From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Feb 1 04:15:43 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:15:43 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Toronto stood up to bottled water industry Message-ID: <4985845F.1030904@ashisuto.co.jp> by Tony Clarke TheStar.com (December 11 2008) Toronto's decision last week to ban the sale and distribution of bottled water on city premises was a watershed moment for water justice advocates the world over. What was truly significant about Toronto's action was not that it banned an environmentally destructive product, but that it included a commitment to ensuring access to tap water in all city facilities. Toronto is now the largest city in the world to pass such far-reaching regulations controlling the distribution of bottled water on municipal property and promoting the use of publicly delivered tap water. Other Canadian and American municipalities have enacted policies encouraging the consumption of tap water and limiting the distribution of bottled water using taxpayer money, but none as large as Toronto has taken such a comprehensive approach. Toronto's action is in many ways the result of a diverse North American public campaign that has successfully raised awareness about bottled water as an unnecessary and wasteful product when the majority of people in Canada and the United States have access to clean drinking water from the tap. In Canada, this campaign gained significant exposure in early 2005 when the Polaris Institute published Inside the Bottle: an Expos? of the Bottled Water Industry, which provided an overview of the ten key problems with bottled water. Over the nearly four years since, a popular movement to challenge the bottled water industry has emerged at an astonishing pace - as schools and universities, restaurants, hospitals, faith-based organizations, unions and municipalities have decided to turn on the tap and kick out the bottle. As is often the case, Toronto's initiative had its own elected champions steering it forward. City Councillor Glen De Baeremaeker and Mayor David Miller had the progressive vision to include bottled water in their goal of keeping unnecessary packaging out of city landfills. Their efforts were coupled with a concerted grassroots push by Ontario-based activists, public interest organizations, community and student groups, labour unions and environmental networks. In the days leading up to the Toronto vote, city councillors faced a barrage of lobbying from the bottled water industry. These frantic attempts to defeat the resolution continued over the two days of debates when the industry brought a battery of lobbyists, corporate executives and industry associations into the council chamber to influence the vote. Representatives from the Canadian Bottled Water Association, Refreshments Canada and Nestl? Waters, along with their hired lobbyists from the Sussex Strategy Group and Argyle Communications, intensively lobbied councillors during the entire six-hour debate. However, their high-priced strategy ultimately failed to influence elected officials, who voted with a two-thirds majority to ban bottled water and reinvest in the public delivery of drinking water. For many, Toronto has now become the champion of the "Back to the Tap" municipal movement in Canada. To date, this movement has already seen seventeen municipalities from five provinces ban the bottle. With 45 others indicating an interest to follow suit, Toronto's leadership will no doubt inspire more municipalities to stand up and speak out in support of public water. To further enable this municipal movement, Toronto City Council also passed a motion to circulate its resolutions and amended staff report to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Regional Public Works Commissioners of Ontario. Increasingly across Canada, municipal leaders are showing that there is a strong political will for reinvestments in public water services. However, access to municipal drinking water is dwindling with new buildings constructed without water fountains and older ones decommissioning existing fountains. Now is the time to issue strong calls to all levels of government for greater public access to free potable water and a wholesale reinvestment in water infrastructure and services It's becoming clear that the recent love affair with bottled water has reached its limits. Bottled water's fifteen minutes are up, the marketing scam is out of the closet and the tap is back. The simple fact is that there is no "green" solution to bottled water. While it might serve a function during natural disasters or other contingencies, it is no alternative to the tap. Toronto has made the right choice to support public water infrastructure and to increase city residents' access to clean, convenient and environmentally sound drinking water - the only question now is which municipality or province will be next. _____ Tony Clarke is the executive director of the Polaris Institute in Ottawa and author of the book, Inside the Bottle. www.insidethebottle.org http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/551909 http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From nmgoro at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 06:28:58 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?N=C3=A9stor_Gorojovsky?=) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 10:28:58 -0300 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?Chavismo=3A_Cristiano=2C_Antinazi=2C_Pro-Musul?= =?utf-8?b?bcOhbiB5IFByby1KdWTDrW8=?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2fa158550902010528p542de1ach6a880f5c0a79c0f6@mail.gmail.com> This is EXACTLY the way in which the war must be waged. El d?a 1 de febrero de 2009 2:46, Yoshie Furuhashi escribi?: > > Chavismo: Cristiano, Antinazi, Pro-Musulm?n y Pro-Jud?o > Roy Chaderton, embajador de Venezuela en la ONU, habla de numerosos > miembros de la comunidad jud?a que apoyaron y apoyan las luchas de los > pueblos en contra del Imperialismo y el Sionismo, y rechaza cualquier > ataque generalizado en contra de las y los jud?os. > > Roy Chaderton Matos > Viernes, 30 de Ene de 2009. 10:33 pm > > Durante una de las leg?timas y necesarias protestas frente a la > Embajada de Israel en Caracas, observ? en la transmisi?n televisada un > cartel solitario y bien elaborado con una consigna que me golpe? el > alma y la raz?n, dec?a algo as? como: "Condenamos a Hitler por no > haber concluido su obra de exterminio?" > > El espantoso mensaje, totalmente ajeno al proceso bolivariano y al > compromiso chavista por la libertad, la democracia, la igualdad y la > justicia social, pone en evidencia que de vez en cuando en nuestras > luchas y protestas se nos "colean" "balas perdidas" que tenemos que > detectar para neutralizar y expulsar como a todo cuerpo extra?o. > > Estos antisemitas agazapados se parecen mucho a otras "balas perdidas" > como son los anticlericales profesionales que gritan "?vade retro > Satan?s!" cuando se topan con un creyente, azuzados por el hecho > innegable de que la mayor?a de la alta jerarqu?a cat?lica venezolana > renunci? a su condici?n potencial de puente entre venezolanos > adversarios para abrazar a la ultra derecha criolla y a la inmoral > dictadura medi?tica; s?lo que a los infiltrados pseudochavistas se les > olvid? la profunda fundamentaci?n cristiana de nuestro proceso > socialista y el hecho social de que la mayor?a de los cat?licos > venezolanos, incluyendo a curas y monjas de base, estamos > comprometidos con la revoluci?n bolivariana. > > Los recurrentes cr?menes contra la humanidad cometidos por la mediocre > y sanguinaria elite militarista del Estado de Israel jam?s podr?n > justificar que la justa rebeli?n y solidaridad con los palestinos > pueda derivar en aberraciones antisemitas. > > Ning?n izquierdista tiene el derecho a ignorar que los jud?os, > perseguidos hist?ricos, no por los musulmanes que por siglos les > abrieron sus puertas, sino por los cristianos cruzados primero, > inquisidores despu?s y finalmente nazis, tienen una tradici?n > hist?rica de solidaridad precursora con rebeliones sociales y > pensamiento de avanzada. Jam?s olvidar a jud?os ilustres como Carlos > Marx, Rosa Luxemburgo, Le?n Trostky, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud y > Bob Dylan. Jam?s ignorar la participaci?n de los jud?os, hasta el > precio de su vida, en las luchas civiles, sindicales, sociales y > contra la guerra en los Estados Unidos o contra dictaduras militares > ultra cat?licas en el Cono Sur. Jam?s pasar por alto que en los > Estados Unidos ante la organizada campa?a antichavista apoyada por el > llamado "lobby israelita" en este pa?s, se levanta la voz del > intelectual m?s reconocido en el mundo, el jud?o Noam Chomsky, tantas > veces citado por el Presidente Ch?vez, y la del Premio Nobel de > Econom?a, el estadounidense jud?o Joseph Stiglitz, quien nos ha > apoyado en nuestras luchas contra la dictadura neoliberal. > > Pero a?n en el supuesto negado de que no hubiese habido en la historia > ning?n jud?o progresista, seguir?a siendo un pecado mortal la > pretensi?n de acallarlos o llamar a su exterminio. Lo que s? tenemos > que hacer es debatir abiertamente y frente a frente las desviaciones > sionistas y las sistem?ticas violaciones de los derechos humanos del > pueblo palestino. La matanza de inocentes o de luchadores justos en > Gaza no se soluciona aplicando la Ley del Tali?n radicalizada que es > precisamente la aventura b?rbara, emprendida con sa?a de criminales y > oportunistas electorales, por las cohortes israelitas. > > Repetidas veces durante la Cuarta Rep?blica se constituyeron en > Venezuela peque?os grupos cripto nazis que ocasionalmente embadurnaban > Sinagogas y edificaciones jud?as con consignas o s?mbolos antisemitas > (por ejemplo "MSN", "Tradici?n, Familia y Propiedad", etc.). En > general cat?licos ultra radicales, como cat?lico fue Hitler, de clase > media alta, quienes en lugar de tener en un espacio de sus casas un > cursi rinconcito taurino con tasca, optaron por un rinconcito nazi con > banderas y cruces gamadas, ediciones viejas de Mein Kampf, cascos de > la Wehrmacht o gorras de la Gestapo y alguna que otra bella Luger en > espera de una oportunidad para matar un jud?o. Para mi sorpresa por > cierto, algunos compatriotas de la comunidad jud?a venezolana, de puro > inadvertidos o antichavistas, han terminado marchando en protesta > contra nuestro Gobierno Bolivariano junto a esos cripto nazis, > exacerbados con los venenos de la dictadura medi?tica. > > Tambi?n en aquellos tiempos, los diplom?ticos venezolanos apoy?bamos > en Naciones Unidas y otros foros internacionales la gran mayor?a de > las resoluciones a favor de la causa palestina. S?lo nos absten?amos, > como en efecto m?s de una vez lo hice personalmente, en aquellos > proyectos de resoluci?n que conten?an proposiciones ultrarradicales > insostenibles. Recuerdo especialmente que en mis tiempos de Consejero > de la Misi?n de Venezuela ante la ONU en 1978 organic? un encuentro en > el Hotel Tudor de Nueva York entre un grupo de diplom?ticos > venezolanos reci?n graduados dirigidos por el Director de nuestra > Escuela de Estudios Internacionales, el venezolano jud?o Carlos Guer?n > y el Jefe de la Oficina de la Organizaci?n para la Liberaci?n de > Palestina en Washington, Hassan Rahman. > > En medio de esta batalla pol?tica internacional, quienes tenemos una > actitud equilibrada frente al problema pero comprometidos con el > pueblo palestino, nos encontramos con dos visiones manipuladoras que > no debemos aceptar. Una, los que insisten en la negaci?n del > Holocausto como si fuese un asunto de estad?stica. Uno se pregunta, ?a > partir de cu?l cifra comienza un holocausto?, ?seis millones?, ?cuatro > millones?, ?dos millones?, ?un mill?n?, ?medio mill?n?. La pol?mica > ser?a rid?cula si no fuese tr?gica. Para m? no hay duda de que hubo > una pol?tica de exterminio de los jud?os en la Europa cristiana. > Banalizarlo es una falta de respeto a la memoria de las v?ctimas y a > la verdad, como tambi?n lo ser?a negar el genocidio en Armenia, en > Ruanda-Burundi, Hiroshima-Nagasaki o en Palestina, sin olvidar el > genocidio de la poblaci?n ind?gena en Hispanoam?rica. > > Otra, es el chantaje que se nos quiere imponer, a trav?s de la > dictadura medi?tica internacional, cuando se nos acusa de antisemitas > a cualesquiera personas u organizaciones que levantamos nuestra voz a > favor de la causa palestina y denunciamos a los ghettos y campos de > concentraci?n en Palestina, donde se extermina a sus habitantes en > procura de una soluci?n final, con apoyo "cristiano" primer mundista y > de manera deliberada se asesina masivamente a los ni?os ?rabes para > eliminar a los "terroristas" del futuro. > > Familiarizado como hab?a estado desde ni?o con el sufrimiento del > pueblo jud?o, por mis conversaciones de familia y mis lecturas, al > llegar a mi primer destino diplom?tico en Varsovia lo primero que > percib? fue el clima de terror sembrado entre la ya diezmada comunidad > jud?a de Polonia por las purgas antisemitas dise?adas por el entonces > ministro del Interior Mieczylaw Moczar en 1968, que alcanzaron incluso > a cuadros jud?os importantes dentro del Partido Comunista polaco. > Familiarizado como estoy desde mi adolescencia, por mis > interlocuciones personales y lecturas con el sufrimiento del pueblo > ?rabe-palestino a quien se ha obligado a pagar por los cr?menes > cometidos por los nazis, no puedo sino identificar como pol?tica de > genocidio lo que ha ocurrido en el ghetto de Gaza. > > Hay mucho m?s que decir sobre esto, pero por ahora basta que nos > llenemos de ox?geno espiritual y nos proclamemos hermanos de los > musulmanes, de los jud?os, de los cristianos, de los hinduistas, de > los budistas, de los ateos y de todos cuantos creen y oran y de todos > cuantos no creen y no oran. > > Mientras tanto, los fantasmas del antisemitismo hist?rico, > especialmente en Europa, incluyendo el Vaticano, vuelven a > alborotarse? > > -- N?stor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autor?a From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Sun Feb 1 15:12:32 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 17:12:32 -0500 Subject: [A-List] NYT: "Moderate Elected President in Somalia" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <027f01c984ba$2e212f40$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> Just like one would never know that for decades the US backed the dictatorship of Siad Barre, as it did the coup of Samual Doe in Liberia, etc. Everything happens today, there is no past and there is no history. Paul Wright, Editor Prison Legal News P.O. Box 2420 West Brattleboro, VT 05303 802 2577-1342 pwright at prisonlegalnews.org www.prisonlegalnews.org Seattle Office 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -----Original Message----- From: a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 10:09 AM To: A-List; Rad-Green Subject: [A-List] NYT: "Moderate Elected President in Somalia" From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Feb 1 18:15:57 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:15:57 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Flow Message-ID: <4986494D.1040507@ashisuto.co.jp> Who Owns the World's Water? by Jessica Mosby Culture Change (January 09 2009) After seeing the new documentary, Flow {1}, my 2009 New Year's resolution is to stop buying bottled water. Over $100 billion is spent annually on bottled water, but it would cost only $30 billion to provide clean drinking water to the entire world. Unlike tap water, bottled water is not regulated for cleanliness. And don't even get me started on the mountains of plastic bottles created by the bottled water industry. For 84 terrifying and informative minutes, filmmaker Irena Salina makes a very persuasive case for stopping the commoditization of water and ensuring that everyone has access to clean drinking water. Salina interviews an array of researchers and activists who all describe the frightening international situation: dirty water kills more people than wars, the world is quickly running out of clean water, and water has become a valuable commodity for multinational corporations to exploit for profit. Flow is currently available on DVD. The film is grounded in the question: Who owns the world's water? Without water life cannot exist. But 1.1 billion people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking water, and over five million people die annually from water-related illnesses. While Flow is a wake-up call that documents all that is wrong with the world's attitude toward water, the film also profiles a number of technologies that could dramatically improve international access to clean drinking water at a nominal cost. Those who exclusively drink bottled water may think they're safe. But according to the National Resource Defense Council Director of Advocacy, Erik Olson, water-borne chemicals can enter the body through the skin when showering. Bathing in bottled water doesn't guarantee safety either; organic chemicals, bacteria, and even arsenic were found in one-third of popular bottled-water brands. The film's most surprising revelation is that water has become a highly valuable commodity instead of a human right. Water is now the third most valuable commodity behind oil and electricity. And the film blames the World Bank for colluding with multinational for-profit water companies, which has led to the promotion of water privatization in developing counties. In Bolivia, short-lived water privatization at the insistence of the World Bank polluted rivers with blood and sewage flowing from slaughterhouses into Lake Titicaca. Though many Americans take their access to clean water for granted, many people throughout the world are not able (or do not want) to pay for privatized water {2}. Maintaining the infrastructure that brings unlimited clean water to kitchen sinks across the country is an unnoticed luxury for most Americans, though they do pay for it: either directly in monthly bills from water treatment facilities, or indirectly in taxes. Flow profiles the heartbreaking situation in South Africa where the world's poorest citizens cannot afford clean water. Instead of paying for clean water from privatized wells, many desperate South Africans are forced to drink free water from dirty stagnant rivers, even if that means contracting cholera. During an onscreen interview, Maude Barlow, author of the book Blue Covenant (2007) and co-author of Blue Gold (2002), discusses the contradiction in providing affordable clean water to people through for-profit private companies. She describes privatization as a "disaster" because multinational corporations cannot help people gain increased access to clean water while also pleasing their shareholders. Several countries have recently built enormous dams to divert and store water in an effort to resolve their water crises. According to Patrick McCully, Executive Director of International Rivers Network {3}, dams alter ecosystems while displacing thousands of people. One example cited in the film is China's Three Gorges Dam - a project also depicted in the beautiful documentary Up the Yangtze {4} - that relocated two million people as water levels rose. McCully believes that there are better ways to store water, especially for individuals; he cites the archaic practice of collecting rain water as a low-cost and effective way to ensure a steady water supply. The most inspiring interviewee in Flow is Ashok Gadgil, Senior Staff Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley professor, who knows the dire consequences of biologically contaminated water firsthand. While growing up in India, he lost five cousins to unhealthy drinking water. To help solve this widespread problem, Gadjil invented a water disinfector that uses UV-light to kill water-borne bacteria and viruses. This "financially viable, self-sustaining model" is maintained cooperatively in local communities - not by multinational for-profit corporations. For only $2 per person per year, over 500,000 Indians living in rural villages now have clean drinking water. Flow captures the complex nature of water supply and accessibility issues with well-researched and entertaining information. But at times there are too many people saying the same thing. The film could have benefited by focusing more on inspiring new technology, such as Gadgil's water filtration system, and creating a narrative structure, instead of a barrage of interviews. Still, everyone interviewed drives the film's message home, and by the end viewers will think twice about their current habits. When I finished watching the film, I turned on my kitchen sink in my Oakland, California apartment and filled a tall glass with fresh clean water. I had never thought twice about where this water came from, and assumed the supply was unlimited, especially when taking too many long showers. But then I remembered Barlow's prediction, "California's water supply is running out - it has about twenty years of water left in the state". Flow could not be a timelier documentary because the world is literally running out of clean water. The unanswerable question of who owns water will become irrelevant when there is not any water left to own. Links: {1} www.flowthefilm.com {2} http://thewip.net/contributors/2009/01/murky_waters_why_privatization.html {3} http://internationalrivers.org/ {4} http://thewip.net/contributors/2008/07/a_new_china_floods_the_traditi.html _____ Flow - The Women's International Perspective (WIP) http://thewip.net/contributors/2009/01/flow_who_owns_the_worlds_water.html This article is published under Title 17 USC. Section 107. See the Fair Use Notice for more information: http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=266&Itemid=26 Related Article: "Water Fight: corporate bottom line versus foes of privatization and plasticization" by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change: http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=65 _____ http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=280&Itemid=1 http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun Feb 1 18:35:47 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 20:35:47 EST Subject: [A-List] Calling Mr.. Henry C.K. Liu Message-ID: _http://groups.google.com/group/marxist-debate/browse_thread/thread/c3f2f46109 89c40c_ (http://groups.google.com/group/marxist-debate/browse_thread/thread/c3f2f4610989c40c) **************From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay up-to-date with the latest news. (http://aol.com?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000023) From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sun Feb 1 19:42:10 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leigh Meyers) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 18:42:10 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Iranian Revolution at 30 - Informed Comment Global Affairs Message-ID: Saturday, January 31, 2009 Iranian Revolution at 30 Posted by Farideh Farhi Today Iran began 10 days of festivities marking the 30th anniversary of its revolution. The Middle East Institute has produced a volume on the occasion of this anniversary in which 53 contributors, including me, reflect on the significance of the 1979 Revolution and its positive and negative ramifications. Short essays dwell on gender issues, education, media, the environment, energy, foreign policy and so on. There is really nothing like it around. Complementing the essays is an extensive resource section of maps, statistics, a timeline, and selected bibliography. The full document can be found here. http://icga.blogspot.com/2009/01/iranian-revolution-at-30.html From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sun Feb 1 12:19:01 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 11:19:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Revolt in in the Air Message-ID: <576312.62350.qm@web180107.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Revolt in in the Air Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/31/global-recession-europe-protests -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 395 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090201/c42fbcef/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Sun Feb 1 13:28:11 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:28:11 -0800 Subject: [A-List] =?iso-8859-1?q?Chavismo=3A_Cristiano=2C_Antinazi=2C_Pro-?= =?iso-8859-1?q?Musul_m=C3=A1n_y_Pro-Jud=C3=ADo?= In-Reply-To: <2fa158550902010528p542de1ach6a880f5c0a79c0f6@mail.gmail.co m> References: <2fa158550902010528p542de1ach6a880f5c0a79c0f6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Isn't it fabulous that people are using their real names, in the comments below the article? Coincidentally some group invaded one of the synagogues in Caracas Friday. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=caracas+synagogue That is bad. Todd At 05:28 AM 2/1/2009, N??stor Gorojovsky posted to The A-List > >This is EXACTLY the way in which the war must be waged. > >El d??a 1 de febrero de 2009 2:46, Yoshie Furuhashi > escribi??: > > > > Chavismo: Cristiano, Antinazi, Pro-Musulm??n y Pro-Jud??o..... Translation by http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt During one of the legitims and necessary protests in front of the Embassy of Israel in Caracas, I observed in the televised transmission a solitary poster and elaborated well with a slogan that struck the soul and the reason to me, it said something as well as: ?We condemned Hitler by not to have concluded its work of extermination ? The frightful message, totally other people's to the bolivariano process and the chavista commitment by the freedom, the democracy, the equality and social justice, puts in evidence that from time to time in our fights and protests us ?fishtail? ?stray bullets? that we must detect to neutralize and to expel like a all strange body. These seized anti-semites look themselves much like other ?stray bullets? like are the anticlerical professionals who shout ?vade retro Satan? when they run into with a believer, urged on by the undeniable fact that the majority of the high Venezuelan catholic hierarchy resigned to its potential condition of bridge between opposing Venezuelans to embrace to the extreme Creole right and the immoral mediatic dictatorship; only that to the pseudochavistas infiltrated ones forgot the deep Christian founding our socialist process and the social fact to them that the majority of the Venezuelan catholics, including a you cure and basic nuns, we are it jeopardize with the bolivariana revolution. The appellants crimes against the humanity committed by the mediocre and bloodthirsty militarista elite of the State of Israel never will be able to justify that the right rebellion and solidarity with the Palestinians can derive in anti-semitic aberrations. No leftist has the right to ignore that the Jews, persecuted historical, not by the Muslims who by centuries abrieron their doors to them, but by the Christians cruzados first, inquisidores later and finally Nazi, have an historical tradition of precursory solidarity with social rebellions and thought of outpost. To never forget to illustrious Jews like Carlos Marx, Luxembourg Rose, Leon Trostky, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Bob Dylan. To never ignore the participation of the Jews, until the price of its life, in the civil, union, social fights and against the war in the United States or military dictatorships extreme catholics in the South Cone. To never happen through stop that in the United States before the organized antichavista campaign supported by the call ?Israelite lobby? in this country, rise the voice of the recognized intellectual more in the world, the Jew Noam Chomsky, so many times mentioned by President Ch?vez, and the one of the Nobel prize de Econom?a, the Jewish American Joseph Stiglitz, who has supported to us in our fights against the neoliberal dictatorship. But still in the assumption denied that there had not been in history any progressive Jew, it would continue being a mortal sin the pretension to silence them or to call to his extermination. What yes we must do is to debate abiertamente and against in front the Zionist deviations and the systematic violations of the human rights of the Palestinian town. The slaughter of innocents or right fighters in Gaza is not solved applying the Law of the Tali?n radicalized that it is indeed the Barbarian adventure, undertaken with viciousness of criminals and electoral opportunists, by the Israelite cohortes. Repeated times during the Fourth Republic small Nazi groups constituted themselves in Venezuela cripto that occasionally smeared Jewish Synagogues and constructions with anti-semitic slogans or symbols (for example ?MSN?, ?Tradition, Family and Property?, etc.). Catholic generally extreme radicals, as catholic were Hitler, of upper middle-class, that instead of to have in a space of their houses a pretentious bullfighting rinconcito with tasca, flags and crossings decided on a Nazi rinconcito with gamadas, old woman editions of Mein Kampf, helmets of the Wehrmacht or caps of the Gestapo and some that another beautiful Luger awaiting an opportunity to kill a Jew. For my surprise by the way, some compatriots of the Venezuelan Jewish community, of pure inadvertent or antichavistas, have ended up marching in protest against our Bolivariano Government next to those cripto Nazi, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-fascism] exacerbated with poisons of the mediatic dictatorship. Also in those times, the Venezuelan diplomats we supported in United Nations and other international forums the great majority of the resolutions in favor of the Palestine cause. Only we abstained, as indeed I did more in one go it personally, in those projects of resolution that contained untenable ultraradical proposals. Memory especially that in my times of Advisor of the Mission of Venezuela before the UN in 1978 I organized an encounter in the Tudor Hotel of New York between a group of Venezuelan diplomats just graduated directed by the Director as our School of International Studies, the Jewish Venezuelan Carlos Guer?n and the Head of the Office of the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine in Washington, Hassan Rahman. In the middle of this international battle political, who we have an attitude balanced against the problem but it jeopardize with the Palestinian town, we were with two manipulating visions that we do not have to accept. One, those that insist on the negation of the Holocausto as if it was a statistic subject. One is asked, from which number holocausto begins? , six million? , four million? , two million? , a million? , half million. The controversy would be ridiculous if she were not tragic. For me there is no doubt that there was a policy of extermination of the Jews in Christian Europe. Banalizar it is a lack of respect to the memory of the victims and the truth, as also it would be it to deny the genocide in Armenia, in Rwanda-Burundi, Hiroshima-Nakasaki or in Palestine, without forgetting the genocide the indigenous population in Hispano-America. Another one, is the blackmail that is wanted to us to impose, through international the mediatic dictatorship, when it accuses of anti-semites to any people or organizations who we raised our voice in favor of the Palestine cause and denounced to the ghettos and concentration camps in Palestine, where it exterminates his inhabitants in tries of a final solution, with ?Christian? support first mundista and of deliberate way it massively assassinates the Arab children to eliminate the ?terrorists? of the future. Familiarized since there were been from boy with the suffering of the Jewish town, by my conversations of family and my readings, when arriving first diplomatic destiny in Warsaw first that I perceived it was the climate of terror seeded between already decimated Jewish community of Poland by the anti-semitic purges designed by the then minister of the Interior Mieczylaw Moczar in 1968, that even reached to important Jewish pictures within the Polish Communist Party. Familiarized as I am from my adolescence, by my personal interlocutions and readings with the suffering of the Arab-Palestinian town to that has commited itself to pay by the crimes committed by the Nazis, I cannot but identify like genocide policy which has happened in ghetto of Gaza. It is much more necessary to say on this, but so far it is enough that we fill of spiritual oxygen and we proclaim brothers of the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians, the hinduistas, of the Buddhists, of the atheists and of all whatever they create and Oran and of all whatever they do not create and nonOran. Meanwhile, the ghosts of the historical anti-semitism, especially in Europe, including the Vatican, return to get excited themselves -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 8850 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090201/61b69736/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sun Feb 1 14:58:45 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2009 13:58:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Macroeconomic Imbalances in the United States and Their Impact on Message-ID: <937189.99200.qm@web180106.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Macroeconomic Imbalances in the United States and Their Impact on ?the International Financial System ?by Julia S. Perelstein ?"This paper argues that the financial crisis of 2007?08 is ?symptomatic of macroeconomic imbalances in the U.S., because the ?imbalances are eventually resolved in financial markets, and passed ?on to the real economy. On the other hand the international ?financial system is dependent on U.S. trade deficit for feeding ?liquidity into financial and commodity markets." ? I have found very little analysis of the connection between the US current account deficit and the financial crisis. What has been written recently by, for instance The Economist, has focused mainly on the low savings (over-consumption) in the US as the driving factor of the deficit and the growth of debts. Anwar Shaikh suggested in his talk with Doug Henwood that the central factor was a rising US trade deficit due to the poor performance of its exports. Gerard Dumenil and Dominque Levy also emphasized this in their article in Le Monde Diplomatique; lack of productive investment in US industry. Perelstein's paper attempts to formulate a systematic theory of these mechanisms. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1590 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090201/724337f8/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Sun Feb 1 18:29:56 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:29:56 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Flow In-Reply-To: <4986494D.1040507@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <4986494D.1040507@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: People have been buying up the water rights in the U.S. for decades, rubbing their hands in glee, thinking that title to ownership is like a physical attribute of nature, mass, temperature, color, owner, etc. The CSPAN this weekend played Antonia Juhasz' lecture in which, among other things, she ranted about TBoone Pickens, who has bought up half of west texas, to build solar and wind farms and control its water. His great campaign now is government assistance for rights of way down to Houston, Dallas, etc. to sell "his" water and electricity. 100 years from now, the Pickens estate will be accepted with the same finality we now accept the railroad givaways of the 1800s (all of them should be unwound, back to the commons) Todd At 05:15 PM 2/1/2009, Bill Totten wrote: >Who Owns the World's Water? > >by Jessica Mosby > >Culture Change (January 09 2009) > > >After seeing the new documentary, Flow {1}, my 2009 New Year's >resolution is to stop buying bottled water. Over $100 billion is spent >annually on bottled water, but it would cost only $30 billion to provide >clean drinking water to the entire world. Unlike tap water, bottled >water is not regulated for cleanliness. And don't even get me started on >the mountains of plastic bottles created by the bottled water industry. > >For 84 terrifying and informative minutes, filmmaker Irena Salina makes >a very persuasive case for stopping the commoditization of water and >ensuring that everyone has access to clean drinking water. Salina >interviews an array of researchers and activists who all describe the >frightening international situation: dirty water kills more people than >wars, the world is quickly running out of clean water, and water has >become a valuable commodity for multinational corporations to exploit >for profit. Flow is currently available on DVD. > >The film is grounded in the question: Who owns the world's water? >Without water life cannot exist. But 1.1 billion people worldwide do not >have access to clean drinking water, and over five million people die >annually from water-related illnesses. While Flow is a wake-up call that >documents all that is wrong with the world's attitude toward water, the >film also profiles a number of technologies that could dramatically >improve international access to clean drinking water at a nominal cost. > >Those who exclusively drink bottled water may think they're safe. But >according to the National Resource Defense Council Director of Advocacy, >Erik Olson, water-borne chemicals can enter the body through the skin >when showering. Bathing in bottled water doesn't guarantee safety >either; organic chemicals, bacteria, and even arsenic were found in >one-third of popular bottled-water brands. > >The film's most surprising revelation is that water has become a highly >valuable commodity instead of a human right. Water is now the third most >valuable commodity behind oil and electricity. And the film blames the >World Bank for colluding with multinational for-profit water companies, >which has led to the promotion of water privatization in developing >counties. In Bolivia, short-lived water privatization at the insistence >of the World Bank polluted rivers with blood and sewage flowing from >slaughterhouses into Lake Titicaca. > >Though many Americans take their access to clean water for granted, many >people throughout the world are not able (or do not want) to pay for >privatized water {2}. Maintaining the infrastructure that brings >unlimited clean water to kitchen sinks across the country is an >unnoticed luxury for most Americans, though they do pay for it: either >directly in monthly bills from water treatment facilities, or indirectly >in taxes. > >Flow profiles the heartbreaking situation in South Africa where the >world's poorest citizens cannot afford clean water. Instead of paying >for clean water from privatized wells, many desperate South Africans are >forced to drink free water from dirty stagnant rivers, even if that >means contracting cholera. During an onscreen interview, Maude Barlow, >author of the book Blue Covenant (2007) and co-author of Blue Gold >(2002), discusses the contradiction in providing affordable clean water >to people through for-profit private companies. She describes >privatization as a "disaster" because multinational corporations cannot >help people gain increased access to clean water while also pleasing >their shareholders. Several countries have recently built enormous dams >to divert and store water in an effort to resolve their water crises. >According to Patrick McCully, Executive Director of International Rivers >Network {3}, dams alter ecosystems while displacing thousands of people. >One example cited in the film is China's Three Gorges Dam - a project >also depicted in the beautiful documentary Up the Yangtze {4} - that >relocated two million people as water levels rose. McCully believes that >there are better ways to store water, especially for individuals; he >cites the archaic practice of collecting rain water as a low-cost and >effective way to ensure a steady water supply. > >The most inspiring interviewee in Flow is Ashok Gadgil, Senior Staff >Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of >California, Berkeley professor, who knows the dire consequences of >biologically contaminated water firsthand. While growing up in India, he >lost five cousins to unhealthy drinking water. To help solve this >widespread problem, Gadjil invented a water disinfector that uses >UV-light to kill water-borne bacteria and viruses. This "financially >viable, self-sustaining model" is maintained cooperatively in local >communities - not by multinational for-profit corporations. For only $2 >per person per year, over 500,000 Indians living in rural villages now >have clean drinking water. > >Flow captures the complex nature of water supply and accessibility >issues with well-researched and entertaining information. But at times >there are too many people saying the same thing. The film could have >benefited by focusing more on inspiring new technology, such as Gadgil's >water filtration system, and creating a narrative structure, instead of >a barrage of interviews. Still, everyone interviewed drives the film's >message home, and by the end viewers will think twice about their >current habits. > >When I finished watching the film, I turned on my kitchen sink in my >Oakland, California apartment and filled a tall glass with fresh clean >water. I had never thought twice about where this water came from, and >assumed the supply was unlimited, especially when taking too many long >showers. But then I remembered Barlow's prediction, "California's water >supply is running out - it has about twenty years of water left in the >state". > >Flow could not be a timelier documentary because the world is literally >running out of clean water. The unanswerable question of who owns water >will become irrelevant when there is not any water left to own. > >Links: > >{1} www.flowthefilm.com > >{2} >http://thewip.net/contributors/2009/01/murky_waters_why_privatization.html > >{3} http://internationalrivers.org/ > >{4} >http://thewip.net/contributors/2008/07/a_new_china_floods_the_traditi.html > >_____ > >Flow - The Women's International Perspective (WIP) >http://thewip.net/contributors/2009/01/flow_who_owns_the_worlds_water.html > >This article is published under Title 17 USC. Section 107. See the Fair >Use Notice for more information: >http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=266&Itemid=26 > >Related Article: > >"Water Fight: corporate bottom line versus foes of privatization and >plasticization" by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change: >http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=65 > >_____ > >http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=280&Itemid=1 > > >http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com >http://www.ashisuto.co.jp -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 9633 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090201/818516c2/attachment.txt From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 06:14:02 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 08:14:02 -0500 Subject: [A-List] U.S. Removes Kashmir from Envoy's Mandate; India Exults Message-ID: U.S. Removes Kashmir From Envoy's Mandate; India Exults By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, January 30, 2009; A09 NEW DELHI, Jan. 29 -- Inside a chandeliered ballroom Thursday, Indian diplomats and business leaders and American officials held forth about a new "Cooperation Triangle" for the United States, China and India. But little mention was made at the Asia Foundation's conference on Indo-U.S. relations of the Indian government's recent diplomatic slam-dunk. India managed to prune the portfolio of the Obama administration's top envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke -- basically eliminating the contested region of Kashmir from his job description. The deletion is seen as a significant diplomatic concession to India that reflects increasingly warm ties between the country and the United States, according to South Asia analysts. Indian diplomats, worried about Holbrooke's tough-as-nails reputation, didn't want him meddling in Kashmir, according to several Indian officials and Indian news media reports. Holbrooke is nicknamed "the Bulldozer" for arm-twisting warring leaders to the negotiating table as he hammered out the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia, a peace that has stuck. "I think it is time for us -- having fobbed off Holbrooke -- to sit quietly and ask where are we and how do we manage the situation," said C. Raja Mohan, an Indian strategic analyst who served on India's national security advisory board in 2006. Mohan's comments captured the public glee many Indians feel over their country's latest diplomatic success. It follows the government's victory in securing a deal with the United States that gives India access to civilian nuclear technology, even though it is a not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India and Pakistan have made slow but steady progress on Kashmir over the past four years, but relations quickly chilled after the November attacks in Mumbai; India accused Pakistan of aiding in the three-day assault. Few places represent the region's complexities more than Kashmir, a territory that has been disputed since the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. The nuclear-armed nations have fought two wars over Kashmir, and the United States stepped in to head off a third one in 2001. Both countries claim Kashmir and both control parts of it, with the United Nations monitoring a cease-fire line between them. "No matter what government is in place, India is not going to relinquish control of Jammu and Kashmir," Brajesh Mishra, India's former national security adviser, said in reference to the territory's Indian-administered sector. "That is written in stone and cannot be changed." During the U.S. presidential campaign, Obama said the Kashmir issue was central to any stability in the region. But India is suspicious of third-party intervention in the dispute. Kashmir is an internal issue and shouldn't be a part of any outsider's mandate, many Indian officials here say. The country's Outlook magazine ran a cover story this week showing Obama dancing with his wife at an inaugural ball with the headline: "Should India fear him? What India must do to ensure Kashmir won't get caught in the crosshairs." Last week, Mohan warned Holbrooke against "any high-profile intervention" in Kashmir. The topic is so politically sensitive here that it is referred to as the "K-word." At a news briefing Tuesday, State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said Kashmir was not part of Holbrooke's mandate. "His mandate is to go out and try to help bring stability to Afghanistan, working closely with Pakistan," Wood said. "India has some very clear views as to what it wants to do vis-a-vis dealing with the Kashmir issue, as well as the Pakistanis." When asked whether Holbrooke would play a role if there were heightened tensions again over the Mumbai attacks, Wood said, "I don't want to speculate in terms of what he may or may not do, but his brief is focused solely on, as I said, Afghanistan-Pakistan." Holbrooke was originally tasked as the special envoy for Afghanistan, Pakistan "and related matters," code for India and Kashmir, according to a U.S. official in Washington who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak publicly. But on the morning Holbrooke's posting was announced, "related matters" had been deleted from the description. Wood said at a briefing Thursday that Holbrooke would stop at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on Tuesday before heading to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the border region is a haven for Taliban fighters and where Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding. Pakistan and Afghanistan have yet to comment on the Kashmir decision. But other South Asia experts say that taking Kashmir out of Holbrooke's hands may upset Pakistan and that there may be back-channel negotiations anyway. "Intellectually, it is impossible to disentangle these problems from each other," said Daniel Markey, a South Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "The smartest thing is to work on this behind the scenes." From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Feb 2 08:04:23 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:04:23 +0900 Subject: [A-List] How Wall Street's Scam Artists Turned Home Mortgages Into Economic WMDs Message-ID: <49870B77.4090003@ashisuto.co.jp> by Joshua Holland, AlterNet AlterNet (October 18 2008) If the ABCs of the financial meltdown leave your head spinning - if "default swaps" and "collateralized debt obligations" and "high-rated tranches" are all just so much gobbledygook - don't worry. You're not alone. The alphabet soup of exotic investments that represent the immediate cause of the banking mess is so complex that many of those "innovative" financiers responsible for bringing the global economy to the brink of collapse are now making a fortune in consulting fees explaining just what the hell it is that they created. According to the Financial Times, Robert Reoch, the London banker who may be responsible for creating the first of the now-infamous debt-based securities, is now "swamped by investors who want to extricate themselves from derivatives-linked messes, or simply to understand the products that came out of the past few years of intense financial innovation". The Washington Post reported that Joe Cassano, the financial products manager "whose complex investments led to (AIG's) near collapse", is raking in $1 million per month in consulting fees from the ailing financial giant to help sort out the toxic sludge on (and off) the bank's books. But despite the dense jargon, it's important to get a handle on this stuff. The global economy is at risk of a crash that would cause intense pain among millions of ordinary people, and not because of a few million homeowners overextending themselves, but rather as a result of a small number of savvy wheeler-dealers rigging an unregulated investment market in such a way that they'd always win no matter who else lost. This is a story that's easily lost in the mumbo-jumbo of market-speak, and the investment banking community - and its political allies - have been working feverishly to shift the blame for the mess onto the poor and people of color, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - the large government-backed lenders - community groups, "Congressional liberals" and even gay people. Those charges don't even rise to the level of an argument, but that only becomes clear when you have a grasp of what all these "toxic" securities that everyone's talking about really are. It's certainly true that people got in over their heads during a frenzy of home-buying and refinancing, and it's also true that lawmakers from across the political spectrum have long tried to increase American home ownership - it's a politically attractive antidote to inequality. In 2002, George Bush announced an ambitious goal to increase "the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million before the end of the decade", and in 2005, before the house of cards came tumbling down, he said, "I like the idea of home ownership ... What I want is more and more people from all walks of life, including our African-Americans, opening up the door where they live and saying, welcome to my home; welcome to my piece property [sic]". But the focus on home mortgages misses a crucial point: Through mid-July, banks had written off about $435 billion in bad American mortgages, a drop in the bucket relative to the size of the global economy. There's simply no way that even a major drop in the value of the US housing market could possibly threaten the economic health of most of the planet. That's where "derivatives" come in. These instruments, which Warren Buffet called "the real Weapons of Mass Destruction", are "worth" about $500 trillion, or roughly ten times the output of the global economy. So just what is a derivative? A derivative is a piece of paper that can be bought and sold for real money but isn't attached to a real asset. Its value is simply derived from something tangible - hence the name. You hear a lot of talk these days about the "real" nuts-and-bolts economy, and derivatives are in essence the exact opposite: They represent an unreal economy, created by financiers in mahogany-paneled office suites in New York and London, and it's this shadow economy that teeters on the edge of collapse today, threatening to bring down much of the real economy with it. There are all sorts of derivatives. They are essentially bets - you can bet that a market will go up, or down, or that a particular company will do well or poorly. You can bet on interest rates going up or down, or the value of a country's currency, or you can make more exotic bets about just about anything in the world - even what the weather will be like at some point in the future. But the current meltdown was caused by debt-backed securities tied, at some point, to the US housing market. When you buy a home, that's an asset. Presuming you make your monthly payments, the mortgage held by the bank is an asset as well. When a number of mortgages are cut up and bundled together and then sold off as a security, that's a derivative. Writing in Salon, Andrew Leonard offered a useful metaphor. He suggested that we think of the real economy like a football game, with real flesh-and-blood players running around on a real field, hitting each other and moving a real ball toward a real goal post. All those guys, the field, the equipment - they're tangible, the same way that an asset like your house is tangible. There are some people who have a direct stake in the game - like the teams' owners and the players' families, agents, et cetera. But there are also millions of people who might bet on the outcome of the game but are in no way directly involved in the play. It's these bets that parallel the trillions of dollars in debt-based derivatives that have become so "toxic" - they were making some people rich when the housing market was flying, but now that it's tanked, they've turned out to be bad bets, and the amount of money at stake is enormous - far, far larger than the entire value of the US housing market. Now, we've also heard a lot about "credit default swaps", "collateralized debt obligations", "structured finance products" and a lot of other finance-speak in recent weeks. Collateralized debt obligations are collections of debt - any kind of debt, but in this case bundles of mortgages - that are sliced and diced and sold off to investors. Credit default swaps are like a form of insurance that allows those investors to hedge their bets, in case their guts prove wrong and the debt that they're betting will be repaid turns bad on them. All these exotic financial vehicles are essentially contracts between two parties - like bets between two fans - that lay largely outside of the regulatory system that governs most of the banking sector. In theory, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this - these are tools that allow sophisticated investors to control the amount of risk they're taking on when they plunk down their money to buy into some sort of security. But in practice, these exotic financial instruments have the potential to devastate the world economy. And you don't need an MBA and an intimate understanding of how "obligation acceleration derivatives" work to understand how. You only need to understand a few central aspects of the huge market in debt-based securities that's grown up over the past three decades. In large part, they exist in a shadowy world free of regulation or oversight, they allow investment bankers to repackage risky investments into something that appears to be relatively safe (or at least safer than they really are), and they allow investors to "leverage" their investments - essentially buying securities that they don't have the money to purchase - to a far greater degree than traditional investments allow. During the 1990s, when interest rates were low around the world, the demand for more exotic "structured" investments - including various derivatives and swaps - skyrocketed. And the investment bankers who were structuring these fancy new bets had little to lose in giving investors what they wanted, as long as the housing market - the hard assets underpinning all this theoretical wealth - held up. In order to meet the demand, those financial gurus also put enormous pressure on the lending industry to lower its standards and pump out more and more loans for everything from houses to small businesses to consumers' spending - the raw materials for the new investment vehicles they were creating out of the ether. By doing so, speculators in the "unreal" financial economy had an enormous amount of influence over events in the real economy. Think about that last point. It's the equivalent of people who are gambling on that football game paying off the ref, or bribing a player to fumble the ball on the five-yard line. _____ Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. It's during uncertain times like these that you need the kind of fiercely independent progressive analysis that you've come to expect from AlterNet to make sense of it all. If you haven't signed up for our weekly Corporate Accountability and Workplace newsletter yet, now is the time. We simply can't fit all the economic coverage we're running on our front page, so if you're not getting the newsletter, you're missing out on some really important news and commentary. Sign up today at http://alternet.org/newsletter/subscribe/?group=55918 (c) 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. http://www.alternet.org/story/103514/ http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 09:19:30 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 08:19:30 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?It=E2=80=99s_Not_Going_to_Be_OK?= Message-ID: <875826.40813.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> It?s Not Going to Be OK http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090202_its_not_going_to_be_ok/ Posted on Feb 2, 2009 By Chris Hedges The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability. At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed. How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won?t have to wait long to find out. There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless. Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book ?Democracy Incorporated? uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. ?Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,? Wolin writes. ?Economics dominates politics?and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.? I reached Wolin, 86, by phone at his home about 25 miles north of San Francisco. He was a bombardier in the South Pacific during World War II and went to Harvard after the war to get his doctorate. Wolin has written classics such as ?Politics and Vision? and ?Tocqueville Between Two Worlds.? His newest book is one of the most important and prescient critiques to date of the American political system. He is also the author of a series of remarkable essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from public awareness because, as he told me, ?it is harder and harder for people like me to get a public hearing.? He said that publications, such as The New York Review of Books, which often published his work a couple of decades ago, lost interest in his critiques of American capitalism, his warnings about the subversion of democratic institutions and the emergence of the corporate state. He does not hold out much hope for Obama. ?The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged,? Wolin told me when I asked him about the new Obama administration. ?This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don?t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium.? Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that without ?radical and drastic remedies? the response to mounting discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge ?expansion of government power.? ?Our political culture has remained unhelpful in fostering a democratic consciousness,? he said. ?The political system and its operatives will not be constrained by popular discontent or uprisings.? Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive. I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in our standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty lead the working and middle classes to place their faith in demagogues, especially those from the Christian right? ?I think that?s perfectly possible,? he answered. ?That was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn?t just FDR. There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin. There were even more extreme movements including the Klan. The extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and bleakness is a very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism.? He said the widespread political passivity is dangerous. It is often exploited by demagogues who pose as saviors and offer dreams of glory and salvation. He warned that ?the apoliticalness, even anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements in taking us towards a radically dictatorial direction. It testifies to how thin the commitment to democracy is in the present circumstances. Democracy is not ascendant. It is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The extent to which young people have been drawn away from public concerns and given this extraordinary range of diversions makes it very likely they could then rally to a demagogue.? Wolin lamented that the corporate state has successfully blocked any real debate about alternative forms of power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not, he said. And those who critique corporate power are given no place in the national dialogue. ?In the 1930s there were all kinds of alternative understandings, from socialism to more extensive governmental involvement,? he said. ?There was a range of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is the narrow range within which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed to work with the financial system. So the people who helped create this system are put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major effort to think outside the box.? ?The puzzle to me is the lack of social unrest,? Wolin said when I asked why we have not yet seen rioting or protests. He said he worried that popular protests will be dismissed and ignored by the corporate media. This, he said, is what happened when tens of thousands protested the war in Iraq. This will permit the state to ruthlessly suppress local protests, as happened during the Democratic and Republic conventions. Anti-war protests in the 1960s gained momentum from their ability to spread across the country, he noted. This, he said, may not happen this time. ?The ways they can isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are formidable,? he said. ?My greatest fear is that the Obama administration will achieve relatively little in terms of structural change,? he added. ?They may at best keep the system going. But there is a growing pessimism. Every day we hear how much longer the recession will continue. They are already talking about beyond next year. The economic difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and because of globalization more difficult to deal with. I wish the political establishment, the parties and leadership, would become more aware of the depths of the problem. They can?t keep throwing money at this. They have to begin structural changes that involve a very different approach from a market economy. I don?t think this will happen.? ?I keep asking why and how and when this country became so conservative,? he went on. ?This country once prided itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It is probably the most conservative of all the advanced countries.? The American left, he said, has crumbled. It sold out to a bankrupt Democratic Party, abandoned the working class and has no ability to organize. Unions are a spent force. The universities are mills for corporate employees. The press churns out info-entertainment or fatuous pundits. The left, he said, no longer has the capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state. He said that if an extreme right gains momentum there will probably be very little organized resistance. ?The left is amorphous,? he said. ?I despair over the left. Left parties may be small in number in Europe but they are a coherent organization that keeps going. Here, except for Nader?s efforts, we don?t have that. We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that?s about it. It goes nowhere -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 11746 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/f69ded98/attachment.txt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 10:13:36 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:13:36 -0800 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?It=E2=80=99s_Not_Going_to_Be_OK?= In-Reply-To: <875826.40813.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <875826.40813.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498729C0.4060401@gmail.com> Charles Brown, on behalf of Chris Hedges: > Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California > in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book ?Democracy Incorporated? uses > the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. > Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not > revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its > expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to > cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically > manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic > institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by > citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to > compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in > Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate > media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a > bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity > gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or > Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. ?Under inverted > totalitarianism the reverse is true,? Wolin writes. ?Economics dominates > politics?and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.? I've come to term it "Soft Despotism". Leigh From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 10:20:10 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:20:10 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Flow In-Reply-To: <7alu89$3cih4e@ipo4smtp.cc.utah.edu> References: <4986494D.1040507@ashisuto.co.jp> <7alu89$3cih4e@ipo4smtp.cc.utah.edu> Message-ID: <49872B4A.2050703@gmail.com> Todd Boyle wrote: > People have been buying up the water rights in the U.S. for decades, > rubbing their hands in glee, thinking that title to ownership is like > a physical attribute of nature, mass, temperature, color, owner, etc. Repost: Torrent: http://www.mininova.org/tor/1852310 Currently, 5 seeds, 2 leechers. A 22 part audiobook (from tape) of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Unabridged, a history of US water politics, specifically in relation to Western US water policy. The narration is 'flat' but human, not digital. The wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert has more. Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, is a 1986 book (ISBN 0-14-017824-4) about land development and water policy in the western United States. Subtitled The American West and its Disappearing Water, it gives the history of the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and their struggle to remake the American West. The book's main conclusion is that development-driven policies, formed when settling the West was the country's main concern, are having serious long-term negative effects on the environment and water quantity. The book was revised and updated in 1993. Some of the topics discussed: * John Wesley Powell * Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869 * Rain follows the plow * William Mulholland * Owens Valley * California Water Wars * NAWAPA * Hoover Dam * Los Angeles Department of Water and Power From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 11:47:47 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:47:47 -0800 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?It=E2=80=99s_Not_Going_to_Be_OK?= In-Reply-To: <991641.19518.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <991641.19518.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49873FD3.2030903@gmail.com> Charles Brown wrote: -On Mon, 2/2/09, Leighm wrote: Charles Brown, on behalf of Chris Hedges: Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book ?Democracy Incorporated? uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. ?Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,? Wolin writes. ?Economics dominates politics?and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.? I've come to term it "Soft Despotism". Leigh ^^^^ CB: Proto-fascist If you would... I've just uploaded a video to my site. Van Hagar sees all... explains all! (to an audience in Fresno California, 1992) ... "It's a rip off!" http://www.leighm.net/media/dream.m3u It's a pocketPC AVI video file (small screen 320x240), a little over 4 minutes and 6.0mb. Due to the technical nature of AVI video, it doesn't 'stream', and depending on networks speed, could take a couple of minutes to start. Or just grab the file: http://www.leighm.net/media/The_Dream_Is_Over_PPC.AVI Enjoy From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 11:52:11 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:52:11 -0800 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?=5Bcorrection=5D_It=E2=80=99s_Not_Going_to_Be_?= =?utf-8?q?OK?= In-Reply-To: <991641.19518.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <991641.19518.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498740DB.5030804@gmail.com> NOT: http://www.leighm.net/media/dream.m3u Case sensitive: http://www.leighm.net/media/Dream.m3u From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 12:20:03 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:20:03 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Day Two: Obama preserves rendition (Day 11: Did the LA Times gets 'punked'... 'rolled'?) Message-ID: <49874763.6060702@gmail.com> RawStory... Linkage @ site: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Obama_preserves_rendition_in__0201.html Obama preserves rendition two days after taking office 02/01/2009 @ 10:47 am Filed by Jeremy Gantz Update at bottom: Did LA Times get 'punked'? Liberals push back against LA Times story Two days after taking the helm of a country ready for change after eight years of George W. Bush, President Obama has allowed one controversial "War on Terror" tactic to remain in place: rendition. Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition -- the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. -- remains in the CIA's playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama. Other executive orders shuttered the CIA's secret prisons and banned the harsh interrogation techniques that have been termed torture. And in his most widely noticed break with his predecessor, Obama signed an order to close Guantanamo Bay's prison within one year. But rendition will remain. Obama and his administration appear to believe that the rendition program was one piece of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard, the Los Angeles Times reported. An administration official told the newspaper anonymously: "Obviously you need to preserve some tools -- you still have to go after the bad guys. The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice." The momentous decision by Obama and his young administration appeared in a small provision of one executive order, which states that instructions to close the CIA's secret prison sites "do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." Under that language, the Soviet-era black site used by the CIA between 2002 and 2004 and revealed by Raw Story in 2007 would remain open. Intelligence officials signaled the facility would no longer be used after it received broad public attention in the Polish press. In late 2007, the U.S. House voted to effectively end CIA renditions. But that prohibition, part of a $50 billion Iraq funding bill, was never passed in the Senate. Also in 2007, Congress apologized for the wrongful detainment of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was "rendered" to Syria, where he was tortured into making a false confession. Obama's decision to continue rendition on an apparently limited basis revives questions about the tactic's effectiveness -- not to mention legality. "The reason we did interrogations [ourselves] is because renditions for the most part weren't very productive," a former senior CIA official told the Los Angeles Times anonymously. But surprisingly, Human Rights Watch -- the worldwide watchdog group that vehemently opposed Bush-era secret detentions facilities and torture tactics -- supports Obama's decision to continue the practice of rendition. "Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, told the Los Angeles Times. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured..." But the former CIA official wasn't quite so optimistic. "In some ways, [rendition] is the worst option," the former official said. "If [the prisoners] are in U.S. hands, you have a lot of checks and balances, medics and lawyers. Once you turn them over to another service, you lose control." Liberals push back against LA Times story Many liberal online journalists and bloggers are pushing back against the LA Times story, saying that the paper "got rolled" and/or "punked." At his blog at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan writes about the "rendition canard." "For some reason, many people on the right and a few within the CIA feel the need to minimize the difference between Obama and Bush on the terror war," Sullivan writes. "And so we are greeted with whoops and hollers because the Obama administration will return to the rendition policies of the GWH Bush and Clinton administrations." However, Sullivan, Washington Monthly's Hilzoy, Harper's Scott Horton, and Cernig at Newshoggers all beg to differ with the LA Times take on Obama's 'endorsement' of rendition. "It is not the practice of 'extraordinary rendition' that the Bush-Cheney administration pioneered to supplement its own torture program," Sullivan writes. "It is the practice of capturing terror suspects and rendering them to non-torturing foreign governments for detention, interrogation or prosecution." Sullivan charges, "The LA Times got rolled by the usual suspects, who seem not to understand how the program changed under Bush-Cheney." At Washington Monthly, Hilzoy argues that "in addition to announcing that the administration will obey the Convention Against Torture, the administration will also study not whether to send detainees off to be tortured, but how to ensure that our policies are not intended to result in their torture, and will not result in their torture. This seems to me like a very clear renunciation of the policy of sending people to third countries to be tortured." "The Los Angeles Times just got punked," Scott Horton writes. Horton adds, "In the course of the last week we?ve seen a steady stream of efforts designed to show that Obama is continuing the counterterrorism programs that he previously labeled as abusive and promised to shut down. These stories are regularly sourced to unnamed current or former CIA officials and have largely run in right-wing media outlets. However, now we see that even the Los Angeles Times can be taken for a ride." Related articles: Soviet-era compound in northern Poland was site of secret CIA interrogation, detentions. From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 16:35:06 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:35:06 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Admissions of Guilt department Message-ID: <4987832A.6020908@gmail.com> A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. Immediately upon its establishment in 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs was an instrument by which the United States enforced its ambition against the Indian nations. As the nation expanded West, the agency participated in the ethnic cleansing that befell the western tribes. War begets tragedy, but the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the bison herds, the use of alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life. After the devastation of tribal economies, the BIA set out to destroy all things Indian by forbidding the speaking of Indian languages, prohibiting traditional religious activities, outlawing traditional government, and making Indians ashamed of who they were. Worst of all, the BIA committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools. The trauma of shame, fear, and anger has passed from one generation to the next, and manifests itself in the rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence that plague Indian country. The BIA expresses its profound sorrow for these wrongs, extends this formal apology to Indian people for its historical conduct, and makes promises for its future conduct. ED445851 - Remarks of Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary--Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, at the Ceremony Acknowledging the 175th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Publication Date: The date the document or article was published. 2000-09-08 Publisher name and contact information, as provided by the publisher; updated only if notified by the publisher. Full text at Web site: http://www.doi.gov/bia/as-ia/175gover.htm. (Dead link... NOT on BIA search engine.) Here: http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED445851&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED445851 PDF Direct: http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED445851 From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Feb 2 17:20:51 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:20:51 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street Message-ID: <49878DE3.70804@ashisuto.co.jp> You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you know your derivatives from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to understanding the current market freakout. by Andrew Leonard Salon.com (August 17 2007) >From New York to Hong Kong and everywhere in between, alarm bells are ringing. Central bankers are on 24/7 alert, ready to perform life support on catatonic markets. Stock traders are panicking - the Dow's wild ride on Wednesday, down 350 points and then almost all the way back, is just the latest declaration of confusion and fear. If you had been paying only casual attention to the financial markets as summer rolled along, you could be excused for glancing at the headlines and wondering, what the hell is going on? By many measures the global economy is growing faster than it has for decades. But in our globalized world, anxiety is everywhere. Soon after the markets close in New York, Asia's traders start running for cover. By the time they're exhausted, Europe is picking up the relay. And then back to the United States it comes. People who devote their entire lives to studying the intricacies of high finance are confused right now. But the basic story line isn't that complicated once you break it down into simple building blocks. And that's what Salon is going to do. Here are some simple questions and, we hope, some simple answers. How did this happen? How did we get here? What does it all mean? There is a standard explanation included as a paragraph in almost every story attempting to explain the current turmoil. It goes like this: Anxious to goose the US economy out of its dot-com-bust doldrums, Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Bank lowered interest rates to rock bottom in 2001. The resulting flood of cheap money encouraged an orgy of borrowing at every level of the US and world economies. Whether you wanted to buy a house or a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, lenders were your best friends, falling over themselves to offer you whatever amount of capital you desired - and charging low, low rates of interest. Cheap money led to a growing complacency about risk. If you ran into trouble, you could just refinance your house, or borrow a few billion more dollars today to pay off the billions you might owe tomorrow. Greenspan's policies are being blamed for inciting the greatest housing bubble in US history. The collapse of that bubble set off a wave of defaults by homeowners no longer able to make the payments on their mortgages. Mortgage lenders were the next link of the chain to break, followed by the investors who were trading in bonds and securities whose value was tied to these loans. Suddenly, risk was back! So that's that? It's Greenspan's fault? Partially, but interest rate tinkering is not the whole story. It may not even be the most important part of the story. There's another reason so many homeowners are in trouble and stock markets are imploding: Wall Street rigged the system so something like this was inevitable. One could make a case that the biggest economic story of the last ten years - bigger than the dot-com or housing booms, bigger than their busts, perhaps even bigger than the extraordinary growth of the Chinese and Indian economies - has been the astonishing growth of what is obscurely referred to as "structured finance", a crazy quilt of arcane derivatives and other "financial instruments" that have become the lifeblood of markets everywhere. Whoa. Stop right there. What is a derivative? Strictly speaking, a derivative is a financial doohickey whose value derives from some underlying asset. A mortgage loan is an asset. A pool of mortgage loans grouped together into a security that can be traded on markets is a derivative. We often hear about the "real economy", that place where real people buy and sell real things, or go to work at real jobs where they make real stuff or deliver real services. Derivatives belong to what should be called - but never is - the unreal economy, a place where speculators make bets about what will happen in the real economy. Derivatives are vehicles for making such bets. If you think the borrowers whose loans are pooled together are going to make their payments, then buying a share in a group of such investments might be a good idea. That would be your bet. A metaphor might be useful here. The real economy is like the Super Bowl. Real men on a real field push each other around and play with a real ball for a set period of time, and the team with the most points at the end wins. But while all this is going on, millions of outsiders who are not physically involved in the game bet on its outcome. Only they don't bet just on the outcome. They also bet on the spread - how badly one team might beat the other. Or they can get more creative and bet on what the combined score of the teams might be, or which team's quarterback will be the first to be injured. There's absolutely no limit to the things that you can bet on, as long as you can find someone to take your bet. The betting economy is the unreal economy. All those sports bets, no matter how kooky, are financial exercises whose value and meaning are derived from what happens on the field. Theoretically speaking, the betting economy exists in a separate dimension from the actual game, but we all know that's not true. There's so much money involved in gambling that the temptation to fix the results becomes irresistible. Players and referees, for instance, can be bribed. We can call a bribed NBA official an example of "spillover" from the betting economy into the sports economy. The very same thing happens in the real and unreal economies. So much money is riding on all the derivative bets connected to the housing sector that Wall Street speculators essentially rigged the housing sector to make their bets pay off. To understand exactly what happened, we must take a closer look at a particular kind of derivative: the infamous "collateralized debt obligation", or CDO. Say what? Collateralized who which how? Don't worry about the name. Call it an extra-special funky doohickey if you like. It's not important. What is important is its function, which is to make things that should be considered risky take on the appearance of less riskiness. After a mortgage lender makes a loan to a homebuyer, that loan is packaged up with a bunch of other loans into a security - a financial instrument that can be traded. Securities are rated by rating agencies according to the chances that the underlying assets will be defaulted upon. US Treasury bonds, for example, get stellar AAA+ ratings because the US government is considered likely to meet its obligations. A security based on a pool of subprime mortgage loans would normally not deserve an AAA+ rating. Subprime, by definition, means "not so good". Subprime loans are made to people who can't put together a down payment or have bad credit, or can't prove they have a job. Subprime loans are risky! Many investors - particularly in pension funds and municipalities - are prohibited from investing in securities that are not high-rated. Let the hedge funds and the investment banks play around with the risky BBB stuff, the "junk". The rest of us should be more prudent. But investment bankers are clever fellows. In cahoots with the ratings agencies, they came up with a way to magically transform a low-rated security to a high-rated security. (The culpability of the ratings agencies - Fitch, Standard & Poor's, Moody's - should be not underestimated. It might be helpful to think of them as the bribed referees in this game.) Enter the collateralized debt obligation. The CDO takes a pool of risky mortgage loans and divides it into slices. (Wall Street calls these slices "tranches", but that seems to be a word that makes the brains of normal people freeze up, so we'll ignore it.) For simplicity's sake, let's say that a mortgage-backed security gets divided into two slices when it is transformed into a CDO - a senior slice and a junior slice. Let's say that the senior slice gets rated AAA+ and the junior slice gets rated BBB-. But if anything goes wrong - if the homeowners whose loans are part of this security start missing their payments - the investors in the junior slice have to lose all of their money before the investors in the senior slice start feeling any pain. That's the beauty of the scheme. You take a bunch of bad loans and turn some of them into high-rated gold and some into lower-rated bronze. You sell the gold to the cautious and the bronze to the bold. If a few loans go kaput, the bronze investors suffer. If all the loans go kaput, everybody gets hurt. Unless there's a total financial meltdown, everyone is happily making money. We keep hearing in the financial news about risk being "sliced and diced". Is that what you're talking about? Yes. After the transformation, we now have an instrument that satisfies the desires of both conservative investors, who can just buy the AAA+ rated slice, and investors who have a taste for risk, who can buy the BBB- slice. It's a brilliant work of alchemy. And very popular. CDOs tied to subprime mortgages became hot commodities, snapped up with gusto by traders all over the world - even the riskiest, most likely to self-immolate, lowest-rated slices of those CDOs. Especially those slices. Why? Why was there such an appetite for risk? No risk, no reward. In the securities world, financial vehicles whose underlying assets are risky yield higher rates of return. Subprime loans ultimately charge higher rates of interest than prime loans. That means that as long as homeowners don't take advantage of introductory low rates and pay off their loans early, pools of such loans will throw off a higher stream of income than pools of less risky loans. Traders who want to get a piece of that higher stream of income will take the chance of default. This is where we approach the crucial turning point. Many different parties have been blamed for the housing mess. Homeowners are told that they should have read the fine print on their loans and should have avoided taking on financial obligations that they couldn't meet. Mortgage lenders are blamed for pushing the risky loans in the first place. And of course, there's the maestro, Alan Greenspan. But these attributions of guilt all miss the mark. The incentive for everyone to behave this way came from Wall Street, where the demand for subprime CDOs simply couldn't be satisfied. Wall Street was begging the mortgage industry to reach out to the riskiest borrowers it could find, because it thought it had figured out a way to make any level of risk palatable. So Wall Street wanted mortgage lenders to make bad loans? Let's return to our Super Bowl metaphor. The gamblers aren't satisfied with their odds of winning, so they bribe a player to fumble at the one-yard line and alter their bets accordingly. Wall Street traders, hungry for more risk, fixed the real economy to deliver more risk, by essentially bribing the mortgage originators and ratings agencies to fumble the ball or make bad loans on purpose. That supplied CDO speculators the raw material they needed for their bets, but as a consequence threw the integrity of the whole housing sector into question. But hang on. Isn't the total amount of subprime loans outstanding just a fraction of the overall home-lending market? And isn't the US economy still growing? Why has just one small sector of one country's economy caused so much trouble? Two main reasons: a lack of transparency and an overabundance of leverage. What's been described here so far is just the simplest possible model of how things work. The truth of what is really going is far more complex. So complex that no one has a good handle on exactly what will happen if things go awry. Not regulators, not traders, not even pessimistic journalists. Try reading an SEC filing from a New York investment bank - it is one of the most difficult-to-comprehend documents ever created by the human mind. It is not, in a word, transparent. It serves the opposite purpose: It is an instrument of obfuscation. Because of failures of regulatory oversight, we have very little idea who owns what, or what risks hedge funds and pension funds and municipalities and mutual funds are really exposed to. This is all fine and dandy if your goal is to prevent your competitors from understanding what kinds of bets you are making. But it becomes a much more severe problem when you're trying to figure what is going wrong when the trains start derailing. (By the way, if you're looking for something that government could do that might address this problem, calling for greater transparency carries the double whammy of being both the right thing to do and, rhetorically speaking, something that free markets are supposed to depend on for their proper functioning.) Next up: leverage. Archimedes told us that if he had a lever long enough and a place to put it, he could move the world. Speculators in the world's financial markets also like leverage; but they don't use crowbars to move objects - they use borrowed money to make bigger bets. This is fine as long as your bets pay off. But when your bets go bad, the people whose money you borrowed want it back. Right now, a great many people want their money back. The people who say that subprime is just a small part of the economy are correct. What they fail to note, however, is that the same games that Wall Street played with subprime are likely being played in every sector of the economy. It's not just a Super Bowl whose results can be fixed. The NBA, and Major League Baseball, and the Tour de France and the Olympics are all under the same pressures. Subprime ripped a window open into the way business as usual is being conducted. Now everyone wonders, what's next? Copyright (c) 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON (R) is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2007/08/17/wall_street_panic/print.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 17:42:25 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 16:42:25 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] The Concept of "Aura" and the Question of Art in Althusser, Benjamin and Greenberg Message-ID: <515668.40697.qm@web180107.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> The Concept of "Aura" and the Question of Art in Althusser, Benjamin and Greenberg By Gary Tedman http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8042/1/359/ 1-28-09, I think we should not expect Marxism to produce a scientific (correct) theory of art, which would be like a Marxist theory of biology attempting to replace Darwinism. Instead, the theory must come from within the realms of art and be "internal" to that gamut of practices. Of course, Marxism has an input to make on this subject, and, in the absence of a universally accepted theory, it is obliged to take a position on art, to pick a side, so to speak. It is also obliged to champion those theories of art it thinks are the most progressive and scientific. I am not convinced that Marxism has done this in the past at all times. The Marxists Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg have, I would argue, produced the most progressive theories of art, sometimes almost as an aside to their more pressing concerns. This essay critiques their contributions and also seeks to amalgamate them into a new and radical whole. It will help us to start this investigation by thinking of visual art as visual philosophy. Art, if it is not simply decorative, entertainment, or utilitarian, communicates deep and fundamental ideas, just like philosophy. I realize, of course, that ?What is philosophy?? is no easy question. The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) has, however, made it an easier one for us. For Althusser, philosophy is class struggle in the field of theory. It battles over the status of the sciences. Thus, the practice of science is distinguished from the practice of ideology. Art, however, differs from philosophy in that, while philosophy (at least as commonly understood) deals with the rational via writing, art specializes in ?feelings,? taking feeling to mean both emotion and sensory perception, using its materials in subtle ways to affect the senses. Linking art and philosophy in this way has the benefit of revealing a hitherto hidden aspect of art: As Althusser said, all philosophy interpellates us as subjects. The same can be said about art. ?Interpellation" is a concept Althusser developed in his theory of ideology. For Althusser, ideology (even a system of false ideas such as bourgeois ideology) participates in the ongoing reproduction of the already existing social conditions of production. "As any child knows," Althusser said, all societies must reproduce themselves. Ideology is necessary in order to reproduce the "right kind" of human subject with the "right kind" of "mentality" for functioning properly in capitalist society. The bourgeois state has organized modern education to manage this task, a task which once had been the function of religious institutions. Part of this reproduction process is the ?interpellation of the subject.? Althusser?s example is the French police way of hailing: ?Hey you there!? Such hailing functions so that the subject recognizes he or she really is a "responsible individual" subject to ideology. For Althusser, the ruling philosophy always interpellates subjects, it always has a particular "world view," and it hails its subjects to recognize its authority. However, all interpellation by the state must be "materialized." It can never just consist of "pure ideas" floating from one brain to another. It must therefore exist in actual practice. We "act out" ideology, or to put it another way, because practice always comes before theory, ideology legitimizes practices that already exist (e.g., ideology legitimated the Iraq war after the war had already been started). But, as Althusser said, bourgeois philosophy ?lives by its denegation," the promise of an objective knowledge of what philosophy is, as a practice, which is offered by Marxism, is always denegated, or disavowed, by bourgeois philosophers, who assert that such knowledge is impossible. This denial of status is crucial to the ruling ideology. The bourgeois world view, for example, sees itself as just because it is universal, which means beyond all partisan positions. Because of this it may/can be forceful, resort to violence, etc. The professional art teacher is similarly obliged to deny real knowledge of their practice. The phrase "there's no accounting for taste" is one of the unwritten commandments of modern art education. This reflects the bourgeois notion that art (ultimately) cannot "be scientific" or subjected to scientific analysis. In this, the ruling philosophy has decided what science and art is, but at the same time (absurdly) it holds there can be no definite (scientific) knowledge of it. It also asserts this of its own practice of philosophy. According to the ruling philosophy, we cannot know what philosophy does, as a practice. All of this is a function of the classical "bifurcation thesis," the great separation of the humanities from the sciences, which runs through all modern western education. The bifurcation thesis functions on the basis of the common ideology; it is simply asserted (unproven) by that ideology. The theorist who in the modern period really began to pick apart this assertion in relation to art was Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), especially in his essay "The Author as Producer." While, for Althusser, ideology takes part in social reproduction by creating "suitably subjected subjects," this was a process largely envisaged as taking place in domain ideology. Even though he describes ideology as existing in material practices, these practices are defined by Althusser with an emphasis on the ideological. Benjamin takes over aesthetically where Althusser leaves off ideologically by considering the material (aesthetic) form of the interpellation, i.e. the sensual mediation of the idea. Certainly, Althusser did this too when he wrote (relatively briefly) about art, Brecht, and the theatre, against the aesthetic of "myths and drugs," as he put it, but Benjamin is a more detailed and, I suggest, gets us further. Benjamin, at the time of his writing, was bemoaning the rise of Neo-Kantian philosophical aesthetics (as opposed to Marxian materialism), and demonstrated its revival in the practice of contemporary leftist art. He put forward his theory against positions that he felt were then, in the 1930s, dominant, "Activism" and the "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit). Activism promoted a classless notion of "common sense" and defended, according to Benjamin, the "indefinable attitude" of "men of mind," referring to their placing all of the emphasis on a metaphysical notion of content understood as entirely separate from the process of language use. Benjamin opposed the Lukacsian theory of art, and any dramaturgy that based its principles on a notion of tragedy which perceived the dramatic hero as the proponent of will in a conflict between two mutually exclusive ethical demands. He criticized, on this basis, those whom he saw as undergoing a revolutionary development only in terms of mentality, without at the same time being able to think through the question of their own work, its technique, and its relationship to the means of production. He thought that these movements functioned (however revolutionary they may have seemed) in a counter-revolutionary way as long as artists experienced solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind, and not as material producers. Instead of asking what the position of an artwork was vis-?-vis the production relations of its time ? does it underwrite these relations, is it reactionary, or does it aspire to overthrow them? ? Benjamin said we should rather ask the question: What is the artwork's position within the relations of production? He argued that this way of looking at art would make artistic products accessible to immediate materialist social analysis, the concept of technique being the dialectical starting-point from which the "sterile dichotomy" of form and content could be overcome. For Benjamin, this was a better way to determine the relationship between an artwork's political tendency and its quality. If a correct political tendency in a work of art includes its literary (artistic) quality, then its literary (artistic) tendency should consist in a progressive development of technique. His example is Brecht's "art of thinking inside other people's heads." (We should note here that, according to Warren Montag, Althusser also came to this conclusion at one point ). Benjamin argues that Brecht's method allowed the process of drama to become transparent to the spectator: that in order to make the sensory transactions accountable, Brecht had developed just such a "productive aesthetic" ? for example, the well known "alienation effect" (not to be confused with Marx's concept of alienation) was a sensual technique of this aesthetic. However Benjamin seems to diverge from this theory when we come to his far more influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (Harrison, 2005). This difference is worth examining because of the latter essay?s standing in the field of art and art history/criticism. In this essay, Benjamin has been interpreted as saying that the new capitalist production relations and the new forces of artistic production within it, such as photography and film, overcome the above-mentioned limitations by (we must presume) the fact of their mass reproducibility ? because mass reproduction removes the so-called "aura" of the traditional work of art. Of course, Benjamin's concept of "aura" is usually taken as referring to a politically undesirable thing by the left, given that it can imply a precious, unique, "elitist" quality, but the background of his thesis derives here from a particular, and relatively traditional, view of art history. It has often been stated in the literature that previously art was religious and that it is only now with modern production that it has become political. Benjamin seems to legitimate this view in his "Work of Art? essay of a radical shift from the previous conditions of art production. I submit, however, using as an example Althusser's theory of how modern education as part of the ideological state apparatus (which deals with the reproduction of ideas) emerged from a feudal background. Althusser contends that art, although definitely located in religious culture, was even in its feudal past political, not least because religion itself was a political force responsible for the maintenance of class order. The change in the mode of production does not alter this aspect. Put bluntly, Benjamin does not seem to acknowledge this function of religious art, and therefore makes the modern condition of art too radically distinct from past class relations. One consequence of this is that his idea that the art of the past did not have a mass audience (as the art of modern reproduction does) is overstressed. In fact, art produced by the old guild system could often be seen by large audiences and even be paraded in the streets. Also, its method of production was often not individual but workshop-based, so that many artists, including apprentices, would work on a single painting. This is not so dissimilar from, say, today's film production, but, ironically perhaps, today's celebrity artists are actually less likely to work together this way. Benjamin?s position also assumes that art needs a mass audience immediately to have a "mass effect," a position which ought not to be simply taken for granted. Great works of art may achieve their mass effect instead by permeating culture slowly, but nevertheless more thoroughly than lesser works, in the passage of time. There are of course many examples of this that we can experience right now in the museums, and this is, of course, a tacit acknowledgment that art has this exact function, in time. Benjamin's other key idea in "The Work of Art? essay, that traditional art has an aura because of its provenance as a unique object in time, may perhaps be considered a progressive, material, aura. By progressive I mean that provenance is always involves a material object being subject to the unique moment in which it was materially constructed, as well as with the material processes that affect it in its subsequent history ? all of which are aspects revealed by the object (when studied closely). Thus, even if a work of art is reproduced exactly, it is difficult to fake provenance. Time cannot be repeated. Additional resources: Podcast #91 - The Road to Peace PA Editors Blog Pass the Recovery & Reinvestment Act Super Bowl, Steelers, Rooney and Obama The Super Bowl Subscribe to this Feed If this interpretation is correct, the sharp contrast, which is often implied, between the new "anti-aura" and the feudal tradition with its religious "pro-aura," is erroneous. All "good works of art," considered as such within the framework of the new capitalist production relations at the close of the feudal period, tended to be newly defined in terms of a "reactionary" aura whatever their technical means. This was, we must assume, because of the new bourgeois humanist ideology and the new practices (exploitation, expropriation, wage slavery) it validated for that/the new ruling class. There was perhaps only a relatively slow shift in terms of the aura, just as the Reformation was a process that represented a slow shift in religious sensibility. Today there are merely different institutions (aesthetic state apparatuses), such as schools, museums, and galleries, for art. And it was and is not something unique to the new technologies promoted in and through these institutions to act against aura. The simple fact of being inherently reproducible is no guarantor against reactionary aura. Indeed we must point out that photography and film today do not generally (exceptions exist of course) go against aura; in fact, they are invariably treated as having the most intense aura of all artworks. The aura they do have, however, is not exclusively found in the uniqueness of the material object itself (the "original film," although there is of course the "director's cut"), but is also due to the uniqueness of the author "showing up" in the work (a la "auteur theory"). But this is little different from the same attitude as in regard to a "traditional" painting (although certainly the traditional Christian attitude towards the artwork may have been actually less directly associating religious values with the individual artist?s particular genius). We can now accept that if the aura of the traditional work of art was once related to its religious context, this was because it was meant to impress the illiterate and had a hypnoidal function (that is, if there was no subversion of this by the artist), adding to the special atmosphere of the church/temple. For example, traditional stained glass windows in typical European churches provided Christian narratives using light; this was their "special effect." Is this hypnoidal effect, this aura, something that modern mass reproducible artworks lack? Hardly. Today, film and video are perhaps the most hypnoidal of all media, given that, to induce this state in a subject, the classic ruse is to use a "fixed moving point," such as the typical glowing TV/video image. Today we have Microsoft Windows taking the place of the old stained glass windows. As "windows," we see they still glow with an "inner light." The only difference is we now invariably have these little "temples" at home, where they can more easily probe us and know our "preferences." In a sense, they watch us far more closely than Big Brother ever could in Orwell?s ?1984?; they are the new temple and oracle rolled into one. Thus we can see that there are at least two kinds of aura, and two ways we can treat this concept-term. Iona Singh has shown how the apparent aura of great works of art by Vermeer ("Vermeer, Materialism, and the Transcendental in Art," in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 16 no. 3) is in fact its superior physical/sensual properties, made by an artist with great skill with materials, and it is this 'sensual aura' that is actually misrepresented by bourgeois critics who wish to salvage these great works for their 'normal' hypnoidal aura. Yet, at the same time, we see that there are traditional artworks that do have aura in precisely the negative sense, in that they use their technical means almost solely for purposes of heightening illusion at the service of mystical ideas. So, while an original traditional artwork (say, a painting) may have aura due to its unique provenance and its expert technical qualities, the new media also has this same aura, and also its own provenance as a material object. It cannot avoid this because there is always the original (even with mass reproduction and even with the Internet). Hence today, art film and photography have just as much, or as little, aura as traditional paintings by old masters, and in terms of artistic technique have the potential to hide the sensual-material transactions between the spectator and the artwork to a far greater extent because of the greater technical possibilities that exist today for illusion. Benjamin's 'The Work of Art? essay has often been taken as the modern left?s justification for many recent kinds of 'new technological' but still narrative art, art that, in effect, still suffers from the same problems his other, more radical, essay attacked (this seems to be a peculiar contradiction in Benjamin's work). Today, mere use of new technology plus a loosely critical narrative, destined to find sympathy with a liberal outlook, is perhaps the equivalent to Benjamin?s "new objectivity." Ironically, however, because of the way Benjamin legitimates its use, this narrative technique becomes the ground on which today's progressive art invariably avoids the scientific question. For Benjamin, it seems to enough to be progressively tendentious and to use new technology, which then stands for "new technique." Although I have no wish to single out any artist, the contemporary work of Bill Viola comes to mind here, with his use of large video plasma screens showing figurative and highly illusionary, emotional, narrative artworks. His exhibition ?The Passions? at the National Gallery London (22-10-03 to 04-01-04) was in a darkened room and the entire effect was hypnoidal. Such emotionalist art always verges on being sophisticated kitsch. It has all the attributes of kitsch: it is highly illusionistic, sentimental and reliant on fancy new technology; but while I criticize, we should also note that Viola is a very professional artist and has genuine expertise, which it would be a mistake to dismiss as simply "low." In his famous defense of ?high? modern abstract art against the forces of populist kitsch, ?Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Clement Greenberg wondered how we could possibly account for "high art" alongside "low" culture, given they are so different. In his essay, Greenberg deals with a problem that Benjamin (in the essays I have mentioned above) only approaches indirectly: the accusation of elitism against advanced art technique, or in other words against avant-garde art. Certainly, it can be inferred that Benjamin?s concept of the diminishing of aura by mass reproduction is simultaneously an attack on elitism. For the Marxian Clement Greenberg of 1939, his understanding of the new US abstract expressionist avant-garde arose from: ?a superior consciousness of history ??more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism ?which made it possible.? This "consciousness of history" (according to this particular essay) somehow or other affected artists, who were even unaware of it, as it apparently just floated in on the breeze of the Zeitgeist. In terms of Benjamin?s productive aesthetic, we can see how na?ve Greenberg?s "spiritual" view actually is, how it is really a repetition of the position that Benjamin was against. Yet, peculiarly, it is used to defend just the kind of technique and quality Benjamin was arguing for (at least in ?The Author as Producer?). Greenberg?s stance clearly stems from a Marxist, but still rather humanist and consequently Hegelian, understanding of art and ideology, in which art is reduced to ideology and ideology is really ?Spirit? dressed as class struggle. Thus, for Greenberg, the state's education of the artist makes no appearance and everything is a question of mental and narrated allegiance, hovering at a distance above economic facts, but occasionally dipping into them to justify certain opinions. Greenberg essentially writes about art from a position assumed to be beyond scientific accountability, that is, from the traditional perspective of the arts/science bifurcation. He is in art, so he accordingly feels little obligation to provide evidence to the same degree as would be necessary in scientific discourse. Here it is only required to be convincing in the "humanities-art way": to be erudite, to be well-referenced, and to be a bit radical. Consequently his Marxism functions not to demand any scientific advance in art theory, but as an externally applied politics, i.e., more a posture than a position. In order to save the avant-garde and high art, with its special aura, even from the Soviets and their fellow travelers, whom he saw as aesthetically entwined in old-fashioned realism. Greenberg is thus obliged to distinguish between avant-garde art and "lowbrow" kitsch. But he had to do this without breaking the bourgeois taboo against ?accounting for taste.? Therefore his theory is ultimately only able to infer the existence of undefined "special people" who have the capacity to "divine" the difference between "high" and "low." This notion of "special people" is also applied to the artists he championed. Thus, although Greenberg champions avant-garde abstract artists, his is not the more rational avant-garde aesthetic of, for example, the Soviet Constructivists (e.g. Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko and Rozanova), or that of Mondrian, but a mystical one that suited his denegation of exact knowledge better. This was undoubtedly an aesthetic which still owed a great debt to the European and Soviet avant-garde in formal terms, but also, I argue, had hypnoidal aspects that could more readily support a mystical narrative. The works of the Abstract Expressionists are technically impressive and formally radical and were, I think (though I will not argue that here), superior to the then official Soviet art (whose existence, I believe, contributed to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union), and had ditched certain "dangerous" Brechtian elements of the kind for which Benjamin argued. To conclude, I maintain that in the new (US) context the techniques of avant-garde art were relatively defused to make them more amenable to their new social context, yet they still functioned in a progressive way (internally to the US, while externally they became a reactionary symbol representing the radicalism of the "free world"). Greenberg, Benjamin and Althusser were writing against the same historical backdrop, the October Revolution and the rise of the artistic avant-garde, particularly the Soviet avant-garde, and its influence, and the lasting effects of World War II, including the legacies of Nazism, Stalinism and cult of personality. It seems to me that Benjamin and Althusser were struggling to free themselves from the vestiges of humanism in how Marxism was interpreted, and that they realized the question of art was somehow central to this project. They did not entirely succeed. Indeed, they both retreat, after making some bold advances at certain stages in their writings (Althusser, for instance, towards the end of his essay on the Piccolo Teatro), to a slightly more conservative position on the question of art. I suggest this was because they came up against the dominant world view that Greenberg aptly voiced and for which he was lionized. Greenberg?s theoretical bequest, however, is much weaker than either Benjamin or Althusser, because he does not really offer any new concepts of art for us to work with. From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 17:56:26 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 16:56:26 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] The End of Neo-Liberalism and Bush's Last Scam: How Racism Sparked the Financial Crisis Message-ID: <917921.60612.