed Shukri Hamadi, a pharmacologist, said "Nothing is better since Saddam has gone." The worst time is at night. Most people lock their doors after 8pm, unwilling to take the risk of being out in the dark because of criminal gangs or the chance of being shot by a US patrol. A city-wide curfew falls at 11pm. Bursts of gunfire continue throughout the night. One of the best places to test the mood of Baghdad before the fall of Saddam was the Cafe Shabandar, off Rashid Street, an old tea house with fans on the ceiling and rare photographs of old Baghdad on its walls. It is popular with intellectuals who were more inclined to speak their minds than most residents, but cautious enough to avoid trouble with the secret police. There is a spontaneity to life in Iraq that did not exist during the Saddam days and that is evident in the Cafe Shabandar. At one table, eight men are having a loud discussion about the politics of the new Iraq with a frankness that would have been impossible before. But the lawlessness is uppermost in everyone's minds. The cafe walls are bare. The portrait of Saddam will not make a comeback but the manager said he had taken the valuable pictures of old Baghdad home for safety from looters and did not feel it was safe enough yet to return them. The US has failed to find weapons of mass destruction, the stated aim of the war, or Saddam. The prevalent view among Iraqis, whose extended family ties provide them with a good information network, are convinced he is still alive and in Iraq. The failure of the US to find him has left many Iraqis uncertain, including Mr Sayeed, who provided the translation in the square the day the statue fell. It is one of the main reasons why he regrets the participation of himself and his son. "My son is scared that Saddam's people will take revenge," he says. "He is right to be scared. Many people round here still love Saddam." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:26:39 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:26:39 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Europe/US rivalry: Solana intervenes Message-ID: <00b701c31626$3de82c20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US warned not to try to split EU Ian Black, Brussels Friday May 9, 2003 The Guardian The EU's foreign policy chief has urged the US to deal with Europe as a whole rather than "cherry-pick" individual allies because they agree with Washington. Javier Solana, the Spaniard who represents all 15 EU member states on foreign policy and security, was on a visit to the US aimed at healing transatlantic divisions. "The European Union is more than the sum of its parts," he said, speaking alongside the US secretary of state, Colin Powell. "I am concerned when I hear ... influential voices asking whether the United States would be better served by 'disaggregating' Europe." European discomfort over post-war Iraq is mounting. Poland, Denmark, Bulgaria and Estonia have now joined the three larger US allies - Britain, Spain and Italy - to declare their readiness to carry out peacekeeping duties. Many European countries would want to see a UN mandate for such a move, which would leave the EU and Nato without a clear role. Traditionally, the US has favoured European integration, but concerns have been raised recently by comments from the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld about "old and new" Europe. Before the war, eight eastern European countries, all joining the EU next year or hoping to do so soon, signed a letter backing Washington - and were rebuked by France. Last month a senior US state department official alarmed European policymakers by saying that Washington's approach to the EU was now to "disaggregate". Asked on Wednesday to comment on the concept of disaggregation, the state department's spokesman Richard Boucher said: "We work with the European Union as a whole, and we work with individual governments in the European Union. "It's not a question of one or the other. Some things are matters for the [European] Commission, some things are matters for individual governments." Mr Solana said that the EU had stood alongside the US in the fight against terrorism, adding that it "may have been divided over the means of Iraqi disarmament, but nobody contested the objective of disarmament". From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:28:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:28:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: overstretched? Message-ID: <00bf01c31626$7f5a52a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Global shift drives US to rethink its military 'footprint' By Peter Spiegel in Washington Financial Times; May 07, 2003 When Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, assumed the top job at the Pentagon for a second time in January 2001, his new boss, President George W. Bush, had a task for him: to review thoroughly the US defence posture around the globe. This was an undertaking begun during the Clinton administration but, with the enlargement of Nato approaching rapidly and growing controversies over US troops in such host countries as Saudi Arabia and South Korea, Mr Rumsfeld ordered his combatant commanders in Europe, the Pacific and Central Command to rethink the US "footprint" everywhere. Many senior military officers bristled at any talk of downsizing forces under their command. Pentagon insiders said Gen Joseph Ralston, then the commander of US forces in Europe, urged Mr Rumsfeld to allow most of the 115,000 active-duty troops to remain in the region. Keeping just 8 per cent of the 1.4m US troops in a command that encompassed 93 countries was hardly an extravagance, Gen Ralston argued. Similarly, Gen Tommy Franks, the newly minted head of Central Command, reportedly argued against completely pulling out of Saudi Arabia and other smaller Gulf bases until alternatives in the region were found. The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq temporarily slowed the review. But with Mr Rumsfeld's ideological opposition to overextending US forces - an accusation frequently lobbied by Bush loyalists at their Clinton administration predecessors - the task of reshaping the US military abroad has picked up pace once again. The first and most high profile restructuring came last week, when the US announced it was withdrawing almost all its forces from Saudi Arabia and transferring its regional air force headquarters from Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh to Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. That base had gained the infrastructure to serve as a combat headquarters only in the weeks preceding the Iraq invasion. US forces at Incirlik Air Base in eastern Turkey have also been reduced to a skeleton crew of 1,400. Senior Pentagon officials have signalled that a similar reduction could be announced shortly in Kuwait - the army's main staging area in the region since the 1991 Gulf war. "Clearly, one of the reasons we had US forces in the region was to enforce the UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq," said Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. "Those forces in Turkey for that purpose, they've already returned home. We had forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well, and, clearly, they're not going to be needed in the future for that." Pentagon insiders familiar with the negotiations said, however, that the army is likely to keep some heavy armaments pre-positioned in Kuwait even if troops are brought back home. "Pulling out of bases is a one-way street," noted Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute. "Once you're gone, there's no going back." The shifts extend well beyond the Middle East, however. Mr Rumsfeld has said repeatedly that he believes the US has too many troops in Germany - close to 80,000 active-duty personnel, along with tens of thousands of family members and civilians. Gen James Jones, who assumed command of US troops in Europe in January, has said he plans to recommend moving forces farther east. "It made a lot of sense to have a number of capabilities in Germany when you were worried about the Soviet Union coming across the north German plain," Mr Rumsfeld said at the weekend. "It does not make a lot of sense to have capabilities that you can't use or you have to go through circuitous routes." Gen Ralston is said to have made a similar recommendation, arguing that basing troops in Bulgaria and Romania would give the US easier access to the Caucasus and Gulf regions. Romanian and Bulgaria have expressed enthusiasm, and Gen Jones has suggested setting up "lily pads", or lightly manned forward bases. Although little noticed during the waning days of the war in Iraq, the US has also begun shifting its forces in the Pacific. In early April the US announced a deal with the new South Korean government to move its regional headquarters - the sprawling Yongsan garrison in Seoul - outside the capital. The agreement to move the base - home to most of the US's 37,000 troops in the South - did not discuss the size of US forces there, but military officials have said there are plans to remove US soldiers from the demilitarised zone. In addition, US diplomats have begun broaching a phase-out. Gen Leon LaPorte, commander of US forces in Korea, has been working on a new configuration, Mr Rumsfeld said in February he would like US forces to be more oriented towards air and sea hubs. "[The hubs would have] the ability to reinforce so there's still a strong deterrent, and possibly, with our improved capabilities of moving people, some of those forces come back home," he said. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:29:18 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:29:18 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Eastern Europe Message-ID: <00c701c31626$9c85f960$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> East Europe open to US troops By Peter Spiegel in Washington FT.com site; May 08, 2003 The foreign ministers of Bulgaria and Romania said they would welcome bases for US troops once they became full members of Nato. The two countries were among seven from eastern Europe unanimously approved for membership of the Atlantic alliance by the US Senate on Thursday. Gen James Jones, the new head of American troops in Europe, is in the process of re-evaluating the US's "footprint" in the region, and is expected to recommend that many of the 80,000 troops based in Germany be moved eastwards. Pentagon insiders have said that Bulgaria and Romania, with their ports on the Black Sea that were used during the Iraq war, are leading contenders. Mircea Geoana, Romania's foreign minister, said he thinks the shift east will help US and Nato forces become more flexible to respond to "new threats coming from the greater Middle East", and noted that Pentagon engineers had been evaluating Romanian military infrastructure since 1997. The Romanian airfield and port at Costaza is seen as a probable location. "It's only normal for Romania and Bulgaria, together with Turkey, to start playing a far more significant role," Mr Geoana told the FT. "I think we have proven to the American and British forces that have been transitted through Romania during the Iraqi war that our locations are attractive, and with additional investment they could be proven as possible operational footprints for the future Nato missions." All seven foreign ministers were in Washington on Thursday to witness a unanimous vote by the US Senate approving their membership in the alliance. The US became the third Nato member, behind Canada and Norway, to approve the enlargement. The new applicants - which also include the three Baltic states, Slovenia and Slovakia - will become official members once all 19 current members approve. In consenting to the enlargement, the US Senate also asked President George W. Bush to begin discussions with Nato allies about whether a new governance structure is needed for the alliance when it reaches 26 members. Three additional countries - Croatia, Albania and Macedonia - have begun discussions to join the alliance, and several senators expressed concern that Nato, which operates only with a consensus of all members, may become too unwieldy. In an interview with the Financial Times this week, Lord Robertson, the Nato secretary-general, dismissed such concerns, saying recent reforms in streamlining the alliance's decision-making process have made it easier for the enlarged group to come to consensus. "They said that after every enlargement of Nato," Lord Robertson said of the senators' concerns. Senior Bush administration officials also oppose any changes to Nato's consensus structure. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 9 06:29:59 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 15:29:59 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU integration struggles: arms industry woes Message-ID: <00cf01c31626$b49d93a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> EuroProp consortium comes back down to earth By Paul Betts and Kevin Done Financial Times; May 08, 2003 Celebrations by Europe's aircraft engine industry at winning the bidding contest to power Europe's future military transport aircraft, the A400M, were tempered yesterday by the scale of the challenge they face to make money from the contract. Jean-Paul B?chat, chief executive of Snecma, the state-owned French aero-engine maker with a 28 per cent stake in the EuroProp International consortium (EPI), acknowledged that the Europeans had been forced to trim their margins to win the engine business against a fiercely competitive bid from the Canadian subsidiary of Pratt & Whitney, the aero-engine arm of United Technologies of the US. Mr B?chat said the contract would not involve a loss for the four European partners. But he conceded it would probably not be greatly profitable either. "Will we make a lot of money? Probably not," he said. EPI comprises Snecma of France, Rolls-Royce of the UK and Germany's MTU, each with 28 per cent stakes, and ITP of Spain (owned 46.9 per cent by Rolls-Royce) with 16 per cent. Having snatched the contract away from P&W, the European consortium must now make the development effort work in practice. The first engine should be ready to test by August 2005 with the first flight due by September 2007, said G?nter Kappler, the veteran aerospace industry executive and Munich University professor brought in last October as managing director of EPI to lead the European bid. First deliveries of the A400M are scheduled for mid-2009. The engine selection should finally clear the way for seven European nations to ratify the ?15.3bn ($17.5bn) A400M programme during the next few weeks, ending a 20-year saga as European nations have argued back and forth about how best to meet their needs for military airlift capacity. The engine project has had a shorter but equally chequered history, with the TP400-D6 offering selected this week representing the fourth attempt by the Europeans to find a solution acceptable to Airbus. Initial competing efforts by Rolls-Royce and Snecma/ MTU were replaced by an earlier unsuccessful European consortium bid, which had included Fiat Avio of Italy. The failure of that design to win approval - Airbus claimed it was too heavy and that fuel consumption was too high - opened the door for P&W to enter the fray in spring last year. Definitive orders should now be placed for 180 aircraft, led by Germany with 60, France 50, Spain 27 and the UK with 25, with a further 10 orders from Turkey, seven from Belgium and one from Luxembourg. Italy and Portugal, both previously partners in the programme, dropped out along the way. The workshare for the engine project will be based on the shares represented by this customer base, rather than by the shareholding structure of the EPI consortium itself. Snecma will be responsible for channelling work to Belgium with ITP providing work to Turkey. EPI is headquartered in Munich with an important liaison office in Paris, which has acted as the main hub for the bidding team in recent months. The main responsibilities for the engines are already clearly delineated with Rolls-Royce, the expert in the three-shaft configuration chosen for the TP400-D6, which is responsible for the overall engine integration from its defence base in Bristol. Rob Sellick of Rolls-Royce, a veteran of the group's highly successful Trent civil jet engine development team, is the EPI technical director. Rolls-Royce's German subsidiary will build the high pressure compressor. MTU will provide the low pressure compressor and intermediate turbine, Snecma the high pressure turbine and combustion chamber and ITP the low pressure turbine and exhaust ducting. Fiat Avio will provide the gearbox as a sub-supplier. Operations director Pierre Drevet has come from Snecma, with Friedrich Lederer from MTU appointed as commercial director and Miguel Angel Bariego of ITP as logistics director. Mr Kappler said EPI would have full responsibility for certification of the engine and intellectual property rights. It would be the design authority with full control of the programme and a single point of contact for Airbus Military. European collaboration has not come easily, but Airbus Military hopes that the A400M will eventually challenge the US's global domination of the supply of military transport aircraft. From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 9 09:43:26 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 11:43:26 -0400 Subject: [A-List] EU stability & growth pact: Stiglitz critique References: <009701c31625$59543e00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <3EBBCC9E.4070806@mindspring.com> I have dealt with the issue of the undesirability of an "independent" central bank in my series on central banking in Asia Times. It is good to see Stiglitz sing the same tune with the credibility of a Nobel prize. As for inflation, everybody is now talking about the need for inflation targeting, while many of us have been arguing for it for a number of years on PKT. Akerlof's research has the same problem as all economic research: it needs past data to substantiate what common sense deems obvious in order to be taken seriously by the profession. This type of research serves only to cover ones professional behind. It tends to have nothing to do with creativeness by its very nature. Macroeconomics is a game of setting rules of the game which all participants try their best to bypass, break, or ignore without being disqualified and expelled. There are a number of ways through which rules are enforced in any game. On way is self termination where violation end the game itself. Since life does not end, even under great unnecessary pain of economic collapse, this type of self termination enforcement does not work in macroeconomics. Another way is through state policing, called government regulations. This has been attacked as antithetical to freedom, the alleged prerequisite for economic prosperity. Self regulation is preferred to government regulation on the ground that participants know best. The result is an exclusive game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is always larger than the number of participants. This is achieved by making membership to the club open only to the selected few. The financial sector, for example, really operates as a cartel, one of the remaining guilds in the modern economy. Another enforcement regime is to punish only the low and mid level soldiers who were merely carrying out implicit orders of maximizing profit by all means, while the specific responsibility of illegality is always confined to the lower levels. The top level is always protected and only indictable if the prosecutor makes a deal with the lower level guilty to finger the higher-ups. The Bank of New York's illegal role in money laundry for Russian gangster capitalism was confined to a vice president based in Moscow, despite that profit from such activities had been visibly celebrated in its annual reports for years. There is a joke about the annual May Day military parade in Moscow during Gorbachev time when a group of unruly civilians marched in lose formation behind the latest ICBM battalion. The nervous aides were busy telling the chief they did not arrange for the poor show where as Gorbachev told them to relax, that he personally approved the participation of this contingent of civilians. "They are economists and they are more deadly to capitalism than ICBMs," explained Gorbi. Henry C.K. Liu Michael Keaney wrote: > Don't trust the bankers' homilies > > The EU stability pact destabilises by cutting spending in a downturn > > Joseph Stiglitz > Friday May 9, 2003 > The Guardian > > France, Portugal and Germany are all flagrantly flouting the stability pact, > the agreement among eurozone members to keep their deficits below a critical > threshold (3% of GDP today, but lower, supposedly, in the future). France's > prime minister, Pierre Raffarin, defends his government's position by saying > that France was not prepared to impose austerity on its own people. If > France will not, other European leaders must wonder, why should they? > > Mr Raffarin was right to say that austerity would result if France obeyed > the pact's strictures, but in debates over economic policy, the truth is > seldom appreciated. There is a long list of central bankers' homilies that > are not supposed to be questioned. Do so and you are exiled from the circle > of those who supposedly know how the world "really" works. Here are three: > > An independent central bank is necessary for sound macroeconomic policy. The > truth: countries that do not have an independent central bank, such as > India, manage to contain inflation as effectively as those with independent > central banks. In Russia, an independent central banker, Viktor Gerashencko, > could not be removed for years, though he tolerated both inflation and > corruption. Generally, there is little evidence that countries with > independent central banks grow faster, have higher wages, or generate higher > incomes - indeed, that they perform better in any real sense than those that > do not. > > Once inflation starts, it increases at a faster and faster rate, and the > costs of reversing it are high. The truth: there is no evidence of an > inflation precipice, or that the costs of reversing inflation (in terms, > say, of pushing unemployment to high levels) are any greater than the > benefits from inflation (in terms, say, of allowing unemployment to fall to > low levels). > > Inflation is bad for growth and productivity. The truth: below a critical th > reshold - a threshold far beyond the levels of inflation that now prevail in > Europe and North America - there is no evidence of significant adverse > effects from inflation. On the contrary, recent research by Nobel laureate > economist George Akerlof and his colleagues suggests that pushing inflation > too low may impede growth, and that the critical threshold is higher for > countries, such as the post-communist transition economies, engaged in large > structural changes. > > When an economy faces a downturn, one should engage in expansionary fiscal > policies. But in a downturn tax revenues fall. Thus, debt must increase. But > the EU's stability pact, as commonly interpreted, requires either that tax > rates be raised (always difficult, especially in a recession) or that > expenditures be cut. Either way, such policies will exacerbate the downturn. > > The stability pact put into place an automatic economic destabiliser. But > the EU - indeed, every country - should seek stabilisers, policies that > automatically boost the economy in a downturn. The US is facing, albeit in a > weaker form, a similar problem. > > Most of America's 50 states have constitutional amendments that effectively > impose a balanced budget. As tax revenues drop due to the economic downturn, > the states are cutting back on expenditures, exacerbating America's slump - > and the world's. I warned of this problem more than a year ago, and I > suggested that the federal government pick up the tab for the shortfall in > state tax revenue, because the states did not cause the country's slowdown. > > At the time, there was some disagreement about how long the downturn would > last (I was a pessimist, and unfortunately I have been proved right). But I > argued that this was irrelevant: making up the states' shortfall would cost > the government nothing if the optimists turned out to be right, but it would > be just the right medicine if pessimists like me were correct. Instead, the > Bush administration pushed ahead with tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts that > were not designed to stimulate the economy and that, no surprise, have > failed to stimulate the economy. > > The lesson for Europe is clear: the EU should redefine its stability pact in > terms of the structural or full employment deficit - what the fiscal deficit > would be if the economy were performing at full employment. To do otherwise > is irresponsible. > > There does need to be a commitment to fiscal responsibility. In the long > run, governments should run balanced budgets, with surpluses in good years > making up for deficits in bad years. But to insist on an arbitrary budgetary > position in an economic downturn is to ignore everything we have learned > about economics in the past 70 years, risking the well-being of millions who > are thrown out of employment. > > > > > From slarson at skidmore.edu Fri May 9 11:24:07 2003 From: slarson at skidmore.edu (Sven R Larson) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 13:24:07 -0400 Subject: [A-List] EU stability & growth pact: Stiglitz critique References: <009701c31625$59543e00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <3EBBCC9E.4070806@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <3EBBE437.11362F21@skidmore.edu> The European situation will get even worse when the EU government is finally formed. An income tax is in the Brussels oven and the target is to claim a flat 5% rate. This idea is backed by a suggestion that member states will yield tax revenues so as to keep the total tax bill unchanged. Wanna bet your paycheck? Stiglitz is right in his critique but he misses the mark on the income tax issue. It makes little difference that some countries - even if it is France and Germany - are running deficits slightly in excess of Article 102, if the EU income tax is put to work (which will probably happen in about two years). Although the old EU member states will take a beating, the real losers are the ten soon-to-be new members. They desperately need to raise their purchasing power, not their taxes. I'm also a bit puzzled by Stiglitz' hint that Article 102 could be done away with. That is the least likely of all scenarios, and the process is monumental even when the Nice treaty has been enacted and softened unanimity as a member state vote requirement. It is more probable that we will see an escalated power struggle between Brussels on the one hand and the Berlin-Paris turncoat axis on the other. (Do keep in mind that the Germans were fiscal prudence fundamentalists when the Maastricht Treaty was designed.) What consequences this will have for the economic integration in Europe is relatively uncertain at this point but it is at least safe to say that using the euro as intermediate currency in Iraq is not a good idea if, at the same time, the EU is growing with ten new member states, all of whom will lower the EU standard of living average. /srl "Henry C.K. Liu" wrote: > > I have dealt with the issue of the undesirability of an "independent" > central bank in my series on central banking in Asia Times. It is good > to see Stiglitz sing the same tune with the credibility of a Nobel prize. > > As for inflation, everybody is now talking about the need for inflation > targeting, while many of us have been arguing for it for a number of > years on PKT. Akerlof's research has the same problem as all economic > research: it needs past data to substantiate what common sense deems > obvious in order to be taken seriously by the profession. This type of > research serves only to cover ones professional behind. It tends to have > nothing to do with creativeness by its very nature. Macroeconomics is a > game of setting rules of the game which all participants try their best > to bypass, break, or ignore without being disqualified and expelled. > There are a number of ways through which rules are enforced in any game. > On way is self termination where violation end the game itself. Since > life does not end, even under great unnecessary pain of economic > collapse, this type of self termination enforcement does not work in > macroeconomics. Another way is through state policing, called > government regulations. This has been attacked as antithetical to > freedom, the alleged prerequisite for economic prosperity. Self > regulation is preferred to government regulation on the ground that > participants know best. The result is an exclusive game of musical > chairs where the number of chairs is always larger than the number of > participants. This is achieved by making membership to the club open > only to the selected few. The financial sector, for example, really > operates as a cartel, one of the remaining guilds in the modern economy. > Another enforcement regime is to punish only the low and mid level > soldiers who were merely carrying out implicit orders of maximizing > profit by all means, while the specific responsibility of illegality is > always confined to the lower levels. The top level is always protected > and only indictable if the prosecutor makes a deal with the lower level > guilty to finger the higher-ups. The Bank of New York's illegal role in > money laundry for Russian gangster capitalism was confined to a vice > president based in Moscow, despite that profit from such activities had > been visibly celebrated in its annual reports for years. > > There is a joke about the annual May Day military parade in Moscow > during Gorbachev time when a group of unruly civilians marched in lose > formation behind the latest ICBM battalion. The nervous aides were busy > telling the chief they did not arrange for the poor show where as > Gorbachev told them to relax, that he personally approved the > participation of this contingent of civilians. "They are economists and > they are more deadly to capitalism than ICBMs," explained Gorbi. > > Henry C.K. Liu > > Michael Keaney wrote: > > Don't trust the bankers' homilies > > > > The EU stability pact destabilises by cutting spending in a downturn > > > > Joseph Stiglitz > > Friday May 9, 2003 > > The Guardian > > > > France, Portugal and Germany are all flagrantly flouting the stability pact, > > the agreement among eurozone members to keep their deficits below a critical > > threshold (3% of GDP today, but lower, supposedly, in the future). France's > > prime minister, Pierre Raffarin, defends his government's position by saying > > that France was not prepared to impose austerity on its own people. If > > France will not, other European leaders must wonder, why should they? > > > > Mr Raffarin was right to say that austerity would result if France obeyed > > the pact's strictures, but in debates over economic policy, the truth is > > seldom appreciated. There is a long list of central bankers' homilies that > > are not supposed to be questioned. Do so and you are exiled from the circle > > of those who supposedly know how the world "really" works. Here are three: > > > > An independent central bank is necessary for sound macroeconomic policy. The > > truth: countries that do not have an independent central bank, such as > > India, manage to contain inflation as effectively as those with independent > > central banks. In Russia, an independent central banker, Viktor Gerashencko, > > could not be removed for years, though he tolerated both inflation and > > corruption. Generally, there is little evidence that countries with > > independent central banks grow faster, have higher wages, or generate higher > > incomes - indeed, that they perform better in any real sense than those that > > do not. > > > > Once inflation starts, it increases at a faster and faster rate, and the > > costs of reversing it are high. The truth: there is no evidence of an > > inflation precipice, or that the costs of reversing inflation (in terms, > > say, of pushing unemployment to high levels) are any greater than the > > benefits from inflation (in terms, say, of allowing unemployment to fall to > > low levels). > > > > Inflation is bad for growth and productivity. The truth: below a critical th > > reshold - a threshold far beyond the levels of inflation that now prevail in > > Europe and North America - there is no evidence of significant adverse > > effects from inflation. On the contrary, recent research by Nobel laureate > > economist George Akerlof and his colleagues suggests that pushing inflation > > too low may impede growth, and that the critical threshold is higher for > > countries, such as the post-communist transition economies, engaged in large > > structural changes. > > > > When an economy faces a downturn, one should engage in expansionary fiscal > > policies. But in a downturn tax revenues fall. Thus, debt must increase. But > > the EU's stability pact, as commonly interpreted, requires either that tax > > rates be raised (always difficult, especially in a recession) or that > > expenditures be cut. Either way, such policies will exacerbate the downturn. > > > > The stability pact put into place an automatic economic destabiliser. But > > the EU - indeed, every country - should seek stabilisers, policies that > > automatically boost the economy in a downturn. The US is facing, albeit in a > > weaker form, a similar problem. > > > > Most of America's 50 states have constitutional amendments that effectively > > impose a balanced budget. As tax revenues drop due to the economic downturn, > > the states are cutting back on expenditures, exacerbating America's slump - > > and the world's. I warned of this problem more than a year ago, and I > > suggested that the federal government pick up the tab for the shortfall in > > state tax revenue, because the states did not cause the country's slowdown. > > > > At the time, there was some disagreement about how long the downturn would > > last (I was a pessimist, and unfortunately I have been proved right). But I > > argued that this was irrelevant: making up the states' shortfall would cost > > the government nothing if the optimists turned out to be right, but it would > > be just the right medicine if pessimists like me were correct. Instead, the > > Bush administration pushed ahead with tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts that > > were not designed to stimulate the economy and that, no surprise, have > > failed to stimulate the economy. > > > > The lesson for Europe is clear: the EU should redefine its stability pact in > > terms of the structural or full employment deficit - what the fiscal deficit > > would be if the economy were performing at full employment. To do otherwise > > is irresponsible. > > > > There does need to be a commitment to fiscal responsibility. In the long > > run, governments should run balanced budgets, with surpluses in good years > > making up for deficits in bad years. But to insist on an arbitrary budgetary > > position in an economic downturn is to ignore everything we have learned > > about economics in the past 70 years, risking the well-being of millions who > > are thrown out of employment. > > > > > > > > > > -- Dr. Sven R Larson Department of Economics Skidmore College 815, North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 (518) 580-5278 From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri May 9 14:54:48 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 13:54:48 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Saddam's lingering presence References: <00af01c31626$2bd5b520$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <00d501c3166d$3b535830$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" > The destruction of the statue, relayed around the world by crews encamped in > the Palestine Hotel opposite, provided the most symbolically important > moment of the war and sent a signal to the Iraqi people that Saddam had lost > power. The pulling down of the Statue was a staged media event: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/NYI304A.html ----------- From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri May 9 20:02:16 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 19:02:16 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Middle Eastern Free Trade Region? Message-ID: <000701c31698$3098dbb0$20fa5718@comintern> Bush Seeks a Free Trade Zone With the Mideast by 2013 By ELISABETH BUMILLER COLUMBIA, S.C., May 9 - President Bush today offered a powerful economic incentive to the nations of the Arab world by proposing the creation of a United States-Middle East free trade area by 2013. In a commencement speech to 1,200 graduates of the University of South Carolina, Mr. Bush promoted the trade deal as a symbol of American commitment to an Arab world alienated by two American-led wars in two Muslim countries in the last two years, and as a means of bringing stability to a region bypassed by globalization and torn by terrorism. "The Arab world has a great cultural tradition, but is largely missing out on the economic progress of our time," said Mr. Bush, who stood out among the maroon South Carolina robes in a deep blue graduation robe from Yale, his alma mater. The trade deal, he said, would bring the Middle East into an "expanding circle of opportunity." Mr. Bush also said that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who left tonight for the Middle East, and Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, would meet with regional leaders in Jordan next month to discuss economic liberalization. "We will work with our partners to ensure that small and midsized businesses have access to capital, and support efforts in the region to develop central laws on property rights and good business practices," Mr. Bush said. "By replacing corruption and self-dealing with free markets and fair laws, the people of the Middle East will grow in prosperity and freedom." Administration officials acknowledged that the idea of creating a free-trade zone that would stretch across North Africa and Asia from the Atlantic faced enormous hurdles. "This is not something that's going to occur tomorrow," a senior administration official said. Officials noted that the 23-nation region had more trade barriers than any other part of the world and that many of the countries had highly restricted economies. Some of the nations - Libya, Syria and Iran - are operating under United States economic sanctions. Today a senior administration official said that some nations were clearly more ready than others for joining a Middle East free trade area. The United States would work with the countries of the region in a series of graduated steps, the official said, and those that demonstrated sufficient economic and political reform would become eligible for inclusion in the deal. Officials said that the United States government would continue to help countries that demonstrated reforms to become members of the World Trade Organization. Democrats praised Mr. Bush's approach as an important step toward pressuring nations in the region to make economic and political reforms, but said it was unclear how far and how quickly the administration was willing to go in lifting trade barriers that hurt the Middle East. Edward Gresser, a former Clinton administration official who is now a trade analyst with the Democratic Progressive Policy Institute, said that the administration should immediately lift tariffs on such Middle East products as olive oil, figs, dates, leather goods, luggage and clothes to make them cheaper in the United States and create jobs in the Arab world. "That's where you could really get a lot of benefit and people to work," Mr. Gresser said. Both Mr. Gresser and Bush administration officials today pointed to the success of the trade deal between Jordan and the United States, signed during the Clinton administration and ratified during the Bush administration, which in the last year increased imports of Jordanian goods to the United States by 80 per cent, to $412 million. Mr. Gresser said that the deal has put 40,000 people in Jordan to work since 2000. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From wenhuadageming at attbi.com Sat May 10 05:11:26 2003 From: wenhuadageming at attbi.com (Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan) Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 07:11:26 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Is Dollar Weakness Signalling Problems Ahead? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030510070718.00a69218@mail.attbi.com> what's up with this "prudent bear" site? what do people think of it? xzy http://www.prudentbear.com/archive_comm_article.asp?category=International+Perspective&content_idx=22833 Is Dollar Weakness Signalling Problems Ahead? International Perspective, by Marshall Auerback May 6, 2003 ?As you know, core prices by many measures have increased very slowly over the last six months. With price inflation already at a low level, substantial further disinflation would be an unwelcome development, especially to the extent it put pressure on profit margins and impeded the revival of business spending.? ? Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, April 30, 2003 Late last year foreign purchases of U.S. equities fell to a very low level but remained positive. Since November the sharp rise of dollar holdings in the Federal Reserve foreign custody accounts suggests that official sector buying has financed almost the entirety of the U.S. current account deficit as private foreign investors have pulled back. Very recently dollar weakness has intensified. And, over the last week, the dollar has broken to new multi-year lows against the euro, Swiss franc, the Australian and Canadian dollars, and a whole host of Latin American currencies. Recently released figures from US Treasury confirm that private capital flows, as opposed to the official sector, are generating this weakness; the data demonstrates an increasing propensity by private investors abroad to sell dollar assets including U.S. equities. The multifold problems of the US economy ? its huge external imbalances, its precarious reliance on debt, and its post-bubble traumas ? have all been around for many years. So why the change in sentiment toward the greenback now? Despite the swift U.S. victory in the Iraq war and continued upside progress in the U.S. stock market, it appears that mounting worries about a messy occupation in Iraq, and a rising fear of the SARS epidemic is starting to weigh heavily on the dollar (indirectly via China), as is the generally poor constellation of economic data that has come out recently in the US itself. With April's job cuts, total layoffs over the past three months topped a half-million workers, a performance usually seen only during the depths of a recession. The long economic expansion during the 1990s was fuelled by an unprecedented rise in private expenditure relative to income, financed by a growing flow of net credit to the private sector, not a ?New Economy paradigm? in which the normal laws of economics were superseded. With Alan Greenspan quietly indicating renewed alarm at the state of the US economy at the end of his Congressional testimony last week (as the quote above illustrates), the markets could not have asked for a clearer signal that short rates were going to stay at these rock-bottom levels or move somewhat lower for a very long time. As the Federal Reserve comes closer to deploying unconventional measures to combat the risk of deflation, ?yield-capping? at the long end of the Treasury curve appears to have emerged as a leading option. This, argues Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach, will bias the yield differential against dollar-denominated assets. Needless to say, these are not policies optimally designed to attract foreign portfolio flows. In fact, Greenspan?s acknowledgement that ?substantial further disinflation? constituted ?an unwelcome development? marks an implicit recognition that high (reported) labour productivity is not supporting profit margins, but rather feeding through into non-financial corporate product price deflation which is offsetting the benefits of unit labour cost deflation. The US Treasury releases securities data with a long lag, with the February data released last week. The report indicates that there was net selling of $4.74bn of Treasuries by the foreign sector, the first net selling since April 2002. More revealing was the actual composition of the flows: Large net Treasury buying from Japan ($5.58bn) and China ($1.80bn) is consistent with our belief that the official sectors of both countries are still accumulating mountainous reserves which they have been using to prevent any natural rebalancing process from taking place in the US external account. Conversely, there has been widespread selling from the Euro area (-$3.4bn), the UK (-$2.9bn) and Canada (-$1.9bn). Of even greater concern, however, was net selling of -$4.19bn from the ?other Asia? region, generally dominated by Middle East countries. We had raised the possibility of this issue a few months ago, and cited such widespread liquidation of US securities as potential blowback from the Islamic world in response to the US position on Iraq. For those inclined to diminish the significance of the latter, former CIA operative, Robert Baer, notes that Saudi Arabia (as but one example) keeps ?as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in US banks ? an agreement worked out in the early eighties by the Reagan Administration, in an effort to get the Saudis to offset US government budget deficits. The Saudis hold another trillion dollars or so in the US stock markets. This gives them a remarkable degree of leverage in Washington? (?The Fall of the House of Saud?, Atlantic Monthly, May 2003). To diversify even a small proportion of this money out of dollars is quite relevant in the context of threats to the external value of the currency. That the US has moved quickly to withdraw the bulk of its troop presence from Saudi Arabia post the Iraqi conflict is further illustration that this symbiotic relationship between the Kingdom and the US is starting to break down. Moreover, though the comparative ease of victory in Iraq was deemed to be supportive of the dollar and the US economy, questions regarding the duration and the nature of the occupation remain foremost in overseas? creditors minds. Such concerns may ultimately override the initial victory euphoria. A prolonged and expensive occupation may revive uncomfortable questions about US imperial overstretch, and raise doubts as to whether American rule in Iraq will create a beacon of secular democracy in the Arab world, or follow Israel's track in Lebanon or the Soviet Union's in Afghanistan. Paradoxically, the quick exit that might alleviate the burden of occupation is not on the cards: were the US to fail to commit the time, effort, and funds to support the difficult transition to a stable, post-Saddam Iraq, then this would likely undercut any residual support for the regime change, leaving the rest of the west even less incentive to lend economic and diplomatic support. Linked to this political problem is the exogenous shock created by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Many health officials now argue that panic and the spreading fear of the disease has actually been worse than the epidemic itself. Be that as it may, this ?overreaction? has had real economic consequences, which have indirectly impacted the dollar as well. The HK and Chinese economies have been smashed by the epidemic: last month, Hong Kong?s economy experienced its worst monthly contraction in at least 5 years, largely as a consequence of the outbreak of SARS. In China, service-sector industries such as tourism and restaurants have been brought close to collapse. The entire retail sector is suffering badly. The fragile banking industry is tottering, and the enormous level of foreign investment China has enjoyed over the past decade is under threat. Since their respective currencies are pegged to the dollar, the only means of alleviating the resulting deflationary shock may have been through the expedient of devaluation, which by virtue of the peg, could only eventuate in the event of dollar weakness. Given China?s primary role in helping to establish the external value of the US dollar (by virtue of its mountainous accumulation of dollar reserves in the past), the SARS crisis has depressed the rate of accumulation in official reserves, which were being habitually cycled into dollars. This put greater pressure on the Europeans and others to soak up the excess dollars sloshing around as a function of the burgeoning current account deficit, and they were unable/unwilling to do so until the dollar assumed a weaker position vis-?-vis the euro. The process has contributed to a further problem in relation to US trade and the corresponding goal to alleviate the country?s external imbalances: Quite apart for the fact that the dollar has been weaker against the wrong currencies, its strength against the euro has not translated into real pressure yet on core Europe. Whatever US officials might say about ?punishing? the anti-war bloc of ?Old Europe?, net exports and current accounts in Germany, France and Belgium are still positive, and healthily so. The euro is working fine for core Europe. Anyone in the US administration who thinks that devaluation is an easy or straightforward option for ?disciplining? America?s recalcitrant allies might need to reconsider. The only real beneficiaries here, according to Goldman Sachs economist John Youngdahl, are the economies of emerging Asia, in that ?a weaker dollar is the means by which the Asian NICs try to lay off some of their SARS-related deterioration onto the Europeans.? SARS was just the last thing a teetering global economy needed at this point. The U.S. and world economy has generally been weaker this year than the consensus expected. Despite this, cyclical stocks have done well, while defensive stocks have done poorly. The most notable aspect of this tendency toward strength in the overall market is in some technology sectors such as semiconductors, where the SOX index had risen 20% on the year when the market peaked several days ago. To some extent this striking outperformance of tech shares in particular reflects an increasingly widespread conviction that history is repeating itself and that we are on the verge of seeing 1998 redux. Notwithstanding a NASDAQ that is still some 70 per cent off its peak, there remains an entrenched optimism among professional money managers, which exists independent of any belief in a strong economic rebound and its probable implications for profits. In 1998, the massive reliquefication of the credit system engendered one final speculative blow-off in the tech sector, even as analysts such as Fred Hickey warned of massively deteriorating fundamentals (warnings which were subsequently borne out in spades). To survive as a money manager during the 1990s meant getting long beta on any bull market move regardless of the fundamentals and history. This ?lesson? has not yet been unlearned, despite 3 years of catastrophic losses since March 2000. It is also worth noting that successive bites at the ?mortgage refi cherry? are yielding correspondingly less economic bang for the buck from the American consumer. This is despite the fact that consumer confidence measures have recovered a significant part of their earlier decline in response to the positive outcome of the war in Iraq. The ?Baghdad bounce? appears to have confirmed the view of many economic commentators (including the Fed chairman) that winning the Iraq war handily would buoy the sentiments of U.S. consumers, corporations and investors, and lead at a minimum to a 2-3 month window in which consumer and corporate spending would surge and stock prices would rally. In the post-war euphoria, however, very little thought has hitherto been devoted to the high costs of occupation, which the U.S. army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, estimated last year might require as many as 200,000 troops at a cost of $50 billion a year (this was based on his experiences conducting the war in Bosnia). Many have also assumed that Gulf War II, like Gulf War I, would become a self-financing proposition in which Iraqi oil exports would pay for occupation and reconstruction, even though it is clear that Shinseki?s estimates was a minimal amount required for foodstuffs and supplies for the Iraqi people. The market place has expectations about the occupation that could ultimately be sorely disappointed, particularly since the initial phase of the occupation has resulting in looting, civil anarchy and a power vacuum which has been rapidly filled by anti-American Islamic clerics. An indigenous political structure may now be created in the immediate post war power vacuum that the U.S. occupiers can now only dislodge with a degree of oppression they do not have the appetite to engage in. If so, there will be no effective U.S. occupation. The ?feel good? response of Western investors to the U.S. invasion in Iraq has been based on market expectations of a new order in the Middle East. This optimism is clearly not shared abroad, where many remain profoundly suspicious of US objectives in the area. Comparing the current US occupation of Iraq to the historical precedent of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon (where the IDF was initially welcomed as a liberating force as well), the Boston Globe?s Neil Swidey notes the following: ?In nearly every occupation, there is a tipping point-a defining incident that crystallizes the popular reception of the occupier. Right now, the views of many Iraqis toward the US occupation force are extremely fluid, changing depending on the circumstances of the day-or hour. They cheer US forces for bringing down a despised regime and delight in their newfound freedom to talk frankly or celebrate long-forbidden religious rituals. They curse the US forces for the darkness, for the lack of water, and for the looting. These are temporary reactions to temporary conditions. At some point-no one knows when-the views of Iraqis toward Americans will become more fixed. As in Lebanon, the views of different communities may coalesce at different times. But those tipping points, say scholars, are what US leaders need to be most concerned about, even now, before the US transition civilian administration is fully in gear in Baghdad.? If the U.S. occupation of Iraq is aborted by indigenous political developments, Wall Street?s Rosy Scenario for Iraq will come in question. Herein lays another adverse shock to investor sentiment and probably consumer and business attitudes that might exacerbate the weakness in the dollar and abort the rising U.S. equity market trend that has been given impetus by celebration over the U.S.?s quick victory in Iraq. There has been no final decisive moment of victory for the coalition forces that could lead to a further celebration. Instead, the war appears to be evolving into an occupation that may be extremely costly and possibly chaotic. If all of the good war news is out, market participants may now be inclined to focus on the negative economic news that they have been ignoring. This might be catalyzing a reduced propensity to hold dollars. But isn?t dollar weakness a necessary corrective to ensure less US-centric growth and more rebalancing of America?s external imbalances? In theory, this is true. In fact, as a matter of simple accounting identities, the ex-post government deficit, the current account and overall private sector financial position must all balance. But the ex-ante flows become the crucial determinant as to how these balances are achieved. In practice, it is unclear that foreign creditors would tolerate the corresponding threat to their capital gains and would therefore demand an equilibrating interest rate from the standpoint of ex-ante flows. At the short end, however, this is not going to happen any time soon, as Alan Greenspan has just told us and if it happens at the long end, it creates additional risks for debt-ridden private households. It is also the case that the fall in net export demand implied by reduced US domestic demand must be offset by some sort of domestic stimulus package in Euroland and Asia, neither of which yet appears on the cards. In the absence of an expansionary effort on an international scale (with a greater share to be taken by the rest of the world) dollar weakness will achieve nothing and the prospect of a severe growth recession will increase. The prospect of further increases of debt in the US is clearly unsustainable. But the dollar devaluation now underway in the US will fail to achieve global rebalancing unless changes are afoot in Europe and Asia. A recurrent theme of our earlier reports was that the United States' rising balance of payments deficit was generating an increasingly negative net asset position. This would eventually constrain the United States, as it would any country, when the cost of servicing the debt started to explode. Until recently, our fears have proved unfounded. A combination of deteriorating domestic fundamentals, coupled with the exogenous shocks engendered by the Iraqi war aftermath and the SARS epidemic, are beginning to change overseas? perceptions, refocusing attention on the increasingly tenuous nature of America?s economic prosperity. The management of monetary policy via the manipulation of short-term interest rates, however sensitively and skillfully this may be carried out, is totally inadequate as a means of dealing with the serious structural problems that threaten the future prosperity both of the United States and the rest of the world. Perhaps it is hoped that dollar weakness is the means by which America forces Europe and Japan to shift the world away from US-centric growth. But the response thus far to the dollar?s weakness does not, as yet, appear to presage the first step toward a more co-ordinated global expansionist policy or, indeed, any kind of co-operative economic multilateralism at all. Rather, it indicates nothing more than credit revulsion on the part of foreign investors. Will this credit revulsion ultimately expose the limits of US unilateralism? From annewilliamson at msn.com Sat May 10 07:59:32 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 09:59:32 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: UN Security Council Resolution References: <3EBB27C8.1080307@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <00ec01c316fc$62aa3f40$c9b7fea9@anne> Stratfor Analysis New Resolution Would Solidify U.S. Position as Global Hegemon May 09, 2003 Summary The United States has presented a resolution to the U.N. Security Council that would suspend the sanctions regime and transition the oil-for-food program in Iraq into a different form. The resolution is an attempt to get a U.N. stamp of approval on coalition efforts in Iraq -- which in reality will continue regardless of the Security Council's actions. But more than that, it is a challenge to every state that opposed U.S. policy in Iraq and a threat to those who might do so again. Analysis The United States presented a new resolution to the U.N. Security Council on May 9. At its core, the resolution would lift all sanctions against Iraq, legalize Iraqi oil sales, give the coalition de facto control over revenue from those sales for reconstruction purposes, and grant international approval to coalition efforts, both past and present. But the resolution has a second implication. The Bush administration is giving countries that opposed its efforts in Iraq a last chance to acquiesce to U.S. policy, or suffer the consequences of being in the bad graces of a global hegemon. The Resolution First and most important, the resolution would extend the legal cover granted by the oil-for-food program for another four months as the program is slowly phased out. This would allow Iraq to sell oil without the risk that proceeds could be seized by Iraq's numerous international creditors. Second, income from Iraq's oil would flow into an Iraqi Assistance Fund instead of its oil-for-food escrow account -- which is controlled by the United Nations. Although the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank would hold seats on an advisory board that oversees the fund, the coalition ultimately would decide when and how to spend the money. This authority would apply retroactively to the existing oil-for-food program, making it unlikely that, for instance, the $1.6 billion in contracts currently held by Russian companies would ever generate revenue. This also would provide the legal basis for the World Bank and IMF to return to Iraq. Currently, since there is no recognized government, the two organizations have no legal standing to assist in the country's reconstruction. Third, there would be no role for U.N. weapons inspectors, whose job would be formally taken over by the coalition. Fourth, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan could appoint a coordinator to assist in reconstruction efforts. This coordinator would have, at best, moral authority and the ability to offer recommendations. But the day-to-day presence of a representative of the U.N. Secretariat would grant international approval, both de facto and de jure, to future coalition actions. Fifth, the resolution declares that all products originating in Iraq and the proceeds from their sale "shall be immune from judicial, administrative, arbitration or any other proceedings arising in relation to claims against Iraq or the Authority [the coalition]." In other words, this means Iraq and its resources would belong to the coalition. All legal claims against the past and current government by countries that received oil contracts from the Hussein government, were owed debts by Hussein or lost business because of the coalition's actions would be null and void. The coalition's aim appears to be to protect future coalition government actions from any and all legal suits. Finally, the resolution would lift all sanctions against Iraq except those prohibiting the import of weapons. In short, the resolution touches on all of the issues to which the coalition of states that opposed U.S. efforts in Iraq object. It would retroactively legitimize U.S. actions, eject all non-coalition interests from Iraq and enshrine U.S. hegemony. The language of the resolution is crafted in a confrontational and at times almost condescending manner -- in a way that leaves little, if any, room for compromise. The Meaning The timing is close to perfect. The world is still stunned by the speed at which the United States conquered Iraq, and the anti-war coalition is quite spectacularly disorganized. Should the United States delay too long, there is a chance that the opposition could coalesce again into a coherent political force. It is simply too early at this point to project how individual powers will react to the resolution. Many states -- including France, Germany and Russia -- this week have sounded notes of compromise on many aspects of recent U.S. policy, particularly in regard to the lifting of sanctions against Iraq. The new resolution, however, would take the U.S. position in Iraq light-years beyond what the anti-war states were willing to consider -- and even the United Kingdom, Washington's staunchest ally, cannot be happy with its wording. That was precisely the intent. The United States is generating a moment of crisis for the countries that opposed its Iraq policy to this point. The war in Iraq was not just about fighting al Qaeda or intimidating the Arab world into acquiescence; it was also about showing that the United States could not and would not be constrained by the international community or international law. When viewed in this light, the new resolution is not merely the next logical step in U.S. efforts to secure Iraq, but also a blunt ultimatum to those who have opposed Washington over the past several months. The rest of the world has seen clearly that the United States can and will use its full military strength to achieve its foreign policy goals. Washington is now presenting them with a choice: they can capitulate to American power and play Washington's game by Washington's rules, or they can continue to resist and freeze relations into a cycle of hostility. With the proposed U.N. resolution, the Bush administration in essence is saying that it can accept that the stance of the anti-war coalition to this point was based on principle -- or greed. However, if the positions of anti-war states do not change, then their past opposition will be viewed as policy -- not as a fluke -- and will not go unpunished. Washington expects to be respected as global hegemon. The resolution will not be popular. But Stratfor does not expect debate to be vociferous. The governments of each state on the Security Council -- once they stop fuming -- will have some serious thinking to do about their relationship with the United States. Stratfor already has detected a sort of frantic rush in national capitals as world leaders come to grips with this new American move. In Washington's view, it is time for all of them to reassess their policies and find a means of fitting into the U.S. paradigm -- or to set their opposition to the United States in stone and suffer the consequences. Copyright 2003 Strategic Forecasting LLC. All rights reserved. From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 10 11:24:07 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 13:24:07 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: UN Security Council Resolution References: <3EBB27C8.1080307@mindspring.com> <00ec01c316fc$62aa3f40$c9b7fea9@anne> Message-ID: <3EBD35B7.9020307@mindspring.com> It is an occupation of the UN escalated from merely dominance of the UN by the US. France and Russia will not veto the new US resolution in return for being given some of the "reconstruction" contracts and an assurance of their Iraqi debt will not be invalidated. What took 10 weeks to destroy will take 10 years to rebuild. Henry C.K. Liu annewilliamson wrote: > Stratfor Analysis > > New Resolution Would Solidify U.S. Position as Global Hegemon > May 09, 2003 > > Summary > > The United States has presented a resolution to the U.N. Security Council > that would suspend the sanctions regime and transition the oil-for-food > program in Iraq into a different form. The resolution is an attempt to get a > U.N. stamp of approval on coalition efforts in Iraq -- which in reality will > continue regardless of the Security Council's actions. But more than that, > it is a challenge to every state that opposed U.S. policy in Iraq and a > threat to those who might do so again. > > Analysis > > The United States presented a new resolution to the U.N. Security Council on > May 9. At its core, the resolution would lift all sanctions against Iraq, > legalize Iraqi oil sales, give the coalition de facto control over revenue > from those sales for reconstruction purposes, and grant international > approval to coalition efforts, both past and present. > > But the resolution has a second implication. The Bush administration is > giving countries that opposed its efforts in Iraq a last chance to acquiesce > to U.S. policy, or suffer the consequences of being in the bad graces of a > global hegemon. > > The Resolution > > First and most important, the resolution would extend the legal cover > granted by the oil-for-food program for another four months as the program > is slowly phased out. This would allow Iraq to sell oil without the risk > that proceeds could be seized by Iraq's numerous international creditors. > > Second, income from Iraq's oil would flow into an Iraqi Assistance Fund > instead of its oil-for-food escrow account -- which is controlled by the > United Nations. Although the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund > and the World Bank would hold seats on an advisory board that oversees the > fund, the coalition ultimately would decide when and how to spend the money. > This authority would apply retroactively to the existing oil-for-food > program, making it unlikely that, for instance, the $1.6 billion in > contracts currently held by Russian companies would ever generate revenue. > This also would provide the legal basis for the World Bank and IMF to return > to Iraq. Currently, since there is no recognized government, the two > organizations have no legal standing to assist in the country's > reconstruction. > > Third, there would be no role for U.N. weapons inspectors, whose job would > be formally taken over by the coalition. > > Fourth, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan could appoint a coordinator to > assist in reconstruction efforts. This coordinator would have, at best, > moral authority and the ability to offer recommendations. But the day-to-day > presence of a representative of the U.N. Secretariat would grant > international approval, both de facto and de jure, to future coalition > actions. > > Fifth, the resolution declares that all products originating in Iraq and the > proceeds from their sale "shall be immune from judicial, administrative, > arbitration or any other proceedings arising in relation to claims against > Iraq or the Authority [the coalition]." In other words, this means Iraq and > its resources would belong to the coalition. All legal claims against the > past and current government by countries that received oil contracts from > the Hussein government, were owed debts by Hussein or lost business because > of the coalition's actions would be null and void. The coalition's aim > appears to be to protect future coalition government actions from any and > all legal suits. > > Finally, the resolution would lift all sanctions against Iraq except those > prohibiting the import of weapons. > > In short, the resolution touches on all of the issues to which the coalition > of states that opposed U.S. efforts in Iraq object. It would retroactively > legitimize U.S. actions, eject all non-coalition interests from Iraq and > enshrine U.S. hegemony. The language of the resolution is crafted in a > confrontational and at times almost condescending manner -- in a way that > leaves little, if any, room for compromise. > > The Meaning > > The timing is close to perfect. The world is still stunned by the speed at > which the United States conquered Iraq, and the anti-war coalition is quite > spectacularly disorganized. Should the United States delay too long, there > is a chance that the opposition could coalesce again into a coherent > political force. > > It is simply too early at this point to project how individual powers will > react to the resolution. Many states -- including France, Germany and > Russia -- this week have sounded notes of compromise on many aspects of > recent U.S. policy, particularly in regard to the lifting of sanctions > against Iraq. The new resolution, however, would take the U.S. position in > Iraq light-years beyond what the anti-war states were willing to consider -- > and even the United Kingdom, Washington's staunchest ally, cannot be happy > with its wording. > > That was precisely the intent. > > The United States is generating a moment of crisis for the countries that > opposed its Iraq policy to this point. The war in Iraq was not just about > fighting al Qaeda or intimidating the Arab world into acquiescence; it was > also about showing that the United States could not and would not be > constrained by the international community or international law. > > When viewed in this light, the new resolution is not merely the next logical > step in U.S. efforts to secure Iraq, but also a blunt ultimatum to those who > have opposed Washington over the past several months. > > The rest of the world has seen clearly that the United States can and will > use its full military strength to achieve its foreign policy goals. > Washington is now presenting them with a choice: they can capitulate to > American power and play Washington's game by Washington's rules, or they can > continue to resist and freeze relations into a cycle of hostility. > > With the proposed U.N. resolution, the Bush administration in essence is > saying that it can accept that the stance of the anti-war coalition to this > point was based on principle -- or greed. However, if the positions of > anti-war states do not change, then their past opposition will be viewed as > policy -- not as a fluke -- and will not go unpunished. Washington expects > to be respected as global hegemon. > > The resolution will not be popular. But Stratfor does not expect debate to > be vociferous. The governments of each state on the Security Council -- once > they stop fuming -- will have some serious thinking to do about their > relationship with the United States. Stratfor already has detected a sort of > frantic rush in national capitals as world leaders come to grips with this > new American move. > > In Washington's view, it is time for all of them to reassess their policies > and find a means of fitting into the U.S. paradigm -- or to set their > opposition to the United States in stone and suffer the consequences. > > > > > Copyright 2003 Strategic Forecasting LLC. All rights reserved. > > > > From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Sat May 10 07:49:26 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 10:49:26 -0300 Subject: [A-List] LA VERDADERA DIMENSION DE LAS INUNDACIONES DE STA FE Message-ID: <4136-220035610134925900@n2b4c1> Graciela CoronelNormalwin98282003-05-04T15:45:00Z2003-05-10T03:35:00Z2003-05-10T03:35:00Z42086118929923146049.3821 21 Envio de graciela antonia coronel [Juventud MNyP] RV: Santa Fe. Estimados amigos de la Red del MNyP Les envio este comentario que puede ser de utilidad para entender mejor la magnitud del desastre de Santa F?.. Gracias ING RAGNO Aquella teor?as que no encuentre aplicaci?n pr?ctica en la vida es una acrobacia del pensamiento". Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902); l?der espiritual y reformador hind?. INUNDACIONES EN SANTA FE La situaci?n es como si se hubiera roto en el R?o Salado, un dique, aguas arriba de la Ciudad de Santa F?. Con un alerta de 48 hs, cuantas v?ctimas fatales se hubiesen evitado. ?A ning?n T?cnico, ge?logo, o Ingeniero se le ocurri? llamar y alertar a defensa Civil o a los Bomberos para que realicen una evacuaci?n? Hemos escuchado a los t?cnicos del INTA, del INA, y al Rector de la Universidad del Litoral explicando y diciendo que desde el a?o 92 presentaron proyectos y que ellos advirtieron. Pero en realidad, como profesional, siento una inmensa pena y verg?enza haciendo un " mea culpa " ya que si bien es cierto que de peregrinar entre tanta burocracia uno baja los brazos y muchos terminan convirti?ndose en ilustres acad?micos esc?pticos y desilusionados que cuando tienen que actuar se inmovilizan, eso no justifica tama?o desacierto. Los pol?ticos se nutren de los t?cnicos pero tambi?n los t?cnicos necesitamos a los pol?ticos para promocionar correctamente los beneficios y convencerlos de la ejecuci?n de las obras que son de indispensable realizaci?n, haci?ndole llegar informaci?n en tiempo y forma para que tomen las decisiones correctas, que al final como balance, resultan un ahorro para toda la sociedad. Cu?nto se hubiese ahorrado si se hubieran realizado las obras que correspond?an en el Salado, esto ya es una triste an?cdota. El proyecto de desarrollo de la Canalizaci?n del R?o Bermejo y Pilcomayo duerme el sue?o de los justos desde hace casi 50 a?os. Siempre el problema en la Ingenieria es de "Magnitud" Un ejemplo: 300 - 1000 - 3000 Son magnitudes abstractas que pueden significar lo siguiente: El R?o Dulce, aqu? en Santiago del Estero, tiene un caudal promedio de 300m3/seg. y cuando crece algunos veranos, como el del a?o 2000 cuando estuvo aqu? la Sra. Meijide, anega vastas zonas de la provincia y alcanza un caudal m?ximo de 900 a 1000 m3/seg. Si por alguna raz?n se averiara (Dios y los t?cnicos as? no lo permitan) el dique de la Presa R?o Hondo, que est? a 70 Km de Santiago) y el r?o trajera un caudal de 3000 m3/seg. , la alerta ser?a M?xima para las poblaciones aguas abajo que ser?n inundadas en el termino de 24 hs. Para lo cual deber?an estar informadas, preparadas y concientizadas con simulacros de evacuaci?n que se deber?an realizar peri?dicamente. Haciendo la analog?a, all? en Santa F? el Domingo 27 se estaban fisurando las defensas y a 100 Km aguas arriba de la Ciudad de Santa F? el Caudal que tra?a el Salado era de 3000 m./seg., ( 10 veces superior al caudal que trae cualquier otro verano). 48 hs despu?s, el mi?rcoles, fue el desastre, cuando llegaron esos 3000 m3/seg. a la ciudad. ?A ning?n T?cnico, ge?logo, o Ingeniero se le ocurri? llamar y alertar defensa Civil o a los Bomberos, que se ven?a esa masa de agua? Con un alerta para evacuaci?n, cuantas v?ctimas fatales se hubiesen evitado. En el Barrio de La Boca sonaba la sirena de los Bomberos de la Vuelta de Rocha y todos sab?amos qu? hacer cuando crec?a el Riachuelo por arriba de los 3.00 metros, 3.90 desbordaba. En 1940 fue la m?xima inundaci?n y el Riachuelo super? la cota de los 4.40 mts. Es esta cota de 4.40 mts con la que fueron realizadas las obras hidr?ulicas de defensa, que hacen que desde 1995, por sudestadas del R?o de la Plata, no se inunde m?s La Boca. Don Benito Quinquela Mart?n desde el cielo, agradecido. Atte. Ing JORGE RAGNO SANTIAGO DEL ESTERO gcfarm at arnet.com.ar " No basta con alcanzar la sabidur?a, es necesario saber utilizarla". Cicer?n, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 a. C.); pol?tico y escritor latino. Inundaciones en Santa F?, R?o Salado y Canalizaci?n del R?o Bermejo : El proyecto de desarrollo de canalizaci?n del R?o Bermejo prev?e en su canal Norte Sur, desde Pichanal (Salta) hasta el puerto de Santa F?, la construcci?n de una hidrov?a por donde circulen barcazas que pueden transportar mil toneladas cada una. Este canal pasa por Tostado, al Norte de Santa F? y coincide desde all? con el cauce del R?o Salado que viene desde Santiago del Estero y Salta. Prev?e el escurrimiento de las Aguas del Salado hacia el Paran? de una forma ordenada, evitando derrames de su cauce, teniendo en cuenta que la cuenca del R?o Salado en el Norte de Santa F?, por arriba de los 80 mm de lluvias, se encuentra saturada ( el terreno no absorbe ? m?s agua)? en esta oportunidad llovi? m?s de 200 mm en pocas horas y 1200 mm en 4 meses. El R?o Salado nace en Salta en el Dique Cabra Corral llam?ndose Juramento, cuando pasa por Santiago del Estero tiene un caudal de apenas 20 m3/seg y cuando sale de Santiago del Estero y entra en Santa F?, en la zona de Tostado, a veces ni lleva agua ( en verano triplica su caudal) . A partir de all? las precipitaciones anuales son mayores y desemboca en el Paran? cruzando la Ciudad de Santa F? con 100m3/seg aproximadamente ( aumentando en verano) En esta oportunidad? su caudal.lleg? a 3000 m3/seg Al r?o Salado, Juan Bautista Alberdi propuso canalizarlo all? por 1860 y el gobernador de Santiago del Estero, Taboada, puso la piedra fundamental de esa obra. Que jam?s se hizo. Con la realizaci ? n del ? Proyecto de desarrollo ?Canalizaci ? n del R ? o Bermejo y R ? o ?Pilcomayo ?, que incluye la canalizaci ? n de la cuenca sur? del R ? o Salado donde la capacidad de transporte de agua ser?a de 200 m3/seg promedio y m ? xima de 600 a 700 m3seg , m?s la construcci ? n de defensas con el material extra ? do del canal,? m?s un sistema de control y predicci ? n de aumentos de caudales, se hubiera reducido al m ? nimo las p ? r didas materiales y no se hubiera lamentado v ? ctimas fatales. Seg?n las informaciones de la Comisi?n Regional del Bermejo (CO.RE.BE.) el Gobernador? Reuteman , que es integrante de la comisi?n junto al resto de los gobernadores de la Cuenca del Bermejo, mas el gobernador de Santiago del Estero y el ? Ministro del interior, nunca apoy? la obra porque no observaba que beneficios tra?a a su provincia de Santa F?. (??) ING JORGE RAGNO ????????? mail : gcfarm at arnet.com.ar :gcfarm at arnet.com.ar gcfarm at arnet.com.ar ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Santiago del Estero, 4/5/2003 Mas informaci?n buscar en http://www.ina.gov.ar "http://www.ina.org.ar" www.ina.org.ar ???? http://www.corebe.org.ar "http://www.corebe.org.ar" www.corebe.org.ar http://www.oea.org.bo/proyecto2.htm Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP, deben suscribirse en :< altasmnyp at argentina.com> y altasmnyp at mnyp.org. Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en los barrios. La mesa de mujeres Adolfo Presidente nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos < mujeresbsas at argentina.com y mujeresbsas at mnyp.org En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a < bajasmnyp at argentina.com y bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista, con las debidas disculpas. PARA UN ARGENTINO, NO DEBE HABER NADA MEJOR QUE OTRO ARGENTINO. Mayo de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?. Nuestras paginas web son: www.institutofederal.org http://www.mnyp.org/ www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com// www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA, y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 100 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presentara el ultimo 7 de marzo en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, que Ud. puede pedir por mail al MNyP < mnyp at ciudad.com.ar > , personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486 Por decision del Dr. Adolfo Rodriguez Saa manifestada en la reunion del Comando Superior del MNyP en Buenos Aires el martes 10 de septiembre de 2002, no se recibe ni se permiten recibir aportes economicos empresarios a los gastos de campa?a de manera encubierta o desmedida salvo de las pymes que acuden a nuestras cenas organizadas por la Comision de Fondos, justamente para recaudar fondos y el esfuerzo que hacen nuestros amigos que ganan bien y han estado pagando una cuota mensual para sumar al esfuerzo. Esto es asi porque se desea llegar al gobierno nacional cuando el pueblo lo decida, con las manos libres para poder hacer efectiva la revolucion nacional y popular sin ningun compromiso con los factores de poder. El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. El Comando Superior Nacional esta compuesto por: Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?, Adrian Morales, Alberto Hensel, Alberto Rodriguez Sa?, Alberto Turcato, Aldo Rico, Alejandro Amor, Alfredo Allende, Alfredo Reto, Amparo Cueto, Ana Savignano, Andres Poggi, Andres Castillo, Arturo Negri, Oscar B?nica, Bold?, Carlos Sergnese, Catalina Pantuso, Coqui Catal?n, Cristina Guzm?n, Daniel Barberis, Daniel Carbonetto, Domingo Moreira, Dorita Lucero, Eduardo Avila, Eduardo Berchot, Enrique Basualdo Enrique Rodriguez, Enrique Vignolo, Eugenia Trigo, Federico Godio, Gerardo Alzamora, Gerardo Vallejo, Gilda Caro, Gisela Vartalitis, Giuliano, Gustavo Casas, Gustavo Valenzuela, Hector Mart?n, Horacio Ghilini, Horacio Obregon Cano, Hugo Moyano, Jeronimo Martoccia, Jes?s Mar?a Tito Plaza, Jorge Benalcazar, Jorge Cravero, Jorge Garcia, Jorge Huidobro, Jorge Enea Spilimbergo, Jorge Rachid, Jorge Varela, Jose Rodr?guez, Juan Garcia, Juan Manuel Palacios, Julian Licastro, Julio Casavelos, Juanchi Moreyra, Julio Diaz Lozano, Julio Piumato, Liliana Finocciaro, Leon Guinzburg, Luis Luco, Luis Lusqui?os, Marcos Garcia, Maria Alejandra Ungaro, Maria Alicia Lemme, Maria Angelica Torrontegui, Maria Berganini, Maria Goniel, Marino Fredes, Mario Alvarez, Martin Garcia, Melchor Posse, Miriam Benedetto, Mirta Videla, N?lida Beatriz Morales, Nestor Zapata, Norberto Hubeli, Pablo Challu, Pablo Moyano, Pascual Rampi, Patricia P?rez, Pedro Raitieri, Ricardo Basualdo, Ricardo Jorge, Roberto Basualdo, Roberto Roitman, Rosa Carrasco, Santiago Julio, Sofia Gonzalez, Soledad Sampaolesi, Victor Novillo, Walter Gomez. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP< mnyp at ciudad.com.ar , < mnypnacional at argentina.com La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . El Area de Participaci?n Nacional del Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina invita a todos los amigos a visitar la P?gina web del IFRA que es http://www.institutofederal.org /y la del IFRA Chubut. cuya direcci?n es : http://www.geocities.com/ifrachubut En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 45166 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5138 bytes Desc: image002.jpg URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Sat May 10 10:26:07 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 13:26:07 -0300 Subject: [A-List] MEDIOS DE COMUNICACION / PAGO EN EFECTIVO DE DUHALDE Message-ID: <4135-22003561016267600@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98102003-05-10T15:30:00Z2003-05-10T15:30:00Z6249514227win11828174719.3821 21 PAGO EN EFECTIVO DE DUHALDE A LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACI?N QUE LO ACOMPA?ARON EN EL OPERATIVO KIRCHNER BUENOS AIRES DECRETO DE NECESIDAD Y URGENCIA PARA LA RADIODIFUSION BUENOS AIRES, Mayo 10, (MECOM Producciones-Ultimo Momento) Mediante un proyecto de DNU (decreto de necesidad y urgencia) se intenta ?declarando la emergencia de la radiodifusi?n- extender por 10 a?os el vencimiento de las concesiones para la explotaci?n de las frecuencias de radio y televisi?n en todo el pa?s . Seg?n sus cr?ticos, la medida no tiene un fundamento jur?dico y hasta se debate si no atenta contra la libertad de expresi?n (asimilando el derecho constitucional de libertad de prensa), del ejercicio de la radiodifusi?n como un derecho del conjunto de los ciudadanos y violatorio del Pacto de San Jos? de Costa Rica (que dice que el abuso o la restricci?n en la disponibilidad de frecuencias del espectro radioel?ctrico ?es decir, cuando se restringe del uso p?blico un recurso natural como las frecuencias- constituye una violaci?n de la libertad de expresi?n). En lo pol?tico, es una concesi?n de Eduardo Duhalde a las presiones corporativas, que han impedido ?desde 1980 a la fecha- la sanci?n de una legislaci?n moderna para la radio y la televisi?n. Adem?s, le impedir?a al pr?ximo Presidente de la Naci?n, encarar una pol?tica seria en materia de medios audiovisuales. S?lo se apunta a fortalecer a los licenciatarios m?s viejos (los hist?ricos de la televisi?n del interior, los beneficiarios de las privatizaciones en Buenos Aires y los titulares de las AM concesionadas hace ya m?s de 20 a?os), cuando muchos de ellos incumplen la legislaci?n en materia de par?metros t?cnicos, contenidos, concentraci?n de la propiedad y conformaci?n irregular de cadenas o redes de repetidoras. Tambi?n supone la condonaci?n total o parcial de las deudas contra?das por las infracciones a la ley 22.285 (Decretos 1201/98, 644/99, 947/99, 762/01, 2362/02) sin que se hayan mejorado los contenidos y la calidad de las emisiones, aunque en todos los casos se argument? ?la grave situaci?n econ?mica que atraviesan las emisoras argentinas?. Tambi?n intentaron mediante el Decreto 1520/99 (del 5 de diciembre de 1999) el canje de las deudas fiscales del sector por espacios de publicidad. Adem?s, el 23 de Noviembre de 2001, lograron ?mediante el Decreto 1522/01- la reducci?n del Gravamen a la Radiodifusi?n en m?s de un 40 por ciento ?lo cual permitir? liberar recursos que promover?n la recuperaci?n y el pleno desarrollo de las empresas de radiodifusi?n del pa?s? (Ver Decreto 1522/01). Pero lo m?s grave del proyecto bajo consideraci?n es que se hace recaer la responsabilidad del dictado de la norma en la propia morosidad del Estado como administrador de las frecuencias del espectro radioel?ctrico. (?Que a la situaci?n de crisis descripta debe adicionarse la carencia de recursos presupuestarios para la normal convocatoria a concursos p?blicos de adjudicaci?n de nuevas licencias?). Es decir, el Estado Nacional invoca su propia inacci?n e incapacidad, para fundamentar la pr?rroga de concesiones sobre el uso de recursos naturales no renovables (como las frecuencias radioel?ctricas) en desmedro de miles de ciudadanos que aspiran a regularizar su situaci?n o que desean ejercer sus derechos constitucionales al comercio y a la difusi?n de sus ideas. El texto del proyecto de decreto fue originado en el Comit? Federal de Radiodifusi?n (Comfer), e ingres? a la Secretar?a Legal y T?cnica de la Presidencia de la Naci?n el lunes 14 de abril de 2003 y ese mismo d?a, durante la noche, se envi? el anteproyecto a la Procuraci?n del Tesoro de la Naci?n, organismo que interviene en todo Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia. Este organismo en la actualidad tiene el anteproyecto. Es evidente el significado de esta medida que tiende a consolidar la concentraci?n de los medios en ciertos grupos econ?micos y pol?ticos . Aqu? el texto completo del proyecto: ?DECLARASE, CON CAR?CTER DE NECESIDAD Y URGENCIA, LA EMERGENCIA ECON?MICO-FINANCIERA DE LOS SERVICIOS DE RADIODIFUSI?N CONTEMPLADOS EN LA LEY 22.285...? BUENOS AIRES, VISTO las leyes N? 22.285 y sus modificatorias, N? 23.313, N? 24.522, N? 25.344, N? 25.413, N? 25.561, N? 25.563 y N? 25.589, los Decretos N? 286/81, del 18 de febrero de 1981, N? 1005/99, del 10 de septiembre de 1999, N? 1116/2000, del 29 de noviembre de 2000, N? 1387/2001, del 1? de noviembre de 2001, N? 71/2002, del 9 de enero de 2002, N? 264/2002, del 8 de febrero de 2002, y N? 883/2002, del 27 de mayo de 2002, las Resoluciones N? 830 ? COMFER/93, del 5 de noviembre de 1993 y N? 374 ? COMFER/94, del 4 de abril de 1994, respectivamente, y CONSIDERANDO Que la Ley N? 22.285 declara de inter?s p?blico a los servicios de radiodifusi?n. Que el art?culo 5? de la ley 22.285, expresa que ?los servicios de radiodifusi?n deben colaborar con el enriquecimiento cultural de la poblaci?n, seg?n lo exigen los objetivos asignados por esta ley al contenido de las emisiones de radiodifusi?n, las que deber?n propender a la elevaci?n de la moral de la poblaci?n, como as? tambi?n al respeto de la libertad, la solidaridad social, la dignidad de las personas, los derechos humanos, el respeto por las instituciones de la rep?blica, el afianzamiento de la democracia y la preservaci?n de la moral cristiana?. Que el bien jur?dico bajo tutela, no es otro que el configurado por la contribuci?n que los medios de radiodifusi?n comportan para el desarrollo social, c?vico, cultural y econ?mico de la sociedad en general. Que, consecuentemente, la ley impone a los licenciatarios de servicios de radiodifusi?n, la carga de asegurar la regularidad de las transmisiones, el cumplimiento de los horarios de programaci?n, y el mantenimiento de la infraestructura t?cnica en condiciones sastisfactorias de funcionamiento a los fines de una prestaci?n eficiente. Que dentro de las potestades inherentes al Poder Ejecutivo Nacional, existe la de formular las pol?ticas p?blicas necesarias y oportunas al bien com?n, comprensivas de la mayor?a de los aspectos que, puntualmente, hagan al universo de la realidad del pa?s. Que la Argentina atraviesa la etapa m?s aguda de la evoluci?n de su crisis, instalada en todos los niveles, social, laboral, cultural, econ?mico y financiero. Que tal cuadro de situaci?n, ha sido determinante del accionar del gobierno nacional, en cuanto a reformular el marco gen?rico y normativo de la pol?tica nacional, sustentado en razones de urgencias nacionales, de toda ?ndole e insoslayables, como lo fuera la sucesiva legislaci?n de emergencia, como la modificaci?n a la ley N? 24.522, de Concursos y Quiebras, ley N? 25.589, la declaraci?n de Emergencia Econ?mico-Financiera, ley N? 25.344, la Declaraci?n de Emergencia P?blica y Reforma del R?gimen Cambiario, ley N? 25.561, la normativa acerca de la Emergencia Laboral, ley N? 25.561, y Decretos N? 264/2002 y N? 883/2002, la celebraci?n de reiterados pactos fiscales con las provincias. Que la grave ca?da de los m?rgenes de la actividad productiva, se ha visto reflejada en una sensible reducci?n de la recaudaci?n tributaria, y una significativa disminuci?n del vol?men de recursos, m?nimamente necesarios para sustentar las funciones escenciales del Estado y honrar los compromisos exigibles. Que en lo concerniente al sector privado, y espec?ficamente, al formado por los actores intervinientes en la prestaci?n de servicios de radiodifusi?n, las m?ltiples presentaciones formuladas ante la Autoridad de Aplicaci?n, dan cuenta suficiente de la dimensi?n e impacto negativo que tales circunstancias han provocado e incidido sobre sus econom?as o patrimonios, arribando en algunos supuestos al uso del remedio concursal. Que ello, sin perjuicio de hacer constar que al asumir dicha calidad y a su tiempo, los prestadores aceptaron su exclusiva responsabilidad en cuanto a la inversi?n que el funcionamiento y explotaci?n de las difusoras les demandare, como as? mismo, al cumplimiento de las normas regulatorias de su actividad. Que no obstante la observaci?n precedente, debe concluirse que la responsabilidad indicada ha surgido dentro de un ?mbito absolutamente diferente, en el cual no resultaban previsibles los actuales hechos econ?micos. Que la finalidad jur?dica que legitima la medida a adoptar tiende fundamentalmente a alentar la regularidad en la prestaci?n y la estricta observancia de la ley, por parte de los adjudicatarios de los servicios de radiodifusi?n. Que a la situaci?n de crisis descripta debe adicionarse la carencia de recursos presupuestarios para la normal convocatoria a concursos p?blicos de adjudicaci?n de nuevas licencias. Que la rese?ada y cr?tica situaci?n de emergencia que aqueja al sector y al pa?s todo, constituye una verdadera circunstancia excepcional que vuelve de cumplimiento imposible proseguir la ordinaria tramitaci?n prevista por la Constituci?n Nacional para la sanci?n legislativa, procediendo de toda urgencia y necesidad al dictado de un acto del Poder Ejecutivo Nacional, con alcance en todos aquellos aspectos que requirieren una ley formal, y no le estuvieren vedados. Que merituando el deterioro que se advierte en el sector, la importancia de preservar la regularidad de las prestaciones de los servicios de radiodifusi?n, resulta de urgente necesidad la declaraci?n de emergencia de los referidos servicios. Que la SECRETARIA LEGAL Y TECNICA de la PRESIDENCIA DE LA NACION, ha tomado la intervenci?n que le compete. Que oportunamente, corresponde dar cuenta de lo dispuesto al HONORABLE CONGRESO DE LA NACION. Que el presente se dicta en virtud de las atribuciones conferidas por el art?culo 99, inciso 3?, de la Constituci?n Nacional. Por ello, EL PRESIDENTE DE LA NACION ARGENTINA EN ACUERDO GENERAL DE MINISTROS DECRETA: ARTICULO 1?.- Decl?rese la emergencia econ?mico-finaciera de los servicios de radiodifusi?n contemplados en la Ley N? 22.285 y sus modificatorias. ARTICULO 2?.- Susp?ndase por el plazo de DIEZ (10 ) a?os los t?rminos que estuvieran transcurriendo de las licencias de servicios de radiodifusi?n o sus pr?rrogas previstas en el art?culo 41 de la Ley N? 22.285 y sus modificatorias. Los t?rminos se reanudar?n autom?ticamente vencido el plazo de suspensi?n antes citado. ARTICULO 3?.- En ning?n caso la suspensi?n dispuesta en el art?culo 2? impedir? la aplicaci?n del r?gimen sancionatorio contemplado en la Ley de Radiodifusi?n. ARTICULO 4?.- Las disposiciones del presente regir?n desde la fecha de su publicaci?n en el Bolet?n Oficial. ARTICULO 5?.- D?se cuenta al HONORABLE CONGRESO DE LA NACION, en virtud de la dispuesto por el art?culo 99, inciso 3, de la Constituci?n Nacional. ARTICULO 6?.- Comun?quese, publ?quese, d?se a la Direcci?n Nacional del Registro Oficial y arch?vese. La enorme mayoria de estos medios tiene a los titulares que fijo el Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional de la Dictadura Militar que se cuido de dejar los medios de Comunicacion para asegurar la continuidad de la politica economica de Martinez de Hoz ?Les suena? ?Asi comienza el Gobierno Popular de Kirchner? Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. La NAC & POP se envia y se recibe gracias a la actitud valiente, activa y decisiva de los suscriptores que la defiendieron cuando fue necesario y determinante ya que, frente a todo tipo de filtro, bloqueo o censura actuo firmemente cuando debio hacerlo en defensa de sus derechos, el derecho a la libertad de expresion, el derecho a la informacion y el derecho a la comunicacion ante quien correspondiera, actuando como si fuera uno solo en una epopeya de miles de correos electronicos , llamados telefonicos y organizacion de futuros actos callejeros de protesta que, si bien, algunos no llegaron a concretarse -porque no hizo falta- mostraron la calidad de sus integrantes y la fuerza de el estar unidos en la defensa de su comun dignidad. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La Nac.& Pop. no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ----------------------------------------- - EN OCTUBRE 2001 LA CAMARA DE DIPUTADOS DE ARGENTINA VOTO UNA LEY PARA CERRAR LAS FM Y LOS CANALES LIBRES Y COMUNITARIOS Y ENVIAR A LA CARCEL A LOS RADIODIFUSORES DE LA DEMOCRACIA MANTENIENDO COMO LEGALES LAS RADIOS Y CANALES DE TV DE LA DICTADURA DEL PROCESO. LO HIZO APROVECHANDO LA IMAGEN DE LOS AVIONES ESTRELLANDOSE CONTRA LAS TORRES GEMELAS, UN MES DESPUES DEL ATENTADO ALEGANDO UN PELIGRO PARA LOS AEROPUERTOS QUE LUEGO SE DEMOSTRO QUE ERA PRODUCIDO POR LAS RADIOS LEGALES. EN OCTUBRE 2002 LO APROBO EL SENADO GRACIAS A LA ENORME PRESION DE LOS LOBBYS DE ATA Y ARPA - LAS MULTINACIONALES ENQUISTADAS DETRAS DE LOS MEDIOS EN ARGENTINA COMO LA JP MORGAN-LA CALIFICADORA DE RIESGO-PAIS, LAS EMPRESAS MULTIMEDIOS COMO CLARIN, LA AQUIESCENCIA DE SENADORES DE DUDOSA HONORABILIDAD COMO JENEFES Y GIOJA Y ANTES, CON LA REPUGNANTE ACTITUD DE LOS DIPUTADOS FONDEVILA, DUMON, LARRABURU Y BRANDONI, SERVILES, ESTOS DIPUTADOS Y SENADORES, HAN DESCUBIERTO LA NUEVA FORMULA DE LOS POLITICOS FRACASADOS: DUROS CON EL PUEBLO, ALFOMBRA CON LOS PODEROSOS...ASI LES VA. AHORA EN EL 2003, VUELVE A DIPUTADOS POR ALGUNOS CAMBIOS INTRODUCIDOS POR LOS COMPA?EROS Y COMIENZA LA BATALLA DEFINITIVA : PUEBLO O ESTABLISHMENT, PATRIA O COLONIA, LIBERTAD O MONOPOLIOS, COMUNIDAD ORGANIZADA O COMUNIDAD SOJUZGADA. LOS LEGISLADORES DEBEN OPTAR. ----------------------------------------- VISITE www.abuelas.org.ar www.agua-mansa.com> www.antiescualidos.com/indexnew.html www.ar.geocities.com/publicidadpolitica www.asamblea.arg.net.ar www.asovic.org> www.ate.org.ar www.caracas.jotaceve.org> www.cels.org.ar/ www.clasemediaenpositivozulia.org> www.cnanoticias.com/ www.conadolfo.com www.ctabsas.org.ar / www.documentalistas.org.ar/ www.eldescamisado.org www.espacioautogestionario.com www.excluidos.org/ www.farco.org.ar www.florestaporjusticia.8m.com/ www.forointergeneracional.freeservers.com/ www.foronacional.gov.ve www.frenteparaelcambio.org www.galeon.hispavista.com/anarcoperonismo1111/ www.geocities.com/bsasnegro/index.html / www.geocities.com/cipayoscom www.geocities.com/fub_usb> www.geocities.com/pmavl/> www.geocities.com/proyectoemancipacion www.geocities.com/revistatizon/arg.html www.geocities.com/walshrodolfo www.hijoslucha.netfirms.com www.hijos-rosario.org.ar / www.inquilinos.org.ar/ www.jdperon.gov.ar / www.ladeudaexterna.com www.lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular www.losocial.com.ar www.lucheyvuelve.com.ar www.madres.org www.madres-lineafundadora.org www.mnyp.org www.movimientomontonero.org www.mr-jsm.com.ar www.mundoamateur.com.ar www.nodo50.org/venezuela-unida/> www.parlamentoperonista.cjb.net / www.patrialibre.org.ar www.pjn.gov.ar/ www.pochormiga.com.ar> www.polemicadigital.com.ar www.porlavida.abuelas.org.ar www.procesobolivariano.8k.com> www.radioataque.org> www.rebelion.org> www.redbolivariana.com/> www.red-vertice.com/anv/index.html www.revistalinea.com ?www.rt-a.com www.sinolvido.org/ www.soberania.info> www.sutebalamatanza.org.ar/ www.todosjuntos.foros.org www.unasolapatria.org/inicio.htm> ?www.villacrespomibarrio.com.ar -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 27568 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 10 13:04:11 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 15:04:11 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Greenspan vs Buffet on Derivatives Message-ID: <3EBD4D2B.70005@mindspring.com> I have been watching the development of derivatives ever since their introduction more than a decade ago and have written on their systemic danger for over four years. See: The dangers of derivatives By Henry C K Liu http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DE23Dj01.html Recently, there is an indirect media debate between Greenspan and Buffet and Bill Gross. I will put my money on Buffet and Gross, even though Greenspan commands more power, because derivatives are the type of problem that power exacerbates their danger rather than aleviates it. http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pkt/2003I/msg00569.html http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/05/09/cx_aw_0509derivatives.html Henry C.K. Liu From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Sat May 10 17:13:12 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 01:13:12 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Welsh Assembly Election Analysis v2.1 Message-ID: <3EBD8788.11CDBF65@usuarios.retecal.es> I'm posting this again for two reasons. First, a lot of typos appeared in the first version (in the text, rather in the figures: I was more worried about the latter). Second, the first version didn't refer to the performance of the parties to the left of Labour and Plaid -- essential if the basic thesis of the piece is to stand up. ************ ----------------- MURKY BROWN WATER ----------------- Exploding the Myths Surrounding the Welsh Assembly Elections ----------------- All elections generate their own mythology, and those for the Welsh Assembly of 1 May have proved to be no exception. There are at present circulating a number of interpretations of what happened that day, apparently held to be incontrovertibly true within the greater part of Welsh Labour, and, by a curious process of inverse logic, by many within Plaid Cymru too. But each of them is false. ***** * Myth Number One: This was a night of triumph for Labour. Or, as Peter Hain put it, 'We won three-quarters of the constituency seats which by normal general election standards would be a landslide. This is the best result for Labour in the elections anywhere in Britain.' (Peter Hain, Independent, 3 May) Labour did indeed win enough seats to give it the promise of a working majority in the new Assembly - although Hain's evident disdain for the brave new world of proportionality is clear - but, as Table 1 shows, there is little other comfort Labour can draw from the election. Looking at total votes cast in all Welsh elections since 1997 - the last British state general election to be held before the establishment of the Assembly - it can be seen that this was Labour's worst performance in this period, excepting the European elections of 1999. Of course, that the Labour turnout stood a fraction of its performance in British general elections was to be expected: no, the really telling fact - one curiously scarcely picked up on by the mainstream media - is that across Wales Labour's performance on 1 May was actually worse, 11.5 per cent worse, than its showing in the 1999 Assembly elections; elections, remember, generally held as an unmitigated disaster for the Welsh party. In fact, as Table 2 shows, Labour only managed to increase its vote - measured in total votes cast - in nine constituencies: The Rhondda, Islwyn, Torfaen, Cynon Valley, Pontypridd, The Vale of Glamorgan, Gower, Bridgend and Merthyr; and, excepting the first three constituencies in this list (where Labour pulled out all the stops in an attempt to get its vote out in order to prevent a repeat of the embarrassments of 1999), only marginally. In every other constituency, Labour's vote was down on 1999. * Myth Number Two: The elections were a disaster for Plaid. On the face of it, Plaid's return does indeed look poor: the promise of 1999 appears to have been unfulfilled. 'A terrible night for nationalists,' as the ubiquitous Peter Hain put it (referring, of course, to Welsh nationalists, not the Great British nationalists of increasingly jingoistic New Labour). But again surface appearances are deceptive. Table 1 shows that Plaid's 2003 performance is indeed well down on its 1999 showing, but that it compares favourably with Plaid's long term performance: excepting the exceptional results of the 1999 elections, Plaid's 180,000 votes in the 2003 constituency ballot rank as its second highest poll in history, marginally topped only by the 2001 general election (where the ripple of 1999 still made itself felt). There is a long term trend at work here, and 2003 has only confirmed it. But it does merit asking why Plaid did poll lower in 2003 than in 1999. Now, although organisational factors undoubtedly played a role, something rather belatedly acknowledged by Ieuan Wyn Jones himself (Western Mail, 6 May), fundamentally the explanation has to be a political one. Marginal reasons will surely include a disillusionment in the operation of the Assembly, felt most strongly among those who had most hopes of the body in the first place. In addition, a relatively (and I emphasise the word 'relatively') resurgent Conservative Party must have partially awakened barely dormant fears of a future possible Tory government in Westminster - a factor that perennially increases Labour's vote at the expense of parties who will never have the possibility of governing in London. But most decisive has to be the role played by Welsh Labour's conscious distancing of itself from Blairism. As Adam Price acknowledged: 'Rhodri Morgan's [11 September] speech, ditching New Labour and declaring henceforth that there would be "clear red water" between Cardiff Bay and Downing Street, is massively significant. Not just for Welsh politics, but for all of us who believe in restoring democratic socialism as the animating principle of the Left.' (Western Mail, 5 May) But it is not the case, as Jon Osmond has argued, that 'Plaid Cymru's underlying failure in the election was that as a nationalist party it did not manage to capture any clear or distinctive national themes. Instead, it chose to concentrate on bread-and-butter health and education issues and service delivery, in a way that failed to distinguish itself from the Labour Party.' (Western Mail, 5 May) Rather, the relationship is the reverse: with 'clear red water' (CRW) Welsh Labour moved closer to Plaid, and, in the short term, Plaid has suffered (although, as we have seen, the suffering is only relative) as a result. But this is not to say, as Osmond seems to imply, that Plaid should now retreat to its traditional base in rural Wales. As we shall see below, this would be to refuse to pick up the gauntlet that history has thrown down. For CRW is but a temporary measure: an electoral finger in the breech. If Plaid wants really to present itself as the Party of Wales, it needs to ask this question: what does CRW mean for the people of Wales if, one, Westminster is so hostile to it, and, two, the very Welsh Assembly itself still lacks the powers to implement it in any meaningful way? That would be the concrete way in which Plaid would be able address the 'clear and distinctive national themes' that Osmond wants them to address without effecting a forced retreat to their historical rural redoubt. * Myth Number Three: Labour voters 'came home'. As Rhodri Morgan himself rather arrogantly put it: 'I do not really think we have to worry about the other parties. Our lead over them is so large because Wales has come back to Labour.' (Western Mail, May 3) But this is precisely, as both Table 1 and Table 2 show, what did not happen. It is worth reminding ourselves of what happened in 1999. Then, traditional Labour voters, especially in the Labour heartlands of the south Wales coalfield, did two things. First, massively, they abstained. Second, in smaller numbers, they voted Plaid. [1] What happened in 2003? >From Tables 1 and 2 it is clear that the first part of this particular double whammy was not reversed: outside of the Rhondda, Islwyn and Torfaen, Labour voters barely returned to Labour; and outside of the further exceptions of Cynon Valley, Pontypridd, the Vale of Glamorgan, Gower, Bridgend and Merthyr they actually stayed away in even greater numbers. Very concretely, we are now in a position to offer an explanation of 1 May: the Labour voters who abstained in 1999 abstained (with the limited exceptions noted above) - frequently in greater numbers - in 2003 as well; the Labour voters who voted Plaid in 1999 did not vote Plaid in 2003. (Why this second feature occurred has already been addressed above.) * Myth Number Four: Plaid's bubble has burst. Or, to put it another way, as spinmeister Hain gloated: 'Plaid Cymru's fantasy of an independent Wales has been buried for ever.' (Guardian 3 May) Now, aside from the real status of the project of an independent Wales in Plaid's strategy, and without going into the fantastic (in both senses of the word) nature of the notion, I am sure that the thinkers behind Welsh Labour would want this to be true, but, away from such wishful thinking and the triumphalist insobriety intended for public consumption, it is clear that they are clever enough to know that it is not. Table 3 is probably the most interesting of all: here we can see the relative shift of Plaid's vote (again, looking at total votes cast) from the 1997 general election (the last to be held before the establishment of the Assembly) to 1 May. And a very curious picture emerges. Plaid's total vote in Wales increased slightly over this period, by some 11.2 per cent. But this rise has by no means been even. Plaid has in fact lost heavily in those areas commonly denominated as its traditional heartlands, Welsh-speaking, rural Wales (in part this would account for the rise in the Tory vote in these areas: frankly, this is Plaid's gain); but has increased spectacularly were it has historically been weak - precisely in urban, Welsh-speaking as well as English-speaking, Wales. And this, long term, is what is happening: as New Labour moves to the right, many in traditional areas are prepared to see Plaid as a better means of defending what they see as traditional 'Old Labour' values. This is what fundamentally happened in 1999: but what happened in 1999 in the south Wales Valleys was so extreme that the longer term process was lost sight of. There is a structural shift taking place in the consciousness of the Welsh working class, of which 1999 was but one reflection. Yet this is a long term process, which is underway but nowhere near completed (and which does not even have an inevitable conclusion). Fundamentally, this shift reflects the fact that a section of the Welsh people, at this stage a relatively small section, have been forced to look politically elsewhere: it is not that the Welsh working class is turning nationalist - Plaid gains in these areas where it does not specifically run a 'nationalist' campaign - nor is it the case that the Welsh working class is becoming less social-democratic: it is that it has increasingly to look for its social democracy elsewhere, since it seems that it is increasingly unable to find it in Welsh Labour. This is the dynamic that Jon Osmond is addressing in his Western Mail article of 5 May. [2] He comments: Plaid 'faces the challenge of blending much more effectively the different character and interests of rural Wales with the Valleys, a challenge that it avoided in May.' But this would be having your cake and eating it. Effectively Plaid finds itself at an historical cross-roads, for the choice now is as clear as this: it can fight to win back its rural conservative base, now defecting to the Tories, or it can move forward to be a real party of (all) Wales. In this choice fear of not differentiating itself sufficiently from Welsh Labour must not act as a deterrent to Plaid moving to consolidate itself in urban Wales. CRW is effectively a chimera. As Daniel Morrissey perceptively noted in a recent edition of the journal Workers' Action: 'But the danger of a repeat of Labour's poor showing in 1999 - or even worse - seems to have strengthened Rhodri's nerve and pushed him into revealing himself in all his glory as "a socialist of the Welsh stripe". In order to carry this through convincingly, however, he has to be able to show that he has something new to offer for the second term, rather than simply recapitulating the story so far. [...] Part of the problem is that many of the levers of economic policy are beyond the reach of the devolved administration - yet Rhodri now dismisses the debate over further powers as the preserve of "the narrow circles of political anorakism".' This maps the contours of the next period of Welsh politics. Plaid (and every socialist in Wales) has to decide whether it wants to be a part of this history, or be swept away by it. The choice is as clear as that. -------------------- STATISTICAL APPENDIX -------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- TABLE 1: All-Wales Elections 1997-2003: Total Votes [3] for Labour and Plaid Compared 1997 1999 1999 1999 2001 2003 2003 (G) (A-C) (A-L) (E) (G) (A-C) (A-L) Lab 886,935 384,671 361,657 199,690 666,956 340,515 310,658 Plaid 162,030 290,572 312,048 185,235 195,893 180,185 167,653 --------------------------------------------------------------- Key: G = British-state General Election; A-C = Assembly Election Constituency Vote; A-L = Assembly Election Party List Top-up Vote; E = European Election Sources: 1997: Beti Jones, Etholiadau'r Ganrif - Welsh Elections (Talybont, 1999); 1999 Assembly Election: Barn (May 1999); 1999 European Election: Welsh Agenda (Summer 1999); 2001: ; 2003: calculated from raw data from --------------------------- TABLE 2: 1999 and 2003 Compared: Change in Total Votes Cast for Labour by Constituency (Constituencies Ordered by Size of Change) Constituency % change [4] 1999-2003 ** Rhondda 25.7 ** Islwyn 19.2 ** Torfaen 11.8 ** Cynon Valley 9.7 ** Pontypridd 7.7 Vale Of Glam 7.2 * Gower 5.3 Bridgend 1.8 ** Merthyr T & Rh 1.1 Vale Of Clwyd -1.2 Clwyd West -1.7 ** Ogmore -5.1 ** Caerphilly -5.6 * Aberavon -6.7 ** Neath -7.4 Caernarfon -10.9 * Llanelli -12.1 Meirionnydd -12.2 Newport West -12.9 * Swansea East -13.4 ** Blaenau Gwent -13.6 Swansea West -14.5 Cardiff North -14.6 Carmarthen W -15.2 Ynys M?n -16.1 Cardiff South -18.8 Preseli Pem -19.1 Carmarthen E -19.3 * Newport East -19.8 Conwy -20.9 Montgomery -22.7 Clwyd South -25.9 Monmouth -26.9 Cardiff West -27.2 Alyn & Deeside -28.0 Ceredigion -34.0 Delyn -38.9 Brecon & Rad. -39.4 Wrexham -39.8 Cardiff Cen -47.2 --------------------------- Key: 'Coalfield' constituencies are marked ** and 'semi-coalfield' constituencies *. [5] Methodology: The percentage change in the party vote is established by: (100(V2-V1))/V1, where V1 = number of votes cast in 1999 and V2 = number of votes cast in 2003. Minor differences in size of electorate between the two elections have been ignored. Sources: 1999: ; 2003: calculated from raw data from: . --------------------------- TABLE 3: Percentage Change in the Plaid Vote 1997-2003 by Constituency Constituency % Change 1997-2003 Vale Of Glam 181.5 Monmouth 162.6 Newport West 159.0 Conwy 124.9 Cardiff N 123.1 Newport East 115.7 Brecon & Rad 113.7 ** Torfaen 100.8 Preseli Pem 94.8 ** Neath 91.0 Cardiff South 87.2 ** Pontypridd 77.6 ** Islwyn 72.8 Swansea West 66.8 * Swansea East 70.0 Delyn 66.1 ** Caerphilly 57.9 Clwyd South 56.9 * Aberavon 59.2 * Gower 57.3 Alyn & Deeside 57.2 Cardiff West 46.7 Carmarthen W 45.7 * Llanelli 26.7 ** Ogmore 25.8 ** Merthyr 28.0 Bridgend 17.6 Cardiff Cen 19.3 Montgomery 19.3 Wrexham 13.6 ** Rhondda 14.1 Vale Of Clwyd 9.3 ** Cynon Valley 4.8 ** Blaenau Gwent -8.8 Carmarthen E -10.3 Clwyd West -13.0 Caernarfon -33.7 Ceredigion -29.0 Meirionnydd -30.1 Ynys M?n -40.0 --------------------------- Key: 'Coalfield' constituencies are marked ** and 'semi-coalfield' constituencies *. [5] Methodology: The percentage change in the party vote is established by: (100(V2-V1))/V1, where V1 = number of votes cast in 1997 and V2 = number of votes cast in 2003. Minor differences in size of electorate between the two elections have been ignored. Sources: 1997: ; 2003: calculated from raw data from: . ------- ADDENDA ------- 1. The Global Picture TABLE 4: Votes and Seats by All Parties in Both Ballots ---------------------------------------- Constituency Vote ---------------------------------------- % % Votes Votes Elect- Seats Cast orate Labour 340,515 40.0 15.3 30 Plaid 180,185 21.2 8.1 5 Con 169,842 19.9 7.6 1 Lib 120,250 14.1 5.4 3 ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- Party List Vote ---------------------------------------- % % Votes Votes Elect- Seats Cast orate Labour 310,658 36.6 13.9 0 Plaid 167,653 19.7 7.5 7 Con 162,725 19.2 7.3 10 Lib 108,013 12.7 4.8 3 ---------------------------------------- Source: . (With the exception of the Labour total in the constituency vote: the BBC gives Labour 7 641 votes in Newport East, a figure 20 votes higher than that given by both and . One can only assume that the BBC figure is wrong. The Labour total has therefore been calculated from the raw data supplied from the latter of the last two sources.) The figure for votes as the percentage of the electorate has been calculated using the total party figures from (appropriately amended with respect to the Labour constituency vote) and a total electorate calculated using the raw data from . 2. Parties to the Left of Plaid and Labour TABLE 5: Parties to the Left of Plaid and Labour: Constituency Vote by Constituency Votes % Votes Cast ----------------------------- WELSH SOCIALIST ALLIANCE ----------------------------- Cardiff C. 541 2.6 Neath 410 1.9 Newport W. 198 0.9 Swansea East 133 0.8 Swansea West 272 1.4 ----------------------------- SOCIALIST PARTY ----------------------------- Aberavon 606 3.2 Cardiff S. 585 2.9 ----------------------------- SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY ----------------------------- Ogmore 410 2.5 ----------------------------- MAREK ----------------------------- Clwyd South 2,210 11.8 Wrexham 6,539 37.7 ----------------------------- ----------------------------- Table 6: Parties to the Left of Plaid and Labour: List Vote Party Votes % Votes Cast --------------------------------------- South Central Green 6,047 3.3 SLP 3,217 1.8 Stop War 1,013 0.6 Communist 577 0.3 --------------------------------------- South East Green 5,291 3.1 SLP 3,695 2.2 --------------------------------------- South West Green 6,696 4.8 SLP 3,446 2.5 --------------------------------------- Mid & West Green 7,794 4.2 Stop War 716 0.4 --------------------------------------- North Marek 11,008 6.3 Green 4,200 2.4 Communist 522 0.3 --------------------------------------- Source: ---------------- FURTHER COMMENTS ---------------- Really, the figures relating to the parties to the left of Plaid and Labour speak for themselves: in effect, these parties failed even to register on the political map. Once again, Wales has proved itself to be not Scotland. What we are dealing with here is what is known as the 'BT vote': family and friends. Where there is a electoral wellspring critical of Labour it expresses itself either through abstention, or by turning to Plaid. This is the long-term dynamic analysed above, even if this time it has been relatively mitigated by the phenomenon of 'clear red water'. There are two exceptions to this trend evident here. The first is the Marek phenomenon. Now, despite the attention paid to Marek by sections of the left, this in no way represents a kind of Welsh mini-SSP. What lies behind the Marek vote is popular discontent at the shabby way that a respected and honest sitting representative has been treated by his party. Marek is essentially a maverick, not afraid to speak his mind and principled enough not to put currying favour over saying what he thinks. This was at the root of his downfall within the Labour Party, and it is this that the voters of Wrexham have responded to. That it is not a generalised phenomenon is indicated by the huge difference between, on the one hand, the constituency votes in Wrexham and Clwyd South, and, on the other, by the difference between the percentage of votes cast of these constituency votes and the Marek party list vote. This is a purely local issue, which, barring unforeseen circumstances, will quickly fade. That Marek now appears to be in contact with the SSP means very little: he really has no-one else to talk to these days. That he does not appear to be in contact with the Welsh Socialist Alliance speaks volumes. In this respect it is unfortunate that the forces around Seren, especially Marc Jones of Cymru Goch (who stood in Clwyd South under the Marek ticket), invest such expectation in the phenomenon. They have clearly hitched their horse to the wrong cart, and it is a pity that they are unable to turn their not inconsiderable resources around a more useful project. The other discordant note is sounded by the Greens (even if to include them under the rubric of 'to the left of Labour and Plaid' stretches the category a little). For a fringe party they registered relatively well in the party list ballot, especially in North and Mid Wales. Nevertheless, excepting these two developments, it is clear that there is still no real political space in Wales to the left of Labour and Plaid. Here it is necessary to address the long term process underway - in part analysed above and further illustrated here - that underlies all these developments. Since the 1970s, the unitary political system in the British state has been progressively breaking down, especially in relation to working class politics. The consequence today is that in England, especially in metropolitan England, there is no significant political space existing outside of and to the left of the organisational and political confines of Labourism. The consistently truly miserable performances of both the SLP and the Socialist Alliance illustrate this. There is no pleasure to be taken in pointing this out: it would be far better were it not true. But it is a fact, and no amount of wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Scotland is clearly different. The concrete features of the development of Scottish nationalism, which in recent times gave rise to qualitatively more developed radicalisation in Scottish working class politics, most recently in the shape of the anti-poll tax movement in the 1990s (greatly more inclusive and politically developed than in England and Wales), have resulted in the appearance of a genuine large-scale radical current that is beginning to break from the dominant current of British working class politics, Labourism: a current that today manifests itself in support for the SSP. But Wales is clearly different again, a difference that arises in turn from the specificities of Welsh nationalism. In Wales what we can discern is a long-term small but significant shift in political allegiance from Labour to Plaid, a shift that the results of 1 May only confirm, once one looks behind the surface. That the British state left needs to grasp the consequences of all this should really brook no argument. That the English Socialist Alliance cannot become another SSP because England is not Scotland is a point rammed home with every election. That neither the Welsh Socialist Alliance nor John Marek can become another SSP because Wales is not Scotland either has also been made absolutely clear. The real conclusion of the preceding analysis therefore is that a British political outlook which does not recognise that England is not Scotland and Wales is not England is going to put itself in a position of being signally ill-prepared to address the real political developments taking place within the British state working class movement. What works in one part of the British state is becoming increasingly unsuited for the others. We forget this at our peril. Le?n, Saturday, 10 May 2003 -------------------- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE -------------------- By far the most satisfying and incisive political analysis currently coming out of Wales at present is that coming from the pen (or probably keyboard) of Daniel Morrissey in the British journal Workers' Action. Although this journal is not available online, Morrissey's penultimate article, 'Welsh Politics after Four Years of the Assembly' is, and can be read at: and . The pamphlet by Ceri Evans and Ed George Swings and Roundabouts: What Really Happened on May 6 (Cardiff, 1999), can now be read at . ----- NOTES ----- [1] This is an issue that is explored in detail in Ceri Evans and Ed George, Swings and Roundabouts: What Really Happened on May 6 (Cardiff, 1999). See the bibliographical note above. [2] Osmond's article can be read online at: . [3] The reasoning behind the concentration of the base statistic of tota votes cast (and votes cast as a percentage of the electorate, rather than as a percentage of votes cast) to be found here is developed in Swings and Roundabouts. [4] For ease of formatting the names of the constituencies have been abbreviated. Their full names are, in alphabetical order: Aberavon, Alyn and Deeside, Blaenau Gwent, Brecon and Radnorshire, Bridgend, Caernarfon, Caerphilly, Cardiff Central, Cardiff North, Cardiff South and Penarth, Cardiff West, Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Carmarthen West and Pembrokeshire South, Ceredigion, Clwyd South, Clwyd West, Conwy, Cynon Valley, Delyn, Gower, Islwyn, Llanelli, Meirionnydd Nant Conwy, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney Monmouth, Montgomeryshire, Neath, Newport East, Newport West, Ogmore, Pontypridd, Preseli Pembrokeshire, Rhondda, Swansea East, Swansea West, Torfaen, Vale Of Clwyd, Vale Of Glamorgan, Wrexham, Ynys M?n. To see where these places are, the BBC's results page has a geographically useful if politically uninformative interactive map. Go to: [5] By 'semi-coalfield' constituency, what is referred to is either a constituency immediately adjacent to the south Wales coalfield itself which incorporates a part of the coalfield within its territory (e.g. Gower), or a constituency immediately adjacent to the coalfield which is notably similar in socio-economic profile (e.g. Swansea East). From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 10 23:06:12 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 01:06:12 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Greenspan Discusses Risks of Derivatives Message-ID: <3EBDDA44.6080104@mindspring.com> Greenspan Discusses Risks of Derivatives By REUTERS CHICAGO, May 8 (Reuters) ? The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, expressed concern today over the risks posed to financial markets by the concentration of the $142 trillion derivatives market in the hands of a few investment banks. Derivatives are contracts based on underlying securities or other variables, ranging from interest rates and currencies to energy and weather. They allow investors both to spread risk and to make big leveraged bets. Mr. Greenspan, as he has done in the past, praised derivatives, saying their benefits materially outweighed the risks and had insulated the financial system from the stock market crash and economic downturn. But, for the first time, in a conference organized by the Chicago Fed, he detailed the potential dangers to financial markets if a big derivatives dealer had to exit the market, and he called for more meaningful disclosure. Mr. Greenspan repeated his opposition to regulating derivatives, but said heavy concentration in the market "gives me and others some pause." "If a major dealer exited and other dealers were unwilling to fill the void, the liquidity of the market likely would be impaired," Mr. Greenspan said. According to the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements, the global over-the-counter derivatives market had grown to nearly $142 trillion by the end of last year. In his speech, delivered to the conference by satellite, Mr. Greenspan said that a single dealer accounts for about a third of the global market in both interest rate and credit derivatives, and a few dealers account for more than two-thirds. Full speech: http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2003/20030508/default.htm Exerpts: But rules cannot substitute for character. Although the benefits and costs of derivatives remain the subject of spirited debate, the performance of the economy and the financial system in recent years suggests that those benefits have materially exceeded the costs. Those that question the net benefits of derivatives see daunting risk-management problems and thus foresee catastrophic outcomes. In particular, they fear that common deficiencies in risk management will result in widespread failures or that the failure of a very large derivatives participant will impose heavy credit losses on its counterparties and yield a chain of failures. Others, like myself, who see the benefits of derivatives exceeding the costs, do not deny that their use poses significant risk-management challenges. But we see ample evidence that the risks are manageable in principle and generally have been managed quite effectively in practice, at least to date. Indeed, credit losses on derivatives have occurred at a rate that is a small fraction, for example, of the loss rate on commercial and industrial loans. Market discipline in the largely unregulated derivatives markets has provided strong incentives for effective risk management and has the potential to be even more effective in the future. To be sure, there undoubtedly will be further risk-management failures. But the largest market participants have such diversified businesses that a risk-management failure involving a single product line is unlikely to be a threat to solvency. Furthermore, risk-management failures are more likely to be idiosyncratic than to reflect common deficiencies in procedure or technique among market participants. In the case of the management of market risk, our bank examiners observe significant differences in approach across the largest U.S. banks, even in the measurement of such a basic concept as value-at-risk. I do not wish to suggest, however, that I am entirely sanguine with respect to the risks associated with derivatives. One development that gives me and others some pause is the decline in the number of major derivatives dealers and its potential implications for market liquidity and for concentration of counterparty credit risks. I also fear that the potential contribution of market discipline to stability in the derivatives markets is not being fully realized because, in our laudable efforts to improve public disclosure, we too often appear to be mistaking more extensive disclosure for greater transparency. This is an issue to which I shall shortly return. Concentration and Market Liquidity In recent years, consolidation has reduced the number of firms that provide liquidity to the OTC derivatives markets by acting as dealers in the more standardized or ?plain vanilla? contracts. To be sure, the resulting concentration sometimes is overstated because of the failure to recognize that the OTC derivatives markets are global markets in which major banks and securities firms from more than half a dozen countries compete. For example, measures of concentration based on data reported by U.S. banks overstate concentration significantly because they ignore the competitive activities of U.S. securities firms and foreign banks. Nonetheless, not all major dealers make markets in all products, and concentration is substantial for certain important types of OTC contracts. Examples include U.S. dollar interest rate options and credit default swaps. In each case, a single dealer seems to account for about one-third of the global market, and a handful of dealers together seem to account for more than two-thirds. When concentration reaches these kinds of levels, market participants need to consider the implications of exit by one or more leading dealers. Such an event could adversely affect the liquidity of types of derivatives that market participants rely upon for managing the risks of their core business functions. Exit could be voluntary. In particular, losses incurred in making markets could lead a dealer to conclude that the returns from market-making are not commensurate with the risks. Alternatively, downgrades of a dealer?s credit rating could force the dealer to exit. Counterparties in the OTC derivatives market are quite concerned about the potential credit risks inherent in such contracts and generally are unwilling to transact with dealers unless their credit rating is A or higher. If a major dealer exited and other dealers were unwilling to fill the void, the liquidity of the market likely would be impaired. Market participants need to consider what their alternatives would be in such circumstances. Are there other liquid markets in which they could manage their risks? In some cases market participants may be able to manage risks reasonably effectively in cash markets or exchange-traded derivatives markets. But in other cases managing risks may become more difficult with the exit of some dealers. If market participants perceive that they are vulnerable to such exit by a liquidity provider, they will tend to redirect some of their risk-management activity to other, more liquid markets or seek out new dealers in the market in which exit is a concern. If enough participants perceive the concentration of dealers as entailing market-liquidity risk, their actions to mitigate the risk should over time reduce that degree of concentration. Concentration and Counterparty Risk Perhaps the more obvious way in which concentration in OTC derivatives markets creates risks for market participants is through its implications for counterparty credit risks. Concentration of market-making has the potential to create concentrations of credit risks between the dealers and the end-users of derivatives as well as between the dealers themselves. This latter concentration of risk results from dealers frequently managing their market risks through derivatives transactions with a limited number of other dealers. As mentioned earlier, critics of derivatives often raise the specter of the failure of one dealer imposing debilitating losses on its counterparties, including other dealers, yielding a chain of defaults. However, derivatives market participants seem keenly aware of the counterparty credit risks associated with derivatives and take various measures to mitigate those risks. The vast majority carefully evaluate the creditworthiness of counterparties before entering into transactions and monitor their credit quality over the life of the transactions. As I indicated earlier, users of derivatives have been reluctant to transact with dealers that are not perceived as solid investment-grade credits. Market participants also establish credit limits for their counterparties and actively monitor their exposures to ensure that they remain within the limits established. Such monitoring, parenthetically, relies heavily on trust in the accuracy of the information forthcoming from the counterparties. Counterparty risk management has been materially assisted by the widespread use of master agreements for derivatives transactions. In the event of a counterparty?s default, such agreements permit the termination of all transactions with the counterparty and the netting of the resulting gains and losses. For many years, market participants have been putting such master agreements in place and working with legislatures to ensure that national laws support the enforceability of netting. Data reported by U.S. banks indicate that, on average, netting now reduces counterparty exposures by almost three-fourths. Even with wider use of netting, however, the outsized growth of derivatives markets has resulted in ever-larger counterparty exposures. Market participants have increasingly responded by entering into collateral agreements to further mitigate counterparty credit risks. Such agreements typically permit counterparties to derivatives transactions to demand collateral if their net credit exposure exceeds a negotiated threshold amount. The threshold often varies with the credit rating of the counterparty: The lower a counterparty?s credit rating, the smaller the threshold. If its credit rating falls below investment grade, a counterparty is often required to overcollateralize its counterparties? exposures. In effect, it becomes obligated to meet a margin requirement. Collateral agreements are a very effective means of limiting counterparty credit risks. At the same time, they increase market participants? exposures to other types of risk, especially funding-liquidity risks. Once a counterparty has agreed to collateralize its derivatives contracts, day-to-day declines in the value of those contracts expose it to immediate demands for more collateral. Furthermore, the practice of tying the size of thresholds and margin requirements to credit ratings exposes a counterparty to extraordinary demands for collateral if its rating is downgraded. Collateral demands arising from rating downgrades may be especially costly to meet because a downgrade would reduce the availability of funding and increase its costs at the same time. Concluding remark: Once market discipline firmly reestablishes reputation and trust as corporate values, the incidence of corporate malfeasance should be greatly reduced. Ha! Earlier in the speech: Today, most banks rely partly on deposit insurance in lieu of reputation to hold below-market-rate deposits. Henry C.K. Liu From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 10 23:07:31 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 01:07:31 -0400 Subject: [A-List] A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market Message-ID: <3EBDDA93.7050208@mindspring.com> FLOYD NORRIS A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market ALAN GREENSPAN has done it again. He has played the markets like a virtuoso musician. Mr. Greenspan's reputation in the long run will rest on whether he can get the economy moving again. If not, he will be remembered for the hubris he showed during the bubble, when he assured worriers that there was no need for the Federal Reserve to deal with the inflating stock market because he knew how to deal with bubble aftermaths and prevent lasting economic damage. Advertisement He has reason to worry. The bubble's economic impact has lasted far longer than anyone expected, despite Dr. Greenspan's diet of Fed rate cuts, which has cut short-term rates to 40-year lows. There are indications that capital spending in the technology sector has finally hit bottom, but an early upturn is no sure thing. For months, Fed officials have been saying they were in no danger of running out of ammunition. The Fed could buy longer-term Treasuries, they said, even if it had not done so for decades. Until this week, the markets seemed to view such talk as an academic exercise of little interest to traders. But the Fed's statement when it left rates unchanged on Tuesday decoupled the issues of economic growth and inflation, and reassured investors that rates will stay low even if the economy does better. "They basically made clear they are not tightening for a long time," said William C. Dudley, chief United States economist at Goldman, Sachs. The impact on expectations was drastic, and can be seen in the eurodollar futures market. That market lets you bet on where short-term interest rates will be in the future. And traders are now betting that rates will rise far more slowly than they had expected. The market expectation for short-term rates in June 2006 is now 3.695 percent, down half a percentage point since the Fed acted. By giving a boost to the bond market while not alarming stock traders, Mr. Greenspan pulled off a neat trick, even if expectations of sustained low interest rates also hurt the dollar. It is the currency markets that may provide the most interesting tales of intrigue over the next year if world economic growth does not accelerate. As it is, nearly every country has reason to hope for a weakening currency, to help its exports compete. Consider the dollar. Its strength in recent years has come because foreigners were eager to invest here, and thus redeploy the dollars they got as we ran huge trade deficits. It stands to reason that if American investments seem less attractive, foreigners will invest less and the dollar will decline. But some central banks, notably in Asia, have no intention of allowing that to happen. "China likes the current system," Mr. Dudley said. "It allows them to keep their currency undervalued and people employed. It is part of a policy of political stability in China." The central bank in China has been buying dollars at a rapid pace to keep the Chinese currency from rising against the dollar. Only the Europeans seem oblivious to what is happening. Even as the leading European economies teeter near recession, the European Central Bank is reluctant to lower its interest rates. That helps the euro, but Europe does not need such help. Robert J. Barbera, the chief economist of ITG/Hoenig, points out that the latest data, for March, indicated that the dollar price of American imports from Europe had risen 6.5 percent over the previous year, while the euro was up 25 percent against the dollar. The difference is shrinking margins for European exporters. A weak world economy means that everyone is fighting for shares of a too-small pie. The hope is for a growing pie. That is why the Fed's indication that it will not tighten for a long time is welcome, and why lower European interest rates are overdue. From xxxx at verizon.net Sun May 11 07:59:55 2003 From: xxxx at verizon.net (xxxx) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 09:59:55 -0400 Subject: [A-List] A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market References: <3EBDDA93.7050208@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <00b301c317c5$9a2f1980$6401a8c0@MineDoyran> henry, where is this published? thanks. ************************************************** xxxx A. xxxx Ph.D. Candidate, ABD Department of Political Science Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University at Albany, S.U.N.Y. 135 Western Avenue, Milne Hall Albany, NY 12222 xxxx at verizon.net *************************************************** "Frequently the only possible answer is a critique of the question and the only solution is to negate the question." Grundrisse, "The Chapter on Money" **************************************************** ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu" To: ; ; ; Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2003 1:07 AM Subject: [A-List] A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market > FLOYD NORRIS > A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market > > ALAN GREENSPAN has done it again. He has played the markets like a > virtuoso musician. > > Mr. Greenspan's reputation in the long run will rest on whether he can > get the economy moving again. If not, he will be remembered for the > hubris he showed during the bubble, when he assured worriers that there > was no need for the Federal Reserve to deal with the inflating stock > market because he knew how to deal with bubble aftermaths and prevent > lasting economic damage. > Advertisement > > He has reason to worry. The bubble's economic impact has lasted far > longer than anyone expected, despite Dr. Greenspan's diet of Fed rate > cuts, which has cut short-term rates to 40-year lows. There are > indications that capital spending in the technology sector has finally > hit bottom, but an early upturn is no sure thing. > > For months, Fed officials have been saying they were in no danger of > running out of ammunition. The Fed could buy longer-term Treasuries, > they said, even if it had not done so for decades. > > Until this week, the markets seemed to view such talk as an academic > exercise of little interest to traders. But the Fed's statement when it > left rates unchanged on Tuesday decoupled the issues of economic growth > and inflation, and reassured investors that rates will stay low even if > the economy does better. "They basically made clear they are not > tightening for a long time," said William C. Dudley, chief United States > economist at Goldman, Sachs. > > The impact on expectations was drastic, and can be seen in the > eurodollar futures market. That market lets you bet on where short-term > interest rates will be in the future. And traders are now betting that > rates will rise far more slowly than they had expected. The market > expectation for short-term rates in June 2006 is now 3.695 percent, down > half a percentage point since the Fed acted. > > By giving a boost to the bond market while not alarming stock traders, > Mr. Greenspan pulled off a neat trick, even if expectations of sustained > low interest rates also hurt the dollar. > > It is the currency markets that may provide the most interesting tales > of intrigue over the next year if world economic growth does not > accelerate. As it is, nearly every country has reason to hope for a > weakening currency, to help its exports compete. > > Consider the dollar. Its strength in recent years has come because > foreigners were eager to invest here, and thus redeploy the dollars they > got as we ran huge trade deficits. It stands to reason that if American > investments seem less attractive, foreigners will invest less and the > dollar will decline. > > But some central banks, notably in Asia, have no intention of allowing > that to happen. "China likes the current system," Mr. Dudley said. "It > allows them to keep their currency undervalued and people employed. It > is part of a policy of political stability in China." The central bank > in China has been buying dollars at a rapid pace to keep the Chinese > currency from rising against the dollar. > > Only the Europeans seem oblivious to what is happening. Even as the > leading European economies teeter near recession, the European Central > Bank is reluctant to lower its interest rates. > > That helps the euro, but Europe does not need such help. Robert J. > Barbera, the chief economist of ITG/Hoenig, points out that the latest > data, for March, indicated that the dollar price of American imports > from Europe had risen 6.5 percent over the previous year, while the euro > was up 25 percent against the dollar. The difference is shrinking > margins for European exporters. > > A weak world economy means that everyone is fighting for shares of a > too-small pie. The hope is for a growing pie. That is why the Fed's > indication that it will not tighten for a long time is welcome, and why > lower European interest rates are overdue. > > > From hliu at mindspring.com Sun May 11 09:34:20 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 11:34:20 -0400 Subject: [A-List] A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market References: <3EBDDA93.7050208@mindspring.com> <00b301c317c5$9a2f1980$6401a8c0@MineDoyran> Message-ID: <3EBE6D7C.1020705@mindspring.com> NYTimes xxxx wrote: > henry, where is this published? > > thanks. > > ************************************************** > xxxx A. xxxx > Ph.D. Candidate, ABD > Department of Political Science > Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy > University at Albany, S.U.N.Y. > 135 Western Avenue, Milne Hall > Albany, NY 12222 > xxxx at verizon.net > *************************************************** > "Frequently the only possible answer is a critique of the > question and the only solution is to negate the question." > Grundrisse, "The Chapter on Money" > **************************************************** > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Henry C.K. Liu" > To: ; ; > ; > Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2003 1:07 AM > Subject: [A-List] A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market > > > >>FLOYD NORRIS >>A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market >> >>ALAN GREENSPAN has done it again. He has played the markets like a >>virtuoso musician. >> >>Mr. Greenspan's reputation in the long run will rest on whether he can >>get the economy moving again. If not, he will be remembered for the >>hubris he showed during the bubble, when he assured worriers that there >>was no need for the Federal Reserve to deal with the inflating stock >>market because he knew how to deal with bubble aftermaths and prevent >>lasting economic damage. >>Advertisement >> >>He has reason to worry. The bubble's economic impact has lasted far >>longer than anyone expected, despite Dr. Greenspan's diet of Fed rate >>cuts, which has cut short-term rates to 40-year lows. There are >>indications that capital spending in the technology sector has finally >>hit bottom, but an early upturn is no sure thing. >> >>For months, Fed officials have been saying they were in no danger of >>running out of ammunition. The Fed could buy longer-term Treasuries, >>they said, even if it had not done so for decades. >> >>Until this week, the markets seemed to view such talk as an academic >>exercise of little interest to traders. But the Fed's statement when it >>left rates unchanged on Tuesday decoupled the issues of economic growth >>and inflation, and reassured investors that rates will stay low even if >>the economy does better. "They basically made clear they are not >>tightening for a long time," said William C. Dudley, chief United States >>economist at Goldman, Sachs. >> >>The impact on expectations was drastic, and can be seen in the >>eurodollar futures market. That market lets you bet on where short-term >>interest rates will be in the future. And traders are now betting that >>rates will rise far more slowly than they had expected. The market >>expectation for short-term rates in June 2006 is now 3.695 percent, down >>half a percentage point since the Fed acted. >> >>By giving a boost to the bond market while not alarming stock traders, >>Mr. Greenspan pulled off a neat trick, even if expectations of sustained >>low interest rates also hurt the dollar. >> >>It is the currency markets that may provide the most interesting tales >>of intrigue over the next year if world economic growth does not >>accelerate. As it is, nearly every country has reason to hope for a >>weakening currency, to help its exports compete. >> >>Consider the dollar. Its strength in recent years has come because >>foreigners were eager to invest here, and thus redeploy the dollars they >>got as we ran huge trade deficits. It stands to reason that if American >>investments seem less attractive, foreigners will invest less and the >>dollar will decline. >> >>But some central banks, notably in Asia, have no intention of allowing >>that to happen. "China likes the current system," Mr. Dudley said. "It >>allows them to keep their currency undervalued and people employed. It >>is part of a policy of political stability in China." The central bank >>in China has been buying dollars at a rapid pace to keep the Chinese >>currency from rising against the dollar. >> >>Only the Europeans seem oblivious to what is happening. Even as the >>leading European economies teeter near recession, the European Central >>Bank is reluctant to lower its interest rates. >> >>That helps the euro, but Europe does not need such help. Robert J. >>Barbera, the chief economist of ITG/Hoenig, points out that the latest >>data, for March, indicated that the dollar price of American imports >>from Europe had risen 6.5 percent over the previous year, while the euro >>was up 25 percent against the dollar. The difference is shrinking >>margins for European exporters. >> >>A weak world economy means that everyone is fighting for shares of a >>too-small pie. The hope is for a growing pie. That is why the Fed's >>indication that it will not tighten for a long time is welcome, and why >>lower European interest rates are overdue. >> >> >> > > > > From annewilliamson at msn.com Sun May 11 10:29:57 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 12:29:57 -0400 Subject: [A-List] A Greenspan Tactic Buoys the Bond Market References: <3EBDDA93.7050208@mindspring.com> <00b301c317c5$9a2f1980$6401a8c0@MineDoyran> <3EBE6D7C.1020705@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <031101c317da$9071eac0$c9b7fea9@anne> A-Listers may recall that Bennett formed some dopey "Committee to Support the War on Terrorism," and then went after libertarians and the Old Right anti-war war crowd in public, targeting - inter alia - Lew Rockwell personally for destruction in one press conference and subsequent published literature. I've been pleased to see that the folks at lewrockwell.com have refrained from gloating over Bennett's current troubles, but this article from VDare's site has some interesting information. I especially liked the revelations concerning his academic credentials and his books' ghostwriters. -A. Bill Bennett's Life Of Vice It Goes Deeper Than His Gambling http://www.vdare.com/francis/be nnett.htm May 08, 2003 The Bennett Brouhaha By Sam Francis If you wanted to prove that not all neo-conservatives are Jewish, which seems to be a burning issue in some quarters these days, one of the first names you'd mention would be that of William Bennett, once famous as the nation's self-appointed instructor in virtue but this week better known as the main character out of an old country-Western song by Kenny Rogers. Unfortunately, Mr. Bennett lacks the flinty wisdom of Mr. Rogers' gambler, who knew when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em and when to cut and run. Also unlike Mr. Bennett, he knew when to shut up. For the last several days, Mr. Bennett has only made the embarrassment of being exposed as a hypocrite worse by trying to defend his wastrel habits. "I don't play the 'milk money'," the Virtue Czar whined to the press. That's swell. The $8 million he has played (and apparently lost) during the last decade was a good deal more than milk money, and most of it probably came from the sales of his books telling all of us how we ought to behave. There's nothing wrong with a little gambling, any more than there's anything wrong with a little drinking. But when you guzzle the equivalent of $8 million worth of booze in ten years, something is definitely wrong, and so it is with gambling. This is not the pastime of a fellow who plays a little poker with his buddies every weekend or a guy who bets the lottery with a system based on his mother-in-law's birthday. A man who loses $8 million in a decade is out of control, and whatever the psychiatric meaning of such conduct, the whole concept of virtue is that you are in control-of your appetites and passions. Mr. Bennett clearly isn't. "Hypocrisy" is not quite the word for it. But his silly and unsavory gambling habit is really not out of character for Mr. Bennett, whose entire life has been based on what many moralists would tell you is fundamentally wrong with gambling-that it's an effort to get something for nothing. From the earliest days of his career, that's exactly what Bill Bennett has been trying to do, and it's closely related to his emergence as a major neo-conservative leader. Mr. Bennett started off his academic life with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy at the University of Texas; the dissertation was all of a whopping 129 pages long, with only 10 pages of footnotes and a mere 13 items in the bibliography. In the humanities, at the graduate level, that's unacceptable-indeed it's barely acceptable for undergraduates. Most dissertations run to 200 or more pages, and if they don't, they're rejected. How he got away with it isn't clear, but, as one scholar who's read it tells me, "It may be the only thing Mr. Bennett ever wrote on his own." In 1980 he published a book on affirmative action that apparently was really written by "co-author" Terry Eastland. That set the future philosopher on his course to stardom. It also set him up, in the new Reagan administration, to be the neo- conservative candidate for the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which decides which academic projects get funded and which don't. His main rival for the position was M.E. Bradford, a real scholar from the University of Dallas whom Mr. Bennett's neo-con and left-wing cronies vilified. One such smear-artist was leftist historian Eric Foner, who curiously received sizable grants from the NEH once Mr. Bennett took charge. It was only a short step from the NEH If to the Department of Education, where Mr. Bennett, with his chief of staff Bill Kristol, managed not only to save the department from President Reagan's pledge to abolish it but actually enlarged it by some $9 billion more than under Jimmy Carter. A former Department employee tells me, "his speech writers used to ask the librarians at the Department library to come up with famous quotations to make Bennett's speeches appear erudite." When his best-selling Book of Virtues came out and made the erudite Dr. Bennett rich, it soon developed, as the New Yorker reported a few years ago,that "Dr. Virtue" had nothing to do with writing it. The whole tome was really the work of a ghostwriter who got a cut of Mr. Bennett's immense royalties. Better him than the casinos, I guess. The pattern is clear enough: Virtually everything Mr. Bennett has done or claimed to have done throughout his career is simply a fraud-not least the fake "conservatism" and vapidly pious moralisms he has made a fortune by preaching. It's hardly surprising that this week his fellow phonies among the neo-cons are shrieking in his defense. Why shouldn't they? They're well-suited to each other. COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. From sherrynstan at igc.org Sun May 11 12:11:55 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 14:11:55 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The piece on Bill Bennett In-Reply-To: <031101c317da$9071eac0$c9b7fea9@anne> Message-ID: <009701c317e8$d192b490$0200a8c0@stan> Anne, please. The reference to Eric Foner as a "smear artist" and the implication that he was colluding with Bill Bennett is as ridiculous as it is repugnant. From hliu at mindspring.com Sun May 11 13:26:44 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 15:26:44 -0400 Subject: [A-List] [Fwd: The Missionary Position] Message-ID: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> William F Hummel wrote: > Your so-called understanding of the Fed and its operations was > revealed when you argued that the Fed controlled the interbank > lending rate through its control of the overnight repo rate. > Apparently rubbing shoulders with Greenspan didn't help. I did not argue, that fact was drawn from the Fed's description of its activities on the Fed's archives. The Fed targets the ffr by influencing the repo rate. This is a fact well defined and recognized by the Fed and all market participants. Contrary to popular relief, the Federal Reserve does not directly control the federal funds rate. It does not participate in any way in the federal funds market. The federal funds rate reflects nothing more than a daily market, between banks, for cash reserves. The federal funds rate is determined, in the course of a market day, by the supply and demand for cash reserves between commercial banks. The connection between the Fed and the federal funds rate is through the repurchase agreement rate (repo rate), which the federal funds rate closely follows, and which the Fed influences through its daily transactions in the repo markets. Normally, changes in the repo rate are reflected in the federal funds rate and therefore the Fed is able to influence the federal funds rate via its influence over the repo rate. But it is a substantive as well as a technical mistake to accept the popular notion that the Federal Reserve directly and arbitrarily sets the Federal Funds rate - as if by decree. William Hummel will do well to understand that. Barkley also disagreed with Hummel.(See Below) Henry C.K. Liu >>William, >> You are confusing things. I fully agree that the >>"target" ("primary" if you prefer) is the fed funds >>rate. That's what they decide on at the FOMC >>meetings. As my friend at the Fed (who has been >>there a very long time and is pretty high up) put it, >>the fact that the Fed operates through the repo >>market is a "technicality." But the fact that they do >>so means that what is most immediately and directly >>affected by their actions is the repo rate. The two rates >>are linked and hence affecting means affecting the other. >> Henry C.K. Liu's characterization of the situation >>remains accurate. >>Barkley Rosser http://www.federalreserve.gov/pf/pdf/frspf3.pdf ? It can target the price of reserves (the federal funds rate) by adjusting the supply of reserves to meet any change in the demand for reserves. In theory, the Federal Reserve could provide or absorb bank reserves through market transactions in any type of asset. In practice, however, most types of assets cannot be traded readily enough to accommodate open market operations. For open market operations to work effectively, the Federal Reserve must be able to buy and sell quickly, at its own convenience, in whatever volume may be needed to keep the supply of reserves in line with prevailing policy objectives. These conditions require that the instrument it buys or sells be traded in a broad, highly active market that can accommodate the transactions without distortions or disruptions to the market itself. The market for U.S. government securities satisfies these conditions, and the Federal Reserve carries out by far the greatest part of its open market operations in that market. The U.S. government securities market, in which overall trading averages more than $100 billion a day, is the broadest and most active of U.S. financial markets. Transactions are handled over the counter (that is, not on an organized stock exchange), with the great bulk of orders placed with specialized dealers (both bank and nonbank). Although most dealer firms are in New York City, a network of telephone and wire services links dealers and customers regardless of their location to form a worldwide market. The Federal Reserve?s holdings of government securities are tilted somewhat toward Treasury bills, which have maturities of one year or less (table 3.1). The average maturity of the Federal Reserve?s portfolio of Treasury issues is only a little more than 3 years, somewhat below the average maturity of roughly 5? years for all outstanding marketable Treasury securities. In the 1980s, the average maturity of the Federal Reserve?s portfolio shortened somewhat, as the Federal Reserve began to emphasize liquidity in managing its portfolio. More recently, the Federal Reserve has slightly lengthened the average maturity of its portfolio. Factors Influencing Nonborrowed Reserves Most purchases and sales of securities are not undertaken to adjust conditions in reserves markets as a result of a policy decision. Rather they are made to offset other influences on reserves. Certain factors beyond the immediate control of the Federal Reserve, such as the amount of currency in circulation, the size of Treasury balances at Federal Reserve Banks, and the volume of Federal Reserve float, cause reserves to rise and fall. (These factors are discussed in detail in appendix A.) The movement of these factors, called technical factors, must be forecast so that the makers of policy can determine what would happen to reserves if the Federal Reserve were to abstain from open market operations. Fluctuations in some technical factors are attributable mainly to pronounced seasonal influences, and thus their effect on nonborrowed reserves is fairly predictable. For example, the amount of currency in circulation rises late in the year because individuals tend to hold more currency during the holiday shopping season. This rise in currency in circulation drains reserves from the depository system because, when a depositor withdraws currency from a bank, the bank turns to the shortened somewhat, as the Federal Reserve began to emphasize liquidity in managing its portfolio. More recently, the Federal Reserve has slightly lengthened the average maturity of its portfolio. Factors Influencing Nonborrowed Reserves Most purchases and sales of securities are not undertaken to adjust conditions in reserves markets as a result of a policy decision. Rather they are made to offset other influences on reserves. Certain factors beyond the immediate control of the Federal Reserve, such as the amount of currency in circulation, the size of Treasury balances at Federal Reserve Banks, and the volume of Federal Reserve float, cause reserves to rise and fall. (These factors are discussed in detail in appendix A.) The movement of these factors, called technical factors, must be forecast so that the makers of policy can determine what would happen to reserves if the Federal Reserve were to abstain from open market operations. Fluctuations in some technical factors are attributable mainly to pronounced seasonal influences, and thus their effect on nonborrowed reserves is fairly predictable. For example, the amount of currency in circulation rises late in the year because individuals tend to hold more currency during the holiday shopping season. This rise in currency in circulation drains reserves from the depository system because, when a depositor withdraws currency from a bank, the bank turns to the Federal Reserve to replenish its depleted vault cash and pays for the shipment of currency by drawing down its reserve account. In contrast, a decline in currency in circulation provides reserves. Movements in the Treasury?s balance at the Federal Reserve also follow certain regular, seasonal patterns, which are related to corporate and individual tax dates, social security payments, and the like. When the Treasury, perhaps anticipating a major spending commitment, shifts funds from its collateralized ?tax and loan? accounts at commercial banks into its account at the Federal Reserve, reserves are removed from the banking system. In contrast, when the Treasury makes a payment, such as a tax refund, it reduces its balance at the Federal Reserve and injects reserves into the depository system. Other technical factors are affected more by random occurrences, such as transportation difficulties due to winter storms, and thus are more difficult to predict. One such factor is float, which is the difference between the total value of checks in the process of collection that have been credited to banks? reserve accounts and the value of those collected but not yet credited to banks? reserve accounts. A rise in float increases reserves whereas a decline in float reduces them. Technical factors can provide or absorb a sizable amount of reserves. If, on balance, they are adding to or drawing down reserves in amounts consistent with the FOMC?s objectives as to the supply of reserves, the Federal Reserve will take no action. At other times, the Federal Reserve may undertake open market operations to neutralize technical factors and to obtain desired levels of nonborrowed reserves. Indeed, most of the Federal Reserve?s operations are defensive in the sense that they are intended to offset the various market forces that are pushing the level of nonborrowed reserves in a direction at odds with the FOMC?s objectives. Techniques of Open Market Operations Depending on the reserve situation, the Federal Reserve approaches open market operations in one of two ways. When forecasts of the factors that influence reserves indicate that the supply of reserves will probably continue to need adjustment, the Federal Reserve may make outright purchases or sales of securities. If the need is to withdraw reserves, the Federal Reserve may also redeem maturing securities held in its portfolio. (When the Federal Reserve redeems the securities, the Treasury takes funds out of its account to pay the Federal Reserve, leaving fewer reserves in the depository system.) In general, it conducts outright transactions (sales, purchases, and redemptions) only a few times each year, to meet longer-term reserve needs. When projections indicate only a temporary need to alter reserves, either because the technical factor affecting reserves is expected to be reversed or offset or because the near-term outlook for reserves is uncertain, the Federal Reserve may engage in transactions that only temporarily affect the supply of reserves?repurchase agreements, in the case of temporary additions of reserves, and matched sale?purchase transactions, in the case of temporary drains of reserves. These temporary transactions, which are designed to reduce fluctuations in the overall supply of reserves by offsetting the short-term effects of technical factors, are used much more frequently than are outright transactions. Market participants monitor these operations very closely for signs of any change in the underlying thrust of monetary policy. Outright Purchases and Sales Transactions on an outright basis occur largely through auctions in which dealers are requested to submit bids to buy or offers to sell securities of the type and maturity that the Federal Reserve has elected to sell or to buy. The dealers? bids or offers are arranged according to price, and the Federal Reserve accepts amounts bid or offered in sequence, taking the highest prices bid for its sales and the lowest prices offered for its purchases, until the desired size of the whole transaction is reached. The Federal Reserve also conducts securities transactions with several official agencies, such as foreign central banks. Occasionally the Federal Reserve reduces its holdings of securities by redeeming maturing securities rather than rolling them over at Treasury auctions, as it usually does (table 3.2). Repurchase Agreements When a temporary addition to bank reserves is called for, the Federal Reserve engages in short-term repurchase agreements (RPs)with dealers; that is, it buys securities from dealers who agree to repurchase them by a specified date at a specified price (table 3.3). Because the added reserves will automatically be extinguished when the RPs mature, this arrangement is a way of temporarily injecting reserves into the depository system. Repurchase agreements for the Federal Reserve account may be conducted on an overnight basis or on a so-called term basis. Most term RPs mature within seven days, and dealers sometimes have the choice of terminating the transaction before maturity. The absorption of reserves due to premature terminations by dealers may also suit the needs of the Federal Reserve. Such terminations often occur when the availability of reserves to depository institutions is greater than anticipated, which tends to reduce the borrowing costs that dealers face elsewhere. Whenever the Federal Reserve arranges RPs with dealers, the distribution of the transaction among dealers is determined by auction. Individual dealers may enter several offers at various interest rates. The Federal Reserve arranges all the offers in descending order and then accepts those offers with the highest rates up to the dollar amount needed to meet the reserve objectives. Matched Sale?Purchase Transactions When the Federal Reserve needs to absorb reserves temporarily, it employs matched sale?purchase transactions with dealers. These transactions involve a contract for immediate sale of securities to, and a matching contract for subsequent purchase from,each participating dealer. The maturities of such arrangements do not usually exceed seven days. The initial sale causes reserves to be drained from the banking system; later, when the Federal Reserve purchase is implemented, the flow of reserves is reversed. Matched sale?purchase transactions are typically arranged in Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve selects a bill in which it has a substantial holding and invites dealers to state an interest rate at which they are willing to purchase the bills for same-day delivery and to sell them back for delivery on a subsequent day. It then accepts the most advantageous (lowest rate) bids to the point that sufficient reserves are withdrawn. Each weekday morning, two groups of Federal Reserve staff members, one at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one at the Board of Governors in Washington, prepare independent projections of the technical factors affecting reserve availability for the next few days and for several weeks to come. At 11:15 a.m., the Manager of the System Open Market Account and the group in New York are linked in a telephone conference call with members of the senior staff at the Board of Governors and with a Federal Reserve Bank president who is currently a member of the FOMC. Participants in the call discuss staff forecasts for reserves, recent developments in financial markets, and the latest data on the monetary and credit aggregates. They pay special attention to trading conditions in the reserves market, particularly to the levelof the federal funds rate in relation to the level expected to be consistent with the reserve conditions specified in the policy directive. In light of this information, they determine a program of open market operations. After the call, which usually ends around 11:30 a.m., all FOMC members as well as all nonmember Bank presidents are informed of the actions the Federal Reserve intends to take during the day. When the Federal Reserve has decided to undertake a particular operation, members of the staff at the Domestic Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York contact dealers trading in U.S. Treasury and federal agency securities. Approximately three dozen dealers that actively trade in U.S. Treasury and federal agency securities have relationships with the Desk; thus, the Federal Reserve normally encounters no difficulty in promptly completing its large orders. Once the transaction is executed, the reserve account of each dealer?s bank is credited or debited accordingly, and the supply of reserves to the banking system changes. DISCOUNT WINDOW The Federal Reserve?s lending at the discount window serves two key functions: ? It complements open market operations in managing the reserves market day to day and in implementing longer-term monetary policy goals. ? It facilitates the balance sheet adjustments of individual banks that face temporary, unforeseen changes in their asset?liability structure. The role of the discount window in the conduct of monetary policy has changed substantially since the early years of the Fedhe Domestic Trading Desk at work. T From annewilliamson at msn.com Sun May 11 14:07:52 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 16:07:52 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The piece on Bill Bennett References: <009701c317e8$d192b490$0200a8c0@stan> Message-ID: <034401c317f9$01d46c60$c9b7fea9@anne> I wouldn't know, but thanks for your input. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: "bon moun" To: Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2003 2:11 PM Subject: RE: [A-List] The piece on Bill Bennett > Anne, please. > > The reference to Eric Foner as a "smear artist" and the implication that > he was colluding with Bill Bennett is as ridiculous as it is repugnant. > > > From soncu at pacbell.net Sun May 11 16:05:29 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 15:05:29 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Bush's nuclear arms plan Message-ID: www.sfgate.com Bush's nuclear arms plan Administration wants billions to update U.S. warheads James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, May 11, 2003 San Francisco Chronicle URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/11/MN167 75.DTL The Bush administration is proposing to spend billions of dollars rebuilding the country's nuclear weapons manufacturing industry, resuming the production of nuclear components and materials halted after the end of the Cold War. Proposals in President Bush's 2004 budget would refurbish virtually every facet of the nuclear weapons complex, ranging from the nuclear test site in Nevada to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina. There has been intense opposition in Washington to some aspects of President Bush's nuclear weapons policies. The Democrats have fought, for instance, a proposal to build a new generation of smaller warheads, which cleared a Senate committee last week. But there has been virtually no congressional dissent or debate over the president's proposed multibillion- dollar resuscitation of America's nuclear infrastructure. The president's budget includes $320 million to build new plutonium cores -- known as "pits" -- for nuclear warheads, $40 million of which would be used to design a plant capable of producing 500 such pits a year. An additional $135 million would go to restart production of tritium, which has not been produced by the government for more than a decade, and more funds would be spent in coming years. The tritium, a gas that dramatically increases the force of thermonuclear explosions, will be produced at a commercial reactor in Watts Bar, Tenn. -- an unprecedented breaching of a long-standing policy that kept weapons work at military facilities. While rebuilding plans were begun under President Bill Clinton, the current budget proposals advance the effort more broadly. Some arms experts say the proposals indicate the White House is planning on a far larger nuclear arsenal than that envisaged in the recently signed Moscow Treaty with Russia. The treaty, ratified by the Senate in March, mandates more than a 60 percent reduction in deployed warheads over the next decade. "The clearest answer to what is happening comes from the fact that they want to build a pit production facility that can make 500 pits a year," said Robert Civiak, a scientist who formerly analyzed nuclear weapons spending at the Office of Management and Budget. "Add to that the tritium production, and it's clear they want to support much more of a stockpile than what is in the Moscow Treaty. They're preparing the capacity to completely replace the existing stockpile in five to 10 years." Further, according to Civiak, the fastest growing program in the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the weapons complex, is the refurbishment of the rest of the industrial machinery of nuclear warhead production. >From 2001, when it was launched, through 2008, the rebuilding program is expected to cost nearly $2.5 billion, Civiak estimated in a recent analysis of the White House numbers. RETURN OF NUCLEAR TESTING The budget also includes $25 million to increase the readiness at the Nevada Test Site, so that a nuclear test could be arranged in as little as 18 months, down from the current limit of three years. Nuclear testing has been banned since 1992, and the Bush administration has said it has no plans to resume underground blasts. But some arms experts and congressional Democrats charge that the proposed spending seems aimed at a resumption of testing. "People don't realize that we're getting back into the nuclear bomb business in a big way, and it's a very expensive business," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Significant portions of the nuclear weapons infrastructure were shut down near the end of the Cold War, either because of severe environmental contamination, as at the Rocky Flats pit plant near Denver, or because of reduced needs, as the standoff with the former Soviet Union eased. But upgrading the aging infrastructure is now regarded as a cornerstone of the Bush administration's more assertive defense strategy. "That infrastructure is part of the nuclear deterrent," Linton Brooks, the administrator of the nuclear safety agency, said in an interview with The Chronicle. Brooks added that the aim was to develop a more flexible U.S. nuclear complex that would not only maintain the existing stockpile of warheads "forever," but would also be able to respond to any new threats that might emerge. "We can't predict the future," Brooks said. "We need to be able to respond to the unforeseen," by having the capability to produce new kinds of nuclear weapons quickly. He strongly denied, however, that the aim was to maintain a nuclear stockpile larger than that permitted by the Moscow Treaty, a reduction from the 10,650 warheads now held by the military to somewhere between 2,200 and 1, 700 deployed in 2012. The facilities and components being developed would be used to maintain the effectiveness of the existing stockpile, Brooks insisted. 'STOCKPILE STEWARDSHIP' Overall spending on nuclear weapons activities has doubled since its low point of $3 billion in 1995, to a proposed $6.4 billion in the next fiscal year, even though the stated mission, begun in the Clinton administration, is "stockpile stewardship" -- maintaining the weapons and certifying they will work as designed without testing. "We already spend more today just to maintain the existing stockpile than we did on design and production during the Cold War," said Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "That will only go higher if we restart things, as they are planning." Some of the proposals may set dangerous precedents, say arms experts. Kenneth Bergeron, a former nuclear scientist at the Sandia National Laboratory, warned in a recent book, "Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power," that the decision to develop tritium at the Watts Bar reactor blurs the line between commercial and military reactors, something the United States has insisted other countries should not do. He also disagrees with administration defenders who insist that new production of tritium is needed to maintain the existing arsenal. Bergeron said he believes enough of the material can be recycled from retired warheads for the military's purposes. "The tritium developments are the first tangible action which show a commitment to expanding the arsenal," said Bergeron. "We're spending money, retraining workers. This is very real. It also represents an erosion of the restraints put in place at the end of the Cold War." ORIGINS OF NEW DOCTRINE The first signs of the administration's new nuclear policy came last January in its Nuclear Posture Review. The policy paper, produced by the Pentagon, said the United States should not just maintain the capability to launch large nuclear counterstrikes as a deterrent to nuclear powers, but should consider possibly striking pre-emptively at those countries developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The new doctrine has spurred a contentious debate in Congress, as has administration proposals to begin design work on a new generation of nuclear "bunker-busters" intended to destroy caches of prohibited weapons buried deep underground. The president also has proposed repealing a decade-old law prohibiting the development of smaller, low-yield weapons. The law was intended to discourage other countries from developing what are regarded as more "usable" nuclear warheads. Congressional committees are scheduled to continue debating the proposals next week. The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday approved $15.5 million for research into the bunker-busters, officially called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. It set aside an additional $6 million for research into advanced nuclear concepts, and approved a repeal of the 10-year-old ban on the development of low-yield warheads. Democrats say there is little hope of halting the initiatives. But there has been virtually no discussion of the far more costly proposals to rebuild the weapons production capability. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, while expressing intense opposition to the administration's new nuclear posture, said she considered the rebuilding of the existing nuclear infrastructure prudent. "We need to balance restraint with credibility," she said. "We have said, 'Let's not go out of the nuclear business.' We need to maintain our capability and not have cold production lines." Still, the country retains an enormous stockpile of nuclear materials. The figures are now classified, but in 1999 the Energy Department said there were more than 12,000 plutonium pits in storage at the Pantex plant, near Amarillo, Texas, said Schwartz of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In addition, there are nearly 200 tons of highly enriched uranium at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. The irony, say some analysts, is that for all the money to be spent on reviving the nuclear weapons complex, the prospect of the weapons actually being employed is slim. "The reality is there aren't going to be many, if any, opportunities to use them," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution who favors maintaining a powerful arsenal. "It's still a relatively unusable deterrent of last resort." ----------------------------------------------------------------- --------------- NUCLEAR WEAPONS ACROSS THE GLOBE There are approximately 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, more than 95 percent of them in the United States and Russia. Aside from the admitted nuclear powers, a number of countries are suspected by international arms monitors of having clandestine weapons or pursuing weapons programs. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into effect in 1970. To date, 187 countries have ratified the NPT, which is monitored by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). COUNTRIES WITH CONFIRMED NUCLEAR WEAPONS The five major nuclear-armed states - the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain - are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and are bound under the NPT not to transfer nuclear weapons or to help nonnuclear states to obtain them. The other nuclear states, India and Pakistan, have not signed the NPT. United States: 10,500 nuclear warheads Russia: 20,000 warheads, half of which are deployed China: 400 warheads France: 450 warheads Britain: 185 warheads India: 65 warheads Pakistan: 30-50 warheads COUNTRIES WITH UNCONFIRMED NUCLEAR WEAPONS Israel: 100 (projected number) warheads; has not signed NPT. North Korea: 1-2 (projected number) warheads; announced its withdrawal from NPT in January. COUNTRIES REPORTED TO BE PURSUING DEVELOPMENT OF NUCLEAR PROGRAMS Algeria, Syria: Suspected intentions to produce nuclear weapons, but no nuclear weapons programs have been identified. Iran, Libya: Suspected of undertaking nuclear weapons programs since the early 1970s, but status of programs difficult to determine. Iraq: Nuclear weapons program started in the early 1970s, but was effectively halted in 1991 by Security Council-mandated inspections. After inspections ended in late 1998, it was suspected of resuming its quest for nuclear weapons, but U.S. troops have found no evidence to date in their post- war searches. COUNTRIES THAT HAVE DISBANDED NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAMS Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan: Inherited nuclear weapons at the breakup of the Soviet Union, but returned the weapons to Russia and signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear weapons state. Argentina: Admitted only that it conducted unsafeguarded uranium enrichment and reprocessing. Australia, Egypt: Ended their programs before they signed the NPT. Brazil, South Korea, Switzerland: Ended their programs before 1970. Romania: Former Warsaw Pact country once had a plutonium-separation program. South Africa: Abandoned its program before it signed the NPT in 1991, but maintains stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium under IAEA safeguards. Spain: May have had an unacknowledged nuclear weapons program under the previous military dictatorship. Sweden: Had a program that was essentially ended by the time it signed the NPT. Taiwan: Ended its program after 1970. Yugoslavia: The former communist government had a program that was ended after 1970. Sources: Nuclear Threat Initiative; Center for Defense Information; Monterey Institute for International Studies; Robert Norris and William Arkin, "Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945-2000"; Institute for Science and International Security; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2000; BBC News; additional research by Chronicle librarian Lois Jermyn E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold at sfchronicle.com. From annewilliamson at msn.com Sun May 11 16:19:56 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 18:19:56 -0400 Subject: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> Young voices shouting against creeping tyranny The Times ^ | May 12, 2003 | William Rees-Mogg It is going to be difficult to get an adequate debate on the European constitution. So far, the issues have not been properly explained to the public, either by the media or by the Government. The scale of the new proposal is immense, far bigger than the questions of the euro, the Maastricht Treaty, or even of Britain?s original decision to join the then European Economic Community. The drafts so far published will be subject to further revision and negotiation. They involve a total change in the nature of the government of the United Kingdom and of all the other nations of the European Union. In simple terms, we should all cease to be independent nations; the sole independent nation would be the EU itself. And that nation would not be a democracy. The proposals include a common defence and foreign policy, a European economic policy, a legal personality for Europe with universal citizenship, the supremacy of the new European legal system based on the Charter of Rights, and overriding European control in all the major domestic areas, including health, education, crime, immigration and the environment. Instead of being self-governed, all the nations of Europe would be governed by the agencies of the Union, which are primarily bureaucratic. There is no parallel to this in British history; it is perhaps closest to the process by which the United Kingdom itself was created, and Scotland and Ireland lost their own parliaments. That has had to be reversed. The process is very far advanced. The Government?s first great failure has already occurred. Apart from his Cardiff speech of last November, in which he presented an extreme Euro-centralist view, the Prime Minister has not put the issues before the people, and he has not made clear to his European partners the limits of what Britain could accept. Indeed, the Government?s position has been very confused. The draft constitution speaks clearly of a common foreign and defence policy. In November the Prime Minister seemed to go a long way towards accepting this. He said of these policies that ?we need more Europe, not less?. Yet the Iraq intervention has shown how divided Europe is on international issues. A common policy over Iraq would have been anti-American, and would have made it impossible for Britain to support the United States action. This is the tipping point between a Europe of nations and a single nation of Europe; there is not all that much time. Giscard d?Estaing will present the draft constitution to the European summit at Salonika on June 20. That is the first point at which the British people will see the whole constitution in its final draft form. There has not been any full discussion in Britain so far; there is therefore no national consensus, except possibly a consensus to reject membership of a bureaucratic European superstate. The Salonika meeting will refer the constitution to an intergovernmental conference. The Italians will be in the chair of Europe for the second half of 2003, and expect to produce a second Treaty of Rome by Christmas. The British Government hopes to be able to water down some of the more extreme proposals which transfer power from the nations to the European centre. No doubt it will have some success. In European negotiations there is always something which can be dropped in order to give each country its own little negotiating victory. But for those who see the constitution as unacceptable in its entirety, because it destroys parliamentary self-government, the negotiations offer little hope. We do not want to lose 100 per cent of our liberty in order for Tony Blair to come back from Rome claiming to have won back the last 20 per cent of it. The tabloid press is beginning to explain what is proposed to its readers, or at least The Sun and the Daily Mail are doing so. It is not politically correct to thank heaven for The Sun and the Mail, but their coverage stands in striking contrast to the Europhile silence of the BBC. On Thursday Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun reported a particularly important parliamentary occasion. There are two MPS who were appointed as members of the Convention; they have played an excellent role which may yet prove to be heroic. They are both now backbenchers, though they have successfully held ministerial office. They are both excellent constituency Members. I know because I have visited both in their constituencies. David Heathcoat-Amory sits for Wells in Somerset, and has held off repeated Lib-Dem attacks. Gisela Stuart sits for Edgbaston in Birmingham. These two members of the European Constitutional Conventional have tried to represent the British point of view. Mrs Stuart herself was born in Germany of German parents. She is no Little Englander. Last Wednesday they were reporting on the constitutional process to a Commons committee. Heathcoat-Amory said: ?It is time for plain speaking by this House on whether such a constitution is reconcilable with our position as a self-governing nation. This is too important to be left to parliamentary procedure and must be given to the people.? Gisela Stuart said that Europe risked turning into an unaccountable monster. ?We should never trade bureaucratic efficiency in return for democratic accountability.? That is, of course, the core issue; it is exactly what Giscard?s draft constitution proposes. These warnings came from two first-class Members of Parliament, one Conservative, one Labour, who have worked on every stage of the constitutional convention. The Government is resisting the proposal that the constitution should be ratified by a referendum, though eight other European countries are expected to have one, and there is even a referendum movement in Germany. What our Government at present proposes is to put whatever treaty is agreed in Rome, or next year, through the normal parliamentary procedure. It will use its huge majority from the 2001 election, in which the constitution of Europe was not an issue, and it will use the power of the Labour whips. In both Houses, amendments will be moved to the Bill, whenever it comes, to make ratification conditional on a referendum. After all, we have had referendums on the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and on the mayors, and we are expecting to have them on the euro and on regional government. It would take a formidable revolt to win a referendum vote in the House of Commons, though there is support for it. There will be a better chance in the House of Lords, where the Conservatives, probably a majority of cross-benchers, some Lib Dems and some Labour rebels will support the referendum. Everything will depend on public opinion, particularly the opinion of the young. A group of young people, of all parties and views on Europe, have been talking to each other. They were all too young to have had a vote when Britain last held a referendum on Europe. Half of them were not born at that time. They feel that it is their future which is being determined. One of them is my youngest daughter, Annunziata, who is the Editor of the European Journal. They have set up a new website: www.trustthepeople.org to fight for a constitutional referendum. We need to look at this debate from all points of view. So far, the BBC and the Government have failed to discharge their public duty. The BBC has not understood the historic nature of the choice. The Government has not even tried to create a coherent public view of the constitutional issues. The BBC governors should ask the board of management to mount a full-scale debate on an impartial basis. The nation is entitled to decide its own future, and to defend its own democracy; the new European constitution itself cannot prosper without public consent and democratic authenticity. In Britain we are accustomed to being democratic; we expect to hold our governments to account and to dismiss them when they fail. That was what happened to Chamberlain in 1940. An integrated and centralised Europe, run by bureaucrats, would in any case be a weak form of government; it would lack the strong basis of public support. But if it were to be created, against the wishes of the British people, the British would not support it in times of crisis, such as come to all governments, sooner or later. Tony Blair should understand this: the British people will not be hijacked into a bureaucratic European superstate. From hliu at mindspring.com Sun May 11 21:31:33 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 23:31:33 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The spread of democracy - McCarthy style. Message-ID: <3EBF1595.7090805@mindspring.com> The official, Stephen Browning, required non-members to declare, "I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party of Iraq," the Baath Party. Iraq's Baath Party Is Abolished Franks Declares End of Hussein's Apparatus as Some Members Retake Posts By Peter Slevin and Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, May 12, 2003; Page A10 BAGHDAD, May 11 -- Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, announced today that Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which dominated the country for more than three decades through violence and intimidation, has been abolished, although U.S. authorities have allowed many prominent members to return to top government positions. The party essentially evaporated after U.S. forces invaded Iraq and overthrew Hussein and his government, but Franks made it official by ordering an institution that exercised power in every Iraqi city and village to cease existence immediately. He said in a broadcast on U.S.-controlled radio that one-party rule was over. "The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party is dissolved," Franks said in a statement read by an announcer in Arabic and broadcast across Iraq this afternoon. He said the "apparatus of Iraqi security, intelligence and military intelligence belonging to Saddam Hussein are deprived of their authority and power." The effect of Franks's declaration remained unclear, but it seemed largely symbolic, given the party's organizational implosion and the somewhat contradictory U.S. request that many former high-ranking government officials, most of whom were Baath members, report to their jobs as usual. U.S. authorities have made "de-Baathification" a goal of the occupation period, but have not laid out consistent rules for accomplishing it. Officials in charge of Iraq's reconstruction have emphasized that the majority of Baath Party members are useful citizens who joined the party without passion, whether out of fear or pragmatism. The only Baath members automatically disqualified from participating in the new government are senior figures from Hussein's rule because of suspected involvement in human rights abuses or close ties to the former Iraqi leader. Just in the past week, however, U.S. officials have removed a dozen Baathists from the Planning Ministry and promised other selective purges. Scattered protests flared again today outside government ministries where employees protested the continued presence of top party officials. "They're all crooks," said Entisar Ahmed, an accountant at the Trade Ministry who had gathered with a group of colleagues at a grain silo to demand they be paid their monthly salary and a promised bonus for last year's performance. "They should not be allowed back to work." Dealing with the estimated 1.5 million people who were Baath members has become a controversial and complicated part of the Pentagon's postwar reconstruction effort. Many Iraqis want former Baathists to be excluded from reclaiming high-level government jobs or at least scrutinized. Non-Baathists, particularly those leading once-exiled political groups opposed to Hussein, contend the inclusion of Baathists could promote corruption, undermine the interim administration's legitimacy and anger those persecuted by the party during years of vengeful rule. U.S. officials say that barring former party members from returning to work until they are screened would delay the resuscitation of important services. Almost every national government agency and local council was stocked with party members. Many are technocrats and bureaucrats that the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance says it needs. At the Health Ministry over the weekend, the U.S. official in charge ordered more than 50 aspirants to senior administrative jobs to resign their Baath memberships. If they were not members, they were required to sign a statement denouncing "the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein and his regime." The official, Stephen Browning, required non-members to declare, "I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party of Iraq," the Baath Party. Former membership did not disqualify any of the aspiring interim officials, as long as they resigned immediately. Browning named as the ministry's temporary leader Ali Shnan, a party member derided by many fellow doctors. Shnan signed the document and quit the party at Browning's insistence. Franks, in addition to dissolving the party, said coalition forces expect Iraqis to help them collect key Baath Party documents. "Anyone who possesses documents related to the Baath Party or the Iraqi government must maintain and protect them and hand these documents to the coalition," Franks said in the statement. Successive U.S. administrations spent more than $10 million collecting evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Baath Party's reign. The Bush administration has pledged criminal prosecutions against top members but also aims to assist future leaders in investigating lower-level Baathists as part of a truth and reconciliation process. Addressing the political process to come, Franks said freedom of expression would be central as Iraqis prepare to choose an interim government and, ultimately, elect a permanent leadership. "All parties and political groups can take part in the political life in Iraq," Franks said, "except those who urge violence or practice it." From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Mon May 12 01:04:20 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 08:04:20 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Habermas on Iraq Message-ID: <001101c31854$b618e470$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> This is an edited translation, by Gary Davis of the Habermas list, of Habermas's response to the invasion of Iraq. I don't have time to comment at the moment, but it may interest listers. [Translation of: "Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?" in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 April, 2003, p. 33; translation by habhamaf; division of the article into 50 paragraph topics/themes (for easy response referencing) by Gary Davis, who is very wrapped up in a discussion of the article, which appeared in English translation as fewer, mostly very long paragraphs, indicated below by separator lines.] ______________________________________________________________ What does the felling of the monument mean? by J?rgen Habermas Let us not close our eyes before this revolution in world affairs: the normative authority of America lies shattered 1 The whole world watched that scene on the 9th of April in Baghdad, followed the American soldiers placing the noose around the neck of the dictator, watched the tyrant being felled from his pedestal in a most symbolic act, before a jubilant crowd. First the apparently immutable monument wobbles, then it falls. Before it crashes liberatingly to the ground, gravity has to overcome the grotesquely unnatural horizontal position in which the massive figure, gently see-sawing up and down, is poised for one last disturbing second. 2 Like the perception of a picture-puzzle 'flipping', so the public perception of the war seems to switch with this image. The morally obscene spread of shock and fear amongst a mercilessly bombarded, starved and helpless population transforms itself on this day, in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad, in the enthusiastically greeted liberation of citizens from terror and repression. Both perceptions contain a kernel of truth, even if they evoke contradictory moral feelings and attitudes. Must the emotional ambivalence lead to contradictory judgments? ______________________________________________________________ 3 On the face of it everything is clear-cut. An illegal war remains an offence against international law even if it leads to consequences which are normatively desirable. But is that the end of the story? Undesirable consequences can negate a good intention. Couldn't perhaps favorable consequences unfold, retrospectively, a legitimating influence? The mass graves, the subterranean cells and the reports of the tortured leaves no doubt about the criminal nature of the regime; and the liberation of a tormented population from a barbaric regime is a high good, the highest under the politically desirable goods. In this respect the Iraqis pronounce, whether they celebrate, loot, suffer apathetically or demonstrate against the occupiers, a judgment upon the moral nature of the war. ______________________________________________________________ 4 With us [in Germany] two kinds of reactions have become apparent in the political sphere. 5 The pragmatists believe in the normative power of the factual and place their faith in a practical judgment which, with an eye on the limitations which politics imposes on the realization of morality, pays its respects to the fruits of victory. In their eyes carping about the justification of the war is fruitless, since this has now become a historical fact. 6 The others, whether capitulating before the power of the factual out of opportunism or out of conviction, brush what they hold to be the dogma of international law aside with the argument that the latter - full of post-heroic squeamishness against the risks and costs of military force - refuses to acknowledge political freedom as the true good. 7 Both of these reactions are off the mark, since they give in to an affect against the ostensible abstractions of a 'bloodless moralism' without clarifying for themselves just what it is that the neo-conservatives in Washington are offering as an alternative to the domesticization of state force by international law. 8 For the neo-conservatives confront the morality of international law not with realism or with the bathos of freedom but with a quite revolutionary perspective: when international law fails then the politically successful hegemonic enforcement of a liberal world order is morally justifiable even when it seeks recourse to means which are indefensible in the light of such international law. 9 Wolfowitz is not Kissinger. He's much more a revolutionary than a power-cynic. Certainly, the superpower reserves for itself the right to act unilaterally - and bring to bear, if necessary, even preventively, all available military means - to strengthen its hegemonic position against possible rivals. 10 But global power ambition is not an end in itself for the new ideologues. What distinguishes the neo-conservatives from the school of the 'realists' is the vision of an American world political order which has jumped the reformist rails of the UN policies on human rights. It does not betray the liberal goals, but it does break the civilizing bounds which the charter of the United Nations placed with good reason upon the process of goal-realization. 11 The world organization is certainly not yet in a position, today, to force deviant member states into offering their citizens a democratic and rule-of-law based order. 12 And the highly selectively pursued human rights policies are subject to the proviso of implementability: the veto-power Russia needs not fear an armed intervention in Chechnya. Saddam Hussein's use of nerve gas against his own Kurdish population is but one of many instances in the scandalous chronicle of the failure of the community of nations, which looks the other way even in cases of genocide. 13a All the more important is hence the core function of peace-keeping, on which the existence of the United Nations is based - i.e. the enforcement of the ban on wars of aggression, with which, after World War II, the jus ad bellum was abolished and the sovereignty of individual states curtailed. ______________________________________________________________ 13b With that, classical international law had at least taken one decisive step in the direction of a cosmopolitan legal order. 14 The United States - which for half a century could claim to be a pacemaker on this road - has, with the Iraq war, not only destroyed this reputation and given up the role of a guarantor power in international law; with its violation thereof she sets future superpowers a disastrous example. 15 Let's not kid ourselves: America's normative authority lies shattered. ______________________________________________________________ 16 Neither of the two conditions for a legally justifiable use of military force was fulfilled: neither the situation of self-defense against an actual or imminent attack, nor an authorized decision by the Security Council in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter. 17 Neither Resolution 1441 nor one of the seventeen preceding and ('used-up') Iraq resolutions could count as sufficient authorization. Something which the alliance of the war-willing confirmed performatively, for that matter, by first of all seeking a 'second' resolution, and then withdrawing it when it became clear that they would not be able to count even on the 'moral' majority of the non-veto members. 18 Finally the whole procedure was turned into a farce by the President of the United States declaring repeatedly that he would act, if necessary, without a mandate of the Security Council. 19 In the light of the Bush Doctrine, the military build-up in the Gulf lacked from the outset the character of a mere threat. This would have presupposed the avertibility of the threatened sanctions. 20 The comparison with the intervention in Kosovo also offers no exoneration. It is true that an authorization by the Security Council in this case was not reached either. But the retrospectively obtained legitimation could be based upon three circumstances: on the prevention - as it seemed at the time - of an ethnic cleansing in the process of taking place, on the imperative - covered by international law - of emergency assistance holding erga omnes for this case, as well as the incontrovertibly democratic and constitutional character of all the member states of the ad hoc military alliance. 21 Today the normative controversy is dividing the West itself. 22 Admittedly, a remarkable difference in the argumentative strategies between the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon powers had begun to manifest itself already then, in April of 1999. While the one side drew from the disaster of Srebrenica the lesson that military intervention was necessary to close the gap between efficacy and legitimacy which earlier missions had revealed - to make headway in the direction of a fully institutionalized world civil rights - the other side was content with the goal of spreading its own liberal order elsewhere in the world, by force if necessary. At the time I ascribed this to differences in the respective legal traditions - Kant's cosmopolitanism on the one hand, John Stuart Mill's liberal nationalism on the other. 23 But in the light of the hegemonic unilateralism which the policy theorists of the Bush Doctrine have been pursuing since 1991 - as Stefan Fr?hlich showed in this newspaper on 10th April - one could surmise, with hindsight, that the American delegation was already pursuing the negotiations of Rambouillet from this novel perspective. Whether this is true or not, George W. Bush's decision to consult the Security Council is at any rate no longer based on a desire - internally long since regarded as superfluous - for authorization by international law. This backing was sought only because it could have increased support for the "Coalition of the Willing" and allay reservations within the domestic population. 24 At the same time we should not read the new doctrine as an expression of normative cynicism. Functions like that of the geo-strategic consolidation of spheres of power and of resources which such a policy may also fulfill may tempt one to adopt a critique-of-ideology approach. But this conventional explanation trivializes the break - inconceivable even a year-and-a-half ago - with the norms to which the United States has been committed until now. 25 We'd be well advised not to spend time on a search for motives, but rather to take the new doctrine at its word. Otherwise we'd misread the revolutionary character of a re-orientation based on the historical experiences of the past century. 26 The historian Eric Hobsbawm quite rightly named the 20th "the American" Century. The Neoconservatives could see themselves as the 'victors' and regard the controversial successes - the reorganization of Europe and the Pacific/South East Asian area after the defeat of Germany and Japan, as well as the transformation of Eastern as well as Eastern and Middle-European societies after the disintegration of the Soviet Union - as a model for a new world order. From the point of view of a liberalistically read post-histoire ? la Fukuyama, this model has the advantage of being able to dispense with the complicated justification of normative goals: what more could people possibly want than the world-wide spread of liberal nations and the globalization of free markets? 27 The road hence is also clear: Germany, Japan and Russia have been forced to their knees by war and the arms race. Military force is an all-the-more attractive option today. As in asymmetric wars, the victor is in any case an a priori certainty. Wars which improve the world require no further justification. At the price of negligible collateral damage, they remove unambiguous evil, which under the aegis of a powerless community of nations would otherwise persist. The Saddam falling from his pedestal is the argument which suffices as justification. ______________________________________________________________ 28 This doctrine was developed long before the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The cleverly instrumentalized mass psychology of the shock of 11 September did however first of all create the climate within which this doctrine could find broad support - if in a somewhat modified version, that of the "War against Terrorism". That it should come to a head in the Bush Doctrine is something it owes to the definition of a novel phenomenon in the familiar concepts of conventional warfare. In the case of the Taliban regime there was indeed a causal connection between a terrorism difficult to pin down and an attackable 'rogue state'. According to this model it is possible to adapt the classical conduct of war between nations to deal with that treacherous danger posed by diffuse and globally operating [terror-]networks. Compared to the original version, this connection of hegemonic unilateralism with defense against an insidious danger mobilizes the additional argument of self-defense. 29 At the cost however of then being saddled with a new burden of proof. The American administration had to seek to convince world public opinion of contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. This dis-information campaign was, for all that, successful enough domestically for 60% of Americans - according to the most recent opinion polls - to greet the regime change in Iraq as "expiation" for the terrorist attack of 11th September. ______________________________________________________________ 30 But for the preventive use of military means, the Bush Doctrine does not really provide a plausible explanation. Since the para-statal violence of the terrorists - the "war in peace" - is not graspable with the categories of war between nations, it doesn't ground in the least the need to weaken the notion of national self-defense (strictly regulated in international law) in the direction of preemptive military action. Against the globally networked, decentralized and invisibly operating enemies, what is of use is prevention at a different operative level. Here what is of use are not bombs and rockets, not airplanes and tanks, but the internationally connected national intelligence- and police services; the control of monetary channels, the tracking down of logistic connections in general. The corresponding "security programs" impinge not on international law but on nationally guaranteed civil rights. 31 Other dangers, arising from the failure (America's own fault) of a politics of non-proliferation of ABC weapons is in any case more manageable through negotiations than through wars of disarmament - as the reserved reaction to North Korea shows. 32 That is, a doctrine concentrating on terrorism does not provide, compared to the directly pursued goal of a hegemonic world order, an increase in legitimacy. 33 The Saddam felled from his pedestal remains the argument - symbol for the liberal reorganization of an entire region. The Iraq war is a link in the chain of a global politics which justifies itself by claiming that it has replaced the unavailing Human Rights policies of a used-up world organization. The United States takes over as it were the mandate in which the United Nations failed. What's to be said against this? ______________________________________________________________ 34 Moral feelings can lead one astray, since they stick to individual scenes, to specific images. There's no way of avoiding the question of the justification of the war in general. The decisive controversy revolves around the question whether justification in the light of international law can and should be replaced by the unilateral global politics of a self-empowering hegemon. ______________________________________________________________ 35 The empirical objections to the feasibility of the American vision boil down to the way world society has become too complex for it still to be steerable from some central point, based on a politics of military force. The fear of terrorism experienced by the technically highly-armed superpower seems to express the Cartesian fear of a subject seeking to turn itself and the world around it into an object, in order to bring everything under control. It is a politics which, in the horizontally connected media of the market and of communication, begins to fall behind, regressing to the original Hobbesian primordiality of a hierarchical security system. A nation which reduces all options to the dumb alternatives of war and peace runs up against the limits of its own organizational powers and resources. It also leads the negotiation with competing powers and foreign cultures in false channels and pushes the coordination costs to dizzying heights. ______________________________________________________________ 36 Even if this hegemonic unilateralism were realizable it would still have side-effects which would, by its own criteria, be morally undesirable. The more that political power manifests itself in the dimensions of military, secret service and police, the more does it undermine itself - the politics of a globally operating civilizing power - by endangering its own mission of improving the world according to liberal ideas. 37 In the United States itself, the permanent regime of a "War President" is already undermining the foundations of the rule of law. Quite apart from the practiced or tolerated torture methods beyond its borders, the war regime is not only denying the prisoners of Guantnamo Bay the legal rights conferred on them by the Geneva Convention. It confers powers on the security services which encroach on the constitutional rights of its own citizens. ______________________________________________________________ 38 And what about the really counterproductive measures the Bush Doctrine is likely to demand in case of the by-no-means unlikely scenario of the citizens of Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and so on making unfriendly use of the democratic rights which the American Government has so kindly made them a present of? 39 In 1991 the Americans liberated Kuwait - democratize it they did not. Most of all it is the superpower's presumptuous trusteeship which is criticized by its coalition partners, who are, for good normative reasons, unconvinced by the unilateral leadership claim. 40 There was a time when Liberal Nationalism felt itself justified in propagating the universal values of its own liberal order throughout the world, with military backing where needed. This self-righteousness does not become any more sufferable by it being ceded from the nation State to a hegemonic power. It is the very universalistic core of democracy and human rights itself which forbids its universal propagation by fire and sword. 41 The universalistic validity claim which the West associates with its 'political core values' - i.e. with the procedure of democratic self-determination and the vocabulary of human rights - may not be confused with the imperial demand that the political life-form and culture of a particular democracy--and be it the oldest--is to be exemplary for all other societies. 42 Of this order was the 'universalism' of those ancient empires which perceived the world beyond their borders - shimmering on a distant horizon - from the central perspectives of their own world-views. 43 The modern self-understanding is on the contrary marked by an egalitarian universalism which insists on the de-centering of each specific perspective; it requires the relativization of one's own interpretive perspective from the point of view of the autonomous Other. ______________________________________________________________ 44 It was American Pragmatism itself which made insight into that which was good and just to all parties concerned dependent upon a reciprocal acceptance of mutual perspectives. 45 The reason upon which modern rational law is based is not expressed in the validity of universal 'values' capable of being owned, exported, and distributed globally. 'Values' - including those for which one could expect global recognition - don't hang in the air; they become binding only in the normative order and practices of specific cultural forms of life. ______________________________________________________________ 46 When in Nasiriya thousands of Shiites demonstrate against Saddam and the American occupation, they bring to expression that non-Western cultures must appropriate the universalistic content of human rights from within their own resources and within an interpretation which can make a convincing connection to local experiences and interests. 47 For that reason, the multilateral formulation of a common purpose is not one option amongst others - especially not in international relations. 48 In its self-chosen isolation, even the good hegemon (presuming for itself trusteeship in the name of the common good) has no way of knowing whether the actions it claims to be in the interests of others is indeed equally good for all. 49 There is no meaningful alternative to the further cosmopolitan development of an international system of law in which the voices of all concerned are given an equal and reciprocal hearing. ______________________________________________________________ 50 The world organization has not as yet suffered irreparable damage. Since the 'smaller' members did not buckle under to the bullying of the larger ones, it has even grown in stature and influence. The reputation of the world organization can be damaged only by its own actions: if it should seek to 'heal' by compromise what cannot be healed. -- habhamaf at f-m.fm james daly From korreboy at hotmail.com Mon May 12 00:43:39 2003 From: korreboy at hotmail.com (P Dehnavi) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 08:43:39 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Exposed: the IRA killer who became top informer Message-ID: Articles origin http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=971207&issue_id=9174 Exposed: the IRA killer who became top informer Mon, May 12 03 BRITAIN'S most important agent inside the IRA was in hiding last night after his identity and details of his 25-year career as a ruthless executioner were exposed. The agent known as Stakeknife was named yesterday as Alfredo "Freddie" Scappaticci. British security officials said he was in a secret safe house and that he may even undergo plastic surgery to give him a new identity. The man was identified in several newspapers as Stakeknife, an army agent who for years held senior posts in the IRA and provided voluminous information to military intelligence. The secretary of Britain's Ministry of Defence's D Notice Committee, which guides British newspapers on matters of security, said last night that Stakeknife's identity was now in the public domain so there was no reason to advise against publishing his name. However, it advised British newspapers not to publish photographs showing his face. Scappaticci is believed to be under investigation by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, who has already reported up to a score of people, including police and army personnel, to the North's director of public prosecutions. Sir John's detectives are to question Stakeknife in the near future. The allegation is that army intelligence officers turned a blind eye to their agent's involvement in murders because his information was so valuable to them. Scappaticci, a west Belfast republican, who comes from a large family with a strong republican background, was last night understood to have left the North. One report said he may have been taken to a British military intelligence base in Dorset. Sir John Stevens said yesterday: "We will be questioning Stakeknife soon. We fear other informants have been sacrificed to save him and we will be asking him about that." Stakeknife, who lived at addresses in both Belfast and Dublin and was interned during the 1970s, was regarded as having close associations with the Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The British government paid him up to stg?80,000 a year, using a secret bank account, for information he was able to provide as it waged its war against militant republicans. Commenting last night on the Stakeknife reports, Sinn Fein said that they added further weight to "what is now a compelling argument that the British state operated a policy of assassination against citizens living in the six counties". "The claims being made at the weekend by media surrounding the alleged activities of a British agent working for the FRU (Force Research Unit) are very serious," said Sinn Fein policing spokesperson, Gerry Kelly. "FRU was not a rogue element of the British war apparatus. It was and continues to be, under a new name, at the very core of British military policy in Ireland. "Sinn Fein will continue to demand that the British government come clean on their collusion policy and we will continue to support the families of those killed in their demands for the truth." The Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble, said he was not shocked the British security forces had penetrated so far into the IRA. He added: "It is the key way in which the paramilitaries have been ground down and brought close to defeat in Northern Ireland." Scappaticci is believed to have been in charge of inquiries into the IRA's Dublin brigade. His squad was called in by IRA bosses after the leadership became concerned about Garda infiltration of the Dublin units. But senior Garda officers last night dismissed reports that Stakeknife was responsible for the controversial murder of Co Louth farmer Tom Oliver 12 years ago. The agent was head of the IRA's internal security unit which was responsible for investigating leaks from the terror organisation and interrogating suspected informers. His double life as a British informer became publicly known four years ago but the real identity of the Belfast man remained a secret outside a close circle of British agents until recently. The decision to leak his name now to newspapers has sparked off a major debate in security and republican circles about the reasons for the move. His information was said to have been vital to the security forces in the North and saved many lives through foiled terror operations and arms seizures. Tom Brady and David McKittrick _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 05:01:13 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 14:01:13 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> Message-ID: <001101c31875$cd6fc3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> William Rees-Mogg intones: Instead of being self-governed, all the nations of Europe would be governed by the agencies of the Union, which are primarily bureaucratic. There is no parallel to this in British history; it is perhaps closest to the process by which the United Kingdom itself was created, and Scotland and Ireland lost their own parliaments. That has had to be reversed. ------ An intriguing and revealing parallel indeed. That the very foundation of the "United Kingdom" should be on a par with the apparently objectionable and wholly undemocratic process that is European integration. Does this mean Moggers would support independence for Scotland, Wales and England, whilst reunifying Ireland? Probably not. That anyone should learn lessons in "democracy" from Rees-Mogg of all people is rich. Do an archive search and you will find copious references to his role as one of the leading protagonists of the "Thatcher gang" that spanned the military, MI5, MI6, the judiciary, the City and academia during the 1970s as it worked to undermine and overthrow the democratically elected government of Harold Wilson. Rees-Mogg, then editor of the Times, played a key role in planting a voluminous quantity of smears and other snippets calculated to do maximum damage to the "communist cell at Number 10". During the 1980s, as vice-chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, he was the insider who implemented the Tebbit agenda by forcing the resignation of Alasdair Milne as Director General via such tactics as settling out of court with Neil Hamilton and Gerald Howarth over the latter two's reported involvement in far right politics during the 1970s. It is well known that Howarth, in particular, was closely involved with George Kennedy Young's faction in the Monday Club, a bunch of racist empire loyalists only recently disaffiliated from the Conservative Party by a stressed Iain Duncan Smith. Rees-Mogg is also part of that peculiarly English institution, the "leading Catholic layperson", alongside such other democratic notables as The Duke of Norfolk. When he's not doing his best to further punk Thatcherism, "Lord" Rees-Mogg writes execrable newspaper columns and books in which he opines magisterially on what will come to pass, as a kind of cross between Alvin Toffler and Nostradamus. Unlike either of these sages, however, Rees-Mogg is notable for a remarkable degree of consistency -- his inability to get anything right. Not unlike his reading of the past, in fact. Mystic Mogg continues: A common policy over Iraq would have been anti-American, and would have made it impossible for Britain to support the United States action. ----- Gosh! How awful! Never mind the fact that opinion polls consistently showed a majority against military action prior to its commencement. But, as we have seen, Rees-Mogg's dedication to "democracy" is highly selective and restricted to his equation of that word with a very particular notion of "Britishness". The great sage continues: A group of young people, of all parties and views on Europe, have been talking to each other. They were all too young to have had a vote when Britain last held a referendum on Europe. Half of them were not born at that time. They feel that it is their future which is being determined. One of them is my youngest daughter, Annunziata, who is the Editor of the European Journal. They have set up a new website: www.trustthepeople.org to fight for a constitutional referendum. ------- How sweet. Annunziata is the sister of Jacob, a few years ago profiled as "Britain's cleverest young man". A former holder of this dubious title was Peter Jay who, as economics editor of the Times under the editorship of Rees-Mogg, used the pages of that organ to forecast the breakdown of law and order and the rise of a "strong man" to take control. Jay has since become economics editor of the BBC, thanks to the patronage of former Director General John Birt, with whom he used to write articles for The Times back in the 1970s about how news reporting could be improved via their philosophy of a "mission to explain", which was put into practice at London Weekend Television by Jay, Birt and others during the 1970s and 80s. Birt himself was appointed Director General of the BBC in succession to Michael Checkland (a stopgap after Milne) with the blessing of Rees-Mogg, whose own ability to "trust the people" seems to have bloomed very late in life. Speaking personally, I was too young to vote in 1979. I would love the chance to be able to correct that aberration and reverse the damage inflicted by Rees-Mogg's superheroine. As list Co-Moderator, being in the company of all you young A-listers discussing such issues on a regular basis, I am at least as well qualified under Rees-Mogg's criteria to be granted this wish. And I am sure that the A-list achieves a far greater circulation and readership than the lavishly funded, pisspoor europhobia of the European Journal. He continues: >We need to look at this debate from all points of view. So far, the BBC and the Government have failed to discharge their public duty. The BBC has not understood the historic nature of the choice. The Government has not even tried to create a coherent public view of the constitutional issues. The BBC governors should ask the board of management to mount a full-scale debate on an impartial basis. ----- This is exactly the sort of rationale used by Rees-Mogg to force BBC management to cave into the libel action launched by Hamilton and Howarth in response to the Panorama documentary, "Maggie's Militant Tendency", in which these two, among several others, were identified as poster boys for the far right courtesy of well-documented flirtations with the Monday Club, Tory Action and the National Front, among other overtly racist organisations. The libel action itself was financed by "Sir" James Goldsmith, another well-known champion of "democracy". Rees-Mogg impressed upon the governors (among whom was chairman Stuart Young, brother of "Lord" David Young, contemporaneously a Thatcherite cabinet minister) to "discharge their public duty" by ultimately discharging Milne to make way for Birt. Mystic Mogg concludes: The nation is entitled to decide its own future, and to defend its own democracy; the new European constitution itself cannot prosper without public consent and democratic authenticity. In Britain we are accustomed to being democratic; we expect to hold our governments to account and to dismiss them when they fail. That was what happened to Chamberlain in 1940. An integrated and centralised Europe, run by bureaucrats, would in any case be a weak form of government; it would lack the strong basis of public support. But if it were to be created, against the wishes of the British people, the British would not support it in times of crisis, such as come to all governments, sooner or later. Tony Blair should understand this: the British people will not be hijacked into a bureaucratic European superstate. ------ Bullshit. There is no such thing as a "British nation", there is no such thing as "the British people", etc. As the noble lord admits, Britain itself rests upon deeply suspect foundations, and is composed of a number of nations and peoples whose "Britishness" is a result of their geography and statehood. The entire argument rests upon an imperial fantasy borne of a time when such fantasies were temporarily supportable via reference to the existence of an actual empire. Its lingering legacy is a europhobia borne of outdated inter-imperialist rivalry of yore. This article is a cry for help from a dying tendency within British capitalism that was once part of the dominant strain. As such it was responsible for allowing "the British people" to be hijacked by the bureaucratic fiat of the US Treasury Department via its IMF subsidiary in 1976. Therefore the sooner it is put out of its misery the better for all. Michael Keaney From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 05:05:22 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 14:05:22 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 1 Message-ID: <002101c31876$62004be0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> [I am forwarding this here because it will be of interest to those who are otherwise not s?bscribed to the Marxism list, and is certainly relevant to what this list is all about. MK] On December 8th 2002, George Packer wrote the following in a NY Times Magazine article titled "The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq": "Why there is no organized liberal opposition to the war? "The answer to this question involves an interesting history, and it sheds light on the difficulties now confronting American liberals. The history goes back 10 years, when a war broke out in the middle of Europe. This war changed the way many American liberals, particularly liberal intellectuals, saw their country. Bosnia turned these liberals into hawks. People who from Vietnam on had never met an American military involvement they liked were now calling for U.S. air strikes to defend a multiethnic democracy against Serbian ethnic aggression. Suddenly the model was no longer Vietnam, it was World War II -- armed American power was all that stood in the way of genocide. Without the cold war to distort the debate, and with the inspiring example of the East bloc revolutions of 1989 still fresh, a number of liberal intellectuals in this country had a new idea. These writers and academics wanted to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy -- especially when it was clear that nobody else would do it." If George Packer's assertion is true, and I believe it is, then it becomes necessary to revisit the Yugoslavia events in the light of everything that has transpired over the past decade. As we move inexorably toward permanent warfare, naked imperialist rule and growing repression at home, the "turn" on the part of a broad sector of the left--symbolized by Christopher Hitchens's mutation--needs to be examined with a cold, clinical eye. The "humanitarian intervention" themes that were first raised on behalf of Bosnia crop up repeatedly. Not only were they used as an excuse to make war in the Balkans on two occasions, they have been used twice in Iraq as well. There are never-ending supplies of evil dictators, who are either the next Hitler or the next Stalin or a combination of the two, to unite the American people in Orwellian "hate minutes". In the latest variation on this theme, some of the USA's highest profile leftists have lent their names to two petitions that basically support their country's right to fund and organize a counter-revolutionary movement in Cuba. The same kind of narcissism that allowed one signatory Susan Sontag to call for the bombing of Yugoslavia now operates with respect to Cuba. One wonders how long it will take for her and her son David Rieff to demand that the US military rescue the Cuban people from their totalitarian oppressors. Having just completed Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions", I intend to post a series of articles that basically review her book chapter-by-chapter and supplement it with my own observations. Johnstone deploys a combination of talents that make this book a stunning achievement. Not only is she a top-notch journalist with a compellingly readable style, she is also a first-rate scholar who draws from primary sources in a number of languages, including Serb. In this first post, I will deal with some of the points made in her introduction. To start with, she presents the "fictional saga" of Yugoslavia in the 1990s that goes something like this: >>Yugoslavia was a "prison of peoples" where the Serbs oppressed all the others. It was destroyed by the rise of an evil leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to create a "Greater Serbia" by eliminating other peoples in a process called "ethnic cleansing". Those other peoples sought to escape, by creating their own independent states. The Yugoslav army, actually Serbian, invaded them. In Bosnia, the invading Serbs tried to drive out the Muslims, who wanted to perpetuate an exemplary multi-ethnic society. The Serb ethnic cleansing killed 200,000 unarmed Muslims while the international community looked on and even prevented the Muslims from arming in self-defense. At Srebrenica, the United Nations allowed the Serbs to commit genocide. Only U.S. bombing forced Milosevic to come to the negotiating table at Dayton. The resulting agreement brought peace and democracy to multi-ethnic Bosnia. However, the international community had failed to save the Albanian majority in Kosovo from apartheid. In 1998 Madeleine Albright warned that NATO must intervene to keep Milosevic from "doing in Kosovo what he could no longer get away with in Bosnia". In January 1999, Serbian security forces massacred defenseless civilians in the Kosovo village of Racak, awakening the NATO governments to the need to act to stop genocide. After the turning point of Racak, the Serbs were summoned to peace negotiations in Rambouillet, in France. Milosevic stubbornly refused to negotiate. NATO had no choice but to start bombing Yugoslavia. Masses of Albanians were deliberately driven out according to a preconceived plan called "Operation Horseshoe". Finally, Milosevic gave in, and NATO liberated the Kosovars from their oppressors. Conclusion: from now on, humanitarian intervention constitutes a principal mission for NATO, as the military arm of an international community henceforth committed to protection of human rights.<< After presenting this version of what took place, Johnstone says, "Almost everything about this tale is false." I agree completely. As an employee of Columbia University, I have access to one of the most well endowed research libraries in the world and to Lexis-Nexis, a database of newspaper articles. Over the past 4 years or so I have consulted hundreds of newspaper articles and a number of books in order to get to the bottom of this story. Whatever I was able to dig up is a mere thimbleful in comparison to Johnstone's study. Not only is her book a masterful refutation of the standard narrative, it is virtually the only one in print. If you go to any university bookstore, including Labyrinth near Columbia, you will find dozens of books on Yugoslavia but none from her perspective. This is not just a problem with scholarly literature; it also infects popular culture as well. Films such as "Welcome To Sarajevo" present the Serbs as Terminators put on earth to kill innocent people. When much of the left was cheering the NATO war on Yugoslavia, another large section bought into the false story while drawing the line at intervention. For example, shortly after the government of Yugoslavia was overthrown by violent, rightwing gangs, Noam Chomsky wrote, "It's hard to think of a more spectacular recent achievement than the overthrow of South Africa's Apartheid horror." It therefore comes as no surprise that he would have the same kind of myopia when it comes to Cuba. I will deal with the overthrow of Milosevic, which is treated in chilling depth in chapter five of Johnstone's book, but will conclude this post with the key point she makes in her introduction. Namely, she identifies a sharp disjunction between the movement against globalization that took shape in the 1990s and the failure to see how that very process was at the root of the Balkans wars and the steady decline of the people in that region. It is easy for activists to respond to Chiapas; it was much harder to break through the propaganda and mystification over Yugoslavia where defense of the right of the Serb peoples to live in peace became tantamount to Holocaust denial. Johnstone writes: >>The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, "groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination". In regard to these conflicts, "American interests and ideals compel a more active role." This may go so far as military intervention when self-determination claims or internal repression of such claims lead to "humanitarian calamities". In the future, the authors announced in 1992, "humanitarian interventions will become increasingly unavoidable". The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene. "The United States should seek to build a consensus within regional and international organizations for its position, but should not sacrifice its own judgment and principles if such a consensus fails to materialize."<< Indeed, just as WWI was launched in part to stop Hun atrocities, so are the wars of the last 10 years or so framed in terms of saving lives and upholding democracy. Unless the left learns how to distinguish between government propaganda and the true aims of an ever more aggressive imperialism, we will be useless. Diana Johnstone's book is a very good place to start. In my next post, I will review chapter one, which is titled "The Yugoslav Guinea Pig" and that deals with the aptly named "Bosnia cult". Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 05:06:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 14:06:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 2 Message-ID: <002901c31876$8f57a840$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> In chapter two (The Yugoslav Guinea Pig) of Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade", she poses the question: "How did the Serbs go from being the heroic little people who stood up to empires and Nazis in defense of freedom, to being the 'new Nazis', pariahs of the Western world?" The answer first of all requires that attention be paid to the underlying economic stresses that drove all Yugoslavs to desperate measures, including the Serbs. When the USSR began to collapse at the end of the 1980s, Yugoslavia was no longer needed as a kind of pro-Western counterweight to the Kremlin. With easy access to cheap credit cut off, the country began to succumb to a debt crisis of the sort that was ravaging most of the developing world. Long devoid of any serious commitment to revolutionary politics, the central government responded not by challenging imperialism, but by cutting jobs and social services. The economic crisis had the effect of eroding the social order and heightening nationalist resentment, particularly among the Croatians. Although Franjo Tudjman had been a life-long CP functionary, he found it easy to remold himself as a nationalist when running for president of Croatia in 1990, especially since this earned him the support of the ?migr? community, including remnants of the fascist Ustashe movement. After his election, Serbs--who made up 12 percent of Croatia's population--were probably alarmed to see the Ustashe flag flown unabashedly in public once again. As a corollary to this symbolic display, the Tudjman administration began to fire Serb government employees and encourage violent attacks on people and property. A search in Lexis-Nexis backed up Johnstone's findings: >>But in recent months Serbs in Knin have become alarmed by a post-Communist flush of Croatian nationalism. The Communists' four-decade-old lock on political power in Croatia was shattered in last spring's free elections, which were won by a nationalist party demanding "historical justice." Among other things, these demands have led to a purge of Serbs from government and media jobs in Croatia. Most importantly, the new Croatian leadership is threatening to secede from Yugoslavia unless the federation becomes a "confederation." Croatia, like the republic of Slovenia to the northwest, demands sovereignty akin to that enjoyed by European Community members. Such demands have a frightening resonance for the Serbs of Knin. People here remember World War II, when Croats collaborated with Nazis in setting up the Ustashi government. Under that regime, tens of thousands of Serbs -- many of them from the Knin area -- were murdered. The new Croatian government has begun to fly a flag similar to that flown by the Ustashi. "A new government has come to power and they have established the same symbols under which our people were killed. We don't agree with this attempt to separate from Yugoslavia," said Lazar Mazura, a Knin schoolteacher and a leader of the Serbian movement here. << (Washington Post, Sept. 16, 1990) After the Serbs began to resist these encroachments, the western press responded by characterizing it as expansionism directed from Belgrade. As Malcolm X once said, the victim was turned into the criminal. In September of 1991, over 120 Serbs living in the town of Gospic were abducted from their homes and murdered. It was an act calculated to have the same effect among Serbs as the Deir Yassin massacre in Palestine. They would no longer be safe in Croatia. Croatian human rights activists told Johnston in 1996 that this was the *first* major massacre of civilians in the Yugoslav civil wars. Unlike Srebrenica or Racak, Gospic never became part of the litany of atrocities in the western news media or journals of "conscience". But in 1997 a disgruntled ex-cop named Miro Bajramovic decided to tell the world what really happened in Gospic. He said that the Croatian Interior Ministry sent paramilitaries to spread terror among the region's 9,000 Serbs. Johnstone quotes him as follows: "The order for Gospic was to perform ethnic cleansing, so we killed directors of post offices and hospitals, restaurant owners and many other Serbs. Executions were performed by shooting at point-blank range. We did not have much time. The orders from headquarters was to reduce the number of Serbs in Gospic." The International Criminal Tribunal, which went to all sorts of lengths to bring Milosevic to justice, has been treating Croatian war crimes in a much more relaxed fashion. After some of the Croatian soldiers who committed war crimes at Gospic came forward to present testimony to the ICT, they were not given adequate protection even after receiving daily death threats and having their cars firebombed. One of them, Milan Levar, was murdered by an explosion in the front yard of his Gospic home. In June of 1999 Croatian courts acquitted 6 soldiers of war crimes committed at Gospic, including Bajramovic. In light of this, it is highly revealing that the chief Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has decided that Croatian courts can render justice in the prosecution of war crimes. Alas, this has been the pattern all along. When Serbs react to murder, they are charged with "aggression". After the secession of Croatia and Slovenia, it was only a matter of time before Bosnia-Herzegovina would be torn apart by the same contradictions. In all of the regions where Serbs were a minority, they saw their survival as a function of the continuation of the Yugoslav republic and protection by the federal army. Whenever they pressed forward in this manner, they were regarded as "expansionist" or worse. From the very beginning, the USA tilted toward the Bosnian Muslim faction. In a highly enlightening review of the power politics behind this foreign policy initiative, Johnstone explains it in terms of developing ties to Turkey and oil-producing regimes in the Middle East. In addition, she provides some insights into class formation in Bosnia that go against the conventional thinking of Muslims as an oppressed nationality. Most of the high-profile Muslim politicians, including Izetbegovic, were scions of the families that enjoyed elite privileges during centuries of Ottoman rule. In elite circles in Washington and London, they were considered more reliably anti-communist than the Bosnian Serb descendants of downtrodden peasants. While the State Department was developing a policy based on such bottom-line calculations, a number of intellectuals were already beginning to develop what Johnstone rightly calls "the Bosnia cult". They developed a romanticized version of Bosnian Islam that once again turned the Serbs into the "bad guys". Susan Sontag's son David Rieff wrote that "Bosnia was and always will be a just cause" in the same fashion that people once wrote about the Spanish Civil War. For an entire generation of 60s radicals, the fight for Bosnia became a fight against fascism and genocide. In countries like France that were grappling with a sullen and resentful Islamic population driven to emigration by economic crisis, the sight of gentle, blue-eyed Bosnian Muslims playing musical instruments was comforting. They were "like us". "Multicultural" Sarajevo became a test tube for the kind of integration that was largely impossible in Western Europe, where skinheads had begun to victimize their own Muslim citizens. If France or Great Britain could not be made safe for Muslims, then military force could surely impose tolerance on a Balkan nation. Unfortunately, "multicultural" Bosnia was largely a myth. By 1992, Croatian militias had already driven Serbs out of Herzegovina in an early act of ethnic cleansing that once again was largely ignored by the western media. As for Izetbegovic, the darling of Rieff and other western progressives, he was under no illusions. In a 1994 speech, he said, "Multicultural togetherness is all very well, but -- may I say it openly -- it is a lie! We cannot lie to our people or deceive the public. The soldier in combat is not dying for a multinational coexistence." Somehow, Izetbegovic's statement and the arrival of 5,000 former Afghanistan fighters in Bosnia escaped Rieff's attention, who continued to press for military action in order to prevent "genocide" in Bosnia. The Serbs were compared not only to the Nazis, but to the Khmer Rouge as well. In the course of his agitation for an imperialist rescue, he kept repeating the unverified figure of 200,00 dead Muslims. Former State Department official George Kenney finally tracked it down to Bosnian information minister Senada Kreso, who first circulated the figure--hardly an unbiased source. Afterwards Kenney tried to come up with a more reliable amount, based on the Red Cross and other less politicized sources. For instance, a Stockholm-based research institute estimated that there were between 30 and 50 thousand casualties during the course of the civil war, but this included *all sides*. After concluding his survey, Kenney observed: "In the words of the writer David Rieff, 'Bosnia became our Spain', though not for political reasons, which is what he meant, but rather because too many journalists dreamed self-aggrandizing dreams of becoming another Hemingway." Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 05:07:39 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 14:07:39 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 3 Message-ID: <003101c31876$b37c9640$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Chapter two of Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade" is titled "Moral Dualism in a Multicultural World". It seeks to explain how the Yugoslavia wars became cast in Manichean terms, with the Serbs representing darkness and evil. This requires her to examine in some detail the role of the media in fabricating three key elements of a narrative that would effectively condemn the Serbs as the Nazis of our era: concentration camps in Bosnia and rape as a political tool. Probably most folks are aware that the question of concentration camps in Bosnia became hugely controversial after the Living Marxism folks ran an expos? in 1997 that charged an ITN television team from Great Britain supervised by Penny Marshall (not of "Laverne and Shirley" fame, but with as much claim to serious reporting as the latter) with using falsified footage. Using an image of an emaciated Muslim "prisoner" named Fikret Alic behind barbed wire, the reporters claimed that this amounted to a new Auschwitz. Among the British reporters was Nation Magazine contributor and anti-Cuba petition signer Ian Williams, who was working for England's Channel Four at the time. This is also the same Ian Williams who told radicals in the audience who had been asking hostile questions at a recent Socialist Scholars Conference panel on Orwell that "Wait until the war starts, then you'll see all those WMD's that Saddam has stashed away." Number 17 in Project Censored top 25 stories in 1999 had the caption "U.S. Media Promotes Biased Coverage of Bosnia". For documentation, the project included the LM article as well as Diana Johnstone's "Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass" that appeared originally in CAQ. (http://www.covertaction.org/full_text_frameset_65_01.htm) Attempts to find the Deichmann article on the Internet will be in vain, since a libel decision against LM that was initiated by Marshall and Williams in a British court resulted not only in the quashing of Deichmann's article but in the liquidation of LM itself. Since this trial occurred, Frank Furedi and company have moved on to a banal, quasi-libertarian agenda, but this does not invalidate the value of Deichmann's reporting. He claimed that Fikret Alic was not behind barbed wire, but around the TV film crew who were shooting from within the perimeter of a fence surrounding a tool shed. Leaving aside the question of whether Fikret Alic was behind or in front of some barbed wire, the real issue was how this image was used to drive home the message that the Serbs were running concentration camps throughout Bosnia on a scale not seen since Hitler. The simple truth is that by the summer of 1992 all sides in the civil war--Serb, Muslim and Croat--were setting up prison camps for people they considered threats to their territorial control. According to the International Red Cross, in the autumn of 1992 a total of 2,692 civilians were being held in 25 detention centers. Of these, Bosnian Serbs held 1,203 detainees in 8 camps. The Muslims held 1,061 captives and the Croats 428. This hardly amounts to Auschwitz, by any stretch of the imagination. In January and February 1993, the French-based M?dicins du Monde used the ITN pictures as part of a vast publicity campaign costing $2 million that resulted in the distribution of 300,000 posters throughout France. Half of them showed Milosevic side by side with Hitler, accompanied by the caption, "Speeches about ethnic cleansing, does that remind you of anything?" Bernard Kouchner, who ran M?dicins du Monde, was an ex-CP'er who became an outspoken advocate of "humanitarian interventions". His tireless efforts on behalf of NATO beneficence earned him the top spot as UN administrator of Kosovo in 1999. It didn't take long for the US press to exploit these themes themselves. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to reporters who could come up with the most grizzly Serb atrocity tale. First on line at the trough were Newsday's Roy Gutman and the NY Times's John Burns who won the award in 1993. David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor picked up his Pulitzer in 1995. All of them filed reports that were riddled with the kinds of errors that got poor Jayson Blair fired from the newspaper of record on May 11, 2003. In retrospect, it seems that the Big Lie on behalf of the imperialist crusade against the Serbs was certain to enhance one's journalistic career rather than torpedo it. Rohde got his award for "discovering" a mass grave near Srebrenica. Not speaking a word of Serbo-Croat, told his readers that he found what amounted to a smoking gun: a human femur and tibia scattered among the area delineated within U.S. satellite photos. How did he find this needle in a haystack? Like the NY Times's Judith Miller, he tells us that a little birdie told him: "I had the locations of the graves marked on a map.which I got from a U.S. intelligence source." In addition to writing propaganda about Serb "death camps", Gutman specialized in the rape as political weapon story. On August 9, 1992 he filed a story titled "Bosnia Rape Horror" that relied on the testimony of a single 16-year-old girl that supposedly was repeated in the "tens of thousands". Gutman also relied on the information provided by Jadranka Cigelj, whom he described in Newsday as a "lawyer and political activist". Cigelj supposedly witnessed nightly beatings and rape at a Serb prison camp in Omarska. What Gutman fails to point out is the exact character of Cigelj's political activism. Johnstone points out that "Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same right-wing Croatian emigre groups that backed Tudjman. The primary source for reports of rape in Bosnia was Cigelj's CIC and associated women's groups, which sent 'piles of testimony to Western women and to the press'". She adds: "The CIC benefited from a close connection with the 'International Gesellschaft fur Menschenrechte' (International Association for Human Rights, IGfM), a far right propaganda institute set up in 1981 as a continuation of the Association of Russian Solidarists, an expatriate group which worked for the Nazis and the Croatian fascist Ustashe regime during World War II. In the 1980s, this organization led a propaganda campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, accusing them of running camps where opponents were tortured, raped, and murdered on a massive scale." This did not prevent Cigelj from becoming a feminist heroine. She was feted by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Women Make Movies in a 25 city tour that featured a documentary "Calling the Ghosts: A Story of Rape, War and Women". In response to all of the atrocity stories flowing out of Bosnia, the United Nations launched an investigation that unsurprisingly corroborated the lurid reports penned by Gutman and others. The original president of the committee was Frits Kalshoven, professor of humanitarian international law at the University of Leiden in German. An Egyptian-American named Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, whose sympathy for the Muslims was obvious, replaced him. Notwithstanding the propaganda consensus that Serbs were using mass rape as a political weapon, Kalshoven concluded: "Terms like 'genocide' came all too easily from the mouths of people like Bassiouni, an American professor of law, who had to establish a reputation and to work on fund-raising. In my opinion these terms were way out of line. 'Genocidal rape' is utter nonsense. 'Genocide' means extermination, and it is of course impossible to exterminate people and make them pregnant at the same time. It is a propaganda term which was used against the Serbs right from the start, but I have never found any indication that rape was committed systematically by any of the parties - and I understand by 'systematically', on orders from the top." Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 12 06:33:39 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 08:33:39 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Habermas on Iraq References: <001101c31854$b618e470$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <005901c31882$b8750e00$c9b7fea9@anne> On May 12, 2003, James Daly posted an excerpt from the Habermas List: 20 The comparison with the intervention in Kosovo also offers no exoneration. It is true that an authorization by the Security Council in this case was not reached either. But the retrospectively obtained legitimation could be based upon three circumstances: on the prevention - as it seemed at the time - of an ethnic cleansing in the process of taking place, on the imperative - covered by international law - of emergency assistance holding erga omnes for this case, as well as the incontrovertibly democratic and constitutional character of all the member states of the ad hoc military alliance. What a crock! To excuse Clinton's unilateralism - bombing aspirin factories, Afghani caves, and an entire nation - weakens the author's justifiable and largely on-target argument against of Bush's attack on Iraq. It's clear now - and it was clear then for anyone who cared to look - that the US shamelessly set up the Serbs with a staged massacre and the outrageously unacceptable demands that harridan Albright put forward at Ramboullet. Oil was behind the Kosovo outrage, just as it is in Iraq. Yugoslavia had been designation as the venue for the EU's energy grid. Just look at the pipelines and refineries being built there, examine the huge contracts Brown and Root have been awarded, the refineries being built. Additionally, all those pipes and refineries are directed towards one, enormous customer, i.e. Germany. Could this be why the EU so quickly fell into step with Bubbaboon's unauthorized, unnecessary, and cruelly destructive war? I believe it is. "Retrospectively-obtained legitimization" indeed! State hypocrisy is not a uniquely American characteristic. Anne From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 12 06:41:01 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 08:41:01 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: War Profiteers References: <3EBF1595.7090805@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <006701c31883$bf71e240$c9b7fea9@anne> The Women Like This War By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 12 May 2003 "We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war." - Chris Matthews, 'Hardball' on MSNBC, 05/01/03 The front page of the May 11 Sunday edition of the Boston Herald carried the headline, "Prop. 2 Override Rampage." The story described towns and cities all across Massachusetts gearing up to watch the local aid they depend on for basic services get massacred. The voters of these towns face a 'Proposition 2' vote; Proposition 2, according to the Herald, "caps annual property-tax increases unless voters agree to pay more either through an override, which permanently raises taxes, or through a debt exclusion, which raises taxes for a set period to fund a specific project." In layman's terms, this means that Massachusetts property owners must vote for a massive hike in property taxes. If they don't - and they may not, after having absorbed many financial beatings from this economic downturn already - thousands of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other municipal employees will be out of work. This kind of shortfall and crisis is happening in all 50 states. Yet as the nation goes slowly broke, we can still enjoy our breads and circuses. Entertaining the masses is a requirement of any empire that would neglect its people in order to augment its military prowess. The Roman Emperor Commodus battled gladiators in the Coliseum to provide a spectacle that obscured, to a degree, the inevitable decline of the empire. Our spectacle came last week when George W. Bush strutted out of the cockpit of a combat jet adorned in the raiment of a warrior/king. This was the culmination of months of propaganda work - the WMD threat, the Osama link, the 'liberation' of the Iraqi people - that has yet to produce a single thing it promised beyond the fact of war itself. Over one hundred American soldiers, and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians, are now dead. It seems for all the world that the war in Iraq was fought not to free people, or to destroy terrorism, or to annihilate dangerous weapons. It was done to provide George W. Bush with footage for his 2004 "Runnin' on 9-11" Presidential campaign commercials. Senator Fritz Hollings summed up best the absurdity of it all at the South Carolina Jefferson-Jackson Dinner: "I saw President Bush on that aircraft carrier in the Pacific yesterday. Incidentally, that's the closest he's ever got to the war in Vietnam." Ouch. Of course the hot pics of the Prez with his package pooched out weren't the only reasons for the war. Look at the numbers. Dick Cheney's Halliburton Corp. is pulling fistfuls of cash out of Iraq, as is Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root. Halliburton still pays Dick Cheney $1 million a year in what they call "deferred compensation." Where I come from, we call that a salary, and a damned good one. In February, a month before the Iraq war, former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Richard Perle received a top-secret government briefing about the coming conflict in that region, and about rising tensions with North Korea. Three weeks later, Perle spoke at an investment seminar for Goldman Sachs. His talk was entitled "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?" In essence, he used classified information to help investors profit from the conflict. Perle lost his chairmanship of the Board because he was consulting, while holding his position at the Pentagon, a major multinational telecommunications corporation that was seeking Pentagon approval to sell their wares in Asia. Then, of course, there is former CIA Director James Woolsey, fellow member of the Defense Policy Board with Richard Perle. Woolsey spent the last six months of his life scaring the cheese out of the American public on national television with incredible warnings about the terror capabilities of Iraq. One of his more ominous quips from CNN: "I would be more worried over the mid to long term about biological weapons.there have been stories that Saddam has been working on genetically modifying some of these biological agents, making anthrax resistant to vaccines or antibiotics." Funny how they haven't been able to find even the dumb old plain anthrax, and never mind Saddam's super-anthrax. Could it be that Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, was grossly overstating the potential terrorism threat represented by Iraq for purely personal gain? Mr. Woolsey is a director at Paladin Capital, formed three months after September 11 for one reason alone - to reap profit from the defense and intelligence contracts that were blizzarding out of the Defense Department as the War on Terror got vamped up. Paladin has amassed $300 million from investors because it sees the US government spending some $60 billion on the anti-terrorism programs it sells, and sees private corporations spending twice that amount. Woolsey has been very busy frightening the American people about the terrorist threat, and is now prepared to profit wildly from those fears. Woolsey is also a member of the Project for the New American Century. The names Cheney and Perle are on the membership rolls next to his. You can read all about the Project here. It seems that while the states are going broke, a small cadre of White House insiders are making more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes. Fancy that. Did I mention that Bush's dad works for the Carlyle Group? Did I mention that the Carlyle Group owns United Defense, a weapons manufacturer that is making billions from selling arms and fighting vehicles to the Defense Department? Writing that took 884 words. How many scandals, catastrophes and outright crimes were listed in that short span? I count 18, but that may be a conservative number. Chris Matthews has it right, to a point. Americans do love a little swagger. They hate, however, being lied to. The lies exist here on many levels. The primary, of course, being the actions of the fellows currently in control. The only reason these boys have been able to maintain control, though, is because of men like Matthews and the others who share his 'profession.' The American television media establishment has hauled more water in the last year than Gunga Din for the Bush administration, and this shows no sign of abating. That is the only thing holding this administration together. Cheney, Perle, Woolsey and Bush don't have to worry about being wrong and crooked. They know they won't get called on it in places where the public might hear about it. That's it. That's all of it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available at http://www.silenceissedition.com from Pluto Press. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report. Thanks to writer Max Black for digging out that Matthews quote. Print This Story E-mail This Story ? : t r u t h o u t 2003 From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 12 07:00:07 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 09:00:07 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Danger of Starvation References: <3EBF1595.7090805@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <006c01c31886$6a438500$c9b7fea9@anne> Iraq in danger of starvation, says UN Helena Smith, Nicosia and Ed Vulliamy in Baghdad The Observer Sunday May 11, 2003 Iraqi agriculture is on the brink of collapse, with fears that many of its 24.5 million people will go hungry this summer, according to a confidential report being studied by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. A special assessment prepared by the UN agency's staff in Rome, which has been seen by The Observer, reveals a catastrophe in the making, with crops and poultry being especially hard hit. Government warehouses that would have served as the main suppliers of seeds, fertilisers and pesticide sprays have been looted, particularly in the centre and south of the country. Iraqi farmers should now be planting tomatoes and onions, potatoes, cucumbers, water melon, peppers, beans and squash. But without seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, that will be hard - a situation exacerbated by the collapse of the pumping stations that powered the irrigation schemes on which the vegetable crop depends. 'Vegetables and poultry are particularly important because they are the main source of protein, vitamins, minerals and a host of micro-nutrients that are missing from the oil-for-food basket which is also why malnutrition is endemic in Iraq,' said spokesman Barry Came. Sixty per cent of the population has depended on the oil-for-food programme, instituted at the end of the 1991Gulf war. Under the programme, Iraq received supplies of wheat, pulses and flour in exchange for oil. The FAO calls the report a 'preliminary desk assessment' and is expected to release a statement commenting on its main points by Wednesday. In the southern and central areas, vital irrigation networks have been destroyed, a once-thriving poultry industry has been ruined and there are predictions of disease and pestilence among both plants and animals. Enormous difficulties are anticipated in harvesting winter crops, 1.2 million tons of wheat, barley, rice and maize. Under Saddam, harvesting normally started this month, with a touring fleet of ageing combined harvesters. Lack of spare parts had long put a strain on the harvesters available and now no mechanism exists for purchasing the yield. In previous years, the Ministry of Trade bought the crop, stored it and arranged for banks to pay farmers, who in turn used the revenues to buy the seeds for their summer vegetable crops. But this year no seeds have been planted because, even if the farmers had money to buy them, most of the seed stock has been looted or destroyed. Iraqi's poultry industry, source of the half of the animal protein eaten by the population, is also in dire straits. All the soybean and protein concentrate feed stored in government warehouses was stolen, along with vaccines, drugs and medicines required to keep the stock healthy. Both the major poultry projects that once supplied Iraqi chicken farmers with layers and hatching eggs have collapsed. Thousands of birds have starved to death. Animal health is another major concern. Most of the veterinary hospitals and clinics were looted or destroyed, and vehicles, drugs, medicines and food ingredients disappeared. The impact could be severe in a country where disease is rife among the 18 million sheep and goats and three million cattle. Some are capable of transmission to humans, so constant control is required. The warning came as America's efforts to get Iraq's Health Ministry up and running twisted into farce yesterday, when it emerged that the new Minister concerned was a Saddam crony. Dr Ali Shnan Janabi, former number three in Saddam's infamously corrupt Ministry, was presented to an all-day conference of doctors. His appointment was greeted with disbelief and charges of corruption from many doctors. Dr Hussein Harith, a senior registrar at the al-Mansour teaching hospital, said Dr Shnan was one of a 'group of senior Ministers who asked the directors of hospitals to report that they did not need drugs and medicines [supplied to Iraq under the oil-for-food programme], even though they were desperate for them. There were happier scenes in Basra, where the 63-year-old leader of Iraq's biggest Shia group returned from exile yesterday. Supporters waved flags and chanted slogans when the convoy of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim crossed into Iraq from Iran, where he has led the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq since 1980. Thousands lined the 12-mile road from the border to Basra, where up to 100,000 people packed a stadium to listen to him address them for the first time in 23 years. (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 12 07:16:40 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 09:16:40 -0400 Subject: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> <001101c31875$cd6fc3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <007701c31888$ba7ed900$c9b7fea9@anne> Oh, Michael, thanks for a delicious read, which I have saved to my "Beastiary" file. Actually, I am concerned about an EU ruled by bureaucrats, and don't think it will work over time. But I am an outsider looking in, and am hardly up to snuff on all details - so I set my task in best understanding the arguments, pro and con. of those who are Europeans. Thanks again for the expose on Rees-Mogg about whom my feelings have always been very, very mixed even without the support of your post :-). The old bugger was certainly gung-ho for Bush and the Iraqi attack, which sickened me and about which I squealed a lot in sound money circles. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" To: Sent: Monday, May 12, 2003 7:01 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution > William Rees-Mogg intones: > > Instead of being self-governed, all the nations of Europe would be governed > by the agencies of the Union, which are primarily bureaucratic. There is no > parallel to this in British history; it is perhaps closest to the process by > which the United Kingdom itself was created, and Scotland and Ireland lost > their own parliaments. That has had to be reversed. > > ------ > > An intriguing and revealing parallel indeed. That the very foundation of the > "United Kingdom" should be on a par with the apparently objectionable and > wholly undemocratic process that is European integration. Does this mean > Moggers would support independence for Scotland, Wales and England, whilst > reunifying Ireland? Probably not. > > That anyone should learn lessons in "democracy" from Rees-Mogg of all people > is rich. Do an archive search and you will find copious references to his > role as one of the leading protagonists of the "Thatcher gang" that spanned > the military, MI5, MI6, the judiciary, the City and academia during the > 1970s as it worked to undermine and overthrow the democratically elected > government of Harold Wilson. Rees-Mogg, then editor of the Times, played a > key role in planting a voluminous quantity of smears and other snippets > calculated to do maximum damage to the "communist cell at Number 10". During > the 1980s, as vice-chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, he was the > insider who implemented the Tebbit agenda by forcing the resignation of > Alasdair Milne as Director General via such tactics as settling out of court > with Neil Hamilton and Gerald Howarth over the latter two's reported > involvement in far right politics during the 1970s. It is well known that > Howarth, in particular, was closely involved with George Kennedy Young's > faction in the Monday Club, a bunch of racist empire loyalists only recently > disaffiliated from the Conservative Party by a stressed Iain Duncan Smith. > Rees-Mogg is also part of that peculiarly English institution, the "leading > Catholic layperson", alongside such other democratic notables as The Duke of > Norfolk. > > When he's not doing his best to further punk Thatcherism, "Lord" Rees-Mogg > writes execrable newspaper columns and books in which he opines > magisterially on what will come to pass, as a kind of cross between Alvin > Toffler and Nostradamus. Unlike either of these sages, however, Rees-Mogg is > notable for a remarkable degree of consistency -- his inability to get > anything right. Not unlike his reading of the past, in fact. > > Mystic Mogg continues: > > A common policy over Iraq would have been anti-American, and would have made > it impossible for Britain to support the United States action. > > ----- > > Gosh! How awful! Never mind the fact that opinion polls consistently showed > a majority against military action prior to its commencement. But, as we > have seen, Rees-Mogg's dedication to "democracy" is highly selective and > restricted to his equation of that word with a very particular notion of > "Britishness". > > The great sage continues: > > A group of young people, of all parties and views on Europe, have been > talking to each other. They were all too young to have had a vote when > Britain last held a referendum on Europe. Half of them were not born at that > time. They feel that it is their future which is being determined. One of > them is my youngest daughter, Annunziata, who is the Editor of the European > Journal. They have set up a new website: www.trustthepeople.org to fight for > a constitutional referendum. > > ------- > > How sweet. Annunziata is the sister of Jacob, a few years ago profiled as > "Britain's cleverest young man". A former holder of this dubious title was > Peter Jay who, as economics editor of the Times under the editorship of > Rees-Mogg, used the pages of that organ to forecast the breakdown of law and > order and the rise of a "strong man" to take control. Jay has since become > economics editor of the BBC, thanks to the patronage of former Director > General John Birt, with whom he used to write articles for The Times back in > the 1970s about how news reporting could be improved via their philosophy of > a "mission to explain", which was put into practice at London Weekend > Television by Jay, Birt and others during the 1970s and 80s. Birt himself > was appointed Director General of the BBC in succession to Michael Checkland > (a stopgap after Milne) with the blessing of Rees-Mogg, whose own ability to > "trust the people" seems to have bloomed very late in life. > > Speaking personally, I was too young to vote in 1979. I would love the > chance to be able to correct that aberration and reverse the damage > inflicted by Rees-Mogg's superheroine. As list Co-Moderator, being in the > company of all you young A-listers discussing such issues on a regular > basis, I am at least as well qualified under Rees-Mogg's criteria to be > granted this wish. And I am sure that the A-list achieves a far greater > circulation and readership than the lavishly funded, pisspoor europhobia of > the European Journal. > > He continues: > > >We need to look at this debate from all points of view. So far, the BBC and > the Government have failed to discharge their public duty. The BBC has not > understood the historic nature of the choice. The Government has not even > tried to create a coherent public view of the constitutional issues. The BBC > governors should ask the board of management to mount a full-scale debate on > an impartial basis. > > ----- > > This is exactly the sort of rationale used by Rees-Mogg to force BBC > management to cave into the libel action launched by Hamilton and Howarth in > response to the Panorama documentary, "Maggie's Militant Tendency", in which > these two, among several others, were identified as poster boys for the far > right courtesy of well-documented flirtations with the Monday Club, Tory > Action and the National Front, among other overtly racist organisations. The > libel action itself was financed by "Sir" James Goldsmith, another > well-known champion of "democracy". Rees-Mogg impressed upon the governors > (among whom was chairman Stuart Young, brother of "Lord" David Young, > contemporaneously a Thatcherite cabinet minister) to "discharge their public > duty" by ultimately discharging Milne to make way for Birt. > > Mystic Mogg concludes: > > The nation is entitled to decide its own future, and to defend its own > democracy; the new European constitution itself cannot prosper without > public consent and democratic authenticity. In Britain we are accustomed to > being democratic; we expect to hold our governments to account and to > dismiss them when they fail. That was what happened to Chamberlain in 1940. > > An integrated and centralised Europe, run by bureaucrats, would in any case > be a weak form of government; it would lack the strong basis of public > support. But if it were to be created, against the wishes of the British > people, the British would not support it in times of crisis, such as come to > all governments, sooner or later. Tony Blair should understand this: the > British people will not be hijacked into a bureaucratic European superstate. > > ------ > > Bullshit. There is no such thing as a "British nation", there is no such > thing as "the British people", etc. As the noble lord admits, Britain itself > rests upon deeply suspect foundations, and is composed of a number of > nations and peoples whose "Britishness" is a result of their geography and > statehood. The entire argument rests upon an imperial fantasy borne of a > time when such fantasies were temporarily supportable via reference to the > existence of an actual empire. Its lingering legacy is a europhobia borne of > outdated inter-imperialist rivalry of yore. This article is a cry for help > from a dying tendency within British capitalism that was once part of the > dominant strain. As such it was responsible for allowing "the British > people" to be hijacked by the bureaucratic fiat of the US Treasury > Department via its IMF subsidiary in 1976. Therefore the sooner it is put > out of its misery the better for all. > > Michael Keaney > > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 07:36:37 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 16:36:37 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> <001101c31875$cd6fc3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <007701c31888$ba7ed900$c9b7fea9@anne> Message-ID: <005301c3188b$82ee9360$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Anne writes: Actually, I am concerned about an EU ruled by bureaucrats, and don't think it will work over time. ------ Needless to say, neither Mark nor I were ever enthused by the thought of an EU ruled by bureaucrats. However, and certainly within the "British" context, further integration into Europe, thereby weakening the British state, is in the interests of all peace-loving peoples of the world. Even assuming that "Britain" is a tenable political entity (which, for other reasons, I believe not), it is in the interests of the "British" people to get the hell out from under US hegemony as far as possible. The results of that hegemony are there for all to see -- a delapidated infrastructure, widening poverty, destitution and polarisation of the distribution of income, and an economy thoroughly skewed towards propping up the pound in the interests of feeding a voracious appetite for imports, supported by an increasingly active military interventionist, imperialist foreign policy. Pretty much like the US, in fact. Meanwhile "Europe" is in no condition, and will not be in any condition any time soon, to conduct itself in such a fashion. This is why far left jeremiads about a European common security and defence policy are hopelessly off the mark. It is very much in the interests of the opponents of US imperialism that the illusion of an independent European military is fostered as much as possible, because it will work to undermine the actually existing instrument of inter-imperialist cooperation (aka subjugation) that is NATO. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:06:13 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:06:13 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <00a001c3188f$a5d07d40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Much is being made in this article and elsewhere of the "devastating effect" that these revelations are having on the republican movement. That may be true -- others are better placed to evaluate the situation. However, I would like to suggest that there is another agenda at work here, and it involves the slow but steady decay of the UK security apparatus's legitimation, ultimately undermining the rationale for the Union. How does this work? There is strong evidence to suggest that various elements within the British state apparatus have concluded that Northern Ireland is an expensive and troublesome possession that need not detain them further. There are far bigger fish to fry, not least Europe and the dilemma of how to negotiate a successful extrication from US hegemony. Since the 1970s elements within MI6 have been promoting a peaceful settlement between the British state and the republican movement, with varying degrees of success. The main obstacle to this tendency has been the empire loyalist faction, whose figurehead was Margaret Thatcher, and whose shock troops were MI5. That organisation's history as the security apparatus for the colonies informed its approach to Northern Ireland: since the other colonies were steadily leaving the empire (at least formally), this one would remain, by any means necessary. Thus the decision to put MI5 in charge of security operations was fatal, from the point of view of those within the British state apparatus (Edward Heath especially) who wanted to engineer some kind of peace arrangement. The Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 was effectively sabotaged by the combined weight of organised Unionism in league with key elements of the security apparatus -- ironically the same apparatus that decried the labour militancy of the period but were happy to use it to thwart Harold Wilson's government as in the Ulster Workers' Council strike of 1974. This episode is the subject of Robert Fisk's "The Point of No Return" (1975) and is summarised by Paul Foot in "Who Framed Colin Wallace?" (1990). What followed thereafter was a bloodbath in which the extremist faction of the British state went on the rampage, much to the disgust of people like the then-head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield. As the recently published work of journalist Peter Taylor testifies, it was MI6 which kept communications with republicans open, and which was the main communications conduit between Sinn Fein and Thatcher throughout the period when officially she "did not talk to terrorists" and sought to "deny them the oxygen of publicity" by instituting the ridiculous broadcasting ban in which British television and radio could not broadcast the voices of Sinn Fein politicians but actors could voice over their pictures. Utterly farcical. In line with the general disaffection with the ever more extreme and irrational Thatcher and her cohort, the punk Thatcherites, the British state apparatus came more and more under the control of "moderates", as evidenced most spectacularly in the putsch of 1990 when Thatcher was replaced by John Major. Major's tenure brought about the Downing Street Declaration of 1995, in which he and then-Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds laid the foundations for what subsequently became the Good Friday Agreement, the basis for the current "peace process". A major part of these developments has been the gradual uncovering of security apparatus activity during the period of the Troubles, of which this latest development is among the most stunning. While that may be responsible for disarray in certain republican ranks (again, I defer to those more in the know), it is at least as damaging to the credibility of the British state as the impartial arbiter of law and order. The entire legitimacy of the Union is on the line here, when taken into consideration with all the other developments that have occurred in the past five years: the Bloody Sunday inquiry, the Patten report and emasculation of the RUC, the Stevens inquiry and the Finucane issue, to name the most obvious examples. A question that must be asked is why is all of this being allowed to happen. It was possible in the past for the most egregious acts of state terrorism to be swept under the carpet in the name of national security, democracy, the rule of law, or whatever. It seems that this is no longer the case. The result is that irreversible changes are taking place, and these are working to undermine the whole basis of British occupation such that Unionism, as a political doctrine, is being progressively denied its primary justification: the moral superiority of the Protestant United Kingdom. Without that, it is reduced to the level that it tried for so long to portray republicanism as occupying -- as manifested in the recent spate of internecine killings and shootings between rival factions of loyalist paramilitaries. It becomes ever harder for the likes of Trimble and Paisley to rail against the threat of republican terror when the actuality of loyalist terror is plain for all to see. And the exposure of Stakeknife shows just how well the British state looks after its own -- the man, while well rewarded in the past, is now condemned to a life of hiding and uncertainty. But why? The continual revelation of secret state activity may be regarded as in the interests of certain fractions within the British state. Since these revelations are sufficiently damaging of the status quo ante's credibility, we must assume that either a) the jig is up and that the process of uncovering the dirty secrets of the past 30 years has developed its own momentum to the point where it is now unstoppable; or b) key elements within the British state apparatus are deliberately doing what they can, within the parameters set in part by themselves, to chip away at the edifice of British occupation and thereby pave the way for eventual reunification of Ireland within the context of a European Union itself subject to greater (presumably dominant, as it must always be) participation by British state and capital. Given the recent history of Northern Ireland, option b seems much more likely. A useful biproduct from the point of view of Blair, and even Major, is that this process involves the continuous revision of the Thatcher and pre-Thatcher eras, to the detriment of those responsible for security policy during these times. Mediated via the party system, this translates into useful point-scoring against the utterly discredited Conservatives by New Labour. A suitably minded Conservative Party leader could also use it to put some distance, finally, between the party as it is now and the lingering presence of Thatcher. But this is merely the surface noise of a deeper struggle within the realms of the British state for control over the reins governing its strategic direction. Despite the very worrying involvement of US President Bush, whose interests have more in common with Bob Jones University graduate Ian Paisley than with the republican and nationalist representatives party to the Good Friday Agreement, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which there has been formulated at the very least a tacit agreement between the hegemonic state fraction and the Sinn Fein leadership, in which concessions from the IRA are to be extracted in return for the continuing disintegration of the British occupation's superstructure (assuming that the base has already evaporated, as argued above), which acts to undercut Unionist demands for further concessions amounting to abject surrender by the republicans in addition to rendering Unionist arguments concerning the essential desirability of the Union irrelevant, again for reasons adumbrated above. If the political and economic base for Unionism is shrinking relative to that supporting reunification (as opposed to republicanism, which should be treated as a distinct fraction within the reunification movement), then, from the British point of view, this is a clever exit strategy conducted with the full connivance of the political party most likely to ascend to hegemonic status within the North, and possibly elsewhere in the remaining 26 counties -- especially if "moderates" within Sinn Fein, post-reunification, tie up with Fianna Fail. The recent revision of Europe policy by Sinn Fein, alluded to some time ago by Domhnall, might contain the seeds of such an outcome, although it should be remembered that such a rethink is also necessary for the development of a pan-European workers' movement opposed to US imperialism and the imposition of a neoliberal agenda by European and US capital. Such are the contradictions and potentialities of the present. Michael Keaney ----- Named: British double agent who murdered for the IRA Exclusive: Top Provo executioner was paid ?80,000 by British government By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor The Sunday Herald, 11 May 2003 THE British army's most deadly double agent, who operated at the very heart of the IRA, has been identified as Alfredo 'Freddy' Scappaticci, known to spy-masters by the codename 'Stakeknife'. As the British government's most powerful weapon in its 30-year 'dirty war' against the IRA and Sinn Fein, Scappaticci is suspected of being allowed by the army's Force Research Unit (FRU) to take part in up to 40 murders. He is said to have been involved in the killings of loyalists, policemen, soldiers, and civilians to protect his cover so he could keep passing top-grade intelligence to the British. He also kidnapped, interrogated, tortured and killed other IRA men suspected of being British informers. He is also said to have provided his military handlers with the information which led to the 'Death on the Rock' killings of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar in 1988 by the SAS. At the time, the IRA were convinced that their active- service unit had been betrayed by an informer. However, their mole-hunt drew a blank. Files based on intelligence from Scappaticci were forwarded to prime ministers Thatcher, Major and Blair. During a 25-year career infiltrating the IRA, Scappaticci rose to become head of their Internal Security Unit (the so-called Nutting Squad) and a member of the IRA's General Headquarters Staff. He also became close to some of the most powerful members of the republican movement, including Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams and former IRA chief-of-staff Brian Keenan. The IRA fear the outing of Stakeknife could deal an almost-fatal blow to the organisation. A senior Republican source said last night: 'This is the most dreadful news I've ever heard. I don't know how we can recover from this. How can we have any confidence left in ourselves when a man like Scappaticci turned out to be Stakeknife?' Scappaticci was paid an estimated ?80,000 a year by British intelligence. The British army knew his cover would be blown this weekend following a story the Sunday Herald carried last week revealing that rogue British agents planned to expose his identity. MI5 spirited Scappaticci out of Ulster, moving him to a safehouse in the Irish Republic. He is now believed to be at a military establishment in southern England. The events follow a week of turmoil and chaos within British military intelligence, the UK government and the ranks of the IRA. The exposure of Scappaticci as Stakeknife comes just weeks after Scotland Yard Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, released his report on alleged collusion between British security forces and terrorists in Northern Ireland. As a result of Stevens's work nine members of the FRU, including Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the Aberdonian army officer who led the unit, could now face prosecution. An unquantifiable number of civilians may have been killed because of state collusion with para militaries, including Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. The dramatic events have now led to the British government taking tentative steps toward setting up a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- an idea backed by many families of the Troubles, but opposed by many unionists. Last night, the Northern Ireland Office told the Sunday Herald that the government now wanted to 'address the suffering of victims of violence as a necessary element of reconciliation. The [British and Irish] governments will seek to establish what practical steps can be taken to recognise and address the suffering of all victims. We expect this initiative to include discussions of issues like truth and reconciliation.' A senior British intelligence officer said Scappaticci's exposure meant 'the dirty war in Ulster is over. With Stakeknife gone, there are no more nasty secrets to come out.' The Republican movement is devastated by the revelations that Scappaticci, one of the IRA's most feared and admired operators, was the biggest and most damaging double agent ever to work within the Provos. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:11:37 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:11:37 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Destructive creation: PFOA Message-ID: <00a801c31890$66f81f00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Non-stick pans raising health fears By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor The Sunday Herald, 11 May 2003 A toxic chemical used to make a host of household products such as non-stick pans, cleaners and anoraks is under investigation in the US because of fears it is damaging human health. But although the US Environment Protection Agency (Epa) has launched a rigorous scientific assessment of the risks the chemical poses, no action is being taken in Scotland. Environmentalists, suspecting a huge new pollution problem, are now putting pressure on the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) to issue its own advice. The chemical is called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and it does not occur naturally. It is a vital component in the manufacture of Teflon, the coating for non-stick pans, and Gore-Tex, the famous rain-proof fabric made at a factory in Livingston, as well as in other protective materials. It can also be released when other chemicals, known as telomers, break down. They are present in hundreds of consumer products including packaged food containers, cosmetics, carpet and furniture treatments, clothing sprays and cleaning products. In laboratory experiments PFOA has been blamed for killing the pups of rats, as well as causing significant changes in the weight of vital organs such as the brain, kidney and liver. The chemical has also been linked with an increased risk of prostate cancer and birth defects, though the evidence is disputed. The major problem is PFOA does not degrade, so once it escapes into the environment it will remain there for thousands of years. Tests in the US and Europe have detected traces of the chemical in the blood of up to 90% of adults and children. Although it is uncertain precisely how so many people have become contaminated, environmentalists say it is now time to sound the alarm bell on PFOA. They are worried that in the future it could become as notorious as such well-known and persistent pollutants as PCBs and CFCs. 'PFOA is the latest in a series of long-lasting chemicals which we have spread all around us in everyday products because they were once thought to be safe,' said Dr Richard Dixon, head of policy at WWF Scotland, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Aberfeldy. 'We have had to ban 'harmless' CFCs because they destroy the ozone layer. We have phased out 'inert' PCBs because they cause cancer and disrupt hormones . Now we need to look with suspicion at that non-stick frying pan or our hill-walking jacket because it turns out another chemical may not be as safe as we were told.' Sepa said it had no reason to question the approach or conclusions of the US environment agency. A Sepa spokesman said: 'While we have not specifically investigated this matter so far, it does not mean that it is not an issue in Scotland.' In April Epa released a preliminary risk assessment of PFOA which highlighted animal studies suggesting 'developmental toxicity and other health effects'. But at the moment they are not suggesting PFOA production be halted or that any products containing the chemical are unsafe. 'The Epa does not believe there is any reason for consumers to stop using any consumer or industrial related products,' it said. But the Environment Working Group in Washington DC, who have led the campaign to expose the risks of PFOA, is urgently calling for a ban . They point out that the company 3M ceased making PFOA in 2000 after the Epa required it to withdraw a closely related chemical from its stain repellent, Scotchgard. PFOA is now made in North Carolina by Dupont, which markets Teflon for non-stick pans. 3M, Dupont and W L Gore & Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex, all insist PFOA is safe. Dupont said while the chemical is used to make Teflon it cannot be detected in pans sold to the public. A spokeswoman for W L Gore & Associates in Livingston said consumers can continue using Gore products, despite 'minute amounts' of PFOA possible in Gore-Tex. Professor Andrew Watterson from the Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group at the University of Stirling thinks it may be prudent to avoid PFOA. He said: 'The precautionary principle should apply. As we don't need Teflon frying pans or even Gore-Tex products -- though they have their uses on the Scottish hills -- as consumers we should avoid or reduce exposures.' www.epa.gov/opptintr/pfoa/index.htm From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:15:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:15:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: Green Party a bit green Message-ID: <00b001c31890$e68c0880$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Environmental issues start to bite The Green factor: From a Holyrood presence of one, the election saw the Scottish Greens flower. But, says Environment Editor Rob Edwards, increased power can bring unpredictable consequences The Sunday Herald, 11 May 2003 'To resolve the environmental crisis, we shall need to forego, at last, the luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination and war. In our unwitting march toward ecological suicide we have run out of options.' The writer was US ecologist, Barry Commoner. The year was 1972. In a passionately argued book, The Closing Circle, he was one of the first to cogently identify the logic that was bringing a powerful new political force into being. 'Now that the bill for the environmental debt has been presented, our options have become reduced to two: either the rational, social organisation of the use and distribution of the Earth's resources; or a new barbarism,' he wrote. As a foundation stone for the modern-day Greens, it is not perfect. But it's not bad. It recognises that the Green movement has to deal with the social and economic issues that govern our lives as well as protecting the environment. It helps explain the extraordinary merging of political thinking that took place in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Three strands came together: the traditional nature conservationists , the growing anti-nuclear movement and the left-wing civil rights activists . >From such disparate roots, Green parties grew across Europe to become challengers to the established political order. Although the first Ecology Party in Europe was formed in England in 1973, it was the German Greens that really made the running. The German anti-nuclear campaigner, Petra Kelly, shot dead in 1992, was an inspirational early leader. Now perhaps the best-known Green is German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer . Like most Green parties over the past three decades, the Germans have had their share of false starts, but they are now the most influential Greens in the world, with 8.5% of the vote and three powerful government ministers. Across Europe today there are Green parties in 31 countries, with 193 representatives elected to parliaments. There are five ministers, 36 members in the European parliament and one European Commissioner. Globally, there are Green parties in some 70 countries. Even in the US, the environmental bad guy, they are making an impact. At the 2000 presidential election, Green candidate Ralph Nader won nearly three million votes. Many of Europe's maturer Green parties have faced the dilemma that split the Germans: how to reconcile principles with pragmatism. Different Green parties have responded differently . In France, they joined the socialists to form the last government. But according to Marian Coyne, spokeswoman for the European Federation of Green Parties , there is now disappointment because they failed to achieve much. This year in Austria, the Green Party tried to negotiate a deal with the Christian Democrats to keep the extreme right-wing Freedom Party out of power. But the Greens broke off talks because of the Democrats' failure to compromise on pension, education and transport policies. In Sweden there has been a loose co-operative with other parties, while in Finland the Greens joined a governing coalition, only to resign after the government decided to go ahead with a new nuclear power station. Green ministers with influence in the Belgium government resigned last week over proposed air transport routes. 'Often, Greens go into a coalition as a small partner, there is a crisis of expectation and people get disillusioned,' said Coyne. 'It's been a learning experience for the Greens, but they are punching above their weight.' Until a little over a week ago, the Scottish Green Party, formed in 1979, were one of the smallest in Europe -- with just one representative, Robin Harper, in the Scottish parliament. But now with 132,138 votes, 6.9% of the second vote, and seven MSPs, they have moved into another league. Like their European counterparts, many of Scotland's Green MSPs come from protest backgrounds. Highland MSP Eleanor Scott campaigned against GM crop trials, and Mark Ruskell, MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife, cut his teeth on the cross-party campaign for an Organic Targets Bill. South of Scotland member Chris Ballance is a veteran of anti-nuclear and tenants' rights campaigns, while Glasgow MSP Patrick Harvie is a gay rights activist who has been arrested for protesting at the Trident base at Faslane. Mark Ballard, the second Green MSP for Lothian after Harper, was a member of Labour's Trotskyite Militant Tendency as a teenager. He left the Labour Party after Neil Kinnock was defeated in 1992, which was, he recalls, a 'great wrench'. But in Scotlands Of The Future, a book being published this week by Luath Press in Edinburgh, Ballard says he still considers himself a socialist. He was attracted by the green movement because it offered a new brand of politics where 'direct action' could get things done. It is impossible to predict how these campaigners-turned-parliamentarians will behave over the next four years. Many are reluctant to be drawn on their targets and tactics because they still have to be discussed among themselves. Some things, however, are clear. The Scottish Greens will not, they say, indulge in the kind of gesture politics -- like raised fists and singing Burns -- associated with Tommy Sheridan's Scottish Socialist Party. But they will, given the right issue and the right time, be prepared to take direct action in defence of their principles. But more often they will seek to use the tools of parliament to make progress on their key policies: organic food, renewable energy, home energy efficiency, green jobs and transport. They will also try to promote their economic alternatives such as green taxes and the replacement of state benefits with a citizens' income scheme. They see themselves as the political arm of the environmental movement, which claims half a million members in 25 organisations in Scotland. In private, the Scottish Greens are relieved they don't yet have to confront the question that has divided many of their European colleagues: whether or not to join a ruling coalition. But if they continue their rise, sooner or later they will have to face the issue. It will not be easy. Preventing fractures will require all their political skills, and they will need the traditional parties to bend in their direction. It could make for interesting times. Greens in Europe Scotland 6.9% of vote. 7 MSPs: With just one MSP, forced the Scottish Executive to draw up a plan to boost organic food production England and Wales 2.9% of vote. No MPs: Two MEPs, three seats on the Greater London Assembly, 44 councillors, helping to run four councils Ireland 3.8% of vote. 6 MPs: Two MEPs, former Mayor of Dublin. Lead a high-profile campaign against Sellafield France 3.2% of vote. 3 MPs: Former environment minister, Dominique Voynet, in the last government, stopped two nuclear plants Germany 8.6% of vote. 55 MPs: A European commissioner, three ministers in governing coalition, including foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and an agreement to phase out nuclear power Belgium 14.5% of vote. 26 MPs: Greens had two ministers in governing coalition and an agreement to phase out nuclear power Austria 9.5% of vote. 17 MPs: Greens negotiated for a governing coalition with Christian Democrats but pulled out. Leading opponents of right-wing Freedom Party Finland 8% of vote. 14 MPs: Greens had two ministers in the governing coalition until a government decision to build a nuclear power station forced their resignations Latvia 9.5% of vote. 4 MPs: Greens have an environment minister in the governing coalition in an alliance with the rural party Sweden 4.6% of vote. 17 MPs: Greens have a say in government programme, but no ministers From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:17:19 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:17:19 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US state: administration fissures Message-ID: <00c201c31891$32804ee0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Newt raises the heat in Washington's tribal spat By Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle The Sunday Herald, 11 May 2003 The attack arrived out of a clear blue sky and it was all the worse for coming from an allied source. While Washington was still basking in the warm afterglow of victory in Iraq there was an unexpected and vicious strike in the long-running conflict between the State Department and the Pentagon or, to personalise it, between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A smart weapon was used too, in the shape of former House speaker Newt Gingrich who spends his time these days working as a policy wonk for Rumsfeld while holding down a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). It was from that base in Washington that Gingrich unleashed last week's sensational assault on the 'pathetic' State Department whose 'pattern of diplomatic failure is beginning once again and threatens to undo the effects of military victory'. To his way of thinking the office is 'ineffective and incoherent,' especially in its policy on the Middle East. At the heart of Gingrich's complaint is the Israeli peace plan and the role played by the Madrid Quartet who, claims Gingrich, are creatures of the State Department and, being representatives of the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, represent 'a formula for denial of anything we've learned over the past six months'. To his credit, Powell responded in his usual statesmanlike manner but Gingrich's intervention marks a new and worrying phase in the cross-Potomac power struggle between President Bush's top foreign policy advisers. Known for his robust views and for his antagonism towards any US participation in the Israeli road map for peace, Gingrich still packs a powerful punch, despite having spent the last eight years in the political wilderness. His membership of the Defence Policy Board gives him Rumsfeld's ear, and through the AEI he is close to other neo- conservative thinkers such as the recently disgraced defence analyst Richard Perle, hawkish editor William Kristol and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz. All are known to be suspicious about the peace plan and have supported Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's 14 objections to the proposals contained in the road map. While the intervention was not unexpected, the rigour of Gingrich's words has surprised Washington's diplomatic community: one source called it 'a hyena attack which was less about the shortcomings of the State Department and more about the rivalry between Secretary Powell and Donald Rumsfeld'. There is nothing new in the enmity between the two men. Throughout the Bush administration they have been at each other's throats, disagreeing over the policies to be pursued against Afghanistan and Iraq and now the Middle East and North Korea. Put bluntly, Powell favours negotiated settlements or diplomacy, while Rumsfeld sees nothing wrong with using force or threatening its use. The defence secretary also believes in attack being the best form of defence and is famous for bombarding the State Department with his Rummygrams -- memos backed by newspaper cuttings which ask demanding questions of the recipient. Not surprisingly, officials resent the interference from the Pentagon and take a healthy interest in rebutting Rumsfeld's probing. This has led to bureaucratic squabbling with officials determined to get the better of their opposite numbers, and at times it has looked as if the inter-departmental war is actually driving US policy. For example, when the State Department made clear its opposition to the presence in post-war Iraq of Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon responded by flying the exiled Iraqi opposition leader into Baghdad. The clash of policies and personalities has added immeasurably to the tensions which emerged during the operations in Iraq and have continued in the aftermath. Powell favours the involvement of the UN in the reconstruction process while Rumsfeld thinks it is the work of the devil. The former likes the idea of inclusiveness while the latter is guided by the primacy of US interests and believes a coalition should only include willing members. A notable scalp was won by the State Department when its nominee Paul 'Jerry' Bremer was named as the White House's representative to Iraq. With his diplomatic background -- he has served the State Department for 23 years as an executive and an ambassador -- he is close to Powell and, with his ability to listen to other points of view he is liked by the inhabitants of Foggy Bottom, the State Department's home in Washington. The selection was pure theatre. Rumsfeld had touted a rival nominee and had briefed journalists accordingly but when questioned about the appointment Powell counter-attacked with the thought that he 'didn't think it was going to happen'. Bremer's appointment is a counterweight to Rumsfeld's choice of retired soldier Jerry Garner but in this proxy war between the rival departments there is no time to think about casualties or wins and losses. No sooner had Bremer's appointment been ratified than Rumsfeld saw two of his nominees taking important positions in the administration of the armed forces -- Colin McMillan, an oil executive, becomes secretary of the navy while James Roche, a former executive with defence giants, Northrop Grumman, has been appointed secretary of the army. Both are Rumsfeld men through and through and, according to Pentagon sources, both are in sympathy with the policy of deterrence and pre-emption which underpins Bush's national security policy. McMillan was close to Bush's presidential campaign and worked for Cheney when he was defence secretary while Roche, an arms procurement specialist, is a strong supporter of Rumsfeld's innovative 'lite' strategies which underpinned the operations in Iraq. The men also share a business background with Rumsfeld -- McMillan is chairman of Permian Oil Exploration Company -- and although both will sever their links, the connections will raise eyebrows, given the extent of the defence secretary's own involvement with commerce. Last week it was revealed that in addition to having links with the Halliburton Corporation, a major beneficiary in awards for reconstruction work in Iraq, Rumsfeld was on the board of Zurich-based ABB company which sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea. The irony is not lost on Rumsfeld's enemies. Although the sale was in support of the previous administration's rainbow policy of encouraging North Korea to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, Rumsfeld has now changed his tune and calls the country a 'terrorist regime' which is a legitimate target for the US. The revelation of his support for the deal will be deeply embarrassing but it is all grist to the mill for the abrasive defence secretary. It also brings into sharper focus the personal differences that exist between him and Powell. Whereas the Princeton-educated Rumsfeld comes from a background in which wealth and privilege are taken for granted and seats on boards are regarded as a natural perquisite, Powell is the son of Jamaican immigrants, was educated at City College, New York, and rose through the ranks of the army by his own efforts. With both men at the top of their professions, neither can be caught out exploiting personal differences but officials say that discussions can descend to a locker-room level with Rumsfeld being the main culprit. When Powell described the inhabitants of Kabul as 'Afghanis' his opponent took great delight in correcting him. Niggled in that way, Powell usually responds with polite sarcasm. Creative rivalry of this kind is hardly uncommon in Washington. Indeed it is encouraged by Bush, who runs meetings in a collegiate style, revelling in the fraternity house debates which follow. Those involved know the importance of making sure that their voices are heard and, more importantly, of making sure that the last message gets through to the president. That is what makes Gingrich's involvement doubly intriguing. Not only was he dismissive of the road map, describing it as a failure, but he knows that Powell has been tasked by an unconvinced president with making sure that it works. In other words, says the Sunday Herald's diplomatic source: 'By attacking Powell, Gingrich has taken the opportunity to fire a shot across the president's bows. He knows full well that Powell is only trying to do what Bush wants him to do. The inference is obvious: it's a matter of record that the road map represents White House thinking.' Within the State Department, Powell's officials are taking a relaxed view of the intervention, arguing that tensions of that kind are good for debate and foster critical thinking. Powell, too, has brushed aside talk of a rift between him and Rumsfeld, insisting that there is no problem and that he 'gets along fine' with his opposite number. In a recent interview he said that the position was not only normal but creative: 'Are there disagreements and debates from time to time? Of course there are. I mean, I've never been in an administration where there wasn't. But we resolve them as two people who are serving one people and one president.' The thought is typical of Powell's understated philosophy and his relaxed view of human relationships, but it cannot disguise the fact that the war between the State Department and the Pentagon is far from over. In the weeks ahead, Powell will be directing the road map and doing his best to moderate between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Both sides are deeply suspicious of the other and Powell will have to demonstrate equal firmness in his dealings with them. He knows, too, that Sharon's supporters in Washington will be watching closely for any hint that Israel is being asked to make too many concessions. Among them will be Gingrich and his neo-conservative associates, all of them Rumsfeld's close friends. The battle continues. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:18:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:18:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: New Labour & social inclusion Message-ID: <00ca01c31891$686b68a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Who Needs The BNP? We've Got New Labour It's a novel way to stop the racists ... give them what they want so they've no need to complain By Ian Bell The Sunday Herald, 11 May 2003 IT is, by any standards, a masterpiece of warped logic. How do you halt the rise of one of the nastiest political sects in British life? The answer, if you happen to sit on the Commons home affairs select committee, is that you give the racists of the BNP exactly what they want. The committee would not express itself in those terms, of course, but it is hard to see what other interpretation can be placed on its report, published last week, into asylum and immigration. The system is in a mess; the numbers arriving, in the view of the MPs involved, are unsustainable; and Britain's ability to cope is now in question. This, the committee says, could lead to social unrest and political reaction; and that, in turn, could lead to more support for the far-right British National Party (BNP), which has just picked up 16 council seats in the English local elections. But what do the BNP want if not an official seal of approval for their claims that economic migrants are a threat to 'our' way of life? What would they like more than respectability for their views? And what is the home affairs select committee doing if not echoing their demand that the government should be tougher still on asylum applications? We have been through this before, of course. We have been through it every time the issue has arisen. Sustainable or not, the number of asylum applications is a direct reflection of the obvious fact that life itself is mightily difficult to sustain in certain countries. The majority of asylum-seekers are, at any given time, people escaping the worst of the world's woes, whether those be war, famine or persecution. Our benefits system, less than generous by European standards, is not the lure. Our established, callous methods for dealing with refugees are scarcely an inducement. And with our population facing decline at a time when unemployment is low, the idea of Britain being 'swamped' is in no sense credible. But still it goes on. Clearly the home affairs select committee believes the government could be a little more humane in its treatment of applicants. It also argues that the absurd 'target' figures for removals should be dropped. But in order to make the system credible, as the MPs would have it, we are invited to accept the argument that Britain is far too generous towards the supplicants of the earth. Too many of 'them' are getting in. I doubt that sincerely. I do know, however, that our treatment of ethnic minorities, whether refugees or native, tends to knock a hole or two in the argument that Britain is such a desirable place to be if you happen to be non-white. In Scotland, for the second time, not one member of an ethnic minority has been elected to the parliament. At Westminster, non-whites remain very few and far between, and are certainly not to be found chairing the home affairs select committee. Beyond the elite who have truly made it, things are very much worse. Last week The Independent did a little digging into the 2001 census returns for England. What it found was a scandal that cannot be explained with scare stories about the sustainability or otherwise of asylum applications. It found that black Britons are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. It found that Asian families suffer ill health at rates double the average. And it destroyed the myth of open, multicultural, aspirational Britain: even the third- generation descendants of immigrants are among the most deprived people in society. Overcrowding, a lack of heating, the inability to own a home, poor education, racism, the threat of assault: if you are non-white, your chance of escaping any of these fates is hugely diminished. Yet even in such straits a native will be better off than an asylum-seeker forced to live on a fraction of minimum benefits -- or forced to work, for a pittance and in fear, in the black economy. In either case families fall apart and the appeal of the drugs trade, gun crime or worse increases. The spiral quickens. When people are allowed to fall so far, it becomes horrifically difficult to rescue their children from the endlessly repeated misery. Yet here we are worrying over the appeal of 16 oafs (there are eight BNP councillors in Burnley alone). Did nobody on the select committee stop to wonder if the BNP's successes had anything to do with the collapse of the Muslim vote among people who have just witnessed a mendacious war, a war that seemed to confirm all their fears about the white world and its attitudes? Didn't it occur to them that a racist asylum policy might lead to more unrest among non-whites than even the provocations of the BNP could stir up? Apparently not. By placating racists we fail our neighbours. And doing this is only possible because Britain's ethnic minorities remain small in number and politically impotent. If they were truly as numerous as the Daily Mail and its kind like to hint as they bring us fresh horrors from the asylum front, they would be better represented. And if they were better represented, they would not be treated as second-class citizens. Anyway: this is the paradise refugees seek. Those who actually know where the smugglers are taking them often arrive with a high opinion of Britain. At the very least, they will console themselves with the thought that at least it cannot be any worse than the country they have fled. T he tiny minority who are granted leave to remain here will be grateful. But those who are expelled or forced underground might conclude that the British idea of what is and is not humane is somewhat underdeveloped. The home affairs select committee's members say the asylum system is falling apart. Why so? If Britain is capable of sending the largest part of its armed forces to the Gulf, and of supporting and supplying them, why can it not process 110,700 asylum applications? If Britain can support a health system with one and a half million employees, why does it struggle with refugees? If Britain is as prosperous as the government likes to claim, why is a relatively tiny number of new residents unsustainable? Perhaps it is because the asylum system long since ceased to be a simple gateway to refuge for the wretched. Instead, under successive governments, it has become a political tool in a grubby argument in which prejudice is preferred to facts. Of all New Labour's failures, the willingness to engage with the racists on their own terms is perhaps the most shameful. It was New Labour that came up with the 'target' figure of 30,000 removals -- why not just call them deportations? -- from Britain each year. That aim has now been abandoned, but the chaos it has caused is evident to the select committee. A cruel system grows yearly more cruel, and it does so because the politicians think there are votes to be had. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps our mongrel society does harbour delusions of racial and cultural purity that prevent it from ever understanding how immigration, of whatever sort, is in most cases a good thing. But if that is the case, all those non-white subjects of Her Majesty who were born here are entitled to despair. All those refugees who made it through a system full of traps and snares are entitled to feel betrayed. And Britain has no right to expect social cohesion. 'Asylum policy' is too grand a term. The basic idea is simply to stop 'them' from getting here while making life as unpleasant as possible for those who get through. There is precious little attempt, as native non-whites can testify, to give refugees a stake in society thereafter. Instead, a few right-wing creeps are allowed to put the wind up an entire government. Instead, the good folk on the Mound go about their business scarcely acknowledging that each and every one of them represents only one strand of society. Instead, skills, talent and energy that we could probably do with go to waste. But give the select committee its due. It might not have denounced the gover nment as vindictive, but it has recognised it as inept. After years of fuss over asylum and immigration, it seems we still have no way of knowing how many people are living here illegally because they were refused permission to join their communities. An invisible underclass has been created just because the politicians wanted to look and sound 'tough'. So what was it they were saying about wars on terrorism and the roots of terror? From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:23:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:23:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: Parliament opening reaction Message-ID: <00d201c31892$14c12540$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This article is a subtle take on what will always be the key difference between the SSP and the Greens -- the susceptibility of the latter to the co-opting strategies of the system. In this case, it is the "femininity" of Green politics as opposed to the implied "masculinity" of socialism, despite the fact that 4 out of 6 SSP MSPs are women whilst the Greens can boast of only 2 out of 7. ----- Holyrood Sisterhood Jeans in parliament, oaths in Gaelic ... whatever next? Vicky Allan meets a new breed of MSP The Sunday Herald, 11 May 2003 EVEN before she stood up in the Scottish parliament like a petulant, insubordinate teenager at school, subverting her swearing-in with a hand scrawled with the words: 'My oath is to the people', it was clear that Rosie 'Citizen' Kane was going to be at the centre of last week's media coverage. In the rookery of mostly male journalists hovering in the balcony, there was a smattering of lewd comments, a rumble of expectation, a feeling, perhaps, that any woman who would wear jeans and bare so much shoulder was bound to deliver, as she's promised, a parliament 'like the Big Brother house'. What was surprising was that, in a country that prides itself in having one of the highest parliamentary representations of women in the world, the response to her has been so cartoonishly sexist, so outdated. According to The Sun, David Steel whispered in private: 'I have to say, the view's going to improve in this parliament.' But then, this is the country that four years ago dreamt up the term 'Dewar's dollies'. Though her jeans mark her out as one of Holyrood's more subversive statement-makers, Kane is not alone. She is one of a new breed of women in parliament, working at the more radical end of politics, and determined not to be bludgeoned into grey-suited compromise. These include fellow SSP MSPs, Carolyn Leckie, Rosemary Byrne, Frances Curran, the Green Party's Eleanor Scott, the only female party leader, and Dr Jean Turner, who stood for election as an independent on a single issue campaign against the closure of Stobhill Hospital. Each has her own agenda, her own story. What binds them is not careerism, or even a sense of public service, but more an issue-based compulsion, an Erin Brockovich effect. They are, by nature, crusaders. It wasn't until the M77 protest that Rosie Kane's political conscience, was born. Before then, she was a struggling mother of two, whose only political statements were angry yelps at the television. Then, while visiting her mother in Pollok, she stumbled across Pollok Free State. 'I was passing by and I saw a guy up in a hammock,' she says. 'Before that I never did politics. I had two children, I was grafting away at that, I didn't have a job. I would never have complained about anything. I would have blushed every time I tried to speak. I was quite depressed. I could even describe myself as slightly agoraphobic, not wanting to leave the house. If you'd come to the door I wouldn't have answered it, because I didn't want anybody to see me, no managing well, no coping. Being involved in the protest, over a period of time I found a voice.' The 41-year-old Rosie Kane of today, youth worker and now parliamentarian, is very much the product of the Pollok Free State, of its ideals, its romanticism, its principles of direct action and protest, and its nurturing of personal development. 'I felt so comfortable sitting at a fire, with a mug of tea, no walls, no ceiling, and just total acceptance.' There were, she says, a lot of casualties of that awareness -- her marriage being one of them. Kane's politics are instinctive rather than ideological. She has read only five books in her life, the first being Tommy Sheridan's Imagine. The others include The Life Of Che Guevara and Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. Yet it's clear she has a gift for the symbolic. Her scribbled message may have looked petty, hippieish, crude, but it had a deft eloquence which is all the more surprising because she tells me that she had come up with it at the last minute, just before walking up to take her oath. 'I'm a direct action person,' Kane says. 'It comes from years of motorway protest, you're trying to grab attention to an issue.' It's this talent, I suspect, that the Scottish Socialist Party has recognised and promoted. The way she describes it, it's as if they sought her out: 'I remember them saying they thought I had something. ' Kane seems to share with her fellow female SSP MSPs a cultish belief that politics is as much a game of personality as it is of policy. Kane is the wild card, Leckie the comedian, Curran the serious old-timer. Often it seems the very playing up of their working-class identities, single-motherhood, humour, accents, way of dressing, are among the biggest statements they make. Their approach is also -- as everyone has noticed -- entertaining, even liberating. When Leckie joked that she was reluctant to take the oath to the queen, 'apart from anything else I don't even know the woman', then followed that up by apologising to her mother, and saying in her oath 'hairs' instead of 'heirs', she did it with the all-embracing skill of an experienced stand-up. Leckie, a 38-year-old single-mother and midwife, is flamboyant, shabbily glamorous and possesses a sharp wit. Like Rosemary Byrne, she has a trade union background. Her first memory of becoming interested in politics is that at age seven, growing up in the Gorbals, she asked her parents -- her father worked in the shipyards, her mother was a machinist -- why people had to have money, why they couldn't just help each other. Leckie explains the increasing attraction of radical politics to women. 'I think a lot of female MSPs got into the Labour Party and they kept quiet. We're not like that. We take direct action. That is undoubtedly an attraction to women who feel their voices have been trapped in whatever situation they have been in.' 'I think,' adds Frances Curran, 'women have taken the brunt of a number of different issues in our society, childcare, poverty, domestic violence, and therefore it can have a radicalising effect. But I think there are two issues in women's lives. There is the issue of gender experience in society, and there is also the issue of class. You see, middle-class and upper-class women don't experience society in the same way as working-class women. Put it this way, we were told that when Blair's babes got elected it would make a significant difference for working-class women. But it didn't. Based on experience, I don't have a lot of confidence in middle-class women who get elected to positions to represent me.' Curran, the most politically experienced of the group, was a former member of the Labour National Executive, involved in the socialist newspaper Militant. She went on to be a strong player in the setting up of the Scottish Socialist Alliance, and then the SSP. She has a three-year-old son, and, up until May 1, worked as a party volunteer. Over the years she has played a role in many protests, blockaded the doors of Glasgow City Chambers, and occupied community centres and schools. Like party leader Tommy Sheridan, all the new SSP MSPs will give half their salary to the party. For most this still leaves them wealthier than they were before. 'I feel strongly about the importance of financially keeping in touch with your roots,' says Curran, 'being on the same wage as the people you represent. Parliament is a very seductive place. I worked at Westminster in the 1980s and I saw the attempts to pull people into the system, the perks, the authority.' It's striking that four out of the six Scottish Socialist MSPs are women, a ratio higher than in any other party. Partly this is due to the 'zipping of the lists', which were topped with equal numbers of men and women, but this policy in itself came from the women in the party. 'There is inequality,' explains Leckie. 'It's not as easy for women to get elected positions. So the women in the party who did have a voice and were prominent strategically campaigned to get the 50-50 mechanism.' Not everyone favours a 50-50 approach. The Greens, a party popular among women, rejected it, and ended up with only two women out of their seven MSPs, and very few female candidates willing to go top of the list. However, they do, in Eleanor Scott, have the only woman party leader in Scotland, and a style of politics which, while essentially radical, is very different in its ethos, less gestural, less personality-driven, and in many ways more stereo- typically feminine. While Scott, who wanted to make her oath in Gaelic (even though she's a learner not a speaker), did make a statement, it was more passive, more ingratiating. As is the policy in Green parties, Scott plays down her identity as leader. Robin Harper, she says, is the spokesperson, she 'does the boring bits'. A community paediatrician in Easter Ross, she is 'more political than direct action' orientated and has an interest in consensual politics, which she seems to play out with her SNP partner, Rob Gibson. Scott, who quips: 'It's taken years for me to become an overnight success,' first became involved in the party in 1989 when, after the Green success at the European elections of that year, she realised there was a party out there which corresponded with her philosophy. Before that she had been a member of Friends of the Earth, and WWF, but 'wasn't a hugely active environmentalist'. In the end, however, it is often the cult, the personality that wins out. If there is a star of last week's Big Brother house it is, almost effortlessly, Citizen Kane. But was she in control? Given the press coverage it gained did her prank back-fire? 'It's been very sexist,' she says, 'and it was in danger of getting more sexist, but it's OK, we've got our eye on the ball here. I think I can understand, because to write about the parliament can be quite boring. But there's a whole load to reveal about me that they don't know, and it's not shoulders. I'm no fool. I'm no gimmick. Not only will my interest in clothes be an issue over the next few years, but much, much more. I'm a serious player. I can wait.' From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 12 08:23:14 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 10:23:14 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Modern Economics: Kleptomacy References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> <001101c31875$cd6fc3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <002e01c31892$075049e0$c9b7fea9@anne> American workers have not enjoyed an actual increase in wages since 1968; families have "made" it by having both adults work, overtime, and through use of "easy" but very high-interest credit. This latter problem has been ameliorated most recently by the re-finance mortgage market, which is gasping. Now the screws are really going to be tightened, and it will be interesting to see if the number one taxpayers coerced into funding the NWO begin connecting the dots. BTW, the Shiller book ("The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century") mentioned in the commentary below is a real totalitarian horror. You should all read it, if you can stomach it. And I though Jeff Sachs was a menace! (He is, of course, but Shiller is a MOAB - and apparently the new theorist of the NWO's finance department.) Anne PS Sorry the charts and graphics didn't reprint. *********************************************** Sanders Research Associates Commentary Chris Sanders Sanders Research Associates Our species, let us accept it, is entering its phase of socialisation; we cannot continue to exist without undergoing the transformation which in one way or another will forge our multiplicity into a whole. But how are we to encounter the ordeal? In what spirit and what form are we to approach this metamorphosis so that in us it may be hominised? This, as I see it, is the problem of values, deeper than any technical question of terrestrial organisation, which we must all face today if we are to confront in full awareness our destiny as living beings, that is to say, our responsibilities towards 'evolution'. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, Harper and Row, New York, 1964, p.42. Emphasis in original. "We will tolerate substantial income inequality." War as you like it Markets have not yet absorbed the realities of the new war. This is particularly true of equities, which have behaved since the "end" of the Iraq campaign as though it was all over. It is not over. Only the imposition of censorship disguises that fact. Once the American military killed a few journalists, serious coverage of its activities in Iraq ended. That is all there is to the end of the campaign. The war goes on, moving into another stage in which American forces focus on cementing control over the region. Donald Rumsfeld is fond of using the experience of Afghanistan as the model for what the world can expect in Iraq. The war continues in Afghanistan, and in spite of the imposition of a puppet regime in Kabul, the US controls very little of the country. For once we agree with Rumsfeld. That is very likely to be the outcome in Iraq. War is being sold, if that is the right word, on the basis that it is good for business and for the market. This is simply wrong. Nothing could in fact be worse. America's apparent offensive is in fact defensively inspired and even desperate. It is a bald attempt to reinvigorate the post World War II international order, collapsed under a mountain of debt. It is, in short, being waged to preserve relative American power. This is doomed to failure, but saying this is not to say that its boosters in Washington, London and Jerusalem are going to be losers, either. The real losers are what the political left has always called the masses, which is to say labour. The problem in economic terms is an old one, but the current level of economic discourse is so impoverished that it is seldom discussed, much less analysed. This is too bad, because current developments threaten not just labour, but the markets themselves. The problem is the age-old conundrum of wealth and income distribution, which contrary to the self-advertisement of the neo twins, "neo-liberalism" and "neo-conservatism," has not been solved in the United States or anywhere else. In modern economics, terminology is just the first of the difficulties encountered by the serious analyst. Neo-liberalism refers supposedly to the exponents of modern global market capitalism, while neo-conservatism might well be characterised as its military wing. The point here is that there is considerable overlap between the two groups, which as in so many facets of the new world order, is nonsensical locution. How one can be liberal and conservative at the same time is a contradiction that does not seem to disturb the smug editorial staff at organs of the press that could be fairly considered to be the propaganda instruments of the of this new order, which is neither new nor endowed with much order. One man's deflation is another's falling income Recognising the problem is a fundamental prerequisite for understanding the behaviour of the modern international economy. If one denies the increasing disparity of wealth and incomes then one need not be troubled by its deflationary consequences. Yet fear of deflation in recent years has become the bugbear of the markets. But deflation as the markets appear to understand it is just another of the order's tautologies. The assertion is this: profits are threatened by poor pricing power so costs must be cut. The costs that are cut, of course, are labour costs. This most emphatically does not include management compensation, which has soared in recent decades. With labour incomes stagnant or even falling, it is no wonder that demand for products falls behind, and in turn creates a new cycle of cost pressures and job cuts. In formal terms, the problem is that New World Order economics does not recognise or acknowledge that one man's cost is another man's income. In the global economy, this can be expressed as an identity, Y = W, or income equals wages. In order for there to be demand, workers must be paid so that they have the means with which to express that demand. If profit, and by extension capital accumulation is supported by lowering wages, than eventually the circulation of money between income and wages will fall to zero. Capital, accumulating with nowhere else to go, will be diverted to investment in paper, which is to say on claims on future income. This is the same as saying that it will be diverted to claims on future wages. This is the real source of deflation in the modern global economy, not the wages of workers. In an idealised economy this could not continue indefinitely or perhaps even for very long, as investment in new productive capacity would fall to bring supply and demand back into alignment. We do not, however, live in an idealised economy, let alone an ideal one. Indeed, it is hard to recognise the economy of the textbooks even remotely in the real political economy of life. In the textbook economy the United States would have long since adjusted to the debt accumulation of the cold war years and raised national savings and net exports. In the textbook economy trade would be free and access to vital resources would be taken as a market and price guaranteed fact of life. In the real economy, world wars have been fought over just this point, and the War on Terror has just had its first real macro economic impact: the US has now become the monopoly price setter in the international petroleum markets. If you can get away with something once, why not twice? In our last issue of Commentary we revisited our expectations for the growth of the US net foreign debt and government deficit. We have been frequent critics of US economic leadership for the reason that the American failure to deal with its dependence on foreign borrowing constitutes a large and growing weight upon the international economy and is the premier source of international instability. The US failure to deal with this has been puzzling and has led us from time to time to deride administration economic plans as no plans at all. A clearer picture is emerging however, of what American intentions might be. Disquietingly, it is more of the same - a lot more of the same. We have in previous issues discussed the effects of the Basel bank capital adequacy standards, one of which has been to enable a vast increase in the leverage permitted the largest international, and especially American, banks. Now the American economist Robert Shiller has published a book The New Financial Order, which proposes six "ideas for a new financial order." (Be sure to read the forthcoming SRA review of Shiller's book by Anne Williamson) Shiller's six ideas, which are for such modest things as livelihood insurance, GDP swaps and markets in national income (yes you heard right, markets in long term claims on national income) which boggle the mind. Not, mind you, because of their thoughtfulness, originality or even exposition, but rather for the opposite. For Shiller, the concentration of financial power represented by the structure of the modern financial industry is the apogee of human development. Facts are no impediment to his post-intellectual mind, which sets the stage with that most fashionable device of the New World Order literati, a thought experiment. Imagine, Shiller invites us, to think of what the world might have been had we had such "innovations" at the end of the Second World War. That what we have, which is an increasingly unstable financial and political system, is of no consequence to this man, who dismisses Enron, Long Term Capital Management, and the stock market debacle of 2000 as aberrations instead of the evidence of systemic dysfunction that they really are. The linkage of these events to the innovations he praises is simply dismissed out of hand. In Shiller, the New World Order economics profession has found its Michael Ledeen. The Ministry of Kleptomania This should terrify anyone with a net worth of under a quarter of a billion dollars because what it represents is a faux intellectual blueprint for institutionalised kleptomania coming out of the heart of American academia, Yale University. Shiller understands this. In his introduction, titled The Promise of Economic Security, he tries to cloak his real intentions by staking claim to the moral high ground. What we are to read, he tells us with typical modesty, is a way to bring economic security and life fulfilment to all. He wastes no time, however, in reassuring the trustees of Yale and others who might read this and wonder if Shiller's career should be deep-sixed. "We are thus concerned about all people's lives, and not just the poorest," Shiller intones. "We will tolerate substantial income inequality." There is thus no danger of mistaking exactly for whom Shiller is shilling. He needn't worry about the Bush family or an invitation to a midnight session at the Skull and Bones Society's crypt on the Yale campus. This is not hot air. Unemployment in the United States has risen to 6%. Corporate profits are recovering, but this is happening through cost reductions, not due to strong demand. Now this is not in itself necessarily a bad thing. Early in a recovery one would expect business to be slow in hiring. But the Employment Cost Index has risen, with benefits inflation surging. That old bugbear, rising health costs, is leading the way. Class War redux The international situation deteriorates almost by the day. Though the Middle East receives the lion's share of attention these days, Latin America is equally troubled. In Cuba, where a thaw in political life was discernible, a crackdown by the regime has put an end to it. This was inevitable, given Washington's escalating rhetoric, and the increasing problems elsewhere in the region. With the examples of Afghanistan and Iraq before them, no one on the Pentagon's hit list could conceivably afford to relax. The point here is that the market wants to believe good news right now and is in a mood to give almost any development the benefit of the doubt. But situations like this usually are a consequence of market positions, not fundamental valuation. Our inclination is to think that after three years of market declines, there must be a lot of shorts. They have to contend with a president determined to win a second term in 2004, a Federal Reserve Board that is equally determined to accommodate whatever financial leverage he demands to get it, and an oil industry that is now in a position to set prices. A short squeeze could well be protracted, and take the market surprisingly high. But not too high, we would venture. War may make for cool photo ops, but the chickenhawk in the White House has started one that is not about to end any time soon, and is going to be a drain on manpower and resources for years to come. Even if he were to lose in 2004, the two Democrats most likely to face him, Lieberman and Gephardt, have run both flags up their halyards, American and Israeli. Electing a democrat is not going to change the things that count. What counts is that there is nothing yet on the horizon to suggest that the trends toward greater national and international wealth and income concentration are going to reverse, the implication being that demand will continue to stagnate. This will continue to be offset by low interest rates and super-accommodative monetary policy. It would be wrong to think of this as deflationary, though. More accurately, it is the essential precursor for hyper-inflation. What is at issue really is how the big blocks of the industrial world, the US and Europe, position themselves for relative advantage. And it may be in ten years time that we all look back on this and remember it as having been the time when the first shots in a new class war were fired. Because the truth is that the "masses" are being left with very little choice in the matter. Sometimes you just have to fight. Whether you want to or not. --- From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 12 08:37:56 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 10:37:56 -0400 Subject: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> <001101c31875$cd6fc3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <007701c31888$ba7ed900$c9b7fea9@anne> <005301c3188b$82ee9360$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <003501c31894$14cb4c80$c9b7fea9@anne> One May 12, 2003, Michael Keany wrote: Meanwhile "Europe" is in no condition, and will not be in any condition any > time soon, to conduct itself in such a fashion. This is why far left > jeremiads about a European common security and defence policy are hopelessly > off the mark. It is very much in the interests of the opponents of US > imperialism that the illusion of an independent European military is > fostered as much as possible, because it will work to undermine the actually > existing instrument of inter-imperialist cooperation (aka subjugation) that > is NATO. Michael: I can sign on to all that you wrote, with the quibble that - even though I too very much want Britain out from under the US hegemon - I don't necessarily agree that further integration into the EU is the way to get the job done, but - large sigh - you may well be right. Further I agree to your point about the "illusion of an independent military" being critical. Just one thing, NATO is starting to unravel, it is rotting from within - so that "illusion" may well get a much-needed kick in the pants. Not that I am anxious to see the EU spend enormously on defense, but the old WWII bargain of having the US provide the defense umbrella while the Europeans built large welfare states has proved to be a devil's bargain. Like Chris Sanders wrote: Sometimes you have to fight. But I'm not referencing a military campaign in the above. The US economy is exhausted, and spending on the military is really going to start to hurt. Over the coming year, Iraq and Afghanistan are not going to "come right." The US simply doesn't have the men, materiel and funds to keep it up without seriously harming the domestic population. And when the American people start feeling the true aim of the Patridiot Act (tax farming by banks, which - unlike govt - are efficient, and state control), the world may at last see a reaction. Amazingly, people here are blithely unaware in large part of those laws, and their ultimate purpose. Zip reporting. The EU doesn't have to have a giant military - it needs a credible defense force, and a big "so long" to NATO. Anne From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:44:23 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:44:23 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Argentina: Naomi Klein analysis Message-ID: <00f201c31894$fa6734c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> >From pots to politics Argentina was eager for change, yet is about to elect a discredited has-been as president Naomi Klein Monday May 12, 2003 The Guardian In most of the world, it's the sign for peace, but here in Argentina it means war. The index and middle finger, held to form a "V", means, to his followers, "Menem Vuelve" ("Menem will return"). Carlos Menem, poster boy of Latin American neo-liberalism, president for almost all of the 1990s, is looking to get his old job back next Sunday. Menem's campaign ads show menacing pictures of unemployed workers blockading roads, with a voiceover promising to bring order, even if it means calling in the military. This strategy gave him a slim lead in the first election round, though he will almost certainly lose the run-off to an obscure Peronist governor, Nestor Kirchner, considered the puppet of the current president (and Menem's former vice-president) Eduardo Duhalde. On December 19 and 20 2001, when Argentinians poured into the streets banging pots and pans and told their politicians "Que se vayan todos" ("Everyone must go"), few would have predicted the current elections would come down to this: a choice between two symbols of the regime that bankrupted the country. Back then, Argentinians could have been forgiven for believing that they were starting a democratic revolution, one that forced out President Fernando de la Rua and churned through three more presidents in 12 days. The target of these mass demonstrations was the corruption of democracy itself, a system that had turned voting into a hollow ritual while the real power was outsourced to the International Monetary Fund, French water companies and Spanish telecoms operators, with local politicians taking their cut. Carlos Menem, though he had been out of office for two years, was the uprising's chief villain. Elected in 1989 on a populist platform, Menem did an about-face and gutted public spending, sold off the state and sent hundreds of thousands into unemployment. When Argentinians rejected these policies, it was hugely significant for the globalisation movement. The events of December 2001 were seen in international activist circles as the first national revolt against neo-liberalism, and "You are Enron, We are Argentina" was soon adopted as a chant outside trade summits. Perhaps more importantly, the country seemed on the verge of answering the most persistent question posed to critics of both "free trade" and feeble representative democracies: "What is your alternative?" With all of their institutions in crisis, hundreds of thousands of Argentinians went back to democracy's first principles: neighbours met on street corners and formed hundreds of popular assemblies. They created trading clubs, health clinics and community kitchens. Close to 200 abandoned factories were taken over by their workers and run as democratic cooperatives. Everywhere you looked, people were voting. These movements, though small, were dreaming big: national constituent assemblies, participatory budgets, elections to renew every post in the country. And they had broad appeal: a March 2002 newspaper poll found that 50% of Buenos Aires residents believed that the neighbourhood assemblies were "a way forward, a new way of governing". One year later, the movements continue, but barely a trace is left of the wildly hopeful idea that they could some day run the country. Instead, the protagonists of the December revolts have been relegated to a "governability problem" to be debated by politicians and the IMF. So how did it happen? How did a movement that was building a whole new kind of democracy - direct, decentralised, accountable - give up the national stage to a pair of discredited has-beens? In Argentina, this marginalisation process had three clear stages, each of which has plenty to teach activists hoping to turn protest into sustained political change. Stage one: Annoy and Conquer. The first blow to the new movements came from the old left as sectarian parties infiltrated the assemblies and tried to drive through their own dogmatic programmes. Pretty soon you couldn't see the sun for the red and black party flags, and a process that drew its strength from the fact that it was normal - something your aunt or teacher participated in - turned into something marginal, not action but "activism". Thousands returned to their homes to escape the tedium. Stage two: Withdraw and Isolate. The second blow came in response. Rather than challenge sectarian efforts at co-option head-on, many of the assemblies and unemployed unions turned inward and declared themselves "autonomous". While the parties' plans verged on scripture, some autonomists turned not having a plan into its own religion: so wary were they of co-option that any proposal to move from protest to policy was immediately suspect. These groups continue to do remarkable neighbourhood-based work, building bread ovens, paving roads and challenging their members to let go of their desire for saviours. Yet they have also become far less visible than they were a year ago, less able to offer the country a competing vision for its future. Stage three: Just Don't Do It. Argentina's screaming and pot-banging went on and on and on. Just when everyone was hoarse and exhausted, the politicians emerged from hiding to call an election. Incredulous, the social movements made a decision not to participate in the electoral farce - to ignore the churnings of the IMF and build "counter-powers" instead. Fair enough. But as the elections took on a life of their own, the neighbourhood assemblies began to seem out of step. People weren't able to vote for the sentiment behind December 19 and 20, either by casting a ballot or boycotting but demanding deeper democratic reforms, since no concrete platform or political structure emerged from those early, heady discussions. They thus left the legitimacy of the elections dangerously uncontested, and the dream of a new kind of democracy utterly unrepresented. The campaign slogan that won the first round was the astonishingly vague "Menem knows what to do and he can do it." In other words, maybe Nike was right: people just want to do something, and if things are bad enough, they will settle for anything. Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear. ? A version of this article first appeared in the Nation. Naomi Klein's most recent book is Fences and Windows From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 12 08:45:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:45:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: pressure builds Message-ID: <00fa01c31895$2fb39d80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Reid and Kinnock push Brown on euro Demand for 'signal of commitment' to referendum Michael White and Ian Black Monday May 12, 2003 The Guardian Tony Blair's ministerial hitman, John Reid, publicly warned Gordon Brown yesterday that the cabinet - not him - would decide Britain's policy towards the European single currency and that the decision was "not whether we will join the euro, but when". "When he [Brown] and the Treasury give an estimate on these things of course it is extremely important. But ultimately these decisions are taken by the cabinet under the leadership of the first lord of the treasury who is the prime minister ... the cabinet will discuss these matters collectively," Dr Reid said on ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby show. To underline the point he also said the verdict expected any week now "will be a decision for the time being ... It doesn't bind us for any specified period in advance because the decision we are taking is not whether we will join the euro, but when." The blunt language deployed by the leader of the Commons, now in his fourth cabinet post in four years, startled Labour MPs who are braced for whatever final formula Mr Blair and Mr Brown manage to agree on the Treasury's "five economic tests" within the next month. There is deadlock, ministers confirm, as pro-euro Labour forces pile on pressure for Mr Blair to overrule Mr Brown. In an interview with the Guardian today, EU commissioner Neil Kinnock demands a "clear, strong and unmissable signal" of commitment to the promised referendum on euro-membership, even if ministers do not name the day. Mr Brown appeared to confirm the deadlock in his talks with Mr Blair over the interpretation of the Treasury's elaborate economic tests - and whether he would be allowed to rule out a referendum in this parliament. It may delay his promised statement until the last moment - after the Whit break, not, as expected, before May 22. Though aides discounted its significance Mr Brown twice spoke of reporting to the Commons "in the first week of June" during a GMTV interview shown yesterday. That would mean going to the limit of Mr Blair's pledge that a verdict on the euro would emerge within two years of the June 7 2001 election. There is even speculation that the pair will have to get some extra wriggle room by delaying the chancellor's statement until June 13, two years after the new parliament first met. As Helen Liddell, the Scottish secretary, warned of the cost to Britain of non-entry, Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor, said "the cabinet is at sixes and sevens". Pro-Europeans such as Mrs Liddell, Robin Cook and Peter Mandelson say the UK economy has largely "converged" with Europe's, while sceptics in all parties insist there remains much to do. With Mr Cook demanding a commitment to enter by 2007 Mr Kinnock disagreed. "The problem with that is it puts the circumstances of a referendum in the hands of others, including most rabid sceptics," he told the Guardian. The former Labour leader is resigned to no date being included in the Brown statement. But he insisted that getting the message right about future intentions was vital to avoid serious economic and political damage. "A lot of store will be set by whether the referendum takes place in this parliament or not," he said. "It should either be in this parliament or the signal for a referendum early in the next parliament should be strong, clear and unmissable." "If the government was to say that in the next election a vote for the Labour party will mean a referendum in the early years of the next parliament, then that would say they are committed - and the effect of further delay would therefore be greatly mitigated," he explained. From zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk Sat May 10 19:37:14 2003 From: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk (Tariq Mahmood) Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 06:37:14 +0500 Subject: [A-List] Baghdad Residents Protest U.S. Troops References: <002b01c305ce$ab270990$6401a8c0@MineDoyran> Message-ID: <000901c3189f$9a346ea0$6e0f38d2@k6n2c2> Dear Prof Mine Doryan, I read your article about Iraq. I am also a student of political science at Peshawar, Pakistan and would like to read you. Tariq Mahmood Hassan Garhi, Peshawar Pakistan Phone: 092-91-246950 E-Mail: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk ----- Original Message ----- From: "xxxx" Subject: [A-List] Baghdad Residents Protest U.S. Troops From hliu at mindspring.com Mon May 12 16:48:39 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 18:48:39 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Unemployment and Tax Cut References: <000001c318b1$53b5d790$0c69f8d1@WindsongP4> Message-ID: <3EC024C7.1030001@mindspring.com> The unemployed and the underemploy ought to start a right to work union to protect their civil rights, to weed out fraud and to pressure government to adopt policies. There are between 10 to 15 million officially unemployed and another 10 million who have given up looking, or those forced into early retirement at 50. Plus another 20 to 50 million under-employed. It would be a powerful lobby with enough swing votes in swing states. For starter, how about a negative income tax in the current tax package? Or a tax rebate, not just a limited time income averaging, but a tax rebate equal to say 70% of your previous high income before unemployment. If you made $100K last year and paid $30k in taxes, you get back $70K this year if you are unemployed. Unemployment ought to be made to hurt the system than than it does the individual, then you will be surprised how fast Congress will eliminated unemployment. Henry C.K. Liu Kathy in the Rocky Mountains wrote: > I recently went to a Job Fair (first time for me) and almost all of the > "employers" where scamming or selling something to the out-of-work and > somewhat desparate job seekers. The only honest employer that had > something to offer was the Army. They offered careers, salaries, > training and education, etc. Qualified people (young, healthy, > intelligent) could get career positions through this employer. This was > in stark contrast to the one who never indicated that I would pay them > 5K or more for them to help me do the work of finding a job ... Or the > various commisioned sales jobs ... Or the truck driver job that really > was selling expensive training in a field that is glutted and with > future on-the-job restrictions that mean few would be reimbursed for > their training. From zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk Mon May 12 20:26:09 2003 From: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk (Tariq Mahmood) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 07:26:09 +0500 Subject: [A-List] EU Struggles: EU Constitution References: <3EBEA3F4.1060403@mindspring.com> <03a601c3180b$74ecf8e0$c9b7fea9@anne> <001101c31875$cd6fc3c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <007701c31888$ba7ed900$c9b7fea9@anne> <005301c3188b$82ee9360$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <003501c31894$14cb4c80$c9b7fea9@anne> Message-ID: <000901c318f9$20a4cb20$6b0f38d2@k6n2c2> ----- Original Message ----- "annewilliamson" wrote: EU Struggles: EU Constitution One May 12, 2003, Michael Keany wrote: Meanwhile "Europe" is in no condition, and will not be in any condition any time soon, to conduct itself in such a fashion. This is why far left jeremiads about a European common security and defence policy are hopelessly off the mark. It is very much in the interests of the opponents of US imperialism that the illusion of an independent European military is fostered as much as possible, because it will work to undermine the actually existing instrument of inter-imperialist cooperation (aka subjugation) that is NATO. Michael: I can sign on to all that you wrote, with the quibble that - even though I too very much want Britain out from under the US hegemon - I don't necessarily agree that further integration into the EU is the way to get the job done, but - large sigh - you may well be right. Further I agree to your point about the "illusion of an independent military" being critical. Just one thing, NATO is starting to unravel, it is rotting from within - so that "illusion" may well get a much-needed kick in the pants. Not that I am anxious to see the EU spend enormously on defense, but the old WWII bargain of having the US provide the defense umbrella while the Europeans built large welfare states has proved to be a devil's bargain. Like Chris Sanders wrote: Sometimes you have to fight. But I'm not referencing a military campaign in the above. The US economy is exhausted, and spending on the military is really going to start to hurt. Over the coming year, Iraq and Afghanistan are not going to "come right." The US simply doesn't have the men, materiel and funds to keep it up without seriously harming the domestic population. And when the American people start feeling the true aim of the Patridiot Act (tax farming by banks, which - unlike govt - are efficient, and state control), the world may at last see a reaction. Amazingly, people here are blithely unaware in large part of those laws, and their ultimate purpose. Zip reporting. The EU doesn't have to have a giant military - it needs a credible defense force, and a big "so long" to NATO. Anne --------- NATO as well as EU, while the two seem to be two faces of a coin, are expanding so fast and in one direction - eastwrds, that they might outrun their capacity to hold together. To an outsider, the two mean one and same thing, following similar polcies, within there is a line dividing interets of members. Europeans wish the line be along mid-Atlantic while Tony is drawing it along the English Channel. However, with increasing addition of east European nations who practiced different ideologies till late and have leaner economies will soon find difficult to adjust within the same bag. The more members joining a club lesser is goinng to be an agreement on common interets and accordingly less cohesive would the group be. Keeping in view the divide of interests beween the US and major 'old Europe' nations we notice the hurry to join in the 'new Erope' countries into NATO and EU serve the two diverse interests. This contain the seeds for the division. However, when the greed to grab from without continue to be possible the imperial powers will agree to mutually accommodate as prior to the two world wars. It was the felt unfairness of division of the loot that tilted the balance which ignited the two wars. It mainly depends on the US for how long she is able to whet the apetite of her allies. One cannot also with ease forecast entry of new contenders into the fray which may tilt the scales even earlier. The name of the game is greed to grab and more. The strategy for the game to continue is to agree within the club on maximum agenda and keep other entrants at bay. Tariq From hliu at mindspring.com Mon May 12 23:47:08 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 01:47:08 -0400 Subject: [A-List] [Fwd: Invitation] Message-ID: <3EC086DC.8070604@mindspring.com> This e-mail should have been sent to Rumsfeld, not me. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: nvitation Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 07:28:34 +0300 From: "Syrian Festival" To: "alfaek" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC Ministry OF TOURISM Damascus international Touristic Meeting for Businessmen & Investors Meeting date: 22-23/7/2003 Activities of the meeting ? Presentation offers and investment of potintial opportunities in Syria presented by the Minestry of Tourism for the first time. ? Presentation the projects and investing offers , presented by the companies and individuals as per the project form . ? Arranging mutual meetings among buisiness men and investors to discuss the touristic investment chances. ? Showing the latest successful touristic investments in the field of investment .. ? Meetings counterparts in the field of tourism . ? Offering a membership card of the meeting with the handbag which includes literature of the meeting and the complete program of the meeting . The main topics for buisinessmen and investors in Damascus Intenational Touristic Meeting ? Touristic investment in Syrian Arab Republic which will be presented by the ministry of tourism . ? Reviewing the investing offers and projects which the participants may present . ? The reality of investing offers and which are possible in Syrian Arab Republic . ? The advantages and guarantees which Syrian Arab Republic offer for protecting the investors and the investments .. ? reviewing the projects and investment projects that are offered by the Syrian ministries . ? Tourist atmosphere in Syria and promotions forSyrian tourism .. ? Seminar about tourist marketing . Participation Form Looking forward to your participation and presence at Damascus International Touristic Meeting for businessmen and investors . Kindly provide us with your activities and your field of interest to enable us to help you and arrange meetings with your counterparts in your field at the meeting ? I like to meet my counterpart in the field of : ? Company name : ? Activity : ? Adress : ? Telephone no : ? Authorized person : ? fax : ? E-mail ? hotel room ( five stars hotel ) Note : For hotel resevation, our booking will be at Sheraton hotel ( 100 us$ ) per day .. Don?t hesitate to contact us at : alfaek at net.sy From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 00:45:04 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 09:45:04 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 4 Message-ID: <000b01c3191b$2fb665c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> In "Comparative Nationalisms", chapter 3 of "Fool's Crusade", Diana Johnstone deals with the national question. For many Marxists, including especially those from a Trotskyist tradition, Milosevic was another Stalin trampling on the rights of oppressed nationalities. Backing the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and--finally--Kosovo became a litmus test for Leninists. The Militant newspaper, for example, described Kosovo as being under the thumb of chauvinist overlords in much the same fashion as Puerto Ricans being dominated by the USA: "In the Yugoslav constitution of 1946, Kosovo was given only limited regional autonomy. Although important gains were made in the area of language and education, the key area of internal security and all managerial appointments were to be controlled from Belgrade. Using the pretext of suppressing Albanian irredentism, longtime chief of the Federal Police Alexander Rankovic, ordered police pressure on Albanians to emigrate. Between 1954 and 1957 some 195,000 Albanians left for Turkey." To say the least, the Militant's characterization of the Titoist system as heavy-handed Stalinist centralism not only falsifies the way the system worked but what drove the secessionist impulses of the 1980s and 90s. While Tito was bureaucratic, he was *not a centralizer*. He continually resorted to methods of decentralization, including "workers' self-management" in the economic sphere. Closely related to this policy was a tendency to *strengthen* the powers of the constituent republics and autonomous regions against the central Federal government. Both of these "radical" practices eventually contributed to the implosion of the nation. As soon as the economic benefits afforded by a special relationship to imperialism began to unwind, the various components of Yugoslavia began to flee a sinking ship. When Lenin spoke in favor of national self-determination, he had socialism in mind. The fracturing of Yugoslavia has done nothing except strengthen capitalism. This is something the Marxist left has to come to terms with at last. The first republic to bolt from Yugoslavia was Slovenia, which had been increasingly drawn to the capitalist charms of its neighbors immediately to the west, especially Austria and Italy. Johnstone cites an increasing affinity between Slovenian intellectuals and Western European leftists, whose attention was being drawn increasingly to German Green type issues such as disarmament, feminism, human rights and the environment. In this changing climate, opposition to Belgrade's power, especially through its army, was seen as a vanguard of democratic progress in the spirit of a renewed "civil society". The old Titoist vision of workers' self-management and trans-national solidarity had gone out of fashion. The Slovenian intelligentsia defined their agenda in the pages of "Mladina" (Youth). They were as recognizably "one of us" to the Western Europeans, just as much as the blue-eyed Bosnian Muslims. In article after article, they lambasted the Yugoslav army which was suppressing "democratic civil society". The hero of the anti-army movement was Janez Jansa, a leader of the "Alliance of Socialist Youth of Slovenia", who was pushing to "modernize" the organization by dropping the word "socialist" from its name. After Jansa was arrested for stealing a secret military document that purportedly detailed plans to contain a domestic uprising, he became an icon to the German peace movement. Jansa's defenders saw the conflict as a simple one of democratic modernization versus conservative repression. A closer examination would reveal a different reality. The Slovenian modernizers sought to be freed from the constraints of the federal state. With only 8 percent of the population, they contributed 20 percent of the federal budget. Slovenia's deliverance would come through the free market and improved job opportunities for college-educated urban professionals. Ironically, this milieu resented the money being "wasted" on Kosovo and regarded all of the Eastern peoples of Yugoslavia, either Albanian or Serbs as unwelcome country cousins. In June 1991, Dr. Peter Tancig, the Slovenian minister of science, send out a mass email to the world's scientists that tried to explain the "mess" in Yugoslavia. One on side was a "typical violent and crooked oriental-bizantine [sic] heritage, best exemplified by Serbia and Montenegro". On the other side was a "more humble and diligent western-catholic tradition." Fast-forwarding a couple of years we discover that Janez Jansa, the darling of the German peace movement, had gone through a remarkable transformation that would anticipate Joschka Fischer's. After the former anti-militarist icon became Slovenia's defense minister, he oversaw the clandestine import of weaponry into his country, most of which was sold illegally to Croatia. When Croatian nationalism exploded in the 1980s, there was very little to inspire leftists. The modern movement saw itself as fighting for the recognition of the "rights" of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia, which had been absorbed by Hungary in 1102. It was always torn between the Serb revolutionary nationalist movement of the late 1800s and the Hapsburg empire, which always sought a Slavic outpost to pursue its ambitions. When the Hapsburgs ended up on the losing side in WWI, it made the choice easier for the Croat nationalist leaders. By becoming part of the new nation of Yugoslavia, they would avoid the heavy reparations imposed by Versailles. After Hitler invaded Yugoslavia, Croatia was detached from the country. While it lost portions of the Adriatic coast to Italy, it was awarded the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Under Ustashe rule, Croatia set out to develop a racially pure state. On May 14, 1941, over 700 Serbs were rounded up in Glina and take to the local Orthodox Church. After the doors were locked, Ustashe gunmen killed everybody inside. The total number of Serbs who died in such fashion will probably never be known, but it is at least 700,000. It is, therefore, not surprising that Serbs began to demand protection from the federal government after Tudjman demonstrated an affinity for the Ustashe. What is surprising, however, is the willingness of some Marxists to regard this as Serb expansionism. