[PEN-L:6772] Appeals to German Greens to oppose bombing
An Appeal from American Jews to the Green Party of Germany -- May 12, 1999 http://www.preamble.org/greensign.html Congressional Democrats' appeal to Green Party of Germany -- May 12, 1999 http://www.preamble.org/greensign2.html Apologies to anyone who wanted to be included in the former but wasn't. It's been a deluge... -Robert Naiman --- Robert Naiman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Preamble Center 1737 21st NW Washington, DC 20009 phone: 202-265-3263 fax: 202-265-3647 http://www.preamble.org/ ---
[PEN-L:6774] Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
Jim Devine wrote: Doug writes: Most studies of turnover/instability/tenure I've seen for the U.S. show no significant increase from the 1970s. I know this is counterintuitive, and it pisses people off when I say it sometimes, but it seems to be true. What may have happened is that some instability has crept up the social ladder, making middle managers vulnerable to the instability that blue/pink collar workers have long known, which attracts more attention than in the past. Also, behind the flattish average tenure figures, men are falling but women are rising. This disaggregation is crucial: I read what's happening as the gradual end (and sometimes rapid demise) of the primary labor market jobs, which offered some job security, and the spread of secondary labor market type jobs, which don't. Because middle-aged white males hogged the primary-type jobs that existed in the core and unionized sectors of the US economy, they (or rather, people of their demographic category) are the ones who have suffered the most from increased instability of job tenure. Women and "minorities" traditionally had secondary-type jobs and typically had little in the way of security. Thus, there's been a convergence of job experience between the old insiders and the old outsiders in the labor-power market. This exaggerates the security of the old days, and treats rising female tenure as a secondary consideration to falling male, which you don't mean to do, do you? Doug
[PEN-L:6780] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
Tom L. wrote: Hey, Jimmy D., your the Ph.D., you tell me. How are you going to have a "better" globalization? A realistically enforceable one with labor and environmental standards that protect people. Controls on the movement of capital? a Ph.D. and $2 will get you a good cup of coffee. One thing we need is more cooperation between labor unions in the "North" and those in the "newly industrialized countries," to figure out how to achieve this goal. Beyond that, I'll leave the answer to the rest of pen-l. Having been released from teaching responsibilities for awhile, I've contributed too much to pen-l of late. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
[PEN-L:6785] Military (was EPR, prison, interest rates)
Robert Naiman wrote: So how does the U.S. look compared to other OECD countries if you count institutionalized adults as part of the population? Can one also account for the role of the military? Doug gave us the figures on incarceration, but what about the military? I remember reading somewhere that about 1 million people are employed by the US armed forces. Is that correct? Yoshie
[PEN-L:6786] Re: People's Daily Commentary
Yoshie, You are happy that people are deluded? I am sorry for you. Barkley Rosser -Original Message- From: Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thursday, May 13, 1999 4:34 PM Subject: [PEN-L:6784] People's Daily Commentary Barkley Rosser: Ooh. Well, if His Excellency, President Jiang Zemin declares that "mistaken bombing" or "accident" is "prevarication" and "can never be accepted" as explanations, that certainly makes it so. I am very impressed. BTW, let us be very clear that "explanation" is most definitely not the same think as "justification." There is no justification for what has happened. 1. I'm happy that most ordinary Chinese people (both those in China and here in America) seem to think that the bombing was purposeful. Their understanding of this bombing has brought back the language of anti-imperialism among the masses and appears to fire up people enough to mount large + militant protests. 2. While explanation is not the same as justification on this list, it is obvious that when USA/NATO spokesmen offer an 'explanation,' they intend it to be taken as justification. Yoshie
[PEN-L:6781] Re: una preguntita
Jim Devine made a point that I raised some time ago. In my department, the average tenure must be about 20 years. We have no young people and we old foggies hang on. Previously, when we had more openings, some young people did not get permanent jobs. Job tenure is now much higher here, but that represents a step back from the 70s. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
[PEN-L:6787] Fw: Re: Re: EPR, prison, interest rates
What would it be if we counted the homeless? Unemployment count, like the poverty count I think, is a household count. They are not counted in the poverty count. There are millions of them Frank -- From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:6783] Re: Re: EPR, prison, interest rates Date: Thursday, May 13, 1999 4:19 PM Doug wrote: If you counted all U.S. prisoners as unemployed, it would push up the U rate from around 4.3% to 5.6%. Details also forthcoming in LBO. If most of these are structurally unemployed (i.e., having the wrong skills or living in the wrong location, like the inner city, for the jobs available), then this would lower the structural unemployment rate and thus the NAIRU, the threshold unemployment rate beneath which inflation gets worse and worse. Prison labor also competes with free labor, undermining its bargaining power and keeping wage demands down. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
[PEN-L:6776] Re: Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
Tom Lehman wrote: For the big industrial unions like the Steelworkers, which is a pretty diverse if not the most diverse union, the losses in jobs resulting from downsizing, globalization etc. have been particularly cruel to our Black membership. Because they and their children will never see union protected jobs again in the so-called brownfields areas. Good jobs to which they have had easy access. right: downsizing (broadly defined) hits the "last hired" (those with the least seniority) hardest. One of the reasons for increased inequality among wage earners is that there is a shrinking of the sector of the working class that is able to benefit from "good jobs" (the primary labor market jobs) so that more and more workers, including younger white workers, are crowded in the secondary labor markets. The whole question is where do you draw the line on globalization, and how do you combat globalization? I think a better question is how can we create a _better_ globalization rather than trying strategies that dump the costs on other nations' working classes via protectionism and the like? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
[PEN-L:6789] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
At 08:26 PM 13/05/99 -0400, you wrote: regarding a "better globalization", Jim D writes: One thing we need is more cooperation between labor unions in the "North" and those in the "newly industrialized countries," to figure out how to achieve this goal. That kinds leaves out Bolivia, what with almost no industrailization and all. Which makes me woneder: if we define the problem of factor price convergences, wages and all, what of the countries -- like Bolivia, perhaps -- left out of the loop? Or regions of countries? What protion of the globe and peoples therein are, uh, irrelevant to this vigorous globalized capitalism? Here I am responding to myself ... a bit selfinvolved. I forgot to mention the recent acquisition of Aceites SAO by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM); the gas line to Brazil; some wood and gold; and "la blanca" as it's called -- cocaine. It's the rest that's irrelevant -- about 80% of folks. Tom Tom Kruse Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242, 500849 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:6790] una preguntita
Thomas Kruse wrote: That kinds leaves out Bolivia, what with almost no industrailization and all. Which makes me woneder: if we define the problem of factor price convergences, wages and all, what of the countries -- like Bolivia, perhaps -- left out of the loop? Or regions of countries? What protion of the globe and peoples therein are, uh, irrelevant to this vigorous globalized capitalism? Didn't Joan Robinson say that the only thing worse than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited? Doug
[PEN-L:6778] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
Hey, Jimmy D., your the Ph.D., you tell me. How are you going to have a "better" globalization? A realistically enforceable one with labor and environmental standards that protect people. Controls on the movement of capital? Your email pal, Tom L. Jim Devine wrote: Tom Lehman wrote: For the big industrial unions like the Steelworkers, which is a pretty diverse if not the most diverse union, the losses in jobs resulting from downsizing, globalization etc. have been particularly cruel to our Black membership. Because they and their children will never see union protected jobs again in the so-called brownfields areas. Good jobs to which they have had easy access. right: downsizing (broadly defined) hits the "last hired" (those with the least seniority) hardest. One of the reasons for increased inequality among wage earners is that there is a shrinking of the sector of the working class that is able to benefit from "good jobs" (the primary labor market jobs) so that more and more workers, including younger white workers, are crowded in the secondary labor markets. The whole question is where do you draw the line on globalization, and how do you combat globalization? I think a better question is how can we create a _better_ globalization rather than trying strategies that dump the costs on other nations' working classes via protectionism and the like? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
[PEN-L:6793] Re: una preguntita
Didn't Joan Robinson say that the only thing worse than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited? Doug My father in law, who worked as a low level office guy for the state mining corporation (COMIBOL) for decades and now (age 73) makes photocopies for a living, said with a laugh once "now I exploit myself -- and I'm worse than COMIBOL ever was." Tom