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> The End of Neo-Liberalism and Bush's Last Scam: How Racism Sparked the Financial Crisis By Joe Sims http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8033/1/359/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With the collapse of several banks and insurance companies, the near bankruptcy of Detroit automakers, a 50 percent drop in world stock exchanges and an almost complete arrest of credit markets, an economic era has ended. It seems almost an understatement to say that capitalism has entered a new stage of a protracted systemic crisis. The crisis of the economy is at once a crisis in ideology. After 30 years of worship at the shrine of the free market, Reaganomics and other branches of conservative and neo-conservative thought seem bankrupt and thoroughly discredited if not dead ? and not only right-wing schools. Deregulation, privatization, intense financial speculation on debt, the scaling back if not elimination of government social spending, in a word, ?neo-liberalism? has reached its extreme limit almost bursting state-monopoly capitalism?s seams and triggering a worldwide financial meltdown. Many causes have been attributed to the turmoil. Among the main contenders: ?financialization? or the capitalism-on-crack of the bond markets and banks, a crisis of overproduction (too many goods chasing too few dollars), and a weak ?real? economy due to insufficient allocation of surplus capital to productive investment. Some point to objective processes, others stress mistaken policy decisions. Clearly all were to one degree or another at play. Caution is in order, however. Objective economic processes, mistaken fiscal policies or even chance economic accidents, taken together or alone do not sufficiently explain the impetus behind the ongoing calamity. Also at work was the pernicious influence of institutionalized racism. In fact racist lending practices may have triggered the global financial collapse. Slouching Toward Collapse The origins of how the unraveling began is to be found in capitalism?s attempt to resolve ongoing crises. In fact, the neo-liberal model itself arose in response to attempts in advanced capitalist countries to maintain profits and find new markets. Faced in the 1970s with a declining rate of profit, a fractured world economy divided into ?socialist? and capitalist camps, structural and fiscal crises along with spiraling inflation, capitalism?s generals undertook a re-forging of economic policy in the form of a wholesale assault on the edifice of the New Deal. Keynesianism had run into wall ? at least from the point of view of big capital ? and policy was now modulated to fit the maximum profit categorical imperatives of the new period. International trade pacts were formed, unions were rolled backed or held in check and fiscal policy was loosened as a new ?post-industrial? service-oriented economy emerged. At the center of this process was a huge transfer of wealth to the super rich, accomplished by means of tax cuts and a huge leap in labor productivity, as the corporate class acquired an even greater share of the surplus. For a period, neo-liberal economic policy seemed to work, lending the appearance of stability with low unemployment, relative labor peace and mild inflation, causing some to wonder if capitalism had become crisis free. Finance capital began to play an increasingly dominant role. Stressing this aspect CPUSA Chair Sam Webb writes: ?what is different in this period of financialization is that the production of debt and accompanying speculative excesses and bubbles were not simply passing moments at the end of a cyclical upswing, but essential to ginning up and sustaining investment and especially consumer demand in every phase of the cycle. When at times confronted with cyclical episodes of economic instability amid the bursting of speculative bubbles, monetarist solutions were seen as a panacea. Strengthening money supply from monopoly capital?s point of view may have helped but in contradictory ways as wages, particularly after the recession of 2001, remained stagnant or declined. At key moments in the cycle, crisis emerged. With worker compensation nearly frozen, where was the purchasing power necessary to keep the circulation process moving? Resolving this problem was a chief preoccupation of bankers, CEOs and bureaucratic policy-makers alike. Indeed, a study of productivity and wages over the last quarter century reveals the acuteness of the problem. From the mid-1970s on, driven by speed-up and new technology, productivity increased dramatically, particularly after 2000. Pay however, remained stagnant. Tracing patterns of pay and productivity, labor-affiliated commentator Jonathan Tasini noted: If the lines [productivity and wages] had continued to track closely together as they did prior to the 1970s, the minimum wage would be more than $19 an hour. The minimum wage!!! (emphasis in the original). So, in short: people had no money coming in in their paychecks so they were forced to pay for their lives through credit ? either plastic or drawing down equity from their homes. John Bellamy Foster and Harry Magdoff in an important article in Monthly Review, entitled Financial Implosion and Stagnation, also mention the equation of productivity and wages: This reflected the fact that real wages of private nonagricultural workers in the United States (in 1982 dollars) peaked in 1972 at $8.99 per hour, and by 2006 had fallen to $8.24 (equivalent to the real hourly wage rate in 1967), despite the enormous growth in productivity and profits over the past few decades. Debt accumulation was key. Speculative bubbles (in information technology and housing) became a driving force in overcoming each new crisis point. Low long-term interest rates had allowed large numbers of people to purchase homes. With rising home prices, experiencing growing debt ? and lured by an intensive marketing campaign in the ?90s by Citicorp and others ? families took out second mortgages en masse. ?Until the early ?90s,? commented Robert Brenner at the November 2008 Berlin symposium organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, ?Bubblenomics allowed people to get wealthy they thought on paper. One hundred percent of wealth is driven by borrowing and consumption, borrowing and residential investments.? Desperately Seeking Higher Profits Capitalism hit another wall, however. During the boom, purchase costs rose quickly pricing new buyers out of the market. Standard mortgages plummeted. In addition, low long-term interest rates meant low profit returns for investors. New problems emerged. In these circumstances confronted with the need to maintain profit rates and find new markets in conditions of declining wages, bankers deliberately devised loan strategies with hidden fees and ballooning interest rates that would greatly elevate the rate of return, targeting unsuspecting and ill informed consumers. Under the ideological guise of George W. Bush?s ?Ownership Society? credit would be extended to potential homeowners with low incomes and allegedly marginal or bad credit ? the subprime crisis was born. The proliferation of subprime loans can be traced to the aftermath of the dot-com bubble. After the bubble burst, speculators turned to the housing market. As Yale economist Robert Shiller asked in 2005, ?Once stocks fell, real estate became the primary outlet for the speculative frenzy that the stock market had unleashed. Where else could plungers apply their newly acquired trading talents?? As it turned out, the supply-sider?s solution to the precipitous decline in technology stocks achieved a momentary short-term fix, but carried within it seeds of a more profound and destructive practices. The editor?s of the German magazine, Der Spiegel, in a recent article spelling the displacement of US capital, argued that ?once again, Greenspan flooded the economy with money and, yet again, Wall Street started looking for a new market for its growth machine. This time it discovered the American homeowner, convincing him to take out mortgages at favorable terms, even when there was practically no collateral.? Capital then flooded the housing market as real estate became a national corporate mania. "These days, the only thing that comes close to real estate as a national obsession is poker,? commented Shiller. Brenner suggested that this mania peaked in 2003: ?Mortgage origination (house purchases) peaks in 2003 ? but the economy expanded through 2007, after which there is a decline.? He continued, ?Normal mortgages, called conforming mortgages in which people have to have a certain income and put up certain collateral or down payment ? plummeted in 2003 and 2004.? ?What saved the day? Just when the conforming mortgages were falling non-conforming mortgages, subprime or ?alt A? or ?liars loans? take over in driving the bubble.? The Federal Reserve, as suggested by Der Spigel, was directly responsible. Brenner confirmed this thesis; ?Subprime mortgages,? he said, ?became so possible, because Greenspan came in again and reduced short term interest rates to one percent in 2003, the lowest of the postwar period in the face of this problem, which meant that for two years real short term interest rates were below 0. And he did that because subprime mortgages are governed by variable interest rates.? In article at Portfolio.com entitled "The End of Wall Street's Boom," writer Michael Lewis also emphasized the role of the new niche market: ?More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population.? The growth of this niche market was spectacular. In 2000 there was between $60 and $130 billion invested in subprime mortgages. By 2005 the amount had grown to $605 billion. This increase was largely attributable to Wall Street banks, conniving with lower level mortgage companies to devise schemes to make huge sums of money by placing side bets on bad loans likely to default. They did so knowingly creating ?exotic financial instruments? and then short selling the market. Lewis described with precision the means by which the process was begun ? short selling the market ? and uncovers just how deep finance capital?s complicity ran. ?The big Wall Street firms," Lewis argued, "had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets.? PA Editors Blog Pass the Recovery & Reinvestment Act Super Bowl, Steelers, Rooney and Obama The Super Bowl Lewis, himself the author of a best selling whistle-blowing 1980s expose of Wall Street, Liar?s Poker, interviewed some of the key players in the subprime swindle, including a hedge fund?s primary trader, one Steve Eisman, who realized what the big investment houses were doing and profited handsomely from it. Lewis described Eisman as "perplexed in particular about why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell short.? The answer: profits. So profit hungry were the Wall Street traders that they pushed these new mechanisms to their farthest limit, creatively manipulating what Marx called fictitious capital. Lewis noted: In fact, there was no mortgage at all. ?They weren?t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn?t afford,? Eisman says. ?They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That?s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that?s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, this is allowed?? Not only did banks and investment firms create this phony capital, there was ruling class complicity all down the line, a complicity that included in addition to the Republican standard bearers, Democratic centrists like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, then an executive of the recently bailed out Citigroup. The beginning of the end came in 2006, according to the editors of Monthly Review: ?The housing bubble began to deflate in early 2006 at the same time that the Fed was raising interest rates in an attempt to contain inflation. The result was a collapse of the housing sector and mortgage-backed securities.? Frantic efforts to throw more money at the problem, so often criticized by the Republican right when applied to social programs, proved of no avail. Foster and Magdoff write that the new chief US financial officer, ever the student of Greenspan and Friedman opened Fort Knox: Confronted with a major financial crisis beginning in 2007, Bernanke as Fed chairman put the printing press into full operation, flooding the nation and the world with dollars, and soon found to his dismay that he had been ?pushing on a string.? No amount of liquidity infusions were able to overcome the insolvency in which financial institutions were mired. Looking back even conservative New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claimed disgust in a recent op-ed entitled ?All Fall Down.? Doling out blame Friedman believes responsibility begins with People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so. Imagine the audacity of comparing working-class families to Wall Street titans! Everyone else was getting paid: the mortgage brokers whose fees increased the bigger the sale with no penalty to themselves; the banks who then bundled the loans up and sold them to other financial institutions around the world again seemingly with no losses; the rating agencies who allowed it to happen. Only working families were left holding the bag. Friedman, quoting Lewis, revealed Wall Street?s unabashed cynicism: ?Eisman knew that subprime lenders could be disreputable. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism... ?We always asked the same question,? says Eisman. ?Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I?d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.?" Eisman himself is unsparing in his criticism: ?That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice,? he says. ?They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.? Race and the Housing Bubble As it turned out, a disproportionate number of the people they "fucked" were African American and Latino families. Perhaps this explains at least in part why no Wall Street insiders had qualms about their activities or why in recent weeks the issue seems to have almost disappeared from discourse on the economic recession. Attention to this highly important issue was given in 2008 when the Urban League, the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus made it the centerpiece of their annual conferences. As the fall election campaign swung into high gear, however, save for oblique references by the Republican candidate, John McCain, concerning the ?mismanagement? of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and more caustic comments by demagogues like Ann Coulter blaming Black and Latino families for the meltdown, the electoral discourse at the height of crisis largely stayed away from what may have been conceived as a racially charged issue. Still, as the main civil rights organizations charged in the summer of 2008, the racist origins of the subprime mess are difficult to ignore. A cursory glance at some of the statistical highlights provides ample evidence. An excellent study authored by United For a Fair Economy entitled "Foreclosed? suggests several indicators, chief among them the disproportionate numbers of people of color holding subprime loans: over 50 percent of all mortgages held by African Americans fall into this category. The figure is 40 percent for Latinos. These percentages have grave economic implications: ?Given that people of color are a disproportionate number of the subprime borrowers, and that this group?s assets are mostly concentrated in homeownership, the current foreclosure crisis can be considered the greatest loss of wealth for communities and individuals of color in modern US history.? Black and Latinos will lose between $164 and $213 billion for loans taken during the past eight years. The disproportionate numbers of Blacks and Latinos with subprime loans, while suggestive serves as only partial explanation. The central question is what caused it? Were the higher relative percentages merely the casual result of ongoing poverty or was a more causal underlying factor at play? Bush administration policy provides important clues. Subprime loans were allegedly established and encouraged as part of government and corporate efforts to provide support for struggling working-class families troubled with bad credit histories. Truth be told, former President Bush himself pushed the program, believing it would create ?stakeholders? in an ?Ownership Society? and expand meager Blacks and Latino support for the Republican Party. In the view of the New York Times, the Bush ?pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent ? and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors.? Indeed, ?the business interests of some of his biggest donors? goes to heart of the matter. While the subprime program was supposedly targeted at those with bad credit, and given that a large percentage of minorities fill this category because of poverty, it would seem disproportionality might be a normal outcome of a well-intentioned program?s attempt to redress historic wrongs. Good intentions, however, was not point. At stake were big business interests. A strong case can be made that banks deliberately connived to target minority buyers in order to push profit margins, knowing full well (from their own risk assessment calculations) that the loans could not be repaid. Not only were the banks betting on the defaults, but, in fact, were pressuring prospective Black and Latino borrowers to take out such loans, leading the unwitting customers like so many sheep to a financial slaughter house. Brenner nailed it: But who would ever lend to them? Who would lend to them is as follows: we talked about that fall in long term interest rates, this is greater for borrowers, but if you are a lender or investor you are in deep trouble because return on investment is really low. And investors are in deep crisis and here is where subprime loans bailed them out. Subprime mortgages because they are so risky pay high interest rates and became the basis for financial assets that allowed investor to appear to get high rates of return. Homeownership, as it turns out, was not the major objective of the lenders. Despite rhetoric promoting an ownership society, only a fraction of loans were awarded to first-time homebuyers. And pubic officials were well aware of this even before the financial meltdown became full blown. In the summer of 2007, in a speech before the Brookings Institute as the credit markets began to seize up, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) charged that: According to the chief national bank examiner for the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, only 11 percent of subprime loans went to first-time buyers last year. The vast majorities were refinancing that caused borrowers to owe more on their homes under the guise that they were saving money. Too many of these borrowers were talked into refinancing their homes to gain additional cash for things like medical bills. sponsored ad Lewis, quoting Eisman in the Portfolio.com article, revealed what went on in a case very close to home: Next, the baby nurse he?d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. ?She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,? he says. ?One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ?How did that happen??? It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. ?By the time they were done,? Eisman says, ?they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn?t make any of the payments.? Nor was bad credit the primary factor for distributing the loans, a myth conveniently circulated and repeated to this day. Schumer again rebutted the notion, quoting none other than the Wall Street Journal: Based on the Journal?s analysis of borrowers? credit scores, 55 percent of subprime borrowers had credit scores worthy of a prime, conventional mortgage in 2005. By the end of last year, that percentage rose to over 61 percent according to their study. While some will have damaged their credit in the interim, it?s clear that many subprime borrowers have the financial foundation for sustainable homeownership, but may have been tricked into unaffordable loans by unscrupulous brokers. Thus, working-class Black and Latino families, over half if not 60 percent of whom were eligible for conventional loans, burdened by several years of stagnant and falling wages during a jobless recovery were led by mortgage companies in clear and blatant cases of predatory racially inspired lending. The racial overtones are evident in this swindle are evident. But what made the loans predatory? The United For a Fair Economy study provides the following criteria: One factor is their marketing and sales to inappropriate customers. Another is pre-payment penalties. Seventy percent of subprime loans had such penalties. A third element was Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMS), which often carried unexplained ballooning interest rates that increase payments by as much as one-third. A majority of subprimes were ARMS. Yet another condition was the exclusion of tax and insurance costs when estimating the monthly payment for a potential home-buyer. And finally the encouragement of ordinary borrowers to take interest-only loans, where in the initial year or two only the interest is paid on, after which the principal rates kick in raising the cost dramatically. The Bush administration was not only complicit in these practices, but may have helped mastermind them. ?The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations,? according to the New York Times. ?And corporate America, eyeing a lucrative market, delivered in ways Mr. Bush might not have expected, with a proliferation of too-good-to-be-true teaser rates and interest-only loans that were sold to investors in a loosely regulated environment.? Might not expected? In actual fact, the Bush team aggressively tore up regulations, intimidated and fired reluctant administrators, litigated against states bucking their authority, taking cases even to the Supreme Court. The Times continues: As for Mr. Bush?s banking regulators, they once brandished a chain saw over a 9,000-page pile of regulations as they promised to ease burdens on the industry. When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks. The administration won that fight in the Supreme Court. When they held a majority, congressional Republicans, too, were deeply involved in the act on behalf of finance capital, threatening and winning a fight to clarify loan terms. In this regard, the Times reported, ?The president did push rules aimed at forcing lenders to more clearly explain loan terms. But the White House shelved them in 2004, after industry-friendly members of Congress threatened to block confirmation of his new housing secretary.? Why the bullying, arm bending and other no-holds barred tactics? The answer lies in the necessity of staying competitive and the imperative to achieve maximum corporate profits to do so ? on a global scale. Der Spiegel quoted a German banker: ?'We need a 25-percent return,' or else his bank would not be 'competitive internationally,' Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann said, thereby establishing a benchmark that would soon apply not just to banks but also to automobile makers, machine builders and steel companies.? Knowns and Unknowns As is now well known, this drive to stay competitive contributed mightily to the undoing of many of the economies in the developed capitalist countries. Reduced consumption in the US, Japan and Western Europe, is resulting in slowdowns throughout the globe. In addition, as is also widely known the racist toxic loans born in the US were also exported abroad, precipitating banks runs and others shock waves to the world financial system and crippling pension funds and even local governments in several countries. Where it will end remains unknown. Most bourgeois economists are of the opinion that the economic crisis will grow worse before it gets better. Economist Nouriel Roubini an early predictor of the financial chaos argues a short term a meltdown has been averted but is pessimistic about prospects for an early recovery, predicting instead a long-term bottoming out of the economy. He writes: But the worst is still ahead of us. In the next few months, the macroeconomic news and earnings/profits reports from around the world will be much worse than expected, putting further downward pressure on prices of risky assets, because equity analysts are still deluding themselves that the economic contraction will be mild and short. Marxists thinkers Magdoff and Foster put things differently: ?The prognosis then is that the economy, even after the immediate devaluation crisis is stabilized, will at best be characterized for some time by minimal growth, and by high unemployment, underemployment, and excess capacity.? Roubini contends that the current system-wide situation was not caused by the subprime scandal but triggered by it, pointing to bubbles in other areas as well, including commercial mortgages, credit cards and students loans. In addition he contends: ?these pathologies were not confined to the US. There were housing bubbles in many other countries, fueled by excessive cheap lending that did not reflect underlying risks. There was also a commodity bubble and a private equity and hedge funds bubble.? Magdoff and Foster on the other hand, point to long-term tendencies in the economy toward stagnation and pose financialization, debt and consumer spending financed by it as a consequence of the underlying weakness of growth. They write: ?Since financialization can be viewed as the response of capital to the stagnation tendency in the real economy, a crisis of financialization inevitably means a resurfacing of the underlying stagnation endemic to the advanced capitalist economy.? Whether faulty subprime mortgages caused the great financial instability or simply triggered the deepening of an already existing problem, one thing is sure: its racist origins are undeniable. What Marxist theoreticians like Henry Winston and William L. Patterson called the ?Achilles heel? of US capitalism ? racism ? has once again made itself felt and sending shock waves around the world, helping close one chapter in the class and democratic struggle and opening up another. Magdoff and Foster also employ the Achilles heel metaphor, albeit with a slightly different emphasis. This growth of consumption, based in the expansion of household debt, was to prove to be the Achilles heel of the economy. The housing bubble was based on a sharp increase in household mortgage-based debt, while real wages had been essentially frozen for decades. The resulting defaults among marginal new owners led to a fall in house prices. This led to an ever increasing number of owners owing more on their houses than they were worth, creating more defaults and a further fall in house prices. Banks seeking to bolster their balance sheets began to hold back on new extensions of credit card debt. Consumption fell, jobs were lost, capital spending was put off and a downward spiral of unknown duration began. As the struggle around the recovery package begins, it must be pointed out what are termed ?marginal new owners? were largely Black and Latino working-class families trying to make ends meet, targeted by Wall Street financiers. Recovery cannot be achieved without an economic package that bail out these homeowners beginning with a moratorium on foreclosures. At the heart of the collapse of the financial system and the economic recession lies the unparalleled greed of the banks coupled with the declining wages of poor working people exacerbated by a racist social division of labor. The solution to problem may well continue to lie in the repayment in full of a centuries-old debt. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, capitalism?s promissory note is still marked, ?Insufficient Funds.? --Joe Sims is the publisher of Political Affairs. From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 18:29:22 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 17:29:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Iraq Communists Campaign With Vigor Message-ID: <479242.72126.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Iraq Communists Campaign With Vigor from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES [FYI] The Communist Party doesn't have much of a chance in elections Saturday, but its candidates see an opportunity to woo voters unhappy with sectarian politics and wary of freewheeling capitalism. By Tina Susman and Raheem Salman January 28, 2009 Reporting from Baghdad -- "Comrade, come in," the man said, ushering a visitor into the lobby of Iraqi Communist Party headquarters. Across the busy intersection, a banner stretched across a newly renovated building promised the imminent opening of American fast-food restaurants, including "Kentacky Fried Chicken." Throughout the capital, portraits of Imam Hussein were omnipresent, reminders of a Shiite Muslim pilgrimage commemorating his death in AD 680. In a nation where religious parties dominate and many people dream of a wealthy life in the West, it's not easy being a Communist. But that doesn't seem to worry the enthusiastic comrades buzzing about the party's sprawling four-story headquarters. After decades on the sidelines or behind bars, they are banking on disenchantment with the religious parties now in power, and a wariness of freewheeling Western capitalism, to lift their fortunes in provincial elections Saturday. "In the past five years, the people have begun to understand that these political parties failed to achieve what people were hoping for," said Abdul Munim Jabber Hadi, wearing a blood-red tie and gray suit as he prepared to go out campaigning Sunday. Hadi is one of 27 Communist Party candidates vying for seats on Baghdad's 57-member provincial council. He is not expecting most of his fellow Communists to prove victorious. The party won two seats on the council four years ago in the last provincial elections, and the 275-member national parliament has two Communists. So it will take time to build power, explained Hadi, an exuberant man with a thick gray mustache. "We're in the process of building the new Iraqi state," he continued, as he sipped tea and waited for his volunteer pamphleteers to show up. Across the room, a white-haired man was discussing his years in the former Czechoslovakia and opining about President Obama's plans for repairing the U.S. economy. Conversations laced with reminiscences are common among party members, many of whom spent years in exile or prison under a succession of repressive Iraqi regimes. Mohammed Jassim Labban, a member of the party's Central Committee, was studying social sciences in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. "It was very hurtful," he said, grimacing at the memory of statues of Lenin being yanked down. Hadi, once a professional soccer player, spent four years in prison on charges of trying to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. He speaks proudly of his mother, who urged him to stick to his principles, even if it meant death by hanging. "That's my mother," he said with a chuckle. "She was a strong believer." Both blame the collapse of the Soviet empire on an overly rigid interpretation of socialist ideas. "We believe that Marxist theories are not sacred. Nothing is sacred in politics," said Labban, insisting that Iraq's Communists would not force people into collective farming or impose state control over the economy. Just what they would do if they gained power remains vague. Like most of the parties fielding candidates -- about 14,500 people are running -- the Communists speak of improving electrical service, creating jobs, ending corruption and wiping out sectarianism, without saying how they would accomplish their goals. Labban pointed to the United States' financial problems as proof that "wild capitalism," as Hadi called it, is not the answer. "We're not gloating, but we expected such a crisis, because the system was set up that way," Labban said. The Communists have their own economic woes. They depend on private contributions to fund their campaigns. They can't afford TV ads, so they hit the streets to spread their message. Hadi, who gives $20 a month to the party, goes out daily to bellow through a bullhorn that the Communists are the "party of the poor" and of "the hard-working people." On Sunday, he visited the Shorja market, a chaotic, mile-long strip lined by tall, crumbling apartment blocks dark with grime. As he marched down the street shouting hoarsely, volunteers wearing yellow jerseys with black lettering fluttered around like giant bumblebees. They thrust Communist Party literature at vendors and shoppers, dodging donkey-drawn carts and wooden wheelbarrows pushed by skinny young men moving tomatoes and space heaters. To get here from the party office, Hadi hailed a taxi. His volunteers crammed into a minivan. There were no visible signs of security. Two Communist Party politicians have been killed in the northern semiautonomous region of Kurdistan since Dec. 18. In the days before the January 2005 provincial elections, two Communist Party members in Baghdad were assassinated. But Hadi didn't seem concerned for his safety and was brimming with energy as he barreled through the crowded market at midday. The working-class Iraqis operating the stalls are the people the Communists hope to lure away from the bigger parties "I'll vote for them," said Mehdi Abbas, a taxi driver, citing the party's support for nationalizing the lucrative oil industry. "And the most important thing is that when these people win, we'll get rid of the turbaned clerics," he added with a laugh. Jamil Hussein, a dapper engineer in a tweed overcoat, said he had supported the Communist Party in 1958 after a coup ousted the nation's monarchy and brought hopes of social and economic reforms. "But the circumstances were stronger than our hopes," he said. Even now, Hussein said, he doubted the Communist Party could make a comeback against the religious forces in power. "Its popularity is not like before," he said. Religious leaders agree. Ahmed Massoudi, a spokesman for the movement loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, said he doubted there was a future for the Communist Party. "It contains good, esteemed figures, but its opportunities are limited because most Iraqis are Muslims and concerned with religious thoughts. Religion plays a major role in life here, so a party like the Communist Party has little chance to play a major role," he said. The Communists say it is just such attitudes that will work to their advantage. Most Iraqis prefer a secular government, Hadi said, as an old woman in a black abaya waved away a campaign flier. A man selling fresh fish accepted three fliers but then carefully placed one in each of his barrels of fish. None of this discouraged the candidate. "After five years, the people are at a crossroads," he said. "They can vote for those they already elected, or they can go for the new, democratic secular powers." From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 18:35:52 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 17:35:52 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] How Greedy Speculators Control Commodity Prices Message-ID: <526805.28600.qm@web180114.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> How Greedy Speculators Control Commodity Prices By Jayati Ghosh -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Original source: People's Democracy (India) One feature of the extraordinary year that has ended was the extreme volatility of global commodity markets. Because economic analysts have become so short-sighted, each of these rapid movements has been over-interpreted as reflecting structural changes in global demand and supply rather than conjunctural forces that are liable to change. For example, when global prices in oil and other commodity markets zoomed to stratospheric levels by the middle of 2008, we were told that it had nothing to do with speculation. Eminent economists joined bankers, financial market consultants and even policymakers, in emphasizing that these price rises were all about "fundamentals" that reflected real changes in demand and supply, rather than the market-influencing actions of a bunch of large players with financial clout and a desire to profit from changing prices. In oil markets, we were warned that the dire predictions of the "peak oil" doomsayers were finally coming to pass. In global food markets the rise in prices of staples was correctly identified to be at least partly related to the medium-term policy neglect of agriculture by governments especially in the developing world, but the role of speculation in commodity futures, enabled by financial deregulation, was denied. Further, it was also argued that the real gainers of this process were the direct producers: not only oil exporting countries but small farmers producing foodgrains that were becoming highly valued internationally. The commodity price boom was supposed to translate directly to income gains for such producers to the point where some governments even argued that there was no need to provide any protection to agriculture since cultivators were already gaining from high crop prices. But the subsequent collapse of commodity prices ? both oil and non-oil ? has shown how wrong the earlier explanations were, and how little primary commodity producers are likely to have gained, especially small producers in the developing world. For primary commodities as a group, all the price gains of the period January 2007 to mid-2008 were wiped out by the later fall in prices. Oil prices in November 2008 were back to the nominal level of January 2007, which implies a decline in real terms. And non-oil commodities, specifically agricultural raw materials and metals, were lower even in nominal terms. SPECULATORS RUIN FARMERS The likelihood of agriculturalists benefiting from such a short-lived price boom is, therefore, unlikely. Indeed, it is likely that they could face opposite effect: farmers shifting acreage in response to price increases could find that prices have crashed by the end of the growing season. Consider, for example, the case of cotton, the most widely planted non-food cash crop that directly affects the livelihood of millions of farmers. This price had fallen significantly in the past few years, so that in January 2007 it was less than 60 per cent of the level reached in 2005. The price started to increase around the middle of 2007, and by March 2008 had increased by 44 per cent compared to May 2007. But after that peak there has been quite a sharp crash in prices in just a few months, such that in November 2008 the price was actually lower than it had been in January 2007! Such volatility can be only very partially be explained by real changes in demand and supply. It is true that there was an increase in demand from China, the world?s foremost garment exporter, around the middle of 2007. But the rapid price thereafter was because speculators took over. Similarly, while the ongoing global recession has affected demand for clothing and, therefore, for cotton, the collapse in prices cannot be explained only by this decline, but is also the result of speculators offloading their stocks. The point is that cultivators who had responded to the price signals of the short-lived boom to sow more cotton will now find themselves stuck with a crop whose price has nearly halved in just eight months. The other major cash crops that dominate cultivation are all oilseeds, and here too, very volatile and sharp swings in prices are evident over the recent period. All the major cooking oils ? palm oil, soybean oil and rapeseed oil ? show continuous and substantial increases January 2007 onwards, followed by sharp declines in the second-half of 2008. The sharpest rise and fall occurred in the palm oil price ? increasing by 208 per cent in March 2008 and then declining by 62 per cent, such that the price in November 2008 was more than 20 per cent lower than it had been in January 2007. Once again, cultivators who opted to sow these crops when their prices were at their peak would now have to face a completely different environment with very different configurations of costs and prices that could easily make the cultivation process financially unviable. Among the agricultural prices that matter the most, of course, are foodgrain prices. The most extreme trends have been evident in rice prices which were broadly stable, increasing only gradually through most of 2007, but then exploded to increase by more than two-and-a-half times between January and May 2008. Rice prices have fallen thereafter but are still 80 per cent higher than they were at the start of the period. Some of this is attributable to the fact that the world trade market for rice is relatively thin compared to total production, as most rice-producing countries are also major consumers of their own output. The sharp rise in prices in early 2008 can be partly attributed to the export bans imposed by two major exporters: India, which the previous year exported around 5 million tons, and Egypt, which exported around 2 million tons out of total world exports of around 18 million tons. Once again, however, speculative pressures are likely to have pushed up trade prices well beyond anything that could be explained by demand-supply imbalances. Wheat prices also more than doubled between January 2007 and March 2008, and declined subsequently although they are still 16 per cent higher than they were at the start of the period. Maize prices went up less sharply but continued to increase until June 2008, but thereafter fell so sharply that the maize price is now below what it was in January 2007. While world trade prices of these foodgrains did fluctuate dramatically, and have now fallen in ways that will adversely affect exporters of these crops, retail prices of these grains have not come down in most developing country markets. Therefore, we have a strange situation in which both the direct producers and the final consumers appear to be worse off because of the volatility. In another context it could be concluded that speculators have gained from this boom-and-bust price cycle, but given the chaos in global financial markets even such a conclusion may not be warranted. A weird example, then, of a negative sum game in global capitalism. From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 21:03:49 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 23:03:49 -0500 Subject: [A-List] El Israel de las manifestaciones por la paz Message-ID: El Israel de las manifestaciones por la paz Unos veinte grupos pacifistas, entre ellos Coalici?n de Mujeres por la Paz, Anarquistas contra el Muro y el Centro de Informaci?n Alternativa, son parte de una resistencia al accionar b?lico de los gobernantes. Por Herman Schiller Hace pocos d?as se hab?a anunciado que iba a hablar en la Universidad de Tel Aviv el ministro de Defensa de Israel, Ehud Barak, art?fice de la masacre de Gaza. R?pidamente los estudiantes se movilizaron llenando las paredes de esa casa de estudios con pintadas que dec?an "Barak rotzeaj" (Barak asesino). Y el ministro, "por precauci?n", ante la evidencia de que podr?an producirse confrontaciones, decidi? suspender la conferencia. Este es uno de los tantos episodios que desde el 27 de diciembre han revelado la resistencia que, en condiciones nada f?ciles ?y en un clima pol?tico, social y comunicativo adverso? se ha extendido en Israel. Los organismos de derechos humanos israel?es han protestado por el silencio que los medios centrales han guardado al negarse a informar a la poblaci?n sobre las numerosas manifestaciones que a diario y a lo largo y a lo ancho del pa?s se produjeron contra la escalada b?lica. Una de las m?s numerosas, encabezada por el legendario Uri Avneri (l?der de Gush Shalom, Bloque de la Paz, y autor del libro Israel sin sionistas), super? las diez mil personas en Tel Aviv y s?lo mereci? 27 palabras (dentro de una nota muy larga) del matutino Haaretz, que suele ufanarse de su "pluralismo". Esa movilizaci?n, que recorri? la zona c?ntrica de la populosa urbe (desde la plaza donde asesinaron a Yitzhak Rabin hasta la Cinemateca, ocupando todos los carriles de la ancha avenida Ibn Gabirol), fue promovida tambi?n por otras 20 organizaciones pacifistas, incluidos la Coalici?n de Mujeres por la Paz, Anarquistas contra el Muro y el Centro de Informaci?n Alternativa. La pancarta gigante de Gush Shalom dec?a en hebreo, ?rabe e ingl?s "?Stop asesinatos!", "?Stop al cerco!", "?Stop a la ocupaci?n!". Entre las consignas coreadas por la densa columna se encontraban las siguientes: "Uno no construye una campa?a electoral sobre cad?veres de ni?os", "Jud?os y ?rabes no queremos ser enemigos", "Olmert, Livni y Barak, la guerra no es un juego", "Todos los ministros del gobierno son criminales de guerra", "Basta, basta, hablen con Hamas" y "Barak, Barak, no te preocupes, nos encontraremos en La Haya" (en alusi?n a la denuncia internacional que los organismos de derechos humanos israel?es formularon contra su gobierno). Tambi?n proliferaron los carteles, algunos parafraseando los lemas electorales de Barak: "Barak no es un amigo, sino un asesino" (el lema original de campa?a dice "Barak no es un amigo, es un l?der"). Y, tambi?n: "Los seis esca?os de la Knesset, esca?os de la guerra", en referencia a las encuestas que muestran que desde el comienzo de la masacre el laborismo gan? seis esca?os. La ultraderecha hostiliz? la movilizaci?n durante todo el trayecto y al llegar a la Cinemateca, donde estaban previstos los discursos, la polic?a se alej? y la patota comenz? sus agresiones con palos y armas de fuego. Hubo corridas, los provocadores se hicieron due?os de la situaci?n y la oratoria debi? ser suspendida. Los militantes de Gush Shalom me enviaron el texto del discurso que debi? pronunciar Avneri. "Acuso a Ehud Barak de aprovechar a los soldados del ej?rcito para obtener m?s esca?os ?dec?a, entre otras cosas?; acuso a Tzipi Livni de abogar por la matanza para llegar a ser primera ministra; acuso a Ehud Olmert de intentar tapar la putrefacci?n y la corrupci?n de su gobierno con esta desastrosa guerra" (..) Las cr?ticas que en todo el mundo suscitaron las acciones del ej?rcito israel? en Gaza dieron lugar a r?plicas desde el juda?smo oficial: "Ustedes no tienen en cuenta los misiles de Hamas que caen sobre la poblaci?n civil del sur de Israel". Esta argumentaci?n fue respondida por un importante referente del pacifismo israel? en la propia Beer Sheva, una de las ciudades afectadas por los misiles palestinos. Se trata del profesor Nev? Gordon, director del Departamento de Pol?tica y Gobierno de la Universidad Ben Guri?n, que declar? a la periodista Amy Goodman en un reportaje: "Reci?n, hace menos de una hora, cay? un cohete a pocos metros de mi casa. Mis dos hijos duermen desde hace una semana en un refugio antibombas. Y aun as?, creo que lo que est? haciendo Israel es una atrocidad". Gordon es uno de los tantos profesores e intelectuales israel?es que nadaron contra la corriente y concurrieron a las masivas demostraciones llevadas a cabo en Tel Aviv. En esa misma ciudad de Beer Sheva, un nutrido grupo de jud?os y ?rabes desafi? la prohibici?n de concentrarse durante la guerra y realiz? una protesta silenciosa. No vocearon consignas y se limitaron a portar carteles con las leyendas "Queremos di?logo, no violencia" y "Jud?os y ?rabes se niegan a ser carne de ca??n". El grupo me envi? el texto de la convocatoria firmada por los jud?os Daniela Yudelevich, doctora Merav Mosh? y Bela Alexandrov y los ?rabes Sultan Abu Abied, Anuar Hajoj y Fadi Masmara. El desaf?o fue reprimido y se produjeron varias detenciones, entre ellas la de Lea Shakdiel, una jud?a religiosa ortodoxa perteneciente al grupo Ierujam. El semanario en castellano Aurora, que aparece en Tel Aviv y ha mostrado una absoluta incondicionalidad con la guerra desatada por su gobierno, titul? as? una de sus ?ltimas ediciones: "Tolerancia cero contra manifestantes". Y esa misma publicaci?n inform? que en Beit Hanina, seis kil?metros al norte de Jerusal?n, la polic?a detuvo a todos aquellos que intentaron levantar una carpa de la dignidad (al estilo argentino) "en honor de los muertos en Gaza". Estos son apenas algunos ejemplos emblem?ticos. La lista completa es absolutamente mayor. Le di prioridad a la digna tarea que realizan los organismos israel?es de derechos humanos, pero tambi?n ha sido muy gravitante la acci?n de la izquierda, que realiz? centenares de actos y movilizaciones. En Haifa, la ciudad portuaria donde abundan las parejas mixtas y sigue vigente el chiste (?chiste?) de que la paz entre jud?os y palestinos s?lo se lograr? en la cama, los actos fueron numerosos. Los dos m?s importantes tuvieron lugar en el barrio de Wadi Nisnas y en el Monte Carmelo. De los ?ltimos d?as, quiero destacar la marcha de Tel Aviv a Jaffa (Iafo) que congreg? a unas 10.000 personas. Y en esta ?ltima ciudad, plet?rica de galer?as de arte y teatros independientes alternativos, se espera una concurrencia multitudinaria para el pr?ximo s?bado a la noche, jornada tradicional de las grandes concentraciones en Israel. Adem?s los M?dicos Israel?es por los Derechos Humanos est?n culminando su campa?a de recolecci?n de medicinas y alimentos para ser enviados a Gaza. En cuanto a las elecciones, la izquierda en las ?ltimas horas ha volcado buena parte de sus esfuerzos a denunciar la campa?a racista y fascista de Ivette Lieberman, un miembro de la mafia rusa que lleg? a Israel despu?s de la desintegraci?n de la URSS y que viene obteniendo buenos resultados en los ?ltimos comicios liderando un partido que se llama Israel Beteinu (Israel, nuestra casa). En el campo de los jud?os en el mundo, hay numerosas expresiones dignas de destacar, pero por razones de espacio me limito a citar dos: el comunicado de Apemia (Asociaci?n por el Esclarecimiento de la Masacre Impune de la AMIA), que aqu? en Buenos Aires repudi? la masacre de Gaza, y sobre todo, el manifiesto emitido por decenas de intelectuales y docentes universitarios jud?os de Gran Breta?a, que en sus p?rrafos esenciales se?ala: "El verdadero motivo del ataque a Gaza es que Israel s?lo desea tratar con los colaboracionistas. El principal crimen de Hamas no es el terrorismo, sino su negativa a convertirse en un pelele en manos del r?gimen de ocupaci?n (..). Los abajo firmantes somos todos de origen jud?o. Cuando vemos los muertos y los ensangrentados cuerpos de ni?os peque?os, los cortes de agua, de electricidad y de comida, recordamos el asedio del ghetto de Varsovia". Gerardo Liebner, historiador de origen uruguayo que reside en Tel Aviv, fue entrevistado largamente y v?a telef?nica por La colectiva, un programa radial que se emite en Montevideo. Sobre el final, Liebner se?al?: "Repudiar la pol?tica del actual gobierno israel? no es ser antisemita, sino algo leg?timo y una forma de apoyar de verdad al futuro democr?tico de la sociedad israel?". Justamente, la banalizaci?n y superficialidad con que el juda?smo oficial acusa de antisemita a cualquiera que se atreva a confrontar con la pol?tica oficial israel? se entremezcla hoy, sobre todo en Buenos Aires, con algunos impresentables que se han colado en el rechazo a la masacre de Gaza y parecen m?s cerca de la polic?a, de la burgues?a ?rabe menemista de Goebbels o del Medioevo, que de la revoluci?n socialista. Este tema, que ahonda a?n m?s la confusi?n en la sociedad, y la demonizaci?n absoluta y total que realiza alg?n segmento de izquierda, omitiendo las contradicciones y la profundidad de la lucha de clases en el campo israel? y jud?o, son por ahora rubros secundarios que no deben opacar la monstruosidad de la masacre de Gaza. Pero son temas que existen y en etapas inmediatas deber?an formar parte de la agenda de debates sin preconceptos. Mi posici?n es conocida: estoy a favor de la creaci?n del Estado palestino al lado de Israel y no en lugar de Israel. Y estoy por la in-teracci?n de las fuerzas revolucionarias y socialistas palestinas e israel?es. Tal como se ratific? hace pocos d?as en una reuni?n que mantuvieron delegados del Partido del Pueblo (PC palestino), del Partido Comunista Israel? y del Frente Democr?tico por la Liberaci?n de Palestina que preside un viejo luchador como Hawatmeh. Esta posici?n ?soy un revolucionario pero no puedo dejar de admitirlo?- suele generarme s?lo angustia y sentimiento de soledad. Muchos jud?os me han declarado "traidor" y no pocos compa?eros de izquierda me recriminan que ?sta es una posici?n "funcional a los intereses sionistas". Repudio una y otra vez la masacre de Gaza. Pero no voy a marchar con quienes esgrimen los mismos argumentos ("juda?smo internacional", "sinarqu?a", "ratas", "ap?tridas") que utilizaba Felipe Romero en la revista El Caudillo (?rgano de la Triple A) y que muy poco tiempo despu?s usaron los militares de la dictadura cuando torturaban a los muchos jud?os que pertenec?an a ERP, Montoneros y dem?s organizaciones combatientes. Paz y amistad entre Palestina e Israel. Paz con justicia, por supuesto; no la paz de los sepulcros, ni la paz impuesta por los ocupantes, ni la paz que le convenga al imperialismo. Paz con justicia entre Palestina e Israel. Por el momento s?lo parece una consigna voluntarista y ut?pica. Pero cada d?a somos m?s. From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 21:43:54 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 20:43:54 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Robinson Crusoe and the South Sea Bubble Message-ID: <413858.26794.qm@web180116.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Robinson Crusoe and the South Sea Bubble Daniel Defoe?s Robinson Crusoe was for Karl Marx in his Das Kapital an object lesson in the labour theory of value. For a Jean Jacques Rousseau who abhorred book learning this naturalistic survival guide was the one book permitted in the education of Emile. For the immediate and lasting mass readership of this international best-seller of the newly literate age of that Commercial and Financial Revolution which was the necessary prelude to the Industrial Revolution, Robinson Crusoe combined escapist adventure with lessons on practicality and directions for profit. For the 60 year old author in 1719 of this first English novel writing was just another of his commercial projects. Defoe was already famous, indeed notorious, as a verse satirist, pamphleteer, founder of the first tabloid [from inside gaol for seditious libel], propagandist, the spymaster who made the 1707 Union of England and also the Protestant Succession possible, bankrupt businessman, writer of millions of words under multiple signatures, government adviser on trade and economics for both the Whigs and the Tories, when in 1719 he decided that there were signs that his market was buying accounts of sea travel perhaps stimulated by the new South Sea [South Atlantic] Company. Defoe was a writer who saw the media as a profitable business. Hence Robinson Crusoe. However this was also when both London with the South Sea Bubble and Paris with the crash of the Bank of France and the Mississippi Company were bled white by a financial crisis over toxic debt derivatives in unregulated international credit markets. The South Sea Company had been founded to fulfil an objective Defoe had been recommending to government since 1688: To carry on ?the sole trade and traffic, from 1 August 1711, into and unto the Kingdom, lands of America, on the east side from the river Aranoca, to the southernmost part of Terra del Fuego, and on the west side thereof, from the said southernmost part of America, and unto and from all countries in the same limits, reputed to belong to the King of Spain, or which shall hereafter be discovered.? Defoe also approved that its capital should be the funding of 60% of the war-time National Debt. The problem was in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht Spain did not cede the expected trading rights. The shipwreck of the British and French economies was in 1720, but throughout 1719, when Defoe sold his own South-Sea shares, Defoe was desperately writing against speculation and for real trading and colonising efforts in the South Seas especially in Venezuela. In February his Voyages of Sir Walter Raleigh, is dedicated to the South Sea Company thus: I must say, it would be the glory of the Company to embark on such a discovery?.It seems worthy for a Trading Company to attempt this part of the world, inhabited by millions of people, because numbers of people are the source of trade, and they occasion the consumption of manufacture?. It seems a loud call to Great Britain to make such an attempt on Guiana and Peru, and as it cannot be done now but under that authority and by the permission of His Majesty?s South-Sea Company, the undertaking seems to be their due; their charter begins at the river Oroonoque, and no can attempt it without this.? Then Defoe the journalist tried to pressurise the Company on 7 February 1719 floating this ?story? in his Weekly Journal: ?We expect, in two of three days, a most flaming proposal from the South Sea Company, or a body of merchants who claim kindred with them, for erecting a British Colony on the foundation of the South Sea Company?s Charter, upon the terra firma, or the northernmost side of the mouth of the great river oroonoko. They propose, as we hear, the establishing of a factory and settlement there, which shall cost the Company ?500,000, and they demand the government furnish six men of war, and some 4000 regular troops, with some Engineers and 100 pieces of cannon, and military stores in proportion for the maintaining and supporting the design.? Another colony would be 1200 miles up river and the trade would be equal that of the Portughese in Brazil and be a huge market for British manufactures. Again in Robinson Crusoe, published in April 1719, we find Defoe, the expert cartographer, shipwrecking Crusoe on an island off the Orinoco estuary near enough to be visited by cannibals in their canoes but far enough away to escape the interest of the Spaniards. Here a restless, resourceful man of the ?middling sort?, who has already seen how much money can be made with a Brazilian plantation, uses his book-keeping and artisan skills as a tradesman to render the island habitable as another England all with a climate fit for Europeans, crops and domesticated livestock. Over this he rules as the landed country gentleman, he becomes when he returns with his Brazilian gold to England. Crusoe is Defoe?s? ideal of the tradesman who manufactures himself into a gentleman - by behaviour and merit not birth and inheritance. This was another invention of the ?gentlemanly capitalism? of the Commercial Revolution where a man might ?make a name for himself? which so impressed Voltaire in his 2 year exile in England escaping France to save his life as a bourgeois who had dared to insult a chevalier. Crusoe, who himself has escaped Barbary slavery, teaches Man Friday English and the technology/ideology of his civilisation and catechises him into ?a better Christian than I am?, while the cannibals Crusoe drives away. Robinson Crusoe, is a prospectus for what the South Sea Company should be doing in 1719 with the interest from the Government they are receiving from the Funded National Debt rather than creating hysteria in the markets by artificially stimulating the capital values of the ?100 shares, which Defoe had sold at ?120. In Jan 1720 shares were ?128; March ?330;May ?550;June ?890;July ?1000. Then the crash came after the Bubble Act and insider trading and by September it was ?175; December ?124 and it settled at ?140. The Companies ?for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody knows what it is? and another ?to develop perpetual motion? of course were zero. ?I can measure the motions of [heavenly] bodies but I cannot measure human folly?, declared Newton. But he himself still lost ?20,000. Defoe reserves his deepest scorn for the Share-jobbers in his 1719 Anatomy of Exchange Alley, where operated the unregulated Stock Exchange ? the Hedge Funds de nos jours. At a public level they are guilty of treason by ?shorting? in times of national crisis as well as causing runs on even The Bank of England as well as destroying the credit and capital of the nation. ?It is a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions.? In fact in his next book in 1719 Captain Singleton the pirate and in 1721 Moll Flanders the thief and prostitute Defoe more than implies that they are less morally repugnant and certainly less dangerous to the public weal and physically more courageous than the stock-jobbers who squandered that credit that underpins his own now desert island. From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 11:01:18 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 10:01:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?It=E2=80=99s_Not_Going_to_Be_OK?= In-Reply-To: <498729C0.4060401@gmail.com> Message-ID: <991641.19518.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> -On Mon, 2/2/09, Leighm wrote: Charles Brown, on behalf of Chris Hedges: > Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California > in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book ?Democracy Incorporated? uses > the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. > Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not > revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its > expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to > cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically > manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic > institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by > citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to > compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in > Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate > media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a > bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity > gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or > Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. ?Under inverted > totalitarianism the reverse is true,? Wolin writes. ?Economics dominates > politics?and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.? I've come to term it "Soft Despotism". Leigh^^^^CB: Proto-fascist -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1814 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/736768c5/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Mon Feb 2 11:28:42 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:28:42 -0800 Subject: [A-List] U.S. Removes Kashmir from Envoy's Mandate; India Exults In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Question: Pakistan and India have been at dagger points for 60 years over Kashmir and the Punjab. Who cares about Kashmir, in Pakistan? The nationalists (the authoritarian establishment, urban elites, etc. in Islamabad), or the tribal regions in the north of Pakistan, or the broader Pashtun population? or who? Forgive my ignorance. Todd maps: http://images.google.com/images?num=30&hl=en&safe=off&q=map%20of%20kashmir At 05:14 AM 2/2/2009, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > >U.S. Removes Kashmir From Envoy's Mandate; India Exults > >By Emily Wax >Washington Post Foreign Service >Friday, January 30, 2009; A09 > >NEW DELHI, Jan. 29 -- Inside a chandeliered ballroom Thursday, Indian >diplomats and business leaders and American officials held forth about >a new "Cooperation Triangle" for the United States, China and India. >But little mention was made at the Asia Foundation's conference on >Indo-U.S. relations of the Indian government's recent diplomatic >slam-dunk. > >India managed to prune the portfolio of the Obama administration's top >envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke -- basically >eliminating the contested region of Kashmir from his job description. >The deletion is seen as a significant diplomatic concession to India >that reflects increasingly warm ties between the country and the >United States, according to South Asia analysts. > >Indian diplomats, worried about Holbrooke's tough-as-nails reputation, >didn't want him meddling in Kashmir, according to several Indian >officials and Indian news media reports. Holbrooke is nicknamed "the >Bulldozer" for arm-twisting warring leaders to the negotiating table >as he hammered out the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in >Bosnia, a peace that has stuck. > >"I think it is time for us -- having fobbed off Holbrooke -- to sit >quietly and ask where are we and how do we manage the situation," said >C. Raja Mohan, an Indian strategic analyst who served on India's >national security advisory board in 2006. > >Mohan's comments captured the public glee many Indians feel over their >country's latest diplomatic success. It follows the government's >victory in securing a deal with the United States that gives India >access to civilian nuclear technology, even though it is a not a party >to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. > >India and Pakistan have made slow but steady progress on Kashmir over >the past four years, but relations quickly chilled after the November >attacks in Mumbai; India accused Pakistan of aiding in the three-day >assault. > >Few places represent the region's complexities more than Kashmir, a >territory that has been disputed since the 1947 partition of India and >Pakistan. The nuclear-armed nations have fought two wars over Kashmir, >and the United States stepped in to head off a third one in 2001. Both >countries claim Kashmir and both control parts of it, with the United >Nations monitoring a cease-fire line between them. > >"No matter what government is in place, India is not going to >relinquish control of Jammu and Kashmir," Brajesh Mishra, India's >former national security adviser, said in reference to the territory's >Indian-administered sector. "That is written in stone and cannot be >changed." > >During the U.S. presidential campaign, Obama said the Kashmir issue >was central to any stability in the region. > >But India is suspicious of third-party intervention in the dispute. >Kashmir is an internal issue and shouldn't be a part of any outsider's >mandate, many Indian officials here say. > >The country's Outlook magazine ran a cover story this week showing >Obama dancing with his wife at an inaugural ball with the headline: >"Should India fear him? What India must do to ensure Kashmir won't get >caught in the crosshairs." > >Last week, Mohan warned Holbrooke against "any high-profile >intervention" in Kashmir. The topic is so politically sensitive here >that it is referred to as the "K-word." > >At a news briefing Tuesday, State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood >said Kashmir was not part of Holbrooke's mandate. > >"His mandate is to go out and try to help bring stability to >Afghanistan, working closely with Pakistan," Wood said. "India has >some very clear views as to what it wants to do vis-a-vis dealing with >the Kashmir issue, as well as the Pakistanis." > >When asked whether Holbrooke would play a role if there were >heightened tensions again over the Mumbai attacks, Wood said, "I don't >want to speculate in terms of what he may or may not do, but his brief >is focused solely on, as I said, Afghanistan-Pakistan." > >Holbrooke was originally tasked as the special envoy for Afghanistan, >Pakistan "and related matters," code for India and Kashmir, according >to a U.S. official in Washington who spoke on the condition of >anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak publicly. But >on the morning Holbrooke's posting was announced, "related matters" >had been deleted from the description. > >Wood said at a briefing Thursday that Holbrooke would stop at the >Munich Conference on Security Policy on Tuesday before heading to >Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the border region is a haven for >Taliban fighters and where Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding. > >Pakistan and Afghanistan have yet to comment on the Kashmir decision. >But other South Asia experts say that taking Kashmir out of >Holbrooke's hands may upset Pakistan and that there may be >back-channel negotiations anyway. > >"Intellectually, it is impossible to disentangle these problems from >each other," said Daniel Markey, a South Asia expert at the Council on >Foreign Relations in Washington. "The smartest thing is to work on >this behind the scenes." -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6690 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/743f3e8d/attachment.txt From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Feb 2 11:43:52 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 19:43:52 +0100 Subject: [A-List] It's not gong to be okey Message-ID: The left or liberals have been targeted for destruction since before the 1970s by the combined Rebublican conservative army of law and regulation dismantlement and the Democrats who wanted to taste the kind of absolute power the Republicans were promising. Both types are quite visible now, probably the fourth or fifth generation of them. The Israeli Lobby has been extremely useful to the well oiled, well organized, Democracy changers. The change always was to be empire...an actual recognized one. Israel's recent Gaza 'war' was the empire's coming out party. for both the US and Israel. In order to get a good handle how much the world population blocks will react when the bood and body parts and phosporous bombs fly. Each day, each week shows how much serious objection is out there. Read "Global War on Liberty". By Jean-Claude Paye. Everything is on schedule. There is a very strong possibility that the depression unfolding was planned. Suzanne de Kuyper suzanedk at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1205 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/5b901519/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Mon Feb 2 14:06:48 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:06:48 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum Message-ID: Prof. Mark Jensen has published at no cost, original translations from the French press, and analyses and comparisons of varioius press, every day, 365 days a year for many years on the Tacoma PJH list. He also leads book discussions and other activities. See the UFPPC website for archives, and join the email list. - Todd To: jensenmk82 at gmail.com From: jensenmk at plu.edu Sender: tacomapjh at yahoogroups.com Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:22:35 -0800 (PST) Subject: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum TRANSLATION: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum (Le Figaro) [On Friday, *Le Figaro* reported on a first at the World Social Forum, which has been meeting in Bel?m, in Brazil's Amazonia: the appearance of five heads of state.[1] -- A Google News search suggests that no mainstream U.S. paper sent a reporter to cover what the *International Herald Tribune* on Monday called (http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/01/business/Forum.4-420588.php) "the world's biggest gathering of leftists." --Mark] http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/8346/ 1. [Translated from *Le Figaro* (Paris)] International THE ANTI-AMERICAN FRONT MEETS IN BELEM By Lamia Oualalou ** Surrounded by four heads of state, Lula attacks the liberal model at the World Social Forum ** Le Figaro (Paris) January 30, 2009 http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2009/01/31/01003-20090131ARTFIG00301-le-front-antiamericain-se-reunit-a-belem-.php BELEM, Brazil -- Something has changed at the World Social Forum. The anti-globlization event, which in its first incarnations refused to allow heads of state to come, was litterally invaded Thursday evening by five Latin American presidents In an overheated room of 8,000 people on the outskirts of Bel?m, the capital of Brazilian Amazonia, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was the first to emphasize this momentous change: "Ten years ago, no president would have thought of coming before you, he would have been booed by the crowd," he said. "Tonight, it's different, none of us has been chosen by the elite, we are the emanation of social movements, unions, and indigenous claims," he continued. And then he recalled the origins of each of the participants of the evening. The left-wing economist Rafael Correa rose to the top in Ecuador, a country that used to favor investment bankers in the government; the former bishop of liberation theology Fernando Lugo brought to a close seventy years of conservatives in Paraguay; the former military rebel Hugo Chavez has set in motion his Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela; the Indian Evo Morales entered the history books as the first indigenous head of state in Bolivia, and, finally, a metallurgical worker raised himself up to the presidency in a Brazil marked by social inequality. On the stage, the five heads of state outdid each other in attacks upon the liberal economic model and its responsiblity for the economic crisis that has been impacting the whole world since the end of 2008. Each statement was hailed by a salvo of applause and extended medleys from the traditional instrument of hundreds of indigenous Amazonians present in the room. It's the first time that the heads of state of the region have visibly boycotted the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 2003, Lula, newly elected, decided he had to show his face at the Swiss ski resort. Six years later, his tone has changed: "I'm tired of going to New York, to London, to see young bankers who explain to me how I have to manage my country, when they've never set foot in Brazil and hardly know where Latin America is," he said. IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES The Brazilian president put aside the ideological differences among the five governments. In the afternoon, though, he had been excluded from the first meeting of the four other heads of state. Lula, despite the social policies he's instituted in Brazil, is not considered by the anti-globalization activists as a "break" president like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Fernando Lugo, and Rafael Correa. At the beginning of that meeting, the Venezuelan president tried to demonstrated that even in Brazil he enjoys tremendous support among Latin American social movements. In a Bolivarian Woodstock-type atmosphere, in a hall where Che Guevara was on half the T-shirts, Hugo Chavez called on the Forum participants to "go on the offensive" and put an end to capitalism. -- Translated by Mark K. Jensen Associate Professor of French Chair, Department of Languages and Literatures Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, Washington 98447-0003 Phone: 253-535-7219 Web page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/ E-mail: jensenmk at plu.edu ------------------------------------ PPJH's website is located at http://www.tacomapjh.org/ -- others may join by sending an email to tacomapjh-subscribe at yahoogroups.comYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tacomapjh/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6162 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/793a96e3/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 15:15:39 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 14:15:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?What_are_the_CPUSA=E2=80=99s_views_on_the_USSR?= =?utf-8?q?=3F?= Message-ID: <371541.20733.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> What are the CPUSA?s views on the USSR? The subject of the USSR is a complex one. There was certainly an insufficiently developed democracy, but to dismiss over 70 years of their history developing socialism as completely undemocratic is a gross oversimplification. They practiced forms of economic democracy and worker involvement unknown in this country. They offered citizens many essential benefits that the drive to capitalism has destroyed. When the "solution" is worse than the problem, it is not a solution. Capitalism has made life for the vast majority in the former Soviet Union and other former socialist countries much worse. All indicators of social health are deteriorating, such as the sharp rise in infant mortality, the decrease in longevity rates, levels of malnutrition and starvation, decreasing health care for most of the population, inadequate and overwhelmed social security and welfare programs. The problems they faced would have had a better chance of being solved by more socialism, not less! I recommend six books to help deepen your knowledge of the accomplishments and shortcomings of the Soviet Union: Heroic Struggle, Bitter Defeat by Bhaman Azad from International Publishers, 2000, Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti from City Light Publishers. These are both valuable contributions to the discussion of what happened in the Soviet Union, why, and how that connects to the history of Soviet policies. About issues of human rights and socialist development in the Soviet Union, see Human Rights in the Soviet Union by Albert Szymanski, Zed Books, 1984. An earlier book of his, Is the Red Flag Still Flying, included an afterward that is a (very incomplete) start at an historical materialist analysis of Stalin?s role. (Symanski was an economist and a Maoist who set out to prove the Maoist thesis of "capitalist restoration" in the Soviet Union, but on examining the statistics and realities, came to the conclusion that the Maoists were wrong, that the Soviet Union was still primarily run in the interests of the working class. He used statistics and facts as reported by right-wing academicians, arguing that facts as reported by anti-communists could be used to prove progressive points with greater believability by anti-communist readers.) Soviet Women ( Ramparts Press, 1975) and Soviet But Not Russian (Ramparts Press, 1985) by William Mandel and The Siberians by Farley Mowat are useful responses to the barrage of anti-communism directed at the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. (Note that for writing this particular book, Farley Mowat was barred from entering the United States in the 1980s! He wrote a short funny book about his experiences. The U. S. State Department finally backed down, at which time Mowat refused to enter! Other world-famous authors have been refused entry into the U.S. as "undesirable aliens," including Nobel Literature Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) http://www.cpusa.org/article/static/511/#question27 ? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3402 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/766c81e8/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 15:36:21 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 14:36:21 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?Ghana=3A_Voters_also_go_for_=E2=80=98change_th?= =?utf-8?q?ey_can_believe_in=E2=80=99?= Message-ID: <864635.97817.qm@web180102.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> ? Author: Dennis Laumann People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/02/09 12:12 ? On Jan. 7, John Evan Ata Mills was sworn in as the new President of Ghana, the third since the country became a multiparty democracy in 1992. Mills and his party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), swept elections last month, deemed free and fair by observers, and which solidified Ghana?s reputation as an African ?success story.? As importantly, Ghanaian voters repudiated neo-liberalism by booting out of office a right-wing party closely tied to George W. Bush?s administration. A lawyer and former Vice President of Ghana, Mills calls himself a ?social democrat? and embraces the politics and legacy of Kwame Nkrumah, the Marxist who led Ghana?s anti-colonial struggle and its first government after independence in 1957. Nkrumah, who advocated industrialization, social welfare programs, and solidarity with oppressed peoples, was ousted in a 1966 coup many believe was orchestrated by the CIA. The outgoing New Patriotic Party (NPP), which ruled Ghana during the two presidential terms of John Kufuor, traces its lineage to the reactionary clique which overthrew Nkrumah. The NPP presided over the privatization of state assets including natural resources, the main revenue earner for most underdeveloped countries, after voluntarily agreeing to Ghana?s designation as a ?Highly Indebted Poor Country? by the International Monetary Fund/World Bank. Bush considered Kufuor one of his closest friends and the NPP returned the compliment by naming a planned highway in the Ghanaian capital of Accra after the disgraced American president. The Kufuor administration was so eager to please its ally in Washington that it hinted Ghana might be willing to host the headquarters of the infamous U.S. Africa Command (Africom) before a resounding public rejection of that idea forced a retreat. While close relations with Bush?s regime may have been sufficient to alienate Ghanaian voters, the corruption and ineptitude of the NPP government coupled with the further impoverishment of ordinary Ghanaians turned public opinion against the ruling party. Over the past eight years, even though foreign-owned department stores and imported luxury cars were offered as evidence of prosperity by so-called development experts, the reality of ?free market? economics was manifest in the multitude of homeless children hawking goods and begging on the streets of Accra. A final nail in the coffin of the NPP was the significant increase in crime linked to Ghana?s recent emergence as one of the major trans-shipment points of South American drugs to Europe. All of this economic and social deterioration occurred under the watch of the NPP, a party cultivated and supported since at least the early 1990s by the U.S. government and one which came to power promising ?development in freedom.? The hypocrisy of their rhetoric and that Ghana is blessed with abundant mineral and agricultural resources, and a soon to be exploited reserve of off-shore oil, led many ordinary Ghanaians to demand more state intervention to alleviate their suffering. Newly-elected President Mills, affectionately known as ?the Prof,? has promised to address people?s hardships by dedicating more state resources to health, education and poverty-eradication programs. The NDC has a history of delivering its promises, as Ghana became one of the most stable and relatively prosperous African nations under the leadership of the founder of the party, former President J. J. Rawlings. Mills served as vice-president during Rawlings? second term, the constitutionally-mandated maximum for a Ghanaian head of state. Although Mills won last month?s presidential run-off election only with a razor-thin 50.23 percent of the vote, that figure is misleading. He defeated his NPP rival in seven out of the ten regions of Ghana, representing nearly all of the ethnic groups in the remarkably diverse nation. Support for the NPP?s candidate was limited to his home and two ethnically-related regions, leading many commentators to conclude that the party has reverted to its ?tribal? base while the NDC, in the tradition of Nkrumah and his Convention People?s Party, has re-claimed its position as the mass, national party of Ghana. Indeed, the NDC?s power base is amongst the urban poor and farmers in rural areas and who represent the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians. The NPP seemed stunned by its defeat and acted as a sore loser, claiming its opponents committed fraud, allegations dismissed by the Election Commission since no evidence was offered. In fact, the only documented cases of rigging took place in the areas where the NPP candidate was victorious. Despite the competitiveness and bitterness of the election season, Mills is determined to move forward and like Obama promises to bring people together to confront the many challenges facing his country. "I will be president for all Ghanaians, whether they voted for me or not. I'll heal wounds and strive to ensure unity,? Mills declared at his swearing-in ceremony. And, again like his American counterpart, Mills? first priority is to undo many of the last-minute, retrogressive measures enacted by his right-wing predecessor, such as a scandalous end-of-service benefits package for Kufuor which would cost the nation millions of dollars. Indeed, the parallels between Mills and Obama were cultivated by Ghanaians who embraced hope and change as enthusiastically as the tens of millions of Americans who joined together to push their country in a new direction. A popular button worn by celebrants at Mills? inauguration, photographed by news reporters and reprinted in newspapers around the world, features images of Mills and Obama beneath the words ?God?s chosen presidents.? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6555 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/95780dc9/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 16:45:10 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 15:45:10 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] White workers make history, proletarian internationalist formula Message-ID: <431721.8186.qm@web180104.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> The history made in O's election was not made by ?Obama, and it was not made by Black people.? ?It was made by the masses ( although minority) of White working people who voted for? Obama.? The majority of white people did not vote for Obama, but the minority who voted for him was critical ?to victory. More White people voted for Obama than Black people. There were appeals to ?racism made by the Republicans and rightwingers in the election. The sufficiently large White vote for Obama amounts to a historic repudiation of this racism , and the larger racist legacy of American history. If Obama had lost, I would have been attributing it to racism. Since he won, I have got to say "it" was anti-racism. The division of the US working class by racism ?is the main division of it. The history in the election of Obama is especially that masses ?of White working class people voted for a Black candidate for President. Glory to the White ?American anti-racist spirit and sentiment. John Brown's soul is marching on ! ? Charles -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1464 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/b28922bd/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 17:01:28 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 16:01:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Anti-Racism in U.S. History The First Two Hundred Years Message-ID: <509717.81433.qm@web180112.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Anti-Racism in U.S. History The First Two Hundred Years (Click to Enlarge) Herbert Aptheker Book Code: ARU/ ISBN: 0-313-28199-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-313-28199-0 DOI: 10.1336/0313281998 264 pages, notes Greenwood Press Publication: 2/28/1992 List Price: $126.95 (UK Sterling Price: ?70.00) Availability: Media Type: Hardcover Also Available: Paperback Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 Subjects: History ? American History (General) Multicultural Studies ? Black Studies Series Title: Contributions in American History Series Number: 143 Awards: Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, 1992 Reviews: Historians, Aptheker argues, have frequently noted but rarely developed the point that throughout the two centuries of North American racial slavery, substantial numbers of whites rejected racist rationales for the "peculiar institution" and displayed a remarkable degree of interracial egalitarianism. Marshaling a large quantity of documentary evidence, Aptheker seeks to draw attention to the pervasiveness of what he calls "anti-racism" in Euro-American culture. The definition of racism in use here is a narrow one--what historians usually describe as "ideological" racism: systematic, pseudoscientific theories of inherent racial inferiority. Consequently, it is easy to concede Aptheker's point yet to wonder that so many white Americans lived comfortably with "societal" racism: de facto black inferiority based on established status relationships. It seems to have been the latter, after all, that had the greatest impact on the actual life opportunities for African Americans in American society. All levels. ?Choice Aptheker's usual care and exhaustive knowledge of primary and secondary sources are evident and impressive. ?The Historian Now Aptheker offers another readjustment of our intellectual and moral sights. This present volume on the first two hundred years of "anti-racism" in the United States ends with the American Civil War, but another volume is promised, which will take the story into the early twentieth century. This book presents a great deal of evidence that shows racism met considerable opposition in this country for many years. ?American Historical Review The preeminent Marxist historian of the African American experience has produced another major work that will provoke debate and stimulate reevaluation; this time of the character and extent of anti-racism in the nation's history. Herbert Aptheker has written an important and wise book which resonates with impressive scholarship and an impassioned affirmation that racism can be fought and eradicated, that black and white unity can be battled for and won. ?Science & Society This book breaks fresh ground in comprehensively and systematically exploring a theme that has hitherto been ignored or received fragmentary attention. ?Journal of American History This book is especially valuable for the large number of instances where whites sided with blacks, sometimes including outright revolts. Herbert Aptheker has himself rendered us all a great service by restoring the record of racial solidarity, justice, understanding and a common culture in America. This is a record that should be known and taught in all our schools and colleges throughout the country. ?People's Culture Description: Many books, both popular and scholarly, have examined racism in the United States, but this unique volume is the first to examine the existence of anti-racism in the first two hundred years of U.S. history. Herbert Aptheker challenges the view that racism was universally accepted by whites. His book thoroughly debunks the myth that white people never cared about the plight of African-Americans until just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Covering the period from the 1600s through the 1860s, Aptheker begins with a short introduction and a questioning of racism's pervasiveness, taking examples of anti-racism from the literature. He then devotes sections to sexual relations, racism and anti-racism, to joint struggles to reject racism, and to a discussion of Gr?goire, Banneker, and Jeffersonianism. Next he considers "inferiority" as viewed by poets, preachers, and teachers and by entrepreneuers, seamen, and cowboys. After a consideration of the Quakers, he turns his attention to the American and French revolutions and racism and to the Republic's early years and racism. Aptheker then devotes several sections to Abolitionism and concludes the work with the "the Crisis Decade," the Civil War, Emancipation, and anti-racism. This book by a well-known scholar in the field will be of interest to all concerned with U.S. history and African American history. Table of Contents: Introduction Anti-Racism: Denial and Distortion Questioning Racism's Pervasiveness Anti-Racism's Presence: Examples from the Literature Sexual Relations Rejecting Racism by Joint Struggle Gr?goire, Banneker, and Jeffersonianism "Inferiority" and Poets, Preachers, and Teachers "Inferiority" and Entrepreneurs, Seamen, and Cowboys From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Mon Feb 2 17:16:37 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 16:16:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Autoworkers dodge the bullet for now... Message-ID: <884013.95880.qm@web180101.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Autoworkers dodge the bullet for now... The government loans to the US auto industry give autoworkers a brief breathing spell. Still the Bush White House "terms" for the loans are a rightwing, Republican slap at the union. The Bush conditions on the loans try and make the auto companies cut wages and benefit for UAW workers to the levels of non-union auto plants. Those kind of terms will further aggravate the overall economic situation. When workers can't even afford to buy the products they make, the cycle of layoffs and shutdowns accelerates. We still need to build solidarity and with and for the autoworkers. Demand that they take no pay and benefit cuts. Demand that the union gets full representation on the boards of GM and Chrysler in exchange for the loans. And keep up the pressure for the Employee Free Choice Act. Raising all autoworkers to the wage and benefit standards of UAW workers will help the economy by putting more spending power in the hands of people who need it and who will spend money on goods and services that will help stimulate the economy. In these emergency times we also need to consider bigger changes to preserve the jobs of autoworkers and the millions of other workers who supply the industry. We need to consider democratic public ownership. http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/1007/1/150/ ? ? End the Auto Crisis: Build Mass Transit Public Ownership to Save Jobs and the Environment st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } Union auto workers are fighting for their lives. For us the fight to defend the United Auto Workers union (UAW) and its members is immediate. It is estimated that over three million jobs are linked to the jobs at GM, Ford and Chrysler: including workers in parts supply, dealerships, steel, rubber, and many other supporting industries. Bankruptcy would have devastating effects on communities where these workers live. Whole regions rely on their purchasing power and the loss of taxes for local and state governments would cause an even bigger crisis. Bankruptcy will also destroy the pensions and healthcare for millions of retirees. We join with labor and all its allies in demanding immediate action by the federal government to guarantee the loans needed to save these jobs. We are actively engaged in the growing fight to build solidarity and support for the burning demands of the workers and their union. Even if/when bridge loans are given to the Big Three, the companies have announced there will be further plant closings and say they will permanently shed tens of thousands of their workforce. They do this while continuing to move production out of the country. GM has manufacturing operations in 32 countries around the world. And while the auto companies complain about competition from lower wage countries, they in turn threaten workers in Mexico, Thailand, South America and elsewhere to accept low wages as a condition of work. Everything unions have fought for throughout our history is being challenged. Republican senators are demanding that unionized workers tear-up their union contracts and work for non-union rates. A forced bankruptcy would destroy the contracts of the UAW. Automotive jobs have been a pathway to a better life for all working people and their loss would hit African American and Latino workers particularly hard. Black workers in particular are more concentrated in auto than other industries. To solve the economic crisis we need to put more money, not less, into the hands of working people. Republican attempts to force the UAW to take cuts will increase the wage gap; it is a continuation of Republican trickledown economics that voters rejected in the November election. These are the same economic policies that created the present economic crisis. It would lower the purchasing power of auto workers and would create a downward wage pressure on all workers If we agree that the auto industry is too important to fail, both in terms of our nation?s transportation needs and the need to move away from reliance on fossil fuels, then it is too important to be left in the hands of the CEO?s. And at the same time, given the overall economic crisis and the underlying failures of unbridled corporate greed and mismanagement, it is the time to look at more basic solutions also. Demands for public and government oversight raise the issue of democratic public ownership of the domestic auto industry. The United States government could buy all the common shares of stock in General Motors for less than $3 billion. The worth of the companies is less than the aid they want from taxpayers. If the public provides the capital, why do decisions remain in private hands? Representatives from the unions, from engineers employed in the industry, from government, and the communities and states where the plants are located, are best able to make the key decisions. Representatives from management itself should have input but not control. We have an economic crisis, but we also have a crisis of the environment and the two are interlinked. We face global catastrophe and the profits before nature philosophy of the auto executives is a major roadblock for building a ?green,? sustainable industry. Cities all over the country are looking at the need for mass transit: from rail to subways, and buses. Public demand for environment friendly cars is also growing. We should demand that unemployed auto workers in Detroit and Michigan are put to work building all of the above. Public ownership can work! From our postal service, to social security, to our public school system, Medicare, police, fire, and military, public ownership has been successful. In the early 70?s the government took over a rail system in crisis, fixed it and then years later sold it to private owners at a profit. The changes needed in our infrastructure to build and sustain the environmentally friendly cars of the future will require public money so why should the ownership of the companies remain in private hands? In addition: * We need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to spur union organizing and to increase the wages and buying power of working people. * We need National Health care, pass HR 676 ? health care is a human right and it should be removed as a bargaining chip. * We need an international minimum wage to stop the whipsawing of workers from one country to another. * We need a law to stop tax breaks for companies that outsourcing our jobs. * We need to get behind President Barack Obama?s economic stimulus and public works jobs program. ? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 9929 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090202/c67e83b5/attachment.txt From nscchicago at igc.org Mon Feb 2 23:42:30 2009 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 00:42:30 -0600 Subject: [A-List] CHICAGO CITY AND PROTESTS FOR PEACE VENEZUELA GOON SQUADS ANTI CHAVISTA JOBS WITH JUSTICE DO NOW AND A TV SHOW Message-ID: <003201c985ca$a005ea40$2101a8c0@NSCCHICAGO> Tom Baker here and Nicaragua to you. I have a nice show You can take some action on the economy JOBS WITH JUSTICE Oligarchies have no problem with goon squads. VENEZUELA from Weekly News Updates WHAT'S THE CITY GOT AGAINST PEOPLE IN THE STREETS? The permit battle in Chicago. How cum the question of war turns into a permit battle? CHICAGO INDEPENDENT VIDEO, Indymedia, a segment of what they produce every month, this video collective. Faith in the People, bo. Have faith in the people. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1634 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/682bd91b/attachment.txt -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 4008 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/682bd91b/attachment-0001.jpeg -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: CCAWR at aol.com Subject: [M20all] City Attempts to Quash Protesters' 1st Amendment Freedoms Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 00:50:47 EST Size: 10634 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/682bd91b/attachment-0004.eml -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Weekly News Update Subject: WNU #977: 2 Workers Shot in Venezuelan Plant Sit-In Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 00:49:59 -0500 Size: 12075 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/682bd91b/attachment-0005.eml -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Mitchell Szczepanczyk Subject: [M20all] Chicago Independent TV in Feb. - Protests about Gaza, James Dobson, Prop 8, and the War Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:00:28 -0600 Size: 6105 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/682bd91b/attachment-0006.eml -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Jobs with Justice National" Subject: Tell the Senate: ACT NOW to Fix the Economy Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:45:37 GMT Size: 18557 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/682bd91b/attachment-0007.eml From nscchicago at igc.org Tue Feb 3 00:13:37 2009 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 01:13:37 -0600 Subject: [A-List] INTERCONNECT Newsletter Message-ID: <007a01c985ce$f8971d60$2101a8c0@NSCCHICAGO> From: Peter and Gail Mott Subject: INTERCONNECT Newsletter January 2009. Vol. 16, No. 1 For Grassroots Movement-Building and Sharing of Resources Within the US-Latin America Solidarity Community In This Issue New Year, New President Not just Change but Justice Anti-Militarization Conference PRESIDENT OBAMA - CUBA PRESIDENT OBAMA - HAITI Venezuela's Regional Elections Bolivia: Enemy or Friend of the US? 2008 in Ecuador FMLN Party Wins Legislative Elections Book Review - Enforce the Law; Purge the Shame Rolling Back Free Trade RESOURCES Movement News in Brief Thank You Join Our Mailing List Email: Dear Tom, As we were standing, freezing at the Inauguration but more excited than we had been in years, we believed the theme of this issue of INTERCONNECT should be: YES, WE CAN! In solidarity, Peter and Gail Mott, Co-Editors www.interconn.org New Year New President NEW CHANCE TO CHANGE US-LATIN AMERICA POLICY! Toward a New Latin American Policy - by Hendrik Voss of SOAWatch - on behalf of the Latin America Solidarity Coalition (LASC) and Christy Thornton, Executive Director of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) The election of Barack Obama provides an opportunity for the United States to change its relationship with the other nations of the hemisphere. It is up to us, as advocates for justice in the hemisphere, to push the Obama administration to end the long legacy of using Latin America's blood and gold for US ends. Now is the time to ensure that the next administration brings to the Americas not just change, but justice. Full Article.... Quotations ...the so-called "free trade agreements" have only a limited relation to free trade, or even to trade in any serious sense of that term; and they are certainly not agreements, at least if people are part of their countries. A more accurate term would be "investor-rights arrangements," designed by multinational corporations and banks and the powerful states that cater to their interests. - Noam Chomsky's address to the VII Social Summit for Latin Amerin and Caribbean Unity, 9/24/08. Anti-Militarization Conference SOA Watch, the Latin America Solidarity Coalition (LASC), and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) are planning a gathering during Presidents Day weekend in February. Join grassroots activists and organizers for a series of events for a new Latin America policy, against empire and militarization. The events start on Sunday, February 15 with reflection, discussion, and strategizing around the campaign to close the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC). The campaign is at a critical stage and we need everyone's ideas, creativity and energy. Full Article.... PRESIDENT OBAMA - CUBA -from IFCO/Pastors for Peace 11/25/09 The election of Barack Obama provides an opportunity for the United States to change its relationship with the other nations of the hemisphere. It is up to us, as advocates for justice in the hemisphere, to push the Obama administration to end the long legacy of using Latin America's blood and gold for US ends. Now is the time to ensure that the next administration brings to the Americas not just change, but justice. Full Article... PRESIDENT OBAMA - HAITI - by Paul Farmer and Brian Concannon 1/25/09 "THE INAUGURATION of a US president committed to reversing 'the failed policies of the past' provoked sighs of relief around the world. Few were more relieved than the citizens of Haiti, because few have suffered so much from failed US policies. But Haitians are still waiting to see whether the 'past' that is to be reversed extends beyond the illegal and destructive policies of the last eight years to include over two centuries of US policies that have failed both our oldest neighbor and our highest ideals. Full Article... Venezuela's Regional Elections Excerpts from a statement from the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network 11/25/08 "The results of the elections for local mayors and state governors (11/23) underlined the continuing mass support for the Bolivarian revolution led by President Hugo Chavez. Full Article.... Bolivia: Enemy or Friend of the US? Excerpts from a survey of current literature 2008 The people approve the new Constitution. It is clear that Morales will run for president by December 2009. However, since October of 2009 the US consulting firm (Carville et al) has posted a job announcement for another "International Campaign Representative in Bolivia." January 22: Bolivia accepts Venezuela's gift of 300 tons of asphalt. January 24: Morales nationalizes the Chaco Oil Company. Full Article.... 2008 in Ecuador - by Daniel Denvir Ecuador - a country where three presidents have been overthrown in the past decade - has kept journalists on their toes for the past year. President Rafael Correa's second year in office witnessed the passage of a new constitution, which many social movements called a step forward for social justice. The new constitution declared that all citizens had the right to free education and healthcare, and that nature has the legal "right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution." It also recognizes Ecuador as a plurinational state, a top demand of the indigenous movement. Full Article.... FMLN Party Wins Legislative Elections -by Burke Stansbury On January 18 the leftist FMLN party celebrated victory in the Salvadoran legislative elections and picked up dozens more municipal seats, despite losing the capital city to the right-wing ARENA. The stage is now set for March 15, when Salvadorans will elect a new president, with the choice between Mauricio Funes of the FMLN, a former independent journalist, and ARENA's Rodrigo ?vila, a former private security mogul and director of the national police force (PNC). Full Article.... Book Review - Enforce the Law; Purge the Shame - by Malcolm Bell The Constitutional separation of powers secures our American democracy, right? Wrong! Congress's failure since 9/11 to rein in the Bush-Cheney semi-coup, and its de facto grant of impunity for their very high crimes, show the fragility of our system. The vaunted separation of powers turns out to be a joke unless Congress has the moxie to enforce it against a usurping President. In The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008), Jane Mayer, who writes for the New Yorker, tracks this mind-boggling usurpation mainly through the U.S. descent into torture, for which she blames Cheney and David Addington (known as Cheney's Cheney) more than Bush. Full Article.... Rolling Back Free Trade - By Tom Lowden January 1st 2009 marked the 15th anniversary of NAFTA. Many of those opposed to NAFTA have been calling for a dismantling of the agreement, due to the many damaging impacts and limited benefits for many sectors in all three signing countries. During the recent electoral campaign, Barack Obama promised to renegotiate treaties such as NAFTA. Exactly what he means by renegotiation and whose interests it would serve are yet to be known. However, based on this commitment, members of ART wrote a letter to President-elect Obama asking him to take his campaign promise seriously, and proactively outlining the most important points which should be negotiated. Full Article.... RESOURCES Major Events - Campaigns - Special Studies - Books - Videos/Movies - Newsletter - Travel Movement News in Brief SOA, 1/26/09: Six human rights advocates who were arrested at the November 22-23 SOA vigil have been found guilty of nonviolent direct action to close the School of the Americas/WHINSEC. Five were fined and sentenced to two months in federal prison; one was fined and sentenced to 6 months' house arrest. For the complete story go to www.soaw.org. Haiti: Thousands of Haitians demonstrated throughout Haiti on 12/16/08 to demand the return of President Aristide, an end to the UN occupation, and the release of all Lavalas political prisoners. The date commemorated Haiti's first free and democratic elections in 1990 that signaled the birth of the Lavalas political movement. (From journalist Kevin Pina. http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_17_8/12_17_8.html) Ecuador has accused Israel of crimes against humanity in Gaza (from Gabe Comacho, AFSC, 1/8/09). Brazil: (1) The Landless Worker's Movement (MST) is 25 years old. (2) Brazil's foreign minister went to Iran in November, expanded commercial ties, defended Iran's right to enrich uranium (cepr, 12/2/08). CAFTA: Three years of a failed trade deal were reported by the Stop CAFTA Coalition which is calling for suspension by President Obama (www.stopcafta.org). CUBA: (1) A US District judge has suspended a Florida legislature's "absurd law' which had curtailed even more the slim chances Cuban-Americans have of traveling to their homeland (CLASP, 10/08). (b) The Cuban Revolution is 50 years old. Mexico: (1) In 2008, 81 femicides (double the previous worst years of 1996 and 2001) were reported in Ciudad Juarez. (2) The Zapatistas (EZLN) are 25 years old. EZLN was founded in 1983 in Oventic, Chiapas, by six people - three Indian, 3 Mestizo. Nicaragua: President Obama's new Secretary of Labor is Hilda Solis, a Democrat from California with one Nicaraguan parent, who supports unions and green jobs (e-mail 12/19/08). Thank You Full Article.... INTERCONNECT Published quarterly... Editors: Peter and Gail Mott E-mail: interconnect_mott at frontiernet.net Website: www.interconn.org Contributing Editor: Malcolm Bell Contributing Photographer: Orin Langelle, Global Justice Ecology Project Publishing: Duncannon Design 2008 INTERCONNECT.org LASC Latin American Solidarity Coalition c/o Alliance for Global Justice 1247 E St SE Washington, DC 20003 202-544-9355 www.lasolidarity.org Join our listserv at lasolidarity at list.mutualaid.org Forward email This email was sent to nscchicago at igc.org by interconnect_mott at frontiernet.net. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribeT | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by INTERCONNECT | 57 South Main Street | Pittsford | NY | 14534 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 57431 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/398e759c/attachment.txt From nmgoro at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 07:44:13 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:44:13 -0300 Subject: [A-List] Hermann Schiller and -false modesty aside- yours truly [was Re: El Israel de las manifestaciones por la paz] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4988583D.2000309@gmail.com> Yes, Hermann Schiller, who is himself a rabbi (and, in political contexture, an Anarchist!), is one of the most outstanding Jews in Argentina who oppose Zionism. He has been working with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo for quite long time. And -I hate these descriptions, but have none better, not in English at least- he has been a beacon for those Args of Jewish ascent who reject Zionism and Zionist crimes. His article aims very well to demonstrating that there _exist_ antiZionist Jews. There has been a permanent danger in Argentina these days that anti-Semite groups (which are small but dormant like cancer cells) hijacked the anti-Israeli movement. The Israeli Embassy would have loved it, and we anti-Zionist have been strong in making it impossible for such a movement to take root these days. I have been interviewed on a radio show yesterday night, on these issues. One of the interviewees was Luis D?El?a, a pro-Kirchner popular leader who has been Satanized by the Zionist "Jewish" Community here as an Anti-Semite. The journalist asked me if I was "afraid of D?El?a", and I answered that of course not, that what I was afraid of was of the policies of the State of Israel who pretended to commit all their crimes in my name and in the name of all the Jews in the world. I also stressed that the single difference between Nazism and Zionism in this respect was that Nazis wanted to gather all the Jews and kill them at once, while Zionists wanted to gather all the Jews and establish a supremacist state at the service of the hegemonic imperialist power. But both thought that Jews were somehow "special" and could not live together with Gentiles. D?El?a -who, like many Arg leaders today, is not privy to the details of the "inside workings" of Zionist ideology- was delighted. And I am glad he was. I have written something on all these issues recently, which has been circulating widely on the Web in Argentina. Though it is too idyosincratically Argentinean, perhaps it would be fine if I sent it to the A-list. It has had quite an interesting reception among many Jews in Argentina who are not represented by the "Community". It tells part of my life history, and -as I guessed while drafting it- detalis aside it has been quite touching for many of them because it was a collective history, not a personal one. Yoshie Furuhashi escribi?: > > El Israel de las manifestaciones por la paz > > Unos veinte grupos pacifistas, entre ellos Coalici?n de Mujeres por la > Paz, Anarquistas contra el Muro y el Centro de Informaci?n > Alternativa, son parte de una resistencia al accionar b?lico de los > gobernantes. > > Por Herman Schiller > > Hace pocos d? From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Tue Feb 3 10:02:02 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 12:02:02 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Iraq Communists Campaign With Vigor In-Reply-To: <479242.72126.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <479242.72126.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <03a801c98621$22a8f270$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> Interesting the article does not discuss whether the Iraqi CP's support for the US invasion and collaboration with the US has harmed its electoral prospects (the Kurds are doing fine) nor does it note they appear to be the only political entity in Iraq without an armed militia. 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -----Original Message----- From: a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Charles Brown Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 8:29 PM To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu; marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: [A-List] Iraq Communists Campaign With Vigor Iraq Communists Campaign With Vigor from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES [FYI] The Communist Party doesn't have much of a chance in elections Saturday, but its candidates see an opportunity to woo voters unhappy with sectarian politics and wary of freewheeling capitalism. By Tina Susman and Raheem Salman January 28, 2009 Reporting from Baghdad -- "Comrade, come in," the man said, ushering a visitor into the lobby of Iraqi Communist Party headquarters. Across the busy intersection, a banner stretched across a newly renovated building promised the imminent opening of American fast-food restaurants, including "Kentacky Fried Chicken." Throughout the capital, portraits of Imam Hussein were omnipresent, reminders of a Shiite Muslim pilgrimage commemorating his death in AD 680. In a nation where religious parties dominate and many people dream of a wealthy life in the West, it's not easy being a Communist. But that doesn't seem to worry the enthusiastic comrades buzzing about the party's sprawling four-story headquarters. After decades on the sidelines or behind bars, they are banking on disenchantment with the religious parties now in power, and a wariness of freewheeling Western capitalism, to lift their fortunes in provincial elections Saturday. "In the past five years, the people have begun to understand that these political parties failed to achieve what people were hoping for," said Abdul Munim Jabber Hadi, wearing a blood-red tie and gray suit as he prepared to go out campaigning Sunday. Hadi is one of 27 Communist Party candidates vying for seats on Baghdad's 57-member provincial council. He is not expecting most of his fellow Communists to prove victorious. The party won two seats on the council four years ago in the last provincial elections, and the 275-member national parliament has two Communists. So it will take time to build power, explained Hadi, an exuberant man with a thick gray mustache. "We're in the process of building the new Iraqi state," he continued, as he sipped tea and waited for his volunteer pamphleteers to show up. Across the room, a white-haired man was discussing his years in the former Czechoslovakia and opining about President Obama's plans for repairing the U.S. economy. Conversations laced with reminiscences are common among party members, many of whom spent years in exile or prison under a succession of repressive Iraqi regimes. Mohammed Jassim Labban, a member of the party's Central Committee, was studying social sciences in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. "It was very hurtful," he said, grimacing at the memory of statues of Lenin being yanked down. Hadi, once a professional soccer player, spent four years in prison on charges of trying to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. He speaks proudly of his mother, who urged him to stick to his principles, even if it meant death by hanging. "That's my mother," he said with a chuckle. "She was a strong believer." Both blame the collapse of the Soviet empire on an overly rigid interpretation of socialist ideas. "We believe that Marxist theories are not sacred. Nothing is sacred in politics," said Labban, insisting that Iraq's Communists would not force people into collective farming or impose state control over the economy. Just what they would do if they gained power remains vague. Like most of the parties fielding candidates -- about 14,500 people are running -- the Communists speak of improving electrical service, creating jobs, ending corruption and wiping out sectarianism, without saying how they would accomplish their goals. Labban pointed to the United States' financial problems as proof that "wild capitalism," as Hadi called it, is not the answer. "We're not gloating, but we expected such a crisis, because the system was set up that way," Labban said. The Communists have their own economic woes. They depend on private contributions to fund their campaigns. They can't afford TV ads, so they hit the streets to spread their message. Hadi, who gives $20 a month to the party, goes out daily to bellow through a bullhorn that the Communists are the "party of the poor" and of "the hard-working people." On Sunday, he visited the Shorja market, a chaotic, mile-long strip lined by tall, crumbling apartment blocks dark with grime. As he marched down the street shouting hoarsely, volunteers wearing yellow jerseys with black lettering fluttered around like giant bumblebees. They thrust Communist Party literature at vendors and shoppers, dodging donkey-drawn carts and wooden wheelbarrows pushed by skinny young men moving tomatoes and space heaters. To get here from the party office, Hadi hailed a taxi. His volunteers crammed into a minivan. There were no visible signs of security. Two Communist Party politicians have been killed in the northern semiautonomous region of Kurdistan since Dec. 18. In the days before the January 2005 provincial elections, two Communist Party members in Baghdad were assassinated. But Hadi didn't seem concerned for his safety and was brimming with energy as he barreled through the crowded market at midday. The working-class Iraqis operating the stalls are the people the Communists hope to lure away from the bigger parties "I'll vote for them," said Mehdi Abbas, a taxi driver, citing the party's support for nationalizing the lucrative oil industry. "And the most important thing is that when these people win, we'll get rid of the turbaned clerics," he added with a laugh. Jamil Hussein, a dapper engineer in a tweed overcoat, said he had supported the Communist Party in 1958 after a coup ousted the nation's monarchy and brought hopes of social and economic reforms. "But the circumstances were stronger than our hopes," he said. Even now, Hussein said, he doubted the Communist Party could make a comeback against the religious forces in power. "Its popularity is not like before," he said. Religious leaders agree. Ahmed Massoudi, a spokesman for the movement loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, said he doubted there was a future for the Communist Party. "It contains good, esteemed figures, but its opportunities are limited because most Iraqis are Muslims and concerned with religious thoughts. Religion plays a major role in life here, so a party like the Communist Party has little chance to play a major role," he said. The Communists say it is just such attitudes that will work to their advantage. Most Iraqis prefer a secular government, Hadi said, as an old woman in a black abaya waved away a campaign flier. A man selling fresh fish accepted three fliers but then carefully placed one in each of his barrels of fish. None of this discouraged the candidate. "After five years, the people are at a crossroads," he said. "They can vote for those they already elected, or they can go for the new, democratic secular powers." From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Tue Feb 3 11:36:51 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 10:36:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] David Duke's Nightmare Comes True! Message-ID: <942549.50286.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> David Duke's Nightmare Comes True! By David Knowles Feb 3rd 2009 9:58AM Filed Under:eRepublicans, Featured Stories, Race, Obama Administration What's a white supremacist to do? Consider the events of recent years. First, David Duke's own party (the GOP) all but abandons the "Southern strategy", hires Condi Rice as Secretary of State and Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Then, the country as a whole has the nerve to elect its first African American president. To crown it all off, last week, Republicans picked Michael Steele to head up the RNC. Here's what Duke had to say about the selection in a none-too-subtle piece, titled "To Hell with the Republican Party: GOP traitors appoint Obama Junior as Chairman of the Republican Party": The Republican Party leadership, in its latest act of self-immolation appointed Michael Steele, a radical black racist as the leader of the Party. Steele is a passionate supporter of affirmative action programs that racially discriminate against tens of millions of White Americans. You get the gist. Capitalize "White", lowercase "black." Same old story. To add insult to injury, another black guy, Eric Holder, has been confirmed as the nation's top law enforcement official. Oh, and don't forget Obama's pick of a Jew, Rahm Emanuel, as his Chief-of-Staff. Yes, it seems like the former KKK-Grand-Wizard's nightmare of a post-racial America might just be coming true. Those obsessed with the notion of "pure blood" (that includes you, Lord Voldemort) felt their collective pulse rise earlier this year when headlines across the country reported a census bureau finding that in the year 2050, whites will officially become a minority population in these United States. But the assertion was true only if you held a perverse, and racist, notion of what constitutes racial identity.As The Boston Globe explained: So what explains the persistent drumbeat about the impending white minority? A statistical distortion: the exclusion of Hispanic whites. If only non-Hispanic whites are counted, the white population today amounts to 66 percent of the total, and will hit around 46 percent by 2050. But excluding whites of Hispanic origin from the overall white population makes no more sense than excluding whites of Slavic or Scandinavian origin. "Hispanic" is not a race. It is an ethnic category. But whatever the genetic/cultural distinctions, there is no doubt that the face of the country is changing--both in the population at large, and as regards those who control its levers of power. For racists like David Duke, that's nothing to celebrate. From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Tue Feb 3 12:59:18 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 11:59:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Black History Month Award goes to White voters for Obama; Iowa Caucus voters special mention Message-ID: <380370.34112.qm@web180109.