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:10:51 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:10:51 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <004801c3191e$c98ed440$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> IRA reviews security as Britain is blamed for Stakeknife leak CATHERINE LYST The Herald, 13 May 2003 SINN Fein yesterday blamed British intelligence for leaking the name of a republican identified as a top IRA informer as the terror group's leadership ordered an immediate review of its internal security. Gerry Kelly, the party's policing spokesman, denied that Freddie Scappaticci fled Belfast knowing his cover was about to be blown, and claimed his family had been in contact with Sinn Fein asking the party for advice. However, security sources said he had gone into hiding in Britain. It emerged yesterday that senior British intelligence officers are expected to be questioned about their No 1 spy in Northern Ireland. Scappaticci, who has been linked to a series of IRA murders of informants, was named on Sunday as a British Army agent operating within the ranks of the Provisional IRA under the codename Stakeknife. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police commissioner who is heading an inquiry into collusion involving military intelligence, the police special branch, and loyalist paramilitaries, will now have to widen his investigation after the exposure of Scappaticci. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:14:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:14:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: UK academia Message-ID: <005001c3191f$4bb157e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Lesson on biotechnology threat for US forces students WILLIAM TINNING The Herald, 13 May 2003 PROSPECTIVE leaders of the US armed forces visited a Scottish university yesterday to sample its expertise in biotechnology. At a time when the issue of biological and chemical weapons has never been more prominent, US forces enlisted the help of Dundee University to educate their future senior decision-makers about biotechnology and advances in biomedical research. Eighteen high-ranking military students from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) in Washington DC visited the university's Wellcome Trust Biocentre, which is highly regarded in its field. Among its area of expertise is an understanding of parasitic tropical diseases such as malaria, which would help US forces if they had to fight somewhere the disease was rife. The university is also involved in research into treatments to combat chemical attacks. Yesterday's visit was the third time in as many years that ICAF students have visited Dundee University. The students also visited the forensic science laboratories of Tayside Police in Dundee, and are expected to meet Church of Scotland representatives during their 10-day stay in the UK. The Pfizer Pharmaceuticals plant in Kent and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge are among other venues which they will visit. The ICAF is a US defence department educational institution established to study national resource management. Its students comprise officers from all branches of the services to the rank of colonel, and government officials from other agencies. The team was in Dundee to further understanding of the relationship between the biotechnology industry and US national security. Joseph Goldberg, director of research at the ICAF, said: "As senior decision-makers, these students will be required to reflect upon issues which most probably will involve dimensions of biotechnology. "It is vital that more of our future strategic leaders in the department of defence not only have an understanding of the nature of the biological threat but have a familiarity with the roots of biological warfare: biotechnology, its industry, and the relationship between the industry and our national security." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:28:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:28:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the quagmire begins Message-ID: <005a01c31921$3ee954c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Here's New Labour insider and general keeper of the social democratic conscience Hugo Young on the necessity of US occupation of Iraq. Could this be an opportunity for the British to wriggle out from under? No one here will support the US occupation, but from the point of view of those concerned to extricate Britain from US hegemony, watching the hegemon taking on the role of Swift's Gulliver getting tied down in both Iraq and Afghanistan presents potential room for manoeuvre as the local Lilliputians get to work making life extremely difficult for the US, thereby opening a possible escape window, which, from Young's point of view (check the archives), is British eurozone membership. Could this be why Blair has caved in on the UN issue again? After all, what a thankless task the UN would be gifted were the likes of Clare Short to be granted their wish. Far better that the US gets bogged down in the quagmire of its own making. ----- The US was wrong to go in - but now it must not leave The chances of liberal democracy in Iraq in less than a decade are small Hugo Young Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian The case for the war against Iraq rested on fluctuating rationales. Those of us who opposed it watched with cynical fascination as the words of the statesmen groped for new reasons to suit the predicament they were in. George Bush and Tony Blair had embarked on a policy they could not reverse. At a certain stage, unless Saddam Hussein fled the scene, they were determined to have a war, and finally homed in on two justifications. These had different levels of explicitness. Both now stand in peril of being void. But the failure of one matters a lot more than the other. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction is becoming an ever bigger deal. Neither 1,000 new US inspectors nor scores of interrogated Iraqi scientists are delivering the goods. It begins to be more possible to believe that most of the bad stuff was destroyed in the 1990s, and that Iraq was telling something like the truth when it claimed to have no weaponised chemical or biological material. What we're learning more about than caches of weapons of mass destruction are the ferocious wars between politicians and intelligence agencies in the US and UK. For Mr Blair and the military establishment it remains an article of faith that the WMD exist. Blair says that any other outcome would imply a conspiracy by several agencies - the French and German as well as MI6 and the CIA - to lie to their political masters. Yet there is plenty of competing evidence that agencies were leaned on or sidelined by politicians in pursuit of answers that had become politically imperative. The New Yorker has carried persuasive details of Donald Rumsfeld's creation of a private intelligence group to produce analyses both of the weapons of mass destruction issue and the al-Qaida connection that the CIA's professional scepticism restrained it from delivering. MI6 was seemingly complicit in a crude forgery of documents designed to show that Niger supplied Iraq with nuclear material. Downing Street was willing to stitch together an old academic paper and pretend it was a hot intelligence assessment. All this happened in support of the WMD thesis, when it was up-front as the leading reason for the war. It was, after all, the only way of conferring legality. A war to enforce UN resolutions came to be defined as the essential link to what was internationally lawful. So the assertion of the presence of WMD in Iraq, even when they had not been discovered, continued as the lynchpin of the public case Bush and Blair made. The failure of the weapons to turn up is, therefore, embarrassing. It should leave a permanent scar on the credibility of anything any government has to say about war and intelligence. It reminds us that when a war script has been written, the end is taken to justify any political means. But does it now do more than provide sniping material for the critics? Does it matter at the present conjunction of Iraqi events? Not as much as a failure of the second rationale, the ambition for political reform in Baghdad. At the time, this was seldom made explicit. It filtered through Blair's passionate moralism about creating a decent society, but neither coalition partner talked easily about regime change. Pre-emptive war was a new enough concept, alarming in its implications. Naked intervention to impose a new politics on a sovereign state would have been an outrage too great to admit to. So, at any rate, it seemed to Washington and London. As it certainly did to their critics. But again, circumstances have to alter judgment. Iraq is where it is. The war was won. Saddam has gone. The high ground, if semi-covert, case of the neo-conservative faction that drove Bush towards this war always was for a regime change that opened the way for Iraq to become some kind of magnetic pole of democracy in the Middle East. I think that those of us who recoiled from the war on any grounds, and certainly on that one, now need to give its exponents the time to see what can be done. Those who once said the US must never go near Iraq should now urge the US to stay there, with every serious commitment it can muster. Making the place safe for political freedom is a fantastically ambitious task. We keep being told that George Bush is not a simple man, but he talks about democracy as if it were a commodity ripe for handing over to the ready-made Mesopotamian heirs of Thomas Jefferson. The odds defined by culture and history make the liberal democracy of Iraq an improbable bet in anything less than a decade, if then. I spent the weekend thinking about this in a different context, at a conference of a fledgling seminar called Ameurus. This is a group brought together by that most fertile animator of such projects, George Weidenfeld, to seek out the common ground between America, Europe and Russia. To hear the Russian speakers, keen democrats all, talk gloomily about human rights and elections and the rule of law was to be reminded how very difficult it is for democracy to penetrate the life and experience of people who are not used to it. Even a society educated in western traditions, knowledgeable in democratic theory, and unencumbered by religious allegiances that challenge it, has a long way to go before becoming a democracy in heart and mind. In Iraq we've soon seen how unprepared the US was for the ambition it had. It didn't bring policemen, let alone nation-builders. It has not brought elementary order to the streets, and its first cohort of proconsuls has already been deemed incompetent and sent home. Its clumsiness reveals a Pentagon apparatus better equipped to win a war than contribute to the peace. And don't forget: the builders of the democratic dream were, and are, in the Pentagon. The message from the early calamities is to reinforce the need for an international approach. Perhaps Mr Blair can play a more effective role than he did before the war, and persuade Washington that what many nations will do for both the reconstruction and the political reform of Iraq is far more important than the effacing of the UN, on which those same Pentagon thinkers seem bent. Their political project has not the slightest hope of working as a unilateral act of imposition. But they need to be committed. If they're serious about democracy, they'll have to pay for it: 75,000 troops and $20bn a year for several years to stabilise the peace, according to an estimate by the Council on Foreign Relations. They need to learn the subtlety required to preside over the emergence of genuine consultative mechanisms that might lead towards free politics in some sort of federal system. Above all they have to engage the world as leader not hegemon. These would be hard concessions for the US. They would change the mindset of the Bush administration. But if their priority is as they state, we should now help to hold them to it. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:31:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:31:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <006801c31921$aba2e360$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Information on Hoon's political background would be useful. From where did this grey eminence rise without a trace? ------ Minister gagged media to guard dirty secret Hoon agreed to injunctions to protect army undercover unit David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, repeatedly gave his personal authority to an extraordinary series of gagging attempts on the army's undercover Force Research Unit and its IRA "mole" Freddy Scappaticci. The propriety of his behaviour is in question after the revelations that the star informer was an IRA torturer whose handlers are alleged to have connived at the murder of innocent Catholics to protect him. Mr Hoon was trying to stop the disclosure of grave allegations of illegal behaviour by soldiers, now under police investigation by Sir John Stevens, the Met commissioner. MoD officials and soldiers also stand accused of repeatedly blocking Sir John's inquiries, telling him lies, and even burning down his offices in Northern Ireland. Mr Hoon's attempt to suppress everything about the FRU began 3 years ago, and continued until yesterday when the former FRU sergeant Martin Ingram gave evidence to the Bloody Sunday inquiry. Mr Hoon tried to prevent Mr Ingram giving evidence. When the inquiry refused to accept this, Mr Hoon tried to have him heard in secret. Lord Saville, the chairman, again refused. The first of Mr Hoon's injunctions was granted in November 1999 against the Sunday Times, after it published Mr Ingram's disclosures that Stevens' office might have been burnt down by his colleagues. Using the archaic civil law of confidence, intended to protect trade secrets, MoD lawyers banned publication of any further information from Mr Ingram. The paper was initially barred even from revealing it had been gagged. It was refused access to documents sworn by intelligence officials, claiming national security had been damaged. That Christmas Mr Ingram was arrested, questioned for 24 hours, and shown transcripts of phone calls to journalist Liam Clarke. His house was broken into, and a draft manuscript of a book was taken and passed to the MoD. Both were told they were being pursued under the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which prevents publication of intelligence information. Special branch officers said they were acting on a complaint from Mr Hoon and the MoD. It was made clear that the identity of Scappaticci, then codenamed Stakeknife, was the real secret being protected. A friend of Mr Hoon's said: "The conduct of the Sunday Times in this matter has been disgraceful and dangerous. People can work backwards and find individuals. You publish details from the past, and people can find out who's who." Some months later, however, the crown prosecution service dropped the official secrets case for lack of evidence. The terms of the injunction had to be specially relaxed to allow Mr Ingram to give evidence to the Stevens police inquiry. So confident was the MoD that it could suppress information on the FRU that for years it refused to cooperate with Sir John. It was only when Mr Ingram gave him documents containing hard evidence that the investigation could pursue the MoD. Meanwhile, in August 2000, the People newspaper was put under an injunction when it published the allegation that the FRU had arranged for the loyalist execution of an elderly Catholic, Francis Notarantonio, to deflect attention from the agent now named as Scappaticci. Again, the paper was initially forbidden even to disclose the injunction, and found it impossible to persuade the high court to lift it. Another injunction was served on a Scottish paper, the Sunday Herald. The following February, yet more injunctions were served in what proved to be a vain attempt to prevent the identification of Sergeant Margaret Walshaw, a former FRU agent-handler central to the Stevens inquiry, along with her boss, Gordon Kerr, who had figured anonymously in a courtroom as "Colonel J". Their two names, in a precursor of the eventual collapse of the MoD's legal strategy, were posted on a US website, Cryptome, and remain there. That April, another Hoon injunction halted an Ulster TV programme investigating the FRU, after it refused to show it to the MoD for censorship. In June last year, the MoD sent another legal threat to the People, after more allegations of Stakeknife's involvement in state-sponsored murder. And last November, one of a group of former soldiers employed by the FRU as agents, Samuel Rosenfeld, was the subject of yet another injunction at the behest of the MoD, after he tried to sue the department. The unprecedented injunction, circulated to all national media and binding on them, banned Mr Rosenfeld "from issuing proceedings which identify... any person alleged to be or have been engaged in intelligence gathering activities by or on behalf of the MoD, in particular any alleged agent or agent handler". Yet another person was being prevented from disclosing what he knew about Stakeknife. MoD spokesmen have taken a consistent line throughout: "No responsible organisation would be willing to put someone's life at risk." The MoD now stands accused of being only too willing to put others' lives at risk, to protect the operations of its agents. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:32:18 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:32:18 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Saudi Arabia: regime doomed? Message-ID: <007601c31921$c883c580$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The war that Bin Laden is winning The US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia will not save the regime Saad al-Fagih Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian If the decision to pull US forces out of Saudi Arabia had been announced before the war on Iraq, it would have been seen, correctly, as a major victory for Osama bin Laden and his supporters. Al-Qaida began its campaign with the demand for a withdrawal of American troops from the country. Timing the announcement for the aftermath of the war has been clearly calculated to minimise that perception. The Americans discovered soon after the 1991 Gulf war that the presence of their forces in Saudi Arabia was doing them more harm than good. Alternative locations would have been sufficient for their purposes. But they did not want to leave because their departure would have been seen as a political breakthrough for Bin Laden. The invasion of Iraq provided an ideal solution. It broke the link between the presence of US forces and the threat from Saddam Hussein. At another level, it eased the American crisis of confidence after the events of September 11, which made the US avoid any decision that might make it seem weak. The removal of Saddam in such a dramatic manner has almost treated this obsession. The decision to leave Saudi Arabia can now appear to have been taken from a position of strength. Al-Qaida sympathisers see it differently. But the majority would concede that invading and occupying Iraq has made the presence of a few thousand troops in the kingdom a less significant issue. It is also clear that this will not be a real departure. Although troops in uniform will leave, the overall establishment - including bases and non-uniformed personnel - is to stay. More important still is the green light that has been given for the troops to return without fresh Saudi approval. Nor is the decision to withdraw likely to reduce Muslim hostility towards America. Many Muslims regard US actions since the September events as far more oppressive to them than the presence of their forces in Arabia. The invasion and occupation of Iraq will never be seen as a liberation. The sight of US tanks in Baghdad has been regarded as the most humiliating event for Arabs and Muslims since 1967. Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic Caliphate for 600 years, occupies a central place in the Muslim memory and means more even than Riyadh or Cairo. After 1998, Bin Laden had in any case gone beyond the aim of expelling American forces from the kingdom to full-scale confrontation with the US. Bin Laden and his supporters can now be expected to see his war as more justified than ever because of the occupation of Iraq. The US invasion of Iraq has been a gift to Bin Laden. He had argued that Muslim countries are the main target - and Iraq was attacked, not North Korea. Bin Laden argued that the US was bent on occupation, not simply intimidation - and that has proved to be the case. He argued that most Arab leaders, and especially the Saudis, would side with the US against their fellow Arabs - as it has turned out. He argued that Ba'athism and Arab nationalism do not work and that only Islam and jihad can deliver for the Muslims and Arabs. The collapse of the Saddam regime has strengthened that argument. The course of the conflict also bore out Bin Laden's view that only "asymmetrical warfare" can be effective against such highly advanced military power. US ruthlessness in killing civilians, destroying infrastructure and the encouragement it gave to the destruction of valuable heritage and public records has also bolstered the al-Qaida message. The same goes for US public support for the invasion of Iraq, because Bin Laden has said his problem is with all Americans, not only the government. What effect will this step have on the stability of the Saudi regime? As is well known, the regime depends on religious legitimacy. It has always breached Islamic teachings, but got away with it by exploiting a loyal religious establishment. The regime thought it could do the same over the presence of American troops. But the result was that the religious establishment itself lost its credibility. That was because Islamic teaching is unequivocal on this issue: non-Muslim troops are forbidden to settle in Arabia. Helping non-Muslims to attack Muslims also makes whoever does so a non-Muslim or "infidel" themselves. The Wahhabi school of Islam, dominant in Saudi Arabia, is particularly unyielding about these two points. So, given the fact that US forces have been in the country for over 12 years, their departure is not real and that Saudi bases have been used to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, it is now impossible for the regime to recover legitimacy. Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister, stupidly destroyed any slim chance of benefit from the US withdrawal by attributing the decision to the US itself. ? Saad al-Fagih is a leading exiled Saudi dissident and director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:35:46 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:35:46 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iran: the chatter of imperialism Message-ID: <007e01c31922$44967780$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> BG pips rivals to risky Iranian gas deal Terry Macalister Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian BG Group will today announce it has beaten European oil firms in the race for groundbreaking - but highly sensitive - gas deals in Iran. Involvement in the $1.75bn (?1.1bn) liquefied natural gas (LNG) scheme has alarmed analysts. It is politically risky because America has extended its influence in the region through Iraq and considers Iran part of its "axis of evil". The British exploration and development company, which will report a strong increase in first quarter profits, is expecting to take a 25% stake in the LNG plant at Bandar Tombak alongside the National Iranian Oil Company. The venture - just given the go-ahead by Tehran - is the first of four gas plants that the Iranians want to construct and operate. The others are under discussion with BP, Shell and Total of France. BG admitted last night that the project would carry risk. "We have made all the necessary assessments on political risk and have kept the UK government informed at all times," said a spokeswoman. She said the company had only signed a "framework agreement" and there was some way to go before the deal was finalised. The US authorities remain hostile to Tehran and US oil companies such as Exxon Mobil are banned from any involvement there. Energy analysts expressed concern at BG's plans, saying LNG was a capital-intensive business with low returns. "I hope it won't get involved through taking a large investment," said Tony Alves, analyst with Investec Securities. But BG said the Iranian plant would allow it to produce LNG for shipping to India, where it is planning an import terminal. BG is expected to report first quarter net income of up to ?170m, compared with ?133m last time, due to the surge in crude and US gas prices. ----- Fall of Saddam prompts Iran to consort with arch-enemy Dan De Luce in Tehran Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian Jolted by the swift collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the hardline clerics who rule Iran have been cracking down on dissent at home and talking discreetly to US diplomats abroad in an effort to stave off American pressure. With US troops and military bases now virtually surrounding Iran, the conservative leaders have broken an old taboo by talking to their arch-enemy in an attempt to buy some breathing room and pre-empt possible US military action. Although the two countries have not had diplomatic relations since the US-backed Shah was overthrown in 1979, officials on both sides have acknowledged a series of contacts between Washington and Tehran in recent months. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said over the weekend that a resumption of diplomatic relations was not on the table, but added that the governments were speaking "in light of the changed strategic situation". The new "situation" has put Iran in a vice. In the past 18 months, the US military machine has toppled two regimes on Iran's borders, Afghanistan and Iraq, with relative ease. As Washington turns its attention to Iran's nuclear programme, the conservative establishment in Tehran is clearly rattled. After the fall of Baghdad last month, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sounded frustrated that Iraqi troops had failed to put up more resistance against US forces, calling their surrender "an eternal disgrace". One former member of the establishment, who has become its most prominent critic, dared to say in public what many reformists were saying privately. Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri said the clerical leadership could face the same fate as Saddam if it continued its autocratic ways. "On this solemn and dangerous occasion, I warn leaders and officials of the Islamic republic to learn from the sad experience of the Iraqi dictator and hear the cry of the Iranian people for justice and democracy," he said. The hardliners, who have blocked attempts at reform by President Mohammad Khatami and his allies in parliament, have drawn a different lesson from the Iraq conflict. Citing the US threat, they are moving against their political opponents and restricting public debate. Proposals from President Khatami to end the obstruction of parliament and halt political trials have been stalled and then vetoed. In recent weeks the judiciary and security services have targeted independent journalists who turned to the internet after their newspapers were shut down, subjecting them to detention without trial and interrogation. The hardliners have handpicked ultra-conservatives to serve in key positions in the judiciary and in Tehran's city government. Last week, officials announced plans to restrict access to "unethical" websites. There are now fears that the authorities will move against the country's award-winning film industry following the detention of several film critics and screen writers. Earlier this month, Ayatollah Khamenei's representative in the militant Revolutionary Guard put MPs on notice that their comments would be "monitored" to safeguard national security, a clear message aimed at intimidating reformists, who form a majority in parliament. In the past, reformist MPs have threatened to resign if the hardliners in the Guardian Council and the judiciary continue to veto legislation and punish dissidents. But they now run the risk of being accused of imperilling national security and playing into the hands of the "enemy" next door in Iraq. While piling pressure on their domestic critics, the most conservative elements in the leadership have been calling on Shias in Iraq to resist the US-led occupation. Ahmad Jannati, a leading cleric, told worshippers at Friday prayers this month: "Iraqis will eventually reach the conclusion that the only way to oust Americans is an intifada. The Iraqi people should remain united and follow their religious leaders to oust the enemy and lead their own country." In the battle for the sympathies of Iraqis, Iran's most effective move has been the launch of an Arabic news channel, which is beamed over the border. Al-Alam, or the World, has won a large Iraqi audience with its portrayal of US and British troops as occupiers who are not to be trusted. By promoting militant Shia politics in Iraq, the hardliners hope to make life difficult for the Americans and force them to withdraw. But the extent of Iran's influence in Iraq remains unclear. Tehran has pinned its hopes on a group of Shia exiles it has sponsored for the past 20 years, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but not all Shia clergy in Iraq favour an Iranian-style theocracy. In the Iranian holy city of Qom, many Iraqi students say they are preparing to leave the seminaries and return home. They say they want to revive the Iraqi holy city of Najaf as a theological centre, undermining Iran's status as the centre for Shia theology. If Iraq moves eventually towards a pluralistic system, hardliners fear it could become a platform for the Iranian opposition and critical media banned inside Iran. However, the most serious threat in a post-Saddam world may come from Iraq's dormant oil fields, which are already attracting the interest of foreign oil companies. Iran relies on its oil income to keep the economy afloat and to subsidise prices. The revival of Iraq's oil industry could eventually drive down oil prices, possibly triggering a social crisis in a country where unemployment is already a concern. ----- 4.30pm update Talks thaw US-Iran relations Guardian Online Staff and agencies Monday May 12, 2003 The United States and Iran have recently held several meetings in the Swiss capital of Geneva in an effort to ease the friction between the two countries, a senior US official said today. The meetings reportedly focused on a wide range of issues, including postwar Iraq. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Geneva meetings between representatives from the US and Iran were technically under the auspices of the United Nations. The issue of Iraq's political reconstruction is a sensitive issue for the US and Iran, with the Bush administration attempting to deter Iran from trying to influence the formation of a new government in Baghdad. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told journalists during a news conference in Cairo that the creation of a fundamentalist regime in Iraq would not be in the interests of the Iraqi people. His statement echoed the stance taken several weeks ago by the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who said the establishment of an Iranian-style fundamentalist government would be unacceptable to the US. The American daily newspaper, USA Today, today reported that the government of Iran was weighing the possibility of reopening diplomatic relations with the US for the first time in nearly 25 years. But the official Iranian news agency today quoted foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi as saying that the discussions were concerning the work in Afghanistan and were conducted through the auspices of the Swiss embassy in Tehran. "During these negotiations, the issue of bilateral relations was not on the agenda and no negotiations were held in that regard," he was quoted as saying by the IRNA news agency in Tehran. This weekend Mr Powell said the US had been in communication with Iran through various channels for some time. However, he said that the US government was not currently trying to restore diplomatic relations with Tehran, which were broken off in 1979 when militants overran the US embassy and took dozens of Americans hostage. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:38:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:38:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK arms industry: BAE desperate Message-ID: <008601c31922$a7e21560$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Hewitt goes on rescue mission for Hawk David Gow Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian Patricia Hewitt, the industry secretary, yesterday urged defence secretary Geoff Hoon to choose BAE Systems' Hawk jets for a new ?10bn fighter training contract and save 2,000 jobs in east Yorkshire. BAE has warned that if the Ministry of Defence proceeds with an open competition for the contract the delay will force it to close its Hawk production plant in Brough. In a letter to her cabinet colleague yesterday, Ms Hewitt is understood to have backed BAE's case for a swift decision in its favour on the grounds that it would buttress Britain's manufacturing base. "She feels a decision in favour of Hawk will underline the government's commitment to UK manufacturing and demonstrate we are prepared to deliver on our new defence industrial policy," a Whitehall source said. The policy, announced last September, puts Britain's manufacturing capability and jobs among crucial criteria when the MoD makes multi-billion pound procurement decisions. Ms Hewitt said the Hawk, which has Rolls-Royce engines and Smiths Group avionics, fitted such criteria exactly and had significant export potential. Ms Hewitt's unusual d?marche comes days after union leaders at Brough lobbied ministers, MPs and officials over BAE's bid for the military flying training systems contract, which was formally submitted on March 31. Britain's biggest defence contractor, which announced 450 redundancies at Brough in November, issued 470 protective dismissal notices on May 1 in case the British order is lost. BAE, which came in for fierce criticism in the 1990s for selling Hawk trainer jets to Indonesia when civil war was under way, has been struggling for years to win a ?1.2bn order for 66 Hawks from India. Despite extensive ministerial backing, including that from the prime minister, the order has yet to materialise. With no other export contracts in sight, "we would have no choice but to close Brough if the British contract is delayed by open competition for a couple of years", according to a BAE official. BAE until recently had a stormy relationship with the MoD over its demands for special treatment in competition for lucrative military contracts, as well as cost overruns and delays in those it had won. The MoD is known to have held talks with several contractors about setting up a public private partnership for the deal. But MoD sources indicated that Mr Hoon could opt to award the jet trainer contract to BAE without proceeding to an open competition. They insisted, however, that BAE would have to prove that the upgraded Hawk 128 was sophisticated enough to provide the right training for pilots on new generation aircraft such as the Eurofighter and joint strike fighter or F35 over 25 years. A decision is due by the end of June but Ms Hewitt urged Mr Hoon to make up his mind earlier. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:40:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:40:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: the neoliberal Brown Message-ID: <008e01c31922$f442b220$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> If it were still required, this should dispel any lingering notion that Gordon Brown is somehow to the "left" of Tony Blair. ----- Brown seeks allies among Europe's newcomers Larry Elliott, economics editor Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian Gordon Brown will today seek to enlist the support of the 10 new members of the European Union for a programme of radical economic reform in an attempt to seize the moral high ground in the debate over Europe's future. Attempting to dispel the view that Treasury doubts about immediate euro entry reflect hostility to Europe, the chancellor plans to give strong backing at a meeting of EU economic and finance ministers to a report from the European commission urging the removal of barriers to the single market in services. Today's meeting of economic and finance ministers (Ecofin) is the first to be attended by accession countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, ahead of their formal entry into the EU. Treasury sources said the new members were expected to back Britain's pro-reform agenda at the meeting, which will discuss the sort of economic strategy that should be followed by EU countries over the next year. Mr Brown will back the Brussels study, which highlights the many barriers that prevent service-sector companies from competing outside their home market, and will call for competition policy to be toughened up and for trade barriers between Europe and the US to be dismantled. The Ecofin meeting will almost certainly be the last before the government gives its decision on a euro referendum, which has to take place before the start of June. Mr Brown is expected to announce that the five economic tests for entry have not been met, but he is eager to show Britain's EU partners that the government has a positive agenda for reform. Sterling yesterday remained under pressure against the euro on the foreign exchanges, ending the day down slightly at a new record low of just under 72p. The pound was up marginally against the dollar at just over $1.61. The Treasury made it clear last night that it remained unmoved by the recent flurry of activity designed to put pressure on the government to set a clear timetable for euro entry even if a referendum is ruled out for the time being. Twenty-five business leaders and heads of multinationals, including Sir Chris Gent, chief executive of Vodafone, Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP, and Lord Simon of Highbury, the former Treasury minister, signed an open letter to the prime minister yesterday saying that inward investment could be damaged if the government ruled out joining the single currency before the next election. However, David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said the letter reflected the views of multinational companies rather than small businesses and called on the chancellor to rule out a reassessment of the tests for a fixed period - possibly three years - if they were not met by the June 7 deadline. "Our concern is that Gordon Brown is going to get up and say that the five economic tests have not been met but the government will then leave the matter open," he told the BBC. "If he does say that, he should say we are not coming back to the issue for a period of, say, three years." Failure to set a fixed timescale would lead to "an endless and potentially destabilising debate". From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:43:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:43:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Britain/US split: Palestine Message-ID: <009601c31923$60d30de0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> An interesting intervention by Mandelson friend and New Labour insider David Aaronovitch. ----- Why friends of Israel should see Gaza David Aaronovitch Tuesday May 13, 2003 The Guardian The checkpoint at the north end of Gaza - where you can (if you're lucky) spend a couple of hot hours waiting to be let through - was manned last Tuesday by a collection of very young Israeli men and women. The boys resembled people I had shared classrooms with in north London, the girls beautiful sixth-formers from my daughter's school. Eventually - along with the woman from Unicef, two Swedes and an ostentatiously world-weary film crew - the three of us (myself, a producer and a Channel 4 cameraman, making a documentary) were waved politely through and made our way across the walled no man's land and into the strip. There is no real distance between Gaza City and the checkpoint: the journey takes only a few minutes. Yet you would hardly situate the dusty, chaotic, governmentless jumble of concrete and rubbish on the same continent as the fields and woods through which you drive from Jerusalem to the border. I saw the camps in Lebanon in the old days, and Gaza is worse. It is becoming like Beirut used to be, except they don't kidnap foreigners in Gaza. Instead the Gazans surround them, smile at them, yell at them, accuse them of being Israelis, shake their hands and, above all, demand to be heard. Men with guns but without uniforms walk the streets. We went to a school. Unbelievably, most of the kids in Gaza still dress up in neat school uniforms, and in our school - recently built with money from the Gulf - the boys wore shorts and a kind of sailor shirt in navy and white. The headmaster showed me round. We saw his office, the classrooms where they were teaching dental hygiene and geography, and the makeshift museum in which the head displays the remains of his safe and the computer destroyed in an Israeli raid two weeks earlier. In the English class, we found a boy who had been educated in Chesterfield and somehow been plonked down here in hell, and we asked him what he and the other 12-year-olds felt about "the situation". For himself, he said, he was always frightened. Every noise became a tank, or a helicopter, and might mean death or injury for him, his family or his friends. His class-mates, however, were too well-schooled to admit to fear. Death was welcome, said one exceptionally handsome, tall boy. His teachers nodded approvingly. Several of the boys in the class had witnessed the Israeli incursion six days earlier, in which 12 people were killed. The target had been a Hamas militant, but he and his brothers had refused to surrender, and they and several of their neighbours (including a two-year old boy) had died in the subsequent fire-fight. One of the dead brothers had been a respected teacher at the school, and his portrait decorated the notice boards. Almost all the children had some experience of violence or coercion. They had been stopped at checkpoints, watched helicopters fire rockets, seen the wreckage of cars in the aftermath of attacks, looked on at the resulting funeral processions, lost relatives. They might have been the nephew of the farmer maimed on his donkey cart last week, after he got too close to the limousine that was carrying the Hamas man. Or they were the grandson of the unfortunate bystander who stopped a tank round. Possibly their cousins owned the house blown up by the IDF this week because it stood alongside one that housed an Islamic jihad activist. Some of this Israeli action is aimed theoretically at stopping terrorist attacks (like the recent bombing in Tel Aviv); some at protecting the 3,000-odd settlers whose pointless and (for Israel) hugely expensive scattered colonies in Gaza cause so much trouble. The result is that, while Israel claims to be hitting at the "terrorist infrastructure", the consequence last week was a two-mile funeral procession through Gaza City, in which mourners chanted "no to Abu Mazen", the new pro-roadmap Palestinian prime minister. In Gaza, as in the other Palestinian territories, the space for moderation gets smaller with every minor humiliation and every death. You don't have to be a peace activist to understand that this is a kind of madness. If ordinary Israelis and their friends in other countries were to spend even a few hours in Gaza, or talking to people on the West Bank, then it is difficult to imagine them supporting the policies of the present Israeli government. They might instead see that the seeds of the present intifada were sown in the way the last intifada was handled. At random, I met several Palestinian men who had, as youngsters, been imprisoned and tortured in the 80s. It is hard to talk to them about peace. And tomorrow's harvest will (if nothing stops it) become the killing of one group of the flawless young people I encountered last week by the other. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 01:48:19 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:48:19 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Russia: its own quagmire continues Message-ID: <009e01c31924$0519cd80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Huge lorry bomb kills dozens in Chechnya By Stephen Castle The Independent 13 May 2003 At least 40 people died yesterday when a truck crammed with explosives detonated in a government complex in Chechnya, causing devastation and undermining Russian claims that the region was returning to normal. The suicide bomb in Znamenskoye, in the relatively peaceful north of the territory, wounded about 100 more people. It went off seven weeks after a constitutional referendum designed to anchor the Muslim region firmly to Russia. Soldiers guarding the building, which housed the local security services, opened fire on the truck but failed to prevent it smashing through barriers before exploding in a ball of flame yards short of the main building. Rescue workers and helpers struggled to free victims trapped under fallen masonry and woodwork, and at least two people were said to have been pulled alive from the rubble. According to local TV reports, most of the casualties were police guarding the complex and villagers living near by. Two bombers thought to have been driving the truck are believed to have been killed. The explosion left a crater five metres deep and 10 metres wide and officials said it shattered windows 500 metres away. It also knocked out the town's electricity and water. A senior regional official blamed fighters loyal to the fugitive rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, although his spokesman issued a denial. Diplomats said that, so confused and anarchic was Chechnya, it would be difficult to work out whether the attack was authorised or a freelance operation by local clansmen. In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin vowed not to let such attacks derail the Kremlin's peace plan for the region. "We can not allow anything like this to happen, nor will we," he told government ministers. Nevertheless, yesterday's carnage is another reminder that the security situation in Chechnya remains out of control despite the Kremlin's insistence things are improving. The authorities argue that basic services, such as education and health care, are returning to normal with schools and hospitals reopening. But in recent days there has been evidence of a resurgence of terrorist activity and Moscow believes Chechen rebels are trying to give a sign to their backers that they remain active. On 9 May, a public holiday during which Russia celebrates victory over Germany in the Second World War, a car bomb was discovered in Grozny before it could be detonated. After a decade of conflict in the region Mr Putin's tough stance against the rebels won him widespread popularity in Russia, sweeping him to an easy victory in the presidential elections in 2000. But, despite deploying overwhelming firepower in Chechnya, the Russian President has failed to prevent a string of terrorist outrages from separatists. Last October, rebels seized 700 hostages in a Moscow theatre and 129 people, including all the Chechen fighters died, after Russian forces stormed the building. In Chechnya itself, the rebels have launched attacks against the Russian military and Moscow's allies within the local government. Last December, a bomb attack on regional administration headquarters in Grozny killed about 80 people. On that occasion, the attack revealed the fragile state of security because the truck passed through numerous checkpoints before detonated. According to Russian media, an estimated 250 people have gone missing in Chechnya since January. Nevertheless, Mr Putin is expected to press ahead with his peace plan for Chechnya, which will be built on the constitution approved in the recent referendum, dividing executive and legislative powers between Moscow and Grozny. From annewilliamson at msn.com Tue May 13 04:05:17 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 06:05:17 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: Baghdad Flooded With Heroin References: <000001c318b1$53b5d790$0c69f8d1@WindsongP4> <3EC024C7.1030001@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <008901c31937$284f7ee0$c9b7fea9@anne> http://www.balochistanpost.com/item.asp?ID=3968 Where the CIA is in control, narcotics flourish After Afghanistan, Baghdad is flooded with heroin AGHDAD: The city, which had never seen heroin, a deadly addictive drug, until March 2003, is now flooded with narcotics including heroin. According to a report published by London??Ts The Independent newspaper, the citizens of Baghdad complained that the drugs like heroin and cocaine were being peddled on the streets of the Iraqi metropolis. It is not unusual that where the Americans go, the narcotics flourish. Taliban had successfully eliminated the drugs from Afghanistan but since the US forces took over the control, Afghanistan has become the largest producer of heroin. Some reports suggest that the drug and arms trafficking is patronized by the CIA to finance its covert operations worldwide. The killing of two US soldiers in Baghdad within 24 hours last week shows how far the US and Britain still have to go to end the chaos gripping the Iraqi capital a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Anger is growing among Iraqis at the Allies' failure to restore order in a city awash with weapons and gangs. Heroin ??" banned under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship upon pain of hanging - is now being traded in back streets, reports The Independent. Residents of Baghdad ??" a conservative city with a large Shia Muslim population ??" are complaining that the breakdown in order has accompanied the emergence of some western practices they view as offensive, and which were prohibited, or tightly restricted, under Saddam. In al-Bataween ??" the worst of Baghdad's badlands which is blighted by carjackings and crime ??" residents say heroin is being traded in the alleys. "In Iraq there were no drugs until March 2003," said Salah Sha'amikh, a pharmacist. "You would be hanged for trafficking. But now you can get heroin, cocaine, anything." He pulled out a Russian-made 8.5mm pistol which he says he keeps to protect his wares. "We are an Islamic society and we don't like drugs. You tell Tony Blair to stop these criminals." Gambling, also banned by Saddam, has begun to spring up too, to the concern of conservative Iraqis. Sunday, May 11, 2003 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:20:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:20:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK economy: social inclusion, the reality Message-ID: <00e001c31939$55aae800$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Poverty levels have grown under Labour By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor The Independent 12 May 2003 The gap between rich and poor in Britain is at its largest in 13 years and poverty levels under Tony Blair exceed those under Margaret Thatcher, government statistics reveal. Figures from the Office for National Statistics for income inequality show that differences in disposable, post-tax income at the top and bottom of society have returned to levels last seen in 1990. The Tories and Liberal Democrats seized on the figures in a report from the department, claiming they exposed the emptiness of the Government's rhetoric on tackling so-called high-earning "fat cats". The report shows that the "Gini coefficient", an international measure of inequality, has increased from an average of 29 points under Baroness Thatcher to 35 points under Mr Blair. The figure for 2001-02 was 36 points. The gap between rich and poor, which was relatively static in the early Tory years, soared in the late 1980s and then declined slightly through the early 1990s. It began an upward trend in 1995 and continued to rise under Labour, which came to power in 1997. The latest figures show that inequality under Labour is, on average, a sixth higher than the equivalent average under the 11-year Thatcher government and 10 per cent higher than the Conservatives' 18-year rule as a whole. The Office for National Statistics said that fast-rising wages, in contrast with slow-rising state benefits, were one of the reasons behind the widening gap. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, announced in the Budget on 9 April that he was commissioning a review of policies aimed at cutting child poverty amid indications that important targets were in danger of being missed. Labour has set a target of cutting the number of children in poor households, defined as 60 per cent of median income, by a quarter by 2004-05. The party wants to eradicate the problem by 2020. Despite promising to take one million children out of poverty in its first term, the Government managed to reduce the number by 500,000. The National Council for One Parent Families has also warned that the targets will continue to be missed unless the national minimum wage is substantially increased and the child tax credit increased by ?13 a week. Critics claim that the Prime Minister has consistently shied away from expressing unease about the gap between rich and poor because he does not want to be seen as attacking high earners. David Willetts, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said that the figures from the Office for National Statistics exposed the deep problems the Government was having in tackling poverty overall. "This devastating evidence shows that Labour are not making progress in cutting poverty. It cannot help that Gordon Brown's complicated tax credits are putting people off claiming benefits due to them," he said. Maurice Fitzpatrick, head of economics at Numerica, a business services group, said it was clear that under the Labour Government, inequality of disposable income had increased. "It has gone up both in absolute terms and in terms of average inequality as compared to the situation under the Conservatives," he said. "Many people might find this surprising, given Labour's commitment to redistributing income via the tax and benefits system. These figures may not make welcome reading for Gordon Brown." Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on work and pensions, said that the figures proved the need for a "super-tax" on higher earners. A tax rate of 50 per cent on those with incomes over ?100,000 could raise billions to combat poverty, he said. "This just shows how empty the Government's rhetoric is. Of course, under Margaret Thatcher's first nine years, there was a top tax rate of 60 per cent," he said. "Tackling poverty takes serious money and serious money is needed." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:21:59 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:21:59 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Destructive creation: not so fast? Message-ID: <00e801c31939$7cd267a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Greenhouse gas soaked up by forests expanding into deserts By John von Radowitz The Independent 12 May 2003 Rising carbon dioxide levels may be helping forests to start reclaiming the world's deserts, scientists believe. The trend could explain why a forest planted on the edge of the Negev desert in Israel 35 years ago is expanding much faster than expected. It could also help account for the estimated seven billion tons of carbon dioxide that goes missing from the atmosphere each year. Scientists believe vegetation creeping back into arid lands could be soaking up the greenhouse gas. Professor Dan Yakir, from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, led a team of experts who made the discovery. Their findings were published in the journal Global Change Biology. They were surprised to find the Yatir forest on the edge of the desert was a substantial carbon dioxide "sink". It was absorbing carbon dioxide as efficiently as vegetation in more fertile areas and it was also expanding quickly into the desert. Seeing the forest, planted 35 years ago, flourish so well contradicted all expectations. "It wouldn't have even been planted there had scientists been consulted," said Professor Yakir. The observation could indicate an unexpected consequence of man-made greenhouse gas pouring into the atmosphere. While contributing to global warming and turning parts of the world hotter and drier, it could be helping to make arid regions more green. Plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and they absorb the gas through pores in their leaves. But the wider the pores open, the more water is lost through them. Professor Yakir believes that when large amounts of carbon dioxide are present, plants do not need to open their pores so much to obtain the carbon dioxide they need. This allows them to conserve water, so that more is left in the ground. Forests are therefore able to grow in areas that previously would have been too dry for them. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:27:16 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:27:16 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: no WMDs Message-ID: <00f701c3193a$39e348a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US weapons team ends its search with no discovery By Andrew Buncombe in Washington The Independent 12 May 2003 The team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is ending its operation without having found proof that Saddam Hussein had stocks of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. It investigated numerous sites identified by US intelligence as those likely to harbour weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but has now all but accepted that it is unlikely to find any weapons. Operations are being wound up and a scaled-down unit called the Iraq Survey Group will take over. The leader of the US Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, Colonel Richard McPhee, said his team of biologists, chemists, computer experts and documents specialists arrived in Iraq believing the intelligence community's warning that Saddam had given "release authority" to those in charge of a chemical arsenal. "We didn't have all those people in protective suits for nothing," he toldThe Washington Post . "[But if they planned to use those weapons] there had to have been something to use and we haven't found it. Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time." Saddam's alleged possession of such weapons was one of the central pretexts given by Washington and London for the war against Iraq. In a February presentation to the UN, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, identified sites he said were producing WMD. When George Bush made his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May, he said: "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Some progress has been made. It was reported on Thursday that a team of experts searching for WMD had concluded that a trailer found near the city of Mosul in northern Iraq last month was a mobile biological weapons laboratory. The team admitted, however that other experts disagreed. Some officials claim that up to three such laboratories have been discovered although no biological or chemical agents have been found at any of them. Yesterday, General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said WMD might still be in the hands of Iraqi special units. "Were they full-deployed and could they have been brought to bear on us, or are they still perhaps out there somewhere in some sort of bunker and could have been used?" he said at the US regional headquarters in Qatar. "We are trying to run that one to the ground." But those on the ground appear more sceptical. US central command started the war with a list of 19 priority suspected weapons sites. All but two have been searched without uncovering any evidence. A further 69 were identified as sites that might offer clues to the whereabouts of WMD. Of these, 45 have been searched without success. Some experts believe that one of the problems has been that WMD search teams were held back for too long, allowing Iraqi forces to dismantle or destroy equipment. Others believe that the assessment that such weapons existed was wrong. One Defence Intelligence Agency official said: "We came to bear country and we came loaded for bear and we found that the bear was not here. The question was 'where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons?' What is the question now? That is what we are trying to sort out." The search for WMD will continue under the auspices of the Iraq Survey Group, which will also hunt for information about Saddam's regime. The White House has claimed this is a bigger unit than the task force. But officials admit that the number of staff hunting for weapons will be scaled back. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:31:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:31:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: heroin flooding Baghdad Message-ID: <010101c3193a$d2ef46c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Further to Anne's post, here's the original article. In this connection, there does appear to be an occasional leak of this sort of information, although few sources in the mainstream media are picking up on it. Thus the Scotsman article last week concerning the outbreak of cholera in Basra has been greeted by almost uniform silence. It is two days since this article appeared, and yet, again, the silence is deafening. Careful monitoring is required. ------ Fury rises in Baghdad as drugs return to the alleys By Phil Reeves in Baghdad The Independent on Sunday 11 May 2003 The killing of two US soldiers in Baghdad within 24 hours last week shows how far the US and Britain still have to go to end the chaos gripping the Iraqi capital a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Anger is growing among Iraqis at the Allies' failure to restore order in a cityawash with weapons and gangs. Heroin - banned under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship upon pain of hanging - is now being traded in back streets. Residents of Baghdad - a conservative city with a large Shia Muslim population - are complaining that the breakdown in order has accompanied the emergence of some western practices they view as offensive, and which were prohibited, or tightly restricted, under Saddam. In al-Bataween - the worst of Baghdad's badlands which is blighted by carjackings and crime - residents say heroin is being traded in the alleys. "In Iraq there were no drugs until March 2003," said Salah Sha'amikh, a pharmacist. "You would be hanged for trafficking. But now you can get heroin, cocaine, anything." He pulled out a Russian-made 8.5mm pistol which he says he keeps to protect his wares. "We are an Islamic society and we don't like drugs. You tell Tony Blair to stop these criminals." Gambling, also banned by Saddam, has begun to spring up too, to the concern of conservative Iraqis. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:32:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:32:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: what WMDs search? Message-ID: <010f01c3193b$021c9ba0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> 'Secret train' the Americans don't seem to be asking questions about By Phil Reeves in Baghdad The Independent on Sunday 11 May 2003 Every day for the last fortnight Salam Salom, a top Iraqi railwayman, has sat down with the Americans. They discussed the bomb-damaged track, the wrecked communications network, and the looters who descended on the rolling stock like a plague of locusts. But one subject has not come up. There has never been any mention, he says, of chemical or biological weapons. "They have not discussed this with me," he said, after yet another round of talks with a US army officer in the imperious monolith erected by the British in 1953 to serve as Baghdad's main railway terminal. "Perhaps they talked to the director-general about it, but it has not been raised with me." If true, this is remarkable. The Americans are supposedly conducting an intensive search to find the illicit weapons programme whose alleged existence served as a pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Three months ago, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, declared that the US had a first-hand description of mobile biological weapons factories that ran on wheels and rails so that they could be moved around to evade detection by UN inspectors. Mr Salom is the traffic manager for the entire 2,000km rail network - high up the pecking order in the Baathist-dominated management structure of Iraqi national railways. He may very well be a stranger to Saddam Hussein's closest military secrets, but one might expect him at least to be asked about the issue by US officials. Yet, he insists, there has been nothing. He can remember first learning that Mr Powell had, on 5 February, told the UN Security Council that the Americans had evidence of biological weapons factories inside lorries and train cars. Mr Powell went into considerable detail, saying the US had an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of the mobile biological laboratories and was present during a 1998 production run that went wrong, killing 12 technicians. He told the Security Council how the Iraqis would begin a production run on Thursday at midnight, because they believed that the UN weapons inspection team (Unscom) would not carry out any operations on Friday, the Muslim holy day. "I heard it on the news," said Mr Salom, "I thought at the time, that's just not true. We have nothing like that, nothing". However, he did claim to have some knowledge of another secret Iraqi military project. Seven years ago, he said, plans were drawn up to create missile launchers on rails. The idea was rejected by Saddam, who concluded that the launchers would be easy to detect by military satellite and would provide a simple target for US and British warplanes. At this point, Mr Salom changed the subject. He refused to answer further questions on the alleged mobile biological weapons labs, declaring the subject to be "inappropriate". Suggestions that the Americans appear surprisingly unengaged in their mission to unearth weapons of mass destruction come as no surprise to many Iraqis, who have long maintained that the US occupation is about seizing their oil. This is certainly the view of ticket inspector Ali Muhsan al-Kinani, 42, a railwayman for 25 years. He backed up this argument by pointing out that the Americans have done nothing to weed out the upper echelons of the Iraqi railway company. He said that US officials are working in close co-operation with the same men who made the workforce's lives a misery by jailing them for minor administrative offences, or levying large fines if they were involved in an accident. The Americans have also yet to speak to him about mobile biological weapons labs. Had they done so they would have drawn a blank. But they would have heard from him about the existence of a top secret and mysterious "special train". Yesterday he and two of his colleagues described a train - about which they dared not speak during the Saddam years - that moved constantly around the railway system, and which they believe might have contained chemical weapons, although they admit to being unsure. According to Mr al-Kinani, the train first appeared around 1996. Its wagons were brown, unmarked and cylindrical. He said it usually had four or five wagons, although these were sometimes mixed with ordinary rolling stock to disguise it. Discussion of its movements, or even its existence, by rail staff was forbidden. It was usually attended by troops from the Special Republican Guard, he said. "It didn't run on the same tracks that ordinary trains run on," said Mr al-Kinani. "UN inspectors did come here, but they didn't see the train. It was moved to Hilla and then to Ad Diwaniya. They were always moving this train." He said he would see it about once a month. "We would see it in the mornings, often near Fallujah [30 miles west of Baghdad]." So did Ya'arab Raauf al-Hadad, 52, another ticket inspector: "The engines would be changed around, but the train was brown." Shehad Ahmed al-Alami, 30, a train driver, said he, too, had seen the train. "Drivers would just be told to come with their engines and hook up the carriages. On the special train we were not allowed to leave our cabins. We would just hook up and say nothing." This train may, of course, have been doing nothing more sinister than carrying loads of sanctions-busting oil. But it is strange - almost as strange as the Americans' apparent lack of interest in finding out more. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:34:25 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:34:25 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: promise and reality Message-ID: <011701c3193b$399a8a60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The allies' broken promises The Independent 10 May 2003 Oil Tony Blair: 'We don't touch it, and the US doesn't touch it' MTV, 7 March The reality: Yesterday's draft UN resolution gives total control of Iraq's oil revenues to the US and UK until an Iraqi government is established The UN George Bush: 'The UN will have a vital role to play' Belfast, 8 April The reality: The UN is reduced to an advisory function on the ground in Iraq. All operational decisions will be taken by UK and US officials Weapons Jack Straw: 'Should the UN have a vital role to play in respect of weapons inspections? The answer to that is yes.' Interview, 25 April The reality: No role for the UN inspectors 'for the foreseeable future' Aid Tony Blair: 'The UN should have a key role in administering the delivery of humanitarian aid' House of Commons, 18 March The reality: US and UK to oversee aid effort with UN reduced to co-ordinating role Government Tony Blair: 'Military action is to uphold the authority of the UN and to make sure Saddam is disarmed' MTV, 7 March The reality: A US and UK 'occupying power' will rule Iraq ----- Iraq Inc: A joint venture built on broken promises By David Usborne in New York, Rupert Cornwell in Washington and Phil Reeves in Baghdad The Independent 10 May 2003 America and Britain declared themselves yesterday to be the "occupying powers" in Iraq and produced a blueprint for the administration of the country that confined the United Nations to a co-ordinating role. Although George Bush declared in Belfast last month that the UN would have "a vital role" in Iraq, there was great disappointment yesterday after the organisation was denied an operational role. Britain acknowledged in a draft UN Security Council resolution that, with the United States, it intended to run Iraq for at least a year as a conquering power. Both countries urged the Council to agree to an instant lifting of economic sanctions against Iraq and accept that, as "occupying powers", they would have near-total control of the country's oil revenues for 12 months and maybe much longer. Despite earlier promises that the UN should have an important role administering the delivery of humanitarian aid to the country, this task now goes to America and Britain, with the UN reduced to a co-ordinator. John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the UN, said yesterday that there would be no role for the team of UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix "for the foreseeable future". Whatever the fate of the UN resolution, Washington has already started a secretive carve-up of the Iraq reconstruction pie in which all the slices thus far have gone to US companies - many of them with close connections to the Bush administration. The impression that Iraq is becoming a carpetbaggers' free-for-all was reinforced at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Centre in Atlanta this week when lawyers, consultants and business people streamed in, all hoping for a piece of the action. They heard a presentation by the US Agency for International Development (USAid), which is handing out contracts worth $1.5bn (?0.9bn) to rebuild the healthcare system. The USAid contracts total about $70m. If America fulfils its sweeping promise to rebuild Iraq's entire infrastructure, the total may reach several hundred billion dollars. The contracts will be paid for from Iraqi oil revenues, controlled by America and Britain and audited by an international firm of accountants. Yesterday's appeal to the United Nations was contained in a baldly worded draft resolution tabled by Mr Negroponte. It was co-sponsored by Britain and Spain. The text, which makes clear that London and Washington would essentially run Iraq for at least a year, was expected to attract resistance from France and Russia. Controversially, the resolution relegates the UN to an advisory capacity on a board that will monitor the spending of Iraq's oil revenue on reconstruction. A "special co-ordinator", who would be appointed by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, would also orchestrate UN humanitarian efforts. Observers believe America is calculating that the Security Council will be unwilling to allow a resurgence of the bitterness that characterised the weeks before the Allies' invasion of Iraq and will therefore, after wrangling, eventually acquiesce to the resolution. But those behind the resolution recognise it is controversial and are open to discussions on amendments. They expect a tough battle. Sir Brian Urquhart, a veteran British diplomat and former UN under-secretary general, said: "Surely it would be better for everyone to push this through rather than reopen all the quarrels and instead do something to help the poor people of Iraq. I can't believe that they won't do that." Yet France and Russia, the most vociferous opponents of the war may even vote for a redrafted resolution. President Jacques Chirac said his government would "undertake discussions on the future of [Iraq] in an open and constructive spirit". But a statement from the French Foreign Ministry said that a "strong involvement of the international community, through a central role of the UN, is indispensable to provide legitimacy" to any post-war Iraqi government. At the resolution's core are provisions to lift the economic sanctions that were put in place in 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. America argues that, without the resumption of full trade, the economic reconstruction of Iraq cannot hope to get off the ground. France and Russia have insisted, by contrast, that sanctions cannot be lifted until the elimination of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been verified by UN weapons inspectors, as stipulated under several existing UN resolutions. The Anglo-American draft omits all mention of UN weapons inspectors. Separately, the text envisions taking away UN control of Iraq's oil sales. This also runs directly counter to the view of several of the nations opposed to war, who have argued for keeping a UN hand on the Iraqi oil industry. Last night, the Russian envoy to the UN, Sergei Lavrov, said he had "lots of questions" on the text. Washington is asking that the UN oil-for-food programme, which currently takes in all oil revenues and distributes them for the purchase of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies, be wound up within four months. Control of oil revenues would pass to the "Iraqi Assistance Fund" to be held by the Central Bank of Iraq, managed by US and UK officials. An advisory board with the UN co-ordinator and envoys from other international financial institutions would oversee the disbursement of the revenues, and make recommendations. The immediate reaction to the plans in Baghdad was negative. "This is very, very bad. We are in the same situation as we were with Saddam," said Bassen al-Khoja, 31. "[They] stole the oil money from the people and we got nothing and now the Americans and British are doing exactly the same. We are not going to see any benefit from it." Similar disgust was expressed by Fareed Ismail al-Qaisi, 42, who is unemployed. "The United Nations should control the oil money, not the Americans," he said. This is the first time that Washington and London have formally acknowledged that they consider themselves "occupying powers" in Iraq. It is a status governed by the Geneva Conventions that also lays out strict responsibilities and obligations for those powers under international law. In Brussels, Poul Nielson, the European Union commissioner for development, voiced dismay at the text. He said Washington was "on its way to becoming a member of Opec", adding: "They appropriate the oil. The unwillingness to give the UN a legal, well-defined role also speaks a language that is quite clear." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:35:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:35:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: West Asia trade Message-ID: <011f01c3193b$64d129a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Bush calls for free trade zone in Middle East By Rupert Cornwell in Washington The Independent 10 May 2003 President George Bush stepped up his drive yesterday for reform in the Middle East by offering to help launch a US-backed free trade area in the region within a decade, once peace had been established. Speaking on the eve of a visit to Israel and the occupied territories by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, Mr Bush said that Arab countries had a combined economy as large as that of Spain. The goal, he said, was to bring new prosperity and stability to the Middle East by rewarding governments which backed political and economic reform. The proposal builds on an earlier initiative by Washington to quicken change in rigid Middle East regimes by promoting educational and social initiatives. The free trade agreements would boost free markets and the rule of law, and clamp down on corruption. Washington has free trade agreements with Israel and Jordan and wants to conclude a trade pact with Morocco. General Powell will hold talks with the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon this weekend. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:37:47 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:37:47 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK pensions crisis Message-ID: <012701c3193b$b1fb30e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Pension wipe-out hits 150 in city company The Scotsman, 13 May 2003 EDWARD BLACK AROUND 150 staff at an Edinburgh engineering firm have been told their pensions have been wiped out after a retirement scheme collapsed under a ?6 million deficit. Independent experts have confirmed that workers at city-based engineering group Blyth & Blyth may not see a penny of their retirement fund. The group, based at South Gyle, went into receivership in January with a ?6 million hole in its final salary pension pool. Although the company was later bought out of receivership, the new company - called Blyth & Blyth Consulting Engineers Ltd - has no responsibility for the old pension scheme. Out of a total of about 250 members of the scheme, about 150 staff who had not retired by the time the company went into receivership now stand to lose everything. Andy Scott, the independent trustee brought in for the scheme, said the Blyth & Blyth case was the "most distressing and difficult" he had ever had to deal with. He also warned that other companies faced similar dangers following three years of a falling stock market which has destroyed swathes of pension funds leaving companies struggling to repair deficits. He said: "This, as far as I am aware, is the first case that has such a large hole and whereby the actual members are likely to get nothing or the state bails them out. "People have felt cheated, there has been one person who has retired recently and got nothing other than his own voluntary contributions. "It has been, from an emotional point of view, easily the most distressing and difficult one that I have had to deal with. Someone who has been in the scheme for 35 years and was only one day away from retirement would not receive anything from the pension scheme. "Someone who retired one day before it got wound up would receive all the pension, but without increases." Mr Scott said it was time that the government reviewed legislation on company schemes to prevent something similar taking place when other companies fell into receivership. "I fear that this could be the tip of the iceberg," he said "The UK equity market has halved in the last three years and there will be other companies struggling in the present financial climate. "Pensions are safe as long as the company in question continues operating but problems can arise when it goes bust. "Under the present rules there is too heavy a cliff edge for those with company pension schemes and something should be done to protect those with them, especially if they have been with a firm for say ten or 20 years." One recent snapshot put the collective pension deficit in 21 of Scotland's listed companies at about ?4 billion, from a collective surplus of ?132 million the year before. Mr Scott said part of the reason for Blyth & Blyth falling into receivership was because it could not plug the pension fund gap. Under the current regulations any money left in the pension pot of an insolvent company must go to existing pensioners first. However, in Blyth & Blyth's case, he said there may not even be enough money to pay the existing pensioners. Mr Scott said he had now called on an independent actuary to examine the workings of Blyth & Blyth's pension scheme. Last November The Scotsman reported that many employers at the firm faced losing their final salary pension scheme because of the company's financial difficulties.There was anger among employees, many of whom had been with the company many years. Alex Lamb, who worked for Blyth & Blyth for 17 years, said: "The word that comes to mind is 'shafted'. We worked all of our lives for this company and the only people who have been able to avoid this are the ones who were earning the most. There are people who will be much worse off than me, but I stand to lose enough money to make a difference." A spokesman for the Occupational Pensions Regulation Authority said: "All companies are obliged to meet a minimum funding requirement, but this does not prevent funds from going into deficit. This has been recognised as a problem. "Pensioners are put into the first tier to get what it is in the fund, but there is less security for members who are still in employment, even those who have been paying into a scheme for 20 years. They are at the bottom of the list for receiving any money, and are not guaranteed a thing." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:42:31 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:42:31 +0300 Subject: [A-List] India: sub-imperialist delusions Message-ID: <014f01c3193c$5b8857a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> India's startling change of axis By Sultan Shahin Asia Times, May 13 2003 NEW DELHI - Having preempted the efforts of the United States for peace in South Asia by its own offer of normalization of relations with Pakistan, India has renewed its bid for an axis with Washington and Israel to counter Pakistan, which Delhi describes as the hub of Islamic fundamentalism and international terrorism. The terminology being officially used for this proposed axis is rather innocuous - democratic alliance against terrorism. While Washington's response is not known, this has created a storm in Indian politics itself, forcing the main opposition Congress party, which ruled India for its first 45 years of independence, to deplore the Hindu fundamentalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government for its "obsession with Israel" even at the cost of national interests. India's national security adviser Brajesh Mishra outlined the proposal for a US-Israel-India axis against Islamic fundamentalism in Washington last Thursday. Mishra is perhaps the most trusted aide of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and served for several years as the head of the BJP's foreign affairs cell before the party came to power five years ago. In an address to a meeting of the American Jewish Committee, Mishra argued that democratic countries that are the prime targets of international terrorism should form a "viable alliance" and develop multilateral mechanisms to counter the menace. He identified India, the US and Israel as countries fitting that description. "Such an alliance would have the political will and moral authority to take bold decisions in extreme cases of terrorist provocation. It would not get bogged down in definitional and causal arguments about terrorism," he maintained. Speaking after a meeting with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice, Mishra hit out at the Pakistani bid to characterize Kashmiri militants as freedom fighters. The talk that terrorism can be eradicated only by addressing its root causes is "nonsense" he said amid applause. He said that preventive measures like blocking financial supplies, disrupting networks, sharing intelligence and simplifying extradition procedures can be effective only through international cooperation "based on trust and shared values". At his meeting with Rice, Mishra is understood to have rebutted the claim of Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf that "nothing is happening across the Line of Control" that divides the Indian and Pakistani-administered areas of Kashmir. He acquainted her with an Indian perspective on the continuing incidents of terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). His meeting with Rice came within hours of Musharraf making the assertion to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in Islamabad. Mishra gave Rice an update on the peace moves made by India. He also touched on some of the outstanding bilateral issues. He sought early US action on the "trinity" of issues: high-technology commerce, civilian nuclear energy cooperation and collaboration in space. India believes that early action on these issues could take the India-US relationship to a qualitatively new level of partnership. He pointed out in his address to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday that he hoped the decks will be cleared for the flow of dual-use technologies between the countries since India has consistently followed responsible policies. While the US has not come up with any response yet, Indian opposition parties have attacked the ruling coalition for its "strange and perverse" obsession with Israel. The most vocal among these has been the Congress. It attacked the BJP-led government on Saturday. "Obsession with Israel on the part of the coalition government is strange and perverse ... when Israel is facing international isolation. It shows the intellectual insolvency of the government," party spokesman S Jaipal Reddy said. Reddy said that Mishra's statement was "not inadvertent" as Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani had also put forward a similar formulation after September 11, 2001. Noting that strategic partnership with Israel was "qualitatively different" from that between India and the US, he said that Mishra would not have pleaded for such an alliance without prior clearance from the prime minister. The Congress warned that a strategic partnership with Israel could upset the consensus built around India's "time-tested" foreign policy. Reddy said that such a tie-up "defies intelligence", given the ideological dissonance between India and Israel. "There are fundamental [ideological] dissimilarities between India and Israel. The problem faced by Israel is qualitatively different from India. We've held the view that Palestinians have been denied their due. There has to be a minimum ideological similarity for a strategic partnership," Reddy said. The BJP-led government has indeed shown a great keenness in trying to convince the US for such a strategic alliance since it came to power. It has not let any opportunity go to repeat its interest in such an axis. Whether it was the issue of national missile defense (NMD) mooted by President George W Bush or the terrorist strikes of September 11, India was the first to offer its total support and cooperation, even without being asked for it. The reasons are not difficult to see. The ideologues of Hindutva (the philosophy of Hindu domination of the sub-continent), had lost no time in justifying their support for NMD on ideological grounds. One such ideologue, Sandhya Jain, for instance, explained this in her column in the daily Pioneer by pointing out that threatened as they both are from Muslim fundamentalism, India and the US are civilizational allies. She gave voice to India's high hopes from a strategic alliance with the US and Israel and the NMD regime: "A defensive umbrella in which a tracking satellite can find and neutralize enemy missiles in mid-air is no small protection for a country physically surrounded by civilizationally hostile forces. The opposition assertion that this would reduce India to a US satellite is jejune, and merits contempt. India would no more be a satellite than France or Germany was under NATO. But she would be allied to the most powerful country of the free world, a country that is fiercely loyal towards its friends, as witnessed by its abiding relationship with Israel." Similarly, September 11 found India in the same mood as Britain after Pearl Harbor. British columnist William Rees-Mogg recalled that his country's reaction to Pearl Harbor was one of "horror, but also a huge sense of relief that the USA was now involved in World War II". India, too, hoped that the US would now be involved in the war against terrorism that India has been fighting for the past two decades, first in the state of Punjab and then in J&K, not to speak of the seven states in its Northeast and the Maoist insurgency in the eastern state of Bihar and the western state of Andhra Pradesh. The Japanese action at Pearl Harbor had, in the words of Rees-Mogg, "started a new process of history; before it was complete, that process led to the destruction of the Japanese empire, the dropping of the first nuclear bombs, the occupation of Japan and eventually to American support for the post-war institutions of NATO, the UN and international peacekeeping". India, too, hoped that the US treating the latest attacks as a declaration of war by the terrorist groups would herald a new historical process that would lead to a new strategic axis of India-US and Israel fighting against Islamic fundamentalism. Calling for the redoubling of efforts to defeat the "great threat" of terrorism, Vajpayee wrote to Bush assuring him of India's full cooperation in investigations into the terrorist strikes. Condemning the events in the strongest terms, Vajpayee said, "The people of India and my government share the sense of outrage with the American people. We stand ready to cooperate with you in the investigations into this crime and to strengthen our partnership in leading international efforts to ensure that terrorism never succeeds again." The prime minister brought in the civilizatonal angle as well. He observed that this dark hour was a stark reminder of the power and reach of the terrorists to destroy innocent lives and challenge the civilized order in this world. "It sends a strong message to democracies to redouble our efforts to defeat this great threat to our people, our values and our way of life." US behavior since September 11 has, however, belied Indian hopes of a strategic US-Israel-India axis fighting Pakistan. The US instead made Pakistan a front-line ally in its fight against the Taliban menace in Afghanistan. Bush and other US officials have often praised India's bug-bear, Musharraf, as a stalwart ally and helped him bring Pakistan back on the path of economic prosperity. Most observers of the Indian political scene believed that events since September 11 had put cold water on Indian hopes of a civilizational axis - Hindu-Jewish-Christian versus Islam and Confucianism. Vajpayee's hand-of-friendship speech directed at Pakistan from the capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir last month was also seen as an indication that India now understood the need for coming to terms with its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan. This is why Vajpayee government's renewal of this bid for a civilizational axis has surprised many. But it shouldn't really surprise anyone. There are deep ideological factors impelling Hindu fundamentalist leaders to hope against hope that a civilizational clash will take place, and that they would be on the winning side of it. The clash of civilization theory is attributed to Samuel Huntington. But few people know, as a Hindutva ideologue Devendra Swaroop Aggarwal pointed out recently, that it had actually been put forward by well-known Hindutva icon Bipin Chandra Pal almost a century ago. Pal had the insight to even foresee that, even though India was at that time engaged in fighting for its independence from the Christian British, in this impending clash Hindus would be on the side of the Judeo-Christian civilization and Islam would be supported by the Confucian Chinese civilization. This may also be one reason why Hindu fundamentalists never participated in the freedom struggle, and have supported the West throughout the period since independence in 1947 at a time that India was struggling with its foreign policy of non-alignment in a bid to remain neutral between the West and the Soviet Union. The opportunities offered by September 11 were too good to be missed. India under the BJP may be unable to believe that it has missed them and that nothing can be done to revive those hopes. Before having to join Pakistan in a serious effort to find a peace formula, therefore, it may have felt like making a last-ditch effort. There is also speculation that the Vajpayee government could not have renewed its offer of a civilizatonal axis without some encouragement from Israel and the US. As for Israel, there can be no doubt that it would love India to be a part of such an axis, and thus be further isolated from the Islamic world. The evolving situation, particularly the US response, will thus be watched with keen interest. Whether or not the proposed peace talks between India and Pakistan move forward will largely depend on the US response to the Indian proposal for a strategic axis. The last time that India and Pakistan come close to blowing each other up in a nuclear holocaust, the US used determined and coercive diplomacy in the form of travel advisories against its citizens visiting India to bring the two to their senses. It seems doubtful that the US will join hands with India to destroy Pakistan or even tame it, as Advani demanded on Sunday, particularly as it already virtually owns that country. It is possible that Indian leaders with their single-point agenda of fighting a civilizational battle with Islam are unable to understand the complex games that the US plays. Visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has in fact left no one in doubt that India is expected to engage in dialogue with Pakistan, while the US is not going to be the one to ensure that the Pakistani leadership lives up to its commitment made in June last year to end cross-border infiltration permanently. Armitage told Indian leaders on Sunday that he was not in the business of giving assurances. This amounts to the US washing its hands of the assurances given last year. India officials are also expressing resentment over reported remarks by some US officials that the Kashmir issue should be resolved first to bring an end to cross-border infiltration. As Pakistani journalist Najam Sethi pointed out, sanity may indeed be located outside South Asia. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:44:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:44:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Henry Liu's analysis Message-ID: <015701c3193c$96c91ac0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> >From Cold War to Holy War By Henry C K Liu Asia Times, 13 May 2003 Barely a decade after the end of the Cold War between the two superpowers, the world has entered decidedly into an age of Holy War between the sole remaining superpower and minor states deemed by it as rogue. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, billed as part of a "war on terrorism", were essentially the remote unleashing of overwhelming military power on defenseless minor states. One unique characteristic about this new Holy War is that it seems to be open ended, that while major combats have ended, or never even took place, victory remains not at hand in the near future. In fact, the US itself refers to these one-sided military operations as "battles in an on-going war on terrorism". That of course is the nature of religious wars. Another unique aspect is that while many governments around the world opposed or at least disapproved of US unilateral use of force, none came to the aid of the victim states. The war against Iraq was not about oil, or about keeping oil denominated in dollars. These objectives, while not trivial, can be achieved by means other than war. The war was about eliminating the will of any state to defy US global intentions, which neo-conservatives define as faith-based benign hegemony. It was above all a warning of similar fate to all who would be foolish enough to follow the footsteps of the Taliban or Saddam Hussein and stand in the path of America's march toward its strategic objective of establishing a world order based on US imperium through preemptive war. Taken at face value, the war as explained by the White House is part of a US strategy to spread democracy, to safeguard freedom and to reinstate popular control of national resources and destiny around the world. Americans generally understand democracy to mean a representative form of government based on majority rule with minority rights, administered by elected officials of fixed terms, with separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, and the institution of peaceful change of administrations through general elections. The American notion of freedom focuses on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom to disagree with and oppose government policies through legal means. Associated with these political freedoms are institutions of free enterprise and free markets. Any nation deemed deficient in any of these characteristics is fair game for regime change through the application of overwhelming military superpower, unless it possesses credible counterattack deterrence. The Bush administration's neo-conservative view of terrorism is that it has become the major threat to US national security. This view is understandable since the September 11, 2001 attacks. Less understandable is its assertion that terrorism is caused by a lack of democracy and freedom associated with domestic oppression, and not by neo-imperialism and the poverty it creates. Curiously, the US domestic recipe for fighting terrorism requires the suspension of civil liberty. Furthermore, terrorists are deemed to be enemies of democracy and freedom. Thus only half the objective of a preemptive war has to do with the elimination of weapons of mass destruction from the control of "rogue states", the other half has to do with the forceful spread of democracy and freedom around the globe to strike at the root of terrorism. The grand strategy of US neo-conservatism is to bring the full force of US superpower to bear on the crusade to spread democracy and freedom around the world, through regime changes by military force if necessary. Unilateralism is justified by moral imperialism. Just as neo-liberal globalization of free trade sweeps aside economic nationalism, neo-conservative globalization of democratization and liberation aims to sweep aside national sovereign and a world order that has operated since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Notwithstanding that such views on terrorism may be simplistic and misguided, that others, including many Americans as well as previous US administrations, view terrorism as last resort reaction from the disfranchised, the persecuted, the defenseless, the exploited and the desperate poor, the political objectives of the war on terrorism as enunciated by the Bush administration cannot be accomplished by military operations alone. President George W Bush himself acknowledged as much when he announced on May 1 that while the military phases in both Afghanistan and Iraq have essentially been completed, the war on terrorism is expected to be long and challenging. Winning the peace is much more complex than overthrowing governments by force. The US, to make the war on terrorism legitimate, must now deliver democracy, freedom and self-determination to the Iraqi people on their terms, a task that cannot be done with precision cruise missiles and bunker busting bombs released at long distance by remote control. It is a tall order that the US will find almost impossible to fulfill, due to its own internal contradiction. Democracy is compromised when the US occupation authority serves notice that "there is no way" a Shi'ite theocracy would be tolerated in the new Iraq, even when 60 percent of the population are Shi'ites, nor that the Iraqi Communists Party would be allowed to participate in the formation of the new Iraqi regime. While US neo-cons embrace the Straussian notion of the need for theocracy, in direct contradiction of the US constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state, they accept only Judeo-Christian theocracy. The Bush faith-based foreign policy of one world under God is derived from its domestic vision of "one nation under God", notwithstanding that in the Supreme Court's 1961 Torcaso vs Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote in a foot note: "Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God is Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others." Neo-cons argue that the First Amendment's religion clauses were intended only to prevent the establishment of a national church, and to keep the state from interfering with the church, not to bar religious groups from co-opting the government, notwithstanding Thomas Jefferson's claim that the First Amendment had erected a "wall of separation between church and state". The co-oopting of the US government by the religious right has launched a new religious war, over which even the Pope, whose church has long since retreated from the doctrine of Ceasaropapism, has expressed wariness. It takes a theocracy to start a religious war. On May 2, Bush, in what is generally billed as the beginning of his political campaign for a second term, discussed national economic security in a speech to the employees of the Ground Systems Division of United Defense Industries in Santa Clara, California, a defense company that produces military vehicles and technology that are being used by soldiers in Iraq, including the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Hercules Recovery Vehicle. It is not surprising that the president chose the defense sector as a platform to discuss national economic security, given that the Bush White House has reorganized national economic policy under the umbrella of national security, and given that the defense sector is the only growth sector in the stalled economy at this time, despite the fact that the US defense budget is only about 3 percent of the GDP. A day before, the president spoke to the American people from the deck of the homeward bound USS Abraham Lincoln super-carrier off the California coast, a political stunt that caused Senator Robert C Byrd to comment on the Senate floor, "I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw." The president declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, and that the US and its allies had prevailed. The world has never doubted that the US superpower would prevail over tiny Iraq, isolated and emaciated by a decade of economic sanctions. Ironically, the fall of Iraq sent a clear message around the world that in this age of superpower holy war, national security lies in the possession of weapons of mass destruction. The US is concerned with Saddam's team of 1,000 nuclear scientists, whom defense officials called "nuclear mujahideen". These scientists, the Defense Department fears, can restart Iraq's weapons program once the crisis passed. Would any new government in Iraq have less reason to possess nuclear weapons after what happened? What was unexpected was the ease and speed with which the US achieved the military phase of the invasion. Despite the fact that its prowess was never fully tested on account of the enemy having failed to put up an expected fight via asymmetrical urban warfare, the US military is nevertheless an undeniably excellent fighting machine, one that any nation would be proud to possess. That US forces suffered unprecedented light casualties, due also to emphasis on protecting and rescuing soldiers in distress, is professionally admirable. The morale of the troops has been as high as any commander can wish. Whether this high morale can be sustained when troops are used as an occupation police force in a hostile country is another question. Invoking September 11 as America's lesson that vast oceans no longer protect it from terrorism - the threat of the new era, the president said, "On that day, 19 months ago, we also began a relentless worldwide campaign against terrorists, those who hate freedom, in order to secure our homeland and to make the world a more peaceful place." He referred to "the battle of Afghanistan" and "the Iraqi theater" and declared that "Iraq and Afghanistan are now free". With daily reports of guerrilla resistance and suicide bombers inflicting US casualties and US soldiers firing on civilians demonstrating against US occupation, such a sweeping declaration raises a credibility gap. It is also arguable that terrorists hate freedom, rather than foreign oppression. The US military has performed professionally and is deserving of recognition. The same cannot be said of the political rationale behind its deployment. Throughout history, the misuse of the military for dubious political causes has led to the downfall of governments and empires. It would not be surprising if the Democrats would separate pride in the military's professionalism from the political folly of its deployment to support the flawed grand strategy adopted by a Republican administration captured by neo-conservatism. About the state of the US economy, the president acknowledged that unemployment is now at 6 percent, which he claimed should serve as a clear signal to the US Congress a bold economic recovery package is needed so people can find work. "We need robust tax relief so our fellow citizens can find a job," the president said in his Santa Clara speech. The original $726 billion tax package over 10 years Bush sent to the Congress is now pared down to $550 billion and it may be cut further in the Senate by those who are worried that the growing budget deficit will lead to higher interest rates that will stall any hope of recovery. Administration economists say that the tax cut will create 1 million new jobs by the year 2004, when Bush will face a second term election. A million new jobs would still leave 7.8 million people unemployed. Historically, the Republican Party prided itself as not being a foreign war party. It was formed in 1856 by anti-slavery activists and individuals who believed that government should grant western lands to settlers free of charge. Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House in 1860. The word democracy does not appear in the Republican Oath, a statement of Republican philosophy published by the Republican National Committee. As the party of prosperity, the GOP benefited from the boom of the 1920s. The Great Depression destroyed the Republican majority. After years of taking credit for prosperity, the GOP found itself branded as the party of depression after the economic collapse in 1929. By the late 1930s, Republicans in Congress sided with those who hoped to avoid involvement in any future European war. Most Republicans were isolationists who supported the neutrality laws and voted against increased defense appropriations. Their isolationism was supported by some prominent Democrats, including Joseph P Kennedy, ambassador to England, father of J F Kennedy. By the end of World War II, most Senate Republicans, led by Arthur H Vandenberg of Michigan, had repudiated isolationism out of realist pragmatism, but foreign war remained not a Republican theme. The surprising loss in the 1948 election to Harry S Truman, a Democrat, again showed how desperately Republicans, out of power for two decades, needed fresh issues. They soon found one in the hysterical charge that communists had infiltrated the Democrat-controlled federal government. In 1950, Senator Joseph R McCarthy of Wisconsin charged that the State Department under the Democrat administrations had been infested with communists, which among other things "lost" China to communism, as if China were America's to lose. Although McCarthy failed to prove his wild accusations, in the process of ruining many lives, Congressional investigations gave Republicans their best issue since the pre-Depression era. Robert McNamara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough purge of China experts by McCarthyism. He wrote, "The irony of this gap - Asian experts - was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department - John Patton Davies Jr, John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent - had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we - certainly I - badly misread China's objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony." There are clear signs that the Bush administration also badly misread Arab political culture and the root cause of terrorism, mostly as a result of experts on Arabism who did not tote the neo-con pro-Israel line having been purged from all US policy establishments. Bernard Lewis, who describes the separation of church and state as a Western disease, and Fouad Ajami are the neo-cons' favored Middle East experts who see the Arab World as ripe for liberation from itself into modernity by the West. The president is not being well served by the neo-cons around him, nor is the peerless US military being used to fight for a good and viable cause. A split between conservative and moderate Republicans flared into the open during the Korea War. The conservatives, led by Senator Robert A Taft of Ohio, continued to oppose the New Deal. Moderates questioned whether this ideological fixation could win the presidency, and they looked to World War II hero General Dwight D Eisenhower to carry their standard in 1952. The popular Eisenhower soundly defeated Adlai Stevenson, liberal governor of Illinois, one of the great figures in US politics, taking 39 states by promising to end the Korean War. Republicans also won control of Congress by a narrow margin. Ironically, the war hero won the election on a pledge to end war. Eisenhower's personal popularity did not carry over to the GOP as a party. Eisenhower continued Truman's foreign policy of containment of communist expansion, but not Truman's readiness to deploy US troops overseas. Domestically, he tried to hold the line on government expenditures, which satisfied neither GOP conservatives who wanted sharp cutbacks nor special interest groups that wanted more government contracts and subsidies. In 1956, he won a rematch against Stevenson, taking 58 percent of the popular vote. But the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. The 1960 election was the closest of the century. Democratic senator John F Kennedy defeated vice president Richard M Nixon, who actually won the popular vote if Alabama had been counted properly. Ballot fraud in Illinois has since been been established as the reason Kennedy won the electoral vote. Nixon gracefully accepted the results of a fraudulent election, declining to file a contest, thus avoiding a constitutional crisis. Al Gore was less graceful in 2000 and the decision was left to a pro-Republican Supreme Court. A split between conservatives and liberals again weakened the GOP during the 1960s. Governor Nelson A Rockefeller of New York emerged as the spokesman for party liberals and Senator Barry M Goldwater of Arizona as leader of the conservatives. A narrowly based presidential campaign by Goldwater produced a stunning defeat for the GOP in 1964. Goldwater took only six states and 38 percent of the popular vote. But his ideology won control of the Republican Party. Nixon led a unified Republican party to a narrow victory in the 1968 race against a Democratic ticket weakened by a split on the race issue between liberal Democrat Hubert H Humphrey and racist George C Wallace, who split to run as an American Independent candidate. Taking only 43 percent of the popular vote, Nixon was the first new president since 1848 to take office with both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition party. Nixon won in part by promising to end the Vietnam War. Nixon won re-election by a lopsided margin in 1972 on the strength of his historic opening to China and his policy of detente with the USSR, but he was forced to resign in 1974 over the threat of impeachment in the wake of the Watergate affair, succeeded by Vice President Gerald R Ford. Republicans lost control of the White House in 1976, when Ford was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter. Economic stagflation under Carter and American hostages held by Iran led to a Republican landslide in 1980. The Republican team of Ronald Reagan and George Bush seizing on Carter's spiritual crisis, ridiculing his "malaise speech", and promising to reduce federal spending, cut taxes, and strengthen defense, won 51 percent of the popular vote and 489 electoral votes. The Republicans gained 12 seats in the Senate, giving them control of that body for the first time since 1954. In the 1984 presidential elections, the Reagan-Bush ticket won overwhelmingly, carrying all the states except Democratic candidate Walter Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia, while amassing 59 percent of the popular vote and 523 electoral votes. The Republicans retained control of the Senate but did not gain a majority in the House. Reaganomics produced the largest budget deficit and highest level of national debt in history. In 1985, the Plaza Accord pushed the exchange value of the dollar down against the yen to stem the rising trade deficit. As a result, in the midterm elections of 1986, the Republicans lost not only control of the Senate but also more ground in the House. This pattern was repeated in 1988. Although Vice President George Bush and his running mate, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, won the presidential election for the Republicans with 53 percent of the popular vote, the party lost ground in both houses of Congress. While Bush took 40 states and scored a 426-to-11 win in electoral votes, the Republicans lost five seats in the House and one in the Senate. In 1992, despite victory in the first Gulf War, the election turned out to be a referendum on the economy, and voters expressed their concerns in a stunning defeat of incumbent Bush by Democrat Bill Clinton of Arkansas. The gradual erosion in Republican party strength in Congress allowed the Democrats to control both branches of government for the first time in 12 years. Bush received only 38 percent of the popular vote and 155 electoral votes. The Republicans retained the same number of seats in the Senate and gained nine seats in the House. It was under Clinton that the concept of dollar hegemony took hold, allowing a rising trade deficit to be financed by a capital account surplus, making possible the notion that a strong dollar is in the US national interest. The 1994 mid-term elections brought an equally dramatic reversal as the Republican party gained control over both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. Most congressional Republican candidates had signed on to Representative Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America", a list of conservative proposals that shaped the congressional agenda under Republican leadership in 1995. Both parties were focused primarily on domestic affairs. Except in 1964, Republican presidential candidates since 1948 have taken most of the votes cast in growing middle-class suburbs. Since 1952, Republican presidential candidates have repeatedly captured at least three of the 11 former Confederate states. Reagan's popularity among young voters was reflected in a marked increase in Republican ranks after 1980. This trend changed with the election of Clinton, a southern Democrat, who brought many young voters into the Democratic party. As with any political coalition, the Republican party has had difficulty finding issues that unite rather than divide its followers. In 1968, Nixon succeeded with appeals to the "silent majority" for "law and order." Despite some success in presidential and congressional races since 1952, the Republican party remains a minority in search of a majority. It was never successful in attempt to include labor and minorities. The Republican party originally built its political majority on state organizations in the northeast and midwest. The two bases of power in these areas were New York and Ohio. Twentieth-century GOP leaders have included Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Thomas E Dewey and Nelson A Rockefeller, all noted liberal governors of New York. Ohio produced five Republican presidents: Rutherford B Hayes, James A Garfield, William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren G Harding. After being reduced to minority status in the 1930s, the Republican party controlled a small number of largely rural states, such as Maine and Vermont in New England and North Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska in the West. On the local level, the strongest Republican organizations have been in rural and suburban areas. The GOP generally has been unable to elect mayors in the nation's big cities, except liberal New York City and conservative Los Angeles. The backbone of the Republican party was historically composed of eastern businessmen and midwestern farmers. Big business was attracted by the party's pro-business philosophy and farmers by Lincoln's successful effort to preserve the Union. Emancipation and congressional reconstruction also brought black voters into the party. By 1896, the GOP had a large following among industrial workers in the nation's growing urban centers. During the 1930s, Republicans lost their grip on urban industrial states with the rise of labor unions whose loyalty remained with the Democrats. The Rockefeller liberal Republicans never captured the midwest because of the problematic history of the Rockefeller oil monopoly in key states, like conservative Ohio, liberal Minnesota and progressive Wisconsin. After World War II, the Republican party found a new base of support in the middle class suburbs that surrounded the country's metropolitan areas. This has enabled the GOP to elect governors and US senators in states such as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. As a result of the Second Reconstruction, which began in the 1950s, the Republican party has made increasing headway in the once solid south. Opposition to civil rights for blacks led a number of southern whites to bolt to the Democratic party, especially in presidential elections. Although Democrats still win most state and local elections in the south, Republicans have won a number of statewide elections in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas. The GOP has had less success in the deep south, but in 1978, Mississippi elected its first Republican senator since Reconstruction. However, even with its new supporters in the south and increasing electoral victories, the GOP remains a minority party, trailing behind the Democratic party in its following until Reagan. Neo-conservatism, supported by its bedfellow neo-liberalism, is opposed in current US politics by libertarians as well as the radical left. Charley Reese, syndicated paleo-libertarian conservative columnist wrote on June 17 last year: "Where is George Bush's conservatism? He's taken another massive step in nationalizing the education system, he's busted the budget, he shows unwavering loyalty to the military-industrial complex, his foreign policy is imperialistic, and he is expanding government at the expense of liberty ... A conservative wishes to preserve the prosperity and health of both the land and the people, not squander them in unnecessary wars ... Nor does American business support a free economy. What it supports and what we have is mercantilism. In its present form it retains its old core - a strong centralized government that manages the economy, and a standing army to protect corporate assets overseas. The Taliban was overthrown not because it supported al-Qaeda but because it opposed an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea fields." While some aspects of these views can be better informed, the general thrust does represent libertarian sentiments against neo-conservatism. The neo-conservative movement began to take shape long before September 11. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on September 15, 1997, William Kristol and David Brooks, editors of The Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of US neo-conservatism, asked: "What Ails Conservatism?" It began: "The era of big government may be over, but a new era of conservative governance hasn't yet begun. Why the delay? Why isn't a victorious conservatism now reshaping the American political landscape? "A barrier to the success of today's conservatism is ... today's conservatism. What's missing from today's American conservatism is America. The left has always blamed America first. Conservatives once deplored this. They defended America. And when they sought to improve America, they did so by recalling Americans to their highest principles, and by calling them forward to a grand destiny. What is missing from today's conservatism is the appeal to American greatness. "American nationalism - the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt - has never been European blood-and-soil nationalism. It's true that in the absence of a real appeal to national greatness, some conservatives are tempted, a la Pat Buchanan, to turn to this European tradition. But this can't and shouldn't work in America. Our nationalism is that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times". Our pride in settling the frontier, welcoming immigrants and advancing the cause of freedom around the world is related to our dedication to our principles. "That's why American nationalism isn't narrow or parochial. It doesn't believe in closing our borders or fearing the global economy. It does believe in resisting group rights and multiculturalism and other tendencies that weaken our attachment to our common principles. It embraces a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad. "This American understanding of greatness is friendly to private property, prosperity and progress. And it isn't unfriendly to government, properly understood. After all, as Lincoln reminds us, it is 'through this free government which we have enjoyed' that Americans have secured 'an open field and a fair chance' for our 'understanding, enterprise, and intelligence'. Free government - limited but energetic - is not the enemy. It can be used, in the spirit of Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt, to enhance competition and opportunity. In sum, national-greatness conservatism does not despise government." Thus the foundation of the Age of Holy War had been laid a good five years before terrorism changed America on September 11. This Holy War is based on US exceptionism, unilateralism and the spread of American values. It is the American version of the Augustian and Napoleonic empires, which unlike the British empire that kept arms-length tolerance for local culture, justified its imperialism on the spread of superior universal values. Neo-conservatism rejects the long tradition of American attachment to multiculturalism. It also reverses America's tradition of being apologetic for its power. Pushing beyond Teddy Roosevelt's "manifest destiny" with "speak softly but carry a big stick", the neo-cons advocate an American missionary empire with loud shouting and hitting with a big stick. Lawrence F Kaplan, a senior editor at the New Republic, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, co-authors of the forthcoming book, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, described George W Bush, in the Wall Street Journal on January 29, as "Neither a Realist Nor a Liberal, W Is a Liberator" who holds a fundamentally different world view from previous administrations. To them, self-declared "realists" believe that foreign policy should be grounded in vital interests - oil wells, strategic chokepoints and most of all, regional stability. They prefer order over liberty. It was in Iraq that the first Bush team's realist foreign policy philosophy manifested itself most clearly. Once Kuwait was liberated, the senior Bush team redirected its energies toward ensuring Iraqi "stability" - even if it had to be enforced by Saddam. Kaplan and Kristol criticized Clinton's Iraq policy as reflecting very different assumptions about America's role in the world, a world view that reduced a complex and dangerous world environment to a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement. According to the Clinton administration's scorecard, it was not the integrity of containment or even the value of keeping Saddam disarmed that mattered. Far more important was the imperative of avoiding war. As Henry Kissinger, the master of realpolitik, said: "Peace, too, is a moral imperative." Kaplan and Kristol see realists and liberals as approaching the world from different directions, but when it comes to Iraq, both ended up in the same place: generating excuses for inaction. Bush, by contrast, does not speak of merely containing or disarming Iraq. He intends to liberate Iraq by force, and create democracy in a land that for decades has known only dictatorship. Moreover, he insists that these principles apply to American foreign policy more broadly. A century of fighting dictators has finally alerted US policy makers to the fact that the character of regimes determines their conduct abroad - their willingness to resort to aggression, their determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and their relationships with terrorist groups. The neo-con commentators concluded, "Hence, the Bush strategy enshrines 'regime change' - the insistence that when it comes to dealing with tyrannical regimes like Iraq, Iran, and, yes, North Korea, the US should seek transformation, not coexistence, as a primary aim of US foreign policy. As such, it commits the US to the task of maintaining and enforcing a decent world order. Just as it was with the Bush team's predecessors, Iraq will be the first major test of this administration's strategy. It will not be the last." The last sentence lingers in the mind of all the world's governments. Since September 11, Bush has declared repeatedly, "If you are not with us, you are against us." There is no co-existence, no neutrality and no non-alignment. Be part of the American system or be destroyed. What if the new US task of enforcing a new world order comes up against a power with nuclear deterrent or other forms of weapons of mass destruction? In this respect, the failure of other great nuclear powers to intervene in the US invasion of Iraq, to preserve the existing world order of nation states, can be viewed as a new Munich that will lead to another global conflict. Anticipating World War IV, Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary Magazine, writing in February, 2002: How To Win World War IV - the Cold War being World War III - characterized the first Gulf War as "an act of military and political coitus interruptus". Podhoretz observed that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels that there was a purpose behind his election all along: as a born-again Christian, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world. The president himself defined it from the start in very broad terms. Our aim was not merely to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and wipe out the al-Qaeda terrorists under his direct leadership in Afghanistan. The governments that gave terrorists help of any kind - sanctuary, money, arms, diplomatic and logistical support, training facilities - would either join us in getting rid of them or would also be regarded as in a state of war with the US. Bush was unequivocal. These governments, he repeated over and over again, were either with us in the war against terrorism, or they were against us: there was to be no middle or neutral ground. In defining the war and the enemy in such terms, the president, seconded by both major political parties and a vast majority of the American people, was acknowledging the rightness of those who had been stubbornly insisting against the skeptical and the craven alike that terrorism posed a serious threat and that it could not be fought by the police and the courts. Perhaps most important of all was the corollary of such an analysis: that, with rare exceptions, terrorists were not individual psychotics acting on their own but agents of organizations that depended on the sponsorship of various governments. Thus the war on terrorism is essentially a war against hostile governments. Bush, with about 90 percent of the people and a nearly unanimous Congress behind him for a war against terrorism, had more than enough political support to act on his own, without permission from anyone, or any other government. But if the coalition was unnecessary both from a political and from a military point of view, and if the inclusion within it of states harboring terrorists undermined and obfuscated the moral clarity of the war we were determined to wage, why did the administration devote so much energy to assembling it? Podhoretz's explanation is that getting a minimal endorsement from as many predominantly Muslim states as possible helped create the impression that the war was not against Islam but against terrorism. The aim is to begin a transformation of the Middle East that could provide many benefits to the populations of an unfree region. That will, in the end, make Americans infinitely more secure at home. Thus the failure of the oceans to protect the US from external threat now compels the US to attack all around the world who are not with it in its war on terrorism. It is conceivable that the US can prevail over all other national governments militarily, but it is pure fantasy that the US can spread US-styled democracy and freedom all over the world, even with a new 100-year war. Or that true democracy and freedom around the world would support US national interests. A healthy dose of realism and multiculturalism will save the world from impending self destruction by superpower theocracy. Either way, it spells the end of the age of superpower because military power, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq, causes more problems than it solves. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:52:47 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:52:47 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: China policy Message-ID: <015f01c3193d$caa7cd40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> China hawk settles in neo-cons' nest By Jim Lobe Asia Times, May 13 2003 WASHINGTON - Neo-conservatives have scored a new victory in the administration of US President George W Bush with the hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent hawk on China policy. China specialist and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been named deputy national security advisor and director of policy planning on Cheney's high-powered, foreign-policy staff headed by I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of the most influential foreign-policy strategists in the administration. Both Friedberg and Libby, as well as Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and 21 other prominent right-wingers, signed the 1997 founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which called for the adoption of a "'Reaganite' policy of military strength and moral clarity". Friedberg also signed another PNAC letter to Bush on September 20, 2001, which called for the "war on terrorism" to be directed against Iraq and other anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, in addition to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the professor wrote a chapter on the threat posed by China in Present Dangers, a 2000 book edited by PNAC co-founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that also included chapters by other leading neo-conservative hawks, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey. The significance of his appointment lies both with Cheney's and Libby's influence in foreign policy-making and the fact that Friedberg will be the only recognized China expert in such a senior position. "There really haven't been top people under Bush who knew much about China," says John Gershman, an Asia specialist at New York University. "He's the first one." But according to Gershman, Friedberg "fits clearly into the group that has been dominant in the administration" since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. "He's a China-threat person without being hysterical about it," Gershman continues. "But his appointment is a clear sign that the cooperation that has emerged between the US and China on the war on terrorism and North Korea is entirely tactical, and that Cheney is still inclined to see China as a strategic competitor." The appointment, which will take effect on June 1, comes at an interesting moment in the evolution of Sino-US ties under Bush, who came into office with a significantly harsher view of Beijing than his predecessor, president Bill Clinton. An early test came in the spring of 2001 after a collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet that destroyed the latter and forced the US plane to land on Hainan Island, where its crew was detained for several weeks. The incident turned out to be an early indication of the profound split within the administration between right-wing hawks centered in the offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose successful negotiation of the crew's return eventually defused a crisis that was avidly stoked by neo-conservatives, especially Kristol and Kagan, whose Weekly Standard magazine generally reflects the views of the administration's hawks. Bush himself appeared to mellow on China after the crisis and a subsequent meeting with then-president Jiang Zemin, a process that was furthered after September 11 when Washington actively sought Beijing's cooperation in the "war on terrorism". But despite the detente, Rumsfeld, presumably with Cheney's backing, held up resumption of military-to-military ties between the United States and China that were cut off for more than one year during the crisis. In addition, the Pentagon has been trying to persuade a reluctant Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province, to buy a slew of weaponry, including destroyers, submarines and aircraft, which the administration approved for sale to the island almost two years ago. According to last Friday's Wall Street Journal, Washington is now offering Taiwan its most advanced anti-missile system, the Patriot-3, a sale, that, if consummated, is almost certain to result in a Chinese protest. The Pentagon has also been eagerly courting the Indian military over the past year in what one recently leaked document revealed by Jane's Foreign Report depicted China as "the most significant threat" to both the US and India, and called for Delhi to become a "vital, component of US strategy" vis-a-vis China, particularly now that Washington is reassessing its military alliances with Japan and South Korea. In this context Friedberg's appointment gains significance. In his writings over several years, Friedberg has depicted China as a "strategic competitor" to the United States that will almost inevitably challenge Washington's own political and military preeminence in the region. In a 2000 article titled "The Struggle for Mastery in Asia", in the leading neo-conservative monthly Commentary, Friedberg wrote, "over the course of the next several decades there is a good chance that the United States will find itself engaged in an open and intense geopolitical rivalry with the People's Republic of China (PRC)". While such a situation is not completely inevitable, he says, it is "quite likely". "The combination of growing Chinese power, China's effort to expand its influence, and the unwillingness of the United States to entirely give way before it are the necessary preconditions of a 'struggle for mastery'," he goes on, adding that actual military confrontation could be either slow to develop or could happen as a result of "single catalytic event, such as a showdown over Taiwan". One of the major problems that US policymakers will face is balancing the interests of "powerful business lobbies" - which Friedberg calls "pro-PRC lobbying groups" - in the United States determined to expand access to China's market and labor force against strategic concerns caused by Beijing's desire to expand its influence in the region. He also expresses concern that China's growing economic power in Asia will enable it to exert influence on the region's governments as part of its "strategic competition". Moreover, writes Friedberg, China "will be a very different kind of strategic competitor from the Soviet Union", given its size, dynamism and relative openness, all of which could work against Washington's ability to contain it in the coming years. "The thrust of what he writes is the inevitability of confrontation with the US or of an attempt to displace the US in Asia," says one former senior State Department Asia specialist. "The problem with this is his automatic presumption of a clash rather than a more careful assumption that confrontation may not be inevitable." Indeed, Friedberg's assumptions were even questioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior Bush strategist who has handled relations with Afghanistan and Iraq but has supported a policy of both engagement and containment - or "congagement" - toward China. In a published reply to Friedberg's Commentary article, Khalilzad criticized his assumption "that the current Chinese regime and/or its likely successor will pursue regional hegemony. This is by no means inevitable," Khalilzad said, arguing that it was also possible that the relationship would evolve into "mutual accommodation and partnership", particularly if Beijing made democratic reforms. But Friedberg thinks this unlikely. "Regimes in transition from strict authoritarianism to greater political openness", he replied, "have historically been prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism". While Washington should continue to foster trade and investment - though not in key strategic areas - the priority, he wrote, should be placed on "serious, sustained, and unchecked efforts to strengthen our alliances, improve our military capabilities, and maintain a balance of power in Asia that is favorable to our interests. Engagement, yes; but from a position of strength." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 13 04:54:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 13:54:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Indonesia: economic disintegration Message-ID: <016701c3193e$0972efa0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Indonesia's mining quagmire By Bill Guerin Asia Times, May 13 2003 JAKARTA - Indonesian Vice President Hamzah Haz, when launching his book New Indonesia and National Self-sufficiency last week, called on all stakeholders in the mining industry to "introspect" and find breakthroughs and solutions. Indonesia's new mining law has to be implemented and incentives offered to investors, Haz said. The mining companies may have collectively sighed in agreement, but many have already packed up and left Indonesia, once a prime destination for mining investment because of its rich natural resources. By the next decade there may be only four major mines left, according to analysts. The embattled mining sector has been under siege on all fronts since regional autonomy moved the goal posts. Former president Abdurrahman Wahid was forced to speed up decentralization after the loss of East Timor and amid ongoing demands for a referendum in Aceh and for separation in Papua. Investment in exploration has dropped in the last few years, against a backdrop of political, social, economic and security concerns. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study late last year showed that new capital invested for green fields projects in Indonesia in 2001 amounted to a paltry US$7 million, a far cry from the $200 million spent on exploration in both 1997 and 1998. This is way below the minimum investment levels needed to ensure the discovery of new mine sites. There has been very little new exploration in the past four years and the country's mineral reserves are depleting rapidly because production by existing companies is high. Low market prices have also hit the country's mining sector hard. In 1999 the sector generated $8.5 billion, reflecting a 2.8 percent contribution to gross domestic product (GDP), but since then more than 220 exploration-stage mining projects have been terminated, experienced temporary closure, simply been left idle or inactive or suffered destruction of their facilities. In 2001, the mining sector still accounted for 11 percent of the economy, though investment that year fell 42 percent to $1.43 billion. By 2010 probably only four major mines will have survived: PT Freeport Indonesia, PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara, PT Inco and PT Kaltim Prima Coal. Foreign companies have frozen or abandoned mining investments worth $2 billion since 1998, driven away by a weak policy framework, disruptive activism at mine sites and other stifling handicaps. The long-awaited draft bill on general mining, which is expected to improve on the 1967 Mining Act, remains stuck in the corridors of power. Industry players and the Indonesian Mining Association (IMA) worked together last year to evaluate the draft bill and submit recommendations and amendments but it is still being deliberated in the House of Representatives (DPR). The bill would regulate all mining concessions for exploration and development and resolve some of the issues thrown up by the autonomy laws. Regional Administration Law No 22/1999 and the Intergovernmental Balance Law No 25/199, were enacted in January 2001 amid regions' outcries for greater authority in managing their own affairs. The result was chaos and confusion and an industry which had been one of the pillars of the economy during the Suharto era was quickly brought to its knees as investment ground to a virtual halt. The law gives greater control over mineral resources to provinces and is in direct conflict with the still current mining laws that give the central government authority over the industry. Conflicts have hit many mining operations across the nation because local villagers, supported by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), considered that the mining companies did not pay enough attention to community development, environmental protections and the local people's land rights. The impacts of mining operations in an area, and the politics of community unrest, are extremely complex but leading local anti-mining NGOs welcome the current downturn in the industry. Walhi (the Indonesian Environment Forum) and Jatam (the Mining Advocacy Network), follow the gospel as laid down by anti-mining foreign NGOs to the point that they pursue global anti-mining campaigns and spend their time attacking foreign companies rather than working to protect and preserve the environment. Though mining companies work closely with local communities to overcome the damage caused by their operations, these NGOs and the government itself, do little about the widespread social and environment damage from illegal mining. Anti-mining groups have the time, commitment and financial resources to persuade communities to destabilize mine sites. They are a driving force behind much of the unrest that has caused investors to head for the door. Illegal mining activities are rampant as the economic crisis forces people to look for lucrative sources of income and coal and tin mining operations are among the worst hit by the illegal miners. Illegal mining companies in South Kalimantan, for example, work hand in hand with a motley crew of land-claim activists in order to unsettle and ultimately displace international companies, so that the illegal companies can move in and grab the mineral deposits. These illegal companies are not in any way community-based but are part of a much wider government-business complex, often supported by security forces and with a war chest partly funded by regional politicians. It is estimated that illegally mined coal accounts for some 10 percent (4 million tonnes) of the country's total coal exports. The essence of regional autonomy was to be an expression of the Indonesian wish to narrow the disparity between local and central governments and, in so doing, to better the social welfare of local communities. Java, though it has few if any natural resources, has been the power base of Indonesia for many decades. The other provinces, many of them very rich, had never received a decent share of the national purse despite the fact that the island of Java accounts for only seven percent of the total land area of Indonesia. Regional autonomy has indeed resulted in power moving to the local level, often at the village and community level. The ministries in Jakarta may remain important, but it is the communities, the representative institutions, the DPRD, the DPRP, and the bupatis who all now exercise far more influence and far more control. They all want to be part of the action and share the cake, and the uncertain legal environment has resulted in local administrations making their own interpretation of the law. Mining companies are an easy target for further demands of cash or "compensation". Fighting permanent battles on the home front is not the only worry for mining companies in Indonesia. Depressed global market prices and, ironically, a stronger rupiah, have cast a shadow over future profitably, particularly with base metals. For example PT Timah Tbk - the largest tin producer in the world - made a net profit of only Rp11.3 billion in 2002, a drastic decrease of 70 percent from Rp36.8 billion in 2001. The 2002 sales decreased 15 percent to Rp1.58 trillion from Rp1.87 trillion in 2001. The decreased net profit and revenues were due to the low price of tin in world markets and the currency drop between the stronger rupiah and the dollar. The added "Indonesia" factor is always a risk of serious civil conflict. Oil and mining companies are used to this but it costs them dearly. Papua's main investor, gold and copper mining giant Freeport McMoran, operates Grasberg, the third-largest copper deposit and the largest gold deposit in the world. Papua is one of Indonesia's "unsettled" provinces where the army is in confrontation with a separatist movement. Freeport is almost permanently at odds with the local community and needs to pay the Indonesian army to guard their facilities. Contractual issues worry investors across the board where Indonesia is concerned. The new mining bill, so far amended no less than 10 times, is meant to do away with the current contract of work (COW) system that gives special incentives and guarantees to foreign investors. Though the COW system has gained appreciation by the international mining industry, it will be replaced by mining agreements. Unlike the COW, which requires a presidential signature, future mining agreements would be subject only to approval from the local authorities, although the central government would handle the drafting of the contents of the contracts with foreign mining firms. Under the bill, the central and regional governments would issue three types of licenses: a Mining Venture License (IUP), People Mining License (IPR) and a Mining Venture Contract (PUP). IPR licenses will be for small-scale traditional miners, while IUP and PUP will be allocated for major players, either local or foreign investors. Would-be investors can choose an IUP license or a PUP contract. The PUP license will be issued by either the regional or central governments, and similar to the COW, will have to be approved by the House of Representatives. Sensitive issues in the contract concerning state income would be handled directly by the central government. Recent increased royalty rates also badly impact on the commercial viability of operations and under the existing autonomy law, regional governments retain 80 percent of mining royalties. Several mining companies have held back royalty payments amounting to Rp1.4 trillion because of an unresolved issue under government regulation (PP) No 144/2000. Mahyudin Lubis, director of coal and mineral mining ventures of the directorate general of geology and mineral resources, last week warned the companies against "mixing up" the unresolved solved issue under the PP with the payment of royalties. One company that has paid up is PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara. It paid a $3,206,749.22 royalty on copper, gold and silver concentrate shipments in the first quarter of this year. Since its operations began in 1999 the company has handed over $52,361,150 in royalties. Mining companies want regional government transparency in the use of these royalty revenues, which are meant to be redistributed to the mine sites and thus fulfill the obligation to generate economic benefits for the area. Community unrest can stem from a variety of causal factors and is not prima facie evidence of transgression by mining companies. Those from outside the community often engineer compensation claims. Kalta Prima Coal (KPC), for example, jointly owned by UK-based energy group BP and Australia's mining giant Rio Tinto, has been trying for well over a year to fulfill contractual obligations with Jakarta to divest 51 percent of its shares to Indonesian parties. A protracted dispute with the East Kalimantan government and East Kutai Regency trying to force unfavorable terms on KPC has shown that first-generation contracts, made with the central government long before autonomy was even on the table, still end up totally enmeshed in the maze of unresolved regulations that followed devolution of mining and forestry rights to the regions. And yet Rio Tinto and BP are global players in the mining, oil and gas industry, and have not only invested massive sums in the country but have transferred technology that has enabled Indonesia's oil, gas and mining sector to bring in more than a quarter of the national revenue. The KPC issue is only the tip of the iceberg as a bundle of these first generation contracts are now due for divestment back into the hands of Indonesians. Four other foreign coal-mining firms and three gold mining companies need to divest their shares in the very near future. The slow pace of action in addressing the problems facing the mining industry is damaging the mindsets of potential investors and has reinforced the impression of Indonesia as unfriendly to foreign investment. Losing investment, revenues and growth potential is nothing new for Indonesia since the pseudo-reformasi began in 1998, but to lose a whole industry sector through greed and a lack of transparency will mark a victory for the vested interests groups who cleverly manipulate the new political freedom to benefit themselves at the expense of their countrymen. Exhortations by the Indonesian Vice President for 'introspection' would be better articulated to the government than to the victims. An entire industry waits ... From annewilliamson at msn.com Tue May 13 05:08:19 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 07:08:19 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: Terror in Riyadh References: <009e01c31924$0519cd80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <011001c3193f$f67fa3a0$c9b7fea9@anne> May 13, 2003 6:05 a.m. EDT Ten Americans Are Killed In Terror Attacks in Riyadh Suspicion Raised of New al Qaeda Activity; Bombings Target Expatriate Housing Complex Associated Press RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Attackers shot their way into three Saudi compounds housing foreigners and set off suicide car bombs, killing at least 11 people in a coordinated overnight terror strike that had the "earmarks of al Qaeda," according to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who arrived in Saudi Arabia Tuesday on a previously scheduled visit. Mr. Powell, after a briefing by U.S. Ambassador Robert Jordan upon his arrival from Jordan hours after the attacks, said at least 10 Americans were killed. The late Monday compound attacks were followed by a smaller bombing near the headquarters of a Saudi-U.S. company in which no casualties were immediately reported. In Australia, a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokeswoman said a 39-year-old Australian from Sydney, who worked for a computer company in Riyadh, was among the dead. The toll was expected to rise. Mr. Powell said "there was a large loss of life of others." A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said overall casualties appear to be in the 100s and that several members of the Saudi national guard perished in the attacks. He also said British, German, French, Australian and other Arab citizens were among the casualties. WAR ON TERROR See continuing coverage1 of terror activities and efforts to track down terrorist groups. Saudi officials told The Associated Press at least 50 wounded were taken to the National Guard Hospital, and other hospitals reported at least 10 injured. A guard at one of the compounds was quoted by the Saudi paper al-Watan saying seven cars, all apparently carrying suicide bombers, exploded there. At least three bodies, one identified by the guard as a Sri Lankan colleague, could be seen lying on the ground at the compound Tuesday morning. The guard did not give his name. Justice Department and FBI officials had no immediate indication that other attacks might be planned against U.S. interests at home or abroad. Mr. Powell was greeted on his arrival by Prince Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, who expressed his sorrow and vowed to cooperate with the U.S. in fighting terrorism. AP Photo/Saudi TV The attacks in Riyadh were capped by a fourth explosion outside the Saudi Maintenance Company, a joint Saudi-U.S. venture. Mr. Powell had said earlier the bombings "had the earmarks of al Qaeda." Al Qaeda is known for suicide bombings and for coordinated attacks such as the simultaneous car bombings outside American embassies in Kenya and neighboring Tanzania in 1988 that killed some 230 people. In the Sept. 11 attacks, 19 Arab men -- 15 of them Saudi -- simultaneously hijacked four planes, slamming two of them into New York's twin World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. The Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, told local newspapers the assailants were believed to be linked to the discovery of a large weapons cache on May 6. The government had said it was seeking 19 suspects, including 17 Saudis, a Yemeni, and an Iraqi with Kuwaiti and Canadian citizenships, it believed were receiving orders directly from bin Laden and had been planning to use the seized weapons to attack the Saudi royal family as well as American and British interests. Prince Nayef told al-Watan that one of the 19 people sought handed himself in -- it was unclear when -- and was being interrogated for information about Monday's explosions. So far he had offered "limited information," Prince Nayef told the paper. A U.S. embassy official said Monday's blasts were set off in the same northeast section of the city where the May 6 weapons seizure was made. A previously unknown Saudi group, the Mujahedeen in the Arabian Peninsula, had linked itself to the cache found May 6 and over the weekend vowed on an Internet site to strike American targets worldwide. It was not clear whether the explosions in Riyadh were linked to the group. An intelligence official in Washington said information from the past two weeks indicated al Qaeda had been planning a strike in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this month, the State Department advised Americans against travel to Saudi Arabia because of increased terrorism concerns. Some 35,000 U.S. citizens live in Saudi Arabia. The wealthy gated communities that were attacked Monday were all in the same area and house corporate executives and other professionals from many countries. John Crossley, a British telecommunications executive who was knocked senseless by the force of a blast in his compound and suffered cuts from glass from his shattered windows, was quoted as telling the Los Angeles Times other villas were leveled by the force of the blast. Mr. Crossley, speaking to the newspaper in a telephone interview from Saudi German hospital, said a carload of men in a car shot their way into the compound and guards gave chase through the streets until the attackers' car exploded. "The fact that they have attacked three compounds in a coordinated way sends a message to the Western community that we are not safe here. It's like they're saying, 'We can get you any time, anywhere,' " Mr. Crossley was quoted as saying. Witnesses at the al-Blaidh compound said the force of the blast shook nearby buildings and rattled windows. Witnesses also reported hearing gunfire moments before the car exploded. The compound is owned by Riyadh's deputy governor, Abdullah al-Blaidh. The small blast went off early Tuesday near the headquarters of the Saudi Maintenance Company, also known as Siyanco. The company is a jointly owned by Frank E. Basil Inc., of Washington, and local Saudi partners, officials said. Saudi officials have long feared that al Qaeda was planning attacks in the oil-rich kingdom, which is the birthplace of Mr. bin Laden and home to Islam's holiest sites. The presence of U.S. troops has been a major concern to the Saudi government, stoking anti-American sentiments among the people. Mr. bin Laden has repeatedly railed against the presence of what he calls "infidel" troops on Muslim holy land. Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said most of the 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia would leave by the end of summer. Copyright (c) 2003 The Associated Press URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105281177966063900,00.html Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/page/0,,2_0800,00.html Updated May 13, 2003 6:05 a.m. Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved From ssandron at hotmail.com Tue May 13 05:21:41 2003 From: ssandron at hotmail.com (Seth Sandronsky) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 11:21:41 +0000 Subject: [A-List] Jason Myers to Speak in Sacramento Message-ID: May 13, 2003 News Release For more information: Call John Rowntree, (916) 446-1758 P.O. Box 160406 Sacramento, CA 95816 At Sierra 2 Center, Jason Myers to Speak on Market Myths and Realities Jason C. Myers will deliver a talk titled ?The Invisible Hand: Markets and Market Ideology? on Wednesday, May 14, at 7 p.m. in the Sierra 2 Center, Room 10, 2791 24th St., Sacramento. Myers? talk is part of the Point of View Speaker Series, sponsored by the Marxist School of Sacramento. He is a professor at CSU, Stanislaus. This is a free, public event. For more information call John Rowntree at (916) 446-1758. ### Seth Sandronsky _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 13 09:12:23 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 11:12:23 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: Unemployment and Tax Cut References: <20030513143239.56662.qmail@web41309.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <3EC10B57.7010101@mindspring.com> Waht is surprising is that the labor movement has not caught on to this potential - an union of the unemployed. This is the ticket fot the movement's survival in an age when union membership is shrinking due to job loss in unionized sectors and anti-union attitude in growth, mostly high tech and financial services sectors. If there are union organizers on these lists, lets hopr they get the message. Henry C.K. Liu Warren Mosler wrote: > When this constituency gets large enough a politician > will cater to it. And the nice thing about elr/jg > is that the constituency for it would be much larger, > including those employed without benefits, part > timers, low wage earners in general, those a step or > two up the ladder afraid of the possibility of falling > off, businesses looking to hire (when there are > any...) etc. > > warren > > > > --- "Henry C.K. Liu" wrote: > >>The unemployed and the underemploy ought to start a >>right to work union >>to protect their civil rights, to weed out fraud and >>to pressure >>government to adopt policies. There are between 10 >>to 15 million >>officially unemployed and another 10 million who >>have given up looking, >>or those forced into early retirement at 50. Plus >>another 20 to 50 >>million under-employed. It would be a powerful lobby >>with enough swing >>votes in swing states. For starter, how about a >>negative income tax in >>the current tax package? Or a tax rebate, not just a >>limited time income >>averaging, but a tax rebate equal to say 70% of your >>previous high >>income before unemployment. If you made $100K last >>year and paid $30k in >>taxes, you get back $70K this year if you are >>unemployed. Unemployment >>ought to be made to hurt the system than than it >>does the individual, >>then you will be surprised how fast Congress will >>eliminated unemployment. >> >>Henry C.K. Liu >> >> >> >>Kathy in the Rocky Mountains wrote: >> >>>I recently went to a Job Fair (first time for me) >> >>and almost all of the >> >>>"employers" where scamming or selling something to >> >>the out-of-work and >> >>>somewhat desparate job seekers. The only honest >> >>employer that had >> >>>something to offer was the Army. They offered >> >>careers, salaries, >> >>>training and education, etc. Qualified people >> >>(young, healthy, >> >>>intelligent) could get career positions through >> >>this employer. This was >> >>>in stark contrast to the one who never indicated >> >>that I would pay them >> >>>5K or more for them to help me do the work of >> >>finding a job ... Or the >> >>>various commisioned sales jobs ... Or the truck >> >>driver job that really >> >>>was selling expensive training in a field that is >> >>glutted and with >> >>>future on-the-job restrictions that mean few would >> >>be reimbursed for >> >>>their training. >> >> > > > ===== > Warren Mosler, www.mosler.org > c/o James River Capital Corp > 5007 Chandler's Wharf, Suite 201/202 > Christiansted, USVI 00820 > 340-719-8813 office phone > 340-719-8804 Fax > Primary email contact: mosler at rocketmail.com > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. > http://search.yahoo.com > From schulte.baeuminghaus at chello.at Tue May 13 10:46:40 2003 From: schulte.baeuminghaus at chello.at (Schulte-baeuminghaus) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 18:46:40 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Re: [gang8] Re: Unemployment and Tax Cut References: <20030513143239.56662.qmail@web41309.mail.yahoo.com> <3EC10B57.7010101@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <001f01c3196f$3a37b720$38f56e50@chello.at> It is amazing, incredible - whatever strong word we might choose - that left-wing, worker, union movements have not emerged as they did in the period before, during and after the Great Depression. All those movements for "the battler" have died. Is it because of the failure - as it was seen in Western countries - of the socialist/communist experience in the Soviet Union and associated countries? Does the reason go deeper than that? Is it that our aspirations have so ballooned - and our concepts of our own "quality" - that we no longer want to think of ourselves as "workers?" Is the cachet "left-wing" too much a badge of shame? Are our economic policies and concepts so wrong that the "left" is still seen as the basic cause of our monetary and other economic difficulties of the past thirty years? This abandonment of the "left" applies not only in the United States of course. It applies, though in varying degrees of intensity, everywhere in the West. We've got strikes right now in Austria, France and Italy on pensions and related issues; but the need for "battler" radicalism and activism - for a genuine, sturdy political movement - goes much deeper than that. Somehow, and soon, we really have to throw off this reluctance to attend to the needs of those nearer to or at the bottom of the economic and social pile. As we used to acknowledge, it would be a good thing for the rich as well as the poor if we did. If the existing Labour and like parties continue to be reluctant to represent their natural constituencies, we need new parties to take their place. But it's hard to see any sign of their appearing now or in the foreseeable future. James Cumes http://VictoryOverWant.org http://crystaldreamspub.com/bios/authors/A-E/cumes_j.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu" To: ; ; ; ; Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2003 5:12 PM Subject: [gang8] Re: Unemployment and Tax Cut > Waht is surprising is that the labor movement has not caught on to this > potential - an union of the unemployed. This is the ticket fot the > movement's survival in an age when union membership is shrinking due to > job loss in unionized sectors and anti-union attitude in growth, mostly > high tech and financial services sectors. > > If there are union organizers on these lists, lets hopr they get the > message. > > Henry C.K. Liu > > Warren Mosler wrote: > > When this constituency gets large enough a politician > > will cater to it. And the nice thing about elr/jg > > is that the constituency for it would be much larger, > > including those employed without benefits, part > > timers, low wage earners in general, those a step or > > two up the ladder afraid of the possibility of falling > > off, businesses looking to hire (when there are > > any...) etc. > > > > warren > > > > > > > > --- "Henry C.K. Liu" wrote: > > > >>The unemployed and the underemploy ought to start a > >>right to work union > >>to protect their civil rights, to weed out fraud and > >>to pressure > >>government to adopt policies. There are between 10 > >>to 15 million > >>officially unemployed and another 10 million who > >>have given up looking, > >>or those forced into early retirement at 50. Plus > >>another 20 to 50 > >>million under-employed. It would be a powerful lobby > >>with enough swing > >>votes in swing states. For starter, how about a > >>negative income tax in > >>the current tax package? Or a tax rebate, not just a > >>limited time income > >>averaging, but a tax rebate equal to say 70% of your > >>previous high > >>income before unemployment. If you made $100K last > >>year and paid $30k in > >>taxes, you get back $70K this year if you are > >>unemployed. Unemployment > >>ought to be made to hurt the system than than it > >>does the individual, > >>then you will be surprised how fast Congress will > >>eliminated unemployment. > >> > >>Henry C.K. Liu > >> > >> > >> > >>Kathy in the Rocky Mountains wrote: > >> > >>>I recently went to a Job Fair (first time for me) > >> > >>and almost all of the > >> > >>>"employers" where scamming or selling something to > >> > >>the out-of-work and > >> > >>>somewhat desparate job seekers. The only honest > >> > >>employer that had > >> > >>>something to offer was the Army. They offered > >> > >>careers, salaries, > >> > >>>training and education, etc. Qualified people > >> > >>(young, healthy, > >> > >>>intelligent) could get career positions through > >> > >>this employer. This was > >> > >>>in stark contrast to the one who never indicated > >> > >>that I would pay them > >> > >>>5K or more for them to help me do the work of > >> > >>finding a job ... Or the > >> > >>>various commisioned sales jobs ... Or the truck > >> > >>driver job that really > >> > >>>was selling expensive training in a field that is > >> > >>glutted and with > >> > >>>future on-the-job restrictions that mean few would > >> > >>be reimbursed for > >> > >>>their training. > >> > >> > > > > > > ===== > > Warren Mosler, www.mosler.org > > c/o James River Capital Corp > > 5007 Chandler's Wharf, Suite 201/202 > > Christiansted, USVI 00820 > > 340-719-8813 office phone > > 340-719-8804 Fax > > Primary email contact: mosler at rocketmail.com > > > > __________________________________ > > Do you Yahoo!? > > The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. > > http://search.yahoo.com > > > > > > ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> > Rent DVDs Online - Over 14,500 titles. > No Late Fees & Free Shipping. > Try Netflix for FREE! > http://us.click.yahoo.com/YoVfrB/XP.FAA/uetFAA/00hrlB/TM > ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> > > The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. > To unsubscribe, email: gang8-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com > > > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ > > From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 13 12:08:59 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 15:08:59 -0300 Subject: [A-List] 15 DE MAYO/ENCUENTTRO FINAL TECNICOS KIRCHNER PRESIDENTE Message-ID: <4135-22003521318859690@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98182003-05-13T17:29:00Z2003-05-13T17:37:00Z311276425win531278909.3821 21 Gentileza de Dr.Carlos Kunkel Equipos T?cnicos Kirchner Presidente - Invitaci?n Jueves 15 de mayo de 2003 a partir de las 13 hs. ENCUENTRO FINAL DE LOS EQUIPOS TECNICOS KIRCHNER Presidente Hotel Panamericano Carlos Pellegrini 551 Ciudad de Buenos Aires Los Equipos T?cnicos Kirchner Presidente tienen el agrado de invitarlos a participar del encuentro final que se realizar? el d?a jueves 15 de mayo de 2003 a partir de las 13 hs. en el Hotel Panamericano de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, sito en Carlos Pellegrini 551, y que contar? con los siguientes temas: - 13 a 15 hs.: ? ? La Econom?a al servicio del desarrollo del empleo ? ? Red Federal de Pol?ticas Sociales ? ? La Universidad, Ciencia y Tecnologia, y planificacion Social ? ? La reforma del Estado y la sociedad de la informaci?n ? ? Cultura - 15 a 15:30 hs: Break - 15:30 hs.: Expositores centrales (Sal?n Gran Panamericano) - Cierre N?stor Carlos Kirchner -------------- Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 28765 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue May 13 15:03:44 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 17:03:44 EDT Subject: [A-List] Re: [gang8] Re: Unemployment and Tax Cut Message-ID: Comment The last time frame - boundary, of social unrest was during the era of colonial revolt and realignment in the world total social capital. This era ended with the defeat of Soviet power and the overthrow - not collapse, of socialism. In America the every intertwining of the national-colonial question with that of the "proletarian" revolution was expressed in an assertion on the part of the African American industrial workers that radicalized sections of the working class. This time frame is spent. For the first time in our history a class struggle is in emergence. Not a fight against imperial domination but a fight against capital and for means of subsistence in the imperial centers. A communist class is rapidly consolidating and seeking it mode of expression. On one level what is called the "left-wing" has absolutely nothing to do with communism but civil rights. Left wing defines itself as the left wing of the bourgeois order. The struggle of the employed workers is undergoing slow transformation on the basis of the technological revolution. The emergence of a communist class is an inescapable conclusion of the obvious. We are undergoing another wave of radical reconfiguration of the economy. To my knowledge, the last time attempts at forming unemployment committees were made in the Mid West were during the period of roughly 1974-1980. Unemployment has skyrocketed and the demand was summarized in a slogan. "Jobs, Peace and Equality." Most of us in and out of industrial production fighting to form unemployment committees were under 30 years old - I was 22 yrs. Old, and only had a vague idea of how to mobilize the unemployed. The cyclical nature of auto was running on the basis of a major layoff of workers every 36 months. The Unemployment Councils and Committee were charge with organizing those laid-off workers into a form that allowed them to press for work, income and means to sustain subsistence. Several "Unemployed Committee" were set up as appendages to Local union structures in the auto industry. At my place of employment - Local 51, the push for an Unemployment Committee was supported by most of the local union leaders under enormous pressure to deal with the mass of unemployed that crowed the monthly union meetings. During the good times Local 51 consisted of roughly 10,000 members located at two primary facilities and several smaller supplier plants. Lynch Road assembly contained roughly 5500 and Mound Road Engine 3500 workers. On that basis the political deal for the organization of the actual structure of the unemployed committee was struck: the Chairperson was from Lynch Road Assembly - a member of the International Socialist, and myself as Vice-Chairperson from the Communist League. I distinctly remember one of our mass actions being a mass march on an Unemployment Office demanding an extension of benefits for laid off office workers and everyone else - which was won. The unemployed committee would also exert pressure on the company to do away with overtime hours inside the plants and increase employment to meet swings in demand. By the time of the massive downturn of 1978-1981, the local, state and federal political structures had a better understanding of how to contain this social movement. If memory serves me correct the Trade Readjustment Act (TRA) was passed in 1978 and laid off autoworkers received lump sum payments of $6000 - $11,000.00 dollars in addition to extended unemployment benefits. There was always a certain tension between the Unemployment Committee and the structure of the trade unions, which be definition are organized to protect the rights and interest of those actively working. Nevertheless the strength of the trade union movement is that it is the organized section of the labor movement. My direct involvement with the Unemployment Committee ended in 1978 when I returned to work from being laid-off. I am not exactly sure why the Unemployment Committees could not maintain themselves. Some of the reason has to do with a certain mobility of the American people and the up and down cyclical nature of work. Each new wave of unemployed workers would contain people with a certain sense of organization that comes from industrial production but primitive skills as organizers and propagandist. The workers seeking out an organized form of protest tended to be those conditioned to work and would eventually seek out and find other employment opportunity. By the time of the massive downturn of the early 1980s - I was laid off in January 11, 1980 and would not be called back until January 1984 or for 4 years, the unemployment committees had crumbled to a large degree and began to give way to Welfare Rights Organizations led and focused on unemployed women. I ended up going South and finding work in the temporary day labor market. Might be time to visit the Fed's again and dig up the pamphlet on Unemployment Committees, although intuition says the scope and dynamics of this downturn is somewhat different. The fight is taking place on the basis of adhoc committees formed to address specific issues. About 18 months ago I work a piece for Marxline about what would become the water struggle in Detroit. At the time I did no sense the potential for a mass movement that would emerge a year later. My direct involvement occurred when the city sent me a bill for $40,000 (that's forth thousand dollars). Unable to cut the red tape I ended up having to call the local TV station ad get the story filmed and put on the news. The depth and breath of rising unemployment and the pension crisis, which is to hit hard in the coming years is outside anything I have experienced. In the city in which I live, in the main surrounded by Detroit, the city government long ago collapsed and city workers - primarily women, have lost their pensions and been emotionally and mentally devastated. Then there was an exceptionally violent struggle that erupted about a year ago around education, funding and the right to elected local school officials. Then there was the march supporting affirmative action several months ago in the wake of Bush Jr. attack on the University of Michigan affirmative action program. I have not a clue as to the form of the mass struggle although I am aware that the individual as individual can impact this form and give it shape. The organized workers - Trade Unions, are already drawn into the social fight as they lose members. Seems to me the new level of struggle is coalescing and being born. I am not sure if the generation disconnect with the pass generation of communist organizers is bad thing. Without question our organizing and propaganda skill will be put to work, but the form of the struggle is still elusive. A league form of organization of revolutionaries is needed but not an ideological grouping or "Marxist" organization. The organization of revolutionaries prime directive is to ensure that groups of people in motion stay on track and fight for only those things they are fighting for and not be disrupted from their goals. No hidden agenda schemes but mastering the objective logic of social forces and how they interact. For example a group fighting to change the government policy on water rights should never have to vote on whether or not they support affirmative action, unless affirmative action means my right to have water. An aspect of what is called the class struggle as it emerges is the tendency of the working class to fight itself. Given our actual configuration of class forces in the imperial centers the Trade Union Movement - on one level or another, is going to have to adopt demands broad enough to accelerate or not oppose the striving of the emerging communist class. Probably 25 percent of all workers on strike at any given moment can be immediately replaced with an existing technology. And this is going to happen as part of the logic of capital. Melvin P. From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 13 17:03:39 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 19:03:39 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [gang8] Re: Unemployment and Tax Cut References: Message-ID: <3EC179CB.8070101@mindspring.com> Melwin, You are the perfect person to carry the ball in this, with your experience in the labor movement. Since every worker is in constant and imminent danger of being unemployed, which as you well know is different than being laid off or furloughed with the first right of recall, and with job security being written out of labor contracts, protection from unemployment is part and parcel of employment rights and benefits. We are talking not just of bargaining power, but of legislation to have employment a part of civil right. There is no reason why there should not be a union for the unemployed and the under-employed. The existing unions ought to help sponsor it. It could be a broad organization like the AARP which lobbies on social security and reitrement issues. Unemployment is both a strucutral and chronic condition that condemns 6% of the work force to ideleness, and usually the same group of people, for the puprose of fighting inflation. Since the system uses unemployment for an economic opurpose, it stands to reason that the system pays for it. It is just good economics. The price of low inflation being high unemployment, let those who benefit from low inflation, anmely those who own financial assets, pay for the unemployment, sort of like a user's fee, which is an idea of the fiscal conservatives. Henry C.K. Liu Waistline2 at aol.com wrote: > > Comment > > The last time frame - boundary, of social unrest was during the era of > colonial revolt and realignment in the world total social capital. This era > ended with the defeat of Soviet power and the overthrow - not collapse, of > socialism. In America the every intertwining of the national-colonial > question with that of the "proletarian" revolution was expressed in an > assertion on the part of the African American industrial workers that > radicalized sections of the working class. This time frame is spent. For the > first time in our history a class struggle is in emergence. Not a fight > against imperial domination but a fight against capital and for means of > subsistence in the imperial centers. A communist class is rapidly > consolidating and seeking it mode of expression. > > On one level what is called the "left-wing" has absolutely nothing to do with > communism but civil rights. Left wing defines itself as the left wing of the > bourgeois order. The struggle of the employed workers is undergoing slow > transformation on the basis of the technological revolution. The emergence of > a communist class is an inescapable conclusion of the obvious. We are > undergoing another wave of radical reconfiguration of the economy. > > To my knowledge, the last time attempts at forming unemployment committees > were made in the Mid West were during the period of roughly 1974-1980. > Unemployment has skyrocketed and the demand was summarized in a slogan. > "Jobs, Peace and Equality." Most of us in and out of industrial production > fighting to form unemployment committees were under 30 years old - I was 22 > yrs. Old, and only had a vague idea of how to mobilize the unemployed. The > cyclical nature of auto was running on the basis of a major layoff of workers > every 36 months. > > The Unemployment Councils and Committee were charge with organizing those > laid-off workers into a form that allowed them to press for work, income and > means to sustain subsistence. Several "Unemployed Committee" were set up as > appendages to Local union structures in the auto industry. At my place of > employment - Local 51, the push for an Unemployment Committee was supported > by most of the local union leaders under enormous pressure to deal with the > mass of unemployed that crowed the monthly union meetings. During the good > times Local 51 consisted of roughly 10,000 members located at two primary > facilities and several smaller supplier plants. Lynch Road assembly contained > roughly 5500 and Mound Road Engine 3500 workers. On that basis the political > deal for the organization of the actual structure of the unemployed committee > was struck: the Chairperson was from Lynch Road Assembly - a member of the > International Socialist, and myself as Vice-Chairperson from the Communist > League. > > I distinctly remember one of our mass actions being a mass march on an > Unemployment Office demanding an extension of benefits for laid off office > workers and everyone else - which was won. The unemployed committee would > also exert pressure on the company to do away with overtime hours inside the > plants and increase employment to meet swings in demand. > > By the time of the massive downturn of 1978-1981, the local, state and > federal political structures had a better understanding of how to contain > this social movement. If memory serves me correct the Trade Readjustment Act > (TRA) was passed in 1978 and laid off autoworkers received lump sum payments > of $6000 - $11,000.00 dollars in addition to extended unemployment benefits. > > There was always a certain tension between the Unemployment Committee and the > structure of the trade unions, which be definition are organized to protect > the rights and interest of those actively working. Nevertheless the strength > of the trade union movement is that it is the organized section of the labor > movement. My direct involvement with the Unemployment Committee ended in 1978 > when I returned to work from being laid-off. I am not exactly sure why the > Unemployment Committees could not maintain themselves. Some of the reason has > to do with a certain mobility of the American people and the up and down > cyclical nature of work. Each new wave of unemployed workers would contain > people with a certain sense of organization that comes from industrial > production but primitive skills as organizers and propagandist. > > The workers seeking out an organized form of protest tended to be those > conditioned to work and would eventually seek out and find other employment > opportunity. By the time of the massive downturn of the early 1980s - I was > laid off in January 11, 1980 and would not be called back until January 1984 > or for 4 years, the unemployment committees had crumbled to a large degree > and began to give way to Welfare Rights Organizations led and focused on > unemployed women. > > I ended up going South and finding work in the temporary day labor market. > Might be time to visit the Fed's again and dig up the pamphlet on > Unemployment Committees, although intuition says the scope and dynamics of > this downturn is somewhat different. The fight is taking place on the basis > of adhoc committees formed to address specific issues. About 18 months ago I > work a piece for Marxline about what would become the water struggle in > Detroit. At the time I did no sense the potential for a mass movement that > would emerge a year later. My direct involvement occurred when the city sent > me a bill for $40,000 (that's forth thousand dollars). Unable to cut the red > tape I ended up having to call the local TV station ad get the story filmed > and put on the news. > > The depth and breath of rising unemployment and the pension crisis, which is > to hit hard in the coming years is outside anything I have experienced. In > the city in which I live, in the main surrounded by Detroit, the city > government long ago collapsed and city workers - primarily women, have lost > their pensions and been emotionally and mentally devastated. Then there was > an exceptionally violent struggle that erupted about a year ago around > education, funding and the right to elected local school officials. Then > there was the march supporting affirmative action several months ago in the > wake of Bush Jr. attack on the University of Michigan affirmative action > program. > > I have not a clue as to the form of the mass struggle although I am aware > that the individual as individual can impact this form and give it shape. The > organized workers - Trade Unions, are already drawn into the social fight as > they lose members. Seems to me the new level of struggle is coalescing and > being born. I am not sure if the generation disconnect with the pass > generation of communist organizers is bad thing. Without question our > organizing and propaganda skill will be put to work, but the form of the > struggle is still elusive. > > A league form of organization of revolutionaries is needed but not an > ideological grouping or "Marxist" organization. The organization of > revolutionaries prime directive is to ensure that groups of people in motion > stay on track and fight for only those things they are fighting for and not > be disrupted from their goals. No hidden agenda schemes but mastering the > objective logic of social forces and how they interact. For example a group > fighting to change the government policy on water rights should never have to > vote on whether or not they support affirmative action, unless affirmative > action means my right to have water. An aspect of what is called the class > struggle as it emerges is the tendency of the working class to fight itself. > > Given our actual configuration of class forces in the imperial centers the > Trade Union Movement - on one level or another, is going to have to adopt > demands broad enough to accelerate or not oppose the striving of the emerging > communist class. Probably 25 percent of all workers on strike at any given > moment can be immediately replaced with an existing technology. And this is > going to happen as part of the logic of capital. > > Melvin P. > > From soncu at pacbell.net Tue May 13 17:29:14 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 16:29:14 -0700 Subject: [A-List] =?iso-8859-1?Q?=28Forward_from_Nestor=29_A_comment_to_Henry=B4s_notes.?= Message-ID: Subj.: A comment to Henry?s notes. Henry Liu: "The American notion of freedom focuses on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom to disagree with and oppose government policies through legal means. Associated with these political freedoms are institutions of free enterprise and free markets. Any nation deemed deficient in any of these characteristics is fair game for regime change through the application of overwhelming military superpower, unless it possesses credible counterattack deterrence." The problem lies in that defending the Dear friends, Written in haste. Menem has decided to quit. He had to confront Kirchner (basically, Duhalde?s child, but now not exactly so IMHO since there is a large amount of local Peronist leaders who are left without a national reference and may turn to the President -Kirchner- for support) on the May 18th elections. He thus ends his life with an act of cowardice. Kirchner will get to power with just a 22% of the vote on the first round, which is too small but in the current context may acquire a different meaning (Menem was to lose 70%-30% or even 80%-20% in the runoff). More later. We shall see what will Rodr?guez Sa? do. He has made many blunders after the April 27 elections. Maybe he hopes to gain all the local Menemist leaders in the Inland country for himself. Tomorrow and on the 15th there will be a meeting of the MNyP where the last decission will be made. Hugs, From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 13 13:21:32 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 16:21:32 -0300 Subject: [A-List] HOY MARTES SE BAJA EL TURCO, NOMAS Message-ID: <4135-220035213192132260@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98142003-05-13T18:52:00Z2003-05-13T18:56:00Z1win119.3821 21 MUCHACHOS Y CHICAS PARECE QUE SE BAJA EL TURCO, NOMAS, QUIZAS HOY MARTES MISMO O MA?ANA MI?RCOLES.. SE FUE A ANILLACO, SUSPENDIO TODAS SUS ACTIVIDADES, EN LOS DISTRITOS NO RECIBEN DINERO Y LA PAUTA DE TV ESTA CORTADA. NOS LLAMA LA GENTE DE LA TV DEL GRUPO CLAR?N ?QUE PREPARAN UN PROGRAMA ESPECIAL... ?SERA O NO SERA? PARECE QUE SI UN ABRAZO LA NAKY ------------------ RADIO LA RED COMUNICO LA DECISION DE MENEM QUIEN HARIA EL ANUNCIO DESDE LA RIOJA (ANCLA-Buenos Aires) A las 14.37, un movil de Radio La Red anunci? desde el Hotel Presidente de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, que Menem no participar? de la segunda vuelta electoral. Operadores del comando menemista aseguraron que Menem har?a p?blica su decisi?n esta tarde desde La Rioja, con el pretexto de "no generar un un gasto econ?mico al pa?s y adem?s quiere un pa?s en paz y no en medio de una lucha entre menemistas y duhaldistas". De esta forma quedar? suspendido el ballottage establecido para el pr?ximo domingo. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3372 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 13 18:58:34 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 20:58:34 -0400 Subject: [A-List] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re=3A_=5BA-List=5D_=28Forward_from_Nestor?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=29_A_comment_to_Henry=B4s_notes=2E?= References: Message-ID: <3EC194BA.7050401@mindspring.com> I don't disaree with you. I was merely stating the American view of its ideology, not approving it. Personally, I think if the US seeks regime change in any country that falls short on these value, the uS itself would be on top of the list. But the main issue is that even a country is deficient in US values, it is not sufficient reason for US imposed regime change. You need to remember that I am speaking to a general audience, including Americans. My aim is to show Americans that even if their values are acceptable to them, they are not universal values. Henry C.K. Liu Sabri Oncu wrote: > Subj.: A comment to Henry?s notes. > > Henry Liu: > > "The American notion of freedom focuses on freedom of speech, > freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom to > disagree with and oppose government policies through legal means. > Associated with these political freedoms are institutions of free > enterprise and free markets. Any nation deemed deficient in any > of these characteristics is fair game for regime change through > the application of overwhelming military superpower, unless it > possesses credible counterattack deterrence." > > The problem lies in that defending the West European right to "freedom of speech, freedom of religion, > freedom of association and freedom to disagree with and oppose > government policies through legal means" clashes, in the (actual > or potential) rogue states, with "free enterprise and free > markets" both _before_ and _after_ the attack. > > Before the attack, because these wars seek to tilt the scales > towards a single group of competitors. After the attack, because > these wars impose conditions for hegemonic domination by this > single group of competitors. > > Thus, they are monopoly wars not "free enterprise wars". > > Even if we stick to the idyosincratic and idiotic (in the > primeval Greek sense of the word) ideology that guides these > movements, they are immediately proven false. > > The whole new order is based on sheer force, not benign hegemony. > Bayonets, however, are a very uncomfortable place to sit on, as > Talleyrand observed some time ago. > > Sooner or later, the whole castle made of cards will crumble > down. And this will be worth seeing, if you cannot have the luck > to be a participant in the destruction of this order. > > The question is not "will it last?" but "how long will it keep > stable?". > > > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue May 13 23:57:44 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 22:57:44 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Fw: dreams and nightmares Message-ID: <004201c319de$5dcb1410$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "michael a. lebowitz" Dear Friends, Last week in Havana, foreign participants at the conference 'Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century' agreed that we could not ignore the current situation in which Cuba finds itself due to the actions of the United States. We heard from many Cubans (including Fidel in a dialogue with us) and then put together a statement of solidarity which reflected the various concerns of the participants and which we think reflects the concerns of many on the Left. We hope that you will read this statement, will agree to support it and will circulate it widely. The initial signers are listed below, and additional signatures can be sent to marxdreams at hotmail.com. Dreams and Nightmares Communique of Solidarity by Foreign Participants in the international conference ?Karl Marx and the challenges of the 21st century'? 1. Humanity has always dreamt of a better world, one marked by equality, solidarity, and the ability of all people to survive and develop their human potential. Today we are living through a nightmare, in a new era of world domination: that of armed neoliberalism. 2. The series of interventionist wars, from Yugoslavia to Iraq, traversing Afghanistan, constitutes what seems to be only the beginning of a longer process. 3. But fortunately the recent and immense protest against the war and in favor of peace has demonstrated that the people of the world , including significant sectors of the North American people, reject this nightmare. 4. This project is led by a group of leaders from the United States who don't only look to control the resources of the planet, but also to establish a universal juridical, political and moral order under their cynical hegemony. 5. These leaders are militarizing the world and are initiating what they call cynically "preventive wars". They do not hesitate to violate international rights and to generalize the inhuman practices inaugurated at Guant?namo. Further they do not hesitate to reduce the civic liberties of their own citizens and to destroy the democratic tradition of their own people. 7. They do not hesitate to adopt attitudes and actions with hegemonic and racist characteristics. 9. Cuba is at the doorway of the empire and it fears, not without reason, that it can be one of the next targets. There are many signs that support this fear: the growing media offensive, the accusations of terrorism, diverse type of provocations, an increase of the extent of the blockade, the financial support of opposition and of subversion, the announcement of future attacks on the country by government spokesmen. 10. Today Cuba is trying to realize those dreams of a better world. No one knows better than the Cuban people themselves how far they have to go yet to realize their dreams. But the political and social achievements of the revolution, the result of their socialist project, demonstrate that dreams can be realized. Those achievements and hopes for a better world are threatened by a power based in inequality, force and war. 11. Despite our pain about the recent use of capital punishment in Cuba, a pain we know is shared by the Cuban government itself, we understand that we must fight against the nightmare that threatens Cuba and all our dreams for a better world. We denounce the current process of violence on the part of the U.S. government. We oppose turning Cuba into another Iraq, and we reaffirm our solidarity with the Cuban people and their revolution. May 8, 2003 Listado Firmantes Declaraci?n Conferencia Carlos Marx y los Desaf?os del siglo XXI. Nombre Pa?s Alarc?n C., Sandra Colombia Albritton, Robert Canad? Alcaraz, Vicente Espa?a Alnasseri, Sabah Irak/Alemania Alzaga, Luciano Suecia Amezcua, Cuauht?moc M?xico Amin, Samir Senegal Bienefeld, Manfred Canad? Bond, Patrick Sud Africa Boulavka, Liudmila Rusia Br?ckner, Gerhard Alemania/Espa?a Burkett, Paul USA Campbell, Al USA . Chelala, Santiago Argentina Chernomas, Robert Canada Clarke, Simon UK Cole, Ken Inglaterrra Comellas Carrizo, Carmen Espa?a Cooney, Paul USA Cordero, Teresa M?xico Cottrell, Allin USA Diaz D?az, Julio Espa?a Edwards, Se?n Irlanda Egan, Daniel USA Escobar, Heron M?xico Fainman, Fagie Canad? Fern?ndez G., Javier M?xico Ferrer, Salvador M?xico Foley, Barbara USA Gallardo, Helio Costa Rica Gil De San Vicente, I?aki Euskal Herria Guerrero, Diego Espa?a Harnecker, Marta Chile Hart-Landsberg, Martin USA Hodson, Diana Canad? Houtard, Fran?ois B?lgica Jim?nez, Lola Espa?a Kohan, N?stor Argentina Kotz, David USA Labica, Georges Francia Lebowitz, Michael Canad? Lynch, Colin Canad? Mar?n, Michelle UK Masondo, David Sud Africa Mavroudeas, Stavros Grecia Mcdonough, Terrence Irlanda M?sz?ros, Donatella Inglaterra M?sz?ros, Istv?n Inglaterra Miller, Nchamah Colombia Milonakis, Dimitris Grecia Monereo, Manuel Espana Morales, Manuel Bolivia Moseley, Fred USA Natarajan, J. India Nayeri, Kamran Iran/USA Ngwane, Trevor Sud Africa Orellana, Mar?a de Lourdes M?xico Ortiz, Dante Rep. Dominicana Rauber, Isabel Argentina Rolein, Strennie Belgica/Cuba Salem, Bassel Ismail Palestina S?nchez R. De Zapata, Matilde M?xico Skalon, Ana de Argentina Spassky, Andrei Rusia/Cuba Stanford, Mark UK Stein, Philip USA Su?rez, Federico Espa?a Torres, Jos? Espa?a Vogel, Lise USA Ware, Robert Canad? Ya?ez, Gonzalo M?xico Yeu, Marian Canad? --------------------- Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Currently based in Cuba. Can be reached via: Michael Lebowitz c/o MEPLA Calle 13 No. 504 ent. D y E, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba Codigo Postal 10 4000 (537) 33 30 75 or 832 21 54 telefax (at night): (537) 33 30 75 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 00:51:30 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 09:51:30 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Destructive creation: mercury medicines Message-ID: <000701c319e5$40148e40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Fears over UK vaccines after US reports link to autism Exclusive: Call for ban on 'hazardous' additive VICKY COLLINS The Herald, 14 May 2003 A PRESERVATIVE blamed for triggering cases of autism, but which is used routinely in vaccines for hundreds of thousands of children across Britain, is unsafe according to a major investigation on behalf of the US government. For the first time, the American authorities have said that mercury-based thiomersal is hazardous and they have accused drug companies of failing to adequately test the product for side-effects. The three-year investigation by the House of Representatives was launched after vaccines containing thiomersal began to be withdrawn from the US market in 1999 without explanation but following increasing concern among parents The UK medical establishment has repeatedly claimed that the preservative is safe, and only recently Andrew Fraser, Scotland's deputy chief medical officer, insisted vaccines containing mercury posed "no significant health risk". In Britain, 13 vaccines still contain the substance, including the triple diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough (DTwP) jab, which is given to babies aged from two to four months every year. But the US report says that "no amount of mercury is appropriate in any childhood vaccine" and calls for the immediate withdrawal of the only two vaccines containing traces of thiomersal that now remain on the American market. The paper, called Mercury in Medicine - Taking Unnecessary Risks, calls for a conference of the "best scientific minds across America" to uncover the cause of the massive increase in autism cases. In Scotland, autism has risen by 1600% in the past 10 years. Many believe vaccines containing mercury are linked to autism, and the report criticises the lack of research into a possible link, noting that mercury poisoning results in "markedly similar" symptoms. Action Against Autism (AAA), the Scottish pressure group, said yesterday the report showed vaccine safety in the UK was monitored by "cavalier incompetents". Bill Welsh, AAA chairman, said: "Thiomersal-containing vaccines should be banned immediately. . . . The more one looks at the vaccination programme, the more one becomes concerned for the safety of our children." The release of the House of Representatives report marks the first official recognition of the dangers posed by thiomersal, paves the way for thousands of lawsuits in the US, and looks likely to completely undermine British policy on the issue. The withdrawal of vaccines containing thiomersal from the US market in 1999 is thought to be linked to a ?30bn class action lodged against Eli Lilly, the main thiomersal producer, but the drug companies refused to say anything other than it was a precautionary measure. In Britain, thiomersal is present in flu vaccines, a pneumonia vaccine, and the DTwP childhood injection. There is no mercury in vaccines for MMR, polio, meningitis C, or the DTaP injection. In January this year Dr Fraser said thiomersal was not dangerous because it contains ethyl mercury, which is excreted, rather than methyl mercury, which accumulates in the body. However, the US report refers to methyl and ethyl mercury as closely associated compounds and says that the Food and Drug Administration is now using the same safe limit standards for both substances. The report says: "The possible risk for harm from . . . high-level exposure to thimerosal (thiomersal) is not 'theoretical' but very real and documented in the medical literature." It criticises the FDA decision to phase out vaccines containing thiomersal from 1999 rather than ban them immediately. It also condemns the lack of research into possible links between autism and thiomersal. It says such research should begin immediately. Last night, a spokesman for Eli Lilly said: "Anyone can lodge a report with the House of Representatives. No government organisation here in the United States has indicated that thiomersal within childhood vaccines is dangerous. No scientific piece of evidence has shown a causal link. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 00:53:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 09:53:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <000f01c319e5$7c27e3a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> There is a second IRA mole, says spy source 'Stakeknife' urged to face press with his denial MICHAEL SETTLE The Herald, 14 May 2003 PRESSURE was mounting on Freddie Scappaticci last night to hold a press conference and publicly deny he is Stakeknife, the British Army's top spy in the IRA. As the 58-year-old builder issued a statement through his lawyer denying he was the security services' most prized IRA informer, it was claimed there was a second "Stakeknife", who for years had supplied his Army handlers with top-grade intelligence. However, unlike Scappaticci, who retired from IRA duties in the mid-1990s, the second unnamed spy was said to be still operating undercover. According to the senior security source who originally revealed Scappaticci's identity, the second man was a republican of several years' standing and from north Belfast. He also said: "Stakeknife is an operation referring to two people, not one." The latest claim throws further intrigue on a saga that has rocked the republican community across Ireland. Last night, another IRA spy, Kevin Fulton, in an interview on Ulster Television, claimed he knew of other agents clandestinely working within the republican terror group. While it was confidently claimed that Scappaticci, known as Scap, had been spirited out of Northern Ireland early on Sunday, his whereabouts remain a mystery. Republican sources said he had gone into hiding on his own initiative and was still in Belfast. One revealed Sinn Fein had urged him to hold a press conference to clear his name. "As far as I am aware Scap's family has been in contact with Sinn Fein and the advice they have received is for him to publicly refute these allegations. He has tried to do that through his solicitor, but was advised that, if necessary, he should consider coming forward through a press conference." Earlier, Michael Flanigan, Scappaticci's lawyer, issued a statement in which he said: "He is not Stakeknife." He added: "He has never been an informer, has never contacted the intelligence services, has never been taken into protective custody and has never received any money from the security services. "My client is the victim of misinformation, apparently emanating from the security forces and disseminated by the press. Mr Scappaticci is an ordinary working man living in west Belfast and as such has no means at his disposal to combat this onslaught of false allegations." Mr Flanigan added: "Clearly, his life has been placed in danger as a result and he is now in hiding." It is claimed Stakeknife was a feared member of the IRA's internal security team, the so-called "nutting squad", which vetted new recruits and executed suspected informers. Security sources claimed he voluntarily became a spy in 1978, providing high quality intelligence. His reward for being the security services' jewel in the crown was reputedly ?80,000 a year. His key role as the second-in-command of the internal security squad raises the question of whether other police and Army agents within the IRA were sacrificed to protect his identity. A security source said: "He was running for a long time and provided a steady flow of information which would have more or less gone to the top. Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence confirmed the Army had operated an informer under the codename "Steak Knife" (sic) but denied Scappaticci was in its custody. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, is believed to have requested an interview with the informer as part of his probe into allegations of collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:00:01 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:00:01 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Paul Foot on New Labour Message-ID: <001701c319e6$707b3100$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Worse than Thatcher Paul Foot Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian My earliest memories of David Triesman glow with pride at the furious and eventually successful campaign to get him reinstated as a suspended student at Essex University in the late 1960s. He was a wild man of the Very Far Left. I didn't follow his subsequent career very closely, except occasionally to observe him on the usual dreary road from left to right, until he ended up as general secretary of the Labour party. Last week, acting entirely on his own authority, he suspended George Galloway from Labour party membership. He gave as a "reason" some mild remarks George made about the role of his party leader during the war in Iraq. Triesman made no comment about the hotly disputed allegations made against George by the Daily Telegraph, but the suspension can only have damaged George's libel case against the newspaper. What amused me most, however, was Triesman's pathetic whine that he was acting against George exactly as he or any of his predecessors would have acted against any other party member. Really? How did the Labour party leadership respond, for instance, to the shocking story of Geoffrey Robinson's massive (and secret) loan to his fellow minister Peter Mandelson? What action followed the revelations about the extremely close connections between Mandelson and the Hinduja brothers when the latter were under investigation in India for the most monstrous arms dealing? What action did the Labour party take against Dr John Reid when the parliamentary standards commissioner exposed his nepotistic employment of his son on a salary paid out of his parliamentary office cost allowance? As far as I know, there was no Labour party investigation into any of these allegations, each of them in my view much more damaging to the Labour movement than the trenchant comments of George Galloway. There were no suspensions. Robinson is still an MP. So is Mandelson. So shocked were the Labour leaders at the revelations about Dr Reid that they promoted him - to be chairman of the Labour party and now leader of the House of Commons. I wonder whether David Triesman ever reflects on the ideals and passion of his youth, and compares them with his current responsibility for New Labour. How, for instance, does he hope to persuade people that the Labour party still deserves the support of the workers and the poor? This week come official figures to prove that after six years of Labour government the gap between rich and poor in Britain is even wider than it was under Thatcher. "Worse than Thatcher" is a terrible indictment, but thoroughly deserved. In every area of social and political endeavour the New Labour administration has distanced itself from its origins, promoted and enriched the rich, glorified them for their wealth and occasionally even dabbled in their greed and their corruption. Those who speak up for the rich are promoted, ennobled, rewarded. Those who have the guts to speak out against them and their cabinet toadies are suspended. Is Tam Dalyell anti-semitic? My first job as a young feature writer on the Scottish Daily Record 41 years ago was to interview the Labour candidate at a parliamentary by-election in West Lothian, an engaging Old Etonian who lived in a castle. I liked him at once (and have liked him ever since) but was rather surprised when he told me a few months later that there was only one socialist country on earth: Israel. Obviously, Tam has changed his mind since, and obviously he is wrong to complain about Jewish pressure on Blair and Bush when he means Zionist pressure. But that's a mistake that is constantly encouraged by the Zionists. The most honourable and principled Jews, here, in Israel and everywhere else, are those who oppose the imperialist and racist policies of successive Israeli governments. It was a Palestinian Jew, Tony Cliff, who convinced me very early in life that the six-day Israeli war in 1967 was a war of conquest and occupation that would make it easier for US billionaires to keep their fingers on the region's oil. When I wrote in this column not long ago about the discrepancy in reactions to UN resolutions against Israel and against Iraq, I was surprised to read a rebuttal from a representative of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The Board was set up in 1760 to "protect, support and defend the interests and religious rights and customs of the Jewish community in the UK". There are lots of Jews in Britain who are bitterly opposed to the loathsome Israeli occupation of other peoples' countries and the grotesque violence it involves. Are their interests also protected and defended by the Board of Deputies? If not, are the deputies guilty of making the mistake for which they denounce Tam Dalyell? From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:00:55 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:00:55 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK corporate state: unhealthy accumulation Message-ID: <001f01c319e6$906f6da0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Blair puts NHS out to tender John Carvel, social affairs editor Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian Tony Blair told private-sector healthcare executives at breakfast in Downing Street yesterday that he wanted to open the whole of the NHS to outside competition. Sharply accelerating NHS reform after defeating the Labour backbench rebellion against foundation hospitals last week, he floated a proposal for the state to regulate NHS services without necessarily running them. The breakfast was attended by representatives of private companies bidding to run 11 diagnostic and treatment centres (DTCs) due to open in December to provide fast-track hip replacement and cataract surgery for NHS patients. They are expected to perform about 100,000 operations a year. South African companies were in the list of bidders released by the Department of Health last night, provoking a fear that the scheme may rely on poaching staff from developing countries which can ill afford to lose them. Mr Blair told the private sector executives and managers of NHS-run DTCs: "We are anxious to ensure that this is the start of opening up the whole of the NHS supply system so that we end up with a situation where the state is the enabler, it is the regulator, but it is not always the provider. "The basic principles of the NHS will remain but we will operate them and implement them in a different way." Alan Milburn, the health secretary, added: "With more resources going into the NHS this is not the time to slow down on reform. It is the time to speed it up to get a better service for NHS patients." The breakfast guests got the impression that they were being encouraged to bid to run DTCs as a means of entering an expanding market for treating NHS patients. The health department said the NHS was running 15 DTCs and had plans for another 30. Eventually NHS and private DTCs would perform 250,000 operations a year on patients from the NHS waiting list. The private bidders included Netcare, the biggest integrated healthcare body in South Africa, and consortia involving companies from the US, Canada, Germany, France and Switzerland, some in partnership with UK firms. For example, Interhealth Canada, a Canadian hospital operator, has joined forces with the PFI provider Jarvis. The department said the companies would bring their own clinical staff with them to avoid exacerbating NHS staff shortages, but this would not breach its commitment to avoid poaching doctors and nurses from developing countries. It promised that the scheme would not go ahead without the blessing of the South African government. Last night Mr Milburn was preparing to name the NHS hospitals which have passed the first selection round for foundation status. It is understood that he will declare 29 of the 32 applicants eligible. David Hinchliffe, Labour chairman of the Commons health select committee, said half of them had applied for foundation status "to win brownie points from the government", and had no intention of proceeding. Committee members could find no substantial evidence that private companies offered the NHS anything that could not be achieved by the public sector. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:04:54 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:04:54 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK corporate state: unhealthy accumulation Message-ID: <002e01c319e7$1f3c6f60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> On 15 January 2002, I wrote: At the moment the NHS is exempt from GATS provision. But the privatisation of NHS *assets* enables the NHS to become a Canadian-style insurer of first resort, whilst enabling private companies to take ownership and complete what would be the first tranche of privatisation. The second would occur once the insurance industry employed GATS and other legislative weapons to attack the NHS's insurance monopoly. This could be sold to the British public as fine were the NHS then to become the Office of the Health Care Regulator or some such outfit, in which the state would then act as a guarantor of a minimum level of universal cover (as appears to have been the model adopted by the World Bank in developing countries) whilst private companies cream skim the lucrative action and leave public facilities to wither amid fiscal crisis. Alarmist? Fanciful? Watch this space. See http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002/msg00170.htm ------ Foundation trust regulator sought Tash Shifrin Wednesday May 14, 2003 The post of independent regulator for NHS foundation trusts, potentially one of the most powerful jobs in the health service, has been advertised at a salary that could top ?175,000. The advert in today's Society Guardian will further stoke the political row over foundation trusts, which last week sparked a rebellion by more than 60 Labour backbenchers. The health and social care (community health and standards) bill, which creates the legislative framework for foundation trusts is now being debated at its Commons committee stage. The independent regulator will have sweeping powers over future foundation trusts, setting out the regulatory framework within which they will operate and setting the terms of authorisation for each foundation. The post-holder will draw up a "prudential borrowing code" covering all foundations and set a "prudential borrowing limit" for each one. But in an apparent snub to the chancellor, Gordon Brown - who has fought to keep borrowing within Treasury-set limits - the job specification says the regulator should "not aim to set prudential borrowing limits so tightly as to negate NHS foundation trusts' freedom to manage". The code will be established after consultation with the health secretary and "every NHS trust intending to apply for foundation status". The independent regulator "will not become an alternate source of line management for NHS foundation trusts, replacing the Department of Health", the job description promises. But although foundations will have wide freedoms to determine what services are provided and to sell off assets, the regulator will lay down which assets and services must be "protected" and retained. . The regulator will also decide the proportion of a foundation trust's total income that can be derived from private patients, subject to provisions in legislation. They will also have strong powers to intervene where trusts are failing or breaking the terms of their authorisation, including powers to appoint "interim management or insolvency administrators" to take over the running of the trust. The regulator will also be able to sack the board or "in extremis" revoke the foundation's licence. The regulator could become one of the most powerful figures in the health service if - as the health secretary, Alan Milburn has suggested - all hospitals become foundations over the next five years. Information for candidates compares the independent regulator's relationship with ministers with that of the charity commission, financial services authority or inland revenue. The salary for the post is "likely to be in the range" of ?150,000-?175,000, but more could be offered. The postholder could also opt for a four-day week. Because legislation to create foundation trusts and the regulator post has not yet been passed by parliament, the successful candidate will initially be appointed as an advisor to the health secretary. Candidates are expected to have a background at chief executive or finance director level or in a role providing both professional and managerial leadership in a professional service or regulatory organisation. They could have experience of either the private or public sector, while "a combination of both might be particularly valuable". Experience directly relevant to the NHS is described as "helpful but not essential". From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:07:32 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:07:32 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU integration struggles: Commission imposed neoliberalism Message-ID: <003601c319e7$7d5b96c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> State's golden share in BAA is illegal Takeover shield scrapped Andrew Osborn in Brussels Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian The government was stripped of its power to protect BAA, the airports operator, from a hostile foreign takeover yesterday and ordered to scrap the state's "illegal" golden share in the company. The ruling, from the European court of justice in Luxembourg, could be the beginning of the end for a string of similar golden shares in former nationalised companies such as National Grid. It also leaves BAA vulnerable to a hostile foreign takeover, a move which could throw the government's plans for airport expansion in the south-east into disarray. Analysts suggested that potential bidders could include Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa or private equity groups such as WestLB. The shares allow the government to veto takeovers deemed not to be in the national interest and are a hangover from the heyday of privatisation in the 1980s. But Europe's highest court yesterday signalled that such shares would be tolerated only in exceptional circumstances. Its ruling is final and cannot be appealed against. In the case of BAA, it said the share flew in the face of EU rules on the free movement of capital, discouraged cross-border investment and had to be scrapped. The government has three months to give up its golden share. Heralding a Europe-wide crackdown on the issue, the court also ordered the Spanish government to scrap similar shares in phone company Telefonica, oil company Repsol and power firm Endesa. The European commission, which brought all four cases, said it was delighted. It is gearing up for more legal challenges - notably against a German law which it believes makes Volkswagen bid-proof. "Hopefully the German authorities will see the writing on the wall and take heed," a spokesman said. "[We] considered that the way in which BAA was privatised gave rise to unjustifiable investment restrictions and the court agreed with us." The government, which has fought hard to keep the BAA golden share, said it accepted the judgment. "We will be reviewing the situation in regard to BAA and other golden shares to ensure that they comply with EU law," a spokesman said. Government sources argued separately that it might be possible to amend the golden shares instead of scrapping them. BAA, which was privatised in 1987 and runs seven UK airports including Heathrow and Gatwick, said it was unfazed. "It's not a big issue for the company," said Mike Toms, regulatory affairs director. "The general principle I think is that a liquid market in our shares is a good thing and we wouldn't oppose the government surrendering its golden share." The share gave the government a right of veto over takeovers and caps the maximum stock that any one shareholder can hold at 15%. The government has made use of it at least once. Under the EU treaty, governments can restrict capital movements only on grounds of "public security, public order, public health and essential interests of security connected to defence and the exercise of public authority". From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:09:15 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:09:15 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: party funding Message-ID: <003e01c319e7$baadd4c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Labour donors stump up ?5.4m David Hencke, Westminster correspondent Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian Four wealthy donors bailed out Labour in the first three months of this year by contributing nearly ?3m to the party, according to the latest returns from the Electoral Commission published yesterday. The science minister, Lord Sainsbury, gave ?2.5m - nearly half the ?5.4m donated to the party over the period. The other big donors were Sir Ronald Cohen, who gave ?250,000, and the Sunderland football club chairman, Bob Murray, who was recently awarded a CBE for public service. He gave ?100,000. The Europhile City financier Derek Tullett, who made almost ?20m in January when he sold his broking firm, also gave the party ?100,000. Patrick Stewart, better known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the sci-fi cult series Star Trek, donated ?50,000. Among the smaller donors, David Lammy, the junior health minister, gave ?1,820. Labour still received substantial donations from trade unions including Unison, Amicus, Usdaw and the TGWU. The Fire Brigades Union - in dispute with the government during this period - gave more than ?12,000. Donations totalling ?61,381 that should have been reported by Labour in previous quarters have been included in the latest returns. The Conservatives received more than ?2m over the same period, mainly from wealthy individuals. The largest donation - more than ?115,000 - was raised at the party's winter ball. The Liberal Democrats raised ?281,817, of which the largest sum - some ?125,000 - came for research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Some 70 registered small parties failed to submit returns but are thought to have had nothing to declare. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:11:35 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:11:35 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: Hain again Message-ID: <005a01c319e8$0dc49540$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Hain plays down any poll on EU future Restructuring mainly a matter of tidying up, says chief negotiator Patrick Wintour, chief political correspondent Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian Labour aims to kill off calls for a referendum on the future of the EU by ensuring the forthcoming restructuring of Europe is mainly a tidying up-exercise, Britain's chief negotiator, Peter Hain, predicted yesterday. Mr Hain was speaking ahead of what he described as the vital end-game of talks starting tomorrow at the Convention on the future of Europe in Brussels. The convention is due to present proposals on a new European constitution to EU heads of state at a summit in Greece in June. "This convention is not going within 100 miles of a European superstate," he said despite a belated pitch by the Conservatives to portray the treaty as a "new tyranny". Mr Hain conceded that Britain was still facing big battles on the future of EU foreign policy, the powers of a new president of the EU council, the blocking powers of national parliaments, and the legal enforceability in domestic law of the new charter of European rights. But he has chosen to adopt the image of a confident participant, rather than the traditional British role of a beleaguered minority fighting off the federalist hordes. He pointed to coming victories, including a new right for national parliaments to direct the commission to rethink proposals if a third of national parliaments regard the measure as breaching the principle of subsidiarity. "If a third of national parliaments tell the commission 'you should not be doing this because it is our show', it is inconceivable the commission would march on regardless," he said. He conceded that Britain had more work to do to ensure foreign policy decisions were not subject to qualified majority voting and could not be referred to European Court of Justice jurisdiction. "Iraq showed Europe was divided down the middle and it was not possible to have a common foreign policy, but in a lot of other areas, such as Kashmir, Africa and the Middle East, a common policy would help." He backed the idea of merging the role of the external affairs commissioner, held by Chris Patten, with the high representative role conducted by Javier Solana. Britain is also an enthusiastic advocate of turning the current president of the EU council into a full-time post held for 30 months. The post would be held by a former prime minister or president in the European council. "The public will identify more with Europe by having a figure that they know speaks for governments on areas that are proper to governments," Mr Hain said. "Citizens elect national governments and then those heads of government will elect a single figure representing them: that offers a chain of accountability and visibility that does not exist at present." Beneath the president would be a team presidency, so giving more member states a chance to shape the EU. He denied this new role would clash with the EU commission president. Mr Hain also sought to assuage fears among smaller states, saying: "Nothing will debar the council president coming from small states." Equally the planned reduction in the number of commissioners need not disadvantage small countries, he insisted. "People must be appointed on the basis of quality, not nationality." The most fraught, and complex, talks remain over the enforceability of the charter of fundamental rights agreed in 2000. "We will only consider bringing the charter into the treaty if it is done in such a way that it cannot alter our domestic law," he said. "It is out of the question that a hospital trust could be taken to the court because it had not provided someone with a hip operation. We want a block to ensure the charter cannot seep down into our domestic law. We are not there yet, and if we cannot negotiate it it, we will make sure the charter is not in the treaty." Overall, Mr Hain urged calm. "I always knew the Tories would play the Eurosceptic card at some stage, but it is classic scaremongering by little Englanders. Three-quarters of the new treaty will come from existing EU treaties." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:12:03 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:12:03 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: GM crops Message-ID: <006201c319e8$1ea8ec80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> America challenges GM crops ban Charlotte Denny Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian President Bush launched a legal challenge at the World Trade Organisation yesterday, to force Europe to accept imports of American genetically modified crops. Raising fears of a full-scale transatlantic trade war, Washington described Europe's five-year-old ban on GM imports as unscientific and a violation of WTO rules. "People around the world have been eating biotech food for years," said Robert Zoellick, America's leading trade negotiator. "Biotech food helps nourish the world's hungry population." Two weeks ago Brussels upped the stakes in a separate transatlantic dispute over tax breaks for some of America's largest exporters. Europe's chief trade negotiator, Pascal Lamy, has given Washington until September to change its laws or face a $4bn (?2.5bn) sanctions bill authorised by the WTO. EU officials described yesterday's challenge as "legally unwarranted, economically unfounded and politically unhelpful", and accused the US of bringing the case against Europe to put pressure on other countries which are also introducing curbs on GM imports. "The European commission finds it unacceptable that such legitimate concerns are used by the US against the EU policy on [GM food]," officials said. More than 70% of US soybeans and one-third of the American corn crop come from biotech seeds. European officials deny that there is a moratorium on GM imports, but several member states led by France have blocked all applications since 1998. The case is likely to inflame opinion among environmental lobbyists and anti-globalisation protesters ahead of a meeting of trade ministers in Cancun, Mexico, in September. Greens accused the US of bowing to pressure from its powerful biotech lobby. "By trying to use the WTO to force GM foods on European consumers, the US is launching the mother of all trade wars and could bring about the institution's collapse," said Caroline Lucas, a Green party MEP. Under WTO rules, member states are allowed to block imports if they can prove there is a danger to health or the environment. Despite pressure from hostile voters, member states are determined to keep the ban, even though studies have so far failed to uncover any dangerous side-effects. "We've waited patiently for five years for the EU to follow the WTO rules and the recommendations of the European commission, so as to respect safety findings based on careful science," said Mr Zoellick. Washington claims the ban has cost its farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales, but European consumers are likely to prove resistant even if the restrictions were lifted. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:12:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:12:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] French imperialism: DR Congo Message-ID: <006a01c319e8$3f237020$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> French offer relief force for Congo James Astill in Nairobi Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian France promised to send a relief force to Bunia in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday as 625 UN peacekeepers and about 8,000 civilians sheltered in two UN compounds. Unidentified rebels who seized control of the town on Monday after a week of inter-tribal fighting continued marauding through the streets and fired random shots outside the compounds. A human rights group in Bunia, Justice Plus, estimated that at least 112 civilians had died in the week of carnage, since Ugandan troops withdrew from the town. The number is probably much higher. The French foreign ministry, responding to Monday's request to the security council by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, for members to send reinforcements, said: "France is willing to contribute to the stabilisation of Ituri [province], and we are currently looking into the practicalities of participating in an ad hoc and temporary international force." Mr Annan had called on the security council to form a "coalition of the willing" to send troops. Protestant missionaries evacuated to Uganda yesterday said dozens of bodies were lying in the streets and at least 20 were piled in the aisle of a small church in the suburb of Nyakazansa. A least six babies in the two UN compounds were reported to have died by early yesterday. "The people eat, sleep and excrete their waste at UN compounds, and falling rains put them at risk of communicable diseases like cholera," Christian Lukusha of Justice Plus said. The Congo human rights minister, Nyumba Luaba, who is in one of the compounds, refused to comment, saying: "I am waiting for medication for hypertension and will only be able to talk later in the day, after I rest," Meanwhile Africa analysts have been castigating the UN for failing to foresee the bloodbath predicted since Uganda agreed last year to withdraw its troops from Bunia. Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch said: "This is an appalling response by the international community. The UN knew this was going to happen, yet they've been completely overwhelmed. "The peacekeepers don't have equipment or proper knowledge; they're not even combat troops. "The UN has to reinforce immediately." The fighting around Bunia exemplifies many aspects of Congo's civil war, estimated to have killed up to 4.7m in the past four and half years. Two tribes in the area, the Hema and the Lendu, were each in turn armed by Uganda in its search for a reliable Congolese ally. When Ungandan troops left the town on May 6 under the agreement by foreign states to withdraw their forces from Congo, Lendu militiamen flooded in. On Monday one of the two Hema militias drove the Lendus from the town. Yesterday the Party for the Unity and Safeguarding of the Integrity of Congo and Union of Congolese Patriots both claimed to have captured Bunia, but independent observers were unable to verify which group was in control. The UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte said yesterday that the three years of tribal killing in Ituri could amount to genocide. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:14:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:14:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Argentina: Menem quits Message-ID: <007201c319e8$6b544de0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Menem set to surrender in poll fight Uki Goni in Buenos Aires Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian Argentina's former president, Carlos Menem, was last night on the brink of throwing in the towel on his re-election bid, as aides admitted that he was ready to withdraw from this Sunday's run-off vote. Mr Menem, 72, was expected to announce his decision this morning, after opinion polls showed he would suffer a humiliating defeat in the second round vote against Nestor Kirchner, a fellow Peronist and a regional governor. Mr Menem, who ruled Argentina for a decade in the 1990s, but whose policies then have since been blamed for the country's spectacular economic decline, narrowly defeated Mr Kirchner last month. But the extrovert veteran with a taste for young television starlets and expensive Italian sports cars, quickly slumped in polls for the run-off, which predicted a 63% vote for Mr Kirchner. Such a result would have constituted Mr Menem's first electoral defeat. Some aides had suggested it would be better to avoid such a humiliation, but not all agreed. "I'm highly critical of the decision," said a top aide, Diego Guelar, a former ambassador to the United States. Mr Kirchner's aides soberly anticipated the capitulation of their rival. "It is time to bury old ghosts from the past," one said, although tacitly officials realise that the move will deprive Mr Kirchner of a strong election win which would have strengthened his legitimacy to lead Argentina through troubled times. Mr Menem's withdrawal would almost certainly spell the end of a colourful political career. He first rose to national prominence as a proteg? of his party's founder, General Juan Peron, back in the early 1970s, when sporting shoulder-length hair and bushy side-whiskers, he became the young governor of his northern province of La Rioja. Arrested in the bloody military coup of 1976, he went back into politics after the return of democracy in 1983, and won the presidential elections of 1989, causing panic among Argentina's bankers and businessmen who feared his populist leanings. But once in office, in an amazing about-face, he implemented a strict free market economic programme, selling off state-owned companies and dismantling the tariff barriers that had for decades kept Argentina a closed economy. The spectacular first-term economic growth made him wildly popular, but the high unemployment and deep recession that followed his re-election seemed to spell the end of his political career when he left office in 1999. Argentina's economic and political trials in the last two years, including the country's default on its massive foreign debt and the bizarre succession of presidents in December 2001, breathed new life into his political ambitions. Argentinians began to wish for the return of the boom days of his first presidency, and the candidate won 24% of the vote in the first round on April 27. But in the run-up to Sunday's second round, despite intense campaigning and a massive media campaign, Mr Menem was unable to increase his numbers in the opinion polls, while Mr Kirchner was able to win over voters of other candidates. His resignation also ended Mr Menem's long-cherished dream of matching the record of his party's founder General Peron, who won the Argentinian presidency three times. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 01:15:47 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:15:47 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Wales: critique of Plaid Cymru Message-ID: <007a01c319e8$a41a4d00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Now what's the point of Plaid? As the party of independence in Wales it had a role - not any more Hywel Williams Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian So did he really resign? Or was he pushed aside by that very Welsh strategy - a putsch by committee? Ieuan Wyn Jones's resignation of the leadership of Plaid Cymru has created even more dissent than his style of leadership. Parties in deep structural distress always enjoy the irrelevance of an internal constitutional debate. Which is why there is now concern that Jones submitted his resignation to just the rump of the six assembly members elected by the direct route. The other six elected by PR and the party's Westminster MP's were not consulted. Time surely for the executive to be summoned. And step forward, with their suspicions of an anti-Ieuan Wyn Jones plot, two possible leadership contenders: Elfyn Llwyd, MP for Meirionnydd, and Helen Mary Jones, the defeated AM for Llanelli. Significant Plaid-ians have almost as many names as votes these days. Failure is an impatient attendant in the political wings. The leader who fails at the ballot box is dictated to by the reality of events and not by constitutional forms. And Jones had led his party to a bashing at the polls. Besides which the questions of the smaller plot which did for the leader is merely symptomatic of the bigger theme: what is the point of Plaid? The Wyn Jones strategy had been to downplay Plaid's unique role as the party of Welsh independence. Taking the cue from New Labour, a superficial programme of "modernisation" was adopted to centrify the party. And, just as with the Blairite conspiracy, the price willingly paid was the alienation of the core constituency: those unfortunates who happened to believe all that stuff about Wales with a seat at the UN. Dafydd Elis-Thomas, travelling in another direction as Plaid leader in the 1980s, achieved a similar hollow result by his preposterous programme of a Meirionnydd-based Maoism. For Blair the destruction of his own party was deemed a price worth paying since the opposition across the floor had simply ceased to exist in any meaningful political sense. But there was no such Welsh vacuum. Plaid's historic opponent was, and is, Welsh Labour: a party that remains much the same kind of thing it always has been. Apart from a few totemic flourishes, the local leaders have been quite as prepared as any other part of the national organisation to adopt the neo-conservative agenda. It is the path of rootlessness that Welsh Labour has travelled from Keir Hardie to Chris Bryant. Welsh Labour's unrepentant style of authoritarian centralism is less a question of economic policy than of political process. It was, and is, that party's jealous contention that every non-Labour vote is somehow stolen from "us". Psychologically, inside that fortress everyone else on the outside is either an enemy or a traitor. Which is why Plaid's decision to travel into New Labour's managerialist centre simply led to a loss of self-respect. And all of this when the really new Europe was springing up from Estonia through Slovakia to Georgia. Here were small and medium-sized nation states acquiring an independent life. Nations sometimes with less of a bedrock national identity than Wales's own. The effect was to make Plaid voters ashamed of their own party's inability to make sense of the word independence. For what has happened at the beginning of the 21st century is the return of the 19th century. The 20th century had been about the class politics of industrialised societies. And the political party had made sense as an expression of that agenda. Those loyalties transcended the nation, which is why both socialist and fascist parties had an international appeal. But the breakdown of industrialised societies also ended the classic solidarity of the party. What emerged was two things. First, old-style parties survived but with only the old methods of party control to define them - and without true social end to justify them. And, simultaneously, the old mass allegiances of the 19th century came back. Class politics was taken over by the politics of the ethnic group, the national group and the religious one. These were the newly reasserted forces of communal identity now - and the only possible alternatives to individualism. The Anglo-American world, being founded on the individual and its lonely ways, have found it difficult to identify this force. On the western frontier of Europe there was a country that could be defined not by religion but by culture and community. It was Plaid's role to capture and express that fact in the Welsh imagination. No other party was summoned to that task. Parties that lose their identity always end up eventually paying a high price, first in self-respect and then in votes. And in turning its back on what was its job - and its job alone - Plaid's pallid leadership also betrayed Wales. From bobenoch at shaw.ca Wed May 14 02:28:09 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 01:28:09 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Iraqi Resistance Report XI - May 14, 2003 Message-ID: <000101c319f2$c22090c0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Iraqi Resistance Report XI - May 14, 2003 (Your Voice in a World where Money, Steel, and Fire have turned Justice Mute) Iraqi Resistance Report XI - May 14, 2003 ========================================= In this issue of FAV's Iraqi resistance report, we present several news items reportedly coming from Iraq: - 2 bulletins from the Leadership of the Resistance and Liberation of Iraq, and - 2 messages, reportedly handwritten by Saddam Hussein. ------------------------------------------------- Al-Quds al-Arabi, London, Wednesday 7 May 2003. The Leadership of the Resistance and Liberation of Iraq: Saddam Hussein to deliver two messages: one to Iraq, the other to the Arab Nation and Islamic world. London: al-Quds al-Arabi: A press release from the Leadership of the Resistance and Liberation of Iraq has stated that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is to deliver two handwritten messages shortly. The first is to be addressed to the people of Iraq, and the second to the sons and daughters of the Arab Nation and Islamic World Community. The press release, a copy of which was sent to "al-Quds al-Arabi", stated that a message from Saddam would contain a warning to foreign diplomats in Iraq that they were going to be treated like invaders. The press release indicated that both letters would be published very shortly. A letter attributed to Saddam Hussein that al-Quds al-Arabi published last week stated that treason had brought about the fall of Baghdad and the defeat of the Iraqis. ---------------------------------------------- Al-Quds al-Arabi, London, Wednesday 7 May 2003. The Leadership of the Resistance and Liberation of Iraq declares the start of a war of attrition in Iraq. London: al-Quds al-Arabi: The Leadership of the Resistance and Liberation of Iraq has declared the start of a war of attrition against the American occupation forces. It told of the following operations. 1. The shooting down of a CH-53 airplane near the al-Baghdadi region in the province of al-Anbar, after a rapid reconnaissance group fired a portable missile at the aircraft. It was observed to be on fire and all aboard the airplane were killed. 2. The Lightning Mission Youth Group carried out four strikes in the City of Baghdad, in which more than 12 American criminals were killed and a larger number wounded in the al-Karradah district in Baghdad. 3. Our special units launched a quick operation in the City of Tikrit, destroying two tanks, killing and wounding those aboard. 4. Our forces have arrested a Kuwaiti criminal who was providing support services to the American enemy. He is to be tried shortly in accordance with Islamic law. 5. Our forces carried out a missile strike against a British personnel carrier burning it totally and killing or wounding those aboard. ------------------------------------------ Al-Quds al-Arabi, London, Saturday, 10 May 2003. The following is the text of the second handwritten letter attributed to former President Saddam Hussein, which al-Quds al-Arabi received yesterday. In the name of God, the Merciful, the Mercy-giving. "And they both said, Our Lord, we are afraid that he will crack down upon us or tyrannize. He said, fear not, for I am with you both. I hear and I see." [al-Qur'an, 20:45-46]. >From Saddam Hussein to the people of great Iraq. Iraq. 6 Rabi' al-Awwal 1424 H., 7 May 2003. Rise to jihad! Rise to jihad! Rise to jihad! Peace be upon you and the mercy of God and His blessings! To the people of great Iraq, Your brothers jihad has begun every day to inflict continuous losses on the American and British criminal enemy. Be with your brethren, for God is with them. "Cling firmly together to Gods rope, and do not separate. Remember God's favor towards you when you were enemies; He united your hearts so you became brothers because of His favor. You were on the brink of a fiery pit, and He saved you from it! Thus God explains His signs to you, so that you may be guided." [al-Qur'an, 3:103] You see the cowardly occupier killing some of your brothers, sisters, and children every day with his hateful bullets, without his crimes being condemned by those who conceal themselves under human rights, nor even by those to whom they apply. In your time, the time of greatness, of the united homeland, and of security, there was no one who would open the door to rob your country. I say that the American and British invaders have stolen from your wealth in antiquities and your oil, indeed they have stolen from the banks more money than they are declaring. Let everyone know that your banks were full of money in various currencies, belonging to depositors and to the state. The invaders, who will steal your oil and your wealth, have taken the money too. It is not a new thing about Bush or Blair that they are thieves, and they are murderers. I am not revealing a secret now when I say that the amount of money that the states around Iraq have spent since 1968 and until now in order to harm Iraq because of its noble Arab nationalist positions and to prevent its rising, if that amount had been spent on the liberation of Palestine and its reconstruction, that task would have been accomplished. Indeed it would have been enough to liberate all the occupied Arab lands from Israel and from others. And while the Syrian regime embraced the oppositionists, and they are traitors, and permitted them to share information with the CIA and Britain, it did not permit resistance fighters to remain even for a matter of days. The same thing has been done by the Jordanian regime, which has been promoting the Zionist program since it signed the shameful Wadi Araba Agreement. As to the Saudi regime, which permitted the invaders to pollute the land of the Prophet (may God's peace and blessings be upon him), it alone spent against Muslim, Arab nationalist Iraq more than the mind can envisage, in service to the Zionist enemy and America. At one time they said "the Americans are here to protect us from Israel", but it became clear that the intention was to facilitate aggression against Arab Muslim Iraq. As to the debauched, lying, traitorous, Kuwaiti regime that has sold out its honor, its land, and its dignity, we say that they are 'Alqamis [Ibn al-'Alqam was a prime minister who negotiated the surrender of Baghdad to the Mongol hordes in 1258] against the Arab Nation, just as there was an 'Alqami in Baghdad among the filthy traitors. The ruling group in Iran practiced hypocrisy and plotted against the Arabs and Islam making use of all its viciousness. It embraced America's spies against Iraq. It helped the blockade of Iraq. And in addition to that, they are the only ones who benefit from what is going on. They took part in the plot against the Taliban and they acted the same with Iraq. Now they will never have a role in plotting except in favor of the regimes that are opposed to American imperialism. Over the course of many years Turkey has permitted American and British airplanes to kill your brothers and sisters and the children of your country as have the cowardly traitors of the Saudi ruling family. We have suffered a great deal. Now our brothers in Syria will discover that they have done wrong against us when they took part in the war against us in 1991, and as Iraq was subjected to wars and blockade lasting 13 years, as well as during the continuous air raids that allowed the aggressors to enter the country. What happened to Iraq has afflicted everyone who wants to live in dignity  whether they be regimes, parties or even information media  with fear. Those who have submitted have submitted, and they have been compelled even to find substitutes for such vocabulary words as "jihad" and religion". People of great Iraq! There are many secrets that, if we told them, would transform the "facts" and people's convictions about certain persons and events. But the reality now that we must act upon is resistance to the occupation, kicking them out and crushing them. I ask, what has Jordan gained by providing information against Iraq and its leaders to the invaders? What has the land of Nejd and al-Hijaz gained by supporting the occupation forces until now with instruments, tanks, airplanes, food, and drink? They lie and try to conceal their crimes when they say "we are providing humanitarian assistance". As for the Iranian regime, beware! They are racists who have no connection with the Islamic struggle. People of great Iraq! Only those who are resisting the occupation are thinking in terms of a unified Iraq. Whoever extends his hand to the invaders is not thinking about a unified Iraq. Unite! Respect one another! And cooperate! Do not evict the person who possesses rented property, and do not attack one another. The money of any one of you is a trust in the care of his brother, or his neighbor, or of the whole of Iraq. Remember that you, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, and other citizens, are brothers and sisters in religion and the homeland; and that you, Sunnis, and Shi'is are Muslims and brothers and sisters in the homeland. I wish to tell you that whoever says that they are victims of the regime, do not believe them. Some of those with weak souls wish to find a place with the occupier. Still others came along with the occupier in the first place. As to the Iraqis abroad, I ask them to help their brothers and sisters immediately and with advice. Encourage them to resist the occupier. Whoever is able to help his brother, let him do so. Everyone preserve the homeland. Everyone mount resistance. Do not! Do not! Do not let them at your oil and your wealth! Resist! Resist! Resist! And boycott the occupier and his supporters. This is a religious and patriotic obligation. In the Battle of the Airport, there took place a battle of such enormity and ferocity, with your brothers the sons of Iraq in the army and the people, that the American criminal losses totaled more than two thousand killed and a greater number injured, their equipment destroyed, damaged, or captured. If the photographers had been allowed to take pictures at the airport they would say that these were pictures of a holocaust that was visited upon them in that battle. But then there was the treachery from certain persons who attached no importance to their religion, their homeland, their Arab Nation, and their honor, and in return for a price which, however large it was, would still be a paltry sum in comparison with the harm that they have inflicted upon Iraq and the Arab nation. We fought with manliness, honor, nobility, and greatness and we were not defeated so long as faith in God remained in our souls, so long as the jihad was our choice, and the resistance our response. The invaders have created a situation of insecurity in Iraq. Theft, murder, rape and looting were among the things they brought with them. Dishonor will remain their lot, and it will not pass without God's reckoning. Look how those who call themselves an Iraqi opposition came offering support to the occupier so that he could rob them, occupy their homeland, and split them off from their Arab Nation and recognize the Zionist entity! Whether they wore the turbans of religious leaders or American-style hats makes no difference so long as they inflict on their people this pain and occupation. People of united Iraq! All those who gathered to decide the course of how you will be ruled are traitors who facilitated the aggression and occupation. You will not find a single honorable person among them. I call on you, Iraqis, to make the mosques a center for resistance and support for religion, Islam, and the homeland. Make the enemy feel that you hate him in word and deed. This great Iraq belongs to all of you; not to any individual. It is a support for and an integral part of the Arab Nation and the Muslim world community. And when there is time and a place to review our experience, we will do that in democratic spirit that does not submit to any foreigner or Zionist. Support your religion and your brethren. Advise the rest of the Arabs and Muslims so that the rupture that you can see does not happen. Be for your Arab Nation so that the people of the Nation will be for you. And if you see the enemy wants to take Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Iran, help those people in resisting him; for they, despite their regimes, are your brethren in religion or Arabism. Help Kuwait and the rest of the Arabian Gulf states, and Egypt and Jordan and Turkey, to get rid of the American enemy. God is greatest! Rise to jihad! Rise to jihad! Long live Iraq, Arab, Muslim, united! Long live Palestine, Arab and free from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River! God is greatest! And may the despicable be despised! The second handwritten message, After one handwritten message and one recorded message. Saddam Hussein 6 Rabi' al-Awwal 1424. 7 May 2003. --------------------------------------- Al-Quds al-Arabi, London, Monday 12 May 2003. The following is the text of the third handwritten message attributed to Saddam Hussein that al-Quds al-Arabi received yesterday. In the name of God, the Merciful, the Mercy-giving. And if they turn away, say: 'God is sufficient for me, there is no god but Him, in Him I put my trust and he is the Lord of the tremendous throne.' [al-Qur'an, 9:129] >From Saddam Hussein to the Great Arab people and the people of Iraq, an integral part of this people. To those who remain fervent on behalf of this Arab Nation, to all of you, Peace be upon you and the mercy of God and His blessings! I send this message of mine to you in the difficult conditions through which the Arab Nation is passing, and Iraq is a part of this nation. I write to you this evening, in which the night has closed in to envelop us in its shade, without electricity, making writing a difficult undertaking in the pitch dark. But the struggle will never cease. The resistance will never end. And night must indeed be followed by day. Great Arab people! I have pledged to God to die a martyr and not surrender to the cowardly and murderous American and British enemy. If the first round was dominated by the treason committed by people who sold out their religion, their nation, their homeland, and their honor; the conclusion will be written by none other than the Believers in God, by those who will expel the murderous invader thieves. As I say farewell to young men and women who go off to carry out missions against the murderous, cowardly enemy, I remember at every moment pure Arab, Islamic history. The future is built by people like those, just as it will be built by the children of the mujahid and great Palestinian people. The Arab states neighboring Iraq, and also those that do not neighbor Iraq, are traitors who have unleashed an opposition against themselves. When the aggression began, they were among the aggressor forces. These states facilitated the communications and the movements of those traitors with the CIA, the Mossad, and British Intelligence. Iran and Turkey in the same way facilitated these communications. It is not strange that those whom Iran had embraced entered Iraq under the protection of the American and British forces. The same was done by Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and the depraved Saudi ruling family, and by hose who have sold out their land and honor in the regime of occupied Kuwait. I confirm to you that the first-rank leaders did not surrender or betray. They were handed over by traitors or their hand-over was carried out by the two regimes in Syria and Jordan along the borders. I am saying this so that you will know that the entry of the enemy into Baghdad was not easy even with the existence of treachery. We fought while we were under blockade for 13 years, and we now face more than 500,000 criminal invaders and more than one intelligence agency has worked against us. In fact all the Arab intelligence agencies  those surrounding Iraq and those further off  would supply American intelligence with free information under the heading of showing their devotion. This is in addition to the equipment and means of communication that we were being denied. But in spite of that, if it had not been for the treason, we would have been able to stand steadfast for years bleeding the enemy and not allowing him to enter Baghdad. After what has happened, I call on those of you who still retain their fervor for your Arab nation and your religion, I call on you directly  and I do not call on your regimes  to act under the banner of jihad, the banner of 'God is Greatest', each in accordance with his ability, capability, and the measure of his or her faith. This jihad begins for everyone with the following: 1. Boycotting the American, British, and Zionist enemy. 2. Refusing to give any concessions to any of their personnel or institutions, even refusing to transport them in taxis or to rent out housing to them. 3. Refusing to hold talks with any of them, so long as the slogan of such talks is not "No to the American, British, and Israeli occupation!" 4. Boycotting the goods of these states and of all those who support the aggression. 5. Non-cooperation with any Iraqi individual, political party, or group if they speak for the criminal occupier or if they agree with or support the occupation. 6. Make your governments hear your voices and make them remember when you are with them that you are all sons and daughters of one country and one Arab Nation. 7. The real struggle must not threaten public or private property. As to those who embark on jihad with their spirits in the path of God and the Arab Nation, their behavior and means are known to all of us. During the start of the aggression, I used to hear your voices, great Arab people of ours, and I saw the very manly and dignified positions that you took. But unfortunately, the Arab regimes were not up to your level of understanding and feeling. So I did not ask the president of Egypt to fight on my behalf, but we did ask that he prevent the passage of the invaders' weapons through the Suez Canal and through Egyptian airspace. Yet 95 percent of the forces and equipment that killed your brothers and sisters in Iraq passed through the Suez Canal. The feebleness of the Egyptian regime was one of the reasons for these situations. Since the passing of the historic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and despite the differences of opinion in assessing his experience, he was able, on the basis of his personal purity and clarity, to commit Egypt with all its weight to make of it a leader of the Arab people and of those who love the cause of liberation from occupation. I say frankly that the Islamic world community and Arab Nation have never brought forth regimes so treacherous as those that we have witnessed in the regimes of Egypt, the Saudi dynasty, the Sabah dynasty [in Kuwait], the Jordanian regime, and the regime of Qatar  which has the duty of washing off the disgrace of the permission it granted to the criminals of the aggression to plan their crimes and their aggression against Iraq. Nor has the Islamic Community ever brought forth regimes so treacherous and contemptible as the regimes in Iran and Turkey. Our great Arab people! Let your slogan be "No to the occupation in word and deed!" Let that begin with the man in the street and rise to the communications media. Expose the aggressor! Do not spread their lies; all of them are murderers! You whose weapon is the word, reject the occupation and aggression! Brother and sister Arab intellectuals, writers, journalists, photographers, artists! You are called upon to expose the cowardly occupier and his crimes. Do not permit those who support the occupier, or who offer excuses for him, to exist in your midst. You in the sports field, reject the occupier! Boycott him and his teams and their supporters. Let the boycott encompass all fields so that all your voices will rise against the occupation! You are our hope  not the regimes. If the leadership of Iraq has been subjected to all that it has been subjected to because of its patriotic and Arab nationalist stances against imperialism and Zionism, then the path of jihad will continue to be the path of this leadership as we have chosen our slogan to be "Martyrs in the path of God, or jihad until victory!" God is greatest! Long live the Arab people! Long live the Iraqi people, who are an inseparable part of the Arab people! Long live Palestine, free and Arab, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River! And may the despicable be despised! The third handwritten message. Saddam Hussein. 8 Rabi' al-Awwal 1424. 9 May 2003. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 02:23:16 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 11:23:16 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: tales of yore Message-ID: <00d301c319f2$11af7f80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post Books At the frontiers of secret information gathering Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage by Philip Taubman Simon & Schuster 441pp $27 Spies in the Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs by M.S. Kohli and Kenneth Conboy Univ. of Kansas 226pp $29.95 Reviewed by Eric Umansky A few months ago, Abu Ali, an al Qaeda operative thought to be responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole, was speeding along a highway in Yemen when a missile fired by an American Predator drone ended his trip. While the Predator got most of the attention for the killing, another gee-whiz technology played a crucial, less noticed, part: A spy satellite had intercepted one of Ali's cellphone calls and guided the Predator to its target. Whether about Iraq, North Korea or al Qaeda, our government gets much of what it knows from spy satellites and Philip Taubman's Secret Empire tells the story of how that came to be. In the early 1950s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev began to brag about his country's growing number of bombers and missiles capable of striking the United States. President Eisenhower had no idea whether to believe him. The United States ended reconnaissance flights over Russia after Soviet air defenses modernized and began to threaten them. "We didn't have . . . any real information," remembers one CIA officer. "We just didn't know what was going on." Eisenhower prepared for the possibility that the USSR could launch a surprise attack and knock out the U.S. ability to respond. He put the country on a war footing. Then he ordered scientists to secretly develop a surveillance system that the Soviets could neither shoot down nor see. The first result was the U-2. The goal was to fly so high that the Soviets would not know the plane was there. It did not work. Soviet radar picked up the plane during its first flyover, and Eisenhower limited the U-2 to just a few flights, one of which was shot down in 1960. With the failure of the U-2 to go undetected, scientists concentrated on photo satellites. As one researcher recalled, trying to take a detailed picture from space "was like trying to photograph the belfry in Boston's North Church from the Empire State Building." And that was only the beginning: How do you keep film stable during space travel? How do you retrieve the photos? And how do you get the darn thing up there to begin with? (At the time, U.S. rockets had a habit of exploding on the launch pad.) The story of how scientists broke through those barriers - thus showing Eisenhower's successor, President Kennedy, that the "missile gap" was bunk - could make for a fascinating tale. But Taubman is not a lively writer and Secret Empire is not it. While Taubman focuses on the CIA's feats in space, M.S. Kohli and Kenneth Conboy unveil one of the agency's only slightly more earthbound achievements in Spies In The Himalayas. In October 1964, China surprised the world by testing a nuclear weapon. The United States and India freaked out and were desperate to monitor the program. But the tests occurred in the middle of China, out of reach of spy planes, and satellites were not yet capable of intercepting the test data. Eventually, the CIA came up with a plan: Send a joint team of the best American and Indian mountain climbers to the top of the Himalayas to plant a monitoring device. Oh, and the sensor would have to be nuclear-powered. (Solar panels were still in their infancy, and gas could not be regularly delivered.) Kohli, who led the Indian half of the expedition (and once made a record-setting Everest climb), and Conboy, a former Heritage Foundation analyst, are not fabulous writers, either. But these two should line up some Hollywood agents, because the story itself is repeatedly jaw-dropping, alternating between something like a James Bond movie and Chevy Chase's Spies Like Us. Climbing some of the world's highest mountains is extraordinarily difficult, even without a nuclear-powered sensor to lug along. Despite some injuries, the team nearly made it to the top during their first try, only to be turned back by bad weather.During the retreat, they decided to save themselves extra work by leaving the monitor near the peak. Bad idea. When they returned months later, it was gone, swept away by an avalanche. It was never found. (The loss was made public in the 1970s and created a panic - apparently unfounded - that radiation had contaminated Calcutta's water supply.) The crew kept trying, and failing. They once reached a peak, only to realize they had forgotten to bring along anchors to hold the monitor in place. Finally, three years after they started, they took a new device, this one gas-powered, and scaled a lower and more manageable mountain. The system worked perfectly - intercepting data from a test - exactly once. Then it was replaced by a satellite. With the years of excruciating labor that Kohli put into the project, that was surely not the ending he had hoped for. But his journey is certainly fun to read about. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 30 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 02:25:18 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 11:25:18 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: Blair cautious Message-ID: <00d901c319f2$5a980c80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Finance / One day the euro may come to be loved / One day the euro may come to be loved Larry Elliott on why Britain is not ready to embrace the single currency Tony Blair has every reason to feel a bit miffed. A couple of months ago he took the most momentous of political risks in taking Britain to war in Iraq, yet now he is accused of being a weak, dithering wimp over his refusal to back an immediate referendum on the euro. Whatever you might think of the British prime minister, the idea that he lacks bottle is harsh, which has made the recent attacks on him sound somewhat hysterical.There is, however, none so bitter as a lover scorned, and those bracketing Blair with Harold Wilson or urging that he should be sacked, feel that they have been left standing at the altar. It's pretty clear that the euro nuptials have been postponed, and that the chances of the ceremony taking place at any time in this parliament are slim. Blair, it is said, has been "got at" by Gordon Brown and his wicked Treasury henchmen. The reason for the increasingly shrill attacks on the prime minister are to put some backbone into Blair for a last-gasp struggle with the chancellor to keep the option of a referendum open for this parliament. Brown, for his part, seems remarkably unperturbed by the furore. He made it clear last weekend that he was not a "no, never" man when it came to the euro, but that the decision had to be taken on the basis of the national economic interest. Sources close to the chancellor say that there is far less disagreement between the first and second lords of the Treasury than reports would suggest. It is worth recalling that Blair has never promised there would be a referendum, but simply promised to assess the five economic tests for entry within two years of the 2001 election. This assessment would determine whether there was a "clear and unambiguous case for joining a successful euro", and the prime minister has stuck to the formula that the economics had to be right. Yet it is impossible to argue that there is a clear and unambiguous case for entry unless the euro is successful, and even a politician as persuasive as Blair would be pressed to argue that it has been. There are three key points here. The first is that the performance of the eurozone economy has been deeply unimpressive. Growth in the eurozone is dismal, unemployment is high and rising, investment is weak, domestic demand is stagnant and public spending is under pressure. Economists who support British entry argue that eurozone countries are enjoying increases in trade flows between them as a result of the currency, and that Britain would in the future risk seeing inward investment dry up, but they tend to gloss over the fact that the UK - while no economic nirvana itself - has its lowest unemployment for 25 years while joblessness in Germany and France has been rising since euro notes and coins were introduced. A second factor is that the framework for conducting economic policy in the eurozone is contributing to the weakness of employment. There is denial here on the part of those who tend to view the single currency through rose-tinted spectacles. The European Central Bank was constructed along deflationist lines and the governing board has stuck to its founding principles. Interest rates should have been cut last week, not just because Germany is facing economic and political crisis, but because the rise in the euro's value since January has been worth a percentage point on interest rates. With the stability and growth pact ensuring that fiscal policy is also contractionary, the ECB's refusal to ease policy was incomprehensible to all but the most rigid of monetarists. As Brown will no doubt have pointed out in his discussions with the prime minister, the third factor worth mentioning about the underperforming eurozone is that the theoretical objections to a one-size-fits-all monetary policy are now being supported by the hard evidence. Some of this is blindingly obvious. In Germany, for example, policy is too tight; in Ireland it is too loose. But it's also interesting to look at the comparison between Germany and the Netherlands, which from the early 1970s to the late 1990s were the two most aligned economies in Europe. In the late 1990s the Dutch had a housing market boom similar to Britain's, with equity withdrawal fuelling consumer spending. The growth, inflation and unemployment rates of the German and Dutch economies diverged sharply, suggesting that real and lasting economic convergence can be a problem even for the most congruent of economies. These three factors have proved compelling for the Treasury, if not for its pro-euro critics, who are now seeking to move the argument away from economics and on to politics. The clock has been turned back to 1989, when the same arguments were used to demand Britain's member ship of the exchange rate mechanism (ERM). As such, Britain must join not just to achieve economic stability but also to punch its weight in Europe. In the end the ERM led both to economic disaster and the marginalisation of Britain within Europe. Brown's case to Blair is that Britain's history is littered with dumb economic decisions being taken for political reasons. The loss of credibility involved in fighting and losing a referendum would be considerable, which is presumably why the Conservatives are urging the Government to hold one. Brown will argue that to take the advice of the pro-euro lobby would be a colossal gamble, and that some of those purporting to offer the prime minister friendly advice place a higher priority on Britain joining the euro than they do on Britain continuing to have a Labour government. The fact that Blair appears to have heeded the chancellor's advice is deeply worrying for the pro-euro camp, because the logic of Brown's argument is that there may be no euro referendum in the next parliament either if the next economic assessment is also negative. From the chancellor's point of view, this is an entirely sensible position to adopt. The euro experiment may eventually prove to be a success, but at the moment it looks to the Treasury more like the creation of Dr Frankenstein. It is not working now, and so it is right not to join. And if it is not working in three or four years' time, it won't be right to join then, either. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 12 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 02:26:50 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 11:26:50 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Europe/US rivalry: more EU integration, please Message-ID: <00df01c319f2$90f8a460$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> What Europe must do now Simon Tisdall Only a multipolar world can resist US power A curious reticence pervades the broader post-Iraq debate. Yet what happens next in terms of the relationship between US hyperpower and Europe, the UN and a seriously battered world order is of vastly greater significance than the specifics of Iraq's rehabilitation. So how to explain this quietude, this almost embarrassed silence?One answer is that, to varying degrees, leading anti-war states like Germany and France are now engaged in pragmatic repairs to bilateral relations. They have no wish, for now at least, to pursue a damaging confrontation with the US. But another, more disturbing answer is that they are at a total loss over what to do about what is variously described as American-centred unipolarity or unilateralism or hegemony or, more candidly, the Bush administration's unapologetic, ideological and steadily advancing belief in the rightness and inevitability of US global dominance. Even if a clear counter-strategy existed, there would be no agreement in a fractious European Union whose divisions the US is increasingly inclined to exploit. This confusion found ultimate, symbolic expression in the UN's inability to prevent the Iraq war despite the opposition of most of the "international community". Yet at bottom, it may be that the war's wider implications are not being fully discussed and explored because the Iraq crisis held up a mirror to the world - and the world was both shamed and repulsed by what it saw. It saw the illusion of the security council as ultimate arbiter of the use of force and guardian of international law shattered, perhaps beyond repair. It saw the flailing impotence, or fawning acquiescence, of once great powers in the face of America's will. It glimpsed the limits of democracy in the smug insouciance with which elected governments rejected the people's protests. This smoking mirror showed a world where reasoned argument, moral suasion, humanitarian imperatives and intense diplomatic lobbying were overwhelmed and swept aside by an insistence on brute military force. More than that, it revealed a world in which a state's sovereign rights counted for little (unless that state was America); in which truly global concerns such as poverty, education, health, environmental degradation, disease pandemics, the roots of terrorism and, yes, even nuclear weapons proliferation could be and were shunted to one side; and in which one man, the US president, could turn the planet inside out. Small wonder the likes of Jacques Chirac do not want to talk about it right now. It is all too galling, if not to say downright depressing. Yet what is to be done about American power? The question will not go away. There seem to be three alternatives. In his now familiar role as explicator and facilitator of the American project, Tony Blair is emerging as prime advocate of the first. Unipolarity should not be feared, he says, but embraced. A "strategic partnership" between the US and Europe is the way forward. Any other approach would only encourage rival power bases and a new "cold war". But Blair's argument ignores both history and reality. History suggests sovereign states will rarely voluntarily accept domination by another; even if it is forced upon them, they will always work to defeat or circumvent it. Reality suggests that, to American eyes, partnership means only one thing: leadership. If it is to work, unipolarity assumes disinterested, wise and beneficent leadership in Washington. Observing George Bush, even before Iraq, one can only say: in your dreams, Tony. The second possible response to US dominance is all-out resistance, political, diplomatic and economic. This is not a promising idea. For sure, the EU can apply leverage in foreign investment, raw materials, oil and trade, upon which the US grows more dependent. All the same, confronting the US would not only be damagingly self-defeating; it is also undesirable. Which brings the argument back, conclusively, to multipolarity - the third and only way of balancing US power. Europeans cannot change America, but they can change themselves. And this they must do to avoid the vassalage that lies implicit in Iraq's cautionary tale. For the EU, this means far greater integration through pooled sovereignty, common defence, economic, monetary and foreign policy. For the UN, it means root-and-branch security council reform in order more faithfully to represent the peoples of a variegated planet that belongs to all, not to the great powers of circa 1945, and not in future to America alone. For Britain and France, in particular, this means surrendering power in order to gain it. It means a whole new way of behaving and looking at ourselves and the world. It means, logically, the prospective end of the nation state as the prime political entity. Threatened by US unipolarity and having failed to restructure the world order in the post-communist era, it is time to take another look at collectivism. And then, who knows, one day we may be able to face the mirror without cringing. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 14 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 02:27:54 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 11:27:54 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the missing WMDs Message-ID: <00e501c319f2$b779d1e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post / Hunt for Hussein's arsenal draws blank / Barton Gellman in Baghdad Hunt for Hussein's arsenal draws blank Task force winds down as highly equipped WMD teams report back empty-handed Barton Gellman in Baghdad The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal arm of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war. Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff - biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops - arrived with high hopes of early success. They expected to find what Secretary of State Colin Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on February 5 - hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to fire them, and evidence of a program to build a nuclear bomb. Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews. Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the force next month, said he took seriously intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time." Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what we came here for, but we're past that." Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves missing vital tools. They consistently found targets iden tified in Washington to be in a different location, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now to "check the blocks" on a prewar list. U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those , the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success. Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun. In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Stephen Cambone, undersec retary of defense for intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon last week that U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war. But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said. "Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust at last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty." Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments came with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads. Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way of human sources on the ground. The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are reducing their weapons staffs for lack of work. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half. State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been called upon no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The labs' director said some of his scientists were also flying home. Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually find evidence of banned weapons. Meanwhile a Defense Intelligence Agency officer said: "We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't here." The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 28 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 02:28:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 11:28:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: West Asia Message-ID: <00eb01c319f2$d32b0da0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post / Bush unveils scheme for Mideast free trade zone / Mike Allen and Karen DeYoung in Columbia, South Carolina Bush unveils scheme for Mideast free trade zone Mike Allen and Karen DeYoung in Columbia, South Carolina President Bush told University of South Carolina graduates last week that economic growth and the rule of law are keys to quieting the rage of the Middle East, and promised to build on the victory in Iraq by increasing trade with the Arab world.Bush launched a 10-year effort to form a U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area, and pledged to help modernize the region's justice, education and political systems and promote concrete steps to equality for women. "The bitterness of that region can bring violence and suffering to our own cities," Bush told the 1,200 graduates in his first commencement address of the season. "The advance of freedom and peace in the Middle East would drain this bitterness and increase our own security." Describing "a great goal for this nation," Bush said "across the globe, free markets and trade have helped defeat poverty, and taught men and women the habits of liberty." Bush's announcement added economic rewards to the administration's military and diplomatic efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. His aides said they saw the free trade offer as a short-term step toward easing the anti-American views that hardened during the Iraq war. The administration also hopes to show that Bush had a higher purpose that he now intends to pursue. Over the longer term, the president's aides believe, opening some of the globe's most closed and moribund economies - not only to the United States, but also Israel - will increase political stability. "In an age of global terror and weapons of mass destruction, what happens in the Middle East greatly matters to America," said Bush, who was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws. "We will use our influence and idealism to replace old hatreds with new hopes across the Middle East." The president described the proposals as part of a policy continuum that includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and peace between Arabs and Israelis. Bush has kept his distance from the Israeli-Palestinian issue over the past year, but he has now pledged to devote new, personal energy toward its success. Although he made his customary call for Palestinians to "take concrete steps to crack down on terror," Bush also sharply warned that "Israel must take tangible steps to ease the suffering of Palestinians and to show respect for their dignity." In proposing to build a thriving Middle East free-trade area by 2013, Bush is offering to eliminate tariffs and other barriers to imports from the Arab world, to spur investments and jobs in the region. "From the U.S. standpoint, the whole payoff is political stability," said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics. "If it pays off, the whole oil picture is a little more settled than it otherwise would be," he said, along with the prospect of decreasing the $3-4 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt and Israel. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 27 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 02:29:31 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 11:29:31 +0300 Subject: [A-List] French imperialism: Ivory Coast Message-ID: <00f101c319f2$f14951c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Le Monde / Undercover war in 'our little Iraq' / Stephen Smith Undercover war in 'our little Iraq' Comment Stephen Smith Stephen Smith France's alternative diplomatic approach to the conflict in Ivory Coast is bad for its credibility In which country that possesses weapons of mass destruction has France maintained a contingent of 4,000 soldiers for the past six months? Which regional conflict between three "rogue states" has France been trying to resolve by mobilising not only its army but the full range of its diplomatic arsenal?Finally, which multilateral solution consistent with the legality embodied by the United Nations has France attempted to implement by committing itself to the hilt? If such a solution existed, it would be an ideal method for dealing with other threats to world peace, and certainly an alternative to the law of the strongest that the United States has been applying in Iraq. The country concerned is Ivory Coast - and its "weapons of mass destruction" range from the machete to the Kalashnikov. It would be a mistake, however, to pooh-pooh such weapons, given that nine years ago in Rwanda, 800,000 people died, most of them hacked to death, within the space of three months. It was because they refused to accept another massacre of Africans that the French intervened in Ivory Coast last September. On February 4 UN resolution 1464, passed unanimously by the security council, gave France the task of protecting civilians. Fact one: if those civilians had had to depend on the "international community", they would not have survived. Fact two: the French intervention was initially legitimate, but became legal only subsequently. In the French foreign ministry communique, which announced in December that France's military commitment was going to extend well beyond the protection of its nationals, there was no reference to either an Ivorian authority or an international body. The UN simply confirmed a situation after the event. In that same communique, Paris denounced "all interference from outside", and said it regarded breaches of Ivory Coast's territorial integrity as "unacceptable". Ivory Coast's borders had indeed been violated. By whom? The communique did not say. And the UN issued no condemnation of, let alone sanctions against, such breaches of international order. The fact was that Burkina Faso and Liberia had breached Ivory Coast's territorial integrity with impunity. In response, the Ivorian regime resorted to criminal practices, setting up "patriotic" militias and even death squads as undercover fighters against an imagined or real "enemy within". Law and order broke down. Faced with two aggressor countries that controlled rebel movements, the Ivorian regime tried by fair means or foul to defend itself. So France found itself at war with three West African "rogue states". The malaise created by its Ivory Coast policy, notwithstanding its humanitarian legitimacy, stems from the fact that it is at war without having declared it. "Is it legitimate to talk of a French failure when France has taken the risk of peace and reconciliation?" the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin asked parliament on February 4. On January 24 a report by the UN High Commission on Human Rights voiced suspicions that death squads in the capital Abidjan were "reportedly made up of elements close to the government and a tribal militia of the president's ethnic group". That same day a report by the French secret service confirmed that those groups of killers had worked for the president's services and were almost exclusively from the president's ethnic group, Bete. When Paris imposed a ceasefire in Ivory Coast on October 18, Burkina Faso opened a second front with Liberia's help: at the end of November the appearance of two new rebel movements in western Ivory Coast gave the war a new lease of life. It was a classic "fight and talk" situation. But the images of hordes of drugged youngsters swooping on peaceful Ivorian villages should not delude one into supposing that neighbouring states were either ill-prepared for or only superficially involved in the conflict. Comfort Ero and Anne Marshall revealed in an article in Politique Africaine No 89 that the attack on the border town of Danane on November 28 "was carried out by some of [the Liberian president] Charles Taylor's most highly reputed military leaders". All the indications are that France is waging an undercover war to which the UN - the body of appeal that France would like to see as the keystone of world order - has so far given only a blank cheque of legality "for a renewable period of six months". That mandate may have to be repeatedly renewed, particularly as the US has blocked the setting up of a UN peacekeeping operation that could take over from French troops in Ivory Coast. And the 1,260 West African "white helmets" would hardly constitute a realistic way out of the dilemma for France even if their numbers were greatly increased. The problem is not about getting "bogged down". More French soldiers have been deployed in Kosovo than in Ivory Coast without anyone asking awkward questions. Nor has the problem anything to do with obstruction by the Americans, who argue that a UN operation in Ivory Coast would be exorbitantly expensive. Their bad faith is no greater than that of De Villepin when he claims that the UN "provides efficiency, transparency and legitimacy". The UN is an undeniable source of international legitimacy, but it is also an appallingly inefficient bureaucracy. Just before the war against Baghdad, one of De Villepin's aides described Ivory Coast as "our little Iraq". The trouble is that the alternative approach adopted by the French in the hope of dealing with an international trouble spot - with the UN as a fig leaf and three "rogue states" left to do more or less what they want - can only undermine France's credibility. May 8 The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 25 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 06:38:26 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 15:38:26 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 References: <001d01c312d0$ee8384c0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> <00a901c3133f$e6d65760$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <016301c31a15$b73efde0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Waaaay back on 5 May, Macdonald asked: I would like to ask A-Listers what they think the information contained in this email means to our analysis of A) "2004" B) what we need to do about this. If this is true, does it not mean everything else is at least *partially* subordinate? Can we please engage this elephant in the living room? ------ "This" concerns the continuing, deepening exclusion of African American voters from voting rolls courtesy of various legal and not-so-legal tricks and "accidents" perpetrated by, among others, corporate hirelings with close links to the Republican Party. It is surely one of the most egregious infringements of bourgeois democracy of recent times, and it deserves some close attention. I would encourage A-listers based in the Americas to contribute their thoughts on this, in line with Macdonald's request. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 06:45:36 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 15:45:36 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism Message-ID: <017d01c31a16$b7c130c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The death of Mark Jones has robbed us of many things, including an unfinished book on the political economy of oil and imperialism. Here is a message sent by Mark to the Marxism list on 4 December 2002, which has some bearing on an article recently forwarded to the list concerning the geostrategic orientation of the US vis a vis China: see http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2003-May/025791.html ----- The whole debate about energy crises only makes any sense if you insert it into the wider and more crucial debate about imperialism and hegemony. As everyone keeps rightly saying, what's really wrong is the completely and hopelessly irrational way that the West and especially the USA *consumes* energy and resources. Of course, this is true and is the point that Escobar (like a lotta folks) makes in his article. But there is a somewhat contradictory theme in Escobar's thinking and a lot of other people's. On the one hand there is the view that technology and production is fine, it's just the gross waste, inefficiency ad irrationality of greed-driven systems like US capitalism which needs to be corrected. Get rid of corporate greed and the US military behemoth, and then we can all live happily ever after knitting yogurt and thatching our own condo-home/office roofs. And drinking the communal beer etc. Socialism + renewables = happiness. That seems to be the logic. On the other hand there is a deeper sense of foreboding, for example in Escobar's comparisons of contemporary USA with the fate of ancient Rome, namely that this surface irrationality probably reflects a deeper, more deterministic, less solvable historical impasse. I think this is the point at which we tend to go into denial, because then the prognoses seem to get just too scary and apocalyptically awful. You can't sell the party newspaper if all you have to offer is terminal doom and gloom. My own position, argued at boring length here and elsewhere already so I won't repeat myself ad nauseam, is that any Marxist analysis of accumulation cycles and crises worth its salt must take the view that phenomena such as stock market bubbles, war hysterias, and the rapid (and highly deflationary) increase in social inequality, are only forms-of-appearance of the deeper and long run secular crisis of accumulation which Marx analysed in a twofold way, as (a) the law of the tendency of the profit-rate to fall and (b) the general law of population (which Marx called 'the most important law' governing the social logic of capitalism). Relative overpopulation (Marx's term, not mine) is a by-product of accumulation and a form of over-accumulation. Another by-product is the immense accumulation of surplus capital, immense waste in production, and immense gulfs opening up between rich and poor. Paradoxically, there is at once too much capital and too little. This is a theoretical result of Marxian value theory, but it is also a basic truth about the modern world which you can only avoid noticing because you don't want to see it. On the one hand there is a powerful global deflation going on, massive idling of plant and labour and capital, massive overproduction. On the other, there is not only a vast amount of unmet human need, a stupendous amount of pauperisation and mass misery, dwarfing anything ever seen before in recorded history. The true weakness of American capitalism is expressed by this central fact: the very low level of social productivity, and the great paucity of available capital and resources, explains the existence of these vast pools of human deprivation and misery comprising up to 4 billion persons. If productivity was higher than it is, more effective demand would appear in the market because more people would be employed because it was profitable to employ them. But because social productivity is so abysmally low (compared to the scale of human need) that there is no way to mobilise the pools of moribund capital and labour which exist everywhere. Attempts to do so, i.e. to raise the level of economic activity by for example Keynesian stimuli, only result in the economy accelerating briefly and then hitting the wall; the entire experience of global stagflation which began in the 1970s has proved this. Arbitrary demand management only produces inflation followed by deeper recessionary crises. Capitalism has adapted to this long run endemic and systemic crisis by adopting avowed and open deflationary policies such as balanced budgets, forced debt repayments etc, which have had the general effect of exporting crisis from the metropoles to the peripheries. I would argue (and Stan Goff and others as well--people like Alf Hornborg--have been so arguing) that there is an entropic dimension to this crisis. Stan Goff has a very good paper on this in the A-List archive. Summarising ad absurdum, his point is that if your tried to stimulate the world economy sufficiently to get real renewed growth and to take the pauperised billions out of poverty and to give them decent homes, jobs, infrastructure etc, then even if you didn't fail economically (thru renewed stagflation) you'd fail entropically. You'd either run out of available energy, steel and other basics almost at once, or you'd get runaway global warming, or both. There is a lot of evidence to support these conclusions. The heart of the so-called oil, or energy, crisis is this speculation: even if you reduced US and western per capita energy consumption by some arbitrary number, say 50% (which is not enough, but surely not politically feasible in the normal run of events) and increased the per capita consumption of the Rest by say 200%, then it is absolutely clear that the oil and gas will run out in a decade or less, long before any alternative technologies appeared on the scene, even supposing they existed, which they don't. You can't even let the population of Iraq and Saudi Arabia consume energy on anything like western per capita terms. So you have to keep them under your boot or exterminate them. That's how consumingly awful, how terrifyingly dangerous, the conjuncture now is. That's the political or strategic reality which now stares not just capitalism but Bush and Blair, Schroeder and Putin etc, hard in the face right now. This is the global context in which we have to think thru our revolutionary politics. It is a worse crisis than 1914-1917, worse than 1941, worse by far than any in the history of either the capitalist class or the working class. We should find a political rhetoric, as well as an organisational mode, which does justice to this. Mark From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 14 07:16:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 16:16:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Europe/US rivalry: hardening of US attitudes Message-ID: <018501c31a1b$0a4d8ec0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Gerard Baker is the Financial Times' token Democrat, just as Amity Shlaes was the token (unspeakably awful) Republican. She has been replaced by Christopher Caldwell, an editor of the neoconservative rag the Weekly Standard. Meanwhile, to get an indication of what US politics is like, and to re-learn the ever-important lesson that the Democrats are worse than useless, a study of Baker's political trajectory over the last two years provides a useful guide. Baker was a partisan backer of Gore, convinced by the economic and foreign policies of the Clinton administration and therefore the appropriateness of a fundamental continuity between that and its successor. Gore fitted the bill perfectly, especially considering the fiscal vandalism likely to be inflicted by a Bush presidency. With Bush having assumed power, Baker consistently attacked his economic policies, in particular reserving scorn for the tax cut. Paul O'Neill was the butt of many good jokes, and the rest of the administration, Powell aside, came in for a lot of criticism. Then the twin towers episode occurred, and suddenly Bush's foreign policy became sacrosanct. Baker has been as partisan a cheerleader of the war party as any newspaper columnist of record, and while he has returned, more recently, to criticising Bush's domestic policies, he remains steadfast in his support of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. Bush himself has been described in glowing terms, as "courageous" and "principled". In addition, his columns have been peppered with complaints about European anti-Americanism and a general wilful misunderstanding of "America" and/or a pitiful European abdication of "responsibility". This recent column ought to be regarded as a good indicator of mainstream Democratic Party thinking, and a strong signal to Europeans wistfully imagining a Gore presidency of just how far to the right the centre of gravity of US politics has moved thanks to the mostly irreversible changes wrought by Bush. Among those changes is the realisation among its former US champions that European unity is no longer in the strategic interest of the US. The one advantage of this sort of thing is that it is brazenly out in the open for all to see. ----- America's divided view of European unity By Gerard Baker Financial Times, May 8 2003 Europe Day -- May 9 -- never did really catch on in the American imagination. Almost every day of the year one group or another of hyphenated-Americans takes time out to celebrate their Irish-American, Mexican-American, Chinese-American, even their French-American heritage. But I never once saw a crowd of elegantly tailored, well remunerated Euro-Americans marching proudly up Fifth Avenue, clasping their Jean Monnet statuettes, waving their blue and gold flags to the rousing finale of Beethoven's Ninth. I suppose it is even less likely now. The euro may be surging these days but, in the American psyche, the Euro is a seriously devalued figure. Discerning Americans, though, especially those in powerful parts of Washington, are starting to take a more nuanced look at the hopeless Europeans. Instead of an undifferentiated bunch of peaceniks and handwringers, they see a more variegated picture. And that makes them more inclined to challenge the established assumption of US diplomacy that ever-closer European union is an unmitigated good thing. Since Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, it has been an axiom of US policy that a strong and united Europe is in America's interests. Economically, US companies had long preferred integrated European markets, free of national regulatory, trade and even monetary policy regimes, to grease the wheels of their global ambitions. Politically, a single European voice (as long as it was broadly supportive of the US) was easier to deal with than the cacophony Americans dreaded to hear when they stepped off the plane in Brussels. And unified European support for what the US was doing elsewhere in the world was a useful additional tool for American diplomacy. But with the cold war over, the cracks in the relationship started to show. As some in Europe began to articulate different sets of goals from those that had held the alliance together and others clung firmly to cold war allegiances, it was inevitable that the virtues of a single European view would become less evident to Americans. Better, surely, to forge connections with those who would continue to hold firm to US values. When the Bush administration arrived in Washington, staffed with the top brass of the First Regiment of Euro Bashers and Doubters, it was widely believed the days of American encouragement of European integration were numbered. But, surprisingly, the Euro-believers continued to win the day. In the very first month of the Bush era, Tony Blair, at the time in full Euro-friendly mode himself, persuaded the president to give a warm endorsement, over the objections of the Pentagon, to the fledgling European Security and Defence Policy. In other intriguing ways, even as they decried general European wimpishness and obstructionism, some American conservatives defied easy labelling as Eurosceptics. Perhaps the most remarkable example was the passionate support of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, that temple of conservative thinking, for European monetary union (admittedly on quirky ideological grounds to do with monetary policy). But whatever else the events of the past six months have done, they have surely encouraged a rethink. Even if the transatlantic brickbats of the last year are replaced with bouquets and billets-doux, how America views a single Europe will never be the same again. A Europe united under its traditional Franco-German leadership would have been a catastrophe for US political and military ambitions in the last year. Now, as Europe concludes its deliberations on a constitution and the role of a common foreign and security policy within it, the US can no longer be a sympathetic observer. Steven Everts of the pro-integration Centre for European Reform writes in a recent paper: "America should welcome a European Union security strategy, even if it will crystallise seom differences with the US on how to respond to specific problems." This is like saying: "The US should welcome an EU security strategy even if it means it will flatly oppose what the US is trying to do." I doubt that, post-Iraq, many Americans see it that way. It is more likely, say even Euro-friendly officials in Washington, that the US will regard with more scepticism than usual European attempts to forge a super-European policy on virtually anything. There is evident admiration in Washington for Mr Blair, but many are nonplussed by his eagerness to drive Britain into the eurozone, especially when they hear that the reason for his enthusiasm is not economic but political. Even this administration is subtle enough to realise that outright meddling in intra-European affairs will only bolster those who want to drive Europe further away from America. But there are alternatives. The decision to ask Poland last week to play a leading role in Iraq comes precisely from this school of thought. Expect much more like this -- an exploration of the possibilities that arise from the new US doctrine that the mission determines the coalition. Some European leaders will chafe at this. But before they turn up the anti-American rhetoric, they should remember the sceptical views of their own electorates about the value of European federalism. Europe Day never caught on in Europe either. From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 14 11:18:05 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:18:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 Message-ID: <6149562.1052932697105.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> We are already facing the attempted imposition of new touch-screen voting machines across the south that generate NO PAPER TRAIL, the manufacturers and programmers of which have suspicious ties to the Republican Party. It is becoming a huge issue in local elections here in North Carolina. This will certainly provoke some dilemmas for various species of "progressive", including genuine leftists. A good friend of mine last election, an African-American woman who feared Republican scortched earth policies that impacted on women and people of color, knowing full-well that Democrats were complicit, said - speaking of Nader-voters - a vote for Ralph Nader is an exercise of white privilege. When these machines and other chicaneries by Republicans are directed at Black voters, there are real questions of solidarity that come up, for which easy abstractions developed out of sight of ravaged neighborhoods and collapsing Black Belt communities will prove inadequate. This points again, I think, to the critical task of developing Black political power, beginning at the municipal and county levels, and not necessarily along the ideological lines that white progressives might prefer. A Black comprador is often easier for communities to hold accountable than a white vestigal planter. From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 14 11:18:15 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:18:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 Message-ID: <4618849.1052932702656.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> We are already facing the attempted imposition of new touch-screen voting machines across the south that generate NO PAPER TRAIL, the manufacturers and programmers of which have suspicious ties to the Republican Party. It is becoming a huge issue in local elections here in North Carolina. This will certainly provoke some dilemmas for various species of "progressive", including genuine leftists. A good friend of mine last election, an African-American woman who feared Republican scortched earth policies that impacted on women and people of color, knowing full-well that Democrats were complicit, said - speaking of Nader-voters - a vote for Ralph Nader is an exercise of white privilege. When these machines and other chicaneries by Republicans are directed at Black voters, there are real questions of solidarity that come up, for which easy abstractions developed out of sight of ravaged neighborhoods and collapsing Black Belt communities will prove inadequate. This points again, I think, to the critical task of developing Black political power, beginning at the municipal and county levels, and not necessarily along the ideological lines that white progressives might prefer. A Black comprador is often easier for communities to hold accountable than a white vestigal planter. From wenhuadageming at attbi.com Wed May 14 12:31:50 2003 From: wenhuadageming at attbi.com (Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 14:31:50 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism In-Reply-To: <017d01c31a16$b7c130c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030514143002.0571f270@mail.attbi.com> >I would argue (and Stan Goff and others as well--people like Alf >Hornborg--have been so arguing) that there is an entropic dimension to this >crisis. Stan Goff has a very good paper on this in the A-List archive. was mark referring to this? http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2001-October/016421.html if so, is there a better formatted version or posting of this? thanks, x. yuan From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 14 13:01:48 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 12:01:48 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: dreams and nightmares Message-ID: <003c01c31a4b$64878be0$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "michael a. lebowitz" > Dear Friends, > Sorry about that!!! The address for signatures is marxdream at hotmail.com. > I.e., no 's'. > michael From WRC92 at aol.com Wed May 14 13:17:26 2003 From: WRC92 at aol.com (WRC92 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 15:17:26 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism Message-ID: <7A102155.54F3F91B.0001044B@aol.com> I do not claim to have the insights of Mark Jones, but as a personal aside, I too am in the process of writing a book on petrodollars, energy, and Imperialism. Many of you may have read my original essay entitled "The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq: A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth." Surprisingly, I received 3 book offers based on that essay. Thus, I am in the process of researching and writing a book on this subject. This weekend I wrote a 3,500 word essay on this matter for possible publication in Global Outlook (CA). I am certainyl not an economist by training, so please feel free to review and critique, thanks. May 12, 2003 The Unspoken Oil Currency War: Macroeconomics behind the Iraq War By William Clark "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be . . . The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe." Those words by Thomas Jefferson embody the unfortunate state of affairs that have beset our nation. It is a disturbing prospect that the U.S.-led war against Iraq appears to have been waged under fraudulent premises. This weekend it was reported in the Washington Post that the US military unit in charge of searching for Iraq?s elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) will be heading home next month. According to the article, this ?frustrated? elite unit could not find any evidence of viable WMD. [1] It is increasingly obvious that Saddam did not possess an imminent or viable threat to the U.S., but like his illusionary ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, the Bush administration will not let such facts get in their way. For those who may still be wondering, ?Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?? - I recommend that you follow the money, or more specifically ? follow Iraq?s oil currency. Although hidden behind the massive media propaganda campaign, the answer to the Iraq enigma is the US dollar. The real reason for the war was this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, the U.S. needed to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. The Iraq war had less to do with any threat from Saddam?s old weapons of mass destruction program and certainly less to do to do with fighting terrorism than it has to do with the almighty dollar. Iraq was an oil currency war ? a war designed to keep the euro from becoming an alternative oil transaction currency. Origins of the oil currency war Saddam sealed his fate with the neo conservatives in President?s Bush administration when he decided in September 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for its oil sales, but accept euros instead. Given that in the fall of 2000 the euro was at it?s lowest point to the dollar (about 82 cents to the dollar), some analysts were rather surprised that Saddam was willing to give up approximately $270 million in annual oil revenue for what was essentially a political statement. [2] Nonetheless, pricing oil in euros was his symbolic way of protesting continued U.S. support of the U.N. sanctions against Iraq. On November 6th, 2000 the U.N. switched the required currency accepted for Iraqi oil sales from dollars to euros. Saddam subsequently converted Iraq?s $10 billion dollar oil for food reserve into euros as well. [2] Well before 9/11 it appears that the Bush administration concluded that regime change and a puppet government in Iraq were necessary to change oil sales back to U.S. dollars. Saddam?s switch to the euro currency appears to be a ?quasi-state secret? within the U.S. government and media, as it exposes one of the core reasons for the war. Currently Iraq?s oil purchases are routed into the U.N.?s ?oil for food program,? and then into a euro-denominated account with a French bank. On May 8th, 2003 the U.S. proposed a U.N. resolution to end the U.N. sanctions, phase-out the oil for food program, and gain full control of Iraq?s oil revenue. [3] The proposed resolution would create an ?Iraqi Assistance Fund? that is solely administered by the U.S. Such a proposal should allow this administration to quietly convert Iraq?s oil currency back to the dollar. As for those who asked ?Why invade Iraq now?? ? perhaps the urgency for the Iraq war was heightened by Iran, which in 2002 moved the majority of its reserve funds to euros. It is well documented that Iran has discussed switching from the dollar to the euro for oil pricing. Due to the lack of coverage of this crucial ?detail,? perhaps this is another ?taboo subject? within our government and our seven corporate-controlled media conglomerates. Nonetheless, given its strong trade relationship with the European Union, it is logical for Iran to make the switch in currencies, if only from a purely monetary and economic perspective. It remains to be seen what Iran will do with its oil currency given its new U.S. neighbors. Overview of structural imbalances within the U.S. economy The U.S. economy has acquired significant structural imbalances, including our record-high $503 billion trade account deficit (now 5 % of GDP), a $6.4 trillion dollar deficit (60% of GDP), and the recent return to annual budget deficits in the hundreds of billions over the last two years. These imbalances are being exacerbated by the Bush administration?s ideologically driven tax cut and massive spending policies, which are creating enormous deficits for the rest of this decade. Why is the dollar still predominant despite these significant structural imbalances? While many Americans assume the strength of the U.S. dollar merely rests on our economic output (i.e. GDP), the ruling elites understand that the dollar?s strength is founded on its two fundamentally unique advantages relative to all other hard currencies. Unfortunately the majority of Americans are not cognizant to the fact that the ?strength? of our current economy is founded on the dollar?s two pivotal advantages following the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944-1945. First is the dollars role as the single international reserve currency, which affords the US market with its ?safe harbor? international status. The second crucial factor is the dollar?s role as the fiat and sole currency for global oil transactions. While the dollar?s role as the only international reserve currency is well understood, the effects of the dollar as the monopoly currency for international oil transactions is rarely discussed. Nonetheless, one of the Federal Reserve?s worst nightmares would consist of an OPEC switch from dollars to euros as the international currency standard for oil purchases. Origins of the Petrodollar The valuation of the U.S. dollar was rather shaky after August 1971 when the Nixon had to ?de-link? the dollar from the $35 per oz. ?gold standard.? According to Dr. David Spiro?s research on this issue, in 1973-74 the Nixon administration sought to alleviate this situation by negotiating assurances from King Saud of Saudi Arabia to price oil in dollars only, and to invest their surplus oil proceeds in U.S. Treasury Bills. [4] In return the U.S. would protect the Saudi regime. These agreements created the phenomenon known as ?petrodollar recycling.? The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of fiat dollars, which U.S. consumers provide to other nations via trade when we purchase their imported goods. Hundreds of billions of these dollars then become petrodollars when used by nations to purchase oil/energy from OPEC producers. Depending upon the price of oil, approximately $600 to $800 billion petrodollars are annually ?re-cycled? from OPEC sales and invested back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets. The fact that all buyers of oil must first buy dollars to pay for the oil supports the U.S. dollar as the world?s reserve currency, and eliminates our currency risk for oil. Oil priced in ?petrodollars? and the dollar as the world?s reserve currency has supported the value of our currency which by normal economic logic, given America?s trillions of dollars in trade deficits over the past decade, should have much less purchasing power than it currently possesses. An enlarged E.U. and a strong euro is challenging this arragement. However, as long as the dollar remains the monopoly oil transaction currency, its ?storage of wealth? is theoretically derived from the simple fact that it purchases between 1.5 and 1.9 gallons of crude oil. (Using OPEC price range of $22-$28 per barrel, and 42 gallons in a production barrel). No other hard currency in the world can be used to directly purchase the most valuable commodity in the world ? oil. This unique geo-political agreement with Saudi Arabia has worked to our favor for the past 30 years by eliminating any fluctuation (currency risk) in our oil purchases in relation to the dollar?s valuation, raising the entire asset value of all dollar denominated assets/properties, and facilitating the Federal Reserve in creating a truly massive debt and credit expansion (or `credit bubble' in the view of some economists). In effect, global oil consumption via OPEC ?petrodollar recycling? provides a subsidy to the U.S. economy. OPEC, the Euro, and E.U. enlargement It is no secret that the Europeans created the E.U. in an effort to create a huge trading bloc and common currency that could directly compete with the large U.S. economy. Hence, the goals of the E.U. include the euro becoming an alternative international reserve currency. To facilitate that goal, the euro would have to become an alternative ?storage of wealth? for oil transactions. Obviously the E.U. would like their oil purchases to be priced in the euro, as that would eliminate their currency risk, and stabilize their oil bill. Moreover, in December 2002 ten additional countries were approved for membership into the EU, which in 2004 will result in an aggregate GDP of $9.6 trillion - directly comparable to the U.S. s? $10 trillion GDP. Indeed, in a visit to Spain in April 2002, Mr Javad Yarjani, the Head of OPEC's Market Analysis Department, illustrated the new dynamics of the E.U. and the euro currency in an important speech. He stated, ?In the short-term, OPEC Member Countries (MCs), with possibly a few exceptions, are expected to continue to accept payment in dollars. Nevertheless, I believe that OPEC will not discount entirely the possibility of adopting euro pricing and payments in the future.? [5] Based on the details of this candid speech, momentum for OPEC to consider switching to the euro will grow once the E.U. expands in May 2004 to 450 million people with the inclusion of 10 additional member states. Undoubtedly, the euro currency is a significant new competitor, and appears to be the primary threat to U.S. dollar hegemony. What would a collective switch by OPEC to euros instead of U.S. dollars for their oil mean to the US economy? Although a sudden switch by OPEC would be very unlikely barring major financial maneuvers or a dollar panic, it would cause oil-consuming nations to flush dollars out of their central bank reserve funds and replace these with euros. That event could cause an additional dollar devaluation anywhere from 20 to 40% (the dollar has already fallen 27% against the euro since late 2001). The consequences of such devaluation would be those one could expect from any currency collapse. Americans would pay dramatically more for the billions of dollars of our imported goods. Americans would pay dramatically more for energy ? the cost to fly our planes, run our factories, heat our homes, and drive our cars. Our economy would grind into a deep recession, or possible much worse. Perhaps fear of decreased investor and consumer confidence is the reason this crucial issue is not discussed in the U.S. media, but European governments and some astute citizens understand the underlying dollar versus euro oil issues. Post-war Iraq We are in the very early stages of the occupation of Iraq, but the initial reactions of the Iraqis, particularity the Shi?ites, does not inspire confidence. Undeterred by the unstable situation on the ground and in Baghdad, the neo-conservatives are pursuing through the U.N. their bold yet simple agenda - to use our new position and Iraq and the perpetual `war on terror' to prevent the OPEC cartel?s inevitable switch to pricing oil in euros. I hypothesize that President Bush toppled Saddam in a pre-emptive attempt to quickly rebuild Iraq?s oil production capability, initiate massive Iraqi oil production in far excess of OPEC quotas, to reduce global oil prices, and dissolve the OPEC cartel?s price controls. Removing Saddam was more of a victory for dollar hegemony and Bush?s re-election campaign than a victory in the fight against terrorism. How does the Bush administration intend to break-up the OPEC cartel's price controls in a post-Saddam Iraq? Assuming the U.N. Resolution proposed last week by the U.S./U.K. passes, that will clear the way for the U.S. to gain full control over Iraq?s oil resources. The newly installed U.S. General will dismantle the U.N.?s oil for food program, create an ?Iraqi Assistance Fund? denominated in U.S. dollars, and thus convert Iraq?s oil pricing back to the dollar. The next step of the U.S. ruling junta involves massive repairs and upgrades to Iraq?s oil production capability (via Halliburton), ultimately allowing a rapid increase in oil production from approximately 2.5 million barrels per day to eventually 6 or 7 million. Such massive Iraqi oil production could lead to a reduction in the price of oil to the $15 per barrel range. This would result in the collapse of the OPEC cartel, and possibly negate their ability to switch oil transaction currencies. An interesting piece of news regarding the dollar/euro issues and the potential political fallout from the Iraq war relates to Indonesia, a small OPEC producer with a Muslim majority. In April 2003 Indonesia?s state oil company, Pertamina, indicated that it was considering dropping the dollar for the euro regarding its oil and gas trades. [6] Additionally, some articles have suggested that other countries such as Malaysia and Nigeria may be considering dropping the dollar in favor of the euro. These countries perceive that switching to the euro will eventually diminish the ability of the neoconservatives to pursue militant global Imperialism. A troubling ?anti-dollar? movement may be spreading. To illustrate, a Wall Street Journal reporter witnessed an anti-war street protest in Nigeria where the crowd shouted ?Euro Yes! Dollar No! [7] The Paradox The Bush administration probably believes that the occupation of Iraq and the installation of a large and permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region will stop other OPEC producers from even considering switching the denomination of their oil sales from dollars to euros. However, using the military to enforce dollar hegemony for oil transactions strikes me as a rather unwieldy and inappropriate strategy. Despite the media reporting otherwise, the current wave of ?global anti-Americanism? is not against the American people or against American values - but against the hypocrisy of militant American Imperialism. I respectfully submit the current polices of the neoconservative movement as expressed through their PNAC document, their manipulation of the citizenry through fear, and the application of unilateral military force is treasonous to both American Public and to the fundamental principles that founded our nation. Regrettably, President Bush and his neo-conservative advisors have chosen to apply a military option to what was is in essence an economic problem. History may not look kindly upon their actions. Paradoxically, for a variety of economic and political reasons, it appears that a growing number of OPEC producers in the Middle East, South America, and Africa may wish to transition their oil pricing from dollars to euros. Furthermore, we may be witnessing the regrettable emergence of a European-Russian-Chinese alliance in an effort to counter American Imperialism. Hence, it is plausible that Russia may at some point re-denominate its oil exports in euros. In conclusion, the structural imbalances in the U.S. economy, along with the Bush administration's flawed tax, economic and most principally their overtly Imperialist foreign polices could result in the dollar's reserve currency status and oil transaction currency status being placed in jeopardy or at the very least significantly diminished over the next 1-2 years. In the event that my hypothesis materializes, the U.S. economy will require restructuring in some manner to account for the reduction of either of these two pivotal advantages. This will be an exceedingly painful process if it occurs in a disorderly manner, perhaps reminiscent of the Great Depression in the 1930s. What is needed is a multilateral meeting of the G-7 nations to reform the international monetary system. Given that future wars will become more likely over oil and the currency of oil, the author advocates that the global monetary system be reformed without delay. This would include the dollar and euro designated as equal international reserve currencies, and placed within an exchange band along with a dual-OPEC oil transaction currency standard. Additionally, the G-7 nations should also explore a future third reserve currency option regarding a yen/yuan bloc for East Asia. A compromise on the euro/oil issues via a multilateral treaty with a gradual phase-in of a dual-OPEC transaction currency standard could minimize economic dislocations within the U.S. While these multilateral reforms may lower our standard of living slightly and reduce our ability to project a massive global military presence, the benefits would include improving the quality of our lives and that of our children by reducing animosity towards the U.S. while we rebuild our alliances with the E.U. and world community. Creating balanced domestic fiscal polices along with global monetary reform is in the long-term national security interest of the United States. Hopefully these proposed monetary reforms could mitigate future armed or economic warfare over oil, ultimately fostering a more stable, safer, and prosperous global economy in the 21st century. Saving the American Experiment Only time will tell what will happen in the aftermath of the Iraq war and U.S. occupation, but I am hopeful my research will contribute to the historical record and help others understand one of the important but hidden reasons for why we conquered Iraq. Until the U.S. agrees to negotiate a more balanced Global Monetary system and embarks on a viable National Energy Strategy, our nation will continue to pursue a hypocritical foreign policy that is incompatible with the ideas of the founding fathers regarding freedom and liberty. The current neoconservative foreign policies are creating ?blowback? and ?anti-American? sentiments around the world, as well as dangerous new geo-political alliances with nations that should be U.S. allies. Compounding these foreign policy issues is the ongoing domestic political strategy of this administration to discourage dissent. While this administration talks of ?spreading freedom abroad,? they are cynically utilizing fear tactics to erode our Constitutional protections while eviscerating our Bill of Rights. The U.S. media has been silent regarding the many components of the so-called USA Patriot Act and Patriot Act II which are profoundly dangerous tools that could be used to suppress the U.S. citizenry. [7] The temptation to abuse such broad powers would be tremendous for political purposes and/or in the event our economy experiences a severe downturn. Quite frankly, in order to save the American Experiment and stop our slide towards an isolated, oppressive Authoritarian State, we must elect an enlightened administration in 2004. The three main challenges of the next U.S. administration will be 1) negotiating global monetary reform, 2) broadly re-organizing U.S. fiscal policies, and 3) attempting to repair our damaged foreign relationships with the E.U., Russia, the Middle East, as well as our frayed alliances with the U.N. and NATO. Sadly, the next U.S. President will have to undertake these challenges from a weakened position both economically and diplomatically. I do not envy the arduous journey that awaits the 44th President of the United States. **************************************** References: 1. Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq: Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons, Washington Post (May 11, 2003) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40212-2003May10.html 2 Recknagel, Charles, "Iraq: Baghdad Moves to Euro," Radio Free Europe (November 1, 2000) http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/01112000160846.asp 3. ?Details of resolution to lift Iraq sanctions,? CNN (May 8, 2003) http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/08/iraq.sanctions/ 4. Spiro, David E., ?The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets,? Cornell University Press, (1999) 5. The Choice of Currency for the Denomination of the Oil Bill," Speech given by Javad Yarjani, Head of OPEC's Petroleum Market Analysis Dept, on The International Role of the Euro (Invited by the Spanish Minister of Economic Affairs during Spain's Presidency of the EU) (April 14, 2002, Oviedo, Spain) http://www.opec.org/NewsInfo/Speeches/sp2002/spAraqueSpainApr14.htm 6. Pesek Jr., William, 'Indonesia May Dump Dollar; Rest of Asia Too?" Bloomberg, (April 17, 2003) http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_pesek&sid=anZbHuX9q8gI 7. Geewax, Marilyn, ?Muslims eye euro as new oil currency? (April 22, 2003) http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/04/21/1050777210439.html 8. Patriot Act II analysis, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), (February 7, 2003) http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/patriot2.html Copyright ? 2003 William Clark Reprinted for Fair Use Only About the Author: William Clark is a graduate student in the MBA & MS/ITS programs at Johns Hopkins University. He has been offered to write a book based on his research regarding Iraq, and hopes to complete this project by year?s end. For questions or interviews please contact: wrc92 at aol.com From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 14 13:43:32 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 12:43:32 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism References: <017d01c31a16$b7c130c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <019901c31a51$1a88c530$20fa5718@comintern> Hi Michael... I read this exact message to my partner awhile ago, just after Mark died. This is both the language and the analysis that we are so dearly missing. Thanks for reposting. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" > This is the global context in which we have to think thru our revolutionary > politics. It is a worse crisis than 1914-1917, worse than 1941, worse by far > than any in the history of either the capitalist class or the working class. > We should find a political rhetoric, as well as an organisational mode, > which does justice to this. From wenhuadageming at attbi.com Wed May 14 13:55:36 2003 From: wenhuadageming at attbi.com (Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 15:55:36 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism In-Reply-To: <7A102155.54F3F91B.0001044B@aol.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030514154910.05754d28@mail.attbi.com> At 03:17 PM 5/14/2003 -0400, you wrote: >I do not claim to have the insights of Mark Jones, but as a personal >aside, I too am in the process of writing a book on petrodollars, energy, >and Imperialism. Many of you may have read my original essay entitled >"The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq: A Macroeconomic and >Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth." Surprisingly, I received 3 >book offers based on that essay. Thus, I am in the process of researching >and writing a book on this subject. This weekend I wrote a 3,500 word >essay on this matter for possible publication in Global Outlook (CA). I >am certainyl not an economist by training, so please feel free to review >and critique, thanks. May 12, 2003 The Unspoken Oil Currency War: >Macroeconomics behind the Iraq War By William Clark hey there, heh, i was wondering you were just a mythical person, as personally i've only come across your work via websites and indymedia postings, etc. but yeah, i've certainly come across your piece, and have forwarded it to many. it has been useful, although i assume you are not a marxist? with all due respect, some of your recommendations at the end of your piece have the character of being reformist, and not challenging the fundamental workings of the system of capitalism itself. just my observation. regards, x. yuan From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 14 13:57:04 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 12:57:04 -0700 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 References: <6149562.1052932697105.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <01ae01c31a52$ffb5f0a0$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: To > We are already facing the attempted imposition of new touch-screen voting machines across the south that generate NO PAPER TRAIL, the manufacturers and programmers of which have suspicious ties to the Republican Party. It is > becoming a huge issue in local elections here in North Carolina. -- >From what I understand, the problem is actually, from a techie point of view (which I'm not) worse. The actually program code, the internal workings if you will, are all off the tables. The machines are programmed and only servicable by the people who own the copyright and built them, a series of Republicans. Personally, I don't see how one can talk of the analysis of the "election" in 2004 meaning anything since this has become the "last line of defense" for the bourgeois. Stan again: >>This points again, I think, to the critical task of developing Black political power, beginning at the municipal and county levels, and not necessarily along the ideological lines that white progressives might prefer. A Black comprador is often easier for communities to hold accountable than a white vestigal planter. --- I appreciate this much and agree with both the sentiment and the tactic, butn I guess my question goes deeper. From now on, it can go like this: Tell us a polling result as far as the opinion poll, then repeat the desired number, change it oh-so-slightly on election day and have the computer belch it out. So, the question is: What do we do to make the reality of this have the meat it needs? to partaphrase, what is the political rhetoric we are going to use that does justice to this? This is gravely worse than anything Mugabe or Slobo ever did, even if one accepts the very worst reports put out by any news agency. Yes, I'm being demanding. I guess it's because inside almost all discussion about what the Republicans (Bush Junta) are planning, going to do next, who they will attack or (most often) when include some reference to how the electoral process is guiding their thinking. Well, popular perception, in lesser degrees but still greatly, may animate the Junta-- but not the electoral process at all. How can we talk about the Republicans doing X,Y or Z for fear of losing to a Democrats when they have stolen the last election and since had what amounts to a coup inside the rulking circels and now they own the copyright and only access to the voting results? I can see a day where another Democrat gets into office. That day would arrive when it is "better" for the oilist Junta that he be there (PR, in other words). I am fully aware how Orwell this sounds. Reality is strager than fiction, and I'm not currently operating as an author. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 14 14:16:50 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:16:50 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: heroin flooding Baghdad References: <010101c3193a$d2ef46c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <028e01c31a55$c28f2810$20fa5718@comintern> Now, as anyone who has been to the Downtown East Side of Vancouver or in the "slums" of any number of American cities knows, this is a real "Weapon of mass destruction", and it can wipe out the hope and future of entire neighbourhoods in a matter of a couple of months. Macdonald From michele at maui.net Wed May 14 14:25:02 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 10:25:02 -1000 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 References: <6149562.1052932697105.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <010f01c31a56$e7ca2480$4a934b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> I don't understand why, if this technology is of such benefit to one party, the other party isn't acting against it; collusive or not, they must have an interest in their share of the spoils through the electoral process, I would assume. And why would not a third party, a Black organization of voters, or maybe just someone with standing to sue take this into the appropriate court? Are there problems of proof, of standing, of the reliability of the judiciary, of funding? Plainly, Black clout through collective action is the real answer, but just wondering. Ralph ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 7:18 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US elections 2004 > We are already facing the attempted imposition of new touch-screen voting machines across the south that generate NO PAPER TRAIL, the manufacturers and programmers of which have suspicious ties to the Republican Party. It is becoming a huge issue in local elections here in North Carolina. > > This will certainly provoke some dilemmas for various species of "progressive", including genuine leftists. A good friend of mine last election, an African-American woman who feared Republican scortched earth policies that impacted on women and people of color, knowing full-well that Democrats were complicit, said - speaking of Nader-voters - a vote for Ralph Nader is an exercise of white privilege. > > When these machines and other chicaneries by Republicans are directed at Black voters, there are real questions of solidarity that come up, for which easy abstractions developed out of sight of ravaged neighborhoods and collapsing Black Belt communities will prove inadequate. > > This points again, I think, to the critical task of developing Black political power, beginning at the municipal and county levels, and not necessarily along the ideological lines that white progressives might prefer. A Black comprador is often easier for communities to hold accountable than a white vestigal planter. > > From WRC92 at aol.com Wed May 14 15:02:10 2003 From: WRC92 at aol.com (WRC92 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 17:02:10 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism Message-ID: <09A43F23.27B3BDD1.0001044B@aol.com> <>>> Well, I'm not a mythical person - at least to be the best of my knowledge. ;-) You are right that I am not a Marxist, but more of a reformist. However, I have learned much from the posts on the A-List. This is a very thought-provoking list, and I enjoy it immensely, even if I do not agree with all of the stated positions. I believe in capitalism/socialism with plenty of rules, certainly not Laissez Faire, not U.S. Imperialism, nor do I beleive in a command economy which this neocon administration is trying to establish. BTW, my views on Globalization are still developing, but my primary concern at the moment is the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration. The more I investigate the issues, the more I understand the need for Global Monetary Reform. With reform, I believe the US will become quite an oppressive Authoritarian State, and a failed Empire. -William From bobenoch at shaw.ca Wed May 14 16:11:38 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 15:11:38 -0700 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 References: <6149562.1052932697105.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> <010f01c31a56$e7ca2480$4a934b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Message-ID: <003d01c31a65$cade6f20$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Ralph asks: " I don't understand why, if this technology is of such benefit to one party, the other party isn't acting against it;....." (snip) -------- It's a bit of a catch-22, Ralph. A Democrat, or a Liberal Republican who believed these allegations must also believe that the mass media have ignored the many stories that have "come out", (put "computer voting fraud" into your search engine). This might lead you to fear that your charges would appear(if at all). on page 52d, right next to a story suggesting that your campaigns are funded by Islamic charities. You would also know that the first use made of Bush's new majority after the last elections was to flood the judiciary with friends of the Junta. This takes the excitement right out of a court challenge....and suggests what you might expect when you are sued for libel.... Finally, you could be expected to assume that the surest result of your initiative would be an unexplained "shift" in the vote in your own District. Better to ask: " How could it be that the programs which control the computers that control the elections are deemed "proprietary", and thus secret,and beyond the jurisdiction of State election officials?" Or, "Why are exit polls now being suppressed?" Bob From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 14 16:52:03 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 18:52:03 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: heroin flooding Baghdad In-Reply-To: <028e01c31a55$c28f2810$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <010301c31a6b$72c79090$0200a8c0@stan> It's also a Swiss Bank account for the CIA. -----Original Message----- From: a-list-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:a-list-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Macdonald Stainsby Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 4:17 PM To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: Re: [A-List] Iraq: heroin flooding Baghdad Now, as anyone who has been to the Downtown East Side of Vancouver or in the "slums" of any number of American cities knows, this is a real "Weapon of mass destruction", and it can wipe out the hope and future of entire neighbourhoods in a matter of a couple of months. Macdonald From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 14 17:21:05 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 19:21:05 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 In-Reply-To: <003d01c31a65$cade6f20$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <010e01c31a6f$814153a0$0200a8c0@stan> I hear you, Mac. This whole situation, and the elections themselves, are presenting us with a lot of contradictions. They are a very hot topic of conversation hereabouts among lefties. Do we, or don't we... Can we, or can't we... The actual fight, county by county has already been engaged here about the machines, and it doesn't look like this will pass unopposed. Everywhere we had close calls with all kinds of bullshit in the last elections, people have been sensitized, and they are already raising holy hell. Beating these machines back may not be a grand strategic victory, but it builds organization. On the question of Black-majority counties, municipalities, districts here, there is a fundamental difference of perception about national elections. The question is not how does the local Democratic Party support the national Democrats, but vice versa. Our best elected officials at the federal level here are Frank Ballance and Mel Watt, both Black, who are in safe districts, from where they can take a lot more political risks than white Dems. But that's an aside. Black political power is seen here as a sine qua non of self-determination, part of the process locally of building a network of social institutions that facilitate dialogue, resolve conflict, and otherwise regulate social life. Black churches are a key part of this network, as are unions, trade associations, NAACP chapters, etc, etc. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but it's a project that's been under construction since Reconstruction, and it constitutes a real foothold. It's when an outsider tries to ingress upon these communities that they will get a taste of how stable some of them are. Many of these communities are small and semi-rural, along a chain of industrial development in the Interstate 95 corridor, and they haven't experienced the nuclear destruction of many urban core communities yet. On the subject of local politics more generally, it seems to me that we've glimpsed some kind of strategic thrust with the string of resolutions from various municipalities around the country who are refusing to support the USA PATRIOT crap. At this level, where community-based organizing can still have a meaningful impact on elections and elected officials, we might begin to think of developing points of this kind of ungovernability. This is a hazy conception, but it feels promising and appropriate to the period. Local officials are enraged at the sequestration of funds with the generalized budget crisis that's being dumped on them, and we run into them at the library or grocery store. I'm rambling, so I'll go. From michele at maui.net Wed May 14 17:20:37 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:20:37 -1000 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 References: <6149562.1052932697105.