From shimogamo at attglobal.net Sat Nov 1 05:58:50 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:58:50 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The Triumph of Ignorance Message-ID: <490C447A.1020205@attglobal.net> Why morons succeed in US politics by George Monbiot Published in the Guardian (October 28 2008) How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist? {1} Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage. There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said "there you go again" {2}. His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks. It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin? On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of fifteen year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD {3}. But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason (2008) provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies. One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing. Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy - now known as Social Darwinism - of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary {4}. Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism. But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order" {5}. The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time {6}. This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment it is a recipe for confusion. Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America. The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism. Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance. www.monbiot.com References: 1. For a staggering display of ignorance and bigotry, see: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lPg0VCg4AEQ 2. You can see this exchange at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=px7aRIhUkHY&feature=related 3. All these facts are contained in Susan Jacoby, 2008. The Age of American Unreason: dumbing down and the future of democracy. Old Street Publishing, London. 4. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Chapter 3. 5. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Page 57. 6. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Page 25. Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/28/the-triumph-of-ignorance/ http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Sat Nov 1 06:46:27 2008 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:46:27 +1100 Subject: [A-List] The difference between McCain and Obama | Links Message-ID: <490C4FA3.1080405@greenleft.org.au> http://links.org.au/node/719 From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 1 13:20:11 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:20:11 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Drug Wars - KPIG News Commentator Arrested On-Air For State Legal (Nevada USA) Medical Marijuana Message-ID: <490CABEB.5090605@gmail.com> Travus T. Hipp, news reader and all-around pundit for KPIG radio, Freedom California was arrested On-Air this past Thursday. I can just visualize the conversation with the police before he made his commentary phone-in from his home in Silver City Nevada on Thursday... "Hang On Occifer? I Need To Make An Important Phone Call..." The audio, at my site: [October 31 2008] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (AKA C.O.Y.O.T.E. Redux) - One For The Late Great State Of Nevada On The Occasion Of Travus T. Hipp?s Arrest For State Legal Medical Marijuana http://leighm.net/wp/2008/10/31/tth_081031/ ...or Archive-DOT-org: http://www.archive.org/details/tth_081031 The follow-up this morning: Update On The Incarceration Of KPIG Radio News Commentator Travus T. Hipp (Chandler Laughlin) "From the Nevada Appeel (That?s for spelling his name wrong in the first ?graph, dickwads? the hacks at that ?newspaper? are probably editorially related to the local bird cage liner, the Santa Cruz SENILE (Sentinel)) . Radio host Chanlder Laughlin, known to listeners as Travus T. Hipp, was jailed Thursday on drug charges after Lyon County investigators served simultaneous warrants on Laughlin?s Silver City home and three others nearby." . . . . "It?s notable that Laughlin had been arrested last year as well, and in Da? Buffalo?s research I discovered he had some sort of dispute with a neighbor regarding the ?squatting? of a local mine building by a person apparently seeking to live there and had stood in that person?s support at a local council meeting perhaps leading to a vendetta on the part of at least one other resident of Silver City Nevada (population 170 people, 2000 census). It seems alternative culture in America is under attack by the people Hunter S. Thompson referred to quite correctly as ?Greedheads?. In Full @ my site: http://leighm.net/wp/2008/11/01/silvercitydrugwar/ From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 1 13:46:15 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:46:15 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Canadian pipeline again targeted in blast (Third time) Message-ID: <490CB207.9060607@gmail.com> Canada pipeline again targeted in blast Nov. 1, 2008 at 10:37 AM DAWSON CREEK, British Columbia, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- Canadian anti-terrorism officials are investigating the third bombing in three weeks of a natural gas pipeline in remote areas of British Columbia. The latest explosion Friday morning in the isolated Dawson Creek area of northeastern British Columbia appears to have been deliberately set, but didn't pose any danger for area residents or pipeline workers, the Vancouver Sun reported. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police indicated in a release that the latest attack was aimed at the same kind of sour-gas pipeline as the other two blasts on Oct. 12 and 16. There is considerable local opposition to the expansion of such sour-gas well operations by EnCana Corp., the newspaper said. Sour gas is natural gas tainted with toxic hydrogen sulphide, which many area residents believe pose risks to human and livestock health. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/01/Canada_pipeline_again_targeted_in_blast/UPI-96961225550267/ More: Second Canadian gas pipeline bombed http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/10/17/Second_Canadian_gas_pipeline_bombed/UPI-57261224240499/ Bomb targeted Canadian gas pipeline http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/10/15/Bomb_targeted_Canadian_gas_pipeline/UPI-82251224081112/ From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 1 14:55:37 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:55:37 -0700 Subject: [A-List] [Fwd] CorpWatch and KPFA Radio - "Afghanistan 2008: Seven Years After the, Taliban" Multimedia Collaboration Message-ID: <490CC249.3010801@gmail.com> << http://www.corpwatch.org >> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, October 31, 2008 CorpWatch and KPFA Radio Launch "Afghanistan 2008: Seven Years After the Taliban" Multimedia Project Collaboration. (Berkeley, CA - October 31, 2008) Seven years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, the country faces an increasingly uncertain future. Award-winning investigative journalists Pratap Chatterjee and Nobu Sakamoto, reported from Afghanistan immediately following the invasion, and now return to the country as part of a CorpWatch/KPFA Radio collaboration to take stock. ?As the United States moves towards perhaps the most critical presidential election in decades, this project aims to bring a spotlight back to both the human cost of war being borne by the Afghan people, and the gross incompetence that has plagued the reconstruction effort here ? at significant profit to private military companies like the Louis Berger Group, Dyncorp, and Espial,? said CorpWatch project director Tonya Hennessey. In 2006, Afghan American journalist Fariba Nawa returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction, detailed in the CorpWatch report ?Afghanistan, Inc.? The findings were tragically disheartening. In 2008, initial observations and interviews show that the situation has continued to deteriorate. "The reconstruction of Afghanistan has definitely not met expectations. Our research is intended to discover why things have gone wrong and what happened to the money provided for Afghan development," says Pratap Chatterjee, KPFA reporter and CorpWatch Managing Editor and author of "Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation". In 2007, America's first listener-sponsored radio station KPFA launched the interactive website Warcomeshome.org, featuring hard-hitting stories about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as innovative means of contributing to, and distributing information about, the impact of the conflict on people in the United States. "Afghanistan 2008: Seven Years After the Taliban," is the newest phase of the project, the contents of which are now part of the permanent collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. "Seven years after the US and its allies invaded, Afghanistan has become the forgotten occupation," says KPFA Program Director Sasha Lilley. "KPFA's War Comes Home project had previously told the story of the costs of the occupation for U.S. soldiers. Yet even more significant are the costs for the Afghan people." In the spirit of CorpWatch?s hard-hitting investigative journalism andKPFA's tradition of media innovation, Warcomeshome.org allows visitors to listen to and share stories about the consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, using their own blogs, email lists, and social networking sites. The website features a blog by Chatterjee, as well as audio interviews, photos, video, and resources for activists. To learn more about "The War Comes Home: Seven Years After the Taliban," go to www.Warcomeshome.org. ### Since 1996 CorpWatch has investigated and exposed corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world. It works to foster global justice, independent media activism, and democratic control over corporations. www.corpwatch.org Founded in 1949, KPFA is the United States ' first listener-sponsored radio station. Broadcasting on 94.1 FM in Berkeley , CA , and 88.1 FM on KFCF in Fresno , KPFA's signal reaches one third of the state of California . KPFA website, kpfa.org, serves thousands of listeners all over the world. Much of KPFA's programming is local, original and eclectic, with a mix of news, arts, and music. www.kpfa.org Press contacts: Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Managing Editor Pratap [at] corpwatch.org, Global Mobile: +1-202-580-8393 Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch Project Director tonya [at] corpwatch.org, 510 271-8080, 650 273-2475 Sasha Lilley, KPFA Program Director ipd [at] kpfa.org, 510 848-6767 ext 209 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- CorpWatch 1611 Telegraph Ave, Suite 720 Oakland, CA 94612 USA Tel: 510-271-8080 Fax: 510-271-8083 URL: http://www.corpwatch.org Feed our wiki! http://www.crocodyl.org =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From nscchicago at igc.org Sat Nov 1 13:19:24 2008 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 14:19:24 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Nicaragua Network Hotline--October 28, 2008 Message-ID: <007001c93c56$c97100d0$0a0110ac@NSCCHICAGO> Nicaragua Network Hotline--October 28, 2008From: Nicaragua Network Subject: Nicaragua Network Hotline--October 28, 2008 You are receiving this email from Nicaragua Network because you are subscribed to the Hotline list. To ensure that you continue to receive emails from us, add nicanet at afgj.org to your address book today. NOTICE: If you want to forward this message, use the forward function at the bottom of the e-mail. Do not use your own message forward function. If you do, you can be unsubscribed. TO BE DELETED FROM THIS LIST, PLEASE REPLY TO NSC WORKERS COOP Nicaragua Network Hotline www.nicanet.org October 28, 2008 1. MRS officially joins PLC campaign; government distribution of stoves and titles criticized 2. Sandinistas take over AMNLAE 3. NGOs gain international support 4. Illiteracy falls below 10%; Health care access skyrockets 1. MRS officially joins PLC campaign; government distribution of stoves and titles criticized On Oct. 26 the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) endorsed Eduardo Montealegre for mayor of Managua in the Nov. 9 elections. Montealegre was the Bush administration-backed presidential candidate in 2006. He is nominee of the right-wing Liberal Alliance led by the Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC) and is running against boxing champ and former Managua council member, Alexis Arg?ello of the Sandinista Party (FSLN). Taking part in the program of endorsement were MRS leaders Enrique Saenz, Dora Maria Tellez, Victor Hugo Tinoco, Hugo Torres and Edmundo Jarquin. The Sandinista dissidents called the FSLN a "deformation of Sandinismo" and called on the population of the country, but especially of Managua, to vote against the FSLN candidates. Shouts of "Democracy, Yes! Dictatorship, No!" were heard throughout the program. Dora Maria Tellez said, "We had no other choice.... The MRS had candidates in 141 municipalities but Ortega took away our legal recognition, prevented us from participating, and we were not going to stay out of these elections..." She added that the MRS was not promised any posts or privileges in exchange for its support of Liberal candidates. The Liberal Alliance is composed of the PLC, the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), and the "Let's Go with Eduardo" Movement. The Supreme Electoral Council took away the MRS legal recognition after the party failed repeatedly to file legally required paperwork. Notable by her absence was Monica Baltodano, of the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo, which joined the MRS for the 2006 elections. At a meeting last week of Rescue Movement leaders, she repeated her insistence that voters should cast a "null" vote in opposition to both the FSLN and the Liberal Alliance. The Ortega government's distribution of property titles and stoves has also been criticized as an election ploy. Hundreds of families on urban plots in poor neighborhoods have received title after nearly 20 years of uncertainty. Superintendent of Property Yara Perez handed over 400 titles in Villa Reconciliacion Sur and expected to be travelling to other neighborhoods in Managua and cities throughout the country. On Nov. 5 she will be joined in El Timal by Cardinal Miguel Obando, coordinator of the Commission for Peace and Reconciliation to distribute titles to former combatants of the contra war. Opposition media noted that the visits by government officials to the poor neighborhoods were followed by members of the Councils of Citizen Power (CPC) urging the new property owners to vote for the Sandinista candidate for mayor. But Perez said, "Why are you suspicious? These people never got a response to their needs before and we began turning over to them their property deeds last year." In another program that opponents of the government criticized as unfair campaign use of government monies, a total of 25,000 poor families received a gas stove and a tank of bottled cooking gas last week. The press of people to receive the stoves was so great that a window broke in the House of the Peoples (formerly the Presidential Palace), where the stoves were being distributed, injuring three people. The stoves were donated as part of the Bolivarian Alternative for Our Americas (ALBA) trade program. The women previously cooked over wood fires. During a ceremony, President Daniel Ortega said, "This is a struggle we are waging to improve women's health and also to improve the environment by eliminating the cutting of forests." The program will eventually benefit 200,000 families according to Ortega. During his speech at the ceremony, Ortega condemned the print media and called the Inter- America Press Association "a mafia." He said, "If our people gathered together are mobs, if our coming together is a dictatorship, then long live the dictatorship of the poor! Those who shout that there is a dictatorship act like the landlords of our people." On Oct. 24 Ortega also handed over the first 400 Houses for the People homes to poor families, mostly to low paid government health workers, teachers and police. The houses cost US$20,000 and the families will pay $40/month for them. In other election news, Roberto Rivas, president of the Supreme Electoral Council said that there will be international election observation for the Nov. 9 election and that the Inter-American Union of Electoral Organisms is ready with a team of more than 40 observers made up of current and former electoral officials and that officials from the Council of Latin American Electoral Experts were presently in the country. He said a decision on national observers will be made "within the next few days." 2. Sandinistas take over AMNLAE Dora Zeledon, long-time president of the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Nicaraguan Women's Association (AMNLAE) resigned on Oct. 24 and turned over the Erlinda Lopez National House of the Woman to First Lady Rosario Murillo and members of the recently formed Sandinista Women's Movement. Beginning the week before, followers of the new Movement took over several of the 60 Women's Houses that AMNLAE owned throughout the country. On Oct. 22, Murillo made a surprise appearance at an AMNLAE national council meeting which Zeledon had called to discuss the takeovers. According to sources, Murillo demanded that AMNLAE follow the line of the FSLN and defend the administration of Daniel Ortega "or turn over its property, because AMNLAE belongs to the Sandinista Front." And, in spite of the fact that the majority of the national council supported Zeledon, Murillo was able to impose her selection of Isabel Arauz to replace Zeledon. The disagreements between AMNLAE and Murillo grew out of AMNLAE's refusal to support the Ortega government's opposition to sex education, therapeutic abortion, and its position on conflicts with some non- governmental organizations and movements. In a communiqu?, Zeledon said that "the blackmail, the threats, the manipulation and the public campaign of questioning and invalidating the work of AMNLAE are things that violate the autonomy, bylaws and statutes of our organization." Zeledon, a Sandinista militant, was an FSLN deputy in the National Assembly from 1997 to 2001 and is now an alternate. In her message of resignation she listed some of the accomplishments of the organization, including work to reform the electoral law based on broad consultation with Nicaraguan women, opposition to gender based violence, and education of women about their civil rights. 3. NGOs gain international support On Oct. 22, the European Union released a statement which expressed concern about what it called the harassment of non-governmental organizations in Nicaragua by the Ortega government. The statement said that accusations through the media against NGOs and civil society representatives should not be substituted for legal processes in the courts. The statement questioned what the "true objectives of these intimidation maneuvers" were. The document went on to say that EU countries consider that NGOs "play an essential part in the democratic life and development of Nicaragua" and confirmed the commitment of EU countries to continue to include NGOs in their foreign aid to Nicaragua. Foreign Minister Samuel Santos criticized the EU statement saying that the government was not persecuting civil society organizations and that the EU statement was based on biased and false articles in the media. "They generalize that there is a conflict with all NGOs and I clarified for them that there are 4,202 registered NGOs and there is a problem with only one registered group and one that is not registered," Santos said referring to the Center for Communications Research (CINCO) and the Autonomous Women's Movement (MAM) whose offices were searched and documents seized last week by authorities. What the government is trying to do, he said, is "defend our institutions" and "make sure the law is followed." On Oct. 23, the US State Department expressing concern about the Nov. 9 municipal elections and about accusations against NGOs. State Department spokesperson Robert Wood claimed that the invalidation of two political parties and intimidation of civil society groups "put in doubt the credibility of the municipal elections." He added, "We are also concerned because the Supreme Electoral Council has not approved with adequate time the requests of international and national groups for credentials to observe the elections." He said that Nicaragua should comply with Article 23 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter which states that it is the obligation of governments to create conditions for free and just elections. A group known as the Friends of the Inter-American Democratic Charter also expressed concern about the electoral process. The letter was signed by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark and others. 5. Illiteracy falls below 10%; Health care access skyrockets Education Minister Miguel De Castilla reported on Oct. 25 that illiteracy now stands at 9.9%, down from 35% when President Daniel Ortega took office, the lowest level in Nicaraguan history. The Ministry of Education used the Cuban literacy program "Yes I can" to achieve the reduction. De Castilla recalled that the great National Literacy Campaign of 1980 reduced illiteracy from 52% to 12.9%, but, he said, under the neoliberal governments since 1990, illiteracy had climbed again. He stated that the goal was to reduce the rate to zero by the 30th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution on July 19 and to be able to announce at the celebration that Nicaragua was free of illiteracy. He said that in the last 19 months fundamental structural changes have been made in education in Nicaragua and added that, for 2009, his goals were to advance in mathematics and science. De Castillo said, "We have to understand that this is just one of the battles of our government, the battle for Housing for the Poor, Zero Usury, Zero Hunger, Program "Love", all are programs in a single battle against poverty." Minister of Health Guillermo Gonzalez on October 21 said that use of the public hospitals and health centers has grown by 40% in 2008 over 2007 and in 2007 it grew 50% over the previous year. "The lack of doctors has been a struggle we are confronting. It is a complicated subject that can only be solved with financial investment," he said. He added that the demand for free medicine and treatment has put pressure on the health care system. "Appointments have grown by 40% over the previous year and the same for surgery," Gonzalez said. "We have calculated that by the end of the year we will have spent US$30.75 million on medicines and we have had to ask for a budget increase for 2009," he explained. He said that the government is investing millions of dollars to develop the hospitals and health centers, which he called "the reestablishment of a right" of the population. "In 21 months the government has transformed the health care system from a model of attention just to injuries and disease into a conception centering on the family, the community, and the person seeking treatment," he said. This hotline is prepared from the Nicaragua News Service and other sources. To receive a more extensive weekly summary of the news from Nicaragua by e-mail or postal service, send a check for $60.00 to Nicaragua Network, 1247 E St., SE, Washington, DC 20003. We can be reached by phone at 202-544-9355. Our web site is: www.nicanet.org. To subscribe to the Hotline, send an e-mail to nicanet at afgj.org Forward email This email was sent to nscchicago at igc.org by nicanet at afgj.org. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribeT | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by Nicaragua Network | 1247 E St. SE | Washington | DC | 20003 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 25905 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081101/0eab7c44/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Sat Nov 1 14:24:18 2008 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:24:18 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade In-Reply-To: References: <490B69D6.3020803@tellas.gr> Message-ID: The trouble arises from the fact that corporate executives and employees have interests that are opposed to stockholders, let alone the general public. The corporation itself, does not even exist. There's a system of contracts, fiduciary responsibility, ethics, etc. which is not very effective, and there is a system of internal controls that is somewhat more effective, for example preventing outright theft like writing a check to themselves.... but the system of internal controls operates at such a trivial and concrete level, it's like the criminal statutes and police. The fact is, the financial crisis and capitalism itself, are broken at the level of fiduciary responsibility, ethics, agency theory, etc. Not at the level of regulatory oversight or internal control. I reluctantly conclude that the corporate form manifest today, is ungovernable. Corporations have never respected the common good, the environment or any externalities without government oversight, and corporations today have developed such an advantage over regulators due to political power, financial resources, smarter people, knowledge infrastructure, strategic options, and clarity of will, that corporations are in fact ungovernable. And we are really in a pickle. Todd At 12:50 PM 10/31/2008, Anne Williamson wrote: >Stathis, > >Your argument that counterparty risk overcomes greed is >commonsensical, but alas has already >been defeated many times just in the last 2 months! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1707 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081101/8a0191f2/attachment.txt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 1 17:06:39 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:06:39 -0700 Subject: [A-List] Georgia On Their Minds - BBC 'Fesses Up To Georgian War Crimes In South Ossetia Message-ID: <490CE0FF.9050802@gmail.com> Human Rights Watch does a turnabout as well. "They went on firing all the next day without stopping. At some point there was a pause, and we saw Georgian soldiers going along the street in their Nato uniforms" Georgia accused of targeting civilians By Tim Whewell BBC File On 4 The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August. Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting. Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians. Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes. The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia's supporters in the West. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told the BBC the attack on South Ossetia was "reckless". He said he had raised the issue of possible Georgian war crimes with the government in Tbilisi. The evidence was gathered by the BBC on the first unrestricted visit to South Ossetia by a foreign news organisation since the conflict. Georgia's attempt to re-conquer the territory triggered a Russian invasion and the most serious crisis in relations between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War. In Full: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7692751.stm From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 02:32:54 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 04:32:54 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Three Way Presidential Debate - Obama, McCain, and Nader Message-ID: Yoshie From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 03:09:43 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 05:09:43 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Britain Uses Anti-terrorism Laws to Freeze Iceland's Assets Message-ID: Financial Sanctions Notice 8 October 2008 The Landsbanki Freezing Order 2008 2008 No. 2668 BANKS AND BANKING The Landsbanki Freezing Order 2008 November 2, 2008 Iceland, Mired in Debt, Blames Britain for Woes By SARAH LYALL LONDON ? No one disputes that Iceland's economic troubles are largely the country's own fault. But there may be more to the story, at least in the view of Iceland's government, its citizens and even some outsiders. As grave as their situation already was, they say, Britain ? their old friend, NATO ally and trading partner ? made it immeasurably worse. The troubles between the countries began three weeks ago when Britain took the extraordinary step of using its 2001 antiterrorism laws to freeze the British assets of a failing Icelandic bank. That appeared to brand Iceland a terrorist state. "I must admit that I was absolutely appalled," the Icelandic foreign minister, Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir, said in an interview, describing her horror at opening the British treasury department's home page at the time and finding Iceland on a list of terrorist entities with Al Qaeda, Sudan and North Korea, among others. In a volatile economic climate, in which appearance matters almost as much as reality, being associated with terrorism is not a good thing. "The immediate effect was to trigger an almost complete freeze on any banking transactions between Iceland and abroad," said Jon Danielsson, an economist at the London School of Economics. "When you're labeled a terrorist, nobody does business with you." The Icelandic prime minister, Geir H. Haarde, accused Britain of "bullying a small neighbor" and said the action was "very out of proportion." In a recent speech in Beijing, Sir Howard Davies, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England and now the director of the London School of Economics, said that Britain had used a "beggar thy neighbor" approach to Iceland. And an online petition signed so far by more than 20 percent of Iceland's population said the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, had sacrificed Iceland "for his own short-term political gain," thereby turning "a grave situation into a national disaster." Iceland's financial problems had been brewing for some time. This past spring, the country's banks, bloated with foreign deposits and debts, began to falter. This fall, as the financial crisis deepened, the government took over two of the country's three largest banks. Britain's government, alarmed about the tens of thousands of accounts held by its citizens, companies, local governments and charities, froze the British assets of one of the failed banks, Landsbanki. It also seized the assets of Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander, the British subsidiary of another Icelandic bank, Kaupthing. "The Icelandic government, believe it or not, told me yesterday that they have no intention of honoring their obligations here," Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer, declared the day Britain seized the assets. The Icelandic government disputed that, saying it was merely asking for time to make good on its obligations. Whatever the case, reaction was immediate and severe, particularly when Mr. Brown said the following day ? inaccurately ? that "we are freezing the assets of Icelandic companies in the U.K. where we can." Iceland's ambassador to Britain, Sverrir H. Gunnlaugsson, said in an interview that this statement was particularly damaging. "There was a perception in the U.K. press and among suppliers that everything Icelandic had been frozen," he said. "The word was put out belatedly that this was not the case." Icelanders say that it is now nearly impossible to get foreign currency into or out of the country. Many banks have refused even to transfer money to Iceland. Importers are having difficulty paying their foreign bills, and exporters are having trouble getting paid by their foreign customers. Many people in Iceland are also furious about what happened to Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander. The British government's seizure of its assets precipitated the immediate collapse of its parent bank, Kaupthing, which the Icelandic government had been propping up and had hoped would survive. "Kaupthing was the last, best hope of the Icelandic banking system, and it was killed there and then," Andres Magnusson, an editorial writer for Icelandic Financial News, said in an interview. "This really was the last straw. A lot of Icelanders are asking, 'Excuse me: who's the terrorist here?' " The bank's collapse had repercussions beyond Iceland and Britain. More than 8,000 depositors, individuals and businesses, hold Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander accounts worth about $1.34 billion on the Isle of Man, money they cannot get their hands on now ? and may never. Iceland is in line to receive a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and is talking to other Scandinavian countries. It is not entirely friendless: it was recently offered a loan of about $52 million from the tiny Faroe Islands, for which it is very grateful, Mr. Gunnlaugsson said. The Icelandic government has pledged to make good on domestic bank accounts. But it is still fighting with Britain over how much it is obliged to pay ? and how much it can afford to pay ? to compensate customers with accounts in Icesave, Landsbanki's British branch. Under European regulations, Iceland is obliged to pay 20,000 euros (about $25,000) to each individual account holder in Icesave. But the total, Ms. Gisladottir, the foreign minister, said, would amount to about 600 billion Icelandic kronur ? only about $5 billion at today's collapsed exchange rate but fully 60 percent of Iceland's gross domestic product. "The compensation that we would give would be twice as much per head as the reparations Germany faced in the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War," she said. "That is something we cannot afford." The British government has guaranteed that individual British account holders will be compensated fully, which is why it is seeking to wrest as much money as possible from Iceland. But no such guarantees have been made to the British companies, local governments, charities and universities ? including Oxford and Cambridge ? that had Icesave accounts. That figure alone is well over a billion dollars. Iceland's key interest rate now stands at 18 percent. The currency, the krona, has declined 44 percent in the last year. Mr. Danielsson, the economist, visited the country recently and found the situation grave. "Salaries are frozen, food prices are shooting up and they are laying off people left, right and center," he said. "Companies are going bankrupt all over the place. It's unimaginable how bad it is." Ms. Gisladottir said Britain's decision had sent Iceland back some 30 or 40 years, to a time when it was an isolated, poor country, dependent mostly on its fishing trade. "This is a major crisis," she said. "We haven't been in this situation for, probably, ever. We cannot solve it alone. We need solidarity from partners, from friendly countries, and we thought the U.K. was one of them." Warning on use of anti-terror law on banks By Michael Peel Published: October 10 2008 04:14 | Last updated: October 10 2008 04:14 The use of anti-terror powers to freeze billions of pounds of Icelandic bank assets in Britain is a distortion of the law's intent and risks further gumming up the ailing financial system, legal experts warned on Thursday. Financial crime lawyers said the government's unprecedented decision to apply the freezing order for purposes other than tackling terrorism opened the way to its use in other cases centred on commercial and political interests. The Treasury's action on Wednesday to protect the deposits of British account holders has highlighted broader concerns that some security-related laws passed since the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks are so widely drafted they are open to abuse. Martin Saunders, a partner at Clifford Chance, the law firm, said it was "surprising" the government was addressing an economic problem with "the kind of order issued against organisations like al-Qaeda". The firm said that the Treasury order freezing an estimated ?4bn of assets of Landsbanki, which went into receivership this week, could create a ripple effect of disruption on deals involving other institutions. The freezing provisions applied to many assets other than account deposits, potentially affecting transactions involving instruments such as gold, securities and letters of credit. Gareth Rees QC, a leading financial crime counsel, questioned whether use of the powers was justified even though "everyone is being urged to treat the present financial crisis as requiring a new approach". He said: "Using powers clearly designed to combat terrorism in this commercial and political way seems to be stretching the meaning of this legislation beyond its intended limits." It is the first time the Treasury has deployed the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act powers in a non-terrorist case, using the sweeping discretion the law offers to combat "action to the detriment of the UK's economy". Lawyers say that this term is so widely drawn that it appears to offer support both to what the government did and to similar action in future situations involving troubled overseas institutions. Asked if the government saw the Landsbanki case as constituting a kind of financial terrorism, one official responded wryly: "The question is: who are the terrorists?" The Treasury stressed it had used the power as a precautionary measure to protect British retail depositors, as it was not clear whether Landsbanki could cover its obligations to them. The order was temporary and officials were working "co-operatively and constructively" with the Icelandic authorities to resolve the situation. The Treasury on Thursday issued a licence allowing a partial relaxation of the order to allow businesses to access their accounts and other facilities with Landsbanki's London branch. The government approach came under political fire, with Baroness Miller, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, condemning it as "clearly a misuse" of the 2001 act. "Although it may have been right to freeze the assets, it is appalling to use terrorism legislation for anything other than counter-terrorism measures." Her attack echoes criticisms of the broad application of official powers in areas such as surveillance, which can ordered by hundreds of authorities, including local councils, to safeguard "the interests of the economic well-being of the UK". Stephen Grosz, the head of public law and human rights at Bindmans, the law firm, said that the Iceland asset freezing was another example of "function creep", under which the breadth of potential applications of an act meant powers adopted for one purpose could be deployed for another. Liberty, the human rights group, declined to criticise the government's use of the anti-terrorism law, arguing that it seemed to fall under the umbrella of the "security" provisions referred to in the act's title. Additional reporting by Jimmy Burns Terror law used for Iceland deposits By FT reporters Published: October 8 2008 17:11 | Last updated: October 8 2008 22:54 Anti-terrorism powers were used on Wednesday to recoup money owed to UK depositors in a failed Icelandic bank in a move that risked sending Britain's relations with Reykjavik to their lowest since the 1970s "cod wars". From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 03:15:34 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 05:15:34 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Credit Lifeline Could Spur Budapest Reforms + Belarus to Liberalise for IMF Loan Message-ID: Credit lifeline could spur Budapest reforms By Thomas Escritt in London Published: October 29 2008 18:24 | Last updated: October 29 2008 18:24 The strings attached to Hungary's rescue package may just give the country's leaders the excuse they need to push through structural reforms. When Hungarians voted in a referendum on spending cuts last March, their response was a resounding "no" and the politicians listened. Since the 1960s, Hungarian governments have secured social peace by borrowing abroad to indulge consumer appetites at home, a tradition that survived the country's transition to free market democracy in 1989. Painful reforms have been a recipe for political suicide. But the news of a $25.1bn credit line to the country, which has been suffering from investor flight due to fears over its ability to finance its foreign debts, may bolster the minority socialist government's resolve. In exchange for the package, led by the International Monetary Fund, Hungary has promised Ft300bn ($1.5bn, ?1.2bn, ?920m) in spending cuts. This is on top of cuts worth Ft80bn, which Hungary pledged following the European Central Bank's grant of a ?5bn credit line two weeks ago. The IMF said it had been impressed by Hungary's comprehensive policy package, designed to restore investor confidence and alleviate the stress experienced in recent weeks in the Hungarian financial markets. The package's fiscal measures "[justified] the exceptional level of access to Fund resources ? equivalent to around 1,020 per cent of Hungary's quota in the IMF ? and deserve the support of the international community," said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF. The IMF and EU interventions have helped Ferenc Gyurcsany, the reform-minded prime minister, to enforce discipline among his fractious backbenchers, convincing them to support the curtailing of totemic "13th month" payments to pensioners and public sector employees. "At least Mr Gyurcsany has now persuaded his party to sacrifice this particular sacred cow," said Krisztian Szabados, a partner at Political Capital, a public affairs consultancy. David Daroczi, spokesman for Mr Gyurcsany, said the cut was also a signal to foreign investors: "We did not need to [cut the 13th month payments] to get the IMF's help. We did it to send a clear message to investors that the government is ready to make cuts. It has symbolic value." The government forecast on Tuesday that the economy could contract by up to 1 per cent next year. Belarus to liberalise for IMF loan By Jan Cienski in Minsk Published: October 29 2008 09:26 | Last updated: October 29 2008 18:53 Belarus is promising to reform its economy and sell off some state assets as it holds talks with the International Monetary Fund on a possible $2bn loan as a "security cushion" in case of further turbulence from the global financial crisis. Minsk has used about 10 per cent of its foreign currency reserves, which now stand at about $4.9bn, over the last month as it tried to support the Belarusian rouble. Belarus, which has a relatively underdeveloped financial sector, was not affected by the initial shock of the crisis, but it has been hit by turmoil in Russia, its main trading partner, and neighbouring Ukraine. "In the first phase Belarus was only minimally affected. But in the second phase, with terms of trade becoming worse, we anticipate certain problems will confront our exporters," Vasily Matyushevsky, the deputy chairman of the central bank, told reporters on Wednesday. The IMF has already agreed to loan Hungary $25.1bn and Ukraine $16.5bn. An IMF delegation arrived in Minsk on Sunday and is holding talks with the Belarusian government. "It is needed to safeguard against any shocks or stresses," said Andrei Kobyakov, the deputy prime minister, adding that if the economic situation improved Belarus might end up not needing the loan. Belarus, one of Europe's last authoritarian states, has long been one of Russia's closest allies but in the last year has been cautiously opening itself to the west. In September it increased the permitted foreign stake in local banks to rise from 25 to 50 per cent. The government is also planning to sell off four state owned banks as well as other state owned enterprises. "We are taking steps to improve the business climate of our country, to ensure a continued inflow of foreign direct investment," said Mr Matyushevsky. Belarus is also in the final stages of negotiating a $2bn loan from Russia, which supplies Belarus with most of its oil and gas. Mr Kobyakov denied that the terms of the loan were tied to Belarusian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions of Georgia that Russia says are independent states. "The Russian loan is not linked to the global economic crisis, although in today's situation it is coming just in time," he said. The Belarusian economy grew by 8.2 per cent last year and the government expects growth this year to be at least 10 per cent. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 03:23:30 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 05:23:30 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The East Is in the Red Message-ID: The east is in the red By Stefan Wagstyl Published: October 16 2008 20:11 | Last updated: October 16 2008 20:11 Current Account Balances, as a % of GDP, 2008 and Cost of Insuring Government Debt, credit default swaps spread (basis points) From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 03:30:47 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 05:30:47 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Turkish Politicians Argue over Need for IMF Help as Crunch Bites Message-ID: Turkish politicians argue over need for IMF help as crunch bites By Delphine Strauss in Ankara Published: October 28 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 28 2008 02:00 A political squabble has broken out in Turkey over whether it should turn again to the International Monetary Fund for help, amid growing evidence of the negative impact of the global financial crisis. The country's most recent $10bn (?6.4bn, ?8bn) IMF deal expired in May, and despite the rush by several European countries this month for support from the Washington-based body, Turkish politicians initially said Ankara could do without outside help. "We cannot darken our future by bowing to the wishes of the IMF," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, said at the weekend - comments that suggest an IMF deal would require cuts in budget plans presented only last week. But Durmus Yilmaz, central bank governor, said yesterday that IMF support would be "useful" to give confidence to international markets - although it would ultimately be a political decision. "At this stage we do not need IMF cash . . . but there is uncertainty about what we will face in the coming term," he said, according to the state-run Anatolian news agency. The governor's comments are a sign of the times in a country that is no stranger to financial turbulence and where fears are growing of an economic slowdown as foreign capital dries up. A history of homegrown currency crises means many people watch inflation and exchange rates more closely than the weather forecast. To them, the convulsions in global markets look wearily familiar. In 2001, two fifths of Turkey's banks failed after a spree of irresponsible - at times corrupt - lending. Taking them over and recapitalising them cost a crippling 30 per cent of gross domestic product and the economy plunged into a deep, if brief, recession. Now, thanks to that restructuring, Turkish banks look conservative and well-capitalised compared with their shaky US and western European counterparts. But that will not spare the country a sharp economic slowdown as the foreign capital flows that funded five years of prosperity decline. Politicians are reluctant to acknowledge the severity of the situation, sticking to a forecast of 4 per cent growth for 2009. That is much higher than independent forecasts, casting doubt on the assumptions on which budget plans are based. The IMF, in its latest forecasts, predicted GDP growth of just 3.5 per cent this year and 3 per cent in 2009 - half the average over the past five years. Slow growth would itself be a novelty for an economy that has historically swung between boom and rapid contraction. But it is a painful prospect for a country already struggling to create jobs for a young and fast-growing population. Serhan Cevik, economist at Nomura, said: "Turkey is one of the best proxies for global risk appetite." The lira has lost a third of its value against the dollar this month and equity values have halved from their peak as foreign investors pull out of a liquid market. The biggest immediate danger lies in Turkey's heavy external financing requirement, a long-standing weakness that makes it vulnerable to tight global credit conditions. Most analysts think it can avoid a full-blown balance of payments crisis. But it will inevitably become harder to manage a current account deficit running above 6 per cent of GDP and increasingly financed by corporate borrowing. The central bank has already begun daily foreign exchange auctions to increase foreign exchange liquidity in the banking system. It is likely to keep interest rates high - they are already at 16.75 per cent - until the risk of a run on the lira has dissipated. Even without the threat of imminent meltdown, the real economy is suffering as high interest rates hasten the end of a consumer boom and the slump in European markets hits an export sector concentrated on cars and white goods. Real estate investors have pulled out of deals, retailers are scaling back store expansions and carmakers are calling halts in production. Lower oil prices will cut Turkey's import bill, but will also mean slower business for Turkish contractors in Middle Eastern markets. Bankers in Istanbul say Gulf investors want to renegotiate prices in deals discussed before the lira's plunge, which will also hurt companies that borrowed heavily in foreign currency without effective hedges. Additional reporting by Funja Guler From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Nov 2 04:16:08 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 06:16:08 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Zimbabwe: Donors Want Break from Past Policies Message-ID: Donors want break from past policies By William Wallis in London Published: October 28 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 28 2008 02:00 It could be many months before Zimbabwe can access donor funds to stabilise its imploding economy even if President Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister designate, break the deadlock over cabinet positions holding up a post-election agreement. Donor officials say any government emerging from the power-sharing talks that resumed in Harare yesterday would first have to establish a clean break from ruinous past policies. "We are keen that they reach a political agreement so that they can have a credible economic reform programme and credible people at the Reserve Bank," says Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank. But the government would have to move quickly to schedule repayment of $1bn (?801m, ?644m) in arrears to the AfDB, and the World Bank, and reach agreement on an International Monetary Fund reform programme before direct budgetary support would be available, he said. The threshold has been raised by the global financial crisis and the likelihood that donors will be reluctant to risk substantial sums on rescuing an administration still headed by Mr Mugabe. "For the bilaterals they could begin now. For the international financial institutions it would require agreement on arrears and an internationally accepted reform package," Mr Kaberuka told the Financial Times. Without an injection of hard currency, potentially more than $1bn, any government would struggle to tame hyper-inflation running officially at an annualised 231m per cent, and by unofficial estimates tracked by the US Cato institute, at 10 quadrillion per cent. Bilateral donors including the US and UK could raise humanitarian aid to an estimated 5m Zimbabweans facing starvation, donor officials say. But a prolonged period of waiting before any formal stabilisation package is available would pose serious difficulties for both Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe. Having signed up to what some opposition activists criticise as a pact with the devil, the opposition leader once in government will be under pressure to prove he can quickly reverse a vertiginous decline in Zimbabwean livelihoods. "Civil servants want real incomes. What happens if he can't deliver?" asks a Zimbabwean analyst connected with the Reserve Bank. As a bare minimum towards maintaining the peace and paying security forces, a new government would have to continue printing money in the near term, an economist with a multilateral donor organisation said. But to accelerate the disbursement of donor funds - in the best case scenario within three months - it would have to signal serious intent to reform. For Mr Mugabe this would pose an acute dilemma. A period of best behaviour could jeopardise the patronage system with which he has maintained his grip on power. In the fantastical world of quadrillions that Zimbabwe's economy inhabits, it has become next to impossible to measure the real state of the country's finances. Donors list some minimum conditions that a new government would have to meet to restore confidence. These include commissioning an external audit of the Reserve Bank, establishing a credible consumer price index, willingness to seek technical assistance from the IMF, and the appointment of credible reformers to positions with influence over monetary and economic policy. Beyond that, a new government could move to protect private property, reverse legislation hindering business, and re-establish the rule of law. Because Mr Mugabe and his principal lieutenants have shown little inclination to do this, many donor officials remain sceptical that a substantial recovery programme will be feasible in the near term. From shimogamo at attglobal.net Sun Nov 2 04:49:44 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:49:44 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Arguments from Ignorance Message-ID: <490D93D8.3040700@attglobal.net> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (October 29 2008) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society For some time now I've been wondering how to bring up a certain habit of thought that, as I see it, forms one of the taproots feeding the contemporary crisis of industrial civilization. That it had to be discussed here on The Archdruid Report I never doubted, but in the midst of a cascade of dramatic current events, that discussion can seem very nearly beside the point. When the system of hallucinatory finance that propped up the illusion of American prosperity for a quarter century may be going to pieces around us, panic selling in commodity markets by speculators hit with margin calls is sending fossil fuel prices to lows just as unsustainable as their recent highs, and the wheels are coming off America's global empire, I find myself wondering, is it really a good time to go wandering off in pursuit of intangibles? Then perspective returns, and I remember that it's precisely the intangibles, the states of mind and attitudes toward the world that form a culture's collective discourse, that define what it can and cannot accomplish as the age of oil comes to an end. As I've commented before, it's not technical issues that make our present predicament so difficult; it's the failure of collective will that keeps even the most grudging acknowledgment of our predicament, and even the most modest response to it, completely off the radar screens of mainstream politics in every nation in the industrial world. Until the "mind-forg'd manacles" of dysfunctional thinking are unlocked and tossed aside, constructive plans for the world after peak oil on anything past an individual level are wasted effort, since they will not be implemented by societies that cannot grasp the need for them. I had a cogent reminder of this over the past week, when three efforts of mine to spark collective discussion about these issues - my book The Long Descent (2008), a reading and booksigning at a local bookstore here in southern Oregon, and the most recent post here - fielded three responses that used very different arguments to make a common claim. A reader of my book emailed me to tell me he thought I was refusing to give proper weight to the possibility that new technology would save our civilization from the impact of peak oil; a serious young man who attended the reading came up afterwards to ask me what I thought about the possibility that the current crisis would drive humanity to achieve a new stage of spiritual evolution, after which we will easily replace fossil fuels with currently unimaginable resources; a new reader of this blog sent in a comment insisting that peak oil was an illusion manufactured by sinister elites who were suppressing inventions that would allow everyone to have all the energy they wanted. Mind you, I'd encountered every one of these assertions before. Ever since this blog first started suggesting that the end of the age of cheap abundant energy was the natural and inevitable result of a human ecology hopelessly out of step with the realities of life on a finite planet, I've fielded a great many emails and comments insisting, basically, that it just ain't so - that one way or another, for one reason or another, humanity could have its abundant energy resources and burn them too, and can reasonably expect more of the same forever. The three responses I've just cited by no means exhaust the full spectrum of arguments advanced to back this curious claim, but they're good representative samples of the type. Now it's possible to dispute each of these claims on their own terms, and I've done that more than once on this blog and elsewhere, but there's a very real extent to which this is a waste of breath. Each of them is what the old logicians used to call argumentia ad ignorantem, arguments from ignorance. They insist on the presence of a factor that isn't actually present for examination and can't be proved or disproved - a technological advance that hasn't happened yet, an imminent spiritual transformation that has to be taken on blind faith, or a conspiracy so secret and pervasive that it can manipulate everything we think we know about the world - to insist that we don't actually have to do anything about peak oil. Such arguments prove nothing, of course; they're the precise equivalent of using the phrase "then a miracle happens" to get from one step of a cookbook recipe or a mathematical equation to the next. Their only virtue is that they're impossible to disprove. I've come to think that this last detail is why they're so popular. It's a very charming social habit, dating back to the 18th century Enlightenment, to profess the belief that people come to decisions about the world by sitting down with the relevant facts, assessing them calmly, and then making a decision on that basis. I think most of us are aware, though, that few decisions are actually made this way; much more often, people start from the conclusion that appeals to their emotions and intuition, and then go looking for logical reasons to support the belief they've already chosen. Most of the time, this is actually a good thing. Left to itself, the reasoning mind tends to run to extremes; it's because most human decisions obey the nonrational promptings of emotional patterns laid down in childhood that our lives have any continuity at all. This same process, averaged out over the millions who inhabit a nation, provides a sense of stability and identity essential to our collective life. Still, the emotions' habit of projecting the past onto the blank screen of the future can become a ghastly liability when the future no longer resembles the past in some crucial sense. That's the situation we're facing now. Between 1980 and 2005, political gimmickry and the reckless overproduction of the North Slope and North Sea oil fields crashed the price of oil to right around US$10 a barrel - corrected for inflation, the cheapest price in history. During that quarter century of unsustainable excess, energy was so cheap that the cost no longer mattered; it seemed to make perfect sense to live in rural Oregon and commute daily by jet to San Francisco or Seattle, or to arbitrage wage costs by manufacturing consumer goods for the American market in Third World sweatshops and shipping them halfway around the world to their customers, or to build internet server farms, thousands of them, each one drawing as much electricity from the grid as a medium-sized town. That world of unlimited free energy is the world in which nearly all of us in the industrial world lived until very recently, and it's the only world people who are under the age of 35 or so can remember at all. Thus it's not surprising that when people are faced with the claim that the future will be very, very different, they tend to reject the notion out of hand, and if the only reasons they can find to justify that rejection are arguments from ignorance like the ones I cited above, then arguments from ignorance are what they'll cite. The problem is that at this point we don't have time to wait for hypothetical solutions to show up and save us. The Hirsch Report pointed out in 2005 that, to avoid severe economic disruption, any effective response to peak oil had to get started at least twenty years before the beginning of petroleum production declines. Any less than that, and the result is damage to the economy; the shorter the lead time, the worse the damage, and waiting until production declines actually begin is a recipe for crippling economic impacts that could make it impossible to respond to the crisis effectively at all. This is dire news, because we no longer have the twenty years Hirsch specified; we most likely have only two years left. By most calculations, in fact, conventional petroleum production actually peaked the same year the Hirsch Report was published; apparent increases since then have happened because biofuels, tar sand extractives, and other alternative fuels that require high energy inputs have been lumped together with conventional oil; and the best estimates suggest that even with the alternatives factored in, production will face serious declines beginning around 2010. That gives us desperately little time to respond, and no time to spare for arguments that insist some unknown phenomenon will pop out of the woodwork just in time. There are times late at night when I find myself wondering if similar reasonings could have been heard in the Yucatan lowlands as the Terminal Classic period of Mayan history arrived and the paired jaws of declining soil fertility and catastrophic drought clamped around the throat of Lowland Maya civilization. There were plenty of potential responses as the corn harvests began to fail, centering on a transition from corn culture to less valued foods such as ramon nuts, but ideological factors made such a transition difficult for the ahauob, "divine lords" of the Maya city-states, to contemplate; abundant corn harvests filled the same role in their culture as abundant fossil fuel supplies have in ours. Thus, instead of facing the crisis, the ahauob responded by hoping that something would provide them with a way out of it. Some of them, anticipating America's recent neoconservative movement, went to war with other city-states to seize their corn supplies, while others offered up human sacrifices and built ever more grandiose temples in the hopes that the gods would take the crisis away. None of this helped, and much of it probably made the situation worse; one way or another, the result was a "rolling collapse" that, over a century and a half, turned the thriving Maya cities of the lowlands to crumbling, overgrown ruins inhabited by a scattering of survivors. The idea that the cities of contemporary North America could meet the same fate is quite literally unthinkable to most people today, but then the Maya, the Romans, and the people of other collapsed civilizations all probably found their historical destiny just as unthinkable before it happened. There may be little reason to hope that anything like a majority can be helped to think the unthinkable in time to make a difference, but the effort seems worth making, and challenging the sort of arguments from ignorance I've described above might be a good first step. _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/10/arguments-from-ignorance.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Sun Nov 2 05:20:55 2008 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt) Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:20:55 +0000 Subject: [A-List] Global Cooling is Here Message-ID: <1225628455.39s8finm1ge8@w3.webmail.telepac.pt> To attention for believers in named "global warming": Global Cooling is Here Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783 From tboyle at rosehill.net Sun Nov 2 00:12:45 2008 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:12:45 -0800 Subject: [A-List] The Triumph of Ignorance In-Reply-To: <490C447A.1020205@attglobal.net> References: <490C447A.1020205@attglobal.net> Message-ID: At 03:58 AM 11/1/2008, you wrote: >How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be >dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity >that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms >as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle... I thought the consensus was clear on Dan Quayle, that George Bush senior, after a career in the CIA and inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, would never have a vice president as cunning and malevolent as Lyndon Johnson. So, he picked Quayle. Todd. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 721 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081101/57e92960/attachment.txt From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Sun Nov 2 08:22:49 2008 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 10:22:49 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN Is Canada creating an "Aboriginal Army"? Message-ID: <01e5d4b5$39754$19f54325070949@your-6904db8205> IS CANADA CREATING AN ?ABORIGINAL ARMY? BECAUSE IT WANTS US TO COLONIZE OURSELVES?? MNN. Oct. 30, 2008. Nathan Wright of the Assembly of First Nations AFN is the liaison with the Ontario Provincial Police OPP. He was told about the unarmed peaceful opposition to this jail being built in Tyendinaga. The OPP were waiting nearby to be called in. ?That?s news to me?, he said. He didn?t know the OPP had ?made themselves visible?. What did he mean by this? Who called in the invading ?aboriginal? police from Moraviantown, Walpole Island, Akwesasne and elsewhere? Tyendinaga Band Council Chief, R. Don Maracle, was at the demonstration until noon and then left for lunch, leaving the truckers behind. The multi-million dollar portable modular mega-prison was still on the trucks. Who needs a prison when many Mohawks have been waiting years for decent housing and clean water? They built a huge fire at the entrance to the site, cooked and served everybody some food, including the truckers. Then the truckers left. Canada sent in what looked like a colonial invading army? If you blinked your eyes, you would have thought you were in the Middle East. The U.S. set up governments in Iraq similar to the ?band? and ?tribal? councils on Turtle Island whose goal is to ?municipalize? and assimilate us. In Iraq they created local armies to protect these U.S. puppets. People were recruited and trained to terrorize their own communities. This is common totalitarian practice. The RCMP and OPP have both indicated they do not have jurisdiction in at least two Mohawk communities, Akwesasne and Kahnawake. They operate behind a ?smoke screen?. They use ?aboriginal police? to do their dirty work. The aboriginal police have managed to sow seeds of suspicion and conflict in Ongwehonwe communities. On October 23 2008 Prothonotary Mireille Tabib of the Federal Court of Canada ordered that Mohawk women, Kahentinetha and Katenies, who live in Kahnawake and Akwesasne, are not ?Canadian residents?! Therefore, they must pay the crown?s expenses to defend itself from charges of assaulting and attempting to murder them at the Cornwall border check point on June 14, 2008. We know that we Ongwehonwe are not Canadians or part of that foreign colony. They swear allegiance to THE QUEEN and came here to squat on our land. They have no jurisdiction over us, our possessions or our territories. They have no right to attack us, beat us up and try to kill us, not under our law which is the law of the land [Kaianereh?ko:wa], or under the international accords they have signed, or even under Canadian law. If we are not careful Canada could try to turn Tabib?s Order calling us ?non-residents? as a pretext to imprison us in our communities or expel us from our land to who knows where. They may want to illegally limit our country to our communities, rather than recognizing our title to the whole of Onowaregeh, Turtle Island, which we never and cannot gave up. Canada and the establishment are always trying to create situations to attack us for resisting their colonial incursions. They have a whole bag of dirty tricks. One is to lay fake charges so they can impose conditions on us for years. When they have to prove their case, they drop the charges. Demonizing us in the media is part of it, calling us terrorists, smugglers and deviates. It?s meant to lull the public so they won?t object to the brutal, obscene and illegal attacks on us. Where does the mid-community jail fit in? The risk is that Canada and the U.S. are setting up a Gitmo ?no man?s land? jail system where Indigenous people will be taken to be jailed or tortured under no one?s scrutiny. The indigenous incarceration rate can be camouflaged by excluding the figures on those of us who are jailed on ?reserves?. Is Canada going to pass martial law in Indian country? The scheme isn?t original. It?s already being done in Australia where some Aborigine communities are being run by the army. Is there discussion going on right now about setting up ?death squads???? Don?t kid yourself. These armed groups kill civilians, mostly in secret, conduct extra judicial assassinations, killings and disappearances. They are associated with political repression, dictatorships and totalitarianism supported by colonial states. They could be ?official? government units like the aboriginal police. Who are these non-natives in the aboriginal police forces? Squads may also be those organized vigilantes who are being sent into our communities. On a ?WATCH LIST? are youth, employment, social and community organizations which are infiltrated. Retired military officers, off duty police, strangers, ?distant cousins? or imposters are sent in to exert influence. The ?SPOTTERS? are sent in as ?subversives? who are fighting against drugs as a pretext, for example. They penetrate communities and assess the security needed to keep it under control. They collect names of those to be watched, imprisoned, tortured and executed such as traditionalists, political leaders, journalists or community workers. Traditionalists are called ?extremists?. Canada may be trying to set up these units within indigenous communities. Of course, the suckers who fall for this won?t be told what they?re doing. They?ll be manipulated into believing they are defending ?law and order? and ?protecting democracy?. Their extravagant pay is not guilt money .. they think they?re worth it! It?s a real trap for young, confused and weak-minded people. As Secretary Rumsfeld said about U.S. trained Iraqi death squads, ?The U.S. doesn?t have a responsibility to do anything about the crimes of the police forces it established and trained. Only to report it.? Chief R. Don Maracle said that the prison is for ?outsiders with criminal records?. This smacks of death squad mentality. The state?s targets are predominantly young males, women and children. In Canada over 3000 young Ongwehonwe women have been ?disappeared?. We did not have police or jails. Social control is needed in all communities. When we were dependant on each other, elders and group opinions kept our communities in balance. The settlers stole our hunting grounds, crowding us into small patches. Now they want this. Settler societies need police to control the many deranged personalities without family and social ties that their society produces. The state has become the major instrument for assault, theft and murder of our people. Lest we forget, RCMP carried out the genocide, took our children to residential schools, protected the land grabbers and jailed our young men who tried to defend us. If they attack us, try to kill us and steal our children, they have a responsibility to investigate, charge, deter and protect us from them. They aren?t doing this. So what?s their purpose? We are told the colonial ideal is that the police protect society. Some of the worst hoodlums we Ongwehonwe have to deal with are the cops themselves. It?s becoming harder to tell the difference between the cops and the thugs they are supposed to protect us from who are coming at us from every direction. Is this Berlin 1940? It?s heavy. It?s no coincidence that the murder attempt on kahentinetha and katenies was by uniformed officers of the colonial state. It?s no coincidence that this story was not in the mainstream media. It?s no coincidence they want to build prisons in our communities. Iako?ha:kowa & MNN Staff - Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com Eagle Watch, Sharbot Lake kittoh at storm.ca; katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Something?s going on. The actions of the bureaucrats/agents need to be measured in public against the standards of legality that Canada has signed onto at the UN. Some of the players who need to be investigated and unmasked seem to be: - High up ? Chantal ?Who-Has-a-Dirty-Hand-in-Everything? Bernier chantal.bernier at psepc-sppcc.gc.ca; - Margaret ?Trying-to-Suck-Every-Last-Drop-of-Indian-Blood-Now-Wants-Her-Fangs-in-Tyendinaga-Mohawks? Bloodworth, ?National Security Advisor? to Prime Minister, Margaret.bloodworth at psepc-sppcc.gc.ca, 613-957-5466; Indian Affairs sewer rats - Walter ?Whose-Billy-Club-Has-Been-Taken-Away? Walling, wallingw at ainc-inac.gc.ca; Christian ?Anti-Christ? Rouleau, rouleau.c at ainc-inac.gc.ca; - Andre ?Turn? Cote, cote.a at ainc-inac.gc.ca; - Stuart ?Swan-Song? Swanson, swanson.s at ainc-inac.gc.ca; - Paul ?The-White-Man? Leblanc, leblanc.p at ainc-inac.gc.ca; - Zuwena ?Squeal? Robidas, Indian Affairs mouthpiece, zuwena.robidas at pspec-sppcc.gc.ca 613-993-2596; - Helene ?Parrot? Philippe, another Indian Affairs mouthpiece, philippe.h at ainc-inac.gc.ca; - David ?Economic-Hit-Man? Hillman, DG Econ. Dev. david.hallman at psepc-sppcc.gc.ca 819-953-0517; More Emergency Preparedness creeps - Jean ?Lapse-of-Selected-Memory? Chartrand, jean.chartrand at psepc-sppcc.gc.ca 613-990-8470; - Denise ?Who-was-in-there-like-a-dirty-shirt? Charron, denise.charron at spepc-sppcc.gc.ca 613-991-1694; Other excreta of the crown - Yvan ?Who-Maintains-Toilet-Supplies? Dery, for the Privy Council Office ydery at pco-bcp.gc.ca; - Gilles ?Pig-Shop-Keeper? Rochon, Aboriginal Policing, gilles.rochon at psepc.gc.ca 613-990-2666; - Emanuel ?Little-Lamb? Chabot, emmanuel.chabot at psept-sppcc.gc.ca 613-990-4353; - ?Slippery? Jim Beaver jim.beaver at pspec-sppcc.gc.ca; - Peter ?Flat-Foot? Fisher, Police Services PSEPC fax 613-991-0961; - Louise ?Who-Doesn?t-Know-the-Half-of-It? Savage louise.savage at psepc-sppcc.gc.ca; - Sylvia ?Ambulance Chaser? McKenzie, Justice Canada sylvia.mackenzie at sppcc-psept.gc.ca 613-998-3952; - Annik ?The-Squeak? Pelletier, Justice Canada apelleti at justice.gc.ca; - Louis-Alexandre ?Who-Sits-on-a-Very-High-Chair? Guay, Justice, lguay at justice.gc.ca; - Phil Fontaine AFN reception at afn.ca; - Brad Duguid, Ontario Minister Aboriginal Affairs bduguid.mpp at liberal.ola.org; - Angus Toulouse AFN Ontario Region 807-626-9339 Fax 807-626-9404 kathleen at coo.org Give a piece of your mind to: GG Michaelle jean info at gg.ca; Stephen Harper, Prime Minister, Fax 613-941-6900 pm at pm.gc.ca; Chuckie ?Baby? Strahl, Indian Affairs Minister, 819-997-0002, Fax 819-953-4941 strahl.c at parl.gc.ca; Prothonotary Mireille Tabib, Federal Court of Canada 613-992-4238 Fax 613-952-3653; Chief R. Don ?Warden-Wanna-Be? Maracle Mohawks of Bay of Quinte 613-396-3424 extension 106, Email: reception at mbq-tmt-org Fax 613-396-3627, 613-396-3089, Cell 613-391-9249 RDONM at MBQ-TMT.ORG info at mbq-tmt.org ; Superintendent & Commander, Smiths Falls, OPP Eastern Regional Headquarters 613-284-4500 fax 613-284-4597, L.G. ?Who-Wants-to-Help-Set-Up-a-Feeder-of-Young-Offenders-into-the-Big-Pens-for-the-Old-Long-Termers? Beechey; To help, please contact the Rotiskenekete: 613-391-4055, 613-813-4053, Friends, allies and supporters: Call 613-813-1017, email wasoonde3232 at aol.com Go to MNN ?Tyendinaga? category for more stories; New MNN Books Available now! Purchase t-shirts, mugs and more at our CafePressStore http://www.cafepress.com/mohawknews; Subscribe to MNN for breaking news updates http://.mohawknationnews.com/news/subscription.php; Sign Women Title Holders petition! http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Iroquois Note: These challenges of abuses at the border require support and money. Your financial help is needed and appreciated. Please send your donations to PayPal at www.mohawknationnews.com, or by check or money order to ?MNN Mohawk Nation News?, Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0. Nia:wen thank you very much. From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Sun Nov 2 12:05:07 2008 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt) Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:05:07 +0000 Subject: [A-List] bank nationalization in Portugal Message-ID: <1225652707.13c1t43ea09s@w3.webmail.telepac.pt> Portuguese government announced this week end the nationalization of Banco Portugues de Negocios. Investigation of central bank expose a leak of 700 millions euros. More info at http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/index.php?template=SHOWNEWS&id=338957 From cbcox at ilstu.edu Sun Nov 2 12:08:05 2008 From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox) Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:08:05 -0600 Subject: [A-List] The Triumph of Ignorance References: <490C447A.1020205@attglobal.net> <7alt5i$2cuhbf@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> Message-ID: <490DFA95.E1160FBB@ilstu.edu> Conspiracism simply drives me up the wall; it simply _destroys_ political conversation by raising topics that could only be even minimally accessible in a court of law, a congressional investigating committee, or a university seminar sometime after 2150. Such theorizing is pure hysteria, pure contempt for politics, and hence pure contempt for humans as a species. It makes a mockery of leftist hope. Carrol Todd Boyle wrote: > > At 03:58 AM 11/1/2008, you wrote: > > > How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be > > dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it > > charity > > that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two > > terms > > as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle... > > I thought the consensus was clear on Dan Quayle, > that George Bush senior, after a career in the CIA and > inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, > would never have a vice president as cunning and > malevolent as Lyndon Johnson. So, he picked Quayle. > > Todd. From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Sun Nov 2 08:22:49 2008 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 10:22:49 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN When Cops Become Thugs Message-ID: <01e5ce66$39754$19f64325085995@your-6904db8205> WHEN COPS BECOME THUGS ? THE USE OF ?NON LETHAL? WEAPONS & ?PAIN COMPLIANCE? ATTACKS ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE MNN. Nov. 1, 2008. We Ongwehonwe need to know about this new weaponry and martial law training that cops are using on us. We?re unarmed. How do we defend ourselves? The military is getting more involved in civil matters. The U.S. Marines are in the forefront of developing, testing and using so-called ?non-lethal weapons? NLW for what is being called ?domestic crowd control?, or more accurately, ?fascism?. Here are some of the new weapons being used by the state?s agents to attack the people they are supposed to protect: 1) ?Directed Energy Weapons? are used against people and electronic equipment. ?Electromagnetic Energy? is directed in a beam or pulse. The transmitter can be mounted on a vehicle that looks like a large speaker box to disable electronic equipment, disorient and disable people. It may cause organ damage and, of course, death. It has no bullet. So it?s harder to trace who the killers are. ?High Powered Microwave Weapon? is an electromagnetic pulse that can burn skin in an instant. It disables equipment. In April 2007, there was an accident with the "Active Denial System 1", which is a ?pain ray? or ?death ray? gun, during a trial at the Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. It was left on and somebody was badly burned. This gun is being used in Iraq, Somalia, Palestine and Afghanistan. V2K is electromagnetic energy for ?mind control? to create mass murderers such as soldiers. [See Link #1] These include (1) a neuro-electromagnetic device that transmits microwave radiation sound pulses into a person?s skull; and (2) a silent sound device that transmits subliminal voice or audio messages into the person?s skull. A sign is that the perpetrator of mass killings appears apathetic, calm, even zombie-like. This is how ?Manchurian Candidates? can be created. 2) A ?Stun Grenade? is an acoustic weapon with explosives meant to cause internal damage, disorient, incapacitate and kill people. 3) For ?crowd control? people are hit with various ?Projectiles? like rubber bullets and "airburst munitions". 4) There are ?Combination Weapons? that Flash, Bang and Stink to temporarily disorient and stop people from resisting. 5) ?Mobility Denial Equipment? stop vehicles and people like entanglement nets, slippery foam and anti traction material. 6) ?Weaponized UAVs? [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] or Drones have been downsized costing as little as $3,000. These mini UAVs can be hand launched and remotely operated by rookie cops, teenaged soldiers or raving lunatics. 7) "Electro-shock stun? equipment has been abused by cops who have harmed or killed those with heart disease, neurological disorders or under the influence of drugs." [See Link #2] 8) Commonly used is the ?eye-in-the-sky? satellite camera to follow our every move and to reign havoc by pushing a button in Ottawa or Washington. These are connected to GPSs in cars. The microwave towers monitor cell phones, computers and ID chips like the enhanced drivers licenses, which are all connected to the eye-in-the-sky. 9) Security Solutions SS of Colorado Springs Colorado sells ?non-lethal? weapons online to the public like stun guns, pepper sprays, tasers and personal alarms which they claim "have been used effectively for years by military and police units world wide?. They sell a Mace Alarm & Flashlight, Crossbows, Throwing Stars (?), Telescopic Steel Batons, High Velocity Sling Shots, Handcuffs, Kubotans (?), Blowguns, Paintball Guns, surveillance cameras, self defense training DVD's and "diversion safes" that look like a can of pop or beer or a jar of peanut butter to hide money or whatever. SS owner, Jack Krohn, is a motivational writer on how every "good citizen" should have their own arsenal. [See Link #3] Think that things are bad now? Is worse being planned for us? Somebody wants to make loads of money and get control based on mass death, big time! Read this! SSs 700,000 volt ?Stun Gun? with a designer holster, even a pink one, costs $69.95. A 950,000 volt ?Pretender Stun Gun? that looks like a cell phone costs $125! The stun gun won't work til you go online and get it activated by the manufacturer. Other stun guns have catchy names like "Stun Monster", "Hot Shot Stun Gun" and "Knuckle Blaster Stun Gun". These deviant nuts like their deadly toys! We are getting the impression that the government is the biggest ?terrorist? of all. SS sells a gun with an alarm that crackles with electricity: "Simply touching .. someone? with a stun gun for three to five seconds delivers a high voltage shock ?. caus[ing] loss of balance and muscle control, confusion, and disorientation bringing him to his knees and incapacitating him." [We know someone who was walking down the street and got taken down. He came to hours later lying in the gutter.] The latest taser uses "Electro-Muscular Disruption? (EMD) technology that can incapacitate faster than a 9mm hand gun. It shoots out 2 darts attached to 15 feet of wire. 50,000 volts travel over the wires and over-rides the central nervous system providing incredible takedown power." This is all available on the internet. 10) Security Solutions International of Florida SSI is not related to SS. SSI is run by a group of SWAT team experts, snipers and ex-military. They prepare cops for ?martial law?. One of SSI's trainers is also the head of the ?Police Training Institute?, of the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana. Police are trained for SWAT "special weapons and tactics".*** The U.S. Department of Homeland Security DHS sponsored training in Israel to teach Canadian cops how the Israelis ?control? the Palestinians. Another session starts this month. Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian ?Linguini Legs? Fantino took the course in 2005. He went with 35 Ontario police chiefs, various bureaucrats, politicians and heads of Jewish organizations on this foray called the ?Ontario Police Mission to Israel?. Morris Zbar of the United Jewish Appeal is involved in ?modernizing? Ontario prisons. That is, bringing them up to ?Abu Graib? standards? See the list at the end of this article of the ?wannabe robo cops?. Notice that most of these neo-fascists ply their trade near Ongwehonwe communities. A year later in early 2006, Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress took another bunch to Israel. This time from the Assembly of First Nations AFN, including Phil ?Tonto? Fontaine and Beverley ?Auntie Tom? Jacobs, President of the Native Women?s Association of Canada, and others. http://www.afn.ca/article.asp?id=2276 We Ongwehonwe are targeted. We need to know about these tactics and weapons, how to defend ourselves and who?s doing it to us. Since Indian Affairs has a fiduciary responsibility to protect us according to their own laws, they should provide every Ongwehonwe man, woman and child with specialized armor to protect us from their new gadgets and the equipment we need to defend ourselves from their colonial liquidators who are always attacking us: As well, we need helmets, flack jackets, gas masks, lemon water for clearing pepper sprayed eyes, hockey pads to protect our bodies from beatings, scramblers so that our phones and computers will work, flares to inform our people when we get ?disappeared? because we aren?t allowed one call, a list of their racist taunts we need to get used to, wide copper bracelets to protect our wrists from over tight handcuffs, descriptions of deadly stress holds, cell phones, camcorders, chastity belts to deter rapes and cavity searches at borders and police stations, special protection for babies and the unborn from birth defects and, to survive interrogation, we need to learn how to sleep with our eyes open while standing, high nutrition power bars, isolation songs to keep us company in the cells like the ?AIM Song?. Better yet, we need weapons that can inject a dose of common sense and sanity into raving maniacs that pretend they?re ?just following orders? of their demented masters. All states have to stop funding weapons and tactics designed to breach the right to life. If they put even one-tenth of this energy and expense into peaceful co-existence, we?d all be way further ahead. Iakoha?ko:wa, Eagle Watch, Sharbot Lake MNN Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com kittoh at storm.ca katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Ontario Police Mission to Israel: Gary Smith, Deputy Chief, Windsor; Chief David Nicholas Halcovitch, Hanover; Chief Stephen Tanner, Belleville; Deputy Chief Charles Mercier, Durham Regional; Deputy Chief Lawrence Hill, Ottawa; Chief B. Wesley Luloff, Nishnawbe Aski: Chief Paul Cook, North Bay; Commissioner Gwenneth Marie Boniface, OPP; Chief Ian Davidson, Greater Sudbury; Deputy Chief Robert Kates, Sault Ste. Marie; Chief Shayne MacKinnon, Dryden; Chief Armand LaBarge, York Regional; Hon. Monte Kwinter, Ministry, Community Safety & Correctional Services; OPP Deputy Commissioner Maurice Pilon; Director Government Relations Joe Couto, Ontario Assn. of Police Chiefs OACP; Chief Paul David Hamelin, Midland, Pres. OACP; Chief Robert Herman, Thunder Bay; Nat. CEO Canadian Jewish Congress CJC Bernie M. Farber; Chair CJC Ont. Joel Richler; Inspector Merle Foster, Belleville Police; United Jewish Appeal Toronto Morris Zbar; Chief Brian John Mullan, Hamilton: Chief William Rose, Michipicoten Wawa; Staff Supt. William Blair, Toronto Police Service; Deputy Chief Dennis James Poole, Chatham-Kent; Director Rudy Gheysen, Ontario Police College; Deputy Chief Frank Elsner, Owen Sound; Commissioner Emergency Management James Young, Toronto; OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino; Premier McGuinty?s Office Andrew Hilton; Wilma Helen Kwinter [somebody?s ?Desperate Housewife?]. All these cop shops are recruiting. Why did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security pay for this? What interest do they have in places like Wawa and Belleville? Canada is being set up to become a ?hell hole? of violence controlled by deadly button pushers. What do they do after a massacre? Susan Weinberger of ?Danger Room? is writing more on microwave weapons and military secrecy. [Link #1] The Federation of American Scientists' website http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/vts.html: [Link #2] Amnesty International. Cruelty in Control? The Stun Belt and Other Electro-Shock Equipment in Law Enforcement. 1999: [See Link #2]http://www.amnestyusa.org/arms_trade/document.do?id=5E287F135521DB378025690000692C81 [Link #3] http://www.homelandsecurityssi.com/ssi/content/view/95/97/ Contacts of ?Murder Inc.? Hit Men who went with Security Solutions International and Fantino to Israel: 1.Monte ?A-Team-Wannabe-Cop? Kwinter mkwinter.mpp.co at liberal.ola.org, 416-325-0036 Fax: 416-325-0316: 416-630-0080 Fax: 416-630-8828 2. Joe ?Barney Fife? Couto, oacpadmin at oacp.on.ca Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, 416-926-0424 Toll Free: 1-800-816-1767 Fax: 416-926-0436 3. Chief Stephen ?Car-54-Where-Are-You? Tanner and Inspector Merle ?Iron Pants? Foster, BELLEVILLE Police, (613) 966-0882 ext 2223 Fax (613) 966-8991; 4. Chief Daniel Parkinson[s disease], admin at cornwallpolice.com CORNWALL 613-933-5000 extension 2400, 613-932-2110 Danny ?Cop Vicious? Aikman, Deputy Chief ext. 2421, Fax 613-932-9317 or 613-932-0121; 5. Chief William Blair TORONTO ?Police Academy? 416-808-8000 Exec Officer 416-808-8015 FAX 416-808-8002, Sgt. 416-808-8007 6. Chief Murray ?Charlie?s Angel? Faulkner, Ian ?Deputy Dog? Peer, and Deputy Chief Bradley ?Dudley Do-Right? Duncan, LONDON Police, (519) 661-5670 7. Chair, London Police Services ?Happy-Hour-Vampires? Board lpsb at police.london.ca (519) 661--5646 Fax: (519) 661-1053 8. Chief Armand ?Frenchy? La Barge YORK REGIONAL Police info at police.york.on.ca 334 at yrp.ca 1-866-876-5423 9. Chief Vernon ?Cagney & Lacey-wants-to-go-to-Israel? White OTTAWA Police info at ottawapolice.ca 613-236-1222, ext. 7300, Deputy Chief Larry Hill 10. Deputy Chief Charles ?Too-Many-Crooks-Spoil-the-Troops? Mercier info at drpa.ca DURHAM REGIONAL POLICE 905-655-5566 Fax: 905-655-5066 11. Bernie ?Hogan?s Heroes? Farber, bfarber at on.cjc.ca Canadian Jewish Congress [from AFN website] CJC CEO 011-972-50-406-1266 (Israel cell phone) 12. Wendy ?Bird-in-a-Gilded-Cage? Lampert, wlampert at on.cjc.ca CJC National Director of Communications 416-631-5844 (office) or 416-845-4674 (cell) 13. Morris ?Colonel Klink? Zbar, info at ujafed.org former DM Correctional Services, now on "transformation team" at Correctional Services Canada, also of United Jewish Appeal Toronto which looks for large donations, 416-635-2883 F 416-635-9565. From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Sun Nov 2 09:17:15 2008 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 11:17:15 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN When Cops Become Thugs Message-ID: <011c0076$39754$0ca64703163889@your-6904db8205> WHEN COPS BECOME THUGS ? THE USE OF ?NON LETHAL? WEAPONS & ?PAIN COMPLIANCE? ATTACKS ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE MNN. Nov. 1, 2008. We Ongwehonwe need to know about this new weaponry and martial law training that cops are using on us. We?re unarmed. How do we defend ourselves? The military is getting more involved in civil matters. The U.S. Marines are in the forefront of developing, testing and using so-called ?non-lethal weapons? NLW for what is being called ?domestic crowd control?, or more accurately, ?fascism?. Here are some of the new weapons being used by the state?s agents to attack the people they are supposed to protect: 1) ?Directed Energy Weapons? are used against people and electronic equipment. ?Electromagnetic Energy? is directed in a beam or pulse. The transmitter can be mounted on a vehicle that looks like a large speaker box to disable electronic equipment, disorient and disable people. It may cause organ damage and, of course, death. It has no bullet. So it?s harder to trace who the killers are. ?High Powered Microwave Weapon? is an electromagnetic pulse that can burn skin in an instant. It disables equipment. In April 2007, there was an accident with the "Active Denial System 1", which is a ?pain ray? or ?death ray? gun, during a trial at the Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. It was left on and somebody was badly burned. This gun is being used in Iraq, Somalia, Palestine and Afghanistan. V2K is electromagnetic energy for ?mind control? to create mass murderers such as soldiers. [See Link #1] These include (1) a neuro-electromagnetic device that transmits microwave radiation sound pulses into a person?s skull; and (2) a silent sound device that transmits subliminal voice or audio messages into the person?s skull. A sign is that the perpetrator of mass killings appears apathetic, calm, even zombie-like. This is how ?Manchurian Candidates? can be created. 2) A ?Stun Grenade? is an acoustic weapon with explosives meant to cause internal damage, disorient, incapacitate and kill people. 3) For ?crowd control? people are hit with various ?Projectiles? like rubber bullets and "airburst munitions". 4) There are ?Combination Weapons? that Flash, Bang and Stink to temporarily disorient and stop people from resisting. 5) ?Mobility Denial Equipment? stop vehicles and people like entanglement nets, slippery foam and anti traction material. 6) ?Weaponized UAVs? [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] or Drones have been downsized costing as little as $3,000. These mini UAVs can be hand launched and remotely operated by rookie cops, teenaged soldiers or raving lunatics. 7) "Electro-shock stun? equipment has been abused by cops who have harmed or killed those with heart disease, neurological disorders or under the influence of drugs." [See Link #2] 8) Commonly used is the ?eye-in-the-sky? satellite camera to follow our every move and to reign havoc by pushing a button in Ottawa or Washington. These are connected to GPSs in cars. The microwave towers monitor cell phones, computers and ID chips like the enhanced drivers licenses, which are all connected to the eye-in-the-sky. 9) Security Solutions SS of Colorado Springs Colorado sells ?non-lethal? weapons online to the public like stun guns, pepper sprays, tasers and personal alarms which they claim "have been used effectively for years by military and police units world wide?. They sell a Mace Alarm & Flashlight, Crossbows, Throwing Stars (?), Telescopic Steel Batons, High Velocity Sling Shots, Handcuffs, Kubotans (?), Blowguns, Paintball Guns, surveillance cameras, self defense training DVD's and "diversion safes" that look like a can of pop or beer or a jar of peanut butter to hide money or whatever. SS owner, Jack Krohn, is a motivational writer on how every "good citizen" should have their own arsenal. [See Link #3] Think that things are bad now? Is worse being planned for us? Somebody wants to make loads of money and get control based on mass death, big time! Read this! SSs 700,000 volt ?Stun Gun? with a designer holster, even a pink one, costs $69.95. A 950,000 volt ?Pretender Stun Gun? that looks like a cell phone costs $125! The stun gun won't work til you go online and get it activated by the manufacturer. Other stun guns have catchy names like "Stun Monster", "Hot Shot Stun Gun" and "Knuckle Blaster Stun Gun". These deviant nuts like their deadly toys! We are getting the impression that the government is the biggest ?terrorist? of all. SS sells a gun with an alarm that crackles with electricity: "Simply touching .. someone? with a stun gun for three to five seconds delivers a high voltage shock ?. caus[ing] loss of balance and muscle control, confusion, and disorientation bringing him to his knees and incapacitating him." [We know someone who was walking down the street and got taken down. He came to hours later lying in the gutter.] The latest taser uses "Electro-Muscular Disruption? (EMD) technology that can incapacitate faster than a 9mm hand gun. It shoots out 2 darts attached to 15 feet of wire. 50,000 volts travel over the wires and over-rides the central nervous system providing incredible takedown power." This is all available on the internet. 10) Security Solutions International of Florida SSI is not related to SS. SSI is run by a group of SWAT team experts, snipers and ex-military. They prepare cops for ?martial law?. One of SSI's trainers is also the head of the ?Police Training Institute?, of the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana. Police are trained for SWAT "special weapons and tactics".*** The U.S. Department of Homeland Security DHS sponsored training in Israel to teach Canadian cops how the Israelis ?control? the Palestinians. Another session starts this month. Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian ?Linguini Legs? Fantino took the course in 2005. He went with 35 Ontario police chiefs, various bureaucrats, politicians and heads of Jewish organizations on this foray called the ?Ontario Police Mission to Israel?. Morris Zbar of the United Jewish Appeal is involved in ?modernizing? Ontario prisons. That is, bringing them up to ?Abu Graib? standards? See the list at the end of this article of the ?wannabe robo cops?. Notice that most of these neo-fascists ply their trade near Ongwehonwe communities. A year later in early 2006, Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress took another bunch to Israel. This time from the Assembly of First Nations AFN, including Phil ?Tonto? Fontaine and Beverley ?Auntie Tom? Jacobs, President of the Native Women?s Association of Canada, and others. http://www.afn.ca/article.asp?id=2276 We Ongwehonwe are targeted. We need to know about these tactics and weapons, how to defend ourselves and who?s doing it to us. Since Indian Affairs has a fiduciary responsibility to protect us according to their own laws, they should provide every Ongwehonwe man, woman and child with specialized armor to protect us from their new gadgets and the equipment we need to defend ourselves from their colonial liquidators who are always attacking us: As well, we need helmets, flack jackets, gas masks, lemon water for clearing pepper sprayed eyes, hockey pads to protect our bodies from beatings, scramblers so that our phones and computers will work, flares to inform our people when we get ?disappeared? because we aren?t allowed one call, a list of their racist taunts we need to get used to, wide copper bracelets to protect our wrists from over tight handcuffs, descriptions of deadly stress holds, cell phones, camcorders, chastity belts to deter rapes and cavity searches at borders and police stations, special protection for babies and the unborn from birth defects and, to survive interrogation, we need to learn how to sleep with our eyes open while standing, high nutrition power bars, isolation songs to keep us company in the cells like the ?AIM Song?. Better yet, we need weapons that can inject a dose of common sense and sanity into raving maniacs that pretend they?re ?just following orders? of their demented masters. All states have to stop funding weapons and tactics designed to breach the right to life. If they put even one-tenth of this energy and expense into peaceful co-existence, we?d all be way further ahead. Iakoha?ko:wa, Eagle Watch, Sharbot Lake MNN Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com kittoh at storm.ca katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Ontario Police Mission to Israel: Gary Smith, Deputy Chief, Windsor; Chief David Nicholas Halcovitch, Hanover; Chief Stephen Tanner, Belleville; Deputy Chief Charles Mercier, Durham Regional; Deputy Chief Lawrence Hill, Ottawa; Chief B. Wesley Luloff, Nishnawbe Aski: Chief Paul Cook, North Bay; Commissioner Gwenneth Marie Boniface, OPP; Chief Ian Davidson, Greater Sudbury; Deputy Chief Robert Kates, Sault Ste. Marie; Chief Shayne MacKinnon, Dryden; Chief Armand LaBarge, York Regional; Hon. Monte Kwinter, Ministry, Community Safety & Correctional Services; OPP Deputy Commissioner Maurice Pilon; Director Government Relations Joe Couto, Ontario Assn. of Police Chiefs OACP; Chief Paul David Hamelin, Midland, Pres. OACP; Chief Robert Herman, Thunder Bay; Nat. CEO Canadian Jewish Congress CJC Bernie M. Farber; Chair CJC Ont. Joel Richler; Inspector Merle Foster, Belleville Police; United Jewish Appeal Toronto Morris Zbar; Chief Brian John Mullan, Hamilton: Chief William Rose, Michipicoten Wawa; Staff Supt. William Blair, Toronto Police Service; Deputy Chief Dennis James Poole, Chatham-Kent; Director Rudy Gheysen, Ontario Police College; Deputy Chief Frank Elsner, Owen Sound; Commissioner Emergency Management James Young, Toronto; OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino; Premier McGuinty?s Office Andrew Hilton; Wilma Helen Kwinter [somebody?s ?Desperate Housewife?]. All these cop shops are recruiting. Why did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security pay for this? What interest do they have in places like Wawa and Belleville? Canada is being set up to become a ?hell hole? of violence controlled by deadly button pushers. What do they do after a massacre? Susan Weinberger of ?Danger Room? is writing more on microwave weapons and military secrecy. [Link #1] The Federation of American Scientists' website http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/vts.html: [Link #2] Amnesty International. Cruelty in Control? The Stun Belt and Other Electro-Shock Equipment in Law Enforcement. 1999: [See Link #2]http://www.amnestyusa.org/arms_trade/document.do?id=5E287F135521DB378025690000692C81 [Link #3] http://www.homelandsecurityssi.com/ssi/content/view/95/97/ Contacts of ?Murder Inc.? Hit Men who went with Security Solutions International and Fantino to Israel: 1.Monte ?A-Team-Wannabe-Cop? Kwinter mkwinter.mpp.co at liberal.ola.org, 416-325-0036 Fax: 416-325-0316: 416-630-0080 Fax: 416-630-8828 2. Joe ?Barney Fife? Couto, oacpadmin at oacp.on.ca Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, 416-926-0424 Toll Free: 1-800-816-1767 Fax: 416-926-0436 3. Chief Stephen ?Car-54-Where-Are-You? Tanner and Inspector Merle ?Iron Pants? Foster, BELLEVILLE Police, (613) 966-0882 ext 2223 Fax (613) 966-8991; 4. Chief Daniel Parkinson[s disease], admin at cornwallpolice.com CORNWALL 613-933-5000 extension 2400, 613-932-2110 Danny ?Cop Vicious? Aikman, Deputy Chief ext. 2421, Fax 613-932-9317 or 613-932-0121; 5. Chief William Blair TORONTO ?Police Academy? 