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> In the US the class and race questions are integrally intertwined. Karl Marx said in _Capital_ "In the United States of America any sort of independent labor movement was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded." THE WORKING DAY Struggle for a Normal Working Day Repercussion of the English Factory Acts on Other Countries http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx37.htm#pg37 Workers of all nations,races and of the World, Unite ! This Black History month the Award goes to the tens millions of White voters around the country for Obama who made Black history and just history. Perhaps the Iowa Caucus voters get a special mention as leaders of this anti-racist movement among White people. Charles From noreply at coha.org Tue Feb 3 11:16:04 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 13:16:04 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Latin America in the Era of Obama Message-ID: <20090203181555.416AE3E459D@mx-out.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 6446 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/5655cae4/attachment.txt From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Tue Feb 3 14:46:28 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 16:46:28 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Kapital-the movie Message-ID: <05cd01c98648$dee24d70$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> Features ? Film 19/01/2009 Marx: the quest, the path, the destination Alexander Kluge's nine-and-a-half hour long film of Marx's "Kapital" is not a minute too long says Helmut Merker What is a revolutionary? The writings of Marx and Engels both use the metaphor of revolution as the "locomotive of history". Is, then, the revolutionary a standard bearer of progress, a pace setter, a frontrunner? None of the above, because in a world ruled by a turbo "devaluation" where only the new has market value, where commodity production spirals out of control, the "train of time" is a deadly trend. Alexander Kluge instead opts for Walter Benjamin's idea of the revolution as mankind "pulling the emergency brake". We must hold up the torch of reason to the problems at hand, and the true revolutionary is therefore the one who can unite future and past, merging two times, two societies, the artist who montages stories and history. And so we come to Alexander Kluge and his art. Kluge's monumental "News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx ? Eisenstein ? Das Kapital" is a 570-minute film available only on DVD which is based on the work of two other montage artists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein. These two met in 1929 to discuss filming Marx's "Kapital" which had been written 60 years beforehand. Now, eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood's capitalists nor Moscow's Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way. Most of the film consists of involved discussions between Alexander Kluge and other Marx-savvy writers and artists. Poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger compares the soul of man with the soul of money, author Dietmar Dath explains the meaning of the hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag and, from the standpoint of the Stoics, leaps (rather than marches at an orderly pace) into industrialisation, the actress Sophie Rois makes an impassioned appeal for Medea, differentiating between additive and subtractive love, filmmaker Werner Schroeter stages a Wagner opera featuring the "rebirth of Tristan in the spirit of battleship Potemkin", philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks about Ovid and the metamorphosis of added value, a man at the piano analyses the score of a strike song while workers and factory owners face off in an opera by Luigi Nono, the poet D?rs Gr?nbein interprets Bert Brecht's aesthetisation of the Communist manifesto in swinging oceanic hexameter, cultural scientist Rainer Stollmann emphasises the myriad meanings of Marx's writings as science, art, story telling, philosophy, poetry. And social theorist and philosopher Oskar Negt looks sceptical when asked whether it's possible to find the right images for all this stuff when you're less interested in pedagogical content than the encompassing theory. Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts as their "thinking gradually deepens through talking" and to watch Kluge interject, hopping adroitly from one thought to the next, surprising his interlocutors, catching them off balance, sending them off on new trajectories. We never know how much agreement and variance is hidden in Kluge's objections. His a Socratic approach to questioning, curious, open to everything, and so wonderfully subtle that at the end always find yourself wondering whether he had been driving at a particular target all along. Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming "Das Kapital" but researching how one might find images to make Marx's book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination. The model for his underlying structure is Joyce's "Ulysses" where the entire history of the world is packed into a day in the life of his hero, Bloom. In Kluge's hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry. Coincidences, collisions. Back to back with a short film in which director Tom Tykwer stirs things up in a Berlin street, two readers struggle to recite the following sentence, slipping in and out of synch with increasing desperation: "Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective." No sooner are we shown "how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology" than we have the history of capitalism is explained to us as a giant extension of the fairytale about the devil with the three golden hairs ? every thing is a human being being cast under a spell. And the beginning of Mae West's film career runs parallel to the leap into industrialisation ? a form of aesthetic slapstick in which not cream pies fly through the air but ideas and concepts. Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of "October" into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it's not a minute too long. * This article was originally published in Tagesspiegel on 8 January 2009. Helmut Merker is a film critic. 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 14130 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/c01387ed/attachment.txt From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Tue Feb 3 16:45:29 2009 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (james daly) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 23:45:29 -0000 Subject: [A-List] Herman Schiller Message-ID: Nestor wrote: I have written something on all these issues recently, which has been circulating widely on the Web in Argentina. Though it is too idyosincratically Argentinean, perhaps it would be fine if I sent it to the A-list. Please do, Nestor. James From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 17:24:29 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:24:29 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Our Pirates and Theirs - Why are more than a dozen of the world's navies converging on Somalia? Message-ID: <4988E03D.6020402@gmail.com> World Beat by JOHN FEFFER | Tuesday, January 27, 2009 Vol. 4, No. 5 Our Pirates and Theirs Here's the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean 4. The film opens with Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow dropping anchor in New York harbor. He descends on Wall Street with his mates and, after a quick costume change at Brooks Brothers, storms the boardrooms of Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and other major firms. They don't need sabers to rake in the haul. Jack's a clever pirate. He takes advantage of the tools at hand. Applying mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, Jack seizes billions of dollars in booty. He distributes huge bonuses to his crew for a job well done. And just before the government steps in to clean up the mess, the pirates scramble back to their ship and set sail. Quick question: Why are more than a dozen of the world's navies converging on Somalia to battle pirates there instead of sailing into New York to capture the Wall Street pirates? After all, CEOs benefited from $20 billion in taxpayer money using tax loopholes, according to an IPS study. Surely the global economy would be made more secure by forcing former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who doled out $4 billion in executive bonuses even as his company was collapsing, to walk the gangplank than by cracking down on the bands of privateers in the Horn of Africa. "Pirate," like "terrorist," has always been a slippery term to define. Just as the British considered George Washington a terrorist rather than a freedom fighter, they portrayed John Paul Jones as a pirate rather than a naval hero. After the Revolutionary War, the shoe was on the other foot when the United States fought several pitched battles with the "Barbary pirates." These fearsome vessels, however, were not really pirate ships. Rather, they worked on behalf of several Barbary states that were part of the Ottoman empire. As Frank Lambert writes in The Barbary Wars, Algeria, Tripoli, and Morocco preferred traditional commerce and resorted to piracy largely because European powers refused to open their markets. If terrorism is the weapon of those on the political margins, piracy is the weapon of those on the economic margins. Fast forward to the latest piracy news. The newspapers have been full of stories about gangs preying on vessels passing through the Suez Canal and near the Somali coast. They seized dozens of ships last year - including a Saudi tanker with $100 million worth of crude oil that yielded a $3 million ransom - with the help of fast boats, GPS, and submachine guns. The pirates are currently negotiating for a comparable ransom before releasing a Ukrainian vessel that has 33 Russian tanks, heavy artillery, and grenade launchers. As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Rubrick Biegon points out, the Somali pirates did not start out as Jack Sparrows. "Piracy in Somalia began because traditional coastal fishing became difficult after foreign fishing trawlers depleted local fish stocks," he writes in Somalia Piracy and the International Response. "Desperate fishermen started attacking trawlers until the trawler crews fought back with heavy weapons, leading the local fishermen to turn to other types of commercial vessels. The pirates prefer to call themselves the Somali 'coast guard,' noting that, prior to the recent spate of hijackings, they organized themselves to defend their communities from overfishing and, according to several accounts, to protect Somalia's coastline from toxic dumping by foreign vessels." Piracy blossomed in Somalia after Ethiopia invaded in 2006 with U.S. support and deposed the Islamic Courts Union. "Under the Courts, there was literally no piracy," observes one maritime security expert. "While many Somalis disapproved of some of the more fundamentalist ways of the original courts, most felt that they were well organized, disciplined, and effective civil administrators who had certainly provided Somalia with its first semblance of order and leadership since 1991," write FPIF contributors Gerald LeMelle and Michael Stulman in Africa Policy Outlook 2009. The anti-piracy campaign, argues FPIF contributor Francis Njubi Nesbitt, is a giant red herring. "Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in December 2006, backed by the United States, sparked an Islamist resistance that led to thousands of civilian deaths, displaced over a million people, and depopulated the capital, Mogadishu," he writes in Somalia: Waiting for Obama. "But instead of focusing on the aftermath of this crisis and helping foster a peace process, the United States, European Union, and other international actors are engaged in the more dramatic and media-friendly anti-piracy campaign." Hussein Yusuf disagrees. "Somalia poses a grave danger to the United States and the Horn of Africa today," the FPIF contributor writes in What's Next for Somalia. "Despite the U.S. 'Global War on Terror,' piracy in the Gulf of Aden threatens the supply of oil and commercial trade to the West. Islamic extremists threaten the stability of this region more than ever." Yusuf and Nesbitt offer contrasting interpretations in their strategic dialogue on this topic. Everyone agrees, however, that the pirates of the Somali coast have raked in quite a lot of money, somewhere around $30 million in 2008. That's more than a few pearls and pieces of eight. But compare that to the bonuses that Wall Street employees took home last year: $18.4 billion. At least the Somali pirates were good at their jobs. http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/5834 From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 18:05:00 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:05:00 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum In-Reply-To: <7alt5i$3cpcj6@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> References: <7alt5i$3cpcj6@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> Message-ID: <4988E9BC.8020807@gmail.com> Todd Boyle wrote: > Prof. Mark Jensen has published at no cost, original translations > from the French press, and analyses and comparisons of varioius > press, every day, 365 days a year for many years on the Tacoma PJH list. > He also leads book discussions and other activities. See the UFPPC > website for archives, and join the email list. > - Todd > > > To: jensenmk82 at gmail.com > From: jensenmk at plu.edu > Sender: tacomapjh at yahoogroups.com > Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:22:35 -0800 (PST) > Subject: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend > World Social Forum > > TRANSLATION: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum > (Le Figaro) > The left-wing economist Rafael Correa rose to the top in > Ecuador, a country that used to favor investment bankers in the > government; the former bishop of liberation theology Fernando Lugo > brought to a close seventy years of conservatives in Paraguay; the > former military rebel Hugo Chavez has set in motion his Bolivarian > Revolution in Venezuela; the Indian Evo Morales entered the > history books as the first indigenous head of state in Bolivia, > and, finally, a metallurgical worker raised himself up to the > presidency in a Brazil marked by social inequality. ================= Don't think it hasn't been duly noted: In The News: The Khyber Pass bridge linking Pakistan with Afghanistan has been blown up? But Russia and Tajikistan have already come to the rescue . Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the US government?s focus on Iraq and Afghanistan is beginning to hinder our ability to ?respond? to military affairs globally. More... [February 03 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Life *IS* A Crapshoot, And The The Republicans Are Playing The Political ?Back Line? In The Crapshoot, Gambling The New Administration?s Economic Recovery Act WILL NOT ?Recover? The American Economy My site: http://leighm.net/wp/2009/02/03/tth_090203/ ArchiveDOTorg: http://www.archive.org/details/tth_090203 From nmgoro at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 20:03:26 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:03:26 -0300 Subject: [A-List] =?iso-8859-1?q?El_a=F1o_que_viene_en_Gaza_y_en_Londres_?= =?iso-8859-1?q?=28Spa=2C_with_notes_in_Eng=29?= Message-ID: <4989057E.4000703@gmail.com> [Answering to James Daly?s request, here I send my piece. I start by a reference to an excellent piece by the Argentinean and Jewish poet Alberto Szpuberg, which I will send on separate mail. I am adding notes to clarify some points that may be too idyosincratic. Both this text and Szpunberg?s article have appeared on the Reconquista Popular mailing list.] El hermoso texto de Szpunberg me mueve a una confesi?n personal, que env?o al p?blico a guisa de testimonial relato de un tramo de la historia social argentina m?s reciente. A veces, medio en broma medio en serio, digo de m? mismo que "nunca fui jud?o y a lo sumo fui sionista". Como hubo quien no entendi? qu? quer?a decir, aprovecho para explicarlo, ya que no creo que se trate para nada de una experiencia aislada. M?s bien, me parece que hay un montonazo de personas que podr?an decir algo parecido. Jam?s recib? una "educaci?n jud?a familiar", a diferencia de Alberto Szpunberg. Para complacer a mis abuelos, me mandaron, s?, a una "escuela jud?a" (hasta los diez a?os, cuando a fuerza de v?mitos matutinos dej? en claro que no quer?a ir nunca m?s). Pero atraves? bastante indemne esa experiencia. Mis maestros no lograron meterme en la cabeza aquello que la vida (la vida, siempre poderosa) me quitaba: que yo era ante todo un jud?o. Eso me chocaba. M?s bien me sent?a bastante inc?modo cuando, a veces, mis amiguitos de la escuela (la del estado, la otra era el "?dishe shule") me preguntaban "Si Israel entra en guerra con la Argentina, ?vos a qui?n apoy?s?". Yo, era argentino y orgulloso de serlo ?Porqu? me hac?an una pregunta tan absurda? En ese entonces no percib?a que Israel reclamaba su derecho a representarme a m?, como jud?o, ante cualquier poder del planeta. Y mucho menos se me ocurr?a que el gobierno y el pueblo argentino pod?an bien ser uno de esos poderes. En 1962, agentes secretos israel?es hab?an violado la soberan?a argentina secuestrando a Eichmann, un criminal de guerra nazi que estaba refugiado aqu? y con empleo en la Mercedes Benz. Pero yo no entend?a lo que esto significaba. Mis amiguitos, quiz?s, tampoco. Pero la pregunta los llevaba naturalmente al n?cleo del asunto... En realidad, aunque estos asuntos no me resultaran claros en lo m?s m?nimo, yo nunca fui otra cosa que un argentino m?s, como miles y miles de "chicos jud?os" criados en los fines de la d?cada del 50 y principios de la del 60. Pero ciertas circunstancias, a las que la Libertadora[1] no fue ajena, me dificultaron comprenderlo. Un solo ejemplo: de pibe[2], siempre me sent? cerca del Tochi. El Tochi era un morochito con quien jugaba a la pelota en el empedrado de la cortada que hace la calle Montenegro al tropezar con el terrapl?n de la v?a, all? donde viv?an mis abuelos maternos, en los barrios m?s inundables y paup?rrimos de Chacarita[3]. El Tochi estaba mucho m?s pr?ximo a m?, por cierto, que esos se?ores raros a los que mi propia madre junaba con cierto lejano recelo mientras pasaban por la Avenida San Mart?n enfundados en sus ropajes y gorros de piel, aptos para Vilna seguramente pero no para La Paternal[4] en verano con 40 grados a la sombra. Mi infancia unific? la comida jud?a con los ?oquis por el inexorable hecho de que mi abuela los hac?a como los dioses (le hab?a ense?ado una vecina de familia italiana, la Sra. Rosso), y la mesa familiar de los Schuminer se parec?a m?s a la de los televisivos Campanelli[5] que a cualquier otra cosa. Y as? siguiendo. Cuando quise meterme a hacer campamentismo y vida al aire libre, la Libertadora se meti? en mi vida sin que yo me enterase. Dado que el intento de construir un scoutismo laico del General Per?n (el Instituto Nacional del Scoutismo Argentino) hab?a capotado tras el golpe del 55 y el scoutismo qued? en manos de la Iglesia otra vez (ellos tambi?n cobraron por su aporte a la infausta Fusiladora: el scoutismo fue parte del pago, y la ley de Ense?anza Libre otra), me met? muy naturalmente en la Iglesia de San Juan Mar?a Vianney. All? lo pas? muy bien por unos meses, hasta que descubr? eso de que el scoutismo era medio cosa de chiquilines boludos[6]liderados por un grandote boludo y todo eso que se dice, y me tom? el pir?scafo[7] de ese asunto inventado por Baden Powell para reconstruir el esp?ritu b?lico de las ?lites brit?nicas (claro est? que por entonces yo ignoraba esto ?ltimo). As? que si en algo me un? al juda?smo fue por ese gusto m?o por el campamentismo y cosas parecidas. A los doce a?os me invitaron a participar de una organizaci?n sionista-socialista donde enfatizaban mucho todo ese asunto, y all? me vincul? con algo que laxamente podr?a definirse como juda?smo. De modo que quienes indirectamente me mandaron a esa bolsa cerrada fueron, no por casualidad, los mismos exclusionistas que colaboraron en el golpe de 1955 en nombre de Cristo Rey. Para colmo, por los mismos tiempos hab?an arreciado los ataques antisemitas que dec?an ser cometidos por "peronistas" (la Tacuara original[8]), con lo cual me sent? mucho m?s compelido a juntarme con "los m?os". En resumen, fue gracias al nacionalismo de derecha cat?lico, que este argentinito casi m?s termina "jud?o", digamos, por el lado _pol?tico_, o sea: sionista. Pero los exclusionistas, los partidarios de una Argentina cat?lica con olor a sacrist?a y sin verdadero Evangelio no pudieron en mi caso (como en el de muchos miles) con la potente marea integracionista de la Argentina de carne y hueso, ?sa que hab?a parido al peronismo del que ellos se hab?an intentado servir no sin cierto ?xito. Es que despu?s, el mismo pa?s -y la experiencia _in situ_ de lo que era el Estado de Israel-, me llamaron de vuelta a mi verdadero lugar en el mundo. All? entend?, antes de leer a Jauretche[9], que los argentinos ven?amos en m?ltiples formatos. Que, como bien dicen ahora algunos amigos, era una Patria mult?gena la nuestra, y como tal forzada por la historia a fusionar culturas en una nacionalidad com?n e incluyente, no en una falsa "naci?n originaria" a la que "los dem?s" vinimos "de pasada". La actitud de los estadounidenses con ra?ces anteriores a la Guerra Civil, ?sa tan bien representada en la pel?cula "El Buen Pastor" por el Agente Thomas de la CIA frente a un mafioso, ?sa por la cual todos pod?an tener muchas glorias pero ellos ten?an los EEUU de Norteam?rica y los dem?s eran inquilinos, ?sa actitud, le est? vedada al movimiento nacional de los argentinos, entre otras cosas porque estamos viviendo un estadio que los EEUU ya superaron, justamente el que es anterior a la Guerra Civil. Lo cual no obsta para que muchos integrantes del movimiento nacional, y muchos que no lo integran pero -hoy como medio siglo atr?s- quieren ponerlo al servicio de sus peque?as mezquindades, insistan todav?a hoy en sus particionistas malas artes. Pero bueno, mientras fui sionista mi sionismo -es decir, mi modo de ser jud?o- tambi?n estaba (como el juda?smo ateo y antisionista de Szpunberg) mucho m?s cerca del profeta Am?s que de cualquier otra vertiente de ese pensamiento. Fatal, mi destino, por lo visto. Y me alegra ver que tipos como Szpunberg, que tienen infinitamente m?s talento que yo, llegan al mismo puerto de recalada desde navegaciones m?s complicadas que las m?as. ?El a?o que viene en Jenin? No, hoy no. El a?o que viene en Gaza. ?so es lo que deber?a decir ahora cualquier jud?o que merezca ese nombre. Quiz?s Szpunberg y el que esto escribe seamos los ?ltimos exponentes de una especie en extinci?n. Si es as?, fund?monos con dignidad en el pueblo al que pertenecemos. Y aport?mosle todo lo de bueno (que es mucho) que puede aportarle el origen jud?o de unos cuantos de los que aqu? hemos venido a recalar para -como le dije alguna vez a un abogadito de "familia tradicional tucumana"- "construir en una generaci?n mucho m?s patria de la que su familia hab?a logrado vender en cinco". El abogadito, dicho sea de paso, era un nacionalista cat?lico y olig?rquico, lo que no le imped?a (sino m?s bien le daba la oportunidad de) trabajar para una empresa imperialista. El a?o que viene en Gaza, lo repito. Y tambi?n en Londres. En Londres, Catamarca[10]. [1] "La Libertadora": the infamous pro-imperialist coup by which, to the great joy among others of Winston Churchill, Per?n was overthrown in 1955. The coup changed the tide in Argentina for the best part of half a century or more, and called itself the "Revoluci?n Libertadora". The mass of the Argentinean people called it a different name. The immediate forerunner of this "Libertadora" had been an unexpected and not informed bombing of downtown Buenos Aires on June 16, 1956 which cost between 350 and 1200 civilian lives (numbers have never been accurately established); on June 9, 1956 the "Libertadora" put to the shooting squad dozens of Argentineans who attempted a revolutionary counter-coup (the plot had been discovered at the very beginning, and its participants were allowed to go ahead in order to give a lesson to the masses) -thus reinstating shooting squads for political reasons in Argentina after almost one hundred years. Thus the Argentineans called it the "Fusiladora", that is the "Shooting Squad" revolution. Every military coup in Argentina between 1955 and our times has been a scion of the "Libertadora", and only now is the cycle slowly beginning to come to a close. (2)Pibe: child, kid, in vernacular Buenos Aires Spanish [3]Chacarita: a very poor bloc of neighborhoods in Buenos Aires [4]La Paternal: another poor neighborhood in Buenos Aires. I was brought up in both. [5] Los Campanelli: there was a most humorous TV show in Argentina during the late 60s, early 70s, recording the Sunday gatherings for lunch of the Campanelli "family". They were very Argentinean, and very Italian at the same time. A good piece of social realism with touches of humor. [6] Boludo: a "must" in Argentinean slang. Literally "big balls". It means "stupid, foolish" [7] Me tom? el pir?scafo: I ran away from the place. Old-fashioned Buenos Aires slang, literally it means "I took the steamer", but "pir?scafo" comes from Italian. [8] la Tacuara original: Tacuara was a legendary politico-military organization which started as a Fascist, Anti-Communist outfit but ended up broken in the most incredible pieces. Some of its members formed the original cadre of Montoneros, others of the ERP, still others became agents of the 1976 dictatorship. Some of them had been comrades in arms, for example Dardo Cabo and Alejandro Giovenco, who in 1966 took an Argentinean airplane and forced it to land at Malvinas. They called themselves the "Comando C?ndor". In 1976 Giovenco was a member of the repressive apparatus, and Cabo a member of Montoneros. During the early 60s they specialized in attacking Jewish people and institutions as well as throwing "tar bombs" against the statues of Liberal hero Domingo F. Sarmiento (in Argentina "liberal" tends to mean "pro British sepoy") [9] Jauretche: the most important national-democratic intellectual in Argentina during the 20th Century. In a sense, the Mark Twain of my country. [10] Londres, Catamarca: Londres (that is, London)is a town in the Argentinean province of Catamarca, founded 1593, when the then King of Spain was about to marry -or thought to be about to marry- an English princess. The name is a hommage to the country of birth of the bride. Catamarca is one of the Inland provinces where you can find the purest Argentinean tradition and the purest (if such a mixture can be pure) type of Creole Argentinean. It was also the starting point of the business carreer of Jos? Ber Gelbard, the Jewish Minister of Economics appointed by Per?n in 1973, during the short year of his third mandate. From nmgoro at gmail.com Tue Feb 3 20:08:29 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:08:29 -0300 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?=5BAlberto_Szpunberg=5D_=C2=BFEl_a=C3=B1o_que_?= =?utf-8?q?viene_en_Jen=C3=ADn=3F?= Message-ID: <498906AD.50009@gmail.com> El a?o que viene en Jen?n por Alberto Szpunberg* 1. El olor dulz?n de la muerte impregnaba el aire de polvo y dolor, mientras un enjambre de moscas sofocaba el campo de refugiados de Jen?n. Con las manos, y sin l?grimas, dos hermanos buscaban el cuerpo de Hamad Massaud Abu Ba, su padre, sepultado por los bulldozer del ej?rcito israel? a un metro bajo tierra. Yo mismo no s? por d?nde empezar. El tecleo siempre es infinitamente m?s lento que las r?fagas. Antes de pulsar una sola letra, alguien ya puso en marcha su bulldozer y avanza, ojo por ojo, diente por diente, sin distinguir ventanas, paredes, perros, ni?os, libros, novias, gasas, platos de sopa a?n tibios, ni siquiera ese viejito ??mi abuelo Jos?? ?Qu? hace ah? en Jen?n, en ese infierno, mi abuelo Jos???, ni siquiera ese viejito que se lleva las manos a la cabeza para cubrirse del horror. Quiero tomarlo por los hombros y apartarlo, quiero gritar, pero es tarde. ?Siempre es tarde? La muerte, que no tiene despu?s, siempre es antes. Y la sangre es el ?nico r?o en que los seres humanos nos ba?amos dos, doscientas, infinitas veces. Me miro al espejo y no sostengo la mirada del jud?o que me mira. Los ojos de mi abuelo Jos? eran transparentes como la primera estrella. Pero su manera de titilar ahora es llanto. 2. El ?rea parece arrasada por un terremoto, con las casas destruidas y sus paredes dinamitadas por los tanques e incendiadas por los misiles, lanzados desde los helic?pteros Apache en Hawashin, el coraz?n del campo de refugiados de Jen?n. Bombardearon los colegios de Naciones Unidas, el centro de salud y tambi?n el de purificaci?n de agua. Mi abuelo Jos? me cont? que Mois?s hab?a sido tartamudo ?pesado de lengua? y no me sorprende. Yo mismo lo he le?do en su libro ?es el Libro de los Libros?, me explic? mi abuelo, y a ese Libro de los Libros lo leo en hebreo, idioma que me ense?? mi abuelo Jos?. ?Es la lengua de Dios -me dijo- y todo lo que dice es verdad?. Fue una revelaci?n. Era una escritura realmente tartamuda: letras y letras desunidas, blanco sobre negro, independientes unas de otras, pero todas juntas a coro para que a trav?s de ellas, incluso a trav?s del blanco que las separa, pueda expresarse Dios, un Dios tan terrible y, a la vez, tan generoso. As? est? escrito, como los mismos jud?os: dispersos, todos diferentes y todos jud?os. Si esta lengua -?pesado de lengua?- es la voz de Dios y todo lo que dice es verdad, ?c?mo se escribe en hebreo la revelaci?n de un verdadero crimen sin tartamudear? Mi abuelo Jos? me mira desde el espejo, se vuelve hacia los fieles que lo rodean y estrecha sus manos. No son muchos -?cincuenta, quinientos, mil palestinos?-, pero todos saben que suman seis millones... Todos ellos han estado en Auschwitz y saben muy bien qu? es Jen?n. Y a mi abuelo se le llenan los ojos de l?grimas. Despu?s de 5.762 a?os, ?l no hace planes de futuro -?El a?o que viene en Jerusalem?- para discutir las diferencias entre un horno crematorio y un misil ni si seis millones de jud?os son m?s que cincuenta, quinientos palestinos. Me acerco un poco m?s al espejo y me reconozco: sus l?grimas son m?as. 3. Abuanas, un empleado del Ministerio de Salud de la Autoridad Palestina, de 35 a?os, se ha quedado sin casa, sin ropa, sin futuro. Vio dos cosas que aun le dan ganas de vomitar. Una, un grupo de soldados israel?es disparando sobre la ingle de un joven palestino armado para despu?s pasarle, a?n vivo, un tanque por encima.... Ahora -?a?n estamos a tiempo?- me doy cuenta: pobre Mois?s, ser portavoz de un Dios tan terrible como para pedirle a Abraham que demuestre su fe con una muerte, nada menos que la de su propio hijo (G?nesis, 32), y tan generoso como para prometerle a una horda de esclavos muertos de hambre una tierra donde manan la leche y la miel (?xodo, 3). Eso, toda esa locura lo volvi? a Mois?s ?pesado de lengua?, tanto es as? que lleg? a las puertas de la tierra prometida y no pudo alcanzarla. ?No nos est? pasando lo mismo? Intento explicarle todo esto a quien me mira desde el espejo, pero apenas tartamudeo, como si mi lengua, pesad?sima, teclease. Estoy a punto de decirlo, lo tengo en la punta de la lengua, pero siempre, siempre la palabra es m?s lenta que una ejecuci?n sumaria. 3. La otra fue ver c?mo los bulldozer israel?es abr?an una trinchera, colocaban cuerpos en pleno centro del campo y los cubr?an con tierra, aunque hoy la lluvia haya transformado esta fosa com?n en un lodazal. Yo pertenezco al pueblo elegido por ese Dios tan terrible y tan generoso. Soy ateo, profunda, tranquila, apaciblemente ateo, pero hay veces en que querr?a que el dedo de Dios no me se?alase. Finalmente, elijo ser elegido. De lo contrario, nunca hubiera sido el nieto de mi abuelo Jos?. El D?a del Perd?n -del perd?n, no del olvido?*, en la sinagoga, ?l se cubr?a hasta la cabeza para que yo me refugiase bajo su manto sagrado cubierto de letras doradas y flecos sedosos. Al amparo de esa intimidad invulnerable -ni los alambres de p?a de Auschwitz, ni la picana el?ctrica de la ESMA, ni los bulldozer de Jen?n pod?an con ella-, su dedo tembloroso segu?a la lectura de las plegarias como quien sigue el curso de un inquietante r?o para que yo no me perdiese en aguas tan turbulentas, aunque siempre los destinos so?ados eran los mismos: paz, sobre todo paz, y de paso, ?por qu? no?, tambi?n salud, comida, buena suerte. Y cuando era el momento de decir ?porque t? nos elegiste entre todos los pueblos?, mi abuelo Jos? se re?a, me daba un codazo y me dec?a al o?do: ?para golpearnos.. .? Y su dedo se deten?a junto al inquietante r?o del vers?culo. Siempre hay que saber detenerse un instante antes de que la sangre llegue al inquietante r?o. Era ese instante en que sus ojos transparentes se humedec?an, cerraba el libro y dec?a: ?El a?o que viene en Jerusalem?. 4. Seg?n Hend Al? Oes, una palestina de 50 a?os, un soldado tom? de los pelos a Rateb, su nieto de dos a?os, le puso una pistola en la cabeza y los intim?: ?Salgan todos o le disparo?. Cuando salieron, un misil incendi? la casa y la familia se refugi?, junto a otras 50 personas, en la casa de una vecina. Muchas veces me pregunto: ?en qu? se parece un jud?o a otro jud?o? Hoy m?s que nunca lo tengo claro: en lo diferentes que son. Por eso, todas las ma?anas, cuando me miro al espejo, veo que no soy el mismo y descubro al jud?o que soy. A veces me veo tan igual, que ni me reconozco y hasta me olvido de qui?n soy. Pero siempre hay alguien diferente a m? que se cruza por mi camino y me lo recuerda. Por lo general, soy yo mismo; a veces incluso es otro jud?o. Ahora, por ejemplo, Shar?n me apunta con su dedo y no le tiembla el pulso. -?Antisemita!- le grita mi abuelo Jos? -?Pogromchik! Oigo su grito y entonces s? me reconozco, tranquilo, al lado de mi abuelo Jos?, que suspira hondamente y, con los ojos h?medos, exclama: ?El a?o que viene en Jerusalem?, y se da vuelta hacia los otros fieles, y yo con ?l, y estrechamos la mano de todos, uno a uno: primero, por supuesto, mi padre, Arieh Leib, en cuyo silencio m?s profundo resuenan los nocturnos de Chopin; el se?or Bercovich, plomero de manos duras y coraz?n tierno; mi t?o Enrique, con el mismo traje gris con que fue rico y cay? en la pobreza; mi t?o Manolo, comunista con un halo de noct?mbulo y mujeriego; el infaltable peluquero Piatock; Isa?as, el zapatero remend?n que ten?a una hija mog?lica, y tambi?n el otro Isa?as, ese que se acerca y nos dice: ?Voy a crear nuevos cielos, una nueva tierra? (65:17)... Mi abuelo asiente satisfecho desde el espejo y sigue estrechando las manos de tantos, tantos profetas: Jerem?as, Ezequiel, Oseas, Zacar?as, el pastor Am?s... 5. Una bomba est? incrustada en la puerta de la casa de Maha Shalabi. ?No avance. Si abrimos la puerta, volamos todos, ?D?nde voy a ir ahora??, pregunta esta estudiante de farmacia de 23 a?os. -?Am?s?- me sorprendo -?Usted por ac?? -S?- me contesta mi profeta preferido -Y ojo, que dos pecados ya perdon?, pero nunca un tercero (Am?s, 1)... Y yo me doy vuelta para preguntarle a mi abuelo Jos?: ??Ya he cometido el tercer pecado??, pero mi abuelo Jos? no est? a mi lado sino enfrente, y me mira desde el espejo y yo no puedo sostener su mirada. Soy otro. El bulldozer pasa por encima de un ni?o de Jen?n y nada lo detiene, ni siquiera Am?s, que se aleja de la sinagoga, siempre rumbo a Jerusalem, pero definitivamente abrazado a un pu?ado de palestinos -entre ellos ?l, yo, mi abuelo Jos?...-, que son llevados al pared?n cuyos ladrillos saltan por los aires y ba?an de sangre el espejo. Nunca volver? a ser el que era. Un Dios terrible, hoy infinitamente m?s terrible que generoso, me ha se?alado con el dedo. Y como es sabido que un jud?o habla hasta cuando s?lo gesticula, lo miro de frente, -?panim el panim?, leer?a mi abuelo en hebreo, ?cara a cara?, como Mois?s hablaba con Dios- y, aunque tartamudee, no quiero callar: ?El a?o que viene en Jerusalem? 6. -S? que aqu? hay un cad?ver, adem?s del de mi hermano Abderrahim, que sacamos ayer-, declara Huda al Farraj, de 23 a?os, mostrando una zona aplastada que hasta hace poco era su casa. S?, hay amores eternos en mi vida -mis hijas, la perra Shila (?que en paz descanse?), el libro de oraciones de mi abuelo Jos? (?que en paz descanse?), la mujer de la que me enamorar? ma?ana, ese verso de Ungaretti (?que en paz descanse?)-, y entre esos amores, Jerusalem (en hebreo, ?ciudad de la paz?). No puedo dejar de creer que todos mis caminos -ESMA, exilios, El Masnou, regresos. clandestinidades, Auschwitz, huidas, combates, Jen?n, derechos humanos- alg?n d?a culminar?n en Jerusalem. En cualquier rinc?n del mundo, pero siempre en Jerusalem. Y entonces habr? llegado, como buen jud?o, acaso para partir nuevamente. Un d?a le pregunt? a mi abuelo Jos?: ?Si ahora estuvieras en Jerusalem, ?seguir?as diciendo ?el a?o que viene en Jerusalem???. Mi abuelo me mir? sorprendido. Nunca se le hab?a ocurrido, ni aun estando en Jerusalem, dejar de decir ?el a?o que viene en Jerusalem?. Mucho menos que a su nieto, este que soy yo frente al espejo, se le ocurriese una pregunta semejante. Siempre, siempre ha sido y ser? ?el a?o que viene en Jerusalem?. S?lo la muerte no sabe del a?o que viene en Jerusalem. Si todos los jud?os se parecen en que son diferentes, ?c?mo un jud?o no va a so?ar un mundo diferente, donde haya lugar para todos y todos se parezcan en eso: en que son diferentes? Y no tartamudeo al decirlo: ?el a?o que viene en Jerusalem?. 7. Cuando la joven empez? a cavar con una pala y la ayuda de cinco familiares, un olor nauseabundo empez? a salir de los escombros, entre la ropa y los cristales rotos. Y mi abuelo Jos? sigue estrechando la mano de todos. ?El principio teol?gico jud?o central, no formulado, no dogm?tico, sino que subyace y cohesiona toda doctrina y profec?a, es la creencia en la participaci?n humana en la obra de redenci?n del mundo?, le dice Mart?n Buber. Y mi abuelo, aunque no sabe qu? significa la palabra ?teolog?a? ni ?doctrina? ni ?redenci?n?, me codea para que lo escuche atentamente y estreche su mano. Y saludo a Baruj Spinoza, Henrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo L?wenthal, Franz Kafka, Shalom Aleijem, Itzjak Babel, Gustav Landauer, Carlos Marx, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm... ??Maim?nides por ac?? ?Pero usted no escrib?a en ?rabe??, pregunta el tesorero de la sinagoga, un falso cabalista que s?lo contabiliza letras en hebreo. ??Y yo no escribo en idish??, interviene Isaac Bathevis Singer. ??Y yo no en italiano?? sonr?e Primo Levi, a un paso del suicidio. ??Y yo no con novias y violinistas que sobrevuelan los tejados del mundo??, protesta Marc Chagall. 8. Poco a poco van saliendo ancianos, con las manos en alto, madres con beb?s que ven la luz del d?a por primera vez en once d?as, y miran las pilas de basura, esa geograf?a de demolici?n y ruinas, como son?mbulos. Amal carga en sus brazos a su hijo de siete meses; el de cuatro a?os ayuda en la mudanza forzada. Pero Walter Benjamin advierte a tiempo: ?Articular hist?ricamente el pasado no significa articularlo como realmente ha sido. Significa adue?arse de un recuerdo tal como ?ste relampaguea en un momento de peligro?. Mi abuelo palidece. ?Un momento de peligro? ?Otro pogrom? ?Auschwitz? ?La ESMA? ?Kosovo? ?Bosnia? ?Jen?n?... . -?Cuidado! ?Abajo de la bota hay una muchacha! -advierte mi abuelo- ?Abajo del bulldozer hay un colegio! Y mi abuelo me abraza para protegerme de m? mismo. Un muchacho de la Intifada, que soy yo, recoge una piedra y la arroja. El espejo relampaguea y salta en pedazos, como letras sagradas, escritas a sangre y fuego en el v?rtigo de la historia. Y tartamudeo, claro que tartamudeo, pero hablo. 9. A las dos de la tarde, los soldados israel?es y sus tanques regresaron a Jen?n y volvieron a imponer el toque de queda. Mi abuelo se cubre de los tanques con el manto sagrado y yo busco la tibieza que anida en su ?kefiah?. El muchachito que arroj? la piedra me lleva por las calles de la capital del Estado Palestino y del Estado de Israel y me dice: ?El a?o que viene en Jerusalem?. Mi abuelo Jos? asiente. Sus ojos brillan transparentes como la primera estrella. Me reconozco en su esplendor, que cubre al mundo. Las alambradas de Auschwitz han desaparecido. Los desaparecidos de la ESMA se acercan a la luz y en ella se refugian. Los refugiados de Jen?n recogen las piedras y reconstruyen sus casas. Volvamos a la tierra prometida, volvamos al mundo. ?Anoche tuve un sue?o y no s? qu? significa?, le dice el Fara?n de Egipto a Jos?, s?, a mi abuelo Jos?. ?l sabe mucho de sue?os y le explica. Pero Shar?n no entiende de sue?os. Lanza sus bulldozers encima de la horda de esclavos, pero el Mar Rojo sabe qui?n pasa y qui?nes no pasar?n. Mi abuelo sigue con su dedo el inquietante r?o de la plegaria. Al final del vers?culo hay una tierra donde mana la leche y la miel. ?Qui?n, por Dios, qui?n no lo entiende? * Poeta argentino de origen jud?o. Premio Antonio Machado, Casa de las Am?ricas y Alcal? de Henares. Su primer libro: ?Poemas de la mano mayor? (1961) y su ?ltimo (por ahora): ?Apuntes? ? ?Luces que a lo lejos? (2008) El presente texto lo escribi? cuando se produjo la matanza de palestinos en el campo de refugiados de Jen?n. Miembro del Espacio Carta Abierta From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Feb 3 21:15:59 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:15:59 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Road Trip Message-ID: <4989167F.1050701@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005) www.kunstler.com (February 02 2009) "We will not apologize for our way of life ..." This unfortunate phrase from President Obama's otherwise sturdy inaugural address, echoed through my mind last week as I cruised the suburban outlands of Montgomery, Alabama. All the usual commercial furnishings of consumerist America hugged the flattish ochre and dusty-green landscape of played-out cotton fields where thirty feet of topsoil has washed away in the two hundred years since the mainly English settlers shoved out the native Alabamu, Coosa, and Tallapoosa. Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center", book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion. They say that the banks have stopped calling in their loans on the commercial real estate, even though the owners of the malls and strip malls have arrived firmly in default. Calling in the loans would only pin another horrifying liability on the banks' balance sheets. So all parties join in a game of "pretend", that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life. Something similar goes on at the next level down, where the tenants of the malls and strip malls sink deeper into rent arrears every month, and the eviction process is simply postponed, while the stores themselves put off paying their vendors and suppliers - as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality . How long will these games go on? This is the primary question that haunts the republic as we wait for new TARPS, and "bad banks", economic stimulus packages, infrastructure renewal roll-outs, and other policy life-lines thrown out in guarded hopefulness to haul America out of a ditch. The center of Montgomery was instructive, too. Not unlike any other city in the USA (population about 200,000), the former main artery of downtown commerce - Dexter Avenue, rolling out like a red carpet below the state capitol hill, where Martin Luther King's early career kicked off in a modest red brick church, and where Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the back of her bus - this "main street" presented a sad sequence of empty shopfronts interrupted here and there by rather creepy amateur murals depicting the cruelties of slavery, as if a remonstrance to the politicos up the hill. Most of the buildings lining the avenue still stood burdened by the clownish facade re-doos and ghastly claddings of the 1950s, which had replaced the ordered classical-vernacular decorum of the original 19th century frontages. Once the malls had landed in the old cotton fields, and MLK moved on to Atlanta, Dexter Avenue was just left to rot in the memory trunk. Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a "building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls - which turned out to belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center - deployed directly across the street from the modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown - the parts not dedicated to surface parking - was the ubiquitous array of muffler shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops. With the city center thus nearly dead, and the asteroid belt of malls and strips on their knees financially, this emblematic sunbelt metro area finds itself in a pickle. Cotton being well-past decline, and having wrecked the soil, the "new" economy of recent decades dedicated itself to building car-dependent air-conditioned suburban sprawl - the perceived perfect antidote to a previous economic order based on serfdom, hook-worm, and inescapable heat. That now-not-so-new economy of sprawl, in turn, has come to a screeching halt, as a cruel destiny threw sand in the mechanisms of reliably cheap oil and revolving credit, and the gears seized up. A mood of ominous watching and waiting pervaded the city, but many of the movers-and-shakers had pinned their hopes on the chance that Mr Obama's stimulus bill would allow them to commence building a new freeway to the ocean on the Florida panhandle. My journey continued on the Jesus-haunted blue highways, to that selfsame place, Walton County, Florida, where some of the most famous experiments in the New Urbanism were conducted beginning in the 1980s with the new town of Seaside. I had been there many times over the years, and I was called down to get a prize in the service of the movement, but it was a little disconcerting to see how the build-out had progressed. The Seaside experiment began very modestly as the idea for a bohemian village of architects and artists in what was then an almost empty quarter of piney woods owned by the St Joe timber company. Seaside was designed so beautifully that it attracted the attention of every thoracic surgeon and corporate lawyer between Nashville and New Orleans, and pretty soon Seaside became the Riviera of the sunbelt's economic elite - and came in for gales of criticism for becoming that. The newer houses and commercial structures grew ever grander, as a Boomer generation status competition ramped up into the new millennium. Several more, ever-grander New Urbanist towns sprouted along the adjacent beaches, some of the most recent composed of immense mansions embarrassing in their opulence. The outcome was a little scary, especially now that the fortunes behind many of these mansions may be threatened by the multiplying fiascos of finance and economy overspreading the nation like a vicious plague. The New Urbanists had not set out to build monuments to Yuppie-Boomer consumerism, but a peculiar destiny shoved them into that role for a while - even while they toiled elsewhere around the nation to reform town planning laws and generally provide an antidote to the fatal cultural cancer of sprawl, that is, of a settlement pattern guaranteed to comprehensively bankrupt our society. Anyway, the collapse of the housing bubble has affected the New Urbanists' business, too, and this may turn out to be a very good thing because they can put aside the distractions of building very grand places to sop up ill-gotten wealth and focus on the issues that Mr Obama's people should have been paying attention to all along, namely, how are we going to reform the way we live in this country and what will be the physical manifestation of how we live in the decades to come. The New Urbanists have preached for years that conventional suburbia would fail America in the long run, and that we'd have to prepare for this failure by restoring traditional modes of occupying the landscape. So far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future - and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day. But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life, with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live this way anymore. But there are scores of places like Montgomery, Alabama, and thousands of traditional main street small towns that are sitting out there waiting to be re-activated. We need to do this much more than we need to build new freeways to the beach. Suburbia is not going to be abandoned overnight (even if it fails logistically and economically !) but we have got to arrive at a consensus about rehabilitating our forsaken small cities and small towns. The New Urbanists have gathered, organized, and codified all the principle and methodology needed to carry out this campaign. This should be their moment. Mr Obama and his team should get with the program. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/02/road-trip.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Tue Feb 3 22:28:37 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 21:28:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] More on generation of capitalist crisis Message-ID: <728806.55848.qm@web180105.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Anonymous: The urbanization rate in the NIEs of Asia accelerates > remarkably after 1986. The World Bank did studies on it. ^^^^^^^ CB: However, people moving into the cities and becoming wage-laborers/proletarians is not the over-accumulation of capital that leads to crisis. Wage-laborers are variable capital. Overaccumulation refers, through the OCC, to the accumulation of too much constant capital relative to the amount of variable capital or wage-laborers. Wage-laborers/variable capital is the source of surplus value. They can't be over-accumulated from the standpoint of producing profits , profits per total capital or rate of profit ( unless their wages are too high ! which was not a problem in East Asia at the time referred to) Variable capital increase does not cause the rate of profit to fall. It is overaccumulation of constant capital relative to the amount of variable capital ( increased OCC) that leads to a fall in the rate of profit. So, this trend of increased urbanization/proletarianization is not the cause of the rate of profit falling when it does. Again the rate of profit falls because of a)over-accumulation of _constant_ capital relative to variable capital, increase in the OCC, because variable capital is the only source of new value , and therefore surplus value (and constant capital is not a source of new value or surplus value); and b)overproduction of commodities relative to the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses of wage-laborers, who are the consumers of the great mass of personal consumption commodities, thereby preventing realization of a major fraction of the potential surplus value exploited by the capitalists. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a valid generalization of capitalism , because, individual capitalists are constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, in order to produce more unit commodities per labor time to get a leg up on the other capitalists. This is relative surplus value as opposed to absolute surplus value. Eventually , all such efficiency increasing eventually spreads to all capitalists in an industry, and this raises the OCC industry wide (see above on how increase in the OCC causes the rate of profit to fall.) From kaliyuga at wildblue.net Wed Feb 4 00:39:35 2009 From: kaliyuga at wildblue.net (MARGARET WYLES) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 23:39:35 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum In-Reply-To: <7alt5i$3cpcj4@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> References: <7alt5i$3cpcj4@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> Message-ID: <82b839ea0902032339x5ffbeb49m3bb822703b19545b@mail.gmail.com> > [On Friday, *Le Figaro* reported on a first at the World Social Forum, > which has been meeting in Bel?m, in Brazil's Amazonia: the appearance of > five heads of state.[1] -- A Google News search suggests that no > mainstream U.S. paper sent a reporter to cover what the *International > Herald Tribune* on Monday called > (http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/01/business/Forum.4-420588.php) "the > world's biggest gathering of leftists." --Mark] > Nor did Democracy Now! have anything to say about it. Where was Amy? Why not bring the good news and words of encouragement direct from Brazil? Or is her job merely to drum defeat into our heads? M From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Wed Feb 4 00:07:08 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:07:08 +1100 Subject: [A-List] What's new at Links: South American revolution, Brazil, Israeli apartheid, Bolivia, Tamils, Gaza, Germany, Hamas, Bolsheviks, BBC Message-ID: <49893E9C.1040103@greenleft.org.au> What's new at Links: South American revolution, Brazil, Israeli apartheid, Bolivia, Tamils, Gaza, Germany, Hamas, Bolsheviks, BBC * * * 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/. * * * Luis Bilbao: Venezuela and `the rebirth of the idea of revolution' . Interview with Luis Bilbao, conducted by Agustina Desalvo for the Argentinian journal Raz?n y Revoluci?n, issue #18 (second semester 2008). Translated by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/Green Left Weekly's Federico Fuentes. Luis Bilbao is a central participant in the construction of the mass United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and in the formation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR); founding editor of the Latin America-wide monthly magazine Am?rica XXI. Luis Bilbao will be a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, on April 10-12, 2009, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Green Left Weekly. Visit http://www.worldATACrossroads.org for full agenda and to book your tickets. * Read more Brazil: Landless Workers' Movement marks 25th anniversary, announces `new phase' in struggle Joao Pedro Stedile (video) addresses the January 24, 2009, national meeting of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement, marking the MST's 25th anniversary. Stedile is co-founder of the MST. Below the videos Michael Fox reports on the MST's ``new phase'' in the agrarian reform struggle, against Brazil's mainly US-owned agro-industry. * Read more Lessons from South Africa for the fight against Israeli apartheid Salim Vally of the Palestine Solidarity Committee of South Africa, addressing a meeting on February 7, 2008, part of Toronto's Israeli Apartheid Week, draws on the experiences of the South African anti-apartheid movement to inspire the Palestinian anti-apartheid movement. Salim Vally was deeply involved in the South African anti-apartheid movement. Watch at http://links.org.au/node/878 Sydney, April 10-12 (Easter), 2009: World at a Crossroads - Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century World At a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century * Read more Sri Lanka: Genocide of the Tamil minority By Brian Senewiratne January 23, 2009 -- There is a humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil minority in the island's north and east are facing annihilation at the hands of the Sinhalese-dominated government. This article will deal with the current crisis, with the more fundamental problem of the legacy left by colonial British rule (1796-1948) dealt with in later articles. These colonial administrative structures will need to be reversed of there is ever to be peace or prosperity in Sri Lanka. * Read more Bolivia's vice-president:'We are consolidating our process of change' Interview with Bolivia's vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera conducted by Pablo Stefanoni from Argentina's Clarin newspaper. Introduction and translation by Green Left Weekly's Federico Fuentes. January 31, 2009 -- The people of Bolivia on January 25 voted overwhelming to approve a new constitution, a demand first raised by the indigenous movements in the early 1990s. It was also a key promise of the successful 2005 election campaign of the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. * Read more Solidarity map of Israel's Gaza massacres By Solidarity Maps Solidarity Maps is a project from a group of Lebanese and Palestinian designers, architects, researchers, media people, and many other random activists who have worked together previously, mainly doing media and mapping work during the summer 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, and some of them later on advocacy and design for the reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared refugee camp. * Read more Italian metalworkers, Western Aust. maritime workers call for boycott of apartheid Israel * Read more Germany: Die Linke, Hesse and the `super election' year By Duroyan Fertl January 29, 2009 -- Germany kicked off a "super election year" on January 18 when voters in the western German state of Hesse returned to the polls for the second time in twelve months. The new election had become necessary after months of negotiations to form a coalition government collapsed late last year, when four parliamentary members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) rebelled against a plan to form government with the assistance of the far-left party, Die Linke. * Read more Hamas and Palestine's right to exist By Tony Iltis January 28, 2009 -- If Western politicians and media are to be believed, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is an anti-Semitic, religious fundamentalist, terrorist outfit that forms part of an al Qaeda- (or, alternatively, Iranian-) led movement which seeks to violently impose Islamic law on the world, and is dedicated to the annihilation of Jews. However, what is Hamas's actual practice and the source of its strong popularity among Palestinians? * Read more Pamphlet: Revolutionaries and parliament: The Bolshevik experience By Maurice Sibelle One of the greatest obstacles to winning working people to the perspective of a socialist revolution is the widespread and deeply ingrained illusion -- inculcated in their minds day-in and day-out by the capitalist rulers -- that through the institutions of bourgeois democracy, particularly parliament, working people can defend and advance their interests. * Read more The aid appeal that the BBC does not want you to see By Dave Riley That emergency appeal for humanitarian aid for Gaza that the BBC refuses to broadcast? Watch it for yourself: * 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: 13542 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090204/69284753/attachment.txt From nscchicago at igc.org Wed Feb 4 00:59:06 2009 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 01:59:06 -0600 Subject: [A-List] Venezuela: "Companies opposed to national interests must go to state hands" References: <551674.70740.qm@web52407.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001201c9869e$7c56ae20$2101a8c0@NSCCHICAGO> Tom Baker here and, bo, what this says to me - Oligarchy and all the NED are doing their best to screw things up, don't know how to give up but friends, - Venezuela is in revolution through democratic means. - People are learning new way. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cort Greene" Subject: [chi-labor-against-the-war] Venezuela: "Companies opposed to national interests must go to state hands" From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Wed Feb 4 09:22:08 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 11:22:08 -0500 Subject: [A-List] A story Oprah won't touch: medical exploitation of prisoners Message-ID: <08cd01c986e4$ba93be80$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/20817_displayArticle.aspx A true story that Oprah won't touch By ALLEN M. HORNBLUM Though I long ago jettisoned the notion of hearing from Oprah, Eddie Anthony continues to wait for the big call from Chicago. Unlike me, he's a dreamer and holds out hope that Ms. Winfrey will recognize the power and redemptive quality of his incredible story and broadcast it to all America - or at least the portion that's glued to each episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." The subject of "Sentenced to Science: One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America," Anthony can probably be forgiven for believing his story of enduring an array of Cold War medical experiments while incarcerated in the Philadelphia prison system is the equal of anything that appears on Oprah's show. What he's now finding increasingly frustrating is Oprah's penchant for selecting extraordinary tales of survival that are, well, let's just say "highly embellished." Just a few weeks ago, Oprah apologized to her viewers, saying she was "very disappointed" that a book she'd featured about friendship in a Nazi concentration camp turned out to be, more or less, a collection of "lies." This is at least the second time Oprah and her staff have been taken by authors under the impression their stories needed an extra shot of drama to heighten their appeal and marketability. A while back, Oprah embraced the tale of a young man confronting addiction and incarceration. It turned out that James Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," contained substantial fabrications leading to protracted embarrassment for the book's author, agent, publisher and, of course, Oprah. Her most recent bout with untruths was Herman Rosenblat's remarkable wartime love story of how he first met his wife when they were children on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence during the Holocaust. Though he'd been an actual concentration-camp prisoner, Rosenblat obviously felt such stories were a dime a dozen, and an appearance on Oprah's show required something truly exceptional. Hence, the heart-rending but totally manufactured scene of a little girl throwing apples over a death-camp fence to a little boy who'd turn out to be her future husband. As Oprah regrettably admitted, the lies only seem to get "bigger and bigger and bigger." Anthony rankles at such historical baggage, especially when his own story is so unbelievable - yet true all the same. He'd like Oprah and her producers to know, if you want the real deal, give him a call. Anthony has the requisite scars, bad memories and court documentation to certify his chilling story. He'd also be glad to share his experience as a human guinea pig while imprisoned in Philly's Holmesburg Prison, as he regularly does at college campuses around the country. This is no ordinary feat, especially for a one-time functional illiterate who spent more time on a cellblock and as a drug addict than anyone the average American is likely to meet on the street - or on his favorite crime show. No longer dependent on drugs or petty crime, Anthony is now a captivating campus speaker. Next month, for example, when he appears at Jefferson Medical College and Brown University, he'll present an eye-opening account of what it was like to be an incarcerated test subject in the '60s for everything from diet studies to chemical-warfare agents. As usual, he'll challenge students to confront the question of how the nation that tried the Nazi doctors could've had such a cavalier attitude about using its own institutionalized citizens for experimentation. I've told Ed on numerous occasions, don't sit by the phone. Oprah isn't going to call. Sure he has the requisite criteria - a dramatic story with years behind bars, many more as a drug user, and the redemptive aspect of being a highly compelling college presenter - but Oprah and her people are examining other books now. And it would also seem Anthony's story is missing one essential ingredient, a healthy dose of mendacity. Allen M. Hornblum, who lives in Northeast Philadelphia, is the author of "Acres of Skin" and "Sentenced to Science." 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 10895 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090204/7f593f38/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Tue Feb 3 19:53:12 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:53:12 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum In-Reply-To: <4988E9BC.8020807@gmail.com> References: <7alt5i$3cpcj6@ipo3smtp.cc.utah.edu> <4988E9BC.8020807@gmail.com> Message-ID: YEP. At 05:05 PM 2/3/2009, Leighm wrote: >Todd Boyle wrote: >>Prof. Mark Jensen has published at no cost, original translations >>from the French press, and analyses and comparisons of varioius >>press, every day, 365 days a year for many years on the Tacoma PJH list. >>He also leads book discussions and other activities. See the UFPPC >>website for archives, and join the email list. >>- Todd >> >> >>To: jensenmk82 at gmail.com >>From: jensenmk at plu.edu >>Sender: tacomapjh at yahoogroups.com >>Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:22:35 -0800 (PST) >>Subject: [PJH] Le Figaro: Five heads of state >>spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum >> >>TRANSLATION: Five heads of state spurn Davos, attend World Social Forum >>(Le Figaro) > >>The left-wing economist Rafael Correa rose to the top in >>Ecuador, a country that used to favor investment bankers in the >>government; the former bishop of liberation theology Fernando Lugo >>brought to a close seventy years of conservatives in Paraguay; the >>former military rebel Hugo Chavez has set in motion his Bolivarian >>Revolution in Venezuela; the Indian Evo Morales entered the >>history books as the first indigenous head of state in Bolivia, >>and, finally, a metallurgical worker raised himself up to the >>presidency in a Brazil marked by social inequality. >================= > >Don't think it hasn't been duly noted: > >In The News: The Khyber Pass bridge linking >Pakistan with Afghanistan has been blown up But >Russia and Tajikistan have already come to the rescue . > >Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of >Staff says the US government?s focus on Iraq and >Afghanistan is beginning to hinder our ability >to ?respond? to military affairs globally. > >More... > >[February 03 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & >Commentary: Life *IS* A Crapshoot, And The The >Republicans Are Playing The Political ?Back >Line? In The Crapshoot, Gambling The New >Administration?s Economic Recovery Act WILL NOT ?Recover? The American Economy > >My site: http://leighm.net/wp/2009/02/03/tth_090203/ > >ArchiveDOTorg: http://www.archive.org/details/tth_090203 > > > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2746 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090203/f75a882b/attachment.txt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Wed Feb 4 10:05:38 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:05:38 -0800 Subject: [A-List] =?utf-8?q?=5BAlberto_Szpunberg=5D_=C2=BFEl_a=C3=B1o_que_?= =?utf-8?q?viene_en_Jen=C3=ADn=3F_-_English_translation?= In-Reply-To: <498906AD.50009@gmail.com> References: <498906AD.50009@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4989CAE2.8020507@gmail.com> Google translation: Next year in Jenin by Alberto Szpunberg * 1. The sweet smell of death permeated the air of dust and pain, while a swarm of flies suffocated refugee camp of Jenin. With hands, without tears, two brothers searching the body of Abu Hamad Massaud Ba, his father, buried by the bulldozer of the Israeli army at one meter below ground. I do not know where to start. The click is always infinitely slower than the blasts. Before pressing a single letter, and someone launched its bulldozer moves, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, regardless of windows, walls, dogs, children, books, brides, gauze, even warm soup plates, not even that viejito "my grandfather Joseph? What is there in Jenin, in this hell, my grandfather Joseph? ", Even this old man who takes his hands to the head to cover the horror. I take it by the shoulders and away, I want to scream, but it is late. Always too late? The death, which is not then it is always first. And the blood is the only river where we bathed two humans, two hundred, countless times. I look in the mirror and do not hold the gaze of the Jew who looks at me. The eyes of my grandfather Joseph were transparent as the first star. But his way of mourning is now flashing. 2. The area seems torn by an earthquake, with its walls and houses destroyed by tanks dynamited and burned by missiles fired from Apache helicopters in Hawashin, the heart of the refugee camp of Jenin. Bombed UN schools, the health center and also the purification of water. My grandfather told me that Joseph had been stuttering Moses "heavy language" and not surprising. Myself what I read in his book 'is the Book of Books', I said my grandfather, and in that book of books I read in Hebrew, a language that my grandfather taught me Jos?. "It is the language of God told me and everything you say is true." It was a revelation. It was a really stuttering writing: letters and broken letters, white on black, independent of each other, but all together in chorus so that through them, even through the white separates them to express God, God as a terrible and at once so generous. Thus it is written, the same as Jews scattered all different and all Jews. If this language - "heavy tongue" - is the voice of God and everything he says is true, what is written in Hebrew revelation of a true crime without stutter? My grandfather Joseph looks at me from the mirror, turns to the faithful around him and close his hands. Not many - fifty, five hundred thousand Palestinians - but everyone knows who number six million ... They have been in Auschwitz and know very well what is Jenin. And my grandfather would bring tears to your eyes. After 5762 years, it makes no future plans - "Next year in Jerusalem" - to discuss the differences between a missile and a crematorium furnace or whether six million Jews are more than fifty, five hundred Palestinians. I go a little more me in the mirror and acknowledge: his tears are mine. 3. Abuanas, an employee of the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian Authority, of 35 years, has been homeless, without clothes, without a future. He saw two things that you still want to vomit. One, a group of Israeli soldiers firing on the groin of a young Palestinian gunman after passing, still alive, over a tank .... Now - we're still in time - I realize: poor Moses, a spokesman for God to be so terrible to ask Abraham to prove their faith with death, nothing less than to his own son (Genesis 32) and so generous as to promise a horde of slaves died of starvation manan a land where milk and honey (Exodus 3). So, all this madness again rioja Moses "heavy language", so much so that he reached the gates of the Promised Land and could not reach it. Is not the same thing is happening to us? Attempt to explain this to me looks from the mirror, but only stutter, as if my tongue pesad?sima, keyboard. I'm about to say, I got on the tip of the tongue, but always, the word is always slower than a summary execution. 3. The other was watching Israeli bulldozers opened a trench, put bodies in the middle of the field and covered with soil, but today the rain has turned this into a mass grave quagmire. I belong to the people chosen by God so terrible and so generous. I am an atheist, deep, quiet, peaceful atheist, but there are times when we would like the finger of God does not bring me. Finally, I choose to be elected. Otherwise, I would never have been the grandson of my grandfather Joseph. The Day of Atonement, forgiveness, no forgetting? * In the synagogue, he covered up his head for me to take refuge under his sacred mantle covered with gold letters and silky fringe. Under the privacy invulnerable nor barbed wires of Auschwitz, or electric batons of ESMA, the bulldozing of Jenin nor could it, shaking her finger followed the reading of prayers as they follow the course of a disturbing river so that I do not lose water as turbulent, but always dreamed destinations were the same: peace, especially peace, and by the way, why not also health, food, good luck. And when it was time to say "because you chose us among all peoples", my grandfather Joseph laughed, gave me a poke in the ear and told me: 'to beat .. . 'And his finger stopped worrying river next to the verse. Always need to know to stop for a moment before the blood reaches the disturbing river. It was that moment when your eyes are moistened transparent, closed the book and said, 'Next year in Jerusalem ". 4. According oes Hend Ali, a Palestinian 50 years, a soldier took a Rateb of hair, his grandson two years, put a gun to his head and intimates: "Get it all or shooting." When they left, fire a missile at the house and the family fled, along with 50 other people in the house of a neighbor. I often wonder: what looks like a Jew to another Jew? Today more than ever I got clear on how different they are. So every morning when I look in the mirror, I see that I am not the same and find that I am the Jew. Sometimes I look so alike, nor acknowledge me until I forget who I am. But there's always someone different from me that crosses my path and I remember. In general, myself, sometimes even another Jew. Now, for example, Sharon me and pointing with his finger on the pulse does not tremble. - Antisemitic! - Yells my grandfather Jose - Pogromchik! I hear her cry and then yes, I admit, quiet, next to my grandfather Joseph, who sighed deeply and, with moist eyes, exclaimed: "Next year in Jerusalem", and turns to the other faithful, and I with him, and all shook hands one by one: first, of course, my father, Arieh Leib, which resonate the deepest silence of night Chopin; Mr. Bercovich, plumber hard hands and tender heart, my uncle Henry, with the same gray suit that was rich and he fell into poverty, my Uncle Manolo, a communist with a halo of noctambulant and womanizer, the inevitable barber Piatock; Isaiah, the cobbler had a daughter who Mughal, and the other Isaiah, this is about and says: 'I am creating new heavens and a new earth "(65:17) ... My grandfather satisfied nod from the mirror and still shake hands with many, many prophets: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Zechariah, Amos the shepherd ... 5. A bomb is embedded in the door of the house Maha Shalabi. "No progress. If we open the door, flew all, Where will I go now? "Asked the student to 23 years in pharmacy. - Amos - surprised me - Are you here? Yes, I replied "And my favorite prophet eye, two sins and forgive, but never a third (Amos 1) ... And I ask you to give back to my grandfather Joseph: "I have committed the third sin?", But Bob is not my grandfather on my side but in front, and looks at me from the mirror and I can not hold his gaze. I'm another. The bulldozer moves over a child from Jenin and nothing stops him, not even Amos, who is away from the synagogue, always heading for Jerusalem, but finally embraced a handful of Palestinians among them, me, my grandfather Joseph. ..-, which are taken to the wall with bricks and jump through the air wash the blood mirror. Never be the era. God awful, now infinitely more terrible than generous, I have pointed the finger. And as you know a Jew who speaks up when only gestures, as I look straight ahead - 'panim the panim, my grandfather would read in Hebrew, "face to face, as Moses spoke with God and, though stuttering, I do not want silence: "Next year in Jerusalem? 6. I know that there is a body, besides my brother Abderrahim, we got yesterday, "said Huda andalusia Farraj, 23, showing a flattened area that until recently was home. Yes, there is eternal love in my life, my kids, the dog Shila (may he rest in peace), the book of prayers for my grandfather Joseph (may he rest in peace), the woman who I enamorar? morning Ungaretti this verse ( "may he rest in peace) - and between these loves, Jerusalem (in Hebrew," city of peace "). I can not but believe that all my roads ESMA, exiles, El Masnou, returns. underground, Auschwitz, fleeing, fighting, Jenin, human rights one day lead to Jerusalem. Anywhere in the world, but in Jerusalem. And it will come as a good Jew, to leave it again. One day I asked my grandfather Joseph: "If we were in Jerusalem, still saying" Next year in Jerusalem "?". My grandfather looked at me surprised. Never had it occurred, even while in Jerusalem, stop saying 'Next year in Jerusalem ". Much less than his grandson, that I am in front of the mirror, you think a similar question. Always has been and always will be "Next year in Jerusalem". Only the death will not know next year in Jerusalem. If all Jews are like that are different, how a Jew is not going to dream a different world, where there is room for all and all look like that: they are different? And do not stutter to say: "Next year in Jerusalem". 7. When the couple began to dig with a shovel and the help of five family members, a nauseating smell began to emerge from the rubble, including clothing and broken glass. And my grandfather Jos? continues to strengthen the hand of all. The central Jewish theological principle, not raised, not dogmatic, but underlying all cohesion and doctrine and prophecy is the belief in human participation in the work of redemption of the world, "says Martin Buber. And my grandfather, but do not know what the word 'theology' or 'doctrine' or 'redemption', rubbing me to listen carefully rioja and strengthen its hand. And welcome to Baruch Spinoza, Henrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Lowenthal, Franz Kafka, Aleijem Shalom, Yitzhak Babel, Gustav Landauer, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm ... 'Maimonides here? But you do not write in Arabic? ", Asked the treasurer of the synagogue, only a true Kabbalist counted letters in Hebrew. 'And I do not write in Yiddish? "Intervenes Bathevis Isaac Singer. 'And I was not in Italian? "Smiles Primo Levi, one step away from suicide. "And me with no girlfriends and violin over the rooftops of the world?" Protest Marc Chagall. 8. Are gradually leaving the elderly, with their hands up, mothers with babies who see the daylight for the first time in eleven days, and watch the piles of garbage, demolition and geography that ruins like sleepwalkers. Amal load in his arms to his son for seven months, four years of assistance in the forced removal. But Walter Benjamin warns time: "Articulate the past historically does not actually have been as articulate. Means acquire a memory as it is on at a time of danger. " My grandfather pales. A moment of danger? Another pogrom? Auschwitz? Does ESMA? ?Kosovo? ?Bosnia? ?Jenin ... . - Beware! Down in the boot there is a girl! my grandfather warns of bulldozer-Down is a school! And my grandfather hugs me to protect me from myself. A boy of the intifada, that's me, takes a stone and throws. The mirror is on and jump into pieces as sacred letters, written in blood and fire in the history of vertigo. And stuttering, stuttering clear, but I speak. 9. At two o'clock in the afternoon, Israeli soldiers and tanks returned to Jenin and to reimpose the curfew. My grandfather was covering the tanks with the sacred mantle and I seek the warmth that lies at its' kefiah. The boy threw the stone that leads me through the streets of the capital of the Palestinian State and the State of Israel and says, 'Next year in Jerusalem ". My grandfather Joseph nods. His eyes sparkle transparent as the first star. I recognize in its splendor, covering the world. The barbed wire of Auschwitz have disappeared. Missing ESMA come to light and take refuge in it. Refugees Jenin collected the stones and rebuild their homes. Let us return to the promised land, back to the world. "Last night I had a dream and I do not know what it means," says the Egyptian Pharaoh to Joseph, yes, my grandfather Joseph. He knows a lot of dreams and explains. But Sharon does not understand dreams. Launches its bulldozers over the horde of slaves, but the Red Sea, and who knows who's going is not passed. My grandfather with his finger still troubling the river of prayer. At the end of the verse where there is a land flowing with milk and honey. Who, by God, who do not understand? * Argentine poet of Jewish origin. Premio Antonio Machado, Casa de las Americas and Alcal? de Henares. Her first book? Poetry couple of hand? (1961) and his last (for now):? Memo? ? ? Lights in the distance? (2008) This text was written at the time of the massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camp of Jenin. Charter Member of Open Space From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Wed Feb 4 11:44:03 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:44:03 -0800 Subject: [A-List] How to Control a Herd of Humans Message-ID: <4989E1F3.6040801@gmail.com> I wonder if singing 'The Internationale' qualifies? 'Just shut up and sing the stupid little ditty they taught you' (Thomas Pynchon, apocryphally, on the instructions to the 'light brigade', Gravity's Rainbow) New Scientist on 'organized' activities: How to control a herd of humans * 04 February 2009 by David Robson * Magazine issue 2694. HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control. Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says. Wiltermuth's team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1). Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447). Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university - college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004). Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says Haidt. Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by research into mirror neurons Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus (Neuron, vol 61, p 140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an "error signal". This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it's how we learn to follow the crowd. Read our related editorial: The Obama factor, revealed Linkage on page: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126945.300-how-to-control-your-herd-of-humans.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg20126945.300 From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Wed Feb 4 15:54:16 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:54:16 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Canada: RCMP agent concedes key role in set-up, running of terrorist training camp Message-ID: <498A1C98.7090401@gmail.com> 'Dog bites man', but I'm glad to see it getting name media attention Feb 03 2009 RCMP agent concedes key role in set-up, running of terrorist training camp Posted by: admin in Canada, Terrorism, tags: CSIS, Mubin Shaikh Source: globeandmail.com Mubin Shaikh always had the makings of becoming the great Canadian spy. In his teens, he was a drill sergeant in the cadets. While still in his early 20s, he started volunteering information to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. A few years ago, at age 30, the Canadian-born Muslim was publicly advocating for sharia law while privately making $1,500 a month for informing on Islamic extremists. He submitted an application to be a CSIS intelligence officer, but was not upset when turned down. ?I was happy it did not work out,? Mr. Shaikh, now 33, testified Friday in a Brampton court. ?I was interested in a more central role.? Defence lawyers put him on the stand Friday alleging he played a central role ? and then some ? in unfurling Canada?s most high-profile terrorism conspiracy. Calling Mr. Shaikh an ?agent provocateur? they suggested that, in the cause of fighting terrorism, he committed terrorist offences himself. Ten adults have yet to face trial in the 2006 conspiracy, whose key elements now notoriously involve a winter training camp, an alleged bomb plot and some chatter by would-be jihadists about storming Parliament and beheading politicians... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090131.wterror31/EmailBNStory/National/ H/t: http://www.the-gates-of-hell.com/rcmp-agent-concedes-key-role-in-set-up-running-of-terrorist-training-camp/ From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Wed Feb 4 17:47:35 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 16:47:35 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Rise of China and Pragmatic Marxism, An Interview Message-ID: <513500.29932.qm@web180108.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Rise of China and Pragmatic Marxism, An Interview By Political Affairs Editor's Note: Josef Gregory Mahoney teaches East Asian Studies in Michigan. He has written numerous articles and essays on Chinese history, politics, culture, and philosophy. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Central Minzu University for China Nationalities in Beijing. PA: You recently wrote a review for Political Affairs on Kishore Mahbubani?s The New Asian Hemisphere. The central idea of his book seems to be that there we are seeing ?a rise of Asia,? especially China. You were somewhat critical of his perspective on that and the shift of global hegemony to the East. Could you talk about this? MAHONEY: As I?ve already stipulated, I have a bit of hostility towards Mahbubani, given some of the statements he has made about China in the past where he has described the CCP not as the Communist Party of China but as the Chinese Capitalist Party. I have written about that elsewhere. In the first instance, Mahbubani is absolutely correct, that there is a rise of power in China, but what is the nature of that power? What is that power based on? On the one hand, it is based on the fact that they are able to sell so many products to the United States. So it is a power that is mediated by their ability to sell in the capitalist market, in the global capitalist market. In other words, it is dependent, in a fashion, on whether or not the United States is buying things from China, but, more than this, it is dependent on whether or not businesses like Wal-Mart and others are investing in China. This has led some critics in China to assert that much of China?s economic growth is a result of comprador capitalism. So is this is a true rise, or is it a rise on the coattails of Western hegemonism? That is the question. But more than this, Mahbubani?s central thesis is that Asia itself is rising ? with perhaps China at the center (he kind of avoids saying this, but he focuses on China so much that one gets the impression that this is the case). China is at the center and India is at the periphery. This is important, because again, much more than China, India?s rise has been driven by providing services to the United States. They provide the US with countless services. For example, if you have a problem with your AT&T bill, you call AT&T and you get someone in Bangalore. But what happens if the United States economy experiences a meltdown? What happens to all the money that is being poured into India now, and by extension what happens to all the money that is pouring into China? What happens to these vast dollar reserves that China holds, that could be literally worthless if the value of the American currency plummets? This is something which many people are very concerned about, including China. China right now is in talks with the European Union trying to find a way of getting around using the dollar as the international common currency. But to get back to Mahbubani?s point of reference. In The New Asian Hemisphere, he looks at the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and how China handled that crisis. As I wrote in my review, this crisis was a very important event. It was one of the most important events in the last 20 years. One could even say it is one of the most important events in the history of global capitalism. Effectively what happened is that you had a number of people ? George Soros was chief among them, perhaps ? who saw an opportunity to enter the currency market and make a quick killing on the Thai bhat. This led to the exposure of a number of structural weaknesses in the Thai economy, and it started a chain reaction, because people began seeing that these structural weaknesses also existed in other places, such as Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. So we began to see a snowballing effect and what was effectively a huge divestment from Asia. And as Western investors began to pull money out of Asia, where did they put it? For the most part they put it in the United States. This has led some Asians to suggest that the Asian financial crisis was, in fact, a strategic or tactical maneuver by the West to effect a massive transfer of wealth back to the West ? which maybe even staved off the financial crisis we are now experiencing for another decade. Meanwhile, what did that financial crisis provoke in Asia? The immediate outcome was that the United States went in with guarantees and shored up the economies of Thailand, South Korea and other areas, effectively re-establishing tighter hegemonic capitalist control over these countries at a time when they were beginning to become more independent. Thus we find the United States establishing itself once again more firmly and making these countries more beholden to the United States, at a time when China is trying to rise in the region. In regard to China's response to all this, there is a great book on Premier Zhu Rongji and how he handled the financial crisis by Laurence J. Brahm, titled Zhu Rongji and the Transformation of Modern China (2002), who talks about how the United States tried to pressure China to follow the Washington Consensus that was then being pursued in Thailand and South Korea, and China declined. Many people saw this as a very bold break with American hegemony, a break that was fundamentally in China?s best interests. But, Mahbubani thinks that China?s refusal to follow Washington?s policy was, in fact, something that hurt China and should have been followed for the greater good of Asia. To me, Mahbubani's conclusion is sort of a mythological narrative, the same sort of narrative that we would expect from someone who says that the Chinese Communist Party is the Chinese Capitalist Party. I think another important thing to keep in mind about China over the last 10 years is that you have 1997, which is the beginning of the Asian financial crisis, but more than this you have 9/11. There are a number of people in China, important and intelligent people, who conclude that the aftermath of 9/11, although it was billed as a war on terror, was really a cover for an encircling campaign to contain China. Why? Well, one of the immediate aftermaths of 9/11 was, of course, that we went into Afghanistan, but more than that we began establishing relations and building bases in Khyrgystan and Uzbekistan. When you take into consideration that the US has bases there and in Afghanistan and Iraq, we could effectively shut down the Gulf. We have F-16s throughout Central Asia. In Southeast Asia we have a big naval base in the Singapore area. In effect we have military assets in Taiwan, because we keep selling them planes and weapons. We have the Pacific Fleet, and we have armed forces in South Korea and Japan. We have effectively surrounded China. The military estimates are that we could hit any target in China with conventional weapons in under 15 minutes. Now this is very concerning and disconcerting to China. It is disconcerting in a manner that recalls two other incidents. The first was the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, which many Chinese believe, and people in government believe, the US did intentionally. Secondly there was the spy plane incident in 2001. We fly planes up and down China's coast with monitoring equipment. There was some aggression between two planes and one was forced to land on Hainan island. As people will recall, it was a very big deal. So China sees itself as being in a strange sort of contradictory position, where on the one hand it does business with the United States and welcomes investment, but on the other hand it is certain that the United States is in a sort of low-grade struggle with China, and that the United States is trying to position assets that could effectively curtail China and threaten it. PA: So your criticism of Mahbubani?s argument is not so much with his argument about the rise of China, as in the way you see them pursuing that rise in relation to the US? MAHONEY: Although we can talk about our interests abroad, let?s keep in mind that the United States is bordered by only two countries, Mexico and Canada. China is bordered by thirteen countries: Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Khyrgystan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, and North Korea. A lot of these countries are places where there is some degree of unrest, where there are things happening that may be a broader threat to regional, if not global, security. And if you start talking about how many countries are close enough to China that a short-range missile could be launched from them and hit China, the number goes up quite a bit more. So, given its geographic situation, it is in China?s best interests to create good relations with its neighbors, because the consequences otherwise would be too difficult to deal with strategically. How do you maintain ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) and some kind of deterrent capacity against the United States, but at the same time maintain the ability to go to war with all the small countries that surround you. And China has gone to war. They had a border conflict with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and they fought a war with Vietnam in the 1970s right after we left. There is friction with North Korea. There is continued concern about Japan, because Japan keeps electing these very nationalistic governments, and Taiwan continues to buy very high-tech weaponry that is basically offensive in nature, not merely defensive. So China lives in a difficult era. But, more than this, China has to have access to oil; it has to have access to resources. It needs to have a good relationship with Russia, because Russia has such vast energy resources. Furthermore, because the United States has effectively put itself in a position to lock down the Gulf, China needs other sources of oil, which is why it has been building relationships in Africa. As a result of China's opening to Africa, the American military is establishing AFRICOM to counteract what it sees as China?s meddling in Africa. But China?s ?meddling? in Africa is in large measure driven by the need to have access to resources that may be closed off to them, given American hegemony in the Middle East. In addition, China has come under substantial attack for working with Myanmar. We keep pressuring China to pressure the admittedly ruthless junta in Myanmar to facilitate democracy, and China has not done this. Neither has India, by the way, and India doesn?t get criticized that much. But why hasn?t China done this? Because there is oil in the waters off of Myanmar, and China has financed and built a pipeline through Myanmar to have access to that oil. Why? For its national security. China is also being criticized for supporting the government in Sudan. But why is it supporting the government in Sudan? Is it because they believe in the repression of minorities? Some would argue yes. They would say, yes, China wants to repress minorities. They do this to their own people. I don?t think that is true. I think that the primary reason they are in Sudan is the same reason they are in Myanmar. They are looking for access to oil and ways to counteract American hegemony in the Middle East. By the same token, just to turn the criticism around, you could say that the United States does business with Saudi Arabia and other regimes that are in many ways as anti-democratic and repressive as the ones that China does business with. This is a broad discussion that has repercussions in many different areas. Do I think that China is broadly committed to global harmony and prosperity? In fact, I do. But I am not convinced by what we have seen in terms of their actions in response to the war on terror or in response to the Asian financial crisis, that there is solid evidence that they are acting in the best interests of the global community. Rather they seem to be simply trying to survive in very difficult times. PA: You are leading us toward, I think, a kind of ideological discussion about China?s role ? that there may be a tendency to view China as a replacement for the Soviet Union. There has always been this idealistic view in our movement that the leading countries in the world socialist movement have an international responsibility to promote democracy, socialism and international solidarity. What you seem to be saying is that China is not trying to take up that banner, except insofar as they can link their own national self-interests to that broader solidarity goal, to the broader issue of internationalism. On the other hand, it is also true that China has developed the concept of peaceful development, so that its own successes do not come at the expense of other countries, as is the case with the United States, but in cooperation with other countries. Could you talk about the history of that concept of peaceful development? MAHONEY: To speak directly to the ideological aspect, Hu Jintao has articulated the notion of a Scientific Development Concept. We could read this on the one hand as the Chinese version of sustainable development, but it is a sustainable development that is not necessarily founded on the idea of sustaining capitalist consumptive practices, as sustainability is so often construed in the West. Instead, it has at its core the notion of socialism and harmony, which is the second major element of Hu Jintao?s ideological statement: the harmonious society. Hu Jintao and others are clear, in a reasonable and logical way, that China cannot ? that no country can ? dominate the globe and sustain that position over the long term, and, furthermore, that pure capitalism is so fundamentally at odds with democracy that it results in exploitative practices, which cannot, at the level of human resources or humanity, or any notion of humanism, be sustained over the long term. But more than this, what we generally see with capitalism is what you see in Northern Mexico right now as a result of NAFTA. It is one of the most polluted areas in the world ? children are being born with birth defects, women are being raped, and so forth and so on, by as a result of the disruptions caused by so-called free trade. Therefore China has expressly stated that this model is not the model it wishes to pursue. I believe that that conviction is based less on ideology than it is on observation of fact. With regard to the idea that China that we should view China in some way as a replacement for the Soviet Union. On the one hand, I do think that we should very carefully study what China is doing. Why? Because China is a big part of the world. But more than this, I believe that China is seriously trying to advance Marxist theory and socialism, and we ought to look at those efforts. However, this is still largely a case of ?socialism in one country.? It is a form of socialism that understands that it cannot sustain itself in China by trying to establish China as a hegemonic power. Now this is not a recent trend. In order to contrast it with the perception of the Soviet Union as the vanguard, we need to maybe go back to 1966, when Mao made it very clear (and the Party seemed to back him on this), that the Soviet Union was pursuing policies that were not sustainable over the long term, and furthermore that the Soviet Union was trying to establish a hegemonic position in the so-called communist world. Therefore, China decided to do two things in the 1960s: First, it broke with the Soviet Union and secondly it broke with internationalism. Whereas in 1950 it entered the conflict in Korea and effectively pushed back the UN forces ? but primarily the United States ? and established a buffer with North Korea. There is also evidence that has been declassified by the Chinese over the last several years that it was largely Chinese ? and this is no slight against the efforts made by Vietnam?s liberation movement ? but it was largely Chinese artillery units that defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Some estimates are that as many as 70,000 pieces of artillery were sent across the border by Mao by Chinese wearing Vietnamese uniforms (see Chen Jian?s Mao?s China and the Cold War, 2001). China was very active in the 1950s trying to advance an internationalist cause/agenda, but then something happened in 1959 ? it was a tragedy really. Again this is according to recently declassified information. The CIA was in fact in Tibet trying to stage an uprising. This led to what then happened to Tibet, which is that the PLA rolled in and crushed the uprising, and the Dalai Lama fled. The Dalai Lama headed an organization that worked directly with the CIA. Now, it is not a popular thing to say in the West, but Lamaist Buddhism in Tibet was one of the most oppressive forms of theocratic feudalism the world has ever seen. So when China says they liberated Tibet in 1949, they mean it, and when they had to go in in 1959 and crush the CIA-organized rebellion there, the really had to. Because whoever controls the Tibetan plateau has an incredible strategic advantage over the whole heartland of China. It was a very unfortunate circumstance, and no one applauds it or feels good about Tibet, but I often say that if you want to criticize China?s modern nation-building in Tibet, then criticize America?s modern nation-building in California, New Mexico, or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that aside, in 1966 China effectively abandons internationalism. It?s a very interesting moment in Chinese history. On the one hand China initiates the Cultural Revolution, and you see this very hard movement to the left, which the Soviets hated by the way ? they hated it and they criticized it ruthlessly. So there was this very hard movement to the left internally, and at the same time a hard movement to the right internationally. They now abandon internationalism. They abandon supporting movements abroad, and they begin to make overtures ? this starts in 1966 really ? to the United States, culminating in Nixon and Kissinger?s visit in the early 1970s. It is not Deng Xiaoping who opens China to the world, it is Mao who does this. Deng is going to get the credit for it, and we would like to pretend like there is this big rupture between Deng and Mao, but it is really Mao who moves China to the right internationally. It is Deng who will move China to the right domestically. The next thing is that many people on the left, and for good reasons, admire Cuba, Venezuela, and what is going on in Ecuador, Bolivia, and the leftism that has to some degree emerged in Brazil. We love it when Ch?vez goes to Beijing or when officials come from Beijing and travel to these countries and you get these great photos. We have this sense that there is a rise in leftism, that there is solidarity, and that maybe China is at the center of it. But I am not sure that this is really the case, because there is really no evidence that China is pursuing a leadership role in a global solidarity movement that is exclusive of anyone. I think maybe the best evidence of my argument here against this would be the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, which is right there on China?s border. I mean this is a Maoist insurgency for democracy and for socialism, and it wins, it is victorious ? but there is absolutely no evidence that they have received any support, ideological, moral, financial, or material from the Chinese. So I am not sure how anyone can then say, "Well here?s China, and they it's doing all these things at the center of some internationalist, and we should see them within an internationalist Marxist revolutionary paradigm." After all, in large measure we saw the end of of the claim to uphold an internationalist model with the fall of the Soviet Union. For China, the Soviet "fall" came much sooner than 1989, of course. Ironically, one of the reasons China broke with the Soviets in the 1960s is that the Chinese did not think the Soviets were capable of supporting China?s best interests, let alone the broader interests of global revolution. Furthermore, in 1966, China effectively abandoned revolutionary international policies. Given this historical context, I think that those people who come to see China as a potential international solidarity revolutionary leader, as some second coming of the idealized role played by the Soviet Union, is a recurrence of wishful thinking in the same way they saw the Soviet Union have an idealization problem. That said, I am not going to retreat from my earlier point, which is that we do need to study China. We do need to study their work in Marxist theory, because it is very advanced. There is much that we can learn from it about what it means to struggle for progress in the world as it presently is, about what it means to survive and grow, about how to sustain some form of socialism within the context of global capitalist hegemony. This is the broader tactic at work in China, and I think that they have achieved a lot. On the other hand, and I know that this is something that we need to discuss separately, there have been some important issues and questions, and the biggest question has to do with ?What about democracy?? From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Wed Feb 4 23:20:41 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 22:20:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Parasails Can Move Ships Message-ID: <391923.96712.qm@web180116.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Parasails Can Move Ships By Maricel Drazer* Terramerica February 4, 2009 D?sseldorf, Germany - They say that faith can move mountains. Now, faith in the wind has led to a new way to move ships. The technique, developed in Germany, is powerful enough to move today's deep-draught cargo vessels and can reduce fuel consumption by 50 percent. An adapted parasail is attached to the ship by cables that can be adjusted according to the direction and intensity of the winds. It is activated automatically, guided by an on-board computer. A 160-square-metre parasail can use the wind to create a traction force of up to eight tonnes, nearly the same push produced by an engine of an Airbus A318 aircraft. With the parasail system, ships can cut their annual fuel use by 10 to 30 percent, reaching 50 percent under optimal wind conditions. In a way it is a return to navigation's origins, prior to the development of steam or diesel powered engines, when sails dominated the seascape. But now, instead of a tall mast with a mainsail attached to it, the large parasail - like a giant parachute - can move in all directions. Its function does not replace, but rather complements the power produced by the engines. The mind behind this return to the wind is Stephan Wrage, born in the northern German port city of Hamburg. He is an engineer and an aficionado of sailing and paragliding. "The idea came to me 15 years ago. I was paragliding on the beach and I wondered if this enormous drag force couldn't be used also to move boats," Wrage told Tierram?rica. In 2001, the SkySails company opened its doors, and began manufacturing this new parasail for ships. In 2007 it began its pilot testing on international routes aboard two cargo ships. The use of wind as a driving force for navigation has met modern technology, notes Peter Schenzle, an advisor for the HSVA, a maritime industries research and development group in Hamburg. Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the project is that the parasails are pollution free: wind is a clean energy source - and abundant on the high seas. There would be great advantages to its widespread use, given that 90 percent of the goods traded in the world is transported by boat along at least one portion of its path from producer to consumer. Currently, there are more than 100,000 ships on the world's seas. The global fleet is predicted to increase 75 percent by 2020. Average fuel consumption of a 100,000-horsepower ship is 12 to 15 tonnes per hour. According to industry estimates, global maritime traffic is thus responsible for some 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Although maritime transport is comparatively less polluting than other modes of transport, new regulations are being considered in order to monitor and limit greenhouse gas emissions from ships. In fact, the International Maritime Organisation, an agency of the United Nations, is drafting standards for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from ship traffic, after doing the same in 2008 for sulphur dioxide emissions. Furthermore, one of the most enticing questions about the parasail technology is how it can reduce a ship's operating costs, 90 percent of which is fuel. "We decided to use the SkySails system to preserve the environment, to save resources and, in the long term with gas and oil prices, to continue being competitive," said Gerd Wessels, director of the Wessels shipping company and owner of one of the ships already using the parasail. Depending on the size, the price of the system varies from 500,000 to 3.5 million dollars. According to SkySails, the investment is recovered in three to five years. In the second half of 2009, the company will begin assembly-line manufacture of the product. With orders already in place from Germany, Norway and other European countries, it has already surpassed production capacity for the first year. (*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierram?rica network. Tierram?rica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.) (END/2009) http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45672 From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Feb 5 03:45:41 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:45:41 +0900 Subject: [A-List] An Introduction to the Employer of Last Resort Proposal Message-ID: <498AC355.4000205@ashisuto.co.jp> A New WPA? by Ryan A Dodd Dollars & Sense magazine (March / April 2008) Dark clouds are now looming over America's economic future. As first the stock market boom and then the housing boom have come to an end, along with the fountains of cheap credit that were their mainspring, the perennial gale of unemployment is blowing in. The president and Congress have addressed the downturn with tax rebates and talk of "debt relief". Meanwhile, public infrastructure is crumbling. Workers' wages are stagnating while their work hours are rising. Health insurance is becoming less and less affordable for the typical family. And as US military spending escalates, government spending on essential services is drastically reduced. All of these facts serve to remind us that capitalist economies are inherently unstable and structurally incapable of creating full employment at decent wages and benefits. While tax rebates and debt relief may provide some minor protection from the coming economic storm, these measures are temporary - and inadequate - responses to a perpetual problem. As an alternative to these ad hoc policies or, worse yet, the free-market fundamentalism still widely preached in Washington, some economists and policymakers, in the United States and abroad, are touting a policy that seeks to end unemployment via a government promise to provide a job to anyone ready, willing, and able to work. Argentina's Experiment in Direct Job Creation In early December 2001, following nearly two decades of neoliberal restructuring, the Argentine economy collapsed. Apparently, two decades of privatization, liberalization, and government austerity, ushered in by Argentina's brutal military junta (in power from 1976 to 1983), were not enough to sate the appetites of global financial capital: earlier that year the International Monetary Fund had withheld $1.3 billion in loans the country needed to service its $142 billion external debt. In response to the IMF's action, the government froze all bank accounts (although many wealthy Argentines managed to relocate their funds abroad before the freeze) and drastically cut government spending. As a consequence, the economy experienced a severe depression as incomes and expenditures fell through the floor. The unemployment rate shot up to a record 21.5% by May 2002, with over fifty percent of the population living in poverty. The popular response to the crisis was massive. Protests and demonstrations erupted throughout the country. The government went through five presidents in the course of a month. Workers eventually reclaimed dozens of abandoned factories and created democratically run cooperative enterprises, many of which are still in operation today and are part of a growing co-op movement. Reclaiming factories was a lengthy and difficult process, however, and the immediate problem of unemployment remained. In response, in April 2002 the Argentine government put into place a direct job creation program known as Plan Jefes de Hogar ("Heads-of-Household Plan"), which promised a job to all heads of households satisfying certain requirements. In order to qualify, a household had to include a child under the age of eighteen, a person with a disability, or a pregnant woman; the household head had to be unemployed; and each household was generally limited to only one participant in the program. The program provided households with 150 pesos a month for four hours of work a day, five days a week. Program participants mainly engaged in the provision of community services and/or participated in worker training programs administered by local nonprofits. While limited in scope and viewed by many in the government as an emergency measure, the program was incredibly successful and popular with its workers. It provided jobs and incomes to roughly two million workers, or thirteen percent of Argentina's labor force, as well as desperately needed goods and services - from community gardens to small construction projects - to severely depressed neighborhoods. The entry of many women into the program, while their husbands continued to look for jobs in the private sector, had a liberating effect on traditional family structures. And by some accounts, the program helped facilitate the cooperative movement that subsequently emerged with the takeover of abandoned factories. Not surprisingly, as Argentina's economy has recovered from the depths of the crisis, the government has recently made moves to discontinue this critical experiment in direct job creation. "Employer of Last Resort" The Argentine experience with direct job creation represents a real-world example of what is often referred to as the employer of last resort (ELR) proposal by a number of left academics and public policy advocates. Developed over the course of the past two decades, the ELR proposal is based on a rather simple idea. In a capitalist economy, with most people dependent on private employment for their livelihoods, the government has a unique responsibility to guarantee full employment. This responsibility has been affirmed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes a right to employment. A commitment to full employment is also official US government policy as codified in the Employment Act of 1946 and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1976. Although many versions of the ELR proposal have been put forward, they all revolve around the idea that national governments could guarantee full employment by providing a job to anyone ready, willing, and able to work. The various proposals differ mainly on the wage and benefit packages they would provide to participants. The most common proposal calls for paying all participants a universal basic wage and benefit package, regardless of skills, work experience, or prior earnings. This wage and benefit package would then form the effective minimum for both the public and private sectors of the economy. After fixing a wage and benefit package, the government would allow the quantity of workers in the program to float, rising and falling in response to cyclical fluctuations in private-sector employment. As with Argentina's program, ELR proposals typically call for participants to work in projects to improve their local communities - everything from basic infrastructure projects to a Green Jobs Corps. Most ELR proponents also advocate a decentralized approach similar to Argentina's, with local public or nonprofit institutions planning and administering the projects, though it is essential that the program be funded at the national level. This raises an important question: How will governments pay for such a large-scale program? Wouldn't an ELR program require significantly raising taxes or else result in exploding budget deficits? Can governments really afford to employ everyone who wants a job but cannot find one in the private economy? Advocates of ELR address the issue of affordability in different ways, but all agree that the benefits to society vastly outweigh the expense. Many ELR advocates go even further, arguing that any talk of "costs" to society misrepresents the nature of the problem of unemployment. The existence of unemployed workers represents a net cost to society, in terms of lost income and production as well as the psychological and social stresses that result from long spells of unemployment. Employing them represents a net benefit, in terms of increased incomes and enhanced individual and social wellbeing. The real burden of an ELR program, from the perspective of society, is thus effectively zero. Most estimates of the direct cost of an ELR program are in the range of less than one percent of GDP per year. For the United States, this was less than $132 billion in 2006, or about five percent of the federal budget. (By way of comparison, in 2006 the US government spent over $120 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and that figure does not include the cost of lives lost or ruined or the future costs incurred, for example, for veterans' health care.) Furthermore, an ELR program provides benefits to society in the form of worker retraining, enhanced public infrastructure, and increased social output (for example, cleaner parks and cities, free child care, public performances, et cetera). By increasing the productivity of those participants who attend education or training programs, an ELR program would also decrease real costs throughout the economy. Estimates of program costs take into account a reduction in other forms of social assistance such as food stamps, cash assistance, and unemployment insurance, which would instead be provided to ELR participants in the form of a wage and benefit package. Of course, those who cannot work would still be eligible for these and other forms of assistance. Today, the ELR idea is mostly confined to academic journals and conferences. Still, proponents can point to a number of little known real-world examples their discussions have helped to shape. For example, the Argentine government explicitly based its Jefes de Hogar program on the work of economists associated with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (CFEPS) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Daniel Kostzer, an economist at the Argentine Ministry of Labor and one of the main architects of the program, had become familiar with the CFEPS proposal and was attempting to create such a program in Argentina a few years before the collapse provided him with the necessary political support. Similar experiments are being considered or are currently underway in India, France, and Bolivia. Advocates of ELR proposals can also be found at the Levy Economics Institute (US), the Center for Full Employment and Equity (Australia), and the National Jobs for All Coalition (US). The Case for Direct Job Creation Involuntary unemployment is a fundamental and inherent feature of a capitalist economy left to its own devices. In a society where most people depend on employment in the private sector for their livelihood, the inability of a capitalist economy to consistently create enough jobs for all who seek work is deeply troubling, pointing to the need for intervention from outside of the private sector. ELR advocates view national governments - with their unique spending ability, and with their role as, in principle, democratically accountable social institutions - as the most logical institutions for collective action to bring about full employment. In addition, government job creation is viewed as the simplest and most direct means for overcoming the problem of involuntary unemployment in a capitalist economy. The standard mainstream response to the problem of unemployment is to blame the victims of capitalism for lacking the necessary talents, skills, and effort to get and keep a job. Hence, the mainstream prescription is to promote policies aimed at enhancing the "human capital" of workers in order to make them more "competitive" in a rapidly globalizing economy. The response of ELR advocates is that such policies, if they accomplish anything at all, simply redistribute unemployment and poverty more equitably. For example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of unemployed workers (including so-called "discouraged" and "underemployed" workers) in August 2007 was 16.4 million, while the number of job vacancies was 4.1 million. No amount of investment in human capital is going to change the fact that there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. Advocates of ELR also consistently reject the Keynesian rubric, with its focus on demand-management strategies - that is, policies aimed at increasing aggregate demand for the output of the economy. This approach has been pursued either directly, through government spending on goods and services (including transfer payments to households), or indirectly, largely through policies intended to increase private investment. Such an approach exacerbates inequality by biasing policy in favor of the already well-to-do, through tax cuts and investment credits to wealthy individuals and powerful corporations. These policies also tend to privilege the more highly skilled and better-paid workers found in the industries that generally benefit from the government's largesse (often arms manufacturers and other military-related companies). For example, much of the increase in government spending during the Cold War era went into the high-tech, capital-intensive, and oligopolized sectors of the economy. Capital-intensive industries require relatively small amounts of labor, and, thus, produce little employment growth per dollar of government expenditure. Under this policy approach, the most that lower-paid or unemployed workers could hope for would be to snatch a few crumbs from the great corporate feast as the economy expanded over time. In contrast to both the human-capital and demand-management approaches, ELR provides a means for rapidly achieving zero involuntary unemployment. By definition, anyone who is unemployed and chooses not to accept the ELR offer would be considered voluntarily unemployed. Many individuals with sufficient savings and decent job prospects may forgo the opportunity to participate in the ELR program, but ELR always provides them with a backup option. In addition to the immediate effects of ELR on employment, the program acts as an "automatic stabilizer" in the face of cyclical fluctuations in the private sector of the economy. During a recession, the number of participants in the program can be expected to grow as people are laid off and/or find it increasingly difficult to find private-sector employment. The opposite happens during the recovery phase of the business cycle, as people find it easer to find private-sector employment at wages above the ELR minimum. As a result, ELR advocates argue, the existence of such a program would dampen fluctuations in private-sector activity by setting a floor to the decline in incomes and employment. A final and less discussed benefit of the program is its socializing effect. The example of Argentina is instructive in this respect. The nature of employment in the Jefes program, oriented as it was toward community rather than market imperatives, created a sense of public involvement and responsibility. Participants reported increases in morale and often continued to work beyond the four hours a day for which they were getting paid; they appreciated the cooperative nature of most of the enterprises and their focus on meeting essential community needs as opposed to quarterly profit targets. By expanding the public sphere, the Jefes program created a spirit of democratic participation in the affairs of the community, unmediated by the impersonal relations of market exchange. These are the kinds of experiences that are essential if capitalist societies are to move beyond the tyranny of the market and toward more cooperative and democratic forms of social organization. Some economists and advocates have pressed for a similar proposal, the basic income guarantee (BIG). Instead of guaranteeing jobs, under this proposal the government would guarantee a minimum income to everyone by simply giving cash assistance to anyone earning below that level, in an amount equal to the gap between his or her actual income and the established basic income. (Hence this proposal is sometimes referred to as a "negative income tax".) BIG is an important idea deserving wider discussion than it has so far received. But ELR advocates have a number of concerns. One is that a BIG program is inherently inflationary: by providing income without putting people to work, it creates an additional claim on output without directly increasing the production of that output. Another is that BIG programs are less politically palatable - and hence less sustainable - than ELR schemes, which benefit society at large through the provision of public works and other social goods, and which avoid the stigma attached to "welfare" programs. Finally, a job offers social and psychological benefits that an income payment alone does not: maintaining and enhancing work skills, keeping in contact with others, and having the satisfaction of contributing to society. When, for instance, participants in Argentina's Jefes program were offered an income in place of a job, most refused; they preferred to work. Consequently, ELR programs meet the same objectives as basic income guarantee schemes and more, without the negative side effects of inflation and stigmatization. Nonetheless, a BIG program may be appropriate for those who should not be expected to work. Learning from the Past The idea that the government in a capitalist economy should provide jobs for the unemployed is not new. In the United States, the various New Deal agencies created during the Great Depression of the 1930s offer a well-known example. Organizations such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps were designed to deal with the massive unemployment of that period. Unemployment peaked at almost 25% of the civilian labor force in 1933 and averaged over seventeen percent for the entire decade. These programs were woefully inadequate, largely due to their limited scale. It ultimately took the massive increases in government expenditure precipitated by the Second World War to pull the US economy out of depression. The onset of the postwar "Golden Age" and the dominance of Keynesian economics sounded the death knell of direct job creation as a solution to unemployment. The interwar public employment strategy was replaced with a "demand-management" strategy - essentially a sort of trickle-down economics in which various tax incentives and government expenditure programs, mainly military spending, were used to stimulate private investment. Policymakers believed that this would spur economic growth. The twin problems of poverty and unemployment would then be eliminated since, according to President Kennedy's famous aphorism, "a rising tide lifts all boats". In the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement revived the idea of direct job creation as a solution to the problems of poverty and unemployment. Although the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had declared a so-called War on Poverty, the movement's call for direct job creation fell on deaf ears as the Johnson administration, at the behest of its Council of Economic Advisers, pursued a more conservative approach based on the standard combination of supply-side incentives to increase private investment and assorted strategies to "improve" workers' "human capital" so as to make them more attractive to private employers. The rise to dominance of neoliberalism since the mid-1970s has resulted in a full-scale retreat from even the mildly social democratic policies of the early postwar period. While a commitment to full employment remains official US economic policy, the concerns of central bankers and financial capitalists now rule the roost in government circles. This translates into a single-minded obsession with fighting inflation at the expense of all other economic and social objectives. Not only is fighting inflation seemingly the only concern of economic policy, it is seen to be in direct conflict with the goal of full employment (witness the widespread acceptance among economists and policymakers of the NAIRU, or "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" theory, which posits that the economy has a set-point for unemployment, well above zero, below which rapidly rising inflation must occur). Whenever falling unemployment leads to concerns about "excessive" wage growth, central banks are expected to raise interest rates in an attempt to force slack on the economy and thereby decrease inflationary pressures. The resulting unemployment acts as a kind of discipline, tempering the demands of working-class people for higher wages or better working conditions in favor of the interests of large commercial and financial institutions. The postwar commitment to full employment has finally been sacrificed on the altar of price stability. ELR and Capitalism As demonstrated by the history of public employment programs in the United States and the example of Argentina, direct job-creation programs do not happen absent significant political pressure from below. This is the case whether or not those calling for change explicitly demand an ELR program. Given the hegemonic position of neoliberal ideology, there are many powerful forces today that would be hostile to the idea of governments directly creating jobs for the unemployed. These forces represent a critical barrier to the implementation of an ELR program. In fact, these forces represent a critical barrier to virtually any project for greater social and economic justice. The purpose of initiating a wider discussion of ELR proposals is to build them into more comprehensive programs for social and economic justice. As is always the case, this requires the building of mass-based social movements advocating for these and other progressive policies. A significant objection to the ELR proposal remains: it's capitalism, stupid. If you don't like unemployment, poverty, and inequality - not to mention war, environmental destruction, and alienating and exploitative work - then you don't like capitalism, and you should seek alternatives instead of reformist employment policies. ELR advocates would not disagree. In the face of the overlapping and myriad problems afflicting a capitalist economy, the achievements of even a full-scale ELR program would be limited. The political difficulties involved in establishing an ELR program in the first place, in the face of opposition from powerful elements of society, would be immense. And certainly, the many experiments in non-capitalist forms of economic and social organization currently being carried out, for example, in the factories of Argentina and elsewhere, should be championed. But it is fair to ask: shouldn't we also champion living wage laws, a stronger social safety net for those who cannot or should not be expected to work, and universal health care - as well as an end to imperialist wars of aggression, environmentally unsustainable practices, and the degradation of work? In sum, shouldn't we seek to alleviate the symptoms of capitalism, even as we work toward a better economic system? _____ Ryan A. Dodd is a PhD student in economics and a research associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, both at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Sources: Joseph Halevi, "The Argentine Crisis", Monthly Review (April 2002); Pavlina Tcherneva, "Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy in Argentina: A Case Study of the 2002 Currency Collapse and Crisis Resolution through Job Creation" (Bard College Working Paper, 2007); L Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Edward Elgar, 1998); Congressional Research Service, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11, updated 7/07; National Jobs for All Coalition, September 2007 Unemployment Data; Nancy Rose, "Historicizing Government Work Programs: A Spectrum from Workfare to Fair Work" (Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, Seminar Paper No 2, March 2000); Judith Russell, Economics, Bureaucracy and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty (Columbia University Press, 2004); Fadhel Kaboub, "Employment Guarantee Programs: A Survey of Theories and Policy Experiences" (Levy Economics Institute, Working Paper No 498, May 2007). Copyright (c) 2009 Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0308dodd.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From noreply at coha.org Wed Feb 4 12:35:13 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 14:35:13 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Obama and the Future of U.S.-Cuban Policy Message-ID: <20090204193455.04AD32955B5@mx-out.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4916 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090204/d263c12b/attachment.txt From hardwin1 at googlemail.com Thu Feb 5 00:34:33 2009 From: hardwin1 at googlemail.com (HMFJ) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 07:34:33 +0000 Subject: [A-List] UK human rights lawyers' eye-witness account of the aftermath of war crimes in Gaza Message-ID: (forwarded) GAZA DELEGATION We were in Gaza earlier this week as part of a lawyers' mission focused on assessing the needs of lawyers and NGOs on the ground with a view to sending further assistance in the future and gathering evidence of war crimes in order to prepare cases for court in a number of jurisdictions. This involved our delegation visiting several sites of massacre and mass destruction along with two other lawyers, a scenes-of-crime expert and a military expert and listening to the eye-witness accounts of the carnage wreaked upon the Palestinian people by the Israeli Army. Several of you will clearly know a good deal about what has been going on in Gaza both recently and prior to the latest attack by Israel. Forgive us if some of what we say seems obvious or trite but there are certain things that merit repetition. -------------------- <...> In the context of the above, has the Israeli response to the renewed rocket attacks that followed the killing of six Hamas members by the Israeli Army been lawful, necessary or proportionate? The Israeli Army has destroyed with mortar, artillery and tank shelling much of what remained of Gaza's already devastated agricultural production and food industry. It targeted chicken, cattle and sheep farms. In one large area we saw hundreds of dead cows with their heads and limbs blown off lying in fields. All the farmhouses in the surrounding area had been bombed and then bulldozed. The families are now forced to live in the open with the stench of death permanently in their nostrils. Some said that relatives remain buried beneath the rubble because there is no way currently of getting the bodies out. We saw a chicken factory that had been razed to the ground, leaving the buildings flattened and the dead animals in piles in their cages or strewn on the ground. We also saw orchards of orange and lemon trees and seas of poly-tunnels that had been shelled out of existence. This level of destruction and the use of the untargeted weaponry that caused it, some in built up areas, undoubtedly amounts to a war crime, as confirmed by the military expert in our delegation. The Israeli Army has systematically used inaccurate and highly destructive weapons in Gaza City, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. They have also used precision weapons, deliberately targeting blocks of flats and multi-occupation houses, killing over 1,300 civilians and wounded thousands of others. One man told us his story. He went to the mosque for morning prayers leaving his wife and four children in bed in the fourth floor of their apartment block. His two brothers and their families lived on the same block. On his way back from the mosque, mortars and bombs began to fall. He ran home to find the entire block had become a pile of rubble. Of his family only one child and one of his brothers survived. 22 others were killed. From a high point of the rubble we watched the man standing and staring silently at the effects of the attack that had destroyed his entire existence. Despite its denials, it is now clear that the Israeli Army has used white phosphorous in contravention of the laws of war. The use of phosphorus is only lawful under international rules of engagement when used as a smokescreen cover in open areas for combatants who are caught in the open and are under fire. However, the evidence on the ground makes clear that the Israeli Army systematically and unlawfully fired phosphorus shells directly over and into populated urban areas. We visited the site of a family devastated by the illegal use of phosphorous. The man we spoke to told us how his wife and three children were asleep in a bedroom of their house. A phosphorous shell came through the roof of the house exploding in the room where the family was sleeping. On impact the mother and children were engulfed in toxic flames smoke and fumes. They died an unimaginable death in that room. We stood in the room and saw the traces of white phosphorus on the walls in the otherwise completely blackened room. A woman came into the room and held up a piece of child's clothing covered in phosphorus burns. Another man then showed us a picture of the body of a 10-month old child who had been in the room during the attack. The heat had been so intense that it had burned the baby's legs off. The child's uncle just stared at the ground for a while before he went on to tell us what happened next. As in many sites of death and injury, the Israelis were not allowing ambulances or doctors into the area even when there were many injured people in need of urgent medical attention. In this case a man who had a tractor offered to take some of the injured to hospital in his trailer. As men, women and children were being placed on the trailer Israeli Army troops came up the street and first shot the tractor driver dead. They then shot and killed two people who were tending to the wounded in the trailer. The remaining wounded were left there to die. Zaytoun. The district of Zaytoun covers a large area on the edge of Gaza City. Yesterday the Times reported that Israeli soldiers were being quoted as saying they had been ordered to "fire on everything that moves" in Zaytoun. That is all too evident from the situation on the ground. The Israeli Army clearly did indeed attempt to kill everyone and everything in the area. There can be no other explanation for what we all saw. From the border with Israel to the sea, not a single house has escaped unscathed. There are flattened buildings as far as the eye can see. This is the story of the Al Samouni family told by several eye witnesses. The Al Samouni family area contained about 15 houses, each surrounded by a plot of land that was used as a smallholding for subsistence farming chickens, goats and small industry. On 5th January a brigade of tanks surrounded the area. A large number of soldiers ordered people out of one house in particular, shouting at them from outside. The woman who told us this story said that her husband had been the first one out, and was holding their baby as he went. The soldiers told him to put his hands in the air and he protested that he was holding his baby. They screamed at him to obey them. His hands went up and the baby fell to the ground. Within seconds the soldiers had fired at least 30 bullets into his head and body. They stepped over him and entered the house. A soldier than fired automatic rounds into the walls above the heads of several people who were sitting or lying on the floor. They were not hit but were told to leave and go into a neighbouring building. They then ordered other people in other houses to leave and go into the same neighbouring building. Over sixty people, including a large number of children, were gathered in the house without food or water. After two days, a number of men decided to leave the building to try to get food and water, but quickly retreated on seeing the Israeli soldiers still in close proximity. Some five minutes later, the building was shelled, killing a large number of the family members gathered in the house, including women and children, and wounding many others. Approximately 20 of the survivors left, raising white flags and carrying the bodies of four of the dead. Despite being shot at, they continued to walk and to try to contact medical services to come and save them and those remaining in the house. The Red Crescent was only permitted access to the house a number of days later, where they found starving children next to the bodies of their dead parents. When they returned a short while later to collect further casualties, the building into which the people had been herded was now a pile of rubble. In total, 29 members of the Al Samouni family were slaughtered, including over 10 children and seven women, many of whom lay dead beneath the rubble. This time the Red Crescent were refused access to the site when they tried to enter. Our military expert was present when many of the bodies were eventually pulled out of the rubble. He confirmed that none of them were in any kind of combat uniform and that none appeared to be fighters. Prior to the massacre the Israeli Army took over the first house as a command post. From inside it was clear that it was a highly strategic location from which a large area could be monitored and operations controlled. They had blasted holes for their machine guns in each of the upstairs rooms. The military expert told us that it looked as if most of the buildings had been destroyed by anti-tank mines and then finished off by bulldozers. People have set up small tents on the rubble of their houses, but aid has yet to reach them. A child told us that every child in the settlement is now either an orphan or has lost at least one parent. The woman whose husband was shot at near point blank range also lost both her mother and father. Inside their command post the Israelis have scrawled graffiti on some walls which says things like '1 Arab down, 999,999 to go', alongside Stars of David, slogans such as 'make war not peace' and a chilling drawing of a tombstone on which it is written Arabs 1948-2008. When they exited the house they started fires in the remaining rooms and left human faeces in many of the rooms. The following is an interview with a little girl from the Al Samouni family who was orphaned in the attacks whom we met while we were there: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/jan/30/gaza-samouni The use of flechette missiles. These are projectiles the size of 4-inch nails with four tail fins. They work by being jettisoned sideways from a missile before it hits a target. Each missile contains 80,000 flechettes. On impact these lethal items tend to bend rather than go straight into their target so when they hit people the wound is over a wider area. On the 6th January a family were holding a wake for an ambulance worker killed as he tried to access the victims of an Israeli attack. Traditional mourning tents had been erected and a large number of people were milling around in a wide residential street with a couple of shops in it and houses on both sides. As the local population were paying their respects to the mourning family a missile was launched at low level from the Israeli border about 800 meters away. It was aimed directly at the crowded street. Its forward trajectory ejected its flechettes over its range of about 100m and 150m either side. A large number of people in the crowd were hit. Many were injured, including the teenager who gave us this account, who was hit by three flechettes, one of which was still embedded in his leg. Given the extent and nature of injuries in Gaza, he is still not considered a high enough priority for it to be removed. He showed us his brother's X-rays, which showed a flechette embedded in his right lung. He is still ill in hospital. A number of others were killed by flechettes, including a pregnant mother and two young members of this young man's family. We saw several flechettes still buried in the walls of the houses. Photographs of the deceased victims show dozens of flechettes deeply embedded in their faces and bodies. The objective of the 22-day attack seems to have been to kill, destroy and disable as much of the population and infrastructure of Gaza as was possible. The Israeli Army targeted the essential services and institutions with astonishing accuracy, leaving the buildings on either side untouched in most cases. Over 60 mosques in Gaza were hit. Some are still standing, some reduced to rubble. Nearly every Palestinian Authority ministry was destroyed, including the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior. This means that all records in Gaza have been destroyed, all records of births and deaths, all records of entitlements and finances. The territory has been reduced to chaos. All 13 police stations in Gaza City were destroyed in one 3-minute strike. The policy cadet school was struck during a graduation parade. Some 40 teenage cadets were killed. We saw their hats and boots, riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes, lying strewn over the parade ground. Shell after shell rained down on those participating in and watching the parade, as they attempted to flee, as demonstrated by the craters in the ground, the last one striking just by the gate. Every aspect of Gazan society was hit, including money changers, ambulance stations, hospitals and schools. We saw a number of the 40+ schools that had been attacked by missiles, including two schools, one of them the American school, a private school, which had been razed to the ground. Over 50 UN installations were also hit, including two schools - children in one of them beheaded by the force of the blasts - and of course, the UNWRA compound warehouse which had contained a significant quantity of food and medical supplies for those injured in the attacks. These are only a fraction of the atrocities the Palestinian population has endured at the hands of the Israelis, in circumstances where huge swathes of Gaza have been laid to waste, approximately 1,300 people have been killed, at least 80 per cent of whom are now estimated by human rights groups to have been civilians, over 5,000 have sustained serious injuries, scores have been made orphans and thousands upon thousands have been left homeless and destitute. Nowhere in Gaza was safe during the bombings. There was nowhere to go. Every adult in Gaza contemplated not only their own death but that of their children, and made the decision about where and when they should die. Many uprooted their families from one area to another in a vain attempt to find safe haven. Others remained at home as the bombs rained down, preferring to die where they lived, rather than face the prospect of being shot as they fled. Although children were some of the greatest casualties of the war, adults have had to face up to their total and utter impotence and their inability to protect their children and those they love. The long-term impact will be huge. As a start, Gaza needs an army of psychiatrists. There is a dire need for aid in Gaza. Unfortunately and despite claims by Israel and its friends the aid is coming in far too slowly at all crossing points. The Israeli Army, again despite the claims to the contrary, is still on the attack. On Tuesday night, still during the ceasefire, missiles whistled over the flat we were staying in followed by dull thuds in the distance. Shelling is also continuing from gunboats off the Gazan shore, unreported in the media. Egypt is refusing to allow food in. Many of the areas of Gaza most affected by the attacks have yet to be accessed by humanitarian aid. Please give generously to Interpal, Medical Aid for Palestine, UNWRA and any other relevant aid providers. If you have time, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights welcome all who are willing or able to assist in whatever way they can. LPHR also has an informative yahoogroup distribution list to which you can sign up. Membership forms can be downloaded from www.lphr.org.uk. Please forgive the roughness of this diatribe. It was written within a day of our return. Steve Kamlish QC (Tooks) and Blinne N? Ghr?laigh (Matrix) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 15730 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090205/2442d273/attachment.txt From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Thu Feb 5 04:30:02 2009 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (james daly) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 11:30:02 -0000 Subject: [A-List] Trade Unionists Against the EU Constitution Message-ID: European single market is undermining labour February 5, 2009 9:23 | by Brian Denny As strikers rage at the use of foreign workers at an oil refinery, Brian Denny lays the blame at the door of the EU. THE use of Italian contract workers at Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire is the latest example of employers across Europe going on the offensive and undermining organised labour. Refinery owner French oil giant Total gave the ?200 million contract to Italian company IREM as it was the cheapest tender. More than 300 of its employees are today being kept on barges berthed at the docks in nearby Grimsby and are being ferried to the refinery to work. The company claims that the Italian workers are on the same wages as their British counterparts, but, even if this was true, sleeping on containers in the freezing seas on the Humber estuary constitutes a lower social wage for these workers. The fact that British energy workers do not know the conditions that these contractors are employed on is enough in itself to set alarm bells ringing. This process undermines the very idea of collective bargaining, a concept which is under attack in a number of ways by employers and the European Union. Total is exploiting EU law which demands the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour, a neoliberal model which facilitates a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. This process began back in 1987 with Margaret Thatcher's Single European Act, which Tory MP John Bercow later boasted was about imposing a single market to achieve the "Thatcherisation of Europe." This internal market was designed to slowly remove barriers to the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour, the so-called "four freedoms," until capital could move anywhere and any time regardless of the consequences. Rather than liberate workers, it has enslaved them by turning people into commodities, with very few collective rights, to be exploited and dumped without regard to social models built up over generations in the member states. We saw this process at work in the Irish Ferries dispute in 2006, when Irish seafarers were displaced by sweated Latvian and Polish labour being paid a third of the wages. The Gate Gourmet strike of 2005 also saw low-paid Polish workers displace local staff, mainly British Asian women. Four recent judgements by the European Court of Justice, known as Laval, Viking, Ruffert and Luxembourg, have also enshrined this race to the bottom in ECJ case law and gives huge new powers to employers to bring in contract labour anywhere within the EU. The ECJ and the European Commission are effectively implementing a programme to narrow the scope for member states to preside over their different social models and labour markets in the context of foreign companies posting workers to their territory. In the Luxembourg case, the ECJ does not even recognise Luxembourg's right to decide which national public policy provisions should apply to both national and foreign service providers on an equal footing. This process is also being played out at Staythorpe power station near Newark, where employers in the energy sector are also refusing to employ local unionised labour. French engineering group Alstom has been contracted by energy privateer RWE to build the power station and two companies, Montpressa and FMM, have since been subcontracted to carry out construction work. It is clear that the the employers' response to the growing economic crisis is to exploit neoliberal EU rules on "free movement" and drive down wages, exclude organised labour and maintain their profits. A stark illustration of this is the fact that the spontaneous strike action came a day after Shell reported the biggest annual profit in British corporate history of ?21.9 billion, leading to renewed calls for a windfall tax on energy companies. But the use of cheap foreign workers as a battering ram against organised labour is not a new concept. In 1934, as European countries followed the United States into the Great Depression, French writer Antoine de St Exup?ry described Polish miners expelled from French coalfields once they had fulfilled their usefulness as "half-human shadows, shunted from one end of Europe to the other by economic forces." This is the European reality for more and more workers as Brussels imposes its increasingly discredited neoliberal economic model that treats labour like a tin of beans. Even Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has said that angry energy workers were "entitled to an answer." Yet while new Labour remains wedded to the creation of a pseudo-state called Europe, where democracy and workers' right only exist in the past tense, then more and more workers will be asking the same questions. Brian Denny is secretary of Trade Unionists Against the EU Constitution. This article first appeared in the Morning Star, now a free access site. see also http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/BrianDenny4.htm From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Thu Feb 5 06:41:19 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 05:41:19 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] What more specifically does irreversible mean ? Message-ID: <640336.49800.qm@web180102.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> AP - President Barack Obama warned on Thursday that failure to act on an economic recovery package could plunge the nation into a long-lasting recession that might prove irreversible, a fresh call to a recalcitrant Congress to move quickly. ^^^^^^ CB: What more specifically does irreversible mean ? ^^^^ This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse," Obama wrote in the op-ed titled, "The Action Americans Need." Senate Democratic leaders hope for passage of the legislation by Friday at the latest, although prospects appear to hinge on crafting a series of spending reductions that would make the bill more palatable to centrists in both parties. Obama rejected the argument that more tax cuts are needed in the plan and that piecemeal measures would be sufficient, arguing that Americans made their intentions clear in the election. "I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change," he wrote. Historically huge to begin with, economic stimulus legislation is growing larger by the day in the Senate, where the addition of a new tax break for homebuyers sent the price tag well past $900 billion. "It is time to fix housing first," Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said Wednesday night as the Senate agreed without controversy to add the new tax break to the stimulus measure, at an estimated cost of nearly $19 billion. The tax break was the most notable attempt to date to add help for the crippled housing industry and gave Republicans a victory as they work to remake the legislation more to their liking. Three swing-vote senators met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday to discuss possible cutbacks, but they declined to discuss details of their talks. Obama has made the legislation a cornerstone of his recovery plan. For their part, Senate Republicans signaled they would persist in their efforts to reduce spending in the measure, to add tax cuts and reduce the cost of mortgages for millions of homeowners. Officials figures were unavailable, but it appeared that the measure carried a price tag of more than $920 billion, making it bigger than the financial industry bailout that passed last year and as large as any measure in memory. Despite bipartisan concerns about the cost, Republicans failed in a series of attempts on Wednesday to cut back the bill's size. The most sweeping proposal, advanced by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., would have eliminated all the spending and replaced it with a series of tax cuts. It was defeated 61-36. Democrats also upheld a so-called Buy American provision that requires projects financed by the measure to be built with domestically produced iron and steel. But with Obama voicing concern about the provision, the requirement was changed to specify that U.S. international trade agreements not to be violated. Additionally, Democrats turned back an attempt to strip out a provision that Obama has said was essential. It would provide a tax cut of up to $1,000 for working couples, including those who do not make enough to pay income taxes. Isakson said the new tax break for homebuyers was intended to help revive the housing industry, which has virtually collapsed in the wake of a credit crisis that began last fall. The proposal would allow a tax credit of 10 percent of the value of new or existing residences, up to a $15,000 limit. Current law provides for a $7,500 tax break but only for first-time homebuyers. Isakson's office said the proposal would cost the government an estimated $19 billion. The provision was the second tax cut approved in as many days targeted to individual industries. On Tuesday, the Senate voted to give a break to consumers who buy new cars. The House approved its own version of the bill last week. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090205/ap_on_go_pr_wh/congress_stimulus Stores see January sales fall; Wal-Mart posts rise (AP) From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Thu Feb 5 07:30:33 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 06:30:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street Message-ID: <897266.12355.qm@web180115.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you know your derivatives from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to understanding the current market freakout. by Andrew Leonard Salon.com (August 17 2007) ^^^^ Was this written in 2007 ? From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Feb 5 08:22:41 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:22:41 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street In-Reply-To: <897266.12355.qm@web180115.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <897266.12355.qm@web180115.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498B0441.4080605@ashisuto.co.jp> Apparently. Charles Brown wrote: > You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you know your derivatives > from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to understanding the current > market freakout. > > by Andrew Leonard > > Salon.com (August 17 2007) > > ^^^^ > Was this written in 2007 ? > > > > From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Thu Feb 5 08:28:27 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 07:28:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street In-Reply-To: <498B0441.4080605@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: <253981.81011.qm@web180108.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> The Wall Street panic started in 2007 ? > From: Bill Totten > Apparently. > > Charles Brown wrote: > > You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you > know your derivatives > > from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to > understanding the current > > market freakout. > > > > by Andrew Leonard > > > > Salon.com (August 17 2007) > > > > ^^^^ > > Was this written in 2007 ? > > > > > > > > From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 10:27:48 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:27:48 -0800 Subject: [A-List] ...Or we COULD just hold them (The SEC bwoyz) criminally liable Message-ID: <498B2194.7000704@gmail.com> Does SEC's Failure To Unmask Madoff Make It Liable? by Sherwood Ross A Massachusetts law school dean that lost money invested with swindler Bernard Madoff says the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was ?willfully, horribly negligent? in failing to monitor Madoff's operation. This raises the question of whether the SEC is liable to repay the investors who, collectively, lost billions of dollars. Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover (The author is media consultant for the school//Leigh), said, ?The SEC?s incredible willful negligence? to not seriously investigate Madoff?s operations despite repeated red flags and written warnings of his criminality probably makes the agency liable to legal action by aggrieved investors. The SEC, he said, ?has no discretion?none?to fail to follow up, with serious investigations, when presented with knowledgeable, detailed, obviously highly competent, and in many respects easily ?checkable? allegations of...a huge fraud that is fooling thousands of people, stealing billions of dollars, and causing horrible injustice.? Equally bad, says Velvel, the SEC was responsible for a lot of people being sucked into Madoff in the first place, because in 1992 it publicly announced that there was no fraud.Referring to the preponderant majority of Madoff?s victims, Velvel said, ?These are not the billionaires, or the huge institutions, that could hire expensive experts in due diligence?These are the plain people who worked hard and saved all their lives, as capitalism says they should, and who?depended on their government to protect them?but were failed by it because of one of the most willfully negligent, incompetent, and perhaps even complicitous courses of action any agency has ever engaged in.? Velvel also said The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private organization of brokerage industry members supposedly dedicated to ?investor protection and market integrity,? is also probably liable for damages. FINRA examined Madoff every two years from 1960 onwards, and in 2007 FINRA conducted a sloppy probe that concluded parts of Madoff?s operation had no customers when, in fact, it had thousands. What?s more, ?If FINRA had so much as competently checked whether the company had the securities and money it claimed, it would have uncovered the fraud,? Velvel writes. Velvel also says investors should not be required to return sums Madoff told them they had and which they innocently withdrew from Madoff to live on. ?This is terrifying to people, and, rightly so. Having been wiped out . . . people now face the prospect of being obligated to give back six years of withdrawals---often withdrawals they needed to live, as with older people.? These people often have no money to give back. Velvel is also critical of the fact that there is only a three year period for which Madoff investors can reclaim taxes they paid on ?phantom income?---money Madoff falsely told them they had earned, so they paid taxes on it. He notes that when the IRS finds an individual guilty of tax fraud it can collect taxes going back 25 years or more because it had a right to the money. When it had no right to the money, the defrauded investor can only go back three years. So the IRS does not allow the same right to those defrauded that it claims for itself. The SEC had been informed at least as far back as 1999 by investment professional Harry Markopolos, in a major study, that Madoff?s business ?could not possibly be on the up and up,? Velvel says, and Markopolos kept reminding the agency periodically but to no avail. Again, the SEC was warned about Madoff in an article written in 2001 for the little known hedge fund-industry publication ?MAR/Hedge? by reporter Michael Ocrant.Finally, most investors knew nothing about a 2001 Barron?s article by reporter Erin Arvedlund ?that focused on secrecy? by Madoff and that should have been a red flag to the SEC, yet the SEC did nothing. The SEC should also have tumbled to Madoff?s crimes, Velvel says, because he was handling many billions of other peoples? money with a tiny, three-person auditor shop, only one of whom was an accountant, and because Madoff handled his own trades rather than have an independent firm make them, and did not use an independent custodian, both of which would have helped to ensure that the claimed securities and money existed. As it turned out, Madoff lied to investors about trades he was making in their behalf. A former U.S. Justice Department attorney, Velvel is co-founder and Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover and regarded as one of the nation's leaders in reforming the way legal education is taught and making quality legal education available to minorities and students from families of modest means. Sherwood Ross is a media consultant to the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. Reach him at sherwoodr1 {AT] yahoo.com Full bio: http://www.opednews.com/author/author4140.html http://www.opednews.com/articles/Does-SEC-s-Failure-To-Unma-by-Sherwood-Ross-090205-240.html From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 10:28:32 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:28:32 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street In-Reply-To: <253981.81011.qm@web180108.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <253981.81011.qm@web180108.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498B21C0.6020308@gmail.com> Charles Brown wrote: > The Wall Street panic started in 2007 ? > > > I don't remember when the first public discussion of 'Crash Protection Teams' in the MSM occurred, but to me, that would be an indicator, if not a benchmark. Leigh > > >> From: Bill Totten >> > > >> Apparently. >> >> > > > >> Charles Brown wrote: >> >>> You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you >>> >> know your derivatives >> >>> from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to >>> >> understanding the current >> >>> market freakout. >>> >>> by Andrew Leonard >>> >>> Salon.com (August 17 2007) >>> >>> ^^^^ >>> Was this written in 2007 ? >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> > > > From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Feb 5 10:51:31 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:51:31 -0800 Subject: [A-List] What more specifically does irreversible mean ? In-Reply-To: <640336.49800.qm@web180102.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <640336.49800.qm@web180102.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498B2723.9090302@gmail.com> Charles Brown wrote: > AP - President Barack Obama warned on Thursday that failure to act on an economic recovery package could plunge the nation into a long-lasting recession that might prove irreversible, a fresh call to a recalcitrant Congress to move quickly. > > ^^^^^^ > CB: What more specifically does irreversible mean ? > It means one of the political parties is an enemy of the American Public, at large and nation as a whole (Agent of a 'foreign-to-democracy, hostile economic power within America), and are doing their best to obstruct the repair of the US economy as they appear to 'pick the fly feces out of the pepper' while their 'friends' (quotes intentional... people like this have NO friends) cherry-pick the remains of the US financial system, AKA 'LOOTING'. If they succeed, just simply look up the definition of irreversible in Websters... From the other day... February 03 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Life *IS* A Crapshoot, And The The Republicans Are Playing The Political ?Back Line? In The Crapshoot, Gambling The New Administration?s Economic Recovery Act WILL NOT ?Recover? The American Economy http://leighm.net/wp/2009/02/03/tth_090203/ Travus explains what the "Back Line" in a Craps game is. From today: [February 05 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: The Current State Of The Rethuglican Party - ?The Mouse? Gives ?The Eagle? ?The Finger? As Barry Goldwater, Sr Rotates In His Grave http://leighm.net/wp/2009/02/05/tth_090205/ The theme being "Just because the Bush admin used the economic crisis to pay off his financial buddies DOES NOT MEAN there isn't currently a nightmare financial crisis. In *other* news today... Leon Panetta, President Obama?s pick for the directorship of the CIA, is going to get grilled by the senate intelligence committee today as the ?Old Boys of Spookland? plot his early demise? politically that is, from that agency. President Obama signs the final version of SCHIP, extending medical insurance to low income children in addition to children already on AFDC and other already existent programs for the impoverished. The Iranians cut off the US Badminton team by rejection of visas. The Independent UK has details... From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Thu Feb 5 08:44:30 2009 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 10:44:30 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN Fake "Obasms" abound: Pres tries to stimulate economy Message-ID: <012423b8$39849$0cf84475570023@xnote> FAKE ?OBASMS? ABOUND WHILE U.S. PRESIDENT TRIES TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY MNN. Feb. 5, 2009. U.S. President Obama says he?s going to stimulate the Americans? economy to stop its dive to oblivion. They?re looking to him for ?obasms? because they don?t know how to save summer?s abundance to get them through the winter. No matter how hard he tries, nothing?s coming up! Like drug addicts hooked on dope, they want another fix. They think they can?t survive without it. Obama is facing a formidable government bureaucracy that?s controlled by a few ?banksters? [bankers and gangsters]. The hierarchical system has jobs for the chosen few arranged in a pyramidal chain of command that is imbedded in every private and public financial, educational, political, economic, trade, military, pharmaceutical and social institution. Far from being ?public servants? they?re on the take and basically never do anything useful for anyone. They grab as much money and benefits as possible and do almost no work. In fact, the less they do, the more likely they are to be promoted. At Indian Affairs offices in Ottawa, their desks are shiny and their feet are sitting on top of them. In the meantime the people they are supposed to serve are living in forced squalor. We?ve seen these bureaucratic bloodsuckers sit and listen to Indigenous people explain their dire situations in some isolated community. They?ve travelled from far away to ask for help. After hearing about the horrific situation, the bureaucratic leech puts his hands behind his head and says, ?We can?t help you. You have to go see somebody else?. This is known as ?passing the buck? to someone else until they wear them out and they go home with nothing. Our suggestion to Mr. Obama is to dump this scrounging class system. These freeloading gate keepers? jobs are to sit behind the desk and take some of the cream as it passes by them. In the end, they?ve done a good job if they?ve made sure that the money meant for the people or program gets almost nothing. Indian Affairs is loaded with non-natives who are trained in that colonial system. The ground under the feet of emperor Obama is shaking. If he wants to get more money to the people, he should get rid of this meat grinding slaughterhouse. These plunderers who were sent to Turtle Island by the European elite came here to kill us off so they could steal everything that wasn?t nailed down. 115 million of us were killed off. The elite who run these systems have to change or adapt to the new reality, and not just by getting rid of their babysitter, cleaning lady, chauffer or maid. The conditions they have created are critical everywhere. The mobs are getting hysterical. People are resisting and reacting worldwide. Some think the elites are going to run. Where? To outer space? Good riddance! This is how this pecking order system works. At the top of the triangle sits the boss who got there by hook or by crook. So the meanest scoundrel sits at the top, has long lunches, plays golf and hollers at people sometimes. Below him/her is a huge pyramid of people who ?yes? the boss but call him down at the water cooler. The more people he has working under him, the more money he gets. The one with an empire of 100,000 employees is paid millions upon millions. The one with only two under him gets a much lower pay. So it pays to perpetuate the empire with more people in it even if they do nothing. After all, they have a direct line to siphon money out of the taxpayers? pockets. Let?s say that the government has budgeted $100,000 to fix a bad water plant problem in an isolated Indigenous community. This plant was designed by the bureaucrats and was meant to cause sicknesses and even death. They want to move these people because there is gold or diamonds underneath them or fresh water nearby to export to the U.S. 70% of Indigenous communities have toxic drinking water not fit for human consumption. This is no accident. Do you really belief the Canadian engineers are that incompetent? The federal, provincial, municipal and band council hierarchies all take their cuts for ?administration? all the way down to the community level. In the end there is almost nothing left to fix the problem. So another proposal goes up the chain, the bureaucrats do the same end run and pocket more money. They make even more by prolonging negotiations, court cases, licensing fees and making sure it doesn?t get resolved, because it wasn?t meant to. The people get warn down and are forced to make a deal that doesn?t benefit them. In the meantime, the band or tribal councilors who work with the banksters live like Middle Eastern sheiks, while crumbs trickle down to the people. If the problem was fixed, the whole hierarchy would fall down like a house of cards. Some bureaucrats might even lose their jobs, we hope. They fight like rats to keep their positions because they?re incompetent. Who else would hire them? The whole set up of lazy bums depends on this system. It?s never meant to serve the people. In November 2008 the heads of the Wall Street financial hierarchies were the first to pocket $750 billion from the U.S. Treasury. Everyone appeared to oppose this package. The nation might have been threatened with martial law or something else that forced Congress to go along with it. To save money and stimulate the economy, demolish the hierarchy. Then bring the relationship between the tax dollar and the grassroots closer together. Instead of getting one dollar out of $100, $95 will go where it?s needed. Let?s b%&@!h slap these parasites in these bureaucracies who sit at desks behind glass walls in big buildings and stare at computers. They are roosting chickens who have jobs, homes, cars, university tuition for their kids and vacations for taking 90% in fees from the people whose resources they are stealing. Why are the currencies going down in value? Why can?t they trade, ship goods or make contracts like they use to? The U.S. dollar is only paper with some printing on it that needs stolen Indigenous resources to prop it up. The thieves have been putting up our land and resources, without our knowledge or permission, as collateral on another parasite, the stock exchange. We never surrendered our land or resources to anyone. This form of raising money from the public is fraud. This toilet paper system of currency went along until we Indigenous people started to resist. We are the caretakers, trustees, protectors and defenders of the earth. Our responsibility is to help achieve balance within the natural world. Our duty is to stop the depletion of our resources which is killing everything and everybody. We, the stewards of mother earth, have spoken. Karakwine & Staff, MNN Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Note: 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. Go to MNN ?United States? 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 From sabri_oncu at yahoo.com Thu Feb 5 17:11:58 2009 From: sabri_oncu at yahoo.com (Sabri Oncu) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 16:11:58 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street Message-ID: <473560.54679.qm@web111513.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Charles: > The Wall Street panic started in 2007 ? Yes, the panic started in 2007. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_crisis_impact_timeline The current crisis started in 2000. Sabri From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Feb 5 18:42:38 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:42:38 +0900 Subject: [A-List] US and UK on Brink of Debt Disaster Message-ID: <498B958E.8050903@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Kemp Reuters (January 20 2009) The United States and the United Kingdom stand on the brink of the largest debt crisis in history. While both governments experiment with quantitative easing, bad banks to absorb non-performing loans, and state guarantees to restart bank lending, the only real way out is some combination of widespread corporate default, debt write-downs and inflation to reduce the burden of debt to more manageable levels. Everything else is window-dressing. To understand the scale of the problem, and why it leaves so few options for policymakers, take a look at Chart 1, which shows the growth in the real economy (measured by nominal GDP) and the financial sector (measured by total credit market instruments outstanding) since 1952 {1}. In 1952, the United States was emerging from the Second World War and the conflict in Korea with a strong economy, and fairly low debt, split between a relatively large government debt (amounting to 68 percent of GDP) and a relatively small private sector one (just sixty percent of GDP). Over the next 23 years, the volume of debt increased, but the rise was broadly in line with growth in the rest of the economy, so the overall ratio of total debts to GDP changed little, from 128 percent in 1952 to 155 percent in 1975. The only real change was in the composition. Private debts increased (7.8 times) more rapidly than public ones (1.5 times). As a result, there was a marked shift in the debt stock from public debt (just 37 percent of GDP in 1975) towards private sector obligations (117 percent). But this was not unusual. It should be seen as a return to more normal patterns of debt issuance after the wartime period in which the government commandeered resources for the war effort and rationed borrowing by the private sector. From the 1970s onward, however, the economy has undergone two profound structural shifts. First, the economy as a whole has become much more indebted. Output rose eight times between 1975 and 2007. But the total volume of debt rose a staggering 20 times, more than twice as fast. The total debt-to-GDP ratio surged from 155 percent to 355 percent. Second, almost all this extra debt has come from the private sector. Take a look at Chart 2 {2}. Despite acres of newsprint devoted to the federal budget deficit over the last thirty years, public debt at all levels has risen only 11.5 times since 1975. This is slightly faster than the eight-fold increase in nominal GDP over the same period, but government debt has still only risen from 37 percent of GDP to 52 percent. Instead, the real debt explosion has come from the private sector. Private debt outstanding has risen an enormous 22 times, three times faster than the economy as a whole, and fast enough to take the ratio of private debt to GDP from 117 percent to 303 percent in a little over thirty years. For the most part, policymakers have been comfortable with rising private debt levels. Officials have cited a wide range of reasons why the economy can safely operate with much higher levels of debt than before, including improvements in macroeconomic management that have muted the business cycle and led to lower inflation and interest rates. But there is a suspicion that tolerance for private rather than public sector debt simply reflected an ideological preference. The Debt Mountain The data in Table 1 makes clear the rise in private sector debt had become unsustainable {3}. In the 1960s and 1970s, total debt was rising at roughly the same rate as nominal GDP. By 2000-2007, total debt was rising almost twice as fast as output, with the rapid issuance all coming from the private sector, as well as state and local governments. This created a dangerous interdependence between GDP growth (which could only be sustained by massive borrowing and rapid increases in the volume of debt) and the debt stock (which could only be serviced if the economy continued its swift and uninterrupted expansion). The resulting debt was only sustainable so long as economic conditions remained extremely favorable. The sheer volume of private-sector obligations the economy was carrying implied an increasing vulnerability to any shock that changed the terms on which financing was available, or altered the underlying GDP cash flows. The proximate trigger of the debt crisis was the deterioration in lending standards and rise in default rates on subprime mortgage loans. But the widening divergence revealed in the charts suggests a crisis had become inevitable sooner or later. If not subprime lending, there would have been some other trigger. Wrongheaded Policies The charts strongly suggest the necessary condition for resolving the debt crisis is a reduction in the outstanding volume of debt, an increase in nominal GDP, or some combination of the two, to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio to a more sustainable level. From this perspective, it is clear many of the existing policies being pursued in the United States and the United Kingdom will not resolve the crisis because they do not lower the debt ratio. In particular, having governments buy distressed assets from the banks, or provide loan guarantees, is not an effective solution. It does not reduce the volume of debt, or force recognition of losses. It merely re-denominates private sector obligations to be met by households and firms as public ones to be met by the taxpayer. This type of debt swap would make sense if the problem was liquidity rather than solvency. But in current circumstances, taxpayers are being asked to shoulder some or all of the cost of defaults, rather than provide a temporarily liquidity bridge. In some ways, government is better placed to absorb losses than individual banks and investors, because it can spread them across a larger base of taxpayers. But in the current crisis, the volume of debts that potentially need to be refinanced is so large it will stretch even the tax and debt-raising resources of the state, and risks crowding out other spending. Trying to cut debt by reducing consumption and investment, lowering wages, boosting saving and paying down debt out of current income is unlikely to be effective either. The resulting retrenchment would lead to sharp falls in both real output and the price level, depressing nominal GDP. Government retrenchment simply intensified the depression during the early 1930s. Private sector retrenchment and wage cuts will do the same in the 2000s. Bankruptcy or Inflation The solution must be some combination of policies to reduce the level of debt or raise nominal GDP. The simplest way to reduce debt is through bankruptcy, in which some or all of debts are deemed unrecoverable and are simply extinguished, ceasing to exist. Bankruptcy would ensure the cost of resolving the debt crisis falls where it belongs. Investor portfolios and pension funds would take a severe but one-time hit. Healthy businesses would survive, minus the encumbrance of debt. But widespread bankruptcies are probably socially and politically unacceptable. The alternative is some mechanism for refinancing debt on terms which are more favorable to borrowers (replacing short term debt at higher rates with longer-dated paper at lower ones.) The final option is to raise nominal GDP so it becomes easier to finance debt payments from augmented cash flow. But counter-cyclical policies to sustain GDP will not be enough. Governments in both the United States and the United Kingdom need to raise nominal GDP and debt-service capacity, not simply sustain it. There is not much government can do to accelerate the real rate of growth. The remaining option is to tolerate, even encourage, a faster rate of inflation to improve debt-service capacity. Even more than debt nationalization, inflation is the ultimate way to spread the costs of debt workout across the widest possible section of the population. The need to work down real debt and boost cash flow provides the motive, while the massive liquidity injections into the financial system provide the means. The stage is set for a long period of slow growth as debts are worked down and a rise in inflation in the medium term. Links: {1} https://customers.reuters.com/d/graphics/USDEBT1.pdf {2} https://customers.reuters.com/d/graphics/USDEBT2.pdf {3} https://customers.reuters.com/d/graphics/USDEBT3.pdf More Information on Social and Economic Policy http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/index.htm More Information on US Trade and Budget Deficits, and the Fall of the Dollar http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/crisis/tradedeficit/index.htm More Information on Bubble Capitalism and the World Economic Crisis http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/crisis/index.htm FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 USC Section. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/crisis/tradedeficit/2009/0120brink.htm http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Thu Feb 5 08:43:52 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 10:43:52 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Business as usual in the torture world under Obama Message-ID: <00a701c987a8$8c5891c0$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> This is a lengthy and excellent article. The servility of the Briitsh to US imperialism is amusing. From empire to very junior lapdog. It pretty much discredits the notion of an independent judiciary as well. The fact that torture is considered a universal crime against humanity is no moment to anyone in a position of power. Hit the url to read the whole thing: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/us-accused-of-blackmail-over- terror-trial-evidence-1546397.html US accused of blackmail over terror trial evidence Threat to withdraw co-operation issued after torture allegations, say senior judges By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor Thursday, 5 February 2009 Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian with refugee status in Britain, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and taken to Cuba PA Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian with refugee status in Britain, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and taken to Cuba * Photosenlarge Barack Obama's government was accused of "blackmail" after it emerged that America had threatened to withdraw co-operation in terrorist cases if a UK court ordered the disclosure of secret torture evidence. In the first real test of the "special relationship" between Britain and the US since Mr Obama's inauguration, MPs and human rights groups called for an inquiry into the case that concerns the treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed, still being held at Guantanamo Bay. Secret CIA documents held by the Foreign Office detail the interrogation and treatment of Mr Mohamed, who claims he was brutally tortured after being flown by US agents to a secret prison in Morocco before his detention at the US naval base in Cuba. Related articles * Miliband defends 'torture' row documents gag * Leading article: Hear, hear His lawyers have asked the courts to order the release of information about their client's detention but were told by the High Court yesterday that to do so would risk Britain's national security after the US threatened to stop its intelligence agents working with their UK counterparts on terror cases. In the ruling, two judges said that, in the face of the threat, they had no choice but to do what the US had demanded and refuse to order publication of the documents. But the judges said American actions demeaned a democratic country and undermined the rule of law. The case immediately led to accusations that the British Government was guilty of "capitulation to blackmail" while also raising questions about Britain's own involvement in the US rendition of terror suspects. The former shadow home secretary, David Davis, demanded a Commons statement from the Government. He called on the Deputy Speaker, Sylvia Heal, to make representations to the Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary to make a Commons statement today "about the involvement of British agents overseas in torture, and the right the US government has to block a British court from disclosing information given to it". Last night, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, denied a rift had developed and said Britain's intelligence relationship with the US relied on mutual trust. "There has been no threat from the US to 'break off' co-operation," he told Channel 4 News. "The US made it clear, in documents that have been published, that there would be serious and lasting harm if that fundamental principle was breached." He said there was no indication that America's position had changed under President Obama. The former United States attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, said in an interview on BBC's Newsnight he had "no specific recollection" of the Government raising objections about waterboarding. When asked if he felt the technique amounted to torture, Mr Gonzales repeatedly refused to answer the question. The judges said they had decided not to release the evidence because the US had threatened to withdraw co-operation over terrorist intelligence, which would "put the public of the UK at risk". Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said in their judgment: "It was, in our view, difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported, as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters." 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 19084 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090205/e27a5c67/attachment.txt -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 15087 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090205/e27a5c67/attachment-0001.jpeg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 75 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090205/e27a5c67/attachment-0001.gif From noreply at coha.org Thu Feb 5 13:33:26 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 15:33:26 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Nicaragua Under the Second Coming of the Sandanistas Message-ID: <20090205203259.AD3142A0E43@mx-out.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3886 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090205/102b1cb8/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Feb 6 04:22:03 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:22:03 +0900 Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth Message-ID: <498C1D5B.2010304@ashisuto.co.jp> by Charles McMillion www.ourfuture.org (February 03 2009) Contrary to the anti-government myths and ideology-driven arguments of conservatives like Amity Shlaes, the facts show FDR's New Deal quickly brought rapid growth to the nation's economy during the Great Depression. The current recession will soon become the longest since the Great Depression. The US is losing over 500,000 jobs each month, and a new president, elected overwhelmingly, is pleading for unity and urgent action on a scale not seen since the New Deal. At such a moment, it is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt's actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation's economy. This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth. Just this past Sunday, The Washington Post featured on Page One of its Outlook section an article by Amity Shlaes headlined "FDR Was a Great Leader, But His Economic Plan Isn't One to Follow". Underscoring Shlaes's made-up claims, the Post ran the continuation of her piece under the title: "FDR's Plan Failed to Spark Real Growth". In it, Shlaes, having passed over the anything-goes policies that led to the financial crash in 1929 - and, to a great extent, the devastating economic losses that occurred between 1929 and Roosevelt's 1933 inauguration - also completely leaves out any specific data on gross domestic product, incomes, consumer spending, production, investment or jobs even for the New Deal period she presumes to explain. Indeed, her pitch is based entirely on emotional misrepresentation. The basic economic facts from the 1930s - according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources - are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak. See charts at http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth GDP, only available as annual averages, plunged 25.6 percent from 1929-1932, including by 13.0 percent in 1932. It stabilized in 1933, and then soared by 10.8 percent, 8.9 percent and 12.0 percent, respectively, in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Real GDP surpassed its 1929 peak in 1936 and never again fell below it. After-tax personal income, consumer spending, real private investment and jobs all reached or surpassed their 1929 peaks by late 1936. In fact, like every decade between 1850 and 1990, the 1930s suffered two distinct downturns. The official US Business Cycle Dating Committee established that the downturn that began in August 1929 ended in March 1933 with the remarkable economic expansion that started within days of FDR's bold - if trial and error - New Deal programs. By any normal definition, the Great Depression had ended by late 1936, with all major indicators surpassing their previous peaks. A second cyclical downturn officially began in May 1937 when FDR, always a fiscal conservative, mistakenly thought the economy had become self-sustaining and slashed public spending programs to balance the budget. These harsh and premature spending cuts caused another severe recession that ended after thirteen months in June 1938. Even in this severe downturn, annual GDP did not fall back below its 1929 peak. And although many suffered and most economic measures did fall back below their 1929 levels, not one fell anywhere close to its March 1933 low. For example, although industrial production fell sharply in the 1937-38 recession, at its low point, in April 1938, it remained 49 percent above its level of March 1933. When the economy again contracted sharply in late 1937 and early 1938, FDR quickly reversed course and rapid growth immediately began again. GDP soared by 10.9 percent in 1939 and industrial production soared by 23 percent. Shlaes's Post article begins with a misleading, emotional story of a young, desperate boy's tragic suicide in 1937. She does not inform readers that FDR had reversed course and was sharply cutting - not adding to - New Deal spending at the time this suicide likely occurred. Rather, she uses this emotional tale to turn facts on their head, asserting - with no actual evidence - that public spending was ineffective and New Deal programs failed. Like other ideological critics of government, Shlaes sites only two economic indicators of the 1930s: the falling but persistently high unemployment rate and the length of time required for the stock market to recover after its bubble burst. Neither of these is used in any serious economic or policy analysis. Media emphasize the unemployment rate but, because it is known to be lagging and misleading, it is not considered at all by economists in determining the start or end of a recession or depression. This is because people stop looking for jobs when there are none to be found and begin looking again when conditions improve. Serious analysis, including recession and depression dating, use the separate business reporting of actual jobs added or lost. Despite the new record peak in the number of jobs by late 1936, because of population growth and because more people were encouraged to seek jobs, the unemployment rate did remain very high until public spending programs truly exploded with the start of World War II. But even here, it was again vastly expanded government spending, this time to fight the war, that ended high unemployment. Finally, Shlaes points to the long time before the Dow Jones industrial average regained - in 1954 - its 1929 bubble levels as a key factor "that made the Depression Great". This is, again, Shlaes's own unique perspective, absent from serious assessments by economists but used by her as a basis for advocating further income and capital gains tax cuts for upper-income Americans. Unmentioned is that these policies were implemented by President Bush and yet, over the eight years of his presidency, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 25 percent and the NASDAQ plummeted 48 percent. Myth and ideology aside, the data show that from 1933 through 1936 the New Deal produced double-digit annual growth in GDP, production, after-tax income and private investment, with strong consumer spending and job growth exceeding their peaks in the 1929 bubble. The Great Depression ended by late 1936. While a new, severe recession began in May 1937 because FDR prematurely slashed public spending on New Deal programs, rapid growth quickly resumed in late 1938 when funding was restored. Today, the US and the world again face extreme crises similar to those in the early days of the 1930s. The largely unregulated private financial and commercial sector has utterly bankrupted itself. I personally believe the recent and current bailout and stimulus packages are grossly misdirected and inadequate when compared with the remarkable trade and industrial policy strategies being implemented elsewhere, particularly in China. But history has shown that crisis can bring people together in common, public purpose or it can set them against one another. Our circumstances are far too dangerous to leave uncorrected the antigovernment disinformation and myths from the 1930s, and in our own generation. _____ Charles W McMillion, president and chief economist of MBG Information Services, is the former associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Policy Institute and a former contributing editor of the Harvard Business Review. See also "An Economy for All" at http://www.ourfuture.org/economy Campaign For America's Future 1825 K Street, NorthWest, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006 202-955-5665 (tel) | 202-955-5606 (fax) | www.ourfuture.org http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Feb 6 05:38:30 2009 From: farmelantj at juno.com (farmelantj at juno.com) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 12:38:30 GMT Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth Message-ID: <20090206.073830.878.0@webmail19.vgs.untd.com> An example of the sort of thing that McMillion discusses in his article was former House Majority leader Dick Armey's op-ed piece that appeared the other day in the Wall Street Journal "Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123371237124446245.html There, Armey champions the views of Friedrich Hayek over John Maynard Keynes, without mentioning anything concerning the debates that raged between Keynes and Hayek through the 1930s and 1940s. Those debates eventually ended with most of the economics profession concluding that Keynes had emerged triumphant. In fact by the late 1940s, Hayek pretty much retired from active work in economics and turned his attention to the other social sciences. He didn't return to active work in economics for another thirty years, following his winning of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, by which time the stagflation of the 1970s had helped to bring his economic ideas back into favor. Jim F, -- Bill Totten wrote: by Charles McMillion www.ourfuture.org (February 03 2009) Contrary to the anti-government myths and ideology-driven arguments of conservatives like Amity Shlaes, the facts show FDR's New Deal quickly brought rapid growth to the nation's economy during the Great Depression. ____________________________________________________________ Find the writing help you need for any essay topic. Click now! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/PnY6rw1VQfVBQjBej01ky9PWUS8l9Vwysbmi8H8Xak2GKyN1eDG5L/ From tboyle at rosehill.net Thu Feb 5 19:50:15 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:50:15 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Trade Unionists Against the EU Constitution In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks for posting this. I'm down, for a devolution of powers back to the 50 states, from the discredited, NY/WashDC "thing". We need a well balanced layering between communities where we live that are small enough to be governable, and larger units such as nations and global institutions. I think we need multiple levels. But they need to be profoundly reformed. Right now, the higher level, larger institutions are corrupted by special interests. It's way beyond the point where change is necessary-- it's critical. No doubt there will be more collapses, similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The prime candidates are China, the EU, and the U.S. All of them really should be disbanded and reformulated, they stink. As long as they're doing it, the constituent states ought to talk about a consistent global framework, however humble and spare it might be, before embarking on reforms of their existing federation arrangements or redesigning them. Todd -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1183 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090205/2ccb0871/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Thu Feb 5 21:29:40 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:29:40 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Alternative currency collapse in Tokyo Message-ID: this report is reminiscent of the collapse of so many other alternative currency schemes, such as the creditos in Argentina, due to fraud or counterfeiting --there is a natural law that when a currency becomes big enough to be worth the determined efforts of thieves (or countermeasures by the banksters, or insider fraud, or anybody else) that's what happens, http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Kazutsugi+&btnG=Google+Search Todd Japanese businessman arrested over ?1.7bn fraud http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/4531698/Japanese-businessman-arrested-over-1.7bn-fraud.html A Japanese businessman has been arrested for allegedly defrauding investors out of an estimated Y226 billion (?1.73 billion) in a get-rich-quick scheme. By Julian Ryall in Tokyo Last Updated: 3:09AM GMT 06 Feb 2009 Kazutsugi Nami, chairman of L&G K.K., was arrested shortly after telling television reporters that he had done nothing wrong. "I have put my life at stake," Mr Nami, 75, said when asked whether he felt responsible for his investors' losses. "Can they charge a company this big with fraud?" The swindle - the largest and most elaborate ever uncovered in Japan - involved 37,000 investors exchanging cash for electronic money called "enten" that could be spent on a dedicated internet site, according to local media. The company behind the scheme also promised to return the original investment with interest of 9 per cent for every three months. With Japanese financial institutions offering returns of less than 1 per cent, it is not perhaps surprising that so many Japanese invested with the Tokyo-based company. Many have described feeling as if they were being given free money to spend. Listed as a supplier of bedding and health products, L&G allegedly set up the scheme in 2001 and began issuing its "enten" currency - a combination of yen and the Japanese word for paradise - the same year. The scam began to unravel in February 2007, when investors were told that their dividends would in the future be paid back in "enten." Investors who tried to cancel their memberships were told that was impossible and the scheme quickly imploded. L&G has since filed for bankruptcy. In October, the company's headquarters was searched on suspicion of breaking laws concerning capital subscriptions and deposits, although Mr Nami has continued to protest his innocence. Shortly before his arrest, Mr Nami said, "It was not fraud. The police have destroyed my business. I am a victim of the police investigation." - From nscchicago at igc.org Fri Feb 6 02:11:19 2009 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 03:11:19 -0600 Subject: [A-List] NEOCONS BASH OBAMA STIMULUS PACKAGE / VENEZUELAN WORKERS TAKE TO THE STREETS Message-ID: <007e01c9883a$e73a7b20$2101a8c0@NSCCHICAGO> Tom Baker here and this is an amusing side by side, the way US Big Money Oligarchy bickers, goes bananas giving trivia half lives to stall resolution What people? While in Venezuela, workers take to the streets confront the oligarchy. Chavez and the Bolivariano are not oligarchy. Oligarchy obstructs what We the People can do. Same oligarchy. TO BE DELETED FROM THIS LIST, PLEASE REPLY TO NSC WORKERS COOP -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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From: Cort Greene Subject: [chi-labor-against-the-war] Venezuela: Militant march of workers in Barcelona Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 09:21:19 -0800 (PST) Size: 24398 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090206/04ab27f6/attachment-0003.eml From thg at mindspring.com Fri Feb 6 02:00:49 2009 From: thg at mindspring.com (Thomas Greco -- thg) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 16:00:49 +0700 Subject: [A-List] Alternative currency collapse in Tokyo References: <200902052328.1lvikG2l63Nl3qU0@albert.mail.atl.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <018201c98846$36cd1cf0$6c02a8c0@TomLap> Todd, Thanks for passing that along. I would not jump to conclusions, however. It looks like a Ponzi scheme, but there might also be an element of official suppression of potential competition, similar to the suppression of the Liberty dollar here. Tom ----- Original Message ----- From: "Todd Boyle" To: "a-list" Cc: "Tom Greco" ; ; ; "Todd Putnam" ; Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 11:29 AM Subject: Alternative currency collapse in Tokyo this report is reminiscent of the collapse of so many other alternative currency schemes, such as the creditos in Argentina, due to fraud or counterfeiting --there is a natural law that when a currency becomes big enough to be worth the determined efforts of thieves (or countermeasures by the banksters, or insider fraud, or anybody else) that's what happens, http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Kazutsugi+&btnG=Google+Search Todd Japanese businessman arrested over ?1.7bn fraud http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/4531698/Japanese-businessman-arrested-over-1.7bn-fraud.html A Japanese businessman has been arrested for allegedly defrauding investors out of an estimated Y226 billion (?1.73 billion) in a get-rich-quick scheme. By Julian Ryall in Tokyo Last Updated: 3:09AM GMT 06 Feb 2009 Kazutsugi Nami, chairman of L&G K.K., was arrested shortly after telling television reporters that he had done nothing wrong. "I have put my life at stake," Mr Nami, 75, said when asked whether he felt responsible for his investors' losses. "Can they charge a company this big with fraud?" The swindle - the largest and most elaborate ever uncovered in Japan - involved 37,000 investors exchanging cash for electronic money called "enten" that could be spent on a dedicated internet site, according to local media. The company behind the scheme also promised to return the original investment with interest of 9 per cent for every three months. With Japanese financial institutions offering returns of less than 1 per cent, it is not perhaps surprising that so many Japanese invested with the Tokyo-based company. Many have described feeling as if they were being given free money to spend. Listed as a supplier of bedding and health products, L&G allegedly set up the scheme in 2001 and began issuing its "enten" currency - a combination of yen and the Japanese word for paradise - the same year. The scam began to unravel in February 2007, when investors were told that their dividends would in the future be paid back in "enten." Investors who tried to cancel their memberships were told that was impossible and the scheme quickly imploded. L&G has since filed for bankruptcy. In October, the company's headquarters was searched on suspicion of breaking laws concerning capital subscriptions and deposits, although Mr Nami has continued to protest his innocence. Shortly before his arrest, Mr Nami said, "It was not fraud. The police have destroyed my business. I am a victim of the police investigation." - From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Fri Feb 6 10:48:39 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:48:39 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Will BlackWater come next? Anti-piracy sonic weapon used against Sea Shepard Society Anti-whaling blockade vessel Message-ID: <498C77F7.8010109@gmail.com> As the Nisshin Maru attempted to hook onto the dead whale, the Steve Irwin and the Yushin Maru No.3 collided with the forward starboard side of the Steve Irwin and the port stern side of the harpoon vessel coming together. "We told them to not continue their illegal whaling operations and that we would be blocking the stern slipway of the factory ship," said Captain Paul Watson. "They decided to test our resolve and apparently expected us to retreat when they charged in ahead of us to make the transfer." Captain Watson said that the Steve Irwin became difficult to control under a barrage of metal objects, blasts from the water cannons, and the disorientation caused by the LRAD acoustic weapons that the whalers were using on the conservationists. "I was dazed by the sonic blasts being used on us at close range." said Captain Watson. "I have to admit it was difficult to concentrate with that devise being focused on us." "I've never felt anything quite like it," said Emily Hunter from Toronto, Canada. "It penetrates the body and you can feel your muscles vibrating. It made me dizzy and left me somewhat dazed." Full: http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/news-090206-1.html See also, "Blackwater 2.0: Hired Guns on the High Seas" http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/10/blackwater.html From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Fri Feb 6 12:09:51 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:09:51 -0800 Subject: [A-List] What Turkmenistan has that the US (and most of the Western industrialized world) doesn't Message-ID: <498C8AFF.70901@gmail.com> What Turkmenistan has that the US (and most of the Western industrialized world) doesn't... The "right to rest" Jurist [jurist.law.pitt.edu] commentary: http://cli.gs/L8QGVR From nmgoro at gmail.com Fri Feb 6 18:25:27 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:25:27 -0300 Subject: [A-List] [Mario Rappoport] VERDADES Y MITOS DEL LIBRE COMERCIO Message-ID: <498CE307.9060401@gmail.com> Gentileza de "Patria Grande", mensuario de la Izquierda Nacional de Bolivia dirigido por Andr?s Soliz Rada VERDADES Y MITOS DEL LIBRE COMERCIO Por: Mario Rapoport 11 de Enero de 2009 Entre los temas principales de debate en la historia econ?mica y en las relaciones internacionales, el dilema entre el proteccionismo y el libre cambio es uno de los m?s controvertidos. Las naciones que lideran el planeta han sido alternativamente partidarias del libre cambio o del proteccionismo cuando les convino y siempre en defensa del tipo de productos que quer?an proteger. Gran Breta?a se hizo librecambista a mediados del siglo XIX (m?s precisamente en 1846, con la abolici?n de las leyes de granos), cuando ya era la principal potencia industrial del mundo y pod?a colocar ventajosamente sus manufacturas y bienes de capital. El caso m?s importante de proteccionismo en la historia del capitalismo es el de los Estados Unidos. All?, los industrialistas y proteccionistas del Norte necesitaron una guerra civil para eliminar a los librecambistas sure?os, cuya base de sustentaci?n econ?mica era el sistema esclavista. La defensa de las industrias norteamericanas, utilizando altas barreras aduaneras, dur? pr?cticamente hasta la d?cada de 1930 y nunca se abandon? la protecci?n a los bienes agropecuarios. La diferencia es que lo que antes defend?a con tarifas o embargos (como el embargo de carnes de 1926 a la Argentina, que sent? las bases de un largo distanciamiento entre los dos pa?ses), hoy se hace con subsidios directos a los agricultores y leyes antidumping, aunque se retorne tambi?n, cuando se cree necesario, a la protecci?n de productos industriales. Un ejemplo a volver a estudiar es la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Comercio y Empleo, que se reuni? en la Habana desde el 21 de noviembre de 1947. Convocada en 1946 por iniciativa del Consejo Econ?mico y Social de las Naciones Unidas, buscaba plasmar los acuerdos angloamericanos presentes en la Carta del Atl?ntico de retorno pleno a un mercado mundial ?libre y abierto?. Este estaba fundamentado en el diagn?stico que hac?an los EE.UU.: eran el nacionalismo econ?mico, las barreras comerciales y el bilateralismo los que habr?an estado en el origen de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para evitar una depresi?n en la posguerra, se deb?a volver r?pidamente al multilateralismo, reducir aranceles aduaneros y bajar barreras comerciales. La potencia del Norte buscaba as?, olvidando su pasado anterior, el libre acceso a las materias primas del mundo y a la colocaci?n de sus bienes y capitales. La Conferencia se bas? en un borrador norteamericano previo y las sesiones se prolongaron largamente hasta el 24 de marzo de 1948. El convenio final con ochocientas enmiendas no fue firmado por la Argentina y en Washington el propio Congreso no lo ratific? debido a la diluci?n de sus objetivos iniciales. Si bien constituy? el origen del GATT, de alcances mucho m?s limitados, all? naufragaron los planes de una primera Organizaci?n Mundial de Comercio. Las contradicciones surgidas en torno de este proyecto reflejaban la realidad econ?mica del mundo. Por un lado, los EE.UU., los pa?ses escandinavos y Canad?, buscaban el retorno r?pido al multilateralismo y la no discriminaci?n. Por otro lado, Gran Breta?a y Francia alegaban su coincidencia con ese objetivo para el largo plazo, pero planteaban que primero hab?a que reconstruir las econom?as europeas. Los pa?ses de Europa Oriental ?sin la Uni?n Sovi?tica, que no participaba? defend?an, a su vez, la planificaci?n econ?mica por parte del Estado y exig?an un acuerdo que la contemplara. Las naciones perif?ricas reclamaban pol?ticas a favor del desarrollo industrial, con aranceles protectores, cuotas de importaci?n y restricciones cuantitativas. Desde un principio, la Argentina expres? posiciones encontradas con el borrador presentado por los Estados Unidos. Era delegado del gobierno peronista el senador Diego Luis Molinari, antiguo yrigoyenista y nacionalista. Dentro de Am?rica latina sus planteos confluyeron con los de la delegaci?n mexicana. Molinari, sobre la base del principio de defensa de la soberan?a y autodeterminaci?n de las naciones, reivindic? el derecho al comercio a trav?s de instituciones estatales y la acci?n sin restricciones de las empresas p?blicas. En el caso argentino, habr?a que recordar el cuestionamiento del IAPI (Instituto Argentino de Promoci?n del Intercambio, que regulaba el comercio exterior) por parte de EE.UU. Seg?n Molinari, se deb?a excluir a las empresas estatales de las regulaciones antimonop?licas, pues expresaban el inter?s superior del Estado en la doctrina argentina. Las intervenciones del delegado argentino tuvieron un perfil nacionalista, que alcanz? su expresi?n m?s significativa cuando reivindic? el uso del espa?ol en la Conferencia. Molinari condicion? tambi?n el proceso de apertura comercial mundial a la recuperaci?n simult?nea de todas las naciones, no s?lo de las europeas, criticando oblicuamente el Plan Marshall, que colocaba en un plano privilegiado a las primeras en el comercio con EE.UU. Sus discursos tuvieron un pronunciado filo antiyanqui, denunciando al capitalismo norteamericano por su intento de impedir la industrializaci?n de Am?rica latina. Seg?n ?l, durante el conflicto b?lico las j?venes industrias del continente se hab?an expandido y reclamaban ayuda o cooperaci?n, algo que la principal potencia mundial no estaba dispuesta a darles. En la Conferencia hubo tambi?n m?ltiples alusiones, recurrentes desde entonces, a la doble pol?tica de Estados Unidos con respecto al mercado mundial y a su mercado interno, que iba a contracorriente del fin proclamado. Especialmente se cuestionaban los subsidios agr?colas, las restricciones cuantitativas que el pa?s del Norte establec?a a las exportaciones e importaciones, la contradicci?n existente entre el discurso librecambista y las pol?ticas concretas de los pa?ses m?s desarrollados. Pero los planteos latinoamericanos de enmiendas al proyecto inicial fueron rechazados. Cuba, que depend?a de las compras de az?car por parte de EE.UU., rompi? el frente com?n y otras naciones de Centroam?rica la acompa?aron, votando con Washington. En aquel momento se denunciaron presiones sobre esos pa?ses por parte de la diplomacia norteamericana. De todos modos, el documento de La Habana result? inconsistente y ambiguo. Por un lado, preconizaba el librecambio para las manufacturas, pero por otro permit?a acuerdos intergubernamentales para las materias primas, que la Argentina se neg? a firmar. Como se ve en este caso, en el debate libre cambio-proteccionismo el discurso est? alejado de la realidad. Los pa?ses que defienden el libre cambio y se benefician m?s con ?l son los que se han industrializado y tienen claras ventajas en productos de mayor valor agregado, lo que no les impide defender tambi?n actividades productivas m?s ineficientes. Como se?ala Wallerstein, ?los pa?ses verdaderamente d?biles en lo econ?mico son por lo com?n naciones tambi?n d?biles pol?ticamente? y no pueden defender sus industrias. La m?s completa libertad de comercio resulta as? un mito o una falacia, y aquella Conferencia de La Habana as? lo demostr?. From tal1 at cogeco.ca Fri Feb 6 23:29:36 2009 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 01:29:36 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: Caveat: ...a "million" Vietnamese killed? ..This figure keeps dropping by the year in leftist journals.. T. The Anti-Empire Report February 3rd, 2009 by William Blum www.killinghope.org Change (in rhetoric) we can believe in. I've said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what's already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire. The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away - Barack Obama's first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we'll never know the names of all the victims - It's doubtful that even Pakistan knows - or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there. The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying "I'm not going to get into these matters."1 Where have we heard that before? After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: "We regret the loss of life." These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called "terrorist". I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the "changes we can believe in" in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me. Iran Just leave them alone. There is no "Iranian problem". They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn't invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That's generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnaping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: "If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us."2 Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare? Russia Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new "color" revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia's neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it's to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions - The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told. "The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union," said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. "At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians." But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia's weakness.3 Cuba Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life. In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba. The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.4 Iraq Freeing the Iraqi people to death ... Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: "It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003."5 The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity. Saudi Arabia Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo? Haiti Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance. Colombia Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America? Venezuela Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he's no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington's role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can't understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list. Put an end to support for Chavez's opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections. Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism. And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It's a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: "Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations."6 Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you've already accused Chavez of being "a force that has interrupted progress in the region."7 This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington's history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office - that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world's savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela's leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia? Bolivia Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state. Afghanistan Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world's powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan. If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country's wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists. But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo. And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union's dissolution in order to assert Washington's domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq? Israel The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence. North Korea Bush called the country part of "the axis of evil", and Kim Jong Il a "pygmy" and "a spoiled child at a dinner table."8 But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear. Central America Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can't undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade. Vietnam In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those "who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom ... For us, they fought and died, in places like ... Khe Sanh." So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes? You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical "Agent Orange" have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. Kosovo Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America's natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country? NATO From tal1 at cogeco.ca Sat Feb 7 00:04:13 2009 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 02:04:13 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Fierce Urgency of Pork Message-ID: Washington Post The Fierce Urgency of Pork By Charles Krauthammer Friday, February 6, 2009; A17 "A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe." -- President Obama, Feb. 4. Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill. And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent. The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years. He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence. At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend. And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination. It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction. It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said. Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance. The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive. After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone. I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks. letters at charleskrauthammer.com From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 01:59:57 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 03:59:57 -0500 Subject: [A-List] As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force Message-ID: Closing the Gap in Employment February 6, 2009 As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force By CATHERINE RAMPELL With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation's payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history. The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling. The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work. "Given how stark and concentrated the job losses are among men, and that women represented a high proportion of the labor force in the beginning of this recession, women are now bearing the burden ? or the opportunity, one could say ? of being breadwinners," says Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. Economists have predicted before that women would one day dominate the labor force as more ventured outside the home. The number of women entering the work force slowed and even dipped during the boom years earlier this decade, though, prompting a debate about whether women truly wanted to be both breadwinners and caregivers. Should the male-dominated layoffs of the current recession continue ? and Friday's jobs report for January may offer more insight ? the debate will be moot. A deep and prolonged recession, therefore, may change not only household budgets and habits; it may also challenge longstanding gender roles. In recessions, the percentage of families supported by women tends to rise slightly, and it is expected to do so when this year's numbers are tallied. As of November, women held 49.1 percent of the nation's jobs, according to nonfarm payroll data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By another measure, including farm workers and the self-employed, women constituted 47.1 percent of the work force. Women may be safer in their jobs, but tend to find it harder to support a family. For one thing, they work fewer overall hours than men. Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs without health insurance or unemployment insurance. Even in full-time jobs, women earn 80 cents for each dollar of their male counterparts' income, according to the government data. "A lot of jobs that men have lost in fields like manufacturing were good union jobs with great health care plans," says Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. "The jobs women have ? and are supporting their families with ? are not necessarily as good." Nasreen Mohammed, for example, works five days a week, 51 weeks a year, without sick days or health benefits. She runs a small day care business out of her home in Milpitas, Calif., and recently expanded her services to include after-school care. The business brings in about $30,000 annually, she says, far less than the $150,000 her husband earned in the marketing and sales job he lost over a year ago. "It's peanuts," she says. She switched from being a full-time homemaker to a full-time businesswoman when her husband was laid off previously. She says she unexpectedly discovered that she loves her job, even if it is demanding. Still, her husband, Javed, says he and their three children ? who are in third grade, junior college and law school ? worry about her health, and hope things can "return to the old days." "In terms of the financial benefit from her work, we all benefit," he says. "But in terms of getting my wife's attention, from the youngest daughter to our oldest, we can't wait for the day that my job is secure and she doesn't have to do day care anymore." Women like Ms. Mohammed find themselves at the head of once-separate spheres: work and household. While women appear to be sole breadwinners in greater numbers, they are likely to remain responsible for most domestic responsibilities at home. On average, employed women devote much more time to child care and housework than employed men do, according to recent data from the government's American Time Use Survey analyzed by two economists, Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller. When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men's child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities. Many of the unemployed men interviewed say they have tried to help out with cooking, veterinarian appointments and other chores, but they have not had time to do more because job-hunting consumes their days. "The main priority is finding a job and putting in the time to do that," says John Baruch, in Arlington Heights, Ill., who estimates he spends 35 to 45 hours a week looking for work since being laid off in January 2008. While he has helped care for his wife's aging parents, the couple still sometimes butt heads over who does things like walking the dog, now that he is out of work. He puts it this way: "As one of the people who runs one of the career centers I've been to told me: 'You're out of a job, but it's not your time to paint the house and fix the car. Your job is about finding the next job.' " Many women say they expect their family roles to remain the same, even if economic circumstances have changed for now. "I don't know if I'd really call myself a 'breadwinner,' since I earn practically nothing," says Linda Saxby, who assists the librarian at the Cypress, Tex., high school her two daughters attend. Her husband, whose executive-level position was eliminated last May, had been earning $225,000, and the family is now primarily living off savings. Historically, the way couples divide household jobs has been fairly resistant to change, says Heidi Hartmann, president and chief economist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "Over a long, 20-year period, married men have stepped up to the plate a little bit, but not as much as married women have dropped off in the time they spend on household chores," Ms. Hartmann says. This suggests some domestic duties have been outsourced, as when takeout substitutes for cooking, for example. And as declining incomes force families to cut back on these outlays, she says, "women will most likely pick up the slack." A severe recession could put pressure on these roles. "It has definitely put a strain" on my marriage, says Debbie Harlan, an executive assistant at a hospital system in Sarasota, Fla. Four months ago, her husband closed his 10-year-old independent car sales business, and the couple have been asking their children to help with bills. "So far we've worked through it, but there have been times when I wasn't sure we could." The Mohammeds say things are not as stressful as they were the last time Mr. Mohammed lost his job. He has been helping out with the cooking and with paperwork for his wife's business, and she says she works to prop up family morale. "Things are not happy in the house if I blame him all the time, so I don't do any of that anymore," Ms. Mohammed says. "I know he is doing his best." From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Sat Feb 7 05:41:47 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 07:41:47 -0500 Subject: [A-List] As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <009d01c98921$71002210$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> Just as men are more likely to be unemployed they are also more likely to be murdered, arrested and imprisoned as well. Numbers which increase exponentially if they lack a high school diploma. 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -----Original Message----- From: a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 4:00 AM To: A-List; Rad-Green Subject: [A-List] As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force Closing the Gap in Employment February 6, 2009 As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force By CATHERINE RAMPELL With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation's payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history. The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling. The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work. "Given how stark and concentrated the job losses are among men, and that women represented a high proportion of the labor force in the beginning of this recession, women are now bearing the burden - or the opportunity, one could say - of being breadwinners," says Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. Economists have predicted before that women would one day dominate the labor force as more ventured outside the home. The number of women entering the work force slowed and even dipped during the boom years earlier this decade, though, prompting a debate about whether women truly wanted to be both breadwinners and caregivers. Should the male-dominated layoffs of the current recession continue - and Friday's jobs report for January may offer more insight - the debate will be moot. A deep and prolonged recession, therefore, may change not only household budgets and habits; it may also challenge longstanding gender roles. In recessions, the percentage of families supported by women tends to rise slightly, and it is expected to do so when this year's numbers are tallied. As of November, women held 49.1 percent of the nation's jobs, according to nonfarm payroll data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By another measure, including farm workers and the self-employed, women constituted 47.1 percent of the work force. Women may be safer in their jobs, but tend to find it harder to support a family. For one thing, they work fewer overall hours than men. Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs without health insurance or unemployment insurance. Even in full-time jobs, women earn 80 cents for each dollar of their male counterparts' income, according to the government data. "A lot of jobs that men have lost in fields like manufacturing were good union jobs with great health care plans," says Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. "The jobs women have - and are supporting their families with - are not necessarily as good." Nasreen Mohammed, for example, works five days a week, 51 weeks a year, without sick days or health benefits. She runs a small day care business out of her home in Milpitas, Calif., and recently expanded her services to include after-school care. The business brings in about $30,000 annually, she says, far less than the $150,000 her husband earned in the marketing and sales job he lost over a year ago. "It's peanuts," she says. She switched from being a full-time homemaker to a full-time businesswoman when her husband was laid off previously. She says she unexpectedly discovered that she loves her job, even if it is demanding. Still, her husband, Javed, says he and their three children - who are in third grade, junior college and law school - worry about her health, and hope things can "return to the old days." "In terms of the financial benefit from her work, we all benefit," he says. "But in terms of getting my wife's attention, from the youngest daughter to our oldest, we can't wait for the day that my job is secure and she doesn't have to do day care anymore." Women like Ms. Mohammed find themselves at the head of once-separate spheres: work and household. While women appear to be sole breadwinners in greater numbers, they are likely to remain responsible for most domestic responsibilities at home. On average, employed women devote much more time to child care and housework than employed men do, according to recent data from the government's American Time Use Survey analyzed by two economists, Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller. When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men's child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities. Many of the unemployed men interviewed say they have tried to help out with cooking, veterinarian appointments and other chores, but they have not had time to do more because job-hunting consumes their days. "The main priority is finding a job and putting in the time to do that," says John Baruch, in Arlington Heights, Ill., who estimates he spends 35 to 45 hours a week looking for work since being laid off in January 2008. While he has helped care for his wife's aging parents, the couple still sometimes butt heads over who does things like walking the dog, now that he is out of work. He puts it this way: "As one of the people who runs one of the career centers I've been to told me: 'You're out of a job, but it's not your time to paint the house and fix the car. Your job is about finding the next job.' " Many women say they expect their family roles to remain the same, even if economic circumstances have changed for now. "I don't know if I'd really call myself a 'breadwinner,' since I earn practically nothing," says Linda Saxby, who assists the librarian at the Cypress, Tex., high school her two daughters attend. Her husband, whose executive-level position was eliminated last May, had been earning $225,000, and the family is now primarily living off savings. Historically, the way couples divide household jobs has been fairly resistant to change, says Heidi Hartmann, president and chief economist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "Over a long, 20-year period, married men have stepped up to the plate a little bit, but not as much as married women have dropped off in the time they spend on household chores," Ms. Hartmann says. This suggests some domestic duties have been outsourced, as when takeout substitutes for cooking, for example. And as declining incomes force families to cut back on these outlays, she says, "women will most likely pick up the slack." A severe recession could put pressure on these roles. "It has definitely put a strain" on my marriage, says Debbie Harlan, an executive assistant at a hospital system in Sarasota, Fla. Four months ago, her husband closed his 10-year-old independent car sales business, and the couple have been asking their children to help with bills. "So far we've worked through it, but there have been times when I wasn't sure we could." The Mohammeds say things are not as stressful as they were the last time Mr. Mohammed lost his job. He has been helping out with the cooking and with paperwork for his wife's business, and she says she works to prop up family morale. "Things are not happy in the house if I blame him all the time, so I don't do any of that anymore," Ms. Mohammed says. "I know he is doing his best." From nmgoro at gmail.com Fri Feb 6 18:18:13 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:18:13 -0300 Subject: [A-List] =?windows-1252?q?Nuevo_n=FAmero_de_=22Patria_Grande=22?= =?windows-1252?q?=2C_mensuario_on_line_de_Andr=E9s_Soliz_Rada?