[PEN-L:6796] Re: una preguntita
This makes me think that the so-called globalization may be simply a reorganization and a tighter integration of the all-ready industrialized countries. Sure there has been some spill over into Mexico, but is it enough to make much of a difference? Any one done any work on this? Rod That kinds leaves out Bolivia, what with almost no industrailization and all. Which makes me woneder: if we define the problem of factor price convergences, wages and all, what of the countries -- like Bolivia, perhaps -- left out of the loop? Or regions of countries? What protion of the globe and peoples therein are, uh, irrelevant to this vigorous globalized capitalism? Didn't Joan Robinson say that the only thing worse than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited? Doug __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
[PEN-L:6798] Court Rules in Favor of MS Permatemps
You have received this mailing from the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. For information about subscribing or unsubscribing, skip to the end of this mail. -- May 12, 1999 COURT: MICROSOFT PERMATEMPS CAN PURCHASE STOCK AT DISCOUNT A federal appeals court has handed a major victory to Microsoft's long-term contractors, or permatemps, by ruling that they have the right to participate in the company's Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). The ESPP allows employees to purchase company stock at a 15 percent discount during specified times each year. The ruling, which came down late Wednesday afternoon, also overturned an earlier decision by Federal District Judge Carolyn Dimmick that had reduced the size of the class to several hundred contract employees who worked at Microsoft between 1987 and 1990. Wednesday's decision restored the appeals court's previous class definition -- a broader definition that covers all past and present common-law employees of Microsoft and easily puts the class size at several thousand people. "We are very happy the court restored the class to its original size," said Stephen Strong, an attorney representing the plaintiffs. "Thousands of Microsoft workers have worked full-time for years without employee benefits. This will allow them to obtain the employee recognition they are due." To read the full report, see: http://www.washtech.org/roundup/courts/051299_vizcaino.html --- The WashTech-News, a free digest of news of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, is delivered via email bi-monthly or whenever issues warrant. We accept all confirmed subscriptions to the newsletter. The WashTech-News subscriber list is a private list whose membership will not be disclosed outside this organization. To subscribe by e-mail, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text SUBSCRIBE WashTech-News in the body of the message. You will receive e-mail confirming your subscription. To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text UNSUBSCRIBE WashTech-News as the body of the message Copyright (c) 1999 WashTech All Rights Reserved --- Published by: WashTech 2366 Eastlake Ave E, #301 Seattle, WA 98102 U.S.A. (206) 726-8580 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- This publication may be freely copied or retransmitted provided it remains intact and without changes. Any unauthorized partial duplication will be considered a copyright infringement.
[PEN-L:6800] Gregor Gysi letter to Slobodan Milosevic
=- A Letter from Gregor Gysi* to Slobodan Milosevic Translation: Eric Canepa (Source: the PDS's weekly press report, Pressedienst, No. 18, 1999 (May 7), in internet at: www.pds- online.de/1/pressedienst/9918/) *Gregor Gysi is the chair of the delegation of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in the German Bundestag. Dear Mr. President, Mindful of our conversation of April 14, 1999 I am writing you this letter. Once again I stress my unequivocal rejection of NATO's illegal and completely unequal war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and express my great dismay at the dead and wounded, especially within the civilian population, and at the ever more cynical destruction of what increasingly turn out to be civilian installations in Yugoslavia, as well as my condemnation of any kind of violation of human rights in Kosovo. I fear that the war will set back European integration and the relation of a number of European states to the Russian Federation for many years to come. This can only be in the interests of the U.S., as a way of hindering a political and economic competitor in Europe. Once again I ask you to give your consent to a UN peace force according to the UN charter--without participation of the aggressor NATO nations. If, in direct negotiations between the political leaderships of Yugoslavia and Kosovo, an accord should be reached with the participation of the United Nations, the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees must follow in a peaceful and secure manner. However, these refugees--and I will come back to this below-- understandably have no trust in the Yugoslav army and police. On the other hand, I understand that those who are now bombing Yugoslavia cannot secure peace. There are, however, other countries which would be more suited to securing that peace. The deployment of a UN peace force after the retreat of your troops from Kosovo would not mean occupation; it would have a time-limit set, and due to UN sovereignty would be a completely different approach to a solution than that of NATO. At the beginning of our conversation you rejected this suggestion; at the end, however, you assured me that you would think it over. I regard the results of your conversation with the Russian president's envoy, Victor Chernomyrdin, and the statements of your Vice-Prime Minister, Vuk Draskovic, as showing that this reconsideration is continuing. I appeal to you once again to open up this path. NATO would thus be forced to decide what is more important to it, the desire to be the sole factor in the Euro-Atlantic order, or the desire for peace. Such a peace would be difficult enough to put into practice, but it would have a real chance [of inhibiting] the current hegemonic strivings, especially those of the U.S. In our conversation, as in others I had in Belgrade, we went on to speak of the fate of Kosovo-Albanians. You claimed that before NATO's bombing of Kosovo there were--and this is incontrovertible--much fewer refugees from Kosovo. As causes for their flight in the period before the bombing, you pointed to KLA attacks and the civilian populations's fear of falling victim to the battles between your army and police and the KLA. The dramatic rise in the number of refugees since the end of March 1999 is, in your opinion, solely attributable to the NATO bombing. To my counter-arguments you replied that news reporting in Germany is one-sided, that the refugees are coached by clan chiefs, and moreover that the refugees only have a chance of being received in a Western country if they criticize the Yugoslav army and police. I told you that I wanted to travel to Albania and speak with refugees, and you thought that there I would see your account confirmed. But this in no way turned out to be the case. At first I followed the advice of a top official in your Foreign Ministry, and I looked at the Germany Foreign Ministry's status reports and the decisions of German high courts on deportation of Kosovo-Albanians during this year. I have to confirm that in these status reports and in the decisions of the high courts reaching through March 1999, expulsions and "ethnic cleansing" aimed at Kosovo-Albanians is expressly refuted. In these reports and decisions, the battle between your army and police and the KLA was confirmed as the motivation for flight; that Kosovo-Albanians were persecuted due to their belonging to "an Albanian ethnicity" was expressly negated. On this basis and with reference to the relevant status reports of the Foreign Ministry, deportations to Yugoslavia, especially to Kosovo, were approved by the German High Courts. It is correct to say that the German administration's current claims that expulsions and "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo have been occurring for a long time, especially since December 1998/January 1999, and during the Rambouillet negotiations, is sharply contradicted by these reports and decisions. During my trip to
[PEN-L:6797] (no subject)
x-rich From New Scientist, 15 May 1999 Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 20:39:41 -0700 To: (Recipient list suppressed) From: Camp Responsible Tech [EMAIL PROTECTED] (by way of Michael Eisenscher [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Subject: New Scientist: The chips are down Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable =A9 Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1999 centersmaller =20 /smallercolorparam,,/parambiggerbiggerbiggerThe chips are down /bigger/bigger/bigger/colorsmaller colorparam,,/paramRob Edwards /color/smaller/centersmaller /smallerbiggerbiggerZACHARY RUFFING/bigger was born almost blind. The bones in his head and shoulders are deformed and he has difficulty using his mouth, but according to his lawyer, Amanda Hawes, he's bright. "He wants to be an astronomer," she says.=20 Thirteen-year-old Zachary and his parents are trying to pin the blame on one of the world's most powerful corporations. When he was conceived and born in 1985 both his parents worked at an IBM semiconductor plant in East Fishkill, New York, where they claim they were exposed to a variety of solvents and other toxic chemicals. Along with 140 other workers and children, they are now suing Big Blue for compensation. Their case, the first of its kind, will come to court this October.=20 Across the Atlantic in Scotland, Grace Morrison, aged 57, blames another American company, National Semiconductor, for the cancers that killed her sister and her friend--and nearly killed her. She is leading a group of 70 women who say they were exposed to chemicals at the company's plant in Greenock. The women are launching a legal battle in Scotland for compensation. "The manufacture of semiconductors is a dirty, dangerous business," Morrison says.=20 boldBirth defects=20 /bold Both IBM and National Semiconductor deny responsibility for birth defects and cancers amongst workers and their children--and it will be hard to prove them wrong. But there is mounting evidence that women in the chip-making industry do suffer an increased risk of spontaneous abortion and that exposure to solvents may cause congenital deformities.