416-808-8000 Exec Officer 416-808-8015 FAX 416-808-8002, Sgt. 416-808-8007 6. Chief Murray ?Charlie?s Angel? Faulkner, Ian ?Deputy Dog? Peer, and Deputy Chief Bradley ?Dudley Do-Right? Duncan, LONDON Police, (519) 661-5670 7. Chair, London Police Services ?Happy-Hour-Vampires? Board lpsb at police.london.ca (519) 661--5646 Fax: (519) 661-1053 8. Chief Armand ?Frenchy? La Barge YORK REGIONAL Police info at police.york.on.ca 334 at yrp.ca 1-866-876-5423 9. Chief Vernon ?Cagney & Lacey-wants-to-go-to-Israel? White OTTAWA Police info at ottawapolice.ca 613-236-1222, ext. 7300, Deputy Chief Larry Hill 10. Deputy Chief Charles ?Too-Many-Crooks-Spoil-the-Troops? Mercier info at drpa.ca DURHAM REGIONAL POLICE 905-655-5566 Fax: 905-655-5066 11. Bernie ?Hogan?s Heroes? Farber, bfarber at on.cjc.ca Canadian Jewish Congress [from AFN website] CJC CEO 011-972-50-406-1266 (Israel cell phone) 12. Wendy ?Bird-in-a-Gilded-Cage? Lampert, wlampert at on.cjc.ca CJC National Director of Communications 416-631-5844 (office) or 416-845-4674 (cell) 13. Morris ?Colonel Klink? Zbar, info at ujafed.org former DM Correctional Services, now on "transformation team" at Correctional Services Canada, also of United Jewish Appeal Toronto which looks for large donations, 416-635-2883 F 416-635-9565. From tal1 at cogeco.ca Sun Nov 2 16:25:48 2008 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 18:25:48 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Global Cooling is Here In-Reply-To: <1225628455.39s8finm1ge8@w3.webmail.telepac.pt> References: <1225628455.39s8finm1ge8@w3.webmail.telepac.pt> Message-ID: To believers in Easterbrook: Easterbrook is one scientist claiming that the many hundreds of scientists who comprise the IPCC are wrong. The IPCC's latest (2007) assessment declares that there is a 90 - 99% chance that the current global warming is anthropogenic in nature. T. ----- Original Message ----- From: To: "a-list" Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 7:20 AM Subject: [A-List] Global Cooling is Here > To attention for believers in named "global warming": > > Global Cooling is Here > Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades > http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783 > > > From rainy at tellas.gr Mon Nov 3 00:17:53 2008 From: rainy at tellas.gr (Stathis Stassinos) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:17:53 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <490EA5A1.6050602@tellas.gr> What you describe Todd is the unwinding of the Weberian ethics, a victim of the same greedy people that brought you neo-liberalism. As Weber had thoroughly described, capitalism cannot survive without an ethical code, even a corporate social contract with its executives. Neo-liberalism not only assumed that the gloves are off in the ethical arena (it was one of their main themes that you cannot trust anything but self-interest), they destroyed the same web of pay-offs and checks that held corporatism together. The idea of a career in one company which would take care of you too, brought loyalty to the last generation. My friend's father worked for 35 years as an executive in a big company. As long as he was loyal, the company was loyal to him too. That fact enhanced the pay-off of not cheating. Cheating the company was the destruction of 35 years of career and trust. Today no executive I know in my age has any fantasy of having a career in one company. They view themselves as temporary workers, getting as much as they can get from each corporation they work for. 5 years is a long time in this environment. That of course enhances the pay-offs of cheating, or looking only their narrow self-interest. Hell, CEOs are temporary, so they just care to boost short term benefits, stock price etc. So the executives not only they dont care about externalities, they dont even care about the long term survival of the institutions they work for. So basically the very ideology that brought you neoliberal economics, will destroy the big corporation they were trying to put in the place of the state. PS Anne, about your comment, what really escapes my reasoning is that we are in an environment where one bank is afraid to lend another overnight. Thats a reality. In greece banks that depended much on the euribor are scrambling to win new depositors because they are at the brink of insolvency. And carry trade as far as I have learned is based on loans (leveraging). So in this environment of fear, are there willing banks to lend to mrs.Watanabe or the hapless hedge fund manager? and if yes, why dont they choose to lend less perilous endeavors? While I value Todd's explanation of this "reason-less" attitude, I still need a more logical line of thought. Maybe Im just in denial mode and asking too much from a collapsing system. > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:24:18 -0800 > From: Todd Boyle > Subject: Re: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade > To: The A-List > Cc: snow-lakeforestpark at lists.riseup.net > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > The trouble arises from the fact that corporate executives > and employees have interests that are opposed to stockholders, > let alone the general public. The corporation itself, does not even exist. > There's a system of contracts, fiduciary responsibility, ethics, etc. > which is not very effective, and there is a system of internal controls that > is somewhat more effective, for example preventing outright theft > like writing a check to themselves.... but the system of internal > controls operates at such a trivial and concrete level, it's like > the criminal statutes and police. The fact is, the financial crisis > and capitalism itself, are broken at the level of fiduciary responsibility, > ethics, agency theory, etc. Not at the level of regulatory oversight > or internal control. I reluctantly conclude that the corporate form > manifest today, is ungovernable. Corporations have never respected the > common good, the environment or any externalities without government > oversight, and corporations today have developed such an advantage > over regulators due to political power, financial resources, smarter > people, knowledge infrastructure, strategic options, and clarity of will, > that corporations are in fact ungovernable. And we are really in a pickle. > Todd > > At 12:50 PM 10/31/2008, Anne Williamson wrote: > >> Stathis, >> >> Your argument that counterparty risk overcomes greed is commonsensical, but alas has already >> been defeated many times just in the last 2 months! The carry trades are put on, and taken off, >> over and over again depending upon rate and currency movements. Hey - I'm on your side in this, >> people ought to be wary, but they are not when they see a momentary gain that maybe, just maybe >> might prove sustainable - and this syndrome is heightened by imperiled hedge funds looking for every >> penny possible in order to stay afloat themselves. >> >> Anne > From shimogamo at attglobal.net Mon Nov 3 02:16:24 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:16:24 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <490EC168.6090300@attglobal.net> Read this or George W Bush will be president the rest of your life by William Blum www.killinghope.org (October 30 2008) Don't tell my mother I work at the White House. She thinks I play the piano in a whore house. The Republican presidential campaign has tried to make a big issue of Barack Obama at one time associating with Bill Ayers, a member of the 1960s Weathermen who engaged in political bombings. Governor Palin has accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists", although Ayers' association with the Weathermen during their period of carrying out anti-Vietnam War bombings in the United States took place when Obama was around eight-years-old. Contrast this with who President Ronald Reagan, so beloved by the Republican candidates, associated with. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how they spent their time when they were not screaming "Death to America". CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar "scary", "vicious", "a fascist", "definite dictatorship material" {1). None of this prevented the Reagan administration from inviting the man to the White House to meet with Reagan, and showering him with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. Reagan's successor, George H W Bush, palled around with characters almost as unsavory during his first campaign for the presidency in 1988. His campaign staff included a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic types from Eastern and Central Europe. Several of these worthies were leaders of the Republican campaign's ethnic outreach arm, the Coalition of American Nationalities, despite the fact that their checkered past was not a big secret. One of them, Laszlo Pasztor (or Pastor) had served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian government's embassy in Berlin during the Second World War. This had been revealed in a 1971 page-one story in the Washington Post {2}. When this past was again brought up in September 1988, the Republicans were obliged to dump Pasztor and four others of his ilk from Bush's campaign {3}. And who has John McCain been palling around with? Who has been co-chair of McCain's New York campaign and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself? None other than the illustrious unindicted war criminal and mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who must be very careful when he travels to Europe for there are committed and serious people in several countries there who will again try to have him arrested for the crimes against humanity he's responsible for ... Chile ... Angola ... East Timor ... Vietnam ... Laos ... Cambodia ... By contrast, there is no evidence that Bill Ayers was involved in any Weathermen bombing that killed anyone; nor have I seen any evidence that on the very rare occasion that an anti-Vietnam War bombing in the United States resulted in a casualty that it could be ascribed to the Weathermen. John McCain's bombings certainly killed - some two dozen aerial attacks upon the people of Vietnam, people who had neither done nor threatened any harm to him or his country. What label do we give to such acts, to such a man? His level of violence is matched by his degree of hypocrisy. Speaking of Ayers, McCain asked: "How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?" {4} In his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days (Penguin), Ayers writes: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." This is something very few Americans can accept, and I wouldn't even make the attempt to persuade them. But I personally didn't blame the Weathermen then, and I don't blame them now. The Vietnam War was in its eighth year of barbarity. I and the rest of the army of the powerless needed a few points up there on the scoreboard against the lords of the national-security corporate state. A bombing, with a suitably war-criminal target - like the State Department or the Pentagon - and taking care to prevent any casualties, told the bastards that we were still out there, that their impunity was not total, that this is how it feels to be bombed. Armed propaganda. It told the public that there was something more serious going on than a town-hall difference of opinion that could be reasonably resolved by reasonable people discussing things in a reasonable manner. And like an unhappy child having a temper tantrum, we needed some instant gratification. We were struggling against the most powerful force in the world. The Weathermen were on the right side of that war. John McCain on the wrong side. And who has Sarah Palin herself been palling around with? John McCain, and the Alaska Independence Party, a secessionist party her husband belonged to for seven years. "My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand", Joe Vogler, who founded the party, once declared. Earlier this year Governor Palin shouted out to party members: "Keep up the good work. And God bless you." {5} I do believe that secession of a state from the union is somewhat frowned upon by the powers that be, and if memory serves me, the last time it was seriously tried the government actually went to war. Who do these Alaskans think they are, the Kosovo gangsters whose secession from Serbia was immediately recognized by Washington? This just in: John McCain (yes, the same one), as a congressman, met in 1985 in Chile with General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights, credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians, jailing tens of thousands of others, and torturing a great many of them. McCain met with Pinochet apparently without any preconditions, which is what McCain has repeatedly criticized Obama for saying he would do with certain present-day foreign leaders whom McCain doesn't like. At the time of the meeting, the US Justice Department was seeking the extradition of two close Pinochet associates for an act of terrorism in Washington, DC - the 1976 car-bomb assassination of former Chilean ambassador to the US, Orlando Letelier, a prominent critic of Pinochet, and his American assistant. McCain made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition in Chile. Senator Edward Kennedy arrived only twelve days after McCain in a highly public show of support for democracy, meeting with Catholic church and human rights leaders and large groups of opposition activists. {6} The John McCains of America, in and out of Congress, would much sooner pal around with Augusto Pinochet than Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro or Bill Ayers. The bourgeois triumphalism that attended the funeral of the USSR Greed is a hot topic now. Stock brokers and others involved in the current financial crisis are angrily accused of being greedy. Time magazine declared that the nation's current troubles were "the price of greed". "Blame greed", echoed the Chicago Tribune. But these establishment publications can't be taken too seriously. Like other believers in the system, they're convinced that greed is a built-in, valuable, and necessary feature of capitalism and capitalist man, that it's indispensable for motivating entrepreneurs, and that it results in all manner of innovation and invention. During the years of the Cold War, this was a key element of the interminable discussions cum arguments between defenders of free enterprise and defenders of socialism; the arguments still continue, although most people now think that history has answered the question - capitalism has won. "The end of history", leading conservative Francis Fukuyama called it in his well-received book in 1992 (Free Press). He asserted that we couldn't expect to find a better way to organize society than the marriage of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Subsequent world movements such as anti-globalization and political Islam caused Fukuyama to have some second thoughts about whether history had actually come to an end. (He also came to renounce the war in Iraq which he had initially embraced on the premise that it would bring the joys of liberal democracy and market capitalism to the benighted Iraqi people.) Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the boys of Capital have chortled in their martinis about the death of socialism. Until recently, the word had been banned from polite conversation (now achieving new notoriety as a term of political insult). And no one seems to notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century was either bombed, invaded, or overthrown; corrupted, perverted, or destabilized; or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement - from the Russian revolution to the Vietnamese communists to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to Salvador Allende in Chile to the FMLN in Salvador - not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It continues today with Washington's attempts to subvert the governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, and, of course, still, forever, Cuba. Imagine that the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines had all failed because the automobile interests had sabotaged each test flight. And then, thanks to the auto companies' propaganda, the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly. It's widely assumed that the Soviet Union demise resulted from gross shortcomings intrinsic to its socialist system, that the economy somehow imploded from its inherent contradictions. But all the shortcomings and contradictions that could have been found in the Soviet system in 1990 could have as well been found in 1980, or 1970, or 1960. Unlike capitalism, whose volatility is legendary, as each day's headlines remind us anew, the Soviet system with its government ownership of the means of production and its command economy, whatever its other defects, remained relatively stable and uniform. The question is thus: What happened in the late 1980s in the Soviet system to cause it to unravel? I believe that the best answer to the question lies in the person of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985. Gorbachev's long-time and ardent ambition was to model the Soviet Union after a West European social democracy and have the country accepted as such by the Europeans. That's the principal reason he put an end to the Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan; and why he instituted his historic economic and political changes at home (with their unintended consequences), and relinquished control over Eastern Europe without resorting to military force. The war in Afghanistan certainly had its effects, financially and psychologically, upon the people of the Soviet Union, and is commonly cited as a major cause for the nation's breakup. But the same can be said even more so of the effect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq upon the American people, millions of whom have marched against the wars, yet none of this has led to an American withdrawal from either place; not even close. Superpowers should not be confused with democracies. Ayn Rand's social philosophy: Let the strong prevail, let the weak pay for their weakness "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms ... So the problem here is [that] something which looked to be a very solid edifice and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me." A remarkable admission from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, long-time opponent of government regulation of the corporate world, and friend and devoted follower of Ayn Rand, the selfishness guru who turned the emulation of two-year olds into a philosophy of life. "I have found a flaw", said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy. "I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact." {7} Greenspan was induced into these admissions by tough questioning from congressmen at a hearing called in October to deal with the financial crisis. There was a time when Greenspan was looked upon as a guru by a largely unquestioning and unchallenging congress and media, no matter how dubious or obscure his pronouncements. He could have passed at times for Chauncey Gardener, the main character of the book and film Being There (1979). Gardener, brought to life by Peter Sellers, was a simple man with very simple thoughts and behavior, who might have been considered to be borderline "retarded", but fortuitous circumstances and the deference toward him by those of insufficient intellect and/or courage resulted in him being thought of as brilliant by people in high positions. There was one noteworthy exception to this delicate treatment of Greenspan. In July 2003, Representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont faced the Fed chairman across the table at a congressional hearing and said: "Mr Greenspan, I have long been concerned that you are way out of touch with the needs of the middle class and working families of our country, that you see your major function in your position as the need to represent the wealthy and large corporations ... I think you just don't know what's going on in the real world. ... You talk about an improving economy, while we have lost three million private sector jobs in the last two years. Long-term unemployment has more than tripled. ... We have a $4 trillion national debt. 1.4 million Americans have lost their health insurance. Millions of seniors can't afford prescription drugs. Middle class families can't send their kids to college because they don't have the money to do that." "Congressman", Greenspan replied, "we have the highest standard of living in the world". "No, we do not", insisted Sanders. "You go to Scandinavia, and you will find that people have a much higher standard of living, in terms of education, health care and decent paying jobs. Wrong, Mister." Not accustomed to having to defend his profundities, Greenspan could do no better than to counter with: "We have the highest standard of living for a country of our size" {8} This was quite a comedown from "in the world", and inasmuch as the only countries of equal or larger population are China and India, with Indonesia being the fourth largest, Greenspan's point is rather difficult to evaluate. The idea that the United States has the highest standard of living in the world is one that is actually believed by numerous grownups in America, and most of them believe that this highest standard applies across the board. They're only minimally conscious of the fact that whereas they've made extremely painful sacrifices to send a child to university, and they often simply can't come up with enough money, and even if they can the child will be very heavily in debt for years afterward, in much of Western Europe university education is either free or eminently affordable; as it is in Cuba and was in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The same lack of awareness about superior conditions in other countries extends to health care, working hours, vacation time, maternity leave, child care, unemployment insurance, and a host of other social and economic benefits. In short, amongst the developed nations, the United States is the worst place to be a worker, to be sick, to seek a university education, to be a parent; or, in the land of two million incarcerated, to exercise certain rights or be a defendant in court. To which the Chauncey Gardeners of America, including the one who used to sit in the Federal Reserve and the one presently sitting in the Oval Office, would say: "Duh! Whaddaya mean?" The Rosenbergs as heroes John Gerassi, professor of political science at Queens College in New York City, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times: To the Editor: NYT In his "A Spy Confesses" (Week in Review 9/21), Sam Roberts claims that folks "fiercely loyal to the far left, believed that the Rosenbergs were not guilty ..." I am and have always been, since my stint as a correspondent and editor in Latin America for Time and Newsweek, a "far leftist", and I have never claimed the Rosenbergs were not guilty. Nor have any of my "far leftist" friends. What we always said, and what I repeat to my students every semester, is that "if they were guilty, they are this planet's great heroes". My explanation is quite simple: The US had a first-strike policy, the USSR did not (until Gorbachev). In 1952, the US military, and various intelligence services, calculated that a first strike on all Soviet silos would wipe out all but six percent of Russian atomic missiles (and, we now know, create enough radiation to kill us all). But those six percent would automatically be fired at US cities. The military then calculated what would happen if one made a direct hit on Denver (why they chose Denver and not New York or Washington was never explained). Their finding: 200,000 would die immediately, two million within a month. They concluded that it was not worth it. In other words, I tell my students, you were born and I am alive because the USSR had a deterrent against our "preventive" attack, not the other way around. And if it is true that the Rosenbergs helped the Soviets get that deterrent, they end up among the planet's saviors. - John Gerassi (tgerassi at hotmail.com) [It will not come as a great surprise to learn that the Times did not allow such thoughts to appear in their exalted pages.] Correction I don't know how it happened, but the address (URL) I sent out for last month's report was incorrect. It should have been: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer62.htm All previous reports can be found at www.killinghope.org Notes 1. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (1990), pages 149-50. 2. Washington Post, November 21 1971 3. Los Angeles Times, September 13 1988, page 19. For further discussion of this issue, see Russ Bellant, "Old Nazis and the New Right: The Republican Party and Fascists", Covert Action Information Bulletin (Washington, DC), #33, Winter 1990, pages 27-31 4. New York Times, October 3 2008 5. David Talbot, Salon.com, October 7 2008 6. John Dinges, The Huffington Post, October 24 2008, based on a declassified US Embassy cable 7. Washington Post, October 23 2008 8. House Financial Services Committee, July 15 2003; http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/bank/hba91775.000/hba91775_0f.htm William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer63.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From shimogamo at attglobal.net Mon Nov 3 02:17:33 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:17:33 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <490EC1AD.8090601@attglobal.net> Read this or George W Bush will be president the rest of your life by William Blum www.killinghope.org (October 30 2008) Don't tell my mother I work at the White House. She thinks I play the piano in a whore house. The Republican presidential campaign has tried to make a big issue of Barack Obama at one time associating with Bill Ayers, a member of the 1960s Weathermen who engaged in political bombings. Governor Palin has accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists", although Ayers' association with the Weathermen during their period of carrying out anti-Vietnam War bombings in the United States took place when Obama was around eight-years-old. Contrast this with who President Ronald Reagan, so beloved by the Republican candidates, associated with. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how they spent their time when they were not screaming "Death to America". CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar "scary", "vicious", "a fascist", "definite dictatorship material" {1). None of this prevented the Reagan administration from inviting the man to the White House to meet with Reagan, and showering him with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. Reagan's successor, George H W Bush, palled around with characters almost as unsavory during his first campaign for the presidency in 1988. His campaign staff included a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic types from Eastern and Central Europe. Several of these worthies were leaders of the Republican campaign's ethnic outreach arm, the Coalition of American Nationalities, despite the fact that their checkered past was not a big secret. One of them, Laszlo Pasztor (or Pastor) had served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian government's embassy in Berlin during the Second World War. This had been revealed in a 1971 page-one story in the Washington Post {2}. When this past was again brought up in September 1988, the Republicans were obliged to dump Pasztor and four others of his ilk from Bush's campaign {3}. And who has John McCain been palling around with? Who has been co-chair of McCain's New York campaign and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself? None other than the illustrious unindicted war criminal and mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who must be very careful when he travels to Europe for there are committed and serious people in several countries there who will again try to have him arrested for the crimes against humanity he's responsible for ... Chile ... Angola ... East Timor ... Vietnam ... Laos ... Cambodia ... By contrast, there is no evidence that Bill Ayers was involved in any Weathermen bombing that killed anyone; nor have I seen any evidence that on the very rare occasion that an anti-Vietnam War bombing in the United States resulted in a casualty that it could be ascribed to the Weathermen. John McCain's bombings certainly killed - some two dozen aerial attacks upon the people of Vietnam, people who had neither done nor threatened any harm to him or his country. What label do we give to such acts, to such a man? His level of violence is matched by his degree of hypocrisy. Speaking of Ayers, McCain asked: "How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?" {4} In his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days (Penguin), Ayers writes: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." This is something very few Americans can accept, and I wouldn't even make the attempt to persuade them. But I personally didn't blame the Weathermen then, and I don't blame them now. The Vietnam War was in its eighth year of barbarity. I and the rest of the army of the powerless needed a few points up there on the scoreboard against the lords of the national-security corporate state. A bombing, with a suitably war-criminal target - like the State Department or the Pentagon - and taking care to prevent any casualties, told the bastards that we were still out there, that their impunity was not total, that this is how it feels to be bombed. Armed propaganda. It told the public that there was something more serious going on than a town-hall difference of opinion that could be reasonably resolved by reasonable people discussing things in a reasonable manner. And like an unhappy child having a temper tantrum, we needed some instant gratification. We were struggling against the most powerful force in the world. The Weathermen were on the right side of that war. John McCain on the wrong side. And who has Sarah Palin herself been palling around with? John McCain, and the Alaska Independence Party, a secessionist party her husband belonged to for seven years. "My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand", Joe Vogler, who founded the party, once declared. Earlier this year Governor Palin shouted out to party members: "Keep up the good work. And God bless you." {5} I do believe that secession of a state from the union is somewhat frowned upon by the powers that be, and if memory serves me, the last time it was seriously tried the government actually went to war. Who do these Alaskans think they are, the Kosovo gangsters whose secession from Serbia was immediately recognized by Washington? This just in: John McCain (yes, the same one), as a congressman, met in 1985 in Chile with General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights, credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians, jailing tens of thousands of others, and torturing a great many of them. McCain met with Pinochet apparently without any preconditions, which is what McCain has repeatedly criticized Obama for saying he would do with certain present-day foreign leaders whom McCain doesn't like. At the time of the meeting, the US Justice Department was seeking the extradition of two close Pinochet associates for an act of terrorism in Washington, DC - the 1976 car-bomb assassination of former Chilean ambassador to the US, Orlando Letelier, a prominent critic of Pinochet, and his American assistant. McCain made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition in Chile. Senator Edward Kennedy arrived only twelve days after McCain in a highly public show of support for democracy, meeting with Catholic church and human rights leaders and large groups of opposition activists. {6} The John McCains of America, in and out of Congress, would much sooner pal around with Augusto Pinochet than Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro or Bill Ayers. The bourgeois triumphalism that attended the funeral of the USSR Greed is a hot topic now. Stock brokers and others involved in the current financial crisis are angrily accused of being greedy. Time magazine declared that the nation's current troubles were "the price of greed". "Blame greed", echoed the Chicago Tribune. But these establishment publications can't be taken too seriously. Like other believers in the system, they're convinced that greed is a built-in, valuable, and necessary feature of capitalism and capitalist man, that it's indispensable for motivating entrepreneurs, and that it results in all manner of innovation and invention. During the years of the Cold War, this was a key element of the interminable discussions cum arguments between defenders of free enterprise and defenders of socialism; the arguments still continue, although most people now think that history has answered the question - capitalism has won. "The end of history", leading conservative Francis Fukuyama called it in his well-received book in 1992 (Free Press). He asserted that we couldn't expect to find a better way to organize society than the marriage of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Subsequent world movements such as anti-globalization and political Islam caused Fukuyama to have some second thoughts about whether history had actually come to an end. (He also came to renounce the war in Iraq which he had initially embraced on the premise that it would bring the joys of liberal democracy and market capitalism to the benighted Iraqi people.) Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the boys of Capital have chortled in their martinis about the death of socialism. Until recently, the word had been banned from polite conversation (now achieving new notoriety as a term of political insult). And no one seems to notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century was either bombed, invaded, or overthrown; corrupted, perverted, or destabilized; or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement - from the Russian revolution to the Vietnamese communists to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to Salvador Allende in Chile to the FMLN in Salvador - not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It continues today with Washington's attempts to subvert the governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, and, of course, still, forever, Cuba. Imagine that the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines had all failed because the automobile interests had sabotaged each test flight. And then, thanks to the auto companies' propaganda, the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly. It's widely assumed that the Soviet Union demise resulted from gross shortcomings intrinsic to its socialist system, that the economy somehow imploded from its inherent contradictions. But all the shortcomings and contradictions that could have been found in the Soviet system in 1990 could have as well been found in 1980, or 1970, or 1960. Unlike capitalism, whose volatility is legendary, as each day's headlines remind us anew, the Soviet system with its government ownership of the means of production and its command economy, whatever its other defects, remained relatively stable and uniform. The question is thus: What happened in the late 1980s in the Soviet system to cause it to unravel? I believe that the best answer to the question lies in the person of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985. Gorbachev's long-time and ardent ambition was to model the Soviet Union after a West European social democracy and have the country accepted as such by the Europeans. That's the principal reason he put an end to the Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan; and why he instituted his historic economic and political changes at home (with their unintended consequences), and relinquished control over Eastern Europe without resorting to military force. The war in Afghanistan certainly had its effects, financially and psychologically, upon the people of the Soviet Union, and is commonly cited as a major cause for the nation's breakup. But the same can be said even more so of the effect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq upon the American people, millions of whom have marched against the wars, yet none of this has led to an American withdrawal from either place; not even close. Superpowers should not be confused with democracies. Ayn Rand's social philosophy: Let the strong prevail, let the weak pay for their weakness "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms ... So the problem here is [that] something which looked to be a very solid edifice and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me." A remarkable admission from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, long-time opponent of government regulation of the corporate world, and friend and devoted follower of Ayn Rand, the selfishness guru who turned the emulation of two-year olds into a philosophy of life. "I have found a flaw", said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy. "I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact." {7} Greenspan was induced into these admissions by tough questioning from congressmen at a hearing called in October to deal with the financial crisis. There was a time when Greenspan was looked upon as a guru by a largely unquestioning and unchallenging congress and media, no matter how dubious or obscure his pronouncements. He could have passed at times for Chauncey Gardener, the main character of the book and film Being There (1979). Gardener, brought to life by Peter Sellers, was a simple man with very simple thoughts and behavior, who might have been considered to be borderline "retarded", but fortuitous circumstances and the deference toward him by those of insufficient intellect and/or courage resulted in him being thought of as brilliant by people in high positions. There was one noteworthy exception to this delicate treatment of Greenspan. In July 2003, Representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont faced the Fed chairman across the table at a congressional hearing and said: "Mr Greenspan, I have long been concerned that you are way out of touch with the needs of the middle class and working families of our country, that you see your major function in your position as the need to represent the wealthy and large corporations ... I think you just don't know what's going on in the real world. ... You talk about an improving economy, while we have lost three million private sector jobs in the last two years. Long-term unemployment has more than tripled. ... We have a $4 trillion national debt. 1.4 million Americans have lost their health insurance. Millions of seniors can't afford prescription drugs. Middle class families can't send their kids to college because they don't have the money to do that." "Congressman", Greenspan replied, "we have the highest standard of living in the world". "No, we do not", insisted Sanders. "You go to Scandinavia, and you will find that people have a much higher standard of living, in terms of education, health care and decent paying jobs. Wrong, Mister." Not accustomed to having to defend his profundities, Greenspan could do no better than to counter with: "We have the highest standard of living for a country of our size" {8} This was quite a comedown from "in the world", and inasmuch as the only countries of equal or larger population are China and India, with Indonesia being the fourth largest, Greenspan's point is rather difficult to evaluate. The idea that the United States has the highest standard of living in the world is one that is actually believed by numerous grownups in America, and most of them believe that this highest standard applies across the board. They're only minimally conscious of the fact that whereas they've made extremely painful sacrifices to send a child to university, and they often simply can't come up with enough money, and even if they can the child will be very heavily in debt for years afterward, in much of Western Europe university education is either free or eminently affordable; as it is in Cuba and was in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The same lack of awareness about superior conditions in other countries extends to health care, working hours, vacation time, maternity leave, child care, unemployment insurance, and a host of other social and economic benefits. In short, amongst the developed nations, the United States is the worst place to be a worker, to be sick, to seek a university education, to be a parent; or, in the land of two million incarcerated, to exercise certain rights or be a defendant in court. To which the Chauncey Gardeners of America, including the one who used to sit in the Federal Reserve and the one presently sitting in the Oval Office, would say: "Duh! Whaddaya mean?" The Rosenbergs as heroes John Gerassi, professor of political science at Queens College in New York City, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times: To the Editor: NYT In his "A Spy Confesses" (Week in Review 9/21), Sam Roberts claims that folks "fiercely loyal to the far left, believed that the Rosenbergs were not guilty ..." I am and have always been, since my stint as a correspondent and editor in Latin America for Time and Newsweek, a "far leftist", and I have never claimed the Rosenbergs were not guilty. Nor have any of my "far leftist" friends. What we always said, and what I repeat to my students every semester, is that "if they were guilty, they are this planet's great heroes". My explanation is quite simple: The US had a first-strike policy, the USSR did not (until Gorbachev). In 1952, the US military, and various intelligence services, calculated that a first strike on all Soviet silos would wipe out all but six percent of Russian atomic missiles (and, we now know, create enough radiation to kill us all). But those six percent would automatically be fired at US cities. The military then calculated what would happen if one made a direct hit on Denver (why they chose Denver and not New York or Washington was never explained). Their finding: 200,000 would die immediately, two million within a month. They concluded that it was not worth it. In other words, I tell my students, you were born and I am alive because the USSR had a deterrent against our "preventive" attack, not the other way around. And if it is true that the Rosenbergs helped the Soviets get that deterrent, they end up among the planet's saviors. - John Gerassi (tgerassi at hotmail.com) [It will not come as a great surprise to learn that the Times did not allow such thoughts to appear in their exalted pages.] Correction I don't know how it happened, but the address (URL) I sent out for last month's report was incorrect. It should have been: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer62.htm All previous reports can be found at www.killinghope.org Notes 1. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (1990), pages 149-50. 2. Washington Post, November 21 1971 3. Los Angeles Times, September 13 1988, page 19. For further discussion of this issue, see Russ Bellant, "Old Nazis and the New Right: The Republican Party and Fascists", Covert Action Information Bulletin (Washington, DC), #33, Winter 1990, pages 27-31 4. New York Times, October 3 2008 5. David Talbot, Salon.com, October 7 2008 6. John Dinges, The Huffington Post, October 24 2008, based on a declassified US Embassy cable 7. Washington Post, October 23 2008 8. House Financial Services Committee, July 15 2003; http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/bank/hba91775.000/hba91775_0f.htm William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer63.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Sun Nov 2 10:34:24 2008 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Sun, 2 Nov 2008 12:34:24 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Germans return to Marx Message-ID: <56837003B2154F5AADD5339D949E0CE5@PrisonLegalNews.local> Global crisis sends east Germans flocking to Marx By Erik Kirschbaum1 hour, 32 minutes ago Two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, communism's founding father Karl Marx is back in vogue in eastern Germany -- thanks to the global financial crisis. His 1867 critical analysis of capitalism, "Das Kapital," has risen from the publishing graveyard to become an improbable best-seller for academic publisher Karl-Dietz-Verlag. "Everyone thought there would never ever again be any demand for 'Das Kapital'," managing director Joern Schuetrumpf told Reuters after selling 1,500 copies so far this year, triple the number sold in all of 2007 and a 100-fold increase since 1990. "Even bankers and managers are now reading 'Das Kapital' to try to understand what they've been doing to us. Marx is definitely 'in' right now," Schuetrumpf said. The revival of Marx's treatise reflects a broader rejection of capitalism by many in eastern Germany, a communist country until 1989 and now racked by high unemployment and poverty. A month of intense financial turmoil has toppled banks in the United States and forced a series of government bailouts in Germany and elsewhere, reinforcing anti-capitalist sentiment. Chancellor Angela Merkel -- herself an easterner -- unveiled a 500 billion euro financial rescue package this week, a move decried as a reward for irresponsible bankers. A recent survey found 52 percent of eastern Germans believe the free market economy is "unsuitable" and 43 percent said they wanted socialism rather than capitalism, findings confirmed in interviews with dozens of ordinary easterners. "We read about the 'horrors of capitalism' in school. They really got that right. Karl Marx was spot on," said Thomas Pivitt, a 46-year-old IT worker from east Berlin. "I had a pretty good life before the Wall fell," he added. "No one worried about money because money didn't really matter. You had a job even if you didn't want one. The communist idea wasn't all that bad." CAPITALISM EVEN WORSE Unemployment in the former communist east is 14 percent, double western levels, and wages are significantly lower. Millions of jobs were lost after reunification. Many eastern factories were bought by western competitors and shut down. "I thought communism was s but capitalism is even worse," said Hermann Haibel, a 76-year old retired blacksmith, who was strolling near Alexanderplatz in the heart of old East Berlin. "The free market is brutal. The capitalist wants to squeeze out more, more, more," he said. Free market hopes were high in the east when Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised "flourishing landscapes." But while some areas on the outskirts of Berlin, in Leipzig and along the Baltic shore are thriving, much of the rest suffers from depopulation and high unemployment. The opposition Left party, which traces its roots to Erich Honecker's SED party, has capitalized on the frustration and become the east's most popular party with support of 30 percent. "I don't think capitalism is the right system for us," said Monika Weber, a 46-year-old city clerk. "The distribution of wealth is unfair. We're seeing that now. The little people like me are going to have to pay for this financial mess with higher taxes because of greedy bankers." Like many other east Germans, Ralf Wulff said he was delighted about the fall of the Berlin Wall and to see capitalism replace communism. But the euphoria was ephemeral. "It took just a few weeks to realize what the free market economy was all about," said Wulff. "It's rampant materialism and exploitation. Human beings get lost. We didn't have the material comforts but communism still had a lot going for it." But not everyone condemned capitalism. Astrid Gerber was a master tailor in East Berlin before her company was shut down. "It was my dream job," said Gerber, 42. She was unemployed for seven years, then opened up a newsstand but gave it up after her family disintegrated due to her 90-hour work week. "Capitalism has its advantages but so does communism," she said. "I can't say one is better than the other." Paul Wright, Editor Prison Legal News P.O. Box 2420 West Brattleboro, VT 05303 802-257-1342 pwright at prisonlegalnews.org www.prisonlegalnews.org Seattle Office: Prison Legal News 2400 NW 80th St. # 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 16784 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081102/a49015b9/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Sun Nov 2 13:41:09 2008 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:41:09 -0800 Subject: [A-List] The Triumph of Ignorance In-Reply-To: <490DFA95.E1160FBB@ilstu.edu> References: <490C447A.1020205@attglobal.net> <7alt5i$2cuhbf@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> <490DFA95.E1160FBB@ilstu.edu> Message-ID: Thank you Carrol, good points worth considering. It seems, however, opaqueness and secrecy is the problem, rather than speculation about the real activities of the actors wielding power through the government. One of Howard Zinn's lectures in 2003 was replayed on Alternative Radio this week, its in the archives at http://kexp.org just navigate into the archive at 6am yesterday (saturday) As Howard Zinn said, politicians lie constantly. That is what they always do. Because if they told anything resembling the truth of things, they would be out of power in 2 weeks. So-- I reject your framing. It is the investigation of the unseen which is good and noble. It is the secrecy and the blocking of truth that is "a contempt of humans.. mockery of leftist hope". Know your enemy. TOdd. At 11:08 AM 11/2/2008, you wrote: >Conspiracism simply drives me up the wall; it simply _destroys_ >political conversation by raising topics that could only be even >minimally accessible in a court of law, a congressional investigating >committee, or a university seminar sometime after 2150. Such theorizing >is pure hysteria, pure contempt for politics, and hence pure contempt >for humans as a species. It makes a mockery of leftist hope. > >Carrol > >Todd Boyle wrote: > > > > At 03:58 AM 11/1/2008, you wrote: > > > > > How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be > > > dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it > > > charity > > > that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two > > > terms > > > as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle... > > > > I thought the consensus was clear on Dan Quayle, > > that George Bush senior, after a career in the CIA and > > inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, > > would never have a vice president as cunning and > > malevolent as Lyndon Johnson. So, he picked Quayle. > > > > Todd. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2366 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081102/26a0692f/attachment.txt From nmgoro at gmail.com Mon Nov 3 06:17:09 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 10:17:09 -0300 Subject: [A-List] For M.H. re: Garetto Message-ID: <2fa158550811030517v618a6fees34b9dbbd6aa35799@mail.gmail.com> Dear Michael Hudson, got info on Garetto. Would you mind to write to me on private line? Best. El 30/10/08, Gustavo Battistoni escribi?: > Seg?n lo que s? por un amigo, es un librero y editor piola de Rafaela, ex- Fip. > Mucho m?s no te puedo decir. > Un abrazo. > > > > El d?a 30 de octubre de 2008 15:37, N?stor Gorojovsky > escribi?: > > Qu? pod?s contarme de este tipo? Aparentemente act?a en Santa Fe, zona > > de Rafaela. > > > > -- > > > > N?stor Gorojovsky > > El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a > > > -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From nmgoro at gmail.com Mon Nov 3 07:07:17 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 11:07:17 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Dollar revaluation? In-Reply-To: <490AB102.5060509@tellas.gr> References: <490AB102.5060509@tellas.gr> Message-ID: <2fa158550811030607w405ac49fh3fc70bc89ef9144b@mail.gmail.com> 2008/10/31, Stathis Stassinos : > > And talking about coercion, Nestor do you believe Brazil has an active > nuclear weapons program? The only reason why Argentina does not own its A bombs is political. We have anything that we need, but it would be politically stupid. Brazilians are some decades behind Arg in the issue, and for the same reasons won?t advance too much. Both countries, together, may reach a level of collaboration that might turn the coalition in a powerful nuclear player (and ICBM, too: with the proper political decission, Argentina can easily develop such a vector program in a few years, while the Brazilian base at Alc?ntara could become a binational -or best, Latin American- initial test ground or even launching pad). Lack of unity, however, conspires against this. And this is why Britain could, as they did, think about A-bombing C?rdoba in Argentina during the battles of 1982: we were in no position to retaliate. -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From michael.hudson at earthlink.net Mon Nov 3 07:43:33 2008 From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net (Michael Hudson) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:43:33 -0500 Subject: [A-List] For M.H. re: Garetto In-Reply-To: <2fa158550811030517v618a6fees34b9dbbd6aa35799@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Dear Nestor, I don't have your private e-mail. Could you let me know it? I'm at michael.hudson at earthlink.net. Michael On 11/3/08 8:17 AM, "N?stor Gorojovsky" wrote: > Dear Michael Hudson, got info on Garetto. Would you mind to write to me on > private line? Best. El 30/10/08, Gustavo Battistoni > escribi?: > Seg?n lo que s? por un amigo, es un > librero y editor piola de Rafaela, ex- Fip. > Mucho m?s no te puedo decir. > > Un abrazo. > > > > El d?a 30 de octubre de 2008 15:37, N?stor Gorojovsky > > escribi?: > > Qu? pod?s contarme de este tipo? > Aparentemente act?a en Santa Fe, zona > > de Rafaela. > > > > -- > > > > > N?stor Gorojovsky > > El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi > autor?a > > > -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede > no ser de mi autor?a From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Nov 3 09:30:21 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 11:30:21 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Study: Gay Marriage Good For Economy In-Reply-To: <2fa158550810270756o75a442b3s4af35a13d2132e6e@mail.gmail.com> References: <2fa158550810270756o75a442b3s4af35a13d2132e6e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: One of the reasons why capitalism has such an extraordinary staying power is that through liberalism -- equal rights before the law, in this case the equal right to marriage -- it can ideologically incorporate so many, including oppressed communities, especially in the North. It's only a few -- perhaps only undocumented workers and the severely mentally disabled -- who are categorically excluded from liberal discourse of rights. Yoshie On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 9:56 AM, N?stor Gorojovsky wrote: > This, of course, is useful for the GLTB struggle. > > But, taken in a deeper sense, it is astonishing. > > So that what matters is not whether people can or can not be happy in > matters that should remain in the most personal and private domain. > No. What matters is that an opportunity to allow people to be happy > "can create jobs". > > It is reification taken to its highest degree. > > 2008/10/26 Yoshie Furuhashi : >> >> Study: Gay Marriage Good For Economy >> UCLA Researchers Say Same Sex Unions Will Create Jobs, Generate Revenue >> SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2008 >> >> (AP) Same-sex weddings could create hundreds of new jobs and pump >> hundreds of millions of dollars into California's economy, according >> to a new study released Monday. >> >> Gay coupl From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Nov 3 10:49:06 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:49:06 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Study: Gay Marriage Good For Economy In-Reply-To: References: <2fa158550810270756o75a442b3s4af35a13d2132e6e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <490F3992.2060503@gmail.com> Why don't we just call it what it is: Cultural assimilation into a war-mongering society. For instance, which global 'insurance' company is going to cover YOUR same-sex spouse and then deny their medical claim because they wouldn't take the poisonous prescription meds foisted off on your society, at astronomical profits, as a 'cure'? Cynically yours, Leigh Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > One of the reasons why capitalism has such an extraordinary staying > power is that through liberalism -- equal rights before the law, in > this case the equal right to marriage -- it can ideologically > incorporate so many, including oppressed communities, especially in > the North. It's only a few -- perhaps only undocumented workers and > the severely mentally disabled -- who are categorically excluded from > liberal discourse of rights. > > Yoshie > > On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 9:56 AM, N?stor Gorojovsky wrote: > >> This, of course, is useful for the GLTB struggle. >> >> But, taken in a deeper sense, it is astonishing. >> >> So that what matters is not whether people can or can not be happy in >> matters that should remain in the most personal and private domain. >> No. What matters is that an opportunity to allow people to be happy >> "can create jobs". >> >> It is reification taken to its highest degree. >> >> 2008/10/26 Yoshie Furuhashi : >> >>> >>> Study: Gay Marriage Good For Economy >>> UCLA Researchers Say Same Sex Unions Will Create Jobs, Generate Revenue >>> SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2008 >>> >>> (AP) Same-sex weddings could create hundreds of new jobs and pump >>> hundreds of millions of dollars into California's economy, according >>> to a new study released Monday. >>> >>> Gay coupl >>> > > > From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Nov 3 10:59:22 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 12:59:22 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Study: Gay Marriage Good For Economy In-Reply-To: <490F3992.2060503@gmail.com> References: <2fa158550810270756o75a442b3s4af35a13d2132e6e@mail.gmail.com> <490F3992.2060503@gmail.com> Message-ID: There are some good critical essays and interviews (though some of them are unfortunately heavy with academic jargon) on this problem of assimilation into capitalism and imperialism at Darkmatter, an online journal: e.g., "Loyal Repetitions of the Nation: Gay Assimilation and the 'War on Terror'" . Yoshie On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Leighm wrote: > Why don't we just call it what it is: Cultural assimilation into a > war-mongering society. > > For instance, which global 'insurance' company is going to cover YOUR > same-sex spouse and then deny their medical claim because they wouldn't take > the poisonous prescription meds foisted off on your society, at astronomical > profits, as a 'cure'? > > Cynically yours, > Leigh > > > Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: >> >> One of the reasons why capitalism has such an extraordinary staying >> power is that through liberalism -- equal rights before the law, in >> this case the equal right to marriage -- it can ideologically >> incorporate so many, including oppressed communities, especially in >> the North. It's only a few -- perhaps only undocumented workers and >> the severely mentally disabled -- who are categorically excluded from >> liberal discourse of rights. >> >> Yoshie >> >> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 9:56 AM, N?stor Gorojovsky >> wrote: >> >>> >>> This, of course, is useful for the GLTB struggle. >>> >>> But, taken in a deeper sense, it is astonishing. >>> >>> So that what matters is not whether people can or can not be happy in >>> matters that should remain in the most personal and private domain. >>> No. What matters is that an opportunity to allow people to be happy >>> "can create jobs". >>> >>> It is reification taken to its highest degree. >>> >>> 2008/10/26 Yoshie Furuhashi : >>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Study: Gay Marriage Good For Economy >>>> UCLA Researchers Say Same Sex Unions Will Create Jobs, Generate Revenue >>>> SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2008 >>>> >>>> (AP) Same-sex weddings could create hundreds of new jobs and pump >>>> hundreds of millions of dollars into California's economy, according >>>> to a new study released Monday. >>>> >>>> Gay coupl >>>> >> >> >> > > > From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 3 11:11:02 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:11:02 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Triumph of Ignorance Message-ID: <490EF867.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> From: Todd Boyle At 03:58 AM 11/1/2008, you wrote: How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle... ^^^^^ CB: The archetype for this over the last 30 years was Reagan. Please don't forget him. The US has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and cults of ignorant personalities. In the early 1800's there was a " Know Nothing" Party. "We're stupid and proud of it." I think it's actually rooted in a democratic reaction against the fact that the thinkers down through the ages have been servants of ruling classes. That is an aspect of Marx and Engels' ancient antagonism between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor, with ruling classes originating in the former. However, in this modern U.S. version it is demogogy, because the political ignoramuses like Reagan ( I think Bush's ignorance is a pose) are the main agents of the ruling class. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Mon Nov 3 11:40:46 2008 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (james daly) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 18:40:46 -0000 Subject: [A-List] Will Hutton -- Will the real Keynes stand up, not this sad caricature? Message-ID: <828113956AA14D8F99C8A296A086338E@home9sg93n9r5y> To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/02/economics-economy-john-keynes Will the real Keynes stand up, not this sad caricature? The great economist is back in fashion, but it will be a disaster if his brilliant theories are now misapplied Will Hutton Sunday November 2 2008 The Observer With the Bank of England declaring that the Western banking system is in its most acute crisis since 1914, John Maynard Keynes is back. Alistair Darling is the first Chancellor since Roy Jenkins to speak warmly of the 20th-century's greatest economist. Newspaper and television profiles mushroom. This is the man who said that countries must spend their way out of recessions, you will read, by allowing public borrowing to rocket. Keynes is allegedly the original big-spending, big government liberal. And along the way, you will have learnt that his ballerina wife, Lydia Lopokova, had to cross-dress because he never relinquished his taste for beautiful young men. That we need a little Keynesianism - a dodgy doctrine from a gay libertine - is a sign of how desperate the economic situation has become. For a convinced Keynesian such as myself, it is a depressing caricature of what remains the most subtle and best explanation of why market economies work as inefficiently as they do. Worse, it may lead not only to some costly policy mistakes, but it will mean that a once in a generation chance to reform the British and world financial system will be missed. The time has come to assert the real Keynes. This is a Keynesian moment because an out-of-control financial system has created a potential slump that can only be solved by the close but generous reform of finance. For Keynes, the interaction of the financial system with the real economy is capitalism's existential problem. Banks are where our savings reside without any promissory note about when we intend to spend them, so that the spectre permanently hovers over the economy of there either being too little spending or too much. The job of finance is to recycle those savings back into investment and so sustain overall levels of demand, production and employment at a balanced rate. Free-market economists maintain that free decisions in free financial markets will propel the rate of interest to take the entire weight of this existential task. Keynes disputed this to the depths of his being. Financial markets were different from the real economy, he proved, and operated on very different, short-term time horizons and impulsive passions. If farming were to be organised like the stock market, he once wrote, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out. This is a ludicrous way to approach any economic activity, but it is how the stock market values companies. Financial markets are always more transactional, more short term and move faster than anyone in the real economy could ever contemplate. Moreover, they are prone to wild enthusiasm and pessimism. Human beings do not know the future. We may try to attach rational probabilities to certain outcomes, but that is not the point; there are, Keynes said, prefiguring Donald Rumsfeld, unknown unknowns. An unknowable future creates herd effects, waves of irrational exuberance or gloom. We doubt our individual capacity to figure out what lies ahead, so we surrender to the greater wisdom of crowds. Because financial markets permit many more fast, transactional, short-term decisions than any other, they swing faster with the crowd than any other part of the economy. Alternating between asset price bubbles and hoarding of cash is in their DNA. And free-market economists' attempts to prove otherwise, along the way serving the interests of a financial plutocracy, are just wrong. Thus, credit flows and the prices of financial assets must be constantly monitored to see if they are behaving rationally. Intervention in the financial markets - regulatory, institutional, via monetary policy and in collaboration with other governments - is vital. The socialisation of the financial system may, paradoxically, be an imperative to save capitalism. Contra-cyclical government borrowing in recessions may be helpful. But the big game is to do everything you can to stimulate private sector credit flows. Keynes would be completely unsurprised by today's events; he would have spent the previous decade warning of the existential danger posed by the mania for financial deregulation. The Bank of England revealed in its financial stability review last week that in the seven years up to 2008 British banks had lent £700bn more to their customers than they had saved, making up the difference from taking deposits from abroad via the now dead markets in securitised assets insured by credit default swaps. If the banks try to restore just half of the gap over 12 months by returning to the ratios in 2003, the Bank of England shows that they would have to cut lending by a depression-inducing 5 per cent. Even doing it over three years implies that lending growth will fall by two-thirds - a prolonged recession. How much feasibly can Chancellor Darling offset this by increasing government borrowing over and above the operation of the automatic stabilisers during a recession - tax revenues falling and social security spending rising? To increase government borrowing by an additional 2 per cent of GDP - some £30bn - is the most which is practically possible. It would be helpful, but unless we stop the banks closing the funding gap we are sunk. Which is why Keynesians focus on monetary policy and the financial system as the principal swing factors at moments such as this. The Bank of England must cut interest rates from 4.5 per cent to 3.0 per cent next week as a minimum. Moreover, the government has to devise mechanisms to persuade the banks they can safely lend and reduce that funding gap slowly. Most important is the introduction of schemes that insure the nominal value of loans, such as James Crosby's proposal to create a government insurance scheme for raising funds for mortgages. We need similar schemes for small firms' working capital requirements and larger firms' investment needs. I would create lending organisations as Roosevelt did in the 1930s. In the longer term, we need to develop a new insurance infrastructure to help banks - and borrowers - better manage risk. None of this will be delivered by market forces. Everything will have to be created by government. For everybody, there is an event or book that changed their life. Mine was reading Axel Leijonhufvud's great exposition - On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes - 20 years ago. I had worked in the City and had experienced its dysfunctional short termism and wild fevers at first hand. Keynes was the economist who put it all together, the liberal who understood why free finance is capitalism's greatest enemy. The State We're In was my attempt to devise a Keynesianism for our own times. I will stand by the heart of the book - deregulate financial markets and create a financial system that dominates business at your peril - to my last. But there was no constituency for reform 10 years ago. Keynesians of my ilk were seen as irrelevant and wrong. But now, with Keynes back in fashion, if we don't do Keynesianism right, we risk a very nasty recession indeed. The Chancellor used his Mais lecture last week to argue for a welcome pragmatism on fiscal policy and urged the Bank of England to do the same on monetary policy. He won't get far, though, unless he can directly change the banks' lending policies. We need him to become the complete Keynesian. There are only weeks left before the downward vortex becomes irretrievably deep. Read Leijonhufvud. And act. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008 If you have any questions about this email, please contact the guardian.co.uk user help desk: userhelp at guardian.co.uk. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Visit guardian.co.uk - the UK's most popular newspaper website http://guardian.co.uk http://observer.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Newspaper Marketing Agency Opening Up Newspapers ------------------------------------------------------------------ Please consider the environment before printing this email This e-mail and all attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender and delete the e-mail and all attachments immediately. Do not disclose the contents to another person. You may not use the information for any purpose, or store, or copy, it in any way. Guardian News & Media Limited is not liable for any computer viruses or other material transmitted with or as part of this e-mail. You should employ virus checking software. Guardian News & Media Limited A member of Guardian Media Group PLC Registered Office Number 1 Scott Place, Manchester M3 3GG Registered in England Number 908396 From tboyle at rosehill.net Mon Nov 3 10:58:06 2008 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:58:06 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade In-Reply-To: <490B69D6.3020803@tellas.gr> References: <490B69D6.3020803@tellas.gr> Message-ID: Stathis, In Japan in the early 1990s, neither individual households nor companies *needed* any loan, or *wanted* any loan. What's the use of a bank, in such circumstances? People and companies generally had sufficient current net cash flow to carry on, as long as policymakers kept the monopolies somewhat in equilibrium-- the perennial task of the Japanese government. The Japanese economy was not so irrational that it had many companies systemically in the red. Other than the finance and property bubbles, the rest of the economy did not need bank loans to meet current cash deficits. Japan's dominant corporations furthermore, didn't need banks for long-term investments. They had plenty of financial resources to finance needed plant and equipment. They had more capital than the banks! This is generally true of today's dominant transnationals as well. Of course, in those circumstances, who needs capital, or capitalism? Capitalism is only relevant when there is excess returns to capital-- it cannot exist in a steady state economy, because supplies of everything have developed to match the demands...... Accordingly, liquidity throughout the economy cannot be increased by reducing interest rates. In Japan they had zero interest rates (negative interest rates, after inflation) and still, nobody wanted to borrow. The only thing needed is to prevent liquidity from being drained, by vandals and pirates etc. It seems to me, today's situation is like 1971 or the late 1960s, really, when US imports of oil were causing such huge balance of payments deficits that the US needed to setup the "petrodollar recycling" arrangements with the Saudis. I seem to note, a bit late, that this scheme depended on growth in the US-- it was a scheme by which prices in excess of costs were extracted from the US by whoever had the oil wells-- a completely absurd situation -- and then, all those $trillions were expected to be reinvested in the US capital markets. Now, that's a recipe for disaster, because in a reasonably mature economy, neither companies nor households need or want that volume of capital investment. So, it went into collossal bubbles, one after another. The whole scheme is really stupid and needs to be reformed. It's mostly caused by the ridiculous runup in oil prices. Since hydrocarbons have intrinsic economic value in excess of cost, the excess gain should be taxed away, and redistributed rationally to households and businesses. Certainly, it should not flow to whoever controls the oil wells. And it shouldn't flow to whoever happens to live nearby the oil wells either (Be they Alaskan, Iraqi, Texan or anybody else.) TOdd At 12:25 PM 10/31/2008, Stathis Stassinos wrote: >Yoshie, it was fun reading about mrs Watanabe, but what I dont get >is how low interest rates will start new bubbles in this enviroment. >Our current problem is not about rates, but about fear. Argentinian >bonds have 30% return in dollar terms, Islandic rates are 18%, but >if you are not sure about getting your money back, 5,6,10 or 15% >wont make a difference. > >Its the same thing as the libor. Its not about the rate, as about >the fear that your counterparty will default and that will trigger >your default too. I think that Keynes Liquidity Trap doesnt really >care about the rates. It s a situation were nomore credit worhy >counterparties exist. > >So, do you believe that dollar or yen "curry trade" will resume swiftly? >Isnt mrs Watanabe suffering from huge losses? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3859 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081103/04e6ac3d/attachment.txt From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Tue Nov 4 03:48:43 2008 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (james daly) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 10:48:43 -0000 Subject: [A-List] Jonathan Steele -- The Guardian -- The prophets of Iranian regime split won't find it in the fury of the bazaar Message-ID: <01A19FEC650B42A2A2BC808A3EE8AFB9@home9sg93n9r5y> To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/03/iran-regime-change-tehran-bazaaris The prophets of Iranian regime split won't find it in the fury of the bazaar Jonathan Steele in Tehran Monday November 3 2008 The Guardian On the lookout for "cracks in the regime", analysts of Iran had a thrill last month. The bazaars of Isfahan, Tehran, and several other cities went on strike for the first time in a generation. In the labyrinth of vaulted passages the richest traders were always the jewellers. Their glittering windows are rarely without at least one mother and daughter glued to the glass. When one pair of black chadors goes in to buy or moves away, another takes its place. The hunt for the right wedding ring is constant and business never flags. Except three weeks ago, when Isfahan's goldsmiths closed their doors, soon followed by jewellers elsewhere. Spice merchants and clothes stores joined in, and the heavy wooden doors of Isfahan's bazaar swung shut. Police swooped on the homes of suspected strike leaders but it was not just repression that ended the protest a day or two later. The government caved in, releasing the detainees and announcing that plans to introduce value added tax, the cause of the anger, would be suspended for a year. Outside Iran, the regime's critics excitedly recalled that the bazaaris have not struck since the months before the Shah's fall three decades ago. Traditionally anti-western, and with close ties to the clergy, they helped to produce the Islamic revolution in 1979. They still control a large chunk of Iran's wholesale trade and distribution networks. Their donations help to fund the mosques. If the bazaaris break ranks, something truly big is under way. So goes the wishful thinking, but it is wrong. First, what infuriated the bazaaris was not the tax (a modest 3%) but the fact that it would require them to open their books for the first time. They were resisting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cautious attempts at modernisation, not protesting against dictatorship. Second, the "cracks in the regime" theory assumes a brittle monolith. But neither my fleeting impressions from visiting seven Iranian cities nor the comments of Iranian pundits put the country anywhere close to this. On the contrary, calm and normality are what strike you. The western stereotype of a threatening and dangerous country is wide of the mark. People regularly greet foreigners with "Welcome to Iran", partly to practise their English but also to thank you for resisting panic and coming to see for yourself. Such analysts as Bijan Khajehpour, who heads a strategic consulting firm in Tehran, see Iran becoming more homogeneous over time. The divide between big cities and smaller rural towns is shrinking, he says, as young people aspire to learn English and computer skills, follow global dress and music codes, and embrace consumerism. Saeed Leylaz, the editor of Sarmayeh, a financial daily, notes an opposite tendency at least in the economy - a widening of the income gap over the last three years. Ahmadinejad's highly publicised tours to small towns and villages, and the largesse he gives for local projects, have not increased equality. Galloping inflation, which has just reached 30% annually, hits the poorest hardest. "In the last year of Khatami [the previous president] the Gini coefficient for income inequality was 0.39. Now it's 0.43, not far below the 0.45 of the Shah's worst period," Leylaz says. The fall in oil prices and the improbability of any early upturn are plunging Iran into a financial crisis as sharp and sudden as that of western economies. This threatens living standards far more than western sanctions. Experts calculate that Iran needs a price of at least $76 a barrel, compared to the current $60, to prevent a rise in the government's budget deficit as well as a trade deficit that will require a slash in imports. Yet the likelihood that Iran's crisis will lead to a political upheaval is as remote as the chance that the wreck of western neoliberalism will produce revolution in the US and Europe. Iran's system is flexible and resilient. Media controls are strong but getting less so. State TV reported the bazaar strikes because most families, in the smaller towns as well as Tehran, watch foreign TV via satellite dishes installed through the black market. The government has to put its own spin on bad news rather than ignore it. With presidential elections next June the political factions are filling the print media, as well as parliament, with heated arguments over domestic and foreign policy. If one test of democracy is having elections in which the result is unpredictable, Iran certainly passes it. "The key point," as Khajehpour puts it, "is that we don't have a dominant political faction or agenda nowadays. They are all minorities." As many as six credible candidates may contest the first round before a French-style run-off. Ahmadinejad represents the conservatives. They prefer to call themselves "principle-ists" since they believe in the principles of Islam and a strong Iranian (that is, non-western) identity. But Ahmadinejad comes under frequent attack from "radical principle-ists" as well as other moderate conservatives like himself. Amir Mohebbian, an economic commentator for the conservative paper Resalat, criticises the president's poor choice of words before foreign audiences as well as aspects of his tax and welfare policies. A parliamentary showdown is looming over Ali Kordan, the interior minister, who will be impeached this week for faking his university degrees. This could trigger a vote of no confidence in Ahmadinejad's government. Some commentators say his reformist opponents may not support it. "They don't want to make him a martyr. They think he will not be re-elected next year anyway," says one analyst who prefers to keep his name unpublished. Foreign critics may claim that in spite of boisterous faction-fighting, Iranian politics are imprisoned within a narrow spectrum of ideas and therefore count as undemocratic. But don't European and US politics also display what the French call pensée unique? It is only when societies are already moving into instability that the political class begins to tolerate, or is forced to accept, a widening of the margins for debate. Iran is becoming more secular. A group of mullahs in Shiraz concede that fewer people attend mosques than a decade ago "because more time has passed since the revolution". Ali Reza Manaei, a guide at Tehran's martyrs' museum and a member of the Basij, a group of revolutionary volunteers, complains that the values of social solidarity are ebbing while corruption is on the rise. "The government's behaviour has got worse, and so has people's behaviour towards one other," he says. Even Ahmadinejad is a quasi-secularist. Formed politically by the eight-year war with Iraq, "he represents a kind of thinking that doesn't see a huge value in having the clergy in power," one commentator argues. Another points out that the president feels he has a direct link to the Hidden Imam (the Shia version of the returning messiah) and can dispense with the mediation of clerics. In short, Iran is complex. Even to Iranians it seems unfathomable. For foreign governments the message is this: don't expect regime change in the near future. Above all, don't try to force it. j.steele at guardian.co.uk Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008 If you have any questions about this email, please contact the guardian.co.uk user help desk: userhelp at guardian.co.uk. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Visit guardian.co.uk - the UK's most popular newspaper website http://guardian.co.uk http://observer.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Newspaper Marketing Agency Opening Up Newspapers ------------------------------------------------------------------ Please consider the environment before printing this email This e-mail and all attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender and delete the e-mail and all attachments immediately. Do not disclose the contents to another person. You may not use the information for any purpose, or store, or copy, it in any way. Guardian News & Media Limited is not liable for any computer viruses or other material transmitted with or as part of this e-mail. You should employ virus checking software. Guardian News & Media Limited A member of Guardian Media Group PLC Registered Office Number 1 Scott Place, Manchester M3 3GG Registered in England Number 908396 From nmgoro at gmail.com Tue Nov 4 04:58:35 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 08:58:35 -0300 Subject: [A-List] The Great Marxist debate again: Meszaros on the crisis Message-ID: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> [Hope this did not get into the list before, have not been following my mail seriously these weeks. If it has, sorry. If it hasn?t, please pay attention to it. It is worth reading, every bit of it] Source: http://www.herramienta.com.ar/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=629 The unfolding crisis and the relevance of Marx Autor: Istv?n M?sz?ros* Some of you may have been present at our meeting in May this year in this building, when I recalled what I said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the French historic may 1968. In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of "organized capitalism", which was supposed to have successfully left behind the stage of "crisis capitalism" ?a view prominently asserted by Marcuse and shared also by my dear friend Lucien Goldmann- I insisted that, compared to the crisis we are actually heading for, "the Great World Economic Crisis of 1929-1933" would look like "the Vicar's tea party". In the last few weeks you had a foretaste of what I had in mind. But no more than a foretaste, because the structural crisis of the capital system as a whole, which we are experiencing in our time on an epochal scale, is bound to get considerably worse. It will become in due course much deeper, in the sense of invading not only the world of more or less parasitic global finance but every single domain of our social, economic and cultural life. The obvious question we must now address concerns the nature of the globally unfolding crisis and the conditions required for its feasible resolution. If you try to remember what you heard in the last two weeks endlessly repeated about the current crisis, one word stands out, overshadowing all of the other claimed diagnoses and corresponding remedies. That word is confidence. If we could get a ten pound note for every occasion when that magic word has been offered for public consumption in the last two weeks all over the world, not to mention its continued reassertion ever since, we would be all millionaires. Our only problem would then be what to do with our suddenly acquired millions. For none of our banks, not even our recently nationalized banks - nationalized to the tune of no less than two thirds of their capital assets - could supply the legendary "confidence" required for safe deposit or investment. Even our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, presented us in this respect last week with the memorable phrase: "Confidence is the most precious thing." I know the song -and probably most of us do- which tells us that: "Love is the most precious thing". But confidence in capitalist banking being the most precious thing?! That suggestion is utterly perverse! Nevertheless, the advocacy of this magic remedy now seems to be universal. It is repeated with such conviction as if "confidence" could simply rain out of the sky or grow in great abundance on capitalistically well manured financial trees. Three days ago (on the 18th of October) the BBC's flagship Sunday morning interview programme -the Andrew Marr programme- wheeled out a very distinguished elderly gentleman, Sir Brian Pitman, who was introduced as the former Head of Lloyd's banking business. They did not say when he headed that organization, but the way he spoke made it amply clear soon enough. For it transpired through his respectfully received answers that he might have been the Head of Lloyd's Bank well before the World Economic Crisis of 1929-33. Accordingly, to encourage the viewers, he introduced a great conceptual innovation into the confidence discourse by saying that our troubles were all due to some Over-confidence. And he immediately also demonstrated the meaning of "Over-confidence" by saying, more than once in a short interview, that there can be no serious problem today, because the market always took care of everything, even if sometimes it went unexpectedly far down. Later it always went up again. So it will do so also this time, and it will unfailingly go up again and again also in the future. The present crisis should not be exaggerated, he said, because it is much less serious today than what we experienced way back in 1974. For in 1974 we had a 3 days working week in Britain [even if nowhere else], and now we do not have it. Do we? And who could argue with that irrefutable fact? Thus, we now have the magic explanatory word of all our troubles not standing like an unhappy orphan, alone, but as part of something like a Fukuyamized pseudo-Hegelian triad: confidence / lack of confidence / over-confidence. The only constituent missing from this magic explanatory discourse is now the real foundation of our perilous banking and insurance system which operates on the ground of self-serving confidence tricks that sooner or later are bound to be (and from time to time actually have been) found out. In any case, all this talk about the absolute virtues of confidence in capitalist economic management is much like the explanation offered in Indian Mythology about the supporting ground of the universe. For in that ancient vision of the world it is said that the universe is carried, most reassuringly, on the back of the elephant. And the self-evid?ently powerful elephant? you might well ask. No one should think of that as a difficulty. For the elephant is, even more reassuringly, supported on the back of the cosmic tortoise. But what about the cosmic tortoise itself? Don't you presume to ask such question, lest you might be fed to the tigers of Bengal, before they are extinguished. Luckily, perhaps (?), The Economist is a little bit more realistic in its assessment of the situation. In the context of our painful subject, the now acknowledged worsening economic crisis, I am going to give you exact quotations, including some damning figures of no longer deniable capitalist failures, taken mainly from such well established and unashameadly class conscious bourgeois newspapers as The Economist and The Sunday Times. Quoting them meticulously word by word not only because they are prominent in their field but also in order to avoid that they should accuse us of "left-wing bias and distortion". Marx used to say that on the pages of The Economist the ruling class is "talking to itself". Things have somewhat changed since those days. For now even in the specialized field of "economic expertise" the ruling class needs a mass circulation propaganda organ, for the purpose of general mystification. In Marx's lifetime the ruling class had plenty of "confidence", and also a great deal of unchallenged "over-confidence", for needing that. Thus, under the present less cocky circumstances, the London based mass distribution weekly paper, The Economist, - the self-righteous mouthpiece of the U.S. dominated annual "Davos Jamboree" - is well advised to concede that the crisis we are facing today is concerned with the difficulties of "Saving the system", according to the full title page of its October 11, 2008 issue. We can grant, of course, that nothing less than "saving the system" (or not) is what happens to be at stake in our time, even if The Economist's discussion of this problem is rather strange and contradictory. For in its usual way of trying to present its highly partisan position as an objectively "balanced view", by using the formula of "on the one hand and on the other hand", The Economist always succeeds in reaching its desired conclusion in favour of the established order. Thus, also on this occasion, The Economist asserts in its pricipal leader article of the 11th of October that "This week saw the first glimmer of a comprehensive global answer to the confidence gap." Now, thankfully, the "confidence gap", although reprehensible in itself, is expected to be remedied thanks to a somewhat mysterious "comprehensive global answer". At the same time, on the more realistic side, the London weekly also acknowledges in the same Editorial article that "The damage to the real economy is becoming apparent. In America consumer credit is now shrinking, and around 150,000 Americans lost their jobs in September, the most since 2003. Some industries are hurting badly: car sales are at their lowest level for 16 years as would-be buyers are unable to get credit. General Motors has temporarily shut some of its factories in Europe. Across the globe forward-looking indicators, such as surveys of purchasing managers, are horribly gloomy." They do not say, though, that "the confidence gap" may have something to do with such facts. Of course, the apology of the system must prevail in every article, even if it must be presented as the unquestionable word of pragmatic wisdom. In this sense, "saving the system" for The Economist amounts to the journal's totally uncritical identification with, and the uncontestable advocacy of, unlimited economic rescue-opera?tion - to be accomplished by no means out of the customarily most dogmatically glorified "market resources" - in favour of the troubled capitalist system. Thus, even the most cherished and well tried propaganda tenets (of a not only non-existent but never in reality existed free market) can be now thrown overboard for the noble cause of "Saving the system". Accordingly, we are told by The Economist that "The world economy is plainly in a poor shape, but it could get a lot worse. This is the time to put dogma and politics to one side and concentrate on pragmatic answers. That means more government intervention and co-operation in the short term than taxpayers, politicians or indeed free-market newspapers would normally like",[1] We have been treated to similar sermons by President George W. Bush before. He told his television audience two weeks ago that normally and instinctively he is the believer in, and the passionate supporter of, the free market, but under the present exceptional circumstances he must think of other ways. He must begin to think under these difficult circumstances, full stop. You cannot say that you have not been warned. The sums involved in the recommended "pragmatic" solution, which advocates sweeping aside the "normal likings" of the "taxpayers and free market newspapers" (that is, the now advocated solution which means, in truth, the necessary submission of the great masses of the people to increasing tax-burdens sooner or later) are literally astronomical. To quote The Economist again: "in little more than three weeks America's government, all told, expanded its gross liabilities by more than $1 trillion - almost twice as much as the cost so far of the Iraq war."[2] "American and European banks will shed some $10 trillions of dollars."[3] "But history teaches an important lesson: that big banking crises are ultimately solved by throwing in large dollops of public money".[4] Tens of trillions of dollars of public money "thrown in", and justified in the name of the claimed "important lesson of history", and of course in the service of the unchallengeable good cause of saving the system, that is certainly quite a dollop. No High Street icecream wendor could ever even dream about such dollops. And if we add to that magnitude the fact quoted on the same page of the London paper, that in the course of last year alone "The Economist's food price index jumped by nearly 55%",[5] and "The food-price spike in late 2007 and early 2008 caused riots in some 30 countries",[6] in that case the dollop in question becomes even more revealing about the nature of the system which now finds itself in ever deepening crisis. Can you think of a greater indictment for a pretendedly unsurpassable system of econproduction and societal reproduction than the one which - at the height of its productive power - is producing a global food crisis, and the suffering of countless millions inseparable from it all over the world? That is the nature of the system which is expected to be saved now at all cost, including the currently "dished out" astronomical economic cost. HOW can one make some tangible sense at all of the wasted trillions? Since we are talking about astronomical magnitudes, I addressed this question to a close friend who is Professor of Astrophysics at London Univesity. His answer was that I should point out that one trillion alone is roughly one hundred times the age of our universe. Now, on the scale of the same magnitude the regularly understated official figure of the American debt, on its own, amounts in our days to more than 10 trillion. That is, one thousand times the age of our universe. But let me quote you a short passage from a Japanese publication. It reads like this: "How much speculative money is moving around the world? According to a Mitsubishi UFJ Securities analysis, the size of the global 'real economy', in which goods and services are produced and traded, is estimated at $48.1 trillion... On the other hand, the size of the global 'financial economy', the total amount of stocks, securities and deposits, adds up to $151.8 trillion. The financial economy thus has swollen to more than three times the size of the real economy, growing especially rapidly during the past two decades. The gap is as large as $100 trillion. An analyst involved in this estimation said that about half the amount, $50 trillion is scarcely necessary for the real economy. Fifty trillion dollars are worth well over 5,000 trillion yen, too big a number for me to actually comprehend."[7] It is indeed very difficult even to comprehend, not to mention to justify, as our capital-apologetic politicians and bankers do, the astronomical sums of parasitic speculation accumulated to the magnitude corresponding to 500,000 times the age of our universe. If you wish to have another measure about the magnitude involved, just imagine an unlucky accountant from Roman times, who is asked nothing more than simply to chalk up on his blackboard the figure of 5,000 trillion yen, in Roman numbers. He would be in total despair. He simply could not do it. And even if he had at his disposal Arab numbers, which he could not have had, even in that case he would need as many as 17 zeros after the number 5 in order to write down the cifre in question. The trouble is, though, that our well heeled politicians and bankers seem to think only of the zeros, and not of their substantive linkages, when they present these problems for public consumption. And that approach cannot possibly work indefinitely. For one needs much more than zeros for getting out of the bottomless hole of the global indebtedness to which we are condemned by the system which they now want to save at all cost. AS a matter of fact, Gordon Brown's newfound popularity has a great deal to do with zeros in more ways than one. His astonishing new popularity - which, on second thought, might well turn out to be rather ephemeral - was illustrated last week by the front-page newspaper headline: "From Zero to Hero". The article in question suggested that our Prime Minister actually succeeded in "saving the system". That is how he earned the high acclaim. The reason why he was hailed in that way, as a hero, was because he invented a new variety of nationalizing capitalist bankruptcy, to be adopted with untroubled "free market conscience" by other contries as well. That made even George W. Bush feel less guilty about acting against his own proclaimed "passionate instinct" when he nationalized a huge "dollop" of U.S. capitalist bankruptcy of which one single item - the liabilities of the giant mortgage companies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - amounted to 5.4 trillion dollars (that is to say, the sum required for 54 years of running the Iraq war). The "pragmatic novelty" - as opposed to "dogma and politics" in the words of The Economist - of the recent nationalization of capitalist bankruptcy by "New Labour" is that the taxpayers get absolutely nothing (in other words, zero-zero-zero as many times as you like to write it down, even seventeen times) for the immense sums of money invested in failed capitalist assets, including our two thirds nationalized British banks. This kind of nationalization of capitalist bankruptcy is somewhat different from the earlier versions, instituted after the Second World War when the Labour Party's "Clause 4" - advocating the public control of the means of production - was still part of its Constitution. For in 1945 the nationalized bankrupt sectors of the capitalist economy were transferred to state control, for the duration of being generously fattened up again from general taxation for the purpose of proper "privatization" in due course. Even Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath's 1971 nationalization of the bankrupt Rolls Royce Company followed the same embarrassing pattern of state controlled and openly admitted nationalization. In our own days, however, the beauty of Gordon Brown's solution is that it removes the embarrassment while multiplying manifold the wasted billions invested in capitalist bankruptcy. Surely that fully deserves his promotion "From Zero to Hero" as well as the highest accolade of "Saviour of the World" conferred upon him by some other newspapers, on account of his great modesty of being satisfied with absolute zero in exchange for our - not his - generously dispensed billions. But can this kind of governmental remedy be considered a lasting solution to our problems even on a short-term basis, not to mention its required long-term sustainability? Only the fool could believe that. In truth, the recent measures adopted by our political and financial authorities only attended to one single aspect of the current crisis: the liquidity of the banks, mortgage, and insurance companies. And even that only to a very limited extent. In reality the huge "dollops thrown in" represent no more than paying the deposit only, so to speak. Much more will be required also in that respect in the future, as even the still unfolding disturbances on the world's stock-exchanges continue to underline it. However. well beyond the problem of liquidity, another dimension of just the financial crisis concerns the near catastrophic insolvency of banks and insurance companies. This fact becomes clear once their speculatively and irresponsibly assumed, but none the less existing, liabilities are actually taken into account. To give you just one example: two of our big banks in Britain have liabilities amounting to $2.4 trillion each, acquired on the adventurist assumption that they will never have to be met. Can the capitalist state successfully bail them out of that size of liability? Where could the state possibly borrow the money of such magnitude for the rescue-operation required for the purpose? And what would be the necessary inflationary consequences of "dishing out such dollops" of truly gigantic rescue-operation by simply printing the money called for in the absence of other solutions? Moreover, the problems are by no means exhausted by the perilous state of the financial sector. For even more intractably, also the productive sectors of capitalist industry are in serious trouble, no matter how highly developed and favoured they might appear to be by their competitively advantageous position in the global pecking order of transnational capital. Due to our limited time, I must confine myself again to one, but one very significant, example. It concerns the United States' motor car industry, greatly humbled in the last few years, despite all of the subsidies received from the most powerful capitalist state in the past, counted in many billions of U.S. dollars. Let me quote from an article published on Ford Corporation and its globalizing fantasies way back in 1994, published in The Sunday Times. This is how our distinguished financial journalists painted in those days their rosy picture: "Full globalization is being attempted by multinationals ... 'This is definitely Trotman's baby', said one American source. 'He has a vision of the future which says that, to be a global winner, Ford must be a truly global corporation.' According to Trotman, who told The Sunday Times in October 1993, 'As automotive competition becomes more global as we get into the next century, the pressure to find scale economies will become greater and greater. If, instead of making two engines of 500,000 units each, you can make 1 million units, then the costs are much lower. Ultimately there will be a handful of global players and the rest will either not be there or they will be struggling along.' Trotman and his colleagues concluded that full globalization is the way to beat competitors such as the Japanese and, in Europe, Ford's arch-rival General Motors, which retains a cost-advantage over Ford. Ford also believes it needs globalization to capitalise on fast-emerging markets in the Far East and in Latin America."[8] Thus, the "only" thing Alex Trotman - the British born Chairman of Ford Corporation at the time - forgot to consider, despite his impeccable arithmetical skills of knowing the difference between 500,000 and 1 million, was this: what happens when they cannot sell the 1 million (and many times more) motor cars, despite the company's strategically envisaged and enjoyed cost-advantage. In the case of Ford Corporation, even the massive differential rate of exploitation which the company could impose worldwide as a huge transnational company - that is: paying for exactly the same work 25 times less to the workers of "Ford Philippines Corporation", for instance, than to their workforce in the United States of America - even this unquestionable advantage could not be considered sufficient for securing a way out of this fundamental contradition. This is where we stand today, not only in the case of the badly humbled Ford Corporation but also in that of General Motors, irrespective of its cost-advantage once deeply envied even by the Ford Corporation of the United States. Talking about a recently instituted deal which provides major subsidies by the American state to the country's giant motor car companies, this is how the unhappy current situation of the U.S. automotive industry is described in one of the last issues of The Economist: "the deal [in question] means that car companies - blessed with the government guarantee - should get loans with an interest rate of around 5% rather than 15% they would face on the open market in today's conditions."