= Message-ID: <498CE155.4090101@gmail.com> Estimados compa?eras y compa?eros, amigas y amigos: En www.patriagrande.org.bo encontrar?n la revista "Patria Grande", correspondiente a fe. 09. Cordial saludo. ASR *Editorial(es)* EL TEMA QUE DEFINE EL FUTURO: LA NACION O LAS NACIONES DE EVO MORALES Eduardo Paz Rada AUSENCIA DEL PENSAMIENTO NACIONAL Andr?s Sol?z Rada *Bolivia* SUPUESTA INGERENCIA NAZI EN FUNDACION DE EMPRESA PETROLERA BOLIVIANA Eduardo Paz Rada DESPU?S DEL REFERENDO CONSTITUCIONAL Roger Ortiz Mercado DETR?S DE LA DESTITUCION DE SANTOS RAMIREZ Evo, prisionero de si mismo Editorial Peri?dico ?El Pa?s? (Tarija) EL VOTO DE HOY AUDITORIAS PETROLERAS: SECRETO DE ESTADO ?ACTO POL?TICO ELECTORAL?: LA TERCERA NACIONALIZACI?N DE CHACO HIDROCARBUROS: LOS ANEXOS "D", ABANICOS Y AGUJEROS NEGROS RESERVAS: INVERTIR, NO GASTAR PURA POL?TICA ANTINACIONAL BOLIVIA, CON DERECHO, RECLAMA SU SALIDA AL MAR F?lix Pe?aranda Ib??ez (*) (felixpda at yahoo.es). RECTIFICACION SOBRE LA GUERRA DEL PACIFICO Rodolfo Becerra de la Roca LULA RECONOCE QUE GRAN PARTE DE LOS BRASILE?OS DEPENDE DEL GAS BOLIVIANO BRASIL PREFIERE AGOTAR LAS RESERVAS BOLIVIANAS DE GAS, ANTES DE CONSUMIR LAS SUYAS: LA VISION GEOPOLITICA DEL PRESIDENTE FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO Javier Lafuente LOS USOS Y COSTUMBRES Y LA JUSTICIA COMUNITARIA Ramiro Loza Calder?n *Am?rica Latina* HISTORIA DE LA NACI?N LATINOAMERICANA JORGE ABELARDO RAMOS PER? Y COLOMBIA DESTRUYERON A LA CAN EN BENEFICIO DE EUROPA Y EEUU PROVINCIALIZACI?N Y ATRASO EN ARGENTINA Federico Bernal KIRCHNER FINANCIA EL DESARROLLO INDUSTRIAL-MILITAR DE ISRAEL APEMIA SOMETIMIENTO DEL GOBIERNO ARGENTINO A LOS FRAUDES Y ENGA?OS DE LA DEUDA EXTERNA Mario Cafiero y Javier Llorens SEG?N PINO SOLANAS, "LOS KIRCHNER PROFUNDIZARON EL DESPOJO QUE HIZO MENEM" GALASSO DEFIENDE A LOS KIRCHNER Los aliados posibles y el enemigo principal Norberto Galasso NUEVO LIBRO DE NORBERTO GALASSO: ?COMO PENSAR LA REALIDAD NACIONAL? DEBEMOS CREAR EL CIADI DEL SUR Roberto Irraz?bal GAS: BRASIL (ENRON) GANA LA PARTIDA Editorial Peri?dico ?El Pa?s? (Tarija) LA EXPLOTACI?N COLONIAL Y NEOCOLONIAL DE NUESTRA AM?RICA LATINA tribunalpazecuador at yahoo.com SIN ESTADO NO HAY NACI?N CHILE-PERU: OTRO QUIEBRE Pedro Godoy *Estados Unidos y Europa* CASI 800 DETENIDOS EN GUANT?NAMO DESDE EL 2002 EL CONSUMISMO SUICIDA DE LA EUROPA RICA Jubenal Quispe AS? SER? EL A?O 2009 Ignacio Ramonet EN ECONOMIA, EL ESTADO NORTEAMERICANO NO ES LIBERAL SINO INTERVENCIONISTA Vicen? Navarro OBAMA NO CUESTION? NUNCA A LAS GRANDES CORPORACIONES Lissete Bustamante LOS CONSEJOS A OBAMA DEL PREMIO NOBEL DE ECONOMIA, PAUL KRUGMAN ABOGADO DE SANCHEZ DE LOZADA EN EL EQUIPO DE OBAMA Atilio Bor?n LA LUCHA POR RECUPERAR LA MEMORIA HISTORICA EN ESPA?A Cecilio Gordillo ?QUIEN FUE MARTIN LUTHER KING? *Otros Continentes* LA INVASI?N ISRAEL? DE GAZA Y LOS YACIMIENTOS MARINOS DE GAS Michel Chossudovsky AFGANIST?N EN LA MIRA DE WASHINGTON N?stor N??ez *Aportes Te?ricos* GOBIERNOS POPULARES O GOBIERNOS POPULISTAS (Cobos y el Opresor introyectado) Miguel Longo VERDADES Y MITOS DEL LIBRE COMERCIO Mario Rapoport From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Fri Feb 6 13:42:04 2009 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 15:42:04 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN Canada & Big Tobacco try to liquidate Indigenous Trade Message-ID: <01f40db9$39850$0cd96542064236@xnote> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 7847 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090206/34f34efc/attachment.txt From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Sat Feb 7 07:12:52 2009 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (james daly) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 14:12:52 -0000 Subject: [A-List] John Pilger deconstructs what used to be called codswallop Message-ID: <4E1B95EB6B7D4BCAA7D711EB3FD27493@home9sg93n9r5y> The Politics Of Bollocks By John Pilger February 06, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" --- Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw off its closest American contender. It had authority. A high official with the Gilbertian title of Lord West of Spithead used it to great effect on 27 January. The former admiral, who is security adviser to Gordon Brown, was referring to Tony Blair's famous assertion that invading countries and killing innocent people did not increase the threat of terrorism at home. "That was clearly bollocks," said his lordship, who warned of the perceived "linkage between the US, Israel and the UK" in the horrors inflicted on Gaza and the effect on the recruitment of terrorists in Britain. In other words, he was stating the obvious: that state terrorism begets individual or group terrorism at source. Just as Blair was the prime mover of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, so Brown, having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will share responsibility for related atrocities at home. There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment. The BBC's explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken people of Gaza is a vivid example. Mark Thompson, the director general, cited the BBC's legal requirement to be "impartial... because Gaza is a major ongoing news story in which humanitarian issues... are both at the heart of the story and contentious." In a letter to Thompson, David Bracewell, illuminated the deceit behind this. He pointed to previous BBC appeals for the Disasters Emergency Committee that were not only made in the midst of "an ongoing news story" in which humanitarian issues were "contentious", but demonstrated how the BBC took sides. In 1999, at the height of the illegal Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal on behalf of Kosovar refugees. The BBC web page for that appeal was linked to numerous articles meant to support the gravity of the humanitarian issue. These included quotations from Blair himself, such as "This will be a daily pounding until [Slobodan Milosevic] comes into line with the terms that Nato has laid down." There was no significant balance of view from the Yugoslav side, and not a single mention that the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after Nato had started bombing. Similarly, in an appeal for the victims of the civil war in the Congo, the BBC favoured the regime of Joseph Kabila without referring to the Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other reports accusing his forces of atrocities. In contrast, the rebel leader Nkunda was "accused of committing atrocities" and was ordained the BBC's bad guy. Kabila, who represented western interests, was clearly the good guy - just like Nato in the Balkans and Israel in the Middle East. While Mark Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on. On 23 January, the Guardian's front page declared, "Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' ". The "wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George Bush's war on terror", said the report, had been ordered by the new president who would be "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition...". The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday". Obama's orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony, "would restore America's moral standing in the world". What moral standing? It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can transmit PR stunts like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies from the same source under only nominally different management. Far from "deconstructing [sic] the war on terror", Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W. Bush's first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama's wars - with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism", 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal. Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network", Obama's executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, "current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role." A semantic sleight of hand is that "long term prisons" are changed to "short term prisons"; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America's numerous "covert actions" will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in Chile, doing the dirtiest work. Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America's "secret army" of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama's nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh interrogation", which will be kept secret. Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush's totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans' library and bookshop records. The man of "change", is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington. The Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Prize (Runner-up) is shared. On 28 January, a national Greenpeace advertisement opposing a third runway at London's Heathrow airport summed up the almost willful naivety that has obstructed informed analysis of the Obama administration. "Fortunately," declared Greenpeace beneath a God-like picture of Obama, "the White House has a new occupant, and he has asked us all to roll back the spectre of a warming planet." This was followed by Obama's rhetorical flourish about "putting off unpleasant decisions". In fact, Obama has made no commitment to curtail the America's infamous responsibility for the causes of global warming. As with Bush and most modern era presidents, it is oil, not stemming carbon emissions, that informs the new administration. Obama's national security adviser, General Jim Jones, a former Nato supreme commander, made his name planning US military control over the exploitation of oil and gas reserves from the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Guinea in Africa. Sharing the Bollocks Runner-up Prize is the Observer, which on 25 January published a major news report headlined, "How Obama set the tone for a new US revolution". This was reminiscent of the Observer almost a dozen years ago when liberalism's other great white hope, Tony Blair, came to power. "Goodbye Xenophobia" was the Observer's post-election front page in 1997 and "The Foreign Office says Hello World, remember us". The government, said the breathless text, would push for "new worldwide rules on human rights and the environment" and implement "tough new limits" on arms sales. The opposite happened. Last year, Britain was the biggest arms dealer in the world; currently it is second only to the United States. In the Blair mould, the Obama White House "sprang into action" with its "radical plans". The new president's first phone call was to that Palestinian quisling, the unelected and deeply unpopular Mohammed Abbas. There was a "hot pace" and a "new era", in which a notorious name from an ancien regime, Richard Holbrooke, was dispatched to Pakistan. In 1978, Holbrooke betrayed a promise to normalise relations with the Vietnamese on the eve of a vicious embargo that ruined the lives of countless Vietnamese children. Under Obama, the "sense of a new era abroad", declared the Observer, "was reinforced by the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state". Clinton has threatened to "entirely obliterate Iran" on behalf of Israel. What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power assembled under cover of America's first "post-racial president". Apart from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel, having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with impunity. On 10 February, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to put Binyamin Netanyahu into power. Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who has made clear his intention of attacking Iran. In the Wall Street Journal on 24 January, he described Iran as the "terrorist mother base" and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities". On 31 January, unaware he was being filmed, Israel's ambassador in Australia described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" - dress rehearsal - for an attack on Iran. For Netanyahu, the reassuring news is that Obama's administration is the most Zionist in living memory - a truth that has struggled to be told from beneath the soggy layers of Obama-love. Not a single member of Obama's team demurred from Obama's support for Israel's barbaric actions in Gaza. Obama himself likened the safety of his two young daughters with that of Israeli children while making not a single reference to the thousands of Palestinian children killed with American weapons - a violation of both international and US law. He did, however, demand that the people of Gaza be denied "smuggled" small arms with which to defend themselves against the world's fourth largest military power. And he paid tribute to the Arab dictatorships, such as Egypt, which are bribed by the US Treasury to help the US and Israel enforce policies described by the United Nations Rapporteur, Richard Falk, a Jew, as "genocidal". It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth. "In the time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act." www.johnpilger.com From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 09:32:17 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:32:17 -0800 Subject: [A-List] As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <498DB791.5020407@gmail.com> Pardon my analysis of some underlying layer in all this... Women, being the target of mindbogglingly expensive, incredibly concentrated, often crass, "advertising" 'campaigns' ("It's not a war it's a campaign... Riiiiigghhht!") it's no surprise that women have been programmed to be 'consumer crap accumulators' and will 'slice throats' to remain so. ...and there's SOMETHING in this statement: > The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax > is falling. > > The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since > the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have > befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries > like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in > areas like education and health care, which are... ...which EXEMPLIFIES gender (in)equality. Leigh Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > Closing the Gap in Employment > > > > February 6, 2009 > As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force > By CATHERINE RAMPELL > > With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar > era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on > the nation's payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in > American history. > > The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax > is falling. > > The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since > the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have > befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries > like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in > areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to > economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child > care and other domestic work. > > "Given how stark and concentrated the job losses are among men, and > that women represented a high proportion of the labor force in the > beginning of this recession, women are now bearing the burden ? or the > opportunity, one could say ? of being breadwinners," says Heather > Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. > > Economists have predicted before that women would one day dominate the > labor force as more ventured outside the home. The number of women > entering the work force slowed and even dipped during the boom years > earlier this decade, though, prompting a debate about whether women > truly wanted to be both breadwinners and caregivers. > > Should the male-dominated layoffs of the current recession continue ? > and Friday's jobs report for January may offer more insight ? the > debate will be moot. A deep and prolonged recession, therefore, may > change not only household budgets and habits; it may also challenge > longstanding gender roles. > > In recessions, the percentage of families supported by women tends to > rise slightly, and it is expected to do so when this year's numbers > are tallied. As of November, women held 49.1 percent of the nation's > jobs, according to nonfarm payroll data collected by the Bureau of > Labor Statistics. By another measure, including farm workers and the > self-employed, women constituted 47.1 percent of the work force. > > Women may be safer in their jobs, but tend to find it harder to > support a family. For one thing, they work fewer overall hours than > men. Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs without health > insurance or unemployment insurance. Even in full-time jobs, women > earn 80 cents for each dollar of their male counterparts' income, > according to the government data. > > "A lot of jobs that men have lost in fields like manufacturing were > good union jobs with great health care plans," says Christine Owens, > executive director of the National Employment Law Project. "The jobs > women have ? and are supporting their families with ? are not > necessarily as good." > > Nasreen Mohammed, for example, works five days a week, 51 weeks a > year, without sick days or health benefits. > > She runs a small day care business out of her home in Milpitas, > Calif., and recently expanded her services to include after-school > care. The business brings in about $30,000 annually, she says, far > less than the $150,000 her husband earned in the marketing and sales > job he lost over a year ago. "It's peanuts," she says. > > She switched from being a full-time homemaker to a full-time > businesswoman when her husband was laid off previously. She says she > unexpectedly discovered that she loves her job, even if it is > demanding. > > Still, her husband, Javed, says he and their three children ? who are > in third grade, junior college and law school ? worry about her > health, and hope things can "return to the old days." > > "In terms of the financial benefit from her work, we all benefit," he > says. "But in terms of getting my wife's attention, from the youngest > daughter to our oldest, we can't wait for the day that my job is > secure and she doesn't have to do day care anymore." > > Women like Ms. Mohammed find themselves at the head of once-separate > spheres: work and household. While women appear to be sole > breadwinners in greater numbers, they are likely to remain responsible > for most domestic responsibilities at home. > > On average, employed women devote much more time to child care and > housework than employed men do, according to recent data from the > government's American Time Use Survey analyzed by two economists, Alan > B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller. > > When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend > daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men's child > care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their > working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, > watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic > activities. > > Many of the unemployed men interviewed say they have tried to help out > with cooking, veterinarian appointments and other chores, but they > have not had time to do more because job-hunting consumes their days. > > "The main priority is finding a job and putting in the time to do > that," says John Baruch, in Arlington Heights, Ill., who estimates he > spends 35 to 45 hours a week looking for work since being laid off in > January 2008. > > While he has helped care for his wife's aging parents, the couple > still sometimes butt heads over who does things like walking the dog, > now that he is out of work. He puts it this way: "As one of the people > who runs one of the career centers I've been to told me: 'You're out > of a job, but it's not your time to paint the house and fix the car. > Your job is about finding the next job.' " > > Many women say they expect their family roles to remain the same, even > if economic circumstances have changed for now. > > "I don't know if I'd really call myself a 'breadwinner,' since I earn > practically nothing," says Linda Saxby, who assists the librarian at > the Cypress, Tex., high school her two daughters attend. Her husband, > whose executive-level position was eliminated last May, had been > earning $225,000, and the family is now primarily living off savings. > > Historically, the way couples divide household jobs has been fairly > resistant to change, says Heidi Hartmann, president and chief > economist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. > > "Over a long, 20-year period, married men have stepped up to the plate > a little bit, but not as much as married women have dropped off in the > time they spend on household chores," Ms. Hartmann says. This suggests > some domestic duties have been outsourced, as when takeout substitutes > for cooking, for example. And as declining incomes force families to > cut back on these outlays, she says, "women will most likely pick up > the slack." > > A severe recession could put pressure on these roles. > > "It has definitely put a strain" on my marriage, says Debbie Harlan, > an executive assistant at a hospital system in Sarasota, Fla. Four > months ago, her husband closed his 10-year-old independent car sales > business, and the couple have been asking their children to help with > bills. "So far we've worked through it, but there have been times when > I wasn't sure we could." > > The Mohammeds say things are not as stressful as they were the last > time Mr. Mohammed lost his job. He has been helping out with the > cooking and with paperwork for his wife's business, and she says she > works to prop up family morale. > > "Things are not happy in the house if I blame him all the time, so I > don't do any of that anymore," Ms. Mohammed says. "I know he is doing > his best." > > > From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 10:54:14 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 07 Feb 2009 09:54:14 -0800 Subject: [A-List] The Fierce Urgency of Pork In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <498DCAC6.5040807@gmail.com> Tony B. wrote: > Washington Post > > The Fierce Urgency of Pork > > By Charles Krauthammer > Friday, February 6, 2009; A17 > > "A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe." > -- President Obama, Feb. 4. Hey, it worked for the last crew... It worked PERFECTLY for passage of the PATRIOT ACT... It worked when GW introduced his auto 'bailout' package and the legislators had to view the TENTATIVE package on a computer screen before voting... These assholes cried wolf as a way of politicking and strong-arming the American public and their politicians for SO LONG that the end result, in the financial sector, is that there actually IS a crisis becoming a GLOBAL catastrophe. I'll reiterate something I typed in response to Charles: > > CB: What more specifically does irreversible mean ? > > > > It means one of the political parties is an enemy of the American > Public, at large and nation as a whole (Agent of a > ?foreign-to-democracy, hostile economic power? within America), and > are doing their best to obstruct the repair of the US economy as they > appear to ?pick the fly feces out of the pepper? while their ?friends? > (quotes intentional? people like this have NO friends) cherry-pick the > remains of the US financial system, AKA ?LOOTING?. > > If they succeed, just simply look up the definition of irreversible in > Websters? > Charles Krauthammer IS one of the "Agent of a ?foreign-to-democracy, hostile economic power within America' mouthpieces". The very fact that anyone publishes his half-educated pap is a living testament to 'pork', or he'd simply be unemployed. Leigh > > Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural > address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." > Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill. > > And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence > peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning > lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a > dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a > Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax > provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on > his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can > have more than one tax delinquent. > > The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more > than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real > scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is > one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal > dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years. > > He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a > lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of > money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it > for picking up the phone and peddling influence. > > At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been > working for years as a humble international civil servant earning > non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a > year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's > private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to > Washington to upend. > > And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the > appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He > inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of > the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not > just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination. > > It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, > giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous > Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 > million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, > reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 > vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction. > > It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal > rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) > are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an > immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds > of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own > budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are > little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven > parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said. > > Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics > where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past > would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. > That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce > urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and > farm-raised fish) insurance. > > The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of > old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time > the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, > pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a > new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax > savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were > fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting > "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a > new "bonus depreciation" incentive. > > After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that > at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation > would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The > hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great > ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that > all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone. > I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half > weeks. > > letters at charleskrauthammer.com > > > From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Sat Feb 7 11:15:37 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 13:15:37 -0500 Subject: [A-List] bad economy drives divorce rate down Message-ID: <014301c98950$141f14a0$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> Bad Economy Makes Troubled Couples Avoid Divorce The continuing recession is putting a strain on divorcing couples and their attorneys Douglas S. Malan The Connecticut Law Tribune February 06, 2009 Post a Comment In years past, divorce lawyers could almost always count on increased business after ringing in the New Year. After all, the weeks following the holiday rush were the perfect time for couples on the rocks to finally split up while avoiding the impact of a Christmastime divorce on their children. But in 2009, the rules have changed for many divorce attorneys. The economic downturn seems to have given many couples second thoughts about untying the knot. "I'm used to a serious uptick in divorce, and I haven't seen it at all this year," said attorney Marc F. Greene of Washington, Conn., who handles divorces in Litchfield County, Waterbury and Danbury. "I have a smaller practice, but this seems to be reflected in conversations I have with other colleagues. I don't recall anything like this in family law practice, and I've been doing this for [26] years." Many of his clients are deciding to stay married simply because of the higher living costs involved following a separation. Because of the soured economy, income is shrinking rapidly for some workers, and spouses who might count on alimony and child support to run a separate household can't count on that money anymore. Greene noted that one of his clients returned to live with her husband who allegedly had a history of verbal abuse because she couldn't afford to find a new place to live. "I've noticed the idea of keeping two households going [following a divorce] is more and more impossible," Greene said. And he's also noticed another dimension of family relationships gone bad when he represents minor children in custody cases. "Over the last year or so, a significant majority of adult respondents have larceny charges pending or they're already incarcerated," Greene said. "It's not directly tied to divorce, but it does feed back to economic instability and the effect on families." 'LIVING ON CREDIT' Debra B. Marino, an attorney in Orange, Conn., said clients are still coming in the door, but at a slower rate and with significant money problems. "More people are trying to wait as long as they can [to divorce] because their economic situation is so bad that they can't afford it," she said. "A lot of these people are in single-income households and they're living on credit cards." That includes a couple who recently came in with $100,000 in credit card debt, a situation that placed the feuding couple on the brink of bankruptcy. Marino said that, more often than ever before, attorneys are suggesting that couples file for bankruptcy and try to work out the financial mess that likely fed into their marriage problems. "This is becoming more prevalent, and I haven't seen it to the degree that I do today," said Marino, whose entire practice is devoted to family law. "It's become a common theme." Also more common are judges giving the benefit of the doubt to one party that claims an inability to pay the bills because of lack of work and not holding that party in contempt, Marino said. "It's actually a credible argument, and it's reality," she said. Marino recently settled a divorce case for a stay-at-home mother whose ex-husband wasn't paying the mortgage because he had been unemployed. The mortgage was in arrears and the property value of the house plummeted, leaving the property worth less than what is owed. Now the mother has few options for financial recourse because the ex-husband has no money to support her and the children. "It's a messy situation that no one can figure out," Marino said. UNEMPLOYMENT IMPACT Annual divorce filings in Connecticut have remained consistent over the past 20 years, ranging from about 13,500 to 14,500 a year, according to research conducted by the state's Judicial Branch. But based on some lawyers' experiences so far, those numbers could change significantly in 2009. Annual pro se filings also have remained consistent -- about 10,000 -- in the past two years, but several attorneys interviewed say they have noticed more pro se parties in divorce proceedings than ever before. In other instances, people are avoiding court and just agreeing to work things out on their own. "People don't want to spend $20,000 on an attorney," said Kate M. Casagrande, a Shelton, Conn., divorce lawyer. "They're willing to compromise on things so it doesn't cost as much in legal fees." Attorney Corrine A. Boni-Vendola, of Charles & Boni-Vendola in Hamden, Conn., was recently in the middle of a tumultuous divorce proceeding in which the parties had spent $25,000 in legal fees. "They realized they didn't have the money to keep fighting, so we settled the other day," said Boni-Vendola, whose firm caseload is predominantly family law. "There's more willingness to settle cases when people realize they can't fund their fight." Attorney Jennifer A. Sadaka in Branford, Conn., said she's dealing with a lot of cases fueled by anger but with few assets to divide. "I just did a five-day trial over a motorcycle," she said. "They're fighting over whatever they can. They're being pettier and they fight more over custody of the kids." Attorney Thomas D. Colin, of Schoonmaker, George & Colin in Greenwich, Conn., represents several clients in lower Fairfield County who work on Wall Street. He said his firm has not noticed a dramatic impact from the economy and no client has stopped a divorce proceeding, though it has been discussed. "The fallout may not be felt until later in the year," said Colin, who is past chair of the Connecticut Bar Association's Family Law Section. On a smaller scale, Colin is noticing some changes in his practice. Parties are filing more post-dissolution modification motions for alimony and child support because people have lost their jobs. "I would think those are going to increase," Colin noted. Last month, the Connecticut Department of Labor reported that unemployment was up to 7.1 percent after the state lost nearly 21,500 jobs in November and December 2008. Economists expect those numbers to increase as the year goes on. Tightened lending standards also are keeping people from being able to buy out their spouse's interest in a house, Colin said. Even if the money is available "no one wants to assume the risk because it's declining in value." That's leaving couples to stay together longer -- in some cases, uncomfortably longer. Cheshire, Conn., attorney Lisa Cappalli said: "Many people [in previous years] who could sell the house while the divorce is pending can't sell now and have to live together after the divorce." CHANGING COURSE Meanwhile, with the divorce practice area in flux, lawyers, especially those who are solo or in small firms, are diversifying to stay afloat. Boni-Vendola, the Hamden attorney, has taken on some personal injury and foreclosure work because of reduced revenues from divorce cases. "More than a few clients owe me money," she said. "It's difficult, but I manage to do it. They pay me in dribs and drabs." Sadaka, of Branford, has branched out to do bankruptcies, foreclosures, real estate, landlord/tenant, evictions and some civil litigation. Still, 80 percent of her cases are divorce. "I'm taking more payment plans," Sadaka said. "It's very difficult to collect. It's like getting blood from a stone." She's even had clients offer to do office work in lieu of payment, but she has refused to accept such agreements. Some clients are so far behind on thousands of dollars in payments that Sadaka is considering small claims actions against them in the very near future. One client owes her $10,000, she said. Suing a client "is a necessary evil," Sadaka said. "When I first opened [in April 2006], I was more concerned about business coming in the door. Now you have to be attached to money." 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 19562 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090207/3d35b164/attachment.txt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Feb 7 18:46:37 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:46:37 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Just Practicing ... Honest! - U.S. Special Operations Command in New Orleans for urban warfare 'training' Message-ID: <498E397D.2070704@gmail.com> Source: wwltv.com Residents in and around New Orleans have been hearing the sounds of low-flying helicopters and what sounds like bomb blasts over the past few nights, but the sounds are part of a training exercise for some of America?s elite military troops. At one Lakefront home, Gigi Burk normally hears her son, 6-year-old Beau, practicing the piano, but last night she heard something much different at around 10 p.m. ?I said, oh my God! They?re bombs. That?s what I thought it was, somebody dropping bombs,? Burk said. Burk said she panicked, not knowing why she was hearing what sounded like explosions and low-flying helicopters. ?We?re a little skittish around here with things that have happened,? Burk said. But according to military officials, it?s a training exercise that brought about 150 U.S. troops from the U.S. Special Operations Command to train in New Orleans for urban warfare. ?They are regularly engaged in combat operations,? said U.S. Special Operations Command staffer Kimberly Tiscione. ?They are the best of the best we have to offer across all the branches of the military.? Black Hawk and ?Little Bird? helicopters are transporting troops to several locations around New Orleans, according to Tiscione. ?They?re going to be flying near buildings, doing approaches on them,? Tiscione said. ?You might see them landing on the roof tops or landing on the ground near them as well.? ?I heard a bunch of explosions starting at about 10 p.m. They were about ten seconds apart, and then they?d stop, and we thought it was over, but then they started again,? said Burk. Tiscione said that the ground troops were performing ?breeches at several different locations. ?So, they?re moving through doorways or walls or that sort of thing. They?re also doing weapons proficiency,? Tiscione said. The forces are using simulated ammunitions, almost like paintball pellets, to conduct the training. And even though the noise may affect your neighborhood, the night-time training is only supposed to last from sundown to 11 p.m., according to Tiscione. ?They are the best of the best because they get these kind of training events,? she said. Burk said she wishes the training had been better publicized before-hand to avoid a scare Tuesday night. ?People were talking about it everywhere today,? Burk said. The NOPD did put a press release out about the training, and WWL-TV aired a story about it; however, that was a week ago. Since U.S. Special Operations Command hasn?t done a similar training here since 2000, it has caught many people by surprise. The training will go on every night through the end of this week. Related posts: Two more U.S. military units assigned for domestic homeland security http://cli.gs/MVDS2a From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Feb 7 19:46:49 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:46:49 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Veblen in Plain English Message-ID: <498E4799.1070708@ashisuto.co.jp> A Complete Introduction to Thorstein Veblen's Economics by Daniel A Underwood Journal of Economic Issues (March 2007) Veblen in Plain English: A Complete Introduction to Thorstein Veblen's Economics, by Ken McCormick. Youngstown, New York: Cambria Press. 2006. Paper: ISBN 0 977 3567 6 0, $24.95. 144 pages. Once in a great while one is asked to review a book that is actually a pleasure to read, and Ken McCormick's Veblen in Plain English is such a book! Direct, lucid and succinct, the 144 pages succeed marvelously in presenting a coherent presentation of Veblen's system of thought. In so doing McCormick has accomplished what I heretofore thought impossible: present the complexity of Veblen's thinking in a form accessible to introductory students. He does this without compromising the totality of Veblen's vision. As a result, the reader will finish with a thorough understanding of how to apply Veblen's analysis to interpret their world. "How" you might ask? Allow me to explain. The secret to McCormick's approach is two fold. First is the compartmentalization of Veblen's writing around four modes of analytical inquiry: Instincts and Institutions, Technology and Social Evolution, Capital and Business Enterprise, and Consumer Behavior. Second, he logically organizes, presents and builds Veblen's evolutionary analysis keeping in mind his audience. Crucial to his approach is the disregard of the historicity of appearance in favor of the logical sequence of ideas. Thus, we work toward the Theory of the Leisure Class rather than from it, and the student is able to quickly savvy the institutional forces shaping consumptive behavior after a thorough introduction to the role instincts play in shaping social evolution. Another reason for McCormick's elucidative success is the orderly development of ideas. He begins each unit with clear succinct definitions that logically and orderly present Veblen's essential modes of intellectual inquiry. For instance, we see "instincts as 'the innate and persistent propensities of human nature'", and "institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the life process of the community". Equipped with clear definitions, he goes on to present the dichotomies of Veblen's analysis and their application to interpret not only the inhibitory forces of habitual behavior, but the role of technology - "matter-of-fact, cause-and-effect thinking" - in perturbing outmoded avenues of thought. On the way, the reader receives an inviting sample of "Veblenian" passages, not only to provide evidence for interpretation, but also to illuminate Veblen's thought process. And all the while McCormick brings these ideas to the reader by creating relevance with their world, be it religion as a habit of thought in legitimating the use of technology, or how absentee ownership has made possible executive compensation over 400 times greater than the average worker. Even better perhaps, is his treatment of the parasitic nature of modern marketing, a theme, process and outcome every undergraduate is all too familiar with! These are themes that resonate with todays undergraduate and, in so doing, make the appropriateness of Veblen's analysis timeless. Of course, Veblen in Plain English is not beyond critique. While these are few, I share them in hope the next edition is even better. To begin, the first message the reader receives is an apologetic: "scholars disagree about the significance of [Veblen's] work". While yes, scholars do disagree, this is a book for students and laypeople, an audience who cares little for the diatribes of scholars. Better to begin "Thorstein Veblen is one of America's most original thinkers, whose analysis penetrates the essence of our cultural existence". Second, the Introduction contrasts an evolutionary approach with one of general equilibrium. This scholastic nuance will be unintelligible to an introductory student and certainly to the layperson. Indeed, there is a danger the book will be closed at this point and the intellectual excitement that soon follows missed. This material could easily be relegated to the final chapter where Veblen's analysis is contrasted with mainstream views. A book like this should begin with excitement, not scholasticism. An introduction that illustrates how Veblen's thinking will help the student better understand their world is more likely to stimulate further interest. But that's it, my only criticisms - and minor at that - of this marvelous book. Had time permitted, I would have invited a number of students to participate in this review process, for; ultimately, they will be the ultimate test of Veblen in Plain English. So alas, that review won't be forthcoming until next quarter. And that it will is my strongest recommendation for this book! Copyright 2007 Association for Evolutionary Economics Copyright 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5437/is_1_41/ai_n29325878 http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 02:02:53 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 04:02:53 -0500 Subject: [A-List] In Russia, Barter Is Back Message-ID: February 8, 2009 Have Car, Need Briefs? In Russia, Barter Is Back By ELLEN BARRY MOSCOW ? Does the Taganrog Automobile Factory have a deal for you! Rows of freshly minted Hyundai Santa Fe sport utility vehicles are available right now. In exchange ? well, do you have any circuit boards? Or sheet metal? Or sneakers? Here is a sign of the financial times in Russia: Barter is back on the table. Advertisements are beginning to appear in newspapers and online, like one that offered "2,500,000 rubles' worth of premium underwear for any automobile," and another promising "lumber in Krasnoyarsk for food or medicine." A crane manufacturer in Yekaterinburg is paying its debtors with excavators. And one of Russia's original commodities traders, German L. Sterligov, has rolled out a splashy "anti-crisis" initiative that he says will link long chains of enterprises in a worldwide barter system. All this evokes a bit of d?j? vu. In the mid-1990s, barter transactions in Russia accounted for an astonishing 50 percent of sales for midsize enterprises and 75 percent for large ones. The practice kept businesses afloat for years but also allowed them to defer some fundamental changes needed to make them more competitive, like layoffs and price reductions. It also hurt tax revenues. The comeback is on a small scale so far. The most recent statistics available, from November, showed that barter deals made up about 3 to 4 percent of total sales, according to the Russian Economic Barometer, an independent bulletin. Nevertheless, economists are taking note. "Russians are so arrogant that they never cut prices," said Vladimir Popov, a professor at Moscow's New Economic School. By turning to barter systems during an economic downturn, he said, "you are hiding your head in the sand." It would be hard, however, to dissuade business owners who see barter as a point of light on a bleak financial horizon. Among the most upbeat of them is Mr. Sterligov, who, just as the credit crunch brought most business deals to a halt, shoveled $13 million into the Anti-Crisis Settlement and Commodity Center. Mr. Sterligov, 42, is one of the great characters of Russian capitalism. In his mid-20s, on the eve of the Soviet Union's collapse, he was a freewheeling, chain-smoking commodities trader surrounded by leggy assistants. But Mr. Sterligov sat out the oil-fueled prosperity of recent years. After a failed run against Vladimir V. Putin in the 2004 presidential election, he retreated to a log house outside Moscow, opting for the beard and boots of a Russian shepherd. In August, intimations of the financial crash lured him out of the woods. He plans to use a computer database to create chains of six or seven enterprises having difficulty selling their products for cash, in which the last firm on the chain would pay the first in a single cash transaction. It is the kind of multiparty barter that rose to prominence in the 1990s, when managers of factories across Russia devised complex barter chains to keep the maximum number of enterprises in business when none had cash to pay their bills. A computer, he said, can do the same job faster and more efficiently. "What was in the past will remain in the past," Mr. Sterligov said in an interview last month, from the 26th-floor suite he has rented in a Moscow high-rise. "We are making a step into the future." So far, economists doubt that barter will grow to the level it reached in the 1990s. Earlier in the transition to a market economy, industrialists still had little monetary stake in their businesses but were dependent on the prestige that went with executive positions, said Andrei Yakovlev of the Higher School of Economics here. They had little incentive to cut costs, and barter deals kept them going for five years, he said. Now, business owners and managers "are really trying to reduce costs and reduce inefficiency," Mr. Yakovlev said. Interest in barter, he said, is more likely to come from regional governments, which have the most to lose from high unemployment. Barter is a side effect of tight monetary policy, said Mr. Popov, who is teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa. Russia is in the grip of a liquidity crisis. As in the mid-1990s, the government has made it a priority to shore up the economy by buying up rubles, hoping to avoid the panicky sell-off that comes with rapid devaluation. The ruble has gradually slid from 23.4 to the dollar in early August, before Russia's war in Georgia, to 36.2 to the dollar last week. As a result, the money supply continues to contract, and some enterprises turn to barter to survive. "We are stepping for the second time on the same rake," Mr. Popov said. "The second time is a greater sin." Long-term macroeconomic trends, however, are the last thing manufacturers were thinking about in recent weeks. The Hyundai factory in Taganrog, the southern seaport where Chekhov was born, rolled out a barter promotion on its Web site, offering to trade vehicles for "raw materials," "high-tech equipment" or "other liquid goods, including finished products of various branches of industry." Gleb Korotkov, a spokesman for the factory, said he could not be specific about what goods were meant, saying it was a "commercial secret." Barter deals seem to be spreading fastest in construction industries. Dmitri Smorodin, who runs a large St. Petersburg building firm, said he thought for two months before announcing in late January that he was willing to accept barter items ? including food products ? as payment for construction work. He said he hoped that adopting the strategy early in the crisis would give him an edge over his competitors. "Food we would happily accept, because it's easy to sell," he said. "Of course, money is always preferable." In contrast, Uralchem, a fertilizer producer, refused payment in grain and beef, because the company conforms to international financial reporting standards in its reports to shareholders, said Andrei Kocherov, a spokesman for Uralchem, which was founded in 2007. The modern accounting system would preclude barter, he said. Meanwhile, in Bashkortostan, a republic in southwestern Russia, local development officials publicly encouraged businesses to develop barter chains. Sergei Ryazanov, 30, a businessman from the Siberian city of Surgut, took out an advertisement a month ago offering to barter excess metal piping. So far, he has not been impressed by the offers he has received; he said people were not desperate enough to drop prices. He is looking for a truly liquid commodity, something universal, like gasoline. Even underwear, which, he said, "is much more liquid than automobiles." He was intrigued by Mr. Sterligov's idea, though he questioned the wisdom of planning a career in barter. "It will take him a couple years to get it right," Mr. Ryazanov said. "And then, in two years, liquidity will be back." From tal1 at cogeco.ca Sat Feb 7 17:20:51 2009 From: tal1 at cogeco.ca (Tony B.) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 19:20:51 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Edward Herman: NATO, The Imperial Pitbull Message-ID: <479ED2E1EF0E4FB585B98F1EDB5A19A6@TonyPC> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11989 Global Research January 23, 2009 Z Magazine February 2009 NATO: the Imperial Pitbull by Prof. Edward S. Herman One of the deceptive clich?s of Western accounts of post World War II history is that NATO was constructed as a defensive arrangement to block the threat of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. This is false. It is true that Western propaganda played up the Soviet menace, but many key U.S. and Western European statesmen recognized that a Soviet invasion was not a real threat. The Soviet Union had been devastated, and while in possession of a large army it was exhausted and needed time for recuperation. The United States was riding high, the war had revitalized its economy, it suffered no war damage, and it had the atomic bomb in its arsenal, which it had displayed to the Soviet Union by killing a quarter of a million Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hitting the Soviet Union before it recovered or had atomic weapons was discussed in Washington, even if rejected in favor of ?containment,? economic warfare, and other forms of destabilization. NSC 68, dated April 1950, while decrying the great Soviet menace, explicitly called for a program of destabilization aimed at regime change in that country, finally achieved in 1991. Thus, even hardliner John Foster Dulles stated back in 1949 that ? I do not know of any responsible high official, military or civilian?in this government or any other government, who believes that the Soviet now plans conquest by open military aggression.? But note Dulles? language??open military aggression.? The ?threat? was more a matter of possible Soviet support to left political groups and parties in Western Europe. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a prime mover of NATO, openly stated that the function of a NATO military buildup would be ?chiefly for the practical purpose of assuring adequate defense against internal subversion.? The much greater support of rightwing forces by the United States was, of course, not a help to internal subversion, and a threat to democracy; only possible Soviet help to the left fit that category. (Recall Adlai Stevenson?s claim in the late 1960s that the resistance within South Vietnam by indigenous forces hostile to the U.S.-imposed minority regime was ?internal aggression.?) The non-German Western European elites were more worried about German revival and a German threat, and, like U.S. officials, were more concerned about keeping down the power of the left in Europe than any Soviet military threat?and the United States was pressing the Europeans to build up their armed forces, and buy arms from U.S. suppliers! Although knowingly inflated or even concocted, the Soviet military threat was still very useful in discrediting the left by tying it to Stalin and bolshevism and an alleged Soviet invasion and mythical world conquest program. In fact, the Warsaw Pact was far more a ?defensive? arrangement than NATO; its organization followed that of NATO and was clearly a response, and it was a structure of the weaker party and with less reliable members. And in the end, it collapsed, whereas NATO was important in the long-term process of destabilizing and dismantling the Soviet regime. For one thing, NATO?s armament and strength were part of the U.S. strategy of forcing the Soviets to spend resources on arms rather than provide for the welfare, happiness and loyalty of their population. It also encouraged repression by creating a genuine security threat, which, again, would damage popular loyalty and the reputation of the state abroad. Throughout this early period the Soviet leaders tried hard to negotiate some kind of peace settlement with the West, including giving up East Germany, but the United States and hence its European allies-clients would have none of it. As noted, in the U.S. official--hence mainstream media-- view, only Soviet intervention in Western Europe after World War II was bad and threatened ?internal subversion.? But in a non-Orwellian world it would be recognized that the United States far outdid the Soviet Union in supporting not only ?internal subversion? but also real terrorism in the years after 1945. The left had gained strength during World War II by actually fighting against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The United States fought against the left?s subsequent bids for political participation and power by any means, including direct warfare in Greece and by massive funding of anti-left parties and politicians throughout Europe. In Greece it supported the far right, including many former collaborators with fascism, and succeeded in putting in place a nasty rightwing authoritarian regime. It continued to support fascist Spain and accepted fascist Portugal as a founding member of NATO, with NATO arms helping Portugal pursue its colonial wars. And the United States, the dominant NATO power, supported rightwing politicians and former Nazis and fascists elsewhere, while of course claiming to be pro-democratic and fighting against totalitarianism. Perhaps most interesting was the U.S. and NATO support of paramilitary groups and terrorism. In Italy they were aligned with state and rightwing political factions, secret societies (Propaganda Due [P-2]), and paramilitary groups that, with police cooperation, pursued what was called a ?Strategy of Tension,? in which a series of terrorist actions were carried out that were blamed on the left. The most famous was the August 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station, killing 86. The training and integration into police-CIA-NATO operations of former fascists and fascist collaborators was extraordinary in Italy, but common elsewhere in Europe (for the Italian story, see Herman and Brodhead, ?The Italian Context: The Fascist Tradition and the Postwar Rehabilitation of the Right,? in Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection [New York: Sheridan Square, 1986]. For Germany, see William Blum, on ?Germany 1950s,? in Killing Hope [Common Courage: 1995]). NATO was also linked to ?Operation Gladio,? a program organized by the CIA, with collaboration from NATO governments and security establishments, that in a number of European states set up secret cadres and stashed weapons, supposedly preparing for the threatened Soviet invasion, but actually ready for ?internal subversion? and available to support rightwing coups. They were used on a number of occasions by rightwing paramilitary groups to carry out terrorist operations (including the Bologna bombing, and many terrorist incidents carried out in Belgium and Germany). Gladio and NATO plans were also used to combat an ?internal threat? in Greece in 1967: namely, the democratic election of a liberal government. In response, the Greek military put into effect a NATO ?Plan Prometheus,? replacing a democratic order with a torture-prone military dictatorship. Neither NATO nor the Johnson administration objected. Other Gladio forces, from Italy and elsewhere, came to train in Greece during its fascist interlude, to learn how to deal with ?internal subversion.? In short, from its inception NATO showed itself to be offensively, not defensively, oriented, antagonistic to diplomacy and peace, and intertwined with widespread terrorist operations and other forms of political intervention that were undemocratic and actual threats to democracy (and if traceable to the Soviets would have been denounced as brazen subversion). . The Post-Soviet NATO With the ending of the Soviet Union, and that menacing Warsaw Pact, NATO?s theoretical rationale disappeared. But although that rationale was a fraud, for public consumption NATO still needed to redefine its reason for existence, and it also soon took on a larger and more aggressive role. With no need to support Yugoslavia after the Soviet demise, NATO soon collaborated with its U.S. and German members to war on and dismantle that former Western ally, in the process violating the UN Charter?s prohibition of cross-border warfare (i.e., aggression). Amusingly, in the midst of the NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia, in April 1999, NATO held its 50th anniversary in Washington, D.C., celebrating its successes and with characteristic Orwellian rhetoric stated its devotion to international law while in the midst of its ongoing blatant violation of the UN Charter. In fact, the original 1949 NATO founding document had begun by reaffirming its members ?faith in the UN Charter,? and in Article 1, undertaking, ?as set forth in the UN Charter, to settle any international disputes by peaceful means.? The April 1999 session produced a ?Strategic Concept? document that laid out a supposedly new program for NATO now that its ?mutual defensive? role in preventing a Soviet invasion had ceased to be plausible. (?The Alliance?s Strategic Concept,? Washington, D.C., April 23, 1999 (http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-065e.htm). The Alliance still stresses ?security,? though it has ?committed itself to essential new activities in the interest of a wider stability.? It welcomes new members and new ?partnership? arrangements, though why these are necessary in a post-Cold War world with the United States and its closest allies so powerful is never made clear. It admits that ?large-scale conventional aggression against the Alliance is highly unlikely,? but of course it never mentions the possibility of ?large-scale conventional aggression? BY members of the Alliance, and it brags about the NATO role in the Balkans as illustrative of its ?commitment of a wider stability.? But not only was this Alliance effort a case of legal aggression??illegal but legitimate? in the Orwellian phrase of key apologists--contrary to this paper, NATO played a major destabilization role in the Balkans, helping start the ethnic warfare and refusing to pursue a diplomatic option in Kosovo in order to be able to attack Yugoslavia in a bombing war that was in process while this document was being handed out. (For a discussion of the NATO role, see Herman and Peterson, ?The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,? Monthly Review, Oct. 2007: http://monthlyreview.org/1007herman-peterson1.php ) ?Strategic Concept? also claims to favor arms control, but in fact from its very beginning NATO promoted more armaments, and all the new members like Poland and Bulgaria have been obligated to build up their ?inter-operable? arms, meaning getting more arms and buying them from U.S. and other Western suppliers. Since this document was produced in 1999, NATO?s leading member, the United States, has more than doubled its military budget and greatly increased arms sales abroad; it has pushed further into space-based military operations; it has withdrawn from the 1972 ABM treaty, refused to ratify the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty, and rejected both the Land Mine treaty and UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms. With NATO?s aid it has produced a new arms race, which many U.S. allies and clients, as well as rivals and targets, have joined. The 1999 document also claims NATO?s support for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but at the same time it stresses how important nuclear arms are for NATO?s power?it therefore rejects a central feature of the NNPT, which involved a promise by the nuclear powers to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. What this means is that NATO is keen only on non-proliferation by its targets, like Iran. Nuclear weapons ?make a unique contribution in rendering the risks of aggression against the Alliance incalculable and unacceptable.? But if Iran had such weapons it could make ?Alliance? ?risks of aggression? - which Alliance member the United States and its partner Israel have threatened - unacceptable. Obviously that would not do. In its Security segment, Strategic Concept says that it struggles for a security environment ?based on the growth of democratic institutions and commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes, in which no country would be able to intimidate or coerce any other through the threat or use of force.? The hypocrisy here is mind-boggling. The very essence of NATO policy and practice is to threaten the use of force, and U.S. national security policy is now explicit that it plans to maintain a military superiority and prevent any rival power from challenging that superiority in order to hold sway globally?that is, it plans to rule by intimidation. NATO now claims to threaten nobody, and even talks in Strategic Concept about possible joint ?operations? with Russia. Again, the hypocrisy level is great. As we know, there was a U.S. promise made to Gorbachev when he agreed to allow East Germany to join with the West, that NATO would not move ?one inch? further East. Clinton and NATO quickly violated this promise, absorbing into NATO all the former Eastern European Soviet satellites as well as the Baltic states. Only self-deceiving fools and/or propagandists would not recognize this as a security threat to Russia, the only power in the area that could even theoretically threaten the NATO members. But Strategic Concept plays dumb, and only threats to its members are recognized. Although ?oppression, ethnic conflict? and the ?proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? are alleged great concerns of the new NATO, its relations with Israel are close, and no impediment whatsoever has been (or will be) placed on Israeli oppression, ethnic cleansing, or its semi-acknowledged substantial nuclear arsenal, and of course neither its war on Lebanon in 2006 nor its current murderous attacks on Gaza have impeded warm relations, any more than the US-UK unprovoked attack on Iraq reduced NATO-member solidarity. If Israel is a highly favored U.S. client, it is then by definition free to violate all the high principles mentioned by Strategic Concept. In 2008 NATO and Israel have signed a military pact, so perhaps NATO will soon be helping Israel?s ?security? operations in Gaza. (In fact, Obama?s choice as National Security Adviser, James Jones, has over the past year or so been clamoring for NATO troops to occupy the Gaza Strip and even the West Bank. He is not a lone voice in the U.S. establishment). The new NATO is a U.S. and imperial pitbull. It is currently helping rearm the world, encouraging the military buildup of the former Baltic and Eastern European Soviet satellites--now U.S. and NATO satellites--working closely with Israel as that NATO partner ethnically cleanses and dispossesses its untermeschen--helping its master establish client states on the Russian southern borders, officially endorsing the U.S. placement of anti-ballistic missiles in Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, and threateningly elsewhere, at a great distance from the United States, and urging the integration of the U.S. plans with a broader NATO ?shield.? This virtually forces Russia into more aggressive moves and accelerated rearmament (just as NATO did in earlier years). And of course NATO supports the U.S. occupation of Iraq. NATO secretary-general Scheffer regularly boasts that all 26 NATO states are involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom, inside Iraq or Kuwait. Every single Balkan nation except for Serbia has had troops in Iraq, and now has them in Afghanistan. Half of the former Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States have also provided troops for Iraq, with some of these also in Afghanistan. These are training grounds for breaking in and ?inter-operationalizing? the new ?partners,? and developing a new mercenary base for the growing ?out of area? operations of NATO, as NATO participates more actively in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As noted, NATO brags about its role in the Balkans wars, and both this war and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have violated the UN Charter. Lawlessness is built-in to the new ?strategic concept.? Superceding the earlier (fraudulent) ?collective self defense,? the ever-expanding NATO powers give themselves the authority to conduct military campaigns "out-of-area" or so-called "non-Article V" missions beyond NATO territory. As the legal scholar Bruno Simma noted back in 1999, "the message which these voices carry in our context is clear: if it turns out that a Security Council mandate or authorization for future NATO 'non-Article 5' missions involving armed force cannot be obtained, NATO must still be able to go ahead with such enforcement. That the Alliance is capable of doing so is being demonstrated in the Kosovo crisis." ("NATO, the UN and the Use of Force: Legal Aspects," European Journal of International Law, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1999, reproduced at http://www.ejil.org/journal/Vol10/No1/ab1.html). The new NATO is pleased to be helping its master project power across the globe. In addition to helping encircle and threaten Russia, it pursues ?partnership arrangements? and carries out joint military maneuvers with the so-called Mediterranean Dialogue countries (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania and Algeria). And NATO has also established new partnerships with the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates), thereby expanding NATO's military ambit from the Atlantic coast of Africa to and throughout the Persian Gulf. In the same time frame there has been a unbroken series of NATO visits to and naval exercises with most of these new partners as well as (this past year) the first formal NATO-Israeli bilateral military treaty. The pitbull is well positioned to help Israel continue its massive law violations, to help the United States and Israel threaten and perhaps attack Iran, and to enlarge its own cooperative program of pacification of distant peoples in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and no doubt elsewhere?all in the alleged interest of peace and that ?wider stability? mentioned in Strategic Concept. NATO, like the UN itself, provides a cover of seeming multilateralism for what is a lawless and virtually uncontrolled imperial expansionism. In reality, NATO, as an aggressive global arm of U.S. and other local affiliated imperialisms, poses a serious threat to global peace and security. It is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary, and while it should have been liquidated back in 1991, it has instead expanded, taking on a new and threatening role traced out in its 1999 Strategic Concept and enjoying a frighteningly malignant growth. =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato To subscribe, send an e-mail to: stopnato-subscribe at yahoogroups.com Daily digest option available. Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages ============================== __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Database | Polls MARKETPLACE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sat Feb 7 20:58:22 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 19:58:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Latin American Workers Uniting, Talking with Maria Pimentel Message-ID: <761746.16749.qm@web180108.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Latin American Workers Uniting, Talking with Maria Pimentel By Political Affairs click here for related stories: labor movement 1-28-09, 10:42 am (Maria Pimentel, CGTB. Political Affairs photo by Mike Tolochko.) Editor's note: Maria Pimentel is the international secretary of the Brazilian General Workers' Union Central (CGTB). PA: Tell us about the CGTB. In what sectors of the Brazilian economy is CGTB strong? MARIA PIMENTEL: In 2008, the CGTB entered its 22nd year. During this period it has organized five national congresses. Today, the CGTB is active in 14 states of the Brazilian Federation. It also participates actively at the international level, and since 2003 has sent a delegation to the ILO (International Labor Organization). We are very deeply rooted in manufacturing industries, metallurgy, construction, and textiles. We also have affiliates in the information technology sector, among public employees, and in commerce and cooperative enterprises. In agriculture, we are present among the sugar cane workers and also participate in both the rural settlers and landless rural workers movements. PA: What are the strategic priorities of the CGTB? PIMENTEL: The main strategic priority of the CGTB is to achieve for Brazil?s workers conditions of work and wages that permit them to live a dignified life in accordance with the wealth that Brazil possesses. In that sense, we are fighting for a developed country that is sovereign and independent, where the State plays an active role in accelerating the country?s economic growth and strives to unite the workers and their unions around achieving these goals. Additional resources: Podcast #91 - The Road to Peace PA Editors Blog The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly News of the Day by Norman Markowitz SACP STATEMENT ON UP COMING NATIONAL ELECTIONS Fidel Reflects on Barack Obama Subscribe to this Feed PA: What is the relationship between the CGTB and other Brazilian labor federations? Does the labor movement share strategic goals? PIMENTEL: Since our main goal is the unity of all Brazilian workers, we concentrate our energy in building and strengthening the Forum of Trade Union Centrals. There are six legally-constituted Union Centrals, which are now eligible to receive money from the Federal Budget to promote trade union activities and support struggles for workers? rights. The Forum of Trade Union Centrals addresses the main demands and problems that the Brazil?s working people face. The Forum also frequently deals with international issues that affect working people on a global scale. PA: How would you describe the state of the labor movement in other countries in Latin America? Is there a formal relationship between labor federations which agree with the CGTB?s strategic approach? PIMENTEL: In Latin America the workers movement is now experiencing huge growth. The election of patriotic and progressive governments in the majority of countries on the continent, such as Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and others, was due to huge mobilizations of the people ? mainly of the organized sectors of the working class. There is throughout the continent a strong current of progress among all the trade union organizations. Based on our experience in creating the Forum of Trade Union Centrals, a structure which combines all Brazil?s labor federations ? independent of their international affiliations ? into a unified aggregate, the CGTB is committed to strengthening all efforts at united action on the part of Latin America?s workers and people. PA: What kind of relationship does the CGTB have with the Cuban trade union group, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC)? PIMENTEL: The relationship between the CGTB and the Cuban CTC is a long-standing one. We have a strong fraternal relationship based on mutual solidarity. We both participate as Deputy General Secretaries in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). We are in frequent contact with Cuban CTC leaders and share the same views about the role of workers and the goals of the international labor movement, especially on our continent. PA: What is the percentage breakdown in the CGTB between private and public sector workers? PIMENTEL: The public sector represents about 15 percent of the organizations affiliated with our Trade Union Central. We have a strong presence in the public sector in all the main states of the country, such as Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and we are also active in the South and Northeast. In the private sector our presence is also significant, in large enterprises as well as small and medium-sized ones. PA: What is the attitude of the CGTB toward the leadership of the government in Brazil? PIMENTEL: For Brazil, Lula's government has meant a decisive break with the neoliberal policies of the former government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The Lula government has put a stop to the privatization of important sectors of our economy. It has also helped to propel the growth of the internal market by increasing wages and expanding employment, and it has promoted the integration of the country with the rest of Latin America through Mercosul (the Southern Common Market) and Unasul (the Union of South American Nations). Another important development for workers under the government of President Lula has been the direct participation of the CGTB in important government decision-making bodies such as the Council of Economic and Social Development, as well as the agencies concerned with migration, industrial policy, the fight against hunger, Mercosul, and other aspects of social and economic policy. The CGTB is also represented on International Relations Commission of the Ministry of Labor, the Commission on Fair Labor Standards, and the Council of Women. All of these are new agencies that were created by the Lula government to allow the working people of Brazil to participate directly in formulating the policies of their government. PA: Which policies of the Brazilian government does the CGTB support and which does it want to change or improve? PIMENTEL: We support the government?s policy of investment in the country's growth by creating good quality jobs and improving the consumer power of the workers. We also support President Lula when he criticizes the policies of financial speculation that have brought about the bitter economic crisis, a crisis that was caused by Washington and Wall Street and is being suffered by everyone. However, the CGTB has stated clearly to President Lula that it the monetary policy of the Brazilian Central Bank must be changed. The interest rate dictated by the Central Bank is currently around 14 percent. Because credit is so expensive, it has a negative impact on the country?s economic development. This has created a situation that favors the interests of finance capital ? a sterile, unproductive force in the economy. The payment of interest is now the top economic priority, at the expense of healthy economic growth. PA: Does the CGTB have any contact with the AFL-CIO in the United States? PIMENTEL: The CGTB looks forward to deepening its relationship with the AFL-CIO, but it has not had too much success up until now. We have more contact with those sectors of the labor movement that participate in the ILO conferences. PA: What is the CGTB?s position on the WFTU (World Federation of Trade Unions) and the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation)? PIMENTEL: The President of the CGTB, Antonio Neto, was elected President of WFTU in 1994. After three years as President of the WFTU, Neto was elected Deputy President at the last WFTU Congress held in Havana in 2005. The CGTB is also a member of the General Council of the WFTU and the Financial Control Commission. In terms of trade union policy, the CGTB concentrates its efforts on building the unity of all the world?s workers. This means always searching for ways to work together with labor councils and trade unions everywhere. The unity of the Brazilian Labor Centrals is an important example for the international trade union movement, especially for workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unity of action, as determined by the main interests of the workers? movement, is the position we defend within the WFTU. PA: What is role of women in the CGTB? PIMENTEL: The CGTB is at the forefront of organizing working women into trade unions. We promote the formation of women?s sections within unions, and work to create women leaders and the election of women to leading posts in our trade unions. We also participate in the Brazilian Women?s Council, an official organization which debates public policy affecting women. PA: Are there immigration issues between Brazil and neighboring countries? What work has the CGTB done in this area? PIMENTEL: The CGTB participates in the National Council on Migration, a new organization created by the Lula Government. On the Council, the government works with the Trade Union Centrals to formulate policies for documenting and assisting immigrant workers. Immigrant workers are granted the same labor rights as other Brazilian workers. They have legal work documents and universal health assistance. Such measures prevent the exploitation of unregistered immigrant workers. PA: What is the role of the CGTB at the annual conferences of the ILO in Geneva? PIMENTEL: Both the CGTB and the WFTU work to counteract hegemonic and neoliberal tendencies in the ILO. We offer our support and solidarity to countries that strive to maintain their national sovereignty but are systematically attacked at the ILO conferences, as has happened with Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Byelorussia, Syria and Palestine, among others. By coming to their defense, we have are succeeded in building the unity of the developing countries against the policies of enslavement, monopolization and foreign intervention. In 2002, because of this unity, we won a very significant victory when the ACFTU (All-China Federation of Trade Unions) regained its seat on the Governing Body of the ILO after a 12-year absence. This victory of the international trade union movement dealt an important defeat to those who wanted ? at all costs ? to isolate the ACFTU, the largest labor federation in the world, in order to maintain their exclusive position within the ILO. As a result of our struggle, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions won the support of the huge majority of the world?s labor federations for its re-integration into the Administrative Council of the ILO. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 15820 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090207/0e43856f/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sat Feb 7 21:39:00 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 20:39:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth Message-ID: <422129.63004.qm@web180113.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> The "FDR Failed" Myth From: Bill Totten Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:22:03 +0900 User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090105) by Charles McMillion www.ourfuture.org (February 03 2009)?^^^^^CB: We need some more of the Great Societyand War on Poverty , too. They had a lot ofsuccess abating the poverty and unrestrictingincome and spending of the masses. We shouldstop the War on Drugs and reinvade poverty, -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 922 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090207/2652a1fd/attachment.txt From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sat Feb 7 21:55:06 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 20:55:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] US and UK on Brink of Debt Disaster; Commandeer the Private Sector like the Great Generation Message-ID: <360632.93627.qm@web180112.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> US and UK on Brink of Debt Disaster From: Bill Totten by John Kemp Reuters (January 20 2009) The United States and the United Kingdom stand on the brink of the largest debt crisis in history. While both governments experiment with quantitative easing, bad banks to absorb non-performing loans, and state guarantees to restart bank lending, the only real way out is some combination of widespread corporate default, debt write-downs and inflation to reduce the burden of debt to more manageable levels. Everything else is window-dressing. To understand the scale of the problem, and why it leaves so few options for policymakers, take a look at Chart 1, which shows the growth in the real economy (measured by nominal GDP) and the financial sector (measured by total credit market instruments outstanding) since 1952 {1}. In 1952, the United States was emerging from the Second World War and the conflict in Korea with a strong economy, and fairly low debt, split between a relatively large government debt (amounting to 68 percent of GDP) and a relatively small private sector one (just sixty percent of GDP). Over the next 23 years, the volume of debt increased, but the rise was broadly in line with growth in the rest of the economy, so the overall ratio of total debts to GDP changed little, from 128 percent in 1952 to 155 percent in 1975. The only real change was in the composition. Private debts increased (7.8 times) more rapidly than public ones (1.5 times). As a result, there was a marked shift in the debt stock from public debt (just 37 percent of GDP in 1975) towards private sector obligations (117 percent). But this was not unusual. It should be seen as a return to more normal patterns of debt issuance after the wartime period in which the government commandeered resources for the war effort and rationed borrowing by the private sector.^^^CB: The post on the myth of the NewDeal's failure points to the fadfor saying the New Deal failed.Part of the story is that it wasWar spending that ended the Great Depression But much of the war measures 'were ,as here "Government commendeeringof the private sector" . It worked.We need some commandeering of theprivate sector like we did duringWWII when it worked. We like thatpart of the New Deal especially.??? From the 1970s onward, however, the economy has undergone two profound structural shifts. First, the economy as a whole has become much more indebted. Output rose eight times between 1975 and 2007. But the total volume of debt rose a staggering 20 times, more than twice as fast. The total debt-to-GDP ratio surged from 155 percent to 355 percent. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 3115 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090207/980416c8/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Feb 8 03:39:36 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:39:36 +0900 Subject: [A-List] A Deindustrial Reading List Message-ID: <498EB668.9010000@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (February 04 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Over the last few months a number of people have asked me what books I think they ought to read to help them prepare for the slow unraveling of industrial civilization now getting started around us. This is frankly the kind of question I try my best to dodge. Premature consensus is arguably one of the most severe risks we face just now, and any image of the future - very much including the one I've sketched out here - is at best a scattershot sampling of the divergent possibilities facing us as the industrial age comes to its end. Thus anything that tends to encourage people in the peak oil movement, or the wider society around it, to think about the future in any stereotyped way is potentially fatal. Still, several readers have noted that the ideas in The Long Descent (2008) and these essays presuppose a worldview and a cultural and intellectual inheritance that aren't exactly widespread in popular culture these days. They've asked, if I may paraphrase a bit, what they should read to make better sense of my ravings. Put that way, it's not an unreasonable request, and since the view of history that shapes those ravings flies in the face of most of the common assumptions of the modern world, a little background may not hurt. I've thus sketched out a reading list of sorts for those interested in exploring in more detail the viewpoint I've presented here. It contains nearly as many broad categories as specific book recommendations; I have my preferences, and will suggest them, but here again diversity of opinion and information are essential. If everybody in your neighborhood reads and uses the techniques in a different gardening book, the resulting knowledge base will be much larger and more useful than if everybody relies on a single text, with its inevitable omissions and errors. For similar reasons, most of the books mentioned below are relatively old, and some of them are out of print. There are excellent new books on most of these subjects, and I certainly encourage you to read as many of those as appeal to you, but books written during any historical period mirror that period's presuppositions and habits of thought to a much greater extent than anybody notices at the time. One advantage of older books is precisely that their unthinking assumptions are easier to catch, and this in turn helps foster the awkward but essential realization that thirty years from now, the unquestioned truths and apparently reasonable assumptions of the present will look as outlandishly dated as bell bottom pants and disco music. Very few of the books I've suggested here are practical, in any ordinary sense of the word, and those that have that distinction are meant to be read and interpreted in rather impractical ways. The sheer diversity of potentials and needs that will likely open up in a deindustrializing future makes any sort of practical booklist an exercise in overgeneralization; the entire thrust of the deindustrial age heads from standardized approaches toward the diversity that comes from a renewed engagement with the local realities of one's own place, time, and community. A reader whose future career involves raising draft horses in rural Iowa has completely different practical needs from a reader who, ten years from now, will be salvaging and repairing appliances in a small West Coast city; what they need in common is a framework of ideas that will help them make sense of the wider picture, and the ideas I am trying to explore here provide one of these. Finally, I've made some suggestions about how to approach the books mentioned below. At the risk of sounding like a 19th-century schoolmaster, I probably need to point out that you won't get much out of any book if you approach it passively, and let the words dribble through your mind and out your ears like so many sitcom plots. The books I've suggested are not there so that you can agree with them unthinkingly; they are meant to get you to look under the hood of the ideas I've offered and see how the machinery works. With those caveats, here goes. The following books should be read, if you can manage that, in the order I've listed them. 1. A basic textbook of ecology. It really doesn't matter which one; the two on my bookshelves are Richard Brewer's Principles of Ecology and Eugene P Odum's Fundamentals of Ecology, but that's simply because these were the college textbooks I studied back in the day. What's essential is that the book you read should be a general textbook of scientific ecology, not a popularization or a polemic. A great many people have embraced ecology as an ideology or a sentimental pose without ever getting around to learning how living things and their environments interact. In the future, I'm convinced, a clear and unsentimental understanding of the way ecology works will be the most essential branch of human knowledge, and could spare individuals and communities some bitter lessons in the years to come. A basic grasp of ecology is also essential for making sense of the next three books. 2. The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, David Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W Behrens III. Get the original 1972 edition rather than either of the two updates, in which the original message has been partly overlaid with political polemic. The most insightful and thus inevitably the most vilified of the 1970s collapse literature, The Limits to Growth was the first book I know of to point out the central paradox of a perpetual growth economy: if economic growth is pursued far enough, the costs of further growth begin to rise faster than its benefits, and eventually force the growth economy to its knees. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies explored the same territory later on from another angle, and my essay on catabolic collapse did the same thing from a different angle again; still, the original presentation remains the most useful. Note whether The Limits to Growth makes more or less sense in the light of the basic ecological principles you read in the first book. 3. Overshoot by William R Catton Jr. Still far and away the best book on the twilight of the age of cheap energy, Overshoot is also one of the very few explorations of that troubling territory that is fully grounded in a clear grasp of ecological realities. A good half of the ideas explored in The Archdruid Report can trace their origins to one page or another of Catton's book. It is challenging reading and, in many places, depressing as well; Catton resolutely refuses to offer easy answers for the predicament into which industrial society has backed itself. Of all the currently out-of-print books on this list, though, this is the one I would most like to see reissued by some small publisher. Once again, assess Catton's claims in the light of the basic ecological principles you've learned. 4. A practical introduction to intensive organic gardening. John Jeavons' How To Grow More Vegetables and John Seymour's The Self-Sufficient Gardener are among the examples on my shelves (along with a number of more recent books, of course). It's best to choose one you haven't read before. The goal here is not to learn how to grow food using intensive organic methods - though that's very likely a good idea - but rather to think through the practical implications of the ecological ideas you've just studied. Ask yourself where the system of gardening presented by the book you're reading works with ecological cycles, and where it conflicts with them; imagine ways in which the logic governing organic gardening could be applied to other aspects of society and economy, and try to get a sense of the costs and benefits of making a transition from current practices to the ones you've imagined. 5 and 6. The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler and A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee. Get the abridged edition of each; the complete two-volume Spengler is hard to get, and only obsessive history fans like me work their way through all twelve volumes of Toynbee, but the one-volume Spengler abridgment and either the two-volume or the later one-volume versions of Toynbee are cheap, readily available, and no great challenge to read. These are the two great modern presentations of the case for cyclic history; they cover much the same territory, but each one does it from a unique perspective. Read them close together, and notice the places where Toynbee is arguing with Spengler's theories and conclusions; the Great Conversation is rarely quite so audible as here. While you read both books, notice whether the ecological perspectives you've absorbed from the first three books cast any additional light on the cycles outlined by these two authors. 7. The history of a dead civilization. It doesn't matter which one, and you have plenty of options to choose from. The only requirements are that the civilization should be as extinct as a dodo; the book you choose should focus on history rather than culture - that is, it should talk about what events happened in what order, rather than simply wallowing in the cultural high points and quietly neglecting how things fell to bits thereafter; and it should cover the whole history of the civilization from its origin to its collapse. As you trace the rise and fall of the civilization you've chosen, bring the lessons of the first six books to bear on it. What role did ecological factors in general, and the specific problems traced by Meadows et al and Catton, play in your civilization's rise and fall? How well do Spengler's and Toynbee's accounts of historical change fit the facts in this specific case? 8. Muddling Toward Frugality by Warren Johnson. This one may be a challenge to find; it appeared right at the end of the 1970s, had a brief flurry of popularity, and then vanished without a trace in the wave of reaction that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House and the lessons of the previous decade into oblivion. Regardless, it's one of the most thoughtful works to come out of the last energy crisis, an argument for unplanned, undramatic, and thoroughly non-ideological change as the best option at the end of the Age of Abundance. Johnson's analysis is much subtler than it looks; this is another book that needs to get back in print sooner rather than later. While reading it, bring your previous reading to bear on it; in particular, ask yourself how useful its proposals would have been if implemented at various points in the decline and fall of the civilization you studied. 9. Where The Wasteland Ends by Theodore Roszak. A brilliant, engaging, frustrating work, this is Roszak's exploration of the narratives and assumptions about reality that undergird modern industrial civilization. Some of my readers will find its argument appealing, while others will find it intolerable; both groups stand to learn a great deal from this book if they set aside these emotional reactions and pay attention to the way that Roszak crafts his case, to his choice of examples and evidence, and also to the things he doesn't address. As you read it, put it in its historical context: if it had been written in a dead civilization just before decline set in, what would Spengler and Toynbee have said about it? Then take it out of its historical context: what does its argument have to offer us now? 10. A book predicting a dramatic social transformation that didn't happen. Choose one that you would have rooted for at the time. If you believe that civilization is the root of all evils, pick up the sturdy Victorian radical Edward Carpenter's Civilization: Its Cause and Cure; if you believe that we are on the verge of breakthrough into a new kind of consciousness, try Charles Reich's The Greening of America; if you're secretly hoping for social collapse and mass dieoff, read one of the hundreds of books that have been predicting exactly that for the last dozen centuries, and so on. Try to put yourself into the mindset of the readers who believed it when it first saw print; see why it seemed to make sense at the time - and then step back and explore the reasons why nothing of the sort actually happened. Bring everything you've learned from the previous nine books to bear on this one. There you have it. It would probably be possible to draw up a list of books in print that would cast the same light on the ideas I'm trying to explore here. It would also be possible to draw up a list drawn entirely from Greek and Roman classical authors - though this would take a tolerance for the sort of thinking modern people mislabel "mysticism" well beyond what most readers have nowadays. Still, this is my list, and I'm stickin' with it; those who tackle it, on the off chance that anybody does, will end up with a much clearer idea of what I'm trying to say in these essays, and with any luck, will be able to go further with these curious notions than I have. _____ ?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/2009/02/deindustrial-reading-list.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 06:40:11 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 08:40:11 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More Message-ID: America does its imperialism as it does its capitalism: when a business fails, blame employees. Mr. Karzai may have sealed his fate by finally coming up with a sensible strategy last year and beginning to show signs of independent thinking: "At a news conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital, Mr. Karzai coupled his offer of safe passage to Mr. Omar with a warning to the Western nations that support his government, saying that if they opposed an assurance of safety for Mr. Omar they would have to remove Mr. Karzai as president or withdraw their troops from Afghanistan. . . . Mr. Karzai has recently toughened his tone when speaking of the American-led coalition in ways that appear to have been aimed at gaining wider support at home. Among other things, he has demanded that the coalition make more measured use of air power to reduce civilian casualties from bomb and missile attacks. With his warning that he would guarantee Mr. Omar's safety, he appeared to have taken one step further in marking his distance from the coalition" (at ). -- Yoshie February 8, 2009 Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More By DEXTER FILKINS KABUL, Afghanistan ? A foretaste of what would be in store for President Hamid Karzai after the election of a new American administration came last February, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator, sat down to a formal dinner at the palace during a visit here. Between platters of lamb and rice, Mr. Biden and two other American senators questioned Mr. Karzai about corruption in his government, which, by many estimates, is among the worst in the world. Mr. Karzai assured Mr. Biden and the other senators that there was no corruption at all and that, in any case, it was not his fault. The senators gaped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Mr. Biden threw down his napkin and stood up. "This dinner is over," Mr. Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time. And the three senators walked out, long before the appointed time. Today, of course, Mr. Biden is the vice president. The world has changed for Mr. Karzai, and for Afghanistan, too. A White House favorite ? a celebrity in flowing cape and dark gray fez ? in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own. In the White House, President Obama said he regarded Mr. Karzai as unreliable and ineffective. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he presided over a "narco-state." The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass Mr. Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside. At home, Mr. Karzai faces a widening insurgency and a population that blames him for the manifest lack of economic progress and the corrupt officials that seem to stand at every doorway of his government. His face, which once adorned the walls of tea shops across the country, is today much less visible. Now, perhaps crucially, an election looms. Mr. Karzai says he will ask the voters to return him to the palace for another five-year term. The election is set for Aug. 20, after what promises to be a violent and eventful summer. In a poll commissioned by a group of private Afghans, 85 percent of those surveyed said they intended to vote for someone other than Mr. Karzai. Meanwhile, the Obama administration will have to decide what it wants from Mr. Karzai as it tries to make good on its promise to reverse the course of the war. Or whether it wants him at all. With the insurgency rising, corruption soaring and opium blooming across the land, it perhaps is not surprising that so many Afghans, and so many in Washington, see President Karzai's removal as a precondition for reversing the country's downward surge. "Under President Karzai, we have gone from a better situation to a good situation to a not-so-bad situation to a bad situation ? and now are going to worse," said Abdullah, a former foreign minister in Mr. Karzai's government who may now challenge him for the presidency (and who, like many Afghans, has only one name). "That is the trend. "So let us say Karzai stays in power through the summer and that nothing serious happens and then he wins re-election," Dr. Abdullah said. "Then there will be two scenarios, and only two scenarios ? a rapid collapse or a slow unraveling." People close to Mr. Karzai say the man is exhausted, wary of his enemies and worried for his physical safety. He feels embattled and underappreciated, they say, but is utterly determined, in spite of it all, to run again and win. In recent weeks, the growing American dissatisfaction with Mr. Karzai, coupled with a simmering frustration among Afghans over what they regard as the reckless killing of civilians by American forces, has prompted extraordinary reactions from Mr. Karzai. At a news conference on Tuesday at his marble-floored palace, Mr. Karzai appeared side-by-side with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. Mr. Karzai wore his signature outfit of fez and cape, but his visage was wan and slack. Asked by an Afghan reporter about his relations with American leaders, Mr. Karzai sprang to life, accusing unnamed people in the American government of trying to "pressure" him to stay silent over the deaths of Afghan civilians in attacks by Americans. "Our demands are clear ? to stop the civilian casualties, the searching of Afghan homes and the arresting Afghans," Mr. Karzai said of the Americans. "And of course, the Americans pressured us to be quiet and to make us retreat from our demands. But that is impossible. Afghanistan and its president are not going to retreat from their demands." Mr. Karzai did not touch on larger frustrations, which Afghan and Western officials here say he harbors, about the overall American effort, namely, the relegation of Afghanistan to second-tier status after the invasion of Iraq. Many Afghans and Western officials here believe that it was the Iraq war, more than any other factor, that deprived Mr. Karzai of the resources he needed to help the Afghan state stand on its own, and to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban that Mr. Obama is now vowing to contain. Yet for all the doubts about Mr. Karzai ? and for all the strains he labors under ? he remains by far the strongest politician in the country. He commands the resources of the Afghan state, including the army and the police, and billions of dollars in American and other aid that flows into the treasury. In his seven years in office, Mr. Karzai has successfully presided over the transition of the Afghan state from the devastated, pre-modern institution it was under the Taliban to the deeply troubled but largely democratic one it is today. Perhaps most important for his future, Mr. Karzai has assembled a team of senior administrators whose competence and experience would be difficult for any challenger to match. Perhaps for that reason, of the many prominent Afghans who have hinted that they may run against him, including Dr. Abdullah and a former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, only a handful of Afghans have so far declared their intentions. Some Afghan leaders say they will announce their candidacies soon, but it seems just as likely that they are waiting to see if Mr. Karzai stumbles. As for the members of Mr. Obama's team, they may yet discover that Mr. Karzai is the man they will be forced to deal with, whether they like him or not. At the palace news conference, Mr. Karzai acknowledged his own unpopularity, and then offered a vigorous defense of his record. He declined to be interviewed for this article. "Well, I have been in government for seven years. It's natural that I would not be as popular now as I was seven years ago," Mr. Karzai said. "The institutions of Afghanistan have worked very well," he added. "The Afghan people participated in the election for president. They participated in elections for Parliament. The parliamentary system has been functioning a lot better than some established parliaments in the world. They have been making laws, approving laws. The government institutions are increasingly in progress ? the economy, the national army, the growth of education. We went from almost two or three universities in 2002 to 17 universities, to the freedom of the press, hundreds of newspapers and radios and all that. I and the Afghan people are proud of our achievements." And, he might also have said, six million Afghan children attending school, a quarter of whom are girls, whose education was prohibited by the Taliban. One of the people with the most generous words for Mr. Karzai is William Wood, the American ambassador. Under the ambassador's former boss, President Bush, Mr. Karzai enjoyed a favored personal status, even if his state did not. That special relationship was symbolized by the videoconferences in which the two men participated regularly. "The guy works very hard," Mr. Wood said of Mr. Karzai. "He faces a problem set every day that would daunt anyone. He's got an insurgency based outside the country, and a level of poverty and criminality inside the country that feeds the insurgency. He's got an army that had to be built from zero following the ouster of the Taliban. He's got a police force that had to be reformed. Speaking in an interview at his office in Kabul, Mr. Wood added: "Yeah, I think he's tired. And I think frankly that everyone ? the international community, the United States, the United Nations, Western Europe, the international press ? were unrealistically optimistic about the problem of Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban." Mr. Wood will soon be replaced by Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former commander of American forces here. In his last tour, which ended in 2007, General Eikenberry enjoyed good relations with Mr. Karzai. Given Mr. Karzai's mood these days, that is probably a good thing. At a ceremony last month for the first graduates of Afghanistan's National Military Academy, Mr. Karzai stood and addressed the assembled 84 cadets as well as a group of diplomats, including Mr. Wood. Mr. Karzai turned the occasion into a populist barnburner. "I told America and the world to give us aircraft ? otherwise we will get them from the other place!" Mr. Karzai roared, prompting applause. "I told them to give us the planes soon, that we have no more patience, and that we cannot get along without military aircraft! "Give us the aircraft sooner or we will get them from the others!" Mr. Karzai roared again. "We told them to bring us tanks, too ? otherwise we will get them from other place!" Mr. Karzai never said what the "other place" was. Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and Peter Baker from Washington. From seanfischer at earthlink.net Sun Feb 8 08:57:37 2009 From: seanfischer at earthlink.net (Sean Fischer) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 10:57:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth???? Message-ID: <5099976.1234108657639.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Uncommon Knowledge: The Great Depression with Amity Shlaes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLeAqbOUt4c -----Original Message----- >From: "farmelantj at juno.com" >Sent: Feb 6, 2009 7:38 AM >To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu >Subject: Re: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth > > >An example of the sort of thing that >McMillion discusses in his article >was former House Majority leader >Dick Armey's op-ed piece that >appeared the other day in the >Wall Street Journal >"Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek" >http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123371237124446245.html > >There, Armey champions the views of >Friedrich Hayek over John Maynard Keynes, >without mentioning anything concerning >the debates that raged between Keynes >and Hayek through the 1930s and 1940s. >Those debates eventually ended with >most of the economics profession concluding >that Keynes had emerged triumphant. >In fact by the late 1940s, Hayek pretty >much retired from active work in economics >and turned his attention to the other >social sciences. He didn't return to >active work in economics for another >thirty years, following his winning of >the Nobel Prize in economics in >1974, by which time the stagflation >of the 1970s had helped to bring >his economic ideas back into favor. > >Jim F, > > >-- Bill Totten wrote: > >by Charles McMillion > >www.ourfuture.org (February 03 2009) > > >Contrary to the anti-government myths and ideology-driven arguments of >conservatives like Amity Shlaes, the facts show FDR's New Deal quickly >brought rapid growth to the nation's economy during the Great Depression. > > > >____________________________________________________________ >Find the writing help you need for any essay topic. Click now! >http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/PnY6rw1VQfVBQjBej01ky9PWUS8l9Vwysbmi8H8Xak2GKyN1eDG5L/ > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Feb 8 17:49:12 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:49:12 +0900 Subject: [A-List] In 'Eat Local' Movement ... Message-ID: <498F7D88.6040504@ashisuto.co.jp> Cuba Is Years Ahead by Esteban Israel Reuters (December 16 2008) After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba planted thousands of urban cooperative gardens to offset reduced rations of imported food. Now, in the wake of three hurricanes that wiped out thirty percent of Cuba's farm crops, the communist country is again turning to its urban gardens to keep its people properly fed. "Our capacity for response is immediate because this is a cooperative", said Miguel Salcines, walking among rows of lettuce in the garden he heads in the Alamar suburb on the outskirts of Havana. Salcines says he is hardly sleeping as his 160-member cooperative rushes to plant and harvest a variety of beets that takes just 25 days to grow, among other crops. As he talks, dirt-stained men and women kneel along the furrows, planting and watering on land next to a complex of Soviet-style buildings. Machete-wielding men chop weeds and clear brush along the periphery of the field. Around fifteen percent of the world's food is grown in urban areas, according to the US Department of Agriculture, a figure experts expect to increase as food prices rise, urban populations grow and environmental concerns mount. Since they sell directly to their communities, city farms don't depend on transportation and are relatively immune to the volatility of fuel prices, advantages that are only now gaining traction as "eat local" movements in rich countries. Rooftops and Parking Lots In Cuba, urban gardens have bloomed in vacant lots, alongside parking lots, in the suburbs and even on city rooftops. They sprang from a military plan for Cuba to be self-sufficient in case of war. They were broadened to the general public in response to a food crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's biggest benefactor at the time. They have proven extremely popular, occupying 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres) of land across the Caribbean island. Even before the hurricanes, they produced half of the leaf vegetables eaten in Cuba, which imports about sixty percent of its food. "I don't say they have the capacity to produce enough food for the whole island, but for social and also agricultural reasons they are the most adequate response to a crisis", said Catherine Murphy, a US sociologist who has studied Cuba's urban gardens. Green Productivity In Alamar, the members get a salary and share the garden's profits, so the more they grow, the more they earn. They make an average of about 950 pesos, or $42.75, per month, more than double the national average, Salcines said. The co-op, which began in 1997, now produces more than 240 tons of vegetables annually on its eleven hectares (27 acres) of land, which is about the size of thirteen soccer fields. The gardens sell their produce directly to the community and, out of necessity, grow their crops organically. "Urban agriculture is going to play a key role in guaranteeing the feeding of the people much more quickly than the traditional farms", said Richard Haep, Cuba coordinator for German aid group Welthungerhilfe, which has supported these kinds of projects since 1994. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Cuba's supply of oil slowed to a trickle, hurting big state agricultural operations. Chemical fertilizers were replaced with mountains of manure, and beneficial insects were used instead of pesticides. Unlike in developed countries, where organic products are more expensive, in Cuba they are affordable. "We have taken organic agriculture to a social level", said Salcines. Some experts fear that rising international food prices along with the destruction of the hurricanes will return Cuba to the path of agrochemicals. The government is planning to construct a fertilizer plant with its oil-rich ally Venezuela. But Raul Castro, who replaced ailing brother Fidel Castro as president in February, has also borrowed ideas from the urban gardens as he implements reforms to cut the island's $2.5 billion in annual food imports, much of it from the United States. Castro has decentralized farm decision-making and raised the prices that the state pays for agricultural products, which has increased milk production, for example, by almost twenty percent. And, in September, the government began renting out unused state-owned lands to farmers and cooperatives, measures that met with approval of international aid groups. "Decentralization and economic incentives. If those elements are expanded to the rest of the agricultural sector, the response will be the same", said Welthungerhilfe's Haep. _____ Reporting by Esteban Israel; Editing by Jeff Franks and Eddie Evans (c) 2008 Reuters http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/16-6 http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From cbcox at ilstu.edu Sun Feb 8 22:29:53 2009 From: cbcox at ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox) Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:29:53 -0600 Subject: [A-List] The Concept of "Aura" and the Question of Art in Althusser, Benjamin and Greenberg References: <515668.40697.qm@web180107.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <498FBF51.751D7DDC@ilstu.edu> Charles Brown wrote: > > The Concept of "Aura" and the Question of Art in Althusser, Benjamin and Greenberg > By Gary Tedman > > I think we should not expect Marxism to produce a scientific (correct) theory of art, which would be like a Marxist theory of biology attempting to replace Darwinism. Instead, the theory must come from within the realms of art and be "internal" to that gamut of practices. Of course, Marxism has an input to make on this subject, and, in the absence of a universally accepted theory, it is obliged to take a position on art, to pick a side, so to speak. It is also obliged to champion those theories of art it thinks are the most progressive and scientific. I am not convinced that Marxism has done this in the past at all times. The "Question of Art" wiol finally be resolved the way all pseudo-questions are; people will get bored with it and turn their attention to more interesting topics. The question did not exist for "Homer" or Shakespeare or Milton or Rembrandt. It flickers in the 18th centyury and comes to full-blown life in the early 19th century. There is an interesting historical question: Why did the 19th-century invent art? I have a few vague ideas on this, but it's probably a question for historians of the future. Carrol From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Feb 8 22:33:34 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 00:33:34 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Khatami (Finally) Declares His Candidacy Message-ID: Khatami finally declared his candidacy: ; . Now the elections will be interesting. Yoshie From annewilliamson at msn.com Sun Feb 8 12:58:48 2009 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (Anne Williamson) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 14:58:48 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth In-Reply-To: <422129.63004.qm@web180113.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <422129.63004.qm@web180113.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The part that really worked great was plowing up crops, slaughtering livestock en mass and then burying the carcasses, and pouring milk on the ground - all this while Americans were standing in soup lines! And for what? To keep farm prices "up"! These acts in particular show what a financial and economic genius FDR and his Mussolini-inspired "brain trust" were...there was just no end to their brilliance as the Fed-created money bust struggled on for FOURTEEN years while the geniuses in Washington labored to bring back the Roaring Twenties! All we got was World War II - bummer. And, here we go again, with America's newest Head Waiter and his "brain trust" team serving all their pals while hoping against reason that they can reflate the Real Estate/derivative bubble. Deflation is not the enemy of the common man ("Gee, I just hate these lower prices, don't you, Ethyl?") but for the Fed and the lard-butt FedGov in DC, it is the kiss of death. Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 20:39:00 -0800 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth The "FDR Failed" Myth From: Bill Totten Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:22:03 +0900 User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090105) by Charles McMillion www.ourfuture.org (February 03 2009) ^^^^^CB: We need some more of the Great Societyand War on Poverty , too. They had a lot ofsuccess abating the poverty and unrestrictingincome and spending of the masses. We shouldstop the War on Drugs and reinvade poverty, -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2381 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090208/dc7ff916/attachment.txt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 9 12:16:53 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:16:53 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Khatami (Finally) Declares His Candidacy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <49908125.1020606@gmail.com> My twittered comment to Juan Cole on his take: http://www.juancole.com/2009/02/could-khatami-be-irans-obama.html "The Frankfurt School AFTER Marcuse? Too bad... Khatami coulda been a contenda." http://twitter.com/Da_Buffalo Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > Khatami finally declared his candidacy: > ; > . > Now the elections will be interesting. > Yoshie > > > From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Mon Feb 9 12:29:42 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:29:42 -0800 Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth In-Reply-To: References: <422129.63004.qm@web180113.