=20 The increasing use of computers over the past few decades has fuelled an explosive growth in the microelectronics industry. From its origins in California's Silicon Valley, it has spread throughout Europe and Asia, and now employs more than a million people worldwide. There are 900 chip-making plants and a further 100 planned, supplying a worldwide market worth more than $150 billion a year. "Because of its growth and size," says Douglas Andrey of the US's Semiconductor Industry Association, "the chip industry is the pivotal driver of the world economy."=20 The semiconductor industry may also be a world leader in another way, according to Joseph LaDou, director of the International Center for Occupational Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. "What was once thought to be the first 'clean' industry is actually one of the most chemical-intensive industries ever conceived," he says. In the process of making, etching and doping silicon chips, workers can be exposed to hundreds of chemicals, including solvents, LaDou says.=20 Campaigners fear that as the industry expands rapidly in the Far East--where safety standards are generally slacker--birth defects will be the unfortunate growth industry following right behind. Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a campaign group in California, says: "The dirtier and more labour-intensive processes are increasingly being shuffled to underdeveloped countries throughout the global South, creating a whole system of environmental and economic injustice." LaDou points out that many of the chemicals present in the factories, such as arsenic and benzene, are known carcinogens.=20 In a semiconductor plant, much of the work takes place in "clean rooms" in which everyone has to wear head-to-toe bunny suits. Unfortunately, this environment is designed to protect sensitive chips, not the health of employees. The air in such rooms is usually recirculated through filters to remove dust, but not replenished with clean air from outside, says LaDou. Toxic fumes are simply recycled. He thinks this may explain why US Department of Labor statistics show that rates of occupational illness in American semiconductor plants caused by "caustic, noxious and allergenic substances" are three times as high as in other manufacturing industries.=20 The most recent study to raise doubts about the safety of semiconductor workers is one of the most dramatic. In Canada, doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto reported in March this year that 13 out of 125 pregnant women exposed to workplace solvents gave birth to children with major congenital malformations, such as spina bifida or deafness. This compares to only one out of 125 women in jobs where they were not exposed to solvents (boldThe Journal of the American
[PEN-L:6792] [Fwd: Dismantle NATO]-R Fisk
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Return-path: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Envelope-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] by pop.uniserve.com with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #4) for jmusselm_rpa-outgoing; Thu, 13 May 1999 17:39:56 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: l03102813b36104f2c71f@[172.16.10.208] Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 15:39:38 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Phil Gasper [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Dismantle NATO Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The Independent (UK) May 13, 1999 An Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe should be wo= und up Robert Fisk How much longer do we have to endure the folly of Nato's war in the Balkans? In just 50 days, the Atlantic alliance has failed in everything = it set out to do. It has failed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian war crimes. It has failed to cow Slobodan Milosevic. It has failed to for= ce the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. It has broken international la= w in attacking a sovereign state without seeking a UN mandate. It has kille= d hundreds of innocent Serb civilians - in our name, of course - while bein= g too cowardly to risk a single Nato life in defence of the poor and the we= ak for whom it meretriciously claimed to be fighting. Nato's war cannot even be regarded as a mistake - it is a criminal act. It is, of course, now part of the mantra of all criticism of Nato that we must mention Serb wickedness in Kosovo. So here we go. Yes, dreadful, wicked deeds - atrocities would not be a strong enough word for it - have gone on in Kosovo: mass executions, rape, dispossession, "ethnic cleansing", the murder of intellectuals. Some of Nato's propaganda programme has done more to cover up such villainy than disclose it. And, as we all know, the dozens of Kosovo Albanians massacred on the road to Prizren were slaughtered by Nato - not by the Serbs as Nato originally claimed. But I have seen with my own eyes - travelling under the Nato bombardment - the house-burning in Kosovo and the hundreds of Albanians awaiting dispossession in their villages. But back to the subject - and perhaps my first question should be put a little more boldly. Not: "How much longer do we have to endure this stupi= d, hopeless, cowardly war?" but: "How much longer do we have to endure Nato? How soon can this vicious American-run organisation be deconstructed and politically 'degraded', its pontificating generals put back in their boxe= s with their mortuary language of 'in-theatre assets' and 'collateral damage'"? And how soon will our own compassionate, socialist liberal leaders realis= e that they are not fighting a replay of the Second World War nor striking = a blow for a new value-rich millennium? In Middle East wars, I've always known when a side was losing - it came when its leaders started to compla= in that journalists were not being fair to their titanic struggle for freedo= m/ democracy/human rights/sovereignty/soul. And on Monday, Tony Blair starte= d the whining. After 50 days of television coverage soaked in Nato propaganda, after weeks of Nato officials being questioned by sheep-like journalists, our Prime Minister announces the press is ignoring the pligh= t of the Kosovo Albanians. The fact that this is a lie is not important. It is the nature of the lie. Anyone, it seems, who doesn't subscribe to Europe's denunciations of Fascism or who raises an eyebrow when - in an act of utter folly - the Prime Minister makes unguaranteed promises that the Kosovo Albanians will all go home, is now off-side, biased - or worthy of one of Downing Street= 's preposterous "health warnings" because they allegedly spend more time weeping for dead Serbs than the numerically greater number of dead Albanians (the assumption also being, of course, that it is less physical= ly painful to be torn apart by a Nato cluster bomb than by a Serb rocket-propelled grenade). President Clinton - who will in due course pull the rug from under Mr Bla= ir - tells the Kosovo Albanians that they have the "right to return." Not th= e Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, of course. They do not have such a right. Nor the Kurds dispossessed by our Nato ally, Turkey. Nor the Armenians driven from their land by the Turks in the world's first holocaust (there being only one holocaust which Messers Clinton and Blair are interested i= n invoking just now). Mr Blair's childish response to this argument is important. Just because wrongs have been done in the past doesn't mean we have to stand idly by now. But the terrible corollary of this dangerous argument is this: that the Palestinians, the Armenians, the Rwandans or anyone else cannot expec= t our compassion. They are "the past." They are finished. But what is all this nonsense about Nato standing for democracy? It happi= ly allowed Greece to remain a member
[PEN-L:6791] American Jews Call for Halt of NATO Bombing
Sunday Journal, DC May 16, 1999 Robert Naiman "On the Left" American Jews Call for Halt of NATO Bombing President Clinton has repeatedly tried to fend off criticism of NATO's war against Yugoslavia by comparing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler and comparing the Yugoslav Army's campaign against Albanian separatists in Kosovo to the Nazi extermination of six million Jews. In an appeal to the Green Party of Germany to oppose the war, more than 200 American Jews, including prominent scholars, writers, and civic leaders, rejected this comparison. The appeal, viewable at www.preamble.org/greensign.html, was signed by many prominent human rights activists, such as the famous linguist and author Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn, and Saul Landau, who helped prepare legal cases against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The occasion was the Green Party conference on the war on May 13, where party activists critical of the war presented resolutions demanding an immediate halt to the NATO bombing. After a raucous debate, the party conference approved a resolution backed by the leadership which called for a suspension of airstrikes but will be interpreted as allowing the Green parliamentary deputies to continue supporting the German government policy of toeing the NATO line. In Germany even more than the United States, the memory of the Holocaust has been repeatedly invoked to justify the war, or at least to silence the opposition. The argument is a powerful one in Germany. We are often told we must understand the lessons of history to avoid repeating its mistakes. But the lessons of history are not given to us in a textbook, nor can we trust editorialists to tell us what they are. If the Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose, then virulent militarists and racists can invoke the Holocaust to justify bombing a defenseless civilian population. As one signer of the anti- war appeal sardonically remarked, "What better way to honor the victims of the Holocaust than to have the German Luftwaffe bomb Belgrade?" We have to figure out the lessons of history for ourselves. If we can't trust editorialists, we certainly can't rely on party allegiances to determine what we think. Many Congressional Democrats seem quite prepared to say any damn thing if the White House or the Democratic leadership tell them it's politically expedient to do so. They'll