[9] However, no amount of subsidy of any kind can be considered satisfactory enough, because the "Big Three" companies - General Motors, Ford, and Chryslers - are on the brink of bankruptcy, despite the fact that Trotsman's dream baby is by now a fully grown teenager. Thus The Economist must admit that "Once industrial subsidies like this begin to flow, it is difficult to stop them. A recent study by the Cato Institute, a rightwing think-tank, found that the federal government spent some $92 billion subsidising business in 2006 alone. Only $21 billion of that went to farmers: much of the rest went to firms such as Boeing, IBM and General Electric in the form of export-credit support and various research subsidies. The Big Three are already complaining that it will take too long to dish out the [state] money, and they want the process speeded up. They also want a further 25 billion, possibly attached to the second version of the Wall Street rescue bill. The logic of bailing out Wall Street is that finance underpins everything. Detroit cannot begin to make that claim. But, given its successful lobbying, can it be long before ailing airlines and failing retailers join the queue?"[10] The immense speculative expansion of financial adventurism, especially in the last three or four decades, is of course inseparable from the deepening crisis of the productive branches of industry and the ensuing troubles arising from the utterly sluggish capital accumulation (and indeed failed accumulation) in that productive field of economic activity. Now, inevitably, also in the domain of industrial production the crisis is getting much worse. Naturally, the necessary consequence of the ever deepening crisis in the productive branches of the "real economy", as they are now beginning to call it and contrast the productive economy with speculative financial adventurism, is the growth of unemployment everywhere on a frightening scale, and the human misery associated with it. To expect a happy solution to these problems from the capitalist state's rescue-opera?tions would be a great illusion. This is the context where our politicians should really begin to pay attention to the claimed "important lesson of history", instead of "dishing out large dollops of public money" under the pretence of "the lesson of history". For as a result of historical development under the rule of capital in its structural crisis, in our own time we have reached the point where we must be subjected to the destructive impact of an ever worsening symbiosis between the state legislative framework of our society and the material productive as well as the financial dimension of the established societal reproductive order. Understandably, that symbiotic relationship can be, and frequently it also happens to be, managed with utterly corrupt practices by the privileged personifications of capital, in business as much as in politics. For, no matter how corrupt such practices might be, they are fully in tune with the institutionalized counter-values of the established order. And - within the framework of the symbiosis prevailing between the economic field and the dominant political practices - they are legally quite permissible, thanks to the most dubious and often even clearly anti-democratic facilitating role of the impenetrable legislative jungle provided in this respect by the state also in the financial domain. Fraud?ulence, in a great variety of its practicable forms, is the nor?mality of capital. Its extremely destructive manifestations are by no means confined to the operation of the military-industrial complex. By now the direct role of the capitalist state in the parasitic world of finance is not only fundamentally important, in view of its all-pervasive magnitude, as we had to find out with shocking clarity during the last few weeks, but also potentially ca?tastrophic. The embarrassing fact of the matter is that the giant U.S. mortgage companies, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were corruptly supported and generously supplied with highly profitable but totally undeserved guarantees by the American State's legislative jungle in the first place, as well as through the personal services of unpunished political corruption. Indeed, the capitalist state's ever more dense legislative jungle happens to be the "democratic" legitimator of institutionalized fraudulence in our societies. The editors and journalists of The Economist are in fact perfectly well acquainted with the corrupt practices whereby, in the case of the giant American mortgage companies, receiving from their state outrageously preferential treatment [here I quote The Economist] "allowed Fannie and Freddie to operate with tiny amounts of capital. The two groups had core capital (as defined by their regulator) of $83.2 billion at the end of 2007; this supported $5.2 trillion of debt and guarantees, a gearing ratio of 65 to one. [ !!! ] According to CreditSights, a research group, Fannie and Freddie were counterparties in $2.3 trillion-worth of derivative transactions, related to their hedging activities. There is no way a private bank would be allowed to have such a highly geared balance sheet,[11] nor would it qualify for the highest AAA credit rating. ? They used their cheap financing to buy higher-yielding assets.[12] [Moreover,] With so much at stake, no wonder the companies built a formidable lobbying machine. Ex-politicians were given jobs. Critics could expect a rough ride. The companies were not afraid to bite the hands that fed them."[13] Not being afraid "to bite the hands that fed them" refers, of course, to the American state legislative body. But why should they be afraid? For such giant companies constitute a total symbiosis with the capitalist state. This is a relationship corruptly asserting itself also in terms of the personnel involved, through the act of hiring politicians who could serve them preferentially, with a mind-boggling "gearing ratio of 65 to one" and the associated AAA credit rating, even according to the reluctant confession of The Economist. The gravity of the present situation is underlined in a characteristic way by the circumstance, reported in these words by The Economist: "traders in the credit-default swaps market have recently made bets on the unthinkable: that America may default on its debt."[14] Naturally, such traders react even to events of such character and gravity that we experience today the only possible way they can: by squeezing profit out of it. The big trouble for the global capital system is, though, that the default of Am?erica is not unthinkable at all. On the contrary, it is - and it has been for a very long time - a coming certainty. This is why I wrote many years ago (in 1995, to be precise) that: "In a world of financial insecurity nothing suits better the practice of gambling with astronomical and criminally unsecured sums on the world's stock exchan?ges - foreshadowing an earthquake of magnitude 9 or 10 on the Financial 'Richter Scale' - than to call the enterprises which engage in such gambling 'Securities Management'; ? When exactly and in what form - of which there can be several, more or less brutal, varieties - the U.S. will default on its astronomical debt, cannot be seen at this point in time. There can be only two certainties in this regard. The first is that the inevitability of the American default will deeply affect everyone on this planet. And the second, that the preponderant hegemonic power position of the U.S. will continue to be asserted in every way, so as to make the rest of the world pay for the American debt for as long as it is capable of doing."[15] Of course, the aggravating condition today is that the rest of the world - even with the historically most ironical massive Chinese contribution to the balance sheet of the American Treasury - is less and less capable of filling the "black hole" produced on an ever growing scale by America's insatiable appetite for debt financing, as demonstrated by the global reverberations of the recent U.S. mortgage and bank crisis. This circumstance brings the necessary default of America, in one of its "more or less brutal varieties", that much nearer. The truth of this disturbing matter is that there can be no way out of these ultimately suicidal contradictions, which are inseparable from the imperative of endless capital-expansion, irrespective of the consequences - arbitrarily and mystifyingly confounded with growth as such - without radically changing our mode of social metabolic reproduction by adopting the much needed responsible and rational practices of the only viable eco?nomy,[16] oriented by human need, instead of alienating, dehumanizing and degrading profit. This is where the overwhelming impediment of capital's self-serving interdeterminations must be confronted, no matter how difficult it must be under the prevailing conditions. For the absolutely necessary adoption and the appropriate future development of the only viable economy is inconceivable without the radical transformation of the established socioeconomic and political order itself. Gordon Brown recently voiced his displeasure about "unfettered capi?talism", in the name of totally unspecified "regulation". You may remember that Gorbachev, too, wanted a kind of regulated capitalism, under the name of "market socialism", and you must also know what happened to him and to his grotesque daydream. On the other hand, British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath's expression, a very long time ago, for the same sin of "unfettered capitalism" was "the unacceptable face of capitalism". And yet, "unfettered capitalism", despite its "unacceptable face", remained all these de?cades not only "acceptable" but - in the course of its further development - it had become much worse. For the causal foundation of our ever more serious problems is not the "unacceptable face of unregulated capitalism" but its dest?ructive substance. It is that over?powering substance that must resist and nullify all efforts aimed at restrain?ing the capital system even minimally - as, indeed, it actually succeeded in doing so also in the form of metamorphosing socialdemocratic "Old Labour" in Britain into neoliberal "New Labour". Accordingly, the periodically renewed fantasy of regulating capitalism in a structurally significant way can only amount to trying to tie knots on winds. But the last thing we need today is to continue to tie knots on winds, when we have to face the gravity of capital's structural crisis, which calls for the institution of radical systemic change. It is most revealing about the incorrigible character of the capital system that even at a time like this, when the immense magnitude of the unfolding crisis cannot be denied any longer even by the system's most devoted ex officio apologists - a crisis described a few days ago by no less a figure than the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England as the greatest economic crisis in all human history - nothing can be contemplated, not to mention actually done, for changing the fundamental defects of an ever more destructive societal reproductive order by those who control the economic and political levers of our society. In contrast to the recent illumination by his own Deputy, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, had no reservations at all about the soundness of the cherished capital system, nor did he have the faintest anticipation of a coming crisis, when he praised to the sky Martin Wolf's capital-apologetic book, with its self-com?placent peremptorily assertive title: Why Globalization Works. He called that book "a devastating intellectual critique of the opponents of globalization" and a "civilized, wise and optimistic view of our economic and political future".[17] Now, however, everybody is forced to have at least some concern about the real nature and the necessary destructive consequences of dogmatically hailed capitalist globalization. Naturally, my own attitude to Wolf's book was very different from that of Mervyn King and others who share the same vested interests. I commented at the time of its publication that "the author, who is the Chief Economics Commentator of the London Financial Times, forgets to ask the really important question: For whom does it work?, if it does. It certainly works, for the time being, and by no means that well, for the decision makers of transnational capital, but not for the overwhelming majority of humankind who must suffer the consequences. And no amount of "jurisdictional integration" advocated by the author - that is, in plain English, the tighter direct control of the deplored "too many states" by a handful of imperialist powers, especially the biggest one of them - is going to remedy the situation. Capitalist globalization in reality does not work and cannot work. For it cannot overcome the irreconcilable contradictions and antagonisms manifest through the global structural crisis of the system. Capitalist globalization itself is the contradictory manifestation of that crisis, trying to overturn the cause/effect relationship in a vain attempt to cure some negative effects by other wishfully projected effects, because it is structurally incapable of addressing their causes."[18] In this sense, the recent attempts to counter the intensifying crisis symptoms, by the cynically camouflaged nationalization of astronomic magnitudes of capitalist bankruptcy, out of the yet to be invented state resources, could only highlight the deep-seated antagonistic causal determinations of the capital system's destructiveness. For what is fundamentally at stake today is not simply a massive financial crisis but humanity's potential self-dest?ruction at this juncture of historical development, both militarily and through the ongoing destruction of nature. Despite the concerted mani?pulation of interest rates and the recent vacuous Summits of the dominant capitalist countries, nothing has been lastingly achieved by "throwing in gigantic dollops of money" into the bottomless hole of the "crunched" global financial market. The "comprehensive global answer to the confidence gap", as wishfully projected by The Economist and its masters, belongs to the world of (not so pure) fantasy. For one of the greatest historic failures of capital, as the long established mode of social metabolic control, is the continued dominance of potentially most aggressive nation states, and the impossibility of instituting the state of the capital system as such on the basis of the structurally entrenched antagonisms of the capital system. To imagine that within the framework of such antagonistic causal determinations a harmonious permanent solution could be found to the deepening structural crisis of a most iniquitous production and exchange system - which is now actively engaged in producing even a global food crisis, on top of all of its other crying contradictions, including the ever more pervasive destruction of nature -, without even attempting to remedy its grievous iniquities, is the worst kind of wishful thinking, bordering on total irrationality. For, self-contradictorily, it wants to retain the existing order despite its necessarily explosive iniquities and antagonisms. And the so-called "jurisdictional integration of the too many states" under a self-appointed few, or one, as advocated by some capital-apologists, can only suggest the - equally self-contradictory - permanence of potentially suicidal global imperialist domination. This is why Marx is more relevant today than ever before. For only a radical systemic change can offer the historically sustainable hope and solution for the future. N O T A S * Lecture written for a meeting held in Conway Hall, London, on 21st October 2008. Este art?culo fue enviado por el autor para su difusi?n en Herramienta a fines de octubre de 2008. Una vez traducido, subiremos a la p?gina tambi?n la versi?n en castellano. [1] All these quotations are taken from the same Editorial article of The Economist, 11 October 2008, p. 13. [2] The Economist, 11 October 2008, special section, p. 3. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid., p. 4. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid., p. 6. [7] Shii Kazuo in Japan Press Weekly, Special Issue, October 2008, p. 20. [8] "Ford prepares for global revolution", by Andrew Lorenz and Jeff Randall. The Sunday Times, 27 March 1994, Section 3, p. 1. [9] "A bail-out that passed. In the slipstream of Wall'street's woes, the Big Three land a huge subsidy." The Economist, October 4th, 2008, p. 82. [10] Ibid., p. 83. [11] Lehman Brothers, one of the principal private merchant banks, had a gearing ratio of 30 to 1. That is bad enough! [12] "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: End of illusions", The Economist, July 19-25, 2008, p. 84. [13] "A brief family history: Toxic fudge", The Economist, July 19-25, 2008, p. 84. [14] "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: End of illusions", The Economist, July 19-25, 2008, p. 85. [15] "The Present Crisis", quoted from Part IV. of Beyond Capital (published in London in 1995), pp.962-3. (In Spanish in M?s all? del capital, Vadell Hermanos Editores, Caracas, 2001, pp. 1111-12.) [16] See in this respect: "Qualitative Growth in Utilization: The Only Viable Eco?nomy", Section 9.5 of my book, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008, pp. 272-93. (Published in Herramienta, Numbers 36 and 37.) [17] Mervyn King's endorsement, on the back cover of Martin Wolf's book, Why Globalization Works, Yale University Press, 2004. [18] In "Education - Beyond Capital", Opening Lecture delivered at the F?rum Mundial de Educa??o, Porto Allegre, July 28, 2004. In Spanish reprinted in La educaci?n m?s all? del capital, Siglo Veintiuno Editores / Clacso Coediciones, Rio de Janeiro, 2008. See also the chapter: "Why Capitalist Globalization Cannot Work?" in my book, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008, pp. 380-398; Spanish edition: El desaf?o y la carga del tiempo hist?rico, Vadell Hermanos Editores / Clacso Coedici?nes, Caracas, 2008, pp. 371-389. -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From shimogamo at attglobal.net Tue Nov 4 06:10:11 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:10:11 +0900 Subject: [A-List] A Nervous Nation Message-ID: <491049B3.30903@attglobal.net> Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) www.kunstler.com (November 03 2008) This is a nervous nation. Though I'm usually allergic to paranoia, something makes me think that there's a back office in the US Treasury that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune moments - like fifteen minutes before the closing bell - at the direction of Mr Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can't put this past the Republican party, despite John McCain's friendly turn on Saturday Night Live, consorting with "the enemy" for laughs. Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign I've ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling fellow among the senators. He's run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that "kiss-of-death" endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if Mr Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater's Darth Vadar costume for the grand occasion. What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity we've just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism. People are nervous not just because Mr Obama might be swindled out of a victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either pupate into something better or die - as the Whigs did in 1856. The Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And with Mr Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked this financial fiasco - lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse - they might just "get her done"! Other people are afraid that Mr Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans - such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don't have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs. He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation. Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become "energy independent" is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we're going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max? is going to be disappointed. We'll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently - in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals). Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated twenty plus percent of the US economy back to something more in the five percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia - our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future - will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process. I reject the label "gloom-and-doomer" where these difficult transitions are concerned. There's a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic - from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don't know it yet. Mr Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/11/a-nervous-nation.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Nov 4 07:18:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:18:06 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Wrecked Iraq Message-ID: <49101350.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/10/25/wrecked-iraq/#comment-281138 Wrecked Iraq 25th October 2008, 08:22 pm by Stan ?what was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society - economically, socially, and technologically - has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world. Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches, which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used until US forces withdraw from the country, provides a glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out of the abyss into which the US invasion pushed it. By Michael Schwartz Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple - usually front page - reports on the country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly summary stories buried inside the paper. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went by without a mention of the war. The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis disappeared. There are still occasional stories about high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions, and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life. A typical ?return to normal life? piece appeared October 11 in the New York Times under the headline, ?Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety.? Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her students by assuring them that ?security has returned to Baghdad, city of peace?. Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam Dagher hedged the ?return to normal? theme. Here was his first paragraph in full: ?On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama looked uneasy standing in formation under an already stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates listened to a teacher?s pep talk - probably a necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn playground.? This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school, amplified in the body of Dagher?s article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated) decline in violence in? FULL ARTICLE at Asia Times Category: General | Comment (RSS) 9 Comments Timothy R. Anderson: I go immediately to the news-article I spotted on page 6 -A of the USA Today newspaper, Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005 . In it, the author, Dave Moniz, describes how the Bush Administration asked Congress for eighty-two billion dollars. ? WASHINGTON - The White House asked Congress for $ 82 billion in special spending Monday, almost $ 75 billion of which would go to the Pentagon to help pay for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fix broken equipment, and increase the size of the U.S. Army in 2005. ? ? Also included is nearly $ 1 billion for tsunami aid, $ 658 million for a new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to U.S. allies in the war on terrorism. ? ? But the overwhelming majority of the money would go to the Pentagon. It comes as a ?supplemental ? request to the normal Pentagon budget for 2005, which was approved by Congress last year. ? The reason that this is still significant, in my opinion, is that the USA?s government continues to award money to the Pentagon, here it is October 2008; thousands of Iraqis have been killed, bombed, made into homeless persons, etc. etc. etc. That?s not a good way to spend billions of dollars ! Going into a foreign country, knocking their government?s leadership out of power ( justified by that government?s ? evil ? -ness or not ! ) , claiming that it was done to bring freedom to people who are capable of running the show themselves???. that is a horrible, horrible, horrible misuse of money. An incredible arrogant horrible misuse of money. Because it does not achieve good things for the Iraqi people. Because it doesn ?t achieve good things for the American military. Because it does NOT achieve good things for the civilians of the United States Of America. Timothy R. Anderson 27 October 2008, 1:11 pm John Owens: I wrote to you a few months back, but I haven?t heard anything back, one thing I forgot to mention in my last email was in I think June 2006 I was in FKTC Kuwaiti office talking to who was then the HR Director Cris, I can?t remember his last name but he was a British man, he told me there were 2500 FKTC employees working on US Gov. projects in Iraq, I was an employee of FKTC at that time, I only met two other Americans working for FKTC at that time, Doug Harger and Mike Ford. We spent billions of dollars rebuilding Iraq, yet we weren?t allowed to work there, I?m sure there were a lot of Americans who wanted to go there and work, I mean, it was US dollars why not let US citizens have the chance earn some those tax dollars back. When I was in Iraq nothing worked right, Electric, water, the roads were all messed up, whenever it rained all the sewers in the city backed up and often contaminated the water used for drinking and bathing. I keep telling everyone there was a reason Very Few Americans were allowed to work there, it was obvious on the US Embassy, OBO didn?t want Americans knowing what was going on there, but elsewhere in Iraq if we had skilled American workers doing the job and earning some of those tax dollars back, the rebuilding efforts wouldn?t have cost so much and gotten so screwed up. Below is what I wrote to you last time, but I?m not sure you got it. I was on that site and spent a total of 16 months in Iraq. I gave testimony before congress and have cooperated with the media in an effort to let not only Americans, but the world know what?s going on there. I?m John Owens, the guy that worked on the US Embassy in Baghdad for 71/2 months from Nov.05 to July 06. When I spoke to congress on C-Span about the problems with the contractor FKTC and OBO about labor abuse and trafficking, it was a small portion of the problems I saw there. Mary French was the most incompetent project manager I ever saw and should be brought up on criminal charges for a wide variety of reasons. How could a project director run a job site of that magnitude without any kind of safety program. I was on site everyday and I never saw one safety meeting. I think every labor law on the books was broken on that site, not to mention human and civil rights violations. Again, another reason they didn?t want Americans on that job. The fact that she was not qualified to manage the project was the reason she got the job. She let FKTC do anything they wanted to do, and get away with shoddy and substandard workmanship as well as endangering peoples lives. This was partly because she didn?t know any better and also because Jim Golden and Ret. General Williams of Overseas Building Operations told her to. I was amazed when I got there and saw OBO (US Government) only had a handful of people overseeing the job, and none of them had ever been on a embassy construction site before. Not including a few security people, there were only four people who were supposed to be supervising FKTC. The mechanical superintendent was from the Navy, he worked on ships boilers and had never been on an Embassy project before. There was a guy from another company ?not OBO? who looked after electrical part time, then there was Juvencio Lopez who was there to supervise the staff housing buildings and didn?t seem to have a clue about embassy construction. I think it was around April or May 06 when OBO ( Golden & Williams) brought in around twenty Malaysian or Indonesian engineers and secretaries (none had a security clearance), Golden?s wife was Indonesian and I?m told that?s how they got the job. I heard the logistics manager Jim Schofield also had a Indonesian wife. Schofield wasn?t allowed on site much because Mary French didn?t like him and FKTC hated him, FKTC did not want any Americans on the job, that?s why I was the only one on site who worked for FKTC. I guess they thought they could control me, and I?d keep quiet the same way they controlled Mary. So, we had inexperienced primary contractor whose management staff was made up of about 95% Lebanese and twenty or so Indonesian staff for the State Dept. responsible for building the largest and most fortified US Embassy in the world. I would say the only time most of these people had ever even been in a US Embassy was to get turned down for a visa to the states, they certainly didn?t have a clue how to build one. I could write a book on this, I mean, who would think you find could Anti-Americanism on a US Embassy Construction Project. I have a lot of information about that job if the American public found out about, well, they would probably really get angry, think about all the skilled American tradesmen in the states who would have gone over there and built an Embassy that wouldn?t be condemned before it?s occupied, too bad Americans weren?t allowed to work there, they just send tax dollars for foreigners who don?t seem to like Americans, only American dollars. Let me know if you need any info. I have copies of my DOD card, LOA, and contract John Owens MODERATOR: Sorry we missed this first time out. I wouldn?t call it ?anti? American to take issue with powers and principalities that wrap themselves in flags. I am in th house with two other Americans right now (spouse and daughter), preparing to go to work with two other Americans, and to work with twenty volunteer Americans, in a town full of Americans, situated near the east coast of the United States. I?ll be driving and walking among Americans, and may greet an American as I buy tonight?s supper-fixins. I am not against them; though I share your outrage. On the other hand, I won?t valorize them above all others because they are American. That said, we a[[reciate this snapshot from the inside; and I for one am unsurprised, except by your willingness to witness. Thanks. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From noreply at coha.org Mon Nov 3 13:41:29 2008 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 15:41:29 -0500 Subject: [A-List] COHA STATEMENT: Message to the Media on Obama and McCain Message-ID: <20081103204113.EDA1B3E420E@mx-out2.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 5881 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081103/446f4594/attachment.txt From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Mon Nov 3 19:44:01 2008 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:44:01 +1100 Subject: [A-List] What's new at Links: Bolivia; climate; Obama; Cuban Five; Marx; Africa; Dennis Brutus poems; Venezuela; Malaysia; Tamils Message-ID: <490FB6F1.7000609@greenleft.org.au> Subscribe free to /Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ - at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 Visit and bookmark http://links.org.au and add it to your RSS feed (http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to consider an article, please send it to links at dsp.org.au Please pass on to anybody you think will be interested in Links. * * * Bolivia: Unprecedented alliance defeats right-wing assault (now with audio) Now with audio: Federico Fuentes' assessment after just returning from Bolivia. Morales seems to have outmanouevred the ultra-right's attempts to unseat him and to have made his position stronger, while his enemies are in disarray. He is so confident of his support in the popular social movements now that he is holding another referendum next month. * Read more Will Obama end Bush's `war on terror'? By Simon Butler October 31, 2008 -- In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, US President George Bush declared an open-ended, apparently indefinite "war on terror". Using the terrorist attacks as an excuse, the "war on terror" has meant a war drive to extend US global domination. The threats were free flowing -- at one point as many as seven nations were part of the "axis of evil" and therefore potential military targets as Bush threatened "pre-emptive strikes" against US "enemies".Facing sustained resistance from the Iraqi people, and increasingly unpopular at home, the failure of the Iraqi occupation has contributed to making the Bush presidency one of the least popular in history. Campaigning for the White House, Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama has made much of his initial vote against the war in 2003. * Read more Overwhelming UN General Assembly vote against US blockade of Cuba New York -- The UN General Assembly on October 29 approved by an overwhelming majority the resolution demanding an end of the US blockade of Cuba, a vote passed by the assembly for the 17th consecutive year, news agencies report. * Read more David Harvey: Reading Karl Marx's Capital David Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital, Volume I for nearly 40 years, and his video lectures are now available at Links. * Read more Meanwhile, in Africa ... a tale of two `bailouts' By Jean-Paul Pi?rot While Africa needs US$72 billion a year in aid, hundreds of billions are being freed up to pay Western banks for the consequences of speculation. * Read more Sister of Cuban hero jailed in US demands `Free the Cuban Five!' Maria Eugenia is the sister of Tony Guerrero, one of the ``Cuban Five'' political prisoners held for 10 years in US prisons on ``conspiracy to commit espionage'' charges for reporting on the Miami-based, Washington-backed terrorist groups operating against Cuba. Eugenia recently toured Australia to build support for the campaign to free the five. Below is the three-part video of her Sydney public meeting. * Read more Two poems by Dennis Brutus in Caracas Below are two poems presented by veteran anti-apartheid and global social justice activist Dennis Brutus, in Venezuela for the eighth meeting of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defence of Humanity and the World Forum for Alternatives, October 18, 2008. * Read more Venezuela: Between assassination plots and abstention By Federico Fuentes, Caracas October 25, 2008 -- Talk of assassination plots and rising concerns about a high abstention rate have marked the beginning of the November 23 regional elections race here in Venezuela. Formally at stake are 23 governorships, more than 300 mayorships and hundreds of representatives on the state legislative councils. However, the result of these elections could also have an important impact on the future of the Bolivarian Revolution led by the Chavez government. During the November 2004 regional elections, the pro-Chavez forces, on the back of the thumping victory in the August 2004 recall referendum on Chavez's mandate, painted the electoral map red as they swept into 21 of the 23 governorships up for election (they later rewon the governership of Amazonas to make it 22 out of 24 all up). * Read more Malaysian opposition stands up to racialism and intimidation By Peter Boyle October 25, 2008 -- Some parties in Malaysia's ruling National Front (BN) government are trying to intimidate opposition parties and social activists, Socialist Party Malaysia (PSM) secretary general S.Arutchelvan told Green Left Weekly, a few days after the PSM's sole federal MP, Dr D. Jeyakumar, had his car torched by thugs on October 17. * Read more New African resistance from below to global finance By Patrick Bond October 25, 2008 -- A far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North's problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the 1981 World Bank Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the early 1980s) and even more deeply, in 35 years of world capitalist stagnation/volatility. Africa has always suffered a disproportionate share of pressure from the world economy, especially in the sphere of debt and financial outflows. But for those African countries which made themselves excessively vulnerable to global financial flows during the neoliberal era, the meltdown had a severe, adverse impact. * Read more Stop the war in Sri Lanka! The Tamil national question in demands a political solution! Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation central committee statement on developments in Sri Lanka. October 27, 2008 -- The Sri Lankan government's ongoing military campaign to corner and crush the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has led to a terrible humanitarian crisis in the country. Reports emanating from the island indicate that the Sri Lankan state is on the verge of wresting military control over large parts of LTTE territory including the administrative headquarters in Killinochi. While the number of people killed so far in the crossfire between the advancing Sri Lankan armed forces is anybody's guess, some 500,000 people are estimated to have been displaced and rendered homeless in their own land. With the Sri Lankan government not allowing any relief to reach the people in refugee camps, international humanitarian organisations have been forced to leave the battle zones and recently even UN food convoys have had to return, leaving a vast population in the battle zones on the brink of starvation. * Read more * * * Links seeks to promote the international exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists coming from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies. It aims to promote the renewal of the socialist movement in the wake of the collapse of the bureaucratic model of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. * ATTENTION: Sign up for regular ``what's new'' announcement emails at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 13127 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081104/1ee37116/attachment.txt From wquimby at embarqmail.com Tue Nov 4 21:09:24 2008 From: wquimby at embarqmail.com (Bill Quimby) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:09:24 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Great Marxist debate again: Meszaros on the crisis In-Reply-To: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> References: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49111C74.7080808@embarqmail.com> Nestor - that is a great site, by the way (the herramienta.com from which you forwarded the article). My Spanish is "nada" but I can struggle through a political text somewhat. However I am unable to see at this point what the political tendency of the site is ... any ideas? - Bill N?stor Gorojovsky wrote: > [Hope this did not get into the list before, have not been following > my mail seriously these weeks. If it has, sorry. If it hasn??t, please > pay attention to it. It is worth reading, every bit of it] > > Source: http://www.herramienta.com.ar/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=629 > > The unfolding crisis and the relevance of Marx > > Autor: Istv??n M??sz??ros* > > > Some of you may have been present at our meeting in May this year in > this building, when I recalled what I said to Lucien Goldman in Paris > a few months before the French historic may 1968. In contrast to the > then prevailing perspective of "organized capitalism", which was > supposed to have successfully left behind the stage of "crisis > capitalism" ???a view prominently asserted by Marcuse and shared also by > my dear friend Lucien Goldmann- I insisted that, compared to the > crisis we are actually heading for, "the Great World Economic Crisis > of 1929-1933" would look like "the Vicar's tea party". > > > In the last few weeks you had a foretaste of what I had in mind. But > no more than a foretaste, because the structural crisis of the capital > system as a whole, which we are experiencing in our time on an epochal > scale, is bound to get considerably worse. It will become in due > course much deeper, in the sense of invading not only the world of > more or less parasitic global finance but every single domain of our > social, economic and cultural life. > > > The obvious question we must now address concerns the nature of the > globally unfolding crisis and the conditions required for its feasible > resolution. > > > If you try to remember what you heard in the last two weeks endlessly > repeated about the current crisis, one word stands out, overshadowing > all of the other claimed diagnoses and corresponding remedies. That > word is confidence. If we could get a ten pound note for every > occasion when that magic word has been offered for public consumption > in the last two weeks all over the world, not to mention its continued > reassertion ever since, we would be all millionaires. Our only problem > would then be what to do with our suddenly acquired millions. For none > of our banks, not even our recently nationalized banks - nationalized > to the tune of no less than two thirds of their capital assets - could > supply the legendary "confidence" required for safe deposit or > investment. > > > Even our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, presented us in this respect > last week with the memorable phrase: "Confidence is the most precious > thing." I know the song -and probably most of us do- which tells us > that: "Love is the most precious thing". But confidence in capitalist > banking being the most precious thing?! That suggestion is utterly > perverse! > > Nevertheless, the advocacy of this magic remedy now seems to be > universal. It is repeated with such conviction as if "confidence" > could simply rain out of the sky or grow in great abundance on > capitalistically well manured financial trees. > > Three days ago (on the 18th of October) the BBC's flagship Sunday > morning interview programme -the Andrew Marr programme- wheeled out a > very distinguished elderly gentleman, Sir Brian Pitman, who was > introduced as the former Head of Lloyd's banking business. They did > not say when he headed that organization, but the way he spoke made it > amply clear soon enough. For it transpired through his respectfully > received answers that he might have been the Head of Lloyd's Bank well > before the World Economic Crisis of 1929-33. Accordingly, to encourage > the viewers, he introduced a great conceptual innovation into the > confidence discourse by saying that our troubles were all due to some > Over-confidence. And he immediately also demonstrated the meaning of > "Over-confidence" by saying, more than once in a short interview, that > there can be no serious problem today, because the market always took > care of everything, even if sometimes it went unexpectedly far down. > Later it always went up again. So it will do so also this time, and it > will unfailingly go up again and again also in the future. The present > crisis should not be exaggerated, he said, because it is much less > serious today than what we experienced way back in 1974. For in 1974 > we had a 3 days working week in Britain [even if nowhere else], and > now we do not have it. Do we? And who could argue with that > irrefutable fact? > > Thus, we now have the magic explanatory word of all our troubles not > standing like an unhappy orphan, alone, but as part of something like > a Fukuyamized pseudo-Hegelian triad: confidence / lack of confidence / > over-confidence. The only constituent missing from this magic > explanatory discourse is now the real foundation of our perilous > banking and insurance system which operates on the ground of > self-serving confidence tricks that sooner or later are bound to be > (and from time to time actually have been) found out. > > In any case, all this talk about the absolute virtues of confidence in > capitalist economic management is much like the explanation offered in > Indian Mythology about the supporting ground of the universe. For in > that ancient vision of the world it is said that the universe is > carried, most reassuringly, on the back of the elephant. And the > self-evid??ently powerful elephant? you might well ask. No one should > think of that as a difficulty. For the elephant is, even more > reassuringly, supported on the back of the cosmic tortoise. But what > about the cosmic tortoise itself? Don't you presume to ask such > question, lest you might be fed to the tigers of Bengal, before they > are extinguished. > > Luckily, perhaps (?), The Economist is a little bit more realistic in > its assessment of the situation. > > In the context of our painful subject, the now acknowledged worsening > economic crisis, I am going to give you exact quotations, including > some damning figures of no longer deniable capitalist failures, taken > mainly from such well established and unashameadly class conscious > bourgeois newspapers as The Economist and The Sunday Times. Quoting > them meticulously word by word not only because they are prominent in > their field but also in order to avoid that they should accuse us of > "left-wing bias and distortion". > > Marx used to say that on the pages of The Economist the ruling class > is "talking to itself". Things have somewhat changed since those days. > For now even in the specialized field of "economic expertise" the > ruling class needs a mass circulation propaganda organ, for the > purpose of general mystification. In Marx's lifetime the ruling class > had plenty of "confidence", and also a great deal of unchallenged > "over-confidence", for needing that. Thus, under the present less > cocky circumstances, the London based mass distribution weekly paper, > The Economist, - the self-righteous mouthpiece of the U.S. dominated > annual "Davos Jamboree" - is well advised to concede that the crisis > we are facing today is concerned with the difficulties of "Saving the > system", according to the full title page of its October 11, 2008 > issue. > > We can grant, of course, that nothing less than "saving the system" > (or not) is what happens to be at stake in our time, even if The > Economist's discussion of this problem is rather strange and > contradictory. For in its usual way of trying to present its highly > partisan position as an objectively "balanced view", by using the > formula of "on the one hand and on the other hand", The Economist > always succeeds in reaching its desired conclusion in favour of the > established order. Thus, also on this occasion, The Economist asserts > in its pricipal leader article of the 11th of October that "This week > saw the first glimmer of a comprehensive global answer to the > confidence gap." Now, thankfully, the "confidence gap", although > reprehensible in itself, is expected to be remedied thanks to a > somewhat mysterious "comprehensive global answer". > > At the same time, on the more realistic side, the London weekly also > acknowledges in the same Editorial article that > > "The damage to the real economy is becoming apparent. In America > consumer credit is now shrinking, and around 150,000 Americans lost > their jobs in September, the most since 2003. Some industries are > hurting badly: car sales are at their lowest level for 16 years as > would-be buyers are unable to get credit. General Motors has > temporarily shut some of its factories in Europe. Across the globe > forward-looking indicators, such as surveys of purchasing managers, > are horribly gloomy." > > They do not say, though, that "the confidence gap" may have something > to do with such facts. > > Of course, the apology of the system must prevail in every article, > even if it must be presented as the unquestionable word of pragmatic > wisdom. In this sense, "saving the system" for The Economist amounts > to the journal's totally uncritical identification with, and the > uncontestable advocacy of, unlimited economic rescue-opera??tion - to > be accomplished by no means out of the customarily most dogmatically > glorified "market resources" - in favour of the troubled capitalist > system. Thus, even the most cherished and well tried propaganda tenets > (of a not only non-existent but never in reality existed free market) > can be now thrown overboard for the noble cause of "Saving the > system". Accordingly, we are told by The Economist that > > "The world economy is plainly in a poor shape, but it could get a lot > worse. This is the time to put dogma and politics to one side and > concentrate on pragmatic answers. That means more government > intervention and co-operation in the short term than taxpayers, > politicians or indeed free-market newspapers would normally like",[1] > > We have been treated to similar sermons by President George W. Bush > before. He told his television audience two weeks ago that normally > and instinctively he is the believer in, and the passionate supporter > of, the free market, but under the present exceptional circumstances > he must think of other ways. He must begin to think under these > difficult circumstances, full stop. You cannot say that you have not > been warned. > > The sums involved in the recommended "pragmatic" solution, which > advocates sweeping aside the "normal likings" of the "taxpayers and > free market newspapers" (that is, the now advocated solution which > means, in truth, the necessary submission of the great masses of the > people to increasing tax-burdens sooner or later) are literally > astronomical. To quote The Economist again: "in little more than three > weeks America's government, all told, expanded its gross liabilities > by more than $1 trillion - almost twice as much as the cost so far of > the Iraq war."[2] "American and European banks will shed some $10 > trillions of dollars."[3] "But history teaches an important lesson: > that big banking crises are ultimately solved by throwing in large > dollops of public money".[4] > > Tens of trillions of dollars of public money "thrown in", and > justified in the name of the claimed "important lesson of history", > and of course in the service of the unchallengeable good cause of > saving the system, that is certainly quite a dollop. No High Street > icecream wendor could ever even dream about such dollops. And if we > add to that magnitude the fact quoted on the same page of the London > paper, that in the course of last year alone "The Economist's food > price index jumped by nearly 55%",[5] and "The food-price spike in > late 2007 and early 2008 caused riots in some 30 countries",[6] in > that case the dollop in question becomes even more revealing about the > nature of the system which now finds itself in ever deepening crisis. > > Can you think of a greater indictment for a pretendedly unsurpassable > system of econproduction and societal reproduction than the one which > - at the height of its productive power - is producing a global food > crisis, and the suffering of countless millions inseparable from it > all over the world? That is the nature of the system which is expected > to be saved now at all cost, including the currently "dished out" > astronomical economic cost. > > HOW can one make some tangible sense at all of the wasted trillions? > Since we are talking about astronomical magnitudes, I addressed this > question to a close friend who is Professor of Astrophysics at London > Univesity. His answer was that I should point out that one trillion > alone is roughly one hundred times the age of our universe. Now, on > the scale of the same magnitude the regularly understated official > figure of the American debt, on its own, amounts in our days to more > than 10 trillion. That is, one thousand times the age of our universe. > > But let me quote you a short passage from a Japanese publication. It > reads like this: > > "How much speculative money is moving around the world? According to a > Mitsubishi UFJ Securities analysis, the size of the global 'real > economy', in which goods and services are produced and traded, is > estimated at $48.1 trillion... On the other hand, the size of the > global 'financial economy', the total amount of stocks, securities and > deposits, adds up to $151.8 trillion. The financial economy thus has > swollen to more than three times the size of the real economy, growing > especially rapidly during the past two decades. The gap is as large as > $100 trillion. An analyst involved in this estimation said that about > half the amount, $50 trillion is scarcely necessary for the real > economy. Fifty trillion dollars are worth well over 5,000 trillion > yen, too big a number for me to actually comprehend."[7] > > It is indeed very difficult even to comprehend, not to mention to > justify, as our capital-apologetic politicians and bankers do, the > astronomical sums of parasitic speculation accumulated to the > magnitude corresponding to 500,000 times the age of our universe. If > you wish to have another measure about the magnitude involved, just > imagine an unlucky accountant from Roman times, who is asked nothing > more than simply to chalk up on his blackboard the figure of 5,000 > trillion yen, in Roman numbers. He would be in total despair. He > simply could not do it. And even if he had at his disposal Arab > numbers, which he could not have had, even in that case he would need > as many as 17 zeros after the number 5 in order to write down the > cifre in question. > > The trouble is, though, that our well heeled politicians and bankers > seem to think only of the zeros, and not of their substantive > linkages, when they present these problems for public consumption. And > that approach cannot possibly work indefinitely. For one needs much > more than zeros for getting out of the bottomless hole of the global > indebtedness to which we are condemned by the system which they now > want to save at all cost. > > AS a matter of fact, Gordon Brown's newfound popularity has a great > deal to do with zeros in more ways than one. His astonishing new > popularity - which, on second thought, might well turn out to be > rather ephemeral - was illustrated last week by the front-page > newspaper headline: "From Zero to Hero". The article in question > suggested that our Prime Minister actually succeeded in "saving the > system". That is how he earned the high acclaim. > > The reason why he was hailed in that way, as a hero, was because he > invented a new variety of nationalizing capitalist bankruptcy, to be > adopted with untroubled "free market conscience" by other contries as > well. That made even George W. Bush feel less guilty about acting > against his own proclaimed "passionate instinct" when he nationalized > a huge "dollop" of U.S. capitalist bankruptcy of which one single item > - the liabilities of the giant mortgage companies of Fannie Mae and > Freddie Mac - amounted to 5.4 trillion dollars (that is to say, the > sum required for 54 years of running the Iraq war). > > The "pragmatic novelty" - as opposed to "dogma and politics" in the > words of The Economist - of the recent nationalization of capitalist > bankruptcy by "New Labour" is that the taxpayers get absolutely > nothing (in other words, zero-zero-zero as many times as you like to > write it down, even seventeen times) for the immense sums of money > invested in failed capitalist assets, including our two thirds > nationalized British banks. This kind of nationalization of capitalist > bankruptcy is somewhat different from the earlier versions, instituted > after the Second World War when the Labour Party's "Clause 4" - > advocating the public control of the means of production - was still > part of its Constitution. For in 1945 the nationalized bankrupt > sectors of the capitalist economy were transferred to state control, > for the duration of being generously fattened up again from general > taxation for the purpose of proper "privatization" in due course. > > Even Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath's 1971 nationalization > of the bankrupt Rolls Royce Company followed the same embarrassing > pattern of state controlled and openly admitted nationalization. In > our own days, however, the beauty of Gordon Brown's solution is that > it removes the embarrassment while multiplying manifold the wasted > billions invested in capitalist bankruptcy. Surely that fully deserves > his promotion "From Zero to Hero" as well as the highest accolade of > "Saviour of the World" conferred upon him by some other newspapers, on > account of his great modesty of being satisfied with absolute zero in > exchange for our - not his - generously dispensed billions. But can > this kind of governmental remedy be considered a lasting solution to > our problems even on a short-term basis, not to mention its required > long-term sustainability? Only the fool could believe that. > > In truth, the recent measures adopted by our political and financial > authorities only attended to one single aspect of the current crisis: > the liquidity of the banks, mortgage, and insurance companies. And > even that only to a very limited extent. In reality the huge "dollops > thrown in" represent no more than paying the deposit only, so to > speak. Much more will be required also in that respect in the future, > as even the still unfolding disturbances on the world's > stock-exchanges continue to underline it. > > However. well beyond the problem of liquidity, another dimension of > just the financial crisis concerns the near catastrophic insolvency of > banks and insurance companies. This fact becomes clear once their > speculatively and irresponsibly assumed, but none the less existing, > liabilities are actually taken into account. To give you just one > example: two of our big banks in Britain have liabilities amounting to > $2.4 trillion each, acquired on the adventurist assumption that they > will never have to be met. Can the capitalist state successfully bail > them out of that size of liability? Where could the state possibly > borrow the money of such magnitude for the rescue-operation required > for the purpose? And what would be the necessary inflationary > consequences of "dishing out such dollops" of truly gigantic > rescue-operation by simply printing the money called for in the > absence of other solutions? > > Moreover, the problems are by no means exhausted by the perilous state > of the financial sector. For even more intractably, also the > productive sectors of capitalist industry are in serious trouble, no > matter how highly developed and favoured they might appear to be by > their competitively advantageous position in the global pecking order > of transnational capital. Due to our limited time, I must confine > myself again to one, but one very significant, example. It concerns > the United States' motor car industry, greatly humbled in the last few > years, despite all of the subsidies received from the most powerful > capitalist state in the past, counted in many billions of U.S. > dollars. > > Let me quote from an article published on Ford Corporation and its > globalizing fantasies way back in 1994, published in The Sunday Times. > This is how our distinguished financial journalists painted in those > days their rosy picture: > > "Full globalization is being attempted by multinationals ... 'This is > definitely Trotman's baby', said one American source. 'He has a vision > of the future which says that, to be a global winner, Ford must be a > truly global corporation.' According to Trotman, who told The Sunday > Times in October 1993, 'As automotive competition becomes more global > as we get into the next century, the pressure to find scale economies > will become greater and greater. If, instead of making two engines of > 500,000 units each, you can make 1 million units, then the costs are > much lower. Ultimately there will be a handful of global players and > the rest will either not be there or they will be struggling along.' > Trotman and his colleagues concluded that full globalization is the > way to beat competitors such as the Japanese and, in Europe, Ford's > arch-rival General Motors, which retains a cost-advantage over Ford. > Ford also believes it needs globalization to capitalise on > fast-emerging markets in the Far East and in Latin America."[8] > > Thus, the "only" thing Alex Trotman - the British born Chairman of > Ford Corporation at the time - forgot to consider, despite his > impeccable arithmetical skills of knowing the difference between > 500,000 and 1 million, was this: what happens when they cannot sell > the 1 million (and many times more) motor cars, despite the company's > strategically envisaged and enjoyed cost-advantage. In the case of > Ford Corporation, even the massive differential rate of exploitation > which the company could impose worldwide as a huge transnational > company - that is: paying for exactly the same work 25 times less to > the workers of "Ford Philippines Corporation", for instance, than to > their workforce in the United States of America - even this > unquestionable advantage could not be considered sufficient for > securing a way out of this fundamental contradition. > > This is where we stand today, not only in the case of the badly > humbled Ford Corporation but also in that of General Motors, > irrespective of its cost-advantage once deeply envied even by the Ford > Corporation of the United States. > > Talking about a recently instituted deal which provides major > subsidies by the American state to the country's giant motor car > companies, this is how the unhappy current situation of the U.S. > automotive industry is described in one of the last issues of The > Economist: "the deal [in question] means that car companies - blessed > with the government guarantee - should get loans with an interest rate > of around 5% rather than 15% they would face on the open market in > today's conditions."[9] > > However, no amount of subsidy of any kind can be considered > satisfactory enough, because the "Big Three" companies - General > Motors, Ford, and Chryslers - are on the brink of bankruptcy, despite > the fact that Trotsman's dream baby is by now a fully grown teenager. > Thus The Economist must admit that > > "Once industrial subsidies like this begin to flow, it is difficult to > stop them. A recent study by the Cato Institute, a rightwing > think-tank, found that the federal government spent some $92 billion > subsidising business in 2006 alone. Only $21 billion of that went to > farmers: much of the rest went to firms such as Boeing, IBM and > General Electric in the form of export-credit support and various > research subsidies. > > The Big Three are already complaining that it will take too long to > dish out the [state] money, and they want the process speeded up. They > also want a further 25 billion, possibly attached to the second > version of the Wall Street rescue bill. The logic of bailing out Wall > Street is that finance underpins everything. Detroit cannot begin to > make that claim. But, given its successful lobbying, can it be long > before ailing airlines and failing retailers join the queue?"[10] > > The immense speculative expansion of financial adventurism, especially > in the last three or four decades, is of course inseparable from the > deepening crisis of the productive branches of industry and the > ensuing troubles arising from the utterly sluggish capital > accumulation (and indeed failed accumulation) in that productive field > of economic activity. Now, inevitably, also in the domain of > industrial production the crisis is getting much worse. > > Naturally, the necessary consequence of the ever deepening crisis in > the productive branches of the "real economy", as they are now > beginning to call it and contrast the productive economy with > speculative financial adventurism, is the growth of unemployment > everywhere on a frightening scale, and the human misery associated > with it. To expect a happy solution to these problems from the > capitalist state's rescue-opera??tions would be a great illusion. > > This is the context where our politicians should really begin to pay > attention to the claimed "important lesson of history", instead of > "dishing out large dollops of public money" under the pretence of "the > lesson of history". For as a result of historical development under > the rule of capital in its structural crisis, in our own time we have > reached the point where we must be subjected to the destructive impact > of an ever worsening symbiosis between the state legislative framework > of our society and the material productive as well as the financial > dimension of the established societal reproductive order. > > Understandably, that symbiotic relationship can be, and frequently it > also happens to be, managed with utterly corrupt practices by the > privileged personifications of capital, in business as much as in > politics. For, no matter how corrupt such practices might be, they are > fully in tune with the institutionalized counter-values of the > established order. And - within the framework of the symbiosis > prevailing between the economic field and the dominant political > practices - they are legally quite permissible, thanks to the most > dubious and often even clearly anti-democratic facilitating role of > the impenetrable legislative jungle provided in this respect by the > state also in the financial domain. > > Fraud??ulence, in a great variety of its practicable forms, is the > nor??mality of capital. Its extremely destructive manifestations are by > no means confined to the operation of the military-industrial complex. > By now the direct role of the capitalist state in the parasitic world > of finance is not only fundamentally important, in view of its > all-pervasive magnitude, as we had to find out with shocking clarity > during the last few weeks, but also potentially ca??tastrophic. > > The embarrassing fact of the matter is that the giant U.S. mortgage > companies, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were corruptly supported > and generously supplied with highly profitable but totally undeserved > guarantees by the American State's legislative jungle in the first > place, as well as through the personal services of unpunished > political corruption. Indeed, the capitalist state's ever more dense > legislative jungle happens to be the "democratic" legitimator of > institutionalized fraudulence in our societies. The editors and > journalists of The Economist are in fact perfectly well acquainted > with the corrupt practices whereby, in the case of the giant American > mortgage companies, receiving from their state outrageously > preferential treatment [here I quote The Economist] > > "allowed Fannie and Freddie to operate with tiny amounts of capital. > The two groups had core capital (as defined by their regulator) of > $83.2 billion at the end of 2007; this supported $5.2 trillion of debt > and guarantees, a gearing ratio of 65 to one. [ !!! ] According to > CreditSights, a research group, Fannie and Freddie were counterparties > in $2.3 trillion-worth of derivative transactions, related to their > hedging activities. There is no way a private bank would be allowed to > have such a highly geared balance sheet,[11] nor would it qualify for > the highest AAA credit rating. ??? They used their cheap financing to > buy higher-yielding assets.[12] > > [Moreover,] With so much at stake, no wonder the companies built a > formidable lobbying machine. Ex-politicians were given jobs. Critics > could expect a rough ride. The companies were not afraid to bite the > hands that fed them."[13] > > Not being afraid "to bite the hands that fed them" refers, of course, > to the American state legislative body. But why should they be afraid? > For such giant companies constitute a total symbiosis with the > capitalist state. This is a relationship corruptly asserting itself > also in terms of the personnel involved, through the act of hiring > politicians who could serve them preferentially, with a mind-boggling > "gearing ratio of 65 to one" and the associated AAA credit rating, > even according to the reluctant confession of The Economist. > > The gravity of the present situation is underlined in a characteristic > way by the circumstance, reported in these words by The Economist: > "traders in the credit-default swaps market have recently made bets on > the unthinkable: that America may default on its debt."[14] Naturally, > such traders react even to events of such character and gravity that > we experience today the only possible way they can: by squeezing > profit out of it. > > The big trouble for the global capital system is, though, that the > default of Am??erica is not unthinkable at all. On the contrary, it is > - and it has been for a very long time - a coming certainty. This is > why I wrote many years ago (in 1995, to be precise) that: > > "In a world of financial insecurity nothing suits better the practice > of gambling with astronomical and criminally unsecured sums on the > world's stock exchan??ges - foreshadowing an earthquake of magnitude 9 > or 10 on the Financial 'Richter Scale' - than to call the enterprises > which engage in such gambling 'Securities Management'; ??? When exactly > and in what form - of which there can be several, more or less brutal, > varieties - the U.S. will default on its astronomical debt, cannot be > seen at this point in time. There can be only two certainties in this > regard. The first is that the inevitability of the American default > will deeply affect everyone on this planet. And the second, that the > preponderant hegemonic power position of the U.S. will continue to be > asserted in every way, so as to make the rest of the world pay for the > American debt for as long as it is capable of doing."[15] > > Of course, the aggravating condition today is that the rest of the > world - even with the historically most ironical massive Chinese > contribution to the balance sheet of the American Treasury - is less > and less capable of filling the "black hole" produced on an ever > growing scale by America's insatiable appetite for debt financing, as > demonstrated by the global reverberations of the recent U.S. mortgage > and bank crisis. This circumstance brings the necessary default of > America, in one of its "more or less brutal varieties", that much > nearer. > > The truth of this disturbing matter is that there can be no way out of > these ultimately suicidal contradictions, which are inseparable from > the imperative of endless capital-expansion, irrespective of the > consequences - arbitrarily and mystifyingly confounded with growth as > such - without radically changing our mode of social metabolic > reproduction by adopting the much needed responsible and rational > practices of the only viable eco??nomy,[16] oriented by human need, > instead of alienating, dehumanizing and degrading profit. > > This is where the overwhelming impediment of capital's self-serving > interdeterminations must be confronted, no matter how difficult it > must be under the prevailing conditions. For the absolutely necessary > adoption and the appropriate future development of the only viable > economy is inconceivable without the radical transformation of the > established socioeconomic and political order itself. > > Gordon Brown recently voiced his displeasure about "unfettered > capi??talism", in the name of totally unspecified "regulation". You may > remember that Gorbachev, too, wanted a kind of regulated capitalism, > under the name of "market socialism", and you must also know what > happened to him and to his grotesque daydream. On the other hand, > British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath's expression, a very > long time ago, for the same sin of "unfettered capitalism" was "the > unacceptable face of capitalism". And yet, "unfettered capitalism", > despite its "unacceptable face", remained all these de??cades not only > "acceptable" but - in the course of its further development - it had > become much worse. For the causal foundation of our ever more serious > problems is not the "unacceptable face of unregulated capitalism" but > its dest??ructive substance. It is that over??powering substance that > must resist and nullify all efforts aimed at restrain??ing the capital > system even minimally - as, indeed, it actually succeeded in doing so > also in the form of metamorphosing socialdemocratic "Old Labour" in > Britain into neoliberal "New Labour". Accordingly, the periodically > renewed fantasy of regulating capitalism in a structurally significant > way can only amount to trying to tie knots on winds. > > But the last thing we need today is to continue to tie knots on winds, > when we have to face the gravity of capital's structural crisis, which > calls for the institution of radical systemic change. It is most > revealing about the incorrigible character of the capital system that > even at a time like this, when the immense magnitude of the unfolding > crisis cannot be denied any longer even by the system's most devoted > ex officio apologists - a crisis described a few days ago by no less a > figure than the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England as the greatest > economic crisis in all human history - nothing can be contemplated, > not to mention actually done, for changing the fundamental defects of > an ever more destructive societal reproductive order by those who > control the economic and political levers of our society. > > In contrast to the recent illumination by his own Deputy, the Governor > of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, had no reservations at all about > the soundness of the cherished capital system, nor did he have the > faintest anticipation of a coming crisis, when he praised to the sky > Martin Wolf's capital-apologetic book, with its self-com??placent > peremptorily assertive title: Why Globalization Works. He called that > book "a devastating intellectual critique of the opponents of > globalization" and a "civilized, wise and optimistic view of our > economic and political future".[17] Now, however, everybody is forced > to have at least some concern about the real nature and the necessary > destructive consequences of dogmatically hailed capitalist > globalization. > > Naturally, my own attitude to Wolf's book was very different from that > of Mervyn King and others who share the same vested interests. I > commented at the time of its publication that > > "the author, who is the Chief Economics Commentator of the London > Financial Times, forgets to ask the really important question: For > whom does it work?, if it does. It certainly works, for the time > being, and by no means that well, for the decision makers of > transnational capital, but not for the overwhelming majority of > humankind who must suffer the consequences. And no amount of > "jurisdictional integration" advocated by the author - that is, in > plain English, the tighter direct control of the deplored "too many > states" by a handful of imperialist powers, especially the biggest one > of them - is going to remedy the situation. Capitalist globalization > in reality does not work and cannot work. For it cannot overcome the > irreconcilable contradictions and antagonisms manifest through the > global structural crisis of the system. Capitalist globalization > itself is the contradictory manifestation of that crisis, trying to > overturn the cause/effect relationship in a vain attempt to cure some > negative effects by other wishfully projected effects, because it is > structurally incapable of addressing their causes."[18] > > In this sense, the recent attempts to counter the intensifying crisis > symptoms, by the cynically camouflaged nationalization of astronomic > magnitudes of capitalist bankruptcy, out of the yet to be invented > state resources, could only highlight the deep-seated antagonistic > causal determinations of the capital system's destructiveness. For > what is fundamentally at stake today is not simply a massive financial > crisis but humanity's potential self-dest??ruction at this juncture of > historical development, both militarily and through the ongoing > destruction of nature. > > Despite the concerted mani??pulation of interest rates and the recent > vacuous Summits of the dominant capitalist countries, nothing has been > lastingly achieved by "throwing in gigantic dollops of money" into the > bottomless hole of the "crunched" global financial market. The > "comprehensive global answer to the confidence gap", as wishfully > projected by The Economist and its masters, belongs to the world of > (not so pure) fantasy. For one of the greatest historic failures of > capital, as the long established mode of social metabolic control, is > the continued dominance of potentially most aggressive nation states, > and the impossibility of instituting the state of the capital system > as such on the basis of the structurally entrenched antagonisms of the > capital system. > > To imagine that within the framework of such antagonistic causal > determinations a harmonious permanent solution could be found to the > deepening structural crisis of a most iniquitous production and > exchange system - which is now actively engaged in producing even a > global food crisis, on top of all of its other crying contradictions, > including the ever more pervasive destruction of nature -, without > even attempting to remedy its grievous iniquities, is the worst kind > of wishful thinking, bordering on total irrationality. For, > self-contradictorily, it wants to retain the existing order despite > its necessarily explosive iniquities and antagonisms. And the > so-called "jurisdictional integration of the too many states" under a > self-appointed few, or one, as advocated by some capital-apologists, > can only suggest the - equally self-contradictory - permanence of > potentially suicidal global imperialist domination. > > This is why Marx is more relevant today than ever before. For only a > radical systemic change can offer the historically sustainable hope > and solution for the future. > > N O T A S > > * Lecture written for a meeting held in Conway Hall, London, on 21st > October 2008. Este art??culo fue enviado por el autor para su difusi??n > en Herramienta a fines de octubre de 2008. Una vez traducido, > subiremos a la p??gina tambi??n la versi??n en castellano. > > [1] All these quotations are taken from the same Editorial article of > The Economist, 11 October 2008, p. 13. > > [2] The Economist, 11 October 2008, special section, p. 3. > > [3] Ibid. > > [4] Ibid., p. 4. > > [5] Ibid. > > [6] Ibid., p. 6. > > [7] Shii Kazuo in Japan Press Weekly, Special Issue, October 2008, p. 20. > > [8] "Ford prepares for global revolution", by Andrew Lorenz and Jeff > Randall. The Sunday Times, 27 March 1994, Section 3, p. 1. > > [9] "A bail-out that passed. In the slipstream of Wall'street's woes, > the Big Three land a huge subsidy." The Economist, October 4th, 2008, > p. 82. > > [10] Ibid., p. 83. > > [11] Lehman Brothers, one of the principal private merchant banks, had > a gearing ratio of 30 to 1. That is bad enough! > > [12] "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: End of illusions", The Economist, > July 19-25, 2008, p. 84. > > [13] "A brief family history: Toxic fudge", The Economist, July 19-25, > 2008, p. 84. > > [14] "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: End of illusions", The Economist, > July 19-25, 2008, p. 85. > > [15] "The Present Crisis", quoted from Part IV. of Beyond Capital > (published in London in 1995), pp.962-3. (In Spanish in M??s all?? del > capital, Vadell Hermanos Editores, Caracas, 2001, pp. 1111-12.) > > [16] See in this respect: "Qualitative Growth in Utilization: The Only > Viable Eco??nomy", Section 9.5 of my book, The Challenge and Burden of > Historical Time, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008, pp. 272-93. > (Published in Herramienta, Numbers 36 and 37.) > > [17] Mervyn King's endorsement, on the back cover of Martin Wolf's > book, Why Globalization Works, Yale University Press, 2004. > > [18] In "Education - Beyond Capital", Opening Lecture delivered at the > F??rum Mundial de Educa????o, Porto Allegre, July 28, 2004. In Spanish > reprinted in La educaci??n m??s all?? del capital, Siglo Veintiuno > Editores / Clacso Coediciones, Rio de Janeiro, 2008. See also the > chapter: "Why Capitalist Globalization Cannot Work?" in my book, The > Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Monthly Review Press, New > York, 2008, pp. 380-398; Spanish edition: El desaf??o y la carga del > tiempo hist??rico, Vadell Hermanos Editores / Clacso Coedici??nes, > Caracas, 2008, pp. 371-389. > > > > > From wquimby at embarqmail.com Tue Nov 4 21:23:57 2008 From: wquimby at embarqmail.com (Bill Quimby) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:23:57 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Great Marxist debate again: Meszaros on the crisis In-Reply-To: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> References: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49111FDD.8060805@embarqmail.com> Nestor - this looks like a great site, by the way (the herramienta.com from which you forwarded the article). My Spanish is "nada" but I can struggle through a political text somewhat. However I am unable to see (at this early point) what the political tendency of herramienta is ... do you have any background info? - Bill N?stor Gorojovsky wrote: > [Hope this did not get into the list before, have not been following > my mail seriously these weeks. If it has, sorry. If it hasn??t, please > pay attention to it. It is worth reading, every bit of it] > > Source: http://www.herramienta.com.ar/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=629 > > The unfolding crisis and the relevance of Marx > > Autor: Istv??n M??sz??ros* From rainy at tellas.gr Tue Nov 4 09:27:12 2008 From: rainy at tellas.gr (Stathis Stassinos) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:27:12 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Nuclear Backed Currency (late dollar revaluation) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <491077E0.5060906@tellas.gr> Thank you Nestor, I never knew that Argentina was more advanced in nuclear research than brazil, mostly because Brazil is making much more noise (active Space program, new nuclear plants etc). I truly believe that any common currency in South America must be backed by ICBMs. It doesnt need to be Brazil's or Argentina's ICBM's in particular. Because as we said before, you cant do anything for a country defaulting on its debt, short of an invasion, and even that is impossible when nuclear weapons are involved. but thats pipedream, at least for now. > > > The only reason why Argentina does not own its A bombs is political. > We have anything that we need, but it would be politically stupid. > Brazilians are some decades behind Arg in the issue, and for the same > reasons won?t advance too much. > > Both countries, together, may reach a level of collaboration that > might turn the coalition in a powerful nuclear player (and ICBM, too: > with the proper political decission, Argentina can easily develop such > a vector program in a few years, while the Brazilian base at Alc?ntara > could become a binational -or best, Latin American- initial test > ground or even launching pad). > > Lack of unity, however, conspires against this. And this is why > Britain could, as they did, think about A-bombing C?rdoba in Argentina > during the battles of 1982: we were in no position to retaliate. > From rainy at tellas.gr Tue Nov 4 10:00:43 2008 From: rainy at tellas.gr (Stathis Stassinos) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:00:43 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49107FBB.5050804@tellas.gr> Todd, It was a pretty compelling image you gave about Japanese economy, and pretty much on the opposite side of the consensus, which I thought it was that minimal lending after 1990s was an effect of banks fearing to lend to corporations, in a kind of liquidity trap. But the image you painted fits more, as most Japanese multinationals are surviving if not thriving 15+ years from the 1990s. If we can assume more or less the same thing about their suppliers down the chain, then fear of default was exaggerated. Your reasoning begs the question. Do you believe that in mature economies with no great addiction to consumption, a near creditless situation is possible? A situation where banks are nearly useless? If that is so, in a stable economy, volatility will be minimal, inflation will be minimal, stock markets will have little capital gains etc. and last, why do you narrow it down to oil? Chinese reserves are bigger than Middle eastern ones, also helping create irrational bubbles. Liu has pointed many times how the sterilization process starves china from needed capital. stathis > ------------------------------ > > Message: 5 > Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:58:06 -0800 > From: Todd Boyle > Subject: Re: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade > To: The A-List > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Stathis, > In Japan in the early 1990s, neither individual households nor > companies *needed* any loan, or *wanted* any loan. What's the use of > a bank, in such circumstances? People and companies generally had > sufficient current net cash flow to carry on, as long as policymakers > kept the monopolies somewhat in equilibrium-- the perennial task of > the Japanese government. > > The Japanese economy was not so irrational that it had many companies > systemically in the red. Other than the finance and property > bubbles, the rest of the economy did not need bank loans to meet > current cash deficits. Japan's dominant corporations furthermore, > didn't need banks for long-term investments. They had plenty of > financial resources to finance needed plant and equipment. They had > more capital than the banks! This is generally true of today's > dominant transnationals as well. > > Of course, in those circumstances, who needs capital, or > capitalism? Capitalism is only relevant when there is excess > returns to capital-- it cannot exist in a steady state economy, > because supplies of everything have developed to match the > demands...... Accordingly, liquidity throughout the economy cannot > be increased by reducing interest rates. In Japan they had zero > interest rates (negative interest rates, after inflation) and still, > nobody wanted to borrow. The only thing needed is to prevent > liquidity from being drained, by vandals and pirates etc. > > It seems to me, today's situation is like 1971 or the late 1960s, > really, when US imports of oil were causing such huge balance of > payments deficits that the US needed to setup the "petrodollar > recycling" arrangements with the Saudis. I seem to note, a bit late, > that this scheme depended on growth in the US-- it was a scheme by > which prices in excess of costs were extracted from the US by > whoever had the oil wells-- a completely absurd situation -- and > then, all those $trillions were expected to be reinvested in the US > capital markets. Now, that's a recipe for disaster, because in a > reasonably mature economy, neither companies nor households need or > want that volume of capital investment. So, it went into collossal > bubbles, one after another. The whole scheme is really stupid and > needs to be reformed. It's mostly caused by the ridiculous runup in > oil prices. Since hydrocarbons have intrinsic economic value in > excess of cost, the excess gain should be taxed away, and > redistributed rationally to households and businesses. Certainly, > it should not flow to whoever controls the oil wells. And it > shouldn't flow to whoever happens to live nearby the oil wells either > (Be they Alaskan, Iraqi, Texan or anybody else.) > > TOdd > From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Tue Nov 4 10:42:17 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:42:17 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Wrecked Iraq In-Reply-To: <49101350.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <49101350.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <49108979.5060205@gmail.com> Charles Brown wrote: > http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/10/25/wrecked-iraq/#comment-281138 > > Wrecked Iraq > 25th October 2008, 08:22 pm by Stan > ?what was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society - economically, socially, and technologically - has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world. Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches, which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used until US forces withdraw from the country, provides a glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out of the abyss into which the US invasion pushed it. > AFAICT, the wrecking of the Iraqi economy was one of the primary foci of the war. Using Vietnam as example, for all intents and purposes Vietnam LOST the war 40+ years after the US evacuated, imho due to the carpet bombing of the Northern infrastructure, ports, factories etc, which in the not-so-long-run caused enough dependence on Western industrial 'prowess' (Before China became an industrial powerhouse) to slowly cause economic assimilation and require continued Western industrial/financial involvement in the country. In the early 90s when I was active on amateur radio, I managed to get a rather rare SWL listen in on Radio Vietnam in English (very bad signal not intended for the US, perhaps targeted at English speakers in Europe). They were literally begging for business for the port of Haiphong . Multiply that by innumerable instances, and you end up with Western industrial economic... if not hegemony, then major financial influence on the country's policies, domestic and foreign. The war on Iraq and the INTENTIONAL DESTRUCTION OF IT'S CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE will, unless the nearby Muslim nations step benevolently into the economic breach, have the same net result in the long run. Value/Opinion = $0.02 Leigh > By Michael Schwartz > > Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a > national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great > Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled > to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued > their daily feasts of multiple - usually front page - reports on the > country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly summary stories > buried inside the paper. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where > violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went > by without a mention of the war. > > The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful reports of > desperate battles and miserable Iraqis disappeared. There are still > occasional stories about high-profile bombings or military campaigns in > obscure places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in old hot > spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions, and the newly emerging > routines of ordinary life. > > A typical ?return to normal life? piece appeared October 11 in the > New York Times under the headline, ?Schools Open, and the First Test > is Iraqi Safety.? Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her > students by assuring them that ?security has returned to Baghdad, city > of peace?. > > Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam Dagher hedged the > ?return to normal? theme. Here was his first paragraph in full: > > ?On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama looked uneasy > standing in formation under an already stifling morning sun. She and > dozens of schoolmates listened to a teacher?s pep talk - probably a > necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn playground.? > > This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school, > amplified in the body of Dagher?s article by other examples, is > symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often > exaggerated) decline in violence in? > > FULL ARTICLE at Asia Times > > Category: General | Comment (RSS) > 9 Comments > Timothy R. Anderson: > I go immediately to the news-article I spotted on page 6 -A of the USA > Today newspaper, Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005 . In it, the author, Dave Moniz, > describes how the Bush Administration asked Congress for > eighty-two billion dollars. > > ? WASHINGTON - The White House asked Congress for $ 82 billion in > special spending Monday, almost $ 75 billion of which would go to the > Pentagon to help pay for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fix broken > equipment, and increase the size of the U.S. Army in 2005. ? > > ? Also included is nearly $ 1 billion for tsunami aid, $ 658 million > for a new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and hundreds of millions of dollars > in aid to U.S. allies in the war on terrorism. ? > > ? But the overwhelming majority of the money would go to the > Pentagon. It comes as a ?supplemental ? request to the normal > Pentagon budget for 2005, which was approved by Congress last > year. ? > > The reason that this is still significant, in my opinion, is that the > USA?s government continues to award money to the Pentagon, here it is > October 2008; thousands of Iraqis have been killed, bombed, > made into homeless persons, etc. etc. etc. That?s not > a good way to spend billions of dollars ! > > Going into a foreign country, knocking their government?s leadership > out of power ( justified by that government?s ? evil ? -ness or > not ! ) , claiming that it was done to bring freedom to people who > are capable of running the show themselves???. that is > a horrible, horrible, horrible misuse of money. An incredible > arrogant horrible misuse of money. > > Because it does not achieve good things for the Iraqi people. > Because it doesn ?t achieve good things for the American military. > Because it does NOT achieve good things for the civilians of > the United States Of America. > > Timothy R. Anderson > > 27 October 2008, 1:11 pm > John Owens: > I wrote to you a few months back, but I haven?t heard anything back, > one thing I forgot to mention in my last email was in I think June 2006 > I was in FKTC Kuwaiti office talking to who was then the HR Director > Cris, I can?t remember his last name but he was a British man, he told > me there were 2500 FKTC employees working on US Gov. projects in Iraq, I > was an employee of FKTC at that time, I only met two other Americans > working for FKTC at that time, Doug Harger and Mike Ford. We spent > billions of dollars rebuilding Iraq, yet we weren?t allowed to work > there, I?m sure there were a lot of Americans who wanted to go there > and work, I mean, it was US dollars why not let US citizens have the > chance earn some those tax dollars back. When I was in Iraq nothing > worked right, Electric, water, the roads were all messed up, whenever it > rained all the sewers in the city backed up and often contaminated the > water used for drinking and bathing. I keep telling everyone there was a > reason Very Few Americans were allowed to work there, it was obvious on > the US Embassy, OBO didn?t want Americans knowing what was going on > there, but elsewhere in Iraq if we had skilled American workers doing > the job and earning some of those tax dollars back, the rebuilding > efforts wouldn?t have cost so much and gotten so screwed up. > > Below is what I wrote to you last time, but I?m not sure you got it. > > > I was on that site and spent a total of 16 months in Iraq. I gave > testimony before congress and have cooperated with the media in an > effort to let not only Americans, but the world know what?s going on > there. > > I?m John Owens, the guy that worked on the US Embassy in Baghdad for > 71/2 months from Nov.05 to July 06. When I spoke to congress on C-Span > about the problems with the contractor FKTC and OBO about labor abuse > and trafficking, it was a small portion of the problems I saw there. > > Mary French was the most incompetent project manager I ever saw and > should be brought up on criminal charges for a wide variety of reasons. > How could a project director run a job site of that magnitude without > any kind of safety program. I was on site everyday and I never saw one > safety meeting. I think every labor law on the books was broken on that > site, not to mention human and civil rights violations. Again, another > reason they didn?t want Americans on that job. > > The fact that she was not qualified to manage the project was the > reason she got the job. She let FKTC do anything they wanted to do, and > get away with shoddy and substandard workmanship as well as endangering > peoples lives. This was partly because she didn?t know any better and > also because Jim Golden and Ret. General Williams of Overseas Building > Operations told her to. > > I was amazed when I got there and saw OBO (US Government) only had a > handful of people overseeing the job, and none of them had ever been on > a embassy construction site before. Not including a few security people, > there were only four people who were supposed to be supervising FKTC. > The mechanical superintendent was from the Navy, he worked on ships > boilers and had never been on an Embassy project before. There was a guy > from another company ?not OBO? who looked after electrical part > time, then there was Juvencio Lopez who was there to supervise the staff > housing buildings and didn?t seem to have a clue about embassy > construction. > > I think it was around April or May 06 when OBO ( Golden & Williams) > brought in around twenty Malaysian or Indonesian engineers and > secretaries (none had a security clearance), Golden?s wife was > Indonesian and I?m told that?s how they got the job. I heard the > logistics manager Jim Schofield also had a Indonesian wife. Schofield > wasn?t allowed on site much because Mary French didn?t like him and > FKTC hated him, FKTC did not want any Americans on the job, that?s why > I was the only one on site who worked for FKTC. I guess they thought > they could control me, and I?d keep quiet the same way they controlled > Mary. > > So, we had inexperienced primary contractor whose management staff was > made up of about 95% Lebanese and twenty or so Indonesian staff for the > State Dept. responsible for building the largest and most fortified US > Embassy in the world. I would say the only time most of these people had > ever even been in a US Embassy was to get turned down for a visa to the > states, they certainly didn?t have a clue how to build one. > > I could write a book on this, I mean, who would think you find could > Anti-Americanism on a US Embassy Construction Project. > > I have a lot of information about that job if the American public found > out about, well, they would probably really get angry, think about all > the skilled American tradesmen in the states who would have gone over > there and built an Embassy that wouldn?t be condemned before it?s > occupied, too bad Americans weren?t allowed to work there, they just > send tax dollars for foreigners who don?t seem to like Americans, only > American dollars. > > Let me know if you need any info. I have copies of my DOD card, LOA, > and contract > > John Owens > > MODERATOR: Sorry we missed this first time out. I wouldn?t call it > ?anti? American to take issue with powers and principalities that > wrap themselves in flags. I am in th house with two other Americans > right now (spouse and daughter), preparing to go to work with two other > Americans, and to work with twenty volunteer Americans, in a town full > of Americans, situated near the east coast of the United States. I?ll > be driving and walking among Americans, and may greet an American as I > buy tonight?s supper-fixins. I am not against them; though I share > your outrage. On the other hand, I won?t valorize them above all > others because they are American. That said, we a[[reciate this snapshot > from the inside; and I for one am unsurprised, except by your > willingness to witness. Thanks. > > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com > > > From critical.montages at gmail.com Tue Nov 4 13:20:39 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 15:20:39 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Students Speak for Merits of Cool Damascus Message-ID: See, also, Jonathan Shannon, "Humanity's Highest Need? The Politics of Art and Culture in Syria" (a review of miriam cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007): . Students speak for merits of cool Damascus By Anna Fifield in Damascus Published: November 4 2008 01:58 | Last updated: November 4 2008 01:58 In the concrete forecourt of Damascus University, blonde Americans in skinny jeans and retro sunglasses mill around in the sunshine among Syrian students in white headscarves. Americans, Czechs, Japanese, Belarusans, Germans, Koreans, Britons, Malays: these Arabic language students are giving Damascus such a cosmopolitan air that a visitor could be excused for forgetting Syria's reputation for isolation. The Bush administration dubbed the country an outpost of tyranny, a state sponsor of terrorism. But now, thanks to its widely intelligible dialect and to the rejuvenation of the old city ? Damascus is becoming the "Prague of the Middle East" ? the Syrian capital is now the cool place to learn Arabic. "When I told people at home that I was coming to Syria to study, they were really worried," says Leah Wawro, a 20-year-old New Yorker studying Arabic in Damascus as part of her international relations degree at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Caroline Guenther, a 21-year-old from Boston who is on the same course, says: "We had a choice of Cairo or Damascus ? and my mom really wanted me to go to Cairo ? but we thought this would be better." Since September 11 2001, western interest in the Middle East and demand for Arabic speakers has increased markedly. The Central Intelligence Agency in the US and Britain's MI6 are among the institutions crying out for Arabists. Alongside the bustling souk and the fabulous Omayad mosque in the old city, cool bars and caf?s with wi-fi have popped up, creating an enticing mix of the traditional and the trendy. "In the past Cairo, Tunis and Beirut were the centres for learning Arabic," says Ahmad Haji Safar, director of the Arabic Teaching Institute in Damascus, where 450 students from 60 countries study each term. He says demand is so high that he turns away as many as 700 students each term. Although classical Arabic ? the language of newspapers and government ? is understood across the Middle East, the spoken dialect differs so much from place to place that an Algerian and a Lebanese are as likely to converse in French as in Arabic. Colloquial Syrian bears the closest resemblance to classical Arabic, making it an attractive dialect for students. "I decided to come here because the Arabic is supposed to be better, the most standard," says Sina Thiessen, a 22-year-old student from Germany. Tuition fees are only $300 (?236, ?189) a term and the cost of living so low that students can get by on $400 a month. Some students in Damascus's language schools are Muslim, but as Syria gradually opens up to outside investment, others are learning Arabic so they can work for foreign companies in Syria or for academic reasons. "I'm studying Islamic history in Japan, so a lot of the books I need to read are in Arabic," says Megumi Okamoto, a 27-year-old graduate from Kobe University who arrived in Damascus a month ago. "But this culture is so different from Japan I'm a bit confused," she admits. Doron Davda, a 24-year-old from London, says it was a "natural step" to come to Damascus after completing his masters in Middle Eastern studies in the UK. "There is a general lack of understanding about the Middle East and this whole 'clash of civilisations'," says Mr Davda, who will return to London to work in the government service. In addition to the low price, Mr Davda says, Damascus has the allure of being "a little bit intrepid". "Everyone has been to Cairo and up and down the Nile but not many people have been to the 'axis of evil' of Syria," he says. Yoshie From shimogamo at attglobal.net Tue Nov 4 20:42:59 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:42:59 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Scenes From the Global Class War Message-ID: <49111643.5030206@attglobal.net> Scrawny Geese; No More Golden Egg by Michael Hudson www.counterpunch.com (October 27 2008) On Friday, October 24, the pound sterling dropped to just $1.58 (down from $1.73 earlier in the week, an enormous plunge by foreign-exchange standards), and the euro sunk to just $1.26, while Japan's yen soared by ten per cent. These shifts threatened to disrupt export markets and hence industrial sales patterns. Global stock markets plunged from five to nine per cent abroad, and there was talk of closing the New York market if stocks fell more than 1,000 points. Pre-opening trading saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average down the maximum limit of 550 points (largely on foreign selling) before bounding back to lose "only" 312 points as the dollar soared against European currencies. Friday's currency turmoil and stock market plunge was a case of the chickens coming home to roost from the class-war policies being waged by European and Asian industry and banking squeezing their domestic consumer markets - that is, labor's living standards - in favor of export production to the United States. The internal contradiction in this industrial and financial class warfare is now clear: To the extent that it succeeds in depressing labor's income, it stifles the domestic consumer-goods market. This disrupts Say's Law - the principle that "production creates its own demand", based on the assumption that employees will (or must) be paid enough to buy what they produce. This has not been true for many years in Europe and Asia. But production has been able to continue without faltering because of an international deus ex machina: consumer demand in the United States. This is not to say that no class warfare is being fought in the United States. Indeed, living standards for most wage earners today are down from the "golden age" of the late 1970s. But the US economy had its own financial deus ex machina to soften the blow: Alan Greenspan's asset-price inflation that flooded the banks with credit, which was lent out to homebuyers and stock market raiders. Rising home prices were applauded as "wealth creation" as if they were a pure asset, much like dividends suddenly being awarded to one's savings account. Homebuyers were encouraged to "cash out" on the rising "equity" margin, the (temporarily) rising market price of their homes over and above their (permanent) mortgage debt. So while most mortgage money was used to bid up the price of home ownership, about a quarter of new lending was reported to be spent on consumption goods. Credit card debt also soared. In the face of a paycheck squeeze, US consumers were maintaining their living standards by running further and further into debt. This could not go on for very long. It never has. Debt-financed bubbles can't last for more than a few years, even when fueled by a self-feeding inflation of asset prices in which households and corporate industry borrow more and more against the rising price of their collateral. But once the housing bubble burst the game was up. The game was up was up not only for the US economy, but also for foreign economies that had geared their industrial production to serve the US market rather than their own home markets. A global industrial slowdown is now threatened, and must continue until foreign domestic markets are nurtured - just the opposite trend from the recent generation of neoliberal anti-labor policies. To understand the dynamics at work, one needs to look at the balance of payments - not so much the balance of trade itself, but the currency speculation, international lending and arbitrage that has dominated exchange rates over the past two decades. Exchange rates no longer reflect relative wage levels, "purchasing power parity" or living costs as in times past. Today, they reflect the flow of international borrowing where interest rates are low and lending at a markup where credit is tight - and then hedging this arbitrage, and jumping on the bandwagon to speculate on which way currencies will go. In this way the balance of payments and currency values have been "post-industrialized" just as domestic economies themselves have been. Instead of promoting industrial growth based on a thriving home market, governments throughout the world have pursued a "post-industrial" financial strategy of "wealth creation". Japan's yen crisis - payback for the "carry trade" Nowhere has this been more the case in Japan, whose economy has remained in the doldrums ever since its bubble burst in 1990. For seventeen years straight, quarter after quarter, Japanese land prices fell, and so did stock market prices - and hence, the collateral pledged as backing for loans. This quickly left Japan's banks with negative equity. The Bank of Japan's response was to devise a way for them to rebuild their balance sheets - to "earn their way" out of the bad loans they had made. The policy was not to revive the faltering domestic market in Japan or its industrial corporations. From 1945 through 1985, Japanese had a model industrial banking system. But in 1985, US diplomats asked Japan to please commit economic suicide. Angered by the striking success of Japanese industry, US officials asked their compliant Japanese counterparts to raise the yen's exchange rate so as to make its industrial exporters less competitive, and in due course to flood its own economy with credit so as to lower interest rates, thereby enabling the Federal Reserve to flood the US market with enough cheap credit to give a patina of prosperity to the Reagan Administration. This policy - announced in the Plaza Accord of 1985 - led economist David Hale to joke that the Bank of Japan was acting as the Thirteenth Federal Reserve District and the Japanese government as the Republican Re-election Committee. Japan flooded its economy with credit, lowering interest rates and fueling the world's largest real estate bubble of the 1980s. The stock market also soared to reflect the rise in Japanese industrial sales and earnings. But after the bubble burst on December 31 1989, the mortgage debts and stock that that Japanese banks held in their capital reserves fell short of the valuation needed to back their deposit liabilities. To help bail out the banks, Japan's government urged them to engage in what has become known as the "carry trade": lending freely created yen credits to foreign financial institutions at remarkably low rates, for these borrowers to convert into other currencies to buy bonds or other assets yielding a higher rate. If the domestic Japanese market lacked credit-worthy borrowers, let them lend to foreigners. As a new source of revenue for the banks in place of loans to domestic real estate and industry, low interest rates enabled them to flood the global economy with credit. This served global finance by providing speculators and "financial intermediaries" with an opportunity to get a free arbitrage ride. Borrowing rates remained high within Japan itself. As veteran Japan watcher Richard Werner, author of Princes of the Yen (2003) recently described the situation to me, "while Japanese small firms were killed by the continued refusal of banks to expand credit (and many a small firm president was killed by having to sell a kidney to the loan sharks he was forced to resort to), foreign speculators received ample yen funds for a pittance". The silver lining to this credit creation was that Japanese exporters were aided as the conversion of yen into foreign currencies drove down the exchange rate. (Yen credit was "supplied" to global currency markets, and was spent to buy and hence bid up the price of euros, dollars, sterling and other currencies.) So the yen remained depressed, helping Japanese sales of consumer goods, while foreign borrowers were enabled to ride their own wave of asset-price inflation. Speculators could borrow at only a few percentage points interest in Japan, and convert their debt into foreign currency and lend to equally desperate countries such as Iceland at up to fifteen per cent. Hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and sterling worth of yen were borrowed and duly converted into foreign currencies to lend out at a markup. Arbitrageurs made billions by acting as financial intermediaries making income on the margin between low yen-borrowing costs and high foreign-currency interest rates. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote over a year ago in the Financial Times, "the Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero for six years until July 2006 to stave off deflation. Even now, rates are still just 0.5 per cent. It also injected some $12 billion liquidity every month by printing money to buy bonds. The net effect has been a massive leakage of money into the global economy. Faced with a pitiful yield at home, Japan's funds and thrifty grannies shoveled savings abroad. Banks, hedge funds, and the proverbial Mrs Watanabe, were all able to borrow for near nothing in Tokyo to snap up assets across the globe. BNP Paribas estimates this 'carry trade' to be $1,200 billion." All this was conditional on the ability of lenders to get a continued free ride. Now that the free lunch is over, Japan's postindustrial mode of rescuing its banking sector is coming home to roost. It is doing so in a way that highlights the inherent conflict between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism. Whereas industrial expansion is supposed to keep going - and can continue to do so as long as markets keep pace with production - debt bubbles end, usually abruptly as we are seeing today. Now that Iceland has gone bust, Hungary looks like it is following suit. As global currency markets no longer provide the easy pickings of the last decade, the yen carry trade is being wound down. This involves converting Icelandic currency, euros, sterling and other non-Japanese currencies back into yen to settle the debts owed to Japanese banks. This repayment - and hence re-conversion into yen - is pushing the yen's price up. This threatens to make Japanese exports higher-priced in terms of dollars, euros and sterling. Last week, Sony forecast that its earnings will fall as a result, and other Japanese companies face a similar squeeze in sales, not only from rising yen/dollar prices but from the global slowdown resulting from two decades of pro-financial anti-labor economic policies. Evans-Pritchard rightly accused the world's central banks of having created this mess. "It was they - in effect governments - who intervened in countless complex ways to push down the price of global credit to levels that warped behavior, as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has repeatedly noted. By setting the price of money too low, they encouraged debt and punished savings. The markets have merely responded with their usual exuberance to this distorted signal. Private equity was tempted to launch a takeover blitz at a debt-to-cashflow ratio of 5.4 because debt was made so cheap. The US savings rate turned negative because interest rates were held below inflation." He should better have said, asset-price inflation. Gains for wealth-holders at the top of the economic pyramid polarized economies. What was rising for the bottom ninety per cent was debt, not asset-price gains from easy money. Financing the US "trickle-down" economy from below The soaring yen and plunging foreign currency rates are the result of unwinding the Japanese "carry trade" strategy to rescue its banks. Japanese industry will pay the bill. And despite the fall in sterling and the euro, Europe's policy of emphasizing exports to the American market rather than to sell to its own domestic labor force looks pretty bad in view of the imminent economic slowdown in store. US consumer spending and living standards will have to fall - and it seems, to fall sharply - in order to finance the "trickle down" economy at the top. Current Treasury policy is to bail out the creditors, not the debtors. The banks are being saved, but not US industry, and certainly not the US wage earner/consumer. Instead of pursuing a Keynesian type of deficit spending in a manner that will increase employment (government spending on goods and services, infrastructure spending and transfer payments), the Treasury and Federal Reserve are providing money to the banks to buy each other up, consolidating the US financial system into a European-type system with only a few major banks. The financial system is to become monopolized and trustified, reversing two centuries of economic policy aimed at preventing financial dominance of the economy. None of the money being given to the banks really will trickle down, of course. Instead, the largest upward transfer of property in over seventy years will occur. The policy of giving money to the wealthiest sectors - these days the financial sector - turns the trickle-down economy into a euphemism for the concentration of wealth. The pretense is that America's economy needs the financial and property overhead in order for the "real" economy to "take off" again. But a stronger financial sector selling yet more debt to the economy at large threatens to deter recovery, not to speak of a new takeoff. Seeing the imminent shrinkage of the US market, lenders and investors are dumping their shares, not only those of US firms but also stocks in European and Asian export sectors. This is the "inner contradiction" of today's financial rescue operation. Finance itself cannot survive in the face of a stifled domestic "real" economy. So the world ought to be at an ideological turning point. But the last thing that Europe's oligarchy wants to see is higher labor standards. Nor does the US financial class. Europe and Asia put their faith in a US consumer-goods market rather than their own. The US financial sector found this appealing as long as consumption was financed by running into debt, not by workers earning more money or paying lower taxes. Industrial and political leaders throughout the world have been so anti-labor that there is little thought of raising domestic living standards via higher wage levels and a tax shift off labor and industry back onto property where progressive tax policies used to be based. Here's why it is impossible to go back to the past, as if this were some kind of normal condition that can be recovered. When Alan Greenspan flooded the mortgage market with credit, homeowners borrowed against ("cashed out" on) the rise in housing prices as if their homes were a piggy bank. The difference, of course, is that when one draws down a bank account there is less money in it, but no debt is involved to absorb future income in repayment schedules. "Equity loans" have left a debt residue, which now has turned into negative equity with loans still needing to be repaid. This will leave less for consumption. So US consumer spending will fall because of (1) no more easy mortgage or credit-card credit, (2) debt deflation as consumers repay past borrowing, "crowding out" other forms of spending, and (3) downsizing and job losses lead to falling wage income. Lower consumer spending means less sales by US and foreign manufacturers - especially those in countries whose currency is rising against the dollar (for example, Japan). Lower sales mean lower earnings, which mean lower stock prices. And in the stock market itself, price/earnings ratios are falling as the credit that fueled stock-market speculation by hedge funds and other arbitrageurs is cut back. So the combination of falling price/earnings ratios and falling earnings mean less in the denominator (earnings) to be multiplied into prices (earnings capitalized at the going interest rate). Declining stock market prices are reducing the coverage of corporate pension funds (as well as personal retirement accounts), requiring higher set-asides to fully fund these accounts. In the face of tightening bank credit, this will cut back new corporate spending on plant and equipment, further slowing the economy. As foreign exporters are rudely awakened the dream of an American demand, when will the point come at which Europe and Asia seek to build up their own domestic consumer markets as an alternative? The first problem is to overcome the ideological bias in which central bankers are indoctrinated, in a world where politicians have relinquished economic policy to bankers trained in Chicago School financial warfare against labor and even against industry. It probably is too much to hope that today's European central bankers and kindred economic managers will drop their neoliberal anti-labor ideology and see that without a thriving domestic market, their own industrial firms will languish. The solution must come from a revived political sector representing the interests of labor, and even of industry itself as it sees the need to revive domestic markets. _____ Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist He was Dennis Kucinich's chief economic advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the US, Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City Hudson is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new edition, Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, mh at michael-hudson.com http://www.counterpunch.com/hudson10272008.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 01:21:55 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 03:21:55 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Armenia and Azerbaijan Seek Peace over Enclave + Caucasian Knot May Be Untied in Moscow Message-ID: Caucasian Knot May Be Untied in Moscow: Armenia and Azerbaijan seek peace over enclave By Isabel Gorst in Moscow Published: November 4 2008 02:00 | Last updated: November 4 2008 02:00 Azerbaijan yesterday welcomed a thaw in relations with Armenia after the -presidents of the two countries pledged to find a political settlement to their 15-year conflict over the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave populated by ethnic Armenians, broke away from Azerbaijan during a violent war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has run its own affairs with support from Armenia, since a fragile ceasefire in 1994, although no state has recognised its independence. Ilham Aliev, the president of Azerbaijan, and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sarksyan held talks about Nagorno-Karabakh at a meeting outside Moscow this weekend hosted by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian -president. The three men signed a declaration agreeing to intensify diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh and to develop confidence building measures in the region. Khazar Ibrahim, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's foreign ministry, said, "This is the first ever document about Nagorno-Karabakh signed by the two heads of state. If we use the document and take practical steps we have a chance to move forward." He said Azerbaijan was prepared to consider allowing Nagorno-Karabakh some measure of self-determination, adding that "self-determination does not mean independence". Azerbaijan has demanded that Armenia withdraw troops from Nagorno-Karabakh and allow ethnic Azerbaijanis displaced during the war to return home. "Comprehensive confidence building will only be possible if both communities live together," he said. Western diplomats said the war in August between Russia and Georgia over Georgia's separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia appeared to have given impetus to diplomatic efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Azerbaijan has grown prosperous amid an oil boom, and has stepped up defence spending recently. However, the country has abandoned threats to retake Nagorno-Karabakh by force since the war in Georgia. Armenia, dependent on Georgia for access to the west since a blockade imposed by Azerbaijan and Turkey in the early 1990's, suffered economic losses during the August war when roads across Georgia to the Black Sea were closed. Mr Ibrahim said that Azerbaijan would invest in Nagorno-Karabakh's economic revival once the conflict was settled. "It is in everybody's interest, including Armenia's, that the conflict is resolved," he said. Armenia is willing to consider returning to Azerbaijan some territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh captured during the war, but insists that the autonomy of Nagorno-Karabakh itself is not negotiable. Karlen Avetissian, Nagorno-Karabakh's permanent envoy in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, said representatives of the mountain enclave wanted to be involved in negotiations about their fate. Like many in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, he expressed fears about spiralling Azerbajaini military spending in the absence of a peace deal between Yerevan and Baku following their conflict. For its part, Turkey sided with Azerbaijan in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, but has recently taken steps to mend its fractured relationship with Armenia, using the impetus of President Abdullah Gul's "football diplomacy" in attending September's match between the two countries in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. With additional reporting by Haig Simonian in Zurich From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 01:32:27 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 03:32:27 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Energy at Root of Karabakh Accord + Azerbaijan to End VOA, Other Foreign Broadcasts on Local Radio Message-ID: Energy at Root of Karabakh Accord 05 November 2008By Nikolaus von Twickel / Staff Writer The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan have signed a declaration on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict at a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev in a sign of the Kremlin's growing role and the importance of energy politics in the South Caucasus. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev signed the largely symbolic document at Medvedev's Maiendorf residence, just outside Moscow on Saturday. Armenia has traditionally been a staunch ally of Russia, while energy-rich Azerbaijan has maintained friendly ties with Georgia, but Moscow has been looking for greater cooperation with Azerbaijan on energy issues. The five-point document, published on the Kremlin's web site, says both countries will step up efforts to find a peaceful solution over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan that broke away after a bloody conflict in the early 1990s that killed more than 30,000 and displaced more than 1 million. The declaration is the first such document signed by the heads of the two states since Russia mediated a cease-fire agreement in 1994. While it stresses the need for a political settlement based on international law, the document does not contain any significant commitments, such as to forego the use of force, nor does it mention the conflicting issues at the heart of the conflict, territorial integrity and national self-determination. The outcome of the meeting was not as significant as some may have hoped. "This was not much different than dozens of meetings before," Svante Cornell, research director at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a joint U.S.-Swedish think tank, said Tuesday by telephone from Tbilisi, Georgia. "All we have seen is basically two leaders committing themselves to solving the conflict." Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said the declaration was largely ceremonial. "The fact that Medvedev [presided over the talks) just means that both sides accept Russia as mediator," Malashenko said Tuesday. "Russia needed an urgent rehabilitation as peacekeeper in the region." Moscow's relations with the West worsened dramatically after it sent soldiers and tanks deep into Georgia to repel a Georgian military attack to reclaim its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August. The declaration also says negotiations should continue within the framework of the so-called Minsk Group, a 12-member body headed jointly by Russia, France and the United States, and overseen by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza and French Ambassador Bernard Fassier were at Maiendorf, an OSCE spokesman said by telephone from Vienna. Bryza, the senior U.S. diplomat overseeing the South Caucasus region, praised the result. "My country fully supports this document. The declaration shows that both presidents can work seriously towards solving this conflict," he said, Interfax reported Monday. Cornell said the declaration was a show of force by the Kremlin capitalizing on the weakness of the West, as the Georgian war in August, the global financial crisis and the leadership change in the United States would all work to cripple Western influence in the region. "There is a new geopolitical situation now," he said. Russia, he said, was offering a solution that would mean a loss of independence for Azerbaijan, possibly through the deployment of a Moscow-sponsored peacekeeping force on its territory. Cornell said Moscow was probably eyeing a "common state" solution, something that had been on the negotiating table back in the 1990s. This proposal, which had been rejected by Baku, focuses on bringing Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh together in a confederation. Carnegie's Malashenko said that while its influence in the region has grown, Russia would not go it alone. "To solve this conflict, you need more than one mediator; you need a group of mediators," he said. "Moscow won't act outside the format of the Minsk Group." Malashenko also denied that the talks might herald a weakening of Moscow's traditional support for Armenia. "I cannot imagine that one country will give one-sided support to one party, because this is impossible," he said. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia depend on trade routes through Georgia. Moscow has recently been courting Azerbaijan, which wants to sell more gas to Russia. Medvedev signed a cooperation agreement with Aliyev in Baku in July, and in Moscow this September both leaders discussed direct talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Europe has also been making overtures to Azerbaijan as a vital supplier to a proposed new gas pipeline, which would reduce Western dependence on Russian energy. The Nabucco pipeline project has been backed both by the European Union and the United States. EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs will travel to Turkey and Azerbaijan this Wednesday to show Europe's commitment to the project, The Associated Press reported. Moscow has worried the EU by negotiating with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to commit to sending their Caspian Sea gas through Russia. It is also pushing South Stream, a rival pipeline project by state-controlled Gazprom, which is slated to cost some $13 billion. On energy, Azeris play Europe and Russia against the middle By Celestine Bohlen Bloomberg News Tuesday, November 4, 2008 BAKU, Azerbaijan: It is boom time in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan: the skyline is dense with cranes and high-rise buildings, and the streets of the port city on the Caspian Sea are clogged with luxury shops and traffic. Oil revenue has fueled the country's growth, and even as prices have plummeted, Azerbaijan's energy resources remain a valuable prize. Evidence of this is the tug-of-war between Russia and Europe over natural gas from the next phase of a project that's expected to at least double current production when it moves from the planning stage to completion. The competition is testing the former Soviet republic's ability to maintain its political balance in the months since Russia's invasion of Georgia heightened tensions between East and West. "As always, Azerbaijan is trying to find common ground with all sides," said Fariz Ismailzade, director of the Advanced Foreign Service Program at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku. Over the past two months, Russia and the United States, acting with the Europeans, have stepped up their attentions to this mostly Muslim nation of 8.5 million people. In addition to selling its gas, Azerbaijan wants to parlay the international interest into the resolution of its conflict over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, occupied by Armenians since a bloody ethnic war ended in 1994. It inched toward that goal in a meeting on Nov. 2, where the two sides agreed to resolve the dispute under Russian, U.S. and French mediation, easing tensions in the South Caucasus after two Azerbaijani oil-export routes were disrupted by the Georgian war. "This is our neighborhood, and everything that happens here worries us," says Novruz Mammadov, head of President Ilham Aliyev's foreign-policy department. Given its strategic location between the Caspian and Black seas, Azerbaijan is used to being in the middle. Since becoming independent in 1991, it has sought to minimize reliance on Soviet-era pipelines that go through Russia, a major trading partner and home to two million Azeris. At the same time, it has maintained neighborly relations. "We have a strategic partnership with Russia and with the U.S., and we don't see any contradiction," said Khazar Ibrahim, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry. Vice President Dick Cheney visited Baku in September, followed a month later by the U.S. deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte. In between, Aliyev, 46, was invited to Moscow for a one-day visit with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. The European Union's energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, is due in Baku this month. One topic of discussion is the natural-gas field Shah Deniz II, with reserves estimated to at least equal the nine billion cubic meters, or 318 billion cubic feet, produced by the project's first phase. That gas is now sold at home and to Turkey and Georgia. Once the second phase is developed, the Moscow-based Gazprom OAO, which holds a monopoly on Russian exports, wants to buy the gas to bolster reserves for future contractual commitments. The United States and the European Union want the new supplies sent directly to Europe through the proposed Nabucco pipeline, an $8 billion venture at the center of the region's efforts to reduce dependence on Russia. Diversification of sources and routes has been a European priority since January 2006, when Russia, which accounts for 25 percent of EU gas imports, briefly halted shipments over a price dispute with Ukraine, a transit country. Azerbaijan has yet to decide when it will develop Shah Deniz II and says it is waiting for the Europeans to make an offer. Azerbaijan can bide its time, Mammadov said. "We have said no to the Russians, for now," he said. "To the Europeans, we have said we are ready to be good partners: for oil, for gas, for transit; but they need this, not us." In trying to strike a balance between East and West, Aliyev is following in the footsteps of his father, whom he succeeded as president in 2003. Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB general, played a key role in securing one link with Europe that bypasses Russia: a $4 billion pipeline that, by 2005, was carrying Azerbaijani oil from the Caspian region through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Operated by the London-based BP, Europe's second-largest oil company, the pipeline now exports a million barrels of oil a day on average - roughly 1 percent of the world's supply. The International Monetary Fund predicts Azerbaijan's gross domestic product will total $53.2 billion this year, compared with $8.6 billion in 2004. Revenue will probably shrink in 2009 as declining economic growth worldwide slows demand for crude oil. Prices had fallen by 56 percent to about $65 a barrel Nov. 3 from a record $147.27 on July 11. For now, though, the signs of oil wealth are everywhere in Baku. In its old city, tycoons have rebuilt modern villas on narrow, winding streets in the style of the mansions of their 19th-century predecessors. Oil has always been key to the fortunes of Baku: Marco Polo spotted a gusher here in the 14th century. In the 1800s, it drew European families, including the Rothschilds and the Nobels, who rushed to profit from the region's hydrocarbons. Still, the dangers to Azerbaijan's thriving energy business from festering conflicts are all too evident. On Aug. 5, the BP pipeline was temporarily closed after an explosion on its Turkish portion, allegedly the work of Kurdish terrorists. That was followed by the closing of two oil-transit routes that cross Georgia because of its five-day war with Russia over the separatist region of South Ossetia. Azerbaijan has been able to leverage some of the interest in its energy resources to try to end its own "frozen conflict" over Nagorno-Karabakh, which has cost it 20 percent of its territory. Medvedev arranged the Nov. 2 meeting in Moscow at which Aliyev and the Armenian president, Serzh Sargsyan, agreed to seek a resolution - signaling Russia's willingness to play mediator in this dispute. "We have to find a way to have a peaceful, stable region," Ibrahim said. Azerbaijan to End VOA, Other Foreign Broadcasts on Local Radio By VOA News 31 October 2008 Authorities in Azerbaijan say they plan to halt local broadcasts by foreign stations by the end of the year. The chairman of Azerbaijan's National Television and Radio Council, Nushiravan Maharramli, says his country is not interested in granting local frequencies to foreign broadcasters. He says the change will affect the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, U.S. financed Voice of America and Radio Liberty. The official says his country has been gradually implementing changes, having previously eliminated broadcasts by Russian, French and Turkish stations. The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal agency responsible for all U.S. government-supported, non-military international broadcasting, says it strongly objects to the proposal. A BBG Board Member, Steven J. Simmons, says the decision follows a "disturbing pattern" that began with harsh restrictions on private broadcasters within Azerbaijan two years ago and now directly impacts international media. A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Baku, Terry Davidson, says it will be seeking clarification of the issue from the Azerbaijani government. He said in Azerbaijan, foreign broadcasters such as the Voice of America, the BBC and Radio Liberty have contributed greatly to enriching the space for public debate and understanding. Some information for this report was provided by AFP. From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 02:04:19 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 04:04:19 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Chinese Growth Slows Sharply: What Is the Risk of a Hard Landing in China? Message-ID: Chinese Growth Slows Sharply: What Is the Risk of a Hard Landing in China? * China's GDP growth slowed to 9.9% in the first three quarters of 2008, or about 9% for Q3 alone, the fifth consecutive quarterly deceleration and lower than expected. Jan-Sept 9.9% growth is the slowest in five years and almost 2% lower than 2007 pace - Further slowing is likely next year perhaps below 7-8%, a level at which China will be unable to create new jobs * In a country with the potential growth of China hard landing would occur if the growth rate of the economy were to slow down to 5-6% as China needs a growth rate of 9-10% to absorb about 24 million new workers joining the labor force every year - macro indicators suggest China is heading for a hard landing (Roubini) * Industrial production continued to slow in September to 11.4% (12.8% in August and 16.4% in H1) and PMIs suggest manufacturing is in contraction. Urban Fixed Asset investment has slowed in real terms as the cost of investment goods has appreciated. Domestic demand provided much of the growth momentum, with exports detracting from growth (HS) Slowing housing sector, indicators like commodity demand point to even slower growth ahead * IMF lowered estimate to 9.7% growth in 2008 and 9.3% in 2009. private banks are lowering their estimates for 2009 with some expecting 8% (Morgan Stanley, UBS ) or lower (Credit Suisse 7.2% StanChart - 7.1%) * China likely to take further fiscal and monetary steps to promote growth particularly as slowing inflation provides an opening. It already cut interest rates, reserve requirements and loan curbs and reinstated export rebates and announced more infrastructure spending. Yet slowing fiscal revenue growth (3.1% in September) may limit fiscal response. * Chinese macro-economy early warning index stood at 105.3 points in September, 2.7 points lower than August, dropping for four straight months.six of ten components -industrial production, fixed assets investment, import and export volume, profit of industrial enterprises, loans of financial institutions, M2 and urban consumption remained in the "green light zone" in September. But Consumer retail sales and disposable income of urban residents were in the slightly-heated "yellow light zone", while the fiscal revenue was in the slightly-frigid "blue light zone". * January-September export growth by value slowed to about 20%, down from 28.9% in the year- earlier period and the weakest consumer confidence since 2003 (SARS) may mean that consumer spending (retail sales are growing at about 17% in real terms for the last four months) is overstating private consumption outlook * Wachovia: the recent slowdown in Chinese economic activity including industrial production may be exaggerated somewhat by the shutdowns associated with the Olympics, but the trend pace of Chinese economic growth appears to have downshifted * BNP: Growth in good exports lost steam in 1H08 in USD and volume terms while commodity prices inflated imports - shifting composition of exports has increased vulnerability to lower external demand. Exports, FAI and private consumption are all projected to post lower growth in 2H08 and 2009. Private consumption may be hurt by lower exports, the lagged impact of the inflation hike of late 2007-early 2008, a softening labor market and falling stock prices -> But growth expected to remain near 9% * WB: China's economic growth has moderated to a more sustainable pace in line with slowing global growth. Declining net exports are partly offset by rising domestic demand * MS: domestic demand is being supported by government policy to cushion against an external demand slowdown . Should external demand disappoint further, the government may step up spending on investment to support growth * StanChart: the era of double-digit growth in China may well be over and export growth may continue to slow through the end of the year and overall economic growth may continue to decelerate through 2009/10 after 9.5% growth in 2008 * Yu: with 24m people entering the workforce each year, China needs a growth rate of at least 9%. China's twin threat of worsening inflation and slowing export growth, both of which are surmountable, but concurrent reforms (especially in the capital market) will ensure adjustments in the country's economic structure for long-term progress. * ADB: Little evidence that China is rebalancing away from investment-led growth, but it is shifting investment sectors. Risk of entrenched inflation and overheating in some sectors * Credit Agricole: Should global demand reacelerate in 2009, China's trade surplus could widen, creating the risk of excess liquidity which could trigger equity bubbles and even more inflation pressure * Xie: China should increase infrastructure spending, slow appreciation, and encourage consumption to hedge against hard landing Nov 4, 2008 Associated Readings (15 Articles) AnalysisFinancial TimesNov 03, 2008 Chinese alarm bells AnalysisRGE MonitorNouriel RoubiniNov 04, 2008 The Rising Risk of a Hard Landing in China: The Two Engines of Global Growth ? U.S. and China ? are Now Stalling AnalysisCreidt SuisseNov 03, 2008 China the Growth Shock AnalysisAMP CapitalShane OliverOct 21, 2008 China's Slowdown AnalysisCitigroup Global MarketsKen PengOct 14, 2008 China: A Potential Return to Deflation NewsXinhuaNov 01, 2008 Chinese consumer confidence index drops slightly in September NewsBloombergKevin Hamlin and Li YanpingOct 19, 2008 China's Economic Growth Cooled to 9.9% in First Nine Months AnalysisMorgan StanleyQing Wang, Denise Yam and Katherine TaiOct 22, 2008 China: Sharper-than-Expected Slowdown in 3Q08 on Destocking AnalysisEconomist Intelligence UnitOct 21, 2008 China economy: Slowing down AnalysisUOB Kay HianOct 21, 2008 What could the inside structure of China's slowdown be? AnalysisStandard CharteredOctober 2008 Asia: Braving Crisis AnalysisHang Seng BankOct 09, 2008 Mainland China's Monetary Policy Easing Begins AnalysisBNP ParibasOct 06, 2008 The TARP has been approved, but the crisis is far from being over. China: Rapid response to weaker growth AnalysisGoldman SachsQ2 2008 China Economics Quarterly: Growth and CPI inflation moderated in 2Q2008, but inflation pressures remain worrisome AnalysisAsian Development Bank March 2008 People's Republic of China: Economic Outlook 2008 From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Nov 5 07:15:52 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:15:52 -0500 Subject: [A-List] We just made history. Message-ID: <49116449.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Charles -- I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history. And I don't want you to forget how we did it. You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change. I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next. But I want to be very clear about one thing... All of this happened because of you. Thank you, Barack This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 07:55:42 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:55:42 -0800 Subject: [A-List] We just made history. In-Reply-To: <49116449.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <49116449.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <4911B3EE.3040601@gmail.com> "This victory alone is not the change we seek. It's just a chance to make that change." http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44582 Charles Brown wrote: > Charles -- > > I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. > > We just made history. > > And I don't want you to forget how we did it. > > You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change. > > I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. > > We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next. > > But I want to be very clear about one thing... > > All of this happened because of you. > > Thank you, > > Barack > > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com > > > From noreply at coha.org Tue Nov 4 11:24:51 2008 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 13:24:51 -0500 Subject: [A-List] PRESS RELEASE: The Dynamic Debut of Raul Castro Message-ID: <20081104182429.9D6533E403C@mx-out2.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4120 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081104/65bea749/attachment.txt From Midhurst14 at aol.com Wed Nov 5 03:35:04 2008 From: Midhurst14 at aol.com (Midhurst14 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 05:35:04 EST Subject: [A-List] A-List Digest, Vol 62, Issue 8 Message-ID: The whole world breathed a sigh of relief on November 5th We owe a great deal to the era of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes for creating the necessary catharsis for change The price we have paid is the loss of 40 years of our lives and the deaths of so many, noble like Martin Luther King and the ordinary soldier dying in Iraq To prompt the American voter, 70% who have never read a book, to overcome the racism endemic in their society Obama's speech was superb, and in his effort to match the occasion, provided many hostages to fortune Let us hope that he lives to provide an alternative to the previous horrors and as exemplified in his quotes from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address George Anthony -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1484 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081105/e0344e88/attachment.txt From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 08:21:56 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 10:21:56 -0500 Subject: [A-List] We just made history. In-Reply-To: <4911B3EE.3040601@gmail.com> References: <49116449.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <4911B3EE.3040601@gmail.com> Message-ID: The Next US President's Afghan Challenge (Al Jazeera): . Presidente Ch?vez: "Ojal? que Obama convenza a los halcones de EEUU a respetar soberan?a de los pa?ses del mundo": . Saramago: Llegada de Obama al poder es una revoluci?n: (Antes del descenlace de la elecciones estadounidenses, el Premio Nobel de Literatura calific? la llegada de Obama a la pol?tica de la naci?n norteamericana como una revoluci?n y le pidi? que de ser electo Presidente, acabar? con Guant?namo y el bloqueo contra Cuba): On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Leighm wrote: > > "This victory alone is not the change we seek. It's just a chance to make > that change." > > http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44582 > > Charles Brown wrote: >> >> Charles -- >> >> I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I >> wanted to write to you first. >> >> We just made history. >> >> And I don't want you to forget how we did it. >> >> You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you >> knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and >> neighbors about why you believe it's time for change. >> >> I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this >> campaign. >> >> We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be >> in touch soon about what comes next. >> >> But I want to be very clear about one thing... >> >> All of this happened because of you. >> >> Thank you, >> >> Barack From nmgoro at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 09:01:49 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 17:01:49 +0100 Subject: [A-List] The Great Marxist debate again: Meszaros on the crisis In-Reply-To: <49111FDD.8060805@embarqmail.com> References: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> <49111FDD.8060805@embarqmail.com> Message-ID: <2fa158550811050801y5a2af68cv60b42b3f814624d2@mail.gmail.com> Not exactly. I agree in that Herramienta brings interesting things. My drop of acid is that they are a "general Marxist" site. And, as you may know, reality is always concrete... Best to all. 2008/11/5 Bill Quimby : > Nestor - this looks like a great site, by the way (the herramienta.com from > which you forwarded the article). My Spanish is "nada" but I can struggle > through a political text somewhat. > > However I am unable to see (at this early point) what the political tendency > of herramienta is ... do you have any background info? -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From nmgoro at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 09:03:04 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 17:03:04 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Nuclear Backed Currency (late dollar revaluation) In-Reply-To: <491077E0.5060906@tellas.gr> References: <491077E0.5060906@tellas.gr> Message-ID: <2fa158550811050803t613985e3x40a2fb7109d05e07@mail.gmail.com> The art of politics is to turn pipe dreams into solid truths... I am in full agreement with your opinion. 2008/11/4 Stathis Stassinos : > > Thank you Nestor, I never knew that Argentina was more advanced in nuclear > research than brazil, mostly because Brazil is making much more noise > (active Space program, new nuclear plants etc). I truly believe that any > common currency in South America must be backed by ICBMs. It doesnt need to > be Brazil's or Argentina's ICBM's in particular. Because as we said before, > you cant do anything for a country defaulting on its debt, short of an > invasion, and even that is impossible when nuclear weapons are involved. > but thats pipedream, at least for now. >> >> > -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt Wed Nov 5 10:52:33 2008 From: jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt (jfgf.consult at mail.telepac.pt) Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:52:33 +0000 Subject: [A-List] The Great Marxist debate again: Meszaros on the crisis In-Reply-To: <2fa158550811050801y5a2af68cv60b42b3f814624d2@mail.gmail.com> References: <2fa158550811040358t16257714n2725e069ec7a3cf2@mail.gmail.com> <49111FDD.8060805@embarqmail.com> <2fa158550811050801y5a2af68cv60b42b3f814624d2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1225907553.3e5idxjzkg3k@w3.webmail.telepac.pt> In my opinion Herramienta is eclectic: publish excelents papers (how this Meszaros article) and swindle papers (how Toni Negri et alii). By the way: Meszaros article is published also in MR Zine: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/meszaros041108.html Jorge Figueiredo Citando N?stor Gorojovsky : > Not exactly. I agree in that Herramienta brings interesting things. > > My drop of acid is that they are a "general Marxist" site. And, as you > may know, reality is always concrete... > > Best to all. > > 2008/11/5 Bill Quimby : > > Nestor - this looks like a great site, by the way (the herramienta.com from > > which you forwarded the article). My Spanish is "nada" but I can struggle > > through a political text somewhat. > > > > However I am unable to see (at this early point) what the political > tendency > > of herramienta is ... do you have any background info? > -- > > N?stor Gorojovsky > El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a > Jorge Fidelino Galv?o de Figueiredo Visite o s?tio web da APVGN: http://www.apvgn.pt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 12:30:56 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:30:56 -0800 Subject: [A-List] USAF scales back cyberwar plans - A sidebar... Message-ID: <4911F470.40603@gmail.com> The USAF is redeploying their CyberWarriors to the Nuclear command. Next time the AF 'accidentally' moves some Cruise missiles to stage for the Middle East as happened recently, those cyber war specialists will make SURE there's no leakage from base to blogger to press. WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- The general in charge of the U.S. Air Force's cyber-warfare effort says plans for his unit have been scaled back, because staff who would have been used to set up a cyber command will be allocated to the service's new nuclear command instead. Air Force Cyber Command was to be stood up as a major command -- alongside the service's space, air combat and other commands -- in October. But those plans were suspended over the summer after Defense Secretary Robert Gates booted the Air Force's civilian and military leaders following their failure to enforce accountability for the accidental flight across the United States of part of the nation's nuclear arsenal. Last month plans for a fully fledged major command for cyber-warfare were scrapped altogether. The Pentagon's Armed Forces News Service reported Oct. 8 that a gathering of the service's leadership in Colorado was told cyber-operations would be stood up as a numbered air force component -- one step down, in organizational terms, from a major command. "We helped solve the organizational (challenge of standing up a new nuclear command), with the manpower that was going to be allocated to make cyber-command a major air command allocated instead to fix the more pressing problem ? (of) making sure that people are comfortable that we in fact have our eye on the ball of our nuclear enterprise," Gen. William Lord told United Press International. Continued http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2008/11/04/Analysis_USAF_scales_back_cyberwar_plans/UPI-11401225843271/2/ From noreply at coha.org Wed Nov 5 10:06:43 2008 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 12:06:43 -0500 Subject: [A-List] PRESS RELEASE: Bolivia's Military Message-ID: <20081105170616.E1D9F3E474A@mx-out2.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4085 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081105/18fa1f6b/attachment.txt From critical.montages at gmail.com Wed Nov 5 17:43:04 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 19:43:04 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Voters Pick Obama But Local Progressive Agendas Flop Message-ID: Voters pick Obama but local progressive agendas flop 6 hours ago WASHINGTON (AFP) ? Despite a landslide for Democrats in the White House race, Americans voted more conservatively on Tuesday in a myriad of referendums on banning gay marriage and abortion. Voters in some states rejected gay marriage rights and affirmative action and approved restrictions on adoption for unmarried couples. However, results were mixed as other referenda across the country -- some 35 states were asked to consider 153 ballot questions -- showed voters in favor of assisted suicide and against outright bans on abortion. In California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas, voters rejected gay marriage. In Arkansas, they voted to prevent anyone who isn't married from adopting a child. The decision was decried by gay rights supporters who said it would limit their ability to adopt children. But voters rejected a near-total ban on abortion in South Dakota and Colorado and allowed assisted suicide in Washington state, making it the second US state after Oregon to allow the procedure for terminally ill people. Jennie Drage-Bower, senior election analyst with the National Conference of State Legislators, said abortion limits do not have a strong history. "Restriction on abortion has been on the ballot 23 times since 1980 and only five of those have been approved by voters," she said. "So that's not really an issue that voters historically have been receptive to on the ballot." In another politically charged issue, voters in five states were asked to rule on affirmative action, or targeted policies that aim to increase employment and education for minorities. In Nebraska the programs, which are often slammed by critics as showing unfair racial preferences, were rejected 58 percent to 42 percent. In Colorado, the result was still too close to call Wednesday. California's gay marriage ban passed with 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent against. Known as "Proposition 8," the proposal was trumpeted by conservative groups as the people's way of overturning the state Supreme Court's ruling in May that legalized gay marriage. Local media reported that a lesbian couple, who previously won the right to marry with the Supreme Court ruling, were to file a new suit to stop the referendum from coming into effect. The vote leaves thousands of same-sex couples who tied the knot in the ensuing months, including some celebrities including comedian Ellen DeGeneres who wed her long-time girlfriend Portia de Rossi in August. Japanese-American actor George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu in the long-running series "Star Trek", and who married his longtime partner Brad Altman in September, said his marriage would stay remain valid no matter what. "There's nothing in the language of Proposition 8 that says it's retroactive, so our marriage is going to be valid," he told a local TV channel. Takei and Altman were the first couple to receive a marriage license in West Hollywood when California began issuing them to gay couples on June 17. Arizona and Florida also passed similar referenda by large margins Tuesday, stating that marriage was the legal union between a man and a woman. Drage-Bower said the results were no surprise as same-sex marriage is generally unpopular. In the 30 statewide votes on the issue since 1998, "only one state (Arizona) has ever voted against a ban and every other proposed ban on same-sex marriage has been approved by voters," she said. "This is one of those measures that are really guaranteed to pass." Neil Giuliano, president of the gay rights group GLAAD, said he was saddened by the vote. "We are disappointed and disheartened by results in Arkansas, Arizona and Florida, where we saw laws passed that are intended to hurt loving, committed couples and families," he said. From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Wed Nov 5 13:42:36 2008 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 15:42:36 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN Zionists meddling with Indigenous? Message-ID: <01c940ec$39757$0bcc6545870949@your-6904db8205> ARE ZIONISTS BACKING A 4 PRONGED PLOT TO TRAP US IN PALESTINIAN-STYLE ENCLAVES? ? Lobbying, Media Relations, Fund Raising & Government - for our land and resources MNN. Nov. 4, 2008. Obama?s election can?t solve everything. Colonialism has left a complex and troubling legacy. We have to work together to solve it. There?s no quick fix. We have to stop the post-911 psychomania that has tried to make fascism a necessity? Panic and fear produce strange reactions. After MNN?s November 1 story about training of Ontario police on Israeli security tactics, an MNN staff received a strange call from ?Pres. and L. Bush? with no message. Another MNNer was followed by a strange ?cop? looking woman and photographed. The colonial Mohawk police visited another staff member?s home with a bunch of papers in hand. Then a few choppers circled over Katenies? house. Finally a strange wooden sculpture was left in front of the MNN publishers house. All within a 24-hour period. In March 23, 2008, Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness, went to Israel to sign the Canada-Israel "Public Security" Agreement with Avi Dicter, Minister of Public Security of Israel. They plan to share technology, information and personnel in "border management and security; correctional services and prisons; immigration; money laundering [mostly theirs]; organized crime; terrorist financing and trafficking in persons". This makes it look like Israel is running Canada! Considering all the blood on their hands, does Israel really provide a good model for intercultural relations? U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and other senior officials were there in ?private meetings?. http://www.ps-sp.gc.ca/app_support/xml/ps_news_e.xml A week later Moshe Ronan, Chairman of the Canada Israel Committee, was with Avi Dicter in Israel. They got bombed which helped to justify the security agreement ? in Canada! What kind of reasoning is this? A few days later Ontario government announced it?s preparing to pass the ?Photo ID Act? for June 2009. The new card will have a number tagged to a private data base. Some will be ?flagged?, like Ongwehonwe, immigrants and ?resisters of fascism?. Day's Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness cabal includes: Chantal ?Dirty-Hands? Bernier, ADM, Community Safety and Partnerships (613) 993-4325; J. Scott ?Mouthpiece? Broughton, Sr. ADM, Emergency Management & National Security (613) 991-2820; Diane ?Clean-Blouse-and-Polished-Shoes? MacLaren, ADM, Policing, Law Enforcement & Interoperability (613) 990-2703; and Kristina ?Who?s-Got-Her-Dirty-Finger-On-the-Button? Namiesniowski, ADM, Strategic Policy (613) 949-6435. These bureaucrats tell the Minister what to do and say and make all the ?Dr. Strangelove? plans. Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research wrote in April 2, 2008, that Public Safety Canada works closely with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Correctional Service Canada (CSC) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ? who all work together trying to victimize the Ongwehonwe. [See Links #1 at end] Are they preparing to turn our communities into refugee camps like they?ve done in Palestine? The Ontario Mission went to Israel to study how to surround people with huge prefab walls, armed guards, electrical fences, high tech surveillance, super militarized checkpoints, to burn down crops and keep people from going to jobs, hospitals and schools often leading to death. In 2005 nearly 35 Chiefs of Police, mostly from Ontario?s cities near Ongwehonwe communities, went to Israel to explore Israeli police procedures. The trip was initiated by Bernie Farber, and paid by the Canadian Jewish Congress, United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General (Monte Kwinter), the Israeli government, the police service boards, Canada Israel Committee and U.S. Department of Homeland Security through ?Security Solutions International?. It looks like the U.S. has been hiding its duplicity by giving money to Security Solutions who then turn it over to the sponsoring organizations. They?re backs are still sore from patting themselves on how well they pulled this one over on the Canadian retardants. Is getting control over policing and prisons part of the four prongs of the Zionist mission? The four cornerstones in Ontario are Bernie Faber, the media man; Monte Kwinter, the longtime Toronto MPP; Morris Zbar, the money manager for the United Jewish Appeal; and Eric Maldoff, Heenan Blaikie Montreal, the lobbyist with the Canada-Israel Committee. We know Eric and his style at Kanesatake and other Mohawk communities. He knows how to stir up trouble for us. Then he hides under a rock until the coast is clear, and gets well paid for it. [See link #2] Susan Howard-Azzeh made a report on the complaint that was filed by the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Against Racism Canada to the Premier of Ontario Dalton ?Chicken-Teeth? McGuinty, the Hamilton, Toronto, York Regional, Ottawa, Windsor police forces, Ontario Registered Lobbyists and the OPP. Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and his gang disrupted the September 21, 2005 public meeting to prevent information about Israeli police brutality against the Palestinians from being heard publicly. [See #3 Link]. Farber stood against a wall where he had a clear line of site with Police Services Board Chair, Bernie ?Scaredy-Cat? Morelli. Farber gave signals to Morelli to ?refrain? speakers from talking about "politics". A witness reported that his crowd continually disrupted the speakers with shouting and intimidation. During a slide presentation of photos of brutal Israeli police methods, his cohorts screamed, bellowed and stamped their feet like they were in a union hall meeting. A screeching woman stood up and blocked the images. Morelli cancelled the meeting, which might have been the plan. [See Link #4] Bernie ?Media Man? Farber likes to charge his critics with ?anti-semitism?. These kinds of guys have all the money it takes to use Canadian courts as a tool to bully people and prevent legitimate criticism. Just by publishing this piece today, we are putting ourselves at risk. Are they going to try to ?Ahenakew? us? Farber mercilessly attacked Indigenous elder, David Ahenakew, for privately muttering something critical about the Israelis. Meanwhile the corporate media has brushed aside complaints about defamatory statements made, on the record, to the press by Dick Pound in his official capacity as a member of the International Olympic Committee and the board of McGill University. Monte ?The Politician? Kwinter, a long time Toronto MPP seems to be the man who carries the Zionist message to the legislature. Eric ?The Lobbyist? Maldoff of the Canada Israeli Committee seems to be pushing all things Israeli. Morris ?The Money Man? Zbar of the United Jewish Appeal was Deputy Minister of Correctional Services. He sits on the Correctional Services Canada "transformation team" involved in setting up these Ongwehonwe ?porta-prisons?, which can be quickly set up, dismantled and moved before anyone can complain about it. The Canada Israeli Committee Board has some high flyers. Many are in ?real estate? development on our territory that we never ceded. CIC has offices in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Israel. [See Link #6]. See who CIC Board members are at the end of this article. What do Israeli checkpoints have to do with Ontario lives? Unless that is what is being planned for us. If we don?t turn this around we may be left with no control our lives with devastating consequences, like no access to jobs, schools or hospitals and no way to defend ourselves. Iakoha?ko:wa, Eagle Watch, Sharbot Lake MNN Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com kittoh at storm.ca katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Go to MNN ?Tyendinaga? category for more stories; New MNN Books Available now! Purchase t-shirts, mugs and more at our CafePressStore http://www.cafepress.com/mohawknews; Subscribe to MNN for breaking news updates http://.mohawknationnews.com/news/subscription.php; Sign Women Title Holders petition! http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Iroquois Note: These challenges of abuses at the border require support and money. Your financial help is needed and appreciated. Please send your donations to PayPal at www.mohawknationnews.com, or by check or money order to ?MNN Mohawk Nation News?, Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0. Nia:wen thank you very much. #1 - http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/prg/le/bs/index-eng.aspx http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/whti-ivho/menu-eng.html http://ogov.newswire.ca/ontario/GPOE/2008/06/03/c7937.html?lmatch=&lang=_e.html http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/dandv/driver/enhancedcards.htm http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/bills/status_of_legislation.do?locale=en http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8530 (Official communique of Israel's Ministry of Public Security, http://www.mops.gov.il/BPEng/MOPS+News/DicterWithCanadianMinister_30_10_07.htm ) http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/media/nr/2008/nr20080323-1-eng.aspx http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/media/nr/2008/nr20080323-1-eng.aspx #2 http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/april23update.htm #3 http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/hamilton.htm and http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/sept21speech.htm . http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/policecomplaint.htm. http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/khaled.pdf ) http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/policecomplaint.htm . #4 http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/hamilton.htm to prevent information from being heard publicly. #5 - http://statismwatch.ca/2005/02/28/ontario-police-chiefs-travel-to-israel-to-study-police-tactics/ http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/policecomplaint.htm http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/media/nr/2008/nr20080328-2-eng.aspx http://www.skylinkgroup.com/default.asp Canadian Jewish Congress cjc.ca Canada Israel Committee http://www.cicweb.ca/aboutcic/bod.cfm Quebec Israel Committee http://www.qic-cqi.org/ (514) 934-0771 T?l?c. : (514) 933-8211 #6 -http://www.cicweb.ca/aboutcic/bod.cfm Canada Israeli Committee. Many of the members of the board are real estate tycoons who wheel and deal on our unsurrendered Ongwehonwe territories. CIC is a well-financed lobby group. They seem to like to brag, exaggerate and out-do each other. It looks like the kind of thing people do when they want to pad up their resumes. They set up organizations and then put themselves and each other on them: Moshe Ronen, World Jewish Congress, Skylink Aviation, First Capital Realty Corporation with shopping centre portfolios; mosheronen at cicweb.ca; Jason Caron, Heenan Blaikie LLP Montreal, Quebec-Israel Committee; jasoncaron at cicweb.ca; David Kroft, Fillmore Riley LLP, Manitoba; davidkroft at cicweb.ca; Marc Gold, Maxwell Cummings & Sons Holdings Limited, Professor McGill University. marcgold at cicweb.ca, Canada-Israel Committee, CJA, United Israel Appeals Federations Canada, Jewish Agency for Israel. Ken Boessenkool, Hill & Knowlton Canada, a lobby for the military industry, advisor and strategist to Stephen Harper, C.D. Howe Institute ?think tank?; kenboessenkool at cicweb.ca; Father Raymond J. de Souza, Roman Catholic priest, Kingston, Ontario, columnist for National Post, Vatican press corps, chaplain, Queen's University, itching to become a bishop or cardinal. [When are they going to appoint a Jewish Pope?]; rjdesouza at sympatico.ca [See Link #5]; David Kroft, Fillmore Riley LLP, commercial litigation and insolvency law. Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, Liberal Party of Canada; Michael Diamond, business consultant and investor; Dr. Michael Elterman, clinical psychologist specializing in forensic evaluations throughout entire Pacific North West [where there are lots of Indigenous communities], Canadian Jewish Congress' Pacific; Professor Karen Eltis, Hebrew University Jerusalem and Columbia University School of Law; Barbara Farber, CEO Leikin Group, Ottawa-based real estate. Ottawa Jewish Community; Len Farber, Ogilvy Renault, tax policy; Paul Forseth, former MP, Canada Israel Friendship Group in Parliament; Rob Gasner, Toronto, Re/max Realtron Realty Inc., residential and commercial re-sales. Canadian Jewish Congress ? Ontario; Brenda Gewurz, Proment Corporation, a residential real-estate company in Montreal. Hebrew Academy. CJA, Hillel, Jewish Community Foundation. Husband is a real-estate developer; Paul Goldman, corporate and securities law. Goodmans LLP. BC Securities Commission. Writes on interjurisdictional and cross-border issues; Cary Green, Verdiroc develops properties for residential, commercial, industrial and mixed-use projects [on Ongwehone land]. Alex Halpern, Canadian Federation of Jewish Students (CFJS) at McGill, United Israel Appeal Federations Canada (UIAFC); Donna Holbrook, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem [ICEJ], AMEN (Anti-Semitism Must End Now), calls herself a Christian Zionist. Claude Lajeunesse, President Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC), TD Meloche Monnex and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). Canadian Liver Foundation to take care of those who get sick from nuclear radiation or drinking too much?; Eric Maldoff, Heenan Blaikie Montreal, land claims negotiator, general destroyer of Ongwehone who foments trouble for us through his PMO and government connections; Brian Morris, who works at the ?apple tree? Morris & Morris L.L.P, B'nai Brith Canada; Berl Nadler, McGill & Harvard Law Schools. Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP. UJA Toronto. Joe Nadler, Reform Movement for Progressive Judaism. ? Nancy ?meddlesome? Rosenfeld, runs Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. Stephen R. Bronfman Foundation. Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation. Special Advisor to Montreal Mayor Pierre Bourque [as any Montrealer will tell you, she must have given him some lousy advice]. Montreal YM-YWHA where she works out. Trans Canada Trail where she wants to jog. Carol Ryder, White Iron Group of Companies. Lisa Samson, Ottawa. Strategy Corp, public affairs and government relations. Key member of Conservative Party ?war room? [war against us?] Frequent media commentator and blabbermouth for Conservatives; Mark Waldman, Tacfast Systems International, global flooring [we all need something to stand on], Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), Access Middle East and United Way. "Friends of America" to counter anti-American sentiment in Canada. [Has his work cut out for him]. Advisor to CIJA and Friends of Simon Weisenthal Centre that promotes history of holocaust guilt and Zionism. Hymie Weinstein Q.C., Myers Weinberg LLP. Lectures Bar Admission Course, Winnipeg Police Academy, and National Criminal Law Program of Federation of Law Societies. CIC Honorary Board Brent Belzberg, Toronto. Torquest Partners Inc. Manages and mismanages over $700M private equity funds. CIBC director. Four Seasons Hotels. DayMen Lowepro. Canadian Council for Israel & Jewish Advocacy, "CIJA"; Harrowston Corp. (formerly First City Financial Corp.); First City Capital Markets; Tory, Tory, Deslauriers & Binnington. Joseph Gabay, Sepharade Francophone, Hillel of the Federation Sepharadie Canadienne and Qu?bec. He got some kind of Sepharade award. Teaches math at CEGEP Rosemont. Married to Dolly [is that the cloned sheep?]; Hon. E. Leo Kolber, P.C., Claridge Inc. CEMP Investments, trusts set up by the late Sam Bronfman. Fairview Corporation real estate. Cadillac Fairview Corporation. Senate of Canada [til he got too old and his snoring kept the other senators awake]. Revenue Committee of the Liberal Party of Canada [which could be one of the reasons they?re now broke]. Some Ontario politicians. Rick Bartolucci Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services rick.bartolucci at liberal.ola.org; Dave Levac Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services dave.levac at liberal.ola.org; Garfield Dunlop Critic, Community Safety and Correctional Services garfield.dunlop at pc.ola.org; Peter Kormos Critic, Community Safety and Correctional Services peter.kormos at ndp.ola.org; Brad Duguid Minister of Aboriginal Affairs brad.duguid at liberal.ola.org; Jeff Leal Minister of Aboriginal Affairs jeff.leal at liberal.ola.org; Norm Miller Critic, Aboriginal Affairs norm.miller at pc.ola.org; Gilles Bisson Critic, Aboriginal Affairs gilles.bisson at ndp.ola.org; dmcquinty.mpp at liberal.ola.org; randy at ruralrevolution.com, info at randyhillier.com, holland.m at parl.gc.ca, pm at pm.gc.ca, Reid.S at parl.gc.ca, Harper.S at parl.gc.ca, Nicholson.R at parl.gc.ca, Day.S at parl.gc.ca, ottawa at chuckstrahl.com, john.yakabuskico at pc.ola.org, jim.wilsonco at pc.ola.org, tim.hudakco at pc.ola.org, hhampton-qp at ndp.on.ca, pkormos-qp at ndp.on.ca, gphillips.mpp at liberal.ola.org; dramsay.mpp at liberal.ola.org, gilles at gillesbisson.com, mbryant.mpp at liberal.ola.org, leader at greenparty.ca, info at greenparty.ca, rlm at xplornet.com, lorraine.rekmans at greenparty.ca, jwarnock at ontarioeast.net, doherty at kos.net, hhampton-qp at ndp.on.ca, norm.sterlingco at pc.ola.org, president at lisamacleod.ca, ahorwath-qp at ndp.on.ca, joyce.savoline at pc.ola.org, dzimmer.mpp at liberal.ola.org, tabunsp-qp at ndp.on.ca, laurie.scott at pc.ola.org, robert.runcimanco at pc.ola.org, toby.barrett at pc.ola.org, donna.cansfield at liberal.ola.org, michael.gravelle at liberal.ola.org, From tal1 at cogeco.ca Wed Nov 5 21:04:35 2008 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 23:04:35 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Brasscheck TV: It's over...almost Message-ID: <703989EF1285448091115828BDDB9041@TonyPC> > Unless the Republicans figure out a way > to steal it back...it's almost over. > > The criminal enterprise that's occupied the > White House for eight years has finally > been evicted. > > Let's hope the new guy is better. > > But it's not *completely* over until Karl Rove and > George Bush are in jail. > > In case you're wondering why the Republicans > didn't succeed in stealing Ohio and Florida > (again), a funny thing happened in an Ohio court > the day before the election. > > Details: > > http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/472.html > > - Brasscheck > > P.S. By the way, that piece of self-propelled > garbage Congressman Tom Feeney who hired programmers > to write a program to "flip" vote counts and who "delivered" > Florida to Bush in 2000 just got voted out of office > in Florida. > > There's room in jail for him too. > > http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/472.html > - Brasscheck > > P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and > videos with friends and colleagues. > > That's how we grow. Thanks. > > ============================== > > > > Brasscheck TV > 2380 California St. > San Francisco, CA 94115 > > To unsubscribe or change subscriber options visit: > http://www.aweber.com/z/r/?zAxs7OwctMwcLIysjIzMtEa0zJycTGzMbA== > > From tal1 at cogeco.ca Wed Nov 5 21:23:31 2008 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 23:23:31 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Western Air Strike Kills Nearly 100 Afghan Civilians Message-ID: <5A595DFB14D84D89807E7DC167CAE804@TonyPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Rozoff To: stopnato at yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 6:15 PM Subject: [stopnato] Western Air Strike Kills Nearly 100 Afghan Civilians http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=74445§ionid=351020403 Press TV November 5, 2008 '95 civilians killed in Kandahar tragedy' An Afghan parliamentarian says at least 95 civilians were killed in a US-led coalition's air strike on a wedding party on Tuesday. MP Shakiba Hashemi, the representative of Kandahar, where the tragedy took place, told the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) on Wednesday that according to witnesses, 95 civilians had been killed in the air raid and several women and children had been injured. The wedding party came under the US-led coalition's aerial attack in Wocha Bakhta village some 80 km north of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The Parliamentarian added that 12 civilians had been sent to Kandahar hospital and four others were transferred to Pakistan for medical treatment. According to Hashemi, the bride was injured and sent to a hospital in Kandahar while the groom is still missing. The Kandahar representative denied the claim by US officials that the incident had taken place at night and it was a result of darkness. Only in 2008, more than 4,700 Afghans were killed in Afghanistan. =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato To subscribe, send an e-mail to: stopnato-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages http://lists.topica.com/lists/ANTINATO/read ============================== __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Database | Polls | Calendar MARKETPLACE From tal1 at cogeco.ca Wed Nov 5 21:24:22 2008 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 23:24:22 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Caucasus War Was West's Test Of Russia's Resolve: Medvedev Message-ID: <5843C80080F24C13B9317B6C4506EBF5@TonyPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Rozoff To: stopnato at yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 5:54 PM Subject: [stopnato] Caucasus War Was West's Test Of Russia's Resolve: Medvedev http://civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=19887 Civil Georgia November 5, 2008 Medvedev: 'Barbaric Attack' on S.Ossetia was a Test for Russia -"The conflict in the Caucasus was used as a pretext for bringing NATO military vessels into the Black Sea and afterwards, for imposing on Europe the U.S. anti-missile systems in an accelerated manner; that will in itself certainly trigger Russia's response and I will speak about it [these measures] later [in the speech]. "So, the local adventure of the Tbilisi regime has triggered a fueling up of tensions far outside the region, in the entirety of Europe and worldwide. It questioned the efficiency of international institutions on providing security. It actually destabilized the principles of global order." Tbilisi - The August war with Georgia and global financial crisis was among issues addressed by Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, in his first annual state of the nation address on November 5. In his address he told the lawmakers from the Russia's lower and upper houses of the parliaments that Russia would not step back in the Caucasus. "This year has become for our citizens not only the year of new hopes and achievements, the events have occurred which have become, I am sure, very significant for each citizen of our country and at the same time very serious test for the entire Russia," he said in the beginning of his speech. "These are barbaric aggression against South Ossetia, as well as the increasing global financial crisis - two extremely different problems, which have common features and, it can be said, common origin," he said. "The attack of the Georgian army on Russian peacekeepers has turned into a tragedy for thousands of people, for whole peoples. "As a result of this provocation, tension has significantly increased in the entire Caucasus region. "The conflict in the Caucasus was used as a pretext for bringing NATO military vessels into the Black Sea and afterwards, for imposing on Europe the U.S. anti-missile systems in an accelerated manner; that will in itself certainly trigger Russia's response and I will speak about it [these measures] later [in the speech]." "So, the local adventure of the Tbilisi regime has triggered a fueling up of tensions far outside the region, in the entirety of Europe and worldwide. It questioned the efficiency of international institutions on providing security. It actually destabilized the principles of global order." Late in his speech Medvedev again spoke about the August events and said that Russia's "peace enforcement" measures were not directed against "the Georgian people," but aimed at protecting S.Ossetia from "criminal adventurism of the Tbilisi regime." "The decision on peace enforcement on the aggressor and the operation carried out by our militaries were directed not against Georgia, not against the Georgian people, but for the sake of saving the residents of the republic and the Russian peacekeepers; for providing firm and long-term security of the peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia against the recurrence of criminal adventurism of the Tbilisi regime," Medvedev said. "The Caucasus crisis has again demonstrated that use of force by one of the conflicting parties cannot provide long-standing solutions. In this connection, based on the norms of international law, we will further promote eradication of hotbeds of instability in the neighboring regions. He said that number of conclusions could be done based on the August events. "The first and major conclusion is that actually a new geopolitical reality has been established," Medvedev said. "The August crisis has simply accelerated the arrival of a moment of truth. We have really proven, including for them who have sponsored the current ruling regime in Georgia, that we are capable of protecting our citizens; we are capable of defending our national interests and to effectively perform peacekeeping duties. Another conclusion, he said, was that Russia had "significantly restored its military potential." He, however, also added that the Russia's military command "should analyze not only the successes, but the shortcomings as well and learn the most serious lessons from it." "The reaction to the August 8 events and to Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia has confirmed that we live in the world of double standards," he continued. "We have acted responsibly in the interests of restoration of international legality and justice, understanding that any delay in those attempts would have been fraught with a more serious humanitarian disaster. "Against this background, the stance of our partners seems extremely biased - quite recently they spared no efforts to achieve the separation of Kosovo from Serbia bypassing international law and to recognize this breakaway region as a subject of international law, and now they are criticizing Russia as if nothing has happened at all." While criticizing the United States, Medvedev in his speech also noted that "the South Ossetian crisis has demonstrated the capability of effective decisions by Europe and we will enhance our relations with Europe in the field of security." .... =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato To subscribe, send an e-mail to: stopnato-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages http://lists.topica.com/lists/ANTINATO/read ============================== __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Database | Polls | Calendar Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe Recent Activity 3New Members Visit Your Group Give Back Yahoo! for Good Get inspired by a good cause. Y! Toolbar Get it Free! easy 1-click access to your groups. Yahoo! Groups Start a group in 3 easy steps. Connect with others.. __,_._,___ From tal1 at cogeco.ca Wed Nov 5 21:29:25 2008 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 23:29:25 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Russia To Deploy New Missile System Near Poland, NATO Border Message-ID: <1181025A62D94CECA5D8A6C79A7CDF1A@TonyPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Rozoff To: stopnato at yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 9:13 AM Subject: [stopnato] Russia To Deploy New Missile System Near Poland, NATO Border http://en.rian.ru/russia/20081105/118136001.html Russian Information Agency Novosti November 5, 2008 Russia to deploy Iskander missiles near Polish border - Medvedev MOSCOW - Russia will deploy short-range Iskander missiles in its exclave of Kaliningrad next to Poland in response to U.S. missile plans for Europe, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday. "An Iskander missile system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad Region to neutralize if necessary the anti-ballistic missile system in Europe," Medvedev said in his first state of the nation address to parliament. Moscow has repeatedly expressed its opposition to Washington's plans to place 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and an accompanying radar in the Czech Republic, saying they threaten Russia's national security. The United States claims the new bases are needed to counter missile attacks by "rogue states" such as Iran. Medvedev also said that Russia had cancelled plans to take three missile regiments out of service in a region to the west of Moscow. "We earlier planned to remove three missile regiments of a missile division deployed in Kozelsk [Kaluga Region] from combat duty and disband the division by 2010. I have made a decision to withdraw these plans," Medvedev said, noting that Russia had been forced to take this measure. The division has RS-18 Stiletto intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles). The U.S. signed deals on the missile shield with Warsaw and Prague during the summer. Polish and Czech lawmakers have yet to ratify the agreements. The planned missile shield has been one of the main points of contention between Russia and the U.S., former Cold War foes. Russian officials earlier said Moscow could also deploy its Iskander tactical missiles and strategic bombers in Belarus, and warned that Russia could target its missiles at Poland. Medvedev said in his address that Russia would not be drawn into an arms race, but would continue to ensure the security of its citizens. He said that Russia was faced with threats and challenges in particular "the emergence of a global missile defense system, the surrounding of Russia with military bases, unrestrained NATO expansion and other 'gifts'." "We will certainly not allow ourselves to be drawn into an arms race, but we are forced to take these into account," he said. ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.rbcnews.com/free/20081105155601.shtml RosBusinessConsulting November 5, 2008 Russia to apply ECM to offset U.S. missile shield threat Moscow - Electronic counter measures (ECM) will be applied from the Kaliningrad region in Russia against any new elements of the U.S. missile defense system, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asserted in his annual address to parliament on Wednesday. He added that an Iskander missile system would also be deployed in the Kaliningrad region to offset any possible threats from the U.S. missile shield. In the same vein, Medvedev pointed out that Russia wanted to counteract common threats in cooperation with other states. He said Russia had an integration framework as part of the Union State and EurAsEC. Moreover, Russia aims to step up its efforts to deepen and expand interaction in the military and political spheres as part of the OSCE, as well. A productive dialog in this relation has already taken place at a summit in Moscow, Medvedev stressed. ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=13241096&PageNum=0 Itar-Tass November 5, 2008 Medvedev lists measures against US missile shield MOSCOW - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev listed the measures he had approved to counter the deployment of US missile defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic, saying they will include suspension of scheduled missile elimination and deployment of a missile unit in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. In his first annual state of the nation address on Wednesday the president said he had decided to keep the missile unit near the city of Kozelsk, which was scheduled to be scrapped, to deploy an Iskander missile complex in Kaliningrad, which is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, and conduct radio electronic jamming of the US missile shield from Kaliningrad. The Russian Navy will be also engaged in the mission. At the same time he expressed hope that relations with the United States would improve under new President Barack Obama. =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato To subscribe, send an e-mail to: stopnato-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages http://lists.topica.com/lists/ANTINATO/read ============================== __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Database | Polls | Calendar Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe Recent Activity 3New Members Visit Your Group Give Back Yahoo! for Good Get inspired by a good cause. Y! Toolbar Get it Free! easy 1-click access to your groups. Yahoo! Groups Start a group in 3 easy steps. Connect with others.. __,_._,___ From tal1 at cogeco.ca Wed Nov 5 21:30:00 2008 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 23:30:00 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Main Russian Demand On US: International Arms Control Message-ID: <7EE977BA51C24C1FA19F410F4D40020F@TonyPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Rozoff To: stopnato at yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 9:07 AM Subject: [stopnato] Main Russian Demand On US: International Arms Control http://www.interfax.com/3/443065/news.aspx Interfax November 5, 2008 Medvedev hopes new U.S. administration will strengthen ties with Russia MOSCOW - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said he hopes that Washington's new administration will choose a policy aimed at strengthening relations with Russia. "We hope that our partners - the new U.S. administration - will make a choice in favor of a full-fledged relationship with Russia," Medvedev said in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on Wednesday. "Progress in Russian-American cooperation would be key," he said. "It is not a secret that a large number of countries, acting by inertia, tend to look back on where the wind blows in Russia's relations with the United States. "It is true that these relations are not going through the easiest period today," Medvedev said. "We also have a large number of questions, including those of a moral nature," the Russian president said. "But I would like to stress that we have no problems with the American people. We have no inherent anti-Americanism," he said. "Plenty of unfavorable tendencies have accumulated in the international situation in recent years. "Responses to new threats can be found only by collective efforts. That is why we stand for well- thought-out reforms of the UN," Medvedev said. "Based on that, we need to take steps to promote the international arms control regime," the Russian president said, adding that cooperation between Moscow and Washington on the last matter "is particularly important." =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato To subscribe, send an e-mail to: stopnato-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages http://lists.topica.com/lists/ANTINATO/read ============================== __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Database | Polls | Calendar MARKETPLACE From rainy at tellas.gr Wed Nov 5 23:06:11 2008 From: rainy at tellas.gr (Stathis Stassinos) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:06:11 +0200 Subject: [A-List] Voters Pick Obama But Local Progressive Agendas Flop In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49128953.4040207@tellas.gr> Public Opinion is so easily transformed. Its only natural that people would vote conservatively after so many years of reactionary government. Sad but true, herd mentality is not only a wall street phenomenon. I trully believe that if Obama pushes for a progressive agenda, 5 years from now the same people would vote more progressively for the same issues. > ------------------------------ > > Message: 12 > Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 19:43:04 -0500 > From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" > Subject: [A-List] Voters Pick Obama But Local Progressive Agendas Flop > To: A-List , Rad-Green > > > Voters pick Obama but local progressive agendas flop > > 6 hours ago > > WASHINGTON (AFP) ? Despite a landslide for Democrats in the White > House race, Americans voted more conservatively on Tuesday in a myriad > of referendums on banning gay marriage and abortion. > > Voters in some states rejected gay marriage rights and affirmative > action and approved restrictions on adoption for unmarried couples. > > However, results were mixed as other referenda across the country -- > some 35 states were asked to consider 153 ballot questions -- showed > voters in favor of assisted suicide and against outright bans on > abortion. > > In California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas, voters rejected gay marriage. > > In Arkansas, they voted to prevent anyone who isn't married from > adopting a child. The decision was decried by gay rights supporters > who said it would limit their ability to adopt children. > > But voters rejected a near-total ban on abortion in South Dakota and > Colorado and allowed assisted suicide in Washington state, making it > the second US state after Oregon to allow the procedure for terminally > ill people. > > Jennie Drage-Bower, senior election analyst with the National > Conference of State Legislators, said abortion limits do not have a > strong history. > > "Restriction on abortion has been on the ballot 23 times since 1980 > and only five of those have been approved by voters," she said. "So > that's not really an issue that voters historically have been > receptive to on the ballot." > > In another politically charged issue, voters in five states were asked > to rule on affirmative action, or targeted policies that aim to > increase employment and education for minorities. > > In Nebraska the programs, which are often slammed by critics as > showing unfair racial preferences, were rejected 58 percent to 42 > percent. In Colorado, the result was still too close to call > Wednesday. > > California's gay marriage ban passed with 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent against. > > Known as "Proposition 8," the proposal was trumpeted by conservative > groups as the people's way of overturning the state Supreme Court's > ruling in May that legalized gay marriage. > > From shimogamo at attglobal.net Thu Nov 6 01:35:17 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:35:17 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The Battle for Obama's Economic Soul Message-ID: <4912AC45.1070403@attglobal.net> by Robert Scheer Truthdig (October 21 2008) The battle for Barack Obama's economic soul is on in earnest, and it has nothing to do with the "European socialism" that John McCain attempted to use as an epithet against him. The Republican quickly dropped that line of attack, perhaps because the European Union's brand of democratic socialism has proved more effective in regulating the rapacious financial markets at the heart of the economic meltdown. Besides, the socialist British Labor Party has been President Bush's most loyal supporter of the Iraq occupation that McCain has made the test of true patriotism. It would be encouraging if the Democratic presidential candidate did indeed attempt to learn something from Europe's democratic, and barely socialist, governing left concerning the welfare of those who are not super-rich, that is, how to provide quality health care and education for all - but that is not what is happening. Instead, Obama has turned to the same American "free market" elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that crowd, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning. Key among the good guys is former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who consistently challenged the radical anti-regulatory crusade of Alan Greenspan, his immediate successor at the Fed. Greenspan's all-too-successful effort to give the banking lobby everything it had ever dreamed of was abetted by two Clinton-era secretaries of the treasury, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Unfortunately, the two, who should have mustered the grace to depart public life in deep contrition over their failed policies, are prominent in the Obama campaign. Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale. What followed, thanks to a rare display of bipartisan teamwork, was a total dismantling of the regulatory regime that President Franklin D Roosevelt had put in place during the New Deal, thus undermining the finest legacy of the Democratic Party. Under the guidance of Rubin and Summers, Clinton signed off on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Gramm's two key pieces of legislation, during his final two years in the White House. The first beneficiary of that legislation was Citigroup, which was allowed to merge with Travelers Insurance, where Rubin became a director after leaving the government. In his position on the executive committee of a floundering Citigroup, Rubin insisted as late as January of this year that a serious crisis was not forming. In a January 31 article in Fortune headlined "Robert Rubin: What meltdown?" the subheading states: "In a talk on Wednesday [January 30], the Citigroup director said the current financial upheaval is just cyclical. And none of the blame that there was to assign went to Wall Street." The writer of the article, Katie Benner, quoted Rubin as saying that the problems were "all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption", neatly exonerating his own bank of any responsibility, even though Citigroup had already written down over $24 billion in bad mortgage losses. At that time, Rubin was advising Hillary Rodham Clinton, while Obama, listening to Volcker, took the opposite tack, issuing a warning in a major address two months after Rubin's talk that the United States was experiencing the most profound economic crisis since the Great Depression. Obama specifically cited the legislation that Rubin had supported and cautioned, "Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it". Although Rubin came over to the Obama campaign after Hillary Clinton's defeat in the primaries, it does seem that Volcker and legendary investor Warren Buffett, another fierce critic of Clinton-era deregulation, are holding the floor for the time being. Buffett has been increasingly visible in the Obama campaign. More than five years ago, Buffett charged that the new investment devices, the "hybrid instruments" and "credit swaps" with which taxpayers are now stuck, were "financial weapons of mass destruction". Let's hope that a President Obama will keep Buffett and Volcker close. They are certainly not the European socialists conjured up in yet another mean-spirited and irrational outburst of the McCain campaign, and their vision for the country seems to extend beyond their own bank accounts. _____ Robert Scheer is the editor in chief of Truthdig and author of a new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright (c) 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081021_the_battle_for_obamas_economic_soul/ http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From critical.montages at gmail.com Thu Nov 6 02:09:15 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 04:09:15 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Masters of the Universe Message-ID: 'Masters of the universe' need to wake up to the real world By Aline van Duyn Published: October 31 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2008 02:00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The focus now has become the nine US banks which are receiving $125bn of public money. They have spent or reserved $108bn for employee pay and bonuses in the first nine months of 2008, nearly the same as last year. From munkle55 at gmail.com Thu Nov 6 02:46:58 2008 From: munkle55 at gmail.com (Matthew Wilson) Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 09:46:58 +0000 Subject: [A-List] The Biggest Bank Heist Ever Message-ID: <92bc092f0811060146m6522f0b9qf4f3430787fc1e52@mail.gmail.com> http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45826,opinion,bail-out-is-the-biggest-bank-heist-ever The Biggest Bank Heist Ever Philip Delves Broughton The First Post Daily November 6 2008 With every passing day of economic woe, the scale of the heist just perpetrated against America's taxpayers by the country's largest banks becomes more apparent. In the shadow of the presidential election, the nine biggest banks were given $125bn of taxpayer money with the understanding they would send this fresh capital coursing into the economy in the form of loans. It was a plan inspired by Gordon Brown's decision to recapitalise Britain's main banks. Unfortunately, the US government forgot to get the lending requirement in writing. Instead, the banks are sitting on the money, earning interest and mulling mergers and acquisitions and replenishing bonus pools for their employees. A stinging letter from Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers and a bullhorn from traditional American industry, to Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs banker-turned-Treasury Secretary, is now in wide circulation and its contents should have Wall Street barricading its doors. Hank Paulson spent $10bn on a stake in Goldman Sachs worth only $5bn Gerard makes several devastating points. The first is that the Treasury grossly overpaid for the stakes it has taken in these nine major banks. Twenty days before Paulson invested $10bn in Goldman Sachs, the investor Warren Buffett invested $5bn for a stake of equal value. Thus Paulson paid twice as much as he should have to his old employer. This pattern, Gerard argues, was repeated across the board. Again and again the Treasury paid double what it should have, giving away half of its investment as a gift to shareholders. "This is no different than if you paid me $10,000 for a car for which no one else would pay more than $5,000," Gerard wrote. "If this deal is the model for how you intend to spend the whole $700bn that you got from Congress, then it would appear that you intend to reward the institutions that have driven our nation, and now it appears the whole world, into its most serious economic crisis in 75 years, with a gift of $350bn from the American taxpayers, who have watched 760,000 of their jobs disappear over just the past nine months." He concluded: "Out in the real economy, we need our government to invest in creating sustainable shared prosperity - not play Santa Claus to the scoundrels who have laid waste to the American Dream." The politicians who approved the Paulson plan are also suffering from acute remorse. Barney Frank, one of the Democrats who shaped the bail-out plan, said: "I am deeply disappointed that a number of financial institutions are distorting the legislation that Congress passed at the President's request. Increased lending activity is the only legitimate purpose for taxpayer funding of these institutions." He has promised to haul the banks in this month to explain themselves. Though, in truth, there is little he can do now the cheques have been written. The legislation was purposely drafted to leave the banks some discretion. And now they have the money, the banks will argue that the most important thing is the stability of the financial system. That may be best served by consolidation and mergers among banks. Or by retaining the best staff with decent compensation. Or keeping investors on board by paying them a good dividend. Anything but lending. The purpose of the bail-out was not to help consumers, but mismanaged banks The banks also point to lower demand for borrowing. Companies and individuals are trying to pay off their debts now rather than take on more. And those in the most desperate need of money are probably the least creditworthy. Banks do not see enough trustworthy borrowers out there. So it becomes clearer and clearer that the purpose of the bail-out was not to help consumers by keeping credit lines open but to prop up banks whose own mismanagement had left them financially exposed. Any bank which has taken government money in Britain or the United States would have to be deranged to pay out the usual bonuses to employees this year. But they are adept at finding ways around this, through deferred pay, pension top-ups and share schemes. As he stares down the first $1 trillion annual deficit, President-elect Obama may like to start by taking some of that back from Wall Street. FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 6, 2008 From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Nov 6 07:32:22 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:32:22 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Mark Jones: Theses on the world conjuncture Message-ID: <4912B9A5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> : Mark Jones: Theses on the world conjuncture The capitalist world system is sinking into turmoil and chaos. Imperialism won a decade more life for itself by plundering the fallen socialist world. The 'fire sale at the end of history' consumed a staggering accumulation of values and assets, the hard-earned achievement of decades of sacrifice and labour by generations of Soviet men and women. It helped fuel the greatest Wall Street boom in history and the most-sustained period of US expansion. By some estimates more than three trillion dollars was pumped out of Russia and eastern Europe between 1990-1998 -- a sum equivalent to the gross national product of France, Italy and Britain combined. No-one knows what the true losses are, and the haemorrhage continues to bleed this vast territory white, at the costs of millions of lives, of the despoliation of the Soviet resource-base, the ransacking of nature and unrestrained environmental destruction, and by stealing the futures of hundreds of millions of lives; stealing even the food from their mouths (Russian nutritional levels have fallen drastically) (see Russia). Such a catastrophe has few historical precedents: the annihilation of the native American civilizations after the 16th century is one. But the conquest of the Americas, the genocidal extirpation of at least 70 million native Americans slaughtered or dead through famine and disease, the wholesale enslavement of African peoples and their mobilization in the greatest flowering of slave-production since ancient times: all this bloody massacre and plunder, which formed primitive accumulation and allowed 18th century protocapitalism to launch the Industrial Revolution: this was the work of three centuries! And the equivalent plunder of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been the work of less than a decade... Such is the frantic acceleration of capitalism's moloch-machinery, such is the intensification of the frenzy of exploitation which sucks whole peoples and generations into its maw; and still it is not enough. The sacking of socialism released vast new resources, in particular energy (oil above all) and enabled a dramatic hike in the profit-rate in the imperial centres. It has directly fuelled the boom in asset-values in the Anglo-Saxon centres and helped stabilize the German-led European Union. Newly-unified Germany could afford to spend $800 bn incorporating east Germany (the former German Democratic Republic), to power the new revanchist German imperialism, yet even this vast sum has proven insufficient to overcome the profound dynamic of centralisation and concentration of capital which is the hallmark of the area. The German revanchists tried to swim against the tide which sucks value out of the neocolonies into the metropoles. For historical and chauvinist reasons they tried to incorporate the East German working class but this politics has been negated by the main trend at work in the world today, namely to leach out value from the peripheries. This is a most striking evidence of the elemental force of the dynamics of imploding capitalism. US imperialism is the heart of the vortex, and this is the pole which draws profit and superprofit to itself, bleaching white the world system. Germany, the second-strongest imperialism, was unable to resist the centripetal process and today, despite its huge subsidising of east German reconstruction, the wasteland of unemployment and despair which capitalism creates in all its neocolonies is as much in evidence in east Germany as anywhere else. (see BasicFacts) China, too, under the Deng Xiaoping clique has become fully reincorporated into the circuits of world capitalism. The Chinese revanchists have raised the banner of renewed Chinese imperialism and aspire to compete with the existing imperial powers. Explosive social contradictions have opened up in the space of former Chinese socialism but the drive to construct a world-centre of capitalist accumulation in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong axis has failed. China cannot escape the dramatic crisis unfolding in Asia, as cannibal-capitalism gnaws its living tissue. China is inescapably caught in the apocalyptic spiral of crisis now dragging the capitalist world system down into chaos, disintegration and war. And a terrible price has already been paid by the Chinese working class for the benefits its parasitic rulers hoped to gain from joining the imperialist club. The achievements of Chinese socialism have been demolished, the assets painfully accumulated since 1949 are being gutted with the same frenzy as in the former Soviet Union, while tens of millions of dispossessed Chinese workers -- robbed of their socialist birthright -- are conscripted into the cauldron of the Chinese coastal enclaves. The collapse of the world system is proceeding at an ever- increasing pace, and the tempo of Chinese accumulation has proven wholly insufficient to drag Chinese capitalism free of the vortex. At the same time, a whole new dimension of crisis is revealed beneath the growing rents and tears of Chinese capitalism. It is daily clearer just what terrible price future generations of Chinese workers will pay for the alleged benefits of economic growth experienced in China since the fall of Chinese socialism. A terrible whirlwind of environmental and resource depletion has been sown by the so-called Green Revolution which has produced agricultural growth in China and throughout Asia. The mechanism of boosting crop-production also led directly to the dispossessing of hundreds of millions of peasants, decanting these discontented, hungry masses into the vast new megacities of Asia, from Bengal to Shenzhen. But this Green Revolution was won not only at terrible social cost; it has resulted in a wholly-unsustainable agriculture which is ravaging the environment and depleting water resources and soil fertility at an unprecedented rate. At the same time, environmental pollution has created a nightmare world for the multimillioned Asian masses. 