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49908426.5080406@gmail.com> I've used the first two paragraphs (slightly re-formatted) of your post anonymously as the masthead quote on my site. http://leighm.net/ If you want credit or are unconcerned about anomonity, just let me know. Leigh Anne Williamson wrote: > The part that really worked great was plowing up crops, slaughtering > livestock en mass and then burying the carcasses, and pouring milk > on the ground - all this while Americans were standing in soup lines! > And for what? To keep farm prices "up"! These acts in particular show > what a financial and economic genius FDR and his Mussolini-inspired > "brain trust" were...there was just no end to their brilliance as the > Fed-created money bust struggled on for FOURTEEN years while the > geniuses in Washington labored to bring back the Roaring Twenties! > All we got was World War II - bummer. > > And, here we go again, with America's newest Head Waiter and his > "brain trust" team serving all their pals while hoping against reason that > they can reflate the Real Estate/derivative bubble. > > Deflation is not the enemy of the common man ("Gee, I just hate these > lower prices, don't you, Ethyl?") but for the Fed and the lard-butt > FedGov > in DC, it is the kiss of death. > From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Feb 9 12:51:59 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 14:51:59 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Khatami (Finally) Declares His Candidacy In-Reply-To: <49908125.1020606@gmail.com> References: <49908125.1020606@gmail.com> Message-ID: I have seen many liberal and leftist commentators on Iran, Iranians as well as non-Iranians, compare Ahmadinejad to Bush, but the comparison is fundamentally off the mark, in that, demographically, those who preferred Ahmadinejad to Rafsanjani in 2005 were roughly the opposite of those who preferred Bush to Gore in 2000 and Bush to Kerry in 2004. The main question is how the popular classes of Iran judge the last four years in three policy areas: domestic economic policy; domestic social and cultural policy; and foreign policy. The first probably is the most important. I'd say the judgment is a matter of whether the glass is half full or half empty. Iran's economy is hardly "in shambles" as Juan Cole suggests, but it's not as good as it could and should be: a fair number of Iranians have been lifted out of poverty, but the rich have benefited more than the poor, in the era of high oil prices, thus increasing inequality. Moreover, Ahmadinejad's new policy direction of cutting direct subsidies -- especially in energy -- and substituting cash benefits for the poor won't be popular (while it is true that direct subsidies -- especially on gasoline -- benefit the richer classes disproportionately, as the President and most economists say, means-tested benefits, especially if the cut-off threshold is set low, are more vulnerable to future cuts than global subsidies that benefit all classes, thus unfavorable to the poor in the long term, and the middle strata suffer immediately and are liable to rise up agianst them). However, Khatami and his supporters are unlikely to challenge this policy direction and try to out-populist Ahmadinejad. Yoshie On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Leighm wrote: > My twittered comment to Juan Cole on his take: > http://www.juancole.com/2009/02/could-khatami-be-irans-obama.html > > "The Frankfurt School AFTER Marcuse? Too bad... Khatami coulda been a > contenda." > > http://twitter.com/Da_Buffalo > > Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: >> >> Khatami finally declared his candidacy: >> ; >> . >> Now the elections will be interesting. >> Yoshie >> >> >> > > > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Feb 9 16:30:45 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:30:45 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Poverty of Imagination Message-ID: <4990BCA5.6010200@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005) www.kunstler.com (February 09 2009) Venturing out each day into this land of strip malls, freeways, office parks, and McHousing pods, one can't help but be impressed at how America looks the same as it did a few years ago, while seemingly overnight we have become another country. All the old mechanisms that enabled our way of life are broken, especially endless revolving credit, at every level, from household to business to the banks to the US Treasury. Peak energy has combined with the diminishing returns of over-investments in complexity to pull the "kill switch" on our vaunted "way of life" - the set of arrangements that we won't apologize for or negotiate. So, the big question before the nation is: do we try to re-start the whole smoking, creaking hopeless, futureless machine? Or do we start behaving differently? The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in futility. We've reached the limit of being able to create additional debt at any level without causing further damage, additional distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too). We can't raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability make monthly payments. We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete "growth" cycle of "economic expansion". We're done with all that. History is done with our doing that, for now. So far - after two weeks in office - the Obama team seems bent on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all the impossible things listed above. Mr Obama is not the only one, of course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth". This is a tragic error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities, and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a level of decreased complexity. For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent" and yet remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and there is absolutely no chance that drill-drill-drilling (or any other scheme) will change that. The public and our leaders can not face the reality of this. The great wish for "alternative" liquid fuels (bio fuels, algae excreta) will never be anything more than a wish at the scales required, and the parallel wish to keep all our cars running by other means - hydrogen fuel cells, electric motors - is equally idle and foolish. We cannot face the mandate of reality, which is to do everything possible to make our living places walkable, and connect them with public transit. The stimulus bills in congress clearly illustrate our failure to understand the situation. The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff with no money. From now on people will have to buy stuff with money they earn and save, and they will be buying a lot less stuff. For a while, a lot of stuff will circulate through the yard sales and Craigslist, and some resourceful people will get busy fixing broken stuff that still has value. But the other infrastructure of shopping is toast, especially the malls, the strip malls, the real estate investment trusts that own it all, many of the banks that lent money to the REITs, the chain-stores and chain eateries, of course, and, alas, the non-chain mom-and-pop boutiques in these highway-oriented venues. Washington is evidently seized by panic right now. I don't know anyone who works in the White House, but I must suppose that they have learned in two weeks that these systems are absolutely tanking, that the previous way of life that everybody was so set on not apologizing for has reached the end of the line. We seem to be learning a new and interesting lesson: that even a team that promises change is actually petrified of too much change, especially change that they can't really control. The argument about "change" during the election was sufficiently vague that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn't, materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought they would only administer it differently than the Bush team - but basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and Skipper's $20,000 college loan, and Dad's yearly junket to Las Vegas, and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan ... and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place. If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don't get started on this right away, we're screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors. The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses. It's a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again. We'll see a striking illustration of "phase change" as the public mood goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were, but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains of our capital resources down a rat hole. A consensus is firming up on each side of the "stimulus" question, largely along party lines - simply those who are for it and those who are against it, mostly by degrees. Nobody in either party - including supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to mention President Obama - has a position for directing public resources and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security, future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable, walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic interdependency. This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change that will tear the nation to pieces. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2009/02/poverty-of-imagination.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From noreply at coha.org Mon Feb 9 12:18:09 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 14:18:09 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Global Negligence Towards Haiti & Guatemalan Crime Message-ID: <20090209191808.A79C43E59E0@mx-out2.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 5363 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090209/e3f8b39f/attachment.txt From annewilliamson at msn.com Mon Feb 9 12:59:06 2009 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (Anne Williamson) Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 14:59:06 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth In-Reply-To: <49908426.5080406@gmail.com> References: <422129.63004.qm@web180113.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <49908426.5080406@gmail.com> Message-ID: Here's a masthead suggestion for another day, Leigh - and from a very authoritative source! None other than FDR's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthal, speaking in 1939: "We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot!" Wishing prices were allowed to clear the market for everyone's benefit, Anne > Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 11:29:42 -0800 > From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com > To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu > Subject: Re: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth > > I've used the first two paragraphs (slightly re-formatted) of your post > anonymously as the masthead quote on my site. http://leighm.net/ > > If you want credit or are unconcerned about anomonity, just let me know. > > Leigh > > Anne Williamson wrote: > > The part that really worked great was plowing up crops, slaughtering > > livestock en mass and then burying the carcasses, and pouring milk > > on the ground - all this while Americans were standing in soup lines! > > And for what? To keep farm prices "up"! These acts in particular show > > what a financial and economic genius FDR and his Mussolini-inspired > > "brain trust" were...there was just no end to their brilliance as the > > Fed-created money bust struggled on for FOURTEEN years while the > > geniuses in Washington labored to bring back the Roaring Twenties! > > All we got was World War II - bummer. > > > > And, here we go again, with America's newest Head Waiter and his > > "brain trust" team serving all their pals while hoping against reason that > > they can reflate the Real Estate/derivative bubble. > > > > Deflation is not the enemy of the common man ("Gee, I just hate these > > lower prices, don't you, Ethyl?") but for the Fed and the lard-butt > > FedGov > > in DC, it is the kiss of death. > > > > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2448 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090209/a44fd5b2/attachment.txt From james.irldaly at ntlworld.com Tue Feb 10 10:09:16 2009 From: james.irldaly at ntlworld.com (james daly) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:09:16 -0000 Subject: [A-List] error Message-ID: <66F48C80CD39422AB337EFF356AB0E63@home9sg93n9r5y> Sorry -- deleted these two messages by mistake. Could you please resend? -- JD From: tboyle at rosehill.net on Mon Feb 9 18:18:59 2009 Subject: Re: [A-List] Poverty of Imagination From: nscchicago at igc.org on Mon Feb 9 23:24:56 2009 Subject: MOVEMENT NEWS AFRO CARIBE SOUTH AMERICAN UPDATE From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Tue Feb 10 07:20:00 2009 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:20:00 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN Revenge of the Cradleboard Message-ID: <01de35a7$39854$0cd73888578356@xnote> REVENGE OF THE CRADLEBOARD ? the ?500 year war? of Indigenous genocide MNN. Feb. 9, 2009. When the Europeans invaded Turtle Island, they thought indigenous people were in their way. They pushed us west and did everything they could to get rid of us. Where did we go? 115 million were ?disappeared? and the world doesn?t care. The scum dogs of Europe set in motion a plan to dispossess us of our territories and resources. Almost all of us were annihilated in the biggest holocaust in the history of mankind. They developed ?scientific theories? that claimed we were an inferior race to justify killing us off. Their motto was ?the only good Indian is a dead Indian?. So there are only we mean ones left. Our ancestors sacrificed their lives at great cost so a few could be on Turtle Island today: in the beginning of the 20th century, from 60 million to 260,000 in the U.S. and less than 100,000 in Canada. The law in Canada was that ?a person was anyone other than an Indian?. We were treated like sub humans. The U.S. and Canada starved, subjugated, exterminated and then interned us on worthless land where it was almost impossible to survive. Today like guinea pigs we are numbered and catalogued more than anyone else in centralized computer information banks on all aspects of our lives. As part of ?racial hygiene? we were sterilized against our will. Our children were taken from us and put into concentration camps called residential/boarding schools. ?Kill the Indian and save the man? was their motto. In Canada almost half never returned home. They were sexually abused, experimented on or murdered. Hitler?s World War II holocaust was modeled on the American Indian one. Eugenics was part of how 10,000 French Canadians become a population of millions while we were being wiped out. In the early days of New France, as Quebec was called, the birthrate was low because few European women were in Canada before 1663. After the English defeated them in 1760, the Roman Catholic Church?s retaliation was called the ?revenge of the cradle?. They wanted to drown the English in a ?bath? of French Catholic babies. The priests told the women that the ideal French Canadian mother was the one who took the first son from the cradle to replace him with his younger brother, while telling him that next year a little sister would take his place and so on. Fourteen children was the ideal. If they did not produce a child every year, they had to confess their sin. The protestants used the same fertility strategy to secure their theft of our lands. The physical strain of this policy killed the settler women and many of their babies. The women got medals from the Pope for having at least 10 children. In 1973 a reporter from France, Andre Luchaire, wrote a story about this for La Presse. He visited a woman in the Laurentians, north of Montreal, who had over 25 children. He asked her to name her children who were running all around playing. She signaled one over and asked him, ?What?s your name, son?? In the 1970s after the ?quiet revolution? when modern life hit Quebec, the French birthrate plummeted. They stampeded out of the church over this issue. Recently technology made it possible for a 33-year old single woman in California to give birth to eight babies at one time through in vitro fertilization. She already had six. In previous multiple births the government stepped in and made assistance and funds available to help out the families. In this recent event, criticism and almost condemnation has been leveled at the mother about the cost to taxpayers, the social problems and government funds expended. Why? She is well educated and loves her 14 children. This woman is a person of color and she did not intend to have eight children. She wanted only one. All the implanted eggs survived in her womb and produced eight babies. She could not bring herself to abort any of them. She is obviously strong and so are her offspring to survive such an ordeal. Since the invaders to Turtle Island have almost destroyed the environment that threatens to wipe out humanity, it is time to bring back the ways of Indigenous people to save mother earth. We are not advocating that Indigenous women start having eight babies at a time. Indigenous women should be given the assistance needed to cut down our high infant death rate and to stop the theft of our children by government agencies such as social services. The survival and health of our babies means raising them in a decent standard of living to which we are entitled. Presently we are forced to live in one of the lowest life standards in the world. To take care of our children we need the same level of human rights as anybody else. Why is this being denied to us? Yes, our birthrate is higher than the rest. This is a natural biological response to the genocide perpetrated on us. Canada wants to cut down our births. To hit us Ottawa recently made two major budget cuts to help stay-at-home mothers and provide day care for those who have to work. More will have to go on welfare which is not enough to cover decent food and shelter. Canada is deliberately creating hopelessness to lower our population by knowingly worsening conditions that will make us sick and that will make it harder for us to look after our children. The colonists would rather hang empty cradle boards on museum walls than put live Indigenous babies in them to be raised by healthy Indigenous communities. Ia?koha:kowa & MNN Staff Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com kittoh at storm.ca katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Note: 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. Go to MNN ?Canada? 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 From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Tue Feb 10 16:43:33 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:43:33 -0800 Subject: [A-List] After 'big game' - Senator Leahy calls for 'truth commission' Message-ID: <49921125.3040905@gmail.com> The other day I saw that Leon Panetta had stated that he would not seek the prosecution of military 'interrogators'. It 'twittered like this: FWIW, so were the Nazis... Panetta won't prosecute CIA 'interrogators' because they followed 'legal orders' http://cli.gs/1gbLQB But those guys are just the small fries... Leahy: "[Lawmakers] could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth. Congress has already granted immunity, over my objection, to those who facilitated warrantless wiretaps and those who conducted cruel interrogations. It would be far better to use that authority to learn the truth." More @ Jurist: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/02/senate-judiciary-chair-leahy-calls-for.php Travus T. Hipp's been on a roll as well... Today: [February 10 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: It?s Not ALL ?Chickens Coming Home To Roost As Raptors? ? California Has Been Ordered By A Federal Panel Of Judges To Release About 40% Of It?s Prisoners, But Everything Will PROBABLY Be Alright http://leighm.net/wp/2009/02/10/tth_090210/ http://www.archive.org/details/tth_090210 Yesterday, a Yemen SPECTACULAR! [February 09 2009] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: What Did S.I. Hayakawa And The Queen Of Sheba Have In Common? They Both Visited Yemen - A Geopolitical Travelogue Of Yemen And Environs http://leighm.net/wp/2009/02/09/tth_090209/ http://www.archive.org/details/tth4_090209 Why Yemen, you say? > We just ?lost? Yemen? The alleged second in command of Al Qaeda?s > Yemen franchise says Yemen is now the AQ ?operational center? for the > Arabian peninsula, and the further, the government says they are > looking forward to receiving the Guantanamo inmates being release? 40% > of Gitmo?s POW population. As a show of goodwill, the Yemeni > government has just released 170 al Qaeda suspects. More on Yemen in > the commentary. > > In case anyone crunches the numbers it means two million men have been > killed? In Iraq, the minister of womans affairs has quit after the > budget for the department was cut from $7500 a month to $1500 (You > read those figures right). Her count is 3 million widows begging on > the streets of Baghdad. More from Reuters AlertNet, sourced from IRIN > Iran. > > Da? Buffalo adds, meanwhile, and apropos to the commentary, the first > Western tourist shows up in Iraq: From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Tue Feb 10 18:10:17 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:10:17 -0800 Subject: [A-List] There Goes The Neighborhood - So-called 'Squatters' In High End Sacramento Neighborhood Raided, Evicted Message-ID: <49922579.9080706@gmail.com> Methinks it was an family nest of middle-class Sacto cokester/cranksters who's party most likely ended recently in the rubble of the California housing market. In California, there are as many RE agents as their are sand fleas on all the beaches put together. "Sacramento Police Department; open the door," Wood yelled as he banged on the front door. Real estate agent Todd Stewart, who represents the bank that owns the home, was with police and gave them a key to the front door lock, which he had changed last week. However, the residents apparently had changed the lock again and Stewart's key did not work. That left the decision on which door would be kicked in. Police settled on a side door and after several sturdy kicks, it gave way. Unfortunately, that door led into the garage. Another sturdier door resisted numerous kicks from an officer, who finally stopped when someone called from the backyard: "There's a window open back here." Sacramento Bee Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2009 Sacramento police today issued arrest warrants for four people who are suspected of illegally occupying a Natomas-area home in the exclusive Westlake neightborhood. Police kicked in a door at the home on Clubside Lane shortly before 11 a.m. this morning in an effort to evict and arrest tentants who they say moved in illegally more than a week ago. Police said they believe the incident is part of a "cash for keys" scam in which the renters planned to stay in the bank-owned home until they received a payment from the bank in exchange for moving out. The home was empty this morning, except for a few personal belongings and landscaping tools. Being sought on criminal trespass charges are Phillis Powers, a real estate agent who police say rented the house out without legal authority to do so; Carver Barney, his wife Sandra, and her brother Dennis Eugene. Police believe the four suspects are related: Sandra Barney and Dennis Eugene are thought to be Powers' siblings. Police said Eugene has an outstanding warrant involving another matter, but provided no details this morning. The raid on the home disrupted a peaceful neighborhood that is home to several influential Sacramentans, including members of the Maloof family, who own the Sacramento Kings, and Sacramento State President Alexander Gonzalez. Neighbors say the home had been vacant for more than a year after its owners had trouble selling it. It was obtained at auction last month by Aurora Loan Services Inc. More than a week ago, according to neighbors, a couple moved in, and signs went up on the front windows claiming the home had been deemed abandoned and threatening trespassers with "justifiable homicide." Police say the new occupants had no right to be there, and Sacramento police Detective Mike Wood and other officers began banging on the door this morning to remove them. "Sacramento Police Department; open the door," Wood yelled as he banged on the front door. Real estate agent Todd Stewart, who represents the bank that owns the home, was with police and gave them a key to the front door lock, which he had changed last week. However, the residents apparently had changed the lock again and Stewart's key did not work. That left the decision on which door would be kicked in. Police settled on a side door and after several sturdy kicks, it gave way. Unfortunately, that door led into the garage. Another sturdier door resisted numerous kicks from an officer, who finally stopped when someone called from the backyard: "There's a window open back here." Officers gained entry through the window, and found no one inside the home. There was no furniture, but there were a few personal belongings, including blankets and pillows, a box of children's toys, Christmas gift wrap, an electric chain saw and a lawn mower. Wood said the investigation is continuing and additional charges may be filed. Police said the house appeared to be in good condition. Once the home is cleaned up, the bank intends to put it back on the market. http://www.sacbee.com/1089/story/1614171.html From tboyle at rosehill.net Tue Feb 10 11:57:56 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:57:56 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Poverty of Imagination Message-ID: Among many other observations that are quite useful, Jim Kuntsler of Clusterfuck Nation is in the habit of overstatement, >If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, >there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of >Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and >grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on >it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change >in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social >relations. But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans >will end up starving, and rather soon. I doubt that "... none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington..." I doubt that "... a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. " I also reject his conclusion immediately following the above claims, that we have to build a railway system that can serve this whole continent, or "we're screwed". Kunstler may indeed be right. But I believe he's wrong. In any case, he did not establish either the economic assumptions or the cost or timeline of his model, to lay an entire new mesh of steel rails, presumably, standard-gauge rail, at such density it could serve the continent without cars. I should add, railroads require 2 rail lines in each direction if you want express trains to flow efficiently, without forcing conflicts with local trains, long layovers. (And dictating the periodicity of the distance between stations, ugh. ) The country is a plane. Transport is required for the entire plane, not a line on the plane. As soon as you put a permanent rail line, you create an extreme distortion in the economic uses of the land, ie. waste, and conflict. come on folks, this is just basic arithmetic. >For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent" and yet >remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply >trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use ...For instance, the myth >that we can become "energy independent" and yet >remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply >trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use ... I doubt that remaining car dependent is absurd. What if cars were electrified, and it becomes a criminal offense to exceed 800 pounds gross weight, or 5 feet high, or 5 feet wide or fail to achieve an equivalent of 100 mpg? And we regulate and tax the hell out of all cargo and legacy automobiles until basically everything that moves in America is palletized to fit on carriages less than 5 feet x 5 feet? -- you can transport *long* things, but not *huge* things, on the new roads. What if we build a lot of bridges and tunnels 5x5 feet and automate the parking and all the navigation, there are no more accidents, no more grade level crossings, and no more red lights. Would that be efficient enough? -- The freeway near my house is 150 feet wide. What if we consolidate it to two 5x5 stacks in each direction, 3 stories tall? That's 6 lanes in each direction and it only took up around 15 feet of width, including all its supporting columns. and we can use the remaining 135 feet of width, for new industry. So, don't give me this "POVERTY OF IMAGINATION" CRAP. [I apologize for the tone; no insult intended to the man, just the idea.] Todd I hate cars: I have never used a car for transportation since I was a teenager. I haven't owned one in decades. http://rosehill.net/cars.htm -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4142 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090210/848db585/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Feb 10 19:16:32 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:16:32 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Tax The Speculators Message-ID: <49923500.6010301@ashisuto.co.jp> by Ralph Nader Nader.org (February 04 2009) Let's start with a fairness point. Why should you pay a five to six percent sales tax for buying the necessities of life, when tomorrow, some speculator on Wall Street can buy $100 million worth of Exxon derivatives and not pay one penny in sales tax? Let's further add a point of common sense. The basic premise of taxation should be to first tax what society likes the least or dislikes the most, before it taxes honest labor or human needs. In that way, revenues can be raised at the same time as the taxes discourage those activities which are least valued, such as the most speculative stock market trades, pollution (a carbon tax), gambling, and the addictive industries that sicken or destroy health and amass large costs. So, your member of Congress, who is grappling these days with gigantic deficits on the backs of your children at the same time as that deep recession and tax cuts reduce revenues and increase torrents of red ink, should be championing such transaction taxes. Yet apart from a small number of legislators, most notably Congressman Peter Welch (Democrat, Vermont) and Peter DeFazio (Democrat, Oregon), the biggest revenue producer of all - a tax on stock derivative transactions - essentially bets on bets - and other mystifying gambles by casino capitalism - is at best corridor talk on Capitol Hill. There are differing estimates of how much such Wall Street transaction taxes can raise each year. A transaction tax would, however, certainly raise enough to make the Wall Street crooks and gamblers pay for their own Washington bailout. Lets scan some figures economists put forth. The most discussed and popular one is a simple sales tax on currency trades across borders. Called the Tobin Tax after its originator, the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist at Yale University, ten to 25 cents per hundred dollars of the huge amounts of dollars traded each day across bordered would produce from $100 to $300 billion per year. There are scores of civic, labor, environmental, development, poverty and law groups all over the world pressing for such laws in their countries {1}. According the University of Massachusetts economist, Robert Pollin, various kinds of securities-trading taxes are on the books in about forty countries, including Japan, the UK and Brazil. Pollin writes in the current issue of the estimable Boston Review: "A small tax on all financial-market transactions, comparable to a sales tax, would raise the costs on short-term speculative trading while having negligible effect on people who trade infrequently. It would thus discourage speculation and channel funds toward productive investment." He adds that after the 1987 stock market crash, securities-trading taxes "or similar measures" were endorsed by then Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and even the first President Bush. Professor Pollin estimates that a one-half of one percent tax would raise about $350 billion a year. That seems conservative. The Wall Street Journal once mentioned about $500 trillion in derivatives trades alone in 2008 - the most speculative of transactions. A one tenth of one percent tax would raise $500 billion dollars a year, assuming that level of trading. Economist Dean Baker says a "modest financial transactions tax would be enough to "finance a ten percent across-the-board reduction in the income tax on labor. The stock transaction tax goes back a long way. A version helped fund the Civil War and the imperial Spanish-American War. The famous British economist, John Maynard Keynes, extolled in 1936 a securities transaction tax as having the effect of "mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise". The US had some kind of transaction tax from 1914 to 1966. The corporate history scholar Thom Hartmann {2}, turned three-hour-a-day talk-show-host on Air America {3}, had discussed the long evolution of what he calls a "securities turnover excise tax" to "tamp down toxic speculation, while encouraging healthy investment". So, why don't we have such a mega-revenue generator and lighten the income tax load on today and tomorrow's American worker? (It was one of the most popular ideas I campaigned on last year. People got it.) Because American workers need to learn about this proposed tax policy and ram it through Congress. Tell your Senators and Representatives - no ifs, ands or buts. Otherwise, Wall Street will keep rampaging over people's pensions and mutual fund savings, destabilize their jobs and hand them the bailout bill, as is occurring now. A few minutes spent lobbying members of Congress by millions of Americans (call, write or e-mail, visit or picket) will produce one big Change for the better. Contact your member of Congress. The current financial mess makes this the right time for action. Notes: {1} See tobintaxcall.free.fr. {2} Read his excellent book, Unequal Protection (2004) {3} airamerica.com/thomvision http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2101-Tax-The-Speculators.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Feb 11 04:53:24 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:53:24 +0900 Subject: [A-List] =?iso-2022-jp?b?KBskQjxSMzAbKEIpIGFzaGlzdXRvLmNvLmpwLT4g?= =?iso-2022-jp?b?YS1saXN0?= Message-ID: <4992BC34.4090806@ashisuto.co.jp> Derivatives by Warren E Buffett, Chairman and CEO From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Tue Feb 10 19:42:07 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:42:07 +1100 Subject: [A-List] What's new at Links: Climate and bushfires; boycott Israel; Philippines new left party; WSF; Canada; Castro on Obama; British strike debate; Venezuela & Israel Message-ID: <49923AFF.3020908@greenleft.org.au> What's new at Links: Climate and bushfires; boycott Israel; Philippines new left party; WSF; Canada; Castro on Obama; British strike debate; Venezuela & Israel * * * 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/. * * * Meltdown, fires as climate emergency hits Australia: Urgent action required By Katherine Bradstreet Melbourne, February 7, 2009 -- The heatwave across south-eastern Australia in recent weeks has given a hint of what we can expect as global temperatures continue to rise: black-outs, fatalities and transport chaos as privatised infrastructure fails. Many are in mourning as bushfires have devastated rural Victoria, with the death toll passing triple figures and more than 750 homes destroyed. The country town of Marysville has been erased from the map. Several other towns have all but been destroyed. Even before the bushfire catastrophe, South Australia and Victoria had seen a sharp increase in deaths as a result of the heatwave, with Adelaide's central morgue quite literally overflowing -- the "excess" cadavers were stored temporarily in a refrigerated freight container. * Read more South Africa: Victory for workers' solidarity as Israeli ship sneaks out of Durban still loaded Congress of South African Trade Unions and Palestine Solidarity Committee (South Africa) [See http://links.org.au/node/888 for more background information.] February 6, 2009 -- The Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU) is pleased to announce that its members, dock workers belonging to the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), achieved a victory last night when they stood firm by their decision not to offload the Johanna Russ, a ship that was carrying Israeli goods to South Africa. This, despite threats to COSATU members from sections of the pro-Israel lobby, and despite severe provocation. * Read more New left party -- Power of the Masses Party -- formed in Philippines Interview with Sonny Melencio, chairperson of Partido Lakas ng Masa of the Philippines. Conducted by Peter Boyle for Green Left Weekly and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewalin Manila on February 1, 2009. * Read more Sydney, April 10-12 (Easter), 2009: World at a Crossroads - Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century World At a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century * Read more World Social Forum: `We won't pay for the crisis. The rich must pay!' Declaration of the Assembly of Social Movements at the World Social Forum, January 27-February 1, 2009, Belem, Brazil. * Read more Spain: Video -- Anti-apartheid protesters disrupt Israeli basketball team's game Barcelona, February 5, 2009 -- Protesters opposed to Israel's apartheid policies and its atrocities in Gaza chanted slogans and waved Palestinian flags during a basketball match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Barcelona on Thursday, February 5, 2009. Despite tight police security, protesters managed to disrupt the game by running onto the court before being dragged away by aggressive cops and security guards. Tel Aviv was thrashed 85-65 by Barcelona. Boicot del partit de b?squet Bar?a -- Maccabi de Tel Aviv. Palau Blaugrana. 5 de febrer de 2009. Boicot a Israel. Solidaritat amb Palestina!! Watch at http://links.org.au/node/895 The capitalist crash and the challenges facing socialists in Canada By Roger Annis and John Riddell [Roger Annis will be a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, on April 10-12, 2009, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and Green Left Weekly. Visit http://www.worldATACrossroads.org for full agenda and to book your tickets.] The first casualty of the financial collapse has been the claim that "there is no alternative" to unrestricted free market capitalism. The imperialist governments are bankrolling imperilled banks and industrial conglomerates with immense bailouts -- an estimated $5.1 trillion in the US alone by November 2008 -- while preparing "stimulus" packages aimed at restoring financial markets. * Read more San Francisco trade unionists support boycott of apartheid Israel San Francisco trade unionists support boycott of apartheid Israel, protest in soldarity with the Palestinian people, January 10, 2009. Watch at http://links.org.au/node/892 Australia: Climate Summit unites new environment movement By Simon Butler, Canberra * Read more Fidel Castro: Contradictions between Obama's politics and ethics By Fidel Castro Ruz February 4, 2009 -- A few days ago I referred to some of Obama's ideas which point to his role in a system that denies every principle of justice. I'd rather address some questions of many that could be raised and that the new President of the United States should answer. * Read more Chavismo: Christian, pro-Muslim, pro-Jewish and anti-Nazi By Roy Chaderton Matos, Venezuela's ambassador to the Organization of American States. January 30, 2009 -- Watching television footage of one of the necessary and legitimate protests against the Israeli Embassy in Caracas, I spotted a lone sign with a slogan that left me thunderstruck. The slogan was something like: "We condemn Hitler for not having completed his work of extermination..." The frightening message, totally alien to the Bolivarian process and the Chavista commitment to liberty, democracy, equality and social justice, shows that, every now and then in our struggles and protests, "loose cannons" come dog us and that we have to detect them and neutralise them and expel them like any foreign body. * Read more South African dockworkers announce ban on Israeli ship; Palestinians salute decision FREE PALESTINE! ISOLATE APARTHEID ISRAEL! February 3, 2009 -- In a historic development for South Africa, South African dock workers have announced their determination not to offload a ship from Israel that is scheduled to dock in Durban on Sunday, February 8, 2009. This follows the decision by COSATU to strengthen the campaign in South Africa for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against apartheid Israel. * Read more `For international solidarity between workers' -- British left debates Lindsey oil refinery strike wave (updated Feb. 7) A range of views from the British and Scottish left on the strike wave that erupted at the Lindsey oil refinery and rapidly spread across the country. Statements from Socialist Resistance, Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Respect MP George Galloway, the Socialist Party, the Morning Star, Lenin's Tomb blog and the Socialist Unity blog. * 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: 14976 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090211/f466d564/attachment.txt From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Feb 11 18:15:04 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:15:04 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Tools for a New Economy Message-ID: <49937818.4020705@ashisuto.co.jp> Proposals for a financial regulatory system by Robert Pollin Boston Review (January / February 2009) The collapse of the housing bubble and the speculative market for subprime mortgages demonstrates, yet again, the simple point that financial markets need tight regulation. Since September 2008 a series of massive bailouts by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have prevented financial markets from experiencing a 1929-style collapse. These extreme measures, however, have not solved the broader problems at hand. As of this writing, we are experiencing the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s. American politicians - Democrats and Republicans alike - began deregulating the US financial system in the 1970s. Their premise was that regulations devised during the 1930s - specifically the Glass-Steagall system, which defined separate spheres for commercial and investment banks - would hinder the effective workings of contemporary financial markets. The 2001 Economic Report of the President, Bill Clinton's last, unequivocally dismissed Glass-Steagall: "Given the massive financial instability of the 1930s, narrowing the range of banks' activities was arguably important for that day and age. But those rules are not needed today." The chorus of politicians and economists who for a generation advocated financial deregulation were right about one thing: the financial system has become infinitely more complex since the 1930s. Something that had been as simple as a local Savings & Loan making a home mortgage in their community - recall Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) - is now part of a speculative global market. The old regulations had indeed become outmoded, but it never followed that financial markets should operate unregulated. The historical record makes this clear. In the classic text Manias, Panics and Crashes (1978), Charles Kindleberger called financial crises a "hardy perennial" within the context of unregulated financial systems. He documented that, from 1725 onward, financial crises have occurred throughout the Western capitalist economies at an average rate of about one every eight and half years. There is an awful lot about the current financial crisis that is familiar. In 2001 the the US stock market crashed after having been driven during the late 1990s to unprecedented levels of speculative frenzy by the dot-com boom. A global financial crisis originated in East Asia in 1997-98 and spread rapidly. The sure-thing investment then was securities markets in developing countries. The US hedge fund Long Term Capital Management - its board of directors guided by two Nobel Prize-winning economists specializing in finance - disintegrated in that crisis, requiring a $4 billion bailout from other Wall Street firms to prevent a market meltdown. The most severe crash of an overwrought financial market, the 1929 Wall Street crash, produced an economic calamity, which led in turn to a collapse of the US banking system. Between 1929 and 1933, nearly forty percent of the nation's banks disappeared. In their wake, Roosevelt's New Deal government put in place an extensive system of financial regulations, many of which persisted beyond the conclusion of the Great Depression. The most important initiative was the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, or, as it is officially known, the Banking Act. Commercial banks were limited to the relatively humdrum tasks of accepting deposits, managing checking accounts, and making business loans. Commercial banks would also be monitored by the newly formed Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provided government-sponsored deposit insurance for the banks in exchange for close government scrutiny of their activities. Investment banks, by contrast, could freely invest their clients' money on Wall Street and undertake other high-risk activities, but they had to steer clear of the commercial banks. Similar regulations were imposed on Savings & Loans (S&Ls) in 1932, and continued to operate through the 1970s. In particular, under the old regulatory regime, mortgage loans in the United States could be issued only by S&Ls and related institutions. The government regulated the rates S&Ls could charge on mortgages, and the S&Ls were prohibited from holding highly speculative assets in their portfolios. But even during the New Deal years themselves, financial-market titans were already fighting to eliminate or at least defang the regulations. Since the 1970s, they have almost always gotten their way. This led cumulatively to the dismantling of Glass-Steagall. The final nail in the coffin came in 1999 when President Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act. He did so with the strong support of then-Senator Phil Gramm, later a top advisor to John McCain's Presidential campaign; then-Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan; and top advisors Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, both of whom would later counsel the Obama campaign and transition team. While the current crisis resembles its predecessors in many ways, it also has some novel characteristics. Its most prominent distinction is that it has resulted from activities that were supposed to benefit working families. Banks created opportunities for families with less-than-stellar credit records to obtain mortgages and buy their own homes. By bundling thousands of mortgages into securities that were freely traded on global financial markets, banks enabled subprime borrowers to purchase houses that would otherwise have been off limits. This kind of financial engineering, operating on a global scale, could not have been possible under the Glass-Steagall system. We need a new regulatory framework that is capable of stabilizing markets and channeling financial resources away from the speculative casino. The idea behind bundling mortgages into marketable securities is that the local bank or S&L that lends you money to buy a home does not hold onto your loan once you get your money. Rather, it sells your loan to a big financial institution, such as the government-sponsored Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which, in turn, bundles thousands of individual mortgages into securities. Fannie or Freddie then sells these mortgage-backed securities to banks, hedge funds, and other market players. With thousands of mortgages packaged into one security, the dangers of lending to higher-risk borrowers are supposed to decline; within a large portfolio of mortgages, the losses lenders incur from the small share of delinquent borrowers are offset by the much larger proportion of borrowers in good standing. Market players became convinced that "securitizing" loans made subprime mortgage lending a much safer bet. For a time, optimistic expectations became self-fulfilling. Money rapidly flowed into the market. Housing prices rose, seemingly creating wealth out of thin air for homeowners. Market bulls grew rich while bears seemed out-of-step. Loan officers earned handsome commissions by bringing new customers to their banks. These officers had large incentives to approve subprime mortgages - they did not have to return their commissions years later when, for example, the loans, now held by a Swiss hedge fund, went sour. The logic here is deeply flawed. Market players believed that the riskiness of subprime mortgages would diminish when pooled. In fact, the opposite turned out to be true. The fortunes of most subprime borrowers rose and fell together with the housing market's boom and bust. In the bust, the problems borrowers faced in meeting monthly payments became pervasive, not limited to isolated cases. This is why major financial institutions such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns, which were holding huge pools of subprime mortgages, experienced unprecedented losses in 2007, setting off the collapse of US financial markets. Today's crisis is thus the direct consequence of the generation-long project of deregulating financial markets. * * * We need a new regulatory framework that is capable of both stabilizing markets and, correspondingly, channeling financial resources toward productive and socially useful investments and away from the speculative casino. What follows is a series of proposals to guide the new framework. They offer a decisive break from the deregulatory agenda of the past generation, yet they are all feasible within the existing set of political and regulatory institutions. Enacting them would require insignificant increases in administrative costs and low levels of public outlay. All of these proposals have been debated seriously within mainstream political circles. US markets, of course, operate within a globally integrated setting, a reality that complicates any regulatory scheme. These proposals are intended to apply to all financial institutions under US legal jurisdiction, whether they are called banks, holding companies, hedge funds, or variations thereof. My first proposal is the establishment of a small tax on all trading of financial assets. Financial markets do provide an essential service by simplifying the conversion of investments into money. But this benefit must be weighed against the fact that trading has almost nothing to do with raising funds for investment. As of 2007, players in the market traded roughly $300 worth of stocks and bonds for every dollar that nonfinancial corporations raise for new investments in plant and equipment. This ratio is about three times what it was only a decade ago, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. A small tax on all financial-market transactions, comparable to a sales tax, would raise the costs on short-term speculative trading while having negligible effect on people who trade infrequently. It would thus discourage speculation and channel funds toward productive investment. Securities-trading taxes are common throughout the world. Roughly forty countries, including Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Chile employ or have recently employed such a tax. In the aftermath of the 1987 crash, securities-trading taxes or similar measures were endorsed by then-House Speaker Jim Wright, then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, and even the first President Bush. Variations on the idea have been introduced in Congress regularly in subsequent years, but never passed into law. Two leading Clinton administration economists, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Summers, argued persuasively for such a tax in the late 1980s. Summers disavowed the idea soon after joining the Clinton Treasury, becoming instead a major supporter of the deregulation agenda of the Clinton years. What Summers might support now, as the head of National Economic Council under President Obama, is an open question. The technical features of a trading tax are simple. For stocks, the seller could be charged, for example, 0.5 percent of the sale price (Jim Wright suggested this rate in 1987). For bonds, the tax would be proportional to the bond's duration, at a rate of 0.01 percent per year. Thus, the tax on selling a thirty-year bond would be 0.3 percent, and a tax on a fifty-year bond, 0.5 percent. The tax would be adjusted on a comparable basis for derivative financial instruments, such as options, futures, and credit swaps. Brokers would be responsible for collecting the tax from the sellers at the time of sale. Since the IRS already imposes trade-reporting requirements, a securities trade tax would entail little additional administrative apparatus. Nor would it have a significant impact on anyone who bought an asset and did not promptly resell it for a quick profit. For someone who buys stock at $50 per share and sells it ten years later at $100 per share, the trading tax would be $0.50 per share, on a $50 capital gain. Conversely, a 0.5 percent tax would seriously reduce profit for short-term speculators. It is not uncommon for speculators to buy a stock, hold it for a day or even hours, and then resell it for a small gain. A $1 capital gain for a $99 share bought yesterday and sold today $100 today nets a good return on a one-day investment. The trading tax would garner 50 cents - half the earnings from the trade. One could use the tax on its own to cut financial speculation dramatically. That would only entail raising the tax rate until the point where traders see little incentive to trade at all. But the aim is not to shut off trading altogether; if that were the case, full nationalization of the financial markets would probably be a more effective approach. Even at a rate too low to dampen speculation, the securities-trading tax has another benefit. It would provide a new source of government revenue at a time when it is badly needed. Working with 2007 figures, I estimate that a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades, and the sliding scale described above for bonds and derivatives, would raise approximately $350 billion, if trading did not decline at all after the tax was imposed. Even if trading declined by fifty percent as a result of the tax, the government would still raise $175 billion, roughly equal to both the entire Iraq war budget for 2008 and the April 2008 fiscal stimulus initiative. The securities trading tax, moreover, could be designed as a major revenue source to fund any new regulatory apparatus for other government initiatives. But a modest tax on securities trading is not enough, on its own, to discourage speculation and channel credit to where it is most needed. A second proposal, if adopted, would increase democratic accountability within the Federal Reserve System, which would in turn raise accountability throughout the regulatory apparatus as well as in private markets. Proposals for democratizing the Federal Reserve have long been advanced in mainstream political circles through the efforts of Congressmen Wright Patman, Henry Reuss, and Henry Gonzales, among others. These three men served, respectively, as Chair of the House Banking Committee from 1963-75, 1976-82, and 1989-94. Specifically, the Fed must be able to promote the channeling of credit to productive purposes over speculation. The best approach to democratization would begin with redistributing power downward to the twelve district banks of the Federal Reserve System, then opening the presidencies of these banks to direct elections. At present, the banks are highly undemocratic, and they have no real power. I propose the reverse: accountable and empowered district banks. When the Federal Reserve system was formed in 1913, the twelve district banks were supposed to disperse the central bank's authority broadly and respond to regional needs. This remains a valuable idea, but it has never been seriously implemented. Bank presidents are currently appointed by the banks' boards of directors. These are businesspeople, mostly commercial bankers, who are also appointed, not elected. At the level of national policy-making, the district banks have influence only because five of the twelve bank presidents sit, on a rotating basis, on the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that votes on all monetary policy initiatives by the Fed. However, under present arrangements, the Chair of the Fed, who is also the Chair of the Open Market Committee, exercises predominant influence over the full Committee, usually acting in consultation with the Treasury Secretary. The direct election of district bank presidents by residents of the relevant regions would democratize the banks. And creating additional seats for them on the Open Market Committee would increase their power. District bank presidents, once on the Committee as elected representatives from their regions, could explicitly address the concerns of their constituents. A related proposal would build on an experiment from the 1930s when district banks formed committees of bankers and businesspeople to discuss financial-market issues in a non-market setting. This model could now be extended to include labor, consumer, and community representatives. Strengthening the Fed's policy toolkit is a third crucial component of any plan to increase democratic accountability. Specifically, the Fed must be able to promote the channeling of credit to productive purposes over speculation. Without this tool, extending democracy within the institution will be largely symbolic. A system of "asset reserve requirements", which would oblige financial institutions to maintain cash reserve funds in proportion to the high-risk assets in their portfolios, would encourage banks, hedge funds, and the rest to channel credit to high-priority and less-risky areas. This idea has an extensive, if largely neglected, mainstream pedigree. MIT's Lester Thurow, for example, sketched the following arrangement in a 1972 paper written for a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: If national goals called for investing 25 percent of national savings in housing and other preferred sectors, each financial institution would have a 100 percent reserve requirement on that fraction of its assets. As long as it invested 25 percent of its assets in housing, however, it would not have to leave any reserves with the government. If it had invested twenty percent of its assets in housing, five percent of its assets would have to be held with the government in required reserves. If it invested nothing, 25 percent of its assets would be held as reserves. Other specific versions of asset reserve requirements were outlined in the 1970s by former Federal Reserve Governors Andrew Brimmer and Sherman Maisel. Their proposals were, more or less, in support of unsuccessful efforts by Senator William Proxmire and Representative Reuss - then chairs of the Senate and House Banking Committees, respectively - to advance bills establishing procedures for Federal Reserve-directed credit allocation policies. In fact, the equivalent of asset reserve requirements has long been established practice in the United States. S&Ls, after all, originally had their loan portfolios restricted to fixed-rate home mortgages. That could be described as a 100 percent asset reserve requirement. Policymakers should first - either within a democratized Federal Reserve or in a broader dialogue - determine which sectors of the economy get preferential access to credit. In my view, we should encourage domestic investments in which risks are relatively well understood, and, correspondingly, discourage speculative investments where risks are relatively opaque. Beyond that, we should give preference to job-creation, subsidizing the growth of green investments and the fight against global warming, and affordable housing. The financing of affordable housing, for example, would then be subsidized directly by public-policy arrangements, and not, as in the last decade, as a byproduct of high-stakes gambling. With established goals, this policy gives significant social control over major finance and investment activities, while allowing considerable decision-making freedom for both intermediaries and businesses. Intermediaries would still be responsible for establishing the credit-worthiness of businesses and the viability of their projects. Businesses would still be responsible for the design and implementation of their investments. Indeed, business would still have freedom to pursue nonpreferred projects, and banks could still finance them. Financing costs would just be significantly higher. Implementing requirements as a system of market auctions rather than quotas, as Maisel proposed, would allow more flexibility. Institutions would not have to carry the specified proportion (say, 25 percent) in loans to preferred sectors. Intermediaries that exceed the limit would obtain a permit that they could then sell to institutions whose loans to preferred sectors are below the minimum. Individual institutions could therefore choose to maintain particular market niches. At the same time, the system would ensure that some niches carried an extra burden of either higher reserves or purchases of "preferred asset permits". A fourth measure that could channel credit to priority areas and reduce risk in US financial markets would focus and expand the federal government's already extensive but unwieldy system of direct lending and loan guarantees. The US government has long been heavily invested in domestic financial markets as a direct lender and even more significantly as a loan guarantor. The sectors of the economy receiving substantial support though these loan programs include housing, education, agricultural and rural development, and small business. As of 2007, the government operated about 140 separate loan guarantee and direct lending programs. That year, the government's $250 billion of new guaranteed loans and $42 billion of direct loans together represented about fourteen percent of the total borrowing by households and businesses in US financial markets. Outstanding government loans and loan guarantees were $1.4 trillion, about six percent of total debt. (These programs are separate from the operations of "Government-Sponsored Enterprises". Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the largest GSEs until they were nationalized in September 2008 to stave off financial collapse. Other GSEs include the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Agricultural Credit Bank and Farm Credit Banks, and the Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation.) Despite their formidable size, these programs have not been integrated into a broader policy agenda or tied in any way to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy and interest rate management efforts. They operate rather as financing vehicles for distinct programs, from student loans to rural business development. Their influence on overall financial-market risk or borrowing costs has not been considered, nor has their effectiveness in leveraging relatively small amounts of public funds to move private financial markets in socially desirable directions. An expanded loan-guarantee program could be included as a tool to promote financial stability and social welfare. Assume, for example, that the government roughly doubled its 2007 level of loan guarantees. The additional $300 billion per year could be earmarked for green investments and affordable housing, and we would set an explicit level of guarantee at, say, 75 percent. The government then would be the guarantor for $225 billion in loans for green investments and affordable housing. Interest rates on these subsidized loans would fall with the reduced level of risk - that is, by 75 percent relative to the difference between a market interest-rate bond and a risk-free government bond. If the market interest rate is ten percent and a government rate five percent, the subsidized rate would be 6.25 percent - the ten percent market rate minus 75 percent of the five point difference between the market rate and the five percent risk-free government bond rate. Under this arrangement, private lenders would still bear significant risks and therefore have strong incentives to evaluate loan applications carefully. Market forces would be at work, but the policy would rig market activity toward desirable social outcomes. How much would such a program cost? That would depend on the default rate for the loans. In 2007 the government had to cover about $50 billion on an outstanding portfolio of guaranteed loans of $1.2 trillion. This is a default rate of four percent. At this rate, our proposed addition of $300 billion in guaranteed loans would cost roughly $9 billion more per year in loan receivables, increasing the overall federal budget by 0.3 percent. But it would leverage more than $300 in private loans for every dollar in government spending. This sort of loan-guarantee program could serve as a carrot to the stick of asset-based reserve requirements for private financial institutions. Fifth, and finally, I propose the formation of a public credit-rating agency to compete with the private agencies such as Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch. These rating agencies contributed significantly to the housing bubble and subsequent crash of 2007-08 by consistently delivering overly optimistic assessments of risky financial ventures, especially in securitized asset markets. Rating agencies are supposed to be in the business of providing financial markets with objective and accurate appraisals of the risks associated with purchasing a given financial instrument. In part, they understated risk in recent years because they relied on orthodox economic theories in their appraisals. But more important for our purposes is that market incentives themselves pushed the agencies toward providing excessively favorable appraisals. Giving a favorable risk appraisal was good for the rating agencies' bottom lines, and the agencies responded predictably. In principle, marketplace incentives should push the agencies toward accurate appraisals because supposedly the only valuable product agencies offer is credibility. One would expect market competition to reward firms that provide better information. But a large gap exists between the ideal set of incentives and the real ones. In practice, rating agencies show strong bias toward favorable ratings for a simple reason: they are hired by the companies they evaluate. Companies therefore choose agencies that they think are likely to provide favorable ratings; those ratings, in turn, enhance the companies' ability to sell their financial instruments. With the benefit of hindsight, the agencies' misjudgments are now widely recognized. Economics writer Roger Lowenstein recently offered this appraisal in The New York Times Magazine: Over the last decade, Moody's and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, ... [put] what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing elan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged ... But who was evaluating these securities? Who was passing judgment on the quality of the mortgages, on the equity behind them and on myriad other investment considerations? Certainly not the investors. The investors assumed that rating agencies were providing objective and accurate appraisals. Agency evaluations shape how investors price assets, which in turn has a major impact on whether and how investment projects get financed. The outsized importance of securitized assets as a share of overall market activity only compounded perverse incentives. In financial markets dominated by securitization, the primary way banks or other financial intermediaries earn money is not holding onto loans and collecting interest. Rather, banks earn fees by selling individual loans to entities such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that want to bundle the loans into securities. Fannie and Freddie will themselves earn another round of fees by selling their bundled loans on the market. Still more fees can be earned by selling insurance policies on the securitized bundle of loans. What makes securitized assets more valuable in the market than the underlying bundle of loans is that the risks associated with those loans have been reconfigured, repackaged, and presumably clarified for market participants. Without a favorable rating, securitized assets are simply not marketable. With a favorable rating, opportunities to earn fees emerge at all points in the chain of securitizing, insuring, and trading, with market traders always keeping their fees, no matter what happens at some later date to the underlying asset. A public credit-rating agency would counterbalance this perverse incentive system. Its staff would be compensated as high-level civil servants. They would receive no benefits from providing either favorable or unfavorable ratings. Indeed, a compensation system could reflect the accuracy of their risk assessments over time. It is true that providing accurate risk appraisals has become increasingly challenging as securitized markets have deepened. The pubic agency's staff may well conclude at times that an instrument is too complex to allow for an accurate appraisal. But the agency would be obligated to be open with such an assessment - that is, to assess an instrument as "not ratable". Financial market participants could then decide whether they want to gamble with such an instrument. Private agencies could still operate as they wish, but would have to explain any large divergence from the public agency in their assessments. Public rating would weaken the biases in favor of greater risk and complexity, and move financial-system operations to a higher level of transparency. It could even provide the basis for establishing the asset-based reserve requirements for loans and other assets held by financial institutions. As risk assessment would likely become more cautious under a public credit-rating agency, the market's enthusiasm for financial innovation would likely dampen. Indeed, this would partly be the point of such a measure. But it need not make the overall economy less innovative or dynamic. With a public credit-rating agency and the other measures proposed here, the dynamism of a leashed financial market would emerge in the way that credit moves into productive areas. * * * At the end of 2008, the financial crisis and recession made respectable a question that would have been unthinkable only months earlier: whether privately owned financial institutions - at least the largest and most important institutions that represent the "commanding heights" of Wall Street - should not merely be re-leashed through regulation, but substantially nationalized, operating with public ownership. After all, the federal government under George W Bush already nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as part of its fall 2008 bailout operations. The main arguments for nationalization are straightforward. First, the failings of an unregulated financial system are now blazingly apparent. Re-leashing financial markets in some form is no longer a matter of dispute; only the question of how best to do it remains. One path would eliminate private ownership of financial institutions altogether. Second, even while assuming equity positions in several large financial institutions at the end of 2008, the government did not insist on exercising significant authority over management decisions. Nor did it clearly establish a claim on any profits once the crisis subsides. With banks fully nationalized, the government would be the clear operational manager of the institutions as well as the claimant on profits. Third, without nationalization, we can be certain that Wall Street will fight vehemently, as it always has, to minimize regulations that might limit its ability to make profits. Such efforts will include attempting to corrupt the regulators and the elected officials overseeing them. Most such efforts will be entirely legal: assuming the regulators are generous toward the industry they are regulating, they will find opportunities for lucrative employment within the industry once they quit their public-sector jobs and move into private-sector positions. These are important considerations, but they do not constitute an adequate case for nationalization over a new financial regulatory system. We would face significant problems under nationalization. Unlike France or Japan, the United States does not have a longstanding tradition of direct public ownership of major financial institutions. Realistically, we would have every reason to expect a wide range of failures and misjudgments, including "crony capitalism" - privileged back-room dealings with selected non-financial firms. Even putting aside problems of corruption, we need to recognize that individual financial enterprises, as with all business entities, literally need micro-management. The US government has at times managed the economy at the macro level reasonably well. But the challenges for the government to combine the demands of both micro- and macro-level management would be formidable. The details of day-to-day management aside, the government would have to create an incentive system for the managers of the publicly owned banks that would substitute for the profit-maximizing incentives that guide managers of private banks. If the nationalized banks are not committed to maximizing profits, how should their performance be evaluated? Resolving such questions would require years of experimentation and fine-tuning. In the meantime, US taxpayers would pay for inevitable breakdowns of the nationalized system. The tolerance for breakdowns would likely be low, and every misstep or mini-scandal could undermine the legitimacy of the new system. In the end, nationalization could undermine the larger project of reestablishing a major public-sector presence in the financial system. Indeed, the failures of the nationalized system could be the very thing - perhaps the only thing - that could shift the target of public outrage over the collapse of the financial system off Wall Street and onto the US government. At this juncture, it seems preferable to promote financial stability and social welfare by leashing the markets and thereby reorienting their priorities, not by choking them off altogether. * * * A range of forces in the US and global economies have combined to create the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. We will debate for years to come how these forces came together and how they interacted once combined. But one factor stands out as the greatest cause of the crisis. This is the collapse of the US financial system. The financial-system collapse can be traced, in turn, to the dismantling since the 1970s of the Glass-Steagall financial regulatory system. Glass-Steagall was created in the 1930s precisely to prevent a recurrence of that era's economic disasters. Both Democratic and Republican political leaders must now accept responsibility for the current calamity. We now begin what will necessarily be a long process of building a regulatory system capable of mobilizing the economy's financial resources for productive economic activity instead of casino capitalism. With the collapsed model of the deregulated financial system now before us, the set of proposals offered here are a starting place for forming a stable and equitable financial structure for the US economy. _____ Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is co-author of A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (2008). Related Articles This article is part of a special issue on Fixing the Economy, which also includes: Dean Baker, Free Market Myth http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/baker.php Jeff Madrick, No New Tax Cuts http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/madrick.php Boston Review Newsletter Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Boston Review and its authors. All rights reserved. http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/pollin.php http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From nmgoro at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 08:09:08 2009 From: nmgoro at gmail.com (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:09:08 -0200 Subject: [A-List] :-) Charles Darwin, gullible victim of Gaucho sense of humor (Spanish) Message-ID: <49943B94.3020800@gmail.com> Source Reconquista-popular mailing list [How Darwin was fooled by a practical joker in Santa Fe province, Argentina, and a host of incredible lies made their way as factual truth to his "voyages of a naturalist around the world". It is a very fortunate thing that birds, plants or insects did not have the same sense of humor of his "informer" in Santa Fe.] CITANDO LA FUENTE,EL MATERIAL DE ESTA LISTA ES DE LIBRE REPRODUCCI?N Un recuerdo peque?o por los 200 a?os La "pila" de Darwin En su libro ?Viaje de un naturalista alrededor del mundo?, anot? Don Charles Darwin, all? por 1833, una pr?ctica de los gauchos de Santa Fe para curar fracturas. ?Los habitantes de este pa?s emplean remedios muy extra?os, pero demasiado repulsivos para que de ellos pueda hablarse. Uno de los menos sucios consiste en dividir en dos a unos perritos peque?os desprovistos de pelo, para amarrar los trozos a uno y otro lado del miembro fracturado?.Seguramente deb?a referirse a los perritos llamados ?pila? y que en el norte se usaban de calientapi?s. Como Darwin no dice haber observado tal pr?ctica, sino que se la contaron, es de suponer, que estamos ante una de esas bromas tradicionales de los santafesinos, que no habr?n querido dejar pasar la oportunidad de re?rse de un gringuito pregunt?n. Yo me imagino a un perro ?pila? partido en dos a cuchillo, y me pregunto por que Darwin dir?a que es un remedio repulsivo, pero ?de los menos sucios?, ?Tambi?n!, ?La cara de fierro que tendr?a el gaucho para refrenar la risa y hacerle creer semejante bolazo! From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 11:16:18 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:16:18 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Charles Darwin's 'flame keepers' In-Reply-To: <49943B94.3020800@gmail.com> References: <49943B94.3020800@gmail.com> Message-ID: <49946772.1040001@gmail.com> Apparently, the 'keepers of the flame' have had the Llama's wool pulled over their eyes too Nestor. Ah., but will the humorless survive or be relegated to the dustbin of hysteria... I mean history? http://www.enews.ma/reinventing-darwin_i118209_4.html Reinventing Darwin: Quotable things he never said PARIS (AFP) - Even the guardians of Darwin's flame got it wrong. Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago Thursday, single-handedly shapeshifted our understanding of the natural world. But his powerful insights into evolution were written in a wordy, Victorian style and did not always emerge in compact, haiku-like nuggets of wisdom. "His writings can be quite hard going," notes Darwin scholar and Cambridge professor John van Wyhe. "Often you have to read a whole chapter to know what he is talking about." Which may be why no single sentence is cited more frequently as a distillation of the great man's ideas than this one: "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." It's etched in marble at the California Academy of Sciences and was cited last week by the Cite de Sciences in Paris. A close runner up: "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment." The British Natural History Museum website singled out that gem for a massive celebratory exhibit. Together, they appear in countless books and magazines, as well as tens of thousands of websites in dozens of languages. But both quotations are spurious, according to top Darwin scholars. "These sentences do not appear anywhere in Darwin's work," says Patrick Tort, a Darwin expert at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris who said he has spent the last decade "combatting the endless distortions of Darwin's ideas." To make matters worse, neither quote is faithful to his ideas about the role of natural selection in evolution. "These pithy little sayings try to encapsulate Darwin," Wyhe said by phone, amused and annoyed in equal measure. "Unfortunately all of them are actually rather wrong." It is not the species that are most responsive to change that are likely to survive, he explained. "It is the ones that are lucky, or already have the right features that can be passed on to the next generation." The Natural History Museum, which holds many of the plant and animal specimens that Darwin collected on the five-year voyage that triggered his insights, could not account for the erroneous citation, prominently highlighted in an online biography. "Our web team are currently looking into the source of the copy in question and will address any errors of misleading information," Sam Roberts, the museum's media relations manager, said by e-mail. In the meantime, the quote has been removed, she said. (AFP, which had picked up the quote from the Museum's website, has run a correction) "Darwin is particularly likely to get these false citations. Everyone has heard of him, but almost no one has read him," said Wyhe. Wyhe suggested the fake Darwin quotes may be inspired by the marketing and business milieu, which distorted his ideas to make a point. That seems to be the case for Darwin Airlines, a small regional carrier based in Switzerland. "We can adapt, we are flexible," said Vincento Cammarato, the company's deputy head of communications, who cites one of the contested quotes in explaining the company's unusual name. When informed that the motto was wrong, Cammarato did not seem too concerned, pointing out that not many people know the difference. A bigger problem for the tiny airline, he explained, is that some consumers associate Darwin with extinction. For Darwin scholars, the great man's entire opus is available online in a searchable format (www.darwin-online.org.uk). Nestor Gorojovsky wrote: > Source Reconquista-popular mailing list > > [How Darwin was fooled by a practical joker in Santa Fe province, > Argentina, and a host of incredible lies made their way as factual > truth to his "voyages of a naturalist around the world". It is a very > fortunate thing that birds, plants or insects did not have the same > sense of humor of his "informer" in Santa Fe.] > > CITANDO LA FUENTE,EL MATERIAL DE ESTA LISTA ES DE LIBRE REPRODUCCI?N > > > > Un recuerdo peque?o por los 200 a?os > > La "pila" de Darwin > > En su libro ?Viaje de un naturalista alrededor del mundo?, anot? Don > Charles Darwin, all? por 1833, una pr?ctica de los gauchos deSanta Fe > para curar fracturas. ?Los habitantes de este pa?s empleanremedios > muy extra?os, pero demasiado repulsivos para que de ellos pueda > hablarse. Uno de los menos sucios consiste en dividir en dos a unos > perritos peque?os desprovistos de pelo, para amarrar los trozos a uno > y otro lado del miembro fracturado?.Seguramente deb?a referirse a los > perritos llamados ?pila? y que en el norte se usaban decalientapi?s. > Como Darwin no dice haber observado tal pr?ctica, sino que se la > contaron, es de suponer, que estamos ante una de esas bromas > tradicionales de los santafesinos, que no habr?n querido dejar pasar > la oportunidad de re?rse de un gringuito pregunt?n. Yo me imagino a un > perro ?pila? partido en dos a cuchillo, y me pregunto por que Darwin > dir?a que es un remedio repulsivo, pero ?de los > menos sucios?, ?Tambi?n!, ?La cara de fierro que tendr?a el gaucho > para refrenar la risa y hacerle creer semejante bolazo! > > From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 12:11:20 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:11:20 -0800 Subject: [A-List] It's like Deja Vu all over again - 1/4 million weapons missing in Afghanistan Message-ID: <49947458.3080208@gmail.com> Yogi Berra is my guru and Twitter is his messenger. Son Of Gun-smuggler! 1/4 million weapons unaccounted for in Afghanistan. Is Viktor Bout out of jail? BBCNews: US 'lost track of Afghan weapons' [Image: Afghan soldiers with US-issue automatic rifles] The US military has failed to keep track of thousands of weapons shipped to Afghanistan, leaving them vulnerable to being lost or stolen, a report says. The report has been compiled by congressional auditors, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country. http://cli.gs/WLQ8Qr Maybe it's the 'Bookkeeping' again... Let's ask Dave... http://cli.gs/9AZNYe ...or could it be.... Blackwater? http://cli.gs/mmZsYN A buffalo's take on the whos whats and whys here http://cli.gs/mQ5QJQ http://twitter.com/Da_Buffalo From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Thu Feb 12 17:25:29 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:25:29 -0800 Subject: [A-List] The Audacity of Dopes (While the bankers play us for chumps) Message-ID: <4994BDF9.1010206@gmail.com> The Huffington Post February 10, 2009 The Audacity of Dopes William K. Black Associate Professor, University of Missouri; Senior regulator during S&L debacle We are being played for chumps. The Bush and Obama plans could only have been designed by failed bankers -- for their principal beneficiaries are failed bankers. We already know enough to confirm that the Bush administration made us the "fool" in the market by massively overpaying for assets. The Obama administration is about to compound that scandal with a "guarantee" program. The bankers that caused the crisis designed both programs. The senior officers at big bank aren't very good lenders, but they are expert in maximizing their compensation. Worse, Mr. Geithner, the senior public official who, with former Treasury Secretary Paulson, designed the failed Bush plan is the architect of the disastrous Obama plan. Indeed, as the New York Times has just revealed, it should be called the Geithner plan. He overcame intense opposition within the Obama administration and designed a plan that is even worse than the failed Bush program. Geithner's gifts to the bankers that caused the crisis include: a unnecessary taxpayer bailout of "risk capital," a massive coverup of their banks' insolvency, gutting the proposed limits on executive compensation, and devising a "guarantee" mechanism designed to hide the expenses of the unprincipled bailouts from the American public. Remember, executive compensation is not "merely" a fairness issue. Executive compensation and the compensation systems used for appraisers, accountants, and rating agencies were designed, and served, to create the perverse incentives and ethical rot that caused the ongoing financial crises by producing a "Gresham's dynamic" in which fraudulent and abusive lending and accounting practices drove good practices out of the marketplace. Here's the amazing part -- the bankers are so arrogant that they bragged to a sympathetic CNBC commentator they are playing us: "What a delicious irony this is--last week, just as President Obama was publicly bashing the stupidity of the banks ... his economic team [was] privately begging for input from Wall Street. The administration was conducting around-the-clock discussions and interviews with senior Wall Street executives, including many from the same firms he was theoretically appalled with, about how to fix the lingering financial crisis. " There are proven ways to resolve the crisis that are far cheaper and more effective because they don't subsidize bankers and "risk capital." We know how to resolve failed banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) can place even the largest banks in "pass through" receiverships on Friday at the close of business and reopen them as "New Federal" bank Monday morning with minimal disruption to customers and creditors and retain "going concern" value. This is how the Reagan administration resolved failed S&Ls during the debacle. The FDIC appoints a senior manager to ensure that "New Federal" is run prudently. There is plenty of unemployed banking talent available. Hundreds of good bankers lost their jobs during the financial bubble because they refused to make bad loans. Research has shown that its sister agency, FSLIC, appointed receivership managers that greatly reduced losses during the S&L debacle. Leaving the managers in charge of failed banks that they led into insolvency is suicidal. The new senior leader is picked based on expertise in prudent lending and integrity. If we want failed banks to return promptly to making prudent loans and help lead an economic recovery an S&L style "New Federal" is the best possible device. The existing managers have terrible incentives -- to cover up existing losses and to make bad or even fraudulent loans that produce the greatest (fictional) accounting income and to "live large" through bonuses and perks. (The Obama compensation limits are political cover. The bankers have designed the "guarantee" plan to ensure that the compensation limits will be illusory.) The FDIC managers have the correct incentives to finally produce an honest evaluation of which assets are toxic and how much they are worth. This transparency is essential if we are to end this crisis. Under the Bush and Obama plans we retain the existing managers that have overwhelming incentives to cover up the losses. The bankers have designed the guarantee plan to encourage banks to continue to cover up their toxic assets and not recognize their losses. These cover-ups make a financial crisis last longer and increase the taxpayers' costs. The FDIC managers preserve the going concern value by making prudent loans and get the "New Federal" in shape to be acquired. By providing reliable information about the toxic assets the managers reduce acquisition risks, which expands the number of bidders and reduces the financial assistance required to aid the acquisition. "New Federal" receiverships dramatically reduce cash needs. Most costs are deferred until the New Federals are sold. Pass through receiverships save the taxpayers money and prevent perverse managerial incentives because they do not subsidize "risk capital" when banks are insolvent. Common and preferred stock and subordinated debt in banks are "risk capital." Their holders are supposed to receive nothing if a bank becomes insolvent, but the Bush and Obama plans reward them. There is no need to do this. Subsidizing risk capital and maintaining the failed managers at insolvent banks creates the worst possible incentives. It will cause future crises. It will delay the recovery from the ongoing crises. It robs the U.S. taxpayers and primarily benefits the wealthy -- many of them non-U.S. citizens. The contract they made was that they would get nothing if the bank failed. It has failed, and they are often complicit in those failures. The bankers have convinced the Bush and Obama administrations that the taxpayers should be looted to bail out risk capital. We should stop listening to the folks that caused the crisis and have interests hostile to our interests. Let's stop them from using us as chumps. William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, University of Missouri - Kansas City. He held senior regulatory positions during the S&L debacle and is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One" (2005) From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Feb 12 18:31:34 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:31:34 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Free Market Myth Message-ID: <4994CD76.1090304@ashisuto.co.jp> Regulation is everywhere. Let's choose who benefits. by Dean Baker Boston Review (January / February 2009) The extraordinary financial collapse of recent months has been commonly described as a testament to the failure of deregulation. The events are indeed testament to a failure - a failure of public policy. Blaming deregulation is misleading. In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. "Less" regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true. Framing regulation debates in terms of more and less is not only inaccurate; it hugely biases the argument toward conservative positions by characterizing an extremely intrusive structure of, for example, patent and copyright rules, as the free market. In the realm of insurance and finance over the last two decades, calls for deregulation have been cover for rules tilted starkly toward corporate interests. And the recent change in bankruptcy law, hailed by conservatives, requires much greater government involvement in the economy. False ideological claims have circumscribed the public debate over regulation and blinded us to the wide range of choices we can make. Without these claims, what would guide regulatory policy? What kinds of choices would we have? * * * Patent and copyright protection are good examples of government policies obscured in the debate. They are forms of regulation, not elements of a "free market". It does not matter that we call patents and copyrights "property" or even that we have a clause in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to grant patents and copyrights. Suppose autoworkers were given a property right to a job in the automobile industry, a right they could even sell. Would anyone say that this right to a job is part of the free market? Patents and copyrights are government-granted protections designed for a specific public purpose, as stated in the Constitution: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". But granting intellectual property rights is one of many possible mechanisms for accomplishing this important public goal. Whether patents and copyrights are the most effective mechanisms for the promotion of the arts and sciences is an empirical question. And the answer could be different depending on the specific social and economic circumstances. However, we cannot have a serious discussion of the relative merits of patents and copyrights until we recognize that these are public policies and not intrinsic features of the free market. Debates about both patent and copyright have been hugely distorted by the failure to recognize this obvious fact. In the case of patent protection, policy disputes arise most frequently with regard to prescription drugs. If drugs were sold in a competitive market (that is, without patent protection), the overwhelming majority of drugs would sell for just a few dollars per prescription. Wal-Mart and other major drug store chains now sell most generic drugs for less than $10 per prescription - we know these drugs can be manufactured safely and sold profitably at low prices. The drugs available as generics are not chemically distinct from their brand-name counterparts that often sell for hundreds of dollars per prescription. The only difference is that the latter, as a group, enjoys a government-guaranteed monopoly. Patents constitute a government policy that effectively raises drug prices by several thousand percent above the free market price. Recognizing this should be the starting point in any policy debate. The next question is whether this policy for supporting innovation is the best mechanism for financing the research and development of new drugs. It clearly is not the only one. The government could, for example, support drug research through a prize system in which it buys drug patents and then places them in the public domain so that newly developed drugs could be manufactured and sold as generics. When we sweep away ideology, we see that it is a debate between two regulatory strategies for keeping drug prices down. Alternatively, the government could pay for the research upfront and make all research findings and patents fully public. It already spends $30 billion a year financing biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, an amount almost as high as the pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on its research. NIH research is highly respected, with almost all observers agreeing that the money is, on the whole, extremely well spent. While the NIH focuses on basic research (it also does some later-stage drug research, including clinical testing), there is no obvious reason why the government could not simply double its commitment to biomedical research in order to replace the research and development currently supported by grants of patent monopolies. But the government may wish to use a different mechanism to encourage drug development. It may choose to establish a small number of master contractors, who would then contract out the awarding of research funds so as to minimize the potential for political interference. Regardless of the structure a particular program would take, expansion of direct funding is clearly feasible. There would also be large public benefits in addition to lowering the price of drugs to their marginal cost. Eliminating huge monopoly rents associated with drug patents would take away the incentive for drug companies to push drugs in cases where they may not be especially beneficial, or even potentially harmful. Nor would there be incentive to conceal research findings that indicate a drug's weak performance. Furthermore, by placing all research findings in the public domain, so that scientists can quickly benefit from the research done by others, the process of drug innovation would likely accelerate. Whether a patent-buyout system or direct public funding would be preferable to the current patent system is obviously debatable; the point is that patent is just one mechanism among many that could facilitate prescription-drug research. And it is one that involves granting monopoly rents to large drug companies. It is important to establish that patents are a form of regulation because there are many venues in which the regulation of prescription drugs has been a major issue, with those who would see prices fall cast as opponents of the free market. For example, the ongoing push to have Medicare bargain for lower prices for drugs bought as part of its prescription drug benefit is widely viewed as interference in the free market. Even The New York Times and other highly respected media outlets often present the argument about Medicare-negotiated drug prices as a debate between proponents of free markets and of government intervention. When we sweep away ideology, we see that it is a debate between two regulatory strategies for keeping drug prices down. * * * There is a similar story with copyrights, although the economic waste is even larger and the enforcement measures even more perverse. In the Internet age, almost any printed or recorded material - music, movies, books, video games - can be instantly transferred anywhere in the world at almost no cost. However, rather than allowing the public to enjoy the full benefit of this technology, the government has created a dizzying array of new laws and restrictions designed to make it more difficult, and legally more risky, to pass along material that is subject to copyright protection. As with drug patents, copyrights serve an important public purpose. They provide an incentive to produce creative and artistic work. But to protect copyright, the government has imposed an aggressive sanction regime even for seemingly minor offenses. In one case, a woman in Minnesota faced a fine of more than $200,000 for allowing people to download music from her computer. Universities have been told to police dorm rooms to ensure that students are not downloading material in violation of copyright, and they have been encouraged to conduct classes teaching that it is wrong to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. The government has repeatedly prohibited the production of various types of hardware until protections could be installed to prevent the duplication of copyrighted material. It has banned the development of software that can break through copyright protections. In one case a Russian computer scientist was arrested by the FBI after a conference presentation in which he described a way to get around a form of copyright protection. The list of extraordinary government measures that have been developed to enhance copyright protection is lengthy. Remarkably, these measures are never described as forms of government regulation. They are treated as enforcement measures necessary to protect copyright. However, just as patents are not the only way to encourage innovation, a government-granted monopoly with extensive rules and heavy-handed enforcement is not the only way to promote creativity. A vast amount of creative and artistic work is already supported through mechanisms that do not depend on copyright protection. Private foundations are a major alternative source of support, as are the limited funds available through public programs such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Colleges and universities are probably the largest source of funding not dependent on copyright. Professors are expected to do research and writing in addition to their teaching responsibilities. It is easy to envision mechanisms to expand support for creative and artistic work outside the copyright regime. For example, it would be possible to design a modest tax credit for individuals who either support creative work directly or contribute to organizations that support such work. The credit could be modeled after the tax deduction for nonprofits or charities. Even a modest tax credit (for example, $100 per person) - which taxpayers could allocate to an artist, writer, musician, or film producer of their choice - would likely be sufficient to fund almost all of the work currently supported by the copyright system. To be fair, rarely does either side argue against regulation as such. The real issue is the structure of regulation and its impact on economic outcomes, especially income distribution. Alternatives to copyright are feasible and probably far more efficient than the copyright system. And they would replace a gigantic array of enforcement measures that can themselves be seen as unnecessary forms of government intervention into the economy. * * * A final example of excessive government regulation, never discussed as such, is the bankruptcy-reform bill that passed Congress in 2005. This bill substantially strengthened the conditions imposed on people seeking bankruptcy protection, making such protection a much less attractive option. The public debate over the bill dealt in liberal/conservative caricatures that completely misrepresented what was at stake. The liberal argument relied on sympathy for the people seeking bankruptcy; it drew on studies showing that the great majority of people seeking bankruptcy had not been spendthrifts who deliberately ran up huge credit card debts, but rather had fallen on hard times as result of job loss, medical emergencies, or family breakup. The opponents of stricter conditions argued that these people needed and deserved the break that bankruptcy allows. The conservative argument centered on individual responsibility. No one forced anyone to take on debt; these people voluntarily chose to do so. Everyone knows that bad things can happen. Those seeking bankruptcy protection should have taken precautions. This version of bankruptcy reform undoubtedly resonated with those inclined to accept that people succeed or fail largely as a result of their own actions, but, most importantly, it obscured the real issue that the bill addressed: to what lengths should the government go to collect unpaid bills? The party seeking the aid of the government in this story is the creditor, not the debtor. Under the preexisting bankruptcy law, creditors could lay claim to most of the debtors' assets and in some cases place liens on future earnings. The new law hugely expanded the creditors' claims on future earnings. This means that the government will be far more involved in bill collection in the future than it has been in the past, possibly monitoring the wages of millions of individuals in bankruptcy who still have debts to creditors. (For those who worry about the negative incentives caused by taxation, it is worth noting that having money deducted from paychecks to pay creditors provides the same disincentive to work.) The individual-responsibility line could have been applied just as validly to the creditors in this story as it was the debtors. Part of being a successful business involves knowing under what circumstances to extend credit. No one forced businesses to extend credit to the people who subsequently declared bankruptcy. They exercised bad judgment in extending credit to people who were not good credit risks. Why should the government step in to help businesses that fail to assess credit risk? The ideological battle around the bill was a distraction. It was an effort to get the government more actively involved in helping the banks. It's that simple. Other cases in which the conservative position arguably requires more government involvement in the economy than the liberal position abound. For years Ben and Jerry's Homemade has fought attempts by state governments to ban labeling dairy products as free of recombinant bovine growth hormone. Some pressure groups associated with the dairy indutry argue that the rBGH-free label implies that bovine growth hormones are harmful, which has not been established by the Food and Drug Administration. Of course, Ben and Jerry's Homemade is not trying to prevent its competitors from assuring the public that their ice cream is safe. It is trying to make a truthful claim about its own ice cream. In the same vein, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently prohibited a meatpacker from testing its cattle for mad cow disease. The meatpacker had intended to privately test all of its cattle, whereas the USDA tests only one percent of cattle. But the USDA, arguing that full testing would cause the public to question the safety of other meat, moved to prevent it. To be fair, rarely does either side argue against regulation as such. The real issue is the structure of regulation and its impact on economic outcomes, especially income distribution. Let's return to the financial crisis with this in mind. In the decades preceding the financial collapse, regulations designed to protect the public and to ensure the stability of the financial system were considerably weakened, but the system was (and is) quite far from being deregulated. The key regulation that remained in place was the "too-big-to-fail" doctrine. Essentially, the banks and other financial institutions took enormous risks with an implicit guarantee that their creditors could count on the protection of the US government if things went badly. For everyone except the creditors of Lehman Brothers and the preferred shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, this gamble proved correct. This one-sided giveaway was not deregulation. Had those setting financial policy over the last three decades been committed to deregulation, they would have assured financial markets that financial institutions making bad investments would go out of business and that their creditors would be out of luck. The Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury would have warned that investors were acting at their own risk when they put money in Bear Stearns, AIG, and the rest. In the context of a too-big-to-fail principle, the removal of restrictions on leverage (investment banks were allowed to leverage their capital at a ratio of forty-to-one compared to just ten-to-one for commercial banks) and the relaxation of other prudential regulation (the nominal value of credit default swaps, a new class of derivative instruments, grew to more than $70 trillion in a nearly unregulated market) essentially gave the banks a license to wager with taxpayers' money. Banks did exactly what economic theory predicts. They took huge risks, leveraging themselves to the hilt with questionable assets, knowing that they would gain as long as the housing bubble held up. And the banks did so with willing accomplices among pension funds, hedge funds, and other investors because these investors knew that the government would rescue them if things went badly. Deregulation can be a principled position held by true believers in a free market. But Wall Streeters all wanted one-sided regulation that provided them with an enormous government security blanket without any costs or conditions. None of the Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan crew ever went to lobby Congress for an explicit repeal of the too-big-to-fail doctrine. And while many on Wall Street lost their jobs when the bubble burst, the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that banking executives earned during the good times are theirs to keep. Even with the market collapse, the vast majority of them are almost certainly better off than they would have been had they done honest work over the last decade. * * * If the real debate is over the type rather than extent of regulation, then why is it always framed as the latter? For conservatives, the answer is obvious. Many Americans embrace the idea of free markets and hold a deep aversion to government. Faith in government ebbs and flows, even in the most liberal times. It will almost always be advantageous, then, to associate a political position with support of the free market. It is less apparent why liberals would be so eager to accept such a disadvantageous caricature of their position. The answer requires digging a bit deeper into what their position implies about the nature of the economy and economic outcomes. Like conservatives, liberals generally acknowledge that people get ahead as a result of their skills and hard work, with some luck thrown in. The main difference in the liberal and conservative views of the economy is that liberals are more likely to believe that many people face serious impediments to their success and do not get the same chance as people from wealthier backgrounds. Liberals are also likely to feel guilty about the difference in opportunities and therefore support political measures that will reduce the gap and help those at the bottom. However, most liberals still accept the proposition that the distribution of income is fundamentally determined by the market rather than political decisions embodied in regulations such as patents, copyrights, and bankruptcy law. But what if we accept a view that virtually every facet of the economy is shaped by policies that could easily be altered? Investment bankers get incredibly rich because the government gives them the shelter of too-big-to-fail but doesn't impose any serious prudential regulation in return. Bill Gates gets incredibly rich because, through copyright and patents, the government gives him a monopoly on the operating system that is (or was) used by ninety percent of the computers in the world. Doctors are well-paid because, unlike less politically connected workers, they enjoy protection from international competition. The same is true for lawyers and other highly paid professionals. The six-figure salaries depend less on skill and hard work than on being able to structure labor markets in ways that autoworkers, textile workers, and cab drivers cannot. Deregulation can be a principled position held by true believers in a free market. But Wall Streeters all wanted one-sided regulation that provided them with an enormous government security blanket. There is a long list of professional licensing requirements (many of which have nothing to do with maintaining quality standards) that make it difficult for foreign professionals to work in the United States. While trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement have been designed explicitly to eliminate institutional barriers that obstruct investment in developing countries and the free flow of manufactured goods back into the United States, there has been no comparable effort to reduce or eliminate the barriers that obstruct highly educated professionals in the developing world from practicing their professions in the United States. Many ambitious professionals from the developing world do manage to overcome these barriers, but professionals in the United States still enjoy a far greater level of protection from international competition than less highly-educated workers. * * * The less-versus-more framing of regulation supports the premise that there is in principle an unregulated market out there and that some of us wish to rein in this unregulated market while others would leave it alone. This is consistent with the idea that large inequalities in income distribution just happen as a result of market forces. But as the above examples illustrate, no one is really talking about an unregulated market - rather we are all just talking about whom the regulation is designed to benefit. Distribution of income has never preceded the intervention of government. The government is always present, steering the benefits in different directions depending on who is in charge. Accepting this view provides a political vantage point much better suited to the case for progressive regulation. After all, conservatives want the big hand of government in the market as well. They just want the handouts all to go to those at the top. This expansive view of regulation puts everything up for grabs, including the six-figure salaries of many of those arguing the liberal position. Do liberals really want everyone asking if we can have the same economic benefits by removing trade barriers in physicians' and lawyers' services that we gain by removing barriers to clothes and cars? Liberals, too, are invested in the obfuscation that less-versus-more provides. Even so, the catastrophe produced by the one-sided deregulation of the financial industry, coupled with a long list of regulatory failures in other areas, will almost certainly lead to a serious rethinking of regulatory policy in the years ahead. It remains to be seen whether this rethinking will go beyond the familiar debate. We know that when we emerge from the current crisis the economy will be extensively regulated. The questions is, to whose benefit? Related Articles This article is part of a special issue on Fixing the Economy, which also includes: Jeff Madrick, No New Tax Cuts http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/madrick.php Robert Pollin, Tools for a New Economy http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/pollin.php Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Boston Review and its authors. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/baker.php http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Thu Feb 12 20:56:01 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:56:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] The "FDR Failed" Myth Message-ID: <430581.68996.qm@web180103.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> From: Anne Williamson Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 14:58:48 -0500 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The part that really worked great was plowing up crops, slaughtering livestock en mass and then burying the carcasses, and pouring milk on the ground - all this while Americans were standing in soup lines! And for what? To keep farm prices "up"! These acts in particular show what a financial and economic genius FDR and his Mussolini-inspired "brain trust" were...there was just no end to their brilliance as the Fed-created money bust struggled on for FOURTEEN years while the geniuses in Washington labored to bring back the Roaring Twenties! All we got was World War II - bummer. And, here we go again, with America's newest Head Waiter and his "brain trust" team serving all their pals while hoping against reason that they can reflate the Real Estate/derivative bubble. Deflation is not the enemy of the common man ("Gee, I just hate these lower prices, don't you, Ethyl?") but for the Fed and the lard-butt FedGov in DC, it is the kiss of death ^^^^ CB: I always wonder what's wrong with lower prices. What's your take on Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and Bank Regulations ? From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Thu Feb 12 21:31:14 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:31:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Derivatives/Panic on Wall Street Message-ID: <821460.29156.qm@web180115.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Panic on Wall Street From: Sabri Oncu <------------------------------------------------------------ Charles: > The Wall Street panic started in 2007 ? Yes, the panic started in 2007. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_crisis_impact_timeline The current crisis started in 2000. Sabri ^^^^^^^ CB: Was it derivatives or subprime mortgages that caused the financial panic ? What sort of crisis has been going since 2000 ? What is the "recession" that "started" at the end of 2007 ? What happened in the fall of 2008 ? Derivatives by Warren E Buffett, Chairman and CEO >From the Chairman's Letter of the 2002 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway Incorporated. "Charlie" is Mr Buffet's partner, Charles T Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire. Charlie and I are of one mind in how we feel about derivatives and the trading activities that go with them: We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system. Having delivered that thought, which I'll get back to, let me retreat to explaining derivatives, though the explanation must be general because the word covers an extraordinarily wide range of financial contracts. Essentially, these instruments call for money to change hands at some future date, with the amount to be determined by one or more reference items, such as interest rates, stock prices or currency values. If, for example, you are either long or short an S&P 500 futures contract, you are a party to a very simple derivatives transaction - with your gain or loss derived from movements in the index. Derivatives contracts are of varying duration (running sometimes to twenty or more years) and their value is often tied to several variables. From noreply at coha.org Wed Feb 11 13:08:20 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:08:20 -0500 Subject: Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, and Readership Responds on Chávez Message-ID: <20090211200802.AE0AF3E47DE@mx-out.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 5073 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090211/a47a3335/attachment.txt From noreply at coha.org Thu Feb 12 11:56:09 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:56:09 -0500 Subject: Wilpert Responds on Chávez; U.S.-Brazil Energy Relations Message-ID: <20090212185543.0446A3E4A68@mx-out2.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 8096 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090212/47735282/attachment.txt From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Thu Feb 12 14:34:14 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:34:14 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Nation Piece on Prison Slave labor, PLN quoted Message-ID: <61AF1ACE30C64CC1BB6DB676FD1B6F07@PrisonLegalNews.local> This is a big topic. In addition to the wage slavery aspect there is the production of war material for the Pentagon, the unsafe work conditions, etc. 