say that the Social Security system is in crisis, or that U.S. taxpayers should give more money to the IMF to help poor countries, or that NATO is bombing Yugoslavia out of humanitarian concern, despite the fact that all of these claims are absurd. Yet, people who should know better -- many of them far from the Beltway -- continue to act as if the position of President Clinton or the Democratic leadership should guide their political judgements. The hoary phrase "strange bedfellows" should be viewed in this light. Progressive critics of the Administration are accused of being "in bed with the Republicans" when they oppose allocating more tax dollars to the IMF, or the bombing of Yugoslav civilians. The accusation is absurd. A moral person determines their position first and then tries to figure out who their potential allies are, not the other way around. To determines one's stance based on the alleged authority of party leaders is to invite oneself to be led around by the nose. While much of the rank and file of the Democratic party slept, the Clinton Administration sabotaged the movement for universal health insurance, passed NAFTA, established the WTO, abolished federally guaranteed support for poor families, restricted civil liberties, increased the use of the death penalty, opened more public land to resource extraction, cut social spending, and expanded the IMF. Starving children in Indonesia can thank outgoing Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin for IMF austerity. Still, liberals rally their supporters by trumpeting that the "real threat" is the Republicans. Check the next fundraising appeal you get from a liberal organization. Note how they try to get your money by whipping up fear of the Republican right and the Christian Coalition. See if they mention how Clinton and the Democratic leadership support the same policies or worse. Of course, conservative Republicans advocate many awful policies, but these policies often would not be adopted if they were not supported by Democratic leaders. Maybe, after all the bombing, militarism and cutbacks supported by this Administration and their "liberal" allies, the rank and file will say, enough is enough. A little more rabble-rousing at the grassroots could go a long way. --- Robert Naiman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Preamble Center 1737 21st NW Washington, DC 20009 phone: 202-265-3263 fax: 202-265-3647 http://www.preamble.org/ ---
[PEN-L:6784] People's Daily Commentary
Barkley Rosser: Ooh. Well, if His Excellency, President Jiang Zemin declares that "mistaken bombing" or "accident" is "prevarication" and "can never be accepted" as explanations, that certainly makes it so. I am very impressed. BTW, let us be very clear that "explanation" is most definitely not the same think as "justification." There is no justification for what has happened. 1. I'm happy that most ordinary Chinese people (both those in China and here in America) seem to think that the bombing was purposeful. Their understanding of this bombing has brought back the language of anti-imperialism among the masses and appears to fire up people enough to mount large + militant protests. 2. While explanation is not the same as justification on this list, it is obvious that when USA/NATO spokesmen offer an 'explanation,' they intend it to be taken as justification. Yoshie
[PEN-L:6788] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
regarding a "better globalization", Jim D writes: One thing we need is more cooperation between labor unions in the "North" and those in the "newly industrialized countries," to figure out how to achieve this goal. That kinds leaves out Bolivia, what with almost no industrailization and all. Which makes me woneder: if we define the problem of factor price convergences, wages and all, what of the countries -- like Bolivia, perhaps -- left out of the loop? Or regions of countries? What protion of the globe and peoples therein are, uh, irrelevant to this vigorous globalized capitalism? Tom Tom Kruse Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242, 500849 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:6782] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
Well, Jim, if it's controls on capital flows. And you can combine that with an effort to educate and legislate controls right into the corporate charters of all corporations foreign, domestic and alien. Then you might have a chance of a "better" globalization. What we do here sets the standard for the rest of the world! On the subject of youth. It's sort of like the Canadian Steelworker told Doug Henwood's reporter, welcome to the wonderful world of minimum wage or something like that. Until people start demanding change and I mean demanding it from the politicians nothing is going to change. People are going to have to button-hole politicians of all parties from the local hack to as high as they can reach if they want real change---up close and very personal and not necessarily politically correct. Your email pal, Tom L. Jim Devine wrote: Tom Lehman wrote: For the big industrial unions like the Steelworkers, which is a pretty diverse if not the most diverse union, the losses in jobs resulting from downsizing, globalization etc. have been particularly cruel to our Black membership. Because they and their children will never see union protected jobs again in the so-called brownfields areas. Good jobs to which they have had easy access. right: downsizing (broadly defined) hits the "last hired" (those with the least seniority) hardest. One of the reasons for increased inequality among wage earners is that there is a shrinking of the sector of the working class that is able to benefit from "good jobs" (the primary labor market jobs) so that more and more workers, including younger white workers, are crowded in the secondary labor markets. The whole question is where do you draw the line on globalization, and how do you combat globalization? I think a better question is how can we create a _better_ globalization rather than trying strategies that dump the costs on other nations' working classes via protectionism and the like? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
[PEN-L:6775] German Greens Back NATO Airstrikes
May 13, 1999 German Greens Back NATO Airstrikes By The Associated Press BIELEFELD, Germany (AP) -- Germany's foreign minister won backing today for continued NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia at an emotionally charged congress of his Green party that had threatened to break up the governing coalition. After a tumultuous, daylong special congress, delegates voted 444-318 for a motion backed by Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and the party's national executive. The motion said it was ``extremely doubtful'' that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ``would be ready to negotiate without facing pressure.'' In a bow to widespread pacifist sentiment that has split the Greens -- Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's junior coalition partner in the 6-month-old government -- the motion also urges NATO to declare a temporary suspension of the bombing to see if Milosevic is ready to end his forces' campaign against Kosovo Albanians and start a troop withdrawal. Despite some criticism of the NATO bombing, Greens leaders had said before the congress that the motion would allow Fischer enough leeway to continue his policy within the government. Leftist peace protesters had disrupted the party congress from the start, forming a human chain around the building to prevent delegates from entering, chanting slogans and waving pictures of Schroeder and Fischer with Hitler mustaches. One demonstrator threw red paint at Fischer and another paraded in front of the dais naked. Stunned and furious, Fischer wiped paint from his face and neck with a paper towel as guards expelled the protesters. Police said 57 demonstrators were arrested. An angry, impassioned Fischer implored his party to support NATO, hinting that he would quit if delegates backed the cease-fire. He warned of further bloodshed in the Balkans if NATO gives in to Milosevic. ``I plead with you to help me and give me your support -- and not cut me off at the knees -- so I can emerge from this congress strengthened and can continue our policy,'' he shouted, prompting cheers, a three-minute standing ovation and a few jeers from the 800 delegates. Fischer, the highest-ranking Green, has warned his party that adopting the anti-war activists' stand would likely break up Germany's center-left government by forcing Schroeder and his Social Democrats to seek another partner. A government collapse would be a blow to NATO unity as the alliance tries to bomb Milosevic into accepting a peace plan for Kosovo, a southern province of Yugoslavia. Schroeder and Fischer have staunchly supported the war. Greens leaders are mostly pragmatists who support Fischer. They acknowledge that their efforts to unite the party behind him were complicated by NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and Yugoslavia's announcement of a partial troop pullout from Kosovo. Party co-chairwoman Antje Radcke pleaded with the 800 delegates to support Fischer's camp and work for peace from inside the government. ``Let's not play Russian roulette'' with the coalition, she said. But it was a leading pacifist, Annelie Buntenbach, who received cheers and a standing ovation after attacking the ``spiral of escalation'' by NATO and declaring: ``War is not an option.'' ``Stopping the bombing is a precondition for giving diplomacy a chance,'' she said. ``After seven weeks, I must ask what this war has achieved.'' Schroeder has expressed confidence the Greens would show ``common sense'' during their meeting in the northwestern city of Bielefeld. ``First, the foreign minister will not resign, and second, there is no government crisis,'' he said during a visit to China. Fear of a wavering Germany has helped prompt a flurry of high-level diplomacy, including a visit by President Clinton last week to bolster Schroeder. Leftists in Schroeder's coalition have been raising doubts for weeks about the logic of NATO's air war, which involves Germany's first combat since World War II. A key pacifist motion -- one of dozens at the Greens congress -- would force the party's lawmakers to work for a unilateral stop to the bombing and a resumption of peace talks, a strategy NATO governments reject. Yet, even a leading pacifist has appeared to soften. Lawmaker Christian Stroebele, co-author of one