'Booming' Asian capitalism has created this stinking environmental hell, characterised by the pollution of water bodies, coastal seas and the land, covering vast regions with global-warming induced forest fires, turning the megacities into uninhabitable death traps. The 'Keynesian' reformers seek to refuel Asian capitalism, but if they succeed then these fundamental resource and environment crises will only be intensified to an intolerable degree; in the next decades the collapse of Asian ecosystems will only accelerate, made worse as global warming raises sea levels and inundates coastal regions where almost a billion people now live. Thus Keynesian reforms, insofar as they are implemented successfully, will serve only to exacerbate the underlying crisis and to hasten the final day of revolutionary reckoning. The contradictions of Asian capitalism are ripening in Indonesia and elsewhwre and is producing aftershocks which are beyond the capacity of world imperialism to direct or control. The mechanism of crisis has assumed a capricious, uncontrollable character and this tendency itself is accelerating. Imperialism, which in the past has eagerly sought to intensify crises, in eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere, is now in a desperate struggle to slow down and contain evolving crisis, but does not know how. Whereas crisis has always been welcomed as a mechanism for destroying the working class, for increasing the tempo of exploitation through constant speed-ups and restructuring and the retirement of 'obsolete' capital (i.e., the productive systems painfully built-up in the course of development and often perfectly suited to the specific conditions in the neocolonies), today imperialism wants to apply the brakes to a world crisis spinning out of control. The political confusion this abrupt change of direction produces is best evidenced in the response of the West to the Asia meltdown. The shock troops of world imperialism -- its parastatal organs such as the World Bank and the IMF - responded to the Asian crisis by applying the tried and tested' methods of crisis INTENSIFICATION. Thus the IMF introduced shock-therapy regimes designed to intensify the rate of exploitation in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere and to further bind these neocolonies into the straitjacket of world capitalism; but the immediate result was to exacerbate the crisis and further destabilise these states and the Asian economy as a whole. This has led to turmoil, confusion and loss of political direction within imperialism, evidenced by the astonishing public criticisms voiced by leading IMF and World Bank bureaucrats and their political masters in Washington, who now openly prescribe the sort of 'Keynesian' social reforms they previously strove with might and main to bury forever. Now the IMF itself speaks of 'labour rights' and 'social protection', and has begun to address the need to reflate collapsing economies and to stimulate demand, all of which flatly contradicts the mission given to these policemen of finance capitalism. Only the continuing inflation of the stock market bubbles continues to conceal the truth. Do the new reformers have any chance of success? With their vocal and enthusiastic supporters in the Non-Governmental Organisations, 'left' social democrats, trade unions, and so-called 'Communist' Parties, these craven lickspittles of world imperialism are seizing their chance, voicing loud 'critiques' of the IMF strategy and urging their imperialist masters to 'relent', to be more 'forgiving' -- i.e., to forgive not just the debts run up by their fellow predators, the banks and speculators who have got caught in the collapse of Asian financial markets, a collapse their own greed catalysed, but also to 'forgive' the peoples of Indonesia, Korea and elsewhere the doubling and tripling of food and fuel prices and the other usurious exactions the IMF and Washington sought to impose. But the crisis of world capitalism has no precedent. Exemplified by incredibly sharp contradictions between wealth and over-accumulation in the metropolitan poles, and the despair and deflationary stagnation of the peripheries, with the relentless immiseration of the newly-urbanised landless, lumpen masses in the sprawling megacities, world capitalism presents a spectacle not seen since the shattering dramas of finance capitalism and imperialism which destroyed the Pax Britannica in 1914 and which led directly to both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the installation of the United States as 20th century hegemon. The historical cycle which began in 1917 has ended, and that the collapse of the USSR was only the harbinger of still more striking and apocalyptic events, in which the stake is not just the safety of US imperialism, but the survival of world capitalism itself. Therefore it is clear that the present world crisis is still in its early stages and that its further development will be marked by a rising tide of working class resistance. This is the real significance of the disarray and confusion now visible in the councils of imperialism. The stench of decay is growing; the dissolution of world-capitalism's structures and institutions is profound and unstoppable and therefore it will be the proletariat which will increasingly make the political running, as the crisis continues to deepen and the inexorable decomposition of morbid capitalism, the gangrene which has already begun to kill off its extremities, accelerates. The malevolent heart of vampire-imperialism beats inside the Washington Beltway. Here are the arrogant institutions of imperial power. Here are the great services -- the dark forces -- of its increasingly-open criminal rule. From here will belch forth the foulest, hitherto unknown technologies of repression, control, assassination, genocide and global war waged by US imperialism against the whole of humankind, including the US working class which itself has suffered much under the iron heel. For two decades the US working class experienced a decline in wage-levels and living standards with no precedent in US history. Renewed prosperity has come only from the hyper-exploitation of the colonial hinterlands, increasingly wracked with social and ecological crisis and entering a new kind of historical impasse. This rotten imperialism will be torn to pieces by the same vast forces that are wracking the capitalist world system. The neoliberal-globalist politics of the past decade is already foundering as its theoretical models and practical policies come under increasingly bitter attack by the forces of the capitulationist-left (the NGOs, academics, labour unions and soft social-democrats mentioned earlier). Keynesian reformism is being feverishly dusted off, the long-discredited politics of social reforms and demand management being hurriedly refreshed in the face of a catastrophic world deflation which is already exposing the brittle, shallow foundations of post-war 'miracle' Japan. Vamped-up Keynesianism, as we have seen, would only propel world capitalism deeper into the historical impasse from which there is no escape anyway. New cycles of capitalist growth, which can only be brief and local in any case, will only deepen the underlying contradictions between capitalist development and the environmental and resource-depletion costs which are the true source of the superprofits sucked by vampire imperialism from the material world which workers have to inhabit: the world of relentless exploitation and environmental degradation, with few of the promised compensations of consumerism. But in any case, political incoherence in the face of uncontrollable crisis does not permit imperialism to implement any single sustainable restructuring process. Thus in opposition to the 'soft- face of reforms, there is already visible the hideous mask of outright, bloody repression. While the beleaguered elites argue matters out inside Washington's Beltway, the dark forces of US imperialism are already taking matters in their own hands. While the 'humanistic' reformers bleat, the CIA and the Pentagon plots. The conscience stricken reformers have now begun to issue their pleas to the IMF and the World Bank, arrogantly claiming for themselves the right to speak on behalf of the world's oppressed and exploited, wringing their hands and venting crocodile tears for the fate on millions of lives imperilled by their own greed -- for none have so benefited from the merciless exploitation of the working class as the milk fed priesthood of US culture, as the harlots of the US intelligentsia, including the so-called left intellectuals - and it is nothing else but their own skins and their comfortable lives that they fear losing and shed tears over. Meanwhile the dark forces have begun their campaigns of assassination, torture, 'disappearances', political pressure, harassment and the like. And this is only the first claw of the monster lurking in the heart of imperialism. There can be no illusions that imperialism will ever give up freely what cannot be torn from its death grip by force. If history teaches anything, it teaches this: imperialism knows no limits. Imperialism will destroy the world sooner than surrender supremacy. The enemies of humankind and of all life on earth are already chafing at the bit, and they will be the first to sweep aside the bleating platoons of reformists blatherers. As the tides of class struggle rise and the fire of people's war meld together, imperialism will convert the politics of the neoliberal 'New World Order' into war. Secret war waged with all the unscrupulous, inhuman zeal of which the Pentagon and CIA are past masters: 'anti-insurgency' low-intensity operations designed to decapitate the proletariat by slaughtering its leaders. Proxy wars waged by the imperial satraps against one another, at Washington's behest. Irredentist and intercommunal wars fomented and instigated by the dark forces whose masters understand the vital importance of divide and rule and hope to save their skins by generalising a Hobbesian war of all against all, outside their own borders. Religious wars instigated by the fanatics who are often the sons and daughters of small tradespeople and the lower professions, and who seize on bigotry and xenophobia to vent the rising frustration and anger of the submerged masses, and thus guarantee their own leading positions within obscurantist theocracies which allow scope for massive personal corruption and the 'good life' for their leaders. In the past two decades imperialism has shown its mastery of this politics, shunting petit-bourgeois political elites away from the developmental, anti-colonialist politics of the 50s and 60s and towards the most, brutal, inhumane and totally senseless forms of sectarian and intercommunal strife, which are always tolerated and supported by imperialism: even when states are declared 'pariah', such as Libya, Iraq and Iran, imperialism does nothing to damage their regimes and even goes out of its way to defend them, as US imperialism has always vigilantly defended its client, Saddam Hussein and his murderous Iraqi regime. Compare this with the fate accorded petit-bourgeois led anticolonial movements a few decades earlier. In Africa, Latin America and Asia, such states and leaderships were always surrounded, isolated, destabilised, and bled white in silent, mostly unreported wars. The allegedly anti-imperialist regimes of the Middle East and elsewhere which are led by professional fanatics, soldiers of fortune or religious zealots, are as much the enemies of the people as are their secret imperial masters; they, like revanchist religious movements, including those castigated as 'terrorist' by imperialism, are roadblocks in the way of world revolution. The imperialists never cease to meddle in the affairs of the neocolonies. US imperialism gave the green light to the Indian government of the right-wing religious BJP fanatics to detonate nuclear devices. They did not just turn a blind eye to the Indian tests, they permitted them, and the hollow White House sanctions rhetoric does not disguise the truth. The imperialists' objective was transparent. The Indian bomb is designed to warn both Islam and China. US imperialism is terrified of risen Islam; this was the whirlwind of jihad which the imperialists themselves encouraged and fostered, for if not Islam, then what else can the West Asian and Middle Eastern masses turn to? Only socialism, only communism, only Leninism. The imperialists did all they could to push Arab nationalism in obscurantist, theocratic directions in the 1950s and 1960s. World capitalism is dependent on Arab oil. This is the secret they dare not speak, although it shouts out its own name loudly enough. To safeguard oil supplies, imperialism has for many decades skilfully sought to create endless instability, local wars and geopolitical 'churning' throughout the Middle East. Now it has raised the stakes still higher, for an apocalyptic endgame approaches: it was time to give Hinduism its bomb, and to let Islam flex its nuclear muscles in the shape of Pakistani reciprocal tests. (see Energy) Thus imperialism sets the stage for fascism in the neocolonies and for war between Islam, Hinduism and China. At the same time, this unleashing of the dogs of war further evidences the disintegration of US hegemony, announced with such arrogant triumphalism only a few years ago as the Cold War ended. The global New World Order is giving way to its opposite -- a world of terrifying disorder in which vast forces have accumulated ready to crash down on humankind in apocalyptic landslides of terror, reaction and mass death at any moment. Will such occasions come to pass? A better question is how will they be avoided, given the deepening systemic disarray of hurrah-capitalism and geopolitical formations and political instances. Economic collapse is being chased by apocalyptic horsemen of eco-catastrophe, hunger, revolt and war. Globalism, neoliberalism, have collapsed almost as soon as they have been announced: the universal hegemony of the markets, a thin screen for rapacious finance capitalism, will dissolve away at the first cold blast of a general, world-wide slump and depression. US imperialism already knows that the choice is not between 'Keynesianism' on the one hand and globalism on the other. The choices are incalculably grimmer and starker. Will the world war be confined to Asia and the Middle East, and fought to the death between imperialism's proxies: India, Pakistan, China? Or will the US game plan to cut the head off Asian resurgence by smashing down Chinese and Japanese capitalism, and by the threat of nuclear war, be only the prelude to a general war, a new and final world war? For it must be said that allowing India to have nuclear weapons would be unthinkable if US imperialism did not face still more abysmal challenges. It is obvious to any competent observer of the world energy scene that capitalism's dependence on fossil fuels, primarily oil, is as great as ever. There are no substitutes which can allow capitalism to continue in anything like its present form, and the collapse of oil supplies will, in the BEST case, be the preliminary to not years but decades of turmoil and reconstruction within the world market. But oil is more scarce than is ever admitted, and the future energy scenarios now published by the US government are more fraudulent and full of barefaced lies and statistical manipulations than anything ever attributed to the mendacity of the Soviet Union. An unsustainable situation already exists with respect to energy supply. If world growth resumes on its pre-1997 trajectory, instead of glutted energy markets of the recent past, an oil-famine is a looming prospect as world oil production peaks and then inexorably declines. Peak production at present rates will occur in the next few years: far too short a time scale for crisis to be forestalled, even if any of the long touted 'alternatives' (cold fusion, nuclear power, photovoltaics etc.) came to fruition, but NONE of them has. Production is geared to cheap oil, even if there were alternatives it will take two decades at least to relaunch the world economy on a different energy path. But there are no alternatives. Imperialism cannot permit the Chinese economy in particular to grow at 10 percent a year. Within a decade, such growth would create Chinese demand for oil equivalent to present day total world production! And if the Chinese growth engine dragged Asia in its wake, then demand would increase still further, but the truth is that world oil production is close to peaking and can never be doubled. The Indian bomb is one of imperialism's answers to the Chinese threat. And it is more evidence of the unscalable historical impasse capitalism has entered. World capitalism is in the early stages of its deepest crisis, embracing all spheres of society, culture and production, all social classes, states, nations and regions. The capitalist world has entered a cul-de-sac from which there can be no escape. The beast is writhing in its death-agony. Its politicians, apologists and strongmen have no viable renewal policies. Beneath the triumphal mask of hurrah-capitalism are the steel teeth of what the Russian communists call samoyezd -- cannibal -- capitalism. Behind the soft words and polite smiles of its salons and academies, where the liturgy of neoliberalism was crafted, with its talk of open markets, democracy and 'one-world' hides a policeman with a truncheon, and behind him are the torturers with their shock-batons. World capitalism is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Damned to economic meltdown, conflict and war if it fails to launch a new accumulation cycle and to jerk free of the fetters now dragging it down. Damned to run into unassailable obstacles if it does recommence accumulation, for the energy and resource deficits which have dogged the world-system for more than two decades are now gigantic impediments to renewed growth. The optimism of hurrah-capitalism is based on nothing more solid than the hypnotic repetition of mindless mantras: 'technology will find the solutions'; 'the Information Revolution will sweep all before it'; 'virtualisation and dematerialisation will solve its resource problems' and last and most baleful: There Is No Alternative. For if the doomsayers are right, and continued growth is unsustainable, threatening the integrity of the biosphere on which all life depends, and if resource limits are insurmountable, then what IS the alternative to capitalism? What OTHER way from the impasse but the relentless pursuit of technology, and if this is so, then surely it is necessary -- however regrettable -- to allow the markets to work unimpeded, retiring old, energy inefficient, polluting capital, and concentrating capital in the imperial heartlands whose powerful science and technology complexes offer the only hope of survival, of feeding the next century's hungry masses, of leapfrogging over technical obstacles? In a word, if generalised prosperity is impossible with existing technology -- and most now agree that it IS impossible to give the Asian masses, for instance, Western living standards -- then surely it makes sense to bow to the inevitable and acknowledge that the only hope for these billions of people, is to put their trust in the galvanic powers of western technology, and wait quietly for better times as capitalism refreshes its cornucopia-machinery. The present generations in the neocolonies will be sacrificed, true, but not for the benefit of the hardworking West, but for the sake of their own unborn generations. It is necessary to tax from these people the wealth necessary to refuel the engines of innovation, strengthen and stabilise markets and western socio-economic systems, and prepare to 'reculer pour mieux sauter'. In any case, Socialism has been tried, has it not? Who seriously suggests that the example of planning Soviet-style offers anything other than monumental waste, bureaucratic corruption and stagnation, shortages, grey uniformity, lack of dynamism and economic vitality? If the problems are really so serious, who is better placed to solve them than the enlightened social theorists of Harvard, Yale and Oxbridge, or the powerful scientific enterprises of the metropoles? To throw away the unquestioned benefits of freedom and capitalist enterprise in pursuit of revolutionary will o'the wisps promoted by power-crazed sociopaths -- this is not sensible is it? What after all, does Communism mean, but gulags, queues and unfreedom, in the midst of terrible pollution and environmental disregard? The mantras of capitalist apologetics will be heard until the moment the ship finally sinks and the waves close over their heads. First of all, it is capitalist science and technology, capitalist rapacity, and the vast overgrowth of surplus population ('the most general law of capitalism', as Marx called it) in the form of a colossal reserve army of labour, which has created the world we now live in. It was precisely the capitalist Green Revolution which triggered a second population explosion among the dispossessed of the world, in just the same way that the population of the first industrial countries exploded, as peasants were made landless and forced into the cities. In fact there is no surplus population in any absolute sense: there is only a population which is surplus to capitalism's requirements. Nevertheless world population will double to more than 10 billion in the coming decades; and these new members of the world proletariat will not be satisfied with virtual food or dematerialised roads, cars, homes, schools, hospitals. Crisis has its inescapable logic. It exhausts one potentiality for growth after another. And in the same way, the working class and its allies inevitably progress on a learning curve which contains as many troughs as peaks. Communism is not just one option among others. If that was the case, we should be wasting our time hoeing such a hard furrow. Communism is inevitable because capitalist crisis is inevitable. Nevertheless, its inevitability will only become transparent to the people when all the other options have been tried. That is just in the nature of things. Left to itself capitalist crisis can only deepen, its contradictions become still more explosive. Nothing can stop the deepening of capitalist crisis or the sharpening of its contradictions; that may still not be so evident in the first class salons of the west, but in the barrios and megacities of the rest of the world, it is self-evident. The contradictions will continue to ripen, and setbacks and defeats suffered by the proletariat only intensify the process. That is the entire lesson of the fall of the socialist world and what followed: the sequel was not the end of history and the final triumph of the capitalist system, but a fantastic acceleration of the necrosis of the tissues and fibre of capitalist society, world-wide. And it is the lesson of the whole 250-year history of industrial capitalism, this Lazarus which has stumbled by many zigzags and deviations, and many unsuspected resurrections, into the present and final crisis. Whether the world likes it or not, we will have Communism because the alternative is barbarism and the extinction of life. There is no alternative... to Communism. Whatever hardship the Soviet people endured, besieged and hounded by the West and under the yoke of a Party which ceased to be Communist and degenerated into one of humankind's most corrupt institutions, nothing prepared the Soviet people for the holocaust of lives, hopes and living standards which capitalism has brought them. The only glimmer of hope in the nightmare visited on the world by capitalism, is the hope offered by socialism: the hope of a world without capitalism, without markets, without warring classes, and without a Sword of Damocles hanging always over our heads. This is the only future open to humanity. All other roads lead to ruin and despair. Only communism offers hope, only communism offers life. "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society." [Karl Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)] That point has now been reached. We must bury capitalism because if we don't, it will bury us. Communism is not a utopia, but a material necessity. This, the fundamental truth of scientific socialism, is no longer a prediction, but a palpable fact. Mark Jones Moderator, Leninist-International listserv November 1999 To subscribe to Leninist-International send to This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Nov 6 07:51:44 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:51:44 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Taking it back... Tactical agility in the Obama campaign Message-ID: <49130480.8070402@gmail.com> Stan Goff: Tactical agility in the Obama campaign 5th November 2008, 06:06 pm by Stan People have heard me harp on John Boyd and the OODA-Loop (an acronym for a decision cycle in tactical conflicts). Tactical agility is something that is lacking in social movements, largely because we are mis-organized. Here is a piece from CP by Chuck Spenney on Boyd and Obama?s campaign ?ground game.? Two things we ought to try to understand, no? The tactically agile ground game, and at some point the campaign phenomenon achieved a tipping point, in the sense that Malcolm Gladwell defines it. Though Spinney?s article focuses on the tactical messaging decisions of the Obama campaign, there was a level of saturation with highly local campaign cadres who could themselves take decisions ?agilely.? Some pundits were referring to the Obama campaign as ?granular,? because everything about the campaign was targeted as locally as possible. Obama?s OODA-Loop against McCain?s frontal assaults... In Full: http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/11/05/tactical-agility-in-the-obama-campaign/ From critical.montages at gmail.com Thu Nov 6 08:54:29 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 10:54:29 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Illusions over Central Banks' Reserves Could Be Shattered Message-ID: Illusions over central banks' reserves could be shattered By Satyajit Das Published: October 22 2008 03:00 | Last updated: October 22 2008 03:00 The substantial reserves of central banks and their acolytes, sovereign wealth funds, are frequently cited in support of the case for a large pool of "unleveraged" liquidity, that is "real" money. These funds, some reckon, sit ready to support asset values across the globe. In reality, the available pool of money may be more modest than assumed. For example, China has close to $2,000bn in foreign exchange reserves. The reserves arise from dollars received from exports and foreign investment into China that are exchanged into renminbi. The central bank generates renminbi by printing money or borrowing through issuing bonds in the domestic market. The reserves are essentially "leveraged" using domestic "liabilities". The dollars acquired are invested in foreign currency assets, 60 per cent in dollar denominated US Treasury bonds, GSE paper (such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae debt) and other high-quality securities. China is exposed to price changes in these investments and currency risk through the mismatch between foreign currency assets funded with local currency debt. Deterioration in the credit quality of the US results in losses on investment through falls in the market value of the debt and a weaker dollar. Also, it is not easy to tap this liquidity pool. Given the size of the portfolios, it is difficult for large investors such as China to mobilise rapidly a large portion of these funds by liquidating their investments and converting them into the home currency without substantial losses. If the dollar assets lose value or access to them cannot be gained, China must still service its liabilities. It can print money but will suffer the economic consequences including inflation and higher funding costs. The position of emerging market sovereign investors with large portfolios of dollar assets is similar to that of a bank or leveraged hedge fund with poor quality assets. Wen Jiabao, China's premier, recently observed: "If anything goes wrong in the US financial sector, we are anxious about the safety and security of Chinese capital." The substantial build-up of foreign reserves in central banks of emerging markets and developing countries has puzzled economists. As identified by David Roche, of research boutique Independent Strategy, the build-up of central bank reserves is really a liquidity creation scheme that relies on the dollar's favoured position in trade and as a reserve currency. Deterioration in the US economy and the issue of more government debt to support the financial sector could increase pressure on the US sovereign rating and the dollar. US government support for financial institutions is approaching 6 per cent of GDP compared with less than 4 per cent at the time of the Savings and Loans crisis. This may set off a further phase in the global deleveraging as large losses on dollar investments slow down the international credit creation system. Gillian Tett of the FT coined the phrase "candy floss money". Financial technology spun available "real" money into an exaggerated bubble that ultimately, like its fairground equivalent, collapses. The emerging market reserves system is another dimension of this candy floss money. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated. In recent years, money was cheap and other assets were expensive. As each of the global economy's credit creation engines breaks down and systemic leverage reduces, money becomes scarce and expensive triggering adjustments in asset prices in a reversal of the process. Mark Twain once advised: "Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist but you have ceased to live". In the current financial crisis, many illusions have been shattered. The quantum of available capital and the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds may be another of the accepted "facts" that may be revealed to be an illusion. The writer is a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives. From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Thu Nov 6 07:36:03 2008 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 09:36:03 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN State harassment at Tyendinaga - Call out Message-ID: <0127723c$39758$0cdc4000380093@your-6904db8205> HELP NEEDED! STATE HARASSMENT AT TYENDINAGA ? SLEEP DEPRIVATION AND ARREST THREATS FOR STOPPING MEGA JAIL ? Mohawk Nation Meeting set for Sun. Nov. 9 MNN. Nov. 5th, 2008. Today army helicopters and fighter jets are flying over Tyendinaga. Troops or supplies are being dropped in nearby fields. Who gave the command? This is a public disturbance and it?s trespassing on Mohawk air space. Canada has no jurisdiction over us, on the ground or in the air. What makes a command legitimate? According to international law, it has to be rooted in institutions that respect the principle of human equality. The Mohawks of Tyendinaga did not call in those war planes. To make a commander?s order legal, it has to be authorized according to democratic laws passed by the people concerned. We know none of this happened. The Mohawks are objecting to illegal actions that are being taken by colonial government agents. It is not legal for a military commander to use force to circumvent the law or the will of the people. Using war planes to create a disturbance in a civilian community is clearly illegal. The military is pitting adolescent adrenaline against innocent unarmed children, elders, women and men who just want to live quietly and decently. We?ve seen this kind of deliberate skuzzy ?black ops? attempt to harm family life. It was used at Kanehsatake and Kahnawake in 1990, Gustafsen Lake in 1995 and Burnt Church in the Nova Scotia fishing dispute. Has war been declared against us? Is there any legal justification for this deliberate assault on civilian life? It is a total disregard for the safety and protection of children. Sending in colonized cops who happen to be ?aboriginal? just doesn?t cut it either. Who are they taking their orders from? It?s not the people of Tyendinaga! Canada is targeting us for opposing the misuse of public funds to build an expensive mega police station. The colonial Band Council put up half of our money ($1 million) for the unwanted cop shop without our consent. The Ministry of Public Safety and Security put up the other half. These millions are desperately needed to provide safe water, to address the toxic housing conditions and to stop the dangerous quarry operations. Inadequate construction caused houses to be abandoned because of mold. The water is undrinkable. It?s shocking to find these conditions in southern Ontario where settler communities enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. International standards on clean water, adequate housing, health care and safe communities is a fundamental right we are being deliberately deprived of. ?Build-All Contractors? quarry operations lacks rigorous environmental study and safety assessments that are standard features elsewhere. Nearby houses are having water problems and collapsed wells for the first time ever. 80 per cent of the community's wells are contaminated. The nearby Quinte Mohawk School has to provide bottled water for students because the tap water is toxic. The kids can?t even wash their hands because they could get sick if they put their hands in their mouth. Build-All Quarry is owned by Police Chief Maracle's brother, who is also trying to construct the new mega high tech jail. Why is a second jail being build in the middle of Tyendinaga for jailing ?outsiders?, as the chief said? It?s supposed to have a chopper pad on the roof! Who is this for? On September 24th, 2008, the prefab mega jail was stopped after community members blocked it from its intended site. The people stopped another delivery attempt on Oct. 29th. It appears that Tyendinaga Police Chief Ron Maracle is charging 30 men, women and youth who demonstrated against his super ?police station? and his brother?s second dangerous quarry operation. He?s targeted Longhouse people who watch over corrupt Band Council operations and spending. Canada is trying to take out or neutralize anyone who defends the rights of the people. Invitation wampums have been sent to every Mohawk community to come to Tyendinaga to take part in a council meeting on Sunday, November 9th at 10:00 am. Mediation strategies will be discussed to sit down with Canada peacefully, if possible. As George Manual said, ?I would rather leave my children with the legitimacy of the struggle than to leave them with a settlement they cannot live with?. Karakwine & MNN Staff Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com Katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com To help, please contact the Rotiskenrakete: 613-391-4055, 613-813-4053, 613-827-4991, 613-391-5132, 613-848-6968, 613-813-1017, email wasoonde3232 at aol.com Friends, allies and supporters: witnesses bring cameras, camcorders, food, cells, phone cards and warm clothes, especially gloves. Directions: Trans Canada Highway 401 to ?Marysville? exit, south on #49 to #2 then turn right into the community. CONTACT: Peter Van Loan, Minister of Public Safety, Ottawa 613-944-4875 or 1-800-830-3118 fax: 613-954-5186 communications at ps.gc.ca; Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 403-253-7990 fax: 613-941-6900 pm at pm.gc.ca Harper.S at parl.gc.ca; Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness cabal includes: Chantal ?Dirty-Hands? Bernier, ADM, Chantal.bernier at psepc-sppcc.gc.ca 613- 993-4325; J. Scott ?Mouthpiece? Broughton, Sr. ADM, 613- 991-2820; Diane ?Clean-Blouse-and-Polished-Shoes? MacLaren, ADM, Policing, 613-990-2703; and Kristina ?Who?s-Got-Her-Dirty-Finger-On-the-Button? Namiesniowski, ADM, 613-949-6435. These bureaucrats tell the Minister what to do and say and make all the plans; GG Michaelle Jean info at gg.ca; Prime Minister Stephen Harper Fax 613-941-6900 pm at pm.gc.ca ; Chuckie Strahl, Indian Affairs Minister, 819-997-0002, Fax 819-953-4941 strahl.c at parl.gc.ca; band council Mohawks of Bay of Quinte 613-396-3424 reception at mbq-tmt-org Fax 613-396-3627; OPP Eastern Regional Headquarters 613-284-4500 fax 613-284-4597 L.G. Beechey, Smiths Falls Detachment; Band Council Chief Chief R. Don Maracle, 613-396-3089, Cell 613-391-9249 RDONM at MBQ-TMT.ORG 613-396-3424 ext. 106 info at mbq-tmt.org Some Ontario politicians. Rick Bartolucci Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services rick.bartolucci at liberal.ola.org; Dave Levac Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services dave.levac at liberal.ola.org; Garfield Dunlop Critic, Community Safety and Correctional Services garfield.dunlop at pc.ola.org; Peter Kormos Critic, Community Safety and Correctional Services peter.kormos at ndp.ola.org; Brad Duguid Minister of Aboriginal Affairs brad.duguid at liberal.ola.org; Jeff Leal Minister of Aboriginal Affairs jeff.leal at liberal.ola.org; Norm Miller Critic, Aboriginal Affairs norm.miller at pc.ola.org; Gilles Bisson Critic, Aboriginal Affairs gilles.bisson at ndp.ola.org; dmcquinty.mpp at liberal.ola.org; randy at ruralrevolution.com, info at randyhillier.com, holland.m at parl.gc.ca, pm at pm.gc.ca, Reid.S at parl.gc.ca, Harper.S at parl.gc.ca, Nicholson.R at parl.gc.ca, Day.S at parl.gc.ca, ottawa at chuckstrahl.com, john.yakabuskico at pc.ola.org, jim.wilsonco at pc.ola.org, tim.hudakco at pc.ola.org, hhampton-qp at ndp.on.ca, pkormos-qp at ndp.on.ca, gphillips.mpp at liberal.ola.org; dramsay.mpp at liberal.ola.org, gilles at gillesbisson.com, mbryant.mpp at liberal.ola.org, leader at greenparty.ca, info at greenparty.ca, rlm at xplornet.com, lorraine.rekmans at greenparty.ca, jwarnock at ontarioeast.net, doherty at kos.net, hhampton-qp at ndp.on.ca, norm.sterlingco at pc.ola.org, president at lisamacleod.ca, ahorwath-qp at ndp.on.ca, joyce.savoline at pc.ola.org, dzimmer.mpp at liberal.ola.org, tabunsp-qp at ndp.on.ca, laurie.scott at pc.ola.org, robert.runcimanco at pc.ola.org, toby.barrett at pc.ola.org, donna.cansfield at liberal.ola.org, michael.gravelle at liberal.ola.org, We need to tell Canada and their agents to: (1) immediately stop their attacks, police brutality and trying to impose a prison on the Mohawks; (2) honor Indigenous rights and jurisdictions; (3) support the Mohawks struggle for self-determination; and (4) to get Canada and Indian Affairs out of Haudenosaunee Territory. Go to MNN ?Tyendinaga? category for more stories; New MNN Books Available now! Purchase t-shirts, mugs and more at our CafePressStore http://www.cafepress.com/mohawknews; Subscribe to MNN for breaking news updates http://.mohawknationnews.com/news/subscription.php; Sign Women Title Holders petition! http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Iroquois Note: These challenges of abuses at the border require support and money. Your financial help is needed and appreciated. Please send your donations to PayPal at www.mohawknationnews.com, or by check or money order to ?MNN Mohawk Nation News?, Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0. Nia:wen thank you very much. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Nov 6 10:19:24 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:19:24 -0500 Subject: [A-List] We just made history. Message-ID: <4912E0CB.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "This victory alone is not the change we seek. It's just a chance to make that change." http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44582 ^^^ CB: Election of a Black person as President of the United States is , in itself, a big reform, i.e. political and historical change. It creates potential for many other reforms. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Nov 6 10:21:57 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:21:57 -0500 Subject: [A-List] A-List Digest, Vol 62, Issue 8 Message-ID: <4912E165.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> From: Midhurst14 at xxxxxxx Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 05:35:04 EST -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The whole world breathed a sigh of relief on November 5th We owe a great deal to the era of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes for creating the necessary catharsis for change The price we have paid is the loss of 40 years of our lives and the deaths of so many, noble like Martin Luther King and the ordinary soldier dying in Iraq To prompt the American voter, 70% who have never read a book, to overcome the racism endemic in their society Obama's speech was superb, and in his effort to match the occasion, provided many hostages to fortune Let us hope that he lives to provide an alternative to the previous horrors and as exemplified in his quotes from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address George Anthony ^^^ CB: Hear, hear ! This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Nov 6 10:31:16 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:31:16 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Voters Pick Obama But Local Progressive Agendas Flop Message-ID: <4912E394.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> The results were mixed on state initiatives. CB ^^^^ Ballot Initiatives: States decriminalize pot, nix abortion limits... Voters also okay doctor-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research and more... By Lisa Stein MARIJUANA REFORM: Massachusetts decriminalizes pot, and Michigan legalizes its medical uses, rejecting "the most intense government war on marijuana since the days of Reefer Madness," says MPP's Bruce Mirken. In addition to electing Barack Obama president and carrying a wave of Dems to victory in Congress, voters in several states approved ballot initiatives decriminalizing marijuana, lifting limits on embryonic stem cell research, allowing doctor-assisted suicide?and nixed others that would have restricted abortions and provided rebates for fuel-efficient vehicles In Massachusetts voters okayed a measure to decriminalize possession of an ounce or less of marijuana. The new law, set to take effect in 30 days, requires anyone caught with that amount of weed to pay a $100 civil fine. Michigan, meanwhile, became the 13th state to allow patients with an Rx to use pot to treat pain and nausea caused by cancer and other diseases. "Tonight's results represent a sea change," Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), a group working to decriminalize pot, declared when the votes were tallied. "Voters have spectacularly rejected eight years of the most intense government war on marijuana since the days of Reefer Madness (a 1936 propaganda film designed to scare teens out of using marijuana by depicting pot smokers as a bunch of deranged lunatics, which, decades later, became a cult hit). Mirken hailed voters for refusing to cave in to pressure from Bush White House drug czar John Walters, who had campaigned against Proposal 1 in Michigan?and from district attorneys in Massachusetts who had warned of dire consequences if penalties for pot possession were reduced despite evidence to the contrary in 11 states with similar laws. "It may take a year or two, but the federal war on medical marijuana is dead. Finished. Over," MPP executive director Rob Kampia said in a statement. Washingtonians made their state the second to approve doctor-assisted suicide. The "Death with Dignity" law allows physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill, competent adults given no more than six months to live who request and self-administer them. Neighboring Oregon is the only other state where assisted suicide is legal. In Colorado voters shot down Amendment 48, the "Personhood Initiative," by a three-to-one margin. The measure would have defined human life as starting "from the moment of fertilization"?which in essence would have made abortion a crime and put the brakes on embryonic stem cell research there. More than 7,000 Colorado doctors and 75 organizations opposed the initiative, saying it would have interfered with privacy and research. PAGE 1 | 2 | Next? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Nov 6 10:51:52 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:51:52 -0500 Subject: [A-List] From Feral Scholar Message-ID: <4912E868.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> "i happened to be in san diego over the election. wow. talk about a very deep, silent undercurrent, you could feel it ? cut it with a knife. one example: to talk with my father?s gardener/friend/mexican-cannot-vote ? was to reach into the heavens of camaraderie, hope, joy ? like tapping into a spring of spiritual renewal. this chance to feel like an american again, that all the people i know in this country ARE AMERICANs. especially in light of the last eight years of exclusion is overwhelming. i cannot stop crying with joy. right now ? i cannot listen to the lefties that i normally listen to, even amy goodman, chris floyd, world socialist, whatever ? the relentless march of the gloom and doomers ? with their negative face against everything except the ABSOLUTE cause. this is profound ? and i?m gonna be there and work." http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/10/31/the-complications-of-conscience-and-elections/#comments This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From michael.hudson at earthlink.net Thu Nov 6 12:51:34 2008 From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net (Michael Hudson) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:51:34 -0500 Subject: [A-List] From Feral Scholar In-Reply-To: <4912E868.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: As my wife remarked this morning, one virtue of Obama's victory will be to replace race antagonisms with an awareness of the class war of finance against the rest of society. What if Obama is the political counterpart of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and Colin Powell at State -- a front man for a combination between Bush 3 and Clinton 3? Will this spur people to see that it's not about individuals or charisma but specific policies? Dennis K. wasn't very successful in this in the debates. Each time, he pointed to the specific law he'd proposed. His opponents simply had verbiage. And it was they that got the votes. Will this change as World Bank/Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs policies are imposed on the country? Remember what Harold Wilson said: The function of a labour party is to control labour, and do what the Conservatives can't get away with. Michael On 11/6/08 12:51 PM, "Charles Brown" wrote: > "i happened to be in san diego over the election. wow. talk about a very > deep, silent undercurrent, you could feel it ? cut it with a knife. > > one example: to talk with my father?s > gardener/friend/mexican-cannot-vote ? was to reach into the heavens of > camaraderie, hope, joy ? like tapping into a spring of spiritual > renewal. > > this chance to feel like an american again, that all the people i know > in this country ARE AMERICANs. especially in light of the last eight > years of exclusion is overwhelming. i cannot stop crying with joy. > > right now ? i cannot listen to the lefties that i normally listen to, > even amy goodman, chris floyd, world socialist, whatever ? the > relentless march of the gloom and doomers ? with their negative face > against everything except the ABSOLUTE cause. > > this is profound ? and i?m gonna be there and work." > > http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/10/31/the-complications-of-con > science-and-elections/#comments > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. > www.surfcontrol.com > From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Nov 6 13:36:25 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:36:25 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Crisis-hit Russia must scale down its ambition Message-ID: <49130EF9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Hey maybe Russia should try more socialism , more democracy. Charles October 31 2008 02:00 Financial Times Crisis-hit Russia must scale down its ambition By Robert Skidelsky The official view is that Russia is an outstandingly successful economy temporarily derailed by a financial shock of foreign origin. Its annual economic growth in real terms averaged 7 per cent in the years during which Vladimir Putin was president (2000-08), annual real wages rose by almost 15 per cent, the federal budget was continually in surplus. Mr Putin, now prime minister, was quick to blame America for the downturn. Before the crisis hit home Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, boasted in June that Russia was not part of the problem but part of the solution. Its cash-rich companies would invest abroad, Moscow would become a world financial centre, the rouble would become a reserve currency and so on. All this turned out to be fantasy. The Russian stock market has lost 70 per cent of its value this year. The commodity prices that spearheaded its boom are now falling. The easy credit money from the west that fuelled it has now fled. Russia has failed to diversify its economy and its politics have long made investors nervous. A confrontation with reality is long overdue. Metals, energy, and food account for 80 per cent of Russian exports. The growth of the economy in the Putin years was largely driven by the devaluation of the rouble in 1998-99 and the increase in the prices of these products: between 2000 and 2007 real prices of metals went up by 275 per cent, of energy by 210 per cent, and of food by 160 per cent. However, it is now clear that the commodity boom peaked in June-July 2008 and is in sharp re-verse. Since July, the commodity price index has dropped by more than 20 per cent. This fall has a twofold significance. First, Russia's consumer economy has been built on the commodity economy. The great oligarchic fortunes are in oil and metals. Although domestic consumption has contributed significantly to growth in recent years, diversification away from commodities has barely started since the high price of oil strengthened the exchange rate and sucked imports into the retail sector, and oil revenues made it easier to posture as a great power. The downturn in the commodity economy will thus have a multiplied effect on the consumer economy and the Russian standard of living. Second, the government's spending plans are based on a $70 a barrel oil price. Every one-dollar decrease in the barrel price implies $3bn less in export revenues a year. It is currently at $65, having fallen from $140 in June. Attention has focused on the slide in Russia's dollar-denominated benchmark RTS index. More important is over-leveraging by a few huge companies. Russia's banking system has been a poor channeller of commodity wealth into non-energy businesses. There are too many banks; most are undercapitalised. Growth in the non-energy sectors has been fuelled by collateralised loans from western banks. Russian banks and companies have about $450bn (362bn, ?292bn) of foreign debt, $50bn of which must be repaid or refinanced by the year end. So Russian businesses are exposed to the troubled European banking system when the value of the shares they put up as collateral may have fallen below the cost of the loans, and Russian inter-bank lending is frozen by a crisis of confidence. The economist Sergei Guriev argues that the fall in commodity prices and the credit crunch have cut Russia's annual growth potential by 2 per cent. Despite the professionalism of the rescue mounted by the finance ministry and central bank -- and the budgetary cushion provided by the stabilisation fund, brainchild of Andrei Illarionov, Mr Putin's discarded economic adviser -- Russia carries a heavy burden of political risk. This is the real economic legacy of the Putin years. Mr Putin does not understand the need for a degree of consistency between economic and foreign policy: or rather the reconciliation he has sought has been based on Russia's energy windfall. If this has now ended, as seems likely, the key assumption of his politics -- that Russia can use its energy power to boost its world power without paying much attention to the sensitivities of anyone but the Russian electorate -- has been destroyed. Russia needs to scale down its geopolitical ambition to its real weight -- that of an emerging economy with only 3 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and a quarter of America's living standard. Also, it desperately needs to develop its human capital. The Putin era is over but Medvedev's has not begun. This is the real Russian crisis. The writer is emeritus professor of political economy at Warwick university, contributes a fortnightly column to Vedomosti and is an independent crossbench peer in the House of Lords Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From noreply at coha.org Thu Nov 6 10:28:08 2008 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 12:28:08 -0500 Subject: COHA response to The Economist article: “The U.S.-Mexican Border: Good Neighbors Make Fences” Message-ID: <20081106172816.87DD03E4834@mx-out2.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4960 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081106/fe6e7e99/attachment.txt From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Nov 7 15:00:45 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:00:45 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Voters Pick Obama But Local Progressive Agendas Flop Message-ID: <4914743F.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Just got word that Colorado defeated an anti-affirmative action ballot initiative. Charles This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Nov 7 15:25:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:25:06 -0500 Subject: [A-List] From Feral Scholar Message-ID: <491479F4.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> From: Michael Hudson As my wife remarked this morning, one virtue of Obama's victory will be to replace race antagonisms with an awareness of the class war of finance against the rest of society. What if Obama is the political counterpart of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and Colin Powell at State -- a front man for a combination between Bush 3 and Clinton 3? ^^^ CB: On the other hand, what if he's like Lyndon Johnson, who the Civil Rights activists were upset about when Kennedy put him on as VP , and then he turned out to be the greatest President for Civil Rights since Lincoln , and passed The Great Society and War on Poverty ? Or what if he turned out to be like FDR , who ran as a center-rightest, and then was the most leftist President ever ? Or what if Obama turned out to be like the guy in his autobiographical books, a definite student lefty, who became a leftist lawyer instead of a Wall Street lawyer from Harvard ? What if ? We won't know for many months. ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ Will this spur people to see that it's not about individuals or charisma but specific policies? ^^^^ CB: Actually, Obama has the exactly correct position on this: change comes from the bottom up, not from the top down. Change doesn't come from Washington. It comes to Washington. He must have said that a thousand times during the campaign. ^^^ Dennis K. wasn't very successful in this in the debates. Each time, he pointed to the specific law he'd proposed. His opponents simply had verbiage. And it was they that got the votes. Will this change as World Bank/Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs policies are imposed on the country? Remember what Harold Wilson said: The function of a labour party is to control labour, and do what the Conservatives can't get away with. ^^^^ CB: Yeah, this is the ultra-left line in the US , too. "The Democratic Party is the place that social movements go to die." In saying this they seem to forget that the labor movement went to the DP in the 1930's and got legalized unions, welfare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, WPA, et al. , hardly the social movement which is labor dying in the DP. And they forget the Civil Rights movement went to the DP and got a whole lot of federal Civil Rights laws from LBJ, _and_ The Great Society and War on Poverty, hardly the social movement called "Civil Rights" dying in the DP. In fact, the DP paid the price for carrying out the Civil Rights agenda that for the next forty years in the successful Republican "Southern Strategy"/racist backlash. One could even say the DP nearly sacrificed itself by championing the Civil Rights movement. And then the social movement which was the anti-Viet Nam war movement went to the DP and got the one issue anti-war candidate George McGovern ( he also was for guaranteed jobs for all !). That's hardly going to the DP and dying, since the war was ended in 1973, with the DP Congress voting to end it. Of course, the DP was bigtime into the Cold War and anti-Communism - Korea, Viet Nam, etc. But what if Obama is in the New Deal- Great Society -McGovern DP tradition ? We won't know for months. ^^^ Michael This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Nov 7 22:25:16 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 00:25:16 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Thousands Demand Saakashvili Resignation Message-ID: Thousands Demand Saakashvili Resignation: November 8, 2008 Protesters Condemn President of Georgia By OLESYA VARTANYAN and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ TBILISI, Georgia ? Thousands of antigovernment demonstrators poured into the streets of Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, on Friday, hoping to weaken the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili as it strives to maintain power despite a catastrophic war with Russia and a growing economic malaise at home. The large, though generally subdued, demonstration occurred one year after black-helmeted riot police officers violently quashed opposition protests in Tbilisi, pelting unarmed civilians with clubs and rubber bullets, and using tear gas and water cannons to chase the protesters from the streets. That event roused accusations domestically and internationally that the president's promises of democracy and reform, which he made upon taking power in a bloodless coup in 2003, had fallen short, leaving Georgia only slightly more democratic than the country's post-Soviet neighbors, including Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia. But while Mr. Saakashvili is perhaps still off kilter after last year's political tumult and the war with Russia in August ? which many see as a humiliation for Georgia that the president may have provoked ? he remains popular and appears still to be very much in control. At Friday's protest, opposition politicians condemned Mr. Saakashvili's handling of the war and blamed the president for losing two separatist Georgian enclaves, South Ossetia, over which the war was fought, and Abkhazia. Russia has consolidated its control of both enclaves and now recognizes them as independent states, despite widespread international disapproval of the move. Protesting opposition members also repeated accusations of fraud in presidential and parliamentary elections held this year, and they called for early elections to be held in the spring. But the message was equally one of patience, with opposition leaders apparently using the protest to gauge the political mood just months after a majority of Georgians rallied to the side of Mr. Saakashvili in the face of a Russian invasion. "It is impossible to reach freedom in half an hour, one hour or two hours," Kakha Kukava, an opposition leader, told the protesters. Some of the demonstrators were disappointed in calls to wait, saying they would like Mr. Saakashvili and his team to be removed from power immediately, lest they provoke renewed fighting with Russia. "Saakashvili should go right now," said Eka Jipashvili, a protesters. "We need a new government that will be able to negotiate with Russia and will not worry us with ideas of new war." Few analysts, however, think Mr. Saakashvili's immediate removal is possible, given the fractured state of the opposition. Some central opposition figures skipped the protest, including Nino Burdzhanadze, a former speaker of the Parliament and an erstwhile confidant of Mr. Saakashvili, who broke with the president over the police crackdown last November. "I don't think the opposition is going to storm the president's office, storm Parliament and take over Georgia," said Lincoln Mitchell, a Georgia expert at Columbia University. Friday's demonstration appeared to be largely a victory for the Georgian government, which has been under increasing scrutiny internally and by backers in Western governments. The government has said it aspires to follow the democratic principles espoused by Mr. Saakashvili, but critics say it has receded in practice. The demonstration, which the government allowed, occurred without problems, and few police officers were on the streets. It was muted compared with last year's raucous protests. Back then, about 500 people were injured, though none fatally, in the police crackdown, which was the culmination of a month of political turmoil that had pushed the once enormously popular government of Mr. Saakashvili to the verge of implosion and that had stained relations with the president's allies in Europe and the United States. Yet Mr. Saakashvili survived politically, unexpectedly conceding to opposition demands and declaring early presidential elections that temporarily eased internal political tensions and foreign criticism. He won the elections, though there were accusations of fraud by the opposition. In a televised appeal made last month, Mr. Saakashvili said he had learned painful lessons from last year's police violence and vowed to prevent a recurrence. "We have all learned big lessons from Nov. 7," he said. "We have seen mistakes made by the Georgian authorities." He added: "Those events demonstrate how important it is for the government and the president to listen to the people, and how important it is to maintain dialogue even with minor groups." Olesya Vartanyan reported from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Michael Schwirtz from Moscow. Olesya Vartanyan reported from Tbilisi, and Michael Schwirtz from Moscow. From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Nov 7 23:25:17 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 01:25:17 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Postcards to U.S. President Message-ID: From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Nov 7 23:35:01 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 01:35:01 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Jean Bricmont: Our Obama Problem: A View From Europe Message-ID: November 7 / 9, 2008 A View From Europe Our Obama Problem By JEAN BRICMONT There are two factors to take into account in order to judge an election : what voters express by their vote and what the elected candidate is likely to do. In the case of the US presidential election, it would have been very depressing if the US population had elected McCain, after eight years of Bush. In fact, it is somewhat surprising that he still managed to get 48% of the popular vote, and that the Republican candidate did so well in states like Louisiana (remember Katrina ?). In that sense, the Left should welcome the Obama victory, not so much because he is "African-American", but because people who vote for him probably express a desire for change, and, in general, for progressive change : less war, a more balanced economic policy, and a more friendly attitude with respect to the environment. But the question of what the candidate will do is an entirely different matter. That depends on what he wants to do and what he can do. An American president has lots of power, but he is not a dictator and even a dictator would have to take into account relationships of forces. What Obama wants to do is not totally clear, but it is certain that he will not oppose the powers that be (Wall Street, big corporations, the pro-Israel lobby, etc.) that allowed him to win. He has at least demonstrated that much during the campaign. Of course, Obama has also to take onto account the pressure from below. But that is where the main problem arises : which pressure ? If some Americans are irritated by the Obamania in the United States, they would be even more so if they looked at what goes on abroad, especially in Europe. There is nothing I find more depressing than to see youth in the French banlieues being "mobilized" for Obama, along with all of social democracy, show business and (enlightened) Zionists. I even saw some of those youths saying they will send a bullet-proof vest to Obama because they think that America will never allow an African-American to be president, as if somebody supported by Warren Buffett and, in fact, by most of the establishment, was a threat to America and in need of their help. In other words, the Obama problem is his extreme popularity in Europe, which is based both on his skin colour and on his "image". Because people don't understand how much race relations in the United States have actually changed, they see Obama's election as a sort of absolute miracle and, since the media present him as a strong alternative to Bush, and hardly report, for example, his plans to send more troops to Afghanistan, they think that he is far more progressive than he actually is. Of course, given the disastrous state of the Left worldwide, people desperately want to believe in something positive happening somewhere, and that only reinforces the illusions about Obama. Besides, there is hardly any Right in Europe that is anti-Obama. In fact the Right and most of current social-democracy love Obama because he will let them be openly pro-American again. Because the United States is less egalitarian (in an economic sense) than Europe, the social wage is smaller, there are weaker unions and fewer worker's rights, the European elite views the United States as some sort of capitalist paradise. The problem with Bush is that he was so brutal, arrogant, inefficient and stupid that it became increasingly difficult for them to openly express their admiration for the United States. But now, everything changes -- by shifting the attention from social issues to ''race'' , they can turn the tables around and make the United States look like THE progressive country of the West. The very pro-American, "New Left", French daily Lib?ration has already suggested that the election of Obama is a lesson in democracy for France. Curiously, they cite long voting lines as evidence for this, while of course such lines in non-Western countries are taken as a sign of inefficiency or, worse, of the government's intention to dissuade people from voting. A final problem is that Obama's critics will automatically be suspected of racism. Already being "anti-American" is identified by Zionists with being antisemitic, so with a African-American president, we can expect the worst of both worlds. The question therefore is, how much will Obama be able to get away with, if and when his foreign policy clashes with the expectations of his leftist European supporters ? Because of the strength of the illusions, it is of course very difficult to combat them before he has done anything. The only hope is that people will take him, not at his word, because he has not promised anything, but at what they think his word is, and will react furiously when he betrays their (unfounded) hopes. Only that can prevent the United States from escalating its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. But the deepest problem is that, sixty years after the end of WW2, Europeans still see themselves as somehow dependent on the United States. For their elites, the reasons are clear and understandable, but the rest of us, including a big part of the Left, still put too much of our hopes in expecting the US population to elect a "good prince", as they have just done with Obama. We should determine our foreign policy, and our social model irrespective of American choices and we should not be afraid of talking with other countries, like Russia, China or Iran without worrying what Uncle Sam thinks. Europeans often view the United States as a model of democracy, but there can't be anything more undemocratic than for us to determine our policies in a way that depends on elections in which we do not participate. The US population elects its president, not the Master of the Universe. This seems to be understood nowadays in Russia, Asia, Latin America and the Muslim world. Only in Europe do we still need to decolonize our minds. Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, is published by Monthly Review Press. He can be reached at bricmont at fyma.ucl.ac.be. From shimogamo at attglobal.net Sat Nov 8 01:57:47 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:57:47 +0900 Subject: [A-List] History and Hope Message-ID: <4915548B.1090303@attglobal.net> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (November 05 2008) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society I'd meant to talk in this week's Archdruid Report post about the peak oil conference I attended last weekend in suburban Detroit. Still, that will have to wait for next time, as last night's election results deserve a comment of their own. Mind you, I intend to leave the political implications for others to discuss. The separation of church and state has been denounced by far too many people, on the left as well as the right, who have forgotten that it was originally put there to protect churches from political interference, not vice versa. It is nonetheless one of the essential foundations of the religious liberty that enables me to practice my Druid faith; one of the lessons I draw from this is that, as the head of a religious organization, I have the civic duty to keep my mouth shut about matters of partisan politics. There will no doubt be a banquet of political discussion in the months ahead of us lavish enough to satisfy even the most eager palate. What I want to discuss just now, though, has less to do with the candidates in the presidential election now ended, than with the millions of ordinary people who filed into polling places yesterday and decided between them. All through the last two years or so, since Barack Obama began what seemed at the time like an improbable quest for the US presidency, one concern expressed repeatedly by the media and ordinary people alike was the possibility that the election would end up being about the issue of race. In a certain sense, that was indeed what happened - but in a very unexpected sense. Some four decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the American people had the chance to judge an African-American candidate, in King's words, not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character - and by and large, they rose to that not inconsiderable challenge. There may well have been some who voted for Obama because of his ethnic background, just as there were doubtless some who voted against him for that reason; but even among those who voted for his opponent, there were many who did so not because of Obama's race, but simply because they disagreed with his policy proposals, just as if he were any other candidate. That is an achievement of immense scope. It may just turn out that this nation has at long last begun to heal the old wound of racial hatred that has riven America right down to its core since the first days of European settlement. So deep a wound will not close at once; as Wendell Berry pointed out some years ago in a book too rarely read, the scar tissue of the racial divide reaches all through our national psyche, on all sides of the various color lines that still wall us away from each other - and from ourselves. Still, it's no little thing that a majority of voters in Virginia, the heart of the old Confederacy; in Indiana, where a quarter of all adult males belonged to the Ku Klux Klan a mere seventy years ago; and in this nation as a whole, voted for the first time in history to send a black man to the White House. We have no way of knowing in advance what kind of president Barack Obama will turn out to be, or how history will regard his tenure. He's proven himself in a difficult campaign to be resourceful, energetic, thoughtful, and almost superhumanly cool under pressure, but many people have arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with abilities like these, and some of them have crashed and burned. Many of the cards in the hand he'll have to play will be dealt him by decisions made months and years beforehand, or by circumstances nobody can control. Still, a door has been opened, and I can't help but think that America will be better off from the simple fact that the highest levels of its political system are no longer exclusively reserved to the fraction of its population that happens to be white. Nor is yesterday's impact limited to issues of race; I think it almost certain that America's first woman president will be inaugurated within a decade, and it's even odds which of the two major parties will nominate her. The broadening of the pool of potential talent this implies will be desperately needed in the years to come. It's unfortunate, though it was probably inevitable, that the major issues of this moment in history were barely mentioned by any party, major or minor, in the presidential campaign. Over the next decade or so, the United States will have to work out a way to stand down from a global military-economic empire it can no longer afford to maintain; it will have to find the money and the means to replace a mostly fictive economy based on the manipulation of baroque financial instruments with a real economy based on the production of goods and services for people; it will have to make good on decades of malign neglect inflicted on the national infrastructure on nearly every level, even as it struggles to convert a suburban landcape viable only in an age of cheap abundant fossil fuels to something that makes sense in the world of scarce and expensive energy ahead of us. Few of the changes that will be imposed by these necessities will be popular. Many, in fact, will be bitterly resented, and none of them will come cheaply. We have wasted so many opportunities and poured so many of our once-abundant resources into a decades-long joyride that the next few years will almost certainly impose one wrenching challenge after another on a society that the recent past has left very poorly equipped to face them. Our history is among the heaviest burdens we face, because the habits we learned during America's imperial zenith are among the things that are most necessary to unlearn in the new and far more multipolar world dawning around us. Still, I find myself feeling a bit more hopeful than before, for the burden of racial hatred was also profoundly rooted in American history and identity, and the verdict of last night's election suggests that it has turned out to be subject to change. I think of the difference forty years has made, from 1968, when an assassin's bullet cut down Martin Luther King and inner cities across America exploded in violence, to 2008, when a nation's ballot sent Barack Obama to the presidency and many of those same inner cities celebrated straight through the night. We live in a different country now, and the possibility that Americans might be able to rise to the massive challenge of the deindustrial transition has become just slightly harder for me to dismiss out of hand. Still, that turn of history's wheel is still ahead of us, and we will have to wait and see. _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-and-hope.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Nov 8 08:09:56 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 10:09:56 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Brazil Oilfield May House '100bn Barrels' Message-ID: Brazil oilfield may house '100bn barrels' By Jonathan Wheatley in S?o Paulo Published: November 7 2008 23:55 | Last updated: November 7 2008 23:55 Brazil's newly discovered "pre-salt" oilfields may contain more than 100bn barrels, Haroldo Lima, head of the industry regulatory, said on Friday. Mr Lima said just the pre-salt oilfields already under concession may contain between 50bn and 80bn barrels and that the total area could surpass 100bn barrels. EDITOR'S CHOICE Lex: Brazilian banks - Nov-03 Wave of mergers set to break in Brazil - Nov-07 S?o Paulo mayoral race turns dirty - Oct-16 Lula's power base faces local polls test - Oct-03 Brazil's low exposure may dilute turmoil - Oct-15 Brazil steps in to shore up real - Oct-09 If so, the new fields would propel Brazil up the world league table of oil producing nations. Brazil currently has reserves of about 12.6bn barrels (or 14.4bn barrels of oil equivalent if natural gas is included), according to a statistical review produced by BP of the UK, a standard industry reference. That compares with 79.4bn barrels of oil in Russia, for example, or 101.5bn in Kuwait, according to BP. "Dimensions are so big that we still don't have a good vision of what this means for Brazil," Mr Lima told reporters in Rio de Janeiro. The pre-salt oilfields ? as their name suggests ? are trapped beneath a layer of salt under about 7,000 metres of sea water and rock and are among the most inaccessible on earth. The geological formation of which they are part is about 800 km long and 200 km wide, running up the southern Brazilian coast from the Santos Basin, about 200 km offshore. The deposits were discovered in 2007 and since then the government has suspended its annual auctions of concessions of geographical "blocks", in which oil companies accept exploratory risk in return for rights over any oil and gas they may discover. Every well so far sunk into the pre-salt fields has struck oil ? a hit rate of 100 per cent compared with about 15 per cent common in new areas in Brazil. Ministers have likened selling concessions in pre-salt fields to selling winning lottery tickets and the government is preparing a new regulatory framework for the pre-salt fields. But 10 concessions in the Santos Basin had been sold before the government realised the potential of the new fields. The areas under concession form a minority of the total pre-salt area, suggesting Mr Lima's estimate may be very conservative. From seanfischer at earthlink.net Sat Nov 8 09:45:10 2008 From: seanfischer at earthlink.net (Sean Fischer) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 11:45:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [A-List] Brazil Oilfield May House '100bn Barrels' Message-ID: <5818174.1226162710416.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Yoshie, Your article states that "...10 concessions in the Santos Basin had been sold before the government realised the potential of the new fields." Do you know which firms purchased these concessions before regulator Haroldo Lima made his announcement public? Sean -----Original Message----- >From: Yoshie Furuhashi >Sent: Nov 8, 2008 10:09 AM >To: A-List , Rad-Green >Subject: [A-List] Brazil Oilfield May House '100bn Barrels' > > >Brazil oilfield may house '100bn barrels' >By Jonathan Wheatley in S?o Paulo >Published: November 7 2008 23:55 | Last updated: November 7 2008 23:55 > >Brazil's newly discovered "pre-salt" oilfields may contain more than >100bn barrels, Haroldo Lima, head of the industry regulatory, said on >Friday. > >Mr Lima said just the pre-salt oilfields already under concession may >contain between 50bn and 80bn barrels and that the total area could >surpass 100bn barrels. >EDITOR'S CHOICE >Lex: Brazilian banks - Nov-03 >Wave of mergers set to break in Brazil - Nov-07 >S?o Paulo mayoral race turns dirty - Oct-16 >Lula's power base faces local polls test - Oct-03 >Brazil's low exposure may dilute turmoil - Oct-15 >Brazil steps in to shore up real - Oct-09 > >If so, the new fields would propel Brazil up the world league table of >oil producing nations. Brazil currently has reserves of about 12.6bn >barrels (or 14.4bn barrels of oil equivalent if natural gas is >included), according to a statistical review produced by BP of the UK, >a standard industry reference. > >That compares with 79.4bn barrels of oil in Russia, for example, or >101.5bn in Kuwait, according to BP. > >"Dimensions are so big that we still don't have a good vision of what >this means for Brazil," Mr Lima told reporters in Rio de Janeiro. > >The pre-salt oilfields ? as their name suggests ? are trapped beneath >a layer of salt under about 7,000 metres of sea water and rock and are >among the most inaccessible on earth. > >The geological formation of which they are part is about 800 km long >and 200 km wide, running up the southern Brazilian coast from the >Santos Basin, about 200 km offshore. > >The deposits were discovered in 2007 and since then the government has >suspended its annual auctions of concessions of geographical "blocks", >in which oil companies accept exploratory risk in return for rights >over any oil and gas they may discover. > >Every well so far sunk into the pre-salt fields has struck oil ? a hit >rate of 100 per cent compared with about 15 per cent common in new >areas in Brazil. Ministers have likened selling concessions in >pre-salt fields to selling winning lottery tickets and the government >is preparing a new regulatory framework for the pre-salt fields. > >But 10 concessions in the Santos Basin had been sold before the >government realised the potential of the new fields. > >The areas under concession form a minority of the total pre-salt area, >suggesting Mr Lima's estimate may be very conservative. > From michael.hudson at earthlink.net Sat Nov 8 10:39:11 2008 From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net (Michael Hudson) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:39:11 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Re Brazilian oil (or that of any other country) Message-ID: If it looks like there's been a giveaway, there's a simple solution that's valid under international law: A RESOURCE RENT TAX. This is what our group was working on with the head of the academic division of Russian Academy of Sciences Dmitri Lvov and Yevgeny Primakov before he was removed as PM. The tax would collect the windfall gains. It's the antidote to "bad-style" neoliberal globalization. Michael From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Sat Nov 8 13:57:28 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:57:28 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Pollitt on Palin Message-ID: <4915B6E8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Sayonara, Sarah Subject to Debate By Katha Pollitt This article appeared in the November 24, 2008 edition of The Nation. November 6, 2008 And so we bid farewell to Sarah Palin. How I'll miss her daily presence in my life! The mooseburgers, the wolf hunts, the kids named after bays and sports and trees and airplanes and who did not seem to go to school at all, the winks and blinks, the cute Alaska accent, the witch-hunting pastor and those great little flared jackets, especially the gray stripey one. People say she was a dingbat, but that is just sexist: the woman read everything, she said so herself; her knowledge of geography was unreal--she knew just where to find the pro-America part of the country; and don't forget her keen interest in ancient history! Thanks largely to her, Bill Ayers is now the most famous sixtysomething professor in the country--eat your heart out, Ward Churchill! You can snipe all you want, but she was truly God's gift: to Barack Obama, Katie Couric--notice no one's making fun of America's sweetheart now--Tina Fey and columnists all over America. Sayonara, Sarah Sarah Palin She was also a gift to feminism. Seriously. I don't mean she was a feminist--she told Couric she considered herself one, but in a later interview, perhaps after looking up the meaning of the word, coyly wondered why she needed to "label" herself. And I don't mean she had a claim on the votes of feminists or women--why should women who care about equality vote for a woman who wants to take their rights away? Elaine Lafferty, a former editor of Ms., made a splash by revealing in The Daily Beast (Tina Brown's new website, for those of you still following the news on paper) that she has been working as a consultant to Palin. In a short but painful piece of public relations called "Sarah Palin's a Brainiac," Lafferty claimed to find in Palin "a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernible pattern of associative thinking and insight," with a "photographic memory," as smart as legendary Senator Sam Ervin, "a woman who knows exactly who she is." According to Lafferty, all that stuff about library censorship and rape kits was just "nonsense"--and feminists who held Palin's wish to criminalize abortion against her were Beltway feminist-establishment elitists who shop at Whole Foods when they should be voting against Barack Obama to make the Dems stop taking women for granted. So the first way Palin was good for feminism is that she helped us clarify what it isn't: feminism doesn't mean voting for "the woman" just because she's female, and it doesn't mean confusing self-injury with empowerment, like the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (I'll vote for the forced-childbirth candidate, that'll show Howard Dean!). It isn't just feel-good "you go, girl" appreciation of female moxie, which I cheerfully acknowledge Palin has by the gallon. As I wrote when she was selected, if she were my neighbor I would probably like her--at least until she organized with her fellow Christians to ban abortion at the local hospital, as Palin did in the 1990s. Yes, feminism is about women getting their fair share of power, and that includes the top jobs--but that can't take a back seat to policies that benefit all women: equality on the job and the legal framework that undergirds it, antiviolence, reproductive self-determination, healthcare, education, childcare and so on. Fortunately, women who care about equality get this--dead-enders like the comically clueless Lynn Forester de Rothschild got lots of press, but in the end Obama won the support of the vast majority of women who had supported Hillary Clinton. Second, Palin's presence on the Republican ticket forced family-values conservatives to give public support to working mothers, equal marriages, pregnant teens and their much-maligned parents. Talk-show frothers, Christian zealots and professional antifeminists--Rush Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly--insisted that a mother of five, including a "special-needs" newborn, could perfectly well manage governing a state (a really big state, as we were frequently reminded), while simultaneously running for veep and, who knows, field-dressing a moose. No one said she belonged at home. No one said she was neglecting her husband or failing to be appropriately submissive to him. No one blamed her for 17-year-old Bristol's out-of-wedlock pregnancy or hard-partying high-school-dropout boyfriend. No one even wondered out loud why Bristol wasn't getting married before the baby arrived. All these things have officially morphed from sins to "challenges," just part of normal family life. No matter how strategic this newfound broadmindedness is, it will not be easy to row away from it. Thanks to Sarah, ladies, we can do just about anything we want as long as we don't have an abortion. Third, while Palin did not win the Hillary vote, the love she got from Republican women, including very conservative, traditional women, shows that what I like to call the feminism of everyday life is taking hold across the spectrum. That old frilly-doormat model of femininity is gone: even women who stay home and attend churches that bar women from the clergy thrill to the idea of women being all that they can be and taking their rightful place in the public realm. Like everyone else, they want respect and power, and now, finally, thanks to the women's movement they despise, they may actually get some. Finally, Palin completed the task Hillary Clinton began: running in different parties across a single political season, they have normalized the idea of a woman in the White House. It is hard even to remember now how iconoclastic Hillary was--how hard it was for her to negotiate femininity and ambition, to be warm but not weak, smart but not cold, attractive but not sexy, dynamic but not threatening. Only a year ago, it was a real question whether men would vote for a woman or, for that matter, whether women would. Palin may have been unfit for high office, but just by running she showed there was more than one mode for a female politician. After almost two years of the whole country watching two very different women in the White House race, it finally seems normal. So thanks, Sarah. And now, please--back to your iceberg. Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week! If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation. About Katha Pollitt Katha Pollitt's writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Ms. and the New York Times. She is the author, most recently, of Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories (Random House), now available in paperback, and an earlier volume of personal essays, Virginity or Death! (Random House. Visit her web site at www.kathapollitt.com. more... Katha Pollitt: God's gift to journalism--and to feminism. Culture War: Out of Juice? Presidential Election 2008 Katha Pollitt: The culture wars may fail at the top of the ticket this year, but expect right-wing mayhem further down the ballot. Follow-ups for Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Katha Pollitt: Don't let reproductive rights get lost in the run-up to Election Day. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 8 14:11:20 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:11:20 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Stan Goff: Our Obama Problem: A View From America In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49160078.6020901@gmail.com> "We have some serious evils in our faces right now; and if we are going to confront them, then we need to list them, organize against them, and make that opposition felt in the principalities and powers. Big pharma. Big food. Big war. Big oil. Big banks. Big prisons. And the big-dick culture of me-first domination and revenge. I have a litmus test, if anyone is interested. Let?s see if Guantanamo is closed in the first month of the new administration." Excerpted from the comments: Susan/catlady: Obama?s transition website, change.gov, is set up for citizens to make suggestions to the new administration.There are several pages under ?Agenda,? listing current policy. A search for ?Guantanamo? comes up zilch. A Look Under the Hood at the (Potential) Obama Administration 7th November 2008, 05:35 am by Stan http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/11/07/a-look-under-the-hood-at-the-potential-obama-administration/ Or, the illustrated variant @ Razed By Wolves: http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2008/11/stan-goff-feral-scholar-there-are-some.html From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Sat Nov 8 14:33:38 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:33:38 -0500 Subject: [A-List] />Did you ever work in the auto industry Message-ID: <4915BF62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Obama: Automakers are nation's backbone November 8, 2008 Read Comments(11)RecommendPrint this page E-mail this article Share this article: Del.icio.us Facebook Digg Reddit Newsvine Buzz up! Here's what President-elect Barack Obama had to say Friday about the auto industry during his news conference: "The news coming out of the auto industry this week reminds us of the hardship it faces, hardship that goes far beyond individual auto companies to the countless suppliers, small businesses and communities throughout our nation who depend on a vibrant American auto industry. The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing and a critical part of our attempt to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I would like to see the administration do everything it can to accelerate the retooling assistance that Congress has already enacted. In addition, I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis, and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States of America. And I was glad to be joined today by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who obviously has great knowledge and great interest on this issue. I've asked my team to explore what we can do under current law and whether additional legislation will be needed for this purpose." In your voice Read reactions to this story Newest first Oldest first Julll wrote: Replying to saltshaker: Replying to Julll: The title of the article Automakers are nation's backbone must either be a mis-quote, or a joke. The true auto workers who work for the auto makers might make a pimple on a good workers rear end in this country. They have forgotten due to the union contracts what it is to work a full day for a full day's pay. Jobbie Nooner says it all. Did you ever work in the auto industry or are you spreading rumors? 4 days at an auto plant 38 years ago. On the 5th day I submitted a letter stating that due to the drinking, drugs and persons not on the job but on the pay roll I would not be able to continue. As recent as the 4th of July weekend last year the complacency continued. Jobbie Nooner. FACT not FICTION. Come and work high steel with me for a couple of days. I'm not anti UNION just anti UAW. 11/08/2008 4:10:16 p.m. EDT

Replying to saltshaker:

Replying to Julll:

The title of the article Automakers are nation's backbone must either be a mis-quote, or a joke. The true auto workers who work for the auto makers might make a pimple on a good workers rear end in this country. They have forgotten due to the union contracts what it is to work a full day for a full day's pay. Jobbie Nooner says it all.

Did you ever work in the auto industry or are you spreading rumors?


4 days at an auto plant 38 years ago. On the 5th day I submitted a letter stating that due to the drinking, drugs and persons not on the job but on the pay roll I would not be able to continue. As recent as the 4th of July weekend last year the complacency continued. Jobbie Nooner. FACT not FICTION. Come and work high steel with me for a couple of days. I'm not anti UNION just anti UAW. Julll Recommend New post Reply to this Post Report Abuse belaen wrote: My wife LOST her job and get another! I do thank God that I still have a job so I can support my family, but this is the most mentally and physically taxing job I have ever had, and the older I get the more I wonder if it's worth it. I haven't had a raise in 7 years, have to pay ten times more when I have to take my kids to the doctor, not to mention that overtime has become a big NO NO for me and my coworkers. But I was willing to accept those CONCESSIONS among many others in order to keep my job. I am more cocerned about my kids well being more than anything else (as I'm sure is the case with anyone with kids), but don't say we are trying to get out of giving up concessions. We already have given up alot. We are just trying to survive, just like you and everyone else. So get off your high horse and quit trashing people whose family you know absolutely nothing about. 11/08/2008 3:26:28 p.m. EDTMy wife LOST her job and get another! I do thank God that I still have a job so I can support my family, but this is the most mentally and physically taxing job I have ever had, and the older I get the more I wonder if it's worth it. I haven't had a raise in 7 years, have to pay ten times more when I have to take my kids to the doctor, not to mention that overtime has become a big NO NO for me and my coworkers. But I was willing to accept those CONCESSIONS among many others in order to keep my job. I am more cocerned about my kids well being more than anything else (as I'm sure is the case with anyone with kids), but don't say we are trying to get out of giving up concessions. We already have given up alot. We are just trying to survive, just like you and everyone else. So get off your high horse and quit trashing people whose family you know absolutely nothing about. belaen Recommend New post Reply to this Post Report Abuse belaen wrote: I cannot believe what I am Reading! It is clear to me that the people that are writing about and trashing workers that work at any of the Detroit three have not worked there or do not know anyone that does. Union workers not willing to give concessions so the company can survive????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? I work for Ford Motor Company, and have for ten years! I have a wife and three kids. I used to own a home. USED TO!!!!! I tried to put money away over the years for my kids to go to college. Guess what! It is ALL gone. I spend day in and day out practically destroying my body on the line! Most of you don't know what that's like. Install the same parts on the same cars; car after car after car after car after car after car after car after car after car ..............etc., for 8 hours! Yes, you heard right, a FULL DAYS WORK! I hate my job! I would love to leave and go somewhere else, but I can't! You see, my wife LOST her job and get anot 11/08/2008 3:10:36 p.m. EDTI cannot believe what I am Reading! It is clear to me that the people that are writing about and trashing workers that work at any of the Detroit three have not worked there or do not know anyone that does. Union workers not willing to give concessions so the company can survive?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
I work for Ford Motor Company, and have for ten years! I have a wife and three kids. I used to own a home. USED TO!!!!! I tried to put money away over the years for my kids to go to college. Guess what! It is ALL gone. I spend day in and day out practically destroying my body on the line! Most of you don't know what that's like. Install the same parts on the same cars; car after car after car after car after car after car after car after car after car ..............etc., for 8 hours! Yes, you heard right, a FULL DAYS WORK! I hate my job! I would love to leave and go somewhere else, but I can't! You see, my wife LOST her job and get anot belaen Recommend New post Reply to this Post Report Abuse saltshaker wrote: Replying to Julll: The title of the article Automakers are nation's backbone must either be a mis-quote, or a joke. The true auto workers who work for the auto makers might make a pimple on a good workers rear end in this country. They have forgotten due to the union contracts what it is to work a full day for a full day's pay. Jobbie Nooner says it all. Did you ever work in the auto industry or are you spreading rumors? 11/08/2008 1:59:26 p.m. EDT

Replying to Julll:

The title of the article Automakers are nation's backbone must either be a mis-quote, or a joke. The true auto workers who work for the auto makers might make a pimple on a good workers rear end in this country. They have forgotten due to the union contracts what it is to work a full day for a full day's pay. Jobbie Nooner says it all.