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: 2400 NW 80th St. # 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/schwartzapfel Your Valentine, Made in Prison By Beth Schwartzapfel February 12, 2009 With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps you're planning a trip to Victoria's Secret. If you're a conscientious shopper, chances are you want to know about the origins of the clothes you buy: whether they're sweatshop free or fairly traded or made in the USA. One label you won't find attached to your lingerie, however, is "Made in the USA: By Prisoners." * Your Valentine, Made in Prison Jails & Prisons Beth Schwartzapfel: Beth Schwartzapfel This Valentine's Day you might want to steer clear of Victoria's Secret, unless of course you like your lingerie made by prisoners. In addition to the South Carolina inmates who were hired by a subcontractor in the 1990s to stitch Victoria's Secret lingerie, prisoners in the past two decades have packaged or assembled everything from Starbucks coffee beans to Shelby Cobra sports cars, Nintendo Game Boys, Microsoft mouses and Eddie Bauer clothing. Inmates manning phone banks have taken airline reservations and even made calls on behalf of political candidates. Still, it's notoriously difficult to find out what, exactly, prisoners are making and for whom. Most of the time, inmates are hired by subcontractors who have been hired by larger corporations, which are skittish about being associated with prison labor. Paul Wright, an expert on prison labor with sources inside many prisons, has broken many labor stories in his newspaper, Prison Legal News. It hasn't been easy. "As a general rule, you'll have an easier time finding out who Kim Jong Il's latest mistress is than finding out who these guys are working for," he says. (Starbucks, Nintendo, Eddie Bauer and Victoria's Secret did not return requests for comment; Microsoft declined to comment.) Advocates of prison labor programs describe the arrangement as win-win: inmates keep busy and stay out of trouble, and employers get low-cost labor with little or no overhead. But critics, from labor unions to prisoner rights advocates, raise a host of concerns about exploitation and unfair business competition. In 1979 Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which provides private-sector companies with incentives to set up shops in prisons using inmates as employees. States offer free or reduced rent and utilities in exchange for the decreased productivity that comes with bringing materials and supplies in and out of a secured facility and hiring employees who must stop working throughout the day to be counted and who are sometimes unavailable because of facility-wide lockdowns. Prisoners are often grateful for the work; when the system is working, they can learn marketable job skills and save money. "It provided a sense of independence," says Kelly DePetris, who worked for eight years in California state prisons at Joint Venture Electronics, doing everything from assembly to administrative jobs to materials control. "You don't have to ask people for things," she says. "I have a son, so it was nice to send home money to help with little things--school clothes, things like that." As a Joint Venture employee, DePetris made about $1.74 per hour after deductions, compared with the thirty cents she estimates she might have made working in the prison laundry. When she was released last May after serving fourteen years, she had saved $16,000, with which she bought a used car, clothes and health insurance. "It's really come in handy," she says. Relatively speaking, PIECP accounts for a tiny fraction of the number of inmates in US prisons and jails. Some 5,300 of the 2.3 million inmates nationwide work for private-sector companies. "It's a small piece, but it's a significant piece" of the overall prison labor system, says Alex Friedmann, who served ten years in a Tennessee prison in the 1990s and worked making Taco Bell T-shirts in a PIECP silk-screening shop. PIECP rules stipulate that work must be voluntary, that workers be paid a wage comparable to what free-world employees doing similar work are paid and that the program not compete unfairly with companies on the outside. But labor unions and companies on the outside have argued that this is impossible: there is no way for a company that pays no rent to compete fairly. Talon Industries was a Washington State-based water-jet company whose competitor, MicroJet, had a PIECP shop inside a state prison. Rick Trelstad, a partner at Talon, contended that his company shut down in 1999 at least in part because MicroJet consistently underbid him for work. (He and an association of his colleagues successfully sued the Washington State Department of Corrections to shut down PIECP, but voters reinstituted it last year.) Lufkin Industries, a Texas-based maker of tractor-trailer beds, claims it was run out of business because its competitor, Direct Trailer & Equipment Company, paid only one dollar per year for factory space in the local prison and so was able to offer much lower prices for the same product. David Lewis, vice president and general manager of Joint Venture Electronics and Kelly DePetris's former boss, acknowledges that the setup has been great for his business. "They get no holiday pay. They get no vacation pay. There's no medical, dental: all that's paid for by the state," he says. What's more, if the company has to downsize, as it did recently, laid-off prison workers have few other places to look for work. When business picks up again, employees who on the outside would have found other jobs are still in prison, just waiting to be rehired. The waiting list for work at Joint Venture is up to 200 people long. Advocates for prisoners' rights take issue with what they see as an inherently exploitative situation. Courts have consistently found that prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they may not unionize. They can't agitate for better wages or working conditions, because any threats to walk off the job would ring hollow--where would they go? What's more, by law, as much as 80 percent of PIECP employees' paychecks is deducted for room and board, taxes, family support, victims' compensation or charity. The National Correctional Industries Association, the nonprofit organization that certifies PIECP programs, found that participants kept only about 20 percent of their wages in the past two quarters. Friedmann, for instance, worked for two years in the late 1990s in the silk-screening shop. He estimates that after deductions for fines, fees and other charges, he left prison with $30. "So while businesses get rent-free space, prisoners are paying for their 'room and board,'" says Prison Legal News's Paul Wright, who himself served seventeen years in a Washington prison. "Prisoners pay their boss's rent." So this Valentine's Day, if your shopper's conscience leads you to check labels, don't bother looking for "Made in Prison." Of all the hundreds of goods and services produced by prisoners with taxpayer subsidies, only one is labeled as such: a line of jeans and denim work shirts made at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. It's called Prison Blues. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 18664 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090212/6393069c/attachment.txt From annewilliamson at msn.com Thu Feb 12 19:29:45 2009 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (Anne Williamson) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:29:45 -0500 Subject: [A-List] The Audacity of Dopes (While the bankers play us for chumps) In-Reply-To: <4994BDF9.1010206@gmail.com> References: <4994BDF9.1010206@gmail.com> Message-ID: Why, how and by whom we're being duped (note the connection between Obama's mother and Geithner's father, sustaining my gut feeling that Obama was "pre-selected" for future possible use by the elite long ago): http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds19.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 462 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090212/4d8252a1/attachment.txt From rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Feb 13 09:53:41 2009 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:53:41 -0000 Subject: [A-List] Ireland and Economic Depression Message-ID: <000001c98dfb$a02b26a0$e08173e0$@net> February 2009-02-12 Ireland and Economic Depression By Paddy Hackett The world economy has plunged into a sustained economic depression. The signs are that this depression will be deep and prolonged. The main way by which capitalism can come out of the depression is by reducing both the living standards and employment conditions of the working class. The only other solution is social revolution involving the seizure of power from the capitalist class by the working class involving the establishment of a world communist federation. Because of the peculiarities of the Irish situation: booms powered by bubbles and a government that instead of storing up its surplus tax returns in anticipation of future contingencies squandered it. The surplus revenue was used to bribe sections of the electorate into voting them back into power. It was also used to subsidise its capitalist friends such as property developers and bankers. Since the outset of the depression this same Irish government has been engaged in a sustained attack on the working class. This is its way of taking the Irish economy out of recession. It seeks to achieve this by dividing the working class --pitting worker against worker. At present the government is encouraging division of private sector workers from public sector workers. In this way it hopes to launch a successful offensive against public sector workers. Victory here will increase the government?s self-confidence while tending weaken to weaken the working class as a whole. Consequently the chances of the government successfully launching further attacks on public and private sections of the working class in the Irish Republic is enhanced. Public sector workers are ?among the most unionised section and politically more advanced of the working class. This helps explain how this strata of the working class has managed to maintain relatively better living standards and conditions of work and social life. This is why the government has been striving to defeat it. The government hopes to restructure the civil service as a means of disorganising public sector workers. It hopes that restructuring with the aid of new technology will put civil service workers out of work. In this way their resistance can be undermined in the way that workers within the private sector were disorganised and disarmed. The introduction of new technology restructured the composition of the working class. The effect of this development weakened and demoralised the working class. It is imperative, therefore, that the working class stoutly resist this sustained offensive being mounted by the government against it. This defensive action must involve strike action eventually culminating in the general strike together with the setting up of workers councils for the organisation of economic, social and political life. To achieve this the current character of the trade union must be replaced by communist unions of the working class. These communist unions, in contrast to the present condition of the unions, must be inherently democratic. They must have minimum centralisation and maximum democracy. Preceding this workers must struggle to set up workplace committees as a means of organising against the bosses and the leadership of the trade unions. The government actively encourages mass immigration into the Republic on an unprecedented scale. Again this forms part of the strategy of promoting division within the working class. This is designed to weaken the working class in the Irish Republic. The mass immigration of labour power into the Republic is intended to drive the price of labour power down. It also tends to hinder the prospects of the Irish working class organising itself into a unified politically conscious class force. The pressure imposed on high profile corporate, banking and media figures with super high salaries to take a voluntary cutback in their salaries is just a ploy to exert further pressure on workers to accept wage cutbacks. The present depression is a result of capitalism?s failure to let the economic system follow its cyclical downswing whereby capitalism cleanses itself of less profitable enterprises. This leads to a restoration of profitability and greater sustained economic activity. Instead the capitalist class through the medium of the state modified downswings through interventionist activity. This is because the ruling class feared a generalised depression because of the threat of a challenge capitalism and its state. But the more the cyclical behaviour of capitalism is modified and prevented from completing its cycle the greater, more intense and universal the crisis. The signs are that we have now been plunged into such an economic depression. However no amount of subjective interventionism will arrest it this time. The growing reserve army of the unemployed means that the production of surplus value, total profits, has diminished. This means that there exists less resources from which to meet state expenditure. This forces the state to cut spending, increase taxes and borrowing. Borrowing is just a form of future taxation with a difference. Interest must be paid which amounts to an addition to future taxation. This constitutes a further deduction from total profits which further adversely affects investment conditions. This tends to spiral downwards. This means that the Irish economy will have to further contract to reproduce the conditions for recovery. This means that spending cuts, taxation and borrowing must be further increased. We have now entered a new historical epoch. Politics will never be the same again. Ireland is heading, as a minute and relatively insignificant component of the capitalist economy into a deep and prolonged economic downturn. Under these new conditions of sustained economic stagnation the class struggle will sharpen. As things progress capitalism?s obsolescent character becomes increasingly visible. This economic depression can only be resolved in two ways: Revolution or reaction. At present the leadership of the working class (trade union and political leadership) has been offering solutions that are intended to rescue capitalism. The rescue of capitalism can only be achieved at the expense of the working class. There exist no significant political forces advocating a solution necessitating the transcendence of capitalism. The latter solution has not been seriously mooted within the public sphere. Communists must begin to build a communist political force if the class interests of the working class is to be served. This can begin by organising of circles of communist intellectuals. Such a communist intelligentsia conducts an intellectual struggle to propagate communist doctrine. As the intelligentsia develops and spreads its influence it can ideologically and politically link up with the more advanced sections of the working class to form a communist party. The throwing out of work of masses of workers weakens the working class both objectively and subjectively. It as no surprise then that the working class may initially show less resistance under conditions of growing unemployment. Having said this there is an opportunistic element embedded in the depression. These are companies that are using the downturn as a pretext for laying off workers, making workers labour harder and imposing wage cuts. These are companies that are not necessarily too adversely affected by the downswing. They are companies hoping to use the depression to increase profits by cutting costs. The government are guilty of a similar strategy in relation to the public sector workers. They have been mounting a campaign against the public sector workforce from well before the depression. In these circumstances workers must demand that the books of companies be opened to the workers for inspection. Paddy Hackett From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Feb 13 10:05:51 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:05:51 -0500 Subject: [A-List] ZIMBABWE: Teachers Dig Their Heels in over Dollars Message-ID: ZIMBABWE: Teachers Dig Their Heels in over Dollars BULAWAYO, 13 February 2009 (IRIN) - Zimbabwe's striking teachers have rejected an appeal by new Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai that they return to work, demanding negotiations on their salary scales in foreign currency as promised. "Teachers want money in their pockets, not promises," said Sifiso Ndlovu, acting head of the Zimbabwe Teachers Association. "He [Tsvangirai] should explain how much we are going to be paid, and the mode of payment." Tsvangirai told a rally on 11 February, the day he was sworn in as part of a new power-sharing government, that public workers would all be paid in foreign currency, and urged those on strike to report for duty on 16 February. "Tsvangirai has to consult President [Robert] Mugabe and cabinet on the payment of salaries in foreign currency, and once he has done that, then he should table a figure that he will discuss with us teachers," Ndlovu said. Zimbabwe's teachers, on strike since September last year, are demanding salaries starting at US$2,200 as a result of the semi-official dollarisation of the economy. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) last week reported that about 94 percent of rural schools failed to open at the start of the 2009 academic year. A broke Zimbabwe is in the grip of an unprecedented economic and humanitarian crisis marked by the world's highest inflation rate, food shortages, and a cholera epidemic that has infected more than 70,000 people and killed over 3,500. Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change party, which is now part of a unity government with Mugabe's rival ZANU-PF, has admitted he does not yet know where the foreign exchange will come from to pay public workers at the end of the month. "But I have made a commitment, and we have to find the money to pay them. But how much, it still hasn't been decided," he said. "We must find something to alleviate the plight of our people who have been receiving worthless currency." The militant Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe said almost half the country's teachers have crossed the border to South Africa, Botswana or further abroad looking for work, even if they are menial jobs. From arno at daastol.com Fri Feb 13 11:59:16 2009 From: arno at daastol.com (Arno Mong Daastoel) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:59:16 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell Message-ID: <002e01c98e0d$2f3325d0$023da8c0@office> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HUD20090211&articleId=12265 Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell by Michael Hudson Global Research, February 11, 2009 Martin Wolf started off his Financial Times column today (February 11) with the bold question: "Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed?"[1] The stock market had a similar opinion, plunging 382 points. Having promised "change," Mr. Obama is giving us more Clinton-Bush via Robert Rubin's prot?g?, Tim Geithner. Tuesday's $2.5 trillion Financial Stabilization Plan to re-inflate the Bubble Economy is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson giveaway - yet more Rubinomics for financial insiders in the emerging Wall Street trusts. The financial system is to be concentrated into a cartel of just a few giant conglomerates to act as the economy's central planners and resource allocators. This makes banks the big winners in the game of "chicken" they've been playing with Washington, a shakedown holding the economy hostage. "Give us what we want or we'll plunge the economy into financial crisis." Washington has given them $9 trillion so far, with promises now of another $2 trillion- and still counting. A true reform - one designed to undo the systemic market distortions that led to the real estate bubble - would have set out to reverse the Clinton-Rubin repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act so as to prevent the corrupting conflicts of interest that have resulted in vertical trusts such as Citibank and Bank of America/Countrywide/Merrill Lynch. By unleashing these conglomerate grupos (to use the term popularized under Pinochet with Chicago Boy direction - a dress rehearsal of the mass financial bankruptcies they caused in Chile by the end of the 1970s) The Clinton administration enabled banks to merge with junk mortgage companies, junk-money managers, fictitious property appraisal companies, and law-evasion firms all designed to package debts to investors who trusted them enough to let them rake off enough commissions and capital gains to make their managers the world's highest-paid economic planners. Today's economic collapse is the direct result of their planning philosophy. It actually was taught as "wealth creation" and still is, as supposedly more productive than the public regulation and oversight so detested by Wall Street and its Chicago School aficionados. The financial powerhouses created by this "free market" philosophy span the entire FIRE sector - finance, insurance and real estate, "financializing" housing and commercial property markets in ways guaranteed to make money by creating and selling debt. Mr. Obama's advisors are precisely those of the Clinton Administration who supported trustification of the FIRE sector. This is the broad deregulatory medium in which today's bad-debt disaster has been able to spread so much more rapidly than at any time since the 1920s. The commercial banks have used their credit-creating power not to expand the production of goods and services or raise living standards but simply to inflate prices for real estate (making fortunes for their brokerage, property appraisal and insurance affiliates), stocks and bonds (making more fortunes for their investment bank subsidiaries), fine arts (whose demand is now essentially for trophies, degrading the idea of art accordingly) and other assets already in place. The resulting dot.com and real estate bubbles were not inevitable, not economically necessary. They were financially engineered by the political deregulatory power acquired by banks corrupting Congress through campaign contributions and public relations "think tanks" (more in the character of Orwellian doublethink tanks) to promote the perverse fiction that Wall Street can be and indeed is automatically self-regulating. This is a travesty of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This hand is better thought of as covert. The myth of "free markets" is now supposed to consist of governments withdrawing from planning and taxing wealth, so as to leave resource allocation and the economic surplus to bankers rather than elected public representatives. This is what classically is called oligarchy, not democracy. This centralization of planning, debt creation and revenue-extracting power is defended as the alternative to Hayek's road to serfdom. But it is itself the road to debt peonage, a.k.a. the post-industrial economy or "Information Economy." The latter term is another euphemistic travesty in view of the kind of information the banking system has promoted in the junk accounting crafted by their accounting firms and tax lawyers (off-balance-sheet entities registered on offshore tax-avoidance islands), the AAA applause provided as "information" to investors by the bond-rating cartel, and indeed the national income and product accounts that depict the FIRE sector as being part of the "real" economy, not as an institutional wrapping of special interests and government-sanctioned privilege acting in an extractive rather than a productive way. "Thanks for the bonuses," bankers in the United States and England testified this week before Congress and Parliament. "We'll keep the money, but rest assured that we are truly sorry for having to ask you for another few trillion dollars. At least you should remember our theme song: We are still better managers than the government, and the bulwark against government bureaucratic resource allocation." This is the ideological Big Lie sold by the Chicago School "free market" celebration of dismantling government power over finance, all defended by complex math rivaling that of nuclear physics that the financial sector is part of the "real" economy automatically producing a fair and equitable equilibrium. This is not bad news for stockholders of more local and relatively healthy banks (healthy in the sense of avoiding negative equity). Their stocks soared and were by far the major gainers on Tuesday's stock market, while Wall Street's large Bad Banks plunged to new lows. Solvent local banks are the sort that were normal prior to repeal of Glass Steagall. They are to be bought by the large "troubled" banks, whose "toxic loans" reflect a basically toxic operating philosophy. In other words, small banks who have made loans carefully will be sucked into Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo - the Big Four or Five where the junk mortgages, junk CDOs and junk derivatives are concentrated, and have used Treasury money from the past bailout to buy out smaller banks that were not infected with such reckless financial opportunism. Even the Wall Street Journal editorialized regarding the Obama Treasury's new "Public-Private Investment Fund" to pump a trillion dollars into this mess: "Mr. Geithner would be wise to put someone strong land independent in charge of this fund - someone who can say no to Congress and has no ties to Citigroup, Robert Rubin or Wall Street."[2] None of this can solve today's financial problem. The debt overhead far exceeds the economy's ability to pay. If the banks would indeed do what Pres. Obama's appointees are begging them to do and lend more, the debt burden would become even heavier and buying access to housing even more costly. When the banks look back fondly on what Alan Greenspan called "wealth creation," we can see today that the less euphemistic terminology would be "debt creation." This is the objective of the new bank giveaway. It threatens to spread the distortions that the large banks have introduced until the entire system presumably looks like Citibank, long the number-one offender of "stretching the envelope," its euphemism for breaking the law bit by bit and daring government regulators and prosecutors to try and stop it and thereby plunging the U.S. financial system into crisis. This is the shakedown that is being played out this week. And the Obama administration blinked - as these same regulators did when they were in charge of the Clinton administration's bank policy. So much for the promised change! The three-pronged Treasury program seems to be only Stage One of a two-stage "dream recovery plan" for Wall Street. Enough hints have trickled out for the past three months in Wall Street Journal op-eds to tip the hand for what may be in store. Watch for the magic phrase "equity kicker," first heard in the S&L mortgage crisis of the 1980s. It refers to the banker's share of capital gains, that is, asset price inflation in Bubble #2 that the Recovery Program hopes to sponsor. The first question to ask about any Recovery Program is, "Recovery for whom?" The answer given on Tuesday is, "For the people who design the Program and their constituency" - in this case, the bank lobby. The second question is, "Just what is it they want to 'recover'?" The answer is, the Bubble Economy. For the financial sector it was a golden age. Having enjoyed the Greenspan Bubble that made them so rich, its managers would love to create yet more wealth for themselves by indebting the "real" economy yet further while inflating prices all over again to make new capital gains. The problem for today's financial elites is that it is not possible to inflate another bubble from today's debt levels, widespread negative equity, and still-high level of real estate, stock and bond prices. No amount of new capital will induce banks to provide credit to real estate already over-mortgaged or to individuals and corporations already over-indebted. Moody's and other leading professional observers have forecast property prices to keep on plunging for at least the next year, which is as far as the eye can see in today's unstable conditions. So the smartest money is still waiting like vultures in the wings - waiting for government guarantees that toxic loans will pay off. Another no-risk private profit to be subsidized by public-sector losses. While the Obama administration's financial planners wring their hands in public and say "We feel your pain" to debtors at large, they know that the past ten years have been a golden age for the banking system and the rest of Wall Street. Like feudal lord claiming the economic surplus for themselves while administering austerity for the population at large, the wealthiest 1% of the population has raised their appropriation of the nationwide returns to wealth - dividends, interest, rent and capital gains - from 37% of the total ten years ago to 57% five years ago and it seems nearly 70% today. This is the highest proportion since records have been kept. We are approaching Russian kleptocratic levels. The officials drawn from Wall Street who now control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve repeat the right-wing Big Lie: Poor "subprime families" have brought the system down, exploiting the rich by trying to ape their betters and live beyond their means. Taking out subprime loans and not revealing their actual ability to pay, the NINJA poor (no income, no job, no audit) signed up to obtain "liars' loans" as no-documentation Alt-A loans are called in the financial junk-paper trade. I learned the reality a few years ago in London, talking to a commercial banker. "We've had an intellectual breakthrough," he said. "It's changed our credit philosophy." "What is it?" I asked, imagining that he was about to come out with yet a new magical mathematics formula? "The poor are honest," he said, accompanying his words with his jaw dropping open as if to say, "Who would have guessed?" The meaning was clear enough. The poor pay their debts as a matter of honor, even at great personal sacrifice and what today's neoliberal Chicago School language would call uneconomic behavior. Unlike Donald Trump, they are less likely to walk away from their homes when market prices sink below the mortgage level. This sociological gullibility does not make economic sense, but reflects a group morality that has made them rich pickings for predatory lenders such as Countrywide, Wachovia and Citibank. So it's not the "lying poor." It's the banksters' fault after all! For this elite the Bubble Economy was a deliberate policy they would love to recover. The problem is how to start a new bubble to make yet another fortune? The alternative is not so bad - to keep the bonuses, capital gains and golden parachutes they have given themselves, and run. But perhaps they can improve in Bubble Economy #2. The Treasury's newest Financial Stability Plan (Bailout 2.0) is only the first step. It aims at putting in place enough new bank-lending capacity to start inflating prices on credit all over again. But a new bubble can't be started from today's asset-price levels. How can the $10 to $20 trillion capital-gain run-up of the Greenspan years been repeated in an economy that is "all loaned up"? One thing Wall Street knows is that in order to make money, asset prices not only need to rise, they have to go down again. Without going down, after all, how can they rise up? Without a crucifixion for the economy, how can there be a resurrection? The more frenetic the price fibrillation, the easier it is for computerized buy-and-sell programs to make money on options and derivatives. So here's the situation as I see it. The first objective is to preserve the wealth of the creditor class - Wall Street, the banks and the other financial vehicles that enrich the wealthiest 1% and, to be fair within America's emerging new financial oligarchy, the richest 10% of the population. Stage One involves buying out their bad loans at a price that saves them from taking a loss. The money will be depicted to voters as a "loan," to be repaid by banks extracting enough new debt charges in the new rigged game the Treasury is setting up. The current loss will be shifted the onto "taxpayers" and made up by new debtors - in both cases labor, onto whose shoulders the tax burden has been shifted steadily, step by step since 1980. An "aggregator" bank (sounds like "alligator," from the swamps of toxic waste) will buy the bad debts and put them in a public agency. The government calls this the "bad" bank. (This is Geithner's first point.) But it does good for Wall Street - by buying loans that have gone bad, along with loans and derivative guarantees and swaps that never were good in the first place. If the private sector refuses to buy these bad loans at prices the banks are asking for, why should the government pretend that these debt claims are worth more. Vulture funds are said to be offering about what they were when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt: about 22 cents on the dollar. The banks are asking for 75 cents on the dollar. What will the government offer? Perhaps the worst alternative is that is now being promoted by the banks and vulture investors in tandem: the government will guarantee the price at which private investors buy toxic financial waste from the banks. A vulture fund would be happy enough to pay 75 cents on the dollar for worthless junk if the government were to provide a guarantee. The Treasury and Federal Reserve pretend that they simply would be "providing liquidity" to "frozen markets." But the problem is not liquidity and it is not subjective "market psychology." It is "solvency," that is, a realistic awareness that toxic waste and bad derivatives gambles are junk. Mr. Geithner has not been able to come to terms with how to value this - without bringing the Obama administration down in a wave of populist protest - any more than Mr. Paulson was able to carry out his original Tarp proposal along these lines. The hardest task for today's banksters is to revive opportunities for creditors to make a new killing. (It's the economy that's being killed, of course.) This seems to be the aim of the Public/Private investment company that Mr. Geithner is establishing as the second element in his plan. The easiest free lunch is to ride the wave of a new bubble - a fresh wave of asset-price inflation to be introduced to "cure" the problem of debt deflation. Here's how I imagine the ploy might work. Suppose a hapless family has bought a home for $500,000, with a full 100% $500,000 adjustable-rate mortgage scheduled to reset this year at 8%. Suppose too that the current market price will fall to $250,000, a loss of 50% by yearend 2009. Sometime in mid 2010 would seem to be long enough for prices to decline by enough to make "recovery" possible - Bubble Economy 2.0. Without such a plunge, there will be no economy to "rescue," no opportunity for Tim Geithner and Laurence Summers to "feel your pain" and pull out of their pocket the following package - a variant on the "cash for trash" swap, a public agency to acquire the $500,000 mortgage that is going bad, heading toward only a $250,000 market price. The "bad bank" was not quite ready to be created this week, but the embryo is there. It will take the form of a public/private partnership (PPP) of the sort that Tony Blair made so notorious in Britain. And speaking of Mr. Blair, I am writing this from England, where almost every America-watcher I talk to has expressed amazement at Obama's performance last week idealizing England's counterpart to George Bush when it comes to unpopularity contests. Blair's tenure in office was a horror story, not something to be congratulated for. He privatized the railroads and entering into the disastrous public/private partnership that doubled, tripled or quadrupled the cost of public projects by adding on a heavy financial overhead If Obama does not realize how he shocked Britain and much of Europe with his praise, then he is in danger of foisting a similar public/private financialized "partnership" on the United States The new public/private institution will be financed with private funds - in fact, with the money now being given to re-capitalize America's banks (headed by the Wall St. bank's that have done so bad). Banks will use the Treasury money they have received by "borrowing" against their junk mortgages at or near par to buy shares in a new $5 trillion institution created along the lines of the unfortunate Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. Its bonds will be guaranteed. (That's the "public" part - "socializing" the risk.) The PPP institution will have the power to buy and renegotiate the mortgages that have passed into the hands of the government and other holders. This "Homeowner Rescue Trust" will use its private funding for the "socially responsible" purpose of "saving the taxpayer" and middle class homeowners by renegotiating the mortgage down from its original $500,000 to the new $250,000 market price. Here's the patter talk you can expect, with the usual Orwellian euphemisms. The Homeowners Rescue PPP will appear as a veritable Savior Bank resurrected from the wreckage of Bubble #1. Its clients will be families strapped by their mortgage debt and feeling more and more desperate as the price of their major asset plummets more deeply into Negative Equity territory. To them, the new PPP will say: "We've got a deal to save you. We'll renegotiate your mortgage down to the current market price, $250,000, and we'll also lower your interest rate to just 5.50%, the new rate. This will cut your monthly debt charges by nearly two thirds. Not only can you afford to stay in your home, you will escape from your negative equity." The family probably will say, "Great." But they will have to make a concession. That's where the new public/private partnership makes its killing. Funded with private money that will take the "risk" (and also reap the rewards), the Savior Bank will say to the family that agrees to renegotiate its mortgage: "Now that the government has absorbed a loss (in today's travesty of "socializing" the financial system) while letting let you stay in your home, we need to recover the money that's been lost. If we make you whole, we want to be made whole too. So when the time comes for you to sell your home or renegotiate your mortgage, our Homeowners Rescue PPP will receive the capital gain up to the original amount written off." In other words, if the homeowner sells the property for $400,000, the Homeowners Rescue PPP will get $150,000 of the capital gain. If the home sells for $500,000, the bank will get $250,000. And if it sells for more, thanks to some new clone of Alan Greenspan acting as bubblemeister, the capital gain will be split in some way. If the split is 50/50 and the home sells for $600,000, the owner will split the $100,000 further capital gain with the Homeowners Rescue PPP. It thus will make much more through its appropriation of capital gains (the new debt-fueled asset-price inflation being put in place) than it extracts in interest! This would make Bubble 2.0 even richer for Wall Street than the Greenspan bubble! Last time around, it was the middle class that got the gains - even if new buyers had to enter a lifetime of debt peonage to buy higher-priced homes. It really was the bank that got the gains, of course, because mortgage interest charges absorbed the entire rental value and even the hoped-for price gain. But homeowners at least had a chance at the free ride, if they didn't squander their money in refinancing their mortgages to "cash out" on their equity to support their living standards in a generation whose wage levels had stagnated since 1979. As Mr. Greenspan observed in testimony before Congress, a major reason why wages have not risen is that workers are afraid to strike or even to complain about being worked harder and harder for longer and longer hours ("raising productivity"), because they are one paycheck away from missing their mortgage payment - or, if renters, one paycheck or two away from homelessness. This is the happy condition of normalcy that Wall Street's financial planners would like to recover. This time around, they may not be obliged to make their gains in a way that also makes middle class homeowners rich. In the wake of Bubble Economy #1, today's debt-strapped homeowners are willing to settle merely for a plan that leaves them in their homes! The Homeowners Rescue PPP can appropriate for its stockholder banks and other large investors the capital gains that have been the driving force of U.S. "wealth creation," bubble-style. That is what the term "equity kicker" means. This situation confronts the economy with a dilemma. The only policies deemed politically correct these days are those that make the situation worse: yet more government money in the hope that banks will create yet more credit/debt to raise house prices and make them even more unaffordable; credit/debt to inflate a new Bubble Economy #2. Lobbyists for Wall Street's enormous Bad Bank conglomerates are screaming that all real solutions to today's debt problem and tax shift onto labor are politically incorrect, above all the time-honored debt write-downs to bring the debt burden within the ability to pay. That is what the market is supposed to do, after all, by bankruptcy in an anarchic collapse if not by more deliberate and targeted government policy. The Bad Banks, having demanded "free markets" all these years, fear a really free market when it threatens their bonuses and other takings. For Wall Street, free markets are "free" of public regulation against predatory lending; "free" of taxing the wealthy so as to shift the burden onto labor; "free" for the financial sector to wrap itself around the "real" economy like parasitic ivy around a tree to extract the surplus. This is a travesty of freedom. As the putative neoliberal Adam Smith explained, "The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments." But worst of all is the "freedom" of today's economic discussion from the wisdom of classical political economy and from historical experience regarding how societies through the ages have coped with the debt overhead. How to save the economy from Wall Street There is an alternative to ward all this off, and it is the classic definition of freedom from debt peonage and predatory credit. The only real solution to today's debt overhang is a debt write-down. Until this occurs, debt service will crowd out spending on goods and services and there will be no recovery. Debt deflation will drag the economy down while assets are transferred further into the hands of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, operating via the financial sector. If Obama means what he says, he would use his office as a bully pulpit to urge repeal the present harsh creditor-oriented bankruptcy law sponsored by the banks and credit-card companies. He would campaign to restore the long-term trend of laws favoring debtors rather than creditors, and introduce legislation to restore the practice of writing down debts to reflect the debtor's ability to pay, imposing market reality to debts that are far in excess of realistic valuations. A second policy would be to restore the power of state attorneys general to bring financial fraud charges against the most egregious mortgage lenders - the prosecutions that the Bush Administration got thrown out of court by claiming that under an 1864 National Bank Act clause, the federal government had the right to override state prosecutions of national banks - and then appointing a non-prosecutor to this enforcement position. On the basis of reinstated fraud charges, the government might claw back the bank bonuses, salaries and bank earnings that represented the profits from America's greatest financial and real estate fraud in history. And to prevent repetition of the past decade's experience, the Obama Administration might help popularize a new psychology of debt. The government could encourage "the poor" to act as "economically" as Donald Trumps or Angelo Mozilo's would do, making it clear that debt write-downs are a right. Also to ward off repetition of the Bubble Economy, the Treasury could impose the "Tobin tax" of 1% on purchases and options for stocks, bonds and foreign currency. Critics of this tax point out that it can be evaded by speculators trading offshore in the rights to securities held in U.S. accounts. But the government could simply refuse to provide deposit insurance and other support to institutions trading offshore, or simply could announce that trades in such "deposit receipts" for shares would not have legal standing. As for trades in derivatives, depository institutions - including conglomerates owning such banks - can simply be banned as inherently unsafe. If foreigners wish to speculate on financial horse races, let them. Financial policy ultimately rests on tax policy. It is the ability to levy taxes, after all, that gives value to Treasury money (just as it is the inability to collect on debts that has depreciated the value of commercial bank deposits). It is easy enough for fiscal policy to prevent a new real estate bubble. Simply shift the tax system back to where it originally was, on the land's site-rental value. The "free lunch" (what John Stuart Mill called the "unearned increment" of rising land prices, a gain that landlords made "in their sleep") would serve as the tax base instead of burdening labor and industry with income taxes and sales taxes. This would achieve the kind of free market that Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall described, and which the Progressive Era aimed to achieve with America's first income tax in 1913. It would be a market free of the free lunch that Chicago Boys insist does not exist. But the recent Bubble Economy and today's Bailout Sequel have been all about getting a free lunch. A land tax would prevent housing prices from rising again. It is the most hated tax in America today, largely because of the disinformation campaign that has been mounted by the real estate interests and amplified by the banks that stand behind them. The reality is that taxing land appreciation rather than wages or corporate profits would save homeowners from having to take on so much debt in order to obtain housing. It would save the economy from seeing "wealth creation" take the form of the "unearned increment" being capitalized into higher bank loans with their associated carrying charges (interest and amortization). The wealth tax originally fell mainly on real estate. The most immediate and politically feasible priority of the Obama Administration thus should be to repeal the Bush Administration's drastic tax cuts for the top brackets and its moratorium on the estate tax. The aim should be to bring down the polarization between creditors and debtors that has concentrated over two-thirds of the returns to wealth in the richest 1% of the population. If alternatives to the Bubble Economy such as these are not promoted, we will know that promises of change were mere rhetoric, Tony Blair style. [1] Martin Wolf, "Why Obama's new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks," Financial Times, Feb. 11, 2009. [2] "Geithner at the Improv," Wall Street Journal editorial, February 11, 2009. Michael Hudson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Michael Hudson 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, www.michael-hudson.com and his email mhmichael-hudson.com . -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 48501 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/9d4318fd/attachment.txt -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 153 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/9d4318fd/attachment-0001.gif From arno at daastol.com Fri Feb 13 12:10:57 2009 From: arno at daastol.com (Arno Mong Daastoel) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:10:57 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell Message-ID: <007a01c98e0e$cf175930$023da8c0@office> Correction in last section 5 percent should read 0,5 percent ----- Original Message ----- From: Arno Mong Daastoel To: gang8 at yahoogroups.com Cc: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu ; Toes list ; worldcity discussion list ; PEN-List - Progressive Economists Network (E-mail) ; TheNewForum at yahoogroups.com ; lwside1 at yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 7:59 PM Subject: Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HUD20090211&articleId=12265 Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell by Michael Hudson Global Research, February 11, 2009 Martin Wolf started off his Financial Times column today (February 11) with the bold question: "Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed?"[1] The stock market had a similar opinion, plunging 382 points. Having promised "change," Mr. Obama is giving us more Clinton-Bush via Robert Rubin's prot?g?, Tim Geithner. Tuesday's $2.5 trillion Financial Stabilization Plan to re-inflate the Bubble Economy is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson giveaway - yet more Rubinomics for financial insiders in the emerging Wall Street trusts. The financial system is to be concentrated into a cartel of just a few giant conglomerates to act as the economy's central planners and resource allocators. This makes banks the big winners in the game of "chicken" they've been playing with Washington, a shakedown holding the economy hostage. "Give us what we want or we'll plunge the economy into financial crisis." Washington has given them $9 trillion so far, with promises now of another $2 trillion- and still counting. A true reform - one designed to undo the systemic market distortions that led to the real estate bubble - would have set out to reverse the Clinton-Rubin repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act so as to prevent the corrupting conflicts of interest that have resulted in vertical trusts such as Citibank and Bank of America/Countrywide/Merrill Lynch. By unleashing these conglomerate grupos (to use the term popularized under Pinochet with Chicago Boy direction - a dress rehearsal of the mass financial bankruptcies they caused in Chile by the end of the 1970s) The Clinton administration enabled banks to merge with junk mortgage companies, junk-money managers, fictitious property appraisal companies, and law-evasion firms all designed to package debts to investors who trusted them enough to let them rake off enough commissions and capital gains to make their managers the world's highest-paid economic planners. Today's economic collapse is the direct result of their planning philosophy. It actually was taught as "wealth creation" and still is, as supposedly more productive than the public regulation and oversight so detested by Wall Street and its Chicago School aficionados. The financial powerhouses created by this "free market" philosophy span the entire FIRE sector - finance, insurance and real estate, "financializing" housing and commercial property markets in ways guaranteed to make money by creating and selling debt. Mr. Obama's advisors are precisely those of the Clinton Administration who supported trustification of the FIRE sector. This is the broad deregulatory medium in which today's bad-debt disaster has been able to spread so much more rapidly than at any time since the 1920s. The commercial banks have used their credit-creating power not to expand the production of goods and services or raise living standards but simply to inflate prices for real estate (making fortunes for their brokerage, property appraisal and insurance affiliates), stocks and bonds (making more fortunes for their investment bank subsidiaries), fine arts (whose demand is now essentially for trophies, degrading the idea of art accordingly) and other assets already in place. The resulting dot.com and real estate bubbles were not inevitable, not economically necessary. They were financially engineered by the political deregulatory power acquired by banks corrupting Congress through campaign contributions and public relations "think tanks" (more in the character of Orwellian doublethink tanks) to promote the perverse fiction that Wall Street can be and indeed is automatically self-regulating. This is a travesty of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This hand is better thought of as covert. The myth of "free markets" is now supposed to consist of governments withdrawing from planning and taxing wealth, so as to leave resource allocation and the economic surplus to bankers rather than elected public representatives. This is what classically is called oligarchy, not democracy. This centralization of planning, debt creation and revenue-extracting power is defended as the alternative to Hayek's road to serfdom. But it is itself the road to debt peonage, a.k.a. the post-industrial economy or "Information Economy." The latter term is another euphemistic travesty in view of the kind of information the banking system has promoted in the junk accounting crafted by their accounting firms and tax lawyers (off-balance-sheet entities registered on offshore tax-avoidance islands), the AAA applause provided as "information" to investors by the bond-rating cartel, and indeed the national income and product accounts that depict the FIRE sector as being part of the "real" economy, not as an institutional wrapping of special interests and government-sanctioned privilege acting in an extractive rather than a productive way. "Thanks for the bonuses," bankers in the United States and England testified this week before Congress and Parliament. "We'll keep the money, but rest assured that we are truly sorry for having to ask you for another few trillion dollars. At least you should remember our theme song: We are still better managers than the government, and the bulwark against government bureaucratic resource allocation." This is the ideological Big Lie sold by the Chicago School "free market" celebration of dismantling government power over finance, all defended by complex math rivaling that of nuclear physics that the financial sector is part of the "real" economy automatically producing a fair and equitable equilibrium. This is not bad news for stockholders of more local and relatively healthy banks (healthy in the sense of avoiding negative equity). Their stocks soared and were by far the major gainers on Tuesday's stock market, while Wall Street's large Bad Banks plunged to new lows. Solvent local banks are the sort that were normal prior to repeal of Glass Steagall. They are to be bought by the large "troubled" banks, whose "toxic loans" reflect a basically toxic operating philosophy. In other words, small banks who have made loans carefully will be sucked into Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo - the Big Four or Five where the junk mortgages, junk CDOs and junk derivatives are concentrated, and have used Treasury money from the past bailout to buy out smaller banks that were not infected with such reckless financial opportunism. Even the Wall Street Journal editorialized regarding the Obama Treasury's new "Public-Private Investment Fund" to pump a trillion dollars into this mess: "Mr. Geithner would be wise to put someone strong land independent in charge of this fund - someone who can say no to Congress and has no ties to Citigroup, Robert Rubin or Wall Street."[2] None of this can solve today's financial problem. The debt overhead far exceeds the economy's ability to pay. If the banks would indeed do what Pres. Obama's appointees are begging them to do and lend more, the debt burden would become even heavier and buying access to housing even more costly. When the banks look back fondly on what Alan Greenspan called "wealth creation," we can see today that the less euphemistic terminology would be "debt creation." This is the objective of the new bank giveaway. It threatens to spread the distortions that the large banks have introduced until the entire system presumably looks like Citibank, long the number-one offender of "stretching the envelope," its euphemism for breaking the law bit by bit and daring government regulators and prosecutors to try and stop it and thereby plunging the U.S. financial system into crisis. This is the shakedown that is being played out this week. And the Obama administration blinked - as these same regulators did when they were in charge of the Clinton administration's bank policy. So much for the promised change! The three-pronged Treasury program seems to be only Stage One of a two-stage "dream recovery plan" for Wall Street. Enough hints have trickled out for the past three months in Wall Street Journal op-eds to tip the hand for what may be in store. Watch for the magic phrase "equity kicker," first heard in the S&L mortgage crisis of the 1980s. It refers to the banker's share of capital gains, that is, asset price inflation in Bubble #2 that the Recovery Program hopes to sponsor. The first question to ask about any Recovery Program is, "Recovery for whom?" The answer given on Tuesday is, "For the people who design the Program and their constituency" - in this case, the bank lobby. The second question is, "Just what is it they want to 'recover'?" The answer is, the Bubble Economy. For the financial sector it was a golden age. Having enjoyed the Greenspan Bubble that made them so rich, its managers would love to create yet more wealth for themselves by indebting the "real" economy yet further while inflating prices all over again to make new capital gains. The problem for today's financial elites is that it is not possible to inflate another bubble from today's debt levels, widespread negative equity, and still-high level of real estate, stock and bond prices. No amount of new capital will induce banks to provide credit to real estate already over-mortgaged or to individuals and corporations already over-indebted. Moody's and other leading professional observers have forecast property prices to keep on plunging for at least the next year, which is as far as the eye can see in today's unstable conditions. So the smartest money is still waiting like vultures in the wings - waiting for government guarantees that toxic loans will pay off. Another no-risk private profit to be subsidized by public-sector losses. While the Obama administration's financial planners wring their hands in public and say "We feel your pain" to debtors at large, they know that the past ten years have been a golden age for the banking system and the rest of Wall Street. Like feudal lord claiming the economic surplus for themselves while administering austerity for the population at large, the wealthiest 1% of the population has raised their appropriation of the nationwide returns to wealth - dividends, interest, rent and capital gains - from 37% of the total ten years ago to 57% five years ago and it seems nearly 70% today. This is the highest proportion since records have been kept. We are approaching Russian kleptocratic levels. The officials drawn from Wall Street who now control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve repeat the right-wing Big Lie: Poor "subprime families" have brought the system down, exploiting the rich by trying to ape their betters and live beyond their means. Taking out subprime loans and not revealing their actual ability to pay, the NINJA poor (no income, no job, no audit) signed up to obtain "liars' loans" as no-documentation Alt-A loans are called in the financial junk-paper trade. I learned the reality a few years ago in London, talking to a commercial banker. "We've had an intellectual breakthrough," he said. "It's changed our credit philosophy." "What is it?" I asked, imagining that he was about to come out with yet a new magical mathematics formula? "The poor are honest," he said, accompanying his words with his jaw dropping open as if to say, "Who would have guessed?" The meaning was clear enough. The poor pay their debts as a matter of honor, even at great personal sacrifice and what today's neoliberal Chicago School language would call uneconomic behavior. Unlike Donald Trump, they are less likely to walk away from their homes when market prices sink below the mortgage level. This sociological gullibility does not make economic sense, but reflects a group morality that has made them rich pickings for predatory lenders such as Countrywide, Wachovia and Citibank. So it's not the "lying poor." It's the banksters' fault after all! For this elite the Bubble Economy was a deliberate policy they would love to recover. The problem is how to start a new bubble to make yet another fortune? The alternative is not so bad - to keep the bonuses, capital gains and golden parachutes they have given themselves, and run. But perhaps they can improve in Bubble Economy #2. The Treasury's newest Financial Stability Plan (Bailout 2.0) is only the first step. It aims at putting in place enough new bank-lending capacity to start inflating prices on credit all over again. But a new bubble can't be started from today's asset-price levels. How can the $10 to $20 trillion capital-gain run-up of the Greenspan years been repeated in an economy that is "all loaned up"? One thing Wall Street knows is that in order to make money, asset prices not only need to rise, they have to go down again. Without going down, after all, how can they rise up? Without a crucifixion for the economy, how can there be a resurrection? The more frenetic the price fibrillation, the easier it is for computerized buy-and-sell programs to make money on options and derivatives. So here's the situation as I see it. The first objective is to preserve the wealth of the creditor class - Wall Street, the banks and the other financial vehicles that enrich the wealthiest 1% and, to be fair within America's emerging new financial oligarchy, the richest 10% of the population. Stage One involves buying out their bad loans at a price that saves them from taking a loss. The money will be depicted to voters as a "loan," to be repaid by banks extracting enough new debt charges in the new rigged game the Treasury is setting up. The current loss will be shifted the onto "taxpayers" and made up by new debtors - in both cases labor, onto whose shoulders the tax burden has been shifted steadily, step by step since 1980. An "aggregator" bank (sounds like "alligator," from the swamps of toxic waste) will buy the bad debts and put them in a public agency. The government calls this the "bad" bank. (This is Geithner's first point.) But it does good for Wall Street - by buying loans that have gone bad, along with loans and derivative guarantees and swaps that never were good in the first place. If the private sector refuses to buy these bad loans at prices the banks are asking for, why should the government pretend that these debt claims are worth more. Vulture funds are said to be offering about what they were when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt: about 22 cents on the dollar. The banks are asking for 75 cents on the dollar. What will the government offer? Perhaps the worst alternative is that is now being promoted by the banks and vulture investors in tandem: the government will guarantee the price at which private investors buy toxic financial waste from the banks. A vulture fund would be happy enough to pay 75 cents on the dollar for worthless junk if the government were to provide a guarantee. The Treasury and Federal Reserve pretend that they simply would be "providing liquidity" to "frozen markets." But the problem is not liquidity and it is not subjective "market psychology." It is "solvency," that is, a realistic awareness that toxic waste and bad derivatives gambles are junk. Mr. Geithner has not been able to come to terms with how to value this - without bringing the Obama administration down in a wave of populist protest - any more than Mr. Paulson was able to carry out his original Tarp proposal along these lines. The hardest task for today's banksters is to revive opportunities for creditors to make a new killing. (It's the economy that's being killed, of course.) This seems to be the aim of the Public/Private investment company that Mr. Geithner is establishing as the second element in his plan. The easiest free lunch is to ride the wave of a new bubble - a fresh wave of asset-price inflation to be introduced to "cure" the problem of debt deflation. Here's how I imagine the ploy might work. Suppose a hapless family has bought a home for $500,000, with a full 100% $500,000 adjustable-rate mortgage scheduled to reset this year at 8%. Suppose too that the current market price will fall to $250,000, a loss of 50% by yearend 2009. Sometime in mid 2010 would seem to be long enough for prices to decline by enough to make "recovery" possible - Bubble Economy 2.0. Without such a plunge, there will be no economy to "rescue," no opportunity for Tim Geithner and Laurence Summers to "feel your pain" and pull out of their pocket the following package - a variant on the "cash for trash" swap, a public agency to acquire the $500,000 mortgage that is going bad, heading toward only a $250,000 market price. The "bad bank" was not quite ready to be created this week, but the embryo is there. It will take the form of a public/private partnership (PPP) of the sort that Tony Blair made so notorious in Britain. And speaking of Mr. Blair, I am writing this from England, where almost every America-watcher I talk to has expressed amazement at Obama's performance last week idealizing England's counterpart to George Bush when it comes to unpopularity contests. Blair's tenure in office was a horror story, not something to be congratulated for. He privatized the railroads and entering into the disastrous public/private partnership that doubled, tripled or quadrupled the cost of public projects by adding on a heavy financial overhead If Obama does not realize how he shocked Britain and much of Europe with his praise, then he is in danger of foisting a similar public/private financialized "partnership" on the United States The new public/private institution will be financed with private funds - in fact, with the money now being given to re-capitalize America's banks (headed by the Wall St. bank's that have done so bad). Banks will use the Treasury money they have received by "borrowing" against their junk mortgages at or near par to buy shares in a new $5 trillion institution created along the lines of the unfortunate Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. Its bonds will be guaranteed. (That's the "public" part - "socializing" the risk.) The PPP institution will have the power to buy and renegotiate the mortgages that have passed into the hands of the government and other holders. This "Homeowner Rescue Trust" will use its private funding for the "socially responsible" purpose of "saving the taxpayer" and middle class homeowners by renegotiating the mortgage down from its original $500,000 to the new $250,000 market price. Here's the patter talk you can expect, with the usual Orwellian euphemisms. The Homeowners Rescue PPP will appear as a veritable Savior Bank resurrected from the wreckage of Bubble #1. Its clients will be families strapped by their mortgage debt and feeling more and more desperate as the price of their major asset plummets more deeply into Negative Equity territory. To them, the new PPP will say: "We've got a deal to save you. We'll renegotiate your mortgage down to the current market price, $250,000, and we'll also lower your interest rate to just 5.50%, the new rate. This will cut your monthly debt charges by nearly two thirds. Not only can you afford to stay in your home, you will escape from your negative equity." The family probably will say, "Great." But they will have to make a concession. That's where the new public/private partnership makes its killing. Funded with private money that will take the "risk" (and also reap the rewards), the Savior Bank will say to the family that agrees to renegotiate its mortgage: "Now that the government has absorbed a loss (in today's travesty of "socializing" the financial system) while letting let you stay in your home, we need to recover the money that's been lost. If we make you whole, we want to be made whole too. So when the time comes for you to sell your home or renegotiate your mortgage, our Homeowners Rescue PPP will receive the capital gain up to the original amount written off." In other words, if the homeowner sells the property for $400,000, the Homeowners Rescue PPP will get $150,000 of the capital gain. If the home sells for $500,000, the bank will get $250,000. And if it sells for more, thanks to some new clone of Alan Greenspan acting as bubblemeister, the capital gain will be split in some way. If the split is 50/50 and the home sells for $600,000, the owner will split the $100,000 further capital gain with the Homeowners Rescue PPP. It thus will make much more through its appropriation of capital gains (the new debt-fueled asset-price inflation being put in place) than it extracts in interest! This would make Bubble 2.0 even richer for Wall Street than the Greenspan bubble! Last time around, it was the middle class that got the gains - even if new buyers had to enter a lifetime of debt peonage to buy higher-priced homes. It really was the bank that got the gains, of course, because mortgage interest charges absorbed the entire rental value and even the hoped-for price gain. But homeowners at least had a chance at the free ride, if they didn't squander their money in refinancing their mortgages to "cash out" on their equity to support their living standards in a generation whose wage levels had stagnated since 1979. As Mr. Greenspan observed in testimony before Congress, a major reason why wages have not risen is that workers are afraid to strike or even to complain about being worked harder and harder for longer and longer hours ("raising productivity"), because they are one paycheck away from missing their mortgage payment - or, if renters, one paycheck or two away from homelessness. This is the happy condition of normalcy that Wall Street's financial planners would like to recover. This time around, they may not be obliged to make their gains in a way that also makes middle class homeowners rich. In the wake of Bubble Economy #1, today's debt-strapped homeowners are willing to settle merely for a plan that leaves them in their homes! The Homeowners Rescue PPP can appropriate for its stockholder banks and other large investors the capital gains that have been the driving force of U.S. "wealth creation," bubble-style. That is what the term "equity kicker" means. This situation confronts the economy with a dilemma. The only policies deemed politically correct these days are those that make the situation worse: yet more government money in the hope that banks will create yet more credit/debt to raise house prices and make them even more unaffordable; credit/debt to inflate a new Bubble Economy #2. Lobbyists for Wall Street's enormous Bad Bank conglomerates are screaming that all real solutions to today's debt problem and tax shift onto labor are politically incorrect, above all the time-honored debt write-downs to bring the debt burden within the ability to pay. That is what the market is supposed to do, after all, by bankruptcy in an anarchic collapse if not by more deliberate and targeted government policy. The Bad Banks, having demanded "free markets" all these years, fear a really free market when it threatens their bonuses and other takings. For Wall Street, free markets are "free" of public regulation against predatory lending; "free" of taxing the wealthy so as to shift the burden onto labor; "free" for the financial sector to wrap itself around the "real" economy like parasitic ivy around a tree to extract the surplus. This is a travesty of freedom. As the putative neoliberal Adam Smith explained, "The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments." But worst of all is the "freedom" of today's economic discussion from the wisdom of classical political economy and from historical experience regarding how societies through the ages have coped with the debt overhead. How to save the economy from Wall Street There is an alternative to ward all this off, and it is the classic definition of freedom from debt peonage and predatory credit. The only real solution to today's debt overhang is a debt write-down. Until this occurs, debt service will crowd out spending on goods and services and there will be no recovery. Debt deflation will drag the economy down while assets are transferred further into the hands of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, operating via the financial sector. If Obama means what he says, he would use his office as a bully pulpit to urge repeal the present harsh creditor-oriented bankruptcy law sponsored by the banks and credit-card companies. He would campaign to restore the long-term trend of laws favoring debtors rather than creditors, and introduce legislation to restore the practice of writing down debts to reflect the debtor's ability to pay, imposing market reality to debts that are far in excess of realistic valuations. A second policy would be to restore the power of state attorneys general to bring financial fraud charges against the most egregious mortgage lenders - the prosecutions that the Bush Administration got thrown out of court by claiming that under an 1864 National Bank Act clause, the federal government had the right to override state prosecutions of national banks - and then appointing a non-prosecutor to this enforcement position. On the basis of reinstated fraud charges, the government might claw back the bank bonuses, salaries and bank earnings that represented the profits from America's greatest financial and real estate fraud in history. And to prevent repetition of the past decade's experience, the Obama Administration might help popularize a new psychology of debt. The government could encourage "the poor" to act as "economically" as Donald Trumps or Angelo Mozilo's would do, making it clear that debt write-downs are a right. Also to ward off repetition of the Bubble Economy, the Treasury could impose the "Tobin tax" of 1% on purchases and options for stocks, bonds and foreign currency. Critics of this tax point out that it can be evaded by speculators trading offshore in the rights to securities held in U.S. accounts. But the government could simply refuse to provide deposit insurance and other support to institutions trading offshore, or simply could announce that trades in such "deposit receipts" for shares would not have legal standing. As for trades in derivatives, depository institutions - including conglomerates owning such banks - can simply be banned as inherently unsafe. If foreigners wish to speculate on financial horse races, let them. Financial policy ultimately rests on tax policy. It is the ability to levy taxes, after all, that gives value to Treasury money (just as it is the inability to collect on debts that has depreciated the value of commercial bank deposits). It is easy enough for fiscal policy to prevent a new real estate bubble. Simply shift the tax system back to where it originally was, on the land's site-rental value. The "free lunch" (what John Stuart Mill called the "unearned increment" of rising land prices, a gain that landlords made "in their sleep") would serve as the tax base instead of burdening labor and industry with income taxes and sales taxes. This would achieve the kind of free market that Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall described, and which the Progressive Era aimed to achieve with America's first income tax in 1913. It would be a market free of the free lunch that Chicago Boys insist does not exist. But the recent Bubble Economy and today's Bailout Sequel have been all about getting a free lunch. A land tax would prevent housing prices from rising again. It is the most hated tax in America today, largely because of the disinformation campaign that has been mounted by the real estate interests and amplified by the banks that stand behind them. The reality is that taxing land appreciation rather than wages or corporate profits would save homeowners from having to take on so much debt in order to obtain housing. It would save the economy from seeing "wealth creation" take the form of the "unearned increment" being capitalized into higher bank loans with their associated carrying charges (interest and amortization). The wealth tax originally fell mainly on real estate. The most immediate and politically feasible priority of the Obama Administration thus should be to repeal the Bush Administration's drastic tax cuts for the top brackets and its moratorium on the estate tax. The aim should be to bring down the polarization between creditors and debtors that has concentrated over two-thirds of the returns to wealth in the richest 1% of the population. If alternatives to the Bubble Economy such as these are not promoted, we will know that promises of change were mere rhetoric, Tony Blair style. [1] Martin Wolf, "Why Obama's new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks," Financial Times, Feb. 11, 2009. [2] "Geithner at the Improv," Wall Street Journal editorial, February 11, 2009. Michael Hudson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Michael Hudson 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, www.michael-hudson.com and his email mhmichael-hudson.com . -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 51805 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/d7b525eb/attachment.txt -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 3045 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/d7b525eb/attachment-0001.jpeg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 153 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/d7b525eb/attachment-0001.gif From arno at daastol.com Fri Feb 13 13:00:06 2009 From: arno at daastol.com (Arno Mong Daastoel) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:00:06 +0100 Subject: [A-List] Fw: Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell Message-ID: <009101c98e15$ade73d00$023da8c0@office> I apologize, These different versions make me confused. Here is the correct one, where the errors on the global research site version has been corrected. Arno ----- Original Message ----- From: Arno Mong Daastoel To: gang8 at yahoogroups.com Cc: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu ; Toes list ; worldcity discussion list ; PEN-List - Progressive Economists Network (E-mail) ; TheNewForum at yahoogroups.com ; lwside1 at yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 7:59 PM Subject: Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HUD20090211&articleId=12265 Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell by Michael Hudson Global Research, February 11, 2009 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HUD20090211&articleId=12265 Bubble Economy 2.0: The Financial Recovery Plan from Hell Michael Hudson Martin Wolf started off his Financial Times column today (February 11) with the bold question: "Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed?"[1] The stock market had a similar opinion, plunging 382 points. Having promised "change," Mr. Obama is giving us more Clinton-Bush via Robert Rubin's prot?g?, Tim Geithner. Tuesday's $2.5 trillion Financial Stabilization Plan to re-inflate the Bubble Economy is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson giveaway - yet more Rubinomics for financial insiders in the emerging Wall Street trusts. The financial system is to be concentrated into a cartel of just a few giant conglomerates to act as the economy's central planners and resource allocators. This makes banks the big winners in the game of "chicken" they've been playing with Washington, a shakedown holding the economy hostage. "Give us what we want or we'll plunge the economy into financial crisis." Washington has given them $9 trillion so far, with promises now of another $2 trillion- and still counting. A true reform - one designed to undo the systemic market distortions that led to the real estate bubble - would have set out to reverse the Clinton-Rubin repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act so as to prevent the corrupting conflicts of interest that have resulted in vertical trusts such as Citibank and Bank of America/Countrywide/Merrill Lynch. By unleashing these conglomerate grupos (to use the term popularized under Pinochet with Chicago Boy direction - a dress rehearsal of the mass financial bankruptcies they caused in Chile by the end of the 1970s) - the Clinton administration enabled banks to merge with junk mortgage companies, junk-money managers, fictitious property appraisal companies, and law-evasion firms all designed to package debts to investors who trusted them enough to let them rake off enough commissions and capital gains to make their managers the world's highest-paid economic planners. Today's economic collapse is the direct result of their planning philosophy. It actually was taught as "wealth creation" and still is, as supposedly more productive than the public regulation and oversight so detested by Wall Street and its Chicago School aficionados. The financial powerhouses created by this "free market" philosophy span the entire FIRE sector - finance, insurance and real estate, "financializing" housing and commercial property markets in ways guaranteed to make money by creating and selling debt. Mr. Obama's advisors are precisely those of the Clinton Administration who supported trustification of the FIRE sector. This is the broad deregulatory medium in which today's bad-debt disaster has been able to spread so much more rapidly than at any time since the 1920s. The commercial banks have used their credit-creating power not to expand the production of goods and services or raise living standards but simply to inflate prices for real estate (making fortunes for their brokerage, property appraisal and insurance affiliates), stocks and bonds (making more fortunes for their investment bank subsidiaries), fine arts (whose demand is now essentially for trophies, degrading the idea of art accordingly) and other assets already in place. The resulting dot.com and real estate bubbles were not inevitable, not economically necessary. They were financially engineered by the political deregulatory power acquired by banks corrupting Congress through campaign contributions and public relations "think tanks" (more in the character of Orwellian doublethink tanks) to promote the perverse fiction that Wall Street can be and indeed is automatically self-regulating. This is a travesty of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This hand is better thought of as covert. The myth of "free markets" is now supposed to consist of governments withdrawing from planning and taxing wealth, so as to leave resource allocation and the economic surplus to bankers rather than elected public representatives. This is what classically is called oligarchy, not democracy. This centralization of planning, debt creation and revenue-extracting power is defended as the alternative to Hayek's road to serfdom. But it is itself the road to debt peonage, a.k.a. the post-industrial economy or "Information Economy." The latter term is another euphemistic travesty in view of the kind of information the banking system has promoted in the junk accounting crafted by their accounting firms and tax lawyers (off-balance-sheet entities registered on offshore tax-avoidance islands), the AAA applause provided as "information" to investors by the bond-rating cartel, and indeed the national income and product accounts that depict the FIRE sector as being part of the "real" economy, not as an institutional wrapping of special interests and government-sanctioned privilege acting in an extractive rather than a productive way. "Thanks for the bonuses," bankers in the United States and England testified this week before Congress and Parliament. "We'll keep the money, but rest assured that we are truly sorry for having to ask you for another few trillion dollars. At least you should remember our theme song: We are still better managers than the government, and the bulwark against government bureaucratic resource allocation." This is the ideological Big Lie sold by the Chicago School "free market" celebration of dismantling government power over finance, all defended by complex math rivaling that of nuclear physics that the financial sector is part of the "real" economy automatically producing a fair and equitable equilibrium. This is not bad news for stockholders of more local and relatively healthy banks (healthy in the sense of avoiding negative equity). Their stocks soared and were by far the major gainers on Tuesday's stock market, while Wall Street's large Bad Banks plunged to new lows. Solvent local banks are the sort that were normal prior to repeal of Glass Steagall. They are to be bought by the large "troubled" banks, whose "toxic loans" reflect a basically toxic operating philosophy. In other words, small banks who have made loans carefully will be sucked into Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo - the Big Four or Five where the junk mortgages, junk CDOs and junk derivatives are concentrated, and have used Treasury money from the past bailout to buy out smaller banks that were not infected with such reckless financial opportunism. Even the Wall Street Journal editorialized regarding the Obama Treasury's new "Public-Private Investment Fund" to pump a trillion dollars into this mess: "Mr. Geithner would be wise to put someone strong and independent in charge of this fund - someone who can say no to Congress and has no ties to Citigroup, Robert Rubin or Wall Street."[2] None of this can solve today's financial problem. The debt overhead far exceeds the economy's ability to pay. If the banks would indeed do what Pres. Obama's appointees are begging them to do and lend more, the debt burden would become even heavier and buying access to housing even more costly. When the banks look back fondly on what Alan Greenspan called "wealth creation," we can see today that the less euphemistic terminology would be "debt creation." This is the objective of the new bank giveaway. It threatens to spread the distortions that the large banks have introduced until the entire system presumably looks like Citibank, long the number-one offender of "stretching the envelope," its euphemism for breaking the law bit by bit and daring government regulators and prosecutors to try and stop it and thereby plunging the U.S. financial system into crisis. This is the shakedown that is being played out this week. And the Obama administration blinked - as these same regulators did when they were in charge of the Clinton administration's bank policy. So much for the promised change! The three-pronged Treasury program seems to be only Stage One of a two-stage "dream recovery plan" for Wall Street. Enough hints have trickled out for the past three months in Wall Street Journal op-eds to tip the hand for what may be in store. Watch for the magic phrase "equity kicker," first heard in the S&L mortgage crisis of the 1980s. It refers to the banker's share of capital gains, that is, asset price inflation in Bubble #2 that the Recovery Program hopes to sponsor. The first question to ask about any Recovery Program is, "Recovery for whom?" The answer given on Tuesday is, "For the people who design the Program and their constituency" - in this case, the bank lobby. The second question is, "Just what is it they want to 'recover'?" The answer is, the Bubble Economy. For the financial sector it was a golden age. Having enjoyed the Greenspan Bubble that made them so rich, its managers would love to create yet more wealth for themselves by indebting the "real" economy yet further while inflating prices all over again to make new capital gains. The problem for today's financial elites is that it is not possible to inflate another bubble from today's debt levels, widespread negative equity, and still-high level of real estate, stock and bond prices. No amount of new capital will induce banks to provide credit to real estate already over-mortgaged or to individuals and corporations already over-indebted. Moody's and other leading professional observers have forecast property prices to keep on plunging for at least the next year, which is as far as the eye can see in today's unstable conditions. So the smartest money is still waiting like vultures in the wings - waiting for government guarantees that toxic loans will pay off. Another no-risk private profit to be subsidized by public-sector losses. While the Obama administration's financial planners wring their hands in public and say "We feel your pain" to debtors at large, they know that the past ten years have been a golden age for the banking system and the rest of Wall Street. Like feudal lords claiming the economic surplus for themselves while administering austerity for the population at large, the wealthiest 1% of the population has raised their appropriation of the nationwide returns to wealth - dividends, interest, rent and capital gains - from 37% of the total ten years ago to 57% five years ago and it seems nearly 70% today. This is the highest proportion since records have been kept. We are approaching Russian kleptocratic levels. The officials drawn from Wall Street who now control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve repeat the right-wing Big Lie: Poor "subprime families" have brought the system down, exploiting the rich by trying to ape their betters and live beyond their means. Taking out subprime loans and not revealing their actual ability to pay, the NINJA poor (no income, no job, no audit) signed up to obtain "liars' loans" as no-documentation Alt-A loans are called in the financial junk-paper trade. I learned the reality a few years ago in London, talking to a commercial banker. "We've had an intellectual breakthrough," he said. "It's changed our credit philosophy." "What is it?" I asked, imagining that he was about to come out with yet a new magical mathematics formula? "The poor are honest," he said, accompanying his words with his jaw dropping open as if to say, "Who would have guessed?" The meaning was clear enough. The poor pay their debts as a matter of honor, even at great personal sacrifice and what today's neoliberal Chicago School language would call uneconomic behavior. Unlike Donald Trump, they are less likely to walk away from their homes when market prices sink below the mortgage level. This sociological gullibility does not make economic sense, but reflects a group morality that has made them rich pickings for predatory lenders such as Countrywide, Wachovia and Citibank. So it's not the "lying poor." It's the banksters' fault after all! For this elite the Bubble Economy was a deliberate policy they would love to recover. The problem is how to start a new bubble to make yet another fortune? The alternative is not so bad - to keep the bonuses, capital gains and golden parachutes they have given themselves, and run. But perhaps they can improve in Bubble Economy #2. The Treasury's newest Financial Stability Plan (Bailout 2.0) is only the first step. It aims at putting in place enough new bank-lending capacity to start inflating prices on credit all over again. But a new bubble can't be started from today's asset-price levels. How can the $10 to $20 trillion capital-gain run-up of the Greenspan years be repeated in an economy that is "all loaned up"? One thing Wall Street knows is that in order to make money, asset prices not only need to rise, they have to go down again. Without going down, after all, how can they rise up? Without a crucifixion for the economy, how can there be a resurrection? The more frenetic the price fibrillation, the easier it is for computerized buy-and-sell programs to make money on options and derivatives. So here's the situation as I see it. The first objective is to preserve the wealth of the creditor class - Wall Street, the banks and the other financial vehicles that enrich the wealthiest 1% and, to be fair within America's emerging new financial oligarchy, the richest 10% of the population. Stage One involves buying out their bad loans at a price that saves them from taking a loss. The money will be depicted to voters as a "loan," to be repaid by banks extracting enough new debt charges in the new rigged game the Treasury is setting up. The current loss will be shifted the onto "taxpayers" and made up by new debtors - in both cases labor, onto whose shoulders the tax burden has been shifted steadily, step by step since 1980. An "aggregator" bank (sounds like "alligator," from the swamps of toxic waste) will buy the bad debts and put them in a public agency. The government calls this the "bad" bank. (This is Geithner's first point.) But it does good for Wall Street - by buying loans that have gone bad, along with loans and derivative guarantees and swaps that never were good in the first place. If the private sector refuses to buy these bad loans at prices the banks are asking for, why should the government pretend that these debt claims are worth more. Vulture funds are said to be offering about what they were when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt: about 22 cents on the dollar. The banks are asking for 75 cents on the dollar. What will the government offer? Perhaps the worst alternative is that is now being promoted by the banks and vulture investors in tandem: the government will guarantee the price at which private investors buy toxic financial waste from the banks. A vulture fund would be happy enough to pay 75 cents on the dollar for worthless junk if the government were to provide a guarantee. The Treasury and Federal Reserve pretend that they simply would be "providing liquidity" to "frozen markets." But the problem is not liquidity and it is not subjective "market psychology." It is "solvency," that is, a realistic awareness that toxic waste and bad derivatives gambles are junk. Mr. Geithner has not been able to come to terms with how to value this - without bringing the Obama administration down in a wave of populist protest - any more than Mr. Paulson was able to carry out his original Tarp proposal along these lines. The hardest task for today's banksters is to revive opportunities for creditors to make a new killing. (It's the economy that's being killed, of course.) This seems to be the aim of the Public/Private investment company that Mr. Geithner is establishing as the second element in his plan. The easiest free lunch is to ride the wave of a new bubble - a fresh wave of asset-price inflation to be introduced to "cure" the problem of debt deflation. Here's how I imagine the ploy might work. Suppose a hapless family has bought a home for $500,000, with a full 100% $500,000 adjustable-rate mortgage scheduled to reset this year at 8%. Suppose too that the current market price will fall to $250,000, a loss of 50% by yearend 2009. Sometime in mid 2010 would seem to be long enough for prices to decline by enough to make "recovery" possible - Bubble Economy 2.0. Without such a plunge, there will be no economy to "rescue," no opportunity for Tim Geithner and Laurence Summers to "feel your pain" and pull out of their pocket the following package - a variant on the "cash for trash" swap, a public agency to acquire the $500,000 mortgage that is going bad, heading toward only a $250,000 market price. The "bad bank" was not quite ready to be created this week, but the embryo is there. It will take the form of a public/private partnership (PPP) of the sort that Tony Blair made so notorious in Britain. And speaking of Mr. Blair, I am writing this from England, where almost every America-watcher I talk to has expressed amazement at Obama's performance last week idealizing England's counterpart to George Bush when it comes to unpopularity contests. Blair's tenure in office was a horror story, not something to be congratulated for. He privatized the railroads and entering into the disastrous public/private partnership that doubled, tripled or quadrupled the cost of public projects by adding on a heavy financial overhead. If Obama does not realize how he shocked Britain and much of Europe with his praise, then he is in danger of foisting a similar public/private financialized "partnership" on the United States The new public/private institution will be financed with private funds - in fact, with the money now being given to re-capitalize America's banks (headed by the Wall St. banks that have done so bad). Banks will use the Treasury money they have received by "borrowing" against their junk mortgages at or near par to buy shares in a new $5 trillion institution created along the lines of the unfortunate Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. Its bonds will be guaranteed. (That's the "public" part - "socializing" the risk.) The PPP institution will have the power to buy and renegotiate the mortgages that have passed into the hands of the government and other holders. This "Homeowner Rescue Trust" will use its private funding for the "socially responsible" purpose of "saving the taxpayer" and middle class homeowners by renegotiating the mortgage down from its original $500,000 to the new $250,000 market price. Here's the patter talk you can expect, with the usual Orwellian euphemisms. The Homeowners Rescue PPP will appear as a veritable Savior Bank resurrected from the wreckage of Bubble #1. Its clients will be families strapped by their mortgage debt and feeling more and more desperate as the price of their major asset plummets more deeply into Negative Equity territory. To them, the new PPP will say: "We've got a deal to save you. We'll renegotiate your mortgage down to the current market price, $250,000, and we'll also lower your interest rate to just 5.50%, the new rate. This will cut your monthly debt charges by nearly two thirds. Not only can you afford to stay in your home, you will escape from your negative equity." The family probably will say, "Great." But they will have to make a concession. That's where the new public/private partnership makes its killing. Funded with private money that will take the "risk" (and also reap the rewards), the Savior Bank will say to the family that agrees to renegotiate its mortgage: "Now that the government has absorbed a loss (in today's travesty of "socializing" the financial system) while letting let you stay in your home, we need to recover the money that's been lost. If we make you whole, we want to be made whole too. So when the time comes for you to sell your home or renegotiate your mortgage, our Homeowners Rescue PPP will receive the capital gain up to the original amount written off." In other words, if the homeowner sells the property for $400,000, the Homeowners Rescue PPP will get $150,000 of the capital gain. If the home sells for $500,000, the bank will get $250,000. And if it sells for more, thanks to some new clone of Alan Greenspan acting as bubblemeister, the capital gain will be split in some way. If the split is 50/50 and the home sells for $600,000, the owner will split the $100,000 further capital gain with the Homeowners Rescue PPP. It thus will make much more through its appropriation of capital gains (the new debt-fueled asset-price inflation being put in place) than it extracts in interest! This would make Bubble 2.0 even richer for Wall Street than the Greenspan bubble! Last time around, it was the middle class that got the gains - even if new buyers had to enter a lifetime of debt peonage to buy higher-priced homes. It really was the bank that got the gains, of course, because mortgage interest charges absorbed the entire rental value and even the hoped-for price gain. But homeowners at least had a chance at the free ride, if they didn't squander their money in refinancing their mortgages to "cash out" on their equity to support their living standards in a generation whose wage levels had stagnated since 1979. As Mr. Greenspan observed in testimony before Congress, a major reason why wages have not risen is that workers are afraid to strike or even to complain about being worked harder and harder for longer and longer hours ("raising productivity"), because they are one paycheck away from missing their mortgage payment - or, if renters, one paycheck or two away from homelessness. This is the happy condition of normalcy that Wall Street's financial planners would like to recover. This time around, they may not be obliged to make their gains in a way that also makes middle class homeowners rich. In the wake of Bubble Economy #1, today's debt-strapped homeowners are willing to settle merely for a plan that leaves them in their homes! The Homeowners Rescue PPP can appropriate for its stockholder banks and other large investors the capital gains that have been the driving force of U.S. "wealth creation," bubble-style. That is what the term "equity kicker" means. This situation confronts the economy with a dilemma. The only policies deemed politically correct these days are those that make the situation worse: yet more government money in the hope that banks will create yet more credit/debt to raise house prices and make them even more unaffordable; credit/debt to inflate a new Bubble Economy #2. Lobbyists for Wall Street's enormous Bad Bank conglomerates are screaming that all real solutions to today's debt problem and tax shift onto labor are politically incorrect, above all the time-honored debt write-downs to bring the debt burden within the ability to pay. That is what the market is supposed to do, after all, by bankruptcy in an anarchic collapse if not by more deliberate and targeted government policy. The Bad Banks, having demanded "free markets" all these years, fear a really free market when it threatens their bonuses and other takings. For Wall Street, free markets are "free" of public regulation against predatory lending; "free" of taxing the wealthy so as to shift the burden onto labor; "free" for the financial sector to wrap itself around the "real" economy like parasitic ivy around a tree to extract the surplus. This is a travesty of freedom. As the putative neoliberal Adam Smith explained, "The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments." But worst of all is the "freedom" of today's economic discussion from the wisdom of classical political economy and from historical experience regarding how societies through the ages have coped with the debt overhead. How to save the economy from Wall Street There is an alternative to ward all this off, and it is the classic definition of freedom from debt peonage and predatory credit. The only real solution to today's debt overhang is a debt write-down. Until this occurs, debt service will crowd out spending on goods and services and there will be no recovery. Debt deflation will drag the economy down while assets are transferred further into the hands of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, operating via the financial sector. If Obama means what he says, he would use his office as a bully pulpit to urge repeal the present harsh creditor-oriented bankruptcy law sponsored by the banks and credit-card companies. He would campaign to restore the long-term trend of laws favoring debtors rather than creditors, and introduce legislation to restore the practice of writing down debts to reflect the debtor's ability to pay, imposing market reality to debts that are far in excess of realistic valuations. A second policy would be to restore the power of state attorneys general to bring financial fraud charges against the most egregious mortgage lenders. The Bush Administration got these prosecutions thrown out of court by claiming that under an 1864 National Bank Act clause, the federal government had the right to override state prosecutions of national banks. Bush then appointed a non-prosecutor to this enforcement position. On the basis of reinstated fraud charges, the government might claw back the bank bonuses, salaries and bank earnings that represented the profits from America's greatest financial and real estate fraud in history. And to prevent repetition of the past decade's experience, the Obama Administration might help popularize a new psychology of debt. The government could encourage "the poor" to act as "economically" as Donald Trumps or Angelo Mozilo's would do, making it clear that debt write-downs are a right. Also to ward off repetition of the Bubble Economy, the Treasury could impose the "Tobin tax" of 1% on purchases and options for stocks, bonds and foreign currency. Critics of this tax point out that it can be evaded by speculators trading offshore in the rights to securities held in U.S. accounts. But the government could simply refuse to provide deposit insurance and other support to institutions trading offshore, or simply could announce that trades in such "deposit receipts" for shares would not have legal standing. As for trades in derivatives, depository institutions - including conglomerates owning such banks - can simply be banned as inherently unsafe. If foreigners wish to speculate on financial horse races, let them. Financial policy ultimately rests on tax policy. It is the ability to levy taxes, after all, that gives value to Treasury money (just as it is the inability to collect on debts that has depreciated the value of commercial bank deposits). It is easy enough for fiscal policy to prevent a new real estate bubble. Simply shift the tax system back to where it originally was, on the land's site-rental value. The "free lunch" (what John Stuart Mill called the "unearned increment" of rising land prices, a gain that landlords made "in their sleep") would serve as the tax base instead of burdening labor and industry with income taxes and sales taxes. This would achieve the kind of free market that Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall described, and which the Progressive Era aimed to achieve with America's first income tax in 1913. It would be a market free of the free lunch that Chicago Boys insist does not exist. But the recent Bubble Economy and today's Bailout Sequel have been all about getting a free lunch. A land tax would prevent housing prices from rising again. It is the most hated tax in America today, largely because of the disinformation campaign that has been mounted by the real estate interests and amplified by the banks that stand behind them. The reality is that taxing land appreciation rather than wages or corporate profits would save homeowners from having to take on so much debt in order to obtain housing. It would save the economy from seeing "wealth creation" take the form of the "unearned increment" being capitalized into higher bank loans with their associated carrying charges (interest and amortization). The wealth tax originally fell mainly on real estate. The most immediate and politically feasible priority of the Obama Administration thus should be to repeal the Bush Administration's drastic tax cuts for the top brackets and its moratorium on the estate tax. The aim should be to bring down the polarization between creditors and debtors that has concentrated over two-thirds of the returns to wealth in the richest 1% of the population. If alternatives to the Bubble Economy such as these are not promoted, we will know that promises of change were mere rhetoric, Tony Blair style. Mr. Geithner may have given the game away in his February 10 statement that "Access to public support is a privilege, not a right." The literal meaning of "privilege" is "private law" (Lat. leges), a law to benefit individuals as a special interest separate from the public interest. The problem is that Mr. Geithner is seeking to save a system that creates no real jobs products. The debt that banks sell is not really a "product." Extracting interest and receiving public bailouts to make financial gamblers whole is extractive, not productive. The banking system often has been characterized as parasitic. The metaphor is appropriate on more than one plane. Most people think of parasites simply as leeches, draining nourishment from the host. But biological nature is more complex. In order for parasites to succeed they must first numb the host's pain-warning system so that they can get a foothold. They then take control of the host's brain. The trick the host into believing that the parasite is part of its own body, and indeed even its child, to be nurtured, protected and given preference. They turn the host into a zombie. So the problem we are facing is not "zombie banks," but the ability of Wall Street to create a zombie economy. This is what the financial sector has done vis-?-vis the economy at large. It depicts itself and the rest of the symbiotic FIRE sector as part of the "real" economy, so that its extraction of interest, economic rent and monopoly prices is payment for providing a "service": the privilege of credit creation, landlordship and "corporate management. Like his predecessor Hank Paulson, Mr. Geithner claims that recovery cannot occur until the banking system is put back on its feet in sufficiently solvent and indeed, prosperous condition to "get credit flowing again," he said. "Without credit, economies cannot grow at their potential." But is the solution really to create yet more debt for the already debt-ridden U.S. economy? It was the Greenspan debt bubble that brought it to a halt! Interest and amortization charges on new debt will eats into the ability of consumers and companies to spend and invest. Claiming that economic recovery must be led by renewed debt creation threatens only to deepen debt dependency and further erode discretionary consumer spending power. When it comes to cleaning up the Greenspan Bubble legacy by writing down homeowner mortgage debt, the Treasury proposal offers homeowners $50 billion - just 0,5 percent of the $10 trillion Wall Street bailout to date, and less than half the amount given to AIG to pay its hedge fund speculators on their derivative gambles. The Treasury has handed out $25 billion to each and every big bank, so just two of these banks alone got as much as the reported one-quarter of all homeowners in America suffering from Negative Equity on their homes and in need of mortgage renegotiation. Yet today's economic shrinkage cannot be reversed without a recovery in consumer demand. The economy has lost the "virtual wealth" in higher-priced homes and the stock market, and must rely on after-tax earnings. But I see little concern for wage earners in the Treasury plan. Without debt relief, consumer spending and business investment will not recover. This debt dimension is what the Treasury's "recovery" plan leaves out of account. It seeks to recover the debt-bubble economy, not the real economy of production and consumption. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Martin Wolf, "Why Obama's new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks," Financial Times, Feb. 11, 2009. [2] "Geithner at the Improv," Wall Street Journal editorial, February 11, 2009. Michael Hudson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Michael Hudson 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, www.michael-hudson.com and his email mhmichael-hudson.com . -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 53545 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/e2fcb730/attachment.txt -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 3045 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/e2fcb730/attachment-0001.jpeg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 153 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/e2fcb730/attachment-0001.gif From noreply at coha.org Fri Feb 13 12:13:23 2009 From: noreply at coha.org (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:13:23 -0500 Subject: Ten Years of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution Message-ID: <20090213191248.B4E723E4F0B@mx-out.daemonmail.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 4869 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/32a837b7/attachment.txt From sabri_oncu at yahoo.com Fri Feb 13 14:28:21 2009 From: sabri_oncu at yahoo.com (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:28:21 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0 Message-ID: <430521.5760.qm@web111516.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> It has been a while since I visited the back wall of this list to do any "moderation." Thank you Arno for sending these to the list. I picked them up at TNF, first. Michael, Are you in New York in these days? If you are, let us get together one Wednesday for lunch. Anne, Good to see that you are back. Let me know your whereabouts. If we are close, let try to us get together, too. Best, Sabri From michael.hudson at earthlink.net Fri Feb 13 15:50:09 2009 From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net (Michael Hudson) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:50:09 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0 In-Reply-To: <430521.5760.qm@web111516.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Good idea. Perhaps this Wednesday. Michael On 2/13/09 4:28 PM, "Sabri Oncu" wrote: > > It has been a while since I visited the back wall of this > list to do any "moderation." Thank you Arno for sending > these to the list. I picked them up at TNF, first. > > Michael, > > Are you in New York in these days? If you are, let us get > together one Wednesday for lunch. > > Anne, > > Good to see that you are back. Let me know your whereabouts. > If we are close, let try to us get together, too. > > Best, > Sabri > > > > > > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Feb 13 21:06:17 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:06:17 +0900 Subject: [A-List] Toward Ecosophy Message-ID: <49964339.3000602@ashisuto.co.jp> The Archdruid Report (February 11 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Two weeks ago, in The Ecology of Social Change {1}, I suggested that the great flaw in most of today's schemes for social change is their failure to grasp the ecological dimensions of human society. That flaw has been almost impossible to avoid, because it is not simply a matter of consciously held beliefs; many of the people drafting plans for social change these days have learned quite a bit about ecology. It's the unexamined and often unconscious presuppositions underlying most such plans that blind them to ecological reality - and the struggle to confront one's own presuppositions is very challenging work. One of the things that makes the end of the industrial age so difficult for many people today, after all, is the way that it drives a wedge between science and what has often been called scientism. Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. Science and scientism are not the same, but it's one of the most common habits of modern thought to assume their identity - or, more precisely, to fixate on science and fail to notice that scientism as a distinctive worldview exists at all. This is not a new thing; most sets of intellectual tools have given rise to their own worldview and values. Classical logic followed the same trajectory. Greek and Roman philosophers took logic as their basic toolkit, defined reality as whatever could be reduced to verbal statements and analyzed by logical means, and consigned the rest to the apeiron, the realm of the formless and unknowable. The results predetermined most of the successes and failures of the ancient world's intellectual history. It's easy enough to condemn the old philosophers for their failures - the debates about justice, for example, that never quite stopped to ask if there might be something wrong with the ancient world's economic dependence on slavery - but of course equivalent blind spots pervade modern thinking as well. What verbal statements were to classical logic, quantification is to the scientific method: phenomena that can't be expressed in numbers usually can't be investigated by the scientific method. Many scientists have reacted by consigning anything that can't be quantified to their own version of the apeiron. Recognizing this bad habit is not a condemnation of science, or even of scientism; rather, it is simply an acknowledgment of the fact that no tool is suited for every job. Still, the natural tendency of a small child with a hammer to believe that everything is in need of a good whacking isn't the only factor at work here; the scientific method itself very often becomes an obstacle in the way of clarity. Worldviews and values, after all, are among the things the scientific method handles most poorly - it's very hard to quantify a value judgment - and this problem becomes particularly serious when the scientist faces the worldview and values that derive from science itself. No controlled double-blind experiment could possibly prove, for example, that truths revealed by science are more important than those uncovered by other means, much less that the scientific method is the best hope for the human future! The fact that scientists have made these claims doesn't make them scientific. Rather, they're among the value judgments that unfold from scientism. The same point can be made with even more force about humanity's supposed "conquest of nature", perhaps the most distinctive concept of scientism. A military metaphor that defines humanity as Earth's enemy is an odd way to understand our relationship with the natural systems that sustain our lives. Still, scratch today's attitudes toward the natural world and the hackneyed image of Man the Conqueror of Nature is rarely far below the surface. Even the narratives of modern environmentalism, far from rejecting this view, reinforce it; most of them glorify human power, in fact, by embracing the claim that humanity has become so almighty that it can destroy the Earth and itself into the bargain. The conflict between these beliefs and the hard realities of the predicament of industrial civilization could not be more stark. Human limits, not human power, define the situation we face today, because the technological revolutions and economic boom times that most modern people take for granted resulted from a brief period of extravagance in which we squandered half a billion years of stored sunlight. The power we claimed was never really ours, and we never conquered nature; instead, we stole as many of her carbon assets as we could reach, and spent most of them. Now the bills are coming due, the balance left in the account won't meet them, and the only question left is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still be ours when nature's foreclosure proceedings finish with us. Such perspectives are impossible to square with most contemporary attitudes about nature and humanity's place in it, and they conflict just as sharply with the Enlightenment faith in reason as the door to a better world. From the perspective of that faith, it's axiomatic that anything unsatisfactory is a problem in need of a solution, and that a solution can be found for it. The suggestion that deeply unsatisfactory conditions cannot be solved but, rather, have to be lived with, is unthinkable and offensive to a great many people. Yet if human life is subject to hard ecological limits, the narrative of human omnipotence falls, and a popular and passionately held conception of humanity's nature and destiny falls with it. It's easy to turn scientism into the villain of this particular piece, but scientism is simply a recent example of the human habit of using successful technique to define the universe. Hunting and gathering peoples see the animals they hunt and the plants they gather as the building blocks of the cosmos; farming cultures see their world in terms of soil, seed, and the cycle of the year; the efforts of classical civilization to inhabit a wholly logical world, and those of modern industrial civilization to build a wholly scientific one, are simply two more examples. Nor was scientism always as maladaptive as it is today. During the heyday of the industrial age, it directed human effort toward what was, at that time, a successful human ecology. In retrospect, scientism's limitless faith in the power of human reason turned out to be a case study in what the ancient Greeks called hubris, the overweening pride of the doomed. At the time, though, this wasn't obvious at all, and there's a valid sense in which scientism has become problematic today simply because its time of usefulness is over. Still, the cultures best suited to the deindustrial age will have to embrace an attitude toward nature differing sharply from scientism: an attitude that starts from humility rather than hubris, remembering that "humility" shares the same root as "humus", the soil on which we depend for the food that keeps us alive. That attitude offers few justifications for today's arrogant notions about humanity's place in nature. Still, just as Greek logic was pulled out of the rubble of the classical world and put to use in a string of successor civilizations, the scientific method is worth hauling out of the wreckage of the industrial age, and could function just as well in a culture of environmental humility as it does in today's culture of environmental hubris. My guess, for what it's worth, is that the environmental sciences offer the most likely meeting ground for such a project of rescue. Every culture draws on the techniques it finds most useful to provide it with its worldview. Industrial civilization thus drew most of the ideas of scientism, and even more of its symbolism and emotional appeal, from the world revealed by Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century and embodied in the first wave of industrial technology a century later. In the same way, the crucial role ecological knowledge will likely play in the wake of the industrial age makes the emergence of a broader way of thinking modeled on ecological science a near-certainty over the centuries immediately ahead of us. Call that way of thinking ecosophy: the wisdom (sophia) of the home, as distinct from - though in no way opposed to - the "speaking about the home" that is ecology, or the "craft (techne) of the home" that is ecotechnics. Ecosophy isn't a science, any more than scientism is, nor is it a religion - though ecological religion is likely to be significant in the deindustrial age, whether it borrows existing religious forms or evolves new ones of its own. Rather, ecosophy is a worldview and value system that gives meaning to ecology and ecotechnics, and makes sense of human life not in terms of some imagined conquest of nature, but of our species' dependence and participation in the wider circle of the biosphere. Some elements of ecosophy already exist, and others will evolve gradually as the twilight of the age of cheap energy makes environmental realities impossible to ignore. Still, there is also a point in sketching at least some of the outlines of an ecosophic worldview here and now. The Christian worldview of the Middle Ages appeared in the writings of theologians such as Augustine of Hippo long before it rooted itself in the imagination of the medieval world; in the same way, founders of modern science from Galileo to Darwin explored the worldview of scientism in their writings, and from there it spread into popular consciousness. Some of the essays in the months to come will discuss authors that have contributed most to the emerging ecosophical worldview, and explore angles along which a vision of human existence founded on ecology might be developed. Link {1}: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/01/ecology-of-social-change.html _____ ?