[PEN-L:6779] Re: EPR, prison, interest rates
Robert Naiman wrote: So how does the U.S. look compared to other OECD countries if you count institutionalized adults as part of the population? Can one also account for the role of the military? Well I was going to have a chart of international incarceration comparisons, as part of the quarterly social indicator page I'm doing for the Nation, but the magazine's editor didn't find mass incarceration an appropriate topic. So I'll do it for LBO. Here's a hint: no OECD country comes anywhere close to U.S. incarceration rates. #1 is Russia (out of 180 studied); #2 is the U.S. Here are a few countries per 100,000). About 20 will be charted in the next LBO. INCARCERATION RATES per 100,000 population, mid-1990s Russia 685 USA645 Israel 190 S Korea155 Portugal 145 United Kingdom 125 Canada 115 Mexico 110 France 90 Japan 40 If you counted all U.S. prisoners as unemployed, it would push up the U rate from around 4.3% to 5.6%. Details also forthcoming in LBO. Doug
[PEN-L:6773] Appeals to German Greens to oppose bombing
At 01:47 PM 5/13/99 -0400, you wrote: An Appeal from American Jews to the Green Party of Germany -- May 12, 1999 http://www.preamble.org/greensign.html Excellent work by Robert Naiman. One very encouraging sign is that James Weinstein of In These Times is included in this group. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:6771] The Old Mole
May 12, 1999 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS MOSCOW -- Russian lawmakers began impeachment hearings today to remove Boris Yeltsin, claiming that the Russian president is guilty of treason, first-degree murder and plotting to sell Russia out to the West. Political leaders say the chances of impeaching Yeltsin soared after the president outraged lawmakers Wednesday by sacking the country's popular prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov. A vote on impeachment in the lower chamber of parliament, the State Duma, could be held as early as Friday. Opening today's hearing, the impeachment commission read out its case on the five charges against Yeltsin. The president is charged with instigating the 1991 Soviet collapse, improperly using force against hard-line lawmakers in 1993, launching the botched 1994-96 war in Chechnya, ruining Russia's military, and waging genocide against Russians with market reforms that impoverished the country... NY Times, May 12, 1999 China Students Are Caught Up by Nationalism By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL BEIJING -- Exactly 10 years ago, as protesters demonstrated in Tiananmen Square, a small grassy triangle in the center of Beijing University became a shrine to democracy, plastered with tracts about liberty and freedom. In recent years it had become a temple for the professions, filled with notices about computers and law examinations. But in the last four days, the plaza has been transformed anew, into a museum of frenzied nationalism and anti-American sentiment. Hundreds of handwritten letters and posters decorate the fence, the trees and nearby billboards in a vitriolic reaction to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital. "Support Yugoslavia and Resist America," one poster read. "Adolph Clinton," another read. A letter suggested that students should cover the U.S. Embassy with garbage. A poem read, in part: "Resist America Beginning with Cola, Attack McDonald's, Storm KFC..." = But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other half. It first completed the parliamentary power in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has achieved this, it completes the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!... Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:6770] Re: Re: Re: una preguntita
!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en" html For the big industrial unions like the Steelworkers, which is a pretty diverse if not the most diverse union, the losses in jobs resulting from bdownsizing, globalization etc/b. have been particularly cruel to our Black membership.nbsp; Because they and their children will never see union protected jobs again in the so-called brownfields areas. Good jobs to which theynbsp; have had easy access. pBlack men, Black women and women in general have suffered proportionately to their numbers, and in our case those numbers are pretty healthy in ratio to the general population. pThe whole question is where do you draw the line on globalization, and how do you combat globalization? pYour email pal, pTom L. brnbsp; pJim Devine wrote: blockquote TYPE=CITEThomas Kruse wrote: brEmployment may be steady, unemployment low, but these kind of numbers brsuggest a lot of turn over.nbsp; I know that when I have to hustle up work, brliving on year-to-year contracts as I do, it is very stressful.nbsp; Sennett's brrecent book illustrates how such hustling makes life pretty miserable. br brIs turnover/instability something you economists study as part of "standard brof living"? pDoug writes: brMost studies of turnover/instability/tenure I've seen for the U.S. show no brsignificant increase from the 1970s. I know this is counterintuitive, and brit pisses people off when I say it sometimes, but it seems to be true. What brmay have happened is that some instability has crept up the social ladder, brmaking middle managers vulnerable to the instability that blue/pink collar brworkers have long known, which attracts more attention than in the past. brAlso, behind the flattish average tenure figures, men are falling but women brare rising. pThis disaggregation is crucial: I read what's happening as the gradual end br(and sometimes rapid demise) of the primary labor market jobs, which broffered some job security, and the spread of secondary labor market type brjobs, which don't. Because middle-aged white males hogged the primary-type brjobs that existed in the core and unionized sectors of the US economy, they br(or rather, people of their demographic category) are the ones who have brsuffered the most from increased instability of job tenure. Women and br"minorities" traditionally had secondary-type jobs and typically had little brin the way of security. Thus, there's been a convergence of job experience brbetween the old insiders and the old outsiders in the labor-power market. pIf we're talking about the bargaining power of the US working class, the brfact that increased instability has hit the types of workers who had the brmost bargaining power in the 1950s and 1960s seems very relevant. pIt might be useful to calculate measures of job instability holding brdemographics constant, in order to see the effects of changes in the brdemographic mix of the US labor force on aggregate stats. pEven though it's always useful to pay attention to statistics, we should bralways be careful with them. This issue reminds me of an article that Bill brLazonick published in the RRPE 25 years ago, on the issue of enclosures in brEngland in the 17th and 18th centuries. He argued against an author who brpointed to the stability of workers' physical location after enclosures, brwhich suggested that Marx was wrong to rail against enclosures as brdisrupting workers' lives, etc. Lazonick argued that despite the author's brstats, social relations had changed radically, i.e., that workers had been brproletarianized. What's been happening in the US is a smaller version of brthis: even though actual job tenure may not have fallen much (especially brfor aggregates), the ability of bosses to threaten their employees with job brloss has increased. The partial deproletarianization that many white male brworkers enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s has been largely reversed. pSee lt;a href="http://www.mijcf.org/pub03/pub03_workingpapers6.html"http://www.mijcf.org/pub03/pub03_workingpapers6.html/a for a review of brthe literature. It's not full text, just an abstrat, but you can order the brprint version for free. Yes, it's from the Milken Institute, but it's a lit brreview, and one of the authors, Stefanie Schmidt, is a fairly liberal brfeminist. pJust because something comes from the Milken Institute doesn't mean it's brbad. But recently, they seem to have focused more on puff pieces and brjournalism, pulling back from serious research. p...nbsp; Extreme turbulence is capitalism's norm. pBut during the "golden Age" of US capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, some brof this turbulence had been moderated. pJim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] amp; bra href="http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html"http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html/a brBombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!/blockquote /html
[PEN-L:6769] EPR, prison, interest rates
It hasn't fallen at all. In April, the U.S. employment/population ratio was 64.2%, off slightly from its all-time high of 64.5% in January, but up from its 61.3% level at the employment trough in Feb 92, and above its earlier cyclical peak of 63.1% in Mar 90. If you adjusted for the 1.8 million people behind bars in this lovely country, though, it would knock about 0.5 percentage points off the EPR. Doug So how does the U.S. look compared to other OECD countries if you count institutionalized adults as part of the population? Can one also account for the role of the military? And has anyone tried to control for interest rates in doing such a comparison? Such a comparison might shed some light on whether European unemployment is in fact due to the dread specter of social democracy. -bob --- Robert Naiman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Preamble Center 1737 21st NW Washington, DC 20009 phone: 202-265-3263 fax: 202-265-3647 http://www.preamble.org/ ---
[PEN-L:6768] Re: HOW NATO THE MEDIA MISREPRESENTED THE CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING
In the post script to Jared Israel's analysis is a sentence that I wish people would commit to memory: And the thought occurred to me that these bits of non-fact stick in our heads, interfering with our thinking the way graphite ribbons interfere with electrical generators, and that this nonsense, multiplied a thousand-fold, forms a kind of smog, preventing us from seeing the surrounding mountains of evidence: that the US government has murdered people and lied about the deed. regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
[PEN-L:6766] Re: NATO Losses -Reply -Rep
Thank you, Michael.