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> <010f01c31a56$e7ca2480$4a934b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> <003d01c31a65$cade6f20$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <024601c31a6f$75be3e80$4a934b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> All may be true enough, but first it seems to me you exhaust administrative and judicial remedies, and then you see more transparently what the beast looks like and proceed from there. Not a great waste of time, maybe you prevail, but in any case if you don't prevail, it's more like a necessary step in demonstrating in many dimensions the depth of the problem and the range of solutions. As to whether and how it will appear in the media, I'd act on the assumption that they'll print it prominently - but let them ignore it - legitimacy and credibility are to that extent diminished as a matter of record. It will be useful and will be picked up elsewhere. Bush's appointments only extend to the list of court vacancies, since federal judges are appointed for life. If voting mechanisms are characterized by the courts as in fact proprietary, (without knowing the law in that area, not likely in my view in light of judicial decisions protecting voter rights), then you have a precedent that you can use against the whole charade of "representative government" under a delegitimized regime. May not be a significant advance, but one to keep in your quiver. As to the abolition of exit polls, that has a plausible rationale in how the eastern exit poll results affect voter participation in the west. Also, if I remember correctly the gag is on publication, not on the taking of polls. Ralph Bob Enoch wrote: Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 12:11 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] US elections 2004 > Ralph asks: > > " I don't understand why, if this > technology is of such benefit to one party, > the other party isn't acting against it;....." (snip) > > -------- > It's a bit of a catch-22, Ralph. > A Democrat, or a Liberal Republican > who believed these allegations must also believe that the mass media have > ignored the many stories that have "come out", (put "computer voting fraud" > into your search engine). > This might lead you to fear that your charges would appear(if at all). on > page 52d, right next to a story suggesting that your campaigns are funded by > Islamic charities. > > You would also know that the first use made of Bush's new majority after the > last elections was to flood the judiciary with friends of the Junta. > This takes the excitement right out of a court challenge....and suggests > what you might expect when you are sued for libel.... > > Finally, you could be expected to assume that the surest result of your > initiative would be an unexplained "shift" in the vote in your own District. > > Better to ask: " How could it be that the programs which control the > computers that control the elections > are deemed "proprietary", and thus secret,and beyond the jurisdiction of > State election officials?" > Or, "Why are exit polls now being suppressed?" > > Bob > > > > > > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 14 17:25:51 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 16:25:51 -0700 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 References: <010e01c31a6f$814153a0$0200a8c0@stan> Message-ID: <047101c31a70$29e26cb0$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "bon moun" > I'm rambling, so I'll go. Actually, rambling is often better than thought-out presentations. Macdonald From soncu at pacbell.net Wed May 14 22:52:10 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 21:52:10 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Greenspan on Corporate Governance, Derivatives and Risk Management Message-ID: If I am not wrong, we have already covered this, but let us have a copy of Greenspan's May 8th talk in the archives. Best, Sabri +++++++ The following remarks are by Mr Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System, at the 2003 Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, Chicago, Illinois (via satellite), 8 May 2003. Corporate governance, the subject of our conference, has evolved over the past century to more effectively promote the allocation of the nation?s savings to its most productive uses. And, generally speaking, the resulting structure of business incentives, reporting, and accountability has served us well. We could not have achieved our current level of national productivity if corporate governance had been deeply flawed. Yet, our most recent experiences with corporate malfeasance suggest that governance has strayed from the way we think it is supposed to work. By law, shareholders own our corporations, and corporate managers ideally should be working on behalf of shareholders to allocate business resources to their optimum use. But as our economy has grown and our business units have become ever larger, de facto shareholder control has diminished: Ownership has become more dispersed, and few shareholders have sufficient stakes to individually influence the choice of boards of directors or chief executive officers. The vast majority of corporate share ownership is for investment, not for operating control of a company. Thus, corporate officers, especially chief executive officers, have increasingly shouldered the responsibility for guiding businesses in what one hopes they perceive to be the best interests of shareholders. Not all CEOs have appropriately discharged their responsibilities and lived up to the trust placed in them, as the events that led to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act demonstrated. In too many instances, some CEOs, under pressure to meet elevated short-term expectations for earnings, employed accounting devices for the sole purpose of obscuring adverse results. A change in behavior, however, may already be in train. The sharp decline in stock and bond prices after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom has chastened many of those responsible for questionable business practices. Corporate reputation is emerging out of the ashes of the debacle as a significant economic value. I hope that we will return to the earlier practices of firms competing for the reputation of having the most conservative and transparent set of books. It is hard to overstate the importance of reputation in a market economy. To be sure, a market economy requires a structure of formal rules--a law of contracts, bankruptcy statutes, a code of shareholder rights--to name but a few. But rules cannot substitute for character. In virtually all transactions, whether with customers or with colleagues, we rely on the word of those with whom we do business. If we could not do so, goods and services could not be exchanged efficiently. Even when followed to the letter, rules guide only a small number of the day-to-day decisions required of corporate management. The rest are governed by whatever personal code of values corporate managers bring to the table. Market transactions are inhibited if counterparties cannot rely on the accuracy of information. The ability to trust the word of a stranger still is an integral part of any sophisticated economy. A reputation for honest dealings within a corporation is critical for effective corporate governance. Even more important is the reputation of the corporation itself as seen through the eyes of outsiders. It is an exceptionally important market value that in principle is capitalized on a balance sheet as goodwill. Reputation and trust were particularly valued assets in freewheeling nineteenth-century America . Throughout much of that century, laissez-faire reigned and caveat emptor was the prevailing prescription for guarding against the wide-open trading practices of those years. A reputation for honest dealings was thus a particularly valued asset. Even those inclined to be less than scrupulous in their private dealings were forced to adhere to a more ethical standard in their market transactions, or they risked being driven out of business. To be sure, the history of business is strewn with Fisks, Goulds, and numerous others treading on, or over, the edge of legality. But they were a distinct minority. If the situation had been otherwise, the United States at the end of the nineteenth century would never have been poised to displace Great Britain as the world?s leading economy. Reputation was especially important to early U.S. bankers. It is not by chance that in the nineteenth century many bankers could effectively issue uncollateralized currency. They worked hard to develop and maintain a reputation that their word was their bond. For these institutions to succeed and prosper, people had to trust their promise of redemption in specie. The notion that ?wildcat banking? was rampant before the Civil War is an exaggeration. Certainly, crooks existed in banking as in every business. Some banks that issued currency made redemption inconvenient, if not impossible. But they were fly-by-night operators and rarely endured beyond the first swindle. In fact, most bankers competed vigorously for reputation. Those who had a history of redeeming their bank notes in specie, at par, were able to issue substantial quantities, effectively financing their balance sheets with zero-interest debt. J.P. Morgan marshaled immense power on Wall Street in large part because his reputation for fulfilling his promises was legendary. Today, most banks rely partly on deposit insurance in lieu of reputation to hold below-market-rate deposits. And a broad range of protections provided by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and myriad other federal and state agencies has similarly partially crowded out the value of trust as a competitive asset. Trust still plays a crucial role in one of the most rapidly growing segments of our financial system?the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market. This market has played an important and successful role in the management of risk at financial institutions, a major element of their corporate governance. I do not say that the success of the OTC derivatives market in creating greater financial flexibility is due solely to the prevalence of private reputation rather than public regulation. Still, the success to date clearly could not have been achieved were it not for counterparties? substantial freedom from regulatory constraints on the terms of OTC contracts. This freedom allows derivatives counterparties to craft contracts that transfer risks in the most effective way to those most willing and financially capable of absorbing them. Benefits of derivatives Although the benefits and costs of derivatives remain the subject of spirited debate, the performance of the economy and the financial system in recent years suggests that those benefits have materially exceeded the costs. Over the past several years, the U.S. economy has proven remarkably resilient in the face of a series of severe shocks--the collapse of equity values, terrorist attacks, and geopolitical turmoil. To be sure, economic growth has been subpar for some time, but we seem to have experienced a significantly milder downturn than the long history of business cycles and the severity of the shocks to the economy would have led us to expect. Although no single factor can account for this resilience, one striking feature that differentiates this cycle from earlier ones is the continued vitality of most U.S. banks and nonbank financial institutions. In past cycles, economic downturns often produced credit losses that were so severe that the capacity of those institutions to intermediate financial flows was impaired. As a consequence, recessions were prolonged and deepened. This time, the economic downturn has not significantly eroded the capital of most financial intermediaries, and the terms and availability of credit have not tightened to such an extent as to be significant factors in deepening the contraction or impeding the recovery. The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the enhanced resilience of our largest financial intermediaries. Derivatives have permitted financial risks to be unbundled in ways that have facilitated both their measurement and their management. Because risks can be unbundled, individual financial instruments now can be analyzed in terms of their common underlying risk factors, and risks can be managed on a portfolio basis. Concentrations of risk are more readily identified, and when such concentrations exceed the risk appetites of intermediaries, derivatives can be employed to transfer the underlying risks to other entities. As a result, not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient. Individual institutions? portfolios have become better diversified. Furthermore, risk is more widely dispersed, both within the banking system and among other types of intermediaries and institutional investors. Even the largest corporate defaults in history (WorldCom and Enron) and the largest sovereign default in history ( Argentina ) have not significantly impaired the capital of any major financial intermediary. Likewise, record amounts of home mortgage refinancing and accompanying declines in mortgage asset durations have not imperiled the principal intermediaries in the mortgage markets, in substantial part because these institutions were able to use derivatives to transfer a significant portion of the convexity risk associated with prepayments of fixed-rate mortgages to investors in callable debt and issuers of putable debt. Risks associated with the use of derivatives If derivatives and the techniques for risk measurement and management that they have facilitated have produced all these benefits, why do they remain so controversial? The answer is that the use of these instruments and the associated techniques pose a variety of challenges to risk managers. Inevitably, risk-management failures occur, and in two instances--the highly publicized cases of Barings and Long Term Capital Management--they proved destabilizing. Those that question the net benefits of derivatives see daunting risk-management problems and thus foresee catastrophic outcomes. In particular, they fear that common deficiencies in risk management will result in widespread failures or that the failure of a very large derivatives participant will impose heavy credit losses on its counterparties and yield a chain of failures. Others, like myself, who see the benefits of derivatives exceeding the costs, do not deny that their use poses significant risk-management challenges. But we see ample evidence that the risks are manageable in principle and generally have been managed quite effectively in practice, at least to date. Indeed, credit losses on derivatives have occurred at a rate that is a small fraction, for example, of the loss rate on commercial and industrial loans. Market discipline in the largely unregulated derivatives markets has provided strong incentives for effective risk management and has the potential to be even more effective in the future. To be sure, there undoubtedly will be further risk-management failures. But the largest market participants have such diversified businesses that a risk-management failure involving a single product line is unlikely to be a threat to solvency. Furthermore, risk-management failures are more likely to be idiosyncratic than to reflect common deficiencies in procedure or technique among market participants. In the case of the management of market risk, our bank examiners observe significant differences in approach across the largest U.S. banks, even in the measurement of such a basic concept as value-at-risk. I do not wish to suggest, however, that I am entirely sanguine with respect to the risks associated with derivatives. One development that gives me and others some pause is the decline in the number of major derivatives dealers and its potential implications for market liquidity and for concentration of counterparty credit risks. I also fear that the potential contribution of market discipline to stability in the derivatives markets is not being fully realized because, in our laudable efforts to improve public disclosure, we too often appear to be mistaking more extensive disclosure for greater transparency. This is an issue to which I shall shortly return. Concentration and market liquidity In recent years, consolidation has reduced the number of firms that provide liquidity to the OTC derivatives markets by acting as dealers in the more standardized or "plain vanilla" contracts. To be sure, the resulting concentration sometimes is overstated because of the failure to recognize that the OTC derivatives markets are global markets in which major banks and securities firms from more than half a dozen countries compete. For example, measures of concentration based on data reported by U.S. banks overstate concentration significantly because they ignore the competitive activities of U.S. securities firms and foreign banks. Nonetheless, not all major dealers make markets in all products, and concentration is substantial for certain important types of OTC contracts. Examples include U.S. dollar interest rate options and credit default swaps. In each case, a single dealer seems to account for about one-third of the global market, and a handful of dealers together seem to account for more than two-thirds. When concentration reaches these kinds of levels, market participants need to consider the implications of exit by one or more leading dealers. Such an event could adversely affect the liquidity of types of derivatives that market participants rely upon for managing the risks of their core business functions. Exit could be voluntary. In particular, losses incurred in making markets could lead a dealer to conclude that the returns from market-making are not commensurate with the risks. Alternatively, downgrades of a dealer?s credit rating could force the dealer to exit. Counterparties in the OTC derivatives market are quite concerned about the potential credit risks inherent in such contracts and generally are unwilling to transact with dealers unless their credit rating is A or higher. If a major dealer exited and other dealers were unwilling to fill the void, the liquidity of the market likely would be impaired. Market participants need to consider what their alternatives would be in such circumstances. Are there other liquid markets in which they could manage their risks? In some cases market participants may be able to manage risks reasonably effectively in cash markets or exchange traded derivatives markets. But in other cases managing risks may become more difficult with the exit of some dealers. If market participants perceive that they are vulnerable to such exit by a liquidity provider, they will tend to redirect some of their risk-management activity to other, more liquid markets or seek out new dealers in the market in which exit is a concern. If enough participants perceive the concentration of dealers as entailing market-liquidity risk, their actions to mitigate the risk should over time reduce that degree of concentration. Concentration and counterparty risk Perhaps the more obvious way in which concentration in OTC derivatives markets creates risks for market participants is through its implications for counterparty credit risks. Concentration of market making has the potential to create concentrations of credit risks between the dealers and the end-users of derivatives as well as between the dealers themselves. This latter concentration of risk results from dealers frequently managing their market risks through derivatives transactions with a limited number of other dealers. As mentioned earlier, critics of derivatives often raise the specter of the failure of one dealer imposing debilitating losses on its counterparties, including other dealers, yielding a chain of defaults. However, derivatives market participants seem keenly aware of the counterparty credit risks associated with derivatives and take various measures to mitigate those risks. The vast majority carefully evaluate the creditworthiness of counterparties before entering into transactions and monitor their credit quality over the life of the transactions. As I indicated earlier, users of derivatives have been reluctant to transact with dealers that are not perceived as solid investment-grade credits. Market participants also establish credit limits for their counterparties and actively monitor their exposures to ensure that they remain within the limits established. Such monitoring, parenthetically, relies heavily on trust in the accuracy of the information forthcoming from the counterparties. Counterparty risk management has been materially assisted by the widespread use of master agreements for derivatives transactions. In the event of a counterparty?s default, such agreements permit the termination of all transactions with the counterparty and the netting of the resulting gains and losses. For many years, market participants have been putting such master agreements in place and working with legislatures to ensure that national laws support the enforceability of netting. Data reported by U.S. banks indicate that, on average, netting now reduces counterparty exposures by almost three-fourths. Even with wider use of netting, however, the outsized growth of derivatives markets has resulted in ever-larger counterparty exposures. Market participants have increasingly responded by entering into collateral agreements to further mitigate counterparty credit risks. Such agreements typically permit counterparties to derivatives transactions to demand collateral if their net credit exposure exceeds a negotiated threshold amount. The threshold often varies with the credit rating of the counterparty: The lower a counterparty?s credit rating, the smaller the threshold. If its credit rating falls below investment grade, a counterparty is often required to overcollateralize its counterparties? exposures. In effect, it becomes obligated to meet a margin requirement. Collateral agreements are a very effective means of limiting counterparty credit risks. At the same time, they increase market participants? exposures to other types of risk, especially funding-liquidity risks. Once a counterparty has agreed to collateralize its derivatives contracts, day-to-day declines in the value of those contracts expose it to immediate demands for more collateral. Furthermore, the practice of tying the size of thresholds and margin requirements to credit ratings exposes a counterparty to extraordinary demands for collateral if its rating is downgraded. Collateral demands arising from rating downgrades may be especially costly to meet because a downgrade would reduce the availability of funding and increase its costs at the same time. Incentives for effective risk management As this discussion of the risks associated with derivatives makes clear, effective risk management by market participants is the key to ensuring that the benefits of derivatives continue to exceed their costs. Some may see government regulation of OTC derivatives dealers as essential to ensuring efficacious risk management. This view presumes that government regulation can address the challenges these types of markets engender and that it can do so without lessening the effectiveness of market discipline supplied by counterparties. Market participants usually have strong incentives to monitor and control the risks they assume in choosing to deal with particular counterparties. In essence, prudential regulation is supplied by the market through counterparty evaluation and monitoring rather than by authorities. Such private prudential regulation can be impaired--indeed, even displaced--if some counterparties assume that government regulations obviate private prudence. We regulators are often perceived as constraining excessive risk-taking more effectively than is demonstrably possible in practice. Except where market discipline is undermined by moral hazard, owing, for example, to federal guarantees of private debt, private regulation generally is far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than is government regulation. The very modest credit losses that have appeared in derivatives portfolios at U.S. banks are a testament to the effectiveness of market discipline in this area. Indeed, credit losses on OTC derivatives also have been quite modest at derivatives affiliates of U.S. broker-dealers, which are subject to very limited government regulation. This is further evidence of the powerful effects on behavior that result when market participants recognize that they bear the bottom-line consequences of their risk-taking decisions. A key support for market discipline is the information that market participants have for evaluating the creditworthiness of counterparties. Over the past decade, enormous attention has been given to disclosures market participants make with regard to their risk exposures, particularly those associated with derivatives activities. Both public authorities and private-sector working groups have recommended ways to enhance market discipline through improved public disclosures. The result of these efforts, however, has been mixed. Clearly, we have made great strides in expanding the volume of publicly disclosed information related to risk exposures and derivatives. A more complex question is whether this greater volume of information has led to comparable improvements in the transparency of firms. In the minds of some, public disclosure and transparency are interchangeable. But they are not. Transparency implies that information allows an understanding of a firm?s exposures and risks without distortion. The goal of improved transparency thus represents a higher bar than the goal of improved disclosures. Transparency challenges market participants not only to provide information but also to place that information in a context that makes it meaningful. Transparency challenges market participants to present information in ways that accurately reflect risks. Much disclosure currently falls short of these more demanding goals. Despite the substantial room for progress with regard to transparency, we should not underestimate the barriers to achieving it. Managers no doubt have to struggle with selecting and organizing data in a meaningful way. The difficulties are well illustrated by the annual reports of large institutions that routinely exceed one hundred pages; pressures are enormous to update existing tables and charts as well as to provide even more. In addressing this challenge, however, both managers of firms and makers of public policy would do well to be mindful of the ultimate goal--a clear understanding of a firm?s activities that fosters market discipline. Conclusion In conclusion, the benefits of derivatives, in my judgment, have far exceeded their costs. Derivatives unquestionably do pose risk-management challenges to market participants. But those challenges are manageable and thus far have generally been managed quite well. The best way to ensure that those challenges continue to be met is to preserve and strengthen the effectiveness of market discipline. Market incentives, in particular, reinforce the importance of reputation and trust as sources of market value. Just as market discipline has fostered effective risk management in the derivatives markets, so too it is now being brought to bear on corporate governance generally. Once market discipline firmly reestablishes reputation and trust as corporate values, the incidence of corporate malfeasance should be greatly reduced. From cburford at gn.apc.org Thu May 15 00:41:04 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 07:41:04 +0100 Subject: [A-List] PR in Scottish local elections Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030515073009.02f36b70@pop3.norton.antivirus> A strengthened platform for the Scottish Socialist Party as a result of the recent elections was progressive. The deal between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats last night to extend proportional representation to local council elections from 2007 sounds as if may give further opportunities for the radical left. The disadvantage of this sort of PR is said to be the platform for racist candidates, but I prefer the view that they are best dealt with by political campaigning, including street demonstrations. PR is very far from a socialist revolution, but depending on the method, it can allow a greater opportunity for more radical socialist views to be proclaimed and to influence the balance of forces in assemblies by splitting the left of centre vote. Broadly it is looking hopeful that Scotland could continue to move in a more radical direction than England. I hope and trust Michael has more detailed information from the Scottish press. Chris Burford From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 15 01:01:24 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 00:01:24 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Turkey: The Erdogan Experiment Message-ID: Sorry for this long post. This is also useful to keep in the archives. If my expectations are not way off the wall, we are looking at a "regime change" also in Turkey. If only I knew when and how. But I expect that if that happens, the new regime will be a coalition of the Military and the Istanbul Bourgeoisie, with some fascistic elements. We will see. Best, Sabri ++++++++ New York Times May 11, 2003 The Erdogan Experiment By DEBORAH SONTAG The new prime minister of Turkey stood stiffly in his formal office in Ankara, his mustache pulling his mouth into a frown. Serious pouches hung beneath his eyes as he shook hands briskly and positioned his lanky frame on a high-backed chair. Like a patient nodding to the dentist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 49, signaled he was ready to be interviewed. It seemed clear that he would have preferred to stretch out on the carpet and go to sleep. There was no trace of Erdogan's famous charisma, of the fiery oratorical skills on display just the previous day in Parliament, when I found myself responding instinctively to his booming voice's cues, knowing, without understanding the Turkish, when I was supposed to rise, to clap, to cheer. Rather, during that evening interview last month, at several points while his remarks were being translated, Erdogan's head bobbed forward and his eyelids drooped shut. He could be forgiven; his party's first months in office had been grueling. The war in neighboring Iraq was drawing to a close, much to Erdogan's relief. The war was unpopular in Turkey and costly to Erdogan. Because he is a pragmatist, Erdogan supported America's request to use Turkish soil as a staging ground. Yet, despite the fact that his party held two-thirds of the Parliament, he failed to win legislators' approval for the request. It was a significant failure, damaging his new government's relations with the Bush administration, depriving Turkey of billions in loans and grants and provoking questions about Erdogan's competence and control of his party. As he also backpedaled on the ever-divisive Cyprus issue, fumbled with Turkey's wrecked economy and confronted Kurdish riots in an earthquake zone it seemed that Erdogan was extinguishing all too quickly the hopefulness that his fledgling party's emphatic win in the Nov. 3 general elections had produced. Influential Turkish columnists abandoned their infatuation with the young Turk who had vanquished the old guard. One, Cengiz Candar, told me he had ''stopped even pronouncing Erdogan's name publicly.'' (It is pronounced EHR-doe-ahn, by the way). Such pressure would have taxed the most seasoned politician, and Erdogan, once a popular mayor of Istanbul, was a novice on the national stage. Yet Erdogan was accustomed to proving himself. A pious man in a country where secularism is worshiped, and once a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, he had always been an outsider. And now, though he was tired, he was, more precisely, annoyed. It had been only a month since he assumed the premiership. He clearly felt, not unreasonably, that he deserved the benefit of the doubt. The stakes were high, as not only his advisers but also opposition leaders told me. Tayyip Erdogan was an experiment for Turkey with ramifications that went well beyond Turkey. As a devout Muslim with an Islamist past who had nonetheless evolved into a modern, pro-Western democrat, Erdogan had the potential to set a powerful example for the region. If he could ease Turks into a less hostile separation of mosque and state, if he could help Turkey undertake long-overdue democratic reforms, then perhaps one day he would exemplify a way in which Islamic faith and democratic principles not only coexisted but also collaborated. But first he needed to be given a chance to succeed. The transition to statesman after a life of struggle with the state was not a simple one. Fingering the Turkish flag on his lapel, Erdogan crossed his legs. ''Our people made us the governing party,'' he said defiantly. ''Those who claim to respect democracy, why don't they respect the vote of the people?'' Erdogan knows that many in the establishment distrust him or look down on him or do both. He knows they can't quite believe that Erdogan is their prime minister; indeed, many seem embarrassed by his ignorance of foreign languages and by the head scarf that his wife wears as an emblem of her faith. He knows they are suspicious of his claims that he has evolved and that they imagine him to have a secret plan to impose religion on the nation. ''I have faced this all my life,'' Erdogan said. But he is weary of it. ''Before anything else, I'm a Muslim,'' Erdogan said. ''As a Muslim, I try to comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep it private.'' Poker-faced, he exhaled. ''A political party cannot have a religion. Only individuals can. Otherwise, you'd be exploiting religion, and religion is so supreme that it cannot be exploited or taken advantage of.'' To understand Erdogan's dilemma, it helps to understand the depths of Turkey's commitment to secularism. It began with the very establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and the founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rejection of traditional Islam as incompatible with his goal of establishing a modern European state. Ataturk shut the Islamic caliphate, dissolved religious courts, outlawed mystic sects and secularized schools. He replaced the Arabic script with Latin script. He outlawed the fez and all but imposed the homburg. He adopted the Swiss civil code and granted women the vote. As secular nationalism became Turkey's religion, the military took on the role of protecting Ataturk's legacy, which meant keeping elected officials on a leash and overthrowing or undermining them if necessary. Erdogan himself is unofficially on probation. Turkey's ''deep state'' sees its duty as preventing the nation from backsliding into religion and ethnic, especially Kurdish, separatism. Islam was, of course, never snuffed out. While most Turks came to consider themselves Turks first, they were still Muslims. And from the start, especially in the heartland, traditional Islam survived despite repression. To this day, in what seems an arcane, self-defeating expression of Turkey's secularism, women wearing head scarves are not allowed to attend universities or work in government. Prime Minister Erdogan's two daughters, in fact, go to Indiana University, where they are free to cover their hair and get a degree at the same time. His wife does not appear at state functions lest her designer head scarf provoke fears of an imminent theocracy. Erdogan's family comes from a devout world in the Black Sea region. His father, Ahmet, migrated to Istanbul in the 1930's, settled in Kasimpasa, a rough working-class quarter, and found work as a captain with a state maritime company. Kasimpasa has a body language all its own, and Turks say that Erdogan retains the Kasimpasa swagger, a way of leading with his right shoulder. Although the district was infamous for its gangs and pickpockets, Erdogan remembers the neighborhood as an idyll, with fruit trees and fields, where kids could get their hands dirty. ''I was shaped by that mud,'' he said, ''not like the poor kids of today who are surrounded by asphalt.'' Near the now-ramshackle mosque where Erdogan studied the Koran as a child, the district manager of Kasimpasa, Ali Riza Sivritepe, spoke of growing up with him. They fetched water from the same well, flew kites and shot marbles over the irregular paving stones. (Erdogan, steely in his ambition even then, always won.) ''He was a very serious child,'' Sivritepe said. ''Everyone respected him here and called him Big Brother.'' His father, according to a biography, was an authoritarian with a temper that could be tamed best by Erdogan's kissing his shoes. Once, Erdogan's father punished him for using bad language by hanging him from the ceiling by the arms. ''After that day, I never swore again,'' Erdogan said. When Erdogan was 7, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes -- ''God bless his soul,'' Erdogan said -- was hanged. Elected in 1950 in Turkey's first free elections, Menderes was a secularist but demonstrated a tolerance for religious practice that his predecessors had not possessed. Over 10 years in government, he faltered and became repressive, and when the Turkish military overthrew him, the coup was largely welcomed. But when Menderes was sent to the gallows, many Turks were horrified. ''Some are saddened by things like this, and they give up,'' Erdogan said. ''In my case, this sadness turned into an attraction for politics.'' Part of the Erdogan lore is that in fifth grade he refused to use a newspaper as a prayer rug in a religion class. It was inappropriate, he told his teacher, who took a special interest in him and persuaded Erdogan's father to send him to a state-run Prayer Leaders and Preachers school, which offered a secular curriculum amplified by religious instruction. Erdogan was particularly good at reciting nationalist poetry. During poetry contests, Sivritepe recalled, Erdogan would hide a Turkish flag inside his shirt and whip it out for dramatic effect. Erdogan was also good at soccer, but he kept his playing secret from his father for years, hiding his soccer shoes in the coal bin. His father considered soccer a diversion from education and faith. In truth, politics was the real diversion. Erdogan juggled soccer -- playing professionally for 11 years -- political activism and school for more than a decade. He graduated with a degree in management at age 27. During that era, political Islam became a force in Turkey, and Necmettin Erbakan, a German-educated engineer, emerged as its leader. Erbakan preached a return to religious values, which resonated in the heartland and in the poorer urban neighborhoods. While Erbakan's first party, National Order, was banned for fomenting fundamentalism, the authorities later encouraged him to try again, seeing him as a counterweight to leftist parties. But his second party, National Salvation, grew steadily more radical and anti-Western, inspired by the Islamic revolution in neighboring Iran. Erdogan was one of Erbakan's disciples. His political climb began when he was appointed chairman of National Salvation's youth group. Young Erdogan would practice his fiery rhetoric on abandoned ships, facing into the wind as he rehearsed his salutation: ''My sacred brothers whose hearts beat with the excitement of a big future Islamic conquest. . . . '' Erdogan's future wife, Emine, belonged to an Islamist women's group, the Idealist Ladies Association, and she was mesmerized by his oratory. After six months of chaperoned dating, the couple became engaged and married in 1978. Two years later, National Salvation was dissolved along with all other parties in another military coup. Not to be suppressed, National Salvation was reborn as the Welfare Party, which is where the Islamists, some of whom saw an Islamic state as their goal and some of whom aspired only to greater tolerance of religion, hit their organizational stride. Erdogan named a son after his leader, and Erbakan made him chairman of the Welfare Party's Istanbul branch. They built a political machine that provided social services as it secured political power, appealing to the needy and disgruntled as well as to the faithful. But they did not always agree. Erdogan stopped kissing Erbakan's hand because it struck him as retrograde, and he subtly pushed for greater democracy within the party and for broader outreach. Erdogan was not Erbakan's first choice to be the Welfare Party candidate for mayor, but the older man bowed to the will of the party. Erdogan took his campaign into pubs, discotheques and even bordellos, and computerized the campaign offices. He made women the worker bees of his organization and involved secular men too. In 1994, Erdogan was elected the first Islamist-oriented mayor of Istanbul. His victory stunned the country. It meant that the Islamists were succeeding in reaching beyond the mosque communities. It also meant that Erdogan was a force to be contended with. Indeed, many found Erdogan a more compelling package than his mentor. Whereas Erbakan was a flashy dresser and and an autocratic figure, Erdogan styled himself as an authentic representative of the masses. ''In this country, there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks,'' Erdogan once said. ''Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.'' At the Hope Barbershop in Kasimpasa that Erdogan used to frequent, Ibrahim Azak, a barber, called him ''the best'' at politics for just that reason. ''He was raised in a place like this,'' Azak said. ''He doesn't come from a palace. When he shops, he carries the bags himself.'' As mayor, Erdogan adopted modern management practices and proved singularly adept at delivering services, installing new water lines, cleaning up the streets, planting trees and improving transportation. He opened up City Hall to the people, gave out his e-mail address, established municipal hot lines. He was considered ethical and evenhanded. (One building-trade professional, however, told me that the corruption endemic to Istanbul City Hall persisted under Erdogan and that donations of equipment and vehicles were still solicited in exchange for building permits.) Yet from the moment he pronounced himself the ''imam'' of Istanbul, Erdogan began both provoking anxieties and recoiling from the fact that he had provoked them. He banned alcohol from municipal establishments, which created concern that he would eliminate alcohol from restaurants too. But he never did. He revived an elaborate project for a mosque complex in the city's heart, then backed off when there were protests. He never clearly allayed secular concerns, keeping them alive instead with comments like: ''Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.'' Meanwhile, the Welfare Party finished first in a close national election, and Erbakan became the country's first Islamist prime minister in 1996. With his rhetorical cannons firing away, he declared Turkish politics a pitiful imitation of the West and announced a campaign for worldwide Muslim solidarity. He overreached. After 12 months, the military forced him to resign. There had long been differences between the younger party leaders, who came to be known as the modernists, and Erbakan and his men -- whom they called the Politburo. When Erbakan was ousted and subsequently banned from politics, the modernists had their opening. But first they had to withstand the legacy of Erbakan's radical provocations of the establishment, a crackdown that would pave the way for Erdogan's rise. In December 1997, the Welfare Party sent Erdogan to a political rally in southeastern Siirt, an impoverished, religious district where his wife's family originated. On that day, as he had several times before, he recited a quatrain by Ziya Gokalp, an ideologue of Turkish nationalism: ''The mosques are our barracks,/the domes our helmets,/the minarets our bayonets,/ and the believers our soldiers.'' Erdogan told me that the poem had been approved for textbooks by the education ministry, and he added, somewhat disingenuously, I think, that it principally served oratorical purposes. ''It was an attention getter,'' he said. ''It would make the people spirited.'' In the speech following the poem, however, Erdogan went on to proclaim that Islam was his compass and that anyone who tried to stifle prayer in Turkey would face an exploding volcano. It was what one observer, Asla Aydintasbas, a New York-based columnist for the newspaper Sabah, described as an ''Al Sharpton moment.'' Erdogan was playing to the crowd and prodding the military. And the military took the bait. Erdogan was charged with inciting hatred on the basis of religion, and convicted. But this time, it was the bureaucracy that had overreached. Erdogan's conviction not only enhanced his popularity among religious Turks but also disturbed many secular Turks. ''It's not right what happened to him,'' said Cuneyd Zapsu, a businessman who owns the Azizler holding company. ''I don't want to live in a country where someone goes to jail for a poem. He was persecuted because they sensed his power, and I think it was not religion but a class thing. The so-called elite has never lived in this country's reality. They've always been afraid of the people. That's why all our laws are restrictions, not freedoms.'' In 1999, thousands accompanied Erdogan to the gates of the prison in western Thrace where he would serve five months. Erdogan told me that when the door clanked shut behind him it marked a breaking point as well as a turning point. ''Prison,'' Erdogan said, ''matures you.'' Zapsu visited Erdogan in prison frequently. A free-spirited 46-year-old, Zapsu first met Erdogan when he was running for mayor. Erdogan had been looking for a liaison to the business community, and he heard that Zapsu, whose grandfather was a well-known Kurdish poet, was a maverick with an open mind. '' 'I don't want your money,' '' Zapsu said Erdogan told him. '' 'I want your help. Nobody from the establishment wants to talk to me.' '' At that time, Zapsu said, Erdogan was more rigid. He wouldn't shake the hands of Zapsu's daughters; he hugs them now. But Zapsu said there was something special about Erdogan. During Erdogan's incarceration, Zapsu worked to persuade him to break with Erbakan and his anti-Western philosophy. It wasn't that hard, Zapsu said. Erdogan was coming to that conclusion himself. And Erbakan never visited anyway. For the modernists in the Welfare Party, Erbakan's ouster followed by Erdogan's conviction undeniably demonstrated that confrontation with the establishment wasn't getting them anywhere. Fehmi Koru, columnist for an Islamic-oriented newspaper, told me: ''When I first started writing about democracy, some members of the community criticized me openly, saying Islam and democracy were incompatible. But they grew ready for a change.'' They decided to start a new party that would aim for a broader political base. They would stop conducting politics with religious symbols and demonstrate instead how true belief informs politics wisely. Metin Heper, a political scientist, said that Erdogan believes in the potential of Islam to unite people around an ideal and build morality, integrity and drive. ''He believes in a kind of Islamic version of the Protestant work ethic, where you work hard for the benefit of the country because it is the good and right thing to do according to Islam,'' Heper said. A poll taken to determine the public's chief concerns generated the party name, Justice and Development, and its symbol, a glowing electric light bulb. Justice and Development would be a party in which religious people could feel at home, but it wouldn't be a religious party. Its members would be Muslim Democrats in the mold of Europe's Christian Democrats. It would entice Westernized Turks from abroad, like Egemen Bagis, 33, a businessman living in New Jersey until Erdogan recruited him to run for Parliament without, Bagis said, ever asking whether he drank (he does) or whether his wife covered her hair (she doesn't). Zapsu, a founder of the party, introduced Erdogan to Ishak Alaton, an industrialist who is part of Istanbul's small Jewish community. The avuncular Alaton told me that he came to see Erdogan as a ''practical man of good will'' who represents ''the forces of change'' in Turkey. Just as Zapsu was Erdogan's Henry Higgins, advising him on how to deal with the establishment and the West, Alaton took on introducing Erdogan to the American Jewish community and helping him send signals that he would maintain Turkey's relationship with Israel. It required a little re-education first. ''They had this impression that the world was run by Jews,'' Alaton said. On Nov. 3 last year, Erdogan's 16-month-old political party captured the first single-party majority in 15 years and the first substantial one in 50 years. It won 34 percent of the popular vote, which translated into a phenomenal 363 seats out of 550 seats in Parliament. All but one of Turkey's established political parties -- the Republican People's, founded by Ataturk -- failed to reach the 10 percent threshold needed for representation. The victory was a resounding rejection of the old, corrupt, mismanaged and fragmented Turkish political order. It was also an embrace of Erdogan personally but not of Islamism. On election night, Erdogan immediately sought to reassure the establishment that he would not be an agent of unwanted change. In a news conference, he said that his government would not interfere with anyone's way of life, would uphold Turkey's Western-oriented foreign policy, would abide by an International Monetary Fund rescue plan and would continue the battle for admission to the European Union. The Turkish markets soared. Even then, many distrusted his transformation. ''He's saying all the right things about Europe and moving westward,'' an American diplomat told me, ''but I fear he's like a wolf in sheep's clothing.'' Those who knew him well, though, took him at his word. ''He wanted to change the system, but the system changed him,'' said Rusen Cakir, one of Erdogan's biographers. Alaton said he had no concerns that Erdogan was a closet fundamentalist. ''He came to power partly because he had this religious platform, but he knows it's a dead end. He knows confrontation with the bureaucracy on religion would break him.'' One Turkish lawyer put it to me more cynically: ''He believes in profits, not prophets.'' After his victory, Erdogan had a problem: banned from politics in 1998, he could not become prime minister. So Abdullah Gul, who is now the foreign minister, assumed the premiership temporarily. In early December, President Bush invited Erdogan, still only chairman of the party, to the White House. This caused considerable controversy in Turkey, since it meant the United States was according international legitimacy to a leader considered illegitimate by the Turkish military. According to Bagis, who served as Erdogan's interpreter during the December meeting, Bush raised the issue of faith that Erdogan has worked so hard to keep in the background. Startling the Turks, Bush said: ''You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in the Almighty. That's why we'll be great partners.'' Erdogan left Washington with Bush's backing for Turkey's long-frustrated accession to the European Union and headed to Europe to lobby for a firm date for talks. There he faced his first serious setback. The E.U. scheduled negotiations to begin in December 2004, but only if Turkey had undertaken sufficient reforms. Erdogan's party, meanwhile, speedily passed a reform of a more self-interested variety, amending the Turkish constitution so that the ban on Erdogan could be lifted. Conveniently, the results of elections in Siirt were nullified because of procedural irregularities, opening up a few seats in Parliament. So Erdogan was preparing to run in by-elections just as the United States was moving closer to war in Iraq. Erdogan had been open in his disdain for Saddam Hussein and calculating in his backing for the American request to base tens of thousands of troops in southern Turkey. The Turkish public, however, was adamantly antiwar, and many in Erdogan's party, especially the more hard-line religious members, firmly opposed him on this issue. Erdogan was quickly learning that his high-wire act wasn't going to be easy to pull off. He was supposed to be the anti-Erbakan, so he was not about to impose his will on his party. Critics of Erdogan's performance, however, say that he should have done just that. ''Leaders have to lead,'' the columnist Candar said, adding cuttingly, ''Being the darling of the simple people is not enough during such turbulent times.'' Erdogan's advisers said that the United States did not fully grasp the political risk that he was taking and how much he needed written agreements demonstrating what Turkey would get in return for cooperating. ''They were used to dealing with our generals and not a politician trying to be democratic,'' Zapsu said. The Turks were insulted when the Americans sent a State Department negotiator rather than a senior leader to work out an agreement with them. They acknowledge that they misjudged the United States' determination to launch a war, with or without Turkey's help, and that they bargained inexpertly. They were thin-skinned too when details of the financial bartering were leaked and cartoons in American newspapers portrayed them as bazaar hagglers. ''There was a very ugly campaign against my country,'' Erdogan said. In the end, Gul, the acting prime minister, had to go to Parliament with promises but no signed guarantees from the Americans. The military establishment didn't want to help Erdogan, so the generals, whose support for Turkey's participation in the war might have persuaded opposition members to vote for it, kept a low profile. Parliament failed -- by three votes -- to authorize the stationing of American troops in Turkey. The Americans were furious. In early March, Erdogan was elected to Parliament and Gul prepared to step aside. Erdogan told me that Bush called to congratulate him, saying he'd never known any politician who had won 85 percent of the vote; Bush also asked him to try again in Parliament. Erdogan, however, told the American president that he needed to wait for Parliament to formally approve him as prime minister first, which his Turkish critics saw as cheeky, immature standing on ceremony. By the time Erdogan was installed as prime minister, the Americans were asking only for the right to fly over Turkish airspace, and they got it, Erdogan said. Luckily for Turkey, the war was quick and contained. As it was drawing to a close, during that April interview, Erdogan insisted that Turkey had done more for the U.S. war effort than any other country except England. Turkish airspace was a singularly essential ingredient, he said. ''How could they feel let down by our doing all this?'' he said defensively. arlier this year, when Muslim faithful were traveling to Saudi Arabia for the hajj, the new Turkish authorities shrouded a billboard at the airport that featured a model in an itsy bitsy bikini. Arch-secularists wrung their hands: this must be the first sign of the coming fundamentalism, they cried. The swimsuit company sued the government, and secularists cheered it on, until one day some realized that they were rushing to the defense of a pretty cheesy picture. Suddenly, everyone got quiet. Overnight, the billboard was moved to a discreet location and uncovered. It was a small, common-sensical compromise. But it raised the possibility of grander, more profound ones. Alaton argues that Erdogan should be given more time by his own people and more open support from Europe and America. ''Erdogan shouldn't be punished,'' he said. ''Maybe people of good faith should understand how important he is.'' And even Kemal Dervis -- a leading opposition figure and, as an elite, polyglot former World Bank official, the antithesis of Erdogan -- told me he thinks the government's success, remote as it seems now, would truly reverberate. ''It would send the message that you can be an overtly Muslim country and part of the club of developed nations too,'' Dervis said. ''The significance of that for the world at large would be incredible.'' Unfortunately for him, Erdogan has been scrambling on several fronts. His government rattled the business community by advocating a pension increase, just the kind of populist spending measure that Turkey didn't need. Further, while he had pledged to push a plan to reunify Cyprus, his government ended up backing away from a showdown with Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, and the Turkish military at a critical moment. This greatly disappointed those who thought he would be an agent of change. To take on the military too soon might be suicidal, they acknowledged, but to defer confrontation could also render him impotent. Slipping confidence in Erdogan, as always, has been colored by distrust of his intentions -- or at least his party's intentions -- on the religion issue. But maybe that concern is misplaced. Maybe Erdogan doesn't have the guts or power to push through any serious reforms, least of all on religion. Or maybe Erdogan, straddling two worlds, is the perfect person to defuse the tensions between secular and religious forces in Turkey. Deborah Sontag is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. From dch at gcal.ac.uk Thu May 15 01:57:12 2003 From: dch at gcal.ac.uk (Douglas Chalmers) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 08:57:12 +0100 Subject: [A-List] PR in Scottish local elections In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20030515073009.02f36b70@pop3.norton.antivirus> Message-ID: On 15/5/03 7:41 am, "Chris Burford" wrote: The proposal of the Scottish Exec to accept PR for Scottish local elections is the culmination of many decades of struggle for a fairer voting system in the UK. Originally championed by the LibDems, PR in the form of STV was also put forward by the marxist left in Scotland from as early as 1943 when the Communist MP Willie Gallacher argued for this reform in the House of Commons. It should not be seen in isolation however. The whole premise of democratisation of Scottish politics which is the basis of the establishment of Scotland's Parliament, was not solely to increase the representation of the 'left' in whatever form it might exist at any time. It was primarily to transform the actual nature of the political system by a move away from bi-polar, presidential style politics to one where political decisions needed consultation and co-operation with non ruling parties and also with extra parliamentary forces like the green movement, womens groups and all types of non party political organisations, which could now exert some real influence on the politics due to the accessibility of the Parliament's new structures. The Parliament is still in its infancy, only 4 years down the road, but PR so far may be the biggest single achievement it has so far agreed on, with the potential to have the longest lasting results. Douglas Chalmers > A strengthened platform for the Scottish Socialist Party as a result of the > recent elections was progressive. > > The deal between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats last night to > extend proportional representation to local council elections from 2007 > sounds as if may give further opportunities for the radical left. > > The disadvantage of this sort of PR is said to be the platform for racist > candidates, but I prefer the view that they are best dealt with by > political campaigning, including street demonstrations. PR is very far from > a socialist revolution, but depending on the method, it can allow a greater > opportunity for more radical socialist views to be proclaimed and to > influence the balance of forces in assemblies by splitting the left of > centre vote. > > Broadly it is looking hopeful that Scotland could continue to move in a > more radical direction than England. > > I hope and trust Michael has more detailed information from the Scottish > press. > > Chris Burford > > From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 15 02:22:50 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 01:22:50 -0700 Subject: [A-List] On PR and STV Message-ID: Just for your information: PR stands for Proportional Representation whereas STV stands for Single Transferable Vote. I don't exactly understand how STV system works but you may look at this address for some explanation: http://www.unison-scotland.org.uk/response/prbill.html Maybe our Scottish friends would offer some help. Sabri From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 15 02:25:17 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 04:25:17 -0400 Subject: [gang8] Re: [A-List] EU stability & growth pact: Stiglitz critique References: <009701c31625$59543e00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <3EBBCC9E.4070806@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <3EC34EED.4040200@mindspring.com> I wrote the following in Asia Times on January 18, 2003 (months before Stiglitz May 9 piece in The Guardian)as part of my series on central banking: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/EA18Dk02.html During the past decade, central banks worldwide have achieved unprecedented heights of policy dominance through their function as chief guardians of strong national currencies in globalized, unregulated financial markets. Simultaneously, monetary authorities the world over have been promoting the doctrine of central-bank independence from duly constituted national governments and their national economic policies, as if populist government and people-oriented policies are financial evils that must be resisted. Poverty and unemployment are hailed as the foundation of sound money that should not be jeopardized by political pressure. This elitist doctrine is fundamentally incompatible with a political world order of independent nation states and the principle of consent of the governed. Any nation that forfeits its monetary prerogative also forfeits its political independence. The ECB's institutional structure represents the ultimate real-world application of this doctrine on a regional scale. In the name of central-bank autonomy, the Maastricht Treaty explicitly prohibits the ECB from seeking or taking instruction from constituent national governments, or European Community institutions such as the European Parliament, or "any other body", and bars constituent national governments from attempting to influence the decisions of the ECB. Critics have pointed out that those same rules place no reciprocal restrictions on the ECB's policy advocacy. ECB president Wim Duisenberg has unreservedly pushed euro zone economies to refashion their labor, product, services, capital and credit markets along neo-liberal market-fundamentalist lines, even in economies under social democratic governments. This has contributed to the EU's slow growth and high unemployment. Germany, the dominant economy in the EU, has persistently suffered high unemployment, which hit 9.7 percent in November, rising above the politically sensitive 4 million level; in eastern Germany, the unemployment rate was 17.6 percent. Article 105 of the Maastricht Treaty states clearly: "The primary objective of the European System of Central Banks shall be to maintain price stability." The wording of the Maastricht Treaty was not so much influenced by economic insights as it was written in a very specific political context: to persuade an inflation-averse Germany to exchange the deutschmark for the euro, by guaranteeing the stability of the new currency. This explains the focus on price stability and the fact that other objectives were mentioned separately and secondarily. The statutes of other central banks, such as the Fed, can be changed by action of a single legislature. The ECB would require all 15 member states and their parliaments to change the treaty that defines the structure and institutional mandate of the ECB. This makes the ECB one of the most independent central banks in the world. The treaty did not define "price stability", leaving a vacuum quickly filled by the new and independent ECB by defining price stability as "an inflation rate that does not exceed 2 percent over the medium term", a very tight definition by any standard. Interest-rate policy alone is an inadequate tool because a single instrument cannot hit multiple targets. Furthermore, using interest rates to control asset markets risks inflicting significant collateral damage on the rest of the economy, which was exactly what happened in the past few years. The BIS harbors latent ambitions to turn itself into a de facto World Central Bank (WCB) with the ECB as a model, while the argument for the need for a WCB is floated around in the upper reaches of internationalist monetary circles. Henry C.K. Liu wrote: > I have dealt with the issue of the undesirability of an "independent" > central bank in my series on central banking in Asia Times. It is good > to see Stiglitz sing the same tune with the credibility of a Nobel prize. > > As for inflation, everybody is now talking about the need for inflation > targeting, while many of us have been arguing for it for a number of > years on PKT. Akerlof's research has the same problem as all economic > research: it needs past data to substantiate what common sense deems > obvious in order to be taken seriously by the profession. This type of > research serves only to cover ones professional behind. It tends to have > nothing to do with creativeness by its very nature. Macroeconomics is a > game of setting rules of the game which all participants try their best > to bypass, break, or ignore without being disqualified and expelled. > There are a number of ways through which rules are enforced in any game. > On way is self termination where violation end the game itself. Since > life does not end, even under great unnecessary pain of economic > collapse, this type of self termination enforcement does not work in > macroeconomics. Another way is through state policing, called > government regulations. This has been attacked as antithetical to > freedom, the alleged prerequisite for economic prosperity. Self > regulation is preferred to government regulation on the ground that > participants know best. The result is an exclusive game of musical > chairs where the number of chairs is always larger than the number of > participants. This is achieved by making membership to the club open > only to the selected few. The financial sector, for example, really > operates as a cartel, one of the remaining guilds in the modern economy. > Another enforcement regime is to punish only the low and mid level > soldiers who were merely carrying out implicit orders of maximizing > profit by all means, while the specific responsibility of illegality is > always confined to the lower levels. The top level is always protected > and only indictable if the prosecutor makes a deal with the lower level > guilty to finger the higher-ups. The Bank of New York's illegal role in > money laundry for Russian gangster capitalism was confined to a vice > president based in Moscow, despite that profit from such activities had > been visibly celebrated in its annual reports for years. > > There is a joke about the annual May Day military parade in Moscow > during Gorbachev time when a group of unruly civilians marched in lose > formation behind the latest ICBM battalion. The nervous aides were busy > telling the chief they did not arrange for the poor show where as > Gorbachev told them to relax, that he personally approved the > participation of this contingent of civilians. "They are economists and > they are more deadly to capitalism than ICBMs," explained Gorbi. > > Henry C.K. Liu > > Michael Keaney wrote: > >>Don't trust the bankers' homilies >> >>The EU stability pact destabilises by cutting spending in a downturn >> >>Joseph Stiglitz >>Friday May 9, 2003 >>The Guardian >> >>France, Portugal and Germany are all flagrantly flouting the stability pact, >>the agreement among eurozone members to keep their deficits below a critical >>threshold (3% of GDP today, but lower, supposedly, in the future). France's >>prime minister, Pierre Raffarin, defends his government's position by saying >>that France was not prepared to impose austerity on its own people. If >>France will not, other European leaders must wonder, why should they? >> >>Mr Raffarin was right to say that austerity would result if France obeyed >>the pact's strictures, but in debates over economic policy, the truth is >>seldom appreciated. There is a long list of central bankers' homilies that >>are not supposed to be questioned. Do so and you are exiled from the circle >>of those who supposedly know how the world "really" works. Here are three: >> >>An independent central bank is necessary for sound macroeconomic policy. The >>truth: countries that do not have an independent central bank, such as >>India, manage to contain inflation as effectively as those with independent >>central banks. In Russia, an independent central banker, Viktor Gerashencko, >>could not be removed for years, though he tolerated both inflation and >>corruption. Generally, there is little evidence that countries with >>independent central banks grow faster, have higher wages, or generate higher >>incomes - indeed, that they perform better in any real sense than those that >>do not. >> >>Once inflation starts, it increases at a faster and faster rate, and the >>costs of reversing it are high. The truth: there is no evidence of an >>inflation precipice, or that the costs of reversing inflation (in terms, >>say, of pushing unemployment to high levels) are any greater than the >>benefits from inflation (in terms, say, of allowing unemployment to fall to >>low levels). >> >>Inflation is bad for growth and productivity. The truth: below a critical th >>reshold - a threshold far beyond the levels of inflation that now prevail in >>Europe and North America - there is no evidence of significant adverse >>effects from inflation. On the contrary, recent research by Nobel laureate >>economist George Akerlof and his colleagues suggests that pushing inflation >>too low may impede growth, and that the critical threshold is higher for >>countries, such as the post-communist transition economies, engaged in large >>structural changes. >> >>When an economy faces a downturn, one should engage in expansionary fiscal >>policies. But in a downturn tax revenues fall. Thus, debt must increase. But >>the EU's stability pact, as commonly interpreted, requires either that tax >>rates be raised (always difficult, especially in a recession) or that >>expenditures be cut. Either way, such policies will exacerbate the downturn. >> >>The stability pact put into place an automatic economic destabiliser. But >>the EU - indeed, every country - should seek stabilisers, policies that >>automatically boost the economy in a downturn. The US is facing, albeit in a >>weaker form, a similar problem. >> >>Most of America's 50 states have constitutional amendments that effectively >>impose a balanced budget. As tax revenues drop due to the economic downturn, >>the states are cutting back on expenditures, exacerbating America's slump - >>and the world's. I warned of this problem more than a year ago, and I >>suggested that the federal government pick up the tab for the shortfall in >>state tax revenue, because the states did not cause the country's slowdown. >> >>At the time, there was some disagreement about how long the downturn would >>last (I was a pessimist, and unfortunately I have been proved right). But I >>argued that this was irrelevant: making up the states' shortfall would cost >>the government nothing if the optimists turned out to be right, but it would >>be just the right medicine if pessimists like me were correct. Instead, the >>Bush administration pushed ahead with tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts that >>were not designed to stimulate the economy and that, no surprise, have >>failed to stimulate the economy. >> >>The lesson for Europe is clear: the EU should redefine its stability pact in >>terms of the structural or full employment deficit - what the fiscal deficit >>would be if the economy were performing at full employment. To do otherwise >>is irresponsible. >> >>There does need to be a commitment to fiscal responsibility. In the long >>run, governments should run balanced budgets, with surpluses in good years >>making up for deficits in bad years. But to insist on an arbitrary budgetary >>position in an economic downturn is to ignore everything we have learned >>about economics in the past 70 years, risking the well-being of millions who >>are thrown out of employment. >> >> >> >> >> > > > > > ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> > Rent DVDs Online - Over 14,500 titles. > No Late Fees & Free Shipping. > Try Netflix for FREE! > http://us.click.yahoo.com/YoVfrB/XP.FAA/uetFAA/00hrlB/TM > ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> > > The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. > To unsubscribe, email: gang8-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com > > > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ > > > From dch at gcal.ac.uk Thu May 15 02:59:10 2003 From: dch at gcal.ac.uk (Douglas Chalmers) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 09:59:10 +0100 Subject: [A-List] On PR and STV In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 15/5/03 9:22 am, "Sabri Oncu" wrote: > Just for your information: > > PR stands for Proportional Representation whereas STV stands for > Single Transferable Vote. I don't exactly understand how STV > system works but you may look at this address for some > explanation: > > http://www.unison-scotland.org.uk/response/prbill.html > > Maybe our Scottish friends would offer some help. > > Sabri > > STV is a type of proportional representation which I think gives the best choice to the voters. In Scotland it was supported by the Communist Party, Liberal Democrats the Scottish nationalists, and the Greens (I think it is also the favoured system of the SSP). The way it works is that constituencies instead of being represented by one councillor or MP or Assembly member, are enlarged to become 'multi-member' constituencies, represented by perhaps 3 or 4 elected representatives. Each voted casts her/his vote in terms of preference , i.e. 1; 2; 3 etc. If there are 4 members in each constituency, then the first preference votes are counted ( i.e. the "1"). Once a representative gains 25% plus 1 vote ( ie a quarter plus 1 in a '4 way' seat), they are deemed elected. Their "2nd" preferences are then counted, and added to the "1st" preferences of the others. Once this brings a second representative up to 25% plus one, she/ he is also elected and their "2nd" preference votes redistributed etc. This way, no vote is 'wasted' and the representatives elected should be in proportion to the votes cast. Disadvantages cited are that the 'link' with the representative and the constituency is not so direct when there are more than 1 representative for each multimember constituency. Personally I think this is advantageous, as it keeps all representatives on their toes, plus the constituent is able to contact a rep from their own political persuasion Douglas From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 04:17:48 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 13:17:48 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: PR in Scottish local elections References: Message-ID: <000701c31acb$3bf06780$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Douglas writes: The Parliament is still in its infancy, only 4 years down the road, but PR so far may be the biggest single achievement it has so far agreed on, with the potential to have the longest lasting results. ------ Of which by far the greatest will be the dismantling of the utterly corrupt, embedded Labour Party local government apparatus, which is the rotten foundation of Tony's shiny New Labour project. This is a central contradiction threatening to tear apart Tony's precarious hegemony. Given the Labour Party's traditional dependence on Scotland, this, combined with the chipping away of the SSP, SNP, and Greens, spells the end of that state of affairs north of Berwick, and ultimately in England, as the legitimacy of the status quo crumbles in the face of Scottish developments (cf. regional assemblies). Michael From dch at gcal.ac.uk Thu May 15 05:01:28 2003 From: dch at gcal.ac.uk (Douglas Chalmers) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 12:01:28 +0100 Subject: [A-List] UK state: PR in Scottish local elections In-Reply-To: <000701c31acb$3bf06780$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: On 15/5/03 11:17 am, "Michael Keaney" wrote: > Douglas writes: > > The Parliament is still in its infancy, only 4 years down the road, but PR > so far may be the biggest single achievement it has so far agreed on, with > the potential to have the longest lasting results. > > ------ > > Of which by far the greatest will be the dismantling of the utterly corrupt, > embedded Labour Party local government apparatus, which is the rotten > foundation of Tony's shiny New Labour project. This is a central > contradiction threatening to tear apart Tony's precarious hegemony. Given > the Labour Party's traditional dependence on Scotland, this, combined with > the chipping away of the SSP, SNP, and Greens, spells the end of that state > of affairs north of Berwick, and ultimately in England, as the legitimacy of > the status quo crumbles in the face of Scottish developments (cf. regional > assemblies). > > Michael > > I agree with you Michael, and the hegemony of old style Labour has been the 'means' of preventing better 'ends' or outcomes in Scotland's politics. I think the weaking of Labour will help open up these alternative ends, as a positive outcome. I think it may mean less general alienation from politics and more openings for civil society organisations and community based groups. Already, despite the flawed system of PR we have for the Parliament itself (a form of Additional member system), the enforced coalitions and the committee system of deliberation have led to a total transformation in terms of access to decision makers by the public. The task will be to use the new voting system for local government to transform the political practice in communities. Douglas From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:27:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:27:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US/Saudi tensions Message-ID: <008101c31ae5$bde5e8e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Saudis feel US wrath over bombs David Pallister, Owen Bowcott, and Oliver Burkeman in Washington Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian The Bush administration gave Saudi Arabia a rare public dressing down yesterday, accusing it of ignoring its earlier requests to step up security at the sites of Monday night's bombings, while Saudi intelligence sources admitted that the al-Qaida suicide cell involved in the attacks had been under surveillance for nearly two months. They knew the identities of the leader of the 15-strong cell and many of its members, they acknowledged, but the police had failed to capture any of them despite two armed encounters this year. "As soon as we learned of this particular threat information, we contacted the Saudi government," Robert Jordan, the US ambassador to Riyadh, said in an interview with the American TV network CBS. "We continue to work with the Saudis on this, but they did not, as of the time of this tragic event, provide the additional security we requested." Requests for increased security had been made on several occasions, he added. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, denied that any such request had been received, and said it would have been fulfilled if it had been. But he said: "The fact that the terrorism happened is an indication of shortcomings. And we have to learn from our mistakes and seek to improve our performance in this respect." Fifteen Saudis were involved in the attacks, he said. But with the death toll rising to 34, including nine suspected suicide bombers, he would not say what had happened to the other six. Saudi officials, releasing information with unprecedented speed, named the cell leader as Khaled Jehani, 29, al-Qaida's chief of operations, wanted by the FBI as a terrorist since the beginning of last year. He appeared in video footage recovered in Afghanistan in which al-Qaida members deliver what US attorney general, John Ashcroft, called "martyrdom messages". Mr Jehani can be seen clutching a Kalashnikov and kissing it. He is reported to have been given his senior post some time after the capture in November last year of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is believed to have played a central role in bombing the USS Cole in 2000. He is said to come from the Harbi tribe in south-west Saudi Arabia, the same origins as Ayman al-Zawahri, the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Osama bin Laden's chief ideologue. Several of the September 11 hijackers came from the area. An FBI counter-terrorism team was on its way to Saudi Arabia last night, where it was expected to demand much more cooperation than it received in the case of the bombing of a US barracks in al-Khobar in 1996, when 19 US personnel were killed. Then, US officials complained that the Saudis were clearly worried about where the inquiry would lead. Prince Saud insisted that intelligence had been shared properly between Washington and Riyadh before Monday's attacks, and the two governments had set up a committee to stop the attack happening. The Americans were told of the Saudis' fears, a fact reflected by notices released by the US state department and the British Foreign Office in the first two days of May, warning that a terrorist group might be in the "final stages" of making an attack on western interests. The Saudi intelligence was based on hard evidence. On March 18 a house in the east of the capital blew up, killing a Saudi inside. Bombs, machine guns, ammunition and explosives were found. The Saudi interior ministry said in a statement that it had begun a surveillance campaign on individuals connected with the house. It was at this house - only metres from one of the compounds attacked - that the Saudi police claimed they had foiled a big terrorist attack on May 6. Explosives, guns and ammunition were found, but the suspects escaped in a gunfight. The Saudi authorities released the pictures and names of 19 suspects - 17 Saudis, including Jehani, a Yemeni, and a Kuwaiti-Canadian of Iraqi origin. Officials said that the cell had 50 to 60 members, recruited by Jehani. The weapons were smuggled in from Yemen. Last week the Saudi interior minister, Prince Naif, told the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Watan that some of the men involved in the gunfight "received military training in Afghanistan ... a number of them had been detained and then freed, because we found their role was very limited". By last weekend Saudi and expatriate security personnel should have been on the highest alert. Four Metropolitan police detectives arrived in Riyadh on Tuesday with to try to establish how many Britons died in the attacks. One Briton is known to have been killed and there is growing concern that two others are among the fatalities. The Foreign Office said that 15 were injured. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:31:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:31:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <009401c31ae6$590b0300$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> That important evidence to the Savile inquiry should be in the process of being heard in the midst of all this Stakeknife business may be significant. ------ Soldier admits gunfire untruths Bloody Sunday Inquiry: Claims made at original hearing were false Richard Norton-Taylor Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian A paratrooper who fired 12 shots on Bloody Sunday admitted yesterday that statements he made about gunfire and bombs being aimed at soldiers were untrue. Soldier S, who was an 18-year-old private at the time and subsequently joined the SAS, told the Bloody Sunday inquiry he had no recollection of what caused him to fire 12 shots in four bursts of three at 30-second intervals. The former paratrooper had told the Widgery inquiry - set up shortly after Bloody Sunday and widely regarded as a whitewash - that he came under fire as soon as he dismounted from his vehicle. The Widgery tribunal, which generally adopted a sympathetic approach to the paratroopers, concluded that his shooting was "unjustifiably dangerous for people round about". Asked yesterday whether his statement to the military police on the night of Bloody Sunday that he saw a gunman open fire at paratroopers with about six shots from a ground-floor window of the Rossville flats in Derry could be relied upon, Soldier S hesitated before replying: "No". He said claims in his original statement that people were throwing nail and acid bombs at the troops from the top of the Rossville flats were inaccurate. "I did not see nail bombs," he said. "A hail of bottles" would be "more truthful". Soldier S added that he did not want to speculate about when he first heard the sound of gunfire. The former paratrooper apologised to the Saville inquiry counsel, Christopher Clarke QC, about "a lot of inaccuracies" which appeared in the original military police statements. They were not a "deliberate lie", he said. Being questioned by military police late at night was a "frightening affair" for an 18 year-old paratrooper. He added: "I am an honest person". He said the inaccuracies were possibly the result of the military police "collating evidence from what several soldiers said". However, although he said he could not remember what caused him to fire, his account of his shooting at someone "holding a long metallic object which appeared to be a rifle" was "truth, definitely". Soldier S denied one of his shots killed John Duddy, a teenager who was shot near where Soldier S was firing from. "I would not have shot an unarmed civilian. It is as plain and truthful as that". Lawyers from the Ministry of Defence have admitted that none of the 13 civil rights marchers killed on January 30 1972 - Bloody Sunday - and a 14th who was fatally wounded was armed. Asked about widely-published photographs showing a priest, Father Daly, holding a white handkerchief, with marchers carrying Duddy away, Soldier S described it as a "dreadful scene", but one which he could not recall. He said he did not see anyone fall down in the area of Derry where he was. Soldier S said he left the Parachute Regiment and joined the special forces, spending nine months in what he called a "separatist war". He was involved in "many shooting incidents during which I would have fired thousands of rounds in total over the period". He was seriously injured in a firefight in the Middle East in 1974-5 when he left the army, he said. His memory had "significantly diminished" over the years. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:31:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:31:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <009501c31ae6$5b7fac80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This man says he isn't Stakeknife, and has never left Ulster. Just what is going on? Rosie Cowan, Stuart Millar and Richard Norton-Taylor Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian The Stakeknife story took another extraordinary twist yesterday when Freddie Scappaticci, the man claimed to be the top army spy at the heart of the IRA, reappeared in west Belfast and denied the allegations. Northern Irish security sources still insist that Stakeknife moved from his west Belfast home on Sunday morning. Whitehall sources told the Guardian on Tuesday he was in a safe house in mainland Britain being protected by the security services. But he was never in police or army custody or care and was free to leave at any time. British security and intelligence sources refused to discuss his movements any further yesterday except to say the case was "extremely sensitive". Yesterday afternoon, however, Mr Scappaticci denied he had ever left Northern Ireland or that he was the double agent known as Stakeknife, who security sources continue to insist was a top IRA man passing intelligence on the Provisionals to the military's shadowy Force Research Unit for years. Mr Scappaticci, a 59-year-old builder, spoke to the BBC and another radio reporter at the offices of his solicitor, Michael Flanigan, on the Falls Road in west Belfast. He said: "I am telling you I am not guilty of any of these allegations, I have not left Northern Ireland since I was challenged by reporters on Saturday night. Nobody had the decency to ask me if any of these allegations were true and why the police had not come to question me about these allegations." However, several security sources were still adamant last night that the agent known as Stakeknife is the man called Freddie Scappaticci. "Freddie Scappaticci is Stakeknife, I am 110% certain of that," said one. "He is in a position where he will do anything to stop being labelled a tout." "It's him and he's brazening it out," said another. "Attack is the best form of defence." At his solicitor's office, asked why he thought he had been linked to Stakeknife, Mr Scappaticci said: "I don't know." Questioned about whether he had ever been involved in the IRA or republican movement, he hesitated before replying: "I was involved in the republican movement 13 years ago but I have had no involvement in this past 13 years." His solicitor then terminated the interview. Earlier, Mr Flanigan read a statement to the two reporters present. It said: "Mr Scappaticci appears here today to give the lie to the continuing media speculation as to his whereabouts. He has not been in England and in the course of the past few days has not left Northern Ireland. "My client refuses to engage in challenging every statement made by an unnamed and apparently unnameable security source. He is not and never has been in any sort of military, security or police custody. He has never been involved in any criminal activity and has a clear record." The statement also said that Mr Scappaticci left his home on Sunday morning, not because of the police, army or a paramilitary group, but because of the media. Mr Flanigan said the media coverage had been "reckless and extremely damaging" to Mr Scappaticci and he was considering issuing proceedings for defamation. "The past three days have been very traumatic for Mr Scappaticci who now intends to resume his private life," said Mr Flanigan. Mr Scappaticci was back home with his family last night where he told a Guardian reporter to "get off my property before I throw you off". There was no visible sign of a police or army presence outside Mr Scappaticci's home last night, even though fears have been expressed that he and his family could be in danger. Sinn Fein appeared to accept his statement yesterday and Gerry Kelly, the party's policing spokesman, said the Scappaticci family were victims of "nameless, faceless people" and called on the government to explain what was going on. "The files must be opened up and there must be full disclosure," he said. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner probing security force collusion with terrorists in Northern Ireland, wants to question Stakeknife about allegations that he killed dozens of people and that his handlers let others, including fellow agents and totally uninvolved civilians, die to protect his identity. Despite pressure from fellow Labour MPs and others, Jane Kennedy, Northern Ireland's security minister, told the Commons that she could not comment on the Stakeknife affair. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:34:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:34:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: blowback over Iraq Message-ID: <00a501c31ae6$c2128620$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Bush feels the heat after Riyadh bombings Oliver Burkeman in Washington Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian The impact of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia began to reverberate through US politics yesterday as the Bush administration defended itself against charges that it had taken its eye off the ball over al-Qaida because of its obsession with Iraq. With George Bush's critics alleging that serious counterterrorism efforts had become "lost in the shuffle", analysts warned that by fostering the widespread perception that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were closely linked, the White House might have created unrealistic expectations that in destroying the Iraqi regime, it was also crushing the terrorist threat. But the president's press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, dismissed as "nonsense" claims by two Democratic senators that the administration was neglecting the hunt for the terrorists behind the September 11 atrocities. Mr Fleischer said that the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, headed a long list of people linked to al-Qaida who had been taken into custody in recent months. Mr Fleischer was responding to a coruscating attack from Senator Bob Graham, who had argued earlier that the Saudi bombings "could have been avoided if you had actually crushed the basic infrastructure of al-Qaida". " I think from the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which was in early October of 2001, until about February or March 2002, we were making good progress in dismantling the basic structure of al-Qaida," Mr Graham said. "Then we started to redirect our attention to Iraq, and al-Qaida has regenerated." His remarks were echoed by a Wisconsin Democrat, Russ Feingold, who invoked the deaths of Americans in past terror attacks to chastise Mr Bush. "In many ways, the actual business of combating the terrorist organisation or organisations responsible for the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for the attack on the USS Cole [in Yemen], for the horror of September 11, and now, possibly, for [the] attack in Riyadh, seems to be lost in the shuffle," Senator Feingold said. "The absence of clarity and the absence of data endangers the American people." The hot-tempered debate is closely interwoven with the run-up to the 2004 presidential election: Mr Graham, an outside candidate for the Democratic nomination, is running almost exclusively on his conviction that the administration has been dangerously distracted from the real fight against terrorism. Mr Bush, meanwhile, has been widely expected to benefit from continued discussion of Iraq and terrorism, since it prevents the Democrats from discussing the economy. As a result, he may even benefit from the Saudi attacks. Alternatively, though, more attacks on Americans could solidify a perception that Mr Bush is powerless to win his declared "war on terrorism", said Peter Bergen, an expert on al-Qaida and author of the book Holy War Inc. "Of course Iraq wasn't going to do much damage to al-Qaida, because there isn't much evidence they're linked," he said. "Setting up the expectation that this was going to further the cause is a mistake." Republicans have consistently sought to present the conflict in Iraq as one part of the larger war on terrorism, even to the extent that the White House has refused to declare an unequivocal end to the recent war. Al-Qaida's failure to mount a major terrorist attack during the Iraq war as it had threatened was proof that "progress has been made", Mr Bergen said. But "it's a fact of human nature that one tends to think of one thing at once. Clearly, the administration in its upper reaches was preoccupied with Iraq, and Bin Laden and al-Qaida fell off the radar-screen. "Now this comes along and shows they are far from down for the count." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:33:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:33:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: party funding Message-ID: <009d01c31ae6$9139f240$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Press baron's gift to Tories Chris Tryhorn and Julia Day Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian Conrad Black, proprietor of the Telegraph group, used company funds to make a personal donation of ?10,000 to the Conservative party, it was revealed yesterday. But the donation was made without the knowledge of senior executives at the publishing firm, forcing the group to distance itself from its proprietor's actions last night. Lord Black, a long-standing supporter of the Conservative party, who favoured Michael Portillo over Iain Duncan Smith in the last leadership battle, paid the sum to honour a pledge made to Sir Stanley Kalms, the party's treasurer. Last night, Dan Colson, deputy chairman and chief executive of the Telegraph group, admitted the group did not usually make donations, and claimed Lord Black had acted in a personal capacity. Mr Colson said: "It is not the practice of the Telegraph group to donate to any political party. "On this one occasion, Lord Black made a pledge to Sir Stanley Kalms to donate ?10,000 to the Conservative party. "The donation was made without the involvement of the group's titles." Sir Stanley, founder of the Dixons chain, gave the party ?160,000 last year. Lord Black's donation was revealed yesterday on the electoral commission's register of political donors. According to the register, the Conservatives raised ?2m in the first three months of this year. Labour raised ?5.4m over the same period. Tyne Tees Television was also listed as a donor to the Conservatives, handing ?1,445.20 to the party's north- east office on January 8. Yesterday, a Tyne Tees spokesman could not give details of the donation. In September 2001, Sir Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media gave ?25,000 to Labour's head office. This quarter, Labour's biggest celebrity benefactor was the Star Trek actor, Patrick Stewart, who donated ?50,000 to the party. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:36:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:36:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] BCCI scandal Message-ID: <00ad01c31ae7$093d84a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> BCCI settlement costs top $1.2bn ? Lawyers reap rewards of 11-year liquidation ? Creditors to receive another $1bn Jill Treanor Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian Creditors of Bank of Credit and Commerce International are to receive another $1bn (?600m), it was announced yesterday as it emerged that the cost of the 11-year liquidation had topped $1.2bn. The liquidators of BCCI - still regarded as the biggest and most complex bank fraud in history - remain confident that more money will be returned to creditors, particularly if a long-running legal case against the Bank of England is successful. The fourth dividend announced yesterday, which is to be paid next month, means that 75% of all claims have now been met - considerably more than the 5% to 10% that the liquidators Deloitte & Touche predicted soon after they were appointed in 1991. The total cost of the liquidation, which has spanned 70 countries and affects more than 70,000 creditors, is put so far at $1.2bn. Deloitte & Touche revealed it had received almost $300m for its work in the English jurisdiction alone. According to the annual return filed to the Department of Trade and Industry yesterday, the total cost in the English jurisdiction is $770m. This includes $173m in legal fees and $70m for property costs. The costs run up by the Bank of England to fight the claim that it failed in its duties as a regulator have only been revealed for the last two years when it spent ?17m on legal fees. Further details may be revealed in court next week. The House of Lords declared in March 2001 that the case should be heard as quickly as possible but the Bank of England is trying to win the right to appeal an order that it disclose 20 files related to the Bingham inquiry, the official investigation into the collapse. The trial is scheduled for January 2004. John Richards, the partner at Deloitte & Touche who has spent the last 11 years working on the liquidation, said claims were continuing to be pursued against Bank of America and State Bank of India as well as a $326m damages claim against Abdul Raouf Khalil, a former BCCI customer who was found to have participated in the fraud. The liquidators are trying to establish whether a gold museum in Saudi Arabia thought to have been owned by Khalil recently burned down. They are optimistic about recovering some assets from Khalil following a pledge by the governor of the board of grievances in the kingdom to look into the matter, but Ralph Preece, Deloitte liquidator, admitted that the recent bombings in Riyadh linked to al-Qaida may affect the process. Once the fourth dividend is paid, the liquidators will have paid out $5.7bn. While this is 75% of all existing claims, the original claims put in when BCCI collapsed in 1991 amounted to $16bn. Mr Richards said the payment of the fourth dividend was made possible when former employees of BCCI agreed to a settlement of their claims that they were tarnished by the "stigma" of having worked for the bank. Among the beneficiaries of the liquidation process are 30 local authorities, including the Western Isles and Bury council, which had deposits or other exposure to BCCI which was largely owned by Abu Dhabi. Stan Monaghan, a former Bury council employee who sits on the creditors' committee, said: "Ten years ago people were offering to buy our debt for 10%. [Now we have 75%]. Hopefully there will be another dividend, particularly as a result of the litigation against the Bank of England. "It has been costly but nobody expected we'd get 75% back. You get what you pay for." Creditors had to wait until 1996 for their first dividend which was 24.5% of the total. Further payments were made in June 1998 and May 2000. The liquidators continue to hold over $1bn to cover the costs of on-going litigation which they aim to release if the judgments go in their favour. 'A truly gargantuan task' BCCI collapsed in 1991 and is still being unravelled. The liquidation has involved court proceedings around the world and is likely to last at least another five years. Its liquidation was described by the then vice chancellor Sir Donald Nicholls as a "truly gargantuan task" Along the way: ? 88,000 boxes of documents have been put together and are now gathering dust. Storage payments are part of the $70.1m of premises costs run up by the liquidators. ? About 100 accountants and lawyers are still working on the liquidation full-time although the number has fallen substantially from the early days in 1991 and 1992. They have their own office - Westgate House - in central London. ? The government has retained $47.2m for VAT which is not recoverable by the liquidators. ? The Bank of England has spent ?17m in the last two years to defend itself against legal action over the way it regulated BCCI. ? Abas Gokal's Gulf Group was a major borrower from BCCI. He was found guilty of false accounting and conspiracy in April 1997. He was sentenced to 14 years and must serve a further three years because he has not paid ?3m to the liquidators. Following the money Liquidation costs ($m) to January liquidators 296.1 lawyers 173.3 liquidators' expenses 15.4 liquidators' committee 3.6 payroll 47.8 premises 70.1 other professional fees 14.9 insolvency service fees 13.3 sundries 15.5 VAT costs 47.20 other 72.2 total 769.4 ? Source: Deloitte & Touche From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:39:50 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:39:50 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU integration struggles: Poland & sub-imperialist fantasies Message-ID: <00b501c31ae7$75819520$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Who better than the British to demonstrate the utility of imperialism as a means of legitimating and buttressing the state? ----- Eurozone in Iraq Poland is wrestling with its new colonial role. Britain should help Timothy Garton Ash in Warsaw Thursday May 15, 2003 The Guardian After the Riyadh bombings, who will be the next western victims of Islamist terror? It could be Poles running the Polish occupation zone in Iraq. I've spent a week in Poland and everyone I have spoken to here, from a peasant farmer sitting on a battered old chair among his apple trees to the prime minister in his imposing office, smiled the same mildly incredulous smile at this staggering metamorphosis of their country's position in the world. For two centuries, Poland's fate was to be occupied and partitioned by imperial powers; suddenly it is itself to be an occupying, colonial power. For 40 years, under communism, my Polish friends spoke longingly of "the west"; now they could be suicide bombed because they're part of it. The Poles, led by a post-communist president and government, are following Rudyard Kipling's imperial admonition to "take up the white man's burden" with deeply ironical shrugs, and trepidation, but also with determination. Poland nearly took the northern zone in Iraq, containing Kurdistan. Here they might have faced a Kurdish uprising for national independence. Since the Poles themselves spent much of the last two centuries fighting for national independence against occupying powers, that would have faced them with a certain moral dilemma. Instead they've got the zone the Americans have tagged "upper south", which contains some of the heartlands of Shia Islam. Shia Islamist extremists, working with armed infiltrators from Iran, pose the most acute security threat. Both the prime minister and the foreign minister explained to me that post-communist Poland has much to offer post-Ba'athist Iraq. After all, no one knows better what it takes to transform a dictatorially run state and economy into a free, democratic one. But the first challenge is security. They've been told they need about 9,000 soldiers to run their zone. The Poles have so far committed only 1,500, and Polish soldiers have zilch experience in this kind of thing. Their immediate problem is that no one else very much wants to serve under them, apart from a miscellaneous group of other central and east Europeans. Last week, they somewhat naively suggested to Germany that it might like to help out, since, after all, there is already a Polish-German-Danish corps working within the framework of Nato. The Germans said a sharp, angry: "Nein!" Polish diplomats should have realised that the Schr?der government would never come in without a clear, prior UN mandate for the occupation. Yet one also feels that the very idea of Germans serving under Poles at the behest of the Americans was just too much for most Germans to take. Reaching out a generous, pronate German hand of "reconciliation" to the Poles is one thing; having enough genuine respect for them to agree to serve under Polish command is quite another. Now the Polish government is trying to persuade the Spaniards to join them, but a combination of Spanish national pride and the unpopularity in Spain of the American war on Iraq, at a time when Jose Maria Aznar faces local and regional elections, makes that difficult too. Here's where Britain comes in. Tony Blair will travel to Warsaw to give a big speech at the end of May. His main purpose will be to show British interest in the country and support for the "yes" campaign in Poland's referendum campaign on EU membership. (Other people's euro-referendum challenges are somewhat easier to tackle than one's own.) But he should also announce on this occasion that Britain will send British troops to serve under Polish command in the "upper south" occupation zone. Logistically this would be easy enough, since the British troops are already in Iraq. Militarily, it makes good sense, since British troops are infinitely more experienced than the Poles in this kind of operation, and chaos in the Polish zone would adversely affect the adjacent British one. Above all, though, it would be a great political gesture. Polish air force pilots once gave their lives for the defence of this country, in the Battle of Britain. They did so under British command. How fitting it would be if Britain were now the first major European power to offer its troops for service in another country under Polish command. Whatever you think of the rights or wrongs of the current Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, I hope you can see the poetic justice in that. Yet there's also a nasty political trap here. For the Bush administration did not assign an occupation zone to Poland out of philanthropic Polonophilia, or just with an eye to Polish-American votes. It was also part of an unpleasant American strategy of "divide and rule" in Europe: a demonstrative reaching out to what Donald Rumsfeld calls "new Europe" while cold-shouldering the "old Europe" of France and Germany. The flattery is almost irresistible. What Polish heart would not be stirred by a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe: "Poland rises to status of global player"? After all, even British prime ministers are liable to have their heads turned by standing ovations in Washington. I have been impressed in Warsaw by the rather level-headed way in which Polish leaders see this temptation. Incensed though they are at French and German attitudes, they seem determined not to become a pawn - or even a knight - in Washington's European chess game. Great attention was paid to a recent summit of the so-called "Weimar Triangle" of Poland, France and Germany, in which President Aleksander Kwasniewski met President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der in the city of Wroclaw. But Poland can be much helped in this balancing act between Europe and America by a country which is, in fact, performing exactly the same act: Britain. So Blair should not make this offer in terms of Poland joining an Anglo- American alliance. Instead, he should do it in a European context. He could put in a private word with his friend Jose Maria Aznar, perhaps to get some Spanish troops transferred from the British to the Polish zone after the Spanish elections on May 25. He might talk to his friend Gerhard Schr?der about the Germans coming in after all, when and if there's a UN mandate acceptable to them. He could have a word with the Danes, who've worked closely with the Poles in that German-Polish-Danish corps. In time, both the British and the Polish zones should become eurozones of Nato peacekeepers, under the kind of international, legal, multilateral authority that Euro peans like to see in the world. And of course we must make it quite clear that this hard core of European security cooperation in the Middle East will be entirely open to the French, whenever they wish to join - as we heartily hope they will. Oh yes, and one other thing: Tony Blair could also put in a quick call to his friend George Bush, to ensure that when the American president speaks in Krakow, a day after the British prime minister speaks in Warsaw, he will say that the United States fully supports Polish membership in a strong European Union. That double whammy, with a bit of spiritual follow-up from the Pope, should enable the Polish government to win its euro-referendum. Indirectly, it might even help Blair to win his own. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:43:24 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:43:24 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US/Russia links: war on terror Message-ID: <00bd01c31ae7$f5389700$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US probe into Chechen, Saudi bombing links By James Harding in Washington and Andrew Jack in Moscow Financial Times: May 15 2003 The US is to investigate possible links between suicide bombs in Saudi Arabia and Chechyna after a second attack in the rebel Russian republic on Wednesday. A female suicide bomber killed 14 people and injured scores more in a Chechen town , officials said. The attack came two days after a suicide truck bombing on Monday at a Russian government complex east of the capital Grozny, which killed 59 people. The bombings have over-shadowed US Secretary of State Colin Powell's diplomatic mission this week. Terrorists struck three foreigners' compounds in Riyadh on the eve of Mr Powell's visit to Saudi Arabia. The second Chechen suicide attack came as Mr Powell was preparing to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Wednesday's attack is deeply embarrassing for Mr Putin, who is looking at ways to offer Chechnya greater autonomy within the Russia republic. The woman who carried out Wednesday's attack was named as Shakhida Baimuratova, a Chechen separatist rebel. She was targeting the pro-Moscow head of the region's administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, posing as a journalist, reports said, at a Muslim religious festival near the town of Iliskhan-Yurt, east of the Chechen capital Grozny. "Kadyrov was speaking into the microphone from a stage, calling people to pray for peace. The woman approached him and his bodyguards rushed towards her. She then detonated the bomb," said Mr Kadyrov's spokesman in Moscow. Mr Kadyrov escaped unhurt. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said the FBI's assessment team was being sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate the Riyadh attacks, which claimed 34 lives including seven Americans. Mr Fleischer said any connection between the bombs in Chechnya and Saudi Arabia would be investigated. He said there are known to be "links and ties" between terrorists. Russian investigators have argued that the bombing on Monday bears some of the hallmarks of explosions in 1999 in Russia, and they have linked the latest blasts to Abu Walid, a leading rebel in Chechnya. Mr Putin said the two attacks "bore the same imprint". Mr Fleischer also dismissed suggestions from some Senate Democrats that the Bush administration had allowed the resurgence of terrorism because its attentions had been diverted by Iraq. Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida, and a candidate for the 2004 presidential nomination, said on Tuesday that al Qaeda "has been allowed to regenerate" and carry out a series of attacks. "[This] indicates that they have significant capability to carry out complicated operations in a simultaneous manner," he said. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 07:47:06 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:47:06 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: not a humanitarian intervention Message-ID: <00c501c31ae8$7927eb60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> On reading this first, I was very surprised to see such a strong condemnation coming from a source like this. However, presumably George Soros is deeply unhappy about the precedents set as a result of the UN's decline into irrelevance. ------ Humanity did not justify this war By Gareth Evans Financial Times: May 15 2003 Don't worry if Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction never turn up. Don't worry if he had neither the capacity nor the intent to threaten the US or his neighbours. Don't worry if Iraq was not in breach of United Nations resolutions. The war, we are now told, can be wholly justified by the horrors Mr Hussein inflicted on his own people, the latest evidence of which was found this week in a mass grave south of Baghdad. The war was a legitimate "humanitarian intervention": tough, ugly but defensible. We did the right thing - just as we did in Kosovo, as we eventually did in Bosnia and should have done in Rwanda. But did we? If the answer is Yes, there may be few limits to what can be done in the name of humanitarian intervention. There are many other repressive, dictatorial and murderous regimes against which the evidence and arguments are as strong as they were against the Saddam Hussein of the last decade. And that means many more temptations to re-write the rulebook of force, with all the risks that can bring. The concern is not just that military action may be taken too often for insufficient reasons. It is that it will be taken too rarely for the right ones. We know from the 1990s how difficult it is to mobilise domestic or international support for intervention, even against the most egregious human rights violations. That may be why so many liberal internationalists - starting with Tony Blair, the UK prime minister - wanted to believe in the legitimacy of the Iraq war. So it is vital to get the principles of intervention right, to understand how they applied to Iraq and establish how they should apply in the future. If the final message of the war in Iraq is that in dealing with the worst human rights violators the ultimate determinant of military action is just the gut feeling of those powers that can exercise it, we shall never agree on what are suitable cases for intervention. That would be a tragedy for those who believe that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations at risk from genocide and other man-made catastrophes. This is not a new debate. It ran through the 1990s, stimulated by the hopelessly inadequate response to the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia a year later, and by the UN Security Council's failure to agree on intervention in Kosovo in 1999. With global opinion starkly divided, the Canadian government established an international commission to report to the UN on rules that might attract broad consensus. Our report* still offers the clearest list of criteria for intervention. The first criterion, just cause, sets the bar high for military action. War is always ugly. It must be confined to exceptional circumstances - large-scale loss of life or "ethnic cleansing". For Iraq, this test is a close call. It would have been easily met a decade or more ago (when the west was indifferent or worse) but much less so in recent years. Subject human rights violators to targeted sanctions and international prosecutions, the commission argued. But keep war for the worst cases, otherwise consensus will evaporate and there will be no sense of obligation even to deal with another Rwanda. Even if Iraq passes the first test, the next four are harder. There is the question of right intention: was the primary purpose of this intervention to halt or avert human suffering? There is the question of last resort: were all reasonable non-military options exhausted? There is the issue of proportional means: were some 2,500 civilian and 10,000 military deaths an appropriate trade for the end of Saddam Hussein's capacity to persecute? And there is the test of reasonable prospects: were the consequences of the action worse than those of inaction? These are all tough calls, particularly the last one. We cannot answer it until we know how long Iraq's postwar misery will last, whether it is going to become a democracy or a theocracy, whether the war has concentrated other dictators' minds and whether al-Qaeda will now find it easier to recruit. Last, there is the criterion of right authority, which essentially means having Security Council endorsement. This was lacking for Iraq and so ends the argument about legality but not necessarily the one about moral legitimacy. As the commission noted, if the Security Council declines to act in a clear and conscience-shocking case, when all other criteria for military intervention are met, it may put the credibility of the UN system at risk. But it is a very large call to claim that all the other criteria were satisfied. The argument about whether the Iraq war was justifiable has a long way to run. Some relevant evidence has yet to emerge and there is room for disagreement on some of the principles involved. But, on the evidence and public debate so far, it would be deeply depressing - and utterly counterproductive for those working for a more decent international order - if the view were to take hold that this war was justified on humanitarian grounds. * The responsibility to protect, 2001 www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca The writer is president of the International Crisis Group and was foreign minister of Australia, 1988-96 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 08:10:14 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:10:14 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 5 Message-ID: <00eb01c31aeb$b4d68420$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> If there is one continuing theme in Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade," it is how florid sounding phraseology about peace, civil society and human rights became the cover for the first war on European soil since the defeat of Hitler. Ironically, as she points out in Chapter Four (Making of Empires), the impetus for this war came from the new Germany itself. While cloaked in the rhetoric of NGO's, the German state's true motive was expansion of its geopolitical influence over the Balkans. She characterizes this aptly as a singular blend of "ideals and interests"--and personified by the rise of Joschka Fischer, the German Green Party leader. By 1991, when Yugoslavia began to unravel at the seams, a hate campaign in the German media was already in full swing. In the influential Frankfurter Allgemene Zeitung (FAZ), editor Joann Reissmuller denounced the "the Serbo-communist power called Yugoslavia", or "Belgrade Serbo-communism" that held a "Greater Serbian-communist knife at the throat" of the Slovenes and the Croats. Reissmuller's racist hysteria was often framed in terms of anti-fascist rhetoric such as the time he warned the "civilized world" against the Serb's "master race madness". This garbage was written at exactly the time that Serbs were being massacred in Croatia under the banner of a crypto-Ustashist movement. The liberal "Der Spiegel" was not much better. It had a cover article on July 8, 1991 devoted to "Serb terror" and depicted Yugoslavia as a "prison of peoples" trying to free itself. Considering the Nazi massacres of Serbs during WWII, this kind of demonization was positively disgusting. One might have expected the German Greens and other anti-Serb leftists to be more sensitive to this kind of smear campaign. What accounts for this monomaniacal drive to destroy Yugoslavia? Johnstone explains it in terms of an almost ritualistic purification for the trauma Germany suffered when it ended up on the losing side of two world wars. Indeed, a leading policy-maker named Rupert Scholz linked the question of Yugoslavia with the need "to overcome the consequences of World War I". By enlisting Germany on behalf of a crusade to "liberate" Yugoslavia, it would be possible to kill two birds with one stone. Not only would humanitarian ends be realized, German would become a "normal power" in the process. Johnstone identifies a peculiarity in German thinking about nation-state formation that can be found from Kaiser to Hitler to Joschka Fischer and that would explain to some degree the zeal for dismantling Yugoslavia. In a nutshell, the nationalist intelligentsia in Germany has a history of favoring states built on a racial or ethnic basis. While obviously most closely associated with the Third Reich, it is first articulated in the waning days of WWI when Chancellor Max von Baden submitted a paper to the Kaiser titled "Thoughts on Ethical Imperialism". (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Von Baden saw Germany as protector of 'Randvolker' (peripheral peoples) in Europe. In the name of protecting the weak and the helpless, the support of ethnic claims in neighboring and hostile states would weaken their host and facilitate the spread of German influence. Of course, when those 'Randvoker' are German minorities, it is all to the better. This policy was pursued not only by Hitler, but by the "enlightened" Weimar Republic that preceded it. In neighboring Poland and Denmark, 30 million Reichsmarks were spent to buy up real estate and businesses that were ultimately used on behalf of German 'Volksgruppen' in what the Foreign Ministry called 'Kampf um den Boden' (struggle for land). This trickle turned into a full-scale flood after Hitler took power. It provided the excuse for the invasion of both Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as the absorption of Alsace. In Franz Neumann's "Behemoth", a study of Nazism, the strategy is described as follows: "Nothing could be more frank. Self-determination is merely a weapon. Take advantage of every friction growing out of the minority problem. Stir up national and racial conflicts where you can. Every conflict will play into the hands of Germany, the new self-appointed guardian of honor, freedom, and equality all over the world." It was not just German minorities who were "rescued" by Nazi humanitarian interventions. The Nazis surveyed all of Europe in pursuit of other regional populations that could be drawn into their orbit, including the Bretons in Brittany. Not long after the end of WWII, Germany once again took up the cause of 'Volker' or small nationalities. In outfits like "The International Association for the Defense of Threatened Languages and Cultures", founded in 1963, the oppression of Croats and Slovenes was weighed and remedies considered, among which was the "right to independence" of the two republics. Long before the IMF began to rake Yugoslavia over the coals, the German nationalist intelligentsia was trying to figure out ways to carve it apart. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the two Germanys united, the nationalist intelligentsia gained a new hearing from a newly emboldened ruling class anxious to reassert itself. A parliamentarian named Rupert Scholz put forward some proposals in a 1995 paper titled "The Right to Self-Determination and German Policy" that basically followed in the volk-state tradition. Now that Germany was reunited, many "lesser" nationalities could be expected to turn to the new power for support. Furthermore, Germany should not shrink from "military operations on behalf of oppressed nationalities", especially those groaning under the Serb heel. Just at the time German imperialism was rediscovering itself, important figures in the German left were beginning to dispense with the foolish pacifist illusions of their youth. Although the Green Party was devoted to peace, ecology, feminism and grassroots democracy, Johnstone points out that Joschka Fischer was not the typical Green. He was a Maoist street fighter who joined the Greens after the sectarian movements in Germany imploded in the 1980s, just as they had in the USA. As "war minister" of his organization's combat unit, Fischer trained his comrades in street-fighting tactics. His journey from ultraleftism into warmongering reformism was a well-traveled one, considering the path of other sixties radicals who would soon learn how to "work within the system". He was joined by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who became famous as "Danny the Red" in the May-June events in France, 1968. After he moved to Frankfurt, he joined the "Realo" faction of the Greens that unlike the misty-eyed "Fundis" showed a readiness to compromise principles in order to win elections. In 1994, after the war in Bosnia took a bloody turn for the worse, the German big-business press and bourgeois politicians began to call for a war against the Serbs. They dragged figures like Fischer and Cohn-Bendit in their wake. Johnstone describes their role in the sorry march toward war: >>The highly controversial question of German participation in military intervention against Bosnian Serbs was a burning issue in December 1994. At that time, Chancellor Kohl was arguing that, on the one hand, because of the suffering caused to the people of Yugoslavia in World War II by the Wehrmacht, Germany should stay out; but, on the other hand, "precisely because of German history we cannot evade our responsibility" to contribute German Tornado fighter planes to "humanitarian intervention". At that time, the Social Democrats and Greens were overwhelmingly against such intervention. The exception was Cohn-Bendit, who dismissed Green objections as "ridiculous" and found original arguments to support Kohl's position. He claimed that the peoples of the world would revert to nationalism if they saw that the international community was failing to defend the "little multicultural Volk" in Bosnia - overlooking the regrettable fact that the "multicultural Volk" was split into warring factions unlikely to be reunited by Tornados flying to the aid of one against another. At that time, Fischer was still arguing that Germany should stay out. But by the following August, Cohn-Bendit was able to announce that his friend Joschka was "on the right path", even though he still opposed sending in German soldiers. But, predicted Cohn-Bendit with remarkable clairvoyance, "Once Fischer is foreign minister, he won't be able to maintain this position." Ambition was having its effect. On 6 December 1995, the historic question of sending German armed forces to intervene outside the NATO area came before the Bundestag. By then, the Green parliamentary group was split on the question of sending troops into Bosnia. As Green spokesman, Fischer was in the early stages of the transformation that would make Cohn-Bendit's prediction come true. The rhetorical hinge by which Fischer led the gradual swing from one "moral obligation" to its opposite was a profound moral dilemma allegedly afflicting the Green conscience: a "genuine conflict of basic values". On the one hand, "non-violence"; on the other, the need to help people survive. Over several years, Fischer developed variations on this theme of a dilemma between "values". In a sharper version, the value of "non-violence", or "pacifism", was pitted against the need to "combat Auschwitz", or "genocide", posited as a special German obligation.<< As it turns out, Cohn-Bendit's appetite for war was shared by some names we have become familiar with in recent weeks. In an open letter that was addressed to " The United Nations, President Clinton, and the Congress" and that appeared in the March 4, 1993 New York Review of Books, a citadel of neoliberal imperialism, demanded that the "cruel arms embargo" imposed against Bosnia be lifted (an embargo that Johnstone characterizes as largely ignored.) In addition to Cohn-Bendit, the signatories include Ariel Dorfman, Erika Munk, Jennifer Scarlott, Joanne Landy, Ken Worcester, Manuela Dobos, Michael Lerner, Peter Weiss, Thomas Harrison, and Todd Gitlin. All of whom have the additional distinction of signing the CPD's anti-Cuba petition. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 08:26:17 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:26:17 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 5 References: <00eb01c31aeb$b4d68420$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <010b01c31aed$f28b69a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Lou Proyect writes: If there is one continuing theme in Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade," it is how florid sounding phraseology about peace, civil society and human rights became the cover for the first war on European soil since the defeat of Hitler. Ironically, as she points out in Chapter Four (Making of Empires), the impetus for this war came from the new Germany itself. ----- This is interesting, because in the US the impetus came from certain members of Clinton's national security advisory apparatus, in particular Ivo Daalder. I wrote about this in connection with the sudden British switch on Yugoslavia, coinciding with the election victory of Blair in 1997. See http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002w26/msg00067.htm Michael Keaney From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 15 08:43:15 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:43:15 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Global capital and fiscal crisis Message-ID: <011b01c31af0$51937f80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Rivalry cuts company tax rates By Christopher Swann Financial Times, May 2 2003 Competition between governments to attract businesses is driving down tax rates on companies, intensifying pressure to raise tax on individuals, according to a survey by KPMG. The average level of corporation tax in the world's 30 richest countries fell from 37.5 per cent in 1996 to 30.8 per cent in 2003, the survey found. Although cuts in headline tax rates have often been offset by restrictions in allowances, tax experts believe that falling rates show how governments are finding it increasingly hard to raise revenues from business. As companies become increasingly multinational, it has become easier for them to shift activities between states or allocate profits to countries with lower taxes. The accountancy firm also said that European Union rules on free movement of capital were making it harder for member states to clamp down on the transfer of profits to lower tax countries. John Battersby, head of strategic tax policy at KPMG, said: "Governments are having to recognise that they are operating in a competitive market to entice companies to their shores." Ireland has been in the forefront, cutting corporation tax to 12.5 per cent in 2003. The Italian government has also cut the total corporate tax rate from more than 40 per cent to 38.25 per cent recently and aims to reduce it to 33 per cent. KPMG said the UK's longstanding appeal as a low-tax state for companies was being chipped away by tax cuts in rival EU states. "The UK can no longer afford to be complacent on this issue," said Mr Battersby. "Its corporate tax rate of 30 per cent is now only a whisker from the OECD average." The figures also show the threat to Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der's hopes of raising more tax from companies to help close Germany's budget deficit, which rose to 3.6 per cent of gross domestic product last year. Infineon, the chip manufacturer, warned this week that it was considering moving its headquarters outside Germany to cut its tax bill. Accountancy experts believe the threat to corporate tax revenues was masked by the high profits during the boom years of the late 1990s. But the problem should become increasingly obvious in coming years as lower profits reduce the tax take, said John Whiting, a tax partner at PWC. "I believe that corporate tax is in near terminal decline," he said. "Over the next 10 years governments may have to deal with a lot less corporate revenue and will have to raise the tax from elsewhere." From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Thu May 15 09:19:23 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:19:23 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Two Alternative Interpretations of the Welsh Assembly Elections Message-ID: <3EC3AFFB.352CB1DC@usuarios.retecal.es> These two analyses, interesting in their own right, are of special note in that they both seem to be saying that Plaid's 'failure' in the recent elections is a consequence of it not being a party 'Welsh nationalist' enough. But as I have argued recently (): ' [...] a section of the Welsh people, at this stage a relatively small section, have been forced to look politically elsewhere [from Labour to Plaid]: it is not that the Welsh working class is turning nationalist - Plaid gains in these areas where it does not specifically run a 'nationalist' campaign - nor is it the case that the Welsh working class is becoming less social-democratic: it is that it has increasingly to look for its social democracy elsewhere, since it seems that it is increasingly unable to find it in Welsh Labour. [...]. Effectively Plaid finds itself at an historical cross-roads, for the choice now is as clear as this: it can fight to win back its rural conservative base, now defecting to the Tories, or it can move forward to be a real party of (all) Wales. [...] Plaid [...] has to decide whether it wants to be a part of this history, or be swept away by it.' The debate now opening up within the Welsh nationalist movement as a whole is going to be decisive for what will happen in the next extended period. What is of note is that both of the authors below seem to be siding with the first of the the historical choices I outline above. Interesting times. ***** Now what's the point of Plaid? As the party of independence in Wales it had a role - not any more Hywel Williams Wednesday May 14, 2003 The Guardian So did he really resign? Or was he pushed aside by that very Welsh strategy - a putsch by committee? Ieuan Wyn Jones's resignation of the leadership of Plaid Cymru has created even more dissent than his style of leadership. Parties in deep structural distress always enjoy the irrelevance of an internal constitutional debate. Which is why there is now concern that Jones submitted his resignation to just the rump of the six assembly members elected by the direct route. The other six elected by PR and the party's Westminster MP's were not consulted. Time surely for the executive to be summoned. And step forward, with their suspicions of an anti-Ieuan Wyn Jones plot, two possible leadership contenders: Elfyn Llwyd, MP for Meirionnydd, and Helen Mary Jones, the defeated AM for Llanelli. Significant Plaid-ians have almost as many names as votes these days. Full: ****** Election Fall-Out John Osmond assesses the impact of the May 2003 National Assembly election on the fortunes of the political parties. The headline story of the May 2003 Welsh Assembly elections was of Labour recovering its heartland Valley seats of Rhondda, Islwyn and Llanelli from Plaid Cymru and placing itself firmly back in its traditional saddle of dominance, if not complete control, of Welsh politics. However, a glance at the statistics summarised in Tables 1 and 2 reveals a rather more complex picture. Certainly Labour fought a shrewd campaign and reaped dividends on election night. However, the figures suggest that overall Plaid Cymru lost the campaign as much as Labour won it. This judgement should also be set against the eight per cent decline in turnout, from 46 per cent in 1999 to 38 per cent. This was a situation which had previously been thought to help Plaid Cymru, the party that traditionally had been the most successful in mobilising its core vote. Full: From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Thu May 15 09:19:31 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:19:31 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Where Next for Welsh Politics? (Part I) Message-ID: <3EC3B003.B7DD5F0A@usuarios.retecal.es> In January I posted to marxmail the article 'Welsh politics after four years of the Assembly' by Daniel Morrissey from the (as yet not available on-line) British-state journal Workers' Action. (The article can be read at and .) In my humble opinion, the analyses of Welsh politics that comrade Morrissey is producing is unmatched anywhere in quality and perceptiveness. Here I am posting a follow-up article, from Workers' Action 21 (April-May 2003), pp 20-23, which, although written one month before the 1 May elections, provides an essential to background to understanding what did in the end happen. ******* Where Next for Welsh Politics? By Daniel Morrissey The National Assembly for Wales will shortly complete the final session of its first four-year term. On Thursday, 1 May, its sixty members (or at least, those not stepping down) will face the electorate. For all the excitement that surrounded the referendum campaign in September 1997, it would be fair to say that the people of Wales have been distinctly underwhelmed by the institution in which so much hope was invested a few years ago. As I explained in the last issue of Workers Action, the body has been systematically undermined by the Blair Government's determination to restrain any ambitions for a distinct Welsh political agenda and the Welsh Labour leadership has lacked the inclination and the nerve to challenge this. While the focus of Welsh politics has largely shifted from Westminster to Cardiff, it is principally the professional/administrative tiers who are engaged with the Assembly, rather than rank-and-file activists or politically conscious citizens. None of the four parties represented in the body has been able to enthuse or inspire the people of Wales and there is little realistic prospect of Welsh politics suddenly becoming more exciting after 1 May. Nevertheless, there is a degree of interest to be derived from the election because of the considerable uncertainty about the voters' verdict on the last four years. With only its unique, inaugural election available for comparison, the Assembly is still too new for any confident predictions to be possible. And the political impact of the war against Iraq, particularly on the fortunes of the Labour Party, means that that uncertainty is considerably magnified. Clear red water? Welsh Labour activists and supporters who hoped that a Labour-led administration in Cardiff might make a clean break with Blairism have repeatedly been disappointed. With the exception of the Education Minister, Jane Davidson, who has acted resolutely on her opposition to selection, league tables and privatisation, the Assembly Government has shown little evidence of any unifying policy agenda at all. Instead, it has approached government in a completely piecemeal fashion, and relied on soundbites, gimmicks and jibes at its opponents to conceal the paucity of its ambitions. Nevertheless, hopes have lingered that, if not political principle, then at least the electoral survival instinct, would convince Rhodri Morgan & his colleagues that something more substantial was necessary. There was, therefore, keen interest when on 11 December Rhodri gave a lecture at Swansea University in which he sought to put 'clear red water' between his administration in Cardiff and the New Labour Government in Westminster. The speech picked up a theme from an earlier address to the Wales TUC, in which Rhodri had talked about a 'Welsh Way' of approaching public services - driven by socialist convictions, but applied pragmatically. In December he took this theme considerably further, claiming for his governmental programme 'ideological underpinnings' in the best traditions of the labour and socialist movement. The main thrust of the speech was to project the key achievements of the Assembly Government as making up an overall strategy - 'the creation of a new set of citizenship rights ... which are as far as possible, free at the point of use, universal and unconditional' - and to promise to build on this if Welsh Labour wins a second term of office. Stripped of the rather grandiose language, this is basically a repackaging of the handful of Assembly initiatives which have made the most difference to people's lives, and for which Welsh Labour never fails to claim credit. These are: free school milk for children under seven; free nursery places for three year olds; free prescriptions for the under twenty-fives; free entry to museums and galleries and free bus travel for pensioners and the disabled. While this list falls a long way short of a comprehensive strategy for addressing Wales' many social ands economic needs, it does represent a worthy, if modest, set of achievements, and in each case the decommodification of an important public service. Previously, Welsh Labour had always failed to link up these policies in this way, instead presenting them as 'one-off' give-aways. Rhodri's speech has belatedly remedied this, albeit under the pressure of an impending election, without which it is doubtful that he would have felt such a burning desire to point out an unacknowledged policy agenda that was supposedly there all along. Hitherto, the Welsh Labour leadership, while containing few (if any) convinced Blairites, has been wary of risking an open rift with Westminster, sometimes hinting at 'Old Labour' inclinations, but having little of substance to show for this. But the danger of a repeat of Labour's poor showing in 1999 - or even worse - seems to have strengthened Rhodri's nerve and pushed him into revealing himself in all his glory as 'a socialist of the Welsh stripe'. In order to carry this through convincingly, however, he has to be able to show that he has something new to offer for the second term, rather than simply recapitulating the story so far. But the only concrete initiative unveiled in his 'clear red water' speech was the possibility of free access for children to local authority swimming pools (this is now being 'piloted' in certain council areas). Beyond this, he talked about the need to focus 'upon a small number of key policy objectives', and specified improving food and nutrition and raising economic activity levels. While the latter should certainly be seen as one of the central objectives of any Labour government worth the name, Rhodri's description of the approach to be followed is simply a string of vague and nebulous phrases - e.g., 'the engagement of the developmental contributions of community regeneration and cultural animateurs'. Part of the problem is that many of the levers of economic policy are beyond the reach of the devolved administration - yet Rhodri now dismisses the debate over further powers as the preserve of 'the narrow circles of political anorakism'. Yet the significance of Rhodri's speech lies more in his willingness to distance himself from New Labour and situate himself in a clearly social-democratic tradition - talking about 'strengthening the collective voice of the citizen' and 'the powerful glue of social solidarity', and criticising 'the theory of marketisation'. This was implicitly acknowledged by the sharp dismissals of his speech by the leaders of the Welsh Conservatives and Plaid Cymru - the former seeing an identifiable ideological enemy, the latter no doubt fearing a loss of his party's appeal to disillusioned Labour voters. Whatever Rhodri's intentions, he has opened up the possibility of a real debate within the Welsh Labour party about the policies that the people of Wales really need - a debate in which socialists can and should take the lead. There has so far been little response, however. To some extent, this is understandable, given the general preoccupation with the war, but it also demonstrates the extent to which Labour activists have lost the habit of discussing substantive politics. Rhodri himself has failed to enlarge on his theme, so far returning to the 'clear red water' concept only once - and then somewhat tangentially. And it is, unfortunately, probably significant that at the Welsh Party conference on 27-28 February Rhodri made a banal, populist speech, full of clumsy pop-culture references and cheap jibes at Labour's opponents. The prospects for an Assembly Government further to the left if Labour wins an overall majority look even less rosy when one considers the human resources available. Practically all of the more independently-minded Labour backbenchers are leaving the Assembly, either voluntarily or under duress. Richard Edwards, the most prominent and consistent opponent of the 'War Against Terrorism', is stepping down due to health problems, while the former Education Minister Tom Middlehurst and former Merseyside Assistant Chief Constable, Alison Halford are effectively retiring. In addition, recent weeks have seen the political demise of the two most high-profile Labour mavericks. John Marek, AM and previously MP for Wrexham, and one of the few Labour members publicly to criticise the Assembly Government, has been deselected. As with every other sitting Labour AM, Marek originally won a trigger ballot which should have enabled him to avoid an open selection battle. Marek had made a number of enemies in his constituency, however, not least by criticising the Labour leadership of Wrexham Council, and there was a call for him to face disciplinary charges for bringing the party into disrepute. The bureaucracy seized on this, being particularly displeased with Marek after he sent a letter to a CWU official expressing the view that the union should withhold further funding from Labour until such time as the party adopted more pro-union policies. As a compromise solution, it was agreed that a second trigger-ballot be held. This time, Marek failed to get through, and in the ensuing selection contrast he was beaten by 84 votes to 80 by his former political assistant, Lesley Griffiths. Marek complained to Welsh Labour of improper conduct by Griffiths' husband, a local councillor, but the complaint was turned down, and it is likely that he will stand as an independent candidate, and at one stage seemed likely to secure the support of the RMT. And finally, Ron Davies, described with some justice as the "architect of devolution" has left politics after The Sun printed photographic evidence of another "moment of madness" at a well-known gay cruising site. Ron badly mishandled his response to the Sun article, changing his story within twenty-four hours. He thereby lost a lot of the initial sympathy that had been felt for him, and was ultimately left with little choice but to resign. He will be a major loss to Welsh politics, having remained almost the only Labour backbencher with both the intellectual capacity and the political independence to make an informed, constructive critique of Assembly Government policies. The newly selected candidates are, if anything, even less promising than the existing Group, and the only medium-term hope for a more left-wing leadership lies with a couple of members who are currently cabinet ministers or deputy ministers, and are therefore bound by collective responsibility to back the existing policies. However, socialists' role in the Labour Party should never involve pinning one's hopes on the best, or least bad, of our elected politicians. Instead, we must build support among party members for socialist policies, and maintain constant pressure on our 'leaders' to adopt and implement those policies. Part of the reason we have such poor leadership in the Welsh Labour Party is the lack of a strong, organised left over the last ten years or so. That is starting to change now, as a general revolt develops through the party over the war, the firefighters' dispute and the privatisation of public services. A revived and organised Welsh Labour left will have to work hard to hold all of our AMs and MPs to account, and to press socialist policies upon them. Plaid Cymru: a socialist alternative? The danger that the election presents for Welsh Labour is not just that longstanding Labour voters who are sick of Blairism will stay at home - although many certainly will. The party also faces a serious challenge from the left in the shape of Plaid Cymru. Plaid's constitution declares it to be a socialist party, but it does not, of course, seek the abolition of capitalism, but rather a set of modest reforms in the direction of greater social equality, collective provision of welfare and public services, etc. It undoubtedly won substantial support from former Labour voters in the 1999 Assembly election by presenting what was essentially an 'old Labour' platform, including commitments to re-establish the link between pensions and earnings, and to restore the full student grant. This allowed it to capture a number of seats in supposed Labour strongholds, thus denying Labour an overall majority. Moreover, it has continued to outflank Labour on the left in its responses to the crisis in the steel industry, the collapse of Railtrack and the controversy over PFI, as well as a range of other issues such as compensation for retired miners with industrial illnesses. This policy stance has both reflected and reinforced the substantial growth in recent years of Plaid's electoral support and membership in the industrial (or post-industrial) South Wales Valleys areas. Nevertheless, the party remains a broad coalition. The weight of its membership is in the predominantly rural, and more conservative, areas of North and West Wales, which partially explains the election as party leader of Ieuan Wyn Jones, the most right-wing of three candidates, in August 2000. But increasingly, the party is attracting the support of working class people in Wales on the basis that its policies serve their class interests. In recognition of this, Bob Crow of the RMT recently met Adam Price MP, effectively the leader of the Plaid Cymru left, to explore the possibility of the union giving financial support to Plaid. Plaid's full manifesto for the forthcoming elections will not be published until early April, but, according to press reports, it contains 'a clear commitment to radical transformation of the economy and public services' and aims to create 'a fairer and more equal society'. The specific measures to be set out reportedly include: * An alternative to PFI, in the form of a Public Investment Trust. * Free eye tests and free dental checks for all and a commitment to tackle the crisis in the health service by increasing the number of doctors, nurses and beds. * An end to the internal market in education and an undertaking to abolish school tests at Key Stages two and three. * A promise to encourage the development of regional growth areas and the creation of a regional jobs plan, to spread economic well-being more justly throughout Wales. The commitments on school tests, eye tests and dental checks do not represent anything novel but only the extension of measures already undertaken by Labour, and the pledge to sort out the health service is fairly meaningless unless it is backed up with hard facts and figures. But the commitment to public provision of public services, in place of PFI, and the promise of greater state intervention in the economy, are a significant improvement on the approach of the current Assembly Government - although they would have been entirely consistent with Labour policy as recently as the mid-1990s. In any case, it will not be primarily the detail of Plaid's manifesto pledges that determines its degree of electoral support, but rather the assessment that is made of its general political character and its credibility as an alternative Welsh Government. And this, of course, will have as much to do with disappointment in Labour's performance than positive enthusiasm for Plaid. From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Thu May 15 09:19:42 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:19:42 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Where Next for Welsh Politics? (Part II) Message-ID: <3EC3B00E.DF5F701C@usuarios.retecal.es> The election and the war The one pressing issue where Plaid currently seems almost certain to win support at the expense of Labour, is the war. From the very beginning of the so-called 'War Against Terrorism', it has consistently called for restraint, opposing the attack on Afghanistan, when the other main parties in Wales were united in supporting the Government. Its AMs, MPs and MEPs have been prominent in the anti-war movement, speaking at all the major demonstrations and, in the case of the MEPs, undertaking a 'peace mission' to Iraq. By contrast, Richard Edwards was the only Labour AM, and Llew Smith the only Welsh Labour MP, to oppose publicly the war in Afghanistan. Subsequently, anti-war sentiment in the party has strengthened and 16 Welsh Labour MPs rebelled against the Government in the crucial vote on 18 March. But although only two Labour AMs support Blair's line, the Labour Group - and therefore the Assembly Government - has failed to take any collective position, beyond an anodyne statement in January, supporting 'our prime minister in looking at all ways possible to avoid war with Iraq', which became obsolete almost immediately. Labour's Assembly chief whip instructed AMs not to respond to a Western Mail survey of their views of the war, and many have continued to observe this 'gagging order'. As with many other issues, the failure of the Welsh Labour leadership to distance itself from Westminster on the war is not only a sign of political weakness, but an electoral liability. At the time of writing it is impossible to predict the course of the war or, therefore, the extent of its impact on party politics. But even if the war is brief and claims few casualties, there will be many people in Wales who are already sufficiently disgusted by Blair's role that they will vote primarily against Labour on this one issue. A 'Vote 2 Stop the War' campaign has belatedly begun on the basis of advising people of constituency candidates' stance on the war, and standing its own slate of candidates in the regional 'top-up' lists. It seems unlikely to make a huge impact, but voters already have the choice of two mainstream anti-war parties - Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats - as well as the Greens, Welsh Socialist Alliance and Socialist Labour Party (whose leader, Arthur Scargill, is himself heading its South Wales East regional list). The election and the devolution project This election will be regarded as a judgement not only on the present Labour-led Assembly Government, but on the whole project of devolution, and the shortcomings of the former will inevitably influence popular sentiment towards the latter. Yet, regardless of the present position, the establishment of the Assembly should be seen as an unqualified gain for the people of Wales. Its very existence represents an opportunity for the expression, at a political level, of the distinct national identity and culture of Wales, and a potential mechanism for the solution of the country's particular problems. Moreover, it opens up a democratic space within the machinery of the British state, within which popular struggles may be conducted. To this extent, the diffusion of power represented by devolution is simultaneously a weakening of the political control held at the centre of the state apparatus. The danger, however, is that the Assembly will remain simply an administrative structure, devoid of real political content. Neglected and even resented by its intended constituency, it could prove itself more useful to the Westminster Government as a means of deflecting popular discontent, than to the people of Wales as a means of directing that discontent against the most deserving targets. This scenario becomes increasingly likely in the absence of the political will to realise the Assembly's potential. To avoid this outcome would mean simultaneously using the Assembly's existing powers to the full and demanding more. Welsh Labour is currently doing neither of these things. Ron Davies famously declared that devolution was a process, not an event, and there are many within his party - including some of the current Cardiff Cabinet - who share his view that the Assembly's creation was merely the first step towards a more thoroughgoing form of self-government. But there are other leading Welsh Labour figures who have no appetite for further devolution, and condemn any moves in that direction as "crypto-nationalist rubbish" (in the words of Huw Lewis, the right-wing Labour AM for Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney). Supported by Paul Starling, political editor of the Welsh Daily Mirror, they counterpose a professed overriding concern for 'social justice' to any interest in a Welsh national project - yet these are, in practice, frequently the strongest supporters of the Blairite agenda. For now, an uneasy peace exists between the two sides, but the potential for more public divisions exists in the form of the Richard Commission on the Assembly's powers, set up by the Assembly Government at the behest of the Lib Dems, and due to report in the autumn. Meanwhile, Plaid Cymru has announced that if it gains control of the Assembly in May, it will initiate a two-year National Convention, involving all sections of society, which will draw up plans for a full Parliament in Wales, to be established by 2007. This proposal is to be welcomed, recognising as it implicitly does that Wales needs the process of national debate that Scotland underwent prior to the finalisation of its own devolution proposals - in part through the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Such a process would be particularly welcome if it facilitated a positive engagement between socialists in the Labour Party, Plaid Cymru and other parties on the national question. Ultimately, the left must support the objective of a Welsh Parliament with full legislative and tax-raising powers, both as a matter of principle and, in the present circumstances, as a bulwark against the neo-liberal policies of the Blair Government. Institutionalised coalition-politics In October 2000, while touring Labour Party meetings around Wales to justify his coalition with the Lib Dems, Rhodri confidently asserted that Labour would win an overall majority in two out of every three Welsh general elections; it was simply unfortunate that the first such election was not among the two-thirds. This claim has looked increasingly hollow since then, and another coalition seems the most likely outcome of the forthcoming elections. In an interview with the current affairs programme at party conference, Dragon's Eye, immediately after Labour's Blackpool conference, Rhodri enraged Labour activists (and several of his own AMs) by suggesting that he might continue his coalition with the Lib Dems even if Labour did win an overall majority. While such an approach no doubt finds favour in Downing Street, it will win Rhodri few friends in the Welsh party, where the Lib Dems are almost universally disliked. And there are sound political reasons why a further Lib-Lab 'Partnership Government' should be strenuously opposed. In fairness, the junior coalition partner cannot be blamed for the weakness of the Assembly Government's programme: as argued above, there is little evidence that Labour would have had anything more substantial to offer if it had governed alone. But the long-run tendency inherent in Lib-Labism is to obstruct any inclination by Labour to put the interests of working people first, or to favour public control of services and economic enterprises as a matter of principle. Yet Wales' (partially) proportional system seems likely to deliver coalitions - or else minority governments - more often than not. Socialists often see minority government as the more preferable option, to avoid undermining Labour's class independence, as it would be by a Lib-Lab administration. But it is simply not credible at the moment, to argue that a minority Labour Government would be a better option for the people of Wales than a coalition between Labour and Plaid Cymru. Plaid's increasingly working-class base, reflected in its social-democratic programme, would be more likely to pull Labour to the left. This option was eloquently laid out by Adam Price MP in an article in Tribune on 23 January. Welcoming Rhodri Morgan's 'clear red water' speech as massively significant for its commitment to equality of outcome and services free at the point of delivery, he argued that 'the most likely party to respond positively to a radical programme of government based on socialist principles would undoubtedly be Plaid'. Price described the Lib Dems as 'neo-liberals, opposed to Government support for the coal industry, against windfarms if they are on their own doorsteps, supporters of a modified Private Finance Initiative, and viciously opportunistic opponents of the Fire Brigades Union.' 'There are', he continued, 'two anti-socialist groupings in the Welsh Assembly, and two avowedly socialist parties, divided on the national question, but apparently united in their opposition to the Government's market-driven approach. As we face down a common enemy, what unites us is far more important than anything that divides us.' He called, therefore, for a 'historic compromise between the two great currents of the Welsh Left, a radical red-green platform of progressive politics.' This is an initiative that deserves a positive response. Socialists and the elections All this leaves us with the question: what attitude should socialists take to these elections? Marxists, such as the supporters of Workers Action, have historically campaigned for the election of social-democratic parties like Labour, not because we have any confidence in their programme, but because they are identified as parties of the working class, within which they have enjoyed consistent and organised support. Putting such parties in office has created the hope and expectation of policies that will advance the interests of the working people. We have always argued within the organised working class, that pressure must be maintained on the social democrats, once in Government, to carry out their programme. However inadequate such programmes might be, they generally represent at least a small advance for the working class at the expense of the capitalist class, and the struggle for their implementation builds the confidence of working people to campaign for a bolder, more radical agenda. In the context of the Assembly elections, however, the pursuit of such an approach is somewhat complicated. The first reason is that, under its present Blairite leadership, Labour has adopted policies which are not simply too timid, but are completely counterposed to the interests of working people. This applies indirectly to Welsh Labour, which although not enthusiastically Blairite, is bound by the same general policy framework. The task for socialists in the Labour Party is therefore to oppose the implementation of the party's programme, and to campaign for a comprehensive alternative agenda. This is a particularly difficult approach to popularise at election times, not least in Wales, where there is no realistic need to vote Labour in order to keep out the Tories. The second complication is that, in Wales voters have the choice of two social-democratic parties, which are both strong contenders for Government. One - Labour - has practically abandoned its social-democratic programme - at least until such time is it is willing or able to break free from the constraints of neoliberalism imposed on it by Westminster. Nevertheless, it retains strong organisational links with the unions and can still count on probably a plurality - though certainly not a majority - of politically conscious working class people. The other party - Plaid Cymru - has a programme that is more in keeping with the heritage of social-democracy, but also a more diverse social base, including a smaller section of the working class, and as yet no formal links with the unions (although this may change). Workers Action believes that the best place for socialists in Wales remains the Labour Party. This is primarily because the link with the unions presents a continuing opportunity to bring working class interests into party politics. However, we must recognise that the Welsh working class is increasingly divided, as people lose any confidence that Labour can solve their problems with its current policies and leadership. We must sharply oppose any sectarian attacks on Plaid Cymru and argue that while its leadership is not qualitatively better than Labour's, its better policies - against privatisation, for state economic intervention, and for a full Parliament in Wales - should be supported. We should argue for joint work between socialists in Labour and Plaid around such concrete issues, and against the war. And in the likely event of no overall majority in Assembly, we should actively campaign for the Labour leadership to form a coalition with Plaid Cymru, not the Liberal Democrats. Finally, it is obvious and necessary that supporting Labour's electoral campaign will be central to the activities of socialists in the Welsh Labour Party over the coming weeks. However, the additional member system (AMS) also presents an opportunity to cast a second vote for Plaid Cymru. The first past the post system, which determines the election of 40 of the 60 Assembly seats, disproportionately favours Labour. For this reason, it is extremely unlikely that the party will qualify for a 'top-up' seat from the regional lists, other than in Mid and West Wales. A Labour vote in the regional list ballot will in most cases, therefore, be wasted, whereas a vote for Plaid Cymru will make a difference to Plaid's fortunes and will also help to minimise the number of seats won by the Tories and Lib Dems. Socialists should therefore argue, wherever it is politically possible, for a first vote for Labour and a second for Plaid. From pbond at sn.apc.org Thu May 15 08:46:56 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 16:46:56 +0200 Subject: [A-List] BCCI scandal References: <00ad01c31ae7$093d84a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <014101c31afd$82fccec0$389c22c4@Patrick> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" > BCCI settlement costs top $1.2bn A report on damages from the field (probably interesting to those A-listers who haven't decided yet whether Robert Mugabe is a comrade). This is from my 1998 book *Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment* (Africa World Press). In 1991, BCCI's Zimbabwe subsidiary suffered such severe financial problems that the government was able to purchase the remaining 53% of the shares for less than Z$1 million ? and then changed the bank's name to Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe. ... According to a United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, The BCCI Affair, a briefcase containing ?500,000 was delivered by a BCCI official to a London hotel during the course of Lancaster House negotiations in 1979. As another bank official, Akbar Bilgrami, confirmed to Senate staff, "We paid Mugabe and [Joshua] Nkomo." Then in 1981, BCCI Chief Executive Officer Agha Hasan Abedi, his personal assistant Nazir Chinoy, and BCCI officer Aluddin Sheikh went, in Chinoy's words, "to the opening of a joint venture with Zimbabwe. I think to get permission for establishing a bank in Zimbabwe that money was paid to President Mugabe and to Nkomo." Chinoy claimed that Sheikh went off on his own to see Nkomo who was the chief opposition at the time, and then he went off to see President Mugabe, and when they talked they wanted me out of the room... Mr Sheikh carried a bag with him. At the time I had a suspicion that you don't get permission as a foreign bank so easily without a payment. Without favours, it wouldn't be so easy to get a bank that fast, especially given the opposition of the British banks who were already established there. BCCI failed in July 1991 when its global pyramid-scheme of deposit-taking, drug money laundering and rampant bribery of international officials imploded, and the national railways of both Zimbabwe and Zambia reportedly lost Z$330 million in deposits. Member of Parliament Edson Ncube alleged that this stemmed from political appointments to the parastatal railroad: "Because of these political appointments, at one stage our bank account for the National Railroad of Zimbabwe was transferred from this one bank to BCCI. What has happened to these funds has not been fruitful" (Weekend Gazette, 13/12/91). Zimbabwe was also a prolific borrower from BCCI. In March 1991 the government owed the bank US$17 million, according to the Senate report, all of which had to be repaid, even if Zimbabweans' deposits had vanished. Later, Bashir Shaik, the former managing director of BCCI's Zimbabwe subsidiary (as late as mid 1993, following its conversion into Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe), was tried for drug money laundering and sentenced to several years in jail in the US. The charge stemmed from his relationship with Manuel Noriega when Shaik worked for BCCI in Panama (FG, 28/10/93). ... The National Railways of Zimbabwe refused to pay its pension fund ? already crippled by the BCCI collapse ? Z$40 million (though workers put the figure owed at Z$196 million), and in 1993 even failed to make its monthly fund contribution (FG, 13/5/93). From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 15 13:57:22 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 15:57:22 -0400 Subject: [A-List] BCCI scandal References: <00ad01c31ae7$093d84a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <014101c31afd$82fccec0$389c22c4@Patrick> Message-ID: <3EC3F122.2010808@mindspring.com> I don't have time to go into the details but BCCI did not do anyhthing that most US banks didn't do regularly. The Bank of New York got away with a small fine laundering Russian mafia capitalism funds, Citibanks had a long and dismal record of paying commission for Third World loans, especially in SE Asia and Latin America. So did Chase and Manny Hannny. BCCI failed because it was a Mulim bank lending to Third World borrowers for national development when the US was pushing the Third World to accept trade and there was no Federal Reserve to bail it out. It a warning to Arab money to stay with US banks. Henry C.K. Liu Patrick Bond wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Keaney" > >>BCCI settlement costs top $1.2bn > > > A report on damages from the field (probably interesting to those A-listers > who haven't decided yet whether Robert Mugabe is a comrade). This is from my > 1998 book *Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and > Underdevelopment* (Africa World Press). > > In 1991, BCCI's Zimbabwe subsidiary suffered such severe financial problems > that the government was able to purchase the remaining 53% of the shares for > less than Z$1 million ? and then changed the bank's name to Commercial Bank > of Zimbabwe. > > ... > > According to a United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, The > BCCI Affair, a briefcase containing ?500,000 was delivered by a BCCI > official to a London hotel during the course of Lancaster House negotiations > in 1979. As another bank official, Akbar Bilgrami, confirmed to Senate > staff, "We paid Mugabe and [Joshua] Nkomo." Then in 1981, BCCI Chief > Executive Officer Agha Hasan Abedi, his personal assistant Nazir Chinoy, and > BCCI officer Aluddin Sheikh went, in Chinoy's words, "to the opening of a > joint venture with Zimbabwe. I think to get permission for establishing a > bank in Zimbabwe that money was paid to President Mugabe and to Nkomo." > Chinoy claimed that Sheikh > > > went off on his own to see Nkomo who was the chief opposition at the time, > and then he went off to see President Mugabe, and when they talked they > wanted me out of the room... Mr Sheikh carried a bag with him. At the time I > had a suspicion that you don't get permission as a foreign bank so easily > without a payment. Without favours, it wouldn't be so easy to get a bank > that fast, especially given the opposition of the British banks who were > already established there. > > > BCCI failed in July 1991 when its global pyramid-scheme of deposit-taking, > drug money laundering and rampant bribery of international officials > imploded, and the national railways of both Zimbabwe and Zambia reportedly > lost Z$330 million in deposits. Member of Parliament Edson Ncube alleged > that this stemmed from political appointments to the parastatal railroad: > "Because of these political appointments, at one stage our bank account for > the National Railroad of Zimbabwe was transferred from this one bank to > BCCI. What has happened to these funds has not been fruitful" (Weekend > Gazette, 13/12/91). Zimbabwe was also a prolific borrower from BCCI. In > March 1991 the government owed the bank US$17 million, according to the > Senate report, all of which had to be repaid, even if Zimbabweans' deposits > had vanished. > > Later, Bashir Shaik, the former managing director of BCCI's Zimbabwe > subsidiary (as late as mid 1993, following its conversion into Commercial > Bank of Zimbabwe), was tried for drug money laundering and sentenced to > several years in jail in the US. The charge stemmed from his relationship > with Manuel Noriega when Shaik worked for BCCI in Panama (FG, 28/10/93). > > ... > > The National Railways of Zimbabwe refused to pay its pension fund ? already > crippled by the BCCI collapse ? Z$40 million (though workers put the figure > owed at Z$196 million), and in 1993 even failed to make its monthly fund > contribution (FG, 13/5/93). > > > > > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu May 15 22:06:07 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:06:07 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Fw: [R-G] The oil-consumption party is over! Message-ID: <01da01c31b62$6a7a97f0$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nicholas Morcinek" Subject: [R-G] The oil-consumption party is over! NEW YORK - Famine, disease, economic collapse, despotism, and resource wars. Sounds horrific, but that's what's in store unless the world cuts back fast on its energy consumption, according to a new book. In "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," author Richard Heinberg argues global oil output will peak in three to 12 years, and if an aggressive shift to include new energy sources, like wind, solar or fuel cells in the mix doesn't happen by then, grim consequences will result. It's no surprise the United States, which consumes a quarter of the world's oil and imports more than half of the 20 million barrels of oil it now uses every day, is at the top of Heinberg's list of offending countries. But the author stresses high growth rates in oil-thirsty countries like China or India heighten the chances of calamity by increasing competition among nations for oil and therefore requiring the shift to alternatives to be even more decisive. "The party, which is the past 200 years of fossil fuels use, is coming to an end, and we have the choice as to how to bring that party to an end," Heinberg told Reuters. "Either we do it voluntarily or it will be thrust upon us." While Heinberg has his share of detractors, even among those who agree that the world may well face some sort of crisis when oil production begins to tail off for good, his worst-case scenario is certainly attention-grabbing. He predicts a less global world where cities shrink into towns as people move closer to food and water supplies, where currencies will be local, electrical power delivered by cooperatives and bicycles and walking widespread once again. "We are going to have to run the movie of globalization in reverse," said Heinberg, an ecology professor at the New College of California, in Santa Rosa north of San Francisco. He also reckons many U.S. citizens would be willing to trade in their energy-intensive lifestyles in exchange for assurances militants halfway around the world would drop America off their target list. Heinberg's views stand in stark contrast to those who believe that the transition from petroleum to alternative fuels will be smooth, even if new energy sources cost more. "(An alternative to oil) is presumably going to cost more, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be catastrophic and it doesn't mean that the change is going to be abrupt, it could be a smooth transition," said Ron Minsk, economist and special assistant for economic policy to former U.S. President Bill Clinton. A SIMPLE CHOICE To avoid catastrophe, Heinberg stresses that the United States must immediately reduce its dependency on petroleum and work on downsizing its resource-intensive way of life with a view toward conservation and developing renewable energy. In his book, Heinberg quotes Colin Campbell - a geologist and author known for his forecasts that world oil production is likely to peak within a decade - to help make the case that time is of the essence to avoid disaster. But Campbell's claim that: "We now find one barrel of oil for every four we consume," is dismissed by people like Minsk as scaremongering. Heinberg's detractors acknowledge that oil will obviously run out one day, but generally say that if oil prices rise as supplies begin to tighten, market forces will kick in to avert a global disaster. "Since the 1950's people have been predicting that oil production will peak 10 years later, and we are now in the 2000's and people are still predicting that production will peak in a decade," Minsk said. Minsk said higher oil prices might hurt the economy in the near term, but would also increase the economic incentive to explore and develop oil and alternative energy sources that may have previously been too expensive to develop before. Oil prices reached $40 a barrel this year in the weeks before U.S.-led forces attacked oil-rich Iraq on fears that widespread destruction of oil fields there could shock the world economy. Prices have since settled back to around $26. Heinberg considers the latest conflict in Iraq not as an attempt to get rid of weapons of mass destruction but as a way for the United States to secure oil supplies. The invasion was, in his view, an early sign of the resource wars of the future he predicts if alternatives to oil are not quickly pursued. He also says that in the absence of massive investments in alternative energy - that is in the billions of dollars rather than the millions proposed by U.S. President George W. Bush in his latest budget - relying on price spikes as an early indicator of supply problems is pretty much useless. That's because the next big supply crisis is likely to signal the beginning of the end of the petroleum era and thus the beginning of chaos - first in the developing world but also, eventually, in the industrialized world as well. "We really need to wake up. It is the greatest challenge that we have faced in the last 200 years," Heinberg said. Story by Manuela Badawy REUTERS NEWS SERVICE _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu May 15 23:00:20 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 22:00:20 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: The oil-consumption party is over! References: <01da01c31b62$6a7a97f0$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <025e01c31b68$0fa6bc40$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nicholas Morcinek" To: > In "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," author > Richard Heinberg argues global oil output will peak in three to 12 years, > and if an aggressive shift to include new energy sources, like wind, solar > or fuel cells in the mix doesn't happen by then, grim consequences will > result. Now, the S.O.B. I'd normally ask about this went and died on us, So I'll ask you folks instead: Is not the above a fancy notion? From what I've come to understand, it will take huge amounts of fossils fuels in excess of the currently existing fossil fuel consumption rates and even when it is finally developed? i.e: the amount of fossil fuels we have are not enough to use them (under exterminist imperialism) for the development of the alternatives to fossil fuels. Or: it would only be possible to come up with alternatives to oil as is if we had a much larger glut of oil, and therefore didn't need the alternative. Why did I suddenly get the desire to read Joseph Heller? Macdonald From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:02:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:02:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: forwarded from Néstor Message-ID: <000801c31b79$2ba60840$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> L. Proyect wrote, summing up D. Johnstone: "This policy was pursued not only by Hitler, but by the "enlightened" Weimar Republic that preceded it. In neighboring Poland and Denmark, 30 million Reichsmarks were spent to buy up real estate and businesses that were ultimately used on behalf of German 'Volksgruppen' in what the Foreign Ministry called 'Kampf um den Boden' (struggle for land)." It should be noted, also, that the theoretical foundations for the blueprints of the German expansion to the East were laid under the Weimar Republic, not under Hitler, by such noted geographers as Walter Christaller, the social meaning of whose work can be best described as an effort to give "scientific" foundations to the restructuring of economic, social and administrative space on an "isotropic plain" (can you imagine something more resembling an "isotropic plain" than Poland?) where towns are considered as the centers that dominate the countryside around them. Christaller, who worked for the Weimar Republic in planning institutions -and has been said to have further worked within State institutions at least during the first stages of the Third Reich-, provides his framework on his famous study of "Central Places in South Western Germany". Though the theses have been proved not to be easily tested against most environments, they fitted (hand in glove) the goal of establishing a Herrenvolk placed in the towns over an ocean of Slav peasants. Also, the famous Hitlerian network of high speed roads had been designed by planners in the Weimar Republic. I guess that the adoption of Christaller by the American bourgeoisie and its organic intellectuals as a mainstay of geographic thought during the late 50s and early 60s cannot be severed from the adoption of the American network of high speed roads by the same time. In fact, the first name of the network included the word "Defense highways", or something to the effect, in its official denomination. The American "military-industrial complex" worked fast to adopt every useful innovation provided by the German military-industrial complex of the 30s. Maybe we are facing another situation where the "vanquished" colonize the "victors", such as was the case with Rome and Greece... From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:11:35 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:11:35 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Re: The oil-consumption party is over! References: <01da01c31b62$6a7a97f0$20fa5718@comintern> <025e01c31b68$0fa6bc40$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <001201c31b7a$62f3a2c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Just to add to this particular broth... Demand for oil forecast to climb 50% by 2025 By Carola Hoyos in London Financial Times, May 2 2003 The US Energy Department yesterday forecast the world will need more than 50 per cent more oil in 2025 than it does now, throwing into question governments' massive efforts to reduce the world's dependence on oil. Most of the extra barrels will come from the Middle East, despite US, European and Asian governments' attempts to diversify their suppliers away from the volatile region. Opec's market share is expected to grow, with the cartel more than doubling its current 27m barrels a day production to 56m b/d. Efforts to move to more environmentally friendly fuels are almost negligible, the department's annual report indicated. Total carbon dioxide emissions are projected to increase 59 per cent by 2025, while the share of energy that comes from renewable resources -- such as wind, water and solar power -- will remain unchanged at 8 per cent. The role of hydrogen was not mentioned in the report. The administration of US President George W. Bush has made the introduction of hydrogen cars on to US roads within the next two decades a priority of its energy policy. But many analysts and US oil executives, including Lee Raymond, head of ExxonMobil, the world's largest listed oil group, do not expect hydrogen to make a palpable impact. "Over the past several decades oil has been the world's foremost source of primary energy consumption, and it is expected to remain in that position," the department said. The biggest growth in oil use will come from the transportation sector and the developing world -- especially China, India and South Korea -- which is forecast by 2025 to need 86 per cent as much oil as the developing world. The share of natural gas in total energy consumption is expected to increase from 23 per cent to 28 per cent by 2025 as countries looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions turn to the cleaner burning fuel to service their power plants. Nuclear energy, which is expected to make up only 12 per cent of the world's electricity supply in 2025, will be on the losing side as developed countries continue to decomission reactors. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:15:12 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:15:12 +0300 Subject: [A-List] BCCI scandal References: <00ad01c31ae7$093d84a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <014101c31afd$82fccec0$389c22c4@Patrick> <3EC3F122.2010808@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <001801c31b7a$e3f8cf80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Henry writes: I don't have time to go into the details but BCCI did not do anyhthing that most US banks didn't do regularly. BCCI failed because it was a Mulim bank lending to Third World borrowers for national development when the US was pushing the Third World to accept trade and there was no Federal Reserve to bail it out. It a warning to Arab money to stay with US banks. ----- Henry, if you do get time, this would be a good topic to explore further here, in connection with the various ongoing threads exploring the rise and maintenance of dollar hegemony. Thanks also to Patrick Bond for filling us in on Zimbabwe. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:46:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:46:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <005a01c31b7f$31e084a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Ex-agent reports Stakeknife to police Allegations that Scappaticci made threats to kill Rosie Cowan, Ireland correspondent Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian The former British army agent known as Kevin Fulton yesterday told police in London that notorious IRA man Freddie Scappaticci threatened to kill him in 1994 because he suspected he had thwarted the attempted murder of a senior RUC officer. Mr Fulton [a pseudonym] told the Guardian he did not know at the time that Mr Scappaticci was the top military spy known as Stakeknife. But Mr Fulton, who also infiltrated the IRA, is now convinced that not only is this the case but that his [Fulton's] army handlers knew this and were prepared to sacrifice him to protect Stakeknife. His explosive claims will open a whole new can of worms in the Stakeknife affair, which sources say will rock the military and intelligence establishment because of allegations that the agent was allowed to murder with impunity and that innocent people died to protect his identity. Mr Scappaticci, 59, who security sources say could be linked to as many as 40 murders and was paid ?80,000 a year by the government for his intelligence information, disappeared from his west Belfast home on Sunday morning. Whitehall sources told the Guardian he was in a safe house under the protection of the security agencies. But he reappeared at his solicitor's offices in west Belfast on Wednesday where he categorically denied all the allegations against him, claiming he had never been a British agent. He said he had not been involved in the republican movement for 13 years. Mr Fulton exposed how Northern Irish special branch ignored intelligence warnings prior to the Omagh bomb but has strenuously denied "outing" Mr Scappaticci as Stakeknife. Yesterday, Mr Fulton claimed he foiled the IRA's attempt to murder a senior policeman, Derek Martindale, in 1994 by reporting the terrorists' plans to his handlers so that they were arrested on their way to shoot the officer in east Belfast. Mr Scappaticci was then deputy head of the Provisionals' feared internal security unit, the infamous Nutting Squad, charged with sniffing out and executing informers. Mr Fulton said he and a family member, who he refused to identify, were summoned to two meetings with Mr Scappaticci at Unity Flats in Belfast. He knew the west Belfast builder because he had encountered him many times in Co Down and south Armagh. "The other party was totally uninvolved in anything but we were told if we didn't turn up, they would come and drag us there," said Mr Fulton. "It was an invitation you didn't refuse. "We were blindfolded, and Freddie Scappaticci interrogated us, the first time for two hours, and on the second occasion, for four hours. He brought up other IRA operations in Newry that had 'gone wrong'. He poked me with his fingers and threatened to 'put me down a hole' if I was to blame. "I am 100% certain it was Freddie Scappaticci. At that time, I only knew him as one of the Nutting Squad. I was terrified. I thought we were going to die, but I knew if I broke down and admitted anything, I was a goner. "He let us go but when they told me to come back a third time, I knew that if I went I would never come back alive. I didn't know he was Stakeknife but I am sure my handlers knew. They said 'Go, you'll be all right. We have the inside track.' But I went awol. I knew if I went I would never have returned alive. "I think now that my handlers were quite prepared to let me die because Stakeknife was more important to them. I was set up to take the fall." Mr Fulton said he had not reported the incident to police at the time because his army handlers were aware of it and he though they would sort it out. But nothing was done. "I have now gone to the Met to force the police to investigate. They will have to tell the Police Service of Northern Ireland and they should arrest Freddie Scappaticci immediately." Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly has said he accepts Mr Scappaticci's statement but grassroots republicans say Mr Scappaticci has questions to answer. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:48:14 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:48:14 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Iran Message-ID: <006201c31b7f$81c0d240$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US accuses Iran of stockpiling chemical arms Dan De Luce in Tehran and Oliver Burkeman in Washington Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian Iran, already accused by the Bush administration of hiding attempts to build a nuclear bomb, faces fresh allegations about its chemical and biological weapons programmes. Washington is now accusing Tehran of stockpiling nerve agents and pursuing a chemical weapons programme, while an Iranian resistance group yesterday alleged that Iran has an aggressive bio-weapons effort under way. "We are most troubled by the activities of Iran, which we believe continues to seek chemicals, production technology, training, and expertise from abroad," a US representative recently told the international chemical weapons watchdog agency in the Hague. Washington also accused Iran of stockpiling blister, blood and choking agents and some nerve agents, US diplomat Stephen Rademaker said in a statement obtained by the Guardian. The statement was read out to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) at a meeting in the Hague last month. Iran has vehemently denied the allegations, which are sure to have been raised in recent talks between the two governments in Geneva. An Iranian resistance group, the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation (MKO), made more drastic accusations about Iran's biological programme, the Washington Post reported yesterday. Theorganisation, which is listed as a terrorist group by Washington but has allies in the US Congress, alleged that Tehran had started producing weaponised anthrax and was actively working with at least five other pathogens, including smallpox, in a drive to build an arsenal of biological weapons. The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told reporters he had not read the allegations. He said that he would have to "go back and refresh" himself on "the latest assessments" before responding to any claims on Iran's chemical and biological weapons capabilities. Kenneth Katzman, an expert on Iran and terrorism at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, told the Guardian: "The US government intelligence assessments do say there is an assumption that they have an ability to weaponise basic biological agents like anthrax. "But I see [the MKO report] as going further in saying that Iran is actively making a stockpile of these weapons." Analysts say hardline elements of the Iranian leadership may see nuclear or other weapons programmes as a possible deterrent against increasing pressure from the US, which now has troops and bases in countries surrounding Iran from every direction. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:49:28 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:49:28 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US police state: Texas Message-ID: <006a01c31b7f$adc0dc00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Republicans 'used anti-terror agency' to find political foes Oliver Burkeman in Washington Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian Fifty-one Texan Democrats who skipped town in the dead of night to defeat a controversial piece of legislation were tracked down after Republicans reportedly used a federal anti-terrorism agency, it emerged yesterday. The group of state representatives were found holed up at a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma, on Tuesday by Texas Rangers with orders to arrest them. They fled Austin to prevent the Texan house of representatives from reaching a quorum in time to vote through a bill which would redraw electoral boundaries, along with other proposals for spending cuts which they argued would harm the poor. The law allows for the arrest of quorum-busting legislators - though they face no civil or criminal penalties - but it does not apply outside Texas. Now it has been alleged that the Democrats were only found after the Republicans asked the air and marine interdiction and coordination centre - part of the homeland security department - to trace an aircraft belonging to one representative, Pete Laney. "We called someone, and they said they were going to track it," the Texas Republican house leader, Tom Craddick, told a Fort Worth newspaper. "I have no idea how they tracked it down _ That's how we found them." Mr Craddick had locked the house of representatives on Monday night, apparently in an effort to make sure that legislators already inside could not leave. The members are said to have spent the night in the chamber playing with toy balls and whistling the national anthem. Yesterday Democrats accused their foes of using intimidatory tactics. In one case, police allegedly ques tioned nurses at an intensive care unit where a lawmaker's prematurely born twins were being cared for. Another said his wife was trailed for the duration of a 200-mile journey from Austin to Jacksonville. Republicans, with no legislating to do, produced a set of playing cards featuring the missing legislators, mimicking those portraying wanted members of Saddam's regime. "These folks are not stupid, they're like members of some weird cult," the leftwing Texan journalist Molly Ivins wrote of the state's Republicans in yesterday's Washington Post. She cited recent comments made by one representative, Debbie Riddle, in a legislative committee: "Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:50:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:50:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] France/US split: media smear campaign Message-ID: <007601c31b7f$d0d93c00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> French complain about smear campaign in American press Julian Borger in Washington Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian In an unprecedented formal complaint, France yesterday accused the Bush administration of conducting an organised smear campaign against the French government through a series of unattributed and unsubstantiated leaks to the United States press. Paris has told its diplomats in America to monitor the US press for further signs of a disinformation campaign, a very public sign of distrust suggesting that there has been no improvement in Franco-American relations since the Iraq war. France's ambassador to Washington, Jean-David Levitte, sent a letter to the administration and to Congress complaining about a string of news stories in the American press before and since the war. They include reports in the conservative Washington Times quoting unnamed American government sources as saying that Paris had given French passports to senior members of Saddam Hussein's regime, allowing them to escape to Syria and then fly to Europe. Following angry French denials, the state department said there was no evidence to "substantiate the premise" behind the report. However, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was more ambivalent, pointing out that "France has historically had a very close relationship with Iraq". Asked about the smear allegations yesterday, Mr Rumsfeld said: "I know nothing of such a campaign. Certainly there is no such campaign out of this building. "I can't speak for the rest of the government." The French embassy yesterday refused to release Mr Levitte's letter before it was formally delivered to US officials. But according to the Washington Post, other stories listed in a two-page annexe to the French complaint include a 1998 New York Times report claiming that France and Germany had sold high-precision switches to Iraq which could be used to detonate a nuclear bomb. In fact, according to French officials, Paris blocked the sale and informed the German government of Iraq's pursuit of the switches. A story which appeared in the Washington Post last November quoted "an American intelligence source" as saying that France had cultures of prohibited strains of the smallpox virus. The French government vehemently denied the allegation. "As part of the campaign of explanation we are undertaking in the United States, we have decided to count the untrue accusations which have appeared in the US press and which have deeply shocked the French," Marie Masdupuy, a French foreign ministry spokeswoman, said yesterday. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:51:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:51:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: managing Russia Message-ID: <007e01c31b7f$ead797a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Powell strikes deal with Russia on debt Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian Colin Powell gave clear assurances yesterday that the new government of Iraq would repay its $7bn Soviet-era debt to Russia. The US secretary of state's commitment on the issue, which has become a big sticking point for Moscow, may bring agreement on a new UN resolution for Iraq a step closer. His comments came on the day that Russia's deputy foreign minister, Georgy Mamedov, said the issue was discussed at Mr Powell's recent meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Mr Mamedow said "very heated discussions" were going on in New York, but the matter would be resolved. Russia, which refused to endorse the coalition war against Iraq, said last month it would oppose any attempt to lift UN sanctions before weapons inspectors had returned to Iraq to verify it had been disarmed. Mr Powell had, hours before Mr Mamedov's remarks, said that, while the question of debt was not discussed during his visit, "we will try to find an approach on how to best solve this problem in some way, perhaps by extending the period in which the debt will be cleared, or maybe refinancing it, or perhaps something else". He added: "I've no doubts the new government will completely take into consideration its obligations towards Russia." He also said that the US would consider suspending sanctions rather than lifting them. Russia's financial concessions in Iraq, which include its national debt and a multi-billion dollar oil contract, have hampered negotiations at the UN. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:51:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:51:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Russia: capitalism's new frontier Message-ID: <008601c31b80$03b0fb40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Shell joins $10bn Russian gas rush David Gow Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian Shell yesterday committed a substantial part of its future growth to Russia by giving the go-ahead to plans by a consortium to build a $10bn (?6bn) liquefied natural gas plant in the country's far east. The company, which also hopes to develop vast oil reserves in western Siberia, is to invest $5.5bn in the second phase of an oil and gas project on Sakhalin island aimed at capturing a quarter of the east Asian LNG market by the end of the decade. Sir Phil Watts, Shell's chairman, said the green light for Sakhalin 2 was a "major milestone" for the company and represented the world's largest integrated oil and gas project - as well as the biggest single foreign direct investment in Russia. Russia was a substantial energy resource holder and he "could not see the future of Shell as a global company without a significant investment position there". Putting to one side worries about political and economic stability in Russia, western oil companies are investing billions of dollars, with BP agreeing earlier this year to buy 50% of the country's third largest oil firm, TNK, for $6.75bn. The Russian government has been promoting mergers among the country's indigenous producers to meet foreign competition but Sir Phil said full agreement had been reached with the authorities on legal and other issues that had dogged the Sakhalin project in the recent past. The Russian state is expected to receive $45bn during the lifetime of the project, which is being developed under a production sharing agreement, while Russian "content" in the form of businesses, materials and contracts is expected to be 70%. Shell's investment as a 55% shareholder in Sakhalin Energy will boost its 10m tonnes of LNG capacity, already the world's largest, by more than a half and bring its gas reserves of 55 trillion cubic feet closer to 65 trillion. But Sir Phil refused to divulge the expected rate of return or Russia's tax take, insisting that the agreement with Moscow justified the project in terms of profitability. Shell's share of the finances is to be funded within its annual $12bn capital spend. The Anglo-Dutch group's partners are Japanese groups Mitsui (25%) and Mitsubishi (20%), which are promoting LNG as an alternative energy source across Asia. The consortium has already signed an agreement with Tokyo Gas to supply just over 1m tonnes of LNG a year for 25 years, triggering the go-ahead for the project. Sir Phil said recent problems in Japan's nuclear power industry, with several plants shut on safety grounds, had prompted cus tomers to look to other fuels, with talks already under way. Sakhalin, which already produces 10m barrels of oil from an offshore platform, will now see a 9.6m tonne LNG plant, two new offshore platforms, two 850km pipelines and a new terminal. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:53:31 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:53:31 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US news media: Murdoch triumphant Message-ID: <008e01c31b80$3e4b6c40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> One US, one market, one media mogul Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian The war in Iraq has sharpened fears among US media pundits that objectivity has gone out of the window in the service of a handful of media tycoons. In a recent article, the Los Angeles Times railed against the shameless editorialising on the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News during the conflict, denouncing the "swirling sands of spin" and criticising the "hyperventilating" anchors. The conservative media meanwhile cling to the notion that the media are overrun by the liberal agenda. Fox on one occasion rudely dismissed the Guardian as an authoritative source. Anchor Shepard Smith later hinted that it might have an agenda for doubting the ruthless efficiency of the Pentagon. Against this backdrop, the US is intending to relax media ownership laws further, allowing the largest media companies to deepen their presence in established markets and expand into new ones. The federal communications commission, the regulator for the US media and telecommunications industries, will vote on the measures on June 2. The proposals have not been published but large parts have leaked to the press. They include allowing the same company to own a broadcaster and a newspaper in all but the smallest markets. Another change would increase the television ownership cap, effectively allowing a network to own stations that reach up to 45% of the viewers in the US, lifting the limit from 35%. A third change would allow the same company to hold up to three television stations in the largest markets, from the current threshold of two. The vote is split down party lines. The five-strong board is made up of three Republicans, including chairman Michael Powell, who are expected to vote in favour of the new regulations, and two Democrats, who are likely to vote against. Mr Powell, the son of the secretary of state, drew up the plans. The political split suggests that the LA Times is closer to the truth than Fox in assessing who is running the US media. The relaxation of ownership rules seems certain to further stifle voices in a country, where, with the exception of New York and LA, there is scant opposition to the prevailing view handed down by the White House. In many of the medium-sized markets, including Dallas, Seattle and Detroit, there is only one, or maybe two newspapers of note. In most cases, lacking competition, they are hardly pressed to create a stir in order to win readers. With the possibility that they could now be owned by the local broadcaster, plurality of views will be further reduced. British websites, including Guardian Unlimited and the BBC, attracted a big increase in traffic from the US during the Iraq war as people sought an alternative voice. The Democrats on the FCC board are seeking a month's delay to the June 2 vote, hoping to generate more debate. The network owners have argued that they need to generate synergies by owning more stations. Viewership of the free-to-air stations is dwindling against the ever growing number of cable channels and programming costs continue to escalate. Mr Murdoch this week described the British and Australian media as a "little bit paranoid" about his acquisition plans. There is perhaps a tendency in Britain to believe that the spectre of Mr Murdoch is sitting over every editorial decision. But a little paranoia is more welcome than the sleepwalk toward further consolidation that will leave the powerful American media in the hands of a few powerful men. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 01:54:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:54:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <009601c31b80$5ff28900$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The story of Stakeknife is full of holes Such as, if this man was a spy, why didn't the MoD protect him? Danny Morrison Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian Among some of the stories that have appeared in the newspapers in relation to "Stakeknife", the alleged senior IRA informer, is that he was involved in setting up myself and others for arrest 13 years ago. On Sunday, January 7 1990, I was contacted by the IRA, who said that a member whom they had arrested and interrogated had admitted being an informer. This man, Sandy Lynch, had also confessed that his special branch handlers had been forcing him to set up for assassination two well-known republicans. They wanted these two men killed in revenge for an undercover operation that had gone wrong, resulting in the death of one of their colleagues. In November 1989 Lynch had tipped off his handlers that a rifle was being moved to a house in Belfast in preparation for an ambush. Incredibly, two different groups of policemen - none aware of the presence of the other - raided the house from the front and the back, shot at each other, resulting in the death of RUC officer Ian Johnston. Special branch was furious, Lynch had claimed. Lynch was abducted and questioned by the IRA after a number of IRA operations had gone wrong and suspicion fell on him. Lynch admitted being an informer. He agreed that he would go to a Sinn Fein press conference and would name his handlers and accuse them of forcing him to set the two men up for assassination. It was a "good" story, further proof of an RUC policy of shoot-to-kill. I was the Sinn Fein director of publicity and was sent for. But when I arrived at the house to meet Lynch, a raiding party of British army and police jeeps swept into the street behind me. I tried to escape but was arrested next door. Lynch, whom I never met, gave evidence in our trial and said that while he had agreed to go to a press conference he didn't believe it would happen and was convinced that he was going to be shot. We were variously sentenced to between eight and 12 years' imprisonment. At our trial Lynch - who was also found to be a liar by the judge - said that one of his interrogators was Freddie Scappaticci and that Scappaticci withdrew from the house on Saturday night. I had arrived on Sunday night. In the early 1970s I had been interned in Long Kesh at the same time as "Scap", as he was known, but I doubt if I have spoken to him more than once or twice since, and certainly not in the last 14 years. In October 2000 the British MoD issued gagging notices prohibiting newspapers from naming an IRA informer, working for British intelligence's force research unit (FRU), whose codename was Stakeknife. On the back of the Stevens inquiry there was a claim that in order to protect Stakeknife from an Ulster freedom fighters' assassination bid in 1987 another FRU agent, Brian Nelson, diverted a UFF murder gang to the home of Francisco Notarantonio, whom they shot dead. I have always found something odd about this story. Surely, when this was revealed in October 2000, the UFF men involved in the 1987 killing would have remembered who was their thwarted target? After all, Nelson had been unmasked as a British agent in 1990 and loyalists are bound to have reflected and speculated on Nelson's decisions. There is only one conclusion: loyalists, who notoriously cannot keep secrets, did not know who Stakeknife was. If Stakeknife was such a senior figure, sabotaging the IRA, then throughout the past few years he or she did not do such a great job when one recalls the mortar attack on No 10 in 1991 and the bombings in Bishopsgate and Canary Wharf or on the British army's HQ in Lisburn in 1997 when a soldier lost his life. It is alleged that last year the IRA broke into the special branch HQ at Castlereagh and stole intelligence files and had a spy ring at the heart of government. If so, where was Stakeknife to stop them? Had he been retired or come under suspicion and been frozen out? Stakeknife's usefulness as an informant might have expired, but rumours of his existence and claims about his seniority have been used in recent years by British intelligence in an attempt to sow confusion and fuel republican dissent. Republican dissidents latched on to these reports to support the contention that Stakeknife was someone close to the Adams' leadership and he or she - through dirty work - had enervated the IRA's capabilities and steered the movement towards compromise and the peace process - as if republicans couldn't work out for themselves the wisdom of the peace strategy. I think we can take with a pinch of salt some of the more lurid claims being made about the state of morale within the Republican movement. One national newspaper wrote: "Meanwhile in the north the IRA appealed last night for calm among members, but some spoke of 'the heart being ripped out' of the organisation by the controversy, which had the potential to destroy it." I live in west Belfast, where it is claimed that Stakeknife has been living for over 20 years. The above quote reflects nothing of the true stoic mood of the people in this area who examine closely all that is said, and by whom. And what they see is bizarre. For years the British MoD issued gagging orders against newspapers which said they knew the real identity of Stakeknife. When those newspapers did just that last weekend, the MoD was uncharacteristically talkative. First, it said that Stakeknife was out of Ireland and in a British army base in England. Security correspondents repeated that story until a journalist found the west Belfast man who was being named, Freddie Scappaticci, at home. The MoD then said Stakeknife was not with them. Second, MoD sources - who for years had been protecting Stakeknife - "confirmed" in off-the-record briefings that the man being named was their agent. Why did they confirm this when they knew that no one had fled Ireland or was in their custody? Why would they break one of the cardinal rules of intelligence (which is to remain silent) and place this man in danger? Scappaticci told the journalist on Saturday night, then again through his solicitor on Monday, and again on television on Wednesday, that no one had warned him that he was going to be named as Stakeknife and he has denied all the allegations. Stakeknife, if he exists, can do no more damage to the IRA. But if what is attributed to him is true - that he was allowed to cull informers who were no longer of any use to British intelligence - then he is a huge liability to the British MoD and the British government because he can reveal many truths about their dirty war in Ireland. ? Danny Morrison is a former publicity director for Sinn Fein. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:47:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:47:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: dubious US/UK custodianship Message-ID: <00be01c31b87$d66230c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Baghdad pays the postwar price: 242 die in three weeks By Phil Reeves in Baghdad The Independent 16 May 2003 Statistics unpublished until today reveal the stark facts: 242 people have died in Baghdad in just over three weeks, almost all from bullet wounds. It is an epidemic, and it is getting worse. But the late-night scenes in a city hospital tell the real story of the postwar price that the Iraqi capital is paying for the occupying forces' failure to live up to their responsibility to make the streets safe. At 3.20am yesterday, Haider Khassem's friends stuffed him half-dead into the back seat of a car. Doctors at al-Kindi hospital's casualty department had done all they could to treat the four bullet wounds in his chest with which he had been brought to them 90 minutes earlier, a hefty young man thrashing in agony and spouting blood like a clubbed seal. They concluded he needed urgent treatment by specialists at a cardiothoracic hospital 20 minutes away. The driver of al-Kindi's only remaining ambulance - the other three have been stolen or looted - had disappeared. So the dangerously ill Mr Khassem was bundled into a clapped-out, rust-bitten orange Moskavich 408. A friend held his intravenous drip out of the back window. In the front seat sat Salah Fayek, his head wrapped in a turban of bandages to staunch an injury inflicted in the same attack. Thus, the maimed and wounded set off into the benighted streets of Baghdad, a city under curfew and echoing with sporadic gunfire, to try to save a life. Fifty minutes earlier - the same. A third victim, Mohammed Tahab, was squeezed into the back of a white Oldsmobile Cutlass, his eyes swollen like plums from a bullet through the brain, his green Iraqi Olympic tracksuit covered with large blots of blood. "I just don't think he'll make it," said Dr Rebar Nouri, al-Kindi's resident duty doctor, as he watched the vehicle pull away past American soldiers guarding the hospital gate - again with an arm out of the car window holding aloft an IV drip. Amazingly, both men were still alive yesterday afternoon. Doctors said Mr Tahab was brain-damaged but clinging to life, although only just. Mr Khassem was stable. The exact circumstances of their shooting was impossible to clarify - their relatives alleged it was American soldiers, but this was not confirmed - yet such scenes have become the norm here. Dr Fa'ak Amin Bakr, director of the city mortuary, says 242 people have died in the past 25 days, of whom more than nine out of 10 had been shot. He says that before the invasion Baghdad had an average of one death a day caused by gunshot wounds. Battles between looters and score-settling from the Saddam years have taken hold, fuelled by a security vacuum that owes much to a decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, to invade and occupy Iraq with minimum troop numbers - two divisions short, say well- informed sources within the Allies' reconstruction team. They are the by-product, too, of the failure of the Allies to coax the Baghdad police to return to work in sufficient numbers. Most of the Iraqi officers who have returned have yet to come out of their police stations. And homicide figures are going up. The 124 who died from bullet wounds in the past 10 days is a rise of 60 per cent on the previous 10-day period. At al-Kindi hospital, 13 people were brought inwith bullet injuries in the 24 hours to yesterday morning. Their combined stories spoke much about present-day Baghdad: there was an 18-year-old girl shot by her brother, who had apparently been given a weapon by his arms-dealing father. She died in the hospital. A six-year-old boy who - according to a doctor who treated him - was hit by a bullet while standing in front of his house, arrived at hospital with a "chest full of blood". There was Nadim Zeidan, shot in the leg in what a relative told a doctor was a revenge attack against his Baathist father in which his brother was killed. Hamid Turki, 28, came in after a bullet fired in a tribal dispute shattered his hip bone. And so the list continued. This is the mess that Washington has deployed Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a prot?g? of Henry Kissinger, to sort out. Unlike Jay Garner, the man he replaces as Iraq's chief administrator, he has been assigned full authority over the Allied administration in Iraq. At his first press conference in Baghdad yesterday, Mr Bremer sounded a bullish note, saying 300 suspected criminals had been thrown into Iraq's reopened jails this week - 92 on Wednesday alone. The "serious law and order problem" in the capital was a top priority, he said. He noted that 100,000 inmates were released from Iraqi prisons in October by Saddam Hussein. "It's time those people are put back in jail," he said. This peculiar endorsement of Saddam's judicial system will not endear Mr Bremer to human and civil rights activists. Less likely to object are the desperate doctors of Baghdad who want something to be done before hundreds more end up in the mortuary. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:50:59 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:50:59 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Argentina: Kirchner profile Message-ID: <00d201c31b88$4605e700$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Argentina pins hope on Patagonia's mystery man By Hannah Baldock in Buenos Aires The Independent 16 May 2003 Until Carlos Menem pulled out of the presidential race in Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, 53, was the little-known governor of Santa Cruz, a remote Patagonian province rich in oil and glaciers. Yesterday Mr Kirchner prepared to assume the presidency without majority electoral support, and began assembling a new government and cobbling together the support of feuding political leaders from his own Peronist party Mr Kirchner's relative anonymity was one of his trump cards in bringing round Argentinians disgusted with the corrupt old guard. His campaign posters portrayed his grave, hyperthyroid gaze above the slogan, "A serious country". A tall, grey lawyer of German-Swiss-Croatian descent with a squint and a lisp, what Mr Kirchner lacks in charisma, his striking, fiercely intelligent senator wife Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner makes up for. He is a centre-left progressive populist, who recognises the importance of foreign investment, but not the "carnal relations" he said Mr Menem maintained with the United States during Argentina's brief period of prosperity in the 1990s, at the expense of jobs and production at home, which now languishes in 58 per cent poverty and 18 per cent unemployment. Mr Kirchner and his wife were militants in the Peronist Youth in the 1970s, but deny Mr Menem's accusation that they were Montoneros, the extreme left-wing Peronist offshoot involved in terrorism. Cristina rejected the title First Lady yesterday in favour of First Citizen. Few doubt the strong-minded senator for Santa Cruz province influences her husband's decisions. When he first spoke of standing for president, he was portrayed as the poodle of the incumbent, Eduardo Duhalde, a Peronist, who had promised to leave office, but was obsessed with keeping his arch-rival, Mr Menem, out of power. When it became clear this week that Mr Kirchner would have to assume the presidency on 25 May with only 22 per cent of the vote, many feared it was a licence for Mr Duhalde to continue pulling the strings. Yet during his campaign he has come across as a serious man of strong conviction, and has refused to be coerced into pacts with Peronist factions or corporate or other interests. Such pledges of ethical rigour have earned him the approval of 46 per cent of Argentinians, the highest of any front-line politician. He will also retain Roberto Lavagna as Finance Minister, who is also highly popular, having stabilised the economy over the past year and negotiated a life-saving $6.3bn (?3.8bn) debt relief deal with the IMF. However, Mr Kirchner is still a member of the Peronist party, a notoriously unwieldy and corrupt machine which rarely grants leaders autonomy. He has a reputation for fiscal prudence - when he became governor of Santa Cruz (a post he has held three consecutive times), the province was $1bn in debt and, after returning its books to the black, he shrewdly stowed part of its savings to banks in Switzerland and Luxembourg. A move of uncanny prescience, since they avoided being frozen and devalued by up to 70 per cent in December 2001. While his fiscal record is encouraging many point out that it is not that hard to administer the finances of a province rich in oil and gas, with a population of only 200,000. Yet, in a country dogged by 18 per cent employment and with 58 per cent living in poverty, and 20 per cent child malnutrition, Mr Kirchner's achievements strike a chord. He pledges to put the needs of the poorest over corporate interests, planning tax reform to achieve a greater distribution of wealth, pledging or example to demand a sizeable "haircut" of Argentina's external debt (it owes $55bn to private foreign bondholders and $30bn to multilateral lenders) and more time to pay it back at lower interest rates. He favours state control of education, health and pensions and proposes to create jobs through a programme of investment in infrastructure, particularly housing. With the economy now emerging from a five-year recession, and predicted to grow at around 4 per cent for the next two years, Mr Kirchner should get a better shot at it than his recent predecessors. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:51:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:51:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: US blasé over no WMDs Message-ID: <00da01c31b88$6516c880$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Fallout of America's vain hunt for WMD confined to embarrassment By Rupert Cornwell in Washington The Independent 16 May 2003 The continuing failure to discover any evidence of Iraq's alleged chemical, germ and nuclear weapons, more than a month after the fall of Baghdad, is thus far a very minor embarrassment for the Bush administration - and probably one which will grow only if order collapses completely and there is an uprising against US military occupiers. Unlike Britain, complaints here at the failure to find the illegal weapons - whose existence was the main justification for war - has been mainly confined to liberal columnists and editorials in liberal newspapers. All but forgotten are the bloodcurdling pre-war assertions of top Bush officials, among them Vice-President Dick Cheney's claim that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear programme, and the President's warning that Iraqi drones, launched from ships in the Atlantic, could spray US cities with biological agents. Instead the justification has shifted from the weapons threat to the humanitarian benefits of having removed a brutal regime. The worry in the US is not about the absence of a smoking WMD gun - but that Iraq will descend into anarchy. This week the US military command blamed escalating street violence not on the inability of the occupiers to guarantee basic services, but on "regime elements" made up of Baath party diehards who are sabotaging US-led efforts to restore infrastructure. The mood is plain in the polls. Yes, Mr Bush probably did overestimate the quantities of non-conventional weapons held by Saddam Hussein's regime, 49 per cent of respondents in a New York Times/ CBS poll said, compared with 29 per cent who said they were about right and 12 per cent who continue to insist - in the face of all the evidence - that they were too little. Even so, more than half thought the war will have been worth it, even if no germ, chemical and nuclear weapons are found, and Saddam himself is not captured or killed. The harrowing discovery this week of mass graves near Baghdad is unlikely to change these feelings. In short, complaints here are unlikely to become as vocal as in Britain. The difference in Britain reflects much greater support for the war in the US, from the moment Congress gave Mr Bush carte blanche to use force last November, even before United Nations weapons inspectors returned and turned up nothing. Inconveniences such as the forged documents purporting to show Iraq had bought uranium ore from Niger, and claims that intelligence analysts were forced to stretch facts to fit the theories of superiors at the White House, Pentagon and Vice-President's office, are simply brushed aside. None the less, doubts are surfacing. Officially, the Pentagon line is that Iraq is a large country and that "we never expected to find weapons quickly." But in the end they would be found. That does not square with what US investigators are being told by Iraqi scientists - who no longer have any reason to lie - that the weapons programmes were shut down several years ago. Nor does it square with what US commanders are learning for themselves. "We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't here," said Colonel Richard McPhee, a member of Task Force 75, which went in with US troops to find and display the hidden WMD. Force 75 will be pulled out of Iraq next month. Privately, US officials concede the best they may come up with is evidence of a programme which once existed, such as the two facilities now being examined by US technicians, alleged to have been mobile laboratories. And unless chaos on the ground grows to the point of invalidating military victory, that may be where the weapons mystery vanishes into the desert sands. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:54:20 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:54:20 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU integration struggles: UK position, Hain again Message-ID: <00e201c31b88$bd4936a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Downing Street will back creation of EU president By Stephen Castle, in Brussels The Independent 16 May 2003 Britain is ready to agree to a "historic compromise" that would lay down a European Union constitution with a new president, says Peter Hain, the cabinet minister who is negotiating the future of the EU on behalf of Tony Blair. After a crucial debate in Brussels yesterday, Mr Hain predicted that a convention chaired by the former French president Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing would bury its public differences to reach a deal on a series of far-reaching changes. And he turned against the Eurosceptic newspapers that have accused Mr Blair of backing a constitution that will produce "tyranny" and end a thousand years of history, describing their reporting as "hogwash" and "a complete figment of fantasy". For the authors of the new constitution the clock is now ticking because their work has to be presented to EU leaders, who have the final word, in five weeks' time. While yesterday saw a succession of protests about M. Giscard's plan for a full-time president of the European Council, where EU governments meet, the convention's big players believe that a compromise is in the making. As one senior figure put it: "The mayonnaise is starting to gel." The final package is expected to satisfy the central demand of the EU's big states by creating the new president of the European Council. In exchange small countries will keep the right to send a commissioner to Brussels, rather than having the size of the Commission trimmed, which they fear could diminish their influence. Mr Hain said Britain would agree to the creation of an EU "foreign minister" - combining two existing posts in one member of the European Commission - if there were safeguards to ensure foreign policy remained the preserve of national governments. Mr Hain argued: "What I see is a big contrast between negotiating positions that are being struck in public from what I know to be the case in private." He said that "virtually every small country tells me in private, 'We know we have to do a deal.' " He added: "What we have here is a historic compromise initiated by the French and Germans [who agreed a joint position] in January which is still pregnant and not born." There were other signs that the 105-strong convention was edging towards compromise. The Benelux countries, which have been staunch opponents of the idea of a council president, now say they are willing to accept the plan under certain conditions. Nevertheless the council presidency idea remains highly contentious, presenting a problem for M. Giscard, who needs to achieve a consensus to give his proposals political force. Johannes Voggenhuber, an Austrian parliamentarian, said M. Giscard "has got to start accepting that there is a huge, overwhelming majority against a full-time president". Finland's government representative, Teija Tilikainen, said the plan "would deprive the EU of one of its cornerstones of equality". Denmark's parliamentary representative, Henrik Dam Kristensen, argued that "the smaller countries will run the risk of being marginalised". George Papandreou, the Greek Foreign Minister, called for the EU president to be directly elected. Andrew Duff, a Liberal Democrat convention member, tabled proposals to merge the presidencies of the European Commission and the European Council. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:55:03 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:55:03 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK corporate state: KPMG Message-ID: <00ea01c31b88$d736c960$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> MPs query Labour's links with consultants By Barrie Clement, Labour Editor The Independent 16 May 2003 Senior MPs expressed deep concern yesterday that a commercial company involved in billions of pounds of government contracts is also supplying expert staff to the Labour Party free of charge. The consultancy firm KPMG is seconding employees to work at Labour's headquarters. Stephen Uttley, a KPMG consultant specialising in the operations of the Financial Services Authority, is working as the party's finance director. His predecessor, Rees Aronson, also came from the company. The secondments are understood to have followed initial approaches from Labour. The former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle has tabled parliamentary questions on the issue. Mr Kilfoyle told Tribune magazine: "This will profoundly concern those people who are alarmed by frequent conflicts of interest with companies awarded lucrative contracts by the Government." David Hinchliffe, Labour chairman of the Commons Health Committee, was equally concerned. He said: "Anybody looking at this from the outside might indeed think here is a conflict of interest." Research conducted by the GMB general union shows that KPMG is involved in more than 90 government contracts worth in excess of ?12bn. A KPMG spokeswoman said the firm had seconded staff to the Liberal Democrats and was working on a placement with Conservative Central Office. Government contracts were awarded under strict British and European law, she added. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:56:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:56:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: psyops & Cuba Message-ID: <00f201c31b89$12ab6dc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> TV is weapon of choice in US siege of Cuba By Richard Lapper and Henry Hamman Financial Times: May 16 2003 Forty-two years ago, Jos? Basulto took up arms to join the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion to topple Cuba's communist government. Today he argues that broomsticks, coat hanger wire and kitchen plungers serve better than bullets. Household materials like these would allow Cubans to receive television from the US. Like a growing number of Cuban-Americans, Mr Basulto, a Cuban-American activist, wants the Bush administration to launch a media blitz into Cuba. He believes US programming would be a more effective weapon than tighter economic sanctions in responding to the latest crackdown against dissidents by Cuba's longtime leader, Fidel Castro. "The graphic depiction of life outside will make Cubans realise that there is an alternative way of living," says Mr Basulto. As the US administration considers further action beyond this week's expulsion of Cuban diplomats from Washington, administration officials have been surprised by the Cuban-American community's reaction to suggested tightening of the four-decade old economic embargo. Washington is expected to announce on Tuesday, Cuba's national day, the results of a policy review that could lead to a change in tack. In the aftermath of Castro's imprisonment of 78 dissidents and execution of three hijackers last month, US officials considered the suspension of direct flights and a ban on dollar remittances by Cuban Americans to Cuba. Some Cuban groups - such as the right-wing Cuban Liberty Council - are pressing for such action, but other groups argue that remittances - estimated at between $500m and $1bn per year - have helped sustain a growing dissident movement on the island. The Cuban-American National Foundation, the most significant Cuban lobbying group, opposes measures that would cut contacts. "We have told them [the US administration] not to over-react," says Joe Garc?a, the foundation's executive director. A US media offensive is not a new idea. But for years signals from TV Marti - the station set up by the US during the Reagan administration - have been nearly impossible to receive in Cuba. Just under a year ago, President George W.Bush - on the last May 20 Cuban independence day - promised a Cuban-American rally that the administration would look "for ways to modernise Radio and TV Marti". Last month, Mr Basulto stepped up pressure on the administration to boost the signal when he showed it was feasible to broadcast into Cuba by doing so from a low-power transmitter carried aboard a single engine aircraft. Cuban-American leaders are confident that the administration is now considering beaming in signals from the air, even though this might flout international broadcasting rules or prompt Mr Castro to retaliate by disrupting US radio and TV stations. For a community where intransigence against Mr Castro has been seen to be a matter of honour, this amounts to something of a revolution. Three factors seem to have been decisive in prompting the change of heart. First, the long 2001 Cuban-American campaign to keep Eli?n Gonz?lez, the small Cuban boy, out of the hands of his Cuba-based father proved unpopular in the US, and prompted Cuban-Americans to rethink their approach. Second, the campaign last year to collect signatures for the Varela petition - a proposed referendum on civil liberties - has raised the profile of the opposition to Mr Castro within Cuba itself. As Mr Garc?a puts it, the growth of the opposition inside Cuba means that Cuban Americans now "have a team to support on the field". Initially, many Cuban-Americans regarded Oswaldo Pay?, the main organiser of the Varela petition, and other dissidents on the island with some suspicion, mainly because of their willingness to work inside the system. Now Cuban-Americans have come to realise "there's nothing wrong with helping dissidents; there's nothing wrong with helping civil society," says Mr Garc?a. Recent Polls suggest Cuban-American support for the embargo is waning. Neither younger Cuban Americans nor the waves of new migrants that have arrived in the US since the mid-1990s regard sanctions as an article of faith. "The thinking of these people is that the embargo hasn't solved anything and is keeping them away from their family," says Alfredo Dur?n, another Bay of Pigs veteran who heads up the Cuba Committee for Democracy, a left-leaning organisation. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 02:58:22 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:58:22 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Venezuela: West's alarm at "Cubanisation" Message-ID: <00fa01c31b89$4dca9f20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Ch?vez feeds the poor as economy starves By Andy Webb-Vidal Financial Times; May 14, 2003 At the Mercal food store in Caricuao, a poor district on the dust-blown outskirtsof Caracas, therange of goods is limited. Shelves are half- empty. An army sergeant loiters at the end of the checkout, ready to bag your ration of beans, flour and sugar. Unpromising as it may seem, the government store in the capital is the model to be replicated across Venezuela under a plan fathered by populist President Hugo Ch?vez and overseen by the military. The plan's goal: to feed Venezuela's growing number of poor and to counter shortages from the private sector. "Prices are cheaper than elsewhere, and for those of us with low incomes, any difference is important," says Viviana Trillo, a Caricuao housewife. "I thank President Ch?vez for this." Paradoxically, the food security programme is being prioritised just as the Ch?vez government is blocking dollar sales to businesses, including soft commodity importers and food processors, curtailing supplies. Currency trading was suspended in January during the strike at Petr?leos de Venezuela, the state oil company that is the government's main source of export revenue. Four months later, international reserves have recovered and oil exports have resumed. But Cadivi, the foreign exchange control agency, has yet to disburse any dollars and business leaders are convinced that Mr Ch?vez intends to bring the business sector - which fiercely opposes his government - to its knees. "This a specific retaliation against all those seen as not being in favour of the regime," says Rafael Alfonzo, president of Cavidea, the food industry chamber. The non-functional currency controls are not only affecting domestic companies, many of which are closing and laying off employees. Multinationals with subsidiaries in Venezuela, such as Cargill, the US agricultural conglomerate, say they will be forced to shut down operations within the next few weeks unless hard currency is made available. "A lot of US companies thought that this would be a temporary situation and they got money from their home offices to maintain market share," says Antonio Herrera, vice-president of the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce. "But now they are being told: 'no longer', so they are exhausting inventories," Mr Herrera says. "This is an economic atrocity against the Venezuelan people." Venezuela's economy appears to be spiralling downwards. Central bank figures due this week are expected to show that the economy shrank 15-25 per cent in the first quarter after a9per cent contraction last year. Inflation is forecast to top 50 per cent this year. The official unemployment rate has surged to 21 per cent - 5 percentage points higher than at the end of 2002 - and many of the jobless are elbowing into the precarious informal sector, itself dependent on imports and contraband. Meanwhile, formal trade links are being severed because of the exchange controls. The US Export-Import Bank last month stopped offering credit to buyers in Venezuela, and the Andean Community could impose punitive tariffs on the country. Venezuela's ports are at a standstill. Mr Ch?vez's strict enforcement of currency controls and the introduction of military-run food distribution is fuelling renewed fears among some opposition groups that he is bent on emulating a Cuban-style command economy. Dozens of Cuban officials are advising Venezuela's agriculture ministry, and the government is using Cuban trading companies to import food for the network of Mercal stores. Officials insist that food imports are not being subsidised and that the price of foodstuffs at private sector outlets is inflated because of excessive profit margins and hoarding. The government's food plan is hugely ambitious. Colonel Gerardo Liscano, head of Mercal, says Mr Ch?vez has ordered him to guarantee that 4m people are supplied with food by the end of the year, and 8m by the end of 2004 - a third of the population. "The idea is to deliver food at prices that are in solidarity with the common people," says Col Liscano. But opposition critics suspect that Mr Ch?vez, through Cadivi, is funneling dollars at a discount to government frontmen, who import basic foods and thus can shore up the political loyalty of the poor ahead of a possible referendum this year. Either way, economists warn that unless the government begins releasing dollars soon, its nascent but inefficient distribution system will not be able to fill the yawning food supply gap that will result from a crippled private sector. "The government cannot substitute all of the most efficient traditional producers," says Francisco Vivancos, economics professor at the Central University of Venezuela. "But the implicit logic is to cater for that section of the population that is politically most important to Ch?vez." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 03:03:48 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 12:03:48 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 Message-ID: <010201c31b8a$1041f260$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Stan Goff wrote: A good friend of mine last election, an African-American woman who feared Republican scortched earth policies that impacted on women and people of color, knowing full-well that Democrats were complicit, said - speaking of Nader-voters - a vote for Ralph Nader is an exercise of white privilege. ----- I was hoping that Melvin might enter the debate here. Any thoughts? Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 05:09:47 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 14:09:47 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Announcement: "Super Imperialism" Message-ID: <015a01c31b9b$a9be2ec0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> As part of our continuing efforts to make full use of this resource, the A-List will be conducting a collective reading of the recently published revised edition of "Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance" (Pluto Press, 2003). The book is available at the usual online retailers: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745319890/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/026 -1205165-8615648 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0745319890/qid=1053082694/sr=1 -2/ref=sr_1_2/104-2108985-7047944?v=glance&s=books https://secure.metronet.co.uk/pluto/cgi-bin/web_store/web_store.cgi?sc_query _subject=Economics A-Lister John Enyang will be coordinating the discussion, which is scheduled to begin on Monday, 2 June. Each week we will cover one chapter, and John will lead off discussion by presenting a brief summary and some provocative commentary. Hopefully one week will be enough time in which to develop all of the discussion threads that may ensue. Each subsequent Monday we will proceed to the next chapter. In order to participate it is easy: simply read the book, and/or follow the discussion. Needless to say, reading the book would be a major advantage. Other list activities will continue as normal in parallel. Our thanks to John for agreeing to undertake this project, and we look forward to some useful analysis and critique. Michael Keaney, Sabri Oncu Moderators From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Fri May 16 06:42:46 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 13:42:46 +0100 Subject: [A-List] media alert Message-ID: <008401c31ba8$a70eb340$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media May 16, 2003 MEDIA ALERT: GRIT YOUR TEETH ? SURGERY IN ?LIBERATED? IRAQ (the full article is archived at http://www.MediaLens.org/alerts/index.html ) Watching Closely? In a recent Media Alert, ?Killings At Falluja ? The BBC Tells One Side Of The Story? (April 29, 2003), we reported how the BBC's lunchtime news had devoted 3 minutes and 10 seconds to the killing of 16 and wounding of 75 Iraqi civilian protestors by US troops in Falluja. In those 190 seconds, the BBC repeated the claim that the US had acted in self-defence five times. The claim made by Iraqi protestors - that the demonstration had been peaceful and unarmed - was not mentioned. In responding to queries from Media Lens readers, Richard Sambrook, the BBC?s director of news, explained: ?Details of the shootings at Falluja came in during the later part of the morning, and more information, including accounts of the events by eyewitnesses, continued to come in throughout the day. At One O'Clock, the primary fact was a simple one, that the Americans had killed 13 Iraqis and wounded several dozens of others.? (Forwarded to Media Lens, May 7, 2003) And yet, as we pointed out in our alert, at 11:41 that same morning, a BBC Online news report had been posted on the Media Lens message board citing a local Sunni cleric in Falluja, Kamal Shaker Mahmoud, who said: ?It was a peaceful demonstration. They did not have any weapons. They were asking the Americans to leave the school so they could use it.? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2984663.stm From annewilliamson at msn.com Fri May 16 07:18:03 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 09:18:03 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 5 References: <00eb01c31aeb$b4d68420$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <010b01c31aed$f28b69a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <050201c31bad$961bc3c0$c9b7fea9@anne> Michael Keany writes: This is interesting, because in the US the impetus came from certain members > of Clinton's national security advisory apparatus, in particular Ivo > Daalder. I wrote about this in connection with the sudden British switch on > Yugoslavia, coinciding with the election victory of Blair in 1997. And the cheerleading in the US came from the Wall Street Journal. Henry Wallace had it exactly write when he said, "There ain't a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats." -A. War and the Capitalist Press by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. During the war on Iraq, and the one before that on Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal predictably became the noisiest mouthpiece for the War Party. Readers of this publication have noted how much more passionate the paper is on that subject than on economic themes. One easily gets the impression that war socialism is a far greater priority in their halls than a free commercial sector. The following is a speech I gave in 1999 at a Rothbard-Rockwell Report conference, during a time when the Journal was whooping it up for another war. It strikes me how closely the propaganda war on Iraq mirrored that of the Clinton wars, particularly that against Serbia. Some people complain that the WSJ is partisan, but the following demonstrates that this criticism is unfair. When it comes to uncritically backing war, the WSJ is truly non-partisan. To make a case against the Nato killers who have laid waste to Yugoslavia, it might be enough to simply quote Bill Clinton. "Our children are being fed a dependable daily dose of violence," the president said. "And it sells." Further, it "desensitizes our children to violence and to the consequences of it." But in these comments, presumably, he wasn't revealing the essence of his war, and its convenient effect of eclipsing Monica as his legacy to the world and its dreadful consequence to imparting an example of violence and bloodshed to anyone who still looks to the government for moral example. Rather, it turns out, he was leveling an attack on the private sector, which entertains us with movies and video games. He says it is the movie and video-game industries, not real-life war, that is corrupting morals. And yet the violence being inflicted and the blood being spilled by the troops Clinton commands are real. It is foolish to believe that this does not have an effect on the children of this country. It is sadly true that the behavior of the president still has an undue influence on those who yet believe the civics-text lie that the office is the most morally exalted in the land. The most corrupt media mogul does far more good, and far less harm, than the president. But for those who still believe in the modern civic religion, it is the president who sets the moral tone, and the boundaries of right and wrong. It is no wonder, then, that one of the killers at Columbine had widely proclaimed his desire to drop some bombs on Serbia. Neither should we forget that the man convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City federal building received his training in how to kill during the war on Iraq ordered up by the last madman to hold the office. But it is not only the killers themselves who must be held accountable. It is also those who would attempt to put the best possible spin on the killing machine, trying to make its actions morally justifiable and putting in print calls for wartime escalation rather than peace. They serve as handmaids to the warfare state and as megaphones for the leviathan state, and I don't care if their politics are from the left or the right: they must be held to account. Two unfortunate facts undergird the thesis and argument of this talk. First, the Wall Street Journal is seen the world over as the preeminent capitalist organ of opinion, one that is seen to speak for the American tradition of free enterprise. Second, of all leading publications, it has proven to be the most aggressive in its promotion of the blood-soaked war on Yugoslavia. Since the war began, the Journal has been unswervingly enthusiastic, tolerated no dissent against its pro-war position in its news, its editorial pages, or its op-ed pages. Its content wouldn't have been different if the most hawkish division of the State Department had been exercising full editorial control. How can these two disparate positions of free enterprise and imperialism be reconciled? The Left has a ready answer. In the Leninist tradition, Marx's failure to predict the overthrow of capitalism can be explained by reference to the international policy of the capitalist nations. Once the capitalists had fully exploited the workers at home, they would seek out foreign markets to exploit and impose their will using war and imperialism. Thus ran Lenin's analysis in August 1915: "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, one that has been reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism began to feel cramped within the old national states, without the formation of which it could not overthrow feudalism. Capitalism has brought about such economic concentration that entire branches of industry are in the hands of syndicates, trusts, or corporations of billionaires; almost the entire globe has been parceled out among the > giants of capital,' either in the form of colonies, or through the entangling of foreign countries by thousands of threads of financial exploitation. "Free trade and competition have been superseded by tendencies towards monopoly, towards seizure of lands for the investment of capital, for the export of raw materials, etc. Capitalism, formerly a liberator of nations, has now, in its imperialist stage, become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, it has become a reactionary force. It has developed the productive forces to such an extent that humanity must either pass over to Socialism, or for years, nay, decades, witness armed conflicts of the 'great' nations for an artificial maintenance of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges, and all sorts of national oppression." (Socialism and War, Chapter 1, 1914) Now, before we all convert to Leninism, let's admit that he was not wrong on the facts, but remember that he made a grave categorical error, as explained by Ludwig von Mises in his 1922 book Socialism. Free trade and free enterprise are not aggressive; they are the global font of cooperation and peace. When conflicts do arise in free market, they are settled based on the terms of contract. So long as the State does not intervene, private property and free enterprise insure peaceful cooperation among men and nations. What Lenin identified as attributes of capitalism were in fact attributes of the State, particularly the State which claims to be master of economic affairs. As Mises explained: "Military Socialism is the Socialism of a state in which all institutions are designed for the prosecution of war. It is a State Socialism in which the scale of values for determining social status and the income of citizens is based exclusively or preferably on the position held in the fighting forces. The higher the military rank the greater the social value and the claim on the national dividend. The military state, that is the state of the fighting man in which everything is subordinated to war purposes, cannot admit private ownership in the means of production. Standing preparedness for war is impossible if aims other than war influence the life of individuals.... The military state is a state of bandits. It prefers to live on booty and tribute." Pairing the Leninist with the Misesian position on the ideological basis of imperialism helps illuminate the crucial framework for understanding this war. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained, the great intellectual error of classical liberalism was its Hobbesian concession in favor of what it believed could be a limited State. In reality, the State is far more dangerous in a productive, capitalist society than it is in an impoverished, socialized society, simply because it has far more private resources to pillage and loot for the State's own benefit. Availing itself of the vast fruits of private production, the State engages in self-aggrandizement, expansion, and, inevitably, imperialism. By way of illustration, in the US today, we have two economies, one free and one unfree. The free one has given us the great abundance of consumer goods, the widest distribution of wealth, and the fastest pace of technological innovation known in the history of man. The unfree one - characterized by the two trillion dollar federal budget and the more than one-quarter of that spent on apparatus that builds and administers weapons of mass destruction - has produced what we have been reading about in the headlines for the last two months. Military Socialism, which exists by pillaging the free economy, is responsible for a brutal and immoral war on a civilian population halfway around the world - the destruction of hospitals, churches, nursing homes, residential neighborhoods, and town squares. In an ideal world, the daily newspaper focusing on American economic life would celebrate the free economy, which the Wall Street Journal does on occasion, but also condemn the unfree one, which the Wall Street Journal does not. There is a reason why this is not the case. The horrible reality is that the unfree economy may be murderous and wasteful but it also makes many people very rich. The stocks of the companies that build the bombs and enjoy the booty after the war is over, are publicly traded, in the same manner as the stocks of real capitalist companies. When the Journal celebrates this war, it is speaking on behalf of the companies that stand to benefit from the war. But that doesn't innoculate the newspaper from moral responsibility for backing the bloodshed. And it doesn't shield it from open displays of confusion, as when the paper's support for free enterprise conflicts with its support for military socialism. For example, the paper recently editorialized about the Clinton administration's drafting of pilots and technicians in the form of an order prohibiting their leaving. Think of it as the nationalization of talent, or simply a stop-gap measure to stop the drain from the public to the private sector. Incidentally, the pilots in the armed forces should be allowed to resign for the private sector anytime they want to. Actually, these pilots have a moral obligation to resign. They must not use their considerable flying talents to commit the war crimes they are being ordered to commit. They have a moral obligation not to murder and destroy property, a moral obligation not to aggress. By prohibiting them from changing jobs, Clinton is coercing these pilots into committing gravely evil acts. But somehow, even though pilot resignations would benefit the private sector, the editors at the Wall Street Journal couldn't bring themselves to condemn Clinton's tyrannical action. Instead, it suggested various incentive programs that would cause pilots to be less likely to abandon their nation-building, or nation-destroying, actions. The paper suggested higher pay and a greater clarity of mission. In this case where the interests of the free and unfree economies collide, the Wall Street Journal sides with War Socialism. And just so that we are clear on how bad things have gotten at the Journal, let's sample some of the analysis that it has printed over the last several months. No journalist today has provided analysis of the high-tech world as trenchant as that of the Journal's regular columnist George Melloan. When he writes about the free economy, he is usually level-headed and morally sound. But on the matter of war, he has epitomized the capitalist-imperialist mode denounced by Lenin. Melloan writes that the purpose of this war is "something far more ambitious than pacification. It is trying to civilize Serbia." If this be civilizing, God save us from barbarism, and from warfare statists masquerading as advocates of free enterprise. What about the US bombing of the Chinese embassy, which would have been perceived as a world-historic crime and act of war if a US embassy had been the target? "The [embassy] bombing," Melloan writes, "was clearly the kind of accident that happens in war." Besides, he further opined, "the Chinese government clearly gives aid and comfort to the Serbian barbarian, Slobodan Milosevic. It has joined with Russia to try to sway United Nations Security Council votes in his favor." Well, clearly then, murder and destruction are just what the State orders for anyone who would give aid and comfort to the Serbian barbarian. In fact, can't we say that anyone who isn't on board with this war is giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Shouldn't their voices be quelled? Can we really say they don't deserve to be bombed? It's all part of the civilizing process. The day after the bombing, there was no time for regrets at the Wall Street Journal. No, the editorial page used the occasion to spread the war fever. After all, the Journal said of the bombed embassy, "War is dangerous, and while NATO has sought to avoid civilian casualties, clearly people have died on the ground. [Catch the responsibility-shedding passive voice?] An obvious question may dawn on Chinese people eventually," the Journal continued, "Why, in the middle of such a war, did their government choose to keep all those people in its embassy and potentially in harm's way?" Imagine that. The US has never declared war on Belgrade. The State Department never demanded that all diplomats leave the city. It promised at the outset only to hit military targets of the Yugoslav army. And yet when the US bombs the Chinese embassy, according to the Journal, it is the fault of the Chinese diplomats in Belgrade. Along these lines, imagine further the future of death coverage in the Journal. Those kids in the Littleton High School: what were they doing there anyway? Don't they know that school can be dangerous? Those people murdered by an immigrant on the Long Island railway: didn't they know the New York metropolitan area is a place not unfamiliar with killing? This is the moral reasoning of a blunted conscience, one no longer struck by the pain of human suffering and the evil of violence except when affecting the appearance of shock serves a political purpose. This illustrates a broader point: in American public life today, there are two kinds of death. Death caused by the US government is justifiable, as Madeleine Albright tells us about the death of children in Iraq. Only death caused by enemies of the US government is considered an atrocious and intolerable act that cries out for vengeance. The operating principle here is not the sanctity of life but the sanctity of the nation state that determines which kind of life is valuable and which is not. And yet this cannot be the entire answer to the mystery of why bloodshed would be overlooked by the Journal. We've all been struck by the mystery of how otherwise sensible people could come to support a massacre to achieve their own view of political utopia. I can't say I have the answer. How were US communists able to reconcile themselves with the mass bloodshed wrought by the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath? How were German intellectuals and religious leaders able to justify in their own minds the bloodshed wrought by the Nazi dictatorship? How were US citizens able to observe the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and the mass ethnic cleansing of German civilians after World War II, and call it patriotism in action? It will always be something of a mystery, but if you want to see the same moral blindness at work right now, look no further than the early column by Max Boot, whose usual beat is the litigation explosion. Writing on the Journal's op-ed page which he edits, he praised this war on grounds that "humanitarianism truly is in the driver's seat." He speaks for many in the pundit class, who regard this war as uniquely motivated by a moral end. Similarly, Robert Samuelson wrote in the Washington Post the other day that "Kosovo may represent the first war in US history that has been undertaken mostly for moral reasons." There are several problems with this theory, aside from the fact that the families of the 2,000 civilians killed do not likely consider their deaths the consequence of humanitarianism. First, the Clinton regime has made an appeal, not only to the well being of the Kosovars, but to American interests as well. Clinton himself says we all have an interest in a stable world where Europe is not embroiled in war. On Memorial Day, he even vaguely suggested that if we don't stop Milosevic now, he and his armies will someday come attacking US shores. Second, no one can convince me that charity and love are the driving forces behind a war in which tens of billions may eventually be transferred from taxpayers to the merchants of death. Perhaps greed also plays a role? Third, every war I can think of, as far back as you look in US history or world history, has been justified under some moral theme. The enemy must always be demonized and the home government sanctified, if only to provide a necessary ethical coating to the nasty business of mass murder. The pundits who say the moral themes of this war are unique are only displaying their historical ignorance. Finally, Boot's phrase about humanitarianism reminds me of Isabel Paterson's brilliant chapter in her book, The God of the Machine entitled "The Humanitarian With the Guillotine." She argued that the great evils of holocausts and mass slaughter could not thrive anywhere in the world unless they were given a benevolent public face. "Certainly the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants," she wrote, "would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions." She pointed to the example of Stalin: "we have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned millions of his own people to starvation, admired by philanthropists whose declared aim is to see to it that everyone in the world has a quart of milk." In a similar way, we are rattled on a daily basis by the atrocities committed by our own government, justified in the name of ending atrocities. Asked about the mounting civilian casualties - first denied, then called mistakes, later dubbed military targets - Nato spokesman Jamie Shea finally if implicitly admitted the existence of the bloodshed that has shocked the world. "There is always a cost to defeat an evil," he responded. "It never comes free, unfortunately." Doing evil so that good may come of it, using evil means to accomplish good ends - these are condemned by the Western religious tradition, particularly in light of the rethinking of public morality after the rise and fall of totalitarianism. Hence, many around the world are already comparing the US with Hitler's army, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I wonder why? Perhaps because Gen. William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Reagan, urged copying German military tactics in a ground invasion of Belgrade. Also, writing - where else? - in the Wall Street Journal, the general praised the Nazis who "swept down this corridor in World War II, taking the whole of Yugoslavia in a couple of weeks." The Journal editors were similarly jingoistic as the prospect of peace raised its ugly head. They raise the horrible prospect, only recently considered an essential feature part of the democratic system, that Milosevic "will remain in power unless his own people throw him out." The Journal just presumes that it is somehow up to the US to decide who gets to be president in far-away sovereign countries. One wonders how it is possible that in wartime, all the normal rules of civilized life, all the lessons learned from history, all the checks on power that have been established over the centuries, are thrown into the trash heap. It's a question to ask Carlos Westendorp, who calls himself the "High Representative of the International Community for the Civil Implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords." Also writing in the Wall Street Journal, he says that after the Serbs have been defeated "a full international protectorate is required. It may last for a few years. Yes, this disregards the principles of sovereignty, but so what? This is not the moment for post-colonial sensitivities." There we have it. It is not just democracy, the very principle of sovereignty itself that is reduced to a mere "sensitivity" not suitable in emergency times such as these. Thus the Wall Street warriors were among the first to call for arming anyone but Serbs, and, in this war, demanding that the US put together an invasive army to conquer the country and overthrow the government - a plan now summed up as "ordering up ground troops." By calling for ground troops, and criticizing anyone who might be skeptical of the idea, the Journal is able to maintain its anti-Clinton posture and appeal to what it believes is the latent hawkishness of its readership. On the very day that the New York Times reported progress in the desperate attempt by non-British European governments and Russia to broker something of a peace agreement, the Journal at last conceded that too many innocents were dying in this war. "Of its nature, war is about suffering," the comfy editors typed into their word processors. Modern war, the editors continued, is particularly irritating because "we now live in an age in which television brings the inevitable ruins of war into everyone's living room every night." This has forced a national conversation about whether blowing up civilian infrastructure is morally wise. Further, the publicity given to civilian killings - no thanks to the Journal here - is "creating divisions inside Nato itself." Interesting how the Journal can muster more moral pathos over divisions within an aggressive military pact than over the death of 2,000 innocents, and the destruction of the property of millions. So how does this bit of soul searching on the part of the editors end? With - you guessed it - another call for ground troops, which they now claim would have prevented civilian casualties. "What the American people do not want are casualties for no purpose," says the Journal. Besides, "going to Belgrade and throwing out a war criminal is not going to lose elections. And while it would involve casualties, it would bring the destruction and killing to an end." The use of language here is strange: note the supposed distinction between mere casualties and killing. That one sentence is a case study in the language of imperialist propaganda. Opposite the editorial page on the same day, a pollster named Humphrey Taylor mulls over the question of popular support for the war, noting that this one has been seriously lagging in that area. The reason, he concludes, is that there have actually been too few casualties on our side. He ends with this stirring call to arms: "It's quite possible that casualties could strengthen, not weaken, American resolve to defeat Slobodan Milosevic." Yes, it's true. This sentence appeared in a respectable newspaper, the voice of capitalism in our times. Thank goodness for the pollsters and their advice! You know, I've been thinking. Clinton says he needs to draft pilots to conduct his war, but this is bad for morale. Shouldn't those who are most enthusiastic for ground troops be the first ones forced into combat? If we are to reinstate the draft, I say let's start by drafting the people who write this drivel and give them the opportunity to become the war heroes they so badly want to be. Let's institute another Lincoln Brigade, staffed by the Journal's own editors, that will make all the necessary sacrifices to save the world for social democracy. I've only scratched the surface of the Journal's two-month-long campaign for US war. True, I have left out the pretentious prattle of a certain Margaret Thatcher, who wrote on its pages in favor of "the destruction of Serbia's political will, the destruction of its war machine and all the infrastructure on which these depend." She could have just summed it up by calling for a wholesale ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Serbia. Also, I have left out the ridiculous parodies written by some British fellow calling himself Winston Churchill, Jr., who appears to be trying, without success, to turn some history-making phrase. In sum, let me say that in these last 70 days, the only truthful statement on the war from the Journal' s editorial page came on May 13: "Propaganda, especially in wartime, knows no bounds." All this war propaganda might be expected from the likes of the New Republic. But for the Journal to beat the drums louder than anyone does great damage to the cause of free enterprise. It links capitalism and imperialism in the public mind, and fans the flames of Leninist theory in the academy and abroad. This damage is deepened by the broader problem that it is not just the Journal that is perceived to be a defender of economic freedom; the US itself, particularly at the end of the Cold War, was, until recently, perceived to be the standard bearer of liberalism. Here is where this war has been so costly. Liberal reform movements in China, Romania, Greece, Serbia, and many other places in the world, have suffered serious blows to their credibility, because their cause is treated under the general rubric of Americanization. The bombs that fall on innocents have the indirect effect of fanning the flames of anti-Americanism, which translates into anti-liberalism. To the extent that America still represents the hope of freedom in the world, this war is very harmful to the cause of liberty, free trade, and human rights. How can such a result benefit Wall Street? Well, there's another side effect of the defeat of liberal reform movements in such places as Serbia and other European and Asian states. The end result of this war is likely to be the rearming of the world, after a period in which it appeared that we were in for a long period of disarmament. You can only imagine yourself as the head of any State that has had difficult relations with the US in the past - and that is most. You might draw from this experience the crucial lesson that States without nuclear weapons, such as Yugoslavia, are vulnerable to the most brutal forms of imperial assault. The only way to forestall this result would be for Congress to take a drastic step and eviscerate the military budget, refusing to pay for this or any future war. But this will not happen, due to a deep intellectual incoherence at the heart of the Republican party. It was only days after the GOP voted not to endorse the war that it voted to double the fiscal outlay to pay for the war. But this is no different from scolding the local gang for their pillaging while giving it the key to a weapons stockpile. If the warfare state has funding and armaments, it is naturally going to go looking for enemies on which to use them. Every bureaucrat knows that he must justify this year's budget in order to position himself for next year's budget battles. Isn't it time the Republicans fundamentally rethink their pro-military bias? Hardly a day goes by when I don't hear some conservative spokesman, GOP presidential hopeful, or right-wing commentator complain about how Clinton has supposedly gutted our defenses. But look at the facts. The US will spend more than $300 billion on the military this year. The second highest military spending in the world comes from Russia, which spends the equivalent of $60 billion. Scary imperialist China spends $37 billion. Just from looking at these numbers, the US could slash the military budget by two thirds, and still spend well more than any other country. The conservative attachment to militarism has doomed the program to cut government in the entire postwar period. The Journal's own editorial position - favoring huge tax cuts and equally huge spending increases - illustrates the problem. This view is rightly denounced as hypocritical by the Left who point out that the American Right is only for limiting government spending when it goes to the wrong people, but all for the tax and spend agenda when it buys military hardware. The usual response to this in the past is that defense is a legitimate constitutional function, whereas welfare redistribution is dubious at best. But there is nothing constitutional about the biggest and most destructive cache of weapons of mass destruction ever held by a single government, much less controlled by a single man we call the president. The original constitutional vision was of 50 states that protected themselves from invasion through local militias. The function of the federal government was to intervene only when this proved insufficient in the case of an invasion. There is no more constitutional justification for the warfare state than the welfare state. In the past, we have been able to count on a large peace movement to oppose US foreign policy adventures. But for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, the soft left has gone AWOL in its responsibilities, leaving only the truly principled Left and the truly principled Right to stand up against the massive nuclear arsenal of the world's biggest power. But it can be done, provided we don't shrink from our responsibilities. Some people have complained that in condemning the US intervention in the Balkans, the antiwar movement has ignored the atrocities of Milosevic. In the first place, it is very difficult to verify claims in wartime, though since Milosevic is both a nationalist and an avowed socialist of the old school, not to mention an elected politician, I can readily believe he is capable of doing all that he is accused of doing. Similarly, I am also quite willing to believe the worst that is said about the US head of state. People in power are not like the rest of us. In their careers, the ordinary vices and evils are rewarded as political successes, an incentive structure that tends to insure that the higher you go in politics, the less you believe you are bound by the moral tenets of the mortal class. At the same time, I do not believe that we, as Americans, have an obligation to denounce all tyrants with equal moral passion. No foreign tyrant ever killed anyone while invoking my name and my heritage. But a long string of American presidents has done so, and one is doing so now. As citizens of this country, as a part of our civic duty, if not as the sum total of our civic duty, we must do our best to denounce and restrain our own tyrants. We cannot stop bloodshed in Rwanda or ethnic conflict in Turkey, but our voices can make a real difference in what our own government is allowed to get away with. When a regime that rules in our name engages in any form of mass killing, the primary question that will be asked of us is: did you speak out against it? Did you do all that you could do to stop it? Or did you remain silent? Near the turn of the last century, two months into the US war on Spain, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard gave an address that ended this way: "My friends, America has been compelled against the will of all her wisest and best to enter into a path of darkness and peril. Against their will she has been forced to turn back from the way of civilization to the way of barbarism, to renounce for the time her own ideals. With grief, with anxiety must the lover of his country regard the present aspect and the future prospect of the nation's life. With serious purpose, with utter self-devotion he should prepare himself for the untried and difficult service to which it is plain he is to be called in the quick-coming years. Two months ago America stood at the parting of the ways. Her first step is irretrievable. It depends on the virtue, on the enlightened patriotism of her children whether her future steps shall be upward to the light or downward to the darkness." May 16, 2003 From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Fri May 16 07:37:20 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 14:37:20 +0100 Subject: [A-List] British media -- a personal experience Message-ID: <009d01c31bb0$46dd5410$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> The British Media -- a personal experience Exactly a week after British paratroopers shot dead 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972 I heard on the BBC 8 a.m. news that the paratrooper barracks at Aldershot had been blown up and three paratroopers killed. At nine o'clock it was six, at 10 eight, at 11 ten, at 12 thirteen... but at 1 p.m. (and here I feel like Leporello chronicling the conquests of Don Juan)... BUT AT 1 P.M. ... the paratrooper barracks at Aldershot had been blown up, and the fatalities were five cleaning ladies and a padre. Several years later I read in the London Times that 13 paratroopers had the previous day dived into the Kiel Canal and been drowned. There was no inquiry into their amazing group incompetence. (By the way, it was frequently reported at that time that British soldiers had walked into railway tunnels and been killed by oncoming trains). An afterthought -- Conor Cruise O'Brien asked rhetorically "What version of Irish history in our education system is responsible for Aldershot?" He did not ask "What version of British history is responsible for Bloody Sunday?" Comradely james daly From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 16 08:00:03 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 17:00:03 +0300 Subject: [A-List] British media -- a personal experience References: <009d01c31bb0$46dd5410$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <020201c31bb3$733d50c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> James writes: Several years later I read in the London Times that 13 paratroopers had the previous day dived into the Kiel Canal and been drowned. There was no inquiry into their amazing group incompetence. (By the way, it was frequently reported at that time that British soldiers had walked into railway tunnels and been killed by oncoming trains). ------ I alluded to this a few days ago in my diatribe against William Rees-Mogg. With the benefit of hindsight, and given what we know now of that period in history, an in-depth analysis of the contents of the "leading opinion-formers" of the period is very necessary and long overdue. Much good work was done during that period by the Glasgow Media Group, for instance (Bad News, More Bad News), but I don't believe that it was as trained on the use and abuse of the news media by the secret state. It was rather directed at more overt propagandising against trade unions, etc. Paul Foot, in "Who Framed Colin Wallace?", briefly mentions an episode involving stories planted in a certain US-based news agency by unnamed British "sources". The idea here was to convince US policy circles that Britain under Heath/Wilson/Callaghan was a basket case and required "surgery", whilst the stories would also "surface" back home and therefore have the apparent authenticity associated with coming from a supposedly reputable US source. Foot doesn't make the connection, but it's definitely a lead I will be following as I build up the evidence supporting the charge of collusion between the British secret state and the US Treasury Department in 1976. Michael From kevin at kevdon.demon.co.uk Fri May 16 04:28:02 2003 From: kevin at kevdon.demon.co.uk (Kevin Donnelly) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:28:02 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Re: [gang8] Unemployment and Tax Cut In-Reply-To: <3EC024C7.1030001@mindspring.com> References: <000001c318b1$53b5d790$0c69f8d1@WindsongP4> <3EC024C7.1030001@mindspring.com> Message-ID: In message <3EC024C7.1030001 at mindspring.com>, Henry C.K. Liu writes >The unemployed and the underemploy ought to start a right to work union >to protect their civil rights, to weed out fraud and to pressure >government to adopt policies. There are between 10 to 15 million >officially unemployed and another 10 million who have given up looking, >or those forced into early retirement at 50. Plus another 20 to 50 >million under-employed. It would be a powerful lobby with enough swing >votes in swing states. For starter, how about a negative income tax in >the current tax package? Or a tax rebate, not just a limited time income >averaging, but a tax rebate equal to say 70% of your previous high >income before unemployment. If you made $100K last year and paid $30k in >taxes, you get back $70K this year if you are unemployed. Unemployment >ought to be made to hurt the system than than it does the individual, >then you will be surprised how fast Congress will eliminated unemployment. > >Henry C.K. Liu I still have a campaign badge Fight for the Right to Work from the early 1970s. The campaigners marched on London and were beaten up and dispersed by the police well before they got anywhere near the corridors of power, though the story was reported as mob violence in the media. Friends of mine were on that march. That story was similar to the famous Jarrow marchers in the mid 1930s. From that time on I began to take a much more serious interest in the future of the labour market and the theories being proposed in both the UK and Europe. So much so that when Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper in 1994 with his scheme for getting France back to work, I knew that he was echoing Mitterand's familiar speeches on the same topic. So I replied as follows, which was published. ..... A new kind of revolution for Europe (letter published in the Guardian Jun 25, 1994) Jacques Chirac argues (Guardian June 21), like many in the UK do, that getting people back to work is vital to prosperity. Few disagree with such a proposal, but it is never explained what these new employees are going to do, or how much they are going to be paid. Produce more goods and services? But neither country is short of producers, rather the need is for consumers to purchase existing production. Simply creating more production will exacerbate the existing problem, almost certainly with further environmental deterioration. Moreover, job creation programmes tend to create jobs we do not need, while neglecting work that needs doing. In my exploration of this area of social policy I have never met so many people whose job it is to find jobs for other people in a tragi-comic echo of C Northcote Parkinson''s First Law, that officials exist to create work for each other. Yet in France as in the UK, there is an urgent need for a house-building and repair programme which should be high on the agenda of any incoming government. Top of the agenda has to be a monetary reform programme whereby an elected government creates its own credit at zero or near zero interest. In fact the kind of social contract M Chirac describes has been commended for many years by French thinkers who argue for a 'service social' in which individuals contribute to society, and a 'revenu social' which enables individuals to purchase other people's output. If that means a new kind of money system, so be it. ... KD But while Henry is right in my view to put forward ideas like those he has done, I wonder where the leadership for such ideas might come from. James rightly notes the absence of the sort of righteous anger needed to generate widespread resistance and constructive alternatives. Maybe Galbraith's "culture of contentment" explains the problem, so perhaps when the so-called middle class finds itself somewhat downwardly mobile things might change, though not, I hope, in the way that the business and middle class did for Germany of the 30s. Tonight there is a meeting in Manchester Town Hall of the 'after New Labour' resistance. See how we go.... As usual, I'm hopeful but not optimistic. Kevin -- Kevin Donnelly From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 16 09:22:31 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:22:31 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: US =?ISO-8859-1?Q?blas=E9_over_no_WMDs?= References: <00da01c31b88$6516c880$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <3EC50237.9050206@mindspring.com> Thomas Friedman of the NY Times said that the discovery of a mass grave in Iraq made the need of finding WMD unecessary, not withstanding the mass grave was for victim of a ill-fated uprising of Shiites encouraged and then abandones by the US. Henry C.K. Liu Michael Keaney wrote: > Fallout of America's vain hunt for WMD confined to embarrassment > By Rupert Cornwell in Washington > The Independent > 16 May 2003 > > The continuing failure to discover any evidence of Iraq's alleged chemical, > germ and nuclear weapons, more than a month after the fall of Baghdad, is > thus far a very minor embarrassment for the Bush administration - and > probably one which will grow only if order collapses completely and there is > an uprising against US military occupiers. > > Unlike Britain, complaints here at the failure to find the illegal weapons - > whose existence was the main justification for war - has been mainly > confined to liberal columnists and editorials in liberal newspapers. > > All but forgotten are the bloodcurdling pre-war assertions of top Bush > officials, among them Vice-President Dick Cheney's claim that Iraq had > "reconstituted" its nuclear programme, and the President's warning that > Iraqi drones, launched from ships in the Atlantic, could spray US cities > with biological agents. > > Instead the justification has shifted from the weapons threat to the > humanitarian benefits of having removed a brutal regime. The worry in the US > is not about the absence of a smoking WMD gun - but that Iraq will descend > into anarchy. This week the US military command blamed escalating street > violence not on the inability of the occupiers to guarantee basic services, > but on "regime elements" made up of Baath party diehards who are sabotaging > US-led efforts to restore infrastructure. > > The mood is plain in the polls. Yes, Mr Bush probably did overestimate the > quantities of non-conventional weapons held by Saddam Hussein's regime, 49 > per cent of respondents in a New York Times/ CBS poll said, compared with 29 > per cent who said they were about right and 12 per cent who continue to > insist - in the face of all the evidence - that they were too little. > > Even so, more than half thought the war will have been worth it, even if no > germ, chemical and nuclear weapons are found, and Saddam himself is not > captured or killed. The harrowing discovery this week of mass graves near > Baghdad is unlikely to change these feelings. > > In short, complaints here are unlikely to become as vocal as in Britain. The > difference in Britain reflects much greater support for the war in the US, > from the moment Congress gave Mr Bush carte blanche to use force last > November, even before United Nations weapons inspectors returned and turned > up nothing. > > Inconveniences such as the forged documents purporting to show Iraq had > bought uranium ore from Niger, and claims that intelligence analysts were > forced to stretch facts to fit the theories of superiors at the White House, > Pentagon and Vice-President's office, are simply brushed aside. > > None the less, doubts are surfacing. Officially, the Pentagon line is that > Iraq is a large country and that "we never expected to find weapons > quickly." But in the end they would be found. > > That does not square with what US investigators are being told by Iraqi > scientists - who no longer have any reason to lie - that the weapons > programmes were shut down several years ago. Nor does it square with what US > commanders are learning for themselves. > > "We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear > wasn't here," said Colonel Richard McPhee, a member of Task Force 75, which > went in with US troops to find and display the hidden WMD. Force 75 will be > pulled out of Iraq next month. > > Privately, US officials concede the best they may come up with is evidence > of a programme which once existed, such as the two facilities now being > examined by US technicians, alleged to have been mobile laboratories. And > unless chaos on the ground grows to the point of invalidating military > victory, that may be where the weapons mystery vanishes into the desert > sands. > > > > > From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 16 09:49:10 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 11:49:10 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [gang8] Unemployment and Tax Cut References: <000001c318b1$53b5d790$0c69f8d1@WindsongP4> <3EC024C7.1030001@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <3EC50876.7060808@mindspring.com> Times are changing. Bush in his recent speeches to sell his tax package said America should be a place where everyone who wants a job should be able to find one. Lets hold him to his slogan. I have in mind a union that focuses on political action, rather than street demonstrations. There is a possibility that state and local governments may not be hostile to this movement, because they feel that the Federal government is letting them carry the burden of high unemployment. I will try to write a mission statement in the near future ass soon as I find time. The coming election may be good timing to launch such an idea. Henry C.K. Liu Kevin Donnelly wrote: > In message <3EC024C7.1030001 at mindspring.com>, Henry C.K. Liu > writes > >>The unemployed and the underemploy ought to start a right to work union >>to protect their civil rights, to weed out fraud and to pressure >>government to adopt policies. There are between 10 to 15 million >>officially unemployed and another 10 million who have given up looking, >>or those forced into early retirement at 50. Plus another 20 to 50 >>million under-employed. It would be a powerful lobby with enough swing >>votes in swing states. For starter, how about a negative income tax in >>the current tax package? Or a tax rebate, not just a limited time income >>averaging, but a tax rebate equal to say 70% of your previous high >>income before unemployment. If you made $100K last year and paid $30k in >>taxes, you get back $70K this year if you are unemployed. Unemployment >>ought to be made to hurt the system than than it does the individual, >>then you will be surprised how fast Congress will eliminated unemployment. >> >>Henry C.K. Liu > > > I still have a campaign badge Fight for the Right to Work from the early > 1970s. The campaigners marched on London and were beaten up and > dispersed by the police well before they got anywhere near the corridors > of power, though the story was reported as mob violence in the media. > Friends of mine were on that march. That story was similar to the > famous Jarrow marchers in the mid 1930s. > From that time on I began to take a much more serious interest > in the future of the labour market and the theories being proposed in > both the UK and Europe. So much so that when Jacques Chirac, then mayor > of Paris, wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper in 1994 with his > scheme for getting France back to work, I knew that he was echoing > Mitterand's familiar speeches on the same topic. So I replied as > follows, which was published. > ..... > A new kind of revolution for Europe > (letter published in the Guardian Jun 25, 1994) > > Jacques Chirac argues (Guardian June 21), like many in the UK do, that > getting people back to work is vital to prosperity. Few disagree with > such a proposal, but it is never explained what these new employees are > going to do, or how much they are going to be paid. Produce more goods > and services? But neither country is short of producers, rather the > need is for consumers to purchase existing production. Simply creating > more production will exacerbate the existing problem, almost certainly > with further environmental deterioration. > Moreover, job creation programmes tend to create jobs we do not > need, while neglecting work that needs doing. In my exploration of this > area of social policy I have never met so many people whose job it is to > find jobs for other people in a tragi-comic echo of C Northcote > Parkinson''s First Law, that officials exist to create work for each > other. Yet in France as in the UK, there is an urgent need for a > house-building and repair programme which should be high on the agenda > of any incoming government. > Top of the agenda has to be a monetary reform programme whereby > an elected government creates its own credit at zero or near zero > interest. In fact the kind of social contract M Chirac describes has > been commended for many years by French thinkers who argue for a > 'service social' in which individuals contribute to society, and a > 'revenu social' which enables individuals to purchase other people's > output. If that means a new kind of money system, so be it. > ... KD > But while Henry is right in my view to put forward ideas like > those he has done, I wonder where the leadership for such ideas might > come from. James rightly notes the absence of the sort of righteous > anger needed to generate widespread resistance and constructive > alternatives. Maybe Galbraith's "culture of contentment" explains the > problem, so perhaps when the so-called middle class finds itself > somewhat downwardly mobile things might change, though not, I hope, in > the way that the business and middle class did for Germany of the 30s. > Tonight there is a meeting in Manchester Town Hall of the 'after > New Labour' resistance. See how we go.... As usual, I'm hopeful but > not optimistic. > Kevin From soncu at pacbell.net Fri May 16 11:01:08 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:01:08 -0700 Subject: [A-List] (Forward from Nestor) Arg. media blackout declaration of MNyP, Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: N?stor Gorojovsky [mailto:ngoro at indec.mecon.gov.ar] Sent: Friday, May 16, 2003 9:32 AM To: Louis Proyect; Sabri Oncu Subject: Could you please post, dear friends? Subj.: Arg. media blackout declaration of MNyP, while disseminating the false idea that Rodr?guez Sa? is "the new Menem" among the Buenos Aires petty bourgeoisie. I am forwarding, in Spanish, a declaration of MNyP which is facing a media black out in Argentina while it is distributed on Uruguayan progressive media. Nobody should be amazed at this. The declaration blasts the whole 1976-2001 period as a single, anti-national and counterrevolutionary unit. Promises opposition to Kirchner based on ideological and programmatical disagreements, not on personal likings. And states the will to begin a long march towards power on a new, nationwide, organizational basis which steps ahead from Peronism. During the 1955-1973 years, when people in Buenos Aires wanted to obtain good information on Peronism and Argentina, it was necessary to listen to Radio Colonia, a small broadcasting station, owned by a business-witty Uruguayan Socialist by name Ariel Delgado. Argentinean media nixed good info on Peronism, thus Delgado made a good deal with his station. Among others the huge incomes he received from advertisers (none of them imperialist companies, always small Argentinean firms) helped him to build one of the finest private Socialist libraries in the River Plate area. Well, the media interdiction on Peronism after 1955 seems to have appeared again, only that directed against the MNyP. What follows is the declaration issued by the meeting of the Movimiento Nacional y Popular held in Luj?n, San Luis, on May 14th and 15th 2003. It was extracted from the webpage of the Uruguayan progressive newspaper _La Rep?blica_. No Buenos Aires media distributed this most important document, probably because they are very busy trying to bracket the MNyP with Menemism and to establish the idea that Rodr?guez Sa? is the "new Menem". This is very good news. Every popular and patriotic leader in Argentina has had to confront media operations, silence and deformations. But facts are stubborn. This declaration includes the whole period opened by the 1976 coup in a single unit, and states that tne MNyP is ideologically and organically in opossition to everything and everyone that keeps alive whatever remains still exist of that age. Full text in Spanish, from the webpage of La Rep?blica (Uruguay) follows. Con la presencia de Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?: Delinearon la estructura partidaria que regir? al Movimiento Nacional y Popular la republica.com (uruguay) Casi seiscientos congresales de todo el pa?s delinearon ayer la estructura partidaria que regir? al Movimiento Nacional y Popular en la etapa organizativa, la cual comenz? a transitar con el objeto de consolidarse como oposici?n constructiva al gobierno de turno y presentar candidatos en todas las contiendas electorales nacionales, provinciales y municipales. Ese fue el tema central que el Congreso Nacional del MNyP, presidido por el ex jefe de Estado argentino Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?, debati? durante dos d?as en la hoster?a "17 de octubre" del sindicato SMATA de la localidad de Luj?n. Finalmente y por unanimidad los congresales aprobaron la moci?n del primer gobernador electo por la incipiente fuerza pol?tica, Alberto Rodr?guez Sa?, quien propuso constituir un Consejo Nacional y un Consejo Ejecutivo. El primer ?rgano estar? conformado por la conducci?n del MNyP y representantes provinciales. En tanto el Consejo Ejecutivo tendr? el siguiente organigrama: un presidente, un vicepresidente 1?, un vicepresidente 2?, un vicepresidente 3?, cuatro secretarios coordinadores, un secretario permanente y veinte secretar?as. Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?, que ejercer? la presidencia, y Melchor Posee, en el cargo de vicepresidente 1?, son los ?nicos nombres que ya conforman el Consejo Ejecutivo. En los pr?ximos c?nclaves se terminar? de definir qui?nes ocupar?n cada lugar. Lo cierto es que la vicepresidencia 2? recaer? en una mujer y la vicepresidencia 3?, en un joven. Tambi?n se defini? el rol que cumplir?n los secretarios coordinadores y el secretario permanente. Los primeros ser?n los encargados de solucionar los problemas coyunturales y el segundo, de manejar encuestas propias y la imagen de los candidatos del MNyP. Nueve personas integrar?n cada una de las veinte secretar?as que abordar?n tem?ticas puntuales como la mujer, ONG, Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina (IFRA), el plano internacional y el Mercosur, el ?mbito parlamentario, entre otros. Dentro de la nueva estructura, al Congreso Nacional asistir?n diez congresales por distrito y veinte en aqu?llos que superan el mill?n de habitantes. Qued? en claro que los nombres de los lugares que restan dilucidar surgir?n del consenso de los congresales. La democratizaci?n de las decisiones es una pr?ctica distintiva del Movimiento Nacional y Popular y as? lo destac? Adolfo al cerrar el plenario: "Somos la ?nica organizaci?n pol?tica que nos reunimos en plenarios y en donde todos son escuchados y tienen participaci?n". En ese marco organizativo, la mayor?a de los disertantes coincidi? en destacar la importancia de que en el MNyP est?n todos los argentinos representados e incluidos. Y al mismo tiempo hicieron hincapi? en asumir el rol de "oposici?n constructiva" a quienes manejar?n los destinos del pa?s en los pr?ximos d?as. Con este ?lconcepto, timo Adolfo fue contundente al manifestar que "el Movimiento Nacional y Popular no es oposici?n porque no nos guste Kirchner sino que lo somos porque no estamos de acuerdo con los ideales que ?l defiende y su plan de gobierno no condice con la bandera que pregonamos". Por eso inst? a los militantes y seguidores del MNyP de todo el pa?s a profundizar, debatir, discutir y difundir las 125 medidas y los 15 puntos program?ticos que constituyen las bases ideol?gicas partidarias. Paralelamente, el ex gobernador sanluise?o exhort? a los congresales a trabajar con "inteligencia" y "talento" para ratificar los votos obtenidos en todos los municipios donde el movimiento sali? victorioso en las ?ltimas elecciones presidenciales. "Tenemos que prepararnos para ganar primero en todos los municipios que obtuvimos la victoria", enfatiz? Rodr?guez Sa?, quien no se olvid? del comicio provincial que en poco m?s de veinte d?as deber?n afrontar en C?rdoba. De la segunda jornada de la cumbre participaron miembros del Comando Superior, el secretario general de SMATA Jos? Rodr?guez, el candidato a jefe de gobierno porte?o Enrique Rodr?guez, Jorge Rachid, y los legisladores nacionales Liliana Negre de Alonso, H?ctor Torino, Jos? Mir?beli y Mar?a Ang?lica Torrontegui. Documento Con la presencia de quinientos ochenta y cuatro congresales de los veinticuatro distritos del pa?s y presidido por el gobernador electo por el Movimiento Nacional y Popular de la provincia de San Luis, doctor Alberto Rodr?guez Sa?, por el doctor Melchor Posse y por el doctor Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?; en las instalaciones de la Colonia de SMATA, s?mbolo de la Argentina solidaria a reconstruir y con la presencia y coordinaci?n de su titular nacional Jos? Rodr?guez , se desarroll? los d?as 14 y 15 de mayo de 2003 el congreso del MNyP. En el transcurso del congreso se trabajaron sobre los siguientes talleres tem?ticos: - Los nuevos escenarios pol?ticos - Organizaci?n definitiva del funcionamiento de la estructura del Movimiento Nacional y Popular. - Reafirmaci?n del pensamiento nacional - Propuesta pol?tica de coyuntura - Talleres provinciales y distritales Las conclusiones del mismo, discutidos en el pleno del congreso y aprobados por unanimidad, tienen lugar a las directivas pol?ticas y organizativas a desarrollar por el MNyP que preside Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa? a partir de este momento. Finalmente se elabor? el documento pol?tico que se desarrolla a continuaci?n para ser aprobado por este congreso nacional del MNyP. Primer Congreso Nacional del Movimiento Nacional y Popular. Declaraci?n de Luj?n. Primero. El MNyP reafirma la voluntad pol?tica, expresada por casi 3 millones de argentinos, de constituirse en la expresi?n de aquellos compatriotas dispuestos a construir un destino nacional, que entierre definitivamente la Argentina de la resignaci?n, que recupere la identidad nacional, la cultura del trabajo y la solidaridad y sepa con sabidur?a construir los espacios soberanos de decisi?n, hoy acotados por el neoliberalismo econ?mico y cultural de los ?ltimos 25 a?os. Segundo. El MNyP est? abierto a construir un modelo solidario en la Argentina, convocando en conjunto con todos aquellos sectores del campo nacional y popular, que comprenda los desaf?os de la hora, alejados de especulaciones de los viejos y enterrados vicios de la pol?tica, como as? mismo de las pr?cticas corruptas y perversas, prebendarias y extorsivas, desarrollados en los ?ltimos tiempos y verificadas en las elecciones nacionales en primera vuelta. Tercero. La decisi?n de la construcci?n de una org?nica estructural del movimiento se constituye en un claro paso hacia la organizaci?n pol?tica que permita encarar los desaf?os de los pr?ximos tiempos. En las luchas electorales que nos disponemos a librar en todos los distritos y municipios del pa?s dando respuesta a los millones de compatriotas que abnegadamente, luchando en condiciones precarias y ante aparatos pol?ticos de a?os fueron capaces de construir el camino de las ideas y de los programas del MNyP que mantendremos en alto como las herramientas vigentes para la construcci?n de una Patria sin excluidos con plena vigencia de los Derechos Humanos, desarrollo econ?mico con justicia social, libertad y soberan?a nacional plena. Cuarto. Los acontecimientos pol?ticos por los que atraviesa nuestro pa?s son la m?s clara expresi?n del derrumbe de una cultura pol?tica que nuestro pueblo ha rechazado y que se desnuda en toda su intensidad, en el marco de la crisis electoral. Nuestra posici?n pol?tica, desde la primera vuelta presionada por los factores de poder, hacia la definici?n falsa opciones y ante esta situaci?n nuestra respuesta fue contundente, la misma que ejercimos en la campa?a, desde el debate de las ideas, las propuestas program?ticas y los objetivos revolucionarios en lo estructural de las medidas para los 100 primeros d?as y en la construcci?n de un modelo social solidario. Fue as? como reafirmamos nuestra oposici?n frontal al neoliberalismo, tanto en sus formas de capitalismo salvaje como el maquillado de la ?ltima etapa del actual gobierno. Quinto. El MNyP reafirma su voluntad pol?tica de ser protagonista, desde nuestra firme posici?n, expresada en este documento, proponiendo los 15 puntos programaticos y las 125 medidas en cada acci?n que desarrollen los sue?os, ya que estos puntos son la s?ntesis de la Marcha de los Sue?os, donde miles y miles de compatriotas de todo el pa?s nos comprometieron a seguir trabajando en la defensa de los humildes, los despose?dos, los trabajadores, los empresarios agredidos por el modelo, los pueblos originarios, los sectores medios empobrecidos, los productores rurales, los comerciantes y profesionales a los que les apagaron la esperanza y encontraron en el MNyP su contenci?n y su s?ntesis. En estas circunstancias y en defensa de estos intereses del pueblo argentino, somos la oposici?n y esteramos al apoyando al gobierno en aquellas medidas que adopte que sean conducentes al inter?s nacional. From dharma at dambiec.com Fri May 16 09:57:47 2003 From: dharma at dambiec.com (Dharmadeva) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 01:57:47 +1000 Subject: [A-List] PROUT Gems - 34 Message-ID: <001101c31bc3$ed4e2500$fe01a8c0@dharmadeva> PROUT Gems - 34 The Future of United Nations and Structural Possibilities of World Governance - World Government, Globalization and UN Reform Sohail Inayatullah, edited by Dieter Dambiec [Originally written in 1999 this article has been re-edited and updated, as well as pointing out additional ideas on PROUT not found in the original.] This article investigates emerging united nations positions, summarizes recommendations for United Nations transformation and provides a synopsis of relevant bibliography. A parliament of humanity or a world government is humanity's natural progression from barbarism to civilization. Only internal fear, greed, hate and other emotions have kept humans from achieving this goal. This is fundamentally the moralist-idealist position adopted by humanists, utopians, and spiritualists. The future world is a mixture of sensate and ideational civilizations; an integrated world that is holistic, wherein there is economic balance between regions, between city and rural areas, between genders, and within the minds of each person. Individuals themselves have found a balance between the materialist, psychic / mental and spiritual tendencies within themselves - with the attraction being towards a cosmic understanding. In this vision of the future, nations gradually disappear and identity is reframed around bio-regions and other more rational, less sentimental (not religious, national, racial, territorial) forms of social organization. The Western liberal view of the long linear march of democracy - the perspective that democracy is the highest form of human social organization, is a relative phenomenon and no true account has ever been made in practice of what democracy actually is. Numerous assertions that here there is democracy and over here there is another democracy, are often motivated by what party politics is about rather than what is democracy. The United Nations stays primarily an organization of nations, with all their relative assertions about democracy or so-called democracy. These nations set out to assert that people are collectively best joined within the nation-state rubric. And that nations, however, can and should, join together to create a parliament of nations thus ensuring collective security. Within the UN itself, within the framework of the nation-state, hierarchy of power is desirable since there are the wise and the foolish, the rational and the irrational, and the parent and the child. Eventually power and responsibility will be shared once the foolish change their ways and children grow up, once all nations become truly democratically representative - so the theory goes, without ever coming to the root of what is actually democracy. But the aspirations for some nations to seek dominance is unlikely to make this a reality. This has been a pervasive American model (which has its own agenda of dominance), democracy having originated in Greece and passed through Europe to finally rest in the US, it is believed. Now that communism is dead, it is only the chaos of the Third World that needs to be managed; that is, world order is primarily a function of implementation, merely a technique, to use Focauldian language. The image of the emerging world order is one where the principles of the European enlightenment and further articulated by the US State Department are realized. The UN would ascertain that universal human rights are respected, that nations follow liberal models of economic growth, and that territorial boundaries are honoured. Structural-Functionalist An alternative structural-functionalist view argued for by Zenia Satti posits that the UN must be seen historically. The United Nations came about to meet certain needs and changed once these needs were met. The League of Nations represented the shift from the European balance-of-powers system to the notion of collective security, of the view that the entire body of nations would safeguard each other from aggression. However, non-compliance from states and its weak structure (the inability to stem aggression when it suited powers) led to the downfall of the League. Nations continued to make agreements based on their national interest. Because of the failure of the League of Nations to become a supernational authority, the UN was less idealistic in its goals, eventually focusing not on becoming a supernational authority but on developing mechanisms of regulating the balance of power between the two world blocks. This is a narrow origin. As a result, general universal notions of justice or peace, behind the idea of collective security, were in practice abandoned, argues Satti. As a consequence, UN meetings became focused on theatrics of mass consumption in the home nations of leaders. However, with the end of the Cold War, the UN was once again at a transition phase, most argue. What type of UN results in the near future is dependent on a range of variables, including world geo-politics, the growth of the world economy, technological advancements, and the globalization of culture. Recently, we have seen the geo-politics of the USA take precedence supported by its deputy countries of the United Kingdom and Australia. The expectations of the UN may have been higher, having been in an idealistic phase, but now having been given a good belting by the USA in the build-up to the Iraq dramatics and the current situation of being caught back in the question of its relevance, a decline of its worthiness has resulted. More radical reforms are required. Radical reforms, for example, call for a consensus on global human rights, on denying sovereignty of criminal nations , for a world militia, that is, a UN organization which is more than the United Nations. Clearly, unlike the 1930's during the demise of the League, the UN is not irrelevant if these reforms are being called for. As Boutros Boutros-Ghali has remarked, "The United Nations has almost too much credibility." Grave questions now arise about this statement also. Given that the emerging world order is believed to be fraught with local and regional ethnic and religious conflicts, usually carryovers from colonial and communist days, the UN has expand its functions over recent time to deal with these matters. The task of the UN now that the world is no longer bipolar is to expand peacekeeping and peacebuilding, to gradually move towards world governance on issues of ecology, development, human rights, penal code and other problems that no one nation-state can individually tackle. Optimists still seek this outcome. Realist >From a realist view, critics such as Coral Bell, Keith Hindell, Frank Ching and Wang Kan Sang argue that any future of the UN must deal with the fact that it is primarily one-nation run and that all nations use it when it is to their political benefit. Thus, even though the actual balance of powers has shifted, governments remain committed to national self-interest. The realist discourse continues to dominate with global justice applied equally to all nations remaining an elusive, if not impossible, idea and reality. Thus the idealist future does not deal with the resentment small nations might feel toward big power hegemony. How will they find a voice in the UN as it becomes more active, remains the operating design question? If they cannot, then we should again expect to see the euphoria surrounding the UN transformed to the realization that it is merely a branch office of Security Council nations and even then its parent company that of American foreign policy can prevail, argue critics. In this realist position of the UN, the image of the future world order is that it will be primarily dominated by a few nations, those currently wealthy and having nuclear advantage. The UN will be used on a case by case basis to press military, strategic, economic and cultural advantages. Even then, the current situation that could develop, of which the Iraq war is an example, is that one nation which has enough military clout can render the UN irrelevant in any case and take on for itself what it considers to be a world cause. Alternatively, instead of a unipolar world, there is evidence that in terms of relative power the most likely world future is that of a multipolar world. Mind you, that is not anyone's democratic choice, either. This assertion can have a range of consequences. First, instead of the assumption that the UN can easily restructure, it could mean that there will be more tensions, as not one but multiple hegemonic powers vie for who gets to run the world. Galtung has argued that we might have an emerging Islamic power (two or three generations hence, although he may be wrong on that given the difficulty of actual unity of those nations), India, China, Japan, and three Western (US, Europe, and Russia) hegemons. However since zones of power are clearly demarcated even in this multipolar world order, structural reform of the UN might indeed be possible. There is a range of potential conflicts ahead which the UN must prepare to handle. Some of these being between two hegemons, a coalition of hegemons (as in against Iraq), and a coalition of peripheries (they of course will not gain UN legitimacy since they were not victorious in the Second World War). We would expect the UN to play a different role as it tries to accommodate the cultural and governance assumptions of these very different world powers. In this model of the future, we would expect continued efforts of India and Islamic nations to gain full-time Security Council membership, thus joining the US, France, England, Russia and China. In any case, the guiding assumption is that the UN has come about for various reasons and its structures reflect these reasons. There is no grand march of history, no Geist, no divine force leading humanity to progress, to civilisation. Nor is there any a priori reason that nations should peacefully coexist. Power and its pursuit, in contrast, go on. However, this simply reflects the lack of real universal or human welfare sentiment. Historical-Structural Related to the functionalist views is a historical structural position offered by Immanuel Wallerstein and Crane Brinton which argues that because of our historical evolution there are only a range of possible world structures available: world ideology as in a world church (the Holy Roman Empire or the Caliphate, for example); a world state as with the communist model; world empire as in the Mongol empire or the Roman empire; or world capitalism as politically constituted by the particular mix of inter-state relations, the call for democracy within nations, and the actual state of anarchy between nations. Mini-cultural systems or small self-reliant states or regions have historically tended to capitulate to these larger structures, as they have been unable to fend off globalizing trends. Thus, we should be surprised if a world government or world governance structure emerges that is multi-cultural, multi-civilizational and resolves issues of local/global, market/state, individual/collective, and spirit/body/mind dilemmas. Idealistic utopians, however, argue that these paradoxes can be resolved and that we should expect a higher level of complexity to emerge that creates a new human being; one not tied to the dark past, but one committed to a humanistic, ecological, gender-equal, inclusive view of the future. Specific reforms Given these general positions and images, what are some specific suggested reforms that would create an alternative future for the UN in emerging world orders, if indeed it should be called the UN at all. These include: (1) An end to the veto structure arising from the Cold War, so that the UN is now expected to work better. Thus no new dramatic changes are needed overall. (2) The UN should be restructured by increasing the number of permanent members on the UN Security Council. This is to reflect emerging new military and population powers such as India and Indonesia. The UN Security Council must become more representative. But this sort of power is not representative of people in general - but only of the politics between nations, of the shifting might of trying to outgun each other. (3) The UN should cease to be nation-state focused and better represent the views of the many social movements who have been and remain critical of both capitalist and State oriented economic and cultural models. These include movements such as the ecological, the spiritual, the alternative-development, indigenous peoples and women's. Often representing non-statist perceptions of social reality and value structures, these groups argue that nations do not adequately represent local and regional interest groups. Currently they have no official power and their success lies in the moral authority they wield and the development programs they have accomplished and the alternative development model they work from. However, they are rejected by many national UN missions since social movements are not considered to represent the people since they are "private" special interest groups. They, for example, are not elected to power at local or national levels, yet claim to represent the people. Social movements, however, respond that while they are not democratically elected, they better represent the aspirations of many and represent positions (generations ahead) and groups (the environment) for which elected officials have no incentive to defend. Nation-state representatives often only represent a certain elite, usually, male, upper-class, elite university, and disciplined in political science or international relations, they also argue. (4) The UN should evolve into a world government with two houses: one house being nation-based the other house being population-based (instead of a general assembly and security council) or some other governance structure that takes into account the range of identities that exist today. Another option (more complicated) is that the UN should have three houses: one based on nations, the second on social movements, and the third a house of the people. (5) The power of the Secretary-General should increase as currently the UN General Assembly (GA) bogs down executive decision-making and implementation because of bureaucratic and national concerns. (6) The UN should become less centralized and move to become a facilitator, helping bring social movements, individuals, governments, ethnicities and other identities into forums of mutual exchange and negotiation. It should focus on its moral authority and not attempt to increase its executive, military or judicial powers. (7) The UN should be disbanded because it represents a minority (which can be the West, the third world, intellectuals, or international bureaucrats depending on one's political, knowledge and class position). Regional associations are better suited to solve conflicts. In any case, the UN has merely become a debating society of clever national leaders. It suits nor helps no one but international intellectuals and bureaucrats. (8) The UN must be revitalized so it can better deal with the many conflicts ahead, including, but not limited to, issues of the newly created nations, problems within old nations, and emerging cases resolved only by global law. However to be revitalized it must obtain increased funding from member nations. (9) The UN should remove itself from the exercise of third world development since, among other reasons, East Asian experience shows that the international system is a hindrance not a help to the creation of miracle economies, to economic growth. The sooner the UN (and, of course, related international agencies) ceases to function (particularly as lender, regulator, and expert) the better it is for economic growth since the UN only serves to create a global welfare state and to create development experts who are unable to transform local or global poverty. Let us focus in of some of these aspects and changes to the UN and images of the future world order. * West-Oriented World Government: Franz Shurmann in his American Soul gives an image of the UN. The UN once a debating society has rapidly become a world government. The first stage of the creation of the world government is a Western Block from Vladivostok to San Francisco. There are some historical precedents for this, when in 1879, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a great power conference to settle all world problems. However in the long run nothing came out of it, instead a generation later a world war erupted. Even if there were a most likely future of a world government it would be West-oriented: a continuation of the Enlightenment project of individual rights and liberal democracy for all. Economies would be liberal for corporations, not necessarily citizens, and free for corporates but with borders primarily for labour and drug trafficking. However, tourists and currencies could travel freely. In this image of the future, human rights are seen as individual-based, although confined to their borders depending if you are a member of a corporate that gets the privilege of being borderless. The perspective of these rights is also somewhat limited being based on the need to seek self pleasure - with real enlightenment being irrelevant or secondary. So communal and collective interests (the role of groups) don't count for much. Nor does redressing the history of colonialism. The third and fourth worlds as well as China are left out of this equation, or must join on the terms of the West if they are willing to give up their cultural views of rights and the role of the State in capital formation. * Cultural Basis for Governance: The Chinese, however, as evidenced by numerous articles in the Beijing Review take a different view of the UN, arguing, for example, as He Hongze does in his "New Role for the UN", that "the internal affairs of one country can be solved only by the people of that country. The efforts of the international community can only be helpful or supplementary." In addition, Chen Jian has argued that reform efforts should not change the structure or mechanisms of the UN, they should merely strengthen it. Change should be accomplished through consensus in line with "the principle of balance and that of rationalization". Of course, coming from the language of a nation being on the Security Council, this is nothing unusual. Although, it again points out the narrow basis of the UN. However, at the 46th General Assembly Keith Hindell in his "Reform of the United Nations" reminds us that the relativistic argument to human rights was resisted most by newly-democratic Eastern European nations, who believe that sovereignty is often an excuse for State terrorism. The issue is: is there a greater good beyond state sovereignty. Must much of the charter be rewritten to have a "right of interference" as suggested but later disavowed by Bernard Kouchner, the French Minister of Humanitarian Action? As the Secretary General has commented, sovereignty does not confer the authority for mass slaughter. All this casts doubt on the UN as the hub of an international community. If not a hub, then it is a club. A community, however, requires the idea of being inclusive, people and nations working together to solve common problems. * The Need for Supranational Authority: However, paradoxically - and this the Chinese find contentious to the idea of an international community - national sovereignty can be a stumbling block, and clearly a reflection of the Cold War and of the lack of representation of Asian and African nations in world economic and political bodies. As Hindell argues, "Taking a slightly longer-term view, the issues of climate change, environmental pollution, AIDS, migration, drugs, and international crime all require some kind of supranational authority to act within the boundaries of the [nation] state." Part of the issue is that without supernational authority to enforce compliance, individual nations, who are legitimised in a majority of ways (none of which is total consensus or for that matter democratic), allow suffering and pain to occur to their own citizens. "If national sovereignty resists the measures to reverse climate change, some UN members will drown while others could lose large slices of their territory." AIDS is another example. Hindell also suggests that an International Criminal Court be established. "An ICC would need to be backed up by an international law-enforcement agency with powers of arrest, detention, arraignment, trial and imprisonment." Of course, all these challenge sovereignty; a boundary that major powers such as the US as well as less powerful Asian nations who have yet to realise full (not only political but economic and cultural as well) sovereignty would yield to. But as R.B.J. Walker reminds us the nation-state is a recent phenomenon, created out of the battle between church and empire. It is a reflection of the modern world, neither eternal nor necessary. Indeed, completely relative. All that is relative, eventually dies. From the view of Hisahiko and Terumasa, what is needed is for nations, particularly Japan, to adopt a three-fold strategy: national interests, UN interests and international interests. These must be balanced. Nations must balance their own interests with those of the UN itself. Equally important are regional interests. This, of course, reflects a more forward moving world, rather than the dogma and staticity of nations. * Moral Not Strategic Power and Authority: Robert Aldridge believes that governments' unwillingness to relinquish authority to the UN should not be seen as a temporary condition, as idealists have maintained. In fact given that strong solutions (such as military or sanctions) in the long run fail, the UN should focus on becoming the "spokesperson of humanity". Part of becoming a spokesperson involves the Secretary General giving a State of Humanity address. Robert Muller seconds this proposal for a State of Humanity address - it should have been so at the 50th UN anniversary. He also suggests that NGOs prepare reports on their activities, results, and membership so as to articulate comprehensive world assessments. Education then of the young in every country - a drive of the NGOs - is a far more important strategy than the long wait for governments to accept supernational authority, especially when such authority can go against their own particular national interests. * World Government: Benign or Dictatorial: A related view at the simplest level, whether one believes a world government is desirable or not, is that based on whether one believes it will be benign or dictatorial, argues Titus North. From there comes the inevitability is that eventually there will be a world government. North writes that historically there have been two ways to consolidate power: integration by empire, that is, by conquest as in the case of the Huns and Mongols; or by consent, as initially in the case of the US. Conquest attempts to break down the notion of balance of power between sovereign states while consent attempts to redefine issues and mutual identity at a global level. The third effort has been hegemonic, not conquering but avoiding consent as well, that is, creating spheres of influence, of colonies. As Crane Brinton writes, in "Global Governance: A historical survey", "It would be rash to prophecy an effective world government in the near future, but it would equally be short-sighted to maintain that no such government is possible. On the contrary, the precedents point clearly, assuming no catastrophic destruction of civilization, to the establishment of some form of organized world government possessing the necessary police and financial powers, and it is not inconceivable that the United Nations will develop into such a government. * The Inevitability of World Government: Far more enthusiastic about the possibility of a world government is P.R. Sarkar. For Sarkar, part of the problem is local leadership and the fear that they will lose their leadership. Normally a cyclical theorist, however, with respect to social movement Sarkar believes that the strength, by and large, of geo-political and social sentiments (casteism, racism, nationalism) will continue to fade over time. He advocates a step-by-step formation of a world government authority, although not necessarily based on a transformation of the UN, and a strengthening of regional organizations. As a suggestive design, Sarkar argues for two houses. The first would have representatives based on population and the second on nation. Both houses would have to ratify decisions. Initially, the world government will be legislative but only in certain areas. Perhaps that which touches most commonly on all people, eg the necessity for a common penal code. This legislative ambit will eventually expand. But world governance must be based on more than a theory of collective security, it must be fundamentally cultural, humanitarian, a belief that local cultures combined can create a new global human culture and retain their own individual aesthetics. In any case, the process for Sarkar must be incremental. Although, incremental not in a sluggish sense but in a rational endeavour to reach the goal that most promotes human welfare, realising also the past still creates hindrances and most be appropriately dealt with. Charles Paprocki, as part of the International Network for a UN Second Assembly, has extended this argument further and writes that the UN General Assembly should become an upper legislative house, and a council of non-governmental organizations (or people's organizations) should become the lower house. Resolutions would be introduced in the lower house and, if approved, passed by the upper house. Once the legislative structure is in place, Paprocki believes that the world government can become strengthened once the Executive and Judicial branches have increased power. * A New Ethic for Peacekeeping: Less concerned with grand issues such as world government, political scientist Coral Bell, writes in "The Fall and Rise of the UN" that a new ethic is needed to justify why a young man from X country should die in a UN peacekeeping operation elsewhere. Formerly having rights within the context of the nation-state also meant that one had the duty to protect one's nation. But patriotism does not help the family of a dead UN peacekeeper. What is needed is the creation of a UN legion, a military service made up of volunteers, working at their own request. His or her death would then not be a burden for a particular state but perhaps a hero, someone who died for the larger idea of global peace or justice. This view is echoed by Edward Luttwak , who believes it should be structured like the French Legion. Using this language of justice would take out the issue of mercenary, of men and women fighting not for their country but for wealth. However, Okasake Hisahiko and Nakanishi Terumasa ask in "Clearing the Way for a Global Security Role" how can a standing army be democratically governed? Who will command the forces? Won't it simply reflect the values and force of the world power that has most to gain from the particular military action? They believe that a UN army will primarily reflect the views of the nation that leads the army and thus argue that Japan should change its constitution so it can play a potentially greater role in future UN actions. * Transforming the Security Council and the General Assembly: Bell gives other suggestions as well, the first of which is based on her reading of the fall and rise of the General Assembly (GA). Used initially by the US as a way to avoid the Security Council (SC) stalemate, the UN General Assembly eventually became a breeding ground of Third World aspirations, argues Bell. Thus initially for the US, "the moral authority of the Assembly had been substituted for the merely legal authority of the Council". The notion then was that the General Assembly better represents the community of nations, with the SC representing only the victors of the second war, the great nuclear powers. However, once the GA was less compliant to US interests, the US attacked the General Assembly's power in the UN. The US's miscalculation of assuming that the world thought like itself - assuming the universal nature of a particular philosophical tradition - was a fundamental mistake signalling the fall of the UN for Bell. The implications are that any effort to rethink the UN must have a intuitive and universal cross-cultural view of human rights, it must account for difference that does not go against the cardinal nature of human rights as well as desired similarity. That is, the UN must become a real parliament of humankind, in which nations would create international harmony and thus banish war and eventually poverty, the original view of Woodrow Wilson. Cardinality is relevant here. Cardinal means that on which something hinges - fundamental, important. This is in contrast to the view of the UN as a great concert of powers, of the mighty paternalistically developing the new young nations so as to make sure that no evil tendencies arise - with those definitions of good and evil being based on a elative view of virtue and vice, which does not get to the intuitive source of inspiration. Coming to consensus on issues such as human rights, economic rights, and now even national sovereignty should begin with an approach to a will to peace, where peace is sentient and dynamic, not static peace. Sarkar explains that static peace derives from the lower levels of existence, in the attempt to seek only physical security without great human aspiration. Sentient peace is the willingness to expand one's consciousness and realise peace is more than feeling basically comfortable. It requires the willingness to fight basic animal tendencies and malevolent intellect - this sentient peace is the attraction towards a greater centre of humanity and to retain the focus there in individual and collective life. In the personal life of every human being, there is a constant fight between the benevolent and the malevolent intellect. This fight between the static and sentient forces will continue as long as the universe exists. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the UN regained centre stage, allowing the possibility of what it was originally designed to do. But with the US lead invasion of Iraq (the term 'coalition' being more of a convenient scapegoat to try to hide the origins of the invasive tendency), this has again slipped. The Security Council has to bear some responsibility for this degradation of the UN. To transform the Security Council, Bell believes that the Council must be more representative and include India, Japan and Germany, as well as some representatives from the South: Brazil from South America, Nigeria from Africa, and Indonesia from the Islamic world. The problem with this is that the 'old' structure still brings forth all its inefficiencies and lack of vision for a universalist and expansive UN. * Making the UN More Representative: Richard Evans in "Reforming the Union" also believes the UN must be more representative. He argues that the British, French and German seats should become a single EU seat and Japan should get a seat as well. The UN should also in itself become democratic, he believes. He asks why five members can dictate policy to over 174 other members. Of course, 15 nations do pay 84% of the budget, but unfortunately there are few suggestions to include this in the reform equation since nations are expected to be altruistic (or foot the bill for their international interests). More problematic for Evans is that the UN is US-dominated. "Even its allies are afraid to vote against it." The US uses the UN to support its own policy agenda, witness the attack on Iraq and the reticence of action against Yugoslavia, argues Evans. * Asia's Voice: In "Reforming the United Nations" Frank Ching believes that now that the UN is already 50 years old, Asia should be heard more. Indonesia's Foreign Minister Ali Alatas suggests the creation of a new category of permanent members that do not have veto powers. Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohammed raises the larger international relations issue, asking why the UN is not democratic? He believes the veto should be eliminated. Singapore, however, has argued that the veto should be diluted not eliminated. Two negative votes would be needed to block a resolution. Moreover, there should be a corresponding financial burden to pay for this privilege. Wang Kan Seng, the Singapore foreign minister, believes that each veto member pay 9% of the UN operating expenses and 11% of the peacekeeping operations. Other suggestions include the regionalization of the UN: giving a seat to the Non-Aligned Movement, to the Organisation of African Unity, to the Organisation of American States. What these suggestions however do not tackle is the implications for this. Will this lead to more regionalization, increased effectiveness or to more stalemates, to a return of not an East-West Cold War but a north-south divide. Pure democracy while participatory is not efficient and efficiency is hardly ever participatory. * Accountability in the UN: Other reform-minded individuals are less concerned with what the UN does and more with how it does what it does. American diplomats, for example, argue that the UN should become more responsible and cost conscious. Equally, Algerian diplomat Muhammed Sahnoun believes that the UN is slow and incompetent, at least in how it acted in Somalia. The French have gone a bit further in their attacks of UN mismanagement. They propose a tribunal to punish UN staffers. This and other suggestions have led to plans to create an Inspector General to sniff out fraud, waste and mismanagement. Of course, being more business-like means less of a focus on affirmative action in hiring practices. But Yeshua Moser gives an alternative reading to the problem of fraud. Writing from Bangkok, he argues that prevalence of fraud in the UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia has not only hurt the UN's legitimacy but has endangered peace as well. In the Cambodian case it led to increased power for the Khmer Rouge, who have come to represent "local" people. This perhaps is the paradox: how to have an agency that reflects the diversity of world expressions of cultural and management practices and is efficient instead of an agency based on power politics, office and position chasing. Part of the problem again of the entire UN is that it is a united nations (representing its member notions) not united peoples or movements or individuals. Johan Galtung in his recent paper, "Global Governance For, And By, Global Democracy" argues for global governance; with governance defined as soft persuasion, largely using positive incentives focused on cultural and normative power rather than on military or coercive power. This is favoured instead of federal world government systems whose power is too great. The goal is to create world citizens at different levels of society, economy, and polity. But who are the world citizens today? Are they transnational corporations representing capital, international NGOs representing civil society often with lack of capital, inter-governmental organizations within the UN (with its many layers from the General Assembly to the Security Council) or the people themselves? The argument goes what then is needed is a world assembly of states, a world assembly of people, with direct voting and direct elections, even referendums, a world assembly of indigenous peoples (to represent those who have special historical claims), a world assembly of international people's organizations, and a world assembly of commerce. Concretely, this means adding a second assembly to the UN for the people and a third for the corporations. Membership would be based on criteria such as representation, level of democracy, concern with human interests, reflecting world perspectives, and having a sense of the long term, of permanence. This model appears to ignore the practical realities of the dynamics that are created when all this is tied together. Again, the quest for peace is insufficient, it depends on the type of peace. Sentient peace has a greater human welfare objective in the physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Mere peace or static peace has little of this cosmological concern - basic security is enough for static peace, with the objective of keeping fear at bay while ignoring the internal psychological origin of fear and the external means such as alleviation of poverty and guarantee of minimum necessities of life that can remove fear and insecurity. Main trends To summarize these are the main reform-oriented trends that have some standing in the intellectual discourse: (1) Transform Security Council - make it more representative of real power; (2) Change structure of power within UN - between the SG, the GA, and the SC as well as UN bureaucracy by increasing the power of the SG, or transforming the power of the SC or making the GA more representative. (3) Democratize UN - by better representation of aspirations of the world. This could mean not only within statist forms by, for example, diluting the veto, but also by allowing for some type of role for NGOs beyond consultative status. (4) Make UN more accountable - treat UN as a business instead of a large bureaucracy functioning through political state level patronage and thus more responsive. (5) Redesign the UN - two houses, four houses, regional associations or some other design structure. (6) Rethink peacekeeping - creating a military with soldiers not from nations but a professional standing army. (7) Popularize UN - create a house of NGO's or social movements that reflect the values of the grass roots movements, ecology, positive peace, spiritual transformation, social justice and sustainability. Develop an annual State of Humanity address. (8) Strengthen UN - more powers, more military powers, more peacekeeping, more development, and more funding for the UN. (9) Become a World Government - with legislative power initially and eventually executive and judicial powers; also deny national sovereignty when necessary. In general, there are three basic positions: (A) REINVIGORATE AND REALIZE THE UN'S ORIGINAL PURPOSE This is the most popular perspective. It includes a range of structural reforms (SC representation, right of veto, power of GA, world militia) to prepare the UN for the next century and the likely political shifts the world is undergoing. Part of the reformist position is to make the UN more accountable to member nations and to general principles of good governance. The focus should be on becoming a moral authority not a world government, a spokesperson for humanity and ecology, not a site for the advancement of the egos of national functionaries. The UN should thus realize its mission of being an arbiter of the disputes of nations. (B) RETHINK ITS STRUCTURE AND MISSION This is less popular among national functionaries. It involves rethinking the UN representational structure to include other forms of representation including social movements, who reflect non-State and non-business power as well as a general assembly of commerce to reflect the views of global commerce. The rights of indigenous cultures and of women is also important here, not only at economic or cultural levels but for allowing their thinking, values, mechanisms, as a means of being part of the running and the structure of the United Nations. (C) TRANSFORM AND EXPAND ITS PURPOSE The UN should become a World Government through some model of layered sovereignties with the UN having supreme sovereignty on most issues (federal and state structure) including the right to suspend national sovereignty when needed. The problem of the UN as quoted earlier by Boutros-Ghali is that it has too many expectations placed on it, too much credibility. It is the ideal of a family of united nations, of united peoples, united organizations that people yearn for, hoping somehow that the UN organization can somehow meet that need. The UN then often is more than the UN, a metaphor of what is possible and desirable: positive peace and justice. Realistically, while national self interest and its politics prevail, this is unlikely to help that ideal. Realists, of course, are not surprised given the power politics of the world system, but idealists have renewed calls for a fundamental transformation in the United Nations. The long view Structurally, if we are to take a macrohistorical view, there are four possibilities. These are derived from: Sarkar's notion of four types of power, being worker, warrior, intellectual and merchant (or labour, coercion with protection; religion or intellectual, and remunerative); Sorokin's ideas of three types of systems, being sensate focused on materialism, ideational focused on religion and integrated, balancing 'earth and heaven' if one wants to use metaphors; and Wallerstein's world systems theory. Simply stated, there are or have been four structures. 1. Mini-systems - small, self-reliant cultural systems - ideational 2. World Empire - victory of warrior historical power - coercive/protective - sensate 3. World Church - victory of intellectual power - normative - ideational 4. World Economy - globalizing economics along national divisions - sensate In the next 25 years, World Empire is unlikely given countervailing powers and given lack of political legitimacy for recolonization, as well as the fear of one hegemon (the most recent example being the USA) for simply conquering other nations. World Church is also unlikely given that there are many civilizations vying for minds and hearts. While the millennium has evoked passions associated with the end of humanity, and the return of messiahs, sons of God and the like, the religious pluralism that is our planet is unlike to be swayed toward any one religion, any one saviour. The World Economy, has been the stable system but now has become increasingly problematic. While the globalizing tendencies remain, the strength of the interstate systems is undergoing relative reduction. Mini-systems is possible because of electronic systems and aspiration for many for self-reliance ecological communities electronically linked. However, small systems tend to be taken over by either warrior power, intellectual/religious power or larger economic globalizing propensities. In the context of a globalized world economy, self-reliance is difficult to maintain. Revolutions from above (global institutions from UN, WTO, IMF) and regional institutions (APEC) and revolutions from below (social movements and nongovernmental organizations), revolutions from technology (cyber democracy, cyber communities and cyber lobbying) and revolutions from capital (globalization) make the nation far more porous. A countervailing force are revolutions from the past - the imagined past of purity and sovereignty which seeks to strengthen the nation state (to either fight mobility of individuals -immigration - or mobility of capital - globalization - or mobility of ideas - cultural imperialism) and seeks to create new nation states (ethno-nationalism. These countervailing forces are narrow sentiments (geo sentiments of socio sentiments) which limit prospects. However, no problems these days can be solved in isolation thus leading to the strengthening of global institutions, even for localist parties, who realize for their local agendas to succeed (for example, the Green Party), they must become global political parties, they must globalize themselves. Realise Global - Act Local. This also means they must face up to making useful economic policies as well, whereas many still have problems dealing with alternatives to capitalism since the fall of communism and in this bifurcated view fall into the trap of allowing the free market of capitalism as the better system - forgetting entirely the prospect of co-operative economics. We are seeing even in local tendencies a move to the global. But for globalism, rather than globalisation, to prevail there must be more then the freeing of capital (which itself may be an impediment to globalism because of the risk of loss of local economic democracy). There must be the freeing of ideas (multiculturalism), the saving of the environment, proper purchasing capacity for achieving minimum necessities for all, all those harmonising measures needed for integration. During times of intense transformation, where there is a struggle between worldviews and processes, the above dilemmas and thoughts arise. Then comes a new centre, a reordering of power. We should anticipate a world government/security system in conjunction with thousands of self-reliant ecological systems, a Gaian future. While liberals hope for a world governance system to help manage world growth, the reality is that over time, it will be a world government system with strong localism that is far more likely. The world government that supports economic democracy. Political democracy is largely a farce, as in reality it is either individual or party dictatorships, given the electoral structure of limited voting prospects around the world created by all sorts of impediments like party stacking, financial donations, etc. The world polity will likely have a world constitution with basic rights such as language, basic needs, culture and spirituality enshrined. The meanings people give to these principles, however, is likely to be both cardinal and local. We should be surprised if the UN at the beginning of the next decade has not evolved from its current structure or been replaced by the real push for global human welfare by another people oriented structure. Sarkar puts the position clearly in "Problems of the Day": "The more time is passing by, the more the glare of casteism, provincialism, communalism and nationalism is fading away. The human beings of today must understand that in the near future they will definitely have to accept universalism. So those who seek to promote social welfare will have to mobilize all their vitality and intellect in the endeavour to establish a world organization, abandoning all plans to form communal or national organizations. They will have to engage themselves in constructive activities in a straight-forward manner, instead of resorting to duplicity and deceitfulness. Many people say that divergent national interests are the only impediments to the formation of a world organization, or a world government. But I say this is not the only obstacle, rather it is just a minor impediment. The main obstacle is the apprehension of local leaders that they will lose their leadership. With the establishment of a world government, the total domination which they exercise today in their respective countries, societies and nations will cease to exist. Divergent national interests and popular scepticism may stand in the way of the formation of a world government. To allay baseless fears from the minds of the people, this task should be carried out step by step. Obstacles will have to be negotiated with an open mind, and the world government will have to be strengthened gradually, not suddenly. For example, to run the world government, two houses may be maintained for an indefinite period. The lower house will be composed of representatives from various parts or countries of the world, elected on the basis of population. The members of the upper house will be elected country-wise. This will provide opportunities to those countries which cannot send even a single representative to the lower house due to their small population, because they will be able to express their opinions before the people of the world by sending their representatives to the upper house. The upper house will not adopt any bill unless it has been passed by the lower house, but the upper house will reserve the right to reject the decisions of the lower house. Initially the world government should go on working merely as a law-framing body. The world government should also have the right to make decisions regarding the application or non-application of any law, for a limited period, in any particular region. In the first phase of the establishment of the world government, the governments of different countries will have only administrative power. As they will not have the authority to frame laws, it will be somewhat difficult for them to arbitrarily inflict atrocities on their linguistic, religious or political minorities." From jcraven at clark.edu Fri May 16 11:56:00 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:56:00 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: we're on our way... Message-ID: > Published on Wednesday, May 14, 2003 by the Boston Globe > > Building a Nation of Snoops > > by Carl Takei > > > > ''WATCHING AMERICA with Pride, not Prejudice.'' This is the Orwellian > motto of the New Jersey-based Community Anti-Terrorism Training > Institute, or CAT Eyes, an antiterrorist citizen informant program > being adopted by local police departments throughout the East Coast > and parts of the Midwest. Mike Licata, a high school teacher and > retired Air Force officer, created the CAT Eyes program in cooperation > with ex-military SWAT officer Jason McClendon and businessman Tony > Elghossain. > > In a recent telephone interview, Licata said he wants to use CAT Eyes > to create what he calls ''a modern civil defense network,'' converting > neighborhood watch groups into antiterrorist informant cells. These > groups, constantly watching for signs of terrorist activity in their > neighborhoods and workplaces, would report suspicious activities > directly to the FBI. Said Licata: ''I envision 100 million Americans > looking for indicators of terrorism and promptly reporting it to a > central database where it would get analyzed.'' > > According to Licata, city and town police departments in New Jersey, > Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio have adopted the program, as > well as the Washington, D.C., Park Police, and scattered cities in > Florida, Nevada, and California. University police departments, > including at MIT, are also adopting the program. > > Licata singles out the Boston police for praise, noting that they have > assigned 20 community service officers to conduct citizen trainings. > He will, no doubt, use his increasing local successes to leverage bids > for state and federal funds. Licata says he is trying to develop a > statewide program with the Virginia governor's office and is currently > drafting funding proposals to the Department of Justice and to > President Bush's CitizenCorps program. > > Licata has few qualms about the prospect of CAT Eyes-trained citizens > spying on their neighbors. ''If I felt that my neighbor of 10 years > was doing fund-raising for a group, I'd turn 'em in,'' says Licata. > After all, he says, the FBI will ''just investigate them -- and if > you're wrong, you're wrong. And if you're right, that's a big thing!'' > > Licata does emphasize that racial profiling is wrong, and his training > materials disavow racism. Terrorism, he says, ''has nothing to do with > race or religion. Timothy McVeigh was an Irish-American and he blew up > the federal building in Oklahoma.'' > > However, such assurances give cold comfort. Citizen informers, after > all, are not subject to the same public accountability as police > officers. If a citizen informer unfairly targets certain races or > ethnic groups, there is no way to keep track of it and no way to > punish the errant informer. Licata himself admits, ''If someone goes > the wrong way, there's nothing I can do about that.'' > > Moreover, with or without racial profiling, CAT Eyes could severely > curtail our expectations of privacy. If Licata comes even close to his > stated goal of 100 million informers, CAT Eyes would dwarf the citizen > informer programs of the most repressive totalitarian states, making > them appear amateurish by comparison. > > Even communist East Germany, a tightly controlled society with more > informants per capita than either Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, > was not as ambitious about citizen surveillance as CAT Eyes. In its > heyday, the East German secret police, or Stasi, is generally believed > to have had about 2 million informers, or about one-eighth of the East > German population. > > CAT Eyes wants to train more than one in three Americans to be FBI > informers. As the number of such informers rises, participants in even > the smallest of dinner parties and water cooler gossip sessions could > reasonably fear that expressing controversial opinions or admitting to > ''suspicious'' associations would attract the attention of the FBI. > > This comes at a time when cherished American rights to privacy are > already under assault. Last year the FBI obtained warrants for 1,228 > secret antiterrorism searches and wiretaps, a 30 percent increase over > 2001. In April, the CIA requested congressional authority to conduct > its own searches and wiretaps of US residents independent of the FBI. > (Though congressional Democrats successfully scuttled the proposal > this time around, it is likely to resurface soon.) Meanwhile, Justice > Department lawyers are quietly drafting proposals to further expand > the FBI's authority to use secret wiretaps and conduct searches with > little or no judicial oversight. > > A country that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors is a not just > a sick society but a weak one. Cooperation and solidarity will never > flourish in an America suffused by the paranoia and mutual suspicion > inevitably generated by an informer culture -- yet those are exactly > the assets we need if we are to confront the terrorist threat with our > national values intact. > > Carl Takei is a paralegal with a Boston law firm and a civil liberties > activist. > > (c) Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. From sherrynstan at igc.org Fri May 16 13:23:43 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 15:23:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] Re: The oil-consumption party is over! Message-ID: <6534964.1053113023784.JavaMail.nobody@wamui03.slb.atl.earthlink.net> The perpetual motion machines are alive and well. From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Fri May 16 15:56:42 2003 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (Jorge Figueiredo) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 22:56:42 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Austria, France and Brazil Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030516225254.0299c3d8@mail.telepac.pt> Austria, France and Brazil Jos? Reinaldo Carvalho (*) The Central Europe is showing signs of a broad, intense labor and popular mobilization. In Austria, a conservative country of high living standards, a place that almost never is object to news regarding social conflicts, the first general strike in 50 took place as workers from all categories stopped their activities and performed several protests, including the suspension of rail transportation and the blockade of border posts. Less than a week after the end of the general strike, the teachers of primary schools began a new strike. France, where the workers? struggles are frequent and always call the attention for the combativeness of their actions, bring us good news regarding a great strike movement that paralyzed the country and took about 2 million people to the streets of the main cities. A common reason motivated the struggles of the Austrian and French citizens: the announcement by both governmentsunsurprisingly right-wing onesof reforms to be undertaken to the social security system, which are viewed as socially regressive by the Austrian and French unions, as well as by many anti-capitalist and left-wing political forces. The facts reveal the existence of social discontentment and disquiet in the countries that lie in the heart of the European capitalist system. They also reveal that, despite the political hegemony of right-wing and right-of-center forces and, in some cases, of so-called left-wing forces that govern according to a right-wing program, and also despite the control of moderate trends in the union movement, the environment is prone to struggle, something that no control is able to refrain. The strikes in Austria and France constitute another answer from European workers to the attempts of the conservative bourgeoisie at imposing anti-social models, a doubtlessly explosive matter since workers gained benefits that are the result of strenuous struggles that lasted decades. The 1990?s were characterized by many similar attempts at reforming the social security systems and also the labor legislation in many European countries. All of them deserved answers that were either in the form of strikes of in the form of street demonstrations. Some took a political character. Also in France a similar attempt at reforming the social security system at the expense of the labor rights caused the collapse of Jupp??s right-wing administration in 1995. During 24 days the country was paralyzed in a memorable strike movement that reintroduced the workers in the scene of political and social confrontation. Italy, Greece, Portugal and Germany also had to face similar attempts at reforms and the reactions of the workers in those countries were not weak. The common aspectthe attempt at imposing socially regressive reforms in social security and labor legislationin a situation marked by growing economic and social instability and the incidence of crises in an unforeseen frequency reveals that the essential character of the program of the dominant classes in the capitalist system in the present conditions is the restriction of economic and social rights (and also political ones, but that is another story), what constitutes a brutal offensive against the workers. Here in Brazil, a country not similar to Austria or France as regarding the political reality and the social and economic indicators, the workers are also facing an attempt at reforming the social security as a change in the labor legislation is also to be made. In our case, we live the paradox of those reforms being about to be approved due to an initiative of a government headed by left-wing forces, which were recently sanctioned in the elections as a result of its opposition to the neoliberal government of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It is not the case of making a comparison between the aforementioned countries and Brazil. But there is no doubt that a common character is that, in the reform that is being proposed here, the logic of some of its aspects is cutting the rights of those who are working and also weakening the national State as a result of a fiscal conception of reducing public expenditure. In Brazil, the reforms in the social security system and the labor and union legislation were designed by the International Monetary Fund with the help of the previous administration. They were partially approvedand partially rejected due to the opposition of the workers? movement and the left-wing parties. Constrained by a very precarious economic and financial situation inherited from the previous government, which left the country vulnerable to the blackmail of international financial organizations, the new government feels impelled to conclude such reforms believing that, by finishing the agenda of the previous administration, the country will regain its breath and retake development after two lost decades. Broad sectors of the union movement oppose cutting rights. The Union Class Current, a communist organization of union intervention, constructively addresses the government with a set of demands that preserve the rights of the workers in the reforms. In a political environment marked by popular expectation regarding the fulfillment of the democratic and popular program of the forces that elected President Lula, the workers will struggle in the defense of the social security and for labor achievements, what strategically favors the consolidation of the new government, since social regression is not a character of democratic and popular forces. ------------------ (*) Journalist. Vice-president of Communist Party of Brazil PCdoB, responsible for International Relations PCdoB - Secretaria de Rela??es Internacionais -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6012 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mainman at agitprop.org.au Fri May 16 18:17:15 2003 From: mainman at agitprop.org.au (mainman at agitprop.org.au) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 18:17:15 -0600 Subject: [A-List] Latest updates to our anti-imperialist war pages Message-ID: Hi all These are the latest additions to our anti Imperialist war pages at http://www.agitprop.org.au/nowar Please remember, if you find any interesting articles that you think we should add, please drop us the url and we'll have a look at it. Cheers John ---------- -- US development of tactical nuclear weapons: Interview with Richard Butler, Mark Davis, Dateline, SBS, broadcast May 14, 2003 -- BushCo Reams Nation Good, Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle (US), May 14, 2003 -- A Nuclear Road of No Return, Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times (US), May 13, 2003 -- US weapons team ends its search with no discovery, Andrew Buncombe, The Independent (US), May 12, 2003 -- No Weapons, No Matter: We Called Saddam's Bluff, Michael Schrage, Washington Post (US), May 11, 2003; Page B02 -- U.S. Empire Menaces Asia, Greg Butterfield, Workers World (US), May 15, 2003 -- Counter-revolution and resistance in Iraq, Richard Becker, Workers World (US), May 15, 2003 -- The war against Iraqi people is not over, Dr Hannah Middleton, Speech at May Day Rally, May 4, 2003 -- From invasion to occupation and colonisation, Editorial, The Guardian, No. 1137, May 14, 2003 -- Halliburton: poised for the spoils, Denis Doherty, The Guardian, No. 1137, May 14, 2003 -- Bechtel And Blood For Water:, Vandana Shiva, Information Clearing House (US), May 12, 2003 -- S Korea to urge Bush to sign nuclear peace pledge, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 12, 2003 -- Lessons From Iraq Include How to Scare North Korean Leader, Thom Shanker, New York Times (US), May 11, 2003 -- US Congress Committee approves nuclear Bill, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 11, 2003 -- The thief of Baghdad, Marian Wilkinson and Peter Fray, Sydney Morning Herald, May 10, 2003 -- North Korea Lashes Out at Seoul Defense Minister, Reuters (UK), May 10, 2003 -- US pushes for control of Iraqi oil revenues, Evelyn Leopold, Reuters (UK), May 10, 2003 -- A New Holocaust: The Genocidal Policies of the US, Kareem M. Kamel, Islam Online (Qa), May 10, 2003 -- Counting The Costs Of "Liberation": After Iraq, Which Way Forward For The Movement?, Tristan Ewins, Z Net (US), May 09, 2003 -- China well placed to defuse N-crisis, Ching Cheong, Straits Times (Sg), May 9, 2003 -- US to ask for UN approval to control Iraq's oil industry, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 9, 2003 -- We protest the war - and remember, W.T. Whitney Jr., MD, People's Weekly World (US), May 10, 2003 -- New dangers and tasks for the new peace movement, Sam Webb, national chairman, Communist Party USA, People's Weekly World (US), May 10, 2003 -- The people of Korea pursue peace, Kay Landby, People's Weekly World (US), May 10, 2003 -- Cuba and dissidents, Cliff DuRand, People's Weekly World (US), May 10, 2003 -- I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world, Margaret Drabble, Daily Telegraph (UK), May 8, 2003 -- Communists in Iraq mark May Day, Susan Webb, The Guardian, May 7, 2003 -- America's weapons evidence flawed, say spies, Tim Reid, The Times (UK), May 7, 2003 -- Background notes: US threatens North Korea, The Guardian, May 7, 2003 -- In Search of a North Korea Policy, Editorial, New York Times (US), May 6, 2003 -- Selective Intelligence, Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker (US), May 6, 2003 -- North Korea denies link to Pong Su, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 6, 2003 -- Bush Shifts Focus to Nuclear Sales by North Korea, David E. Sanger, New York Times (US), May 5, 2003 -- Tech Wars: American Military Preponderance, Novakeo, Ether Zone (US), May 5, 2003 -- "Lethal and Compassionate": The Militarization of US Culture, Jorge Mariscal, Counterpunch (US), May 5, 2003 -- Soldiers, God and Empire: Achtung! Are We the New Nazis?, Douglas Herman, Strike the Root (US), May 5, 2003 -- Weapons of Mass Destruction Were a Fantasy From the Start, Gwynne Dyer, Salt Lake Tribune (US), May 5, 2003 -- Interview: Kim Myong Chol, Jana Wendt, Sunday, PBL, broadcast May 4, 2003 -- Real American Agenda Now Becoming Clear, Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star (Ca), May 4, 2003 -- Iraq divided into three military sectors, United Press International (US), May 2, 2003 -- Cleric's Killing a Setback to US: CIA lost an ally and $13M, Knut Royce, Newsday (US), May 2, 2003 -- Counterterrorism Expert Gets Key Post in Iraq, Reuters (UK), May 2, 2003 -- US plots to oust Mugabe with African nations' help, Basildon Peta and Andrew Grice, The Independent (UK), May 2, 2003 -- Reds under the ruins, Paul Belden, Asia Times (HK), May 2, 2003 -- Caught out: US Ambassador lies about North Korean nuclear weapons, David Wall, Japan Times (Jp), May 1, 2003 -- Media Monopolies Have Muzzled Dissent, Ian Masters, Los Angeles Times (US), May 1, 2003 -- Speech at May Day rally in Revolution Square, Havana, Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, May 1, 2003 -- United Front, Andrew Casey, Workers Online, April 2003 -- Communists not invited to Iraqi leadership meeting, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, April 30, 2003 -- Human shield tells of ongoing tragedy in Iraq, Bob Briton, The Guardian, April 30, 2003 -- Occupiers out!, The Guardian, April 30, 2003 -- About Those Iraqi Intelligence Documents: Were They Planted?, Wayne Madsen, Counterpunch (US), April 29, 2003 -- Matters of Emphasis, Paul Krugman, New York Times (US), April 29, 2003 -- Fury at agriculture post for US businessman, Heather Stewart, The Guardian (UK), April 28, 2003 -- From Vietnam To Iraq, by Edward S. Herman, Swans (US), April 28, 2003 -- North Korea faces naval blockade over nuclear arms, Shane Green, Sydney Morning Herald, April 28, 2003 -- Who could ask for anything more?, Stephen Gowans, What's Left (Ca), April 28, 2003 -- The Tasteful War And Other Media Lies, Deck Deckert, Swans (US), April 28, 2003 -- Americans have good reason to be afraid of their leaders, Barbara Sumner Burstyn, New Zealand Herald, April 28, 2003 -- Rumsfeld's North Korea Connection, Richard Behar, Fortune (US), April 28, 2003 -- Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies, Raymond Whitaker, The Independent (UK), April 27, 2003 -- "Progressives" Should Think Twice About Piling Onto Cuba, Emile Schepers, April 27, 2003 -- The Empire Slinks Back, Niall Ferguson, New York Times (US), April 27, 2003 -- Superman declares war on America, Senay Boztas, Sunday Times (UK), April 27, 2003 -- Scott Ritter: US lied about WMDs, By Jim Anderson, Dawn (Pk) April 27, 2003 -- Weapons of Mass Distraction: Where? Find? Plant?, David MacMichael and Ray McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (US), April 26, 2003 -- Former Shell chief 'to run Iraqi oil industry', Agence France-Press, April 25, 2003 -- Will Iraq Prove to Be OPEC's Nemesis?, Christopher Weafer, The Moscow Times (Ru), April 24, 2003. Page 8 -- North Korea urges US to open its nuclear forces to inspections, Sergei Mingazhev, Itar-Tass, April 24, 2003 -- The Most Dangerous President Ever: How and why George W. Bush undermines American security, Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect (US), Vol. 14, No. 5, May 1, 2003 -- Oil flow from Iraq resumes, Japan Today (Jp), April 24, 2003 -- North Korean flights unsettle crisis talks, Shane Green, April 24, 2003 -- U.S. bridles as Annan calls it 'occupying power', Jonathan Fowler, Toronto Sta (Ca), April 24, 2003 -- Pentagon staged statue's fall, Heather Cottin, Workers World (US), April 24, 2003 -- Spoils of war: U.S. bosses make grab for oil, contracts, Greg Butterfield, Workers World (US), April 24, 2003 -- The Great Unravelling of US Global Power, The Black Commentator (US), Issue Number 39 - April 24, 2003 -- US refuses to allow UN inspectors in Iraq, Caroline Overington, Marian Wilkinson, The Age, April 24, 2003 -- Russian official predicts 'catastrophic' events, Agence France-Presse, April 24 2003 -- Oil Flows Again from Iraq's Southern Oilfields, Reuters (UK), April 23, 2003 -- Analysis: Strategic bombing in Iraq war, Thomas Houlahan, United Press International (US), April 23, 2003 -- Blix attacks 'shaky' intelligence on weapons, Gary Younge, Richard Norton-Taylor and Patrick Wintour, The Guardian (UK), April 23, 2003 -- What, No Smoking Gun? The Media and the Specter of WMD, Cynthia Cotts, Village Voice (US), April 23 - 29, 2003 -- The decline and fall of American journalism, Alexander Cockburn, Working for Change (US), April 23, 2003 -- CNN, Republican Guard Remnants, And The Old-Closet Ploy, Jed Babbin, National Review (US), April 23, 2003 -- Prosecute US Corporate Media Whores For War Crimes, David Walsh, Information Times (US), April 22, 2003 -- Korea at Risk, Chalmers Johnson,, Pacific News Service (US), April 22, 2003 -- Which War Are You Watching?: The View from Spain, Dwight F. Reynolds, April 20, 2003 -- The Germans "supported" their troops, too, Dennis Rahkonen, Online Journal (US), April 20, 2003 -- Batting for the Winning Team: America's In-Bedded Journalism, William Macdougall, Counterpunch (US), April 19, 2003 -- Desolation Row, Chris Floyd, Moscow Times (Ru), April 18, 2003. Page XXIV -- Privatizing Iraq: The battle for the bucks, Milt Neidenberg, Workers World (US), April 17, 2003 -- Korea, South and North, at Risk, Chalmers Johnson, Mother Jones (US), April 17, 2003 -- Please, prove us peaceniks wrong, Peter FitzSimons, Sydney Morning Herald, April 17, 2003 -- On to Syria?, Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive (US), April 16, 2003 -- Mondo Washington: Our Man in Baghdad, James Ridgeway, Village Voice (US), April 15, 2003 -- Waiting In The Wings: North Korea's Bomb, John Clearwater, Winnipeg Free Press, March 23, 2003 -- In This War, Products are Targets Too, The Holmes Report (US), March 12, 2003 -- Using The "UN Process" To Help Organize A Massacre, Edward S. Herman, Swans (US), February 17, 2003 -- Report Explains the withdrawal of the DPRK from the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, Korean Central News Agency, January 21, 2003 -- Rule of the Pirates, Editorial, Black Commentator (US), Issue Number 19, December 5, 2002 -- The innocent dead in a coward's war: Estimates suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians, Seumas Milne, The Guardian (UK), December 20, 2001 -- The real meaning of the "war against terrorism", Peter Symon, The Guardian, December 5, 2001 -- 'It's a show trial without the show', Edward Helmore, The Guardian (UK), November 28, 2001 -- This Raging Colossus, Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian (UK), November 19, 2001 -- The Empire strikes back, Maria Misra, The New Statesman (UK), November 12, 2001 -- How a free press censors itself, Scott Lucas, The New Statesman (UK), 12th November 2001 -- Say what you want, but this war is illegal, Michael Mandel, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 9, 2001 -- It's the rich wot get the blame, Nick Cohen, The New Statesman (UK), September 3, 2001 -- The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply, Thomas J. Nagy, The Progressive (US), September, 2001 -- Neighbourhood Bully: An interview with Ramsey Clark on American Militarism, Derrick Jenson, The Sun (US), Issue 308, August 2001, -- Liberate Okinawa From a 'Rogue Superpower' -- The U.S. and Japan will be embarrassed if they don't take a cue from the Korean summit, Chalmers Johnson, Los Angeles Times (US), June 23, 2000 -- Declaration of the WFTU: Month of Solidarity with the workers and people of Korea, World Federation of Trade Unions, Press Release No.12, June 21, 2000 -- Korea -- Giant step towards reunification, The Guardian, June 21, 2000 -- US pilots 'sometimes attacked civilian groups' in Korean war, Sang-Hun Choe, Associated Press (US), December 29, 1999 -- Pentagon may offer immunity in No Gun Ri massacre, Los Angeles Times (US), October 24, 1999 -- The massacre at No Gun Ri -- Forgotten no more, Michael R. Allen, American Partisan (US), October, 1999 -- Korean war killing inquiry, The Guardian (UK), October 30, 1999 -- South Korean policeman accused of torturing hundreds turns himself in, Associated Press (US), October 28, 1999 -- U.S., S. Korea Gingerly Probe the Past, Doug Struck, Joohee Cho, Washington Post (US), October 27, 1999 -- South Korean Students Protest No Gun Ri Massacre, Associated Press (US), October 16, 1999 -- 'We followed orders' -- U.S. troops admit No Gun Ri massacre, Pat Chin, Workers World (US), October 14, 1999 -- Refugees Killed on U.S. Orders -- Korean War Veterans Recall Blasting Bridges Full of Civilians, Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Randy Herschaft, Associated Press (US), October 14, 1999 -- The Bridge at No Gun Ri, Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Randy Herschaft, Associated Press (US), October 1999 -- South Korea Provoked War with North, Oliver Lee, Star-Bulletin (US), June 24, 1994 -- The Korean War -- An Unanswered Question, Dr. Channing Liem, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, DPRK, 1993 From Waistline2 at aol.com Fri May 16 22:09:07 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 00:09:07 EDT Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 Message-ID: <172.1a8278ec.2bf70fe3@aol.com> >A good friend of mine last election, an African-American woman who feared Republican scorched earth policies that impacted on women and people of color, knowing full-well that Democrats were complicit, said - speaking of Nader-voters - a vote for Ralph Nader is an exercise of white privilege. < Aspect of the Modern Presentation of the African American National Colonial Question By Melvin P. How people think things out and their language to express politics - as they perceive their self-interest, is really a question of the art of politics. White privilege is an inverted way of addressing the issue of the unity of the working class. Perhaps the long way around is the shortest way home on this question of exercise of white privilege. The good part is that one can play their favorite song and enter a realm of a Marxist approach to the national and colonial question. As a child I earnestly thought the world consisted of basically white people and we - as African America, were different in a way I could not quantify or qualify. All my comic book heroes were white and my God concept - mother was a church going women, was more than less white. That is to say Jesus as the Son of God was white. Since neither of my parents advocated such a view nor spoke in these terms, much of these ideas came from schooling, the cultural medium, the ethical norms of the societal infrastructure and media. On the surface of my childhood thinking were ideas about white people being a majority on earth and superior, because that is how I thought things appeared. As we get older we learn that things are not as they may appear. Detroit contained what I would later come to understand as a massive concentration of Negroes - (at this point in time Negro was still popular having replaced "Colored" and term "black people" had not taken firm root to be replaced by African American), with all classes more than less coalescing in the same or similar neighborhoods. Similar neighborhoods means different economic area bounded by one another within a larger division based on color. A major street could separate a prosperous black neighborhood of skilled workers, lawyers, professionals and even doctors from a lower sector white working neighborhood. A lower sector black working class neighborhood hardly ever bordered a prosperous white neighborhood. What would become the modern technological revolution had not manifested itself yet on an industry wide basis as the application of new production processes. We were passing through what would later be identified as a quantitative boundary expansion - the transition from vacuum tubes to solid-state transistors, which created new applications throughout industry. This was expressed in a history-altering manner in Detroit and made possible what became the Motown sound, which in turn created a new sense of expression and feeling amongst the rebellious masses of Detroit and the country. This "Sound of Young America," - absolutely black, urban and hip, was not the historic sound of the South and arose during a period of social upheaval and technological innovation. The technological innovation was the mechanization of agricultural and the historic mass migration North and the post Second Imperial war world industrial expansion led by America. Detroit was also a center of jazz and the post war cool movement occurs within this context. What arose in the industrial sector was a form of sophisticated love songs with simple but clever lyrics, a new form of music with first tenor as lead, falsetto and a faster paced dance music. How the Motown music factory saw itself and its music was much different from how the music industry saw Motown and how the individual may have saw himself and his relationships in "society." That this musical form gripped America and carried forward the Cultural Revolution that broke out in the 1950s is without dispute. Scores of revolutionaries appeared in the music industry, but for my money the major seminal figures in popular music are Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and James Brown, with James adding the fourth beat at the base of all modern music. The cultural riots of the 50s prove in my mind the validity of culture (small "c") as an indicator of material unity of class and classes in America. Very little to nothing is written on the technology basis of the rise of the Motown Sound and why it could reconfigure its specific blend of European harmonic structure and African rhythm. Pioneering the usage of eight-track recording, large-scale utilization of equalizers, the five head microphone, the "echo chamber," plugging the guitar directly into the control console, isolating the drummer and remixing his time keeping function was combined with a youthful urban group of youngsters who not only could hold a note but also excelled in the enunciation of the English language. During the late 1950s and early sixties the industrial form of education meant that every school had a large music department and everyone was taught European harmonic structure - dough, ray, me, far, so la, tee and dough. Anyone that listens to Motown's early "girl groups" will immediately be struck by their power of enunciation. Motown's first official million selling record was "Please Mr. Postman," and one cannot be amazed by the power of articulation of these young women, which in a fundamental way expressed how these youngsters saw themselves. Much of "Please Mr. Postman," was reshaped and written by the young ladies. To this very day there remains a view that the Motown Sound was a black synthesis of a white synthesis of Southern black music - birthed in the chambers of slavery, as opposed to a development rooted in the urban industrial experienced and articulated on the basis of a certain stage in the development of instruments and mass cultural proletarianization. The dictum of the music language was not white but Northern. The Motown Sound is not a black expression of a white expression of Negro music. White American music articulation is not white - European, or simply an expression or mimicking by Anglo-Americans of Southern black music. These concepts of white and black do not adequately express the richness of American music, which is Southern/Negro (or Negro/Southern because there is no such division at this stage of its emergence) at its matrix. The category of white and black are simply inadequate, historically obsolete and belittle that rich is culturally distinct in our country, although this understanding persists in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. The answer to every historical question is contained in history. How we approach this history shapes the answer. There were only two fundamental sources of culture in the formation of America (USNA) - that of the Native peoples or Indigenousness Bands and the people of the Black Belt, while there is a Spanish hemispheric basis of culture. This is so because America was fundamentally Southern before the Civil War. Even the culture of the whites of the Black Belt is fundamentally based in the culture of the "colored people" as they evolved into what is called the Negro. Negro means black in Spanish but we at not a Spanish-speaking nation at our root and therefore imbues the word "Negro" with an American meaning. Negro means the specific historically concrete and material real people that evolved on the basis of the evolution of American society and not simply black because there are a lot of black people on earth and we are not talking about everyone that is black. Today Cuba is 70% black but we are not talking about the revolutionary people of Cuba and their evolution. No maturing national formation - America is still maturing, can have a culture that is simply the extension of another nations culture. The process of maturing in part means the creation - emergence, of a nationally distinct cultural form. The simplest explanation of this process resides in the fact that America is a nation of continuous immigrant with two exceptions: the Native peoples and "the black" - Negro, slaves of the South. This will seems absurd at first glance but that is why we are Marxist and attempt to unravel the underlying living movement - dialectic, of process and shape. Up until perhaps the outbreak of World War 2, the working class in America was expanded on the basis of successive waves of European immigrants. These ethnic immigrants carry with them the culture, language and customs of their native lands and require several generations to assimilate that, which is distinctly American in American culture. This generation process is not an absolute category but a description of process logic. For example, the ethnic white post War World 1 singer Al Jolson assimilated the Negro musical disposition and not simply something abstractly called "black." Every chance I get to watch the 1946 production of the Al Jolson story is a treat for me because the cultural dialectic cannot - not, be described. Let's face the issue in a sober manner; Al J. did much more than black face and sang more songs than Mammie. Yes, I would right now today, "walk a million miles for one of her smiles." Every time I hear his line, "the folks up North won't see me no more, when I reach that swany shore," I laugh my ass off and break into a wide grin. Yes sir, if I could carve me out a safe haven from official Yankee insanity "the folks up North won't see me no more." ;) This generation process operated on a different basis with the Native bands and the Negro people in history although there is a certain intermingling of peoples. The growth of the African American people in our country was not on the basis of successive waves of ethnic groups or tribes from Africa as immigrants and evolving on the basis of the expansion of the industrial infrastructure, as was the case with the Anglo-American people. The historical consequence was that the "culture" of the Negro People would emerge as the axis of stability in a land whose growth is driven by successive wave of immigrants. This process began consolidation in the historic old South where a most peculiar process unfolded. From time to time I am asked why the Native Bands and their culture did not become the primary cultural axis. This is a profound question that can only be approach as materialist. Once we admit that all of humanity exists on the exact same evolutionary plane, it becomes obvious that one can only enslave another that exist on the same general plane of economic development. Technological superiority - economic development, does not equal biological evolution. The Native bands could not be enslaved on the basis of private property relations because these property relations had not begun to take root in their culture. This does not mean that manufacturing was at a developed stage in Africa. What is meant is that slavery existed but the character of slavery varied. Slavery must exist for one to have a concept of selling (offering) another into slavery. Private ownership of 'means' appear as insanity to the Native Bands and outside the bounds of the personal possession of things. I am convinced they were right in their historical thinking. To continue. The various ethnic African slaves were consolidated as a class first - a class of slaves, and in the course of decades (perhaps a century) began to emerge as a distinct people that to this day defy the category called ethnic group or tribe. What accelerated this process of people creation and chemical mixture of various ethnic groups was the transition in the economy of America. The capitalist character of economy in America is very important. This was not a form of slavery were the "other people" are brought into the fold on the basis of the production of use-values and biological imperative - reproduction of the species. How does one say this properly? You cannot fuck your sister and first cousin in a continuous cycle and produce healthy human beings. Slavery also arises in isolated areas as a biological imperative. I did not want to get this deep. The development of this new people - the Negro People and not simply blacks, would enter its phase of completion in the post World War 2 eras. No one in their right mind would speak of the Anglo-American people as a tribe or ethnic group but a people formed and coalescing on the basis of various white ethnic groups continuously becoming Anglo-American. This process has generally been referred to as "the melting pot theory." Today no one can seriously talk about American culture that is not riveted to the cultural expressions whose genesis are the African American people. Actually, American culture means a peculiar fusion of European harmonic structure and African rhythm as it took shape on the basis of the formation and revolution of the Negro people. "European harmonic structure and African rhythm' is not limited to the music of sound but used also as a general cultural index. Walking and talking is a particular form of European harmonic structure and African rhythm. "Slapping skin" - a peculiar form of embracing on the basis of the handshake, is an expression of "European harmonic structure and African rhythm." Perhaps it is necessary to state again that the culture is still maturing, but it is fundamentally "black." This thing called "black" is being defined on the basis of slavery in America and not black Africa. Old ideas and concepts die very hard deaths. Marx once stated to let the dead bury the dead. OK, but what does one do when the living has to bury the dead in order for the living to advance to the next level? There is no need to try and understand the method of Marx if we do not from time to time shut our eyes and try and think out the process we are living and use his method and standpoint - our materialist conception of history and how we understand dialectics in real time. The most reactionary sector of the ruling class very well understands that the front line struggle to isolate and oppress the blacks is the cultural arena. Here is how class fragmentation is maintained and fought for in the ideological arena. There is no way to ideologically defeat the demand for reforming the health care system on the basis of point a finger at blacks because to many people are affected. Check this out! As the ethnic whites become "Americanized" they drift away from "European culture." "Negro culture" is filling the vacuum. Not because it is "better," although I hold that it is in fact better and define "better" as a materialist - a category moving away from historic feudal customs, and this poses serious problems. Everyone - revolutionary and reactionary, face the same problem because history poses the same questions to all of us. Cultural fusion if you will, means the emergence of the same generalized categories in which people think things out. No matter what our eyes tell us, the increasing separateness of the black masses is more apparent than real and the process fact is that separateness is being abolished and for the first time in our history there is a material bass for mass unity of the working class as an objective process of the infrastructure and in the ideological realm. We are at a new juncture. When someone says, "White privilege" I reach for my culture or rather analysis of the black masses as class and then masses. Why? Because we are dealing with a peculiarity of history, where a people evolved first as a class and then became a people and basically everyone else on earth developed as a people (distinct ethnic groups) and then fragmented into classes. What was called the black community as a specific formation and coalescing of various classes held together as a social category no longer exists as it did in other periods of our history, although there are large communities of blacks in most major urban enclave of America. This description of a social category where all classes were combined into definite geographic areas on the basis of the most violent white chauvinism is not the present configuration of American society. The black community does not exist as such as the social category that gave rise to the term black community. This old class configuration has been superseded, but the pressure of the reactionaries in the ideological sphere and the color psychosis has made us crazy and dampers our ability to discern class configuration. Snoop Dog does not live in my neighborhood or neighborhood like mine or your neighborhood. What are we talking about? The ruling class of America that founded and expanded what has become the multinational state of the United States of America is without question Anglo-American - white. The national figures to run for national office are without question fundamentally white. Why is this? To answer the color factor or "white skin privilege" does not answer why because this means, "Because they are white" and that is a circle of logic without a defined beginning or end. To answer because the Anglo American people are racist does not answer why and how did history present this thing called "white skin privilege" - a concept no Marxist worth his salt can uphold. The question has to be approached on the basis of how America developed and a developmental process particular to the Anglo American people. America as a nation of immigrant and coalescing on the basis of the various ethnic whites culturally assimilating the "Negro" and/as the inner meaning of becoming Anglo-American also means that the previously white ethnic politico's have access to a historically evolved national structure that allows one to enter the national political arena as Anglo-America. National political structures in America were founded and evolved on the basis the exclusion of the slave - African, and her descendant. This process is articulated as a category but today - after 225 years of development, it is not a hard and fast category as such. Black political figures that are perceived to have cast off that which is identified as Negro are slowing gaining assess to this historically evolved political structure. Let's look at this a little closer. A Polish politician who retains the heavy accent of his native land will catch hell running for any national office in America, as is the case with any "Slavic" person who is most certainly white. An Irish national with a thick Irish accent will face formidable barriers in a climb to national prominence, although one can claim a historic Irish ancestry. As these white ethnic politicians lose their ethnicity they begin to resemble the Anglo-American people perse, and this is the constituency base of the Anglo-American politician. The contradiction for the bourgeoisie as the opening form of a body of class politics is that very real fact that the base of culture for the Anglo-American people is black culture. On the other hand the absolute majority of African American politicians can only come to prominence on the basis of their constituency - the Negro or rather African American people. In this respect the African American politician to a degree resemble the Irish politician at the turn of the century. At a certain point in Irish immigration their mass was converted into politics and victories in political wards. The same hold for Italians. We forget that there is a national-colonial question in America and tend to lump all black people together and all white people together and this is not the political reality. The emergence of black office holders in the South is somewhat different from in the North, although this process had to unfold in the same time frame. I guess we are going to have to see a slew of fascistic Southern black politicians before we face reality. This is not to say the color factor is no longer pronounced in America or that discrimination is not very sharp and real. It is to say that staying on the level of "black and white" and screaming "white skin privilege," makes one lose sight of changes in present day society. The point is that what allows for a white person to ascend to national prominence and enter the national body politic is not white skin privilege as such. White skin is not a privilege within a historically evolved white political infrastructure, but a historical configuration mirroring the formation of the Anglo-American people and the various ethnic, economic and class tensions within the Anglo-American people. That the Anglo American people have a historic privilege over African Americans is not disputed. To make sense of how politics are being played out one has to mention the process in which the white ethnic minority becomes part of the Anglo-American majority. I have not a clue what is meant by a vote for Nader is an exercise of white skin privilege. Is a vote for Bush or Gore an exercise of white skin privilege? In my estimate the Nader candidacy represented the efforts to break away from the Democratic and Republican Parties - and contain this motion, a process Jesse Jackson played a role in during his first run for presidency under the banner of the Rainbow Coalition. What is being contained is a class motion no matter what the skin color of the forces involved or how the class motion of the lower sections of the working class expresses themselves. To advocate for national health care uninhibited or not limited and defined by ones income is a class demand because this speaks to and seeks to survive the striving of the lowest sectors of the working class in real time. Now the question of National black politicians seeking national office like President is simple and complex, but it is the only way I know how to get to the essence of this question of white skin privilege and what is generally called the petty bourgeois left and what a small section of Marxist in America have always called the petty bourgeois black masses. Here we are going to have to put on our thinking caps and leave the comfort of the womb of "white privilege." End of part 1. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 22600 bytes Desc: not available URL: From sherrynstan at igc.org Sat May 17 06:39:12 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 08:39:12 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 In-Reply-To: <172.1a8278ec.2bf70fe3@aol.com> Message-ID: <002501c31c71$549f15e0$0200a8c0@stan> Melvin, your comments are very thought provoking and more thought through than many we hear on 'race' questions these days, and both of us already know where we agree and where we don't on national-colonial questions. We are, in fact, quite close. But just as 'negritude', to borrow a word from Fanon and others, has been historically forged, and just as the African American people emerged into history as a distinct people, so has whiteness been historically-socially constructed and adapted - and not always economistically. Economism in unpacking race has been a huge pitfall for white Marxists, who have themselves 'naturalized' whiteness, giving it a kind of de facto normacy. This is an indication, I think, of the powerful ideological persistence of race, and we all know that ideology asserts itself as a material force. The white left has been content in many cases to call for "black and white unite and fight" and such, implicitly and sometimes explicitly claiming that socialism will dispense with this 'race thing' (and this gender thing) once and for all, because the material foundation of exploitation will be abolished, and with it, the evil flower of racial ideology. This mechanical interpretation of base-superstructure flies directly in the face of experience. Race is far more powerful than that, far more compelling than simple 'social necessity.' The very construction of the US 'white' working class, from its inception, has been racialized. It is no accident that so many left formations are still dominated overwhelmingly by white males, or that the inclusion of 'others' is so often and so glaringly tokenistic. Don't get me wrong. It is clear that class formation is still an essential subject for Marxists to understand, but I think we have erred in trying to subsume race and gender into class at every juncture, and I believe that has been an often unconscious exercise of 'white' male hegemony. Your arguments are certainly more historically grounded and nuanced than that, but I believe there is a construction of 'whiteness' and with it the construction of racial privilege. I fought against this when I was in the CP some time ago, because it was declared an official deviation, but in defending that position, I eventually found it to be untenable. It is not a petit bourgeois deviation. Denial is at the heart of white working class racism - which remains endemic - and recognition of 'whiteness" as a social construction is key terrain for an important ideological struggle. It is not privilege that has to be understood first, IMO, but whiteness, which has proven remarkably plastic - with one unwaiverable 'value' at its core - Negrophobia. This relates, I think, directly to the colonial condition of African Americans, a distinctly 'national' condition, in contrast to peoples oppressed by more transient and opportunistic forms of discrimination, and in contrast to the relation between dominant US society and indigenous peoples, who were marked for (and continued to be marked for) extermination. Whiteness only began as anglo-american. In the army special operations community, I saw honorary whiteness conditionally bestowed on Latinos, Pacific-Islanders, even West Asians, when they would conform in word and deed to the Negrophobia that characterized that whole culture. That didn't just mean sharing contempt for Black soldiers and Black culture, it meant conforming to "white' values and norms - values and norms that are invisible because they are counted as somehow axiomatic - with all else rendered deviant. These norms constitute a whole epistemology - one that is sought after from any variety of motivations as a condition of assimilation. Race and class, as Du Bois showed, is a complex dialectical dance. White workers in the US have historically refused to confront generalized exploitation at almost every turn, preferring to fight for their 'vision' of evading the most rigorous forms of that exploitation, for a racial division of labor that is at its heart colonial. I think you know what my friend meant about voting for Nader, too. I assume that was rhetorical. There is a real and immediate material difference in the consequences for Black and white (and men and women) of Republican rule (even if it asserts itself, as it did with Clinton, through a ratcheting process). At the very center of the Republican ideological agenda is white male supremacy. For the left to pretend otherwise is, I think, a little disingenuous. I may not agree with her across the board, but her attitude is a real thing and part of the mass political consciousness of African Americans. So is 'white privilege.' Forgive anything that doesn't hang together well here. I'm nursing my second cup of coffee. What a way to start the day, eh? Best, Stan From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Sat May 17 08:00:02 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 15:00:02 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz Message-ID: <001d01c31c7c$9d5fce90$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> This news about International Action Center (IAC) founder Ramsey Clark seems to me to have parallels with the signed public criticisms of Cuba. >From Jared Israel's newsletter: * Ramsey Clark Poses as Milosevic's Lawyer and Smears the "Client" on TV * by Jared Israel and Nico Varkevisser Research by Andy Wilcoxson and Jared Israel Reprinted from www.icdsm.org full text at http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/ramsey1.htm Since Slobodan Milosevic was kidnapped from Yugoslavia two years ago, there has been a media campaign using lawyers who make public statements in which a) these lawyers falsely claim to represent Milosevic, b) these lawyers compare or otherwise link Milosevic in the public mind to the most monstrous criminals and c) these lawyers argue that even such criminals deserve a defense, thus cementing the impression that Milosevic is, indeed, one of these war criminals. In this report we will examine the case of Ramsey Clark. (This is the first of a three-part series on Clark.) -- On Monday, 12 May 2003, Mr. Ramsey Clark appeared at a luncheon of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. At that luncheon, National Press Club president Tammy Lydel asked Ramsey Clark why he represented war criminals like Slobodan Milosevic. Tammy Lydel: Salon Magazine called you "the war criminal's best friend." Why have you represented the war criminals like Milosevic? ... --snip Ramsey Clark: Well the real reason is I'm a lawyer - and therefore never far from sin, as Kafka observed. ... -- snip ... But - um - it's a form of guilt by association to, to ask the question, "Why would you represent such a bad person?" Are they human beings? Do they need help? Is that your calling? You can't do it all, but you do what you can. -- snip -- [Emperor's Clothes comments] So by first affirming the lie that he represents Milosevic and then accepting the lie that Milosevic is a war criminal, Clark was strengthening the *false* impression among the public that Milosevic is a monster. ...... The video of the Lydel-Clark exchange can be viewed at http://video.cspan.org:8080/ramgen/odrive/iraq051203_clark.rm Go to the 47:40 mark...... -- snip -- james daly From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat May 17 10:57:09 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 09:57:09 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz References: <001d01c31c7c$9d5fce90$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <002801c31c95$5d32a1d0$20fa5718@comintern> Personally, and I am a defender of the Yuogslav people and Milosevic as far as this "trial" and most of the slander, I think Jared is simply losing his cool. He's just not worth reading any more, even though I still get these ICDSM mails. When he goes after Ramsey Clark, one has to wonder about his mental stability. Macdonald From zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk Fri May 16 21:38:19 2003 From: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk (Tariq Mahmood) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 08:38:19 +0500 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: managing Russia References: <007e01c31b7f$ead797a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <000401c31c8d$25197e20$780f38d2@k6n2c2> Mullah Naseer-u-din a legendry chracter of Turkish lore was once asleep at home when he heard great commotion down in the street. His wife persuaded him to go out and find out what is the reason. Mullah wrapping his blanket to save himself from the chil outside went down. In the street he found two thieves fighting over division of their loot. On noticing the costly blanket Naseer ud-din was wearing one thief grabbed it and both fled. When questioned for the cause for noise outside Naseer replied I persumed they were quarreling for my blanket, for no soon they got it the quarrel ended. So was probably the noise in the UNSC about war on Iraq for the blankets of the great powers. Once they get them there will be no noise. Tariq ---------------- "Michael Keaney" wrote: Powell strikes deal with Russia on debt Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow Friday May 16, 2003 The Guardian Colin Powell gave clear assurances yesterday that the new government of Iraq would repay its $7bn Soviet-era debt to Russia. The US secretary of state's commitment on the issue, which has become a big sticking point for Moscow, may bring agreement on a new UN resolution for Iraq a step closer. His comments came on the day that Russia's deputy foreign minister, Georgy Mamedov, said the issue was discussed at Mr Powell's recent meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Mr Mamedow said "very heated discussions" were going on in New York, but the matter would be resolved. Russia, which refused to endorse the coalition war against Iraq, said last month it would oppose any attempt to lift UN sanctions before weapons inspectors had returned to Iraq to verify it had been disarmed. Mr Powell had, hours before Mr Mamedov's remarks, said that, while the question of debt was not discussed during his visit, "we will try to find an approach on how to best solve this problem in some way, perhaps by extending the period in which the debt will be cleared, or maybe refinancing it, or perhaps something else". He added: "I've no doubts the new government will completely take into consideration its obligations towards Russia." He also said that the US would consider suspending sanctions rather than lifting them. Russia's financial concessions in Iraq, which include its national debt and a multi-billion dollar oil contract, have hampered negotiations at the UN. From bar at idirect.com Sat May 17 11:28:35 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 10:28:35 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz References: <001d01c31c7c$9d5fce90$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> <002801c31c95$5d32a1d0$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <00da01c31c99$d31b94c0$96089ad8@Chris> Macdonald, As a member of the ICDSM I can assure you that Jared's articles on the middle east the last few months really distress me, but I can also tell you that the facts set out in his article are correct and worse is to come. I am not sure what conclusion to draw as I know both Ramsey Clark and Israel. However certain facts about Clark's actions are puzzling to say the least and demand an explanation. There is some smoke there. But whether there is a fire I am not sure what to think. I, like you, have great respect for Clark and his work, but there are some things that just dont make sense.I can tell you that this attack was not authorized by me or anybody else on the ICDSM. Chris Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2003 9:57 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz > Personally, and I am a defender of the Yuogslav people and Milosevic as far > as this "trial" and most of the slander, I think Jared is simply losing his > cool. > > He's just not worth reading any more, even though I still get these ICDSM > mails. > When he goes after Ramsey Clark, one has to wonder about his mental > stability. > > Macdonald > > > > > From bar at idirect.com Sat May 17 13:43:19 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 12:43:19 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz References: <001d01c31c7c$9d5fce90$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> <002801c31c95$5d32a1d0$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <000201c31cbf$1e2b95d0$e4089ad8@Chris> Macdonald, PS. Also remember that Jared Israel would like to discredit Clark re his stand on Iraq. C ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2003 9:57 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz > Personally, and I am a defender of the Yuogslav people and Milosevic as far > as this "trial" and most of the slander, I think Jared is simply losing his > cool. > > He's just not worth reading any more, even though I still get these ICDSM > mails. > When he goes after Ramsey Clark, one has to wonder about his mental > stability. > > Macdonald > > > > > From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Sat May 17 22:54:57 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 05:54:57 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Re- Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz Message-ID: <005c01c31cf9$a1a27980$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> Perhaps I should not have ventured into an area (the politics of Ramsey Clark, and in general the anti-war alliances) about which I know next to nothing, and perhaps an egg (Jared Israel) cannot be good in parts (on former Yugoslavia). I am aware of the bad parts, and I was apprehensive about J. I.'s planned agenda. However, what Ramsey Clark said to Tammy Lydel seems to contradict what he said in Louis's quotation (on the marxmail list). Surely he should have at least been more careful with his words. He seems to have accepted unchallenged the description of Milosevicz as a war criminal, and to have given only humanitarian reasons for "representing" him (which by the way does not seem a true description of his role, whatever Milosevicz's motivation). I do not know what else was said, because the link Jared gave did not work for me, though I forwarded it in case it worked for others. james daly From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun May 18 01:53:28 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 00:53:28 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re- Ramsey Clark and Milosevicz References: <005c01c31cf9$a1a27980$bd106351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <003c01c31d12$92034310$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Daly" > Perhaps I should not have ventured into an area (the politics of > Ramsey Clark, and in general the anti-war alliances) about which I > know next to nothing, and perhaps an egg (Jared Israel) cannot be good > in parts (on former Yugoslavia). I am aware of the bad parts, and I > was apprehensive about J. I.'s planned agenda. However, what Ramsey I strongly caution people in assessing Jared's overall work on the things he has published since his stray into deep Zionism. Jared, like many people weak on their conviction to a class analysis and detached from the class struggle personally, has been rather weird since 9-11 and has been unhelpful at best since he embraced the last remaining Apartheid state. His work, as a researcher and an amateur journalist, on Yugoslavia before his retreat is beyond reproach. I personally, and I know both Chris and Louis among many, needed his extremely valuable research on Yugoslavia during the war. He provided first hand sources and verifiable proof of the Orwellian flip done to the entire situation, culminating in calling Nazis liberators and resistance fascism. That said, he has signed off from the progressive community with his grotesque apologia for one of the most disgusting, venal, racist and imperialist-laden regimes in history; Jared Israel was once useful and now is a bigger embarrassment to Slobodan Milosevic than Milosevic is to the left-- and I continue to defend he and would gladly shake his hand and break bread with Slobo, just not Jared. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun May 18 02:13:45 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 01:13:45 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark Letter Message-ID: <008201c31d15$770d39a0$20fa5718@comintern> Jared Israel has horrible judgement these days. I forward the letter written by his new "enemy". Macdonald LETTER FROM FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL RAMSEY CLARK TO PRESIDENT BUSH May 14, 2003 President George W. Bush The White House By fax: 202-456-2461 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear President Bush, The authorization to U.S. military personnel in Iraq to shoot looters reported in the press today must be rescinded immediately. Neither the laws of war, nor peace, or any legal definition of "American Justice", authorize soldiers, or police to shoot looters. Any soldier who shoots a looter has committed armed assault if injury results and murder if death results. You must not put this Iraqi blood on the hands and conscience of young American soldiers. During the racial turbulence of the 1960's, there was "Much loose talk of shooting looters." As Attorney General I said "this talk must stop!" "If America has a conscience we had best awake from this wild talk of shooting looters and face reality." "Far from being effective, shooting looters divides, angers, embitters, drives to violence... Is this American justice?" Deadly force, including firearms, can be employed only as a last resort when necessary to stop a direct and immediate threat to life. This new authorization to shoot looters compounds the excessive use of force employed against the people of Iraq by the shock and awe aggression already committed. It means the U.S. does not respect the lives of the people of Iraq and will use its armed might to kill them as it chooses. Only your immediate action can prevent more deaths and greater hatred toward our country. Sincerely, Ramsey Clark ********* Ramsey Clark will be one of the featured speakers at the MAY 17-18 National Conference Against War, Colonial Occupation & Imperialism. A full list of plenary and workshop speakers will be send out in an email later today. For a detailed schedule of workshops and plenaries, transportation to the conference, online pre-registration and more information, go to http://www.internationalanswer.org --------------------------------------- Email circulated by: A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition Act Now to Stop War & End Racism FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.InternationalANSWER.org info at internationalanswer.org New York 212-633-6646 Washington 202-544-3389 Los Angeles 213-487-2368 San Francisco 415-821-6545 To make a tax-deductible donation, go to http://www.internationalanswer.org/donate.html Sign up to receive updates (low volume): http://www.internationalanswer.org/subscribelist.html ------------------ Send replies to iacenter at iacenter.org ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From bobenoch at shaw.ca Sun May 18 04:17:44 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 03:17:44 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark Letter References: <008201c31d15$770d39a0$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <001901c31d26$b9c712a0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> I am a little bemused by this position of Clark's. A few weeks ago, much of the world, according to articles published without rebuttal on this and other left lists, was condemning the "coalition" for failing to take steps to prevent the despoliation of the Baghdad Museum, and dozens of hospitals. A tank, and a few soldiers at such locations, it was said, would have prevented these outrages. How would they have done so? By the threat, and almost certainly the fact, of "shooting looters". It seems to me that we cannot have it both ways . The real criticism is that it should have been done much sooner. I would be willing to bet that, during Mr. Clak's tenure the Smithsonian was not left unguarded. Bob From franka at fiu.edu Sat May 17 09:31:18 2003 From: franka at fiu.edu (Andre Gunder Frank) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 11:31:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] MODEST PROPOSAL: NATO INVADE BELGIUM AND NATO HEADQUARTERS (fwd) Message-ID: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ANDRE GUNDER FRANK Senior Fellow Residence World History Center One Longfellow Place Northeastern University Apt. 3411 270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114 USA Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 617-948 2315 Tel: 617 - 373 4060 Fax: 617-948 2316 Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/ e-mail:franka at fiu.edu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A MODEST PROPOSAL : NATO invade Belgium beginning with its own headquarters there! - made in the tradition of Jonathan Swift who during the Irish Potato Famine modestly proposed that the Irish eat their own children to kill two birds with one stone. The following message just appeared on the net: " Sent: Monday, May 12, Subject: URGENT Support the case against General Franks. Send signatures to support Court case against General Franks in Brussels. No impunity for war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Iraq. " Moreover, the same appeal has already been made and signed by far more than 100, 000 people to prosecute also in Belgium Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for War Crimes committed in Lebanon in 1982. The precedent for both is the Spanish civil court's indictment of Chilean General Pinochet for human rights crimes committed elsewhere and his arrest for about a year in the UK on that charge following Spain's demand to the UK for extradition. Several other European countries also indicted Pinochet, who was eventually returned to Chile on grounds of excessive physical and mental ill health to stand trial. The British Home Secretary supporting this indictment and extradition for a year was the same Jack Straw who after being promoted to Foreign Secretary recently toured the world war mongering for the attack on Iraq. Following that precedent set by himself, how about indicting Jack and his boss Tony Blair in Belgium and elsewhere as well. In face of all this imminent danger, NATO MUST INVADE BELGIUM. The US already warned that it was ready to invade Holland if any of its citizens be indicted by any of the UN Courts of Human Rights there. Indeed NATO invasion of Belgium and of NATO headquarters there is an urgent necessity also for yet another reason. On the same May 12, the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE published an op ed by Lord Robertson, now Head of NATO and during its War Against Yugoslavia, British Secretary of 'Defense." In that op ed, Lord Roberston, now of course based also in Belgium, specifically welcomed and even further promoted what used to be called Mission "Creep", but which he signaled to have taken a huge jump at the last NATO meeting, which converted into de Jure, what it had already done de Facto: Aggressive Expansion into Non-European Areas [which happen to have oil]. An apparently only minor problem, so minor as to have escaped Lord Robertson's attention, is that also first de facto and then also de jure, all this violates THREE separate principles enshrined in the very first Preamble paragraph of the NATO Charter [for word by word quotation see csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/ New World Order Section, NATO sub-section]: NATO [1] shall NOT Act '' Out of Area," that is the Western Europe and North America it was established to defend, 2] shall NOT wage Aggressive War as it did out of area in Yugoslavia and as some of its members then did against Afghanistan and Iraq, in which NATO only supplied logistic support, and 3] shall NOT act in any way that would be in violation of the UN Charter, which was violated wholesale in each of these wars - including the 1991 war Against Iraq, which despite the UN Security Council resolution then that was not forthcoming now, violated SEVEN separate Articles of the UN Charter, eg. 2, 27, 41,42,43,52]. So Lord Robertson could also be a candidate for trial in a Belgian court for his waging of war in 1999 and more than that also in violation of several Geneva Conventions, then as British Secretary of ''Defense" and now as Head of NATO, actively supporting the triple violation of its own NATO Charter. Since no appeal regarding Lord Roberston as well has yet appeared on the net, at least here, my MODEST PROPOSAL is to go whole hog and NATO INVADE BELGIUM AND NATO HEADQUARTERS IN BRUSSELS immediately, also in keeping with the Bush [son] Doctrine's waging of not only preventive but pre-emptive war, lest things get even further out of hand. For evidently there has been a major COUP d' ETAT at NATO Headquarters and perhaps also in Washington, which the poor Belgian judicial system cannot realistically be expected to stand up to all alone. Perhaps General Franks could offer his strategic talents also to the service of this WAR AGAINST WAR, which his Commander in Chief never tires of defending, as in 1984 Big Brother did in his assurances that WAR IS PEACE. A Footnote on Democracy Not a single NATO member country in 1999 submitted its participation in the NATO War Against Yugoslavia to its national parliament. The Canadian Prime Minister went so far as to declare publically that he could NOT afford to consult his parliament, because there would be some voices and votes against going to[an illegal] war, and that would give aid and comfort to the enemy. Now Europe's reputedly most NON democratic country, so much so that it is a supposed barrier to its entry to the EU dedicated to democratic princples, Turkey saw its parliament democratically vote AGAINST and thereby effectively PREVENT a US ground attack of Iraq through Turkey. Wolfowitz of Arabia just went there to tell them that they should now admit they had made a mistake. The Turkish government [against which the parliament had voted!] answered that it would do NO such thing. I guess NATO has to expand its invasion list also to another member country, Turkey. At least that is not out of area! From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Sat May 17 10:44:02 2003 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (Jorge Figueiredo) Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 17:44:02 +0100 Subject: [A-List] solidarity with Cuba Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030517173950.02a223a8@mail.telepac.pt> Dear friends, the last week the participants in the Conference" Carlos Marx and the challenges for the XXI Century" that had place in The Habana entre the 5 and 10 of May agreed on not ignoring the critical threat situation that Cuba lives after the war of Iraq. We consider that it was the hour of closing lines around the revolution in which so many hopes are played. Here I send you a communicate that was signed by most of the participants and I want you to read it and if you agree sign it and circulate it. We are happy with the endorsement we have received already. Adhesional signature can be send marxdream at hotmail.com A big hug Marta Harnecker Dreams and Nightmares Communique of Solidarity by Foreign Participants in the international conference ?Karl Marx and the challenges of the 21st century?? 1. Humanity has always dreamt of a better world, one marked by equality, solidarity, and the ability of all people to survive and develop their human potential. Today we are living through a nightmare, in a new era of world domination: that of armed neoliberalism. 2. The series of interventionist wars, from Yugoslavia to Iraq, traversing Afghanistan, constitutes what seems to be only the beginning of a longer process. 3. But fortunately the recent and immense protest against the war and in favor of peace has demonstrated that the people of the world , including significant sectors of the North American people, reject this nightmare. 4. This project is led by a group of leaders from the United States who don't only look to control the resources of the planet, but also to establish a universal juridical, political and moral order under their cynical hegemony. 5. These leaders are militarizing the world and are initiating what they call cynically ?preventive wars?. They do not hesitate to violate international rights and to generalize the inhuman practices inaugurated at Guant?namo. Further they do not hesitate to reduce the civic liberties of their own citizens and to destroy the democratic tradition of their own people. 7. They do not hesitate to adopt attitudes and actions with hegemonic and racist characteristics. 9. Cuba is at the doorway of the empire and it fears, not without reason, that it can be one of the next targets. There are many signs that support this fear: the growing media offensive, the accusations of terrorism, diverse type of provocations, an increase of the extent of the blockade, the financial support of opposition and of subversion, the announcement of future attacks on the country by government spokesmen. 10. Today Cuba is trying to realize those dreams of a better world. No one knows better than the Cuban people themselves how far they have to go yet to realize their dreams. But the political and social achievements of the revolution, the result of their socialist project, demonstrate that dreams can be realized. Those achievements and hopes for a better world are threatened by a power based in inequality, force and war. 11. Despite our pain about the recent use of capital punishment in Cuba, a pain we know is shared by the Cuban government itself, we understand that we must fight against the nightmare that threatens Cuba and all our dreams for a better world. We denounce the current process of violence on the part of the U.S. government. We oppose turning Cuba into another Iraq, and we reaffirm our solidarity with the Cuban people and their revolution. May 8, 2003 Listado Firmantes Declaraci?n Conferencia Carlos Marx y los Desaf?os del siglo XXI. Nombre Pa?s Alarc?n C., Sandra Colombia Albritton, Robert Canad? Alcaraz, Vicente Espa?a Alnasseri, Sabah Irak/Alemania Alzaga, Luciano Suecia Amezcua, Cuauht?moc M?xico Amin, Samir Senegal Bienefeld, Manfred Canad? Bond, Patrick Sud Africa Boulavka, Liudmila Rusia Br?ckner, Gerhard Alemania/Espa?a Burkett, Paul USA Campbell, Al USA . Chelala, Santiago Argentina Chernomas, Robert Canada Clarke, Simon UK Cole, Ken Inglaterrra Cole, Mike UK Comellas Carrizo, Carmen Espa?a Cooney, Paul USA Cordero, Teresa M?xico Cottrell, Allin USA Diaz D?az, Julio Espa?a Edwards, Se?n Irlanda Egan, Daniel USA Escobar, Heron M?xico Fainman, Fagie Canad? Fern?ndez G., Javier M?xico Ferrer, Salvador M?xico Foley, Barbara USA Gallardo, Helio Costa Rica Gil De San Vicente, I?aki Euskal Herria Guerrero, Diego Espa?a Harnecker, Marta Chile Hart-Landsberg, Martin USA Hodson, Diana Canad? Houtard, Fran?ois B?lgica Jim?nez, Lola Espa?a Kohan, N?stor Argentina Kotz, David USA Labica, Georges Francia Lebowitz, Michael Canad? Lynch, Colin Canad? Mar?n, Michelle UK Masondo, David Sud Africa Mavroudeas, Stavros Grecia Mcdonough, Terrence Irlanda M?sz?ros, Donatella Inglaterra M?sz?ros, Istv?n Inglaterra Miller, Nchamah Colombia Milonakis, Dimitris Grecia Monereo, Manuel Espana Morales, Manuel Bolivia Moseley, Fred USA Natarajan, J. India Nayeri, Kamran Iran/USA Ngwane, Trevor Sud Africa Orellana, Mar?a de Lourdes M?xico Ortiz, Dante Rep. Dominicana Rauber, Isabel Argentina Rolein, Strennie Belgica/Cuba Salem, Bassel Ismail Palestina S?nchez R. De Zapata, Matilde M?xico Skalon, Ana de Argentina Spassky, Andrei Rusia/Cuba Stanford, Mark UK Stein, Philip USA Su?rez, Federico Espa?a Torres, Jos? Espa?a Valle Baeza, Alejandro Mexico Vogel, Lise USA Ware, Robert Canad? Ya?ez, Gonzalo M?xico Yeu, Marian Canad? Endorsers of ?Dreams and Nightmares? Alpert-Sandler, Blair Greenbelt Alliance, San Francisco USA Andrews, Charles USA Bickerton, Geoff Research Director, CUPW Canada Bihari, Peter Hungary Bishop, Jordan Canada Bolden, Hilda USA Bonefeld, Werner Canada Briemberg, Mordecai Canada Carroll, Wm K. Sociology, University of Victoria Canada Cope, Zak Northern Ireland Daly, James Northern Ireland Djuric, Milan Serbia Dore, Elizabeth UK Emre, Halil Can Turkey Gentry, Douglas Carl USA Gettleman, Marvin E. USA Gibson, Rich Dr. Education, San Diego State University USA Gindin, Sam Canada Gorgzadeh, Marteza Toronto Free the Five Committee Canada Gray, Hunter (Hunterbear) USA Han, Deqiang China Janzen, Ed Canada Johnston, Jay USA Jones, Heather Canada Judson, Fred Political Science, University of Alberta Canada Krausz, Tamas Hungary Laibman, David Editor, Science & Society USA McLaren, Peter Professor, UCLA USA Menec, Richard Canada Moreno, Jose Professor Emeritus, Univ of Pittsburgh USA Pagliccia, Nino Canada Rathlef, Jeffrey S. USA Roberts, Bruce Economics, University of Southern Maine USA Saraka, Sean Canada Segal, Jeffrey UAW Local 2320 USA Sene, Rachel USA Stainsby, Macdonald Canada Thiessen, Janis Canada Torres, Carlos Canada Wood, Ellen UK Wood, Neil UK Yada, Dorothy Canada Yangxlun China Yates, Michael Associate Editor, Monthly Review USA --------------------- Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Currently based in Cuba. Can be reached via: Michael Lebowitz c/o MEPLA Calle 13 No. 504 ent. D y E, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba Codigo Postal 10 4000 (537) 33 30 75 or 832 21 54 telefax (at night): (537) 33 30 75 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 7918 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun May 18 10:22:25 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 12:22:25 EDT Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 Message-ID: <1e2.933a62e.2bf90d41@aol.com> >Melvin, your comments are very thought provoking and more thought through than many we hear on 'race' questions these days, and both of usalready know where we agree and where we don't on national-colonial questions. We are, in fact, quite close. But just as 'negritude', to borrow a word from Fanon and others, has been historically forged, and just as the African American people emerged into history as a distinct people, so has whiteness been historically-socially constructed and adapted - and not always economistically. Economism in unpacking race has been a huge pitfall for white Marxists, who have themselves 'naturalized' whiteness, giving it a kind of de facto normalcy. This is an indication, I think, of the powerful ideological persistence of race, and we all know that ideology asserts itself as a material force. The white left has been content in many cases to call for "black and white unite and fight" and such, implicitly and sometimes explicitly claiming that socialism will dispense with this 'race thing' (and this gender thing) once and for all, because the material foundation of exploitation will be abolished, and with it, the evil flower of racial ideology. This mechanical interpretation of base-superstructure flies directly in the face of experience. Race is far more powerful than that, far more compelling than simple 'social necessity.' The very construction of the US 'white' working class, from its inception, has been racialized. < Stan On most questions in life we are extremely close and I try and walk softly but firmly on this thing dubbed the national colonial question. Then I am a "tan Yankee" and have a generation's history as part of the more privilege section of the industrial workers and this colors my view even when I think I am being non-imperial in attitude. I most certainly agree and reject the flat and static traditional concept of "base and superstructure" as social categories when Marx and Engels were attempting to explain a dynamic relationship of society. What many Marxist call the fetish mediated dynamic of modern society might be a better framework to talk about "whiteness" after one has "gotten behind" some of the historical factors in American society that inform ones view. My tendency to describe social movement/motion riveted to material changes in how society is organized to work/labor is an effort to enforce a materialist conception - approach, and many times common sense is lost in the process. That is to say "why" something happens and evolves tend to be sacrificed on the altar of how - the context, in which the something emerges and begins to operate on its own basis. "Whiteness" contains its own logic and self-movement as an ideological form and as a material category that is a material relationship and reality in our life. Social revolution and most certainly the various political revolutions (politics in the broadest sense of the word) cannot abolish a historical configuration. Social privilege as being white is not simply fused into our system but the historical configuration of the system itself. Socialist revolution in and of itself cannot and will not abolish the primary features of this historical privilege because the societal infrastructure was as you state, the "very construction of the US 'white' working class, from its inception, has been racialized." This 'identity' of being will not just go away because one thinks it is not proper. 'Negritude', to borrow a word from Fanon and others, is a wonderful thing and the Anglo-American people as white 'negritude' contains its own logic and self-movement. The term Anglo-American means a specific national formation of white people and one encounters seemingly insurmountable difficulties in describing this process logic. The whites of the South and North of America are Anglo-American as is the majority in Canada. The identity of say these three different social groups who are Anglo-American who together are one large social group that has dominated and been guardian of the evolution of the industrial infrastructure is a historical and material category that is not "bad" or "good" as an abstraction. In this sense every generation that produces leaders as guardians/custodians of the societal infrastructure perpetuate the historical privilege that is bourgeois property relations. Abolishing bourgeois property does not abolish the historical feature of guardians/custodians but sets the basis for an evolution that is not antagonistic class movement. This question of the slogan "black and white unite and fight" has generally been presented in a non-class and anti-material perspective, as has the concept called "the white left." When the Communist Party USA raised this slogan in the 1930 the reason - "why," can be gleamed on the basis of "how" - the context. The context embraces the categories of politics, ideology and economics. At that time the blacks, to an overwhelming degree, were agricultural laborers to one degree or another - sharecroppers or working for wages on the farm. In the North many were service workers and a tiny section in heavy industry. What is clear is that the majority of blacks were not eking out an existence in the historically evolved industrial infrastructure, which was shaped on the basis of the importation of the ethnic whites and this is the area where the CP was concentrated. To an enormous degree the Marxism of our history was shaped on the basis of the white ethnic immigrants fleeing European reaction. The northern industrial workers could not decisively win their fight because the Southern senators and members of the House of Representatives held the balance of power. They held that power because the African American masses couldn't vote and these national politicians acquired their seniority and control based on the exclusion, isolation and terrorizing of the blacks. The lack of voting privileges of the blacks allowed the fascist and reactionaries to maintain a grip o Congress. All the progressive votes of the North could not overturn and upset the reaction based in the South. The only way to defeat Southern based reaction was to unite on the basis of the democratic demands of the blacks. The white workers were not prepared to fight for this due to economic competition and the material reality of whiteness as privilege - the right to enter the industrial infrastructure in front of the blacks. In this specific context what we ended up with was the fight for a unity between the white petty bourgeois democrat - liberals, with the blacks laborers. It was an act of political desperation and facing an impossible alignment of actual social forces that led to the CP putting forth the slogan "black and white unite and fight." The social alignment was that blacks and whites were in different areas of work - the economy, and was therefore economically disunited. This made it difficult for the communist to come up with a slogan that expressed the need for unity. "Black and White unite and fight" is abstract and impossible because people who are economically different and socially unequal cannot be united. No on can unite two qualitatively different things because these differences are framed in social life as different agendas. The agenda of the blacks was equality. The agenda of the whites was basically economic expansion. The communist could not win a fight within the working class on the basis of "Unite around equality of opportunity" because the socially privilege whites would not buy it. The socially privilege whites had fought the entry of the Irish into the working class because they lowered the wages of the working class from their actual standpoint and ideology. The skilled workers resisted opening their doors to the unskilled because this entailed the cheapening of their labor power and the disintegration of the components of their skill. Here the transition from craft unions to industrial unionism can be better understood and why it required a social struggle and fight within the working class. The working class always fights itself as an aspect of the social and class struggle. It was not different with blacks and more complicated because the black masses as a discriminated mass were primarily petty bourgeois in their economic status as sharecroppers and as farm laborers engaging what the traditional Marxist call petty bourgeois production. "Back and white unite and fight" was the best thing going at the time but an impossible slogan that could never work. The CPUSA - these historically loyal, primarily white ethic immigrants, honorable industrial warriors and champions of fair-play, ended up trapped by history and to this day cannot overcome what is basically an outlook that says "black and white unite and fight" against the bosses and corrupt politicians. Today we face a very different class alignment. Class alignment means the composition of social classes as they face and interact with one another. Today no one has to call for "black and white unite and fight" because class are politically mobilized on the basis of a common perceived need. There is no need to emphasis the color factor and when this is stated the white left works itself into a frenzy and scream that one is belittling racism. This is not true. The practical way to unite is always where there is relative economic equality. In a very real way 'Negritude', expresses this practical sense and striving of material unity. Appearance reality and white privilege as a mediated form of social existence is more apparent than real and more real than apparent at the same time. Blacks are hit the hardest because of their social existence in the industrial infrastructure and their social existence is the reality of how the working class took shape in our country. Just the trajectory of the technological revolution means that the less skilled sector of the work force is replaced as a social sector by the implementation of advance robotics and computerization, while the more skilled and most skilled is retrained on the basis of the technological advance. This is the reality of white privilege. This white privilege is most certainly bestowed upon non-whites as a form of class struggle and ideological unity with the ruling class because this is how the working class was constituted in our country. Some of the most ardent opponents of "illegal" Mexican immigration are Mexicans that immigrated to America one generation ago and in the course of time received citizenship. This "new racism" has at its core white privilege. I generally use the term white chauvinism because it gets behind the historical process from the standpoint of Marx. On the one hand every section of society is being hit hard and watching their wages fall as the value form unravels. This process is most certainly uneven and as long as the value of food products fall faster than the industrial product the appearance of stability of the value form maintains itself to a degree. As long as products with qualitatively less human labor meet the same products in the market with cheap labor the price form maintains certain stability. On the other hand the Republicans and Democrats both represent the same dominant sector of capital. It is easy to forget that Clinton reformed welfare, as we had known it and was the hand that inflicted a level of economic pain on the black masses that far surpassed anything done by the Reagan administration or Bush Sr. President Clinton was most certainly not a racist. The "white left" just don't get it and neither do those who contend that the Republicans will inflict more pain on the black masses than the Democrats. Below are some figures on the impact of the Democrats policy. >In 1996 this country's ruling class, led by Bill Clinton, pulled the rug out from under the poorest of the poor by declaring "the end of welfare as we know it." This cold-blooded measure denied the most basic help to those who have nothing. The government's cruel message to millions was "Sink or swim." In 2002 George W. Bush praised Clinton's "welfare reform," saying that it "dramatically improved" the lives of poor people. Now, in 2003, a new report has revealed one devastating effect of the government's assault on the welfare poor. Almost 1 million Black children today live in "extreme poverty"--in families who have incomes that are less than half the official poverty level. According to a report issued in April by the Children's Defense Fund, the number of extremely poor Black children has risen sharply in recent years and is now at its highest level since 1980. Households in "extreme poverty" are defined as those with incomes of less than $7,064 for a three-person family (half the official poverty level of $14,128). The number of Black children in extreme poverty shot up 50% from 1999 to 2001 (the last year for which figures are available). In the same period, the number of Latino children in extreme poverty rose 13% to 733,000. White children in the same group increased 2 percent to 1.8 million. > Here is the emerging poverty that indicates a specific historically emerged form of the class struggle. The Democrats did a job on women as a class, children and single parent female households. The most economically depressed and politically impotent section of women is those hit by welfare reform. "At the very center of the Republican ideological agenda is white male supremacy" and at the center of Clinton's policy was a distinct alliance based on social classes without regard to color. Clinton and the Northern Democrats do no suffer from Negrophobia as ideology as such. The sectarian polices of the Republican Party demands that their attempts at electoral victory must embrace the historically evolved reactionary South. Even here this ideological assault is more complex than black and white and deals with national chauvinism. The Cuban Mafia is by definition not white as in Anglo-American and bestowing "white privilege" of a huge sector of Cuban immigrants, who live at a higher economic and social status than white workers is not in fact "white privilege" but something else. The language structure and words I generally employ in discussing the national and colonial question and the color factor in history shy away from terms like "racism," "white skin privilege," "black nationalism" and "white people" not because I belittle the "color factor" but because we are trying to unravel and get behind a social process. White privilege means very little to the 2 million more Anglo-American children and their parent's recently pushed into intense poverty. We have no need to emphasize color generally speaking. I do not believe that Bush Junior is a racist as such but a fascist who by definition must employ aspects of the ideology of the historic fascist movement in America. Junior is not a throwback to the 1930s and 40s but a sophisticated ideologist of the ruling class. What primarily remains as difference between Dem's and Repub's are sectarian policy. More later Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 15746 bytes Desc: not available URL: From lnp3 at panix.com Sun May 18 13:22:00 2003 From: lnp3 at panix.com (Louis Proyect) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 15:22:00 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Ramsey Clark In-Reply-To: <20030518184704.10685.33480.Mailman@lists.econ.utah.edu> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030518151944.024c12e0@pop.panix.com> Let's be crystal-clear where Jared Israel is going with this bullshit. The third article will address the question: Then, third, "Ramsey Clark: Once an Intelligence Operative always an Intelligence Operative?" When you pose questions like this, it is a clear signal that you are trying to disrupt the left. It was accusations/insinuations like this that helped to destroy the radical movement of the 1960s. Be on guard, comrades. From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Sun May 18 15:06:51 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 18:06:51 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Nazis and imperialism: Help needed Message-ID: <3EC7CBBB.16460.3615C6@localhost> Dear comrades, particularly those in Germany! I need information (newspaper notes, etc.) on the following: During the early years of the 1976 regime, many union organizers were desaparecidos in the Mercedes Benz plant at Gonz?lez Cat?n, an outskirts town in Buenos Aires. Some years ago, it was known that these desaparecidos had been spotted by the management of the plant, including some former Nazis or children of former Nazis who had fled to Argentina after 1945. Now, there is a campaign against the auto workers union leader, Jos? Rodr?guez, who is no saint but would never have pointed out people for the disappearers nor keep silent during the kidnappings, only that he was in jail by those years. The pro-imperialist _Clar?n_ media group is heading now a campaign against Rodr?guez, because he has become one of the union mainstays of A. Rodr?guez Sa?. In this campaign, the false accusation that he let these workers fall undefended is paramount. Please send me anything you still have on the not so old proceedings of investigations and journal denounces against the imperialist management of Mercedes Benz. Thank you. N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Sun May 18 20:17:52 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 23:17:52 -0300 Subject: [A-List] RODRIGUEZ SAA/ DECLARACION DE LUJAN / DOCUMENTO DEL PLENARIO DEL MNyP Message-ID: <4132-22003511921752600@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98152003-05-17T00:52:00Z2003-05-17T00:57:00Z415388768win7317107679.3821 21 CONCLUSIONES DEL PRIMER CONGRESO NACIONAL DEL MOVIMIENTO NACIONAL Y POPULAR Reunidos en Luj?n ?Provincia de San Luis?, con la presencia de 584 Congresales, de los 24 distritos del pa?s y presididos por el gobernador electo del MNyP de la Provincia, doctor Alberto Rodr?guez Sa?; el candidato a Vicepresidente por la f?rmula, doctor Melchor Posse y el candidato a presidente de la Naci?n, doctor Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?, en las instalaciones de la colonia ?17 de Octubre? de SMATA, s?mbolo de la Argentina solidaria a reconstruir y con la presencia y coordinaci?n de su titular nacional, don Jos? ? Rodr?guez, se desarroll? el mismo los d?as 14 y 15 del mes de mayo del? a?o 2003. En el transcurso del Congreso se trabaj? en los siguientes talleres tem?ticos: 1. 1. Nuevos escenarios pol?ticos. 2. 2. Organizaci?n definitiva de la estructura del MNyP. 3. 3. Reafirmaci?n del Pensamiento Nacional. 4. 4. Propuesta pol?tica de coyuntura. 5. 5. Talleres provinciales distritales. Las conclusiones de los mismos discutidos en el pleno del Congreso y aprobados por unanimidad, dieron lugar a las directivas pol?ticas y organizativas a desarrollar por el Movimiento que preside Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa?, a partir de este momento. Finalmente se elabor? el documento pol?tico ? que se desarrolla a continuaci?n aprobado por el Congreso Nacional del Movimiento Nacional y Popular: DECLARACION DE LUJAN 1. El Movimiento Nacional y Popular, reafirma la voluntad pol?tica expresada por casi 3 millones de argentinos, de constituirse en la expresi?n de aquellos compatriotas dispuestos a construir un destino nacional, que entierre definitivamente la Argentina de la resignaci?n, recupere la identidad nacional, la cultura del trabajo y la solidaridad y sepa con sabidur?a construir los espacios soberanos de decisi?n, hoy acotados por el neoliberalismo econ?mico y cultural de los ?ltimos 25 a?os. 1. 2. El Movimiento Nacional y Popular est? abierto a construir un modelo social solidario en la Argentina integrado a Latinoam?rica desde el MERCOSUR, en conjunto con todos aquellos sectores del campo nacional y popular, que comprendan los desaf?os de la hora, alejados de especulaciones de los viejos y enterrados vicios de la pol?tica, como asimismo de las pr?cticas corruptas y perversas, prebendarias y extorsivas desarrolladas en los ?ltimos tiempos y verificadas en las elecciones nacionales de primera vuelta. 2. 3. La decisi?n de la construcci?n de una org?nica estructural del Movimiento, se constituye en un claro paso hacia la organizaci?n pol?tica, que permita encarar los desaf?os de los pr?ximos tiempos, en las luchas electorales y de construcci?n pol?tica, que nos disponemos a brindar en todos los distritos y municipios del pa?s, dando respuesta a los millones de compatriotas que abnegadamente, luchando en condiciones precarias y ante aparatos pol?ticos de a?os, fueron capaces de construir el camino de las ideas y los programas del MNyP, que mantendremos en alto como las herramientas vigentes para la construcci?n de una Patria sin exclu?dos, con la vigencia plena de los Derechos Humanos, con Desarrollo Econ?mico con Justicia Social, Libertad y Soberan?a Nacional plena. 3. 4. Los acontecimientos pol?ticos por los que atraviesa nuestro pa?s, son la m?s clara expresi?n del derrumbe de una cultura pol?tica, que nuestro pueblo ha rechazado y que se desnuda en toda su intensidad en el marco de la crisis electoral. Nuestra posici?n pol?tica ? desde la primera vuelta, presionada por ? factores de poder hacia la definici?n r?pida de falsas opciones. Ante esta situaci?n nuestra respuesta fu? contundente, la misma que desarrollamos en la campa?a, desde el debate de las ideas, las propuestas program?ticas y los objetivos revolucionarios en lo estructural de las medidas para los 100 primeros d?as, en la construcci?n de un modelo social solidario. Esa fu? por parte del MNyP la respuesta clara de nuestra oposici?n frontal al neoliberalismo tanto en sus formas de capitalismo salvaje como en el maquillado de la ?ltima etapa del actual gobierno. 4. 5. El Movimiento Nacional y Popular reafirma su voluntad pol?tica de ser protagonista, desde nuestra firme posici?n expresada en este documento, proponiendo los 15 puntos program?ticos y las 125 medidas en cada acci?n que desarrolle el gobierno, ya que los mismos son la s?ntesis de la Marcha de los Sue?os, donde miles y miles de compatriotas de todo el pa?s nos comprometimos a seguir trabajando en la defensa de los humildes, de los despose?dos, los trabajadores, los empresarios agredidos por el modelo, los pueblos originarios, los sectores medios empobrecidos, los productores rurales, los comerciantes, profesionales, t?cnicos y cient?ficos a los que se les apagaron las esperanzas y encontraron en el MNyP su contenci?n y s?ntesis. 5. 6. En estas circunstancias y en defensa de estos intereses del pueblo argentino, SOMOS LA OPOSICION, y estaremos apoyando al gobierno en aquellas medidas que adopte que sean conducentes al inter?s nacional. MNyP Plenario del Comando Superior Nacional y los congresales del MNyP de todo el pa?s, reunidos en Lujan, San Luis, el 14 y 15 de Mayo de 2003 Mart?n Garc?a 011 154.027-3093 martin-garcia at ciudad.com.ar Comando Superior Nacional Prensa y Difusi?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular Gustavo Valenzuela 011 155.060-2446 Vocero personal del Dr. Adolfo Rodr?guez Sa? Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP , deben suscribirse en:< altasmnyp at argentina.com > y altasmnyp at mnyp.org. En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a < bajasmnyp at argentina.com y bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista, con las debidas disculpas. Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en el MNyP , la mesa de mujeres de la Capital Federal nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos < mujeresbsas at argentina.com y mujeresbsas at mnyp.org PARA UN ARGENTINO, NO DEBE HABER NADA MEJOR QUE OTRO ARGENTINO. Mayo de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?. Nuestras paginas web son: www.institutofederal.org http://www.mnyp.org/ www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA, y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 100 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presentara el 7 de marzo de 2003 en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, que Ud. puede pedir personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486 o por mail al MNyP , El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP < mnyp at ciudad.com.ar , < mnypnacional at argentina.com La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . El Area de Participaci?n Nacional del Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina invita a todos los amigos a visitar la P?gina web del IFRA que es http://www.institutofederal.org/y la del IFRA Chubut. cuya direcci?n es : http://www.geocities.com/ifrachubut En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo perso -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 37365 bytes Desc: not available URL: From soncu at pacbell.net Sun May 18 22:14:02 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 21:14:02 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Saudi Arabia Message-ID: I just wanted to bring old two articles by Mark Jones to your attention once again: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2001-October/016389.h tml http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2001-November/016634. html Watching the events that are unfolding in front of our eyes, I remembered the above. Note that the second of these is entitled: "It's not about Afghanistan, it's about Saudi Arabia". Now, go and do a search on Saudi Arabia at any news service be that yahoo or google to see that Saudi Arabia seems to be on the verge of a collapse. In Mark's words, this is the era of Exterminism, the highest stage of imperialism, and it is getting worse by the day. We will see whether the US will be able to control the coming chaos that will emanate from Saudi Arabia or not. My bet is: It won't be. Best, Sabri PS. Because of my formatting the above links will most likely break. You may need to use the usual "cut and paste" trick. From hliu at mindspring.com Sun May 18 22:30:42 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 00:30:42 -0400 Subject: [A-List] U.S. Adviser Says Iraq May Break With OPEC Message-ID: <3EC85DF2.4010709@mindspring.com> U.S. Adviser Says Iraq May Break With OPEC Carroll Hints Nation Could Void Contracts By Peter S. Goodman Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 17, 2003; Page E01 BAGHDAD, May 16 -- The U.S. executive selected by the Pentagon to advise Iraq's Ministry of Oil suggested today that the country might best be served by exporting as much oil as it can and disregarding quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. His comments offered the strongest indication to date that the future Iraqi government may break ranks with the international petroleum cartel. "Historically, Iraq has had, let's say, an irregular participation in OPEC quota systems," said Philip J. Carroll, who formerly headed Royal Dutch Shell in the United States and now chairs a commission advising Iraq's oil ministry. "They have from time to time, because of compelling national interest, elected to opt out of the quota system and pursue their own path. . . . They may elect to do that same thing. To me, it's a very important national question." In an interview held in an anteroom off a cavernous ballroom at Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace, Carroll also signaled that oil contracts signed under the old regime are now potentially void or subject to renegotiation. Hussein's government had an official policy of steering contracts for drilling services, joint production and machinery to companies based in France, Russia and China, whose governments tended to be more supportive of Iraq in the United Nations Security Council. Though Carroll did not single out any potentially imperiled contracts, he asserted that the old system of preferential treatment ended with the demise of Hussein. "There will have to be an evaluation by the ministry of those contracts and a determination of whether they were made in the best interests of the Iraqi people," Carroll said. "Certainly, where contracts are, shall we say, excessively beneficial to one party, and that party is not the Iraqi people, and there is a legal basis for not going forward, then I would expect that the ministry would want to have another look." Carroll stressed that his first priority is resuming enough production of oil, gasoline and cooking fuel to relieve painful domestic shortages. Questions about Iraqi exports and the country's participation in OPEC remain moot for now. Sanctions continue to bar sales of the country's oil abroad, except under a U.N.-governed program that allows exports to pay for food. And analysts say it may be more than a year before there is enough oil produced for export to even reach OPEC quotas. But Carroll also echoed one of the chief goals of the Bush administration -- returning Iraq to its prewar export capacity as soon as possible to fund reconstruction. Iraq's resumption of oil exports under a new government would expose OPEC to considerable uncertainty. Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves. Flows of Iraqi oil to the world market unconstrained by OPEC quotas could further erode the cartel's already limited ability to set prices and might even trigger a price war, eating into the profits of its member countries. Such an outcome would surely delight the Bush administration as well as buyers of gasoline in the United States, the world's largest oil consumer. With that in mind, commentators -- particularly in Europe -- have contended that the real purpose of Bush's war in Iraq was to put in place a government that would break OPEC. Such an outcome would dismay the world's largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Carroll repeatedly rejected suggestions that he is an instrument of any such policy, saying that he is merely an adviser. "In the final analysis, Iraq's role in OPEC or in any other international organization is something that has to be left to an Iraqi government," he said. Already, officials within the oil ministry -- now supervised by U.S. forces -- are actively considering pulling Iraq out of OPEC and exporting as much crude as possible to maximize revenue once the oil fields have returned to full capacity, according to a senior engineer at the ministry. Asked about those talks, Carroll said: "That is a very good debate for Iraqis to have, and I think they ought to do what they believe to be in their national self-interest." Iraq's oil production historically has comprised 90 percent of its economy while bringing in nearly all of its foreign exchange. That flow of oil and money is needed more than ever, Carroll said. "I do believe the assertion that Iraq is going to need every bit of financial wealth that it can lay its hands on," he said. "The sale of Iraqi crude internationally is crucial to help all the other sectors of the Iraqi economy. Those economic and financial resources are going to be essential if the Iraqi economy is going to get back, if Iraq is going to be able to pay its people and pay its pensions and rebuild." Carroll's advisory board is today in fledgling state, counting only himself as chairman and his assistant, Fadhil Othman, a longtime official at Iraq's oil export agency. But as Carroll fills the board with others from the industry, financial experts and lawyers, he plans to embark on a series of studies to help the ministry set policy. Among the questions the ministry will confront is whether to break up the state oil empire and put some of its pieces into private hands. Hussein used the state apparatus -- centrally controlled by the oil ministry -- to skim profits for his family and funnel wealth to companies tied to his security agencies. Carroll said his team planned to assist the ministry with a study of potential structures. All options, from maintenance of the old system to complete privatization, will be on the table, he said. Carroll was careful to avoid endorsing any particular structure, but he warned of the pitfalls of maintaining a system dominated by the ministry and the state companies. "Highly centralized models are not always as efficient as they should be," he said. "They are prone to corruption. They tend to be more prone to the government seeing them as a cash cow" for funds for other purposes. Still, Carroll also suggested that an overly aggressive privatization would risk putting the oil companies "in the hands of a few people, so that the nation receives little or no benefit, but all of a sudden you get instant billionaires." The one near-certainty: The future expansion of Iraq's oil industry will be driven in part by foreign capital, Carroll said. He confirmed a report in the Los Angeles Times that he continues to own substantial stock in Fluor, which has already announced intentions to bid on contracts to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. He said he also has large holdings in Shell. Carroll said he had already disclosed these holdings to the Defense Department and announced his intention to recuse himself from the consideration of any decisions from which they could benefit. ? 2003 The Washington Post Company From cburford at gn.apc.org Mon May 19 01:12:28 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 08:12:28 +0100 Subject: [A-List] solidarity with Cuba In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20030517173950.02a223a8@mail.telepac.pt> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030519080819.02a15c70@pop3.norton.antivirus> There is silence on the American Enterprise Institute website about the seminar they held on Cuba last week. I assume the results will feed into Bush's announcement scheduled for tomorrow, 20th, of further measures against Cuba. It seems likely that some of the Neo-Cons are pushing hard behind the scenes that Cuba should be the next "tyranny" to fall. Chris Burford London From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 19 04:24:21 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 13:24:21 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 6 Message-ID: <000701c31df0$d04141c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> We now have arrived at the fifth and final chapter of Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade", which is titled "The New Imperial Model". It is a postmortem on the recently concluded war in Kosovo that shatters all of the illusions upon which this dress rehearsal for the war on Iraq and future wars was conducted. In contrast to sections of the radical movement that superimposed their own ideologies of liberation on the "plucky" Albanians, Johnstone takes an unsentimental view of the Albanian society and culture. This involves at the outset a consideration of the importance of blood feuds as part of the 'Kanun' (orally transmitted code) among the clans that reside in the province's mountains. Even among themselves, the "Shqiptars" (a more common term than Kosovar or Albanian) would carry out vendettas from generation to generation. Johnstone writes: "The male members of the victim's family are under obligation to kill the person responsible, or any male member of his family. To escape revenge, the men in a family caught in a blood feud may remain housebound for years, while their women carry out the tasks necessary for survival. This custom is reflected in the form of the typical Albanian rural home - a wall-enclosed compound, which can serve as a defensive fortress." On the face of it, this does not appear to be fertile soil for the growth of a socialist movement. Largely as a result of the failure of a coherent Albanian national movement to emerge, the region became part of Yugoslavia after the end of WWI. Johnstone does not really try to whitewash the record of Belgrade's role in assimilating Kosovo and even compares the agenda of the early state to Zionism or other traditional forms of colonialism. But is it fair to judge Titoist Yugoslavia from this perspective? There is a tendency to view the Albanian nationality through the prism of other oppressed groups such as the Kurds. For example, in a 1999 Z Magazine interview, Noam Chomsky said, "Or consider Turkey, a neighbor to the former Yugoslavia. By a very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo." Unfortunately, there seems to as much forethought in this comment as there was when Chomsky added his name to the CPD anti-Cuba petition. Turkish repression against the Kurds means first and foremost the violent campaign against a language. Amir Hassanpour, a leading Kurdish scholar, has written in "Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan": "Physical violence and separation from one's own family were some of the other methods used in Turkish schools to prevent the student from speaking Kurdish. Students were also punished for speaking their language outside the classrooms during the breaks. Boarding schools were established in 1964, in order to isolate students for the greater part of the year and to encourage them to forget their mother tongue." Nothing like this ever happened to Albanians in Yugoslavia. From the time of the birth of Tito's Yugoslavia, not only was there an attempt to raise literacy levels throughout the republic, but in the native language of all the peoples. Johnstone claims, "Despite a severe shortage of able to provide a instruction in Albanian, serious efforts were made to educate the Albanians of Kosovo, including girls and women, in their own language." (Her source on this and many other matters of fact is Miranda Vickers's excellent "Between Serb and Albanian: a History of Kosovo", a reliable source despite Vickers's open advocacy of Albanian nationalism.) Also, according to an Albanian professor at Pristina University in 1981, "not a single national minority in the world has achieved the rights that the Albanian nationality enjoys in Socialist Yugoslavia." Only the Hungarians in Romania and the Swedes in Finland had their own universities, but neither had the kind of autonomy enjoyed by the Albanians. To continue the false analogy with the Kurds one step further, it is commonly acknowledged that the Ankara government withholds development funding for the Kurdish region. However, Belgrade introduced electrification, paved roads and sewages systems into Kosovo for the first time in its history. Despite such efforts, Albanian resentment grew. Even though it was progressive to allow Albanians to be taught in their own language, there were side effects. Since written Albanian was a relatively new phenomenon, there were no large-scale libraries in Kosovo that could serve education and technical advancement. Schooling in Serb would have provided greater access, but at the expense of nationalist resentment. Such are the contradictions of the national question in Yugoslavia that mattered little to European and North American radicals who projected their own schematic understandings on a poorly understood terrain. But no amount of affirmative action could make up for centuries of underdevelopment and a retrograde paternalistic social structure. Unemployment and illiteracy not only remained deeply entrenched but accelerated during the financial crisis of the 1980s. When Kosovo began to erupt in secessionist protests, Belgrade began to crack down. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the confrontation was most often viewed as a variation on the Turkey-Kurdish conflict. Once this view became popular in the world of Western NGO's, there was little that Yugoslavia could do to reverse the perception, just as there is little that Cuba can do today to reverse the perception in this milieu that it is a totalitarian dungeon. The only thing one can hope for is that the radical movement can view such things impartially. Given the defection of a large part of the left into NGO liberalism, our work seems cut out for us today. The job of demonizing Yugoslavia fell to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) just as it had a decade earlier in Nicaragua. The editor of Kosovo's main newspaper, which had become the beneficiary of NED and Soros Foundation largesse, announced that Kosovo had become "the world's biggest non-governmental organization." With NED funding, the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedom circulated reports worldwide condemning Serb repression. Because the goal was secession, the reports had a one-sided character. In light of its historical record, is it of any wonder that Cuba would crack down on an NED inspired opposition? What is truly of wonder is the inability of people like Noam Chomsky to take this record into account before signing petitions on a half-cocked basis. NED funding made it possible for the Council to support a network of 2,000 volunteers in the province while its inflammatory reports went out unimpeded to a score of human rights agencies and the media. Despite all this, Kosovo was characterized as being in the grips of a fierce repression that was likened to either Hitler's or Stalin's--or in some quarters, a combination of each. After NATO's war began, the Council continued to be the main source of "human rights abuses" in the west. It was joined by high officials of the German government, who felt free to make up atrocity stories of the same kind that marked recent media coverage of both wars in Iraq. Not only did defense minister Rudolf Scharping claim that a genocide was in progress in Kosovo, it appeared to be carried out with a relish that might have even shocked the Nazi high command: "it is recounted that the foetus was cut out of the body of a dead pregnant woman in order to roast it and then put it back in the cut-open belly... that limbs and heads are systematically cut off, that sometimes they play football with heads..." In the aftermath of the ouster of the Serbs, the Milosevic government found itself the target of the same "human rights" intervention that had served NATO's goals in Kosovo itself. The USA openly poured money into coffers of rival parties, such as the one led by Zoran Djindjic, the recently assassinated politician who spearheaded privatization and austerity. The NED lavished millions of dollars on "Otpor" (Resistance), a youth group that expressed no other goal except to be "normal" on western terms. When the west is making war and enforcing economic hardship against "abnormal" forces in one's country, it is no wonder that many will seek this kind of normalcy. In Nicaragua, this is what Reagan called "crying uncle". In the first round of Serb elections on September 24, 2000, Milosevic failed to gain re-election but his rival Kostunica failed by 2 percent to achieve the 50 percent required for victory. Instead of following Yugoslav law, he encouraged the NED-funded opposition to take to the streets in a "democratic revolution". In practice this meant storming and setting fire to the parliament building, a so-called "symbol of the Milosevic regime". Images of this violent attack were depicted in an endless television loop reminiscent of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue. If this wasn't enough, a gang of thugs was bussed in from the town of Cacak, whose fiercely anti-Communist mayor Velimir Ilic openly boasted described his activists as "ex-parachute troops, former army and police officers as well as men who had fought in special forces". Some of these commandoes had undoubtedly fought in Croatia and Serbia, where the same kind of reckless and violent behavior on behalf of "ethnic cleansing" was now winning them plaudits from exactly the same panoply of "human rights" leftists who had urged military intervention to stop Serb aggression in the first place. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 19 05:43:48 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 07:43:48 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: Sour taste of victory References: Message-ID: <009c01c31dfb$ea007080$c9b7fea9@anne> Novak has good relations with the RNC, but remains a thorn in their side. A conservative himself he actually points out the RNC's hypocrisies, sell-outs, and sometimes even their corruption. In return, he is subject to periodic smear campaigns for being "anti-Semitic" when in reality he is one of a handful in DC who publicly criticizes Israel, and questions the wisdom and justice of the US's total commitment to that - as the French say - "shitty, little country." For a mainstream reporter operating in the current jingoistic atmosphere, that's a whole lot more than the usual cheerleading and "Israel uber alles" fare. Slowly, very slowly, it is becoming "okay" for Republicans to criticize Bush - from the shadows - and only because a few are beginning to sense how quickly and how badly neo-conism could go seriously wrong. Since the wheels may well come off the economy entirely over the next six months, Bush may soon lose his teflon war covering. Novak is clearing a path here for the dissidents. -A. Sour taste of victory Robert Novak May 19, 2003 WASHINGTON -- As all good leaders should be, George W. Bush is a positive thinker. So, in private conversation, he exults about how well things have been going in occupied Iraq. It takes a brave soul to look the president of the United States in the eye and talk about the sour taste in Iraq following the stirring military victory of Anglo-American forces, but a few Republicans are doing just that. Nor is Iraq the only place whose condition worries members of President Bush's own party and even high-ranking officials in his administration. In Afghanistan, U.S. officials are experiencing the frustrations that foreign occupiers have experienced there for more than a century. The roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace shows signs of being strangled at birth. And the terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia open the way for destabilization of the kingdom. With desperate Democrats trying to seize on all these troubles as the 2004 presidential race gets off to an early start, no Republican is going to be popular at the White House by making rain over Bush's victory parade. Politics aside, however, the outlook is troubled. -- Iraq: When Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to the war, he offered no clear plan for occupying Iraq. Worried Republicans in Congress still have not heard one. Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the first American proconsul, departed for Iraq without giving Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar the opportunity to question him about his plans. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the new American proconsul, is highly regarded by the Pentagon, State Department and Congress. Still, even he cannot function without a plan. Growing concern among Republicans was reflected last Wednesday when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee to request funds for the occupation of Iraq. The partisan Democratic rant of Sen. Robert Byrd could be written off, but not the intense dialogue between Rumsfeld and a veteran Republican stalwart, Sen. Pete Domenici. Normally not prone to criticizing the Bush administration, Domenici worried "that the victory we claim is not a victory at all." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently conferred privately with Lugar about Iraq, to the chairman's satisfaction. He will go before Lugar's committee this week with Republicans demanding a more coherent explanation of strategy than Rumsfeld's. -- Afghanistan: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican from California who was a Reagan White House speechwriter, went on the House floor May 6 to accuse the State Department of squandering the fruits of military victory in Afghanistan. An old Afghan hand, Rohrabacher complained that the anti-Taliban fighters who collaborated in the military victory are being cut out of the governing process. U.S. officials "are pushing the wrong way in Afghanistan," he declared. Rohrabacher's warnings are dismissed by State Department officials, who contend that no foreign power has ever managed to control Afghanistan beyond the gates of Kabul and accuse the congressman of angling for a piece of the action. Nevertheless, more and more Republicans in Congress believe the Afghan policy has gone awry. -- Israel-Palestine: "Realistically, I would say that the roadmap appears to be dead," a senior State Department official told me after Secretary of State Colin Powell's failed Middle East mission. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon guaranteed failure when he announced his visit to Bush in Washington to undercut Powell. If Bush does not counter Sharon's intransigence, the message sent throughout the Middle East will worry those Republicans who see the need for a Palestinian state. -- Saudi Arabia: CIA briefers last week said the new terrorist bombings signified not lack of will by Crown Prince Abdullah but a lack of means. Nevertheless, the barrage of U.S. criticism directed against the Saudi government threatens destabilization of another Arab country. How, ask some thoughtful Republicans, can the U.S. take on this added burden? That burden is a quasi-imperial one. The president's avowed aim of bringing democracy to a region that has never known it faces massive problems -- beginning with Iraq. The dispatch of 15,000 more U.S. troops for occupation duty may be only the down payment. The heartiest celebration over the fall of Baghdad clearly is in the past. ?2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 19 05:50:23 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 14:50:23 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Saudi Arabia Message-ID: <007401c31dfc$d497fb40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The article below comes courtesy of David Quarter via Marxmail. The position of The Times in British newspapers deserves scrutiny, if only because it was once the "paper of record" and a leading "opinion former". The acquisition of the title by Rupert Murdoch, and its subsequent dumbing down, coupled with the launch of The Independent, has reduced the Times' influence, but it remains an important media outlet. These days the title goes head-to-head with Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph, vying for an ostensibly Conservative readership. But there are subtle differences, again illustrating the gulf between the more business-savvy Murdoch and the more ideologically-inclined Black. For whereas the Telegraph is a repository of punk Thatcherite little Englanderism, hysterically europhobic and slavishly pro-US, the Times affects a greater detachment as befits a quintessentially British establishment organ. In fact it hosts various strands of centre-right opinion, and has taken some very interesting stances with respect to the Conservative Party. Under editor Peter Stothard the paper conducted a reasonably successful vendetta against the Conservatives' former treasurer, "Lord" Michael Ashcroft, whose business dealings in Belize are notoriously fishy as regards tax liability. Ashcroft controls most of Belize's telecommunications, which are so expensive that even British embassy staff there are encouraged to cut costs by using alternative modes of communication (according to Private Eye, a careful student of Ashcroft's dealings). Ashcroft was embroiled in the Tyco scandal, where he had been a director appointed by disgraced ex-CEO Dennis Kozlowski. Kozlowski had bought a house in Florida from Ashcroft's wife at a market price, with the house having previously changed hands for a song, "Lady" Ashcroft having "bought" it from, yes, you guessed it ... "Lord" Ashcroft. The Times effectively chased Ashcroft out of the Conservative Party. Even today it retains a rather grim view of Iain Duncan Smith's leadership of the party, although should a brighter prospect arrive it would be inclined to revert to type and support, once again, the Conservative Party. While not exactly pro-eurozone membership, the Times does not slavishly follow the Murdoch line on this issue. A major constituency of the Times is that section of establishment opinion which encompasses the Foreign Office and other self-appointed guardians of the "national interest", including MI6. It has long been argued here that MI6 (or at least a working majority of that organisation) has an agenda quite separate to that of the US, and has been in the ascendant ever since the mid-1980s (perhaps as a result of the Westland affair? see archives) with the aim of re-orienting Britain away from its "special relationship" with the US and towards its European "destiny", as Tony once put it. Thus The Times takes some very interesting positions on foreign policy, including a rather more critical stance on the Yugoslavia bombings (in line with the policies of the Major government as overseen by Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind). In this connection it may be worth noting that Mick Hume, former editor of LM magazine and once leading light of the Revolutionary Communist Party, is a regular columnist for The Times. See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,1054,00.html The article below bears all the hallmarks of intelligence service involvement, and again underlines the essentially anti-US agenda of certain key elements of the British state. A major clue is the reference, clothed in affront, to a CIA-backed outfit working to overthrow the government of a *Commonwealth* country, no less. That'll shake up the Carlton Club, make no mistake. More relevant for us is the timing of Vinnell's appearance in Saudi Arabia -- "almost 30 years" ago, which would be around the time that Treasury Secretary William Simon was busy coaxing the Saudis to reinvest their petrodollars in dollar-denominated assets whilst promising them a seat on the International Monetary Fund if they get OPEC to agree to a ruling rendering the international oil trade completely dollarised. Which, of course, they did. ----- May 14, 2003 In the shadows Firm was 'cover for CIA' By Ian Cobain The Times AS BEFITS a company that has been accused of being a CIA front, of recruiting "executive mercenaries" and attempting to overthrow the Prime Minister of a Commonwealth state, the Vinnell Corporation kept a low profile in Riyadh. Its discreet security fooled nobody, however: the bomb attack was the second it has suffered in eight years. In 1995 seven people were killed. This shadowy corporation is said to have been founded during the Depression. Dan Briody, author of The Iron Triangle, a study of Vinnell's one-time owners, the Carlyle Group, serialised last week in The Times, says that there is "no publicity, no press releases, no news clippings". He adds: "No one knows who the original owners were." Vinnell's work in Saudi Arabia dates back almost 30 years, when it won a contract to train Saudi troops to guard oilfields. A congressional inquiry found that it had agreed a "no Jews" clause. In the 1991 Gulf War Vinnell employees were seen fighting alongside Saudi troops. The company has helped the Saudis build their National Guard from 26,000 troops to around 70,000. In the early Eighties Time magazine reported that two employees were embroiled in a failed attempt to overthrow Maurice Bishop, the left-wing Prime Minister of Grenada, and soon after that a former employee was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 19 07:27:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 16:27:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <00ac01c31e0a$6ae4ed80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> "The IRA have said they will not attempt to kill Scappaticci. They want him arrested by the Stevens team so they can humiliate the British government over its role in Ulster's 'dirty war'." ----- The beauty of this is that the British government being humiliated no longer exists, thus the British government can quite afford the humiliation. However, as a way of further eroding the entire political and ideological basis for continued British occupation of Northern Ireland, this sort of "humiliation" is most useful, both to Sinn Fein and the British government. ----- 'Scappaticci's lying ... he is Stakeknife' Exclusive: Former military intelligence spy handler confirms identity of Britain's double agent inside the IRA By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor The Sunday Herald, 18 May 2003 A BRITISH intelligence officer who ran the IRA double agent codenamed Stakeknife within the highest ranks of the Provos has spoken exclusively to the Sunday Herald, confirming that the spy was indeed Freddie Scappaticci. Last week, the Sunday Herald revealed that Scappaticci was Stakeknife. Since then, many British newspapers and television stations have been told the same by their own security force sources. But Scappaticci has denied being a double agent, although he did admit he was part of the 'Republican movement'. After leaving his house in west Belfast for an 18-hour period after the story broke, to be debriefed by British intelligence, he told his handlers that he did not want to be relocated and would instead return to Andersonstown to 'bluff it out'. His denials were categorically rebuffed, however, by an officer from the Force Research Unit -- the British Army's ultra-secret agent-handling wing -- who ran Stakeknife as an agent inside the IRA. He said: 'Scap [Scappaticci] is Stakeknife and Stakeknife is Scap. It's as simple as that.' The FRU officer reconfirmed that Stakeknife had been allowed to take part in murders in order to keep his cover in the IRA and continue passing top-grade intelligence to the British. He also admitted that at least one innocent man was allowed to die to ensure Scappaticci's cover. In total, the FRU handler says the running of agent Stakeknife may have cost up to 40 lives. Despite claiming that Scappaticci was a top IRA hitman -- allegedly specialising in shooting British soldiers -- before he was turned as a double agent by the FRU, the army handler justified the use of agents like Stakeknife, saying: 'It saved more lives than it cost.' Other claims made by the FRU handler centred on Scappaticci providing devastating intelligence on senior Republicans. This information included Scappaticci telling British intelligence that he personally witnessed a very high-profile Republican shoot an informer in the head, and Scappaticci providing information which allowed British intelligence to turn two close relatives of another very high-profile Republican into army agents. On Thursday, a former British soldier who worked undercover inside the IRA for the intelligence services, walked into a London police station and made a complaint against Scappaticci. Kevin Fulton, a covername for the former agent, claimed that Scappaticci had threatened to kill him as he suspected Fulton was an informer. However, on Saturday morning police raided Fulton's home under an Official Secrets Act warrant. Nobody has been able to contact Fulton since the raid. By coincidence, a whistleblowing former FRU officer, who uses the covername Martin Ingram, issued a public statement around the time Fulton was being raided. Ingram, who did not reveal to this newspaper that Scappaticci was Stakeknife, said he told the team of detectives investigating collusion between the British state and paramilitaries -- working under Scotland Yard commissioner Sir John Stevens -- of the existence of Stakeknife three years ago. He called for the Stevens team to take Scappaticci into protective custody. 'It was clear to me,' Ingram said, 'that [police] were well aware of both Stakeknife's role and activities prior to me meeting them.' The Stevens team, which has said it wants to interview Stakeknife, has documentary evidence that Scappaticci is the double agent. Ingram said Stakeknife had 'appeared to act illegally while operating under the cover of an agent of the state', adding: 'I am deeply disturbed that Stakeknife is still reportedly living in Belfast. I don't know whether he had decided to put himself in this situation or if he was asked to do so by his handlers. What I do know is that it is the duty of the Stevens team to put this man beyond harm's way.' Ingram said he feared Scappaticci would be killed unless the Stevens team 'acted immediately'. Ingram also said he had given 'the identity and role of Stakeknife' to the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, in August last year. Speaking to the Sunday Herald, O'Loan said Ingram had passed her this information, adding that she had forwarded the details to the Stevens team. Questions are now being raised why Stevens has not yet spoken to Scappaticci. Scotland Yard said they would not discuss any plans to interview, arrest or take Scappaticci into protective custody. The Republican movement is privately admitting that Scappaticci is Stakeknife, although publicly Provos and Sinn Feiners say he should be treated as 'innocent until proven guilty'. It is understood that the FRU has Scappaticci's house under 24-hour surveillance. The IRA have said they will not attempt to kill Scappaticci. They want him arrested by the Stevens team so they can humiliate the British government over its role in Ulster's 'dirty war'. The Sunday Herald, however, understands that the Provos are worried the Real IRA may try to kill Scappaticci before he is approached by the Stevens team. Some of those who died to protect Stakeknife have relatives connected to the Real IRA. From pbond at sn.apc.org Mon May 19 07:20:22 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 15:20:22 +0200 Subject: [A-List] (Fwd) Mugabenomics: Cars 'on diet' but luxury imports still plentiful... Message-ID: <019201c31e0b$76fa3b10$049f22c4@Patrick> Business Day (SA), 18 May Zimbabweans told to put cars on 'diet' Harare - "Put your car on diet! Save fuel" was the message sent to drivers in Zimbabwe this week as the critical shortage of foreign exchange needed to import fuel continued to hit motorists hard. An information sheet entitled Fuel Facts and produced by oil firms and commercial and industrial groups confirmed that the fuel situation "continues to be critical." Even fire and ambulance services have not been spared. The capital's municipality announced this week that all services requiring transport had been grounded - including fire engines and ambulances. One of Air Zimbabwe's passenger jets had to land in neighbouring Zambia on its way from London last week to re-fuel. The government has this week been frantically seeking 75 million dollars needed to import fuel. While the official exchange rate is 824 Zimbabwe dollars to the greenback, or around 1,300 on the underground market, this week the parallel rate surged to an unprecedented high of 2,700 to the dollar, dealers said. As a result very little foreign exchange makes it through to the central bank. Media reports also said the government had been trying to revive a stalled deal with Libya to trade agricultural products for fuel. The plan failed last year when Zimbabwe was unable to supply the promised goods due to low agricultural production, blamed on poor rains and a controversial and disruptive land reform programme. Zimbabwe's foreign earnings have been shrinking in recent years as production of the major hard currency earners - tobacco, gold and other exports - has been cut by up to two thirds. The situation has been worsened by the withdrawal of lines of credit by international banks because of Zimbabwe's failure to repay on time. Neither the World Bank nor the African Development Bank can lend to Zimbabwe, according to local economist John Robertson. "We spoiled our credit record," he said. To rectify the situation, Robertson said certain national policies need to be reversed and relations with the international lenders restored. "Those multi-lateral institutions such as the Bretton Woods (the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank) have to be re-engaged for Zimbabwe's survival and this is not a matter of choice," industrialist Anthony Mandiwanza concurred. Economists say that for the country to regain international confidence, some political developments may be necessary. "The international community would like to see new management in Zimbabwe," said Robertson. "The government will actually do Zimbabwe a favour if they say 'We will resign'," he said. Another economist, Moses Tekere, said: "It's time for sacrifice." If President Robert Mugabe stepped down, "Zimbabwe will get forex" he predicted. But despite the acute shortages of foreign exchange, shop shelves here are full of expensive imported goods, from cooking oil to trinkets. And the latest designs in luxury vehicles are a common sight on the streets of the capital. Foreign currency shortages have also affected Zimbabwe's supply of electricity. The country imports around 30 percent of its power needs from South Africa, Mozambique and the Democratic Repubic of Congo (DRC). Last week the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) ordered registered exporters to pay for their electricity in foreign currency in a bid to raise the hard currency to pay for energy imports. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 19 07:39:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 16:39:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: local government reform Message-ID: <00b801c31e0c$14fa61a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Following on from last week's discussion. McWhirter points out the downside of these reforms for those most eager to gain from them -- the SSP and the Greens. And the prospect of it being implemented for the Parliament is a step backwards, if we are to expect more equitable distribution of seats among the four establishment parties (where we must now count the SNP). But, on the upside, the smashing of the Labour Party local government apparatus is worthy of rejoicing. ----- Labour's cultural revolution Holyrood commentary: McConnell's concession on PR has put him on a collision course with council leaders who foresee a four-year war. Iain MacWhirter reports The Sunday Herald, 18 May 2003 SINCE he took over from Henry McLeish in November 2001, Jack McConnell has taken a lot of stick, not least from this column, for his lack of radical vision and his play-safe small 'c' conservatism. Well, time for smart arse columnists to eat their sneers. Last week, the First Minister-elect faced down his own party and struck a major blow for democratic renewal. Scottish politics will never be the same. The introduction of proportional representation to local government is no mere technicality. It will transform the culture of politics in Scotland. No longer will councils such as Glasgow and Midlothian be Labour monopolies, one party states with no opposition to speak of. At last, all votes will count, not just Labour ones. People said it would never happen, that Labour would never give up its council hegemony, that Jack McConnell would face an internal rebellion which would force him to bend. Well, the rebellion took place all right -- it is still taking place and howls of anguish are echoing across the council chambers of Scotland. But happen it will. There has been shocked disbelief, even a sense of betrayal, among Labour councillors. They have been fighting hard against the SNP and the hated Liberal Democrats all their political lives. Now, suddenly, their own leader has handed power to the enemy. It's not as if there was any demand from the voters, who are bemused by the alphabet soup of electoral reform. But if McConnell is worried about the consequences of falling out with most of the Scottish Labour Party, it doesn't show. It had long been suggested, not least by the LibDems, that McConnell was a supporter of electoral reform. But as he prevaricated and obfuscated through 2002, holding irrelevant reviews and cod consultations, many began to wonder if he was really still a prisoner of his party. Well, now we know. It's not at all clear what, if anything, McConnell won in exchange for throwing open the doors of every Labour council in Scotland to the SNP and the hated LibDems. Of course, he got his promise of stable coalition government for the next four years. But even that is a little less than it appears. The LibDems didn't have to promise to obey the Labour whip in future votes on partnership issues. The coalition will have a working majority of only six, which could be wiped out by a rebellion of only three backbenchers. This administration is going to be much more vulnerable to defeats such as those over warrant sales and fishing support. But Jim Wallace and his crew were happy enough to go along with the spin that Labour had driven a hard bargain. Labour face a future of coalitions and deal-making at local level which is totally alien to their all-or-nothing tradition. The cronyism that was revealed in the Henry McLeish constituency Officegate affair will not end overnight. Labour networks will still control politics and patronage in the local state for years to come. Personal or family links to key Labour councillors will still be a ticket to a council job or a place on a local quango. But the introduction of democratic scrutiny and opposition to these councils will gradually blow away the cobwebs of petty corruption and civic numptyism. In future, Labour councillors will have to argue their case, justify their actions, form working agreements with opposition parties. They will be held to account by powerful local oppositions who will be able to use the local press to expose the inefficiencies and malpractices by the council establishment. To Labour councillors, these changes seem like the end of civilisation as we know it. There will be chaos and instability in the land, they say. PR will undermine the quality of local government; hamper delivery of key policies; erode the vital link between councillor and constituency; and introduce rogue elements such as the Reds and Greens into town halls. In fact, none of these criticisms really stands up. Current standards of local government in Scotland are anyway little to write home about. Scottish local administration is a by-word for inefficiency and cronyism. Just think of the scandals of the last decade alone: votes-for-trips in Glasgow, Direct Labour Organisations in Lanarkshire and South Ayrshire, sectarianism in Monklands, faction fighting just about everywhere else. These abuses result directly from one party having too much power and too little accountability. As in the old one party states of Eastern Europe, monolithic power breeds bureaucracy and corruption. In the absence of meaningful opposition, politics starts to take place within the governing party itself. Factions and cliques battle it out for dominance of the machine. Only proper democratic politics can restore the balance. As for the constituency link, there is no reason to suppose that multi-member constituencies would be any less effective at representing local voters than the present arrangements. Indeed, there might even be a hint of competition between the councillors, the better to reflect the aspirations of the voters. And there could be more voters. At present, there is little point in voting in large areas of West Central Scotland, because Labour dominance is a foregone conclusion. And far from local government becoming a playground for Trotskyites and Greenies, the Single Transferable Vote system proposed in the partnership agreement may not benefit the small parties at all. The Greens, for example, will find it a lot harder to win seats in local government in future than in the Scottish parliament, where an appeal to the second vote has proved to be devastatingly effective. There's no second vote in STV and no party lists. With only three or four members per constituency, the threshold for representation is much higher and few fringe candidates will make it. One reason we are likely to hear calls for STV to be introduced for elections to the Scottish parliament in future from Labour and the SNP is that this form of PR could sweep the Reds, Greens and Indies out of Holyrood. But that's for the future. For now it is enough to applaud Jack McConnell's willingness to press the accelerator for reform. It wasn't without cost, but the First Minister has launched a truly radical reform. Jack McConnell always said that he would be his own man once he had secured his own mandate, and he has been as good as his word. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 19 08:01:46 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 17:01:46 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Europe/US rivalry: trade union view Message-ID: <00da01c31e0f$2f3d6000$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Monks was always seen as Blair's man at the top of the UK trade union congress. His move to Europe was treated as a major blow to Blair by the press (check the archives), very much mistakenly, in my view. He is replaced by his deputy, another Blairite, whilst the UK agenda is furthered in Europe by a prominent trade union leader who, it is intended, will do much to dissolve the opposition to further UK integration into Europe among the remaining so-called "leftist" trade union general secretaries who remain locked in a 1970s time warp. And Blair has someone else "on the inside" to keep him informed of developments. ----- Monks attacks 'malign' US influence Top priority in Brussels will be resisting business domination, writes CATHERINE MacLEOD The Herald, 19 May 2003 THE outgoing leader of the TUC is gearing up to resist "malign" US influences on business and industry as he prepares to take on the top job in the European trade union movement. John Monks, who leaves the post of TUC general secretary after almost 10 years, has said the fight against American domination will be his top priority. And in a forthright interview with The Herald before handing over the reins of the TUC to Brendan Barber, Mr Monks also takes a swipe at the leaders of British industry, whose abilities he calls into question. Mr Monks, who becomes general secretary of the European TUC in Brussels next week, has already established the priorities for his four-year term of office. He said: "We have to tackle the forces of American conservatism, and how they dominate the world, and the trade union world. For some of these guys in the White House trade unions are part of the axis of evil and they are after us, you know. "All these things, share-holder values, massive salaries, privatisation, deregulation, they are all made in America and they are all, among other things, designed to weaken unions and collective bargaining. "In Europe there are still plenty of fortresses that stand against that - in Britain there aren't so many - and it is our job to buttress these fortresses with argument and support for a more social approach based on the welfare state, worker rights, and public services. "And the trade unions must have an influence in central and eastern Europe, where America rules OK. At the moment too many of the managers look like they have come out of a Mormon political college, and they believe with blazing sincerity the virtues of American capitalism." The union leader was also scathing of Britain's business leaders and compared them to the doomed Bourbons of eighteenth-century France. He said: "I'm just waiting for one of them to come out and say 'let them eat cake'. Their lack of understanding, and their failure to see how they are regarded, makes them absolutely insufferable. There is a major question mark over their suitability to lead. "God knows how much time they spend on their own packages, getting them tax-friendly, and all the things they do. At the same time they are not slow to cut pension schemes back and some of them are even prepared to put up the age of retirement for everybody but the senior staff. Their behaviour is incredible." Mr Monks's criticism is not confined to management. Although he dismissed government critics who suggest a Labour government is as hostile to the unions as the Tories, he urged the prime minister to move from the centre ground, away from business and closer to the unions. "The election of the Labour government was an achievement and also a worry. But I keep reminding colleagues, sounding a bit plaintive at times, that things are going quite well. Recognising things are not going fully and as fast as you'd like is one thing but when some say there is no difference between this lot and the Tories, it is not true." However, he expressed strong disappointment at the government's approach to public services, foundation hospitals, management of public servants, and its "lack of willingness" to embark on joint projects. Mr Monks said: "There is little confidence in the government's approach to improving public services. They have only recently taken steps to ensure workers do not get worse conditions. The initial PFI schemes were disastrous. "Public servants should have a tremendous boost from the enormous investment in the public sector, but there is a feeling that the private sector is waiting round the corner to take them over. "The government are too business friendly, too respectful of captains of industry, and that reflects caution on labour law." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 19 08:28:09 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 17:28:09 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: exporters weigh in Message-ID: <013001c31e12$df35de80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Johnston call to end UK's euro charade Business leaders back single currency vote By Ian Fraser, Financial Editor The Sunday Herald, 18 May 2003 SCOTTISH manufacturers and business people have fired a warning shot across the government's bows ahead of its long-awaited announcement on whether the conditions are right for the UK to join the euro, scheduled for June 9. Under a deal brokered last week, Chancellor Gordon Brown has agreed to actively work to overcome barriers to UK entry so long as Tony Blair backs a negative assessment of the five economic tests, originally set by Brown in 1997. But Fred Johnston, chairman of Scotland in Europe and ex-chairman of Johnston Press, warned that excluding Britain from the euro long term would have devastating consequences for the UK economy. Johnston said: 'The UK would fail to realise its pot ential. People would become less wealthy and opportunities would be closed off. Increasingly, we would become an economic backwater.' He added: 'We have seen how inward investment to the UK has fallen. It's down from 29% of the EU total in 1999 to 5% last year. What a triumph!' James Walker, managing director of Walkers Shortbread, which has annual sales of ?60 million, said: 'To rule out euro membership would be a crime. We're already at a disadvantage when trading in Europe. 'If membership has been ruled out, we'd be even further disadvantaged. We would be particularly handicapped when expanding into eastern European markets, most of which will be joining the euro.' Walker added: 'The five economic tests are a load of nonsense. It is a political rather than an economic decision.' Geoffrey Maddrell, chairman of Unite Group and ex-chairman of Glenmorangie, said: 'By preventing UK companies from adopting a stable European currency, we are handing competitive advantage to our continental competitors.' Both Denmark and Sweden may vote to join the single currency in referenda this year and all 10 of the countries poised to join the EU intend to adopt the euro. 'That means Britain could end up as the only country out of an EU of 25 not using the euro. Inward investors would definitely start looking elsewhere,' said a senior Scots businessman. The Treasury issued its 18-volume, 2000-page assessment of the five tests, described by one political commentator as 'the homework from hell', to ministers this weekend. Europhiles among them, including Tony Blair, now have until June 9 to persuade Brown that the door should be left ajar to a referendum during this parliament, meaning before spring 2006. The Treasury is likely to single out the differences between the UK and European housing markets and the slow pace of structural reform in European economies as key obstacles. Euro supporters were reassured when Brown announced an inquiry, led by Professor David Miles of Imperial College London, into how a culture of long-term fixed-rate mortgages might be introduced to the UK during his Budget speech. UK banks, for their part, would welcome a shift towards long-term fixed-rate mortgages. A spokesman for HBOS said advantages could include risk reduction and a marked downturn in 'churning'. 'It could be a win-win situation but it hinges on the design of the product and is unlikely to happen overnight.' However, one negative is the weak performance of many eurozone economies. GDP figures for the first quarter 2003 show Germany to be in recession, with negative growth also seen in Italy and Holland. HSBC economist Robert Prior-Wandesforde said: 'The Treasury has taken the view that the UK should not be part of something which is looking pretty sickly now.' Together with the recent slide in sterling, these factors have made some formerly pro-euro groups review their commitment to the single currency. The Confederation of British Industry has lately shied away from repeating past support for the euro -- perhaps for fear of alienating members. But Johnston detects signs of hope. He said: 'The five tests -- which are anyway a bit of a charade -- may not have been fully passed. But the issue now is whether a referendum might still take place during this parliament. That is still perfectly possible. If not, it would have to be very early in the next parliament ... It is better to get it right than to hold a referendum prematurely and lose it.' Until late 2002, Johnston recognised that the sterling-euro exchange rate would have presented problems to euro membership but now feels that, with the pound down 11% against the euro this year, that 'the exchange rate is about right at the moment'. Wali Tasar Uddin, chief executive of Britannia Spice in Leith and the Bangladesh- British Chamber of Commerce believes it's too early to accept defeat: 'We still have three more weeks to put pressure on the government and to fight. We'll do this through whichever means, including Scotland in Europe, Britain in Europe, and the chambers.' From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon May 19 09:57:52 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 11:57:52 EDT Subject: [A-List] US elections 2004 Message-ID: <36.40606963.2bfa5900@aol.com> >Denial is at the heart of white working class racism - which remains endemic - and recognition of 'whiteness" as a social construction is key terrain for an important ideological struggle. It is not privilege that has to be understood first, IMO, but whiteness, which has proven remarkably plastic - with one unwaiverable 'value' at its core - Negrophobia. This relates, I think, directly to the colonial condition of African Americans, a distinctly 'national' condition, in contrast to peoples oppressed by more transient and opportunistic forms of discrimination, and in contrast to the relation between dominant US society and indigenous peoples, who were marked for (and continued to be marked for) extermination. Whiteness only began as anglo-american. In the army special operations community, I saw honorary whiteness conditionally bestowed on Latinos, Pacific-Islanders, even West Asians, when they would conform in word and deed to the Negrophobia that characterized that whole culture. That didn't just mean sharing contempt for Black soldiers and Black culture, it meant conforming to "white' values and norms - values and norms that are invisible because they are counted as somehow axiomatic - with all else rendered deviant. These norms constitute a whole epistemology - one that is sought after from any variety of motivations as a condition of assimilation. Race and class, as Du Bois showed, is a complex dialectical dance. White workers in the US have historically refused to confront generalized exploitation at almost every turn, preferring to fight for their 'vision' of evading the most rigorous forms of that exploitation, for a racial division of labor that is at its heart colonial.< Stan Why - not how, did the white people of Europe lead the development of industrial society? Why are white people "white" when the majority of the world is not white? How is "white" related to this phase of history and industrialization of the societal infrastructure? Is "white" an aberration or a deviation from the norm that proves the rule called the norm? Is black a signature of general inferiority in relationship to white? Under what conditions are the rules of "race" created? Humanity most certainly arose from the area called Africa not because it is black but because black is an indication of organic composition we currently identify on the basis of what we call alkalinity. Alkalinity is a concept that exists in relationship to its anti-thesis called acids. Why did society take shape in the Mesopotamian crest and reach its first written and historically retrievable written language form outside mother Africa? These areas of inquiry are fair game for the materialist-dialectic standpoint but have very little to do with the political revolution begin generated on the basis of change in our current mode of production. This matter of "whiteness" and its core value as Negrophobia" has to be approached as a political question as opposed to a sociological or psychological disposition. Approaching the matter of national and colonial oppression from the standpoint of privilege and the color factor in history as opposed to "whiteness" is in my estimate the correct approach. I feel your righteous passion and indignation but I must proceed from an assumption that the ideological categories in ones head lose their forces with certain changes in the material conditions of labor and changes in political structures. "Lose their force" does not mean go away or disappear but lose their force as material domination, economic exploitation and political oppression. In a real way no one cares what anyone thinks - in the case of white chauvinism and male supremacy, if there is no societal mechanism where this poisonous ideology become a level of domination and privilege, exploitation and political oppression. Whatever is thought of me, as an individual and African American is irrelevant if the mechanics of the peculiar system of exploitation and oppression against the slave and his descendant is dismantled and shattered. White chauvinism and male supremacy are not just ideology but rather ideological forms - the shape, of material privilege and historic bribery handed to the Anglo-American people. White chauvinism is the most historical aggressive form of American national chauvinism and provides the ideological justification for the brutal exploitation of the colored peoples of earth; it is the form that the social bribery takes to the Anglo-American people; it is tightly linked to anti-communism and the principle ideology of American fascism. One cannot properly speak of a system of white supremacy before the 15th century although aspect of the color factor in question are ancient in history in my opinion. The color factor in history deals with identity radically different that the ideology that arose on the basis of capital. If this is true then we are dealing with a 600-year time frame at best. What is being stated is that the color factor in history only assumes the ideological form of white supremacy and white chauvinism in a definite period of time under specific concrete conditions. All ideological categories and "consciousness" that justify the perpetual slavery or domination of one people (not one sex) by another is generated on the basis of economic domination and the drive to accumulate wealth no matter what its form. That, which is generated on the economic domination -striving, is in itself a product of human being acting upon and within a definite sphere of social interaction. Until it is understand by the Marxist that capitalism as the industrial system emerged on the basis of the African slave trade we are never going to be able to get behind this question and unravel its logic. White supremacy and white chauvinism was the historical consequence of the rise of capitalism as the industrial system. Capitalism as the industrial system did not evolve on the basis of an abstract passage from simple commodity production to manufacture as such. Capitalism did not emerged on the basis of the transition in wealth from landed property to what Engels called "movable property" and then gold as an abstraction. Nor did capitalism as the industrial system spring from feudal economic and social relations as an abstraction. Capitalism evolved from the slave trade and later the Caribbean plantation system and drove this transformation, then finally slavery emerged as a peculiar form of the value producing system - capitalist commodity production, in the Southern United States. This is stated because a small section of the democratic intelligencia enjoys pretending that the past generation of Marxist in total maintain a rigid conceptual framework that divides society into a structural base and structure superstructure with a mythical ascending ladder connecting these two social categories and fail to understand the gravity of thinking as ideology and ideology as the shape of thinking. Although thinking and ideology are not cognitive functioning but a historically defined mode or shape cognitive functioning assumes under the impact of "social practice" during a definite time and place/space, Marxism as insurgency demands that the ideological form is understood as a secondary feature of totality as social practice and by definition has a certain - limited, shelf life. Secondary feature of social practice is not a static category as sequence as in "A, B, C, and D" but rather a concept of fundamentality. One does not in fact have to understand the totality of capital as a self-mediating system producing its own distinct forms of social intercourse, ethics and social classes to 1) understand white supremacy and white chauvinism as a historical distinct form of the color factor in humanity evolution. 2) Rivet white supremacy and white chauvinism to the evolution of capitalism as/is the industrial system. 3) Entertain a vision that allows for the dismantling of the material power of white supremacy and white chauvinism as they embody and express domination, and lastly, white supremacy and white chauvinism cannot be fundamentally shattered as social practice without the overthrow of the power of capital. Slavery as an institution is much older than the last 600 years of plunder of mother Africa. Slavery of the African is much older than the European plunder and slavery of Africa. White supremacy and white chauvinism or as the bourgeoisie calls it "white racism" did not create African slavery since this slavery predated the European plunder of African by perhaps seven centuries and maybe even one thousand years. I categorically state that the European slavery of the African came first and then the rise of the ideology of white supremacy as a societal force involving the exploitation and criminalization of the black. This is of course the most elementary but fundamental materialist approach and consistent with the materialist conception of history. What has been held to be a mechanical determinist "Marxist" position on the color factor in history and the peculiar oppression of blacks in American is unjustified in the sense of Marxist as political insurgents. We are said to worry too much about the economic sphere although the economic activity of the workers has been our historic basis for organization. Marx approach is inherently European centered and obsessed with the mode of production and don't "really" understand the reality of "white racism" and even justifies the oppression of other people, states another sector of the "left." Well, Marxism is not meant to explain everything because it is also a doctrine of the class struggle. The approach used by Marx and Engels provides us with the framework to unravel and get behind the social process and its ideological forms. I hold that white supremacy and white chauvinism are best understood on the basis of the transitions in the mode of production first and foremost and as an ideological rationale for domination and not on the basis of the internal development within the cultural conditions and traditions of the dominating peoples. I hold the former is fundamental and interactive with the latter. The various theorist of race familiar with the standpoint of Marx hold the opposite point of view and insist that the latter is fundamental. The bourgeois intelligencia seek a historical explanation and that is their undoing. The Marxist insurgent seeks a way to effect and affect history. The Marxist theorist of race have in my estimate approach the question from the wrong side of history. The question of the historical senses in man - the standard five senses one learns about in elementary school; how groups of people understand their fate and destiny or how one articulates the meaning of existence, life and death or phobias are interesting arenas of study but not the levers of engagement as societal transformation. The confluence of bodies or as one feminist stated, "all that black skin" is combined with a more than less idealist conception of historically evolved culture and tradition and hurled onto the world stage as a coherent theory. One author even speaks of the obsession whites have with feces. Here is the paradox. If in fact capital is a self-mediating system of production reproducing itself and its forms of mediation - shapes, then on what basis does one delineate what aspect of culture and tradition, concepts of death and life are free from the self transforming nature of capital in order to compare the former with the latter? I hold that there is a materialist standpoint to unravel how and why the sense operates a certain way and under what conditions of existence the sense are given maximum range and depth. I also hold that there is a standpoint and materialist approach to mans "thermo-dynamic" biological processes and "obsession with feces." I do not however hold that any of this is principally related to how the class struggle is waged and leadership in the class struggle consolidate. >White workers in the US have historically refused to confront generalized exploitation at almost every turn, preferring to fight for their 'vision' of evading the most rigorous forms of that exploitation, for a racial division of labor that is at its heart colonial.< What has buttressed this brutal exploitation of the slave and their descendent by the Anglo-American people was the structure of capital that made it profitable to brutally enforce segregation; to murder children, rape women and hang and burn black bodies. In a couple of words material bribery taken to the Anglo-American people in the form of a higher standard of living than that of their ethnic homelands, not intense ideological debate or a non-localized feeling of superiority. What made the enslavement of the African possible was not a feeling of superior but guns. An ideology of oppression and exploitation that cannot be enforced and realized cannot sustain itself, much less evolve as a systemic totality and then reproduce itself in ever widening dimensions of insanity. An ideology of superiority that cannot assume the dimensions of a social force unfolds itself to be a form of insanity that result in institutionalization or incarceration, depending on the nature of ones misbehaving. An ideology of superiority can only become a social force when one has the means to enforce the apparent underlying reality. The reason the communist revolution in American will deliver the deathblow to capital and white chauvinism is not a mystical question but deals with the actual social forces in play. The social revolution generated on the basis of the means of production combines with the black masses unrelenting struggle against white chauvinism and when their density allows it, to defeat the legal and extra legal violence of whites. No one in Detroit and the areas immediately outside of Detroit gets arrested for DWB - driving while black. What we are dealing with is a political question that is part of the ideological sphere that emerged on the basis of a historically evolved infrastructure relationship. In my estimate this is the materialist approach to the question of ideology for the Marxist insurgent. I never approached the white workers in my district on the basis of fighting white racism. On question of discrimination it was a matter of fair play because the whites are unequal on the basis of ethnicity. They understood that I understood. I most certainly had a different approach to the black worker face with the discrimination. In much of the South and to a degree in isolated areas of the North and states like Illinois where slavery persisted, much of the Negrophobia is the specific form of fascism. This is not racism but fascism. Melvin P -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 15301 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dch at gcal.ac.uk Mon May 19 10:18:58 2003 From: dch at gcal.ac.uk (Douglas Chalmers) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 17:18:58 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: local government reform In-Reply-To: <00b801c31e0c$14fa61a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: On 19/5/03 2:39 pm, "Michael Keaney" wrote: > And far from local government becoming a playground for Trotskyites and > Greenies, the Single Transferable Vote system proposed in the partnership > agreement may not benefit the small parties at all. The Greens, for example, > will find it a lot harder to win seats in local government in future than in > the Scottish parliament, where an appeal to the second vote has proved to be > devastatingly effective. There's no second vote in STV and no party lists. > With only three or four members per constituency, the threshold for > representation is much higher and few fringe candidates will make it. I agree with Ian McWhirter's report here, but it will be up to pressure groups and forces in parliament to argue for larger multimember constituencies in order to make the minimum threshold for representation lower. The principle of PR is the key thing - it changes a whole mindset. Plus over time it will no doubt change voting patterns themselves. Getting the optimum size is the next battle. > > One reason we are likely to hear calls for STV to be introduced for > elections to the Scottish parliament in future from Labour and the SNP is > that this form of PR could sweep the Reds, Greens and Indies out of > Holyrood. This call would be unlikely ( although STV would actually be an advance on the present form of the Additional Member System (AMS) of PR exercised at the Scottish Parliament). The reason it would be unlikely is that the existing boundaries for the AMS fit very comfortably with the present European seat boundaries (which they use) - ie approximately 8 MSPs are elected in every regional list seat. Adopting STV and continuing with the same size constituency would mean a minimum threshold of one eighth (i.e 12.5%) which is achievable for the smaller parties. Whilst the LibDems ( and most other parties) would support it, it would be a step too far for labour, who I suspect would lose further. It is historically also closely associated with the Liberal Democrat's approach (which again would be unacceptable to Labour) Douglas -- Douglas Chalmers Division of Economics and Enterprise Glasgow Caledonian University 70 Cowcaddens Road Glasgow G4 OBA Tel: 331 3350 E.mail: d.chalmers at gcal.ac.uk WebPage: http://cbs3.gcal.ac.uk/eco/WebAccounts/~dch/dch.htm "hypertext is greater than the sword" From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 19 12:34:30 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 14:34:30 -0400 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: Shocking US Proposal References: <013001c31e12$df35de80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <002f01c31e35$4adb6ca0$c9b7fea9@anne> ALL NEWS IS LIES S A N D E R S R E S E A RCH ASSOCIATES May 19, 2003 Becoming the 51st State by JOHN LAUGHLAND It beggars belief, but it is true. Last week, a group of influential politicians who inhabit the rarefied but influential world of Washington DC think-tanks proposed that US government officials be given the right to sit in on the European Union's inter-governmental conference and on meetings of its other executive bodies so that the USA can keep an eye on the direction Europe is taking. The cat, therefore, is finally out of the bag: American politicians are now so seriously worried that the European Union might be emerging as some kind of independent force that they are trying to work out a way of preventing this from ever happening. The suggestion that US officials attend the highest-level European inter-governmental meetings was made on 14th May 2003 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. [1] The proposal was signed by one of those ephemeral constellations into which the luminaries of the American political establishment frequently arrange themselves in order to encourage policy to navigate by their lights: Madeleine Albright, Harold Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, Bob Dole, Lawrence Eagleburger, Stuart Eizenstat, Al Haig, Lee Hamilton, John Hamre, Sam Nunn, Paul O'Neill, Charles Rob, William Roth, and James Schlesinger. [2] That makes four former Secretaries of State, one former National Security Adviser, two former Secretaries for Defense, a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a former Director of the CIA, and three Senators. This distinguished and powerful group expresses concern that Europe and the United States are drifting apart. While reiterating the traditional US commitment to the integration of the European Union, the group stresses that "There is also an urgent need for Europeans to do more to reassure Americans that the union they are completing will continue to make the United States feel welcome in Europe." In particular, say the authors, it is wrong for Europeans to present their achievements as "challenging" the United States. "Rather, more should be done to reinforce the perception that the 'finality' of Europe is being developed in cooperation with the United States." To this end, the authors of the Declaration suggest that US officials should be allowed to monitor the meetings of the European Convention, the body charged with drawing up a European Constitution, and of the Intergovernmental Conference which will take over from the Convention in the second half of this year. The authors also suggest that, once the new constitution is approved, provision be made for members of the US government to be "associated on appropriate issues with the work of separate European Councils." The European Councils are the meetings of EU ministers which make policy and law for the whole of the European Union, so this means that the states of the European Union, which are among the richest and most powerful states in the world, should invite US government officials to attend their highest-level legislative and policy-making meetings, in order that these officials can ensure that the Europeans do not pursue policies which are independent of, or disapproved by, the American government. just looking for a little reassurance Despite an attempt at even-handedness (the document berates American anti-Europeanism as much as European anti-Americanism) the authors make no suggestion that the transatlantic relationship is or should be a relationship between equals. Instead, their inspiration is clearly a relationship between hegemon and subordinate. The authors make no equal and opposite proposal, for instance, that members of European governments should be invited to sit in on meetings of the US Cabinet, the Pentagon or the National Security Council, so that they can monitor whether decisions being taken there are directed towards what Richard Perle called for in February, namely "a policy to contain our erstwhile ally, France". [3] This extraordinary document therefore confirms that senior Americans are now seriously worried that the tame EU states might be flirting with the heretical idea that they are masters of their own fate. We know from Donald Rumsfeld's division of Europe into "old" and "new", as well as from the subsequent confirmation that US troops are to be re-located from Germany to South-East Europe, that US policy is indeed now to counter-balance a resurgent Franco-German axis by bolstering new satrapies in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. Other countries, too, might host new US bases: after Colin Powell visited Belgrade in April, during the Iraq war, the Serbian papers speculated that he had come to discuss the installation of 50,000 US troops at a military base outside Nis in Southern Serbia. This suggestion was denied by the US embassy in Belgrade - just as the US government had initially denied, only later to confirm, reports that there are plans to move troops out of Germany into Eastern Europe. [4] We also know that the influential neo-conservative commentator, Michael Ledeen, recently made the outlandish suggestion that "We will have to pursue the war against terror far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, into the heart of Western Europe." [5] Relations between the US and Europe have deteriorates so fast, indeed, that a Bill was presented to the US House of Representatives on 9th May which, if passed, would allow the US to attack Belgium, where NATO has its headquarters. The "Universal Jurisdiction Rejection Act of 2003", [6] presented by Rep. Gary Ackerman (Democrat, New York) was occasioned by the fact that Belgium has recently declared its courts competent to judge accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity, wherever in the world they are alleged to have been committed. This pretence to "universal jurisdiction" by Belgium has led to a flood of suits lodged with Belgian courts against a host of political leaders, including Ariel Sharon, George Bush Sr., Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and, most recently, General Tommy Franks. Rep. Ackerman seems more preoccupied with the apparent threat to General Sharon than to General Franks, judging by the bill's fourth paragraph, but the key provision comes in Section 6, where the Act would permit the President of the United States to use "all necessary means and appropriate to bring about the release from captivity of any person" detained under the provisions of Belgian law. Unlikely though the prospect may be of bombs falling on Brussels, the US government has already issued a threat to close down NATO's headquarters in Belgium if the kingdom persists in thinking its courts have the right to sit in judgement over US or Israeli citizens. [7] All this may explain the sudden extraordinary volte-face of the British government over the euro. When Tony Blair became prime minister in May 1997, one of his principal policy aims was to repair the relations between Britain and Europe which had suffered so badly under the Conservatives. As soon as New Labour was elected, London set about constructing numerous close alliances in Europe, with Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid. By the end of 2001, it looked as if Britain had bagged the prize which had eluded the British foreign policy establishment ever since the EEC was created in 1957, namely the replacement of the Franco-German axis with a Franco-German-British triumvirate. [8] The principal bridge which Tony Blair constructed to cross the Channel led to France: Jacques Chirac paid a high-profile state visit to Britain in 1997, where he extolled the virtues of the new "young Britain," Blair returned the compliment by addressing the French National Assembly, in French, in 1998; and Jacques Chirac even celebrated his 70th birthday on 29th November 2002 in 10, Downing Street, when he got to kiss little baby Leo Blair, and when the British prime minister called him "a great man in every sense of the term". [9] That cosy relationship went suddenly sour on the evening of 10th March 2003, when Chirac announced that France would veto the Anglo-American UN Security Council Resolution permitting an attack on Iraq. From being the closest of allies, Britain and France reverted to type and became the sharpest of enemies. The 10 Downing Street spin machine briefed massively against France in general and Chirac in particular, deliberately distorting what he had said on television. Blair's sudden reversal of foreign policy priorities could not have been more fundamental. Whereas he had built six years of diplomacy on the previously correct assumption that European integration and the Atlantic alliance were complementary, not contradictory, he suddenly found that the Franco-German axis was indeed lining up against Washington. Whereas Blair had repeatedly insisted that there was no choice between Europe and America - he said in 2000, "I believe stronger with America makes us stronger in Europe. Stronger in Europe and we are a better ally to America. I never believe we need or should choose between the two" [10] - he now found that he did have to make that choice. And he chose America. This choice, the most fundamental decision to be taken in British foreign policy since at least 1972, was reflected in the heavy leaks to the British press last week that the United Kingdom will not, after all, abolish the pound sterling and adopt the euro. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this momentous decision, which flies in the face of everything Blair has said he stands for. It now seems certain that on 9th June the cabinet will decide, on advice from the Treasury, that there should be no attempt to join the European single currency in the lifetime of the present Parliament. In our view, this means that Britain will never join it. To make things even clearer, the extreme pro-European British Minister for Europe, Peter Hain, was despatched to the European Convention to tell the other member states that Britain rejected the concept of a common European foreign policy subject to majority vote. Hain demanded that foreign policy remain a matter for national sovereignty, and that all European initiatives be subject to a national veto. If correct, this all supports the view that one of the reasons why the US and Britain attacked Iraq was to bolster the dollar against the euro. In 2000, Iraq had started to denominate its oil sales in the new European currency, and it invited other oil-producing nations to do the same. Had they followed suit, the pre-eminent role of the dollar in the international system would have come under severe strain. The need for dollars to buy oil is one of the main things which bolsters world demand for the American currency, which in turn means that the US can live off debt by issuing ever greater amounts of currency to pay for its imports. By contrast, if the world demand for dollars ever faltered, which would happen if it were no longer required for the purchase of oil, then the value of the currency could collapse. We can be sure that the new Anglo-American resolution, presented last week to the UN Security Council - but not, to my knowledge, made public - contains a key proposal to re-denominate in dollars the oil sales of Iraq, which will be controlled by the Occupying Powers, Britain and America. The principal threat to the pre-eminence of the dollar is obviously the euro. If the US was prepared to fight a war to protect the dollar, it would hardly give away the fruits of victory by allowing its principal ally to join the rival currency camp. If Britain were now to announce its intention to adopt the euro, this would crown the euro zone with the inclusion of the London capital market, one of the biggest in the world, and it would reverse the highly anomalous status quo in which Europe's financial capital city is outside the European currency zone. In short, a British decision to join would bolster the euro project immeasurably. That is why such a decision will never be taken. As if on orders from Washington, Tony Blair has thrown six years of diplomacy into reverse. Britain's decision to remain outside the euro zone now looks, therefore, like a key component of the Anglo-American strategy to encircle and contain the Franco-German core: it looks, in other words, like the monetary equivalent of the military re-location of American bases to the European periphery. Welcome to the new Europe, and welcome to the new world order. _____ [1] http://www.csis.org/index.htm [2] http://csis.org/europe/2003_May_14_JointDeclr.pdf [3] Perle's remarks were reported on 4th February 2003: see for instance http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/2/4/171345 [4] See the denial of the report, "US denies plans to transfer German military bases to Poland," Agence France Presse, 31st January 2003, which quotes State Department spokesman Richard Boucher; and the confirmation of it a month later by General James L. Jones, the commander of Nato: "General Tells Of Plan To Thin Out G.I. Presence In Germany", New York Times, 4th March 2003 [5] National Review Online, 10th March 2003, http://wwwnationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen031003.asp [6] The text of the bill can be viewed on . The Bill number is H.R. 2050. [7] See "La ? justice universelle ? reste un br?lot diplomatique" by Philippe G?lie, Le Figaro, 12th May 2003, http://216239.51.104/search?q=cache:cLRBMMfAz5QJ:www.lefigaro.fr/internation al/20030512.FIG0050.html+%22La+%C2%AB+justice+universelle+%C2%BB+reste+un+br %C3%BBlot+diplomatique%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 [8] I wrote about this myself in The Spectator on 27th October 2001. See http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old?ion=current&issue=2003-05- 17&id=1231&searchText= [9] "Blair showers Chirac with birthday honours," The Guardian, 29th November 2002, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,850237,00.html [10] Speech on the occasion of Bill Clinton's visit to the University of Warwick, 14th December 2000, , my italics. You might have missed . . . Here are extracts from the draft US-UK resolution for the administration of post-war Iraq. Very difficult to find on the Internet; the full document can be read at: The Security Council, Stressing the right of the Iraqi people to freely determine their own political future, welcoming the commitment of concerned parties to support the creation of an environment in which they may do so as soon as possible, and expressing resolve that the day when Iraqis govern themselves must come quickly; Noting the letters of [DATE] from the Permanent Representative of the United States of America and the United Kingdom to the President of the Security Council and recognizing the specific authorities, responsibilities, and obligations under applicable international law of these states as occupying powers and the responsibilities of others working now or in the future with them under unified command (the "Authority"); 12. Notes the establishment of an Iraqi Assistance Fund, with an international advisory board including duly qualified representatives of the Secretary General, the I.M.F., [appropriate regional institution(s)] and the World Bank, to be held by the Central Bank of Iraq, and to be audited by independent public accountants chosen by the international advisory board; 19. Decides that all export sales of petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas from Iraq following the date of the adoption of this resolution shall be made consistent with prevailing international market practices, to be audited by independent public accountants reporting to the international advisory board referred to in paragraph 12 above, and decides further that, except as provided in paragraph 20 below, all proceeds from such sales shall be deposited into the Iraqi Assistance Fund, until such time as a new Iraqi government is properly constituted and capable of discharging its responsibilities; 20. Decides further that [X] percent of the proceeds referred to in paragraph 19 above shall be deposited into the Compensation Fund established in accordance with resolution 687 (1991) and subsequent relevant resolutions; 21. Further decides that petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas originated in Iraq, and proceeds of sales thereof, shall be immune from judicial, administrative, arbitration or any other proceedings (including any prejudgment or postjudgment attachment, garnishment, or execution or other action to satisfy a judgment) arising in relation to claims, of whatever kind and whenever accrued, against Iraq or any instrumentality or agents thereof (or the Authority, or its participating states or their instrumentalities or agents), and that all Member States shall take any steps under their respective domestic legal systems necessary to give full effect to this paragraph; 23. Endorses the exercise of the responsibilities stated in this resolution by the Authority for an initial period of 12 months from the date of the adoption of this resolution, to continue thereafter as necessary unless the Security Council decides otherwise. Copyright Sanders Research Associates Ltd. 2003. The contents of the following, either in whole or in part, may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of Sanders Research Associates. While considering the contents to be reliable, SRA take no responsibility for the information set forth herein. ENQUIRIES & CORRESPONDENCE: EDITORIAL OF F I C E : P.O. B OX 221, HEMEL HEMPSTEAD HERTS HP1 3TJ, U. K . esavage at www.sandersresearch.com S ANDERS RESEARCH ASSOCIATES LTD. ALEXANDRA HO. , THE SWEEPSTAKES BALLSBRIDGE DUBLIN 4 IRELAND From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Mon May 19 11:38:43 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 14:38:43 -0300 Subject: [A-List] El Proyecto Bermejo de EE UU Message-ID: <4130-220035119173843910@n2b4c1> Fernando Del CorroNormalwin982972003-05-18T00:01:00Z2003-05-18T00:01:00Z3149084987016104369.3821 21 AUTORIDAD DEL VALLE DE TENNESSE CUMPLE? MA?ANA 70 A?OS (Nota del MNyP: La obra del Valle de Tennesse fue muy similar a la obra del Bermejo propuesta por Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa) Por Fernando Del Corro ??????????? Cuando se habla de obras p?blicas y de combate al desempleo en el mundo surge siempre un ejemplo paradigm?tico, el de la ?Tennesse Valley Authority? (TVA), la Autoridad del Valle de Tennesse, creada en los Estados Unidos de Am?rica (EEUU) bajo la administraci?n del presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt siete d?cadas atr?s y cuyo ?xito, a trav?s del tiempo, ha hecho que sus facultades especiales sean parte de las reservas formuladas por el gobierno de ese pa?s al constituirse, hace tres lustros, la Organizaci?n Mundial del Comercio (OMC). ??????????? La crisis de Wall Street de 1929 hab?a provocado en EEUU una fuerte recesi?n y un marcado desempleo. El gobierno intent? algunas salidas pero se trat? de intentos limitados dentro de los par?metros preexistentes. Fue cuando a fines de 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt reemplaz? a Herbert Clark Hoover que fue posible apelar a otras alternativas basadas en su propuesta del ?New Deal? (Nuevo Trato), dentro del cual el restablecimiento del empleo deb?a basarse en el desarrollo de grandes obras p?blicas y la intervenci?n del estado como empleador. ??????????? As? fue que se conform? la ?Civil Work Administration? (Administraci?n Civil del Trabajo) que un a?o despu?s, a comienzos de 1934, ya empleaba a cuatro millones de estadounidenses. Pero lo m?s trascendente fue la TVA, cuya ley de creaci?n fue promulgada por Roosevelt el 18 de mayo de 1933, fecha de la que ma?ana se cumplir?n 70 a?os. ??????????? La TVA fue creada como una corporaci?n del estado ?pero con la flexibilidad e iniciativa de una empresa privada?, otorg?ndosele diversas responsabilidades, entre ellas, la m?s importante, desarrollar una serie de represas en los siete estados por los que atraviesa el curso de agua del R?o Tennesse. Represas que deb?an generar energ?a el?ctrica pero cuyas obras complementarias se planearon para asegurar la navegabilidad de esa v?a fluvial, controlar las inundaciones, desarrollar un sistema canales de riesgo, encarar la prevenci?n de epidemias en ?reas cr?ticas, reforestar zonas desertizadas, producir fertilizantes, adiestrar a los agricultores en el uso de nuevas tecnolog?as mediante la creaci?n de fincas modelo (una propuesta que impulsan algunos economistas pr?ximos al futuro presidente argentino), colaborar con la educaci?n y la cultura instalando una biblioteca en cada presa y organizar el turismo regional. ??????????? Enmarcado el proyecto en el ideario del ?Nuevo Trato?, coincidente con las propuestas que impulsaban en el Reino Unido algunos economistas, particularmente John Maynard Keynes, cuya obra cumbre reci?n se conoci? tres a?os despu?s, la ley de creaci?n de la TVA estableci?, formalmente, para la misma, la tarea de ?mejorar las condiciones econ?micas y el bienestar social de los habitantes del valle?. ??????????? Este posee una superficie de 106.000 kil?metros cuadrados (algo m?s que la provincia argentina del Chaco), que al decir del estudioso venezolano Alejandro Pe?a Esclusa, por entonces se encontraban en ?una situaci?n deplorable?, al punto de que menos del tres por ciento de sus habitantes contaba con el servicio el?ctrico, el 30 por ciento estaba atacado de malaria, los ingresos per capita de la zona equival?an a un tercio de los nacionales y el 25 por ciento de la carne de cerdo faenada, principal alimento local, se descompon?a por falta de conservantes, entre otras ?ventajas?. ??????????? Pueden seguir enumer?ndose las calamidades que viv?an los pobladores del valle pero tambi?n debe consignarse que una d?cada m?s tarde las familias con electricidad en sus viviendas pasaron de 6.000 a 500.000, las represas se construyeron a raz?n de una por a?o, por lo que en veinte a?os se hicieron veinte, para lo cual se dio empleo a 200.000 trabajadores y se utilizaron 86 millones de metros cuadrados de arena, piedra y cemento. La TVA hab?a pasado a ser la principal generadora de electricidad del pa?s mientras el r?o se convirti? en navegable a lo largo de sus 1.050 kil?metros. ??????????? Los habitantes del valle a partir de 1935 fueron organizados en? cooperativas, las que para 1939 ya eran 417 que, a trav?s de la Administraci?n de Electricidad Rural abastec?a a 288.000 hogares mientras la Autoridad El?ctrica para Hogares y Fincas otorgaba cr?ditos para que la gente adquiriera artefactos el?ctricos para sus casas, en tanto se instalaron f?bricas que generaron medio mill?n de empleos industriales y se erradicaron las enfermedades end?micas como el paludismo. ??????????? Con el correr del tiempo la TVA debi? ampliar sus represas a 50 ante el crecimiento de la demanda y luego, ante la posibilidad de seguir por ese camino encar? la generaci?n nucleoel?ctrica con la instalaci?n de centrales at?micas. La rentabilidad anual de la corporaci?n supera hoy anualmente el total de la inversi?n y de la misma se destina un sexto a nuevos desarrollos. Un paradigma de 70 a?os que nada tiene que ver con el moderno neomercantilismo disfrazado de ?neoliberalismo. Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?. Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP, deben suscribirse en:< altasmnyp at argentina.com> y altasmnyp at mnyp.org. En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a < bajasmnyp at argentina.com y bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista. Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en el MNyP en todo el pais. La mesa de mujeres de Capital Federal nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos < mujeresbsas at argentina.com y mujeresbsas at mnyp.org PARA UN ARGENTINO, NO DEBE HABER NADA MEJOR QUE OTRO ARGENTINO. Mayo de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Nuestras paginas web son: http://www.mnyp.org/ www.institutofederal.org www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com// www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA, y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 100 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presentara el ultimo 7 de marzo de 2003 en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, y que Ud. puede pedir por mail al MNyP < mnyp at ciudad.com.ar>, personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486. El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP< mnyp at ciudad.com.ar , < mnypnacional at argentina.com La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Jean Jaures (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . El Area de Participaci?n Nacional del Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina invita a todos los amigos a visitar la P?gina web del IFRA que es http://www.institutofederal.org /y la del IFRA Chubut. cuya direcci?n es : http://www.geocities.com/ifrachubut En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 22975 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Mon May 19 11:47:23 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 13:47:23 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Press Release May 2003-text format Message-ID: <000201c31e2f$1030b6b0$260b9ad8@Chris> CHRISTOPHER C. BLACK Barrister-at-Law PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 19, 2003 CHIEF OF STAFF OF RWANDAN GENDARMERIE DURING 1994 WAR IN RWANDA MAKES AN APPLICATION FOR A STAY OF CHARGES DUE TO POLICY OF SELECTIVE PROSECUTION OF CARLA DEL PONTE AT RWANDA WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL STATING DEL PONTE PROTECTS WAR CRIMINALS OF THE RPF AND ITS ALLIES. Toronto, Canada - Counsel for the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Gendarmerie during the 1994 war in Rwanda, General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, has submitted a motion to the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda asking the judges of the Tribunal to order a stay of the charges against him and his immediate release based on an abuse of process by the Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, due to her policy of selective prosecution by which only members of the former Hutu majority regime in Rwanda are targeted for prosecution while Tutsis, belonging to the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its allies, who have committed similar war crimes as those alleged against the Hutus, including genocide, are granted effective immunity from prosecution. The motion requests, in the alternative, that the role of the Prosecutor, presently in breach of her mandate under the statute of the Tribunal, be referred back to the Security Council to seek clarification of its intentions and provide instructions to the Tribunal with respect to all those who committed war crimes in Rwanda during the events of 1994. The motion stipulates that though the Prosecutor has evidence of war crimes committed by the RPF and its allies during the war of 1994 and has conducted investigations of them, not one indictment has been made against any member of the RPF, including the many senior members of the current military dictatorship presently in control of Rwanda up to and including President Paul Kagame. The motion states that Del Ponte's policy has no legitimate criminal justice objective, only a political one and that, vis a vis the war crimes of the RPF, there is a well entrenched culture of impunity in the Prosecutor's office at the ICTR. According to Dr. Alison DesForges, the principal prosecution expert witness in several of the trials at the ICTR and author of the book, Leave None To Tell The Tale, the crimes of the RPF can be characterized as follows: "These killings were widespread, systematic, and involved large numbers of participants and victims. They were too many and too much alike to have been unconnected crimes committed by individual soldiers or low-ranking officers. Given the disciplined nature of the RPF forces and the extent of the communication up and down the hierarchy, commanders of this army must have known of and at least tolerated these practices. According to several informants, Kagame himself was told about the killings in Byumba and did not intervene to stop them." She further states, "Despite talk of the need for accountability, the international community, like the RPA high command, has been satisfied with a mere pretence of justice for the 1994 abuses. It has not insisted on effective prosecutions of the most responsible officers, either within the Rwandan military system or from the international tribunal which is mandated to try crimes against humanity as well as genocide committed in Rwanda in 1994..." General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, who, as head of the gendarmerie, was instrumental in escorting the RPF forces into Kigali, the capital of Rwanda in 1993, to ensure the success of the Arusha Peace Accords, is entitled to ask the question, "Why am I, a Hutu, being charged with war crimes when Tutsis and their allies who committed crimes similar to those alleged against me are not? He is entitled to an answer. For more information contact Christopher Black: 1-905-773-4140, bar at idirect.com Ste 202, 968 Wilson Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 416-928-6611, Fax:416-928-9515, bar at idirect.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 19972 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Mon May 19 13:13:27 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 15:13:27 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: George McGovern in The Nation 21 April Message-ID: <000d01c31e3a$d053dfc0$77019ad8@Chris> FW: George McGovern in The Nation 21 April ----- Original Message ----- From: Branka josilo-perry To: Marbles Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 12:00 PM Subject: FW: George McGovern in The Nation 21 April ------ Forwarded Message From: "David Roberts" Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 18:08:29 +0100 To: "Esther Stetter" , "Alistair" , "Brenda" , "Brian Hall" , "Christine Coulouris" , "Cilla de Lande Long" , "Francis Clark-Lowes" , "Julie Sadler and Dave Waldon" , "Neil and Jude Smith" , "Paul Pawlowski" , "Viv Coles" Subject: Fw: George McGovern in The Nation 21 April Forward > > This is stunning: > "compelling commentary on Bush Administration...This is perhaps the most > sober, thoughtful and compelling commentary I've seen yet on the Bush > administration's present course of action. Alison > > ======================== > THE REASON WHY > By George McGovern > The Nation > From the April 21, 2003 issue > http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=mcgovern > > "Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die." > Alfred, Lord Tennyson "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (in the Crimean War) > > Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme > Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and > compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing > to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of > the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a > seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient > press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation > on a course for one-man rule. > > He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and > international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal > bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental > building blocks of national security as full > employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 > trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already > rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a > larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly. > This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial > crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same > families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and > daughters being called to war, as they were in > Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that > the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian > Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military > service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with > me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.) > > The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are > fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President > Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address. War profits are booming, as > is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our > economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and > incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush > Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America. > > Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the > entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to > the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative > diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world > united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others. > My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has > well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush > Administration. For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. > For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by > changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom > fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a > gift from France--will now have to be demolished? And will we have to give > up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance. > > During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider." > As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world > against him." In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and > countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if > you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done > us no harm, whether you like it or not." This is a good line for the macho > business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect > to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political > standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless > and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another > Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I > tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." > > The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences > that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of > Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic > Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many > distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of > Iraq is against God's will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, > Richard Perle, Paul > Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline > warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President. > > As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a > then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot.. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of > Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, > and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat > missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to > God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at > the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of > his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify > matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest > man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was > planning to become a clergyman at war's end. > > Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers > brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to > the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor > for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel > during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of > the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew. > > I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction now > unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional > American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how > can I suggest that a fellow Methodist > with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want > to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 > mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I > fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already > got a long list of strikes against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've > been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the > greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in > harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and > influence in world affairs. > > We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of > "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our > troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the > world--with the possible exception of the > Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, > whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an > independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. > But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is > to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly > endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly > thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to > regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then > for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese > independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great > men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the > end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies > against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot > down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American > lines by Ho's guerrilla forces. > > During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential > campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of > disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men > do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our > bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically > or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well > as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying > waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its > schools, churches, markets and hospitals. > > I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by > our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again > would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that > had done us no harm and posed no threat to our > security. I was wrong in that assumption. > > The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely > linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up > as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are > rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, > win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that > both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole > world and lose > his own soul," or the soul of his nation? > > It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass > destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it > be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United > States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike > Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed > during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize > the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New > Yorker, we are > reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must > result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may > happen." Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after > the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist > an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The > symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been devised to > defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never > contemplated." > > I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me > opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the > Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive. > > The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my > fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was > first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and > dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the > Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient > city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class > in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have > stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear > of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of > civilization. > > But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be > redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the > long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the > historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man. > > > > > ------ End of Forwarded Message -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 16402 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon May 19 14:21:30 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 13:21:30 -0700 Subject: [A-List] (Fwd) Mugabenomics: Cars 'on diet' but luxury imports still plentiful... References: <019201c31e0b$76fa3b10$049f22c4@Patrick> Message-ID: <03e101c31e44$3c0a4020$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Bond" > predicted. But despite the acute shortages of foreign exchange, shop shelves > here are full of expensive imported goods, from cooking oil to trinkets. And > the latest designs in luxury vehicles are a common sight on the streets of > the capital. Foreign currency shortages have also affected Zimbabwe's supply > of electricity. The country imports around 30 percent of its power needs > from South Africa, Mozambique and the Democratic Repubic of Congo (DRC). > Last week the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) ordered > registered exporters to pay for their electricity in foreign currency in a > bid to raise the hard currency to pay for energy imports. The country is being systematically blockaded by the outside world, so this isn't really surprising or a sign of "Mugabenomics" anymore than it is in Cuba when they are short on fuel and petrol. I'm not certain what this is supposed to indicate: Third World countries should not hold out when blockaded? Macdonald From pbond at sn.apc.org Mon May 19 14:46:26 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 22:46:26 +0200 Subject: [A-List] (Fwd) Mugabenomics: Cars 'on diet' but luxury imports still plentiful... References: <019201c31e0b$76fa3b10$049f22c4@Patrick> <03e101c31e44$3c0a4020$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <07a601c31e47$ec0e3050$049f22c4@Patrick> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" > The country is being systematically blockaded by the outside world, so this > isn't really surprising or a sign of "Mugabenomics" anymore than it is in > Cuba when they are short on fuel and petrol. Mac what the hell are you talking about? There are NO sanctions against Zimbabwe, aside from some petty symbolic difficulties that Mugabe and a few dozen cronies have travelling, plus some difficulties depositing their personal loot in European or US banks (plenty of others to choose from of course). I was in Cuba last week. There's a society that knows how to struggle against imperialism (notwithstanding the tragic dollarisation that is so obviously debilitating). In contrast, Zimbabwe has had two mass workers' strikes -- two days in March, three in April, and an indefinite mass strike planned next month -- against Mugabe. The urban poor and workers want him out, pronto. One reason is that they see how wonderfully Mugabe and the elite live (see below). > I'm not certain what this is supposed to indicate: Third World countries > should not hold out when blockaded? You can't understand why there are plenty of new 4x4s and luxury goods? Ever hear of class formation? The hypocrisy that this report referred to is simple: the parasitical neauveou-riche that Mugabe has nurtured through patronage since 1980, and that he has permitted to import luxury goods since 1990; and that he encouraged to open banks (with some spectacular flops) since 1994; and that he encouraged, since 2000, to take the best farms away from landless people during the ongoing period of rural chaos (even a government report issued a few weeks ago admits that the crony class is making out like bandits with those huge farms). (I have a chapter in my PhD on this sort of stunted class formation, but the best thing to read to understand it is Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Chapter Three on Pitfalls of National Consciousness.) Yes, to answer you: Third World countries that have any self-respect should 'hold out' on behalf of the workers and peasants, and they should NOT go down the toilet like Zimbabwe. And their leaders should CERTAINLY not be squealing anti-imperialist, pro-socialist rhetoric on their way out. It gives our team a very bad name... *** Sunday Times (SA), 18 May Mugabe lives it up down south Penny Sukhraj and Sapa Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has been living the high life in South Africa while his countrymen grapple with food and fuel shortages and a shambolic economy. As the Zimbabwe dollar plunged on the black market to 2 500 against the US currency , Mugabe, visiting South Africa: a.. Checked into a luxury suite in one of South Africa's plushest hotels; a.. Brought crates of food into the hotel; and a.. Travelled around the country in a privately chartered aircraft and long motorcades. In contrast, Zimbabwe has virtually run out of fuel and ordinary people have had to brave long queues for basic foodstuffs. On Thursday the unofficial Zimbabwe dollar exchange rate plunged 40% when the black market crashed. Mugabe was in South Africa to attend a graduation ceremony at Fort Hare University in the Eastern Cape and the funeral of ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu. South African Foreign Affairs officials confirmed that Mugabe was paying for the trip himself. Early on Thursday Mugabe checked into a luxury one-bedroom suite in The Westcliff hotel in Johannesburg. His entourage - reported to consist of 20 to 30 people including two butlers, a personal chef and numerous bodyguards - are also staying at the hotel. The Westcliff's one-bedroom suites have separate lounges, oversized marble bathrooms, kitchenettes and balconies with magnificent views of northern Johannesburg. The rack rate for the suites - the price paid by those walking in off the street - is R9 480 a night. Sources at the hotel said Mugabe had also brought along "crates" of his own food, which included frozen beef, pork, chicken, potatoes, baby corn and spinach. His first meal - prepared by his personal chef - was roast potatoes and pork chops served with pap. Mugabe's entourage ensured that other guests did not get a glimpse of him when he ventured out of his suite. On Friday morning he flew to the Eastern Cape on an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 737 for the Fort Hare ceremony. Sources at Bisho's Bulembu Airport said Mugabe was driven off in a bulletproof limousine, part of a 50-vehicle motorcade that included many traffic officials, policemen and security men. Mugabe was warmly welcomed to the university by controversial praise singer Jongela Nojozi, who praised him for "chasing the whites" out of Zimbabwe. Mugabe smiled as Nojozi, dressed in furs and skins and wielding a spear, called on him to "please, please chase them from our land". Nojozi has come under fire in South Africa for alleged abuse of government vehicles. Fort Hare spokesman Luthando Bara said Mugabe had been invited to the graduation because he was an alumnus, a recipient of an honorary doctorate and the patron of several graduates. He said Mugabe had been accompanied by acting Zimbabwean Education Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo, Zimbabwean ambassador to South Africa Simon Moyo and other senior government officials. Bara insisted that the university was "shocked" by Nojozi's comments. After the reception Mugabe returned to Johannesburg and The Westcliff, where 20 to 30 people demonstrated against his presence in the country. From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Mon May 19 11:38:43 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 14:38:43 -0300 Subject: [A-List] El Proyecto Bermejo de EE UU Message-ID: <4130-220035119173843910@n2b4c1> Fernando Del CorroNormalwin982972003-05-18T00:01:00Z2003-05-18T00:01:00Z3149084987016104369.3821 21 AUTORIDAD DEL VALLE DE TENNESSE CUMPLE? MA?ANA 70 A?OS (Nota del MNyP: La obra del Valle de Tennesse fue muy similar a la obra del Bermejo propuesta por Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa) Por Fernando Del Corro ??????????? Cuando se habla de obras p?blicas y de combate al desempleo en el mundo surge siempre un ejemplo paradigm?tico, el de la ?Tennesse Valley Authority? (TVA), la Autoridad del Valle de Tennesse, creada en los Estados Unidos de Am?rica (EEUU) bajo la administraci?n del presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt siete d?cadas atr?s y cuyo ?xito, a trav?s del tiempo, ha hecho que sus facultades especiales sean parte de las reservas formuladas por el gobierno de ese pa?s al constituirse, hace tres lustros, la Organizaci?n Mundial del Comercio (OMC). ??????????? La crisis de Wall Street de 1929 hab?a provocado en EEUU una fuerte recesi?n y un marcado desempleo. El gobierno intent? algunas salidas pero se trat? de intentos limitados dentro de los par?metros preexistentes. Fue cuando a fines de 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt reemplaz? a Herbert Clark Hoover que fue posible apelar a otras alternativas basadas en su propuesta del ?New Deal? (Nuevo Trato), dentro del cual el restablecimiento del empleo deb?a basarse en el desarrollo de grandes obras p?blicas y la intervenci?n del estado como empleador. ??????????? As? fue que se conform? la ?Civil Work Administration? (Administraci?n Civil del Trabajo) que un a?o despu?s, a comienzos de 1934, ya empleaba a cuatro millones de estadounidenses. Pero lo m?s trascendente fue la TVA, cuya ley de creaci?n fue promulgada por Roosevelt el 18 de mayo de 1933, fecha de la que ma?ana se cumplir?n 70 a?os. ??????????? La TVA fue creada como una corporaci?n del estado ?pero con la flexibilidad e iniciativa de una empresa privada?, otorg?ndosele diversas responsabilidades, entre ellas, la m?s importante, desarrollar una serie de represas en los siete estados por los que atraviesa el curso de agua del R?o Tennesse. Represas que deb?an generar energ?a el?ctrica pero cuyas obras complementarias se planearon para asegurar la navegabilidad de esa v?a fluvial, controlar las inundaciones, desarrollar un sistema canales de riesgo, encarar la prevenci?n de epidemias en ?reas cr?ticas, reforestar zonas desertizadas, producir fertilizantes, adiestrar a los agricultores en el uso de nuevas tecnolog?as mediante la creaci?n de fincas modelo (una propuesta que impulsan algunos economistas pr?ximos al futuro presidente argentino), colaborar con la educaci?n y la cultura instalando una biblioteca en cada presa y organizar el turismo regional. ??????????? Enmarcado el proyecto en el ideario del ?Nuevo Trato?, coincidente con las propuestas que impulsaban en el Reino Unido algunos economistas, particularmente John Maynard Keynes, cuya obra cumbre reci?n se conoci? tres a?os despu?s, la ley de creaci?n de la TVA estableci?, formalmente, para la misma, la tarea de ?mejorar las condiciones econ?micas y el bienestar social de los habitantes del valle?. ??????????? Este posee una superficie de 106.000 kil?metros cuadrados (algo m?s que la provincia argentina del Chaco), que al decir del estudioso venezolano Alejandro Pe?a Esclusa, por entonces se encontraban en ?una situaci?n deplorable?, al punto de que menos del tres por ciento de sus habitantes contaba con el servicio el?ctrico, el 30 por ciento estaba atacado de malaria, los ingresos per capita de la zona equival?an a un tercio de los nacionales y el 25 por ciento de la carne de cerdo faenada, principal alimento local, se descompon?a por falta de conservantes, entre otras ?ventajas?. ??????????? Pueden seguir enumer?ndose las calamidades que viv?an los pobladores del valle pero tambi?n debe consignarse que una d?cada m?s tarde las familias con electricidad en sus viviendas pasaron de 6.000 a 500.000, las represas se construyeron a raz?n de una por a?o, por lo que en veinte a?os se hicieron veinte, para lo cual se dio empleo a 200.000 trabajadores y se utilizaron 86 millones de metros cuadrados de arena, piedra y cemento. La TVA hab?a pasado a ser la principal generadora de electricidad del pa?s mientras el r?o se convirti? en navegable a lo largo de sus 1.050 kil?metros. ??????????? Los habitantes del valle a partir de 1935 fueron organizados en? cooperativas, las que para 1939 ya eran 417 que, a trav?s de la Administraci?n de Electricidad Rural abastec?a a 288.000 hogares mientras la Autoridad El?ctrica para Hogares y Fincas otorgaba cr?ditos para que la gente adquiriera artefactos el?ctricos para sus casas, en tanto se instalaron f?bricas que generaron medio mill?n de empleos industriales y se erradicaron las enfermedades end?micas como el paludismo. ??????????? Con el correr del tiempo la TVA debi? ampliar sus represas a 50 ante el crecimiento de la demanda y luego, ante la posibilidad de seguir por ese camino encar? la generaci?n nucleoel?ctrica con la instalaci?n de centrales at?micas. La rentabilidad anual de la corporaci?n supera hoy anualmente el total de la inversi?n y de la misma se destina un sexto a nuevos desarrollos. Un paradigma de 70 a?os que nada tiene que ver con el moderno neomercantilismo disfrazado de ?neoliberalismo. Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?. Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP, deben suscribirse en:< altasmnyp at argentina.com> y altasmnyp at mnyp.org. En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a < bajasmnyp at argentina.com y bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista. Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en el MNyP en todo el pais. La mesa de mujeres de Capital Federal nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos < mujeresbsas at argentina.com y mujeresbsas at mnyp.org PARA UN ARGENTINO, NO DEBE HABER NADA MEJOR QUE OTRO ARGENTINO. Mayo de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Nuestras paginas web son: http://www.mnyp.org/ www.institutofederal.org www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com// www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA, y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 100 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presentara el ultimo 7 de marzo de 2003 en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, y que Ud. puede pedir por mail al MNyP < mnyp at ciudad.com.ar>, personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Sanchez de Bustamante (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486. El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP< mnyp at ciudad.com.ar , < mnypnacional at argentina.com La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Jean Jaures (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . El Area de Participaci?n Nacional del Instituto Federal para la Refundaci?n Argentina invita a todos los amigos a visitar la P?gina web del IFRA que es http://www.institutofederal.org /y la del IFRA Chubut. cuya direcci?n es : http://www.geocities.com/ifrachubut En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 22975 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Mon May 19 13:53:54 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 16:53:54 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Martes 20-19 hs-Hart Davalos-El pensamiento de Marti y la educacion cxubana Message-ID: <4130-220035119195354210@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98272003-05-19T19:19:00Z2003-05-19T19:28:00Z312287003win581486009.3821 21 Gentileza de ? ALIA at uolsinectis.com.ar Presencia en Argentina del cubano Armando HART D?VALOS El FORO DEL PENSAMIENTO NACIONAL Y LATINOAMERICANO celebra la presencia en Argentina del eminente intelectual cubano, Armando HART D?VALOS, adhiriendo a todas las actividades que desarrolle en nuestro pa?s, precisamente cuando el conjunto de los latinoamericanos recordamos el 150 Aniversario del nacimiento de JOS? MART?. p. MESA EJECUTIVA DEL FORO Carlos O. Su?rez Roberto H. Varela Jorge Cholvis Beba Balv? cesarc La Secretar?a de Extensi?n de la Facultad de Filosof?a y Humanidades invita a participar de la Conferencia El pensamiento Martiano y la Educaci?n en Cuba Dr. Armando Hart D?valos* Martes 20 de Mayo 19hs Aula Magna ? Facultad de Ciencias Econ?micas Ciudad Universitaria Armando Hart D?valos es uno de los fundadores del Movimiento 26 de Julio. Al triunfo de la Revoluci?n es designado Ministro de Educaci?n, cargo que ocup? hasta 1965. Dirigi? la Campa?a de Alfabetizaci?n conocida como la m?s vasta y eficaz llevada a cabo en Am?rica Latina. Fue Ministro de Cultura desde la constituci?n de ese organismo en 1976 hasta 1997, realiz? una fruct?fera labor al implantar numerosas instituciones culturales y una articulada red de ense?anza art?stica. Desde febrero de 1997 es director de la Oficina del Programa Martiano, adscripta al Consejo de Estado, y preside la Sociedad Cultural Jos? Mart?. En la actualidad es miembro del Consejo de Estado de la Rep?blica de Cuba. Organizan: Secretar?a de Extensi?n de la Facultad de Filosof?a y Humanidades, UNC CESARC Embajada de Cuba en Argentina Adhieren: Facultad de Ciencias Econ?micas Secretaria de Extensi?n de la Escuela de Trabajo Social Secretaria de Extensi?n de la Escuela de Ciencias de la Informaci?n Centro de Estudiantes de la Facultad de Filosof?a y Humanidades Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza Uni?n de Educadores de la Provincia de C?rdoba Para cancelar su suscripci?n a este grupo, env?e un mensaje de correo-e a: ALIA-unsubscribe at gruposyahoo.com Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. La NAC & POP se envia y se recibe gracias a la actitud valiente, activa y decisiva de los suscriptores que la defiendieron cuando fue necesario y determinante ya que, frente a todo tipo de filtro, bloqueo o censura actuo firmemente cuando debio hacerlo en defensa de sus derechos, el derecho a la libertad de expresion, el derecho a la informacion y el derecho a la comunicacion ante quien correspondiera, actuando como si fuera uno solo en una epopeya de miles de correos electronicos , llamados telefonicos y organizacion de futuros actos callejeros de protesta que, si bien, algunos no llegaron a concretarse -porque no hizo falta- mostraron la calidad de sus integrantes y la fuerza de el estar unidos en la defensa de su comun dignidad. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP. no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ----------------------------------------- - EN OCTUBRE 2001 LA CAMARA DE DIPUTADOS DE ARGENTINA VOTO UNA LEY PARA CERRAR LAS FM Y LOS CANALES LIBRES Y COMUNITARIOS Y ENVIAR A LA CARCEL A LOS RADIODIFUSORES DE LA DEMOCRACIA MANTENIENDO COMO LEGALES LAS RADIOS Y CANALES DE TV DE LA DICTADURA DEL PROCESO. LO HIZO APROVECHANDO LA IMAGEN DE LOS AVIONES ESTRELLANDOSE CONTRA LAS TORRES GEMELAS, UN MES DESPUES DEL ATENTADO ALEGANDO UN PELIGRO PARA LOS AEROPUERTOS QUE LUEGO SE DEMOSTRO QUE ERA PRODUCIDO POR LAS RADIOS LEGALES. EN OCTUBRE 2002 LO APROBO EL SENADO GRACIAS A LA ENORME PRESION DE LOS LOBBYS DE ATA Y ARPA - LAS MULTINACIONALES ENQUISTADAS DETRAS DE LOS MEDIOS EN ARGENTINA COMO LA JP MORGAN-LA CALIFICADORA DE RIESGO-PAIS, LAS EMPRESAS MULTIMEDIOS COMO CLARIN, LA AQUIESCENCIA DE SENADORES DE DUDOSA HONORABILIDAD COMO JENEFES Y GIOJA Y ANTES, CON LA REPUGNANTE ACTITUD DE LOS DIPUTADOS FONDEVILA, DUMON, LARRABURU Y BRANDONI, SERVILES, ESTOS DIPUTADOS Y SENADORES, HAN DESCUBIERTO LA NUEVA FORMULA DE LOS POLITICOS FRACASADOS: DUROS CON EL PUEBLO, ALFOMBRA CON LOS PODEROSOS...ASI LES VA. AHORA EN EL 2003, VUELVE A DIPUTADOS POR ALGUNOS CAMBIOS INTRODUCIDOS POR LOS COMPA?EROS Y COMIENZA LA BATALLA DEFINITIVA : PUEBLO O ESTABLISHMENT, PATRIA O COLONIA, LIBERTAD O MONOPOLIOS, COMUNIDAD ORGANIZADA O COMUNIDAD SOJUZGADA. LOS LEGISLADORES DEBEN OPTAR. ----------------------------------------- VISITE www.abuelas.org.ar www.agua-mansa.com> www.antiescualidos.com/indexnew.html www.ar.geocities.com/publicidadpolitica www.asamblea.arg.net.ar www.asovic.org> www.ate.org.ar www.caracas.jotaceve.org> www.cels.org.ar/ www.clasemediaenpositivozulia.org> www.cnanoticias.com/ www.conadolfo.com www.ctabsas.org.ar / www.documentalistas.org.ar/ www.eldescamisado.org www.espacioautogestionario.com www.excluidos.org/ www.farco.org.ar www.florestaporjusticia.8m.com/ www.forointergeneracional.freeservers.com/ www.foronacional.gov.ve www.frenteparaelcambio.org www.galeon.hispavista.com/anarcoperonismo1111/ www.geocities.com/bsasnegro/index.html / www.geocities.com/cipayoscom www.geocities.com/fub_usb> www.geocities.com/pmavl/> www.geocities.com/proyectoemancipacion www.geocities.com/revistatizon/arg.html www.geocities.com/walshrodolfo www.hijoslucha.netfirms.com www.hijos-rosario.org.ar / www.inquilinos.org.ar/ www.jdperon.gov.ar / www.ladeudaexterna.com www.lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular www.losocial.com.ar www.lucheyvuelve.com.ar www.madres.org www.madres-lineafundadora.org www.mnyp.org www.movimientomontonero.org www.mr-jsm.com.ar www.mundoamateur.com.ar www.nodo50.org/venezuela-unida/> www.parlamentoperonista.cjb.net / www.patrialibre.org.ar www.pjn.gov.ar/ www.pochormiga.com.ar> www.polemicadigital.com.ar www.porlavida.abuelas.org.ar www.procesobolivariano.8k.com> www.radioataque.org> www.rebelion.org> www.redbolivariana.com/> www.red-vertice.com/anv/index.html www.revistalinea.com www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net/ www.rt-a.com www.sinolvido.org/ www.soberania.info> www.sutebalamatanza.org.ar/ www.todosjuntos.foros.org www.unasolapatria.org/inicio.htm> www.venezuela-en-videos.com/> www.villacrespomibarrio.com.ar -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 24511 bytes Desc: not available URL: From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 19 21:05:13 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 23:05:13 -0400 Subject: [A-List] MODEST PROPOSAL: NATO INVADE BELGIUM AND NATO HEADQUARTERS (fwd) References: Message-ID: <003b01c31e7c$a2bed820$c9b7fea9@anne> The notion that satire is not possible when attempted against the realities of "our" times is a cliche ("our" times being those times in which the speaker is living.) Perhaps our contemporary tragedy is that never has the shopworn phrase been so adequate for descriptive purposes. I can see the whack jobs encircling Bushkinka proposing the invasion of Nato HQ in Belgium with Nato troops; I really can. But then Jeff Sachs did nail me long ago as a "wing nut." -A. Let's hear it for Belgium An attempt to try Tommy Franks for war crimes in a Belgian court has outraged the US George Monbiot Monday May 19 2003 The Guardian Belgium is becoming an interesting country. In the course of a week, it has managed to upset both liberal opinion in Europe - by granting the far-right Vlaams Blok 18 parliamentary seats - and illiberal opinion in the US. On Wednesday, a human rights lawyer filed a case with the federal prosecutors whose purpose is to arraign Thomas Franks, the commander of the American troops in Iraq, for crimes against humanity. This may be the only judicial means, anywhere on earth, of holding the US government to account for its actions. The case has been filed in Belgium, on behalf of 17 Iraqis and two Jordanians, because Belgium has a law permitting foreigners to be tried for war crimes, irrespective of where they were committed. The suit has little chance of success, for the law was hastily amended by the government at the beginning of this month. But the fact that the plaintiffs had no choice but to seek redress in Belgium speaks volumes about the realities of Tony Blair's vision for a world order led by the US, built on democracy and justice. Franks appears to have a case to answer. The charges fall into four categories: the use of cluster bombs; the killing of civilians by other means; attacks on the infrastructure essential for public health; and the failure to prevent the looting of hospitals. There is plenty of supporting evidence. US forces dropped around 1,500 cluster bombs from the air and fired an unknown quantity from artillery pieces. British troops fired 2,100. Each contained several hundred bomblets, which fragment into shrapnel. Between 200 and 400 Iraqi civilians were killed by them during the war. Others, mostly children, continue to killed by those bomblets which failed to explode when they hit the ground. The effects of their deployment in residential areas were both predictable and predicted. This suggests that their use there breached protocol II to the Geneva conventions, which prohibits "violence to the life, health and physical or mental well-being" of non-combatants. On several occasions, US troops appear to have opened fire on unarmed civilians. In Nassiriya, they shot at any vehicle that approached their positions. In one night alone they killed 12 civilians. On a bridge on the outskirts of Baghdad they shot 15 in two days. Last month, US troops fired on peaceful demonstrators in Mosul, killing seven, and in Falluja, killing 13 and injuring 75. All these actions appear to offend the fourth convention. The armed forces also deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure, bombing the electricity lines upon which water treatment plants depended, with the result that cholera and dysentery have spread. Protocol II prohibits troops from attacking "objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population such as ... drinking water installations and supplies". The fourth convention also insists that an occupying power is responsible for "ensuring and maintaining ... the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory". Yet when the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked why his troops had failed to prevent the looting of public buildings, he replied: "Stuff happens. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." Many hospitals remain closed or desperately under-supplied. On several occasions US soldiers acted on orders to fire at Iraqi ambulances, killing or wounding their occupants. They shot the medical crews which came to retrieve the dead and wounded at the demonstration in Falluja. The Geneva conventions suggest that these are straightforward war crimes: "Medical units and transports shall be respected and protected at all times and shall not be the object of attack." The armed forces of the US, in other words, appear to have taken short cuts while prosecuting their war with Iraq. Some of these may have permitted them to conclude their war more swiftly, but at the expense of the civilian population. Repeatedly, in some cases systematically, US soldiers appear to have broken the laws of war. We should not be surprised to learn that the US government has responded to the suit with outrage. The state department has warned Belgium that it will punish nations which permit their laws to be used for "political ends". The Belgian government hasn't waited to discover what this means. It has amended the law and denounced the lawyer who filed the case. The Bush government's response would doubtless be explained by its apologists as a measure of its insistence upon and respect for national sovereignty. But while the US forbids other nations to proscribe the actions of its citizens, it also insists that its own laws should apply abroad. The foreign sovereignty immunities act, for example, permits the US courts to prosecute foreigners for harming commercial interests in the US, even if they are breaking no laws within their own countries. The Helms-Burton Act allows the courts in America to confiscate the property of foreign companies which do business with Cuba. The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act instructs the government to punish foreign firms investing in the oil or gas sectors in those countries. The message these laws send is this: you can't prosecute us, but we can prosecute you. Of course, the sensible means of resolving legal disputes between nations is the use of impartial, multinational tribunals, such as the international criminal court in the Hague. But impartial legislation is precisely what the US government will not contemplate. When the ICC treaty was being negotiated, the US demanded that its troops should be exempt from prosecution, and the UN security council gave it what it wanted. The US also helped to ensure that the court's writ runs only in the nations which have ratified the treaty. Its soldiers in Iraq would thus have been exempt in any case, as Saddam Hussein's government was one of seven which voted against the formation of the court in 1998. The others were China, Israel, Libya, Qatar, Yemen and the US. This is the company the American government keeps when it comes to international law. To ensure that there was not the slightest possibility that his servicemen need fear the rule of law, George W Bush signed a new piece of extra-territorial legislation last year, which permits the US "to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release" of US citizens being tried in the court. This appears to include the invasion of the capital of the Netherlands. All this serves to illustrate the grand mistake Tony Blair is making. The empire he claims to influence entertains no interest in his moral posturing. Its vision of justice between nations is the judicial oubliette of Guantanamo Bay. The idea that it might be subject to the international rule of law, and therefore belong to a world order in which other nations can participate, is as unthinkable in Washington as a six-month public holiday. If Blair does not understand this, he has missed the entire point of US foreign policy. If he does understand it, he has misled us as to the purpose of his own diplomacy. The US government does not respect the law between nations. It is the law. www.monbiot.com Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 20 00:11:08 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 02:11:08 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [TNF] Re: USD goes cliff-diving again References: <005401c31e4f$243a3530$472c29c3@hefty> <002d01c31e87$4c30f140$1400a8c0@evs> Message-ID: <3EC9C6FC.6090903@mindspring.com> You are looking at the wrong things. The real danger of a sudden and drastic change in exchange value of any currency is not its impact on trade, but its impact on structured finance - derivatives. This is particularly true with the dollar and dollar interest rates. The Russian bond default, of no signifiacnce in term of the golbal sovereign debt market, brought dowm LTCM, which if the Fed did not step in, would have caused a liquidity meltdown in the financial system. Henry C.K. Liu Gary Santos wrote: > The other thing that stikes me as a potential non-starter is the notion that > making the dollar cheaper will increase sales in Europe. > --------------------------------------- > Adding to this, the effect of the depreciation will be diminished. US GDP is > about $10 trillion. $800 billion of that or 7% is exports. The US share of > EU imports and exports is about 10%. > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 02:07:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 11:07:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland & RoI Message-ID: <001301c31ea6$e9f8b1a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This has been bubbling for a while in the pages of Private Eye, and I hope that others better placed will keep us informed of Barron's report when that emerges. However, as part of the continuing unravelling of the official British story re Northern Ireland, this particular episode is undoubtedly of tremendous importance, perhaps marking one of the last almighty struggles within the British state apparatus over the future of the occupation. ----- Private Eye No. 1079, 2-15 May 2003 Ulster Update While much of the outcry surrounding the Stevens Report focused on whether Brigadier Gordon Kerr, currently military attach? (ie chief spook) at the British embassy in China, will face prosecution for his role in orchestrating loyalist hit squads, the culpability of other British officials was largely ignored. Only the Observer, for example, alluded to the efforts of the ministry of defence's home secretariat to obstruct Stevens' investigations. The secretariat is responsible for handling all politically sensitive issues concerning the armed forces. Until his resignation the day before the report was published, the unit was headed by Colin Davenport. Wherever Davenport goes, controversy, it seems, is not far behind. Last February he was arrested and questioned by Special Branch over the leaking of extracts from Stella Rimington's memoirs to the Sun back in 2000. Rimington subsequently described the leak as a "rather laddish covert operation". Davenport had been a member of the cabinet office committee charged with vetting her book. It was also the home secretariat which tried to thwart the efforts of the Justice for the Forgotten (JFF) group to compel military personnel to give evidence to the Barron Inquiry based in Dublin (see Eyes 1067 and 1071). JFF represents relatives of the victims of the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings which took the lives of 33 people. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that the Ulster Volunteer Force was assisted in this operation by members of the security apparatus in the north. When lawyers for JFF wrote to some of those individuals requesting their presence at the inquiry, they were swiftly and coldly batted away by an anonymous official within Davenport's department. Meanwhile, further evidence of collusion between the security forces and the loyalists has been produced. In January, not long after articles had appeared in the Eye, both the Sunday Times and the Irish Sunday Business noted the latest developments at the inquiry. An explosives expert had submitted a report to Barron which reached the following conclusion: "The loyalist terrorists who undertook this operation were at least guided, and very likely directed, by somebody with considerable knowledge of terrorist bombing activities. The most likely sort of person who could have provided that guidance is an ammunition technical officer or ammunition technician with experience of intelligence processes and practices and with access to loyalist terrorists. Loyalist terrorist groups did not have the skills to undertake this operation in 1974. Further, I do not believe they have ever possessed them, otherwise a similarly complex operation would have been repeated." Barron was due to have completed his inquiry last year. However, bureaucratic delays on the part of the Northern Ireland office and the MoD have forced him to postpone publication. He is now expected to report this summer. ----- NOTE: The Dublin and Monaghan bombings took place on 17 May 1974. The Ulster Workers Council strike began on 15 May 1974 and ended, victorious, and supported by the security forces in Northern Ireland against the minority British government of Harold Wilson, on 29 May 1974. From cburford at gn.apc.org Tue May 20 02:15:18 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 09:15:18 +0100 Subject: [A-List] (Fwd) Mugabenomics In-Reply-To: <07a601c31e47$ec0e3050$049f22c4@Patrick> References: <019201c31e0b$76fa3b10$049f22c4@Patrick> <03e101c31e44$3c0a4020$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030520085149.035867a0@pop3.norton.antivirus> At 2003-05-19 22:46 +0200, Patrick wrote to Macdonald: >Yes, to answer you: Third World countries that have any self-respect should >'hold out' on behalf of the workers and peasants, and they should NOT go >down the toilet like Zimbabwe. And their leaders should CERTAINLY not be >squealing anti-imperialist, pro-socialist rhetoric on their way out. It >gives our team a very bad name... Isn't the point which team we are in? Genuine internationalism only works if we realise that we are writing from very different perspectives. That can be disguised by the immediacy of the the internet. I appreciate Patrick's informed posts from someone who tries to combine theory and active practice in the context of southern Africa and that is the context in which I read him. But Macdonald's address indicates he is writing from Canada, which is among the countries both benefiting from imperialism and being oppressed by hegemonism. And I am writing from the old imperialist country and the old colonialist country. Do we in Britain not need to own a very different perspective as we watch the compelling newsreels on British tv of Zimbabweans being beaten? Is it not true that Britain very much resisted paying compensation for the expropriation of the colonial farmers and has encouraged the IMF to restrict international credit? Of course in local class terms it is deeply offensive that Zimbabwe continues to import all the luxuries to which I have ready access in London while people starve. And of course it it the right and duty of the people of Zimbabwe and southern Africa to struggle for the most democratic regime possible in their local conditions. But in an international email list do we not have to be very clear about are different vantage points precisely to try to produce at a least a slightly more internationalist perspective. The imperialist west who benefitted so much from colonialism and the neo-colonialism of apartheid, still chooses to regard Africa as marginal to the world economy and a beggar at the table for development capital. Compensation has never been paid (though we hear for the first time Kenya may get some). And from the outside it is clear that Zimbabwe is being starved of exchange liquidity. However corrupt, incompetent or repressive its present regime, that is also part of the dialectical truth, is it not? Mugabe looks as if he is going to fall. He deserves to and although frankly there are severe imperialist pressures as well as popular opposition, progressive forces have to make the best of it. And it may be better for workers and working people to be struggling under a state with a more formal bourgeois democratic rule of law, but more openly acquiescent in the global power of international finance capital and the hegemony of the USA and its closest allies. But this will create another precedent for interventionsm and the Cuba is much less deservedly vulnerable to overthrow even though it may have made a few mistakes which it should sort out internally. We are scheduled to hear today how Bush will turn the screw on Cuba. Chris Burford London PS I sign this way, because my email address does not automatically betray my context, and as I have argued above we need to be conscious of the context in which each of us attempts to write. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 06:06:17 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 15:06:17 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Yugoslavia: Louis Proyect analysis 6 Message-ID: <004001c31ec8$37de16a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> In this my final post on Diana Johnstone's "Fool's Crusade", I want to address some of the points made in her postscript, which despite being written before the war on Iraq is aptly titled "Perpetual War". To give these questions the proper attention they deserve, however, it is necessary to take a step back and look at some material covered in Chapter Four ("The New Imperial Model"). In her discussion of the Albanian lobby in the United States, Johnstone makes it clear that the Balkans policy was very much a bipartisan affair. Although the prime mover in this lobby was a Republican named Joseph DioGuardi, who was of partial Albanian descent, it also tapped into the Clinton campaign through the auspices of Ilir Zherka, an Albanian-American. Although the Clinton campaign was anxious to court the ethnic vote, no Serbs were invited to apply. One of the most important lobbyists for the Kosovo cause, however, was a Croatian. Mira Radievolic Barrata, who went to work for Robert Dole in 1989, was credited for pushing Congress to lift the arms embargo against Bosnian Muslims, a key demand of Joanne Landy, Danny "the Red" Cohn-Bendit and other rightward-lurching members of the 1960s generation. Among Baratta's biggest boosters in Washington were some names that are no doubt familiar to you: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Long before these characters had been identified as exclusively promoting Zionist interests worldwide, they had no problem raising support for the Muslim cause in Bosnia, whose field combatants included many of the same elements now demonized by the very same neoconservatives. As Perle himself was adviser to the Bosnian Muslims in the Dayton Peace Talks, one can only conclude that the only constant in all of this is dedication to US imperial interests, and not to any particular deity. Although there has been emphatic denial in establishment quarters that material self-interest--especially related to oil--explained the wars against Yugoslavia and Iraq (less so in the latter case), it became very clear after the victory in the Balkans that long-term geopolitical interests were key. Nothing symbolized this more than Camp Bondsteel, a permanent base for US troops in Kosovo. This base dominates a strategic corridor in Kosovo guarding mountain passes and in close proximity to Thessalonika, a key Greek port. As Johnstone puts it, Camp Bondsteel is a self-sufficient high tech enclave. Guess who supplies all the basics, including electricity, transport, fire department, etc. Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, whose CEO was a guy named Dick Cheney. When George W. Bush chose to sign a bill that increased military spending by 1.9 billion dollars, guess where he chose to commemorate it. Camp Bondsteel, that's where. So those who yearn for a return to the good old days of a Democratic presidency might give careful consideration to the way that all this played out during Clinton's term in office. When it comes to defending US long-term imperial interests, it is strictly a bipartisan affair. Furthermore, if something like Camp Bondsteel and the Albanian lobby represent the convergence of class interests between the two major parties, so does the NATO victory itself represent the affinity between Europe and the United States. This old boys club has been around since the 1500s practically. Except for some unpleasantries in 1914 and then again in 1940, the imperialists have always stood on the opposite side of the barricades of the colonized. The Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema summed up this relationship as follows: "The crisis of Kosovo created new networks of relations. For example, the daily teleconferences between the Foreign Ministers of five countries: the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy. With Kosovo, we entered such a group. It isn't written in any official document, but in fact, around Kosovo was born a sort of Club. It's difficult to define the rules of membership in the noble circle of the great, there exists no statute." Indeed. Only the French foreign minister, Hubert V?drine, found himself capable of striking a discordant note. He warned that the bloodletting in the Balkans was disturbingly similar to the "civilizing mission" of nineteenth century French imperialists and to the "white man's burden" celebrated by Rudyard Kipling. It is no accident that the bourgeois intelligentsia, including figures such as NYU's Niall Ferguson, has begun speaking openly of the benefits of imperialism to the benighted denizens of the South. In a very real sense, the clock has been turned back to this period. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the old justification for imperialist intervention is no longer possible. Containing Communism has given way to a new set of rationalizations that were mobilized prior to October 1917. When the imperialists conducted "rescues" against the Mahdists, the Boxers or the Sepoys, the excuse was always about protecting innocent civilians and wiping out backward, atavistic revolts. For those who have had a hard time figuring out why such a large swath of the left defected into the imperialist camp, we would remind them that history has a tendency to repeat itself--hopefully not in a Viconian sense. In a January 5, 1898 article titled "The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution," Social Democratic leader Eduard Bernstein made the case for colonial rule over Morocco. Drawing from English socialist Cunningham Graham's travel writings, Bernstein stated that there was absolutely nothing admirable about Morocco. In such countries where feudalism is mixed with slavery, a firm hand is necessary to drag the brutes into the civilized world: "There is a great deal of sound evidence to support the view that, in the present state of public opinion in Europe, the subjection of natives to the authority of European administration does not always entail a worsening of their condition, but often means the opposite. However much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are *without exception better off* than they were before. "However much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are without exception better off than they were before. Even before the arrival of Europeans in Africa, brutal wars, robbery, and slavery were not unknown. Indeed, they were the regular order of the day. What was unknown was the degree of peace and legal protection made possible by European institutions and the consequent sharp rise in food resources..." Let's be clear about the division on the left that emerged with the wars in Yugoslavia, that continued with the recently concluded war in Iraq and that now figures in the Cuba petition controversies. It is fundamentally a problem of what was known commonly in the Marxist movement as 'social patriotism'. The tendency of some leftists, especially those who enjoy privileged positions as trade union bureaucrats, parliamentarians, professors and journalists, to tail end the foreign policy initiatives--including warfare--of their own bourgeoisie has been around since the earliest days of imperialism. Our task, of course, is to delineate clear class lines and mobilize working people and their allies to destroy this irrational system that threatens not only the people of the South but us as well. As Marx once said, as long as the Irish are unfree, the British workers cannot be free. Substitute Yugoslavia or Iraq for Ireland (still unfree) and the task remains the same. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 06:33:12 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 15:33:12 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: ideological tinkering Message-ID: <00cd01c31ecb$fa76f440$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Lou Proyect forwarded this to Marxmail last December. I am archiving it here in full for possible future reference, in addition to whatever interest it may have for listers. A prickly opinion on just about everything The Andrew Billen interview If you need someone to stand up for Gary Glitter, globalisation and GM, look no further than Claire Fox. But how did a revolutionary socialist end up setting the pace for public debate? The Times, December 17, 2002 IF YOU GO DOWN TO the British Museum tonight you'll be sure of a big surprise. A local hotel is hosting one of London's most extraordinary Christmas parties. Among those who have been invited to feast on mulled wine and "seasonal canap?s" are Jonathan Dimbleby, Fiona Shaw, Peter Tatchell, Chris Woodhead, Alan Sillitoe, Charles Moore, Fay Weldon, and Lord Evans of Temple Guiting. It is an eclectic mix, even by Bloomsbury's standards, and an even odder one if, among the coincidence of faces, you notice a selection of backroom ideologues from the Left and Right, people not normally seen dead in one other's company, still less drunk in it. Their hostess is Claire Fox, director of the unlikely sounding Institute of Ideas. Every contradiction of the guest list is contained in this woman: a veteran of the Left but the Right's latest pin-up; a professed socialist who speaks up for globalisation; the loser of a major libel action brought by one of Britain's largest news organisations yet a media favourite, resident on Radio 4's The Moral Maze and increasingly a participant on TV shows such as Question Time; a courteous and humorous social animal yet the possessor of views that cause phone-in hosts as well as their callers to abuse her on air, as when she set about defending Gary Glitter's right to feast on child pornography. In public debates, and she seems to go to them all, she says the unsayable. Over the last few years, I have noticed, however, that audience reaction to her has matured from "who the hell does she think she is?" to, more simply, "who is she?" Others ask what on earth is the Institute of Ideas? Its website provides an anodyne self-definition. Its mission is to "expand boundaries of public debate by organising conferences, discussions and salons, and publishing written conversations and exchanges". Co-sponsors have included the Royal Society of Arts, the Tate, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Museum. Two festivals ago, I spoke at an IoI session in Edinburgh on the future of satire. It was lively, fun and unpartisan. The IoI's origins lie, however, deep in a Seventies Trotskyite splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party and in its organ, Living Marxism. When the RCP abolished itself in 1996, Fox relaunched the magazine as the glossier, trendier LM. It was a minor publishing phenomenon until March 2000 when ITN forced its closure by winning a court case against it for an article that claimed it had misrepresented footage of an emaciated Bosnian Muslim at a Serbian internment camp. Some then accused Fox or being a pro-Serb "tanky". The complaint now is different: that the IoI has mutated in a sinister fashion into a front organization for the far Right. We meet at noon in the IoI's narrow, white offices near Smithfield. Fox, wearing more make-up and looking more nervous than is usual for her, leads me out to a caf? which I say is too noisy. We move on to a delicatessen, Fox accusing me of being picky and "posh". I say it just shows how unreliable impressions can be. "I'm a little bit of an unknown quantity myself," she says, explaining her nervousness. "I didn't emerge in the traditional fashion. I didn't come out of the Oxbridge club. I didn't come out of the traditional trade union movement. I've just emerged on the scene and people are a little bit like, 'What's she about?' " So what, I ask, is her agenda? She says they - she means IoI's four staff - remain influenced by their left-wing background. She still opposes capitalism, although she stopped believing in revolution when the Berlin Wall fell. Why, then, does The Guardian, which mounted a big investigation into the IoI two years ago, think her part of the American libertarian Right? "I've no idea why The Guardian think what they think, but there are people who seem to imagine that you can't have an idea unless it's paid for. "The only explanation that some people can come up with for, for example, why I'm a relatively enthusiastic supporter of GM (genetically modified) food must be that I'm in the pay of the multinationals. It couldn't possibly be that I have intellectually decided, having looked at the evidence, that GM might be a way of solving some of the problems of the developing world, might be at least something that should be looked at. "It's as though nobody believes any ideas any more. You must only have them because you've been bought off." When it comes to her defining her current principles, Fox talks vaguely about "challenging orthodoxies" and promoting "the idea of the active subject". "We can make our destinies. We are not victims of it," she says, and we segue into a conversation about how victimhood has become the new heroism and how Diana, Princess of Wales, has become its icon. "The espousal of Princess Diana as a model is a disaster and, as one of the BBC's Great Britons, a complete disaster. She's a great Briton because she suffered more than anyone else and she talked about it and opened her heart." The Sexual Offences Act currently before Parliament is another symptom of society's search for victims. "Its notion of consent is extremely dangerous. The idea that you have to ask for consent, that is that consent has to be explicitly given, would indicate that this was drawn up by people who have never had a sexual encounter, never had a personal encounter and have no idea about how human beings work. Either people will stop having sex, which won't happen, or more and more people are going to be done for rapes when I do not think rape will have occurred." But the "there was yes-yes in her eyes" defence is pretty scummy, isn't it? "Look, human beings have to be treated as grown ups who can actually negotiate these things. I'm not saying there aren't times when the law and people's defences can be irritating. But even this encounter, it's not unambiguous. Life is not unambiguous. I mean by that: 'am I being set up?' Not am I going to pounce? "No," she says, "but it's nerve racking. There's a degree of risk. But I have to be a grown up. You have to be a grown up. We have to trust each other to a degree and maybe that trust will be abused and that won't be the end of the world either. We'll both survive." She points out the flaccid liberal defence of asylum seekers also relies on elevating victimhood to a moral good. "One of the most dynamic things about human development has been people have moved through the world, moved to other countries. What I don't like is the way the debate about asylum has distorted what the real discussion should be about immigration. People are forced to seek legitimacy by showing us their scars. The only way they're considered to be legitimate is if they've suffered sufficiently. I think that's completely degrading, for a start off, but it also then leaves this notion of the 'bogus' asylum seeker. I don't think there's anything bogus about wanting to improve your standard of living or to live somewhere else. "My parents were Irish immigrants and they came to England. They made the decision to try and improve their standards of living by moving on and they were treated badly but they survived and they did rather well." The Foxes' eldest daughter was born 42 years ago in Manchester in 1960 but the family moved to Clwyd, the industrial northeastern corner of Wales, where they speak with hardly a lilt. Her father, who died a few years ago, ran a successful plant-hire business and owned their house, but it was a working-class area dominated by British Aerospace and British Steel. She calls her family a matriarchy: a strong mother, bright, bookwormish Claire and her two younger sisters, both of whom have successful careers. The first inkling of a political awakening for Fox followed a visit in the sixth form by the local Labour MP, who made the mistake of pledging that Shotton Steelworks would not close. When it did, the feeling of having been sold out hit Fox so hard it never left her. She voted for Mrs Thatcher in 1979, and no one since. At Warwick University she worked lazily at her degree in English and American literature, emerging with a 2:2, and harder at finding a political identity. She even went to a meeting of the Federation of Conservative Students, whose callow libertarianism she rejected (some might say only to embrace it later) and argued passionately from a Catholic position against abortion. She realised that she did not know what she was talking about and was, she says, fortunate to meet people rude enough to tell her so. Did she jettison God at that stage? "Oh, don't do that to my mother," she pleads. "I became a Marxist and then I looked at religion completely differently. I was a liberation theologist in that Catholic sense." On leaving, she worked for a decade in the voluntary sector, mainly in mental health but also in homelessness and for battered women (dealing with victims, in other words). Afterwards, she began teaching special needs adults in further education and started writing for local newspapers about the issues she was dealing with. She moved from the North to London to work full-time in further education. She loved teaching but rowed with her bosses. She finally resigned to work on LM. Throughout all this, her inspiration and succour was the RCP. And, meanwhile, what happened to her personal life? "Did I have one? Yes. It 's had its ups and downs. Well, I'm not married and I haven't got children, that will do, but I'm an enthusiastic auntie." Boyfriends? Girlfriends? "I have boyfriends." Why won't she talk about it? "I don't talk about this to anyone. No one. My sister if she's lucky. My sister said only the other evening, 'Claire's private life has always been a mystery to all of us'." For a moment, listening to her reject the personal in favour of the "real issues", I think she sounds like a Marxist. It's the only time in 90 minutes. It would be simplistic to suggest that such ideological swings are a symptomatic of a Catholic who, having lost her faith, has spent two decades pursuing alternative theologies. It's no more simplistic, however, than believing her opinions have been bought by the "secret" backers who pay her a salary which, she assures me, is so low that she's too embarrassed to disclose it - circa ?20,000, I'd guess. As it happens, unless there is concealment of Cherie-like proportions going on, the institute is open about where its money comes from. Sixty per cent is from individual donations, the rest comes from corporate or institutional sponsors, a list of which they e-mail me. Some names, such as Saatchi & Saatchi and the Adam Smith Institute, certainly lean to the Right, but the British Council and Relate are on the list too. I ask if the IoI has received cash from America's leading right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation. She says it has not. A conference in America last autumn was sponsored by the pro-gun, pro-GM Reason Foundation, but the venue for the event was the New School in Manhattan, a radical left-wing bastion. Whom else might we object to? "Novartis." Who are they? "Pharmaceuticals, I think. I don't know who they are. That's not very good for future sponsorship, is it?" Do sponsors ever tell her what not to say? "Never. Well, one company, a private company with a lot of money in a trust, wanted their chief executive to speak at an event and we said no. But, in fact, and I hate to say this because of my background, but who does interfere in debate? The only people who interfere are politically correct liberals who would have you kicked out of every polite dinner party for querying their sacred orthodoxies." I just wonder if she ever notices her knee jerking against an orthodoxy that actually has right on its side? "That is a really good question. Actually, I hate professional mavericks, and I know I keep saying 'challenging orthodoxies' in a bit of a buzzword type way. I think you have to query everything without being silly about it. Sometimes orthodoxies may be right." A little after seeing her, I ask John Vidal, co-author of the The Guardian investigation, what he thinks of her now. He speaks warmly of her personally but remains convinced that the institute is intellectually, at least, part of a business-funded network of American libertarians. Tactically, on the other hand, its attempts to infiltrate the media recall the heyday of the far Left. He is "spooked by the clones, the boys and girls looking for a life view", at IoI meetings. In short, though, he would have no great objections if the institute were more open about its beliefs, if it renamed itself, perhaps, the Institute of Libertarian Ideas. Myself, I think Fox is right that liberal pieties can forestall debate. The IoI's discussions are therefore stimulating, even if her own contributions are sometimes so unnuanced that they sound dotty. But then, having had the courage to discharge two otiose theologies from her life, she might yet abandon her latest. Her real agenda, secret even from herself, perhaps, may be the promotion of Claire Fox. In which case, good luck to her. If my invitation still stands, save the last seasonal canap? for me. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 07:59:28 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:59:28 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <012701c31ed8$07c62060$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This article is interesting in a number of respects. I don't know who O'Neill is, or his background. He has his own website, where he reveals that, among other things, he is an assistant editor of "spiked". See http://www.brendanoneill.net/ What catches my eye is O'Neill's accurate perception of the current crisis as emanating from within the state itself. Nevertheless his railing against the state's "self-loathing" is misleading to say the least. I'm not sure what political dividends are supposed to be reaped from this sort of castigation, but it does demonstrate the limitations of an anti-state-for-its-own-sake perspective. To characterise the current crisis within the state as "less an effort to see justice done in Northern Ireland than a bad dose of post-conflict confusion and uncertainty" begs the question of why any state as traditionally airtight as the British should be in such bad shape. O'Neill should read a bit more, then he would know that the state has been the arena of a bitter struggle for decades, and only in the last decade has the Europe faction won out against the empire loyalist faction, helped in part by the Provos targeting of the City of London and Canary Wharf -- too much for British capital. For all the state's "display" of "a solid and united front" during the Troubles, we know that many within were deeply unhappy at the conduct of the war (as O'Neill insists we should now call it, apparently to legitimate British state actions conducted during this period), not least because it overlapped with other struggles being conducted simultaneously between MI5 and MI6, Westminster and Belfast, the RUC and the army, and all underdetermined by a rise in labour militancy that threatened the overthrow of the status quo as was. Northern Ireland was a key arena in the dirty tricks campaign conducted by MI5 against various UK politicians and the Labour Party generally. To say that this was all sorted out in private during the period of the Troubles is casual empiricism at best, and wilfully misleading at worst, given the amount of material that has been in the public domain for at least a decade. To reiterate: the "self-loathing" of the British state, as portrayed by O'Neill, is in fact vital to the success of its exit strategy as it prepares for the reunification of Ireland. Since the weakened loyalist politicians cannot be expected to give any substantive concessions, Sinn Fein and other republicans are being assauged by a British state apparently wounding itself via public flagellation. The beauty of this is that it leads those accustomed to viewing the British state as one big unified oppressor as getting its just desserts, long overdue, whilst the legitimacy of the entire unionist political case goes belly up. And it is a costless "humiliation" for the British state because the blood is being drawn from those who were once hegemonic but who are now fighting a desperate rearguard against a long ascendant Europe faction that better reflects the true interests of British capital in the here and now than a bunch of unreconstructed empire loyalists, racists and bigots who once typified the conduct of foreign and colonial policy. And in any case, having already written off Northern Ireland, what's to lose? Only by prolonging the needless occupation does Britain really inflict wounds upon itself. There is no question that the whole process of opening up the sordid details of the past to the public eye is a good thing, and that it should have been done a long time ago. The activities and bitter legacy of the empire loyalists should be exposed. O'Neill seems to be upset that this is happening. It's like he is saying "this is not how states are supposed to behave, and certainly not the British state". Presumably it would be better that we do not know how much the supposed upholders of the rule of law and due process smashed to pieces precisely those principles as part of raison d'?t?t. A strange argument for a libertarian, and certainly not one a republican would consider legitimate. My impression of O'Neill, drawn largely from this article and the company that he seems to keep, is that his critique, ostensibly anti-state libertarian, is in fact merely another stick with which to beat New Labour, which is hardly the same thing (however commendible in theory). The real danger of such a position is that it will end up supporting the "right" of the loyalist "community" to self-determination or somesuch formulation, against the wicked machinations of faceless state bureaucrats concerned only for their own welfare. Thus libertarians end up demanding that the state should retain a firm grip rather than exit stage right; that the state should keep its secrets beyond the reach of public scrutiny. That much is already implied in O'Neill's article. Presumably it's a matter of time before such "reasoning" is made explicit. Michael Keaney ------ spiked-online, 13 May 2003 'Stakeknife' cuts both ways by Brendan O'Neill 'If it's true that Stakeknife was the head of [IRA] internal security, then it's a major coup for the British. It would mean they have been steering republican strategy for years..' (1) So said Anthony McIntyre, a former member of the Provisional IRA, in the wake of Sunday's revelations that 'Stakeknife' - the British military's top mole in the IRA, who has been the subject of speculation for years - is allegedly one Alfredo Scappaticci. Scappaticci was reportedly the deputy head of the Provisional IRA's internal security team from the late 1970s through to the ceasefire of 1994. This would have made him central to the IRA - responsible for rooting out alleged informers and for scrutinising every new recruit who entered the IRA's ranks. At the same time, he was apparently passing information to the British army for ?80,000 a year. The Stakeknife revelations, if true, will certainly deliver a massive blow to the IRA. Scappaticci's intelligence is said to have played a role in some of Britain's major attacks on Irish republicans in the latter half of the 'Troubles' - including the Loughgall ambush of 1987, where the SAS killed eight active members of the IRA, and the killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988. Yet for the shock that must be sweeping through IRA circles, the Stakeknife episode reveals as much about contemporary British politics as it does about the 25-year war in Northern Ireland. From the internal British squabbling that led to Stakeknife's identity being revealed to the post-Stakeknife handwringing over Britain's dirty war, it is the British elite's inability to hold a line on any issue that has made this into such a big deal. The Stakeknife debate shows that, today, the liveliest clash over Northern Ireland is within the British elite itself. It was the British authorities that made Britain's underhand tactics in the Troubles - its use of paid informers in the IRA and its collusion with loyalist paramilitaries - into a major focus over the past five years. Irish nationalists and republicans have been kicking up a stink about Britain's so-called 'dirty war' for the past 25 years, especially British forces' links with loyalist paramilitaries - but their protestations were largely sidelined. Now, the British-backed Stevens Inquiry into collusion - which has been running for 14 years but has only recently made a big impact - has published a 3000-page report; the Stevens team has committed itself to further investigation of British tactics in Northern Ireland; and newspaper editorials demand 'a full public inquiry' into the 'murky secrets' of Britain's war (2). British judges, politicians and, indeed, journalists weren't always so keen to debate British collusion and infiltration. During the Troubles, if any inquiry got too close to the uncomfortable truth of the war, it was simply shut up. The Stalker Inquiry into the Royal Ulster Constabulary's alleged 'shoot-to-kill' policy, led by John Stalker of Greater Manchester Police, was closed down in 1986, after Stalker was accused by British sources of 'associating with known criminals'. Even earlier versions of the Stevens Inquiry into collusion were intimidated by British military forces. In January 1990, the Stevens team launched a dawn raid to arrest Brian Nelson, a British military agent who had infiltrated the loyalist Ulster Defence Association, enabling it to target prominent Irish republicans. When the Stevens team returned from the raid, they found their secure investigation headquarters in flames (3). The infamous Brian Nelson court case of the early 1990s was more an attempt to take the heat of the British military, rather than anything like a real investigation into the 'dirty war'. By allowing Nelson to be arrested and tried for passing sensitive information to loyalists, British forces in Northern Ireland hoped that collusion would appear as the dodgy work of a handful of out-of-order British agents, rather than as a British policy in the war against the IRA. Yet now 'dirty war' talk is everywhere, instigated, not by anti-British elements in Ireland, but by sections of the British elite itself. It seems to have been this process of British self-investigation that led to the unveiling of Stakeknife's identity by Irish and Scottish newspapers over the weekend. Scappaticci's name was apparently revealed to journalists by a former British agent who once infiltrated the IRA, and who is now unhappy about Britain's failure to offer him proper protection. Yet members of the Stevens Inquiry have been talking up the prize of Stakeknife, and their desire to interview him, for months. And when Andrew Jaspan, a journalist at the Glasgow Sunday Herald , informed government sources that he intended to reveal Stakeknife's identity, they didn't warn him off. According to one report: '[I]n two previous cases, when the Herald was on the brink of naming British spies, a Treasury solicitor had threatened the paper with legal action.. Jaspan said he received no such warning this time, leading him to speculate that the government might have decided it wanted Stakeknife's identity to be in the public domain.' (4) Stevens officials and sections of the British government may have wanted Stakeknife's identity in the public domain, but the British military and the Department of Defence most certainly did not. Military commanders are said to be 'furious' with the Stevens Inquiry (5), while defence secretary Geoff Hoon has spent the past few weeks slapping injunctions on anyone who attempted to name Stakeknife - even as other government sources apparently turned a blind eye to Stakeknife's eventual unveiling. Why have Britain's dirty war tactics become such an explosive issue now? And why are sections of the British elite seriously clashing over their 25-year war in Northern Ireland? This squalid infighting among the British authorities is less an effort to see justice done in Northern Ireland than a bad dose of post-conflict confusion and uncertainty. It is British self-loathing that has made dirty war tactics such a focal point. >From 1969 to 1994, the British authorities fought a war against the Irish republican movement, which was demanding a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Britain denied that the 'Troubles' was a war at all, instead claiming to be simply upholding law and order against the criminals of the IRA. Yet it was broad-based support for the IRA within nationalist communities that allowed it to conduct a 25-year campaign against British forces, and which undermined the British authorities' claims that the IRA was just a small gang of thugs. Despite Britain's claims about the Troubles, on the ground its security forces and judiciary operated as they normally do in war time: combating, killing and imprisoning the enemy. As during any war (as opposed to your average clampdown on 'criminals'), all sides did nasty things - including, on Britain's part, colluding with pro-British paramilitaries, and allowing British agents within the IRA to kill and torture in order to protect their cover. As in any conflict, differences of opinion that army majors, judges, soldiers or politicians might have had about army tactics would have been settled behind closed doors. The threat posed by the IRA to the stability of the United Kingdom forced the British establishment to close ranks against its common enemy, and to settle problems in private. So Northern Ireland was the one issue that enjoyed bipartisan agreement in parliament. From the army's point of view, it would have been unthinkable to have a political debate about underhand tactics. It was the end of the Irish conflict in 1994 - in the absence of the common enemy of the IRA, who at least reminded the British authorities what they were all against - that led to serious cracks in the establishment over Northern Ireland. With the winding down of the conflict, debates that once would have taken place in private emerged into the public arena. So the Stevens team launched its most serious investigation into collusion in 1993, as the British and Irish governments kickstarted the peace process and just months before the IRA declared its ceasefire. In the 1990s, against the wishes of the military, the Stevens Inquiry has had its remit extended. It wasn't just the issue of collusion that exploded in the aftermath of the war. The events of Bloody Sunday, when 14 Catholics were killed by British paratroopers in Derry on 30 January 1972, became a live public debate in British political and military circles in the 1990s. The ongoing Bloody Sunday Inquiry has forced British soldiers and commanders to reveal all about Bloody Sunday - and some in the military have responded by claiming that Downing Street, not the military, gave the ultimate orders to open fire in Derry. Sections of the British elite are at each other's throats over the events of the Troubles, publicly passing the blame and the buck among themselves. It would have been unthinkable for such divisive debates to have taken place during the conflict, when the state displayed a solid and united front against the IRA. But with the end of the conflict, and the instability of the peace process that followed, nothing seems certain - except that the British elite finds it difficult to close ranks or act in a singular or determined fashion on just about any issue. Even worse than the internal clashes over who should take responsibility for the dirty war, British politicians and commentators are now taking part in some serious self-flagellation over the Irish conflict. The Stevens Inquiry accuses British soldiers of doing 'terrible' things; British soldiers confess their feelings of guilt and regret at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry; prime minister Tony Blair talks up Britain's responsibility to the 'victims' in Northern Ireland. If there's anything more off-putting that the British elite's squabbling, it is its self-loathing. Beyond the immediate focus on Northern Ireland's 'dirty war', some in the British elite appear to questioning the very drive that enabled the British authorities to contain the IRA for 25 years. With the loss of any clear sense of what the British elite represents or what it fought for, what would previously have been seen as acts of war are now seen as being problematic or even shameful. The current tensions over Northern Ireland are internally generated. Anybody who thinks that justice will come out of this internal war, for either community in Northern Ireland, should think again. Read on: spiked-issue: Ireland (1) Top IRA killer revealed as British spy, United Press International, 12 May 2003 (2) Stakeknife's dirty war, Guardian, 13 May 2003 (3) The Stevens Inquiry: Chronology, BBC News, 17 April 2003 (4) How Stakeknife was unmasked, Guardian, 12 May 2003 (5) Top double agent in IRA guilty of 'up to 40 murders, Belfast Telegraph, 12 May 2003 Reprinted from : http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DD96.htm From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:03:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:03:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: management problems Message-ID: <012f01c31ed8$9e450b00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Bush beset by struggles to win the peace Post-war chaos undermines progress in Iraq and Afghanistan MICHAEL SETTLE The Herald 20 May 2003 GEORGE W Bush's post-war strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq were under severe strain last night as growing turmoil threatened to plunge both war-ravaged nations deeper into instability and disorder. In Kabul, an exasperated Hamid Karzai said he would resign as Afghanistan's president if regional warlords continued to pocket hundreds of millions of pounds in vital customs revenue and fail to hand them over to the exchequer. Such is the depth of the financial crisis that Mr Karzai said he would call a second loya jirga to try to resolve the matter. His government was formed by such a grand council last summer. However, the president gave an ominous warning if such a summit failed. He said: "With such a situation, is it possible to continue on the path to peace? No." While the government exerts influence over the Afghan capital, most of the country is ruled by warlords, who command their own private armies. Mr Karzai pointed out that regional authorities had sent no money to government coffers since mid-March, so many security forces and civil servants had not been paid. "A few weeks ago the finance ministry reported there was no money in the treasury, but we do have money: hundreds of millions of dollars in customs revenues are being collected in the provinces," Mr Karzai explained. Afghanistan's border provinces straddle lucrative import routes and are ruled by the warlords. The finance ministry estimated the 12 provinces had earned more than ?300m from customs in the last year, yet only ?50m was handed over to Kabul. Mr Karzai sought to reassure the regional chiefs that his government would collect revenues and redistribute them to the provinces fairly. But he warned: "If we are not successful, we'll convene a loya jirga in two or three months and say what didn't work, who's not complying and why. "The people of Afghanistan want to have a good economy. They want to have a government that can pay the salaries of civil servants and soldiers, but today the central government cannot pay those salaries," he added. Makhdom Raheen, the information minister, spelled out what a loya jirga would mean: "The whole government, including Karzai, would step down and the loya jirga would choose another one," he said. Instability and uncertainty were also evident in Iraq yesterday, where thousands took to the streets of Baghdad in the largest post-war protest to demonstrate peacefully against the US-led plans to install an interim Iraqi authority. American troops watched as up to 10,000 people gathered in front of a Sunni Muslim mosque in the Iraqi capital's northern district of Azimiyah. The protesters then marched across a bridge on the Tigris River to the nearby Kadhamiya district, home to one of the holiest Shi'ite shrines in Iraq. The crowd chanted: "No Shi'ites and no Sunnis, just Islamic unity," sang religious songs, and carried banners reading "No to the foreign administration". Adding to headaches for the coalition, the UN's nuclear watchdog agency said it was alarmed by almost daily reports of looting and destruction at nuclear sites, warning that the theft of radioactive material posed a security threat and a danger to health. Oil officials said the looting and lack of security were also hampering efforts to restore oil output, vital for the devastated country's economic recovery. Elsewhere, former Iraqi generals returning from exile claimed Saddam Hussein was in hiding in Iraq and issuing orders to trusted supporters as he plotted a return to power. The generals, who now play a key role in working with US forces to purge the Iraqi public service and security apparatus of Saddam diehards, said the deposed president had ordered a name-change for his Ba'ath party. Major-General Tawfiq al Yassiri said the former Iraqi dictator had changed its name in the last few days to Auda, meaning return. In the north of the country, police said more than 10 people have been killed in clashes between Arabs and Kurds in Kirkuk in the oil city's worst violence since the war. As officials prepared for city council elections this week, Arabs and Kurds fought over the weekend in mainly Arab districts in the south of the city, 155 miles north of Baghdad, said Jwamma Kakey, a senior officer. A senior US military official said members of each community blamed the other for the fighting. Colonel William Mayville, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, said: "My sense is that there are external forces at work." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:04:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:04:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: constitutional deform Message-ID: <014101c31ed8$c2160ca0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Watchdog aims to curb prime minister's military power DEBORAH SUMMERS The Herald, 20 May 2003 TONY Blair could be stripped of the power to deploy troops without the support of parliament under radical laws being considered by MPs. The move would force the prime minister to seek parliamentary approval for a wide range of prerogatives including the right to confer honours, run the Civil Service, grant passports and make treaties. Under the proposals, drawn up by the public administration select committee, a new act would end the antiquated notion of "royal prerogative", from which most of the government's powers arise. Tony Wright, chairman of the committee, said: "Much of government in Britain is based on ancient powers handed down from monarchs to ministers. "It is time to re-examine this strange state of affairs which means that vital functions of our government, from the power to run the Civil Service to the power to deploy troops at home and abroad, rest on uncertain and antique foundations. Few other countries have such opaque constitutional arrangements." The committee will today publish a paper entitled "Ministerial powers and the prerogative". Among the powers called into question are: the use of armed forces; recommendations for honours; grants of peerages; grants of pardons; grants and revocations of passports; the prime minister's ability to appoint and dismiss ministers; organisation of the Civil Service; dissolution of parliament; making and ratification of treaties. MPs on the committee said they recognised that such powers were necessary for effective government and were subject to a number of check and balances. They argued, however, that minister's use of them needed to be properly scrutinised. "Ministers' executive powers do not require, either by law or convention, parliamentary approval before or after they are used," the paper states. "Parliament doesn't even have to be told that they have been exercised," it adds. A Downing Street spokesman said: "We will comment in due course." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:08:16 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:08:16 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: wretched despair Message-ID: <015101c31ed9$427360a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Until Europe agrees with us, the tests will always fail The cabinet's euro debate is a sham designed to cover the PM's retreat Hugo Young Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian Yesterday is said to have seen the start of a period of supercharged cabinet government that will conclude on June 9. Not only will there be full cabinet meetings to determine policy on the euro, but each colleague has been allotted time with the prime minister and chancellor to ask questions and raise any doubts about the Treasury's conclusions. They will have their say, which they have hitherto been denied. But there's supposed to be more to it than that. This is Mr Blair hoping to deploy the cabinet behind his own line, that there should be a referendum in this parliament, against the chancellor's determination that there should not. That is not, in reality, what is happening. It's a fiction both men have reasons to cultivate, but it is almost the opposite of the truth. These ministers will be seen by Blair and Brown jointly to hear what is becoming their joint opinion. They won't witness an argument, for there no longer is much argument. Blair has been co-opted to the Brown position, that there can be no early referendum, which means in practice no referendum in this parliament. All there is to play for is the language, though here too fiction pervades the scene. Mr Blair has been reduced to abandoning the argument and saving face. The words of the June 9 statement will allude to the possibility of a referendum later. That's Brown's concession, to give Blair a political point he needs. But this is not in any way sincere on the chancellor's part. It is not intended to be real. The substance, as everyone ought to understand, is that the referendum will be indefinitely delayed. That is Brown's great victory. The role of cabinet members is not to adjudicate between rival positions, or lend their collective weight to the task of outfacing Gordon. They have been brought into play to ratify, or submit to, the concordat reached between the two men. So they too are playing their part in a charade, playing at cabinet government. Some may have a few ideas to contribute about the most appropriate weasel words. But it is inconceivable that any would challenge what is now the Blair-Brown strategy. Their task is to provide unified cabinet cover for the prime minister's retreat. Most will do this, I think, with equanimity, either because they are Brownites who are euro-sceptic anyway, or Blairites happy to endorse the general delusion, including their own, that a referendum might take place soon. Having gained his victory, Mr Brown presents himself as not in the least euro-sceptic. He regards himself as Europe's best friend. The current period, he thinks, should be a fruitful pro-European moment, not a triumph for the antis. The time is ripe for a heavy push towards economic reform in the EU, and Britain is perfectly positioned to be its prophet and leader. The major enemies are French protectionism and German labour-market rigidity, which defy the inexorable laws of globalisation and sooner or later will have to be unpicked. Britain, Brown thinks, is the exemplar, with an American attitude to job creation and a European philosophy of social protection. Britain can lead the way towards economic practices that break the old EU out of its inward-looking box. This, he argues, will have massive benefits both abroad and at home. It is the way to persuade the British eventually to love the euro. Once the people have seen the benign spreading of British economic reform across the continent, their hysteria about the loss of sovereignty will disappear as fast as their passion for national identity. They are, he seems to think, as mesmerised as he is by the incontestable rightness of the British economic model. I don't doubt that Brown wants to be fully engaged in Europe, including at some distant time swapping sterling for the euro, perhaps after he has supplanted Mr Blair in No 10. But his tactics and his vision are extremely narrow. He says there must be "unambiguous" proof of the economic case, of a clarity that will only be available in the eye and at the subjective choosing of the beholder. His people believe that no popular endorsement should even be sought until they can look confidently towards a 60-40 majority. He also seems to believe that British influence on the political and economic shape of the EU will be undiminished by a decision, however artfully dressed up, which says to all observers that the euro is off his agenda. Blair doesn't agree with any of that - though it should be noted that succumbing to the Brown analysis will draw him into stronger assertions about the unmet economic tests than he possibly believes. He has always thought that the only way of retaining a modicum of influence with his EU partners after a negative decision on the euro would be by rooting it totally in the economic case. They would understand that position, he says. The immediate political case, of course, is not open and shut. This year would be a hard time to be arguing for entry, what with the German economy failing and the French Iraqi posturing that has prompted another burst of abomination in good old Albion. But there's a difference between saying No, with a few vague words of pretence to console the other side; and saying Yes but not quite yet, and then setting a political and economic course that is purposefully directed to preparing the way for entry. Once, the second course looked like being the policy. Now, Brown is making it ever clearer, from the height of his intellectual superiority and the distance of his outsider's position, that until the EU does things our way, the tests will always fail. Meanwhile, the climate in which EU discussion takes place in Britain gets more poisonous. A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that one consequence of rejecting the euro would be the stoking up of anti-EU opinion, with a new drive behind the case for decoupling altogether. It has happened sooner than I thought. The sudden demands by the anti-Europe press for a referendum on a new EU constitution that nobody has yet seen have the thinly concealed purpose of putting an exit on the map. Far from running a country that had at last exorcised its anti-European ghosts, the government remains dumbly terrified by their power. Faced with this confluence of forces - unyielding chancellor, party splitting over personalities and issue, and polling figures that look hard to overcome - Mr Blair has backed down. He hates to do it. The shared assessment the big two present is another fiction, in the sense that it disguises mutual mistrust and even loathing. Is this the over-mighty prime minister presented in Clare Short's philippic? He has been drawn into procrastination he can't control. The question about the euro moves on from this parliament to the next. But no promises, even then. Or if there are, don't believe a word. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:16:47 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:16:47 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: punk Thatcherism's last stand Message-ID: <015d01c31eda$72a7a8c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> "Lord" Conrad Black puts the issue very bluntly -- as one in which Europe is becoming a counterweight to US influence, and should therefore be opposed. If Blair had balls then he might pick up the gauntlet and frame the issue as squarely -- Britain's future: US satrap or European player? Instead Brown has Ed Balls, whose "five tests" are the smokescreen behind which the government, with all pseudo-scientific gravity, will postpone the issue yet again. But what if the government did rise to Black's challenge? Is it really down to being with Bush or with Giscard? How many of the "British people" would really like to line up *behind* Bush as opposed to being alongside Chirac and Schr?der? Few, I reckon, although such a campaign would have problematic consequences with respect to foreign policy. Both Black and Rupert Murdoch, eagerly supplicating their neoconservative patrons, are vulnerable to exposure as US agents of influence. But if Blair is going to continue to duck the issue then this sort of pitiful spectacle is the inevitable result. ----- Telegraph owner threatens media war Matt Wells, media correspondent Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian Conrad Black, the owner of the Telegraph newspapers, yesterday took the unusual step of announcing that his newspapers would vigorously campaign for a referendum on the European constitution. Lord Black of Crossharbour said there would be a "very serious controversy" if ministers refused to consult voters directly. Newspaper proprietors rarely state their positions in public, preferring to let editors, at least nominally, make the decisions on matters of political controversy. His intervention - trailed on the front page of yesterday's Daily Telegraph - raised the stakes in the stand-off between the government and the press. Yesterday the Daily Mail printed placards demanding a referendum, while the Sun continued to promote its telephone poll pressing the government for a vote. Lord Black said, in an interview for a BBC Radio 4 programme about Britain's relationship with Europe and the US, that pro-constitutionalists wanted to set up a "ramshackle structure of alternate influence" to the United States. "I'm certainly not one to claim exaggerated influence for the press or any part of the press, but if there is anybody in government who imagines that there is not going to be a serious controversy about whether a referendum is called for on an issue of the importance of the new constitution of Europe, then I can certainly set their minds at ease. "I and the newspapers I am associated with would become extremely active in promoting the view that [adopting the constitution] was a step of such importance that the people had to be consulted," Lord Black said. The Telegraph has opposed an EU constitution, but has not led the charge for a referendum. In its leader yesterday, it said: "The question at this stage is not whether or not we have a referendum on a constitution, although it is vital that we continue to press for one. Rather, why is Mr Blair apparently so keen on an EU constitution in the first place? Indeed, it is only if he makes the wrong decision now that the question of a referendum will arise." Other papers, however, did not hold back. The Daily Mail printed a picture of Peter Hain, the government's main negotiator on Europe, under the headline Minister of Arrogance. Mr Hain had said at the weekend: "Those campaigning for a referendum might as well put away their placards and stop wasting their money, because we are not going to do it." On page 54, the paper printed a cut-out placard which read, under the Daily Mail masthead: Europe, Let the People Decide. It added in a leader column: "This newspaper - and the gathering throng determined to fight for a referendum - will emphatically not put away its placards. We will have our say." The Sun last week criticised the draft plans for a constitution as "the biggest betrayal in our history". Under a "save our country" banner, it launched a telephone poll to gauge public opinion on the question of a referendum. It reported yesterday that 148,974 callers had demanded a poll, against 13,843 who did not wish one. In a leader column, the Sun called the former French president Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing an "arrogant, condescending snob" who was "planning the end of Britain's freedom", and it hit out at the "treacherous French". The British government has not enjoyed unqualified support from the left; in its leader column on Saturday, the Guardian pointed out that debate about the draft constitution would last well into next year, and said calls for a referendum were premature. But it added: "This is not to dismiss concerns that the convention may come up with plans that are unacceptable, either in part or in whole. Nor is it to rule out the possibility that, if the draft ultimately proposes radical change to the way Britain is governed, a referendum may be an appropriate part of the process by which British consent is sought." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:21:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:21:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues Message-ID: <018901c31edb$2b7eb0a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Afghan warlords hoarding income Jonathan Steele Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian President Hamid Karzai has threatened to resign if Afghanistan regional governors go on hoarding customs revenues rather than handing them to the central government in Kabul. His angry remark shows how much power still remains in the hands of rebellious warlords and religious fundamentalists 18 months after US forces toppled the Taliban regime and promised to create a properly functioning society. In a speech broadcast on state television Mr Karzai said the provincial authorities had sent no money to Kabul since mid-March, the beginning of the Afghan fiscal year, and in consequence scores of security personnel and civil servants had not been paid. "A few weeks ago the finance ministry reported there was no money in the treasury, but we do have money," he said. "Hundreds of millions of dollars in customs revenues are being collected in the provinces." Afghanistan's border provinces straddle lucrative import routes and warlords such as Ismail Khan in Herat and Abdul Rashid Dostum in Mazar-i-Sharif prefer to keep the revenues in their own areas. Mr Karzai promised that the central government would collect the revenues and redistribute in the provinces equitably. If the governors failed to comply, he would convene a loya jirga (grand council) to pick a new government. Donors have agreed to give $350m (?216m) to the budget this year, and the government is expected to raise $200m. Mr Karzai said customs revenues alone could bring in $600m. Security is also getting worse: seven Afghan mine clearers have been shot and one killed in ambushes in the past month. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:22:55 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:22:55 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK export success: arms to Indonesia Message-ID: <019101c31edb$4df85fa0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Indonesia uses UK Hawks in Aceh offensive UK warns Jakarta that export licences may be at risk as raids continue against rebels in province John Aglionby in Jakarta Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian Indonesia launched its much-anticipated military offensive against separatists in Aceh province yesterday with displays of "shock therapy" on land, at sea and in the air. It was intended as a demonstration of what the rebels can expect from Jakarta's latest operation to crush the 27-year insurgency. Four of the 13 aircraft used in what were mostly choreographed manoeuvres rather than attacks on fighters of the Free Aceh Movement (Gam), were British-made Hawk-200 fighter jets, sold to Indonesia on the understanding that they would not be used for internal repression. The Hawks were used primarily to scare and intimidate people on the ground by flying low over targets already attacked with rockets by other aircraft, and then over terrain in advance of parachute drops by 600 troops. They were also used as close protection for Hercules transport planes. A military spokesman did not rule out the Hawks being used to attack suspected rebel positions. "Sure. They could well be used [in a direct attack role] if we wanted to," said Lieutenant Colonel Firdaus Kormano. "But we haven't decided to do that yet." A Foreign Office spokeswoman said Britain had not received any reports of Hawks being used offensively, but would "obviously take [any reports] extremely seriously". "Senior members of the Indonesian government and the military have repeatedly promised that British-supplied equipment would not be used offensively or in violation of human rights anywhere in Indonesia," the spokeswoman said, warning that future export licenses could come under threat if the reports were substantiated. Col Firdaus said the Indonesian military's main operations yesterday were not intended to kill large numbers of rebels. "We just wanted to give some shock therapy to Gam, to make them mentally and psychologically afraid of what the future holds," he said. The operation began only hours after President Megawati Sukarnoputri declared martial law in Aceh after the collapse of peace talks aimed at salvaging a ceasefire signed last December. The talks failed because Gam refused to meet Jakarta's demand to renounce its claim to independence and lay down its weapons. Within hours, Ms Megawati authorised what was described as an integrated operation involving military, law enforcement, humanitarian and local government personnel. Few people doubt where the emphasis will lie. The opening salvo of the military offensive was the early morning airstrikenear the village of Glee Iniem, about 15 miles outside the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. The target was a collection of empty buildings, but locals living nearby were terrified by the impact of the three rockets. "The sound from the three bangs was like thunder. They were combined with gunfire, shocking us so we are now afraid to go outside," said Usman Hanfiah, 50. The airstrike was followed by the parachute drop, which was a little more risky, Col Firdaus claimed. "It was in a grey area, a sort of no-man's land where we weren't sure if there were Gam fighters or not," he said. "This is what the paratroops will be used for throughout this campaign." About half a dozen skirmishes were reported across the province on the northern tip of Sumatra, but the only Indonesian military fatality was a marine who fell off a boat. Two civilian corpses were taken to a hospital near the town of Bireuen, where officials claimed one was a rebel. The military claimed Gam also burned several schools and government buildings. Col Firdaus said commanders were not expecting many large, set-piece battles with the guerrillas, who number only 3,000 to 5,000. "Gam have prepared themselves," he said. "They will be using guerrilla tactics and so be seeking to avoid large encounters. "Our aim is to barricade them into small, confined areas and then destroy them." Dozens of journalists have been embedded with military units, and television viewers were able to sample the parachute drop and several skirmishes. "There is a clear attempt to try and win hearts and minds going on," said one western diplomat in Jakarta. "This is a new chapter in Indonesian military operations." A Gam spokesman, Sofyan Dawod, however, said a couple of dozen civilians had been either killed, beaten or kidnapped. "It's going to be genocide all over again," he said. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:25:04 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:25:04 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: civil disorder Message-ID: <019901c31edb$9b3ad0e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Saddam's praise singer shot dead as revenge killings start Rory McCarthy in Baghdad Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian Two gunmen shot and killed a senior Ba'ath party official who appeared regularly in uniform on Iraqi state television singing anthems praising Saddam Hussein, the Guardian has learned. It was one of the first known revenge executions since the fall of the regime. Daoud al-Qaisy was a familiar face in the dictator's relentless propaganda machine through his television appearances. At dusk on Saturday, gunmen drew up outside his large house in central Baghdad and shot him dead on his doorstep. Similar attacks on the party's leaders have been reported from other areas, including an attack earlier this month in a Shia district formerly known as Saddam City, where a Ba'athist and several members of his family were killed. Many Iraqis had long expected the fall of the regime to trigger a wave of brutal lynchings. For many it has come as a surprise that it took so long for the attacks to begin. The murder on Saturday, which was committed less than two miles from a US military patrol, underscores the growing sense of lawlessness that has gripped the capital. Yesterday, thousands of protesters marched to the Kadhimiya mosque in north-western Baghdad, in the biggest demonstration so far against the US military. Many in the crowd were followers of some of the hardline Shia clerics who have begun to emerge as popular figures. They also criticised the lack of security in Baghdad, the shortage of electricity and the slow pace of reconstruction. Graffiti has begun to appear on street corners in Baghdad threatening attacks on American soldiers. "You'll be dead US army," reads one message painted in English on a wall in the wealthy Mansour district. Al-Qaisy had the relatively senior rank of "comrade" in the Ba'athist hierarchy and was handed military command of seven districts in his area of Baghdad. By profession, he was a singer and the head of the Iraqi artists' union, whe re he was responsible for keeping the propaganda flowing. For two decades, particularly during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the first Gulf war in 1991, he appeared on television in uniform, sometimes brandishing a Kalashnikov assault rifle, singing tribute after tribute to Saddam. Preparing for Al-Qaisy's funeral yesterday, his son, Salwan, 27, said he had no doubt that his father was murdered because of his affiliation to the Ba'ath party. "My father was one of the president's supporters. He believed in him," the son said. "This [the killing] is a natural consequence of the lack of security in Baghdad. Now all his friends are scared, some of them are too frightened even to come to the funeral." The gunmen drove up to the house in a Nissan pick-up truck, he said. One of them called his father to the door, started talking to him and then shot him in the head. He died immediately. A bullet found embedded in the kitchen wall after the attack revealed that the killer had used a .38 revolver, a gun commonly available in the city. The singer was injured in an assassination attempt during an uprising after the 1991 Gulf war. He survived, despite being shot five times. In the run-up to the recent war, he fled his home and was sheltered by his sister. Two weeks ago, he returned to his Baghdad house. "He was scared and he knew his life could be in danger. This was an organised killing," his son said. US officials who are heading the interim civil authority in Baghdad said last week that up to 30,000 Ba'athists would be permanently excluded from future governments in Iraq. Salwan said that the announcement would trigger more attacks. "Such a message only encourages people to take revenge or to kill anyone they don't like." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 20 08:26:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 17:26:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: GM foods Message-ID: <01a701c31edb$bca7f1e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US uses GM foods in first assault of EU trade battle Heather Stewart and Charlotte Denny Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian Washington is coming under mounting pressure from big business to use the transatlantic trade spat over GM crops as a test case for an all-out assault on EU health and safety rules, environmental campaigners warn. They fear EU rules on recycling, animal testing and chemicals will all be targeted by the Bush administration. After the administration caused consternation at the EU last week by launching a dispute over Europe's moratorium on GM foods at the World Trade Organisation, Friends of the Earth accused them of caving in to the powerful business lobby group, the National Foreign Trade Council. "These are not obscure laws, they're about the food we eat - something that Europeans really care about; and it looks as if there's a hit list out there for them," said Liana Stupples, the policy and campaigns director at FoE. The NFTC has a list of regulations it would like Europe to abandon. The US state department website prominently displays a paper titled "Looking Behind the Curtain: The Growth of Trade Barriers that Ignore Sound Science", published by the NFTC, whose members include Halliburton, the energy firm once run by vice-president Dick Cheney. The report criticises Europe's practice of banning imports it believes may be risky, deriding this "precautionary principle" as "an inherently unscientific touchstone". It calls Europe's restrictions on GM crops a "disguised trade barrier". The NFTC also singles out other rules it would like to see struck down - including Japanese restrictions on apple imports and Korean rules on nuts. The list of products that could be affected includes a wide range of foods and other consumer goods, from cars to toiletries. US firms are concerned that "burdensome national standards and technical regulations are increasingly being used by foreign countries to protect ailing industries and block market access to US exports", the report says. Ms Stupples said the NFTC appeared to want the US to use the GM foods case as a "show of strength" to force the EU into relaxing a much wider range of trade rules. The drawn-out nature of WTO disputes means the GM foods row will be coming to the boil just as ministers meet in Cancun, Mexico, in September to try to make progress on the Doha round of trade negotiations. Those talks are intended to tilt trade rules to benefit developing countries. "Unless the EU fights back hard and stops further expansion of WTO rules in Cancun in September, much of what Europe holds dear will be systematically attacked," said Ms Stupples. A spokesman for the US trade representative's office said the document did not represent government policy. From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 20 09:46:10 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 11:46:10 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: Monday's WSJ Front Page and pg 15-triumph of the GT? References: <2D5E2F48C186CC4A8FE9E135479CB9B1545E4A@srv0mx1.intranet.shawnee.edu> Message-ID: <3ECA4DC2.7090108@mindspring.com> The catch is that the WSJ reports views not truth. It feels no obligation to reconcile opposing views in a complex world. Take today's front page: the lead report in What's News states: A strong dollar could push Europe's economy closer to recession while aiding US firms; and another front page headline: US dollars slide could push Europe closer to a recession. When the dollar goes up, Europe goes into recession. When the dollar goes down, Europe goes into recession. What the WSJ did not report is when the dollar stays the same, Europe goes into recession. The irony is that the three prospects are all valid. It's just that recession will come from diffferent sectors and directions in the European economy in each of the three possible conditions. General Motors, IBM, and the like will face problems if the dollar rises, falls, or stays the same, albeit only different problems. The same dilemma with multinationals that has to file their quarterly report in euros or yen, but with different problems. One of the paradoxes of globalization is that the global economy is boxed into a no win paralysis for everyone. But volatility is now a structural profit center. It gives life to the market, incentives for trade and keeps trading profitable. The yo-yo economy needs ups and downs, and as long as the downside does not hit the ground, the performance will appear spectacular. But the financial system is now disconnected from the economic system, if not totally at least with highly elastic connections. And the danger of collapse will come from the financial system, not the economic system. A financial collapse will create more unemployment, not the other way around. Henry C.K. Liu Clifford Poirot wrote: > The front page and page 15 of Monday's WSJ are well worth a look and of some > considerable interest to Post-Keynesians. Here is a brief synopsis: > > "Caution: Tax Cuts Are Bigger Than They Appear in Budget" : While there is > some disagreement on this list over the desirability of tax cuts and > deficits, I don't think anybody on this list would approve of Bush's long > held strategy of using mirrors and gimmicks to redefine the size of the tax > cuts. This article pretty much directly accuses Bush of lying and hypocrisy. > > "Newly Defined "strong dollar" Signals U.S. Shift": Now this one made me > almost burst out into raucous laughter and roll on my office floor-a "strong > dollar" policy is no defined by Treasury Secretary John Snow as "general > public confidence" and "difficulty to counterfeit". Perhaps it can be used > in Bounty commercials too-a comparison test between the dollar and the Euro? > Which one will hold up when wet...?. Again, clearly we have some differences > on this list about the advisability and meaning of the current dollar > devaluation. And again, regardless of what one thinks about this (I'm in > favor) I wonder why is the Bush administration resorting to redefining terms > rather than admitting what is going on? > > I think it is significant politically that a paper that has practically > become the Republican Party propaganda page, takes Bush to task (far more > than the NYT has been willing to do) for his verbal sleight of hand on two > significant economic issues. > > More interesting from a theoretical point of view is the FED's new found > concern on the problems of deflation "Having Defeated Inflation, FED girds > for New Foes: Falling Prices". Follow the story to page 8 where the IMF now > says we need to prevent deflation, rather than fighting it. > > So there we have it-the WSJ, the FED and the IMF warning us against the > dangers of deflation and frank admissions that falling prices don't bring > the economy back to full employment. It's as if I woke up on some bizarre > parallel universe where the WSJ excoriates Bush and the FED and the IMF take > the GT seriously. There's got to be a catch somewhere. > > > From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 20 10:36:59 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 13:36:59 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Hoy martes 18 hs Deuda EXterna Mario Cafiero Message-ID: <4133-220035220163659190@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98142003-05-20T15:59:00Z2003-05-20T16:03:00Z210515996win491173639.3821 21 Gentileza de Memoria de la Deuda INVITACION Hoy, martes 20 de mayo de 2003, a las 18:30 horas CONFERENCIA SOBRE Deuda externa argentina: antecedentes y proyecciones Expositores: Dr. Armando De Angelis Dr. Mario Cafiero Dr. Alfredo E. Calcagno Dr. Carlos H. Juli? Coordinadora: Mina Bely Martes 20 de mayo de 2003, a las 18:30 horas Consejo Profesional de Ciencias Econ?micas de la Ciudad Aut?noma de Buenos Aires Viamonte 1549 ? Piso 2 Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 21073 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jcraven at clark.edu Tue May 20 12:30:51 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 11:30:51 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Voodoo Economics Message-ID: > Buffett slams dividend tax cut > One of world's richest calls plan 'voodoo economics,' says it puts burden > on low-income families. > May 20, 2003: 10:41 AM EDT > > NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Renewing his criticism of the dividend tax cut laid > out by the Senate last week, Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett called > the proposal "voodoo economics" that uses "Enron-style accounting." > The Senate's plan for dividends to be 50 percent tax free in 2003, 100 > percent tax free in 2004 through 2006 and then face the full tax in 2007 > would "further tilt the tax scales toward the rich," Buffett wrote in an > opinion piece in the Washington Post. > Buffett posed a hypothetical situation in which Berkshire Hathaway, which > does not currently pay a dividend, paid $1 billion in dividends next year. > > Through his 31 percent ownership of the company, Buffett said he would > receive an additional $310 million in income that would reduce his tax > rate from about 30 percent to 3 percent, while his office secretary would > still have a tax rate of about 30 percent. > "The 3 percent overall federal tax rate I would pay -- if a Berkshire > dividend were to be tax free -- seems a bit light," Buffett wrote. > Instead of the Senate's tax cut plan, Buffett proposed that it provide tax > reductions to those who need and will spend the money in the form of a > Social Security tax "holiday" or a tax rebate to lower-income people. > "Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is > going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same > $310 million in my pockets," Buffett added. > He closed the piece by saying that the "government can't deliver a free > lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for > lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party." > Warren Buffett sits on the board of the Washington Post Co > > (WPO > >: up $3.91 to $715.01, > Research >, Estimates > >). and Berkshire Hathaway > > (BRK.B > >: up $2.00 to $2451.00, > Research >, Estimates > >) owns a stake in the > newspaper publisher. <<...OLE_Obj...>> > > > From bar at idirect.com Tue May 20 16:58:46 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 18:58:46 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: The America I missed this time. Message-ID: <001601c31f23$732b2670$5a0e9ad8@Chris> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mick Collins" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 2:03 AM Subject: The America I missed this time. Here's a side of the America dream that got right past me between airport security checks and desperately caring people trying to save my lost child--apparently lost because, in the mall, he'd wandered 'aimlessly' more than six feet from me. But the national illness has always been evident--it's just spreading like a plague--a real plague, not SARS. Mick ___________________________________ Live Sicker, Die Younger By Julie Winokur, AlterNet May 15, 2003 A year and a half ago, Sheila and Bob Wessenberg lived in a 2200-square-foot luxury townhouse outside Dallas, on an income of over $100,000. Today, they are facing bankruptcy and a terminal illness without healthcare. "I might die as a result of my poverty," says Sheila in disbelief. She has gone seven months without chemotherapy or follow-up exams because she has no insurance and no money to pay for healthcare. In a country that prides itself on medical excellence, we also have one of the most dysfunctional healthcare delivery systems in the world. While politicians tiptoe around the problem, thousands of Americans live sicker and die younger because they don't have access to even basic care. The Wessenbergs and their two children are among an estimated six million people who lost their insurance last year as a result of the economic downturn. They are also living proof that the slide from middle class comfort to absolute desperation can happen at warp speed, especially when health issues are involved. Just over a year ago, Bob, a Lotus programmer, had a relatively secure job and his family had excellent health benefits. When Sheila was diagnosed with Stage 2, Grade B breast cancer, she was able to get the lumpectomy and mastectomy she needed. Then Bob lost his job in December, 2001, and the dominoes began to fall. The Wessenbergs did the best they could to pay for COBRA insurance, but when the premiums jumped to $837 a month it became prohibitive. Like most people, the Wessenbergs chose to pay for food and their mortgage rather than health coverage. When the Wessenbergs dropped their insurance, Sheila stopped seeking treatment for her breast cancer. She was eight months into chemotherapy, and since she suffers a particularly aggressive form of cancer, her doctor had recommended continuing treatments indefinitely. Since losing her insurance, she has not even had follow-up blood work to see if her cancer has spread. Considering that uninsured women with breast cancer are twice as likely to die from the disease as women with coverage, she is free falling without a parachute. I met Sheila while writing a book that examines the personal toll of being uninsured. "Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured," which was released last month, recounts 41 individual stories to reflect the 41 million uninsured Americans. I wish I could say that Sheila's story is unique, but in researching this book I found there is an overabundance of tragedy ? every bit of it unjustifiable. The stories I came across are harrowing. They include Nancy Gorman who was refused radiation for her brain tumor for ten months until she lost her vision and could be reclassified as 'urgent.' And there's Wendy Bennett, who was sitting in her truck at a stop sign, got hit by another vehicle, injured her arm, and was forced to file for bankruptcy within two years as a result. Then there's Kevin Holyroyd, whose strep throat went untreated until it spread to his heart, causing a massive heart attack. These stories piece together the puzzle of how people become uninsured ? be it job loss, divorce, tight finances or chronic illness ? and how that translates into deferred care, financial ruin and unfathomable suffering. According to the Institute of Medicine, some 18,000 people die prematurely every year as a result of being uninsured. If that isn't an epidemic, then what is? That's like having six September 11ths every year. It makes a mockery of our preoccupation with bio-terrorism and small pox vaccines. While we direct inordinate resources toward a potential threat, we are allowing real people to die real deaths every day on the home front. As if this weren't dire enough, now even the future of our existing subsidized programs is in jeopardy. Nearly every state has announced plans to trim Medicaid, potentially leaving millions more without any coverage in the coming year. In California, the cuts go painfully deep, with a projected 10 percent reduction likely next year. That means services will be reduced, while the eligibility bar will be raised. Currently one in seven people is uninsured ? more than the populations of Texas, Florida, and Connecticut combined! The Wessenbergs happen to live in Texas, which has the highest percentage of uninsured people in the country. California ranks fourth, with over 21 percent of the population uninsured. Every expert I interviewed for this book concurred that it's not a matter of whether the system will crack, but rather when it will crack. "No one who studies the healthcare system believes it will stay afloat too much longer," says Dr. Sandra Hernandez, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation. The future looks catastrophic. As it stands now, the burden of healthcare falls on hospital emergency rooms. Although ERs used to be the option of last resort, they have become the line of first defense for uninsured people. Whether people use it as a primary care clinic or are brought in via ambulance with an acute condition, many of these patients could have been seen elsewhere, at far less expense. "Actually, we do have a nationalized health plan. It's called the emergency room," says Dr. Dave Ores of lower Manhattan. He isn't being facetious. The emergency room is the only place an American has a right to medical care. As a result, it has become the portal for healthcare in this country. Couple that with cutbacks in the number of staffed hospital beds, and we have a core meltdown in the making. In San Francisco, on a recent night I visited San Francisco General Hospital, where there were 13 people waiting in the emergency room for in-patient beds. The wait can be as long as 24 hours. S.F. General, like hospitals all over the country, has seen a steady increase in uninsured patients. When General fills to capacity, which happens on a nightly basis, ambulances are diverted to other facilities. The number of hours that San Francisco hospitals divert ambulances has grown tenfold in the past five years, meaning it is more difficult for critical patients to receive timely care. Ultimately, the destinies of the insured and the uninsured converge in the emergency room, because when services are strained, patients who desperately need acute care suffer. Despite common misconceptions, most people do not choose to be uninsured, unless you consider the choice between paying rent and paying for insurance a genuine choice. The uninsured cut a profile that is somewhat surprising. Eight out of ten live in families where one or more adults work. A third live in households that have an annual combined income over $50,000. The fastest growing group of uninsured people last year was middle and upper income adults, according to the Census Bureau. These individuals tended to work for small businesses and were either laid off from their jobs or their employers passed insurance costs off to them because the premiums jumped 13 percent in the last year alone. In fact, the rise in premiums has outpaced the rise in income for nearly 30 years. When Bob Wessenberg was laid off, he had no idea how fast the down escalator traveled. "Our life used to be different," says Bob, whose voice betrays the inordinate stress he's under. "Our life was comfortable. We had a little left over for nicer things and enough to start saving for a rainy day. Then we got a rainy month and now we got a rainy year." After going through all their savings and receiving an additional $10,000 in support from their family, the Wessenberg's have nowhere left to turn. Sheila works a few hours a week doing bookkeeping for Avery labels, earning $14 an hour, and Bob finally landed a menial job scanning documents for $11 an hour. Despite his qualifications, as a 51 year-old Lotus programmer Bob has become obsolete in today's job market. He has interviewed for over 300 positions without a hopeful prospect in sight. As a last resort Sheila started panhandling. At a busy intersection near the Dallas airport, she recently held out a can that read: I am not a bum. I'm a mom. Please help. She was able to earn $150 in just two hours, which was used to buy groceries and other necessities, but it barely put a dent in the thousands of dollars of outstanding debt the couple owes. With each passing week they are falling farther and farther behind on being able to keep up with their house and car payments. They have been forced to consider splitting their family up among relatives if they lose their home. Despite her lack of treatments, Sheila already has $2800 in outstanding medical bills she can't pay off. She applied for Medicaid and was denied because she was told she had too many assets. Her fate hung on a single piece of property: her car. She says without a car she will be a prisoner in her suburaban Texas home. But with her car, she may very well die sooner. "There is no reason why anybody should be shoved into homelessness and helplessness just to survive," she says. "It's morally wrong. We're out saving other countries and we can't save our own people. Most people have no idea how the millions of uninsured Americans actually get healthcare, but they're confident that somehow everyone is taken care of. They don't realize that late detection and death rates are higher for uninsured cancer sufferers, and that healthcare costs are one of the two leading causes of personal bankruptcy in this country. They also don't realize that in the end, even though we don't have nationalized healthcare, we're already paying a heavy price for the uninsured. We pay every time an uninsured person can't pay their bills, so the hospital needs to make up the difference elsewhere. We pay every time we go to the emergency room and the beds are full and the waiting room is overflowing so we can't get adequate care. We pay every time we lose a loved one because they got too little, too late. It has been said that our healthcare system is one of "perverse incentives, where everyone is incentivized to do the wrong thing." Doctors are incentivized to turn people away who have inadequate or no coverage. Patients are incentivized to forgo treatment until their conditions become urgent. Adults working fulltime jobs are advised to go part-time to qualify for benefits. Others are encouraged to spend down everything they've saved to get public assistance. Hospitals are forced to inflate their rates because insurance companies are driving down reimbursements. As a result hospitals then overcharge uninsured patients who aren't as adept at negotiation. Any one of these "perverse incentives" can cause severe damage. Cumulatively, they are a diagnosis for disaster. While suggestions for reform range from a federally managed single-payer plan to a multi-tiered insurance scheme, ultimately, this has to be a battle of conscience over special interests. People's lives are on the line, while special interests continue to prevail. We are a society at risk. When illness strikes, it afflicts the whole body. It doesn't choose one organ and spare the rest. In its current condition, America is a body with a raging infection. Forty-one million cells are already afflicted, and they are undermining everything they come in contact with. They have taken a toll on their immediate families and they are impeding the flow of care to others who think they're immune. We are all endangered by the crisis at hand. Julie Winokur's latest book, "Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured," is published by Talking Eyes Media. This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. From bar at idirect.com Tue May 20 17:28:08 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 19:28:08 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Word (and words and more words) from the godess of little things. Message-ID: <005d01c31f27$8d87aad0$5a0e9ad8@Chris> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mick Collins" To: "Danise Delgado" ; "Kathi Montgomery" ; "Yana Collins" ; "Lou Olker" ; "Christopher Black" ; "Anton Jarvis" ; "joseph goodrich" Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 5:27 PM Subject: Word (and words and more words) from the godess of little things. This is another fatty but pretty comprehensive--that is to say, you've probably heard all this before but never in one essay like this. The only small thing the godess seems to have left out is after 'Seize the time!', I wanted to read 'Off the slime!' Mick ________________________________________ Published on Sunday, May 18, 2003 by CommonDreams.org Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free) by Arundhati Roy Presented in New York City at The Riverside Church May 13, 2003 Sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights In these times, when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight? As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries. So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night. Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an "Indian citizen," to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king. Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free). Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be. When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn't any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "Free Press," that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests. Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media. Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be "suicidal" for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries - earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they'll have to be planted before they're discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn't use them when his country was being invaded. Of course, there'll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they're really chemicals, whether they're actually banned and whether the vessels they're contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.) Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation. Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a "Homicidal Dictator." And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a "regime change." Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the "Allies" fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal. The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren't the faces of U.S. and U.K. government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women? Because when it comes to Empire, facts don't matter. Yes, but all that's in the past we're told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the U.S. can stop him. It's an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, butS.our endowment from God." (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?) So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb). But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs don't really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don't qualify as real deaths. Our histories don't qualify as history. They never have. Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a "power vacuum." Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization slid into anarchy. On live TV. Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq's oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were "secured" almost before the invasion began. On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a "liberated people" venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "It's untidy. Freedom's untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things." Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder - did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in U.S. prisons right now? (The world's "freest" country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas? Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world's first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world's first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice. At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'" Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth? The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down? Television tells us that Iraq has been "liberated" and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's leading feminists. In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords. Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged "positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline." President Bush, who never served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress - a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was "just one victory in a war on terror S [which] still goes on." It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the "War on Terror" might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill. It was Herman Goering, that old Nazi, who said, "People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.S All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." He's right. It's dead easy. That's what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast. The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less. At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, "This campaign will be like no other in history." Maybe he's right. I'm no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this? After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army! Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It was more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees. As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped for the "rapid collapse" of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very na?ve could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise. Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments - despite the opposition from the majority of their people - was overwhelming. When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned down the U.S. government's offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking "democratic principles." According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its allies" higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What's it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain's New Labour?) In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I'm sure, were among them. They - we - were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, "It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case the security of the people."Democracy, the modern world's holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will. Until quite recently, right up to the 1980's, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice. But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy - the "independent" judiciary, the "free" press, the parliament - and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder. To fully comprehend the extent to which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World's Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and therefore will not speak about tonight). The World's Most Interesting: South Africa. The world's most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world's newest: Iraq. In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services - electricity, water, and housing-has meant that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have been evicted from their homes. Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism barely disturbed the grass. It's apartheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of Democracy. Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism. In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy's TV viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, "How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?" That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy's TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech for whom? In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists. As America's show business gets more and more violent and war-like, and America's wars get more and more like show business, some interesting cross-overs are taking place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and "Good Morning America." It is a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom. The news and entertainment industry in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations - AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed. America's media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation. So here it is - the World's Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America's Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency? In the three years of George Bush the Lesser's term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush's initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars. So who's paying for the war? America's poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers. And who's actually fighting the war? Once again, America's poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq's desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America's "volunteer" army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population. It's ironic, isn't it - the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised. For African Americans there's also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African American men from here in Harlem. This year, on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan's affirmative action program favouring Blacks and Latinos. He called it "divisive," "unfair," and "unconstitutional." The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don't suppose affirmative action for White Boys From Yale ever is. So we know who's paying for the war. We know who's fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America's poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America's single mothers? Or America's Black and Latino minorities? Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate, military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous. Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny. The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President's Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it." Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts. Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America's anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, "Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation." The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law. Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as "unlawful combatants." (In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be "disappeared" like the people of Chile under Washington's old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives. Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation" with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy at home. Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for "liberation." (Or did they mean "liberalization" all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that "the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S. image." Iraq's constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy. The United States Agency for International Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks. Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said, "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission." The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria. Tom Brokaw (one of America's best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. "One of the things we don't want to do," he said, "is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country." Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy. So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done? WellS We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly. The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly. Its "homeland" may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds - government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable. It would be na?ve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire's working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning. Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press. The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade. You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to remind yourself of this. Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland. If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated. I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people. History is giving you the chance. Seize the time. Copyright 2003 by Arundhati Roy ### From evs at tri-isys.com Wed May 21 00:07:59 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:07:59 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Fw: The America I missed this time. References: <001601c31f23$732b2670$5a0e9ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <002f01c31f5f$55444ec0$1400a8c0@evs> This is why the alternative of using "third" world countries' as health care providers and retirement venues is a possible wave of the future. The US will source its needs outside of its borders. Instead of wallowing in lower middle class standards, the money pinched can move to countries like the Philippines and live much more comfortably even going on a visit to the US once a year for a vacation. Hospitals in the Philippines may not be cutting edge like John Hopkins or the Boston Children's Hospital but the equipment is state of the art, the doctors excellent, the nurses (the Philippines exports nurses to the US) are great comforters and there is cable TV in each airconditioned room -- private with room for a relative to stay and sleep with you = P1,500 per day or $30 per day. An apendectomy with a week's stay in the hospital cost me $800 including doctor's fees and medicine. Doctor fee for operation = P10,000 or $200. Some of these doctors, friends of mine from high school, practiced for many years in the tristate area. They just wanted to come home as they are already middle aged. For those who want a 5 star treatment where they even give you a rose when you leave there is the new Asian Hospital. You however pay for the hotel-like service. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Black" To: ; "comparty" ; "Herb" ; Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 6:58 AM Subject: [A-List] Fw: The America I missed this time. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mick Collins" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 2:03 AM Subject: The America I missed this time. Here's a side of the America dream that got right past me between airport security checks and desperately caring people trying to save my lost child--apparently lost because, in the mall, he'd wandered 'aimlessly' more than six feet from me. But the national illness has always been evident--it's just spreading like a plague--a real plague, not SARS. Mick ___________________________________ Live Sicker, Die Younger By Julie Winokur, AlterNet May 15, 2003 A year and a half ago, Sheila and Bob Wessenberg lived in a 2200-square-foot luxury townhouse outside Dallas, on an income of over $100,000. Today, they are facing bankruptcy and a terminal illness without healthcare. "I might die as a result of my poverty," says Sheila in disbelief. She has gone seven months without chemotherapy or follow-up exams because she has no insurance and no money to pay for healthcare. In a country that prides itself on medical excellence, we also have one of the most dysfunctional healthcare delivery systems in the world. While politicians tiptoe around the problem, thousands of Americans live sicker and die younger because they don't have access to even basic care. The Wessenbergs and their two children are among an estimated six million people who lost their insurance last year as a result of the economic downturn. They are also living proof that the slide from middle class comfort to absolute desperation can happen at warp speed, especially when health issues are involved. Just over a year ago, Bob, a Lotus programmer, had a relatively secure job and his family had excellent health benefits. When Sheila was diagnosed with Stage 2, Grade B breast cancer, she was able to get the lumpectomy and mastectomy she needed. Then Bob lost his job in December, 2001, and the dominoes began to fall. The Wessenbergs did the best they could to pay for COBRA insurance, but when the premiums jumped to $837 a month it became prohibitive. Like most people, the Wessenbergs chose to pay for food and their mortgage rather than health coverage. When the Wessenbergs dropped their insurance, Sheila stopped seeking treatment for her breast cancer. She was eight months into chemotherapy, and since she suffers a particularly aggressive form of cancer, her doctor had recommended continuing treatments indefinitely. Since losing her insurance, she has not even had follow-up blood work to see if her cancer has spread. Considering that uninsured women with breast cancer are twice as likely to die from the disease as women with coverage, she is free falling without a parachute. I met Sheila while writing a book that examines the personal toll of being uninsured. "Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured," which was released last month, recounts 41 individual stories to reflect the 41 million uninsured Americans. I wish I could say that Sheila's story is unique, but in researching this book I found there is an overabundance of tragedy ? every bit of it unjustifiable. The stories I came across are harrowing. They include Nancy Gorman who was refused radiation for her brain tumor for ten months until she lost her vision and could be reclassified as 'urgent.' And there's Wendy Bennett, who was sitting in her truck at a stop sign, got hit by another vehicle, injured her arm, and was forced to file for bankruptcy within two years as a result. Then there's Kevin Holyroyd, whose strep throat went untreated until it spread to his heart, causing a massive heart attack. These stories piece together the puzzle of how people become uninsured ? be it job loss, divorce, tight finances or chronic illness ? and how that translates into deferred care, financial ruin and unfathomable suffering. According to the Institute of Medicine, some 18,000 people die prematurely every year as a result of being uninsured. If that isn't an epidemic, then what is? That's like having six September 11ths every year. It makes a mockery of our preoccupation with bio-terrorism and small pox vaccines. While we direct inordinate resources toward a potential threat, we are allowing real people to die real deaths every day on the home front. As if this weren't dire enough, now even the future of our existing subsidized programs is in jeopardy. Nearly every state has announced plans to trim Medicaid, potentially leaving millions more without any coverage in the coming year. In California, the cuts go painfully deep, with a projected 10 percent reduction likely next year. That means services will be reduced, while the eligibility bar will be raised. Currently one in seven people is uninsured ? more than the populations of Texas, Florida, and Connecticut combined! The Wessenbergs happen to live in Texas, which has the highest percentage of uninsured people in the country. California ranks fourth, with over 21 percent of the population uninsured. Every expert I interviewed for this book concurred that it's not a matter of whether the system will crack, but rather when it will crack. "No one who studies the healthcare system believes it will stay afloat too much longer," says Dr. Sandra Hernandez, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation. The future looks catastrophic. As it stands now, the burden of healthcare falls on hospital emergency rooms. Although ERs used to be the option of last resort, they have become the line of first defense for uninsured people. Whether people use it as a primary care clinic or are brought in via ambulance with an acute condition, many of these patients could have been seen elsewhere, at far less expense. "Actually, we do have a nationalized health plan. It's called the emergency room," says Dr. Dave Ores of lower Manhattan. He isn't being facetious. The emergency room is the only place an American has a right to medical care. As a result, it has become the portal for healthcare in this country. Couple that with cutbacks in the number of staffed hospital beds, and we have a core meltdown in the making. In San Francisco, on a recent night I visited San Francisco General Hospital, where there were 13 people waiting in the emergency room for in-patient beds. The wait can be as long as 24 hours. S.F. General, like hospitals all over the country, has seen a steady increase in uninsured patients. When General fills to capacity, which happens on a nightly basis, ambulances are diverted to other facilities. The number of hours that San Francisco hospitals divert ambulances has grown tenfold in the past five years, meaning it is more difficult for critical patients to receive timely care. Ultimately, the destinies of the insured and the uninsured converge in the emergency room, because when services are strained, patients who desperately need acute care suffer. Despite common misconceptions, most people do not choose to be uninsured, unless you consider the choice between paying rent and paying for insurance a genuine choice. The uninsured cut a profile that is somewhat surprising. Eight out of ten live in families where one or more adults work. A third live in households that have an annual combined income over $50,000. The fastest growing group of uninsured people last year was middle and upper income adults, according to the Census Bureau. These individuals tended to work for small businesses and were either laid off from their jobs or their employers passed insurance costs off to them because the premiums jumped 13 percent in the last year alone. In fact, the rise in premiums has outpaced the rise in income for nearly 30 years. When Bob Wessenberg was laid off, he had no idea how fast the down escalator traveled. "Our life used to be different," says Bob, whose voice betrays the inordinate stress he's under. "Our life was comfortable. We had a little left over for nicer things and enough to start saving for a rainy day. Then we got a rainy month and now we got a rainy year." After going through all their savings and receiving an additional $10,000 in support from their family, the Wessenberg's have nowhere left to turn. Sheila works a few hours a week doing bookkeeping for Avery labels, earning $14 an hour, and Bob finally landed a menial job scanning documents for $11 an hour. Despite his qualifications, as a 51 year-old Lotus programmer Bob has become obsolete in today's job market. He has interviewed for over 300 positions without a hopeful prospect in sight. As a last resort Sheila started panhandling. At a busy intersection near the Dallas airport, she recently held out a can that read: I am not a bum. I'm a mom. Please help. She was able to earn $150 in just two hours, which was used to buy groceries and other necessities, but it barely put a dent in the thousands of dollars of outstanding debt the couple owes. With each passing week they are falling farther and farther behind on being able to keep up with their house and car payments. They have been forced to consider splitting their family up among relatives if they lose their home. Despite her lack of treatments, Sheila already has $2800 in outstanding medical bills she can't pay off. She applied for Medicaid and was denied because she was told she had too many assets. Her fate hung on a single piece of property: her car. She says without a car she will be a prisoner in her suburaban Texas home. But with her car, she may very well die sooner. "There is no reason why anybody should be shoved into homelessness and helplessness just to survive," she says. "It's morally wrong. We're out saving other countries and we can't save our own people. Most people have no idea how the millions of uninsured Americans actually get healthcare, but they're confident that somehow everyone is taken care of. They don't realize that late detection and death rates are higher for uninsured cancer sufferers, and that healthcare costs are one of the two leading causes of personal bankruptcy in this country. They also don't realize that in the end, even though we don't have nationalized healthcare, we're already paying a heavy price for the uninsured. We pay every time an uninsured person can't pay their bills, so the hospital needs to make up the difference elsewhere. We pay every time we go to the emergency room and the beds are full and the waiting room is overflowing so we can't get adequate care. We pay every time we lose a loved one because they got too little, too late. It has been said that our healthcare system is one of "perverse incentives, where everyone is incentivized to do the wrong thing." Doctors are incentivized to turn people away who have inadequate or no coverage. Patients are incentivized to forgo treatment until their conditions become urgent. Adults working fulltime jobs are advised to go part-time to qualify for benefits. Others are encouraged to spend down everything they've saved to get public assistance. Hospitals are forced to inflate their rates because insurance companies are driving down reimbursements. As a result hospitals then overcharge uninsured patients who aren't as adept at negotiation. Any one of these "perverse incentives" can cause severe damage. Cumulatively, they are a diagnosis for disaster. While suggestions for reform range from a federally managed single-payer plan to a multi-tiered insurance scheme, ultimately, this has to be a battle of conscience over special interests. People's lives are on the line, while special interests continue to prevail. We are a society at risk. When illness strikes, it afflicts the whole body. It doesn't choose one organ and spare the rest. In its current condition, America is a body with a raging infection. Forty-one million cells are already afflicted, and they are undermining everything they come in contact with. They have taken a toll on their immediate families and they are impeding the flow of care to others who think they're immune. We are all endangered by the crisis at hand. Julie Winokur's latest book, "Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured," is published by Talking Eyes Media. This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 02:47:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 11:47:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US secret state: William Colby Message-ID: <001101c31f75$ad7eaa20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post / Public confession to save America's secret service / Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby by John Prados Oxford Univ 380pp $35 Reviewed by David Wise William Colby, a quintessential cold warrior, probably saved the CIA from self-destructing three decades ago by coming clean - well, relatively clean - with Congress about the agency's past abuses.For this he was rewarded with a whispering campaign suggesting he was a Soviet mole - which, as Lost Crusader makes clear, was nonsense - and was ostracized by many colleagues, in whose eyes he had violated Langley's code of omerta, and ultimately fired by President Gerald Ford. This is the central and accurate theme of John Prados's in-depth biography of the late CIA director. It is surprising that no one previously attempted a biography of Colby, because his story is in many ways also the story of the CIA. From Italy to Vietnam, to the military coup in Indonesia, to Watergate, the prosecution of Richard Helms, investigations of CIA assassination plots, the drugging and surveillance of unwitting Americans, Colby was there, on the ground or deeply involved at headquarters. Although written in generally dry, academic style, Prados's study is richly detailed (sometimes overwhelmingly so), and he has mined newly declassified documents and scores of interviews to reveal some previously undisclosed gems. For example, the minutes of a secret 1975 meeting of the National Security Council attended by President Ford reveal Henry Kissinger grumbling, "It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination." Apparently Ford was not convinced; a year later, amid disclosures of how the CIA had hired mafiosi to try to poison Fidel Castro, he banned assassination. Prados, a historian and author of 10 other books on national security, has difficulty deciding whether to draw his portrait of Colby in black or white. Which may be understandable, since the CIA director was so self-effacing a figure that he fit and indeed tried to personify his own concept of the perfect spy - a "gray man." Born in Minnesota in 1920, as a boy Colby spent three years in China, where his father, a U.S. Army officer, protested the murder of a black soldier at a cost to his career. At Princeton, Colby was so poor he waited on tables in the cafeteria. When World War II came, Colby joined the OSS, precursor of the CIA. He had learned to ski as a high-school student in Burlington, Vermont, and parachuted into occupied Norway as head of a 100-man sabotage unit. After the war, he went to Columbia Law School, then joined the Wall Street firm of Gen. William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, who had been head of the OSS. There, the ambiguity that characterized so much of Colby's career surfaced when, as a Donovan associate, he befriended the widow of George Polk, a CBS journalist who was murdered in Greece in 1948. Prados implies, but does not quite say, that the CIA may have been involved and that Donovan was assisting in a coverup. Colby, the book says, was "bothered" by the affair. Not long after, a former OSS pal recruited Colby into the fledgling CIA. While serving as a foreign service officer in the Stockholm embassy, Colby recruited more than 1,000 Swedes for the network. Posted to Rome, he clashed with James J. Angleton, who later became chief of counter-intelligence, and whom Colby, as CIA director, fired two decades later. It was the early 1950s, and the CIA was spending hundreds of millions on political action to shore up Italy's Christian Democrats. By 1960, Colby was station chief in Saigon and then head of the entire CIA operation in Vietnam. According to Prados, Colby thought the United States could win the war by supporting President Ngo Dinh Diem, but the Kennedy administration did not and encouraged the generals who overthrew and killed him. The intrigue in Washington, Langley and Saigon surrounding the 1963 coup was a rat's nest; Prados struggles manfully, with only partial success, to penetrate it. By 1965, with Colby now head of the CIA's Far East division, the military in Indonesia overthrew Sukarno, bringing about a regime change long favored by the agency. "The full panoply of CIA assistance to the Indonesian military remains shrouded in secrecy," Prados writes. But the United States turned over hundreds of names to the military, and he quotes an unnamed CIA officer as saying that a secret review "admitted much broader engagement in the bloodbath." The CIA described these events as "one of the worst episodes of mass murder of the twentieth century, ranking with Germany's Holocaust against the Jews." But it was back in Vietnam, to which Colby returned in 1968 as director of "pacification," that he became forever tarred by the Phoenix operation. Phoenix was a program aimed at "neutralization" of the Viet Cong network in South Vietnam, a euphemism that all too often meant torture and murder. Although Colby testified to a House investigating committee in 1971 that Phoenix was "not a program of assassination," Prados makes clear that "there was plenty of killing in Phoenix" and "success was defined by locking people up or killing them." Still, Lost Crusader misses an opportunity to define the Phoenix program and Colby's precise role in it clearly once and for all. Back in Langley, Colby became CIA director Richard Helms's chief subaltern in trying to contain the Watergate scandal for Richard Nixon. In 1977, Helms was prosecuted and convicted for misleading Congress about the CIA's role in Chile; it was Colby who had referred the matter to the Justice Department, an act for which the CIA's old guard never forgave him. Then, during the Church and Pike committee investigations of the intelligence agencies, Colby, albeit reluctantly, gave up the "Family Jewels," a 693-page compendium of CIA abuses that totally alienated him from his colleagues. He waved a CIA dart gun at a Senate hearing, and he talked. That led Kissinger to chide Colby, who was a Catholic: "Bill, you know what you do when you go up to the Hill? You go to confession." There is an irony here because, while Colby did reveal the agency's sometimes felonious misdeeds, the truth, as Prados points out, is that he "cooperated just enough" to save the institution to which he had devoted his life. He died in 1996, drowned while canoeing alone one April evening, adding a touch of mystery to the end of a clandestine life. If at times Prados is too admiring of his subject, there was nevertheless much to admire in the courage that Colby showed when he parachuted behind Nazi lines in World War II, and when he opened the Pandora's box of CIA abuses to public scrutiny. He paid dearly for revealing the agency's transgressions, but he was comforted by the knowledge that what he did was right for his country and his conscience. By portraying William Colby's life in all its nuances, Lost Crusader makes an important contribution to intelligence literature. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 34 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 02:49:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 11:49:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Syria: the Damascus spring Message-ID: <001701c31f75$ec6b5e40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Books / Damascus stumbles on the road to reform / Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom by Alan George Zed Books 224pp ?13.95 (?11.95) Reviewed by Julie Flint A few years before the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad died, a group of journalists were driving through the centre of Damascus, bound for Beirut. Suddenly two cars screamed past and blocked the road in front. A thuggish-looking fellow in jeans and dark glasses got out, approached the journalists' car and, reaching inside the driver's window, hit him so hard that his head snapped through 180 degrees. Then, without a word, the assailant returned to his car and drove off.Those were the bad old days of Ba'athist rule in Syria, when the mukhabarat, or secret police, were in evidence on every street, and road rage was the least of the ways in which they exercised their power. For all its surface calm, Syria was shot through with an undercurrent of fear. Today it is not. Since July 2000, when Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as president, the barricades in front of government buildings have been removed, and internet cafes are proliferating in many Syrian cities. The infamous Mezzeh prison, where thousands of political prisoners once rotted without trial, has been closed and hundreds of prisoners released. The younger Assad has helped initiate unprecedented criticism of Syria's stagnant economy and its isolation from the rest of the world, and has called for greater accountability and change. When Assad and his wife, Asma, visited Britain last December the red carpet was rolled out in Downing Street, and much of the press coverage could have come straight from the pages of Hello! magazine. Only a few months later, however, in the wake of the war in Iraq, those who want to rewrite the map of the Middle East are telling us that the 37-year-old Assad is "a strange and capricious leader" with an "urge to obliterate Israel", and that the country he heads is a rogue state packed with terrorists and chemical weapons. This is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense in present times. Before President Bush turns his liberating attentions to Syria, he would do well to read Alan George and understand that the principal threat Syria poses today is towards its own citizens; that, despite the hopes for reform, Syria remains a state that is ruthless in suppressing opposition - even when it comes from a civil society movement led, in the main, by artists, professionals and intellectuals. George's book takes us inside the "Damascus Spring" of Syria's civil society movement - a heady six months, beginning in the dying days of Hafez al-Assad, in which political discussion groups mushroomed and words such as "democracy" and "reform" were spoken without fear. But as the fundamentals of the Ba'athist state came under question the hardliners hit back, and by September 2001 it was all over: 10 of the movement's most prominent members were in jail, where nine of them still remain. Their crime, as one member of parliament, Riad Seif, said at his trial, was to have demanded "a break of the political, cultural, economic, social and media monopoly in Syria". In opposing the reforms demanded by civil society activists, the hardliners' excuse was what it always has been: Syria, already facing external threats, could not risk reforms that might upset domestic unity and stability. George concludes that although the hopes of reform invested in the young President Assad were probably exaggerated, he might yet succeed in launching a programme of limited political reform if the West, through support for an aggressive Israel and swaggering threats against Syria, does not perpetuate the conditions that allowed the most anti-democratic wing of the Syrian regime to prevail over the pro-democracy activists. It was, he reveals, not an opponent but one of Assad's closest advisers who penned a critical, anonymous article that government censors excised from the al-Dommari newspaper in June 2001. The fact that it was written at all must be cause for hope. George is a distinguished journalist whose investigations into arms procurement networks in Libya and Iraq in the late 1980s caused a British diplomat to tell the Scott inquiry on arms to Iraq that he was "sometimes better informed than the intelligence services". On the evidence of this book he still is. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 19 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 02:54:08 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 11:54:08 +0300 Subject: [A-List] France: between a rock and a hard place Message-ID: <002301c31f76$8a824120$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Le Monde / 'The world is stronger when we all respect the rules' / 'The world is stronger when we all respect the rules' The French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin talks to Francis Deron and Alain Frachon about a post-Iraq world France stood up for certain principles on the Iraq issue, such as respect for international law, the United Nations and so on. Yet the war happened, and the UN seems doomed to play a marginal role in peacemaking. What lessons should be drawn from that? We said from the beginning that a great power can win a war on its own, but peacemaking presupposes the involvement of everybody. We have to consider the challenges which we face and which are in no way restricted to the Iraq crisis: terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional crises. That is why, when faced with such urgent matters, we wanted to exhaust all the possibilities of a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis. In the longer term it is only by relying on principles of collective responsibility and determination that we can hope to build a stable and fair international order. Since the end of the [cold war era], the UN has played a more vital role than ever. Some people believe that, given its power, America is capable of acting more effectively than an international community, which it regards as indecisive and powerless. Our belief is that the UN embodies a universal conscience that transcends states. Between powerlessness and unilateral, pre-emptive action, there is the option of collective responsibility and the arduous construction of a world democracy. Is the resolution on Iraq planned by the United States, Spain and Britain a good basis for peace? It's a good starting point . . . The Anglo-American forces have claimed the status of an occupying force. That status, provided for by the Hague and Geneva conventions, confers rights and duties: the forces concerned must run the occupied country without calling into question its internal legal order. In the present case, they have requested that status while at the same time, given the scale of the task, hoping to obtain an international mandate with exceptional powers. The UN security council should assist the coalition's action without abandoning its own responsibilities. To do that, it should base its actions on a number of principles. The first principle is information and transparency: regular reports could be made to the security council, every three months for example, to enable it better to assess the situation on the ground . . . The second principle is compliance with the rule of law. Quite apart from the general immunity granted to the coalition forces, the present project envisages exempting the occupying authority from any legal responsibility connected with oil extraction. That could cause problems and needs to be closely examined. The third principle is that these arrangements should be given a strict and reasonable timetable, with scope for an extension to be approved by the security council. The council cannot allow itself to be deprived of its responsibilities or its prerogatives. A system of automatic renewal after one year, as provided for by the project, is probably not the most suitable. Do those principles form a framework for future discussions? Those principles should apply in every area. Thus sanctions are no longer justified now the war is over; we therefore proposed that they be suspended. In order to lift them formally, as the project suggests, the conditions laid down in earlier UN resolutions would need to be taken into account. That implies a gradual winding up of the oil-for-food programme and the ending of disarmament control operations. The second priority is a strict definition of the conditions under which Iraq's oil resources are exploited. In a country that has the world's second-largest oil reserves, we cannot allow a climate of suspicion to develop. We need precise, universally accepted rules, and a transparent mechanism that makes it possible to ensure that the Iraqi population is not deprived of its wealth. The Americans have taken a step in that direction. We therefore need to establish rules to govern the allocation of oil revenues and to make sure that their management is placed under undisputed international control. There remains the most important question - that of the political process. A legitimate Iraqi administration needs to be set up, even if it is provisional. Only the UN can confer international legitimacy. The political principles and conditions should be clearly defined by the draft resolution so that the process is irreproachable. There must be a precise timetable, transparency and no arbitrariness in the selection of individuals. At the end of the initial phase of making the country secure, the UN should gradually assume responsibility for the political transition process, under the authority of the secretary general's representative, as was the case in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia. What are the chances of a vote in favour of that? We have entered into a process of consultation with all our partners - not only the Americans and Europeans of course, but the Russians, Chinese and all security council members. There is common concern and an awareness of the difficulties surrounding the points on which we must try to make progress . . . We are approaching this stage in an open and constructive frame of mind. We will make proposals that should enable us to obtain a successful conclusion rapidly. Don't you feel the Americans are approaching the debate in a take-it-or-leave-it spirit? We are all well aware of the importance of what is at stake and of our responsibilities. We're talking about building peace, and it's in the interest of everyone, particularly of those on the ground, to chart a course that has wide support both internationally and in the region. Beyond the case of Iraq, what is at issue here is the way crises are handled by the international community. We believe that we are stronger when we respect principles and rules, and when we act in accordance with our joint wishes. Similarly, we feel that a multipolar world, based on cooperation and not rivalry, is better equipped than a "unipolar" world for mobilising everyone's energies and abilities. You've said that it's in no one's interest to try to settle scores over Iraq. Yet the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, has said France should pay for opposing the US. Much has been made of Powell's remarks. He is a man who is open to dialogue while having his own convictions, and I'm in constant contact with him. I'm perfectly aware of the polemic that some would like us to get drawn into . . . Let's avoid the twin pitfalls of Francophobia and anti-Americanism. I've often been asked about the alleged links that the US administration and certain American companies may have had with Saddam's regime in the past, including support for his programme of weapons of mass destruction. I've always refused to get involved in such controversial issues . . . How important are Franco-American relations? There are very strong links between France and the US. I always keep in mind the fact that the desk at which I work is the one used by [Louis XVI's foreign minister, Count Charles Gravier de] Vergennes, who ordered French troops to be sent out to support American independence. No one has forgotten the Americans' commitment in the two world wars. Today we must build up a true partnership based on responsibility, respect and equality . . . between America and Europe. The US has an interest in a strong Europe, as we saw with the introduction of the euro which also benefited the American economy. We are convinced the same holds true for defence. Europe has to play its full role in that effort. September 11 caused an unbelievably deep trauma in the US and strong feelings of solidarity among the peoples of Europe. If we want to progress towards a more stable and fairer world, we have to do so together. There is no point in rivalry. The duty of responsible people is to work towards joint solutions and to seek areas of agreement. May 13 The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 29 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 03:12:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 12:12:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: strategy of tension Message-ID: <003501c31f79$1fda2600$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US raises alert as terror web grows Hamas seeks bombers abroad amid heightened fear of attacks, writes VICKY COLLINS and IAN BRUCE The Herald, 21 May 2003 THE threat of fresh terrorist attacks yesterday forced the closure of US, British, and German embassies in Saudi Arabia. As the US went on high terror alert, it was revealed that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for most of the recent suicide bomb attacks on Israel, has sent agents to Afghanistan and Pakistan to recruit fugitive Arab fighters trained in al Qaeda's military camps. Intelligence sources said the organisation was beginning to set its sights beyond the Gaza strip and Israel to strikes on US and European targets throughout the Middle East. The US last night raised its terror alert to orange, the second-highest level, because of the renewed risk of an attack. The decision to raise the alert from the elevated alert, or yellow, to high was made by national security officials. The FBI said earlier that recent suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco could lead to an attack in the United States, although it knew of no specific threat. Earlier, the US closed its Saudi embassies and consulates after warnings that bigger operations were planned in the kingdom in the wake of a series of suicide bombings that killed 34 people in Riyadh last week. The move was followed by the UK and Germany. A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office, which last week warned of possible Saudi chemical and biological attacks, said: "We have received credible information that further terrorist attacks against unspecified targets in Saudi Arabia are being planned and may take place imminently." Jordanian authorities, meanwhile, said Hamas planned to raise its profile among Palestinians by attacking US interests in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, in order to fend off a possible takeover by the Lebanon-based Hizbollah. Abdullah, Jordan's new king, closed Hamas headquarters in Amman, the capital, last year under US diplomatic pressure and expelled the leaders of the group's military wing. The men then moved to Qatar. The Jordanians say senior agents travelled from the Middle East to Afghanistan to persuade al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to join them in a war on American interests in Arabia under the Hamas banner. CIA sources say up to 17,000 Muslim Arabs, Africans, Chechens and Pakistanis received military training in the Afghan camps set up by Osama bin Laden between 1998 and 2002. Fewer than 3000 were killed or captured when US-led forces invaded. Most of the fugitives are believed to have set up new bases in Pakistan. A US intelligence source said: "The last thing we need is a Hamas-sponsored, resurgent al Qaeda operating inside Iraq in its current state of flux, or striking at American and European interests in Saudi Arabia and some of the vulnerable Gulf states. There are enough home-grown militants in most places without importing veterans who could wreak some real havoc." In Morocco, officials linked the young suicide bombers who killed at least 29 people in Casablanca last week to international terrorism. Mustapha Sahel, the interior minister, said two would-be bombers had confirmed the link during questioning. A further 12 bombers blew themselves up in the co-ordinated strike, which came four days after the Riyadh bombings. In Ankara, Turkish authorities said a suicide bomber who killed herself and one other person in an attack in a cafe the capital yesterday was from a banned Marxist group not thought linked to al Qaeda. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 05:24:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:24:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: Mandelson weighs in Message-ID: <007d01c31f8b$7b93b9e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Delaying euro poll will damage Labour, Mandelson warns Blair DEBORAH SUMMERS and CATHERINE MacLEOD The Herald, 21 May 2003 PETER Mandelson exposed the deep divisions between the prime minister and Gordon Brown over the euro yesterday just as the chancellor was urging Labour "to unite and not divide over the euro". Risking the wrath of Tony Blair, Mr Mandelson challenged the prime minister to stand his ground on the euro and warned that a decision to rule out a referendum in this parliament would do "tremendous damage" to the government and New Labour. At the same time, Mr Brown called upon Labour MPs, in an interview in today's Times, to rally behind the leadership. Last night, the Tories accused Mr Mandelson of suggesting that Tony Blair had been "out-manoeuvred" by the chancellor on the issue of the single currency. His comments will further alienate him from the chancellor, who has been consistently irked by his interventions in the euro debate. The former Northern Ireland minister told journalists: "The government's got to stick its ground, stand up for itself, by applying its case, which I believe is strong, setting out its pro-European arguments and not give ground." Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor, seized on the chance to embarrass the government by accusing Mr Mandelson of making damaging remarks about the negotiations between Mr Brown and Mr Blair. He said: "Peter Mandelson's comment that Blair had been out-manoeuvred by his own chancellor shows quite how vicious and personal the infighting in Labour has become. As on foundation hospitals, as on Iraq, as on the euro, Labour is a deeply divided party." Downing Street has insisted that the decision on the euro will not be made until Cabinet ministers have had their chance to put their views across at a series of sessions with Mr Brown and Mr Blair. But many believe that the Treasury's assessment of the five tests, to be announced on June 9, will conclude that Britain is not yet ready to join the single currency. At a Westminster lunch, Mr Mandelson insisted that the decision to join the single currency "in principle" was a "cornerstone" of the New Labour project and insisted that any failure to call a euro referendum before the general election would be a "tremendous setback" for the party and the country. "The price we would pay in lost investment, in jobs and trade would be incalculable," he said. Mr Mandelson argued that, if a euro referendum was ruled out in this parliament, "the people who will jump for joy and be greatly emboldened and energised will be the anti-Europeans in Britain; the Eurosceptic press, those who would be able to argue with some reason that they won the battle of ideals and that the government is seen off". Last night, Mr Brown prepared the ground for rejecting an immediate euro referendum while keeping the option open for the future. He told the CBI's annual dinner: "I believe that membership of the euro can bring clear benefits to Britain in trade, investment and growth - benefits to British business, consumers and jobs. Our assessment will set them out. "But I also know that to repeat the ERM mistake and take risks with stability is not in the national economic interest. So if, based on the five tests assessment, the economics are right we should join. If the economics are not right, we should not." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 05:37:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:37:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <007e01c31f8d$6356f980$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The revenge actions apparently being taken by former RUC Special Branch officers shows what sort of mentality pervaded that organisation. That the upper echelons of British state did not anticipate such actions is unlikely. Instead it is another apparently spontaneous and independently determined but no less predictable act that in fact furthers the state agenda. What is interesting about all of this is that, as yet, no-one seems to have begun asking awkward questions about what might have been known about the assassinations of Earl Mountbatten and Airey Neave, both in 1979. And speaking of Thatcher's friends, what of Ian Gow's assassination in 1990? If Thatcher herself was sufficiently aware of the dirty war and authorised it, does this mean that she unwittingly but no less effectively signed the death warrant of her friend and close political ally? The ramifications of all this are indeed profound, but relatively costless to the government of Tony Blair and its bourgeois backers. ------ Stakeknife was just one of five spies inside IRA Former Special Branch men threaten to name agents in revenge for being sacked by Government In the wake of the Stakeknife controversy that has rocked the IRA and the British security services, it emerged last weekend that four more senior Provisionals, including Stakeknife's deputy, were double agents.Stakeknife, who worked inside the IRA's internal security department, is rated as fifth in importance, say former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch officers and senior members of the Garda. The disclosure that more British spies were working in the IRA will increase tensions among its members, and it further highlights the culture of secrecy and suspicion in Ulster's terrorist groups. Freddie Scappaticci, the west Belfast man accused of being Stakeknife, continues to deny that he ever worked for British intelligence. In the latest twist to his story a former intelligence officer, Martin Ingram, has threatened to produce documents he claims prove the denials are untrue. Mr Ingram (a pseudonym) has been a source of leaks that have embarrassed the Government and the security services. The former warrant officer, who has revealed the extent of links between the Army and Special Branch and loyalist terrorists, has been arrested under the Official Secrets Act and his house has been burgled by MI5. Mr Ingram categorically denied that he was behind Mr Scappaticci's name being revealed earlier this month. However, he insisted that Mr Scappaticci's identity had been known for three years by the inquiry into security force cooperation with terrorists headed by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens. He said he had spoken out because he was worried that Stakeknife could be murdered before the Stevens' inquiry got round to questioning him. In a dramatic development Kevin Fulton, a former army agent who once operated inside the IRA, was arrested in London by officers from the Metropolitan Police. Mr Fulton, whose real name is Peter Keeley, infiltrated the IRA for the Army's Force Research Unit (FRU) in the late 1970s. He is the source of the allegation that the RUC and Garda Special Branch failed to act on a tip-off that could have prevented the Omagh bomb, which killed 29 people in 1998. He has also given evidence to reporters about the existence of Stakeknife. The reasons for Mr Fulton's arrest are not clear. In a separate development senior members of the Garda said last weekend that Mr Scappaticci's second-in-command during the 1980s, the late IRA veteran John Joe Magee, worked for the security forces on both sides of the border. Mr Magee, a former British soldier, interrogated and shot alleged informers in the 1980s and early 1990s. He is understood to have "wrecked" a number of IRA units in Belfast and County Tyrone, as well as sabotaging IRA guns and explosives. Meanwhile retired RUC Special Branch officers have threatened to name more agents in the IRA. Their motive is revenge against the Government, which they believe laid them off to appease the terrorists. "Some of the boys who left the force were angry and took some of the dynamite with them. This is their payback," one former RUC officer said last weekend. It is understood that many of them have photographs of leading IRA figures meeting FRU contacts in Belfast, as well as transcripts and classified documents about their work for the security forces. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 11 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 05:39:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:39:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US military: goodbye peace dividend Message-ID: <008e01c31f8d$b1645be0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post / Defense bills on fast track as spending nears Cold War levels / Walter Pincus and Dan Morgan The Senate and House were poised this week to rush through bills approving the Bush administration's plan to spend more than $400 billion on military programs, with only one or two days of debate on measures that would consume nearly 20 percent of the federal budget.Except for some modifications on the margins, the congressional defense panels last week largely ratified the Bush administration's plan to "transform" the armed services to fight the war on terrorism and meet other new threats. But at the same time, they went along with the administration on spending increases to buy advanced versions of the kind of military hardware that was used to confront the Soviet Union during the Cold War, including submarines, destroyers and fighter aircraft. The bills were scheduled to reach the Senate floor on Monday and the House floor two days later. Debate is expected to last no more than two days in either chamber, congressional sources said. The Senate Armed Services Committee drafted its bill behind closed doors. Though most experts recognize that the United States faces a whole new set of enemies, the military plan has raised concerns among some analysts. Under the Pentagon's plan, defense spending could reach $500 billion in 2010 when measured in today's dollars, congressional sources said. That would exceed the peak at the height of the Cold War buildup ordered by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and would be near the level of the Korean War years. Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is paying for his transformation program and weapons systems that are the priority of the services. Rumsfeld "could take on the military and change things, but he is just adding things," O'Hanlon said. He compared Rumsfeld to Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who had a reputation as a budget-cutter when he arrived at the Pentagon but then supported most of the services' spending requests. The administration's plan "is heavily weighted toward . . . the acquisition of next-generation systems," according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent policy research institute. "An approach that included the purchase of some next-generation weapons systems but focused relatively more on the production of new current-generation systems and upgrades of existing systems . . . might cost substantially less." With Republicans and Democrats supporting more defense spending in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, congressional pressures for cost-cutting appear minimal. But the center warned that if the nation's fiscal situation continues to deteriorate, "over the long term, perhaps even more than some other areas of government spending (especially entitlements like Social Security and Medicare), defense spending is likely to be undercut by the existence of large and growing deficits." An example of how programs capable of performing similar future missions are growing simultaneously is aircraft procurement, defense analysts said. While the Pentagon has announced plans for an array of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it also will get a new air-to-air fighter, the F-22, to replace the F-15. The new fleet of 276 F-22s for the Air Force will cost $42 billion. "We already have an ample number to establish air superiority almost anywhere . . . even China, which could eventually produce a good fighter," O'Hanlon said. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 31 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 05:41:18 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:41:18 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the struggle for Kirkuk Message-ID: <009901c31f8d$e4dacc20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington Post / Ethnic power struggle emerges in Kirkuk / Scott Wilson in Kirkuk Kurdish influence grows as U.S. struggles to establish order in northern Iraq In cooperation with U.S. occupation forces, two armed Kurdish organizations have moved swiftly in recent weeks to gain a political hold on Kirkuk, a city in the northern Iraqi oil fields that the groups have long coveted as a Kurdish economic and cultural center.Since moving into Kirkuk on April 10, behind fleeing Iraqi soldiers, U.S. forces have struggled to build a viable local administration in a region where Kurds are the majority among several often hostile ethnic groups. For help, U.S. officers have turned to eager leaders from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), who have administered sectors of a largely autonomous U.S.-protected portion of northern Iraq since shortly after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The two groups, each with strong militias, have sent in more than 400 police officers and a variety of city administrators from the Kurdish enclave that begins 25 miles east of this city. This has formalized their political reach outside that area for the first time. Many of those police officers are former pesh merga guerrillas, who have spent decades fighting efforts by the government of former president Saddam Hussein to bring the independence-minded Kurds to heel. U.S. officers have also reached out to local Arabs, Assyrians and Turkmen, ethnic groups that each make up a significant minority of greater Kirkuk's 1 million residents. But Kurds, with a long history of working with the U.S. military, have emerged with more influence in the police force and the interim city council. As a result, the council has already been boycotted by a Turkmen group to protest perceived U.S. favoritism toward Kurds. The Kurdish parties, among the few well-organized political organizations on Iraq's new landscape, are increasing their visibility here after years of operating as clandestine cells hiding from Hussein's security forces. The PUK has moved part of its interior ministry from the autonomous zone to Kirkuk, and has taken over the city's only television station, all with at least tacit U.S. permission. Party officials have also been buying property, often at inflated prices, from Kirkuk's Arabs in hopes of increasing the number of Kurdish residents ahead of U.S.-sponsored mayoral and city council elections scheduled this week for this city 150 miles north of Baghdad. "The only real opposition groups in this region were Kurdish, the only ones to stand up to the regime," said Mohammed Kamal Salah, the KDP's deputy director in Kirkuk. "The truth is that this is a Kurdish city, so we have come to represent it." Until now, U.S. forces have tried to keep the Kurdish parties at arm's length, even ordering the pesh merga out of Kirkuk in the days after the Hussein government's collapse. Turning to them now marks a shift by U.S. forces that has potentially far-reaching implications for stability in a region with restive Kurdish populations scattered across four countries. While Kurdish party leaders meet in Baghdad to negotiate a role in a federated Iraq, their foot soldiers have worked on the ground to tip the political balance in their favor. The parties, whose pesh merga moved alongside U.S. forces throughout the northern campaign, appear to be riding that mutually useful alliance to greater political power. Turkey, which did not allow U.S. forces to invade from its territory, has warned against allowing Kurdish groups to assume political or military power in Kirkuk or elsewhere in northern Iraq. Fearing that Kurdish control of the economically important city could encourage Turkey's separatist Kurds, Turkish officials threatened to dispatch troops to evict pesh merga militias after they defied U.S. orders not to enter Kirkuk. The pesh merga withdrew, but the United States has invited their political wing to return. "It's a reward from the allied forces to allow the Kurds back in here," said Muner Qafi, political director of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, the largest party representing ethnic Turkmen in Kirkuk. In recent weeks, U.S. forces have tried to help establish a representative city government and police force. Because Hussein used settlement of Arabs to alter the demographics of this strategic region, census information remained secret. No one is sure of the size of each ethnic group, although most agree that the Kurds represent a majority. And now the numbers are increasing as hundreds of Kurds - displaced years ago by Hussein's "Arabization" campaign, which paid Arabs from the south to settle on Kurdish lands - have returned to reclaim their property. Many more intend to do so once school lets out in the Kurdish enclave in July. Violence is already on the rise. Last Saturday, witnesses said Arab men from the nearby town of Hawijah arrived in trucks and opened fire in town, killing at least five people. The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 32 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 05:42:20 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:42:20 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Germany: economic gloom Message-ID: <009f01c31f8e$09eab660$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Le Monde / Spectre of Japanese-style deflation fills Germans with gloom / Philippe Ricard in Berlin Germany's leaders are obsessed with the following question: could their country, the European Union's largest economic power, become the Japan of Europe? Is Germany, they wonder, doomed to descend into a long period of deflation amid crises in the banking and property sectors and the ever-present threat of recession?The spectre of events in Japan is exercising the minds of Germans all the more keenly because their politicians are finding it hard to agree on a recipe for reversing the trend - as witnessed in the endless debates over Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's proposed economic reforms. Japan and Germany undoubtedly display similar symptoms. "The scale of the problem is different but its causes and the evolution of macroeconomic indicators are remarkably similar in both countries," notes Frank Westermann, an econo mist at the Munich-based Institute for Economic Research (Ifo). Like Japan, Germany continues to register a growth rate well below its potential. For the past 10 years, and with the euphoria of reunification long gone, increases in GDP have remained below 1.5%. At best Germany is going through a period of stagnation: its growth rate, after dipping to 0.2% in 2002, should approach 0.75% this year, according to official forecasts. That figure is regarded as optimistic by most experts, some of whom have not ruled out a further phase of recession. As in Japan, the most pessimistic observers are concerned about the inherent risks of deflation: low demand, caused by a massive unemployment figure of 4.6m, is pushing prices down. Germany now has the lowest inflation figure in the eurozone - just a fraction above 1%, or half the EU average. Another similarity is the crisis in the banking sector, with credit insti tutions suffering from the depressed economic climate. This year a record 42,000 companies are expected to go bankrupt. The value of banks' holdings in the industrial sector has plummeted amid chaos on the stock market. And, caught up in an unprecedented process of restructuring, banks now think twice before taking on fresh commitments. Their cautious attitude has only increased the risks of a credit shortage. Yet there is a difference between the situations in Germany and Japan. The German property crisis that was fanned by excessively high subsidies to the building industry in the former East Germany bears no relation to Japan's traumas in the same sector. It continues to seriously affect the building industry and is causing credit institutions considerable problems but, according to one expert, "its scale remains modest compared with the Japanese property bubble". More generally, opinion is divided on the imminence of deflation in Germany. "The threat of deflation is often mentioned, but it is insignificant, despite some unfavourable economic prospects," says Ralph Solveen, an economist with Commerzbank, who also points out that Germany has been through previous periods of deflation without being sucked into a Japanese-style vicious circle. Germany's problems have specific causes. Almost 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the country has still not recovered from the process of reunification. West-East transfers aimed at bringing the eastern Lander up to the level of their Western counterparts continue to demand a considerable proportion of the country's resources. The impact is particularly burdensome because the transfers restrict Germany's room for budgetary manoeuvre. And the difference with what happened in Japan is that the German government cannot afford to inject billions of euros into the economy to crank it back into action. Germany, which remains the leading economic power in the eurozone, is probably paying the price for joining the single currency when the Deutschmark was overvalued against the euro, causing companies to lose some competitive edge overnight. In the wake of that, the whole economy became dependent on a monetary policy devised by the European Central Bank for all 12 EU members. While Germany sorely needs a little monetary stimulation, according to the International Monetary Fund, its government no longer controls the instruments with which to provide it. Japan resorted heavily to such action - though, it must be said, with little success. According to Schroder's supporters, this state of affairs only makes the chancellor's proposed structural reforms all the more urgent. May 10 The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0522, page 30 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:03:37 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:03:37 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Fw: The America I missed this time. References: <001601c31f23$732b2670$5a0e9ad8@Chris> <002f01c31f5f$55444ec0$1400a8c0@evs> Message-ID: <00ad01c31f91$02c834e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Gary writes: This is why the alternative of using "third" world countries' as health care providers and retirement venues is a possible wave of the future. The US will source its needs outside of its borders. Instead of wallowing in lower middle class standards, the money pinched can move to countries like the Philippines and live much more comfortably even going on a visit to the US once a year for a vacation. Hospitals in the Philippines may not be cutting edge like John Hopkins or the Boston Children's Hospital but the equipment is state of the art, the doctors excellent, the nurses (the Philippines exports nurses to the US) are great comforters and there is cable TV in each airconditioned room -- private with room for a relative to stay and sleep with you = P1,500 per day or $30 per day. An apendectomy with a week's stay in the hospital cost me $800 including doctor's fees and medicine. Doctor fee for operation = P10,000 or $200. Some of these doctors, friends of mine from high school, practiced for many years in the tristate area. They just wanted to come home as they are already middle aged. For those who want a 5 star treatment where they even give you a rose when you leave there is the new Asian Hospital. You however pay for the hotel-like service. ------ Jeffrey Sachs led a WHO-sponsored Commission which published its report "Investing in Health" in December 2001. Within the vast output of that Commission's working groups were proposals just like these, imagining Third World development being propelled by the development of globally competitive health services. India was mentioned specifically as an exemplar. You can find more details at http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002/msg00170.htm http://www.cmhealth.org/ http://www.cmhealth.org/docs/wg4_paper5.pdf http://www.cmhealth.org/docs/wg4_paper6.pdf Quite why the "US" should need to source its needs outside of its borders is another question. Just as why the needs of the Filipinos should be secondary to those of the "US". I'm pretty sure that the vast majority would love to "wallow in lower middle class standards". It's fair to say that, by "US", you mean those US citizens sufficiently insured. Which is not the US at all. Why are Filipino nurses great comforters as opposed to, say, US nurses? Might Filipino nurses be less protected in the work place, and therefore more subservient? Or is it simply that money buys its own comfort regardless of the country? And why should the dream of every Filipino be a once-a-year vacation to the US? Michael Keaney From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:07:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:07:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: George Galloway analysis Message-ID: <00b501c31f91$8c272340$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This is part of an extensive set of interviews conducted by the Guardian as part of its "Voices on Iraq" series. George Galloway Anti-war campaigner and MP for Glasgow Kelvin Wednesday May 21, 2003 We first spoke on the 14 January, which is an auspicious date. One of the newspapers I'm suing, the Christian Science Monitor, has me in Baghdad personally picking up $3m from Saddam Hussein's son, and carrying it over three national frontiers, but in fact I think you'll find I was sitting in my office in Westminster with you. So you have a small part in this legal action I'm involved in. I hope Mr Blair is proud of himself. He really has done everything that he can to ensure the reelection of the most rightwing fundamentalist American president the country has ever seen Anyone who saw Bush arrive as a copilot on an aircraft carrier in military clothes; anyone who's seen him roaring like a bull in aircraft hangars to pumped up young men, roaring with approval at the belligerence of their leader - I hope Mr Blair's proud of himself in that picture, because he has certainly helped to strengthen the far right in American politics. I don't believe at all that the war is over. I don't believe it's the end or remotely near the end. I said that when Baghdad falls, as fall it must given it's being assailed by two such superpowers, that will not be the beginning of the end but just the end of the beginning. We are already, much more rapidly than most people predicted, into a cycle of occupation violence and resistance violence. Young children in Iraq are throwing rocks at occupation forces and receiving volleys of automatic fire in return. This is precisely the pattern of everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories. There have been several massacres, in Mosul and Falluja. It should come as no surprise; this is the way they do things. Anyone who knows anything about Vietnam will not be surprised that when they think they are under attack the safety catches come off and the live fire is unleashed. In the short term, the intifada of the Iraqis has begun; it will provoke occupation violence, which will in turn fuel still greater intifadas. So the best thing, at least for British people, would be to bring our soldiers out of this quagmire as soon as possible. In the last few days, something like 25 Iraqi demonstrators have been shot dead by American forces. That's 25 new families with another reason for eternal, undying bitterness and hatred. They have poisoned the well in Iraq from the start, they are continuing to heap poison in to it, and they will drink bitterly from it in the months and years to come. I honestly don't think there are many people left in the UK who believe the reasons given for going into this war, even those who supported the war. It's come to something when the British people have been fed such a diet of deception in order to persuade that to commit such a crime as this. I'd be lying if I said there was a way they could undo this damage. I don't think they can even if Mr Blair had a Damascene conversion tomorrow, and - heaven forbid - had second thoughts. It will follow Blair and Bush through history, and unfortunately the two countries that they led as well. My own demand is for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces, for an Arab League force to enter the country to help stabilise the security situation and to proceed immediately to free and fair elections - not a stooge, hand-picked government. The Americans have declared that no Islamic government will be allowed to emerge from any free election - therefore it isn't a free election. And we're some years from that rigged election. No, there must be free and fair immediate elections, supervised by the Arab League. But if you ask me if that's going to happen, there's zero chance of that happening. The Americans are there to occupy the country for good, and they will until they are driven from the country. I have no doubts now that I am the victim of a systematic campaign of forgery. Anyone who looks at the CSM [Christian Science Monitor] documents, even my worst enemy, would realise that not only are they false, but literally could not be true. The CSM documents had me on the payroll of Saddam more than one year before I ever set foot in Iraq or met any Iraqi official; they had me collecting $3m in cash on a day I was sitting here with you in my office. Anyone who looks at the rhetoric will laugh at them. The idea that I could carry $10m [home] is preposterous as well as absolutely defamatory. There is no doubt that there are forged documents about me in Baghdad. I'm not able to say who did the forgeries; I certainly know who benefits from them. I'm not able to explain how they came about, but I do know that what's in them is a lie of fantastic proportions. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:13:01 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:13:01 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: London mayoral election Message-ID: <00c101c31f92$53325680$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> In tried and tested fashion, when you can't nail them legitimately, smear them as financially and ethically suspect. Kumar Murshid is an active member of the leftist Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. ----- Questions raised over GLA contracts Mayor rejects analysis and defends procedures Hugh Muir Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian Millions of pounds worth of public contracts handed out by officials working for Ken Livingstone are under scrutiny amid claims that proper procurement procedures were not followed. After conducting an audit trail of contracts, members of the London assembly have alleged that rules governing the award of high-profile contracts have been lax and that too little effort has been made to achieve transparency. Though no accusations of criminality or wrongdoing are being made, they question deals which were struck without the potential contracts being advertised and where no competitive tender took place. An analysis of 47 contracts - worth almost ?4m - found that 21 raised further questions. In some cases, it emerged that retrospective approval was obtained, in others the formal approval date followed the beginning of the agreed funding. Members of the Greater London authority's (GLA) budget committee are now considering whether to refer their findings to the district auditor. But the mayor, who says his procedures are robust and have been approved by external auditors, has rejected the analysis. The contract that triggered the inquiry was struck between the Greater London authority and the Irish media group Smurfit to organise the capital's St Patrick's Day celebrations. The contract was given to Smurfit on the basis that no other supplier could provide a comparable service, owing to the "unique position" it occupies in London's Irish community and the fact that it was willing to operate on a not-for-profit basis. But the budget committee inquiry found that some of the work was subcontracted to the Mean Fiddler organisation. Members say: "This suggests that other companies were in a position to provide at least some of the services provided by Smurfit." They say the deal was therefore "not the option which would provide the GLA with the greatest level of assurance that value for money had been achieved". For this year's St Patrick's Day event, Smurfit was again employed. The GLA's contribution to the event was ?112,000. The total budget was ?350,000. Again the contract was handed out without a competitive tender but, on this occasion, officers were able to do so because they obtained a mayoral waiver from Mr Livingstone. While the committee accepts that Mr Livingstone has the authority to do that, it has been unable to establish that the correct procedure was followed in this case. It was told that an agreement existed whereby any surplus funds from each year's event would be carried over to the next, but could not find any specific written reference to this. Contracts with Smurfit in 2002 and 2003 were not signed until days before the event took place, meaning that Smurfit had been working with no guarantee of payment in the run-up to the event. The members say this opened up the GLA to an unnecessary risk of legal action by Smurfit. "If the mayor had not given his approval, it seems hard to believe that no claim would have been made by Smurfit or the sponsors." The members call for further scrutiny of contracts worth ?4m between the GLA and a number of firms, though no wrongdoing by the firms has been suggested. ----- Mayor's adviser under scrutiny David Hencke and Rob Evans Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian A special adviser to London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, is being investigated by the councillors' probity body, the national standards board for England, for failing to declare his connections to a businessman at the centre of a police inquiry into an alleged multi-million pound fraud. Kumar Murshid, a member of the mayor's cabinet, has been suspended by the Labour party from being a councillor in Tower Hamlets in east London, along with two other councillors. Mr Murshid, who advises the mayor on race and regeneration issues, is accused of concealing his commercial relationship with the head of a training agency which has been awarded around ?3m of public grants. The money was given by the European commission, the Department for Education and Skills, the council, the London Development Agency and the City of London. A confidential auditors' report, seen by the Guardian, alleges that the agency, known as Millennium Advanced Technology Training (Matt), "was used as a vehicle for deception and the diversion of public funds to sources unknown, but not for the benefit of the local community". The auditors claim to have uncovered "a web of related companies which could only be the basis of a bedrock of fraud". They "strongly recommended" that Tower Hamlets council stop the payment of all grants to Matt and related companies as well as cutting off relations with these organisations. The police are investigating the claims in the report, which was commissioned by the council after receiving complaints of alleged malpractice last November. It is understood that the police are investigating some 20 to 30 companies and organisations connected with the agency. The auditors' report contains a spider's web diagram setting out the connections. Abu Ahmed, who founded Matt, said: "I categorically deny there has been any fraudulent behaviour in Matt. It has done a lot for the community." Mr Murshid has also been chairman of the National Assembly Against Racism, a coalition of community groups, and criticised the Duke of Edinburgh for being an "unreconstructed racist" three years ago. He was suspended by Labour after party bosses sent around a questionnaire to all Tower Hamlets councillors asking them if they had any connections with Mr Ahmed. Mr Murshid is accused of failing to declare that he was chairman of a youth organisation which traded with Matt and is being investigated as part of the police inquiry. He was also accused of not declaring that he was a director of a company, known as Global 21, of which Mr Ahmed was also a director. It is also alleged that he failed to make these connections public in meetings of the council, where he has been responsible for regeneration issues in recent years. Mr Murshid said: "I now think that I should have declared to the Labour party that I had been a director of Global 21. But I didn't think of doing so because the company was dormant and was not trading. Yes, I do know Abu Ahmed but so do many other people in Tower Hamlets. "I feel that this is a technical matter and not a matter of substance. I am writing to the Labour party about this suspension because it is very damaging to my reputation as the police inquiry will take a considerable time. "Matt did do work on a project for Youth Action, which I chair, but as far as I am aware it was properly audited." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:15:58 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:15:58 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US police state: TIA Message-ID: <00d401c31f92$bc956720$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Alarm at Pentagon's email snooping Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian Civil liberties groups raised their concerns yesterday about the Pentagon's plans for cyber-surveillance systems which would give the government access to private emails and medical, education, travel and financial records. The fears were expressed as the defence department reported on its plans for the total information awareness (Tia) programme. The project is the brainchild of the Pentagon's defence advanced research projects agency (Darpa) and would significantly expand the areas of private life into which the authorities could go. In February, Congress asked Darpa for a report on the project. Defence contractors and universities have already applied for potential contracts to develop the programme in anticipation of it receiving approval. Tia is based on the notion, promoted by the retired admiral John Poindexter, that terrorists will be engaged in a series of transactions involving finances, communications and travel plans that will enable them to be tracked down if sufficient data is accessed. James Dempsey, the executive director of the Centre for Democracy and Technology, told the congressional committee reviewing the plans that the government was entitled to powers including the infiltration of organisations and wiretaps. However, he argued that the normal checks and balances of the system had been seriously eroded by the Patriot Act and government actions in the wake of September 11. "Prior to 9/11, the government had awesome powers but failed to use them well," said Mr Dempsey. "Those failures had little if anything to do with the rules established to protect privacy." Mr Dempsey said that "under the Patriot Act and other laws, the FBI might have the authority to scoop up entire databases of information, including data on persons suspected of no wrongdoing." Under the Pentagon plans, the FBI would be able to use the technique known as data mining, which supposedly finds evidence of possible terrorist plans by scanning billions of everyday transactions, including medical information, travel records and financial data. According to an FBI presentation obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, the FBI's use of public source information has already grown about 100-fold since 1992. Barry Steinhardt, the director of the technology and liberty programme at the American Civil Liberties Union said there was no evidence that the measures adopted would make people safer. The ACLU produced its own report that asked: "How can Americans remain free when their every transaction is opened up to potential government scrutiny?" The ACLU said that the other concerns were whether the principle of "individualised suspicion" would be maintained in the face of a system designed to guess about who might be a suspect. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:17:22 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:17:22 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: without thought aforethought Message-ID: <00d501c31f92$ee9a9420$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US dirty bomb fears after nuclear looting Julian Borger in Washington Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian The Pentagon yesterday dropped its opposition to allowing UN nuclear inspectors into Iraq, amid rising concern that looters stole radioactive material during the war. The announcement was made by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who said the Pentagon had "no problem with" the inspectors' return, but the final decision is expected to be hammered out at the UN this week, when the overall shape of postwar Iraq is to be debated. The US has come under increasing pressure to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country after the failure of American troops so far to find weapons of mass destruction. Some members of the security council also argue that only the UN can verify that Iraq is free of banned weapons, and therefore lift sanctions. However, the apparent disappearance of radioactive material from Tuwaitha - the Iraqi nuclear research centre near Baghdad sealed by the UN after the last Gulf war - after looters ransacked its network of bunkers during and immediately after the recent war, has caused alarm at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Earlier this week, the agency's director, Mohammed El Baradei, said he was "deeply concerned" by the reports from Tuwaitha. According to some of those reports, uranium was simply emptied on to the ground from metal containers, which were then taken for domestic use, such as milking cows. IAEA officials are concerned that the uranium could fall into the hands of terrorists who could use it to build a so-called dirty bomb, whereby conventional explosives are used to scatter radioactive nuclear material. The Pentagon had opposed the return of UN inspectors, believing that they would interfere with its own investigation, but Mr Rumsfeld indicated yesterday that that opposition had been dropped. "I've checked with General [Tommy] Franks, the combatant commander, and he has no problem with their going in [to Tuwaitha]," the defence secretary said. "The reason I think it might not be a bad idea for them to come in is that they probably have inventories of all of that and would be in a position to know what was there, or what they thought was there, and where the seals were and what it looked like the last time they were there." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:18:34 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:18:34 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Message-ID: <00dd01c31f93$197ecda0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Soros bets against the dollar David Teather in New York Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian George Soros, the billionaire investor dubbed "the man who broke the pound", yesterday added to the mounting pressure on the dollar when he admitted publicly he was betting against the currency. In an interview with US cable channel CNBC, Mr Soros disclosed that he had recently begun to sell. "I now have a short position against the dollar," he said. "I have listened to what the secretary of the treasury is telling me. Who am I to stand in the way? "We continue to sell the US dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold." Mr Soros played a significant role in forcing the pound from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992 when he bet against sterling. His firm was said to have made $1bn after the pound was ejected. US treasury secretary John Snow signalled a policy shift at the weekend, suggesting he was at ease with the recent slide in the dollar. He said the currency's 20% decline against the euro over the past year was "really fairly modest". That was interpreted as a reversal of the White House's strong dollar policy and an indication that the treasury will not be shoring up the currency by buying in the open market. The euro was yesterday trading a fraction below Monday's four-year high of $1.1738, just below its January 1999 launch price. The dollar fell further against the yen after the Bank of Japan said it would ease monetary policy again. The BoJ has spent billions to halt the yen's rise against the dollar. Mr Soros was fiercely critical of the White House policy shift. "It's a beggar thy neighbour policy," he said. "I think [Mr Snow] was somewhat irresponsible by talking down the dollar." He said the policy shift was an attempt to stimulate the US economy at the expense of other countries. "This administration is happy to hurt France and Germany but that won't help the US very much. It will make US exports more competitive, but to whom are we going to export?" He joined another billionaire, Warren Buffett, in a stinging attack on the White House tax cut plan centred on the ending of tax on dividends. The senate is expected to approve the tax cuts by next week. "The administration is basically using the recession to redistribute income to the wealthy," Mr Soros said. Mr Buffett dubbed the cuts "voodoo economics" in yesterday's Washington Post. Forecasters are increasingly concerned about the Bush administration's stewardship of the economy. A quarterly survey of economists yesterday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found them cutting full year forecasts for GDP growth from 2.5% to 2.2%. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:20:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:20:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: fading multilateralism Message-ID: <00ef01c31f93$6665b160$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> America first In the second of our series on global institutions, we see how the Iraq conflict accelerated the crisis in the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO Larry Elliott Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian Last autumn, Gordon Brown and his fellow finance ministers told the International Monetary Fund to draw up a plan that would give bankruptcy protection to countries. The idea was to give states the same rights as companies if they went belly-up, avoiding the expensive bail-outs that have accompanied the big financial crises of the past decade. The IMF was given six months to come up with a blueprint, but when it reported back last month the idea was dead in the water. Billions of dollars from the bail-outs ended up in the coffers of the big finance houses of New York and George Bush was told not to meddle with welfare for Wall Street. The message was understood: the US used its voting power at the IMF to strangle the bankruptcy code at birth. So much, so familiar. The US has wielded clout at the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, since they were created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Add in the World Trade Organisation, seen by its critics as the epitome ofUS corporate capitalism and you have the unholy trinity of globalisation. The reality is somewhat more complex than this caricature would suggest. There is indeed a crisis looming in the global economic institutions but the problem is less that the Bush administration is seeking to carpet bomb the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO with neo-liberal ideas - rather that the US shows signs of giving up on multilateralism in favour of cutting bilateral deals with willing (and weaker) partners. First, some background. The Bretton Woods institutions were the economic arm of the new world order designed to ensure there was no repetition of the Great Depression. Collective action at the economic level was seen as just as important as collective action in the political sphere. But over the years, the IMF changed. Set up to combat global market failure, it saw free markets as the solution to every problem in every country, every time. The IMF (and the World Bank) reflected the economic orthodoxy, championing privatisation, liberalisation and tough anti-inflation strategies when they became fashionable in the west. Europe has more votes than the US, but has rarely dissented from Washington's world view. To complete the picture of a rich-country stitch-up, a European was always appointed to head the IMF, while the US picked the president of the World Bank. The WTO is a different beast. Created in 1995, it has two safeguards to protect the interests of smaller countries: a one-member, one-vote decision-making structure and an arbitration system under which countries such as Costa Rica, Venezuela and Chile have been able to force the US to change its trade practices or pay sanctions in compensation. Bill Clinton saw this as a price worth paying for opening up global trade to American companies. If anything, US control-freakery was more in evidence under Clinton than it has been under his successor, because Bush is more of a neo-conservative. In the late 1990s, Larry Summers, Clinton's treasury secretary, was in day-to-day contact with the IMF, letting it know what the administration wanted, and arranged for Joseph Stiglitz to be ousted as the World Bank's chief economist after he criticised the US treasury and the IMF's handling of financial crises. Bush, by contrast, has pursued much more of an overt America-first policy, using the multilateral system only when it suits the administration. US aid is being channelled into poor countries through the Millennium Challenge Account. The money comes with strings attached: to liberalise service sectors and accept US intellectual property laws. Similarly, the White House does not support the World Bank's fast-track initiative under which rich countries would guarantee the resources to help developing countries implement improvements in education. In trade policy, the US has been following a twin-tracked strategy, putting forward ambitious proposals for liberalisation at the WTO, but also cutting bilateral deals with Singapore and Chile that provide more favourable terms for US firms than could be negotiated multilaterally. Although many in the US strongly oppose the neo-conservative agenda, there are two problems for those seeking change. The first is that the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are largely friendless bodies. Under its president, James Wolfensohn, the Bank has gone the furthest in reaching out to its critics, but those on the free-market right who see the Bretton Woods institutions as expensive, statist bureaucracies are mirrored by those on the left who view them as agents of neo-liberal oppression. "The truth is that you can't defend what these institutions currently are", says Kevin Watkins of Oxfam, "but they were part of a Keynesian political project, and it is up to the left to make them into something better." Something better would include an open and meritocratic system for the top jobs at the World Bank, IMF and WTO, rather than the unseemly horse-trading that currently takes place. It would include stopping the IMF and the Bank colonising the territory of other UN organisations. It would involve the Bretton Woods recognising that in a deflationary world there is a need to return to their original pro-growth mandate. And it would involve the other big shareholders - the Europeans - acting in concert to put pressure on Washington. Alex Wilkes, who runs the Bretton Woods project, a watchdog body set up by aid agencies to monitor the IMF and the World Bank, says there are few signs of this happening. There is too much grandstanding, he says, too much of a tendency to take up symbolic positions. Watkins of Oxfam says the one arena where the EU flexes its muscles is the WTO, but only to put European corporate demands on the global agenda. Meanwhile, he believes the US is marginalising and downgrading the Bretton Woods institutions just as it is the UN. "This is a critical juncture. Iraq is accelerating the demise of multilateralism." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 06:22:04 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:22:04 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK sub-imperialism: Iraq Message-ID: <00fd01c31f93$968d44c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> As British as afternoon tea By imposing regime change in Iraq, Blair is not so much following the US as continuing a national tradition Mark Curtis Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian Iraqis facing an uncertain future in the wake of forcible "regime change" have every reason to fear not only US but also British policy. While past American behaviour in the region is widely criticised, contributing to fears of real US intentions, Britain's role is often regarded as more benign. The reality is that overthrowing governments and backing repressive regimes is as British as afternoon tea. Fifty years ago, MI6 and the CIA overthrew the popular, nationalist government in Iran, which had threatened British interests by nationalising oil operations. Churchill's government continued covert operations begun by Attlee, to install what foreign secretary Anthony Eden called "a more reliable government". Formerly secret files reveal that our ambassador in Tehran preferred "a dictator" who would "settle the oil question on reasonable terms". The Shah took control and ruled Iran with an iron fist for 25 years, while Britain and the US helped train his secret police. Britain's invasion of British Guiana in the same year is long forgotten. Democratic elections had resulted in victory for a popular, leftist government committed to reducing poverty. Its plans also threatened the British sugar multinational, Bookers, who pleaded with London to intervene. Britain dispatched warships and 700 troops to overthrow the government, and ruled out elections since "the same party would have been elected again", the colonial secretary stated. The files also reveal British support for "regime change" in Indonesia in 1965 - one of the worst bloodbaths of the 20th century. "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change," the ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, secretly informed the Foreign Office. A million people were killed when the army exterminated the Indonesian Communist Party, PKI. The Foreign Office stated that "we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the generals". London directly aided those engaged in slaughter by conducting covert operations to "blacken the PKI". Britain also delivered secret messages to the army promising not to use its military forces in the region to undermine "the attempts which they now seem to be making to deal with the PKI". General Suharto removed Sukarno's nationalist government and instigated a brutal military regime, which ruled until 1998, with constant British support. Syria, Oman, Yemen and Egypt are among other governments targeted by Britain in the last half-century. By invading Iraq, and bombing Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, the Blair government is simply continuing a British tradition of promoting regime change. Looking at these examples, Iraqis should take little comfort. And they should be worried about the other side of the coin: equally indefensible current British policies of promoting "regime support" for favoured governments. Turkey has destroyed 3,500 Kurdish villages, made hundreds of thousands of people homeless and killed thousands more in its war against Kurds. Atrocities have decreased since the late 1990s but hundreds of thousands of Kurds are unable to return to their villages. Ankara-appointed "village guards" occupy much of their lands; villagers attempting to return have recently been shot dead. Turkish police torture remains systematic. Britain has been an apologist for these crimes while conducting business as usual. Arms exports flow, while Turkish military officers and the police, guilty of the worst human rights abuses, receive training in Britain. London aided Ankara by closing down the Kurdish TV station, MED-TV, in the same month that BAE Systems, Britain's largest arms company, struck an arms deal with Turkey. Whitehall is bending over backwards to support Ankara's bid to join the EU. Another major Blair ally is Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is instructive that the Foreign Office claims this close official and personal relationship as a great success since it implicates Britain in some of the worst horrors of our time. The invasion of Chechnya in September 1999 was followed by Russia's flattening of Grozny, killing thousands. British leaders offered the mildest of protests, while defence minister Geoff Hoon spoke of "engaging Russia in a constructive bilateral defence relationship". Human rights atrocities in Chechnya are increasing again, with thousands of "disappearances". The government refuses to use bilateral levers to press Russia, such as aid or military training. Last year, Blair said of Chechnya, "I have always been more understanding of the Russian position, perhaps, than many others." The aim of "regime change" and "regime support" is to ensure other governments promote policies favourable to British elites. Basic goals are to shape economies to benefit private corporations and maintain Britain's political status in the world. The concept of "human rights" is generally deployed by leaders as a tool to achieve these objectives. If the past and present in other countries is anything to go by, Iraqis would be wise to challenge British plans for their country and region. ? Mark Curtis's Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, is published this month by Vintage. From evs at tri-isys.com Wed May 21 07:54:14 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 21:54:14 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare - was The America I missed this time. References: <001601c31f23$732b2670$5a0e9ad8@Chris> <002f01c31f5f$55444ec0$1400a8c0@evs> <00ad01c31f91$02c834e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <005301c31fa0$77a77f00$0fc74ccb@pentium> Michael, I am glad there are reports already made. But, I think it will be part of a larger trend. It will not just be healthcare. It will necessarily have a retirement component. I can see it even now -- An Japanese marry Filipinas to own property and, even, have a kid (this makes the woman feel secure). I see them in the malls. Also, ex-GI's, who know the country, find it very convenient to spend most of their time here and spending a vacation in the States visiting kids. At the current rate of P52 per dollar, they lead comfortable lives, much more comfortable than if they stayed in NYC or San Francisco. If you had a consumable $3,000 per month, you have a steak dinner every meal, have a golf and country club membership, live in a a 200 sqm Condo in the middle of the city with good security, a good car (GM/Ford now sold here), get the best medical treatment with insurance, and visit your kids twice a year too boot. In all third world countries, at least the main urban areas have the same conveniences as any US city. Cable. Restaurants, all kinds. Delivery door to door. More successful American food chains. Cigarettes at $1.50 a pack. Cheap food. Retail chicken at $0.87 per lb. Excellent steak at $4.37 per lb. A personal maid/laundry woman at $100 per month. Excellent malls. It's a real deal that no sane man, woman or couple won't, at least, consider. Gary ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" Gary writes: This is why the alternative of using "third" world countries' as health care providers and retirement venues is a possible wave of the future. The US will source its needs outside of its borders. Instead ------ Jeffrey Sachs led a WHO-sponsored Commission which published its report"Investing in Health" in December 2001. Within the vast output of that Commission's working groups were proposals just like these, imagining Third World development being propelled by the development of globally competitive health services. India was mentioned specifically as an exemplar. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 21 08:17:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 17:17:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare - was The America I missed this time. References: <001601c31f23$732b2670$5a0e9ad8@Chris> <002f01c31f5f$55444ec0$1400a8c0@evs> <00ad01c31f91$02c834e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <005301c31fa0$77a77f00$0fc74ccb@pentium> Message-ID: <015101c31fa3$c2321be0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Well Gary, I am not glad that such reports are made. The explicit colonialism of such reportage is sufficient to turn me off. Never mind doing something about the "lower middle class wallow" that I find myself in -- I'll decant to another country where the resources are just so much more exploitable, precisely because of my own country's uniquely beneficial exchange rate (clearly Mr Snow will be causing you some concern, then) which is itself directly related to the lower middle class wallow I am trying to escape from. But, assuming dollar hegemony persists, let's imagine how retirement communities of affluent US citizens all around the Third World will be received by the locals, denied permission to all the golf and country clubs, to the hotel-like hospitals, and all the other benefits created specifically for the benefit of these non-nationals. It won't be long before these communities will require expensive security to keep the local hoi-polloi out, thereby diminishing the financial benefits to be had from such outsourcing. I suppose that would be an equilibration of sorts, however -- and, hey, maybe we could stave off that equilibration by hiring some of the locals as security guards on the cheap. No doubt some retired law enforcement officer could be made an emeritus chief of security on site just to make sure the locals know who's really boss. And better make sure that there is sufficient water available to keep that golf course nice and lush -- a few kickbacks should be enough in case of a drought. Michael Keaney From evs at tri-isys.com Wed May 21 09:20:55 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 23:20:55 +0800 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <00dd01c31f93$197ecda0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <006701c31fac$953329a0$0fc74ccb@pentium> Michael, I think the Fed wants the ECB, Canada, etc. to step in and, together, stop the Euro rise. But, will the ECB step in? It's a drama that will just unfold before our eyes. Soros wants others to come in. He said that he is in. His cost is 1.18 or below. He wants others to buy the dollar above 1.18 or stop selling Euros thereby lowering his exposure. Soros will have to put in $200 billion over a year to hold it at present levels for one year. He will be playing an increasing amount of Euro as time passes. I wonder how much he has cashed out already? What did Henry say? That the currency market is ruling over the US-EU economies -- affecting the whole world in the process? Gary ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 8:18 PM Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Soros bets against the dollar David Teather in New York Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian George Soros, the billionaire investor dubbed "the man who broke the pound", yesterday added to the mounting pressure on the dollar when he admitted publicly he was betting against the currency. In an interview with US cable channel CNBC, Mr Soros disclosed that he had recently begun to sell. "I now have a short position against the dollar," he said. "I have listened to what the secretary of the treasury is telling me. Who am I to stand in the way? "We continue to sell the US dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold." Mr Soros played a significant role in forcing the pound from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992 when he bet against sterling. His firm was said to have made $1bn after the pound was ejected. US treasury secretary John Snow signalled a policy shift at the weekend, suggesting he was at ease with the recent slide in the dollar. He said the currency's 20% decline against the euro over the past year was "really fairly modest". That was interpreted as a reversal of the White House's strong dollar policy and an indication that the treasury will not be shoring up the currency by buying in the open market. The euro was yesterday trading a fraction below Monday's four-year high of $1.1738, just below its January 1999 launch price. The dollar fell further against the yen after the Bank of Japan said it would ease monetary policy again. The BoJ has spent billions to halt the yen's rise against the dollar. Mr Soros was fiercely critical of the White House policy shift. "It's a beggar thy neighbour policy," he said. "I think [Mr Snow] was somewhat irresponsible by talking down the dollar." He said the policy shift was an attempt to stimulate the US economy at the expense of other countries. "This administration is happy to hurt France and Germany but that won't help the US very much. It will make US exports more competitive, but to whom are we going to export?" He joined another billionaire, Warren Buffett, in a stinging attack on the White House tax cut plan centred on the ending of tax on dividends. The senate is expected to approve the tax cuts by next week. "The administration is basically using the recession to redistribute income to the wealthy," Mr Soros said. Mr Buffett dubbed the cuts "voodoo economics" in yesterday's Washington Post. Forecasters are increasingly concerned about the Bush administration's stewardship of the economy. A quarterly survey of economists yesterday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found them cutting full year forecasts for GDP growth from 2.5% to 2.2%. From hliu at mindspring.com Wed May 21 09:59:01 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 11:59:01 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Dollar's slide and PPP Message-ID: <3ECBA245.40803@mindspring.com> Some market analysts are observing, with some validity, the the dollar if falling against the wrong currency - the euro - when view as a movement to help the US economy, particularly US exports. To begin with, my views is that pushing the dollar down does not have much to do with boostinng US exports. IT has more to do with stabilizing domestic deflation in the US by export it to the EU. Then there is another issue of the myth of fixed exchang rates. Several major currencies in Asia are pegged to the dollar, namely, China and Hong Kong, amd Malaysia, others are loosely pegs, such as Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, otheres are free floating with open government intervention toward fx targets, such as the Japanese yen, with its target rate of 120 to the dollar. Economist know that the nominal exchange value of a currency can be misleading when the purchasing price parity widens between two economies. The nominal GDP for the US is $10 trillon against China's $1 trillion. But PPP adjusted GDP for China is $4 trillion. The official exchange rate between China's yuan and the US dollar is 8.28 to one. But while the US is still experience a slight inflation of about 1%, China's had experienced deflation of about 1% annually since 1997 and has continued even after the dollar began to fall since 2002. In trade weighted terms, the Chinese yuan is actually depreciating against the dollar. Henry C.K. Liu From soncu at pacbell.net Wed May 21 11:05:19 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 10:05:19 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare Message-ID: Michael: > It won't be long before these communities will require > expensive security to keep the local hoi-polloi out, > thereby diminishing the financial benefits to be had > from such outsourcing. Speaking of which, gated communities in Turkey are a fact of life, especially in bigger cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara, where there are people who can afford to live in such communities. Of course, these communities are guarded by private security against the dispossessed and it happens that most of these security guards are dispossesseds themselves. The sad news is that most of the stealing at these gated communities are done by the security guards. Put differently, Michael is right. His is not a prediction, it is a fact. Some years ago, a friend of mine asked me to send him a piece by Galeano that appeard in the Nation print edition. It was not electronically available, so I typed it for him and kept a copy in my archives. I am sending that piece to you too. Best, Sabri +++++++++++ Capitalist Realism Eduardo Galeano The punishment of Tantalus is the fate that torments the poor. Condemned to hunger and thirst, they are condemned as to contemplate the delights dangled before them by advertising. As they crane their necks and reach out, those marvels are snatched away. And if they manage to catch one and hold on tight, they end up in jail or the cemetery. Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and people are less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, television watches you. Wild Blue The sky never grows cloudy; here it never rains. On this sea no one ever drowns; this beach is free of theft. There are no stinging jellyfish, no spiny urchins, no bothersome mosquitoes. The air and the water, climatized at a temperature that never varies, keep colds and flues at bay. The dirty depths of the port are envious of these transparent waters; this immaculate air mocks the poison that people in the city must breathe. The ticket doesn't cost much, thirty dollars a person, although you pay extra for chairs and umbrellas. On the internet, it says: "Your children will hate you if don't take them... " Wild Blue, the Yokohama beach encased in glass, is a masterpiece of Japanese industry. The waves are as high as the motors make them. The electronic sun rises and falls when the company wishes, and the clientele is offered astonishing tropical sun rises and rosy sunsets behind swaying palms. "It is artificial," says one visitor. "That is why we like it." A Martyr In the fall of 1998, in the center of Buenos Aires, a distracted pedestrian got flattened by a city bus. The victim was crossing the street while talking on a cell phone. While talking? While pretending to talk: The phone was a toy. The Great Day They live off garbage amid garbage eating garbage in garbage houses. But once a year, the garbage collectors of Managua star in the show that draws the country' s largest crowds. "The Ben-Hur Races" were the inspiration of a businessman who came back from Miami to do his part for the "Americanization of Nicaragua." Riding their garbage carts, fists in the air, Managua' s garbage collectors salute the president of the country, the ambassador of the United States, and other dignitaries who grace the dais of honor. Over their everyday rags, the competitors wear broad colorful capes, and on their heads sit the plumed helmets of Roman warriors. Their dilapidated carts are freshly painted, the better to display the names of their sponsors. The skinny horses, covered with open sores like their owners and punished like their owners, are corsairs that fly to finish line for the sake of glory, or at least a case of soda. Trumpets blare. The starting flag drops, and they' re off. Whips beat down on the bony haunches of the sorry nags, while the delirious crowd cheers: "Co-ca-Co-la! Co-ca-Co-la!" By the Grace of God At the end of 1993, I attended the funeral of a beautiful trade school that had existed for three years in Santiago, Chile. The students came from the poor slums of the city, kids condemned to be delinquents, beggars or whores. The school taught them trades like ironwork, carpentry and gardening; above all, it taught them to love themselves and to love what they were doing. For the first time they heard people say that they were worth something and that doing what they were learning to do was worth something. The school depended on foreign financing. When the money ran out the teachers turned to the government. They went to the ministry and got nothing. They went to city hall and the mayor suggested, "Turn it into a business." ----------------------------------- Adapted from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (Metropolitan. 358 pp, $24) From bar at idirect.com Wed May 21 11:10:52 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 13:10:52 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: THE SAGA OF PFC. JESSICA LYNCH Message-ID: <013a01c31fbc$01ac07f0$05059ad8@Chris> ----- Original Message ----- From: david peterson To: David Peterson Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 12:31 PM Subject: RE: THE SAGA OF PFC. JESSICA LYNCH ( * A very intersting piece follows. (Thanks to Portside for this one.--See also Edward Herman's assessment of the bigger picture, "Little Versus Big Lies (and Structures Of Lies)" (ZNet, May 20).--Note that the New York Times recently forced the resignation of reporter Jayson Blair on the grounds that he fabricated elements of stories, stole the work of others, and in one of the Times's hierarch's words, committed a "grave breach of journalistic standards" (or words to that effect). Among the stories that the Times outed Blair over were his contributions in early April to the Jessica Lynch saga. Note additionally that NONE OF THE TIMES's COMPLAINTS ABOUT BLAIR's CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LYNCH SAGA CONCERNED THE CORE FABRICATIONS OF THE KIND ROBERT SCHEER DISCUSSES BELOW.--SO THE QUESTION IS, EXACTLY WHAT KINDS OF LIES LEAD TO GRAVE BREACHES OF JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS? AND WHAT KINDS LEAD TO PULITZER PRIZES IN THE NONFICTION CATEGORY?) "After a thorough investigation, the British Broadcasting Corp. has presented a shocking dissection of the "heroic" rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, as reported by the U.S. military and a breathless American press. "Her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived," the BBC concluded - the polite British way of saying "liar, liar, pants on fire." === Saving Private Lynch: Take 2 By Robert Scheer, AlterNet - May 20, 2003 http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15958 In the 1998 film "Wag the Dog," political operatives employ special editing techniques to create phony footage that will engender public sympathy for a manufactured war. Now we find that in 2003 the real-life Pentagon's ability and willingness to manipulate the facts make Hollywood's story lines look tame. After a thorough investigation, the British Broadcasting Corp. has presented a shocking dissection of the "heroic" rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, as reported by the U.S. military and a breathless American press. "Her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived," the BBC concluded - the polite British way of saying "liar, liar, pants on fire." Though the Bush administration's shamelessly trumped-up claims about Iraq's alleged ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11 and its weapons of mass destruction take the cake for deceitful propaganda - grand strategic lies that allow the United States' seizure of Iraq's oil to appear to be an act of liberation - the sad case of Lynch's exploitation at the hands of military spinners illustrates that the truth once again was a casualty of war. Lynch, who says she has no memory of the events in question, has suffered enough in the line of duty without being reduced to a propaganda pawn. Sadly, almost nothing fed to reporters about either Lynch's original capture by Iraqi forces or her "rescue" by U.S. forces turns out to be true. Consider the April 3 Washington Post story on her capture headlined "She Was Fighting to the Death," which reported, based on unnamed military sources, that Lynch "continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds," adding that she was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in. It has since emerged that Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed, but rather suffered accident injuries when her vehicle overturned. A medical checkup by U.S. doctors confirmed the account of the Iraqi doctors, who said they had carefully tended her injuries, a broken arm and thigh and a dislocated ankle, in contrast to U.S. media reports that doctors had ignored Lynch. Another report spread by news organizations nationwide claimed Lynch was slapped by an Iraqi security guard, and the U.S. military later insisted that an Iraqi lawyer witnessed this incident and informed them of Lynch's whereabouts. His credibility as a source, however, is difficult to verify because he and his family were whisked to the U.S., where he was immediately granted political asylum and has refused all interview requests. His future was assured, with a job with a lobbying firm run by former Republican Rep. Bob Livingstone that represents the defense industry, and a $500,000 book contract with HarperCollins, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox network did much to hype Lynch's story, as it did the rest of the war. But where the manipulation of this saga really gets ugly is in the premeditated manufacture of the rescue itself, which stains those who have performed real acts of bravery, whether in war or peacetime. Eight days after her capture, American media trumpeted the military's story that Lynch was saved by Special Forces that stormed the hospital and, in the face of heavy hostile fire, managed to scoop her up and helicopter her out. However, according to the BBC, which interviewed the hospital's staff, the truth appears to be that not only had Iraqi forces abandoned the area before the rescue effort but that the hospital's staff had informed the U.S. of this and made arrangements two days before the raid to turn Lynch over to the Americans. "But as the ambulance, with Pvt. Lynch inside, approached the checkpoint, American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch," the BBC reported. "We were surprised," Dr. Anmar Uday told the BBC about the supposed rescue. "There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. [The U.S. forces] cried 'Go, go, go,' with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions," Uday said. "They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - [like] action movies [starring] Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan." The footage from the raid, shot not by journalists but by soldiers with night-vision cameras, was fed in real time to the central command in Qatar. The video was artfully edited by the Pentagon and released as proof that a battle to free Lynch had occurred when it had not. This fabrication has already been celebrated by an A&E special and will soon be an NBC movie. The Lynch rescue story - a made-for-TV bit of official propaganda - will probably survive as the war's most heroic moment, despite proving as fictitious as the stated rationales for the invasion itself. If the movies, books and other renditions of "saving Private Lynch" were to be honestly presented, it would expose this caper as merely one in a series of egregious lies marketed to us by the Bush administration -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 8163 bytes Desc: not available URL: From rosserjb at jmu.edu Wed May 21 12:48:34 2003 From: rosserjb at jmu.edu (J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 14:48:34 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <00dd01c31f93$197ecda0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <006701c31fac$953329a0$0fc74ccb@pentium> Message-ID: <005201c31fc9$958254e0$a15b7e86@F1127> Maybe that is what the Fed wants. But as near as I can tell the Bushites really do want a substantial decline of the dollar. Snow is a "Main Street" businessman, not a Wall Streeter. Karl Rove has read the studies that argue that what matters most for presidential (re)elections is the growth rate of the economy in the second quarter of the election year. All Bush policies are therefore trained on that very narrow result and damn the rest. Getting W reelected is all that matters. That this is going to be done by Robinsonian "beggar thy neighbor policies" does not matter to this crowd (and I just saw a report forecasting that a 20% decline of the dollar would boost US GDP growth in 2004 by 1.5%, probably enough to do the trick). Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Cc: "EGroup TheNewForum" ; "EGroup PKT" Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 11:20 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > Michael, > > I think the Fed wants the ECB, Canada, etc. to step in and, together, stop > the Euro rise. But, will the ECB step in? It's a drama that will just unfold > before our eyes. > > Soros wants others to come in. He said that he is in. His cost is 1.18 or > below. He wants others to buy the dollar above 1.18 or stop selling Euros > thereby lowering his exposure. Soros will have to put in $200 billion over a > year to hold it at present levels for one year. He will be playing an > increasing amount of Euro as time passes. I wonder how much he has cashed > out already? > > What did Henry say? That the currency market is ruling over the US-EU > economies -- affecting the whole world in the process? > > Gary > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Keaney" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 8:18 PM > Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > > > Soros bets against the dollar > > David Teather in New York > Wednesday May 21, 2003 > The Guardian > > George Soros, the billionaire investor dubbed "the man who broke the pound", > yesterday added to the mounting pressure on the dollar when he admitted > publicly he was betting against the currency. > > In an interview with US cable channel CNBC, Mr Soros disclosed that he had > recently begun to sell. "I now have a short position against the dollar," he > said. "I have listened to what the secretary of the treasury is telling me. > Who am I to stand in the way? > > "We continue to sell the US dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, > the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold." > > Mr Soros played a significant role in forcing the pound from the European > exchange rate mechanism in 1992 when he bet against sterling. His firm was > said to have made $1bn after the pound was ejected. > > US treasury secretary John Snow signalled a policy shift at the weekend, > suggesting he was at ease with the recent slide in the dollar. He said the > currency's 20% decline against the euro over the past year was "really > fairly modest". > > That was interpreted as a reversal of the White House's strong dollar policy > and an indication that the treasury will not be shoring up the currency by > buying in the open market. The euro was yesterday trading a fraction below > Monday's four-year high of $1.1738, just below its January 1999 launch > price. The dollar fell further against the yen after the Bank of Japan said > it would ease monetary policy again. The BoJ has spent billions to halt the > yen's rise against the dollar. > > Mr Soros was fiercely critical of the White House policy shift. "It's a > beggar thy neighbour policy," he said. "I think [Mr Snow] was somewhat > irresponsible by talking down the dollar." > > He said the policy shift was an attempt to stimulate the US economy at the > expense of other countries. "This administration is happy to hurt France and > Germany but that won't help the US very much. It will make US exports more > competitive, but to whom are we going to export?" > > He joined another billionaire, Warren Buffett, in a stinging attack on the > White House tax cut plan centred on the ending of tax on dividends. The > senate is expected to approve the tax cuts by next week. > > "The administration is basically using the recession to redistribute income > to the wealthy," Mr Soros said. Mr Buffett dubbed the cuts "voodoo > economics" in yesterday's Washington Post. > > Forecasters are increasingly concerned about the Bush administration's > stewardship of the economy. A quarterly survey of economists yesterday from > the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found them cutting full year > forecasts for GDP growth from 2.5% to 2.2%. > > > > > > > From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 21 13:19:11 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:19:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Message-ID: <6502728.1053544751986.JavaMail.nobody@wamui06.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Seems like a damn risky strategy if that's what it is. Alienating speculative capital that way. Can Wall Street stand a shortage of hot money for that long? November 2004? Does ayone have figures that show the relative weights of (real) productive capital and finance capital in the US GDP right now? And if this is what Henry says (which I suspect is pretty close) that this is an attempt to dump deflation into Europe, isn't that also a risky strategy? -------Original Message------- From: "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." Sent: 05/21/03 02:48 PM To: Gary Santos , a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > > Maybe that is what the Fed wants. But as near as I can tell the Bushites really do want a substantial decline of the dollar. Snow is a "Main Street" businessman, not a Wall Streeter. Karl Rove has read the studies that argue that what matters most for presidential (re)elections is the growth rate of the economy in the second quarter of the election year. All Bush policies are therefore trained on that very narrow result and damn the rest. Getting W reelected is all that matters. That this is going to be done by Robinsonian "beggar thy neighbor policies" does not matter to this crowd (and I just saw a report forecasting that a 20% decline of the dollar would boost US GDP growth in 2004 by 1.5%, probably enough to do the trick). Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Cc: "EGroup TheNewForum" ; "EGroup PKT" Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 11:20 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > Michael, > > I think the Fed wants the ECB, Canada, etc. to step in and, together, stop > the Euro rise. But, will the ECB step in? It's a drama that will just unfold > before our eyes. > > Soros wants others to come in. He said that he is in. His cost is 1.18 or > below. He wants others to buy the dollar above 1.18 or stop selling Euros > thereby lowering his exposure. Soros will have to put in $200 billion over a > year to hold it at present levels for one year. He will be playing an > increasing amount of Euro as time passes. I wonder how much he has cashed > out already? > > What did Henry say? That the currency market is ruling over the US-EU > economies -- affecting the whole world in the process? > > Gary > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Keaney" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 8:18 PM > Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > > > Soros bets against the dollar > > David Teather in New York > Wednesday May 21, 2003 > The Guardian > > George Soros, the billionaire investor dubbed "the man who broke the pound", > yesterday added to the mounting pressure on the dollar when he admitted > publicly he was betting against the currency. > > In an interview with US cable channel CNBC, Mr Soros disclosed that he had > recently begun to sell. "I now have a short position against the dollar," he > said. "I have listened to what the secretary of the treasury is telling me. > Who am I to stand in the way? > > "We continue to sell the US dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, > the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold." > > Mr Soros played a significant role in forcing the pound from the European > exchange rate mechanism in 1992 when he bet against sterling. His firm was > said to have made $1bn after the pound was ejected. > > US treasury secretary John Snow signalled a policy shift at the weekend, > suggesting he was at ease with the recent slide in the dollar. He said the > currency's 20% decline against the euro over the past year was "really > fairly modest". > > That was interpreted as a reversal of the White House's strong dollar policy > and an indication that the treasury will not be shoring up the currency by > buying in the open market. The euro was yesterday trading a fraction below > Monday's four-year high of $1.1738, just below its January 1999 launch > price. The dollar fell further against the yen after the Bank of Japan said > it would ease monetary policy again. The BoJ has spent billions to halt the > yen's rise against the dollar. > > Mr Soros was fiercely critical of the White House policy shift. "It's a > beggar thy neighbour policy," he said. "I think [Mr Snow] was somewhat > irresponsible by talking down the dollar." > > He said the policy shift was an attempt to stimulate the US economy at the > expense of other countries. "This administration is happy to hurt France and > Germany but that won't help the US very much. It will make US exports more > competitive, but to whom are we going to export?" > > He joined another billionaire, Warren Buffett, in a stinging attack on the > White House tax cut plan centred on the ending of tax on dividends. The > senate is expected to approve the tax cuts by next week. > > "The administration is basically using the recession to redistribute income > to the wealthy," Mr Soros said. Mr Buffett dubbed the cuts "voodoo > economics" in yesterday's Washington Post. > > Forecasters are increasingly concerned about the Bush administration's > stewardship of the economy. A quarterly survey of economists yesterday from > the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found them cutting full year > forecasts for GDP growth from 2.5% to 2.2%. > > > > > > > > From evs at tri-isys.com Wed May 21 13:52:49 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 03:52:49 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: Message-ID: <001401c31fd2$8f1f6b20$2cc54ccb@pentium> Sabri, Speaking of which, gated communities in Turkey are a fact of life, especially in bigger cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara, where there are people who can afford to live in such communities. --------------------------- In the Philippines, not all areas where people live need security guards. In the condos, there are guards but no different from those found in any condominium or coop with a security man in the lobby. The villages with guards do so to, keep out the hoi-polloi, yes, but the hoi polloi don't try to get in. These hoi-polloi keep to themselves and don't try to enter the villages and condominiums anyway. It's just like the Upper East Side separated from Harlem. Exactly the same. And, the rich and the poor mix in public markets, in the main wholesale market, in malls, the rich ride their cars while the rest ride the public transportation. I don't know any mall that will refuse entry to anyone. There is no dress code in malls. And, I would suppose only the homeless who look dirty and greasy would be refused entry but they don't even try. No one lives in constant fear of theft, burglary or tresspassing. The "village"guards are more to check if those entering those places have business in the area. Normally, one just leaves some form of ID, even the hoi polloi. Do flocks of hoi polloi enter these villages to look? They could if they wanted to. Just leave an ID but the fact is, they don't. I'm sure one or two hoi polloi have even done so -- entered Alabang in a car or on foot and looked. They are free to do so. But, they 99.9% of the time, don't. In fact, to talk about the situation in terms of hoi polloi or the dispossessed, just doesn't make sense in the Philippines. And, the guards are of the higher earning "dispossessed" but I'd rather call them by Class D, a marketing term to describe them: earning above the poverty line threshhold, has a colored TV, refrigerator and may even have a kid in public school. It is hard for him to make ends meet when large unexpected expenses arise. But, he has other sources of income -- from the villagers who give out of kinship like a lesser kind of extended family and, yes, some give because they want to feel safe. Each to his own reason. Look, I'm describing Asian culture and I am assuming that the elements that hold it together are somewhat uniform. I don't know how it is in Turkey but, I am giving a factual, objective description of what is happening in the Philippines. To say and generalize "that these communities are guarded by private security against the dispossessed" is really, pardon the expression, Sabri, a mischaracterization of what the reality is. I will not be in Manila today if the above were accurate. I'm not saying the Philippines has no problems. We have and they have to be solved. All I'm saying is that no one is being guarded from the dispossessed. It is not like that at all. Gary Put differently, Michael is right. His is not a prediction, it is a fact. Some years ago, a friend of mine asked me to send him a piece by Galeano that appeard in the Nation print edition. It was not electronically available, so I typed it for him and kept a copy in my archives. I am sending that piece to you too. Best, Sabri +++++++++++ Capitalist Realism Eduardo Galeano The punishment of Tantalus is the fate that torments the poor. Condemned to hunger and thirst, they are condemned as to contemplate the delights dangled before them by advertising. As they crane their necks and reach out, those marvels are snatched away. And if they manage to catch one and hold on tight, they end up in jail or the cemetery. Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and people are less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, television watches you. Wild Blue The sky never grows cloudy; here it never rains. On this sea no one ever drowns; this beach is free of theft. There are no stinging jellyfish, no spiny urchins, no bothersome mosquitoes. The air and the water, climatized at a temperature that never varies, keep colds and flues at bay. The dirty depths of the port are envious of these transparent waters; this immaculate air mocks the poison that people in the city must breathe. The ticket doesn't cost much, thirty dollars a person, although you pay extra for chairs and umbrellas. On the internet, it says: "Your children will hate you if don't take them... " Wild Blue, the Yokohama beach encased in glass, is a masterpiece of Japanese industry. The waves are as high as the motors make them. The electronic sun rises and falls when the company wishes, and the clientele is offered astonishing tropical sun rises and rosy sunsets behind swaying palms. "It is artificial," says one visitor. "That is why we like it." A Martyr In the fall of 1998, in the center of Buenos Aires, a distracted pedestrian got flattened by a city bus. The victim was crossing the street while talking on a cell phone. While talking? While pretending to talk: The phone was a toy. The Great Day They live off garbage amid garbage eating garbage in garbage houses. But once a year, the garbage collectors of Managua star in the show that draws the country' s largest crowds. "The Ben-Hur Races" were the inspiration of a businessman who came back from Miami to do his part for the "Americanization of Nicaragua." Riding their garbage carts, fists in the air, Managua' s garbage collectors salute the president of the country, the ambassador of the United States, and other dignitaries who grace the dais of honor. Over their everyday rags, the competitors wear broad colorful capes, and on their heads sit the plumed helmets of Roman warriors. Their dilapidated carts are freshly painted, the better to display the names of their sponsors. The skinny horses, covered with open sores like their owners and punished like their owners, are corsairs that fly to finish line for the sake of glory, or at least a case of soda. Trumpets blare. The starting flag drops, and they' re off. Whips beat down on the bony haunches of the sorry nags, while the delirious crowd cheers: "Co-ca-Co-la! Co-ca-Co-la!" By the Grace of God At the end of 1993, I attended the funeral of a beautiful trade school that had existed for three years in Santiago, Chile. The students came from the poor slums of the city, kids condemned to be delinquents, beggars or whores. The school taught them trades like ironwork, carpentry and gardening; above all, it taught them to love themselves and to love what they were doing. For the first time they heard people say that they were worth something and that doing what they were learning to do was worth something. The school depended on foreign financing. When the money ran out the teachers turned to the government. They went to the ministry and got nothing. They went to city hall and the mayor suggested, "Turn it into a business." ----------------------------------- Adapted from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (Metropolitan. 358 pp, $24) From WRC92 at aol.com Wed May 21 16:08:56 2003 From: WRC92 at aol.com (WRC92 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 18:08:56 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Message-ID: <5F719A3A.1B2E309C.0001044B@aol.com> I rarely chime-in on this list, but I find today's commentary quite interesting (as it appears to support what Richard Duncan states in his recent book 'Dollar Crisis" regarding how the US/US dollar is in effect be "exporting" deflation to Europe. I have his book on order, and thus have not read it yet, but below is interesting interview with him. Given Japan's fragile banking situation and the need for a highly appreciated dollar to maintain their perilous state, Snows "dollar devaluation strategy" appears quite risky. Any thoughts as to the effects on the 5 Japanese "meaga banks"? (one of which was nationalized this week in a effort to avoid its failure) http://www.business-in-asia.com/dollar_crisis.html INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD DUNCAN ON 'THE DOLLAR CRISIS: CAUSES CONSEQUENCES CURES' Question 1: Your new book was recently released by J. Wiley & Sons. In the book you argue that the current International monetary system is in danger of collapse. Could you explain why you believe the present international trade system is a danger to all of us? Answer: It is the imbalances in the international trade system rather than the system itself that poses the danger. The United States? Current Account deficit is now $60 million AN HOUR! It increased 28% in 2002 to half a trillion dollars, an amount roughly equivalent to 5% of US GDP. This unprecedented trade imbalance has created extraordinary disequilibrium in the global economy. The countries that build up large stockpiles of international reserves due to large current account or financial account surpluses?such as Japan in the 1980, the Asia Crisis countries in the 1990s and China today?develop bubble economies. When those bubbles pop, as they inevitably do, they leave behind banking crises and excess capacity. The governments of those countries must then go deeply into debt to bail out the depositors of the failed banks. At the same time, the excess capacity in the economy results in deflation. Economic bubbles and systemic banking crises can be expected to reoccur and deflationary pressure can be expected to persist so long as the US Current Account deficits continue to flood the world with dollar liquidity. Question 2: In your book you write that the current system is neither good for the countries who export goods to the U.S. nor ultimately to the U.S. How can a system that has brought such growth to so much of the world be bad? Answer: Ultimately, the imbalances in the system are harmful to the United States? trading partners and to the United States itself. The countries with overall balance of payments surpluses are destabilized through the rise and collapse of economic bubbles. Ironically, the US current account deficits also helped fuel the New Paradigm Bubble in the United States. The surplus nations earn their surpluses in US Dollars. They must either invest those dollars in US dollar denominated assets or else convert the dollars into their own currencies. If they convert such large amounts of dollars into their own currencies, those currencies would appreciate sharply, putting an end to their trade surpluses and perhaps driving their economies into recession. Consequently, they park their surpluses in US dollar denominated assets instead. By investing their dollar surpluses in US dollar assets, the trading partners of the United States helped fuel the stock market bubble, facilitated the incredible misallocation of corporate capital, and, by acquiring Fannie Mae debt, contributed to the dangerous rise in US property prices. The imbalances in the current international monetary system are also bad because they are unsustainable. The United States cannot continue going into debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $1 million a minute indefinitely. The net indebtedness of the US to the rest of the world is already approximately $3 trillion or 30% of US GDP?and its now growing at roughly 5% of GPD per annum. The economies of most of the United States? major trading partners have grown dependent on exporting much more to the US than the US imports from them. When the United States current account imbalance returns to equilibrium, and it eventually must, the era of export led growth will come to end and the world will find itself without an engine of economic growth. Question 3: I should note here that you are an economist and have worked in the past for the International Monetary Fund including working as a consultant for the international Fund in Thailand and later at the World Bank. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to the conclusion that the current international trade system is so flawed? Answer: Since 1986 I have worked in Asia as a securities analyst for international brokerage firms. From 1990 to 1996, I was based in Bangkok, heading up a large team of research analysts. We analyzed and wrote research reports on most of the listed Thai companies, as well as most of the major industries and the overall economy. In the early 1990s, the Thai economy really was experiencing something of an economic miracle. The fundamentals and growth prospects of the companies were very solid. By mid-1993, however, that was no longer the case. The companies had borrowed too much and investors too much. It was difficult to see how they would be able to generate enough revenue to repay their debt. I turned bearish on Thailand by the end of that year, but the bubble economy continued to expand?for four more years! I wanted to understand what was happening and why. I began reading the economic classics: Keynes, Schumpeter, Friedman and Rostow. By the time the bubble finally popped in mid-1997, I thought I had pieced it together. I had the fortunate opportunity to work as a consultant for the IMF in Thailand for three weeks in May of 1998 and then went to work for the World Bank in Washington later that year. While I was there, I believe I was able to put the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together. So, in short, it was the economic bubble in Thailand that taught me about the flaws in the international monetary systems. Question 4: In the book, you discuss Japan?s economy and Thailand?s experience with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and onward. You also write in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 and elsewhere that ?China has a bubble economy just waiting to pop.? Can you explain this statement and why you feel China which currently has one of the highest GDP growth rates of any country is so in danger? Answer: Yes, China has a bubble economy. Economic bubbles are caused by excessive credit creation. In China, the loan growth of the commercial banks has amounted to approximately 15% per annum for almost 15 years. To extend loans, banks must have deposits. Much of the deposits the Chinese banks have extended as loans were earned when Chinese businesses exported their goods to the United States. In 2001, China?s surplus with the US was equal to 7% of China?s GDP. China?s GDP growth that year was 8%. Without its trade surplus with the US, China?s economy would have grown at a much slower pace?if at all?both because the exporter?s profits would have been much worse and also because the banks would not have had enough deposits to allow them to expand lending so rapidly. There are a number of problems with this economic model. First, a very large percentage of the credit extended by the Chinese banks cannot be repaid: estimates of non-performing loans in the banking system range from 25% to 50% of all loans. Next, credit expansion in China has already been so excessive that the supply of goods exceeds the purchasing power of the public by a considerable margin. Consequently, prices are falling and China is experiencing deflation despite its rapid economic growth. Finally, China cannot depend on maintaining such large trade surpluses with the US for very many more years. The origins of China?s rapid growth?credit creation and trade surpluses?are both unhealthy and unsustainable. Question 5: Many U.S. politicians have explained to the public that the U.S. current account deficit is caused by the desire of foreign investors to buy U.S. assets to take advantage of perceived lesser financial risk in the U.S. Do you agree with these statements and if not, why not? Answer: It is true that the US Financial Account Surplus must be equal to the US Current Account Deficit. However, there is no ?Chicken or the Egg? riddle here. It is very obvious which comes first. American consumers buy foreign goods because they are cheaper than goods made in the United States. Foreign goods are cheaper because the wage rates in developing countries are as low as $4 per day. Developing countries have far less money to buy expensive US goods. That is clearly the cause of the US current account deficit. Once the Unites States? trading partners have their surplus earnings they must invest them in US dollar denominated assets or convert them into their own currencies causing them to appreciate. If they are to avoid causing their currencies to appreciate, they must invest their dollar earnings in the US. They certainly don?t do it because they believe NASDAQ shares can only go up or because they have strong faith in US accounting standards. Those who argue that the finance account surplus causes the current account deficit must be able to explain how capital inflows into the US compel Americans to buy so many foreign-made goods. Question 6: Also in the book you note that ?over-investment causes excess capacity and excess capacity causes deflation.? Could you explain to our readers exactly what deflation is, why it is to be feared and why you believe the threat of global deflation is real? Answer: Inflation comes about when there is too much demand relative to supply. Deflation is caused when there is too much supply relative to demand?or, more precisely, purchasing power. When credit is abundant, companies borrow and expand industrial capacity and aggregate supply increases. However, the purchasing power of the public does not necessarily expand in line with supply. During periods of very rapid credit expansion as in the 1970s and ?80s in Japan, in the Asia Crisis countries during the 1990s and in China during the last 15 years, supply grows much faster than the personal income of the public. When supply exceeds purchasing power, prices fall. That is why Japan and China are suffering from deflation now. The Asia Crisis countries avoided deflation by devaluing their currencies and exporting deflation abroad. For example, the devaluation of the South Korean Won after the Asia Crisis contributed to the downward pressure on global semiconductor and steel prices. The US current account deficit is flooding the global economy with dollar liquidity. When the dollar earnings of the surplus nations are deposited into their domestic banking systems, those dollars, being exogenous to those banking system, act as high powered money and spark off an explosion of credit creation. Excessive credit creation permits over-investment, which, in turn, causes excess capacity and deflation. So long as the huge US current account deficits continue to flood the world with dollars, global deflationary pressures are very likely to continue to build, as reckless credit creation results in more industrial capacity than can be absorbed at the prevailing price level. The reason that deflation is harmful is because it undermines corporate profitability and, thereby, leads to rising unemployment and falling purchasing power. Question 7: In your book in Chapter seven you list two tables showing a list of banking crises (Table 7.2 and 7.3). You also note in the book that ?there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between surging international assets and systematic bank failures.? Can you explain this and how the charts above and others in your book support your contentions? Answer: Corporate distress frequently evolves into financial sector distress and banking crises. Falling product prices make it impossible for businesses to repay their bank loans. A similar process occurs when excessive credit creation causes asset price bubbles in the stock market and the property market. Rapid loan growth causes asset prices to rise. Frequently banks accept the inflated assets as collateral for additional loans. This process continued for so long in Japan that the imperial gardens in Tokyo came to be considered as valuable as California. Eventually, it becomes impossible to pay the interest expense on such extraordinarily overvalued assets. The owners default, the banks then refuse to make new loans, the house of cards in asset prices begins to shake, panic sets in, the bubble pops and banks fail. Banking crises require expensive government bailouts. This pattern has been repeated frequently around the world since the Bretton Woods System broke down in the early 1970s. This sequence of events is set into motion when large amounts of foreign capital enter a country?s commercial banking system and set off excessive credit creation. When more foreign capital enters a country than leaves it, that country?s international reserves rise. When international reserves rise rapidly over a short period of time, economic bubbles and hyper inflation in asset prices rise and, then implode, leaving deflation and systemic banking crisis behind. Question 8: It is almost like arguing against motherhood to oppose free trade. Why do you feel that existing trade arrangements are destabilizing the global economy and therefore should be opposed? Answer: Many benefits are derived from trade between nations. However, the trade system that evolved following the collapse of the Bretton Woods System produces very serious side effects as well as benefits. In fact, the existing trade arrangements are destabilizing the global economy by creating economic bubbles, banking crises and deflationary pressures. These problems have arisen because international trade has become so unbalanced. The United States is buying $1 million a minutes more from the rest of the world than the rest of the world is buying from the US. Or put differently, last year the deficit was the equivalent of almost 2% of global GDP. To put that into perspective, global GDP grew by less than 2% last year. So, were it not for the US deficit, it is quite likely that the global economy would have actually contracted. The United States? deficit makes the United States the world?s engine of economic growth. However, the United States must finance this deficit by issuing credit. Credit expansion on such a large scale is creating a global credit bubble. It is also unsustainable. The United States will not be able to finance such large deficits forever. When the US deficits return to equilibrium, a severe and protracted global recession is likely to ensue unless policy makers can devise a new source of global aggregate demand to replace that which is currently being provided by the US current account deficit. Question 9: In Chapter 9 you state that ?The over-indebted American economy has entered a recession that is likely to be as extreme and prolonged as the economic boom that preceded it.? These are very strong words. Do you really feel that a strong recession is inevitable and if so why? Answer: Economic cycles generally exhibit a considerable degree of symmetry. Big booms are generally followed by big busts. The excesses of the 1980s and 1990s were unlike anything witnessed since The Roaring Twenties. The savings rate of the public has fallen to the lowest levels every recorded. A rapidly inflating property bubble has enabled American consumers to extract huge amounts of equity from their homes so that they can continue living beyond their means. When interest rates bottom, home prices will stop rising, equity extraction will cease, consumption will fall and the second phase of the New Paradigm Recession will begin. Question 10: In the following chapter of the book you review the likely effect of a recession on Japan, China and the Asian Exporting economies. Your prognosis is that they may fare even more poorly in the coming recession than the United States. Could you explain why you think this is so and whether there aren?t things that could be done in Asia to lessen the effects of such a recession? Couldn?t a growing China help to soften the blow? Answer: During 1999 and 2000, the final two years of the New Paradigm Bubble, imports into the United States jumped by $307 billion, an increase of 33% over the level of 1998. Then in 2001, US imports fell by $79 billion, or by 6.3%. The impact of that decline in US demand on the rest of the world was extraordinary. That year, the economic growth rates of all the United States? major trading partners decelerated abruptly. Stock markets spiraled downward, commodity prices fell, and government finances came under strain all around the world. The same consequences can be expected during the second phase of the recession, when the US consumer is finally forced to stop spending more than he earns. At that time, imports into the US will decline and all those countries that rely on exporting to the United States will suffer. China will be one of the hardest hit since it a leading supplier of cheap consumer goods to the US. When China?s exports to the US decline it will not have the cash to act as an engine of growth for the rest of Asia. Asia should not harbor false hopes of China replacing the Unites States as importer of last resort. Instead, Asian policy makers should recognize that the era of export led growth will end once the US current account deficits can no longer be financed and they should act now to develop sufficient domestic demand. Question 11: In the last portion of the book you argue that a new source of global aggregate demand must be found to replace the U.S. You argue for a plan to establish a global minimum wage. This seems extremely hard to achieve in a short time, perhaps ever. Are there other remedies that could be used to give the World time to come up with a new international trade system? Answer: You are right to point out that introducing a global minimum wage will be difficult to achieve. I do recognize that, of course. However, harder things have been accomplished. National minimum wage rates have been in effect for 100 years in some advanced economies. If minimum wages can be enforced on a national scale, I believe they could also be enforced on a global scale. Basically, where there?s a will, there?s a way. There may be easier solutions to this problem of creating sufficient aggregate demand to replace the $500 billion a year that is currently being supplied by the US current account deficits. However, I cannot see what those solutions might be. Most countries?in Asia and elsewhere around the world?already have too much national debt to allow for a long term Keynesian-fiscal deficit solution. Worse still, a Monetary Policy response would do more harm than good since it was too much monetary expansion in the form of US dollar liquidity that caused all the problems outlined in the preceding paragraphs in the first place. It might be possible to fight fire with fire, but no one has ever suggested that it?s possible to fight liquidity with liquidity. That said, I hope other proposals will be made. Any discussion on this very important subject would be a step in the right direction. Question 12: Lastly you argue that a new international monetary accord is needed to govern international trade and you discuss the Keynes Plan, use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and creation of a Global Central Bank. These seem all very major steps, especially in a world where major international body, the U.N., seems sidelined. Could you discuss how you see the above mitigating the effects of a major recession and tell us how achievable you feel any or all of these steps might be and why? Answer: The United States? current account deficits have acted as an important subsidy to the rest of the world, but they have also flooded the world with dollars, which have replaced gold as the new international reserve asset. Those deficits have, in effect, become the font of a new global money supply. In addition to being destabilizing, this system is neither sustainable nor easily controlled. It is not sustainable because the US cannot continue going deeper into debt to the rest of the world indefinitely. It is not easily controlled because the disbursement of the new Global Money Supply takes place as a result of trade imbalances and capital flows that are far too complex to easily direct. This is really no way to run a global economy. A new international monetary accord is needed. The new system must prevent persistent trade imbalances, and it must put in place a mechanism that would allow the growth of the global money supply to be controlled and allocated in an orderly and rational manner. Otherwise, the existing flaws in the international monetary system are going to continue destabilizing the global economy as they have over the last two decades. It may be hard to adjust to this fact, but a global central bank is needed to control the global money supply. The IMF has the organizational structure and many of the policy tools (including to authority to create Special Drawing Rights) needed to carry out the role of a quasi- Global Central Bank. However, there are three important tasks that the Fund must now master if it is going to succeed in that role. First, the IMF must gain control over the global money supply?that is over the creation of international reserve assets. Second, it must learn how to allocate the future supply of global liquidity (SDRs) in quantities that are neither excessive nor too sparse. Finally, it must learn how to allocate the global money supply in a way that both ensures global economic stability and, simultaneously, supports the global development agenda. Gaining control over the global money supply is the first step. That would stop the excessive credit creation responsible for the bubble economies and systemic banking crises that have occurred around the world in recent decades. However, gaining control over the global money supply would not be sufficient to prevent the inevitable correction of the US current account deficit from ending in a severe and protracted global recession. I believe those countries that are now dependent on export led growth must develop new sources of domestic demand and I believe this could be achieved by an international initiative to put in place a global minimum wage. It is difficult to do justice to such complex issues in only a few paragraphs. Your readers will find a much more well argued case for a global minimum wage and a global central bank in chapters 12 and 13 of The Dollar Crisis. About the Author: Richard Duncan has worked as a financial analyst in Asia for more than 16 years, conducting research and publishing investment reports on companies, industries, and economies from India to Korea. In 1993, Mr. Duncan was one of the first to warn of the impending collapse of the Thai economy and the Thai stock market in a series of published reports and speeches directed at institutional investors. At the height of the Asian crisis, he worked as a consultant for the International Monetary Fund in Thailand. Subsequently, he joined the World Bank in Washington DC as a Financial Sector Specialist focusing on issues related to the economic crisis in Asia. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About the Interviewer: Christopher W. Runckel, a former senior US diplomat who served in many counties in Asia, is a graduate of the University of Oregon and Lewis and Clark Law School. He served as Deputy General Counsel of President Gerald Ford?s Presidential Clemency Board. Until April of 1999, Mr. Runckel was Minister-Counselor of the US Embassy in Beijing, China. Mr. Runckel lived and worked in Thailand for over six years. He was the first permanently assigned U.S. diplomat to return to Vietnam after the Vietnam War. In 1997, he was awarded the U.S. Department of States highest award for service, the Distinguished Honor Award, for his contribution to improving U.S.-Vietnam relations. Mr. Runckel is one of only two non-Ambassadors to receive this award in the 200-year history of the U.S. diplomatic service. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright, 2003 ? Runckel & Associates From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 21 17:55:16 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 19:55:16 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the struggle for Kirkuk In-Reply-To: <009901c31f8d$e4dacc20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <013101c31ff4$70935190$0200a8c0@stan> Washington Post / Ethnic power struggle emerges in Kirkuk / Scott Wilson in Kirkuk Kurdish influence grows as U.S. struggles to establish order in northern Iraq In cooperation with U.S. occupation forces, two armed Kurdish organizations have moved swiftly in recent weeks to gain a political hold on Kirkuk, a city in the northern Iraqi oil fields that the groups have long coveted as a Kurdish economic and cultural center.Since moving into Kirkuk on April 10, behind fleeing Iraqi soldiers, U.S. forces have struggled to build a viable local administration in a region where Kurds are the majority among several often hostile ethnic groups. For help, U.S. officers have turned to eager leaders from the ... ************* Now here's a big surprise! I am reminded of fishing with my kids in a local lake some years ago, when ever so often we'd catch an eel. I don't know about other people's eels, but ours here are... energetic. They are easy to catch, but a lot can happen when you try to get them off the hook. From evs at tri-isys.com Wed May 21 14:44:08 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 04:44:08 +0800 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <00dd01c31f93$197ecda0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <006701c31fac$953329a0$0fc74ccb@pentium> <005201c31fc9$958254e0$a15b7e86@F1127> Message-ID: <05e001c31fdb$19abe360$2cc54ccb@pentium> Barkley, Point taken. Some news. I hear that Malaysia and Indonesia are getting ready to begin to price their oil in Euro. But, I can't find it on the Net. Closest I got was Mahathir wanting Petronas to price in Euro. http://www.us-asean.org/malaysia.asp Now EU oil importers will borrow Euro instead of buying dollars. This will lessen the pressure on the Euro rise. What's bigger the EU's oil bill or the decrease in Euro trade? Can Soros tip the balance? Gary Santos ----- Original Message ----- From: "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." To: "Gary Santos" ; Cc: "EGroup TheNewForum" ; "EGroup PKT" Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 2:48 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Maybe that is what the Fed wants. But as near as I can tell the Bushites really do want a substantial decline of the dollar. Snow is a "Main Street" businessman, not a Wall Streeter. Karl Rove has read the studies that argue that what matters most for presidential (re)elections is the growth rate of the economy in the second quarter of the election year. All Bush policies are therefore trained on that very narrow result and damn the rest. Getting W reelected is all that matters. That this is going to be done by Robinsonian "beggar thy neighbor policies" does not matter to this crowd (and I just saw a report forecasting that a 20% decline of the dollar would boost US GDP growth in 2004 by 1.5%, probably enough to do the trick). Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Cc: "EGroup TheNewForum" ; "EGroup PKT" Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 11:20 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > Michael, > > I think the Fed wants the ECB, Canada, etc. to step in and, together, stop > the Euro rise. But, will the ECB step in? It's a drama that will just unfold > before our eyes. > > Soros wants others to come in. He said that he is in. His cost is 1.18 or > below. He wants others to buy the dollar above 1.18 or stop selling Euros > thereby lowering his exposure. Soros will have to put in $200 billion over a > year to hold it at present levels for one year. He will be playing an > increasing amount of Euro as time passes. I wonder how much he has cashed > out already? > > What did Henry say? That the currency market is ruling over the US-EU > economies -- affecting the whole world in the process? > > Gary > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Keaney" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 8:18 PM > Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > > > Soros bets against the dollar > > David Teather in New York > Wednesday May 21, 2003 > The Guardian > > George Soros, the billionaire investor dubbed "the man who broke the pound", > yesterday added to the mounting pressure on the dollar when he admitted > publicly he was betting against the currency. > > In an interview with US cable channel CNBC, Mr Soros disclosed that he had > recently begun to sell. "I now have a short position against the dollar," he > said. "I have listened to what the secretary of the treasury is telling me. > Who am I to stand in the way? > > "We continue to sell the US dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, > the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold." > > Mr Soros played a significant role in forcing the pound from the European > exchange rate mechanism in 1992 when he bet against sterling. His firm was > said to have made $1bn after the pound was ejected. > > US treasury secretary John Snow signalled a policy shift at the weekend, > suggesting he was at ease with the recent slide in the dollar. He said the > currency's 20% decline against the euro over the past year was "really > fairly modest". > > That was interpreted as a reversal of the White House's strong dollar policy > and an indication that the treasury will not be shoring up the currency by > buying in the open market. The euro was yesterday trading a fraction below > Monday's four-year high of $1.1738, just below its January 1999 launch > price. The dollar fell further against the yen after the Bank of Japan said > it would ease monetary policy again. The BoJ has spent billions to halt the > yen's rise against the dollar. > > Mr Soros was fiercely critical of the White House policy shift. "It's a > beggar thy neighbour policy," he said. "I think [Mr Snow] was somewhat > irresponsible by talking down the dollar." > > He said the policy shift was an attempt to stimulate the US economy at the > expense of other countries. "This administration is happy to hurt France and > Germany but that won't help the US very much. It will make US exports more > competitive, but to whom are we going to export?" > > He joined another billionaire, Warren Buffett, in a stinging attack on the > White House tax cut plan centred on the ending of tax on dividends. The > senate is expected to approve the tax cuts by next week. > > "The administration is basically using the recession to redistribute income > to the wealthy," Mr Soros said. Mr Buffett dubbed the cuts "voodoo > economics" in yesterday's Washington Post. > > Forecasters are increasingly concerned about the Bush administration's > stewardship of the economy. A quarterly survey of economists yesterday from > the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found them cutting full year > forecasts for GDP growth from 2.5% to 2.2%. > > > > > > > From jcraven at clark.edu Wed May 21 18:32:36 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 17:32:36 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Dark Night Chat Room Message-ID: Oki, As punishment for all the grief I have given list moderators over the years, DNFN has given me the task of moderating an inter-nation chat-room in which Indigenous activists (Rez-based/connected) can share resources, lessons, data, tactics, connections or whatever to advance our struggles in Indian Country and among Indigenous Peoples globally. If anyone receiving this message is interested, please contact me with some suggestions as to time availabilities so that we can coordinate among the diverse participants with obviously diverse time availabilities. Thank you, Jim Craven Omahkohkiaayo i'poyii Blackfoot Nation Jim (and others who want to try this), The dark night chat room is up and running. The following are instructions on how to access it. When you are set up, lets run a test to make sure you are connected properly. Either email me or call me to let me know you are connected. So far, I am the only participant in the chat room (my nickname is rat1960). If you are not familiar with chat rooms, it may take time to get acclimated. Once we work out any issues with downloading and using this Jim, you can send the instructions out to whoever you want to include on the discussion. Based on a previous conference call discussion, this chat room is intended to be kind of an intertribal chat room with Jim as the moderator. Hopefully, based on some of these discussions, with the agreement of the participants, in the future we can develop an indigenous issues worldwide map on the Dark Night website where up to date information can be accessed by clicking on a state, country or region. A step by step installation process follows: Please print these instructions before following! 1. An IRC channel (chat room) has been created on nevernet. To use it you'll need an IRC client. mIRC is a good client which can be found at http://www.mirc.com Click on this link. - Once you get to the mIRC home page, you need to download the IRC Client. Go to 'Download mIRC' and follow the instructions to download to your computer. - If this is done correctly, you will end up with an mIRC icon on your computer. 2. Click on the mIRC icon. An 'About IRC' popup box will appear. Close out of this (use the X in the upper right of the popup box). - Next, an 'mIRC Options' popup box will appear. Fill out the full name (you don't have to use your real name), email address and nickname portions and click OK. - Next, you should see the 'Status' popup box. At the bottom of this box is a blinking cursor (or carat if you prefer). Type in: /server kewlio.nevernet.net and then click on the Enter key. - Next, an 'mIRC Channels' popup box will appear. At the top, type in: #darknightpress and click on the join button. 3. You can now participate in the discussion. - To learn more about functions and utilization of the chat room, go to HELP and then CONTENTS on the mIRC screen. Dave -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6183 bytes Desc: not available URL: From WRC92 at aol.com Wed May 21 19:08:01 2003 From: WRC92 at aol.com (WRC92 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 21:08:01 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Message-ID: <421B64BC.04B8A92D.0001044B@aol.com> Gary, Please see below for a couple of articles addressing your question: <<>> 'Indonesia May Dump Dollar; Rest of Asia Too?" Bloomberg, Pesek Jr., William (April 17, 2003) http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_pesek&sid=anZbHuX9q8gI Tokyo, April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, dropped a bombshell recently. It's considering dropping the U.S. dollar for the euro in its oil and gas trades. With war unfolding in Iraq and a mysterious pneumonia spreading around Asia, few noticed. News that Indonesian government officials favor the euro also fell through the cracks. Yet it could have major implications for the world's biggest economy. Other Asian countries may not be far behind any move in Indonesia to dump the dollar. The reasons for this are economic and political, and they could trigger a realignment that undermines U.S. bond and stock markets over time. Indonesia's rationale: The dollar may be the world's reserve currency but it has become too volatile. ``One thing is for sure, the adoption of the euro as an alternative means of payments could be an effective solution to speculative dollar-oriented dealings,'' Indonesia's Vice President Hamzah Haz said last month. ....and one more interesting article about a street protest in Nigeria.... 'Muslims eye euro as new oil currency' April 22 2003 http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/04/21/1050777210439.html Since 1901, when drillers unleashed a Texas gusher and created the modern oil industry, barrels of oil have been sold for greenbacks. Whether they buy oil in Alaska, Norway or Bahrain, today's customers pay in US dollars. But when the United States launched its military attack against Iraq last month, many Muslim clerics began demanding that Arab countries sell oil for euros, not US dollars. That move could send shock waves through the world oil market and the US economy. Newspaper columnists and antiwar activists in countries from Morocco to Indonesia have rallied behind the sentiments shouted in a Nigerian street protest witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter this week: "Euro yes! Dollar no!" Using currency to wage economic warfare against the US "has been talked about, off and on, since the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s", said Robert Lynch, senior currency strategist in the New York office of BNP Paribas. "It is mostly a threat" rather than a real possibility, Mr Lynch said, because switching from dollars could economically harm many Muslim countries that already hold lots of US dollars - notably Saudi Arabia. Still, given the level of Muslim anger directed at the US following the war, "anything is possible", he said. "If oil trading shifted from dollars to euros, it would be a hugely significant event and certainly a negative one" for the US economy, he said. From soncu at pacbell.net Wed May 21 19:39:10 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 18:39:10 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare Message-ID: Gary: > To say and generalize "that these communities are guarded > by private security against the dispossessed" is really, > pardon the expression, Sabri, a mischaracterization of what > the reality is. Hi Gary, I guess we are suffering from a miscommunication problem. The gated communities in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir are guarded by private security against the dispossessed. This is sad but real. Not only that, one of the best selling consumer goods in Istanbul are steel doors and Kale (Castle in translation) is the best selling steel door brand because it is the strongest. Even my father-in-law got one installed last year, after two break-and-entries into their apartment. Of course, not many can buy a Kale steel door because it costs about $700 US. Muggings, robberies, thefts are unpleasant realities in Istanbul. None of these is a mischaracterization of reality and things have gotten worse after the last economic crisis, about which you can read here: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~yeldane/crisis.html Now, if you go to the rural parts of Turkey or to the smaller cities, the situation is not that bad. Because there, the non-market based tradiational social support systems are still functioning and social fabric is still intact, or, at least, not as rotten as it is in the metropolises. The Phillipines you are describing and I know next to nothing sounds like the non-metropolitan Turkey which still enjoys similar traditional social support systems. The question is what happens when these non-market based social support systems are replaced with market-based systems of sorts? Today, I picked up my wife's prescription from the drug store and for two tubes of ointment and some pills, paid $80 as co-pay. This is with health insurance. About a year ago, the same prescription would have costed $15. If I did not have the money or the insurance or both and if my wife's condition were life threatening and we desparately needed these medication, what options do you think I would have had here in Berkeley? Sabri From evs at tri-isys.com Wed May 21 21:18:06 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 11:18:06 +0800 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <5F719A3A.1B2E309C.0001044B@aol.com> Message-ID: <001401c32010$c4123900$1400a8c0@evs> The only thing this thing lacks is a discussion on the insight that financial flows wag the real economy. Also, Henry's idea that instead of a minimum wage, companies should be given tax credits for the full value of any new employee for the next x years. To increase minimum wages would distort costs as it increases it above what the market values labor. At least, that's what I think. The matters covered by the book have been and continue to be fodder for discussion in two other discussion groups. PKT and The New Forum. Demand for Asian exports need not decrease in $ terms as the current account gap closes. Exports just have to increase/jump faster than the growth of imports. In this respect, I note that retail prices for electronics have dropped over the last six months in the US. The modest appreciation of the Asian currencies will serve to preserve margins but will encourage more buying because of lower prices to the US consumer. Time will tell how the imbalances work themselves out. Europe, increasingly, is looking to bear the brunt of the imbalances but the US will have to look out for its bond market. Anyone computed yet who is creating more money -- the US or the EU? It seems the EU is and will continue to with Malaysia and Indonesia (I hear) accepting Euro for oil. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 6:08 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar I rarely chime-in on this list, but I find today's commentary quite interesting (as it appears to support what Richard Duncan states in his recent book 'Dollar Crisis" regarding how the US/US dollar is in effect be "exporting" deflation to Europe. I have his book on order, and thus have not read it yet, but below is interesting interview with him. Given Japan's fragile banking situation and the need for a highly appreciated dollar to maintain their perilous state, Snows "dollar devaluation strategy" appears quite risky. Any thoughts as to the effects on the 5 Japanese "meaga banks"? (one of which was nationalized this week in a effort to avoid its failure) http://www.business-in-asia.com/dollar_crisis.html INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD DUNCAN ON 'THE DOLLAR CRISIS: CAUSES CONSEQUENCES CURES' Question 1: Your new book was recently released by J. Wiley & Sons. In the book you argue that the current International monetary system is in danger of collapse. Could you explain why you believe the present international trade system is a danger to all of us? Answer: It is the imbalances in the international trade system rather than the system itself that poses the danger. The United States? Current Account deficit is now $60 million AN HOUR! It increased 28% in 2002 to half a trillion dollars, an amount roughly equivalent to 5% of US GDP. This unprecedented trade imbalance has created extraordinary disequilibrium in the global economy. The countries that build up large stockpiles of international reserves due to large current account or financial account surpluses?such as Japan in the 1980, the Asia Crisis countries in the 1990s and China today?develop bubble economies. When those bubbles pop, as they inevitably do, they leave behind banking crises and excess capacity. The governments of those countries must then go deeply into debt to bail out the depositors of the failed banks. At the same time, the excess capacity in the economy results in deflation. Economic bubbles and systemic banking crises can be expected to reoccur and deflationary pressure can be expected to persist so long as the US Current Account deficits continue to flood the world with dollar liquidity. Question 2: In your book you write that the current system is neither good for the countries who export goods to the U.S. nor ultimately to the U.S. How can a system that has brought such growth to so much of the world be bad? Answer: Ultimately, the imbalances in the system are harmful to the United States? trading partners and to the United States itself. The countries wit h overall balance of payments surpluses are destabilized through the rise and collapse of economic bubbles. Ironically, the US current account deficits also helped fuel the New Paradigm Bubble in the United States. The surplus nations earn their surpluses in US Dollars. They must either invest those dollars in US dollar denominated assets or else convert the dollars into their own currencies. If they convert such large amounts of dollars into their own currencies, those currencies would appreciate sharply, putting an end to their trade surpluses and perhaps driving their economies into recession. Consequently, they park their surpluses in US dollar denominated assets instead. By investing their dollar surpluses in US dollar assets, the trading partners of the United States helped fuel the stock market bubble, facilitated the incredible misallocation of corporate capital, and, by acquiring Fannie Mae debt, contributed to the dangerous rise in US property prices. The imbalances in the current international monetary system are also bad because they are unsustainable. The United States cannot continue going into debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $1 million a minute indefinitely. The net indebtedness of the US to the rest of the world is already approximately $3 trillion or 30% of US GDP?and its now growing at roughly 5% of GPD per annum. The economies of most of the United States? major trading partners have grown dependent on exporting much more to the US than the US imports from them. When the United States current account imbalance returns to equilibrium, and it eventually must, the era of export led growth will come to end and the world will find itself without an engine of economic growth. Question 3: I should note here that you are an economist and have worked in the past for the International Monetary Fund including working as a consultant for the international Fund in Thailand and later at the World Bank. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to the conclusion that the current international trade system is so flawed? Answer: Since 1986 I have worked in Asia as a securities analyst for international brokerage firms. From 1990 to 1996, I was based in Bangkok, heading up a large team of research analysts. We analyzed and wrote research reports on most of the listed Thai companies, as well as most of the major industries and the overall economy. In the early 1990s, the Thai economy really was experiencing something of an economic miracle. The fundamentals and growth prospects of the companies were very solid. By mid-1993, however, that was no longer the case. The companies had borrowed too much and investors too much. It was difficult to see how they would be able to generate enough revenue to repay their debt. I turned bearish on Thailand by the end of that year, but the bubble economy continued to expand?for four more years! I wanted to understand what was happening and why. I began reading the economic classics: Keynes, Schumpeter, Friedman and Rostow. By the time the bubble finally popped in mid-1997, I thought I had pieced it together. I had the fortunate opportunity to work as a consultant for the IMF in Thailand for three weeks in May of 1998 and then went to work for the World Bank in Washington later that year. While I was there, I believe I was able to put the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together. So, in short, it was the economic bubble in Thailand that taught me about the flaws in the international monetary systems. Question 4: In the book, you discuss Japan?s economy and Thailand?s experience with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and onward. You also write in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 and elsewhere that ?China has a bubble economy just waiting to pop.? Can you explain this statement and why you feel China which currently has one of the highest GDP growth rates of any country is so in danger? Answer: Yes, China has a bubble economy. Economic bubbles are caused by excessive credit creation. In China, the loan growth of the commercial banks has amounted to approximately 15% per annum for almost 15 years. To extend loans, banks must have deposits. Much of the deposits the Chinese banks have extended as loans were earned when Chinese businesses exported their goods to the United States. In 2001, China?s surplus with the US was equal to 7% of China?s GDP. China?s GDP growth that year was 8%. Without its trade surplus with the US, China?s economy would have grown at a much slower pace?if at all?both because the exporter?s profits would have been much worse and also because the banks would not have had enough deposits to allow them to expand lending so rapidly. There are a number of problems with this economic model. First, a very large percentage of the credit extended by the Chinese banks cannot be repaid: estimates of non-performing loans in the banking system range from 25% to 50% of all loans. Next, credit expansion in China has already been so excessive that the supply of goods exceeds the purchasing power of the public by a considerable margin. Consequently, prices are falling and China is experiencing deflation despite its rapid economic growth. Finally, China cannot depend on maintaining such large trade surpluses with the US for very many more years. The origins of China?s rapid growth?credit creation and trade surpluses?are both unhealthy and unsustainable. Question 5: Many U.S. politicians have explained to the public that the U.S. current account deficit is caused by the desire of foreign investors to buy U.S. assets to take advantage of perceived lesser financial risk in the U.S. Do you agree with these statements and if not, why not? Answer: It is true that the US Financial Account Surplus must be equal to the US Current Account Deficit. However, there is no ?Chicken or the Egg? riddle here. It is very obvious which comes first. American consumers buy foreign goods because they are cheaper than goods made in the United States. Foreign goods are cheaper because the wage rates in developing countries are as low as $4 per day. Developing countries have far less money to buy expensive US goods. That is clearly the cause of the US current account deficit. Once the Unites States? trading partners have their surplus earnings they must invest them in US dollar denominated assets or convert them into their own currencies causing them to appreciate. If they are to avoid causing their currencies to appreciate, they must invest their dollar earnings in the US. They certainly don?t do it because they believe NASDAQ shares can only go up or because they have strong faith in US accounting standards. Those who argue that the finance account surplus causes the current account deficit must be able to explain how capital inflows into the US compel Americans to buy so many foreign-made goods. Question 6: Also in the book you note that ?over-investment causes excess capacity and excess capacity causes deflation.? Could you explain to our readers exactly what deflation is, why it is to be feared and why you believe the threat of global deflation is real? Answer: Inflation comes about when there is too much demand relative to supply. Deflation is caused when there is too much supply relative to demand?or, more precisely, purchasing power. When credit is abundant, companies borrow and expand industrial capacity and aggregate supply increases. However, the purchasing power of the public does not necessarily expand in line with supply. During periods of very rapid credit expansion as in the 1970s and ?80s in Japan, in the Asia Crisis countries during the 1990s and in China during the last 15 years, supply grows much faster than the personal income of the public. When supply exceeds purchasing power, prices fall. That is why Japan and China are suffering from deflation now. The Asia Crisis countries avoided deflation by devaluing their currencies and exporting deflation abroad. For example, the devaluation of the South Korean Won after the Asia Crisis contributed to the downward pressure on global semiconductor and steel prices. The US current account deficit is flooding the global economy with dollar liquidity. When the dollar earnings of the surplus nations are deposited into their domestic banking systems, those dollars, being exogenous to those banking system, act as high powered money and spark off an explosion of credit creation. Excessive credit creation permits over-investment, which, in turn, causes excess capacity and deflation. So long as the huge US current account deficits continue to flood the world with dollars, global deflationary pressures are very likely to continue to build, as reckless credit creation results in more industrial capacity than can be absorbed at the prevailing price level. The reason that deflation is harmful is because it undermines corporate profitability and, thereby, leads to rising unemployment and falling purchasing power. Question 7: In your book in Chapter seven you list two tables showing a list of banking crises (Table 7.2 and 7.3). You also note in the book that ?there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between surging international assets and systematic bank failures.? Can you explain this and how the charts above and others in your book support your contentions? Answer: Corporate distress frequently evolves into financial sector distress and banking crises. Falling product prices make it impossible for businesses to repay their bank loans. A similar process occurs when excessive credit creation causes asset price bubbles in the stock market and the property market. Rapid loan growth causes asset prices to rise. Frequently banks accept the inflated assets as collateral for additional loans. This process continued for so long in Japan that the imperial gardens in Tokyo came to be considered as valuable as California. Eventually, it becomes impossible to pay the interest expense on such extraordinarily overvalued assets. The owners default, the banks then refuse to make new loans, the house of cards in asset prices begins to shake, panic sets in, the bubble pops and banks fail. Banking crises require expensive government bailouts. This pattern has been repeated frequently around the world since the Bretton Woods System broke down in the early 1970s. This sequence of events is set into motion when large amounts of foreign capital enter a country?s commercial banking system and set off excessive credit creation. When more foreign capital enters a country than leaves it, that country?s international reserves rise. When international reserves rise rapidly over a short period of time, economic bubbles and hyper inflation in asset prices rise and, then implode, leaving deflation and systemic banking crisis behind. Question 8: It is almost like arguing against motherhood to oppose free trade. Why do you feel that existing trade arrangements are destabilizing the global economy and therefore should be opposed? Answer: Many benefits are derived from trade between nations. However, the trade system that evolved following the collapse of the Bretton Woods System produces very serious side effects as well as benefits. In fact, the existing trade arrangements are destabilizing the global economy by creating economic bubbles, banking crises and deflationary pressures. These problems have arisen because international trade has become so unbalanced. The United States is buying $1 million a minutes more from the rest of the world than the rest of the world is buying from the US. Or put differently, last year the deficit was the equivalent of almost 2% of global GDP. To put that into perspective, global GDP grew by less than 2% last year. So, were it not for the US deficit, it is quite likely that the global economy would have actually contracted. The United States? deficit makes the United States the world?s engine of economic growth. However, the United States must finance this deficit by issuing credit. Credit expansion on such a large scale is creating a global credit bubble. It is also unsustainable. The United States will not be able to finance such large deficits forever. When the US deficits return to equilibrium, a severe and protracted global recession is likely to ensue unless policy makers can devise a new source of global aggregate demand to replace that which is currently being provided by the US current account deficit. Question 9: In Chapter 9 you state that ?The over-indebted American economy has entered a recession that is likely to be as extreme and prolonged as the economic boom that preceded it.? These are very strong words. Do you really feel that a strong recession is inevitable and if so why? Answer: Economic cycles generally exhibit a considerable degree of symmetry. Big booms are generally followed by big busts. The excesses of the 1980s and 1990s were unlike anything witnessed since The Roaring Twenties. The savings rate of the public has fallen to the lowest levels every recorded. A rapidly inflating property bubble has enabled American consumers to extract huge amounts of equity from their homes so that they can continue living beyond their means. When interest rates bottom, home prices will stop rising, equity extraction will cease, consumption will fall and the second phase of the New Paradigm Recession will begin. Question 10: In the following chapter of the book you review the likely effect of a recession on Japan, China and the Asian Exporting economies. Your prognosis is that they may fare even more poorly in the coming recession than the United States. Could you explain why you think this is so and whether there aren?t things that could be done in Asia to lessen the effects of such a recession? Couldn?t a growing China help to soften the blow? Answer: During 1999 and 2000, the final two years of the New Paradigm Bubble, imports into the United States jumped by $307 billion, an increase of 33% over the level of 1998. Then in 2001, US imports fell by $79 billion, or by 6.3%. The impact of that decline in US demand on the rest of the world was extraordinary. That year, the economic growth rates of all the United States? major trading partners decelerated abruptly. Stock markets spiraled downward, commodity prices fell, and government finances came under strain all around the world. The same consequences can be expected during the second phase of the recession, when the US consumer is finally forced to stop spending more than he earns. At that time, imports into the US will decline and all those countries that rely on exporting to the United States will suffer. China will be one of the hardest hit since it a leading supplier of cheap consumer goods to the US. When China?s exports to the US decline it will not have the cash to act as an engine of growth for the rest of Asia. Asia should not harbor false hopes of China replacing the Unites States as importer of last resort. Instead, Asian policy makers should recognize that the era of export led growth will end once the US current account deficits can no longer be financed and they should act now to develop sufficient domestic demand. Question 11: In the last portion of the book you argue that a new source of global aggregate demand must be found to replace the U.S. You argue for a plan to establish a global minimum wage. This seems extremely hard to achieve in a short time, perhaps ever. Are there other remedies that could be used to give the World time to come up with a new international trade system? Answer: You are right to point out that introducing a global minimum wage will be difficult to achieve. I do recognize that, of course. However, harder things have been accomplished. National minimum wage rates have been in effect for 100 years in some advanced economies. If minimum wages can be enforced on a national scale, I believe they could also be enforced on a global scale. Basically, where there?s a will, there?s a way. There may be easier solutions to this problem of creating sufficient aggregate demand to replace the $500 billion a year that is currently being supplied by the US current account deficits. However, I cannot see what those solutions might be. Most countries?in Asia and elsewhere around the world?already have too much national debt to allow for a long term Keynesian-fiscal deficit solution. Worse still, a Monetary Policy response would do more harm than good since it was too much monetary expansion in the form of US dollar liquidity that caused all the problems outlined in the preceding paragraphs in the first place. It might be possible to fight fire with fire, but no one has ever suggested that it?s possible to fight liquidity with liquidity. That said, I hope other proposals will be made. Any discussion on this very important subject would be a step in the right direction. Question 12: Lastly you argue that a new international monetary accord is needed to govern international trade and you discuss the Keynes Plan, use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and creation of a Global Central Bank. These seem all very major steps, especially in a world where major international body, the U.N., seems sidelined. Could you discuss how you see the above mitigating the effects of a major recession and tell us how achievable you feel any or all of these steps might be and why? Answer: The United States? current account deficits have acted as an important subsidy to the rest of the world, but they have also flooded the world with dollars, which have replaced gold as the new international reserve asset. Those deficits have, in effect, become the font of a new global money supply. In addition to being destabilizing, this system is neither sustainable nor easily controlled. It is not sustainable because the US cannot continue going deeper into debt to the rest of the world indefinitely. It is not easily controlled because the disbursement of the new Global Money Supply takes place as a result of trade imbalances and capital flows that are far too complex to easily direct. This is really no way to run a global economy. A new international monetary accord is needed. The new system must prevent persistent trade imbalances, and it must put in place a mechanism that would allow the growth of the global money supply to be controlled and allocated in an orderly and rational manner. Otherwise, the existing flaws in the international monetary system are going to continue destabilizing the global economy as they have over the last two decades. It may be hard to adjust to this fact, but a global central bank is needed to control the global money supply. The IMF has the organizational structure and many of the policy tools (including to authority to create Special Drawing Rights) needed to carry out the role of a quasi- Global Central Bank. However, there are three important tasks that the Fund must now master if it is going to succeed in that role. First, the IMF must gain control over the global money supply?that is over the creation of international reserve assets. Second, it must learn how to allocate the future supply of global liquidity (SDRs) in quantities that are neither excessive nor too sparse. Finally, it must learn how to allocate the global money supply in a way that both ensures global economic stability and, simultaneously, supports the global development agenda. Gaining control over the global money supply is the first step. That would stop the excessive credit creation responsible for the bubble economies and systemic banking crises that have occurred around the world in recent decades. However, gaining control over the global money supply would not be sufficient to prevent the inevitable correction of the US current account deficit from ending in a severe and protracted global recession. I believe those countries that are now dependent on export led growth must develop new sources of domestic demand and I believe this could be achieved by an international initiative to put in place a global minimum wage. It is difficult to do justice to such complex issues in only a few paragraphs. Your readers will find a much more well argued case for a global minimum wage and a global central bank in chapters 12 and 13 of The Dollar Crisis. About the Author: Richard Duncan has worked as a financial analyst in Asia for more than 16 years, conducting research and publishing investment reports on companies, industries, and economies from India to Korea. In 1993, Mr. Duncan was one of the first to warn of the impending collapse of the Thai economy and the Thai stock market in a series of published reports and speeches directed at institutional investors. At the height of the Asian crisis, he worked as a consultant for the International Monetary Fund in Thailand. Subsequently, he joined the World Bank in Washington DC as a Financial Sector Specialist focusing on issues related to the economic crisis in Asia. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- About the Interviewer: Christopher W. Runckel, a former senior US diplomat who served in many counties in Asia, is a graduate of the University of Oregon and Lewis and Clark Law School. He served as Deputy General Counsel of President Gerald Ford?s Presidential Clemency Board. Until April of 1999, Mr. Runckel was Minister-Counselor of the US Embassy in Beijing, China. Mr. Runckel lived and worked in Thailand for over six years. He was the first permanently assigned U.S. diplomat to return to Vietnam after the Vietnam War. In 1997, he was awarded the U.S. Department of States highest award for service, the Distinguished Honor Award, for his contribution to improving U.S.-Vietnam relations. Mr. Runckel is one of only two non-Ambassadors to receive this award in the 200-year history of the U.S. diplomatic service. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Copyright, 2003 ? Runckel & Associates From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 21 21:33:26 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 23:33:26 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar In-Reply-To: <001401c32010$c4123900$1400a8c0@evs> Message-ID: <013401c32012$ec203620$0200a8c0@stan> http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/CGPE/Failed%20States/soederberg.pdf http://www.gre.ac.uk/~fa03/iwgvt2/files/9-gowan.rtf Soros was at the front of the hedge fund pack when Reich sicced him and the rest on Asia in order to bend them to accept their SAPs. The top HFs can now mobilize more credit in a day than Australia, and play with currencies like toys. But their calculations in these games remind me of what chaos theorist Gleick said, that there is a mathematical solution for standing a pencil on its point. And once you have the solution, you still can't stand the pencil on its point. Financial flows don't only wag the economy now, they clutch at it as they swim into the rapids. From Annewilliamson at msn.com Wed May 21 21:50:09 2003 From: Annewilliamson at msn.com (Annewilliamson) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 23:50:09 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <5F719A3A.1B2E309C.0001044B@aol.com> <001401c32010$c4123900$1400a8c0@evs> Message-ID: <01b001c32015$3f269100$2aa8fea9@igrushkii> The US has created, is creating, and will create more dollars than the Europeans will euros. The Fed has got about $600 billion in debt somebody needs to eat, and that's why they are encouraging a dollar decline. The strong euro is killing EU exports, and the Fed is simply trying to force the ECB into lowering their interest rates and emit more credit (create a larger deficit), and buy up US T-bills. After all, Washington has a war expense and it's time the foreigners stepped up to the plate. It'll work - short term - you watch. Long term, it won't. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 11:18 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > The only thing this thing lacks is a discussion on the insight that > financial flows wag the real economy. Also, Henry's idea that instead of a > minimum wage, companies should be given tax credits for the full value of > any new employee for the next x years. To increase minimum wages would > distort costs as it increases it above what the market values labor. At > least, that's what I think. The matters covered by the book have been and > continue to be fodder for discussion in two other discussion groups. PKT and > The New Forum. > > Demand for Asian exports need not decrease in $ terms as the current account > gap closes. Exports just have to increase/jump faster than the growth of > imports. In this respect, I note that retail prices for electronics have > dropped over the last six months in the US. The modest appreciation of the > Asian currencies will serve to preserve margins but will encourage more > buying because of lower prices to the US consumer. > > Time will tell how the imbalances work themselves out. Europe, increasingly, > is looking to bear the brunt of the imbalances but the US will have to look > out for its bond market. Anyone computed yet who is creating more money -- > the US or the EU? It seems the EU is and will continue to with Malaysia and > Indonesia (I hear) accepting Euro for oil. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 6:08 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > > > I rarely chime-in on this list, but I find today's commentary quite > interesting (as it appears to support what Richard Duncan states in his > recent book 'Dollar Crisis" regarding how the US/US dollar is in effect be > "exporting" deflation to Europe. I have his book on order, and thus have > not read it yet, but below is interesting interview with him. Given Japan's > fragile banking situation and the need for a highly appreciated dollar to > maintain their perilous state, Snows "dollar devaluation strategy" appears > quite risky. Any thoughts as to the effects on the 5 Japanese "meaga banks"? > (one of which was nationalized this week in a effort to avoid its failure) > > > http://www.business-in-asia.com/dollar_crisis.html > > INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD DUNCAN ON > 'THE DOLLAR CRISIS: CAUSES CONSEQUENCES CURES' > > Question 1: Your new book was recently released by J. Wiley & Sons. In the > book you argue that the current International monetary system is in danger > of collapse. Could you explain why you believe the present international > trade system is a danger to all of us? > > Answer: It is the imbalances in the international trade system rather than > the system itself that poses the danger. The United States? Current Account > deficit is now $60 million AN HOUR! It increased 28% in 2002 to half a > trillion dollars, an amount roughly equivalent to 5% of US GDP. This > unprecedented trade imbalance has created extraordinary disequilibrium in > the global economy. The countries that build up large stockpiles of > international reserves due to large current account or financial account > surpluses?such as Japan in the 1980, the Asia Crisis countries in the 1990s > and China today?develop bubble economies. When those bubbles pop, as they > inevitably do, they leave behind banking crises and excess capacity. The > governments of those countries must then go deeply into debt to bail out the > depositors of the failed banks. At the same time, the excess capacity in > the economy results in deflation. Economic bubbles and systemic banking > crises can be expected to reoccur and deflationary pressure can be expected > to persist so long as the US Current Account deficits continue to flood the > world with dollar liquidity. > > Question 2: In your book you write that the current system is neither good > for the countries who export goods to the U.S. nor ultimately to the U.S. > How can a system that has brought such growth to so much of the world be > bad? > > Answer: Ultimately, the imbalances in the system are harmful to the United > States? trading partners and to the United States itself. The countries wit > h overall balance of payments surpluses are destabilized through the rise > and collapse of economic bubbles. Ironically, the US current account > deficits also helped fuel the New Paradigm Bubble in the United States. The > surplus nations earn their surpluses in US Dollars. They must either invest > those dollars in US dollar denominated assets or else convert the dollars > into their own currencies. If they convert such large amounts of dollars > into their own currencies, those currencies would appreciate sharply, > putting an end to their trade surpluses and perhaps driving their economies > into recession. Consequently, they park their surpluses in US dollar > denominated assets instead. By investing their dollar surpluses in US > dollar assets, the trading partners of the United States helped fuel the > stock market bubble, facilitated the incredible misallocation of corporate > capital, and, by acquiring Fannie Mae debt, contributed to the dangerous > rise in US property prices. > > The imbalances in the current international monetary system are also bad > because they are unsustainable. The United States cannot continue going > into debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $1 million a minute > indefinitely. The net indebtedness of the US to the rest of the world is > already approximately $3 trillion or 30% of US GDP?and its now growing at > roughly 5% of GPD per annum. The economies of most of the United States? > major trading partners have grown dependent on exporting much more to the US > than the US imports from them. When the United States current account > imbalance returns to equilibrium, and it eventually must, the era of export > led growth will come to end and the world will find itself without an engine > of economic growth. > > > Question 3: I should note here that you are an economist and have worked in > the past for the International Monetary Fund including working as a > consultant for the international Fund in Thailand and later at the World > Bank. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to > the conclusion that the current international trade system is so flawed? > > Answer: Since 1986 I have worked in Asia as a securities analyst for > international brokerage firms. From 1990 to 1996, I was based in Bangkok, > heading up a large team of research analysts. We analyzed and wrote > research reports on most of the listed Thai companies, as well as most of > the major industries and the overall economy. In the early 1990s, the Thai > economy really was experiencing something of an economic miracle. The > fundamentals and growth prospects of the companies were very solid. By > mid-1993, however, that was no longer the case. The companies had borrowed > too much and investors too much. It was difficult to see how they would be > able to generate enough revenue to repay their debt. I turned bearish on > Thailand by the end of that year, but the bubble economy continued to > expand?for four more years! I wanted to understand what was happening and > why. I began reading the economic classics: Keynes, Schumpeter, Friedman > and Rostow. By the time the bubble finally popped in mid-1997, I thought I > had pieced it together. I had the fortunate opportunity to work as a > consultant for the IMF in Thailand for three weeks in May of 1998 and then > went to work for the World Bank in Washington later that year. While I was > there, I believe I was able to put the rest of the pieces of the puzzle > together. So, in short, it was the economic bubble in Thailand that taught > me about the flaws in the international monetary systems. > > Question 4: In the book, you discuss Japan?s economy and Thailand?s > experience with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and onward. You also > write in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 and elsewhere that ?China has a bubble > economy just waiting to pop.? Can you explain this statement and why you > feel China which currently has one of the highest GDP growth rates of any > country is so in danger? > > > Answer: Yes, China has a bubble economy. Economic bubbles are caused by > excessive credit creation. In China, the loan growth of the commercial > banks has amounted to approximately 15% per annum for almost 15 years. To > extend loans, banks must have deposits. Much of the deposits the Chinese > banks have extended as loans were earned when Chinese businesses exported > their goods to the United States. In 2001, China?s surplus with the US was > equal to 7% of China?s GDP. China?s GDP growth that year was 8%. Without > its trade surplus with the US, China?s economy would have grown at a much > slower pace?if at all?both because the exporter?s profits would have been > much worse and also because the banks would not have had enough deposits to > allow them to expand lending so rapidly. There are a number of problems > with this economic model. First, a very large percentage of the credit > extended by the Chinese banks cannot be repaid: estimates of non-performing > loans in the banking system range from 25% to 50% of all loans. Next, > credit expansion in China has already been so excessive that the supply of > goods exceeds the purchasing power of the public by a considerable margin. > Consequently, prices are falling and China is experiencing deflation despite > its rapid economic growth. Finally, China cannot depend on maintaining such > large trade surpluses with the US for very many more years. The origins of > China?s rapid growth?credit creation and trade surpluses?are both unhealthy > and unsustainable. > > > Question 5: Many U.S. politicians have explained to the public that the > U.S. current account deficit is caused by the desire of foreign investors to > buy U.S. assets to take advantage of perceived lesser financial risk in the > U.S. Do you agree with these statements and if not, why not? > > Answer: It is true that the US Financial Account Surplus must be equal to > the US Current Account Deficit. However, there is no ?Chicken or the Egg? > riddle here. It is very obvious which comes first. American consumers buy > foreign goods because they are cheaper than goods made in the United States. > Foreign goods are cheaper because the wage rates in developing countries are > as low as $4 per day. Developing countries have far less money to buy > expensive US goods. That is clearly the cause of the US current account > deficit. Once the Unites States? trading partners have their surplus > earnings they must invest them in US dollar denominated assets or convert > them into their own currencies causing them to appreciate. If they are to > avoid causing their currencies to appreciate, they must invest their dollar > earnings in the US. They certainly don?t do it because they believe NASDAQ > shares can only go up or because they have strong faith in US accounting > standards. Those who argue that the finance account surplus causes the > current account deficit must be able to explain how capital inflows into the > US compel Americans to buy so many foreign-made goods. > > Question 6: Also in the book you note that ?over-investment causes excess > capacity and excess capacity causes deflation.? Could you explain to our > readers exactly what deflation is, why it is to be feared and why you > believe the threat of global deflation is real? > > Answer: Inflation comes about when there is too much demand relative to > supply. Deflation is caused when there is too much supply relative to > demand?or, more precisely, purchasing power. When credit is abundant, > companies borrow and expand industrial capacity and aggregate supply > increases. However, the purchasing power of the public does not necessarily > expand in line with supply. During periods of very rapid credit expansion > as in the 1970s and ?80s in Japan, in the Asia Crisis countries during the > 1990s and in China during the last 15 years, supply grows much faster than > the personal income of the public. When supply exceeds purchasing power, > prices fall. That is why Japan and China are suffering from deflation now. > The Asia Crisis countries avoided deflation by devaluing their currencies > and exporting deflation abroad. For example, the devaluation of the South > Korean Won after the Asia Crisis contributed to the downward pressure on > global semiconductor and steel prices. > > The US current account deficit is flooding the global economy with dollar > liquidity. When the dollar earnings of the surplus nations are deposited > into their domestic banking systems, those dollars, being exogenous to those > banking system, act as high powered money and spark off an explosion of > credit creation. Excessive credit creation permits over-investment, which, > in turn, causes excess capacity and deflation. So long as the huge US > current account deficits continue to flood the world with dollars, global > deflationary pressures are very likely to continue to build, as reckless > credit creation results in more industrial capacity than can be absorbed at > the prevailing price level. > > The reason that deflation is harmful is because it undermines corporate > profitability and, thereby, leads to rising unemployment and falling > purchasing power. > > Question 7: In your book in Chapter seven you list two tables showing a > list of banking crises (Table 7.2 and 7.3). You also note in the book that > ?there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between surging > international assets and systematic bank failures.? Can you explain this > and how the charts above and others in your book support your contentions? > > Answer: Corporate distress frequently evolves into financial sector > distress and banking crises. Falling product prices make it impossible for > businesses to repay their bank loans. A similar process occurs when > excessive credit creation causes asset price bubbles in the stock market and > the property market. Rapid loan growth causes asset prices to rise. > Frequently banks accept the inflated assets as collateral for additional > loans. This process continued for so long in Japan that the imperial > gardens in Tokyo came to be considered as valuable as California. > Eventually, it becomes impossible to pay the interest expense on such > extraordinarily overvalued assets. The owners default, the banks then > refuse to make new loans, the house of cards in asset prices begins to > shake, panic sets in, the bubble pops and banks fail. > > Banking crises require expensive government bailouts. This pattern has been > repeated frequently around the world since the Bretton Woods System broke > down in the early 1970s. This sequence of events is set into motion when > large amounts of foreign capital enter a country?s commercial banking system > and set off excessive credit creation. > > When more foreign capital enters a country than leaves it, that country?s > international reserves rise. When international reserves rise rapidly over > a short period of time, economic bubbles and hyper inflation in asset prices > rise and, then implode, leaving deflation and systemic banking crisis > behind. > > > Question 8: It is almost like arguing against motherhood to oppose free > trade. Why do you feel that existing trade arrangements are destabilizing > the global economy and therefore should be opposed? > Answer: Many benefits are derived from trade between nations. However, the > trade system that evolved following the collapse of the Bretton Woods System > produces very serious side effects as well as benefits. In fact, the > existing trade arrangements are destabilizing the global economy by > creating economic bubbles, banking crises and deflationary pressures. These > problems have arisen because international trade has become so unbalanced. > The United States is buying $1 million a minutes more from the rest of the > world than the rest of the world is buying from the US. Or put differently, > last year the deficit was the equivalent of almost 2% of global GDP. To put > that into perspective, global GDP grew by less than 2% last year. So, were > it not for the US deficit, it is quite likely that the global economy would > have actually contracted. The United States? deficit makes the United > States the world?s engine of economic growth. However, the United States > must finance this deficit by issuing credit. Credit expansion on such a > large scale is creating a global credit bubble. It is also unsustainable. > The United States will not be able to finance such large deficits forever. > When the US deficits return to equilibrium, a severe and protracted global > recession is likely to ensue unless policy makers can devise a new source of > global aggregate demand to replace that which is currently being provided by > the US current account deficit. > > Question 9: In Chapter 9 you state that ?The over-indebted American economy > has entered a recession that is likely to be as extreme and prolonged as the > economic boom that preceded it.? These are very strong words. Do you > really feel that a strong recession is inevitable and if so why? > > Answer: Economic cycles generally exhibit a considerable degree of > symmetry. Big booms are generally followed by big busts. The excesses of > the 1980s and 1990s were unlike anything witnessed since The Roaring > Twenties. The savings rate of the public has fallen to the lowest levels > every recorded. A rapidly inflating property bubble has enabled American > consumers to extract huge amounts of equity from their homes so that they > can continue living beyond their means. When interest rates bottom, home > prices will stop rising, equity extraction will cease, consumption will fall > and the second phase of the New Paradigm Recession will begin. > > Question 10: In the following chapter of the book you review the likely > effect of a recession on Japan, China and the Asian Exporting economies. > Your prognosis is that they may fare even more poorly in the coming > recession than the United States. Could you explain why you think this is > so and whether there aren?t things that could be done in Asia to lessen the > effects of such a recession? Couldn?t a growing China help to soften the > blow? > > Answer: During 1999 and 2000, the final two years of the New Paradigm > Bubble, imports into the United States jumped by $307 billion, an increase > of 33% over the level of 1998. Then in 2001, US imports fell by $79 > billion, or by 6.3%. The impact of that decline in US demand on the rest of > the world was extraordinary. That year, the economic growth rates of all > the United States? major trading partners decelerated abruptly. Stock > markets spiraled downward, commodity prices fell, and government finances > came under strain all around the world. The same consequences can be > expected during the second phase of the recession, when the US consumer is > finally forced to stop spending more than he earns. At that time, imports > into the US will decline and all those countries that rely on exporting to > the United States will suffer. China will be one of the hardest hit since > it a leading supplier of cheap consumer goods to the US. When China?s > exports to the US decline it will not have the cash to act as an engine of > growth for the rest of Asia. Asia should not harbor false hopes of China > replacing the Unites States as importer of last resort. Instead, Asian > policy makers should recognize that the era of export led growth will end > once the US current account deficits can no longer be financed and they > should act now to develop sufficient domestic demand. > > Question 11: In the last portion of the book you argue that a new source of > global aggregate demand must be found to replace the U.S. You argue for a > plan to establish a global minimum wage. This seems extremely hard to > achieve in a short time, perhaps ever. Are there other remedies that could > be used to give the World time to come up with a new international trade > system? > > Answer: You are right to point out that introducing a global minimum wage > will be difficult to achieve. I do recognize that, of course. However, > harder things have been accomplished. National minimum wage rates have been > in effect for 100 years in some advanced economies. If minimum wages can be > enforced on a national scale, I believe they could also be enforced on a > global scale. Basically, where there?s a will, there?s a way. > > There may be easier solutions to this problem of creating sufficient > aggregate demand to replace the $500 billion a year that is currently being > supplied by the US current account deficits. However, I cannot see what > those solutions might be. Most countries?in Asia and elsewhere around the > world?already have too much national debt to allow for a long term > Keynesian-fiscal deficit solution. Worse still, a Monetary Policy response > would do more harm than good since it was too much monetary expansion in the > form of US dollar liquidity that caused all the problems outlined in the > preceding paragraphs in the first place. It might be possible to fight fire > with fire, but no one has ever suggested that it?s possible to fight > liquidity with liquidity. That said, I hope other proposals will be made. > Any discussion on this very important subject would be a step in the right > direction. > > Question 12: Lastly you argue that a new international monetary accord is > needed to govern international trade and you discuss the Keynes Plan, use of > Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and creation of a Global Central Bank. These > seem all very major steps, especially in a world where major international > body, the U.N., seems sidelined. Could you discuss how you see the above > mitigating the effects of a major recession and tell us how achievable you > feel any or all of these steps might be and why? > > > Answer: The United States? current account deficits have acted as an > important subsidy to the rest of the world, but they have also flooded the > world with dollars, which have replaced gold as the new international > reserve asset. Those deficits have, in effect, become the font of a new > global money supply. In addition to being destabilizing, this system is > neither sustainable nor easily controlled. It is not sustainable because > the US cannot continue going deeper into debt to the rest of the world > indefinitely. It is not easily controlled because the disbursement of the > new Global Money Supply takes place as a result of trade imbalances and > capital flows that are far too complex to easily direct. This is really no > way to run a global economy. A new international monetary accord is needed. > The new system must prevent persistent trade imbalances, and it must put > in place a mechanism that would allow the growth of the global money supply > to be controlled and allocated in an orderly and rational manner. > Otherwise, the existing flaws in the international monetary system are going > to continue destabilizing the global economy as they have over the last two > decades. > > It may be hard to adjust to this fact, but a global central bank is needed > to control the global money supply. The IMF has the organizational > structure and many of the policy tools (including to authority to create > Special Drawing Rights) needed to carry out the role of a quasi- Global > Central Bank. However, there are three important tasks that the Fund must > now master if it is going to succeed in that role. First, the IMF must gain > control over the global money supply?that is over the creation of > international reserve assets. Second, it must learn how to allocate the > future supply of global liquidity (SDRs) in quantities that are neither > excessive nor too sparse. Finally, it must learn how to allocate the global > money supply in a way that both ensures global economic stability and, > simultaneously, supports the global development agenda. > > Gaining control over the global money supply is the first step. That would > stop the excessive credit creation responsible for the bubble economies and > systemic banking crises that have occurred around the world in recent > decades. However, gaining control over the global money supply would not be > sufficient to prevent the inevitable correction of the US current account > deficit from ending in a severe and protracted global recession. I believe > those countries that are now dependent on export led growth must develop new > sources of domestic demand and I believe this could be achieved by an > international initiative to put in place a global minimum wage. > > It is difficult to do justice to such complex issues in only a few > paragraphs. Your readers will find a much more well argued case for a > global minimum wage and a global central bank in chapters 12 and 13 of The > Dollar Crisis. > > > > About the Author: Richard Duncan has worked as a financial analyst in Asia > for more than 16 years, conducting research and publishing investment > reports on companies, industries, and economies from India to Korea. > > > In 1993, Mr. Duncan was one of the first to warn of the impending collapse > of the Thai economy and the Thai stock market in a series of published > reports and speeches directed at institutional investors. At the height of > the Asian crisis, he worked as a consultant for the International Monetary > Fund in Thailand. Subsequently, he joined the World Bank in Washington DC > as a Financial Sector Specialist focusing on issues related to the economic > crisis in Asia. > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- > ---- > > > About the Interviewer: Christopher W. Runckel, a former senior US diplomat > who served in many counties in Asia, is a graduate of the University of > Oregon and Lewis and Clark Law School. He served as Deputy General Counsel > of President Gerald Ford?s Presidential Clemency Board. Until April of 1999, > Mr. Runckel was Minister-Counselor of the US Embassy in Beijing, China. Mr. > Runckel lived and worked in Thailand for over six years. He was the first > permanently assigned U.S. diplomat to return to Vietnam after the Vietnam > War. In 1997, he was awarded the U.S. Department of States highest award > for service, the Distinguished Honor Award, for his contribution to > improving U.S.-Vietnam relations. Mr. Runckel is one of only two > non-Ambassadors to receive this award in the 200-year history of the U.S. > diplomatic service. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- > ---- > > Copyright, 2003 ? Runckel & Associates > > > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 21 20:22:28 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 19:22:28 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Gordo in Van on Day of Defiance Message-ID: <012401c32009$023a1020$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Big Garlic Bobcat" ANTI-POVERTY COMMITTEE 119 West Pender, suite 108 Coast Salish Territory, E. VAN The Anti-Poverty Committee has learned that Premier Gordon Campbell has the guts to come to Vancouver on the 'DAY OF DEFIANCE'. Our allies have long been planning to make Friday May 23rd a day of action against the BC Liberals. Apparently Gordon Campbell intends to have a Prayer Breakfast at 7:30 AM at the Hotel Vancouver. He will need all the prayers he can get. The Anti-Poverty Committee is putting the Liberals on notice. If they will not stop the new landlord favored Residential Tenancy Act, and insist on cutting 38,000 people off Welfare April 1st 2004: they are going to have to get past us first. We are going to build momentum on our demands for welfare and housing, and we will go to Victoria this fall to get the message across. We are dedicated to creating a climate where political squats, direct action, social and economic disruptions across BC interfere with the Liberals business interests. Gordon Campbell's timely visit will be a great motivator to kick some Liberal again ass this year. Join us Friday at: 7:00 AM, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY ROBSON we will march down together with strength and dignity. Bring muffins, bagels and donuts. The defiant ones can have a breakfast of our own. FIGHT TO WIN. DAY OF DEFIANCE From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 21 23:40:25 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 22:40:25 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: [R-G] French military team arrives in DR Congo References: <012401c31ed8$fb0fed00$f7eefea9@q1t3r5> Message-ID: <00bf01c32024$a86a0de0$20fa5718@comintern> I will take seriously the reports and/or posts from leftists that have something to say on this matter (about the recent history of the DR Congo) when the messages I refer to make some mention of the fact that: A) Mobutu was placed to stall the 'takeover' by a radical, Patrice Lumumba, in Congo/Zaire at the behest of imperialism (most all state this) B) Mobutu was overthrown by a revolutionary upsurge in 1997 that was led by a former comrade-in-arms of Ch? Guevara's, Laurent Kabila (some state this, though they underplay the radical history of Kabila); C) The newly annoited Democratic Republic of Congo was to immeidately tell the IMF that all loans were ill-gotten and not valid-- they had nothing to do with the wishes of the Congolese (Zairean) peoples and would not be honored (almost never mentioned); D) That Laurent Kabila also established an absolute monopoly on the foreign traqde of the diamond industry to the dismay of all capitalists, both foreign and domestic in DR Congo (I have only seen this mentioned derisively by the Washington Post and Stratfor); E) That these current "peace making" gesures of the west come after Joseph Kabila, Laurent's son, sold out both the debt (by stating that the DR Congo would honor that money that went into Mobutu's pocket to the IMF) and the diamond industry controls and succumbed to "blood diamonds" (again, only the Wash. Post has stated this to my eyes); F) that all the countries that have supported the DR Congo in the "First African World War" are countries that have fought physically (i.e. a revolutionary struggle of a variant or two) for their independance: Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola, while the 'half-revolutionary' country, South Africa, has given half support and offered to "negotiate"; G) that all the countries that are part of the invading forces are all part of the imperialist world-- i.e. they are all puppets and have a historical place well (and some might say "deep") inside the US and French imperialist bloc. These facts are never mentioned but are as important to understanding what is going on as oil is in the Middle East. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Feldman" > Apparently this move, proposed by Kofi Annan, was approved by the Security > Council by "consensus." If the deployment is approved by the Tutsi-led > government of Rwanda, which has been high on the list of U.S.-approved > From cburford at gn.apc.org Thu May 22 00:20:03 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 07:20:03 +0100 Subject: [A-List] "Occupation of Iraq illegal" Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030522071543.02b592e0@pop3.norton.antivirus> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,961146,00.html The subtleties of bourgeois politics! The invasion is legal, even if no WMD are found, but the occupation is not, unless there is a UN resolution. Interesting that this story has leaked out just as the US has had to concede some ground to the UN to get a resolution through today. Including possibly the return of the UN inspectors. What a humilation! Chris Burford London From cburford at gn.apc.org Wed May 21 23:58:31 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 06:58:31 +0100 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar In-Reply-To: <013401c32012$ec203620$0200a8c0@stan> References: <001401c32010$c4123900$1400a8c0@evs> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030522064955.02c235d0@pop3.norton.antivirus> At 2003-05-21 23:33 -0400, you wrote: >Financial flows don't only wag the economy now, they clutch at it as >they swim into the rapids. Important and illuminating discussion. My recollection was in the summer Soros predicted the dollar would fall 30%. It is now said to be 25% lower than it was in Jan 2002 (against the euro?) While watching the short term shifting of advantage between the major economic blocs as we move into more turbulent water, a key question is how to keep a perspective. One point point of orientation I suggest is to think of what is happening to living labour rather than dead labour. Ultimately it is the living labour that is more important. Secondly where will the destruction of dead labour, or the relative depreciation of dead labour, mostly occur? That is part of the inter-imperialist battle at the moment. Reality, presentation, and perceptions are very complex and could shift the momentum one way or another. Chris Burford London From evs at tri-isys.com Thu May 22 00:01:05 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 14:01:05 +0800 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <5F719A3A.1B2E309C.0001044B@aol.com> <001401c32010$c4123900$1400a8c0@evs> <01b001c32015$3f269100$2aa8fea9@igrushkii> Message-ID: <00be01c32032$e9055400$1400a8c0@evs> The sorry thing is that that is the only thing we can all do -- watch. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Annewilliamson" To: Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 11:50 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar The US has created, is creating, and will create more dollars than the Europeans will euros. The Fed has got about $600 billion in debt somebody needs to eat, and that's why they are encouraging a dollar decline. The strong euro is killing EU exports, and the Fed is simply trying to force the ECB into lowering their interest rates and emit more credit (create a larger deficit), and buy up US T-bills. After all, Washington has a war expense and it's time the foreigners stepped up to the plate. It'll work - short term - you watch. Long term, it won't. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 11:18 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > The only thing this thing lacks is a discussion on the insight that > financial flows wag the real economy. Also, Henry's idea that instead of a > minimum wage, companies should be given tax credits for the full value of > any new employee for the next x years. To increase minimum wages would > distort costs as it increases it above what the market values labor. At > least, that's what I think. The matters covered by the book have been and > continue to be fodder for discussion in two other discussion groups. PKT and > The New Forum. > > Demand for Asian exports need not decrease in $ terms as the current account > gap closes. Exports just have to increase/jump faster than the growth of > imports. In this respect, I note that retail prices for electronics have > dropped over the last six months in the US. The modest appreciation of the > Asian currencies will serve to preserve margins but will encourage more > buying because of lower prices to the US consumer. > > Time will tell how the imbalances work themselves out. Europe, increasingly, > is looking to bear the brunt of the imbalances but the US will have to look > out for its bond market. Anyone computed yet who is creating more money -- > the US or the EU? It seems the EU is and will continue to with Malaysia and > Indonesia (I hear) accepting Euro for oil. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 6:08 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar > > > I rarely chime-in on this list, but I find today's commentary quite > interesting (as it appears to support what Richard Duncan states in his > recent book 'Dollar Crisis" regarding how the US/US dollar is in effect be > "exporting" deflation to Europe. I have his book on order, and thus have > not read it yet, but below is interesting interview with him. Given Japan's > fragile banking situation and the need for a highly appreciated dollar to > maintain their perilous state, Snows "dollar devaluation strategy" appears > quite risky. Any thoughts as to the effects on the 5 Japanese "meaga banks"? > (one of which was nationalized this week in a effort to avoid its failure) > > > http://www.business-in-asia.com/dollar_crisis.html > > INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD DUNCAN ON > 'THE DOLLAR CRISIS: CAUSES CONSEQUENCES CURES' > > Question 1: Your new book was recently released by J. Wiley & Sons. In the > book you argue that the current International monetary system is in danger > of collapse. Could you explain why you believe the present international > trade system is a danger to all of us? > > Answer: It is the imbalances in the international trade system rather than > the system itself that poses the danger. The United States? Current Account > deficit is now $60 million AN HOUR! It increased 28% in 2002 to half a > trillion dollars, an amount roughly equivalent to 5% of US GDP. This > unprecedented trade imbalance has created extraordinary disequilibrium in > the global economy. The countries that build up large stockpiles of > international reserves due to large current account or financial account > surpluses?such as Japan in the 1980, the Asia Crisis countries in the 1990s > and China today?develop bubble economies. When those bubbles pop, as they > inevitably do, they leave behind banking crises and excess capacity. The > governments of those countries must then go deeply into debt to bail out the > depositors of the failed banks. At the same time, the excess capacity in > the economy results in deflation. Economic bubbles and systemic banking > crises can be expected to reoccur and deflationary pressure can be expected > to persist so long as the US Current Account deficits continue to flood the > world with dollar liquidity. > > Question 2: In your book you write that the current system is neither good > for the countries who export goods to the U.S. nor ultimately to the U.S. > How can a system that has brought such growth to so much of the world be > bad? > > Answer: Ultimately, the imbalances in the system are harmful to the United > States? trading partners and to the United States itself. The countries wit > h overall balance of payments surpluses are destabilized through the rise > and collapse of economic bubbles. Ironically, the US current account > deficits also helped fuel the New Paradigm Bubble in the United States. The > surplus nations earn their surpluses in US Dollars. They must either invest > those dollars in US dollar denominated assets or else convert the dollars > into their own currencies. If they convert such large amounts of dollars > into their own currencies, those currencies would appreciate sharply, > putting an end to their trade surpluses and perhaps driving their economies > into recession. Consequently, they park their surpluses in US dollar > denominated assets instead. By investing their dollar surpluses in US > dollar assets, the trading partners of the United States helped fuel the > stock market bubble, facilitated the incredible misallocation of corporate > capital, and, by acquiring Fannie Mae debt, contributed to the dangerous > rise in US property prices. > > The imbalances in the current international monetary system are also bad > because they are unsustainable. The United States cannot continue going > into debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $1 million a minute > indefinitely. The net indebtedness of the US to the rest of the world is > already approximately $3 trillion or 30% of US GDP?and its now growing at > roughly 5% of GPD per annum. The economies of most of the United States? > major trading partners have grown dependent on exporting much more to the US > than the US imports from them. When the United States current account > imbalance returns to equilibrium, and it eventually must, the era of export > led growth will come to end and the world will find itself without an engine > of economic growth. > > > Question 3: I should note here that you are an economist and have worked in > the past for the International Monetary Fund including working as a > consultant for the international Fund in Thailand and later at the World > Bank. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to > the conclusion that the current international trade system is so flawed? > > Answer: Since 1986 I have worked in Asia as a securities analyst for > international brokerage firms. From 1990 to 1996, I was based in Bangkok, > heading up a large team of research analysts. We analyzed and wrote > research reports on most of the listed Thai companies, as well as most of > the major industries and the overall economy. In the early 1990s, the Thai > economy really was experiencing something of an economic miracle. The > fundamentals and growth prospects of the companies were very solid. By > mid-1993, however, that was no longer the case. The companies had borrowed > too much and investors too much. It was difficult to see how they would be > able to generate enough revenue to repay their debt. I turned bearish on > Thailand by the end of that year, but the bubble economy continued to > expand?for four more years! I wanted to understand what was happening and > why. I began reading the economic classics: Keynes, Schumpeter, Friedman > and Rostow. By the time the bubble finally popped in mid-1997, I thought I > had pieced it together. I had the fortunate opportunity to work as a > consultant for the IMF in Thailand for three weeks in May of 1998 and then > went to work for the World Bank in Washington later that year. While I was > there, I believe I was able to put the rest of the pieces of the puzzle > together. So, in short, it was the economic bubble in Thailand that taught > me about the flaws in the international monetary systems. > > Question 4: In the book, you discuss Japan?s economy and Thailand?s > experience with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and onward. You also > write in Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 and elsewhere that ?China has a bubble > economy just waiting to pop.? Can you explain this statement and why you > feel China which currently has one of the highest GDP growth rates of any > country is so in danger? > > > Answer: Yes, China has a bubble economy. Economic bubbles are caused by > excessive credit creation. In China, the loan growth of the commercial > banks has amounted to approximately 15% per annum for almost 15 years. To > extend loans, banks must have deposits. Much of the deposits the Chinese > banks have extended as loans were earned when Chinese businesses exported > their goods to the United States. In 2001, China?s surplus with the US was > equal to 7% of China?s GDP. China?s GDP growth that year was 8%. Without > its trade surplus with the US, China?s economy would have grown at a much > slower pace?if at all?both because the exporter?s profits would have been > much worse and also because the banks would not have had enough deposits to > allow them to expand lending so rapidly. There are a number of problems > with this economic model. First, a very large percentage of the credit > extended by the Chinese banks cannot be repaid: estimates of non-performing > loans in the banking system range from 25% to 50% of all loans. Next, > credit expansion in China has already been so excessive that the supply of > goods exceeds the purchasing power of the public by a considerable margin. > Consequently, prices are falling and China is experiencing deflation despite > its rapid economic growth. Finally, China cannot depend on maintaining such > large trade surpluses with the US for very many more years. The origins of > China?s rapid growth?credit creation and trade surpluses?are both unhealthy > and unsustainable. > > > Question 5: Many U.S. politicians have explained to the public that the > U.S. current account deficit is caused by the desire of foreign investors to > buy U.S. assets to take advantage of perceived lesser financial risk in the > U.S. Do you agree with these statements and if not, why not? > > Answer: It is true that the US Financial Account Surplus must be equal to > the US Current Account Deficit. However, there is no ?Chicken or the Egg? > riddle here. It is very obvious which comes first. American consumers buy > foreign goods because they are cheaper than goods made in the United States. > Foreign goods are cheaper because the wage rates in developing countries are > as low as $4 per day. Developing countries have far less money to buy > expensive US goods. That is clearly the cause of the US current account > deficit. Once the Unites States? trading partners have their surplus > earnings they must invest them in US dollar denominated assets or convert > them into their own currencies causing them to appreciate. If they are to > avoid causing their currencies to appreciate, they must invest their dollar > earnings in the US. They certainly don?t do it because they believe NASDAQ > shares can only go up or because they have strong faith in US accounting > standards. Those who argue that the finance account surplus causes the > current account deficit must be able to explain how capital inflows into the > US compel Americans to buy so many foreign-made goods. > > Question 6: Also in the book you note that ?over-investment causes excess > capacity and excess capacity causes deflation.? Could you explain to our > readers exactly what deflation is, why it is to be feared and why you > believe the threat of global deflation is real? > > Answer: Inflation comes about when there is too much demand relative to > supply. Deflation is caused when there is too much supply relative to > demand?or, more precisely, purchasing power. When credit is abundant, > companies borrow and expand industrial capacity and aggregate supply > increases. However, the purchasing power of the public does not necessarily > expand in line with supply. During periods of very rapid credit expansion > as in the 1970s and ?80s in Japan, in the Asia Crisis countries during the > 1990s and in China during the last 15 years, supply grows much faster than > the personal income of the public. When supply exceeds purchasing power, > prices fall. That is why Japan and China are suffering from deflation now. > The Asia Crisis countries avoided deflation by devaluing their currencies > and exporting deflation abroad. For example, the devaluation of the South > Korean Won after the Asia Crisis contributed to the downward pressure on > global semiconductor and steel prices. > > The US current account deficit is flooding the global economy with dollar > liquidity. When the dollar earnings of the surplus nations are deposited > into their domestic banking systems, those dollars, being exogenous to those > banking system, act as high powered money and spark off an explosion of > credit creation. Excessive credit creation permits over-investment, which, > in turn, causes excess capacity and deflation. So long as the huge US > current account deficits continue to flood the world with dollars, global > deflationary pressures are very likely to continue to build, as reckless > credit creation results in more industrial capacity than can be absorbed at > the prevailing price level. > > The reason that deflation is harmful is because it undermines corporate > profitability and, thereby, leads to rising unemployment and falling > purchasing power. > > Question 7: In your book in Chapter seven you list two tables showing a > list of banking crises (Table 7.2 and 7.3). You also note in the book that > ?there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between surging > international assets and systematic bank failures.? Can you explain this > and how the charts above and others in your book support your contentions? > > Answer: Corporate distress frequently evolves into financial sector > distress and banking crises. Falling product prices make it impossible for > businesses to repay their bank loans. A similar process occurs when > excessive credit creation causes asset price bubbles in the stock market and > the property market. Rapid loan growth causes asset prices to rise. > Frequently banks accept the inflated assets as collateral for additional > loans. This process continued for so long in Japan that the imperial > gardens in Tokyo came to be considered as valuable as California. > Eventually, it becomes impossible to pay the interest expense on such > extraordinarily overvalued assets. The owners default, the banks then > refuse to make new loans, the house of cards in asset prices begins to > shake, panic sets in, the bubble pops and banks fail. > > Banking crises require expensive government bailouts. This pattern has been > repeated frequently around the world since the Bretton Woods System broke > down in the early 1970s. This sequence of events is set into motion when > large amounts of foreign capital enter a country?s commercial banking system > and set off excessive credit creation. > > When more foreign capital enters a country than leaves it, that country?s > international reserves rise. When international reserves rise rapidly over > a short period of time, economic bubbles and hyper inflation in asset prices > rise and, then implode, leaving deflation and systemic banking crisis > behind. > > > Question 8: It is almost like arguing against motherhood to oppose free > trade. Why do you feel that existing trade arrangements are destabilizing > the global economy and therefore should be opposed? > Answer: Many benefits are derived from trade between nations. However, the > trade system that evolved following the collapse of the Bretton Woods System > produces very serious side effects as well as benefits. In fact, the > existing trade arrangements are destabilizing the global economy by > creating economic bubbles, banking crises and deflationary pressures. These > problems have arisen because international trade has become so unbalanced. > The United States is buying $1 million a minutes more from the rest of the > world than the rest of the world is buying from the US. Or put differently, > last year the deficit was the equivalent of almost 2% of global GDP. To put > that into perspective, global GDP grew by less than 2% last year. So, were > it not for the US deficit, it is quite likely that the global economy would > have actually contracted. The United States? deficit makes the United > States the world?s engine of economic growth. However, the United States > must finance this deficit by issuing credit. Credit expansion on such a > large scale is creating a global credit bubble. It is also unsustainable. > The United States will not be able to finance such large deficits forever. > When the US deficits return to equilibrium, a severe and protracted global > recession is likely to ensue unless policy makers can devise a new source of > global aggregate demand to replace that which is currently being provided by > the US current account deficit. > > Question 9: In Chapter 9 you state that ?The over-indebted American economy > has entered a recession that is likely to be as extreme and prolonged as the > economic boom that preceded it.? These are very strong words. Do you > really feel that a strong recession is inevitable and if so why? > > Answer: Economic cycles generally exhibit a considerable degree of > symmetry. Big booms are generally followed by big busts. The excesses of > the 1980s and 1990s were unlike anything witnessed since The Roaring > Twenties. The savings rate of the public has fallen to the lowest levels > every recorded. A rapidly inflating property bubble has enabled American > consumers to extract huge amounts of equity from their homes so that they > can continue living beyond their means. When interest rates bottom, home > prices will stop rising, equity extraction will cease, consumption will fall > and the second phase of the New Paradigm Recession will begin. > > Question 10: In the following chapter of the book you review the likely > effect of a recession on Japan, China and the Asian Exporting economies. > Your prognosis is that they may fare even more poorly in the coming > recession than the United States. Could you explain why you think this is > so and whether there aren?t things that could be done in Asia to lessen the > effects of such a recession? Couldn?t a growing China help to soften the > blow? > > Answer: During 1999 and 2000, the final two years of the New Paradigm > Bubble, imports into the United States jumped by $307 billion, an increase > of 33% over the level of 1998. Then in 2001, US imports fell by $79 > billion, or by 6.3%. The impact of that decline in US demand on the rest of > the world was extraordinary. That year, the economic growth rates of all > the United States? major trading partners decelerated abruptly. Stock > markets spiraled downward, commodity prices fell, and government finances > came under strain all around the world. The same consequences can be > expected during the second phase of the recession, when the US consumer is > finally forced to stop spending more than he earns. At that time, imports > into the US will decline and all those countries that rely on exporting to > the United States will suffer. China will be one of the hardest hit since > it a leading supplier of cheap consumer goods to the US. When China?s > exports to the US decline it will not have the cash to act as an engine of > growth for the rest of Asia. Asia should not harbor false hopes of China > replacing the Unites States as importer of last resort. Instead, Asian > policy makers should recognize that the era of export led growth will end > once the US current account deficits can no longer be financed and they > should act now to develop sufficient domestic demand. > > Question 11: In the last portion of the book you argue that a new source of > global aggregate demand must be found to replace the U.S. You argue for a > plan to establish a global minimum wage. This seems extremely hard to > achieve in a short time, perhaps ever. Are there other remedies that could > be used to give the World time to come up with a new international trade > system? > > Answer: You are right to point out that introducing a global minimum wage > will be difficult to achieve. I do recognize that, of course. However, > harder things have been accomplished. National minimum wage rates have been > in effect for 100 years in some advanced economies. If minimum wages can be > enforced on a national scale, I believe they could also be enforced on a > global scale. Basically, where there?s a will, there?s a way. > > There may be easier solutions to this problem of creating sufficient > aggregate demand to replace the $500 billion a year that is currently being > supplied by the US current account deficits. However, I cannot see what > those solutions might be. Most countries?in Asia and elsewhere around the > world?already have too much national debt to allow for a long term > Keynesian-fiscal deficit solution. Worse still, a Monetary Policy response > would do more harm than good since it was too much monetary expansion in the > form of US dollar liquidity that caused all the problems outlined in the > preceding paragraphs in the first place. It might be possible to fight fire > with fire, but no one has ever suggested that it?s possible to fight > liquidity with liquidity. That said, I hope other proposals will be made. > Any discussion on this very important subject would be a step in the right > direction. > > Question 12: Lastly you argue that a new international monetary accord is > needed to govern international trade and you discuss the Keynes Plan, use of > Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and creation of a Global Central Bank. These > seem all very major steps, especially in a world where major international > body, the U.N., seems sidelined. Could you discuss how you see the above > mitigating the effects of a major recession and tell us how achievable you > feel any or all of these steps might be and why? > > > Answer: The United States? current account deficits have acted as an > important subsidy to the rest of the world, but they have also flooded the > world with dollars, which have replaced gold as the new international > reserve asset. Those deficits have, in effect, become the font of a new > global money supply. In addition to being destabilizing, this system is > neither sustainable nor easily controlled. It is not sustainable because > the US cannot continue going deeper into debt to the rest of the world > indefinitely. It is not easily controlled because the disbursement of the > new Global Money Supply takes place as a result of trade imbalances and > capital flows that are far too complex to easily direct. This is really no > way to run a global economy. A new international monetary accord is needed. > The new system must prevent persistent trade imbalances, and it must put > in place a mechanism that would allow the growth of the global money supply > to be controlled and allocated in an orderly and rational manner. > Otherwise, the existing flaws in the international monetary system are going > to continue destabilizing the global economy as they have over the last two > decades. > > It may be hard to adjust to this fact, but a global central bank is needed > to control the global money supply. The IMF has the organizational > structure and many of the policy tools (including to authority to create > Special Drawing Rights) needed to carry out the role of a quasi- Global > Central Bank. However, there are three important tasks that the Fund must > now master if it is going to succeed in that role. First, the IMF must gain > control over the global money supply?that is over the creation of > international reserve assets. Second, it must learn how to allocate the > future supply of global liquidity (SDRs) in quantities that are neither > excessive nor too sparse. Finally, it must learn how to allocate the global > money supply in a way that both ensures global economic stability and, > simultaneously, supports the global development agenda. > > Gaining control over the global money supply is the first step. That would > stop the excessive credit creation responsible for the bubble economies and > systemic banking crises that have occurred around the world in recent > decades. However, gaining control over the global money supply would not be > sufficient to prevent the inevitable correction of the US current account > deficit from ending in a severe and protracted global recession. I believe > those countries that are now dependent on export led growth must develop new > sources of domestic demand and I believe this could be achieved by an > international initiative to put in place a global minimum wage. > > It is difficult to do justice to such complex issues in only a few > paragraphs. Your readers will find a much more well argued case for a > global minimum wage and a global central bank in chapters 12 and 13 of The > Dollar Crisis. > > > > About the Author: Richard Duncan has worked as a financial analyst in Asia > for more than 16 years, conducting research and publishing investment > reports on companies, industries, and economies from India to Korea. > > > In 1993, Mr. Duncan was one of the first to warn of the impending collapse > of the Thai economy and the Thai stock market in a series of published > reports and speeches directed at institutional investors. At the height of > the Asian crisis, he worked as a consultant for the International Monetary > Fund in Thailand. Subsequently, he joined the World Bank in Washington DC > as a Financial Sector Specialist focusing on issues related to the economic > crisis in Asia. > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- > ---- > > > About the Interviewer: Christopher W. Runckel, a former senior US diplomat > who served in many counties in Asia, is a graduate of the University of > Oregon and Lewis and Clark Law School. He served as Deputy General Counsel > of President Gerald Ford?s Presidential Clemency Board. Until April of 1999, > Mr. Runckel was Minister-Counselor of the US Embassy in Beijing, China. Mr. > Runckel lived and worked in Thailand for over six years. He was the first > permanently assigned U.S. diplomat to return to Vietnam after the Vietnam > War. In 1997, he was awarded the U.S. Department of States highest award > for service, the Distinguished Honor Award, for his contribution to > improving U.S.-Vietnam relations. Mr. Runckel is one of only two > non-Ambassadors to receive this award in the 200-year history of the U.S. > diplomatic service. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- > ---- > > Copyright, 2003 ? Runckel & Associates > > > > From evs at tri-isys.com Thu May 22 00:55:19 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 14:55:19 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: Message-ID: <00bf01c32032$ec4c8fc0$1400a8c0@evs> My greetings, Sabri, Yes, miscommunication. But, you're a nice fellow and so am I. So, there is really no problem. At the risk of being repetitive, I can honestly say that no one is being guarded from the dispossessed in Manila and, more so, in the provincial urban areas. Steel doors are unheard of here unlike NYC where it is fairly common (because of the 1980's). There are, of course, reports of thefts and burglaries and bank robberies and kidnapping Chinese businessmen. But, this is run of the mill for any densely populated city. The Philippines (and we are trying to solve it) has a special problem of the last few years of Abu Sayyaf and Al Queda terrorists. But this is being addressed with more vigor. (The bigger problem are our politicians who are only out there for themselves. Except present president. And, I shudder to think who will run since the present president has said she would not run for the next term.) To get a better picture of how "traditionally" Asian Manila still is: while the situation is becoming less common, my maids have been with me for more than 15 years. If you count the number of years they have been with the extended family (they were former maids of my brother-in-law's family), 45 years. One had a stroke and is lame. I hired another maid to be sure that she is okay and worked less. Her grand children sleep in the house because their public school is very near the village. They play in my yard and I like the sound of kids having none of my own. I answer for any medical bills and the last time she had a bout with high blood pressure, she ended up in a hospital I would go to. (I was in the office then and her granddaughter decided to bring her grandmother to the Makati Medical Center.) I visited her out of concern and that goes a long way in relationships. The same "treatment" with village guards only to a lesser extent, not as personal. One characteristic of Filipinos is loyalty. You make a friend, a real one, trust he will be loyal. But, let me be even more objective: People have become more jaded over the years or decades. When some homeless comes up to the car window to beg, less people are prone to give alms because some people make it a racket and start carrying 1 year olds on purpose. But, I know people are fighting against this tendency. The best analogy I can give because I witnessed the "change" is New York City. It was the most jaded city in the 1980's but I noticed the New Yorkers were fighting against the callousness. One would see more and more men giving seats to women on buses and in the subway. Church (catholic) attendance was almost nil in the 1980's. But, now, the church is almost always 3/4 filled during each mass which is, by the way, every hour until noon starting 6am -- much like the Philippine churches have always been. What hasn't changed in NYC are the rich Jews who still have an attitude. (They are friendly but they keep their distance and are snobbish.) If there are any New Yorkers on this list, they might second me. I see no problem with market based support systems coming in because I see a blend with the traditional. If medical bills become too expensive, I see myself taking out medicare insurance for the maids. But, I don't because medical bills are still affordable. In fact, my doctor scolded me for checking into a private room in one hospital. He told me since he teaches in the state univerisity's school that I could have gotten better service and the same equipment in the hospital of the school. And, he would still be the operating surgeon. Medicare, by the way, is standard (for guards also). When I had my appendectomy, about 20% was paid for by standard Medicare. No doubt, Sabri, if more and more go below the poverty line (and by this I mean the *real* poverty line since the 40% reported for the Philippines is nowhere to be seen in actuality), things will probably break down. Since the peso depreciation stemming from the Asian Crisis, I have occasionally gone to the most public wholesale market (I am a real scrooge) to buy stuff, amused at how cheap Made in China goods are. VCD's and DVD's of the latest film at $2 and $5 respectively. PC programs like Windows and MS Office for $0.05 each (they come in "installer CD's which contain about 30-50 major applications in one Cd. All pirated.) Electronic alarm clocks for $0.50. Textile material for a pair of pants for $5 which is also the cost for the ordinary tailor or pay $100 for a "branded" one situated in a 5 star mall. And, while current international economic trends point in the direction of increasing poverty, prices as you can see are reasonable and, as of today, the Philippines is still reasonable, pleasant place to live in, foreigners are very welcome and feel welcome. The Philippines is expected to grow by 4% this year due to a fiscal deficit and inward remittances from overseas workers. Then there is outsourcing. By the way, Muslims in their traditional head gear, walk the malls and the city freely in Metro Manila. They just lack a sense of humor and become defensive when asked or kidded about the Abu Sayyaf. I would expect the same in other urban areas. There is absolutely no discrimination and the mantra among the Catholics is that: We are all Filipinos, can't we live in peace? There is one area in manila where destitute Muslims squat (on the government owned properties as they like being together). But, they are former ex-convicts and members of gangs (as in street gangs) and are viewed as such. One mall, near where many rich Chinese live, is dominated by Muslim traders who sell jewelry and stuff from the wholesale market. I have had Muslim classmates and we treated each other like the next fellow. The Muslims that people are fear are in the area of the Abu Sayyaf and the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Force) both of which are Al Qaeda linked and that is far, far away from any major urban center. In fact, they are in the southern tip of the Philippine archipelago and have been there since the 1500's. Their area, I will have to admit, contains "the dispossessed" and that is why it is so hard to capture the Abu Sayyaf as they can blend in well. But, the table has been turned on the bandits starting last year as these people continue to bomb areas killing fellow Muslims. The Muslim problem of the Philippines is not linked to ideology, it is linked to poverty per se. With US help coming (the Philippines is now a full non-NATO ally), infrastructure and development will be seen in those areas. No one has dared to in the past because these bandits started to "tax" businesses just like what the communists insurgents used to do. More On The Cost Of Living The last time I paid $80 or so for medicine. It was for 7 days worth of this super high-tech antibiotic that my wife's doctor's prescribed for a flu. Surprised at the cost, I was told by the pharmacist that the medicine I bought was for germs not yet mutated. I subsequently scolded my wife and told her she should change doctors. To give you an idea of pharmaceutical costs here: $4 for a large sized bottle of a Robitussin/Vicks cough syrup; $2.50 for colchicine, an anti-inflammatory for gout, 100 tablets; $1.50 for 30 days of branded allopurinol also for gout; $5 for the largest tube of Bengay (but there are better local ointments at a fraction of the cost); paracetamol 500 mg at $4 for a box of *100* pills, $20 for a box of *100* pills of 500 mg amoxicillin which my wife's doctor should have prescribed in the first place. Someone is making a lot of money in Turkey as these drugs in the Philippines are mostly manufactured abroad. I went to your link. No wonder things are bad there. The IMF prescription a la Washington Consensus was implemented. Here, after the Asian Crisis, we immediately went into increasing budget deficits and rates were lowered to the unheard of 4% interbank with the exchange rate allowed to float. An illiquid system was made more liquid. Blame it on neocon thinking for Turkey's plight. I attach however the link to the apologia of the inventor of the term "Washington Consensus" in case you haven't read it yet, Did The Washinton Consensus Fail?: http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/williamson1102.htm) Also, here's a link to more on Williamson's proposals on a revitalized consensus: http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/williamson0403.htm Take care, Gary problem. The gated communities in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir are guarded by private security against the dispossessed. This is sad but real. Not only that, one of the best selling consumer goods in Istanbul are steel doors and Kale (Castle in translation) is the best selling steel door brand because it is the strongest. Even my father-in-law got one installed last year, after two break-and-entries into their apartment. Of course, not many can buy a Kale steel door because it costs about $700 US. Muggings, robberies, thefts are unpleasant realities in Istanbul. None of these is a mischaracterization of reality and things have gotten worse after the last economic crisis, about which you can read here: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~yeldane/crisis.html Now, if you go to the rural parts of Turkey or to the smaller cities, the situation is not that bad. Because there, the non-market based tradiational social support systems are still functioning and social fabric is still intact, or, at least, not as rotten as it is in the metropolises. The Phillipines you are describing and I know next to nothing sounds like the non-metropolitan Turkey which still enjoys similar traditional social support systems. The question is what happens when these non-market based social support systems are replaced with market-based systems of sorts? Today, I picked up my wife's prescription from the drug store and for two tubes of ointment and some pills, paid $80 as co-pay. This is with health insurance. About a year ago, the same prescription would have costed $15. If I did not have the money or the insurance or both and if my wife's condition were life threatening and we desparately needed these medication, what options do you think I would have had here in Berkeley? Sabri From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 22 03:35:40 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 12:35:40 +0300 Subject: [A-List] FW: Dark Night Chat Room References: Message-ID: <002c01c32045$827a6f00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> MessageJim Craven writes: As punishment for all the grief I have given list moderators over the years, DNFN has given me the task of moderating an inter-nation chat-room in which Indigenous activists (Rez-based/connected) can share resources, lessons, data, tactics, connections or whatever to advance our struggles in Indian Country and among Indigenous Peoples globally. ---- As far as I'm concerned whatever punishment Jim has handed out on this or any list is enough to make masochists of us all. Jim's presence here is much appreciated, and it is to be hoped that his participation will be long and mutually fruitful. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 22 04:45:54 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 13:45:54 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Call for Papers: Twenty Years On! The Great Miners Strike inHistorical and International Perspective Message-ID: <004001c3204f$51fc4ba0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Forwarded from Douglas Chalmers: Subject: Call for Papers: Twenty Years On! The Great Miners Strike in Historical and International Perspective Twenty Years On! The Great Miners Strike in Historical and International Perspective Saturday November 1st 2003, Institute of Historical Research, Malet St, London March 2004 marks the twentieth anniversary of the start of the 1984/5 British miners strike, one of the great labour struggles of the second half of the twentieth century. This conference seeks to mark the event by placing miners strikes and mining trade unionism in an historical and international perspective. One strand will focus specifically on the British miners strikes of 1972, 1974 and 1984/5 and how the left related to them. A second section will relate these conflicts to the longer history of coal-mining in Britain. A third strand will aim to put these epic labour struggles into an international perspective by examining the experiences of South African, American and Zambian miners. Initial proposals for conference papers should be sent by 30th June to the London Socialist Historians Group, 38 Mitchley Road, London N1 9HG, or emailed to conference2003b at londonsocialisthistorians.org This day-conference is organized by the London Socialist Historians Group. John Walker London Socialist Historians Group http://www.londonsocialisthistorians.org ------ End of Forwarded Message From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 22 05:39:14 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 12:39:14 +0100 Subject: [A-List] 51st state Message-ID: <00b801c32056$c5739af0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> URL http://www.antiwar.com/orig/laughland16.html It beggars belief, but it is true. Last week, a group of influential politicians who inhabit the rarefied but influential world of Washington DC think-tanks, proposed that US government officials be given the right to sit in on the European Union's inter-govermmental conference, and on meetings of its other executive bodies, so that the USA can keep an eye on the direction Europe is taking. The cat, therefore, is finally out of the bag: American politicians are now so seriously worried that the European Union might be emerging as some kind of independent force, that they are trying to work out a way of preventing this from ever happening. The suggestion that US officials attend the highest-level European inter-governmental meetings was made on 14th May 2003 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The proposal was signed by one of those temporary constellations into which the luminaries of the American political establishment frequently arrange themselves in order to encourage policy to navigate by their lights: Madeleine Albright, Harold Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, Bob Dole, Lawrence Eagleburger, Stuart Eizenstat, Al Haig, Lee Hamilton, John Hamre, Sam Nunn, Paul O'Neill, Charles Rob, William Roth, and James Schlesinger. That makes four former Secretaries of State, one former National Security Adviser, two former Secretaries of Defense, a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a former Director of the CIA, and three Senators. From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 22 06:05:57 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 13:05:57 +0100 Subject: [A-List] 51st state -- addendum Message-ID: <00de01c3205a$812050b0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> The following phrase and word were two links in the text at the original URL Center for Strategic and International Studies and proposal They were to http://www.csis.org/index.htm and http://csis.org/europe/2003_May_14_JointDeclr.pdf JD From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Thu May 22 08:15:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 17:15:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: <00bf01c32032$ec4c8fc0$1400a8c0@evs> Message-ID: <00a401c3206c$99851b60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Gary writes: The Philippines (and we are trying to solve it) has a special problem of the last few years of Abu Sayyaf and Al Queda terrorists. But this is being addressed with more vigor. (The bigger problem are our politicians who are only out there for themselves. Except present president. And, I shudder to think who will run since the present president has said she would not run for the next term.) ------ In a forum like this, "problems" of the kind mentioned above are part and parcel of our reason to exist. Abu Sayyaf I am aware of, but has there been any evidence to suggest, let alone prove, that Al Qaeda actually has a presence in the Philippines? If I were living in the Philippines, I might want to know more about why Abu Sayyaf might be a problem, or, indeed, if the problem lies elsewhere and Abu Sayyaf is a response to the very same. It would also be of interest to me to know more of what exactly the role of US troops are in the Philippines, and the legitimacy of their presence. Indeed, were I a US citizen, the history of my country's involvement with the Philippines would be a topic deserving of research. As for the calibre of Filipino politicians, it sounds remarkably consistent with that of others in developed countries, not least in the US. Michael Keaney From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 22 08:46:46 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 10:46:46 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The Renminbi Zone Message-ID: <3ECCE2D6.3000703@mindspring.com> CURRENCY The Renminbi Zone Driven by the country's economic success and with quiet support from Beijing, China's currency is more and more welcome across the region for business and tourism. And it could be on its way to a much bigger role in Asia By Michael Vatikiotis/HONG KONG and Bertil Lintner/CHIANG MAI Issue cover-dated May 29, 2003 SOMETHING SURPRISING is happening to China's currency. Although not fully convertible, the renminbi, the "people's money," is growing in use as a hard currency outside China--the first sign of its potential role as "Asia's money." In Hong Kong and along China's borders with Southeast Asia, an emerging renminbi zone can be traced, fuelled by burgeoning Chinese trade and tourism. WHAT GIVES THE RENMINBI REACH ? The growth of China as a market and export base ? Beijing's drive to deepen its trade ties with Asia ? Growing renminbi use in areas bordering China ? Full convertibility is an eventual goal for Beijing ? Rising domestic demand In Hong Kong, which has its own currency pegged to the United States dollar, the renminbi is used to buy goods at electronics stores in the busy shopping areas of Kowloon. At some automated teller machines in Hong Kong, customers already have the option of withdrawing renminbi or Hong Kong dollars. Mainland banks in Hong Kong issue renminbi-denominated credit cards. Fewer Chinese who travel exchange renminbi for foreign currency before leaving China--as they're supposed to. Instead, they do so at their destinations. The renminbi is, for instance, listed among exchange rates of hard currencies at Chiang Mai airport in northern Thailand. More than 16 million mainland Chinese went abroad in 2002. The renminbi is also increasingly used in commercial transactions across wide stretches of Southeast Asia close to the Chinese border. "China is effectively managing a hard currency," says Michael Kurtz, chief analyst for Bear Stearns in Hong Kong. "The move is almost effortless, backed by solid reserves and wise economic policies." What's more, adds Steve Xu, a Chinese economist in Hong Kong, "this is all driven by market forces, not a deliberate policy." The rise of the renminbi is a quiet result of the rapid growth of China's economy, and a conscious effort by the government in the past few years to deepen trade ties with the rest of Asia. The International Monetary Fund estimates that 40% of total trade within non-Japan Asia is intra-regional, and trade with China accounted for 40% of the increase in 2002. As well as reflecting China's growing economic influence in the region, experts say that Beijing is counting on the currency acting as a strategic tool to consolidate China's power and influence in Asia, possibly paving the way for the renminbi's debut as a regional reserve currency. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said recently that a strong and stable renminbi is good for Asia. Annual growth rates in China of about 8%, boosting regional trade and tourist flows, seem to be achieving such an aim. Some experienced financiers worry that sceptics may be ignoring a dawning reality. A particularly strong advocate of the currency is John Wadsworth, an advisory director of Morgan Stanley based in San Francisco. "The renminbi will be free to trade, it will be a strong currency, Chinese banks will be dominant, and it is highly likely that there will be four major currencies in the world within 10-15 years," he says. Adds Edward Zeng, CEO of Sparkice, a leading Beijing-based electronic-commerce company: "It amounts to a gradual move toward convertibility." The authorities in Beijing tentatively support this development. Guo Shuqing, a deputy governor of China's central bank and the chairman of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told local media in March that the government's attitude "is both supportive and cautious" about the increasing internationalization of the renminbi. Guo estimated the total amount of renminbi in circulation outside China at greater than 30 billion renminbi ($3.6 billion). "Not only in neighbouring countries, but even in the United States, there are places for the exchange of renminbi. The circulation of renminbi demonstrates confidence in the Chinese economy," Guo said. China's membership of the World Trade Organization only accelerates the emergence of a strong, unified Chinese currency. This, in turn, will increase the desirability of a fully convertible renminbi, both as a way of smoothing the integration of China's economy into the world economy, and as a way for China to exercise its economic might more directly. Full convertibility is a stated goal, but no fixed timetable has been set. The renminbi's gradual emergence is consistent with past Chinese experiments in economic and political reform. "Since China trade is becoming an important part of intra-regional trade, China will be happy to see the renminbi used," says Andrew Freris, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Hong Kong. "China turns a blind eye to all this and sees an upside in terms of acceptance of the currency," concurs a senior economic adviser at HSBC in Hong Kong. This willingness to experiment could explain why a blind eye is being turned to the flouting of foreign-exchange restrictions normally applied to Chinese citizens travelling abroad (officially there's a limit of 6,000 renminbi each). The renminbi is already in wide circulation in the countries favoured by Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia, principally Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. For its part, Hong Kong is open to increased use of the renminbi to buy goods and services. Joseph Yam, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, says the city as an international financial centre in China should "capture any international financial intermediation activities denominated in renminbi." A spokesman for Hong Kong's Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau says: "The growing use of renminbi in Hong Kong is a natural development along with the financial integration between Hong Kong and the mainland." Economist Xu, a research fellow at the Hong Kong think-tank Civic Exchange, estimates that renminbi worth HK$30 billion-40 billion ($3.8 billion-5.1 billion) is in circulation in the territory. Then there's the growing use of the currency in areas bordering on China that increasingly rely on cross-border trade. For now, the heart of this creeping renminbi zone is focused on some of the region's most marginal economies. The renminbi is the principle trading currency in northern Laos and northern Burma as far west as Mandalay and south to Kentung, just 150 kilometres from Thailand. It is also widely used for business in Cambodia and Vietnam. According to some reports, the renminbi is being hoarded as a hedge against inflation in Cambodia, alongside the dollar. In Burma and Laos, the Chinese currency is a hard substitute for weak local currencies like the Burmese kyat and Laotian kip. The blackmarket rate for the kyat is as low as 1,000 to the dollar, from 250-300 in 1997. The official rate of the kip has slipped from 960 to 10,500 in the same period. More conveniently, the renminbi can be used for purchases and any kind of deal across the Chinese border. Cross-border trade has increased in recent years. Consumer goods, machinery and fruit come in from China; timber, minerals and smuggled cars leave Burma, Laos and Thailand. All these transactions, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual value, are settled in renminbi--greatly helped by lax controls over carrying currency in and out of China. An official from the Yunnan provincial government told a recent Asia Society conference in Hanoi that more than a million people crossed the border with Vietnam in the previous 15 months. Along the Thai banks of the Mekong River, Chinese traders from Yunnan do business without converting their renminbi into Thai baht. All over Thailand, an underground banking network enables traders to transfer funds in and out of the Chinese currency. A similar system works in the Pearl River Delta region connecting Hong Kong with Guangdong province. Says Marc Faber, one of Asia's most experienced financial analysts: "The renminbi is the strongest currency in Asia right now; the problem is there isn't enough of it in circulation." It's a curious situation because the renminbi is still subject to rigid capital controls. Regional central banks will not hold the renminbi as a reserve currency, nor do they issue debt in renminbi because China keeps it to a de facto peg of nearly 8.28 to the dollar. The renminbi is not freely convertible on the capital account, and most analysts don't expect this to change for some years. The fear is that opening the country's capital account too soon will lead to huge outflows because of a lack of confidence in the banking system. Of course, China has already used its currency to play a leading regional role. Pledges to maintain a stable renminbi were a key source of confidence for Southeast Asia during the 1997 financial crisis. China signed currency-swap agreements as part of an Asia-wide currency safety net under the Chiang Mai Initiative, designed to ward off future financial crises. China's $300 billion in foreign reserves are the second-largest in the world and will likely play a central role in a planned Asian bond market quietly backed by Beijing. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have agreed to form a free-trade area within a decade. In the longer term, these developments foreshadow what some experts see as the evolution of the renminbi into a regional currency floating against the dollar, euro and Japanese yen. A Chinese currency that becomes a regional currency would validate and facilitate China's emergence as a global economic power and reduce dependence on the dollar. It would also make possible renminbi financing throughout the region. Chinese official data show illicit capital inflows in 2002 instead of the usual drain, indicating new confidence in the Chinese currency. Japan's latent banking and debt crisis makes the yen less suitable as a vehicle for wider Asian monetary integration, some experts believe. In turn, the mighty dollar could become relatively less important in an area dominated by trade links with China. So argue George von Furstenberg and Jianjun Wei of Indiana University, in a recent academic paper proposing that a fourth major international currency, after the dollar, euro and yen, will have to crystallize in continental East Asia. "If and when China's currency . . . develops into a major international denomination rivalling the yen, it could become one of the two pillars of a multilateral monetary union with most other East Asian (and some Southeast Asian) countries," they write. Long-term trends lend support to this view. There is the growing size and importance of China's financial system, assuming sustained economic growth, and the fact that the relative importance of the U.S. market to China and Hong Kong is shrinking. "China is today a medium-sized economy with GDP equivalent to that of Italy," writes Jonathan Woetzel, a Shanghai-based director of consultants McKinsey & Co. in his new book Capitalist China. "What makes it distinctive is its growth. By 2010, it is expected to almost double in size to rival Germany. With continued growth it will surpass Japan by 2020." There are signs that East Asia's combined real GDP could even exceed that of the United States if productivity growth and technology catch-up continue at a rapid pace. "Based on this outlook," argue the paper's authors, "we do not share the view that maintaining a U.S. dollar peg, particularly with the yen-dollar rate on the loose, would continue to bring the blessings of stability to a continental East Asian monetary area far into the future." That's not to say the renminbi will emerge as the dominant Asian currency in the near future. After all, Japan tried and failed to build a yen-trading bloc in Asia at the height of its boom. But the needs of hungry Japanese corporations overseas meant that Japan's banks went on a lending spree that contributed to the weakening of the yen. And some analysts see an interim period during which China will rely more heavily on the dollar as it pulls in foreign direct investment, bolsters its reserves and stretches its trading wings farther afield. For now, and perhaps the next few years, there are clear limits to the scope of the renminbi. The overwhelming majority of foreign-exchange transactions in the world involve the trading of shares, bonds and other financial instruments. Actual transactions involving goods and services amount to probably less than 10%. China's currency won't figure in financial-service transactions until full convertibility. Even if 30 billion renminbi is circulating outside China, that's barely 2% of the total value of the currency in circulation. The dollar will likely continue to dominate the region because the U.S. is a net borrower. "The reason the yen and the euro are not as strong as the U.S. dollar is because both Japan and the European Union are net lenders, not net borrowers," says Freris of BNP Paribas. China is also a net lender with a total estimated foreign debt of $170 billion against its reserves of $300 billion--much of this denominated in U.S. treasuries. While its spread across Asia presages a wider role, the renminbi's strength against the dollar and yen are far from assured. China may have another economic downturn, or a banking crisis that would puncture confidence. The renminbi also needs to secure legitimacy in the free, open market, rather than in shadowy corners of Southeast Asia's marginal economy. As Zeng of Sparkice points out: "It is only when China has surpassed Japan economically and Japan is bogged down in stagnation that the renminbi can acquire the position as a common currency in Asia." Susan V. Lawrence in Beijing contributed to this article From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 22 08:59:39 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 10:59:39 -0400 Subject: [A-List] More on RMB Message-ID: <3ECCE5DB.5060402@mindspring.com> CURRENCY THE TIDE CHANGES AT LAST FOR THE RENMINBI IN CHINA By David Murphy Issue cover-dated May 29, 2003 The renminbi is gaining ground at home, as well as abroad, especially against the U.S. dollar. It's fast turning into the preferred currency for locals and foreign companies investing in China. "With confidence growing in the boom, it is becoming the currency of choice within China," says Stoyan Tenev, lead economist at the International Finance Corp. in Washington. That's a big reversal. In the years after the Asian financial crisis, foreign companies, unable to borrow renminbi inside China, borrowed dollars offshore and converted them into renminbi to pay for their local investments. As the companies earned hard currency for their exports, their loan repayments were secure against what many feared would be an inevitable devaluation of the Chinese currency. Chinese firms, meanwhile, paid off dollar borrowings for the same reason and many individuals converted savings into dollars to take advantage of higher interest rates at local banks. A devaluation never came, but the result was a $75 billion foreign-currency surplus from 1999-2001, outstripping the $67 billion added to official foreign-exchange reserves, according to the Bank of International Settlements in the BIS Quarterly Review last September. Billions of dollars were hoarded inside China and billions more were sent abroad, despite the efforts of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe) to staunch the haemorrhage. Between 1996 and the end of 2001 about $80 billion was registered under the "errors and omissions" column in China's balance of payments, according to Safe. The column exists in the financial statements of many countries, including the United States, and is where bookkeepers put the loose ends. "It's a summary of all your misses," explains Robert McCauley, deputy chief representative of the BIS Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific based in Hong Kong. "The balance of payments ought to add up to zero, and when it doesn't, the net of all the unrecorded transactions is called 'errors and omissions'." This capital flight despite strict currency controls includes money from smuggling and frauds. Most of it, however, seems to be controlled by state companies that shared the widely held lack of confidence in the renminbi. But last year in a dramatic U-turn, $7.79 billion flooded back into China in contrast to the $4.8 billion that left in 2001. Analysts interpreted the switch as the result of the attractiveness of the renminbi because of China's ability to pull in investment and export overseas. In addition, Chinese banks have made it easier for foreign companies to borrow in renminbi. Tied to U.S. interest-rate changes, renminbi rates are now cheaper than for dollar loans. In late 2001, U.S. dollar deposit rates fell below those for renminbi, so people changed dollars into renminbi, bolstering growing expectations of an eventual renminbi appreciation. In addition, foreign companies that are now focused on the domestic market prefer to spend and earn in the local currency. Increasing the demand for renminbi, foreign companies are more likely to buy Chinese-made capital equipment. "China's capability to supply equipment of the quality we require has improved and of course we need to pay local suppliers in local currency," says a spokesman for British Petroleum, which early last year secured a ground-breaking $1.8 billion-equivalent loan from a consortium dominated by domestic banks. The loan consisted of more than 9 billion renminbi and $708 million with borrowings in both currencies from Chinese banks. Adding to the renminbi's increasing allure is a sharp rise in consumer loans to buy homes and cars. The popularity of the renminbi looks set only to grow. From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Thu May 22 09:02:02 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 17:02:02 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Wales: Hain backs clear red water Message-ID: <3ECCE66A.2C086A15@usuarios.retecal.es> This is interesting. Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, speaking at the Wales TUC yesterday: 'The Government has made mistakes. We've made gratuitous comments and insulted our natural allies. In an attempt to show that Labour has changed, we've exaggerated some things we've done to make a point - like elevating the sensible and practical use of the private sector in public service delivery to the level of principle - rather than simply the good practice it often is. So we've caused our natural allies to become alienated about things we are not even doing - rather than engaged in things we are. 'We now have a 100% Labour Government in Wales which stands ready to implement a 100% Labour programme - a 'classic' Labour programme as Rhodri would say. 'I stand shoulder to shoulder with Rhodri, supporting his right to do things differently in Wales - whether over foundation hospitals or student fees or through the work you are doing together to look at how to protect staff during changes arising from PFI. 'That's devolution in action. Welsh Labour, with the campaigning force of the union movement behind it, put forward a radical platform at this election - and, significantly, achieved a better result than anywhere else in Britain. 'There's something more fundamental than individual policies that we can learn from Wales - and that's the partnership between government and unions. A rock-solid partnership to bind us together - party, government and unions: one labour movement. With one clear goal: social justice.' Full: From jcraven at clark.edu Thu May 22 09:19:14 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 08:19:14 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Dark Night Chat Room Message-ID: MessageJim Craven writes: As punishment for all the grief I have given list moderators over the years, DNFN has given me the task of moderating an inter-nation chat-room in which Indigenous activists (Rez-based/connected) can share resources, lessons, data, tactics, connections or whatever to advance our struggles in Indian Country and among Indigenous Peoples globally. ---- As far as I'm concerned whatever punishment Jim has handed out on this or any list is enough to make masochists of us all. Jim's presence here is much appreciated, and it is to be hoped that his participation will be long and mutually fruitful. Michael Thanks so much Michael, that means a lot. Not one day goes by without my thinking about Mark and what he and you and everybody else have done with this list and all the comrades who have been brought together through this and other lists to share resources, experiences, data, sources, debate on critical issues etc. We are trying to do the same among Indigenous activists, many Rez-based/connected who lack these resources and need them desperately. We will be going to trial in Lethbridge on August 28th. One of our activists, Bella Yellowhorn, a tough and determined Blackfoot woman and Elder, was caught driving with "Sovereign Blackfoot Nation" license plates and the claim is no insurance. The Crown argues that all Blackfoot are bound by Treaty 7 and the Indian Act to obey Canadian law and are Canadian citizens. We are arguing: 1) Treaty 7 does not exist, it was never signed by the Blackfoot Chiefs (who would have never signed a Treaty the major provisions of which are to abolish the very Nation having the standing to sign and keep the terms of any Treaty); 2) The Indian Act is genocidal pe se as it forces assimilation and Canadian nationality (we do not mind Blackfoot opting for dual citizenship only we object to forced nationalization); 3) The arresting officer was engaging in pure harassment of Indigenous activists and there are serious "irregularities" in the arrest, confinement, sale of an impounded vehicle; 4) The requirement of Blackfoot carrying insurance costing up to $800 per year, while confined to Reserves on $229 Canadian per month, Reserves that are isolated without any mass transportation, leave Blackfoot under conditions of life that are genocidal in predictable effects and violate the UN Convention on Genocide which is part of the Supreme law of Canada as a Treaty ratified by Canada in 1953. They have brought in but another prosecutor, switched the previous one, and have added but another "Constitutional expert" to their team. At the previous trial, and at the upcoming trial, the traditional government of the Blackfoot Nation will be in attendance. Plus, in an ex parte conversation with the previous prosecutor and arresting officer, that officer made comments that now make it imperative to call the previous prosecutor as one of our witnesses for rebuttal of the officer. Will keep all advised. That to all for what you do. Jim (Omahkohkiaayo i'poyii) As per my telephone message left on your answering service today this matter is now set for trial on August 28th Courtroom #2 commencing at 9:30 AM Lethbridge Provincial Court. Mr. Brooks of our Lethbridge office will along with Mr. Sandstrom be prosecuting this matter. Peter Scott Dear Mr. Scott: Thank you for the information and I will be contacting Mr. Brooks and Mr. Sandstrom for any further discovery requests and to notify them of our own plans and meet any discovery requests they may have of us. As you know, I was unable to attend court on May 20th, but I would request that a transcript be sent to me as soon as possible so that I may prepare for the upcoming trial. I did hear from Bella that the Magistrate suggested that I may not be able to act as an unpaid agent to assist Bella in her pro se defense on the grounds that I am not a Canadian but that you or someone else noted that I had already been accepted by the Court to assist Bella in her defense. For the record, I am not only a citizen of the Blackfoot Nation and the U.S., I am also a bonafide Canadian citizen and can provide documentation if requested. In fact, when requested by the Court to provide information about my background, the sources I gave do indicate that I am, in terms of citizenship, Blackfoot, U.S. and Canadian. Would you please inform the Court of this fact or perhaps forward this message to the Court and to Mr. Brooks? I have one more request. Since you will not be the designated prosecutor, I would ask that you recall and make notes about, as accurately and truthfully as possible, the substance of the conversation that you, Bella, the arresting officer and I had in your office at 1:30 pm prior to trial as well as any conversations on the phone. We may call you as a witness, with particular reference to the questions that I posed of the arresting officer and his responses to me during our talk in your office. As I do not wish to influence or shape your recollections, I will leave it at that what we intend in terms of the possible scope and content of any testimony from you that we might require. Should you not be able to recall the exact substance of my questions to the arresting officer and his responses, who knows, perhaps the RCMP or CSIS has a tape of our conversation to refresh your memory (not any kind of allegation, just a possibility that occurred to me). Thank you for your assistance and by-the-book professionalism in this matter. Sincerely, James M. Craven Blackfoot Name: Omahkohkiaayo i'poyii Acting as unpaid agent in the pro se defense of Bella Yellowhorn From bar at idirect.com Thu May 22 09:53:54 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 11:53:54 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [R-G] French military team arrives in DR Congo References: <012401c31ed8$fb0fed00$f7eefea9@q1t3r5> <00bf01c32024$a86a0de0$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <009a01c3207a$6b6b9f20$74039ad8@Chris> Macdonald You have the picture pretty much. I was watching Counterspin on the CBC last night about the fighting in the Congo and the nonsense they were talking was enough to make you drink. The present troubles in central Africa begain in the late 80's when the US decided their boy Mobutu was no longer reliable and decided to replace him. They approached the government of Rwanda which was governed by a regime compose maimly of the Hutu majority (85% of the population) and which at that time had the best GDP growth rate in all of Africa despite it being very small and poor. It was modelled on the Cuban system of democracy and while people were poor they enjoyed the benfits of education, health care, nationalized industry and so on. The US asked the Hutus to allow them to build bases in Rwanda from which they could lauch an attack on Zaire to oust Mobutu. The Hutus, being fellow Bantus as was Mobutu refused. Their days were then numbered. With the fall of the USSR the US and Britain began a similar campaing against Rwanda and its government as was carried out by them against the Milosevic government. They used the same pressures, calling for "democracy", multipartism, and so on and complaining about human rights abuses vis a vis the minority Tutsis. The even more of a minority Twa (pygmies) who were treated like shit by both the Hutu and Tutsi nobody seemed to care about. There was some truth to discrimination about the Tutsis but no more than exist in the US against Arabs, blacks and so on. By and large they were fairly prosperous. Along with this came IMF and World Bank money embargos and the British arranged to stop their sales of tea on the London exchange and coffee on the world coffee exhanges. Their economy collapsed. The British and US then financed the Ugandan Army to invade Rwanda in 1990. A large section of the Ugandan Army was composed of Tutsis many of whom were trained in the US and by the British. These elements supposedly "mutinied" and invaded Rwanda by themselves but every captured Tutsi soldier carried Ugandan army id cards and when Mobutu and the French came in to help the Rwandans repel the attack the US ordered them to return to Uganda. In this attack the Tutsi RPF (so-called Rwanda Patriotic Front) and which claimed to be leftist and a liberation movement a la the KLA in Serbia, killed tens of thousands of Hutus and any Tutsis they thought supported the government. They then began a terrorist campaign similar to that waged by the KLA and the contras in Nicaragua, murdering Hutu intellecutals, priests, farmers and managed to kill or drive out almost a million people from the northern third of the country by 1993. Most of them became refugees around the small capital of Kigali creatng massive problems for the government. Unemployment increased. Under pressure the government agreed to introducing multipartism and under pressure from the US, Belgium, and Britain the government agreed to peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania which produced the Arusha Accords. The US tried everything to keep out the French who realized that the US was activley trying to eject them from central Africa. In fact the war in Rwanda in 94 was a war between France and the United States for control of central Africa, to which Rwanda is the doorway. The majority government was forced, under threat of continiuing war to agree to egregious connditions: that the Tutsis though only 10 to 15% of the population would have 50% of the army command positons and 50% of the minsitries in the government and so on. Many Hutus saw it as a total surrender. The rest accepted it reluctantly to avoid war. In October 1993, the recently elected Hutu governemtn in neighbouring Burundi (also the same tribal mix) was overthrown by the Tutsi dominated army and the Tutsi army then mudered over 300,000 Hutus. The west said nothing, The Americans and British said nothing. Canada said nothing but the Hutus in Rwanda got very nervous. A few months later the Tutsi RPF assassinated the Hutu president of Rwanda and the new Hutu president of Burundi by shooting down the plane they were in. There is strong evidence that Uganda, Belgium and the US and Canada was involved in the murder(the Canadians and Belgians as they were the controlling forces in the UN peace-keeping forces sent there in October to ease the transition to the new government). There is strong evidence that the UN was used as a cover for "regime change". With the shootdown of the plane on April 6, ' 94 the war began. Tutsi officers who have since defected state that the RPF may have deliberatley murdered up to 2 million Hutus in 12 weeks and the Hutus, many refugees from Burundi among them, attacked Tutsis suspected of supporting the invading forces and in doing so killed a large number of innocent Tutsis. It is beliived te number of Tutsi dead is 200,000 to 500,000 but that most of the dead the present Tutsi dicatorship in Rwanda claim to be Tutsi were in fact Hutu. The governement was finally forced to withdraw due to lack of ammunition (the west embargoed Rwanda but not the RPF who they financed and supplied) though the French managed to arrange a temporary effort to save the majority goverment. 2 million Hutu refugees fled into the Congo forest chased by the RPF who claimed they were all war criminals. Most of them were just ordinary civilains mixed in with the bulk of the Rwandan Army. The US then used spotter plains to advise the RPF where Hutu camps were located and the RPF then went in to those camps and massacred thousands and thousands. Since the basic prize was the mineral wealth of the Congo basin (almost as large as Europe) the RPF was used as a proxy army by the US to invade the Congo along with Laurent Kabila (Che expresses an opinion of him in his African Diaries) to kick out Mobutu and the French and take control of the resources for western companies. This was the quid pro quo for the US helping the Tutsis to take power in Rwanda. Laurent Kabila, after taking power in the Congo, turned on the Americans and began awarding mining contracts to China etc to the detriment of US and Canadian companies. His resulting murder just one day shy of the anniversary of the murder of Patrice Lumumba was a warning to others. His son Joseph (a shady opportunistic character may have been involved in the murder of his father.) In the leadup to the murder of Kabila the father, there were a series of invasions by countries fronting for the US etc and who in reward were allowed to rip off the resources of the eastern Congo. The Congolese and the Rwanda Army in Congo resisted. South Africa, to Mandelas shame, along with Uganda and Rwanda backed the imperialist forces to benefit the capitalists in South Africa. The socialist countries, Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique were asked by Kabila to help resist the invasion and did so. But in the western press everything was reversed and those countries were condemned as invaders whereas Uganda and Rwand were excused as they had to deal with the "genocidaires"in the forest. After Kabila was murdered the Ugandans and Rwandans began fighting over the spoils in eastern Congo, to the satisfaction of the US and the other western powers, who while wringing their hands and crying crocodile tears over the horrors of the continuous wars in the Congo which by last year had killed between 4 to 6 million people, were exploiting the confusion and lack of control in Congo by going in and establishing mining operations from which they have taken billions in wealth. Meanwhile, Kofi Annan, viewed by most Africans I have come across as the US bumboy whines but does nothing. The western press, racist to the core says nothing about millions of Africans being killed which if it occurred in Europe would be a world scandal. It is a world scandal. But becuase they are blacks belonging to tribes with unpronounceable names, the greatest slaughter of the last hundred years apart from WWII and WWI and Vietnam is relegated to the back pages and no one gives a damn. Even the left shamefully ignores the plight of the people of central Africa. There should be a move to make the demand to stop the war in central Africa a part of the anti-war movement. These are not tribal wars or ethnic wars, they are economic wars financed and controlled and directed by the US, Britain, Canada, Belgium, France and Germany. Many African regimes are in collusion with them as is the UN. The events and destruction in Yugoslavia and Iraq are terrible but they pale into insignifigance in comparison to the horrors of the war in the Congo. And what do people say and do about it, the left in particular-zip. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Cc: Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 1:40 AM Subject: [A-List] Re: [R-G] French military team arrives in DR Congo From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 22 10:06:37 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 17:06:37 +0100 Subject: [A-List] media lens Message-ID: <000f01c3207c$1fd0d880$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> for full article Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org This media alert will shortly be archived at: http://www.MediaLens.org/alerts/index.html In a recent Media Alert, ?Grit Your Teeth ? Basic Surgery In ?Liberated? Iraq? (May 16, 2003), Media Lens invited readers to ask the BBC and ITN why they had devoted so little coverage to the severe crises afflicting the civilian population of Iraq. One reader forwarded a copy of this letter sent to ITN?s editor of news, David Mannion: ?Dear David Mannion, Why have you given so little coverage to the grave crises afflicting the civilian population of Iraq? Please draw attention to UNICEF's, May 14 report indicating that 300,000 Iraqi children are currently facing death from acute malnutrition - twice as many as under Saddam in February - and the suffering in Umm Qasr, where patients undergoing basic surgery without painkillers "have to grit their teeth, or put a piece of cloth in their mouths to bite on," according to aid workers. Why are these horrors not being widely discussed? Our own government needs to take direct responsibility to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people and the press should be bringing this to our attention. Just imagine this happening in the UK - what an outcry there would be!? (Forwarded to Media Lens, May 19, 2003) This email is close to ideal from our point of view ? polite, rational and succinct. It raises issues of obviously vital humanitarian concern. How can it be that the broadcast media has failed to even mention the doubling of acute malnutrition rates among literally hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq? The implied suffering of tiny innocents is beyond imagining. And how can the horrific conditions in Umm Qasr ? ?liberated? by British troops, after all - not even have been reported? How could we not be moved by these tragedies and the media?s failure to cover them? And are we not forever being told that the media is desperate to engage a bored and indifferent public in political debate; to involve ordinary people in thought, discussion and democratic action in response to the vital issues of the day? So what was David Mannion?s response to this example of polite public engagement in politics?: ?I would be most grateful if you would cease sending me unsolicted e-mails. Thank you? (Forwarded May 19, 2003) From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 22 10:28:19 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 12:28:19 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Central Banks and Deflation Message-ID: <3ECCFAA3.9040202@mindspring.com> The Federal Reserve is very nervous about deflation. The reason for this is more than its awarenes of the grave danger of deflation on the economy. The real reason is is that central banks in general, and the Fed in particular, do not have the power or operative measures within their discourse to deal with deflation. The exclusive dependence of central banks on interest rate policy to fight inflation does not work for fighting deflation, as a decade of data in Japan has shown. The Fed is now following Japan's lead in trying to manage an exchange rate policy (talking is not pushing the dollar down) to export deflation to its trading partners. The Chinese economy has been accused by some Japanese economists as exporting deflation by stripping non-Chinese companies of their pricing power. That is an obvious fact, but the cause of this does not origninal from inside China. As I pointed out in an earlier post (Dollar's slide and PPP), the Chinese currency, the RMB, is actually depreciating against the dollar on a PPP adjusted basis, despite a nominal peg. Thus with the US pushing the dollar down, it will only exacerbate China's deflation export. The problem is not the relative value of the dollar, but the dollar's role as the dominant reserve currency for trade. The use of exchange rates to manage trade is a destructive move, regardless who does it. Exchange rates need to be stable and to change only gradually and infrequently. Trade needs to be structured to increase domestic wages rather than to push domestic wages down. Pushing wages down decreases purchaing power domestically which directly contracts international trade. Central banks must change their theology of protector of the value of money and start promoting full employment and rising wages worldwide and alter an economic system that rewards corporate policies of layoffs and cost cutting, to one that rewards job creation and expansion. Henry C.K. Liu From evs at tri-isys.com Thu May 22 10:25:37 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 00:25:37 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: <00bf01c32032$ec4c8fc0$1400a8c0@evs> <00a401c3206c$99851b60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <003801c3207e$c7629280$bcc94ccb@pentium> parcel of our reason to exist. Abu Sayyaf I am aware of, but has there been any evidence to suggest, let alone prove, that Al Qaeda actually has a presence in the Philippines? ------------------------------- I thought this was common knowledge. A google search using these two search terms will yield many hits: sayyf qaeda. If I were living in the Philippines, I might want to know more about why Abu Sayyaf might be a problem, or, indeed, if the problem lies elsewhere and Abu Sayyaf is a response to the very same. It would also be of interest to me to know more of what exactly the role of US troops are in the Philippines, and the legitimacy of their presence. Indeed, were I a US citizen, the history of my country's involvement with the Philippines would be a topic deserving of research. --------------------------------------- The Abu Sayyaf (does the name stand for anything) do not have an ideology. They are plain mercenaries and bandits. The founder trained and fought in Afghanistan but they found out that kidnapping was a good business. Here's a link on the history: http://www.pacom.mil/piupdates/abusayyafhist_pf.html More sources using google search using: sayyaf history. As for the calibre of Filipino politicians, it sounds remarkably consistent with that of others in developed countries, not least in the US. ------------------------------- Question, Michael, what is marxist ideology in this day and age? Gary Santos Michael Keaney From evs at tri-isys.com Thu May 22 11:05:33 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 01:05:33 +0800 Subject: [A-List] ABC news on Abu Sayyaf - Al Qaeda Message-ID: <005e01c32084$5d8d0240$bcc94ccb@pentium> http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/philippines011220_abusayyaf_a lqaeda.html From zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk Thu May 22 03:42:23 2003 From: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk (Tariq Mahmood) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 14:42:23 +0500 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: Message-ID: <000b01c320b8$cd1b5e20$700f38d2@k6n2c2> The Americanos in a Third World country, especially those who are yet living off the States Department enoy their vacaions the most. There are reportedly three US officials in the US consulate at Peshawar for whose security the street passing in their front is closed for common mortals of the town for the last so many years. Commuters have to do extra two thousand yards of journeying for the couple of hundred yarsd that has been denied to them. A few years ago when thing less unsafe and the street had been opened for the locals, I passing along the cosulate wall counted 22 personnel belonging to four different departments guarding the three US nationals. The entrance on both side is blocked by concrete blocks each more tha a ton by weight. These pill boxes have been specially flown in from the States. Pakistani concrete cannot be relied upon. Against the said 22 outside many times more are inside the premises. And it is said the three Americans no more live there but still peole of Peshawar has to take a longer round. Other US institutions no more display any sign boards. They wish to remain anonymous so as not to attract any unwelcome guests yet they can be easily identified by the concertina of razor wire along the top of the 12 feet compound wall. Only yesterday the US sentries guarding the US embassy at Kabul fired by 'mistake' some Afghan soldiers who were unloading their truck closeby. Four Afghan soldiers of Karzai regime were killed and a few others injured. A Pakistan minister who at that time was inside the embassy was scared and remained confined inside the premises for some time. The US officials at that very moment were trying to convince the Pak visitor that the Kabul regime was in control of the dituation. Tariq ----- ----- "Sabri Oncu" wrote: > Michael: > > > It won't be long before these communities will require > > expensive security to keep the local hoi-polloi out, > > thereby diminishing the financial benefits to be had > > from such outsourcing. > > Speaking of which, gated communities in Turkey are a fact of > life, especially in bigger cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and > Ankara, where there are people who can afford to live in such > communities. Of course, these communities are guarded by private > security against the dispossessed and it happens that most of > these security guards are dispossesseds themselves. The sad news > is that most of the stealing at these gated communities are done > by the security guards. > > Put differently, Michael is right. His is not a prediction, it is > a fact. > > Some years ago, a friend of mine asked me to send him a piece by > Galeano that appeard in the Nation print edition. It was not > electronically available, so I typed it for him and kept a copy > in my archives. I am sending that piece to you too. > > Best, > > Sabri > > +++++++++++ > > Capitalist Realism > > Eduardo Galeano > > The punishment of Tantalus is the fate that torments the poor. > Condemned to hunger and thirst, they are condemned as to > contemplate the delights dangled before them by advertising. As > they crane their necks and reach out, those marvels are snatched > away. And if they manage to catch one and hold on tight, they end > up in jail or the cemetery. > > Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all > and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and > people are less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the > means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, > television watches you. > > Wild Blue > > The sky never grows cloudy; here it never rains. On this sea no > one ever drowns; this beach is free of theft. There are no > stinging jellyfish, no spiny urchins, no bothersome mosquitoes. > The air and the water, climatized at a temperature that never > varies, keep colds and flues at bay. The dirty depths of the port > are envious of these transparent waters; this immaculate > air mocks the poison that people in the city must breathe. > > The ticket doesn't cost much, thirty dollars a person, although > you pay extra for chairs and umbrellas. On the internet, it says: > "Your children will hate you if don't take them... " Wild Blue, > the Yokohama beach encased in glass, is a masterpiece of Japanese > industry. The waves are as high as the motors make them. The > electronic sun rises and falls when the company wishes, and the > clientele is offered astonishing tropical sun rises and rosy > sunsets behind swaying palms. > > "It is artificial," says one visitor. "That is why we like it." > > A Martyr > > In the fall of 1998, in the center of Buenos Aires, a distracted > pedestrian got flattened by a city bus. The victim was crossing > the street while talking on a cell phone. While talking? While > pretending to talk: The phone was a toy. > > The Great Day > > They live off garbage amid garbage eating garbage in garbage > houses. But once a year, the garbage collectors of Managua star > in the show that draws the country' s largest crowds. "The > Ben-Hur Races" were the inspiration of a businessman who came > back from Miami to do his part for the "Americanization of > Nicaragua." > > Riding their garbage carts, fists in the air, Managua' s garbage > collectors salute the president of the country, the ambassador of > the United States, and other dignitaries who grace the dais of > honor. Over their everyday rags, the competitors wear broad > colorful capes, and on their heads sit the plumed helmets of > Roman warriors. Their dilapidated carts are freshly > painted, the better to display the names of their sponsors. The > skinny horses, covered with open sores like their owners and > punished like their owners, are corsairs that fly to finish line > for the sake of glory, or at least a case of soda. > > Trumpets blare. The starting flag drops, and they' re off. Whips > beat down on the bony haunches of the sorry nags, while the > delirious crowd cheers: "Co-ca-Co-la! Co-ca-Co-la!" > > By the Grace of God > > At the end of 1993, I attended the funeral of a beautiful trade > school that had existed for three years in Santiago, Chile. The > students came from the poor slums of the city, kids condemned to > be delinquents, beggars or whores. The school taught them trades > like ironwork, carpentry and gardening; above all, it taught them > to love themselves and to love what they were > doing. For the first time they heard people say that they were worth something and that doing what they were learning to do was worth something. The school depended on foreign financing. When the money ran out the teachers turned to the government. They went to the ministry and got nothing. They went to city hall and the mayor suggested, "Turn it into a business." From rosserjb at jmu.edu Thu May 22 11:39:03 2003 From: rosserjb at jmu.edu (J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 13:39:03 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: Central Banks and Deflation References: <3ECCFAA3.9040202@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <007701c32089$0921e310$a15b7e86@F1127> Bush has already shown that he is a hard line unilateralist who does not give a rat's behind regarding what goes on anywhere in the rest of the world other than to a handful of countries that kiss his behind very hard. He (and his closest political advisers) see getting employment growth up in the battleground swing states of the industrial upper midwest at least for the early part of next year as the key to guaranteeing his reelection. I think they are probably right, and a quick bout of beggar-thy-neighbor dollar devaluation before the rest of the world can do anything about it will probably do the trick for him, I fear. Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu" To: ; ; ; Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 12:28 PM Subject: Central Banks and Deflation > The Federal Reserve is very nervous about deflation. The reason for > this is more than its awarenes of the grave danger of deflation on the > economy. The real reason is is that central banks in general, and the > Fed in particular, do not have the power or operative measures within > their discourse to deal with deflation. The exclusive dependence of > central banks on interest rate policy to fight inflation does not work > for fighting deflation, as a decade of data in Japan has shown. The Fed > is now following Japan's lead in trying to manage an exchange rate > policy (talking is not pushing the dollar down) to export deflation to > its trading partners. > > The Chinese economy has been accused by some Japanese economists as > exporting deflation by stripping non-Chinese companies of their pricing > power. That is an obvious fact, but the cause of this does not origninal > from inside China. As I pointed out in an earlier post (Dollar's slide > and PPP), the Chinese currency, the RMB, is actually depreciating > against the dollar on a PPP adjusted basis, despite a nominal peg. Thus > with the US pushing the dollar down, it will only exacerbate China's > deflation export. > > The problem is not the relative value of the dollar, but the dollar's > role as the dominant reserve currency for trade. The use of exchange > rates to manage trade is a destructive move, regardless who does it. > Exchange rates need to be stable and to change only gradually and > infrequently. Trade needs to be structured to increase domestic wages > rather than to push domestic wages down. Pushing wages down decreases > purchaing power domestically which directly contracts international trade. > > Central banks must change their theology of protector of the value of > money and start promoting full employment and rising wages worldwide and > alter an economic system that rewards corporate policies of layoffs and > cost cutting, to one that rewards job creation and expansion. > > > Henry C.K. Liu > > From wenhuadageming at attbi.com Thu May 22 21:24:02 2003 From: wenhuadageming at attbi.com (Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 23:24:02 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The Renminbi Zone In-Reply-To: <3ECCE2D6.3000703@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030522232313.0576b1c8@mail.attbi.com> where were these pieces published? From bobenoch at shaw.ca Thu May 22 21:43:38 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 20:43:38 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Smart Bribes - Centcom's real secret weapon Message-ID: <004601c320dd$7f2813a0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> http://slate.msn.com/id/2083271/ Slate Posted May 20, 2003 Smart Bribes Centcom's real secret weapon. By Fred Kaplan A fascinating piece in the May 19 Defense News quotes Gen. Tommy Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, confirming what had until now been mere rumors picked up by dubious Arab media outlets-that, before Gulf War II began, U.S. special forces had gone in and bribed Iraqi generals not to fight. "I had letters from Iraqi generals saying, 'I now work for you,' " Franks told Defense News reporter Vago Muradian in a May 10 interview. The article quotes a "senior official" as adding, "What is the effect you want? How much does a cruise missile cost? Between one and 2.5 million dollars. Well, a bribe is a PGM [precision-guided munition]-it achieves the aim, but it's bloodless and there's zero collateral damage." One official is quoted as saying that, in the scheme of the whole military operation, the bribery "was just icing on the cake." But another says that it "was as important as the shooting part, maybe more important. We knew that some units would fight out of a sense of duty and patriotism, and they did. But it didn't change the outcome because we knew how many of these [Iraqi generals] were going to call in sick." All of which further reinforces the vague sense that-for all the embeds, armchair generals, and round-the-clock news coverage-we still know startlingly little about what really happened in this war. The Defense News article raises what could be the biggest military question of all: Just what won this war so swiftly-the high-tech prowess and agility of the modern American military, or old-fashioned back-alley spycraft? Which was the real wonder weapon-the smart bomb or the greenback? I suspect a bit of both. But before we rush ahead and restructure the entire U.S. military on the basis of the lessons from the war, it might be good to find out for sure just what those lessons were. A month ago, I posed eight unanswered questions about this war. (Only one of them has since been resolved.) Here's another: How many Iraqi generals, representing how many brigades or divisions, were paid off? How much money passed hands? Where are these generals today? As a broader assessment, to what degree did the Republican Guard collapse because they were bombarded and outmaneuvered-and to what degree because their generals went on paid leave? This is not a matter of mere curiosity. If bribes played a major part, we should understand that the tactic may not work against more ideologically driven commanders-say, North Koreans (who would have nothing to buy with the money, in any case) or al-Qaida higher-ups (who have apparently turned up their noses at the $25 million reward for turning over Osama Bin Laden). While we're at it, here's another question, about the continuing mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction. When Secretary of State Colin Powell made his Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council-the much-lauded but rejected pitch for taking action against Iraq-he played two tape recordings of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officers. On one, from Nov. 26, 2002, the day before U.N. weapons inspectors were to visit a certain site, an Iraqi colonel told a Republican Guard brigadier general, "We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left." On the second, one Republican Guard commander told another, "Write this down: Remove the expression 'nerve agent' whenever it comes up in wireless instructions." These tapes struck many at the time as persuasive evidence (I called it a "smoking gun") that a) Iraq possessed illegal weapons, b) was deliberately hiding them from the inspectors, and c) was not likely to give up the weapons on its own. So, here's the question, which could now presumably be answered: Who were officers on the tapes? Are they still alive? Were they among the Iraqi officers who were bribed before the war? Were they taken away someplace and interrogated-or could they be interrogated now-on exactly what was "evacuated" and just where those hushed-up "nerve agents" are? If not, why not? The U.S. intelligence officials involved in this intercept must have known, or could have found out, the identities of the Iraqis speaking. Is it possible that we let these A-list witnesses disappear? Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 22 21:58:44 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 20:58:44 -0700 Subject: [A-List] ABC news on Abu Sayyaf - Al Qaeda Message-ID: Hi Gary, Let me put it in a language that I am most comfortable with. When I read such sources, I am well aware of the fact that the information I get is quite noisy. I have no problems with using such information sources since signals from such sources also have information content. Using such signals to update my subjective probability distributions about the world affairs is fine since I can use these signals in such a way that signals from such sources have small effects on my expectations. Now, this ABC is a very noisy source of information. Do you have any other information from a less noisy source that you can share with us? Sabri From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 22 23:25:34 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 22:25:34 -0700 Subject: [A-List] JINSA: Maintaining the U.S.-Turkey Relationship Message-ID: Interesting, is it not? Sabri +++++++++++ Maintaining the U.S.-Turkey Relationship Since the war, Turkish political analysts increasingly suggest, "Turkey no longer fits in America's thinking." For two reasons, we are more concerned that America no longer fits in Ankara's thinking. It would be in the interest of both Washington and Ankara to find a way to maintain a security relationship as well as an economic and political one. May 20, 2003 JINSA Report #334 For Two Reasons For two reasons we were extremely disappointed by the Turkish government's poor political choices prior to the liberation of Iraq. First because we believed and continue to believe Turkey's future is in concert with the U.S. and the new democracies of Europe (France and Germany will never willingly allow Turkey a place in the EU), and second because we were concerned that the absence of a northern front would increase the likelihood of American and allied casualties in the war. For two reasons, we chose not to write about our concerns. First because Turkey is a democracy and it was clear that the government's position was that of the people - although the people might have had a different position if the government hadn't been leading from behind. And second because by location, size, disposition, educational achievement and form of government, Turkey remains important for the future of democratic advancement and the destruction of terrorist assets and ideology in the larger region. We instead expressed our concerns privately and forcefully to members of the Turkish government and military, to the political opposition, and to the business and civic elite. They asked that we "have patience" with Turkey. And until now we did. For two reasons. First because the military victory in Iraq did not require heavy use of Turkish assistance and the loss of coalition lives was minimal (though each loss was a great one). Second because in the post-war reconstruction phase, we assumed that Turkey would find a way to take the initiative in expressing a desire to work with the U.S. once again as the friend and ally we had long considered it to be. We were wrong on the second reason. Since the war, Turkish political analysts increasingly suggest, "Turkey no longer fits in America's thinking." For two reasons, we are more concerned that America no longer fits in Ankara's thinking. First, Turkey has made overtures to Iran and Syria (which is vying for the open slot in the Axis of Evil) rather than to Washington. Second, Turkey asked the U.S. to remove the forces that have been at Incirlik since the start of Operation Northern Watch in 1991. JINSA remains a supporter of Turkey as a modern, secular, democratic state, the presence of which has made the Middle East and Central Asia more stable and has advanced American interests. It would be in the interest of both countries to find a way to maintain a security relationship as well as an economic and political one. But for two reasons, its pre-war choices and its post-war choices, it will be hard, though not impossible for Turkey to regain its position as an unquestioned ally. Source: http://www.jinsa.org/articles/view.html?documentid=2039 From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 22 23:31:48 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 22:31:48 -0700 Subject: [A-List] India: Privatisation strike Message-ID: Indians in privatisation strike BBC NEWS - Wednesday, 21 May, 2003, Millions of workers in India have held a nationwide strike in protest at government plans to privatise state-owned businesses. The one-day stoppage severely affected the banking, transport, insurance and mining sectors, and brought Calcutta to a virtual standstill as protesters marched through the streets. Public transport, including the Calcutta underground ground to halt, while attendance at government offices was very poor. The strike was called by trade unions including the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the Hind Mazdoor Sabha, who claimed about 40 million workers were participating in the walk-out. They are calling for a halt to the government's ongoing privatisation and plans to change labour laws. Job losses The strike is being described as the biggest show of discontent in recent times against the central government's economic policies. The government may not want to annoy the trade unions in the run up to the national elections next year Sanjeev Svirastava, BBC reporter in Delhi The government's privatisation plans aim to raise 132 billion rupees ($2.75bn) by selling off state-run companies in the year ending March 2004. But protesters claim this is leading to widescale job losses. They are also angry at plans to allow state-run companies to fire workers and reduce deposit rates for pension funds. "We want a complete halt to privatisation and other economic policies that favour only the rich," said Swadesh Dev Roye, leader of the National United Forum, an umbrella group of labour unions in state-run oil companies. National standstill The strike almost crippled the financial sector, with four out of the nine major banking unions taking part and the Calcutta stock exchange was shut. Movement and handling of goods in most of the country's ports also came to a standstill. Rail and air transport were disrupted and Calcutta's normally crowded roads were empty except for children playing and some police vehicles. Train services in both Eastern and South Eastern railway were hit as protesters blocked railway tracks in various places, leaving many tourists, amongst others, stranded. The strike's impact was most felt in areas where the left-wing parties are either in government, like West Bengal, or have a substantial following such as the southern states of Andra Pradesh and Kerala, said the BBC's Sanjeev Srivastava in Delhi. Government stalled? He said the government was unlikely to give in to demands immediately but that the strike could slow down reforms. The government may not want to annoy the trade unions in the run up to national elections next year, he said. The government has said labour reforms are needed to allow Indian industry to compete with countries such as China. And it claims privatisation is needed to bridge its increasing fiscal deficit. But plans to sell national oil firms have been strongly rejected by key ministers including defence minister George Fernandes and petroleum minister Ram Naik. Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/3045713.stm From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 23 00:33:20 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 02:33:20 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The Renminbi Zone References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030522232313.0576b1c8@mail.attbi.com> Message-ID: <3ECDC0B0.4020709@mindspring.com> Sorry. FEER. Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan wrote: > where were these pieces published? > > > From cburford at gn.apc.org Fri May 23 01:45:54 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 08:45:54 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Cuba deadline passed? Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030523083737.03831140@pop3.norton.antivirus> I thought I had picked up that Bush was due to make an announcement turning the screw on Cuba on 20th? Is no news good or bad? Chris Burford London From cburford at gn.apc.org Fri May 23 01:34:11 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 08:34:11 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Central Banks and Deflation In-Reply-To: <3ECCFAA3.9040202@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030523082648.038f1cf0@pop3.norton.antivirus> At 2003-05-22 12:28 -0400, Henry Liu wrote: >The Federal Reserve is very nervous about deflation. The reason for this >is more than its awarenes of the grave danger of deflation on the >economy. The real reason is is that central banks in general, and the Fed >in particular, do not have the power or operative measures within their >discourse to deal with deflation. The exclusive dependence of central >banks on interest rate policy to fight inflation does not work for >fighting deflation, as a decade of data in Japan has shown. The Fed is now >following Japan's lead in trying to manage an exchange rate policy >(talking is not pushing the dollar down) to export deflation to its >trading partners. In order to maximise employment and the continued accumulation of surplus value on a world scale does there not have to be a mechanism under capitalism to destroy a portion of old capital periodically? One of the merits of inflation is that it does this fairly smoothly provided it is not too great. Do the capitalists not need a mildly inflationary regime for the management of "world money". If we are about to enter a deflationary cycle are they not likely to explore a raft of measures to increase global money, like after the oil price shock 30 years ago? The relative influence of the dollar in these negotations will be interesting. Chris Burford London From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri May 23 02:29:35 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 01:29:35 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Cuba Maintains Vigilance as U.S. Expels Diplomats Message-ID: <01da01c32106$0698bf60$20fa5718@comintern> Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the May 29, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- CUBA MAINTAINS VIGILANCE AS U.S. EXPELS DIPLOMATS By Gloria La Riva In its latest provocation against Cuba, the Bush administration has suddenly expelled 14 Cuban diplomats from the United States, falsely inferring that they were engaged in espionage on the U.S. The Cubans were assigned to the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York and the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. Since the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in early 1961, just months before the CIA sponsored an invasion at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to turn back the Cuban Revolution, the Interests Section has been Cuba's only official link in the United States. With the bogus charges and mass expulsions, the U.S. government seems to be trying to further escalate tensions--and perhaps provoke a reciprocal expulsion of U.S. diplomats by Cuba--to justify more aggressive action by Washington. Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in response, "The expulsion of the Cuban diplomats is done with the objective of provoking an escalation that could culminate in the closing of the Interests Sections of both countries, as the anti-Cuba terrorist mafia has demanded historically." The timing of the expulsions was only two days before President George W. Bush was to give an anti-Cuba address on May 20, a speech that the New York Times of April 16 said could contain "a series of steps to punish the Cuban government." The newspaper said administration officials were "preparing a variety of options for the president," including the ending of direct flights to Cuba and eliminating cash remittances from Cuban-Americans to their families in Cuba. BUSH 'SPEECH' SAYS NOTHING However, when the time came, Bush, surrounded by Cuban right-wingers at the White House, delivered a 66-word, 40-second, one-paragraph "speech" dripping phrases like "freedoms and rights" but announcing no official policy changes toward Cuba. Bush played it very low-key, but that may be only temporary. It is possible that the development of other crises in the world in recent days, including bombings in the Middle East, growing resistance in Iraq, and the deployment of U.S. troops to the Philip pines, might have forced this belligerent president to pull back momentarily regarding Cuba. Even the most powerful imperialist country has resource limitations. But it is most likely that the administration was unable to draw Cuba into a confrontation that would work to its advantage. Washington has been hoping to unleash an emigration crisis. Even though the U.S. made an agreement, codified in the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, to allow in 20,000 Cubans a year through normal immigration procedures, the State Department has granted only a few hundred visas to Cubans so far this year. At the same time, it has gone easy on those who hijack planes and boats from Cuba to the U.S. There were seven armed hijackings over a seven-month period. Finally, when a Cuban ferry boat and its passengers were seized by armed hijackers on April 11, the Cubans saw this as the product of a serious escalation of Wash ington's campaign of threats and subversion. The prosecution asked for the death penalty for the three hijackers, a sentence that was carried out after their appeal was rejected by a higher court. Since this stern action, there have been no more hijacking attempts. After denunciations by some intellectuals abroad who had been considered friends of Cuba, the Cuban government defended the measure as necessary to insure its stability and security at a time of extreme threat from outside. All this took place while the U.S. was showing the world in the most brutal way in Iraq what it means by "regime change." Bush's latest actions toward Cuba are also generating debate and contention within the U.S. political establishment. A sign of that rift was the May 15 revelation by the FBI that the decision to detain the Cuban diplomats came from the White House and the State Department. The 14 expelled diplomats received a warm welcome when they returned to Cuba and spoke to the people via television, radio and newspapers. They denounced the expulsions as politically motivated. The expulsions may also have been directed in part at certain diplomats for the work they have conducted on behalf of the five Cuban political prisoners who are unjustly incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Two of the Cubans who had been based in the D.C. consular office, Florentino Batista Gonz?lez and Jos? Anselmo, attended to the needs of the Cuban Five, visiting them frequently in the prisons where they are held across the U.S. and sharing news from their loved ones back home. On his arrival in Havana on May 19, Florentino Batista talked to Cuba's Granma newspaper about the country's five heroes: "The best memory and gift that I take with me from my stay in the United States is to have known all of them. Any sacrifice for them was worth it." - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011) From dch at gcal.ac.uk Fri May 23 02:40:55 2003 From: dch at gcal.ac.uk (Douglas Chalmers) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 09:40:55 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Wales: Hain backs clear red water In-Reply-To: <3ECCE66A.2C086A15@usuarios.retecal.es> Message-ID: On 22/5/03 4:02 pm, "Ed George" wrote: > This is interesting. Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, speaking at the Wales > TUC yesterday: > > 'The Government has made mistakes. We've made gratuitous comments and > insulted our natural allies. In an attempt to show that Labour has > changed, we've exaggerated some things we've done to make a point - like > elevating the sensible and practical use of the private sector in public > service delivery to the level of principle - rather than simply the good > practice it often is. So we've caused our natural allies to become > alienated about things we are not even doing - rather than engaged in > things we are. > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I think Ed is right - it is interesting. However, I would put the same take on it as I would when Gordon Brown used to address the Scottish Miners Gala, or indeed the Scottish TUC. These are empty words designed to pacify either labour movement listeners, or labour supporters in the national parliaments/ assemblies. One thing which you can't pin down on Hain and is sincerity. Perhaps more interesting is the following: > 'We now have a 100% Labour Government in Wales which stands ready to > implement a 100% Labour programme - a 'classic' Labour programme as > Rhodri would say. Of course the '100%' labour government are elected by a minority of the electorate - so whatever their vote reflects (and of course it is complex and mixed), it is not the 'true blooded socialism' that rhetoric like '100% Labour' and '100% Labour programme' would suggest. What we are actually seeing here is a very sectarian approach - ignoring the vast amount of the Welsh who also voted nationalist (or for others), and who labour is now seeking to brutally ignore. Even more than Scotland, for many years Wales was a labour party 'fiefdom' with labour as the one party establishment - with all the patronage and corruption that entailed. Hence their original stubborn opposition to the setting up of an Assembly at all. Now they have the assembly and now that this time round they have a tiny majority in terms of Assembly members returned, the 100% is being paraded - not as a vindication of 'socialism', but rather as a 'we're in - the nationalists are out' approach. This is not the type of socialism needed in Wales - which must be radical, feminist, and green and fought for through the prism of the national question - which like elsewhere in the UK is a democratic, not an ethnic issue. Douglas Chalmers Glasgow, Scotland From Michael.Keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 23 05:55:54 2003 From: Michael.Keaney at mbs.fi (Keaney Michael) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 14:55:54 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare Message-ID: Gary writes: I thought this was common knowledge. ----- As commonly known as the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. You continue: Question, Michael, what is marxist ideology in this day and age? ----- Answer, Marxism is a vital tool to the understanding of actually existing capitalism. Marxist ideology is what Marxists and others use when formulating answers to specific questions of what is to be done. Michael From sherrynstan at igc.org Fri May 23 07:20:29 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 09:20:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare Message-ID: <894644.1053696030813.JavaMail.nobody@wamui04.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Question, Michael, what is marxist ideology in this day and age? ----- Answer, Marxism is a vital tool to the understanding of actually existing capitalism. Marxist ideology is what Marxists and others use when formulating answers to specific questions of what is to be done. Michael ********** I feel compelled to add a bit on this question, because my own experience in talking with others is that inside the question is an assumption that Marxism is a doctrine and that - by extension - socialism which we strive for is something that is a decree. It's like asking for the most recent monolithic boilerplate on an issue from an advocacy group. It is very important for people (who are not now 'marxists') to understand that Marxism is a method of inquiry predicated on some basic premises; philosophically, that reality itself is subject to one set of physical and tendential laws without a separate spirit world intervening, that this reality is in a perpetual state of evolution that obeys those laws, and that to understand this reality it is not enough to simply disaggregate reality into parts and describe them, but that relationships and interactions matter. sociologically, that human society is also evolving based on both physical and tendential laws, and that understanding realtionships and interactions is the key to understanding there as well... this method led Marx to examine capitalism as a particular evolution of society. Where capitalism has been studied before by capitalists, it was studied from the point of view of exchange, and Marx took that as his point of departure, whereupon he moved to a deeper understanding by trying to describe capitalism from the point of view of production. Using this same method, of going deeper... my own conviction is that this method (historical materialism) has helped us go even deeper to the point of view of social reproduction (Hartsock, Mies), and even to the most basic of all levels, bioshperic-geologic (which many on this list - especially our dear departed Mark Jones have contiruted to). Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao, Fanon, Cabral, Gramsci and others have expanded the analysis of capitalism from one country (Marx used England as a kind of research laboratory to abstract certain capitalist principles) to the international/interstate arena, and now Frank, Mies, Biel, Amin, and others have begun a process of theorizing capitalism as an evolution within a world system. Again, as dialectical materialists (philosophically) and historical materialists (sociologically). Forgive my overisights and possible distortions. This was quick from work. I just hate that so many people unfamiliar with Marxism, except the caricature that has been generalized, often get the impression (from putative marxists, unfortunately, who have cultified it) that it involves catechisms. From bar at idirect.com Fri May 23 10:12:12 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 12:12:12 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Then They Came for Me / Rwanda: steady course towards dictatorship Message-ID: <002b01c32146$245bf720$b10f9ad8@Chris> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Maurice Nsabimana" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 1:18 AM Subject: Then They Came for Me / Rwanda: steady course towards dictatorship ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Then They Came for Me" by Stephen F. Rohde, Esq. First they came for the Muslims, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Muslim. Then they came to detain immigrants indefinitely solely upon the certification of the Attorney General, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an immigrant. Then they came to eavesdrop on suspects consulting with their attorneys, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a suspect. Then they came to prosecute non-citizens before secret military commissions, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a non-citizen. Then they came to enter homes and offices for unannounced "sneak and peek" searches, and I didn't speak up because I had nothing to hide. Then they came to reinstate Cointelpro and resume the infiltration and surveillance of domestic religious and political groups, and I didn't speak up because I had stopped participating in any groups. Then they came for anyone who objected to government policy because it aided the terrorists and gave ammunition to America's enemies, and I didn't speak up because...... I didn't speak up. Then they came for me....... and by that time no one was left to speak up. [Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer and President of the ACLU of Southern California, is indebted to the inspiration of Rev. Martin Niemoller (1937).] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ URL: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=34181 RWANDA: Cabinet approves ban on main opposition party KIGALI, 19 May 2003 (IRIN) - The Rwandan government endorsed a parliamentary report on Monday that called for the banning of the main opposition party in the country, the Mouvement democratique republicain (MDR), ahead of the country's first post-genocide elections. "We call upon the relevant authorities to implement these recommendations in accordance to the specified laws," the cabinet reported. Parliament voted on Thursday to dissolve the party after a parliamentary commission accused it of propagating a "divisive" ideology. The report named 47 individuals, including two government ministers and five Members of Parliament in the transitional national assembly. The MDR, of which Prime Minister Bernard Makuza is a member, is one of eight parties in the transitional government of national unity that comes to an end in July. The survival of the MDR will now depend on the decision that the country's constitutional court makes, although analysts predict that its chances for survival diminished with the cabinet's approval of the report. The parliamentary report also accused the MDR of secretly mobilising a pro-Hutu youth wing, the "Itara", which the report said was similar to the 1994 "Interahamwe" militia group that largely executed the genocide. Since parliament's recommendation to ban the MDR, human rights groups have criticised the Rwandan government for what they termed a "government-orchestrated crackdown on the political opposition", before presidential and parliamentary elections due to be held later in 2003. The Rwandan government has rejected the allegation. In a recent report, human rights NGO Amnesty International (AI) said: "The recent purge of MDR party members and alleged supporters prior to a scheduled [26] May constitutional referendum along with the August presidential and October parliamentary elections, is a blatant infringement of these individuals' human rights." Another NGO, New-York based Human Rights Watch also accused the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front of working to eliminate any opposition to its victory in the elections. President Paul Kagame recently asked one of the cabinet ministers accused in the report to resign. Observers believe that the cabinet's decision to ban the party could be a setback to the opposition in Rwanda. Former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, who has declared his intention contest the presidency, was to have contested on an MDR ticket. [ENDS] --- URL: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=34133 RWANDA: Interview with presidential hopeful Faustin Twagiramungu Photo: http://www.irinnews.org/images/200351535.JPG ? Jacques Collet Rwandan former prime minister Faustin Twagiramungu BRUSSELS, 16 May 2003 (IRIN) - Faustin Twagiramungu was prime minister of Rwanda from 1994 to 1995, taking up the post after the 1994 genocide when the transitional government was formed. Now living in exile in Belgium, he talked to IRIN on Wednesday about his candidacy in Rwanda's presidential elections scheduled for later this year, when he hopes to challenge President Paul Kagame. QUESTION: Can you confirm your announcement of 10 December 2002 that you will be a candidate in the presidential election later this year? ANSWER: I have announced my candidacy but officially I am not yet a candidate because the electoral law has not yet been made official. The National Transitional Assembly, certainly, has recommended the banning of my party, the Mouvement democratique republicain (MDR), but the government has not yet made its decision. If the party is banned I will present myself as an independent. As for President Kagame's virulent words against the opposition, they don't impress me. The international community should not accept one man making himself the master of everything and use all means to assure his election. It remains to be seen when I will be able to return to Rwanda. Q: Exactly how do you run as a candidate when you are in exile? A: I am not expecting to run a campaign and get myself elected from my small apartment in Brussels. I am not a refugee in Belgium. I still have my Rwandan passport and nothing prevents me from going to Rwanda to officially submit my candidacy. But first the referendum must take place before I can exercise my rights. Then the problems of security for the opposition have to be settled, but for that I have to be on the spot. Finally, international observers, and not only Africans, have to be able to move about freely so that these elections are free and transparent. Q: Do you imagine campaigning in Rwanda while former president Bizimungu is still in prison? A: Bizimungu was put in prison principally for political reasons because he wanted to set up a party. I would appreciate him being freed before the elections. My party already exists, it's even been part of the government of national unity since 19 July 1994. Also I should be able to move about freely to express myself. If the current regime finds that a democracy can function without an opposition party it must say so loudly. But I say to the international community that it shouldn't fund these elections or it may as well let Kagame carry on with the transition. The genocide suffered by Rwanda cannot be a reason for returning to a one party system that we fought during the time of President Habyarimana. Q: What are the main points of your programme? A: We will concentrate above all on poverty, and economic problems. Secondly, the socio-political situation: the trauma suffered by Rwanda means that we must consider the framework for reconciliation best suited to giving solutions for everyone in Rwanda. Thirdly, the inter-regional context: there must be peace in Rwanda and above all in the region. Rwandans, Burundians and Congolese want to put an end to their conflicts and live together. In any case, I will present myself as a Rwandan and not as a Hutu; we have suffered enough because of these distinctions. Q: What is your relationship with the Concertation permanente de l'opposition democratique rwandaise (CPODR), which principally groups exiled Tutsis and Hutus, monarchists, as well as the Forces democratiques de liberation du Rwanda (FDLR)? A: I don't believe in their programme of an inter-Rwandan dialogue and I don't think it will ever happen. We already had the opportunity for this dialogue during the Arusha negotiations in 1993. The conditions which have led to an inclusive inter-Congolese dialogue in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] in order to end the conflict there do not exist in Rwanda. With us, the problems can be solved by putting pressure on President Kagame to accept the process of democratisation. The opposition figures should be able to come with me to Rwanda. As for the FDLR, they have been in the DRC for nine years, they have tried everything, they have never succeeded. I am astonished nowadays to see unarmed political opposition figures teaming up with these armed combatants. These are not necessarily Interahamwe but it's not for me to prove that. If among them there are people soaked in the genocide then everything must be done to arrest them and bring them before the courts. As for the others, pressure must be brought both on [DRC President Joseph] Kabila and Kagame to get these fighters repatriated in return for guarantees. The solution is political, not military. The FDLR and Kagame are wasting their time fighting each other with weapons. Q: What do you think of the draft constitution which will be put to a referendum on 26 May? A: It contains positive elements and negative elements. For example, I am totally against exorbitant power being given to the executive which will have de facto control over all other parties and which on certain points will be able to control both the judiciary and the legislative. It is not democratic and if I am elected I will get down to modifying these points of the constitution. Q: What is your assessment of the transition period? A: I participated in it for thirteen months, from July 1994 to the end of August 1995. I don't assess these nine years entirely negatively. Security is not 100 percent, but at least in Rwanda people are not fighting each other any more. Secondly, efforts have been made over the programme of reconciliation even if this remains problematic. Thirdly, economic progress has been made, but poverty in Rwanda is the worst I have known since my childhood. The failures: freedom of expression, political freedom and freedom of association. Newspapers are being closed, journalists are put in jail, people are forced to adopt the words of the president. It is intolerable. Today people are tired of Kagame not only in Rwanda but throughout the region. But he has to give us the means to challenge him and the Rwandan people the right to choose. [ENDS] --- D?claration des Forces D?mocratiques de Lib?ration du Rwanda (FDLR) sur le Processus Electoral au Rwanda Les Forces D?mocratiques de Lib?ration du Rwanda (FDLR) estiment que la caricature d'un processus ?lectoral qui est en cours au Rwanda ne vise qu'? l?gitimer le r?gime totalitaire du Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) Inkotanyi sans tenir compte des aspirations profondes du peuple rwandais. Les r?sultats du pseudo-referendum sur la constitution pr?vu le 26 mai 2003 ainsi que les pseudo-?lections pr?sidentielles qui suivront ce referendum n?auront aucun effet sur l'objectif des FDLR consistant ? lib?rer le peuple rwandais d'un r?gime totalitaire. La nouvelle constitution n'a ?t? pr?par?e que par la clique au pouvoir au Rwanda sans la participation de la population rwandaise et de l'opposition: Les tourn?es faites dans le pays par la commission ?lectorale du FPR Inkotanyi pour recueillir les avis de la population n??taient destin?es qu?? faire croire ? la communaut? internationale et aux sponsors du FPR que le projet de constitution ? soumettre au referendum refl?te l?opinion de la population rwandaise alors que les r?unions excluaient l?expression des opinions contraires ? l?id?ologie totalitaire du FPR Inkotanyi. Aussi toutes les propositions de l'opposition ext?rieure rwandaise r?unie au sein du CPODR (Concertation Permanente de l'Opposition D?mocratique Rwandaise) pour participer ? la pr?paration du projet de constitution furent rejet?es par le r?gime en place. Pendant que le FPR s??vertuait ? cet exercice de mascarade politique, il machinait la destruction de ce qui reste de l?opposition interne par l?emprisonnement de l?ancien pr?sident Pasteur Bizimungu et de l?ancien ministre des Travaux Publics Charles Ntakirutinka, tous deux fondateurs du Parti pour La D?mocratie et le Renouveau (PDRUbuyanja) ainsi que par l'emprisonnement du secr?taire g?n?ral du MDR, Pierre Gakwandi. Le FPR n'h?site pas ? ?liminer physiquement ses opposants politiques comme par exemple l'assassinat de Gratien Munyarubuga, un membre de PDR Ubuyanja; l'assassint du Dr L?onard Hitimana, un membre influent du MDR et l'assassinat du Lieutenant Colonel Cyiza, un officier en retraite connu pour sa d?fense des droits de la personne, etc. Le FPR a aussi recouru ? un terrorisme international en kidnappant et emprisonnant les membres des Forces D?mocratiques de Lib?ration du Rwanda sous la protection du Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies pour les R?fugi?s ? Kinshasa, dont le Commissaire aux Affaires Politiques, C?lestin Harelimana. Pour s?assurer la consolidation de son r?gime totalitaire, le FPR Inkotanyi s'acharne aussi ? intimider ses adversaires politiques en les accusant d??tre des g?nocidaires, des monarchistes, des Parmehutistes, des interahamwe, des membres d?ALIR et des nazis tout en masquant le fait que dans ses actes et l?expression de certains de ses dirigeants le FPR pratique la discrimination des Hutus, celle des Tutsis qui n'ont pas v?cu dans les anciens camps de r?fugies ?tablis en Ouganda apr?s la r?volution sociale de 1959 ainsi que celle des Tutsis survivants de la trag?die de 1994. Pour les leaders extr?mistes du FPR Inkotanyi et selon la d?claration de Monsieur Tite Rutaremara, un id?ologue de cette organisation totalitaire, sur les ondes de la British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) en avril 2003, tout politicien Hutu qui refuse de se plier ? l?id?ologie du FPR Inkotanyi est un nazi. Pour lui ?Akabaye icwende ntikoga niyokoze ntigacya, niyo gakeye karanuka.? Selon cet id?ologue les Hutus oppos?s au FPR Inkotanyi sont des ?amacwende.? Sous le r?gime du FPR Inkotanyi, l?ins?curit? continue ? ?tre rampante. Les "Local D?fense Forces", une milice du FPR Inkotanyi sans cadre l?gal connu, continuent de terroriser la population civile dans les campagnes. Une clique d?officiers de l?arm?e du FPR Inkotanyi s?est empar?e des meilleures terres sous le couvert de la fameuse politique de ? villagisation ?, imidugudu. Le FPR Inkotanyi poursuit ses vis?es militaristes et expansionnistes et sa politique d?exploitation illicite des richesses naturelles de la R?publique D?mocratique du Congo. La politique ?trang?re du FPR bas?e sur le mensonge continue de couvrir ses crimes contre l'humanit?, ses crimes ?conomiques et autres violations massives des droits de l?homme aussi bien au Rwanda qu?en R?publique D?mocratique du Congo et m?me dans les pays o? les r?fugi?s rwandais ont obtenu l?asile politique. Les ?lites rwandaises qui le peuvent continuent de fuir le pays. Parmi eux se trouvent des officiers militaires sup?rieurs, des hommes politiques, des magistrats, des hommes d?affaires, des activistes des droits de la personne, des journalistes, et des ?tudiants. Les FDLR r?it?rent les principes fondamentaux de sa plate-forme politique comme voie pouvant mettre fin ? la crise que traverse le Rwanda ? savoir: 1? La crise qui secoue le Rwanda depuis le d?but des an n?es 90, est avant tout de nature politique et sa solution doit ?tre d?abord politique; 2? Une solution politique n?est viable que si elle est j uste, ?quitable et pr?serve les int?r?ts de toutes les composantes de la soci?t? rwandaise ; 3? Le respect des droits fondamentaux du citoyen, notamme nt le droit ? la vie, demeure un principe sacr?; 4? Les droits des minorit?s doivent ?tre garantis par la loi; 5? La souverainet? de l??tat rwandais et l?int?grit? territoriale des pays limitrophes doivent ?tre pr?serv?s conform?ment ? la Charte de l?OUA; 6? Les conventions internationales, les trait?s et pactes in ternationaux ratifi?s par le Rwanda doivent ?tre respect?s. Les FDLR condamnent sans ?quivoque le pseudo-processus ?lectoral men? par le FPR Inkotanyi dont les r?sultats sont d?j? connus comme l'a dit r?cemment le G?n?ral Kagame. Les FDLR demandent ? la communaut? internationale de ne pas continuer ? fermer les yeux devant l'intimidation de la population civile et des opposants par le r?gime de Kigali. La communaut? internationale devrait ne pas continuer ? cautionner et ? financer la caricature d'un processus ?lectoral au Rwanda. Les FDLR restent convaincus que seul un dialogue inter-rwandais hautement inclusif peut aider le peuple rwandais ? ?laborer un nouveau contrat social et ? se r?concilier avec lui m?me et avec ses voisins. Les FDLR militent pour la D?mocratie Consensuelle comme syst?me de gestion et de contr?le du pouvoir pouvant mettre fin d?finitivement aux conflits cycliques pour la conqu?te et le contr?le du pouvoir au Rwanda. Washington, D.C., le 19 Mai, 2003 Dr. Jean Marie Vianney Higiro Vice-Pr?sident, Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR) From jcraven at clark.edu Fri May 23 11:24:32 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 10:24:32 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Zionism and the Cognitive Dissonance of Some Jews of the Dias pora Message-ID: Often one will find that the most fanatic of the self-described/defined Zionists are among Jews living outside of Israel--particularly the U.S. One Zionist, an influencial one in Portland, told me that they were well aware of the "cognitive dissonance" problem faced by some Jews living outside of Israel (e.g. one the one hand you say you support Israel and are a Zionist, the Zionists want/need your type to "settle" in Israel, yet you live in the west obviously because in Israel you would not likely enjoy the creature comforts, have the type of job, or personal security, that you enjoy in the West) and they exploit it to the hilt. So they have a way out of the cognitive dissonance problem for all those who style themselves/play "super-Jews" and super-Zionists yet don't want to put their privileged asses on the line by actually migrating to Israel, and that is the concept of the necessary Diaspora. So they are told "Don't fret, you are critical to Zionism living in the Diaspora, you can do more by living there and raising money for the cause and engaging in actions against anti-Zionism/Zionists than by actually liiving in Israel. We need you as Sayyonim, supporters, fund-raisers etc in the Diaspora and that contribution is more critical than you actually moving to Israel." Many of the new settler types also demonstrate some of this fanatacism born out of their own cognitive dissonance problems. Many of them I have seen interviewed, many American Jews who speak no Hebrew, who were mostly secular and non-observant until relatively recently, many in their thirties and forties, all of a sudden get the fever, perhaps have some kids and are looking for instant families with instant stability and tradition, also want instant Jewishness, and have some problems explaining what they have been doing as Jews for the cause up to now, they get the fever, move over, go into the settlements where they can really "prove" their Jewishness and commitment to Zionism to the Likkud types, and they are off and running as new, instant, "super-Jews." We have the same phenomenon among some Indians. All their lives they cared nothing about "Indianness" or really living "Indian", all of a sudden it might seem cool or some need to "find one's roots", and they are off and running with all sorts of new-found identity, never-previously-declared "blood-quantum", they are proud to be "enrolled" (by that they mean BIA or DIA and actually use BIA/DIA enrollment as "evidence" of their Indianness") and then they are off and running. But these types, just like some of the Jews outside of Israel or the religious communities, have no links with the communities themselves (guess how many calls I get each week from someone saying their Father, Mother, Grandfather, Grandmother etc was Blackfoot, they don't know from where or if that person lived Blackfoot, but they want to link-up with Blackfoot communities to get their instant credentials as Blackfoot with Blackfoot ties to Blackfoot communities) and here we go... Add: About two weeks ago I was at a meeting with some "Crazy Dogs" (one of the traditional societies of the Blackfeet in Montana; they are called "Brave Dogs in Canada and they are for self-defense/policing) at the Blackfeet Rez at Browning. In this meeting were some who, until recently, had been dope dealers, dope heads, drunks, former Tribal police etc. Few spoke Blackfoot or had practiced any traditional Blackfoot Ways; the ones who had been least "Traditional" were now the most vocal and fanatic self-described/defined "Super-Blackfoot." (nothing like a convert for fanatacism). Because the real Traditionals are the most effective and respected in Blackfoot Country, we have the old-line traitors and "Hang-Around-The-Fort" Indians now playing at being "Traditionals", with their own ersatz versions of the real thing, much like these new "Super-Jews" and "Super-Zionists" settler types (or super-Zionists of the Diaspora) demonstrate their own forms of the fanatacism of the recent converts. Jim C James M. Craven Blackfoot Name: Omahkohkiaayo-i'poyii Professor/Consultant,Economics;Business Division Chair Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. USA 98663 Tel: (360) 992-2283; Fax: (360) 992-2863 http://www.home.earthlink.net/~blkfoot5 Employer has no association with private/protected opinion "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." (George Orwell) "...every anticipation of results which are first to be proved seems disturbing to me...(Karl Marx, "Grundrisse") From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri May 23 11:22:05 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 10:22:05 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: Message-ID: <002f01c3214f$d5f76880$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- Gary writes: Question, Michael, what is marxist ideology in this day and age? ----- If I may intrude: Marxism is the best tool for seeing the parts as a greater whole, and also a tool for analysing class society, particularly under capitalism. Considering that we have not seen this much "capitalism" since 1916, I would venture that Marxism remains depressingly indispensible and vital to any understanding of the world today. Macdonald From zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk Thu May 22 19:33:30 2003 From: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk (Tariq Mahmood) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 06:33:30 +0500 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar References: <421B64BC.04B8A92D.0001044B@aol.com> Message-ID: <004601c3214d$44549c60$750f38d2@k6n2c2> Malaysia since long has been expressing her disinterest of dealing any more in US dollars. In 1997 the rug was pulled from under her feet to teach her and other SE Asian nations a lesson for trying to be smart. Malaysia's Mahathir Muhammad has also repeatedly said of bringing out gold dinars to trade in. Now with other nations thinking or actually switching over from USDs will create major financial tidal waves that may wash many shores. Nor only the US economy will feel setbacks but many who hold huge stocks of the greenbacks. Most likely trend maybe investments into the US to sustain her deficit trickle out. A situation like now was warded off by the US in early 70s when Japan demanded payment for its trade surplus against the US in something more substantial than USD. The US retaliated by asking Saudi Arabia to jack up price of her oil from three to 10 dollars a barrel in on go, but to price tag the barrel in USD term only. Japan and Europe were made to buy costly oil while the US almost got it free, against their aper currency that she knew, the US will never be required to honour it. The world was told the Arabs have used their oil weapon to revenge their military set backs in 1973. Instead the Arabs sold their oil 'cheaply' to the country that held the Arab money in their coffers and used it to help their foe, Israel. Last year China over exported to the US 103 billion dollars worth of their goods. Since she has been only been paid in paper currency, which the US can always refuse making good like her latest conduct in the UN. The Third World, though the term has lost much of its value, will find it better to go for barter trading like in the past when currency was openly used in international trading or resort to paper transactions, preseving economic interests of the trading partners. Soviet Union had been trading with reasonable fairness with her satellites in the Comincon. Maybe a time has arrived when the poor of the world group together to have a poorman's currency for mutual trade and trading with others. Tariq ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 6:08 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Gary, Please see below for a couple of articles addressing your question: <<>> 'Indonesia May Dump Dollar; Rest of Asia Too?" Bloomberg, Pesek Jr., William (April 17, 2003) http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_pesek&sid= anZbHuX9q8gI Tokyo, April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, dropped a bombshell recently. It's considering dropping the U.S. dollar for the euro in its oil and gas trades. With war unfolding in Iraq and a mysterious pneumonia spreading around Asia, few noticed. News that Indonesian government officials favor the euro also fell through the cracks. Yet it could have major implications for the world's biggest economy. Other Asian countries may not be far behind any move in Indonesia to dump the dollar. The reasons for this are economic and political, and they could trigger a realignment that undermines U.S. bond and stock markets over time. Indonesia's rationale: The dollar may be the world's reserve currency but it has become too volatile. ``One thing is for sure, the adoption of the euro as an alternative means of payments could be an effective solution to speculative dollar-oriented dealings,'' Indonesia's Vice President Hamzah Haz said last month. ....and one more interesting article about a street protest in Nigeria.... 'Muslims eye euro as new oil currency' April 22 2003 http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/200 3/04/21/1050777210439.html Since 1901, when drillers unleashed a Texas gusher and created the modern oil industry, barrels of oil have been sold for greenbacks. Whether they buy oil in Alaska, Norway or Bahrain, today's customers pay in US dollars. But when the United States launched its military attack against Iraq last month, many Muslim clerics began demanding that Arab countries sell oil for euros, not US dollars. That move could send shock waves through the world oil market and the US economy. Newspaper columnists and antiwar activists in countries from Morocco to Indonesia have rallied behind the sentiments shouted in a Nigerian street protest witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter this week: "Euro yes! Dollar no!" Using currency to wage economic warfare against the US "has been talked about, off and on, since the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s", said Robert Lynch, senior currency strategist in the New York office of BNP Paribas. "It is mostly a threat" rather than a real possibility, Mr Lynch said, because switching from dollars could economically harm many Muslim countries that already hold lots of US dollars - notably Saudi Arabia. Still, given the level of Muslim anger directed at the US following the war, "anything is possible", he said. "If oil trading shifted from dollars to euros, it would be a hugely significant event and certainly a negative one" for the US economy, he said. From WRC92 at aol.com Fri May 23 12:54:36 2003 From: WRC92 at aol.com (WRC92 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 14:54:36 -0400 Subject: [A-List] US economy: Soros vs. dollar Message-ID: <6A32B76C.75BA8AE6.0001044B@aol.com> <<>> I would suggest the world may end up with 3 or 4 reserve currencies by the end of this decade, either that or a global contraction of epic proportions, perhaps both... :-( The following is my latest rant on the Iraq war and currency. May 12, 2003 The Unspoken Oil Currency War: Macroeconomics behind the Iraq War By William Clark "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be . . . The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe." Those words by Thomas Jefferson embody the unfortunate state of affairs that have beset our nation. It is a disturbing prospect that the U.S.-led war against Iraq appears to have been waged under fraudulent premises. This weekend it was reported in the Washington Post that the US military unit in charge of searching for Iraq?s elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) will be heading home next month. According to the article, this ?frustrated? elite unit could not find any evidence of viable WMD. [1] It is increasingly obvious that Saddam did not possess an imminent or viable threat to the U.S., but like his illusionary ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, the Bush administration will not let such facts get in their way. For those who may still be wondering, ?Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?? - I recommend that you follow the money, or more specifically ? follow Iraq?s oil currency. Although hidden behind the massive media propaganda campaign, the answer to the Iraq enigma is the US dollar. The real reason for the war was this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, the U.S. needed to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. The Iraq war had less to do with any threat from Saddam?s old weapons of mass destruction program and certainly less to do to do with fighting terrorism than it has to do with the almighty dollar. Iraq was an oil currency war ? a war designed to keep the euro from becoming an alternative oil transaction currency. Origins of the oil currency war Saddam sealed his fate with the neo conservatives in President?s Bush administration when he announced on September 24, 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for its oil sales, but accept euros instead. Given that in the fall of 2000 the euro was at it?s lowest point to the dollar (approx 82 cents), many analysts were rather surprised that Saddam was willing to give up approximately $270 million in annual oil revenue for what was essentially a political statement. [2] Nonetheless, pricing oil in euros was his symbolic way of protesting continued U.S. support of the U.N. sanctions against Iraq. On November 6th, 2000 the U.N. switched the required currency accepted for Iraqi oil sales from dollars to euros. Saddam subsequently converted Iraq?s $10 billion dollar oil for food reserve into euros as well. [2] Well before 9/11 the Bush administration concluded that regime change and a puppet government in Iraq were necessary to change oil sales back to U.S. dollars. Saddam?s switch to the euro currency appears to be a ?quasi-state secret? within the U.S. government and media, as it exposes one of the core reasons for the war. Currently Iraq?s oil purchases are routed into the U.N.?s ?oil for food program,? and then into a euro-denominated account with a French bank. On May 8th, 2003 the U.S. proposed a U.N. resolution to end the U.N. sanctions, phase-out the oil for food program, and gain full control of Iraq?s oil revenue. [3] The proposed resolution would create an ?Iraqi Assistance Fund? that is solely administered by the U.S. Such a proposal should allow this administration to quietly convert Iraq?s oil currency back to the dollar. As for those who asked ?Why invade Iraq now?? ? perhaps the urgency for the Iraq war was heightened by Iran, which in 2002 moved the majority of its reserve funds to euros. It is well documented that Iran has discussed switching from the dollar to the euro for oil pricing. Due to the lack of coverage of this crucial ?detail,? perhaps this is another ?taboo subject? within our government and our seven corporate-controlled media conglomerates. Nonetheless, given its strong trade relationship with the European Union, it is logical for Iran to make the switch in currencies, if only from a purely monetary and economic perspective. It remains to be seen what Iran will do with its oil currency given its new U.S. neighbors. Overview of structural imbalances within the U.S. economy The U.S. economy has acquired significant structural imbalances, including our record-high $503 billion trade account deficit (now 5 % of GDP), a $6.4 trillion dollar deficit (60% of GDP), and the recent return to annual budget deficits in the hundreds of billions over the last two years. These imbalances are being exacerbated by the Bush administration?s ideologically driven tax cut and massive spending policies, which are creating enormous deficits for the rest of this decade. Why is the dollar still predominant despite these significant structural imbalances? While many Americans assume the strength of the U.S. dollar merely rests on our economic output (i.e. GDP), the ruling elites understand that the dollar?s strength is founded on its two fundamentally unique advantages relative to all other hard currencies. The majority of Americans are not cognizant to the fact that the ?strength? of our current economy is founded on the dollar?s two pivotal advantages following the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944-1945. First is the dollars role as the single international reserve currency, which affords the US market with its ?safe harbor? international status. The second crucial factor is the dollar?s role as the fiat and sole currency for global oil transactions. While the dollar?s role as the only international reserve currency is well understood, the effects of the dollar as the monopoly currency for international oil transactions is rarely discussed. Nonetheless, one of the Federal Reserve?s worst nightmares would consist of an OPEC switch from dollars to euros as the international currency standard for oil purchases. Origins of the Petrodollar The valuation of the U.S. dollar was rather shaky after August 1971 when the Nixon had to ?de-link? the dollar from the $35 per oz. ?gold standard.? According to Dr. David Spiro?s research on this issue, in 1973-74 the Nixon administration sought to alleviate this situation by negotiating assurances from King Saud of Saudi Arabia to price oil in dollars only, and to invest their surplus oil proceeds in U.S. Treasury Bills. [4] In return the U.S. would protect the Saudi regime. These agreements created the phenomenon known as ?petrodollar recycling.? The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of fiat dollars, which U.S. consumers provide to other nations via trade when we purchase their imported goods. Hundreds of billions of these dollars then become petrodollars when used by nations to purchase oil/energy from OPEC producers. Depending upon the price of oil, approximately $600 to $800 billion petrodollars are annually ?re-cycled? from OPEC sales and invested back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets. The fact that all buyers of oil must first buy dollars to pay for the oil supports the U.S. dollar as the world?s reserve currency, and eliminates our currency risk for oil. Oil priced in ?petrodollars? and the dollar as the world?s reserve currency has supported the value of our currency which by normal economic logic, given America?s trillions of dollars in trade deficits over the past decade, should have much less purchasing power than it currently possesses. An enlarged E.U. and a strong euro are challenging this arrangement. However, as long as the dollar remains the monopoly oil transaction currency, its ?storage of wealth? is theoretically derived from the simple fact that it purchases between 1.5 and 1.9 gallons of crude oil. (Using OPEC price range of $22-$28 per barrel, and 42 gallons in a production barrel). No other hard currency in the world can be used to directly purchase the most valuable commodity in the world ? oil. This unique geo-political agreement with Saudi Arabia has worked to our favor for the past 30 years by eliminating any fluctuation (currency risk) in our oil purchases in relation to the dollar?s valuation, raising the entire asset value of all dollar denominated assets/properties, and facilitating the Federal Reserve in creating a truly massive debt and credit expansion (or `credit bubble' in the view of some economists). In effect, global oil consumption via OPEC ?petrodollar recycling? provides a subsidy to the U.S. economy. OPEC, the Euro, and E.U. enlargement It is no secret that the Europeans created the E.U. in an effort to create a huge trading bloc and common currency that could directly compete with the large U.S. economy. Hence, the goals of the E.U. include the euro becoming an alternative international reserve currency. To facilitate that goal, the euro would have to become an alternative ?storage of wealth? for oil transactions. Obviously the E.U. would like their oil purchases to be priced in the euro, as that would eliminate their currency risk, and stabilize their oil bill. Moreover, in December 2002 ten additional countries were approved for membership into the EU, which in 2004 will result in an aggregate GDP of $9.6 trillion - directly comparable to the U.S. s? $10 trillion GDP. Indeed, in a visit to Spain in April 2002, Mr Javad Yarjani, the Head of OPEC's Market Analysis Department, illustrated the new dynamics of the E.U. and the euro currency in an important speech. He stated, ?In the short-term, OPEC Member Countries (MCs), with possibly a few exceptions, are expected to continue to accept payment in dollars. Nevertheless, I believe that OPEC will not discount entirely the possibility of adopting euro pricing and payments in the future.? [5] Based on the details of this candid speech, momentum for OPEC to consider switching to the euro will grow once the E.U. expands in May 2004 to 450 million people with the inclusion of 10 additional member states. Undoubtedly, the euro currency is a significant new competitor, and appears to be the primary threat to U.S. dollar hegemony. What would a collective switch by OPEC to pricing oil in euros instead of U.S. dollars mean to the US economy? Although a sudden switch by OPEC would be very unlikely barring major financial maneuvers or a dollar panic, it would cause oil-consuming nations to flush dollars out of their central bank reserve funds and replace these with euros. That event could cause an additional dollar devaluation anywhere from 20 to 40% (the dollar has already fallen 27% against the euro since late 2001). The consequences of such devaluation would be those one could expect from any currency collapse. Americans would pay dramatically more for the billions of dollars of our imported goods. Americans would pay dramatically more for energy ? the cost to fly our planes, run our factories, heat our homes, and drive our cars. Our economy would grind into a deep recession, or possible much worse. Perhaps fear of decreased investor and consumer confidence is the reason this crucial issue is not discussed in the U.S. media, but European governments and some astute citizens understand the underlying dollar versus euro oil issues. Post-war Iraq We are in the very early stages of the occupation of Iraq, but the initial reactions of the Iraqis, particularity the Shi?ites, does not inspire confidence. Undeterred by the unstable situation on the ground and in Baghdad, the neo-conservatives are pursuing through the U.N. their bold yet simple agenda - to use our new position and Iraq and the perpetual `war on terror' to prevent the OPEC cartel?s inevitable switch to pricing oil in euros. I hypothesize that President Bush toppled Saddam in a pre-emptive attempt to quickly rebuild Iraq?s oil production capability, initiate massive Iraqi oil production in far excess of OPEC quotas, to reduce global oil prices, and dissolve the OPEC cartel?s price controls. Removing Saddam was more of a victory for dollar hegemony and Bush?s re-election campaign than a victory in the fight against terrorism. How does the Bush administration intend to break-up the OPEC cartel's price controls in a post-Saddam Iraq? Assuming the U.N. Resolution proposed last week by the U.S./U.K. passes, that will clear the way for the U.S. to gain full control over Iraq?s oil resources. The newly installed U.S. General will dismantle the U.N.?s oil for food program, create an ?Iraqi Assistance Fund? denominated in U.S. dollars, and thus convert Iraq?s oil pricing back to the dollar. The next step of the U.S. ruling junta involves massive repairs and upgrades to Iraq?s oil production capability (via Halliburton), ultimately allowing a rapid increase in oil production from approximately 2.5 million barrels per day to eventually 6 or 7 million. Such massive Iraqi oil production could lead to a reduction in the price of oil to the $15 per barrel range. This would result in the collapse of the OPEC cartel, and possibly negate their ability to switch oil transaction currencies. An interesting piece of news regarding the dollar/euro issues and the potential political fallout from the Iraq war relates to Indonesia, a small OPEC producer with a Muslim majority. In April 2003 Indonesia?s state oil company, Pertamina, indicated that it was considering dropping the dollar for the euro regarding its oil and gas trades. [6] Additionally, some articles have suggested that other countries such as Malaysia and Nigeria may be considering dropping the dollar in favor of the euro. These countries perceive that switching to the euro will eventually diminish the ability of the neoconservatives to pursue militant global Imperialism. A troubling ?anti-dollar? movement may be spreading. To illustrate, a Wall Street Journal reporter witnessed an anti-war street protest in Nigeria where the crowd shouted ?Euro Yes! Dollar No! [7] The Paradox The Bush administration probably believes that the occupation of Iraq and the installation of a large and permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region will stop other OPEC producers from even considering switching the denomination of their oil sales from dollars to euros. However, using the military to enforce dollar hegemony for oil transactions strikes me as a rather unwieldy and inappropriate strategy. Despite the media reporting otherwise, the current wave of ?global anti-Americanism? is not against the American people or against American values - but against the hypocrisy of militant American Imperialism. I respectfully submit the current polices of the neoconservative movement as expressed through their PNAC document, their manipulation of the citizenry through fear, and the application of unilateral military force is treasonous to both American Public and to the fundamental principles that founded our nation. Regrettably, President Bush and his neo-conservative advisors have chosen to apply a military option to what was is in essence an economic problem. History may not look kindly upon their actions. Paradoxically, for a variety of economic and political reasons, it appears that a growing number of OPEC producers in the Middle East, South America, and Africa may wish to transition their oil pricing from dollars to euros. Furthermore, we may be witnessing the regrettable emergence of a European-Russian-Chinese alliance in an effort to counter American Imperialism. Hence, it is plausible that Russia may at some point re-denominate its oil exports in euros. In conclusion, the structural imbalances in the U.S. economy, along with the Bush administration's flawed tax, economic and most principally their overtly Imperialist foreign polices could result in the dollar's reserve currency status and/or oil transaction currency status being placed in jeopardy or at the very least significantly diminished over the next 1-2 years. In the event that my hypothesis materializes, the U.S. economy will require restructuring in some manner to account for the reduction of either of these two pivotal advantages. This will be an exceedingly painful process if it occurs in a disorderly manner, perhaps reminiscent of 1930?s Great Depression. What is needed is a multilateral meeting of the G-7 nations to reform the international monetary system. Given that future wars will become more likely over oil and the currency of oil, the author advocates that the global monetary system be reformed without delay. This would include the dollar and euro designated as equal international reserve currencies, and placed within an exchange band along with a dual-OPEC oil transaction currency standard. Additionally, the G-7 nations should also explore a future third reserve currency option regarding a yen/yuan bloc for East Asia. A compromise on the euro/oil issues via a multilateral treaty with a gradual phase-in of a dual-OPEC transaction currency standard could minimize economic dislocations within the U.S. While these multilateral reforms may lower our standard of living slightly and reduce our ability to project a massive global military presence, the benefits would include improving the quality of our lives and that of our children by reducing animosity towards the U.S. while we rebuild our alliances with the E.U. and world community. Creating balanced domestic fiscal polices along with global monetary reform is in the long-term national security interest of the United States. Hopefully these proposed monetary reforms could mitigate future armed or economic warfare over oil, ultimately fostering a more stable, safer, and prosperous global economy in the 21st century. Saving the American Experiment Only time will tell what will happen in the aftermath of the Iraq war and U.S. occupation, but I am hopeful my research will contribute to the historical record and help others understand one of the important but hidden reasons for why we conquered Iraq. Until the U.S. agrees to negotiate a more balanced Global Monetary system and embarks on a viable National Energy Strategy, our nation will continue to pursue a hypocritical foreign policy that is incompatible with the ideas of the founding fathers regarding freedom and liberty. The current neoconservative foreign policies are creating ?blowback? and ?anti-American? sentiments around the world, as well as new geo-political alliances with nations that should be U.S. allies. Compounding these foreign policy issues is the ongoing domestic political strategy of this administration to discourage dissent. While this administration talks of ?spreading freedom abroad,? they are cynically utilizing fear tactics to erode our Constitutional protections while eviscerating our Bill of Rights. The U.S. media has been silent regarding the many components of the so-called USA Patriot Act and Patriot Act II which are profoundly dangerous tools that could be used to suppress the U.S. citizenry. [7] The temptation to abuse such broad powers would be tremendous for political purposes and/or in the event our economy experiences a severe downturn. Quite frankly, in order to save the American Experiment and stop our slide towards an isolated Authoritarian State, we must elect an enlightened administration in 2004. The three main challenges of the next U.S. administration will be 1) negotiating global monetary reform, 2) broadly re-organizing U.S. fiscal policies, and 3) attempting to repair our damaged foreign relationships with the E.U., Russia, the Middle East, as well as our frayed alliances with the U.N. and NATO. Sadly, the next U.S. President will have to undertake these challenges from a weakened position both economically and diplomatically. I do not envy the arduous journey that awaits the 44th President of the United States. **************************************** References: 1. Gellman, Barton, ?Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq: Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons,? Washington Post (May 11, 2003) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40212-2003May10.html 2 Recknagel, Charles, "Iraq: Baghdad Moves to Euro," Radio Free Europe (November 1, 2000) http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/01112000160846.asp 3. Neisloss, Liz, ?Details of resolution to lift Iraq sanctions,? CNN (May 8, 2003) http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/08/iraq.sanctions/ 4. Spiro, David E., ?The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets,? Cornell University Press, (1999) 5. The Choice of Currency for the Denomination of the Oil Bill," Speech given by Javad Yarjani, Head of OPEC's Petroleum Market Analysis Dept, on The International Role of the Euro (Invited by the Spanish Minister of Economic Affairs during Spain's Presidency of the EU) (April 14, 2002, Oviedo, Spain) http://www.opec.org/NewsInfo/Speeches/sp2002/spAraqueSpainApr14.htm 6. Pesek Jr., William, 'Indonesia May Dump Dollar; Rest of Asia Too?" Bloomberg, (April 17, 2003) http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_pesek&sid=anZbHuX9q8gI 7. Geewax, Marilyn, ?Muslims eye euro as new oil currency? (April 22, 2003) http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/04/21/1050777210439.html 8. Patriot Act II analysis, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), (February 7, 2003) http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/patriot2.html Copyright ? 2003 W. Clark Reprinted for Fair Use Only About the Author: William Clark is a graduate student in the MBA & MS/ITS programs at Johns Hopkins University. He has been offered to write a book based on his research regarding Iraq, and hopes to complete this project by year?s end. For questions or interviews please contact: wrc92 at aol.com From wenhuadageming at attbi.com Fri May 23 14:14:36 2003 From: wenhuadageming at attbi.com (Xenon Zi-Neng Yuan) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 16:14:36 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Attn: WRC In-Reply-To: <6A32B76C.75BA8AE6.0001044B@aol.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20030523161105.058e4ab0@mail.attbi.com> At 02:54 PM 5/23/2003 -0400, you wrote: >I would suggest the world may end up with 3 or 4 reserve currencies by the >end of this decade, either that or a global contraction of epic >proportions, perhaps both... :-( The following is my latest rant on the >Iraq war and currency. just a suggestion, but try to more properly format your longer posts, and in case of your essay here, which has been circulated before, try to excerpt it with a weblink to the full article instead. From hliu at mindspring.com Fri May 23 21:26:26 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 23:26:26 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [TNF] Fw: Don't look too good for JPM... from gold eagle... References: <001b01c32193$a1b7eb00$0100a8c0@nico> Message-ID: <3ECEE662.3040404@mindspring.com> Its always intersting to hear rumors provided they are rumors, not fantasies. A good rumor requires reflection of a good command of knowledge of how the process works. To begin with, gold reserves, like proven oil reserves, do not need to be mined to have value. The mining of gold is a separate contract from the ownership of the gold to be mined. 3.7 million ounces of gold reserve has a value of less than $1 billion, a value arrived at by subtracting extraction cost and carrying cost from anticipated market value at time of market delivery. Not a big deal. The $44 trillion is notional value, which in itself means potential for derivative losses as well as profits. True, the fall of the dollar is giving JPM/Chase headaches, but banks in the US do not go bankrupt. Besides the OTC derivatives are hedged so many time over, it is hard to traced which which the fan is flowwing when the stuff hit the fan. Bank may become insolvant, in whcih case FDIC would first step in to take care of the individual accounts and eventually the Fed will step in to take care of the corporate accounts. The derivative exposures will most likely hit the bank holding company and will be handled beside closed doors. Greenspan has already made it very clear that no money center banks will be allowed to fail, particularly if the threat of failure comes from the US Treasury talking the dollar down. The holding company may fail, but the bank subsidiary will continue to operate. When the dollar falls, by definition, gold goes up. But its not all that simple because gold prices in dollar is determined by many other factors, such as interst rate, market balance, panic, derivative unwounding trends, etc. The key is no bank needs to deliver gold, they can always deliver gold substitute - or dollars, of which there is never a shortage unless the Fed creates one. Greenspan told Congress last week something that everyone knows but many have forgotten, that the value of the dollar is a matter of national security, which compels the Fed to follow the lead of the US Treasury. So much for the "independence" of the central bank. Greenspan told Congress: "The Secretary of the Treasury is the spokesman for the US on the dollar." And Strong Dollar is still in the US national interst, though not too strong. Now market participants can guess wrong and they often do, and remember, Soros has not made any killing since 1997 and has in fact lost quite a bit in recent years. The odds are, those who bet against the dollar will lose their shirts, unless they are only interested in making small change in day trading. Sharefin wrote: > The below is posted for interest and discussion. Accuracy is un-known, and > source in also un-known, but interesting in view of the JPM-Newmont > situation. > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 12:09 PM > Subject: shares in hand? ///bgm > > [ECON] Rumors of TEOTWAWKI > > There are rumors (with some legs and truth to them) that Newmont Mining > told > JPMorgan/Chase (the govt's banker and illegal activities agent) to go > 'fukthemselves' when JPM informed Newmont that it was raising margin > requirements on a > hedged gold operation that Newmont acquired when it took over another gold > company. > > The gold mine in question has 3 million ounces of gold estimated to be > in the > ground. They sold, under contract, years ago, before being acquired by > Newmont, 3.7 million ounces of gold at a specific price which allowed > JPM to use the > paper ownership of that gold to supress the price of gold during 2000 - > 2002. > > Now, JPM has told Newmont that they want more money for the 'hedge' on that > property. (as they are desperately trying to force the price of gold > down below > certain levels.) > > Newmont is playing hardball and told JPM, 'you want it, well, you got > it.....the property is yours.....have a good time trying to recover the > gold in the > ground.' > > This is significant in two ways: > 1) the mere fact that JPM has initiated higher margin requirements on its > gold hedges shows how desperate they are (i.e. the gold price supression > scheme > is collapsing around their ears). > 2) that Newmont told them to go 'shitgoldbricks for all the money you'll > get > out of us' means that the power that JPM had had in the past to intimidate > (mafia style) the gold industry has evaporated. > > Further, for those who read French and German, the newsletters in Europe > today are making a huge deal about this as proof that JPM/Chase (and by > extention, > Citi and BoA) are broke and underwater on 44 trillion dollars of > derivatives > mostly keyed to the price of gold and interest rates. These various > newsletter > writers are advising their readers to demand physical delivery of any > shares > in any company which they bought through the > brokerages of these banks. Why? Well, so that they will actually be able to > sell the shares. They (newsletter writers) a re saying that once it becomes > known that the biggest bankruptcy in history is going to occur in June > (JPM/Chase > is expected to start a cascading counterparty failure among the top 15 > banks > in the US in derivatives based collapse), that any shares held 'in the > trader's name' will not be available for those who actually own them. > The rumor being > that the bank is using those shares it holds in your name for their own > loans, shorting activities, and as collateral on other loans. > > Be warned, TEOTWAWKI starts in June. > > Look to Argentina to see what we face in the US of A. > > Yahoo! Groups Sponsor > ADVERTISEMENT > Click Here! > > > > TNF has two guidelines designed to maintain a positive tone. > > (1) If you take offense at another member's message, write to that > person privately; if you think the moderators should be informed, CC > your private message to thenewforum-owner at yahoogroups.com. > > (2) Avoid on-list meta-discussions or co-moderation; address such > matters to the individuals involved and/or to the moderators. > > > > Address to unsubscribe: TheNewForum-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com > > > > > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service > . From pbond at sn.apc.org Sat May 24 00:30:06 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 08:30:06 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Re: [TNF] Fw: Don't look too good for JPM... from gold eagle... References: <001b01c32193$a1b7eb00$0100a8c0@nico> <3ECEE662.3040404@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <212e01c321c5$f4d883d0$a4c021c4@Patrick> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu" > True, the fall of > the dollar is giving JPM/Chase headaches, but banks in the US do not go > bankrupt Hmmm... sounds like Walter Wriston redux, Henry! When I worked at the Fed, I thought so too... then Continental Illinois came along and suddenly both bankruptcy and nationalization were possible... From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat May 24 00:55:05 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 02:55:05 EDT Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare/Marxism Today-doctrine & theory Message-ID: <1f1.97f3668.2c007149@aol.com> >I feel compelled to add a bit on this question, because my own experience in >talking with others is that inside the question is an assumption that Marxism is a >doctrine and that - by extension - socialism, which we strive for, is something that >is a decree. >It's like asking for the most recent monolithic boilerplate on an issue from an >advocacy group. >It is very important for people (who are not now 'Marxists') to understand that >Marxism is a method of inquiry predicated on some basic premises. . . < Reply: Marxism is infinitely more than a method of inquiry, although Marx method - approach, was absolutely revolutionary. Marxism is also a doctrine of the class struggle. "The Three sources and Three Components of Marxism," - published March 1913 and written by V. I. Lenin, is an excellent guild and starting point in summarizing the writings, teachings and practical politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. In his "three Components" Lenin writes: "On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in the fact that he furnished answers to questions which had already engrossed the foremost minds of humanity. His teachings arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism. "The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true...It is the legitimate successor of the best that was created by humanity in the nineteenth century in the shape of German philosophy, English political economy and French Socialism." Equally important are Lenin's articles, "Karl Marx," written also in 1913, published May 1918 and "Frederick Engels" written in the autumn of 1895. The first subtitle in "Karl Marx" is "The Marxist Doctrine" with the following subsections: "Philosophical Materialism," "Dialectics," "The Materialist Conception of History" and finally "The Class Struggle." In the Second section of this wonderful works - titled Marx's Economic Doctrine, Lenin divides this summary into two parts titled "Value" and "Surplus Value." The third section is simply called "Socialism" and the last section is "Tactics of The Class Struggle Of The Proletariat." There is "The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx" also written in 1913 where Lenin states: "The chief thing in the doctrine of Marx is that it brings out the historic role of the proletariat as the builder of socialist society. Has the course of events all over the world confirmed this doctrine since Marx expounded it? Marx first advanced it in 1844. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, published in 1848, gave an integral and systematic exposition of this doctrine, an exposition that has remained the best to this day. Since then world history has clearly been divided into three main periods: (1) from the revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune (1871); (2) from the Paris Commune to the Russian revolution (1905); (3) since the Russian revolution. Let us see what has been the destiny of Marx's doctrine in each of these periods." In Lenin's view the historical destiny of Marx doctrine is spoken of in the same sense as in the last section of his "Karl Marx" - "Tactics of The Class Struggle Of The Proletariat," as an assessment of the communist approach to the practical social struggle of classes. Ones assessment of the specific and historically concrete "daily events" experienced by the individual and organization of the communist workers is called the doctrine of Karl Marx or Marxism as a doctrine. Lenin is very clear and straightforward in distinguishing phases and stages of capitalist development or "history boundaries" whose changes call forth different approaches or changes in the doctrine of Karl Marx. The body of ideas associated with name Marx and Engels - Marxism, is weightier than its "philosophic underpinning" as it emerged on the basis of German philosophy. As a doctrine Marx and Engels spent considerable time in insuring the practical organization of the workers and this practical organization is perhaps the most important part of Marxism as a doctrine and not merely a theory of classes moving in antagonism. The problem is that the universal triumph of Marx and Engels approach - materialist dialectics, is so resounding that one can be a materialist dialectician in a given field and have nothing whatsoever to do with social and political revolution as a unity. Marx and Engels founded the Communist League - the first international communist organization of the proletariat and it existed from 1847 to 1852. Frederick Engels article "On the History of the Communist League," give an overview of the conditions under which their doctrine of the class struggle took shape as oppose to their standpoint in unraveling social forms or what is strictly called by Marx "my materialist conception" or the materialist conception of history. In respect to the doctrine of Marx "The Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" is the document that sets forth how Marx and Engels worked out the theory and tactics of the proletariat in the upcoming revolution. Marx and Engels laid stress on the need for the setting up of an independent proletariat party; for isolation of the petty bourgeois democrats and declared for the "revolution in permanence," or what is the same, not pausing and systematically striving to abolish bourgeois property based on the degree of development of the productive forces and the relative strength of the proletariat. In past times (roughly 1965-1990) some communist in our country have approached and articulated the various components of Marxism - to our English language proletariat, on the basis of Marxism as a theory or science and Marxism as a doctrine of how to organize the leaders who organize leading workers along a strategic line of march or historical trajectory. In terms of praxis another distinction arose historically during the time of Marx and in our past called the "art" of conflict. Marxism as a science means an approach - theory, used to unravel the law system that governs the social process. Science means systematized knowledge derived from observation, study and experimentation. Doctrine is a body of principles in a given branch of knowledge. Art is creativity or skill. These three different aspects of the individuals and class organization relationship within the social struggle are spoken of as categories to make sense to the workers. Materialist dialectics underlay our entire approach to the social movement. One cannot apply the science of society directly to leadership in the social struggle any more than a general can apply metallurgy to the conduct of a tank battle although knowledge of metallurgy is necessary to make a tank. Here the development of tanks put an end to the doctrine of trench warfare. Rapid-fire guns put an end to the doctrine of street barracks as a doctrine of revolt. I cannot be certain but it appears that the development of the Internet and a mass interactive communications infrastructure is going to put an end to old doctrines of organization. The organization of modern political power in large cities has to be reconciled, the tendency towards a fascist labor front in imperial countries and the depth of surveillance capacity of the state has to be confronted. However the underlying principles of organization of the communist and workers - the Marxist doctrine, will remain in force. That is to say the working class needs an independent class voice on a national and international level and cannot becomes merged with the class demands of the bourgeoisie. Momentary intersection of interest is not a question of doctrine but skill or art of the class struggle, once one has grasped and lived the ideology (big "I") of proletarian social revolution. How shall the communist and Marxist workers organize themselves? In what relationship does the communist sit in respects to the working class social movements? Where does one begin and exactly what is to be done? These are question answered by the doctrine of Marx and reshaped with transitions in society that alter the correlation within and between classes. In this regard Lenin's give a masterly summation of the reasons for shifts in the doctrine of Marx and Engels in the aforementioned writings. The various quantitative and qualitative stages of the development of the class struggle require corresponding doctrines - changes in the shape of the doctrine of Marx. For, example, as political conditions changed in Europe, Engels developed a doctrine that included the use of the ballot box. This doctrine was most useful and appropriate in the period of maturing imperialism with all its military and social consequences. As imperial conflict engulfed the world as World War 1, Lenin evolved a new doctrine of the class struggle and enriched the general treasure house of Marxism. Thus Lenin strategy and tactics were accurately described this way: "Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular." There were other changes in doctrine during the era of colonial revolts when the party of the proletariat was a military formation charged with recruiting enough capacity to defeat the imperial aggressor. I do not pose one path of revolt against another but point out what arose under specific conditions that altered the doctrine of Marx from the Lenin era and Soviet type revolution. The conditions that force revolutionaries to take one path or the other are too complex to be discussed here. I do remember Che Guevara's "Declaration to The Miners of Bolivia." Today we have no need for the concept and doctrine of the comandante in the imperial centers. There is no basis to try and establish "the guerrillas . . . within the people" as such. The role of leaders and the question of democracy are very different in the imperial centers. Here we are dealing with an emergent communist class and a reconfiguration of the national-colonial question - at least in its shape. Science and doctrine do not win wars or class struggle generally speaking or gets one elected. The necessarily ingredient is skill or art. Here one must shed any traces of sectarianism and understand the how their working class think things out in real time with all of our perceived flaws. That is to say one must understand ideology - not of the Marxist, but of the living working class and why it is bounded by every quantitative and qualitative expansion and change in the productive forces, shifts, breaks, ebbs and flows in the class struggle. Here ideology is not spoken of as grand historical narrative but as classes and strata collide and as sections of the population "hit bottom" and experience an epiphany. One has to read and reread - many times, the legacy of the Marxist movement to appreciate why there is a doctrine of Marx and why Lenin spoke of components of Marxism and its historical destiny. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 11485 bytes Desc: not available URL: From pbond at sn.apc.org Sat May 24 00:25:06 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 08:25:06 +0200 Subject: [A-List] (Fwd) Decadence in declining Zimbabwe Message-ID: <212701c321c5$f059d980$a4c021c4@Patrick> (Article by Sarah Duguid in yesterday's M&G; sorry I don't have the title. Last week at a seminar in Pretoria, the Harare civil society comrades were unanimous that the rise of a new class of parasitical rentiers and speculators that know how to play Mugabe's various games will put a serious brake on a potential transition to peace, democracy and even normal capitalist accumulation.) Sitting around the kitchen table in a wealthy suburb of Harare, two housewives puff cigarettes, slug on mugs of tea and cut a petrol deal. One of the women has a mate who has managed to get his hands on 5000 litres of fuel; the other woman is going to buy it, with great bricks of the devalued Zimbabwe dollar, and sell it on for a tidy profit. Welcome to Zimbabwe; the land of opportunity. Nearly two thirds of the population are dependant on food aid. Bands of youth militia under orders to kill, rape and maim roam the countryside looking for opposition members. State-sanctioned torture has become so rife that a human rights organisation has argued that the country is poised for genocide. The economy is in freefall and those on monthly salaries watch their buying power dwindle with each month?s pay cheque. For many, full-time work provides just enough income to eat every other day. But in Harare, you could be forgiven for thinking all was well. Exclusive restaurants that look more Soho than sub-Saharan Africa, bend under the weight of wealth. Most are fully booked well in advance and every evening Harare?s elegant elite, of all hues, sweep into the car parks in new Mercedes Kompressors, luxury jeeps and sporty Voltswagens. In the Keg&Sable, a bar in the affluent suburb of Borrowdale, revellers spill out onto the pavement, drinking bottles of beer that cost the equivalent of a week?s salary for the lowest paid. At 6 o? clock the bar in the exclusive Meikles hotel fills with well-oiled members of the elite. Businessmen in dark suits mingle with CIO agents, Mugabe?s omnipresent intelligence apparatus, and the bejewelled Onew money? crowd. And, inevitably, lurking in the background are the women who live in well-remunerated symbiosis with them. Inside the Meikles bar, a man in a black silk shirt and a gold watch tells me he?s in Obusiness?. ?Do you know what I mean by business in Zimbabwe? We?re all in business here.? His friend, an aviation mechanic, stopped making a living when tourism dried up and he now survives by servicing private jets. Zimbabwe is experiencing new levels of poverty but at the same time a tiny proportion of the population is revelling in unprecedented wealth. ?I tell people they are mad to leave now. The next two years is the time the money is going to be made,? the son of a former cabinet minister told me. ?There?s big money to be made. We?ve all become like the mafia. I don?t know anyone who pays tax.? Mugabe?s Stalinist economic policies have effectively emptied supermarket shelves and rid the country of petrol. So the entrepreneurial are buying up food and fuel from around Africa and importing them for sale at a huge mark up, knowing that people will pay. One woman, fresh out of her evening bible class, said that she hopes the chaos continues for a few more years. Her husband runs a transport business importing scarce commodities and the couple are making so much money they are almost set for life. A onetime farmer who lost everything when his farm was taken by war veterans told me that he hopes to make back the money from a lifetime in farming in just two years as a commodities trader. Pictures of Harare?s empty supermarket shelves have been beamed across the world, but supermarkets in wealthy areas of the city look almost like those anywhere else. Shelves are stuffed with food and, at least at the times I was visiting, the smell of freshly baked bread was wafting through the air. The price tags are the only giveaway. Basic commodities are sold at rates inflated far beyond the cost of transporting them. Food shortages are for the poor, for those with the cash foodstuffs are plenty, from imported whisky and wine to French cheese and exotic fruit. There is also a thriving black market for farm produce. I met a former squaddy from the British army who had left his job to come to Zimbabwe just a few weeks previously. As Mugabe?s assault on agriculture has all but ground food production to a halt people, he noticed, are starving. So he has leased some land from a friend and is trying his hand at being a farmer. He plans to grow maize, the staple diet in Zimbabwe and, with a few shrewd payments to party officials he can bypass the official channels and sell his crop directly onto the hugely profitable black market. ?I realise I?m putting my cock on the block. But it?s worth the risk. People are going hungry. There?s money to be made. And if it doesn?t work out I can always go back to the army.? The Rhema Church, a highly profitable South African brand of happy clappy evangelism, has just built a church the size of a shopping mall in Harare, called OCelebration Centre.? But the desperate need hope and Rhema provides that, for a fee of course. But all this is small fry compared to black market currency dealing which is, according to one economist, the country?s largest growth industry. The canny and well-connected, flit nimbly between the black market and the state controlled markets, buying cheap and selling expensive, and making gargantuan profits. ?Anyone who doesn?t make money here is, frankly, a fool,? an American expatriate worker told me. ?There is no way to speculate and lose money. The stock market is doing gangbusters. With as little as US$5000 in savings, you can make a killing.? Crippled by a large amount of foreign debt, the Zimbabwean government pegged the exchange rate with the US dollar in order to stave off bankruptcy by making its debts appear smaller. Banks officially work at the disingenuous rate of US$1 to Z$55, but on the streets, young men, with bulging rucksacks and one eye on the look out for the police, will buy an American dollar for anything between Z$1300 to Z$1800. New banks are being formed all the time and the huge profits they turn have given rise to the ostentatious Kompressor class, named after the cars they drive. Theoretically, by working between the bank rate and the street rate, US$1000 can be turned into US$1 million in just four transactions. It goes without saying that to get access to bank rate US dollars you need to be well connected to the government. But, as a result, Harare is full of tales of shadowy characters with riches of mythic proportion. The kinds of people that everyone has heard about and nobody knows: the epic wealth of the Indian man in Matabeleland who runs virtually all the street forex dealers and evades justice by taking on cabinet minister?s deals. Or there?s the man who was caught at the South African border with US$1 million in cash in the boot of his car. Or the Apostolics, the fervent women who hide wads of banknotes under their long white robes and wander the streets like restless ghosts doing forex deals. Apparently, even the police are scared of them. And as the wheeler-dealers rise to the top, those at the bottom sink ever further down. I went north to Hurungwe, a Zanu PF stronghold about 300 kilometres from Harare. In this remote area, people complained that they were unable to grow food because government handouts of seeds and fertiliser were only given to those with party cards. One woman told me that her uncle was killed, and his body strung up in the township as a public deterrent to political subversion. The grip of Mugabe?s all-pervasive henchmen is far reaching. But for many in Harare, the reality of Zimbabwe is remote. Wayde, a travelling salesman, seems gloriously unaware of the training camps operating across the country where school leavers are fed government propaganda and taught to hate whites. ?In Malawi and places it?s still very colonial. They?re like, OI say old chap.? But here we?re not so colonial. I don?t say Oarsehole, get me a drink?, I say Oexcuse-me, get me a drink?. And anyway, they enjoy it. They like us. They are very down to earth people.? ?I?m kind of ignorant,? one white farmer tells me, and sounds actually quite proud of the fact. ?I tend to just keep my eyes on my own little circle.? He pays off the local war veterans who in return let him remain on his farm. ?Its not ideal but we have to do it,? he says. I heard stories of many farmers paying off Zanu PF chefs, even those who had publicly bayed for white blood. And business owners have to be constantly vigilant that they don?t go the way of the farmers and have their livelihoods swallowed up through the process of Oindigenisation.? The new class of bankers take out loans from their own banks, at very favourable rates, and then as an individual can buy up large percentage of the shares of an established company under the guise of redressing racial imbalances of ownership. And, if businesses don?t cooperate they will be gradually pushed out of the market. Those companies will be the last ones to hear about a rise in interest rates or the State will fix the selling prices of their products at unsustainably low prices so that they become loss making. There is a dingy restaurant on the edge of Harare where reluctant waiters serve up tired looking plates of food. But no one comes for the food. Behind the bar, there is a dazzling array of imported whisky ministers. Ministers are lured in with the promise of drinking for free and the owner, whose real bread and butter lies in various businesses elsewhere, knows that as long as he?s pouring the drinks, he won?t be frozen out. But it?s survival, and the maintenance of a lifestyle that is not easy to give up. "We?ve got friends who?ve been in Australia for 18 years and don?t have what we?ve got here. We want someone to sweep our floors and serve us,? one woman tells me. ?I?m staying here. I?ll be the last one to leave. The one to turn the lights off,? she continues. But as Zimbabwe continues on its steady tumble downwards that idea sounds faintly optimistic. There won?t be lights to switch off. The last ones to leave will be blowing out the candles. From pbond at sn.apc.org Sat May 24 04:40:45 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 12:40:45 +0200 Subject: [A-List] NEPAD and Zimbabwe? References: <5D1A47AA7C487648A78A7C550947CB1532453E@commhrfirst.lchr.org> Message-ID: <27b201c32213$03900900$a4c021c4@Patrick> Lorna, Thanks for the reply. Because I was educated in the United States, I think I understand the problem. It's that deep-seated structural inability of US liberal institutions to connect the dots, and then to dress up that pathological failure--in the process, totally distorting power relationships--using an open-minded-sounding discourse, for opportunistic and feel-good purposes. It's a shame. I thought LCHR might have transcended that style. Your relegitimation of the Bush regime and NEPAD does enormous damage. Yours, Patrick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lorna Davidson" To: "Patrick Bond" Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 4:29 PM Subject: RE: Lorna: NEPAD and Zimbabwe? Dear Patrick, Thanks for your message and your interest in our work on Zimbabwe. We very much welcome your (and indeed all) comments on our letter to the G8 and are always interested in receiving more information and different perspectives on the best advocacy strategies. We have, of course, consulted widely with a range of colleagues in southern Africa, including in Zimbabwe and South Africa, on how best to advocate for greater respect for human rights in Zimbabwe at this time. I and a colleague were in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Harare in February and March, to discuss these issues with local activists and academics and to get people's views on NEPAD, the AU and other African institutions that might be utilised to promote greater respect for human rights. We recognise that there are many differing views on the NEPAD plan and the role that is being played by western countries in shaping and implementing it. Our position is that, while there are flaws in the NEPAD constitutive document and problems about how it was created and how it is being pursued, it remains nonetheless one of a range of mechanisms that can and should be utilised to promote fundamental human rights standards. At the very least, it bears being said that grand plans for home-grown initiatives to promote development cannot be trumpeted unless the countries who are pushing these plans take their own commitments seriously. This is our main point with regard to Zimbabwe. If NEPAD and its peer review mechanism does fail (or has already failed), then we must be clear about why that is and what it means, both now and for the future. With regard to the role of the G8 and the Bush administration in particular, we do believe that the US remains an important player in the international community and can have a positive influence on human rights around the world. While many of the actions that have recently been taken (and continue to be taken) by the US government have done severe damage, both with regard to respect for human rights domestically and internationally, this does not mean that there is no room left at all for the US to be a positive force on human rights in many respects. If you wish to look at the copious material produced by the Lawyers Committee on recent developments in the US with regard to the precarious balancing of rights and considerations of national security, as well as on a range of other issues, you can find this on our website (www.lchr.org). Similarly, with regard to the role of South Africa in Zimbabwe, I agree with you that President Mbeki has done very little to inspire confidence. Many of my colleagues in Zimbabwe have told me of the betrayal felt in the country with regard to the role being played by South Africa. However, the reality remains that the South African government is an important player in the developing situation, at a political level, and is likely to remain so. We therefore believe that positive engagement with South Africa remains an important part of our advocacy strategy, both directly (we regularly communicate directly with the South African government) and indirectly through US, or other international channels. In short, our work on Zimbabwe is multi-faceted, and our letter to the G8 is just one part of a broader advocacy strategy. We continue to work closely with Zimbabwean human rights activists and always take their advice on the kinds of approach they feel can be most effective, given our own limitations and strengths as a US-based organisation. I have done a fair amount of research on NEPAD and am certainly very interested to receive more material on it. So, I would very much welcome copies of the manuscripts that you mention. Thanks again for your interest in our work. Sincerely, Lorna Davidson Senior Associate Human Rights Defenders Project Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 333 Seventh Ave, 13th floor New York, NY 10001 USA Tel: (+1) 212 845 5251 Fax: (+1) 212 845 5299 E-mail: Davidsonl at lchr.org -----Original Message----- From: Patrick Bond [mailto:pbond at sn.apc.org] Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 4:00 PM To: Lorna Davidson Subject: Lorna: NEPAD and Zimbabwe? Dear Lorna (if I can be informal), This concerns the controversial letter (below) that you have sent out to colleagues on email, signed by Mr Posner. No doubt the intentions are democratic, but will the results be acceptable -- if G8 leaders do as is requested, namely codify NEPAD and put pressure on African governments, in precisely the way that the repressive ZANU-PF regime warns against? Is your group not playing into the hands of some very dubious actors? Won't men like Mugabe and Jonathan Moyo point to such a letter with glee? I know it's hard from New York to keep an eye out for all the fine details of politics in Southern Africa. However, it shouldn't be a surprise to you that the New Partnership for Africa's Development is widely derided as 'subimperialist' by progressive civil society groups (e.g., those most closely associated with the World Social Forum) in this region. In fact, based upon the appalling record of nurturing the dictatorship since 2000, as well as the SA government's strategic interests -- economic, geopolitical and domestic (in relation to future opposition party challenges from the labour movement) -- there are very very few serious observers of the Zimbabwe situation who believe that there is ANY positive role for the Mbeki regime. In particular, NEPAD's peer review mechanism is widely considered 'a joke' (even by the secretariat, which in our main business newspaper last month admitted that NEPAD is no longer taken seriously because of Zimbabwe). Even more disturbing is that you believe the Bush administration can and should make interventions on behalf of Zimbabweans, in the wake of his delegitimation thanks to the US occupation of Iraq, not to mention the racially-biased Florida election. There are a great many resources that can be sent to you from southern Africa to clarify these issues. For example, the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development is producing a booklet on how NEPAD has failed. A book I edited a year ago -- Fanon's Warning -- provides ample evidence that the major civil society and intellectual forces in Africa view NEPAD as having only one merit: as a point of unity against which all progressive forces are uniting in opposition. Another book I coauthored -- Zimbabwe's Plunge -- provides detailed documentation of why Mbeki and Obasanjo cannot be trusted to support democracy in Zimbabwe (as if the recent Nigerian election was not enough proof). Also, three weeks ago, I presented a long powerpoint at Columbia University and the African American Institute on NEPAD. Please let me know if you'd like any of these manuscripts emailed (both the books were copublished by a New Jersey press, Africa World Press). There are SO many ways an excellent organisation like LCHR can promote democracy and development in Zimbabwe and across Africa, but I must insist that your group's strategy of working through the Bush and Mbeki regimes will certainly rebound negatively on LCHR's good name. Yours, Patrick Bond (Professor, University of the Witwatersrand) > > "Lorna Davidson" > > 16/05/2003 > > > > Please find attached a letter sent today to each of > > the G8 heads of state, > > in advance of their upcoming Summit at Evian. The > > letter calls on the G8 > > states to fully implement their Africa Action Plan, > > by working closely with > > African states that demonstrate committment to the > > NEPAD principles both in > > their domestic policies and their regional > > relations. In particular, the > > G8 should demonstrate their commitment to ending > > ongoing human rights > > violations in Zimbabwe, by working closely with > > regional governments and > > civil society groups to resolve the current crisis. > > > > Lorna Davidson > > > > Human Rights Defenders Project > > Lawyers Committee for Human Rights > > 333 Seventh Ave, 13th floor > > New York, NY 10001 > > USA > > > > Tel: (+1) 212 845 5251 > > Fax: (+1) 212 845 5299 > > > > E-mail: Davidsonl at lchr.org > > (See attached file: G8 letter Bush.doc) > > > President George W. Bush > The White House > 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW > Washington, DC 20500 > Fax: 1 202 456 2461 > > > May 16, 2003 > > Dear President Bush, > > We write to urge that the current crisis in Zimbabwe > receives sufficient attention at the upcoming meeting > of G8 countries in Evian, France. The commitment of > the G8 to ending serious human rights abuses in > Zimbabwe by working alongside African states and > institutions is crucial. The resolution of the > Zimbabwean crisis is not only a legal and moral > imperative, but it also fundamental to the successful implementation > of the G8's Africa Action Plan and the New Partnership for Africa's > Development (NEPAD). > > We are pleased to note that monitoring the > implementation of the G8 Africa Action Plan, which was adopted at the > end of the June 2002 summit held in Kananaskis, Canada, is one of the > items on the agenda of your upcoming meeting at Evian. We are also > encouraged by President Chirac's proposal to focus on > several major themes during the meeting, including the > promotion of democracy through dialogue with civil > society and other states. The crisis in Zimbabwe is a > litmus test for the efficacy of your discussions. The > situation in Zimbabwe starkly contradicts the > principles contained in NEPAD and supported by the > Africa Action Plan. Moreover, Zimbabwean civil > society groups are routinely being persecuted, which > hampers their efforts to promote respect for human > rights and the rule of law. > > In the Africa Action Plan, the G8 states pledged > their commitment to the principles and objectives > contained in NEPAD. Among these are the attainment of sustainable > development through good governance, democracy and respect for human > rights. The G8 Africa Action Plan describes NEPAD as "a bold and > clear-sighted vision of Africa's development" and > seeks to encourage "the imaginative effort that > underlies [it]." The Plan also refers to NEPAD's > peer-review process as an "innovative and potentially > decisive element in the attainment of the objectives > of the NEPAD." The Plan does not, however, lay out > any guidelines for how the G8 states will seek to > support the peer-review process and ensure that it > indeed fulfils its role as a "decisive element" in > ensuring good governance and respect for human rights. > > We see the need for an effective peer review process > in the implementation of NEPAD that includes > independent civil society groups within Africa and > rigorously examines states' implementation of > internationally recognized human rights standards. > (See Lawyers Committee letter to African heads of > state, November 13, 2002, attached.) The peer review > process should include an examination not only of a > state's internal practices and implementation of human rights, but > also should assess their policies towards other African states and the > consistency of such policies with international human rights > obligations. > > We commend the commitment of the G8 states, contained > in the Africa Action Plan, to establish enhanced > partnerships with African countries whose performance reflects the > principles and undertakings contained in NEPAD. In order for this > commitment to be fully realized, such enhanced partnerships should be > established with countries whose actions both at home > and in their relations with other countries in the > region are reflective of the principles of good > governance, democracy and human rights. NEPAD is > itself a regional initiative and requires regional > vision and implementation, not only domestic policies > and practices that conform with its aims. > > Many crises of poverty, disease, armed conflict, and > denial of democracy and human rights continue to > plague Africa and fundamentally undermine efforts to > achieve sustainable development. Combating such > crises requires effective, co-ordinated strategies > among African states and supported by the > international community. The current situation in > Zimbabwe is one such crisis, the details of which are well-documented > by local and international organizations (see Lawyers Committee > Briefing Paper for the G8, June 2002). Since your June 2002 meeting, > the situation in Zimbabwe has further deteriorated, > and it is largely the black population that is > targeted for abuse. Serious human rights violations > committed by the government and its agents continue to > receive insufficient attention both within the region > and internationally. Efforts to end the crisis must > involve the combined efforts of governments and civil > society groups in Africa which are encouraged by the > G8. Fundamental human rights issues must be > addressed, including bringing an end to political > violence, arbitrary detention and torture, restoring > full freedom of expression and association, ensuring > the independence of the judiciary, and combating > impunity for human rights abuses. > > The very fundamental challenges to NEPAD presented by > the Zimbabwe crisis and the response to it, and the > creation of viable regional mechanisms to enhance > respect for human rights in Africa must be prioritized > at the G8 meeting. We would greatly appreciate your > action in this regard and any information that you can provide to us > in response to our concerns. > > Sincerely, > > > Michael Posner > Executive Director > > > Cc: President Jaques Chirac > Prime Minister Tony Blair > Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien > President Vladimir Putin > Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder > Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi > Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi > > > > Mr. Colin Powell, Secretary of State > Mr. Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth > Affairs Mr. Joschka Fischer, Federal Minister for Foreign > Affairs > Mr. Igor Ivanov, Minister for Foreign Affairs > Mr. Dominique de Villepin, Minister for Foreign > Affairs > Mr. Franco Frattini, Minister for Foreign Affairs > Mr. Yoriko Kawaguchi, Minister for Foreign Affairs From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 24 10:46:56 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 12:46:56 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [TNF] Fw: Don't look too good for JPM... from gold eagle... References: <001b01c32193$a1b7eb00$0100a8c0@nico> <3ECEE662.3040404@mindspring.com> <212e01c321c5$f4d883d0$a4c021c4@Patrick> Message-ID: <3ECFA200.8010408@mindspring.com> This is not an opinion. It is a fact. The Bankruptcy Code in the US does not cover Banks which is regulated by the Fed. Beanks cannot file for bankruptcy to address insolvency problems. If you worked at the Fed, you should know that. Banks do fail, but they do not file bankruptcy in the US. Walter Wriston was also correct. Countries do not go bankrupt. He was wrong only in the expectation that debtor nations must repay their loans. That became the IMF's job, which acts as a forclosure police for the private banks of the lending nations, by holding debtor nations to auterilty programs as the price for new loans to bail out the private banks. Countries do not go bankrupt, but they can default on their loans and many do, or at least should do. The penalty for defaulting is the inability to get new loans which under finance globalization can be very painful. Such pain tend to express themselves through a collapse of the foreign exchange value of the debtor government's currency which further exacerbates the pains. The inability to borrow may well be the god-sent cure for most debtor economies, much like the inability of drag adicts to get new fixes, but to do effective withdrawal debtors need to do foure things: 1) replace export trade with domestic development, 2) adopt a monetary policy based on the State Theory of Money and impose currency control, 3)adopt a full employment and rising wage regime in the economy through state credits, and 4) substitute central banking with national banking to support the health of the economy rather than support the vaule of money. Henry C.K. Liu Patrick Bond wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Henry C.K. Liu" > >>True, the fall of >>the dollar is giving JPM/Chase headaches, but banks in the US do not go >>bankrupt > > > Hmmm... sounds like Walter Wriston redux, Henry! When I worked at the Fed, I > thought so too... then Continental Illinois came along and suddenly both > bankruptcy and nationalization were possible... > > > From pbond at sn.apc.org Sat May 24 11:37:51 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 19:37:51 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Re: [TNF] Fw: Don't look too good for JPM... from gold eagle... References: <001b01c32193$a1b7eb00$0100a8c0@nico> <3ECEE662.3040404@mindspring.com> <212e01c321c5$f4d883d0$a4c021c4@Patrick> <3ECFA200.8010408@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <00be01c3221f$14dc5360$2f9f22c4@Patrick> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu" > to do effective withdrawal debtors need to do foure things: 1) replace > export trade with domestic development, 2) adopt a monetary policy based > on the State Theory of Money and impose currency control, 3)adopt a full > employment and rising wage regime in the economy through state credits, > and 4) substitute central banking with national banking to support the > health of the economy rather than support the vaule of money. Agree entirely. (Second edn of a book I did in 2001, *Against Global Apartheid*, coming soon from Zed Press, has a final cahpter making especially arguments 1-2-3 in great detail.) Can you elaborate on 4? By the way, there is a nearby country ('north of the Limpopo R.' as we say) that may indeed go 'bankrupt' by both defaulting on foreign debt (since 1999) *and* turning over its future to Washington (part of the future deal). Stay tuned... From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 24 13:51:39 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 15:51:39 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [TNF] Fw: Don't look too good for JPM... from gold eagle... References: <001b01c32193$a1b7eb00$0100a8c0@nico> <3ECEE662.3040404@mindspring.com> <212e01c321c5$f4d883d0$a4c021c4@Patrick> <3ECFA200.8010408@mindspring.com> <00be01c3221f$14dc5360$2f9f22c4@Patrick> Message-ID: <3ECFCD4B.7030807@mindspring.com> As long as central banking persists, 1,2 and 3 cannot be accomplished. See: http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DE14Dj01.html Also: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/EA18Dk02.html Patrick Bond wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Henry C.K. Liu" > >>to do effective withdrawal debtors need to do foure things: 1) replace >>export trade with domestic development, 2) adopt a monetary policy based >>on the State Theory of Money and impose currency control, 3)adopt a full >>employment and rising wage regime in the economy through state credits, >>and 4) substitute central banking with national banking to support the >>health of the economy rather than support the vaule of money. > > > Agree entirely. (Second edn of a book I did in 2001, *Against Global > Apartheid*, coming soon from Zed Press, has a final cahpter making > especially arguments 1-2-3 in great detail.) Can you elaborate on 4? > > By the way, there is a nearby country ('north of the Limpopo R.' as we say) > that may indeed go 'bankrupt' by both defaulting on foreign debt (since > 1999) *and* turning over its future to Washington (part of the future deal). > Stay tuned... > > > From borranius at hotmail.com Sat May 24 11:12:41 2003 From: borranius at hotmail.com (Biff Aurelius) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 17:12:41 +0000 Subject: [A-List] US Imperialism: Space Message-ID: Wonder what China, France and Russia has to say about this. U.S. 'negation' policy in space raises concerns abroad By Loring Wirbel, EE Times May 22, 2003 (1:26 p.m. EST) URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030522S0050 COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. ? While much of the talk around the Pentagon these days focuses on "transformation" of the military, some of the United States' closest allies worry about another buzzword being used in subtler ways at the National Reconnaissance Office: "negation." The nation's largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time?not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets. At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide "persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters." If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have "no veto power." Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets. The program will include two components: the Counter Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-gathering technology in air or space. "Negation implies treating allies poorly," Robert Lawson, senior policy adviser for nonproliferation in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, said at a Toronto conference in late March. "It implies treaty busting." Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage. The European Union complained in no uncertain terms five years ago that the NRO and National Security Agency were using global electronic-snooping programs like Echelon outside the boundaries of mutual NATO advantage. The European Space Agency chimed in last fall, when the Defense Department tried to bully ESA into changing its design plans for a navigational-satellite system called Galileo. In the aftermath of the successful Iraq campaign, concern goes much deeper and extends to the heart of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain near here. While Canada is supposed to be an equal member of NORAD, representatives of Canada's military and civilian establishment are complaining that they are not allowed to use space-based communications and intelligence in the same way the United States can. "We cannot address the way the U.S. views missile defense and weapons in space without dealing with their insistence on space negation head-on," said Lawson of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Judd Blaisdell, director of the Air Force Space Operations Office, said recently, "We are so dominant in space that I pity a country that would come up against us." Missile-defense critic William Hartung, of the Institute for Policy Studies, said none of this should be a surprise. U.S. unilateralism in space was codified in a Sept. 20, 2002, document titled the "National Security Strategy of the United States." After the administration renounced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the abrogation of treaty constraints in the use of radar and tracking devices was not just for the benefit of fielding a missile-defense system, but to build better unilateral networks to manage the planet from space. In fact, NRO director Teets said here and in earlier Congressional testimony that it is artificial to see communication tools, intelligence tools and missile-defense tools as separate. In reality, he said, the programs all feed into each other and help reinforce the Pentagon's current overwhelming space dominance. Currently, the NRO manages a series of imaging satellites, including the 20-year-old Advanced Crystal system. It manages a family of large radar satellites called Lacrosse/Onyx, and two classes of listening satellites: a microwave-only system known as Vortex or Mercury, and a multifrequency behemoth known as Magnum or Orion. The last two geosynchronous satellites are so large they must be launched by the massive Titan-IV rocket. Even though billions were spent every year on these satellites in the 1980s and 1990s, they could not fulfill the new NRO mission of disseminating intelligence beyond the nation's civilian leaders, direct to the attlefield. NRO lobbied Congress for a radar satellite follow-on, now called Space-Based Radar. While NASA is supposed to be a customer for such a system, Teets said its primary purpose is to improve moving-target indication on the battlefield. On the imaging and signals fronts, Boeing Corp. won separate contracts in the late 1990s for a next-generation imaging network called Future Imagery Architecture and for a listening satellite called Intruder. Both Boeing projects now face Congressional scrutiny for being over budget and behind schedule. To fill the imaging gap during the Afghan and Iraq wars, the NRO and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) bought up all the image products from two companies that fly commercial imaging satellites, Space Imaging Inc. and DigitalGlobe Inc. In the first phase, ClearVision, the agencies merely bought up existing photographs. But a new phase, NextVision, calls for NRO and NIMA to specify how the commercial firms should build their next-generation satellites. The constellation of 27 satellites in the Global Positioning Satellite navigation network were used in Iraq to turn dumb bombs into precision weapons. With further upgrades planned in the GPS-III system, DoD wants to be sure the United States holds the trump in space-based navigation. The SBIRS-High infrared detection system, meanwhile, has become one of the Defense Department's biggest white elephants. The SBIRS-High Increment 1 software finally was installed at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., almost two years late, but the birds themselves are plagued with problems involving the infrared telescopes and other glitches. New communications satellites are being rolled out for the Defense Information Systems Agency, under the management of NRO. The Advanced Extremely High-Frequency satellite is the successor to Milstar. Voiceband communications will be handled by the Multi-User Objective System satellite, or MUOS, while new broadband video services will be handled by the Wideband Gapfiller. But NRO's Teets said those three programs are only the beginning. The Transformational Communication Office was established last September to meld the communication and intelligence interests of the Defense Department. NRO and NASA will spend more than $10 billion in coming years to define a network of joint NRO-NASA satellites that will bring Internet-like space communications to terrestrial battlefields. What will this massive palette of space resources bring? Teets told Congress that what's already in place allows U.S. military dominance in any possible battle scenario. This transformational use of space resources may play well since the end of the Iraq War, but it is causing some defections. Several analysts at the Naval War College and Air Force Academy published essays in the months leading up to the Iraq assault, warning against assuming that the United States can maintain sole dominance of space. In March, retired Brig. Gen. Owen Lentz, former director of intelligence for Space Command, publicly voiced his opposition to using space intelligence assets for first-strike warfare. Just because the strategy worked in Iraq, Lentz warned, "does not mean that it should become a pattern for future action against others." _________________________________________________________________ Fynda p? n?tet! Handla p? MSN Shopping http://www.msn.se/shopping From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat May 24 12:40:06 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 14:40:06 EDT Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: Why does it matter how Marxism is understood? In a period of relative peaceful development and evolution of capital, Marxism is understood based on these conditions. Doctrine - the body of principles serving as the grid of communist activity in general preserves our revolutionary cutting edge under conditions when the ideological awareness of the working class as a class is weak and feeble and various forms of legal Marxism predominate. In the course of the practical social movement faced by Marx and Engels the doctrine of the class struggle emerged as guiding principles of scientific socialism. Marx points of in the Communist Manifesto: ". . . They (the communist) have over the mass of proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement . . . In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interest of the movement as a whole." (End of quote) The above passage is at the critical heart of the Marxist doctrine of scientific communism. In speaking of the three sources and three components of Marxism Lenin writes about German Philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. Concerning philosophy Lenin further states: "Commercial affairs did not prevent Engels from pursuing his scientific and political education. He had come to hate autocracy and the tyranny of bureaucrats while still at high school. The study of philosophy led him further. At that time Hegel's teaching dominated German philosophy, and Engels became his follower. Although Hegel himself was an admirer of the autocratic Prussian State, in whose service he was as a professor at Berlin University, Hegel's teachings were revolutionary. Hegel's faith in human reason and its rights, and the fundamental thesis of Hegelian philosophy that the universe is undergoing a constant process of change and development, led some of the disciples of the Berlin philosopher -- those who refused to accept the existing situation -- to the idea that the struggle against this situation, the struggle against existing wrong and prevalent evil, is also rooted in the universal law of eternal development. If all things develop, if institutions of one kind give place to others, why should the autocracy of the Prussian king or of the Russian tzar, the enrichment of an insignificant minority at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination of the bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel's philosophy spoke of the development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic. From the development of the mind it deduced the development of nature, of man, and of human, social relations. While retaining Hegel's idea of the eternal process of development, [1] Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view; turning to life, they saw that it is not the development of mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the explanation of mind must be derived from nature, from matter.... Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists." (End of quote.) Marx and Engels taught the working class to know itself and to be conscious of itself as a historical and social force and these teachings constitute what generations of Marxist have called the subjective side - intellectual side, of the revolutionary process or the principled task of Marxist/communist. Marx and Engels doctrine of the class struggle - not their theory of classes moving in antagonism, emerged under specific conditions that Lenin describe in his celebrated booklet "Frederick Engels." "But when in the forties the two friends took part in the socialist literature and the social movements of their time, they were absolutely novel. There were then many people, talented and without talent, honest and dishonest, who, absorbed in the struggle for political freedom, in the struggle against the despotism of kings, police and priests, failed to observe the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. These people would not entertain the idea of the workers acting as an independent social force. On the other hand, there were many dreamers, some of them geniuses, who thought that it was only necessary to convince the rulers and the governing classes of the injustice of the contemporary social order, and it would then be easy to establish peace and general well being on earth. They dreamt of socialism without struggle. Lastly, nearly all the socialists of that time and the friends of the working class generally regarded the proletariat only as an ulcer, and observed with horror how it grew with the growth of industry. They all, therefore, sought for a means to stop the development of industry and of the proletariat, to stop the "wheel of history." Marx and Engels did not share the general fear of the development of the proletariat; on the contrary, they placed all their hopes on its continued growth. The more proletarians there are, the greater is their strength as a revolutionary class, and the nearer and more possible does socialism become. The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams. That is why the name and life of Engels should be known to every worker." (End of quote) Marx and Engels theory of classes moving in antagonism is their materialist conception of history. Lenin's "Frederick Engels" further states: "Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces. On the development of the productive forces depend the relations into which men enter with one another in the production of the things required for the satisfaction of human needs. And in these relations lies the explanation (standpoint for reasoning. MP) of all the phenomena of social life, human aspirations, ideas and laws. The development of the productive forces creates social relations based upon private property, but now we see that this same development of the productive forces deprives the majority of their property and concentrates it in the hands of an insignificant minority. It abolishes property, the basis of the modern social order, it itself strives towards the very aim which the socialists have set themselves. All the socialists have to do is to realize which social force, owing to its position in modern society, is interested in bringing socialism about, and to impart to this force the consciousness of its interests and of its historical task. This force is the proletariat. Engels got to know the proletariat in England, in the center of English industry, Manchester, where he settled in 1842, entering the service of a commercial firm of which his father was a shareholder." (End of quote) Lenin describes the meeting of Engels with Karl Marx and what would birth the Marxist doctrine of social revolution and the proletarian class struggle. "It was not until he came to England that Engels became a socialist. In Manchester he established contacts with people active in the English labour movement at the time and began to write for English socialist publications. In 1844, while on his way back to Germany, he became acquainted in Paris with Marx, with whom he had already started to correspond. In Paris, under the influence of the French socialists and French life, Marx had also become a socialist. Here the friends jointly wrote a book entitled "The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique." This book, which appeared a year before "The Condition of the Working Class in England," and the greater part of which was written by Marx, contains the foundations of revolutionary materialist socialism, the main ideas of which we have expounded above. "The holy family" is a facetious nickname for the Bauer brothers, the philosophers, and their followers. These gentlemen preached a criticism which stood above all reality, above parties and politics, which rejected all practical activity, and which only "critically" contemplated the surrounding world and the events going on within it. These gentlemen, the Bauers, looked down on the proletariat as an uncritical mass. Marx and Engels vigorously opposed this absurd and harmful tendency. In the name of a real, human person -- the worker, trampled down by the ruling classes and the state -- they demanded, not contemplation, but a struggle for a better order of society. They, of course, regarded the proletariat as the force that is capable of waging this struggle and that is interested in it. Even before the appearance of The Holy Family, Engels had published in Marx's and Ruge's Deutsch-Franz?sische Jahrb?cher his "Critical Essays on Political Economy," in which he examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the rule of private property. Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution. (Frederick Engels by V. I. Lenin, end of quote). It is our of this "struggle for a better order of society ... regard(ing) the proletariat as the force that is capable of waging this struggle," that the doctrine of Marxism was born. In describing Marxism and why the revolutionary workers are won over to his standpoint and what they must do to remain Marxist, the last generation of communist workers generated on the basis of the social upheaval and revolts of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, use the categories of science, doctrine and art. Science knows, doctrine guides and art does. None of these aspects of the Marxist treasury are separate entities unto themselves but critical ingredients of the objective and subjective aspects of the social revolution. "The name and life of Engels should be known to every worker." Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 10734 bytes Desc: not available URL: From soncu at pacbell.net Sat May 24 17:13:44 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 16:13:44 -0700 Subject: [A-List] A Proposal: PRE-EMPTIVE PEACE AS OPPOSED TO PRE-EMPTIVE WAR Message-ID: Friends, Please find below a preliminary darft of a proposal from the Peace Initiative of Turkey. I would appreciate it, if you distribute it widely. Best, Sabri +++++++++++ NEVER AGAIN ? PRE-EMPTIVE PEACE AS OPPOSED TO PRE-EMPTIVE WAR Peace Initiative of Turkey PROPOSAL TO CONVENE AN INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL WITH FINAL SESSION IN ISTANBUL - TURKEY TO HOLD THE US & UK REGIMES TO ACCOUNT FOR THE CRIMES PERPETRATED AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ AND FOR THE VIOLATION OF HUMANITARIAN AND INTERNATIONAL LAWS AND VALUES Justification:The act of aggression committed by the US administration and its collaborators against Iraq has gravely undermined the UN system and international laws, in fact it has practically rendered them unfunctional. The US doctrines of "pre-emptive war" and "full spectrum dominance" put into practice in total disregard for all international mechanisms designed to seek non-military methods to resolve international conflicts, constitute a threat to world peace in general and an immediate threat to peace in the Middle East in particular. As a follow up of this policy, the US has openly declared its intention to re-design the Middle Eastern map. We are all heading towards a new world-scale war for control over energy resources, a new war for hegemony. Under the current conditions where international mechanisms for peace which uphold international humanitarian values have been rendered inoperative, the world public needs to create its alternative mechanisms to uphold and defend these values which are dear to all of us. One very powerful way of achieving this is to hold an international tribunal which will examine the whole process and bring to light the crimes and violations committed by the forces of aggression and occupation. Such public highlighting and condemning of these crimes will show our determination not to go along with the US imposed fait d'accompli. The more we succeed in turning this tribunal into a broadly publicized and respectable hearing, the greater its power of deterrence shall be. This can discourage the belligerent powers from engaging in similar acts in the near future and it can help push the UN into devising proper ways and mechanisms to address such circumstances. The so-called "shock and awe" operation may not and should not have shocked and awed the activists of the anti-war movement, but it has shocked and awed: the world public at large: They thought the world had created mechanisms to prevent new Hitlerites from dragging the world into full scale war and chaos at their own discretion. These mechanisms have failed them. Now they behold an unpredictable future where any belligerent power acting upon this example may cite its national security at risk and take action to "pre-empt" the threat. There is a feeling of helplessness and indignation. We must overcome the feeling of helplessness and strengthen the feeling of indignation. Our tribunal will present them with an alternative mechanism to uphold international law and values. the UN: In this process, the UN has been effectively reduced to the state of an incapable and powerless institution. The strong statement to be put by a respectable international tribunal with representative power will push the UN out of its paralysis into action. Some very basic violations that have taken place include: the UN Charter, the Geneva Convention, the Human Rights Charter, etc. Many weapons which were outlawed by international treaties and conventions have been used, turning the land of Iraq into a toxic zone unfit for human life. If the UN cannot take action of itself, our tribunal can take the initiative and spell out all these and many more crimes one by one for all to see. Then, they will have to move and taking up from where we left, develop measures to solve the problem. We need to show that peace and justice shall be upheld, that no one shall get away with committing injustice and destroying peace. We propose that we convene the final session of this tribunal in Istanbul-Turkey. Why? The Middle East occupies a central place in the US plans for world hegemony. It is the theater of war. The intial target Iraq, and the next declared targets Syria and Iran are right on our borders. The best venue for such a tribunal would be Iraq, but the closest we can get there is Turkey. The recent developments call for urgent and ever stronger solidarity between anti-war movements in the West and the Middle East. It would be a strong declaration of solidarity and coordination to hold these criminals to account in the Middle East which they are preparing to colonize. It will be a big moral support to all of our peoples an encouragement to our populations. It will materialize the bonds between the western activists and themselves and help them actually feel themselves part of a world movement opposing US hegemony and colonization plans. This will also be a strong statement against scenarios trying to present and turn the current conflict into a so-called "clash of civilizations". The peoples of our region feel themselves under attack and alienated. The world's activists converging in Turkey and making it clear that this is a threat against the world as a whole and that we all stand united will help us all overcome this feeling. Turkey is not a theoretical but a real cultural bridge between the East and the West and there is overwhelming popular opposition to this war in Turkey. It is this opposition which has pushed the Turkish parliament to reject the government bid to station 62.000 US troops in Turkey and to open the northern front for the US war in Iraq. It is true that Turkey has its human rights problems but this unprecedented popular opposition has resulted in the failure of a government, which has over two thirds majority in the parliament, to pass its bid. Last, but not least is the fact that we are ready to host such an activity. We are ready to give secretarial support and to devote whatever time and effort is required. When? We propose that the final tribunal convenes in late 2003-early 2004. One month for setting up the components of the tribunal. Time for initial preparations, investigations, etc. Preparatory sessions in different countries. With the cooperation of peace movements of those countries. How do we envision this tribunal? Composition of the tribunal + jury: world renown and respected jurists, people from all six continents with representative capacity, broadly acknowledged intellectuals. Testimonies by: people from Iraq, journalists in Iraq (like Fisk, etc.), human shields, US diplomats and advisors who resigned (Ramsey Clark, etc.), UK minister who resigned, representatives of various communities and interest groups who have been adversely effected by the US policies of full spectrum dominance, pre-emptive warfare and support for brutal regimes (from Palestinians to Colombians and Venezuelans), people to testify to reveal the corporate interests/profits underlying the present policies, arms inspectors, people (preferably officials) to testify against the blackmail and bullying done by the US against other states (Turkish parliamentarians, Galloway, etc.), scientists on the effects of the weapons employed, testimonies singling out accomplices.... Visual material: photos, films, exhibitions revealing the extent of the carnage and destruction. Prosecutor Defense Site: a large conference hall. Open to public. Not like an official court procedure. Flexible and open to interventions. But in an acceptable and respectable manner that will be acknowledged by the world. Lively, interactive but very keen on objective evaluation, orderly and cool. The event in itself and the bare truth is so powerful in this case that there should be little room for demonstration. The session may last 3-4 days. It would be better to conclude it within this 3-4 days or one week. Peace Initiative of Turkey peaceturkey at ttnet.net.tr Direct contact for this International Tribunal proposal: ayseberktay at superonline.com From bar at idirect.com Sat May 24 16:14:30 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 18:14:30 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: Message-ID: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. But instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesnt she just read Marx herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third hand from those of us who have. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Waistline2 at aol.com To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2003 2:40 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Why does it matter how Marxism is understood? In a period of relative peaceful development and evolution of capital, Marxism is understood based on these conditions. Doctrine - the body of principles serving as the grid of communist activity in general preserves our revolutionary cutting edge under conditions when the ideological awareness of the working class as a class is weak and feeble and various forms of legal Marxism predominate. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2015 bytes Desc: not available URL: From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Sun May 25 00:20:50 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 07:20:50 +0100 Subject: [A-List] "School of Assassins" protesters imprisoned Message-ID: <001301c32285$ca0eace0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> sent to Seven_Stars_Republican_Socialist_News at yahoogroups.com Subject: Protestors against 'U.S. School of Assassins" Sentenced to Prison "SOA Watch" info at soaw.org> Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 2:48 PM Subject: Activists Sentenced to Prison Becky Johnson, Charity Ryerson and Jeremy John appeared before Judge Clay Land in Columbus Federal court yesterday to receive sentencing for their respective acts of civil resistance against the SOA/WHISC in July 2002 and November 2002. Jeremy appeared first after his and Charity's request to be sentenced together was denied. Jeremy stated that he was in court because he had violated a law by cutting the lock on the pedestrian gate at Ft. Benning and accepted responsibility for that; that laws are only valuable in the context of human relationships; and that as long as laws allow atrocities to continue, he will continue to violate them. Charity appeared next, speaking of her personal witness and experience of the cycle of violence in Northern Irelend; how the victimization and domination of people by institutionalized forms of violence such as the military only leads to more oppression; and that she accepts responsibility for her actions but has no remorse for taking them. Becky appeared last, briefly stating that she is a passionate person; she has no shame or remorse for her actions -- although she violated the law, it was not wrong to do so; and that she expected to get 6 months for her action. Judge Land sentenced Jeremy to 6 months in federal prison, $1000 fine and 1 year probation; Charity to 6 months in prison, $1000 fine and 1 year probation; and Becky to 6 months in prison and $1000 fine. Jeremy and Charity will self-report to federal prison when they receive their designations from the Bureau of Prisons. Becky started serving her sentencing immediately and is currently in the Muscogee County Jail. Her address is: Rebecca Johnson Muscogee County Jail 700 10th St. Columbus, GA 31901 Becky, Charity and Jeremy are joining hundereds who have been sentenced for actions to close the School of the Americas/WHISC. 40 Prisoners of Conscience are currently incarcerated in prisons across the United States, serving 2-6 month for nonviolently speaking out against SOA violence. Please write the prisoners. Click here for their addresses: http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=127 Thousands will again converge in November at the gates of Fort Benning, GA. La Lucha Sigue! Make travel plans now to come to Georgia and consider to engage in nonviolent direct action. If your phone company is Working Assets, please call them to nominate SOA Watch to receive Working Assets funding in 2004. You can call them at 1-800-362-7127. SOA Watch ~ PO Box 4566 ~ Washington DC 20017 ~ (202)234-3440 ~ www.soaw.org From franka at fiu.edu Sun May 25 07:10:10 2003 From: franka at fiu.edu (Andre Gunder Frank) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 09:10:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] Subscription Message-ID: Please suspend until further notice Andre Gunder Franks Subscription (s) due to his unexpected Hospitalization as of "" Immediately."" Per Gunders request. Thank you. Alison/Andre Gunder Frank. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ANDRE GUNDER FRANK Senior Fellow Residence World History Center One Longfellow Place Northeastern University Apt. 3411 270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114 USA Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 617-948 2315 Tel: 617 - 373 4060 Fax: 617-948 2316 Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/ e-mail:franka at fiu.edu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From evs at tri-isys.com Sun May 25 08:29:33 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 22:29:33 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: <000b01c320b8$cd1b5e20$700f38d2@k6n2c2> Message-ID: <007901c322ca$0fb0f7a0$45c44ccb@pentium> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tariq Mahmood" The Americanos in a Third World country, especially those who are yet living off the States Department enoy their vacaions the most. There are reportedly three US officials in the US consulate at Peshawar for whose security the street passing in their front is closed for common mortals of the town for the last so many years. ---------------------------------- It was a little of like that in the Philippines before the fall of the Iron Curtain (1986?). There was a housing unit called "Sea Front" that only Americans could live in. Fairly large area. The "militants" (associated with the revolutionary "red" movement: NDF, pariamentary; New People's Army, military; KMU, sympathetic labor organization) lobbed a pillbox or grenade in "Sea Front". After that, the walls were changed to a nicely designed, solid, see-through-fence. But, now, Americans rent condominiums or houses with no particular place or location. Mostly in Makati, the business district residential area, I suppose. end Commuters have to do extra two thousand yards of journeying for the couple of hundred yarsd that has been denied to them. A few years ago when thing less unsafe and the street had been opened for the locals, I passing along the cosulate wall counted 22 personnel belonging to four different departments guarding the three US nationals. The entrance on both side is blocked by concrete blocks each more tha a ton by weight. These pill boxes have been specially flown in from the States. Pakistani concrete cannot be relied upon. Against the said 22 outside many times more are inside the premises. And it is said the three Americans no more live there but still peole of Peshawar has to take a longer round. Other US institutions no more display any sign boards. They wish to remain anonymous so as not to attract any unwelcome guests yet they can be easily identified by the concertina of razor wire along the top of the 12 feet compound wall. Only yesterday the US sentries guarding the US embassy at Kabul fired by 'mistake' some Afghan soldiers who were unloading their truck closeby. Four Afghan soldiers of Karzai regime were killed and a few others injured. A Pakistan minister who at that time was inside the embassy was scared and remained confined inside the premises for some time. The US officials at that very moment were trying to convince the Pak visitor that the Kabul regime was in control of the dituation. Tariq ----- ----- "Sabri Oncu" wrote: > Michael: > > > It won't be long before these communities will require > > expensive security to keep the local hoi-polloi out, > > thereby diminishing the financial benefits to be had > > from such outsourcing. > > Speaking of which, gated communities in Turkey are a fact of > life, especially in bigger cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and > Ankara, where there are people who can afford to live in such > communities. Of course, these communities are guarded by private > security against the dispossessed and it happens that most of > these security guards are dispossesseds themselves. The sad news > is that most of the stealing at these gated communities are done > by the security guards. > > Put differently, Michael is right. His is not a prediction, it is > a fact. > > Some years ago, a friend of mine asked me to send him a piece by > Galeano that appeard in the Nation print edition. It was not > electronically available, so I typed it for him and kept a copy > in my archives. I am sending that piece to you too. > > Best, > > Sabri > > +++++++++++ > > Capitalist Realism > > Eduardo Galeano > > The punishment of Tantalus is the fate that torments the poor. > Condemned to hunger and thirst, they are condemned as to > contemplate the delights dangled before them by advertising. As > they crane their necks and reach out, those marvels are snatched > away. And if they manage to catch one and hold on tight, they end > up in jail or the cemetery. > > Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all > and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and > people are less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the > means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, > television watches you. > > Wild Blue > > The sky never grows cloudy; here it never rains. On this sea no > one ever drowns; this beach is free of theft. There are no > stinging jellyfish, no spiny urchins, no bothersome mosquitoes. > The air and the water, climatized at a temperature that never > varies, keep colds and flues at bay. The dirty depths of the port > are envious of these transparent waters; this immaculate > air mocks the poison that people in the city must breathe. > > The ticket doesn't cost much, thirty dollars a person, although > you pay extra for chairs and umbrellas. On the internet, it says: > "Your children will hate you if don't take them... " Wild Blue, > the Yokohama beach encased in glass, is a masterpiece of Japanese > industry. The waves are as high as the motors make them. The > electronic sun rises and falls when the company wishes, and the > clientele is offered astonishing tropical sun rises and rosy > sunsets behind swaying palms. > > "It is artificial," says one visitor. "That is why we like it." > > A Martyr > > In the fall of 1998, in the center of Buenos Aires, a distracted > pedestrian got flattened by a city bus. The victim was crossing > the street while talking on a cell phone. While talking? While > pretending to talk: The phone was a toy. > > The Great Day > > They live off garbage amid garbage eating garbage in garbage > houses. But once a year, the garbage collectors of Managua star > in the show that draws the country' s largest crowds. "The > Ben-Hur Races" were the inspiration of a businessman who came > back from Miami to do his part for the "Americanization of > Nicaragua." > > Riding their garbage carts, fists in the air, Managua' s garbage > collectors salute the president of the country, the ambassador of > the United States, and other dignitaries who grace the dais of > honor. Over their everyday rags, the competitors wear broad > colorful capes, and on their heads sit the plumed helmets of > Roman warriors. Their dilapidated carts are freshly > painted, the better to display the names of their sponsors. The > skinny horses, covered with open sores like their owners and > punished like their owners, are corsairs that fly to finish line > for the sake of glory, or at least a case of soda. > > Trumpets blare. The starting flag drops, and they' re off. Whips > beat down on the bony haunches of the sorry nags, while the > delirious crowd cheers: "Co-ca-Co-la! Co-ca-Co-la!" > > By the Grace of God > > At the end of 1993, I attended the funeral of a beautiful trade > school that had existed for three years in Santiago, Chile. The > students came from the poor slums of the city, kids condemned to > be delinquents, beggars or whores. The school taught them trades > like ironwork, carpentry and gardening; above all, it taught them > to love themselves and to love what they were > doing. For the first time they heard people say that they were worth something and that doing what they were learning to do was worth something. The school depended on foreign financing. When the money ran out the teachers turned to the government. They went to the ministry and got nothing. They went to city hall and the mayor suggested, "Turn it into a business." From evs at tri-isys.com Sun May 25 08:39:43 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 22:39:43 +0800 Subject: [A-List] ABC news on Abu Sayyaf - Al Qaeda References: Message-ID: <008501c322cb$7bbd12c0$45c44ccb@pentium> Sabri, I knew I'd get a reaction like that so I suggested that a google search using "sayyaf qaeda" as the serach term. There are at least a hundred links. Here's one: http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=740 You choose what you want to give credibility to. But, I believe it. Gary ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sabri Oncu" To: "ALIST" Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 11:58 AM Subject: [A-List] ABC news on Abu Sayyaf - Al Qaeda Hi Gary, Let me put it in a language that I am most comfortable with. When I read such sources, I am well aware of the fact that the information I get is quite noisy. I have no problems with using such information sources since signals from such sources also have information content. Using such signals to update my subjective probability distributions about the world affairs is fine since I can use these signals in such a way that signals from such sources have small effects on my expectations. Now, this ABC is a very noisy source of information. Do you have any other information from a less noisy source that you can share with us? Sabri From evs at tri-isys.com Sun May 25 08:45:18 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 22:45:18 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: Message-ID: <00a001c322cc$430cf020$45c44ccb@pentium> Thanks, Michael, it does give one another analytical framework. And, on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, I sent an earlier post. Gary Question, Michael, what is marxist ideology in this day and age? ----- Answer, Marxism is a vital tool to the understanding of actually existing capitalism. Marxist ideology is what Marxists and others use when formulating answers to specific questions of what is to be done. Michael From evs at tri-isys.com Sun May 25 09:03:07 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 23:03:07 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Third World Medicare References: <002f01c3214f$d5f76880$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <00b101c322ce$c2294dc0$45c44ccb@pentium> Thank you, all, for the answers. I can appreciate your use of the thinking. Sherry, I see no problem with: "capitalism is one state in a cycle of human society". The future will tell if that is true. Society is evolving, for sure. And, human philosophy has always set the direction. I know that. But, to say that Marx is right (and, this is separate from using Marxism as an analytical tool) in his predictions is another thing. Time will tell. And, for me, the production problem has to be solved first and I don't think we are near that. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2003 1:22 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Third World Medicare ----- Original Message ----- Gary writes: Question, Michael, what is marxist ideology in this day and age? ----- If I may intrude: Marxism is the best tool for seeing the parts as a greater whole, and also a tool for analysing class society, particularly under capitalism. Considering that we have not seen this much "capitalism" since 1916, I would venture that Marxism remains depressingly indispensible and vital to any understanding of the world today. Macdonald From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun May 25 09:29:22 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 11:29:22 EDT Subject: [A-List] Empire Message-ID: <31.390cf5c1.2c023b52@aol.com> RALLY, COMRADES!: THE NEW AMERICAN EMPIRE By Nelson Peery The American people are awakening from their political slumber. The deepening economic crisis and the growing threat of world war is cracking the ice and we again see the possibility of widespread revolutionary work amongst the masses. The tactical contradiction re-surfaces: Should the revolutionaries simply "fan the flames of social discontent?" Or should they adhere to a "line of march?" Too often, "fanning the flames" means to zero in on the social or political targets that are visible and easily understood by the masses. While it is easy to mobilize large numbers with such agitation, they conclude that the problem is with a few individuals rather than with a system. For example, any examination will show that the political tendencies followed by the government today are historical and did not originate with George W. Bush. At the same time, it is clear that the character of the people leading the administration is such that they could not pass up the opportunity to transform the plan for American world hegemony over globalization into a plan for Empire. Modern Empire is not concerned with direct colonies for primary exploitation. Its goal is undisputed world domination. While world hegemony would rest on mutually beneficial alliances with other countries, the imperial state stands alone and above all. The tendency toward Empire has risen and retreated over the past 30 years. Not only is the political situation favorable to those espousing Empire, the leading personalities of the government are committed to it. It is important to understand that they are not a gang of opportunists. They are ideologues who somehow believe they are on a divine mission of Empire. Bush, a determined born again Christian, is strengthened by a circle of Christian fundamentalists and Zionists who in turn are strengthened by a whole body of pro-fascist think tanks, a super-rich gang of lobbyists and the reactionary wing of the Southern Christian church. A major aspect of this belief is that Greater Israel must become a reality by taking over all of Palestine and reducing the Arab states to the level of vassals. Not only has preparation for and the onslaught of war provided a cover for the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians, but Israel's "protective fence" has been moved another 50 miles into Palestinian land with the purpose of moving in another 40,000 Israeli settlers. All this is taking place within the context of globalization. We would be wrong if we didn't see that globalization is absolutely tied to the new economy and the new economy cannot exist without it. The economic motion is toward globalization, but the political motion today is toward Empire. The two things are not incompatible. Globalization can take place under a political system of allies and equal states or it can take place under vassal states, such as with Empire. We should not think categorically, saying either globalization or national interests or Empire. These things are all dialectically intertwined into one thing. It's impossible to pull out just one thread; they are entangled and interdependent upon one another. We have to visualize all these tendencies as part of the same process, all existing alongside, clashing, intertwining and developing with one another. As an individual, President Bill Clinton visualized an America as top dog in the world, but not Empire. He saw the harmful economic consequences of that path. But the drive toward Empire is always there. In that sense, it's objective. With the destruction of the Soviet Union, the main blocks to American Empire were removed and these forces were released. It might not have happened today, or around Iraq. It might have been another 10 years of slowly loosening ties and slowly developing competition between the different areas of the world. Bush, however, has accelerated everything. If he's crazy, he's crazy along the line of march of history. The move toward Empire demands that the U.S. deals with two major sources of resistance: China and the European Union (EU). On the one hand, China is rising like a giant with 7-8 percent per year economic growth and they are talking about increasing their workforce by a billion people in the next 10 years. They have to have a reliable source of energy for their industrial development. To achieve this, China has always courted the Muslim areas and population. Western China is part of the Middle East. China as a nation has strong ties to this area, not only in religion but in trade and culture. The U.S. has to stop China. The other source of resistance is the rise of the EU. The U.S. recognizes that if the EU should really get together, it can out-produce and out-fight the U.S. Yet Europe has no oil. To strangle Europe and China, Bush has to get hold of the oil resources. The Bush gang thinks if they can gain control of Saudi oil and Iraqi oil -- which represent two-thirds of the world's oil resources -- they will have effective control over the rate of development of China and Europe. This is the reason Bush is taking the militant stand of "We fought this war and we're going to rebuild Iraq." Rebuilding Iraq means controlling their oil and putting the U.S. in the position to control everyone else's. Under the tremendous pressure this generates in Europe, we're beginning to see fissures and divisions between the U.S. and Great Britain. Of course the British agree with the U.S., but Europe is much more a market for Britain than the U.S. The U.S. is a great source of loans and investment, but Great Britain can't do anything without the European market. The other piece is that oil reserves equal to Saudi Arabia and Iraq are in the Caspian Basin. During the Soviet Union era, large historically evolved groups were treated as nations and small groups of people who spoke a separate language or had a separate history were designated autonomous areas. Most of the Soviet investment went into building up these backward, mostly Muslim nations and areas rather than Russia proper. The result is well- educated and well-organized republics such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan among others. These countries are sitting on top of or in close proximity to Caspian Basin oil. When the U.S. talks in terms of blocking the oil in the Middle East, immediately France, China and Germany think in terms of the Caspian Basin. Russia has been saying some very harsh things about the U.S. Vladimir Putin is not a lackey of the U.S. He's a lackey of the Russian bourgeoisie. Right now the Russian bourgeoisie is in trouble. They've lost billions of dollars in oil and industrial contracts with Iraq. Iraq doesn't border the old Soviet Union, but Iran does and Iran is right next to Iraq. The Russians have influence in this area as well as Central Asia and have traded there over the last thousand years. The U.S. is a newcomer. After the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States moved to establish its strength in the Caspian area. They practically bought up Georgia, a key Caspian country. Tiblis is the main oil exporting area for Russia, but it's in Georgia. The head of the Georgian government is bitterly anti-Russian and very pro-U.S. The whole war in Chechnya is nothing more than a reflection of this. The Russians are rapidly trying to resolve this problem. This is the meaning of the Chechnya struggle. The Russians still have to deal with the problem of the U.S.-influenced governments of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, among others in that area. We should not forget also that Afghanistan borders on all this area too and the U.S. has a large number of troops stationed there. Just as the U.S. knows how to conduct coups around the world whenever they need to, the Russians know how to conduct coups when they need to as well. When bad goes to worse they'll do whatever is necessary because they are fighting for their national existence. We should look to see a wave of coups and civil wars around the Caspian area. The question is will the U.S. allow the overthrow of these pro- American governments, and the installation of pro-Russian governments, allowing the balance of oil to shift toward China, Russia, Germany and France? This would probably means war. Proxy war to begin with, but eventually war between the big nations. Will this happen overnight? No. We're talking in terms of a long period of time. A very serious situation is developing around the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caspian Basin area. It is the main aspect of international motion. The reality is that irreversible polarization has begun. By polarization we mean the breaking of the monolithic character of a process, and struggle becoming the dominant relationship. Ever since the end of WWII, there have been all kinds of contradictory processes going on between the U.S. and the rest of the world. There was ideological polarization between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was not an economic polarization. Trade continued between the USSR and the West. They were tied together with a hundred economic and historic threads. Their differences were ideological -- either socialism or private property. But they were not polarized economically. They came close to it several times, but it never really happened. The polarization developing today isn't ideological. These countries are all capitalist. Now, the tendency at least, is toward economic polarization and therefore the situation is very dangerous. Under these conditions old alliances are coming apart and new ones are taking their place. This is not a matter of crazy man Bush wrecking all the alliances that have made the U.S. strong. The Bush Administration doesn't want those alliances anymore. Empire doesn't deal with allies, Empire deals with vassal states. They don't want to be encumbered by alliances with anybody. They are not foolish. They are after something. When they break the alliances between the U.S., France and Germany and sour the good will with China -- it's for a purpose. The headlong drive toward Empire was first met by strengthening the resistance of the various nations. National resistance wasn't strong enough. As the goals of the American offensive have become clear, potentially powerful regional blocs are coming about. There is the inevitable antithesis. There is no question that the Iraqi war has accelerated this process of Russia, Germany, Belgium France and China getting together. Right now they are all saying, "This is not an anti-American discussion, we love America, we're grateful to America," but they are getting themselves together. Bush and his gang are openly saying the next invasion will be Iran. There is a lot of saber rattling going on about Syria. In the main, this is pushed by the Zionists, since Syria is the only remaining strong enemy of Israel. But Bush's "axis of evil" or their imperial line of march hardly includes Syria. Economically weak, militarily and politically isolated, Syria is bound to give in to a combination of threats and bribes. The Empire builders are worried about North Korea. North Korea probably has rockets that can reach the U.S. with nuclear bombs. The North Korean pledge of total war if attacked is not to be taken lightly. It certainly has the ability to do terrible damage to South Korea and Japan if war should come. More importantly, China fully understands that the U.S. is attempting to surround her with military might. It is doubtful that China could remain neutral if North Korea is invaded. Under such delicate and dangerous conditions, what are the tasks of the revolutionaries? While doing their mass work, they must tirelessly point out the material economic basis for the struggles going on throughout the world. They must constantly bring forth an understanding that the horrors of today are the pain of a new world in birth. It is either going to be the capitalists' world or ours. Such propaganda needs facts and analysis, not ideological arguments. While there is still time, the comrades must consciously practice and develop their skills by greater participation in the growing social response. [Nelson Peery is available to speak through Speakers for a New America. Call 1-800-691-6888 or email speakers at lrna.org.] From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun May 25 06:53:36 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 08:53:36 EDT Subject: [A-List] Marxism Message-ID: >This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. But instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesn't she just read Marx herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third hand from those of us who have. < Chris Marx himself also gives an overview of his method - not doctrine of the class struggle, in "After word to The Second German Edition of the First Volume of Capital." An interesting article by Lenin called "Marxism and Insurrection" - September 1917, was inadvertently left out. Here Lenin discuss in detail the question of the art of insurrection and "revolutionary sweep," by pinpointing the cardinal features of a revolutionary crisis. How does one know they are experiencing a revolutionary crisis? The attempt was to pinpoint the source material and dates in which this material was written as an aid to anyone pursuing a study or inquiry into Marxism as science, doctrine of the class struggle and the art of insurrection. I of course had no idea concerning how to approach this question and others without a somewhat serious study of the historical writings. I have no recollection of the question of what constitutes the body of Marxism ever being discussed from the particular standpoint I used, which is why a generous amount of source material and direct quotes was presented. Each generation of communist/Marxist reshapes - not change, the basic underlying threads of the approach used by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels as well as the doctrine - in the language of their generation, through taking into account the historical development of Marxism. Rather than interpret Marxism my approach was to present the time frame and conditions under which my individual understanding of Marxism was shaped, present published documents and conclusion of the organizations in which I was involved and how conclusions concerning doctrine were arrived at. The Internet makes this task infinitely easier today. Peace Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2159 bytes Desc: not available URL: From evs at tri-isys.com Sun May 25 11:56:02 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 01:56:02 +0800 Subject: [A-List] On Marxism Message-ID: <000901c322e6$eb04f920$79c44ccb@pentium> Thanks. Gary "Rather than interpret Marxism my approach was to present the time frame and conditions under which my individual understanding of Marxism was shaped, present published documents and conclusion of the organizations in which I was involved and how conclusions concerning doctrine were arrived at. The Internet makes this task infinitely easier today. " --------------------------------- From soncu at pacbell.net Sun May 25 14:02:31 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 13:02:31 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: Subscription Message-ID: > Please suspend until further notice Andre Gunder > Franks Subscription (s) due to his unexpected Hospitalization > as of "" Immediately."" Per Gunders request. > Thank you. > Alison/Andre Gunder Frank. I did. Please keep us informed of his condition and convey him our hope that he gets well soon. Best, Sabri Oncu From hliu at mindspring.com Sun May 25 22:03:02 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 00:03:02 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool Message-ID: <3ED191F6.5040007@mindspring.com> Irving Kristol said a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. He should have finished his sentence: "and has been able to think straight since." Henry C.K. Liu The Analyst Strategy guru Albert Wohlstetter spent decades arguing for military flexibility and precision targeting. But have his Washington disciples learned his real lessons? By Neil Swidey, 5/18/2003 IN 1959, RICHARD PERLE was just another California high-school kid struggling to pass Spanish. But even then, the future Pentagon adviser and TV pundit was gripped by subjects far weightier than the next sock hop. Albert Wohlstetter, a classmate's father, had written an article in Foreign Affairs entitled ''The Delicate Balance of Terror,'' and Perle found it riveting. When they met poolside at the Wohlstetter family home in the Hollywood Hills, Perle says he was dazzled by the older man's ''uncontrollably analytical'' mind. ''Maybe if I hadn't been seduced by the discussion about strategic policy, I might have passed Spanish,'' he says. Though his name is not well known, Albert Wohlstetter was one of the great defense intellectuals of the 20th century. A systems analyst with a background in mathematics, he spent his career studying the intricate logic of using military force, and training his disciples to do the same. Many of those acolytes now hold considerable sway within the Bush administration. Foremost among them is Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and chief architect of current Pentagon policy in the Middle East, who studied under Wohlstetter while earning his doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. (''Paul thinks the way Albert thinks,'' says Perle.) Other former Wohlstetter students include Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration's special envoy to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Paul Kozemchak, an official with DARPA, the Defense Department office charged with ''radical innovation.'' A host of other notables, ranging from Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi to the high-tech weaponry guru and longtime Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall, traveled in Wohlstetter's circles. Of course, the people shaping administration policy aren't dusting off their old grad-school seminar notebooks before making decisions. But it is clear enough that Wohlstetter, who died in 1997, taught his disciples a great deal. His legacy can be seen in the precision-targeted yet muscular prosecution of the war in Iraq, and the specialized weaponry and information technology that made it possible. ''This is the first war that's been fought in a way that would recognize Albert's vision for future wars,'' Perle says. ''That it was won so quickly and decisively, with so few casualties and so little damage, was in fact an implementation of his strategy and his vision.'' At the height of the Cold War, Wohlstetter rejected the prevailing wisdom of the nuclear priesthood. He did not believe that the threat of massive retaliation would necessarily deter attack, or that a nation's security was proportional to the number of megatons in its arsenal. Because he presumed the enemy could and would use its weapons, he concentrated on designing options for leaders who might find it prudent to use force themselves. He pushed aggressively for the development of nimble military units and high-precision weaponry, so that problems could be neutralized quickly and surgically-either by credible threat or actual attack- before they got out of control. While he devoted most of his career to overcoming a Soviet threat that no longer exists, he spent his last years developing arguments that appear to have directly influenced the Bush administration's view of the post-Cold War world. He rejected the United Nations as a reliable vehicle for reining in rogue states and was suspicious of arms controls treaties like the 1972 ABM treaty that Bush withdrew from last year. In a 1995 Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, he insisted on calculating the price of inaction when faced with dangerous tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. ''The increasing spread of genocidal terror can be discouraged or dealt with only by coalitions that exclude the perpetrators of genocide and their supporters and are equipped and willing to back coalition diplomacy with precise and discriminate force,'' he wrote. FOR A MAN OBSESSED with analyzing how the world might end, the Manhattan-born Wohlstetter sure knew how to live. A famous epicure, he became legendary for ambling his way to overseas strategic conferences so that he got the chance to dine at as many three-star restaurants as possible. Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta-a noted analyst herself and author of a classic study on the failure of US intelligence to anticipate Pearl Harbor-met as law school students at Columbia in the mid-1930s. They were both studying law to please their parents. That didn't last long, but their partnership over the years produced brilliant analysis and dazzling dinner parties featuring experimental ethnic cuisine, live jazz or chamber music, and guest lists ranging from poets to engineers. (Albert originally went to college on a modern-dance scholarship, according to his daughter Joan, who recalls that growing up she would often come home to hear music playing and find her parents ''doing the mambo or pasa doble around the house.'') In the 1950s, Albert and Roberta emerged as two of the brightest stars at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica during the think tank's heyday. But mastery of other matters eluded them. Perle says Wohlstetter's brother used to tell the story of a dinner party Albert and Roberta held after moving into a new apartment in New York City. The food and wine were out of this world. They just failed to notice that they didn't have any chairs. But when he was analyzing a strategic problem, nothing escaped Wohlstetter's attention. In the early `50s, RAND gave Wohlstetter the ho-hum assignment of analyzing the location of Strategic Air Command bomber bases. He began with the common-sense view that we would want to have bases as close as possible to Soviet territory. Then he scoured for data on every conceivable factor-length of supply lines; costs of construction, training, and maintenance; vulnerability to local political instability; ability to respond to surprise attacks. Once he'd processed the data, he came to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the US military was often better off relying on long-range missiles launched from bases inside the United States. His work eventually led to the withdrawal of SAC bombers from overseas and the development of the ''fail-safe'' concept, under which bombers are automatically launched when there is any warning of an enemy attack but can easily be called back. By the late `50s, Wohlstetter had devised the equally groundbreaking concept of ''second-strike deterrence.'' At the time, most people were concerned with amassing more and bigger weapons, but Wohlstetter argued that what really matters is what's left after you've been attacked-what you can muster for a second strike. Before Wohlstetter, few people paid much attention to cement, shelters, and hardened silos. ''In the `50s, people were pushing to acquire 10,000 Minuteman missiles,'' says Henry Sokolski, a former Wohlstetter student who now runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. ''Albert pointed out: What's the use if they're all going to be in parking lot and get wiped out. Doesn't it make more sense to get 1,000 and put them in the ground?'' By the 1960s, his work had attracted the attention of members of the Kennedy administration, whom he advised during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In `64, Wohlstetter left his full-time work at RAND to join the political science department of the University of Chicago, where he remained until he retired from teaching in 1980. Over the years, he advised Democratic and Republican administrations alike. To his displeasure, he found that his second-strike theories were used by other policy makers to justify a theory he disagreed with strenuously: Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. This concept held that as long as the United States could guarantee a second strike that would wipe out huge civilian population centers, the Soviets would not launch a nuclear attack. Wohlstetter thought the logic was unsound and needlessly put millions of lives at risk. What about a war begun accidentally, or a conventional Soviet attack on a US ally? Who's to say the Soviets would factor the worth of civilian lives into strategic decisions? Besides, will enemies always act rationally? Instead, Wohlstetter argued the focus should be on building the most accurate weapons possible, both nuclear and conventional. It's hard to imagine now, but in the 1970s the dominant view was that increasing the accuracy of nuclear weapons would only make nuclear war more likely. Wohlstetter railed against this thinking, insisting it was better to target Soviet weapons rather than Soviet civilians, and arguing that decision makers needed to be able to respond to regional conflicts with non-suicidal options. In the age of detente, Wohlstetter often found himself derided as an implacable hawk. Colleagues say Wohlstetter's ego sustained him just fine through this period. (''He was almost totally consumed with himself-very narcissistic,'' says Leonard Binder, a fellow professor at the University of Chicago who now teaches at UCLA.) By the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and prot?g?s like Perle and Wolfowitz serving in the administration, Wohlstetter's views gained new traction. In 1985, Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter each received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Wohlstetter began to focus on the new dangers facing the remaining superpower. He was particularly concerned with the Persian Gulf, having led a Defense Department study in the 1970s showing that the Pentagon had overestimated American military access to the region and undervalued its strategic import. Following the Gulf War, he lambasted the first Bush administration for allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It was a view shared by Wolfowitz and Perle, among others. Wohlstetter also called on the United States to aid Iraqi dissidents aiming to overthrow Hussein, allying himself closely with Ahmed Chalabi. (Perle, now a leading supporter of Chalabi's bid to lead the new Iraq, says Wohlstetter introduced him to the Iraqi exile.) And Wohlstetter became obsessed with the ethnic cleansing going on in Bosnia, hammering Western leaders for preventing the victims from arming themselves. For him, Iraq and Bosnia were closely linked, and emblematic of the dangers confronting a post-Cold War America. In the 1995 Wall Street Journal piece, he wrote: ''The successful coalition in the Gulf War stopped too soon and... left in place a Ba'ath dictatorship nearly sure to revive its programs for getting weapons of mass terror that would menace its neighbors and some countries far beyond them. That told Slobodan Milosevic, who is not a slow learner, that the West would be even less likely, four months later, to stop his own overt use of the Yugoslav Federal Army to create a Greater Serbia purged of non-Serbs.'' ''A lot of his work has been enormously vindicated in the last year and a half,'' says the Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert L. Bartley, a longtime friend. Still, he stresses that Wohlstetter was not a neoconservative, since his true loyalty was to rigorous analysis, not fixed political doctrines. Some even question how closely Wohlstetter's most influential disciples paid attention to his lessons. ''Many of the people who populate this administration are Albert's intellectual children, but I'm not sure the father would approve of the great risk they're taking,'' says Augustus Richard Norton, a former Wohlstetter student and current Middle East scholar at Boston University. Norton suggests that the case being made by some in the administration that democracy will spread from Iraq throughout the Middle East ''like an influenza'' shows none of Wohlstetter's emphasis on weighing measurable factors, such as the socioeconomic preconditions for democracy. ''I must say that a number of the people who have been speaking publicly about what it is we will accomplish, and what the logical connections are, probably would have gotten F's from Albert,'' Norton says. ''There's a lot of very flaky thinking out there.'' Perle concedes that prot?g?s like Wolfowitz are too busy to undertake the kind of intensive, multifactor analysis that Wohlstetter perfected. Asked who is filling that vacuum, Perle says, ''You don't see much of it right now, I'm sorry to say.'' Still, he says, Wohlstetter ''would think the administration broadly has it right.'' Charles Wolf Jr., who worked with Wohlstetter during his days at Rand and is still plugging away there on a study of North Korea, agrees that Wohlstetter would have much to contribute to the analysis of today's international crises. In fact, he says, ''I would welcome Albert's resurrection.'' Neil Swidey is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine. He can be reached at swidey at globe.com . This story ran on page H1 of the Boston Globe on 5/18/2003. ? Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. Transcript for: Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative Ben Wattenberg: Hello. Richard Perle, the infamous and famous Richard Perle, thank you for joining us on Think Tank. Richard Perle: It's a pleasure to be with you Ben. Ben Wattenberg: Well, why don't we pick up the Perle story at that swimming pool. Whose swimming pool was it and what were you doing there? Richard Perle: It was Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills. Albert's daughter, Joan, was a classmate at Hollywood High School. We sat next to each other in Spanish class. She passed, I didn't, but she invited me over for a swim and her dad was there. We got into a conversation about strategy, a subject I really didn't know much about. Albert gave me an article to read, that was typical of Albert. Sitting there at the swimming pool I read the article which was a brilliant piece of exposition and obviously so. We started talking about it and... Ben Wattenberg: About nuclear weapons and that kind of stuff? Richard Perle: It was the called the "Delicate Balance of Terror." It became quite a famous article in foreign affairs, and it was a way of looking at the strategic relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and the product of the serious piece of research that he had done as the director of the Research Council at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. Ben Wattenberg: And Albert Wohlstetter is regarded by some as sort of the grandfather of this hawkish mode of looking at things in America? Is that right? Richard Perle: Well, it happens that a number of people who like to regard themselves as prot?g?s of Albert's can probably be described as hawks, but it isn't so much that Albert was a hawk, it's that Albert was extraordinarily rigorous. For Albert, it was just impermissible to assume anything. You had to run down every fact, every proposition. He was a mathematical logician by training. Ben Wattenberg: Who were some of his prot?g?s? Richard Perle: Well, Paul Wolfowitz was one. Ben Wattenberg: Who's now Deputy Defense Secretary. Richard Perle: Yes. Paul was his student in his doctoral thesis under Albert, and Paul Kezemchek who's now at Dartmouth. But almost everyone who got to know Albert became his student formally or informally. Bob Barkley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal was a great admirer of Albert's and learned a lot from him. You couldn't help but learn from Albert because he was teaching all the time. And what he taught us to do was think hard about difficult issues, and if several of us wound up hawks, we'd like to think it's because that's the product of thinking hard about the dilemmas that a difficult world poses, particularly for policy makers in democratic societies. Ben Wattenberg: And then you ended up with Scoop Jackson? How did that happen? Senator Jackson, my hero, your hero, our hero, who really embodied hawkishness? Richard Perle: In a good cause always. Ben Wattenberg: Right. Richard Perle: It was a complete accident although it traces back. Albert Wohlstetter phoned me one day. I was still a graduate student at Princeton doing some research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he said, could you come to Washington for a few days and interview some people and draft a report on the current debate shaping up in the Senate over ballistic missile defense, which was a hot issue in the Nineteen Sixty-nine debate. This was in Nineteen Sixty-nine. And he said, I've asked somebody else to do this too, and maybe the two of you could work together. The someone else was Paul Wolfowitz. So Paul and I came to Washington as volunteers for a few days, to interview people, and one of the people we interviewed was Scoop Jackson and it was love at first sight. I will never forget that first encounter with Scoop. Here we were a couple of graduate students, sitting on the floor in Scoop's office in the Senate, reviewing charts and analyses of the ballistic missile defense and getting his views on the subject. Before I went back up to Cambridge, Scoop said, you know, you're never... Ben Wattenberg: To Cambridge or to Princeton? Richard Perle: To Cambridge, well I was living in Cambridge... Ben Wattenberg: Oh, I see. Richard Perle: ...while working on my thesis from Princeton. Scoop said, you're never really gonna understand how these governments work until you have some direct experience, so why don't you come and work for me for a year and you can work on your thesis in your spare time. But there was never any spare time working for Scoop, and I was there for eleven years. Ben Wattenberg: You became very involved in his sort of signature legislation, the Jackson-Vanek Bill, which was the human rights side of his toughness. Could you explain that? It involves the Soviet Union, which is now Russia, and where we stand on that now? Richard Perle: It all started in the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-two, when the Soviet Regime imposed a prohibitive tax on immigration. It affected principally Jewish immigration, but it was aimed at all immigrants, and the tax was so high that nobody could afford to pay it, and it looked as though they were about to close the door on the trickle of immigration that had been permitted, and Scoop looked around for some way to counter this. At about that time, Richard Nixon had proposed a new trading arrangement with the Soviet Union in which, among other things, the Soviets would be accorded what used to be called "Most Favored Nation Status." That is to say their products would be treated as well as the products of our closest friends and allies. Ben Wattenberg: And most every country has most favored nation status? Richard Perle: Most countries did, but very few Communist countries. In fact, at that point non at all. So Scoop got behind the idea of an amendment, which I had the privilege of actually drafting, that said to the Soviet Union if you want most favored nation status, you have to let people immigrate. Scoop believed that immigration was in some ways the most powerful of all the human rights because if people could vote with their feet, governments would have to acknowledge that and governments would have to make for their citizens a life that would keep them there. If you can imprison people you can do anything, but if people have the right to leave, you'd have to create a decent society, so that was the seminal human right for Scoop. And this legislation which ultimately passed, well, it was the first time I think in history that the United States or any other country had made its trading relationship contingent upon adherence to a fundamental human right. Ben Wattenberg: I mean, it made human rights into a player in the international arena, not just sort of a do-good cause? Richard Perle: That's right. It put teeth into the idea of human rights and it was a tremendous inspiration to those who were fighting for human rights in the Soviet Union. Andre Sakharov, who wrote an open letter in support of it, Natan Sharansky, who now is Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, then a human rights activist and ultimately sentenced to jail in part for his role in supporting Jackson-Vanek. They were all enormously encouraged by the fact that the United States was not only giving verbal support to the demand for human rights but was actually encumbering important interests in order to achieve that. Ben Wattenberg: The other side of the coin was to be strong militarily and that got involved in all the arguments between Scoop Jackson's office and the Senate and versus the White House about how those SALT Treaties, which stands for it, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Right? You've had to educate me on this over the years but in a nutshell, what was the argument? Richard Perle: The argument was that the idea of legislating a military relationship by Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, that it was a pretty doubtful proposition. The Soviets were building up their military forces. It was the only thing they were any good at it, and about a third of their GDP was being poured into the military. We never spent more than six percent of GDP, so it was huge massive investment, and indeed, the militarization in the Soviet economy contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Scoop was very skeptical about the idea that you could talk the Soviets into a set of arrangements that would restrain their appetite for military power, and so he set a very high standard. The only agreements he was prepared to support were ones that had a demonstrable effect on the military balance. We now know by the way, I mean, one of the benefits of the end of the Cold War is we can talk to people who were on the other side at one time. We now know that those agreements have virtually no effect on Soviet Military programs, and indeed, we know that they had twenty thousand more nuclear weapons than we ever attributed to them, and the number that they managed to keep concealed through the whole of the Cold War was larger by far than the total number that was ever brought under the terms of an arms control agreement. So Scoop's skepticism was, in fact, right. Ben Wattenberg: Now, Scoop was surrounded by people who then and certainly now are called neoconservatives. It's become a fashionable word now thanks to you and your colleagues because you're all categorized that way. How did that come into your life, that whole school of thought? Richard Perle: Well, I think the term has something to do with the sense that those of us who are now called neo-conservatives were at one time liberals, and in this... Ben Wattenberg: Richard Perle: Right. And I think that's a fair description, and I suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school and a little bit into college. But reality and rigor are important tonics, and if you got into the world of international affairs and you looked with some rigor at what was going on in the world, it was really hard to be liberal and na?ve. Ben Wattenberg: And you keep coming back to this word "rigor", that you have to do this careful analysis of who's strong, who's not strong, how do you go about that, and for that generation the great lesson was Munich and the appeasement of Hitler? Is that about right? Richard Perle: The inter-war period, the period between World Wars One and Two, were categorized by a complete absence of rigor and will. Analytical rigor was wholly lacking because the evidence was there. We saw, or some people saw anyway the steady buildup of Nazi military power and that... Ben Wattenberg: Churchill for one. Richard Perle: Churchill saw it and there were some civil servants in the ministry of defense and the admiralty who were feeding him information. It was there if you wanted to see it and understand it, and it could be explained away if you didn't. But the explaining away required a suspension of healthy skepticism and so the value of that skepticism or rigor is that it forces you to look at the facts as they are. Anyone who looked at the facts in Nineteen Thirty-six knew what was coming or could at least see that the balance of power was in the process of shifting from one in which the democracies could expect to contain this growing totalitarian threat in Nazi Germany to a balance in which they couldn't. Ben Wattenberg: Richard, you are Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. What is that? Richard Perle: It's a group of volunteer civilians who advise the Secretary of Defense. It now includes a pretty illustrious list of people, Henry Kissinger, James Slessinger, Harold Brown, Tom Foley and Newt Gingrich, two former Speakers. These are wise men with deep experience who come together half a dozen times a year for extensive briefings, discussions, meetings, and advice for the Secretary of Defense. Ben Wattenberg: And does the Board itself put out dicta? I mean, does it say, this is what we believe? Richard Perle: No, no. But the term "board" is a little misleading. It sounds like a zoning board that either gives you or doesn't give you a permit. The Board doesn't take corporate views. It's simply a means by which the Secretary of Defense can come together with a group of people who have interesting things to say and they, in turn, can look into what's going on in the Defense Department and give him advice, but there are no votes or anything like that. Ben: And in your case because you are the Chairman and because you are well-known in this whole argument, people impute to that role that you are a part of the Bush Administration. That is not correct? Richard: No. I'm completely independent of the Administration. I think that prefer it that way. Ben Wattenberg: Does Secretary Rumsfeld sometimes get a little agitated that you say things that they aren't necessarily ready to say and it says Chairman of the Defense Policy Board and it sounds as if it's linked? Richard Perle: Yes. I go to great lengths to discourage people from identifying me as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, because it does confuse people and from time to time I say something that people wish I hadn't said. In fact, I sometimes say things that I wish I didn't say. Ben Wattenberg: Right. And do they put some heat on you then? Richard Perle: Oh, there have been a couple of times when it was brought to my attention. Ben Wattenberg: You were calling attention to the Iraqi Regime under Saddam long before the Kuwait War. Is that right? Richard Perle: Oh, long before. I was actually rather uncomfortable with the support that we gave Saddam during the war between Iraq and Iran... Ben Wattenberg: Which we did sort of for geo-political balance? Richard Perle: Yes, the view was that the mullahs in Tehran were worst than the tyrant in Baghdad, and I understand that argument. I don't agree with it, but even for those who accepted that view, the right course immediately after the end of that war would have been to say to Saddam, now we've had enough of you too, and we're not gonna to tolerate it. Ben Wattenberg: And we didn't do that? Richard Perle: No, we didn't do that, and the indulgence of Saddam led to the invasion of Kuwait. Ben Wattenberg: Well, people say...they say two things. What are they gonna do to us and why now? Richard Perle: Well, why now, because we're late. We should have done it a long time ago. We should never have allowed the inspectors to be expelled four years ago. Bill Clinton didn't want a confrontation, so he allowed the expulsion of the inspectors. We should have done this four years ago. In fact, we should have dealt with Saddam decisively in Nineteen Ninety-one but we didn't. And in the years since, thousands of people have died at his hands and mostly his own citizens, and he's been working away at weapons of mass destruction, so now, because every day that goes by, we are incurring the risks that he will use those weapons. Ben Wattenberg: But people say he wouldn't use them on America. He doesn't have the means nor the will if he's got a couple of atomic bombs, to drop one on America. Richard Perle: First at all I don't know that anyone can say what he will do. And a lot of people could not have predicted what he's done in the past. Nobody predicted that he was going to go in and invade Kuwait, so I don't know what Saddam Hussein is going to do but this is a man who is almost unique among current heads of government. He's used poison gas against civilians. He has killed people with his own hand, almost arbitrarily. He uses torture, rape and all the rest, as instruments of policy. So he is capable of doing almost anything. The man who once ran his nuclear program said he has no doubt that Saddam perhaps alone in the world is capable of giving the order to use a nuclear weapon and then going to sleep. But the assumption that he won't do it and basing on our security on the hope that he won't do something he's capable of, that's not my idea of a tough-minded approach to international affairs. It's certainly not rigorous. Ben Wattenberg: You and some of your colleagues have been under attack. One for being chicken hawks. Here's the Nation magazine. They're not very good caricatures. The idea being that you and some of your colleagues who now take a hawkish position did not serve in the military. How do you respond to that? Richard Perle: Well, I haven't seen any reference to chicken doves, so I assume that it's only if you take a hawkish position that the fact that you did not serve in the military is held against you. I think it's an intimidating McCarthyite tactic. It tries to de-legitimize the views of people on an entirely irrelevant measure. It is true that I did not serve in the armed forces. It's in part because I was a student at a time when student deferments were a normal thing, and then I was married. And they weren't taking married men into the Army, so I didn't serve. I was not opposed in any way to service, but the notion that I'm not entitled to a view or at least not entitled to a view that somebody decides is hawkish because I didn't serve is just monstrously unfair. Ben Wattenberg: As this argument has gotten rancorous, there is also an undertone that says that these neoconservative hawks, that so many of them are Jewish. Is that valid and how do you handle that? Richard Perle: Well, a number are. I see Trent Lott there and maybe that's Newt Gingrich, I'm not sure, but by no means uniformily. Ben Wattenberg: Well, and of course the people who are executing policy, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Connie Rice, they are not Jewish as last report. Richard Perle: No, they're not. Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking. Ben Wattenberg: On both sides. Richard Perle: On both sides. Jews gravitate toward that and I'll tell you if you balance out the hawkish Jews against the dovish ones, then we are badly outnumbered, badly outnumbered. But look, there's clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism about it. There's no doubt. Ben Wattenberg: Well, and the linkage is that this war on Iraq if it comes about would help Israel and that that's the hidden agenda, and that's sort of the way that works. Richard Perle: Well, sometimes there's an out and out accusation that if you take the view that I take and some others take towards Saddam Hussein, we are somehow motivated not by the best interest of the United States but by Israel's best interest. There's not a logical argument underpinning that. In fact, Israel is probably more exposed and vulnerable in the context of a war with Saddam than we are because they're right next door. Weapons that Saddam cannot today deliver against us could potentially be delivered against Israel. And for a long time the Israelis themselves were very reluctant to take on Saddam Hussein. I've argued this issue with Israelis. But it's a nasty line of argument to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our loyalties are. Ben Wattenberg: It's the old dual loyalty argument. Ben Wattenberg: The idea that the sort of neo-con hawks have and the Administration has is that we would be able to oust Saddam Hussein and basically install a government that would become democratic, and the promotion of democracy has been a hallmark of this whole neoconservative hawkish view. Is that realistic in an Islamic country, that you'll get democracy? You really don't have any now. Richard Perle: Well, Turkey is not an Islamic country, although it's a country whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim. I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test because it's a sophisticated educated population that has suffered horribly under totalitarian rule, and there's a yearning for freedom that, you know, I think we find everywhere in the world but especially in subject populations. Ben Wattenberg: Well, why is it important to an American citizen that we promote democracy in other lands? I mean, the easy argument is, it's not our government, you know, let them do what they want. Richard Perle: The lesson of history is that democracies don't initiate wars of aggression, and if we want to live in a peaceful world, then there's very little we can do to bring that about more effective than promoting a democracy. People who live in democratic societies don't like to pay for massive military machines. Democratic societies don't empower their executives to make unilateral decisions to plunge countries into war. Wars have been started by tyrants who have complete control and who can squander the resources of their people to build up military machines. Ben Wattenberg: So this really squares the circle on that ancient argument as to whether American foreign policy should be idealistic or realistic. What you and the Scoopites are saying is that idealism is the real realism? Richard Perle: That's right and the realism of the diplomats in which you put great confidence in the United Nations, that corrupt and weak and ineffective institution, that's not realism. That's not even idealism. It's just plain stupid. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Let's close this out and, tell me...look ahead ten years. Are we gonna see democracies in the Middle East? Richard Perle: I think we will. It won't be uniform and it probably won't be without reverses, but I think deep down, human beings everywhere want to make decisions about their own lives, and they don't want them dictated, and there's gonna be a reaction to the extremity of Islamic law, Sharia, in which people were told what music they can hear and what clothes they can wear. We already see it in Iran where there's tremendous restiveness among the population, but people basically want freedom. If you give them half a chance, they'll find a way to get it. Ben Wattenberg: And if they go down freedom's way, that is nice and makes us feel good, but it also makes our world for our children safer? Richard Perle: Ultimately it's the only enduring safety and there may be moments of danger on the way because the process of introducing rule by a whole population can be messy. It can lead to turbulence and instability in the near term. But in the long-term the stability that comes from tyrannical governments is an interim step before catastrophe. It's always been so. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Thank you very much Richard Perle for joining us on Think Tank, and thank you. Please remember to send your comments to us via e-mail. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg Back to top Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ?Copyright 2003 Think Tank. All rights reserved. From hliu at mindspring.com Sun May 25 22:59:47 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 00:59:47 -0400 Subject: [A-List] [Fwd: [gang8] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool]- correction Message-ID: <3ED19F43.5020206@mindspring.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [gang8] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 00:03:02 -0400 From: "Henry C.K. Liu" Reply-To: gang8 at yahoogroups.com To: gang8 at yahoogroups.com, a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu, TheNewForum at yahoogroups.com Irving Kristol said a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. He should have finished his sentence: "and has been unable to think straight since." Henry C.K. Liu The Analyst Strategy guru Albert Wohlstetter spent decades arguing for military flexibility and precision targeting. But have his Washington disciples learned his real lessons? By Neil Swidey, 5/18/2003 IN 1959, RICHARD PERLE was just another California high-school kid struggling to pass Spanish. But even then, the future Pentagon adviser and TV pundit was gripped by subjects far weightier than the next sock hop. Albert Wohlstetter, a classmate's father, had written an article in Foreign Affairs entitled ''The Delicate Balance of Terror,'' and Perle found it riveting. When they met poolside at the Wohlstetter family home in the Hollywood Hills, Perle says he was dazzled by the older man's ''uncontrollably analytical'' mind. ''Maybe if I hadn't been seduced by the discussion about strategic policy, I might have passed Spanish,'' he says. Though his name is not well known, Albert Wohlstetter was one of the great defense intellectuals of the 20th century. A systems analyst with a background in mathematics, he spent his career studying the intricate logic of using military force, and training his disciples to do the same. Many of those acolytes now hold considerable sway within the Bush administration. Foremost among them is Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and chief architect of current Pentagon policy in the Middle East, who studied under Wohlstetter while earning his doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. (''Paul thinks the way Albert thinks,'' says Perle.) Other former Wohlstetter students include Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration's special envoy to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Paul Kozemchak, an official with DARPA, the Defense Department office charged with ''radical innovation.'' A host of other notables, ranging from Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi to the high-tech weaponry guru and longtime Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall, traveled in Wohlstetter's circles. Of course, the people shaping administration policy aren't dusting off their old grad-school seminar notebooks before making decisions. But it is clear enough that Wohlstetter, who died in 1997, taught his disciples a great deal. His legacy can be seen in the precision-targeted yet muscular prosecution of the war in Iraq, and the specialized weaponry and information technology that made it possible. ''This is the first war that's been fought in a way that would recognize Albert's vision for future wars,'' Perle says. ''That it was won so quickly and decisively, with so few casualties and so little damage, was in fact an implementation of his strategy and his vision.'' At the height of the Cold War, Wohlstetter rejected the prevailing wisdom of the nuclear priesthood. He did not believe that the threat of massive retaliation would necessarily deter attack, or that a nation's security was proportional to the number of megatons in its arsenal. Because he presumed the enemy could and would use its weapons, he concentrated on designing options for leaders who might find it prudent to use force themselves. He pushed aggressively for the development of nimble military units and high-precision weaponry, so that problems could be neutralized quickly and surgically-either by credible threat or actual attack- before they got out of control. While he devoted most of his career to overcoming a Soviet threat that no longer exists, he spent his last years developing arguments that appear to have directly influenced the Bush administration's view of the post-Cold War world. He rejected the United Nations as a reliable vehicle for reining in rogue states and was suspicious of arms controls treaties like the 1972 ABM treaty that Bush withdrew from last year. In a 1995 Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, he insisted on calculating the price of inaction when faced with dangerous tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. ''The increasing spread of genocidal terror can be discouraged or dealt with only by coalitions that exclude the perpetrators of genocide and their supporters and are equipped and willing to back coalition diplomacy with precise and discriminate force,'' he wrote. FOR A MAN OBSESSED with analyzing how the world might end, the Manhattan-born Wohlstetter sure knew how to live. A famous epicure, he became legendary for ambling his way to overseas strategic conferences so that he got the chance to dine at as many three-star restaurants as possible. Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta-a noted analyst herself and author of a classic study on the failure of US intelligence to anticipate Pearl Harbor-met as law school students at Columbia in the mid-1930s. They were both studying law to please their parents. That didn't last long, but their partnership over the years produced brilliant analysis and dazzling dinner parties featuring experimental ethnic cuisine, live jazz or chamber music, and guest lists ranging from poets to engineers. (Albert originally went to college on a modern-dance scholarship, according to his daughter Joan, who recalls that growing up she would often come home to hear music playing and find her parents ''doing the mambo or pasa doble around the house.'') In the 1950s, Albert and Roberta emerged as two of the brightest stars at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica during the think tank's heyday. But mastery of other matters eluded them. Perle says Wohlstetter's brother used to tell the story of a dinner party Albert and Roberta held after moving into a new apartment in New York City. The food and wine were out of this world. They just failed to notice that they didn't have any chairs. But when he was analyzing a strategic problem, nothing escaped Wohlstetter's attention. In the early `50s, RAND gave Wohlstetter the ho-hum assignment of analyzing the location of Strategic Air Command bomber bases. He began with the common-sense view that we would want to have bases as close as possible to Soviet territory. Then he scoured for data on every conceivable factor-length of supply lines; costs of construction, training, and maintenance; vulnerability to local political instability; ability to respond to surprise attacks. Once he'd processed the data, he came to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the US military was often better off relying on long-range missiles launched from bases inside the United States. His work eventually led to the withdrawal of SAC bombers from overseas and the development of the ''fail-safe'' concept, under which bombers are automatically launched when there is any warning of an enemy attack but can easily be called back. By the late `50s, Wohlstetter had devised the equally groundbreaking concept of ''second-strike deterrence.'' At the time, most people were concerned with amassing more and bigger weapons, but Wohlstetter argued that what really matters is what's left after you've been attacked-what you can muster for a second strike. Before Wohlstetter, few people paid much attention to cement, shelters, and hardened silos. ''In the `50s, people were pushing to acquire 10,000 Minuteman missiles,'' says Henry Sokolski, a former Wohlstetter student who now runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. ''Albert pointed out: What's the use if they're all going to be in parking lot and get wiped out. Doesn't it make more sense to get 1,000 and put them in the ground?'' By the 1960s, his work had attracted the attention of members of the Kennedy administration, whom he advised during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In `64, Wohlstetter left his full-time work at RAND to join the political science department of the University of Chicago, where he remained until he retired from teaching in 1980. Over the years, he advised Democratic and Republican administrations alike. To his displeasure, he found that his second-strike theories were used by other policy makers to justify a theory he disagreed with strenuously: Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. This concept held that as long as the United States could guarantee a second strike that would wipe out huge civilian population centers, the Soviets would not launch a nuclear attack. Wohlstetter thought the logic was unsound and needlessly put millions of lives at risk. What about a war begun accidentally, or a conventional Soviet attack on a US ally? Who's to say the Soviets would factor the worth of civilian lives into strategic decisions? Besides, will enemies always act rationally? Instead, Wohlstetter argued the focus should be on building the most accurate weapons possible, both nuclear and conventional. It's hard to imagine now, but in the 1970s the dominant view was that increasing the accuracy of nuclear weapons would only make nuclear war more likely. Wohlstetter railed against this thinking, insisting it was better to target Soviet weapons rather than Soviet civilians, and arguing that decision makers needed to be able to respond to regional conflicts with non-suicidal options. In the age of detente, Wohlstetter often found himself derided as an implacable hawk. Colleagues say Wohlstetter's ego sustained him just fine through this period. (''He was almost totally consumed with himself-very narcissistic,'' says Leonard Binder, a fellow professor at the University of Chicago who now teaches at UCLA.) By the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and prot?g?s like Perle and Wolfowitz serving in the administration, Wohlstetter's views gained new traction. In 1985, Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter each received a Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Wohlstetter began to focus on the new dangers facing the remaining superpower. He was particularly concerned with the Persian Gulf, having led a Defense Department study in the 1970s showing that the Pentagon had overestimated American military access to the region and undervalued its strategic import. Following the Gulf War, he lambasted the first Bush administration for allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It was a view shared by Wolfowitz and Perle, among others. Wohlstetter also called on the United States to aid Iraqi dissidents aiming to overthrow Hussein, allying himself closely with Ahmed Chalabi. (Perle, now a leading supporter of Chalabi's bid to lead the new Iraq, says Wohlstetter introduced him to the Iraqi exile.) And Wohlstetter became obsessed with the ethnic cleansing going on in Bosnia, hammering Western leaders for preventing the victims from arming themselves. For him, Iraq and Bosnia were closely linked, and emblematic of the dangers confronting a post-Cold War America. In the 1995 Wall Street Journal piece, he wrote: ''The successful coalition in the Gulf War stopped too soon and... left in place a Ba'ath dictatorship nearly sure to revive its programs for getting weapons of mass terror that would menace its neighbors and some countries far beyond them. That told Slobodan Milosevic, who is not a slow learner, that the West would be even less likely, four months later, to stop his own overt use of the Yugoslav Federal Army to create a Greater Serbia purged of non-Serbs.'' ''A lot of his work has been enormously vindicated in the last year and a half,'' says the Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert L. Bartley, a longtime friend. Still, he stresses that Wohlstetter was not a neoconservative, since his true loyalty was to rigorous analysis, not fixed political doctrines. Some even question how closely Wohlstetter's most influential disciples paid attention to his lessons. ''Many of the people who populate this administration are Albert's intellectual children, but I'm not sure the father would approve of the great risk they're taking,'' says Augustus Richard Norton, a former Wohlstetter student and current Middle East scholar at Boston University. Norton suggests that the case being made by some in the administration that democracy will spread from Iraq throughout the Middle East ''like an influenza'' shows none of Wohlstetter's emphasis on weighing measurable factors, such as the socioeconomic preconditions for democracy. ''I must say that a number of the people who have been speaking publicly about what it is we will accomplish, and what the logical connections are, probably would have gotten F's from Albert,'' Norton says. ''There's a lot of very flaky thinking out there.'' Perle concedes that prot?g?s like Wolfowitz are too busy to undertake the kind of intensive, multifactor analysis that Wohlstetter perfected. Asked who is filling that vacuum, Perle says, ''You don't see much of it right now, I'm sorry to say.'' Still, he says, Wohlstetter ''would think the administration broadly has it right.'' Charles Wolf Jr., who worked with Wohlstetter during his days at Rand and is still plugging away there on a study of North Korea, agrees that Wohlstetter would have much to contribute to the analysis of today's international crises. In fact, he says, ''I would welcome Albert's resurrection.'' Neil Swidey is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine. He can be reached at swidey at globe.com . This story ran on page H1 of the Boston Globe on 5/18/2003. ? Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. Transcript for: Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative Ben Wattenberg: Hello. Richard Perle, the infamous and famous Richard Perle, thank you for joining us on Think Tank. Richard Perle: It's a pleasure to be with you Ben. Ben Wattenberg: Well, why don't we pick up the Perle story at that swimming pool. Whose swimming pool was it and what were you doing there? Richard Perle: It was Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills. Albert's daughter, Joan, was a classmate at Hollywood High School. We sat next to each other in Spanish class. She passed, I didn't, but she invited me over for a swim and her dad was there. We got into a conversation about strategy, a subject I really didn't know much about. Albert gave me an article to read, that was typical of Albert. Sitting there at the swimming pool I read the article which was a brilliant piece of exposition and obviously so. We started talking about it and... Ben Wattenberg: About nuclear weapons and that kind of stuff? Richard Perle: It was the called the "Delicate Balance of Terror." It became quite a famous article in foreign affairs, and it was a way of looking at the strategic relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and the product of the serious piece of research that he had done as the director of the Research Council at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. Ben Wattenberg: And Albert Wohlstetter is regarded by some as sort of the grandfather of this hawkish mode of looking at things in America? Is that right? Richard Perle: Well, it happens that a number of people who like to regard themselves as prot?g?s of Albert's can probably be described as hawks, but it isn't so much that Albert was a hawk, it's that Albert was extraordinarily rigorous. For Albert, it was just impermissible to assume anything. You had to run down every fact, every proposition. He was a mathematical logician by training. Ben Wattenberg: Who were some of his prot?g?s? Richard Perle: Well, Paul Wolfowitz was one. Ben Wattenberg: Who's now Deputy Defense Secretary. Richard Perle: Yes. Paul was his student in his doctoral thesis under Albert, and Paul Kezemchek who's now at Dartmouth. But almost everyone who got to know Albert became his student formally or informally. Bob Barkley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal was a great admirer of Albert's and learned a lot from him. You couldn't help but learn from Albert because he was teaching all the time. And what he taught us to do was think hard about difficult issues, and if several of us wound up hawks, we'd like to think it's because that's the product of thinking hard about the dilemmas that a difficult world poses, particularly for policy makers in democratic societies. Ben Wattenberg: And then you ended up with Scoop Jackson? How did that happen? Senator Jackson, my hero, your hero, our hero, who really embodied hawkishness? Richard Perle: In a good cause always. Ben Wattenberg: Right. Richard Perle: It was a complete accident although it traces back. Albert Wohlstetter phoned me one day. I was still a graduate student at Princeton doing some research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he said, could you come to Washington for a few days and interview some people and draft a report on the current debate shaping up in the Senate over ballistic missile defense, which was a hot issue in the Nineteen Sixty-nine debate. This was in Nineteen Sixty-nine. And he said, I've asked somebody else to do this too, and maybe the two of you could work together. The someone else was Paul Wolfowitz. So Paul and I came to Washington as volunteers for a few days, to interview people, and one of the people we interviewed was Scoop Jackson and it was love at first sight. I will never forget that first encounter with Scoop. Here we were a couple of graduate students, sitting on the floor in Scoop's office in the Senate, reviewing charts and analyses of the ballistic missile defense and getting his views on the subject. Before I went back up to Cambridge, Scoop said, you know, you're never... Ben Wattenberg: To Cambridge or to Princeton? Richard Perle: To Cambridge, well I was living in Cambridge... Ben Wattenberg: Oh, I see. Richard Perle: ...while working on my thesis from Princeton. Scoop said, you're never really gonna understand how these governments work until you have some direct experience, so why don't you come and work for me for a year and you can work on your thesis in your spare time. But there was never any spare time working for Scoop, and I was there for eleven years. Ben Wattenberg: You became very involved in his sort of signature legislation, the Jackson-Vanek Bill, which was the human rights side of his toughness. Could you explain that? It involves the Soviet Union, which is now Russia, and where we stand on that now? Richard Perle: It all started in the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-two, when the Soviet Regime imposed a prohibitive tax on immigration. It affected principally Jewish immigration, but it was aimed at all immigrants, and the tax was so high that nobody could afford to pay it, and it looked as though they were about to close the door on the trickle of immigration that had been permitted, and Scoop looked around for some way to counter this. At about that time, Richard Nixon had proposed a new trading arrangement with the Soviet Union in which, among other things, the Soviets would be accorded what used to be called "Most Favored Nation Status." That is to say their products would be treated as well as the products of our closest friends and allies. Ben Wattenberg: And most every country has most favored nation status? Richard Perle: Most countries did, but very few Communist countries. In fact, at that point non at all. So Scoop got behind the idea of an amendment, which I had the privilege of actually drafting, that said to the Soviet Union if you want most favored nation status, you have to let people immigrate. Scoop believed that immigration was in some ways the most powerful of all the human rights because if people could vote with their feet, governments would have to acknowledge that and governments would have to make for their citizens a life that would keep them there. If you can imprison people you can do anything, but if people have the right to leave, you'd have to create a decent society, so that was the seminal human right for Scoop. And this legislation which ultimately passed, well, it was the first time I think in history that the United States or any other country had made its trading relationship contingent upon adherence to a fundamental human right. Ben Wattenberg: I mean, it made human rights into a player in the international arena, not just sort of a do-good cause? Richard Perle: That's right. It put teeth into the idea of human rights and it was a tremendous inspiration to those who were fighting for human rights in the Soviet Union. Andre Sakharov, who wrote an open letter in support of it, Natan Sharansky, who now is Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, then a human rights activist and ultimately sentenced to jail in part for his role in supporting Jackson-Vanek. They were all enormously encouraged by the fact that the United States was not only giving verbal support to the demand for human rights but was actually encumbering important interests in order to achieve that. Ben Wattenberg: The other side of the coin was to be strong militarily and that got involved in all the arguments between Scoop Jackson's office and the Senate and versus the White House about how those SALT Treaties, which stands for it, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Right? You've had to educate me on this over the years but in a nutshell, what was the argument? Richard Perle: The argument was that the idea of legislating a military relationship by Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, that it was a pretty doubtful proposition. The Soviets were building up their military forces. It was the only thing they were any good at it, and about a third of their GDP was being poured into the military. We never spent more than six percent of GDP, so it was huge massive investment, and indeed, the militarization in the Soviet economy contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Scoop was very skeptical about the idea that you could talk the Soviets into a set of arrangements that would restrain their appetite for military power, and so he set a very high standard. The only agreements he was prepared to support were ones that had a demonstrable effect on the military balance. We now know by the way, I mean, one of the benefits of the end of the Cold War is we can talk to people who were on the other side at one time. We now know that those agreements have virtually no effect on Soviet Military programs, and indeed, we know that they had twenty thousand more nuclear weapons than we ever attributed to them, and the number that they managed to keep concealed through the whole of the Cold War was larger by far than the total number that was ever brought under the terms of an arms control agreement. So Scoop's skepticism was, in fact, right. Ben Wattenberg: Now, Scoop was surrounded by people who then and certainly now are called neoconservatives. It's become a fashionable word now thanks to you and your colleagues because you're all categorized that way. How did that come into your life, that whole school of thought? Richard Perle: Well, I think the term has something to do with the sense that those of us who are now called neo-conservatives were at one time liberals, and in this... Ben Wattenberg: Richard Perle: Right. And I think that's a fair description, and I suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school and a little bit into college. But reality and rigor are important tonics, and if you got into the world of international affairs and you looked with some rigor at what was going on in the world, it was really hard to be liberal and na?ve. Ben Wattenberg: And you keep coming back to this word "rigor", that you have to do this careful analysis of who's strong, who's not strong, how do you go about that, and for that generation the great lesson was Munich and the appeasement of Hitler? Is that about right? Richard Perle: The inter-war period, the period between World Wars One and Two, were categorized by a complete absence of rigor and will. Analytical rigor was wholly lacking because the evidence was there. We saw, or some people saw anyway the steady buildup of Nazi military power and that... Ben Wattenberg: Churchill for one. Richard Perle: Churchill saw it and there were some civil servants in the ministry of defense and the admiralty who were feeding him information. It was there if you wanted to see it and understand it, and it could be explained away if you didn't. But the explaining away required a suspension of healthy skepticism and so the value of that skepticism or rigor is that it forces you to look at the facts as they are. Anyone who looked at the facts in Nineteen Thirty-six knew what was coming or could at least see that the balance of power was in the process of shifting from one in which the democracies could expect to contain this growing totalitarian threat in Nazi Germany to a balance in which they couldn't. Ben Wattenberg: Richard, you are Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. What is that? Richard Perle: It's a group of volunteer civilians who advise the Secretary of Defense. It now includes a pretty illustrious list of people, Henry Kissinger, James Slessinger, Harold Brown, Tom Foley and Newt Gingrich, two former Speakers. These are wise men with deep experience who come together half a dozen times a year for extensive briefings, discussions, meetings, and advice for the Secretary of Defense. Ben Wattenberg: And does the Board itself put out dicta? I mean, does it say, this is what we believe? Richard Perle: No, no. But the term "board" is a little misleading. It sounds like a zoning board that either gives you or doesn't give you a permit. The Board doesn't take corporate views. It's simply a means by which the Secretary of Defense can come together with a group of people who have interesting things to say and they, in turn, can look into what's going on in the Defense Department and give him advice, but there are no votes or anything like that. Ben: And in your case because you are the Chairman and because you are well-known in this whole argument, people impute to that role that you are a part of the Bush Administration. That is not correct? Richard: No. I'm completely independent of the Administration. I think that prefer it that way. Ben Wattenberg: Does Secretary Rumsfeld sometimes get a little agitated that you say things that they aren't necessarily ready to say and it says Chairman of the Defense Policy Board and it sounds as if it's linked? Richard Perle: Yes. I go to great lengths to discourage people from identifying me as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, because it does confuse people and from time to time I say something that people wish I hadn't said. In fact, I sometimes say things that I wish I didn't say. Ben Wattenberg: Right. And do they put some heat on you then? Richard Perle: Oh, there have been a couple of times when it was brought to my attention. Ben Wattenberg: You were calling attention to the Iraqi Regime under Saddam long before the Kuwait War. Is that right? Richard Perle: Oh, long before. I was actually rather uncomfortable with the support that we gave Saddam during the war between Iraq and Iran... Ben Wattenberg: Which we did sort of for geo-political balance? Richard Perle: Yes, the view was that the mullahs in Tehran were worst than the tyrant in Baghdad, and I understand that argument. I don't agree with it, but even for those who accepted that view, the right course immediately after the end of that war would have been to say to Saddam, now we've had enough of you too, and we're not gonna to tolerate it. Ben Wattenberg: And we didn't do that? Richard Perle: No, we didn't do that, and the indulgence of Saddam led to the invasion of Kuwait. Ben Wattenberg: Well, people say...they say two things. What are they gonna do to us and why now? Richard Perle: Well, why now, because we're late. We should have done it a long time ago. We should never have allowed the inspectors to be expelled four years ago. Bill Clinton didn't want a confrontation, so he allowed the expulsion of the inspectors. We should have done this four years ago. In fact, we should have dealt with Saddam decisively in Nineteen Ninety-one but we didn't. And in the years since, thousands of people have died at his hands and mostly his own citizens, and he's been working away at weapons of mass destruction, so now, because every day that goes by, we are incurring the risks that he will use those weapons. Ben Wattenberg: But people say he wouldn't use them on America. He doesn't have the means nor the will if he's got a couple of atomic bombs, to drop one on America. Richard Perle: First at all I don't know that anyone can say what he will do. And a lot of people could not have predicted what he's done in the past. Nobody predicted that he was going to go in and invade Kuwait, so I don't know what Saddam Hussein is going to do but this is a man who is almost unique among current heads of government. He's used poison gas against civilians. He has killed people with his own hand, almost arbitrarily. He uses torture, rape and all the rest, as instruments of policy. So he is capable of doing almost anything. The man who once ran his nuclear program said he has no doubt that Saddam perhaps alone in the world is capable of giving the order to use a nuclear weapon and then going to sleep. But the assumption that he won't do it and basing on our security on the hope that he won't do something he's capable of, that's not my idea of a tough-minded approach to international affairs. It's certainly not rigorous. Ben Wattenberg: You and some of your colleagues have been under attack. One for being chicken hawks. Here's the Nation magazine. They're not very good caricatures. The idea being that you and some of your colleagues who now take a hawkish position did not serve in the military. How do you respond to that? Richard Perle: Well, I haven't seen any reference to chicken doves, so I assume that it's only if you take a hawkish position that the fact that you did not serve in the military is held against you. I think it's an intimidating McCarthyite tactic. It tries to de-legitimize the views of people on an entirely irrelevant measure. It is true that I did not serve in the armed forces. It's in part because I was a student at a time when student deferments were a normal thing, and then I was married. And they weren't taking married men into the Army, so I didn't serve. I was not opposed in any way to service, but the notion that I'm not entitled to a view or at least not entitled to a view that somebody decides is hawkish because I didn't serve is just monstrously unfair. Ben Wattenberg: As this argument has gotten rancorous, there is also an undertone that says that these neoconservative hawks, that so many of them are Jewish. Is that valid and how do you handle that? Richard Perle: Well, a number are. I see Trent Lott there and maybe that's Newt Gingrich, I'm not sure, but by no means uniformily. Ben Wattenberg: Well, and of course the people who are executing policy, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Connie Rice, they are not Jewish as last report. Richard Perle: No, they're not. Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking. Ben Wattenberg: On both sides. Richard Perle: On both sides. Jews gravitate toward that and I'll tell you if you balance out the hawkish Jews against the dovish ones, then we are badly outnumbered, badly outnumbered. But look, there's clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism about it. There's no doubt. Ben Wattenberg: Well, and the linkage is that this war on Iraq if it comes about would help Israel and that that's the hidden agenda, and that's sort of the way that works. Richard Perle: Well, sometimes there's an out and out accusation that if you take the view that I take and some others take towards Saddam Hussein, we are somehow motivated not by the best interest of the United States but by Israel's best interest. There's not a logical argument underpinning that. In fact, Israel is probably more exposed and vulnerable in the context of a war with Saddam than we are because they're right next door. Weapons that Saddam cannot today deliver against us could potentially be delivered against Israel. And for a long time the Israelis themselves were very reluctant to take on Saddam Hussein. I've argued this issue with Israelis. But it's a nasty line of argument to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our loyalties are. Ben Wattenberg: It's the old dual loyalty argument. Ben Wattenberg: The idea that the sort of neo-con hawks have and the Administration has is that we would be able to oust Saddam Hussein and basically install a government that would become democratic, and the promotion of democracy has been a hallmark of this whole neoconservative hawkish view. Is that realistic in an Islamic country, that you'll get democracy? You really don't have any now. Richard Perle: Well, Turkey is not an Islamic country, although it's a country whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim. I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test because it's a sophisticated educated population that has suffered horribly under totalitarian rule, and there's a yearning for freedom that, you know, I think we find everywhere in the world but especially in subject populations. Ben Wattenberg: Well, why is it important to an American citizen that we promote democracy in other lands? I mean, the easy argument is, it's not our government, you know, let them do what they want. Richard Perle: The lesson of history is that democracies don't initiate wars of aggression, and if we want to live in a peaceful world, then there's very little we can do to bring that about more effective than promoting a democracy. People who live in democratic societies don't like to pay for massive military machines. Democratic societies don't empower their executives to make unilateral decisions to plunge countries into war. Wars have been started by tyrants who have complete control and who can squander the resources of their people to build up military machines. Ben Wattenberg: So this really squares the circle on that ancient argument as to whether American foreign policy should be idealistic or realistic. What you and the Scoopites are saying is that idealism is the real realism? Richard Perle: That's right and the realism of the diplomats in which you put great confidence in the United Nations, that corrupt and weak and ineffective institution, that's not realism. That's not even idealism. It's just plain stupid. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Let's close this out and, tell me...look ahead ten years. Are we gonna see democracies in the Middle East? Richard Perle: I think we will. It won't be uniform and it probably won't be without reverses, but I think deep down, human beings everywhere want to make decisions about their own lives, and they don't want them dictated, and there's gonna be a reaction to the extremity of Islamic law, Sharia, in which people were told what music they can hear and what clothes they can wear. We already see it in Iran where there's tremendous restiveness among the population, but people basically want freedom. If you give them half a chance, they'll find a way to get it. Ben Wattenberg: And if they go down freedom's way, that is nice and makes us feel good, but it also makes our world for our children safer? Richard Perle: Ultimately it's the only enduring safety and there may be moments of danger on the way because the process of introducing rule by a whole population can be messy. It can lead to turbulence and instability in the near term. But in the long-term the stability that comes from tyrannical governments is an interim step before catastrophe. It's always been so. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Thank you very much Richard Perle for joining us on Think Tank, and thank you. Please remember to send your comments to us via e-mail. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg Back to top Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ?Copyright 2003 Think Tank. All rights reserved. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions. http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/CNxFAA/00hrlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. To unsubscribe, email: gang8-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Mon May 26 02:22:14 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 09:22:14 +0100 Subject: [A-List] plans for Guantanamo Message-ID: <008601c3235f$ea01fd10$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> US plans death camp 26May03 THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber. Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday. The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians. The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months. General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber. The Mail on Sunday reported the move is seen as logical by the US, which has been attacked worldwide for breaching the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war since it established the camp at a naval base to hold alleged terrorists from Afghanistan. But it has horrified human rights groups and lawyers representing detainees. They see it as the clearest indication America has no intention of falling in line with internationally recognised justice. The US has already said detainees would be tried by tribunals, without juries or appeals to a higher court. Detainees will be allowed only US lawyers. British activist Stephen Jakobi, of Fair Trials Abroad, said: "The US is kicking and screaming against any pressure to conform with British or any other kind of international justice." American law professor Jonathan Turley, who has led US civil rights group protests against the military tribunals planned to hear cases at Guantanamo Bay, said: "It is not surprising the authorities are building a death row because they have said they plan to try capital cases before these tribunals. "This camp was created to execute people. The administration has no interest in long-term prison sentences for people it regards as hard-core terrorists." Britain admitted it had been kept in the dark about the plans. A Downing St spokesman said: "The US Government is well aware of the British Government's position on the death penalty." This report appears on news.com.au. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: hpn Type: application/octet-stream Size: 44 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon May 26 03:15:22 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 02:15:22 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Subscription References: Message-ID: <023c01c32367$56dd8e70$20fa5718@comintern> All best to Andre Gunder Frank! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andre Gunder Frank" To: ; "Discussions on the Socialist Register and its articles" ; Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2003 6:10 AM Subject: [A-List] Subscription > Please suspend until further notice Andre Gunder Franks Subscription > (s) due to his unexpected Hospitalization as of "" Immediately."" > Per Gunders request. > Thank you. > Alison/Andre Gunder Frank. > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > ANDRE GUNDER FRANK > > Senior Fellow Residence > World History Center One Longfellow Place > Northeastern University Apt. 3411 > 270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114 USA > Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 617-948 2315 > Tel: 617 - 373 4060 Fax: 617-948 2316 > Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/ e-mail:franka at fiu.edu > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > From sherrynstan at igc.org Mon May 26 04:22:28 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 06:22:28 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Subscription In-Reply-To: <023c01c32367$56dd8e70$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <011001c32370$b8e04280$0200a8c0@stan> Please forward best wishes for a speedy recovery to Andre Gunder Frank. From sherrynstan at igc.org Mon May 26 04:48:08 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 06:48:08 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool In-Reply-To: <3ED191F6.5040007@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <011b01c32374$4eb52a20$0200a8c0@stan> The Analyst Strategy guru Albert Wohlstetter spent decades arguing for military flexibility and precision targeting. But have his Washington disciples learned his real lessons? By Neil Swidey, 5/18/2003 IN 1959, RICHARD PERLE was just another California high-school kid struggling to pass Spanish. But even then, the future Pentagon adviser and TV pundit was gripped by subjects far weightier than the next sock hop. Albert Wohlstetter, a ... ... [Aside from the ritual Serb-bashing and Saddam-bashing, this is a very interesting article for what it doesn't emphasize. that of Wohlstetter and all his acolytes - with the exception of Rumsfeld who spent four-years as a peacetime Navy pilot - none have any actual military experience. It appears that the assumption is that one need not have any experience to qualify as a military "genius." Apply the same logic to medicine, and see what you get. The fact remains, the US military is the most inefficient in the world, totally dependent on extremely high-cost, high-entropy systems, with a bureaucratic, not dynamic, leadership. All this trumpeting of US military efficacy reminds me of the end-of-history horseshit Fukiyama and others were spouting a few years back. It completely ignores the most decisive factor in US military successes over the last two decades. The immense and expensive power of that military has been deployed against helpless people. When they confronted credible forces - out of hubristic miscalculation - like in Somalia and Yugoslavia, they either depended on (Russian) treachery to win the day (and of course, that counts too), or they pulled out. -SG] From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon May 26 05:06:35 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 07:06:35 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool References: <3ED191F6.5040007@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <037301c32376$e0490220$c9b7fea9@anne> I remember Jude Wanniski asking me in the mid-90s if I knew who Wohlstetter was - and, of course, I didn't. He grumbled in reply, clearly not the man's admirer. Now I understand why. Despite nuclear weapons, Wohlstetter provided the analysis to wage war anyway and to keep the DOD in business bigtime. His work allowed them all to continue "as always" without a care that their weapons could already - if used - wipe out everybody and everything. The trick to this type of thinking is to never use any of it - then you can go on procuring and analyzing and sucking up the public's money forever. Now they've gone and implemented some of this crap, and are talking eagerly of "battleground nukes." Big mistake. First, now the consequences of their "analysis" will be playing out at great expense of blood and treasure in the Middle East, probably delivering up an Islamic Iraq aligned with Iran - exactly what the US doesn't want or need....and, secondly, quite possibly an enormous human tragedy when these hyperventilating Zionists in the Bush administration find them- selves really cornered, and "go over the top" in some bizarre roll of the nuclear dice. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu" To: ; ; Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 12:03 AM Subject: [A-List] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool > > Irving Kristol said a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by > reality. > > He should have finished his sentence: "and has been able to think > straight since." > > Henry C.K. Liu > > The Analyst > > Strategy guru Albert Wohlstetter spent decades arguing for military > flexibility and precision targeting. But have his Washington disciples > learned his real lessons? > > By Neil Swidey, 5/18/2003 > > IN 1959, RICHARD PERLE was just another California high-school kid > struggling to pass Spanish. But even then, the future Pentagon adviser > and TV pundit was gripped by subjects far weightier than the next sock > hop. Albert Wohlstetter, a classmate's father, had written an article in > Foreign Affairs entitled ''The Delicate Balance of Terror,'' and Perle > found it riveting. When they met poolside at the Wohlstetter family home > in the Hollywood Hills, Perle says he was dazzled by the older man's > ''uncontrollably analytical'' mind. ''Maybe if I hadn't been seduced by > the discussion about strategic policy, I might have passed Spanish,'' he > says. > > Though his name is not well known, Albert Wohlstetter was one of the > great defense intellectuals of the 20th century. A systems analyst with > a background in mathematics, he spent his career studying the intricate > logic of using military force, and training his disciples to do the same. > > Many of those acolytes now hold considerable sway within the Bush > administration. Foremost among them is Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy > secretary of defense and chief architect of current Pentagon policy in > the Middle East, who studied under Wohlstetter while earning his > doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. (''Paul > thinks the way Albert thinks,'' says Perle.) Other former Wohlstetter > students include Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration's special > envoy to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Paul Kozemchak, an official with > DARPA, the Defense Department office charged with ''radical > innovation.'' A host of other notables, ranging from Iraqi National > Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi to the high-tech weaponry guru and > longtime Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall, traveled in Wohlstetter's > circles. > > Of course, the people shaping administration policy aren't dusting off > their old grad-school seminar notebooks before making decisions. But it > is clear enough that Wohlstetter, who died in 1997, taught his disciples > a great deal. His legacy can be seen in the precision-targeted yet > muscular prosecution of the war in Iraq, and the specialized weaponry > and information technology that made it possible. > > ''This is the first war that's been fought in a way that would recognize > Albert's vision for future wars,'' Perle says. ''That it was won so > quickly and decisively, with so few casualties and so little damage, was > in fact an implementation of his strategy and his vision.'' > > At the height of the Cold War, Wohlstetter rejected the prevailing > wisdom of the nuclear priesthood. He did not believe that the threat of > massive retaliation would necessarily deter attack, or that a nation's > security was proportional to the number of megatons in its arsenal. > Because he presumed the enemy could and would use its weapons, he > concentrated on designing options for leaders who might find it prudent > to use force themselves. He pushed aggressively for the development of > nimble military units and high-precision weaponry, so that problems > could be neutralized quickly and surgically-either by credible threat or > actual attack- before they got out of control. > > While he devoted most of his career to overcoming a Soviet threat that > no longer exists, he spent his last years developing arguments that > appear to have directly influenced the Bush administration's view of the > post-Cold War world. He rejected the United Nations as a reliable > vehicle for reining in rogue states and was suspicious of arms controls > treaties like the 1972 ABM treaty that Bush withdrew from last year. > > In a 1995 Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, he insisted on calculating the > price of inaction when faced with dangerous tyrants like Saddam Hussein > and Slobodan Milosevic. ''The increasing spread of genocidal terror can > be discouraged or dealt with only by coalitions that exclude the > perpetrators of genocide and their supporters and are equipped and > willing to back coalition diplomacy with precise and discriminate > force,'' he wrote. > > FOR A MAN OBSESSED with analyzing how the world might end, the > Manhattan-born Wohlstetter sure knew how to live. A famous epicure, he > became legendary for ambling his way to overseas strategic conferences > so that he got the chance to dine at as many three-star restaurants as > possible. > > Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta-a noted analyst herself and author of > a classic study on the failure of US intelligence to anticipate Pearl > Harbor-met as law school students at Columbia in the mid-1930s. They > were both studying law to please their parents. That didn't last long, > but their partnership over the years produced brilliant analysis and > dazzling dinner parties featuring experimental ethnic cuisine, live jazz > or chamber music, and guest lists ranging from poets to engineers. > (Albert originally went to college on a modern-dance scholarship, > according to his daughter Joan, who recalls that growing up she would > often come home to hear music playing and find her parents ''doing the > mambo or pasa doble around the house.'') > > In the 1950s, Albert and Roberta emerged as two of the brightest stars > at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica during the think tank's heyday. > But mastery of other matters eluded them. Perle says Wohlstetter's > brother used to tell the story of a dinner party Albert and Roberta held > after moving into a new apartment in New York City. The food and wine > were out of this world. They just failed to notice that they didn't have > any chairs. > > But when he was analyzing a strategic problem, nothing escaped > Wohlstetter's attention. In the early `50s, RAND gave Wohlstetter the > ho-hum assignment of analyzing the location of Strategic Air Command > bomber bases. He began with the common-sense view that we would want to > have bases as close as possible to Soviet territory. Then he scoured for > data on every conceivable factor-length of supply lines; costs of > construction, training, and maintenance; vulnerability to local > political instability; ability to respond to surprise attacks. Once he'd > processed the data, he came to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the > US military was often better off relying on long-range missiles launched > from bases inside the United States. His work eventually led to the > withdrawal of SAC bombers from overseas and the development of the > ''fail-safe'' concept, under which bombers are automatically launched > when there is any warning of an enemy attack but can easily be called back. > > By the late `50s, Wohlstetter had devised the equally groundbreaking > concept of ''second-strike deterrence.'' At the time, most people were > concerned with amassing more and bigger weapons, but Wohlstetter argued > that what really matters is what's left after you've been attacked-what > you can muster for a second strike. Before Wohlstetter, few people paid > much attention to cement, shelters, and hardened silos. ''In the `50s, > people were pushing to acquire 10,000 Minuteman missiles,'' says Henry > Sokolski, a former Wohlstetter student who now runs the Nonproliferation > Policy Education Center in Washington. ''Albert pointed out: What's the > use if they're all going to be in parking lot and get wiped out. Doesn't > it make more sense to get 1,000 and put them in the ground?'' > > By the 1960s, his work had attracted the attention of members of the > Kennedy administration, whom he advised during the Cuban Missile Crisis. > In `64, Wohlstetter left his full-time work at RAND to join the > political science department of the University of Chicago, where he > remained until he retired from teaching in 1980. > > Over the years, he advised Democratic and Republican administrations > alike. To his displeasure, he found that his second-strike theories were > used by other policy makers to justify a theory he disagreed with > strenuously: Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. This concept held > that as long as the United States could guarantee a second strike that > would wipe out huge civilian population centers, the Soviets would not > launch a nuclear attack. Wohlstetter thought the logic was unsound and > needlessly put millions of lives at risk. What about a war begun > accidentally, or a conventional Soviet attack on a US ally? Who's to say > the Soviets would factor the worth of civilian lives into strategic > decisions? Besides, will enemies always act rationally? > > Instead, Wohlstetter argued the focus should be on building the most > accurate weapons possible, both nuclear and conventional. It's hard to > imagine now, but in the 1970s the dominant view was that increasing the > accuracy of nuclear weapons would only make nuclear war more likely. > Wohlstetter railed against this thinking, insisting it was better to > target Soviet weapons rather than Soviet civilians, and arguing that > decision makers needed to be able to respond to regional conflicts with > non-suicidal options. > > In the age of detente, Wohlstetter often found himself derided as an > implacable hawk. Colleagues say Wohlstetter's ego sustained him just > fine through this period. (''He was almost totally consumed with > himself-very narcissistic,'' says Leonard Binder, a fellow professor at > the University of Chicago who now teaches at UCLA.) By the 1980s, with > Ronald Reagan in the White House and prot?g?s like Perle and Wolfowitz > serving in the administration, Wohlstetter's views gained new traction. > In 1985, Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter each received a Presidential > Medal of Freedom. > > After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Wohlstetter began to focus on the > new dangers facing the remaining superpower. He was particularly > concerned with the Persian Gulf, having led a Defense Department study > in the 1970s showing that the Pentagon had overestimated American > military access to the region and undervalued its strategic import. > Following the Gulf War, he lambasted the first Bush administration for > allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power. > > It was a view shared by Wolfowitz and Perle, among others. Wohlstetter > also called on the United States to aid Iraqi dissidents aiming to > overthrow Hussein, allying himself closely with Ahmed Chalabi. (Perle, > now a leading supporter of Chalabi's bid to lead the new Iraq, says > Wohlstetter introduced him to the Iraqi exile.) And Wohlstetter became > obsessed with the ethnic cleansing going on in Bosnia, hammering Western > leaders for preventing the victims from arming themselves. For him, Iraq > and Bosnia were closely linked, and emblematic of the dangers > confronting a post-Cold War America. In the 1995 Wall Street Journal > piece, he wrote: ''The successful coalition in the Gulf War stopped too > soon > > and... left in place a Ba'ath dictatorship nearly sure to revive its > programs for getting weapons of mass terror that would menace its > neighbors and some countries far beyond them. That told Slobodan > Milosevic, who is not a slow learner, that the West would be even less > likely, four months later, to stop his own overt use of the Yugoslav > Federal Army to create a Greater Serbia purged of non-Serbs.'' > > ''A lot of his work has been enormously vindicated in the last year and > a half,'' says the Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert L. > Bartley, a longtime friend. Still, he stresses that Wohlstetter was not > a neoconservative, since his true loyalty was to rigorous analysis, not > fixed political doctrines. > > Some even question how closely Wohlstetter's most influential disciples > paid attention to his lessons. > > ''Many of the people who populate this administration are Albert's > intellectual children, but I'm not sure the father would approve of the > great risk they're taking,'' says Augustus Richard Norton, a former > Wohlstetter student and current Middle East scholar at Boston University. > > Norton suggests that the case being made by some in the administration > that democracy will spread from Iraq throughout the Middle East ''like > an influenza'' shows none of Wohlstetter's emphasis on weighing > measurable factors, such as the socioeconomic preconditions for > democracy. ''I must say that a number of the people who have been > speaking publicly about what it is we will accomplish, and what the > logical connections are, probably would have gotten F's from Albert,'' > Norton says. ''There's a lot of very flaky thinking out there.'' > > Perle concedes that prot?g?s like Wolfowitz are too busy to undertake > the kind of intensive, multifactor analysis that Wohlstetter perfected. > Asked who is filling that vacuum, Perle says, ''You don't see much of it > right now, I'm sorry to say.'' Still, he says, Wohlstetter ''would think > the administration broadly has it right.'' > > Charles Wolf Jr., who worked with Wohlstetter during his days at Rand > and is still plugging away there on a study of North Korea, agrees that > Wohlstetter would have much to contribute to the analysis of today's > international crises. > > In fact, he says, ''I would welcome Albert's resurrection.'' > > Neil Swidey is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine. He can be reached > at swidey at globe.com . > > This story ran on page H1 of the Boston Globe on 5/18/2003. > ? Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. > Transcript for: > Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative > Ben Wattenberg: Hello. Richard Perle, the infamous and famous Richard > Perle, thank you for joining us on Think Tank. > Richard Perle: It's a pleasure to be with you Ben. > Ben Wattenberg: Well, why don't we pick up the Perle story at that > swimming pool. Whose swimming pool was it and what were you doing there? > Richard Perle: It was Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool in the > Hollywood Hills. Albert's daughter, Joan, was a classmate at Hollywood > High School. We sat next to each other in Spanish class. She passed, I > didn't, but she invited me over for a swim and her dad was there. We got > into a conversation about strategy, a subject I really didn't know much > about. Albert gave me an article to read, that was typical of Albert. > Sitting there at the swimming pool I read the article which was a > brilliant piece of exposition and obviously so. We started talking about > it and... > Ben Wattenberg: About nuclear weapons and that kind of stuff? > Richard Perle: It was the called the "Delicate Balance of Terror." It > became quite a famous article in foreign affairs, and it was a way of > looking at the strategic relationship between the United States and the > Soviet Union and the product of the serious piece of research that he > had done as the director of the Research Council at the Rand Corporation > in Santa Monica. > Ben Wattenberg: And Albert Wohlstetter is regarded by some as sort of > the grandfather of this hawkish mode of looking at things in America? Is > that right? > Richard Perle: Well, it happens that a number of people who like to > regard themselves as prot?g?s of Albert's can probably be described as > hawks, but it isn't so much that Albert was a hawk, it's that Albert was > extraordinarily rigorous. For Albert, it was just impermissible to > assume anything. You had to run down every fact, every proposition. He > was a mathematical logician by training. > Ben Wattenberg: Who were some of his prot?g?s? > Richard Perle: Well, Paul Wolfowitz was one. > Ben Wattenberg: Who's now Deputy Defense Secretary. > Richard Perle: Yes. Paul was his student in his doctoral thesis under > Albert, and Paul Kezemchek who's now at Dartmouth. But almost everyone > who got to know Albert became his student formally or informally. Bob > Barkley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal was a great admirer of > Albert's and learned a lot from him. You couldn't help but learn from > Albert because he was teaching all the time. And what he taught us to do > was think hard about difficult issues, and if several of us wound up > hawks, we'd like to think it's because that's the product of thinking > hard about the dilemmas that a difficult world poses, particularly for > policy makers in democratic societies. > Ben Wattenberg: And then you ended up with Scoop Jackson? How did that > happen? Senator Jackson, my hero, your hero, our hero, who really > embodied hawkishness? > Richard Perle: In a good cause always. > Ben Wattenberg: Right. > Richard Perle: It was a complete accident although it traces back. > Albert Wohlstetter phoned me one day. I was still a graduate student at > Princeton doing some research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he said, > could you come to Washington for a few days and interview some people > and draft a report on the current debate shaping up in the Senate over > ballistic missile defense, which was a hot issue in the Nineteen > Sixty-nine debate. This was in Nineteen Sixty-nine. And he said, I've > asked somebody else to do this too, and maybe the two of you could work > together. The someone else was Paul Wolfowitz. So Paul and I came to > Washington as volunteers for a few days, to interview people, and one of > the people we interviewed was Scoop Jackson and it was love at first > sight. I will never forget that first encounter with Scoop. Here we were > a couple of graduate students, sitting on the floor in Scoop's office in > the Senate, reviewing charts and analyses of the ballistic missile > defense and getting his views on the subject. Before I went back up to > Cambridge, Scoop said, you know, you're never... > Ben Wattenberg: To Cambridge or to Princeton? > Richard Perle: To Cambridge, well I was living in Cambridge... > Ben Wattenberg: Oh, I see. > Richard Perle: ...while working on my thesis from Princeton. Scoop said, > you're never really gonna understand how these governments work until > you have some direct experience, so why don't you come and work for me > for a year and you can work on your thesis in your spare time. But there > was never any spare time working for Scoop, and I was there for eleven > years. > Ben Wattenberg: You became very involved in his sort of signature > legislation, the Jackson-Vanek Bill, which was the human rights side of > his toughness. Could you explain that? It involves the Soviet Union, > which is now Russia, and where we stand on that now? > Richard Perle: It all started in the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-two, > when the Soviet Regime imposed a prohibitive tax on immigration. It > affected principally Jewish immigration, but it was aimed at all > immigrants, and the tax was so high that nobody could afford to pay it, > and it looked as though they were about to close the door on the trickle > of immigration that had been permitted, and Scoop looked around for some > way to counter this. At about that time, Richard Nixon had proposed a > new trading arrangement with the Soviet Union in which, among other > things, the Soviets would be accorded what used to be called "Most > Favored Nation Status." That is to say their products would be treated > as well as the products of our closest friends and allies. > Ben Wattenberg: And most every country has most favored nation status? > Richard Perle: Most countries did, but very few Communist countries. In > fact, at that point non at all. So Scoop got behind the idea of an > amendment, which I had the privilege of actually drafting, that said to > the Soviet Union if you want most favored nation status, you have to let > people immigrate. Scoop believed that immigration was in some ways the > most powerful of all the human rights because if people could vote with > their feet, governments would have to acknowledge that and governments > would have to make for their citizens a life that would keep them there. > If you can imprison people you can do anything, but if people have the > right to leave, you'd have to create a decent society, so that was the > seminal human right for Scoop. And this legislation which ultimately > passed, well, it was the first time I think in history that the United > States or any other country had made its trading relationship contingent > upon adherence to a fundamental human right. > Ben Wattenberg: I mean, it made human rights into a player in the > international arena, not just sort of a do-good cause? > Richard Perle: That's right. It put teeth into the idea of human rights > and it was a tremendous inspiration to those who were fighting for human > rights in the Soviet Union. Andre Sakharov, who wrote an open letter in > support of it, Natan Sharansky, who now is Deputy Prime Minister of > Israel, then a human rights activist and ultimately sentenced to jail in > part for his role in supporting Jackson-Vanek. They were all enormously > encouraged by the fact that the United States was not only giving verbal > support to the demand for human rights but was actually encumbering > important interests in order to achieve that. > Ben Wattenberg: The other side of the coin was to be strong militarily > and that got involved in all the arguments between Scoop Jackson's > office and the Senate and versus the White House about how those SALT > Treaties, which stands for it, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Right? > You've had to educate me on this over the years but in a nutshell, what > was the argument? > Richard Perle: The argument was that the idea of legislating a military > relationship by Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, > that it was a pretty doubtful proposition. The Soviets were building up > their military forces. It was the only thing they were any good at it, > and about a third of their GDP was being poured into the military. We > never spent more than six percent of GDP, so it was huge massive > investment, and indeed, the militarization in the Soviet economy > contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Scoop > was very skeptical about the idea that you could talk the Soviets into a > set of arrangements that would restrain their appetite for military > power, and so he set a very high standard. The only agreements he was > prepared to support were ones that had a demonstrable effect on the > military balance. We now know by the way, I mean, one of the benefits of > the end of the Cold War is we can talk to people who were on the other > side at one time. We now know that those agreements have virtually no > effect on Soviet Military programs, and indeed, we know that they had > twenty thousand more nuclear weapons than we ever attributed to them, > and the number that they managed to keep concealed through the whole of > the Cold War was larger by far than the total number that was ever > brought under the terms of an arms control agreement. So Scoop's > skepticism was, in fact, right. > Ben Wattenberg: Now, Scoop was surrounded by people who then and > certainly now are called neoconservatives. It's become a fashionable > word now thanks to you and your colleagues because you're all > categorized that way. How did that come into your life, that whole > school of thought? > Richard Perle: Well, I think the term has something to do with the sense > that those of us who are now called neo-conservatives were at one time > liberals, and in this... > Ben Wattenberg: > Richard Perle: Right. And I think that's a fair description, and I > suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school > and a little bit into college. But reality and rigor are important > tonics, and if you got into the world of international affairs and you > looked with some rigor at what was going on in the world, it was really > hard to be liberal and na?ve. > Ben Wattenberg: And you keep coming back to this word "rigor", that you > have to do this careful analysis of who's strong, who's not strong, how > do you go about that, and for that generation the great lesson was > Munich and the appeasement of Hitler? Is that about right? > Richard Perle: The inter-war period, the period between World Wars One > and Two, were categorized by a complete absence of rigor and will. > Analytical rigor was wholly lacking because the evidence was there. We > saw, or some people saw anyway the steady buildup of Nazi military power > and that... > Ben Wattenberg: Churchill for one. > Richard Perle: Churchill saw it and there were some civil servants in > the ministry of defense and the admiralty who were feeding him > information. It was there if you wanted to see it and understand it, and > it could be explained away if you didn't. But the explaining away > required a suspension of healthy skepticism and so the value of that > skepticism or rigor is that it forces you to look at the facts as they > are. Anyone who looked at the facts in Nineteen Thirty-six knew what was > coming or could at least see that the balance of power was in the > process of shifting from one in which the democracies could expect to > contain this growing totalitarian threat in Nazi Germany to a balance in > which they couldn't. > Ben Wattenberg: Richard, you are Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. > What is that? > Richard Perle: It's a group of volunteer civilians who advise the > Secretary of Defense. It now includes a pretty illustrious list of > people, Henry Kissinger, James Slessinger, Harold Brown, Tom Foley and > Newt Gingrich, two former Speakers. These are wise men with deep > experience who come together half a dozen times a year for extensive > briefings, discussions, meetings, and advice for the Secretary of Defense. > Ben Wattenberg: And does the Board itself put out dicta? I mean, does it > say, this is what we believe? > Richard Perle: No, no. But the term "board" is a little misleading. It > sounds like a zoning board that either gives you or doesn't give you a > permit. The Board doesn't take corporate views. It's simply a means by > which the Secretary of Defense can come together with a group of people > who have interesting things to say and they, in turn, can look into > what's going on in the Defense Department and give him advice, but there > are no votes or anything like that. > Ben: And in your case because you are the Chairman and because you are > well-known in this whole argument, people impute to that role that you > are a part of the Bush Administration. That is not correct? > Richard: No. I'm completely independent of the Administration. I think > that prefer it that way. > Ben Wattenberg: Does Secretary Rumsfeld sometimes get a little agitated > that you say things that they aren't necessarily ready to say and it > says Chairman of the Defense Policy Board and it sounds as if it's linked? > Richard Perle: Yes. I go to great lengths to discourage people from > identifying me as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, because it does > confuse people and from time to time I say something that people wish I > hadn't said. In fact, I sometimes say things that I wish I didn't say. > Ben Wattenberg: Right. And do they put some heat on you then? > Richard Perle: Oh, there have been a couple of times when it was brought > to my attention. > Ben Wattenberg: You were calling attention to the Iraqi Regime under > Saddam long before the Kuwait War. Is that right? > Richard Perle: Oh, long before. I was actually rather uncomfortable with > the support that we gave Saddam during the war between Iraq and Iran... > Ben Wattenberg: Which we did sort of for geo-political balance? > Richard Perle: Yes, the view was that the mullahs in Tehran were worst > than the tyrant in Baghdad, and I understand that argument. I don't > agree with it, but even for those who accepted that view, the right > course immediately after the end of that war would have been to say to > Saddam, now we've had enough of you too, and we're not gonna to tolerate it. > Ben Wattenberg: And we didn't do that? > Richard Perle: No, we didn't do that, and the indulgence of Saddam led > to the invasion of Kuwait. > Ben Wattenberg: Well, people say...they say two things. What are they > gonna do to us and why now? > Richard Perle: Well, why now, because we're late. We should have done it > a long time ago. We should never have allowed the inspectors to be > expelled four years ago. Bill Clinton didn't want a confrontation, so he > allowed the expulsion of the inspectors. We should have done this four > years ago. In fact, we should have dealt with Saddam decisively in > Nineteen Ninety-one but we didn't. And in the years since, thousands of > people have died at his hands and mostly his own citizens, and he's been > working away at weapons of mass destruction, so now, because every day > that goes by, we are incurring the risks that he will use those weapons. > Ben Wattenberg: But people say he wouldn't use them on America. He > doesn't have the means nor the will if he's got a couple of atomic > bombs, to drop one on America. > Richard Perle: First at all I don't know that anyone can say what he > will do. And a lot of people could not have predicted what he's done in > the past. Nobody predicted that he was going to go in and invade Kuwait, > so I don't know what Saddam Hussein is going to do but this is a man who > is almost unique among current heads of government. He's used poison gas > against civilians. He has killed people with his own hand, almost > arbitrarily. He uses torture, rape and all the rest, as instruments of > policy. So he is capable of doing almost anything. The man who once ran > his nuclear program said he has no doubt that Saddam perhaps alone in > the world is capable of giving the order to use a nuclear weapon and > then going to sleep. But the assumption that he won't do it and basing > on our security on the hope that he won't do something he's capable of, > that's not my idea of a tough-minded approach to international affairs. > It's certainly not rigorous. > Ben Wattenberg: You and some of your colleagues have been under attack. > One for being chicken hawks. Here's the Nation magazine. They're not > very good caricatures. The idea being that you and some of your > colleagues who now take a hawkish position did not serve in the > military. How do you respond to that? > Richard Perle: Well, I haven't seen any reference to chicken doves, so I > assume that it's only if you take a hawkish position that the fact that > you did not serve in the military is held against you. I think it's an > intimidating McCarthyite tactic. It tries to de-legitimize the views of > people on an entirely irrelevant measure. It is true that I did not > serve in the armed forces. It's in part because I was a student at a > time when student deferments were a normal thing, and then I was > married. And they weren't taking married men into the Army, so I didn't > serve. I was not opposed in any way to service, but the notion that I'm > not entitled to a view or at least not entitled to a view that somebody > decides is hawkish because I didn't serve is just monstrously unfair. > Ben Wattenberg: As this argument has gotten rancorous, there is also an > undertone that says that these neoconservative hawks, that so many of > them are Jewish. Is that valid and how do you handle that? > Richard Perle: Well, a number are. I see Trent Lott there and maybe > that's Newt Gingrich, I'm not sure, but by no means uniformily. > Ben Wattenberg: Well, and of course the people who are executing policy, > President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, > Connie Rice, they are not Jewish as last report. > Richard Perle: No, they're not. Well, you're going to find a > disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking. > Ben Wattenberg: On both sides. > Richard Perle: On both sides. Jews gravitate toward that and I'll tell > you if you balance out the hawkish Jews against the dovish ones, then we > are badly outnumbered, badly outnumbered. But look, there's clearly an > undertone of anti-Semitism about it. There's no doubt. > Ben Wattenberg: Well, and the linkage is that this war on Iraq if it > comes about would help Israel and that that's the hidden agenda, and > that's sort of the way that works. > Richard Perle: Well, sometimes there's an out and out accusation that if > you take the view that I take and some others take towards Saddam > Hussein, we are somehow motivated not by the best interest of the United > States but by Israel's best interest. There's not a logical argument > underpinning that. In fact, Israel is probably more exposed and > vulnerable in the context of a war with Saddam than we are because > they're right next door. Weapons that Saddam cannot today deliver > against us could potentially be delivered against Israel. And for a long > time the Israelis themselves were very reluctant to take on Saddam > Hussein. I've argued this issue with Israelis. But it's a nasty line of > argument to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our > loyalties are. > Ben Wattenberg: It's the old dual loyalty argument. > Ben Wattenberg: The idea that the sort of neo-con hawks have and the > Administration has is that we would be able to oust Saddam Hussein and > basically install a government that would become democratic, and the > promotion of democracy has been a hallmark of this whole neoconservative > hawkish view. Is that realistic in an Islamic country, that you'll get > democracy? You really don't have any now. > Richard Perle: Well, Turkey is not an Islamic country, although it's a > country whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim. I think there is a > potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic > institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that > proposition to the test because it's a sophisticated educated population > that has suffered horribly under totalitarian rule, and there's a > yearning for freedom that, you know, I think we find everywhere in the > world but especially in subject populations. > Ben Wattenberg: Well, why is it important to an American citizen that we > promote democracy in other lands? I mean, the easy argument is, it's not > our government, you know, let them do what they want. > Richard Perle: The lesson of history is that democracies don't initiate > wars of aggression, and if we want to live in a peaceful world, then > there's very little we can do to bring that about more effective than > promoting a democracy. People who live in democratic societies don't > like to pay for massive military machines. Democratic societies don't > empower their executives to make unilateral decisions to plunge > countries into war. Wars have been started by tyrants who have complete > control and who can squander the resources of their people to build up > military machines. > Ben Wattenberg: So this really squares the circle on that ancient > argument as to whether American foreign policy should be idealistic or > realistic. What you and the Scoopites are saying is that idealism is the > real realism? > Richard Perle: That's right and the realism of the diplomats in which > you put great confidence in the United Nations, that corrupt and weak > and ineffective institution, that's not realism. That's not even > idealism. It's just plain stupid. > Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Let's close this out and, tell me...look ahead ten > years. Are we gonna see democracies in the Middle East? > Richard Perle: I think we will. It won't be uniform and it probably > won't be without reverses, but I think deep down, human beings > everywhere want to make decisions about their own lives, and they don't > want them dictated, and there's gonna be a reaction to the extremity of > Islamic law, Sharia, in which people were told what music they can hear > and what clothes they can wear. We already see it in Iran where there's > tremendous restiveness among the population, but people basically want > freedom. If you give them half a chance, they'll find a way to get it. > Ben Wattenberg: And if they go down freedom's way, that is nice and > makes us feel good, but it also makes our world for our children safer? > Richard Perle: Ultimately it's the only enduring safety and there may be > moments of danger on the way because the process of introducing rule by > a whole population can be messy. It can lead to turbulence and > instability in the near term. But in the long-term the stability that > comes from tyrannical governments is an interim step before catastrophe. > It's always been so. > Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Thank you very much Richard Perle for joining us > on Think Tank, and thank you. Please remember to send your comments to > us via e-mail. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg > > Back to top > Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith > Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the > Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the > Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. > > ?Copyright 2003 Think Tank. All rights reserved. > > From julfb at alternativagratis.com.ar Mon May 26 06:20:22 2003 From: julfb at alternativagratis.com.ar (Julio Fernández Baraibar) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 09:20:22 -0300 Subject: [A-List] André Gunder Frank References: <023c01c32367$56dd8e70$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <005001c32381$30e6eee0$99cd44c8@k3v6h4> Me uno a los deseos de todos los miembros de la lista: la m?s pronta y completa recuperaci?n del profesor Andr? Gunder Frank. Desde Argentina Julio Fern?ndez Baraibar julfb at sinectis.com.ar ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: ; "Discussions on the Socialist Register and its articles" Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 6:15 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Subscription > All best to Andre Gunder Frank! > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Andre Gunder Frank" > To: ; "Discussions on the Socialist Register and > its articles" ; > Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2003 6:10 AM > Subject: [A-List] Subscription > > > > Please suspend until further notice Andre Gunder Franks Subscription > > (s) due to his unexpected Hospitalization as of "" Immediately."" > > Per Gunders request. > > Thank you. > > Alison/Andre Gunder Frank. > > > > > > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > > > ANDRE GUNDER FRANK > > > > Senior Fellow Residence > > World History Center One Longfellow Place > > Northeastern University Apt. 3411 > > 270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114 USA > > Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 617-948 2315 > > Tel: 617 - 373 4060 Fax: 617-948 2316 > > Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/ e-mail:franka at fiu.edu > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > > > > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:11:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:11:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] André Gunder Frank References: <023c01c32367$56dd8e70$20fa5718@comintern> <005001c32381$30e6eee0$99cd44c8@k3v6h4> Message-ID: <000501c32388$5774c260$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Our best wishes for a speedy recovery. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:16:35 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:16:35 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Chris writes in response to Melvin: This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. But instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesnt she just read Marx herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third hand from those of us who have. ------ While Melvin's extensive exposition might not be regarded as appropriate as a response to Gary's enquiry, I want to gratefully acknowledge the manner of that enquiry and the response it has generated. "Go off and read it yourself" is an option (if not a very friendly answer), but getting others to clarify how they see the issues is equally useful, and perhaps Gary has been able to identify a useful starting point in his inquiry as a result of suggestions made here. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:28:01 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:28:01 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: constitutional deform Message-ID: <004001c3238a$a1664900$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Here is a measure of the Labour Party's commitment to devolution: "left" Westminster MP Ian Davidson threatens the Scottish Executive with superior Westminster powers in order to overrule electoral reform in Scotland -- something very much within the remit of the Scottish Parliament. Davidson himself is a product of the system currently under threat, having been a longstanding member of Strathclyde Regional Council prior to its extinction. ------ PR pressure mounting on McConnell Rogue MP group formed to campaign for Executive U-turn on council voting reform By Douglas Fraser, Political Editor The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 Westminster MPs are turning up the heat on Jack McConnell and other Scottish parliament collea gues over the coalition deal struck two weeks ago with Liberal Democrats, including a warning that some want to change the Holyrood voting system. A group has been formed to campaign for a Scottish Executive U-turn on voting reform for councils, a LibDem demand which McConnell agreed to despite widespread Labour opposition. That follows Labour council leaders' angry warning last week that there would be a 'four-year war' with the Executive over the voting reform plans, with the explicit threat that Labour MSPs could face deselection before the 2007 election. The First Past The Post Group is to press their case with Scotland Secretary Helen Liddell, in a meeting after the current Westminster recess. But behind the anger that MPs will lose council strongholds on which they rely for campaigning, there are more widespread concerns among MPs that LibDems in the Holyrood coalition are being treated too leniently, particularly after the rival party gained an MSP seat from Labour in Edinburgh South and is beginning to encroach in other capital seats, Aberdeen, Renfrewshire, Inverclyde and East Lothian. Transport Secretary Alastair Darling is one of those facing a growing LibDem threat in Edinburgh Central. And Nigel Griffiths, the consumer affairs minister in Whitehall who represents Edinburgh South for Labour at Westminster, showed his alarm that the junior partner has the two key economic posts in the new Scottish Cabinet. Instead of offering co-operation, he told the BBC he would monitor them closely in driving forward the Scottish economy, claiming their track record in local government is 'very poor'. Ian Davidson, the Glasgow Pollok MP, warned MSPs that Westminster retains the power to change the Holyrood voting system, just as MSPs are able to change it for councils. He said that the voting system, which gave Labour a minority and forced it into coalition, should be changed. In pressuring McConnell over the voting reform, he said MPs could press for a special conference on the issue as 'the nuclear option'. McConnell should be required to explain the coalition deal to the party, he said: 'Jack needs to argue his case within the party, to convince us that he got a good deal. Maybe he can convince us, but we don't think so at the moment'. Speaking of the 56 Westminster MPs from Scotland, he added: 'We reflect perhaps more accurately than MSPs do the views of the Labour Party in the country.' Mark Lazarowicz, Labour MP for Edinburgh North and Leith, is one of several MPs warning his Westminster colleagues not to get involved in the council voting issue. His concern instead is that MPs and Scottish Labour at large scrutinise LibDem policies, and are free to criticise. He says the party may have focused too much on the threat of Nationalists and Tories, while LibDems were given little attention: 'The fact that we are in coalition doesn't mean we have to suspend all our differences. If they don't deliver, we have to speak up for the communities we represent,' he said. That includes transport spending, for instance, which he says could be allocated to LibDem areas outside the central belt. And he yesterday accused the LibDem Scottish environment minister Ross Finnie of 'astounding arrogance' in refusing to listen to the widespread protests about shifting the headquarters of Scottish Natural Heritage from Edinburgh to Inverness. 'All Edinburgh MPs have constituents who are extremely angry about this move, and if he continues to press ahead with it, then obviously we'll be strongly criticising him,' said Lazarowicz. Other MPs have told the Sunday Herald that the row over council voting reform is a means of increasing leverage on different issues, where they have more chance of influencing events. They include Westminster backbenchers' desire to secure a cut in the current number of MSPs -- 129 -- so that they fall proportionately with the planned cut in MP constituency numbers, from 72 to 59. Some MPs are also talking of legislating to limit the powers of MSPs elected from the top-up list. Only four out of 56 are Labour, and several, particularly Nationalists, have been an annoyance to Labour MPs and MSPs by encroaching on constituency issues and cases. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:33:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:33:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: imperialism is good for you Message-ID: <004e01c3238b$67773dc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> In recent years we have had "eminent" historians including Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson and David Cannadine all producing major works (Schama's with a tv series) proclaiming the greatness of empire. Meanwhile Blair's foreign policy guru Robert Cooper justified the need for a new imperialism (under the rubric of humanitarian intervention) to counter the threat of "failed states". Now another born again imperialists steps up to the plate to proffer wisdom about the joys of war, and in the most ridiculously populist way imaginable. ------_ Common men had a great war, says historian Academic challenges 'middle-class' accounts of horrors of trenches in 1914-18 conflict By Liam McDougall, Arts Correspondent The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 A MAJOR historical revision of the first world war has been launched which claims that far from being a world of disillusionment and despair it was viewed in a positive way by ordinary front-line soldiers. In a dramatic reassessment of life on the Western Front, the eminent historian, Professor Richard Holmes CBE, claims that the accepted view of what took place has been wrongly coloured by the writings of middle-class war poets. Instead of being a place of dejection, futility and darkness, as typified in Wilfred Owen's Anthem For Doomed Youth (What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?) and works by Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, many of the troops were upbeat about their experiences. Using written accounts by British soldiers at the time, Holmes argues that it was only after 1918, when it became clear that the world they had been fighting for had not mat erialised, that disillusionment had set in. Holmes, a professor at the Royal Military College of Science at Cranfield University, said: 'The problem is that the first world war is seen through literature and not history. We think of the war in the way that the poets want us to think of it. 'The poets were almost universally middle-class men serving in the infantry. Often they had not worked before the war and had gone to it straight from school or from a relatively easy environment. It's the first thing that they've done and they bring all the baggage of a public school education. They see it in a particular way. 'Let us not deny the validity of their view of the war, but we ought not to imagine that a miner or docker would have seen the war the same way. I don't think they did.' Holmes's controversial re- evaluation of events in the front-line trenches during the first world war will be set out tomorrow at the Caledonian Research Foundation Prize Lecture in Edinburgh. In the talk -- War of Words: the British Army and the Western Front -- to be hosted by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Holmes draws on the letters and diaries of soldiers who fought in the conflict. One year after the start of the war, Lieutenant Talbot Kelly, a gunner officer supporting the New Army 9th Scottish Division, wrote: 'Our Scottish infantry created an enormous impression in our minds. Never again was I to see so many thousands of splendid men, the very heart and soul of the nation. These were they who, on the outbreak of war, had rushed to enlist, the best and first of Kitchener's New Armies. And here we saw them, bronzed and dignified, regiments of young gods.' Another, Frederick Hodges, had gone to enlist with school friends in March 1917 -- three years after the war had started -- before being formally called up. 'My friends and I had been quite determined not to be classified as anything but A1 when we joined up so half-a-dozen of us had gone into strict training during the winter,' he wrote. When he eventually went to France in April 1918, he reflected: 'We accepted that our young lives were no longer our own in this crisis and that our country expected us to sacrifice them. I felt no fear. The grave situation overwhelmed personal fear.' Almost one million men from Britain and the empire died during the first world war, nearly all of them on the western front. Despite the devastation, Holmes said that human suffering was 'infinitely worse' during the second world war and blames a 'literary cult' which has come to shape the traditional view of the war as 'waste built of futility and compounded by human error'. As evidence that the war has been hijacked, he points to soldier Charles Carrington, who won the Military Cross at Passchendaele in 1917 -- one of war's costliest battles -- who wrote: 'It appeared that dirt about the war was in demand ... Every battle a defeat, every officer a nincompoop, every soldier a coward.' The same battle was made famous in Sassoon's poem, Memorial Tablet. In it, he penned the enduring epitaph: 'I died in hell -- They called it Passchendaele'. Holmes added that from the poems -- which tell the story of the war through images of mud, blood, barbed wire and shell holes filled with dead bodies -- other works based on their views were made. 'Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, first published in 1929 and made into a film the following year, was an important milestone,' he said. 'Remarque's own experience of the war was very limited. The very undis illusioned Charles Carrington served at the front perhaps 100 times longer than the horrified Remarque. In a sense, that's part of the problem. Ghastly though a couple of weeks at the front must have been, they were all Remarque had to go on. What we have is a memoir as pastiche.' Now, Holmes -- while admitting that he is still in a 'no man's land of historiography' -- suggests more academics are coming to view the first world war in a different light. He said: 'I can't think of any other event in modern history where we come to it as literature before we come to it as history. The problem I have is that before I argue my case, people have already read Anthem For Doomed Youth. 'Other historians have come to believe that the first world war was far too literary a war. If you read what people wrote at the time the soldiers are far more positive about it and it fits far more into the pattern of their lives than the poets lead us to believe. I think we have misjudged their experience.' From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:35:55 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:35:55 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Destructive creation: carbon sink mythology Message-ID: <005601c3238b$bbee78a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Executive 'promises' 150m trees A new forest six times the size of Glasgow required to absorb CO2 from planned roads By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 It's just a minor snag, hardly worth mentioning. But where are ministers going to plant the 150 million trees they need to combat traffic pollution? In the partnership agreement for the next four years of coalition government, Labour and the Liberal Democrats promised to protect the environment by planting trees alongside new roads. The aim is to soak up the carbon dioxide from vehicle exhausts which wrecks the climate. But experts claim it will take a forest five or six times the size of Glasgow to counteract the steep rise in carbon pollution that will be caused by the Executive's ?1 billion road-building programme. Environment minister Ross Finnie would have to organise the planting of 150m trees over an area the size of 140,000 football pitches. The idea met with derision from transport campaigners, environmental groups and the Green Party. 'Maybe ministers should ensure they are fig trees. At least then they could use the leaves to cover their embarrassment,' said Colin Howden from the TRANSform Scotland campaign group. 'They seem to have given up on trying to tackle the growth in road traffic. As well as more pollution, that means more road deaths, more ill-health, more disrupted communities, and more urban sprawl.' Trees absorb and trap carbon dioxide as they grow, and so can be used as 'carbon sinks' to offset pollution and reduce the risks of climate change. This is the rationale for the green promise made in the partnership agreement signed this month by Labour leader Jack McConnell and LibDem leader Jim Wallace. It declared: 'We will learn from experience overseas with a view to setting a minimum standard for planting trees to act as carbon sinks beside new road developments.' So the Sunday Herald asked a leading expert on carbon sinks to estimate the area of woodland needed to offset the pollution new roads will cause. The answer, according to Dr Richard Tipper, a director of The Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, is a massive 100,000 hectares. 'It is obviously unrealistic to achieve anything like this by planting along the edges of highways,' he said. But if the Scottish Executive was serious, it could invest in large-scale United Nations schemes to combat the growth of deserts in China and India, he added. Studies for the Executive have put the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by road vehicles at more than eight million tonnes, and predict a 27% growth in road traffic over the next 20 years. On this basis, Tipper estimates that an additional 22m tonnes of carbon dioxide could be released into the atmosphere by 2023. 'Making motorists and road-builders contribute to schemes such as the UN programme on desertification could be an effective way of stimulating environmental awareness,' he argued. Environmental groups, however, were more scathing. 'Ministers should start looking out their wellies because their plans to keep on building new roads such as the M74 and Aberdeen by-pass mean there's going to be one heck of a lot of trees needing to be planted,' said Dr Dan Barlow, head of research at Friends of the Earth Scotland. Barlow is alarmed that the partnership agreement, and the Labour and Lib Dem manifestos that preceded it, fail to mention any plans to cut road traffic growth. In 2002, then transport minister Wendy Alexander vowed to 'stabilise' growth at 2001 levels by 2021. But the fear now is that this aim has been quietly dropped under pressure from the powerful roads lobby. 'The absence of any mention in the partnership agreement that the overall aim is to stabilise and reduce traffic growth, as previously promised, speaks volumes,' said Barlow. The Executive insisted it was committed to making an 'equitable contribution' to the UK target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by 2020. 'We will review international work, including the latest scientific advice, to determine the extent to which tree planting beside roads can assist our climate change objectives ,' said an Executive spokesman. 'This information , together with practical considerations such as land availability, will be used to inform minimum recommended standards for the planting of trees .' If tree-planting throughout Scotland continues at current levels, the Executive pointed out, the area of woodland planted since 1990 would be enough to absorb an average of 0.4 million tonnes of carbon a year by 2010. But this was ridiculed by the Scottish Green Party, which now has seven MSPs in the Scottish parliament. 'This is laughable tokenism by the coalition,' said Mark Ruskell, the new Green MSP for mid-Scotland and Fife. 'Planting trees to offset carbon emissions is not a long-term solution. If the Executive was serious about tackling climate change, it would be opening new rail links, not building new roads. ' From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:36:58 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:36:58 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: constitutional deform Message-ID: <005e01c3238b$e1385ea0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Scottish Labour MPs undermine devolution again: this time over PR Holyrood Commentary By Iain Macwhirter The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 Labour MPs in Westminster are at it again. They are trying to undermine the Scottish Executive and the First Minister -- or if they aren't, they are putting on a pretty good pretence. Labour MPs are incensed at the concessions made to the Liberal Democrats in the partnership agreement by Jack McConnell, and are determined to save first-past-the-post voting in local elections. There is a real sense of betrayal among Labour MPs, many of whom have strong personal ties to the Labour councillors who stand to lose their jobs when electoral reform is introduced. MPs like Ian Davidson are saying McConnell was 'stitched' by the LibDems during the coalition deal-making, and say they are determined to reverse the policy of introducing proportional representation for local government, one of the key elements in the coalition agreement. They say PR is not Labour policy and McConnell had no right to go ahead with it. Edinburgh South MP and small businesses minister Nigel Griffiths, a man with close connections to Gordon Brown, says he will be 'looking closely' at what happens in Scotland in future, and making it abundantly clear he doesn't trust the LibDems. The Labour MP for Hamilton South, Bill Tynan, a neighbouring constituency to McConnell's own, has even called for a special Labour recall conference in Scotland to overturn the Lib-Lab deal. This would be a direct assault on the legitimacy of the Scottish Executive and a personal affront to the First Minister. We have been here before. After Jack McConnell first took over as First Minister in November 2001, almost the first thing he did was travel south to Westminster to square things with Scottish Labour MPs. Throughout the brief reign of his predecessor, Henry McLeish, a constant stream of damaging stories emanated from the Labour benches. Labour MPs deeply resented McLeish's introduction of free personal care for the elderly against party policy and his proposal to call the Scottish Executive the 'Scottish Government'. Henry was 'thick', it was said in Westminster. He could call the Scottish Executive the ''White Heather Club'' if he liked, but it was not the government of Scotland. The then pensions minister, Alistair Darling, refused to refund ?23 million in attendance allowances needed by the Scottish Executive to defray the cost of the free personal care scheme. When McConnell took over he moved quickly to silence this damaging off-stage chorus. He addressed the Scottish Labour group of MPs directly, something Henry McLeish had never done. He promised a new era of co-operation in which there would be no more radical departures from UK policy. Unfortunately, he wasn't in a position to make such a commitment. Nor indeed is he in any position now to reverse elements of the partnership agreement -- at least not if he wants to remain in office. It is in the nature of coalition politics that certain policies have to be sacrificed to reach agreement. The LibDems had made clear that without a commitment to PR there would simply be no deal. Labour MPs seem to be unaware of the new rules in post-devolution Scotland. Ian Davidson took Mr McConnell to task on BBC's Politics Scotland on Friday for making deals over the heads of Labour MPs. Bill Tynan warned McConnell that he was defying the party's internal consultation last summer, which had registered massive opposition to PR. It is strange that Labour MPs have only now woken up to what has been going on. They surely realised when they voted for the Scotland Act that they were opening the way for coalition government in Scotland. This means Labour cannot get its own way any more. Too many MPs seem to be living in the past. In the days of winner-takes-all politics, councils like Midlothian could return 95% Labour seats on 45% of the vote. They don't understand why their Scottish leader should be handing over to the SNP, or the LibDems, councils which Labour has controlled since the dawn of time. They have a divine right to rule. They are Labour, and in Scotland Labour calls the shots. However, there was no way that this was going to survive given the new political realities in Scotland. The only thing the latest Westminster revolt will achieve is a weaker Labour Party in Scotland. They need another bout of fratricide like a hole in the head. Labour lost a lot of votes in the May election, even if it kept most of its seats. The turnout, a whisker under 50%, wasn't as bad as some feared, but it was a warning that the Labour vote in Scotland is decomposing. A house divided is a house defeated, and if there is to be a protracted civil war in the Labour Party, McConnell's new administration could be seriously damaged, even before it gets its feet under the table. From mjlima at uol.com.br Mon May 26 07:39:21 2003 From: mjlima at uol.com.br (Mario Jose de lima) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 10:39:21 -0300 Subject: [A-List] André Gunder Frank References: <023c01c32367$56dd8e70$20fa5718@comintern> <005001c32381$30e6eee0$99cd44c8@k3v6h4> Message-ID: <008201c3238c$37c8b580$2101a8c0@v6e1f2> One immediate and complete recovery of the health of Frank Professor, is my sincere desires. M?rio Jose de Lima/Brazil ----- Original Message ----- From: "Julio Fern?ndez Baraibar" To: Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 9:20 AM Subject: [A-List] Andr? Gunder Frank Me uno a los deseos de todos los miembros de la lista: la m?s pronta y completa recuperaci?n del profesor Andr? Gunder Frank. Desde Argentina Julio Fern?ndez Baraibar julfb at sinectis.com.ar ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: ; "Discussions on the Socialist Register and its articles" Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 6:15 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Subscription > All best to Andre Gunder Frank! > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Andre Gunder Frank" > To: ; "Discussions on the Socialist Register and > its articles" ; > Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2003 6:10 AM > Subject: [A-List] Subscription > > > > Please suspend until further notice Andre Gunder Franks Subscription > > (s) due to his unexpected Hospitalization as of "" Immediately."" > > Per Gunders request. > > Thank you. > > Alison/Andre Gunder Frank. > > > > > > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > > > ANDRE GUNDER FRANK > > > > Senior Fellow Residence > > World History Center One Longfellow Place > > Northeastern University Apt. 3411 > > 270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114 USA > > Boston, MA 02115 USA Tel: 617-948 2315 > > Tel: 617 - 373 4060 Fax: 617-948 2316 > > Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/ e-mail:franka at fiu.edu > > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > > > > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:43:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:43:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: ideology & McCarthyism Message-ID: <006601c3238c$d91484a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Land Of The Unfree A media attack on the Danish director of a Palme d'Or-nominated film for having 'Taliban thinking' reveals the depths to which America has sunk and the dangers of more illiberal reaction to come Ian Bell The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 IT doesn't take much to offend certain Americans at the moment. Why might that be? Possibly -- though this I tend to doubt -- anger at any and every criticism of their country is tinged by a degree of guilt, given recent events. Perhaps, equally, if you truly happen to believe your country is the greatest the world has ever seen, even if no-one has put the matter to a vote, you will resent having it picked on. But the rancour that erupts in the United States these days when someone voices dissent can seem a little, well, childish. After all, if you want to be the planet's only hyperpower you cannot also expect to be loved. It could even be argued that if you are the planet's only hyperpower you probably do not need to be loved. Right-wing American opinion seems to veer, nevertheless, from a determination to ensure that the US will always have its way, no matter what, and sheer petulance towards the reactions such behaviour tends to provoke. Not all Americans feel this way, of course. Last week, certain Democrats, with an eye on the presidency, at last found the courage to say that the war on Iraq was a bloody distraction from the real and pressing war on terrorism. They added, for good measure, that the US had better start discovering a little humility if it wants to win back the trust of its natural allies. But this sort of language is scarcely universal. Witness, first, the continuing tirades against France and all things French, as though Jacques Chirac was the only statesman in the world to attempt to obstruct the Iraq war. Witness, secondly, the antics of the neo-conservatives who now command the controlling heights in Washington, the think-tank warriors with their lists of countries to be visited by the Pentagon roadshow, the blue-skies brainstormers whose export trade in American 'values' is about to cost the US taxpayer $400 billion a year. And witness, finally, Lars von Trier. Who he? The Dane, distinguished film-maker though he may be, is hardly a household name. His country is not normally nominated as a hot-bed of Islamist rebellion. Yet with the White House having failed utterly in its attempts to link Saddam with Osama, an American journalist last week managed to connect the director with the Taliban, or rather with 'Taliban thinking', whatever that might be. This was not because the Americans have yet again failed to produce a film capable of winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, as von Trier is likely to do for the second time with Dogville. It is not even because he has actually managed to mention the Taliban. American critical opinion appears to have taken a fundamentalist turn of its own simply because the Dane's movie appears to be a parable on moral decay in the US -- and because of one or two provocative remarks he made to accompany the launch of the piece. Thus he stands accused of that most heinous crime, anti-Americanism. The trouble is, he denies the charge absolutely. Questioned in Cannes, von Trier -- who ironically has never been to America because of a fear of flying -- said: 'I feel like an American. Ich bin ein American. I would love to start a Free America campaign because we have just had a Free Iraq campaign. You could say I'm a communist, but I'm not. I want to free America because, from over here, I see a lot of shit in America.' The director, never a man to make complete sense, went on to say that 'America is not how it should be'. Whoever said it was? Did Bob Dylan lose his citizenship for writing some scathing songs about the place? Has John Steinbeck ceased to be revered because some of his novels portrayed the brutalities of life among America's poor? Are all those Hollywood movies in which guns go off and buildings explode a tribute to an orderly democracy? Von Trier makes a point, in any case, that at least half of the American electorate would accept; as 'homeland security' erodes their civil liberties, they could stand to be freed from the hawks in the White House. Leathery old Neil Young had a crack at this argument last week. Contrary to what their mass media tell them, he said, people in the US are far from united in their attitudes towards anti-Americanism. The Dixie Chicks might have suffered a boycott by radio stations after one of their number said she was ashamed, because of the war, to come from the same state as their president, but sales of the band's recordings are up, as are sales of tickets for their concerts. The satirist Michael Moore might also have been vehement in his opposition to the conflict, but his book, Stupid White Men, has been a huge best-seller in America. So what's different about von Trier? All he said, in essence, was that America has some problems. That did not mean he had no affection for the country or its culture, nor did it mean that he sided with those who would like to destroy the US. His was friendly criticism, an exercise in free speech, an artist's personal opinion. But then, von Trier is a European. That seems to have been the real significance of what was otherwise a trivial spat. Mutual ignorance on either side of the Atlantic is leading to mutual antag-onism. The idea that Europe and America form a community of beliefs and attitudes has broken down. As societies they are no longer members of the same cultural family. While certain super-patriots will tolerate no criticism of America from anyone, the anger takes on a harder edge when Europe is involved. Why be surprised? There are underlying realities here. Trade wars are about to resume as the European Union grumbles about subsidies and America again insists that we swallow GM food. Attitudes towards politics long ago diverged in every sphere from workers' rights to healthcare. Europeans are mystified, at best, by America's gun culture and the widespread enthusiasm for the death penalty. Americans, for their part, cannot grasp Europe's liberal thinking and its 'socialistic' welfare states. Above all, the issue of American power is driving a wedge between the quarrelsome allies. In that context it is not difficult for an exotic figure such as von Trier to make himself controversial. Yet what is striking is the language used against him. 'Taliban thinking' -- what does that mean? How does a Dane find himself associated with a bunch of fanatical Afghans who would undoubtedly have banned his films without even looking at them? Gerald Peary of the Boston Phoenix, who made the remark -- and who also made a good point about von Trier's treatment of the women in his films -- seemed to be grasping for a catch-all phrase, something more resonant to his presumed audience than 'alien threat'. So it comes to this: say that America needs to be more free and a professional journalist will associate you with a terrorist sect. For my money, von Trier deserves the Palme d'Or just for that. Yet the irony is that Peary made the director's case for him: America must be in poor shape when its language can be debased, by a supposed communicator, to this lowest of common denominators. To say the very least of it, von Trier might be on to something if fact-free propaganda can replace argument so easily. But then, that's the way the neo- con servatives like it. They are not foolish enough to believe that they can eradicate dissent, or win every heart and mind in the world. The point is to banish dissent from the public sphere, to ensure that The West Wing lands in a welter of controversy if Martin Sheen speaks his mind, to discredit the New York Times if it whispers scepticism, to cause pop singers and school teachers alike to fear for their careers if they question the patriotic consensus. Von Trier, who claims no expertise, probably does not know the half of it. With the Pentagon hatching plans to tap e-mails across America and gain access to any health, employment or educational record it chooses, the country increasingly resembles a house divided against itself. This, as the director dared to suggest, is far from ideal. Yet those who govern a country with a constitutional guarantee of free speech do not want to hear it. Just as well, I suppose, that we have a prime minister who speaks his mind so fearlessly on such matters. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:45:38 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:45:38 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK pensions crisis Message-ID: <006e01c3238d$1737ce40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Safety net to end pension fund scandals Government to act as millions face crisis By Teresa Hunter Personal Finance Editor The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 Employees who see their pensions wiped out by a company collapse could soon receive compensation, following government plans to establish a safety net. Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Andrew Smith is expected to announce new rules forcing companies to improve the solvency of their pension schemes. But according to senior sources the government has decided a so-called 'discontinuance fund' must also be established, and it will announce proposals for doing so before the summer recess. The fund will follow the American model, and be paid for by levies on all existing pension schemes. Well-funded schemes, which are significantly less likely to hit problems will pay less than poorly-funded schemes. These could face painful penalty levies designed to encourage them to improve their overall funding. The new pensions strategy, much of which has already been foreshadowed by the Green Paper published before Christmas, will reveal the Government's growing unease at the deepening pensions crisis. Most schemes are now in deficit and BT and the Royal Mail last week became the latest to announce measures to shore up black holes. BT has pledged ?6.3 billion and the Royal Mail ?4.6bn to plug the gaps. But it is the ease with which employers are able to walk away from their responsibilities to pension scheme members, either by winding up the funds, or after bankruptcies, which is causing greatest concern. The government plans to announce measures which will put pressure on solvent companies to keep their pension promises, and stand behind their funds, while victims of bankruptcies can look for some compensation from the new safety net. However, this may still not restate all the money they might lose. Around 200 employees of Edinburgh-based Blyth & Blyth saw their pensions slashed or wiped out completely, after the engineering firm went into liquidation last year, leaving a ?6m black hole in the retirement fund. Some people who had paid into the scheme for decades were furious to discover they might get no pension whatsoever after the collapse. Yet, on Wednesday, a newly reconstituted company, called Blyth & Blyth Consulting Engineers, issued bullish publicity material boasting about how a management buyout from the liquidators was on target to 'generate a turnover in excess of ?4.5m during its first financial year.' Malcolm McLean, chief executive of the Office of the Pensions Advisory Service, said: 'They have not done anything illegal in re-establishing the company in this way. But, however you look at it, someone has got out of funding a pension problem.' Around 60,000 employees have seen their pensions wiped out in recent years by corporate bankruptcies, and sacked Labour pensions guru, Frank Field, estimates that 1,440,000 final salary participants could be at risk from collapses or wind-ups. Governments have always strenuously resisted calls for a compensation scheme to shore up victims, from fear that it would encourage irresponsible company owners and let them off the hook. However, the crisis of confidence, which recent collapses have triggered, has changed their minds. One pensions expert said: 'A compensation scheme is good for all employees, because it gives them peace of mind that their retirement savings are safe and, therefore, it makes sense to save.' The problem with industry-funded schemes, however, as the US is currently experiencing, is that they, too, can encounter shortfalls. The only body which can ever guarantee pensions is the government. But apparently Chancellor Gordon Brown's Treasury has given short shrift to any suggestion that it should be the safety net of last resort. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:49:53 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:49:53 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: constitutional deform Message-ID: <008601c3238d$af406620$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Once again, thank you very much, Labour Party. ------ EU probes Holyrood contracts HAMISH MACDONELL SCOTTISH POLITICAL EDITOR The Scotsman, 26 May 2003 THE European Commission is investigating allegations of mismanagement, secrecy and bias in the Holyrood parliament project. The Scotsman has learnt that competition lawyers in Brussels are looking into the way the project has been handled by the government. A detailed, 20-page complaint has been received by the European Commission in Brussels relating to the choice and acquisition of the Holyrood site, the conduct of the architectural competition, the award of some of the contracts and the suitability of a senior manager. Officials will study the complaint and are likely to ask the UK government to provide more information before reaching a preliminary judgment. A full investigation could then be launched into every aspect of the project - which could result in a big fine for the UK government if it is found to have breached EU rules. This is the latest in a series of setbacks for the Holyrood building project, which is now two and a half years behind schedule and ?250 million over budget. Jack McConnell, the First Minister, has ordered his own inquiry to find out what has gone wrong - but a separate, full, European Commission investigation would prove to be much more politically damaging because it would drag the UK government into the affair for the first time. Westminster, not the Scottish Executive, will have to answer to the commission on this complaint, if it is taken further, because it is always the member state which has to answer on competition matters, not the devolved administration. A spokeswoman for the commission said she understood the complaint had been lodged, adding that any allegations of breaches of single market and competition rules were taken very seriously by the commission. She said: "It will be looked at under single market rules. There are now strict rules about tenders and competition governing everyone in the European Union." And she added: "A judgment will be made on whether there has been unfair competition. What the commission is trying to do is to create an environment of fair competition in the single market. It is something that the commission takes very seriously indeed." The complaint was submitted by David Black, an Edinburgh architect, who has been one of the most vociferous critics of the Holyrood project. He has written a book on the subject and has also submitted a formal complaint about the tendering process to the Auditor General. Mr Black has asked the commission to investigate "possible breaches of EU regulations in the letting of contracts". He claimed that an agreement to acquire the Holyrood site in October 1997 was "kept secret for two months", that the conduct of the architectural competition "may have disadvantaged some entrants unlawfully" and that the choice of the Holyrood site may have been "politically driven". Mr Black has also questioned the experience and qualifications of Sarah Davidson, the civil servant in charge of the project, and the role of Kirsty Wark, who was on the selection panel which chose the winning design, and who was then awarded a contract to make a publicly-funded documentary of the project. Mr Black said last night: "What I am trying to do is put the focus where it really belongs, which is on Downing Street. "The beginnings of all these problems happened under the aegis of the UK government. Even if Scottish civil servants had a responsibility, they were answerable to the UK government." He added: "With the cost likely to rise to between ?400 million and ?500 million, I think it is extraordinary that this will come out of our health and education budgets. "I think it is incredible that hardly any of our MSPs have focused on this." Mr McConnell's inquiry was dismissed by Mr Black as "inadequate". He said: "That inquiry will have its terms of reference limited entirely to Scotland, it will not be a full legal inquiry." A spokesman for the Scottish parliament said that the award of contracts had already been examined by the Auditor General. He said: "In his September 2000 report he concluded that 'in general terms the appointments of the consultants were properly undertaken' and that the appointment process for the architects 'was based on merit'. "Subsequent contracts for work on site have also been awarded strictly in line with EU competitive tendering procedures." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:51:09 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:51:09 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: strategic dilemma Message-ID: <008e01c3238d$dc66ee80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Britain told to choose between US and Europe JASON BEATTIE CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT The Scotsman, 26 May 2003 THE former French president Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing raised the temperature in the debate over the new EU constitution yesterday by declaring Britain had to choose between a future with Europe or its special relationship with the United States. In a series of controversial statements, Mr d'Estaing, who is chairing the convention drawing up the blueprint for an enlarged EU, insisted there were two prerequisites for the constitution: a common foreign policy and a stable presidency. His remarks provided further ammunition to those calling for a referendum on the issue, fearing that the proposals put forward by the convention will mean Britain losing a swathe of sovereign powers as it becomes subsumed into a United States of Europe. Mr d'Estaing tried to allay British fears about the draft text of the constitution, insisting it would propose neither harmonisation of taxes nor a federal system. "The idea of offending or destroying Britain is nonsense," he told Breakfast with Frost. "I did set out at the beginning of the convention that I would not ignore at all the British point of view - even the British sensitivity." And he promised that the post-enlargement Europe would be "stronger, better organised", and one in which the powers of the Commission, the heads of states and national parliaments were clearly defined. "We need democratic legitimacy and the democratic legitimacy is enshrined in our national parliaments," he said. "I am in favour of the very clear definition of the whole of the European institutions on one side and national institutions on the other side." Mr d'Estaing said Britain's problems with Europe stemmed from its long-standing ambivalence towards Brussels. "Britain never considered Europe as a full option. It wanted to be in Europe and to have all the options ... the special relationship with the US. I would say if you want as a wish to be a leading country in Europe . I think you should make up your mind in the next ten years," he said. But the former president's call for a common foreign policy and a president of the council could put him on collision course with Tony Blair when the heads of state meet later this year to agree the new constitution. Mr Blair has been arguing for an elected president answerable to the member states, not the EU Commission. The Prime Minister is also losing the battle for the new EU foreign minister to be answerable to national parliaments rather than Brussels. The draft text of the constitution, setting out the reforms necessary when the EU expands next year from 15 to 25 states, will be published on 20 June. A special conference will then be held to discuss the document which can only be ratified if there is the unanimous approval of all 25 member states. The Tories stepped up their calls for a referendum on the issue, with Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, claiming Mr Blair was in the process of the "serial surrendering" of sovereign powers at the convention. Interviewed by the ePolitix website, Mr Ancram warned that the convention would create a legal personality, which was the prerequisite of a state, set up a full-blown constitution, and take control of foreign policy, defence policy and home policy including asylum. "All of these are crucial areas which define a sovereign nation and the moment they are taken away that nation's sovereignty is gone," he said. But Peter Hain, the Welsh Secretary, who is Britain's lead envoy on the convention, insisted the negotiations were "going well" in Britain's favour. "The facts are we have achieved over the last few days a lot of the things which we thought we would but which the Tories and their friends in the media said we wouldn't," Mr Hain said. "They said we would lose our seat on the Security Council in the United Nations. We are going to keep it with Britain's position protected. They said foreign and security policy would be decided by Brussels. It isn't. Britain's veto remains there. They said we were going to have a European diplomatic service. We won't. I could go on and on." Mr Hain also underlined the government's opposition to a referendum, saying that the issue was best dealt with in parliament. "Let's just calm down and see how this goes. So far we have made very good progress," he said. "There are still some tough issues to negotiate but I am confident we can get a good result for Britain in the end." The government's refusal to consider a referendum may be challenged in the Lords, it emerged yesterday. Lord Blackwell, a former adviser to Lady Thatcher and John Major, is promising to table an amendment to the government bill sanctioning the new constitution requiring a referendum to be held before the proposals could be enforced in the UK. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:53:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:53:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: now for Iran Message-ID: <009601c3238e$2eff0920$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US prepares to undermine Iranian government MARGARET NEIGHBOUR The Scotsman, 26 May 2003 THE Bush administration has cut off contact with Iran and Pentagon officials are pushing for action to destabilise the government of the Islamic republic, according to a US newspaper report. The move follows intelligence reports suggesting al-Qaeda operatives based in Iran played a role in the 12 May suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia. Citing administration officials, the Washington Post said the White House "appears ready to embrace an aggressive policy of trying to destabilise the Iranian government". Officials are due to meet tomorrow at the White House to discuss the Iran strategy, with Pentagon officials pressing for action that could lead to the toppling of the government through a popular uprising, the Post said. After this month's suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration cancelled a planned meeting with Iranian officials, according to the Post. The newspaper said "very troubling intercepts" before and after the Saudi Arabia bombing played a major role in the administration's new stance toward Iran. The intelligence apparently suggested al-Qaeda operatives in Iran were involved in the planning of the bombings, which killed 34 people. The report came as Iran's foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi yesterday called Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network a "dangerous organisation" and said his country was serious about combating it. Mr Kharrazi insisted Iran had already arrested and deported many al-Qaeda members who had crossed illegally into the country and was interrogating other suspects. "We have been serious about al-Qaeda and we will remain serious about al-Qaeda because it is a very dangerous organisation," Mr Kharrazi told reporters. "There is no way that Iranians would support al-Qaeda because we have been fighting with al-Qaeda since before even the Americans were engaged with [fighting] them," he said. Iran's top United Nations envoy confirmed yesterday that Tehran was holding members of the terrorist group. "We have probably captured more al-Qaeda people in the past 14 months than any other country. We have had a number of al-Qaeda people in custody, and we continue to keep them in detention, and we continue to interrogate them, and once we have any information from them, we will pass them to friendly governments," Javad Zarif told ABC's This Week programme. Mr Zarif said Iranian authorities were trying to determine if Saif al-Adil, al-Qaeda's security chief, was among those being held. Washington's quick military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, both neighbours of Iran, have rattled many in the country's clerical establishment, diplomats say. Hassan Rohani, secretary general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Iran "would like to reduce the existing tensions" between Tehran and Washington. "If America shows goodwill, one could expect better prospects in the future relations of the two countries," the Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper yesterday quoted him as saying. Mr Rohani added Iran was "ready to open its nuclear programme to full international supervision". But there were also signs of increasing tensions yesterday within Iran between reformers and conservatives. The BBC said nearly 130 members of Iran's reformist-dominated parliament have signed an open letter to the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, asking him to break a deadlock holding up reforms. It was the latest move by supporters of the moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, to rescue the political reform process in the country, where conservative bodies have blocked new legislation allowing greater social freedoms, justice and democracy. The reformist deputies, who comprise nearly half the parliament, also called for a referendum that would lead to a real democracy guaranteeing freedom and dignity. The letter accused unelected right-wing institutions of mounting a campaign to undermine the reformist movement and Mr Khatami, its chief symbol, despite his landslide election victories. But conservatives within the regime are also asserting their authority. Authorities sent directives to shops to stop the production and sale of "immoral coats", which are body-clinging and too short, newspapers reported. Under Iran's Islamic law, women must dress in long, loose-fitting, clothes and cover their hair and neck with a scarf. Violators risk being fined or lashed. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:54:28 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:54:28 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Zimbabwe: regime's end in sight? Message-ID: <009e01c3238e$533de7c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Opposition claims top members of Mugabe's party want to defect JANE FIELDS IN HARARE The Scotsman, 26 May 2003 ZIMBABWE's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has claimed senior ruling party officials have secretly asked to join his party, fuelling speculation that President Robert Mugabe's days in power are numbered. "We will accept [the officials] but they should not expect high posts and to be treated with kid gloves when they come to us," Mr Tsvangirai told supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at a rally this weekend, according to a report in the Standard newspaper. Mr Tsvangirai has been addressing back-to-back rallies across the country over the past few weekends, ahead of street demonstrations scheduled for early June. He has promised his supporters that 2003 will be "the year of freedom". Most here are taking that to mean the end of Mr Mugabe's 23-year stranglehold on power, which has brought this once calm and prosperous country to its knees. "We will not call on [the US president George] Bush to remove the despotic dictator but we will do it ourselves because it is our responsibility," Mr Tsvangirai told thousands of supporters at Saturday's rally in Chitungwiza, an impoverished town just outside Harare. He did not name the ruling party officials who he said had approached him "in the Nicodemus hours of the night". But the claim adds to speculation that even those in power here privately believe Mr Mugabe's rule could soon be over. Eyewitnesses at a rally yesterday in Harare's Highfield suburb said Mr Tsvangirai claimed some ruling party officials had asked him: "What are you going to do with us if you come into power?" In January this year, Mr Tsvangirai claimed he had been approached by an intermediary representing a top government official, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the army chief Vitalis Zvinavashe over plans to form a transitional government and pension off Mr Mugabe. That report was fiercely quashed by the government. But there are signs that the 79-year old leader may be seriously considering stepping down. On Thursday he hinted that some ZANU-PF leaders were engaging "in clandestine activities over the issue" of who was to succeed him, the government-run Herald said. He said the party leaders were "consulting traditional healers and ancestral spirits in search of charms". As Zimbabwe edges closer to meltdown, electricity and bank workers last week joined teachers on strike. Parts of Harare, including the airport, were reported to be crippled by power cuts last week. Employees of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) were ordered to report for work yesterday after the strike was declared illegal. A strike last week by teachers over pay, which left pupils in many low-income suburbs without lessons to go to, was also declared illegal. With inflation now at 269 per cent, the government is struggling to contain popular discontent. The Zimbabwe dollar is said to be worth less than one cent of its value in 1990. The few people who have money move around with briefcases and car boots full of cash in order to be able to pay for their purchases. Employees of one of Zimbabwe's biggest banks, Zimbank, have also gone on strike. Amid calls for more demonstrations, city residents have begun panic-buying what few goods are available. Long queues formed outside banks in Harare on Saturday, while in shops people jostled to fill their baskets. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:55:56 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:55:56 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: UK/US tensions Message-ID: <00a601c3238e$877dc280$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Col Tim Collins' accuser named The Scotsman, 26 May 2003 THE US soldier who accused a British colonel of war crimes during the Iraqi conflict has been named as a 37-year-old part-time serviceman. Colonel Tim Collins is being investigated for breaches of the Geneva Convention after complaints over his treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war and a civic leader. His accuser, Major Re Biastre, 37, works as a school counsellor and part-time traffic policeman, according to the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times. The reports said that Maj Biastre's complaint followed a period of tense British-American relations. Maj Biastre was involved in a clash with Col Collins after he handed out sweets to Iraqi children in defiance of orders. Col Collins feared that Maj Biastre's actions would endanger the children. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 07:59:55 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:59:55 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: UK/US tensions Message-ID: <00b601c3238f$15f6d7e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Army clears colonel of war crimes in Iraq Humiliated major's claim 'triggered by spite' IAN BRUCE The Herald, 26 May 2003 COLONEL Tim Collins, the British officer who made world headlines with his rousing eve-of-battle speech before the invasion of Iraq, has been cleared of war crimes in a preliminary report by the army's special investigation branch. Military sources confirmed yesterday that claims by Re Biastre, a part-time US army civil affairs major, that Colonel Collins had mistreated Iraqi prisoners, threatened civilians, and "pistol-whipped" a local Iraqi official were unfounded and "based probably on a personal vendetta". Major Stan Coerr, a US Marine officer in charge of an "Anglico" team attached to the Royal Irish Regiment throughout the campaign to co-ordinate American air support and prevent "friendly fire" incidents, said the entire episode was triggered by spite. Major Biastre, 37, a school counsellor in upstate New York, had been humiliated verbally and arrested for insubordination by Colonel Collins when he breached orders, and then argued with his British superior. Major Coerr described his fellow-countryman's allegations as "ludicrous" and "spiteful" and said he would serve with Colonel Collins "any time, anywhere". He has also volunteered to testify in the colonel's favour in any inquiry. Colonel Collins, now on leave after relinquishing command of 1st battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment, to await a new promoted post, still faces another inquiry into his style of leadership of the unit two years ago and an alleged "climate of bullying" by fellow officers which may have contributed to the suicide of 18-year-old Ranger Paul Cochrane in South Armagh in 2001. Major Biastre was in charge of a detachment from the US 402nd civil affairs battalion in southern Iraq. His job was to smooth relations between the military and local civilians. Colonel Collins had him placed under arrest for insubordination and demanded that he be demoted after he found Major Biastre handing out lollipops to children in the town of Al Rumailah in defiance of standing orders. British concern was that children would be at risk of being knocked down by army vehicles if they expected sweets to be handed out by anyone in uniform. Major Coerr said yesterday: "Biastre had a chip on his shoulder from the moment he arrived. All of us understood the order not to hand out candy, as it caused the children to run towards military vehicles. "When Biastre violated the rule and Colonel Collins confronted him, he said something like 'you do your job and I'll do mine'. The colonel ordered him to stand to attention and salute a senior officer. "Biastre did so reluctantly and sloppily. I think they call it 'dumb insolence' in the British army. When he continued to argue, he was arrested. That's what started the vendetta. It was pure spite. He was embarrassed about being humiliated in front of his own men." When Major Biastre was later summoned to Colonel Collins's headquarters, he was made to wait at attention for 45 minutes before being seen. He then submitted a 2400-word statement based on hearsay evidence to US authorities about the British colonel's alleged conduct towards Iraqi soldiers and civilians. The statement also complained that British officers had described George Bush as a "cowboy" and were openly critical of US methods and competence after a series of "friendly fire" tragedies. The main allegation was that Colonel Collins had led a party to the house of Ayoub Yousif Naser, a headmaster, and had struck him with his pistol, fired a shot into the floor, and kicked and punched him. Mr Naser, who has not made any complaint, turned out to be a senior official in Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party. He also had two Kalashnikov rifles buried in his garden. Friends said yesterday that Colonel Collins, 43, felt he was being "hung out to dry". From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 08:02:19 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 17:02:19 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: sovereignty & racism Message-ID: <00be01c3238f$6c334260$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The power of one Weak nations will succumb to American ambition unless we insist on respecting sovereignty Martin Jacques Monday May 26, 2003 The Guardian It has become fashionable to denigrate national sovereignty. The arguments are well versed: sovereignty is no absolute; it should not be used to excuse the abuse of human rights; the needs of justice should override the principle of sovereignty. It is suggested that this represents some profound shift in thinking, a reversal of centuries of history. This would be true if we were talking about the charmed circle of the developed world - Britain, France, the United States and the rest. But of course we are not. The sovereignty at issue is that of countries in the developing world which, until the second half of the 20th century, for the most part did not enjoy national sovereignty anyway. For them, the taste of self-rule, the possibility of not being governed by a race and culture from far away, is, historically speaking, an extremely recent experience. And now it is again under serious assault. Many things came to an end in 1989, even though it was not until after 9/11 that we could begin to understand what many of them were. Nineteen eighty-nine was about the defeat of communism. With 9/11 we saw the emergence of a unipolar world. The invasion of Iraq began to define the nature of American interest and the parameters of that unipolar world, as well as bringing into question many post-1945 arrangements, norms and institutions. It is now clear that the latter included one profound change that has been barely commented upon. American hyperpower marks the end of the post-colonial era, little more than 50 years after it started. It takes the loss of one era and the emergence of a new one to properly understand the dynamics and merits of the former. Tony Blair may fear that we are re-entering a bipolar world - in reality there is no possibility of this for at least two decades, probably longer, and the only candidate on the horizon is China - but in truth bipolarity offered possibilities that unipolarity denies. Competition between the two superpowers served to constrain their respective behaviour, especially beyond their agreed spheres of influence. It may not be "politically correct" to speak of the merits of a bipolar world, but it gave space and opportunity to people in the former colonies where now, in a world where there is just one master, there is much less. The anti-colonial moment was shaped, and in part enabled, by the emergence of the bipolar world after the second world war. The undermining of the sanctity of sovereignty has taken little more than a decade. It should be remembered that at the time of the first Gulf war, "regime change" was an entirely unacceptable proposition, breaching as it did the accepted conventions concerning sovereignty: the first Bush administration recognised this by not taking Baghdad. There followed a slow erosion, with the western intervention in Kosovo - the benefits of which remain dubious - proving to be the most important violation of the principle before the invasion of Iraq. This is not to suggest that the world was not replete with breaches of sovereignty during the cold war: the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the successive attempts by the Americans to unseat Castro, for example. But until now, since the era of decolonisation was ushered in, there has been no serious attempt to challenge sovereignty as a sacrosanct principle of state relations. The argument over Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction acted as a convenient (and seemingly fictitious) bridge between the last Gulf war and this one. In reality, the American invasion was about something completely different: the assertion of American power in this most sensitive of regions, with the added perk of control of the country's oil. Perversely, while the first Gulf war was fought in defence of the principle of sovereignty - Kuwait's - the second was about precisely the opposite, the rape of Iraq's. A handful of left commentators have sought to justify the American invasion on the grounds that it would bring to an end the human rights violations of the Saddam regime. This may prove to be a by-product of the American invasion - though at a huge and far greater cost than non-intervention - but it was never the main intent, simply one of the pretexts. To major on this possibility betrayed a failure to comprehend the big picture, namely the emergence of a unipolar world and the transformation of the United States into a new kind of political animal. This is a moment of a huge historical regression. The rise of imperial America has seen not only the destruction of Iraq's sovereignty, it also brings into question the sovereignty of those countries deemed to be part of the "axis of evil", and in due course no doubt others as well. That is how imperial powers behave when they try and bend the world to their own will and interest. Such attitudes are infectious, not least in a country like ours, where old colonial instincts remain strong. Not long before the invasion of Iraq, a well-known Labour MP, in a TV interview, described Zimbabwe as a rogue state. According to some accounts, Tony Blair would, given a free hand, like to sort out Zimbabwe's problems using the same methods as in Iraq. One would have thought that Britain's historical role in screwing up Zimbabwe might have taught a little humility, but none of it. Or take another example. During the course of an item on Newsnight examining the likely attitudes of the developing countries towards the second, aborted, UN security council resolution, Jeremy Paxman scoffed at the very idea that a country like Guinea should be in a position to exercise any influence on a matter of such global significance. I would not argue that sovereignty is always sacrosanct. There was clearly a powerful case for intervention in Rwanda, more powerful than any recent example I can think of, but in any case this would not necessarily have undermined sovereignty. Some critics would argue that my position puts sovereignty before human rights, and condones genocide, torture and ethnic cleansing. But to oppose intervention is not to condone the behaviour of Saddam, Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il or whoever. It is to assert that western intervention that violates sovereignty is the wrong way to solve these problems. As Iraq demonstrates so eloquently, intervention is never simply or mainly an altruistic enterprise. It is about might and interest: and never has this been more true than today. Moreover, many of the problems of these societies are bound up with the colonial legacy. This is not to deny the abject failure or worse of some of these regimes (though many more have done extremely well: the case of east Asia springs to mind), but to insist on the historical responsibility of the former colonial powers for many of their present problems. Ethnic cleansing in Africa is directly linked to the behaviour of the former colonial powers and the way they drew the borders. Malaysia is ethnically so diverse because the British brought in indentured labour on a huge scale from China and India. The fact that it has been so successful as a multi-ethnic society is a tribute, far too little acknowledged, to post-independence Malaysia. Humility rather than hubris would be the appropriate western response to the problems and challenges these countries face. Plus respect. There is a widespread view in the west that our values are the right values, that we know best, that every country will sooner or later take our road, that everyone will end up, at some point in the future, looking like a variant of ourselves. Such a mindset denies difference and betrays a lack of understanding of the specificity of history and culture. It is misconceived and chauvinistic. The non-western world will certainly share some things with the west, but in many respects they will remain, in their various ways, quite different. One only has to look at the attempts to impose democracy and the free market on Russia to see how western values are culturally specific and not a universally applicable panacea. Does anyone seriously believe that Iraq will become a western-style, free-market liberal democracy - in five years or indeed 50? Embedded in this lack of respect for other cultures is a barely concealed racism. To this day, the racist legacy of the British empire is little considered and hugely underestimated. The new imperialism carries its own racial charge, in some respects greater than before. The new global fault line - the struggle between "good" and "evil", between "civilisation" and "barbarity" - is terrorism; and the agents of terror are, in this discourse, usually brown, sometimes black, never white. In the heyday of European colonialism, expansionism was in part a by-product of imperial competition. This time the divide is constituted as that between the developed and a very large part of the developing world. At the heart of the new imperial politics, in other words, lies race. ? Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asian Research Centre From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 08:04:26 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 17:04:26 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Germany Message-ID: <00c601c3238f$b7ca74a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US will 'work round' German leader Gary Younge in New York Monday May 26, 2003 The Guardian George Bush's administration will continue to ostracise the German chancellor, Gerhard Schr?der, because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has reportedly said. Ms Rice said the Bush administration was trying to patch up strained relations with Germany, but would continue to marginalise Mr Schr?der, according to the conservative German magazine Focus. "We're now doing everything we can to improve relations with Germany at all levels," she reportedly told a German visitor to Washington. "But we're going to work around the chancellor. It's better to leave him out. She was also quoted as saying that Mr Bush was aware of the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer's past as a street-fighter-turned-politician, and does not believe he is suited to be a statesman. The conservative Munich-based magazine did not further identify the German visitor. But two German political leaders recently visited the White House: the economy minister, Wolfgang Clement, travelling with a group of German business leaders, and the premier of Hesse state, Roland Koch, both met administration officials. The White House's approach to Germany reflects a desire by the administration to settle scores with countries that actively opposed its war on Iraq. Ms Rice has been widely quoted telling associates that US policy should be: "Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia." Mr Schr?der angered Mr Bush during the chancellor's re-election campaign last year when he described the proposed attack on Iraq as a "military adventure". Mr Bush has reportedly not talked to him for about six months. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 08:05:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 17:05:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Uzbekistan: blowback booked in advance Message-ID: <00ce01c3238f$e5868640$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US looks away as new ally tortures Islamists Uzbekistan's president steps up repression of opponents Nick Paton Walsh in Namangan Monday May 26, 2003 The Guardian Abdulkhalil was arrested in the fields of Uzbekistan's Ferghana valley in August last year. The 28-year-old farmer was sentenced to 16 years in prison for "trying to overthrow the constitutional structures". Last week his father saw him for the first time since that day on a stretcher in a prison hospital. His head was battered and his tongue was so swollen that he could only say that he had "been kept in water for a long time". Abdulkhalil was a victim of Uzbekistan's security service, the SNB. His detention and torture were part of a crackdown on Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), an Islamist group. Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death. The US condemned this repression for many years. But since September 11 rewrote America's strategic interests in central Asia, the government of President Islam Karimov has become Washington's new best friend in the region. The US is funding those it once condemned. Last year Washington gave Uzbekistan $500m (?300m) in aid. The police and intelligence services - which the state department's website says use "torture as a routine investigation technique" received $79m of this sum. Mr Karimov was President Bush's guest in Washington in March last year. They signed a "declaration" which gave Uzbekistan security guarantees and promised to strengthen "the material and technical base of [their] law enforcement agencies". The cooperation grows. On May 2 Nato said Uzbekistan may be used as a base for the alliance's peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan. Since the fall of the Taliban, US support for the Karimov government has changed from one guided by short-term necessity into a long-term commitment based on America's strategic requirements. Critics argue that the US has overlooked human rights abuses to foster a police state whose borders give the Pentagon vantage points into Afghanistan and the other neighbouring republics which are as rich in natural resources as they are in Islamist movements. The geographical hub of the US-Uzbek alliance is 250 miles south of the capital, Tashkent. Outside the town of Karshi lies the Khanabad military base, the platform for America's operations in Afghanistan. The town of Khanabad has been closed for months by the Uzbek government. Locals say the restrictions are compensated for by the highly paid work the base brings. Journalists are not allowed in to see its runway, logistical supply tents and troop lodgings, all set on roads named after New York avenues. One western source said: "[The Americans] expect to be here for over a decade." This will suit the Uzbek government, which welcomes America's change in attitude as its own security forces continue to repress the population. Uzbeks need a permit to move between towns and an exit visa to leave the country. Attendance at a mosque seems to result in arrest. In the city of Namangan, in the Ferghana valley, there are many accounts of the regime's brutality. A fortnight ago, Ahatkhon was beaten by police and held down while members of the Uzbek security service stuffed "incriminating evidence" into his coat pocket. They called in two "witnesses" to watch them discover two leaflets supporting Hizb-ut-Tahrir. He was forced to inform on four friends, one of whom - an ex-boxer - is still in pain from his beating. Abdulkhalil and Ahatkhon prayed regularly. This seemed to have been enough to brand them as the Islamists the Karimov government fears. The Ferghana valley has been a base for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which the US and the UK say has links with al-Qaida. But the group is thought to have been crippled by the operations in Afghanistan. Analysts dismiss US claims that the IMU is targeting American military assets in the neighbouring republic of Kyrgyzstan. The fight against the IMU has been used to justify the repression of Islamists. But the Islamic order advocated by Hizb-ut-Tahrir fills a void left by devastating poverty and state brutality. Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said: "The intense repression here combined with the inequality of wealth and absence of reform will create the Islamic fundamentalism that the regime is trying to quash." Another senior western official said: "People have less freedom here than under Brezhnev. The irony is that the US Republican party is supporting the remnants of Brezhnevism as part of their fight against Islamic extremism." The US is also funding some human rights groups in Uzbekistan. Last year it gave $26m towards democracy programmes. A state department spokesman said America's policy was "reform through engagement" and that Uzbekistan had "taken some positive steps", including "registering a human rights group and a new newspaper". Matilda Bogner of Human Rights Watch's office in Tashkent said: "I would deny there has been any real progress. "The steps taken are basically window dressing used to get the military funding through the US Congress's ethical laws. Nothing has changed on the ground." Hakimjon Noredinov, 68, agreed. He became a human rights activist after a morgue attendant brought him his eldest son, Nozemjon. He had been left for dead by the security service but was still alive despite having his skull fractured. Nozemjon is now 33, but screamed all night since they split his skull open. He is now in an asylum, Mr Noredinov said. "People's lives here are no better for US involvement," he said. "Because of the US help, Karimov is getting richer and stronger." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 08:12:21 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 17:12:21 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US/China tensions: Iran Message-ID: <00d601c32390$d295c7c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> China hits out at 'unreasonable' US sanctions over Iran missile claims By James Kynge in Beijing and Guy Dinmore in Washington Financial Times; May 24, 2003 China yesterday dismissed as "entirely unreasonable" a US decision to slap sanctions on a large state-owned Chinese company that Washington says supplied missile technology to Iran. The issue is expected to figure in a scheduled meeting soon between President George W. Bush and Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart. But it was not expected to derail attempts by Washington and Beijing to find common ground on other problems such as the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, foreign diplomats and Chinese sources said. "The United States is imposing its national policies on others, and the implementation of sanctions is entirely unreasonable," the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement. The US announced this week that it would impose sanctions on North China Industries (Norinco), a sprawling state conglomerate that also deals in arms, for two years. The Chinese group stands to lose more than $200m (?171m, ?122m) in exports to the US over the duration of the sanctions. This was the first time that the US had imposed sanctions against a Chinese company that included a ban on imports of all goods and services, Washington officials said yesterday. Beijing said it was enforcing a law passed last year aimed at curbing missile-related exports by Chinese corporations. "The related Norinco company has not supplied any assistance to the relevant project in Iran," the foreign ministry statement added. Several executives within different Norinco subsidiaries said the company was reviewing the US accusations. One said the sanctions would hit the company hard, especially in its exports of optical fibre and other telecommunications equipment to the US. The sanctions were announced just days before Mr Hu, China's new president and Communist party boss, was due to leave for a four-nation trip during which he will meet Mr Bush in either Evian, France, or St Petersburg, Russia. Foreign diplomats in Beijing said, however, that China's co-operation on the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programme was so crucial that Washington would be reluctant to allow bilateral ties to rupture over Norinco's activities. Nevertheless, the US would apply considerable pressure on Beijing to step up its efforts against the proliferation of sensitive technologies to enemies of America. The US State Department called for the termination of all existing contracts between Norinco and Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, a leading Iranian missile manufacturer. Shahid Hemmat has already been identified by the US for alleged missile technology exchanges with North Korea. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 08:14:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 17:14:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Germany: economic & political crisis Message-ID: <00de01c32391$0e014460$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> E German steel sector faces strikes By Hugh Williamson Financial Times; May 26, 2003 Germany's powerful IG Metall engineering union is to mount strikes to press for a 35-hour working week in economically depressed eastern Germany, union officials said yesterday. The strikes, likely to start on June 2, follow a ballot in which 83 per cent of 7,000 steel workers polled supported strike action, well above the 75 per cent approval rate required. The union is demanding a gradual reduction from a 38-hour working week. Employers have rejected this as highly damaging for the region's fragile economy and predict a long strike. Separately, 90,000 trade unionists joined nationwide protests on Saturday against the government's economic reforms. Unions say the social welfare, health and labour market reforms are socially unjust. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Mon May 26 09:00:54 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 18:00:54 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Germany Message-ID: <00f401c32397$9b70ca40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This article highlights a number of issues followed in depth on the A-list during the last year or so: the deepening German crisis, the political mistakes and missed opportunities of Gerhard Schr?der, class configuration, and the penetration of German television by US interests. With respect to class configuration, the closing paragraph encapsulates just how big a mistake Schr?der is making by alienating his trade union support base, like James Callaghan in Britain 25 years ago. Meanwhile Saban, whose takeover of ProSiebenSAT.1 was achieved via some crude political pressure courtesy of the US ambassador to Germany (at Saban's request), is now pressing for further reform of German corporate law to suit his interests. This is a stark illustration of Nicos Poulantzas's points made over 30 years ago about inward capital investment bringing about a reconfiguration of the regulatory framework along lines suited to US monopoly capitalism. But with Schr?der having already burnt his bridges with a Bush administration intent on unseating him, and desperately trying to placate an implacable business sector by alienating his support base, he is more vulnerable than ever to a populist campaign of the Murdoch variety orchestrated against him by Saban and his new media mouthpiece. And most Germans will be more than happy to accept the prospect of seeing Schr?der shredded, little realising the terrible consequences of this sorry spectacle. ------ Saban seeks to cut German TV takeover bill By Bertrand Benoit in Frankfurt Financial Times, May 6 2003 Haim Saban, the US investor who is acquiring a controlling stake in ProSiebenSAT.1, has requested an exemption from German takeover rules forcing him to bid for the company's outstanding shares. News of the move could spark outrage among minority shareholders in Germany's largest television broadcaster, who have already warned Mr Saban not to exclude them from the transaction. The veteran US entrepreneur made headlines in March when he beat Bauer, a publisher, in the race for control of ProSiebenSAT.1, ending the year-long auction of the bankrupt KirchMedia empire. Observers had suspected that Mr Saban would seek to avoid a mandatory tender offer for the listed shares in ProSiebenSAT.1, but spokespeople had so far insisted he would abide with local rules. However, the Financial Times has learnt that Hogan & Hartson, one of the law firms advising Mr Saban, had filed a request for an exemption with BaFin, the chief German financial services and takeover regulator. Since January 2002, any investor whose holding rises above 30 per cent of a listed company's equity has had to tender for the outstanding shares, at least matching the original offer price. Mr Saban is offering about ?525m ($590m) for a 36 per cent stake. ProSiebenSAT.1's dual share structure means this carries 72 per cent of the votes, above the level that triggers a mandatory offer. In the filing, however, his lawyers argue that ProSiebenSAT.1, which is due to report a first-quarter loss and a 15 per cent drop in sales next week, is a restructuring case and therefore qualifies for a "Section 9" exemption. "This means the money that would have to be spent on an offer is better invested in bringing the company back into shape," one insider said, alluding to a possible apital increase at the broadcaster. BaFin, which declined to confirm it had received the request, has asked for additional information about ProSiebenSAT.1. A spokeswoman for Mr Saban would only say he was "evaluating the situation and will fully comply with the applicable law". If granted, the exemption would cut between ?400m-?500m from a maximum bill of ?1.3bn facing Mr Saban and his bidding partners. However, it would risk drawing the ire of minority shareholders, who have seen the value of their holdings evaporate over the past three years, with the shares losing a third of their value this year alone. Guy Wyser-Pratte, a US investor who claims to hold a "substantial" stake in ProSiebenSAT.1, yesterday told the FT: "As long as Saban's argument sticks to the wall, I suspect it will be good enough for BaFin." "That is why there is no equity culture in Germany. Regulators do not regulate, adjudicators do not adjudicate, prosecutors do not prosecute, all because of these lovely socialists running the country." ----- German watchdog sued over ProSieben takeover By Thomas Clark in Hamburg Financial Times, May 24, 2003 A major shareholder at ProSiebenSat1 is suing BaFin, the German financial watchdog for being denied a say in the takeover of the company by Haim Saban, the US media billionaire. K-Capital Partners, the US investment group which owns about 8 per cent of ProSiebenSAT1 in preference shares has this week filed a complaint against BaFin at the higher regional court in Frankfurt. The shareholder's complaint concerns the denial of a right to participation or to a hearing into BaFin's investigation of the Saban deal. BaFin, Germany's takeover watchdog, launched an investigation and is to rule on Mr Saban's request to be exempted from a mandatory tender offer for ProSiebenSAT1's outstanding shares. K-Capital Partners says its lawyers have put in several requests to get access to the records of the Saban exemption case, which BaFin has denied. Mr Saban currently acquiring a 36 per cent stake, and 72 per cent of the votes, in ProSiebenSAT.1, Germany's largest broadcaster, from KirchMedia. He is trying to avoid triggering a mandatory tender offer for the outstanding shares which could add up to ?500 to his bill. Germany's takeover law forces any holder of stocks in a listed company to make a full offer when their stake exceeds 30 per cent. Mr Saban, who is offering KirchMedia ?7.40 for each of its Pro SiebenSAT.1 shares has argued that ProSiebenSat1 is a "restructuring case", a condition which could merit exemption according to paragraph 9 article 3 of the German takeover law. From bobenoch at shaw.ca Mon May 26 09:30:06 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 08:30:06 -0700 Subject: [A-List] =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_=5BA-List=5D_Andr=E9_Gunder_Frank?= References: <023c01c32367$56dd8e70$20fa5718@comintern> <005001c32381$30e6eee0$99cd44c8@k3v6h4> <008201c3238c$37c8b580$2101a8c0@v6e1f2> Message-ID: <001701c3239b$afcc2300$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> I read Politics of Underdevelopment 35 years ago, and learned much from it...I will look forward to his next post on this list. Bob From hliu at mindspring.com Mon May 26 11:54:36 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 13:54:36 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: [gang8] Albert Wohlstetter's swimming pool References: <1e5.9aebd6f.2c038fec@aol.com> Message-ID: <3ED254DC.5070102@mindspring.com> Herman Khan was by far the dominant figure in nuclear deterrence scholastics. Wohlstetter was the minor voice which worked on theories to prove nuclear war was winnable and deterrence unnecessary. Both Khan and Wohlstetter subscribed to the theme of terror, the different between them is that Khan was strategic and Wohlstetter was tactical inclined. Both had supporters in the Pentagon as long as both themes provided ample rationalization for defense spending. The turning point came after Khan's death and when strategic deterrrence ran out of steam in its justification for rising spending. At that point, under Reagan, tactical weapon spending took over, propelling Wohlstetter onto a pedestal of respectability. See: http://www.rand.org/publications/classics/wohlstetter/D2270/D2270.html http://www.rand.org/publications/classics/wohlstetter/P1472/P1472.html http://www.rand.org/publications/classics/wohlstetter/ I met Khan both at Rand when I was Chairman of Urban Design at UCLA in the mid 60s and also when he set up the Hudson Institute, through his interst in transferring nuclears arms control to urban problems. I worked with Olaf Helmer at Rand on applying the Delphi methodology to predict future urban problem. Olaf introduced me to Wohlsetter who was also a mathemetician. We had a few meetings but did not develope a close relation. I did not have security clearance so much of whtat they were doing ar Rand was off limits to me except for the conceptual rationale. But most of the classified stuff were rathe naive and peripheral so we managed to have some indepth discussions. On global issues, having access to classified information was actually is a hindrance, becuase the information turned out to be so misleading and biased. It did allow the Rand types to discern which wat the official wind was blowing. Wohlsetter impressed me as very intelligent and with a broad interest, like most Rand types. He also had a strong interst in Asia, partucularly China. The Trotskyites vehemantly deny the connection between Trotskyism and US neo-cons. See: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/shac-m23.shtml Hudsonmi at aol.com wrote: > Dear Henry, > How strange that in this article there is no mention of Herman > Kahn, who also grew up in Los Angeles and came out of RAND, was a major > strategist for Scoop Jackson, a mentor to Rumsfeld and Cheney, and of > course was a major Zionist. His Thinking About the Unthinkable was a > major mathematical military strategic work. > Unlike Wohlstetter, he was not a narcissist, but in fact was a > good friend of mine as we agreed to disagree and would bounce ideas off > each other. > The telling point -- and the one on which I finally left the > Hudson Institute -- came when Herman refused to calculate compound > interest. He asked me one day to calculate the doubling times of GNP for > many third world countries, for him to show how a steady growth would > bring everyone up. I pointed out that only debts grow exponentially, not > economies. > These histories of the neocons are one-sided. It was Herman who > collected all the Schachtmanites around him and captured them for the > neocon movement. > Michael > Yahoo! Groups Sponsor > > > > > The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. > To unsubscribe, email: gang8-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com > > > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service > . From bar at idirect.com Mon May 26 16:34:01 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 18:34:01 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> Michael, I agree that Gary's response and Melvin's were well thought out and well put but the person asking for an answer as to what Marxism is cannot and must not be sent just someone else's explanation. Marx is meant to be read and should be read and I simply wanted to suggest the very simple solution of reading Marx for herself. Too often this is ignored and those of us who have read Marx end up translating it or explaining for others who then never bother to read him. This is a disservice to Marx but more to the person making the enquiry. And frankly, no matter how well one of us or all of us may explain, none of it is as exciting or as pleasurable to read as the man himself. Too often working people are put off or too intimidated by Marx or what they think Marx is when instead they should be exploring him on their own and in light of their own experience. I have met too many "marxists" and others on the left who have read little or no Marx directly, only someone else's interpretation of him. My admonition too all workers is don't just listen to me, listen to Karl's voice. And Engels becuase the two go together. There is no other like it. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" To: Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 9:16 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Chris writes in response to Melvin: > > This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. But > instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesnt she just read Marx > herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third > hand from those of us who have. > > ------ > > While Melvin's extensive exposition might not be regarded as appropriate as > a response to Gary's enquiry, I want to gratefully acknowledge the manner of > that enquiry and the response it has generated. > > "Go off and read it yourself" is an option (if not a very friendly answer), > but getting others to clarify how they see the issues is equally useful, and > perhaps Gary has been able to identify a useful starting point in his > inquiry as a result of suggestions made here. > > Michael > > > > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon May 26 22:43:48 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 21:43:48 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Calling all students: Conference on student anti-war movements past and present! Message-ID: <00a601c3240a$b7c5c3d0$20fa5718@comintern> **This message needs to be forwarded!!** **apologies for any cross postings** Calling all students (and others who hate war, racism and occupation)! It's time for us to begin RISING UP OFF OUR ASSES: A conference on Student-led Anti-War Movements-past, present . and future. On June 14, 2003 at SFU Harbour Centre (in the Fletcher Challenge Theatre) >From 11am-530pm on there will be three events. (Speaker bios appended at the bottom of this email) First, "learning our history"- a revisiting with some of the major players from the major student battles against the Vietnam war and more at SFU of the late 60's and early 70's. This will involve Mordecai Briemberg (former SFU-PSA dep't head), Marcy Toms (former student leader, SFU) & Bob Enoch (former student union rep SFU). Second, "our living history"-a talk with two of the Concordia Student Union activists, Tom Keefer (former Vice President-communications CSU) and Leila Khaled Mouammar (member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights) about their struggles to raise consciousness around such issues as Palestine and anti-Arab racism on campus. Finally (and most important!), "organizing to act"- a spokes-council to end the day, with feedback from other students on plans and recent actions to oppose the current drive towards more war and continuing occupations. No panel leaders, everyone asked to participate and plan more (not just) student resistance to war, racism and occupation. Some people are being asked to participate, and all are encouraged to show up and are more than welcome. There will be no admission charged, but donations to recuperate costs appreciated; anything raised above and beyond costs of the event will go to the International Solidarity Movement in honor of the recently shot students Brian Avery and Tom Hurndall and the murdered student Rachel Corrie, all victims of the on-going Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Speaker bios (alphabetically): Mordecai Briemberg: Mordecai Briemberg currently teaches English as a Second Language at Douglas College. Previously he taught sociology and was chair of the Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology Department at SFU in the late 1960's. He was educated at the universities of Alberta, Oxford, and California (Berkeley). He is a member of the editorial board of Canadian Dimension magazine, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Near East Cultural and Educational Foundation of Canada. He writes on contemporary Middle East issues and edited the book It Was, It Was Not: Essays and Art on the War Against Iraq. He is a founding member of the Canada Palestine Support Network (www.canpalnet.ca). Mordecai is a member of the collective that produces the weekly public and cultural affairs radio program "Redeye", broadcast Saturday mornings 9 a.m. to noon on Vancouver Cooperative Radio, CFRO 102.7 FM. He has long been active in social justice struggles, particularly for the creation of democratic structures in education and in opposition to war and racism. Bob Enoch: Bob Enoch was a student activist at SFU in the late 60's. Radicalized by the Vietnam war, he was involved with the SDU there, and later joined with other former university comrades in what would now be called the "new Communist" movement of the early 70's. After 20 plus years as an NGO executive, he has now been re-proletarianized, and eagerly awaits the opportunity to dance on the grave of Imperialism. Tom Keefer: Tom Keefer was Vice President-Communications of the Concordia Student Union in Montreal from 1999-2001 and a member of the CSUs board of directors from 2001-2003. Tom has been a long time anti-capitalist activist who was summarily expelled from Concordia in August of 2001 for his opposition to the university administration and his pro-Palestinian activism. Tom is a member of the New Socialist Group (www.newsocialist.org) and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. Leila Khaled Mouammar: Leila Khaled Mouammar serendipitously participated in the shutdown of the Sep. 9 Netanyahu rally at Concordia. She works with Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR - Montreal: www.sphr.org) on the Karameh campaign to embody and support the dignity and rights of people assaulted and criminalized for resisting the Anglo-American-Israeli imperialist war machine, at home and abroad. Marcy Toms: Marcy Toms was born and educated in Vancouver and has a degree in Anthropology and Sociology and an MA in Women's Studies. She was a founder of both the Vancouver Women's Caucus (1968) and the Spartacus Book Collective (1973) and has been on the executives of End the Arms Race, COPE and the NDP Women's Rights Committee. Her flirtation with social democracy was brief and exceptionally unsatisfactory. Since 1976, she has been a secondary school teacher in Vancouver and involved in her union local and the BC Teachers Federation (BCTF) At present, she is an English and History teacher as well as the Department Head for Literacy, Study Skills and Cognitive Improvement at Templeton Secondary School. Academically, she studies the history of 'social movement feminism,' and educating for 'social responsibility' and has presented papers on these at various conferences in Canada and the United States. From cburford at gn.apc.org Tue May 27 00:40:12 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 07:40:12 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Marxism today In-Reply-To: <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030527063853.03a4faf0@pop3.norton.antivirus> At 2003-05-26 18:34 -0400, Gary wrote: >Michael, > >I agree that Gary's response and Melvin's were well thought out and well put >but the person asking for an answer as to what Marxism is cannot and must >not be sent just someone else's explanation. Marx is meant to be read and >should be read and I simply wanted to suggest the very simple solution of >reading Marx for herself. I also thought that Stan's response on May 23rd was good, although rushed and impressionistic. The liveliest text to read is the Communist Manifesto. As many commentators noted at the time of the 150th anniversary, much of its description of the onward march of capitalism could be a description of what is happening today. This then requires some discussion of why the followers of Marx who organised around the Third International ran into problems in the centralised socialist states. I suggest through a mixture of internal and external problems. The main argument for looking at Marx again now is that with most commentators openly acknowledging that the world economy is capitalist, he was the most penetrating critic of the workings of capitalism and of its economists. Although class struggle may be a powerful motivator, many movements and beliefs take up class struggle, which Marx of course did not invent: the task is to go beyond subjective idealism to a scientific form of socialism. Although some of the immediate democratic demands in the Communist Manifesto have already been widely implemented they are not specifically marxist, and there is no specific immediate marxist programme that all self-defined marxists would subscribe to. With the demise of the Third International, and problems formulating the Fourth, what holds marxists together at its most coherent I suggest are three main features, which are all at a high level of abstraction and necessarily rather fuzzy. They have also percolated into wider society. My formulation would be along similar lines, I felt, to Stan's. 1) Historical materialism Reinterpreted in a probabilistic rather than a mechanically deterministic way, the broad approach of historical materialism remains valid. Indeed the assumption that societies are shaped by their economic base, is so widespread that it is not noticed as marxist any more. A probabalistic assumption about the likelihood of socialism and communism remains reasonable. Developments in monopoly finance capitalism prepare the ground for socialism. Class struggle and a favourable combinations of contradictions are also needed. 2) The Law of Value Marx and Engels were describing something more than the "labour theory of value", which had been described by the classical economists. This is the underlying emergent self-regulatory process of capitalist reproduction, to which bourgeois economists have to remain blind. A difficulty is that Marx analysed its workings in abstract and then illustrated them concretely. He wrote comparatively little about how it operates in a world in which the means of production are at enormously different levels of development. 3) Dialectical materialism The fact that everything is connected with everything else, is becoming more accepted with the advent of computer systems. These have modelled emerging phenomena, and non-linear interactions between even a small number of variables in self-organising systems, in which qualitative changes occur with deterministic indeterminism every so often. This has implications for historical materialism, and for demystifying theories of mind. Although the most sincere religious people are subjective communists and often good allies in practical struggles, the core of marxism is materialist. For marxists the morality of human cooperation arises from material self interest. Despite, and through, many contradictions, the call for working people of all countries to unite remains strong, and is expressed in many ways. Chris Burford From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:10:49 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:10:49 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Comments on a Wallerstein article Message-ID: <000501c3242f$ddef0d80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Another interesting and pertinent commentary from Lou Proyect, who should know that this sort of material is bread and butter for A-listers... Empire and the Capitalists (http://fbc.binghamton.edu/113en.htm) by Immanuel Wallerstein WALLERSTEIN: In short, [Stephen] Roach is arguing that the macho militarism swagger of the Bush regime, the dream of the U.S. hawks to remake the world in their image, is not merely undoable, but distinctly negative from the point of view of large U.S. investors, the audience for whom Roach writes, the customers of Morgan Stanley. Roach is of course absolutely right, and it is noteworthy that this is not being said by some left-wing academic, but by an insider of big capital. COMMENT: Roach represents a distaff view within Wall Street and the foreign policy establishment. You get the same sort of hand-wringing from George Soros, who spoke at a Paris conference organized to explore Wallerstein's thought that was sponsored by Le Monde, the Paribas Foundation among others. (The Paribas Foundation was set up by BNP, one the most powerful investment banks in France and--like Soros--given to pangs of conscience about screwing the rest of the world.) What Roach, Soros, Krugman, Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs all represent is the nagging doubt of the bourgeoisie about whether the current expansionist drive is sustainable. In other words, it is the expression of mainstream Democratic Party thinking. It tends to crop up on the eve of some imperialist adventure and subside after the unruly natives are subdued. Contrary to Wallerstein's spin on Roach's remarks, the "macho militarism swagger" is not something that Bush initiated. It is simply the latest installment in a foreign policy around which is there is a substantial consensus. Clinton's war against Yugoslavia involved virtually all the same themes, including "human rights" rhetoric and large-scale Goebbels-esque propaganda-lies. The war in Afghanistan was simply a more ambitious version of the "war on terror" that had led to the bombing of Sudan's only pharmaceutical factory and other violent attacks by the Clinton administration that were barely noticed by the liberal establishment. WALLERSTEIN: Seen in longer historical perspective, what we are seeing here is the 500-year-old tension in the modern world-system between those who wish to protect the interests of the capitalist strata by ensuring a well-functioning world-economy, with a hegemonic but non-imperial power to guarantee its political underpinnings, and those who wish to transform the world-system into a world-empire. We had three major attempts in the history of the modern world-system to do this: Charles V/Ferdinand II in the sixteenth century, Napoleon in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Hitler in the middle of the twentieth century. All were magnificently successful - until they fell flat on their faces, when faced by opposition organized by the powers that ultimately became hegemonic - the United Provinces, the United Kingdom, and the United States. COMMENT: Odd. I had the distinct impression that the United Kingdom ran a world-empire. At least that's what NYY professor and imperialist ideologue Niall Ferguson believes and promotes. Does Wallerstein think that Winston Churchill was less of an architect of world-empire than Adolph Hitler? The people of India, China, Burma, and most of Africa might have quibbled with that assessment not too long ago. WALLERSTEIN: Hegemony is not about macho militarism. Hegemony is about economic efficiency, making possible the creation of a world order on terms that will guarantee a smoothly-running world-system in which the hegemonic power becomes the locus of a disproportionate share of capital accumulation. The United States was in that situation from 1945 to circa 1970. But it's been losing that advantage ever since. And when the U.S. hawks and the Bush regime decided to try to reverse decline by going the world-imperial path, they shot the United States, and U.S.-based large capitalists, in the foot - if not immediately, in a very short future. This is what Roach is warning about, and complaining about. COMMENT: There is a fundamental confusion here. No advice from Roach, nor Soros, nor Stiglitz can change the precarious situation world capitalism finds itself in today. Despite my sharp disagreements with Robert Brenner over the origins of capitalism and his inexplicable endorsement of the right of the USA to fund a counter-revolutionary movement in Cuba, his 1998 New Left Review article seems more astute than ever. With the rise of the German and Japanese economies in the 1960s, the USA has been forced to respond by driving down wages at home and stepping up attacks on the 3rd world. All this falls under the rubric of 'neoliberalism'. Despite the crocodile tears of a Joseph Stiglitz, there is NO ALTERNATIVE within the capitalist system. The logic that drives this is the need to accumulate capital. Since attacks on wage labor in the pursuit of profit introduce other potentially sharper contradictions, reformist illusions about a global Marshall Plan, etc. will crop up. On my employer's website, you can find a press release about Professor Jeffrey Sach's proposal to end "extreme poverty" by 2015. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/03/05/millennium_project_2015.html The one measure that is capable of accomplishing such a goal is the very one these liberal do-gooders will never support, namely proletarian revolution. WALLERSTEIN: But doesn't the Bush regime give these capitalists everything they want - for example, enormous tax rebates? But do they really want them? Not Warren Buffett, not George Soros, not Bill Gates (speaking through his father). They want a stable capitalist system, and Bush is not giving them that. Sooner or later, they will translate their discontent into action. They may already be doing this. This doesn't mean they will succeed. Bush may get reelected in 2004. He may push his political and economic madness further. He may seek to make his changes irreversible. COMMENT: It does not matter what Buffett, Gates or Soros want. To paraphrase Wallerstein: not John Kerry, not Dennis Kucinich, not George W. Bush are capable of providing a "stable capitalist system". We are in a period of deepening crisis, imperialist war and--ultimately--revolutionary war. If you can't stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen. WALLERSTEIN: But in a capitalist system, there is also the market. The market is not all-powerful, but it is not helpless either. When the dollar collapses, and it will collapse, everything will change geopolitically. For a collapsed dollar is far more significant than an Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers. The U.S. has clearly survived the latter. But it will be a vastly different U.S. once the dollar collapses. The U.S. will no longer be able to live far beyond its means, to consume at the rest of the world's expense. Americans may begin to feel what countries in the Third World feel when faced by IMF-imposed structural readjustment - a sharp downward thrust of their standard of living. The near bankruptcy of the state governments across the United States even today is a foreshadowing of what is to come. And history will note that, faced with a bad underlying economic situation in the United States, the Bush regime did everything possible to make it far worse. COMMENTARY: A typical Wallerstein declaration from Mount Olympus. Not a single strategic recommendation, let alone an engagement with politics. I guess when we are dealing with 500 year long waves, such imperatives must appear mundane if not an outright nuisance. From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 27 02:36:01 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 05:36:01 -0300 Subject: [A-List] FIDEL EN DERECHO Message-ID: <4132-2200352278361770@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin981112003-05-27T07:17:00Z2003-05-27T07:28:00Z4195311136win9222136759.3821 21 Gentileza de "leo cofre" < lcofre at hotmail.com> ?[R-P] Fidel derecho "La idea neoliberal ha recibido un golpe colosal" Por Eduardo Tagliaferro Nota Madre "Un mensaje a los que quieren bombardear Cuba" "Seg?n me explicaban las autoridades universitarias, se planteaba una actividad en la que participar?an algunos estudiantes c?modamente sentados en una sala. Por si acaso, si ven?an m?s, se hab?a instalado una pantalla gigante en las escalinatas. Tengo que hacer una cr?tica a nuestros compa?eros: Ustedes subestimaron al pueblo argentino", arranc? el presidente cubano Fidel Castro desde las escalinatas de la Facultad de Derecho. Fue el primer p?rrafo de m?s de dos horas y media de disertaci?n. La idea original de que unas mil personas lo escucharan en el aula magna, hab?a sido superada por una marea desbordante de j?venes, ancianos, mujeres, piqueteros, empleados de saco y corbata y profesores universitarios que se desesperaban por encontrar una ubicaci?n destacada. El cierre se lo dedic? al resultado de los ?ltimos comicios en la Argentina. Evitando nombrarlo y refiri?ndose a la derrota de Carlos Menem, le dijo a la multitud: "Ustedes no saben el servicio que le han prestado a Am?rica latina y el mundo". ?En un principio la actividad estaba programada para las siete de la tarde. ?Los primeros en llegar hab?an logrado una butaca apenas se abrieron las puertas a eso de las cinco. Pero de repente la multitud se desbord? y no qued? ning?n espacio sin ocupar. Todos los esfuerzos por imponer cierto orden fueron en vano. Fracasado el intento por despejar los accesos al aula magna, fue el propio canciller cubano Felipe P?rez Roque el que exhort? a los estudiantes a abandonar el sal?n para que la actividad pudiera realizarse frente a las escalinatas de la facultad. -Me comenzaron a llegar noticias de que hab?a dos mil, tres mil. (Se cree que llego a 10 mil la gente reunida alli) Tambi?n las emisoras comenzaron a explicar lo que aqu? ocurr?a. Nosotros tenemos cierto h?bito de calcular la gente que va a una concentraci?n y entonces esto parec?a? La Plaza de la Revoluci?n, le coment? Fidel a la multitud. En un sinceramiento de los pormenores del acto, Castro le se?al? a la multitud que sus colaboradores le repet?an que en esas condiciones era imposible concretarlo. "No me hago a la idea de que haya imposibles", coment? dejando en claro que, a pesar de todos los contratiempos, fue su decisi?n la que garantiz? la realizaci?n del acto. Durante mas de dos horas y media cont? an?cdotas del guerrillero argentino-cubano Ernesto "Che" Guevara, se explay? sobre la educaci?n y la salud en Cuba,? sobre el combate al Dengue y por supuesto sobre el enorme "vecino" que lo mira desde el norte. Aunque se cuid? de respetar los andariveles diplom?ticos no dej? pasar la oportunidad de hacer una menci?n a los ?ltimos comicios en la Argentina. Sin nombrarlo, destac? la derrota de Carlos Menem. Fue cuando luego de hablar del ALCA y de se?alar que "hay que evitar que ese veneno circule por nuestros pa?ses", coment?: "tuve gran satisfacci?n y j?bilo con el resultado de las elecciones en esta querid?sima Argentina. Porque lo peor del capitalismo salvaje, como dice Hugo Ch?vez, lo peor de la ofensiva neoliberal, ha pasado. Sin nombrarlo, les digo que la organizaci?n neoliberal ha recibido un golpe colosal y ustedes no saben el servicio que le han prestado a Am?rica Latina y al mundo". ?Fidel no quiso nombrarlo y la multitud tampoco quiso o?r su nombre. Cuando parec?a que estaba por nombrarlo, a voz en cuello le gritaron "No". Castro se estaba acercando a los ?ltimos momentos de su discurso, aunque nadie era capaz de predecirlo. Los miles que concurrieron a la Facultad de Derecho a pesar del fr?o, lo escucharon con un silencio desacostumbrado. ?Luego de caracterizar a la globalizaci?n neoliberal como "cosa terrible" y de se?alar que "es creciente el n?mero de personas que tomaron conciencia en Am?rica Latina, record? que en su visita a La Habana, el papa Juan Pablo II hab?a hablado de "globalizaci?n solidaria". Aqu? volvi? sobre la realidad nacional: "Ser? un d?a de gloria el d?a que el pueblo argentino pese a las divisiones y fragmentaciones pueda decir 'otro mundo mejor es posible'". Pero tampoco ese es un punto de llegada. En ese momento, propuso, -habr? que repetir que otro mundo mejor es posible y luego otra vez y otra vez. (Jos?) Mart? dec?a que los sue?os de hoy ser?n las realidades del ma?ana. Se los dice un so?ador que ha tenido el privilegio, no el m?rito, de vivir muchos a?os, concluy?. Durante las mas de dos horas y medias, tuvo tiempo para detenerse en las pol?ticas educativas que se implementan en Cuba y sobre la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias M?dicas, un emprendimiento en el que estudian j?venes becados del Tercer Mundo. Record? que de acuerdo a estimaciones estadounidenses un graduado universitario cuesta 200 mil d?lares, y luego de se?alar que all? se hab?an recibido, unos 10 mil m?dicos, destac? que "Cuba le aport? a los pa?ses del Tercer Mundo unos 2 mil millones de d?lares". ?Tambi?n le dedic? un buen espacio a contar an?cdotas sobre el Che. ?Coment? que todos los fines de semana Guevara intentaba escalar el Popocat?petl, una cima volc?nica a las afueras de la ciudad de M?xico. Aunque no lograba hacerlo, cont? que cada siete d?as volv?a a intentarlo y "si no se hubiera embarcado con nosotros hacia Cuba, seguramente seguir?a intent?ndolo". Resalt? que los domingos en Cuba, en su d?a libre, el Che se dedicaba a tareas comunitarias y coment? que as? naci? la idea del trabajo voluntario. Con los comentarios sobre el Che homenaje? a la multitud embelesada que tuvo su propia Plaza de la Revoluci?n. Para suscribirse o borrarse por v?a Internet, visite ? http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular. Para suscribirse o borrarse por correo electr?nico, env?e un mensaje escribiendo 'help' en el asunto o en el cuerpo, a reconquista-popular-request at lists.econ.utah.edu Para comunicarse con la persona que administra la lista, env?e correo electr?nico a reconquista-popular-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu ?_______________________________________________ ?Lista de correo electr?nico Reconquista-popular ? Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu- http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular ------------- Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 30576 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dch at gcal.ac.uk Tue May 27 03:05:20 2003 From: dch at gcal.ac.uk (Douglas Chalmers) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 10:05:20 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: constitutional deform In-Reply-To: <005e01c3238b$e1385ea0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: On 26/5/03 2:36 pm, "Michael Keaney" wrote: > Scottish Labour MPs undermine devolution again: this time over PR ----------------- The anti-PR protest from Members of the Westminster parliament such as Ian Davidson and others in the Scottish Local Councils, whose privilege depends on the anti-democratic nature of the First Past The Post (FPTP) system, was always on the cards, and was to be expected. The tide has been running against them for several decades now, and like members of the House of Lords voting against their own abolition, they were hardly likely to lie down in front of the democratic will of the people. So Ian McWhirter in the Sunday Herald is spot on when he points out that the main outcome of this knee jerk opposition will only be further weakening of the Labour Party in Scotland. Why the anti PR forces in Scotland are now so weak are that, under ?old labour? some of them claimed a fig leaf of leftist respectability by highlighting the differences between Labour and the forces of the right. The implication was that ?using the system? i.e. the inbuilt majority which a FPTP system can give a party with perhaps 35% of the turnout in an election, would allow ?Socialism? to be implemented over the opposition of the right. The reality of course was that rather than this, it served only to fortify an elitist form of politics (rarely radical in content), which was implemented over the head of the population and which relentlessly helped create the widespread alienation from politics which we?re seeing in the UK. It was to their credit that the real forces of the radical left ? the CP were always clear in this regard ? having learned from their Stalinist past the dangers of any monolithic control of power. Hence when I represented the CP, and their successors Democratic Left Scotland on the Constitutional Convention which drew up the framework for the new parliament, we united with the Liberal Democrats and Greens for rejection of FPTP as one of the bottom lines in the debate. The fact that the system of PR achieved was a compromise ? Additional Member rather than Single Transferable Vote, was an unfortunate but very necessary compromise under the circumstances. It?s important that to ensure the success of further reform (such as of Scotland?s local government), the debate needs to move from a rather arid technical matter of percentages of votes and of MSPs/ councillors (important though that is), to the wider issue of how reform of the voting system is only part of overall transformation of how democracy is practiced at a lower council level and at the level of the Scottish Parliament itself. For instance Scotland?s Parliament remains an all white enclave. In at present (as I recall) there is only one Moslem MP in the whole of the UK Parliament (or this was certainly the cased before the last General election). This represents an inbuilt and institutional racism in the way Scotland?s political parties are operating and needs tackled along with the issues of access to others (where real inroads have been made). It seems to me that the supporters of privilege like Mps Ian Davidson et al have the easy time when supporters of reform and change are apologetic about the changes needing made. Take up the issue in a pro active way and it really knocks them down. Douglas Chalmers -- Dr. Douglas Chalmers Division of Economics and Enterprise Glasgow Caledonian University 70 Cowcaddens Road Glasgow G4 OBA Tel: 331 3350 E.mail: d.chalmers at gcal.ac.uk WebPage: http://cbs3.gcal.ac.uk/eco/WebAccounts/~dch/dch.htm "hypertext is greater than the sword" > > Holyrood Commentary By Iain Macwhirter > The Sunday Herald, 25 May 2003 > > Labour MPs in Westminster are at it again. They are trying to undermine the > Scottish Executive and the First Minister -- or if they aren't, they are > putting on a pretty good pretence. Labour MPs are incensed at the > concessions made to the Liberal Democrats in the partnership agreement by > Jack McConnell, and are determined to save first-past-the-post voting in > local elections. > > There is a real sense of betrayal among Labour MPs, many of whom have strong > personal ties to the Labour councillors who stand to lose their jobs when > electoral reform is introduced. > > MPs like Ian Davidson are saying McConnell was 'stitched' by the LibDems > during the coalition deal-making, and say they are determined to reverse the > policy of introducing proportional representation for local government, one > of the key elements in the coalition agreement. They say PR is not Labour > policy and McConnell had no right to go ahead with it. > > Edinburgh South MP and small businesses minister Nigel Griffiths, a man with > close connections to Gordon Brown, says he will be 'looking closely' at what > happens in Scotland in future, and making it abundantly clear he doesn't > trust the LibDems. The Labour MP for Hamilton South, Bill Tynan, a > neighbouring constituency to McConnell's own, has even called for a special > Labour recall conference in Scotland to overturn the Lib-Lab deal. This > would be a direct assault on the legitimacy of the Scottish Executive and a > personal affront to the First Minister. > > We have been here before. After Jack McConnell first took over as First > Minister in November 2001, almost the first thing he did was travel south to > Westminster to square things with Scottish Labour MPs. > > Throughout the brief reign of his predecessor, Henry McLeish, a constant > stream of damaging stories emanated from the Labour benches. Labour MPs > deeply resented McLeish's introduction of free personal care for the elderly > against party policy and his proposal to call the Scottish Executive the > 'Scottish Government'. > > Henry was 'thick', it was said in Westminster. He could call the Scottish > Executive the ''White Heather Club'' if he liked, but it was not the > government of Scotland. The then pensions minister, Alistair Darling, > refused to refund ?23 million in attendance allowances needed by the > Scottish Executive to defray the cost of the free personal care scheme. > > When McConnell took over he moved quickly to silence this damaging off-stage > chorus. He addressed the Scottish Labour group of MPs directly, something > Henry McLeish had never done. He promised a new era of co-operation in which > there would be no more radical departures from UK policy. > > Unfortunately, he wasn't in a position to make such a commitment. Nor indeed > is he in any position now to reverse elements of the partnership > agreement -- at least not if he wants to remain in office. It is in the > nature of coalition politics that certain policies have to be sacrificed to > reach agreement. The LibDems had made clear that without a commitment to PR > there would simply be no deal. > > Labour MPs seem to be unaware of the new rules in post-devolution Scotland. > Ian Davidson took Mr McConnell to task on BBC's Politics Scotland on Friday > for making deals over the heads of Labour MPs. Bill Tynan warned McConnell > that he was defying the party's internal consultation last summer, which had > registered massive opposition to PR. > > It is strange that Labour MPs have only now woken up to what has been going > on. They surely realised when they voted for the Scotland Act that they were > opening the way for coalition government in Scotland. > > This means Labour cannot get its own way any more. Too many MPs seem to be > living in the past. In the days of winner-takes-all politics, councils like > Midlothian could return 95% Labour seats on 45% of the vote. They don't > understand why their Scottish leader should be handing over to the SNP, or > the LibDems, councils which Labour has controlled since the dawn of time. > They have a divine right to rule. They are Labour, and in Scotland Labour > calls the shots. > > However, there was no way that this was going to survive given the new > political realities in Scotland. The only thing the latest Westminster > revolt will achieve is a weaker Labour Party in Scotland. They need another > bout of fratricide like a hole in the head. > > Labour lost a lot of votes in the May election, even if it kept most of its > seats. The turnout, a whisker under 50%, wasn't as bad as some feared, but > it was a warning that the Labour vote in Scotland is decomposing. A house > divided is a house defeated, and if there is to be a protracted civil war in > the Labour Party, McConnell's new administration could be seriously damaged, > even before it gets its feet under the table. > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:14:44 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:14:44 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK military: recycling initiative Message-ID: <001101c32430$696eb900$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Second-hand gear for UK Gulf troops IAN BRUCE The Herald, 27 May 2003 HUNDREDS of the British Army reservists scheduled for duty in post-war Iraq are to be issued with hand-me-down desert camouflage uniforms because of a Ministry of Defence blunder. The MoD had delayed placing new clothing orders in time for the Gulf campaign. There were also complaints from soldiers over body armour, or the lack of it. As the troops return to the UK after six-month tours of duty, the scarce dappled tunics and trousers and prized desert boots worn by the first 6000 reservists sent out in February are being collected at a depot near Nottingham. The second-hand items are to be cleaned, patched and handed out to the next batch called up to replace their counterparts at Basra. Up to half of the regular troops were forced in temperatures of up to 100F to wear black leather combat boots de-signed for northern Europe. The footwear melted and fell apart in the heat. Even when available, desert boots often came in the wrong sizes. Soldiers with size 12 feet were issued size nine or 10 boots on a "take it or leave it" basis. Many spent up to ?500 of their own money to buy surplus US Army desert boots and leftover uniforms from the 1991 conflict. Most ended up wearing motley collections of brown, green, and black jackets and desert camouflage trousers. One soldier, Private Lee Williams, of the Irish Guards, whose unit was part of the Scots Dragoon Guards' battlegroup, was reduced to wearing abandoned Iraqi army boots he found in an enemy trench after his black boots disintegrated. Soldiers of every rank complained bitterly that they had not been issued with enough protective ceramic back and chest plates for their potentially life-saving body armour. The Kevlar flak vests would stop shrapnel but were vulnerable to rifle and machine-gun fire without them. An investigation is under way into the death of Sergeant Steven Roberts, a tank commander with the Desert Rats and the first British soldier killed in action in the campaign, after colleagues claimed he would have survived if he had been issued with a ceramic plate. Military police are trying to establish whether the sergeant neglected to wear it or there were not enough plates. Other troops were concerned the respirators, to protect against nerve-gas or biological attacks, had exceeded their operational lifespan. A veteran Black Watch sergeant, whose tour ends in July, said yesterday: "Half of our guys still look like they're headed for a fancy-dress party instead of being part of the world's best army. It's all down to MoD penny-pinching. "We'll know we're definitely going home to our base in Germany when every member of the battlegroup is fully kitted out with desert cams, boots and helmet covers. It'll look good for the television cameras as we disembark at the airfield. Then they'll take it all back again." The MoD said it sympathised "particularly where boots are concerned" but added there has to be a balance over the "cost of ordering and stockpiling expensive equipment which may never be used again. The speed of deployment . . . outpaced the ability of the system to cope with demand." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:15:44 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:15:44 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: resistance continues Message-ID: <001901c32430$8d8a7f40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Americans seize ?70m in gold bars Soldier is killed in day of violence in Iraq, writes DAMIEN HENDERSON The Herald, 27 May 2003 AMERICAN forces seized almost ?70m worth of suspected gold bars in northern Iraq yesterday, while troops in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit announced the capture of his brother-in-law. The seizure was made during one of the most violent days the occupying forces have seen since the war against Saddam's forces ended last month. One US soldier was killed and five were injured in three separate attacks. The gold was found near Kirkuk, the oil city in northern Iraq, when soldiers searched an old Mercedes truck and questioned its three occupants. It is the second such find in four days. Major Kevin Petit, who announced the discovery yesterday, said 999 bars were lying under an old tarpaulin and that the driver claimed to have been paid ?200 to carry what he though were copper bars out of Baghdad. Speaking at Kirkuk airbase where the impure and roughly moulded bars were being held, Major Petit said: "These are not minted bars. The gold was melted down quickly." The bars are now expected to be transferred to Baghdad. The three men, who had no weapons, were interrogated further last night, and US forces said they suspected the men had been unaware of what they were carrying. In the worst attack mounted against the occupying US forces yesterday, one soldier was killed and another injured when a convoy was ambushed near the town of Hadithah, 120 miles north of Baghdad. The eight-vehicle convoy was mounting a resupply mission to an army base near the town when it came under fire from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was the latest of several attacks on American troops this month. In a separate incident, four US soldiers were injured when their Humvee all-terrain vehicle was destroyed after hitting a mine in the affluent Baghdad neighbourhood of Yarmouk. Witnesses, who gave contradictory accounts of the attack, said they heard several explosions and a 15-minute burst of gunfire along the road to the airport, west of the capital. It was not clear whether the mine had been placed deliberately to target American troops, but the road that connects Baghdad International Airport with the city is frequently used by US soldiers, many of whom are based at the airport. In Baqubah, 45 miles north-east of Baghdad, US soldiers shot and killed a woman who tried to approach them carrying two hand grenades. The incident occurred immediately after unknown attackers threw hand-held explosives at US soldiers. In a statement, American officials said: "Squad members verbally warned her several more times, but she continued to advance towards them. "When she refused, the squad shot her several times. She fell to the ground, dropping one grenade, and continued to crawl towards them. The squad fired again, killing her." Another American soldier was killed and one injured when a munitions dump they were guarding in southern Iraq exploded. The explosion was not thought to be a result of hostile action. The capture of Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law was being trumpeted as a "significant" development by the American military yesterday, although he is not on the Pentagon's list of 55 most-wanted Iraqi officials. Mulhana Hamood Abdul Jabar was identified early on Sunday morning when he drove into a hospital in central Tikrit with two passengers carrying gunshot wounds to the chest and leg. He was found in possession of $300,000 (?200,000), eight million Iraqi dinars (?4000), three AK-47 assault rifles, and a rocket-propelled grenade. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:23:46 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:23:46 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK military: unhappy with US Message-ID: <002101c32431$ac7d5c00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> RAF denies war strategy put troops at risk HAMISH MACDONELL SCOTTISH POLITICAL EDITOR The Scotsman, 27 May 2003 THE RAF yesterday hit back at accusations that the lives of British troops had been put at risk during the Iraq war because its planes had been pooled with American jets. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative defence spokesman, claimed that the system of combining all coalition aircraft under one central command had deprived British ground forces of support at crucial times. But the Ministry of Defence rubbished his suggestions, insisting that the pooling arrangements had given British ground troops the benefit of massive American air superiority, helping them to make progress. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday, Mr Jenkin said British forces should have first call on some elements of RAF air support during Iraq-style multi-national operations. And he argued that it was undesirable for all RAF attack aircraft to be assigned to a coalition "pool", limiting their availability to support British ground forces. Mr Jenkin said: "The Americans, both with their marines and their infantry, the two-pronged attack on Baghdad, were fighting as land-air systems; that is, the air component was an integrated part of the land attack. "That was not the case with the British in Basra and I think there is an important lesson to be learned from that situation. Because while some air strikes came in a very timely manner ... there were occasions when it would have been preferable to have close air support very quickly, and it took a considerable time to arrive because the coalition as a whole had other priorities." Mr Jenkin, who plans to write to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon about the issue, added: "We need to look carefully at such decisions in future and maintaining a Tornado or Harrier ground attack capability directly answerable to the brigade command or divisional command in the field is much more preferable than having to go through the main headquarters and compete with other claims elsewhere during the war." But a Ministry of Defence spokeswoman rejected the apparent accusation that British troops had been let down. She said: "There is no doubt in anyone's mind, as far as the coalition is concerned, that pooled resources make available a much broader range of resources for our forces than would have been the case, had we been operating on our own. We were more than happy with the pooled arrangements." An RAF insider was even more direct. He said: "With all the firepower and resources the Americans had, wouldn't you want them on your side?" Restoring security to Iraq is the "paramount" task of coalition forces in Iraq, Tony Blair's newly-appointed special representative on human rights said yesterday. Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP for Cynon Valley, will travel to Iraq today to start work. Ms Clwyd, who has a long-standing interest in human rights in Iraq, said her role would combine reporting back to the Prime Minister on the human rights violations of Saddam Hussein's regime with researching the practical post-war problems being experienced by Iraqis. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:29:54 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:29:54 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland, Finucane case Message-ID: <002b01c32432$87dedbc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Looking for answers Pat Finucane was seen as an 'uppity Fenian lawyer'. Then he was murdered. His son tells Jon Robins how, 14 years afterwards and despite a recent report, the truth is still unclear The Independent 27 May 2003 "One of the first times I saw my Dad on telly, he was being interviewed on the Six O'Clock News acting for the hunger strikers," recalls the son of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. "It was one of the first occasions in Northern Ireland's history where there was a lawyer talking about human rights and saying that these men have inherent dignities that were being denied them." Michael Finucane admits the significance was lost on the 10-year-old boy he was then, but it is not on the 30-year-old lawyer he is now. As Sir John Stevens delivered his recent damning report into collusion and state-sanctioned murder, Michael Finucane was explaining how his father, seen by the state as "an uppity Fenian lawyer", came, 14 years ago, to be the first solicitor to be cold-bloodedly murdered in the Troubles. The Finucane verdict on the Stevens report is that it is "flawed" because it tried to identify what went wrong with the system. "Nothing went wrong," the Dublin-based solicitor argues. The policy was to "harness the killing potential" of loyalist hit men, provide them with weapons and the intelligence. "The system worked exactly as intended and, in the British government's eyes, it worked perfectly," he says. Now is not an easy time for the Finucane family, who refused to have anything to do with all three reports by the commissioner of the Metropolitan police; instead they have, since the 1989 murder, unwaveringly held out for a full public inquiry. It is hard to see whether the Stevens report, damning and unambiguous though it might be, moves the Finucane family and their supporters closer to that goal or further away. However the Irish foreign minister, Brian Cowen, said last week that the former Canadian supreme court judge, Mr Justice Peter Cory's investigation into a number of high profile murders, including that of Pat Finucane, would provide "a context" for investigating allegations about the alleged IRA informer, Stakeknife. Michael calls the report "a confirmation, not a revelation, of what we already knew". Indeed. More than 12 months ago the BBC's Panorama exposed the work of the shadowy Force Research Unit that directed terrorists towards high-profile republicans. The programme showed footage of Ken Barrett, an Ulster Defence Association killer, claiming that the agent Brian Nelson provided him with a photograph of the solicitor and took him to his house. A couple of years before the programme, the Finucane family presented its own 70 page report to the Irish government and Mo Mowlam, minister for Northern Ireland. "What we presented then was the collusion machine broken down and explained for the first time," Michael recalls. The British government response was to send the Met boss back to embark upon Stevens three. Did they feel insulted? Yes, he replies. Haven't they lost an opportunity by not co-operating with Sir John? "No. I honestly don't believe that the establishment of a public inquiry would be hastened by my family's co-operation," he replies. "If anything, a public inquiry would be delayed and postponed, possibly inevitably." Michael Finucane acknowledges that the report "pulls no punches". But that, as he quickly points out, is not enough. The Stevens team claims to have interviewed 15,000 people, catalogued 4,000 exhibits, taken 5,460 statements and seized 6,000 documents. But what is left is a 19 page summary. None of the other information will be made public (as was the case with the other two reports) unless there is a public inquiry. In advance of the report, campaigning organisations - including Amnesty International, British Irish Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York - joined forces to back "a full, public, international, independent and impartial judicial inquiry". For the Finucane family, the purpose of an inquiry is not to identify whose finger was on the trigger ("we have a pretty good idea," says Michael) but to reveal how far up the political ladder collusion had crept. "Many people were murdered by these agents of the British state," he argues. The passing of time makes an effective public inquiry increasingly problematic. The death of Brian Nelson from a brain haemorrhage only last month means that his secrets have gone to the grave with him. "We need to move quickly before anyone else dies or another box of documents mysteriously falls into the shredder," he says. The chilling words of the then junior Home Office minister Douglas Hogg still reverberate down the years. He told the House of Commons that there were a number of solicitors in Northern Ireland "unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA". An incensed Seamus Mallon, now deputy first minister, immediately responded that no doubt there were "lawyers walking the streets or driving the roads of the north of Ireland who have become targets of assassin's bullets as a result of the statement that has been made tonight". Sir John notes in his report that the former minister has been "compromised" by whoever briefed him. According to Michael Finucane, Hogg's words were the equivalent of "a verbal hand grenade lobbed into the cauldron of Northern Ireland". Three weeks after the speech the solicitor was shot 14 times in the kitchen of their home in front of the 17-year-old Michael, together with his mother, younger brother and sister. There is a striking physical likeness shared by father and son. Michael also appears to have inherited his father's enthusiasm for the law but claims to have become a solicitor 'in spite, rather than because of' his father. "I don't really remember that much about what my Dad did and I only come to appreciate the work he was doing many years later," he says. Pat Finucane was among the first of a generation of working-class Catholics to take advantage of the opportunities of free education introduced in 1968. "With his friend Terry he was the first on his street, and probably in the whole area, to go to college," Michael says. "It was a big deal." Pat set up Madden and Finucane in Belfast with Peter Madden in 1979. "Both Peter and Pat had experience of the law being wielded against one side of the community," Michael says. "There was internment, martial law, curfews and plastic bullets, and those experiences gave them the attitude that the law was there for all." Such an egalitarian philosophy did not go down well with everyone and they were quickly written off as "provos in suits". Not surprisingly perhaps, as three of Finucane's brothers had been IRA volunteers and his best-known client was the dying Bobby Sands. But the firm were always just as amenable to Loyalist rioters hit by stray plastic bullets as to the steady stream of Republicans coming through their doors. Finucane specialised in cases arising out of the emergency powers legislation. He acted for clients caught up in the alleged shoot-to-kill policy, and for Sinn Fein in a test case to challenge the legality of the Home Secretary's decision to ban interviews. At the time he was murdered he had two cases on the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Michael, who only qualified as a solicitor a couple of years ago, appears to have inherited his father's taste for controversy. Last year he hit the headlines by refusing to be searched by the police when he was representing alleged members of the continuity IRA. In another case, he attacked the inquest into the murder of two women in a community care home more than five years ago. His pride in his father's achievements in the courts of Northern Ireland is obvious. "He was among the first to use the law to show that even in a situation of conflict, the law still applies. It was because he chose to do all of this that he became the first solicitor to be murdered." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:30:56 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:30:56 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK sub-imperialism: arms to Africa Message-ID: <003301c32432$ad412bc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Government accused of hypocrisy over arms sales to African states By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent The Independent 27 May 2003 The Government was accused of hypocrisy yesterday for allowing arms sales worth ?16m to central African nations embroiled in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. British companies sold shotguns, pistols, helmets and body armour to Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe between 1999 and 2001. They have been caught up in fighting that has paralysed the country since the 1990s. The Government - which announced last week that it was considering joining a peace-keeping force planned for the north-eastern DRC - said that careful checks were made on arms exports to central Africa to ensure they could not make their way to the DRC. But critics said that the sales were underminilng government promises to apply an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy - and warned it would be impossible to keep track of the equipment once it had arrived in central Africa. In 1999, sales to the region included ?3m of body armour and helmets to Angola and armoured vehicles to Uganda. The following year, UK companies sold ?1m of body armour and assault rifles to Namibia and ?1m of military vehicles to Zimbabwe. In 2001, the most recent year for which arms sales figures were released, Angola bought ?8m of military and armoured vehicles, while machine pistols and weapon-cleaning equipment was sent to Uganda. Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP and campaigner on the crisis in the DRC, said: "This makes claims of an ethical policy a sham. The Government has been hypocritical on this issue. We are talking about four and a half million African lives that have been lost over five years and British companies are profiting from it. There's blood on the Government's hands over this." A spokesman for Amnesty International said: "The fact that the UK has relatively recently licensed the export of armoured vehicles to Angola and Uganda - two nations heavily involved in Africa's so-called world war - raises fresh questions about the Government's ability to properly regulate the arm trade. "The question that should be asked is - can the British Government account for the whereabouts of its equipment and can it guarantee it has not fallen into the hands of warring militias committing massacres in eastern Congo?" A spokesman for Saferworld, an anti-arms sales pressure group, said the granting of licences proved the need for tougher scrutiny of the weapons trade. "It is encouraging that the Government are considering sending troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo as an effective peace-keeping force is desperately needed. This must be backed up, though, by tougher arms export controls," he said. The Foreign Office has said that each licence granted was checked against the risk that the arms could be used in internal suppression or external aggression. Much of the 2001 sales to Angola were said to be for the oil industry. In February 2000, Tony Blair announced that the Government would not grant arms export licences to countries involved in the DRC, if there was a "clear risk" that they could be used in the conflict. One month earlier, the Prime Minister faced anger after he overruled the Foreign Secretary at the time, Robin Cook, and gave the all-clear for parts for Hawk jets to be sent to Zimbabwe, which was known to be involved in the fighting in the DRC. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:33:48 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:33:48 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK military: selling out 'our boys' again Message-ID: <003b01c32433$1376f140$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Fears of 'Gulf War II syndrome' after British soldiers given multiple vaccinations fall ill By Charles Arthur The Independent 26 May 2003 Four soldiers vaccinated before the war in Iraq have triggered fears of a "Gulf War II syndrome" after exhibiting symptoms similar to those suffered by hundreds of troops who fought in the 1991 conflict. Veterans' organisations are demanding that Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, explain why he told the Commons in January that soldiers would not be given multiple vaccinations over a short timeframe because of "lessons learnt" from the previous Gulf conflict, They claim he then allowed the armed forces to follow the 1991 procedures for vaccinations. The new syndrome became apparent when two men vaccinated before the Iraq conflict became so ill that they were unable to fly to the Gulf. One, Stephen Cartwright, was admitted to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge because he developed a serious rash after he was inoculated. He had had five vaccinations, including two against anthrax, in a single day. The other, Tony Barker, also became too ill to travel to join his unit after the vaccinations. Two other soldiers, based in Germany, who served in Iraq have fallen ill, according to the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, which has 4,500 members who say they are suffering from Gulf War syndrome. Charles Plumridge, a senior co-ordinator for the association, said: "Wives of present servicemen are concerned about whether their husbands will get ill too. It's only a small number so far but we fear it will get bigger." The group blames the original syndrome on the powerful cocktail of vaccinations against diseases and germ agents that was given to troops over a short period in 1991. The symptoms include skin disorders, hair loss, headaches, muscular pain, nervous system disorders and sleep disturbances. The group says promises made by Mr Hoon were broken. On 7 January 2003 he was asked by Paul Keetch MP whether the Government was confident that "vaccines issued to servicemen today will not make them ill in the future". Mr Hoon replied that "a key lesson learnt from the Gulf conflict was the importance of ensuring that members of the armed forces should not undergo in a short time a series of different vaccinations. That was identified as a particular cause of difficulty, and the lesson has been learnt and acted upon, so that there is now a process whereby individual members do not receive a number of vaccinations in a short timeframe". But Mr Plumridge said recent reports suggested that the advice was not followed. "We blame the Ministry of Defence for giving vaccinations in multiple doses rather than singly," he said. "It would be a serious offence for Mr Hoon to mislead the Commons." On 23 May, the Medical Research Council published a review of existing research, which recommended "a full review of the differing vaccinations schedules used in participating countries" for the Gulf War in 1991. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:35:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:35:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK secret state: all clear on Iraq Message-ID: <004301c32433$4e97a940$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> No review for MI6 over arms search By Paul Lashmar and Raymond Whitaker The Independent on Sunday 25 May 2003 Despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or concrete evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida since the end of the war on Iraq, there are no plans for Britain's intelligence agencies to reassess the reports they produced in the run-up to the conflict. According to government sources, "there is no intention of mirroring our American counterparts, either on a public basis or otherwise", by duplicating the kind of exercise that Donald Rumsfeld has asked the CIA to undertake. America's main spy agency is carrying out a review of intelligence from all sources to try to determine whether US assessments of the Iraqi regime and its alleged WMDs were wide of the mark. Mr Rumsfeld's request was made last year, at a time when there was furious debate about the quality of intelligence coming out of Iraq, but the review has been lent added urgency by the failure of American and British investigators in Iraq to find any evidence since the war of the existence of unconventional weapons. Behind the scenes, members of the intelligence community have accused politicians on both sides of the Atlantic of exaggerating, distorting and selecting secret information to make the case for war in Iraq. Political leaders have explained away the absence of WMDs by suggesting that Saddam's regime had plenty of time to hide them. This is the line being taken by British intelligence, which still believes "it is a question of finding out where the stuff was destroyed", in the words of one source, and that hard evidence will be found at some point in the future. One former intelligence officer said: "Despite the growing chorus of politicians asking about proof of WMD and terror links in Iraq, MI6 are brazening it out. They seem confident that they are going to turn up hard evidence, and that it's just a matter of time." GCHQ, the Government's monitoring agency based in Cheltenham, and MI6 were maintaining that their reports were accurate, said the former officer. If the public felt misled, that was a result of the spin put on their information by politicians. Although some in Washington are seeking to present the CIA review as a bureaucratic exercise aimed at greater efficiency, there was considerable tension between the agency and the Pentagon, which was accused of setting up a unit to "re-interpret" intelligence in line with the hardline views of Mr Rumsfeld's aides. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:39:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:39:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the quagmire deepens Message-ID: <005f01c32433$e62ac300$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US sends in extra troops to quell unrest By Andrew Buncombe in Washington The Independent 27 May 2003 A further 20,000 US troops are to be deployed in Iraq amid growing concerns that there are insufficient forces to bring law and order to the country after the American-led invasion. Over the next few weeks, troops from the 1st Armoured Division will start to arrive, bringing the total number of US forces to about 163,000. Whether forces from other countries will be deployed is unclear, though there are certainly no plans to add more American troops to the so-called stabilisation force. General Peter Pace, deputy chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "The number is being increased as we speak by about 18,000 with the arrival of the 1st Armoured Division." News of the deployment was given amid increasing concern that there were not enough soldiers within Iraq, which has been rife with looting since Saddam Hussein's regime was ousted six weeks ago. In an illustration of the problems establishing order, two American soldiers were killed yesterday in separate incidents. One soldier was killed and another wounded when their convoy was ambushed by unidentified gunmen who opened fire on them in northern Iraq. Separately, another American died and three other soldiers were injured by a land mine when their Humvee military vehicle ran over a landmine on the outskirts of Baghdad, military officials said. The exact circumstances were unclear but US Central Command said the land mine may have been the result of "hostile action", and witnesses said a burst of gunfire preceded the explosion. Meanwhile, in Baqubah, 45 miles north-east of Baghdad, US soldiers shot and killed a woman carrying two hand grenades who was trying to approach them. The incident occurred immediately after unknown attackers threw handheld explosives at US soldiers in the town, Central Command said. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:44:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:44:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: strategic dilemma Message-ID: <007301c32434$8098c220$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Shine a light into the cave of lies with a referendum Only a vote on the EU constitution will expose the scaremongers Hugo Young Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian Whatever the leaders of Europe finally produce by way of a constitution for the EU, I shall be arguing in favour of a British referendum. Whether the outcome is great or slight does not matter. Both sides of the argument are playing up the greatness ("a blockbuster" - J Redwood) or the slightness ("a tidying-up exercise" - P Hain) to suit their strategies, each equally concealing the present opaqueness of the final product, which remains hardly less obscure after yesterday's release of the first draft text from the Giscard convention. We need a referendum, come what may. The British people need a new, transparent chance to decide the only big question worth putting: do you want to remain a member of the European Union, or get out? That is the unspoken agenda, certainly the driving moral impulse, behind the campaign that has suddenly erupted for a referendum. An opportunity has arisen that Eurosceptics did not expect, but whose radical implications they find it safer not to talk about. Instead of scorning a public verdict, the government should do the country a favour by bringing the truth out into the brightest, harshest, most dazzling and unobscurable light of day. The strongest argument against this may be that we already had a referendum, in 1975. It produced 2-1 support for remaining in the European community. It approved both aspirations and details now being cited by Europhobes as heralding the end of a thousand years of British history. For example, "ever-closer union" of the peoples of Europe was in the open text of the Treaty of Rome 1957, yet is now regarded as an intolerable new ambition that the British must expunge from the Giscard draft. Equally neuralgic is the supremacy of EU law over domestic law, as if this too were part of the new federalist overreach that is about to tear apart the British legal system. But that doctrine was established in 1965, 10 years before the first referendum. Like the EU role in trade and commerce and transport, it was there in all the texts, though almost completely neglected by Tony Benn and Barbara Castle and the other leaders of the No campaign who then concerned themselves primarily with the price of bread rather than an extended debate about national sovereignty. So, we have been here before and, by going there a second time, would arguably be succumbing to the virulent propaganda that has been trying for years to persuade the Brits they were victims of a con. It is also true that this second visit may turn out to be occasioned by quite minor changes in the balance of power between the nations and the confederation of Brussels. If Mr Blair has anything to do with it, they will be mainly technical and procedural; the nations will continue to husband the powers that matter. While 80% of British people polled say they fear what Giscard is producing, 80% also confess they have no idea what the arguments are about. Would even 50% bother to turn out to vote yes or no to technical changes that do not stir them? On the other hand, what will be produced is certainly a form of constitution. It will be a basic document clarifying, and to some extent adjusting, the distribution of power. There will be more majority voting, though not on tax or defence. Between now and the end of the process, there will be much brokering between divergent interests: big countries v small, centralisers v nation-staters, contests for different kinds of president, institutional rebalancing that advances or retards democratic accountability. And so on. But even diluted change can produce a constitutional moment, which there's an honest as well as dishonest case for putting to the people. This is not, however, the most potent reason for such an exercise. The real reason has more to do with national amnesia. Yes, the fundamental question was asked before, but it needs to be asked again. The consent the British gave to full membership of Europe 30 years ago has been whittled away. The influences that caused this - incessant xenophobia, shameless misreporting from Brussels, brainless paranoia about national identity, as well, certainly, as extensions of EU power - may have been mainly malign. But they have done their work. Public opinion about Europe is in a more poisonous condition than it was even when the hemlock was being infused into the bloodstream by Prime Minister Thatcher. So the British need a second chance to face the question, and the new constitution, whatever its details, will supply the right moment to put it. After the deals have been done, the government can present its case. "Here is the EU, here is its present and future shape, here are the shifts in sovereignty we agree to, here are our defences against the superstate, here remain our national vetoes, here are the balances we have struck. Here, at the same time, are what we get out of this, here the costs and benefits, here the consequences of not belonging. Here is reality, not fantasy. Here is the choice, no longer left to be defined by ranters and conspiracy theorists but deployed, for the first time in recent years, in large and comprehensive detail, requiring a response that faces facts. Do you want to stay or leave?" Such a campaign would bring the right's real agenda out on to the table. It would compel the semi-sceptics, who want to wreck the EU's ambitions without leaving it, to explain themselves. It would liberate the EU to make its choices without the louring threat of this member putting the narrowest national interest before the need to make a 25-member EU function sensibly: for we would have voted ourselves unambiguously in or out. It would free British governments, if the verdict was positive, to pursue policies based on rational discussion, rather than a supposed national consensus opposed to every minor piece of further integration. This is not the sort of referendum now being demanded by those shouting loudest for it. At best they want a campaign enabling Britain, withholding ratification by popular demand, to put one more spanner in the entire EU works. More ambitiously, the spanner would become a hammer, driving nails into the coffin of any further British political role as a believing and practising member of the union. Rather than spurning this, the government should embrace it as the time to turn the Europe argument decisively in its own direction. There is no evidence that the people, presented with the real and fundamental choice, would produce anything other than a majority for staying in. Mr Blair should offer it to them. Running away from it looks deeply undemocratic: yet another example in our long national history of failing to engage the people with the truth about this vexing subject. But it would be worse than that: the rejection of a unique opportunity to take the discussion out of the fetid cave of lies and nightmares, on to the terrain where the nation has to ask where its future truly belongs. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:46:13 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:46:13 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the quagmire deepens Message-ID: <007b01c32434$cfa06300$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> UN chief warns of anti-American backlash in Iraq Rory McCarthy in Baghdad Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian The UN's most senior humanitarian official in Iraq warned yesterday that US attempts to rebuild the country were overly dominated by "ideology" and risked triggering a violent backlash. Ramiro Lopes da Silva said the sudden decision last week to demobilise 400,000 Iraqi soldiers without any re-employment programme could generate a "low-intensity conflict" in the countryside. "The reconstruction of minds is as important. We cannot force through an ideological process too much," said Mr Lopes da Silva, 54, a Portuguese UN official who served in Angola and Afghanistan before becoming the humanitarian coordinator in Iraq last year. In unusually frank comments, he said the first three weeks after the collapse of the Iraqi regime were characterised by "talk about grandiose plans and a lot of promises but there were no decisions". Since Jay Garner, the retired general appointed to lead postwar Iraq, was replaced this month by Paul Bremer, a former ambassador, decisions have begun to be made. But Mr Lopes da Silva echoed the concerns of international aid agencies and the Iraqi people when he said poor security remained the overwhelming problem holding back the restoration of power, water and health services as well as the political process. "The situation is improving but law and order is still the key," he said. It is clear many UN officials are frustrated to have been excluded from the running of postwar Iraq. Most of the decisions taken at the US authority's headquarters in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace in Baghdad are made by Pentagon appointees who report to Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary. Arab specialists from the state department have been largely excluded and while British diplomats have had some influence on decision-making, the UN has hardly been consulted. Mr Lopes da Silva said the UN "disagreed" with some of the decisions made by the US-led authority in Baghdad. He was surprised the decision to disband the Iraqi military had not been accompanied by an attempt to reintegrate soldiers into society. "The way the decision was taken leaves them in a vacuum," he said. "Our concern is that if there is nothing for them out there soon this will be a potential source of additional destabilisation." Even US generals admitted at the time they feared the decision could worsen the lawlessness and looting. Mr Lopes da Silva said the demobilisation, along with tightened security in the capital, could force looters into the less well-guarded countryside. "What you are potentially going to create is more banditry and a low-intensity conflict in the rural areas," he said. "These edicts are seen very much just as ideological statements." Mr Lopes da Silva also questioned the authority's de-Ba'athification programme, under which up to 30,000 Ba'ath party officials are automatically excluded from office. "Many bureaucrats who have important experience that would help the new government were only Ba'ath party members on paper," he said. In another step against the Ba'ath party yesterday, US military officials fired the police chief for west Baghdad against the advice of several American soldiers. Abdul Razak al-Abbassi, who for the past three weeks has helped bring hundreds of officers back to work, was dismissed because he had been a senior member of the Ba'ath party under Saddam. On Sunday, the UN started its own re-employment programme which it hopes will provide 250,000 jobs in the next six months. Officials will now see if it can be expanded to include some Iraqi soldiers. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 03:47:00 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:47:00 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: now for Iran Message-ID: <008301c32434$ebbf7bc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Next stop Tehran? With Iraq beaten, the US is now playing the same dangerous WMD game with Iran Simon Tisdall Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian Imagine for a moment that you are a senior official in Iran's foreign ministry. It's hot outside on the dusty, congested streets of Tehran. But inside the ministry, despite the air-conditioning, it's getting stickier all the time. You have a big problem, a problem that Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, admits is "huge and serious". The problem is the Bush administration and, specifically, its insistence that Iran is running "an alarming clandestine nuclear weapons programme". You fear that this, coupled with daily US claims that Iran is aiding al-Qaida, is leading in only one direction. US news reports reaching your desk indicate that the Pentagon is now advocating "regime change" in Iran. Reading dispatches from Geneva, you note that the US abruptly walked out of low-level talks there last week, the only bilateral forum for two countries lacking formal diplomatic relations. You worry that bridge-building by Iran's UN ambassador is getting nowhere. You understand that while Britain and the EU are telling Washington that engagement, not confrontation, is the way forward, the reality, as Iraq showed, is that if George Bush decides to do it his way, there is little the Europeans or indeed Russia can ultimately do to stop him. What is certain is that at almost all points of the compass, the unmatchable US military machine besieges Iran's borders. The Pentagon is sponsoring the Iraq-based Mojahedin e-Khalq, a group long dedicated to insurrection in the Islamic republic that the state department describes as terrorists. And you are fully aware that Israel is warning Washington that unless something changes soon, Iran may acquire the bomb within two years. As the temperature in the office rises, as flies buzz around the desk like F-16s in a dogfight and as beads of sweat form on furrowed brow, it seems only one conclusion is possible. The question with which you endlessly pestered your foreign missions before and during the invasion of Iraq - "who's next?" - appears now to have but one answer. It's us. So what would you do? This imaginary official may be wrong, of course. Without some new terrorist enormity in the US "homeland", surely Bush is not so reckless as to start another all-out war as America's election year approaches? Washington's war of words could amount to nothing more than that. Maybe the US foolishly believes it is somehow helping reformist factions in the Majlis (parliament), the media and student bodies. Maybe destabilisation and intimidation is the name of the game and the al-Qaida claims are a pretext, as in Iraq. Perhaps the US does not itself know what it wants to do; a White House strategy meeting is due today. But who knows? Tehran's dilemma is real: Washington's intentions are dangerously uncertain. Should Iran continue to deny any present bomb-making intent and facilitate additional, short-notice inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to prove it? Should it expand its EU dialogue and strengthen protective ties with countries such as Syria and Lebanon, India, Russia and China, which is its present policy? The answer is "yes". The difficulty is that this may not be enough. Should it then go further and cancel its nuclear power contracts with Moscow? Should it abandon Hizbullah and Palestinian rejectionist groups, as America demands? This doubtless sounds like a good idea to neo-con thinktankers. But surely even they can grasp that such humiliation, under duress from the Great Satan, is politically unacceptable. Grovelling is not Persian policy. Even the relatively moderate Khatami made it clear in Beirut recently that there would be no backtracking in the absence of a just, wider Middle East settlement. And anyway, Khatami does not control Iran's foreign and defence policy. Indeed, it is unclear who does. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, security chief Hassan Rohani, and the military and intelligence agencies all doubtless have a say, which may be why Iran's policies often appear contradictory. Tension between civil society reformers and the mullahs is endemic and combustible. But as US pressure has increased, so too has the sway of Islamic hardliners. Iran's alternative course is the worst of all, but one which Bush's threats make an ever more likely choice. It is to build and deploy nuclear weapons and missiles in order to pre-empt America's regime-toppling designs. The US should hardly be surprised if it comes to this. After all, it is what Washington used to call deterrence before it abandoned that concept in favour of "anticipatory defence" or, more candidly, unilateral offensive warfare. To Iran, the US now looks very much like the Soviet Union looked to western Europe at the height of the cold war. Britain and West Germany did not waive their right to deploy US cruise and Pershing nuclear missiles to deter the combined menace of overwhelming conventional forces and an opposing, hostile ideology. Why, in all logic, should Iran, or for that matter North Korea and other so-called "rogue states" accused of developing weapons of mass destruction, act any differently? If this is Iran's choice, the US will be much to blame. While identifying WMD proliferation as the main global threat, its bellicose post-9/11 policies have served to increase rather than reduce it. Washington ignores, as ever, its exemplary obligation to disarm under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Despite strategic reductions negotiated with Russia, the US retains enormous firepower in every nuclear weapons category. Worse still, the White House is set on developing, not just researching, a new generation of battlefield "mini-nukes" whose only application is offensive use, not deterrence. Its new $400bn defence budget allocates funding to this work; linked to this is an expected US move to end its nuclear test moratorium in defiance of the comprehensive test ban treaty. Bush has repeatedly warned, not least in his national security strategy, that the US is prepared to use "overwhelming force", including first use of nuclear weapons, to crush perceived or emerging threats. It might well have done so in Iraq had the war gone badly. Bush has thereby torn up the key stabilising concept of "negative security assurance" by which nuclear powers including previous US administrations pledged, through the NPT and the UN, not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. Meanwhile the US encourages egregious double standards. What it says, in effect, is that Iran (and most other states) must not be allowed a nuclear capability but, for example, Israel's undeclared and internationally uninspected arsenal is permissible. India's and Pakistan's bombs, although recently and covertly acquired, are tolerated too, since they are deemed US allies. Bush's greatest single disservice to non-proliferation came in Iraq. The US cried wolf in exaggerating Saddam's capability. Now it is actively undermining the vital principle of independent, international inspection and verification by limiting UN access to the country. Yet would Iraq have been attacked if it really had possessed nuclear weapons? Possibly not. Thus the self-defeating, mangled message to Iran and others is: arm yourselves to the teeth, before it it too late, or you too could face the chop. Small wonder if things grow sticky inside Tehran's dark-windowed ministries right now. If Iran ultimately does the responsible thing and forswears the bomb, it will not be for want of the most irresponsible American provocation. From sherrynstan at igc.org Tue May 27 05:16:53 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 07:16:53 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Kurds declare for independence, demand US leave In-Reply-To: <007b01c32434$cfa06300$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <003301c32441$7e50bb00$0200a8c0@stan> Barzani says US forces should leave after Iraqi government takes over Al Jazeera, May 27, 2003 Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said Saturday there would be "no justification" for US forces to remain in Iraq once an interim Iraqi government has taken over ahead of general elections. It should be recognized that it was the US-led forces which toppled the government of President Saddam Hussein, Barzani told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel when asked about his recent meeting with Jay Garner, the US civil administrator for Iraq. "What we discussed with Garner is that the opposition leadership council would meet in Baghdad very soon, to be followed by a broader meeting of all Iraqi parties, forces and figures," he said. "But if matters stabilize and the national authority takes over and fills the security and administrative vacuum, there will no longer be any justification for the coalition forces to remain, and their (presence) would then be regarded as an occupation," Barzani said. Barzani gave no date for the opposition meeting, but a Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official told AFP in Iraqi Kurdistan earlier Saturday it would be held in Baghdad on Wednesday and bring together five of the six members of an opposition leadership council named in February. Agreement that the Iraqis would be "their own masters" and pick their interim government had been reached with the Americans before they launched the war that ousted Saddam April 9, said Barzani, whose fighters aligned themselves with the US-led forces. Garner promised that the United States would deal with that government as "the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people," he added. Barzani said the Kurds were committed to a post-Hussein federal arrangement agreed with other groups that opposed the ousted regime despite the fact that they in principle have the right to statehood. "Like all other nations, the Kurdish nation is fully entitled to self-determination and the establishment of a Kurdish state," he said. "But at the moment, we do not have an agenda different to that of the Iraqi opposition. We are pursuing the agenda hammered out at the London conference (of major opposition groups in December) and the (follow-up) Salahaddin conference" in February, he said, referring to the opposition's endorsement of a federal democratic system. Asked whether the Kurds were in fact "pitching their tent wherever they reach" and would eventually demand statehood, Barzani said: "Life progresses, the world progresses, and the Kurdish people too are entitled to progress with others." Referring to Turkey's fears about the possible resurgence of separatist aspirations among its own Kurdish community, Barzani said he was speaking strictly about Iraq's Kurds. "The Kurdish nation is one ... but fact is that the Kurdish nation is now scattered (in several states) and we now bear the responsibility of settling the Kurdish issue in Iraq," said Barzani, who was speaking from his Salahaddin headquarters in northern Iraq. "Resolving the Kurdish issue in Turkey or Iran or anywhere else is up to the Kurds there. "However, in the long term, and from a strategic standpoint, the Kurdish nation is entitled to unite and to have an independent state," he said. Barzani angrily dismissing his interviewer's hint at KDP-Israeli relations and pointing out that many Arab countries have links with the Jewish state. - Agencies From sherrynstan at igc.org Tue May 27 05:20:51 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 07:20:51 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Rumsfeld "studies" mini-nukes Message-ID: <003401c32442$0913cd40$0200a8c0@stan> U.S. to study new kind of nuclear weapons May 27, 2003 BY BRAD KNICKERBOCKER The Pentagon is interested in a new generation of nuclear weapons designed to attack an enemy's conventional military forces, including weapons of mass destruction hidden deep underground. This comes as the United States shifts its doctrine from deterrence in conjunction with NATO and other allies to unilateral preemption--attacking enemies before they become more dangerous rather than hoping to hold them off with the threat of overwhelming attack. Many observers say nuclear weapons are obsolete. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argues just the opposite. "Nuclear attack options that vary in scale, scope, and purpose will complement other military capabilities, [providing] the range of options needed to pose a credible deterrent to adversaries," Rumsfeld says. Included as possible targets are weapons of mass destruction as well as conventional enemy forces, including those tied to terrorist activities. Over the objections of Democratic lawmakers, the Senate last week moved in this direction. It approved a Bush administration request to research new nuclear weapons. The measure would lift the ban on development of low-yield nuclear weapons (those with no more than 5 kilotons of explosive force, about one-third the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II), and it provides funding to research a much larger bunker-busting bomb. Some read this as making nuclear war more "thinkable." "The administration seems to be moving toward a military posture in which nuclear weapons are considered just like other weapons," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said. But Rumsfeld insists: "It's not to develop. It's not to deploy. It's not to use. It's to study." Christian Science Monitor From sherrynstan at igc.org Tue May 27 05:26:48 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 07:26:48 -0400 Subject: [A-List] China opens renminbi capital market In-Reply-To: <007b01c32434$cfa06300$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <003a01c32442$e0e71d30$0200a8c0@stan> China opens door to foreign brokers in landmark deal By James Kynge in Beijing Published: May 26 2003 21:52 | Last Updated: May 26 2003 21:52 China announced on Tuesday that it had given approval to two foreign brokers to trade domestic shares denominated in renminbi for the first time, a milestone in Beijing's quest to bring its capital markets up to international standards and attract foreign funding for a voracious corporate sector. UBS, Switzerland's biggest bank, and Nomura Securities, the leading Japanese securities firm, have won the right to trade in the $500bn A-share market, on which 1,200 companies are listed. They may also trade renminbi- denominated Treasury, convertible and corporate bonds and participate in initial public offerings and secondary share issues. The two brokers, thought likely to start trading A shares within weeks, are the first of several tipped for approval by the China Securities Regulatory Commission to participate in a scheme called Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor, launched in November. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch had submitted applications, Chinese sources said. Three foreign banks, Citibank, HSBC and Standard Chartered, all of which have branches in Shanghai, have gained permission to be custodians for funds under the scheme. The decision is a breakthrough in China's desire to upgrade its capital markets in the face of longstanding fears that an opening for foreign capital could precipitate the type of financial meltdown seen in south-east Asian markets in 1997. Rodney Ward, Asia chairman at UBS Warburg, said: "QFII will accelerate improvements in the standards of corporate governance in China because, increasingly, mainland companies will be benchmarked against their international peers." UBS said it would expand its research to cover 50 A-share companies by the end of 2003. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets have been described by one prominent Chinese economist as "worse than casinos". Accounting standards are often lax, funds manipulate prices and the level of research is rudimentary. Partly because of this, authorities have been anxious to mitigate risk by imposing onerous restrictions. Qualified investors cannot withdraw funds from China until one year after the initial investment, while closed-end funds must wait three years. No foreign investor can hold more than 10 per cent of the shares in a listed company. Separately, an official at the CSRC denied reports that Chinese authorities would soon allow qualified domestic institutional investors to invest in markets abroad such as Hong Kong. "We are focusing on QFII. The time is not yet ripe for QDII," said the CSRC official. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:06:03 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:06:03 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Britain/US split: Iraq media coverage Message-ID: <00bc01c32448$582e9940$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Bell berates media giants for warmongering words Stephen Bates Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian Martin Bell, the former BBC war correspondent and independent MP, yesterday condemned the hypocrisy of the media owners Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, whose news organisations had led the calls for war in Iraq. He said the proprietors had never taken the sorts of risks they had urged on British service personnel in calling for the war. Speaking during a debate at the festival on media coverage of the war in Iraq, Mr Bell, who was a commentator for Channel 5 during the conflict, also attacked Mr Murdoch's Sky News for the amount of speculation it indulged in and for "reporting rumours as fact". Mr Bell said: "The thing that worries me most about the coverage was its feverishness. The networks became rumour bazaars. There was spin and manipulation. Our political and military leaders also have an obligation not to deceive." Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor, told the thousand-strong audience that technological developments had enabled the immediate transmission of pictures and information. They allowed the internet distribution of thousands of sources of information, including from the so-called Baghdad Blogger. Another aspect of this war was the use of reporters who stayed with particular troops during the conflict, "embedded" in military units. "It would be churlish to rubbish the concept of embedded reporters, having asked for it in previous conflicts," he said. He added that members of the Household Cavalry had been so taken by the coverage of the reporter Audrey Gillan that they claimed they had become Guardian readers. A retired general, Arthur Denaro, was sympathetic to the media's problems but said constant, immediate transmission of news had left the public "a touch depressed". Stephen Marshall, creative director of the Guerrilla News Network website, based in the US, argued that there had been a higher level of debate and intelligence in the British media coverage compared with the output from the American side. "In the US it tends to be more derivative, focusing on the lowest common denominator," he said. Mr Marshall stirred up debate with one member of the audience when he pointed out that the federal communications commission - the American regulatory body for the media - was chaired by Michael Powell, who is the son of Colin Powell, the serving US secretary of state. The audience member claimed it was unfair to imply bias within the organisation just because of a close family relationship. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:07:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:07:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Clare Short mark 2 Message-ID: <00c601c32448$9438c6e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Leftwinger wins plum job as rights envoy Pro-war Clwyd rewarded for springing to PM's aid Sarah Hall, political correspondent Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian When Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour party the first person he sacked from his frontbench, for remaining in Iraq when she should have been voting in the Commons, was the Welsh leftwinger Ann Clwyd. Eight years on he has come full circle. Yesterday it was announced that Ms Clwyd, the woman who helped him minimise the Commons rebellion over Iraq - the greatest threat to his premiership - has been made his special envoy on human rights in that country. Today she flies to Kuwait to discuss the 600 missing Kuwaiti prisoners of war. Later in the week she will go to Iraq to liaise with Iraqi women whom the government hopes will attend the next Baghdad conference on rebuilding Iraq. During the debate over Iraq the former Guardian journalist told her colleagues graphic stories of dead Iraqi babies and dissidents being dropped into shredders. The job will give Ms Clwyd extra authority and opportunities to pursue her work as chair of Indict, an organisation funded by the US Congress to bring Iraqi war criminals to trial. It is also clearly a reward for a woman who was rumoured in the Westminster corridors to have her eye on Clare Short's old job. But giving Ms Clwyd the post of international secretary would have meant catapulting a backbencher into the cabinet. And had she been given that job, it could also have backfired on her and led to the belief that her support for the prime minister had been motivated not by conviction but ambition. Ms Clwyd's transformation into a Blair favourite has shocked fellow leftwingers. They recall her being one of the 47 MPs in the first rebellion against the government - over cuts to lone parent benefits. She also rebelled in 1988 over increased spending on nuclear weapons and, as a result, was sacked by the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Mr Blair sacked her in 1995. Yesterday one Labour colleague said: "It's been a remarkable turnaround. I'm not convinced she always advocated war and fellow backbenchers were deeply unhappy that she was just repeating the government line. The feeling was that she was going along with it hook, line and sinker." But no one doubts the strength of the former MEP's conviction in campaigning against human rights abuses in Iraq for 25 years. However, leftwingers are concerned that the new job will give her little real power but will instead ensure she serves as the prime minister's "conscience". One MP who rebelled over Iraq said: "I just wonder whether she isn't going to be used by Tony Blair and the Americans. How effective she is all depends on how critical she is going to be of the US. "I imagine she might find this frustrating, and spend a lot of time arguing with American generals." Yesterday Ms Clwyd said she might well argue with the Americans, to whom she has endeared herself with her Commons speech and with a forceful pro-war opinion piece which appeared in the Times. It was emailed widely by the White House. "Anyone who's been listening to me in the House of Commons will know I frequently criticise what's going on," she said. "If anyone thinks I can be muzzled, they've another think coming." "She can be very awkward," one backbencher said. "Tony Blair could be in for a shock." As vice-chairwoman of the parliamentary party Ms Clwyd already sees the prime minister once a week. She is confident he will listen attentively to his new envoy. "When I read all these stories about him being inaccessible, I don't recognise them," she said. "He's been particularly receptive to things we've put forth." But he appears to have forgotten that he sacked her eight years ago. "Before I went into the house in the Iraq debate, we had a parliamentary meeting and I said, 'I can't be accused of being a government patsy because you sacked me in 1995 for going to Iraq'." Such behaviour now appears to have been forgotten. "He looked bemused," she said. Career path March 21 1937: Born Ann Roberts in Denbigh, Wales 1964-79: Welsh correspondent of the Guardian and the Observer June 1979: Elected MEP for mid and west Wales, insisting Labour had conducted a "feeble and mean-spirited campaign" for EU elections May 1984: Elected MP for Cynon Valley Nov 1986: First woman to be elected to chair Tribune group July 1987: Deputy spokeswoman on women and primary school education 1988: Sacked by Neil Kinnock for rebelling on defence figures November 1989: Opposition spokeswoman for overseas development 1993-94: Employment spokeswoman 1994-95: Foreign affairs spokeswoman until sacked for failing to leave Kurds at the Iraqi border and return to UK December 1997: One of 47 Labour rebels who opposed lone-parent benefit cuts March 2003: Helped minimise Iraq rebellion, telling MPs: "I believe in regime change. I say without any reservation I will support the government [as] I think it is doing a brave thing." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:14:07 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:14:07 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: political realignment Message-ID: <00ce01c32449$78c38d40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This development should be seen in the context of the above thread, which has been an occasional series devoted to the continuing disintegration of the Conservative Party and the potential rise of a new centre-right force tacitly backed by the US but more in tune with "British" sensibilities and therefore more marketable. This looks like just such a vehicle in embryonic form, although it could yet rise and take over the Conservative Party apparatus, if the punk Thatcherites finally yield. Nevertheless, I must admit to being surprised at just how far these so-called moderates would go to curry favour with the Bush administration. It can be rationalised as an indication of just how far consensus/hegemonic opinion within the British state has gone with respect to humanitarian intervention -- the legacy of Robert Cooper, Blair's favourite foreign policy adviser. If that is the case, then here is a classic example of the Tory "left" having to catch up with New Labour in the race for the "centre" ground, itself now hanging precariously over a deep precipice over on the right. The people involved in this are all backers of Michael Portillo, still seen as the star capable of reviving the centre right (whatever that means, these days). ----- Thinktank offers tips on regime change Sarah Hall, political correspondent Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian Fancy a little regime change? Should a sabre-rattling President George Bush, buoyed by the conflict in Iraq, need help in assessing which country to turn his attention to next, then British help, once again, is at hand. A Westminster neo-conservative thinktank has produced a guide for the US, and its partners in the coalition of the willing, that lays out the circumstances required for such contentious action to succeed. Regime Change: It's Been Done Before looks at eight past instances and analyses the conditions for the overthrow of dictators to succeed. Drawing on countries such as Germany, East Timor and Afghanistan, the authors say regime change works best if it is internally induced; if as little blood as possible is spilled; and if external forces make a huge commitment of effort and money. Policy Exchange, the thinktank set up by the centre-right Tory MPs Archie Norman, David Willetts and Francis Maude, advocates regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan and hopes its viewpoint will be influential. "This is a guide to how the only superpower, and its natural partners in the coalition of the willing, should approach regime change," said Policy Exchange director Nicholas Boles. "We hope it will prove useful. This is not a high political manifesto. This is about how you get regime change right." Labour MPs denounced the introduction to Britain of such rightwing thinking which, under the influence of Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, is shaping US foreign policy and causing alarm on the international left. "This must concern any sane and rational person," said the former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle. "We certainly don't want this apeing of American thinking, over here. It's regressive, militaristic nonsense that appeals to the lowest common denominator." Tom Watson, the Labour MP for West Bromwich East, said: "They're obviously trying to gain attention. There is an issue liberal democracies need to tackle, which is what you do about rogue and failing states. But regime change is a pretty emotive phrase and it doesn't help to introduce it into the debate. I presume they'll be at the head of the charge?" From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:15:10 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:15:10 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Turkey: political crisis Message-ID: <00dd01c32449$9e382cc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Turkey's military chief warns pro-Islamist government of possible coup Jonny Dymond in Istanbul Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian The head of Turkey's armed forces warned the government yesterday that the possibility of military intervention still existed and that the government should be sensitive to the country's secularist constitution. General Hilmi Ozkok, the chief of the Turkish general staff, told a selected group of Turkish journalists that the government's policy of re-employing those expelled from the army for their Islamist activities was offensive. The armed forces fear the government is appointing religious radicals to important positions in the bureaucracy. Gen Ozkok also appeared to reject changes to the role of the military in reforms intended to ease Turkey's entry into the EU. The army has carried out four coups in four decades. It still plays a big role in the government through the national security council - an advisory body whose pronouncements are closely monitored in the country. Criticising the military was until recently a criminal offence. But commentators have now begun to question its role in the government and its secretive nature. Since the Justice and Development party (AKP) was elected last November the relationship between the military and the government has been tense. The military sees itself as the guardian of Turkey's secular constitution. The AKP is publicly committed to secularism but contains MPs from banned Islamist parties. In January, Gen Ozkok said the government should halt its attempt to loosen restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf - a flashpoint in the battle between Islamists and secularists - and that it should stop meddling in internal military affairs concerning the expulsion from the army of those accused of Islamism. Last week Gen Ozkok met the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The proceedings of the meeting were leaked to the media as a series of warnings from the military leader to the head of the government. Mr Erdogan denied that the meeting was anything like that. But no such denial was forthcoming from the military. At yesterday's briefing Gen Ozkok repeated the Turkish military's desire to join the EU. But he suggested that the military's role in the government would not change. He denied suggestions that junior officers were calling for a tougher line to be taken, reportedly saying that all ranks were "sensitive" to the government's policies. But his most incendiary remarks were on the question of a repeat of the kind of military intervention which saw an openly Islamist government eased out of power with the military's help in 1997. "That was cause and effect" he said, "and if the cause is still there then the effect will be there also." Asked if the military would intervene again, he refused to answer. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:16:42 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:16:42 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Central America Message-ID: <00e501c32449$d4fd79e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Poor neighbours fall prey to US gang culture Central America counts cost of deadly export from Los Angeles Rupert Widdicombe in Managua and Duncan Campbell in Tegucigalpa Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian The signs of the influence of the United States on Central America are everywhere: McDonald's and KFC, movies and sportswear. Less easy to spot is one export which has a devastating effect on the region: gang culture. Six years ago, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was introduced in the US, which allowed the "expedited removal" of immigrants who had committed crimes. This has led to the deportations to Central America of thousands of gang members, mainly from the Los Angeles region, who arrived in the US as children with their parents. Back in Central America they are retaining their structures. Gang "franchises" have taken hold in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. The influence of US gang culture is evident in poor neighbourhoods or barrios across Central America. There are local variations on a dress code of baggy clothes, baseball caps and chains, a defined taste in music (much of it Latino rap and hip-hop), a semiology in tattoos, graffiti and hand signs, and a slang peppered with imported words like broderes (brothers) and "homies". Most damaging is a fashion for extreme violence that has found an easy home in countries with violent histories. In El Salvador, with a population of 6 million, a survey put gang membership at 20,000. Gang members are thought to be responsible for 10% of El Salvador's annual murder rate of 120 killings for every 100,000 people. The economic impact is huge: a study commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank found that 12% of GNP is spent on dealing with violence and its consequences. In Guatemala, with a population of 13 million, the police calculate that there are more than 300 gangs with a total membership of 200,000. In Honduras, with a population of 6 million, there are said to be 60,000 gang members. The two major international "franchises" are the MS (Mara Salvatrucha) and the Mara 18 (also known as MS-18 and Calle 18). Local branches of these gangs are involved in major crime from smuggling drugs and weapons, to kidnapping and car-jacking. The spread of the gangs has its origins in the conflicts that have racked Central America during the past 25 years. In the early 1980s, more than 1 million refugees fled to the US during El Salvador's civil war, which killed 75,000 people. Some had ties with La Mara, a street gang from the capital, San Salvador. Others had been members of groups such as the leftwing Farabundo Marti National Liberation front. Many settled in Los Angeles and found themselves in conflict with local Latino gangs. Al Valdez, a district attorney investigator for Orange County in California specialising in gangs, said initially the gangs had been formed for self-protection, but "quickly developed a reputation for being organised and extremely violent". According to Mr Valdez, Mara Salvatrucha has expanded across the US, Canada, and Mexico. "MS is unique in that, unlike traditional US street gangs, it maintains active ties with MS members and factions in El Salvador. Mara Salvatrucha is truly an international gang." Deportations to El Salvador began after the immigration act was passed and now about 300 arrive from the US every month. It is a similar story in Guatemala and Honduras, where the latest annual figures show that 8,000 have been deported from the US. Miguel Cruz a Salvadorean academic and author said: "Only a few of the deportees are criminals, but they have a significant influence on the local gang members. They quickly become leaders and role models for the youngest." Increased sophistication is one thing the deportees bring. Oscar Alavarez, Honduras minister of security, said a police raid on one gang last week uncovered a book which detailed all their transactions, from the costs of transport to ammunition. "They communicate on the internet, they run the gangs like a business." On April 5, 69 people were killed in El Porvenir prison in La Ceiba, Honduras, of whom 61 were members of Mara 18. Most were shot by guards. Many bodies had been burnt. President Ricardo Maduro has ordered an investigation but relatives claimmost were killed after they surrendered. Jorge Hernandez, Honduras minister of the interior, said the influence of the gangs now permeated the country's way of life. The government is spending $30m (?18m) a year on projects to take people out of the gangs but the gangs are growing. The official response in Central America has been a mix of repression and attempts to open a dialogue with gangs and young people: about a third of the region's population are under 10. Half are under 20. In Nicaragua, the police set up "prevention committees" and began visiting gang members and their families. The hope is to prevent MS and Mara 18 taking hold there. The organisation Ceprev has worked with more than 3,000 pandilleros (gang members) over the past six years in one district of Managua with the aim of improving their relations with their families. Its director, Monica Zalaquette, says: "The problem is not economic poverty, it is the poverty of our family culture - that's what we have to change." Bruce Harris of Casa Alianza, which works with at-risk young people in Central America, said: "For years, the authorities have left young people without hope, without access to school or jobs and the only governmental response to youth dissent has been repression. We have forced the kids to the extremes of society and they have responded with violence. Gangs can no longer be ignored, especially if we want to live in peace." 'He is chained to stop him being killed' Jose, 17, is chained by the ankle to an iron ring set into the floor of his parents' wooden shack. He spends his days in a chair, a few feet from a tiny black and white television. At night he is chained to the frame of his bed. He is freed only to perform what his mother calls "his bodily needs". Jose is a member of Los Puenteros, a street gang from a poor neighbourhood in southern Managua, Nicaragua's capital. He is addicted to crack cocaine. To pay for it he breaks into people's houses or robs on the streets armed with a machete. He once took and sold his young cousins' school shoes and rucksacks. "I don't know how long we will keep him there," Dona Wilma, Jose's mother, said. Jose says nothing and doesn't take his eyes off the cartoons. "But what else can we do? If we didn't he would go out on the streets and be killed or arrested." Without the chains, Jose would be on the run from the police with other members of Los Puenteros who were at a bar on May 17 when their leader, Tres Ojos (Three Eyes), killed a member of a rival gang with two machete blows to the head. Inter-gang violence has increased to the point where an unofficial curfew operates in most of Managua's marginal neighbourhoods where more than 100 gangs operate. In this city of 1.2 million people, police made more than 40,000 arrests of gang members in 2001. Although the gang franchises have not spread to Nicaragua because there have been relatively few deportations from the US, the Los Angeles culture has fuelled the growth of organised crime. After dark, people close their doors and windows and the streets become a battleground between rival gangs armed with stones, machetes, pistols, and home-made mortars. Nelly Rodriguez, a resident of the area known as Las Americas II, said: "When they start to fight, stones start flying in every direction. So many hit the roof of the house it feels like it is going to cave in and I get under the table with my children." The risks to non-combatants are real. In March Yolanda Molina, 12, was shot dead in her home during a gunfight between rival gangs. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:18:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:18:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US state: Senator Robert Byrd Message-ID: <00fe01c3244a$257dff20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Washington's rare Byrd Matthew Engel Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian The more we learn, the more the Iraq war seems to be a war without heroes, even in the debased tabloid-newspaper usage of the word. The funny thing is that a hero really has emerged on the other side of the argument. And a very improbable one he is. Last week, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, Robert C Byrd, again got up and delivered a passionate denunciation of Bush's adventure: "The run-up to our invasion of Iraq featured the president and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ-laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post-traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger." The speech was, I believe, heard by a similar-sized audience to the others: about two people in the chamber and three watching on C-Span. Yet these things have legs. Byrd's main anti-war oration in February was reprinted across the world, in these pages among others. The cadences are often beautiful. The logic has gone unrefuted and, since Bush has now had his way and unhorsed Saddam, is forever irrefutable. Who is this man? Why isn't he running for president instead of the mealy-mouthed Democratic front-runners, Kerry and Edwards? Well, there are one or two conventional objections to this idea. Byrd is 85, and has Parkinson's. And his reputation, achieved over a mere 51 years in Washington - the last 45 in the Senate - has always been for four of the most objectionable senatorial vices: (a) windbaggery; (b) constitutional and procedural pedantry; (c) an ego the size of a much larger state than West Virginia and (d) absolute unprecedented brilliance at the Senate's most noxious vice of all, securing those federal hand-outs for constituents collectively known as "pork". I was recently musing, possibly on a flight from Reagan National airport in Washington to Bush airport in Houston just how crass it is to name things after living politicians. In West Virginia, there are at least 32 federal projects named after Byrd, including four stretches of road, two interchanges, two courthouses, a bridge and a dam. In the state capitol rotunda, there is a double-life-sized statue of him. On his website, he is described as "the West Virginian of the 20th century". No wonder he was against overthrowing Saddam, you might think; they have much in common. But the 20th century always seemed a bit modern for Byrd. He was, briefly, in the Ku Klux Klan and has never been any kind of leftie. But if you focus on the Klan episode, you miss the point of his political career. What he has is 19th-century earnestness: he was the son of a coal miner and earned his degree at night school when already a senator. And he has a Victorian reverence for the constitution, which he carries round with him, and for senatorial prerogative, which is one explanation for his fury about the war. There is also a Victorian shamelessness about his self-promotion. He likes to say there are four things all West Virginians believe in: God, the Sears Roebuck catalogue, Carter's Little Liver Pills and Robert C Byrd. God has never seemed to treat West Virginia all that kindly, the Sears Roebuck catalogue is no more, and Carter's pills have apparently been overtaken by more modern laxatives. But Byrd is unassailable at least until God stops being fearful of the rivalry. (He still hasn't plucked up the courage to face up to 100-year-old Strom Thurmond.) In the meantime, it doesn't matter what Byrd says about Iraq or if he gives up his Victorian morality (he hated Clinton, same party or not) and takes up with floozies. His 45 years of seniority means that if he wants something for West Virginia, he can get it. So if he runs again, aged 88, the voters know they would be insane to toss that away just because some young whippersnapper agreed with them about mere politics. Some of us suddenly find we do agree with him. Last week, Byrd said: "The American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law, under false premises." You would have thought a few more politicians under the age of 85 might acquire the courage to say that, but they haven't. Maybe he'll be the West Virginian of the 21st century too. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:20:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:20:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Westland affair Message-ID: <010601c3244a$6a809f60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Sir Basil Blackwell Engineer turned businessman who fought in vain to save Westland Helicopters Roger Cowe Tuesday May 27, 2003 The Guardian Engineers find it notoriously difficult to make the leap to general management, but Sir Basil Blackwell, who has died aged 81, was one who achieved it. He led the Westland helicopter company in the 1970s and early 1980s, leaving the year before the 1986 furore that split the Thatcher government and led to Michael Heseltine storming out of the cabinet and resigning as defence secretary. The cabinet divided over how Westland should be rescued, which was a sad postscript to Blackwell's career. It is true that he failed to find the commercial success the company needed, but he did avoid the dilemma that caught out the politicians - whether to go with an American or European partner. Under Blackwell, Westland had done both. Blackwell was born in Whitkirk, Yorkshire, where his father ran an engineering company. He went to Leeds grammar school and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and won the Hughes prize. Graduating in 1942, he joined the Admiralty's scientific research department, where he applied his maths to the trajectories of torpedoes and other anti-submarine weapons. After the second world war, he worked on jet engines at Rolls-Royce, while also gaining a first-class degree in engineering from London University, an achievement that reinforced his potential as an engine engineer. Blackwell left Rolls-Royce in 1949 to work on engines at the Bristol Aeroplane Company, creator of many famous planes, including, in the 1960s, Concorde. He was involved in several major projects through the 1950s, including the Olympus engines that powered Britain's Vulcan bombers. In 1959, the company merged its engine operations with Hawker Siddeley's to create Bristol Siddeley engines, and Blackwell became deputy chief engineer of the aero-engine division. Still only in his late 30s, Blackwell was perhaps at the ideal age to leap the technical barrier into commercial management, and, in 1961, he became business manager of the aero-engine division. Four years later, he was made managing director of the small engine division, a move that brought him back to Rolls-Royce when the division was merged into its engine operations. In 1970, he moved to Westland, where he spent the rest of his career in an increasingly vain battle to build the helicopter company's commercial viability. Blackwell began as the group's commercial director, but rose rapidly: he was appointed managing director of Westland Helicopters in 1972, and group chief executive two years later. He retained this position until the mounting commercial and political battles brought the departure of the chairman, Lord Westland, in 1985. Blackwell briefly took over, before leaving the company and handing over to Sir John Cuckney, who saw it through the political crisis. Westland had been quite successful in the military market. It made the Sea King, Wessex and Lynx helicopters for the British armed forces, and they were also sold to several other navies. They were developed in partnership - especially with the US company Sikorsky (which became Mrs Thatcher's choice to take over Westland), but also with Aerospatiale in France and the Italian company Agusta. Blackwell was determined to build a similarly successful commercial arm to the business. But while the Westland 30-passenger helicopter was successful technically, civil demand did not materialise in sufficient numbers to make it a commercial success. As the 1980s progressed, Westland's plight grew worse, and it proved impossible to engineer a successful denouement. The board looked for a white-knight rescuer, but the only interest came from Alan Bristow, the helicopter operator. Confusion followed: at first, Blackwell resisted Bristow's approach; then, when he recommended the deal, Bristow withdrew. In retirement, Blackwell continued to be active, especially, between 1986 and 1995, at Bath University, where he was made an honorary fellow. He also co-wrote The Global Challenge Of Innovation (1991). He was knighted in 1983. He lived in Sherborne, Dorset, with his wife Betty, the daughter of a naval engineering captain, whom he married in 1948. She survives him, as does their daughter. ? Basil Davenport Blackwell, businessman and engineer, born February 8 1922; died May 18 2003 From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:22:48 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:22:48 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: strategic dilemma Message-ID: <010e01c3244a$af387b00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Britain's European policy at crisis point By Peter Ludlow Financial Times: May 27 2003 There is a widespread belief that the principal losers from the conflict in Iraq are the countries of "Old Europe". It is they who have been proved wrong by events and it is they who are having to beg for "forgiveness". This is a singularly short-sighted reading of the current situation. The war has caused deep divisions inside Europe. These fractures are more complex than analyses based on the eligibility or non-eligibility of particular leaders for invitations to President George W. Bush's Texan ranch might suggest. Three issues can be used to illustrate the point. The first concerns the norms underpinning the international order as a whole. As recent developments in the United Nations Security Council have confirmed, Europeans will have to adjust to the realities that the coalition has created. There is, however, no mistaking the profound unease with which leaders and public opinion, in new as well as old Europe, regard a world in which the authority of the UN has been flouted, the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction is shrugged off as a matter of indifference and the invasion of a sovereign state is justified retrospectively because it brought about regime change. However much coalition leaders may protest, the normative issue will not simply go away. The second issue is the unipolar system. The Iraq war did not tell us anything that we did not already know about the awesome military power of the US. But it is one thing to acknowledge the fact that the world has only one superpower, quite another to claim that an international order in which this power can behave as if it is free of any checks or balances is desirable. Some of those who have sought to defend a unipolar system have given the impression that their only serious opponents in Europe are French Gaullists. The notion of a unipolar system is, however, profoundly at odds with the principles and dynamics of the European integration process itself. Integration has always been about enabling the member states, all of which are small or medium-sized in global terms, to stand on their own feet. No European leader wants perpetual confrontation between Europe and the US. They are natural partners because they share many common values. But partnership cannot be based on subordination. "The alliance leader right or wrong" is an even more rotten principle on which to base a foreign policy than "my country right or wrong". The third issue is the "special relationship". Before the Iraq crisis, Britain's privileged position in Washington could still be seen as an asset in European Union politics. As the political and moral compromises of maintaining it have grown and the pay-off has remained so meagre, it has turned into more of a liability. An advocate who can advance Europe's collective interests in the US capital has his uses. A viceroy has no place in a community of sovereign states whose most important institution, the European Council, is a striking example of collective government by a club of equals. The EU has undoubtedly been battered by the Iraq crisis. But for core Europe, represented in the monetary union and Schengen agreement on open borders, integration has long since passed the point of no return. France and Germany may still slow down the European construction if they do not carry through the economic reforms that both governments have acknowledged are necessary, or if they ignore the aspirations and rights of their smaller partners. The bruising reminders that the Iraq crisis has given them of their limited powers, not to mention their stake as founding members, mean that it should be relatively easy for them in the coming year to accept an EU constitution worthy of the name. The present Italian and Spanish prime ministers are cooler towards the EU than their predecessors. The role of satrap in a system based on divide and rule is not only demeaning but also incompatible with the accumulated commitments that the two countries have made towards the Union; and unlikely to appeal for long to public opinion, which in both cases remains profoundly sceptical about the attractions of US hegemony. As for the new entrants, it seems safe to assume that geography, if not sentiment, will draw most, if not all, of them increasingly towards the core. As a Polish minister remarked after the Brussels European Council last October: "We realise as well as anybody that France and Germany are at the heart of the enterprise." It is, in fact, Britain's European policy, rather than France's or Germany's, that is manifestly in crisis. Adoption of the euro before the end of the decade has looked unlikely for some time. In recent weeks, as the war has taken its toll, interest in developing a credible common foreign and security policy appears to have evaporated and input into the convention on the future of Europe has become increasingly defensive. The UK may claim, as so often before at significant moments in the EU's history, that it is the continent that is cut off. But, when the fog has cleared, the landscape seems all too likely to look wearisomely familiar. The writer is chairman of Euro-Comment and founding director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:24:39 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:24:39 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: mounting blowback Message-ID: <011601c3244a$f1b72f80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The war on terror requires subtler weapons By Daniel Byman Financial Times: May 27 2003 The terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco highlight a sad truth: the war on terrorism is far from over. Al-Qaeda and the ideology it promulgates remain strong and the Middle East in particular will remain fertile ground for anti-western radicalism for the foreseeable future. As a result, for years and perhaps decades to come, western states must be ready to live with the risk of large-scale terrorist violence. Several important tasks remain to be completed in the war on terrorism. First, much of al-Qaeda's senior leadership apparently remains alive, including of course Osama bin Laden himself and Ayman Zawahiri, his deputy. Not only can these leaders continue to organise and plan but, as long as they remain alive in the face of a worldwide manhunt, they gain stature for their movement through nothing more than successful defiance. Al-Qaeda also has a remarkable ability to regenerate its leadership and cells. In the years before September 11 2001, police and security forces disrupted its cells worldwide and arrested many members. These efforts probably saved hundreds if not thousands of lives but they did not stop it. It is more than a movement: it is also an organisation that seeks to inspire and co-ordinate other groups and individuals. Even if it takes losses beyond its ability to recuperate, there is still a much broader Islamist movement that is hostile to the US and other western countries, seeks to overthrow US allies and is committed to violence. A proper listing of the al-Qaeda roster should also include at the very least senior officials of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad; the Jamaat Islamiyya in south-east Asia; the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in Algeria; and al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya in Somalia. The conceptual key is to see al-Qaeda not as a terrorist group but, rather, as a global insurgency. Unlike, say, the November 17 organisation in Greece, al-Qaeda cannot be crushed with a few arrests. Instead, it requires a painstaking struggle to take out not only the current leadership but also the broader organisational structure. That struggle is going well in the short term but the long-term outlook is more troubling. Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups continue to draw numerous recruits throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world more broadly. Although it is difficult to get more than an anecdotal sense of al-Qaeda's recruitment, Mr bin Laden himself gloated about its successes in a videotape recorded before the overthrow of the Taliban. While al-Qaeda remains attractive, the US appears to be failing to win support in the Muslim world. Polls taken before the war with Iraq became imminent suggest that in Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt - whose governments strongly support the war on terror - popular antipathy towards the US is intense. US efforts at public diplomacy have made little progress so far. Indeed, efforts to fight terrorism have fostered anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Washington has embraced sordid governments such as the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, remained silent about Russian brutality in Chechnya and made other distasteful concessions to ensure co-operation against al-Qaeda. Such moves bolster al-Qaeda's claims that the US supports the oppression of Muslims and props up brutal governments. Another sign of problems on the horizon is the emergence of new areas in Afghanistan where would-be radicals are able to congregate and form lasting ties. Chechnya remains a bloody stand-off, attracting militant Islamists as well as homegrown radicals. Kashmir has died down but the trouble may soon reignite. Xinjiang remains turbulent and Indonesia may flare up. If the US mishandles the reconstruction of Iraq, that country too could become a training ground for potential al-Qaeda recruits. No easy long-term strategy promises success. Instead, the US and its allies must accept the inevitability of a large, global movement bent on murder as a form of political expression. Success will mean winning the hearts and minds of the people of the Islamic world. This is a much bigger campaign than the war on terrorism has so far embraced. It will require tools - economic, cultural, and political - that the US has defined but has yet to wield effectively. The writer is assistant professor in the security studies programme at Georgetown University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 06:30:31 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:30:31 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: a Clintonian view Message-ID: <012e01c3244b$c3554b80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> A useless extravaganza in Evian By Jeffrey Garten Financial Times: May 27 2003 When the Group of Seven industrialised nations meets this weekend for its annual economic summit in Evian, France, should we expect Iraq-related tensions to spill over into economic relationships? Absolutely. George W. Bush's administration is not hiding its deep distrust of France and Germany. Only last week, the president delivered a public broadside against European trade and development policies. Moreover, the US is currently obsessed with projecting its own power and seems determined to work with ad hoc "coalitions of the willing" rather than within established multilateral frameworks. In fact, we may be seeing the beginning of the end of G7 heads-of-state gatherings. And this may not be such a bad thing. I believe in the importance of collaboration among the big powers to steer the world economy. If the G7 had operated effectively in the past, or if it had appeared capable of reforming itself, it would be ill-advised or reckless for the US to undermine the institution. But this high-level group now looks as if it is beyond repair. The fact is that, except for its first several years when it at least attempted co-ordination of energy and macroeconomic policies, and except for some exhortation in the mid-1990s regarding completion of the Uruguay round of trade negotiations, the G7 is a case study in bureaucratic dysfunctionality and irrelevance. It has failed to steer Japan and the European Union towards essential domestic reforms that would unlock much-needed growth. It has had no influence in curbing America's unrestrained appetite for oil. It has done nothing to avert recurrent financial crises in Latin America. It was a bystander during the Asian financial disaster of 1998. And it has done little to alleviate global poverty. Looking ahead, the G7 shows every sign of being impotent in the face of the currency disturbances that could arise if the dollar sank too fast. Its response to looming deflation will be rhetorical bromides. It will be on the sidelines when it comes to the challenge of nation building, or to balancing openness and security in the world economy, post-September 11 2001. These summit meetings are a far cry from what was intended when they were conceived in 1975. At the time, I was a young official working for Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state. I recall discussions about the importance of heads of state getting together in intimate, informal circumstances to build genuine rapport. The bureaucracy was to be kept to an absolute minimum. The objective was to manage the interdependence of G7 countries and for them to co-ordinate important policies in both their own collective interest and that of the world at large. Today, these meetings are overrun by large bureaucratic staffs and have become gargantuan media extravaganzas. Except for sleep-inducing communiqu?s, G7 members barely deal with critical economic reforms within their own countries - the very policies that matter most to the global economy. Instead, they offer plenty of advice on what non-member countries should do. The group also likes to deflect attention from its inability to make the tough economic choices at home by loading the agenda with the political issues of the day. The non- proliferation of weapons and illegal traffic in narcotics are among past examples. Another diversionary ploy is to embrace the pet projects of the host countries, such as the digital divide (Japan's favourite) or African economic development (France's preoccupation). Sooner rather than later, the world economy will need effective political leadership. It is foolish to think that any one country can alone provide this, or that it can be done ad hoc. Some formal collective effort will be needed. But before anyone designs a new mechanism, some big structural changes to the G7 should be considered. There ought to be a clear charter that focuses the group's work on domestic policies that have global ramifications, on the economic aspects of security issues such as counter- terrorism and on the importance of co-ordination in these and other areas. To cut down on redundant participants, the EU should be the sole representative of its 25 constituent countries. There ought to be rotating membership from the most important emerging nations - China, India, Brazil and Russia for example. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation should be directly involved. There should be a strong link to global business leaders. These proposals obviously need further thought. But they stem directly from some of the most important changes in the global arena since the G7 first met. These include intensification of economic globalisation and the need for a deeper collective policy response; the evolution of the EU and the euro; the emergence of important developing nations on the world scene; the critical role of the Bretton Woods institutions; and the expansion of global corporations. The G7 has done pitifully little to adjust to these developments. It is time to close it down. The writer is dean of the Yale School of Management. He has held economic and foreign policy posts in the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations From evs at tri-isys.com Tue May 27 07:07:00 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 21:07:00 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <005001c32450$dca6ac00$19c54ccb@pentium> Chris, I will certainly try to read Marx and Engels one day. But, as you pointed out, some of us don't have the time. There are just too many books that must be read in the original out there. One day. But, you know, I've learned a great deal since I joined these discussion groups. PKT, A-list and the New Forum. There is value in listening and, at times, asking basic questions. I have saved all of the posts from the three groups for reference and even have a separate folder for "interesting threads". They are all on my drive "D". Gary ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Black" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 6:34 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Michael, I agree that Gary's response and Melvin's were well thought out and well put but the person asking for an answer as to what Marxism is cannot and must not be sent just someone else's explanation. Marx is meant to be read and should be read and I simply wanted to suggest the very simple solution of reading Marx for herself. Too often this is ignored and those of us who have read Marx end up translating it or explaining for others who then never bother to read him. This is a disservice to Marx but more to the person making the enquiry. And frankly, no matter how well one of us or all of us may explain, none of it is as exciting or as pleasurable to read as the man himself. Too often working people are put off or too intimidated by Marx or what they think Marx is when instead they should be exploring him on their own and in light of their own experience. I have met too many "marxists" and others on the left who have read little or no Marx directly, only someone else's interpretation of him. My admonition too all workers is don't just listen to me, listen to Karl's voice. And Engels becuase the two go together. There is no other like it. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" To: Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 9:16 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Chris writes in response to Melvin: > > This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. But > instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesnt she just read Marx > herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third > hand from those of us who have. > > ------ > > While Melvin's extensive exposition might not be regarded as appropriate as > a response to Gary's enquiry, I want to gratefully acknowledge the manner of > that enquiry and the response it has generated. > > "Go off and read it yourself" is an option (if not a very friendly answer), > but getting others to clarify how they see the issues is equally useful, and > perhaps Gary has been able to identify a useful starting point in his > inquiry as a result of suggestions made here. > > Michael > > > > > From evs at tri-isys.com Tue May 27 07:20:24 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 21:20:24 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Marxism today References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <4.3.2.7.1.20030527063853.03a4faf0@pop3.norton.antivirus> Message-ID: <005801c32452$bc4bac60$19c54ccb@pentium> This then requires some discussion of why the followers of Marx who organised around the Third International ran into problems in the centralised socialist states. I suggest through a mixture of internal and external problems. ---------------------------------- It has occurred to me while listening in that Marx was born too early. Any Star Trek fans out there? I ask because if you discern from the series what sort of economic system the Federation of Planets adopted, the configuration you will end up with will be one where the production problem was solved by technology. While from our time frame technology is eliminating jobs, in the series, technology has not only eliminated all production jobs, it has done so to the benefit of all. There's a parallel to Marxism, I think. Marxism, in today's context, will regain prominence if it can offer a better means to produce all that we need. The weakness of the *present form* of Capitalism is it is subject to the greed and avarice of men who act only in self-interest and, thereby, create desperate inequality. Gary The main argument for looking at Marx again now is that with most commentators openly acknowledging that the world economy is capitalist, he was the most penetrating critic of the workings of capitalism and of its economists. Although class struggle may be a powerful motivator, many movements and beliefs take up class struggle, which Marx of course did not invent: the task is to go beyond subjective idealism to a scientific form of socialism. Although some of the immediate democratic demands in the Communist Manifesto have already been widely implemented they are not specifically marxist, and there is no specific immediate marxist programme that all self-defined marxists would subscribe to. With the demise of the Third International, and problems formulating the Fourth, what holds marxists together at its most coherent I suggest are three main features, which are all at a high level of abstraction and necessarily rather fuzzy. They have also percolated into wider society. My formulation would be along similar lines, I felt, to Stan's. 1) Historical materialism Reinterpreted in a probabilistic rather than a mechanically deterministic way, the broad approach of historical materialism remains valid. Indeed the assumption that societies are shaped by their economic base, is so widespread that it is not noticed as marxist any more. A probabalistic assumption about the likelihood of socialism and communism remains reasonable. Developments in monopoly finance capitalism prepare the ground for socialism. Class struggle and a favourable combinations of contradictions are also needed. 2) The Law of Value Marx and Engels were describing something more than the "labour theory of value", which had been described by the classical economists. This is the underlying emergent self-regulatory process of capitalist reproduction, to which bourgeois economists have to remain blind. A difficulty is that Marx analysed its workings in abstract and then illustrated them concretely. He wrote comparatively little about how it operates in a world in which the means of production are at enormously different levels of development. 3) Dialectical materialism The fact that everything is connected with everything else, is becoming more accepted with the advent of computer systems. These have modelled emerging phenomena, and non-linear interactions between even a small number of variables in self-organising systems, in which qualitative changes occur with deterministic indeterminism every so often. This has implications for historical materialism, and for demystifying theories of mind. Although the most sincere religious people are subjective communists and often good allies in practical struggles, the core of marxism is materialist. For marxists the morality of human cooperation arises from material self interest. Despite, and through, many contradictions, the call for working people of all countries to unite remains strong, and is expressed in many ways. Chris Burford From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 08:00:40 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 17:00:40 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> <005001c32450$dca6ac00$19c54ccb@pentium> Message-ID: <015801c32458$5b74a940$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Gary writes: But, you know, I've learned a great deal since I joined these discussion groups. PKT, A-list and the New Forum. There is value in listening and, at times, asking basic questions. I have saved all of the posts from the three groups for reference and even have a separate folder for "interesting threads". They are all on my drive "D". ----- Gary, thanks for this. Part of the rationale for this list is the creation of an atmosphere in which such "basic" questions can be asked without fear of being shouted down or ridiculed for supposed ignorance. We are all learning here, and long may that continue. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Tue May 27 08:05:29 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 17:05:29 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK secret state: book review Message-ID: <016a01c32459$07b81660$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> In his latest New Statesman column, John Pilger reviews a "brilliant, exciting and deeply disturbing" book by the historian Mark Curtis. This is Web of Deceit, which draws back the screen in front of British foreign policy and imperial power. : Pilger :22 May 2003 The official version is that Britain's foreign policy is basically benevolent: that it promotes democracy, peace and human rights. The truth is that Britain supports terrorism, argues John Pilger. In recent weeks, a number of apparently unrelated news reports have, in sum, told a truth that is never reported. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of British and American cluster bombs were fired at and dropped on civilian areas in Iraq. British artillery fired more than 2,000 of them at Basra. Each shell scatters bomblets over a wide area, and many fail to explode. Their victims are "not known", says the Ministry of Defence. They are known. They are often children; Iraq's population is almost half children. At the same time, HMS Turbulent, a nuclear-powered submarine, returned to Plymouth flying the Jolly Roger, the pirates' emblem. This vessel fired 30 American Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq, at a cost to the British taxpayer of ?21m. What did they hit? How many people did they kill or maim in this nation of sick people and disproportionate numbers of children? The commander would only say that he was "proud to be called forward". Readers will remember the patriotic calls to "support the troops" regardless of one's misgivings about the war. Why a non-conscripted force deserved our "support" in its illegal and craven actions against a weak and stricken nation was never explained by any politician, newspaper or broadcaster. Very recently, the news was dominated by embarrassing disclosures about the British "secret war" in Ireland. The British "security services" were confirmed as the most important and most ruthless terrorist organisation in Northern Ireland, having funded, trained and protected terrorists on both sides. Their victims included solicitors, pensioners and even their own agents. Like the Blair government's crimes in Iraq, the revelations now emerging from the murk of Britain's war in Ireland are unlikely to be placed in their proper historical context. That was certainly true following the 1994 public inquiry into the scandal of illegal British arms sales to Iraq, presided over by Lord Justice Scott. Behind the obfuscations of Scott's summary, the truths he found were explosive. Tim Laxton, an auditor assisting the inquiry and one of the few to hear almost all the evidence, believes that had Scott's terms of reference given him clout, hundreds would have faced criminal investigation. "They would include," he said, "top political figures, very senior civil servants from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Trade and Industry . . . the top echelon of the British government." British imperial power has been second to none in covering, even romanticising its crimes, projecting itself as benign and wise, even a gift to humanity. With every generation comes new mythologists. "When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations," observed the American sage Dresden James, "the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." A brilliant, exciting and deeply disturbing book, published this month, unwraps the whole package, layer by layer, piece by piece. This is Web of Deceit: Britain's real role in the world by Mark Curtis (Vintage). Curtis's history could not be more timely, for not in my memory has there been such an expose of private revelations and true intentions, told largely from official files. I know of no other living historian who has mined British foreign policy archives as devastatingly. From Africa to south-east Asia, Chechnya to Iraq, Curtis provides documented evidence of British foreign policy as "one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today . . . a simple fact never mentioned in the mainstream political culture". Most of his primary sources have long been in the public domain: a fact that shames silent, mainstream journalism. It was Mark Curtis who was among the first to reveal the scale of British complicity in the bloodbath that brought General Suharto to power in Indonesia in 1965-66 (and had difficulty getting a newspaper to publish his findings). He describes a total silence in the 1960s when the Labour government of Harold Wilson supplied warships, logistics and intelligence in support of Suharto. The slaughter of up to a million people was simply ignored in Britain; the headlines said that communism had been defeated in Indonesia and "stability" restored. What has changed? Not much. At the Labour Party conference in 2001, Tony Blair declared his "moral commitment" to the world. "I tell you," he said, "if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1993, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act." The following day, as Curtis points out, Blair's statement was reported without a single journalist reminding the British people that their government had contributed to the slaughter in Rwanda. >From official files, Curtis describes how the British government "used its diplomatic weight to reduce severely a UN force that, according to military officers on the ground, could have prevented the killings. It then helped ensure the delay of other plans for intervention, which sent a direct green light to the murderers in Rwanda to continue. Britain also refused to provide the capability for other states to intervene, while blaming the lack of such capability on the UN. Throughout, Britain helped ensure that the UN did not use the word 'genocide' so the UN would not act, using diplomatic pressure on others to ensure this did not happen." Not a word about this appeared in the British media at the time. A similar silence has shrouded the shocking story of Diego Garcia. Last year, a report in the Washington Post alleged that the United States had "rendered" alleged al-Qaeda prisoners for interrogation (tortured them) at the US base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. This is British territory "leased" by the United States without the agreement of the inhabitants. As Curtis documents, the 1,500 Ilois people were, to use the official term, "removed" from their homeland in the Chagos island group in 1966 by the Wilson government. This ruthless dispossession, secretly executed so that the largest island, Diego Garcia, could be handed to the American military, was, as the files show, "the subject of systematic lying by seven British governments over near four decades". The Ministry of Defence even denied that the island had been populated at all. BBC newsreaders routinely echo this. A high court action giving the people the right of return has been ignored by the Blair government. "Violating international law," writes Curtis, "has become as British as afternoon tea." The final chapter, "The Mass Production of Ignorance", describes a virulent media censorship by omission that is not conspiratorial, more a celebration of "one key concept: the idea of Britain's basic benevolence . . . the idea that Britain promotes high principles - democracy, peace, human rights and development - in its foreign policy". In other words, the truth is simply left out. This superb book puts it back in. http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132978 From bar at idirect.com Tue May 27 08:29:29 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 10:29:29 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> <005001c32450$dca6ac00$19c54ccb@pentium> Message-ID: <00bc01c3245c$74fffaf0$41089ad8@Chris> Gary, I appreciate the value of the discussion on this list. It is high quality material but there is nothing like reading Marx to make you passionate about changing the world and maing you a revolutionary. Marx.'s Capital is a book that will affect you in many ways and you will be surprise perhaps at the humour of the man. And the sheer beauty of much of his writing leaves a lasting impression. But perhaps the best book on socialism ane capitalism and no doubt an easier read is Engels book Anti-Durhing. Lucid; sharp; crystal clear; written in a compelling style. Irrefutable. If there is one thing that I could get you to do in life before you die it is read Capital; the Civil War in France; and the & 18th Brumaire. A whole world opens up. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 9:07 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Chris, > > I will certainly try to read Marx and Engels one day. But, as you pointed > out, some of us don't have the time. There are just too many books that must > be read in the original out there. One day. > > But, you know, I've learned a great deal since I joined these discussion > groups. PKT, A-list and the New Forum. There is value in listening and, at > times, asking basic questions. I have saved all of the posts from the three > groups for reference and even have a separate folder for "interesting > threads". They are all on my drive "D". > > Gary > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Christopher Black" > To: > Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 6:34 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > > > Michael, > > I agree that Gary's response and Melvin's were well thought out and well put > but the person asking for an answer as to what Marxism is cannot and must > not be sent just someone else's explanation. Marx is meant to be read and > should be read and I simply wanted to suggest the very simple solution of > reading Marx for herself. Too often this is ignored and those of us who > have read Marx end up translating it or explaining for others who then never > bother to read him. This is a disservice to Marx but more to the person > making the enquiry. And frankly, no matter how well one of us or all of us > may explain, none of it is as exciting or as pleasurable to read as the man > himself. Too often working people are put off or too intimidated by Marx or > what they think Marx is when instead they should be exploring him on their > own and in light of their own experience. I have met too many "marxists" and > others on the left who have read little or no Marx directly, only someone > else's interpretation of him. My admonition too all workers is don't just > listen to me, listen to Karl's voice. And Engels becuase the two go > together. There is no other like it. > > Chris > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Keaney" > To: > Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 9:16 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > > > > Chris writes in response to Melvin: > > > > This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. > But > > instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesnt she just read Marx > > herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third > > hand from those of us who have. > > > > ------ > > > > While Melvin's extensive exposition might not be regarded as appropriate > as > > a response to Gary's enquiry, I want to gratefully acknowledge the manner > of > > that enquiry and the response it has generated. > > > > "Go off and read it yourself" is an option (if not a very friendly > answer), > > but getting others to clarify how they see the issues is equally useful, > and > > perhaps Gary has been able to identify a useful starting point in his > > inquiry as a result of suggestions made here. > > > > Michael > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From sherrynstan at igc.org Tue May 27 09:05:07 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 11:05:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: <2050599.1054047907900.JavaMail.nobody@wamui08.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Bit of dissent here about reading Marx, Engels, etc, directly. As Hans Ehrbar points out in his very useful notes on reading Capital, simply reading it is not enough. It requires study and a good deal of interpretation, given multiple translations and archaic language. There are also some leaps to be made for those of us who are not grounded, as Marx was in stuff like Hegel, to whom he is frequently responding. So the advice to simply read it is a little disingenuous. No one who understand it has simply read it. And I reiterate, it is important to realize that much has been done since these gentlemen died, to extend and expand the body of theory and practice. This list is a perfect example. From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Tue May 27 09:47:28 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 16:47:28 +0100 Subject: [A-List] John Cleese Message-ID: <006301c32467$49c69b90$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> The Life of Brian is an extended satire on anti-imperialism by a team of British social chauvinists. Ironically, the real John Cleese is a master-splitter. He was a PR icon and a bank roller for The Gang of Four (David Owen et al) who split the British Labour Party after it had moved significantly to the left (with deselection of candidates etc) and formed the right wing Social Democratic Party (only after they had prevented Tony Benn from becoming deputy leader of the Labour Party). Cleese's sitcom Fawlty Towers is a miasma of prejudices. The idiot waiter Manuel is repeatedly explained away by saying to all and sundry "He's from Barcelona" [-- one of the most sophisticated cities in Europe.] The idiot, whose English is of course pathetic, refers unintelligibly and (of necessity) hilariously to the scam-artist jerry-builders as "orrelly (O'Reilly) men" (the Irish element). I have seen the famous Cleese speech from The Life of Brian "What have the Romans [sc. British] ever done for us?" quoted in a British academic journal as an illustration of an argument for imperialism worthy of Bill Warren -- the answer is of course sanitation, etc. etc. In my own personal experience, again in an academic setting, the version of the argument put forward was, in an unconscious masterpiece of irony, that the English brought the Irish "the rule of law". The speech could be summed up in words relayed in Arland Usher's enjoyable autobiography. This descendant of the 18th century Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh who calculated the date of the origin of the universe as October 4004 BC reported that it was a common saying among his "class and creed" that the Irish had no word for gratitude in their language. In another film appearance Cleese ponderously explains a joke of his to two small harmless old German professors with (approximately) the words "He was Irish". When after hearing that repeated they still and quite understandably look baffled he snorts [the Germans apart from goose-stepping, notoriously have no sense of humour], turns on his heel and stalks off. James Daly From bar at idirect.com Tue May 27 08:44:31 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 10:44:31 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Emailing: deliso78 Message-ID: <000501c3245e$94599350$41089ad8@Chris> 'The Yanks Have Really Screwed Up in Iraq': Interview with Scott Taylor, by Christopher Deliso 'The Yanks Have Really Screwed Up in Iraq': Interview with Scott Taylor by Christopher Deliso May 27, 2003 Scott Taylor is Canada's top war reporter and publisher of Esprit de Corps, a monthly magazine devoted to the Canadian military. Over the past decade, he has penned numerous inside reports from the Balkans and Iraq - in the process often challenging the conventional wisdom and biases of mass media reports. Two of Scott's books - Inat, and Diary of an Uncivil War - present the untold stories of the wars in Kosovo and Macedonia, based on his eyewitness experiences. Scott has just returned from yet another foray into Iraq. His decidedly unembedded views offer a fascinating glimpse into the realities of post-Saddam Iraq. Chris Deliso: Scott, you're just out of Iraq. But before we talk about this latest trip, can you tell us what happened before, when you tried to go in March? As I understand, it didn't quite work out. Scott Taylor: I went with a colleague (Australian photojournalist Sasha Uzunov), and we tried to get into Iraq through southern Turkey, at the border crossing of Silopi. This is all a Kurdish area, of course. And there were close to 700 journalists massed there at the time - 300 of whom were foreign. But they weren't letting anyone in. The only guy who got across was a Spaniard who paid a $4,000 bribe. So we got some bicycles from the locals - CD: Oh no. Not another bicycle story. ST: Yes indeed. It was late afternoon when we started out, hoping to get around the guards and cross in on our own, unseen. But then after we had pedaled and pedaled it was getting near dark, and we came up to the border where a giant sign with the skull and crossbones told us we were on top of a minefield. So we got out of there, and were discovered on the way back by a very surprised Turkish soldier with a flashlight. Somehow we managed to convince him that we were tourists, and he let us go. Iraq: a 'Boiling Kettle' CD: Wow. But your last trip, a week ago - how did that go? ST: Yes, this time I went in through southern Turkey again - but I had the official OK from the Turkish General Staff (TGS). Apparently I was one of the only journalists covering the ethnic Turkoman angle in northern Iraq, and so the Turkish military had seen my articles and decided they "liked" me. I had developed contacts with the Iraqi Turkoman Front months back, and these guys were to prove instrumental for me to piece together my story. CD: So where did you manage to get in Iraq? And how is the situation now? ST: I visited Kirkuk, Erbil, Tikrit and Baghdad. I can tell you that Iraq, though calm on the surface, is like a boiling kettle. The Yanks won't be able to keep the lid on it much longer. Look, Chalabi had 80 bodyguards, and 12 of them were killed on his second day in the country. Now he is under Marine protection. No doubt about it, the Yanks have really screwed up in Iraq. There is a lot of chaos and looting, and the only concern their soldiers have is for their own self-defense. They don't generally try to intervene against looters, etc., but when they do it is in a very clumsy and culturally insensitive way. They usually only make the situation worse. As the Troops Cower, Looters Run Rampant CD: Any examples? ST: Right now in Baghdad there are armed looters trying to steal from homeowners. The latter have guns to try and protect themselves and their property. When the Americans hear of such a gun battle, they send in tanks. When the looters see the Americans coming, they just melt away into the surrounding area. But since the Americans have a mandate to collect weapons, they end up taking the weapons they can see - those belonging to the homeowners standing out in front of their houses. And so these people are then left unprotected. When the Americans leave - guess what - the looters take over. I mean, it's really the Wild West out there. You had the Turkish ambassador, Osman Paksut, coming out with a pistol on his hip and six Palestinians with guns manning the roof. One told me that he had killed a lot of would-be looters. This was one of the only such places that wasn't looted. The Hungarian Fiasco CD: In January, you reported from Taszar Air Force Base in Kaposvar, Hungary. At the time, the US was opening a training camp for Iraqi opposition guys - who were allegedly learning to be "civil administrators." However, it came out that the Turkmen, Kurds and Iraqis at the camp were receiving military training. Tell us, had any of the Turkoman fighters you met in Iraq been trained at Taszar? ST: The Iraqi Turkoman Front sent 54 guys to Hungary, of which only 12 "graduated." They lost interest when it became obvious that the US was favoring the Kurds and empowering them above the other groups. In all, the program was meant to process 3,000 men; 1,500 US Special Forces were on hand to train them. Of the much fewer guys who actually went, most were too out of shape or for all practical purposes, useless. In the end, only 80 graduated. You can understand, actually, with some US sergeant major blustering in their face why an Iraqi guy would say, "screw this, I'm going home." Anyway, they got to keep the $3,000 in cash that the Americans gave them. So the program actually was a failure. And the Hungarians were worried that its presence might inspire retribution from Saddam loyalists. No one was too upset when it closed down early. Saddam's Intelligence Service: Laying Low, But Still Deadly CD: Are remnants of Saddam's military or intelligence regime still operating? ST: The Iraqi intelligence agency - known as the Mukhabarat - just melted away when the bombs started falling. They are still there - just not showing themselves openly. According to my sources inside, the American bombings only killed about 3 percent of these Iraqi agents. I spoke with one agent who recounted the story of two female Mukhabarat who executed suicide bombings, during the battle for the airport that left several dead. "She did her job," he said. "We haven't done ours - yet." CD: Are the Mukhabarat still loyal to Saddam? Do they have any kind of strategy? ST: They are disappointed, because they have lost contact with Saddam. And without his central leadership, they are disoriented. They often don't know each other's real names. They are a loose-knit group. Now they are sitting in caf?s; the only thing they have left to plot is how to kill more Americans. As for their strategy, they are planning for two civil wars. The first would be between Shiite fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists in the south; the second could conceivably turn into a nasty three-way fight in the north, between Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs. Could Iraq Become a Second Bosnia? CD: That does not sound auspicious for American peacekeeping. ST: The worst thing is that the Bosnia scenario could be repeated. The major Kurdish groups have a history of infighting, the two Christian groups (Assyrians and Chaldeans) don't get along, and the Arabs are not even united. Right now there are 80 registered political parties in northern Iraq. There is a high likelihood that things could get very mixed up in terms of military alliances. The Iraqi situation does resemble Bosnia in 1991. Everyone is preparing for civil war and mistrusting the other groups. The Turkmen groups have their guys in uniform in front of headquarters, which doesn't make the (Kurdish) peshmergas happy - but then again, they were supposed to have been disarmed too. There's a lot of tension in the air. The Iraqi Turkoman Front is, as can be expected, closely aligned with the Turkish General Staff. Right now, they perceive Bush as being very pro-Kurdish. They don't understand why they are not being consulted; if the US really is intent on keeping the integrity of Iraq's borders as they are now, the Turkmen need to play a role - after all, they comprise up to two million people there. CD: Northern Iraq is the "American sector." Are they up to the challenge? ST: The fact that the colonial administration has been changed - and so fast - is not a good sign. The best spin Washington has been able to put on it is that Bremer's administration is more of a civilian government than Jay Garner's would have been. But nobody's buying that shit. Look, you don't start a game with your second string. Changing administrations now is like changing quarterbacks when you're down 21-7 in the third. US Troops Still Being Targeted CD: How is the situation on the ground for the American troops? We've stopped hearing very much news about skirmishing or Iraqi attacks. ST: There are still plenty of attacks. In fact, the US has officially stopped reporting casualties, according to a sergeant I talked to at one checkpoint. The truth is, they're losing at least one man a day to hostile fire in Baghdad. They don't want to report this because they fear it might encourage more attacks. One week ago, seven Americans were killed by Iraqis. The graffiti on the wall behind them read, "beware monkeys, I'll be back - Saddam." In this symbolic statement, the word "monkeys" is a derogatory reference to the Iraqis themselves. Saddam's Diner: Intelligence Breakthrough, or a Great Deception? CD: Does the US have any intelligence on the ground, or any idea where Saddam may be lurking? ST: On April 7, the US tried to attack Saddam by bombing a restaurant in an upscale neighborhood of Baghdad. According to them, the missile attack had "narrowly missed" hitting Hussein's party - they had been there something like 15 minutes earlier, it was alleged. And this was supposed to be a sign that American intelligence, thought to be lacking, was getting closer to their man. Remember, getting Saddam was still politically important then to sustaining support for the war. After I heard this, I thought, "well, maybe it's possible." So I had my taxi driver take me there. And you know what? The possibility of Saddam ever having been there is absolutely zero. This place was the only American style restaurant in Baghdad. It served burgers, fries, and "Kentuckiy" fried chicken. They had the whole works - paper hats, deep-fat fryers, plastic trays. The only people who went there were American journalists. The whole idea was absurd. I mean, can you imagine Saddam carrying a plastic tray? CD: Heh heh. So how do you think they came with the idea to bomb this place? ST: My opinion is that the military was looking to make a show, and so they asked the journalists, "do you know any restaurants around?" And this was the only place they knew, except for the Al Rasheed. They just wanted to bomb something to make it seem like they were on the ball. Actually they were just clueless. by Scott Taylor for Antiwar.com Democracy-Building CD: President Bush has pledged to bring American-style democracy to the Iraqi people. What're the chances of this happening? ST: Iraq is a country that has never really experienced elections before, yet the US is forcing them on the people. At the same time, the only Iraqis who can afford to form political parties now are the gangsters. So who's going to run the country? It will be just like "liberated" Kosovo, only probably worse. Is There Any Future for Iraq? CD: Finally, give me some predictions. How are the US soldiers holding up, and what can we expect in the future? ST: As an ex-soldier, I can say that their lack of knowledge of the local culture was shocking. These guys are young, scared, frustrated, and clearly weren't briefed to cope with the "post-war" challenges of dealing with the locals. The heat is getting to them, they don't go out, and there are anti-American slogans on all the walls. The Iraqis are proving to be a tough crowd. Unless Bush works a miracle, there will be civil war. I put the odds right now at about 60 percent. There's a lot of mutual mistrust and all of these groups are eyeing one another - and the US - with suspicion. The Iraq mission is clearly turning out to be something much different than the Americans had anticipated. comments on this article? send them to backtalk! [visit backtalk!] Previous articles by Christopher Deliso on Antiwar.com 'The Yanks Have Really Screwed Up in Iraq' 5/27/03 Wolfowitz in Skopje - What Next for Macedonia? 5/20/03 America's 'Conservative' Christians - and the Middle East's 5/8/03 Occupation by Bad Example 4/23/03 Iraq's Cultural Catastrophe - and Ours 4/18/03 Has America Gone Commie? 4/11/03 The Ends of Alliance in Iraq 4/9/03 Washington's Hubris Invites a Fatal Iraqi Misjudgment 3/28/03 Suing in England, Vacationing in France: the Misplaced Patriotism of Richard Perle 3/25/03 Top Ten Bogus Justifications for the Iraqi War 3/5/03 Disaster Par Extraordinaire? 2/24/03 Almost Spot On: The British Critique of American Newspapers 2/4/03 So Many Fronts, So Little Sense 1/18/03 Poisonings or Power Plays? 1/1/03 Terrorist Bombing in Kumanovo, 1 Dead 12/26/02 The Instability Myth, Free Markets and Macedonia's Future 12/21/02 The Interview That Never Happened 12/16/02 The Price of Paranoia 11/25/02 The Trouble with Turkey 11/18/02 Greater Albania: a Place, or Just a State of Mind? 11/4/02 Explosion Rocks Macedonian Parliament 11/1/02 How to Take Down the Macedonian Government a series by Christopher Deliso Part One 8/26/02 Part Two 8/27/02 Part Three 8/28/02 Part Four 8/29/02 Part Five 8/30/02 Baghdad Braces for War 9/14/02 Envisioning Peace in the Shadow of War 9/5/02 Seducing Intervention: The Dangers of Diaspora 8/13/02 Nobody's Fault But Their Own? 7/12/02 In Macedonia, Transforming the Media Through Technology 7/9/02 European Intelligence: The US Betrayed Us In Macedonia 6/22/02 A Georgian Gaffe and the War on Terror 6/18/02 Heavy Fighting Erupts in Aracinovo on First Anniversary of NLA's 'Free Zone' 6/8/02 Kodra Fura and Macedonia's Emerging War 6/6/02 Kosovar Terrorists Renew Attacks on Macedonia 5/25/02 Macedonia On War Footing Over Kosovo Border Provocations 4/19/02 Macedonian Tortured In Tetovo Village, As Gang War Rages 4/18/02 A Macedonian Miracle 4/16/02 Balkan Meltdown 3/27/02 Macedonia: A Nation of Ingrates 3/21/02 Mujahedin In Macedonia, or, an Enormous Embarrassment For the West 3/12/02 How Not To Capture Osama bin Laden 3/7/02 Whispers of Folly and Ruin 3/4/02 Blurring the Boundaries in Macedonia 2/26/02 When The Terror Goes Down To Georgia: Some Thoughts On The Caucasus Imbroglio 2/19/02 In Macedonia, Terrorism Remains the Law 2/14/02 But Would It Be an Evil Axis? 2/12/02 Economics and Politics in Macedonia: an Interview with Dr. Sam Vaknin 1/29/02 Macedonians and the Media 1/28/02 Secrets of the Blue Caf? 1/26/02 On the Front Lines in Tetovo 1/25/2002 Interview with Ljube Boshkovski 1/24/02 A Connection Between NATO and the NLA? 1/23/02 The Legacy of War: Kidnapped Persons in Macedonia 1/22/02 The Day's Disturbances and Developments in Macedonia 1/21/02 Macedonia: A Prelude 1/19/02 Crisis in Macedonian Government - Vice President Resigns 1/18/02 Albanian Hackers Deface Macedonian Website 1/18/02 On Names and Power 1/4/02 Partition: Macedonia's Best Lost Hope? 12/26/01 Important Notice to Readers of the Macedonia Page 12/515/01 Selective Democracy Comes to Macedonia 12/1/01 Macedonia Capitulates 11/20/01 With a Friend Like Pakistan 10/27/01 Afghan-Americans Oppose Interventionism, Seek Unity 10/19/01 The Afghan Quagmire Beckons 10/17/01 Suddenly, Terrorists Are Everywhere 10/10/01 Turkey's Eclipse: Earthquakes, Armenians, and the Loss of Cyprus 10/5/01 Chechnya Comes Home To America 9/29/01 A Quiet Battle in the Caucasus: Georgia Between Russia & NATO 9/26/01 Central Asia: The Cauldron Boils Over 9/22/01 Bin Laden, Iran, and the KLA 9/19/01 The Meaning of Belarus 9/8/01 The Macedonian Phrase-Book: Writing NATO's Dictionary of Control 9/5/01 Barbarism and the Erasure of Culture 8/24/01 Macedonian Endgame: The Sinister Transformation of the Status Quo 8/14/01 Christopher Deliso is a freelance writer and Balkan correspondent for Antiwar.com, UPI, and private European analysis firms. He has lived and traveled widely in the Balkans, southeastern Europe and Turkey, and holds a master's degree with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University. In the past year, he has reported from many countries, including Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Greece, the Republic of Georgia and the Turkey-Iraq border. Mr. Deliso currently lives in Macedonia, and is involved with projects to generate international interest and tourism there. Back to Antiwar.com Home Page | Contact Us -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 42989 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: antiwar4.gif Type: image/gif Size: 6801 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: stayloriraq.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 27171 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jcraven at clark.edu Tue May 27 09:56:12 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 08:56:12 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Video Surveillance watches Native spiritual encampment Message-ID: Hello everyone! This is an update on the Ihanktonwan Nakota Oceti Sakowin(Yankton Sioux tribe) Burial Ground and Sacred Site issue. The tribe is in Federal court today to continue with the evidenciary hearing -- it's the tribe's turn to put on evidence today. We are asking for an injunction to halt construction in the burial grounds, which if you haven't heard yet, is being destroyed for an RV sewage dump and parking lot, along with a fish cleaning station by bulldozers contracted by the state of SD -- they're in a mad rush because the summer tourist season is approaching, along with the big hoopla over the 200th anniversary of the coming of Lewis & Clark. Actions are focused on the Governor of South Dakota, Michael Rounds, and continuing to put pressure on the SD Department of Tourism -- calls are still very critical, since your calls are kicking up quite a bit of dust out here in this blatantly racist state. KEEP THE PRESSURE ON! The Ihanktonwan want to thank everyone who has made phone calls, faxes, emails, and sent prayers on their behalf, from wherever you live. They know that without the help of the outside world, their fight would go unnoticed and they would stand little chance. And let's circulate this information far and wide! Again, so many thanks for all your work and support. We can stand together to say NO to the injustices against Indigenous Peoples and our collective voice will be the protection. Amanda Governor Michael Rounds (605) 773-3661 fax (605) 773-5844 governor at state.sd.us TELL HIM YOU WILL NOT TRAVEL TO HIS STATE UNTIL HE TAKES A STAND AGAINST DESECRATION OF INDIAN BURIAL GROUNDS AND THE ONGOING TRAUMATIZATION OF NATIVE PEOPLES IN HIS STATE, AT THE HANDS OF THE STATE AND US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS ACTING IN HIS STATE. TELL HIM YOU WILL NOT VISIT A STATE THAT ROBS NATIVE PEOPLE OF THEIR LANDS, THEN BULLDOZES AND DESECRATES THEIR SACRED SITES AND BURIAL GROUNDS TO MAKE RV SEWAGE DUMPS AND PARKING LOTS. TELL HIM YOU WILL BE TELLING YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILIES, LOVED ONES, EMAILS LISTS, CO-WORKERS, ETC WHAT IS HAPPENING IN SD AND URGING THEM NOT TO GO, EITHER. SD Department of Tourism 800-732-5682 605-773-3256 THEY CAN BE TOLD THE SAME THING AS THE GOVERNOR! Attached are 2 new press releases for today: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: pr on video surveillance may 27 03.rtf Type: text/richtext Size: 5342 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: update on boycott may 26 final copy.doc Type: application/msword Size: 20992 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 27 09:14:45 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:14:45 -0300 Subject: [A-List] BERGOGLIO Y LA PATRIA Message-ID: <4129-220035227151444950@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin983172003-05-27T14:47:00Z2003-05-27T14:48:00Z6357420374win16940250209.3821 21 Gentileza de? "Julio Fern?ndez Baraibar" < julfb at alternativagratis.com.ar> ?[R-P] Bergoglio y mi Patria EL OTRO 25 DE MAYO JORGE BERGOGLIO Y LA PARABOLA DEL 'BUEN SAMARITANO' ' Y entonces, un doctor de la ley se levant? y le pregunt? a Jes?s para ponerlo a prueba: 'Maestro, ?qu? tengo que hacer para heredar la Vida Eterna?' Jes?s le pregunt? a su vez: ?Qu? est? escrito en la ley? ?Qu? lees en ella?' El le respondi?: 'Amar?s al Se?or, tu Dios, con todo tu coraz?n, con toda tu alma, con todas tus fuerzas y con todo tu esp?ritu, y a tu pr?jimo como a ti mismo '. 'Has respondido exactamente, le dijo Jes?s; obra as? y alcanzar?s la vida'. Pero el doctor de la Ley, para justificar su intervenci?n, le hizo esta pregunta: '?Y qui?n es mi pr?jimo?'. Jes?s volvi? a tomar la palabra y le respondi?: 'Un hombre bajaba de Jerusal?n a Jeric? y cay? en manos de unos ladrones, que lo despojaron de todo, lo hirieron y se fueron, dej?ndolo medio muerto. Casualmente bajaba por el mismo camino un sacerdote: lo vio y sigui? de largo. Tambi?n pas? por all? un levita: lo vio y sigui? su camino. Pero un samaritano que viajaba por all?, al pasar junto a ?l, lo vio y se conmovi?. Entonces se acerc? y vend? sus heridas, cubri?ndolas con aceite y vino; despu?s lo puso sobre su propia montura, lo condujo a un albergue y se encarg? de cuidarlo. Al d?a siguiente sac? dos denarios y se los dio al due?o del albergue, dici?ndole: 'Cu?dalo, y lo que gastes de m?s, te lo pagar? al volver ' ?Cu?l de los tres te parece que se port? como pr?jimo del hombre asaltado por los ladrones?' 'E1 que tuvo compasi?n de ?l', le respondi? el doctor. Y Jes?s le dijo: ' Ve, y procede t? de la misma manera'. (Lc. 10, 25-37) El tiempo pascual es un llamado a renacer de lo alto. Al mismo tiempo es un desaf?o a hacer un profundo replanteo, a resignificar toda nuestra vida -como personas y como Naci?n- desde el gozo de Cristo resucitado para permitir que brote, en la fragilidad misma de nuestra carne, la esperanza de vivir como una verdadera comunidad. Desde este misterio de alegr?a ?ntima y compartida, sentimos resurgir un sol de Mayo al que los argentinos, como siempre, deseamos ver como un recuerdo que es destello de resurrecci?n. Es el esperanzado llamado de Jesucristo a que resurja nuestra vocaci?n de ciudadanos constructores de un nuevo v?nculo social. Llamado nuevo, que est? escrito, sin embargo, desde siempre como ley fundamental de nuestro ser: que la sociedad se encamine a la prosecuci?n del Bien Com?n y, a partir de esta finalidad, reconstruya una y otra vez su orden pol?tico y social. La par?bola del Buen Samaritano es un icono iluminador, capaz de poner de manifiesto la opci?n de fondo que debemos tomar para reconstruir esta Patria que nos duele. Ante tanto dolor, ante tanta herida, la ?nica salida es ser como el Buen Samaritano. Toda otra opci?n termina o bien del lado de los salteadores o bien del lado de los que pasan de largo, sin compadecerse del dolor del herido del camino. Y 'la patria no ha de ser para nosotros -como dec?a un poeta nuestro-; sino un dolor que se lleva en el costado'. La par?bola del Buen Samaritano nos muestra con qu? iniciativas se puede rehacer una comunidad a partir de hombres y mujeres que sienten y obran como verdaderos socios (en el sentido antiguo de conciudadanos). Hombres y mujeres que hacen propia y acompa?an la fragilidad de los dem?s, que no dejan que se erija una sociedad de exclusi?n, sino que se aproximan -se hacen pr?jimos- y levantan y rehabilitan al ca?do, para que el Bien sea Com?n. Al mismo tiempo la Par?bola nos advierte sobre ciertas actitudes que s?lo se miran a s? mismas y no se hacen cargo de las exigencias ineludibles de la realidad humana. Desde el comienzo de la vida de la Iglesia, y especialmente por los Padres capadocios, el buen samaritano fue identificado con el mismo Cristo. ?l es el que se hace nuestro pr?jimo, el que levanta de los m?rgenes de la vida al ser humano, el que lo pone sobre sus hombros, se hace cargo de su dolor y abandono y lo rehabilita. El relato del buen Samaritano, dig?moslo claramente, no desliza una ense?anza de ideales abstractos, ni se circunscribe a la funcionalidad de una moraleja ?tico-social. Sino que es la Palabra viva del Dios que se abaja y se aproxima hasta tocar nuestra fragilidad m?s cotidiana. Esa Palabra nos revela una caracter?stica esencial del hombre, tantas veces olvidada: que hemos sido hechos para la plenitud de ser; por tanto no podemos vivir indiferentes ante el dolor, no podemos dejar que nadie quede 'a un costado de la vida', marginado de su dignidad. Esto nos debe indignar. Esto debe hacernos bajar de nuestra serenidad para 'alterarnos' por el dolor humano, el de nuestro pr?jimo, el de nuestro vecino, el de nuestro socio en esta comunidad de argentinos. En esa entrega encontraremos nuestra vocaci?n existencial, nos haremos dignos de este suelo, que nunca tuvo vocaci?n de marginar a nadie. El relato se nos presenta con la linealidad de una narraci?n sencilla, pero tiene toda la din?mica de esa lucha interna que se da en la elaboraci?n de nuestra identidad, en toda existencia 'lanzada al camino' de hacer patria. Me explico: puestos en camino nos chocamos, indefectiblemente, con el hombre herido. Hoy ? y cada vez m?s ese herido es mayor?a. En la humanidad y en nuestra patria. La inclusi?n o la exclusi?n del herido al costado del camino define todos los proyectos econ?micos, pol?ticos, sociales y religiosos. Todos enfrentamos cada d?a la opci?n de ser buenos samaritanos o indiferentes viajantes que pasan de largo. Y si extendemos la mirada a la totalidad de nuestra historia y a lo ancho y largo de la Patria, todos somos o hemos sido como estos personajes: todos tenemos algo de herido, algo de salteador, algo de los que pasan de largo y algo del Buen Samaritano. Es notable c?mo las diferencias de los personajes del relato quedan totalmente transformadas al confrontarse con la dolorosa manifestaci?n del ca?do, del humillado. Ya no hay distinci?n entre habitante de Judea y habitante de Samaria, no hay sacerdote ni comerciante; simplemente est?n dos tipos de hombre: los que se hacen cargo del dolor y los que pasan de largo, los que se inclinan reconoci?ndose en el ca?do, y los que distraen su mirada y aceleran el paso. En efecto, nuestras m?ltiples m?scaras, nuestras etiquetas y disfraces se caen: es la hora de la verdad, ?nos inclinaremos para tocar nuestras heridas? ?Nos inclinaremos a cargamos al hombro unos a otros? Este es el desaf?o de la hora presente, al que no hemos de tenerle miedo. En los momentos de crisis la opci?n se vuelve acuciante: podr?amos decir que en este momento, todo el que no es salteador o todo el que no pasa de largo, o bien est? herido o est? poniendo sobre sus hombros a alg?n herido. La historia del buen Samaritano se repite: se toma cada vez m?s visible que nuestra desidia social y pol?tica est? logrando hacer de esta tierra un camino desolado, en el que las disputas internas y los saqueos de oportunidades nos van dejando a todos marginados, tirados a un costado del camino. En su par?bola, el Se?or no plantea v?as alternativas, ?qu? hubiera sido de aquel malherido o del que lo ayud?, si la ira o la sed de venganza hubieran ganado espacio en sus corazones? Jesucristo conf?a en lo mejor del esp?ritu humano y con la Par?bola lo alienta a que se adhiera al amor de Dios, reintegre al dolido y construya una sociedad digna de tal nombre. La Par?bola comienza con los salteadores. El punto de partida que elige el Se?or es un asalto ya consumado. Pero no hace que nos detengamos a lamentar el hecho, no dirige nuestra mirada hacia los salteadores. Los conocemos. Hemos visto avanzar en nuestra Patria las densas sombras del abandono, de la violencia utilizada para mezquinos intereses de poder y divisi?n, tambi?n existe la ambici?n de la funci?n p?blica buscada como bot?n. La pregunta ante los salteadores podr?a ser: ?Haremos nosotros de nuestra vida nacional un relato que se queda en esta parte de la par?bola? ?Dejaremos tirado al herido para correr cada uno a guarecerse de la violencia o a perseguir a los ladrones? ?Ser? siempre el herido la justificaci?n de nuestras divisiones irreconciliables, de nuestras indiferencias crueles, de nuestros enfrentamientos internos? La po?tica profec?a del Mart?n Fierro debe prevenirnos: nuestros eternos y est?riles odios e individualismos abren las puertas a los que nos devoran de afuera. El pueblo de nuestra Naci?n demuestra, una y otra vez, la clara voluntad de responder a su vocaci?n de ser buenos samaritanos unos con otros: ha confiado nuevamente en nuestro sistema democr?tico a pesar de sus debilidades y carencias, y vemos c?mo se redoblan los esfuerzos solidarios para volver a tejer una sociedad que se fractura. Nuestro pueblo responde con silencio de Cruz a las propuestas disolutorias y soporta hasta el l?mite la violencia descontrolada de quienes est?n presos del caos delincuencial. La Par?bola nos hace poner la mirada, redobladamente, en los que pasan de largo. Esta peligrosa indiferencia de pasar de largo, inocente o no, producto del desprecio o de una triste distracci?n, hace de los personajes del sacerdote y del levita un no menos triste reflejo de esa distancia cercenadora, que muchos se ven tentados a poner frente a la realidad y a la voluntad de ser Naci?n. Hay muchas maneras de pasar de largo que se complementan: una ensimismarse, desentenderse de los dem?s, ser indiferente, y otra: un solo mirar hacia afuera. Respecto a esta ?ltima manera de pasar de largo, en algunos es acendrado el vivir con la mirada puesta hacia fuera de nuestra realidad, anhelando siempre las caracter?sticas de otras sociedades, no para integrarlas a nuestros elementos culturales, sino para reemplazarlos. Como si un proyecto de pa?s impostado intentara forzar su lugar empujando al otro; en ese sentido podemos leer hoy experiencias hist?ricas de rechazo al esfuerzo de ganar espacios y recursos, de crecer con identidad, prefiriendo el ventajismo del contrabando, la especulaci?n meramente financiera y la expoliaci?n de nuestra naturaleza y -peor a?n- de nuestro pueblo. A?n intelectualmente, persiste la incapacidad de aceptar caracter?sticas y procesos propios, como lo han hecho tantos pueblos, insistiendo en un menosprecio de la propia identidad. Ser?a ingenuo no ver algo m?s que ideolog?as o refinamientos cosmopolitas detr?s de estas tendencias; m?s bien afloran intereses de poder que se benefician de la permanente conflictividad en el seno de nuestro pueblo. Inclinaci?n similar se ve en quienes, aparentemente por ideas contrarias, se entregan al juego mezquino de las descalificaciones, los enfrentamientos hasta lo violento, o a la ya conocida esterilidad de muchas intelectualidades para las que 'nada es salvable si no es como lo pienso yo'. Lo que debe ser un normal ejercicio de debate o autocr?tica, que sabe dejar a buen recaudo el ideario y las metas comunes, aqu? parece ser manipulado hacia el permanente estado de cuestionamiento y confrontaci?n de los principios m?s fundamentales. ?Es incapacidad de ceder en beneficio de un proyecto m?nimo com?n o la irrefrenable compulsi?n de quienes s?lo se al?an para satisfacer su ambici?n de poder? T?citamente los 'salteadores del camino' han conseguido como aliados a los que 'pasan por el camino mirando a otro lado'. Se cierra el c?rculo entre los que usan y enga?an a nuestra sociedad para esquilmarla, y los que supuestamente mantienen la pureza en su funci?n cr?tica, pero viven de este sistema y de nuestros recursos para disfrutarlos afuera o mantienen la posibilidad del caos para ganar su propio terreno. No debemos llamarnos a enga?o, la impunidad del delito, del uso de las instituciones de la comunidad para el provecho personal o corporativo y otros males que no logramos desterrar, tienen como contracara la permanente desinformaci?n y descalificaci?n de todo, la constante siembra de sospecha que hace cundir la desconfianza y la perplejidad. El enga?o del 'todo est? mal' es respondido con un 'nadie puede arreglarlo'. Y, de esta manera, se nutre el desencanto y la desesperanza. Hundir a un pueblo en el desaliento es el cierre de un c?rculo perverso perfecto: la dictadura invisible de los verdaderos intereses, esos intereses ocultos que se adue?aron de los recursos y de nuestra capacidad de opinar y pensar. Todos, desde nuestras responsabilidades, debemos ponernos la patria al hombro, porque los tiempos se acortan. La posible disoluci?n la advertimos en otras oportunidades, en esta misma fecha patria. Sin embargo muchos segu?an su camino de ambici?n y superficialidad, sin mirar a los que ca?an al costado: esto sigue amenaz?ndonos. Miremos finalmente al herido. Los ciudadanos nos sentimos como ?l, malheridos y tirados al costado del camino. Nos sentimos tambi?n desamparados de nuestras instituciones desarmadas y desprovistas, ayunos de la capacidad y la formaci?n que el amor a la patria exigen. Todos los d?as hemos de comenzar una nueva etapa, un nuevo punto de partida. No tenemos que esperar todo de los que nos gobiernan: esto ser?a infantil, sino m?s bien hemos de serparte activa en la rehabilitaci?n y el auxilio del pa?s herido. Hoy estamos ante la gran oportunidad de manifestar nuestra esencia religiosa, filial y fraterna para sentimos beneficiados con el don de la Patria, con el don de nuestro pueblo, de ser otros buenos samaritanos que carguen sobre s? el dolor de los fracasos, en vez de acentuar odios y resentimientos. Como el viajero ocasional de nuestra historia, s?lo falta el deseo gratuito, puro y simple de querer ser Naci?n, de ser constantes e incansables en la labor de incluir, de integrar, de levantar al ca?do. Aunque se automarginen los violentos, los que s?lo se ambicionan a s? mismos, los difusores de la confusi?n y la mentira. Y que otros sigan pensando en lo pol?tico para sus juegos de poder, nosotros pong?monos al servicio de lo mejor posible para todos. Comenzar de abajo y de a uno, pugnar por lo m?s concreto y local, hasta el ?ltimo rinc?n de la patria, con el mismo cuidado que el viajero de Samaria tuvo por cada llaga del herido. No confiemos en los repetidos discursos y en los supuestos informes acerca de la realidad. Hag?monos cargo de la realidad que nos corresponde sin miedo al dolor o a la impotencia, porque all? est? el Resucitado. Donde hab?a una piedra y un sepulcro, estaba la vida esperando. Donde hab?a una tierra desolada nuestros padres abor?genes y luego los dem?s que poblaron nuestra Patria, hicieron brotar trabajo y hero?smo, organizaci?n y protecci?n social. Las dificultades que aparecen enormes son la oportunidad para crecer, y no la excusa para la tristeza inerte que favorece el sometimiento. Renunciemos a la mezquindad y el resentimiento de los internismos est?riles, de los enfrentamientos sin fin. Dejemos de ocultar el dolor de las p?rdidas y hag?monos cargo de nuestros cr?menes, desidias y mentiras, porque s?lo la reconciliaci?n reparadora nos resucitar?, y nos har? perder el miedo a nosotros mismos. No se trata de predicar un eticismo reivindicador, sino de encarar las cosas desde una perspectiva ?tica, que siempre est? enraizada en la realidad. El samaritano del camino se fue sin esperar reconocimientos ni gratitudes. La entrega al servicio era la satisfacci?n frente a su Dios y su vida, y por eso, un deber. El pueblo de esta Naci?n anhela ver este ejemplo en quienes hacen p?blica su imagen: hace falta grandeza de alma, porque s?lo la grandeza de alma despierta vida y convoca. No tenemos derecho a la indiferencia y al desinter?s o a mirar hacia otro lado. No podemos 'pasar de largo' como lo hicieron los de la par?bola. Tenemos responsabilidad sobre el herido que es la Naci?n y su pueblo. Se inicia hoy una nueva etapa en nuestra Patria signada muy profundamente por la fragilidad: fragilidad de nuestros hermanos m?s pobres y excluidos, fragilidad de nuestras instituciones, fragilidad de nuestros v?nculos sociales... ?Cuidemos la fragilidad de nuestro Pueblo herido! Cada uno con su vino, con su aceite y su cabalgadura. Cuidemos la fragilidad de nuestra Patria, Cada uno pagando de su bolsillo lo que haga falta para que nuestra tierra sea verdadera Posada para todos, sin exclusi?n de ninguno. Cuidemos la fragilidad de cada hombre, de cada mujer, de cada ni?o y de cada anciano, con esa actitud solidaria y atenta, actitud de projimidad del Buen Samaritano. Que nuestra Madre, Mar?a Sant?sima de Luj?n, que se ha quedado con nosotros y nos acompa?a por el camino de nuestra historia como signo de consuelo y de esperanza, escuche nuestra plegaria de caminantes, nos conforte y nos anime a seguir el ejemplo de Cristo, el que carga sobre sus hombros nuestra fragilidad. Buenos Aires, 25 de mayo de 2003. Jorge Mario Bergoglio sj. _______________________________________________ Para suscribirse o borrarse por v?a Internet, visite http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular. Para suscribirse o borrarse por correo electr?nico, env?e un mensaje escribiendo 'help' en el asunto o en el cuerpo, a reconquista-popular-request at lists.econ.utah.edu Para comunicarse con la persona que administra la lista, env?e correo electr?nico a reconquista-popular-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu _______________________________________________ Lista de correo electr?nico Reconquista-popular Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu- http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 51324 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue May 27 11:17:56 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:17:56 EDT Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: <1d5.a593170.2c04f7c4@aol.com> >If there is one thing that I could get you to do in life before you die it is read Capital; the Civil War in France; and the & 18th Brumaire. A whole world opens up. < Chris Comment All of us bring something individual, something personal, something private but at all times passionate to the game of which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were major figures. In my opinion most descriptions of Marxism lack the overriding aspects of the life of Marx and Engels, which is their engagement in the social struggle as it unfolded. In the flesh Marx and Engels did infinitely more than write books. The practical activity that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels was involved in has been recorded and is historically retrievable through their 70 some odd books of writings. Marx was a father and husband, while Engels is said to be something of a Ladies man dubbed "the General" by his closet comrades. These gentlemen were not just beautiful "cats" but in the course of decades evolved a poetic grasp of historical events and articulation of daily events that allowed them to write with a passion unprecedented. Section one of the 18th Brumaire has on occasion moved me to tears and Engels Introduction to Marx "Class Struggle In France" - March 6, 1895, is a moving portrayal of the conditions under which their conceptions of social change shifted. They were not simply theoretical giants but their own harshest critics and remain the model of the revolutionary. I cannot reframe from quoting a couple of paragraphs from Engels 1895 "Introduction" to "France" because it is most certainly relevant to revolutionaries today. "When the February Revolution broke out, we all of us, as far as our conception of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements was concerned, were under the spell of previous historical experience, namely, that of France. It was, indeed, the latter, which had dominated the whole of European history since 1789, and from which now once again, the signal had gone forth for general revolutionary change. It was therefore natural and unavoidable that our conceptions of the nature and the path of the "social" revolution proclaimed in Paris in February 1848, of the revolution of the proletariat, were strongly colored by memories of the models of 1789-1830. Moreover, when the Paris upheaval found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement; when in Paris the first great battle for power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was joined; when the very victory of their class so shook the bourgeoisie of all countries that they fled back into the arms of the monarchist-feudal reaction which had just been overthrown-for us under the circumstances of the time, there could be no doubt that the great decisive struggle had broken out, that it would have to be fought out in a single, long and changeful period of revolution, but that it could only end with the final victory of the proletariat. After the defeats of 1849 we in no way shared the illusions of the vulgar democracy grouped around the would-be provisional governments in partibus. This vulgar democracy reckoned on a speedy and finally decisive victory of the "people" over the "usurpers"; we looked to a long struggle, after the removal of the "usurpers," between the antagonistic elements concealed within this "people" itself. Vulgar democracy expected a renewed outbreak from day to day; we declared as early as autumn 1850 that at least the first chapter of the revolutionary period was closed and that nothing further was to be expected until the outbreak of a new world crisis. For this reason we were excommunicated; as traitors to the revolution, by the very people who later, almost without exception, have made their peace with Bismarck-so far as Bismarck found them worth the trouble. But we, too, have been shown to have been wrong by history, which has revealed our point of view of that time to have been an illusion. It has done even more: it has not merely destroyed our error of that time; it had also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete from every point of view, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion." (End of Quote) Today, in my opinion we are struggling to cast off conceptions of social movements inherited from a period of time currently understood by most to be exhausted. The struggle to express and articulate the revolutionary essence of Marx and Engels manifest the reconfiguration of Marxism taking place as we live events. How does one discern the primary features of an event - a social process? All social processes demand certain things from the individual and the individual respond in a manner that demands something from the social process. The conflict of billions of individual wills become crystallized in states, multi-national states, organizations, bureaucratic social structures and leaders emerged expressing the essence of the totality of the social process and its historical limits. I state emphatically that Marxism is this that and the other and the next person states something different. Why is this? To reduce differences to the individual will outside the shape of the social process violates the most elementary understanding of the things called Marxism that is being defined. How does one discover their/the truth? What in fact is this thing called "the most elementary understanding of the things called Marxism" and how does one stand upright in a period of history where everything is momentarily stood on its head and appears crazy? Yes, Marx has to be read and the other books can be tossed to the side for the moment. The eye of the beholden and their articulation of the beauty of truth demand an analysis of the "eye" - "I," even when one lacks the analytic tools to unravel why and how the "eye-I" is constituted. Here the art of the class struggle and the art of articulating modern doctrine win over the masses to ones "line of March." Those won over manifest who they are as representations of categories of classes and strata in society. Victory to proletarian Marxism. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6559 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Tue May 27 09:14:45 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:14:45 -0300 Subject: [A-List] BERGOGLIO Y LA PATRIA Message-ID: <4129-220035227151444950@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin983172003-05-27T14:47:00Z2003-05-27T14:48:00Z6357420374win16940250209.3821 21 Gentileza de? "Julio Fern?ndez Baraibar" < julfb at alternativagratis.com.ar> ?[R-P] Bergoglio y mi Patria EL OTRO 25 DE MAYO JORGE BERGOGLIO Y LA PARABOLA DEL 'BUEN SAMARITANO' ' Y entonces, un doctor de la ley se levant? y le pregunt? a Jes?s para ponerlo a prueba: 'Maestro, ?qu? tengo que hacer para heredar la Vida Eterna?' Jes?s le pregunt? a su vez: ?Qu? est? escrito en la ley? ?Qu? lees en ella?' El le respondi?: 'Amar?s al Se?or, tu Dios, con todo tu coraz?n, con toda tu alma, con todas tus fuerzas y con todo tu esp?ritu, y a tu pr?jimo como a ti mismo '. 'Has respondido exactamente, le dijo Jes?s; obra as? y alcanzar?s la vida'. Pero el doctor de la Ley, para justificar su intervenci?n, le hizo esta pregunta: '?Y qui?n es mi pr?jimo?'. Jes?s volvi? a tomar la palabra y le respondi?: 'Un hombre bajaba de Jerusal?n a Jeric? y cay? en manos de unos ladrones, que lo despojaron de todo, lo hirieron y se fueron, dej?ndolo medio muerto. Casualmente bajaba por el mismo camino un sacerdote: lo vio y sigui? de largo. Tambi?n pas? por all? un levita: lo vio y sigui? su camino. Pero un samaritano que viajaba por all?, al pasar junto a ?l, lo vio y se conmovi?. Entonces se acerc? y vend? sus heridas, cubri?ndolas con aceite y vino; despu?s lo puso sobre su propia montura, lo condujo a un albergue y se encarg? de cuidarlo. Al d?a siguiente sac? dos denarios y se los dio al due?o del albergue, dici?ndole: 'Cu?dalo, y lo que gastes de m?s, te lo pagar? al volver ' ?Cu?l de los tres te parece que se port? como pr?jimo del hombre asaltado por los ladrones?' 'E1 que tuvo compasi?n de ?l', le respondi? el doctor. Y Jes?s le dijo: ' Ve, y procede t? de la misma manera'. (Lc. 10, 25-37) El tiempo pascual es un llamado a renacer de lo alto. Al mismo tiempo es un desaf?o a hacer un profundo replanteo, a resignificar toda nuestra vida -como personas y como Naci?n- desde el gozo de Cristo resucitado para permitir que brote, en la fragilidad misma de nuestra carne, la esperanza de vivir como una verdadera comunidad. Desde este misterio de alegr?a ?ntima y compartida, sentimos resurgir un sol de Mayo al que los argentinos, como siempre, deseamos ver como un recuerdo que es destello de resurrecci?n. Es el esperanzado llamado de Jesucristo a que resurja nuestra vocaci?n de ciudadanos constructores de un nuevo v?nculo social. Llamado nuevo, que est? escrito, sin embargo, desde siempre como ley fundamental de nuestro ser: que la sociedad se encamine a la prosecuci?n del Bien Com?n y, a partir de esta finalidad, reconstruya una y otra vez su orden pol?tico y social. La par?bola del Buen Samaritano es un icono iluminador, capaz de poner de manifiesto la opci?n de fondo que debemos tomar para reconstruir esta Patria que nos duele. Ante tanto dolor, ante tanta herida, la ?nica salida es ser como el Buen Samaritano. Toda otra opci?n termina o bien del lado de los salteadores o bien del lado de los que pasan de largo, sin compadecerse del dolor del herido del camino. Y 'la patria no ha de ser para nosotros -como dec?a un poeta nuestro-; sino un dolor que se lleva en el costado'. La par?bola del Buen Samaritano nos muestra con qu? iniciativas se puede rehacer una comunidad a partir de hombres y mujeres que sienten y obran como verdaderos socios (en el sentido antiguo de conciudadanos). Hombres y mujeres que hacen propia y acompa?an la fragilidad de los dem?s, que no dejan que se erija una sociedad de exclusi?n, sino que se aproximan -se hacen pr?jimos- y levantan y rehabilitan al ca?do, para que el Bien sea Com?n. Al mismo tiempo la Par?bola nos advierte sobre ciertas actitudes que s?lo se miran a s? mismas y no se hacen cargo de las exigencias ineludibles de la realidad humana. Desde el comienzo de la vida de la Iglesia, y especialmente por los Padres capadocios, el buen samaritano fue identificado con el mismo Cristo. ?l es el que se hace nuestro pr?jimo, el que levanta de los m?rgenes de la vida al ser humano, el que lo pone sobre sus hombros, se hace cargo de su dolor y abandono y lo rehabilita. El relato del buen Samaritano, dig?moslo claramente, no desliza una ense?anza de ideales abstractos, ni se circunscribe a la funcionalidad de una moraleja ?tico-social. Sino que es la Palabra viva del Dios que se abaja y se aproxima hasta tocar nuestra fragilidad m?s cotidiana. Esa Palabra nos revela una caracter?stica esencial del hombre, tantas veces olvidada: que hemos sido hechos para la plenitud de ser; por tanto no podemos vivir indiferentes ante el dolor, no podemos dejar que nadie quede 'a un costado de la vida', marginado de su dignidad. Esto nos debe indignar. Esto debe hacernos bajar de nuestra serenidad para 'alterarnos' por el dolor humano, el de nuestro pr?jimo, el de nuestro vecino, el de nuestro socio en esta comunidad de argentinos. En esa entrega encontraremos nuestra vocaci?n existencial, nos haremos dignos de este suelo, que nunca tuvo vocaci?n de marginar a nadie. El relato se nos presenta con la linealidad de una narraci?n sencilla, pero tiene toda la din?mica de esa lucha interna que se da en la elaboraci?n de nuestra identidad, en toda existencia 'lanzada al camino' de hacer patria. Me explico: puestos en camino nos chocamos, indefectiblemente, con el hombre herido. Hoy ? y cada vez m?s ese herido es mayor?a. En la humanidad y en nuestra patria. La inclusi?n o la exclusi?n del herido al costado del camino define todos los proyectos econ?micos, pol?ticos, sociales y religiosos. Todos enfrentamos cada d?a la opci?n de ser buenos samaritanos o indiferentes viajantes que pasan de largo. Y si extendemos la mirada a la totalidad de nuestra historia y a lo ancho y largo de la Patria, todos somos o hemos sido como estos personajes: todos tenemos algo de herido, algo de salteador, algo de los que pasan de largo y algo del Buen Samaritano. Es notable c?mo las diferencias de los personajes del relato quedan totalmente transformadas al confrontarse con la dolorosa manifestaci?n del ca?do, del humillado. Ya no hay distinci?n entre habitante de Judea y habitante de Samaria, no hay sacerdote ni comerciante; simplemente est?n dos tipos de hombre: los que se hacen cargo del dolor y los que pasan de largo, los que se inclinan reconoci?ndose en el ca?do, y los que distraen su mirada y aceleran el paso. En efecto, nuestras m?ltiples m?scaras, nuestras etiquetas y disfraces se caen: es la hora de la verdad, ?nos inclinaremos para tocar nuestras heridas? ?Nos inclinaremos a cargamos al hombro unos a otros? Este es el desaf?o de la hora presente, al que no hemos de tenerle miedo. En los momentos de crisis la opci?n se vuelve acuciante: podr?amos decir que en este momento, todo el que no es salteador o todo el que no pasa de largo, o bien est? herido o est? poniendo sobre sus hombros a alg?n herido. La historia del buen Samaritano se repite: se toma cada vez m?s visible que nuestra desidia social y pol?tica est? logrando hacer de esta tierra un camino desolado, en el que las disputas internas y los saqueos de oportunidades nos van dejando a todos marginados, tirados a un costado del camino. En su par?bola, el Se?or no plantea v?as alternativas, ?qu? hubiera sido de aquel malherido o del que lo ayud?, si la ira o la sed de venganza hubieran ganado espacio en sus corazones? Jesucristo conf?a en lo mejor del esp?ritu humano y con la Par?bola lo alienta a que se adhiera al amor de Dios, reintegre al dolido y construya una sociedad digna de tal nombre. La Par?bola comienza con los salteadores. El punto de partida que elige el Se?or es un asalto ya consumado. Pero no hace que nos detengamos a lamentar el hecho, no dirige nuestra mirada hacia los salteadores. Los conocemos. Hemos visto avanzar en nuestra Patria las densas sombras del abandono, de la violencia utilizada para mezquinos intereses de poder y divisi?n, tambi?n existe la ambici?n de la funci?n p?blica buscada como bot?n. La pregunta ante los salteadores podr?a ser: ?Haremos nosotros de nuestra vida nacional un relato que se queda en esta parte de la par?bola? ?Dejaremos tirado al herido para correr cada uno a guarecerse de la violencia o a perseguir a los ladrones? ?Ser? siempre el herido la justificaci?n de nuestras divisiones irreconciliables, de nuestras indiferencias crueles, de nuestros enfrentamientos internos? La po?tica profec?a del Mart?n Fierro debe prevenirnos: nuestros eternos y est?riles odios e individualismos abren las puertas a los que nos devoran de afuera. El pueblo de nuestra Naci?n demuestra, una y otra vez, la clara voluntad de responder a su vocaci?n de ser buenos samaritanos unos con otros: ha confiado nuevamente en nuestro sistema democr?tico a pesar de sus debilidades y carencias, y vemos c?mo se redoblan los esfuerzos solidarios para volver a tejer una sociedad que se fractura. Nuestro pueblo responde con silencio de Cruz a las propuestas disolutorias y soporta hasta el l?mite la violencia descontrolada de quienes est?n presos del caos delincuencial. La Par?bola nos hace poner la mirada, redobladamente, en los que pasan de largo. Esta peligrosa indiferencia de pasar de largo, inocente o no, producto del desprecio o de una triste distracci?n, hace de los personajes del sacerdote y del levita un no menos triste reflejo de esa distancia cercenadora, que muchos se ven tentados a poner frente a la realidad y a la voluntad de ser Naci?n. Hay muchas maneras de pasar de largo que se complementan: una ensimismarse, desentenderse de los dem?s, ser indiferente, y otra: un solo mirar hacia afuera. Respecto a esta ?ltima manera de pasar de largo, en algunos es acendrado el vivir con la mirada puesta hacia fuera de nuestra realidad, anhelando siempre las caracter?sticas de otras sociedades, no para integrarlas a nuestros elementos culturales, sino para reemplazarlos. Como si un proyecto de pa?s impostado intentara forzar su lugar empujando al otro; en ese sentido podemos leer hoy experiencias hist?ricas de rechazo al esfuerzo de ganar espacios y recursos, de crecer con identidad, prefiriendo el ventajismo del contrabando, la especulaci?n meramente financiera y la expoliaci?n de nuestra naturaleza y -peor a?n- de nuestro pueblo. A?n intelectualmente, persiste la incapacidad de aceptar caracter?sticas y procesos propios, como lo han hecho tantos pueblos, insistiendo en un menosprecio de la propia identidad. Ser?a ingenuo no ver algo m?s que ideolog?as o refinamientos cosmopolitas detr?s de estas tendencias; m?s bien afloran intereses de poder que se benefician de la permanente conflictividad en el seno de nuestro pueblo. Inclinaci?n similar se ve en quienes, aparentemente por ideas contrarias, se entregan al juego mezquino de las descalificaciones, los enfrentamientos hasta lo violento, o a la ya conocida esterilidad de muchas intelectualidades para las que 'nada es salvable si no es como lo pienso yo'. Lo que debe ser un normal ejercicio de debate o autocr?tica, que sabe dejar a buen recaudo el ideario y las metas comunes, aqu? parece ser manipulado hacia el permanente estado de cuestionamiento y confrontaci?n de los principios m?s fundamentales. ?Es incapacidad de ceder en beneficio de un proyecto m?nimo com?n o la irrefrenable compulsi?n de quienes s?lo se al?an para satisfacer su ambici?n de poder? T?citamente los 'salteadores del camino' han conseguido como aliados a los que 'pasan por el camino mirando a otro lado'. Se cierra el c?rculo entre los que usan y enga?an a nuestra sociedad para esquilmarla, y los que supuestamente mantienen la pureza en su funci?n cr?tica, pero viven de este sistema y de nuestros recursos para disfrutarlos afuera o mantienen la posibilidad del caos para ganar su propio terreno. No debemos llamarnos a enga?o, la impunidad del delito, del uso de las instituciones de la comunidad para el provecho personal o corporativo y otros males que no logramos desterrar, tienen como contracara la permanente desinformaci?n y descalificaci?n de todo, la constante siembra de sospecha que hace cundir la desconfianza y la perplejidad. El enga?o del 'todo est? mal' es respondido con un 'nadie puede arreglarlo'. Y, de esta manera, se nutre el desencanto y la desesperanza. Hundir a un pueblo en el desaliento es el cierre de un c?rculo perverso perfecto: la dictadura invisible de los verdaderos intereses, esos intereses ocultos que se adue?aron de los recursos y de nuestra capacidad de opinar y pensar. Todos, desde nuestras responsabilidades, debemos ponernos la patria al hombro, porque los tiempos se acortan. La posible disoluci?n la advertimos en otras oportunidades, en esta misma fecha patria. Sin embargo muchos segu?an su camino de ambici?n y superficialidad, sin mirar a los que ca?an al costado: esto sigue amenaz?ndonos. Miremos finalmente al herido. Los ciudadanos nos sentimos como ?l, malheridos y tirados al costado del camino. Nos sentimos tambi?n desamparados de nuestras instituciones desarmadas y desprovistas, ayunos de la capacidad y la formaci?n que el amor a la patria exigen. Todos los d?as hemos de comenzar una nueva etapa, un nuevo punto de partida. No tenemos que esperar todo de los que nos gobiernan: esto ser?a infantil, sino m?s bien hemos de serparte activa en la rehabilitaci?n y el auxilio del pa?s herido. Hoy estamos ante la gran oportunidad de manifestar nuestra esencia religiosa, filial y fraterna para sentimos beneficiados con el don de la Patria, con el don de nuestro pueblo, de ser otros buenos samaritanos que carguen sobre s? el dolor de los fracasos, en vez de acentuar odios y resentimientos. Como el viajero ocasional de nuestra historia, s?lo falta el deseo gratuito, puro y simple de querer ser Naci?n, de ser constantes e incansables en la labor de incluir, de integrar, de levantar al ca?do. Aunque se automarginen los violentos, los que s?lo se ambicionan a s? mismos, los difusores de la confusi?n y la mentira. Y que otros sigan pensando en lo pol?tico para sus juegos de poder, nosotros pong?monos al servicio de lo mejor posible para todos. Comenzar de abajo y de a uno, pugnar por lo m?s concreto y local, hasta el ?ltimo rinc?n de la patria, con el mismo cuidado que el viajero de Samaria tuvo por cada llaga del herido. No confiemos en los repetidos discursos y en los supuestos informes acerca de la realidad. Hag?monos cargo de la realidad que nos corresponde sin miedo al dolor o a la impotencia, porque all? est? el Resucitado. Donde hab?a una piedra y un sepulcro, estaba la vida esperando. Donde hab?a una tierra desolada nuestros padres abor?genes y luego los dem?s que poblaron nuestra Patria, hicieron brotar trabajo y hero?smo, organizaci?n y protecci?n social. Las dificultades que aparecen enormes son la oportunidad para crecer, y no la excusa para la tristeza inerte que favorece el sometimiento. Renunciemos a la mezquindad y el resentimiento de los internismos est?riles, de los enfrentamientos sin fin. Dejemos de ocultar el dolor de las p?rdidas y hag?monos cargo de nuestros cr?menes, desidias y mentiras, porque s?lo la reconciliaci?n reparadora nos resucitar?, y nos har? perder el miedo a nosotros mismos. No se trata de predicar un eticismo reivindicador, sino de encarar las cosas desde una perspectiva ?tica, que siempre est? enraizada en la realidad. El samaritano del camino se fue sin esperar reconocimientos ni gratitudes. La entrega al servicio era la satisfacci?n frente a su Dios y su vida, y por eso, un deber. El pueblo de esta Naci?n anhela ver este ejemplo en quienes hacen p?blica su imagen: hace falta grandeza de alma, porque s?lo la grandeza de alma despierta vida y convoca. No tenemos derecho a la indiferencia y al desinter?s o a mirar hacia otro lado. No podemos 'pasar de largo' como lo hicieron los de la par?bola. Tenemos responsabilidad sobre el herido que es la Naci?n y su pueblo. Se inicia hoy una nueva etapa en nuestra Patria signada muy profundamente por la fragilidad: fragilidad de nuestros hermanos m?s pobres y excluidos, fragilidad de nuestras instituciones, fragilidad de nuestros v?nculos sociales... ?Cuidemos la fragilidad de nuestro Pueblo herido! Cada uno con su vino, con su aceite y su cabalgadura. Cuidemos la fragilidad de nuestra Patria, Cada uno pagando de su bolsillo lo que haga falta para que nuestra tierra sea verdadera Posada para todos, sin exclusi?n de ninguno. Cuidemos la fragilidad de cada hombre, de cada mujer, de cada ni?o y de cada anciano, con esa actitud solidaria y atenta, actitud de projimidad del Buen Samaritano. Que nuestra Madre, Mar?a Sant?sima de Luj?n, que se ha quedado con nosotros y nos acompa?a por el camino de nuestra historia como signo de consuelo y de esperanza, escuche nuestra plegaria de caminantes, nos conforte y nos anime a seguir el ejemplo de Cristo, el que carga sobre sus hombros nuestra fragilidad. Buenos Aires, 25 de mayo de 2003. Jorge Mario Bergoglio sj. _______________________________________________ Para suscribirse o borrarse por v?a Internet, visite http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular. Para suscribirse o borrarse por correo electr?nico, env?e un mensaje escribiendo 'help' en el asunto o en el cuerpo, a reconquista-popular-request at lists.econ.utah.edu Para comunicarse con la persona que administra la lista, env?e correo electr?nico a reconquista-popular-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu _______________________________________________ Lista de correo electr?nico Reconquista-popular Reconquista-popular at lists.econ.utah.edu- http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 51324 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue May 27 14:26:30 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:26:30 -0700 Subject: [A-List] John Cleese References: <006301c32467$49c69b90$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <012f01c3248e$420b2b10$20fa5718@comintern> It's attitudes like this towards humour that help keep the left alienated permanently from all the "average" people who find humour so desperately needed in this horrible world we all live in. Congratulations! This will help hold us further back. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Daly" To: From evs at tri-isys.com Tue May 27 15:12:01 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 05:12:01 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> <005001c32450$dca6ac00$19c54ccb@pentium> <00bc01c3245c$74fffaf0$41089ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <001c01c32494$9de81be0$68c44ccb@pentium> Chris, I hear you. Gary ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Black" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 10:29 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Gary, I appreciate the value of the discussion on this list. It is high quality material but there is nothing like reading Marx to make you passionate about changing the world and maing you a revolutionary. Marx.'s Capital is a book that will affect you in many ways and you will be surprise perhaps at the humour of the man. And the sheer beauty of much of his writing leaves a lasting impression. But perhaps the best book on socialism ane capitalism and no doubt an easier read is Engels book Anti-Durhing. Lucid; sharp; crystal clear; written in a compelling style. Irrefutable. If there is one thing that I could get you to do in life before you die it is read Capital; the Civil War in France; and the & 18th Brumaire. A whole world opens up. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Santos" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 9:07 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Chris, > > I will certainly try to read Marx and Engels one day. But, as you pointed > out, some of us don't have the time. There are just too many books that must > be read in the original out there. One day. > > But, you know, I've learned a great deal since I joined these discussion > groups. PKT, A-list and the New Forum. There is value in listening and, at > times, asking basic questions. I have saved all of the posts from the three > groups for reference and even have a separate folder for "interesting > threads". They are all on my drive "D". > > Gary > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Christopher Black" > To: > Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 6:34 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > > > Michael, > > I agree that Gary's response and Melvin's were well thought out and well put > but the person asking for an answer as to what Marxism is cannot and must > not be sent just someone else's explanation. Marx is meant to be read and > should be read and I simply wanted to suggest the very simple solution of > reading Marx for herself. Too often this is ignored and those of us who > have read Marx end up translating it or explaining for others who then never > bother to read him. This is a disservice to Marx but more to the person > making the enquiry. And frankly, no matter how well one of us or all of us > may explain, none of it is as exciting or as pleasurable to read as the man > himself. Too often working people are put off or too intimidated by Marx or > what they think Marx is when instead they should be exploring him on their > own and in light of their own experience. I have met too many "marxists" and > others on the left who have read little or no Marx directly, only someone > else's interpretation of him. My admonition too all workers is don't just > listen to me, listen to Karl's voice. And Engels becuase the two go > together. There is no other like it. > > Chris > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Keaney" > To: > Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 9:16 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > > > > Chris writes in response to Melvin: > > > > This is all very well in answer to our friend's question about Marxism. > But > > instead of trying to interpret it for her why doesnt she just read Marx > > herself. Then she can interpret it instead of getting it second and third > > hand from those of us who have. > > > > ------ > > > > While Melvin's extensive exposition might not be regarded as appropriate > as > > a response to Gary's enquiry, I want to gratefully acknowledge the manner > of > > that enquiry and the response it has generated. > > > > "Go off and read it yourself" is an option (if not a very friendly > answer), > > but getting others to clarify how they see the issues is equally useful, > and > > perhaps Gary has been able to identify a useful starting point in his > > inquiry as a result of suggestions made here. > > > > Michael > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From bobenoch at shaw.ca Tue May 27 15:26:25 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 14:26:25 -0700 Subject: [A-List] John Cleese References: <006301c32467$49c69b90$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> <012f01c3248e$420b2b10$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <009301c32496$a1bb3200$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Curious, but somehow it failed to occur to me that I was being encouraged to think of Basil Fawlty as an intellectual role model. Come to think of it, I can now see that I was also unwittingly led to condone cruelty to dead parrots, and unprincipled slanders against the sexuality of B.C. lumberjacks. Bob From hliu at mindspring.com Tue May 27 16:39:04 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 18:39:04 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Dollar Hegemony Message-ID: <3ED3E908.8000303@mindspring.com> See also: US dollar hegemony has got to go By Henry C K Liu http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DD11Dj01.html The case for an Asian Monetary Fund By Henry C K Liu http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/DG12Dk01.html U.S. Debt In Asia Has Its Costs http://www.newsday.com/business Charles V. Zehren May 25, 2003 As British economist John Maynard Keynes observed, if you owe the bank 100 pounds, you're the one with the problem. But if you owe a million pounds, the bank's the one with the problem. So it goes with Asia and the United States. In recent decades, Asian central banks and investors have lent trillions of U.S. dollars to the U.S. government and American corporations to finance everything from federal deficits to mergers and acquisitions. As a result, the Asian countries, which form the wheelhouse of the global economic machine, now have "the problem." They're fed up with "dollar hegemony" or having to keep high dollar reserves to pay their debts and protect their currencies. Consequently, they're poised to issue "cross-border" debt instruments in their own currencies, essentially putting the rest of the world on notice that they no longer consider the United States as the sole safe haven for storing the considerable fruits of their financial success. While it may sound innocuous, the possibility of such a move represents nothing less than a "massive hammer poised above the U.S. economy," warns Arun Motianey, the Citigroup Private Bank's director of investment research. An even weaker U.S. dollar, higher interest rates, and lower stock and bond prices could eventually result, affecting Americans who pay federal taxes, buy imported goods or have their retirement savings tied up in a 401(k). The key player is ASEAN+3, the 36-year-old Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which represents Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, along with the big three - Japan, China and South Korea. A critical date comes June 30 when the organization is expected to telegraph its members' intention to begin issuing cross-border debt in the "Chiang Mai Initiative" report to the Asian Development Bank board of governors in Manila. It's anticipated the plan will call for Asian central bankers to reduce the dollar holdings in their reserves and greatly increase how much they hold in each others' currencies, elevating them to "reserve status." Once this is done, Asian debtors will find securities issued in their own currencies more marketable with deep-pockets Asian investors and their fellow central bankers. By eschewing the dollar and buying each others' debt in their own currencies, the Asian countries would be scaling back on the amount of excess wealth they invest in the United States. And that wealth has been considerable. Japan and China pack most of ASEAN+3's international economic punch. But as a group, Motianey estimates, the 13 countries - which export a lot and import a little - account for 95 percent of the world's surplus "current accounts" - or the difference between imports and exports. The Asian countries then send about four-fifths of those savings to the United States and wind up holding about 90 percent of all the reserves in U.S. dollars worldwide. "America's success at attracting foreign capital may be a pyrrhic victory," Motianey said. "The U.S. may live to rue the day that it has such a huge portion of its debt held by foreigners," he said, putting the figure at 30 to 40 percent. Given the dominance of the dollar, the U.S. government and American corporations have been able to count on the Asian countries paying up to buy their debt as U.S. imports rise in proportion to exports. But ASEAN+3, favoring its debt over U.S. debt, could erode the status of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency. That could reduce demand for U.S. government and commercial debt, forcing the United States to pay more to borrow money to finance growing federal deficits, worsening the nation's fiscal situation. As borrowing costs mount, the president and Congress would have a tougher time keeping a lid on taxes, the Fed would face more of a challenge maintaining low interest rates, and the private sector would see the gap widen between what it spends and what it earns. With Asian central bankers and investors demanding fewer dollars, the value of the dollar would fall, helping U.S. exporters, but hurting the ability of U.S. consumers to buy cheap imports. Resulting strength in Asian capital markets could also result in what Motianey calls "collateral damage," by stemming demand for U.S. equities and fixed income instruments by Asian investors, weakening U.S. prices. ASEAN+3 is no monolith. But Motianey and others say the members generally believe Asian countries should expand their options and take steps toward limiting their dollar exposure. There's something that can be said, too, for investing in instruments issued by culturally and economically familiar countries instead of the United States. And for foreign investors, Sept. 11 and the war on terror has lessened the attractiveness of this nation as a place to invest compared to other parts of the world. The Fed also estimates nonresidents hold about $3 trillion in U.S. credit market instruments, with most of the dollar-related currency risk getting passed on not to the U.S. debtors, but to the Asian creditors. "No other net- debtor economy has the luxury of doing this," Motianey said. "As a result, all of the risk of the weak U.S. dollar hits unhedged creditors disproportionately." The members of the ASEAN+3 are bearing the brunt of the dollar's recent fall. But ASEAN+3's decision to rely more on their members' own currencies is not so much "us vs. them," as an imbalance that economic forces will correct, Motianey said. "ASEAN+3 is not looking to punish America or clip its wings. It has a problem. And their solution is to say 'maybe we should not be holding that much in dollars.'" Spinning out the scenario to a logical conclusion has Motianey mulling the possibility that an Asian monetary union could in the "medium to long term" create its own Euro-type currency, an ACU or Asian Currency Unit. Reducing the dollar's status as the paramount reserve currency could then eventual force the United States into a "major debt workout," Motianey said. And one day the U.S. government may actually find itself issuing Treasury bonds not in dollars, but in Asian currencies, like the yen. "Either way, near or long term, there's likely to be restraints on the dollar's appeal and attractiveness, and that could eventually mean that U.S. entities will have to curb their appetite for living beyond their means," Motianey said. "It will no longer be so easy to borrow from the future." Copyright ? 2003, Newsday, Inc. From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue May 27 14:28:09 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 16:28:09 EDT Subject: [A-List] Matrix Message-ID: Date: 20 May 2003 Publisher: LA Times Subject: Matrix Redux The intellectual and 'The Matrix' Princeton scholar Cornel West, featured in both of the sequels, talks about the films' deeper meaning. By Lynn Smith Times Staff Writer May 20 2003 When the call came two years ago, Cornel West was still one of the elite professors at Harvard University. A bitter dust-up over his off-campus activities was brewing, but he hadn't yet decamped for Princeton. On the other end of the line was Larry Wachowski, the writer-director who, along with his brother Andy, created the worldwide movie phenomenon "The Matrix." He wanted to know if the high-profile scholar would appear as a character in the two sequels. "I said, 'Good God almighty,' " West recalled. "He said my writings had been influential in his writing the movie. He had read my first book, 'Prophesy Deliverance!,' and 'Race Matters.' I was flabbergasted. He said he had written a role for me, Councillor West, and he wanted me to play it. I said, 'You've got to be kidding.' " As it turned out, the two sentences the Wachowskis had written for West's character ("Comprehension is not requisite for cooperation" is the one he remembers) run counter to West's body of work, which champions progressive socialism and the power of diversity in society. But "The Matrix Reloaded," the second part of a trilogy about the last citizens on Earth threatened with extinction by machines, is a "sophisticated work of art" that, he said, captures the core themes of his social, religious and philosophical writings. The role (an elder of the human community of Zion) is dignified, he decided, and participating would allow him to reach out beyond academia. West decided he was ready for his close-up. He flew to Sydney, Australia, for a 2 1/2-week shoot. There, he met the Wachowskis and had "long philosophical discussions" between takes and in restaurants about the purpose of life and the role of technology in science and history. They covered a range of thinkers including Lewis Mumford, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Homer and Nikos Kazantzakis (author of "Zorba the Greek.") "We talked about James' essay, 'The Will to Believe' in terms of Schopenhauer's challenge .... He was unsure life had a purpose at all." Most Hollywood action movies have little more on their minds than presenting high-testosterone mayhem in ways that will appeal to teenage boys. Not "The Matrix," a film series that takes its philosophy very seriously (too seriously for the many critics who chided "Matrix Reloaded" for being ponderous). West (who will turn 50 on June 2) became a kind of muse for the brothers, called "college dropout comic book artists" by William Irwin, editor of the book "The Matrix and Philosophy." West offered a focal point for the film, in which various academics and others find bits of Buddhism and Christianity as well as feminism, Marxism and nihilism. At the core of the "Matrix" trilogy lies the disturbing notion that the world is nothing but perceptions controlled by malevolent forces. While the films repeatedly ask questions about the nature of truth and reality, the possibilities of choice and free will, the meaning of life and love, they offer no answers. "They [the Wachowskis] want the audience to wrestle with it," West said. In "The Matrix Reloaded," the citizens of Zion pin their hopes on computer hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves), who struggles with his role as their savior. West says the film has a "fascinating," if subtle, critique of "salvation narratives." Themes in the sequel undercut those in the original, he said. "The first was all about Neo as a salvation figure, saving the globe. The second is a devastating critique of all salvation stories. It has political implications. It has religious implications." The most fundamental parallel, however, between his work and the "Matrix" movies, West said, is found in the films' multiracial casting. In the city of Zion, most citizens are people of color and many of the movie's leading actors are black (Laurence Fishburne, Jada Pinkett Smith, Nona Gaye, Harry Lennix, Harold Perrineau Jr. and the late Gloria Foster.) People of color outnumber whites in the world's population, he noted. "It's not just the representation in numbers but the humanity displayed," said West, whose writings urge cross-cultural tolerance and a recognition of the power of diversity. "The acknowledgment of the full-fledged and complex humanity of black people is a new idea in Hollywood, given all the stereotypes and distortions," he said. The son of civil rights activists, West was educated in the Ivy League, where he earned a reputation as an intellectually aggressive and cerebral student. He came to prominence in the 1990s as a young, hip intellectual who took his beliefs to the streets, an author who wrote books for an audience beyond academe. While he was acclaimed by some as a "black Jeremiah" who could engage almost anyone in serious conversation, he was also criticized for work that was "a thousand miles wide and about 2 inches deep." In 2001 West was sharply criticized by Harvard University President Larry Summers after recording a rap CD and leading a committee for New York activist Al Sharpton's short-lived presidential campaign. West denied Summers' accusation that he had skipped three weeks of classes because of political activities and raised the specter of racism. Amid a spiraling tempest, he left a year ago, resettling in July at Princeton. Unlike the president of Harvard, Princeton's president, Shirley Tilghman, has no problems with his off-campus activities, he said. "The difference between Shirley Tilghman and Lawrence Summers is like the difference between Abe Lincoln and Dan Quayle," he said. Tilghman declined to speak directly about West, but a university spokeswoman said, "Our president here doesn't take issue with faculty members' various interests. She definitely supports Cornel West and his individual pursuits." West teaches a course on the public intellectual as well as other freshman and graduate seminars. He is working on a book about writer Anton Chekhov and jazz musician John Coltrane, both of whom, he said, "speak to our time with a level of insight and wisdom that is rare." He is enjoying a sort of celebrity among students, who are "amazed" that a professor would have any kind of relationship with the Wachowski brothers, he said. He has invited the famously media-shy brothers to Princeton to speak, privately of course, with students and professors. "They didn't say no, but they didn't say when," he said. West said his character, an elite who has to make fundamental decisions to save the city, is so unlike himself that he had to pick up acting tips in order to deliver his two lines. He said Councillor West will also appear in the next sequel, "The Matrix Revolutions." And this time he hopes to have five or six lines. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 7578 bytes Desc: not available URL: From brendan.holland at ntlworld.com Tue May 27 15:29:34 2003 From: brendan.holland at ntlworld.com (brendan holland) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 22:29:34 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Lest we forget. Message-ID: <001301c32497$11b45b40$bd1d6751@s1k0u1> The British liberal press. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3523.htm The British media in general and a new book on genteel British values. http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132978 From bar at idirect.com Tue May 27 18:47:25 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 20:47:25 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <2050599.1054047907900.JavaMail.nobody@wamui08.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <003201c324b2$c72894d0$d8049ad8@Chris> I disagree It is readable and was meant to be read and understood and any reasonably intelligent worker can and was meant to be able to read it and understand it. To say otherwise is not just ingenuous it smacks of condescension to workers who no doubt never heard of Hegel and sure dont need to to understand hegel to understand Capital. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 11:05 AM Subject: Re: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Bit of dissent here about reading Marx, Engels, etc, directly. > > As Hans Ehrbar points out in his very useful notes on reading Capital, simply reading it is not enough. It requires study and a good deal of interpretation, given multiple translations and archaic language. There are also some leaps to be made for those of us who are not grounded, as Marx was in stuff like Hegel, to whom he is frequently responding. > > So the advice to simply read it is a little disingenuous. No one who understand it has simply read it. > > And I reiterate, it is important to realize that much has been done since these gentlemen died, to extend and expand the body of theory and practice. This list is a perfect example. > > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue May 27 19:05:40 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 18:05:40 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <2050599.1054047907900.JavaMail.nobody@wamui08.slb.atl.earthlink.net> <003201c324b2$c72894d0$d8049ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <02bd01c324b5$438e5df0$20fa5718@comintern> That in 150 years language changes and becomes therefore less accessible is not condescension, nor is it to state that many people find it a dry, tough read. You gotta really, I mean REALLY like widgets and yarn to find it an exciting read. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Black" From bar at idirect.com Tue May 27 18:56:31 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 20:56:31 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <1d5.a593170.2c04f7c4@aol.com> Message-ID: <005a01c324b4$0c84d150$d8049ad8@Chris> Melvin, Thanks a l lot my friend, your comments were much appreciated. And more convincing than me on reading Charlie's work. I walked into a used bookstore on the east coast a couple of years ago in Canada and within seconds my eyes fell on a biography of Marx. Picked it up. $5 . Thats all. Turned out to be a first English edition of of franz Mehring's biography of Marx. Quite a book. ----- Original Message ----- From: Waistline2 at aol.com To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 1:17 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 >If there is one thing that I could get you to do in life before you die it is read Capital; the Civil War in France; and the & 18th Brumaire. A whole world opens up. < Chris Comment All of us bring something individual, something personal, something private but at all times passionate to the game of which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were major figures. In my opinion most descriptions of Marxism lack the overriding aspects of the life of Marx and Engels, which is their engagement in the social struggle as it unfolded. In the flesh Marx and Engels did infinitely more than write books. The practical activity that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels was involved in has been recorded and is historically retrievable through their 70 some odd books of writings. Marx was a father and husband, while Engels is said to be something of a Ladies man dubbed "the General" by his closet comrades. These gentlemen were not just beautiful "cats" but in the course of decades evolved a poetic grasp of historical events and articulation of daily events that allowed them to write with a passion unprecedented. Section one of the 18th Brumaire has on occasion moved me to tears and Engels Introduction to Marx "Class Struggle In France" - March 6, 1895, is a moving portrayal of the conditions under which their conceptions of social change shifted. They were not simply theoretical giants but their own harshest critics and remain the model of the revolutionary. I cannot reframe from quoting a couple of paragraphs from Engels 1895 "Introduction" to "France" because it is most certainly relevant to revolutionaries today. "When the February Revolution broke out, we all of us, as far as our conception of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements was concerned, were under the spell of previous historical experience, namely, that of France. It was, indeed, the latter, which had dominated the whole of European history since 1789, and from which now once again, the signal had gone forth for general revolutionary change. It was therefore natural and unavoidable that our conceptions of the nature and the path of the "social" revolution proclaimed in Paris in February 1848, of the revolution of the proletariat, were strongly colored by memories of the models of 1789-1830. Moreover, when the Paris upheaval found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement; when in Paris the first great battle for power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was joined; when the very victory of their class so shook the bourgeoisie of all countries that they fled back into the arms of the monarchist-feudal reaction which had just been overthrown-for us under the circumstances of the time, there could be no doubt that the great decisive struggle had broken out, that it would have to be fought out in a single, long and changeful period of revolution, but that it could only end with the final victory of the proletariat. After the defeats of 1849 we in no way shared the illusions of the vulgar democracy grouped around the would-be provisional governments in partibus. This vulgar democracy reckoned on a speedy and finally decisive victory of the "people" over the "usurpers"; we looked to a long struggle, after the removal of the "usurpers," between the antagonistic elements concealed within this "people" itself. Vulgar democracy expected a renewed outbreak from day to day; we declared as early as autumn 1850 that at least the first chapter of the revolutionary period was closed and that nothing further was to be expected until the outbreak of a new world crisis. For this reason we were excommunicated; as traitors to the revolution, by the very people who later, almost without exception, have made their peace with Bismarck-so far as Bismarck found them worth the trouble. But we, too, have been shown to have been wrong by history, which has revealed our point of view of that time to have been an illusion. It has done even more: it has not merely destroyed our error of that time; it had also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete from every point of view, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion." (End of Quote) Today, in my opinion we are struggling to cast off conceptions of social movements inherited from a period of time currently understood by most to be exhausted. The struggle to express and articulate the revolutionary essence of Marx and Engels manifest the reconfiguration of Marxism taking place as we live events. How does one discern the primary features of an event - a social process? All social processes demand certain things from the individual and the individual respond in a manner that demands something from the social process. The conflict of billions of individual wills become crystallized in states, multi-national states, organizations, bureaucratic social structures and leaders emerged expressing the essence of the totality of the social process and its historical limits. I state emphatically that Marxism is this that and the other and the next person states something different. Why is this? To reduce differences to the individual will outside the shape of the social process violates the most elementary understanding of the things called Marxism that is being defined. How does one discover their/the truth? What in fact is this thing called "the most elementary understanding of the things called Marxism" and how does one stand upright in a period of history where everything is momentarily stood on its head and appears crazy? Yes, Marx has to be read and the other books can be tossed to the side for the moment. The eye of the beholden and their articulation of the beauty of truth demand an analysis of the "eye" - "I," even when one lacks the analytic tools to unravel why and how the "eye-I" is constituted. Here the art of the class struggle and the art of articulating modern doctrine win over the masses to ones "line of March." Those won over manifest who they are as representations of categories of classes and strata in society. Victory to proletarian Marxism. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 8449 bytes Desc: not available URL: From soncu at pacbell.net Tue May 27 19:31:28 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 18:31:28 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: > I disagree > > It is readable and was meant to be read and > understood and any reasonably intelligent worker > can and was meant to be able to read it and understand > it. To say otherwise is not just ingenuous it smacks > of condescension to workers who no doubt never heard > of Hegel and sure dont need to understand hegel to > understand Capital. > > Chris I don't think I am that intelligent but I sure have serious difficulty in understanding Capital. I doubt that any reasonably intelligent worker can and was meant to be able to read it and understand it. If no one else, I am a counter example. Then again, I am not that intelligent. Best, Sabri From michele at maui.net Tue May 27 19:29:16 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 15:29:16 -1000 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <2050599.1054047907900.JavaMail.nobody@wamui08.slb.atl.earthlink.net> <003201c324b2$c72894d0$d8049ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <040d01c324b8$8f42adc0$48954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Friends of mine who were teaching Marx's Capital in the 30's and 40's have said that people who worked directly for a wage, in blue collar jobs especially, immediately understood what Marx was saying. The concept of the labor theory of value, of exploitation of the working class, of class struggle, Marx's detailed exposition of the process of accumulation and reproduction of capital at the expense of those who did not possess any means of survival except their labor power, were understood only too well. His thought and his method were crystal clear. It was the people in middle management, in white collar clerical positions where shoulder rubbing with management obscured vision, people in technical and professional capacities who found Marx prolix, turgid and obscure. Many hung up interminably on such issues as whether labor was the sole or main source of value, or the 'transformation of value into price', or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or the precise contours of class distribution, and so forth. Ralph If any difference ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Black" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 2:47 PM Subject: Re: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > I disagree > > It is readable and was meant to be read and understood and any reasonably > intelligent worker can and was meant to be able to read it and understand > it. To say otherwise is not just ingenuous it smacks of condescension to > workers who no doubt never heard of Hegel and sure dont need to to > understand hegel to understand Capital. > > > Chris > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 11:05 AM > Subject: Re: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > > > > Bit of dissent here about reading Marx, Engels, etc, directly. > > > > As Hans Ehrbar points out in his very useful notes on reading Capital, > simply reading it is not enough. It requires study and a good deal of > interpretation, given multiple translations and archaic language. There are > also some leaps to be made for those of us who are not grounded, as Marx was > in stuff like Hegel, to whom he is frequently responding. > > > > So the advice to simply read it is a little disingenuous. No one who > understand it has simply read it. > > > > And I reiterate, it is important to realize that much has been done since > these gentlemen died, to extend and expand the body of theory and practice. > This list is a perfect example. > > > > > > > > > > From sherrynstan at igc.org Tue May 27 20:09:51 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 22:09:51 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 In-Reply-To: <040d01c324b8$8f42adc0$48954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Message-ID: <006401c324be$3c72f9a0$0200a8c0@stan> "The same commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously appear in both forms in the same expression of value. These forms rather exclude each other as polar opposites...Whether a commodity is in the relative form or its opposite, the equivalent form, entirely depends on the position it holds in the expression of value. That is, it depends on whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed, or the commodity in which value is being expressed." Chosen completely at random from Capital I. I am truly an obtuse fuck. I went back and forth most of one day trying to get my head around relative and equivalent forms, and never once caught the literary rapture therein. I am thankful that people condescended to me to help me understand Marx... not being a working-class ubermensch and all. As Macdonald said, ya gotta learn to love that yarn, and it's a hard love. From bar at idirect.com Tue May 27 21:09:01 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 23:09:01 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <2050599.1054047907900.JavaMail.nobody@wamui08.slb.atl.earthlink.net> <003201c324b2$c72894d0$d8049ad8@Chris> <02bd01c324b5$438e5df0$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <001601c324c6$8f4bcd20$98069ad8@Chris> yeah, I liked the humour the wit, the anger. OK I admit the first 50 pages are more difficult tham the rest but really I liked reading him. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 9:05 PM Subject: Re: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > That in 150 years language changes and becomes therefore less accessible is > not condescension, nor is it to state that many people find it a dry, tough > read. > > You gotta really, I mean REALLY like widgets and yarn to find it an exciting > read. > > Macdonald > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Christopher Black" > > > > > From michele at maui.net Tue May 27 22:12:03 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 18:12:03 -1000 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <006401c324be$3c72f9a0$0200a8c0@stan> Message-ID: <043801c324cf$4c96fe60$48954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Fair enough, irony noted, but I don't know why anyone would go into a contextual exposition, select a paragraph at random, and try to assert the difficulty in understanding it without regard for what went before and what came after. Are you suggesting that this is really all that difficult if you pay attention and follow Marx's argument? Well, I know I struggled with it on first several readings, especially the whole first part about the commodity form that you quoted from, mainly because its difficulty had become mystified in my mind, and I could re-read many times more and still get a lot out of it. In fact it would be good if Lou's website set up a few years ago for a discussion of Cap I had gotten off the ground. Several people volunteered to moderate, Juriaan Bendien for one, but couldn't find time for it. I can't expand too much on this without a lot of thought and it may sound to some kind of didactic or doctrinaire, but you I'm sure nevertheless would agree: my impression, a strong impression, is that a great many who followed along in the Marxist movement but had never really studied or understood or attempted to apply what Marx was saying were the first to fall by the wayside or come up with reformist and distorted views on the world, especially after the euphoria of the sixties had worn off. Ralph .---- Original Message ----- From: "bon moun" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 4:09 PM Subject: RE: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > "The same commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously appear in both > forms in the same expression of value. These forms rather exclude each > other as polar opposites...Whether a commodity is in the relative form > or its opposite, the equivalent form, entirely depends on the position > it holds in the expression of value. That is, it depends on whether it > is the commodity whose value is being expressed, or the commodity in > which value is being expressed." > > Chosen completely at random from Capital I. > > I am truly an obtuse fuck. I went back and forth most of one day trying > to get my head around relative and equivalent forms, and never once > caught the literary rapture therein. > > I am thankful that people condescended to me to help me understand > Marx... not being a working-class ubermensch and all. > > As Macdonald said, ya gotta learn to love that yarn, and it's a hard > love. > > > > From bar at idirect.com Tue May 27 21:31:24 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 23:31:24 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Fw: [indict-nato] Unity for freedom! Message-ID: <006701c324c9$b2bad140$98069ad8@Chris> Important message from Yugoslavia re Milosevic and the dictatorship in Serbia but also a statement by the international committee re the issue of Ramsay Clark written by Vladimir Krsljanin. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Vladimir Krsljanin To: Undisclosed-Recipient:; Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 8:25 PM Subject: [indict-nato] Unity for freedom! Unity for freedom! (On the demonstrations in Belgrade and The Hague, on the activities of Sloboda and ICDSM) By Vladimir Krsljanin The puppet colonial regime in Belgrade is loosing more and more influence every day. The people is outraged by they're ruthless dictatorship and obvious links to the criminal circles. By the first political demonstration after the "State of Emergency" five days ago Sloboda have opened a season of protests against the regime in agony. Before the demonstration, almost 200 people have submitted, one by one, individually, to the Belgrade District Prosecution the criminal charges against the "acting president" Natasa Micic, Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic, all ministers in the Serbian Government and unknown investigative judge in the "Stambolic case". They are charged for serious violations of the Constitution and Low, abuse of power, spread of the false news aiming to discredit President Milosevic, his family and political opposition. The demonstration of several hundred in front of the Foreign Ministry and Government of Serbia buildings, on the day of the last visit of Carla del Ponte to Belgrade demanded "end of the Hague-DOS dictatorship", restoration of democracy and sovereignty in Serbia. The speakers pointed the existence of the coalition between the illegal Hague tribunal and the present rulers in Serbia. It is a coalition of common despair - both anti Serbian groupings face total failure in their attempt to suppress the truth and freedom-loving spirit of the Serbian people. The patterns of this coalition are seen in the present mass violation of human rights in Serbia, following the example of the Hague tribunal. [1] The atmosphere of fear is still present in Serbia. But President Milosevic teaches: "Time of the dictatorship is a right time for the activity of all honest people and of all people devoted to democracy." Our duty is to work on the creation of the broadest possible political front to return freedom, hope, dignity and sovereignty to the Serbian people, to stop turning the country into a colony. Serbs in Diaspora demanded to mark this year's Vidovdan by a demonstration at The Hague. Sloboda supported this demand immediately [2]. The work of Serbian-International Organizational Committee of the Hague demonstration is supported up to now by Serb organizations and groups from Germany, France, Britain, Austria, Sweden, by progressive and leftist parties, groups and organizations from several European countries, by many distinguished personalities, including many ICDSM members. The situation in Serbia now, for the sake of the future of the Serbian people require unity, lack of sectarian approaches and total solidarity with the struggle of an old European people for its freedom, democracy, sovereignty and equality. This important and decisive struggle also requires new effective and more developed forms of organization and mutual support at home and abroad. Everyone ready to support or to take part in this struggle should be aware of its importance for the world peace and destiny of the mankind. In that struggle everyone will take a position he is willing or able to take [3]. The progressive forces today don't need disputes. The struggle for the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia and Yugoslavia is a cause absolutely clean and undisputable. We don't have time nor wish to measure our contributions to that struggle. After we reach the victory, which is close, the reward for the fighters will be the benefit of the people. [1] http://www.icdsm.org/more/shock.htm [2] see the inviting leaflet at http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/sloboda051203.htm /English version/ http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/POZIVZAHAG.htm /Serbian version/ or at http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/files/AIA/ /Both versions + PDF/ [3] Honoring all who associated their names with the ICDSM and our struggle in general, the author of these lines does not subscribe to making analyses of individual contributions to this struggle. What I have witnessed is the visit Mr. Ramsey Clark to Belgrade in 2001, aiming to intervene against the extradition, but delayed due to manipulation of that time Yugoslav Ambassador to Washington. Mr. Clark made a speech in the people's rally in front of the Federal Parliament and two press conferences in Belgrade. Then, there were two visits (all on his own expense) to President Milosevic at the Hague, with one press conference there [4], all the time readiness to give advice, several written interventions to the Tribunal etc. Ramsey Clark signed the ICDSM letter to all heads of states: http://www.icdsm.org/appeal.htm In his recent interview to Egyptian "Al Ahram" (Weekly On-Line No.624, February 6-12), Ramsey Clark stated: "I met Milosevic a few days ago. His health has deteriorated," he tells me in Cairo. "He had the strength to hold the people of his country together in a very difficult situation." "Only absolute power, unrestrained by any rule of law or standards of human decency, openly taunts an intended victim as President George W Bush has taunted Iraq." Yesterday it was Yugoslavia. Milosevic was struggling to preserve Yugoslavia, Clark says. "If there was any independent state in central and eastern Europe it was Yugoslavia. They were playing off the Soviet Union and the US to maintain their independence and relative prosperity." That was during the socialist and non- aligned regime of the country's founder, Joseph Broz Tito. In Tito's day, Yugoslavs were happily united -- a rare occurrence in the Balkans. "In 1991 there were six [constituent] republics with lots of different peoples in Yugoslavia. And Belgrade had held all these formerly warring groups together in peace. In 1991 Time reported that by far the most progressive, and truly the most successful country in Eastern Europe, was Yugoslavia. And almost immediately you see foreign powers trying to dismantle it. First they dismantled Slovenia, then Croatia. Germany comes in after its deplorable historical record in the Balkans and encourages Croatian independence. Then Bosnia and Macedonia." "We deliberately broke it up. It was US policy to break it up for economic exploitation and to show other Eastern European nations not to dare dream of being independent. If you want to have any economic or political independence you'll be crushed. That was the brutal message signalled to Yugoslavia's neighbours." A public example had to be made of Milosevic's Yugoslavia: "Within two years of the break up of the Soviet Union Ukraine became the third largest recipient of US aid. First Israel and second Egypt and third Ukraine. Can you imagine the old enemy? And what was the aid for? It was to identify public facilities for privatisation. And most went to American companies, and we identified 6,000 properties. We destroyed their economies and they were obliged to buy our goods. And you pay our price. And we'll advertise and make you want to buy our goods just like we make you want McDonald's and blue jeans. And now what have the people got? They lost their education system, they've lost their health care system and they've lost their jobs. [Western investors] came in with big plans for privatisation and nationalisation. What they did is unbelievable -- a despicable act of greed," Clark says. And the same fate awaits a defeated Iraq, he warns. [4] http://www.icdsm.org/more/clarkm.htm#a Yahoo! Groups Sponsor Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 15464 bytes Desc: not available URL: From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Tue May 27 23:48:06 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 06:48:06 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Arundhati Roy -- " Buy One, Get One Free Message-ID: <00ba01c324dc$b630c380$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 11:09 PM Subject: Arundhati Roy - 'Buy One, Get One Free ' Roy's Address Buy One, Get One Free By Arundhati Roy Riverside Church, New York, NY May 17, 2003 In these times, when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight? As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries. So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night. Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an "Indian citizen," to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king. Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free). Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be. When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn't any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto- suggestion, and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "Free Press," that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests. Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media. Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be "suicidal" for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries - earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they'll have to be planted before they're discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn't use them when his country was being invaded. Of course, there'll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they're really chemicals, whether they're actually banned and whether the vessels they're contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.) Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation. Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a "Homicidal Dictator." And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a "regime change." Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba'ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the "Allies" fomented an uprising of Shi'as in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal. The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren't the faces of U.S. and U.K. government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women? Because when it comes to Empire, facts don't matter. Yes, but all that's in the past we're told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the U.S. can stop him. It's an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but....our endowment from God." (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?) So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb). But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs don't really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don't qualify as real deaths. Our histories don't qualify as history. They never have. Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a "power vacuum." Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization slid into anarchy. On live TV. Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq's oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were "secured" almost before the invasion began. On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a "liberated people" venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "It's untidy. Freedom's untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things." Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder - did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in U.S. prisons right now? (The world's "freest" country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas? Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world's first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world's first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice. At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'" Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth? The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down? Television tells us that Iraq has been "liberated" and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's leading feminists. In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords. Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged "positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline." President Bush, who never served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress - a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was "just one victory in a war on terror ... [which] still goes on." It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the "War on Terror" might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill. It was Herman Goering, that old Nazi, who said, "People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.... All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." He's right. It's dead easy. That's what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast. The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less. At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, "This campaign will be like no other in history." Maybe he's right. I'm no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this? After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army! Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It was more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees. As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped for the "rapid collapse" of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very na?ve could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise. Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments - despite the opposition from the majority of their people - was overwhelming. When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned down the U.S. government's offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking "democratic principles." According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its allies" higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What's it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain's New Labour?) In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I'm sure, were among them. They - we - were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, "It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case the security of the people."Democracy, the modern world's holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will. Until quite recently, right up to the 1980's, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice. But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy - the "independent" judiciary, the "free" press, the parliament - and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder. To fully comprehend the extent to which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World's Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and therefore will not speak about tonight). The World's Most Interesting: South Africa. The world's most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world's newest: Iraq. In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services - electricity, water, and housing-has meant that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have been evicted from their homes. Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism barely disturbed the grass. It's apartheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of Democracy. Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism. In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy's TV viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, "How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?" That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy's TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech for whom? In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists. As America's show business gets more and more violent and war-like, and America's wars get more and more like show business, some interesting cross overs are taking place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and "Good Morning America." It is a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom. The news and entertainment industry in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations - AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed. America's media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation. So here it is - the World's Greatest Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America's Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency? In the three years of George Bush-the-Lesser's term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year. That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush's initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion dollars. So who's paying for the war? America's poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers. And who's actually fighting the war? Once again, America's poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq's desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America's "volunteer" army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population. It's ironic, isn't it - the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised. For African Americans there's also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African American men from here in Harlem. This year, on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan's affirmative action program favouring Blacks and Latinos. He called it "divisive," "unfair," and "unconstitutional." The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don't suppose affirmative action for White Boys >From Yale ever is. So we know who's paying for the war. We know who's fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America's poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America's single mothers? Or America's Black and Latino minorities? Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate, military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous. Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny. The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President's Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it." Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts. Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America's anti- terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for simi lar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, "Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation." The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law. Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as "unlawful combatants." (In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be "disappeared" like the people of Chile under Washington's old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives. Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation" with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy at home. Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for "liberation." (Or did they mean "liberalization" all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that "the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S. image." Iraq's constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy. The United States Agency for International Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks. Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said, "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission." The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria. Tom Brokaw (one of America's best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. "One of the things we don't want to do," he said, "is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country." Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy. So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done? Well... We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly. The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly. Its "homeland" may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds - government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable. It would be na?ve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire's working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning. Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press. The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade. You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to remind yourself of this. Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland. If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated. I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people. History is giving you the chance. Seize the time. From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Wed May 28 00:10:05 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 07:10:05 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese Message-ID: <00c601c324df$c882d430$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> >From Arundhati Roy's "Buy One, Get One Free". ************************************ At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'" Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth? *************************************** Do I hear someone say "Lighten up, Arundhati!"...? I rest my case. JD This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 28 00:53:21 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 23:53:21 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <00c601c324df$c882d430$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <04bd01c324e5$da61f770$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Daly" > *************************************** > > Do I hear someone say "Lighten up, Arundhati!"...? > I rest my case. > JD These situations are rather different ones. Cleese is not in charge of running the military in these countries, etc. I am going to stop there, because I can't really believe that you are comparing the evil of Rumsfeld's "humour", or indeed Rumsfeld himself, with Cleese. If you think these matters are the same, we have nothing to say. If you indeed "rest your case", Cleese is found "not guilty". Macdonald From bobenoch at shaw.ca Wed May 28 01:54:07 2003 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 00:54:07 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <00c601c324df$c882d430$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <008b01c324ee$5107fc00$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> It is just possible, (and it would be nice to think), that James is having us all on. Cleese as Rumsfeld. Personally, I think Cleese is a great deal funnier than the Ilkhan Rumsfeld. Bob From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 28 03:47:58 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 05:47:58 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 In-Reply-To: <001601c324c6$8f4bcd20$98069ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <00bb01c324fe$3b63b870$0200a8c0@stan> "The same commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously appear in both forms in the same expression of value. These forms rather exclude each other as polar opposites...Whether a commodity is in the relative form or its opposite, the equivalent form, entirely depends on the position it holds in the expression of value. That is, it depends on whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed, or the commodity in which value is being expressed." Chosen completely at random from Capital I. I am truly an obtuse fuck. I went back and forth most of one day trying to get my head around relative and equivalent forms, and never once caught the literary rapture therein. I am thankful that people condescended to me to help me understand Marx... not being a working-class ubermensch and all. As Macdonald said, ya gotta learn to love that yarn, and it's a hard love. From farmelantj at juno.com Wed May 28 03:51:48 2003 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 05:51:48 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese Message-ID: <20030528.055149.3680.0.farmelantj@juno.com> On Tue, 27 May 2003 23:53:21 -0700 Macdonald Stainsby writes: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "James Daly" > > > *************************************** > > > > Do I hear someone say "Lighten up, Arundhati!"...? > > I rest my case. > > JD > > These situations are rather different ones. Cleese is not in charge > of > running the military in these countries, etc. > I am going to stop there, because I can't really believe that you > are > comparing the evil of Rumsfeld's "humour", or indeed Rumsfeld > himself, with > Cleese. If you think these matters are the same, we have nothing to > say. > > If you indeed "rest your case", Cleese is found "not guilty". This whole discussion sounds like a bloody Python routine to me! Jim F. > > Macdonald > > > > ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 28 04:10:50 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 06:10:50 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 In-Reply-To: <043801c324cf$4c96fe60$48954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Message-ID: <00bc01c32501$6d75d660$0200a8c0@stan> <>I can't expand too much on this without a lot of thought and it may sound to some kind of didactic or doctrinaire, but you I'm sure nevertheless would agree: my impression, a strong impression, is that a great many who followed along in the Marxist movement but had never really studied or understood or attempted to apply what Marx was saying were the first to fall by the wayside or come up with reformist and distorted views on the world, especially after the euphoria of the sixties had worn off. Ralph<> Estoy de acuerdo. But the problem has been twofold, as the hirsute one would have said. On the one hand, there is the tendency to veer down the social democrat path (or even as we see today, swing wildly to the right), and on the other, the tendency to ossify Marx's thinking into "teachings" (read catechisms), and turn Marxism into a timeless religion. Being great thinkers and great revolutionaries has never indemnified anyone against errors, oversights, or changes in conditions. I still maintain that Marx and post-Marx revolutionaries who built on his work cannot be simply read and understood without assistance and study. One, on account of the language, two on account of the references (and Marx frequently battles with Hegel and others in Capital which contributes to its sometimes arcane and confusing character), and three on account of the drastic epistemological shift required. My parents drove rivets in an airplane factory. There was never at any time in their lives they would have read or understood Marx. They were workers with imperial privilege, sexist, racist, backward, and reactionary in their politics. And they were not atypical. Sorry, but I don't have much patience with idealizing workers. And it doesn't help workers or the revolution to engage in such romantic self-delusion. Neither does deluding others with claims that all they have to do is read the holy texts to understand revolutionary socialism. Like everything else, it is a social and developmental process. From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Wed May 28 04:28:53 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 11:28:53 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour Message-ID: <002901c32503$f026cc70$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> My "case" is not that Cleese = Rumsfeld; it is the elementary but sadly neglected Marxist one that there is no abstraction called humour which is neutral, relaxing and "as simple as the air we breathe". Like the air we breathe concrete humour (including for instance class, racial and gender humour, black and sick humour) is complex and often poisonous. Indeed the poison is often a weapon, as in the form of satire (which some might think is all too prevalent in Marxist literature, beginning with Marx and Engels). It can also be a defence -- there are mechanisms (repetition, timing etc.), which can be studied in Rumsfeld's little speech for instance, which tickle our laugh nerve (I'm only joking!) and divert us from the dangerous matter in hand -- such as responsibility for deaths caused by the looting of hospitals. There was a brilliant French film recently called "Le Ridicule". It was set around the French Royal Court just before the Revolution, and in it a victim of highly organised ridicule commits suicide. I am sure there are psychological and sociological laws of ridicule, such as that laughing at people presupposes or causes a superior/ inferior social relation, which is where imperialist humour comes in. For decades, including while prisoners were dying on hunger strike (with loyalist graffiti calling Bobby Sands "Slimmer of the Year") what was the Polish joke in America was the Irish joke not only in Britain, but in Dublin and its surroundings (the historic Pale of the English in Ireland), where it was taken by many to be a sign of maturity to be able to "take a joke at one's own expense" -- though the pain was sometimes passed on to other "whipping boys", as in "the Kerry man" joke. The Spanish-dubbed version of Fawlty Towers makes Manuel Portuguese. Humour in a given society has a wide scope and spectrum, and as a social relationship a wide variety of receptions and sensibilities. But though it has not enhanced my chances in the popularity stakes I do not apologise for my subject line which sees a common thread of imperialist humour in Rumsfeld and Cleese, however different they may be in situation, actuality, degree -- from horror to mere offensiveness -- etc. -- and I think that is just recognising reality. Pointing out that Cleese was a splitter was not ad hominem (-- i.e. " with his record *he* should not be joking about splitting"); what I had in mind was that for him (at least for his idea of humour in the film) when little people split that is farce, but when he splits that is History. By the way, he may be no commander of troops, but he was a major supporter of Lord Owen who after receiving his well earned peerage went on to draw up the plan for the partition of Bosnia. However, my case as I said in the first line, is universal, and John Cleese is only an illustration of it. I had all this argument out with a Catholic priest who is a professor of philosophy. He is an anti-anti-imperialist snob from the Pale, who wishes the British had never left any part of Ireland and has no criticism of their or their supporters' behaviour in the North now. As I told him I was surprised (I'm only joking) to find myself teaching him lessons in charity. I am also delighted to call it political correctness. I think political correctness is morally correct, being just common decency and respect for all other people who do not forfeit their right to respect. I thought everyone was brought up to believe that it is wrong to laugh at other people, especially the unfortunate. But one of the Rev. Professor's defences was precisely that the Spanish made Manuel Portuguese. That was supposed to be some kind of argument from the need to accept "original sin". It is not one I accept. As a victim of imperialism I could not share his finding the "What have the Romans done for us?" speech funny. I refuse to be browbeaten into accepting that I -- or any humanist human being -- should. And I would even argue that by right (reason) we should not -- but of course it is not always easy to connect reason and the laughter nerve. James Daly From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 04:40:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:40:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <20030528.055149.3680.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: <000b01c32505$83fbfe60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Jim Farmelant writes: This whole discussion sounds like a bloody Python routine to me! ----- Yes, there is something surreal to it, but I think that derives from the apparent lack of appreciation of what James is getting at in his criticisms of Cleese. James is absolutely correct to point out that Cleese has been and is overtly political. He was a leading supporter and campaigner for the SDP, appearing in their party political broadcasts and speaking for them on occasion. His type of humour also has certain undertones which are worthy of more critical appraisal. I have been known to laugh at Benny Hill, but I am quite aware of the problems pertaining to his humour, despite the fact that he was a supremely gifted technician. Similarly, Jackie Mason is a very sharp and witty observer of life's apparent contradictions and stupidities, but he is also profoundly conservative and ultra-Zionist. Just as women might be expected to be among the first to point to the shortcomings of Hill's oeuvre, so too might someone with direct experience of "third position" rationalisation of imperialism be more sensitive to the ideological nuances of popular comedy as that applies to a reinforcement/affirmation of "conventional wisdom". If we are to take this discussion further, I suggest we do so via the prism offered to us earlier by Jim Craven, whose own researches into the proliferation of "reality tv shows", social-darwinism-as-entertainment and deep narcissism as indicative of our present conditions of production (the social structure of accumulation) seem far more relevant than a recourse to "well, I thought it was funny"; "no, it was deeply insulting"; "don't be so sensitive"; "this sort of stuff gives the left a bad name", etc. For Jim C's and other earlier postings on this, see http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w12/msg00165.htm http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w15/msg00008.htm http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w02/msg00037.htm http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w02/msg00046.htm Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 04:45:56 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:45:56 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Northern Ireland: loyalist anti-racists Message-ID: <003501c32506$51cfa4e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Courtesy of John O'Neill via Marxmail: PUP campaigns to drive racists out of Ballymena Henry McDonald, Ireland editor Sunday May 25, 2003 The Observer They chant 'No surrender to the IRA' at England internationals and fly the Ulster flag, the symbol of Protestant loyalism, alongside the Cross of St George. They even come on 'solidarity tours' during the Northern Ireland marching season, hoping to meet idols such as the loyalist terrorist Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair. But now the far-right neo-Nazis of Britain are being told they are not welcome in the staunchest loyalist town in Ulster and capital of Ian Paisley's Bible belt - Ballymena. The man leading the campaign to stop English-based far-right groups establishing a base in the province is a former loyalist killer who now supports the peace process. Over the past three months there have been attacks on houses rented by nurses from the Philippines and Romanian economic migrants in the Co Antrim town. In response, the ex-Ulster Volunteer Force prisoner Billy McCaughey, and colleagues in the Progressive Unionist Party, PUP, have come on to the streets to drive the neo-Nazis out. Standing under a street sign covered in race hate leaflets, McCaughey points to a slogan from the National Front. It reads: 'Proud to be British and white.' 'I'm proud to be British too,' he says, 'but you don't have to be white to be British. Even in my most sectarian days I was never a racist.' His 'sectarian days' began while he was a serving Special Branch officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary by day and a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force at night. He was sentenced to a life sentence for the 1977 murder of Catholic chemist William Strathhearn. In the Maze prison he met Gusty Spence, David Ervine and other UVF leaders who were to push the loyalist movement towards a ceasefire and a compromise with the republicans. Since the neo-Nazi presence emerged in his home town, McCaughey has been concerned to stop young loyalists joining organisations such as the National Front and the White National Party, a more extreme offshoot of the British National Party. 'These groups can sound attractive to young loyalists because their rhetoric is so pro-British and pro-unionist,' he says. 'But these people are no friends of Ulster loyalists. The PUP believes in a pluralist United Kingdom.'What's more, the UVF centres its history on the Somme and the sacrifice of Ulster people in two world wars. In the Second World War, Ulster people fought against Hitler and the Nazis, and now these neo-Nazis want to make common cause with us.' McCaughey said he and fellow PUP members have held meetings in Ballymena to persuade UVF members to have nothing to do with the neo-fascist groups that have descended on the town. Since the PUP door-to-door campaign against the Far Right began around Easter, there have been no further attacks on immigrant workers in the town. Not all loyalist terror groups and their political allies are as hostile towards the English Far Right as the UVF and PUP. The Loyalist Volunteer Force maintains connections with the neo-Nazi terrorist organisation Combat 18. Until recently sections of the UDA also had links with C18. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 04:55:21 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:55:21 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Reminder: Super Imperialism Message-ID: <004101c32507$a2322560$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Just a reminder that next Monday, 2 June, we will be starting our list discussion of Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism", and John Enyang will be coordinating that discussion, leading it off with his own summary of Hudson's first chapter. For more details, see http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w19/msg00147.htm Since we are beginning the discussion quite near the summer break, when we can expect many listers to disappear for a while, we might postpone the discussion for a few weeks. We'll see nearer the time. However, it should otherwise be a very good opportunity for us to focus discussion on what is the most pressing political problem of our time. Incidentally, I suggest that we pay particular attention to the subject line so that we can easily relate messages to the book discussion, distinct from all other list activity (which will go on in parallel). Since we are reading a chapter a week, we could go with, e.g. "Hudson, ch. 1" for all messages on this topic. Sorry if this seems pedantic, but it should make things easier now and in the future, for archiving purposes. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 04:59:30 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:59:30 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Support George Galloway Message-ID: <004901c32508$369052e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Galloway: I can't afford libel action without help MP claims appeal to pay for legal battle has been positive KEITH SINCLAIR The Herald, 28 May 2003 GEORGE Galloway admitted yesterday he has insufficient means to launch legal action against newspapers which alleged he received money from Saddam Hussein, but claimed a large number of people have offered financial support to help him clear his name. Mr Galloway, the controversial Glasgow MP who has set up a fund to help pay for the legal costs of any libel action against the papers, said he had received a positive response to an appeal for financial assistance, including substantial payments from supporters in London and Glasgow. He denied that a letter he wrote to friends and supporters asking for help amounted to a begging letter. Speaking to The Herald after meeting two former Lebanese prime ministers in Beirut and delivering a speech on the Middle East in the Bekkaa valley yesterday, Mr Galloway said: "I have taken this step because the enemies I am fighting are extremely rich and powerful and I don't myself have anything remotely like the means to take them on without asking my friends for support." Mr Galloway ended the interview, saying: "Do you know I am paying for these calls? You will have to forgive me, this is costing me about ?3 a minute mate..." The Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor said they had uncovered documents claiming he received money from Saddam's regime. The Daily Telegraph last month claimed it had discovered a memo in the foreign ministry in Baghdad from a senior Iraqi intelligence officer which stated that Mr Galloway was being paid ?375,000 a year by Iraq. That was followed by allegations in the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor which claimed documents found in a house owned by one of Saddam's sons showed $10m had been paid to Mr Galloway from 1992 until this year. The MP has written to supporters claiming that the allegations are false and politically motivated and said: "With the support of my friends I intend to fight this. I hope I can count on you as one of those friends." During the interview, he said that even before the letter went out he had received a very spirited response "and the postman is being kept busy going up and down the stairs to my lawyers' office". "I don't know the quantum in terms of money because it doesn't come to me, it goes straight to the lawyers," he said. "All I know is that there have been hundreds of letters and the most significant donations have been one for ?1000 from Lewisham in south London from a person who heard me speak and one for ?500 from Bearsden from someone I have never met or heard of before. So I am really pleased." Mr Galloway added: "I don't want these rich and powerful newspapers to think that just because they have deeper pockets than me that they can exhaust me. I was sure that there would be a big public response and so it has turned out to be. "When the billionaire press slanders a person who only has their salary to live on inevitably that is a mismatch. "Of course no-one is obliged to help me fight the case but the early signs are that a very large number of people very much want to do so." He referred all questions about his possible legal action to his solicitors, but they declined to comment. However, sources at the Daily Telegraph, which also declined to comment officially on the matter, said no writ or legal proceedings had yet been issued against them by solicitors acting for Mr Galloway. Mr Galloway said: "I don't know what stage they are at but I fully intend to challenge this in the courts. They are lies of fantastic proportions." A spokesman for the Labour Party yesterday declined to comment on Mr Galloway's appeal saying: "That's a matter for George." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:03:32 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:03:32 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK eurozone membership: farcical Message-ID: <005101c32508$c6e701e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Hain in Euro storm after talk of a surrogate referendum MICHAEL SETTLE The Herald, 28 May 2003 PETER Hain, Britain's euro envoy, was last night accused of performing an embarrassing u-turn on whether voters should have a referendum on the new constitution for Europe. Tories claimed Tony Blair had hauled the Welsh secretary over the coals after Mr Hain said in a radio interview that the European parliamentary elections in June 2004 would become a surrogate referendum. The elections would, he said, give voters the chance to choose between a party that supported the new look EU constitution and one that opposed it. Insisting once again the government would not hold a referendum, the secretary of state told the BBC: "In the end, if people don't like what they get, they can vote against the government in the European elections next year. "They will more or less coincide with the end of this constitution. "I would be quite happy to fight the next European elections on a Labour platform endorsing this treaty and the Conservatives can oppose it and then the people will decide," he added. Downing Street quickly distanced itself from Mr Hain's assertion, stressing it was "incorrect" to suggest the Euro elections would become a surrogate referendum. Later, No. 10 denied the prime minister had rebuked his cabinet colleague, insisting his comments had been misinterpreted. However, the Conservative opposition claimed Mr Hain had inadvertently "let the cat out of the bag". As right-wing and left-wing newspapers deepened their euro battle lines over the merits and demerits of a referendum, Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, wrote to Mr Hain accusing him of trying to secure public support for the constitution by "sleight of hand" instead of allowing voters a genuine voice. "Are you seriously suggesting that you see the European parliamentary elections as some sort of surrogate and binding referendum on the new constitution?" he asked. The Welsh secretary, who together with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, met Mr Blair at Chequers yesterday to discuss the government's strategy for the final stage of the convention talks, hit back, dismissing Mr Ancram's claims as "the latest in a long line of misrepresentations from the Tories". "Elections are the way public opinion makes itself felt in our parliamentary democracy. It is totally absurd of Michael Ancram to suggest next year's European elections will be a substitute referendum. Of course they won't," insisted Mr Hain. "People will be voting on a variety of issues. The elections will be fought on two very different visions of Britain's role in Europe: Labour wants Britain right at the heart of Europe, getting a good deal for us; the Tories want Britain isolated and leading to Britain's withdrawal from Europe," he added. However, Mr Ancram sensed he had touched a nerve and claimed Mr Hain was panicking. "I am surprised that within three hours he is so readily disowning his own words," argued the Tory front bencher. "It should be a warning to the British people not to put any store by what he says. "Tony Blair has summoned Hain to Chequers today. It seems Big Brother has called him into the Diary Room and given him a strong rebuke. Hain should watch out or next time he will be evicted," he quipped. Mr Ancram added: "Peter Hain's supposed explanation of his comments only shows what a mess the government is in. They are running scared of the British people. Why won't they let the people decide? Is it because they know they will lose?" As more details of the proposed EU constitution were released yesterday covering such issues as Qualified Majority Voting, an EU public prosecutor and workers' rights, the Tories continued to press for a referendum on the new blueprint, saying it fundamentally shifted power from Westminster to Brussels. The government meanwhile insisted it was, for the most part, a "tidying-up exercise" simply to enable an EU of 25 nations to work efficiently. ----- Euro campaign has shades of Keep the Clause farce IAIN MacWHIRTER The Herald, 28 May 2003 If I had a ?10 note for every Daily Mail column warning of the threat to "a thousand years of British sovereignty" posed by the EU, I might be rich enough to afford holidays in the member states. As you may learn this summer, the pound isn't worth what it used to be, now that the euro is challenging the dollar as a global reserve currency. Funny, we don't hear so much about the euro being a basket-case anymore. The Sun is still warning of two million jobs being destroyed by Europe - not by the euro this time, but by the proposed new EU constitution. The dry formulas of euro constitution-speak - subsidiarity, conditionality, and qualified majority voting - are to be seen as the latest European job-killers. The hysteria about the draft constitution says more about the distorted priorities of the UK media and their largely-foreign owners than it does about the future of the EU. The Daily Telegraph, and its Canadian proprietor Conrad Black, believes the new constitution will amount to an annexation of Britain; the extinction of our independence. This is, of course, nonsense. The constitution enshrines the inviolability of the existing nation states of Europe. It sets absolute limits on the extent to which EU institutions can encroach on sovereignty. This is not a federal union like the US, but a union of nation states, free to leave at any time, who pool sovereignty in certain areas, like foreign policy and currency, that can best be managed at European level. Trouble is, that's not how the ordinary Mail reader sees it. And there are rather a lot of them. It doesn't matter what the draft constitution actually says if the people of Britain believe it is a threat to their freedom, and many of them do. That this might be based on misunderstanding and the effect of anti-European propaganda doesn't make it any less real. If the people want a referendum on the issue, who's to say they shouldn't have one? The row about the constitution reminds me of the row in the first year of the Scottish Parliament over Section 2A on promoting homosexuality in schools. Again, a coalition of conservatives with powerful media connections turned a rather innocuous piece of legislation into a cause celebre. They tapped into a latent fear and suspicion of sexual minorities in the Scottish public, and gave this bigotry a spurious legitimacy. With the EU constitution, a similar powerful media campaign has played upon latent xenophobia by hyping the constitution issue into a test of will. Like Section 2A, the campaign for a referendum now has a life of its own. There is another similarity with 2A: the government response. The Scottish Executive was paralysed by the issue. Donald Dewar didn't know how to handle it and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. Remember poor old Sam Galbraith being deployed to dead-bat every outrageous allegation by Keep the Clause? The tales of lurid homosexual pornography being peddled in primary schools were rubbish, but ministers couldn't muster the will to see off the media campaign. The issue was only finally layed to rest when Tony Blair himself came to the Scottish Labour conference and rubbished the scare-mongering by Souter and Co. Similarly, over the constitution, the UK cabinet seems in denial and unable to act. For Sam Galbraith, read Peter Hain. His mantra that the constitution is merely "tidying things up" will no longer do. His suggestion yesterday that the people of Britain should regard the next European elections as some kind of alternative to a referendum was particularly unhelpful. The Tories have leaped upon this and said to Blair: "Make my day." Given the low turnout and the volatility of the electorate, this could pose real problems for the government. I mean, if Labour loses, does that mean we pull out of Europe? Meanwhile, the Daily Mail is staging its own referendum on June 12, another stunt borrowed from Keep the Clause. Now, of course, the press is exploiting public ignorance: 80% of the population hasn't a clue what the new constitution is about. But that's precisely the point. Because the government has been preoccupied by that other referendum over the single currency, it has opted out of the public debate on Europe as a whole and has allowed the right to colonise the terrain. Locked in their own private universe, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have bickered and jostled over the timing of the referendum and the meaning of the five economic tests, when they should have been out there arguing the broader case for Britain's continuing involvement in the European project. The government is now suffering the consequences of this failure of leadership. The way things are going, Tony Blair could find himself in the absurd position of having to concede a referendum on the constitution even while he dithers over the referendum on the euro. It is difficult to argue against holding a referendum on the Giscard d'Estaing document if it can be demonstrated that there is a demand from the British people. After all, most other European countries are holding them. Hain insists that, in our political system, the sovereign British parliament should decide. But he is on shaky ground. If it is right to have a referendum on the euro, Scottish devolution, English devolution, and anything else the government can't make up its mind on, it is difficult to argue there shouldn't be one on the most comprehensive constitutional exercise in Europe since 1965, even if it doesn't threaten fundamental British freedoms. The draft constitution is supposed to become law this time next year, to coincide with the enlargement of the EU to 25. It envisages a permanent foreign minister and a full-time president, elected by the member states. The president of the European Commission will be elected by the European Parliament, which will impose a measure of democratic accountability over the bureaucracy. There will also be a public prosecutor, who can pursue corruption across state lines, and a common European policy on asylum and immigration. There will be no common policy on taxation or defence, which remain the sole preserve of the national parliaments. This is not a blueprint for a European superstate, but it is a considerable change in the practice and powers of the EU institutions. My own view is that the draft constitution doesn't go far enough. There should be a democratically-elected president of Europe, and a real increase in the legislative powers of the parliament. But there is no forum in which this debate can take place. This is why we need an event, like a referendum, to address the level of public ignorance on the EU and clear the air. We need a reaffirmation from the British people that they agree with the broad European project. The last time they had a say was in 1975. A referendum would also smoke out Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and force them finally to argue a positive case for Europe. It's also time to call the Daily Mail's bluff. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:05:05 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:05:05 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: no dollar hegemony Message-ID: <005901c32508$fec204c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Saddam takes on the mighty dollar COLIN FREEMAN IN BAGHDAD The Scotsman, 28 May 2003 IN A SHABBY sidestreet in downtown Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is finally getting the upper hand over Uncle Sam. The man himself has long vanished, but his portrait still remains on every Iraqi dinar banknote - and every day at 8am in Al Kefah Street, a fresh round of attacks on the dollar begins. The US administration that governs Iraq has yet to settle the future of the old Iraqi dinar. The shouting crowd of currency traders on Al Kefah Street aren't waiting to find out, as they huddle each morning to buy, sell and set the day's exchange rate of the dinar against the dollar. Al Kefah is Iraq's Wall Street; the deals done here guide the markets in other Iraqi cities. Just like their colleagues in New York or London, the traders rely on a mix of wits, gut instinct, rumour and hearsay. Right now, the talk on the dinar is more bullish than ever. "Just two weeks ago we were selling at 2,000 dinars to the dollar, but two days ago it went right down to 1,000 - the lowest it's been in about six years," said trader Adnan Ali, one of a crowd of about 100 traders yesterday. The logic is simple: Iraqi civil servants are now getting paid by Americans, in dollars - a $20 one-off payment so far. Looted cash is also finding its way to market. The more dollars in circulation, the lower the price, and so the Iraqi dinar is doing better. "But it all depends on the political situation, and it's very hard to judge with the way things are," said Mr Ali. "We don't know how many more people the Americans will pay, or if they'll still get paid in dollars, so we don't know how many more will come on the market. "Today the dollar went back up to 1,200 dinars - who knows what will happen tomorrow." The US administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, is turning his efforts to rejuvenating the Iraqi economy. US officials are talking with western banks to establish credit lines for companies that trade with Iraq. The government's finances have been boosted by US troops stumbling over massive finds of cash or gold. About $250 million in soggy but salvageable US bills was recently recovered from the flooded basement vaults of the Iraqi Central Bank. Yesterday there were reports of a second large seizure of gold - this time, 999 bars in a truck stopped and searched by US troops near the Iranian border. The dollar is now the de facto hard currency in Iraq; the dinar is used for change or smaller daily purchases. The Al Kefah Street exchange sprang up after the 1991 Gulf war, when Saddam' s increasingly desperate finance ministry lifted a ban on the private buying and selling of money, and it thrived on smuggled foreign cash. Since then it has thrived on smuggled dollars and every other currency except Israel's. With Iraq's banks all either looted or shut, it is now the main bureau de change. Deals are sealed on a word and involve large amounts of cash up front. That has given the place its other claim to fame: as one of Baghdad's most dangerous streets. Traders estimate that up to $1million a day changes hands, with buyers and sellers from all over Iraq. The street and its environs are a prime target for gangs of armed robbers. "It is a very dangerous place - just two days ago some Ali Babas came and murdered somebody for their money," said Sattar Nowrooz, a Kurdish trader, who like the others earns about $30 a day on a commission of about 1 per cent. "Sometimes it isn't even safe to go out on the street - the robbers just come in and start shooting at anybody. "Since the last shooting we have had some American soldiers here on guard, but we don't know how long they'll stay." When a deal is reached, buyer and seller disappear down the back streets to shops where cash reserves are held in safes. Those buying dollars can easily spirit the cash away. Various concealment methods are then used to spirit the cash out of Al Kefah Street to the rest of the city and beyond, an easier task for those buying dollars than those switching their faith to the dinar. While $1,000 can easily be spirited away in pockets stitched inside a plastic carrier bag, others leave with boxes of 250 dinar notes. They have to resort to an empty stereo box or crate of orange juice. Al Kefah Street traders also have their own version of a futures market - gambling on whether the old 10,000 dinar note will remain legitimate currency. "When all the banks were robbed during the looting after the war, a lot of the 10,000 notes were stolen and came on to the streets," said Mr Nowrooz. "Now most places won't accept them - they are worried that the Americans would say they were no longer legal because they had been stolen." For now people are buying the 10,000 notes at a discounted rate - about 7,000 dinar. "Recently Paul Bremer was on TV saying they will start paying workers in the 10,000 notes. But there is no government to say: 'this is definitely legal money', and until that happens the public won't accept them and we can't make our profit." But the biggest speculation of all is on the future of Al Kefah Street itself. If, or when, Iraq's banking system and economy finally get up and running again, the black market in dinars may vanish - and the shouts of "buy" and "sell" may end for good. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:06:43 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:06:43 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK pensions crisis Message-ID: <006101c32509$38b49d00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> ?31bn saving shortfall prolongs working life JOHN INNES The Scotsman, 28 May 2003 BRITONS are collectively saving ?31 billion a year too little, suggesting that increasing numbers of people will have to work on beyond 65, it was claimed yesterday. Sainsbury's Bank said that people were generally advised to save about 10 per cent to 15 per cent of their income, but research found that 12.4 million people who are in full-time work were saving just 4.7 per cent of their salary, while 3.7 million part-time workers were putting aside only 3 per cent. It said this suggested that people were saving ?31 billion too little each year to have a comfortable retirement, meaning many people would have no choice but to work on beyond 65. Nearly two-thirds of people who were not saving enough said that it was because they could not afford to, while 14 per cent said they thought savings products offered poor value and 11 per cent said that they did not trust savings institutions. Derek Bottom, the deputy chief executive of Sainsbury's Bank, said: "The government and the financial services sector as a whole is faced with a very real and difficult challenge to educate people as to why they need to take greater responsibility over their finances. "This calls for radical changes based around strong government reassurances to consumers and greater product transparency and flexibility so that people can see how their savings and investments can help them at different stages of their lives." The government is proposing a range of simple, low-cost stakeholder-style products, including a with-profits policy and unit trust investment, to encourage people on low incomes to save more. Meanwhile, Philip Scott, the executive chairman of Norwich Union Life, warned that many providers may not offer the new stakeholder-style products if the government caps charges at 1 per cent. He said: "We believe if the pricing was fixed at 1 per cent then it would not lead to a successful market as it will be uneconomic to actually provide the products." He added that stakeholder pensions had not been the success that the government had anticipated. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:08:08 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:08:08 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: resistance continues Message-ID: <006901c32509$6b7a0cc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US suffer casualties after Fallujah gun battle FOREIGN STAFF The Scotsman, 28 May 2003 GUNMEN killed two United States soldiers yesterday and wounded nine others in the troubled Iraqi town of Fallujah, a hotbed of support for Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath Party. US troops returned fire, killing two attackers and capturing six Iraqis for questioning, US army sources said. All the soldiers hit were from the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, of Fort Carson, Colorado. Hours after the Fallujah incident, two American military police officers were injured, at least one seriously, after two attacks with rocket-propelled grenades on a north-west Baghdad police station, said Lieutenant Clint Mundinger of the US army's 709th Military Police Battalion. In the past three days, seven American soldiers have died and well over a dozen have been injured in attacks or accidents in Iraq, but the American general commanding troops in Baghdad said yesterday that security is improving in Iraq and that US authorities are making progress on improving life for ordinary Iraqis. The attack in Fallujah which lies about 50km west of Baghdad happened around midnight at a checkpoint. Initial reports said the Americans were fired upon from many directions, including from a mosque. But local people said only two men fired shots and that the US troops quickly killed them. Bashir Jasim, who lives in the area, said the two Iraqis stopped their truck at a traffic checkpoint, stepped out and opened fire. They were killed immediately by the Americans, he said. Other locals recounted very similar versions of the events. Major Randy Martin, a spokesman for the US army, said two vehicles had pulled up at the checkpoint together, and a search of the first turned up some weapons. Just as the guns were discovered, men in the second vehicle opened fire and threw a grenade. The intensity of the assault "would suggest the possibility" it had been coordinated beforehand , said Captain Tom Bryant, another army spokesman. He said US troops responded with fire from Bradley tanks, machineguns and small arms. They killed two of the attackers and captured six others. An army helicopter landed during the fire fight to evacuate the wounded and was damaged when a Bradley struck it while manoeuvring into a firing position. The wounded soldiers were evacuated to a military aid station in the area. The names of the two dead soldiers have not yet been released. US forces have run into trouble before in Fallujah, where many of the 200,000 residents benefited greatly from Saddam Hussein's Baath regime. Saddam's chemical and munitions factories were big employers and many of Fallujah's young men were members of the elite Republican Guard. Protests against the army's presence in Fallujah turned violent earlier this year when US soldiers fired on crowds on 28 April and 30 April, killing 18 Iraqis and wounding at least 78. "Fallujah has been an area of concern for us," Major Martin admitted yesterday. However, he insisted that conditions had been improving before the most recent attack happened. Yesterday's attack came on the same day that Fallujah residents said they were growing increasingly angry with the American presence. "Every Iraqi is ready to sacrifice his life for resistance," said Safa al-Jubair, a 27-year-old street vendor. "We are 26 million Iraqis and we are all resisting and, God willing, occupation will end." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:29:03 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:29:03 +0300 Subject: [A-List] EU integration struggles: constitution Message-ID: <007101c3250c$5769e9a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Europe needs a rallying cry The problem with the EU's draft constitution is not that it is too radical, but too limited in its vision Vernon Bogdanor Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian Europe's draft constitution has at last appeared. It has aroused a predictable quota of invective from the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the ineffable William Rees-Mogg, all of whom believe that it means the end of Britain as we know it. They said the same, of course, about devolution. The draft, however, is an innocuous document, which will change little. Indeed, far from creating a "federal superstate", it is likely to prove too feeble to yield the radical changes that Europe so desperately needs. The European Community was created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome for six member states. It is now about to mark an end to the artificial division of Europe, and to close one of the darkest chapters in European history by admitting 10 new member states, eight of which were formerly communist. But the institutions and procedures appropriate to six or even 15 states, the current membership, are unlikely to be appropriate for 25. Moreover, the European Union faces the challenge of democracy. How can its institutions be brought closer to its citizens, fewer than half of whom could be bothered to vote in the 1999 elections for the European parliament? In December 2001, the European heads of government, meeting at Laeken, declared that Europe's citizens were "calling for a clear, open, effective, democratically controlled Community approach". It was for this reason that they established a convention to draw up proposals for a European constitution. Constitutions have three main purposes. The first is to define the powers of the various branches of government - to provide, as it were, an organisation chart. The second is to define the rights of the citizen vis-?-vis government. The third is to provide an indication of purpose, a rallying cry for the citizen. The American constitution, for example, declares its purpose to be to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". The draft European constitution fulfils the first purpose well, making clear distinctions between those powers that lie exclusively with Europe, those that lie with the member states, and those that are shared. The Daily Telegraph shrieks hysterically of "sweeping new powers". In fact, there are only four exclusively European powers. They are "monetary policy, for member states that have adopted the euro; commercial policy; customs union; and the conservation of marine biological resources under the common fisheries policy". None of these powers is new. All derive from existing treaties. The draft does much less well on the other two criteria. It does little to secure more democratic control of European institutions. Indeed, its main proposal is that the president of the European council should hold office for two-and-a-half years, rather than, as at present, for six months, and be chosen by European heads of government, rather than by rotation. This will make democratic control more difficult, and, partly for this reason, it is strongly opposed by the more federalist member states such as the Netherlands. The European council is composed of the heads of government of the member states, who enjoy democratic legitimacy through being accountable to their parliaments and peoples. But they cannot be accountable on detailed European legislation, which is, all too often, a product of deals done in Brussels behind closed doors. The convention proposes an enhanced role for national parliaments, but most MPs have neither the time nor the inclination to do the job, which is one for the European parliament. For this reason, no solution is possible to the democratic deficit in Europe without an increase in the powers of the European parliament or greater involvement of Europe's citizens. The constitution does suggest a small increase in the powers of the parliament to choose the president of the European commission, but it does not propose the one big reform that would strengthen the European parliament and encourage turnout in elections - namely, election of the commission by the parliament from among its own members; nor does it propose to allow the people themselves to choose the commission. Either change would make the European electoral contest genuine and exciting, since voters would at last be able to decide what sort of Europe they really wanted . But the greatest failing of the convention lies in its inability to provide a rallying cry for Europeans. In the 1950s, the aims were obvious. They were, in the words of a cynic, to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down. With the end of the cold war, some new statement of purpose is desperately needed. How can the heads of government expect Europe's citizens to enthuse about their project when they themselves seem to have no clear idea what it is for? ? Vernon Bogdanor is professor of government at Oxford University. He is editor of The British Constitution in the 20th Century, to be published by Oxford University Press next month. From blackmore at balcab.ch Wed May 28 05:33:26 2003 From: blackmore at balcab.ch (Salaam Blackmore) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:33:26 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour References: <002901c32503$f026cc70$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <001201c3250c$f48be530$d50fc8d5@salaamo1rw4n2e> "it is not always easy to connect reason and the laughter nerve" Well, a good laugh - even a snigger - has long been a useful weapon in the human armoury. It has always been a good weapon against demoralisation and loss of confidence. The world is often rough and fortune harsh, yet there are men and women who can face defeat or loss and still bounce back into a positive mind-set, using the vehicle of a joke or anecdote that puts the tragedy of the moment into a wider perspective. These people are gold dust in any community, particularly at times of crisis and disaster. And as a weapon against individuals, humour has a long history. If the bards thought someone had behaved in a particularly offensive way, they would - so I have read - write a poem about the miscreant's behaviour, which would then be sung by the populace, whenever he went out in public. Come to think of it, that's not really a bad strategy, if you are dealing with difficult and powerful rulers, who cannot be brought to account in any other way. There is a time for tears - we have all shed them. There is a time for being serious. But there are also times for that ancient and valued bonding ritual, a really good laugh. Salaam ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Daly" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:28 PM Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour > As a victim of imperialism I could not share his finding the "What > have the Romans done for us?" speech funny. I refuse to be browbeaten > into accepting that I -- or any humanist human being -- should. And I > would even argue that by right (reason) we should not -- but of course > it is not always easy to connect reason and the laughter nerve. > > James Daly > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:34:31 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:34:31 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Peter Hain Message-ID: <007901c3250d$1b0f5ca0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Going behind the scenes of the current media fracas over the EU constitution in Britain, here is the Guardian talking up Peter Hain's intervention against the europhobes. It is absolutely correct that the europhobe position is a disgrace, since it is informed ultimately by a none-too-subtle racism and nostalgic empire loyalism. But the power of Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch would not be so overstated were it not for the real threat, of which Black and Murdoch are mere cyphers -- that of direct US intervention. This explains the pathological dithering of Blair and his cohort on this issue, for which Iraq might well have been a welcome distraction, enabling Blair to put off and hopefully somehow diminish the otherwise inevitable crunch decision that must now be made. Truly, Bush has spoilt everything. Meanwhile the Guardian, in rushing to highlight Hain's utterance of "truth", bolsters his claims to the Tony succession. ------ Our national disgrace Lies, damned lies and Europhobe papers Leader Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian It has been too long since we heard a Labour cabinet minister strike back at the Europhobia currently spewing from the newspapers of Conrad Black, Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere. Yesterday, that changed. The Welsh secretary Peter Hain was the man who rose to the occasion. In a Financial Times interview, Mr Hain accused "embittered Eurosceptics" of a campaign of "hype, fantasy, scaremongering and downright lies" about the new European constitution drafted by Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing's constitutional convention. Each of Mr Hain's charges was spot on. The only disappointment is that Mr Hain should have been so restrained in his condemnation of a campaign which has been a disgrace to British journalism. Take, as an example, the document that is at the centre of many of the latest wild charges in the Europhobic press. To read the Sun, the Mail and the rest, you might imagine that the EU charter of fundamental rights - which Mr Giscard said yesterday he wants to insert into the draft constitution - is a rough guide to repression, which would confer vast power on a handful of malicious bureaucrats to reduce our ancestral liberties to dust. Anyone who is tempted to believe such a thing should simply take the trouble to read the 22-page charter itself. They will discover that the charter is a disarmingly admirable document. It spells out, in 54 articles, exactly the rights which most people in most modern societies would regard as both decent and basic. It sets out human dignities and freedoms which are the foundations of a liberal society. It enumerates principles of equality, solidarity and justice which would threaten only the bigot, the thief and the tyrant. Though it seeks to make these rights and principles synonymous with the enlarged European Union, it is respectful towards national sovereignty, local identity and individual liberty. To say, as the Sun did yesterday, that it puts 2 million jobs at peril and means that Britain will be ruled from Brussels, is simply untrue. To claim, as the Scotsman did, that it is a blueprint for a European superstate, is a lie. To pretend, as the Mail did, that it will sweep almost 1,000 years of British history into the dustbin of history, is a total fantasy. How anyone can pretend, as the Daily Telegraph did, that the documents that Mr Giscard released this week are worse than expected, is beyond rational understanding. No one who has read the accounts in the Europhobic press over the past two weeks, and who then reads the Giscard drafts themselves, could fail to be amazed by the contrast. Pompous? Sometimes. Platitudinous? Often. Plodding? Yes, more often than one would like. But the death knell of democracy, the end of our nationhood, the shattering of Tony Blair's credibility? Get real. None of this is to suggest that the Giscard draft is either perfectly balanced or beyond criticism. Neither of these claims withstands a careful reading of the texts. But a careful reading is what they have not had. Too many papers - and too many Conservative politicians, to their shame - have tried to mug the Giscard draft rather than to study it. If they had looked at it objectively they would have found weaknesses and dangers, for which changes and improvements are needed. But they would also have found many strengths and much good judgment. An honest commentator would have been struck more by the pragmatic messiness of the document than by its grand pretensions. But then we are not talking about honest commentators. We are talking about fantasists, scaremongerers and, as Mr Hain says, about liars. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:39:27 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:39:27 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Paul Foot on New Labour Message-ID: <00a101c3250d$cbbefd80$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Beating the block vote Paul Foot Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian This time last year I wrote here about the amazing contortions of the supporters of Barry Reamsbottom, then retiring general secretary of the country's largest civil service union, the PCS. In an election to succeed Mr Reamsbottom, Mark Serwotka, an almost unknown candidate and a rank-and-file civil servant in Sheffield, ran as a socialist and won a thumping and remarkable victory against the favoured candidate of the right, Hugh Lanning. To his credit, Mr Lanning immediately accepted the result of the election and agreed to continue working under the newly elected general secretary. Mr Reamsbottom, however, refused to accept the result and coolly continued in office. He even persuaded his servile executive to declare the election result invalid. This was too much even for the high court. Late last summer, a judge confirmed the result of the election, and Mr Reamsbottom was declared to have no further legal standing in the union. An appeal against the court decision was swiftly dropped. Ever since, Mark Serwotka and the elected president of the union, Janice Godrich, also a socialist, have battled against the ferocious opposition of a rightwing majority on the union executive. Their efforts to make the union more democratic, continually opposed by the executive, are coming to a climax. One of the legacies left to the union from the bad old days of Barry Reamsbottom was a switch from the traditional executive elections and conference every year to elections and a conference every two years. Almost as soon as Mark Serwotka took over last year, a powerful initiative was launched to restore the union to its more democratic traditions. Last year's conference, by an enormous majority, well over the necessary two-thirds, voted to ballot the membership for a return to an annual conference and annual executive elections. In the referendums that followed, both proposals were endorsed by substantial majorities of the whole union membership. Annual executive elections were carried in a postal ballot by 31,322 to 18,926, and at annual conference by 28,190 to 22,053. More people voted than in the executive elections the previous year. All voting members in the referendums received strongly worded written recommendations from the executive to vote for the status quo - advice they duly rejected. The executive majority was shocked at this impertinence. Their view was that they had been elected for two years and, whatever their electors might say, had an inalienable right to stay in office for all that period. They employed the unusual, if not unique, move of boycotting their own executive meetings. First, they flatly refused to carry out their legal duty to appoint independent scrutineers for new executive elections. Then, at a meeting on March 13, "apologies for absence" were received from no less than 28 members, leaving only 17. Excuses from the 28 ranged from "childcare responsibilities" to "other union business". The meeting was "inquorate" and therefore could not appoint scrutineers for executive elections. Bound by law to carry out the elections, Mark Serwotka and Janice Godrich were obliged once again to go to the high court, where Mr Justice Pumfrey issued an order that the Electoral Reform Society should run new elections for the union executive. Voting will take place all through June. Two personal points. I despised the practice, perfected by the wealthy snob Woodrow Wyatt when he had a column in the Sunday Mirror, of drawing up lists of candidates in union elections whom he regarded as respectable and calling on his readers to vote accordingly. That is not the job of newspaper columnists. Second, I know and like Mark Serwotka, who, unlike so many union leaders, says what he believes and believes what he says. He pays ?1,000 a month out of his salary to the union's strike fund. But this is not a personal plea on his behalf. It is a simple matter of democracy. The one demand of the Chartists that has not been granted 166 years after it was made was for annual parliaments. Annual elections are plainly more democratic, and plainly more resistant to bureaucracy, slackness and corruption, than biennial ones. Democracy is becoming a dirty word in New Labour circles. More and more Labour councils are surrendering their grip on houses and schools they used to control, and the quango state - once reviled by Blair and Brown - has been reconstituted and refreshed by their administration. The trade union movement remains one of the few constituents of British Labour even occasionally to transfer decisions to its rank and file, and every effort should be made by trade unionists to sustain that principle. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:41:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:41:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland Message-ID: <00a901c3250e$24bad620$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Northern Ireland regiment will be cut to the core Rosie Cowan, Ireland correspondent Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian The army is to press ahead with plans to disband most of the Royal Irish Regiment, despite the IRA's failure to destroy all its weapons and end paramilitary activity, military sources said last night. As revealed in the Guardian last month, the three home battalions are to be phased out as part of the British/Irish government blueprint to help persuade the Provisionals to move on decommissioning. Some of the 3,000 full- and part-time soldiers in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Battalions will be given the chance to transfer to the 1st [general service] Battalion, which served in Iraq under the Belfast-born Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, but most will have to leave the army, according to an army source who spoke to the Guardian in April. Tony Blair and the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, recommended slashing the number of service personnel in Northern Ireland from 14,000 to 5,000 over the next three years, though no regiments were specified. Now it has emerged that an internal memo to senior officers from the general officer commanding in Northern Ireland confirms that the cuts, codenamed Operation Banner, will "inevitably mean the disbandment of the home battalion element of the RIR." Trade union representatives have already been consulted about redundancy packages. Unionists are furious at the dismantling of units they see as heroes in the frontline against terrorism. David Burnside, the hardline South Antrim Ulster Unionist MP, called it "security madness" which must be "resisted at all costs". But Peter Robinson, the Democratic Unionist deputy leader, blamed Ulster Unionists for selling out the RUC and now the RIR. Republicans, who regard the RIR and its forerunners, the Ulster Defence Regiment and the B Specials, as Protestant-biased, will be pleased. The RIR was formed when the Royal Irish Rangers and UDR amalgamated in 1992. Terrorists have murdered 197 UDR and RIR soldiers in the past 30 years. The RIR hit the headlines recently because of the controversy surrounding Col Collins, currently the subject of two separate investigations - one for alleged war crimes in Iraq, the other regarding the overall management of the regiment, which some soldiers claim has a vicious and pervasive bullying culture. Supporters of Col Collins say that the Iraq allegations, made by a US officer, were motivated by spite. Unionists thought the timing of the accusations was suspect, and linked to government plans to get rid of the RIR. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:53:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:53:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: WMDs discovered, at last Message-ID: <00b801c3250f$b6971e40$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field near Maryland Julian Borger in Washington Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria. The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside. The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme. They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post. But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion. Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick. Iraq's failure to come up with paperwork proving the destruction of its biological arsenal was portrayed by the US as evidence of deception in the run-up to the war. In an effort to explain why no chemical or biological weapons had been found in Iraq, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday the regime may have destroyed them before the war. Speaking to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, he said the speed of U.S. advance may have caught Iraq by surprise, but added: "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict." The US germ warfare programme at Fort Detrick was officially wound up in 1969, but the base has maintained a stock of nasty bugs to help maintain America's defences against biological attack. The leading theory about the unsolved anthrax letter attacks in 2001 is that they were carried out by a disgruntled former Fort Detrick employee; equipment found dumped in a pond eight miles from the base has been linked to the crimes. The Fort Detrick clean-up has unearthed over 2,000 tonnes of hazardous waste. The sanitation crews were shocked to find vials containing live bacteria. As well as the vaccine form of anthrax, the discarded biological agents included Brucella melitensis, which causes the virulent flu-like disease brucellosis, and klebsiella, a cause of pneumonia. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:54:19 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:54:19 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US military: forward planning Message-ID: <00c001c3250f$df717e00$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Pentagon was warned over policing Iraq Julian Borger in Washington Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian In the months before the Iraq war the Pentagon ignored repeated warnings that it would need a substantial military police force ready to deploy after the invasion to provide law and order in the postwar chaos, US government advisers and analysts said yesterday. Some 4,000 US military police are now being deployed in Baghdad, but only after most Iraqi government services have been crippled by a wave of looting and arson. The anarchy and crime in the Iraqi streets was predicted by several panels of former ambassadors, soldiers and peacekeeping experts, who advised the Pentagon and the White House while the invasion was being planned. They urged that lessons be learned from previous US-led military interventions and a post-conflict police force be established before the war. Robert Perito, a former diplomat who had designed a similar police mission in Haiti nine years ago, put together a detailed plan on how to deal with postwar lawlessness, warning that regular troops, trained to shoot to kill or retreat, were not right for the job. He wrote a report for the United States Institute for Peace and briefed the defence policy board, a Pentagon advisory panel, in February. He said the board had appeared to agree with his conclusions but no action was taken. "The need for specialised forces was widely anticipated, but they have only just got there and are going to be just in Baghdad," he said. "The damage has already been incalculable. The bombing campaign was conducted in such a way by the air force to meticulously preserve key government facilities, cultural sites, hospitals and other civilian buildings. But as soon as the conflict ended, those facilities were destroyed by looters." Similar warnings and recommendations were made by experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. The Council on Foreign Relations study was overseen by a Republican former defence secretary and member of the defence policy board, James Schlesinger. It was presented to White House officials but its recommendation, that a police force be sent alongside the combat force was not acted on. The breakdown of law and order in Iraq has several precedents in US military history. It resembles the Panama invasion of 1989, where much of the damage to Panama City occurred after combat operations were over. Five years later, in Haiti, the lesson appeared to have been learned, and an international constabulary force, which Mr Perito helped to assemble, was standing by in Puerto Rico to follow US troops into Port-au-Prince. But after the 1995 Dayton peace accord US-led forces in Bosnia were unprepared to deal with a wave of arson, looting and thuggery by Serbs abandoning the suburbs of Sarajevo. Eight years later, in Iraq, Mr Perito said the Pentagon had made a "colossal miscalculation over what they thought the Iraqis would do". "They thought the Iraqis would just get over the trauma of the war and go back to work on the first day," he said. The deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, rejected the criticism, saying the fighting in Iraq was not over. "We need to recognise that this situation is completely different from Haiti or Bosnia or Kosovo, where opposition ceased very soon after our peacekeeping troops arrived," he told Congress last week. While Mr Wolfowitz and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have been at odds with army generals over many aspects of military doctrine, they are in agreement over peacekeeping. Most US military police are reservists who are given just one day's instruction in dealing with civilian crowds, and the US army peacekeeping institute is being closed in September. The state department is consulting other governments over creation of an international police force. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 05:55:19 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:55:19 +0300 Subject: [A-List] China: seeking multipolar world Message-ID: <00c801c32510$02ddca60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> China and Russia look for a counterbalance John Gittings Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian The new president of China, Hu Jintao, has joined President Vladimir Putin of Russia in a call for a "multipolar world" while condemning "the use of force", as he begins a foreign tour designed to revitalise Chinese diplomacy. After a week in Russia Mr Hu will attend the G8 conference in France, where China has been given observer status for the first time. The two presidents are trying to establish a better Sino-Russian understanding which will offset, if not counterbalance, the predominance of the US in the post-Iraqi-war world. Meeting in Moscow yesterday, they said that they stood for "a multipolar, just and democratic world order" on the basis of international law. In another thrust at US unilateralism, they called for a peaceful solution on the Korean peninsula, saying scenarios "of forceful pressure or use of force are unacceptable". They also said that the UN should be given the "central role" in Iraq's reconstruction. Significantly, before he left home Mr Hu called for more military modernisation of China. His senior military advisers appear to have been impressed - and shocked - by the White House's pre-emptive strategy, and now believe that China must do more to hold its own. But Chinese diplomacy is still based on seeking good relations with the US, at least in the medium term, and its criticism of the occupation of Iraq has been muted. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 06:21:24 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 15:21:24 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Wilson plot Message-ID: <00c901c32513$a7f0fa60$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Here we go again, more smears directed at Harold Wilson. For what purpose? He really must hold some symbolic importance to have inspired all of this effort. Last year we had Joe Haines recycling some old crap about Wilson and "Lady Falkender" -- now it's "Lord" Bernard Donoughue's turn. He, of course, is better remembered as a member of the board of Mirror Group when that organisation was headed by Robert Maxwell. Like his other director colleagues, Donoughue detected no financial wrongdoing whilst taking the Maxwell shilling. Donoughue has published a book recounting his memories of the Wilson/Callaghan era before: "Prime Minister: the conduct of policy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan", published in 1987. In that volume he recounts an interesting episode during Callaghan's tenure, in which IMF documents passed through No. 10 Downing street stating that the socialist government of Portugal should not be enabled to escape from a financial plight requiring IMF intervention, of the kind imposed upon Britain the year earlier (1976). However, such memories may be harder for him to place, given his devotion to more weighty matters like Wilson's "Walter Mitty" characteristics. Strangely enough, Guardian journalist and former US naval officer Andrew Roth published a biography in 1977: "Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty", in which appeared scurrilous rumours about Wilson's "affairs". Wilson sued and Roth was forced to withdraw the book from publication, paying undisclosed damages into the bargain. But the "Walter Mitty" smear lives on. ----- Wilson had secret plan for vanishing act if he lost 1974 election Julian Glover Wednesday May 28, 2003 The Guardian Harold Wilson had to be prevented from carrying out a secret plan to disappear in a snowstorm on election night in February 1974, one of his leading aides has claimed. In a scheme that reeks of the paranoia of the later Wilson years and has echoes of the faked death of the Labour minister John Stonehouse, the Labour leader intended to vanish from the political scene to avoid the public humiliation of losing to Edward Heath. As the press waited to greet the future prime minister after the close of polls on February 28, Wilson intended to switch hotels under the cover of darkness before diverting the official Heathrow-bound plane to a small airstrip in rural Bedfordshire and then vanish by car to a secret hideaway. In the event, Wilson only carried out the first part of his plan, moving in the middle of the night from his established base at the Adelphi to the smaller and less salubrious Golden Cross. He was then persuaded to continue his flight to London when it became clear that Labour was unexpectedly on course to form the new government. The revelation comes in a biography, called The Heat of the Kitchen, by Bernard Donoughue, the former head of Wilson's policy unit. Lord Donoughue, who went on to work with Wilson at Downing Street before the prime minister's surprise resignation in 1976, was with him in Liverpool on polling day and helped to convince him to carry on to London, where Wilson returned to No 10 three days later. The escape plan - part of what Lord Donoughue calls the "Walter Mitty" atmosphere surrounding Wilson in his later years - was a reaction to opinion polls putting the Tories narrowly ahead at the close of the crucial general election, called by Edward Heath in the wake of the three-day week. Wilson, desperate to shake off memories of his defeat by Heath four years earlier, appears to have been unable to cope with the prospect of facing the public after a second election defeat. Lord Donoughue recounts how the Labour leader planned to "slip away unseen in our plane, indicating to the air traffic controllers that he was going to London, but during the flight to divert to a small airfield in Bedfordshire. Wilson would then race away by car to some secret hideaway". "He had an old road map on his lap," Lord Donoughue continues. "At dinner, Wilson further developed his escape plans with mentions of false trails, diversionary cars and planes, as well as more plans for fleeing in the invisible aeroplane. So many complications were introduced, so many bluffs and covers that I could not work out how or when I was supposed to travel back to London, if at all". When Lord Donoughe put the escape plan - which he describes as "a pathetic fantasy in a major politician" - to Wilson's controversial political secretary Marcia Williams, she described it as "schoolboy behaviour". "You will be on the plane to London, like everybody else, including him," she said. Even when early results suggested a strong showing for Labour, writes Lord Donoughue, "Wilson began to implement his strange escape plans". Only at dawn was the Labour leader persuaded to return to the Adelphi hotel and hold a press conference in response to the the Tories' poor showing. Harold Wilson's anxiety about the outcome of the election was justified by a freak result that saw the Conservatives win more votes, but Labour the most seats. The result was a three-day stand-off in which Edward Heath, who won 37.9% of the vote against Labour's 37.1% but took three fewer seats, remained in No 10 while he attempted to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe's Liberal party. Though Thorpe was tempted, his MPs rejected the deal and Heath gave up the attempt to cling on to power. Wilson fought and won a second election later in the year only to leave office unexpectedly in 1976. He was made a life peer in 1983 and died in 1995. Lord Donoughue also describes the former prime minister's strange relationship with Marcia Williams. "In my hearing Marcia threatened to 'destroy' Wilson, tapping her handbag ominously," he writes. On one occasion as prime minister, Wilson called from a public payphone in the Oxford Union to ask him to drive to her house and "pull the telephone wires out of the wall to stop her speaking to the press". From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Wed May 28 07:03:46 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:03:46 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Northern Ireland: loyalist anti-racists References: <003501c32506$51cfa4e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <01bd01c32519$934182a0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> Could I ask John (or Michael) what we are supposed to make of this? JD ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Keaney" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:45 PM Subject: [A-List] Northern Ireland: loyalist anti-racists > Courtesy of John O'Neill via Marxmail: > > > PUP campaigns to drive racists out of Ballymena > > Henry McDonald, Ireland editor > Sunday May 25, 2003 > The Observer > > They chant 'No surrender to the IRA' at England internationals and fly the > Ulster flag, the symbol of Protestant loyalism, alongside the Cross of St > George. They even come on 'solidarity tours' during the Northern Ireland > marching season, hoping to meet idols such as the loyalist terrorist Johnny > 'Mad Dog' Adair. But now the far-right neo-Nazis of Britain are being told > they are not welcome in the staunchest loyalist town in Ulster and capital > of Ian Paisley's Bible belt - Ballymena. > > The man leading the campaign to stop English-based far-right groups > establishing a base in the province is a former loyalist killer who now > supports the peace process. > > Over the past three months there have been attacks on houses rented by > nurses from the Philippines and Romanian economic migrants in the Co Antrim > town. > > In response, the ex-Ulster Volunteer Force prisoner Billy McCaughey, and > colleagues in the Progressive Unionist Party, PUP, have come on to the > streets to drive the neo-Nazis out. > > Standing under a street sign covered in race hate leaflets, McCaughey points > to a slogan from the National Front. It reads: 'Proud to be British and > white.' 'I'm proud to be British too,' he says, 'but you don't have to be > white to be British. Even in my most sectarian days I was never a racist.' > > His 'sectarian days' began while he was a serving Special Branch officer in > the Royal Ulster Constabulary by day and a member of the Ulster Volunteer > Force at night. He was sentenced to a life sentence for the 1977 murder of > Catholic chemist William Strathhearn. In the Maze prison he met Gusty > Spence, David Ervine and other UVF leaders who were to push the loyalist > movement towards a ceasefire and a compromise with the republicans. > > Since the neo-Nazi presence emerged in his home town, McCaughey has been > concerned to stop young loyalists joining organisations such as the National > Front and the White National Party, a more extreme offshoot of the British > National Party. > > 'These groups can sound attractive to young loyalists because their rhetoric > is so pro-British and pro-unionist,' he says. 'But these people are no > friends of Ulster loyalists. The PUP believes in a pluralist United > Kingdom.'What's more, the UVF centres its history on the Somme and the > sacrifice of Ulster people in two world wars. In the Second World War, > Ulster people fought against Hitler and the Nazis, and now these neo-Nazis > want to make common cause with us.' McCaughey said he and fellow PUP members > have held meetings in Ballymena to persuade UVF members to have nothing to > do with the neo-fascist groups that have descended on the town. > > Since the PUP door-to-door campaign against the Far Right began around > Easter, there have been no further attacks on immigrant workers in the town. > Not all loyalist terror groups and their political allies are as hostile > towards the English Far Right as the UVF and PUP. The Loyalist Volunteer > Force maintains connections with the neo-Nazi terrorist organisation Combat > 18. Until recently sections of the UDA also had links with C18. > > > > > > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Wed May 28 07:42:52 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 16:42:52 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Northern Ireland: loyalist anti-racists References: <003501c32506$51cfa4e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> <01bd01c32519$934182a0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> Message-ID: <00e701c3251f$09139cc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> James asks: Could I ask John (or Michael) what we are supposed to make of this? ----- Good question. I posted it here because I thought it was an interesting development, if not entirely related to my main analytical focus re NI. But on reflection this does appear to further isolate unionism from what has always been a major source of backing in the "mainland" -- the empire loyalist tendency, albeit the bovver boot division. Nevertheless, having to define "Britishness" in such a way as to differentiate themselves clearly from those who are amongst the few, if not the only, prepared to support unionism opens up a potentially dangerous (for them) can of worms which ultimately undercuts their whole political and ideological rationale. To put it simply, if the only people in "Britain" supporting vigorous defence of unionism are racist empire loyalist skinheads, what does this tell us about the social basis of the union? That the PUP is tackling this is a credit to them, of course, but that they have to tackle it at all ought, at the very least, to lead them to ask themselves deep questions about their whole raison d'etre. Additionally, and even more fundamentally, the British state went to great lengths to see off the sort of progressivist policies of the PUP when there was a chance of their enactment by the pre-Kinnock Labour Party. Why Ervine and co. think they stand a better chance of progressive, redistributionist policy in Britain than in Ireland is deserving of a very detailed answer. Here they could quite easily learn from the Scottish experience, where an imposed Thatcherism merely accelerated the disintegration of the status quo. I can see why the uses to which this report might be put could cause some anxiety, however. With respect to Britain and Northern Ireland, it could lead to the sort of rationalisations employed by e.g. Tom Nairn in his 1977 "Break-up of Britain", where he advocates Ulster nationalism rather than reunification. Which, I suppose, is an ever-present possibility, tempered by the even more blindingly obvious fact that an independent "Ulster" is wholly unworkable and quite undesirable from the point of view of British state, which is instead engaged in managing the current, slow process of transition with the Irish state, leading to eventual reunification (as I see it). Michael From bar at idirect.com Wed May 28 08:44:36 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 10:44:36 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <006401c324be$3c72f9a0$0200a8c0@stan> <043801c324cf$4c96fe60$48954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Message-ID: <003101c32527$bb39de70$f8009ad8@Chris> I agree with Ralph. In the communist party I am in now and in Trotskyist groups I hung around with for years before very few members had actually read Marx and even fewer any of Lenin. What they were reading were books or pamphlets explaining Marx but because they never really understood why Marx began his analysis in the first place, the anger about society that was always in his writing along with the humour and razor sharp analysis, they easil fell prey to all sorts of bourgeois conceits and prejudices about the relevance of Marx and they never understood what revolutionary politics was all about. One of the main complaints inside my party is that we lack as much relevance as we would like because not enough of the members have an understanding of Marx. And too often you hear it said "It is too difficult for ordianry workers to read or understand. They need books explaining Marx to them instead of reading it themselves. it was as though they consider workers too stupid to cope with it, an attitude which reflects the prejudices of the bourgeois culture around them. It leads to a division between intellectuals who read Marx and workers who (like little children) have to be talked down to about it. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Johansen" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:12 AM Subject: Re: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Fair enough, irony noted, but I don't know why anyone would go into a > contextual exposition, select a paragraph at random, and try to assert the > difficulty in understanding it without regard for what went before and what > came after. Are you suggesting that this is really all that difficult if you > pay attention and follow Marx's argument? Well, I know I struggled with it > on first several readings, especially the whole first part about the > commodity form that you quoted from, mainly because its difficulty had > become mystified in my mind, and I could re-read many times more and still > get a lot out of it. In fact it would be good if Lou's website set up a few > years ago for a discussion of Cap I had gotten off the ground. Several > people volunteered to moderate, Juriaan Bendien for one, but couldn't find > time for it. I can't expand too much on this without a lot of thought and it > may sound to some kind of didactic or doctrinaire, but you I'm sure > nevertheless would agree: my impression, a strong impression, is that a > great many who followed along in the Marxist movement but had never really > studied or understood or attempted to apply what Marx was saying were the > first to fall by the wayside or come up with reformist and distorted views > on the world, especially after the euphoria of the sixties had worn off. > > Ralph > > .---- Original Message ----- > From: "bon moun" > To: > Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 4:09 PM > Subject: RE: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > > > > "The same commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously appear in both > > forms in the same expression of value. These forms rather exclude each > > other as polar opposites...Whether a commodity is in the relative form > > or its opposite, the equivalent form, entirely depends on the position > > it holds in the expression of value. That is, it depends on whether it > > is the commodity whose value is being expressed, or the commodity in > > which value is being expressed." > > > > Chosen completely at random from Capital I. > > > > I am truly an obtuse fuck. I went back and forth most of one day trying > > to get my head around relative and equivalent forms, and never once > > caught the literary rapture therein. > > > > I am thankful that people condescended to me to help me understand > > Marx... not being a working-class ubermensch and all. > > > > As Macdonald said, ya gotta learn to love that yarn, and it's a hard > > love. > > > > > > > > > > > > From bar at idirect.com Wed May 28 08:57:55 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 10:57:55 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <00c601c324df$c882d430$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> <04bd01c324e5$da61f770$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <005001c32529$991876b0$f8009ad8@Chris> John Cleese"s humour reflects English humour generally. When I watched fawlty towers and his bashing Manuel around the head and saying "hes from barceleona" the humour was in the fact that Cleese was meant to be portrayed as a redneck idiot with racist and fascist tendencies. That was the joke. Wheh he insulted Germans or Americans it was a commentary on the English trend of dissing anybody not English. The Monty Python crew"s most famous example of this was a parody of a TV game show in which the audience wouls send in their best insults of foreigners. After going through "filthy gypos (Egyptions), fat Americans, irish potato farmers the prize was awarded for "the best insult of the program -- wait for it -- "Belgians". No description required. The whole point was to make fun of racism and prejudice by carrying it to its extreme. In Fawlty Towers we have a character much like Archie Bunker in the US comedy All In the Family, which was also a brilliant comedy exposing the narrow-mindedness of a certain type of American worker. All contradiction and ignorance. That it was funny never made me think the program was adovcating prejudice. it was a complete send-up of racists. I always though Clees was trying to do the same thing. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 2:53 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "James Daly" > > > *************************************** > > > > Do I hear someone say "Lighten up, Arundhati!"...? > > I rest my case. > > JD > > These situations are rather different ones. Cleese is not in charge of > running the military in these countries, etc. > I am going to stop there, because I can't really believe that you are > comparing the evil of Rumsfeld's "humour", or indeed Rumsfeld himself, with > Cleese. If you think these matters are the same, we have nothing to say. > > If you indeed "rest your case", Cleese is found "not guilty". > > Macdonald > > > > > From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Wed May 28 09:01:42 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 16:01:42 +0100 Subject: [A-List] re: John Cleese (and imperialist humour) Message-ID: <024601c3252a$0ca06c00$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> I should point out that I spoke in my first sentence on the thread of "a team of *social* chauvinists" (emphasis added). This only adds to the smugness with which they view the rest of the world. Some listers have referred to differences in the politics of individual members of Python. But the politics of the SDP were those of the early Blair, in preparation for whom the SDP held onto the right. I often contrast Python in my mind with the ultra-brilliant but also politically faultless comedy of the TV political impersonator Rory Bremner, who is probably not seen outside Britain and Ireland, but who for decades has been the one-man and formidable opposition to Blair and New Labour. He has built up his team, Bremner, Bird and Fortune, with others such as Annette Crosbie who does a wonderful Queen Elizabeth. There's comedy which comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, and which does inspire the hope and bonding which several contributors to the thread have urged is so precious. To join with those who have reminisced about good comedic moments, one of my favourites was on another probably untravelled programme, "Have I Got News for You". The supercilious snooty compere Angus Deayton conjures up the image of a hypothetical but typical Irishman "with a pig under his arm". His teammate Paul Merton protests, and a genuinely surprised Deayton inquires haughtily "Well isn't that what you think of when you think of an Irishman?" His little teammate on the other side Ian Hislop (of Private Eye) interrupts devastatingly. "I've never seen an Irishman with a pig under his arm, but I've seen a pig with an Irishman under his arm. He was a member of the East Midlands crime squad". (Their custodial exploits had been in the news for some time). James Daly This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From annewilliamson at msn.com Wed May 28 09:17:55 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 11:17:55 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <00c601c324df$c882d430$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> <04bd01c324e5$da61f770$20fa5718@comintern> <005001c32529$991876b0$f8009ad8@Chris> Message-ID: <012301c3252c$514e98c0$c9b7fea9@anne> Thank you, Chris! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Black" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 10:57 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese > John Cleese"s humour reflects English humour generally. When I watched > fawlty towers and his bashing Manuel around the head and saying "hes from > barceleona" the humour was in the fact that Cleese was meant to be portrayed > as a redneck idiot with racist and fascist tendencies. That was the joke. > Wheh he insulted Germans or Americans it was a commentary on the English > trend of dissing anybody not English. The Monty Python crew"s most famous > example of this was a parody of a TV game show in which the audience wouls > send in their best insults of foreigners. After going through "filthy gypos > (Egyptions), fat Americans, irish potato farmers the prize was awarded for > "the best insult of the program -- wait for it -- "Belgians". No > description required. The whole point was to make fun of racism and > prejudice by carrying it to its extreme. > > In Fawlty Towers we have a character much like Archie Bunker in the US > comedy All In the Family, which was also a brilliant comedy exposing the > narrow-mindedness of a certain type of American worker. All contradiction > and ignorance. That it was funny never made me think the program was > adovcating prejudice. it was a complete send-up of racists. I always though > Clees was trying to do the same thing. > > Chris > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Macdonald Stainsby" > To: > Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 2:53 AM > Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "James Daly" > > > > > *************************************** > > > > > > Do I hear someone say "Lighten up, Arundhati!"...? > > > I rest my case. > > > JD > > > > These situations are rather different ones. Cleese is not in charge of > > running the military in these countries, etc. > > I am going to stop there, because I can't really believe that you are > > comparing the evil of Rumsfeld's "humour", or indeed Rumsfeld himself, > with > > Cleese. If you think these matters are the same, we have nothing to say. > > > > If you indeed "rest your case", Cleese is found "not guilty". > > > > Macdonald > > > > > > > > > > > > > From benpincas at isuisse.com Wed May 28 10:57:57 2003 From: benpincas at isuisse.com (benpincas at isuisse.com) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 18:57:57 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour In-Reply-To: <001201c3250c$f48be530$d50fc8d5@salaamo1rw4n2e> Message-ID: Has no no one heard of the word "propaganda"? Charlie Chaplin had when he made the film,: "the great dictator". Strange that those who call themselves leftists should enjoy liberation movemnts and themselves being held up to ridicule. How can one claim one is a good analyst when one does not even realise who and what is the butt of the joke? James Daly's points are very good. The problem is that the media are cutting out leftist humour. One of the best political satire programs on german tv (Scheibenwischer) has now been dropped, and what are we left with? The old right wing SNEER humour to which pavlovian audiences can laugh and sneer their heads off. _____________________________________________________________________ Envie de discuter en "live" avec vos amis ? T?l?charger MSN Messenger http://www.ifrance.com/_reloc/m la 1?re messagerie instantan?e de France From blackmore at balcab.ch Wed May 28 12:11:27 2003 From: blackmore at balcab.ch (Salaam Blackmore) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 20:11:27 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour References: Message-ID: <006e01c32544$8e7e1fa0$d50fc8d5@salaamo1rw4n2e> Yes, but be fair...I rather like the German Turkish comedian, who pretends to be making fun of his Turkish fellow-countrymen, but in reality, is taking the mickey out of those Germans who continue to cling to an imagined stereotype. Salaam ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 6:57 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour > Has no no one heard of the word "propaganda"? Charlie Chaplin had when he > made the film,: "the great dictator". > > Strange that those who call themselves leftists should enjoy > liberation movemnts and themselves being held up to ridicule. > How can one claim one is a good analyst when one does not even realise who > and what is the butt of the joke? > > James Daly's points are very good. > > The problem is that the media are cutting out leftist humour. One of the > best political satire programs on german tv (Scheibenwischer) has now been > dropped, and what are we left with? The old right wing SNEER humour to > which pavlovian audiences can laugh and sneer their heads off. > > > > _____________________________________________________________________ > Envie de discuter en "live" avec vos amis ? T?l?charger MSN Messenger > http://www.ifrance.com/_reloc/m la 1?re messagerie instantan?e de France > > > From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 28 12:32:41 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (sherrynstan at igc.org) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:32:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: <1212030.1054146763102.JavaMail.nobody@wamui06.slb.atl.earthlink.net> <> And too often you hear it said "It is too difficult for ordianry workers to read or understand. They need books explaining Marx to them instead of reading it themselves. it was as though they consider workers too stupid to cope with it, an attitude which reflects the prejudices of the bourgeois culture around them. It leads to a division between intellectuals who read Marx and workers who (like little children) have to be talked down to about it.<> No one is suggesting that people don't read Marx (and all the others). Tie some pie pans to that scarecrow and it will keep away more birds. We are saying that when people read it, it needs to be a collective process, as most learning is. And we are saying that it is challenging. I'm some factory workers' kid who spent most of his adult life in the Army, with no advanced degrees, and I therefore reject completely any false dichotomy between worker and intellectual. Academics learn with the help of those who have gone before them, too. Perhaps there are geniuses here who read it alone and leapt over the translations, the outdated language, the obscure references, and all the internalized impediments of bourgeois epistemology, but the rest of us mere mortals needed help. From Waistline2 at aol.com Wed May 28 12:43:36 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:43:36 EDT Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: >I agree with Ralph. In the communist party I am in now and in Trotskyists groups I hung around with for years before very few members had actually read Marx and even fewer any of Lenin. What they were reading were books or pamphlets explaining Marx but because they never really understood why Marx began his analysis in the first place, the anger about society that was always in his writing along with the humor and razor sharp analysis, they easily fell prey to all sorts of bourgeois conceits and prejudices about the relevance of Marx and they never understood what revolutionary politics was all about. < Comment When we formed the Communist League in the early 1970s a major push was made to make the study of the writings of Marx and Engels assessable to all members. By the time the Communist Labor Party was formed we had created a major study guide called the study of Marxism-Leninism, which ran about 40 pages - 81/2 by 11. Frederick Engels writings were always studied extensively and Anti-Duhring was perhaps the Detroit areas favorite book. Major writings of Karl Marx was covered and broken down into sections with questions along with Lenin's major writings. A generous amount of J.V. Stalin's writings were included - every major writing on the national-colonial question, expositions on Leninism and industrialization, along with major writings by Chairman Mao. There was study guilds on fascism, imperialism and authors like Leontiev. For reasons of our peculiar development virtually everyone nationwide had a copy of "The Civil War in the US" by Marx and Engels, "History of the CPSU (B)" - 1939, Stalin's Speeches on the American Communist Party and Fascism and Social Revolution by R. Palme Dutt. >From roughly 1971 until 1985 a week did no go by when I was not studying some major writings of whom we referred to as the masters. From 1985 through roughly 1996 I occasionally studied from Marx and Engels and owning Lenin's 45 volumes made reading his works a pastime. I gave away my 13-volume set of Stalin's work to comrade in the South who lacked a library. Between 1985 and 1995 much of my reading was on contemporary literature dealing with economic and politics and for about two years a passion to study Sumerian history griped me. From 1970 until 2001 I was involved in all kinds of political activity and numerous organizations, with a more or less non-political three years between 1995-1998. During the "non-political years" I could not escape trade union activity - although I tried, and this was a period where our Local Union 51 engaged Chrysler in the longest strike action since the 1950s. My partisan and to a degree sectarian politics led me to read some of Leon Trotsky writings but he has never made much since to me in theory and in practical assessment of social movements. During the early 1980s I was charged with teaching an American labor history class for comrades and would edit much of our literature and went on to Edit the Southern Advocate - with my wife, for a couple of years. The problem with education of any sort is that one has to study. To educate or attempt to educate someone means understanding your "target market." Our experience proved to us that most people would assimilate the Marxist method in a dogmatic manner and achieve creativity with experience and years of study. There were times when - to the horror of the General Secretary of the Party, we used a method in Detroit where we taught comrade how to memorize portions of Marx and books like "On Contradiction" and "On Practice" by Chairman Mao. This was in Detroit only and comrades nationwide thought we had lost our marbles. We favored memorization among the industrial workers to conform to the repetitive nature of assembly line work. For example I worked in an engine assembly plant and for 10 years on the line that cycled work in 13 -18 seconds increments. Comrades in assemble would forget what they read without memorization, although the General Secretary insisted that we stop this method. We have always had a subtle distinction between communist workers and Marxist workers. Many communist workers who are going to fight and die for a better world are not going to read Capital although they will buy the books, sit in study groups and occasionally glance inside the jacket cover. They become communist workers from a materialist outlook and stubborn class stance about the nature of society. In Detroit we have always has a sizable section of intellectual, who happen to be attorneys and many of them were absolutely proletarian Marxist in their outlook, behavior and fighting capacity. The women amongst the proletariat tended to study Marx the least in the last period and this no doubt had much to do with child rearing and inequality. The women amongst the intelligencia played second fiddle to no one. The minority comrades gravitated more to the writings of Engels and Lenin or doctrine, and Stalin on the National Colonial Question. The Anglo-American comrades gravitated more towards Marx economic theory, Stalin on the National-Colonial Question and Lenin on questions of the art of insurrection. In early 2000 I made a commitment to myself to restudy all of the 75 volumes of Marx or as much of this material I could get my hands on because I was slated to retire in October 2001, which I did. Explaining something to anyone is a much different process than assimilating that, which is being explained. My writings tend to focus on the technological aspects of the mode of production for reasons of personal development and the fact that we are leaving a period of time when much attention was focused on capital as a mode of accumulation, i.e. what is called by the bourgeois intellectual neo-liberal policy or the ascendancy of the speculative sector of capital to the helm that writes the agenda for the world total social capital. That a sector writes the agenda for the total social capital is a formulation from Marx and Engels. Memory fails me and this formulation might be located in "Revolution and Counter Revolution In Germany." This is stated because the Marxist approach is the approach used by Marx and Engels. Approach means approach - standpoint, not conclusion. I flatly call this "Neo-colonial" rhetoric a bourgeois intellectual proposition because no one can prove to the world masses that the last period of history has been anything less than rampant terror and fascism as imperialism extended its financial tentacles deep into the lifeblood of the world peoples. History should has taught us by now that concepts like the "Third World" or "race" is the pressure of the bourgeoisie in the ideological sphere. But enough of this, I accept the utter defeat - my personal defeat, of the proletarian Marxist by the holy alliance of the bourgeoisie in the last period. It is a law of bourgeois politics that the proletarian Marxist must first be defeated in the ideological sphere to effect their material defeat and routing. At the end of the day Bolshevikism - in its modern form, cannot - not, reassert itself. The comrade who raised the question of Marxism and does not have the time to study it is doing them self a disservice. Personally I am open to anyone in my practical activity but choose not to waste too much time with anyone that feels Marx and Engels and the masters are not worth reading. My responses are written solely to make our history retrievable and give experience that others can use. Also I read Chris and Stan comments, which I respect, but it is very clear that both write in a manner outside that of one taught in organizations of communist. Chris tends to be diffuse and academic pretending that words like "impressionistic" and "determinist" actually means something to someone who has broken with bourgeois ideology and the bourgeois inheritance of philosophy 30 years ago. Stan tends to bleed over history and manifest in my opinion a specifically Southern cultural phenomenon of profound regret. I understand why this is so while the dialectic of how this is formed and manifest eludes me. Then again I am of the imperial sector and gotten too old for pretense. Stan is going to break both his shoulders carrying the weight of history. His passion is profound and moving. I encountered these bourgeois concepts like "impressionistic" and "determinist" long ago during a personal relationship with Professor Cornel West who dedicated Chapter 4 of his first book to me and the debate we were conducting twenty years ago. At the time he was 30 years old and I, 31 and very much enjoyed hanging out with him in the New York and partying together. His criticism was of my "Stalinism" and dogmatic materialism. He later conceded that he was premature on his conception of philosophic materialism. I claim no all embracing truth or superior knowledge. I do reference the writing of Marx and Engels as a way of life and believe much of the writings on Marxline, Pen-L and even the A-List have very little to nothing to do with the approach of Marx. But then again I am "determinist" and "dogmatic." It is impossible for an oppressed class to assimilate class logic in a non-dogmatic manner. The creativity comes later . . . much later, but faster today than in the last period of history. Any worker or child that chooses can understand the logic of Capital if it is studied in a group and presented in the concepts of the ideological framework in which people think things out. For example, "advanced robotics destroys the value in commodities." Our intelligencia screams, "No it is more complicated than that and you leave out the self mediating role of capital as spoken of by Marx in his assessment of the abstract character of labor. Here is the key to the self perpetuating nature of capital as a historically evolved social relations." When the workers look at them crossed eyed and leave never to return they are called stupid or "not yet ripe." The question for proletarian Marxist is always insurgency and training the next generation in the Marxist tradition, while learning to lead the workers in their actual struggles. This is not possible if one fails to appreciate the art of the class struggle and the ideological forms specific to their own working class. On this question of applying what Marx has written there is no way to apply Capital to our social activity. It simply is not possible. Only doctrine can be applied. Marx wrote that when theory grips the masses it becomes a material forces. Theory does not grip the masses as a wonderful theoretical postulate but as it is manifest as a fighting doctrine dealing with class conflict. How do we organize to achieve whatever we are fighting for is a question of doctrine and art. Theory informs but one cannot apply the science of why society changes on the basis of the material power of production to the social struggle. One hundred fifty years of assertion proves this to anyone that has read the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 11341 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jcraven at clark.edu Wed May 28 12:55:14 2003 From: jcraven at clark.edu (Craven, Jim) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 11:55:14 -0700 Subject: [A-List] FW: Federal Court Hearing on Burial Ground continues Message-ID: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2003 Contact: (509) 429-3508 (914) 414-4343 State Claims Surveillance Camera Discovered Near Spiritual Encampment Put There to Protect Remains; Tribe Never Told About Camera in their Burial; Expert on Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Testifies on Federal Law; Vice Chair of Yankton Sioux Tribe Expresses Deep Disappointment at the Corps & State The Ihanktonwan were back in Federal court in Sioux Falls again on Tuesday for continuance of evidentiary hearings on the bulldozing of their ancestral remains, squaring off against the state of South Dakota and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Testimony of witnesses for the tribe continued throughout the day. One young Ihanktonwan man, Harris Baker, was called to testify about the discovery of video surveillance equipment belonging to South Dakota Department of Game Fish and Parks that was hidden in the woods and aimed at the Ihanktonwan spiritual encampment. Ihanktonwan people have expressed how upset they were that their ceremonies may have been recorded illegally, without their knowledge, by the state of South Dakota. If it was that the state installed the camera to protect the burial grounds and provide security, as claimed at the hearing yesterday, and was not meant to record tribal activities, the Ihanktonwan are asking why they were never informed about the presence of the video surveillance unit. Tribal people wonder whether the camera was truly meant to protect the burials and from whom the state was protecting the burials, since it has been in the process of bulldozing and desecrating the burial areas ever since it began construction. Baker was also questioned about witnessing the presence of bones outside the "crosshatch quadrant," a limited area within the burial Site C that the state and Corps have been asserting contain the only bones in the burial grounds. The Tribe then called Sherry Hutt, an expert on cultural resource protection acts like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Archaeological Resources Protection Act, National Environmental Protection Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act, the responsibilities of agencies to adhere to these laws, and their violations. She talked about the difference between an "inadvertent" and "intentional" discovery of human remains, stating that an "inadvertent discovery" under NAGPRA occurs whenever remains are found and the parties do not agree on how to handle them. All removal of dirt must cease and a 30-day waiting period is required before any more digging is allowed. Vice Chairman of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, Robert Cournoyer, went to Sioux Falls with other members of the Business and Claims Committee to witness firsthand what was happening. He stated that he was not at all pleased with what the state and Army Corps is doing to the tribe, that they have been thwarting the Tribe's efforts at respectful treatment of their ancestors since the remains were first discovered at North Point. At the same time, he said he wholeheartedly supported everyone from the Tribe who has been involved in the process since the very beginning. Expressing that litigation is not always the best way to resolve matters, he felt that it was what the Tribe was forced to do at that moment. Cournoyer ended by saying, "Indian people are always dealing with these kind of things, we always have to defend ourselves. But Indian people are survivors and somehow or other we'll survive. We've survived many atrocities, so we'll survive this atrocity the state and Corps are doing to us too, and we'll come out on top down the road. We're going to come out on top." Contact: (509) 429-3508 (914) 414-4343 --11-- From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 28 13:43:15 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 12:43:15 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour References: <002901c32503$f026cc70$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> <001201c3250c$f48be530$d50fc8d5@salaamo1rw4n2e> Message-ID: <006b01c32551$6377cc40$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Salaam Blackmore" > Well, a good laugh - even a snigger - has long been a useful weapon in the > human armoury. When my father died, I was a six-year old boy. He asked to be cremated and to have his ashes dispersed around the property that had belonged to his mother and the family before that, a beachfront property. It had (and still has, though it no longer belongs to the family) a beautiful view overlooking a cliff-face approximately 40-50 feet high and above a rocky beachfront below. The day after the funeral, people moped around the house, putting ashes here or there, trying to come to some personal resolution of the situation we were in. My siblings are all much older that I: from 12 to 22 years my senior. One of my brothers went down the rock-built stairs to the beach. At the top of the cliff were large bushes about the height of a good sized man or woman. Another brother tossed some of our fathers ashes in the wind over the cliff face. A second or two later, from below came a bellow "HEY!!" Dead silence for about a second. Then, my brother in law, a man who was Canadian because he had dodged the Vietnam War, buest out with a beautiful laugh I can still hear to this day. Everyone started laughing. I was outraged. I was six and my father just died-- how could anyone laugh? Wasn't that disrepsectful? But a family member got down on knee and said "When things are really bad, and emotion gets really thick, sometimes you just need a release". The laughing fits took a few minutes. I calmed down immediately, and noticed the air change. It's the single greatest memory I have of that day. I wish for more people to laugh in times of great pain, irregardless of how and why. Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps you human. Macdonald From michele at maui.net Wed May 28 13:38:05 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 09:38:05 -1000 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <20030528.055149.3680.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: <003701c32550$aa5f75a0$97954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Viewing their humor from the left, my favorite Python scenes are the upper class twits, the peasants working the land who say when a put off King Arthur reminds them, "I am your king", "Oh bug off, we ain't got no king", which I'm sure they hadn't, and the knight who's fighting the giant, being successively sliced into a paraplegic until, holding his sword in his teeth he's still yelling something like, "Come on, try me, I'll wipe the place up with you". Hard to beat the Frenchman though - "I fart in your general direction". Ralph ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Farmelant" To: Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 11:51 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese > > > On Tue, 27 May 2003 23:53:21 -0700 Macdonald Stainsby > writes: > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "James Daly" > > > > > *************************************** > > > > > > Do I hear someone say "Lighten up, Arundhati!"...? > > > I rest my case. > > > JD > > > > These situations are rather different ones. Cleese is not in charge > > of > > running the military in these countries, etc. > > I am going to stop there, because I can't really believe that you > > are > > comparing the evil of Rumsfeld's "humour", or indeed Rumsfeld > > himself, with > > Cleese. If you think these matters are the same, we have nothing to > > say. > > > > If you indeed "rest your case", Cleese is found "not guilty". > > This whole discussion sounds like a bloody Python routine to me! > > Jim F. > > > > > Macdonald > > > > > > > > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! > Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! > Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! > > From michele at maui.net Wed May 28 13:49:25 2003 From: michele at maui.net (Ralph Johansen) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 09:49:25 -1000 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <00bc01c32501$6d75d660$0200a8c0@stan> Message-ID: <007701c32552$3fe62820$97954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Okay, agreed, and I'm interested to see whether anyone tuning in might want to start a discussion group on Cap I. If so, good, I'm sure it can happen, and if not that's also some sort of message. In my case, my parents were second generation in the US, seeking their opportunities and not proles. Their parents had been loggers, carpenters [a red-bearded Norwegian socialist], farmers and a clerk in a London land company which was swiping midwest land alongside railway rights of way, land he bought into for a song during the depression, I have discovered. All dodgers to be sure. Ralph ----- Original Message ----- From: "bon moun" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:10 AM Subject: RE: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > <>I can't expand too much on this without a lot of thought and it > may sound to some kind of didactic or doctrinaire, but you I'm sure > nevertheless would agree: my impression, a strong impression, is that a > great many who followed along in the Marxist movement but had never > really > studied or understood or attempted to apply what Marx was saying were > the > first to fall by the wayside or come up with reformist and distorted > views > on the world, especially after the euphoria of the sixties had worn off. > > Ralph<> > > Estoy de acuerdo. But the problem has been twofold, as the hirsute one > would have said. > > On the one hand, there is the tendency to veer down the social democrat > path (or even as we see today, swing wildly to the right), and on the > other, the tendency to ossify Marx's thinking into "teachings" (read > catechisms), and turn Marxism into a timeless religion. Being great > thinkers and great revolutionaries has never indemnified anyone against > errors, oversights, or changes in conditions. > > I still maintain that Marx and post-Marx revolutionaries who built on > his work cannot be simply read and understood without assistance and > study. One, on account of the language, two on account of the > references (and Marx frequently battles with Hegel and others in Capital > which contributes to its sometimes arcane and confusing character), and > three on account of the drastic epistemological shift required. > From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed May 28 14:00:08 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:00:08 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese References: <20030528.055149.3680.0.farmelantj@juno.com> <003701c32550$aa5f75a0$97954b40@defaultMicheleDriscoll> Message-ID: <00a001c32553$bdcae590$20fa5718@comintern> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Johansen" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 12:38 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese > Viewing their humor from the left, my favorite Python scenes are the upper > class twits, the peasants working the land who say when a put off King > Arthur reminds them, "I am your king", "Oh bug off, we ain't got no king", You are fooling yourself! We are living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes... Macdonald From bar at idirect.com Wed May 28 14:16:05 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 16:16:05 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: <1212030.1054146763102.JavaMail.nobody@wamui06.slb.atl.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <002601c32556$09d2f020$8e089ad8@Chris> I dont think you need to be educated to read Capital nor did Marx. he stated in his preface that "With the exception of the section on value form, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I presuppose of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself." Engels said "Das Kapital is often called the Bible of the working class" but unlike the Bible it doenst need priests to interpret it for the flock. It was written for the working class and was meant to be read by the working class and I might add that in the 1860s the working class was a lot less educated that the working class today. I have no idea what bourgeois epistemologu has to do with anything. its jsut a damn good book and if it migh take some concentration in the first couple of chapters, ok but its wotrth the effort and afterwards you can go through it fairly easily. The langauge is not outdated except in the use of british pounds as the currency of discussion. Above all marx is a good perhaps even great writer and one of its beauties is it stands up now just as much as it did when he wrote it. Anybody who can quote Benjamin Franklin, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Aristotle and Christopher Colombus all in a few pages is worth the read. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 2:32 PM Subject: Re: Re: Re: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > <> And too often you hear it said "It is too difficult > for ordianry workers to read or understand. They need books explaining > Marx > to them instead of reading it themselves. it was as though they consider > workers too stupid to cope with it, an attitude which reflects the > prejudices of the bourgeois culture around them. It leads to a division > between intellectuals who read Marx and workers who (like little children) > have to be talked down to about it.<> > > No one is suggesting that people don't read Marx (and all the others). Tie some pie pans to that scarecrow and it will keep away more birds. > > We are saying that when people read it, it needs to be a collective process, as most learning is. And we are saying that it is challenging. I'm some factory workers' kid who spent most of his adult life in the Army, with no advanced degrees, and I therefore reject completely any false dichotomy between worker and intellectual. Academics learn with the help of those who have gone before them, too. > > Perhaps there are geniuses here who read it alone and leapt over the translations, the outdated language, the obscure references, and all the internalized impediments of bourgeois epistemology, but the rest of us mere mortals needed help. > > > > From borranius at hotmail.com Wed May 28 14:50:23 2003 From: borranius at hotmail.com (Biff Aurelius) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 20:50:23 +0000 Subject: [A-List] US Surveillance: DARPA project well underway? Message-ID: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=569&ncid=738&e=1&u=/nm/20030528/tc_nm/tech_pentagon_dc Pentagon Seeks to Sort, Store Lifetime Experience Wed, May 28, 2003 By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is shopping for ways to capture everything a person sees, says and hears as part of a project it says is meant to help create smarter robots. The projected system called Lifelog would suck in all of a subject's experience -- from phone numbers dialed and emails viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone. The idea is to index the material, and make patterns easily retrievable in an effort to make machines think more like people, learning from experience. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's cradle for revolutionary technologies, is sponsoring a competition to bring out proposals for setting up such a system. The resulting know-how could give U.S. war fighters more effective computers capable of building on a user's past and interpreting his or her commands, said Jan Walker, a DARPA spokeswoman. She said the new project had nothing to do with DARPA's Terrorism Awareness Information program, a research initiative into creating a giant surveillance system aimed at thwarting terrorism which has been criticized by civil rights groups. The LifeLog goal is to create a searchable database of human lives -- initially those of the developers -- to promote artificial intelligence, the agency said. 'BIG BROTHER?' The technology will advance a new class of systems able to reason in a number of ways, learn from experience and "respond in a robust manner to surprises," DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office said. To do so, it must index the mumbo jumbo of daily life and make it possible "to infer the user's routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task," the announcement said. Perhaps eager to avoid any comparisons with George Orwell's all-seeing "Big Brother" in the classic novel 1984, DARPA said respondents must address "human subject approval, data privacy and security, copyright and legal considerations that would affect the LifeLog development process." Steven Aftergood, who tracks government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said he was not prepared to reject the LifeLog initiative or call it illegitimate. "But, you know, it's one more program that demands vigilant oversight," he said in a telephone interview. "The more personal experience that can be captured by digital means, the more vulnerable that experience is to unwanted surveillance." _________________________________________________________________ Hela veckans v?der http://www.msn.se/vader From annewilliamson at msn.com Wed May 28 15:28:36 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 17:28:36 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour References: <002901c32503$f026cc70$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> <001201c3250c$f48be530$d50fc8d5@salaamo1rw4n2e> <006b01c32551$6377cc40$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: <01c401c32560$1a2004e0$c9b7fea9@anne> What a perfect, "short story" of a comment. Now I'll always remember that moment in your life, Macdonald. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 3:43 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Salaam Blackmore" > > > Well, a good laugh - even a snigger - has long been a useful weapon in the > > human armoury. > > When my father died, I was a six-year old boy. He asked to be cremated and > to have his ashes dispersed around the property that had belonged to his > mother and the family before that, a beachfront property. It had (and still > has, though it no longer belongs to the family) a beautiful view overlooking > a cliff-face approximately 40-50 feet high and above a rocky beachfront > below. The day after the funeral, people moped around the house, putting > ashes here or there, trying to come to some personal resolution of the > situation we were in. My siblings are all much older that I: from 12 to 22 > years my senior. One of my brothers went down the rock-built stairs to the > beach. At the top of the cliff were large bushes about the height of a good > sized man or woman. Another brother tossed some of our fathers ashes in the > wind over the cliff face. A second or two later, from below came a bellow > "HEY!!" > > Dead silence for about a second. Then, my brother in law, a man who was > Canadian because he had dodged the Vietnam War, buest out with a beautiful > laugh I can still hear to this day. Everyone started laughing. > > I was outraged. I was six and my father just died-- how could anyone laugh? > Wasn't that disrepsectful? But a family member got down on knee and said > "When things are really bad, and emotion gets really thick, sometimes you > just need a release". The laughing fits took a few minutes. I calmed down > immediately, and noticed the air change. It's the single greatest memory I > have of that day. I wish for more people to laugh in times of great pain, > irregardless of how and why. Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps you > human. > > Macdonald > > > From benpincas at isuisse.com Wed May 28 15:14:35 2003 From: benpincas at isuisse.com (benpincas at isuisse.com) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 23:14:35 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour In-Reply-To: <006b01c32551$6377cc40$20fa5718@comintern> Message-ID: Sorry, but I believe we are completely off-topic now. We weren't discuusing humour per se, especially the type of humour which does not ridicule nor the type of humour which acts as a release from sadness or tension, but we were discussing, I thought, IMPERIALIST humour. Think about the jokes which Goebbels made about the jews, and the jokes in in the fifties of a xenophobic or racial nature. Also, those jokes which can be used to perpetuate a lie. How about the jokes which have been made about the french and Chirac recently.. funny? Hilarious? Laughing then becomes a matter of conformity, proof that one is on-side, on-message, one of the imperialist clan. It is in fact pavlovian, especially since the audience is often laughing in response to prompts from the studio director. Ben. On Wed, 28 May 2003, Macdonald Stainsby wrote: > When my father died, I was a six-year old boy. He asked to be cremated and > to have his ashes dispersed around the property that had belonged to his > mother and the family before that, a beachfront property. It had (and still > has, though it no longer belongs to the family) a beautiful view overlooking > a cliff-face approximately 40-50 feet high and above a rocky beachfront > below. The day after the funeral, people moped around the house, putting > ashes here or there, trying to come to some personal resolution of the > situation we were in. My siblings are all much older that I: from 12 to 22 > years my senior. One of my brothers went down the rock-built stairs to the > beach. At the top of the cliff were large bushes about the height of a good > sized man or woman. Another brother tossed some of our fathers ashes in the > wind over the cliff face. A second or two later, from below came a bellow > "HEY!!" > > Dead silence for about a second. Then, my brother in law, a man who was > Canadian because he had dodged the Vietnam War, buest out with a beautiful > laugh I can still hear to this day. Everyone started laughing. > > I was outraged. I was six and my father just died-- how could anyone laugh? > Wasn't that disrepsectful? But a family member got down on knee and said > "When things are really bad, and emotion gets really thick, sometimes you > just need a release". The laughing fits took a few minutes. I calmed down > immediately, and noticed the air change. It's the single greatest memory I > have of that day. I wish for more people to laugh in times of great pain, > irregardless of how and why. Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps you > human. > > Macdonald > > > > _____________________________________________________________________ > Envie de discuter en "live" avec vos amis ? T?l?charger MSN Messenger > http://www.ifrance.com/_reloc/m la 1?re messagerie instantan?e de France > _____________________________________________________________________ Envie de discuter en "live" avec vos amis ? T?l?charger MSN Messenger http://www.ifrance.com/_reloc/m la 1?re messagerie instantan?e de France From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 28 19:26:24 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:26:24 -0400 Subject: [A-List] China/Russia energy deal In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <001501c32581$5b4d7e40$0200a8c0@stan> China signs US$150b oil deal with Russia ChannelNews Asia China has signed a US$150 billion landmark deal with Russia that would pave the way for a pipeline to export Siberian oil to China. Under the agreement, Russia's largest oil producer, Yukos, will supply China National Petroleum (CNPC) with some 718 million tonnes of oil for 25 years from 2005. It will be transported by rail and through a pipeline expected to be completed in 2 years time. The deal came on the third day of a week-long visit to Russia by Chinese President Hu Jintao. China, the world's third largest oil importer, depends heavily on supplies from the Middle East, but is trying to diversify its sources away from the volatile region. Russia, on its part, has long wavered between China and Japan as a destination for a new oil pipeline to export oil from its major Siberian reserves. The deal between Yukos and CNPC now casts further doubt over rival plans by Japan to import large volumes of Russian oil in the near future. Russian officials have said Russia does not have enough oil to justify two huge pipeline to the east. From annewilliamson at msn.com Wed May 28 19:26:15 2003 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (annewilliamson) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:26:15 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour References: Message-ID: <000c01c32581$4d685d40$c9b7fea9@anne> Sorry, but as the single anarcho-capitalist on this list I feel I must step in and politely request that this thread come to an end! You are trivilaizing yourselves, your ideas, your passions, your hopes and your dreams! Please! Just stop! Everyone has weighed in now on the basis of their prejudices, their understanding of the universal, and even their personal specifics. There is no need - and, alas, I must say very little competence on the evidence of the postings - for this list to pursue further the dissection of humor. Let it go................the mystery of Monty Python lives, and even Marx (:-) can not reveal the internal dynamic. Though I am mightily tempted to make a few remarks of my own regarding p.c. and some of the misplaced, highly sensitive commentary I've read today I am just not going to do it for fear my sharp commentary would only extend what has truly become a hopeless exercise. If I can restrain myself, will not the rest of you join me in my rare demonstration of self-discipline? Do what you do well - please! This list has other fish to fry, and leave the comedians/satirists to their own business. -A. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 5:14 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour Sorry, but I believe we are completely off-topic now. We weren't discuusing humour per se, especially the type of humour which does not ridicule nor the type of humour which acts as a release from sadness or tension, but we were discussing, I thought, IMPERIALIST humour. Think about the jokes which Goebbels made about the jews, and the jokes in in the fifties of a xenophobic or racial nature. Also, those jokes which can be used to perpetuate a lie. How about the jokes which have been made about the french and Chirac recently.. funny? Hilarious? Laughing then becomes a matter of conformity, proof that one is on-side, on-message, one of the imperialist clan. It is in fact pavlovian, especially since the audience is often laughing in response to prompts from the studio director. Ben. On Wed, 28 May 2003, Macdonald Stainsby wrote: > When my father died, I was a six-year old boy. He asked to be cremated and > to have his ashes dispersed around the property that had belonged to his > mother and the family before that, a beachfront property. It had (and still > has, though it no longer belongs to the family) a beautiful view overlooking > a cliff-face approximately 40-50 feet high and above a rocky beachfront > below. The day after the funeral, people moped around the house, putting > ashes here or there, trying to come to some personal resolution of the > situation we were in. My siblings are all much older that I: from 12 to 22 > years my senior. One of my brothers went down the rock-built stairs to the > beach. At the top of the cliff were large bushes about the height of a good > sized man or woman. Another brother tossed some of our fathers ashes in the > wind over the cliff face. A second or two later, from below came a bellow > "HEY!!" > > Dead silence for about a second. Then, my brother in law, a man who was > Canadian because he had dodged the Vietnam War, buest out with a beautiful > laugh I can still hear to this day. Everyone started laughing. > > I was outraged. I was six and my father just died-- how could anyone laugh? > Wasn't that disrepsectful? But a family member got down on knee and said > "When things are really bad, and emotion gets really thick, sometimes you > just need a release". The laughing fits took a few minutes. I calmed down > immediately, and noticed the air change. It's the single greatest memory I > have of that day. I wish for more people to laugh in times of great pain, > irregardless of how and why. Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps you > human. > > Macdonald > > > > _____________________________________________________________________ > Envie de discuter en "live" avec vos amis ? T?l?charger MSN Messenger > http://www.ifrance.com/_reloc/m la 1?re messagerie instantan?e de France > _____________________________________________________________________ Envie de discuter en "live" avec vos amis ? T?l?charger MSN Messenger http://www.ifrance.com/_reloc/m la 1?re messagerie instantan?e de France From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 28 19:28:58 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:28:58 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Peru melting down In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <001601c32581$b2f7a990$0200a8c0@stan> Peru Troops, Strikers Clash in State of Emergency Wed May 28, 2003 08:13 PM ET By Missy Ryan LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Soldiers fired into the air and police used tear gas and water hoses in violent clashes across Peru on Wednesday with protesters who vowed to continue crippling strikes despite a government state of emergency. Police said at least seven farmers were injured in Barranca, north of Lima, as soldiers fired shots to disperse rock-throwing protesters a day after unpopular President Alejandro Toledo imposed a 30-day emergency banning strikers from the streets. Police did not say how many people were arrested in the latest in a series of widespread protests by Peruvians demanding better pay and conditions. In the northern city of Chiclayo, security forces fired tear gas and arrested teachers, while shops in the jungle city of Huanuco were shuttered to avoid looting. In Lima, police in riot gear turned water hoses on protesting court workers at the national justice palace. Health workers and farmers have, at least officially, temporarily called off strikes that disrupted highway transport with blockades of rocks and trees. But teachers, striking for more than two weeks demanding a rise of 210 soles ($60) to an average monthly wage of 700 soles ($200), were undeterred. "The 100-sol ($29) raise they have offered us is insufficient ... so we teachers have the right to keep expressing our unhappiness in the streets," said Nilver Lopez, head of the SUTEP union that groups some 280,000 teachers. Toledo's 2-year-old presidency has been marked by protests and a declining approval rating that now stands at 14 percent. "One thing is democracy and another thing is the understanding that democracy means people can destroy the peace," Prime Minister Luis Solari told RPP radio. Many Peruvians complain Toledo -- a U.S.-trained former World Bank adviser -- has failed to fulfill ambitious promises of jobs, prosperity and a return to true democracy after the corrupt, hard-line rule of ex-President Alberto Fujimori. Protests intensified in recent weeks with farmers, teachers, health and court workers pledging they would not give up on demands for wage rises and greater job security. SIGN OF 'GOVERNMENT DESPAIR' On Wednesday, many schools appeared to remain empty despite a promise to reopen. "This isn't democracy. They send out soldiers as soon as they are unable to manage," said teacher Carmen Fajardo, 58, banging cymbals at a Lima school. Toledo last declared a state of emergency in June 2002. That measure was limited to the city of Arequipa amid protests, which killed three people, against the sale of two power firms. Such decrees are not uncommon in Latin America, where governments sometimes resort to military responses to protests against unpopular policies. Miguel Angel Bermudez, an analyst at private consultancy Maximixe in Lima, said the measure was a sign "of urgency, of the government's despair." Peruvian stocks fell amid the political uncertainty while the sol currency's value improved slightly in seesaw trade against the U.S. dollar, traders said. In New York, the Peruvian share of the benchmark JP Morgan Emerging Market Bond Index Plus fell. Analysts said the emergency was unlikely to sully Peru's reputation as a Latin American investment safe haven. Peru's economy grew by 5.2 percent in 2002, fastest in the region. (Additional reporting by Eduardo Orozco and Monica Vargas) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- C Copyright Reuters 2002. All rights reserved. Any copying, re-publication or re-distribution of Reuters content or of any content used on this site, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent of Reuters. From sherrynstan at igc.org Wed May 28 19:31:18 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:31:18 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Kurds gain political control of Kirkuk In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <001701c32582$027bf480$0200a8c0@stan> May 28, 2003 Kurds Mobilize to Elect One of Their Own in City of Kirkuk By SABRINA TAVERNISE NYT IRKUK, Iraq, May 28 - A Kurd was elected today to head the local interim government, a significant political victory for the Kurds that tipped the ethnic balance in this oil-rich northern city that was dominated for years by Arabs from the Baathist-led regime. The vote came just two days after Kurds swept City Council elections, taking the largest single block of votes on the 30-seat council. American forces here organized the elections, which officials say are important steps toward establishing democracy in Iraq. Other elections have taken place in the northern city of Mosul and three cities in Iraq's south. Elsewhere in the north, the American administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, paid a brief, low-profile visit to the cities of Erbil and Suleimaniya. The operations officer at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs, Maj. Steven Johnson, said the two-hour visit to Erbil was "decided at the last minute" and intended to "link up with the regional coordinator." Earlier this month, Mr. Bremer called off a visit, in a move that officials confided at the time was linked to uncertainty on the Kurdish situation. The elections in Kirkuk are significant for two reasons. First, the city is the center of Iraq's vast northern oil resources, with the fields here producing about 40 percent of Iraq's crude. The oil is the property of Baghdad, but the local governor will wield influence over it. Second, Kirkuk has been the center of ethnic disputes between Arabs and Kurds. Clashes in the city two weeks ago left 12 people dead, but doctors at the main hospital, Saddam General, said they had not had to treat any victims of ethnic violence for several days. The ethnic makeup of the local administration will be crucial in determining how such disputes are settled. Kurds in Kirkuk were in a celebratory mood today. Outside the government building where the voting took place, Kurdish police officers and guards danced traditional Kurdish steps to the beat of a large drum and the high, nasal hum of a folk horn. Passing cars honked. "I cannot describe how I am glad," said Kemal Kerkuki, a council member and a leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party here. "After so many years of dictatorship, we've chosen our own leader." Although an Arab was elected deputy mayor, Arab delegates were subdued. The Arab community was not as well equipped for political sparring as were the Kurds, who have years of experience working with American administrations. "We don't have a choice - we must be happy," one of the six Arab council members, Akar Nezal Altawil, said. "Kirkuk is not controlled by Kurds but by Kirkuk residents." Since the war, Kurds have made large strides in Kirkuk, a city they call their spiritual center that was the target of a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing beginning in the 1960's. The central police department, in the Ahmed Agha quarter, is staffed almost exclusively by Kurds. Other Kurdish cities sent doctors, police forces and even teachers. "Now the head of the government is a Kurd - that's very good," said Abdulla Rasheed, a senior police officer on duty today. "If an Arab had won, we would have gone back to the mountains," he added, referring to the traditional northern homeland of the Kurds. Arab neighborhoods were quiet today, though there are concerns that with today's Kurdish victory Arabs, feeling slighted, will strike back or that they will be subject to harassment and reprisals by local Kurds. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company From borranius at hotmail.com Wed May 28 15:02:57 2003 From: borranius at hotmail.com (Biff Aurelius) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:02:57 +0000 Subject: [A-List] US: Quiet Debt limit increase Message-ID: US Debt proudly stood at USD 6 544 044 605 247.85 (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/) when this message was posted. Source: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/money/2230603/detail.html Bush Quietly Raises Debt Limit Nations Credit Limit Now At $7.5 Trillion POSTED: 4:44 p.m. EDT May 27, 2003 WASHINGTON -- With no comment or ceremony, President George W. Bush has signed a measure allowing Uncle Sam to borrow a bunch more money. The bill he signed Tuesday raises the federal debt limit by nearly $1 trillion. It now stands at just under $7.5 trillion. The U.S. Bureau of Public Debt says that as of May 23, the debt was exactly $6,460,375,443,807.49. Its figures are updated daily during the week. Democrats say Bush's tax cuts are a big reason the government is so short of cash. He blames a recession and the cost of fighting terror. This year's deficit is expected to top $300 billion -- a record. Wednesday, Bush is signing his latest round of tax cuts into law. The package costs roughly $330 billion. The measure raising the debt ceiling was given final approval in the Senate Friday. But the House didn't even vote. It used a rule making the increase automatic after Congress finishes its annual budget process. _________________________________________________________________ Bli f?r?lskad p? MSN Dejting http://www.msn.se/dejting/default.asp From ajlapolla at yahoo.com.ar Wed May 28 15:07:44 2003 From: ajlapolla at yahoo.com.ar (=?iso-8859-1?q?Alberto=20Jorge=20Lapolla?=) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 18:07:44 -0300 (ART) Subject: [A-List] Alberto Lapolla: seminario sobre los 70 Message-ID: <20030528210744.18161.qmail@web9403.mail.yahoo.com> Seminario dictado por Alberto Jorge Lapolla > > Duraci?n: cuatro- cinco meses. Iniciaci?n: > Miercoles 11 de junio de 2003 19.30 hs > Lugar: Asociaci?n Mutual Sentimiento ? Federico > Lacroze 4181 > Protagonistas invitados ? proyecci?n de filmes > > "Un pueblo transita el presente y forja su destino > con toda su historia encima." > Antonio Gramsci > > "Nuestras clases dominantes han procurado siempre > que > los trabajadores no tengan historia, no tengan > doctrina, no tengan h?roes ni m?rtires. Cada lucha > debe de empezar de nuevo, separada de las luchas > anteriores: la experiencia colectiva se pierde, las > lecciones se olvidan. La historia aparece as? como > propiedad privada, cuyos due?os son los due?os de > todas las otras cosas." Rodolfo Walsh > > Debate, ense?anzas, conclusiones y perspectiva > hist?rica. Los ?70 en la perspectiva actual. > La Nueva Izquierda -La lucha armada > Las luchas populares entre 1955-1976 > La Revoluci?n Latinoamericana: > Cuba-Chile-Per?-Argentina-Panam?-Bolivia > Per?n entre 1955 y 1974 > El Peronismo y la Revoluci?n -El Peronismo > Revolucionario > El Che, Cooke y la perspectiva hist?rica > La guerrilla guevarista: el PRT-ERP -Santucho > El Sindicalismo Combativo: Tosco, Ongaro, la CGT de > los Argentinos, el Clasismo Rene? Salamanca > -Sitrac-Sitram- Villa Constituci?n- > Cordobazo-Villazo- > Las coordinadoras fabriles > El gobierno popular de C?mpora y la JP- > Ezeiza - Golpe en Chile asesinato de Allende > el papel de la guerrilla durante el Tercer gobierno > peronista > Per?n el proyecto nacional-Geldbard: el ?ltimo > burgu?s nacional > El fascismo lopezrreguista-isabelino- La AAA-La > Patria > Metal?rgica > La preparaci?n del golpe -Mart?nez de hoz-Videla-el > grupo Perriaux-Kissinger y la CIA > La dictadura genocida- el terror -el genocidio- la > instalaci?n del modelo neoliberal- La demolici?n de > la > Argentina peronista- ?Porqu? los 30.000 > desparecidos? > Arte, cultura, literatura, ideolog?a, pol?tica y > conciencia social en los ?60 y los ?70 > > Consultas Tel?fonos: 4865-3465 ? 4552-2257 > > > mail: ajlapolla at yahoo.com.ar - > asociacion at mutualsentimiento.org.ar > ------------ Internet GRATIS es Yahoo! Conexi?n 4004-1010 desde Buenos Aires. Usuario: yahoo; contrase?a: yahoo M?s ciudades: http://conexion.yahoo.com.ar From dharma at dambiec.com Wed May 28 16:31:23 2003 From: dharma at dambiec.com (Dharmadeva) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 08:31:23 +1000 Subject: [A-List] PROUT GEMS - 35 Message-ID: <002d01c32568$e1971fb0$fe01a8c0@dharmadeva> PROUT GEMS Number 35 How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility The Fundamental Principles of PROUT The Six Factors for Social Progress PROUT Compared with Capitalism and Communism -- How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility A corporate attorney proposes a 'Code for Corporate Responsibility' in USA state law by Robert Hinkley After 23 years as a corporate securities attorney-advising large corporations on securities offerings and mergers and acquisitions - I left my position as partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom because I was disturbed by the game. I realized that the many social ills created by corporations stem directly from corporate law. It dawned on me that the law, in its current form, actually inhibits executives and corporations from being socially responsible. So in June 2000 I quit my job and decided to devote the next phase of my life to making people aware of this problem. My goal is to build consensus to change the law so it encourages good corporate citizenship, rather than inhibiting it. The provision in the law I am talking about is the one that says the purpose of the corporation is simply to make money for shareholders. Every jurisdiction where corporations operate has its own law of corporate governance. But remarkably, the corporate design contained in hundreds of corporate laws throughout the world is nearly identical. That design creates a governing body to manage the corporation-usually a board of directors-and dictates the duties of those directors. In short, the law creates corporate purpose. That purpose is to operate in the interests of shareholders. In Maine, where I live, this duty of directors is in Section 716 of the Business Corporation Act, which reads: ...the directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interests of the corporation and of the shareholders.... Although the wording of this provision differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, its legal effect does not. This provision is the motive behind all corporate actions everywhere in the world. Distilled to its essence, it says that the people who run corporations have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money. Failing this duty can leave directors and officers open to being sued by shareholders. Section 716 dedicates the corporation to the pursuit of its own self-interest (and equates corporate self-interest with shareholder self-interest). No mention is made of responsibility to the public interest. Section 716 and its counterparts explain two things. First, they explain why corporations find social issues like human rights irrelevant--because they fall outside the corporation's legal mandate. Second, these provisions explain why executives behave differently than they might as individual citizens, because the law says their only obligation in business is to make money. This design has the unfortunate side effect of largely eliminating personal responsibility. Because corporate law generally regulates corporations but not executives, it leads executives to become inattentive to justice. They demand their subordinates "make the numbers," and pay little attention to how they do so. Directors and officers know their jobs, salaries, bonuses, and stock options depend on delivering profits for shareholders. Companies believe their duty to the public interest consists of complying with the law. Obeying the law is simply a cost. Since it interferes with making money, it must be minimized-using devices like lobbying, legal hair-splitting, and jurisdiction shopping. Directors and officers give little thought to the fact that these activities may damage the public interest. Lower-level employees know their livelihoods depend upon satisfying superiors' demands to make money. They have no incentive to offer ideas that would advance the public interest unless they increase profits. Projects that would serve the public interest--but at a financial cost to the corporation--are considered naive. Corporate law thus casts ethical and social concerns as irrelevant, or as stumbling blocks to the corporation's fundamental mandate. That's the effect the law has inside the corporation. Outside the corporation the effect is more devastating. It is the law that leads corporations to actively disregard harm to all interests other than those of shareholders. When toxic chemicals are spilled, forests destroyed, employees left in poverty, or communities devastated through plant shutdowns, corporations view these as unimportant side effects outside their area of concern. But when the company's stock price dips, that's a disaster. The reason is that, in our legal framework, a low stock price leaves a company vulnerable to takeover or means the CEO's job could be at risk. In the end, the natural result is that corporate bottom line goes up, and the state of the public good goes down. This is called privatizing the gain and externalizing the cost. This system design helps explain why the war against corporate abuse is being lost, despite decades of effort by thousands of organizations. Until now, tactics used to confront corporations have focused on where and how much companies should be allowed to damage the public interest, rather than eliminating the reason they do it. When public interest groups protest a new power plant, mercury poisoning, or a new big box store, the groups don't examine the corporations' motives. They only seek to limit where damage is created (not in our back yard) and how much damage is created (a little less, please). But the where-and-how-much approach is reactive, not proactive. Even when corporations are defeated in particular battles, they go on the next day, in other ways and other places, to pursue their own private interests at the expense of the public. I believe the battle against corporate abuse should be conducted in a more holistic way. We must inquire why corporations behave as they do, and look for a way to change these underlying motives. Once we have arrived at a viable systemic solution, we should then dictate the terms of engagement to corporations, not let them dictate terms to us. We must remember that corporations were invented to serve mankind. Mankind was not invented to serve corporations. Corporations in many ways have the rights of citizens, and those rights should be balanced by obligations to the public. Many activists cast the fundamental issue as one of "corporate greed," but that's off the mark. Corporations are incapable of a human emotion like greed. They are artificial beings created by law. The real question is why corporations behave as if they are greedy. The answer is the design of corporate law. We can change that design. We can make corporations more responsible to the public good by amending the law that says the pursuit of profit takes precedence over the public interest. I believe this can best be achieved by changing corporate law to make directors personally responsible for harms done. Let me give you a sense of how director responsibility works in the current system. Under federal securities laws, directors are held personally liable for false and misleading statements made in prospectuses used to sell securities. If a corporate prospectus contains a material falsehood and investors suffer damage as a result, investors can sue each director personally to recover the damage. Believe me, this provision grabs the attention of company directors. They spend hours reviewing drafts of a prospectus to ensure it complies with the law. Similarly, everyone who works on the prospectus knows that directors' personal wealth is at stake, so they too take great care with accuracy. That's an example of how corporate behaviour changes when directors are held personally responsible. Everyone in the corporation improves their game to meet the challenge. The law has what we call an in terrorem effect. Since the potential penalties are so severe, directors err on the side of caution. While this has not eliminated securities fraud, it has over the years reduced it to an infinitesimal percentage of the total capital raised. I propose that corporate law be changed in a similar manner--to make individuals responsible for seeing that the pursuit of profit does not damage the public interest. To pave the way for such a change, we must challenge the myth that making profits and protecting the public interest are mutually exclusive goals. The same was once said about profits and product quality, before Japanese manufacturers taught us otherwise. If we force companies to respect the public interest while they make money, business people will figure out how to do both. The specific change I suggest is simple: add 26 words to corporate law and thus create what I call the "Code for Corporate Responsibility." In Maine, this would mean amending section 716 to add the following clause. Directors and officers would still have a duty to make money for shareholders, ... but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates or the dignity of its employees. This simple amendment would effect a dramatic change in the underlying mechanism that drives corporate malfeasance. It would make individuals responsible for the damage companies cause to the public interest, and would be enforced much the same way as securities laws are now. Negligent failure to abide by the code would result in the corporation, its directors, and its officers being liable for the full amount of the damage they cause. In addition to civil liability, the attorney general would have the right to criminally prosecute intentional acts. Injunctive relief-which stops specific behaviours while the legal process proceeds-would also be available. Compliance would be in the self-interest of both individuals and the company. No one wants to see personal assets subject to a lawsuit. Such a prospect would surely temper corporate managers' willingness to make money at the expense of the public interest. Similarly, investors tend to shy away from companies with contingent liabilities, so companies that severely or repeatedly violate the Code for Corporate Responsibility might see their stock price fall or their access to capital dry up. Many would say such a code could never be enacted. But they're mistaken. I take heart from a 2000 Business Week/Harris Poll that asked Americans which of the following two propositions they support more strongly: Corporations should have only one purpose--to make the most profit for their shareholders--and pursuit of that goal will be best for America in the long run. Or Corporations should have more than one purpose. They also owe something to their workers and the communities in which they operate, and they should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities. An overwhelming 95 percent of Americans chose the second proposition. Clearly, this finding tells us that our fate is not sealed. When 95 percent of the public supports a proposition, enacting that proposition into law should not be impossible. If business people resist the notion of legal change, we can remind them that corporations exist only because laws allow them to exist. Without these laws, owners would be fully responsible for debts incurred and damages caused by their businesses. Because the public creates the law, corporations owe their existence as much to the public as they do to shareholders. They should have obligations to both. It simply makes no sense that society's most powerful 'citizens' have no concern for the public good. It also makes no sense to endlessly chase after individual instances of corporate wrongdoing, when that wrongdoing is a natural result of the system design. Corporations abuse the public interest because the law tells them their only legal duty is to maximize profits for shareholders. Until we change the law of corporate governance, the problem of corporate abuse can never fully be solved. http://www.proutjournal.org/economy/economy2.html -- The Fundamental Principles of PROUT The Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT) incorporates a unique understanding of human potential, history and class dynamics, as well as a broad social, political and economic perspective. Despite its expansive scope, however, the essence of PROUT can be reduced to a number of basic principles. P R Sarkar, the author of the theory, summarized it in sixteen principles. The following five are regarded as the most fundamental. They embody the multi-dimensional approach of PROUT, addressing the physical, mental and spiritual needs of individuals and society at large. 1) No individual should be allowed to accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission or approval of the collective body. Several points are embodied in this statement. The most important point is that ownership lies with the collectivity, while the individual has a right to usage only. Society shall have the right to determine to what extent private ownership will be accepted. The over accumulation of wealth by an individual may easily deprive others. Similarly, the misuse of wealth and resources by an individual may also bring harm to the collectivity, or at least hinder its general affluence. Therefore, the right to accumulate wealth cannot be accepted as final. Individual liberty, in the economic sphere, must be in balance with the collective well-being. This refutes the basic notion of capitalism, which allows virtually unlimited liberty for individual accumulation. This also refutes communist theory that prescribes uniform salaries to all, regardless of labour and merit. In the Proutist philosophy, absolute uniformity of wealth is viewed as idealistic and unpsychological, while unchecked accumulation is also to be avoided. This principle also implies that the very notion of ownership may vary considerably according to the collective psychology. Obviously different notions have existed in this regard. A comparison between modern Western concepts of private ownership with those of various tribal societies of the past and present illustrates a difference in viewpoint. This first principle of PROUT essentially assures that the extent of private ownership will be in adjustment to the well-being of the collective. Note that no particular mechanism for determining ownership is specified, for such methods are also not absolute - it is only the general principle which is unchanging. This principle is the basis for PROUT embracing economic democracy insofar as the notion of collective ownership implies a democratic approach to the utilization of resources. 2) There should be maximum utilization and rational distribution of all mundane, supramundane, and spiritual potentialities of the universe. This statement supposes the existence of material as well as more subtle resources, which should be fully utilized and distributed in a rational manner. For the maximum utilization of physical resources, constant scientific endeavour must be made to understand the latent potentials of the physical world. No one would have imagined the latent potentials of the atom a few decades before its energetic potential was harnessed, regardless of how one may feel about the uses made of the discovery. Newer and better ways must be found to get maximum benefits from minimal resources, reducing environmental impact and increasing efficiency. Constant endeavour to find uses for different resources (such as the medicinal use of plants) will increase the potential standard of living. However, depending upon the distribution of wealth, a high standard of living for the general population may or may not be guaranteed. Hence rational distribution of wealth is necessary. Though different opinions may exist upon what is considered rational distribution, clearly a need-based (starting with minimum necessities for all), rather than profit driven economy will lead to a more rational (and more equitable) distribution of wealth. This principle of PROUT contains the philosophical basis for the guarantee of the basic needs. This is achieved by providing employment opportunities in those industries that produce products and services to meet these needs and by ensuring that the jobs created in the economy provide adequate purchasing power to secure the essential products and services. Rational distribution, as opposed to equal distribution, may also include the recognition of special needs and reward for special abilities. The idea of increasing or maximum amenities over time is derived from this principle. Indeed, many of the basic principles of the PROUT economic system are based upon the ideal of maximum utilization and rational distribution - including cooperatives, decentralization, etc. The inclusion of supramundane and spiritual resources within the scope of maximum utilization and rational distribution acknowledges subtle layers of existence. Utilizing the arts for development of the subtle mental faculties may be an example of supramundane utilization. Higher supramundane and spiritual potentialities should also be developed (one can refer to Sarkar's books on Microvita, Yoga Psychology and other topics for his views on these potentialities). Though perhaps not obvious now, Sarkar envisions a time when these potentialities can also be utilized for the collective benefit, and hence the same approach should be followed as with physical resources. The utilization of the subtlest resources will require systematic research into the nature of consciousness itself. 3) There should be maximum utilization of the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual potentialities of the unit and collective bodies of human society. The second principle referred to utilizing the objective world, crude and subtle, while this principle refers to the utilization of human potential in the physical, metaphysical and spiritual spheres. Development of the collective and individual potentialities are equally important, and the two are inexorably linked. The physical, intellectual and spiritual potentialities of individuals must be used in a constructive way, and maximum effort must be made for their all-round development. In a similar way the collective strengths of different groups should be utilized according to their circumstances. Those with outstanding abilities should be given maximum scope for utilizing their skills and creativity, while additional effort is to be made for the development of the innate potential of all. In order to develop the potentialities of all, existential fear must be removed by the guarantee of the minimum requirements of life. Only then can people at large have the mental ease needed for psychic and spiritual growth. Free and ample educational opportunities must be made available to all. There should also be opportunities in the workplace for the development of new skills and expertise, which should then be creatively utilized. The development of the collective mind has, of course, the development of the individual mind as a base. Special effort should be made to include factors in the educational system that will help ensure the development of the collective mind, such as socio-economic consciousness, ethical conduct, service mindedness, social awareness, and spirituality. Most of the socio-cultural Proutist ideas pertaining to education, language and the arts are elaborations upon this fundamental principle. 4) There should be a proper adjustment amongst these physical, metaphysical, mundane, supramundane and spiritual utilizations. This principle asserts that the previous two principles must be applied in a balanced and integrated way. Neither should physicality and the material world, nor metaphysical, supramundane and spiritual potentialities be developed to the exclusion of the others, or society will exist in a state of imbalance and meet with degeneration. People must be encouraged and challenged on various levels, otherwise widespread idleness or lethargy and apathy may develop. For example, increasing purchasing power is the best method of meeting people's needs and guaranteeing them on the physical level rather than handouts which would be both impractical and destructive to initiative. "Proper adjustment" in this context also means that people's role in society should be determined in a balanced way. As a general rule, employment should be guaranteed which is both agreeable and suitable to people, drawing upon their inherent talents and interests. It is generally recognized that intellectual and artistic skills are comparatively rare as opposed to physical skills, while spiritual wisdom is even more rare. Society should require comparatively less mundane service from those utilizing their higher mental and spiritual faculties for the benefit of society, following a balanced policy. Sarkar feels that it is imperative for the leaders of society to be developed intellectually and spiritually and to be physically fit as well, which certainly requires a degree of all-round development. The concept of the six factors (see below) is somewhat akin to the spirit of this principle. What is required is the integration of many aspects of human life in a balanced way. 5) The method of utilization should vary in accordance with the changes in time, place, and person, and the utilization should be of a progressive nature. This fifth principle holds that new and better methods of utilization should be continually developed in accordance with scientific and human development, considering changes in human psychology, the physical environment, etc. For instance, in accordance with maximum utilization, better ways should be found to harness the energy of manual labour, increasing efficiency. But of course, this should lead to increased productivity and decreased work hours, not a loss of jobs. Economic, social and political policies must be adjusted to human needs, and there should be efforts for their continual improvement in a progressive, humanitarian way. Scientific research must be guided by progressive ideals as well. An anti-technological attitude is certainly antithetical to human development. Some may argue that the environmental impact of technology is such that it will eventually destroy our ecological balance. It may be more reasonable to conclude that this state of affairs is the result of the regressive utilization or misutilization of science. Progressive utilization of science necessitates continual effort to assess and mitigate the environmental impact of new technologies. The progressive utilization of mental potentialities may include increased computer assistance, new developments in art and philosophy, improved educational methods and the like for general progress. Progressive utilization in the higher sphere of life may include the development of new intuitional techniques for self-realization or spiritual practices, and the harnessing of the spiritual inspiration and transformative power of self-realized individuals in a better way. Sarkar surmises, "Through struggle, society will have to move forward towards victory along the path of all-round fulfilment in life." (Ananda Sutram). -- The Six Factors for Social Progress P R Sarkar The first factor is that there should be a spiritual ideology in the life of both the individual and the collective body. Much of one's energy is misused due to the ignorance of one's own self and the destination towards which a person is moving. This misuse of energy is bound to cause destruction. The second factor for the progress of society is spiritual culture, a process of spiritual practices. Everyone has got a physical structure. The problem with every individual is to produce more and more mental pabulum or ectoplasmic stuff by the body and then to convert it into consciousness. There should be a proper process for this conversion. Spiritual cult consists of the conversion of the five rudimental factors into ectoplasmic stuff and then into consciousness through a special scientific process. This is a process of metamorphosis. Spiritual culture therefore, is indispensable. But only spiritual ideology and spiritual philosophy will not do. The third factor is a socio-economic theory. There should be a priori knowledge regarding the social structure, the distribution of wealth and its growth. For want of this knowledge there can't be a solid ground for the construction of the social edifice. The fourth one is social outlook. All living creatures in this manifest universe are the children of the same Cosmic Entity. They are the progeny of the same Supreme Progenitor. Naturally they are bound in a thread of fraternal relations. This is the central spirit. A socio-economic theory is of no use but for this fraternal feeling. The implementation of this theory is an impossibility without genuine spiritual practice and effort. The fifth factor for the progress of society is for it to have its own scripture. There is a need for the company of elevated persons (spiritualists) in all spheres of life. The authority which provides for this can be called scripture. It is not religion, but rather it is that which elevates society by dint of intuitive value founded on elevation of the mind. The last but not the least important factor for the progress of society is for it to have its own preceptor. -- PROUT Compared with Capitalism and Communism To distinguish PROUT clearly from communism and capitalism, the significant differences between these respective systems are reviewed below. Human development: Human development under communism is primarily concerned with the political and economic spheres of life. Under capitalism there is a pluralistic expression of personal freedom, with no clear conception of human potentiality. PROUT promotes the integrated development of the full human personality. Freedom: Human liberty under communism is limited by the primacy of the interests of the state. Under capitalism, a licentious freedom of expression is permitted, but not a freedom from want and material insecurity. In practice, capitalist societies will restrict freedom of expression when this expression challenges the interests of capital. PROUT grants full freedom of psychic and spiritual expression, but recognizes the need for society to place limits on individual hoarding of wealth. Without this limitation, collective interests will be violated and universal freedom from want cannot be guaranteed. Privileged Interests: Communism privileges the interests of the party and state. Capitalism gives primacy to property rights, and thus privileges the class controlling capital. PROUT gives central importance to promoting the common welfare while protecting ecological integrity. Progress: Both communism and capitalism regard material development as the basis of progress. PROUT defines progress as the increase in inner fulfilment of individuals. While this is primarily a spiritual conception of progress, PROUT recognizes that material and intellectual development is necessary as a foundation for seeking spiritual fulfilment. Culture: Communism compels culture to be consistent with state ideology. Under capitalism, mass culture primarily serves commercial interests. As a result, it is creative but not authentic, energetic but often destructive of higher values. PROUT sees need for culture to emerge out of regional and ethnic experience, and for these diverse cultures to instil values which empower the human psyche. Motivation: Communism emphasizes income equality at the expense of individual productivity. Capitalism's system of incentives motivates high productivity, but the excess of its monetary rewards wastes collective wealth, encourages greed, and disrupts social unity. PROUT strives for balance: maximizing the efficacy of incentive while minimizing social inequality. Environment: Both communism and capitalism lack a clear value context for environmental protection. PROUT has adopted the value framework of Neo-Humanism, which affirms the inherent, existential value of all life. Both communism and capitalism are unsuited to sustaining environmental integrity because they emphasize short term gain of profit or productivity and ignore long term costs of environmental degradation. PROUT's planning system (bottom to up) aims to create ever higher orders of balance, and therefore inherently protects biodiversity and promotes ecosystem vitality. Planning: Under communism, economic planning is highly centralized and controlled by the state. Capitalism centralizes the major part of economic planning in the hands of huge, transnational corporations. PROUT decentralizes planning authority to the level at which people are most aware of economic problems and potentialities - co-operative enterprises - and therefore best able to plan for their common welfare. Labour: Workers in both communist and capitalist economies are alienated due to lack of ownership or control of their workplace. PROUT's enterprise system is based on worker participation in decision making and cooperative ownership of assets - fundamental conditions which increase motivation and enhance possibilities for personal fulfilment. Economy: Communism's command economy is responsive to production quotas. Capitalism's free market economy is profit motivated. PROUT's economy is consumption oriented. It seeks to increase consumer purchasing power and availability of consumer goods as the means for maintaining economic vitality and meeting people's amenity needs. -- To unsubscribe send mail to with the following command in the body of your email message: unsubscribe prout-gems, but also visit www.prout.org; www.proutworld.org, http://www.proutjournal.org/ From soncu at pacbell.net Wed May 28 23:13:54 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 22:13:54 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 Message-ID: Chris: > It was written for the working class and was meant > to be read by the working class and I might add that > in the 1860s the working class was a lot less > educated that the working class today. I definitely agree with the second part of this proposition but with the first part, I have serious problems. I read, but not studied, the first volume and parts of the third volume of Capital. Don't know much about the second. What I recall from my readings of the above parts of Capital is a very intelligent explorer, who boldly goes where no one has gone before, who was heavily influenced by the state of the natural sciences of his era, among other things, who was trying to understand, as well as trying to offer an explanation to what he observed in the concrete, by abstracting from it. But what I recall the most is a fighter attacking his intellectual opponents. No doubt Marx was a genius but I have doubts that he really cared about whether Bayram could really read and understand what he wrote. Bayram was a foreman at SEKA-Datca I met as a summer intern when I was 18 and at the time, he was 23. He was a very smart young man from the city of Datca where SEKA was located. SEKA-Datca is one of the largest paper and pulp factories the State of Turkey owns, or, at least used to own, since I don't know whether it had been privatized or not. He was not only the smartest and the wittiest of the central maintenance workshop of the factory but also was he very funny and the most caring of all the workers of his workshop. He often used to go out of his way to help others, sometimes putting his own life into danger, and I had witnessed one of those occasions since I was next to him, because on occasions they had to work very close to high voltage transmission lines. Everybody in his workshop loved Bayram but he was just a simple man. I don't think when Marx wrote Capital what he had in mind as audience was people like Bayram. He was addressing a different audience, most of whom were his opponents that he was attacking. And in that he was quite successful. Or so is my opinion. Sabri From pbond at sn.apc.org Wed May 28 20:35:44 2003 From: pbond at sn.apc.org (Patrick Bond) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 04:35:44 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Interesting days ahead for Zim & Africa Message-ID: <01b001c325a2$a7f07830$73c021c4@Patrick> Panic Buying Grips Cities Zimbabwe Standard (Harare) May 25, 2003 Henry Makiwa Thousands of Zimbabweans swamped banks and emptied supermarket shelves as panic buying swept the country ahead of an anticipated series of long mass job actions organised by labour, civic organisations and the opposition. Shoppers in Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru, Masvingo and Mutare could be seen frantically snapping any available foodstuffs while banks and building societies ran out of cash and some began to ration the amounts clients could withdraw. While it has been common to see short queues of people with a few items in their supermarket trolleys because of the skyrocketing prices of commodities, it was the complete opposite from Friday. Long and snaking queues were all over the major cities at the start of the weekend as shoppers attempted to secure most of the basic but scarce food stuffs left on the shelves. Cash shortages also resurfaced in banks and building societies amid reports that one building society, which is heavily patronised by civil servants, had to appeal for money from supermarkets after it had run completely dry. Many shoppers said they were not taking chances in view of the planned mass action by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). "I experienced problems the last time when we had a stayaway. I can't be caught napping again. I have to stock enough food to ensure that even if they call for a week long mass action, my grandchildren will be well catered for," said Ambuya Mutero of Mucheke, a high-density suburb in Masvingo. Martha Mhlanga of Kambuzuma in Harare said: "There is so much alarm among the people to withdraw as much money as possible from banks and buy the basic necessities needed in homes." In Bulawayo, hordes of city residents swarmed around supermarkets much of Friday and yesterday afternoon in search of foodstuffs while thousands waited patiently in long queues outside banking halls as the stayaway fever gripped Zimbabwe's second largest city. Sithembile Ncube, a Bulawayo resident, described the massive shopping sprees as "abnormal". The ZCTU last week urged Zimbabweans to "store a bucket of mealie meal and save a penny" ahead of a planned and indefinite mass action to protest against fuel price increases, which went up by more than 300 percent, and the general decay in living standards. Yesterday Wellington Chibhebhe, the ZCTU secretary general said: "We have noted the intense purchasing of goods by the ordinary citizenry. That is the right thing for them to do." Chibhebhe could however not disclose the form in which the mass action will take though many observers believe the ZCTU will call on workers to go on an indefinite stayaway. The MDC last week said it was planning combined mass protests to push President Robert Mugabe out of office.# *** (My colleague John makes use of the kneepad to do 'generous and flexible' fundraising for 'five designs'. Good luck.) Business Day, 28 May Evian talks could yield rich fruit for Nepad by John Stremlau HOW deeply divided are the western democracies? What might this mean for Africa? These are issues President Thabo Mbeki faces as he prepares for Sunday's meeting with Group of Eight (G-8) leaders in Evian, France. Despite last week's 14-0 approval by the United Nations Security Council to end sanctions against Iraq, phase out the oilfor-food programme and grant a UN special representative a greater oversight role in Iraq, French President Jacques Chirac opposes the interventionist policy of US President George Bush and seems intent on using the G-8 summit to rally global support for the UN, interests SA shares. In a surprise step Chirac will host a Sunday G-8 luncheon discussion of northsouth, with the leaders from Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and neighbouring Switzerland, plus African leaders invited earlier. This will be followed by a G-8 dinner devoted to the New Partnership for Africa's Development, with the presidents of Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and SA. The UN secretary-general and heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will also take part in Sunday's proceedings. US detractors are already calling the enlarged dialogue with leaders beyond Africa "Chirac's circus" a pompous personal challenge to US leadership of slight symbolic significance. Such ill will need not preclude Sunday's Nepad dinner focusing on priorities of real value to Africa. However, it will require deft diplomacy by Mbeki and others. Recent security council preoccupation with Iraq has starved Congolese and West African peace efforts of badly needed support. If rebuilding of Iraq diverts development funds, this risks more conflicts in and with Africa. Other less obvious issues plague G-8 and African relations. For example, Morocco, chairing the developing nations' G-77 and an ally of Paris and Washington, will be at the enlarged luncheon dialogue but not at the Nepad dinner. A dispute on the right of self-determination of about 360000 Saharawi nomads leaves Morocco as the only African state not in the African Union. Issues such as Moroccan occupation of Spanish Sahara or repression in Zimbabwe are not part of Nepad, which aspires to inclusiveness as a voluntary agreement to uphold human rights, democratic values and an open economy. By backing Nepad, the G-8 confirms its core values as well. Growing support for Nepad among civil society groups in African and G-8 nations helps. To illustrate, Wits University with the University of Victoria (Canada) as a partner, is co-operating with the UN Economic Commission for Africa and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Centre to produce five designs for Nepad development initiatives by African experts around the continent. They consist of: an African universities HIV/AIDS consortium; an African code of electoral norms and standards; a low-cost energy scheme for rural populations; a central database of illegal natural resource exploitation, and an innovative microen- terprise finance fund for West Africa. Effective implementation will require more generous and flexible G-8 funding, with backing from a strengthened Nepad secretariat. Making credible commitments in this regard will be vital for building better G-8 partnerships with Africa and score significant successes for the Evian summit. Stremlau heads international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand. May 28 2003 09:52:43:000AM John Stremlau Business Day 1st Edition *** (Forthcoming variously.) Africa in Evian: If the G8 is meeting, is it time again to 'dignify' Nepad? by Patrick Bond The June G8 meeting in Evian, France may not, after all, feature the once-anticipated spoils-of-war squabbles between the warmongering coalition (US, UK and Italy) and their ephemeral opponents (Germany, France, Russia, Japan and Canada). But China's invitation to attend will distract attention from a promise by French premier Jacques Chirac to loosen up Northern agricultural barriers to trade which hold back African exports. Where, then, does the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) fit? Is it, as many commentators now agree, yesterday's news? More than a year ago, South African trade minister Alec Erwin made a revealing statement just as Robert Mugabe was stealing a presidential election: 'The West should not hold Nepad hostage because of mistakes in Zimbabwe. If Nepad is not owned and implemented by Africa it will fail and we cannot be held hostage to the political whims of the G8 or any other groups.' In contrast, civil society critics alleged that Nepad was already a subimperial project, influenced by the elite team of partners who helped craft it in 2000-01. Nepad surfaced only after extensive consultations with the World Bank president and IMF managing director (November 2000 and February 2001); major transnational corporate executives and associated government leaders (at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2001, NYC in February 2002); G8 rulers (at Tokyo in July 2000 and Genoa in July 2001); and the European Union president and individual Northern heads of state (2000-01). What was civil society's input? In late 2001 and early 2002, virtually every major African civil society organisation, network and progressive personality attacked Nepad's process, form and content. Until April 2002, no trade union, civil society, church, women's, youth, political-party, parliamentary, or other potentially democratic or progressive forces in Africa were formally consulted by the politicians or technocrats involved in constructing Nepad. In addition, tough critiques of the 67-page base document soon emerged from intellectuals associated with the Council for Development and Social Research in Africa (Adesina, Nabudere, Olukoshi, and others). By the time of the launch of the African Union last July, more than 200 opponents of Nepad from human rights, debt and trade advocacy groups from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe were sufficiently organised to hold a militant demonstration at the opening ceremony in Durban. Then on August 31, at least 20,000 protesters against the privatisation of nature and development at the Johannesburg Earth Summit also forcefully condemned Nepad. The economics and politics of Nepad provide a good basis for ongoing critique. The two central premises of Nepad are that deeper integration into the world economy will inexorably benefit the continent, and that the enlightened proponents of Nepad will discipline Africa's ubiquitous despots. Is Africa insufficiently integrated? In reality, the continent's share of world trade declined over the past quarter century, while the volume of exports increased. 'Marginalisation' of Africa occurred, hence, not because of lack of integration, but because other areas of the world-especially East Asia--moved to the export of manufactured goods, while Africa's industrial potential collapsed thanks to excessive deregulation associated with structural adjustment. Moreover, Africa's debt crisis worsened during the era of globalisation. >From 1980-2000, Sub-Saharan Africa's total foreign debt rose from $60 billion to $206 billion, and the ratio of debt to GDP rose from 23% to 66%. Hence, Africa now repays more than it receives. In 1980, loan inflows of $9.6 billion were comfortably higher than the debt repayment outflow of $3.2 billion. By 2000, only $3.2 billion flowed in, and $9.8 billion was repaid, leaving a net financial flows deficit of $6.2 billion. Meanwhile, (already-corrupt) donor aid was down 40% from 1990 levels. So much for debt relief. By all accounts, the World Bank and IMF debt programmes (HIPC, PRSPs) that are trumpeted in Nepad have failed miserably. Convincing evidence continues to be found that women and vulnerable children, the elderly and disabled people are the primary victims, as they are expected to survive with less social subsidy, with more pressure on the fabric of the family during economic crisis, and with HIV/AIDS closely correlated to structural adjustment. Africa's elites contribute to the problem through looting the continent. The two leading scholars of the phenomenon, James Boyce and L?once Ndikumana, show that a core group of African countries whose foreign debt was $178 billion suffered a quarter century of capital flight that totaled more than $285 billion (including imputed interest earnings). Capital flight by elites is not taken seriously in Nepad, because a crackdown would conflict with the programme's commitment to further financial liberalisation. But there remained, nevertheless, a naive hope that the good-governance rhetoric in the document might do some good: 'With Nepad, Africa undertakes to respect the global standards of democracy, which core components include political pluralism, allowing for the existence of several political parties and workers' unions, fair, open, free and democratic elections periodically organised to enable the populace choose their leaders freely.' While South Africa under Mbeki's rule still permits free and fair elections, the other main Nepad leader, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, certainly does not. In the April 2003 presidential poll, Obasanjo's home state of Ogun reportedly provided him with 1,360,170 votes, against his opponent's 680. The number of votes cast in a simultaneous race in the same geographical area was just 747,296. Obasanjo's explanation, by way of denigrating the European Union's electoral observers, was that 'Certain communities in this country make up their minds to act as one in political matters... They probably don't have that kind of culture in most European countries.' International observers found 'serious irregularities throughout the country and fraud in at least 11 (of 36) states.' According to Chima Ubani of the Civil Liberties Organisation, 'It's not the actual wish of the electorate but some machinery that has churned out unbelievable outcomes. We've seen a landslide that does not seem sufficiently explained by any available factor.' Harsh complaints also came from the Transition Monitoring Group and the Catholic Church's Justice Development and Peace Commission, which together had 40,000 monitors documenting abuse. In contrast, Mbeki's weekly ANC internet ANC Today letter proclaimed, 'Nigeria has just completed a series of elections, culminating in the re-election of president Olusegun Obasanjo into his second and last term. Naturally, we have already sent our congratulations to him.' Mbeki had to register, and then dismiss, the obvious: 'It is clear that there were instances of irregularities in some parts of the country. However, it also seems clear that by and large the elections were well conducted.' A similar pattern of respect for democracy was evident in Zimbabwe. Mbeki and Obasanjo had termed the 2002 presidential election 'legitimate', and repeatedly opposed punishment in the Commonwealth and UN Human Rights Commission. In February 2003, foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma arrogantly stated, 'We will never criticise Zimbabwe'. The Nepad secretariat's Dave Malcomson, responsible for international liaison and co-ordination, openly admitted to a reporter, 'Wherever we go, Zimbabwe is thrown at us as the reason why Nepad's a joke.' The increasingly cozy relationship between Pretoria and Harare alienated both the Movement for Democratic Change and more progressive civil society groups like the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (Zimcodd). Late last year, the formerly pro-Nepad MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, concluded that Mbeki had 'embarked on an international safari to campaign for Mugabe's regime. Pretoria is free to pursue its own agenda. But it must realise that Zimbabweans can never be fooled anymore.' A February 2003 gambit to readmit Zimbabwe to the Commonwealth was merely, in Tsvangirai's words, 'the disreputable end game of a long-term Obasanjo-Mbeki strategy designed to infiltrate and subvert not only the Commonwealth effort but, indeed, all other international efforts intended to rein in Mugabe's violent and illegitimate regime.' Tsvangirai called the Nepad sponsors 'self-confessed fellow travellers on a road littered with violence, destruction and death.' Most in Zimbabwean civil society were just as cynical. In a foreward to a new booklet entitled Nepad's Zimbabwe Test: Why the New Partnership for Africa's Development is Already Failing, Zimcodd chairperson Jonah Gokova writes of 'the profound rejection of Nepad by Zimbabweans from important social movements, trade unions and NGOs within our increasingly vibrant civil society'. He terms Nepad a 'homegrown rehashing of the Washington Consensus, augmented by transparently false promises of good governance and democracy'. The durable suspicion from democratic, progressive forces across Africa appeared validated when, in October 2002, political-governance peer review was nearly excised from Nepad. Johannesburg's Business Day newspaper described how Nepad 'had fallen victim to the realities of African politics... Diplomats said that there were indications that SA had succumbed to pressure from other African countries, including Libya and Nigeria, to confine peer review to economic and corporate governance matters.' Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien reportedly called Mbeki to insist that peer review--even Nepad's voluntarily and hence toothless (but nevertheless crucial for public relations)--be restored. As a result, who can blame the G8 rulers for a more reserved attitude to their elite African visitors? When Pretoria's delegation flew to Kananaskis in June 2002, expectations were high, not least because of a front-page Time magazine feature on 'Mbeki 's mission: He has finally faced up to the AIDS crisis and is now leading the charge for a new African development plan.' In reality, Mbeki has still denied more than five million South Africans access to life-saving medicines, and his health minister was recently charged by activists with 'culpable homocide', alongside minister Erwin. Last year was Africa's big moment before the G8. However, as Institutional Investor reported, global elites 'coughed up only an additional $1 billion for debt relief, failed altogether to reduce their domestic agricultural subsidies and--most disappointing of all to the Africans--neglected to provide any further aid to the continent.' Mbeki refused to accept reality: 'I think they have addressed adequately all the matters that were put to them.' Kananaskis was, he claimed, 'a defining moment in the process both of the evolution of Africa and the birth of a more equitable system of international relations. In historical terms, it signifies the end of the epoch of colonialism and neo-colonialism.' Nepad's future is predicted in the current issue of Institutional Investor: 'Like other far-reaching African initiatives made over the years, this one promptly rolled off the track and into the ditch... Almost two years after Nepad's launch, it has little to show in aid or investment. Only a handful of projects have fallen within the plan's framework.' As a sort of kiss of death, the magazine quotes the chief US Africa bureaucrat, Walter Kansteiner: 'Nepad is philosophically spot-on. The US will focus on those emerging markets doing the right thing in terms of private sector development, economic freedom and liberty.' Famed poet-activist and former Robben Islander Dennis Brutus alleged in a Business Day newspaper column a year ago, that Mbeki and his colleagues in Kananaskis were 'apparently intent on selling out the continent under the rubric of a plan crafted by the same technocrats who wrote Pretoria's failed Gear economic programme, under the guidance of Washington and the corporate leaders of Davos... It is past time for us to insist that president Mbeki rise off his kneepad and assume the dignity of an African leader, or face ridicule.' Unfortunately, Mbeki continues to ignore the advice. (The second edition of Bond's book Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the IMF, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, is forthcoming from Zed Press and University of Cape Town Press.) From soncu at pacbell.net Wed May 28 23:33:39 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 22:33:39 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 (Correction) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Bayram was a foreman at SEKA-Datca I met as a summer intern > when I was 18 and at the time, he was 23. He was a very smart > young man from the city of Datca where SEKA was located. It was not Datca, it was Dalaman. Datca is another Agean city across the Bay. http://www.oludenizbeach.com/areamap.html The summer I mentioned was the summer of 1980 so it has been a while. Sabri From evs at tri-isys.com Thu May 29 02:29:16 2003 From: evs at tri-isys.com (Gary Santos) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 16:29:16 +0800 Subject: [A-List] Understanding the Chang Mai initiative Message-ID: <02bc01c325bc$64e34080$93c84ccb@pentium> (NB. I'm sending this to the A-list wondering if there is a Marxist view point regarding international finance. It is something I sent to PKT.) It seems to me that the CMI does not significantly weaken the US dollar in its position as a reserve currency. I've been looking at the web for the details of the CMInitiative in order to understand it better. So far, (a) The region's reserves in USdollars among its ASEAN+3 (Japan, China and Korea) members are effectively being spread around to each member. This is being done, presently, by currency swap arrangements (circa 2001). Magnitudes involved insofar as Japan dollars are concerned are $3 billion for equivalent pesos. More at: http://www.mof.go.jp/jouhou/kokkin/pcmie.htm. (b) The amounts involved are small compared to what is required to defend an attack on a currency. The CMI provides for credit facilities (interest based on LIBOR) approx. averaging $3-4 billion each country. In the 1997 financial crisis borrowings, the Philippines US$ 1 billion; Thailand US$ 17.2 billion; Indonesia US$ 42.3 billion ; and the Republic of Korea US$ 58.4 billion. (c) Most of the swap facilities are US$ denominated. (d) From Henry's post on U.S. Debt In Asia Has Its Costs http://www.newsday.com/business by Charles V. Zehren: A critical date comes June 30 when the organization is expected to telegraph its members' intention to begin issuing cross-border debt in the "Chiang Mai Initiative" report to the Asian Development Bank board of governors in Manila. It's anticipated the plan will call for Asian central bankers to reduce the dollar holdings in their reserves and greatly increase how much they hold in each others' currencies, elevating them to "reserve status." (NB. I'm sending this to the A-list wondering if there is a Marxist view point regarding international finance.) From Waistline2 at aol.com Thu May 29 05:29:18 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 07:29:18 EDT Subject: [A-List] Sorry Chris Message-ID: <180.1aec9f25.2c07490e@aol.com> Sorry Chris, I used your name and meant C. Burford. I do apologize. Melvin P. From sherrynstan at igc.org Thu May 29 05:32:23 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 07:32:23 -0400 Subject: [A-List] The Iranian Pretext Message-ID: <003b01c325d5$fdb6e730$0200a8c0@stan> [While many are suggesting that Washington is about to attack Iran, the glaring fact is that Washington's military plate is already overflowing, and an additional armored division as well as hundreds more military police are being sent back to Iraq, as Afghanistan has slowly encircled US forces there behind the concertina wire around their heavily fortified bases. This would make it appear that - taking a page from the fight to preserve American Apartheid in the 60s - Iran will now play the role of "outside agitator" in the new script being prepared by Rumsfeld, et al, in order to justify the summary dismissal of an American "democratic" handover in Iraq. -SG] Iran Says It's Determined Not to Interfere in Iraq Thu May 29, 2003 06:56 AM ET TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran Thursday dismissed U.S. charges it was stirring up trouble in post-war Iraq and said it was determined not to interfere in its neighbor's affairs. Iran has repeatedly pleaded its innocence in answer to a stream of charges from Washington that Tehran is trying to unhinge the U.S. hold on Iraq, develop nuclear weapons and is giving refuge to top al Qaeda fugitives. "We are determined not to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs and impose a government on the Iraqi people or say what kind and model of government they should have," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters. U.S. administrator Paul Bremer Wednesday cited "troubling" Iranian activity in Iraq which he said could result in serious problems if it went too far. Tehran backs Shi'ite Muslim groups in Iraq, many of whose leaders fled the rule of Saddam Hussein for exile in Iran. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said Washington would not let Tehran try to foster Iranian-style rule in Iraq. But Asefi said only the Iraqi people could decide what sort of government they should have. "It depends on the Iraqi nation and they should choose the model of government they want," he said on the sidelines of an Islamic conference. "Whatever they choose we will accept it and respect it." The United States, which broke diplomatic ties with Tehran after the 1979 Islamic revolution and brands Iran as part of an "axis of evil," has stepped up pressure on Tehran after intelligence intercepts suggested orders for the May 12 Saudi suicide bombings were issued by al Qaeda operatives inside Iran. Iran says it has deported some 500 al Qaeda members who fled Afghanistan, but says it is still questioning others. U.S. officials say al Qaeda security chief Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian indicted for conspiracy in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in east Africa, and Saad bin Laden, son of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, are believed to be in Iran. "We still don't know if this Adel is in Iran or not," said Asefi. "A group of al Qaeda members have been arrested, but we don't know if he is among them." Iran has accused the United States of double standards in fighting terrorism by refusing to hand over People's Mujahideen Iranian rebels disarmed by U.S. forces in Iraq. While branded as terrorists by the State Department, analysts say Pentagon hawks are mulling whether to use the group against Iran. From sherrynstan at igc.org Thu May 29 05:36:06 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 07:36:06 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Anti-U.S. Russo-Chinese alliance may be in works Message-ID: <003c01c325d6$82495960$0200a8c0@stan> May. 28, 2003. 09:23?PM Toronto Star Anti-U.S. Russo-Chinese alliance may be in works ASSOCIATED PRESS MOSCOW ? Chinese President Hu Jintao called today for a "multipolar world" and a strategic partnership with Russia to counter U.S. dominance while oil executives signed a preliminary deal for a pipeline to carry Siberian oil to China. "The trend toward a multipolar world is irreversible and dominant," Hu said in a speech at a Moscow university specializing in international relations. A joint call for a "multipolar world," the term Russia and China used to describe their shared ambition to offset U.S. global dominance, has cemented the post-Soviet friendship between the two former rivals. On the sidelines of Hu's visit, China National Petroleum Corp. and Russia's Yukos oil company signed a preliminary agreement on shipping Siberian oil to China by a 2,250-kilometre pipeline that would link Angarsk in eastern Siberia and Daqing, China. Along with the Chinese route, the Russian cabinet considered a rival, Japanese-backed proposal that would first lay the pipeline to Russia's Pacific port Nakhodka. But the cabinet now appears to favour building the Chinese section first with the route to Nakhodka to come later. A final decision is expected in the next few weeks. Under Wednesday's deal, Yukos would ship about 5.1 billion barrels along the new pipeline to Daqing over 25 years beginning in 2005. The deal is estimated to be worth the equivalent of about than $210 billion Cdn. Hu chose Russia for his first trip abroad after replacing Jiang Zemin as president in March. He hailed a friendship treaty Jiang signed with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2001, saying it created "political guarantees for the long-term and steady development of Chinese-Russian relations." The treaty became the first such document since 1950, when the late Soviet leader Josef Stalin and his Chinese counterpart Mao Zedong created an alliance that slid into rivalry and then hostility in the 1960s. Hu said warmer ties have helped to clear border disputes and increase bilateral trade from the equivalent of about $8 billion in the mid-1990s to $16 billion last year. Without naming the United States, Hu assailed unilateralism in world affairs and condemned the use of force in settling disputes. "Peace can't be achieved through using force," he said. On Tuesday, Hu and Putin issued a joint declaration urging North Korea to relinquish its nuclear ambitions but also voiced support for the North's demand for security guarantees and warned against using force to resolve the crisis. On Thursday, Hu and Putin will take part in a Moscow summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, a six-country group that also includes four former Soviet Central Asian republics. Hu also is scheduled to attend weekend festivities marking the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, Russia's former imperial capital. From sherrynstan at igc.org Thu May 29 05:40:19 2003 From: sherrynstan at igc.org (bon moun) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 07:40:19 -0400 Subject: [A-List] New Palestine Message-ID: <003d01c325d7$193e1040$0200a8c0@stan> POINT OF VIEW/ Masanori Naito: Northern Iraq could become second Palestine The United States is taking the initiative in the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. The U.S.-led venture, however, could trigger a new Middle East crisis. Oil resources, which hold the key to the reconstruction effort, are concentrated in the northern and southern parts of the country. Shiites comprise the largest religious group in Iraq, and the authority that represents them, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, has clearly opposed the establishment of a U.S.-backed government. If southern Iraq, the Shiites' stronghold, refuses to take part in an interim government, it will be difficult to build a unified nation. The northern territory, which holds the Kirkuk oil fields, is inhabited mostly by Kurds who support U.S. forces. The area is a major oil production base, like the Rumailah oil fields in the south. France and Russia are both eyeing oil rights in the region. At the moment, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan are calling for Iraq to be reassembled as a federation offering them a considerable degree of autonomy. But both are sure to demand concessions on the Kirkuk oil fields. Turkey, which shares a border with Iraq, wants to prevent the establishment of a neighboring Kurdish state and is monitoring Kurds looking to expand their influence. Turkey is concerned that a Kurdish separatist or independence movement in Iraq could spread to its own sizable Kurdish population. Even before the outbreak of the war, the Turkish military was warning that it would deploy in North Iraq if Kurdish forces were to take over Kirkuk. In early April, the U.S. administration struck a deal with Turkey in which the Turks would put off a military foray into Iraq. In exchange, the United States promised to keep the Kirkuk oil fields and the city of Mosul independent from Kurdish forces. Eager to head off a military clash in the north, Western nations welcomed the agreement. By agreeing to the conditions, however, the U.S. government essentially took control of the region around the oil fields. Even if Kurdish self-rule takes root and expands, in other words, the area would remain under strong U.S. influence. That could trigger a new crisis. From the viewpoint of Middle Eastern nations, the United States appears to be positioning itself to seize oil rights and dominate the north under the guise of supporting the Kurds. Such a scenario, however, would fundamentally alter the Mideast geopolitical power structure as we know it. Even Turkey, traditionally an American ally, is certain to reject it. In addition to Turkey, Islamic hard-liners and Arab nationalists are expected to intensify their resentment of the Kurds, in this case for abetting U.S. efforts to colonize the region. Without control of the oil fields, the Kurds have no way of achieving economic independence. Yet if they acquire oil rights in the region, they are destined to clash with Arab Iraqis. Instability in northern Iraq, moreover, would give Turkish forces an excuse to advance. The war to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein has ended. But if the United States insists on claiming oil rights in the process of setting up a new government, it will not only stand in the way of Iraqi unification but could also seriously damage its relations with surrounding countries. Throughout history, the Middle East has been ravaged by foreign powers scrambling to seize its resources and annex its land. No matter the stated objective of reconstruction efforts, the people of the region do not want history to repeat itself. We must not forget how Britain tried to rule Palestine under the pretext of fostering Jewish independence. That enterprise, which led to the foundation of Israel, continues to vex Palestine to this day. If a Kurdish administration emerges in northern Iraq under de facto U.S. control, a ``second Palestinian problem'' could arise. The international community must not be blinded by the moral cause of rebuilding a democratic Iraq into forgetting the dangers of a new Middle East crisis. * * * The author is a Hitotsubashi University professor specializing in Middle Eastern studies. He contributed this comment to The Asahi Shimbun.(IHT/Asahi: May 28,2003) From bar at idirect.com Thu May 29 09:26:13 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 11:26:13 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 References: Message-ID: <001a01c325f6$ba0ca800$2e009ad8@Chris> Sabri, It was precisley for Bayram, this simple man as you say, that he was writing for and no one else. Opponents. He had none til he wrote the book. Capital wasnt written as a response to anything. It was 20 years of dedicated research and analysis to try and figure why people were so alienated and why there was so much injustice and he came to realize it was all about economics and that there was a way out of that box. His audience was not a bunch of intellectuals or psuedo-intellectuals and petit-bourgeois like me. And if one rereads Capital it is full of descriptions of the living conditions in all aspects of workers who at that time were far worse off than today and less educated. Engels ran a large factory and knew first hand the conditions and literacy level of the workers in his factory. Never did they say this is meant only for intellectuals to read and then lecture to the workers about it or for academics to mull over after dinner. It was meant to be and is a call for revolution and why one is necessary, that all workers are literally slaves. He said in Grundrisse a very important thing. He said that if there was one single idea to get across to workers which would lead to a successful overtherthrow of capitalism it was the fact that they work for free most of the time, that they are really slaves, in other words the labour theory of value. He said if that single idea could be gotten across there would a revolution tomorrow. But you cannot explain that to workers in short summaries. The have to understand why Marx says it is so and that takes some explaining. And anybody who can understand plain english, no matter there education level can read Marx. I have held discussion groups with workers to go through Capital together and I have never found that they had difficulty with it once they got the hang of his style becuase Marx often reiterates things to clinch his point. The only people who have a hard time with it, as someone else on this list said, were the office workers, university grads who saw themselves as middles class and had a hard time accepting that profit comes from unpaid labour. They always argue that it is the market and so on. This idea that somneone working in a factory who has perhaps only an elementary school education, not even high school, cannot understand these ideas is insulting to that worker becuase it assumes they are some sort of lesser human being. Education does not mean intelligence. And all you need to understand marx is intelligence. To say otherwise results in the view that the working class are stupid, not able to control their own lives and therefore it is left to us intellectuals to tell them what to do and how to do it and why. This is not revolutionary marxst politics, it is bourgeois, liberal politics, the politics of noblesse oblige and is completely anti-revolutionary. It is the same thinking that argued against the French revolution and the Russian revolution, the workers are like dumb animals, they lack the intelligence to run things like we the educated and elite can. They need to be guided. It is fear of the masses, of the "mob". it sounds dispiritingly like the justifications for keeping blacks in their place; the are too stupid, they are incapapble of running their own affairs, they are not capable of reasoning and so on. I come from east end London. My father and mother never went to school. There was just extreme poverty, the depression so everyody had to work then the war and the bombing and they never got to school and the conditions they lived in were bad; six, ten people to a room, no running water and this is the 1930's. Well my father, by reading on his own and through his own intelligence and drive became the director of several hospitals when he retired and my mother wrote a novel. They are your Bayram. Nobody would dare tell my father to his face that he was not capable of reading Marx. He would first laugh, then be insulted and then would kick you out of his house. No, I cannot accept ypur thinking about the working class at all. It demeans and insults them. And it is simply not correct. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sabri Oncu" To: "ALIST" Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 1:13 AM Subject: [A-List] Marxism Today-doctrine & theory-2 > Chris: > > > It was written for the working class and was meant > > to be read by the working class and I might add that > > in the 1860s the working class was a lot less > > educated that the working class today. > > I definitely agree with the second part of this proposition but > with the first part, I have serious problems. I read, but not > studied, the first volume and parts of the third volume of > Capital. Don't know much about the second. > > What I recall from my readings of the above parts of Capital is a > very intelligent explorer, who boldly goes where no one has gone > before, who was heavily influenced by the state of the natural > sciences of his era, among other things, who was trying to > understand, as well as trying to offer an explanation to what he > observed in the concrete, by abstracting from it. > > But what I recall the most is a fighter attacking his > intellectual opponents. No doubt Marx was a genius but I have > doubts that he really cared about whether Bayram could really > read and understand what he wrote. > > Bayram was a foreman at SEKA-Datca I met as a summer intern when > I was 18 and at the time, he was 23. He was a very smart young > man from the city of Datca where SEKA was located. SEKA-Datca is > one of the largest paper and pulp factories the State of Turkey > owns, or, at least used to own, since I don't know whether it had > been privatized or not. He was not only the smartest and the > wittiest of the central maintenance workshop of the factory but > also was he very funny and the most caring of all the workers of > his workshop. He often used to go out of his way to help others, > sometimes putting his own life into danger, and I had witnessed > one of those occasions since I was next to him, because on > occasions they had to work very close to high voltage > transmission lines. > > Everybody in his workshop loved Bayram but he was just a simple > man. > > I don't think when Marx wrote Capital what he had in mind as > audience was people like Bayram. > > He was addressing a different audience, most of whom were his > opponents that he was attacking. > > And in that he was quite successful. > > Or so is my opinion. > > Sabri > > > > > From bar at idirect.com Thu May 29 09:39:59 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 11:39:59 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Sorry Chris References: <180.1aec9f25.2c07490e@aol.com> Message-ID: <006901c325f8$a34f0d90$2e009ad8@Chris> Melvin No problem. I thought it was something like that which is why I didnt reply to it. Though I do sometimes think like a petit-bourgeois psuedo-intellectual to my regret. My parents were both cockney working class kids without any education at all but I was lucky enough to be able to go to university and picked up, along with an education, a certain elitist attitude which I have had to try to get rid of ever since. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 7:29 AM Subject: Re: [A-List] Sorry Chris > Sorry Chris, I used your name and meant C. Burford. > > I do apologize. > > Melvin P. > > > From Waistline2 at aol.com Thu May 29 10:43:49 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 12:43:49 EDT Subject: [A-List] Sorry Chris Message-ID: <1e0.9ef0ee0.2c0792c5@aol.com> In a message dated 5/29/03 9:20:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time, bar at idirect.com writes: Melvin No problem. I thought it was something like that which is why I didnt reply to it. Though I do sometimes think like a petit-bourgeois psuedo-intellectual to my regret. My parents were both cockney working class kids without any education at all but I was lucky enough to be able to go to university and picked up, along with an education, a certain elitist attitude which I have had to try to get rid of ever since. Chris Education for your parents, like my mother and father was extremely important. The class content of everything you write hits me on the head like a hammer. East London and Detroit . . .hummmmm. I used Stan's name in one of my replies but I immediately sense the difference in conception between Stan and Chris. I don't like the word elitist. All of us inherit a certain bourgeois orientation. The word elitist is used by the bourgeoisie to condemn the proletarian revolutionaries from consolidating an organization of elite fighters. Elite means vanguard and vanguard of the vanguard. There is nothing elitist in your writings or attitude although I understand why you are your most harsh critic. There is nothing elitist in Stan's writings. This cannot be said of C. Burford and the proof is in the pudding. Again . . . Stan is going to break his shoulders carrying the weight of the world. This is Stan's national character and he is most certainly very white and American to the core. If Stan is not reprinting an article, what he writes make me cry at night and I ain't did nothing to nobody. We will never understand things like the bourgeois intelligencia and are in fact the proletariat intelligencia no matter what walk of life we come from. Peace my brother. Melvin P. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2056 bytes Desc: not available URL: From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 29 12:01:23 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 19:01:23 +0100 Subject: [A-List] UN capitulation Message-ID: <001d01c3260c$514befe0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> [The former represenative to the UN from Jordan denounces Resolution 1483 as absurd, bizarre, and ridiculous.] THE SECURITY COUNCIL THAT BETRAYED ITS MISSION By Hasan Abu Nimah Jordan Times May 28, 2003 http://jordantimes.com/Wed/opinion/opinion3.htm APART FROM lifting the 12-year-old sanctions on Iraq, but for entirely different reasons than helping the Iraqi people, the latest Security Council resolution on Iraq, 1483, has been a flagrant betrayal of the UN Charter, a scandalous resultant of power politics and opportunistic superpower compromises, and a dangerous submission to the fait accompli of war and aggression, at the expense of principle and international legality. Earlier, in the weeks leading to the war, the council had stood firm in the face of immense American and British pressure, boldly refusing to prematurely undercut the arms inspection programme in favour of a resolution providing legal international cover for the military action against Iraq which was already planned by the US and Britain. The view, in the council, of those who strongly opposed the hasty resort to war, France, Russia, Germany, China and others, was that any further council action would have to wait and be based upon the final report of the arms inspectors whose mission was last reconfirmed and defined in Security Council Resolution 1441. The international community, world official and popular public opinion, in addition to those defiant and courageous voices in the Security Council, were gravely concerned and deeply outraged by the threat to established international order the US-British war on Iraq without council approval would have implied. That effort, spearheaded by the French-declared warning to use the veto, had successfully blocked the war resolution, rendering the attack on Iraq an illegal, naked aggression. While some accused the Security Council of failure and inaction, others, more appropriately, valued the council inaction as proper and compatible with the council's basic mission of preventing the use of force for settling conflicts. It is true that the council could not stop the war, and that is because it had no available physical means to do that, but it did, however, act correctly by depriving the war of any legitimacy. Additionally, and although the council had the power to condemn the war and demand a ceasefire, it was clearly understandable that any such move in the council would be aborted by an American or a British veto and that, for purely pragmatic reasons, many believed that any ceasefire would have only prolonged the life of a brutal regime which did not deserve to be saved. It is amazing how, on May 22, the council dramatically abandoned its steadfast position by suddenly legitimising aggression, endorsing devastation of an innocent country and its weary people, and by licensing their indefinite, unwarranted occupation. The latest Council Resolution is an extraordinary catalogue of contradictions and flaws, a striking example of hypocrisy and acquiescence to power politics. Therefore, it will leave a very dark stain on the already inglorious record of the United Nations. While the resolution opens by "affirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq", it recognises further "the specific authorities, responsibilities, and obligations under applicable international law of these states [the US and the UK] as occupying powers under unified command (the `Authority')", and the Authority here means Washington. The resolution fails to clarify how the sovereignty and integrity of any country can be preserved under an occupation which has, in the case of Iraq, left the country in total chaos, at the mercy of looters, criminals and thugs, without any services, vital survival basics or governing authority since the total breakdown of law and order in early April. Neither does the resolution explain how the partition of the country by the "Authority" into three separate units along sectarian and ethnic lines guarantees any territorial integrity. Surprisingly, and while the desperate efforts of the occupiers to find any of the alleged huge arsenals of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which predicated the war, have reached the point where the occupiers started advertising awards of millions of dollars for anyone who would lead them to any WMDs location, the resolution "reaffirms the importance of the disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and of the eventual confirmation of the disarmament of Iraq". The resolution obviously needed to affirm the existence of the WMDs to save the occupiers the embarrassment, indeed the legal responsibility, of waging a war on false basis; and that the resolution did. The council also needed to confirm the exact opposite, which is that Iraq is free of any WMDs, not only to justify the lifting of the sanctions, but because it is an established fact now; and that, the council failed to do because it contradicts the interests of the resolution authors and sponsors, the occupying powers, which the resolution was designed to serve. Earlier attempts by the occupying powers to secure council approval for lifting the sanctions in order to pave the way for their full control of Iraqi wealth and natural resources were in fact met with French, German and Russian resistance. The opposing group rightly demanded that the closure of the sanctions file required the final liquidation of the WMDs issue, either by occupier admission that they found no weapons or by allowing the inspectors to return to Iraq and finish their mission. Evidently neither option suited the occupiers' purposes, as the last thing they would like to settle is the WMDs issue in order to endlessly delay any troubling negative conclusion. Consequently, this counterargument was also suddenly abandoned, and the issue was treated in the resolution by a most arbitrary and unassertive manner, "underlining the intention of the council to revisit the mandates of the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency as set forth in resolutions 687, 1284, and 1441." That practically means nothing. Other idiosyncrasies in the resolution included peculiar stuff such as: 1) "Stressing the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and control their own natural resources...", at the same time as the resolution legitimises the occupation, and grants the occupying "Authority" full unlimited control of Iraq's resources. 2) The UN resolves to "play a vital role in humanitarian relief, the reconstruction of Iraq, and the restoration and establishment of national and local institutions for representative government", when it is very clear that both the appointment of a special adviser for the secretary general, welcomed in the resolution, and the appointment of a special representative, demanded by the resolution, to upgrade the offer for those insisting on an active UN role meant, in reality, to serve no better purpose than disguising the fact that the UN will have no role and its officials will have no power of their own, except perhaps as useful tools in the hands of the "Authority". 3) The UN "stressing the need for respect for the archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious heritage of Iraq, and for the continued protection" (the protection never started, to be continued) of such heritage, comes a bit too late, after the occupiers left those historic treasures to be pillaged and destroyed right in front of the eyes of their soldiers, to the great bewilderment and pain of the whole watching world. More alarming is the bizarre council invitation for "other states that are not occupying powers" to join the occupation and to work "now or in the future under the Authority". Furthermore, and clearly to meet the occupiers' need for other states' support to maintain their control in occupied Iraq, the council "welcomed the willingness of member states to contribute to the stability and security in Iraq (meaning to help the occupier to keep control) by contributing personnel, equipment and other resources under the Authority". How could this be anything but an open UN invitation to its member states to support an illegal occupation, rather than the UN taking charge of the situation itself, as required by its Charter, building its own UN force under the UN flag and moving in as a rescue mission to rebuild destroyed Iraq, and to free its people? But the resolution descends from bizarre to ridiculous when it "determines that the situation in Iraq, although improved, continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security". Clearly, this was an entirely thoughtless justification for the council to act under chapter seven of the Charter; but it turned out to be so absurd that no amount of wild imagination could explain how a country which has completely collapsed, whose army disintegrated, whose government disappeared, that the occupation allowed to be ravaged and pillaged, that descended into total chaos, whose every function has been paralysed and that is totally under the control of its occupiers could be a threat to world peace. And what kind of world do we live in that could be threatened by such a non-existing danger? And those are just few examples. It was the precious hope of many, since the eruption of this major international crisis, that those who stood firm by the principle at the UN, insisting that the rule of law, not the blind arrogance of power, should prevail as the guiding force in international relations, as a guarantee for our peaceful future, would stay firm on their position. They, sadly, did not, as the current resolution proves. The question is: Is this the end of the battle or just a temporary set back in a long, ongoing fight between the forces of conquest and evil and the rule of law. The answer is hidden somewhere in the Security Council chamber. --The writer is former ambassador and permanent representative of Jordan to the UN. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu May 29 13:22:05 2003 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (James Daly) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 20:22:05 +0100 Subject: [A-List] John Cleese -- and imperialist humour Message-ID: <003f01c32617$9788bcd0$4d116351@D2RH1H0J> John Cleese is only one of the "team of social chauvinists" I referred to in the first line of my first contribution to the thread, which includes the scriptwriters. They wrote the part of Manuel, taken up enthusiastically by Andrew Sachs, as a real idiot, not just a Spaniard being treated with prejudice -- that wouldn't have been "funny". (Nobody from Barcelona whom I have met is like Manuel). They showed Fawlty's gullibility and greed in relation to the Irish builders -- but they were still criminals. They wrote the sneering passage about the splitters. And they wrote the unforgivable passage about the lack of gratitude from the imperialised (a caricature of the people who in historical fact were massacred soon after the date of the setting of the film). I am providing a chance for people to become aware of the reality of imperialist humour, which is just part of imperialism and of social imperialism. Ironically, in some quarters it seems to be something of a thankless task. James Daly From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Thu May 29 15:38:31 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:38:31 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Discurso de Fidel en Argentina (5 de 5 partes) Message-ID: <3ED653A7.5349.AF1CB1@localhost> Hemos creado, en fecha reciente, la posibilidad de ver la televisi?n al medio mill?n de cubanos que viv?a en ?reas rurales que no ten?an televisi?n, con 1 885 casas de video, 50 sillas por sala, panel solar de 1 900 d?lares, con un gasto tambi?n menor de 4 millones de d?lares. Acceso a informaci?n y a programas por televisi?n, en un televisor de 29 pulgadas, por esa cifra tan rid?cula, se puede decir, al lado de los miles de millones que se mencionan constantemente; hasta un pa?s bloqueado durante tantos a?os puede hacerlo, no debe haber ninguno que no pueda hacerlo (Aplausos). Vean, les estoy dando datos concretos. Hemos creado, no inaugurado ?ya va para el segundo curso?, una universidad de la ciencia inform?tica con alumnos seleccionados entre los mejores de todo el pa?s, donde ingresar?n 2 000 alumnos por a?o; no ser?n, desde luego, los ?nicos, ah? se formar?n analistas m?s que programadores. Bien, no voy a mencionar otras cosas, no solo en aras del tiempo, sino que tengo la esperanza de que alg?n d?a las conozcan, y es lo que est? transformando nuestro pa?s y le da la posibilidad de vivir por la inteligencia. Eso no tendr?a ning?n valor y ninguna importancia, si no tuvi?ramos la convicci?n profunda de que esos m?todos se pueden masificar y, por lo tanto, acabar con esos bochornosos millones de personas analfabetas de las que se viene hablando hace 40 ? 50 a?os y que pudieran erradicarse, sencillamente, en cinco a?os, simplemente si Naciones Unidas quisiera, si la UNESCO quisiera. ?Son tan baratos esos procedimientos! Y despu?s podr?an venir los cursos de seguimiento, primer grado, segundo, tercero, son infinitas las posibilidades. Tambi?n se puede competir con las prisiones sembrando escuelas y utilizando procedimientos sencillos como estos procedimientos (Aplausos). Estoy convencido de que si un pa?s pobre puede garantizar las cosas modestas, pero honradas, dignas, para cada uno de sus ciudadanos, ?por qu? otros no podr?an hacerlo? Es por ello que hasta con un poco de pasi?n les hablo de estos problemas, porque son problemas en que durante mucho tiempo hemos pensado. Y les confesaba que cuando hemos llegado a tener algunos de estos conocimientos, resultado de la observaci?n, del estudio constante de la situaci?n de la vida de los ciudadanos, es que digo que sentimos verg?enza por no haber podido descubrir antes muchas de estas cosas que tanto bienestar podr?an traer para nuestros ciudadanos. Nosotros no recomendamos f?rmulas dogm?ticas, no nos ponemos a recomendar que tengan tal y m?s cual sistema social. Conozco pa?ses con tantos recursos, que con el uso adecuado de los recursos no tendr?an ni necesidad, vean, de hacer un cambio revolucionario con relaci?n a la econom?a, de tipo radical, como el que ha hecho nuestro pa?s. Sabemos lo que ocurre en lugares, como el m?s pobre de este hemisferio, que es Hait?, los problemas que tiene de recursos naturales, y algunos muy ricos, no voy a discutir sobre este tema; pero el problema est? en la distribuci?n equitativa de la riqueza (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Esto no necesita ni siquiera confiscar; no, en una concepci?n de lo posible..., porque hay que pensar en lo deseable y lo posible, hay que diferenciar entre lo que se puede so?ar y lo que se puede realizar ahora, y lo que se puede realizar ahora y lo que podr?a realizarse dentro de 20 ? 30 a?os, a partir de las realidades del mundo actual. Nosotros no tenemos ni un ?tomo de arrepentimiento de lo que hemos hecho en nuestro pa?s y de la forma en que hemos organizado nuestra sociedad (Aplausos). Hemos tenido la posibilidad de aprender mucho sobre nuestras posibilidades y tenemos una idea de prioridades, porque es muy importante para los que deseamos un mundo mejor tener idea de las prioridades, de las posibilidades, de las realidades. Les mencion? como dos veces o tres el famoso proyecto de ALCA. Hoy una enorme necesidad de nuestros pueblos es evitar que ese veneno se implante en nuestros pa?ses y estar?amos obteniendo una gran victoria (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Les puedo a?adir que vemos en Am?rica Latina un movimiento de avance que se produce. Si me preguntara alguien por qu? sent? gran satisfacci?n y j?bilo cuando llegaron las noticias de un resultado electoral en nuestra querid?sima Argentina (Aplausos y exclamaciones), f?jense, hay una raz?n muy grande: Lo peor del capitalismo salvaje, como dir?a Ch?vez; lo peor de la globalizaci?n neoliberal es que el s?mbolo por excelencia... Y no menciono nombre, nadie puede quejarse, a no ser que alguien se sienta s?mbolo de lo que digo. Mi opini?n es que una de las cosas extraordinarias es que el s?mbolo de la globalizaci?n neoliberal ha recibido un colosal golpe (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Ustedes no saben el servicio que le han prestado a Am?rica Latina; ustedes no saben el servicio que le han prestado al mundo al hundir en la fosa del Pac?fico ?no s? c?mo se llama ahora?, que tiene m?s de 8 000 metros de profundidad, el s?mbolo de la globalizaci?n neoliberal. Le han insuflado tremenda fuerza al n?mero creciente de personas que han ido tomando conciencia en toda nuestra Am?rica sobre qu? cosa tan horrible y fatal es eso que se llama globalizaci?n neoliberal (Aplausos). Si se quiere, pod?amos partir de lo que el Papa dijo muchas veces y cuando estuvo de visita en nuestro pa?s, cuando habl? de la globalizaci?n de la solidaridad. ?Alguien estar?a en contra de la globalizaci?n de la solidaridad en el m?s cabal concepto de la palabra, que abarque no solo las relaciones entre los hombres y mujeres dentro de la frontera de un pa?s, sino dentro de las fronteras del planeta, y que la solidaridad la ejerzan tambi?n aquellos que derrochan el dinero y destruyen y malbaratan los recursos naturales y condenan a muerte a los habitantes de este planeta? (Aplausos y exclamaciones.) No se alcanza el cielo en un d?a, pero cr?anme ?no lo digo por halagar, y trato de decirlo con el mayor cuidado? que ustedes han asestado un descomunal golpe a un s?mbolo, y eso tiene un enorme valor, y se ha producido, precisamente, en este momento cr?tico, de crisis econ?mica internacional, donde est?n envueltos todos; ya no es una crisis en el sudeste asi?tico, es una crisis en el mundo, m?s amenazas de guerra, m?s las consecuencias de una enorme deuda, m?s el fatalismo de que el dinero escape. Es mundial el problema, y por eso mundialmente tambi?n se est? formando una conciencia y por ello ser? un d?a de gloria ese d?a en que el pueblo argentino, pese a dificultades, que como sabemos todos existen aqu? y en otras partes, muchas veces fragmentaci?n, muchas veces divisiones, y divisiones puede haber y hasta debe haber, pero es que hay tantas cosas de inter?s com?n que se puede tener la convicci?n de que estas deben prevalecer, el mundo posible. F?jense que ha tomado fuerza esa frase: un mundo mejor es posible. Pero cuando se haya alcanzado un mundo mejor, que es posible, tenemos que seguir repitiendo: Un mundo mejor es posible, y volver a repetir despu?s: Un mundo mejor es posible (Aplausos y exclamaciones de: ??Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!?, y de: ??Ol?, ol?, ol?, ol?, Fidel, Fidel!?) Les he expresado ?y estoy pr?ximo a terminar?, as? en estas peculiares condiciones, y me alegro m?s, la experiencia modesta de nuestro pa?s, y c?mo d?a a d?a aprend?amos cosas nuevas y cosas nuevas, y cuando luch?bamos contra el 30% de analfabetismo, qu? lejos est?bamos de pensar que un d?a estar?amos masificando los estudios universitarios, extendiendo las universidades por todos los municipios del pa?s, a partir del capital humano que hab?amos creado, sin lo cual habr?a sido imposible esa aspiraci?n, y, por eso he dicho, y Mart? ya lo hab?a dicho hace muchos a?os, que a los que le llamaban so?ador ?l dec?a que los sue?os de hoy ser?n las realidades del ma?ana (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Los so?adores no existen, se lo dice un so?ador que ha tenido el privilegio de ver realidades que no fue capaz de so?ar. No lo considero un m?rito, sino tambi?n privilegio y azar afortunado de vivir, a pesar de los cientos de planes por acelerar mi viaje hacia la tumba (Exclamaciones), con lo cual me han hecho un enorme favor, obligarme a perder todo instinto de preservaci?n y conocer que los valores s? constituyen la verdadera calidad de vida, la suprema calidad de vida, aun por encima de alimento, techo y ropa. No disminuyo, ni mucho menos, la importancia de las necesidades materiales, siempre hay que colocarlas en primer lugar, porque para poder estudiar, para adquirir esa otra calidad de vida hay que satisfacer determinadas necesidades que son f?sicas, que son materiales; pero la calidad de vida est? en los conocimientos, en la cultura. Cuando un hombre termina su trabajo quiere ir a un lugar a ver una buena pel?cula, o a un teatro, para ver una obra excelentemente presentada, o una danza, o un grupo musical. Ya despu?s que desayun? y almorz?, lo que desea es esa recreaci?n, distraerse. Nadie quiere que los hijos se entretengan o se recreen aprendiendo a consumir drogas, o viendo violencia y cosas absurdas, que envenenan la mente de ese ni?o (Aplausos), la calidad de vida es otra cosa, calidad de vida es patriotismo, calidad de vida es dignidad, calidad de vida es honor (Aplausos y exclamaciones); calidad de vida es la autoestima a la que tienen derecho a disfrutar todos los seres humanos (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Argentinos todos, hermanos entra?ables de Am?rica Latina, cualquiera que sea su creencia, su pensamiento o sus ideas, no he tenido intenci?n de lastimar ni de ofender a nadie. Si alguno considera que algunos conceptos aqu? expresados fuesen algo como una injerencia en los asuntos argentinos, algo que por cierto he tratado de evitar, y con m?s raz?n a partir de la extraordinaria solidaridad y calor con que he sido recibido en esta ciudad y en este pa?s, si alguien lo cree, le pido sinceramente que nos excuse. ?Viva la hermandad entre los pueblos! (Exclamaciones de: ??Viva!?) ?Viva la humanidad! (Exclamaciones de: ??Viva!?) ?Hasta la victoria siempre! Gracias. (Ovaci?n.) N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Thu May 29 15:38:35 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:38:35 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Discurso de Fidel en Argentina (4 de 5 partes) Message-ID: <3ED653AB.32362.AF2AB3@localhost> ?Qu? hicimos, qu? utilizamos? En todos los municipios y en todos los centrales azucareros, por ejemplo, hab?a escuelas secundarias b?sicas y a veces t?cnicas de nivel medio o de bachiller, de las externas, escuelas que terminaban sus clases a las 4:30 de la tarde, y todas ten?an sus laboratorios de computaci?n y de medios audiovisuales, y entonces de 5:00 a 8:00 comenzaban las clases en esas mismas instalaciones, para este Curso de Formaci?n Integral para j?venes, con nuevos profesores o con los mismos profesores que daban clases, o profesores que se hab?an retirado y que con la ayuda de esos medios lo que pueden hacer son milagros, se lo aseguro. De esa forma, ya hoy se les da una remuneraci?n por estudiar (Aplausos). Se cre? as? con esta experiencia el empleo de estudiar. Es que muchas veces no se piensa que, aunque sea pobre, un hombre vive en un lugar, aunque sea en un cuarto, o utiliza un ?mnibus. En nuestro caso, tiene garantizada la seguridad social; en nuestro caso, el 85% es due?o de las viviendas (Aplausos), y no paga impuesto por la propiedad de la vivienda (Aplausos). F?jense bien, quiero aclarar que no estoy recomendando nada, yo simplemente deseo explicarles qu? estamos haciendo, y por qu? estamos sobreviviendo, y por qu? el pueblo en masa apoya la causa revolucionaria. Si el kilowatt cuesta medio centavo de d?lar, si una cantidad de alimentos esenciales cuestan los precios que les se?al?, si la cantidad de arroz que se entrega, a un precio bien reducido, tambi?n con un d?lar que, cambiado por peso, a 25 centavos y con el cambio de 26 a 1, una familia, o una persona puede comprar 105 libras de arroz por un d?lar (Aplausos). Hay otras tiendas en que se vende m?s caro y todo en relaci?n del lujo o de la cosa necesaria. Los medicamentos en nuestro pa?s tienen la mitad del precio que ten?an hace 44 a?os, porque se rebajaron entonces a la mitad, y hoy se mantienen esos precios de aquellos productos gen?ricos. Vuelvo a repetir que cuento para explicar. S? la asistencia m?dica de una calidad cada vez mejor, porque estamos haciendo grandes esfuerzos en ese sentido, es gratuita para todos los ciudadanos por igual, lo mismo una cirug?a del coraz?n, a coraz?n abierto, que una gripe. La educaci?n, cada vez con m?s calidad, es absolutamente gratuita, desde el prescolar hasta un doctorado en ciencias, sin que le cueste un centavo a nuestros ciudadanos (Aplausos), una de las razones por las cuales tiene mucha tranquilidad nuestra poblaci?n. Pero ahora estamos pasando a una sociedad de cultura masiva, y nuestro pa?s vivir? en el futuro fundamentalmente de las producciones intelectuales. Si la naturaleza no nos dio gran cantidad de otros recursos, tuvimos el privilegio de una Revoluci?n a la que nos oblig? un vecino muy poderoso, aunque de esto ?ltimo no podemos echar la culpa a nadie, quiz?s a Crist?bal Col?n, no s?, que nos descubri? y nos trajo la civilizaci?n, como ustedes saben; aunque ustedes, argentinos, desde luego, no entender?an tan bien como la Rep?blica de Hait? lo que signific? la colonizaci?n. Pero no vamos a discutir sobre eso. Es un producto hist?rico. Se sabe, desde luego, que all? fueron muchos peregrinos en una emigraci?n religiosa, que tra?an una ?tica religiosa. Yo atribuyo a eso el hecho del idealismo que suele caracterizar a los ciudadanos norteamericanos y el por qu? si usted logra demostrarle la verdad es capaz de apoyar una causa justa. No hay que olvidarse de ellos, que est?n tan amenazados como nosotros de todas las calamidades ecol?gicas y otras de las cuales habl?. Hay muchas cosas en com?n con ellos y ellos est?n bien persuadidos, tienen razones para estar bien persuadidos de que a quienes los dirigen no les importa un bledo ?no s? si ustedes usan esa palabra?, el medio ambiente o el cambio de clima. Porque me pregunto por qu? demonios ese pa?s tan poderoso, que gasta el 25% de la energ?a mundial y aporta la mayor cantidad de bi?xido de carbono y otros gases contaminantes, ha renunciado al Acuerdo de Kyoto. Tengan la seguridad de que decenas de millones de norteamericanos tienen las mismas preocupaciones que ustedes y los dem?s con relaci?n a todos esos problemas. Yo dec?a: Bueno, tenemos un vecino muy poderoso, pero ha sido una suerte que hayamos podido ir desarrollando, cultivando las inteligencias de nuestros compatriotas de forma masiva. El ciento por ciento de los ni?os se grad?an de sexto grado y el 99% y fracci?n de noveno grado ya en nuestro pa?s, y ahora entramos en la etapa de masificaci?n, usando los medios audiovisuales, us?ndolos exhaustivamente, no para sembrar veneno, no para que otro piense por uno; porque ya habl? de que si al ni?o le falta alimento no desarrolla la inteligencia con que vino al mundo, la inteligencia potencial, pero si se usan incorrectamente determinados medios, le suprimen la opci?n de pensar, porque piensan por usted y le dicen qu? color es el que tiene que usar, si la falda es larga o corta, si la tela de moda es esta o la otra. Nos env?an el mensaje desde all? sobre lo que debemos usar, qu? refresco tenemos que tomar ?digo, gaseosa, porque supe que decir refresco aqu? es otra cosa, y me equivoqu? en una declaraci?n; no me equivoqu?, dije refresco porque as? se conoce en Cuba lo que ustedes conocen por gaseosa; eso lo dije cuando habl? de cierto tipo de champ?n, que no voy a repetir aqu?; pero, bueno, quise decir lo que ustedes llaman gaseosa?, vienen y le dicen qu? cerveza deben tomar, o qu? marca de whisky o de ron. A nosotros no nos importa, si nosotros, que somos productores de tabaco hist?ricamente, y no podemos renunciar a ?l, y mucho menos bloqueados, cuando le regalamos una caja de puros a un amigo le decimos: ?Con ella, si fumas, puedes fumar; si alg?n amigo fuma, le puedes brindar, pero lo mejor que puedes hacer con esa caja es regal?rsela a tu enemigo? (Aplausos). Cuba es productora y exportadora de tabaco y hace campa?a contra la fuma; Cuba es productora de ron de cierta calidad ?para actuar con la debida modestia; ahora han robado una marca, pero no importa, no pueden producir el ron cubano?, no lo recomiendo, pero si alguien puede probarlo... A las mujeres embarazadas lo que les recomiendo es que no lo consuman, que no consuman alcohol. Lo sabemos porque estamos estudiando todas las causas de cada uno de los casos de atraso mental y sabemos el da?o que el alcohol produce en una mujer gestante, es una de las causas. Pero, bien, el pa?s vivir? no en una sociedad de consumo; la sociedad de consumo es uno de los m?s tenebrosos inventos del capitalismo desarrollado y hoy en la fase de globalizaci?n neoliberal. Es nefasto, porque trato de imaginarme a 1 300 millones de chinos con el nivel de motores y de autom?viles que tiene Estados Unidos. No puedo imaginarme a la India, con 1?000 millones de habitantes, viviendo en una sociedad de consumo; no puedo imaginarme a los 520 millones de personas que viven en el ?frica Subsahariana, que no tienen ni electricidad y en algunos lugares m?s del 80% no sabe leer ni escribir, en una sociedad de consumo. Empezar?a pregunt?ndome cu?nto van a durar los yacimientos de combustible, probados y probables, al ritmo en que lo gastamos hoy, de modo que apenas durar? 150 a?os lo que la naturaleza form? a trav?s de 300 millones de a?os (Aplausos). Hablo as?, porque se nos ha introducido en la cabeza la idea sobre un falso concepto de calidad de vida. ?C?mo puede haber calidad de vida sin educaci?n? ?Cu?nto sufre un analfabeto!, no se lo imagina nadie; porque hay algo que se llama autoestima, que es m?s importante, incluso, que los alimentos, la autoestima (Aplausos). ?Qu? es un analfabeto?, en el ?ltimo escal?n all? abajo, que tiene que pedirle a un amigo que le redacte una carta para la novia. Yo lo vi de ni?o, en un lugar donde hab?a muchos analfabetos y unos pocos que sab?an leer y escribir y le ped?an una carta para una mujer que pretend?an; pero no es que le dictara una carta diciendo que so?? toda la noche y todav?a est? pensando y que no come pensando en ella, digamos, si el campesino quiere mandar ese mensaje; sino que le dec?a al que sab?a leer y escribir: ?No, no, escr?bele t? lo que t? crees que debes escribirle?, para conquistar a la novia. No exagero. Yo viv? en los campos en que eso era as?. ?Qu? humillaci?n tener que poner las huellas digitales! Aquellos que despu?s estudiaron segundo, tercero, cuarto o quinto, ?qu? es una persona de cuarto o quinto grado? Luego dicen all? en Estados Unidos que hay democracia, pero me pregunto si millones de personas son analfabetas, con qu? criterio votan; si millones son semianalfabetas, con qu? criterio votan (Aplausos). Entonces, todos ustedes han o?do hablar del ALCA y yo me hac?a, en mi fuero m?s ?ntimo, una pregunta, ?y si les da por decir que el ALCA es la salvaci?n de todos los dolores y de todas las calamidades? (Silban.) Es decir, c?mo puede decidir alguien que no sepa leer y escribir, o que apenas tenga cuarto, quinto o sexto grado, lo que es el ALCA; lo que es abrir todas las fronteras de pa?ses que tienen un nivel muy por debajo de desarrollo t?cnico a los productos de aquellos que tienen los m?s elevados niveles tecnol?gicos y de productividad, de aquellos que fabrican aviones del ?ltimo modelo, de aquellos que dominan las comunicaciones mundiales, de aquellos que quieren garantizar de nosotros tres cosas: materia prima, fuerza de trabajo barata, y, adem?s, clientes (Aplausos). ?C?mo va a comprender una poblaci?n donde un porcentaje alto no sepa leer y escribir, no tenga nociones de econom?a, lo que significa renunciar a la moneda propia? Renunciar a la moneda, ya algunos lo han hecho tranquilamente. Si nuestro pa?s hubiera renunciado a su moneda, no habr?a podido vencer los obst?culos que venci?, sobre todo, a partir de ese que llamamos per?odo especial al derrumbarse el campo socialista. Jam?s renunciamos. Ahora, ?c?mo va a explicar el fen?meno de la fuga de capitales? ?Qu? le dice?, si hay algo tan claro que lo puede ver un ciego de nacimiento, y es que las monedas de nuestros pa?ses est?n obligadas a escapar y est?n obligadas a fugarse, sean bien habidas o mal habidas. Un profesional que reuni? 50 000 ? 100?000 d?lares y lo tiene en la moneda de su pa?s, y de repente aquella moneda, por ley de la gravedad, como aquella que descubri? Newton, se cae hacia Estados Unidos ?esta es una especie de ley de gravedad lateral, no hacia el centro de la Tierra, sino hacia una direcci?n geogr?fica (Aplausos)?, y se tiene que ir porque nuestras monedas no pueden sostener la llamada paridad. Es verdad que luchando contra la inflaci?n, que es la confiscaci?n sistem?tica y casi diaria, algunas f?rmulas y promesas se abrieron paso. Junto con ello, el famos?simo libre cambio, que abre las puertas para que el dinero se escape. Apenas hay un d?ficit presupuestario o un d?ficit en la balanza de pagos, de inmediato se empiezan a crear problemas; aun sin los especuladores, que ayudan porque encuentran en eso el medio de cultivo, y se llevan el dinero. Se tienen los datos del dinero que se fuga, sea cual sea su origen, algo que no tiene que ver con la deuda ni con los intereses usurarios de una deuda, sino algo que tiene que ver con esa ley de la fuga de las monedas d?biles. En un tiempo el oro fue moneda, ten?a un valor per se y lo fue, incluso, hasta el a?o 1971 ? 1972, en que el se?or Presidente de la potencia hegem?nica ?aunque todav?a no era hegemonismo unilateral? decidi? suprimir la conversi?n del papel moneda norteamericano en oro. Entonces, ya la moneda era papel, no ten?a un valor per se, la imprim?an los due?os de las m?quinas donde se imprime el d?lar. ?Y para d?nde va el d?lar? No se va para el Caribe. Bueno, puede haber alguna islita con para?so fiscal, pero esas son excepciones (Aplausos). Bien, ?para d?nde se marcha? No se va para el ?frica, no se va para un pa?s vecino latinoamericano, porque a todos les pasa exactamente lo mismo. Usted puede tener una moneda que se llame equis, no la voy a mencionar, que est? a la par del d?lar ?es que no quiero tocar nombres de pa?ses?, y en seis semanas puede estar a la mitad o a un tercio de su valor, y si usted ten?a un valor en papeles, que era real por su capacidad de compra, cuando se produce ese fen?meno un valor de 30 se reduce a un tercio o a un 25% o m?s. Cuando usted ve que algunas monedas son cientos de pesos por un d?lar, no hay que olvidar que en un tiempo val?an lo mismo que un d?lar. Y as? con algunas monedas se ha visto en estos d?as, ll?mese equis o ll?mese bol?var ?Ch?vez no se va a poner bravo conmigo, porque yo mencione el bol?var, porque ?l sabe muy bien c?mo se deval?an todas nuestras monedas?; luego est?n obligadas a marcharse, ir all? a los bancos del pa?s m?s rico del mundo. Vean, este solo concepto, ?c?mo se lo vamos a explicar a un analfabeto? ?C?mo se lo vamos a explicar a un hombre que tiene sexto grado? ?C?mo se lo vamos a explicar a un hombre que no tenga un m?nimo de conocimientos econ?micos, que conozca estas cosas? Le venden un ALCA y 10 ALCA (Aplausos). De ah? la necesidad de sembrar conciencia, sembrar ideas, ense?ar, porque el hombre es capaz de comprender cuando se le explica y mediante ejemplos. Hoy esa ignorancia se utiliza como caldo de cultivo, como instrumento para saquearnos cada vez m?s, explotarnos cada vez, enga?arnos cada vez m?s. Por eso ahora nosotros, en nuestro pa?s, explic?bamos el Primero de Mayo, hab?amos desarrollado un programa para ense?ar a leer y escribir por radio ?no hablo por televisi?n?, por radio, lo ?nico que necesita el oyente es un radio de onda corta y unas cuantas hojas. El m?todo est? y est? probado, lo puede trasmitir por una cadena nacional de radio o por cadenas locales; ya hay algunos que lo est?n haciendo. Incluso, nuestro pa?s por onda corta podr?a ense?ar a leer y escribir, bueno, digamos, a algunos analfabetos de Estados Unidos (Aplausos). En d?as recientes le?amos el n?mero de miles de alumnos de escuelas p?blicas con cuarto grado y hasta con noveno grado que no sab?an leer. ?Qu? clase de ense?anza les impartir?n? Como 36 alumnos por aula all? mismo en Miami, all?, donde tienen globos y donde han hecho despegar aviones para imponer trasmisiones piratas de televisi?n a un pa?s donde m?s de la mitad de las horas hoy se dedican a educaci?n; muchas horas que eran libres, incluso, por ahorro de combustible. Hace unos d?as inauguramos el tercer canal televisivo, que es para la educaci?n, y tambi?n anunciamos que en el primer trimestre del pr?ximo a?o estar? el cuarto canal educativo. La televisi?n es una verdadera y no conocida forma de trasmitir conocimientos masivos (Aplausos). Y hay otras m?s, no voy a mencionarlas ahora, de incre?ble eficacia, no voy a explicar por qu?. Pero van surgiendo posibilidades. Al se?or de la UNESCO y a cualquier pa?s le ofrec?amos p?blicamente, el Primero de Mayo, esa patente, pudi?ramos decir, esa f?rmula, gratuitamente: los programas para ense?ar a leer y a escribir por radio. Conocemos tambi?n las t?cnicas de ense?ar a leer y escribir por televisi?n, lo que ocurre es que un gran n?mero de los analfabetos no tienen electricidad, no tienen televisor. En nuestro pa?s, en dos mil trescientas y tantas escuelas del campo que no ten?an electricidad lo hemos resuelto mediante un modesto panel solar de 1,2 metros cuadrados, y cuyo costo no supera los 1 123 d?lares (Aplausos); de modo que por menos de 4 millones de d?lares, f?jense bien, hemos llevado el panel solar a todas esas escuelas, tanto para el televisor que gasta solo 60 watt como para la computadora, que cuando hay un n?mero mayor de ni?os no le alcanzar?a el kilowatt de un panel y tiene que poner dos, y por eso digo que por menos de 4 millones de d?lares, hemos llevado la electricidad a todas las escuelas rurales del pa?s; no la electricidad para cocinar, sino para el televisor y para la computadora (Aplausos). N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Thu May 29 15:38:37 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:38:37 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Discurso de Fidel en Argentina (3 de 5 partes) Message-ID: <3ED653AD.11920.AF3516@localhost> Nosotros hemos estudiado eso y unas cuantas cosas m?s, que no es el momento de explicar. Lo digo solo para decir que sin una revoluci?n educacional, bien profunda, la injusticia y la desigualdad continuar?n prevaleciendo aun por encima de las satisfacciones materiales de todos los ciudadanos del pa?s (Aplausos). En nuestro pa?s nosotros le garantizamos un litro de leche a cada ni?o hasta los siete a?os (Aplausos). A partir de esa edad y debido a nuestros recursos, le garantizamos una leche de otro tipo, ya que, afortunadamente, existen posibilidades. Ahora, esa leche la garantizamos a ese ni?o, a un costo de menos de un centavo de d?lar (Aplausos). Con un d?lar que le env?e alguien que vive en el Norte a un amigo, puede comprar la leche de 104 d?as (Aplausos). En nuestro pa?s, el bloqueo nos oblig? al racionamiento, ese bloqueo que ha durado 44 a?os (Silban); pero en nuestro pa?s no se encontrar? un ni?o sin escuela, uno solo no se encontrar? sin escuela (Aplausos). En nuestro pa?s, incluso, los ni?os que nacen con alg?n problema mental ?y es algo que estamos estudiando en profundidad, causas que originan distintos tipos de retraso mental, si ligero, moderado, severo o profundo, cada uno con sus caracter?sticas; afortunadamente, son m?s numerosos los ligeros y moderados?, en este momento nosotros tenemos el expediente de cada uno, y no de los ni?os solo, sino de las ciento cuarenta y tantas mil personas de distintas edades que tienen alg?n problema de retraso mental. Todos los ni?os que tienen alg?n problema de incapacidad f?sica o mental, o ciego, o sordomudo; o algo m?s terrible, ciego y sordomudo al mismo tiempo. Hay tragedias humanas, que para conocerlas hay que investigarlas, y nosotros no las conoc?amos desde el primer d?a. Fue a lo largo de la pr?ctica y luchando por la educaci?n, como hemos luchado, que fuimos descubriendo estas cosas. Tienen escuelas especiales, hay 55 000 ni?os matriculados en escuelas especiales. Hemos planteado que no basta que un ni?o vaya a una escuela especial entre sexto y noveno grado. Hemos planteado que de esa escuela, si es un ni?o que no puede ir a un nivel superior de nueve a doce grados, sea bachillerato, o conocimientos t?cnicos, una escuela tecnol?gica, termine su noveno grado o el tiempo que necesite, si hace falta un a?o o dos m?s, preparado para el tipo de trabajo que pueda realizar y, adem?s, con un empleo (Aplausos). No se puede subestimar a los muchachos que tengan ese tipo de problemas, tienen cualidades para muchas cosas, y ya no nos conformamos, no nos podemos conformar, porque ser?amos inconscientes si nos limit?ramos a ense?arle lo que se le puede ense?ar a un ni?o con ese tipo de limitaci?n, ligeras y moderadas, que son la mayor?a. A todos se les atiende, cualquiera que sea el tipo de incapacidad que se tenga. Podemos tener la satisfacci?n de que, a pesar del bloqueo ese que tiene 44 a?os, no hay un solo ni?o con necesidad de ense?anza especial que no tenga su escuela (Aplausos). Quiero a?adir un dato, y nadie lo tome como una vanidad de nuestro pueblo, porque lo que digo siempre con relaci?n a lo que hemos hecho por la educaci?n y la salud nos produce verg?enza en la medida en que descubrimos nuevas y nuevas posibilidades, verg?enza por no haberlo descubierto antes. Nadie piense que Cuba se jacte de ?xito, les puedo asegurar algo que ni siquiera nosotros mismos sab?amos. Hac?amos comparaciones por los datos de la UNESCO y las investigaciones que hizo sobre los niveles de educaci?n y, en nuestro pa?s, los ni?os de cuarto y quinto grados, en lenguaje y en matem?ticas, casi duplican los conocimientos de los ni?os del resto de Am?rica Latina y de Estados Unidos tambi?n, no vayan a creer que solo de Am?rica Latina (Aplausos). S? que les estoy hablando de un pa?s que tiene elevados niveles de educaci?n y de cultura; s? c?mo es el pueblo argentino y sus conocimientos. Nuestro pa?s hoy tiene niveles m?s altos, pero Argentina est? entre los dem?s pa?ses, cuatro o cinco, que se acercan, aunque a una relativamente alta distancia, a los niveles de nuestro pa?s; pero nos llam? m?s la atenci?n cuando descubrimos que nuestros ni?os de primaria, sus conocimientos de lenguaje y de matem?tica, est?n por encima de los pa?ses m?s desarrollados del mundo (Aplausos). Es decir, nuestro pa?s hoy ocupa ese lugar, del mismo modo que el ?ndice de mortalidad infantil en nuestro pa?s est? por debajo de siete por cada 1 000 nacidos vivos en el primer a?o de vida ?el ?ltimo a?o fue de 6,5; el anterior hab?a sido 6,2?, nosotros pensamos bajarlo. No sab?amos siquiera si en un pa?s tropical pod?a bajarse el ?ndice de mortalidad infantil a esos niveles, porque influyen muchos factores: el clima influye, incluso el potencial gen?tico de cada poblaci?n influye; esos factores, independientemente de los factores de asistencia, factores alimenticios, etc?tera. No sab?amos si pod?a bajarse de 10 y nos alent? mucho cuando lo logramos. No crean que es la capital la que tiene los mejores ?ndices, hay provincias enteras que tienen, incluso, menos de cinco de mortalidad infantil, y ese ?ndice es m?s o menos parejo. No ocurre como en el pa?s vecino nuestro, donde en algunos lugares, donde viven los que tienen m?s recursos, mejor asistencia y mejor alimentaci?n, etc?tera, etc?tera, pueden tener un cuatro o un cinco, y en otros, como en la propia capital de Estados Unidos, donde hay mucha gente pobre y donde hay grupos ?tnicos, los afronorteamericanos, que no tienen la asistencia m?dica adecuada, en que la mortalidad puede ser tres veces, cuatro veces o cinco veces m?s que la mortalidad infantil en determinados lugares que reciben todas las atenciones (Aplausos). Sabemos lo que pasa con los hispanos y con los afronorteamericanos y los de otras regiones del mundo, sus ?ndices de mortalidad infantil, sus ?ndices de perspectivas de vida, sus ?ndices de salud, del mismo modo que sabemos que hay m?s de 40 millones de norteamericanos que no tienen asegurada la asistencia m?dica. Cuando hablo de los norteamericanos, jam?s hablo con odio, porque nuestra Revoluci?n no ha ense?ado a odiar; se basa en ideas y no en fanatismos, no en chovinismos (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Hemos tenido el privilegio de aprender que todos somos hermanos y nuestro pueblo se educa en los sentimientos de amistad y solidaridad, lo que calificamos como sentimientos internacionalistas (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Cientos de miles de nuestros compatriotas han pasado por esa escuela, es por ello que puedo decir que no es tan f?cil liquidar la Revoluci?n, que no es tan f?cil aplastar la voluntad de ese pueblo, en virtud de sus ideas, conceptos y sentimientos cultivados, porque tanto las ideas como los sentimientos tienen que ser cultivados, de esa verdad partimos; pero a un pueblo que alcanza determinados niveles de conocimiento, capacidad de comprender los problemas, capacidad de unidad y de disciplina no es tan f?cil desaparecerlo de la faz de la Tierra (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Es por ello que, a pesar de esas teor?as nazifascistas, tenemos la convicci?n de que un ataque a nuestro pa?s costar?a, como ya les dije, un precio muy alto, porque es un pueblo que jam?s se rendir?, que jam?s dejar? de luchar (Aplausos y exclamaciones), y mientras exista un solo hombre o mujer capaz de combatir, ese hombre o esa mujer continuar? combatiendo. Conociendo durante muchas d?cadas a ese adversario, nuestro pa?s ha tenido que aprender a defenderse. Nuestro pa?s no lanza bombas contra otros pueblos, ni manda miles de aviones a bombardear ciudades; nuestro pa?s no posee armas nucleares, ni armas qu?micas, ni armas biol?gicas (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Las decenas de miles de cient?ficos y m?dicos con que cuenta nuestro pa?s han sido educados en la idea de salvar vidas (Aplausos). Estar?a en absoluta contradicci?n con su concepci?n poner a un cient?fico o a un m?dico a producir sustancias, bacterias o virus capaces de producir la muerte a otros seres humanos. No faltaron, incluso, las denuncias de que Cuba estaba haciendo investigaciones sobre armas biol?gicas. En nuestro pa?s se hacen investigaciones para curar enfermedades tan duras como la meningitis meningoc?cica, la hepatitis, a trav?s de vacunas que produce por t?cnicas de ingenier?a gen?tica, o, algo de suma importancia, la b?squeda de vacunas o de f?rmulas terap?uticas a trav?s de la inmunolog?a molecular ?perd?nenme si he empleado esta palabra t?cnica, quiere decir a trav?s de m?todos que atacan directamente las c?lulas malignas?; y lo mismo unas pueden prever y otras pueden, incluso, curar, y avanzamos por esos caminos. Ese es el orgullo de nuestros m?dicos y de nuestros centros de investigaci?n. Decenas de miles de m?dicos cubanos han prestado servicios internacionalistas en los lugares m?s apartados e inh?spitos. Un d?a dije que nosotros no pod?amos ni realizar?amos nunca ataques preventivos y sorpresivos contra ning?n oscuro rinc?n del mundo; pero que, en cambio, nuestro pa?s era capaz de enviar los m?dicos que se necesiten a los m?s oscuros rincones del mundo (Aplausos y exclamaciones). M?dicos y no bombas, m?dicos y no armas inteligentes, de certera punter?a, porque, al fin y al cabo, un arma que mata traicioneramente no es absolutamente un arma inteligente (Aplausos y exclamaciones de: ??Ol?, ol?, ol?, Fidel, Fidel!?). Como ven, mis palabras a ustedes, los estudiantes, han estado girando en torno a estas cuestiones, que son las que para nosotros constituyen el mayor orgullo de la Revoluci?n. Hay quienes afirman que en Cuba la Revoluci?n est? muy bien y es muy acertada en educaci?n ?al menos admiten eso?, en salud p?blica ?al menos admiten eso?, y que en deporte tiene un buen nivel de desarrollo, y yo s? que ustedes son muy amantes del deporte y los ?ol?, ol?? esos han salido, los he escuchado de alg?n deporte (Risas), en el cual ustedes han sido campeones, compartiendo esos honores con los brasile?os (Exclamaciones de: ??Ol?, ol?, Fidel, Fidel!?). Pero tendr?n que decir, y no deben tardar mucho en decir que Cuba avanza aceleradamente en el terreno de la cultura y del arte (Aplausos). Y no solo vamos en busca de una cultura art?stica, vamos en busca de una cultura general integral. Puedo darles algunas noticias poco conocidas: en nuestro pa?s, en los ?ltimos tres a?os, las universidades no es que se multipliquen, de unas poquitas que hab?a, una facultad de medicina, hoy tiene 22 facultades de medicina, y una de ellas se llama Escuela Latinoamericana de Ciencias M?dicas (Aplausos), donde hay alrededor de 7 000 alumnos procedentes de pa?ses latinoamericanos y alcanzar? la cifra de 10?000 alumnos (Aplausos); y se conoce que en Estados Unidos una carrera universitaria, especialmente una de medicina, cuesta, cuando menos, 200 000 d?lares la carrera (Exclamaciones). Cuando se hayan formado de esta escuela, que tiene algunos a?os funcionando, 10?000 alumnos, solo en ese campo, nuestro pa?s estar? d?ndoles una cooperaci?n a los pa?ses del Tercer Mundo que equivaldr?a a 2 000 millones de d?lares, una prueba de que si un pa?s se gu?a por ideas justas, aunque sea pobre, pobr?simo, puede hacer muchas cosas (Aplausos). Es el pa?s bloqueado durante 44 a?os; es el pa?s al cual, cuando se derrumb? el campo socialista, con el que ten?amos nuestro comercio y asegur?bamos nuestros abastecimientos ?compr?ndolos y comerciando?, el imperialismo apret? m?s todav?a sus medidas econ?micas con las leyes Torricelli y Helms-Burton (Chiflidos y abucheos). Hay, adem?s, una ley criminal que nosotros le llamamos la Ley asesina de Ajuste Cubano, aplicable ?nicamente a un pa?s en el mundo: Cuba. A alguien que no le dar?an jam?s visa, por tal antecedente o por lo que sea, si llega all? en un barco que se roba o un avi?n que se roba, o por cualquier medio, le conceden ipso facto el derecho a residir, e incluso a trabajar al d?a siguiente. F?jense ustedes: en la frontera de M?xico con Estados Unidos mueren alrededor de 500 personas por a?o y sufren una muerte horrible, porque le propusieron a ese pa?s, o le impusieron ?como sea? un tratado llamado TLC que implica el libre movimiento de mercanc?as y de capitales, pero no el libre movimiento de seres humanos (Aplausos), y mientras a nuestro pa?s le aplican esa Ley de Ajuste, que nosotros no la pedimos para los dem?s porque es una ley asesina, s? planteamos que se le conceda al ser humano, por parte de aquellos caballeros que acusan a todo el mundo de violar los derechos humanos, algo que con relaci?n a Cuba solo pueden hacer sobre la base de infames calumnias y de bochornosas y rid?culas mentiras, dan lugar a la muerte de cientos de mexicanos y latinoamericanos all? donde cada a?o mueren m?s seres humanos que todos los que murieron en los 29 a?os que dur? el muro de Berl?n (Aplausos). Del muro de Berl?n he hablado millones y millones de veces; pero no hay noticias, si no muy espor?dicas, de los mexicanos que mueren todos los a?os tratando de cruzar la frontera. Ahora, si usted es latinoamericano, asi?tico o de cualquier pa?s que llegue all? ilegalmente y se quede o se pueda quedar, lo llaman refugiado, lo llaman emigrante. Si es cubano tiene el apellido ya certificado: son exiliados. En Estados Unidos no hay emigrantes cubanos, a pesar de que m?s de 100 000 todos los a?os vienen a visitar a sus familiares en Cuba, pero no son emigrados, son exiliados; esa es la palabra acu?ada con sus p?rfidos m?todos de sembrar la confusi?n y la mentira. S? les puedo asegurar que si esa ley que nos han aplicado a nosotros durante 37 a?os la hubiesen aplicado a los latinoamericanos y caribe?os, a los que quieren imponer un ALCA (Exclamaciones), ?un ALCA!, si les hubieran aplicado las prerrogativas esas ?y, repito, no lo aconsejamos, porque es una ley asesina, es para los que llegan ilegales al pa?s?, en realidad les puedo asegurar que hoy no tendr?amos los 534 millones de habitantes entre Am?rica Latina y el Caribe, y con seguridad, m?s de la mitad de los norteamericanos ser?an de origen latinoamericano o caribe?o (Aplausos). (Del p?blico le dicen algo.) Hay que decirlo, pero sin emplear la palabra. M?s bien es mejor que se deduzca a que se diga; que se razone lo que son los que dirigen aquel pa?s, no el pueblo de aquel pa?s, muchas veces enga?ado. Nosotros tenemos la prueba de que en muchas ocasiones ha apoyado malas causas, pero para que apoye una mala causa, primero hay que enga?arlo, y en eso son especialistas y lo han sido en la historia, del enga?o (Aplausos); pero cuando conoce la verdad, y recordemos Viet Nam, que el pueblo norteamericano desempe?? un papel decisivo en el fin de la guerra de Viet Nam, porque los l?deres, la opini?n internacional, la de ustedes, la de todos los latinoamericanos, pr?cticamente lo que piensen no les importa, les importa lo que piensen los electores dentro de Estados Unidos, porque votan all?. Puede haber su fraude, su fraudecito o un fraud?n enorme, como el que vimos en las ?ltimas elecciones ?superdemocr?ticas? de Estados Unidos (Exclamaciones), donde el candidato opositor obtuvo medio mill?n de votos m?s que el candidato ?dos grandes comillas? ?triunfador?. Todo el mundo sabe de forma exacta, y no lo duda ning?n norteamericano, lo que ocurri? all?, que la extrema derecha, apoyada por la mafia terrorista cubano-americana, mediante fraude, le arrebat? la victoria a su adversario. No me meto a decir cu?l era m?s democr?tico o menos democr?tico, no estoy inscrito a ninguno de los dos partidos porque, en ?ltimo t?rmino, se podr?a decir que all? impera el monopartidismo (Aplausos). Algunos dir?n: ?Pero no tienen en Cuba un solo partido? Digo: S?, pero nuestro Partido ni postula ni elige. Los delegados de circunscripci?n, que son la base de nuestro sistema, los propone el pueblo en asamblea, por cada circunscripci?n (Aplausos); no pueden ser menos de dos, ni m?s de ocho, y casi el 50% de aquellos delegados de circunscripci?n, que constituyen la asamblea municipal en cada municipio del pa?s, esos que propone y elige el pueblo, en elecci?n donde tienen que tener m?s del 50% de los votos, la Asamblea Nacional de Cuba, con un poco m?s de 600 delegados, est? constituida, casi en el 50%, por esos delegados de circunscripci?n, que no solo tienen el papel de constituir la Asamblea Municipal, tienen el papel de postular a los candidatos a la Asamblea Provincial y a la Asamblea Nacional. No me extiendo, pero, realmente, me gustar?a que un d?a se conociera un poco m?s cu?l es el sistema electoral de Cuba; porque es asombroso que de all? del Norte a veces algunos nos preguntan cu?ndo va a haber elecciones en Cuba. La pregunta la podr?amos hacer los cubanos y decirles: Cu?ndo hay que ser supermillonario para alcanzar la presidencia de Estados Unidos (Exclamaciones); o vaya, no tiene que ser necesariamente el candidato supermillonario, sino preguntar cu?ntos miles de millones necesita el candidato para ser electo presidente y cu?nto cuesta cada cargo, hasta un modesto cargo municipal. En nuestro pa?s no ocurre, ni puede ocurrir eso. No se llenan las paredes de pasquines, no se usa masivamente la televisi?n con mensajes de estos subliminales, creo que se llaman, ustedes los abogados, se me ha olvidado que yo lo era tambi?n, pueden saber (Risas). ?Qu? papel han desempe?ado esos medios masivos, desgraciadamente en aquel pa?s y en muchos lugares del mundo?, y no los estoy atacando. Yo les mencion? el caso que demostraba c?mo el pueblo norteamericano, cuando conoce la verdad, puede apoyar una buena causa: el caso del ni?o Eli?n Gonz?lez, secuestrado hace tres a?os y medio. Ese ni?o regres? cuando el pueblo conoci? la verdad y m?s de un 80% de los norteamericanos apoyaron su regreso (Aplausos). Es cierto que cuando la guerra de Viet Nam, no solo fueron conociendo la verdad, hab?a un factor importante que influ?a: el regreso de j?venes muertos, que hab?an sido llevados all? mediante el Servicio Militar. En el caso del ni?o no hubo nada de eso, logramos que el pueblo norteamericano conociera nuestras razones, y fue a trav?s de las cadenas de televisi?n, porque un desfile de 600 000 madres como tuvo lugar en La Habana, es un espect?culo inusitado, o de cientos de miles de ni?os, o de un mill?n de personas desfilando delante de la Oficina de Intereses, o millones de personas moviliz?ndose simult?neamente en muchos lugares, o grandes concentraciones, y fueron actividades que las grandes cadenas trasmitieron por el mundo. Hubo actos, como aquel en que se conmemor? el XXV aniversario del sabotaje a un avi?n de Cubana, destruido en pleno vuelo por un acto terrorista, que 40 cadenas internacionales trasmitieron. Hoy hay forma de trasmitir los mensajes. Hay sat?lites que pueden bajar una se?al; hay ?y ustedes los estudiantes lo saben mejor que nadie? Internet que puede permitir enviar un mensaje a cualquier rinc?n del mundo, aunque no sea oscuro, porque, realmente, en general, los que tienen Internet tienen tambi?n electricidad y posibilidades de comunicarse; pero no subestimar a esas capas intelectuales, que en el mundo son decenas y decenas de millones, que no son necesariamente una clase explotadora y rica. Hay que ver, recuerden, por ejemplo, all? en Seattle; recuerden Quebec; recuerden las movilizaciones ya en cualquier parte del mundo, han sido organizadas a trav?s de Internet, por personas que tienen cultura y tienen conocimientos, y hay muchas cosas que amenazan hoy la vida del planeta, aparte de las guerras, los cambios de clima, la destrucci?n de la capa de ozono, el calentamiento de la atm?sfera, el envenenamiento de la atm?sfera, de los r?os y de los mares, que amenazan la vida de todo el planeta y en eso todos los pueblos del mundo tienen una causa com?n con los latinoamericanos, con los norteamericanos, y con los europeos. Las cat?strofes avanzan de una en una. Hoy hay enfermedades que no exist?an hace 25 ? 30 a?os. El SIDA no exist?a hace 25 a?os, y los que poseen los mejores laboratorios est?n dedicados a la terap?utica, no a la prevenci?n, no a las vacunas, porque un tratamiento ?se conoce muy bien? que se vende a 10 000 d?lares por a?o y cada a?o tiene que repetirlo, produce m?s. Sencillamente, produce mucho m?s la medicina terap?utica que la medicina preventiva (Aplausos). Apareci? ahora el virus de la neumon?a at?pica, cuando nadie lo esperaba; o la fiebre del Nilo, que vino del noreste de Estados Unidos, evidentemente, trasladada de alg?n otro lugar del mundo; o el dengue famoso, tan mencionado, que tiene cuatro formas diferentes de virus, y la combinaci?n de unos y otros da lugar a complicadas enfermedades como el dengue hemorr?gico. Se lo digo en nombre de un pa?s que ha visto en carne propia el empleo de virus y bacterias para atacar a nuestra agricultura, e incluso nuestra poblaci?n. Se lo aseguro y no exagero, no tendr?a yo un ?tomo de verg?enza si les digo a ustedes una sola mentira. Nosotros sabemos algunas cosas y de casi todas tenemos pruebas, cuando hablamos de algunos de estos problemas (Aplausos). Pero les dec?a que hoy hay medios de comunicarse con el mundo, que nos hacen menos v?ctimas o dependientes de los grandes medios de difusi?n masiva sean cuales sean, porque hoy, teniendo direcciones, y teniendo esa red de Internet en el mundo, todos los que tienen un sue?o, una aspiraci?n, una causa que les quita la tranquilidad, y pensando, fundamentalmente, no en ellos, sino en sus hijos, har?n causa com?n, sean de pa?ses subdesarrollados o ricos; porque, en realidad, son nuevos problemas. Hay que meditar en la enorme suma de nuevos problemas que han ido apareciendo en el mundo, aparte de amenazas de guerra y del empleo de esas armas brutales y b?rbaras, en una etapa de la historia donde el hombre no ha demostrado todav?a su capacidad de sobrevivir, y que puede ser destruido diez veces por una sola potencia, sobre la base de su monopolio tecnol?gico y de armas que ser?an suficientes para aplastar a todos los dem?s Estados del mundo. De todos esos problemas un creciente n?mero de millones est? aprendiendo, y es en los centros de educaci?n, en los centros universitarios donde se va adquiriendo la cultura necesaria para saber lo que es el mundo de hoy, y qu? es el Fondo Monetario y qu? es el Banco Mundial y qu? significa una deuda de 800 000 millones de d?lares en Am?rica Latina (Aplausos). Cuando tuve el honor, inolvidable para m?, de visitar Buenos Aires, sobre todo hoy cuando vuelvo, aunque lo record? siempre, la deuda de Am?rica Latina era de 5 000 millones de d?lares; hoy es ciento sesenta veces mayor. Antes los presupuestos se dedicaban, m?s o menos, a escuelas, a hospitales; los argentinos lo conocen muy bien, porque de Argentina venimos oyendo hablar hace mucho tiempo; sabemos los niveles que ten?a educaci?n, salud y otras cosas. Pero perm?tanme no hablar del caso concreto; en este caso lo menciono porque, realmente, ustedes alcanzaron altos niveles, es conocido, como es conocido que hay dos cabezas de ganado de vacuno ?no cuento el resto? por habitante en el pa?s; los niveles de tipo social alcanzados son muy importantes. Pero el mundo en que vivimos, repito, es muy diferente. Hay muchos problemas que los grandes pensadores pol?ticos y sociales no pod?an, a tan larga distancia, prever, aunque sus conocimientos fueron decisivos para convertirnos a nosotros en personas con ideas revolucionarias. No olvidarse de esta realidad. En nuestro pa?s empezamos por las universidades, hab?a momentos en que no se ense?aba computaci?n en las universidades, fuimos poco a poco; despu?s hicimos 170 Joven Club de computaci?n, hace no mucho tiempo los duplicamos a 300, con doble n?mero de m?quinas; pero lo esencial es que hoy en nuestro pa?s el ciento por ciento de los ni?os, desde prescolar hasta la universidad, cuentan con sus laboratorios de computaci?n, y hemos descubierto las posibilidades enormes que eso brinda (Aplausos). Y entramos en la etapa masiva y trabajamos intensamente en otras cosas, de las que no hablamos mucho, pero se est?n formando por decenas de miles los programadores. A aquellos que hablan de que Cuba prosper? en esto y en lo otro, las cosas que mencionaba y la mencionada cultura, a aquellos les podemos decir que hoy en nuestro pa?s se extienden por los municipios las facultades universitarias, desde el momento en que 800 000 ciudadanos cubanos son graduados universitarios o intelectuales (Aplausos). De modo que hoy hay dos graduados universitarios por cada graduado de sexto grado que hab?a al triunfo de la Revoluci?n (Aplausos). Se est? desarrollando una sociedad donde los conocimientos y la cultura se extienden masivamente y donde se lograr? el sue?o de masificar esos conocimientos y esa cultura (Aplausos). Masificarlas en un central azucarero, en un municipio, porque all? est?n suficientes economistas; si hace falta quien vaya a dar clases de econom?a en uno de los centros que se van desarrollando, o una clase de cualquier carrera humanista, o una clase de una carrera t?cnica, como ingenier?a mec?nica, y otras muchas; pudiera ser una excepci?n el caso de la medicina, donde las facultades est?n al lado de los hospitales, y desde el tercer a?o en constante contacto no solo con la teor?a sino tambi?n con la pr?ctica (Aplausos). ?Por qu? se han extendido a esa velocidad? Porque buscando, precisamente, las causas de determinados problemas sociales, vimos que hab?a un n?mero elevado de j?venes, entre 17 y 30 a?os, con noveno grado, que no estudiaba ni trabajaba; entonces buscamos las causas, se habl? con cada uno de ellos y, de repente, se establecieron las escuelas que llevan el nombre de escuelas juveniles para el desarrollo de una cultura general integral. El primer a?o se inscribieron 85 000, ya en el segundo curso, este que transcurre, hay 110?000 alumnos (Aplausos). Y qu? dir?an ustedes si les afirmo que ya en el pr?ximo curso, que empieza en septiembre, 35 000 de esos j?venes comenzar?n estudios universitarios (Aplausos). N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Thu May 29 15:38:40 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:38:40 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Discurso de Fidel en Argentina (2 de 5 partes) Message-ID: <3ED653B0.14164.AF3F0F@localhost> Pero les voy a decir una de las caracter?sticas del Che y una de las que yo m?s apreciaba, entre las muchas que apreciaba mucho: ?l todos los fines de semana trataba de subir el Popocat?petl, un volc?n que est? en las inmediaciones de la capital. Preparaba su equipo ?es alta la monta?a, es de nieves perpetuas?, iniciaba el ascenso, hac?a un enorme esfuerzo y no llegaba a la cima. El asma obstaculizaba sus intentos. A la semana siguiente intentaba de nuevo subir el ?Popo? ?como le dec?a ?l? y no llegaba; pero volv?a a intentar de nuevo subir, y se habr?a pasado toda la vida intentando subir el Popocat?petl, aunque nunca alcanzara aquella cumbre (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Da idea de la voluntad, de la fortaleza espiritual, de su constancia, una de esas caracter?sticas. ?Cu?l era la otra? La otra era que cada vez que hac?a falta, cuando ?ramos un grupo todav?a muy reducido, un voluntario para una tarea determinada, el primero que siempre se presentaba era el Che (Aplausos). El se quedaba, como m?dico, con los enfermos, porque en determinadas circunstancias en la naturaleza, monta?as boscosas y perseguidos desde muy diferentes direcciones, la fuerza que pudi?ramos llamar principal, era la que ten?a que moverse, dejar un rastro bien visible para que en alguna zona m?s cercana pudiera permanecer el m?dico con los que estaba asistiendo. Hubo un tiempo en que el ?nico m?dico era ?l, hasta que otros m?dicos se acercaron, y all? estaba. Puedo recordar, ya que ustedes me piden an?cdotas, una acci?n que fue sumamente riesgosa para todos, sencillamente porque hab?an llegado las noticias a un lugar donde est?bamos en las monta?as de un desembarco que se hab?a producido por el norte de la provincia. Nos acordamos de nuestras peripecias, de nuestros sufrimientos en los primeros d?as y, como acto de solidaridad a favor de aquellos que hab?an desembarcado, decidimos realizar una acci?n bien audaz que no era, desde el punto de vista militar, correcto hacerlo, y fue sencillamente atacar una unidad que estaba bien atrincherada en la orilla del mar. No voy a dar m?s datos. Como resultado de aquel combate que dur? tres horas, y tuvimos bastante suerte, porque hab?amos logrado neutralizar las comunicaciones, y despu?s de tres horas, cuando termin? aquel combate en que ?l tuvo, como siempre, una actitud destacada, estaban muertos o heridos una tercera parte de los combatientes que participaron en esa acci?n, cosa no muy usual; entonces ?l, como m?dico, atendi? a los adversarios heridos ?hab?a adversarios que estaban vivos y no estaban heridos, pero hab?a un n?mero elevado de heridos y ?l los atendi?? y atendi? a los compa?eros que estaban heridos (Aplausos). ?No se imaginan ustedes la sensibilidad de aquel argentino! (Aplausos). Y hay algo que me viene a la mente: un compa?ero, cuya herida era mortal, y ?l lo sab?a; en aquel momento el lugar deb?a ser abandonado r?pidamente, porque muy pronto, no se sab?a cu?ndo aparec?an los aviones, milagrosamente no aparecieron durante aquel combate, porque era lo primero que aparec?a a los 20 minutos; pero creo que tuvimos la suerte de destruir las comunicaciones con algunos disparos certeros. Dispusimos de ese tiempo, pero hab?a que atender a los heridos, retirarse r?pidamente. Y no se me puede olvidar, y me lo cont? ?l, cuando un compa?ero que iba a morir inexorablemente... No se pod?a movilizar; hay heridos m?s graves que usted no los puede movilizar, tiene que confiar ah?, puesto que usted ha atendido los adversarios, ha logrado un n?mero de prisioneros, prisioneros que nosotros siempre respet?bamos; no hubo un solo caso jam?s que, prisionero en un combate, fuese alguna vez maltratado o ejecutado (Aplausos). Nosotros les entreg?bamos, incluso, a veces nuestros medicamentos, que eran muy escasos. Esa pol?tica, sinceramente, nos ayud? mucho al ?xito en la guerra, porque usted en cualquier lucha debe ganarse el respeto del adversario (Aplausos). En cualquier lucha ?lo vuelvo a repetir?, de una forma o de otra, el comportamiento de los que defienden una buena causa, debe dirigirse a ganarse el respeto del adversario. En aquella ocasi?n tuvimos que dejar un n?mero de compa?eros heridos que no pod?an evacuarse, entre ellos algunos muy graves. Pero lo que me impact? fue cuando me cont?, con dolor, recordando aquel momento en que sab?a que no ten?a salvaci?n posible y ?l se hab?a inclinado y le hab?a dado un beso en la frente a aquel compa?ero, que, herido all?, sab?a que inexorablemente morir?a (Aplausos). Son algunas de las cosas que les menciono del Che como hombre, como ser humano extraordinario. Era, adem?s, un hombre de elevada cultura, era un hombre de gran inteligencia; ya mencion? su tes?n, su voluntad. Cualquier tarea que se le asignara, despu?s del triunfo de la Revoluci?n, era capaz de aceptarla. Fue director del Banco Nacional de Cuba, donde hac?a falta un revolucionario en aquel momento, y en cualquier otro, desde luego; pero acababa la Revoluci?n de triunfar y los recursos con que contaba eran muy pocos, porque las reservas se las hab?an robado. Los enemigos bromeaban, siempre bromean, tambi?n nosotros bromeamos; pero la broma, que ten?a una intenci?n pol?tica, se refer?a a que un d?a yo hab?a dicho: Hace falta un economista. Pero entonces se hab?an confundido y creyeron que yo dec?a que hac?a falta un comunista, y por eso es que hab?a ido el Che (Aplausos). Pues el Che era un revolucionario, era un comunista y era un excelente economista (Aplausos); porque ser economista excelente depende de la idea de lo que quiera hacer quien dirige un frente de la econom?a del pa?s y quien dirige el frente del Banco Nacional de Cuba, as? que en su doble car?cter de comunista y economista; no es porque se hubiera llevado un t?tulo, sino porque hab?a le?do mucho y observaba mucho. Che fue el promotor del trabajo voluntario en nuestro pa?s, porque todos los domingos se iba, un d?a a hacer trabajo en la agricultura, otro d?a a probar una m?quina, otro d?a a construir. Nos dej? la herencia de aquella pr?ctica que, con su ejemplo, conquist? la simpat?a o la adhesi?n, o la pr?ctica para millones de nuestros compatriotas. Son muchos los recuerdos que nos dej?, y es por eso que digo que es uno de los hombres m?s nobles, m?s extraordinarios y m?s desinteresados que he conocido, lo cual no tendr?a importancia si uno no cree que hombres como ?l existen por millones y millones y millones en las masas (Aplausos). Los hombres que se destaquen de manera singular no podr?an hacer nada si muchos millones, iguales que ?l, no tuvieran el embri?n o no tuvieran la capacidad de adquirir esas cualidades. Por eso nuestra Revoluci?n se interes? tanto por luchar contra el analfabetismo, por desarrollar la educaci?n (Aplausos). Si antes dec?a que las ideas eran m?s poderosas que las armas, la educaci?n es el instrumento por excelencia para que ese ser vivo que es el hombre, regido poderosamente por instintos o leyes naturales, que evolucion?, como lo demostr? Darwin y hoy no lo niega nadie... Me refiero a la teor?a de la evoluci?n, y dec?a que nadie lo negaba, porque recuerdo el momento en que el Papa Juan Pablo II declar? que la teor?a de la evoluci?n no era inconciliable con la doctrina de la creaci?n. Y, realmente, experimento un gran aprecio por acciones como esas, porque ces? de haber una contradicci?n entre una teor?a cient?fica y una creencia religiosa. Pero ese hombre puede ser como un animalito en la selva, si lo ponen all? en la selva; tiene inteligencia, se sabe los gramos que hay en una cabeza humana y se sabe, incluso, que es el ?nico ser viviente cuyo cerebro contin?a creciendo dos a?os y medio despu?s de nacido, ustedes lo saben, los estudiantes universitarios, deben haberlo le?do. Eso tiene una influencia tremenda en el desarrollo de la inteligencia. Ni?o que no se alimente con todos los elementos adecuados hasta cumplir los dos a?os y medio, llega a los seis a?os, al preescolar o la escuela, con la inteligencia disminuida, con relaci?n a los ni?os que se alimentan de una manera adecuada (Aplausos). Y debo decir que una de las cosas m?s necesarias, si queremos igualdad, es, al menos, el derecho a llegar a los seis a?os con la capacidad de inteligencia con que nazca un ni?o, y sabemos que aquellos ?y que en el mundo se cuentan por cientos de millones? que no se alimentan adecuadamente en esas edades, llegan a la edad escolar ?si hubiera escuelas, si hubiera maestros capaces de ense?arlos? con menos posibilidades de aprender; aunque tambi?n puede ocurrir que aliment?ndose adecuadamente en esa etapa despu?s no tengan ni escuelas ni maestros (Aplausos). Pero, ?qu? ocurre con los sectores m?s pobres de la Tierra, que est?n concentrados, fundamentalmente, en los pa?ses del Tercer Mundo, al que pertenecen las cuatro quintas partes de la humanidad? Es que en esas regiones se concentran los pobres, los hambrientos, los que no pueden alcanzar ese nivel de capacidad instalada, no de capacidad desarrollada, los que no tienen ni siquiera escuelas. Si a ustedes les dicen que hay 860 millones de analfabetos adultos en el mundo, inmediatamente les explican c?mo casi el 90% de esos 860 millones de analfabetos viven en el Tercer Mundo. Hay que a?adir que en pa?ses muy desarrollados hay analfabetos, en ese gran vecino cercano a nuestra patria, hay millones de analfabetos (Chiflidos y abucheos), de analfabetos totales; pero hay decenas de millones de analfabetos funcionales. Y nadie tome esto... (Exclamaciones de: ?Un m?dico?). ?Qu? dicen, un m?dico, qu? dice del m?dico? (Le dicen algo). Yo dije decenas, realmente son cientos. Bueno, no, en los pa?ses desarrollados no, estoy hablando del Tercer Mundo. (Le dicen que est?n pidiendo un m?dico, para una persona del p?blico). ?Un m?dico? Hay un m?dico aqu?, ?d?nde hace falta el m?dico? Bueno, pasen al compa?ero, r?pido. Mandamos un m?dico, ustedes ver?n qu? r?pido llega. Les hablaba ?y me estoy extendiendo por encima de mi voluntad? de dos problemas muy importantes, que est?n muy asociados, se llaman educaci?n y salud. Bueno, habl?bamos de un m?dico argentino que se convirti? en soldado sin dejar de ser m?dico un solo minuto, fue lo que nos trajo a explicar estas cosas, y despu?s les dec?a que es la educaci?n la que convierte el animalito en ser humano. No se olviden de eso (Aplausos), es la educaci?n la que es capaz de hacerlo que sobrepase los instintos que le vienen de la naturaleza. Es m?s, a?ado, es la educaci?n la que podr?a vaciar las c?rceles donde est?n aquellos que no recibieron educaci?n, que no se alimentaron adecuadamente; porque hasta en nuestra propia patria, tardamos en descubrir que por muchas leyes que se hagan, por muchas escuelas que se construyan, muchos maestros que se formen, siempre habr?, por una raz?n o por otra mucho m?s que hacer por la educaci?n de los hombres. En nuestra sociedad, porque hay cientos de miles de profesionales universitarios e intelectuales, la influencia del n?cleo familiar es decisiva. Cuando usted va a una prisi?n e investiga a los j?venes entre 20 ? 30 a?os que est?n en prisi?n, se encuentra que proceden de las capas m?s humildes y m?s pobres de la poblaci?n (Aplausos), proceden de lo que podr?amos llamar ?reas marginales. Cuando, a la inversa, busca la composici?n social de escuelas que son muy anheladas y donde se llega por expediente y por notas, es al rev?s, la inmensa mayor?a son hijos de padres intelectuales o artistas. F?jense que no estoy hablando de una diferencia de clases desde el punto de vista econ?mico; el problema de la construcci?n de una sociedad nueva es mucho m?s dif?cil de lo que pueda parecer, porque son muchas cosas que se van descubriendo por el camino. Si usted empez? luchando contra un 30% de analfabetismo y un 90% entre analfabetismo total y funcional, concentra su atenci?n en esas tareas, y cuando han pasado los a?os y cuando anda en estudios m?s profundos de la sociedad, es cuando puede darse cuenta de la influencia que tiene la educaci?n. Les puedo decir que en los sectores m?s pobres, en las ?reas marginales, donde es m?s frecuente la disoluci?n del n?cleo familiar, esa disoluci?n tiene una influencia grande. Por ejemplo, usted puede apreciar un 70% que proceden de n?cleos disueltos, donde, incluso, hasta un 19% no vive con el padre o la madre, sino con alg?n familiar que se ocupa de ?l, y cuando ese mismo fen?meno ocurre en un n?cleo de intelectuales, no se observa el mismo efecto en el hijo aquel, aunque se haya producido la disoluci?n familiar. En general, quedan con el padre o con la madre; en nuestro pa?s, por costumbre, con la madre, y las mujeres constituyen en Cuba el 65% de la fuerza t?cnica del pa?s (Aplausos). Es as? como les estoy diciendo, es un poquitico m?s del 65% y observa usted esos fen?menos. ?Qu? lo puede explicar, sino la educaci?n? Es decir, que el nivel de escolaridad de los padres, aun cuando se haya hecho una revoluci?n, sigue influyendo tremendamente en el destino ulterior de los ni?os. Bien puede ocurrir, en determinadas circunstancias, en que los hijos de los sectores m?s humildes, o con menos conocimientos, no estoy hablando ya de la situaci?n econ?mica del n?cleo, sino la educaci?n del n?cleo se encuentra que tiende a perpetuarse a lo largo de decenas de a?os, y uno puede decir entonces ?como nosotros a veces hemos planteado en algunos casos?: Estas personas que est?n haciendo esta tarea o que brindan tal apoyo, sus hijos nunca ser?n directores de empresas, gerentes, u ocupar?n posiciones importantes; les esperan, en primer lugar, las prisiones. N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Thu May 29 15:38:42 2003 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:38:42 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Discurso de Fidel en Argentina (1 de 5 partes) Message-ID: <3ED653B2.21884.AF4876@localhost> Gentileza de "Eduardo Auer" Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Secretario del Comit? Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba y Presidente de los Consejos de Estado y de Ministros, en la Facultad de Derecho, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 26 de mayo de 2003, ?A?o de gloriosos aniversarios de Mart? y del Moncada?. (Versiones Taquigr?ficas-Consejo de Estado) Queridos hermanos estudiantes, trabajadores y, estoy por decir, compatriotas argentinos (Aplausos). He vivido algunos a?os, pero nunca ni siquiera imagin? un acto tan azaroso y tan incre?blemente emocionante como este (Aplausos y exclamaciones). Quiero comunicarles que a esta misma hora millones de cubanos estar?n presenciando tambi?n este espect?culo (Aplausos y exclamaciones de: ??Cuba, Cuba, Cuba, el pueblo te saluda!?). En nombre de nuestro pueblo se lo agradezco infinitamente, porque de la fuerza que dan las ideas, que da la verdad y que da una causa justa es que los pueblos se vuelven invencibles (Aplausos). Hab?amos concebido un acto, o hab?an concebido, seg?n me explicaban los estudiantes y las autoridades universitarias, una actividad en esta escuela de derecho, un programa modesto. Comenzar?a a las 7:00 de la noche y participar?an algunos estudiantes sentados en una sala y, por si acaso ven?an m?s, ten?an una pantalla para que pudieran presenciar el acto. Yo podr?a hacer una cr?tica ?no a ustedes? a nuestros compa?eros y decirles: ?Ustedes subestimaron al pueblo argentino? (Aplausos). Comenzaron a llegar noticias de que hab?a llenado el sal?n, que hab?a el doble de los que pod?an all? sentarse, y que en los laterales tampoco ya cab?an, y que el pasillo se hab?a llenado y que la escalinata se ven?a llenando, y dec?an que eran 1 000, que 2 000, que 3 000. En un momento dado tambi?n las emisoras de televisi?n hablaban y explicaban ya lo que estaba ocurriendo aqu?, y, de repente, veo algunas im?genes ?tenemos cierto h?bito de calcular el n?mero de personas que hay en una concentraci?n? y esto parec?a la Plaza de la Revoluci?n en Cuba (Aplausos). Todas las comunicaciones y v?as de acceso cortadas; menos mal los aparaticos esos que tanto fastidian y tanto ruido hacen, pero en momentos como este ?me refiero a los celulares? sirven para comunicarse y conocer la situaci?n. Nuestro embajador, que forma parte del grupo de culpables de la subestimaci?n (Risas) ?s? que ustedes lo van a defender, porque tiene un gran cari?o por el pueblo argentino (Exclamaciones)? se comunicaba con su familia en la sala de la facultad donde deb?a realizarse el acto ?hab?a hasta unos ni?os all?, ellos cre?an que este iba a ser el m?s pac?fico de los actos, y lo es, ?no??, no se imaginaba lo capaz que es la multitud de organizarse; pero no pod?a moverse, todo el mundo estaba aislado, comunic?ndose solo por los celulares. No hab?a entrada por ninguna parte, ya se hab?a declarado que era imposible entrar, y yo no me resignaba a la idea de incumplir mi compromiso, que por circunstancias f?sicas, obstrucci?n por multitudes, no pudiera tener el honor y el orgullo de saludarlos. Se hab?a declarado ya que era imposible, y realmente insist? en que nada era imposible (Aplausos), que era un problema que deb?a resolverse, que no pod?a resignarme a la idea de quedarme all? esperando noticias. Toda mi vida he tenido el h?bito de moverme, ir hacia donde haya cualquier dificultad, y no me pod?a adaptar a la idea de tomar ese avi?n, a la hora en que lo tome, sin venir a esta universidad. Claro est? que yo soy un visitante y, primero que todo, debo respeto a la ley, al orden; no tengo el derecho a hacer absolutamente nada que en lo m?s m?nimo viole un reglamento o una orden de sus autoridades. Hay que decir que, realmente, las autoridades cooperaron el m?ximo en su deseo de encontrar una soluci?n. De la escuela de Derecho me continuaban comunicando y nos dec?an: ?Nadie se mueve de la sala?. Avanzaban un poquito en los laterales, llega un momento en que se rompe no s? qu? cosa por alg?n lugar ?creo que vamos a tener que asumir tambi?n, que compartir con alguien o pagar nosotros los da?os que se puedan derivar de una ventana rota, alguna brecha abierta por esta tropa patri?tica y revolucionaria de argentinos (Aplausos). Entonces acudimos a un cuadrito joven de nuestra delegaci?n, el Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, que ustedes vieron y escucharon, y le dije: ?Tienes que salir para all?, entra por donde puedas, habla con los que est?n dentro de aquella sala y expl?cales la situaci?n real, objetiva y como fuera posible que no di?ramos el acto all??, porque hab?a un justificado temor de que si el acto se daba all? y las pantallas por all?, algunos que hab?an salido voluntariamente entraran otra vez, hab?a que plantear la necesidad real de moverse hacia la escalinata y dar el acto en ese lugar. Impacientes estuvimos esperando, escuchamos a nuestro enviado por doble v?a, por la televisi?n, ya que algunas cadenas estaban transmitiendo sus palabras y hasta por un tel?fono celular, y vimos cuando ?l trataba de persuadir a los que estaban dentro de la sala para que se movieran hacia ac?. Una vez m?s se prob? la capacidad de los pueblos de comprender, de cooperar, de reaccionar, porque a los pocos minutos me dice: ?Ya est?n movi?ndose hacia la escalinata?. Pero hab?a otro obst?culo que vencer y eran las c?maras de la televisi?n y los micr?fonos (Exclamaciones). F?jense, no se peleen con las c?maras ahora, d?jenlo para ma?ana, si quieren (Le dicen algo). Ya s?, ya s?, pero no, yo estuve escuchando, hubo realmente inter?s en informar lo que estaba ocurriendo, as? que no tengo quejas; pero hab?a que instalarla o si no solo ustedes se enteran de lo que se est? diciendo aqu?. Por ejemplo, nuestro pueblo, sin las c?maras, sin los medios t?cnicos no estar?a viendo lo que en este momento estaba ocurriendo, y entonces eso era lo que tardaba una hora. ?Ustedes saben lo que es una hora de impaciencia? Ustedes y nosotros hemos conocido esa larga, interminable, e infinita hora de impaciencia, porque hab?a que poner esto, los micr?fonos y los altoparlantes, los equipos e instalaciones de la prensa, que todo estaba ajustado al acto anterior, y la verdad es que ha sido un r?cord el tiempo en que pudieron hacerlo. Pregunt?bamos, eran las 8:40, y nos dicen: ?Est? todo listo, lo conveniente es que vengan r?pido, porque est? el fr?o, por otro lado, pero un fr?o que no pueda ser superado por el calor de ustedes (Aplausos). Bueno, a m? me han puesto esto que no lo necesito realmente, voy a renunciar a ?l, porque es que me da verg?enza andar poni?ndome aqu? algo (Se quita el abrigo). R?pido partimos hacia ac?, a fin de llegar m?s o menos a la hora en que se hab?a calculado; pero como milagro fue la proeza organizativa realizada por la masa (Aplausos). Jam?s olvidar? lo que ustedes hicieron esta noche, permiti?ndonos marcharnos felices y eternamente agradecidos. Alguno podr? preguntarse, si acaso es vanidad nuestra por los inmensos honores que ustedes nos han concedido. No, no es eso en lo que pienso. Cuando hablo de gratitud eterna es porque este pueblo de Buenos Aires est? enviando un mensaje a aquellos que sue?an con bombardear nuestra patria, nuestras ciudades (Aplausos y exclamaciones de: ??Cuba, Cuba, Cuba, el pueblo te saluda!? ??Bush, fascista, vos sos el terrorista!?); a aquellos que sue?an con destruir ya no solo la Revoluci?n, destruir al pueblo que fue portador de esa Revoluci?n y que fue capaz de resistir m?s de 40 a?os de bloqueos, de agresiones y de amenazas contra nuestro pa?s (Aplausos). En circunstancias como esas no se pueden calcular solo los ni?os muertos, o las madres que han muerto, o los ancianos que han muerto, o los j?venes y adultos que hayan muerto. Hay ocasiones en que quedan los sobrevivientes tan mutilados y tan destrozados, que uno se pregunta si estando en esas circunstancias no preferir?an cien veces m?s morir que seguir viviendo de aquella forma, como consecuencia de algo que se realizaba sin raz?n de ninguna clase, ley ni justificaci?n, que no fuese la violaci?n de las normas internacionales, la violaci?n de las leyes que cre?amos que reg?an este mundo; aunque muchos de nosotros sospech?bamos que este era un mundo donde lo que menos se respetaba era la ley y donde se estaba estableciendo el principio de la fuerza como ?nica justificaci?n para cometer cualquier tipo de cr?menes, para someter a nuestros pueblos, para conquistar nuestros recursos naturales, para imponernos lo que ustedes dec?an, una tiran?a nazifascista mundial (Abucheos). No es exageraci?n, ni uso excesivo de palabras, por nuestra parte, cuando escuchamos un d?a decir que 60 pa?ses o m?s pod?an ser blanco de ataques sorpresivos y preventivos; nadie jam?s en la historia, ning?n imperio, hizo semejante amenaza (Abucheos). Cuando se hablaba de estar preparados para lanzar cualquier ataque a cualquier oscuro rinc?n del mundo, no recuerdo haber escuchado jam?s esas palabras. Cuando se dijo que cualquier arma pod?a ser utilizada, lo mismo armas nucleares, que armas qu?micas, que armas biol?gicas, aparte de las supersofisticadas armas que ya no tienen nada de convencional, porque son capaces de causar cualquier tipo de destrucci?n, record?bamos eso: ?Qu? derecho tiene alguien para amenazar de esa manera a los pueblos? Me pregunto si tambi?n aqu?, en este acto, porque no hay mucha luz, hay que encender muchos m?s bombillos para que no seamos un oscuro rinc?n del mundo que atacar sorpresiva y preventivamente (Aplausos). Claro que esta plaza y esta escalinata que aqu? vemos no es un oscuro rinc?n, es un rinc?n lleno de luz, lleno de millones de luces. Esta plaza y esta escalinata es como un sol, como el sol ese que vimos al llegar aqu? o vimos esta ma?ana cuando visit?bamos la estatua de Mart? para colocar una ofrenda floral en aquel punto (Aplausos). (Del p?blico le dicen algo.) S?, pero en la de San Mart?n era todav?a un poquito m?s temprano, pero ya el sol era muy fuerte, y razon?: ?Caramba!, nuestro sol es fuerte, es sobre todo caluroso, y pensaba: Este sol no es tan caluroso, es decir, el clima es fr?o, pero el sol era superresplandenciente. Se le ve?a una gran fuerza al sol; porque aqu? hay dos soles en este momento: el sol que vimos esta ma?ana y el sol que hemos visto a nuestra llegada a este pa?s, y el sol que estamos viendo aqu? en esta escalinata y en esta plaza. Son las ideas, son las ideas las que iluminan al mundo (Aplausos), son las ideas, y cuando hablo de ideas solo concibo ideas justas, las que pueden traer la paz al mundo y las que pueden poner soluci?n a los graves peligros de guerra, o las que pueden poner soluci?n a la violencia. Por eso hablamos de la batalla de ideas. Pienso ?porque soy optimista? que este mundo puede salvarse, a pesar de los errores cometidos, a pesar de los poder?os inmensos y unilaterales que se han creado, porque creo en la preminencia de las ideas sobre la fuerza (Aplausos y exclamaciones), y eso es lo que estamos observando aqu?. Yo no ten?a el prop?sito esta noche de pronunciar una arenga, m?s bien me sent?a en el deber de ser cuidadoso en mis palabras. Claro, pensaba hablar principalmente de nuestro pa?s y del mundo, y es lo que estoy haciendo, pero no puedo hacerlo sin verlos a ustedes aqu?, sin estarlos presenciando en este acto. Mi idea m?s bien, ya que me hicieron so?ar tambi?n con un sal?n tranquilito y sentaditos all?, pues pensaba en una cuesti?n que es la siguiente, dec?a: ??De qu? debo hablarles a los argentinos?? Pronunciar un discurso en cualquier lugar siempre es complejo, no es f?cil, hay que evitar decir una palabra que pueda lastimar a alguien o que parezca alguna injerencia ?y no creo que haya pronunciado una sola que parezca la m?s m?nima injerencia en los problemas internos del pa?s hospitalario en que me encuentro?; pero dec?a: ??De qu? debo hablar?? Y me planteaba una cuesti?n: Los oradores suelen imponerles a los que los escuchan el tema, piensan hablar de tal cosa y m?s cual cosa, y entonces yo ten?a una idea: no plantear ning?n tema, sino preguntarles a los estudiantes, que supon?a sentaditos all?, que me dijeran qu? temas les interesaban: Preg?ntenme de cualquier tema que a ustedes les interese, sean ustedes los que me impongan el tema y no sea yo el que les diga el que mejor me parezca; me parec?a m?s democr?tico y m?s justo. Eso es lo que pensaba antes de que ocurriera el terremoto este, el maremagno, el hurac?n que se produjo alrededor de esta universidad en las horas del anochecer. Al llegar aqu? miraba si aquella t?cnica ser?a posible, y ya no era posible. No obstante, creo que alguien dijo por ah?..., o? una voz que me dijo: H?bleme de algo (Le dicen que del Che); la vida del Che (Aplausos). Extenso no podr?a ser, no tendr?a sentido en estas circunstancias, pero algunas cosas puedo decir. Me han preguntado por el Che (Exclamaciones), habl? de ?l esta ma?ana ante la estatua de San Mart?n, porque lo recuerdo siempre como una de las personalidades m?s extraordinarias que he conocido. El Che no se uni? a nuestra tropa como soldado, era m?dico. Estaba en M?xico casualmente, hab?a estado antes en Guatemala, hab?a recorrido muchos lugares de Am?rica; hab?a estado por minas, donde el trabajo es m?s duro; hab?a estado, incluso, en el Amazonas en un leprosorio trabajando all? como m?dico. ------- End of forwarded message ------- N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ "S?, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos". Sim?n Bol?var al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de Buenos Aires, 1822 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ From cburford at gn.apc.org Thu May 29 17:04:19 2003 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 00:04:19 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Marxism today In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20030527063853.03a4faf0@pop3.norton.antivirus> References: <002001c323d6$fa5e3f80$46009ad8@Chris> <003801c32241$eb4e6d30$1f0d9ad8@Chris> <000e01c32389$0845f500$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.1.20030529233304.0360ed20@pop3.norton.antivirus> At 2003-05-27 07:40 +0100, I wrote: <> I do not object to Melvin's comments which I regard as fair from his point of view, and some of which I agree with. >Also I read Chris and Stan comments, which I respect, but it is very clear >that both write in a manner outside that of one taught in organizations of >communist. Chris tends to be diffuse and academic pretending that words >like "impressionistic" and "determinist" actually means something to >someone who has broken with bourgeois ideology and the bourgeois >inheritance of philosophy 30 years ago. I thought for me, I was being fairly concise on this occasion. I was certainly being formal, and I was certainly alluding to ideas outside the conventional marxist tradition. The phrase "deterministic indeterminism" was intended to refer to a methematical concept in chaos theory. I suggest marxism is compatible with this, and it is important because it overcomes the question of whether marxism is rigidly deterministic, just because it has a theory of the economic base determining the superstructure. My aim in the post was to assert, what in my opinion remain the central robust concepts of 1 The law of value 2 historical materialism 3 dialectical materialism. I used language to indicate that with suitable explanations, which there was not time to give in a concise statement, these concepts can be defended against anything that bourgeois science can throw at them. Chris Burford From soncu at pacbell.net Thu May 29 17:30:04 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 16:30:04 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Nobody would dare Message-ID: Chris: > Capital wasn't written as a response to anything. Dear Chris, I guess we have a disagreement here but we don't have to agree on everything, do we? > Education does not mean intelligence. And here, we have a complete agreement. Because you brought it, let me tell you that my mom did not go beyond elementary school. Yet I never thought that she was not intelligent because of that. If it were not taking some credit for myself, I would have said she is very intelligent, but that would make me intelligent to some extent too, since I am her son and hence inherited some of her genes. > Nobody would dare tell my father to his face that > he was not capable of reading Marx. Whether your father or my mother was capable of reading Marx is one thing, whether Marx wrote his works with them in mind is another. I don't blame or look down on my mother because she cannot read my articles on thermodynamics. They don't teach you variational calculus or optimal control theory at elementary school, do they? Sabri From bar at idirect.com Thu May 29 20:07:48 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 22:07:48 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Nobody would dare References: Message-ID: <007501c32650$572c8340$67029ad8@Chris> Sabri, Not really a fair comparison. You make a point, fair enough, but there is a difference between thermodynamics and what Marx wrote. T understand the one you have to understand certain mathematical principles, certain laws of physics and the scientific method.To read Capital you only need understand basic arithmetic and the relity of economic and plitical life. To understand one you need special training and knoweldge. For the other you only need to be reasonably intelligent and have an interest in the subject. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sabri Oncu" To: "ALIST" Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 7:30 PM Subject: [A-List] Nobody would dare > Chris: > > > Capital wasn't written as a response to anything. > > Dear Chris, > > I guess we have a disagreement here but we don't have to agree on > everything, do we? > > > Education does not mean intelligence. > > And here, we have a complete agreement. Because you brought it, > let me tell you that my mom did not go beyond elementary school. > Yet I never thought that she was not intelligent because of that. > If it were not taking some credit for myself, I would have said > she is very intelligent, but that would make me intelligent to > some extent too, since I am her son and hence inherited some of > her genes. > > > Nobody would dare tell my father to his face that > > he was not capable of reading Marx. > > Whether your father or my mother was capable of reading Marx is > one thing, whether Marx wrote his works with them in mind is > another. I don't blame or look down on my mother because she > cannot read my articles on thermodynamics. They don't teach you > variational calculus or optimal control theory at elementary > school, do they? > > Sabri > > > > From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 00:50:57 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 09:50:57 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: looting Iraq via privatisation Message-ID: <000501c32677$d29eebe0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Economic reform will push Iraq towards sell-offs By Charles Clover in Baghdad and Arkady Ostrovsky in Moscow Financial Times; May 27, 2003 Paul Bremer, chief of the US-led provisional authority in Iraq, yesterday outlined an economic reform programme, saying the country needed to move in a "clear direction towards a liberal, market-run economy". While he said that food rations and price controls would continue in the short term, over the long term "eliminating artificiality" through price liberalisation and privatisation were among the main goals of his administration. "We need to get out of a situation where 60 per cent of the people rely on the government to get their food. Our task is now to help the Iraqis rebuild their economy," he said. Governments are negotiating with western banks to create a trade credit facility for Iraq, which would help jump-start exports that had been forbidden under United Nations sanctions. The step would also play a key role in encouraging foreign investment into Iraq, Mr Bremer said. The focus on foreign investment and trade comes after oil ministry officials announced a number of production contracts signed by the previous Iraqi regime with Russian and Chinese companies would be terminated. Abass al Aani, of the Iraq oil ministry, yesterday said an agreement with Lukoil of Russia to develop the West Qurna oilfield, which had been ended by the regime of Saddam Hussein in January, would still be terminated, despite Russian support in the United Nation last week for the ending of sanctions against Iraq. He said that some contracts with Russian companies to explore for oil in Iraq's western desert had not been cancelled but that these were only drilling and exploration contracts, and not aimed at production. But Lukoil, which is Russia's leading oil company with interests in Iraq's fields, dismissed the threat to terminate or freeze contracts signed by the previous government and warned it was ready to take its battle to an arbitration court in Geneva. "These contracts cannot be terminated unilaterally. We shall only talk to a legitimate sovereign government of Iraq, when there is one," said Dmitri Dolgov, a spokesman for Lukoil. The threat to terminate the contract with Lukoil is likely to further strain US-Russian relations ahead of the meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President George W. Bush in St Petersburg on Sunday. The Iraqi statement is also a snub to Mr Putin, who has given his personal assurance to Lukoil that it would be able to keep its huge stake in Iraq's oilfields in a post-Saddam Hussein era. Lukoil has a 68.5 per cent stake in a production sharing agreement to develop West Kurna oilfield, which has estimated reserves of 20bn barrels. According to Mr Dolgov, the 20-year contract has an estimated value of $5bn (?4.2bn, ?3bn). "This is not the first time Iraq's officials have threaten to terminate this contract, but the law is on our side. "We consider this contract valid and are planning to start developing these reserves as soon as possible. If someone tries to stop us we'll take them to an arbitration court in Geneva." Christopher Granville, political analyst at United Financial Group, a Moscow-based brokerage, said: "The reality is that US influence will be crucial, if not decisive, in Iraq and, while the US government is un- likely to exclude Russian oil companies entirely, it is clear that all commercial terms will be up for renegotiation." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 00:51:11 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 09:51:11 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Russia: winning from Iraq? Message-ID: <000b01c32677$db5d62c0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Putin emerges as one of the winners after Iraq war By Andrew Jack and Stefan Wagstyl Financial Times; May 27, 2003 Vladimir Putin, theRussian president, has emerged, somewhat improbably, as one of the winners of the Iraq war. In siding with France and Germany in opposing the US-led invasion, Mr Putin risked damaging his carefully cultivated friendship with George W. Bush, US president. But while Washington has made clear its displeasure with Paris and Berlin, it has dealt gently with Moscow. Mr Putin has kept his ties with the US intact, improved his relationship with France and Germany and maintained his record standing in the Russian opinion polls. To cap it all, Mr Putin will have the chance to celebrate his achievement on an international stage this week when he hosts Mr Bush and over 40 other leaders, who are visiting St Petersburg for the city's 300th anniversary celebrations. "This is a very important event, both from the practical and the symbolic point of view," says Sergei Prihodko, Mr Putin's top foreign policy adviser. It is a far cry from the frantic pre-war diplomacy, when Russia found itself opposed to the US and pushed into a troika with France and Germany. The Kremlin insists it decided its policy on a principle - the defence of a United Nations-dominated multilateral world order. But diplomats in Moscow say that Mr Putin's approach was anything but clear, and included complicated efforts to protect Russian business interests in Iraq. However, in the aftermath US officials have decided to treat Mr Putin more favourably than Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr?der, the French and German leaders, because he was a less enthusiastic critic. The war's end certainly leaves Mr Putin in a better position than seemed likely a few weeks ago, but the Russian president must still confront fundamental challenges in establishing a role in the world for his country. He wants to align Russia more closely with the US and the European Union, arguing that Russia has common interests with the west in everything from economic partnerships to fighting terrorism. He also knows that friendly ties with the west will ease the adoption of western ideas in Russia. However, Mr Putin cannot turn Russia into another European ally of the US, like France, Germany or the UK. Millions of Russians still see their country as a superpower. So Mr Putin tries to maintain the illusion that Russia is still a potential challenge to the US. He preserves links with Soviet-era allies such as Cuba and with states blacklisted by Washington such as Syria and Iran. These countries are also buyers of Russian arms, a key consideration in a country with big military factories. Mr Putin does not expect the US to treat Russia as an equal. But he wants respect. And he wants it to be public, so it can be relayed to ordinary Russians. The expansion of the Group of Seven leading industrialised countries to the Group of Eight, including Russia, was a triumph by the Kremlin. As Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko liberal group, says: "We want to feel inside the same room." The St Petersburg celebrations will almost certainly help Russians to feel that they do indeed belong to the right club. But there are also some flies in the ointment. First, whatever Mr Putin might feel, Russia is nowhere near the top of Washington's agenda. As Bob Nurick, head of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank, says: "The danger is not that anything dramatic will change in the relationship, but that below the pleasantness on the surface, it will be essentially empty." Next, the tensions between the US and the EU have stirred up the western club to which Russia wants to belong. Mr Prihodko says Moscow wants to work with both partners, but this will be more difficult if there is a transatlantic rift. Also, Russia's ties with Iran and other states the US regards as hostile could threaten links between Moscow and Washington, just as happened over Iraq. Finally, with parliamentary elections due this autumn and a presidential poll next year, Mr Putin will pay more attention to domestic criticism. He seems assured of victory himself but will try to protect his parliamentary supporters from attack by communists and other critics of his west-oriented foreign policy. As one western diplomat in Moscow says: "This will not be the time for us to put pressure on Putin." From bar at idirect.com Thu May 29 20:39:52 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 22:39:52 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Sorry Chris References: <1e0.9ef0ee0.2c0792c5@aol.com> Message-ID: <001a01c32654$d1f5a170$67029ad8@Chris> Melvin, Yes, I have walked the streets of Detroit many times back in the 80's and could still see the bullet holes in the walls of buildings along the streets just off the hideous phallic fortress of the Renaissance Centre from the rebellion in 1967, "Motor City's burning", when the brothers stood up to the man and fought back and there were tanks and machine guns being used against working class Americans, blacks, becuase all they did was protest their poverty and the cops. I have never forgotten what I saw (second hand on TV) with ordinary people taking on the US Army and how it scared them so much, rattled them, then Tet, then the fragging, the dodgers and deserters, it was all coming apart for them, (Chicago and Kent State and Georgia Tech were the vicious reaction). And I will never forget my father telling me that when he was in the Royal Marines and Royal Navy in WWII he never saw an enlisted man or a seaman salute an officer becuase they hated the officers more than the germans (the Invergordon Mutiny was still fresh) and that if it had not been for the war there would have been a revolution in Britain as conditions were so bad and then I think, "Detroit, London, whats the diff? The man is always the same and we are his one and only enemy. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Waistline2 at aol.com To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 12:43 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Sorry Chris In a message dated 5/29/03 9:20:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time, bar at idirect.com writes: Melvin No problem. I thought it was something like that which is why I didnt reply to it. Though I do sometimes think like a petit-bourgeois psuedo-intellectual to my regret. My parents were both cockney working class kids without any education at all but I was lucky enough to be able to go to university and picked up, along with an education, a certain elitist attitude which I have had to try to get rid of ever since. Chris Education for your parents, like my mother and father was extremely important. The class content of everything you write hits me on the head like a hammer. East London and Detroit . . .hummmmm. I used Stan's name in one of my replies but I immediately sense the difference in conception between Stan and Chris. I don't like the word elitist. All of us inherit a certain bourgeois orientation. The word elitist is used by the bourgeoisie to condemn the proletarian revolutionaries from consolidating an organization of elite fighters. Elite means vanguard and vanguard of the vanguard. There is nothing elitist in your writings or attitude although I understand why you are your most harsh critic. There is nothing elitist in Stan's writings. This cannot be said of C. Burford and the proof is in the pudding. Again . . . Stan is going to break his shoulders carrying the weight of the world. This is Stan's national character and he is most certainly very white and American to the core. If Stan is not reprinting an article, what he writes make me cry at night and I ain't did nothing to nobody. We will never understand things like the bourgeois intelligencia and are in fact the proletariat intelligencia no matter what walk of life we come from. Peace my brother. Melvin P. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4751 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bar at idirect.com Thu May 29 20:43:26 2003 From: bar at idirect.com (Christopher Black) Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 22:43:26 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Sorry Chris References: <1e0.9ef0ee0.2c0792c5@aol.com> Message-ID: <002801c32655$511c9850$67029ad8@Chris> PS, By elitist I guess I meant a certain smugness that sometimes comes with being educated and "knowing" more than others. Life knocked a lot of that out of me but sometimes I wonder just who is talking. Over to you Dr. Freud. Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Waistline2 at aol.com To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 12:43 PM Subject: Re: [A-List] Sorry Chris In a message dated 5/29/03 9:20:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time, bar at idirect.com writes: Melvin No problem. I thought it was something like that which is why I didnt reply to it. Though I do sometimes think like a petit-bourgeois psuedo-intellectual to my regret. My parents were both cockney working class kids without any education at all but I was lucky enough to be able to go to university and picked up, along with an education, a certain elitist attitude which I have had to try to get rid of ever since. Chris Education for your parents, like my mother and father was extremely important. The class content of everything you write hits me on the head like a hammer. East London and Detroit . . .hummmmm. I used Stan's name in one of my replies but I immediately sense the difference in conception between Stan and Chris. I don't like the word elitist. All of us inherit a certain bourgeois orientation. The word elitist is used by the bourgeoisie to condemn the proletarian revolutionaries from consolidating an organization of elite fighters. Elite means vanguard and vanguard of the vanguard. There is nothing elitist in your writings or attitude although I understand why you are your most harsh critic. There is nothing elitist in Stan's writings. This cannot be said of C. Burford and the proof is in the pudding. Again . . . Stan is going to break his shoulders carrying the weight of the world. This is Stan's national character and he is most certainly very white and American to the core. If Stan is not reprinting an article, what he writes make me cry at night and I ain't did nothing to nobody. We will never understand things like the bourgeois intelligencia and are in fact the proletariat intelligencia no matter what walk of life we come from. Peace my brother. Melvin P. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3594 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Fri May 30 01:32:51 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 04:32:51 -0300 Subject: [A-List] DISCURSO COMPLETO DE FIDEL CASTRO EN LA UBA Message-ID: <4128-22003553073251530@n2b4c1> Dante L?pez ForesiNormalwin98372003-05-30T06:20:00Z2003-05-30T06:24:00Z171174366939557133822059.3821 21 DISCURSO COMPLETO DE FIDEL CASTRO EN LA FACULTAD DE DERECHO DE LA UBA Duraci?n: 2 hs.30 minutos ???????? ?Argentinos. He vivido algunos a?os, pero nunca ni siquiera imagin? un acto tan azaroso y tan incre?blemente emocionante como este (aplausos). Quiero comunicarle que ha esta misma hora millones de cubanos estar?n presenciando tambi?n este acto. En nombre de nuestro pueblo se lo agradezco infinitamente, porque de la fuerza que dan las ideas, que da la verdad de una causa justa, es que los pueblos se vuelven invencibles (aplausos). Hab?amos concebido un acto o hab?an concebido, seg?n me explicaban los estudiantes y las autoridades universitarias, una actividad en esta escuela de derecho, un programa modesto, comenzar?a a las 7 de la noche y participar?an algunos estudiantes sentados en una sala y por si acaso ven?an mas, ten?an una pantalla para que pudieran presenciar el acto. Yo quer?a hacer una cr?tica a nuestros compa?eros y decirles, que ustedes subestimaron al pueblo argentino (aplausos). Es que comenzaron a llegar noticias que se hab?a llenado el sal?n y despu?s se hab?a llenado otro lugar y que los laterales tambi?n ya no cabr?an y que hab?a el doble de los que pod?an all? sentarse, que el pasillo se hab?a llenado y que la escalinata se hab?a llenado y dec?an que mi, que dos mil, que tres mil. En un momento dado tambi?n las emisoras de transmisi?n explicaban ya lo que esta ocurriendo aqu? y de repente nosotros mirando aqu? todo, tenemos cierto h?bito de calcular el n?mero de personas que hay en una concentraci?n y esto se parec?a o a Plaza de la Revoluci?n (aplausos). Todas las comunicaciones cortadas menos mal los aparatitos eso que tanto fastidian y tanto ruido hacen, por el momento como este parecido a los celulares, sirven para comunicarse y todo el mundo estaba aislado, nuestro embajador forma parte del grupo de culpables de la subestimaci?n, ya que ustedes lo van a defender porque tienen un gran cari?o por el pueblo. Y entonces se comunicaba con su familia, all? hab?a unos ni?os, ellos cre?an que esto iba a ser mas pac?fico de los actos y lo es ?no? No se imaginaba lo que es la multitud capaz de organizarse. Pero no pod?a moverse, todo el mundo estaba aislado comunic?ndose solo con los celulares, no hab?a entrada por ninguna parte y hab?a declarado que era imposible entrar. Pero yo no me voy a resignar a la idea que no pod?a saludarlos, ni circunstancias f?sicas, obstrucci?n por multitudes no pudiera tener el honor, el orgullo de saludarlos. Se hab?a declarado ya que era imposible, pero realmente insist?a en la idea de que nada era imposible (aplausos). Y que era un problema que deb?a resolverse, que yo no pod?a resignarme a la idea de quedarme all? esperando noticias. Toda mi vida he tenido el h?bito de moverme, ir hacia un lugar y a cualquier dificultad y no pod?a resignar la idea de tomar ese avi?n a la hora en que lo tome sin venir aqu? a esta universidad. Claro esta que yo soy un visitante y primero que nada debo respeto a la ley, al orden y no tengo derecho a hacer absolutamente nada que en lo mas m?nimo viole un reglamento o una orden. Hay que decir que realmente las autoridades cooperaron al m?ximo en su deseo de encontrar una soluci?n. Nos comunicaban y nos dec?an: ?nadie se mueve de la sala?. Y avanzaban un poquito los laterales, llega un momento que se rompe una serie de cosas, por alg?n lugar tambi?n vamos a tener que asumir el compartir con alguien o pagar nosotros los da?os que se puedan derivar de una ventana rota, una brecha abierta por esta tropa patri?tica y revolucionaria de Argentina (aplausos). Entonces acudimos a un cuadrito joven, que ustedes vieron y escucharon y tienen que salir para hablar entrar por donde puedan, habla con los que est?n dentro de aquella sala, expl?cales la situaci?n real, objetiva, y como esto era posible de que di?ramos el acto no all? porque hab?a injustificado temor de que si al acto se daba all? y la pantalla por aqu?, algunos que hab?an salido, varios, entraran otra vez y hab?a que plantear la? necesidad de moverse ac? y dar el acto en este lugar. Impacientes estuvimos parados, escuchando, yo ve?a por la televisi?n una cadena que estaba transmitiendo su palabra y hasta por un tel?fono, y hemos tratado de persuadir a los que estaban dentro de la sala a que se movieran hacia ac?; una vez mas se prob? la capacidad de los pueblos de comprender, de cooperar, de reaccionar, porque a los pocos minutos me dice: ?ya est?n movi?ndose hacia las escalinatas?. Pero hab?a otro obst?culo que vencer, y? era las c?maras de la televisi?n y los micr?fonos (silbidos). Bueno, d?jenlo para ma?ana (r?e). Ya se, ya se, yo estoy escuchando, hubo mucho inter?s en informar lo que estaba ocurriendo. Bien, pero hab?a que instalar, porque sino solo ustedes se enteran de lo que estoy diciendo aqu?, sino por ejemplo otros pueblos sin las c?maras y otros medios t?cnicos no se estar?a viendo lo que en este momento se esta viendo, y entonces eso era lo que tardaba una hora, ?ustedes, saben lo que es una hora de impaciencia? Ustedes y nosotros hemos conocido esas largas, interminables, infinitas horas de impaciencia, porque hab?a que poner esto y los micr?fonos y los altoparlantes, que todo este ajustado a la condici?n; y la verdad que ha sido r?cord el tiempo en que pudieron hacerlo. Pregunt?bamos eran las 8 y 35 y 40, yo dije: ?esta todo listo, lo conveniente es que vengan r?pido porque esta el fr?o?, pero un fr?o que no puede ser superado por el calor de ustedes. Bueno, a mi me han puesto esto que no lo necesito, voy a renunciar a esto, es que me da verg?enza andar poni?ndome aqu? yo. Y entonces, r?pido partimos hacia ac? y pudimos llegar a la hora que se hab?a calculado, pero como por milagro fue la proeza organizativa realizada por la masa, jam?s olvidar? lo que ustedes hicieron esta noche permiti?ndonos marcharnos felices y eternamente agradecido. Alguno podr? preguntarse si acaso es vanidad nuestra por los inmensos honores que ustedes nos han concedido. No, no es eso en lo que pienso y cuando hablo de gratitud eterna es porque este pueblo de Buenos Aires esta enviando un mensaje a aquellos que suenan con bombardear nuestra patria, nuestras ciudades (aplausos). Aquellos que sue?an con destruir ya no solo la Revoluci?n, destruir al pueblo que fue portador de esa Revoluci?n y que fue capaz de resistir mas de 40 a?os de bloqueos, de agresiones y de amenazas contra nuestro pa?s. En circunstancias como esa no se puede calcular solo un ni?o que ha muerto, o las madres que han muerto, o los ancianos que han muerto, o los j?venes y adultos que hayan muerto? Uno se pregunta si estando en esa circunstancia no preferir?a cien veces mas morir que seguir viviendo de aquella forma. No hay ninguna clase de ley ni justificaci?n como no sea la violaci?n de las normas internacionales, la violaci?n de las leyes que cre?amos que reg?an este mundo, aunque muchos de nosotros sospech?bamos que este era un mundo donde lo que menos se respetaba era la ley y donde se estaba estableciendo el principio de la fuerza como ?nica justificaci?n para cometer cualquier tipo de cr?menes, para someter a nuestro pueblo, para conquistar sus recursos naturales, para imponernos una tiran?a nazi fascista (aplausos). Y no es exageraci?n ni uso excesivo de palabras, cuando escuchamos un d?a decir que 60 pa?ses o mas pod?an ser blanco de los ataques sorpresivos y preventivos, nadie jam?s en la historia, ning?n imperio hizo semejante amenaza. Y cuando se hablaba, se hablaba de estar preparados para lanzar cualquier arma a cualquier oscuro rinc?n del mundo no recuerdo haber escuchado jam?s esa palabra. Y cuando se dijo que cualquier arma pod?a ser utilizada, lo mismo armas nucleares que armas qu?micas, biol?gicas, a parte de la super sofisticadas armas que ya no tienen nada de convencional porque son capaces de causar cualquier tipo de destrucci?n. Record?bamos eso, que derechos tiene alguien para amenazar de esa manera a los pueblos. Me pregunto si tambi?n aqu?, porque no hay mucha luz, hay que encender muchos mas bombillos para que no seamos un oscuro rinc?n del mundo que atacar sorpresivamente y preventivamente (aplausos). Claro, que esta plaza y esta escalinata que aqu? vemos no es un oscuro rinc?n, es un rinc?n lleno de luz, lleno de millones de luces esta plaza y esta escalinata es como un sol y como el sol ese que vimos al llegar aqu? o vimos esta ma?ana cuando visit?bamos la estatua de San Mart?n a colocar una ofrenda floral, porque finalmente aquella en la de San Mart?n era un poquito mas temprano pero ya el sol era muy fuerte y yo razon? ?caramba, nuestro pueblo es fuerte, pero es sobre todo caluroso? y pensaba, ? este sol no es tan caluroso, el clima es fr?o pero el sol era superresplandeciente, se le ve?a una gran fuerza al sol. Porque aqu? hay dos soles en este momento, el sol que vimos esta ma?ana y el sol que vimos al llegar a este pa?s, y el sol que estamos viendo aqu? en esta escalinata y en esta plaza son las ideas, son las ideas las que iluminan al mundo, son las ideas. Y cuando hablo de ideas solo concibo ideas justas las que pueden traer la paz al mundo y las que pueden imponer soluci?n a los graves peligros de guerra, o las que pueden poner soluci?n a la violencia, son las ideas y por eso hablamos de la batalla de ideas. Pienso, porque soy optimista, que este mundo puede salvarse a pesar de los errores cometidos, a pesar de los poder?os inmensos y unilaterales que se han creado, porque creo en la preeminencia de las ideas sobre la fuerza (aplausos). Y eso es lo que estamos, observando aqu?. Yo no ten?a el prop?sito de esta noche de pronunciar una arenga, mas bien me sent?a en el deber de ser cuidadoso en mis palabras. Claro, empec? a hablar de nuestro pa?s y del mundo y es lo que estoy haciendo, pero no puedo hacerlo sin verlo a ustedes aqu?, sin estarlo presenciando en este acto. Mi idea tambi?n, ya que me hicieron so?ar tambi?n con un sal?n, tranquilito y sentadito all?, fue pensar en una cuesti?n que es la siguiente: ??de qu? debo hablarle a los argentinos?. Comenzar un discurso en cualquier lugar siempre es complejo, no es f?cil, hay que evitar decir una palabra que pueda lastimar a alguien o que parezca alguna injerencia; no creo que haya pronunciado una sola que parezca la mas m?nima injerencia en los problemas internos del pa?s tan hospitalario en que me encuentro. Pero dec?a: ??de qu? debo hablar??. Y me planteaba una cuesti?n, los oradores suelen imponerle a los que escuchan el tema, piensan hablar de tal cosa y mas cosa, y entonces yo ten?a una idea, no plantear ning?n tema sino preguntar a los estudiantes que supon?a sentaditos all?, plantearles que me dijeran que tema les interesaba y decirle preg?ntenme de cualquier tema que a ustedes les interese, que sean ustedes los que me impongan a mi el tema y no sea yo el que les diga el tema que mejor me parezca; me parec?a mas democr?tico y mas justo. Eso es lo que pensaba antes de que ocurriera el terremoto este, el marem?gnum, el hurac?n que se produjo alrededor de esta universidad en las horas del anochecer; al llegar aqu? miraba si aquella t?cnica fuera posible y no era ya posible. No obstante creo que alguien dijo por ah?, o? una voz, h?blenme de algo (gritos) la vida del Che. Extenso no podr?a ser, no tendr?a sentido esta circunstancia, pero algunas cosas puedo decir, puedo decir me han preguntado por el Che. Hable de ?l esta ma?ana ante la estatua de San Mart?n, porque lo recuerdo siempre como una de las personalidades mas extraordinarias que he conocido. El Che naci? en nuestra tropa como soldado, era m?dico, estaba en M?xico casualmente, hab?a estado antes en Guatemala, hab?a recorrido muchos lugares de Am?rica, hab?a estado por minas donde se trabaja mas duro, hab?a estado incluso en el Amazonas en un leprosario trabajando all? como m?dico. Pero les voy a decir una de las caracter?sticas del Che y una de las que yo mas apreciaba entre las muchas que apreciaba mucho. ?l todo los fines de semanas trataba de subir el Pococatepel(?), volc?n que esta en las inmediaciones de la capital, preparaba su equipo, es alta la monta?a, es de nieve perpetua; iniciaba el ascenso, hac?a un enorme esfuerzo y no llegaba. A la semana siguiente intentaba de nuevo el Poco, como le dec?a ?l, y no llegaba. Pero volv?a a intentar de nuevo y se habr?a pasado toda la vida intentando subir el Pococatepel aunque nunca alcanzaba aquella cumbre. La idea de la voluntad, de la fortaleza espiritual, de su constancia una de sus caracter?stica. ?Cu?l ? era la otra? La otra era que cada vez que hac?a falta, cuando ?ramos un grupo todav?a muy reducido, un voluntario para una tarea determinada, el primero que siempre se presentaba era el Che (aplausos). ?l se quedaba como m?dico con los enfermos, porque en determinadas circunstancias en la monta?a boscosa y perseguido de muy diferentes direcciones, la fuerza que pod?amos llamar principal era la que ten?a que moverse, dejar un rastro bien visible para que en alguna zona mas cercana pudiera permanecer el m?dico con los que estaba asistiendo, un tiempo en el que el ?nico m?dico era ?l, hasta que otros m?dicos se acercaban. Puedo recordar, ya que ustedes me piden an?cdotas, una acci?n que fue sumamente riesgosa para todos, sencillamente porque hab?an llegado las noticias de un lugar donde est?bamos en la monta?a, de un desembarco que se hab?a producido por el norte de la provincia, nos acordamos de nuestra peripecia, de nuestros primeros sufrimientos en nuestros primeros d?as; y como acto de solidaridad contra aquello a favor de aquellos que hab?amos desembarcado, decidimos realizar una acci?n bien audaz que no era desde el punto de vista militar correcto hacerlo, y fue sencillamente atacar una unidad en la orilla del mar que estaba bien atrincherada. No voy a dar mas datos, como resultado de aquel combate que dur? tres horas y tuvimos bastante suerte porque hab?amos logrado neutralizar las comunicaciones. Y despu?s de tres horas cuando termin? aquel combate, ?l tuvo como siempre una actitud destacada, hab?an muerto, estaban muertos o heridos una tercera parte de los combatientes que participaron en esa acci?n, cosa no muy usual; entonces ?l como m?dico atendi? a los adversarios, a los adversarios heridos. Hab?a adversarios que estaban vivos, no estaban heridos, pero hab?a un n?mero elevado y ?l los atendi? y atendi? a los compa?eros que estaban heridos. No se imaginan ustedes la sensibilidad de aquel argentino (aplausos). Y hay algo que me viene a la mente, un compa?ero cuya herida era mortal y ?l lo sab?a y en aquel momento el lugar deb?a ser abandonado r?pidamente, porque muy pronto no se sab?a cuando aparecieron los aviones durante aquel combate, porque era lo primero que aparec?a. Pero al parecer tuvimos la suerte de destruir las comunicaciones con algunos disparos certeros, dispusimos ese tiempo pero hab?a que atender a los heridos y retirarse r?pidamente y no se me puede olvidar, que me lo cont? ?l, cuando un compa?ero que iba a morir inexorablemente no se pod?a movilizar y hay heridos mas graves que usted no puede movilizar, tiene que confiar ah? en que usted los ha atendido, puesto que usted ha logrado un n?mero de prisioneros; prisioneros nosotros siempre respet?bamos, no hubo un solo caso jam?s que prisioneros de un combate fuese alguna vez maltratado o ejecutado (aplausos), nosotros les entreg?bamos incluso nuestros medicamentos que eran muy escasos. Esa pol?tica realmente nos llev? mucho al ?xito, porque usted en cualquier lucha debe ganarse el respeto del adversario, en cualquier lucha, lo vuelvo a repetir, de una forma o de otra el comportamiento de los que defienden una buena causa debe dirigirse a ganarse el respeto del adversario. En aquella ocasi?n debimos dejar un n?mero de compa?eros heridos que no pod?an evacuarse, entre ellos alguno muy grave; pero vaya, lo que impact? es cuando me cont? con dolor recordando aquel momento en que sab?a que no ten?a salvaci?n posible y ?l se hab?a inclinado y le hab?a dado un beso en la frente a aquel compa?ero herido all?, sab?a que inexorablemente morir?a. Son algunas de las cosas que le menciono del Che como hombre, como ser humano extraordinario, era un hombre de elevada cultura, un hombre de gran inteligencia, ya mencion? su tes?n, su voluntad. Cualquier tarea que se la asignara despu?s del triunfo de la Revoluci?n, era capaz de aceptarla, fue director del Banco Nacional de Cuba donde hac?a falta un revolucionario en aquel momento y en cualquier otro desde luego, pero acababa la Revoluci?n de triunfar y los recursos con que contaba eran muy pocos porque las reservas se las hab?an robado. Los enemigos bromeaban, siempre bromean, tambi?n nosotros bromeamos pero la broma ten?a una intenci?n pol?tica que refer?a a que un d?a yo hab?a dicho: ?hace falta un economista?. Pero entonces se hab?an confundido y creyeron que yo dec?a que hac?a falta un comunista y por eso es que hab?a ido el Che, porque el Che es un revolucionario, era un comunista y era un excelente economista (aplausos) porque ser economista excelente depende de la idea de lo que quiera hacer quien dirige un frente de la econom?a del pa?s y quien dirige el frente del Banco Nacional de Cuba. As? que en su doble car?cter de comunista y economista, no porque tuviera un t?tulo, sino porque hab?a le?do mucho y observaba mucho. Che fue el promotor del trabajo voluntario en nuestro pa?s, porque todos los domingos se iba a hacer un trabajo a la agricultura, otro d?a a probar una m?quina, otro d?a a construir, o la herencia de aquella pr?ctica que con su ejemplo conquist? la adhesi?n, o la simpat?a, o la pr?ctica para millones de nuestros compatriotas. Son muchos los recuerdos que nos dej? y es por eso que es uno de los hombres mas nobles, mas extraordinario y mas desinteresado que he conocido; lo cual no tendr?a importancia si uno no cree que los hombres como ?l existen por millones y millones y millones en las masas, los hombres que se destaquen de manera singular no podr?an hacer nada si muchos millones iguales que ?l no tengan el embri?n, no tengan la capacidad de adquirir esas cualidades. Por eso nuestra Revoluci?n se interes? tanto por luchar contra el analfabetismo, por desarrollar la educaci?n. Si antes dec?a que las ideas eran mas poderosas que las armas (aplausos). La educaci?n es el instrumento por excelencia, para que ese ser vivo que es el hombre regido poderosamente por instinto o por leyes naturales, que evolucion? a trav?s de lo que mostr? Darwin, y hoy no lo niega nadie, me refiero a la teor?a de la evoluci?n, que dec?a que nadie lo negaba porque recuerdo el momento en que el Papa Juan XXIII declar?, que la teor?a de la evoluci?n no era inconciliable con la doctrina de la creaci?n, y realmente experimento un gran aprecio por acciones como esa, porque ces? de haber una contradicci?n entre una teor?a cient?fica y una creencia religiosa. Pero ese hombre puede ser como un animalito en la selva, si lo ponen all? en la selva tiene inteligencia, se sabe los gramos que hay en una cabeza humana y se sabe incluso que es el ?nico ser viviente cuyo cerebro contin?a creciendo dos a?os y medio despu?s de nacido; ustedes lo saben los estudiantes universitarios, deben haberlo le?do. Esto tiene una influencia tremenda en el desarrollo de la inteligencia, ni?o que no se alimente con todos los elementos adecuados hasta cumplir los dos a?os y medio, llega a los 6 a?os al preescolar o a la escuela con la inteligencia disminuida con relaci?n a los ni?os que se alimentan de una manera adecuada.? Y debo decir, que una de las cosas mas necesarias si queremos igualdad, es al menos el derecho a llegar a los 6 a?os con la capacidad de inteligencia con que nazca un ni?o, y sabemos que aquellos y que en el mundo se cuentan por cientos de millones que no se alimentan adecuadamente en esas edades, llegan a la edad escolar, si hubiera escuelas, si hubiera maestros capaces de ense?arlo porque ocurre en que puede alimentarse adecuadamente en esa etapa y despu?s no tengan ni escuela ni maestro. Pero que ocurre en los sectores mas pobres de la tierra que est?n concentrados, fundamentalmente los pa?ses del tercer mundo al que pertenece las cuatro quintas parte de la humanidad, es que en esas regiones se concentran los pobres, los hambrientos, los que no pueden alcanzar ese nivel de capacidad instalada, no de capacidad desarrollada, los que no tienen ni siquiera escuela. Si a ustedes les dicen que hay 860 millones de analfabetos adultos en el mundo, y le explican como el 90% de esos 860 millones de analfabetos viven en el tercer mundo, porque hay que a?adir que en pa?ses muy desarrollados hay analfabetos, en ese gran vecino cercano a nuestra patria hay millones de analfabetos, analfabetos totales, pero hay decenas de millones de analfabetos funcional. Y nadie tome esto (aplausos)? Un m?dico, ?qu? dice el m?dico? Yo dije decenas, realmente son cientos. Bueno, en los pa?ses desarrollados no, estoy hablando del tercer mundo. Un m?dico, un m?dico aqu?, ?d?nde hace falta el m?dico? Bueno, pasen al compa?ero, r?pido un m?dico. Ya ver?n que r?pido llega. Muy bien. Les hablaba y me estoy extendiendo por encima de mi voluntad, me estoy extendiendo. Les hablaba de un problema muy importante que esta muy asociado, se llama educaci?n y salud. Les dec?a, bueno habl?bamos de un m?dico argentino que se convirti? en soldado sin dejar de ser m?dico un solo minuto, es lo que nos trajo a explicar estas cosas y despu?s les dec?a que es la educaci?n la que convierte el animalito, el animalito en ser humano. No se olviden eso, es la educaci?n la que es capaz de hacer lo que sobrepase los instintos que les vienen de la naturaleza. Es mas, a?ado, es la educaci?n la que podr?a vaciar las c?rceles donde est?n aquellos que no recibieron educaci?n, no se alimentaron porque hasta en nuestra propia patria tardamos en descubrir que por muchas leyes que se hagan, por muchas escuelas que se construyan, muchos maestros que se formen, siempre habr? por una raz?n o por otra, en nuestra sociedad porque hay cientos de miles de profesionales universitarios e intelectuales, la influencia del n?cleo familiar es decisiva cuando usted va a una prisi?n e investiga los j?venes entre 20 o 30 a?os que est?n en prisi?n, se encuentra que proceden de las capas mas humildes y mas pobres de la poblaci?n, proceden de lo que podr?amos llamar ?reas marginales. Cuando a la inversa busca la composici?n social de escuelas que son muy anheladas y donde se llega por expediente y por notas, es al rev?s, la inmensa mayor?a son hijos de padres intelectuales o artistas. Piense que no estoy hablando de una diferencia de clase desde el punto de vista econ?mico, el problema de construcci?n de una sociedad es mucho mas dif?cil de lo que pueda parecer, porque con muchas cosas las que se van descubriendo por el camino, y llega un d?a si empez? luchando contra un 30% de analfabetismo y un 90% entre analfabetismo total y funcional, concentra su atenci?n en esas tareas y cuando han pasado los a?os y cuando hay un estudio mas profundo de la sociedad es cuando puede darse cuenta de la influencia que tiene la educaci?n; le puedo decir que por ejemplo en los sectores mas pobres en las ?reas marginales donde es mas frecuente la disoluci?n del n?cleo familiar, esa disoluci?n tiene una influencia grande. Por ejemplo, usted puede apreciar un 70% que proceden de n?cleos disueltos, donde incluso hasta un 19% puede vivir o vive no con el padre o la madre, sino con alg?n familiar que se ocupa de ?l. Y cuando ese mismo fen?meno ocurre en un n?cleo de intelectuales, no se observa el mismo efecto en el hijo aquel aunque se haya producido la disoluci?n familiar, en general quedan con el padre o con la madre, en nuestro pa?s por costumbre con la madre y las mujeres constituyen en Cuba el 65% de la fuerza t?cnica del pa?s (aplausos). Es as? como le estoy diciendo, un poquitito mas del 65%, y observe usted ese fen?meno y no se da, que lo puede explicar si no es la educaci?n. Es decir, que el nivel de escolaridad de los padres a?n cuando se haya hecho una Revoluci?n, sigue influyendo directamente en el destino ulterior de los ni?os. Bien puede ocurrir en determinada circunstancias en que los hijos de los sectores mas humildes o con menos conocimiento, no estoy hablando ya de la situaci?n social econ?mica del n?cleo, sino la educaci?n del n?cleo; se encuentra que tiende a perpetuarse a lo largo de decenas de a?os, y uno puede decir entonces, como a veces nosotros hemos planteado en algunos casos estas personas que est?n haciendo esta tarea, o que hab?an dado apoyo, sus hijos nunca ser?n directores de empresas, gerentes, o ocupar?n posiciones importantes; los espera, en primer lugar, las prisiones. Nosotros hemos estudiado eso y unas cuantas cosas mas que no es el momento de explicar, para decir que sin una revoluci?n educacional bien profunda, la injusticia y la desigualdad continuar? prevaleciendo aun por encima de las satisfacciones materiales de todos los ciudadanos del pa?s (aplausos). En nuestro pa?s nosotros les garantizamos un litro de leche a cada ni?o hasta los 7 a?os (aplausos). A partir de esa edad y debido a nuestros recursos le garantizamos una leche de otro tipo, ya que aproximadamente existen posibilidades, ahora esa leche la garantizamos a un costo de menos de un centavo de d?lar. A ese ni?o con un d?lar que le env?a alguien que vive en el norte a un amigo, puede comprar la leche de 104 d?as. ? En nuestro pa?s el bloqueo nos oblig? al racionamiento, ese bloqueo que ha durado 44 a?os, pero en nuestro pa?s no se encuentra un ni?o sin escuela, uno solo no encontrar?n sin escuela (aplausos). Y en nuestro pa?s, incluso, los ni?os que nacen con alg?n problema mental, y es algo que estamos estudiando en profundidad causas que originan, distintos tipos de retraso mental, si ligero, severo, moderado, profundo, cada uno con sus caracter?sticas, afortunadamente son mas numerosos los ligeros y moderados; pero en este momento nosotros tenemos el expediente de cada uno, no de los ni?os solo, de las 140 y tantas mil personas de distintas edades que tiene alg?n problema de retraso mental. Todos los ni?os que tienen alg?n problema de incapacidad f?sica, o mental, o ciego, o sordomudo, o algo mas terrible ciego y sordomudo al mismo tiempo, hay tragedias humanas ? que para conocerlas hay que investigarlas, y nosotros las conoc?amos desde el primer d?a. Pero a la larga de la pr?ctica y luchando por la educaci?n como hemos luchado, fuimos descubriendo estas cosas, y tienen escuelas especiales, hay 55 mil ni?os matriculados en escuelas especiales. Yo he planteado que no? basta que un ni?o vaya a una escuela especial entre sexto y noveno grado, hemos planteado que de esa escuela si es un ni?o que no puede ir a un nivel superior de 9 a 12 grado sea bachillerato o sea un conocimiento t?cnico en escuelas tecnol?gicas, termine su noveno grado o el tiempo que necesite, si hace falta un grado o dos mas, preparado para el tipo de trabajo que pueda realizar y adem?s con un empleo; no se puede subestimar, los muchachos tienen cualidades para muchas cosas. Y ya no nos conformamos, no nos podemos conformar porque ser?amos inconscientes si nos limit?ramos a ense?arle lo que se le puede ense?ar a un ni?o con ese tipo de limitaci?n ligeras y moderadas, que son la mayor?a. A todos se les atiende cualquiera que sea el tipo de incapacidad que se tenga. Hemos tenido la satisfacci?n que a pesar del bloqueo ese que tiene 44 a?os, no hay un solo ni?o con necesidad de ense?anza especial que no tenga su escuela (aplausos). Quiero a?adir un dato, quiero decirles que hoy, y nadie lo tome como una vanidad de nuestro pueblo, porque lo que digo siempre con relaci?n a lo que hemos hecho con la educaci?n y con la salud nos produce verg?enza a medida que descubrimos nuevas y nuevas posibilidades, verg?enza por no haberlo descubierto antes; nadie piense o se jacte de ?xitos. Les puedo asegurar algo que ni siquiera nosotros mismos sab?amos, hac?amos comparaciones con los datos de la UNESCO y los datos que hizo sobre los niveles de educaci?n, y en nuestro pa?s los ni?os de cuarto y quinto grado en lenguaje y matem?tica casi duplica los conocimientos de los ni?os de Am?rica latina y de Estados Unidos tambi?n, no vaya a creer que solo? Se que le estoy hablando de un pa?s que tiene elevados niveles de educaci?n y de cultura, se como es el pueblo argentino y sus conocimientos. Nuestro pa?s hoy tiene niveles mas altos, pero Argentina es entre los dem?s pa?ses, 4, 5, aunque a una relativa alta distancia a los niveles de nuestro pa?s. Pero nos llam? mas la atenci?n cuando descubrimos que nuestros ni?os de primaria, sus conocimientos de lenguaje y de matem?tica est?n por encima de los pa?ses mas desarrollados del mundo (aplausos), y en nuestro pa?s hoy ocupa ese lugar del mismo modo que el ?ndice de mortalidad infantil nuestro pa?s esta por debajo de 7. El ?ltimo a?o fue 6,5, el anterior hab?a sido 6,2; pero nosotros pensamos bajarlo, no sab?amos si quiera si un pa?s tropical pod?a bajarse el ?ndice de mortalidad infantil a esos niveles, porque influye muchos factores, el clima influye, incluso el potencial gen?tico de cada poblaci?n influye, esos factores independientemente de los factores de asistencia, factores alimenticios, etc. No sab?amos si pod?a bajarse de 10, nos alent? mucho cuando lo logramos. Pero hay provincias, no crea que es la capital la que tiene los mejores ?ndices, hay provincias enteras que tienen menos, incluso menos de cinco de mortalidad infantil, y ese ?ndice mas o menos parejo no ocurre como en un pa?s vecino nuestro, donde en algunos lugares que viven los que tienen mas recursos y mejor asistencia y mejor alimentaci?n, etc, etc, pueden tener un 4, un 5. Y en otro como en la propia capital de Estados Unidos, donde hay mucha gente pobre y donde hay grupos ?tnicos, afro-norteamericanos que no tienen la asistencia adecuada en que la mortalidad puede ser tres veces, cuatro veces o cinco veces mas que la mortalidad infantil de determinados lugares que reciben toda la atenci?n. Sabemos lo que pasa con los hispanos y con los afro-norteamericanos y los de otras regiones del mundo, sus ?ndices de mortalidad infantil, sus ?ndices de perspectiva de vida, sus ?ndices de salud, del mismo modo que sabemos que hay mas de 40 millones de norteamericanos que no tienen asegurada la asistencia m?dica. Cuando hablo de los americanos no hablo con odio, porque nuestra Revoluci?n no ha ense?ado a odiar, se basa en ideas y no en fanatismo, no en chauvinismo, somos, hemos tenido el privilegio de aprender que todos somos hermanos y nuestro pueblo se educa en los sentimientos de amistad y solidaridad, lo que calificamos como sentimientos internacionalistas. Cientos de miles de nuestros compatriotas han pasado por esa escuela, es por ello que puedo decir que no es tan f?cil liquidar la Revoluci?n, que no es tan f?cil aplastar la voluntad de ese pueblo, que en virtud de las ideas, de sus ideas, conceptos y sentimientos cultivados, porque tanto las ideas como los sentimientos tienen que ser cultivados, de esa verdad partimos. Pero un pueblo que alcanza determinados niveles de conocimiento, capacidad de comprender los problemas, capacidad de unidad y de disciplina, no es tan f?cil desaparecerlo de la faz de la tierra (aplausos). Y es por ello, es por ello que a pesar de esas teor?as nazi fascistas, tenemos la convicci?n de que una lucha, un ataque a nuestro pa?s costar?a, como ya les digo, un precio muy alto, porque es un pueblo que jam?s se rendir?, que jam?s dejar? de luchar (aplausos), y mientras exista un solo hombre, mujer, capaz de combatir ese hombre o esa mujer continuar? combatiendo. Es por ello que conociendo durante muchas d?cadas a ese adversario, nuestro pa?s ha tenido que aprender a defenderse, nuestro pa?s no lanza bombas contra otros pueblos ni manda miles de aviones a bombardear ciudades, nuestro pa?s no posee armas nucleares ni armas qu?micas ni armas biol?gicas; las decenas de miles de cient?ficos con que cuenta nuestro pa?s y sus m?dicos, han sido educados en la idea de salvar vidas, est?n en absoluta contradicci?n con su concepci?n poner un cient?fico o un m?dico a producir sustancias, o bacterias, o virus capaces de producir la muerte a otros seres humanos. No faltaron incluso las denuncias de que Cuba estaba haciendo investigaciones sobre armas biol?gicas, en nuestro pa?s se hacen investigaciones para curar enfermedades tan duras como la meningitis meningoc?sica, la hepatitis a trav?s de vacunas que produce, a trav?s de t?cnicas de ingenier?a gen?tica, o algo de suma importancia, la b?squeda de vacunas o f?rmulas terap?uticas a trav?s de la inmunolog?a molecular. Perd?nenme si he empleado esta palabra t?cnica, quiere decir a trav?s de m?todos que atacan directamente las c?lulas malignas. Y lo mismo unas pueden prever y otras pueden incluso curar y avanzamos por esos caminos, ese es el orgullo de nuestros m?dicos y de nuestros centros de investigaci?n; decenas de miles de m?dicos cubanos han prestado servicio internacionalista en los lugares mas apartados e inh?spitos. Un d?a dije, que nosotros no pod?amos ni enviar?amos nunca o nunca realizar?amos ataques preventivos ni sorpresivos contra ning?n oscuro rinc?n del mundo, pero que en cambio nuestro pa?s era capaz de enviar los m?dicos que se necesiten a los mas oscuros rincones del mundo (aplausos). M?dicos y no bombas, m?dicos y no armas inteligentes de certera punter?a, porque al fin y al cabo? un arma que mata traicioneramente no es absolutamente un arma inteligente (aplausos y ovaci?n). Como ven mis palabras, a ustedes los estudiantes, han estado girando en torno a estas cuestiones que son lo que para nosotros constituye el mayor orgullo de la Revoluci?n. Hay quienes afirman que en Cuba la Revoluci?n esta muy bien y muy acertada en educaci?n, al menos admiten eso, en educaci?n, en salud p?blica, al menos admiten eso; y que en deportes tiene un muy buen nivel de desarrollo, y yo se que ustedes son muy amantes del deporte y los ?ol?, ol?? esos los he escuchado en alg?n deporte en el cual ustedes han sido campeones compartiendo estos honores con los argentinos (ovaci?n del p?blico). Pero tendr?n que decir, y no deben tardar mucho en decir, que Cuba avanza aceleradamente en el terreno de la cultura y del arte (aplausos). Y no solo vamos en busca de una cultura art?stica, en busca de una cultura general, integral. Puedo darles algunas noticias, poco conocidas, en nuestro pa?s en los ?ltimos tres a?os las universidades, no es que se multiplique, unas poquitas que hab?a, una facultad de medicina que tiene 22 facultades de medicina,? y una de ellas se llama Escuela Latinoamericana de Ciencias M?dicas, donde hay alrededor de 7 mil alumnos procedentes de pa?ses Latinoamericanos y alcanzar? la cifra de 10 mil alumnos y se conoce que en Estados Unidos una carrera universitaria, especialmente una de medicina, cuesta cuando menos 200 mil d?lares la carrera (silbidos). Cuando salgan formados de esta escuela, que tiene algunos a?os, 10 mil alumnos solo en ese campo, nuestro pa?s estar? d?ndoles una cooperaci?n a los pa?ses del tercer mundo que equivaldr?an a dos mil millones de d?lares, una prueba de que si un pa?s se gu?a por ideas justas, aunque sea pobre, pobr?simo, puede hacer muchas cosas. El pa?s bloqueado durante 44 a?os, el pa?s al cual cuando se derrumb? el campo socialista con el que ten?amos nuestro comercio comprando y comerciando, el imperialismo apret? mas todav?a sus medidas econ?micas con las leyes Torricelli y Helms Burton. Hay adem?s una ley criminal, que nosotros le llamamos ?la ley asesina de ajuste cubano?, aplicable ?nicamente a un pa?s en el mundo, Cuba, a alguien que no le dar?as jam?s por tal antecedente o por lo que sea, que llega all? en un barco que se roba, o un avi?n que se roba, o por cualquier medio le conceden el derecho insofacto el derecho a recibir e incluso a trabajar desde el otro d?a. F?jese ustedes, que en la frontera de M?xico con Estados Unidos, mueren alrededor de 500 personas por a?o, y sufren una muerte horrible porque le propiciaron a ese pa?s o le impusieron, como sea, una ley que implica el libre movimiento de mercanc?a y de capitales, pero no el libre movimiento de seres humanos (aplausos). Y mientras a nuestro pa?s le aplican esa ley de ajuste, que nosotros no la pedimos para los dem?s porque es una ley asesina, si planteamos que se le conceda al ser humano por parte de aquellos caballeros que acusan a todo el mundo de violar los derechos humanos, algo que con relaci?n a Cuba solo pueden hacer infames calumnias y de bochornosas y rid?culas mentiras, dan lugar a la muerte de cientos de mexicanos y latinoamericanos all? donde cada a?o mueren mas seres humanos que todos los que murieron en los 29 a?os que dur? el muro de Berl?n. Y del muro de Berl?n han hablado millones y? millones de veces, pero no hay noticias sino muy espor?dicas de los mexicanos que mueren todos los a?os tratando de cruzar la frontera. Ahora, si ustedes latinoamericanos o de cualquier pa?s asi?tico llega ah?, si realmente se queda y se puede quedar, lo llaman refugiado, lo llaman emigrante. Si es cubano, tiene el apellido ya certificado, son exilados. En Estados Unidos no hay emigrantes cubanos, a pesar de que mas de cien mil todos los a?os vienen a visitar a sus familiares en Cuba, pero no son emigrados, son exiliados; esa es la palabra acu?ada con sus p?rfidos m?todos de sembrar la confusi?n y la mentira. Si les puedo asegurar, que si esa ley que nos han aplicado a nosotros durante 37 a?os, la hubiesen aplicado a los latinoamericanos y caribe?os a los que quieren imponer un ALCA (silbidos), un ALCA. Si le hubieran aplicado la prerrogativa esa, y repito no la aconsejamos porque es ley asesina, es para los que llegan ilegales al pa?s, en realidad les puedo asegurar que hoy no tendr?amos los 534 millones de habitantes entre Am?rica latina y el Caribe, y con seguridad mas de la mitad de los norteamericanos ser?a de origen Latinoamericano o caribe?o (aplausos). Hay que decirlo pero sin empe?ar la palabra, mas bien que se deduzca a que se diga, que se razone lo que son los que viven en aquel pa?s, no el pueblo de aquel pa?s, muchas veces enga?ado. Tenemos la prueba que muchas ocasiones apoyaron la causa, pero para que apoyen la causa primero hay que enga?arlo y en eso son especialistas y lo han sido en la historia del enga?o. Pero cuando conoce la verdad, y recordemos Vietnam, que el pueblo norteamericano desempe?o un papel decisivo en el fin de la guerra de Vietnam, porque la opini?n internacional, la de ustedes, la de todos los americanos, pr?cticamente lo que piense no les importa, les importa lo que piensen los seres de Estados Unidos porque votan all?, puede haber su fraude, su fraudecito o un fraud?n enorme como el que vimos en las ?ltimas elecciones superdemocr?ticas de Estados Unidos, donde el candidato opositor obtuvo medio mill?n de votos mas que el candidato, dos grandes comillas, triunfador. Todo el mundo sabe de forma exacta, y no lo duda ning?n norteamericano lo que sufri? all? que la extrema derecha apoyada por la mafia terrorista cubano-americano, mediante fraude le arrebat? la victoria a su adversario. No me meto a decir cual es ma?ana democr?tico o menos democr?tico, no estoy inscripto a ninguno de los dos partidos, porque en ?ltimo de los t?rminos se podr?a decir que all? impera el monopartidismo (aplausos). Algunos dir?n, ??pero no tiene Cuba un solo partido??. Digo si, pero nuestro partido ni postula ni elige, los delegados de circunscripci?n que son la base de nuestro sistema lo propone el pueblo en Asamblea por cada circunscripci?n. No pueden ser menos de dos ni mas de 8 y casi el 50% de aquellos delegados de circunscripci?n que constituyen la Asamblea Municipal en cada municipio del pa?s, eso es lo que propone y elige el pueblo en elecciones que tienen que tener mas del 50% de los votos, la Asamblea Nacional de Cuba con un poco mas de 600 delegados, esta constituida en casi el 50% por estos delegados de circunscripci?n,? que no solo tienen el papel de constituir la Asamblea, tienen el papel de postular a los candidatos a la Asamblea Nacional. No me extiendo, pero realmente me gustar?a que un d?a se conociera un poco mas de cual es el sistema electoral de Cuba, porque es asombroso que all? en el norte a veces alguno nos pregunta cuando va a haber elecciones en Cuba. La pregunta la podr?amos hacer los cubanos y decirle, cuando hay que ser supermillonario para alcanzar la presidencia de Estados Unidos (aplausos). O preguntar, vaya no tiene que ser el candidato el supermillonario, sino cuantos miles de millones necesita el candidato para ser electo presidente y cuanto cuesta cada cargo de un modo cargos municipales. En nuestro pa?s no ocurre ni puede ocurrir esto, no se llena las paredes de pasquines, no se usa masivamente la televisi?n con mensajes de estos subliminares, creo que se llaman ustedes los abogados, se me ha olvidado que yo lo era tambi?n. Que papel ha jugado esos medios masivos desgraciadamente en esos pa?ses y en muchos lugares del mundo, y no los estoy atacando. Yo les mencion? el caso que les demostraba el pueblo cubano cuando conoce la verdad pueden apoyar una buena causa, el caso del ni?o secuestrado hace 3 a?os y medio, el ni?o regres? cuando el pueblo conoci? la verdad y mas de un 80% de los norteamericanos apoyaron el regreso del ni?o. Es cierto que cuando la guerra de Vietnam, no solo fueron conociendo la verdad, hab?a un factor importante que inclu?a, era el regreso de j?venes muertos que hab?an sido llevados all? mediante el servicio. En el caso del ni?o no hubo nada de eso, logramos que el pueblo norteamericano conociera nuestras razones y fueron a trav?s de las cadenas porque un desfile de 600 mil madres en un espect?culo inusitado, o de cientos de miles de ni?os, o de un mill?n de personas desfilando delante de la oficina de inter?s, o millones de personas moviliz?ndose espont?neamente en muchos lugares, grandes concentraciones son actividades que las grandes cadenas transmitieron por el mundo. Hubo actos como aquel que se conmemor? el 25 aniversario del sabotaje de un avi?n cubano destruido en pleno vuelo, fueron actos terroristas, 40 cadenas internacionales transmitieron. Hoy hay forma de transmitir los mensajes, hay sat?lites que pueden bajar una se?al, hay, y ustedes los estudiantes lo saben mejor que nadie, Internet que puede permitir enviar un mensaje a cualquier rinc?n del mundo, aunque no sea oscuros porque realmente quienes tienen televisi?n, tienen Internet, tienen electricidad y posibilidad de comunicarse. Pero no subestimar esa capaz intelectuales y que en el mundo son decenas, decenas de millones que no son necesariamente una clase explotadora y rica. Hay que ver, recuerden, por ejemplo all? en Seatle, recuerden Quebec, recuerden las movilizaciones ya en cualquier parte del mundo han sido organizadas a trav?s de Internet por personas que tienen cultura y tienen conocimiento de muchas cosas que amenazan la vida del planeta a parte de la guerra, los cambios de clima, al destrucci?n de la capa de ozono, el calentamiento de la atm?sfera, el envenenamiento de la atm?sfera, de los r?os, de los mares que amenazan la vida de todo el planeta; y en esto todos los pueblos del mundo tienen una causa com?n con los Latinoamericanos, con los norteamericanos y con los europeos, la cat?strofe avanza de una en una y hoy hay enfermedades que no exist?an hace 30 a?os o 25, el SIDA no exist?a hace 25 a?os y los que poseen los mejores laboratorios se han dedicado a la terap?utica y no a la prevenci?n, no a las vacunas; porque un tratamiento, se conoce muy bien, que se vende a 10 mil d?lares por a?o y cada a?o tiene que repetirlo, sencillamente produce mucho mas la medicina terap?utica que la medicina preventiva. Y apareci? ahora el virus de Hong-Kong (aplausos) cuando nadie lo esperaba, o la fiebre del Nilo que vino del noreste de Estados Unidos evidentemente trasladada de alg?n lugar a otro lugar del mundo. O el dengue famoso tan mencionado que tiene 4 formas diferentes de virus y la combinaci?n de uno y otro da lugar a complicadas enfermedades como el dengue hemorr?gico. Se lo digo en nombre de un pa?s que ha visto en carne propia el empleo de virus y bacterias para atacar nuestra poblaci?n y para atacar, iba a decir primero nuestra agricultura, e incluso nuestra poblaci?n; se los aseguro y no exagero. No tendr?a yo verg?enza para decirle a ustedes una sola mentira, nosotros sabemos algunas cosas y de casi todas tenemos pruebas cuando hablamos de alguno de estos problemas. Pero les dec?a, que hoy hay medios de comunicarse con el mundo que nos hace menos v?ctimas o dependientes de los grandes medios de difusi?n masiva, sea cuales sean, porque hoy teniendo direcciones y teniendo ese equipo de Internet en el mundo todos los que tienen un sue?o, una aspiraci?n, una causa que les quita la tranquilidad y pensando fundamentalmente no en ellos sino en sus hijo, har?n causa com?n sean de pa?ses desarrollados o sean de pa?ses subdesarrollados o ricos, porque en realidad son nuevos problemas, hay que meditar en la enorme suma de nuevos problemas que han ido apareciendo en el mundo, a parte de amenazas de guerras y del empleo de esas armas brutales y b?rbaras en una etapa de la historia donde el hombre no ha demostrado todav?a su capacidad de sobrevivir y que puede ser destruido 10 veces por una sola potencia a base de su monopolio tecnol?gico y de armas que ser?an suficientes para aplastar a todos los dem?s estados del mundo. Todo ese problema, un creciente n?mero de millones esta aprendiendo y son los centros de educaci?n, los centros universitarios donde se va adquiriendo la cultura necesaria para saber lo que es el mundo de hoy y que es el Fondo Monetario y que es el Banco Mundial y que significa una deuda de 800 millones, de 800 mil millones de d?lares en Am?rica latina. Cuando tuve el honor inolvidable para mi, incluso hoy cuando vuelvo aunque lo record? siempre, la deuda de Am?rica latina era de 5 mil millones de d?lares, hoy es 160 veces mayor. Antes los presupuestos se dedicaban mas o menos a escuela, hospitales, los argentinos lo conocen muy bien porque de Argentina venimos oyendo hablar hace mucho tiempo, sabemos los niveles que ten?a de educaci?n y salud y otras cosas, pero perm?tanme no hablar del caso completo, en este caso lo menciono, porque realmente ustedes alcanzaron altos niveles desconocidos, como es conocido que hay dos cabezas de ganado vacuno por habitante en el pa?s. Pero los niveles alcanzados en muchos equipos sociales son muy importantes, pero el mundo en que vivimos es muy diferente, hay muchos problemas que los grandes pensadores pol?ticos y sociales no pod?an a tan larga distancia prever, aunque sus conocimientos fueron decisivos para convertirnos a nosotros en personas con ideas revolucionarias. No olvidarse de esta realidad, ya en nuestro pa?s hemos logrado, empezamos por las universidades, hab?a momentos en que no se ense?aba computaci?n en las universidades, fuimos poco a poco. Despu?s hicimos 170 j?venes clubes de computaci?n, hace no mucho tiempo lo duplicamos con el n?mero de m?quinas, pero lo esencial es que hoy en nuestro pa?s el ciento por ciento de los ni?os desde preescolar hasta la universidad cuentan? con sus laboratorios de computaci?n; y hemos descubierto las posibilidades enormes que eso tiene y entramos en la etapa masiva. Y trabajamos intensamente en otra cosa de lo que no hablamos mucho, pero se est?n formando por decenas de miles los programadores. Aquellos que hablan de que Cuba prosper? en esto y en lo otro, las cosas que mencionaba de? la cultura, a aquellos hoy le podemos decir que en nuestro pa?s se extiende por los municipios las facultades universitarias desde el momento en que 800 mil ciudadanos cubanos son graduados universitarios o intelectuales, de modo que hoy hay dos graduados universitarios por cada graduado de sexto grado que hab?a al triunfo de la Revoluci?n, esta desarrollando una sociedad donde los conocimientos y la cultura se extienden masivamente y donde se lograr? el sue?o de masificar esos conocimientos y esa cultura. Masificar en un sector azucarero, en un municipio, porque all? est?n los suficientes economistas si hace falta que haya que dar clases de econom?a en uno de los centros que se van desarrollando, o una clase de cualquier carrera humanista o? una clase de cualquier carrera t?cnica como ingenier?a mec?nica y otras muchas. O bien pudieran ser una excepci?n en el caso de la medicina donde las facultades est?n al lado de los hospitales y del tercer a?o en constante contacto, no solo con la teor?a, sino tambi?n en la pr?ctica. ?Por qu? se han extendido a esa velocidad? Porque buscando precisamente la causa de determinados problemas sociales, vimos que hab?a un n?mero elevado de j?venes entre 17 y 30 a?os con noveno grado que no estudiaban ni trabajaba; y entonces buscamos la causa, se habl? con cada uno de ellos y de repente se establecieron escuelas que llevan el nombre de escuelas juveniles, escuelas de desarrollo integral; escuelas juveniles para el desarrollo de la cultura general integral. El primero a?o se inscribieron 85 mil, ya en este segundo curso que transcurre hab?a 110 mil y que dir?an ustedes si le afirm? que ya en este a?o, en el pr?ximo curso que empiece en septiembre, 35 mil de esos j?venes comenzar?n estudios universitarios (aplausos). ?Qu? hicimos?, ?qu? utilizamos si en todos los municipios y en todos los sectores azucareros por ejemplo, hab?an escuelas secundarias b?sicas y a veces t?cnicas de nivel medio, o de bachiller de las externas, escuelas que terminaban sus clases a las 4 y media de la tarde y todas ten?an sus laboratorios de computaci?n y de medios audiovisuales, televisi?n? De 5 a 8 comenzaban las clases en esas mismas instalaciones, con nuevos profesores o con los mismos profesores que daban clases o profesores que se hab?an retirado y con la ayuda de esos medios lo que pueden hacer son milagros, se lo aseguro, de esa forma ya se le da una remuneraci?n por estudiar que muchas veces no se piensa, que aunque sea pobre un hombre vive en un lugar aunque sea un cuarto utiliza un ?mnibus cuando puede, en nuestro caso tiene garantizada la seguridad social, en nuestro caso el 85% es due?o de las viviendas y no paga impuesto por la propiedad de la vivienda (aplausos). F?jese bien, quiero aclarar que no estoy recomendando nada, f?jense bien quiero aclarar que no estoy recomendando nada, yo? simplemente deseo explicarles que estamos haciendo y porque estamos sobreviviendo y porque el pueblo en masa apoya la causa revolucionaria. Si el kilowatt cuesta medio centavo de d?lar, si una cantidad de elementos esenciales cuestan los precios que le se?al?, si la cantidad de arroz que se entrega a un precio muy reducido tambi?n con un d?lar que cambiado por peso a 25 centavos y con el cambio de 26 a uno, una familia, una persona, puede comprar 105 libras de arroz por un d?lar. Claro, hay otras tiendas en los que se vende mas caro y todo en relaci?n del lujo o de la cosa necesaria. Los medicamentos en nuestro pa?s tienen la mitad del precio que ten?an hace 44 a?os, porque se rebajaron entonces a la mitad y hoy se mantienen esos precios de aquellos productos gen?ricos. Vuelvo a repetir que cuento para explicar, si la asistencia m?dica de una calidad cada vez mejor, porque estamos haciendo grandes esfuerzos en ese sentido, es gratuita para todos los ciudadanos por igual. Lo mismo una cirug?a a coraz?n abierto que una gripe, la educaci?n cada vez con mas calidad es absolutamente gratuita desde el preescolar hasta doctor en ciencias sin que le cueste un centavo a nuestro pa?s. Una de las razones por las cuales lleva mucha tranquilidad que estamos pasando a una sociedad de cultura masiva y nuestro pa?s vivir? en el futuro fundamentalmente de las producciones intelectuales. Si la naturaleza no nos dio los recursos, si tuvimos un vecino muy poderoso que no le podemos echar la culpa a nadie; quiz?s Crist?bal Col?n, no se, que nos descubri? y nos trajo la civilizaci?n como ustedes saben, aunque ustedes argentinos no entender?an tambi?n como la Rep?blica de Hait? lo que signific? la colonizaci?n; pero no vamos a discutir sobre eso. Es un producto hist?rico, se sabe de luego que fueron muchos peregrinos, una inmigraci?n religiosa que tra?an una ?tica, una ?tica religiosa. Yo dije mucho el idealismo que suele caracterizar a los ciudadanos norteamericanos y el porque si usted logra demostrarle la verdad, es capaz de apoyar una causa justa; no hay que olvidarse de ellos que est?n tan amenazados como nosotros de todas las calamidades ecol?gicas y otras de las cuales habl?, hay muchas cosas en com?n con ellos y ellos est?n bien persuadidos, tienen razones para estar bien persuadidos de que quienes los dirigen no les importa un bledo -no se si ustedes usan esa palabra- el medio ambiente, o el cambio de clima. Porque me pregunto, porque demonios ese pa?s tan poderoso que gasta el 25% de la energ?a mundial y aporta la enorme cantidad, la mayor cantidad de bi?xido de carbono y otros gases contaminantes, ha denunciado el acuerdo de Kioto. Tengan la seguridad que decenas de millones de norteamericanos tienen la mismas preocupaciones que ustedes y los dem?s con relaci?n a todos esos problemas. Yo dec?a, es bueno tener un vecino muy poderoso, pero ha sido una suerte que hayamos podido sobrevivir desarrollando, cultivando la inteligencia de nuestros compatriotas de forma masiva. El ciento por ciento de los ni?os hasta sexto grado se grad?an de sexto grado y el 99 y fracci?n? llegan al noveno grado ya en nuestro pa?s y ahora entramos en la etapa de masificaci?n usando los medios audiovisuales, us?ndolos exhaustivamente, no para sembrar el veneno, no para que otro piense por uno; porque ya habl? de que si al ni?o le falta alimento no desarrolla la inteligencia con que vino al mundo, la inteligencia potencial; pero si se usan incorrectamente determinados medios le suprime la opci?n de pensar, porque le dice que piensa por usted y le dice que color tiene que usar, si la falda es larga o corta, si la tela de moda es esta o la otra, y nos env?an el mensaje desde all? sobre que debe usar, que refresco tenemos que tomar. Digo gaseosa, porque supe que decir refresco ac? es otra cosa y me equivoqu? en una declaraci?n, dije refresco porque as? se conoce en Cuba lo que ustedes conocen por gaseosa, eso lo vi cuando habl? de cierto tipo de chantaje que no voy a repetir aqu?. Pero bueno, quise decir lo que ustedes llaman gaseosa. Pero vienen y le dicen que cerveza debe tomar, o que marca de whisky o de ron, a nosotros no nos importa si nosotros que somos productores de tabaco hist?ricamente y no podemos renunciar a ?l, y mucho menos bloqueado, lo que decimos cuando regalamos una caja de puros, decimos ?si fuma puede fumar, si alg?n amigo fuma le puede brindar. Pero lo mejor que puedes hacer con esa caja es regal?rsela a tu enemigo? (aplausos. Pues Cuba, Cuba es productora de tabaco y exportadora y hace campa?a contra la fuma. Cuba es productora de ron de cierta calidad, para actuar con la debida modestia, si ahora han robado una marca pero no importa, no pueden producir el ron cubano; no lo recomiendo. Pero bueno, si alguien quiere probarlo. A las mujeres embarazadas lo que les recomiendo es que no consuma, que no consuma alcohol, lo sabemos porque estamos estudiando todas las causas de cada uno de los casos de atraso mental y sabemos el da?o que el alcohol produce en una mujer lactante, es una de las causas. Pero bien, el pa?s vivir? no en una sociedad de consumo, sociedad de consumo es uno de los mas tenebrosos inventos del capitalismo desarrollado y hoy en la fase de globalizaci?n neoliberal, es nefasto porque trato de imaginarme a un mill?n 300 mil chinos ahora, y crecen con el nivel de motores y de autom?viles; no voy a mencionar Argentina aunque he visto muchos, pero no quiero mezclarme en eso, hablo del nivel de autom?viles de Estados Unidos. No puedo imaginarme a la India con mil millones viviendo en una sociedad de consumo, no puedo imaginarme a los 520 millones de personas que viven en el ?frica que no tienen ni electricidad ? y en algunos lugares mas del 80% no sabe leer ni escribir, convertida en una sociedad de consumo. Empezar?a pregunt?ndome cuanto va a durar los yacimientos de combustibles probados y probables al ritmo en que lo gastamos hoy , de modo que apenas durar? 150 a?os lo que la naturaleza form? a trav?s de 300 millones de a?os (aplausos). Y hablo as?, porque se nos ha introducido en la cabeza la idea sobre un falso concepto de calidad de vida, ?c?mo puede haber calidad de vida sin educaci?n? Cuanto sufre un analfabeto no se lo imagina nadie, porque hay algo que se llama autoestima que es mas importante incluso que los alimentos, la autoestima (aplausos).? Que es un analfabeto en el ?ltimo escal?n, que tiene que pedirle a un amigo que le redacte una carta para? la novia, yo lo vi de ni?o en un lugar donde hab?a muchos analfabetos y unos pocos que sab?an leer y escribir y le ped?an una carta para una mujer que pretend?an; pero no es que al dictar una carta que so?? toda la noche y que todav?a esta pensando y que no come pensando en ella, digamos si el campesino quiere mandar ese mensaje, sino que le dec?a al que sab?a leer y escribir ?no, escr?bele tu, lo que tu crees que debes escribirle para conquistarla la novia?. Y no exagero, yo viv? en los campos en que eso era as?, que humillaci?n tener que poner las huellas digitales. Y aquellos que despu?s estudiaron tercero, cuarto, quinto, ?que es una persona de cuarto, quinto grado? En Estados Unidos all? dicen que hay democracia, pero yo me pregunto, ?si millones de personas son analfabetas con que criterio votan?, ?si millones son semianalfabetos con que criterio votan? (Aplausos). Entonces, todos ustedes han o?do hablar del ALCA y yo me hac?a en mi fuero mas ?ntimo una pregunta y se le da por decir que el ALCA es la salvaci?n de todos los dolores y todas las calamidades (silbidos). Es decir, ?c?mo puede decidir alguien que no sepa leer y escribir o que apenas tenga cuarto grado, quinto grado, sexto grado, lo que es el ALCA, lo que es abrir todas las fronteras de pa?ses que tienen un nivel muy por debajo del desarrollo t?cnico, de aquellos que tienen los mas elevados niveles tecnol?gicos de productividad, de aquellos que fabrican aviones del ?ltimo modelo, de aquellos que dominan las comunicaciones mundiales, de aquellos que quieren garantizar de nosotros dos cosas: materia prima, fuerza de trabajo barata y adem?s clientes? ?C?mo va a comprender una poblaci?n donde un porcentaje alto no sepa leer ni escribir, no tenga nociones de econom?a, lo que significa renunciar a la moneda propia? Renunciaron a la moneda y algunos lo han hecho tranquilamente, si nuestro pa?s hubiera renunciado a su moneda no habr?a podido vencer los obst?culos que venci?, sobre todo a partir de ese que llamamos el per?odo especial al derrumbarse el campo socialista, jam?s. ?C?mo explicar el fen?meno de la fuga de capitales?, que le dice si hay algo tan claro que lo puede ver un ciego de nacimiento, y es que las monedas de nuestros pa?ses est?n obligadas a escapar, est?n obligadas a fugarse, sean bien habido o mal habido, un profesional que reuni? 50 mil d?lares, cien mil y lo tiene en la moneda de su pa?s y? de repente aquella moneda por ley de la gravedad, como aquella que descubri? Newton, se cae hacia Estados Unidos, es una especie de ley de gravedad lateral; no hacia el centro de la tierra sino hacia una direcci?n geogr?fica, y se tienen que ir porque nuestra moneda no pueden sostener la llamada paridad. Es verdad que luchando contra la inflaci?n que es la confiscaci?n sistem?tica y diaria, alguna f?rmulas y promesas se abrieron paso, un poco ellos el famos?simo libre canje, que abre las puertas para que el dinero se escape, apenas hay un d?ficit presupuestario, un d?ficit en la balanza de pago, de inmediato se empiezan a crear problemas, aun si los especuladores que ayudan con boicot a ese medio de cultivo, se llevan el dinero. Se tienen los datos del dinero que se fuga, sea cual sea su origen, algo que no tiene que ver con la deuda ni con los intereses usurarios de una deuda, sino algo que tiene que ver con esa ley de la fuga de las monedas d?biles. En un tiempo el oro fue moneda, ten?a un valor y lo fue incluso hasta el a?o 1971, 72, en que el se?or presidente de la potencia hegem?nica, aunque todav?a no era hegemonismo unilateral, decidi? suprimir la conversi?n del oro, la conversi?n del papel moneda norteamericano en oro. Entonces, ya la moneda era papel, no ten?a un valor? la imprim?an los due?os de las m?quinas donde se imprime el d?lar, ?y para d?nde va el d?lar? No se va para el Caribe, bueno puede haber alguna islita con para?so fiscal pero son excepciones. Bien, ?para d?nde se marcha? No se va para el ?frica, no se va para un pa?s vecino Latinoamericano, porque a todos les pasa exactamente lo mismo; usted puede tener una moneda que se llame equis, no la voy a mencionar, a la par -porque no quiero tocar el nombre del pa?s- y en 6 semanas se puede estar a la mitad o a un tercio de su valor, y si usted ten?a un valor en papeles, que era real por su capacidad de compra, cuando se produce ese fen?meno se queda con un valor de 30, se reduce a un tercio con 25% o mas; algunas monedas son cientos de pesos por un d?lar, no hay que olvidar que en un tiempo val?an lo mismo que el d?lar. Y as? con otras monedas se ha visto en estos d?as, ll?mese equis o ll?mese bol?var, Ch?vez no se va a poner bravo conmigo? porque mencione el bol?var, porque ?l sabe muy bien como se deval?an todas nuestras monedas, est?n obligadas a marcharse y de ah? a los bancos del pa?s mas rico del mundo. Ven, por este solo concepto ?c?mo se lo van a explicar a un analfabeto?, ?c?mo se lo vamos a explicar a un hombre que tiene solo sexto grado?, ?c?mo se lo vamos a explicar a un hombre que no tenga un m?nimo de conocimiento econ?mico, que conozca? estas cosas? Le venden un ALCA y 10 ALCA. De ah? la necesidad de crear conciencia, sembrar ideas, ense?ar, porque el hombre es capaz de comprender cuando se le explica y mediante ejemplo hoy esa ignorancia se utiliza como caldo de cultivo, como instrumento para saquearnos cada vez mas, explotarnos cada vez mas, enga?arnos cada vez mas. Por eso nosotros en nuestro pa?s, festejamos el primero de mayo, hab?amos desarrollado un programa para aprender a leer y escribir por radio, no habl? por televisi?n, por radio lo ?nico que necesita un oyente tal vez sea un radio de onda corta y unas cuantas hojas, el m?todo esta y est? aprobado, lo puede hacer por una cadena nacional o por cadenas locales, hay algunos que lo est?n haciendo, incluso nuestro pa?s por onda corta podr?a ense?ar a leer y escribir, bueno digamos algunos analfabetos de Estados Unidos (aplausos). Y reciente, le?amos el n?mero de alumnos de escuelas p?blicas con cuarto grado y hasta con noveno grado, que no sab?an leer, ?qu? clase de ense?anza le impartir?n? Como 36 alumnos por aula all? mismo en Miami, all? donde tienen globos y donde han hecho despegar aviones para imponernos transmisiones piratas de televisi?n, un pa?s donde mas de la mitad de las horas se dedica a educaci?n, esas horas quedan libres incluso, por ahorro de combustible. Hace unos d?as inauguramos el tercer canal televisivo que es para la educaci?n y tambi?n anunciamos que en el primer trimestre del pr?ximo a?o estar? el cuarto canal educativo, la televisi?n una verdadera y no conocida forma de transmitir conocimientos masivos. Y hay otras mas, no voy a mencionar ahora, de incre?ble eficacia y no voy a explicar porque pero van surgiendo posibilidades. Al se?or de la UNESCO p?blicamente le ofrec?amos esa patente, pudi?ramos decir, esa forma gratuitamente a cualquier pa?s, los programas para ense?ar a leer y escribir por radio, conocemos tambi?n las t?cnicas de ense?ar a leer y escribir por televisi?n; lo que ocurre es que un gran n?mero de los analfabetos no tiene electricidad, no tiene televisi?n. En nuestro pa?s, en las mil 300 y tantas escuelas del campo que no ten?an electricidad, lo hemos resuelto mediante un modesto panel solar de 1,2 metros cuadrados y cuyo costo no supera los mil 123 d?lares; de modo que por menos de 4 millones de d?lares, piense bien, hemos llevado panel solar a todas esas escuelas, tanto para el televisi?n que gasta solo 60 watt y como para la computadora, que cuando hay un n?mero mayor de ni?os no alcanzar?a el kilowatt de un panel y tiene que poner dos. Y por eso digo, que por menos de 4 millones de d?lares hemos llevado electricidad a todas las escuelas rurales del pa?s, no electricidad para cocinar sino para el televisi?n y para la computadora. Hemos creado, fecha reciente, la posibilidad de ver la televisi?n al medio mill?n de cubanos que viv?an en zonas rurales que no ten?an televisi?n, con mil 885 casas de video, 50 sillas, panel solar de mil 900 d?lares -cost? un poco menos-; a esos lugares con un gasto tambi?n menor de 4 millones de d?lares? acceso a informaci?n, a programas por televisi?n en un televisi?n de 29 pulgadas por esa cifra tan rid?cula, se puede decir, al lado de los miles de millones que se mencionan constantemente. Si un pa?s bloqueado durante tanto a?os puede hacerlo, no debe haber ninguno que no pueda hacerlo (aplausos). Vea, les estoy dando datos concretos. Hemos creado, no inaugurado ya para el segundo curso, una universidad de la ciencia inform?tica con alumnos seleccionados entre? los mejores de todo el pa?s, donde ingresar?n dos mil alumnos por a?o, no ser?n desde luego los ?nicos, y se formar?n analistas mas que programador. Bien, no voy a mencionar otras cosa, no solo porque no nos de el tiempo, sino porque tengo esperanza que alg?n d?a las conozcan, lo que esta transformando al pa?s y que da la posibilidad de vivir por la inteligencia. Eso no tendr?a ning?n valor y ninguna importancia si no tuvi?ramos la convicci?n profunda de que esos m?todos se pueden masificar y por lo tanto acabar con esos bochornosos millones de personas analfabetas de las cuales se viene hablando hace 40 y 50 a?os, y que pudieran erradicarse sencillamente en 5 a?os, simplemente si las Naciones Unidas quisieran, si la UNESCO quisiera; son tan baratos esos procedimientos y despu?s podr?an venir los cursos de seguimiento, primer grado, segundo, tercero, son infinitas las posibilidades. Tambi?n se puede competir con las prisiones sembrando escuelas, utilizando procedimientos sencillos como estos procedimientos. Estoy convencido de que si un pa?s pobre puede garantizar las cosas modestas pero honradas, dignas para cada uno de sus ciudadanos, ?porque otro no podr?a hacerlo? Es por ello que hasta con un poco de pasi?n les hablo de esos problemas, son problemas que durante mucho tiempo hemos pensado. Y les confesaba, cuando hemos llegado a tener estos conocimientos resultado de la observaci?n, del estudio constante de la situaci?n de la vida de los ciudadanos, es que digo que sentimos verg?enza por no haber podido descubrir antes muchas de estas cosas que tanto bienestar podr?an traer para nuestros ciudadanos. Nosotros no recomendamos f?rmula autom?ticas, no nos ponemos a recomendar que tengan una tal y una cual sistema social, conozco pa?ses con tantos recursos que con el uso adecuado de los recursos no tendr?an ni necesidad de hacer un cambio revolucionario con relaci?n a la econom?a de tipo radical como ha hecho nuestro pa?s. Sabemos lo que ocurre en lugares como el mas pobre de este hemisferio, que es Hait?, los problemas que tiene de recursos naturales y de algunos muy ricos; no voy a discutir sobre este tema; pero el problema esta en la distribuci?n equitativa de la riqueza (aplausos). Esto no necesita ni siquiera confiscar, no, en una concepci?n de lo posible, porque hay que pensar en lo deseable y lo posible, hay que diferenciar entre lo que se puede so?ar y lo que se puede realizar ahora, y lo que se puede realizar ahora y podr?a realizarse dentro de 20 o 30 a?os a partir de la realidad del mundo actual; nosotros no tenemos ni un ?tomo de arrepentimiento de lo que hemos hecho en nuestro pa?s, de la forma en que hemos organizado nuestra sociedad. Hemos tenido la posibilidad de aprender mucho sobre nuestras posibilidades y tenemos una idea de prioridades, porque es muy importante para los que desean un mundo mejor la idea de las prioridades, de las posibilidades, de las realidades; les mencion? como dos veces, tres, el famoso proyecto de ALCA; hoy una enorme necesidad de nuestros pueblos es evitar que ese veneno se implante en nuestros pa?ses, y estar?amos teniendo una gran victoria (aplausos). Les puedo a?adir que en Am?rica latina tenemos un movimiento que se produce de avance, si me preguntara alguien porque sent? gran satisfacci?n y j?bilo cuando llegaron las noticias de un resultado electoral en nuestra querid?sima Argentina. F?jese, hay una raz?n muy grande, lo peor del capitalismo salvaje, como dir?a Ch?vez (aplausos), lo peor de la globalizaci?n neoliberal es que el s?mbolo por excelencia, y no menciono un nombre, nadie puede quejarse a no ser que se sienta un s?mbolo de lo que digo. Mi opini?n es, que una de las cosas extraordinarias del s?mbolo de la globalizaci?n neoliberal que ha recibido un colosal golpe, ustedes no saben el servicio que le han prestado a Am?rica latina, ustedes no saben el servicio que le han prestado al mundo a hundir en la fosa del pac?fico -no se como se llama ahora- que tiene como 8 mil metros de profundidad el s?mbolo de la globalizaci?n neoliberal, le han insuflado tremenda fuerza al n?mero creciente de personas que han ido tomando conciencia en toda nuestra Am?rica, sobre que cosa tan horrible y fatal es eso que se llama globalizaci?n neoliberal. Hablemos si se quiere, podemos partir de lo que el Papa dijo muchas veces, cuando estuvo de visita en nuestro pa?s, cuando habl? de la globalizaci?n de la solidaridad. ?Alguien estar?a en contra de la globalizaci?n de la solidaridad en el mas cabal concepto de la palabra, que abarque no solo las relaciones entre los hombres y mujeres de la frontera de un pa?s, sino dentro de la frontera del planeta y que la solidaridad la ejerzan tambi?n aquellos que derrochan el dinero y destruyen y malbaratan los recursos naturales y ? condenan a muerte a los habitantes de este planeta? (Aplausos) no se alcanza el cielo en un d?a, pero cr?anme, no lo digo por halagarlos, y trato el siglo con el mayor cuidado, que ustedes han asestado un descomunal golpe a un s?mbolo y eso tiene un enorme valor, y se ha producido precisamente en este momento, en este momento cr?tico, de crisis econ?mica internacional donde est?n envueltos todos, ya no es una crisis en el sudeste asi?tico sino en el mundo, mas amenaza de guerra, mas la consecuencia de una enorme deuda, mas el fatalismo que el dinero escape; es mundial el problema y por eso mundialmente tambi?n se esta formando una conciencia y por eso ser? un d?a de gloria, ese d?a que el pueblo argentino pese a dificultades, que como sabemos todos existen? aqu? y en otras partes, muchas veces fragmentaci?n, muchas veces divisiones y divisiones puede haber y hasta debe haber, pero que hay tantas cosas de inter?s com?n que se puede tener. La convicci?n de que esas deben prevalecer en el mundo posible, porque ha tomado fuerza esa frase, un mundo mejor es posible, pero cuando se haya alcanzado un mundo mejor es posible, tenemos que seguir repitiendo un mundo mejor es posible y volver a repetir despu?s, un mundo mejor es posible (ovaci?n). Les he expresado (ovaci?n), les he expresado -y estoy pr?ximo a terminar- les he expresado as? en estas peculiares condiciones, y me alegro mas, la experiencia modesta de nuestro pa?s y como d?a a d?a aprend?amos cosas nuevas y cosas nuevas y como luch?bamos con 330% de analfabetismo, que lejos est?n de pensar que un d?a estar?amos masificando los estudios universitarios extendiendo las universidades por todos los municipios del pa?s a partir del capital humano que hab?amos creado, sin lo cual habr?a sido imposible esa aspiraci?n. Y por eso he dicho, Mart? ya lo hab?a dicho hace muchos a?os, que a los que le llaman se?ores, ?l dec?a ?que los due?os de hoy, ser?n las realidades del ma?ana?. (Aplausos) los so?adores no existen, se lo ha dicho un so?ador que ha tenido el privilegio, no el m?rito, de vivir a pesar de los cientos de planes por acelerar mi viaje hacia la tumba; con lo cual me han hecho un enorme favor, porque me han hecho perder todo instinto de preservaci?n y conocer que los valores si constituyen la verdadera calidad de vida, la suprema calidad de vida, aun por encima de alimento, techo y ropa, no disminuyo ni mucho menos la importancia de las necesidades materiales y siempre hay que colocarlas en primer lugar, porque para poder estudiar, para poder adquirir esa otra calidad de vida hay que satisfacer determinadas necesidades que son f?sicas, que son materiales; pero la calidad de vida en los conocimientos, en la cultura, cuando un hombre termina su trabajo quiere ir a un lugar a ver una buena pel?cula o a un teatro para ver un excelente obra excelentemente presentada, o una danza, o un grupo musical; y a esto desayun? y almorz? lo que desea es esa recreaci?n, distracci?n. Y distraerse, nadie quiere que los hijos se entretengan o se recreen viendo consumir drogas, o viendo violencia y cosas absurdas que envenenan la mente de ese ni?o. La calidad de vida es otra cosa, calidad de vida es patriotismo, calidad de vida es dignidad, calidad de vida es honor, calidad de vida en la autoestima a la que tiene derecho a disfrutar todos los seres humanos. Argentinos, argentinos todos, hermanos entra?ables de Am?rica latina, cualquiera que sea su creencia, su pensamiento o sus ideas; no he tenido intenci?n de lastimar ni de ofender a nadie, si alguno considera que algunos conceptos aqu? expresados dicen algo como una injerencia en los asuntos de aqu?, algo que por cierto he tratado y con mas raz?n a partir de la extraordinaria solidaridad y calor con que he sido recibido en esta ciudad y en este pa?s; si alguien lo cree, le pido sinceramente que nos excuse. Viva la hermandad entre los pueblos, viva la humanidad. Gracias, hasta la victoria siempre.? Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ------------------ Malvinas, Aerolineas y Austral m?s argentinas que nunca No se olviden de Cabezas, Oesterheld y Walsh ?Nadie est? obligado a cooperar en su propia p?rdida o en su propia esclavitud, la Desobediencia Civil es un derecho imprescriptible de todo ciudadano". (Mahatma Ghandi) - Coco, la guerra ya esta ganada, solo hay que tomar la colina de los gansos (Mauricio Prelooker) Si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera. (Eduardo Mignogna) Honrar la deuda externa...la deuda ?es honrada? (Clemente/Caloi/ Carlos Loizeau) El poder es nuestro, lo hemos delegado. Debemos recuperarlo, por la iniciativa creadora de cada uno. (Bernardo Lischinsky) - O se est? con la Patria y contra la deuda externa, o se est? con la deuda externa y contra los intereses del pa?s?. (Alejandro Olmos) - La econom?a nunca ha sido libre: o la controla el Estado en beneficio del Pueblo o lo hacen los grandes consorcios en perjuicio de ?ste.(Juan Domingo Per?n) -Cuando veas a un gigante, examina antes la posici?n del sol, no vaya a ser la sombra de un enano (FiedrichL. Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis) El hoy no es un ayer en falsa escuadra. (Raul Barreiros) Patria te han tira?o al a?ujero y te tenemos que sacar (Santa Revuelta) -Asi la quiero Eulogia, ?retobada! ( Inodoro Pereyra/Roberto Fontanarrosa) Mi unico heredero es el Pueblo (Juan Domingo Peron) Debemos saldar la historia de nuestra identidad con nuestros cuatro abuelos: El abuelo indigena, el abuelo negro, el espa?ol y el inmigrante arabe, polaco, italiano o de las demas inmigraciones. (Hugo Chumbita) -Si me llega a pasar algo, no pidan por mi, pidan por todos (Jorge Di Pascuale) ?Hay momentos en que el pueblo sintetiza en la acci?n los pasajes m?s significativos de su historia? (Agust?n Tosco). - La historia parece propiedad privada cuyos due?os son los due?os de todas las otras cosas (Rodolfo Walsh) -Tenemos que crear las instituciones en que la funci?n del vigilante sea meter la finanza en vereda para que no lastime la libertad del pueblo. (Arturo Jauretche) -El Estado brota de abajo, de la muchedumbre, y es casi una redenci?n, una creaci?n del pueblo solidario. (Raul Scalabrini Ortiz) Yo me esfuerzo en descubrir c?mo hacer una se?al a mis compa?eros (...), c?mo decir a tiempo una simple palabra, una contrase?a, como hacen los conspiradores: un?monos, manteng?monos estrechamente unidos, fusionemos nuestros corazones, creemos un solo cerebro y coraz?n para la Tierra, demos un significado humano al sobrehumano combate". (Nikos Kasantzakis) . -Alli donde vaya el movimiento nacional, ira mi corazon (Alejandro Dolina) -No pasaran, ?no pasaran!, ?NO PASARAN! (Jose Tchercawski) "No estamos contra nada ni contra nadie, sino con todos y para el bien de todos". ? ( Hip?lito Yrigoyen) El unico heroe valido, es el heroe en grupo, nunca el heroe individual, el h?roe solo. (Hector German Oesterheld) Al penetrante grito de la patria, todos debemos ser uno (Jose Artigas) -El hombre no encuentra su patria sino all? donde no es extranjero y en donde su dignidad humana no sufre... (Felipe Varela) -Nuestra patria dejara de ser colonia, o la bandera flameara sobre sus ruinas.(Eva Peron) La patria es un peligro que florece (Leop?ldo Marechal) -El destino de nuestra Revoluci?n nacionalista est? indisolublemente unido al destino de esa patria com?n que es Latinoam?rica (General Juan Velasco Alvarado) -El colapso del marxismo no debe ser considerado como el triunfo del sistema capitalista liberal...Am?rica latina ha de reafirmar su identidad desde sus ra?ces genuinas, para la construcci?n de una sociedad solidaria, m?s justa. ?( Juan Pablo II ) En esta tierra lo mejor que tenemos es el pueblo ( 20 verdades peronistas) Estar?a dispuesto a entregar mi vida por la liberaci?n de cualquiera de los pa?ses de Latinoam?rica. (Ernesto ?Che? Guevara) Brindo por una Am?rica capaz de abatir a las bandas imperiales, cuando se una en la cruz de los senderos camino a la segunda libertad. (Raul Gonzalez Tu?on) La Patria es la Am?rica (Simon Bolivar) -Por los clamores que con generalidad han llegado al cielo, en el nombre del Dios Todopoderoso, ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna de las personas dichas, paguen ni obedezca en cosa alguna a los ministros europeos intrusos... ( Tupac Amaru) -Ning?n pa?s puede pensar en desarrollarse sobre bases coloniales ( Arturo Illia) Cuando la Patria esta en peligro, todo esta permitido, excepto, no defenderla (Jose de San Martin) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 122483 bytes Desc: not available URL: From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 03:17:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 12:17:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Iraq and EU Message-ID: <004701c3268c$3b566320$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Moves to isolate Berlin and Paris approved by US By James Harding in Washington and Judy Dempsey in Brussels Financial Times; May 28, 2003 The US administration was informed and approved of two separate European declarations earlier this year designed to isolate France and Germany over Iraq. The discreet involvement of officials in the White House and a consultant working with the administration in Washington came at a critical moment in diplomacy in the weeks ahead of war. The statements were intended to show support for the Bush administration's agenda and demonstrate that Paris and Berlin did not speak for Europe. The White House has maintained that it was not behind the two joint statements, but at the time welcomed the show of support. In Europe they caused great consternation, exposing the rifts over Iraq and undermining efforts to forge a common foreign and security policy. The first statement, which was signed by the leaders of eight European countries, was written by the office of Jos? Mar?a Aznar, the Span ish prime minister. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, was the prime mover in recruiting others such as Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic to sign up. France, Germany and the European Union were deliberately kept in the dark. The text noted "American bravery, generosity and farsightedness" in helping to liberate Europe from Nazism and Communism, and pledged solidarity with the US in its effort to "rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction". The Letter of Eight, as it became known, was published in the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers on January 30. In the days before publication the Bush administration was kept closely informed of who the signatories would be and was sent a draft of the statement. The following week the 10 nations of central and eastern Europe lining up to join Nato, known as the Vilnius 10, issued a joint statement endorsing the US position on Iraq. The text was written by Bruce Jackson, a US citizen with close ties to the White House. US administration officials were closely consulted in the process. The "V10" letter, as it became known, endorsed the "compelling evidence" presented by Colin Powell, US secretary of state, to the UN Security Council on February 5. It was written the previous week and signed by the 10 countries the day before Mr Powell made his presentation. A senior White House official insisted that the Letter of Eight was not "a product made in the USA", but conceded that the V10 letter involved a greater level of Washington input. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 00:56:31 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 09:56:31 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Re: John Cleese -- and imperialist humour References: <000c01c32581$4d685d40$c9b7fea9@anne> Message-ID: <001701c32678$99b346e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Anne writes: Sorry, but as the single anarcho-capitalist on this list I feel I must step in and politely request that this thread come to an end! You are trivilaizing yourselves, your ideas, your passions, your hopes and your dreams! Please! Just stop! ... alas, I must say very little competence on the evidence of the postings - for this list to pursue further the dissection of humor. ... Do what you do well - please! This list has other fish to fry, and leave the comedians/satirists to their own business. ------ Never a truer word spoken, Anne. Like I said earlier, if we are going to pursue this at all, then it should be via the sort of analytical approach exemplified by Jim Craven's work on SSAs (or Stuart Hall's work on the cultural aspects of Thatcherism) and the ideological function served by social-darwinism-as-entertainment, or, as in this case, imperialist humour. Since no one seems able or willing to take this on, then I suggest we get back to business, which is analysing actually existing capitalism in all its manifestations and making the linkages. Michael From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 00:57:59 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 09:57:59 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Germany: doomed foreign policy Message-ID: <002d01c32678$ce935940$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Germany will not become America's vassal By Christoph Bertram Financial Times; May 28, 2003 Those who wonder when Gerhard Schr?der will lead Germany back into US favour by breaking ties with France and forgoing attempts at a more independent security policy should remember how only a few months ago so many wrongly thought that Jacques Chirac was bluffing in the United Nations Security Council. In the pre-Bush days the two leaders would probably have ended tensions with America by falling back into the groove of transatlantic harmony. But President George W. Bush has changed the terms of the Atlantic relationship, which is why Messrs Chirac and Schr?der are no longer conforming to type. Mr Schr?der is less ambitious and more circumspect than Mr Chirac, who overplayed his hand, throwing away the chance of uniting Europe over a second Iraq resolution. Before and during the Iraq war, Germany, not Poland, Italy or Spain - all proud members of "the coalition" and now the darlings of the Bush administration - provided real military support. US aircraft used German air space, German conscripts secured US military installations and the German chemical and biological weapons protection team in Kuwait was strengthened. It is true the chancellor last autumn prematurely and, given the need to back up UN weapons inspections, unwisely refused to send German soldiers into a war against Iraq. But he never wavered in meeting Germany's obligations to Nato and the fight against terrorism. With the war over, he has supported the lifting of sanctions and displayed a willingness to assist in reconstructing Iraq. Mr Schr?der's earlier statements that so angered the White House might have remained a one-off episode. They did not, at first, signal a shift in German foreign policy. But they have hardened into such a shift in the months since. US policy in Nato and over Iraq seems to have convinced the chancellor not only that his position was justified but also that, since the US was treating Nato as a toolbox from which to pick and choose, Germany should no longer rely on it as the exclusive framework for its defence. Hence the commitment with France, Belgium and Luxembourg to set up a European military headquarters capable of planning and implementing operations independently of Nato. In its 50-year history, the Federal Republic could always be counted on to give Nato priority over Europe in security matters. Not any more. That is why those who believe that Mr Schr?der merely wanted to show gratitude to Mr Chirac for saving him from isolation in the Security Council are wrong. And it explains why those who hope that, with time and a bit of US coaxing, Germany will soon fall back into line will be disappointed. The good cop/bad cop tactics of the Bush administration - while Colin Powell, US secretary of state, met Mr Schr?der in Berlin two weeks ago, Mr Bush warmly received Roland Koch, a possible challenger from the Christian Democratic opposition - will only confirm the chancellor in his convictions. He will continue to be a correct ally, no more, no less. But he will also emphasise that Germany cannot be taken for granted by an administration that dumps into the camp of its opponents those who do not automatically and fully support its policies. The commitment to a separate European command is, of course, more symbolic than substantive. It will not turn the European Union or even the four signatories into a serious international operator. Nor will it prevent EU foreign and security policy from falling apart the next time the US challenges the cohesion of its members. The only way to achieve this would be genuine military integration, tying members together irreversibly in defence, as the euro has done in monetary policy. The challenge to the military plan is not that it has gone too far but that it has not gone far enough to protect against a US strategy of divide and rule. To Mr Schr?der, this may sound much too ambitious. He is not a strategic visionary; nor, since he must fight for his contentious welfare reform programme, is he primarily concerned with international affairs. The basic strand in his foreign policy approach has been that Germany is an important country and should be respected as such - by the European Commission, by other EU partners but also by the US. That may not be sufficient to prompt an imaginative European policy. But it is enough to assure that an America that treats Germany as a vassal will not make him budge. The writer is director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 05:52:28 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 14:52:28 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the war goes on Message-ID: <009301c326a1$f22c8560$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> 'War goes on' says US general FOREIGN STAFF The Scotsman, 30 May 2003 THE war in Iraq is not over, the chief United States commander said yesterday, announcing that he would keep more troops in the country and step up combat operations against "thugs" left from Saddam Hussein's regime. Lieutenant-General David McKiernan was speaking on a day when a US soldier became the ninth to die in the country this week, killed when his convoy was hit by a rocket- propelled grenade in an attack north of Baghdad. "The war has not ended," Lt-Gen McKiernan said. "Decisive combat operations against military formations has ended, but these contacts we're having right now are in a combat zone, and it is war, and they are members of [Saddam's] regime that must be removed." He said the attacks were "being perpetrated by enemies whose future is gone ... the rest of the population knows that they were thugs under his regime and they know, and the Iraqi population knows, that they have no future in this country." The US Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which had been planning to return home in June, would remain in Iraq until commanders decided they were no longer needed, he said. Now that the 1st Armoured Division had taken over in the Baghdad area, more troops could go to places such as Fallujah, a Baath Party stronghold where two US soldiers died and nine were wounded on Sunday. In the Sunni Muslim town of Hit, meanwhile, riots have greeted house-to-house searches for weapons carried out by US troops. The troops have now withdrawn after talks with local leaders, it was reported. The rioters set a police station alight. More than 500 Shiite Muslims marched in Baghdad yesterday to demand the release of religious leaders they said US forces had arrested in the cities of Hilla and Najaf, south of the capital. Some distributed leaflets threatening suicide bombers would strike in the event of further arrests. Meanwhile, US investigators have found no sign of bodies or even a bunker at the site of a missile attack aimed at Saddam and his sons on 20 March, the war's opening night. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 05:56:02 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 14:56:02 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Scotland: constitutional deform Message-ID: <009b01c326a2$7121bde0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> The developments listed here are good, inasmuch as they further strengthen the Executive. While at the expense of local government (for now), it increases the profile of the Executive vis a vis Westminster and thereby makes it more difficult for the Labour (and other) ultra-unionists to reverse in future. ----- Executive set to clash with councillors DAVID SCOTT SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT EDITOR The Scotsman, 30 May 2003 A PARTNERSHIP deal that was struck between the Labour-led Executive and Scotland's councils is on the point of collapse as relations between the local authorities and Jack McConnell, the First Minister, plunge to an all-time low. Today, council leaders throughout Scotland will gather in Edinburgh to consider ways of protesting at the Executive's decision to press ahead with a number of major initiatives which have put the councils - many of which are controlled by Labour - on a collision course with Mr McConnell and his Cabinet. The decision to introduce proportional representation (PR) in local government, as a result of the partnership deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, is being strongly opposed by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), the body which represents the majority of the country's 32 councils. But there are other issues which have also enraged the council leaders. These include the Executive's controversial plan to set up a single, national Correctional Agency to administer the criminal justice system; the proposed new powers which would allow ministers to intervene if an education authority does not act against failing schools and a plan to set up a Strategic Transport Authority, an agency that would be directly accountable to ministers. The decision by the Executive to press ahead with these policies without proper consultation is seen by the council leaders as having breached a "partnership framework" that was signed by Angus MacKay, the then minister for finance and local government, and Norman Murray, the former COSLA president, in May 2001. When Mr McConnell, himself a former councillor, became First Minister in November 2001, he spoke about the need to develop a close working relationship between the Executive and councils. Pat Watters, the president of COSLA and a leading Labour councillor, will today voice the concerns of his organisation at talks with Andy Kerr, the recently re-appointed minister for finance and public services. On the same day, the council leaders, many of them Labour, will discuss what course of action should be taken. Consideration is likely to be given to withdrawing COSLA representatives from joint working groups, refusing to provide services that are now required by law and petitioning the Scottish Parliament over the need for a new constitution that protects the rights of local government. Rory Mair, the chief executive of COSLA, said the initiatives that had come from the Executive, especially since the 1 May election, were regarded as being a "real offence" against the partnership framework that was drawn up in 2001. He added: "Taken collectively, there is such a raft of proposals that affect local government that they cannot, in any way, be accommodated in terms of parity of esteem or partnership working. "We had heard nothing about these proposals until they were announced. They amount to such a level of intrusion by central government in the workings of local government that it just would not happen in any other country without some of the constitutional issues being addressed. It could lead to demands for a similar level of constitutional protection for councils in this country." The deal that was struck in 2001 led to the production of a document called Partnership Framework: The Scottish Executive and Local Government Working Together. COSLA has particularly strong views on the proposed national Correctional Agency which it opposes on the grounds there is no justification for introducing such a system and "no evidence" it would work to cut re-offending. It is particularly incensed, however, at a lack of consultation on the proposed agency and the plans for intervening if education authorities fail to act against failing schools. But it is the issue of PR in local government that will be particularly difficult for Mr McConnell because of the scale of opposition from Labour councils. This week, Mr Watters spoke about a "wilful disregard" for local government and claimed calls to develop a realistic partnership had "fallen on deaf ears". Today, Mr Kerr will challenge COSLA's arguments. An Executive spokesman said councils had been given increased freedom and flexibility, along with more opportunities for dialogue and access to ministers. He disagreed there had been a lack of consultation, saying COSLA would have the chance to voice their views about various initiatives in the partnership agreement. "We both have to work to make sure the environment in which were are working is one where mature discussion can take place," the Executive spokesman added. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:17:14 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:17:14 +0300 Subject: [A-List] UK state: Iraq crisis (and more) Message-ID: <00ac01c326a5$678c1980$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Hmmm -- things are getting interesting in UK-land, especially when intelligence officers start briefing against their own prime minister. When it's MI6 briefing against Tony Blair then something is clearly amiss. I suspect there is much more than meets the eye going on here, what with the continuing fiasco over Europe afflicting the government and the generally precarious position of UK interests vis a vis a vigorously assertive Bush administration. Is Blair being weakened in order to make way for a successor? If so, who is it to be? Since it's MI6 doing the dirty work it's unlikely to be Gordon Brown, who would be unlikely in any case. Peter Hain, however, as a former Foreign Office Minister and ongoing EU constitutional convention delegate and thorough Europhile would be likeliest to succeed. And given his political history and assiduous cultivation of a trade union image, his position within the Labour Party is solid enough for him to stand a good chance of meeting the formal requirements of leadership selection. And a footnote: Peter Hennessy, the self-styled "neutral" who would love to be a Crown servant, is pissed off at Blair and New Labour for not having been consulted more frequently, despite his evident expertise in ... anodyne empiricist political history. ------ Ministers 'distorted' UN weapons report Nicholas Watt, Richard Norton-Taylor and Michael White in Basra Friday May 30, 2003 The Guardian Tony Blair's Iraq crisis deepened last night as ministers were accused of distorting the findings of the chief UN weapons inspector to support Britain's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programme. Amid growing anger among senior intelligence officials about Downing Street's use of their work for political ends, Hans Blix's office rejected claims by ministers that he had provided unequivocal evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programme. As the prime minister became the first western leader to visit Iraq since the end of the war, Dr Blix's spokesman said the chief weapons inspector had "never asserted" that Iraq definitely had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the conflict. Ewen Buchanan, who said Dr Blix had merely said there was a "strong presumption" that banned items such as an thrax still existed, was speaking after the armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, declared that the UN had provided "damning" evidence of illegal Iraqi weapons. Mr Buchanan's remarks will undermine the credibility of Downing Street, which faced severe pressure yesterday over claims that it doctored a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to strengthen the case for war. An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC that the key claim in last September's dossier - that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - had been inserted on the instructions of officials at No 10. Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's director of communications, who played a key role in drawing up the dossier, said yesterday in Basra that the BBC was "saying we forced the intelligence agencies to put things in the dossier that were untrue. That is wholly untrue; there is nothing in there that was not the work of the intelligence agencies". As the prime minister insisted once again that banned weapons would be found, Downing Street faced renewed pressure last night when the hawkish deputy US defence secretary appeared to belittle the importance of such weapons. Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair magazine that the decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for invading Iraq was taken for "bureaucratic" reasons, indicating that Washington did not take the threat seriously. Amid the furore, British intelligence sources expressed fury at Downing Street's behaviour. They were deeply reluctant to allow Downing Street to use their intelligence assessments because they feared it would be manipulated for political ends. Widespread unease in the intelligence community about Downing Street's use of their information in the September dossier was compounded by a second report in February containing sections plagiarised by Mr Campbell's staff. John Scarlett, chairman of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee, was reported to be furious at what a senior Whitehall source described yesterday as a "serious error". Caveats about intelligence supplied by MI6 and GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, were swept aside by Mr Blair, egged on by Mr Campbell, well-placed sources said. A Whitehall source told the Guardian yesterday: "It may take several months to decide what the Iraqis were doing." He added that something had to be found, if only for political reasons, to support Mr Blair. Downing Street will also struggle to shrug off the remarks by Dr Blix's office. Ministers, who privately rubbished the chief weapons inspector when he resisted the rush to war, have recently hailed a 173-page report he produced in March to prove that Iraq had a banned weapons programme. Dr Blix's spokesman, who did not directly criticise any ministers, said the report indicated that there was a "strong presumption" Iraq did not destroy illegal substances such as anthrax. But Mr Buchanan added: "We know they had anthrax. We never asserted that these days they had them." However, Mr Buchanan made clear that Dr Blix's report raised serious questions about Iraq: "There are hundreds, if not thousands, of unanswered questions." ----- MI6 led protest against war dossier Agencies kept quiet on claims over al-Qaida links and forgeries to avoid embarrassing PM Richard Norton-Taylor Friday May 30, 2003 The Guardian Downing Street's determination to use intelligence to bolster its case for war against Iraq provoked a fierce debate in Whitehall last autumn. Many in the intelligence community, including MI6 and GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, were against publishing a dossier spelling out their assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. They were concerned that MPs and journalists would say the dossier, which was sanitised, contained little that was new. They feared there would be demands for the disclosure of more intelligence-based information. Above all, they were concerned that Downing Street would use the intelligence agencies to justify a pre-emptive strike against Iraq in the face of widespread opposition at home. Downing Street needed intelligence for political reasons. The intelligence community's worst fears about this unprecedented use of their information were fully realised. The dossier may have been based on intelligence as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's communications chief, insisted yesterday; the question was how the words were used and dressed up. In the foreword to the dossier Mr Blair said it "discloses that [Saddam's] military planning allows for some of the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them". What the dossier actually says is that "intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so". Yesterday, Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "That was said on the basis of security service information - a single source, it wasn't corroborated." Intelligence officials said yesterday that whether the claim came from a single source, or many, was a red herring. What mattered was the reliability of the source. That claim, like all the others in the dossier, was based on intelligence assessments with all the caveats that implies. In this case, it was based on the assumption - which now seems highly unlikely - that Saddam's forces had drums of chemical or biological weapons close to missile batteries. Intelligence is an imprecise art but Downing Street wanted certainty to back up its case for war. The intelligence agencies' anger was heightened in February when another "intelligence" dossier put out by Downing Street contained information lifted from academic sources and included a plagiarised section written by an American PhD student. Compilers of the documents included members of Mr Campbell's staff and the Coalition Information Centre, a propaganda body set up in the Foreign Office. Intelligence officials, including John Scarlett, chairman of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee, were reported to be furious. It was a "serious error", a Whitehall source said yesterday. The intelligence agencies - unused to the limelight, although certainly accustomed to being used for political ends - could not stand up to Mr Campbell, let alone to the prime minister. Their situation was further complicated by tensions with their counterparts in the US about the nature of the threat posed by Iraq and al-Qaida. They strongly contested American claims - put about notably by the highly politicised agency set up by the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, called the Office of Special Plans - of links between al-Qaida and Baghdad. Mr Blair went further than the agencies wanted by suggesting to MPs that such links could exist. They had to keep mum because they did not want to embarrass the prime minister. They also were under pressure from the Foreign Office not to upset Britain's relations with the US. But the agencies, and MI6 in particular, were themselves vulnerable to allegations of "doctoring" or manipulating intelligence. The September dossier claimed that there was intelligence that Iraq "has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa". The claim was seized on by the media. But investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear inspections body, soon discovered that documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger were forged. Whitehall officials admit they were forged. Mr Blair, so far, has not. The episode encouraged the scepticism of Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, about intelligence he was given by western agencies during his visits to Iraq. Whitehall sources yesterday described the government's dossier as based on earlier information and reflecting a current view that, as one put it, the Iraqis "were up to something". A source said: "It may take several months to decide what the Iraqis were doing". He added that something had to be found if only for political reasons - to support Mr Blair. The issue presents the intelligence agencies with an important test of their credibility as well as the government's case for pre-emptive military action against Iraq, analysts said yesterday. That action was widely opposed in Whitehall. Peter Hennessy, professor of modern history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and a close watcher of Whitehall said: "If ever we needed a vivid example to show the indispensability of politically neutral crown servants, this is it." ----- What they said The main points of the government's September 2002 dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme Friday May 30, 2003 The Guardian ? Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological agents and has military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population. ? Some weapons are deployable within 45 minutes, and command and control arrangements are in place to use chemical and biological weapons. ? The regime has developed mobile labs for military use, corroborating earlier reports about the mobile production of biological warfare agents. ? Pursued illegal programmes to procure controlled materials of potential use in the production of chemical and biological weapons. ? Tried covertly to acquire technology and materials which could be used in the production of nuclear weapons. ? Sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it. ? Recalled specialists to work on its nuclear programme. ? Illegally retained up to 20 Hussein missiles, with a range of 650km, capable of carrying chemical or biological warheads. ? Started deploying its Samoud liquid propellant missile, and has used the absence of weapons inspectors to work on extending its range to at least 200km, which is beyond the limit of 150km imposed by the UN. ? Started producing the solid-propellant Ababil-100, and is making efforts to extend its range to at least 200km. ? Built a new engine test stand for the development of missiles capable of reaching the UK sovereign base areas in Cyprus and Nato members Greece and Turkey as well as all Gulf nations and Israel. ? Learnt lessons from previous UN weapons inspections and has already begun to conceal sensitive equipment and documentation in advance of the return of inspectors. ----- 'I simply don't believe the whole thing was a lie' Pro-war pundits keep faith in reasons for war while MPs reveal discomfort that house may have been misled Friday May 30, 2003 The Guardian William Shawcross Historian and journalist who supported the war "I am absolutely convinced that weapons of mass destruction were there and that they will be found. I simply do not believe that the whole thing was a lie. "But I must admit I am perplexed that they haven't been found, although I think they will be. Just because Saddam Hussein has not been found does not mean he did not exist either." Brian Donohoe Labour MP for Cunningham South, rebelled in the initial Iraq debate in February but abstained in the March 18 debate "In the Iraq debate, my conscience was overruled by loyalty but I doubt I'd vote the same way again. The sole reason I backed the government amendment was because we were given very clear indications there were weapons of mass destruction and that these could be used against neighbouring countries. As far as I'm concerned, that was the only legitimate reason for going to war. "The prime minister is still of the opinion that they exist, and we will hold him to this. "Do I think they exist? I just can't accept the government, with the intelligence facilities they have over here and in the States ... would make such a fundamental mistake ... But it's beginning to look as if they don't. It's five or six weeks after the end of the war, we've 300,000-400,000 troops over there and we're still not in a position to have determined if they're there. "I am not saying I feel conned. But at some point in the future the government have to be able to establish the fact they exist. It's an extremely worrying situation and we would want to have clarification in our own party, in our government. We want an explanation being given. Clearly, there are major concerns about the credibility of those telling us things about WMD." Doug Henderson Former defence minister, rebelled against the government "I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq but not specifically because of weapons of mass destruction. The issue wasn't just about WMD but about whether [Saddam] was a danger to other countries. "I thought after the war that it would be reasonable to give the government six months or a year [to find them], but now Rumsfeld has more or less implied there may not be WMD. I think the government are going to have to make a statement when the house comes back and tell the house what exactly they knew before the war. "If it transpires the government had information that said it was unlikely there were WMD then parliament, and the country, have been misled. "If the government doesn't find the WMD quickly, I think there will be political instability. "I know a lot of colleagues voted with the government because of WMD. They have had to face their constituency parties over this - and they will feel they have been made mugs of." Parmjit Dhanda Labour MP for Gloucester, voted with the government in the first Iraq debate, rebelled in the second and abstained from the government's motion on weapons of mass destruction "I don't regret the way I voted and I would do so again. "Finding weapons of mass destruction does matter but for me this wasn't the overriding reason: for me, and for many of my colleagues, the main thing was not getting a second UN resolution. "I personally believe weapons of mass destruction will be found, but we have to be patient and give this time. They could be found within the next 24 hours." Frederick Forsyth Novelist "Tony Blair is exceptionally dangerous in that he can believe anything he wants to believe. If he wants to believe that north is south, that is what he will do. "Oddly that does not change my view that there was justification for the war. Firstly there is no doubt Saddam had cracked all the technology of WMD, secondly the cruelty and mass murder he committed, and thirdly it is not a good idea to have a third of the world's oil resources under the control of a man who is so clearly mad." Malcolm Rifkind Former Conservative foreign secretary "At each stage Blair's justification for the war has been shown to be on very very shaky ground. What you tend to get now is statements from Washington and London, saying, 'Well never mind all that we have got rid of a very nasty regime which would have been still there if we hadn't gone to war.' "Quite a lot of us, from all political parties, had significant reservations about the conflict. We were entitled to assume the government had access to information which made them confident that the attack on Iraq was essential to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. "I think it is too early to conclude that they were wrong, because who knows they could be discovered tomorrow, but it is looking pretty odd." Andrew Roberts Rightwing historian "It has not changed my view of the war at all. Just because we have not found WMD does not mean we want Saddam back. It was a brilliant operation, it was over in three weeks and it cost 31 British dead. It was a miraculous victory. "I truly believe that both Bush and Blair genuinely believed there were weapons of mass destruction so logically that does not affect the justification for the war. "I believe they genuinely thought he was a threat to the region. "I think they were right in that; I think his invasions of his neighbours prove that and he had used WMD before so he obviously had them at some stage. "So in all logic they had every right and it does not affect my view one iota. Anyway, shouldn't we all be celebrating that our troops were not subjected to chemical and biological weapons rather than moaning about it?" Yasser Alaskary Iraqi exile who supported military action to bring down Saddam Hussein "The issue of weapons of mass destruction is the way that America and Britain justified the war, but it would not have been the way that I justified it. "I believe that there was a humanitarian disaster going on in Iraq for so many years under the regime of Saddam Hussein - and that was good enough on its own. "That's quite clear if you look at the mass graves being dug up. If they'd based it on that, they would have been on much stronger ground. "As an Iraqi, it doesn't concern me what trouble the UK or American administrations are in, what concerns me is that the Iraqi people have been liberated from Saddam. "The major task is rebuilding the country and finding weapons of mass destruction doesn't aid that at all. "It doesn't matter to ordinary Iraqis. I've spoken to relatives, who can now speak freely, and nobody mentions this." From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:22:35 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:22:35 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US news media: New York Times Message-ID: <00b401c326a6$26f62cc0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> This looks a bit fishy. Yes the NYT is home to lots of people most of us here would walk across the street to avoid at the best of times, but the deepening implosion happens to coincide with a low intensity campaign against the paper by rightwingers close to the Bush administration and Conrad Black's media empire. Black's "The National Interest" recently carried a diatribe against the NYT, forgetting to mention of course that Black's launch of the New York Sun might have something to do with that. Are there any US listers out there with some further leads? Or is this simply cock-up, rather than conspiracy? BTW, how many university professors would have to be suspended were it discovered that their award-winning articles were written by lowly research assistants? ----- US paper gripped by new crisis of ethics Another New York Times reporter forced to resign Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Friday May 30, 2003 The Guardian The spectacle of a publishing institution in crisis moved to a second act yesterday after the bitter departure of a star writer from the New York Times. Rick Bragg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his evocative features from the southern US, resigned on Wednesday night, days after the newspaper suspended him (with pay) and admitted that an unpaid assistant had done virtually all of the reporting for a story on oyster fishers in Florida for which Bragg took full credit. Bragg's descriptive opening paragraph, with its mention of egrets gliding through the skies and grey mullet flopping in the water, had strongly suggested that he had visited the scene. The downfall of one of the paper's most prized journalists deepened a crisis of credibility at the New York Times caused by the discovery that a young reporter on the fast track had plagiarised or concocted dozens of stories. The angry and self-pitying nature of Bragg's farewell ensured his exit will prolong the internal agony at the paper, which has been consumed by recriminations and rivalries for weeks. In an interview with the Washington Post, Bragg said he was being made the scapegoat for the earlier scandal involving Jayson Blair, which caused huge embarrassment to the paper and which inflamed old grudges and slights. Some of the feuding has been conducted in other media outlets - such as last week's leaked exchange of emails between two of the paper's senior writers over a story on Iraq. The exchange inadvertently raised other questions about newsgathering at the New York Times when the paper's bioterrorism expert, Judith Miller, admitted her main source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme had been the Pentagon's favoured Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi. That in turn suggested that the Pentagon and Mr Chalabi had used the paper to help create justification for war. Many have also pointed to resentment of the paper's executive editor, Howell Raines, and speculated about his future. Bragg, who was said to be a favourite of Raines', said he was being punished for what was common practice at the Times, where journalists made regular use of teams of helpers without assigning them credit. His colleagues disagreed. Peter Kilborn, a New York Times reporter, wrote in an email posted on the internet yesterday: "Bragg's comments in defence of his reportorial routines are outrageous." Media websites carried accounts from several other journalists yesterday whose work had appeared uncredited in the New York Times, including Lisa Shuhay, who wrote: "Since the Bragg story broke I have been contacted by writers who have provided vast amounts of description, ambience, the dateline and interviews for Times news pieces and never seen a byline or tag." Other reports complained of a hierarchy at the Times which allowed Bragg to use a huge network of sources and impose a ban on the editing of his stories. That response provoked Bragg to conduct a number of further interviews in which he complained of a poisoned workplace atmosphere. But, he told the Washington Post: "I'm too mad to whine about it." He told reporters from other organisations that he had a $1m book contract waiting for him. It was this last admission that influenced yesterday's reaction to Bragg's departure from the New York Times on media websites. Although he has his defenders most responses have been unsympathetic. Despite the voluminous traffic on websites, the general public has remained largely unaffected by the crisis at the Times. But the newspaper has been under intense observation from its peers following the Jayson Blair scandal. There is also interest in the results of an internal investigation established by the Times in the wake of the scandal. Bragg was one of the first journalists at the paper to come under investigation. The work of three others is believed to have come before the panel. The self-destruction at the Times has been watched avidly and with a large dose of schadenfreude at newsrooms across the US. But it has also led to uncomfortable reflection. In the wake of the scandal, the Chicago Tribune, the Buffalo News, and other newspapers have called staff meetings to examine their own working practices. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:24:41 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:24:41 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Conrad Black Message-ID: <00bc01c326a6$7231d180$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Black to bail out Hollinger. Guess who bails out Black? Money-go-round at Telegraph group Friday May 30, 2003 The Guardian Call us ghoulish, geekish or simply obsessive, but Hollinger Inc, one of Lord Black's parent companies for the Telegraph and his other newspapers, has lodged some new filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US. Predictably enough, they raise fresh questions about the extraordinary way this business is run. Following last week's hot tempered annual shareholder meeting in New York for Black's main operating company Hollinger International (yes, you'll have to pay close attention here), its Toronto-based parent, Hollinger Inc, has just released first quarter figures. The trading numbers are of little in terest. After all sorts of adjustments, net income rose from a loss of $1.2m to a profit of $22.9m during the first three months, on sales revenue down $5m at $404m. What warrants attention is the company's entangled relationship with its lenders, which are looking increasingly bleak. There now appears to be a real risk that Black is going to lose control of his cherished papers. Hollinger Inc can't be sure of meeting its interest payments on senior debt and three tranches of preference shares. As is already known, Black's private vehicle, Ravelston, which controls most of the voting rights at Hollinger, has agreed to make annual payments of at least $14m to help Hollinger out of its cash flow difficulties. What yesterday's filing discloses, however, is that Ravelston itself is wholly dependent on money from Hollinger to make the crucial support payments. Let's go through that again, using some of Hollinger's tortured prose. "The company (Hollinger) is dependent upon the continuing financial support of Ravelston Management Inc (RMI)... to fund such shortfalls and, therefore, pay its liabilities as they fall due. On March 10, 2003, concurrent with the issue by the company of senior secured notes, RMI entered into a support agreement with the company, under which RMI has agreed to make annual support payments in cash to the company by way of capital contributions or subordinated debt... "RMI currently derives all of its income and operating cash flow from the fees paid pursuant to service agreements with (Hollinger) International and its subsidiaries. RMI's ability to provide the required financial support under the agreement with the company is dependent on RMI continuing to receive sufficient fees pursuant to those service agreements." The company goes on to state that the fees paid to Ravelston for the current year will be between $22m and $24m, while if Hollinger fails to receive $4.7m in cash in any quarterly period from RMI and/or dividends from its subsidiaries (almost $19m annually) then its senior debt - which is secured with the bulk of Black's shareholding in the business - will be in default. So Hollinger pays Black up to $24m each year, but then Black has to pay back about two-thirds to keep Hollinger solvent. Where's the logic in that? If Black didn't take such ludicrously high management fees out of Hollinger in the first place, the newspaper business would not be in trouble. Or at least not as much trouble. One other point from the SEC filings: during a six month period last year Hollinger International ran up a bill of $2.3m for the use of a corporate jet. Presumably Black needs it to rush around, propping up his tottering empire and placating nervous bankers. We wish him the best of luck. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:28:08 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:28:08 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Argentina: military shake-up Message-ID: <00c401c326a6$ed5b0de0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Argentina tries to limit military's role By Adam Thomson in Buenos Aires Financial Times; May 29, 2003 N?stor Kirchner (pictured), Argentina's president, on Thursday delivered a powerful address to the country's armed forces, telling them they had to modernise and integrate fully with society. Speaking on the anniversary of the founding of Argentina's army, the president of less than a week, said: "It is not the role of a member of the military to analyse political leadership." He added that he wanted an army that was "highly professional, prestigious and committed to the future, not to the past". Mr Kirchner's comments follow his decision to replace the heads of the country's armed forces and up to 70 per cent of all top-ranking officials, amounting to the biggest shake-up of the military's top brass since the country emerged from military dictatorship 20 years ago. On Wednesday, Mr Kirchner replaced Ricardo Brinzoni, the head of the army, with Roberto Bendini, who until recently commanded a brigade in Mr Kirchner's native Rio Gallegos in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz. Outgoing Commander Brinzoni said he was saddened by the change, "not for personal reasons but because of the unexplained circumstances that surround it". In a bitter parting speech, he said: "Military intrigue in politics was eradicated from Argentine life. Political intrigue in the military is just as dangerous and it seems to have reappeared after 20 years." Some believe Mr Kirchner's plans to purge the military have to do with his own bitter memories of the dictatorship. After finishing university in the 1970s, Mr Kirchner, then a member of a left-wing faction of the Peronist party, was forced to flee to Santa Cruz to avoid persecution. But political analysts say that far from trying to rid the institution of any potential threat, Mr Kirchner's announcement was an attempt to stamp his authority in his first week in power after assuming the presidency with a mere 22 per cent of the vote. Sergio Berenstein, professor of politics at the Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, said yesterday: "He is trying to show that he is in charge and the way to do that is to choose a weak policy area where the risk of failure is small. In that sense, he has picked the right target." Indeed, although the military played an active - and often interventionist - role in national politics throughout the 20th century, the institution today is weak, under-funded and largely irrelevant. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:29:33 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:29:33 +0300 Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Brazil Message-ID: <00cc01c326a7$2032cd20$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Brazil wants US help in power probe By Jonathan Wheatley in S?o Paulo Financial Times; May 28, 2003 Brazil's justice ministry has asked the US department of justice to assist its investigation into allegations that AES and Enron, the US energy groups, colluded to rig the auction price for Eletropaulo, the S?o Paulo electricity utility that was privatised in April 1998. Officials at the ministry's economic affairs division asked for assistance last Friday by telephone, a ministry official said. The move follows a Financial Times report this month that the US companies struck a deal under which Enron agreed not to bid for Eletropaulo in return for contracts to build a power plant. Daniel Goldberg, head of the division, also began a preliminary inquiry at the ministry into the affair, the first step towards a full investigation. The mines and energy commission of Brazil's Congress will hold a hearing tomorrow into the privatisation of Brazil's electricity industry. The trade union representing industry employees in S?o Paulo state will ask the commission to investigate whether other, similar deals were agreed during or after the auctions. Twenty-three Brazilian electricity companies were privatised between July 1995 and November 2000, raising more than R$24bn ($8bn). The sale of Eletropaulo had been expected to bring the S?o Paulo government several hundred million dollars above the minimum price of $1.78bn. But only one bidder - Light, in which AES was a shareholder - emerged to buy the utility, offering the minimum price. AES has launched an internal investigation into the allegations, while Enron has denied collusion. Brazil's request for assistance from the US is the first under an agreement signed in 1999 but ratified by Brazil's Congress only in March. The allegations over Eletropaulo come at a critical period in negotiations between AES and the BNDES, Brazil's government-controlled national development bank. AES owes the BNDES $1.2bn in loans made to finance several acquisitions during privatisation, and the US group has been in default for several months on a $600m loan guaranteed by its controlling stake in Eletropaulo. Negotiations have repeatedly failed to reach agreement and the BNDES has begun preparations to sell control of the utility. Falling share prices since privatisation mean the BNDES stake is worth about $125m at current market prices. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:31:45 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:31:45 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Germany: welfare "reform" Message-ID: <00d401c326a7$6eac85e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Pensioners will be hit by German plans to cut subsidies By Uta Harnischfeger in Frankfurt and Birgit Marschall and Margarete Heckel in Berlin Financial Times; May 30, 2003 Germany's pensioners will see their disposable income fall under drastic government plans to slash ?5bn ($5.9bn) off state subsidies to the mandatory retirement savings system. The plan by Hans Eichel, finance minister, to use the cuts to make good a third of the projected ?15bn shortfall in next year's budget are the latest sign of the government's determination to make significant cuts in Germany's social welfare system. The move precedes a crucial party congress on Sunday when members of Mr Eichel's Social Democratic party will vote on Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der's economic reforms. The reforms, known as Agenda 2010, include cutting welfare programmes, loosening job protection rules and reducing healthcare benefits. Direct pension cuts are illegal under the German constitution. So far, German pensioners pay less into their health care schemes than employed people. Under the plan, Mr Eichel would force the country's 19.8m pensioners to pay more for their health insurance schemes, which in effect leaves them with less disposable income, people close to the minister said. Last week Mr Eichel admitted net new borrowing this year would reach nearly ?38bn - double the budgeted amount and above even the most pessimistic forecasts. So far, the German government subsidises the pension system with ?73.1bn annually, up from about ?43bn in 1997. Wolfgang Clement, the German economics minister, on Wednesday flatly ruled out an increase in social security contributions. His remarks came after the country's pension agencies had forecast that pension contributions must increase to 19.9 per cent from the current 19.5 per cent of gross salary by year-end. At the same time, Katrin G?ring-Eckardt, head of the parliament's Green faction, yesterday called for pension cuts for wealthy pensioners. "There are many pensioners who would not be hurt if you kept pensions flat and [gradually] lowered their level," Mrs G?ring-Eckardt said in a newspaper interview. Bert R?rup, the government's pension expert, said it would make sense to ask pensioners for higher health care contributions. So far, the bulk of government subsidies into the pension system flow into the pensioners' health care system. "That is a place where you can cut and where there have already been cuts," Mr R?rup said. He heads a commission assigned to create ideas to deal with the growing pension problem. Already, the Agenda 2010 reform package has led to one of the most serious showdowns between the labour movement and its traditional allies in Mr Schr?der's party since he took office in 1998. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:32:42 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:32:42 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Germany: fiscal crisis & US investors Message-ID: <00dc01c326a7$90d9e9a0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Leasing 'family silver' causes concern in German cities By Tony Major in Frankfurt Financial Times; May 30, 2003 Germany's cash-strapped cities are leasing the "family silver" to make ends meet. Using innovative transactions, scores of cities have been cashing in on US tax laws to plug gaping holes in their budgets. But the latest plan by Finanzplatz Frankfurt to lease most of its U-Bahn or metro system to a group of US investors - and then rent it back - has fuelled opposition to the cities' flirtation with high finance. The "cross border" leasing deal, which takes advantage of US tax breaks, could net Frankfurt as much as ?100m ($117m), urgently needed to finance investment, fund services and cut a ballooning deficit. But the deal has raised hackles among politicians disturbed at the prospect of public assets being "handed over" to US investors, while others question the legality of what some see as a tax trick that could saddle the city with crippling losses. The concerns have been echoed in city halls across the country. For several years, hard-pressed municipalities have leased trams, clinics, water treatment plants and incinerators worth millions of euros to foreign investors in an attempt to raise funds. Last year Stuttgart leased its sewerage network to a US insurance company, raising ?22m. D?sseldorf leased part of its subway system. The Frankfurt Fair, majority-controlled by the city, has leased exhibition halls. Regional politicians estimate that at least ?36m worth of public assets have so far been leased to foreign investors, with 10-20 deals being arranged each year. But growing suspicion of these complex financial transactions now threatens to end the schemes, despite offering clear financial advantages to many cities. Bavaria and other states have even talked of bringing in laws to ban them. Bankers say the opposition is based on misunderstanding and compare the transactions to the sale and leaseback deals that big companies have used for years to release capital and shore up their balance sheets. The Frankfurt deal, likely to be one of Germany's biggest so far, will involve leasing up to ?2bn worth of U-Bahn tunnels, and possibly track and rolling stock, to a group of US investors for 99 years. Under US tax laws the long lease confers ownership and means the investors can take advantage of tax breaks aimed at encouraging overseas investment. It is attractive to US investors as the tax benefits and the rental income they earn are greater than the cost of the lease. In return, Frankfurt gains a portion of the tax benefit, but pays US investors for the use of the assets. "The beauty of this," says Rolf Ulrich, a leasing specialist with Commerzbank, "is that under German law there is no change of ownership. That makes it attractive to German cities." Mr Ulrich insists the practice is widespread among Germany's neighbours. "In the Netherlands most water treatment plants have been leased to foreign investors." Experts admit it is a complicated business. The deals, structured under US law, are expensive to arrange, requiring international law firms, with contracts often running to thousands of pages. "But the investors pay for most of that," says Mr Ulrich. Bankers, eager to minimise the risks to German cities, cite two threats. Under the terms of the contracts, cities would have to continue renting the assets even if they found they no longer required them. US tax authorities might also move to close the tax loopholes at the heart of the deals, although that is deemed unlikely. Frankfurt's plans will be put to a vote in the city parliament soon. Sceptics say only the advisers make any money out of such a deal. Supporters say it fills the city's coffers and is better than privatisation. Hopes for better city budgets could be riding on the decision. From michael.keaney at mbs.fi Fri May 30 06:46:46 2003 From: michael.keaney at mbs.fi (Michael Keaney) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:46:46 +0300 Subject: [A-List] Germany: Kirch & Haim Saban Message-ID: <00e401c326a9$8811c3e0$8d5094c3@mbs.fi> Last year Saban donated $7m to the Democratic Party in what was the largest single donation of its kind, in response to DNC chief Terry McAuliffe's appeal for funds. Earlier this week the BBC was interviewing some pundit from the Saban Center for Middle East Studies based at the Brookings Institution. So, clearly, this guy has money to throw around, but it looks like the lawyers, rather than minority shareholders protected under German law at present, who will be benefiting from Saban's largesse. ----- Creditors may block Saban's Kirch takeover By Bertrand Benoit in Frankfurt Financial Times; May 29, 2003 Haim Saban was yesterday warned that his planned acquisition of Germany's largest television station could be blocked by creditors of its bankrupt owner unless the US billionaire makes a ?525m ($617m) cash payment within the next fortnight. The ultimatum from creditors of KirchMedia crowned weeks of mounting tension and brinkmanship in the talks that could see a US investor take control of a large German media asset for the first time. In a sign of goodwill, the lenders, meeting at a creditors committee yesterday, agreed that Mr Saban should not be punished if, as seems increasingly likely, he missed a May 31 deadline for wiring the cash to an escrow account. But the creditors, mainly large German banks, also authorised Michael Jaff?, the court-appointed administrator for insolvent KirchMedia, to end negotiations with Mr Saban whenever he deemed necessary. KirchMedia holds more than 75 per cent of the voting shares in ProSiebenSAT.1, the broadcaster Mr Saban is trying to acquire, as well as Europe's largest film library, also part of the transaction. Advisers to Mr Saban denied the deal was in danger and said talks with the banks on Tuesday had allowed both parties to reach agreement on significant points. Yet they said Mr Saban would not authorise the cash transfer as long as all aspects of the contract had not been settled. The main sticking point lies in the future of Kirch's film library. Mr Saban has been struggling to push through a business plan that would force the lenders to forego a large portion of their loans. The lenders, meanwhile, suspect Mr Saban is dragging his feet over the transfer because he is struggling to find partners to co-finance the takeover. Another factor that could decide the future of the deal is the response to Mr Saban's request that he be exempted from an obligation to tender for all outstanding shares in ProSieben, which could add ?300m to his bill. Germany's takeover watchdog is expected to rule on the issue next week. Should either Mr Jaff? or Mr Saban end the talks, the banks, HVB, Commerzbank, Bayerische Landesbank, and DZ Bank, would take control of ProSieben, fund a capital increase for the business, and auction it again after about two years. From soncu at pacbell.net Fri May 30 10:35:10 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 09:35:10 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Nobody would dare Message-ID: > Sabri, > > Not really a fair comparison. You are right Chris. My comparison was not fair. My point was basically this, although I could not make it very clear: Capital is not an easy book to read irrespective of your level of education. Well. Of course, this is my subjective opinion. There are no equations in that thing, just words, and writings without equations are difficult to read for mathematicians. As Stan was saying, no one is claiming that it should not be read, of course. Such books are important sources of theory that would help us better understand what the heck is going on so that with that understanding we can intervene and change these bloody things that are happening to us. Best, Sabri From mnyp at ciudad.com.ar Fri May 30 10:27:59 2003 From: mnyp at ciudad.com.ar (MNyP) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 13:27:59 -0300 Subject: [A-List] CUADRO DE SITUACION AL 29 DE MAYO DE 2003 Message-ID: <4135-220035530162759870@n2b4c1> MNyPlNormalwin982102003-05-19T19:19:00Z2003-05-30T07:48:00Z2003-05-30T07:48:00Z4292216657MNYP13833204559.3821 2100 N? 47 CUADRO DE SITUACI?N NACIONAL, INTERNACIONAL y DEL MNyP AL 29 DE MAYO DE 2003 INTERNACIONAL EL MUNDO La semana que pas? el derecho y la legalidad internacional recibieron un nuevo golpe. El Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas, la mayor?a de sus miembros se hab?an opuesto hace unos meses a apoyar la guerra del Sr. Bush contra el pueblo de Irak, ahora por 14 votos a 0 convalid? la ocupaci?n de ese pa?s y les dio v?a libre a EEUU y Gran Breta?a para controlar su petr?leo y gas, uno de los objetivos centrales en esta guerra. Esta decisi?n retrotrae el orden internacional a las peores formas de colonialismo del siglo XIX y constituye una herramienta para la depredaci?n de los pueblos m?s d?biles. Los l?deres de los pa?ses miembros del Consejo de Seguridad tomaron esta decisi?n contrariando la posici?n de la opini?n p?blica de sus propios pa?ses, lo cual les puede traer en el futuro un alto costo pol?tico. Sin ir m?s lejos, este fin de semana Berlusconi (Italia) y Aznar (Espa?a), dos aliados incondicionales de EEUU, fueron derrotados o sufrieron fuertes retrocesos en las elecciones municipales que se llevaron a cabo en sendos pa?ses. AMERICA LATINA Y EL MERCOSUR : ? La asunci?n de Kirchner como presidente argentino recibi? un fuerte respaldo de los presidentes latinoamericanos m?s progresistas y que pretenden resistir el modelo hegem?nico impulsado por los EEUU, los cuales sin lugar a dudas ve?an con preocupaci?n una nueva presidencia de Menem, que encarnaba el alineamiento autom?tico con EEUU y la primac?a del ALCA sobre el MERCOSUR y los acuerdos regionales. As?, por ejemplo, Lula declar? que ahora con Argentina y los otros pa?ses latinoamericanos se puede construir un ?eje del bien? (contraponi?ndolo con el eje del mal de Bush) y agreg?: ?Tenemos la oportunidad de hacer avanzar nuestros pa?ses en el camino de la democracia y la integraci?n, para superar las enormes deudas sociales?. Tambi?n propuso (conjuntamente con el presidente de Per? Alejandro Toledo), conformar un fondo con el 20% del dinero que los pa?ses latinoamericanos pagan por intereses de la deuda externa, que se reinvertir?an en la gobernabilidad del continente. Por su parte, Lagos se?al?: ?Kirchner asume con la misma esperanza que cuando C?mpora lleg? al poder?. Asimismo, Hugo Ch?vez, ferviente cr?tico del ALCA al que considera una amenaza para toda la regi?n, afirm? que la asunci?n de Kirchner fortalece el sistema democr?tico argentino, no descart? la incorporaci?n de Venezuela al MERCOSUR y propuso la constituci?n del ALBA (Area Bolivarianas para las Am?ricas), como un instrumento para luchar contra la aplicaci?n de recetas neoliberales. Fidel Castro : Sin embargo, el mayor impacto fue la presencia en nuestro pa?s de Fidel Castro. El presidente cubano, s?mbolo mundial de la lucha de un pueblo contra el imperialismo norteamericano, no s?lo atrajo la atenci?n de la mayor?a de los pol?ticos presentes en la Asamblea Legislativa, muchos de los cuales no comulgan con su ideolog?a, sino que adem?s produjo una fuerte conmoci?n en todos los sitios a los que concurri?. ? En especial se destac? el acto organizado en la Facultad de Derecho de la UBA, previsto inicialmente como un ? acto acad?mico en el Aula Magna ante un auditorio? limitado, debi? realizarse en la calle ante el p?blico numeroso que desbord? ampliamente el recinto universitario. ? En una noche muy fr?a pero rodeado del respeto y fervor de los asistentes, Fidel habl? dos horas y media sobre los m?s diversos temas, entre ellos la pobreza, el analfabetismo, el bloqueo contra Cuba, la ?guerra preventiva? de EEUU en Irak y la pol?tica exterior de la administraci?n Bush en general, a la cual calific? de ?proyecto para imponer una tiran?a nazifascista universal?.La repercusi?n del acto fue de tal magnitud que los canales de noticia por cable lo trasmitieron integramente. NACIONAL POLITICA El 25 de Mayo N?stor Kirchner asumi? la presidencia de nuestro pa?s. Hasta el 10 de diciembre completar? el mandato que la Asamblea Legislativa le hab?a asignado originalmente a Duhalde y a partir de ah? cumplir? con el per?odo que le corresponde constitucionalmente hasta el 10 de diciembre de 2007. El discurso pronunciado por el nuevo presidente frente a la Asamblea Legislativa se centr? en un fuerte cuestionamiento al modelo neoliberal que se aplic? en nuestro pa?s desde 1976 y a sus desastrosas consecuencias sociales, culturales, econ?micas y pol?ticas. Los militantes del MNYP vemos con benepl?cito que banderas que fueron levantadas casi exclusivamente por el MNYP durante la campa?a electoral, sean hoy asumidas por Kirchner. Conceptos tales como ?el Estado promover? pol?ticas activas para lograr el desarrollo econ?mico y una mejor distribuci?n de la riqueza?, ?debemos hacer que el Estado ponga igualdad all? donde el mercado excluye y abandona?, ?no se puede volver a pagar deuda a costa del hambre y la exclusi?n de los argentinos, generando m?s pobreza y aumentando la conflictividad social?, ?los acreedores deben entender que s?lo podr?n cobrar si a la Argentina le va bien?, ?nuestro pa?s debe estar abierto al mundo, pero de una manera realista, fundamentalmente a trav?s del MERCOSUR?, ?de la misma manera que luchamos contra la pobreza econ?mica tendremos una conducta sin dobleces para impedir la pobreza c?vica?, ?a la Constituci?n hay que leerla completa. La seguridad jur?dica debe ser para todos, no s?lo para los que tienen poder o dinero?, ?la tragedia c?vica del clientelismo pol?tico no es producto de la asistencia social como gesti?n de Estado, sino de la desocupaci?n como consecuencia de un modelo econ?mico. Mientras en la Argentina hubo trabajo, nadie fue reh?n de un dirigente partidario?, etc.,? merecen el apoyo de nuestro movimiento, que ya desde los 7 d?as de EL ADOLFO viene impulsando una participaci?n activa del Estado para equilibrar la econom?a, la integraci?n plena al MERCOSUR y proponiendo una urgente pol?tica de inclusi?n social, a la vez que denunci? la corrupci?n estructural y el clientelismo electoral de la ?vieja pol?tica?, como una de las causas m?s profundas de la decadencia nacional. Por lo tanto, reiteramos, esperamos sinceramente que a N?stor Kirchner le vaya bien y apoyaremos su gesti?n en tanto y en cuanto se mantenga fiel a este mensaje inaugural, ya que no nos interesan los r?ditos pol?ticos personales o de sector, sino solamente el inter?s y el bienestar del pueblo argentino. Por las alianzas y acuerdos pol?ticos que concret? durante la campa?a electoral, el nuevo presidente va a tener m?s de un problema para poder aplicar los conceptos anunciados este domingo. No cuenta con un bloque legislativo propio (s?lo le responden los diputados del PJ de su provincia), tampoco cuenta con muchas ?simpat?as? ? en la Corte Suprema de Justicia, y su principal aliado, el duhaldismo, no aparece como un interlocutor cre?ble para combatir la corrupci?n estructural y el clientelismo pol?tico. Pero tambi?n es cierto que Kirchner cuenta con herramientas, tales como apelar a la movilizaci?n popular o convocar a un plebiscito, para avanzar en reformas que encuentren resistencias en los grupos de poder econ?micos o pol?ticos. Si acude a estos mecanismos, indudablemente contar? con el decidido respaldo de los referentes y militantes del MNYP. De hecho, a s?lo tres d?as de haber asumido la presidencia, ya a tenido los primeros choques con algunas corporaciones. Su decisi?n de designar a un general con poca antig?edad como jefe del ej?rcito,? plausible si se inscribe en el marco de una pol?tica que apunte a desplazar a una c?pula militar comprometida con la aplicaci?n del modelo neoliberal, le produjo contradicciones con el ministro de defensa Pampuro, uno de los m?s estrechos colaboradores de Duhalde, que trat? de limitar los retiros. Adem?s, el Jefe saliente (Brinzoni) organiz? un acto de despedida, algo poco usual en el ej?rcito, ya que en los ?ltimos 20 a?os s?lo dos jefes salientes lo hicieron. De esta manera pudo pronunciar un discurso, en el cual cuestion? la decisi?n de Kirchner, a la que calific? de ?intrigas pol?ticas?, hecho que el presidente hab?a querido evitar al precipitar el retiro de Brinzoni antes del acto por el d?a del ej?rcito, que se lleva a cabo todos los a?os el 29 de mayo. ECONOMICA Es en este campo donde N?stor Kirchner enfrentar? m?s inconvenientes para aplicar los postulados de su discurso. Mientras el presidente habla de inclusi?n social, no pagar la deuda con el hambre de nuestro pueblo, condicionar el aumento de tarifas, etc.. Lavagna, en sinton?a con el FMI que este mismo s?bado 24 le mand? una nota a Kirchner, pidi?ndole que siga con el plan que se est? aplicando, pretende avanzar en el ajuste del sistema financiero y la privatizaci?n del Banco Naci?n, la inmunidad legal para los directores del BCRA y otros funcionarios que encabecen ese ajuste, acelerar las negociaciones con el FMI y los acreedores privados, etc.. La designaci?n de Felisa Miceli como presidenta del Banco Naci?n es positiva, ya que por su trayectoria no parece que pueda encabezar la privatizaci?n del banco. Pero esta designaci?n resulta contradictoria con? el proyecto de llamar a licitaci?n, para designar una consultora que efect?e estudios orientados a la modernizaci?n y el gerenciamiento de? esta instituci?n oficial, lo que estar?a encubriendo el comienzo del proceso de privatizaci?n. Adem?s? Lavagna acord? con la mayor?a de los legisladores, que el Congreso le delegue la potestad de aumentar tarifas, con todos los peligros que ?sto conlleva. No caben dudas que en muy poco tiempo tendremos claros indicios de cual de los dos discursos predominan, ?por el bien del pueblo argentino confiamos en que sea el del flamante presidente. Al cierre del presente Cuadro de Situaci?n,? se ha producido un choque con otro funcionario heredado del gobierno de Duhalde ; el presidente del BCRA (Prat Gay), cuestion? la propuesta presidencial de un d?lar con una cotizaci?n de $3. SOCIAL Dado el terrible cuadro social que afrontan la mayor?a de los argentinos, cabe esperar que en los pr?ximos d?as se conozcan medidas concretas,? que permitan crear puestos de trabajo para los desocupados, recomponer el poder adquisitivo de los asalariados y brindar una cobertura sanitaria m?nima a los millones de argentinos que viven en la pobreza extrema o directamente en condiciones de indigencia. Merece destacarse la celeridad con que el nuevo presidente resolvi? el problema educativo de la provincia de Entre R?os, donde por el atraso de los salarios a?n no hab?a comenzado el ciclo lectivo. De esta manera repar? una injusticia y dio un mensaje sobre la importancia que este gobierno le asigna a la educaci?n. De todos modos, el gobierno deber? formular r?pidamente una pol?tica educativa nacional, ya que de lo contrario corre el riesgo de no contar en el futuro con los recursos necesarios para apagar este tipo de ?incendio?. Acordamos tambi?n con los Tribunales Especiales Tributarios anunciados por el nuevo presidente, pero esperamos que realmente act?en contra los grandes evasores, por poderosos que ?stos sean? y no contra peque?os evasores poco conflictivos. DEL MOVIMIENTO NACIONAL Y POPULAR El domingo 25 de mayo EL ALBERTO asumi? la gobernaci?n de San Luis por el per?odo 2003-2007, mientras que Blanca Rene? Pereyra jur? como vicegobernadora. Lo hizo en una austera ceremonia que no lo report? gasto alguna al Estado provincial,? suprimi?ndose adem?s los honores, la banda y el bast?n de mando. Al asumir, el nuevo gobernador dijo: ?Desde este instante ponemos la imaginaria proa de la nave provincial con direcci?n al futuro y en consecuencia dejamos establecido que venimos con mandato de los pueblos de San Luis, a refundar la provincia de los puntanos para beneficio y progreso de los puntanos.? Explic? que asum?a el ? 25 de mayo legitimado por el 91% de sus comprovincianos y finalmente rescat? e hizo un reconocimiento a su antecesora Alicia Lemme, por asumir la enorme responsabilidad de reemplazar a un gobernador como EL ADOLFO, ?que marc? una impronta de progreso y justicia social en sus 18 a?os de gobierno". Su primer acto como gobernador fue entregar p?blicamente su declaraci?n? jurada de bienes al escribano de Gobierno, tal como establece la ley y posteriormente representantes de la comunidad y las nuevas autoridades procedieron a la firma del Tratado de Convivencia, Derechos Humanos, Producci?n y Trabajo. Se trata de un nuevo pacto social a partir del cual el Estado Provincial y todos los firmantes se comprometen a ajustar su accionar a distintos tratados internacionales, tales como la Declaraci?n Universal de los Derechos Humanos aprobada y proclamada por la Resoluci?n NI 217 A del 10 de diciembre de 1948, el Pacto Internacional de los Derechos Econ?micos, Sociales y Culturales, el Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Pol?tico y su Protocolo Facultativo, la Convenci?n sobre la Prevenci?n y la Sanci?n del Delito de Genocidio, la Convenci?n Internacional sobre la Eliminaci?n de todas las formas de Discriminaci?n Racial, la Convenci?n sobre la Eliminaci?n de todas las formas de Discriminaci?n contra la Mujer y la Convenci?n sobre los Derechos del Ni?o, entre otros Tratados y Convenciones, con el objetivo de lograr la consolidaci?n y el total respeto de los Derechos Humanos en todo el sentido amplio que le cabe en su interpretaci?n. Asimismo, se invit? a las dem?s provincias argentinas y al Estado nacional para que dispongan una medida similar. El tratado incluye un proyecto que en los pr?ximos d?as ser? remitido a la legislatura provincial, para revisar toda la legislaci?n vigente, a los efectos de derogar aquellas normas que contengan privilegios o nichos de corrupci?n estructural. En los pr?ximos d?as el nuevo gobierno tambi?n va a implementar el programa de pleno empleo "Trabajo por San Luis" dirigido a todos los ciudadanos de la Provincia que est?n desocupados. Este programa, que no tiene fecha de caducidad, se propone terminar con los bolsones de desocupaci?n que puedan quedar en la provincia. Como complemento, el nuevo gobernador dio instrucciones para que en todas las ?reas de la administraci?n provincial se eliminen los gastos que tengan que ver con ceremonial, protocolo, desplazamiento y otras actividades similares (Gasto Cero), para destinar estos recursos a la inversi?n o al Plan de empleo. A pesar de tratarse de un hecho que l?gicamente contiene una relevancia pol?tica menor a la nacional, le hemos dedicado un amplio espacio a la asunci?n de EL ALBERTO (casi equivalente a la dedicada a Kirchner), porque pr?cticamente no ha recibido cobertura de los grandes multimedios argentinos. Esta pr?ctica, que ya hemos denunciado en otros Cuadros de Situaci?n, se hace tambi?n extensiva a todas las actividades de EL ADOLFO, que durante las ?ltimas semanas recorri? las provincias de C?rdoba, San Juan, Mendoza y San Luis brindando 21 conferencias de prensa, que no tuvieron ning?n tipo de cobertura radial, televisiva o escrita (con la excepci?n de una brindada en Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, que ?por error? fue recogida por el diario ?Clar?n?). Cabe se?alar que durante los ?ltimos d?as se han llevado a cabo reuniones de militantes del MNYP en todo el pa?s (juventud, mujeres, estructuras provinciales, etc.) para organizar y coordinar las actividades del movimiento durante los pr?ximos meses. A PASO DE VENCEDORES MOVIMIENTO NACIONAL Y POPULAR ANDRES CASTILLO??????? andrescastillomnyp at infovia.com.ar Este correo se envia desde el Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lidera Adolfo Rodriguez Sa?. Si Ud. quiere que sus contactos reciban el material de prensa y difusi?n del MNyP, deben suscribirse en: altasmnyp at mnyp.org. En cambio, si Ud. prefiere no recibir nuestros mensajes, por favor, haganoslo saber a bajasmnyp at mnyp.org en el termino de 96 horas lo borramos de nuestra lista. Las mujeres est?n participando activamente en el MNyP en todo el pais. La mesa de mujeres de Capital Federal nuclea mujeres independientes, militantes sociales y pol?ticas, universitarias, profesionales, etc. Pueden contactarnos mujeresbsas at mnyp.org SOMOS EL ANTISISTEMA Junio de 2003, A?o 1 de la Refundacion Argentina. Nuestras paginas web son: http://www.mnyp.org/ www.institutofederal.org www.fisal.org.ar // www.rodriguezsaapresidente.cjb.net // www.adolfopresidente.com// www.adolfo2003.com // www.conadolfo.com // www.juventudmnp.com.ar/ / Las posiciones acerca de la realidad actual estan expresadas en los 15 puntos de las BASES PARA LA REFUNDACION DE LA ARGENTINA, y que es lo que propone el MNyP esta contenido en las 100 primeras medidas para los primeros 100 dias de gobierno que Adolfo Rodr?guez Saa presentara el ultimo 7 de marzo de 2003 en la Sociedad Rural de Buenos Aires, y que Ud. puede pedir por mail al MNyP < mnyp at ciudad.com.ar>, personalmente en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Jean Jaures (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto) 1er piso, Capital Federal, Republica Argentina o por TE a 011-4866-4300 (lineas rotativas) 4866-1486. El MNyP esta organizado en dos instituciones equivalentes. Una es la organizacion territorial de los Comandos Superiores que comienzan en el Comando Superior Nacional del MNyP y continuan en los Comandos Superiores de cada Provincia y el de la Ciudad de Bs. As. y alcanzan a los Comandos Superiores de cada territorio electoral. Los Comandos Superiores son conducciones colectivas y horizontales. Dentro de los comandos cada voto de un integrante vale uno al igual que el de otro compa?ero de Comando, es decir que ninguno tiene el voto calificado aunque alguien sea un senador y el compa?ero de al lado sea un carpintero o un desocupado, como sucede en la realidad. Los Comandos se constituyen con una indicacion precisa: debe haber una determinada cantidad de jovenes de formacion politica como apolitica, tanto de unos como de otros. Debe estar representada la sociedad actual con sus nuevos liderazgos, mujeres que manejan comedores, militantes de base, dirigentes sociales que actuan en la emergencia de la exclusion social, representantes de oeneges, piqueteros, viejos dirigentes sindicales o politicos que habian sido olvidados por la dirigencia; jovenes profesionales universitarios, la juventud de los gremios, una cantidad importante de mujeres ya sean dirigentes o no, que encabecen demandas sociales, politicas o de genero, activistas del trueque, representantes de personas con discapacidades, etc. Para comunicarse con el Comando Superior Nacional puede escribirnos a MNyP< mnyp at ciudad.com.ar La otra institucion importante del MNyP es el Instituto Federal para la Refundacion de la Argentina que reune a tecnicos y profesionales de cada una de las ciudades de la Argentina que se ocupan de discutir y organizar los planes de gobierno, desde lo estrictamente local, del municipio, a la provincial y aun de los planes para el gobierno nacional. El Instituto Federal Nacional esta conducido por Jorge Benalcazar quien facilita la organizacion de los Institutos, por ciudad, en todo el pais. La sede fisica del Instituto Federal Nacional esta sita en Av. Corrientes 3149 y Jean Jaures (a media cuadra del ex Mercado de Abasto), Capital Federal, Republica Argentina. Su correo electronico es o . En la actualidad son 200 los Institutos Federales para la Refundacion Nacional conformados en todo el pais. El MNyP no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 58137 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 3170 bytes Desc: image003.jpg URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5663 bytes Desc: image004.gif URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4169 bytes Desc: image005.gif URL: From brendan.holland at ntlworld.com Fri May 30 12:43:34 2003 From: brendan.holland at ntlworld.com (brendan holland) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 19:43:34 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Re: Northern Ireland: Loyalists anti-racists Message-ID: <000901c326db$600c0680$bd1d6751@s1k0u1> Michael, in your reply to James Daly's question you clarified your position on this topic. Could you clarify it further by explaining " the sort of progressivist policies of the PUP". In the mean time, in order to cast more light on the nature of the PUP, I would commend the following. A news report from last summer on the PUP, which is the political wing of the UVF. http://members.lycos.co.uk/socialistdemocracyie/NewsLoyalistIntimidationInEa stBelfast.html A discussion within the Belfast Left on the PUP/UVF. http://members.lycos.co.uk/socialistdemocracyie/TheMeeting.html From soncu at pacbell.net Fri May 30 15:12:48 2003 From: soncu at pacbell.net (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 14:12:48 -0700 Subject: [A-List] (Forward from Nestor) Re: Argentina: military shake-up Message-ID: Financial Times informeth: "Argentina tries to limit military's role By Adam Thomson in Buenos Aires Financial Times; May 29, 2003" "N?stor Kirchner (pictured), Argentina's president, on Thursday delivered a powerful address to the country's armed forces, telling them they had to modernise and integrate fully with society." Not at all. What he told the Armed Forces was, simply put, that he was the Commander in Chief, and no military man could criticize the decissions of the Commander in Chief in a public speech. Brinzoni was against his own ousting simply because he has to confront law for presumed crimes during the 1976 dictatorship. Kirchner did in 2003 the same thing that Per?n did in 1973: he cleaned top brass of anyone who had been a high officer during the previous military regime. 50 top brass were thus passed into retirement. The new commanders, additionally, share personal knowledge of Kirchner since they were all active in Patagonia during recent years. The commander in chief of the Army was a lieutenant in 1976. What is important here is that Kirchner made this move in order to attain an Army that is "highly professional, prestigious and committed to the future, not to the past" (FT). That is, an Army that stops keeping respectful memories of the years when they were the "preferred victims" of "terrorists" and "had to"... overthrow a Constitutional president in order to save Argentineans from ourselves. This may also mean that the Argentinean army must now look forward to future joint work with our Brazilian, etc., counterparts in the constitution of a regional Latin American force of defense (this is, at least, what the most fervid pro-Kirchner guys have been spreading; I don?t buy this at all, but I comment it here). FT, rather triumphantly, finishes by stating that "Indeed, although the military played an active - and often interventionist - role in national politics throughout the 20th century, the institution today is weak, under-funded and largely irrelevant." Which is true but partial. To begin with, 50% of the military personnel lives below the poverty line. And officers have been steadily turning nationalists and anti-oligarchic together with the mass of the middle classes, and more or less at the same pace. Weakness of the Armed Forces is nothing for Argentineans to celebrate, indeed: it is one of the most serious consequences of the 1982 defeat. We are still under the secret Versailles Treaty that I am convinced that was imposed on us by the victors in the South Atlantic. We shall all overcome. The Armed Forces with us. We can trust on imperialism in this sense. From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat May 31 03:59:09 2003 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 02:59:09 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Cuba Dares-- By Patrick Bond Message-ID: <01f701c3275b$4942d610$20fa5718@comintern> Cuba Dares May 30, 2003 By Patrick Bond ZNet Commentary Any visitor initially experiencing Cuba might easily deduce that growing pressures make the continuation of the revolution and social progress untenable. The contradictions scream out. After rounding a corner leading from one drab Old Havana street with its decayed concrete and flaked walls, suddenly a gentrified square emerges with restored architecture, fresh paint and a United Colors of Benetton shop. Dollars rule, and tourism is not cheap. But the next street is back to peso-denominated urban grit. Then, not far away, a tacky shopping mall sells sweatshop products from Indonesia for dollars. Lessons that a self-proclaimed socialist society might provide the South African left were reason enough for Trevor Ngwane, David Masondo and me to trek from Johannesburg earlier this month. We were also intrigued by a four-day conference on 'The Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century', sponsored by the government's Institute of Philosophy, an economists' association and the trade union federation. The most poignant moment may have been at the harbour, after the intellectual arguments faded into the night, when Ngwane pulled the trumpet he'd brought from Soweto--always a fixture at our demonstrations--and pointed it out towards the sea. Another horn sounded nearby, and Ngwane was quickly joined by a Cuban musician. While language barriers made communication difficult, the trumpets told their stories. Ngwane's salary as a township anti-privatisation organiser is measly, but enough to pay for the couple of beers that, purchased at a medium-range hotel nearby, would have consumed a third of his new friend's monthly salary (US$9) as a music teacher. Holding tight to a 44-year old revolution amidst capitalist merchant encirclement, and facing down the deprivation of minor luxuries are hard enough. Although the extent of basic-needs decommodification is inspiring, the last few months have added all manner of geopolitical problems, not least the ebb and flow of Washington's intervention threat. The May 20 statement on Cuba by George W. Bush, who was joined at the White House by rightwing Miami-based exiles, was anticipated to ratchet up sanctions and travel restrictions. It did not, for now at least. Whether because of Middle East distractions or opposition emerging from US businesses who are opening new trade routes, including a roaring $150 million in US food exports to Cuba, Bush held fire. (But for context, even loony-right Wall Street Journal editorialists have recently called for an end to the US economic blockade.) Washington's expulsion of 14 Cuban diplomats a few days earlier, threats to prosecute US citizens traveling to Cuba, and public association with the Miami thugs, together may have helped him save face on the right. But president Fidel Castro's longevity and personal popularity will continue to present an infuriating target for the neoconservative clique in the Pentagon. These quirks also help explain the appearance of at least four international internet sign-on statements over the past weeks. Two from the centre-left and autonomists/anarchists chide Castro; one originating in Mexico and another from the Marx conference commit to defending Cuba against imperialism. So if not in practice, at least in theory, the ruthless critique of capitalism and search for routes to socialism were on the conference agenda. The most heated debates unfolded around the global situation and the state of the Cuban economy. President Fidel Castro made three appearances. He defended--in several hour-long interventions--the crackdown on US-funded dissidents and execution of three hijackers, as well as cracking jokes about the 'reptiles' and 'bandits' populating Latin American politics. But he also made a strong bid for an alliance with those global justice movements which, perhaps astutely, remain so wary of contemporary state politics. Terribly disappointed by the World Social Forum's decision to move in 2004 from Porto Alegre to Mumbai, Castro asked an international WSF leader, 'Is India about to be swallowed?!' He had apparently harboured hope of welcoming tens of thousands of delegates to Havana next January, an idea which perhaps at some point the WSF will be sufficiently mature and self-confident to entertain. Castro did, however, provide a vision--again, maybe merely a romantic hope--that one day radical Third World governments will be so strong, coherent and foresighted that they will seek real alliances with radical movements. His message: 'These are FIGHTERS, and that's what we must call them. They won at Seattle. At Quebec, they forced the FTAA into a fortified position. It was more than a demonstration, it was an insurgency.' If Castro and Che Guevara holed up in the mountains perfecting their surgical foci theory of agrarian-based revolution, entirely different circumstances seemed to have inspired Castro during the conference: 'The leaders of the world must now meet inside a bunker. They had to meet on a ship in Italy, and on a mountain in Canada. They needed police barriers in Davos, in peaceful Switzerland. The most important thing is that the fighters have created a real fear. The IMF and World Bank cannot meet properly.' Even if the G8, WTO and IMF/Bank officials must gather in fortresses these days, the dominance of neoliberalism has made its mark even on Cuba. Castro was, indeed, humble and self-critical about the country's economic failings and turned to ask a leading Havana economist, in a good-natured harangue that continued for hours: 'So we poisoned socialism?' It was more a statement than a question. As another example, the South African bureaucrat in charge of water, Mike Muller, posted a comment to a progressive listserve last Saturday with this slippery argument: 'You should know that Cuba has two concession contracts with Agbar--a subsidiary of Lyonnaise--one for approximately 50% of Havana. I believe it would be useful for critics of privatisation to consider the Cuban case and the background to their decision to choose this route in order to develop a better understanding of the challenges that face PUBLIC service providers in all countries.' In the past, Muller's boss, SA Communist Party national executive committee member and water minister Ronnie Kasrils, has also cited Havana as a justification for promoting 'public-private partnerships' at home. What, then, is the 'background', and how does it compare to South Africa? Really, Pretoria officials dare not make these sorts of comparisons: * Cuba has the commanding heights of their economy firmly under state control. (In contrast, South Africa has been part-privatising our main state-owned assets ever since the dying days of apartheid: electricity this year, telecommunications in 1997 and via a NY Stock Market listing three months ago, the transport sector throughout, several long-term water concessions dating to the early 1990s, the main iron/steel firm in 1989; and the results have been uniformly disastrous in terms of job cuts and disconnections of service to low-income people.) * Cuba has had a policy of egalitarianism, albeit under recent threat by dollarisation, but nevertheless based upon a grassroots-driven, revolutionary imposition of new social policies that, from the outset, eradicated the kind of inequality pervasive in the Third World. (In contrast, since the ANC government took power in South Africa, black households have become much poorer--a 19% loss of income from 1995-2000--and white households 15% wealthier, according to even government statistics; which reflects an elite clique's imposition of neoliberal macroeconomic and microdevelopment policies, including water until the 2000 cholera outbreak became a national scandal.) * Cuba's water-system regulations are extremely rigorous. (In contrast, our SA regulations are so pathetic that the world's biggest water firms have screwed up water provision in small towns--like Dolphin Coast, Nkonkobe and Nelspruit--which were meant to be model private participation pilot projects but which in reality failed miserably, leading in Nkonkobe to Suez being tossed out entirely, in Dolphin Coast to Saur insisting on a contract rewrite to assure higher profits, and in Nelspruit to Biwater potentially withdrawing in coming weeks because of such high levels of consumer dissatisfaction; all of this without any supportive pro-municipal interventions from Pretoria, especially Muller, the de facto national regulator.) * Cuba's state finances are desperate for a logical reason: the decades-old US embargo forced the economy into dependency upon the East Bloc, and when neoliberalism and changes in regimes there forced an end to trade and barter arrangements in 1991-93, Cuba suffered a 75% loss of export earnings. (In contrast, after anti-apartheid sanctions were lifted in a newly-liberated SA, our economy 'benefitted' from a dramatic increase in export earnings, but at the same time, Pretoria's proud record of financial liberalisation--specifically, the 1995 relaxation of most exchange controls and the 1998-99 permission granted for the biggest SA firms to relocate their financial hqs to London--led to massive capital flight, i.e., not economic bleeding caused by factors beyond control as in Cuba, but instead, ideologically-driven financial suicide.) * Cuba's water-system finances are also desperate, because cross-subsidisation from the big water users (e.g., cane fields and forestry) would really adversely affect their scarce inflows of hard currency, so the possibilities for harmonising the social aspects of the hydrological cycle are quite limited. (In contrast, in SA, water apartheid remains as severe as any in the world, and Muller's water department has not yet moved to discipline the hedonistic users of water--especially timber plantations, white farmers, corporate mines and white suburban households--with far higher water prices, that would then allow the state to cross-subsidise water for the masses; and moreover, Pretoria is happy to spend US$5 billion on offensive high-tech weaponry at a time cholera and diarrhoea run rampant due to lack of clean water.) * Notwithstanding terrible poverty across the society in general due to the export collapse, Cuba's own investment in water engineers and the health sector is the highest of any Third World country, and is reflected, for example, in an extremely low level of full-blown AIDS, especially related to water-borne diseases. (In contrast, Pretoria's reluctance to treat people who are HIV+ remains so durable that the most respected health researchers and doctors regularly refer to the health minister and president as 'genocidal'; and meanwhile, many of our 600+ AIDS deaths each day occur because Muller's dirty water causes opportunistic infections.) * Cuba does not disconnect people from their water supplies. (In contrast, even after millions of water disconnections and the worst recorded cholera epidemic in SA's history, there are still municipal officials like the man in Durban who brags about disconnecting water supplies to 1,000 people in his jurisdiction every day, notwithstanding periodic cholera outbreaks and persistent diarrhoea problems in Durban's black townships.) That's why, to Ngwane, Masondo and me, Cuba left such an excellent impression. Also, though he raves didactically for hours on end, Castro is a far superior radical nationalist leader than the mediocre, repressive crew at the helm of African states, and in his late 70's still retains an extraordinary grasp of detail. The conference was also inspiring. It included a revitalising exchange between several hundred Cuban marxists and more than 100 international scholars and activists mainly of the independent-left, such as Samir Amin, Fred Bienefeld, Liudmila Boulavka, Simon Clarke, Francois Houtart, Diane Flaherty, Barbara Foley, Marta Harnecker, David Kotz, Michael Lebowitz and Istvan Meszaros. Controversies raged over the use of phrases such as Nazi-fascism (a Castro favourite) to describe the US Empire, and whether, as Amin suggested, it is feasible to posit 'the construction of a large front, composed of all the forces that could be in opposition.' That idea, Clarke replied, was a 'fantasy,' as genuine international anti-imperialism would arise only, following the classic maxim, after 'each working class first settled accounts with their own (national) bourgeoisies.' But none of the participants objected to a final 'Communique of Solidarity' that observed how Cuba's 'achievements and hopes for a better world are threatened by a power based in inequality, force and war... and we reaffirm our solidarity with the Cuban people and their revolution'. (Patrick is at pbond at sn.apc.org) ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat May 31 09:58:21 2003 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 11:58:21 EDT Subject: [A-List] Cuba Dares-- By Patrick Bond Message-ID: <1c8.a7e2a6b.2c0a2b1d@aol.com> In a message dated 5/31/03 3:04:56 AM Pacific Daylight Time, mstainsby at tao.ca writes: Cuba Dares May 30, 2003 By Patrick Bond ZNet Commentary >Although the extent of basic-needs decommodification is inspiring, the last few months have added all manner of geopolitical problems, not least the ebb and flow of Washington's intervention threat. The May 20 statement on Cuba by George W. Bush, who was joined at the White House by rightwing Miami-based exiles, was anticipated to ratchet up sanctions and travel restrictions. < Comment What a brilliant article of actuality and a sense of that, which is profoundly political and immediate. The basic-needs in Cuban society have not undergone decommodification but instead have been shielded by a series of political acts that blunt the fact of the law of value and remove them from the sphere of the harsh law of value - to an enormous degree. Here are the economic problems of socialism, as it existed in the former Soviet Union and in Cuba and North Korea today. Here is the question of Marx's approach to the theory of value, which Engels first discovered in its historical trajectory and of which Marx unfolded its basic law system. Engel's did not discover the theory of value and neither did Marx, but he unfolded its trajectory in 1844, when he stated that all that would be left of value is its residual impact in the administration of things and not as an all determining force of production and distribution of the social product. Engels basically stated this in his Condition of the Working Class In England. Marx worked out the law system that governs the value producing society decline and decay. The law of value has been mystified by the bourgeois intelligencia but there is nothing difficult in the way Marx and Engels re-presented the question. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into the creation of products - commodities. Anyone can understand this. We are not talking about how to measure what is socially necessary in everything created but a definition of value. We are not talking about the price of anything but value. Price is subject to another set of interactions, which included productive capacity of one country against another, what commodities are being traded, distribution factors and how much you can fool me and jack up the price on me before I go elsewhere. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into the creation of products. Cuba cannot escape the law of value and no country on its own can remove itself from the impact and affect of the law of value simply because political leaders think it is a good idea. To engage in trade and secure things that the people of Cuba need and desire, the government of Cuba - like all governments on earth, must enter into exchange relations with countries that product different things that their country do not produce. Here is the question: Cuba needs a cement industry to produce the foundations for homes, roadways and commercial centers. Her industry cannot supply the total amount of cement needed because of her economic development. Cuba enters the world market to buy cement. Whoever she buys the cement from demands she pay them something - money. Why? Because money is the medium of exchange. Forget the history of money as a universal medium of exchange and know that to get the cement from France you need money. In return for the cement from France, Cuba exchanges a lot of sugar, which has a price on the world market. It gets tiny bit complicated because the price of sugar on the world market is cheaper than the price of cement. Why is the price of sugar cheaper than the price of cement in the world market? There are only two explanations. 1.) It takes more labor, equipment and energy to make cement than sugar and this means that there is more value in cement than sugar on the world market. 2). Or, the price of sugar is being subsidized - carried, by major producers, which collapsing the price of sugar in the world market. The value of sugar is not being lowered in number two only its price. Here in number 2 example, the value in producing a thousand pounds of sugar is more than the value of producing a thousand pounds of cement, but the government is footing the bill to allow cement to be sold cheaper than sugar on the world market. No matter how we look at matters that bottom line is "Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into the creation of products" and equivalents exchange. Politics affect prices and technology + human labor + energy source, governs the parameters of the law of value. What is the point? 1). Marx approach to economics and the law of value is correct and simple. 2). No one escapes the law of value because they think it is a bad idea. 3). Governments have to deal with exchange relationships because we are currently in an interactive world market and you must engage in exchange. 4). Even when you cheat the law of value and get thousands of people to volunteer to cut sugarcane (for free and out of revolutionary commitment), the bourgeoisie know you are cheating the law of value and you end up paying by way of facing collapsing prices on the world market for sugar or by having to sell something else for exchange to get your cement. All of humanity faces the very real issue of the technological revolution and competition. Competition will drive the price of sugar or coffee down as more producers enter the market to sell their products - the same thing, and the technological revolution takes grip on the process and drives one producer after another, cost down. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into the creation of products. There is no such thing as a "labor theory of value." This is a formulation of the bourgeoisie as it pressures the proletarian Marxists. At the end of the day, value is human labor - the amount of human labor, which goes into the production of commodities and the only way it is measured, is by the category called "socially necessary." Here is the economic problem of socialism in the real world. Cuba needs an expanding array of products because the population expands, develops, evolves and is under pressure of desire of goods from the capitalist world. Cuba and no country on earth is an island on to itself. The young man in Cuba, at age 20 wants to get his women friend at 19, a great pair of jeans. He has to get the money or equivalents to get those jeans. The jeans are not offered for sell in government stores but in the illegal market, which is allowed by the government to exist in order to satisfy the desires of the people. The problem arises within socialism when the government leaders gets their reports that say 100,000,000,000 of their dollars are going to purchase those great looking jeans. Someone says "if we crack down a little bit we can capture 500,000,000 of these dollars and use it to buy beef, pharmaceuticals or new technology to build our own jean making factories or as in the case of the article water purifying equipment and water systems. Who has the best water purifying systems if not the most industrial developed countries? What happens is that government officials who have shielded and protected illegal producers of those great jeans (who have boot legged Levi tags), and allowed government equipment to be diverted that was earmarked for making dresses, now comes under pressure by other people in the government who are witness to their operations. Someone screams "they are drawing labor from another sector of the economy - the sugar industry," and this leads to a crack down by the same people who said, "We better make a bunch of blue jeans." This is called the political struggle or the face of the class struggle under socialism. In the Soviet Union this meant another wave of purges and execution of executives - not the folks in the factory making the jeans. What governed the context of this bizarre struggle were a shortage of productive capacity or goods and the unrelenting pressure of bourgeois property on public property. The problem is not the free market as an abstraction but the power of capital and bourgeois property relations. There is no such thing as a free market as such. The "bourgeois free market" means that capital and labor are relatively free - within certain national boundaries, to engage in exchange unrestricted by political laws that blunt and shape the law of value. Cuba has to engage in world exchange. Why? Because that is the configuration of the world market and no one country produces everything on its own. The international division of labor is real and simply because it arose on the basis of the capitalist mode of production does not change the fact. American, Canada, China, Brazil, Germany, Britain and Russia and Ethiopia must engage in world exchange. It is true as in the case of Britain that most of her commodity exchange is with the European Union but borrowing money on the international market leads one to America, but that is a story for later. Here a real antagonism is emerging but in the last instance it is based in the technological revolution and America's desire for Empire. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into the creation of products - commodities. The coffee producers in Ethiopia and South America have been hit real hard as competition has reduced the price of their export product on the world market and to America. Starbucks is cleaning up based on this divergence between price and value. It is not like we pay less for a cup of coffee from Starbucks although the grocery store price of coffee fell a year ago. Even the oil producers are hit by competition although profound political assertions seek to stabilize and control oil. Politics always enter the picture. As each of the former colonial countries rushed to produce a desired product on the world market they acted to collapse its price and value as a law of operations of the value system. Think about Putin in Russia and trying to modernize the former Soviet economy to engage in exchange on the basis of bourgeois property relations. Russia cannot compete in the international market against China or increasingly valueless production in America and Japan. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into the creation of products -commodities and in the last instance the tendency is always for equivalents to exchange. The equivalent is the labor content and not the price expression of commodities. Politics can blunt the law of value but only a technological revolution in the mode of production - the material power of production, can unravel the value producing system. Cuba is facing the pressure of the most imperial centers of world capital rule and holding its own. Trade to Cuba is important and I am going to go and spend some money under socialism. We must discover the means to tell the American people what is taking place in a way in which they think things out. Why should all of our national wealth go increasingly to war and the military industry? Even if one has sympathy for the military industry how do you justify not providing people with the basis-need commodities - this includes housing, education and health care, when a political law can remove these items from the full weight of the value system today and right now? Marx is relevant for today and right now. Melvin P. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 11958 bytes Desc: not available URL: From nacypop at ciudad.com.ar Sat May 31 17:18:17 2003 From: nacypop at ciudad.com.ar (NAC&POP) Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 20:18:17 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Un reportaje a Alfredro Eric Calcagno Message-ID: <4129-22003563123181740@n2b4c1> win98Normalwin98232003-05-31T22:49:00Z2003-05-31T22:49:00Z4200711440win9522140499.3821 21 Gentileza de Julio Fern?ndez Baraibar" < julfb at alternativagratis.com.ar> Reportaje a Eric Calcagno DECLARACIONES DE ERIC CALCAGNO INDEPENDENCIA NACIONAL O MAS DE LO MISMO Por: Joaqu?n Rivery Tur y Jorge Luis Gonz?lez ?(GRANMA) -En Argentina se cay? un modelo sin reemplazo, asegur? en su departamento Alfredo Eric Calcagno, un eminente economista argentino que observa bien de cerca lo que est? sucediendo en su pa?s, sin perderle pie ni pisada a la situaci?n. ?Para Alfredo Eric Calcagno, -se cay? un modelo y no fue reemplazado por nada y todav?a seguimos sin que nada lo reemplace. -En estas ?ltimas elecciones hubo un cambio pol?tico importante, pero que no alcanza para configurar un nuevo panorama de partidos pol?ticos lo importante es que desapareci? Menem de la pol?tica nacional y desapareci? el radicalismo, que sac? solo el 2,8% de los votos -Un an?lisis suyo de la situaci?n lo hace subrayar que 'el problema es que todav?a no tiene vida pol?tica el sistema alternativo, que est? elaborado en la visi?n de muchos economistas y pol?ticos, pero a?n no tiene organizaci?n pol?tica que lo sostenga. -En realidad -a?ade- en estas elecciones no hubo programas. Fueron esencialmente con Menem o contra Menem. El deseo era no queremos m?s esto, pero no se estableci? claramente qu? es lo que queremos y c?mo vamos a estructurar el pa?s. -Bas?ndose en la historia, defini? que la econom?a argentina tiene tres etapas. Una desde sus inicios hasta 1946 que denomin? agraria. La segunda, hasta1976, considerada como industrial, muy influida por la pol?tica cepalista. Y la tercera, a partir de ese a?o (comienza la dictadura militar), calificada como de renta y financiera, que dura hasta hoy. ? -Con Menem se dio la apertura comercial m?s absoluta; resultaba m?s barato importar que producir en el pa?s. -Se trata de un sistema completamente inviable, porque, de acuerdo con la Ley de Convertibilidad (un peso=un d?lar), todo d?ficit del sector fiscal o externo hab?a que saldarlo, bien con venta de propiedades del Estado, bien con endeudamiento. -En los primeros tiempos no m?s que ya se vendi? todo, expres? el acad?mico. -No qued? m?s que el endeudamiento, lo que funcion? mientras entraban 20 000 millones de d?lares de endeudamiento por a?o. Es sabido que no puede vivir ning?n pa?s y ninguna persona sobre la base del endeudamiento perpetuo. Se da el momento en que no prestan m?s. Eso fue lo que sucedi? en el 2001. -La crisis que volte? al Gobierno se produjo simplemente porque no prestaron m?s los prestamistas internacionales y entonces se derrumb? todo, pero sin que todav?a estuviera maduro, ni siquiera en sus rasgos m?s evidentes, el modelo que lo va a sustituir ni el cambio pol?tico. Para Alfredo Eric Calcagno, que siempre realiza sus investigaciones junto a su hijo Eric, -este Gobierno tiene como reto fundamental pasar del modelo de renta y especulaci?n a un modelo de producci?n. Eso tiene implicaciones enormes. -Hay que reindustrializar el pa?s; hay que afianzar la soberan?a nacional, que no se ejerce. En estos momentos, si usted quiere saber cu?l es el plan del pa?s en lo econ?mico, no tiene que ir a los gobernantes, sino al acuerdo stand by con el Fondo Monetario. Desde 1976 el programa econ?mico es dise?ado en los acuerdos con el Fondo Monetario Internacional.. -Ahora hay un acuerdo en vigencia, firmado en enero del 2003 y que hay que revisar en agosto y que ser?a nefasto para Argentina. La otra cosa es pasar a un r?gimen de preproducci?n. Para eso hay que hacer una fort?sima redistribuci?n de la riqueza. -En este momento estamos en el quinto a?o de recesi?n. - El producto por habitante de este a?o es como un 15% menor que en 1976. Por eso hacen falta actos del Gobierno de inmediato. Uno es un shock redistributivo. -Queremos que lo haga el Gobierno, porque para reactivar, lo primero que tiene que hacer es darle poder de compra a la poblaci?n, que est? bajo la l?nea de pobreza en un 57%, y de ellos el 20% en la indigencia. -Hay actos clave necesarios, pero todav?a estamos con la incertidumbre. No sabemos si lo que se va a cumplir son los prop?sitos muy buenos enunciados por el presidente Kirchner, quien dijo que va a dejar de ser el gerente de las corporaciones y que no va a aceptar imposiciones del Fondo. Lo que plantea el nuevo Presidente es completamente viable en opini?n del doctor Calcagno. -Lo que pasa es que hay que tener valent?a para aplicarlo en la pr?ctica, porque las condiciones para ello est?n. -Basta con hacer funcionar lo que ya tenemos. En Argentina existen las f?bricas, las empresas, la memoria industrial, y basta con que la gente se ponga otra vez a trabajar. -La dificultad que cita el profesor de Econom?a es que los due?os del pa?s son los bancos, las empresas privatizadas que extraen recursos naturales, sobre todo petr?leo, y el Fondo Monetario Internacional y no quieren que esto suceda. Va a venir una tremenda lucha con esos grupos si el presidente Kirchner mantiene sus prop?sitos. -Hemos salido un poco de la recesi?n, explica, porque no hicieron caso de las recetas del FMI. Pero ahora viene una lucha interna entre los due?os del pa?s y el pa?s mismo. -Tenemos vencimientos acumulados por 11 000 millones de d?lares, enfatiza, pero debemos salir de la econom?a del endeudamiento. Todo ha sido por vivir 25 a?os bajo el endeudamiento. -Incluso no necesitamos que vengan d?lares, lo que necesitamos es que no se los lleven. El a?o pasado salieron del pa?s 19 000 millones de d?lares. Se evaporaron. -Hay que implantar un control de cambios y medidas que impidan que eso suceda y creo que es insensato hacer una pol?tica para que vengan d?lares en lugar de impedir que se lleven los que generamos nosotros. En la consideraci?n de Calcagno, la perspectiva es muy buena respecto a la integraci?n, pues una de las cosas que se discut?an en las elecciones eran ALCA con Menem o MERCOSUR con Kirchner. -La salida l?gica para Argentina es ir a una relaci?n muy estrecha con Brasil con vistas a hacer una integraci?n de Sudam?rica, incorporando tambi?n a Venezuela, de forma que Sudam?rica pueda ser una unidad geopol?tica con alg?n peso en la arena internacional. ? -Hay dos cl?usulas en el acuerdo con el FMI que son una trampa para el Gobierno. Se fija un super?vit primario (es decir, antes del pago de intereses), que es el que se usa para pagar los intereses de la deuda. Se ha fijado un 2,1% del PIB como super?vit necesario, pero el plan de obras p?blicas pr?cticamente no lo permite, sobre todo si se junta con los requerimientos de fondos que se exigen en el campo social. Calcagno es tajante: -Es un crimen tener un super?vit fiscal con 10 millones de indigentes. Esos fondos tienen que destinarse a planes sociales y a la reconstrucci?n de la industria. Si se cumple con ese super?vit no habr? posibilidad de ninguna obra p?blica ni social y el Gobierno de Kirchner corre serios riesgos de no poder hacer nada. Al final, su gran interrogante es -si vamos hacia un proceso de independencia nacional o vamos a tener m?s de lo mismo. Hay que esperar para ver. Es una tarea muy dura. ? ? redaccion at argenpress.info ? info at argenpress.info ?COPYRIGHT ARGENPRESS.INFO (c) 2003 ? webmaster at argenpress.info Esta recibiendo este mensaje de la NAC&POP (Red Nacional y Popular de Noticias) porque es uno de nuestros amigos, o porque su direcci?n de correo electr?nico pertenece a un medio de comunicaci?n social o porque es una personalidad que nos ha sido recomendada por alguno de nuestros amigos comunes y por eso est? incluida en la lista de los que llamamos "AMIGOS DE LOS AMIGOS". Amigos de los Amigos es ya una comunidad real de comunicaci?n virtual donde se comparten solidariamente las noticias, las reflexiones, los conocimientos y la experiencia producida por las luchas de los distintos sectores del pueblo criollo en la defensa de su justas causas. S Ud ha pedido la BAJA a nuestro servicio y todav?a no han pasado las 96 horas necesarias para sacarlo de nuestra lista le pedimos que nos tenga un poco de paciencia y disimule las molestias que le ocasionamnos con este nuevo envio. En la NAC&POP se discuten ideas, visiones, filosof?a, experiencias, practicas e informaci?n sobre los diversos temas relacionados con la Cultura y la Comunicaci?n; la Pol?tica y el Desarrollo Social, Econ?mico e Institucional de la Argentina como parte indivisible de la gran familia de la Patria Grande de Iberoam?rica en lucha por su destino y en unidad con todos los pueblos del mundo, con el genero humano, como hermanos. En la NAC & POP la circulaci?n de noticias, art?culos, discusiones y eventos est? relacionada con la defensa de la independencia econ?mica, la soberan?a pol?tica y la justicia social de los criollos en la majestad de su propia cultura y en armonia con el ecosistema natural de su territorio. La NAC & POP est? impulsada por La Mesa de los Sue?os de los Compa?eros de Utop?as de la Agrupaci?n Oesterheld en su permanente homenaje a los grandes patriotas y como un humilde aporte de amor activo al Pueblo criollo, de pie, en la conformaci?n y consolidaci?n del Movimiento Nacional y Popular que lo lleve a la victoria. La NAC & POP se envia y se recibe gracias a la actitud valiente, activa y decisiva de los suscriptores que la defiendieron cuando fue necesario y determinante ya que, frente a todo tipo de filtro, bloqueo o censura actuo firmemente cuando debio hacerlo en defensa de sus derechos, el derecho a la libertad de expresion, el derecho a la informacion y el derecho a la comunicacion ante quien correspondiera, actuando como si fuera uno solo en una epopeya de miles de correos electronicos , llamados telefonicos y organizacion de futuros actos callejeros de protesta que, si bien, algunos no llegaron a concretarse -porque no hizo falta- mostraron la calidad de sus integrantes y la fuerza de el estar unidos en la defensa de su comun dignidad. Si quiere dar de BAJA su direcci?n o tramitar un ALTA env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar Si quiere realizar una CONTRIBUCION a la distribuci?n de noticias, datos, mensajes, art?culos o reuniones, congresos actos y espect?culos, env?e un mensaje a: nakypop at sinectis.com.ar La NAC&POP. no se hace responsable por el contenido de los articulos de opinion que se difundan por esta red ya que deben ser considerados realizados por los compa?eros a titulo personal. Director Editorial: Mart?n Garc?a / Coordinadora General: Rosana Salas ----------------------------------------- - EN OCTUBRE 2001 LA CAMARA DE DIPUTADOS DE ARGENTINA VOTO UNA LEY PARA CERRAR LAS FM Y LOS CANALES LIBRES Y COMUNITARIOS Y ENVIAR A LA CARCEL A LOS RADIODIFUSORES DE LA DEMOCRACIA MANTENIENDO COMO LEGALES LAS RADIOS Y CANALES DE TV DE LA DICTADURA DEL PROCESO. LO HIZO APROVECHANDO LA IMAGEN DE LOS AVIONES ESTRELLANDOSE CONTRA LAS TORRES GEMELAS, UN MES DESPUES DEL ATENTADO ALEGANDO UN PELIGRO PARA LOS AEROPUERTOS QUE LUEGO SE DEMOSTRO QUE ERA PRODUCIDO POR LAS RADIOS LEGALES. EN OCTUBRE 2002 LO APROBO EL SENADO GRACIAS A LA ENORME PRESION DE LOS LOBBYS DE ATA Y ARPA - LAS MULTINACIONALES ENQUISTADAS DETRAS DE LOS MEDIOS EN ARGENTINA COMO LA JP MORGAN-LA CALIFICADORA DE RIESGO-PAIS, LAS EMPRESAS MULTIMEDIOS COMO CLARIN, LA AQUIESCENCIA DE SENADORES DE DUDOSA HONORABILIDAD COMO JENEFES Y GIOJA Y ANTES, CON LA REPUGNANTE ACTITUD DE LOS DIPUTADOS FONDEVILA, DUMON, LARRABURU Y BRANDONI, SERVILES, ESTOS DIPUTADOS Y SENADORES, HAN DESCUBIERTO LA NUEVA FORMULA DE LOS POLITICOS FRACASADOS: DUROS CON EL PUEBLO, ALFOMBRA CON LOS PODEROSOS...ASI LES VA. AHORA EN EL 2003, VUELVE A DIPUTADOS POR ALGUNOS CAMBIOS INTRODUCIDOS POR LOS COMPA?EROS Y COMIENZA LA BATALLA DEFINITIVA : PUEBLO O ESTABLISHMENT, PATRIA O COLONIA, LIBERTAD O MONOPOLIOS, COMUNIDAD ORGANIZADA O COMUNIDAD SOJUZGADA. LOS LEGISLADORES DEBEN OPTAR. ----------------------------------------- VISITE www.abuelas.org.ar www.agua-mansa.com> www.antiescualidos.com/indexnew.html www.ar.geocities.com/publicidadpolitica www.asamblea.arg.net.ar www.asovic.org> www.ate.org.ar www.caracas.jotaceve.org> www.cels.org.ar/ www.clasemediaenpositivozulia.org> www.cnanoticias.com/ www.conadolfo.com www.ctabsas.org.ar / www.documentalistas.org.ar/ www.eldescamisado.org www.espacioautogestionario.com www.excluidos.org/ www.farco.org.ar www.florestaporjusticia.8m.com/ www.forointergeneracional.freeservers.com/ www.foronacional.gov.ve www.frenteparaelcambio.org www.galeon.hispavista.com/anarcoperonismo1111/ www.geocities.com/bsasnegro/index.html / www.geocities.com/cipayoscom www.geocities.com/fub_usb> www.geocities.com/pmavl/> www.geocities.com/proyectoemancipacion www.geocities.com/revistatizon/arg.html www.geocities.com/walshrodolfo www.hijoslucha.netfirms.com www.hijos-rosario.org.ar / www.inquilinos.org.ar/ www.jdperon.gov.ar / www.ladeudaexterna.com www.lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/reconquista-popular www.losocial.com.ar www.lucheyvuelve.com.ar www.madres.org www.madres-lineafundadora.org www.mnyp.org www.movimientomontonero.org www.mr-jsm.com.ar www.mundoamateur.com.ar www.nodo50.org/venezuela-unida/> www.parlamentoperonista.cjb.net / www.patrialibre.org.ar www.pjn.gov.ar/ www.pochormiga.com.ar> www.polemicadigital.com.ar www.porlavida.abuelas.org.ar www.procesobolivariano.8k.com> www.radioataque.org> www.rebelion.org> www.redbolivariana.com/> www.red-vertice.com/anv/index.html www.revistalinea.com? www.rt-a.com www.sinolvido.org/ www.soberania.info> www.sutebalamatanza.org.ar/ www.todosjuntos.foros.org www.unasolapatria.org/inicio.htm> www.villacrespomibarrio.com.ar -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 29141 bytes Desc: not available URL: From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Sat May 31 18:13:21 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 02:13:21 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Frankenstein and the Monster (Part I) Message-ID: <3ED94521.9C28C508@usuarios.retecal.es> Frankenstein and the Monster The Spanish State Left after the Elections of 25 May 'There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shadows and in miseries.' --Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3 On 25 May local elections [1] were held in the Spanish state: a veritable rehearsal for the general elections scheduled for next spring. And for the first time since 1993, PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Party, won more votes across Spain that the neo-clerical [2] conservative Partido Popular (PP), in power in Madrid since 1996. A cause for celebration? A sign of change for the future? Not a bit of it. Although PSOE managed to win a marginal lead over the PP in terms of total municipal votes cast, the very narrowness of this lead fell far short of both the party's and popular expectations. The other left force, Izquierda Unida, failed to increase its vote. Viewed in context this was a truly miserable performance on the part of Spanish-state social democracy, a performance, moreover, in its contours utterly predictable. Why this should be the case forms the substance of what follows below. AZNAR'S WINTER OF DISCONTENT To say that Spanish State Prime Minister [3] Jos? Mar?a Aznar has had a difficult last six months would seem to be stating the obvious. In an unluckily symbolic fashion Aznar's PP government began its difficult winter last November, as the Greek-skippered, Bahamas-registered and Liberian-owned tanker Prestige sank off the northern Galician coast - site of some of the richest beds of shell-fish in Europe - taking 60,000 tonnes of Russian-owned fuel oil and seemingly the reputation of the Spanish government down with it. It wasn't so much that the PP mishandled the situation - although its dithering over whether to bring the ship into port or send it further out into the Atlantic did in the end prove fatal to the vessel as it broke up in heavy seas: it was that the government, both in Madrid and in Galicia - the latter itself an historical heartland of the PP, where the President of the regional government is none other than Manuel Fraga, a founder of the PP and a former Francoist minister - appeared indifferent to the impending ecological catastrophe. Fraga himself was away on a hunting trip as the Prestige went down, but took the time out to assure the panic-stricken Galician fishermen, who were seeing the possibility of the source of their livelihoods being destroyed forever, that 'God would resolve everything,' and that they had to put their trust in Him (in God, that is; not Fraga). Nevertheless, despite both divine caprice and Madrid's soothing reassurances that the combination of sea pressure and the cold would safely solidify the oil that remained in the ship, an enormous slick that was to herald the worst ecological disaster in Spanish history was washed onto one of the most beautiful coastlines in Europe. As volunteers rushed to the scene from all over Spain, and indeed from all over Europe, to help clear the oil from the Galician beaches, the complacency of the government once again stood exposed as prime-time Spanish-state television viewers were treated to nightly news reports showing volunteers clearing away the oil without even the most basic of protective equipment, at times even having to scoop up the highly toxic and carcinogenic heavy fuel oil, which has the consistency of sticky chewing gum, with their bare hands. With Fraga cast as Marie Antoinette, and his prot?g? Aznar as Louis XVI, the PP had seemed to have forgotten the first basic rule of bourgeois government: that, in a crisis, it is better to do the wrong thing that to be seen to be doing nothing at all. As if this was not bad enough, more troubles were to come. Aznar had long harboured aspirations to play the role of world statesman. His long and public courtship of whom he would refer to as 'my friend Tony Blair' (the Blair and Aznar families had been long in the habit of taking their summer holidays together) had been followed by the bestowing of political favour by one George W. Bush, who, knowing a soft landing when he sees one, opened his first European tour as President with an official visit to the Spanish state on the reasoning that, no matter how tough things might get later, at least in Spain he was sure of a welcome and something of an easy ride. Thus, as war loomed over Iraq, Aznar was keen to play a key role in the setting up of the international alliance in favour of military invasion. Aznar it was who authored the first draft of the 'Carta de los Ocho', later redrafted by Tony Blair and subsequently co-signed by the governments of Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Denmark and the Czech Republic, in which, in frankly racist terms, the pro-war European faction nailed its colours to the mast of US militarism. [4] And it was Aznar who was invited by Bush and Blair to the Azores summit in April where the final decision to go to war was taken. So even if the final Spanish state contribution to the military effort was in the end negligible (amounting only to a few botched attempts to distribute food aid at its close) Aznar played a significant diplomatic and propaganda role in drumming up international support for it, for which services he has subsequently been obsequiously feted on both anglophone sides of the Atlantic. But rarely has a government been so unsuccessful in taking its people with it. Although the anti-war mobilisations were huge all over the world, in the Spanish state they were truly enormous. On 15 February, probably the peak of the movement, if one tots up the total numbers who mobilised in Madrid, Barcelona and many other Spanish state towns and cities one comes to the figure of something around an unprecedented four million - one in ten of the population - marching that day in Spain, in a mobilisation hardly matched by anything seen since the days of the Second Republic. Trouble had in fact been looming for Aznar as early as the beginning of that same month when the Goyas, the Spanish version of the Oscars, turned into a veritable anti-war protest as the Spanish cinema gliterati declared itself almost unanimously against the government. The Aznar government found itself almost completely isolated over the issue: not only did the major trade union federations and the Communist Party come out against the war, but the mobilisations of 15 February were also backed by PSOE. An opinion poll published by the conservative Madrid daily El Mundo at the end of March put the opposition to the war in Spain - and this before any military assistance had been committed by the government - at an astonishing 91 per cent. [5] Thus by early spring, and only one year before general elections and barely three months before the recent local elections, Aznar's government - in power since 1996 - looked to be in fairly serious trouble. But the War over Iraq and the Prestige crisis were not the only harbingers of electoral difficulties ahead. Indeed, the PP itself has been hovering on the brink of a succession crisis for some time now, since Aznar has long since decided that he would not be leading the party in the 2004 elections. [6] Although no formal candidates have put themselves forward for the future vacancy, it is clear that there has been a sharpening of knives for some time now. And if all this were not enough, it is well known that, taking stock of more long term features of Spanish society, the Aznar government has been presiding over some of the worst social conditions in the European Union. Labour insecurity is a chronic problem in the Spanish state: a little under one third of the entire Spanish workforce is on temporary contracts - around triple the EU average - a phenomenon that is naturally more pronounced among women, among young people, and in the private sector. As a consequence, nearly 40 per cent of women working in the private sector work with temporary contracts; with respect to young people, in 2001 the temporary employment rate stood at 63 per cent among the population aged 20-24, and 44 per cent among those aged 25-29. Of all new contracts registered with the Spanish State employment ministry, an astonishing 90 per cent plus are time-limited in some way. The unemployment rate, even going by the heavily massaged official figures, stands at over double the average of the OECD area, and is rising. Spain is additionally a low wage economy: the last government increase in the national minimum wage, the Salario M?nimo Interprofesional, put its level to ?442.20 per month (or ?14.74 per day). This level, less than ?2 per hour, is the lowest in the EU and is far below the EU average of ?5.65. It is true that most workers are covered by compulsory employer-union agreements which normally set wage levels relatively higher, but it is still estimated that around half a million Spanish workers receive the minimum wage. In addition to all this, Spain is in the grip of a fierce speculation-fuelled housing crisis: house prices have risen by over 63 per cent in the last four years. In 2001, the growth in the average price of housing property was 15.4 per cent while inflation stood at 2.7 per cent. That these rises are fuelled by speculation and not by a 'normal' supply and demand imbalance - i.e. that they indicate that something is going awry in the economy as a whole - is illustrated by a growing homeless crisis, as a huge number of dwellings stand unoccupied: second and unoccupied homes at present stand at a total of 7 million dwellings, 34 per cent of the total housing stock. As a consequence of the housing crisis, unemployment rates and job insecurity, over two thirds of all Spanish 25 to 30 year olds still live - through economic necessity - with their parents. And this startling figure is rising. On the strength of all this - the government's clear incompetence over the Prestige crisis, the massive opposition to its position on the war, the structural difficulties in the labour market - it seemed as if the Partido Popular was set for an electoral comeuppance on 25 May. But it didn't come about. The only source of good news for Spanish-state social democracy on 25 May was their largely symbolic fractional lead won over the PP in terms of municipal votes cast on a Spanish-state basis. But given the acknowledged fact that Spanish voters generally vote more 'conservatively' in general elections than in local ones [7] a fractional lead, in normal circumstances, would have been regarded as a scant victory. Given the developments of the last six months, however, anything less than a total humiliation of the right must be regarded as failure. Every PSOE electoral target bar one (and this only partially) was not reached. PSOE had counted on maintaining control of the Comunidad Auton?mica of Baleares (they lost it), consolidating its hold on Barcelona (they lost seats, if not control), wining control in the Comunidad Valenciana (they didn't) and, in Madrid, wining both the ayuntamiento (they didn't) and the Comunidad (at the time of writing it looks as if they will be able to control the Comunidad - even though they were outpolled by the PP - through a probable governing pact with the Communist Party's electoral front Izquierda Unida). The other branch of Spanish-state social democracy, [8] Izquierda Unida (IU - United Left), [9] also has little to shout about. Again we can see a failure to capitalise on the misfortunes of the right. The 6.1 per cent of the vote won by IU on 25 May compares with the 5.5 it won in the general elections of 2000 and the 5.9 in the previous local elections of 1999. If, looking on the bright side, things are not worse, being realistic - and bearing in mind that IU publicly set itself the electoral target of turning the winter and spring mobilisations into votes in the ballot box - this is a pretty poor performance. With the possible exception of Euskadi. Here, IU is - uniquely in the Spanish state - not run by the Communist Party. The independent group around its leader Javier Madrazo has charted an independent course, especially in relation to Basque politics (much to the annoyance of IU headquarters in Madrid). In the last elections for the Basque parliament in 2001 it was given to be understood by the leadership of PSOE and the PP that were their combined votes sufficient they would form a coalition - anti-Basque nationalist - government in Euskadi. As it happened, they narrowly failed: on a near record turn-out, the two moderate Basque nationalist parties, PNV and EA - who stood on a joint ticket - won sufficient votes to form a government. And - highly significantly - this government has been (quite correctly in my view) supported by the Basque section of IU: again to much horror at IU headquarters in Madrid (Madrazo is in fact the Housing Minister in the current autonomous government). This story took another twist last summer. In August, the PP government in Madrid passed a new amended version of the law relating to the regulation of political parties which made it a crime not to condemn the actions of the armed radical Basque nationalist organisation ETA. [10] As a consequence, Batasuna, approximately the Basque equivalent of Sinn Fein, was banned, and its assets seized. An attempt to set up a new political formation to run in these elections - Autodeterminaziorako Bilgunea (AuB) - failed when it too was refused electoral registration under the new legislation. (There is a bitter irony at work here. A good part of PSOE's recent electoral campaign was marked by the claim that the PP were 'threatening democracy': principally because they persisted in support for the war in Iraq when public opinion was solidly against it - as if bourgeois democracy didn't work in this way! But in fact the only place were the PP is indeed 'threatening democracy' is in the Basque country itself, where the PP and PSOE share exactly the same political line.) Thus it is highly significant that it is only in the Basque country - if we except the Communist Party's historical power base of C?rdoba - that IU's vote significantly increased, by 3.5 per cent overall, resulting in a near tripling of its local council representation. (In addition, both moderate Basque nationalist parties - EA and PNV - increased their vote as compared to the last local elections, and the abstention rate rose by a factor of 10. [11]) Nevertheless, apart from this partial exception, overall in the Spanish state as a platform for building for 2004 25 May offers little comfort for the left. As a failure to capitalise on government error and misfortune its failure has been truly colossal. How did it come to this? Why is it that the Spanish state left is so incapable of advancing a clear march forward in what appear to be such advantageous conditions? To answer this question, we need to step back a little and take a longer term view of Spanish state politics. From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Sat May 31 18:13:44 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 02:13:44 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Frankenstein and the Monster (Part II) Message-ID: <3ED94538.2D47F25F@usuarios.retecal.es> THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF THE TRANSICI?N At the end of 1975, as the octogenarian dictator Franco lay dying, [12] whatever the differences that existed within the ranks of the regime's apparatus and base, there was near unanimity on one point. The previous year, in neighbouring Portugal, the Caetano dictatorship had fallen in full-blown revolutionary crisis. That was not going to happen in Spain. What did in fact happen - universally an accurately subsequently dubbed la transici?n - was a remarkably seamless and bloodless process of self-reform of the Francoist state apparatus. The fundamental fact was that the dictatorship, having accomplished its mission of modernising the Spanish social structure (a modernisation carried out on the back of a defeat of crippling proportions for the Spanish state working class [13]) was deemed in effect no longer necessary, and reformed itself out of existence. When Franco died, a transitional government, incorporating regime hard-liners and reformers alike, was rapidly assembled around Adolfo Su?rez, the former general secretary of the Movimiento (previously Falange), the official - and only permitted - political party under the dictatorship; and the king, Juan Carlos, Franco's personally chosen heir. This government oversaw the drafting of a new constitution, and the first free elections since the days of the Second Republic in the 1930s. But it is significant to note that this reform process was carried out entirely under the tutelage of the old Francoist state bureaucracy: there was no revolution, no tumultuous overthrow of the old order; neither was there any kind of calling to account of anyone for the terrible suffering inflicted on the Spanish people during the civil war and dictatorship. And fundamental to the success of this operation was the enthusiastic support lent to the new regime by the Spanish Communist Party, the dominant oppositional force within Spain at the time (mainstream Spanish social democracy had proved itself incapable of maintaining an underground organisation of any note, and, although in its formal political positions stood well to the left of the Communist Party, had been forced to operate from outside of Spain). As then leader of the Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo, was to tell Su?rez in this period during one of their frequent private t?te-?-t?tes: 'Adolfo, there are only two serious politicians in this country: you and me.' What lay behind the Communist Party's decision to throw its weight so unreservedly behind this new government of relatively unreconstructed fascists? The position of the Party was informed by the same popular-frontist policy that had determined their line in the civil war of the 1930s. For them, the dictatorship of Franco was not a dictatorship of Spanish capitalism tout court, but of only the most backward and reactionary sectors of it. This had two consequences. First, the dictatorship was seen as inherently unstable (even though it had long resisted the PCE's promises that it was on the point of collapse). Second, that there were in Spain bourgeois elements who had a vested interest in ending the dictatorship; who could be won to a popular struggle against Spanish fascism - as long, of course, that the struggle remained politically within certain limits and did not become too radical. It was this approach that underlay the PCE's curious line, which dominated its positions from the mid-1950s, of 'national reconciliation'. [14] Of course, as in the civil war, that the forces of Spanish fascism were the principle enemy of the working class movement was incontestable. Where the line of the PCE was flawed was where it saw Spanish fascism as anachronistic. This was far from the case: once the radicalisation of the 1930s had displayed itself, the crushing of the working class movement became the precondition for the modernisation of Spanish capitalism, and this latter was the overriding concern of the Spanish bourgeoisie en bloc. That the 'modern', 'democratic' bourgeoisie could find common cause with the fascist apparatus of the Spanish state against popular anti-fascist struggle was ruled out of the Communist schema; but this is what precisely happened in the transici?n. The irony of the PCE's position lay in the fact that its view that the very anachronistic nature of Spanish fascism made its overthrow obligatory was something it shared with the revolutionary left: where the revolutionary left differed from the Communist perspective was that it viewed the overthrow of fascism as a 'socialist' task which could only be carried out by the working class, while the Communists clung, against all evidence to the contrary, to their popular-frontist proclivities. Nevertheless, the two perspectives clearly share a curious symmetry of form. What practically nobody predicted was that Spanish fascism, representing as it did the hegemonic interests of the whole Spanish bourgeoisie, could simply, once its historical modernising function had been completed, reform itself into 'normal' bourgeois democracy. Yet of course this is precisely what happened: it is precisely this process that lies behind the way that the Spanish experience has been held up as a model of moves from dictatorship to democracy the world over. In fact the only political current in Spain that had grasped the essential nature of Spanish fascism was the opposition within the PCE led by Fernando Claud?n and Jorge Sempr?n, which was able to see the hegemonic role and function of dictatorship and, as a consequence, predicted that, under the right conditions, a project of democratic self-reform was open to it. It really is one of the tragedies of the Spanish left that the analysis of Claud?n and Sempr?n appealed to so few of its ranks: within the Communist Party such views were simply regarded as heretical, and Claud?n and Sempr?n found themselves ejected from the party in fairly short order; to the revolutionary left, heavily influenced by radical Maoist-Guevarist models of revolution, or by the worst excesses of the impossibilist 'socialism now' interpretation of permanent revolution then (as now) in vogue within the Trotskyist movement, the possibility of a peaceful transition to a normal bourgeois-democratic form of state rule appeared itself as authentic 'Stalinist' popular frontism. That the transition largely passed the Spanish state left by - in the case of the Communist Party after it had played the role of legitimising the transitional governments of Su?rez - was a function of its incapacity to understand the real nature and function of the very dictatorship it had aligned itself against. As we shall see, the legacy of this - a bitter one - makes itself felt all too strongly even to this very day. Su?rez attempted to organise the ad hoc coalition of forces behind the new regime into a new political party, the UCD, encompassing regime moderates and even a layer of social democrats, but, inevitably, what had been assembled was transitory and unstable and the UCD, although it won the first elections, haemorrhaged forces to its left and right: to PSOE on the one side and to the newly formed neoclerical conservative Alianza Popular, set up by Franco's former Minister of Tourism Manuel Fraga. It was the Alianza Popular that was to mutate, in 1990, into the Partido Popular, when Fraga was replaced by his prot?g?, a young former Falange activist by the name of Jos? Mar?a Aznar. The progressive disintegration of the UCD government at the turn of the decade opened up a vacuum at the heart of Spanish state politics; at the same time, it was becoming increasingly clear that the shift from the top-down state social management of the Franco era to a more open free-marketism - imposed in a context of a severe austerity programme as the government desperately tried to avert the free-fall into which the Spanish economy appeared to heading by locking down wages and slashing social spending - was stimulating working class discontent. This twin process found its resolution in 1982: by a huge margin, the elections of that year were won by a PSOE which had been transformed at its last conference in exile (in 1974, in Suresnes, France) and which had won the Socialist International's Spanish-state franchise in 1976, and which was now led by a new young generation from the interior - figureheaded by the charismatic and photogenic young sevillano Felipe Gonz?lez, but in reality driven by the eminence gris of Spanish social-democracy, the irascible but brilliant Alfonso Guerra (a Spanish Mandelson if ever there was one). This was the first time history that Spain had had a socialist government: and the memory of 1982 still lives on in Spanish state social democratic circles much in the same way as the mythical legacy of 1945 does in British ones. [15] Yet - and it is important to register the following in order to grasp the dynamic of events - the PSOE landslide had been preceded one year before by a curious event. On 23 February, as the Spanish Parliament was sitting to confirm Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as Su?rez's successor as Prime Minister [16] (the latter having resigned - a symptom of the centrifugal forces gathering force within the UCD - at the end of the previous month), Antonio Tejero, a colonel in the paramilitary Guardia Civil police force, led a group of fellow officers into the chamber. As his colleagues blocked the doors, and as astonished deputies looked on, Tejero marched up to the speaker's podium, and, firing his revolver wildly in the air, ordered everyone to the floor. It seemed that Spain's democratic experiment was going to be short-lived. But the attempted coup won little support among the upper echelons of the military: only General Jaime Milan del Bosch, commander of the Valencia region, responded, ordering tanks onto the streets of the capital of the Spanish Levante; and within 24 hours Tejero and his followers had surrendered, and the deputies released. The coup made legends out of three people. Out of Su?rez and Carrillo, who, legend had it, were the only deputies who refused to move from their seats and hit the floor as they had been ordered. Both men thus emerged from the incident having displayed almost superhuman courage, and covered in glory. Emerging equally blessed by events was the king himself, who, after a little (still unaccounted for) hesitation, had appeared in the small hours of that night on state television to denounce the coup and call on military units loyal to the government to put it down: something that, as we have seen, was not in the end necessary. Juan Carlos was thus transformed by the coup into something of a saviour of Spanish democracy; significantly, any remaining stain left by his association with the dictatorship had been removed. Nevertheless, alongside the emergence of this triumvirate of saviours of democracy, the idea had been rammed home that the fascist threat had not been completely extinguished, and the idea that undue radicalism could awake the slumbering fascist beast had been impressed on all (a point that Carrillo was to repeat again and again in his copious memoirs of the transition). Which was very convenient for all concerned, all in all. Now, there is insufficient evidence that the whole event was a put-up job, even if evidence has subsequently emerged that CESID, the Spanish secret service, had been heavily involved in its preparation. It is certainly true as well that the ring leaders of the coup escaped especially heavy sentences (for a crime which, in lesser countries and in recent times, would have got them shot, or worse). And its timing, with the possibility of a resurgent working class radicalism and a disintegrating government, was certainly fortuitous. Nevertheless, no final judgement can be made on the question of whether 23 February was a grand conspiracy or simply an extraordinary fortuitous stroke of luck, even if the former view is increasingly widely held in Spain. [17] But from this point, everyone operated as if there was a slumbering fascist giant ready to be awakened; whereas in fact the entire logic of preceding events indicates that this view was absolutely false. To return to our story. The economic scenario facing the new PSOE government was far from encouraging. Franco had in fact chosen an unfortunate time to die, at least from the economic point of view: the transici?n had to coincide with the explosive quadrupling of world oil prices, and since Spain imported 70 per cent of its energy, mostly in the form of Middle Eastern oil, it was hit hard. By the end of 1982, as PSOE took office, inflation was running at an annual rate of 16 per cent, the external current account was US$4 billion in arrears, public spending was ballooning and the foreign exchange reserves had become dangerously depleted. To deal with this the policy framework adopted by the new PSOE government was essentially a continuation - and a deepening - of that pursued by that of Su?rez, what today would be called 'Thatcherite': privatisation, restructuring and lay-offs, hiking the prices of public goods, slashing pensions and sickness payments. [18] The record of the government would be a familiar one for many Europeans in this period, but it was not what had been expected from the until recently 'Marxist' PSOE as it took the reigns of a country blinking into the new democratic dawn. There was one particular measure taken by the government that was to have particularly and insidiously deleterious consequences over the long term: the 1984 Reforma del Estatuto de los Trabajadores sought (ostensibly at least) to facilitate the creation of new employment by liberalising what was considered an especially rigid labour market (inherited from the dictatorship). Temporary working, as we have seen, has subsequently become a structural feature of Spanish employment (I say 'structural', since it bears little relation to typical patterns of seasonal work or gender distribution of employment, towards which the reforms of 1984 were ostensibly aimed). The fundamental point to register here is that the reforms opening up the Spanish-state labour market to 'flexibility' were introduced by the Socialist Party government, not by the right: and in 1996, at the end of the PSOE government, temporary contracts stood at around 40 per cent of the private sector entire workforce. Nevertheless, the 1982-96 PSOE government effected the stabilisation of the Spanish economy, but a stabilisation carried out at the expense of the working class, and nowhere is this clearer than in relation to 'labour flexibility'. A complaint heard from time to time by older people is 'we lived better under Franco': and in relation to job security we are obliged to say that by and large they are right. That it was a government of the left that was responsible for this state of affairs rather than a government of the right is a fact whose consequences we are still having to deal with. Its job done, however, PSOE found itself discarded by Spanish capitalism. In 1996, by the slenderest of margins, and with the support of the moderate Basque and Catalan nationalist parties, the PP was able to assemble a government. The end of the PSOE period was ignominious. It wasn't so much that the government was rejected by the people than that it collapsed under the weight of its own dashed expectations. The resounding memory that people have now of this period is one of corruption. This is a little unfair: corruption is in Spain - as in many countries - an endemic and almost accepted feature of everyday daily life. All the major parties, including the parties of the left, operate on the basis of clientage networks. But corruption is something that can normally be lived with: dirt only sticks when there is a reason for people to want it to (as a certain Tony Blair has been finding out recently). Thus with PSOE: as its project ran out of steam, and the government out of momentum, the abiding popular memory remains one of something of a governmental kleptocracy. (There is one 'scandal' that is worthy of further comment: 'el caso GAL'. Between 1983 and 1987 the government - a 'socialist' government, let's not forget - organised a secret commando, recruited from the French criminal underworld, under the name of Grupos Antiterrorristas de Liberaci?n, specifically to target the Basque nationalist organisation ETA, which was organising itself from southern France. Dozens of people were killed, not all of them ETA sympathisers. And as time has gone on, it has become apparent that GAL was organised right from the top echelons of the government. As yet, the then prime minister Felipe Gonz?lez has not found himself the subject of legal process in relation to GAL, but, following the circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, that he was in full knowledge of it is beyond any doubt whatsoever. In the later 80s, as Franco-Spanish inter-governmental and inter-police relations were regularised, and extradition agreements normalised, GAL was dropped as a weapon against Basque nationalism. But it indicates the thinking of Spanish-state social democracy on the matter of Basque national rights and self-determination for the non-Spanish nationalities in general: the present PSOE leadership's support for the illegalisation of Batasuna is of a piece with the 'GAL method'.) How can we characterise the period of PP government, begun in 1996 and consolidated by the more convincing parliamentary majority won in 2000? [19] The first thing that is necessary to reject is the idea, prevalent among some sections of the left outside of the Spanish state, that the PP government is in some sense 'fascistic'. [20] True, through the upper echelons of the party we can trace a lineage back to Franco, both literally [21] as well as politically, but this is to miss the point of the nature of the transici?n: today the PP is as much an orthodox bourgeois-democratic party of the right as the Spanish state is itself a bourgeois democracy. Evidence of, for example, 'undemocratic' practices in Euskadi is not evidence of fascism: all bourgeois democracies kill and ban oppositions in times of difficulty (Northern Ireland!). To perceive this as evidence of a 'creeping fascism' is not only to under-estimate the dangers of real fascism but also to display illusions in bourgeois democracy itself. Neither is the Spanish state under PP rule the economic wreck it might appear to be at first sight. Although growth has slowed since the sustained period of expansion in the late 1990s, it stands well above the Eurozone average. And while it is true that unemployment is high, so too is the rate of job creation: nearly 1.4 million jobs were created between 1996 and 1999, accounting for nearly a quarter of aggregate EU employment growth. And while temporary contracts - probably the fundamental 'bread-and-butter' issue in Spanish politics - constitute a phenomenal proportion of the workforce, overall the level now is lower than it was under PSOE, [22] and it was the latter who introduced temporary working as a structural feature of the Spanish economy in the first place. And while at the beginning of 1996, Spain did not meet any of the economic convergence criteria required by the Maastricht treaty, and many doubted it would be in any way prepared for entry into the Eurozone in 1999, Spain sailed comfortably into the EMU, much to the delight of the powers that be within the EU, who are even, in moments of insobriety, inclined to bandy around phrases like 'economic miracle'. The only cloud on the immediate horizon is Spain's above European average rate of inflation, but as any A-level economics student will tell you, a little inflation can be the indicator of a certain economic buoyancy. Thus when Aznar says, as he was wont to do during the late 1990s, that 'Espa?a va bien' (Spain is doing well), from the point of view of bourgeois politics he is right: Espa?a va muy bien indeed. And this is the fundamental difficulty faced by the left in general, and PSOE in particular. For there is no criticism that they can in truth make against the PP for which they can produce supporting evidence. When the PP attacks the working class - in relation to labour flexibility, for example, or cutting benefits, or in relation to the repression it metes out in the Basque country - it does nothing that PSOE has not done in office, and PSOE's record on these matters is in fact often worse than that of the PP. In terms of the management of the economy, given that the days of Keynsian pump-priming are long gone, and as long as PSOE does not seriously challenge the present set-up of the European Union and its present convergence and enlargement, it cannot argue that it would deal with the problems facing the Spanish economy in a fundamentally different way with any credibility. The only issues on which PSOE can challenge the PP are contingencies - such as the Prestige, or the War, when all it can say really is. 'Trust us, we would do this differently if we were the government' - or to raise the perennial question of the PP's fascist roots. The former is simply not credible election material, and the latter is either pure demagogy, or indicative of the fact that the PSOE in its modern incarnation simply does not understand where it has come from. From edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es Sat May 31 18:14:05 2003 From: edgeorge at usuarios.retecal.es (Ed George) Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 02:14:05 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Frankenstein and the Monster (Part III) Message-ID: <3ED9454D.16841F64@usuarios.retecal.es> 'BUT WHERE ARE ALL THE CAPTURED GUNS?' In August 1914, as the German armies rolled across Belgium and France practically unopposed presaging a stunning military victory in only a matter of days, in the German High Command in Berlin the Chief of General Staff, Helmuth Moltke, was worried. 'But where are the prisoners?' he would ask his junior officers. 'Where are all the captured guns?' The Spanish transici?n is a little like this. In a way surprisingly but absolutely unforeseen (dogmatic thinking has weighed especially heavy on the Spanish state workers' movement) the Francoist state apparatus effected a seamless process of self-reform and ushered in a bourgeois-democratic system virtually indistinguishable - understood in both positive and negative senses - from those obtaining elsewhere in western Europe. To say that this caught the left unawares would be to severely understate the matter. Unguarded, the left found itself at the mercy of bourgeois democracy at most clinically efficient. That bourgeois rule follows the path of least resistance has become something of a truism on the left, but it reveals a profound truth. Bourgeois democracy is no mere sop to the workers, a compromise dispensed by a grudging bourgeoisie. For the parliamentary system operates something as does the sand-trap on a motorway. It absorbs the momentum of the runaway vehicle, leaving it stranded and with nowhere to go. If the Spanish transici?n stands as a model of anything, it illustrates with unprecedented clarity how effective a measure bourgeois democracy is at absorbing popular radicalisation and mobilisation. The efficiency with which Spanish-state parliamentarism was brokered stopped any radicalisation of the transici?n period dead in its tracks. [23] The effect of the transici?n reduced the Communist Party - historically the predominant opposition to Francoism domestically - to a rump, a status it enjoys to this day; and to call what is left of the revolutionary left a rump would be too kind. The only force to emerge relatively intact from the whole process was the more pragmatically-minded PSOE, but its turn to be sucked in and spat out by Spanish capitalism was to come. The record of the its governmental period stands clear. Elected on a popular wave of hope for the future by a people recently freed from the shackles of dictatorship - and remember that up till the late 1970s PSOE was still openly calling itself a 'Marxist' party: its electoral slogan in 1982 was 'Por el Cambio', 'For Change' - all that it did was open up the Spanish economy to the cold winds of free-marketism, 'labour flexibility' and austerity, along with managing the entry of Spain into both the European Community and NATO. PSOE effectively 'bedded in' Spanish bourgeois democracy on behalf of the bourgeoisie; it is unlikely that an unreconstructed government of the right could have achieved so efficiently a package of measures so consonant with the untrammelled operation of capitalism so soon after dictatorship itself. For Spanish capitalism the services of the PSOE government has thus been of inestimable value. That the PP government of Aznar (and his successor to come) can now proceed as they are doing - consolidating the operation of neoliberalism as well as, and it is fundamental to grasp this, ameliorating some of its worst excesses - is due entirely to the foundations laid down by the left in government, and in the last analysis explains the PP's continued and dogged electoral robustness. For, if we cast Aznar's PP as the monster, the Spanish left plays the role of the good Doctor Frankenstein: the resurgence of the neoliberal, neoclerical right in Spain is entirely the creation of the left, and until it can understand this there is no way out for the latter of the labyrinth of despair it has created for itself. No amount of renovaci?n, of shiny young photogenic leaders, can make up for this deficiency. But for the left, to challenge its role in making the monster would be to challenge everything that is noble and good in its history: the transici?n remains untouchable in Spanish politics, especially among the left - the totemic representation of everything that is progressive and modern, the anti-pariah to dictatorship itself. This is the fundamental difference between Zapatero and Blair, however much the former may like to model his approach on the latter's transformation of British Labour. For the Blairite renovaci?n was precisely predicated on a break with a dark past - the Labour governments of the 1970s and the consequent (so the story goes) period of 1980s and 90s opposition and unelectability - with reference, in however a distorted and perverted way, to a prior period of halcyon glory rooted in 1945 (no wonder is it that the NHS, that ridiculous and inefficient dinosaur, remains an inviolable in Labourite mythology). But for Zapatero the dark days from which he has to break and the halcyon days of glory are one and the same, and no amount of ideological and demagogic gymnastics can break this bind. The seed of Blairism cannot nourish itself on such barren Spanish soil, and for this reason Zapatero's reign will itself be seen as something of an interregnum by the future renovadores to come. In its fundamental contours the same kind of process is underway with respect to the Spanish Communist Party. If Spanish capitalism 'needed' the left cover of PSOE to implement the first wave of neoliberal free-marketism, it 'needed' too the left cover of the Communist Party to legitimise the very transici?n itself. In turn, and by the same token, the Communist Party too will need to rethink its past role in order to be able to face the challenges of the future: but yet again, to do thus would require thinking the unthinkable, such is the status of the transici?n and the Party's role within it in its ideology. What, then, is to be done? If, as Brecht said, in the contradiction lies the hope, the fact is that the present position in which the left finds itself is unsustainable. Already, within the Communist Party, the opposition Corriente Roja has begun, in a limited and timid way, to raise at least questions about the role of the party in the transici?n. Should, as seems likely, Zapatero fail in 2004, PSOE will have to address why: although the pressure will be to move the party further to the right, opportunities will emerge to address the fundamental questions engaged with here. And - most importantly - it is undeniably and demonstrably the case that the Spanish state working class, although politically bloodied, remains unbowed. The massive mobilisations of the last six months stand clear testament to that. But to capitalise on opportunities that may arise in the future the left has to begin to focus itself a little more on the recent past, in order to better avoid repeating its own history. Nevertheless, until these tasks are addressed, the left remains trapped by the tentacles of the system it helped create. It would be a foolish man who would bet on there not being a PP Prime Minister occupying the Moncloa Palace this time next year. And the left finds itself still stuck in the sand-trap, without momentum, and going nowhere. Unable to understand that it was he who created the monster, Doctor Frankenstein finds himself incapable of killing it. Le?n, Saturday 31 June NOTES [1] There were in fact a number of simultaneous elections on this day: on a Spanish-state basis municipal elections, for what are called ayuntamientos, roughly equivalent to the British local council, which include the enormous councils of Madrid (population around 3 million) and Barcelona (population roughly 1.5 million), down to tiny villages where the population may be only measured in tens of people; and for the governing bodies of 13 of the 17 comunidades auton?micas: a region of government between the ayuntamiento and the state dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s when a regional structure of devolved government was established with the aim of assuaging rebellious national minorities - in Galicia, Catalunya and, especially, Euskadi - by creating an all-Spanish state structure in which powers could be devolved to these nationalities without acknowledging them any special 'national' status. The structure of comunidades auton?micas sometimes follows accepted national or regional logic, such as in the cases mentioned above, but also includes such administrative absurdities as Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y Le?n, in which previously unrelated regions have been roped together in a way akin to, for example, creating a unitary authority out of Yorkshire and Lancashire. There were also elections for the Spanish held enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, which hold a position in the Spanish state constitutional structure similar to the comunidades auton?micas. Elecciones Auton?micas were not held in Catalunya (scheduled for later this year), Andalucia (next year), and Euskadi and Galicia (both scheduled for 2005). [2] Aside from the traditional Catholic Church, which in Spain is in part financed through the public tax system (direct payments to the Church in 2001 amounted to some approximately ?120 million, not including state funding for religious teachers in public schools, military and hospital chaplains, and other indirect assistance), we also have to take note of the influence of the fundamentalist and highly secretive sect Opus Dei, which enjoys a heavy influence in governmental circles. The Defence Minister Federico Trillo, for example, is an Opus Dei 'supernumerary', a member of the organisation's elite who tithe it a share of their earnings. Other prominent Opus supporters include Spain's Attorney General Jes?s Cardenal, the former police chief Juan Cotino, and three former ministers, Isabel Tocino, Jos? Manuel Romay and Loyola de Palacio, the last of these now a European commissioner. The present Foreign Minister, the deeply strange Ana Palacio, attended last year's canonisation of Opus Dei founder Jos? Mar?a Escriva in Rome. Aznar himself sent two of his children to Opus Dei schools and his wife, Ana Botella, a political figure in her own right, is at least openly sympathetic, if not an actual member. [3] His official title is the rather grand-sounding 'President of the Government', but since Prime Minister is effectively what he is, that is what we shall be calling him here. [4] The full text of the letter in English can be read at . [5] El Mundo 27 March 2003. [6] Aznar had in fact threatened to do the same thing before the general elections of 2000, but, that time, had been persuaded that his presence at the helm of the party would be essential. It is perhaps surprising that a character so singularly lacking in charisma - his deadpan delivery style is only exacerbated by a congenital if relatively minor facial paralysis, which he conceals in part with his trademark moustache - should be so highly regarded as a political figurehead. But it was precisely Aznar's plain-man, common-sensical persona that had appealed to a good part of the Spanish state electorate as a refreshing change from the flashy politics of glamour - and corruption - of the PSOE governments of Felipe Gonz?lez in the 1980s and early 90s. [7] See the statistical appendix below. [8] Some would characterise IU as 'Stalinist'; I insist on the term 'social democratic'. For the reasoning behind this see my notes at and . [9] Izquierda Unida was set up by the Spanish Communist party in 1987 as a broad left coalition out of the popular mobilisations against the governing Socialist Party's move to win Spanish NATO entry. The project has been a spectacular failure: practically every founding organisation bar the Communist Party itself has left the organisation, and although it managed to win around 10 per cent of the popular vote in the mid 1990s, nowadays it is unable to break out of the five/six per cent position - which is what the Communist Party was getting before it set up the IU project. Effectively, IU is these days simply the Communist Party under a different name. [10] The position held by Izquierda Unida in Madrid was to abstain on the illegalisation of Batasuna. IU's president, Gaspar Llamazares (the PCE chief in Asturias) - trying to have his cake and eat it - explained the decision to abstain in these terms: 'We are abstaining because while we repudiate Batasuna's connivance with ETA, we don't think that the Parliament should involve itself in something that pertains to the judges', i.e. that illegalisation should now have been a legal and not a political matter. (See El Pa?s, 21 August 2002.) The only currents within IU outside of the Basque country who rejected this position and called for IU to oppose illegalisation were Corriente Roja - an opposition led by ?ngeles Maestro that emerged within the PCE at its sixteenth congress in March of last year - and Espacio Alternativo - a rump formation that originated from the old Spanish State USEC section. Thus, aside from this very small opposition, IU outside of the Basque country effectively lined itself up - once we allow for its own nuance of abstention - alongside the PP and PSOE in their offensive against the abertzale left. Indeed, both IU and PCE have a long history of Greater Spanish chauvinism: denunciation of ETA as 'fascists' is not only routine from the leadership of PSOE and PP but is also the preferred characterisation of present PCE general secretary (and former leader of IU) Francisco Frutos. [11] In Spanish state elections voters have an opportunity to cast a 'no vote', the voto en blanco. By 'abstention rate' here is referred to this vote plus votos nulos - spoiled ballot papers. [12] In Raymond Carr's description the fundamental juxtaposition of modern and antediluvian inherent to Francoism is neatly expressed: 'The dying Caudillo was plugged into every modern medical device; on his bed was the mantle of the Virgin of Pilar and grasped in his hand was the mummified arm of St. Theresa of ?vila.' (Spain 1808-1975 (Oxford, 1982), 769) [13] I am not here talking only about the Civil War itself, although this was bad enough, nor the compounding process of terror - imprisonment, summary execution, torture - that followed it, but also of the impact of the dreadful material hardships inflicted on an entire generation of ordinary Spanish people during the years of the regime's autarkic period. Raymond Carr quotes Ronald Fraser, writing on rural Spain: 'The people ate anything they could find: thistles and weeds.... Our skin burst open with ulcers from not having enough to eat, from not washing. There wasn't any soap.... When they saw me giving food to my dogs they began to cry.... A lot of others died like that, not directly of starvation but from eating only cabbage leaves and things.' (Carr, ibid., 742, ellipses in the original) Talk to any Spaniard over the age of 50 and you will see that the bitter experiences of these years are far from forgotten. [14] Joan Estruch: 'Se trataba, pues, de arrinconar la pol?tica sectaria de los a?os de la Guerra fr?a y de recupera la pol?tica de Uni?n Nacional que el PCE hab?a defendido durante la guerra civil. La pol?tica de reconciliaci?n nacional no era, pues, tan novedosa como parec?a.' Historia Oculta del PCE (Madrid, 2000), 197. [15] The way that within PSOE 1982 still resonates as halcyon, and consequently Felipe Gonz?lez as a totem, was illustrated very graphically in the 2000 leadership elections that followed the disastrous electoral campaign of the same year. The winner (and present incumbent), the previously unheard of Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero, was the only candidate to combine the necessary balance between modernisation and affinity with the past. Zapatero's campaign, although he presented himself as an out-and-out moderniser (with more than a passing borrowing from Blairism - his cabal of supporters within the party operated under the rubric of Nueva V?a, a conscious assimilation of 'New Labour' and 'Third Way') was also assiduously replete with fawning references to Felipe Gonz?lez. The other modernising candidate, the Basque Euro deputy Rosa Di?z, famously began her campaign with the words 'I was not at Suresnes' - i.e. 'I am not of the Felipe generation'. Di?z, as a consequence of this presentation of herself as a break from Felipismo, performed miserably in the membership ballot. The more astute Zapatero, on the other hand, understood perfectly that any project of modernisation that did not present itself as in some way under the paternal tutelage of Felipe Gonz?lez would not be acceptable to the party. The consequences of this we shall examine below. [16] See note 3 above. [17] As the chamber of deputies was in full session the opening sequence of the coup had been filmed, and fascinating viewing it makes too. Watching the scenes one is struck by a curious observation: Su?rez, as outgoing Prime Minister, was seated not 15 metres from the podium as it was stormed by Tejero. As the latter begins to fire his revolver, one cannot help but notice that, as the surrounding deputies hit the floor, not only does Su?rez not move (thus confirming the legend referred to above) he does not even move a muscle - not even a flinch. Anyone who has been in close vicinity of a revolver being discharged, especially in a confined space, will know how difficult this is to achieve. Nevertheless, it is not possible to conclude that this strange, almost unnatural, behaviour can be put down to the fact that Su?rez knew not only what was going to happen but that what was going to happen was only for public display, and that he consequently was in no real danger, or whether supreme personal courage had indeed moved him to complete insensibility. Perhaps we will never know, but the circumstantial evidence is sufficient to provoke a certain incredulity. [18] There was in fact a certain precedent for this approach: the 1978 Moncloa Pacts, signed by amongst others PSOE, the Communist Party, UCD and the Alianza Popular, broached a well below inflation wage freeze along with a series of measures aimed at restricting credit and reducing public spending. In the words of Paul Preston, one of the more honest if hardly left commentators on this period, 'The Pact [of Moncloa] was [...] virtually the only way, short of revolutionary measures, of confronting the inextricably linked problems of the burden of Francoist economic imbalance and the unfavourable international situation.' (The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (London and New York, 1990), 137, my emphasis) Preston, of course, does not say this to advocate the 'revolutionary measures'. [19] In 2000 PSOE and IU stood on a joint ticket. Essentially what happened was that the then leader of IU, Julio Anguita, whose political trajectory had been characterised by a visceral anti-PSOE sectarianism, was taken seriously ill just before the election; his place was filled by the Communist Party General Secretary Francisco Frutos, who comes from a current more open to working with the Socialists, who brokered a deal with the PSOE leadership that, in turn for endorsing the latter's programme, IU candidates would be entered into PSOE lists. Supporters of both parties, recognising a behind closed doors stitch-up when they saw one, voted with their feet and handed the PP an immediate ten-point lead. See the statistical data below. [20] This is also the characterisation held by a good part of the abertzale left in the Basque country. Indeed, the a priori characterisation of the post-transici?n set-up as still 'fascist' would seem to be about the only way that ETA's increasingly lunatic 'armed struggle' can be politically justified. Once again, profound political errors in the present find their root in an incapacity to understand the nature of the transici?n. [21] 'Literally' in the sense that a roll-call of the surnames of the upper layers of the PP and the state structure reveals that they are in good part peopled by the children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces of the great Francoist families. [22] Although it should be noted that although in the workforce as a whole the figure is coming down, in the public sector, where the figure has been historically lower, the proportion of temporary workers is rising. This is indicative of the PP's strategy. In general, working conditions in the public sector are qualitatively better - in terms of job security, if not salaries - than in the private; trade union affiliation is also significantly higher here too (which goes some way to explaining the conservatism and craftist elitism of the Spanish-state trade union movement). By attacking conditions in the public sector what the PP is achieving is something of a levelling down, rather than up. The same thing can be seen in the overall workforce: the mechanism of choice deployed by the government with respect to lowering the level of temporary working is a cheapening of dismissal costs for time unlimited contracts - again, a levelling down. [23] Again, with the possible exception of Euskadi, where the mix of social and national discontent provoked a popular radicalisation and mobilisation that did threaten to break out into a crisis of revolutionary proportions. Hence the urgency with which the structure of the comunidades auton?micas was established: without recognising Basque nationhood, a structure was put in place which allowed the transfer of significant devolved powers to a Basque parliament. That this strategy has been only partially successful is indicated by the persistence of radical Basque nationalism, in both its armed and political manifestations. The devolution of powers to a regional level was also key in keeping the Catalan bourgeoisie on board of the transici?n too. STATISTICAL APPENDIX: THE MAJOR PARTIES IN ALL SPANISH STATE ELECTIONS SINCE 1977 1. Percentage of votes cast RIGHT LEFT (AP/PP (PSOE AP/PP PSOE PCE/IU UCD/CDS + + UCD/CDS) PCE/IU) 1977L 8.21 29.32 9.33 34.44 42.7 38.7 1979L 6.05 30.40 10.77 34.84 40.9 41.2 1982L 26.50 48.36 4.04 9.34 35.8 52.4 1986L 26.31 44.62 4.47 9.22 35.5 49.1 1987E 24.73 39.19 5.27 10.30 35.0 44.5 1989L 25.80 39.60 9.13 7.95 33.8 48.7 1989E 21.70 40.20 6.20 7.20 28.6 45.7 1991M 25.34 38.34 8.38 25.3 46.7 1993L 34.77 38.79 9.6 1.76 36.5 48.4 1994E 40.60 31.10 13.60 1.00 41.1 44.2 1995M 35.26 30.83 11.68 35.3 42.5 1996L 38.79 37.63 10.54 38.8 48.2 1999E 40.42 35.88 5.87 40.4 41.8 1999M 35.11 34.93 6.64 35.1 41.6 2000L 44.54 34.08 5.46 44.5 39.5 2003M 33.84 34.71 6.06 33.8 40.8 2. Total Votes Cast RIGHT LEFT (AP/PP (PSOE AP/PP PSOE PCE/IU UCD/CDS + + UCD/CDS) PCE/IU) 1977L 1,504,771 5,371,866 1,709,890 6,310,391 7,815,162 7,081,756 1979L 1,088,578 5,469,813 1,938,487 6,288,593 7,377,171 7,408,300 1982L 6,795,447 10,127,392 844,976 1,354 858 8,150,305 10,972,368 1986L 5,247,677 8,901,718 892,070 1,838 799 7,086,476 9,793,788 1987E 4,747,283 7,522,706 1,011,830 1,976,093 6,723,376 8,534,536 1989L 5,285,972 8,115,568 1,858,588 1,617,716 6,903,688 9,974,156 1989E 3,395,015 6,275,554 961,742 1,133,929 4,528,944 7,237,296 1991M 4,775,051 7,224,242 1,579,097 4,775,051 8,803,339 1993L 8,201,463 9,150,083 2,253,722 414,740 8,616,203 11,403,805 1994E 7,453,900 5,719,707 2,497,671 183,418 7,637,318 8,217,378 1995M 7,820,392 6,838,607 2,589,780 7,820,392 9,428,387 1996L 9,716 006 9,425,678 2,639,774 9,716,006 12,065,452 1999E 8,346,166 7,409,427 1,211,589 8,346,166 8,621,016 1999M 7,334 135 7,296,749 1,387,900 7,334,135 8,684,649 2000L 10,230,345 7,829,210 1,253,859 10,230 345 9,083,069 2003M 7,772,934 7,972 995 1,390,673 7,772,934 9,363,668 Key: L=Elecciones Legislativas; M=Elecciones Municipales; E=Elecciones Europeas AP = Alianza Popular; PP = Partido Popular; PSOE = Partido Socialista Obrero Espa?ol; PCE = Partido Comunista de Espa?a; IU = Izquierda Unida; UCD = Uni?n de Centro Dem?cratico; CDS = Centro Dem?cratico y Social Sources: 1977L, 1979L, 1982L, 1986L, 1989L, 1991M, 1993L, 1993M: Anuario El Pa?s 1996; 1987E (total votes cast), 1989E (total votes cast): Anuario Estad?stico 1997 Junta de Castilla y Le?n; 1987E (percentage of votes cast), 1994E (total votes cast): Anuario El Pa?s 1990; 1994E (percentage of votes cast): Anuario El Pa?s 1995; 1996L, 2001L: El Mundo 14.3.2000; 1999E, 1999M: Anuario El Pa?s 2000; 2003M: El Pa?s 27.5.2003 From hliu at mindspring.com Sat May 31 23:07:49 2003 From: hliu at mindspring.com (Henry C.K. Liu) Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 01:07:49 -0400 Subject: [A-List] Stiglitz not opposed to Globalization Message-ID: <3ED98A25.1080400@mindspring.com> I take it back. Stiglitz is nowhere near McNamara. zzzzzzzz....... Henry C.K. Liu The Preacher: Joseph StiglitzBy Christopher Swann Published: May 30 2003 15:03 | Last Updated: May 30 2003 15:03 Few prophets have ever looked so different from their disciples. Standing at a lectern beneath the great dome of St Paul's cathedral, the portly frame of Joseph Stiglitz, the contentious American Nobel laureate, is bursting out of his smart grey suit. He is surrounded by the expectant stares of dreadlocked activists, earnest pensioners and thrusting economics students. We're all here on this gloomy London evening to hear a globally famed anti-globalist talk about globalisation. Most economists become famous if they take up public office. Stiglitz became famous for leaving his. In 2000, he quit as chief economist of the World Bank, after repeatedly panning it for imposing harsh free market policies on the developing world. That was just the start of it. The International Monetary Fund was staffed by "third-rate brains from first-rate universities". He also wondered if the IMF's former deputy managing director, Stan Fischer, had been "richly rewarded" with a job as president of Citigroup, "for having faithfully executed" Wall Street's desired policies. Stiglitz's former colleagues might have wanted to write him off as an embittered heretic. But in 2001, he won the Nobel Prize for economics for his contribution to the theory that market economics can fail if one party to a transaction knows more than the other. All of which makes him a hard man to dismiss - and a wise choice of speaker for St Paul's recent series of lectures on ethics. As one church official ruefully tells me, religious ceremonies rarely come close to attracting a crowd the size of tonight's. "Bit embarrassing really," he shrugs. But when Stiglitz finally starts to speak, he surprises. Though many regard him as a blatant self-publicist, he seems a reluctant prophet. He smiles nervously and speaks haltingly when departing from his notes - not quite the picture of the fearless iconoclast one might have expected. It gets worse. Firmly clasping the lectern with both hands, he says he wants to dispel any suggestion that he is opposed to globalisation. In south-east Asia, for example, globalisation has led to a huge rise in per capita income, a dramatic increase in literacy and a sharp reduction of poverty. This provokes nervous glances among the more activist members of the audience. Could they have wandered into the wrong meeting? But their fears are quickly assuaged. "South-east Asia succeeded because they managed globalisation on their own terms," he says. But Latin America, countries obeyed the edicts of Washington by focusing on low inflation and balanced budgets, and ended up with economic disaster. Political globalisation, moreover, has lagged behind economic globalisation, meaning that decisions with a profound effect on the developed world have been taken without its participation. "A European cow receives more than $2 a day from the taxpayer in subsidies," he says. "This is more than millions of people in the developing world live on." Developing countries who fail to meet debt repayments are thrown into a sort of debtors' prison. Former freedom fighters are forced to honour the debts of the military governments that persecuted them. Stiglitz says all this without the oppressive jargon of economists, but occasionally the veil of the populist slips. At one point, he utters the word "externalities". Then, looking as if he has just blasphemed in the house of the Lord, he explains what he meant. As the ideas become increasingly complex, Stiglitz enlists the help of urgent hand movements to coax out his thoughts. It is then time for questions. It turns out that these had to be submitted in writing in advance. They are read out by a black-robed churchman. People ask about "hot money flows" and "capital market liberalisation" and then this: "Why are economics textbooks so boring?" "Mine isn't," says Stiglitz, offering a rare gleam of humour. As Stiglitz finishes speaking, and the applause dies down, I notice that one of the pensioners behind me has quietly nodded off. "Would you like to go home for a nap now dear?" asks his wife. The disciples of Joseph Stiglitz may be grateful for what he has to say. But apparently not all of them have the stamina required to hear him say it. Christopher Swann is the FT's economics correspondent From zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk Sat May 31 11:14:43 2003 From: zaogir at pes.comsats.net.pk (Tariq Mahmood) Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 22:14:43 +0500 Subject: [A-List] Deep-rooted malaise - By Husain Haqqani Message-ID: <000201c329d7$575c9aa0$7e0f38d2@k6n2c2> "M. Othman" wrote: Deep-rooted malaise - By Husain Haqqani Hi Pakistan May 21 2003 Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf will visit > Washington and meet President Bush on June 24. General > Musharraf's visit substitutes the visit by Prime Minister > Zafarullah Jamali that was scheduled for April and cancelled due > to the war in Iraq. > Although Pakistanis elected a parliament in October and General > Musharraf nominated a civilian Prime Minister earlier this year, > no one really believes that the country has reverted to civilian > rule. It is for that reason, perhaps, that the US decided to > invite the general so that talks can be held with the real > wielder of power instead of a stand-in. In Washington, General > Musharraf can expect to be thanked for his cooperation in the > war against Al-Qaeda and offered a long-term commitment of > economic assistance. But he is also likely to be told of the > deep misgivings that analysts and policy-makers have about the > long-term direction of Pakistan. There is still apprehension > that Pakistani authorities are pursuing mutually contradictory > policies and that General Musharraf is not willing to undertake > the fundamental shift that is needed to make Pakistan a more > normal country than it has been in a long time. > Two characteristics of the Pakistani State make it difficult for > Pakistan to function as a democracy and as a civilian-led > society. The first of these is that Pakistan has become a > rent-seeking state, living off the rents of its strategic > location since its involvement in US-sponsored treaties of the > cold war era. > The principal instrument of attracting foreign, mainly US, > support for Pakistan has been the value of its military and > intelligence apparatus. During the cold war, the Pakistani > military-intelligence machinery was of use to the west against > the Soviet Union. After 9/11, Washington looks upon General > Musharraf's military regime as a key ally in the global war > against terrorism. The military's status as the principal > attraction for international interest, and the economic > assistance that comes by way of strategic rents, vests > considerable power and legitimacy in the Pakistani military's > desire to control and direct the country's politics. Conflict > with India is the military's raison d'_tre but it now sees > itself as Pakistan's only effective institution and therefore > the only group worthy of running the country. > Pakistan is also a 'manipulated state', the second > characteristic that distorts its politics. This means that > political actors do not always function on their own and that > much that appears to be domestic political bickering is actually > the result of manipulation by the military-controlled > intelligence services. Behind-the-scenes funding of political > parties, creating and breaking up political alliances and > engineering defection of politicians from one party to another > is often part of the Pakistani intelligence services' agenda. > Quite often, what passes off as politics is actually the > military's covert handiwork. The objective is to ensure that the > political process does not acquire a life of its own and that > the military's ascendancy remains unquestioned. > The October election and subsequent domestic developments must > be seen in the light of these more permanent realities of > military supremacy in Pakistan. Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali > ostensibly leads a civilian government, cobbled together for him > by the Intelligence services. He lacks national stature, did not > lead the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q), also known as the > king's party, in the general elections, and is dependent on > several smaller factions including defectors from Benazir > Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) for parliamentary support. > He and the coalition he leads have no natural constituency and > the thing that binds them is the willingness to bend to the will > of Pakistan's permanent establishment. In any case, General > Musharraf retains the power to dismiss the Prime Minister, his > cabinet and the national assembly and is refusing to allow > parliament to review constitutional amendments he promulgated as > a package - the Legal Framework Order - at the time of > parliamentary elections. > Before holding elections, General Musharraf had declared his > preference for a centralized system of government. "Unless there > is unity of command, unless there is one man in charge on top, > it will never function," he had said. Pakistan's mainstream > political parties, bar associations and leading civil society > organizations have questioned General Musharraf's right to > arbitrarily alter the country's constitution but it is the > recently resurgent Islamists against whom he says he has > declared war that have led the charge against the military > ruler. To keep the politicians from threatening his power, the general is likely to cut a deal with the Islamists though that could undermine his international support, which is dependent on his commitment to take on militant Islamists. Prime Minister Jamali faces, in many ways, the dilemma that was faced by Muhammad Khan Junejo when he was appointed Prime Minister by General Ziaul Haq in 1985, after seven years of Martial Law. Like Junejo, Jamali must balance his position as the military's creature with civilians' aspiration for asserting greater influence over policy. Junejo found that the balancing act was not easy. In the beginning, Junejo was extremely deferential to his military benefactor, causing him to be seen as a mere puppet. The moment he started exercising his constitutional authority, or failed to 'defend' General Zia against parliamentary criticism, the general felt slighted. The weak and embattled Prime Minister finally fell afoul of General Zia when he agreed to the Geneva Accords for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in April 1988. Zia dissolved parliament and dismissed Junejo under powers he had given himself earlier. Elections to a new parliament could be held only after Zia died in a mysterious plane crash and the new army chief, General Aslam Beg, opted to control the government from behind-the-scenes. During the decade (1988-1999) that the military did not directly wield power, Pakistan was said to be run by a troika comprising the President, the army chief and the Prime Minister. Although General Zia's successors as President were civilians, they wielded powers under Zia's constitutional amendments. These powers were used to dismiss every elected Prime Minister and to prematurely dissolve parliament thrice, each time with the military's involvement. After the 1997 election, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose political career had been launched by the military and the ISI, got parliament to revoke the President's power to dismiss the Prime Minister and dissolve parliament. In 1999, Sharif was toppled in the military coup that brought General Musharraf to power. Prime Minister Jamali is likely to be extremely cautious, given the experience of Junejo and Sharif, both of whom started out as the military's political proteges like Jamali. He knows that Junejo and Sharif found no protection against removal from office once they crossed the military's path. The only pragmatic option for him is to enjoy the perks of office without trying to assert his views in the realm of government policy. But doing so would mean that he would not be able to raise either his own stature or that of the office that he has now been given. The wild card in Pakistan's domestic politics remains the Islamists. Unified under the banner of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), Pakistan's religious parties have been able to take advantage of the political vacuum created by General Musharraf's suppression of the mainstream PPP and PML. While traditionally the Islamists have been allies of the military, they could leverage their new political strength in making demands on General Musharraf, thereby limiting his ability to operate as a free agent in domestic matters. On the other hand, the Islamists could also be useful for the military as an excuse for dragging its feet in areas such as relations with India and the US. Instead of refusing to cooperate fully in clamping down on anti-India Kashmiri militants, for example, Musharraf and the military could simply argue that domestic political compulsions do not allow them a freer hand. > Whatever the outcome of the political power play inside and outside parliament, there is no immediate prospect of the military, as an institution, relinquishing its pre-eminence in political matters. The US can, at best, 'advise' Musharraf to set things right, focusing on what matters to Washington (at this moment, the war against al-Qaeda) but that is unlikely to address Pakistan's deeper-rooted malaise.