Did you ever work in the auto industry or are you spreading rumors? saltshaker Recommend New post Reply to this Post Report Abuse Julll wrote: The title of the article Automakers are nation's backbone must either be a mis-quote, or a joke. The true auto workers who work for the auto makers might make a pimple on a good workers rear end in this country. They have forgotten due to the union contracts what it is to work a full day for a full day's pay. Jobbie Nooner says it all. 11/08/2008 1:24:39 p.m. EDTThe title of the article Automakers are nation's backbone must either be a mis-quote, or a joke. The true auto workers who work for the auto makers might make a pimple on a good workers rear end in this country. They have forgotten due to the union contracts what it is to work a full day for a full day's pay. Jobbie Nooner says it all. Julll Recommend New post Reply to this Post Report Abuse 1 2 3 >> LastFull page view See more comments per page and quote other replies You must be logged in to leave a comment. Login | Register This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Sat Nov 8 14:47:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:47:06 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Howard Zinn on Obama win Message-ID: <4915C28A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Obama's Historic Victory by Howard Zinn http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19384 "Those of us on the Left who have criticized Obama, as I have, for his failure to take bold positions on the war and on the economy, must join the exultation of those Americans, black and white, who shouted and wept Tuesday night as they were informed that Barack Obama had won the presidential election. It is truly a historic moment, that a black man will lead our country. The enthusiasm of the young, black and white, the hopes of their elders, cannot simply be ignored. "There was a similar moment a century and a half ago, in the year 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Lincoln had been criticized harshly by the abolitionists, the anti-slavery movement, for his failure to take a clear, bold stand against slavery, for acting as a shrewd politician rather than a moral force. But when he was elected, the abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, who had been an angry critic of Lincoln's cautiousness, recognized the possibility in his election. "Phillips wrote that for the first time in the nation's history "the slave has chosen a President of the United States." Lincoln, he said, was not an abolitionist, but he in some way "consents to represent an antislavery position." Like a pawn on the chessboard, Lincoln had the potential, if the American people acted vigorously, to be moved across the board, converted into a queen, and, as Phillips said, "sweep the board." "Obama, like Lincoln, tends to look first at his political fortunes instead of making his decisions on moral grounds. But, as the first African American in the White House, elected by an enthusiastic citizenry which expects a decisive move towards peace and social justice, he presents a possibility for important change. "Obama becomes president in a situation which cries out for such change. The nation has been engaged in two futile and immoral wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American people have turned decisively against those wars. The economy is shaken by tremendous blows, and is in danger of collapsing, as families lose their homes and working people, including those in the middle class, lose their jobs, So the population is ready for change, indeed, desperate for change, and "change" was the word most used by Obama in his campaign. "What kind of change is needed? First, to announce the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to renounce the Bush doctrine of preventive war as well as the Carter doctrine of military action to control Mideast oil. He needs to radically change the direction of U.S. foreign policy, declare that the U.S. is a peace loving country which will not intervene militarily in other parts of the world, and start dismantling the military bases we have in over a hundred countries. Also he must begin meeting with Medvedev, the Russian leader, to reach agreement on the dismantling of the nuclear arsenals, in keeping with the Nuclear Anti-Proliferation Treaty. "This turn-around from militarism will free hundreds of billions of dollars. A tax program which will sharply increase taxes on the richest 1% of the nation, and will tax their wealth as well as their income, will yield more hundreds of billions of dollars. "With all that saved money, the government will be able to give free health care to everyone, put millions of people to work (which the so-called free market has not been able to do. In short, emulate the New Deal program, in which millions were given jobs by the government. This is just an outline of a program which could transform the United States and make it a good neighbor to the world." This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 8 14:58:44 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:58:44 -0800 Subject: [A-List] />Did you ever work in the auto industry In-Reply-To: <4915BF62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <4915BF62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <49160B94.7010100@gmail.com> Yes... yes I have. Charles Brown wrote: > Obama: Automakers are nation's backbone > November 8, 2008 > > The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing and a critical part of our attempt to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Fuck the 'Auto Industry' The presumption that "Automakers are nation's backbone..." Laughable... Just laughable. ...and this presumption: "The auto industry... ...a critical part of our attempt to reduce our dependence on foreign oil." ...Is just SICK, PERVERSE NONSENSE with NO basis in fact. Got that Charles... Nonsense. SCRAP the US auto industry... DO it today (Because Nancy P was meeting with these anachronistic, greedy dinosaurs just the other day, figuring out how to give them MORE U.S. treasury money...) and retrain the workers to do something socially and environmentally useful for the planet. Like this: > Barring the revolutionary transformation of society in one fell swoop, > the system is going to require some duct tape and bailing wire to hold > it together for the time being, or folk will literally starve. > > This will likely require a Keynesian intervention of some kind (or it > all goes over a cliff, and Obama?s administration is counted by > history as more of the same shit). > > Key here is a public works jobs program; and if we don?t fight like > crazy for one that focuses on ***reparing biospheric damage***, then > shame on every one of us. http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/11/07/a-look-under-the-hood-at-the-potential-obama-administration/ From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Nov 8 15:17:27 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:17:27 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Howard Zinn on Obama win In-Reply-To: <4915C28A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <4915C28A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <49160FF7.7090008@gmail.com> Charles Brown wrote: > Obama's Historic Victory > by Howard Zinn > http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19384 > > "Those of us on the Left who have criticized Obama, as I have, for his > failure to take bold positions on the war and on the economy, must > join the exultation of those Americans, black and white, who shouted > and wept Tuesday night as they were informed that Barack Obama had won > the presidential election. The folks around THESE parts celebrated by driving their SUVs and cars around the city shouting honking and waving for the better part of the night. Most watched the election results roll in on big screen TVs at local bars where the cheering at each result sounded no different than the NFL playoffs as their unattended children ran around shouting Obama! Obama!... programmed for the last so-many months by their neo-liberal parents to a name, an image, an idea of 'Change' that does not seem to yet exist, nor has been voiced in any coherent way by the new presidential face-on-the-block. The celebration is premature, and history? History will be the judge. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Nov 8 19:56:13 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 21:56:13 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Cuban Ballet Marks 60th Anniversary Message-ID: Cuban Ballet Marks 60th Anniversary: Yoshie From kaliyuga at wildblue.net Sat Nov 8 21:17:13 2008 From: kaliyuga at wildblue.net (MARGARET WYLES) Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 20:17:13 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Howard Zinn on Obama win In-Reply-To: <49160FF7.7090008@gmail.com> References: <4915C28A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <49160FF7.7090008@gmail.com> Message-ID: <82b839ea0811082017v6a1949ffu24b705c1b798ebb0@mail.gmail.com> On 11/8/08, Leighm wrote: > The celebration is premature, and history? > > History will be the judge. > I celebrated, but with tepid enthusiasm. Is Obama merely tasked with playing the music on the Titanic or will history afford an opportunity for a charismatic leader to create something quite different. I took Biden's words quite seriously. He will be tested, and only then will we begin to answer McCain's question. "Who is Obama?" From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Nov 9 07:34:21 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:34:21 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Farmer in Chief Message-ID: <4916F4ED.4050607@ashisuto.co.jp> The Food Issue by Michael Pollan The New York Times (October 12 2008) (The original version of this article, at the URL at the end of this post, contains links to several reference materials.) Dear Mr President-Elect, It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration - the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact - so easy to overlook these past few years - that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention. Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on - but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain. After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy - nineteen percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do - as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes ten calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis - a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact. In addition to the problems of climate change and America's oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from five percent of national income in 1960 to sixteen percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top ten killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from five percent to sixteen percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount - from eighteen percent of household income to less than ten percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the US food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet. The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than thirty nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the IMF) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor's precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases "food sovereignty" and "food security" on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little - a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy. Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do". This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you've inherited - designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so - are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food - organic, local, pasture-based, humane - are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that "this is a conservative cause if ever there was one". There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I'm urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done - fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food. How We Got Here Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it's important to understand how that system came to be - and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement. It must be recognized that the current food system - characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table - is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy. Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare - black - from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people. This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer - ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer - and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant "fence row to fence row" and to "get big or get out". The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger. Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year - a half pound every day. But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant - factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution - animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete - and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all. What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope - thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy - for trucking food as well as pumping water - is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, "Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient". Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized. In drafting these proposals, I've adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration's food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change. These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security. I. Resolarizing the American Farm What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals - if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land. Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children. Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops" - farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops - including animals - as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides. The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world's best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can't survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don't survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason - save current policy and custom - that American farmers couldn't grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today's sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.) Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green - that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don't farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility. In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields - a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The USDA estimates that Americans throw out fourteen percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet. Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the USDA are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in "conservation" or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to "perennialize" commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses - without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon. But that is probably a fifty-year project. For today's agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm - as in Wendell Berry's elegant "solution". Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season's grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste - all without our help or fossil fuel. If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these - the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it - has just been kicked away. The second strut is FDA approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The FDA should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality. It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will - as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry's greatest burden on the environment; a recent UN study estimated that the world's livestock alone account for eighteen percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine. It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world? There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don't know, because we haven't tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn't produce comparable yields. Today's organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve eighty to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world - with a population expected to peak at ten billion - survive on these yields? First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today's organic levels could increase the world's food supply by fifty percent. The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn't everything - and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we're growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations. The final point to consider is that forty percent of the world's grain output today is fed to animals; eleven percent of the world's corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone - however we choose to grow it. In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels - performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals - is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely "driving and spraying", which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living. To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food - millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don't. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production - as farmers and probably also as gardeners. The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn't expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for "better" jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food. National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day's drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do "food-system impact statements" before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do "open space") in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center. The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new "green jobs", which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy. II. Reregionalizing the Food System For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy - one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding twenty million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it. Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers' markets, of which the USDA estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few: Four-Season Farmers' Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers' markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the USDA should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds. Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won't ever have food-safety problems - it will - only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable. Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the USDA does little to support the ones that remain. From the department's perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The USDA should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the USDA should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat. Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda - as well as the food security of billions of people around the world - will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation. Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases - whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons - go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed. Create a Federal Definition of "Food". It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a "junk food". We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them "junk food" - and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you'll recall President Reagan's ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only "food" is exempt from local sales tax. A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers' markets - all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers'-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers' markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies. III. Rebuilding America's Food Culture In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal - not just federal policy and public education but the president's bully pulpit and the example of the first family's own dinner table - to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda. Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to "edible education" - in Alice Waters's phrase - by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals. To change our children's food culture, we'll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day - the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared. But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial. There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible - the other sense in which "sunlight" should be the watchword of our agenda. The FDA should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they're eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals' diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another. Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what's needed is a change of culture in America's thinking about food, then how America's first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil. The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn't be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you're in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence - at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans' TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week - a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking twnty million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes. Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden. When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the USDA, which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than twenty million home gardens were supplying forty percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking "victory" over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system - something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently. I don't need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one's family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement. You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: "rocket".) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry - the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat - meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher "family value", after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal? Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced - it is in fact unconscionably expensive. Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America's agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment - that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both. _____ Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008). Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From tboyle at rosehill.net Sat Nov 8 18:06:09 2008 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:06:09 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade In-Reply-To: <49107FBB.5050804@tellas.gr> References: <49107FBB.5050804@tellas.gr> Message-ID: Stathis- I have been thinking about this for a few days. Your question is invaluable, to me, since I have never explicitly thought about the higher question of a creditless economy-- whether the entire economy might operate just fine without credit. My grandmother was a gold bug, she walked up and down the house, ranting about the corrupt banks and money system... She had fits, when the silver certificates were pulled and FRN's were issued in the early 60s. She finally died in 1964 ranting and cussing all the while. Since childhood I concluded, borrowing money is nuts, and lending money is great-- a free ride. By elementary school, I was a loan shark... I operated a loan business. I've never had a credit card or loan of any kind, saved and bought my home for cash. Is the individual better off, never borrowing one cent? Oh hell yes. I tell my sons. But, will this ever happen--banning lending? in a country based on bubbles and pyramids?? In a culture that is building casinos, state run lotteries, legalizing drugs? NO. Not in the near or mid-term.. So, your question may be an academic question. Would the entire production/distribution economy work better without credit? That's another question. The answer is not so clear, but I think the answer is YES. dominant corporations don't need outside financing to replace plant/equipment, or start new lines of business. And, entirely new sectors, competing/ displacing older monopolies CAN BE BUILT by groups of individuals pooling their money. That is called capital investmnet-- not borrowing, not credit. New industries are not generally built on debt. In conclusion-- the so called "credit markets" are something we can live without and certainly should not be "bailed out" by governments-- if anything, the "credit markets" should be banned. Todd Boyle retired CPA, kirkland wa. At 09:00 AM 11/4/2008, Stathis Stassinos wrote: >Todd, It was a pretty compelling image you gave about Japanese >economy, and pretty much on the opposite side of the consensus, >which I thought it was that minimal lending after 1990s was an >effect of banks fearing to lend to corporations, in a kind of liquidity trap. > >But the image you painted fits more, as most Japanese >multinationals are surviving if not thriving 15+ years from the >1990s. If we can assume more or less the same thing about their >suppliers down the chain, then fear of default was exaggerated. > >Your reasoning begs the question. Do you believe that in mature >economies with no great addiction to consumption, a near creditless >situation is possible? A situation where banks are nearly useless? >If that is so, in a stable economy, volatility will be minimal, >inflation will be minimal, stock markets will have little capital gains etc. > >and last, why do you narrow it down to oil? Chinese reserves are >bigger than Middle eastern ones, also helping create irrational >bubbles. Liu has pointed many times how the sterilization process >starves china from needed capital. > >stathis > >>------------------------------ >> >>Message: 5 >>Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:58:06 -0800 >>From: Todd Boyle >>Subject: Re: [A-List] Beware the Unwinding of the Yen Carry Trade >>To: The A-List >>Message-ID: >>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >> >>Stathis, >>In Japan in the early 1990s, neither individual households nor >>companies *needed* any loan, or *wanted* any loan. What's the use >>of a bank, in such circumstances? People and companies generally >>had sufficient current net cash flow to carry on, as long as >>policymakers kept the monopolies somewhat in equilibrium-- the >>perennial task of the Japanese government. >> >>The Japanese economy was not so irrational that it had many >>companies systemically in the red. Other than the finance and >>property bubbles, the rest of the economy did not need bank loans >>to meet current cash deficits. Japan's dominant corporations >>furthermore, didn't need banks for long-term investments. They had >>plenty of financial resources to finance needed plant and >>equipment. They had more capital than the banks! This is >>generally true of today's dominant transnationals as well. >> >>Of course, in those circumstances, who needs capital, or >>capitalism? Capitalism is only relevant when there is excess >>returns to capital-- it cannot exist in a steady state economy, >>because supplies of everything have developed to match the >>demands...... Accordingly, liquidity throughout the economy >>cannot be increased by reducing interest rates. In Japan they had >>zero interest rates (negative interest rates, after inflation) and >>still, nobody wanted to borrow. The only thing needed is to >>prevent liquidity from being drained, by vandals and pirates etc. >> >>It seems to me, today's situation is like 1971 or the late 1960s, >>really, when US imports of oil were causing such huge balance of >>payments deficits that the US needed to setup the "petrodollar >>recycling" arrangements with the Saudis. I seem to note, a bit >>late, that this scheme depended on growth in the US-- it was a >>scheme by which prices in excess of costs were extracted from the >>US by whoever had the oil wells-- a completely absurd situation -- >>and then, all those $trillions were expected to be reinvested in >>the US capital markets. Now, that's a recipe for disaster, >>because in a reasonably mature economy, neither companies nor >>households need or want that volume of capital investment. So, it >>went into collossal bubbles, one after another. The whole scheme >>is really stupid and needs to be reformed. It's mostly caused by >>the ridiculous runup in oil prices. Since hydrocarbons have >>intrinsic economic value in excess of cost, the excess gain should >>be taxed away, and redistributed rationally to households and >>businesses. Certainly, it should not flow to whoever controls the >>oil wells. And it shouldn't flow to whoever happens to live >>nearby the oil wells either (Be they Alaskan, Iraqi, Texan or anybody else.) >> >>TOdd >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6737 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081108/44f22bc3/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Nov 9 06:35:54 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:35:54 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Farmer in Chief Message-ID: <4916E73A.8040406@ashisuto.co.jp> The Food Issue by Michael Pollan The New York Times (October 12 2008) (The original version of this article, at the URL at the end of this post, contains links to several reference materials.) Dear Mr President-Elect, It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration - the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact - so easy to overlook these past few years - that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention. Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on - but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain. After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy - nineteen percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do - as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes ten calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis - a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact. In addition to the problems of climate change and America's oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from five percent of national income in 1960 to sixteen percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top ten killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from five percent to sixteen percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount - from eighteen percent of household income to less than ten percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the US food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet. The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than thirty nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the IMF) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor's precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases "food sovereignty" and "food security" on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little - a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy. Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do". This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you've inherited - designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so - are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food - organic, local, pasture-based, humane - are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that "this is a conservative cause if ever there was one". There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I'm urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done - fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food. How We Got Here Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it's important to understand how that system came to be - and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement. It must be recognized that the current food system - characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table - is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy. Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare - black - from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people. This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer - ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer - and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant "fence row to fence row" and to "get big or get out". The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger. Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year - a half pound every day. But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant - factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution - animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete - and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all. What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope - thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy - for trucking food as well as pumping water - is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, "Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient". Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized. In drafting these proposals, I've adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration's food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change. These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security. I. Resolarizing the American Farm What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals - if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land. Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children. Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops" - farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops - including animals - as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides. The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world's best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can't survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don't survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason - save current policy and custom - that American farmers couldn't grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today's sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.) Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green - that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don't farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility. In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields - a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The USDA estimates that Americans throw out fourteen percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet. Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the USDA are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in "conservation" or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to "perennialize" commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses - without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon. But that is probably a fifty-year project. For today's agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm - as in Wendell Berry's elegant "solution". Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season's grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste - all without our help or fossil fuel. If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these - the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it - has just been kicked away. The second strut is FDA approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The FDA should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality. It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will - as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry's greatest burden on the environment; a recent UN study estimated that the world's livestock alone account for eighteen percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine. It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world? There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don't know, because we haven't tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn't produce comparable yields. Today's organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve eighty to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world - with a population expected to peak at ten billion - survive on these yields? First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today's organic levels could increase the world's food supply by fifty percent. The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn't everything - and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we're growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations. The final point to consider is that forty percent of the world's grain output today is fed to animals; eleven percent of the world's corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone - however we choose to grow it. In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels - performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals - is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely "driving and spraying", which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living. To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food - millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don't. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production - as farmers and probably also as gardeners. The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn't expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for "better" jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food. National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day's drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do "food-system impact statements" before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do "open space") in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center. The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new "green jobs", which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy. II. Reregionalizing the Food System For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy - one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding twenty million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it. Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers' markets, of which the USDA estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few: Four-Season Farmers' Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers' markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the USDA should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds. Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won't ever have food-safety problems - it will - only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable. Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the USDA does little to support the ones that remain. From the department's perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The USDA should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the USDA should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat. Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda - as well as the food security of billions of people around the world - will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation. Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases - whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons - go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed. Create a Federal Definition of "Food". It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a "junk food". We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them "junk food" - and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you'll recall President Reagan's ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only "food" is exempt from local sales tax. A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers' markets - all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers'-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers' markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies. III. Rebuilding America's Food Culture In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal - not just federal policy and public education but the president's bully pulpit and the example of the first family's own dinner table - to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda. Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to "edible education" - in Alice Waters's phrase - by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals. To change our children's food culture, we'll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day - the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared. But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial. There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible - the other sense in which "sunlight" should be the watchword of our agenda. The FDA should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they're eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals' diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another. Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what's needed is a change of culture in America's thinking about food, then how America's first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil. The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn't be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you're in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence - at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans' TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week - a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking twnty million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes. Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden. When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the USDA, which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than twenty million home gardens were supplying forty percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking "victory" over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system - something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently. I don't need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one's family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement. You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: "rocket".) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry - the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat - meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher "family value", after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal? Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced - it is in fact unconscionably expensive. Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America's agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment - that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both. _____ Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008). Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From shimogamo at attglobal.net Sun Nov 9 18:28:40 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:28:40 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Farmer in Chief Message-ID: <49178E48.6080908@attglobal.net> The Food Issue by Michael Pollan The New York Times (October 12 2008) (The original version of this article, at the URL at the end of this post, contains links to several reference materials.) Dear Mr President-Elect, It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration - the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact - so easy to overlook these past few years - that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention. Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on - but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain. After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy - nineteen percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do - as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes ten calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis - a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact. In addition to the problems of climate change and America's oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from five percent of national income in 1960 to sixteen percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top ten killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from five percent to sixteen percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount - from eighteen percent of household income to less than ten percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the US food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet. The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than thirty nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the IMF) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor's precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases "food sovereignty" and "food security" on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little - a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy. Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do". This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you've inherited - designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so - are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food - organic, local, pasture-based, humane - are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that "this is a conservative cause if ever there was one". There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I'm urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done - fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food. How We Got Here Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it's important to understand how that system came to be - and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement. It must be recognized that the current food system - characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table - is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy. Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare - black - from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people. This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer - ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer - and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant "fence row to fence row" and to "get big or get out". The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger. Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America's meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year - a half pound every day. But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant - factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution - animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete - and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all. What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope - thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy - for trucking food as well as pumping water - is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, "Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient". Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized. In drafting these proposals, I've adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration's food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change. These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security. I. Resolarizing the American Farm What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals - if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land. Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children. Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops" - farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops - including animals - as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides. The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world's best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can't survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don't survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason - save current policy and custom - that American farmers couldn't grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today's sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.) Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green - that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don't farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility. In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields - a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The USDA estimates that Americans throw out fourteen percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet. Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the USDA are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in "conservation" or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to "perennialize" commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses - without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon. But that is probably a fifty-year project. For today's agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm - as in Wendell Berry's elegant "solution". Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season's grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste - all without our help or fossil fuel. If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these - the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it - has just been kicked away. The second strut is FDA approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The FDA should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality. It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will - as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry's greatest burden on the environment; a recent UN study estimated that the world's livestock alone account for eighteen percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine. It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world? There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don't know, because we haven't tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn't produce comparable yields. Today's organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve eighty to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world - with a population expected to peak at ten billion - survive on these yields? First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today's organic levels could increase the world's food supply by fifty percent. The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn't everything - and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we're growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations. The final point to consider is that forty percent of the world's grain output today is fed to animals; eleven percent of the world's corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone - however we choose to grow it. In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels - performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals - is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely "driving and spraying", which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living. To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food - millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don't. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production - as farmers and probably also as gardeners. The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn't expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for "better" jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food. National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day's drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do "food-system impact statements" before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do "open space") in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center. The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new "green jobs", which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy. II. Reregionalizing the Food System For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy - one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding twenty million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it. Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers' markets, of which the USDA estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few: Four-Season Farmers' Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers' markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the USDA should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds. Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won't ever have food-safety problems - it will - only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable. Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the USDA does little to support the ones that remain. From the department's perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The USDA should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the USDA should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat. Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda - as well as the food security of billions of people around the world - will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation. Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases - whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons - go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed. Create a Federal Definition of "Food". It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a "junk food". We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them "junk food" - and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you'll recall President Reagan's ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only "food" is exempt from local sales tax. A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers' markets - all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers'-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers' markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies. III. Rebuilding America's Food Culture In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal - not just federal policy and public education but the president's bully pulpit and the example of the first family's own dinner table - to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda. Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to "edible education" - in Alice Waters's phrase - by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals. To change our children's food culture, we'll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day - the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared. But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial. There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible - the other sense in which "sunlight" should be the watchword of our agenda. The FDA should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they're eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals' diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another. Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what's needed is a change of culture in America's thinking about food, then how America's first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil. The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn't be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you're in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence - at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans' TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week - a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking twnty million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes. Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden. When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the USDA, which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than twenty million home gardens were supplying forty percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking "victory" over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system - something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently. I don't need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one's family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement. You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: "rocket".) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry - the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat - meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher "family value", after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal? Our agenda puts the interests of America's farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry's. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more "populist" or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative "economies" depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced - it is in fact unconscionably expensive. Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America's agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment - that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both. _____ Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008). Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 02:01:30 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:01:30 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda "Anywhere in the World" Message-ID: November 10, 2008 Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI WASHINGTON ? The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials. These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States. In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants' compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission ? captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft ? in real time in the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center at the agency's headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away. Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations. But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence. More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment. Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives. According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called "Al Qaeda Network Exord," or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said. It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. "If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target," a former senior military official said, "the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly." The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America's intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda's extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military's vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said. Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval. The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported. For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a "fleeting opportunity" to neutralize the enemy. Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes' results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed. But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said. The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy, was aborted at the last minute. Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan's tribal areas, and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky. Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission. Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great. Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military's Joint Staff, declined to comment. The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon. Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government. Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military's proper role around the world, several administration officials said. American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization. Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador's knowledge or approval. Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before. Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries' consent. Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack. The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said. Administration officials said that Mr. Bush's approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order ? separate from the 2004 order ? that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan. Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush's top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee. From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 02:09:47 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:09:47 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Obama Quashes Iran's Hopes for Change Message-ID: Obama quashes Iran's hopes for change By Jim Muir BBC News, Tehran If anybody had hoped that Barack Obama's election victory would lead to a swift breakthrough in Washington's relations with one of its toughest adversaries, Iran, the honeymoon seems to be over before it even began. Many Iranians, including some officials, were thrilled by the stunning election victory, seeing it as offering hope of a radical change in US foreign policy and relations. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since shortly after the Islamic revolution in 1979, and tensions have risen recently over Iran's nuclear programme. Both Mr Obama and his future vice-president, Senator Joseph Biden, have in the past advocated unconditional dialogue with Iran. That was one reason behind the excitement generated in Iran by their election success. No 'knee-jerk' response That excitement led the country's quixotic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to break with precedent and send a congratulatory message to the American president-elect. But it swiftly became apparent that a whirlwind romance was out of the question, as political problems sprang up on both sides. In Iran, both Mr Ahmadinejad's initiative and Mr Obama's cagey response drew fierce attacks from rival hard-line circles, where the political atmosphere is already heating up sharply in advance of Iranian presidential elections next June. On the American side, while Barack Obama responded gracefully and personally to messages of congratulation from other world leaders, he held back from doing so with Mr Ahmadinejad, mindful of the political implications of such a gesture. He said he would be reviewing the Iranian president's letter and responding appropriately, rather than reacting in a "knee-jerk fashion". But Mr Obama made it clear that he will not be a soft touch when it comes to Tehran. "Iran's development of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable. We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening," he said. "Iran's support of terrorist organisations, I think, is something that has to cease." The Speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani - who has been sharply at odds with President Ahmadinejad over parliament's impeachment last week of the latter's interior minister - described Mr Obama's comments as a step in the wrong direction. "It signals a continuation of the erroneous policies of the past," he said. "Change has to be strategic, not just cosmetic." Hard-line Iranian newspapers on Sunday took up the theme of continuing American hostility to Iran and a common policy shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. Some also pointed out that one of Mr Obama's first actions was to appoint as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, whose background reportedly includes volunteer service in the Israeli army. Reformist support Some also criticised Mr Ahmadinejad directly for stretching out his hand to the American president-elect. The right-wing daily Jumhouri Islami said his initiative was wrong on several counts. If it was a prelude to reopening a dialogue with Washington, it said, such issues were of a magnitude which only Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was qualified to address. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - file photo President Ahmadinejad sent Mr Obama a congratulatory letter Ironically, the main voices raised in support of Mr Ahmadinejad's overture came from the reformist camp, which favours dialogue with Washington and which is normally at loggerheads with the president. The issue of opening a direct dialogue between Washington and Tehran is clearly a political minefield for both sides. But that does not necessarily mean it will not happen. As he pointed out in his remarks about President Ahmadinejad's letter, Mr Obama's hands are in any case tied until he takes office in January. The economic and financial crisis will then be his obvious first priority. But he has already singled out Iran and its pursuit of nuclear technology as a compelling foreign policy issue to be addressed, and he has not so far drawn back from the idea of direct talks, an approach long championed by Senator Biden. Shark-pool Back in Tehran, much will depend on the position taken by Ayatollah Khamenei. His addresses are often very tough on the United States. But some Iranian officials say that he is not against a direct dialogue, if it is without preconditions and Iran's dignity is respected. There is even some speculation about who might be qualified and authorised to conduct talks from the Iranian side. Students in Iran - 3/11/2008 The US remains unpopular with many Iranians Only if a dialogue had the clear support of the Leader - who cannot be criticised - would it be likely to resist being torn to shreds in the shark-pool of Iranian factional politics. If direct talks did get under way, it would clearly not be plain sailing. Iranian officials and leaders remain adamant about what they see as their absolute right to pursue nuclear fuel enrichment, which they insist is only for peaceful power-generation purposes. The Americans and others - apparently including Mr Obama - are convinced that Tehran is actually seeking to develop nuclear arms, and insist it must stop enrichment operations in exchange for imports of ready-enriched nuclear fuel and other inducements. Some reformist leaders have suggested that the ascendant hard-liners don't really want normalisation with the US, on the grounds that continuing tension allows them to focus on external threats and silence their domestic critics. From kaliyuga at wildblue.net Mon Nov 10 07:16:34 2008 From: kaliyuga at wildblue.net (MARGARET WYLES) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 06:16:34 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Obama Quashes Iran's Hopes for Change In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <82b839ea0811100616g4de01143u5e2618ba85b49a96@mail.gmail.com> On 11/10/08, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > > Obama quashes Iran's hopes for change > >Some reformist leaders have suggested that the ascendant hard-liners >don't really want normalisation with the US, on the grounds that >continuing tension allows them to focus on external threats and >silence their domestic critics The comments could just as well be said about US hardliners. Obama's rebuff is terribly disappointing, though it's possible he is being strategic and will respond eventually in a way that opens up the possibility of dialogue. My first thought is that the official policy will continue to seek and create chaos rather than peace. From alli at alimar.net Sun Nov 9 12:57:53 2008 From: alli at alimar.net (Allison Riches) Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 19:57:53 +0000 Subject: [A-List] Asbos - Michael Kearney's comment Message-ID: <05204C3E-C8A8-4F74-AE9B-47E0500ADDDE@alimar.net> I have just discovered this site with regard to a search on google : 'asbo victimisation, uk'. I have just read michael Kearney's posted comments from 2005. Ironic in timing as that was when my smouldering problems had petrol thrown over them, and it has taken over 3 years to clear my name and consequently rebuild my confidence, clear my head and identify holes in the law which only serve a dictatorship styled social cleansing. I was inspired by Kearney's comments as he is a learned man and has an informed view of both sides of a vague hastily implemented, yet individually crippling life scarred scenario. I wish to pursue the legal links between ASBOs and victimisation, as the Police and councils will always suggest that they are clearly defined as separate. I'm reasonably bright, and frankly cannot see the differences. On this basis, I would like to run my scenario by an expert in the field, as a possible history making case, therefore reform/abolition of such a social branding. We are a century post Oscar Wilde, yet our society remains static. Suddenly we're morally obliged to dictate democracy to the Middle East. Ironic. Is it possible the emphasis of moral justice is back to front regarding the social stance? What happened to justice? Is it Masonic? Please contact me Michael Kearney. i have much to discuss, and look for an honest assessment from a scholar in this field. The facts regarding my case are in writing, headed and signed, not just heresay. I'm ready. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3372 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081109/89911d0e/attachment.txt From michael.hudson at earthlink.net Sun Nov 9 14:09:23 2008 From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net (Michael Hudson) Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:09:23 -0500 Subject: [A-List] FW: [gang8] Hudson: The Bailout's New Financial Oligarchy In-Reply-To: <000c01c9429f$3ded3980$033da8c0@office> Message-ID: ------ Forwarded Message From: Arno Mong Daastoel Reply-To: Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 20:13:20 +0100 To: Subject: [gang8] Hudson: The Bailout's New Financial Oliarchy http://michael-hudson.com/interviews/0810158NewOligarchy2.html > > The Bailout?s New Financial Oligarchy > > By Dr. Michael Hudson > > > > > Guns and Butter Interview on KPFA> radio- Part Two , and Part One > > > October 15, 2008 > > >> >> >> ?If you want to see the ideal of the World Bank and the IMF, look at the >> Russian Latvian and Estonian economies. They have shrunk as if there were a >> war on. And in a sense it is a war ? a class war and simultaneouslya war of >> American high finance against the rest of world. As in military ars, its >> devastating consequences threaten to include shortening life exectancy, >> lower health standards and depopulation, poverty and de-industrialiation, >> rising debt arrears and defaults. You?re going to have many of the > post-Soviet countries going the way of Iceland very quickly as their real >> state debt collapses. Because crazy as it may seem, it was the real estate >> buble that brought in the foreign exchange ? in the form of mortgage loans > denominated in foreign currencies ? that financed their structural trade >> eficits. Now that the bubble has burst, there?s no way of keeping these >> noliberal hothouse economic experiments afloat.? > > > ---------- > > > I?m Bonnie Faulkner (BF): Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael > Hudson. Today?s show: ?The Bailout?s New Fiancial Oligarchy.? Dr. Hudson > is a Financial Economist and Historian. He i President of the Institute for > the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a WallStreet Financial Analyst and > Distinguished Research Professor of Economics atthe University of Missouri, > Kansas City. His 1972 book ?Superimperilism: The Economic Strategy of > American Empire? is a critique of how the Unitd States exploited foreign > economies through the IMF and World Bank. He is alo author of ?The Myth of > Aid? and ?Global Fracture: the New International Econmic Order.? > > > Dr. Hudson has written several articles n the recent Wall Street > meltdown and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson?s Plan. These articles > include, Financial Bailout: America?s wn Kleptocracy ? the Largest > Transformation of America?s Financial System snce the Great Depression; The > Paulson/Bernanke Bailout: Will the Cure Be Worstthan the Disease?; Financial > Fraud: Mr. Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scndal; and Thinking the > Unthinkable: a Debt Write Down and Jubilee Year Clen Slate. These articles > are on CounterPunch and Global Research, and are piced up on Information > Clearing House and other sites. > > > > BF: Dr. udson, welcome again. > > > Michael Hudson (MH): Thank you, Bonnie. > > > BF: Last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed out its worst wee > ever, down 18%. On Thursday, October 9th, it touched 7999, down over 40% fom > its high around 14000. Then on Friday it had a 1000-point swing on record volume. I heard one woman on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange yelling >that no one knows what anything is worth. What?s going on? > > > MH: Durin the first seven minutes on Thursday I watched the Dow sink 100 > poins per minute. That?s over 1% per minute. Then the average began to > recover, pending statement by President Bush. But when he didn?t say > anything helpful, it ontinued its fall. Late in the day you could see the > Plunge ProtectionTeam come in and try to push up the financial stocks, but > the attempt ran ou of steam. The reason is that most investors ? and voters > too, by the wy ? have come to realize that Paulson?s plan is not going to > help the ?eal? economy, only his cronies on Wall Street. > > > Let?s go ovr his two plans. Plan A, initially rejected by > Congress (thanks mainly to Repulican opposition) was to buy $700 billion of > junk mortgages and other bad ebts, including fraudulent loans. The aim was > to bail out bad lenders and investors, but not their victims. This > predator-oriented plan as a waste of money as far as helping the economy > recover was concerned. Congress rejected it as a bltant giveaway, although > Mr. Paulson says that he?s still going to spend hundrds of billions of > dollars for this purpose and nobody looks ready to impeac him. Predatory > finance has been able to protect its gains extracted from te economy at > large by passing its losses onto the government sector. > > Plan B calls for giving this money directly to the banks and > eading insurance companies, on terms that let them continue paying high > excutive salaries and dividends to existing shareholders rather than wiping > themout as normally happens when an enterprise has Negative Equity. The > Treasury?s idea of ?protecting the taxpayer? is to buy ?peferred? stock. The > word ?preferred? is a legal term that means simply thatthe shares are > non-voting and can be wiped out, because they are not technicaly creditor > claims. In case of further trouble the government goes to theback of the > collection line, not to the front. This gives the banks money t pay the big > speculators on bad gambles, enablng the winners to collect from suddenly > affluent debtor-banks and debtor insurance copanies. > > > The pretense is that the banks are going to urn around and lend > out this government money is going to help the economy at arge. But the > economy is too over-indebted and is shrinking too fast totake on more debt. > Homeowners and consumers, real estate investors and corpoations have pledged > so much of their income to pay debt service that there s not much left to > pay interest on yet more debt. The solution to today?s prblem is less debt, > not more. > > > The market plunge for mrtgages and corporate bonds had the > virtue of prearing the ground for renegotiations, write-downs and write-offs > along these lines. ut Mr. Paulson made it much more difficult sought to turn > things around in ths way. Higher valuations for mortgages and other debt > claims have taken te pressure off creditors to agree to write-downs. It?s > easier for them simply to swap their junk mortgages to the Treasury or > Federal Reserve for full-value US. Treasury bonds, and make the government > take the loss ? and presumably evy taxes to cover the interest charges on > the augmented debt! > > > There is no way that Mr. Paulson, in charge of as clever a > compan as Goldman Sachs, could honestly pretend that giving money to banks > ould persuade them to make bad loans that will lose even more.[1] > This > assertion merely serves as a cover story fr the Treasury giveaway. The money > actually will be used to buy other bank, consolidating the U.S. banking > sector into just a few giant nationwide bans, European-style. > > > Mr. Paulson is what Franklin Rooseveltcalled a ?bankster.? > Congress is not going to indict him for perjury but I think people have seen > his true colors and that he is not a ?publicservant? acting in the national > interest. When an official follows a polic that fails, you can be pretty > sure that somebody is benefiting by his blidness. Such people are called > ?useful idiots? to the vested interest, but I thnk we are dealing here not > with idiots but by skilled double-talkers, masters of deception. The aim of > these banksters is to take the bailout mone and run ? or as I said, to act > as vulture investors buying other banks tostrengthen their monopoly hold on > the rest of the economy. So what we?re seing is really the largest financial > theft in American history. Wall Steet has inserted its lobbyists into the > government?s decision-making apparatu and crafted a cover story that they > know to be false. The media are barly questioning it. Today?s New York Times > front page (Oct. 15) does point out that the Treasury has given the banking > sstem and its lobbies what they want ? a program free of Treasury control > over xecutive remuneration. > > > But neither the New York Timesnor other popular media have > acknowledged the basic problem: Today?sdebt overhead is substantially in > excess of the ability to pay, and hence of tday?s market valuations. This > means that a large part of the private sector?sbad mortgages and other bad > debts are unpayable. But now are going to be arried, either by the banks or > by the government if it takes ownership inexchange for the new Treasury bonds > it is printing. > > > hen you get down to the actual magnitude of this problem, the > only real soution turns out to be ?Plan C? ? the Unthinkable Option from the > creditors? vantage point. That is to do what always has to be done in the > end: to write down the unpayable debts to reflect e current market value of > collateral pledged to back them, that is to the amout that can be paid under > today?s conditions. And remember, these conditions re worsening. The economy > will continue to shrink as long as these cessive debts are kept on the > books. > > > Unfortunately, the Treasury plan does not require banks to > renegotiate or otherwise write down he debts. The bailout plan passed by > Congress is an anti-debtor plan. It won?twork over time, but a lot of > speculators and creditors can get richerby leaving the government holding > the bag for these bad debts. The Treasur is swapping its own bonds for bad > IOUs. Interest charges on these newly inted Treasury bonds will be built > into the federal budget as a transfer paymnt from taxpayers (that is, the > lower income brackets, which pay the highesttax rates) to creditors and > property owners (who have made themselvs exempt from income taxation). > > > One twist to Mr. Paulon?s Plan is that banks do not have to mark > their securities or other assts to actual market prices. Rather thantelling > prospective investors, depositors or others that they?re worth, bans can use > Enron-style ?mark-to-model? accounting to say thattheir stock?s book values > whatever in-house model-builders want to say they?re worth, on whatever > blue-sky assmptions they choose. The only constraint now that > foreigners and domestic investors have now realized the degree to which that > the banking system, Wall Street and the rating agencies are run by men that > used to be crooks, but now are euphemized simply as ?creative acc> > > > BF: A lot of people, including yourself, have come out with good ideas about > what ought to be done, but they?re not doing it. It seems that the people at > the levers of power don?t really want to fix the economy. > > > MH: Its worse than that, Bnnie. The interests of Mr. Paulson and his Wall > Street banksters are antithetical to the economy. The ?product? that the > banks and Wall Street sell is interest-bearing bt. The banking system makes > its money by extracting interest from the economy, and by lending it out. Its > gain is the industrial economy?s loss if it does not finance new tangible > capital formation bu simply provide borrowers with the credit to bid up > prices for housing, commercial buildings, stocks and other assets already in > place. This forces prospective buyers of these assets t borrow yet more and > pay yet more interest in a snowballing effect. The process doesn?t create new > tangible property; it only inflates access prices, while the rising payment > of debt ervice diverts income away from the ?normal? or ?Say?s Law? circular > flow between producers and consumers. > > > To make matters worse, the financial sector lobbies politicaly > to un-tax commercial real estate and other property so as to leave more rent > and monopoly super profits available to be paid as interest. But interrupting > this flow to siphon of interest and management fees is the basic business of > financial institutions, in contrast to industry and public enterprises. So > when Mr. Paulson?s plan leaves the economy poorer than befre, it?s not a case > of, ?Oh, gee, we messed up. We didn?t expect downturn to continue.? The > reality is that they?re trying their worst to take as much of the economy for > themselves as they an. Their aim is to empty out the cupboards before the > November 4th election. > > > It?s something like medieval populations fleeing from Genghis > Khan: ?Le take everything we can carry.? Except in this case, it?s Wall > Street Republicans fleeing from the prospect of a Democratic election > victory, fearing that somehow Obama may not end up appointing Robert Rubin or > another Wall Street Treasury Secretary. They better steal everhing they can > while they ca. And it looks like they may steal enough to shape the next > century of American Wealth by creating a new set of ruling families and vested > interests before our very eyes. > > > here goes the theory of the Invisible Hand! It turns out to e > the hand of predators, not that of a beneficent deity. Acting coverly as > insiders, they?ve crated a deceptive rhetoric by weaving a cloak of > invisibility around ther actions. They do this first by decting finance > and rent-seeking privilege as part of the economy?s real wealth-creating > process rather than as an extractive sector, and second, by, pretending that > the financial problem is temporary liquidity problem, not a structural > probt of debts that can?t be paid ?unless the governmemakes up the > gap at the non-financial sector?s expense. > > > ttom line is that we have two economies. An extractive > financial sector (Economy #2) has wrapped itself around the ?real? economy of > production, distribution and producion (Economy #1). Th > political strategy of Economy #2 is to conceal public recognition of this > dichotomy, so that it can continue its extraction of interest and fees. > > > > BF: There doesn?t seem to be much fight-back at all. Do you see anybody in > any positionof power pushing back against this? > > > MH: (laughing wryly) I don?t even see anybody ?not? in a position of power > pushing back. Hardly anyone is confronting the real issue ? the fact that the > only way to revive an over-indebted economy is to write down the bad debts. > This should be so obvious that leaving it out of account shows the degree of > control that Wall Street lobbyists have, not just over Congressional debate, > but over the mass media and even academic economics departments. > > > > BF: How significant is insider trading n the Dow?s huge daily price swings? > > > MH: There?s no way to know. It doesn?t seem to make sense that something > worth one price in the morning can be worth either twice or half as much in > the afternoon. Wall Street has killed the regulatory policemen. The > Republicans say they?re in favor of putting more police on the streets, but > they?ve fired or downsized the financial policemen on Wall Street. > > > > BF: It seems from these huge swings that institutions and people with a lot > of money know ahead of time what?s going to happen, and it?s all discounted > in advance. > > > MH: It?s hard to know what?s going to happen, but they have a fallback > position. Years ago, insurance companies who managed pension funds and other > peoples? money would do the usual array of trades each day. The good trades > that made money would be registered in their own accounts. The bad trades > would be put in the accounts of the clients whose funds they managed. This is > the option that repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act has provided to banks and > their money-management subsidiaries. > > > > BF: On television they keep talking about interest-rate cuts. What will this > do? > > > MH: The interest rate they?re talking about is not the rate on credit cards. > It?s not the mortgage rate either. It?s not a kind of interest that people or > companies pay, but the very low interest rate at which the government > provides credit to the banking system and large financial speculators. The > Treasury and Federal Reserve are saying: ?We?re going to give you almost free > credit. If you borrow enough, you can bid up the price of assets and make a > capital gain. So we?re going to flood the economy with credit and let you > make this gain. That will re-inflate the assets you hold to back what you owe > your depositors.? > > > The problem is that the banks and the other investors who would > like to make such a free lunch don?t want to buy assets that already are > underwater. The problem is Negative Equity. So many mortgages, so many assets > and so many banks themselves have negative equity ? that is, they owe more > debt than their assets are worth ? that there is no point in buying assets > right now. The government credit policy is called ?pushing on a string.? You > can lead a horse to water, but you can?t make it drink. You can provide > credit, but in a shrinking economy you can?t make people borrow to buy assets > they expect to keep falling in price. > > > > BF: Financial commentators on television keep saying, ?We?ve got to unfreeze > credit. Banks are scared to lend money to each other.? They think the answer > is for banks to lend short-term credit to each other. What about this? > > > MH: The reason banks aren?t lending isn?t that they don?t have enough capital > reserves. It?s that Wall Street?s behavior has destroyed trust. The law that > Congress passed made things worse, by giving banks the right to misrepresent > their position by ?marking to model? accounting. This lets banks take a > package of sub-prime junk mortgages and say it?s worth anything they want. So > their model-builders say, ?If it?s paid off at the exploding interest rate we > expect, if the current owner somehow is able to sell the house in a revived > real-estate market, then the mortgage is worth such-and-such.? This turns > financial markets into an exercise in science fiction that has little basis > in reality. > > > Bank lobbyists have gotten their way in avoiding reality ? and > now the banks are suffering for their political victory of being able to keep > financial reality secret. When Congress, backed by the President and a Wall > Street Treasury Secretary, all give banks a license to lie, investors and > money managers respond by saying, We don?t want any part of this.? The media > are not reporting that as far as Europe is concerned, Wall Street is being > run by crooks in much the same way that it used to be before the Reform Era > and New Deal clean-ups. Instead of acknowledging crooked behavior and > prosecuting these guys, government financial officials are rewarding them. > And when investors refrain from providing new money to these banks and > insurance companies, the government turns around and spends $125 billion to > buy their stocks at a price way above current market value. So the worse Wall > Street behaves, the worse the financial crisis gets and the more they are > able to go to Washington and say, ?You have to pay more money to save us, > because what?s good for us is good for the economy.? The implicit message is, > ?We?ll wreck the economy if you don?t give us what we want!? > > > > BF: Wasn?t this part of Paulson?s Plan ? this change in accounting rules > where they don?t have to mark to market? > > > MH: He hoped that promising that the government would give $700 billion to > the banks would convince foreigners and sovereign wealth funds (maybe OPEC > countries, Arab oil sheiks, maybe China and Japan) that the government could > solve the problem. But the trick didn?t work, because the Bush Administration > has lost credibility. Wall Street has made matters worse by the way Lehman > Brothers emptied out its European offices of cash the day before it went > bankrupt, paying off its closest U.S. cronies. The government followed up by > making an illegal gift to American car manufacturers by saying ?We?re going > to break international law and only give subsidies to U.S. auto companies, > not foreign-owned companies in the United States. Asian companies protested > against this favoritism that discriminates against Japanese firms that have > relocated in the United States to take advantage of a tariff and non-tariff > trade barriers. They say, ?We?re doing everything you?ve said, and now you?re > screwing us.? So is it any surprise that foreigners view this administration > as a gang? That?s why they?re bailing out of the economy. > > > Never before in my experience (which goes back fifty years on > Wall Street), have I seen seven days of steady decline in the stock market. > Every decline I?ve ever seen has normally been a zigzag: It goes down one, > two, three maybe even four days, then it bounces up. There?s a brief squeeze > on short sellers, pessimists who have oversold and have to buy shares to > cover their positions. But then the market goes down again, bounces up, and > then goes down further. A zigzag is how markets normally operate. But there?s > been no zigzag. So you know it?s not a panic but a phase change. Foreign > investors in particular ? and even foreign officials now ? are disgusted with > how the Americans are mismanaging the economy and indeed, flagrantly stealing > from the public domain. > > > > BF: Yet I hear financial reporters on television railing about how we need > foreign investment, and how we?re going to attract it. > > > MH: That era has ended. We are entering a new era of other countries treating > the U.S. economy as a hot potato. They want to get rid of dollar-denominated > assets. The German government has had to bail out German banks in D?sseldorf > and in Saxony ? banks that had faith in the packaged mortgage debt that U.S. > financial institutions and money managers were selling them. It?s like the > situation in Animal House, when one of the fraternity boys lent his friends > his father?s expensive car and they wrecked it. He was crying, all upset: > ?You?ve wrecked my father?s car! What will I do?? One of the boys explained: > ?You screwed up. You trusted us.? That?s what America has said to banks in > Germany and other countries: ?You screwed up, you trusted our money > managers.? > > > In other words, ?We?ve made a mint off you, and we?re going to > keep it.? These managers already have given themselves stock options, golden > parachutes and high salaries. That?s the result of our failure to regulate. > The banksters have got their money ? that is, all the Treasury bonds that Mr. > Paulson has been able to give them ? and they?re running. Let the next > administration clean up the mess and pay for this bailout and the vast new > sums of public debt it?s created. > > > > BF: So Paulson?s bailout is not going to fix the need for foreign capital. > > > MH: That?s one reason why the stock market has been going down. Foreigners > are saying, ?We don?t trust the U.S. economy anymore. We especially don?t > trust the banks.? So they?re selling U.S. stocks and other investments. The > balance-of-payments problem looks like it will be pushing down the dollar?s > value against other currencies, so even if stocks go up in dollars, they may > fall when denominated in euros. > > > The big picture is that America is running a heavy long-term > structural trade deficit. It also is already running a heavy military deficit > because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the past these deficits have > been financed by foreign central banks and private-sector foreign investors > recycling these dollars back to the United States via the Treasury or Wall > Street. But now there?s a net U.S. investment outflow as well. The result is > a three-fold pressure on the U.S. dollar. Wall Street?s ?free-market? > planning has hollowed out the economy. > > > Dismantling public regulation has been supported by the economic > theory taught in almost every university. This is the junk-economic theory > that has been getting Nobel prizes for free trade and open capital markets > for the last thirty-two years. It is as bankrupt as the banking system. > > > > BF: You?re referring to Milton Friedman. Didn?t he get a Nobel Prize? > > > MH: Yes. The vast majority of these prizes have been given to Chicago School > economists who are in effect shills for the financial sector. When these > ?useful idiots? use complex math to oppose a role for government planning, > they overlooked what you and I have talked about on this show before: Every > economy is planned by some party or other. Economies have been planned ever > since the Neolithic. People have to look forward. That?s why the calendar was > invented. If the government doesn?t do the key planning, if it withdraws as > society?s long-term planner, then the role is left to Wall Street. The > problem with this relinquishing of public authority is that the time frame of > the financial sector?s credit allocation traditionally has been short-term. A > hit-and-run mentality is the norm. Today, Wall Street managers have taken > their golden parachutes and exercised their stock options, squirreled away > their high salaries and put them into hard assets ? land, real estate, > anything they can get. They?ve made themselves safe, and now they?re letting > the rest of the economy go under. > > > BF: In the show that you and I did entitled ?America: host or parasite?? you > explained how foreign investment has been supporting our economy. > > > MH: These days foreigners are pulling out their money. They?re also unwinding > the cheap money they?ve borrowed via Japan?s carry trade. This has been > pushing up the yen, and that money has been coming to the United States, > pushing up the dollar temporarily. But when this unwinding is finished, we > return to a situation in which foreign creditors to the United States have > lost a bundle. German banks have gone broke from their U.S. investments, and > English banks have gone broke on their own U.S.-style real estate pyramiding. > The G7 meetings in Washington have failed because the U.S. Government has > taken a belligerent nationalistic position. It is telling European and other > governments to bail out the American bank branches in their countries. The > message is, ?We don?t care what it costs you. Just take care of us.? > > > The reaction by the European and other foreign bankers has been > to conclude that there can?t really be an agreement. They?re now trying to > figure out how to try and save themselves. At best this will put governments > on a path to try to develop an alternative to the U.S. dollar-based system, > that is, dollar hegemony that obliges other countries to hold their foreign > exchange reserves in the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury. It?s become > obvious that the money they?re lending will never be repaid. It never can be > repaid, and in any event there is no desire in the United States to repay > foreigners. > > > > BF: Can we expect hyperinflation? > > > MH: Not yet. That occurs when a currency crashes against other currencies, > usually by trying to pay debts that its trade balance can?t cover. I don?t > think you?ll find hyperinflation of dollar prices until other economies > create an alternative to the dollar. This will start by developing a vehicle > for trade among themselves. > > > The first stage is to arrange barter deals, as was done with the > Soviet Union in the 1960s. The moral is that over-indebtedness always leads > to barter in the ?final? stage. The Roman Empire remains civilization?s > primary and most serious example. But as we move toward this position, the > United States simply will not have much to exchange with foreign economies. > > > Once Europe, Asia and the post-Soviet economies can?t find many > dollarized financial vehicles in which to invest, you can be sure that will > try to develop an alternative to the dollar. Until they actually do that, > there will not be inflation here. There will simply be a polarization of > income between wealthy creditors ? the top 10 percent of the population ? and > an increasingly indebted bottom 90 percent. This is basically a deflationary > process ? debt deflation as far as the distribution of income is concerned. > The only inflationary impact will come as the dollar declines to reflect how > much the debt overhead has hollowed out the U.S. economy. > > > What Congress?s vote to approve the Wall Street bailout > accomplished was to polarize the economy to an unprecedented degree. The > effect will be to reverse the American dream and make it much harder for > people to get rich, except for the few who win the lottery. But most people > who play the lottery are going to lose, of course. People will become more > desperate. And the more desperate they get, the more money they?re going to > lose and the faster the economy will polarize. That?s how polarization > occurs. It?s an accelerating process, and Mr. Paulson and the Democrats have > just pressed the financial accelerator. > > > > BF: Even on American television, commentators were complaining that he?s not > being specific and isn?t going far enough, that is, far enough to help > debtors as well as Wall Street. What will be the effect of the G7 meeting and > the communiqu? from Hank Paulson? > > > MH: When a Treasury Secretary is not specific coming out of a meeting of > finance ministers, this means they wouldn?t give him what he wanted. He tried > to boss them and they wouldn?t say yes, so the United States has nothing to > say. In other words, it made irrational demands. Short of dropping an atom > bomb on Europe, I don?t see there?s any way of getting the U.S. demands met. > > > > BF: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank also are meeting > this weekend. What role do these organizations play? > > > MH: Nothing positive. These institutions function as extensions of the U.S. > Treasury. Most of their staff ? and most finance ministers in general, for > that matter ? are brainwashed pro-creditor monetarists or they wouldn?t be in > the World Bank or the IMF in the first place. The IMF has lost its Western > clients, as Turkey left in May by paying off its remaining debt. And its > prime minister says it doesn?t want to go back to it. Nobody wants to go near > the IMF and World Bank, because of their knee-jerk policy demands: economic > austerity and privatization sell-offs to insiders. The World Bank is equally > dysfunctional, creditor-oriented and pro-American. > > > So when you hear calls for a ?new Bretton Woods? from Europe, > Asia and the Third World, this really means an anti-Bretton Woods, negotiated > to protect the rest of the world from U.S. dollar hegemony rather than lock > them into it as occurred in 1944. (This is the story I?ve told in Super > Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.) For the United > States, on the other hand, a ?new Bretton Woods? means a plan to wipe out the > U.S. Treasury debt and replace it with ?paper gold,? that is, IMF notes for > foreign central banks to trade among themselves, to be exchanged for claims > on the U.S. Treasury and hence on the U.S. economy. This pseudo-reserve IMF > currency would be meaningless ?trash for cash? from an economic point of > view. I don?t see how any country except little England and maybe Tonga will > go along with it. > > > > BF: Both these organizations have played a destructive role in Third World > countries, haven?t they? > > > MH: Yes, and also in Russia and the post-Soviet countries where they promoted > kleptocracies and an anti-labor, anti-development ?flat tax? while freeing > real estate and finance from taxation. If you want to see the ideal of the > World Bank and IMF, look at the Russian, Latvian, and Estonian economies. > They have shrunk as if there?s a war on. It is a war ? a neoliberal class war > being waged by American finance against the rest of world. The effect is to > ?free? land rent and monopoly rent from privatized public enterprises to be > paid to banks as interest, forcing taxes to be levied on labor and industry. > So the government budget is limited to what it can extract from labor. The > World Bank applauds this and puts Latvia and the Baltic states at the top of > its list of business-friendly countries. These happen to be the countries > whose economies are now falling apart the fastest. These are the most > neoliberalized economies in the world, causing them to suffer from > depopulation, de-industrialization, poverty, deteriorating health standards > and rising industrial accident rates. They anti-labor policy and trade > dependency are so extreme that about a sixth of men between the ages of 25 > and 35 have told pollsters that they expect to emigrate in the next five > years. In the past two years nearly 10 percent of Latvia?s workforce has > emigrated ? between 50,000 and 100,000 workers, about half to Ireland. > > > Many post-Soviet countries are going to go the way of Iceland as > their real estate debt collapses. IMF and World Bank advice has led the > Baltics to borrow primarily in foreign currency against their real estate. > Over three-quarters of Latvian mortgage debt is denominated in foreign > currencies. Once the domestic currency goes down, debt defaults will spread > and the economy will fracture. > > > > BF: To shift back to the U.S. economy, I just saw an on-line video clip from > a television station in southern California, an area referred to as the > ?inland empire.? I think this covers Riverside and San Bernardino County > where a lot of expensive housing recently has been built. They took a > television-crew into some of these new developments. The houses are brand > new, very spacious beautiful homes that people simply have walked away from. > The video was very disturbing because people haven?t even taken anything with > them. There was a business that does something that?s now referred to as > ?trash-outs.? They go into these big homes where all the furniture is still > there, people?s clothing is hanging in the closets, there are computers, > printers, flat-screen televisions, birth certificates, photographs ? > everything that you can imagine would be in a house is still there. They go > in and they move these big dumpsters out in the front yard and start clearing > everything out of the house to take to a landfill. The homeowners apparently > don?t even have time to call a charity to come and pick it up, because they > say the trucks don?t arrive on time. One man has a company that charges $200 > to fix up lawns that have gone without any water. He spray-paints the lawns > green so that the place has what he calls curb appeal. > > > Every other house in this neighborhood is either in foreclosure > or on what is called a short sale. The interviewer asked the person in charge > of this trash-out why people left their things and he said, ?Well, I don?t > know, maybe they couldn?t afford to hire a moving truck.? > > > MH: Under the bankruptcy law, if you?re a business, you?re not allowed to > empty it out when you go bankrupt. You have to leave everything as it was or > else the creditors can come after you for what you?ve taken. But for > homeowners there wouldn?t seem to be any motivation for people to act so > irrationally. Nobody really needs to hurry to get out of the house. I don?t > understand why the creditors didn?t try to recover some of this material. It > suggests that what?s left is going to be difficult to sell. California?s > property tax laws don?t help ? its Proposition 13 limiting how much the state > can tax owners who bought in early. The state economy is going to shrink and > suffer more bankruptcies as its economy becomes more stratified. > > > > BF: Under the old bankruptcy law, before they changed it, I thought you could > keep your house. > > > MH: You can renegotiate mortgages on as many houses as you want, except for > the house you live in. Senator McCain said he has maybe seven houses. If he > were to go bankrupt he could keep the second, third, forth, fifth, sixth and > seventh house and the judge could reset the debts attached to them. But the > new bankruptcy law prevents judges from renegotiating the mortgage on the > house the defaulting debtor or bankrupt lives in. The aim evidently was to > deer homeowners from threatening bankruptcy as a way to negotiate their > mortgage debt downward, the way commercial investors such as Donald Trump > have done. The effect is to cause abandonment. This is the law that Congress > passed on behalf of the credit card companies and mortgage lenders. > > > > BF: Regarding these mortgages in default, in terms of the junk paper that the > Treasury Plan was designed originally to buy, I understand now that Fannie > Mae and Freddie Mac are now buying this paper. Is that right? > > > MH: They were given $200 billion dollars to resume lending and to buy these > mortgages. In today?s market not many people are able to get new mortgages. > If they really wanted to fix things, they would simply write down existing > mortgages to the current market value of houses. This would begin to liquefy > the real estate market again without costing government money. Bad lenders > would absorb the losses from their bad decisions. The reason why property > can?t be sold is that their mortgages exceed the market price. > > > The government is now scheduled to absorb the loss of writing off > this negative equity, this extra debt that?s been loaded onto them. This > opens the door for cronyism. If I?m working for Fannie Mae and buy $2 billion > worth of loans from Countrywide (now part of Bank of America), I may hope > that when they break up Fannie Mae into a smaller agencies, I may get a nice > vice-presidential job in Bank of America. There is no protection against this > kind of conflict of interest. > > > > BF: Could you say a bit about the demise of the investment bank Lehman > Brothers. That seemed to go belly up overnight, and is had a devastating > effect. Nobody is writing much about it. > > > MH: Lehman Brothers basically committed suicide. It was trashed by its CEO, > Richard Fuld, Jr. The Koreans and other groups made offers to buy the company > if he would have sold it at a reasonable price in a timely way. But he > insisted on getting the reported book value according to his Enron-style > accounting. He wanted to be paid what Lehman Brothers used to be worth. > Prospective buyers offered to pay what the company was worth at the time. > That would have been enough to keep it in business. But he preferred that the > company go bankrupt rather than take one penny less than what it used to be > worth. He didn?t want to take a loss. So the company went bankrupt. The > employees lost their jobs. Employees in the London office were told to get > out that night. All they had were the canteen credit cards on which they?d > prepaid for a month up to a hundred pounds. The news reports said that > employees were lining up before the canteens to buy coffee, gum or anything > they could carry with them. The employees were furious at Mr. Fuld?s > grandstanding. Having made hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and > excess salary, he said in effect, ?I don?t care if everybody?s losing their > job and retirement accounts. I?ve got my money. If I can?t sell at the price I > paid for Lehman?s assets, I don?t want to play in the game anymore. And if I > don?t play, no other Lehman employees will either.? > > > The bankruptcy was contagious because Lehman had so many > cross-trades on its books. Its executives had emptied out the company > treasury by paying out much of its capital in bonuses, dividends and even for > stock buybacks. So it lacked the money to cover its bad trades and insurance. > > > > BF: Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi said that governments may shut > financial markets as the credit freeze pummels stocks and threatens global > recession. He said that markets may be shut while policy makers ?rewrite the > rules of international finance.? How likely do you think this is? > > > MH: Even if you shut down formal markets, a shadow market will spring up > somewhere in the world. It could be in the Cayman Islands, or even Russia or > Beijing. These would be offshore trade in options, for settlement by > securities held in American depositories. But officially, shares wouldn?t be > transferred. So what does it really mean to shut down financial markets? > > > One meaning would be that when the markets reopen, banks would > start from a near-zero position. Debts (except for current wages that > employers owed their employees) would be wiped out, along with deposits over > a basic working-balance amount. This happened with remarkable success in > Germany with the Allied monetary and debt reform of 1947. Alternatively, the > currency could be devalued. As in the post-Soviet economies, people would get > possession of their homes free and clear. But this could not be done with > commercial properties, or you would create an incredibly wealthy class. So > the rental value would have to be collected by a tax policy simultaneous with > the financial restructuring. Quite frankly, I don?t think any politician has > thought through what restructuring really would mean, because there are so > many variables and so many policies ? and even inevitable future developments > ? are still in the ?unthinkable? category. > > > Wiping out debts gets into the realm of rewriting the rules of > international finance as well as domestic tax policy. I have no indication > that Europeans have such an idea. There was a communiqu? from the IMF > yesterday saying that they were going to look at all possible options. But > you know that when they say ?all possible options,? it really is a pretty > narrow range, designed to favor creditors and oppose labor?s interests. > Richard W. Fischer of the Federal Reserve said that the Fed will do whatever > is necessary to ease the strains on markets and the economy. But here again, > when someone in his position refers to ?whatever is necessary,? this does not > even consider writing down debts to the ability to pay. Appointees vetted by > Wall Street or European financial interests are not going to consider > nationalizing the banks or insurance companies. > > > So the bottom line is that politicians are not going to go > against these vested interests ? their biggest campaign contributors, after > all. They?re not willing to think what, to them, is politically unthinkable. > Even when reality hits them in the face, few politicians understand enough > economics to understand the constraints at work, especially now that the > leeway for indebtedness has almost all been used up. That?s the real problem: > The only solutions able to save the economy from depression are, to them, > unthinkable. So politicians and public officials are most likely to keep on > steering the economy over the cliff. > > > In such a situation, insiders normally take what they can, as > fast as they can. This is what?s happening with the Paulson bailout today. It > is the plan he worked out with the help of banking and Wall Street lobbyists, > supported by the Democratic Congress. > > > > BF: Do you think they want a Depression? > > MH: No, they?d love to have a thriving economy in which they could continue > to make money and siphon off a free lunch for themselves. This is their > dream, the guiding fiction of the ?miracle of compound interest.? The problem > is that the financial sector doesn?t want to do anything that doesn?t serve > its own short-term interest. That?s the inherent historical problem with > finance. It?s time frame is short-term, based on quick in-and-out buying and > selling. This is not a strategy of long-term growth. That is supposed to be > the responsibility of governments. But for the last half century the > financial sector has backed an ideology that sees governments only as part of > the problem, not part of the solution. Taxes are supposed to be only > deadweight, not the basis for funding infrastructure. Government planning is > supposed to be inherently inefficient. The inference is that government > should relinquish planning power and resource allocation to the private > financial sector. But when you do this, when you shift planning out of the > hands of government to the banks and money managers, their policies aim to > make money in the easiest way possible ? by inflating asset prices and > engaging in financial engineering rather than industrial engineering. > > > > BF: State and local governments tax revenue is declining. What effect will > this have? > > > MH: Already in New York City, where I live, Mayor Bloomberg has said now that > Wall Street is not going to be paying as much tax, so we?ll have to cut back > capital spending such as the 2nd Avenue subway and raise fares for > transportation and other public services. All over the country we?ve heard > about infrastructure rotting away ? bridges collapsing in Minnesota, roads in > disrepair, levees breaking. But states and municipal taxes are being voted > down and cut back, while federal revenue sharing also is down. So they?re not > able to fix the roads. They?re not able to fix the bridges. They?re cutting > back capital spending programs and downsizing the municipal labor force, so > we?re going to suffer economic shrinkage. > > > To top matters, almost no states and municipalities have been > funding their pension programs. So they?re heading for the kind of situation > that San Diego is in. If you want to see where many localities are going, > look at San Diego?s failure to put aside money to pay the pensions that it > now has to fund on a current basis as tax revenues fall. This means huge > cutbacks. > > > If the government really wants to help the American economy it > would set up an insurance fund for states and municipalities, with regulatory > power to insist on adequate financing rather than borrowing. It would do well > to federalize the property tax, levied on land rent as the basic fiscal > revenue, reversing the tax shift since the 1930s onto labor via income and > sales taxes. But it has done nothing of the sort. The Treasury and Federal > Reserve are only funding Wall Street, not the localities that are actually in > need of revenue these days, and certainly not mortgage debtors. Now that real > estate prices are falling, the banks and the real estate industry are > clamoring for property tax cuts so that owners can pay more to the banks and > therefore support higher mortgages and hence a return to higher property > prices. But if cities and states lower their real estate taxes, their fiscal > position will be squeezed even more. > > > Along with Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, Mr. Paulson, is > saying that we?ve got to reflate the real estate market. They depict the > collapse in real estate prices as a tragedy. But what is this tragedy? It is > that real estate prices are becoming more affordable. So restoring ?wealth > creation? by supplying more credit ? that is, by running up yet more debt ? > is