[PEN-L:6765] from SLATE, May 13, 1999
today's papers By Scott Shuger ...The fronts at the NYT, the LAT, the WP, and the WSJ [big US papers] all give plenty of space to the surprise resignation announcement yesterday by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The papers say that any extended period of concern in the financial markets about lack of Treasury leadership was checked by President Clinton's immediate statement that he would nominate Treasury's #2, Lawrence Summers, for the top spot. The Rubin coverage is pretty hagiographic. Rubin's departure, opines the WP, "deprives the administration of one of its most influential and respected figures," a person "whose steely stewardship of U.S. economic policy commanded admiration on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill." The coverage that best breaks through the back-patting is the NYT's, which high up states that many in Asia felt that Rubin's formula of conditioning IMF loans on high interest rates and government spending cuts led to high unemployment and more severe recessions. The NYT and LAT also explain best that inside the administration, Rubin led the budget-balancers against the social program spenders, a debate that the NYT says he "ultimately won." The NYT runs a Reuters dispatch reporting on a first-of-its kind internet-related government crisis. Officials of the British government were in flail mode yesterday trying to shut down a U.S.-based web site that apparently has posted names of dozens of British intelligence agents. The British government appealed to British media outlets not to publish the site's address. gee, what's that address? The WP and NYT report that at the eleventh hour, NBC has laundered the term "nuclear waste" out of this weekend's made-for-TV-movie "Atomic Train." NBC is owned by General Electric, which has holdings in the nuclear power industry --- international papers Let's Blame Bill By Alexander Chancellor The frustration of the bellicose British press at the half-hearted pursuit of the war in Kosovo vented itself Wednesday in an editorial in the Times attacking President Clinton, who, it said, has "proved his absolute inadequacy as a Commander-in-Chief, stumbling on a stage that is bigger than his talents can match and performing with hesitancy, frailty and fear." It added, "[T]his war will not be serious until Mr Clinton listens to the Pentagon, rather than the latest opinion poll. He has never countenanced a campaign plan; and in the absence of one, even air power has been misapplied. ... Mr Clinton has retreated into the semantic ambiguities for which his presidency has become infamous." The editorial concluded that "[f]or Nato, for European peace and for Britain, the true, high reckoning begins: it is called failure." The Daily Telegraph led its front page Wednesday with a report that both Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were struggling "to hold back a growing tide of criticism of their leadership of the Kosovo conflict." Along with other papers, the Telegraph reported cracks in British bipartisan support for the NATO offensive. In an article in the Telegraph, the Conservative Party spokesman on foreign affairs, Michael Howard, called for the establishment of a committee of inquiry into the war and the "diplomatic failures" that preceded it. Howard described the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade as "an act of gross incompetence." He said, "To use outdated street maps for an operation of this kind beggars belief." The liberal Guardian led Wednesday on "gloom" in NATO as China and Russia hardened their demands for a halt to airstrikes before they will agree to support peace moves in the United Nations. Having consistently urged the use of ground forces, the paper finally recognized in an editorial that "the possibility of a ground attack has dwindled." It said that the British and the French have been willing to do their bit but that Clinton "could not muster the will, or lacks the necessary political weight, to commit the United States to ground action." The central issue now, it said, is that "NATO forces, acting for the Kosovo Albanians, must have preponderant physical power on the ground, whatever the formalities of status may be." The liberal Independent's front-page lead spoke of "an unmistakable whiff of panic and confusion in the West's councils of war." There was gloom on the continent as well. Le Monde of Paris led its front page Wednesday with the headline "Kosovo emptied of half its population" and said in an editorial that President Slobodan Milosevic knows--"because we have been at pains to tell him"--that he need not fear a land offensive, and he knows the limits of the air bombardments. "He can, at his leisure, test the unity and determination of the allies," it added. "One way or another, it is always he who holds the cards." On Tuesday, the Greek daily Ta Nea published a leaked NATO document warning that Albania, Montenegro, and Macedonia are in imminent danger of
[PEN-L:6763] Re: Re: una preguntita
Michael wrote: The short answer to Tom's question is, no. Several times, I have raised the possibility of a quality of employment index to counter the idea that labor markets are healthy because unemployment is low. Jim Devine just mentioned Bob Pollin's piece, observing that U.S. labor markets are coming to resemble those of Mexico. Now that I think of it, Bob Pollin's reference was (by coincidence) to Bolivia, Tom's abode. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!