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/2009/02/toward-ecosophy.html http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From sabri_oncu at yahoo.com Fri Feb 13 22:40:34 2009 From: sabri_oncu at yahoo.com (Sabri Oncu) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:40:34 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street Message-ID: <127667.64233.qm@web111508.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Charles: > Was it derivatives or subprime mortgages that caused the > financial panic? Subprime mortgages, in the summer of 2007. > What sort of crisis has been going since 2000? The financial leg of the ongoing over-production crisis. Second to the last asset price inflation ended and the equities started to deflate. Shortly after, the then ongoing real estate asset price inflation started to accelerate. > What is the "recession" that "started" at the end of 2007 ? The last asset price inflation ended, the real estate asset prices started to deflate in 2007, and about the end of 2007, the last depression started. > What happened in the fall of 2008? It became visible to some that the current depression will be worse than the previous few. Best, Sabri From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sat Feb 14 02:27:47 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:27:47 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Ian Angus on Charles Darwin Message-ID: <850588.15767.qm@web180111.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Ian Angus on Charles Darwin http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=366 February 6, 2009 Charles Darwin and Materialist Science *By Ian Angus. *February 12, 2009 is Darwin Day, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His masterwork, /On the Origin of Species/, was published 150 years ago, in November 1859, initiating a revolution in science that continues to this day. Although Darwin?s political views were far from radical, his insights became the central weapons in the battle to establish materialist science as the basis for our understanding of the world, and contributed to the development of Marxism. Charles Robert Darwin was, to say the least, an unlikely revolutionary. His father was a prominent physician and wealthy investor; his grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, founder of one of the largest manufacturing companies in Europe. He could have lived a life of leisure ? instead he devoted his life to science. After graduating from Cambridge in 1831, 22-year-old Charles Darwin boarded the British survey ship /HMS Beagle/ as an unpaid naturalist, subsidized by his doting father. When he returned after five years, he had thousands of pages of scientific observations, over 1,500 carefully preserved specimens ? and growing doubts about the dominant scientific and religious ideas of his day. *A heretical conclusion* At that time, Darwin wrote in his 1861 introduction to /Origin/, ?the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created.? Biblical literalists and deists alike agreed that species were fixed by divine law. Dogs might vary in appearance, but dogs don?t give birth to cats. After five years of travel and two years of study at home, Darwin came to a heretical conclusion: species were not immutable. All animals were descended from common ancestors, different species resulted from gradual changes over millions of years, and God had nothing to do with it. It is difficult, today, to understand how shocking this idea would be to the middle and upper classes of Darwin?s time. Religion wasn?t just the ?opium of the masses?? it gave the wealthy moral justification for their privileged lives in a world of constant change and gross inequality. The world was unfolding according to God?s wishes, and anyone who questioned that endangered the very fragile social order. Nevertheless, by the 1830s educated people knew that the /Genesis/ creation story couldn?t be literally true. The rise of capitalism in the 1700s had led to booms in mining and canal building: those works exposed geological layers and ancient fossils that clearly contradicted the idea of a recently-created earth. In the same period, imperialism led to global exploration and the discovery of more varieties of plant and animal life than any European had ever imagined. Why had the Creator been so extravagant? And why, if each animal was created separately, were their underlying structures so similar ? why do bats? wings, whales? flippers, lions? paws and human hands all contain the same bones? Many attempts were made to preserve a central role for God and creation in the face of this evidence. Perhaps the most sophisticated was developed in the 1850s by Richard Owen, head of natural science at the British Museum and inventor of the word ?dinosaur.? He argued that all animals are variations on ideas ? ?archetypes? ? in God?s mind. God ?foreknew all variations? on those archetypes, and made them real in forms that would suit various environments or situations over time. At the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum, the great French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck offered a non-religious explanation. He proposed that there is a ?chain of being,? a ladder of life, with single-celled animals at the bottom and humans at the top. Nature constantly and spontaneously creates new creatures that have an innate drive to climb the ladder, becoming more complex, or perfect, over time. As they climb, they also adapt to environmental changes: giraffes have long necks because their ancestors had to stretch to reach high leaves, while fish that live in caves are blind because their ancestors? vision declined as a result of disuse. This concept was not central to Lamarck?s theory, but ?inheritance of acquired characteristics? has since become inextricably connected to his name. *A materialist explanation* While Lamarck and others just /speculated/ that species changed over time, Darwin provided convincing /evidence/. More important, he showed that it happened by natural processes, without any help from gods or mysterious progressive forces. That is, his explanation of evolution was /materialist/. In Darwin?s theory, three factors combine to create new species: variation, inheritance, and natural selection. There are many differences between the members of any species, and those differences will result in some individuals being more likely to survive environmental changes and so pass on their variations to the next generation. Over long periods of time, such variations will spread through the population, while any that reduce the possibility of reproduction will decline. Eventually the accumulation of new characteristics results in new species. Darwin developed the key elements of his theory by 1838, but didn?t publish it because he knew how hostile the scientific community of his day was to both materialism and evolution . Only after 20 years, when he had become one of the best-known and most respected naturalists in England, did he finally make his heresy public. /On the Origin of Species/ was an instant best-seller. The publisher printed 1,250 copies but received orders for 1,500 copies on the first day. A second edition of 3,000 copies followed in a few weeks, and some 110,000 copies were sold in England by the end of the century. While Darwin?s ideas were quickly accepted by many scientists, especially younger ones, they were roundly condemned by the scientific establishment and by religious leaders. Adam Sedgwick, Darwin?s geology professor at Cambridge, called /On the Origin of Species/ ?utterly false and grievously mischievous? and declared his ?detestation of the theory, because of its unflinching materialism,? while Richard Owen denounced it as an ?abuse of science.? *Marx and Engels and Darwin* Outside official scientific circles, Darwin?s ideas found strong support in the workers movement. Friedrich Engels said /Origin/ was ?absolutely splendid,? and Karl Marx called it ?the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.? Marx?s friend Wilhelm Liebknecht later recalled that ?when Darwin drew the conclusions from his research work and brought them to the knowledge of the public, we spoke of nothing else for months but Darwin and the enormous significance of his scientific discoveries.? In /Origin,/ Marx and Engels/ /found a materialist explanation of nature?s history to complement and strengthen their materialist explanation of human history. They particularly valued Darwin?s demonstration that nature has a history that can be explained in materialist, natural terms. In /Anti-D//?hring/, Engels wrote: ?Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically ? she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.? *A triumph for humanity* Darwin spent most of the rest of his life researching evolution and natural selection, while his supporters defended his ideas against the most influential opinion leaders of his day. By the time he died in 1882, few scientists still disputed the fact of evolution ? but it took much longer for most to accept the materialist core of Darwin?s work, that variation and natural selection are the processes that drive evolution. For decades scientists searched for an alternative to natural selection that would be compatible with the idealist conception that God, or some equivalent progressive tendency in nature, guided evolution upwards until humans emerged as the pinnacle of creation. But twentieth century genetic research proved that Darwin was right all along: that variations occur naturally, and that natural selection is the main force determining which variations survive and spread. Darwin?s commitment to naturalist science has triumphed. No modern scientist, not even one with deep religious convictions, would today suggest that ?then a miracle happened? is an acceptable explanation for anything in nature, including the origins, immense variety and constant changes in life on our planet. This materialist victory in science is one of humanity?s greatest achievements. For that reason alone, no matter what his hesitations, delays or prejudices, Charles Darwin deserves to be remembered and honoured by everyone who looks forward to the ending of superstition and ignorance in all aspects of life. The idea that nature has a history, that species come into existence, change and disappear through natural processes, is just as revolutionary, and just as important to socialist thought, as the idea that capitalism isn?t eternal but came into being at a given time and will one day disappear from the earth. /Ian Angus// is an associate editor of Socialist Voice , and editor of the online journal Climate and Capitalism . He is currently writing a book on Darwin and materialism. / From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sat Feb 14 02:28:24 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:28:24 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] The Jewishness of Jews Without Money Message-ID: <856057.66241.qm@web180102.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Buhle_Gold.htm The Jewishness of Jews Without Money By PAUL BUHLE Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the 1996 edition of Jews Without Money (originally published in 1930) was how the political wrangling of the past had slipped into history, leaving behind one of the most magnificent of Jewish-American sagas. Alfred Kazin?s introduction to the new edition almost skipped over Michael Gold?s better-known reputation as polemicist for the Daily Worker and its literary counterparts through some thick and much thin, all the way to Gold?s death in 1967. Jews Without Money had been written as Gold?s own personal story of Jewish slum life with a heroic-political ending as brief and irrelevant as the ending of a Hollywood melodrama. The real thing was the rest of the saga. And what a saga! The Yiddish short-story writer and dramatist Leon Kobrin became known, mainly by virtue of his stories in the Forverts, as the ?Jewish Zola,? chronicler of misery and impoverishment. If the sobriquet had not already been earned, Gold would have had the best claim. Original Sin is not the problem of the Lower East Side inhabitants; poverty sinks into every corpuscle of their collective blood. The Sin is real, but it belongs to the bullies and the braggarts. Generations before Woody Allen?s Crimes and Misdemeanors roasted the hypocritical figures among the Jewish-American arrivistes, Gold lacerated the diamond-wearing matrons, the slum lords, the sweatshop kings, and others who had scant mercy for their own people (and wanted to be accepted by the Gentiles, preferably rich Gentiles, more than anything). Not all the villains were Jews, by any means. Gold was keen on the Irish cops of New York who took pride in drawing blood with their clubs at any Jewish labor activity, especially if they could bash a young radical woman. He took in the others, boxers to politicians, who were part of Jewish life but not of it. But Gold was more interested in human consequences. In one of his famous phrases, ?America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.? Gold wrote, in his own introduction to the book, that he could not accept America?s gods because he had his own idol: his mother. If this sounds amazingly saccharine for an avowed atheist and revolutionary, it is nevertheless the deepest sentiment in the novel and the one that rings the truest after all these years. A wife: a ?buttinski? and reformer, self-sacrificing for anyone in trouble, literal midwife for home births, defender of neighbors threatened by drunken husbands, also proud to be Jewish in no small part because antisemitism showed how low and animalistic the haters were?all this thanks to a marriage broker. Jewish also because the memory of Europe, the relatives left behind in Europe, one might suggest the 800 years of Yiddishkayt, was inextricably part of her sense of family and self. What would a Jew be without that memory, or the generosity of spirit toward the poor that his mother represented? Jews Without Money, the testimony of Michael Granich aka Mike Gold, is alive as long as Jewish-American immigrant history plays a vivid role in collective memory?and that shows no sign of dissipating. For all Gold?s particularities, it?s certain that the election of Barack Obama with the overwhelmingly enthusiastic support of Jewish voters is one more reminder that if poverty is the real sin, reform offers redemption. Mike Gold knew it a long time ago. Paul Buhle's latest project is "Yiddishland," a comic-art volume collaboration with Harvey Pekar and others. Reprinted with permission from the journal Sh'ma (January 2009) as part of a larger conversation about Jews and Money (www.shma.com). From nscchicago at igc.org Fri Feb 13 22:10:25 2009 From: nscchicago at igc.org (NSC WORKERS COOP) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:10:25 -0600 Subject: [A-List] NEW POLICY TOWARD THE AMERICAS - CLOSE THE SOA Message-ID: <001801c98e62$91af6520$2101a8c0@NSCCHICAGO> Tom Baker here and you don't have to do anything but feel yourself a part of this. - Organizers kit for New Policy toward the Americas - Close the SOA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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From: "Hendrik Voss, SOA Watch" Subject: [LASolidarity] Feb.15-17: Human Rights Advocates Poised to Win Closure of School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC)] Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:19:14 -0500 Size: 23061 Url: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090213/41091cb4/attachment-0003.eml From annewilliamson at msn.com Sat Feb 14 03:41:48 2009 From: annewilliamson at msn.com (Anne Williamson) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:41:48 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0 In-Reply-To: References: <430521.5760.qm@web111516.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Alas, Sabri, I am far away; otherwise, it'd be a treat to meet up with you and Michael...maybe this autumn I'll be in town again. -A. > Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:50:09 -0500 > From: michael.hudson at earthlink.net > To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu > Subject: Re: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Bubble Economy 2.0 > > Good idea. Perhaps this Wednesday. > Michael > > > On 2/13/09 4:28 PM, "Sabri Oncu" wrote: > > > > > It has been a while since I visited the back wall of this > > list to do any "moderation." Thank you Arno for sending > > these to the list. I picked them up at TNF, first. > > > > Michael, > > > > Are you in New York in these days? If you are, let us get > > together one Wednesday for lunch. > > > > Anne, > > > > Good to see that you are back. Let me know your whereabouts. > > If we are close, let try to us get together, too. > > > > Best, > > Sabri > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1429 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090214/54ffee8e/attachment.txt From the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 09:08:31 2009 From: the.buffalo.in.the.midst at gmail.com (Leighm) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:08:31 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [abu muqawama] Comment on Freefall in the Emirates Message-ID: <4996EC7F.9070809@gmail.com> K Ackermann has left a new comment on the post "Freefall in the Emirates": Our own government and media is very reluctant to speculate on the depth of the crisis here in the US. When China recently talked about guarantees on the US debt it is holding, the media was quick to speculate that it was a tit-for-tat response to Geithner's recent criticism of China. However, if you look at Fed's book, the quality of the assets that make up a substantial part of the expanded balance sheet are of poor quality. They have been trading good dollars for high-yield paper and and other 'assets' such as CDO's that nobody can sell otherwise. Even without monetizing, our currency value could be greatly impacted if the junk they are holding starts defaulting. If they start buying large amounts of long-term treasuries, then the gig is up. When/if things deteriorate to depression levels, people will rally around the loudest mouth promising a return to the American way of life. The loudest mouth probably being the most unstable. Post a comment. Posted by K Ackermann to abu muqawama at February 13, 2009 9:13 PM http://abumuqawama.blogspot.com/2009/02/freefall-in-emirates.html From ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com Sat Feb 14 09:35:55 2009 From: ioriwase at mail.mohawknationnews.com (Mohawk Nation News) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:35:55 -0500 Subject: [A-List] MNN Divining Obama secretly "damning" Indigenous water Message-ID: <012cf779$39858$0ce94832738773@xnote> DIVINING OBAMA SECRETLY ?DAMNING? INDIGENOUS WATER MNN. Feb. 13, 2009 ? On February 19th the U.S. ?bucket brigade? of President Barack ?The-Sorcerer?s-Apprentice? Obama and his entourage will be bringing their empty pails to Canada. They want Prime Minister Stephen ?Sponge-Bob? Harper and his buddies to start hauling Indigenous water to the States. They?re after our resources. You can bet on it! The following day Secretary of Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs, Ken ?Spanish-Amphibian? Salazar, will make an important announcement about their plan to steal our water. Ripping off our water is another route of the ?banksters? to bring in their New World Order. The multinationals know about the forthcoming water shortages because they?re stealing and polluting it. These water czars call themselves the "global guardians". Part of their plan to control the world is by controlling the food supply through controlling the water supply. The United Nations calls water a human right. The fox want to be in charge of the hen house in this ?humanitarian crisis? of their making. Since colonization our Indigenous communities no longer have access to clean water. This doesn?t stop them from pilfering even more from us. Barack Obama?s front man, Rahm ?Walleye? Emanuel, is known as "the godfather of Great Lakes restoration". The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed is part of Haudenosaunee Territory which we will never surrender. The Nanfan Treaty of 1701 prohibits interference by colonists and foreigners on the eastern half of Turtle Island. If they try to do this, they will be committing another violation of the Two Row Wampum Agreement with our people. They know very well we never gave the colonists any rights over our land and resources. As the caretakers and trustees, we have the duty to protect the largest surface fresh water in the world. We Indigenous people are in their way but we are not going away. Tom ?Ol-Man-Canal? Kierans and GrandCo executives like Louis ?Marine-Dead-Zone? Desmarais know that Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are the biggest obstacles to their greedy power seizing schemes. That is why Indigenous people like the Algonquins are bombarded with agents from every direction who are trying to confuse and subvert them. The Grand Canal would pass through Algonquin territory in the Canadian Shield of northern Quebec and Ontario. Senator Salazar of Colorado controls the tap. He lives near Canadian billionaire Maurice ?Meathead? Strong who ?owns? all that land on top of the largest aquifer in the "USA". Strong is high up in the UN food chain. The resource grab will be ?legalized? by setting up a UN army to enforce their attempted domination over us and our water. Is it a coincidence that Maude ?Stiletto-Rubber-Boots? Barlow of Ottawa has been appointed as the ?UN Senior Advisor on Water?? Strong also works in Beijing with the Chinese. Huge water diversion projects will be done in China first where there are less environmental or labor laws. China is now building its South to North Water Diversion, the biggest engineering feat since the Three Gorge Dam built by Canadian companies. Half a million people will be relocated or forced to move. One of the ways that the colonists destroyed our environment was through water diversion to do stupid projects like growing rice in the desert. Even within the last few years the salmon fishery on the Pacific coast has been destroyed to provide water for commercial farmers. They were so focused on immediate profits that they did not heed the damage they were causing to the environment. Turtle Island easily and comfortably supported a large Indigenous population before these catastrophic interventions by these European visitors. California has just declared a state of emergency due to their four-year drought. Farmers have been denied water and forced to reduce their crops or to stop planting. Drought stricken southwestern USA and Mexico need irrigation to grow food for their market. The U.S. has been turned into a desert. Now they want to mess up the northern part of Turtle Island. The ?Grand Canal? scheme is supposed to divert what they call ?wasted? water that flows into James Bay. One of their hair-brained schemes is to block off James Bay and turn it into a fresh water lake which will be diverted to the U.S. Do they realize that they?ll kill everything in the ocean by making it too salty? These plans are made by money grubbers, not ecologists or Indigenous people. It was first proposed by Tom Kierans in 1959. It?s an old rotten idea, just like the opportunists who thought it up. Kierans has no qualifications as an environmentalist. He?s not looking at the inevitable environmental collapse he wants to perpetrate. Water will be sent for miles along concrete canals and aqueducts sometimes uphill. Nuclear energy will be the horse and wagon for this job. The venture is backed by powerful dirty engineering companies like the UMA Group, the SNC Group, Bechtel Canada Ltd., Rousseau, Sauve and Warren Inc. Kierans says that Lavalin, Canada's largest engineering company, is courting GrandCo, his company. Even Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. [AECL]hopes to supply CANDU reactors to power the pumps that will move up to 30 per cent of the discharge of the Great Lakes. Canadian people aren?t opposing these schemes because they are too polite and too ignorant. They are also afraid the US will come and take the water by force anyway. The North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA, Security and Prosperity Partnership SPP and North American Union NAU are set up as ?illegal diversions? for water theft. Don?t kid yourselves, the U.S. always behaved like vipers in these accords. When they want something, they take it. They don?t let the welfare of other people get in their way. Look at what happened in Iraq! The Great Lakes Water Compact recently approved by Congress and Parliament without any public discussion is a bucket full of holes. They?re going to need more than mops to swab up the humongous environmental disaster they?re trying to commit. The White Mountain Apaches in Arizona just signed a deal to get clean water to drink. They were forced to give their water in the entire state so that hundreds of golf courses could be kept green. Arizona ?loaned? the Apaches the money for their water treatment facility and reservoir. Most Apaches weren?t consulted. The agreement isn?t legal. It?s just the usual colonial con job! These colonists have to sit with us on a ?nation to nation? basis according to our treaties, agreements and inherent jurisdictionh, not on a ?government to government? basis as they recently stated. They cannot deal with their hand maidens, the illegal ?band? and ?tribal? governments they?ve set up. For us, we should resume growing corn, beans and squash, the sustainers of our ancestors. We need to stay closer to home and family to care for the earth and protect our communities from these water world vultures. These zany visitors from Europe and their passengers just can?t stop themselves from creating one calamity after another over here. Hey, Barack, Stephen, Ken, Maurice, Tom, Louis and Maude, why don?t you stand on the street corner with your empty pails. We might put in a few drops of water to quench your thirst. But that?s all! [For more information and contacts, see background notes are at the end of this article.] Ia?koha:kowa & MNN Staff Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com kittoh at storm.ca katenies20 at yahoo.com kahentinetha2 at yahoo.com Note: 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. Go to MNN ?Canada? 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 ------------------------------------------------- BACKGROUND NOTES: Water is the staff of life. We can live without oil, but not water. Some water usage statistics from the UN: Over the past century, the world population has tripled but water consumption has multiplied by a factor of 6. Urban dwellers use more water than rural dwellers for personal use. Right now, agriculture uses about 75% of water, industry 15% and domestic use the balance. Creating a glass of orange juice requires 850 litres of water to produce. A hamburger requires 2400 liters. Strong worked at the UN in Environment and Economic Development. He was tainted in the oil-for-food scandal. He is still No. 2 at the UN. The water diversion plan is a big secret scheme. The northern Quebec and Ontario Algonquin territory is being grabbed by Tom Kierans and his GrandCo. One of his backers is the think tank, the ?Montreal Economic Institute? headed by the Desmarais family, which is supposedly worth $3.9 billion, all earned from extraction and exploitation of Indigenous resources. Paul Desmarais Sr. son, Louis Desmarais, is on the board of GrandCo. Louis? wife, Helene, is chair of the Montreal Economic Institute. Another brother is married to the daughter of former Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien. The Desmarais family is also closely associated with former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin. These people know that water will soon be more valuable than crude oil. The Desmarais own Power Corp, one of Canada's biggest investment firms. Paul Volker, former US Federal Reserve chairman, is on Power Corp.'s international board. Power Corp. owns a major share in Total Group, formerly Total Fina Elf, the French company that wanted to buy oil from Iraq in Euros. Power Corp. and BNP Paribas, a French bank, were involved in the UN ?oil for food? scandal in Iraq. John Rae, Bob's brother, is on the board at Power Corp. and Pargesa Holding SA, a Paribas subsidiary. Bob Rae took a run at being head of the Liberal Party of Canada to become Prime Minister. The Grand Canal ? estimated in 1994 to cost $100-billion [in 1964 dollars] to build and another $1-billion a year to operate ? sees a string of nuclear reactors and hydro dams to pump water uphill, and nine inter-basin transfer locations. Water would be pumped south from the newly-formed James [Bay] Lake. This would be created by putting a dike across James Bay, which is the southern portion of Hudson?s Bay in northern Quebec and Ontario. This water would be made to flow into the Harricana River, crossing into the Great Lakes watershed near Amos, which is near Barriere Lake, into Lake Timiskaming and the Ottawa River. It would cross near Mattawa into Lake Nipissing and the French River to Lake Huron. The Ogoki diversion moves water through Lake Nipigon and the Nipigon River into Lake Superior at a point 96 kilometres (60 miles) east of Thunder Bay Ontario. This water was diverted to support three hydroelectric plants on the Nipigon River in 1943. Two huge dams reverse the flow of water way in the wilderness. The Long Lac diversion diverts water through Long Lake and the Aguasabon River into Lake Superior near Terrace Bay. The diversion provides water for the hydroelectric plant near Terrace Bay and to drive pulpwood down the river. The Chicago diversion was built after the cholera epidemic which killed over 90,000 people in 1890's. It resulted from raw sewage being dumped into the lake at Chicago. The river was diverted to carry it away to the Mississippi River. Because of Chicago's growing population there is always pressure to increase this diversion out of the Great Lakes. Many insane diversions have been suggested, often involving blasting and paving waterways. The most persistent is the Grand Canal which was first proposed by Tom Kierans in 1959. The multinationals know about the forthcoming water shortages because they are causing it. Crandon Mine, Wisconsin, is owned by Exxon and Rio Algom. They propose to develop an underground hard rock metallic sulfide mine near Crandon, Wisconsin, in the Wolf River Basin, which is in the Great Lakes Basin. The company wants to mine 55 million tons of ore, extracting primarily copper and zinc and some lead, silver and gold. "...Crandon Mining Company proposes to pump out the withdrawn groundwater through a 38 mile pipeline to the Wisconsin River to avoid costly water treatments required to return it to the Lake Michigan watershed." "...As of February 1997, this proposal was still under consideration by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The proposal is opposed by the Mole Lake Reservation, a large number of local organizations and local governments along both the Wolf and Wisconsin Rivers." Surrounding states and provinces approved this water diversion in 1998. Great Lakes United staff member Bruce Kershner and intern Carl Bolster found: "the areas with the highest potential to raise demands to divert water from the Great Lakes are Kenosha-Pleasant Prairie (Wisconsin), Lowell-Gary-Hobart (Indiana), Waukesha-New Berlin-Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Akron-Cleveland (Ohio), Chicago (Illinois) and New York City. Recent diversion requests are proving the accuracy of this study." Diversion within Great Lakes basin: "For the past several years, the Ontario government and several municipalities in southern Ontario have been considering proposals by private companies to build a $500-million pipeline to divert 190 to 229 mld (50 to 60 mgd) of water from Georgian Bay on Lake Huron to provide water to York, Peel, Halton, Wellington and Waterloo Regions.48 This intrabasin transfer would bypass much of Lake Huron, all of the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers, and, depending on the municipality served, Lake Erie and the Niagara River." Grate lakes have different mineral content. Georgian Bay has drinkable water. Northern mountains have certain hormones that eat up certain viruses as they flow south. York Region, just north of Toronto, has most actively pursued this proposal, after awarding a tender to provide future water supplies to a consortium of Consumers Gas and British Northwest. In 1996, they came out with a proposal to draw 655 mld (177 mgd) of water from Georgian Bay and discharge treated sewage into Lake Ontario. Several citizens groups, including the Georgian Bay Association, the Safe Sewage Committee, the Canadian Environmental Law Association and Great Lakes United, objected on environmental grounds. In December 1996, York Regional Council dropped the proposal to divert water from Georgian Bay, primarily for economic reasons." Commission for Environmental Cooperation - Mexico has serious water problems. Much of the US groundwater aquifers are being rapidly depleted. http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Kierans_Tom_7131907.aspx "It [grand canal]can add 10% to Canada's fresh water," Kierans claimed in a 1989 presentation to American water regulators in Boston. Global warming, droughts and depleted water reserves in the prairies, California and the US Midwest make the GRAND project inevitable, he says. Now, Kierans says, individual pieces of the project are coming together. Lake Diefenbaker became operational in 1968, and the controversial Rafferty-Alameda dams in southern Saskatchewan - which are being constructed with substantial American financing - would help to regulate the release of water into the Souris and Missouri river systems, Kierans says. " http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/grand.htm ."..The venture is backed by powerful engineering companies - the UMA Group, the SNC Group, Bechtel Canada Ltd., and Rousseau, Sauve, Warren Inc. Kierans says that Lavalin, Canada's largest engineering company is courting GRANDCO. Even Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. [AECL] hopes to supply CANDU reactors to power the pumps. Kierens company is GrandCo. Chair of Board is "Louis Desmarais, Liberal MP from 1979 to 1984 in Montreal; president of J.D.E. Consulting Services Ltd.; chairman of Canadian Home Assurance Co; Power Corporation; and Canada Steamship Lines. "GRANDCO Joint Ventures for Engineering is headed by Gilles Mariner, who recently returned to the SNC Group from the James Bay Energy Corporation..." SEARCH TERMS: Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal; Thomas Kierans and GrandCo; Simon Reisman, negotiator for the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement; the late Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa; Brian Mulroney , former Prime Minister, on board of food cartel, Archer, Daniels Midland; Rafferty and Alameda dams in Alberta; Lake Diefenbaker, Saskatchewan; Montreal Economic Institute, Helene Desmarais; Alliance for the Great Lakes; American Rivers; Karel Mayrand of David Suzuki Foundation, Quebec; Louis Desmarais; Bill C-6; Great Lakes Compact; Mitch Bronfman and Maurice Strong; WATER: RETHINKING MANAGEMENT IN AN AGE OF SCARCITY, Worldwatch Institute; Power Corp., Paul Desmarais, Jr.; Garda World Security Corporation; "Great Lakes Water Wars" by Peter Annin. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_Development_Canal http://www.greatlakesdirectory.org/zarticles/102802_great_lakes2.htm http://waterwars.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/a-brief-history-of-the-great-recycling-and-northern-development-grand-canal-project/ http://www.discovervancouver.com/forum/BRIAN-MULRONEY-S-GRAND-CANAL-t131262.html http://www.greatlakeswaterwars.com/chapter1.htm Contact info, Links and sources The White House and Interior web sites: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 FAX: 202-456-2461 www.doi.gov. Mailing Address: Department of the Interior 1849 C Street, N.W. Washington DC 20240 Phone: 202-208-3100 E-Mail: webteam at ios.doi.gov Canadian Politricksters: Reid.S at parl.gc.ca, Harper.S at parl.gc.ca, Nicholson.R at parl.gc.ca, Day.S at parl.gc.ca,VanLoan.P at parl.gc.ca, McCallum.J at parl.gc.ca, Easter.W at parl.gc.ca, Szabo.P at parl.gc.ca, Baird.J at parl.gc.ca, Clement.T at parl.gc.ca, leader at greenparty.ca, donna.dillman at greenparty.ca, Cannon.L at parl.gc.ca, Sorenson.K at parl.gc.ca, Dewar.P at parl.gc.ca, Patry.B at parl.gc.ca, ThibaLo at parl.gc.ca, ChongM at parl.gc.ca, TrostB at parl.gc.ca, BigraB at parl.gc.ca, CardiS at parl.gc.ca, LafraM at parl.gc.ca, CulleN at parl.gc.ca, GallaC at parl.gc.ca, HawnL at parl.gc.ca, McTeaD at parl.gc.ca, AlghaO at parl.gc.ca, AnderDa at parl.gc.ca, BevinD at parl.gc.ca, DebelC at parl.gc.ca, OuellCh at parl.gc.ca, CrowdJ at parl.gc.ca, ChowO at parl.gc.ca, LunnG at parl.gc.ca, BerniM at parl.gc.ca, StrahC at parl.gc.ca, MilliP at parl.gc.ca, Hill.J at parl.gc.ca, MacKay.P at parl.gc.ca, Kramp.D at parl.gc.ca, Brown.G at parl.gc.ca, DelMastro.D at parl.gc.ca, Dewar.P at parl.gc.ca, Coderre.D at parl.gc.ca, DionS at parl.gc.ca, Comartin.J at parl.gc.ca, Oda.B at parl.gc.ca, OConnor.G at parl.gc.ca, Atamaa1 at parl.gc.ca, blackd at parl.gc.ca, Black.D at parl.gc.ca, Ambrose.R at parl.gc.ca, Toews.V at parl.gc.ca, Blackburn.J at parl.gc.ca, Paradis.C at parl.gc.ca, Moore.J at parl.gc.ca, Mulcair.T at parl.gc.ca, Duceppe.G at parl.gc.ca, Barbot.V at parl.gc.ca, Layton.J at parl.gc.ca, BlackJ at parl.gc.ca White River Apaches http://www.wmicentral.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20258633&BRD=2264&PAG=461&dept_id=505965&rfi=6 http://www.geocities.com/coqrico/apacheintro.html http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/01/16/20090116waterdeal0116.html http://www.wmat.nsn.us/ Indian Water Resources News http://www.waterchat.com/News/Indian/ind_headlines.htm www.fsin.com/landsandresources/downloads/2006WaterSummit-Presentations/FNwaterrightsFNwaterpowers.pdf http://www.doi.gov/secretary/speeches/021209_statement.html http://waterwatchalliance.googlepages.com/agenda21 http://www.landsurveyinghistory.ab.ca/Characters/Dennis_JS.htm http://media.www.lawrentian.com/media/storage/paper409/news/2009/01/23/Features/Annin.Welcomes.Lu.To.The.Basin-3591763.shtml Read: "Great Lakes Water Wars" by Peter Annin California's water worries http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jan/25/1n25water232615-farmers-feel-squeeze-which-could-w/?zIndex=42700 http://sonomasun.thmm.com/?p=6578 http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1603598.html China's water woes http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2006/08/chinese_drought.html http://www.mwr.gov.cn/english1/20040806/38392.asp http://www.wwfchina.org/english/loca.php?loca=299 Human Rights in China (HRIC) http://www.hrichina.org International Rivers Network (IRN) http://www.irn.org Three Gorges Probe http://www.threegorgesprobe.org http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-02/07/content_10778515.htm http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90785/6586680.html Maurice Strong (1,000's of hits at google) http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3522537 http://www.pehi.eu/organisations/introduction/PEHI_Maurice_F_Strong_bio.htm http://www.sovereignty.net/p/sd/strong.html http://www.locolocass.net/locoforum/viewtopic.php?t=10347 From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 13:06:33 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:06:33 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Empire, Inc Message-ID: Israel's Gaza massacre has raised consciousness of many regarding the longstanding problem of the Israeli occupation. It has begun to make more people in Europe, and even in the United States, question their governments' support for it; it has rekindled activism of Arab masses; it has highlighted the fault line in inter-state politics in the Middle East (the alliance of Iran, Syria, and Qatar versus the axis of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) in a way that is favorable to not only Iran and Syria, which would be defeated by the US if isolated, but also the Palestinians; and Hamas (resistance) is up, Fatah (collaboration) is down, in the opinions of Palestinians. All in all, Israel, once again, has won a battle militarily, but it is beginning to lose the war politically. That is good. What is not so good is the tendency of conspiracy theory, especially anti-Semitic conspiracy, to rise in this context among loose canons on the margins of movements for solidarity with the Palestinian cause. I once thought that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is only a problem of the residual far right in the West and the dark caves of the al Qaeda schools of Islamism in the East. But the problem, it turns out, is not so simple. It has to be said that conspiracy theory is gaining purchase among a few liberals and Marxists as well. This, I believe, is in large part not due to a sudden rise of anti-Jewish hatred but due to deficiency in theory, more specifically due to the rise of liberalism and waning of Marxism and the consequent rise of liberal "interest groups" theory and waning of Marxist theory of imperialism. The liberal theory of "interest groups" suggests that the state is fully autonomous of the mode of production; that each aspect of politics is to be analyzed in isolation from the rest; and that each issue, thus isolated, is up for grabs for any well organized "interest group" who can influence and change it without changing the rest of social relations at all. Therefore, if the United States government favors Israel against Iran and the Palestinians, for instance, it must be because of the power of the Israel Lobby (according to liberals) or even the Jewish Lobby (according to anti-Semites and their dupes). It is not just the anti-Semitic extreme of the "interest groups" theory that is execrable; the whole theoretical premise of the "interest groups" theory is wrong, and it must be criticized wholesale, not just anti-Semitic versions of it. The fist thing to do in combating "interest groups" theory in general and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in particular, it seems to me, is to refuse to look at the US-Israel relation in isolation and restore it in its proper context, the context of US imperialism, and historicize it. The George W. Bush administration and its wars of aggression have confused many, but the secret of the power of US imperialism is that, in the main, it has functioned by incorporating the power elites of other countries, not by directly colonizing them as imperial powers competitively did prior to the end of WW2. (Bush's failures are in large part due to his going against this tried and true strategy of US imperialism, and the election of Barack H. Obama is also in large part due to the realization on the part of the US ruling class that the adventurist departure from the tried and true strategy was, well, a dud, and a dangerous one to boot.) The incorporation began with the power elites of the defeated axis and the weakened allies after WW2. Those power elites continue to be the central players in the US-led multinational empire, which has since then expanded by gradually incorporating the power elites of an increasing number of post-colonial states. "Nous sommes tous Am?ricains," Le Monde declared after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Well, almost all of us are "Americans" in this sense, really. Today, only the power elites of a handful of countries -- such as Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea -- may be regarded as fully outside of the US-led multinational Empire, Inc., which is the reason why the USG regards these holdouts as threats, even though none of them -- not even Cuba -- presents any threat whatsoever to capitalism as the global mode of production. Empire, Inc. has its economic and military aspects, which overlap but are not identical. Economically, the most important players next to the US power elite in Empire, Inc. are the power elites of China, Japan, the UK, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. Notice that, except China, the other powers in this category have virtually renounced independent foreign policy making and practically pledged to use their armed forces only under the US command, in exchange for access to the US market. Beyond that, the US power elite have sought to cultivate "special relations" with what may be called "anchor states," the states that are chief conduits of US foreign policy in their respective regions, sometimes solely militarily, other times militarily, politically, and economically. Israel is one of the anchor states, the most important one in the Middle East, but it is _not_ unique in its function, and that's what Marxists should emphasize. There is a little overlap between the "anchor states" and the aforementioned central economic players of Empire, Inc.: e.g., Japan, which has been till recently the most important surplus recycler for the maintenance of the dollar hegemony and still the most important anchor state in the Asia-Pacific region, through its own considerable armed forces (though seldom used after WW2) and its hosting of the US bases, both of which serve as an insurance should China ever reconsider its integration in Empire, Inc. Many of the most important anchor states have distinctive dominant cultures due to historical reasons that make a great part of their populaces regrettably prone to thinking that they are superior to the other nations in their respective regions and should therefore be special friends of the United States: the UK (for which the Atlantic Alliance has been more important than the European integration), Japan (having been an imperial power in its own right, conquering other Asian countries, as well as having its own language unlike any other in the Asia-Pacific), Australia (a white settler state), Turkey (whose Kemalist power elite had long sought to make Turks think that they had more in common with Americans and Europeans than other Muslims), Israel (a settler state where the dominant group has been Ashkenazi), Pakistan (whose creation owes as much to the old British Empire as Israel does), and so on. Brazil and South Africa are anchor state candidates, but their power elites' applications have yet to be fully processed, as in both cases most of the popular classes are not in favor of full incorporation, and their power elites therefore feel popular pressures to assert their independence once in a while. Note that, compared to Empire, Inc.'s central economic players (the only major change in this category has been the addition of China), the cast of characters in the ranks of anchor states changes relatively often. Iran is a good example. Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran was as good an anchor state as Israel, making the Persian Gulf area safe for the American capitalists. In that period, the Iranians were taught by the Shah's promotion of pre-Islamic Persian culture to think that they are superior to "backward Arabs whose development was held back by Islam." Iran's Islamic revolution changed that dramatically, and today the Iranians are exhorted by the Khomeinist power elite to believe that their historical destiny is inseparable from that of the Palestinians. The change may come from the American side, too: as the USG has incorporated the Indian power elite (who once tilted toward the USSR during the Cold War) in Empire, Inc., the Pakistani power elite are now disposable. So, the USG has begun to think that, to win the war in Afghanistan, it must bypass the feckless Pakistani power elite and make direct military interventions in Pakistan. Similarly, it is not impossible for the relation between the USG and the Israeli power elite to change. The motto of Empire, Inc.: No Permanent Friends, No Permanent Enemies. Yoshie From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sat Feb 14 14:05:15 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:05:15 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Oligarchs Message-ID: <277552.63964.qm@web180101.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> "Financial oligarchy" Bill Moyers interviews Simon Johnson. Must see video. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02132009/watch.html From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 19:23:57 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:23:57 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Interview with Dr. Musa Abu Marzuk, Deputy Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, Second-in-command in Its leadership-in-exile Message-ID: A struggle to realise Palestinian hopes Atul Aneja Interview with Dr. Musa Abu Marzuk, Deputy Chairman of the Hamas political bureau who is second-in-command in the group's leadership-in-exile. Musa Abu Marzuk, a key Hamas figure, has been ceaselessly at work since the Israeli attacks on Gaza began on December 27. The 58-year-old second-in-command in the Palestinian group has emerged as its public face over Arab satellite television channels such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. In this interview he says Hamas is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital, without formally recognising the state of Israel. He clarifies that once this state emerges "we [would] then arrive at a stage when a status of calm between this state and Israel is established." Asked how Hamas would visualise the return of Palestinian refugees after a Palestinian state was established on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, the Deputy Chairman of the Hamas political bureau says: "Any kind of solution after that will be between the people. Now if the people return to Israel and they have full rights, human rights and political rights, then it's their choice of the kind of future they want. Our struggle is that Palestinian hopes are realised and full justice is accomplished." Dr. Marzuk, who has a doctorate from the United States, spoke to The Hindu at an undisclosed location in the Syrian capital Damascus. Excerpts: Q. The first phase of resistance in Gaza appears to have been accomplished after the recent war. How does your resistance advance from the level that has already been achieved? A. During this stage, the Israeli aggression hit Gaza from everywhere: the sea, air and land. Gaza Strip, as you know, is a very small area. It's 365 sq km, and it's one of the most crowded areas in the world. It has 1.5 million people living there. Most of the people in Gaza are refugees. They have come from their cities, towns, villages and farms in [historical] Palestine. Nearly 75 per cent, or one million, people are refugees who live in this area. Now after Hamas won the elections in 2006, we tried to change the ideology, policy and goal of the movement. From the beginning our goal has been to return our people to Palestine. We have emphasised that Palestinians have a right to live in their country and not in refugee camps. Our goal has been to establish our state and to struggle against occupation. Q. Are you saying your final objective is a single Palestinian state? Are you inclined to accept a two-state solution? A. Look, after we won the elections we accepted the [formation of the Palestinian] state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of the balance of power in region. And we suggested that after that a status of calm would be established between this new state and Israel, without recognising Israel. This was our aim after we won the elections. In the past, we didn't see this as a Palestinian objective. Q. So your objective is to establish an independent Palestinian state including West Bank and Gaza on territory occupied by Israel during the 1967 war? However, that is not your ultimate goal? A. We have priorities. Our priority now is to get the [Israeli] siege lifted and let the Palestinian people carry out reconstruction of their buildings and homes which were destroyed by the Israeli aggression in Gaza. This is the first priority now. Our second priority is to re-establish our national unity. Q. Under which plan? There is a Yemeni proposal and the Egyptians have been involved as mediators to achieve Palestinian unity. A. It doesn't matter whether there is a Yemeni plan or an Egyptian plan. We have to achieve our objectives ? the tools are not very important. The important thing is to rebuild our unity. Our third priority is to work together to establish a Palestinian state with Gaza Strip and West Bank and with Jerusalem as the capital. Q. When you say Jerusalem as the capital, are you referring to East Jerusalem alone? A. You see they [Israelis] should withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip up to the borders of 1967. That means East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state. After this is done, we then arrive at a stage when a status of calm between this state and Israel is established. We refuse as a movement, whether we are inside the government or outside, to recognise Israel as an independent state, because all our rights would not have been restored. Q. These rights relate to the rights of refugees to return to their homeland? A. We have refugees in Lebanon and Syria who must return to their homes, to their relatives, who are still waiting for them. Those people will not just accept a state in West Bank and Gaza Strip. Q. Where should they return? To West Bank or Gaza or their ancestral villages and towns which are in present-day Israel? A. If they return to West Bank or Gaza Strip, that is not a return to their country, to their villages or their homes. They would become refugees again, inside their country but in a different area. There are already more than 1.5 million refugees in West Bank and Gaza Strip. I am talking about historical Palestine, not West Bank and Gaza Strip. Q. So, you wish to establish an independent state along the 1967 borders without recognising Israel. But full normalisation will come only after the last phase has been accomplished ? when the refugees return to their ancestral homeland? A. Any kind of solution after that will be between the people. Now if the people return to Israel and they have full rights, human rights and political rights, then it is their choice of the kind of future they want. Our struggle is [to ensure] that Palestinian hopes are realised and full justice is accomplished. Q. There have been accusations that Hamas is a terrorist organisation which wants to throw all Jewish people into the sea? A. This is not true. You know, in history, Jews have suffered many massacres. This happened in Germany, Poland in the Second World War, and in Spain. These are the three main massacres that the Jewish people have suffered. After these massacres the Jews immigrated to Islamic countries, especially Turkey, Palestine, Morocco, in fact in many places in the Islamic world. Now, we do not have any problem with any other religion. If you look at the Islamic countries, we are part of a mixed region. I can't be a Muslim unless I believe in Jesus. I can't be a Muslim unless I believe in Moses. I have to believe in their prophets also. My religion rejects any kind discrimination. So to say that we will throw the Jewish people in the sea, this is just propaganda. On the contrary, it is also necessary to recognise the massacre of the Palestinian people. In the last massacre [in Gaza] 1,500 people have been killed, including 400 children and more than 200 women. Q. What are the principles that unify the Palestinian resistance? You have a Leftist group like the Popular Front for the People of Palestine (PFLP) as your ally and you have support from a country like Venezuela. Do you find any contradiction between Leftist or Marxist principles and Islamic principles, or do you see them coming together in some way? A. Our responsibility as Muslims is to be with people suffering injustice. These are human values that we share with others on ideological terms. We have to stand with suffering people, people suffering from hunger or people under occupation. Q. There have been attempts to link Hamas with terrorism and Al Qaeda. Do you reject Al Qaeda? A. We are completely different. We are under occupation. Of course, we reject Al Qaeda. Q. Is your resistance in Gaza during the recent conflict part of a wider struggle in the region which includes Hizbollah in Lebanon, with support from countries such as Syria and Iran? A. Our success is a victory for all Palestinians and not one for the people of Gaza alone. Of course, with Israel's defeat we have defeated many others in the region who want Israel to reoccupy Gaza Strip for different reasons. It is therefore going to help all countries and people who stand with Hamas and support Hamas in different ways. At this stage our support goes beyond Hizbollah, Syria and Iran. If you return to the war, most of the people in the Muslim world and the rest of the world stood by Hamas. They have been raising Hamas flags and burning Israeli flags. That means we have the support of millions of people throughout the world. Q. What is the significance of the Doha conference where Hamas and its allies were invited? A. At Doha, Qatar's Emir invited [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas to this conference. But he could not take this step because of pressure from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. After that Hamas was chosen to attend this conference because, being a conference about Palestinians it would have lost significance had Palestinians not participated. It was a good conference because it supported the Palestinian struggle. It is very clear that certain countries are now behind the Palestinian struggle and the Palestinian cause. That was the main message that emerged from the Doha conference. Q. Does Turkey have a specific role in resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict? A. Day by day our international support is expanding. When we won the elections we were backed by Russia, Turkey and many others. Now, European representatives who come to meet the Syrian President or the Foreign Minister seek us out. Q. Did U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon meet you? A. No, but I met his political representative in the West Bank and Gaza Strip one day before the Secretary-General's visit. Q. How do you perceive Egypt's role in the conflict? A. We have differences with Egyptian policy. We want the Egyptians to open the Rafah gate, because we have no access to the rest of the world. Q. There have been proposals about a larger American military presence in Egypt to curb smuggling of weapons through tunnels into Gaza. A. It's Egypt's responsibility to do whatever it wants to do on its territory. Nothing has been smuggled from Gaza to Egypt or Israel. There may be some people involved in smuggling items from Israel to Gaza or from Egypt to Gaza. But that is the responsibility of those countries, not ours. Q. Will you accept international monitors inside Gaza? A. No, we do not accept international monitors either within Gaza or between the stretch from the Egyptian border to the Gaza border. Q. Will you accept the presence of European monitors and representatives of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the Rafah border crossing? A. We have no objection to the presence of European monitors or from representatives of Mr. Abbas at the gates. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 20:32:07 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:32:07 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Hampshire Is First to Divest Message-ID: Another sign of positive change. -- Yoshie Hampshire Is First to Divest by Gary Lapon / February 13th, 2009 The Hampshire College Board of Trustees voted to transfer assets from a fund that invests in corporations that contribute to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, making Hampshire the first institution of higher education in the U.S. to divest. This historic decision came as a result of from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group formed at Hampshire in 2006. According to a statement from Sigmund Roos, chair of the Board of Trustees, the board reviewed the college's investments to address a petition from SJP. Among the corporations that Hampshire will divest from are United Technologies, which produces Blackhawk helicopters and engines for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets that Israel uses to kill Palestinians, and Caterpillar, which supplies Israel with bulldozers that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) uses to destroy Palestinian homes, orchards and olive groves in clearing land for illegal settlements and the "Separation Barrier" apartheid wall. The petition in support of divestment was signed by over 800 Hampshire students, faculty and alumni (on a campus with under 1,500 students). It was the product of a two-year campaign that included educational events such as film screenings and lectures, "mock walls" simulating life in the occupied West Bank, and interactive forums. SJP explained the reasons for its actions in a statement: Traditionally, Hampshire College has advocated for the oppressed. In 1977, Hampshire College was the first college in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa. In 2001, Hampshire was the first college to object to the war in Afghanistan. In this spirit and in light of the fact that the Israeli occupation is the longest ongoing occupation since World War II, we state our objection to the oppression of the Palestinian people. The Hampshire community hereby declares its commitment to work toward the end of this occupation. Furthermore, we call upon Israel to end its policies of discrimination and to respect international law and Palestinian rights, including the right to self-determination. We support the Palestinian right to resist the occupation in accordance with international law. In recent weeks, the SJP at Hampshire joined with students from area colleges and the community in the recently formed Pioneer Valley Coalition for Palestine, which organized protests against the Israeli bombing and ground assault in Gaza that killed over 1,300 people, including hundreds of children. The protests, on January 10 and February 7, drew hundreds of people each time. The banner at the front of the February 7 march proclaimed "From Amherst to Gaza: Abolish Racism." That was a reference to the "Justice for Jason" movement against the prosecution of University of Massachusetts Amherst Jason Vassell for defending himself from racist attackers. It was also meant to express the links between racism against African Americans and the Islamophobia used to justify the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. The rallies were the largest antiwar actions in Amherst in recent years and were heavily attended by Arabs and Muslims. Student activists from SJP, Palestine solidarity organizations on other local campuses, the Campus Antiwar Network, the UMass Muslim Students Association and the International Socialist Organization added their voices to the call for divestment from Israel. SJP hopes their success will be an inspiration and a call to action for others who support justice for the people of Palestine. With students occupying buildings and winning concessions in support of Palestine across Britain?and now in the U.S. at the University of Rochester, divestment at Hampshire College is an important victory for a growing movement. Building a movement that calls on U.S. institutions to divest from Israel is a key component of the struggle for justice for the people of Palestine. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 to make possible to foundation of the state of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 1967 have created a horrific reality for Palestinians, which anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu described after a 2003 visit as "much like what happened to us Black people in South Africa." Israel's illegal occupation and slaughter of innocents would not be possible without the vast funding and political support it receives from the U.S. government. Israel has been the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid for years?a total of more than $100 billion since 1948, over half of which is military aid. Hampshire College's divestment of funds from Israel has set a precedent for a movement that could play an important role in ending apartheid in Israel. Hampshire played a similar leading role in the struggle against apartheid South Africa. In 1977, students in the Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa occupied the college's administrative offices. They won their demands, and Hampshire became the first U.S. college to divest from apartheid South Africa. By 1982, similar struggles won divestment at other colleges and universities, including the nearby Umass Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University and the entire University of California system (which withdrew $3 billion in investments). By 1988, over 150 institutions had divested from South Africa. By the end of the 1980s, as well, dozens of cities, states and towns across the U.S. had put in place some form of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Inspired by the resistance of Black South Africans, the U.S. movement pressured Congress to pass (over a veto by President Ronald Reagan) sanctions against the racist regime. The solidarity movements around the world provided important support to the struggle of Black South Africans that defeated apartheid. Hampshire College's role in the campus anti-apartheid movement was an inspiration and a tool for SJP's movement for divestment from corporations that support Israeli apartheid, according to SJP member Brian Van Slyke. "That Hampshire was the first college to divest from apartheid South Africa was really a rallying cry for us on this campus," he said. Hampshire SJP is hosting a rally outside the campus library at Noon on February 13 to celebrate this historic victory and have an open discussion about the next steps for the movement for justice in Palestine. According to Van Slyke, these include defending this gain by "getting the word out to other activists and community organizers" to "make sure that people like [rabid pro-Israel supporter] Alan Dershowitz don't succeed in smearing us or shutting us down." SJP members plan to continue organizing to push for Hampshire to provide resources for an exchange with Palestinian students. SJP has received numerous invitations from activists on other campuses and is considering sending members on a tour to share the story of their victory and the lessons they've learned to inform and inspire other students to push for and win divestment from Israel. "SJP has proven that student groups can organize, rally and pressure their schools to divest from the illegal occupation," SJP said in a press release. "The group hopes that this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the U.S. to take similar stands." Gary Lapon is an activist and political cartoonist in Western Massachusetts. He can be reached at: glapon at gmail.com. Read other articles by Gary. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Feb 14 21:26:28 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:26:28 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Tell the Anti-Defamation League to stop defending Avigdor Lieberman! Message-ID: Lieberman loyalty proposal finds support in U.S. By Ben Harris ? February 10, 2009 NEW YORK (JTA) ? As Yisrael Beiteinu vaulted into third place in Israel's elections, capturing 15 Knesset seats, several American Jewish organizational leaders defended the party's controversial leader, Avigdor Lieberman. Some liberal Israeli and Jewish groups have condemned Lieberman as a fascist -- the left-wing Meretz Party even compared him to the late far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider -- for his proposal to require Israeli citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state in a bid to curtail Israeli Arab political power. But the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that is quick to spot instances of discrimination, says Lieberman is right to be concerned about apparent acts of disloyalty by Israeli Arabs. Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director, noted with concern the trips by Arab Israeli Knesset members to enemy states and expressions of solidarity with Hamas by Israeli Arabs during Israel's recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. "There were a lot of people who said, 'Hey, that's disloyal,' " Foxman told JTA. "That's what he's talking about. He's not saying expel them. He's not saying punish them." Lieberman, 50, has proposed requiring a loyalty oath as a condition of Israeli citizenship. Those who refuse -- Arab or Jewish -- would have their citizenship revoked, though they'd be permitted to remain in the country as permanent residents. "Arabs have all their rights in Israel, but they have no right to Eretz Yisrael," Lieberman said last week at the Herzliya Conference, an annual summit on Israeli state and security. Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said he found Lieberman's proposal "legitimate." Foxman promised to speak out if Lieberman advanced any legislative proposals not in keeping with the spirit of Israeli democracy, noting that the ADL had criticized his proposals in the past. In 2006, the ADL issued a statement saying it was "disturbed" by Lieberman's call for the execution of Arab legislators who met with Hamas leaders. Marc Stern, the acting co-executive director of the American Jewish Congress, noted that American Jews historically have been skeptical of or against loyalty oaths. He also pointed out that Lieberman's proposal would require all citizens to take loyalty oaths, not merely oaths by those seeking to become citizens. Stern called Lieberman's proposal "not a serious solution to a very serious problem." Ori Nir, a spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, said that expressions of solidarity by Israeli Arabs with the enemies of Israel should be considered protected political speech, and that asking Israeli Arabs to sign a loyalty oath only would alienate them further. "Once you put them on the spot, by the mere act of doing that you're going to alienate them in such a way that you will create security challenges to the state," Nir said. "You will put them on a spot where they will have to make some sort of a decision. That may lead some of them to a situation where they would say, 'You know what, the heck with you.' " Tell the Anti-Defamation League to stop defending Avigdor Lieberman! Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is defending one of Israel's most powerful far-right extremists and his plan to strip "unfaithful" citizens, mostly Arab Israelis, of their citizenship. The Anti-Defamation League is supposed to "secure justice and fair treatment to all." Instead, they are supporting a dangerous ideology that calls for taking citizenship away from Israelis for exercising their right to free speech. How can we expect the ADL to effectively defend the rights of Jews when they so easily step on the rights of Arabs? Avigdor Lieberman now heads Yisrael Beytenu, the third largest party in Israel, and is likely to be a minister in a new Israeli government. On February 10, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Abe Foxman defended Lieberman's plan, despite the fact that "Some liberal Israeli and Jewish groups have condemned Lieberman as a fascist - the left-wing Meretz Party even compared him to the late far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider - for his proposal to require Israeli Arab citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state." (1) Instead of defending Lieberman, the ADL should be condemning him. Why should the Anti-Defamation League condemn Lieberman? * Avigdor Lieberman led the drive in Israel's Central Election Committee to have Arab political parties banned from running in the most recent election, which passed successfully and was overturned only by the Israeli Supreme Court. (2) * He has called for the expulsion of Arab Members of the Knesset, threatening them that "a new administration will be established and then we will take care of you." (3) * He has called for Arab citizens of Israel to sign an "oath of loyalty" to the state or be stripped of their citizenship. (4) * His party has been very clear about what being "loyal" means: If you are an Arab student and dare come to school wearing a kefiyah, you are "disloyal." (5) * Lieberman's party said that if you are a Muslim Israeli and collect money and medicines for Gaza relief, you are "disloyal." (6) If Lieberman's plan is put into place, if you do not meet his standards of loyalty, you lose all the rights of a citizen; you lose the right to vote; and you lose the right to have a political party or to run for office - that is, the right to participate in Israel's political process. Is this what the ADL stands for? It is ironic that the ADL understands as anti-Semitic the accusations of dual loyalty hurled against Jews in the US and elsewhere, but remains unconcerned about similar accusations against Arab Israelis. Remind Abe Foxman that his organization was founded "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all" - and that all means all, including Arab Israelis. Click here to sign the letter to Abe Foxman. ---- (1) Back in 2006, the ADL condemned Lieberman's call to execute Arab legislators. But today, Abe Foxman defends Lieberman's loyalty oath (http://jta.org/news/article/2009/02/10/1002906/controversial-lieberman-proposal-finds-support-among-american-jews) (2) http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054867.html (3) http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/962767.html (4) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090204/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_hard_line_hero (5) in Hebrew: http://beytenu.org.il/126/2596/article.html (6) in Hebrew: http://beytenu.org.il/126/2345/article.html From sabri_oncu at yahoo.com Sun Feb 15 00:43:51 2009 From: sabri_oncu at yahoo.com (Sabri Oncu) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:43:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] When can you call a recession a depression? Message-ID: <435603.83575.qm@web111506.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5734059.ece From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 01:05:06 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:05:06 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Aid Convoy Heading for Gaza Message-ID: This is impressive. -- Yoshie Aid convoy heading for Gaza 10 hours ago LONDON (AFP) ? A convoy of more than 100 vehicles loaded with aid bound for the Gaza Strip left London on Saturday. The convoy, including 12 ambulances and a fire engine, is bearing more than one million pounds (1.4 million dollars, 1.1 million euros) worth of aid. The vehicles will travel 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres) through France, Spain and North Africa, crossing from Egypt into Gaza at Rafah in early March. The convoy was organised by the Viva Palestine umbrella group. Hundreds of volunteers are driving the convoy, which includes a boat and trucks full of medicines, tools, clothes, blankets and shoe-boxes bearing gifts for children. "There is an intifada sweeping Britain. It is a massive and peaceful movement in support of the beleaguered population of Gaza and Palestine," said pro-Palestinian lawmaker George Galloway, who will help drive the convoy. "It is happening everywhere, but is especially strong in the north of England and especially among young Muslims. "We will lead the biggest convoy of British vehicles across North Africa since Montgomery." Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery commanded Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt in 1942, a turning point in World War II. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 01:09:50 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:09:50 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Chavez Holds Slim Poll Lead before Venezuela Vote Message-ID: Chavez holds slim poll lead before Venezuela vote Sat Feb 14, 2009 9:08pm GMT By Enrique Andres Pretel CARACAS, Feb 14 (Reuters) - President Hugo Chavez holds a slim lead in opinion polls ahead of Sunday's referendum, which would allow him to run for re-election, but many Venezuelans remain undecided how to vote, pollsters said. The anti-U.S. socialist who wants to govern for at least another decade in the OPEC nation has maintained a steady advantage of several points for the past few weeks in his second bid to change the constitution with a referendum. Two pollsters on Saturday -- Datanalisis, which works for the public and private sector, and Consultores 30.11, which works for the government -- gave the 'Yes' vote a lead of between 5 points and 7 points. Chavez has been widening his lead slightly since January, the pollsters said. Both surveys conducted during the final week of the campaign also said more than 10 percent of Venezuelans who planned to vote still had not made up their minds, making the outcome hard to predict. "At the end of the campaign, there is a significant consistency in the data from the main Venezuelan pollsters," Datanalisis's Luis Vicente Leon told Reuters. "(But) given that the percentage of undecided voters is bigger than the difference between the 'Yes' and 'No' votes, it is very difficult to project the result." In 2007, Chavez narrowly lost a referendum on a raft of constitutional changes, including allowing him to run for re-election. On Saturday, Chavez said he lost in 2007 because of a weak get-out-the-vote effort, which he has now overhauled, making him "infinitely more" confident of victory on Sunday. If he does win, the Cuba ally who calls capitalism an evil and has nationalized swaths of the economy can stay in office as long he keeps winning elections. He first won office in 1998 and has vowed to rule for decades. If he loses on Sunday, he should leave office in 2013. But most political analysts expect the ex-soldier who once sought power in a coup would seek another way to change the election rules. The Datanalisis poll showed 45 percent of survey respondents backed the referendum and 38 percent opposed it. It surveyed 1,260 voters Feb. 3-9 and had a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points. The Consultores 30.11 gave the 'Yes' vote a lead of 46 points to 41 points. It surveyed 2,120 voters Feb. 6 to 11 and the poll's margin of error was 2.1 percentage points. (Additional reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez, Writing by Saul Hudson) From seanfischer at earthlink.net Sat Feb 14 10:20:37 2009 From: seanfischer at earthlink.net (Sean Fischer) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:20:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [A-List] NEW POLICY TOWARD THE AMERICAS - CLOSE THE SOA Message-ID: <4988305.1234632037066.JavaMail.root@elwamui-ovcar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1598 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090214/bb3c0f04/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Sat Feb 14 14:21:40 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:21:40 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Empire, Inc In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Excellent. I don't disagree with a word of it. The history of Israel certainly has common characteristics with other anchor states. However, the motivations of people are not only economic. This may be true even for power elites. Once they get an attitude about something, I have seen quite wealthy people exercise power and money in ways that are anything but financially profitable. As other evidence I have witnessed the determination of people in support of Israel, clearly visible throughout the U.S. political process. Obviously, this support is coming out of religious belief or indoctrination, and ethnic identity or racial identity. Try this experiment. Go to any Democratic Party caucus. Stand up and offer a resolution or platform position ending U.S. support for Israel. These are my neighbors. Just a fact of life. Oh--another one is militarism. Just try to push any motion that disrespects the military. You'll get WW2 and other vets, their voices revealing emotion that is not motivated by economics. The most interesting question here, is to what degree, in aggregate, the power elites way up there in the hierarchies of power, are motivated by anything other than money. Are they really automatons? --purely obedient to money? So, what possible evidence or reasoning could be offered, to figure out what really makes them tick. Todd. At 12:06 PM 2/14/2009, Yoshie wrote: >Israel's Gaza massacre has raised consciousness of many regarding the >longstanding problem of the Israeli occupation. It has begun to make >more people in Europe, and even in the United States, question their >governments' support for it; it has rekindled activism of Arab masses; >it has highlighted the fault line in inter-state politics in the >Middle East (the alliance of Iran, Syria, and Qatar versus the axis of >Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) in a way that is favorable to not >only Iran and Syria, which would be defeated by the US if isolated, >but also the Palestinians; and Hamas (resistance) is up, Fatah >(collaboration) is down, in the opinions of Palestinians. All in all, >Israel, once again, has won a battle militarily, but it is beginning >to lose the war politically. That is good. > >What is not so good is the tendency of conspiracy theory, especially >anti-Semitic conspiracy, to rise in this context among loose canons on >the margins of movements for solidarity with the Palestinian cause. I >once thought that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is only a problem of >the residual far right in the West and the dark caves of the al Qaeda >schools of Islamism in the East. But the problem, it turns out, is >not so simple. It has to be said that conspiracy theory is gaining >purchase among a few liberals and Marxists as well. This, I believe, >is in large part not due to a sudden rise of anti-Jewish hatred but >due to deficiency in theory, more specifically due to the rise of >liberalism and waning of Marxism and the consequent rise of liberal >"interest groups" theory and waning of Marxist theory of imperialism. > >The liberal theory of "interest groups" suggests that the state is >fully autonomous of the mode of production; that each aspect of >politics is to be analyzed in isolation from the rest; and that each >issue, thus isolated, is up for grabs for any well organized "interest >group" who can influence and change it without changing the rest of >social relations at all. Therefore, if the United States government >favors Israel against Iran and the Palestinians, for instance, it must >be because of the power of the Israel Lobby (according to liberals) or >even the Jewish Lobby (according to anti-Semites and their dupes). It >is not just the anti-Semitic extreme of the "interest groups" theory >that is execrable; the whole theoretical premise of the "interest >groups" theory is wrong, and it must be criticized wholesale, not just >anti-Semitic versions of it. > >The fist thing to do in combating "interest groups" theory in general >and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in particular, it seems to me, is >to refuse to look at the US-Israel relation in isolation and restore >it in its proper context, the context of US imperialism, and >historicize it. > >The George W. Bush administration and its wars of aggression have >confused many, but the secret of the power of US imperialism is that, >in the main, it has functioned by incorporating the power elites of >other countries, not by directly colonizing them as imperial powers >competitively did prior to the end of WW2. (Bush's failures are in >large part due to his going against this tried and true strategy of US >imperialism, and the election of Barack H. Obama is also in large part >due to the realization on the part of the US ruling class that the >adventurist departure from the tried and true strategy was, well, a >dud, and a dangerous one to boot.) The incorporation began with the >power elites of the defeated axis and the weakened allies after WW2. >Those power elites continue to be the central players in the US-led >multinational empire, which has since then expanded by gradually >incorporating the power elites of an increasing number of >post-colonial states. "Nous sommes tous Am?ricains," Le Monde >declared after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Well, >almost all of us are "Americans" in this sense, really. Today, only >the power elites of a handful of countries -- such as Iran, Syria, >Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea -- may be regarded as fully outside >of the US-led multinational Empire, Inc., which is the reason why the >USG regards these holdouts as threats, even though none of them -- not >even Cuba -- presents any threat whatsoever to capitalism as the >global mode of production. > >Empire, Inc. has its economic and military aspects, which overlap but >are not identical. > >Economically, the most important players next to the US power elite in >Empire, Inc. are the power elites of China, Japan, the UK, Germany, >and Saudi Arabia. Notice that, except China, the other powers in this >category have virtually renounced independent foreign policy making >and practically pledged to use their armed forces only under the US >command, in exchange for access to the US market. > >Beyond that, the US power elite have sought to cultivate "special >relations" with what may be called "anchor states," the states that >are chief conduits of US foreign policy in their respective regions, >sometimes solely militarily, other times militarily, politically, and >economically. Israel is one of the anchor states, the most important >one in the Middle East, but it is _not_ unique in its function, and >that's what Marxists should emphasize. There is a little overlap >between the "anchor states" and the aforementioned central economic >players of Empire, Inc.: e.g., Japan, which has been till recently the >most important surplus recycler for the maintenance of the dollar >hegemony and still the most important anchor state in the Asia-Pacific >region, through its own considerable armed forces (though seldom used >after WW2) and its hosting of the US bases, both of which serve as an >insurance should China ever reconsider its integration in Empire, Inc. > >Many of the most important anchor states have distinctive dominant >cultures due to historical reasons that make a great part of their >populaces regrettably prone to thinking that they are superior to the >other nations in their respective regions and should therefore be >special friends of the United States: the UK (for which the Atlantic >Alliance has been more important than the European integration), Japan >(having been an imperial power in its own right, conquering other >Asian countries, as well as having its own language unlike any other >in the Asia-Pacific), Australia (a white settler state), Turkey (whose >Kemalist power elite had long sought to make Turks think that they had >more in common with Americans and Europeans than other Muslims), >Israel (a settler state where the dominant group has been Ashkenazi), >Pakistan (whose creation owes as much to the old British Empire as >Israel does), and so on. Brazil and South Africa are anchor state >candidates, but their power elites' applications have yet to be fully >processed, as in both cases most of the popular classes are not in >favor of full incorporation, and their power elites therefore feel >popular pressures to assert their independence once in a while. > >Note that, compared to Empire, Inc.'s central economic players (the >only major change in this category has been the addition of China), >the cast of characters in the ranks of anchor states changes >relatively often. Iran is a good example. Under Mohammad Reza Shah >Pahlavi, Iran was as good an anchor state as Israel, making the >Persian Gulf area safe for the American capitalists. In that period, >the Iranians were taught by the Shah's promotion of pre-Islamic >Persian culture to think that they are superior to "backward Arabs >whose development was held back by Islam." Iran's Islamic revolution >changed that dramatically, and today the Iranians are exhorted by the >Khomeinist power elite to believe that their historical destiny is >inseparable from that of the Palestinians. The change may come from >the American side, too: as the USG has incorporated the Indian power >elite (who once tilted toward the USSR during the Cold War) in Empire, >Inc., the Pakistani power elite are now disposable. So, the USG has >begun to think that, to win the war in Afghanistan, it must bypass the >feckless Pakistani power elite and make direct military interventions >in Pakistan. Similarly, it is not impossible for the relation between >the USG and the Israeli power elite to change. > >The motto of Empire, Inc.: No Permanent Friends, No Permanent Enemies. > >Yoshie -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 10841 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090214/1eef5019/attachment.txt From tboyle at rosehill.net Sat Feb 14 19:20:08 2009 From: tboyle at rosehill.net (Todd Boyle) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:20:08 -0800 Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [counter-recruitment] 27, 000 Work in Pentagon PR and Recruiting Message-ID: Why does the US military have to spend $4.7 billion dollars persuading indoctrinating the American people? What the hell is *this*? Who do they work for???? The cart before the horse. Tail wags the dog. Please donate to http://watir.org so we can get recruiters out of all the 300 school districts in the State of Washington, not just Seattle. http://watir.org/res/WatirOrgFlyerV21.doc Todd. >From: radtimes >Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:34:47 -0800 >Subject: [counter-recruitment] 27,000 Work in Pentagon PR and Recruiting > >27,000 Work in Pentagon PR and Recruiting > >http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/02/27000-work-in-p.html > >By Noah Shachtman >February 05, 2009 > >Forget the drone stuff. Here is your eye-popping statistic of the >day: "This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for >recruitment, advertising and public relations ? almost as many as the >total 30,000-person work force in the State Department." > >That's from an Associated Press investigation, "which found that over >the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts >and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least >$4.7 billion this year." > >Staff costs take up most of the money, more than $2 billion. Another >$1.6 billion goes into recruiting. About a half-billion goes towards >"psychological operations, which targets foreign audiences." And, >finally, "$547 million goes into public affairs, which reaches >American audiences." > >That last one may be the most amazing figure of 'em all. Because >getting a straightforward answer out of most military public affairs >shops is still a root-canal-painful procedure. You'd think it'd be >easier, with all those resources brought to bear. > >. > >------------------------------------ > >To Post a message, send it to: counter-recruitment at eGroups.com >To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: >counter-recruitment-unsubscribe at eGroups.comYahoo! Groups Links > ><*> To visit your group on the web, go to: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/counter-recruitment/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 2800 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090214/4146e7d9/attachment.txt From suzannedk at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 03:51:33 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:51:33 +0100 Subject: [A-List] The StressTest Message-ID: The stress test for the banks will be only as accurate as the numbers of the true costs of all the derivitives, now world wide, issued. Those true numbers will be unable to be found. The banks will make sure of that as will all the corollary financial institutions in the United States or their foreign offshoots, like the vast corporations, such as the Big Three for example, Johnson and Johnson, I.B.M., Bell South, A T & T, Boeing Co., the list is endless and unknown by 95% of U.S. citizens, thanks to the silence of all U S media. The stress test is a means to reassure the no longer gullible, the billions newly homeless, jobless and desperate. An attempt to clothe the naked empire builders. Suzanne de Kuyper -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 790 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090215/df243603/attachment.txt From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 11:43:50 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:43:50 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism Message-ID: One of the best illustrations of Empire, Inc.'s motto -- no permanent enemies, no permanent friends -- is its about-face on Afghanistan. Today's a good day to remember it: "Twenty years ago today, the commander of the Soviet Limited Contingent in Afghanistan Boris Gromov crossed the Termez Bridge out of Afghanistan, thus marking the end of the Soviet war which lasted almost ten years and cost tens of thousands of Soviet and Afghan lives. . . . The documents suggest that the Soviet decision to withdraw occurred as early as 1985, but the process of implementing that decision was excruciatingly slow, in part because the Soviet-backed Afghan regime was never able to achieve the necessary domestic support and legitimacy -- a key problem even today for the current U.S. and NATO-supported government in Kabul" (at ). Capitalism and imperialism has no structural necessity for Islamophobia. Islamophobia is ascendant today because Empire, Inc is fighting wars against predominantly Muslim nations. When it was fighting against godless Communists, in contrast, it celebrated even the most reactionary Islamist extremists as "freedom fighters." Similarly, capitalism and imperialism have no structural need for Zionism or anti-Semitism. They can rise or fall depending on the perceived self-interests of the power elite of Empire, Inc. Classic anti-Semitism is already a residual ideology, and so will Zionism be, as it has already lost its original raison d'etre (the inability of Jews to obtain equal rights in the West), and as it begins to lose, slowly but surely, Western elite support for Israel. Yoshie From pwright at prisonlegalnews.org Sun Feb 15 14:30:25 2009 From: pwright at prisonlegalnews.org (Paul Wright) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:30:25 -0500 Subject: [A-List] Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <001501c98fb4$9d89aa60$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> This is hardly a new oberservation. Benjamim Disraeli noted there were no permenant allies only permanent interests. But I think that is one of the flaws of post modernism: it makes all things equal. Islam and Zionism have no fundamental contradiction with US imperialism or capitalism. However, communism does and that was and remains the basis for the constant opposition to it. But beyond ideology there is the political reality of great power rivalry. France, England, Germany, et al., were all capitalist and the only issue was the division of spoils. Hence the current US hostility to Russia and china now that that they have abandoned Marxism. 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 2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148 Seattle, WA 98117 206-246-1022 -----Original Message----- From: a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2009 1:44 PM To: A-List; Rad-Green Subject: [A-List] Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism One of the best illustrations of Empire, Inc.'s motto -- no permanent enemies, no permanent friends -- is its about-face on Afghanistan. Today's a good day to remember it: "Twenty years ago today, the commander of the Soviet Limited Contingent in Afghanistan Boris Gromov crossed the Termez Bridge out of Afghanistan, thus marking the end of the Soviet war which lasted almost ten years and cost tens of thousands of Soviet and Afghan lives. . . . The documents suggest that the Soviet decision to withdraw occurred as early as 1985, but the process of implementing that decision was excruciatingly slow, in part because the Soviet-backed Afghan regime was never able to achieve the necessary domestic support and legitimacy -- a key problem even today for the current U.S. and NATO-supported government in Kabul" (at ). Capitalism and imperialism has no structural necessity for Islamophobia. Islamophobia is ascendant today because Empire, Inc is fighting wars against predominantly Muslim nations. When it was fighting against godless Communists, in contrast, it celebrated even the most reactionary Islamist extremists as "freedom fighters." Similarly, capitalism and imperialism have no structural need for Zionism or anti-Semitism. They can rise or fall depending on the perceived self-interests of the power elite of Empire, Inc. Classic anti-Semitism is already a residual ideology, and so will Zionism be, as it has already lost its original raison d'etre (the inability of Jews to obtain equal rights in the West), and as it begins to lose, slowly but surely, Western elite support for Israel. Yoshie From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Sun Feb 15 15:36:26 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:36:26 -0800 (PST) Subject: [A-List] Panic on Wall Street Message-ID: <350727.80616.qm@web180107.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Panic on Wall Street Charles: > Was it derivatives or subprime mortgages that caused the > financial panic? Subprime mortgages, in the summer of 2007. ^^^^^ CB: If the derivatives were a factor by making the situation fragile, that should be included in the explanation , otherwise it will involve blaming especially low incomed debtors. ^^^^^ > What sort of crisis has been going since 2000? The financial leg of the ongoing over-production crisis. Second to the last asset price inflation ended and the equities started to deflate. Shortly after, the then ongoing real estate asset price inflation started to accelerate. ^^^^^^ CB: Why not say since 1997 South Asia bust ? Wasn't there an interim boom since 2000 crisis ? ^^^^ > What is the "recession" that "started" at the end of 2007 ? The last asset price inflation ended, the real estate asset prices started to deflate in 2007, and about the end of 2007, the last depression started. > What happened in the fall of 2008? It became visible to some that the current depression will be worse than the previous few. ^^^^ CB: Seemed to be a specific financial crash. Best, Sabri From suzannedk at gmail.com Sun Feb 15 15:36:17 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:36:17 +0100 Subject: [A-List] A-List Digest, Vol 65, Issue 28 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Message number 7 is the question of the decade if not more. The question is also worth several million, at least 40, of human lives used to show what a good world policeman the US is. It is an execrable one! It seems to destroy the infrastructure of any country it attacks, It even does this more slowly to those it occupies for generations. The most financially viable product of the US is military hardware, which is why it is going bankrupt. So, as Hitler did, it concentrates on more world wars, fomenting them right and left with abandon. Propaganda costing billions is necessary to attempt to seem like a healthy rich democracy, so that the world stays on the USD. Luck looks like it is running out. US schools need the two billion a week it costs to do the wars now. Bridges need rebuilding, the millions of homeless need tents, blankets, food kitchens, free healthcare. Which is why the propaganda the writer of number 7 asks about is now extended to all US news, world wide. An unsustainable effort, but one wished more would ask that question! Just as the world truns away from Israel, it will do so from the US, it will have to ...... suzannedk at gmail On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 10:29 PM, wrote: > Send A-List mailing list submissions to > a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/a-list > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > a-list-request at lists.econ.utah.edu > > You can reach the person managing the list at > a-list-owner at lists.econ.utah.edu > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of A-List digest..." > > > The A-List Digest > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Tell the Anti-Defamation League to stop defending Avigdor > Lieberman! (Yoshie Furuhashi) > 2. When can you call a recession a depression? (Sabri Oncu) > 3. Aid Convoy Heading for Gaza (Yoshie Furuhashi) > 4. Chavez Holds Slim Poll Lead before Venezuela Vote > (Yoshie Furuhashi) > 5. Re: NEW POLICY TOWARD THE AMERICAS - CLOSE THE SOA (Sean Fischer) > 6. Re: Empire, Inc (Todd Boyle) > 7. Fwd: [counter-recruitment] 27, 000 Work in Pentagon PR and > Recruiting (Todd Boyle) > 8. The StressTest (Suzanne de Kuyper) > 9. Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism (Yoshie Furuhashi) > 10. Re: Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism (Paul Wright) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:26:28 -0500 > From: Yoshie Furuhashi > Subject: [A-List] Tell the Anti-Defamation League to stop defending > Avigdor Lieberman! > To: A-List , Rad-Green > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 > > < > http://jta.org/news/article/2009/02/10/1002906/controversial-lieberman-proposal-finds-support-among-american-jews > > > Lieberman loyalty proposal finds support in U.S. > > By Ben Harris ? February 10, 2009 > > NEW YORK (JTA) ? As Yisrael Beiteinu vaulted into third place in > Israel's elections, capturing 15 Knesset seats, several American > Jewish organizational leaders defended the party's controversial > leader, Avigdor Lieberman. > > Some liberal Israeli and Jewish groups have condemned Lieberman as a > fascist -- the left-wing Meretz Party even compared him to the late > far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider -- for his proposal to > require Israeli citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish > state in a bid to curtail Israeli Arab political power. > > But the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that is quick to spot > instances of discrimination, says Lieberman is right to be concerned > about apparent acts of disloyalty by Israeli Arabs. > > Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director, noted with concern the > trips by Arab Israeli Knesset members to enemy states and expressions > of solidarity with Hamas by Israeli Arabs during Israel's recent > military operation in the Gaza Strip. > > "There were a lot of people who said, 'Hey, that's disloyal,' " Foxman > told JTA. "That's what he's talking about. He's not saying expel them. > He's not saying punish them." > > Lieberman, 50, has proposed requiring a loyalty oath as a condition of > Israeli citizenship. Those who refuse -- Arab or Jewish -- would have > their citizenship revoked, though they'd be permitted to remain in the > country as permanent residents. > > "Arabs have all their rights in Israel, but they have no right to > Eretz Yisrael," Lieberman said last week at the Herzliya Conference, > an annual summit on Israeli state and security. > > Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said > he found Lieberman's proposal "legitimate." > > Foxman promised to speak out if Lieberman advanced any legislative > proposals not in keeping with the spirit of Israeli democracy, noting > that the ADL had criticized his proposals in the past. > > In 2006, the ADL issued a statement saying it was "disturbed" by > Lieberman's call for the execution of Arab legislators who met with > Hamas leaders. > > Marc Stern, the acting co-executive director of the American Jewish > Congress, noted that American Jews historically have been skeptical of > or against loyalty oaths. He also pointed out that Lieberman's > proposal would require all citizens to take loyalty oaths, not merely > oaths by those seeking to become citizens. > > Stern called Lieberman's proposal "not a serious solution to a very > serious problem." > > Ori Nir, a spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, said that > expressions of solidarity by Israeli Arabs with the enemies of Israel > should be considered protected political speech, and that asking > Israeli Arabs to sign a loyalty oath only would alienate them further. > > "Once you put them on the spot, by the mere act of doing that you're > going to alienate them in such a way that you will create security > challenges to the state," Nir said. "You will put them on a spot where > they will have to make some sort of a decision. That may lead some of > them to a situation where they would say, 'You know what, the heck > with you.' " > > > Tell the Anti-Defamation League to stop defending Avigdor Lieberman! > > Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is defending one of Israel's > most powerful far-right extremists and his plan to strip "unfaithful" > citizens, mostly Arab Israelis, of their citizenship. The > Anti-Defamation League is supposed to "secure justice and fair > treatment to all." Instead, they are supporting a dangerous ideology > that calls for taking citizenship away from Israelis for exercising > their right to free speech. > > How can we expect the ADL to effectively defend the rights of Jews > when they so easily step on the rights of Arabs? > > Avigdor Lieberman now heads Yisrael Beytenu, the third largest party > in Israel, and is likely to be a minister in a new Israeli government. > > On February 10, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Abe Foxman > defended Lieberman's plan, despite the fact that "Some liberal Israeli > and Jewish groups have condemned Lieberman as a fascist - the > left-wing Meretz Party even compared him to the late far-right > Austrian politician Joerg Haider - for his proposal to require Israeli > Arab citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state." (1) > > Instead of defending Lieberman, the ADL should be condemning him. > > Why should the Anti-Defamation League condemn Lieberman? > > * Avigdor Lieberman led the drive in Israel's Central Election > Committee to have Arab political parties banned from running in the > most recent election, which passed successfully and was overturned > only by the Israeli Supreme Court. (2) > * He has called for the expulsion of Arab Members of the Knesset, > threatening them that "a new administration will be established and > then we will take care of you." (3) > * He has called for Arab citizens of Israel to sign an "oath of > loyalty" to the state or be stripped of their citizenship. (4) > * His party has been very clear about what being "loyal" means: If > you are an Arab student and dare come to school wearing a kefiyah, you > are "disloyal." (5) > * Lieberman's party said that if you are a Muslim Israeli and > collect money and medicines for Gaza relief, you are "disloyal." (6) > > If Lieberman's plan is put into place, if you do not meet his > standards of loyalty, you lose all the rights of a citizen; you lose > the right to vote; and you lose the right to have a political party or > to run for office - that is, the right to participate in Israel's > political process. > Is this what the ADL stands for? > > It is ironic that the ADL understands as anti-Semitic the accusations > of dual loyalty hurled against Jews in the US and elsewhere, but > remains unconcerned about similar accusations against Arab Israelis. > > Remind Abe Foxman that his organization was founded "to stop the > defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair > treatment to all" - and that all means all, including Arab Israelis. > > Click here to sign the letter to Abe Foxman. > > ---- > > (1) Back in 2006, the ADL condemned Lieberman's call to execute Arab > legislators. But today, Abe Foxman defends Lieberman's loyalty oath > ( > http://jta.org/news/article/2009/02/10/1002906/controversial-lieberman-proposal-finds-support-among-american-jews > ) > > (2) http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054867.html > > (3) http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/962767.html > > (4) > http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090204/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_hard_line_hero > > (5) in Hebrew: http://beytenu.org.il/126/2596/article.html > > (6) in Hebrew: http://beytenu.org.il/126/2345/article.html > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:43:51 -0800 (PST) > From: Sabri Oncu > Subject: [A-List] When can you call a recession a depression? > To: A-List > Message-ID: <435603.83575.qm at web111506.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5734059.ece > > > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:05:06 -0500 > From: Yoshie Furuhashi > Subject: [A-List] Aid Convoy Heading for Gaza > To: A-List , Rad-Green > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 > > This is impressive. -- Yoshie > > < > http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gUOqmqx9BgKn5rWER8qK3cRqBufg > > > Aid convoy heading for Gaza > > 10 hours ago > > LONDON (AFP) ? A convoy of more than 100 vehicles loaded with aid > bound for the Gaza Strip left London on Saturday. > > The convoy, including 12 ambulances and a fire engine, is bearing more > than one million pounds (1.4 million dollars, 1.1 million euros) worth > of aid. > > The vehicles will travel 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres) through > France, Spain and North Africa, crossing from Egypt into Gaza at Rafah > in early March. > > The convoy was organised by the Viva Palestine umbrella group. > > Hundreds of volunteers are driving the convoy, which includes a boat > and trucks full of medicines, tools, clothes, blankets and shoe-boxes > bearing gifts for children. > > "There is an intifada sweeping Britain. It is a massive and peaceful > movement in support of the beleaguered population of Gaza and > Palestine," said pro-Palestinian lawmaker George Galloway, who will > help drive the convoy. > > "It is happening everywhere, but is especially strong in the north of > England and especially among young Muslims. > > "We will lead the biggest convoy of British vehicles across North > Africa since Montgomery." > > Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery commanded Allied forces at the Battle > of El Alamein in Egypt in 1942, a turning point in World War II. > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 4 > Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:09:50 -0500 > From: Yoshie Furuhashi > Subject: [A-List] Chavez Holds Slim Poll Lead before Venezuela Vote > To: A-List , Rad-Green > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > > Chavez holds slim poll lead before Venezuela vote > Sat Feb 14, 2009 9:08pm GMT > > By Enrique Andres Pretel > > CARACAS, Feb 14 (Reuters) - President Hugo Chavez holds a slim lead in > opinion polls ahead of Sunday's referendum, which would allow him to > run for re-election, but many Venezuelans remain undecided how to > vote, pollsters said. > > The anti-U.S. socialist who wants to govern for at least another > decade in the OPEC nation has maintained a steady advantage of several > points for the past few weeks in his second bid to change the > constitution with a referendum. > > Two pollsters on Saturday -- Datanalisis, which works for the public > and private sector, and Consultores 30.11, which works for the > government -- gave the 'Yes' vote a lead of between 5 points and 7 > points. Chavez has been widening his lead slightly since January, the > pollsters said. > > Both surveys conducted during the final week of the campaign also said > more than 10 percent of Venezuelans who planned to vote still had not > made up their minds, making the outcome hard to predict. > > "At the end of the campaign, there is a significant consistency in the > data from the main Venezuelan pollsters," Datanalisis's Luis Vicente > Leon told Reuters. "(But) given that the percentage of undecided > voters is bigger than the difference between the 'Yes' and 'No' votes, > it is very difficult to project the result." > > In 2007, Chavez narrowly lost a referendum on a raft of constitutional > changes, including allowing him to run for re-election. > > On Saturday, Chavez said he lost in 2007 because of a weak > get-out-the-vote effort, which he has now overhauled, making him > "infinitely more" confident of victory on Sunday. > > If he does win, the Cuba ally who calls capitalism an evil and has > nationalized swaths of the economy can stay in office as long he keeps > winning elections. He first won office in 1998 and has vowed to rule > for decades. > > If he loses on Sunday, he should leave office in 2013. But most > political analysts expect the ex-soldier who once sought power in a > coup would seek another way to change the election rules. > > The Datanalisis poll showed 45 percent of survey respondents backed > the referendum and 38 percent opposed it. It surveyed 1,260 voters > Feb. 3-9 and had a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points. > > The Consultores 30.11 gave the 'Yes' vote a lead of 46 points to 41 > points. It surveyed 2,120 voters Feb. 6 to 11 and the poll's margin of > error was 2.1 percentage points. > > (Additional reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez, Writing by Saul Hudson) > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 5 > Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:20:37 -0500 (EST) > From: Sean Fischer > Subject: Re: [A-List] NEW POLICY TOWARD THE AMERICAS - CLOSE THE SOA > To: The A-List , NSC WORKERS COOP > > Message-ID: > < > 4988305.1234632037066.JavaMail.root at elwamui-ovcar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > A non-text attachment was scrubbed... > Name: not available > Type: text/html > Size: 1599 bytes > Desc: not available > Url : > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20090214/bb3c0f04/attachment.txt > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 6 > Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:21:40 -0800 > From: Todd Boyle > Subject: Re: [A-List] Empire, Inc > To: The A-List > Cc: VFPResearch at yahoogroups.com > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Excellent. I don't disagree with a word of it. The history of Israel > certainly has common characteristics with other anchor states. > > However, the motivations of people are not only economic. This may > be true even for power elites. Once they get an attitude about something, > I have seen quite wealthy people exercise power and money in ways that > are anything but financially profitable. > > As other evidence I have witnessed the determination of people in > support of Israel, clearly visible throughout the U.S. political process. > Obviously, this support is coming out of religious belief or > indoctrination, > and ethnic identity or racial identity. Try this experiment. Go to any > Democratic Party caucus. Stand up and offer a resolution or platform > position ending U.S. support for Israel. These are my neighbors. > Just a fact of life. Oh--another one is militarism. Just try to push > any motion that disrespects the military. You'll get WW2 and other vets, > their voices revealing emotion that is not motivated by economics. > > The most interesting question here, is to what degree, in aggregate, > the power elites way up there in the hierarchies of power, are motivated > by anything other than money. Are they really automatons? --purely > obedient to money? So, what possible evidence or reasoning > could be offered, to figure out what really makes them tick. Todd. > > > At 12:06 PM 2/14/2009, Yoshie wrote: > >Israel's Gaza massacre has raised consciousness of many regarding the > >longstanding problem of the Israeli occupation. It has begun to make > >more people in Europe, and even in the United States, question their > >governments' support for it; it has rekindled activism of Arab masses; > >it has highlighted the fault line in inter-state politics in the > >Middle East (the alliance of Iran, Syria, and Qatar versus the axis of > >Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) in a way that is favorable to not > >only Iran and Syria, which would be defeated by the US if isolated, > >but also the Palestinians; and Hamas (resistance) is up, Fatah > >(collaboration) is down, in the opinions of Palestinians. All in all, > >Israel, once again, has won a battle militarily, but it is beginning > >to lose the war politically. That is good. > > > >What is not so good is the tendency of conspiracy theory, especially > >anti-Semitic conspiracy, to rise in this context among loose canons on > >the margins of movements for solidarity with the Palestinian cause. I > >once thought that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is only a problem of > >the residual far right in the West and the dark caves of the al Qaeda > >schools of Islamism in the East. But the problem, it turns out, is > >not so simple. It has to be said that conspiracy theory is gaining > >purchase among a few liberals and Marxists as well. This, I believe, > >is in large part not due to a sudden rise of anti-Jewish hatred but > >due to deficiency in theory, more specifically due to the rise of > >liberalism and waning of Marxism and the consequent rise of liberal > >"interest groups" theory and waning of Marxist theory of imperialism. > > > >The liberal theory of "interest groups" suggests that the state is > >fully autonomous of the mode of production; that each aspect of > >politics is to be analyzed in isolation from the rest; and that each > >issue, thus isolated, is up for grabs for any well organized "interest > >group" who can influence and change it without changi