the same thing as saying, ?We don?t want more affordable real estate > prices. We want high enough real estate prices to keep the debt bubble fully > inflated and growing once again.? > > > The problem from Mr. Paulson?s point of view seems to be that > Americans are only paying 40 percent of their money for housing now. His plan > calls for Americans to reflate the real estate market by paying up to 60 > percent of their income on housing and financial charges, mainly in the form > of mortgage debt. If this trend persists, how will families have enough to > spend on goods and services at anywhere near present levels? > > > Today?s form of finance capitalism is turning out to be the > antithesis of the industrial capitalism that most textbooks describe. > Financial managers have increased stock prices for industrial companies not > by investing more in capital formation, but by borrowing money to buy their > own stocks or simply to pay out as dividends. This enables financial managers > to cash out on their stock options at higher prices than they otherwise could > have. But Wall Street has stripped corporate assets, hollowing out industrial > capital by loading it down with debt. > > > So with regard to your question about state and municipal > finance, today?s finance capitalism is committed to capitalizing the entire > economic surplus into interest charges. Local payment of debt service is > ?crowding out? the use of tax revenue for direct spending. This threatens to > de-urbanize the economy and dismantle the public infrastructure that has kept > down the cost of living and doing business since the Progressive Era. In the > public as well as the corporate sector, debt extraction is depleting the > ?wealth of nations.? > > > > BF: What do you think things will look like in the near future? So far we > haven?t been able to identify any pushback against this debt trend. What will > our world look like after the next president takes office? > > > MH: For a foretaste you might to look at what happened in Russia after 1996 > and other post-Soviet economies that Mr. Rubin had a free hand in designing. > Labor unions were broken (or simply stillborn) and living standards fell. If > that is any guide, suicide rates will go up, life expectancy will shorten. > President Bush already has told people to go to the emergency wards of > hospitals if they?re sick. They will be given an aspirin and maybe some > baking soda to settle their stomachs. Jobs will be cut. Cities will be less > pleasant places as people lose their jobs and mental problems rise. Transport > will be cut back, as it?s already being cut back in New York, raising the > cost of living in outlying areas. Public infrastructure will crumble until > it?s sold off to foreigners to ?solve? the local fiscal crisis. The new > private owners will charge ? or charge more ? for what they used to give for > free or at subsidized prices for roads and other basic services. People will > be squeezed like never before in modern times. It may lead to emigration of > skilled labor abroad just as there was a brain drain in the case of Russia. > > > > BF: This could lead to complete social breakdown, couldn?t it? > > > MH: I?m not sure how far you want to go in defining the word ?breakdown.? > Today?s economic deterioration is financially driven to evolve into > kleptocratic rentier economies with polarized wealth distribution and > debtor-creditor strains. America may begin to look like Mexican and Latin > American kleptocracies as politicians adopt essentially the economic plan the > Chicago Boys who advised Gen. Pinochet in Chile, right down to trying to turn > privatized Social Security into casino capitalism. > > > The problem is debt deflation. The solution must be political ? > by restructuring the institutional context within which market forces > operate. Unfortunately, I don?t see much political pushback. > > > > BF: Are we on the verge of a Great Depression? > > > MH: We seem to be ? not a V-shaped downturn with a quick recovery, but a > longer L-shaped one, limping along until the debt overhead is paid off. The > problem is that if the debts are indeed paid, this must be at the expense of > foregoing the purchase of goods and services. If you don?t buy goods and > services then people will not be hired to produce them. > > > It doesn?t have to be this way. The financial sector and its > neoliberal economists will try to convince people that going to say this is > just a normal business cycle and will be cured automatically ? if the > government cuts taxes for the wealthy to let the financial sector lead the > economy back up. So the cure is more trickle-down tax policy. > > > When stagnation continues, they?ll insist that not enough > subsidies have been given fast enough to the banking and financial sector to > restore normalcy. Their idea of ?normal? leaves out of account the fact that > this financial sector has gotten rich by loading down the economy with debt ? > debt that is beyond the ability to be paid, resulting in Negative Equity. The > economy cannot ?earn its way out of debt? of this magnitude. It would be much > easier if the creditors and investors in junk mortgages and junk bonds took > their losses, and if the $450 billion in derivative superstructure simply was > let go. Instead, we are getting the worst of all possible worlds. The > Treasury is taking responsibility for making bad lenders and bad investors > whole, but leaving bad debts and even Negative Equity on the books and even > putting the government in the position of ?debt collector of last resort.? > But instead of confronting the over-indebtedness problem, financial lobbyists > ?along with the staff at the Fed and Treasury, and the Congressional > leadership ? will say that a depression happens mathematically once a > century, and recommend that one do nothing but give more money to the > financial sector to loan out and create yet more debt. Without saying just > what problem Mr. Greenspan created and Mr. Paulson aggravated, there is > little likelihood of a real solution being proposed. > > > It was the Clinton Administration that really started the ball > rolling. Now that you have Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid leading the pack for Wall > Street, the Democrats have to take as much responsibility as the Republicans > for the Bailout and hence for pushing us into Depression. > > > > > > BF: People keep talking about injecting money directly into the banks. What > will this achieve? > > > MH: They?re talking about the government buying special non-voting stock in > the banks. This will enable the banks to report this equity as part of their > capital structure under what?s called Basel II. This is the set of reserve > requirements to have a certain amount of capital to back deposit liabilities. > The government?s contribution will take the form of so-called preferred > stock, which is counted as equity. As I mentioned above, it won?t be voting > stock. Instead of the governments taking over the banks as in Europe, instead > of steering their lending in the public interest, the Treasury is leaving > control over to the same guys who have been mismanaging the credit system all > along. So it?s a subsidy to mismanagement. > > > This is not merely a set of personal errors or ?bad apples.? The > error is systemic. It?s a mentality at work ? one that blocks out an > awareness of how serious the debt problem is. Just as culpable are the > Congressional committee heads who act in effect as lobbyists to block > appointment of officials or advisors who do understand the financial problem > at hand. And at university economics departments, neoliberal economists have > acted as censors to exclude from the curriculum any response to the debt > problem that does not serve the short-term interests of the banks and Wall > Street. > > > > BF: In that vein, I understand that one of the parts of the Emergency > Economic Stabilization Act says that banks no longer are required to maintain > cash reserves to cover deposits. Is that true? > > > MH: What that means is that if the banks go under, the FDIC now will bail > depositors out up to $250,000 per account. So why should the banks need to > keep heavy cash reserves if the government is going to take responsibility? > The pretense is that banks will be able to lend more. But all the government > guarantee really does is to enable them to operate more profitably, by > shifting the risk onto the government and leveraging their own capital more. > > > > BF: What do you expect to see tomorrow morning when the stock markets reopen? > > > MH: I have no idea. Nobody I know has any idea on any given morning. Last > week even Jim Cramer on CNBC, who euphemizes every decline as a ?buying > opportunity,? told viewers that if they are going to need their money in the > next year or so, they don?t belong in this market. If even manic Jim Cramer > says to sell out for the short term, what?s the point of holding onto stocks? > If they are going to keep drifting down for another year or so before going > back up, why should people hold onto them on the way down? > > > > BF: You know, I actually heard Jim Cramer say that whatever money you need in > the next FIVE years you should take off the table. > > > MH: It?s unprecedented. Suppose I need money in ten years. If I know the > market is going down for five years, my interest would be to pull out now, > put my money in cash or Treasuries, and buy back into stocks five years from > now, or whenever the crisis has passed. The present gloom shows the > demoralization at work. What people imagined to be reality turns out to have > been a fictitious science-fiction world, a just-pretend happy world where > stocks and real estate prices only go up and debts can be paid out of the > financial free lunch of capital gains. The model that most people ? including > Congressional policy makers ? carry around in their minds has not been > reframed to grasp financial reality. > > > > BF: So you think we haven?t hit the bottom yet? > > > MH: When congenitally optimistic Jim Cramer worries that we may be five years > from the bottom, I think people should realize that a phase change has > occurred. In terms of the actual economy, the real economy of people?s living > standards, public services, the cost of living and the value of the dollar, > all these things have a long way down to go. > > > > BF: Before we close, could you say a bit more about the credit crunch. Is it > still the case that people are not able to get loans? > > > MH: It?s hard to get a loan for property that?s worth less than the mortgage > that already is on it. It?s hard to get an auto loan, because it used to be > that lenders could resell the car at a given price after a year or two. But > nobody is buying more cars these days, so lenders are not lending as high a > proportion of the car?s price as they used to ? or real estate for that > matter, because prices for housing and office building are declining. When > forecasters say that they expect prices to decline for another year or so, > that means ?as far as the eye can see.? Falling asset prices deter lending. > > > Banks are not going make any more mortgage loans with zero > down-payment at 100% of the purchase price, to say nothing of 125% loans. > Buyers actually have to put up some money of their own now. That hasn?t been > done for a while, and it is changing the market. Most people don?t have > enough money to make the higher down payments that the banks now require. > > > The problem isn?t only the banks. Suppose you want to buy a > house. Why would you buy right now, when houses all over the neighborhood > have ?For Sale? signs? You know that as these houses are sold off at distress > prices, you can buy it cheaper later on. Why would buyers want to borrow > under these conditions ? or banks lend to them? The economy is having to face > the diverging relationship between the volume of debt and the falling market > prices for whatever assets they own or are buying. The Negative Equity gap is > killing the market and preventing new credit from being extended. > > > Many home owners are frozen into where they live, like feudal > serfs tied to the land. If their employers shift them to another city, they > can?t move without paying off their mortgage, and most don?t have the cash to > do this. They would be wiped out, as the Treasury and Congress are only > making lenders whole. The political system is thus as dysfunctional as the > financial system. It has become the legislative mirror image of the > trickle-down mentality of neoliberal ?financialization.? It means the ending > of America?s great traditions of upward mobility and geographic mobility. > > > > BF: I?ve been reading that the lack of transparency in mortgage securities > makes people uncertain, so they don?t want to buy them. > > > MH: Instead of ?lack of transparency? I prefer the term ?fraudulent > Enron-style accounting.? There?s a good reason for the lack of trust. It?s > not a ?lack,? but a positive awareness of how the banks, insurance companies > and money managers are trying to exploit their customers and counter-parties > in any way possible. People prefer safe investments such as Treasury bonds > because they realize that banks have lobbied to deprive victims of financial > fraud of their rights. As I mentioned earlier, the Treasury gave bank > lobbyists the right not to disclose the accurate market value of their > reserves, so nobody really knows their net worth or degree of negative > equity. Why should anyone be gullible enough to trust such people under these > conditions? > > > > BF: The media is referring to the lack of market confidence and say that we > need to restore it. Do you think that?s possible? > > > MH: There?s certainly been is a ?confidence game,? which the financial sector > would like to lead to a trickle-down economic policy. A con man is someone > who gets people confidence and then steals their money. The con will be: ?You > didn?t give us enough the first time. We need more. Otherwise, without our > being ?made whole, the economy won?t be able to function.? Implicit is the > follow-up threat: ?We?ll see to that.? So the banking system is holding the > economy hostage, not only for itself but for the financial and insurance and > brokerage affiliates that banks have taken over since Glass-Steagall was > repealed in 1999. > > > The idea is to keep up confidence that the financial sector > should continue to act as the economy?s planner and resource allocator via > its control of the credit, payment and savings-management system. But > confidence in this worldview will gone as people come to understand that > deregulation has let a financial gang take over the banking system and > vertically organize the financial sector into a giant trusts with only a few > dominant capo banks. Remember what Zola said: ?Behind every family fortune is > a great theft,? Never has this been more true than under the Clinton and Bush > Administrations. They?ve let Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide walk away with > hundreds of millions of dollars instead of prosecuting him for fraud. They?re > using the government?s bailing funding to reward executives who have wrecked > the lives of millions of American families. These individuals are predators > posing as philanthropists. That?s the con. > > > There is no ?panic? in the market. Panic is a neurotic > psychological response, often unrealistic. This is an intelligent, > well-calculated economic response. It?s not panic when investors refrain from > buying anything they don?t know the value of. And if sellers have shown > repeatedly that they?re out for themselves and have been dishonest about what > they?re selling, investors are not going to patronize them. When people see > banks browbeating the bond rating agencies and accounting firms to whitewash > the quality of what they?re pawning off on their customers, when they see > bank lobbyists getting Washington to block state prosecutions of financial > fraud so as to clear the way for more predatory lending and false packaging > of the junk securities they?re selling and to win the right not to reveal > their true financial position, there?s a good reason not to buy what?s in > these black boxes. Not many intelligent people would take a chance on paying > good money to so deceptive a sector. > > > > BF: You mentioned at the beginning of the show that foreigners, sovereign > investment funds and central banks are getting out. > > > MH: Foreign and U.S. investors. When the Secretary of the Treasury lets the > banks act like crooks, depositors and other customers are going to expect > them do just that. Only a crazy person would keep on making a mistake of > trusting them ? or trusting Congress again. Insanity is defined as doing the > same thing and imagining that the result will be different this time. Until > the financial system and the regulatory system and legal system are changed > to put in place a reality-based economic ideology and corresponding system of > checks and balances, the economy cannot recover. It will limp along and > shrink slowly. Financial depression will stifle the ?real? economy ? while > pretending to save it with an IMF-style austerity plan, something like an > abusive parent beating a child and saying, ?It?s for your own good.? It?s > really not good at all, of course. > > > What the government wants people to do is indeed to panic. It?s > succeeded in creating panic, in the hope that this will enable a radical > giveaway ?to restore the market.? The Treasury is spreading the panic by its > deception. We?re in an economy of deception spread by the Treasury, promoted > by the Bush administration and amplified by the Democratic Party?s > Congressional leaders. I?m afraid that all you?re getting from Mr. Obama and > Mr. McCain is further deception in support of a bailout act that should have > been seen for what it is ? a plan that will create precisely the anarchy that > we?ve seen in the last eight trading days. What created this crisis was > Congressional ratification of the Wall Street rip-off. > > > What is so discouraging is that there has been no real pressure > by the media, the public, the pension funds, labor unions or other groups. > There has been no serious discussion of the basic problem ? the fact that the > debts can?t be paid. No economy ever has repaid its debts, as Adam Smith > noted already back in 1776. We?re now at that crisis point for the United > States, but no one is discussing how we are going to not pay the debts. Are > we going to resolve the problem of their non-payment by letting widespread > foreclosures take place at the expense of debtors? Will this include the > voluntary public bankruptcy of cities and states selling off their public > enterprises, land and public domain to private buyers as an alternative to > taxing property and wealth? Will voters be panicked into believing that this > kind of IMF austerity plan is valid for the United States, not just for third > world kleptocracies? Or, are we not going to pay the debts by writing them > down to what can be paid, or writing off many bad debts altogether? > > > Mr. Paulson only wants to write down the debts of his cronies on > Wall Street and major campaign contributors. That?s not going to help the > economy. It means that the government will have to tax the industrial > economy, labor and middle classes all the more. So when you were asking for > the scenario, I should have said I expect taxes and user fees to go up > sharply for most people, and the quality of public services to decline > sharply. This is part of turning America into a Third World country. The only > choice that voters are now being given is between two presidential candidates > who have announced nearly identical economic programs as far as financial > policy and favoritism to Wall Street is concerned. > > > > BF: Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say the government wants > people to panic? > > > MH: Panic is what gives politicians a free hand to serve special interests > with policies that could not be enacted under normal circumstances. The Wall > Street panic has been the financial sector?s 9/11. It created an emergency > condition in which a government run by thieves can do whatever its backers > want, by claiming that they?re doing what they?re acting to cure the panic. > So they need to create a panic in order to say that they?re curing it. In > reality, of course, what they?re doing is making the debt and tax problem > much worse ? so they can grab much more, in a vicious circle that they?ll try > to keep going for as long as possible. > > > On the one hand the government wants to panic voters to buy into > a program of saving creditors from having to take a loss on bad loans, and > supporting anti-debtor policies. This is a radical U-turn in the direction in > which Western civilization has been moving since the Enlightenment, and > indeed since the fall of ancient Rome as a result of its debt strains that > reduced its imperial economy to debt bondage. > > > On the other hand, the financial sector wants investors and asset > holders to panic the market to sell stocks and real estate at such low > distressed prices that vultures can pick up assets on the cheap to ?clear the > market.? But the market is not being cleared of its debt encumbrances, > although the government may take many of these over. New buyers may come in > to make a killing by buying assets for much less than they?re worth ? from > the government itself, if public agencies take ownership of real estate and > other property being foreclosed on. This way of clearing market is to have > the Treasury or Federal Reserve absorb the loss. > > > But we?re not yet near the lows. Stock market prices still have > pretty high price-earnings ratios, especially in view of the fact that sales > and earnings are expected to go way down as debt deflation depresses the > economy. > > > > BF: Do you want to summarize the points you?ve made? > > > MH: Paulson?s Giveaway Plans A and B ? buying trash for cash (Plan A) and > giving money to the banks by buying ?preferred? stocks (Plan B) ? are the > financial equivalent of the Patriot Act that a panicked Congress passed > quickly after 9/11. The Fed?s $850 billion purchase of loans on which Wall > Street otherwise would take losses on is being made explicitly under > ?emergency? conditions. It?s not allowed to lend to non-banks under anything > except emergencies. > > > But the real emergency affects mainly debtors ? mortgage debtors > with negative equity, companies loaded down with junk bonds (many of them > taken to buy back corporate stock and increase dividend payouts to increase > the price at which managers can cash out). Also facing emergency conditions > are pension funds from their stock losses and bad-debt gambles. The > government is likely to insist that if automakers and other companies get > federal aid, they will have to avoid ?rewarding labor unions? and replace > defined benefit pension plans with ?defined contribution? plans. The PBGC > lacks the money to insure corporate pension-fund losses. Nobody has suggested > helping it, because the savers are workers, not billionaires. > > > State and local budgets with falling tax receipts. In fact, real > estate interests are demanding even further tax cuts, backed by financial > lobbyists wanting to leave more revenue in the hands of property owners to > pay their mortgages. This will aggravate the tax shift onto labor and > industry. Homeowners will pay interest in place of property taxes ? and will > have to make up the tax shortfall as well! So debt deflation and fiscal > deflation will go hand in hand. > > > All these parts of the U.S. economy are being plunged into a real > economic emergency in order to benefit Wall Street. Yet its losses and gains > are extraneous to the ?real? economy, except that it uses its financial > inflows to lend out and indebt the economy further. This financial > wrap-around of the ?real? economy is being saved, but not the contents ? the > work force and tangible means of production. This ?flesh and bone? is being > sacrificed in order to protect the ?fat.? The result is a toxic form of > financial and fiscal pollution ? debt pollution and the tax policies to > preserve the ?magic of compound interest? as an exponential trend. It is > stifling life and growth by shifting the economic surplus out of the real > economy. > > > > BF: Dr. Hudson, thank you very much. > > > MH: Thank you, Bonnie. > > > > > > [1] > For recent confirmation see James Politi, ?US banks tighten grip on lending,? > Financial Times, November 4, 2008: ?US banks have pulled back on lending to > consumers and businesses in a big way over the past three months.? > http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/26a624c2-aa13-11dd-958b-000077b07658.html > > > > > Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the > balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan > Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no > relation). In 1990 he helped established the world?s first sovereign debt > fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich?s Chief > Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and > has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as > the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A > Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City > (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The > Economic Strategy of American Empire > (new > ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, > mh at michael-hudson.com > > Contact mhmichael-hudson.com www.michael-hudson.com __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Files | Photos | Links | Database | Polls | Members | Calendar The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. To unsubscribe, email: gang8-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! 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Name: at.gif Type: application/octet-stream Size: 153 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081109/ffc79487/attachment-0001.obj From michael.hudson at earthlink.net Sun Nov 9 14:09:48 2008 From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net (Michael Hudson) Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:09:48 -0500 Subject: [A-List] FW: [gang8] Hudson: The New Kleptocracy In-Reply-To: <000b01c9429e$ec4e4bf0$033da8c0@office> Message-ID: ------ Forwarded Message From: Arno Mong Daastoel Reply-To: Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 20:11:04 +0100 To: Subject: [gang8] Hudson: The New Kleptocracy http://michael-hudson.com/interviews/081008NewKleptocracy1.html > > The New Kleptocracy > > By Dr. Michael Hudson > > > > > Guns and Butter Interview on KPFA > radio- Part One , and > Part Two > Copy: Global Research > > > > > > > October 8, 2008 > >> >> >> ?Considering that there is an $800 billion giveaway, to be followed by >> another trillion and another trillion after that, this is the biggest >> giveaway since the land giveaway to the railroads in the mid-nineteenth >> century and just as that giveaway created a power elite that would rule >> America for a century and a half, this is creating a new power elite that >> has changed America from a democracy into an oligarchy. And as Aristotle >> said, ?what is democracy but the stage immediately preceding oligarchy??? > > ---------- > > > I?m Bonnie Faulkner (BF): Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael > Hudson. Today?s show: ?The New Kleptocracy?. Dr. Hudson is a Financial > Economist and Historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of > Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street Financial Analyst and Distinguished > Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. > His 1972 book ?Superimperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire? > is a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through > the IMF and World Bank. He is also author of ?The Myth of Aid? and ?Global > Fracture: the New International Economic Order?. > > > Dr. Hudson has written several articles on the recent Wall Street > meltdown and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson?s Plan. These articles > have included, Financial Bailout: America?s Own Kleptocracy--the Largest > Transformation of America?s Financial System since the Great Depression. The > Paulson/Bernanke Bailout: Will the Cure Be Worst than the Disease? Financial > Fraud: Mr. Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal. And Thinking the > Unthinkable: a Debt Write Down and Jubilee Year Clean Slate. > > > > > > BF: Dr. Michael Hudson, welcome again. > > > Michael Hudson (MH): Thank you very much, Bonnie. > > > > BF: Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson?s $700 billion so-called bailout, > first called ?The Plan?, was defeated in the House. Then a modified version > called ?Troubled Asset Rescue Plan or (TARP)? was passed by Congress in it?s > ?Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008?. Still others refer to this > legislation as ?Cash for Trash?. What would you call it? > > > MH: Cash for trash is exactly what it was, and the emphasis should be placed > on ?Emergency ? for Emergency Plan. It was rushed through without giving any > opportunity to debate. Dennis Kucinich protested, for instance, that this was > the first time a major plan that was going to create the equivalent of 700 > billionaires, people who are going to become the next power elite to govern > America for the next century --that this act was done without any hearings, > without specialists--despite hundreds and hundreds of major economists > throughout the world saying that it was a disaster and a giveaway. It is cash > for trash. It will not resolve the problems. The dollar will plunge. The > stock market already plunged. It is purely a giveaway to Mr. Paulson?s > colleagues on Wall Street and a giveaway to Mr. Obama?s and Mr. McCain?s > campaign contributors. The Democrats were the major supporters of Mr. Paulson > while even the Republicans sought to dissociate themselves from the plan so > they couldn?t get blamed when the inevitable failure of the plan shows that > all that was done was a giveaway of $700 billion to Mr. Paulson?s colleagues > and pals on Wall Street. > > > > BF: Well, now what and who are being bailed out? People now are saying it?s a > $700 to an $850 billion revolving money fund. > > > MH: The Secretary of the Treasury said that he really just picked the amount > out of the air. There will be another $700 billion next month, another $700 > billion after that. Trillion after trillion will go to create a financial > elite of kleptocrats. What?s happened here by Mr. Paulson of Goldman Sachs is > almost a mirror image of what the other Goldman Sachs? Treasury Secretary > Robert Rubin did in Russia: he?s creating and endowing a class of kleptocrats > by giving them liquid treasury securities in exchange for basically worthless > junk. It?s actually called the ?Worthless Assets Recovery Program, (WARP)?. > This is pretty much what was done in Russia to create Russian kleptocrats. In > Russia?s case they gave State ownership of raw materials and fuels, oil, > other assets to individuals who then diversified their portfolios by selling > as much as they could to the West and taking their money out and putting them > into dollars and sterling and euros. What?s happening here is that the Wall > Street beneficiaries are going to take the money and run and put it in safe > economies such as Russia, China and any other non-US economy they can find: > the result will be a huge capital outflow, a capital flight that will put > downward pressure on the dollar. > > > > BF: You know Dr. Hudson, I was just about to ask you what the difference is > between the Russian Kleptocrats and the American Crony Capitalists? Is there > any difference at all that you see? > > > MF: Only that the Russian Kleptocrats were supported by Clinton?s Democratic > Administration and the American?s Kleptocrats are supported nominally under a > Bush Administration but primarily by Mr. Obama and the Democrats led by > Barney Frank in the Congress, and Nancy Pelosi and by Reid. These are > Democrats that must go and if there is any sign of Mr. Obama keeping them on > then you know that the Democratic Party has been firmly captured by the > Democratic Leadership Committee, i.e. Wall Street?s lobbying group within the > Democratic Party. > > > > BF: Well now, since you?ve brought up Barack Obama, he was the one that > lobbied ?for? the passage of this, isn?t he? > > > MF: That?s correct and the amazing thing was that McCain did too. Last Friday > I was attending the American Monetary Institute Conference in Chicago and we > had some of the smartest financial brains around at that. It was at Roosevelt > University and we all went down to the Student Union to watch the debate. And > let?s take a look at what happened last Friday. The previous Thursday Mr. > McCain had said there might not be a Friday debate because he was going to > suspend the campaign until he could straighten out Washington regarding the > bailout. So he went to the White House. There was reportedly not much very > much that he said during the meeting but the Republican Congressional Leader > Boehner made some very good suggestions. He suggested instead of the bailout > the government use the money to set up a bank insurance fund of say anywhere > from $250 billion to the $700 billion that was mentioned. The insurance fund > would lend money to banks in exchange for their preferred stock. This fund > would be financed by levying an insurance charge on the entire US banking > system, just like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation levies insurance > rates on the banks. And the rates that would be levied, under the > Republication proposal, would have reflected the actual risks involved. So > that if the banks got together and lobbied politicians and supported the > political campaigns of politicians who wanted to deregulate the industry > that?s? fair enough but let them pay the risks. Let them pay 1% or 2% or even > 3% of their deposits for this because that?s what it would take the > government to bail out policies that Alan Greenspan and others have > supported. Instead of supporting this plan and instead of saying that he?d > come to Washington to save American taxpayers from the giveaway, Mr. McCain > did absolutely nothing. He was blamed by the media on Friday morning (Friday > afternoon too) for saying, ?Oh he?s come to disrupt a done deal. Look what > happened. He went to the White House. Now you have the Congressional > Republicans opposing it.? Mr. McCain could have said, ?Absolutely,? that?s > just what he?s done because he?s a maverick and he?s going to protect > American taxpayers from the bipartisan attempt to both reflect the campaign > contributions of their largest contributors--Wall Street. And he?s not going > to let it happen. He could have jumped in front of the parade. Jumped in > front of the opposition to the Act, that reportedly 90% of voters were > supposed to oppose, and this would have put Mr. Obama on the defensive. > McCain could have said, ?I?m opposed on the giveway and supporting taxpayers. > Mr. Obama is the man who is giving it all way to Wall Street and his major > campaign contributors. Look at what?s happening with Mr. Rubin, there?s no > difference at all between his financial advisor Robert Rubin and the Treasury > Secretary Hank Paulson.? Instead Mr. McCain shifted gears, reversed himself, > gave in and said, ?now I?m supporting the plan too?. So the result of the > Friday debate, if you remember the first half hour, Mr. Lehrer kept trying to > press both presidential candidates on ?how do you feel about the bailout, > what do you think? ? And they talked about anything else. Mr. Lehrer tried to > be more polite and finally he was laughing, and he said, ?Aren?t either of > you guys going to answer my question?? And they both of them said, ?No.? Now > when they refused to give their position to the bailout to the American > people. When they refused to take a position on a plan that most voters > ?overwhelmingly? opposed and then they support the plan this shows they?re > just in the hands of their financial backers. > > > > BF: Could you just briefly explain again how this insurance proposal would > have worked and why it would have been preferable? > > > MF: The government would have set up a fund and the fund?s money would have > been provided to banks on the term that Warren Buffet earlier that week had > made--a $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs. It would have leant money to > banks on the condition that number one, it wipes out the stockholders--if any > bank would have borrowed from the insurance fund that meant it was doing so > as a life or death matter and either it would have sacrificed its common > stock or it would have made its common stock subordinate to repaying the > government for the risk. The government would have charged a high rate of > interest and a high fee for making the insurance payment (as any insurance > company would have done). And instead of printing new treasury bonds to give > away in exchange for these bad mortgages it would have established simply a > line of credit which at first would have been the same thing but the credit > would have been repaid not only by the banks that borrowed but by all the > banks in the country paying insurance?essentially bank insurance. Instead of > being an insurance fund for depositors like the FDIC is, it would have been > an insurance fund for the bank owners themselves. The banks have been acting > almost as a financial gang in pressing not only to support the Federal Reserve > chairman who is a deregulator (and the Federal Reserve is supposed to > essentially represent the interests of the commercial banking system), but the > banks also now have supplied the Treasury Secretary and the Treasury Secretary > is not supposed to represent the banks. The Treasury Secretary is supposed to > represent the public interests. And instead, Mr. Paulson is representing the > banking interests, Wall Street, not the public interest and so there is an > inherent conflict of interest and the system of checks and balances that are > supposed to prevent a giveaway like this have been broken. > > > > BF: That?s right. And you mentioned Warren Buffett and I?ve noticed you?ve > mentioned the $5 billion he was putting into Goldman Sachs and other > investments. He?s set it up where he?s got a good deal and he gets 10% back > every year and other things. > > > MH: Yes. And he says the government should have done the same thing. And the > Republican congressmen actually voted according to their ideology not > according to their campaign contributions because they realized that what?s > the point of getting a political campaign contribution if voting for the > giveaway is going to result in their voters voting against them anyway and > voting them out of office. Their corruption in changing their votes has been > so egregious that no amount of television advertising can wipe away the fact > that the voters now know that they?re bought and paid for. They?re trying to > pretend that they did it in order to help the upper middle class by insuring > bank deposits not only for $100,000 but for $250,000 so all your listeners up > there that thought they were worried that had more than $100,000 in the bank > can now rest a little bit more secure. And there were a few other giveaways > to the upper middle class. They had to have the pretense of doing something > as an excuse for changing but really the giveaway remains in place and most > American voters realize that this has been a giveaway with no quick pro quo. > > > > BF: One commentator noted after the modified plan passed the Senate, that > most of the senators that voted against it were up for re-election in > November. > > > MH: That?s right. If they want votes they have to represent the popular > position and according to all the press reports and the statements out of > Washington there has never been so much of a voter protest as there has been > against this giveaway. The people seem to know very clearly when they?re > being given a line that just isn?t true. And no amount of apology and > pretense can cover up this obvious fact. > > > > BF: Now is the government buying real assets or just worthless toxic junk? > > > MH: Well no real assets will be bought at all, although the government will > end up foreclosing on them. Let?s say what the real problem is: the real > problem is that the volume of mortgage debt far exceeds the ability of > debtors to pay and the willingness to pay. Mr. Paulson?s pretense, which is > an absolute lie and which should lead him to criminal prosecution because he > knows it?s a lie, is that the problem here is a liquidity problem. But its > not a liquidity problem, it?s a bad debt problem. Suppose that people bought > a house for $125,000 and have a full mortgage on it for that price and > suppose the house has fallen to $80,000. I know a number of houses like that. > I know a professor in western Illinois that had a house that she bought for > $125,000. The highest bid she has it on: $80,000, fully mortgaged. Dennis > Kucinich tells me that the house next door to him in Cleveland, Ohio was > bought for $125,000 and now it?s only worth $80,000. So this is typical. Now > imagine a bank responding to a borrower who wants to say, ?Well gee, I want > to be able to pay my mortgage can you lend me enough money to pay my > mortgage?? What bank can be expected, when already the house is 50% > over-mortgaged? who is going to lend more mortgage than a property is worth? > That era is over! No bank any longer is going to lend more money than a house > is worth. And already Mr. Paulson said that 5 million Americans are in arrears > and facing foreclosure. The figure was then corrected by other economists to > 10 million Americans in the coming year are going to lose their homes! Now no > amount of liquidity is going to provide them with the money to stay in if > already they can?t afford the mortgage. And in fact the government is now > supposed to make money ?quote? for taxpayers ?unquote? by coming in and acting > as debt collector. Now, in order to make money for taxpayers, the government > now has to come in and say, ?We?re going to enforce the Adjustable Rate > Mortgages that are exploding in interest rates. You are now going to have to > pay much higher interest rates. Penalty rates. Back fees and penalties or > we?re going to throw you out of your house because we have to make money for > the taxpayers. We are now the collecting agents not Countrywide Financial or > Fannie Mae or Washington Mutual or the others. So the debts of homeowners will > remain in place. The debts of cities and municipalities will remain in the > place and all that happens is that people who have the mortgages are supposed > to be bailed out now because under Mr. Paulson?s plan as he wrote it and the > plan that the house originally rejected, the terms were that the government > would buy the bad mortgages and bad debts from the banks and other investors > and insurance companies for what they had paid for them. In other words > insurance companies will not take a loss for their bad investments. Banks > won?t take a loss for their bad investments. Hedge funds won?t take a loss for > their bad investments. Now how many of your listeners would love to be able to > say, ?geez I made a bad stock investment. I?d like the government to buy back > these stocks that I bought that have gone down.? That?s not what the > government is doing because these aren?t the major campaign contributors. So > this is the asymmetry. The inequity. And the irony is that the Democrats have > supported this so strongly. A week ago last Thursday in the Wall Street > Journal, Hillary Clinton of all people came out with a wonderful wonderful > plan. She said that the government should insist on rewriting the bankruptcy > laws. She said the government should rewrite the mortgages down to the current > market price and the government should replace exploding interest rate > mortgages with normal interest rates or the teaser rates that had been signed. > So she obviously knew what the right thing to do was. And that?s the plan that > would have worked. And yet she went and voted for the plan as it came out of > the Senate when they passed it on Thursday. So she met the criterion of evil > that Milton described in Paradise Lost: somebody who knows the right thing > and yet does the wrong thing knowingly. That is also the definition of a > crime. A criminal has to knowingly and consciously be making a mistake. And > Hillary, and the other democrats, Obama? just about all the democrats who > supported the bill said, ?We don?t like it. We know its wrong but we?re voting > for it because it?s an Emergency and if we don?t vote for it the stock market > will go down.? Well as you saw on Friday the stock market did go down and it > will continue to go down because foreign investors realize that this money > that is being given away is going to flow out of the country very quickly and > that?s going to put downward pressure on the dollar. And even if housing > prices only fall another 20% or so, if the dollar declines by more they?re > going to take a heavy loss that they basically can?t afford to take. > > > > BF: Well you know Dr. Hudson I was going to ask you if the Plan (we?ll refer > to it that way) gives struggling homeowners the chance to refinance into > long-term fixed-rate mortgages and it sounds like?. I mean, there?s some sort > of subterfuge in the media, and some claims that, well. plans have been > mitigated and we fixed it and we?ve put something in for homeowners, but > that?s not really true is it? > > > MH: No. It?s not true at all. They said, they will ask the banks, ?will you > please give homeowners a break?? Now this is absolutely ridiculous. And it?s > very funny that while many of the Republicans and Democrats claim to appeal > to Christians, what they?re doing is the exact opposite of what you found in > the Bible. For instance in Matthew there?s one of the passages where Peter > asks Jesus about forgiveness. Jesus tells the story of a king whose official > comes to him and owes him about 10,000 talents and he can?t pay. He said, ?I > just don?t have the money.? And the king says, ?Well, you have to pay the > penalty. You will become my debt-bond servant and so will your family. You > and your family are going to come into debt bondage to me. The official threw > himself down at the king?s knees and said, ?I?m sorry. I?m a good man. Please > have pity on me.? So the king had pity on him and said, ?Okay, I?m going to > relieve you. I?m not going to throw you into debt bondage. Pay me when you > can.? Then the official went out and found somebody who owed him about 1,000 > talents or a much smaller sum and he said, ?Pay the money. I have to pay the > king.? And the debtor didn?t have the money so the official said, ?Okay, I?m > throwing you and your family into debt bondage.? Well, he went around trying > to collect all this money and this frightened a lot of debtors and the > debtors went to the king and said, ?look this official is coming and throwing > everybody in jail and throwing everyone into bondage in order to collect a > debt to pay you. This is bad. So the king called the official in and said, > ?Look I had pity on you but you don?t have pity and forgiveness on your > debtors so now I?m going to throw you into jail.? And in this case now the > king is like the US Treasury Department forgiving the debts of Wall Street > saying Wall Street doesn?t really have to pay. But now Wall Street and the > banks are going and tightening the screws on the smaller debtors. So > technically the government should say, ?Well gee, in view of your bad > behavior now that Countrywide and Bank of America and others are going to go > around (and I?m already told that the thugs are going around to the black > neighborhoods in Brooklyn to try to scare people out of their houses to take > over) the government should say, ?well, now that we see how it?s working out, > we?re not going to lend you the money except on very extortionist terms that > will reduce you guys to debt bondage.? I?m amazed that in the South, the Bible > belt, nobody is looking at this passage from Matthew in the Bible that > describes it. And in fact, lets get back to the point, where under the > Emergency part of the Act, all of this is done as if it had to be in a hurry. > There easily could have been enough time for the Democrats to put in a bill > letting judges renegotiate the mortgages. Nothing was done. They could have > repealed the awful bankruptcy bill that the credit card companies and other > bankers lobbied for so carefully a few years ago. The government could have > restored the favoritism to the debtors, 90% of the population rather than to > the creditors, the upper 10%. But it didn?t do this. There was no bailout for > the debtors. No renegotiation or lightening of the credit terms for them. > There was nothing at all that was done. > > > > BF: Well speaking of the vote in Congress, on Black Monday, September 29, the > Dow drops by 777 points after the first vote in the House of Representatives > on the plan is defeated. Do you think that this vote was staged in the sense > that Congressional leaders know where the vote is before its taken? > > > MH: No. I think obviously the leaders didn?t know. The leaders had all begged > the Congressmen to support the act because the leaders themselves had already > arranged very heavy campaign contributions for themselves out of all of this. > And they?d taken care of themselves but the fact is that the individual > Congressmen knew not only that they weren?t promised any cash on the table > for themselves to sell out their voters to Wall Street but they thought that > even if the Democratic National Committee or the Republication Congressional > Committee contributed money to their campaigns, no amount of television or > media advertising could persuade the voters that they were not crooks. So the > Congressional leaders thought their subordinates would obey them. This was > always a false hope. The leaders were surprised. But it was very clear from > the very beginning on the part of the actual Congressmen that they weren?t > going to support it because they had already come out on the floor with such > vehement opposition to the bill and pointing out exactly what was wrong with > the bill, that it didn?t have to be done in a hurry. That there was no > attempt to solve the debt problem which was the core of the thing, that it > misrepresented the debt problem as a liquidity problem and that it simply was > to bail out Mr. Paulson?s friends who are of course the same people who > contribute to the Democratic campaigns. > > > > BF: Well then if the people who initially? in Congress, who initially voted > ?No?? then [they] ?did? understand the bailout bill. See I was going to ask > you if politicians understood the problem in the bailout bill. > > > MH: They seemed to have very well. They understand the problem is a debt > problem. The real problem for them is what?s more important: to get money in > their pockets and to sell out to their backers? Or to represent what they > think is right and what their voters think is right? The people who voted for > the bill decided to sell out the public and vote against the public interest > in their own interest and that of their backers. > > > > BF: So now what are you saying turned the No?s around into Yes?s? Were they > paid off? > > > MH: An enormous amount of lobbying took place in the intervening week. Not > only in terms of money to the campaigns of just a few people (and they only > had to turn over maybe 20 or 30 votes), but also the leadership went to the > No voters and said, ?Look what is your pet project? Is it ecology? Is it the > environment? We?re going to put in environmental things. Do you want more > FDIC coverage for the upper middle class among your voters, the people who > can afford to contribute to your campaign? We?ll give you that.? Politicians > call this a Christmas Tree of something for everybody to persuade politicians > that their pet hobbies or their pet concerns will be taken care of. > > > > BF: Well, in your opinion then, were the politicians bought off cheaply? > > > MH: Considering that there is an $800 billion giveaway, to be followed by > another trillion and another trillion after that, this is the biggest > giveaway since the land giveaway to the railroads in the mid-nineteenth > century and just as that giveaway created a power elite that would rule > America for a century and a half this is creating a new power elite that has > changed America from a democracy into an oligarchy. And as Aristotle said, > ?what is democracy but the stage immediately preceding oligarchy?? > > > > BF: Yes, that?s becoming a very prescient quote. I even saw in there the > cancellation of a rum tax in the Caribbean. > > > MH: Yes. There was every special interest. In other words they negotiated > special interests for constituents of particular representatives so that the > representatives could then go to their contributors and say, ?Look, now we > want our payoff. We?ve given away more money to you.? So now the giveaway has > been to a lot of special interests and campaign contributors and bribers. > Every campaign contributor got a huge gift for this--enough of a gift to > convince the representatives that when they leave office they?ll be taken > care of for life. > > > > BF: Do you think fear played a part in it? I mean there was such a > turnaround. > > > MH: No fear at all. Pure greed. > > > > BF: Now in your opinion, why didn?t Treasurer Secretary Hank Paulson want > oversight in his plan? > > > MH: Because now the government is going to be negotiating with Wall Street > what price to pay for giving mortgages? for junk mortgages. If there was > oversight, people could say, here?s a mortgage that was fraudulent to begin > with, that didn?t have any market value and that no private investor in the > world has been willing to buy, why are you willing to pay so much for > something no private investor would have bought? And there are guaranteed to > be charges of corruption about the people who are doing the buying and > selling and Paulson didn?t want any of those charges. He wanted the property > and the money to be stolen fair and square. > > > > BF: Well, since you?ve brought up fraud in the mortgage-backed securities, > everyone seems to agree that many of these securities are worthless but > doesn?t the fraud go much deeper? For instance, I?ve heard that the same > worthless mortgage shows up in multiple bundled securities. Do you think this > is true? > > > MH: It?s reported to be true. And the cure promises to be much worse? make > the problem much worse. Mr. Paulson and the Democrats agree that there should > be a regulator, a single regulator over the financial and real estate > industry. Now at present Washington has actually brought a lawsuit to stop > the Attorneys Generals for various States from prosecuting fraudulent > mortgage loans. And they say that ?only? the government can do this (under > some obscure law from the 1840s) because ?we?re going to regulate, you?re not > allowed to do anything?. Then the government has done nothing to enforce the > law. Now suppose a super-regulator going to say we have the authority to > regulate financial fraud, nobody else does. All they have to do is, put > someone like Alan Greenspan in charge of this? All they have to do is put a > deregulator in charge of it and do absolutely nothing and nobody else in the > entire country; no Attorney General, no prosecutor, not private suits? Nobody > can stop the fraud. So centralizing the regulatory process in the hands of > deregulators appointed by the industry to be regulated, by the major campaign > contributors, institutionalizes systematic rip off of the Treasury. > > > > BF: I think I read in the newspapers about what you?re referring to. Was part > of this where the States themselves, the State governments, wanted to go > after fraud and were stopped by the Federal government? > > > MH: Yes, that?s exactly right. > > > > BF: That?s what I thought. > > > MH: People like Mr. Mozillo should be in jail. Franklyn Roosevelt said, > ?Nothing in politics is accidental?. Nothing that happens in politics really > is an accident. So when you have a plan that?s going to fail very shortly, > like Mr. Paulson?s plan, and he says, ?Gee I guess I didn?t understand Wall > Street?, you?re talking about one of the smartest guys on Wall Street, from a > firm that?s considered to be the smartest financial firm on Wall Street. So > when they claim, ?Gee its just incompetence. I guess our giveaway didn?t > work,? you can be pretty sure that this is not an accident. That it wasn?t > out of ignorance they did it. You can assume that they knew just exactly what > would happen. That they knew it would be a failure but it would be a failure > that gives their constituency $700 billion, 700 billionaires, while > tightening the screws on the rest of Americans. > > > > BF: Now can you tell me what are credit default swaps? > > > MH: Credit default swaps are the easiest way to lose money. Suppose I would > do this: Dennis Kucinich?s other political advisor, Dave Kelly and I have > said, ?if you give us $5,000, for every $5,000 we?ll insure a billion dollars > worth of these bonds.? Nobody is going to give us $5,000 because on a teeny > little base, suppose we got 10 people to say, ?gee, this is great, we?ll > ensure 10 billion dollars worth of bonds,? we?d end up with $50,000, and then > the bonds would go under and people would come to us for insurance. They?d > say, ?Okay now pay us, we?ve lost our money.? And we?ll say, ?Gee, I?m sorry, > the $50,000 we put in the fund we?ve already spent it on salaries and bonuses > for ourselves. We don?t have any money to bail you out.? So companies were > buying, pretending to buy, insurance from Monoline companies, i.e. companies > who were set up exclusively to insure bad debts and the insurance premiums > were laughably low compared to the actual risk. So the insurance companies > used junk mathematics to create options to buy and sell junk bonds and junk > mortgages. The whole thing was junk. Remember the people who developed the > [Stowe?] mathematics for options trading and insurance were the people who > set up the long-term capital management that went bust ten years ago and > almost broke down the market. And then this year the same managers started > all over again, started another fund and they?ve lost 40% this year. So the > fact is their models don?t work. The Nobel Prize for these guys turned out to > be pretty much of a Booby Prize because the models that were used have led to > the biggest financial crisis in history. Its junk mathematics and the > insurance companies were collecting premiums that didn?t have any > relationship whatsoever to the risk. What they did provide was a cover story > for investors to say, ?Well we?ve done due diligence. We?ve insured our > small holders. We?ve insured our depositors. We?ve actually taken out credit > insurance so that we can?t lose. And now they express surprise, shedding > crocodile tears, over the fact that ?Gee, I?m afraid the insurance didn?t > work. Thank God we?ve already paid ourselves huge bonuses and paid ourselves > [decent] salaries. Thank God we?ve taken care of ourselves. Sorry folks. I?m > okay.? > > > BF: Well now was the bailed out AIG involved in these credit-default swaps? > > > MH: Yes. It was a major writer of the credit-default swaps. And in today?s > paper today it is reported that of the $85 billion that the government gave > them, they?ve already run through $61 billion. So its already used it, and > now its already run through it and its been downgraded by the ratings > agencies and its about to go bankrupt anyway. So the only effect that the $85 > billion that was given to it was to repay the pals of Paulson who sold out > the quickest. They paid the smartest insiders and the people on the > periphery, the foreign bankers, the people who have been gullible enough to > have faith that this is actually going to help the system have been left > holding an empty bag. > > > > BF: Well now, if this credit-default swap, this fake insurance? I would have > thought this would have gone belly-up immediately. What would happen when > people would try to collect? > > > MH: They can?t collect because there?s no money there. The assumption is that > only a few marginal companies will go bankrupt by accident--not that the > problem was systemic. And the problem is systemic. The whole idea of banks > originating loans and selling them to outsiders was a guaranteed failure from > the very beginning because ? let?s contrast that with how one makes money by > speculating on property. If you buy property the idea is to buy a house and > to sell it to somebody else at a higher profit hoping for the proverbial > greater fool to come along. No fools come along now and the speculator is > withdrawn from the market. Now this property is financed by a mortgage and > the way that Wall Street has worked is, ?Let?s package the mortgage and sell > the mortgage at a profit to somebody else.? Well you have to find the > proverbial greater fool for that. Now they expected the proverbial greater > fool to be Sovereign Wealth Funds. They thought, ?If everything goes wrong in > this game of musical financial chairs, we can turn around and sell to the > Arabs. We can sell to OPEC. We can sell to maybe China and Japan. We can > leave them holding the bag just like we left the German banks holding the bag > and we can escape cleanly. But they didn?t have enough time to do this so now > the proverbial greater fool is the US government. And the US government is > going to create about $2 trillion of new Treasury Bonds and exchange these > perfectly good Treasury Bonds that are as good as cash (because you know the > government can always print the money), they?ll exchange these bonds?cash for > trash. > > > > BF: Wow. Now also the trash that the cash is buying, are these mostly > collateralized debt obligations and derivatives? I mean this is what they?re > really buying isn?t it? > > > MH: It?s all left up to the Treasury. And do you want to really leave it up > to a Secretary Treasury that has been so deceptive as to misrepresent > everything? the problems that are facing America? Do you want to leave it to > the discretion of a Secretary Treasury that says, ?We have a liquidity > problem, perfectly good mortgages at some price, its just a little > liquidity?; that will not tell the people what every American seems to know > by now that it?s a debt problem? Every American knows that if there?s a > higher mortgage than the value of the property nobody is going to lend money, > because most Americans know they can?t get mortgage loans. They can?t get car > loans. They can?t get personal loans. They can?t get new credit card loans. > They know there is no money available at all. And the reason is when they ask > the bank, ?Why not?? the bank said, ?Well we?ve looked at your income and > you?re already loaned up. You?re already paying 40% of your income for > housing and debt. You?re already paying another 20% just for student loans, > health loans, personal loans, car loans, credit card arrears.? There?s no > more slack left in the economy. The debt overhead is absorbing now the entire > economic surplus. There isn?t anymore that people can do? so now is the time > for foreclosures to come. Now is the time for the upper one percent to > sharply increase its holdings, its degree of wealth and income. The > Congressional Record Office has estimated that 10 years ago, the top > wealthiest one percent of America?s population owned 37% of all revenue from > wealth--interest, dividends, capital gains. Five years ago they?ve increased > this so that the upper one percent owns 57% of America?s wealth. The estimate > is today that the top one percent of the population now owns almost 70% of all > the American wealth. Now just think of it. This is like a Banana Republic. > This is like a third world Kleptocracy--one percent of Americans owning almost > 70% of all of the income from wealth. The hypocrisy of the Treasury Secretary > and of the Democrats who support the plan is that ?Well, gee we have to bail > out the stock market to help the little guy. We have to help the pension fund. > We have to help the small investor.? Now if they really wanted to help the > pension funds what they would have done was say, ?look, we?re going to give > this money to bailout the Pension Benefit Guarantee Benefit? which is now $25 > billion in arrears for what it needs to guarantee failing pension plans. They > would have said, if they wanted to help depositors, ?Gee, the Federal Deposit > Insurance Corporation? which is now $40 billion in deficit, they would have > put $40 billion, much less than $700 billion, just $40 billion to bail out the > FDIC. They didn?t do it. They would have said? remember when Mr. Bush said > last year said there?s no money at all for Social Security, that Social > Security is running a trillion dollar deficit over the next 40 years. ?Let?s > put some of this money to refinance the Social Security Program.? They didn?t > do that. They could have used a much smaller amount to guarantee Public > Health. They didn?t do that. So instead Mr. Obama and Hillary came out against > Public Health and against Social Security; against bailing out the pensions, > against bank security, in voting for this plan. And they should be held > accountable. > > > > BF: So that when they say there is a liquidity crisis, there is no liquidity > crisis, it?s a debt crisis. > > > MH: That?s correct. It?s a bad debt crisis and a bad investment crisis. And > Wall Street says, ?Gee, we thought that in the game of musical chairs, we?d > have a chance to get out quick. Just like Goldman Sachs was able to get out > quick from a lot of the junk mortgages. And they weren?t able to get out > quick enough so they said, ?We want the government to take the loss. We don?t > want to take the loss. Will you please buy all our bad investments at the > price we paid for them so that we won?t take a loss? We?d much rather the > taxpayers take a loss.? And Mr. Obama said ?Yes?. Mrs. Clinton said ?Yes?. > Most of the Democrats said ?Yes?. The Republicans tried to say ?No?. They > said, ?We don?t want any part of this.? Many of the Republicans obviously did > vote for it but this is a Democratic plan for the incoming Democratic > administration to impose with a vengeance. And it?s the Democrats that have > put the class war back in business. > > > > BF: Well, we here in the media declaim that, ?Oh well, the Republicans were > against it but for the wrong reasons.? > > > MH: (laughs) What can one say to that? The fact is that yes that?s true. They > were against it because if you look at what they said, they said that this is > socialism. Well its nothing like socialism at all. When you give away money > to the wealthiest class, this is old-fashioned Kleptocracy and it?s a step > back towards feudalism. It?s not a step towards socialism at all. So in that > sense, the rhetoric that the Republicans used was their usual silly rhetoric > but the fact is they did oppose the act. And if you look at the statements > that were made on the house floor and the senate floor, statements that do > not appear in the New York Times, that do not appear in the Chicago Tribune, > that do not appear in the Wall Street Journal, then you?ll see that these > Congressmen who voted against it were pretty smart and the media is refusing > to say what they actually said. The media is refusing to cite the reasons > that the Congressmen voted against it. You don?t find any discussion at all > of Dennis Kucinich?s reasons for voting against it: the fact that there was > no need to panic, the fact that there were no hearings. It?s unbelievable > that an act of this magnitude by government, never before has there been an > act like this with no congressional hearings. No bank oversight committee > hearings. No testimony by expert witnesses--absolutely no discussion at > all--a total clamp down almost done under Martial Law. And that?s why I said > last Friday was the day that American democracy ended and the Oligarchy > imposed its brute force. > > > > BF: Dr. Hudson, I was about to ask you about the role the media has played in > this. There?s been an awful lot of disinformation put out. > > > MH: That?s the role of the media these days. And what would you expect from a > media that has been centralized in the hands of the wealthiest classes? The > media has acted as cheerleaders for the Act, for Wall Street, for the Real > Estate industry and they have indeed been promoting disinformation. You don?t > get any of what I?ve been saying, not only in the media but on educational > TV, on MacNeil Lehrer or any of the other reports. You get a little bit more > on PBS. You get much more on radio. And of course much much more on the > Internet. The Internet is really the only place where you can get very open > discussion of the problems. Almost every day in the last two weeks I?ve > written the lead article for Counterpunch, for instance, and my Counterpunch > articles on Internet have been picked up by many other major Internet > information clearing houses? Michel Chossudovsky? all sorts of other people > have been picking up my articles and these have been going around so that my > website Michael-Hudson.com has 5,000 hits a day. So somebody is reading all > of this. The media is not reporting it--in this country. Yesterday I was on > Japan?s largest Sunday talk show debate program talking about it. I?ve been > on Canadian media. I?ve been on BBC?s international service. I?ve been > writing articles in Latvia. Nothing in the United States. > > > > BF: I?ve been reading your articles on GlobalResearch.ca, Michel > Chossudovsky?s website. > > > MH: Yes. > > > > BF: I wanted to talk a bit about how Secretary Treasurer Hank Paulson?s plan > has changed. What do you think of the FDIC insurance increase for depositors? > > > MH: The Wall Street Journal had a wonderful editorial on that yesterday. They > said this can be almost as much of a giveaway as the $700 billion itself, > because its something open-ended. The banks are in trouble. How many > Americans do you think have more than a $100,000 in the bank? Remember if a > couple has $200,000 they?re doubly insured. They?re insured for $200,000. If > they have four kids they can put them in accounts. Ever since I worked for > the Savings Bank Trust Company in 1961 the savings banks would take money > from wealthy bank depositors and they would spread them around, $100,000 in > each of the 127 New York Savings Banks. So the fact is you?d have to have > more than about I?d say $2 million to have difficulty finding insurance that > you couldn?t spread around among 20 banks. All of this was insuring the top > 10% of the population. How many people have that much liquidity that it > really matters? It was a giveaway. Again they solved the problem of the > giveaway to the ultra-rich by giving even more away to the rich and that?s > what the Wall Street Journal itself pointed out in its editorial page on > Friday and it was a great editorial. Now so far, people have talked about the > $700 billion that is at stake and the government has said we?re going to put > securities in here, however what the media has not reported, although the > British newspaper The Economist had a wonderful chart last week, showing that > the Federal Reserve has already swapped $500 billion worth of Treasury bonds > for junk. The cash for trash has already begun since March by the Federal > Reserve so $500 billion is almost as much as the $700 billion that the > Treasury is talking about, this has already been given away by the Fed to > Wall Street insiders and nothing has been said in the media about this at > all. Although its been statistically reported by the Fed. The Fed reports its > holdings and securities. It reports its holdings of Treasury Securities, > which have gone down by $ 500 trillion. It reports its overall securities, > which are now $1.1 trillion compared to less than $500 billion in Treasury > Securities. And this leaves between $500 billion and $600 billion in > essentially non-treasury securities, which are the junk they?ve taken on with > these swaps that it?s arranged. And the Fed has been swapping this not only > with the banks that its supposed to represent but its been doing cash for > trash with insurance companies, investment banks and people who have no > relation at all under the Fed and this is being done under the Fed?s special > small print of the Fed?s Articles of Incorporation saying it can do this to > save the economy. Well its not saving the economy at all. It?s wrecking the > economy by doing this. It?s wrecking the economy by buying trash from insiders > and as I said, creating a new Kleptocracy. > > > > BF: Well I?ve never heard of this other, this previous $500 billion. No, that > wasn?t reported. Well if they don?t have to?Why are they? > > > MH: Well the Fed says that it has reported it. Anybody can go online on the > Federal Reserve and check the daily and weekly Federal Reserve Statistics. > You can be sure that just everybody on Wall Street that has a stake in the > financial system has done that. The media has blacked it out. > > > > BF: Well if they gave away $500 billion previously with a media blackout why > did they even bother to go public with the $700 billion? > > > MH: Because they need altogether about $5 trillion to create? If they?re > going to create 500 billionaires to run the country for the next century and > to create really a new feudal class they need $5 trillion and they don?t want > the people to know what?s occurring because if they did the voters would get > so upset they?d create probably a new political party, an alternative. And > they don?t want the voters to have an alternative certainly before this > election. They?ve got one candidate, McCain who is advised by Phil Gramm?s] > who is in completely in [???]?s pocket. They have another presidential > candidate, Obama, whose financial advisor is Treasury Secretary Rubin. If you > want to see what is likely to happen to the United States you should look at > what Mr. Rubin did when America had a completely free hand in redesigning the > Russian economy. This was their ideal. You?ve seen since the 1996 giveaways > in Russia, the Russian population has fallen more than it fell in World War > Two. The financial devastation today is even more devastating than military > destruction. The result is a shortened life expectancy, lower birth rate, > depression. The effect is psychological and social, not merely economic. > > > > BF: Well why didn?t they keep their subsequent $700 billion a secret? Did > they just feel they couldn?t? > > > MH: Because it?s become so large, larger than the Federal Reserve has on its > balance sheet. The Federal Reserve only had $1.1 trillion and the Treasury > can print an infinite amount of bonds to exchange for trash and what they > needed was much more than just a trillion, they need really trillion after > trillion to bail out the bad debts because that is how deep the hole is that > Wall Street (and behind it, Free Market Economics of the Chicago School > variety) has led the country into. > > > > BF: Well then would you say it?s too big to bail out? > > > MH: In essence yes. It can?t really be bailed out. But what you can do is let > the insiders get as much money as they can as quickly as they can under > emergency conditions so that they can take their money and run. Of course it > can?t be bailed out. But you can have a lot of insiders take their money and > run. And they?re going to run--out of the dollar. > > > > BF: Dr. Hudson, as always, thank you for the good analysis. > > > MH: Well thank you Bonnie. It?s always good to be on your Guns and Butter > show. > > > > > > Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the > balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan > Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no > relation). In 1990 he helped established the world?s first sovereign debt > fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich?s Chief > Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and > has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as > the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A > Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City > (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The > Economic Strategy of American Empire > (new > ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, > mh at michael-hudson.com > > Contact mhmichael-hudson.com www.michael-hudson.com __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Files | Photos | Links | Database | Polls | Members | Calendar The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. To unsubscribe, email: gang8-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com MARKETPLACE From nscchicago at igc.org Sun Nov 9 22:51:31 2008 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 23:51:31 -0600 Subject: [A-List] Fw: An Open Letter from the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama Message-ID: <001501c942f8$6b3b70b0$0a0110ac@NSCCHICAGO> ----- Original Message ----- From: Mario Murillo Subject: An Open Letter from the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama Sunday, November 9, 2008 An Open Letter from the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama. November 10, 2008 An Open Letter from the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama. Santander de Quilichao, Cauca, Colombia Dear Mr. President-Elect, First, please accept our sincerest congratulations. We congratulate you for having won because of the noblest aspirations of your people. We believe your election expresses the deep desire for change felt by the majority of the American people: change in the economy and society, change in international relations, and from there, we hope, a change in the relation between the United States of America and the indigenous peoples of the world. During your historic campaign, you publicly noted some of what Colombians currently face: you acknowledged the murders of trade unionists by the regime and stated your reservations about a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, which our people have decided against through a democratic referendum, about which we have written before. We thank you for this, and now want you to know about the specific situation facing Colombia's indigenous peoples. In the past six years we have lost 1,200 people to assassinations by armed groups, both legal and illegal: right-wing paramilitaries, guerrillas, police, and members of the Armed Forces. These murders have created insecurity, and this insecurity has been used to strip us of our rights with what we call the 'Laws of Disposession', legislation and other institutional norms that legalize the loss of our lands, our fundamental freedoms, and our rights. These 'Laws of Disposession' dispose of Colombia's mines, hydrocarbons, water resources, intellectual property, and national parks ? all of these are brought under the ultimate rule of the Free Trade Agreement with the US. The FTA will mean that if Colombia tries to change the laws to allow its people to share in its resources, or take any independent action, then we will be obliged to compensate investors. We will have to submit our laws to international arbitration outside our own legal jurisdiction. But in our view, the ultimate law is respect for life. In our view, the FTA puts commercial logic above the respect for life itself, not to mention international humanitarian law, and agreements such as the ILO's Covenant 169, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Worldwide. These covenants, as well as the respect for life, have to date been ignored by the government of our country, as well as by your government. Unfortunately both of our governments, yours with Plan Colombia, and ours with the so-called 'Democratic Security' policy, have done great harm to indigenous peoples and to Mother Earth, while multinational corporations have profited from the petroleum and gas contracts, mining concessions, privatizations, and low wages. We hope that you will contribute to change all this. We hope that you will listen to our words. We have lost many lives defending these words. Words that we have walked and words we have backed up with our civil resistance. These are the words that we have shared throughout Colombia since October 10th, through the Minga of Resistance, a national mobilization we convened as indigenous peoples, in association with other peoples and processes. We believe that the spirit of change in your people cannot be contained. We believe it is a powerful force and we hope it will join with the force of our words and with the need for change that has been crying out throughout Latin America. We invite you to come to listen to these words here in Colombia, and we are ready to articulate them there, if you invite us. Here or there, it is the same planet and our mission is the same: to protect it, to save us all. Finally, we call on you to join with us in fulfilling our responsibilities to Mother Earth and to history. The first one, our collective Mother, has given all of us life. The second one, History, has reflected our growing pains and our errors. History has not matured into systems that reconcile it with the rhythms, pulses and mandates of Nature. We believe the very reason human beings and our societies exist is to create the harmony between History and Mother Earth. As children of Mother Earth, we speak to you as to a brother or sister. As indigenous, we speak to you as peoples, obliged from creation to seek harmony between History and Mother Earth. To reconcile ourselves with nature is not an option, but an imperative. By transforming life into merchandise, by making sacred the accumulation of wealth, by enshrining greed, we believe our societies have entered a crisis, including the economic crisis currently faced by your country. The destruction of our peoples in Colombia is a consequence of that Historic error that has placed greed before life. Brother President-elect Barack Obama, we do not write to ask or demand anything for ourselves, because we know that the death of our peoples and the destruction of our cultures for greed, signifies the beginning of the end for Mother Earth itself. Before we disappear with our collective Mother, we have decided to speak and to walk our words. In the name of life, of change, let us listen to one another and make the effort to find a way to create harmony between our peoples and life. Let us create the conditions for new History. One where the sacred ends of promotion and protection of Life and Beauty can never again be transformed into means for private accumulation of power at the service of greed. We await you. With great respect, Association of Indigenous Couincils of Northern Cauca ACIN (Cxab Wala Kiwe-Territory of the Great People) Cauca, Mother Earth, November 10th, 2008 Santander de Quilichao -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 8184 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20081109/52bb9acb/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Nov 10 05:00:19 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:00:19 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Organic farming 'could feed Africa' Message-ID: <49182253.6000407@ashisuto.co.jp> Traditional practices increase yield by 128 per cent in east Africa, says UN by Daniel Howden in Nairobi www.independent.co.uk (October 22 2008) ?Organic farming offers Africa the best chance of breaking the cycle of poverty and malnutrition it has been locked in for decades, according to a major study from the United Nations to be presented today. New evidence suggests that organic practices - derided by some as a Western lifestyle fad - are delivering sharp increases in yields, improvements in the soil and a boost in the income of Africa's small farmers who remain among the poorest people on earth. The head of the UN's Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, said the report "indicates that the potential contribution of organic farming to feeding the world maybe far higher than many had supposed". The "green revolution" in agriculture in the 1960s - when the production of food caught and surpassed the needs of the global population for the first time - largely bypassed Africa. Whereas each person today has 25 per cent more food on average than they did in 1960, in Africa they have ten per cent less. A combination of increasing population, decreasing rainfall and soil fertility and a surge in food prices has left Africa uniquely vulnerable to famine. Climate change is expected to make a bad situation worse by increasing the frequency of droughts and floods. It has been conventional wisdom among African governments that modern, mechanised agriculture was needed to close the gap but efforts in this direction have had little impact on food poverty and done nothing to create a sustainable approach. Now, the global food crisis has led to renewed calls for a massive modernisation of agriculture on the hungriest continent on the planet, with calls to push ahead with genetically modified crops and large industrial farms to avoid potentially disastrous starvation. Last month the UK's former chief scientist Sir David King said anti-scientific attitudes among Western NGOs and the UN were responsible for holding back a much-needed green revolution in Africa. "The problem is that the Western world's move toward organic farming - a lifestyle choice for a community with surplus food - and against agricultural technology in general and GM in particular, has been adopted across the whole of Africa, with the exception of South Africa, with devastating consequences", he said. The research conducted by the UN Environment Programme suggests that organic, small-scale farming can deliver the increased yields which were thought to be the preserve of industrial farming, without the environmental and social damage which that form of agriculture brings with it. An analysis of 114 projects in 24 African countries found that yields had more than doubled where organic, or near-organic practices had been used. That increase in yield jumped to 128 per cent in east Africa. "Organic farming can often lead to polarised views", said Mr Steiner, a former economist. "With some viewing it as a saviour and others as a niche product or something of a luxury ... this report suggests it could make a serious contribution to tackling poverty and food insecurity". The study found that organic practices outperformed traditional methods and chemical-intensive conventional farming. It also found strong environmental benefits such as improved soil fertility, better retention of water and resistance to drought. And the research highlighted the role that learning organic practices could have in improving local education. Backers of GM foods insist that a technological fix is needed to feed the world. But this form of agriculture requires cash to buy the patented seeds and herbicides - both at record high prices currently - needed to grow GM crops. Regional farming experts have long called for "good farming", rather than exclusively GM or organic. Better seeds, crop rotation, irrigation and access to markets all help farmers. Organic certification in countries such as the UK and Australia still presents an insurmountable barrier to most African exporters, the report points out. It calls for greater access to markets so farmers can get the best prices for their products. Kenyan farmer: 'I wanted to see how UK did it' Henry Murage had to travel a long way to solve problems trying to farm a smallholding on the western slopes of Mount Kenya. He spent five months in the UK, studying with the experts at Garden Organic a charity in the Midlands. "I wanted to see how it was being done in the UK and was convinced we could do some of the same things here", he says. On his return ten years ago, he set up the Mt Kenya Organic Farm, aimed at aiding other small farmers fighting the semi-arid conditions. He believes organic soil management can help retain moisture and protect against crop failure. The true test came during the devastating drought of 2000-02, when Mr Murage's vegetable gardens fared better than his neighbours'. At least 300 farmers have visited his gardens and taken up at least one of the practices he espouses. "Organic can feed the people in rural areas", he says. "It's sustainable and what we produce now we can go on producing". Saving money on fertilisers and pesticides helps farmers afford better seeds, and composting and crop rotation are improving the soil. Traditional maize, beans and livestock farming in the area have been supplemented with new crops from borage seeds to cayenne peppers and honey, with buyers from the US to Europe. Now he is growing camomile for herbal tea, with buyers from the UK and Germany both interested. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/organic-farming-could-feed-africa-968641.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Nov 10 05:07:19 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:07:19 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Organic farming 'could feed Africa' Message-ID: <491823F7.2050800@ashisuto.co.jp> Traditional practices increase yield by 128 per cent in east Africa, says UN by Daniel Howden in Nairobi www.independent.co.uk (October 22 2008) ?Organic farming offers Africa the best chance of breaking the cycle of poverty and malnutrition it has been locked in for decades, according to a major study from the United Nations to be presented today. New evidence suggests that organic practices - derided by some as a Western lifestyle fad - are delivering sharp increases in yields, improvements in the soil and a boost in the income of Africa's small farmers who remain among the poorest people on earth. The head of the UN's Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, said the report "indicates that the potential contribution of organic farming to feeding the world maybe far higher than many had supposed". The "green revolution" in agriculture in the 1960s - when the production of food caught and surpassed the needs of the global population for the first time - largely bypassed Africa. Whereas each person today has 25 per cent more food on average than they did in 1960, in Africa they have ten per cent less. A combination of increasing population, decreasing rainfall and soil fertility and a surge in food prices has left Africa uniquely vulnerable to famine. Climate change is expected to make a bad situation worse by increasing the frequency of droughts and floods. It has been conventional wisdom among African governments that modern, mechanised agriculture was needed to close the gap but efforts in this direction have had little impact on food poverty and done nothing to create a sustainable approach. Now, the global food crisis has led to renewed calls for a massive modernisation of agriculture on the hungriest continent on the planet, with calls to push ahead with genetically modified crops and large industrial farms to avoid potentially disastrous starvation. Last month the UK's former chief scientist Sir David King said anti-scientific attitudes among Western NGOs and the UN were responsible for holding back a much-needed green revolution in Africa. "The problem is that the Western world's move toward organic farming - a lifestyle choice for a community with surplus food - and against agricultural technology in general and GM in particular, has been adopted across the whole of Africa, with the exception of South Africa, with devastating consequences", he said. The research conducted by the UN Environment Programme suggests that organic, small-scale farming can deliver the increased yields which were thought to be the preserve of industrial farming, without the environmental and social damage which that form of agriculture brings with it. An analysis of 114 projects in 24 African countries found that yields had more than doubled where organic, or near-organic practices had been used. That increase in yield jumped to 128 per cent in east Africa. "Organic farming can often lead to polarised views", said Mr Steiner, a former economist. "With some viewing it as a saviour and others as a niche product or something of a luxury ... this report suggests it could make a serious contribution to tackling poverty and food insecurity". The study found that organic practices outperformed traditional methods and chemical-intensive conventional farming. It also found strong environmental benefits such as improved soil fertility, better retention of water and resistance to drought. And the research highlighted the role that learning organic practices could have in improving local education. Backers of GM foods insist that a technological fix is needed to feed the world. But this form of agriculture requires cash to buy the patented seeds and herbicides - both at record high prices currently - needed to grow GM crops. Regional farming experts have long called for "good farming", rather than exclusively GM or organic. Better seeds, crop rotation, irrigation and access to markets all help farmers. Organic certification in countries such as the UK and Australia still presents an insurmountable barrier to most African exporters, the report points out. It calls for greater access to markets so farmers can get the best prices for their products. Kenyan farmer: 'I wanted to see how UK did it' Henry Murage had to travel a long way to solve problems trying to farm a smallholding on the western slopes of Mount Kenya. He spent five months in the UK, studying with the experts at Garden Organic a charity in the Midlands. "I wanted to see how it was being done in the UK and was convinced we could do some of the same things here", he says. On his return ten years ago, he set up the Mt Kenya Organic Farm, aimed at aiding other small farmers fighting the semi-arid conditions. He believes organic soil management can help retain moisture and protect against crop failure. The true test came during the devastating drought of 2000-02, when Mr Murage's vegetable gardens fared better than his neighbours'. At least 300 farmers have visited his gardens and taken up at least one of the practices he espouses. "Organic can feed the people in rural areas", he says. "It's sustainable and what we produce now we can go on producing". Saving money on fertilisers and pesticides helps farmers afford better seeds, and composting and crop rotation are improving the soil. Traditional maize, beans and livestock farming in the area have been supplemented with new crops from borage seeds to cayenne peppers and honey, with buyers from the US to Europe. Now he is growing camomile for herbal tea, with buyers from the UK and Germany both interested. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/organic-farming-could-feed-africa-968641.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From nmgoro at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 07:50:24 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:50:24 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Illusions over Central Banks' Reserves Could Be Shattered In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2fa158550811100650n59633474sc5259589e8f1208@mail.gmail.com> In fact, one of the lessons that this crisis will certainly provide (once it is over, and IMHO it is very far from being over) is that "whatever deserves being shattered WILL be shattered" 2008/11/6 Yoshie Furuhashi : > > Illusions over central banks' reserves could be shattered > By Satyajit Das > Published: October 22 2008 03:00 | Last updated: October 22 2008 03:00 > > The substantial reserves of central banks and their acolytes, > sovereign wealth funds, are frequently cited in support of the case > for a large pool of "unleveraged" liquidity, that is "real" money. > -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From nmgoro at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 08:08:06 2008 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:08:06 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Re Brazilian oil (or that of any other country) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2fa158550811100708u78476bf0v32c06e97997fea4b@mail.gmail.com> The "resource rent tax", from what I can gather, is the generalized version of the UN-ECLA?s suggestion in 1965 that in Latin America a tax should be imposed on land according to its potential productivity, which came to be known as the "tax to potential rent of land" in Argentina when, under the third government of Juan Per?n, it was presented as a law in the Congress in 1973. Three years later the government was falling down, and its unability to impose this law (together with the rashness implicit in having suggested it) tore it down. Conditions now are different. It would be very interesting to see the Brazilian government imposing a similarly tailored task on oil rents. 2008/11/8 Michael Hudson : > If it looks like there's been a giveaway, there's a simple solution that's > valid under international law: > A RESOURCE RENT TAX. > This is what our group was working on with the head of the academic > division of Russian Academy of Sciences Dmitri Lvov and Yevgeny Primakov > before he was removed as PM. The tax would collect the windfall gains. > It's the antidote to "bad-style" neoliberal globalization. > Michael > > -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 08:46:24 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:46:24 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Obama to Back Ailing Ethanol Makers, Follow Failed Bush Policy Message-ID: When it comes to ethanol, Obama is not even neoliberal -- just pork-barrel. -- Yoshie Obama to Back Ailing Ethanol Makers, Follow Failed Bush Policy By Mario Parker and Kim Chipman More Photos/Details Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- President-elect Barack Obama plans to support unprofitable U.S. ethanol producers and pursue the same policies that failed George W. Bush. Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois, the second- biggest corn-growing state, will maintain Bush's goal requiring fuel producers use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels in 2022, said Heather Zichal, the campaign's senior energy adviser. The ethanol industry, which loses about 66 cents a gallon at current prices, will receive at least as much support as from the current administration, including tax credits to spur consumption, she said. ``Obama recognizes how important the renewable and biofuels industry is to creating jobs and meeting our goal of reducing dependence on foreign oil,'' Zichal said in a Nov. 3 interview. ``He's fully committed to it and sees tremendous value in the renewable fuels standard and continuing down this path.'' Ethanol makers are collapsing after wrong-way bets on corn prices overwhelmed $20 billion in federal aid and government- guaranteed demand for the fuel additive. VeraSun Energy Corp., the second-largest producer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Oct. 31. Bush's approach has been criticized for hurting the environment, increasing global food prices and contributing to riots from Haiti to Egypt. Earlier this year, at least 51 members of his own party, led by Texas Governor Rick Perry, called for relaxing the policy. Distillers struggle to make money because costs to produce ethanol are rising while increasing supplies drive down prices of the fuel. U.S. output climbed to a record 647,000 barrels a day in August, more than double the 318,000 barrels a day in June 2006, when VeraSun had its initial public offering, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Farm Politics Rising feed costs caused third-quarter profit to plunge 92 percent at Tyson Foods Inc., the nation's largest meat producer. Pilgrim's Pride Corp. said Sept. 25 it may breach a credit covenant because of a ``significant'' loss in the quarter ended Sept. 27. Pilgrim's Pride shares dropped 24 percent on Oct. 17 amid speculation the company may file for court protection from creditors. Record prices for corn, soybeans and wheat in the past 12 months helped boost net farm income to a record $95.7 billion this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There are about 2 million farmers in the U.S., according to the USDA. Farm belt states that voted Republican in 2004, including Colorado, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio, went to Obama this time. `Zero Margins' ``We know that corn farmers like ethanol very, very much,'' said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates in Houston. ``Corn farmers have a lot of political influence in swing states such as Iowa and Missouri. Certainly ethanol continues to enjoy some support because of its political and electoral significance.'' Corn futures traded in Chicago more than doubled in the past three years to almost $8 a bushel as worldwide demand expanded to make sweeteners and fuel. U.S. ethanol prices dropped 5 percent because output from new mills grew faster than demand, damaging profit for distillers. ``Obama has clearly said part of his energy policy has been for renewable fuels, including ethanol,'' said Ronald Miller, chief executive officer of Aventine Renewable Holdings Inc., a Pekin, Illinois-based ethanol producer, which delayed the opening of a plant in Aurora, Nebraska, until the second quarter. Producers ``are managing the day-to-day business on near zero margins,'' he said. Advanced Biofuels Obama, 47, plans to spend $150 billion over 10 years to develop renewable fuels and to create 5 million so-called green collar jobs. He will also require at least 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels be produced by 2030. Ethanol is a form of alcohol created by fermenting and distilling the starches from corn and other crops. Bush's Energy Independence and Security Act, passed in December, called for ethanol production to more than double to 15 billion gallons in 2015 from 6.5 billion last year. The U.S. pays oil refiners 51 cents in tax credits for each gallon of ethanol they blend into regular gasoline. A 54 cent-a-gallon tariff is slapped on imports from Brazil to protect and stimulate U.S. production. Obama supports the mandate and wants to expand it and move toward so-called cellulosic ethanol, Zichal said. Cellulosic ethanol is derived from non-food crops such as switch grass and wood chips. Speaking in Missouri in July, Obama said corn-based ethanol isn't ``our best strategy'' because of its impacts on food, adding the current additive will usher in commercial production of cellulosic. Bad Hedges ``He very much sees it as an important bridge fuel and important source of revenue for many rural communities but something that is the beginning of hopefully a greater investment and greater commitment to advanced biofuels,'' Zichal said. Falling margins caused Gateway Ethanol LLC, Heartland Ethanol LLC, LiquidMaize LLC, Greater Ohio Ethanol, Glacial Lakes Corn Processors and Abengoa SA to curtail production. Biofuel Energy Corp., based in Denver, said in August that it didn't have enough money to cover $46 million in losses on contracts for corn, ethanol and the natural gas used to run its distilleries. The company locked in third- and fourth-quarter corn costs of $7.01 and $6.90 a bushel, respectively. Corn plunged to about $4 a bushel for December delivery on the Chicago Board of Trade. Failure stems from ``the way they operate their companies rather than the government support,'' said Ian Horowitz, an analyst at Soleil Securities Corp. in New York. ``You can't policy your way out of bad hedging positions.'' To contact the reporters on this story: Mario Parker in Chicago at mparker22 at bloomberg.net; Kim Chipman in Chicago at 1927 or kchipman at bloomberg.net. Last Updated: November 5, 2008 19:00 EST From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 10:54:56 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:54:56 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Public takeover Message-ID: <49182F22.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Both Wall Street banking monopolies and the automobile monopolies are insolvent. Thus, the biggest companies of the private sector are inefficient. Let us never hear again how private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise. Let us never hear the term "bureaucrat" confined to the public sector. The worst bureaucratt in existence are the private sector bureaucrats. Reverse privatization ! Publicization now ! This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 11:07:13 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:07:13 -0500 Subject: [A-List] GM's shares plummet after analysts downgrade stock Message-ID: <49183202.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081110/AUTO01/811100410 Monday, November 10, 2008 GM's shares plummet after analysts downgrade stock David Shepardson / Detroit News Washington Bureau General Motors Corp.'s shares plunged more than 31 percent to their lowest level in more than 55 years after two analysts downgraded the Detroit automaker's stock and said it could be worth little or nothing if the company gets a government bailout. GM fell to $3.02 a share at one point -- down $1.34 a share -- or about 31 percent. It recovered in morning trading to $3.27, down 25 percent. Deutsche Bank analyst Rod Lache reduced GM to sell and put a price target of $0 a share -- saying any government bailout would sharply lower the value of the stock. "Without government assistance, we believe that GM's collapse would be inevitable, and that it would precipitate systemic risk that would be difficult to overcome for automakers, suppliers, retailers, and sectors of the U.S. economy," Lache wrote. "As part of GM's restructuring, we are also convinced that a large number of stakeholders who are senior to GM's equity will have to settle for pennies on the dollar." GM needs $10 billion in government loans, Lache wrote, to survive until 2010. GM said Friday it lost $2.5 billion in the third quarter, while burning through $6.9 billion in cash. The automaker warned it might not have enough cash to meet minimum funding requirements by the second quarter of 2009. Brian Johnson, an auto analyst at Barclay Capital, put a price target of $1 a share on GM. "We estimate that GM will end 2008 with just $13.3 bil of gross cash, and expect GM to fall below its $11-14 bil minimum cash needs in 1Q09," Johnson wrote. "Of the four broad options for government assistance for GM, we believe that political pressure to protect taxpayers may lead to a solution similar to the 1979 Chrysler bailout, which was accompanied by concessions from debt holders, labor, suppliers and management." But as Johnson noted, shareholders could end up suffering as they did in the Chrysler bailout. "In any scenario, we see little value for current equity. In the Chrysler-like approach, potentially 98 percent of the recapitalized company's equity would be transferred to the UAW VEBA, existing GM debt holders and the government." GM must pay $7 billion into a UAW-run health care trust fund in 2010 under a labor deal reached last year. On Thursday, GM chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, along with the CEOs of Chrysler LLC and Ford Motor Co. and the president of the United Auto Workers met with congressional leaders seeking $25 billion in "bridge financing" to help the companies survive until 2010 as they face the prospects of another dismal year of auto sales in 2009 -- after 2008 looks to be the worst year for the auto industry in more than 15 years. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Saturday said there would have to be "taxpayer protections" in exchange for more aid -- including the government getting equity in the automakers, along with limits on executive compensation and bonuses. Saving GM is becoming a global war cry. Today Joint General Secretary Tony Woodley of United, the U.K.'s largest union, urged British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson to use his international expertise for "global action to save the motor industry from crisis and above all to stave off bankruptcy at General Motors." "General Motors is running out of money as a result of the crisis in the USA," Woodley said, "and British workers employed by Vauxhall will be among the victims." The union wants Mandelson to work with President-elect Barack Obama as well as leaders in Europe on a "co-ordinated global package to get the motor industry out of the crisis caused by the reckless bankers." With Monday's steep selloff, GM's market capitalization fell to below $2 billion for the first time in more than 60 years. More than 40 million shares traded hands in the first 90 minutes of trading -- far above the average daily volume of 28 million shares. Before today's sharp drop, GM's lowest share price of the year was $4 -- and that was the lowest level the Detroit automaker hit since 1949. GM announced Friday would improve its cash position by $5 billion by the end of 2009 by cutting capital spending, cutting salaried spending by 30 percent, reducing promotions and further cutting production. About 3,600 hourly workers will be laid off indefinitely in early 2009 as GM slows production at 10 of its assembly plants -- following the company announcement last month it was laying off 1,600 worker. GM, which cut about 5,100 salaried workers from its payroll by Nov. 1, is cutting another 2,000 salaried workers. Ford Motor Co. said it used $7.7 billion in cash in the third-quarter but it is in a better position because it borrowed more money. Ford's stock fell $0.07 a share, or 3.5 percent, in early trading to $1.99 a share. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 11:07:28 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:07:28 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Public takeover In-Reply-To: <49182F22.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <49182F22.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <49187860.5000400@gmail.com> The 'Big Boxes' aren't doing so good either. Circuit City had been closing a good percentage of their stores over the last few weeks and today they filed ch 11. Sigh... I was putting off looting myself a big screen plasma TV to plug into my tree when the revolution happens... Knew I should have gone for it on election eve. Charles Brown wrote: > Both Wall Street banking monopolies and the automobile monopolies are insolvent. Thus, the biggest companies of the private sector are inefficient. Let us never hear again how private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise. Let us never hear the term "bureaucrat" confined to the public sector. The worst bureaucratt in existence are the private sector bureaucrats. > > Reverse privatization ! Publicization now ! > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com > > > From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 11:10:28 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:10:28 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Big banks back off consumer car loans Message-ID: <491832C6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Monday, November 10, 2008 Big banks back off consumer car loans Credit for buyers tight as many banks take wait-and-see approach to vehicle business. Bryce G. Hoffman / The Detroit News Despite a $700 billion bailout, the nation's big banks are not in any rush to get back into the automotive lending business -- more bad news for an automobile industry struggling to rebound from some of the worst sales in decades. The federal government's bailout of Wall Street was supposed to get America's credit markets moving again, but experts say they have been slow to loosen their purse strings. "I haven't seen any impact yet," said Melinda Zabritski, director of automotive credit for Experian's automotive group. "We're starting to see a little bit of a loosening, but it has not been significant." One Wall Street source told The Detroit News that some banks have decided to remain on the sidelines, waiting to see how the car market shakes out over the next several months -- despite having received billions in taxpayer dollars to get the credit channels moving again. That is likely to keep car and truck sales from rebounding, said analyst Erich Merkle of Crowe Horwath in Grand Rapids. "As long as lending standards remain tight, you're not going to see vehicle sales coming back," he said. "They're going to remain depressed until lenders start to relax their standards." Many lenders are only willing to underwrite deals for consumers with perfect credit. And while some automakers like Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. continue to offer loans and leases through their in-house consumer finance arms, the fear of being turned down is keeping many potential customers out of showrooms. That helped make October one of the worst sales months in recent history. U.S. auto sales plunged last month to their lowest level in decades, deepening the industry slump and prompting carmakers to renew their pleas for government aid. Car and truck sales slid 31.9 percent from prior-year levels to 838,156 vehicles, despite measures by the government to stabilize the economy and financial markets. That was the lowest total since January 1991, according to Autodata Corp. On Tuesday, Moody's Investors Service issued a report on the auto finance sector that warned that lenders are still grappling with increased delinquencies, bigger losses because of slumping used car values and higher funding costs because of the continuing credit crunch. "The sector is clearly under severe stress," said Curt Beaudouin, a vice president and senior analyst at Moody's. "Banks would like to exit the market, but there are no willing buyers for their auto operations. So, banks are withdrawing from the business by slowing originations and winding down portfolios." Experian's Zabritski said banks have seen a big increase in delinquency rates in their auto portfolios. According to her data, their 30-day delinquency rate was up 12 percent in the second quarter. A total of nearly 532,000 bank customers were a month behind on their car payments, representing more than $3.5 billion in delinquent loans. Their 60-day delinquency rate is up 9 percent, with more than 85,000 car loans worth more than $1 billion two months past due. "Buyers have simply bought 'too much vehicle,' thereby increasing their debt burden. Auto lenders were enablers in this process by offering increasingly aggressive financing terms and exposing themselves to increased severity of loss," Beaudouin said, adding that those bad bets are now being called. "Clearly, deteriorating U.S. economic conditions are taking a toll on the consumer, the used car market, new vehicle sales and lenders' asset quality." Many dealers insist that they can still get loans for qualified customers, but some say the dearth of lenders has forced them to turn customers away. Zabritski's research shows that loans are still readily available for customers with high credit scores, but are getting more difficult to secure for those with lower ratings. "We're still seeing a lot of lending in the prime universe," she said. You can reach Bryce Hoffman at (313) 222-2443 or bhoffman at detnews.com. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 11:12:46 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:12:46 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Obama and labor References: <3dd87eb30811100958y5a2fc972t92d7861a2f709eb3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <49183350.