[PEN-L:6761] An important Sean Gervasi article
The very best article I've ever seen detailing the background of the ten-year long war in the Balkans was written by Sean Gervasi in the Winter 1992-93 "Covert Action Quarterly", which I was pleased to discover has now been put on their website at http://caq.com/ along with other valuable information. This is a section from Gervasi's lengthy article, which I strongly urge everybody to take a look at in its entirety. YUGOSLAVIA STEPS OUT OF LINE A crucial change in Yugoslav relations with the West occurred when Yugoslavia balked at carrying out the reforms urged by the west. As Yugoslavia had initiated market-oriented policies before any of the countries in the former Eastern bloc--tasting some the the bitter consequences--its halting of "reforms" in 1990 particularly rankled the U.S. The Bush administration set out to farce the recalcitrant nation to accede to Western demands for a "change in regime." (17) In January 1989, when Ante Marcovic was named federation premier, the U.S. had anticipated a cooperative relationship. "Known to favor market-oriented reforms," (18) the new Prime Minster was described by the BBC correspondent as "Washington's best ally in Yugoslavia." (19) In Autumn 1989, just before the Berlin Wall fell, Marcovic visited Bush in the White House. The president, the New York Times reported, "welcomed Mr. Marcovic's commitment to market-oriented economic reform and to building democratic pluralism." In this friendly atmosphere, Marcovic asked for "United States assistance in making economic and political changes opposed by hard-liners in the Communist Party." He requested a substantial aid package from the U.S., including $1 billion to prop up the banking system and more than $3 billion in loans from the World Bank. He also tried to lure private investment to his country. In exchange, Marcovic promised "reforms," but warned, as the Times put it, that they "are bound to bring social problems [including] an increase in unemployment to about 20 percent and the threat of increased ethnic and political tension among the country's six republics and two autonomous provinces." (20) Marcovic's new austerity plan, announced two months later in Belgrade, deepened the Yugoslav crisis. The plan called for a new devalued currency, a six-month wage freeze, closure of "unprofitable" state enterprises, and reduced government expenditure. Believing it would lead to social unrest, Serbia, the largest republic, immediately rejected it. Some 650,000 Serbian workers staged a walkout in protest. (21) Marcovic's proposal for some first steps toward political democratization--a multi-party system and open elections--fared a bit better and, in January 1990, was accepted by the Central Committee of the Yugoslav League of Communists. Not long afterward, however, the Slovene League of Communists seceded from the Yugoslav League. In April, Demos, the Slovene opposition coalition, described in the U.S. as "an alliance of pro-western parties," (22) won a majority in parliamentary elections in Slovenia. Thus, as the unity of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia weakened, a pro-Western, pro-"reform" camp consolidated and pushed for separatism as the only possible way to realize nationalist aims--which would shatter the Yugoslav economy. By June 1990, when Prime Minister Marcovic introduced the second phase of his austerity program, industrial output in Yugoslavia had already fallen some ten percent since the beginning of the year, in part as a result of the measures introduced the previous October. Nonetheless, the second phase of the prime minister's plan called for further reductions of 18 percent in public spending, the wholesale privatization of state enterprises, and the establishment of new private property rights. To make the package more palatable, Marcovic also proposed lowering interest rates and conditionally lifting the wage freeze. Economic "reform" was the crucial issue in 1990 multi-party elections held throughout Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, separatist coalitions ousted the League of Communists. In Serbia and Montenegro, the ruling party--renamed the Socialist Party in Serbia--won. The federal government, including Prime Minister Marcovic, denounced the separatist tendencies to the two northern republics. President Borisav Jovic resigned as federal president when his proposal for a national state of emergency was rejected. (23) The line was drawn. The new separatist governments in the north wished--at least in the flush of their electoral victories--to join Europe and the parade toward capitalism. The federal government and some of the republics, including Serbia, balked. One European scholar summarized the West's view: "With the ending of the Cold War...Yugoslavia was no longer [a] problem of global importance for the two super-powers...The important factor was the pace of reforms in the East. What lasted nine months in Poland, took
[PEN-L:6760] Re: Re: una preguntita
Tom Walker wrote: Another factor IN CANADA would no doubt be the substantial withdrawal of people from the labour force over the past ten years. Most of those people would no doubt have either been precariously employed or unemployed but instead became simply non-employed. I haven't looked at comparative labour force participation in the U.S. lately, but my impression was it hasn't fallen to the same extent as in Canada. Is that right, Doug? It hasn't fallen at all. In April, the U.S. employment/population ratio was 64.2%, off slightly from its all-time high of 64.5% in January, but up from its 61.3% level at the employment trough in Feb 92, and above its earlier cyclical peak of 63.1% in Mar 90. If you adjusted for the 1.8 million people behind bars in this lovely country, though, it would knock about 0.5 percentage points off the EPR. Doug
[PEN-L:6759] (Fwd) ALBANIANS TRY TO TAKE OVER KOSOVARS' CRIME NETWORK - S.F
--- Forwarded Message Follows --- Date sent: Wed, 12 May 1999 14:46:13 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:ALBANIANS TRY TO TAKE OVER KOSOVARS' CRIME NETWORK - S.F. Chronicle The San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, May 11, 1999 ALBANIANS TRY TO TAKE OVER KOSOVARS' CRIME NETWORK War leaves drug, arms traffic up for grabs By Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer In the shadows of the war in Kosovo, a ferocious upheaval is reshaping the criminal landscape of Europe. As NATO bombs and Serbian troops disrupt a Kosovar crime network that has dominated the narcotics trade across the continent, underworld clans from neighboring Albania are making a powerful bid to take over. They are the real government of Europe's poorest -- and most lawless -- nation, and by some estimates even more dangerous to the Allied campaign than the tanks and anti-aircraft systems of Yugoslavia. "Albania has become the leading country in a wide variety of trafficking, in clandestine immigration, in prostitution. It ranks as a top exporter of narcotics," the nation's own former president, Sali Berisha, charged in a January speech accusing his successors of corruption and links to criminal syndicates. "Until recently, our heroin abusers got their supplies from Kosovars based in Zurich," Chief Jean-Bernard Lagger of the Geneva police brigade told investigators from Geopolitical Drug Watch (OGD), Europe's most respected narcotics surveillance organization. "But now, Albanian traffickers have moved into Geneva to deliver drugs to their doorstep." Police officials say that the clans, known as "fares" in Albanian, have even begun contesting turf with South American cartels in the European cocaine market. "The criminal mentality in certain fares existed before the war, but it was relatively small-time," says Michel Koutouzis, senior researcher at OGD and Europe's leading expert on organized crime in the Balkans. "What the Kosovo crisis and the war have done is to elevate that mentality enormously, to push it to a much higher level." The clans have embraced what police officials call the "Sicilian model" of criminal organization. Put simply, this model works on the solidation of a firm power base at home, with deadly influence on the political structure, from which domestic crime syndicates gradually build international operations. By the time NATO and hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees arrived in Albania two months ago, the consolidation was well under way. "Whole districts and towns are actually under the utter control of the gangs," former president Berisha says. In the countryside surrounding the cities of Vlore and Durres, according to the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and other European periodicals, refugee convoys from the war zone have been held up by armed bands in the past two weeks, with young Kosovar women singled out and abducted. Elsewhere in the country, humanitarian workers and journalists from many Western news services report highly organized war profiteering -- including the diversion of aid shipments into the black market, bribery demands by customs agents processing the shipments in Albanian ports, and gang-run "taxi firms" charging as much as $120 to transport exhausted refugee families less than eight miles from the Kosovo border to the Albanian town of Kukes. The normal fee is $4. An unheated room for aid workers in Kukes today rents for $300 per night, in ramshackle houses that sold outright for less than $1,000 before the NATO bombings began. "It's like the Klondike during the Gold Rush," Albanian journalist Frrok Cupi told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, describing the profits being reaped from foreign military and humanitarian operations. Men claiming to be sales agents for the national telecommunications company have asked as much as $3,000 for the computer card necessary to connect a cellular phone with the satellite network. "We should know from experience -- from places like Rwanda and Somalia and Bosnia -- that humanitarian agencies must deal with the local mafias in a war zone," says Koutouzis. "There is no other way to get to the victims." Those who try to sidestep the clan syndicates do so at their own peril, in a land where the number of illegally owned Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons in some cities is greater than the number of residents. On April 30, the Associated Press reported that "almost every journalist" who has gone to the refugee camp at Bajram Curri in northern Albania has been robbed, including a team from the Associated Press. The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, which
[PEN-L:6758] Re: Balkan Action Committee
Louis Proyect wrote: William Howard Taft This isn't the same Taft of the Taft-Hartley law is it? Still alive? Lame Kirkland? Sam Pawlett
[PEN-L:6757] More Details on Unexploded Missile
Unexploded Missile in Rubble of Chinese Embassy in Belgrade BEIJING, May. 13, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Chinese officials in Belgrade have uncovered an unexploded missile in the ruins of their embassy compound decimated by NATO bombing, official media reported Thursday. Ambassador Pan Zhanlin and embassy staff found the missile while clearing debris from the five-story building which was struck by NATO missiles on May 7, the Xinhua news agency said in a Belgrade-datelined story. Previous reports had indicated three missiles struck the mission, but diplomats now claim five missiles hit the embassy from different angles, with four of them exploding, the report said. The attack, which NATO says was accidental, killed three Chinese and injured 20, spawning violent anti-U.S.protests across China. ( (c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
[PEN-L:6756] NATO Dilevers Miiltary Secret to China
Unexploded Missile in Rubble of Chinese Embassy in Belgrade BEIJING -- Chinese officials in Belgrade have uncovered an unexploded missile in the ruins of their embassy compound decimated by NATO bombing, official media reported Thursday.