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> *New York Times* *November 9, 2008*** * * *After Push for Obama, Unions Seek New Rules* *By **STEVEN GREENHOUSE* ** WASHINGTON - After making millions of phone calls and knocking on millions of doors to elect Barack Obama, the nation's labor unions have begun a new campaign: to get the new president and Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize. Unions, delighted that they will have a friend in the White House after eight years of fighting President Bush, also plan to push for universal health coverage and a huge stimulus program to create jobs and counter the downturn. "Our major priority in the short and long term," said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, "is to get the economy working for Americans who work." But corporate America has already declared war on labor's push for new legislation that would help unions organize. "This will be Armageddon," said Randel Johnson, vice president for labor policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce. Labor's No. 1 priority is a piece of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, also known as the card-check bill. The bill would give workers the right to join a union as soon as a majority of employees at a workplace signed cards saying they wanted one. Business groups have attacked the legislation because it would take away employers' right to insist on holding a secret-ballot election to determine whether workers favored unionization. With union membership sliding to 7.5 percent of the private-sector work force, one-third the rate in 1983, unions see enactment of the bill as the single most important step toward reversing their loss of membership and power. Some labor leaders predict that if the bill is passed, unions, which have 16 million members nationwide, would add at least five million workers to their rolls over the next few years. "We really need fundamental change to counterbalance corporate power and reverse the decline of the middle class," said John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, "and that's why we support the Employee Free Choice Act." Mr. Sweeney said labor unions were eager for a stimulus program to jump-start the economy and to help those hurt by the downturn. He called for extending unemployment benefits, increasing financing for food stamps, approving a rescue plan for Detroit's automakers and immediately spending more on rebuilding roads, bridges and schools. Thomas J. Donohue, the chamber's president, criticized the card-check bill as "payback" that labor unions were expecting in return for their campaign efforts. Bill Samuel, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s director of government affairs, disagreed, noting that President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. BidenJr.had co-sponsored the act as senators. "This is not about payback," Mr. Samuel said. "We're looking to work with the new administration on a shared set of priorities that focus on lifting workers and improving the economy." The A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win, the rival labor federation, campaigned all out for Mr. Obama, with labor leaders saying that unions and their political action committees spent nearly $450 million during the race. Mr. Sweeney said that in the last four days of the campaign, 250,000 volunteers from A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions made 5.5 million phone calls and visited 3.9 million union households. All told, he said, unions reached out to more than 13 million voters in 24 states, with some undecided union members being contacted more than 30 times through phone calls, household visits and workplace conversations. Union leaders say they were pivotal in helping Mr. Obama win several battleground states, including Florida, Indiana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvaniaand Wisconsin. According to a voter poll by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, 67 percent of members of A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions voted for Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and 30 percent for his Republican rival, Senator John McCain . One of labor's main goals was to help the Democrats capture 60 Senate seats, with an eye to overcoming a Republican filibuster against the card-check bill, which the House approved last year. In the Senate, there were 51 votes for the bill, but it failed because supporters could not overcome a Republican filibuster. Democrats gained at least six Senate seats on Tuesday, giving their caucus at least 57 seats, but they are likely to fall short of 60. (In three races, the winner has not yet been determined.) Even without 60 seats, many labor leaders want to press ahead with the Employee Free Choice Act. The service employees union has pledged to mobilize tens of thousands of members to urge Mr. Obama and Congress to enact that bill and universal health coverage in the 100 days after Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. "I don't think that just because we have 40 Republican senators or some higher number means we can't get EFCA passed," said Tom Woodruff, director of strategic organizing for Change to Win, a federation of seven unions that quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "There are a number of Republicans who, in order to save our economy, can be brought around to supporting the act." One Republican senator, Arlen Specterof Pennsylvania, has co-sponsored the bill. While the Chamber of Commerce seems ready to cooperate with organized labor to back an economic stimulus package, Mr. Donohue, the chamber's president, said it would be unwise for Mr. Obamato embrace the Employee Free Choice Act when the economy was in such bad shape. He said the bill - along with other labor-backed bills that would raise business costs, including one that would guarantee most workers seven paid sick days a year - would hurt companies when many were struggling. "The president has one barrel of challenges," Mr. Donohue said, "and he should read the doctor's oath to make sure in the first 100 days he does no harm." Chamber officials voiced confidence that they have the backing in the Senate to block the bill, a move that might cause business and labor to negotiate a version with compromises. Among the compromises floated would be keeping the secret ballot vote, but holding the vote just a few days after the union requests an election. Other ideas are to give union organizers access to workplace sites and to limit employers' ability to campaign against the union. But Mr. Stern of the service employees said today's hard times for workers increased the urgency to enact the bill, without compromises. "We have to solve the problems of sliding wages and increased inequality, and you can't compromise on solving those problems," he said. Businesses oppose another provision in the bill: if a newly recognized union and an employer fail to agree on a contract within 120 days, there would be binding arbitration to determine what should be in the contract. "The card-check provisions and the arbitration provisions are a nonstarter with the employer community," said Mr. Johnson of the chamber. "The idea that government arbitrators can set every term is ludicrous and unacceptable." Union officials say they do not dislike the secret ballot, but rather the lengthy, expensive, adversarial campaign before the vote in which companies often fire union supporters and use videos, large meetings and one-on-one sessions to pressure employees to vote against unionizing. "Their focus is maintaining their right to wage an aggressive campaign against the union," said Mr. Samuel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "That's what we're trying to protect workers from." This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 11:22:09 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:22:09 -0800 Subject: [A-List] The 'Bright Side' Of Global Economic Mayhem - Corporate Extractive Resource Looters Experiencing Lower Demand Message-ID: <49187BD1.3040506@gmail.com> DENVER - Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. said Monday it would cut molybdenum production and lay off 14 percent of its work force at a Colorado mine, citing a 60 percent drop in price and slowing global economic conditions. The world's largest publicly traded copper producer also said it would delay the long-planned restart of a molybdenum mine near Leadville, Colo., and re-evaluate molybdenum produced as a byproduct at its other mines. . . . . Molybdenum, a metal used in strengthening steel and some chemical businesses, has enjoyed a strong market recently but the price has fallen significantly due to slowing global demand, the credit crisis and tumultuous financial markets, Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan said. The price averaged $30 a pound last year and about $33 a pound in the first nine months of the year. However, since mid-October, the price has fallen from $30 a pound to $12 a pound as of Monday, the company said, citing the Metals Week Molybdenum Dealer Oxide price. In Full: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/11/10/ap5672623.html From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 12:11:58 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:11:58 -0500 Subject: [A-List] did anyone actually get involved with the obama campaign? Message-ID: <4918412F.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> lbo-talk] did anyone actually get involved with the obama campaign? Dorene Mon Nov 10 09:45:51 PST 2008 Hah. BHO, a friend from high school and I all graduated the same year. Friend's parents were country club Republicans. Friend and I both fled the hinterlands for lives in dramatically climes. Friend is now a doctor in LA. Way last spring before Obama was anointed, friend wrote me something or other about what I thought of election. At the time I was not really taking a position about HRC vs BHO: by that time HRC had done a few things to make me cringe and I figured BHO was going to be more important as a symbol than for policies I could get enthused about. I hate loud crowds in small spaces and could not even muster enthusiasm for caucuses. I wrote my friend that I was worried about voter suppression in lots of directions, but also that I did not feel able to comment yet on a few different topics. Anyway, I told friend to pick a race or tow where she thought attention would make a difference and to check out options. So here is her account of taking time off from work to go to FL and work on Get out the Vote. Here is friend's account of her efforts. Full disclosure: I am kind of in awe of her efforts even though now I am going to plug back in on my own account: I showed up at 8 AM on Thursday morning Oct 30 to the volunteer office in a poor Cuban section of Tampa: "Casa Obama"; I started by doing canvassing--a rather textile term for going door-to-door, up and down avenues and ringing doorbells, being barked at by dogs and looking up house numbers on streets. Same as I did in North Las Vegas in early October and September. Yeah, brilliantly organized. Lots of email and conference calls and local cellphone communication. There were 100,000 Obama volunteers in Florida alone. I was given every day, several times a day, lists of names and addresses of "sporadic" Democrat voters--not soldier-voters like me, but folks who by record don't vote every election. Targeted canvassing--so no wasted effort. I was given specialized handouts on policy issues and best of all, specific voter information--where each neighborhood's precinct was, how to vote early, how to vote absentee, how to get a ride to the polls, whether or not parolees could vote, etc. That was probably the single most useful thing I did-- make sure whoever showed up at the door knew exactly where to go to vote. For all the fancy Internet stuff, I think democracy is a hand-made product delivered on foot. I generally did canvassing from 10 AM until after dark--did neighborhoods by flashlight (yes, we did work in pairs), and in the Florida sun, and in the rain. Democrats have a perverse love of 3rd floor walkup apartments, I decided. My particular talent was to sweet-talk the gated apartment managers into letting us riff-raff Democrats into the gated apartment grounds. (I think they just took pity on me; I am really blond and pathetic when I am really tired). I was also sent off to pick up absentee ballots so that they would not get lost in the mail, and to give rides to other volunteers when the work was done. I drove one voter to the polls--the taxi service contracted by the Obama office could not get out to her house in time for the polls on Election Day--she lived 10 miles out of town. My GPS (named Minerva McGonagle after the head of Gryffendor House) was a godsend; I got to all sorts of odd little places only because Minerva found them. I did get into a nasty habit of arguing with her--in her precise British accent she did not always reckon in the construction-caused road changes and once I circled the Tampa airport for 45 minutes, trying to find the right turnoff. There was an amazing amount of paper goods to be handled during an election; flyers, door signs, pamphlets, cards, stickers, banners, yard signs. I made yard signs and stacked pamphlets and sat on the floor with a half-dozen other volunteers and got paper cuts rearranging a mess of door signs--these are election reminders-- to be hung on the door knobs for Monday and Election Day. There were two rooms just for the cases of paper campaign literature. I learned to watch a TV show called Sabado Gigante "(Big Saturday") while doing this sort of stuff--its the Latino television show that is American Idol, Miss America pagent, and Oprah all rolled into one--you don't need to know any Spanish--its mostly about gorgeous women jiggling in bikinis. My Latino fellow volunteers all loudly criticized the show for demeaning women and were glued to the set. It goes on for hours. Its been hugely popular, at least in Florida, for years. I learned to like Cuban food at the neighborhood diner--black beans and yellow rice, tall glasses of cafe con leche with sugar, spiced meats with sliced onions, fried plantains and pressed Cuban ham and cheese sandwiches--sitting at the counter with the local shift workers was a cultural experience in itself. My colleagues at the CARE clinic covered my patients while I was away, and they provided me with a big bag of Tootsie Rolls as I was leaving for Tampa to assuage my chocolate needs. I ended up buying more and munching them in traffic. I did play hooky on Saturday morning, ... but then went back to work in the afternoon. The fifteen or so full-time twentysomething volunteers at my office were wonderful--and they had already done three weeks of intense campaigning by the time I got there--made me feel great for America and I can understand why this Kennedy-like experience is so important to this whole generation. Most had just graduated from high school. I was so proud for them; that they could drink in this experience. I was awash in Obamamania--its when little kids chant his name and hop up and down when I came up to the house--when teenagers on bikes would give me the thumbs up as I walked by--when I laughed out loud at the 14 year old who had shaved his head with the word: "OBAMA"--when people answered the door with "Mom, Obama people are here"--when Latinos of limited English just bust out with every happy English word they knew when I met them while I was wearing the Obama t-shirt and campaign buttons. One little poor roadside hotel had the most welcoming Spanish speaking lady living there--overjoyed to see us with our pamphlets in Spanish and Spanish-language voter instructions. It gave her dignity, I think, to have someone seek her out for her vote. People would stop their cars in the street and beg for an Obama button; I carried extra on my hat to pass out. Guys got up from the bus stop to help me put up Obama signs. It wasn't all grand, of course. Mostly I sweated and got sore feet. Several ugly people in ugly cars yelled the n-word at me. It does say something that the racists were so against Obama; good people are known by those that hate them. So on Election Day I showed up at the volunteer office 5:30 AM.Several of the other full time volunteers had spent the night at the office, making more piles of door signs and getting ready for the day. The lines for voting started at 6 AM, but as the day went on, lines disappeared and it looked like the voting went smoothly. At the polling places Obama volunteers passed out water to people in line, and helped direct traffic to parking spots. Others stayed at the main office and made a million more phone calls to remind people to vote. I was sent out to several polling sites to put up signs, then I came back to do two more cycles of canvassing (as if there were anyone left in Tampa who did NOT know it was Election Day), picked up some last-minute absentee ballots, and drove other volunteers around. After the polls closed there was a party sponsored by the main Obama office for the out-of-state volunteers to watch the results, and I was NOT missing that. It was at the Marriott on Florida street, downtown Tampa--really nice hotel. Appetizers, drinks and two huge TV screens with CNN and NBC on. There were about 300 people with all sort of TV camera crews there, all of us loud and happy and jumpy for the results to start coming in. One guy dressed up as Lincoln--hat and beard included, got on stilts and was strolling around the crowd waving Obama signs. Hysterical. The CNN and NBC commentaries were silly and useless--couldn't hear it anyway with all the crowd, and we all just waited and waited for results. Everything we did had worked. When Pennsylvania and Ohio went blue we cheered like mad--then more states went blue, and finally Virginia and Florida and NBC declared Obama President. Pandamonium! Chants of O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! and Yes We Can!, Yes We Can!, Yes We Can! Most emotional for me were the cheers of "U-S-A!" "U-S-A!" "U-S-A!" It had been a long time since I was proud of my own country. Great to be there, great to have done it, great to be with that crowd at that time and in that place. On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 2:11 AM, boddi satva wrote: > On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:38 PM, shag carpet bomb > wrote: > > Out of curiosity, I was hoping folks who actually got involved in the > > campaign could tell me a little more about what they observed. For > instance, > > did anyone actually participate in how the campaign used barcodes to > track > > potential voters. > > When you say the campaign "used barcodes" what do you imagine that means? > > Campaigns - at least smart ones - use barcoded forms to make it easier > for volunteers to enter information. That way they can put the > response info from calling or doorbelling into the computer by swiping > a laser pen over a form and hitting a couple numbers rather than > typing and finding and generally doing things that are time-consuming > and lead to mistakes. Alas, most campaigns get the training to use the > barcodes but end up not doing it. > > Barcodes are just a way to represent a number in a database. They have > nothing to do with SKUs on products or assimilation into The Borg. > > Republicans do use more consumer data in their targeting, mostly > through marketing consultants, as I understand it. Democrats focus > more on voter lists. Both sides are very unsophisticated relative to > private industry. > > What the new system the Dems use allows for is information to be > changed dynamically. During the Kerry campaign, a lot of people got > absolutely inundated with the same calls. This time you may have > noticed a lot less repetition. When you talked to a volunteer on the > phone, your responses actually were recorded in a meaningful way this > time! Wow! > > The biggest change to data this year was a huge expansion in the way > volunteers could be managed with Internet tools. > > The "data mining" that went on is really more data sharing. The fact > that the Democratic party now has a voter list backbone has moved the > world from one of campaigns hording their little spreadsheets of > names to a sharing across campaigns through a central system. > > And it's all done by people a lot like you. > > > Stuff like that -- or not like that also -- would be > > interesting. > > > > thanks! > > > > shag This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 13:06:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:06:48 -0500 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?It=27s_a_tsunami_but_=2Cthe_economy_isn?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZdCBldmVyeXRoaW5n?= Message-ID: <49184E0A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=77&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=&wpage=&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com It?s a tsunami By Grace Lee Boggs Special to The Michigan Citizen I have been searching for an image powerful enough to convey the historic significance of today?s economic meltdown and replace the misleading ?not since the Great Depression of the 1930s? clich?. With the help of Scott Kurashige, I found it on ?Clusterfuck Nation,? the weekly blog of author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. ?We are witnessing the two stages of a tsunami,? writes Kunstler. ?The current disappearance of wealth in the form of debts repudiated, bets welshed on, contracts canceled, and Lehman Brothers-style sob stories played out is like the withdrawal of the sea. ?The poor curious little monkey-humans stand on the beach transfixed by the strangeness of the event as the water recedes and the sea floor is exposed and all kinds of exotic creatures are seen thrashing in the mud, while the skeletons of historic wrecks are exposed to view, and a great stench of organic decay wafts toward the strand. ?Then comes the second stage, the tidal wave itself ? which in this case will be horrific monetary inflation ? roaring back over the mud flats toward the land mass, crashing over the beach, and ripping apart all the hotels and houses and infrastructure there while it drowns the poor curious monkey-humans who were too enthralled by the weird spectacle to make for higher ground. The killer tidal wave washes away all the things they have labored to build for decades, all their poignant little effects and chattels, and the survivors are left keening amidst the wreckage as the sea once again returns to normal in its eternal cradle. ?So, that?s what I think we will get: an interval of deflationary depression followed by a destructive wave of inflation that will wipe out both constructed debt and constructed savings, scraping the financial landscape clean. There?s no question that stage one is underway. But we can be sure the giant wave of money recklessly loaned into existence in just a few weeks time will wash back through the global economy leaving a swath of destruction. ?And then what? The societies of the world will be faced with the task of rebuilding, systems of fruitful activity i.e. rather than the smoke-and-mirrors of Frankenstein-finance con games.? I believe Kunstler is right on. As we approach the second stage of the tsunami, our only salvation lies in ?rebuilding systems of fruitful activity.? Instead of hoping for a FDR to regulate, resurrect or reform capitalism (so that we can continue to struggle against it), we need to seize this opportunity to leave behind our competitive capitalist selves damaged by years of living in a society which values rapid growth of the economy over caring relationships with each other and with the Earth, and begin creating real economies based on ?fruitful activity.? To regain/maintain our humanity, we need to create economies that nurture our productive and better selves, economies based on collective self-reliance, cooperation and looking out for each other. Together, employed and unemployed, we can prevent foreclosures, build our communities and our cities, plant community gardens, host community fairs to feed and clothe ourselves. Together we can slow down global warming by living more simply so others can simply live. This is our time to look in the mirror and recognize we are the ones who have brought on this tsunami because we have been living beyond our means and the Earth?s capacity. In order to ensure our access to more than our fair share of the world?s resources, we maintain nearly 700 military bases in countries all over the world and are now desperately trying to quell popular resistance to our occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the process we have not only killed over 4,000 Americans and countless Iraqis and Afghans, we have also militarized our own hearts and minds. Healing ourselves and our world can begin with our building fruitful local economies that value our relationships with one another over consumer goods. Instead of saving capitalism, we will be saving our selves and our planet. As Will Allen, urban farmer and 2008 winner of the MacArthur award, put it recently, ?We have to go back to when people shared things and started taking care of each other. That?s the only way we will survive.? The economy isn?t everything By Grace Lee Boggs Special to The Michigan Citizen In these times of economic meltdown, when so many of us are losing our homes and our jobs and agonizing about how to pay our bills, the conventional wisdom is to insist that the economy is everything, and that you?re stupid if you don?t agree. That is why I?d like to share the email about the Dow that I received this week from my friend, Rosa Naparstek, who used to live in Detroit and now lives in New York. Rosa is an artist who helps us liberate our imaginations from the dominant culture and get to our human essence. In August she gave a very moving slide show presentation of her artwork at the Boggs Center. She called it ?Childscapes? because it revealed how our inner landscapes form the emotional roots of the world we create personally and politically. In this email about the Dow ,Rosa reminds us that life isn?t only about the economy. We are, first and foremost, human beings who down through the ages have created our way of life according to who and what we are. Until the onset of capitalism only a few centuries ago, our relationships with one another and our communities, not the rapid growth of the economy, were what we valued. The current crisis provides us with the opportunity to reclaim those fundamental human values. ?Last week,? her email begins, ?my sister and I went to Ellis Island , the portal of our entry into the United States in 1951. I remember standing on deck at the railing, holding my father?s hand and cheering at the sight of the statue and land. I knew we had arrived for a new life and home. ?My father was a socialist who brought me up to respect labor and recognize that capitalism was an exploitative form of human relationships. He was a scholar and also by trade an ?upper maker? (the top part of the shoe) who worked at Henry Ford?s cutting upholstery. My mother worked there too, sewing the upholstery. She had been a seamstress. He wanted to teach me how to make shoes so that I could always earn a living. I told him I didn?t need to; that I would go to college and be safe. ?Now, after many professions, I find myself gathering things, the fruit of human labor, to put together in a form that honors the story behind them so that I too can finally say I have made something with my hands. ?We are at an interesting juncture. The sky is falling. Crisis, danger and opportunity are palpable. Evolution takes a long time, but emergent realities can sometimes break through. ?Many celebrated when ?communism? failed in what seemed ?not with a bang, but a whimper.? We won, we won! And now, who will say forthrightly that capitalism, unfettered markets and unaccountable profits, have failed, bringing us down with a global bang? ?As much as I read and have read about economics now and in the past, I feel most of what we say about it is fiction. We do not live the truths in each theory. We live and create from the truth of who and what we are. ?Socialism and communism are spiritual economic systems: to give according to our abilities and receive according to our needs. And, the final stage, the withering away of the state, is the stage when we no longer need external rules or laws because we have become our best and highest selves, and are unafraid to know that we are all one. ?Laissez faire also has its theoretical validity, a belief in personal freedom, which after all is also the highest goal of ?the withering away of the state.? However, personal freedom unmoored from spiritual development can become greed and ruthless disregard of the other and the best in ourselves. ?We can create an economy of caring and sharing and cooperating. The land is still here. The people, hands, minds are still here. It is an affair of the heart, giving and receiving.? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 13:08:30 2008 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:08:30 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Obama's Indian: The Many Faces of Sonal Shah Message-ID: Weekend Edition November 7 / 9, 2008 The Many Faces of Sonal Shah Obama's Indian By VIJAY PRASHAD Barack Obama has appointed John Podesta to run his transition. During the lean years of the Bush administration, Podesta, native of Chicago, ran a shadow cabinet for the Democrats. Since 2003, the home of this government-in-exile has been the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank set-up to rival the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The money, about $10 million per year, came from George Soros, Peter Lewis, Marion Sandler and Herb Sandler ? the main liberal financiers. CAP has its set of fellows. Many of them worked in some capacity within the Clinton administration (where Podesta was Chief of Staff). There are hard-nosed people like Rudy deLeon (who went through every Defense secretariat in the Clinton years) and Jeanne Lambrew (who served as a health analyst in the National Economic Council during the waning years of the Clinton administration). But there are also the fresh faces, young people who came to Washington with glowing references from the Ivy League. Others marched over from the Hill, after serving various terms as staff members for the Democratic warhorses. They have been groomed to be part of the next Democratic administration. Their hibernation is over. Obama has called. The likely suspects have picked up the phone and moved to the transition headquarters. Among them is a former CAP fellow and now Google employee, Sonal Shah. Shah is well known in the South Asian American community, and is a fixture in the Washington liberal circuit. The latter know her for her Democratic credentials, most of which seem to lie somewhere between neo-liberalism and welfare liberalism. The bleeding heart pauses, but then ticks again to the tune of pragmatism. This is perfect material for the CAP, which is hardly enthusiastic about the Democratic Leadership Council's total commitment to triangulation (which means capitulation to conservatism), but it is not averse to a little political calculus itself. Shah, a product of the University of Chicago, shined her corporate shoes at Anderson Consulting (who was Enron's accountant), which probably made it easier for her to go into Clinton's Treasury Department, where she helped Robert Rubin put a U. S. stamp on the post-1997 Asian economic recovery. The corporate side was balanced with an interest in the ideology of "giving back." When Bush took office, Shah went to the Center for Global Development, and while there joined her brother Anand in forming Indicorps. Knowing full well the desire among many South Asian Americans to give back to their homeland, the Shahs created an organization to help them go and volunteer in India, to do for them what the Peacecorps did for young liberals in the 1960s. Shah left the CAP to work for Goldman Sachs, and then went to Google. Shah's story is not unlike that of most of the CAP fellows, many of whom honed their dexterity at trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, capital and freedom, private accumulation and human needs. But there is a less typical side to the Shah story. Born in Gujarat, India, Shah came to the United States as a two-year old. Her father, a chemical engineer, first worked in New York before moving to Houston, and then moving away from his education toward the stock market. The Shahs remain active in Houston's Indian community, not only in the ecumenical Gujarati Samaj (a society for people from Gujarat), but also in the far more cruel organizations of the Hindu Right, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Overseas Friends of the BJP (the main political party of the Hindu Right) and the Ekal Vidyalaya. Shah's parents, Ramesh and Kokila, not only work as volunteers for these outfits, but they also held positions of authority in them. Their daughter was not far behind. She was an active member of the VHPA, the U. S. branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India. The VHP's head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organization should "inculcate a fear psychosis among [India's] Muslim community." This was Shah's boss. Till 2001, Shah was the National Coordinator of the VHPA. In 2004, I ran into Shah at the South Asian Awareness Network conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At an earlier panel I questioned her links to the Hindu Right, and so asked people to be wary about her organization, Indicorps. She was furious, and we had a bitter exchange in the Green Room. But at no point did she deny her active connections to the Hindu Right. Her brother, Anand, wrote to me not long after, concerned that Indicorps, which he runs full-time from India, would be tainted by our tussle. "I was curious about Sonal's own personal relationship with the VHPA," I wrote back, "That sparked some concern for me. Of course we are free to have our multiple associations, and there is no expectation that all our affiliations necessarily influence each other. That necessity is granted, although it is my understanding that the VHPA is a very disciplined organization that demands a lot from its members ? notably congruence in all the work that they do. Which is why I raised the question." And so I raise the question again. Don't Cry for her, Gujarat. Gujarat was once a tolerant society, made vibrant by its role in the Indian Ocean trade. People of all faiths lived there with the kind of pre-modern conviviality that did not always include respect for each other, but which did not at least dissolve into the kind of virulence on display in recent years. Certainly, oppressed castes bore the full brunt of an unequal social order, but even for them there was escape into Islam and there was a history of protest against the madness of caste rigidity. Gujarat gave us Gandhi, who went off to South Africa to learn his politics and returned to his state in 1915 to incubate the massive nation-wide movement he was to lead. In November 1917, Gandhi launched a major campaign among the Gujarati peasantry at the town of Godhra. He began his meeting there by tearing up the oath of loyalty to the King, making it clear that the new grammar of Indian politics did not require such obescience. From Godhra, charged Gandhian activists went into the villages of Gujarat to organize the peasantry against the many abuses of colonialism. The uprising that resulted, historian David Hardiman points out, made the area "the strongest center of rural nationalism in India." From Godhra, in 1917, went the quiet fury of freedom. In 2002, other elements came out of Godhra, showing us how different today's Gujarat is from its own history. This time Godhra was the flashpoint not for rural protest against tyranny, but for the forces of Hindu fascism. A disputed train fire that killed fifty-eight people (most of whom were activists of the Hindu Right) led to a massive pogrom against impoverished Muslim families and modestly well-off Muslim merchants. Even the normally reticent Human Rights Watch could not hold back, and its report's title revealed not only the anger of the investigators but also their own principle finding, "We have no orders to save you" State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat (April 2002). The Hindu Right let loose its warriors who killed two thousand people and displaced several thousand more. The state apparatus either stood by or actively participated in the torment. Investigators who traced the line of violence routinely met people who told them, "They killed my whole family." The carnage was ghastly. Historian Tanika Sarkar wrote of a "breathless climate of terror," as people fled their homes for poorly managed relief camps, afraid not only of the organized mob but also of the police. People couldn't sleep, afraid that their tormentors would come again. Chief Minister Narendra Modi came to one area and told the terrified residents, "You will be taken care of." The language chills: he might have meant that the state will protect them, or that it would punish them. His scowl and his brazen defense of his mobs was no comfort. Gujarat remains a manufacturing center, but in the 1970s the social basis of industry changed. From the 1910s to the 1970s, the textile factories hired large numbers of workers, most of whom were members of the Gandhian trade union, the Majoor Mahajan Sangh (MMS). They had their various grouses with the system, but most had grown accustomed to the rhythms of industrial society. When a major riot between Hindus and Muslims broke out in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad in 1969, the police moved their headquarters to the MSS office, and the union and the state jointly helped to calm things down. But in the 1970s, the large textile factories snuffed their fires, sending their workers from the formal into the informal economy. The social infrastructure of the towns and cities collapsed. Workers went into the piecework economy, driving the economic fortunes of the big businessmen through the roof but at the cost of the workers' health and social dignity. Globalization arrived in Gujarat. The disgruntled workers regrouped out of the MSS into the arms of the newly aggressive Hindu Right, which welcomed their grievances and reshaped their dignity around hatred of Muslims and oppressed castes. The riot of 1993 was a dress rehearsal for the pogrom of 2002. Lumpen-capitalism led to the social collapse of Gujarat. In mid-March 2002, a few weeks after the pogrom, sociologist Jan Breman went to meet MSS's secretary general, who sorrowfully recounted his inability to reach the police during the killings. It is a sign of the eclipse of the Gandhian platform in favor of what has been called the Vedic Taliban. The Vedic Taliban includes not only the BJP, the party in power during the Gujarat killings, but also a host of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. These include groups whose U. S. affiliate drew in Sonal Shah's parents, and to which she also gave her time and energy. This is not in the distant past. In 2004, while at the CAP, Sonal Shah gave the keynote address in Miami for the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of the USA. The Ekal Vidyalaya is an organization given over to "education" in tribal areas of India. It is the policy of the Ekal Vidyalaya to organize tribal peoples into the "Hindu community" and to eschew the Christianity and animism that many practice. The climate created by the Ekal Vidyalaya and the VHP in the tribal areas of India led to the recent massacres of Indian Christians. Sonal Shah's father Ramesh is in charge of the Ekal Vidyalaya in the U. S. She didn't take the time in Miami to raise these concerns. Rather she talked about her Indicorps project, which has sent volunteers to work with groups like Ekal Vidyalaya. The language of social justice and cultural rights work well to cover over the fascism that is otherwise being promoted. In 2004, the hard Right government in Gujarat honored Shah with the Pride of Gujarat (Gujarat Garima) award. Sonal Shah could not attend, but her brother was there, to get the award from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in the presence of the venomous Narendra Modi. Hold It In Your Heart. Obama's campaign was monumental. The energy unleashed within the country was something to behold. The small dissident wings of the anti-war and anti-free trade movements had not been able to cultivate such a massive wave, and even as many of us had our doubts about this or that element of the Democratic agenda, it was hard to be unmoved by the urgent enthusiasm of the people. Obama himself was super, a disciplined candidate who not only carried the weight of history lightly, but also made sure to remain unruffled by the riotous attacks of the Republicans. Coming to power with an incredibly efficient campaign, it is therefore all the more surprising that he had to turn to the likes of Podesta to form his governing team. But this is also no surprise. Podesta played a role in the mysterious Democracy Alliance, the group of high rollers around the Democratic Party who were frustrated with the Clinton theory of triangulation and wanted a more robust liberalism to command their party (it was for a time presided over by Rob McKay, the Taco Bell heir who gave some of his millions to finance the San Francisco living wage battle). The Democracy Alliance came together to bridge the gap between the two arguments that tore at the Democratic Party in the Bush years. The principled argument ran between those who pushed a more liberal strategy and those who wanted to take Clintonian pragmatism to its limit. The organizational argument took place between those who felt that the Democratic Party should compete in all fifty states (Howard Dean) and those who wanted to maintain the focus on the fourteen competitive states (Rahm Emanuel). This was a bitter battle. Podesta's calmness usefully held these two sections together. His CAP, in fact, not only became a neutral ground for these two sections of the Democratic Party, but it also had ambitions to link the Party to the various progressive movements that lay on its outer rim and beyond. Many of the Centers' ideas, however, strayed far from progressivism, keener to be bold against its base (such as teacher's unions) than against the world of finance. A recent study complained about teacher absence in the public schools (ten days a year), something that disproportionately impacted students in low-income neighborhoods. But not a word about the ruin of social welfare by the Clinton White House that resulted in the lack of institutions to shore up parents, teachers and students in these neighborhoods. For our intrepid liberals it is far easier to utilize their calculus of triangulation to blame the teachers. On foreign policy, the champions of humanitarian interventionism based at the CAP remain confident, regardless of the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are blamed on Bush's incompetence rather than on the exhaustion of U. S. imperialism. To revive their interventionist fantasies, the CAP liberals use Darfur. It stiffens the spine. John Prendergast holds the reins here, running the ENOUGH project of the CAP. He is committed to the merits of doing something in Darfur, but has little sense of the role that "Darfur" plays within the U. S. in keeping the terminally ill concept of humanitarian interventionism alive (for more on this, look for Mahmood Mamdani's Survivors and Saviors, coming out in 2009). Right after Obama's election, Predergast co-wrote a letter to the president-elect asking Obama to "lead a concerted international peace surge for Sudan." This letter went out just as violence increased in the Great Lakes region of Africa (ground-zero for the Cell-Phone Wars of our day; the region is the source of coltan, an essential element for cell-phones) and as Israel's armies once more struck the civilian populations of Gaza. Not a word from CAP on this. Nor on the Gujarat violence, or the killing of the Christians by the Hindu Right. No humanitarian interventionism when this affects U. S. imperial interests. Which is why Shah's own far Right commitments in India are not contradictory to those of the CAP liberals; many of them have similar commitments to the far Right in Israel or in other parts of the world. When asked to name his favorite books, Obama mentioned that one of them is Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I encourage him to go to his edition (mine is the Beacon Press one from 1957) and turn to page 155. There he will find a simple sentence, "It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow-beings." The Hindu Right thrives on the humiliation of Indian Muslims, Christians, and oppressed castes, and it derives its social power from those who are survivors of the failed experiment in globalization. Those millions, like myself, who feel a joy in snubbing the Bush dynamic and the entire history of social exclusion in the United States should demand that our hopes be held to a higher standard. Not to the howling dogs, but to the doves. Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad at trincoll.edu From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 13:56:32 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:56:32 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Solvency vs. Liquidity References: <48DCFA33.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <491859B2.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Don't those biggest Wall Street banks and insurance company, and biggest manufacturing auto companies have solvency problems ? So isn't US capitalism insolvent ? Charles This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 14:43:12 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:43:12 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Goldman Sachs: more big stimulus needed References: <968B8639-E083-4BAE-A31C-379DAF3C14B9@panix.com> Message-ID: <491864A2.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> US Views: More Stimulus Is Needed 1. When President-elect Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, he will face an economy that continues to sink. We now expect an unemployment rate of 81?2% by 2009 Q4, for a total increase of 4 percentage points since 2007 Q1. Assuming a modest further rise in 2010, this would imply the biggest cumulative increase of the postwar period. 2. We now also think that the Fed will cuts its funds rate target further from 1% to 50bp at the December 16 FOMC meeting. We're not sure about this, and in any case it isn't a very big deal -- it would just bring the target closer to the actual funds rate, which has averaged just 26bp since the October 29 FOMC meeting. This is likely to be the last step for conventional monetary policy. A funds rate of literally 0% would probably cause more problems -- e.g., money funds going out of business and forcing banks to take more assets onto their balance sheets -- than it would solve. So it's clear that we are reaching the end of the rate cut road. 3. The next step will be on the fiscal side. We estimate that given the current level of asset prices, the private sector of the US economy might cut its spending (relative to its income) by 6% of GDP or more over the next 1-2 years. Some of this demand hit will be absorbed by a smaller trade deficit, but most of it is likely to translate into a sharp reduction in output. If the private sector is retrenching, the obvious response is for the public sector to step into the breach via a large fiscal stimulus program. The minimum in our view is $300 billion, but $500 billion would be a better number. Such a bold program will further boost the near-term budget deficit. But in the longer term this cost is likely to be considerably smaller than that of allowing the recession to deepen further and tax receipts to slide as a result. 4. Can monetary policy contribute further to stabilization policy once interest rates are near 0%? The answer is an emphatic yes, via three potential channels: a) Using the Fed balance sheet to substitute for private-sector lending. This is already happening, as the Fed balance has more than doubled since early September. b) Trying to affect longer-term Treasury yields, either by pre- committing to low rates for a "considerable period" or by buying longer-term Treasuries. This could occur in conjunction with fiscal policy, i.e. buying some of the bonds that are issued by the Treasury in order to finance the stimulus package. c) Trying to affect the prices of risk assets by buying corporate bonds or equities. Legally, the Fed isn't allowed to buy assets with a meaningful chance of a loss, so this would have to come in cooperation with Treasury and Congress. So in practice, the Treasury might buy risk assets and issue debt that is then purchased by the Fed -- i.e. the process would resemble b), except that the money is spent on assets rather than goods and services. In practice, we don't think anything beyond a) and perhaps a soft version of b) via some kind of "considerable period" language is imminent, and I'm pretty confident that the upcoming stimulus package will be financed via old-fashioned borrowing from the public. But if the downturn deepens further and/or there are any signs that large-scale borrowing is putting upward pressure on Treasury yields, the "monetization" of additional fiscal stimulus via Fed purchases of longer-term Treasuries would become more conceivable. And if a yet bigger boost is required, these proceeds from the Treasury's bond sales to the Fed could be purchase risk assets. In any case, the important point is to heed the advice given by Ben Bernanke in his famous speech on deflation in 2003 -- do not underestimate the Fed's essentially limitless ability to ratchet up the policy response to a deflationary downturn, especially when cooperation with the Treasury is assured as it likely would be under President Obama. ______________________________________________ Jan Hatzius Chief US Economist Goldman, Sachs & Co. _______________________ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 14:49:03 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:49:03 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Historic November 4 Election:People's Demands for Change Message-ID: <49186600.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> THE ORGANIZER NEWSPAPER P.O. Box 40009, San Francisco, CA 94140 Tel. (415) 641-8616; fax: (415) 626-1217 email: The Organizer at earthlink.net> ------------------------------------------------ [Please Endorse this Statement and Join Us in Promoting it Widely!; Please Excuse Duplicate Postings] Historic November 4 Election: People's Demands for Change Must Now Be Heeded! Hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of people took to the streets spontaneously across the country the night of Nov. 4 to celebrate the election of Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president. This was an historic election, not because electing the nation's first Black president signifies the end of racist oppression in this country, but because millions of Blacks, Latinos, youth, and working people of all backgrounds seized on this election to say: enough is enough, racism and oppression must end now. In the context of the deepening economic crisis, the election also was a cry from working people of all backgrounds: We cannot accept the destruction of our jobs, our homes, our public services and our communities -- this crisis is not of our making and we should not be made to pay for it. The corporate elite who own and control most of the wealth in this country are deeply worried that the powerful tide that lifted Obama to power may be too difficult to contain and to redirect back into safe channels for the ruling rich. They have loudly applauded Barack Obama's call, issued in his acceptance speech, for a "national consensus" between workers and bosses, rich and poor -- but, in their own way, they understand that the workers and all the oppressed nationalities may not be so easily co-opted into accepting "common solutions" with the employers. For the corporate elite "national consensus" means that working class organizations must give up their own specific demands and interests in the name of "national unity" and the "common good." This means bailing out the corporate elite, not addressing the pressing needs of working people and all the oppressed. Today, the country is confronted with a catastrophic situation. Since the beginning of the year, 1.2 million jobs have been lost and millions more are on the chopping block, more than 2 million people have lost their homes to foreclosure, social services are being dismantled left and right, and with the unfolding economic crisis even more severe attacks against working people are in store. In the aftermath of the election, the question of what way forward for working people is posed with great urgency. On Nov. 5, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney issued an important statement that raised the immediate need to promote the specific interests of working people in this situation. After noting that "[t]he election is just Step One in delivering the change we need," Sweeney stated that, "[W]orking people need an economic recovery package that will jump-start the economy and put America back to work. ... We need an immediate investment plan to create jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads and schools and bridges." Sweeney went on to urge a national healthcare plan for the "nearly 50 million people who have no coverage or for the millions more who lack adequate coverage." He then underscored the federation's most pressing demand: [O]ur top priority is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that will restore workers' freedom to bargain for a better life." On Oct. 3, Democrats and Republicans -- working hand in hand with the Bush administration -- pulled off one of the greatest swindles in U.S. history when they gave away more than $1.3 trillion (including all funding prior to the Oct. 3 bailout plan) to the very Wall Street bankers who had profited from the home-mortgage speculative orgy. To address the AFL-CIO agenda (which in large part is endorsed by the Change to Win trade unions) requires stopping the Wall Street bailout plan in its tracks. Not one more penny should go to the speculators and bankers. Every dollar that goes to a speculator is one dollar less that could go to rebuilding the economy and putting millions of people back to work. Bailing out the speculators, moreover, will not solve the financial crisis. On the contrary, it will only deepen the problem. To meet the needs of the working class also requires opposing the scapegoating of immigrants and other sectors of the working class, and putting an immediate end to the war so that the needs of the people can be met. The time has come to implement an emergency plan to bail out working people -- NOT Wall Street. Here are some proposed demands that could be included in such a plan: 1) Put a halt to the Paulson bailout plan. Not one more penny should be earmarked to bail out Wall Street. It's time to bail out working people. 2) Enact a moratorium on all home foreclosures, utility shut-offs, evictions and rent hikes. 3) Enact the Employee Free Choice Act so that every worker can have union representation. 4) Stop the layoffs in auto and other industries across the country. 5) Stop the ICE raids and deportations. 6) Enact a universal, single-payer healthcare plan. 7) End all funding for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring our troops home now. Redirect all war funding to meet human needs. 8) Enact a massive national reconstruction public works program to rebuild the nation's schools, hospitals and crumbling infrastructure and to put millions of people back to work, with a living wage. Provide all necessary funding for a genuine Reconstruction program in the Gulf Coast. At this historic crossroads facing our country, it is more urgent than ever to forge the broadest unity in action of the labor movement, Black and Latino organizations, antiwar and other social protest movements to secure the emergency measures needed to address the pressing needs of all working people and oppressed nationalities. ****************** This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 15:38:59 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:38:59 -0800 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?It=27s_a_tsunami_but_=2Cthe_economy_isn?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZdCBldmVyeXRoaW5n?= In-Reply-To: <49184E0A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <49184E0A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <4918B803.5000006@gmail.com> OMMFG! This came from a mainstream circulation US newspaper. Gasp! How WILL they sell advertising in the new ?fruitful activity.? future? (Extracts sardonic tongue from cheek...) Charles Brown wrote: > I believe Kunstler is right on. As we approach the second stage of the tsunami, our only salvation lies in ?rebuilding systems of fruitful activity.? > > Instead of hoping for a FDR to regulate, resurrect or reform capitalism (so that we can continue to struggle against it), we need to seize this opportunity to leave behind our competitive capitalist selves damaged by years of living in a society which values rapid growth of the economy over caring relationships with each other and with the Earth, and begin creating real economies based on ?fruitful activity.? From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 15:46:12 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:46:12 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Kunstler' Clodhoppers Message-ID: <4918B9B4.4000109@gmail.com> Food for thought... this from January 21, 2008 A whole closet full of "other shoes" is now waiting to be dropped. Surely the biggest clodhoppers in the closet belong to the hedge funds, representing trillions and trillions of dollar-denominated "positions" which, however hallucinatory, had previously yielded enough real "money" year-by-year to keep all the realtors and Humvee dealers in the Hamptons goose-stepping to Goldman Sachs's drumbeat. These "positions" can't help now from moving into counterparty crisis territory, especially as the bond insurers such as MBIA and Ambac go up in a vapor, and if that happens the damage could be so colossal globally that Stephen Hawking might have to be brought in to run the Federal Reserve. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/01/fullblown-panic.html From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Nov 10 15:52:21 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:52:21 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Dawn of a new era Message-ID: <491874D7.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> EDITORIAL: Dawn of a new era Author: PWW Editorial Board People's Weekly World Newspaper, 11/06/08 11:29 A seismic shift, a watershed moment, an electoral landslide or the dawn of a new era. No matter what the turn of phrase, Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in the history books as the beginning of the end of the 30-year political reign of the ultra-right and its vicious pro-corporate agenda, and the end of a beginning of new politics in the United States of America. Convinced by the power of one man?s arguments for hope, unity and change, his program and example, a 52 percent majority of voters rejected the old politics of fear, racism and red-baiting and elected Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States. Perhaps it was historically inevitable that this country elected its first African American president. The dynamics of slavery, race and racism, together with the historic role of the African American freedom movement in helping propel the expansion of democracy for all people, have always been a central narrative to the making of America. An accident of history, maybe, is the fact that in 2009 the country will celebrate the bicentennial birthday of another tall, lanky, transformative figure from Illinois: Abraham Lincoln. In this age of 24-hour news cycles and instant information, when a seismic victory happens it?s important to take a breath and reflect even while celebrating. There will be analysis in the coming weeks in our pages and web site. We?ll be taking closer looks at the many different actors, issues and developments. But here is an initial take, a basic framework to ponder and analyze such a momentous moment. This was a victory for the whole U.S. working class. And workers of all job titles, professions, shapes, colors, sizes, hairstyles and languages put their indelible stamp on this victory. This is an important point to ponder, not only for people here in the U.S., but also for our sisters and brothers around the world. The U.S. working class is pushing for a new day ? in which our country can be a good global citizen and not the ?rogue state? the Bush administration has projected. The most organized section of the working class ? the labor movement ? played a stellar role in this election, organizing more than 250,000 labor activists in critical battleground states. But it was its role in challenging and educating union members on racial bias, coupled with a program for economic recovery, that labor proved its invaluable mettle. A powerful coalition of forces, inspired towards a new kind of politics, bubbled up from the ground of discontent sown by the authoritarian, reckless and greed-driven policies of the Bush administration. Union members and retirees of all races and the African American people as a whole joined with the emerging political might of Latinos ? Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and others ? and with women and young people en masse to successfully challenge the power of the ultra-right. And the seeds of a renewed and strengthened Jewish-Black unity ? historically so key to civil rights progress ? are taking root. Such unity ? as President-elect Obama said ? of ?young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled? is an idea that has been grasped by millions of people and made into a material force shattering the Republicans? ?Southern strategy? and forcing this party of the reactionary right into a meltdown. The election outcome represents a clear mandate for pro-people change on taxes, health care, the war in Iraq, job creation and economic relief, union organizing and the Employee Free Choice Act. Reform and relief are in the air. Their scope and depth will be the arena of struggle. The best thing the coalition that won this victory can do is to stick together and help the new administration carry through on its promises. We suspect an Obama administration will have to govern from the center with progressive and left voices included in the dialogue along with conservatives. The ultra-right and corporate interests will do everything in their power to limit, and even steal, the people?s victory. Jubilation and celebration, yes, along with realization that the hard work is just beginning. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Nov 10 16:04:03 2008 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:04:03 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Yes We Can What? Message-ID: <4918BDE3.7080503@gmail.com> Yes we can can: http://www.vh1.com/video/play.jhtml?id=1584620&vid=222196 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3uOOhm8Fj8 Informed Comment Global: http://icga.blogspot.com/2008/11/yes-we-can-what.html Friday, November 7, 2008 YES WE CAN WHAT? BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM America appears to be swept up in a feel-good moment, but as much as Barack Obama wows people as a public speaker and wordsmith, as much as his candid, inclusive style represents an antidote to everything rotten redolent of George W. Bush, as thrilling as it is for black Americans, who have proudly claimed the mulatto son of a Kansas mother and Kenyan father as one of their own, and by his precedent feel empowered by his victory, the feel-good moment has not yet arrived, or if it has, it is cruelly illusory. That Obama gives good speeches is a given, his acceptance speech stands as one of the best ever, good enough to rouse even jaded political commentators to goose bumps. Good enough to drive people to tears, not just Americans but even foreigners. I watched the acceptance speech in Kyoto with a classroom full of Japanese students and by the time the 16-minute speech had ended, a good number of students were crying. ?Wow. What did you think of that speech?? I asked. ?I wish we had a leader like that,? said one. ?It?s so powerful when he says ?Yes We Can?!? chimed another. ?I am so moved, he is kind to everyone,? answered a third. And despite misgivings rooted in a media analyst?s appreciation for Obama?s truly awesome and awesomely manipulative gift for language, I too was almost speechless after hearing his speech. It was such a sterling performance, so brilliantly crafted and so naturally read from two strategically placed teleprompters that it seemed like he was talking from his heart to his closest friends. Barring a few tired, over-worn clich?s about Wall Street and Main Street, barring the braggadocio of American exceptionalism and the incantatory, quasi-religious refrain ?Yes We Can,? Obama?s speech was a speech for the ages, down to the touching review of a century of history as imagined through the eyes of a 106 year old voter, taking us back to ?before there were cars on the road and planes in the sky? to the moon landing all the way on to the promise he made to his kids, that a puppy would be accompanying them to the White House. Finding time to embrace erstwhile bitter rivals John McCain and Sarah Palin, finding time to include every one who didn?t vote for him in his mandate to be the president of one and all, he seemed a man incapable of having enemies. And therein lies the problem. Obama wants to play nice, and to do that in a contentious, demanding job, he needs to surround himself with people who are not so nice. This became immediately obvious with his first and most important political pick, Rahm Emanuel for White House Chief of Staff. Emanuel, with his impressive resume as Washington insider, Clinton White House retread, wealthy investment banker, and a harsh reputation as a political enforcer, is not only more Wall Street than Main Street, but rather akin to one of those hard-core Republican political operatives like Karl Rove or Newt Gingrich who Democrats so love to hate. Politely described in the mainstream press as ?aggressive? or ?Rahmbo? or ?obnoxious? or ?combative,? the kind of guy who the New York Times reported as having shoved a steak knife into a restaurant table while expressing anger about political enemies, Emanuel can be as infuriating and blood-curdling as Barack Obama is inclusive and charming. While still serving in the Clinton White House, Rahm Emanuel gave a talk to a seminar I attended at Harvard. When challenged on matters of policy or ethics, even in a friendly small group discussion over sherry and canap?s, he would leap forward at those who dared to question him, clenching his fists with a menacing physicality that was either comical or intimidating depending on how much you liked to fight. But that?s just personality; it?s the old hawkish ideas he espouses that are troubling. American voters, fed up with the old Washington politics, suffering and anxious for absolution and release after eight years of heartache and disappointment, elected the ultimate anti-Bush only to get an anti-Obama appointed into the most strategic White House office slot, second to the President. Proximity to an ax-man is not likely to alter President-elect Obama?s almost magical poise and good-humored equilibrium, but it will influence policy and raise judgment questions almost as serious as John McCain?s lapse of judgment in choosing the ditzy Sarah Palin as his running mate. What further deepens the disappointment with the man who promises to bring peace to a wounded world is his right-hand-man?s hawkish identification with right-wing Israeli politics ?Emanuel did a stint with the Israeli military during the first Gulf War?a gung-ho gesture if not a sign of confused allegiance. More generally, Emanuel?s hawkish foreign policy views and his take-no-prisoners approach to domestic foes promises not only to confound hopes for a more equitable and balanced worldview in the White House, but also serves to keep political strife and war on the table. For those who followed the flowering of Obama?s foreign policy thinking over the last few months rather than getting distracted with his flowery, seductively-scented rhetoric, it?s no secret that he is not only not anti-war but actively considering military escalations that even old battle-ax Bush was hesitant to make in tinderbox locations like Pakistan. The brilliance of Obama?s speaking style lies in his ability to fire up sentimental notions of unity while evading matters of substance. In this sense he is both a better and worse speaker than his speech-giving teacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. From what I?ve seen on TV and You-tube, including ?controversial? material that was used against Wright by Republican political operatives, I was impressed by the preacher?s style and forthright substance; you know where he stands even if you can?t agree with all of it. I like his dramatics, his vivid hand gestures, his ability to fire up an audience, his passion for his people. Barack Obama, who was exposed to virtually no such talk in Indonesia and little such talk in Hawaii, chose an effective inner-city mentor and eventually exceeded his mentor in talking the talk of the street and the pulpit, while toning it down and fine-tuning it for political viability and political correctness. In short, if this was truly a victory for African-Americans, we?d see more Wrights than Rahms at Obama?s side in the White House, but that?s not going to happen any time soon. In the meantime, I hope Obama starts to show some real insight and originality in picking the rest of his administration, --please no more Clinton retreads like Richard Holbrooke or Robert Rubin-- because America, saddled with twin disasters of a failed military policy and a failed economic policy, cannot afford to have the same old hawks and same old investment bankers peddling the same old wine in a new bottle labeled ?Yes We Can.? pc From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Nov 10 18:19:07 2008 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:19:07 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The Food and Farming Transition Message-ID: <4918DD8B.5030204@ashisuto.co.jp> MuseLetter 199 (November 2008) by Richard Heinberg The only way to avert a food crisis resulting from oil and natural gas price hikes and supply disruptions while also reversing agriculture's contribution to climate change is to proactively and methodically remove fossil fuels from the food system. The removal of fossil fuels from the food system is inevitable: maintenance of the current system is simply not an option over the long term. Only the amount of time available for the transition process, and the strategies for pursuing it, can be matters for controversy. Given the degree to which the modern food system has become dependent on fossil fuels, many proposals for de-linking food and fuels are likely to appear radical. However, efforts toward this end must be judged not by the degree to which they preserve the status quo, but by their likely ability to solve the fundamental challenge that will face us: the need to feed a global population of seven billion with a diminishing supply of fuels available to fertilize, plow, and irrigate fields and to harvest and transport crops. If this transition is undertaken proactively and intelligently, there could be many side benefits - more careers in farming, more protection for the environment, less soil erosion, a revitalization of rural culture, and more healthful food for everyone. Some of this transformation will inevitably be driven by market forces, led simply by the rising price of fossil fuels. However, without planning the transition may be wrenching and destructive, since market forces acting alone could bankrupt farmers while leaving consumers with few or no options. The Transition ----------------- To remove fossil fuels from the food system too quickly, before alternative systems are in place, would be catastrophic. Thus the transition process must be a matter for careful consideration and planning. In recent years there has been some debate on the problem of how many people a non-fossil fueled food system can support. The answer is still unclear. But we will certainly find out, because there is likely to be no alternative, given that substitute liquid fuels - including coal-to-liquids, biofuels, tar sands, and shale oil - are all problematic and cannot be relied upon to replace cheap crude oil and natural gas as these deplete. There are reasons for hope: a recent report on African agriculture from the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) suggests that "organic, small-scale farming can deliver the increased yields which were thought to be the preserve of industrial farming, without the environmental and social damage which that form of agriculture brings with it". Nevertheless, given that we do not know whether non-fossil fuel agriculture can in fact feed a population now approaching seven billion - and given that current fuels-based agriculture cannot be relied upon to do so for much longer, given the reality of fuel depletion - the prudent path forward would surely be to tie agricultural policy to population policy. Indeed, coordination will be essential also between agriculture policies and education, economic, transport, energy policies. The food system transition will be comprehensive, and will require integration with all segments and aspects of society. This document is intended to serve as the basis for the beginning of that planning process. Our aim is to develop a template that can be used to strategically plan the transition of food and farming across the world, region by region, and at all scales (from the farm to the community to the nation), beginning here in the UK. Elements of Transition --------------------------- The following are some key strategic elements of the food systems transition process that will need to be addressed at all levels of scale, from the household to the nation and beyond. Re-Localization In recent decades the food systems of Britain and most other nations have become globalized. Food is traded in enormous quantities - and not just luxury foods (such as coffee and chocolate), but staples including wheat, maize, meat, potatoes, and rice. The globalization of the food system has had advantages: people in wealthy countries now have access to a wide variety of foods at all times, including fruits and vegetables that are out of season (apples in May or asparagus in January), and foods that cannot be grown locally at any time of year (eg, avocadoes in Scotland). Long-distance transport enables food to be delivered from places of abundance to areas of scarcity. Whereas in previous centuries a regional crop failure might have led to famine, its effects now can be neutralized by food imports. However, food globalization also creates systemic vulnerability. As fuel prices rise, costs of imported food go up. If fuel supplies were substantially cut off as the result of some transient event, the entire system could fail. A globalized system is also more susceptible to accidental contamination, as we have seen recently with the appearance of toxic melamine in foods from China. The best way to make our food system more resilient against such threats is clear: decentralize and re-localize it. Re-localization will inevitably occur sooner or later as a result of declining oil production, since there are no alternative energy sources on the horizon that can be scaled up quickly to take the place of petroleum. But if the transition process is to unfold in a beneficial rather than a catastrophic way, it must be planned and coordinated. This will require deliberate effort aimed at building the infrastructure for regional food economies - ones that can support diversified farming and reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the British diet. Re-localization means producing more basic food necessities locally. No one advocates doing away with food trade altogether: this would hurt both farmers and consumers. Rather, what is needed is a prioritization of production so that lower-value food items (which are typically staple calorie crops) are mostly sourced from close by, with most long-distance trade left to higher-value foods, and especially those that store well. This decentralization of the food system will result in greater societal resilience in the face of fuel price volatility. Problems of food contamination, when they appear, will be minimized. Meanwhile, revitalization of local food production will help renew local economies. Consumers will enjoy better quality food that is fresher and more seasonal. And transport-related climate impacts will be reduced. Each nation or region will need to devise its own strategy for re-localizing its food system, based on a thorough initial assessment of vulnerabilities and opportunities. The following are some general suggestions that are likely to be applicable in most instances: * The process will benefit enormously from policy support at both national and regional levels. This could include, for example, the provision of grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers' markets. * Food-safety regulations should be made appropriate to the scale of production and distribution, so that a small grower selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. While local food may have safety problems, these will inevitably occur on a smaller scale and will be easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable. * Governments can require that some minimum percentage of food purchases for schools, hospitals, military bases, and prisons are sourced within 100 miles of the institutions buying the food. Channelling even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local growers would greatly expand opportunities for regional producers while improving the diet of people whom these institutions feed. * Cities and towns can rework their waste management systems so as to collect food scraps that can then be converted to compost, biogas, and livestock feed - which can in turn be made available to local growers. But government can do only so much. Consumers must develop the habit of preferentially buying locally sourced foods whenever possible, and they can be encouraged in this by "Buy Local" educational literature distributed by retailers - who can also assist by clearly labeling and prominently displaying local products. Growers themselves must rethink their business strategies. Instead of growing specialty crops for export, they must plan a transition to production of staple foods for local consumption. They must also actively seek local markets for their food. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement provides a business model that has proven successful in many communities. Small producers can also create informal co-ops to acquire machinery (such as small threshing machines for cereal and oilseed processing or micro hydro turbines for electricity). The strategy of re-localizing food systems will be more challenging for some nations and regions than others. Given that the food footprint of London encompasses essentially all of England, the challenge for Britain is greater than is the case for many other nations. More urban gardens and even small animal operations (with chickens, ducks, geese, and rabbits) within London and other cities should be encouraged, but even then it will be necessary to source most food from the countryside, delivering it to the city by rail. Thus re-localization should be seen as a process and a general direction of effort, not as an absolute goal. Energy As society turns away from fossil fuels, the energy balance of farming must once again become net positive. However, the transition process will be complex and problematic. Farms will still need sources of energy for their operations, and will need to provide much or all of that energy for themselves. Meanwhile, farmers could also take advantage of opportunities to export surplus energy to nearby communities as a way of increasing farm income. Farms must be powered with renewable energy. However, many energy needs on farms - such as fuel for tractors and other machinery - are currently difficult to fill with anything other than liquid fuels, which currently come in the form of diesel or petrol made from crude oil. Farmers should first look for ways to reduce fuel needs through efficiency or replacement of machines with animal power or human labor. This is most likely to be economically feasible in dairy, meat, vegetable, fruit, and nut operations. Where fuel-fed machinery is still required, which is likely to continue being the case for grain production, ethanol or biodiesel made on-site could supplement or replace petroleum. Farmers could aim to apportion one-fifth of their cropland to production of biofuels for their own use. Many other farm operations require electricity, and this can be generated on-site with wind turbines, solar panels, and micro-hydro turbines. Effort first must be devoted to making operations more energy-efficient. Because these technologies require initial investment and pay for themselves slowly over time, assistance from government and from financial institutions in the form of grants and low-interest loans could be instrumental in helping farmers overcome initial economic hurdles toward energy self-sufficiency. Eventually farmers are capable of being not just self-sufficient in energy, but of producing surplus energy for surrounding communities. Much of this exported energy is likely to come in the form of biomass - agricultural and forestry waste that can be burned to produce electricity. While farmers can also grow crops for the production of biofuels, the ecological and thermodynamic limits of this energy technology require that the scale of production be deliberately restricted. Otherwise, society's demand for fuel could overwhelm farmers' ability to produce food - and food must remain their first priority. In exporting biomass from the farm, growers must always keep in mind the productive capacity of sustainable agricultural systems, and they must strictly monitor soil health and fertility. The transition of farms to renewable energy will require planning. Farmers, ideally with the assistance of regional and national agencies, should plan to increase energy efficiency, to reduce fossil fuel inputs, and to grow renewable energy production according to a staged, integrated program designed for the unique needs and capabilities of each farm. As a general guideline, the plan should aim to reduce oil and natural gas inputs by at least half during the first decade. Soil Fertility In industrial agriculture, soil fertility is maintained with inputs provided from off-site. Of these inputs, the most important are nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen comes from ammonia-based fertilizers made from fossil fuels - principally, natural gas. Phosphorus comes from phosphate mines in several countries. While sufficient low-quality phosphate deposits exist to supply world needs for many decades, high-quality deposits that are currently being mined are quickly depleting, which means that phosphate prices will likely rise within the next few years. {1} Both nitrogen and phosphorus are essential to agriculture. And our current ways of supplying both are clearly unsustainable. Unless alternative ways of maintaining soil fertility are quickly found, a crisis looms. The long-term solution will surely depend on a two-fold strategy: designing farm systems that build fertility through crop rotations, and recycling nutrients. Crop rotation can help with maintaining nitrogen levels. Simply planting a cover crop after the fall harvest significantly reduces nitrogen leaching while cutting down on soil erosion. Meanwhile, introducing leguminous crops into the rotation cycle replaces nitrogen. Cleverly designed polycultures can sustainably produce large amounts of food, as has been shown not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in Britain and America, but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in Argentina. There, farmers employ an eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture, farmers then grow three years of grain without applying fertilizer. The need for herbicides is also dramatically reduced: weeds that afflict pasture cannot survive the years of tillage, and weeds of row crops don't survive years of grazing. Most industrial farmers have left behind the practice of cover cropping because commercial fertilizers have become the cheaper option. That cost equation is about to shift. It is therefore important that farmers begin planning for higher fertilizer prices now by gearing up their rotation cycles and building natural soil fertility ahead of the immediate need. In industrial agriculture, the soil is treated as an inert substance that holds plants in place while chemical nutrients are applied externally. Without efforts to maintain natural fertility, over time organic matter disappears from the soil, along with beneficial soil micro-organisms. In the future, as chemical fertilizers become more expensive, farmers will need to devote much more attention to the practice of building healthy soil. But rebuilding nutrient-depleted soil takes, at minimum, several years of effort. Traditional farmers increase organic matter in topsoil through the application of compost - which not only builds soil fertility, but also improves the soil's ability to hold water and thus withstand drought. There is also mounting evidence that food grown in properly composted soil is of higher nutritional quality. Currently, in typical modern cities, consumers, retailers, wholesalers and institutions discard enormous quantities of food. Some communities have already instituted municipal programs for composting of food and yard waste; such programs could be expanded and made mandatory, with compost being given free to local farmers. This would reduce the amount of garbage going to land fills, as well as farmers' needs for fertilizers and irrigation, while improving the nutritional quality of the British diet. In addition, recent research with "terra preta" (also known as "bio char"), a charcoal-like material that can be produced from agricultural waste, suggests that its introduction to soils could reduce plants' need for nitrogen by twenty to thirty percent while sequestering carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere. The potential of composting and the use of terra preta to mitigate the climate crisis is hardly trivial: a one-percent increase of soil organic matter in the top 33.5 centimetres of the soil is equivalent to the capture and storage of 100 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide per square kilometre of farmland. Ultimately, there is no solution to the phosphorus supply problem other than full-system nutrient recycling. This will entail a complete redesign of sewage systems to recapture nutrients so they can be returned to the soil - as Chinese farmers learned to do centuries ago. But if sewage systems (or simpler variants) are to become primary sources of phosphorus and other soil nutrients, they cannot continue to be channels for the disposal of toxic wastes. It is essential that separate waste streams be developed for the disposal of all pharmaceuticals, household chemicals, and industrial wastes. Thus the problem of soil fertility is one that farmers cannot solve on their own: it is a crisis of the food system as a whole, and must be addressed contextually and holistically. Diet The consumer is as important to the food system as the producer. During recent decades, consumer preferences have been shaped to fit the industrial food system through advertising and the development of mass-marketed, uniform, packaged food products that, while often nutritionally inferior, are cheap, attractive, in some cases even physically addictive. The advent and rapid proliferation of "fast food" restaurants has likewise fostered a diet that is profitable to giant industrial agribusiness, but disastrous to the health of consumers. However lamentable these trends may be from a public health standpoint, they are clearly unsustainable in view of the energy and climate crises facing modern agriculture. Because processed and packaged foods and fresh foods imported out of season add to the energy intensity of the food system, rich and poor alike must be encouraged to eat food that is locally grown, that is in season, and that is less processed. Public education campaigns could help shift consumer preferences in this regard. A shift toward a less meat-centered diet should also be encouraged, because a meat-based diet is substantially more energy intensive than one that is plant-based. Government can help with a shift in diet preferences through its own food purchasing polices (see "Re-Localization", above). The process can be helped even further by a more careful official government definition of "food". It makes no sense for government efforts intended to improve the nutritional health of the people to support the consumption of products known to be unhealthful - such as soda and other junk food. Farming Systems During the past few decades farming has become more specialized. Today, a typical farm may produce only meat of a single kind (turkey, chicken, pork, or beef), or only dairy, or a single type of grain, vegetable, fruit, or nut. This narrow specialization seemed to make economic sense in the era of cheap transport and cheap farm inputs. But because nature is diverse and integrated, the deliberate elimination of diversity on the farm has led to problems at every step. For example, animal feedlot operations (also known as concentrated animal feed operations, or CAFOs) produce enormous amounts of waste that end up in massive manure lagoons that pollute ground water and foul the air. Meanwhile, grain diets fed to the animals result in digestive problems requiring the large-scale administration of antibiotics that find their way into both the human food system and ground water, and that lead to antibiotic resistance among disease organisms that afflict humans. Farm specialization also impacts the grain or vegetable grower: soils that annually produce these crops need a regular replenishment of nitrogen; but if the farmer keeps few animals, there may be no option other than to import fertilizers from off-site. By switching to multi-enterprise diverse systems, farmers can often solve a range of problems at once. Feeding much less grain to livestock while giving them access to pasture that is in rotation with other crops maintains soil fertility while leading to better animal health and higher food quality. The farmer, the environment, and the consumer all benefit. The post-hydrocarbon food transition may also compel a rethinking of the size of farm operations. The mechanization of farm operations and the centralization of food systems favored larger farms. However, as fuel for farm machinery becomes more costly, and as farming once again involves more labor, smaller-scale operations will once again be profitable. In addition, a smaller scale of operations will be needed as farms become more diverse, since farmers will have more system elements to monitor. Agriculture will thus become more knowledge-intensive, requiring a curious, holistic attitude on the part of farmers. In urban areas, micro-farms and gardens - including vertical gardens and rooftop gardens that in some cases include small animals such as chickens and rabbits - could provide a substantial amount of food for growers and their families, along with occasional income from selling seasonal surpluses at garden markets. Farm Work With less fuel available to power agricultural machinery, the world will need many more farmers. But for farmers to succeed, some current agricultural policies that favor larger-scale production and production for export will need to change, while policies that support small-scale subsistence farms, gardens, and agricultural co-ops must be formulated and put in place - both by international institutions such as the World Bank, and also by national and regional governments. Currently the UK has 541,000 farmers, depending on how the term is defined. In the UK in 1900, nearly forty percent of the population farmed; the current proportion is less than one percent. Today, the average farmer is nearing retirement age. In nations and regions where food is grown without machinery, a larger percentage of the population must be involved in food production. For example, farmers make up more than half the populations of China, and India, Nepal, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. While the proportion of farmers that would be needed in Britain if the country were to become self-sufficient in food grown without fossil fuels is unknown (that would depend upon technologies used and diets adopted), it would undoubtedly be much larger than the current percentage. It is reasonable to expect that several million new farmers would be required - a number that is both unimaginable and unmanageable over the short term. These new farmers would have to include a broad mix of people, reflecting the UK's increasing diversity. Already growing numbers of young adults are becoming organic or biodynamic farmers, and farmers' markets and CSAs are also springing up across the country. These tentative trends must be supported and encouraged. In addition to Government policies that support sustainable farming systems based on smaller farming units, this will require: * Education: Universities and community colleges must quickly develop programs in small-scale ecological farming methods - programs that also include training in other skills that farmers will need, such as in marketing and formulating business plans. Apprenticeships and other forms of direct knowledge transfer will also assist the transition. * Financial Support: Since few if any farms are financially successful the first year or even the second or third, loans and grants will be needed to help farmers get started. * A revitalization of farming communities and farming culture: Over the past decades UK rural towns have seen their best and brightest young people flee first to distant colleges and then to cities. Farming communities must be interesting, attractive places if we expect people to inhabit them and for children to want to stay there. Seeds Today's seed industry is centralized and reliant upon the very fuel-based transport system whose future viability is in question. Most commercial seeds are of hybrid varieties, so that farmers cannot save seed but must purchase new supplies each year. Worldwide, a growing proportion of the commercial seeds that are available are genetically modified. GM seeds have primarily been developed by chemical companies to support the sale of their proprietary herbicides. The promise of more nutritious foods, or crops that can produce biofuels more efficiently, is years from realization. Given that the need for transition is immediate, efforts to build a post-fossil fuel food system cannot wait for new technologies that may or may not appear or succeed. In any case, the GM seed industry is based upon current systems of transport, and fuel-based inputs such as chemical fertilizers and herbicides, that are all inextricably tied to the wider fossil-fuel based provisioning systems of society. Thus GM crops would be unlikely to be of much help in the transition in any case. What is needed instead is a coordinated effort to identify open-pollinated varieties of food crops that are adapted to local soils and microclimates, and a program to make such seeds available to farmers and gardeners in sufficient quantities. In addition, local colleges must begin offering courses on the techniques of seed saving. Processing and Distribution Systems The transition process will undoubtedly be fraught with challenges to food processing and distribution systems, which currently rely on large energy inputs and long-distance transport. For example, the meat industry now depends upon centralized facilities for slaughtering livestock - which must be transported long distances to these facilities. Re-localizing food systems will entail creating incentives for the emergence of smaller, more localized slaughterhouses and butcher shops. One interim solution would be for a fleet of mobile abattoirs to go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Many health regulations were originally designed to check abuses by the largest food producers, but such regulations may now inhibit the development of smaller-scale and more localized processing and distribution systems. For example, farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbours without making a huge investment in nationally approved facilities. A small producer selling direct from the farm or at a farmers' market should not be subject to the same food safety regulations as a multinational food manufacturer: while local food may occasionally have safety problems, those problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage than similar problems at industrial-scale facilities. Food processors must look for ways to make their present operations more energy efficient, while government, consumers, and retailers find ways to reduce the need for food processing and also for food packaging. This gradual shift will require institutional support for families in storing, processing, cooking, and preserving food within the home. Meanwhile, in view of inevitable problems with existing transport systems, national and regional food storage systems must be reconsidered. Reserves of grain, sufficient to provide for essential needs during an extended food crisis, should be kept and managed to avoid spoilage. Packaging of food should be regulated to minimize the use of plastics, which will become more scarce and expensive as oil and gas deplete - and which are implicated as sources of toxins in any case. Government should institute policies that prioritize the distribution of food within the nation by rail and water, rather than by road, as trucks are comparatively energy inefficient. Supermarkets are currently the ultimate distribution sites for food in most instances. However, this model presupposes near-universal access to automobiles and petrol. A resilient food system will require smaller and more widely distributed access points in the forms of small shops and garden or farm markets. Government regulations and tax incentives can help accomplish that shift. Wholesalers and distributors will have a changed role in a transitioning food system. They will still be needed to manage the supplies of various seasonally produced foods moving from producers to consumers. However, rather than favoring large producers and giant supermarket chains, they must alter their operations to serve smaller, more distributed farms and gardens, as well as smaller and more distributed retail shops. Resilience Action Planning ------------------------------- The transition process will succeed by creating more resilience in food systems. Resilient systems are able to withstand higher magnitudes of disturbance before undergoing a dramatic shift to a new condition in which they are controlled by a different set of processes. One quality of resilience is redundancy - which is often at odds with economic efficiency. Efficiency implies both long supply chains and the reduction of inventories to a minimum. This "just-in-time" delivery of products reduces costs - but it increases the vulnerability of systems to disturbances such as fuel shortages. As more attention is paid to resilience and less to economic efficiency, redundancy and larger inventories are seen as benefits rather than liabilities. Other resilience values include diversity (as opposed to uniformity), and dispersion (rather than centralization) of control over systems. Building resilience into our food systems as we move toward a post-fossil fuel economy will entail all of the Elements of Transition detailed above. It will also require planning at four levels: Government, Community, Business, and Individual or Family. At each level the planning process will necessarily be somewhat different. The purpose of this section is to delineate the main planning steps that will make sense at each of these levels. In some instances, steps within an action plan can or should be undertaken concurrently. In any case, what is offered here is merely a skeletal outline for a process that must be developed to fit unique needs of those it will serve. Government The following steps are applicable at any level of government - national, regional, or local. At the highest level of scale (the nation), each step will itself be the subject of planning and delegation. At the lowest level of scale (small villages), government may lack the capacity to undertake any of these steps and can do more than offer symbolic official support to volunteer citizen initiatives. 1. Assess the existing food system. Begin with a study of current systemic vulnerabilities and opportunities. How are farm inputs currently sourced? How much food is currently imported? What proportion of those food imports are staples, and what proportion are luxury foods? What are the environmental costs of current agricultural practices? How would the current food system be impacted by fuel shortages and high prices? 2. Review policies. How are current policies supporting these vulnerabilities and environmental impacts? How can they be changed or eliminated? Are there policies already in place that are likely to help with the transition? How can these latter policies be strengthened? 3. Bring together key stakeholders. Organizations of farmers, food processing and distributing companies, and retailers must all be included in the transition process. Many will wish simply to maintain the existing system; however, it must be made clear that this is not an option. Many companies involved in the food system will need to change their business model substantially. 4. Make a plan. The transition plan that is formulated must be comprehensive and detailed, and must contain robust but attainable targets with timelines and mechanisms for periodic review and revision. A scoping exercise must be undertaken to assess the impact of the plan on agricultural output and to quantify the changes in kinds of commodities produced and in their volumes and prices. Simon Fairlie's paper, "Can Britain Feed Itself?", is an initial attempt at such an exercise, and can be used as a model to be built upon and supplemented {2}. 5. Educate and involve the public. The public must not only be informed about the government-led aspects of the transition process, but must be included in it to the extent that is practical. Citizens must be educated about food choices, gardening opportunities, and ways to access food from local producers. Their successes and challenges in adaptation will inform new iterations of the plan. 6. Shift policies and incentives. This is the key responsibility of government, as it either limits or enhances the ability of community groups, businesses, and families to engage in the transition process. Policy changes must reflect stakeholder input, but must nevertheless be designed primarily to further the Elements of Transition, rather than the short-term interests of any particular stakeholder group. 7. Monitor and adjust. An undertaking of this magnitude will inevitably have unforeseen and unintended impacts. Thus it is essential that progress be continually be reviewed with an eye to making adjustments to pace and strategy, while maintaining absolute adherence to the central task of methodically removing fossil fuels from the food system. Community The following are action steps for adoption by voluntary community groups, as opposed to governments (see above). The Transition Network provides an excellent model for this kind of community action. Such efforts seem to work best when the scale of community is such that meetings are manageable in size and meeting participants need not travel long distances. Thus in large cities, neighborhoods could apply Resilience Action Planning while sending delegates to occasional city-wide coordinating meetings. The overlap and mutual support between community organizations and local government efforts must be a matter for discussion and negotiation. 1. Assess the local food system. This assessment process should be undertaken in cooperation with government, so as not to duplicate tasks. Volunteer citizen groups are in position to provide perspectives that otherwise might elude government assessment efforts - such as opportunities for community gardens, or problems with access to food from local producers. 2. Identify and involve stakeholders. Local growers, shop owners, public kitchens, restaurants, schools, and other institutions that produce or serve food should all be contacted and invited to join a voluntary re-localization initiative and to offer input into the process. 3. Educate and involve the public. Community groups can stage public events to raise awareness about food transition issues. "Buy local" brochures and pamphlets, paid for and distributed by a consortium of local businesses (but organized by volunteer groups), can list local producers, farm markets, restaurants, and shops. 4. Develop a unique local strategic program. This can include farmers' markets, CSAs, school lunch programs, and public kitchens, networked with local producers, including community gardens. The program, based on input from stakeholders, should feature targets and timelines developed through a "backcasting" process, beginning with a collaborative exercise aimed at envisioning the local food system as it might look in 2025 after fossil fuels have ceased to play a role. 5. Coordinate with national programs. Local volunteer efforts can play a significant role in informing national government policies, and in implementing the national transition strategy. However, this will require the maintenance of open channels of communication, which in turn will be the responsibility of both government and the local groups. 6. Support individuals and families. Individuals are likely to change food habits and priorities only if they see others doing so as well, and if they feel that their efforts are supported and valued. Community groups can help by establishing new behavioral norms through public events and articles in local newspapers. Practical help can be offered via canning parties, garden planting and harvest parties, and gleaning programs. Local food and gardening experts can be made available to answer questions and concerns. Neighborhood food storage facilities can also be created to supplement household cupboards. 7. Monitor and adjust. All of these efforts must be continually adjusted to assure that all segments of the community are included in the transition process, and that the process is working as smoothly as possible for all. Business Relevant businesses include farms, shops, processors, wholesalers, and restaurants. However, the following steps could also be useful to organizations such as schools, colleges, and hospitals that dispense food as an ancillary part of their operations. 1. Assess vulnerabilities. Every business or organization that is part of the food system must take an honest look at the inevitable impacts of higher fuel prices, and fuel scarcity, on its operations. Examine scenarios based on a doubling or tripling of fuel costs to highlight specific vulnerabilities. 2. Make a plan. Develop a business model that works without - or with continually shrinking - fossil fuel inputs. Then "backcast" from that imagined future condition, specifying time-related targets. 3. Work with government and community groups. Given the fact that government will be developing regulations to reduce fuel use in the food system, and that community organizations will be offering support to local farmers and food shops that spearhead the transition, it makes good business sense to lead the parade rather than lagging at the rear. 4. Educate and involve suppliers and customers. No business is an island. The transition will flourish through strengthened relationships on all sides. 5. Monitor and adjust. For businesses, one obvious and essential criterion of success is profitability. The bottom line will help indicate which adaptive strategies are working, and which ones need work. However, negative financial feedback is no reason to abandon the essential goal of transition. Individual and Family 1. Assess food vulnerabilities and opportunities. Whether at a family meeting or by oneself over a cup of tea, take a long honest look at your typical monthly food purchases and give careful thought to the implications. How much of your food comes from within 100 miles? How much is packaged and processed? How many meals are meat-centered? Where do you shop? How would you be impacted if food and fuel prices doubled or tripled? 2. Make a plan. Create an ideal food scenario for yourself, including diet, shopping habits, and gardening goals. Then "backcast" a series of time-related goals. Write these prominently on a calendar and attach it to the front of your refrigerator. 3. Garden. Even if you don't have access to a plot of land, you can still grow sprouts in a jar or a few food plants in a window box. Look for opportunities to contribute work to a community garden. Develop your skills by seeking out gardening mentors. 4. Develop relations with local producers. Even if you have a large garden you probably can't grow all the food you eat. Rather than shopping at a supermarket, begin to frequent your local farmers' market, or join a CSA. 5. Become involved in community efforts. Get to know your neighbors and compare gardening experiences with them. Together, form a "tool library" from which members can check out garden tools and gardening books. Organize or participate in planting, harvesting, food-swapping, gleaning, and canning parties. 6. Monitor and adjust. At the end of each month, revisit your plan and revise it if necessary. Links ----- {1} http://www1.fipr.state.fl.us/PhosphatePrimer {2} http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/CanBritain.pdf _____ This essay is excerpted from a larger document-in-process, a co-publication of the Soil Association and Post Carbon Institute, that will be released in somewhat different versions in the UK and in the US, both in mid-November. (c) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Post Carbon Institute Post Carbon Institute is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization incorporated in the United States. http://globalpublicmedia.com/museletter_199_the_food_and_farming_transition http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From shimogamo at attglobal.net Mon Nov 10 20:41:33 2008 From: shimogamo at attglobal.net (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:41:33 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The Food and Farming Transition Message-ID: <4918FEED.9000005@attglobal.net> MuseLetter 199 (November 2008) by Richard Heinberg The only way to avert a food crisis resulting from oil and natural gas price hikes and supply disruptions while also reversing agriculture's contribution to climate change is to proactively and methodically remove fossil fuels from the food system. The removal of fossil fuels from the food system is inevitable: maintenance of the current system is simply not an option over the long term. Only the amount of time available for the transition process, and the strategies for pursuing it, can be matters for controversy. Given the degree to which the modern food system has become dependent on fossil fuels, many proposals for de-linking food and fuels are likely to appear radical. However, efforts toward this end must be judged not by the degree to which they preserve the status quo, but by their likely ability to solve the fundamental challenge that will face us: the need to feed a global population of seven billion with a diminishing supply of fuels available to fertilize, plow, and irrigate fields and to harvest and transport crops. If this transition is undertaken proactively and intelligently, there could be many side benefits - more careers in farming, more protection for the environment, less soil erosion, a revitalization of rural culture, and more healthful food for everyone. Some of this transformation will inevitably be driven by market forces, led simply by the rising price of fossil fuels. However, without planning the transition may be wrenching and destructive, since market forces acting alone could bankrupt farmers while leaving consumers with few or no options. The Transition ----------------- To remove fossil fuels from the food system too quickly, before alternative systems are in place, would be catastrophic. Thus the transition process must be a matter for careful consideration and planning. In recent years there has been some debate on the problem of how many people a non-fossil fueled food system can support. The answer is still unclear. But we will certainly find out, because there is likely to be no alternative, given that substitute liquid fuels - including coal-to-liquids, biofuels, tar sands, and shale oil - are all problematic and cannot be relied upon to replace cheap crude oil and natural gas as these deplete. There are reasons for hope: a recent report on African agriculture from the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) suggests that "organic, small-scale farming can deliver the increased yields which were thought to be the preserve of industrial farming, without the environmental and social damage which that form of agriculture brings with it". Nevertheless, given that we do not know whether non-fossil fuel agriculture can in fact feed a population now approaching seven billion - and given that current fuels-based agriculture cannot be relied upon to do so for much longer, given the reality of fuel depletion - the prudent path forward would surely be to tie agricultural policy to population policy. Indeed, coordination will be essential also between agriculture policies and education, economic, transport, energy policies. The food system transition will be comprehensive, and will require integration with all segments and aspects of society. This document is intended to serve as the basis for the beginning of that planning process. Our aim is to develop a template that can be used to strategically plan the transition of food and farming across the world, region by region, and at all scales (from the farm to the community to the nation), beginning here in the UK. Elements of Transition --------------------------- The following are some key strategic elements of the food systems transition process that will need to be addressed at all levels of scale, from the household to the nation and beyond. Re-Localization In recent decades the food systems of Britain and most other nations have become globalized. Food is traded in enormous quantities - and not just luxury foods (such as coffee and chocolate), but staples including wheat, maize, meat, potatoes, and rice. The globalization of the food system has had advantages: people in wealthy countries now have access to a wide variety of foods at all times, including fruits and vegetables that are out of season (apples in May or asparagus in January), and foods that cannot be grown locally at any time of year (eg, avocadoes in Scotland). Long-distance transport enables food to be delivered from places of abundance to areas of scarcity. Whereas in previous centuries a regional crop failure might have led to famine, its effects now can be neutralized by food imports. However, food globalization also creates systemic vulnerability. As fuel prices rise, costs of imported food go up. If fuel supplies were substantially cut off as the result of some transient event, the entire system could fail. A globalized system is also more susceptible to accidental contamination, as we have seen recently with the appearance of toxic melamine in foods from China. The best way to make our food system more resilient against such threats is clear: decentralize and re-localize it. Re-localization will inevitably occur sooner or later as a result of declining oil production, since there are no alternative energy sources on the horizon that can be scaled up quickly to take the place of petroleum. But if the transition process is to unfold in a beneficial rather than a catastrophic way, it must be planned and coordinated. This will require deliberate effort aimed at building the infrastructure for regional food economies - ones that can support diversified farming and reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the British diet. Re-localization means producing more basic food necessities locally. No one advocates doing away with food trade altogether: this would hurt both farmers and consumers. Rather, what is needed is a prioritization of production so that lower-value food items (which are typically staple calorie crops) are mostly sourced from close by, with most long-distance trade left to higher-value foods, and especially those that store well. This decentralization of the food system will result in greater societal resilience in the face of fuel price volatility. Problems of food contamination, when they appear, will be minimized. Meanwhile, revitalization of local food production will help renew local economies. Consumers will enjoy better quality food that is fresher and more sea