[PEN-L:6752] Statement of Basic Steel Industry Conference
http://www.uswa.org/news/steel/statement042799.html html head meta NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0" meta NAME="Template" CONTENT="C:\PROGRAM FILES\MICROSOFT OFFICE\OFFICE\html.dot" titleStatement of Basic Steel Industry Conference/title /head body LINK="#FF" VLINK="#800080" BGCOLOR="#FF" bfont FACE="Arial Narrow" p/fontfont FACE="Arial" SIZE="4"STATEMENT OF THE BASIC STEEL INDUSTRY CONFERENCE/p /fontfont FACE="Arial" SIZE="6" p ALIGN="CENTER"UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA/p /fontfont FACE="Arial" SIZE="4" p ALIGN="CENTER"Adopted at Pittsburgh, PA on April 27, 1999/p /fontfont FACE="Arial Narrow" SIZE="5" pnbsp;/p /fontfont FACE="Arial" SIZE="6" p ALIGN="CENTER"I. INTRODUCTION/p /font/bfont FACE="Arial" SIZE="4" p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"The Basic Steel Industry Conference is vested by the International Convention with the authority to implement the wage policy of the Union and apply it to the Basic Steel Industry. In Canada, bargaining matters have been and will continue to be addressed by the Canadian National Policy Conference. We here address these issues as they affect our members in the United States./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"Fulfillment of our charge has always been an imposing task. Today, this body confronts challenges that are in many ways unrivaled since the early days of our Union./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"We meet today on the eve of bargaining with the nation#146;s major integrated steel companies. And while we did bargain with them in 1996, all of our major contracts were resolved through binding arbitration, as provided for in the 1993-94 settlements. Thus for the first time in six years we will be facing the companies with a traditional strike deadline./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"nbsp;/p b p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"Stand Up For Steel/p /b p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"The last six years have been nothing if not eventful. For most of this period the steel industry enjoyed a sustained period of substantial prosperity. Between 1993 and 1997 total industry shipments rose by 18%, operating profit rose from $10 per ton to $40 per ton and the industry generated total profits of over $10 billion./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"Recently, however, a dark cloud has moved over the horizon. /p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"For 18 months now the Steelworkers Union has been speaking out about the crisis facing America#146;s steel industry. Immediately following the first of the currency collapses in Asia, we pointed to the series of events that, if left unchecked, would follow: these countries would face economic collapse and decline in their domestic demand; and, with the application of the IMF#146;s quot;medicine,quot; a flood of imports into America of key manufactured products -#150; particularly steel. /p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"We pointed out that none of this was inevitable, that prompt and decisive Government action could easily avert this crisis. In fact, as we made clear, the longer action was delayed, the more damage would be done, much of it damage that could never be repaired, and the more difficult the problem would be to solve. /p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"Eventually our voice was joined by America#146;s steel companies in the creation of our extraordinary Stand Up For Steel campaign. That campaign, to put it mildly, has turned the nation#146;s capital on its head./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"When we began this effort, no one believed that we could do anything to stop the flood of imports. By November of last year imports consumed almost 50% of our market, and there seemed no limit to the damage that would be done./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"But this Union mobilized and organized itself and has forced our nation#146;s leaders to address the situation. And our efforts are paying off./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"On March 17, the United States House of Representatives, by an overwhelming 289 #150; 141 margin, passed HR 975 #150; a bill limiting steel imports into this country to their level prior to the crisis. While the bill still awaits action in the Senate, it is clear that our Union has succeeded in forcefully bringing the issue to the nation#146;s attention./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"Through our efforts we have also taken important steps toward changing the basic terms of the debate in this country about international trade. The purpose and effect of trade must be to help working people, not enrich multinational corporations and Wall Street. Stand Up For Steel has opened up this issue and has laid important groundwork in creating a global economy that works for workers./p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"The crisis is not over, far from it. While it is true that overall import levels in the first quarter of this year were below the record levels reached in the third and fourth quarters of 1998, imports from a number of key steel producing countries are still dramatically above their pre-crisis level. /p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"nbsp;/p p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"Although imports of hot-rolled steel declined in the first quarter of 1999 from their peak in November of 1998,
[PEN-L:6755] [floridaleft] ACTION ALERT-Guestworkers-URGENT (fwd)
forwarded by Michael Hoover - Forwarded message -- From: Vicki Nichols [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: fcpj [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 20:09:00 -0400 Subject: ACTION ALERT-Guestworkers-URGENT Please distribute widely. Thanks, Vicki. Migrant Farmworker Justice Project Florida Legal Services, Inc. Post Office Box 2110 Belle Glade, FL 33430 Phone: (561) 996-5266 Fax: (561) 992-5040 Toll Free: (800) 277-7447 Action Alert To: All Farmworker Advocates, Interested parties From: Dylan Morgan Date: May 5, 1999 Re: Federal Guestworker Legislation Background... Guestworker programs like the current H-2A program allow agricultural businesses claiming to experience a labor shortage to apply to bring in foreign workers on temporary visas to perform seasonal work. Because guestworkers have few rights and little legal recourse, they are often unable or unwilling to speak out about abuses they endure for fear of losing their job and being deported. Generally, farmworkers face harsh conditions. Their wages have not kept up with inflation and amount to a meager $6,500 annually while a continuous flow of foreign labor removes growers' incentives to improve wage and working conditions. Currently... The Senate immigration subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), who supported the grower's guestworker amendment last year, is holding and oversight hearing on guestworker programs on Wednesday, May 12, 1999 (date subject to change). The growers have not yet had their bill introduced, but it is expected at the end of May. Their guestworker proposal is likely to be added as a proposed amendment to an appropriations (spending) bill, probably the one for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Last Congress, they tacked it onto the Commerce, Justice and State appropriations bill.) Needed Action... Write letters, both individually and on behalf of as many organizations as possible, to your Senators asking that they strongly opposed the guestworker legislation being sought by agricultural employers. Of critical importance are members of the Senate immigration subcommittee (Republicans Abraham, Specter, Grassley and Kyl and Democrats Kennedy, Feinstein and Schumer) and agricultural appropriations subcommittee (Republicans Cochran,Specter, Bond, Gorton, McConnell, Burns, and Democrats Kohl, Harkin, Dorgan, Feinstein and Durbin), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, running for President), Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.VA, ranking Democrat on Appropriations Committee) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D.VT ranking Democrat on Judiciary Committee) Write letters to President Bill Clinton, thanking him for opposing the agricultural guestworker legislation last year and asking him to announce that he would veto a new guestworker bill or amendment if it were to pass this year. Contact Information Mail can be sent to the Clinton Administration at the following address: President Bill Clinton The Whitehouse Washington, D.C. 20500 Senate addresses are all: Senator U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 If you can fax the letter, so much the better. A few fax numbers for Senators' offices in Washington, D.C. are: Florida Senators: Bob Graham (202) 224-2237 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Connie Mack (202) 224-8022 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For other contact addresses, visit: http://www.senate.gov/ Senate immigration subcommittee: Spencer Abraham, (R) 224-8834 Arlen Specter, (R) 228-1229 Charles Grassley, (R) Jon Kyl, (R) 228-1239 Ed Kennedy, (D) 224-0405 Diane Feinstein, (D) 228-3954 Chuck Schumer, (D) Senate agricultural appropriations subcommittee: Thad Cochran, (R) Arlen Specter, (R) 228-1229 Christopher Bond, (R) Slade Gorton, (R) 224-9393 Mitch McConnell, (R) 224-2499 Conrad Burns, (R) 224-8594 Herb Kohl, (D) Ton Harkin, (D) Byron Dorgan, (D) 228-4466 Diane Feinstein, (D) 228-3954 Richard Durbin, (D) Others: John McCain, (R) 228-2862 Robert Byrd, (D) 228-0002 Patrick Leahy, (D) Sample Letter Dear Senator : We write out of concern for this nations migrant farmworkers who harvest our fruits, vegetables, tobacco and other horticultural crops. We ask that you oppose the agricultural "guestworker" legislation that agricultural employers intend to introduce again, possibly as an amendment to an appropriations bill. [State who you are and what you or your organization does] America's farmworkers are underpaid, often ill-housed and frequently lack access to health care. Wage rates remain quite low, and here in Florida, piece rates for most agricultural commodities have
[PEN-L:6754] Balkan Action Committee
Today's NY Times has an ad sponsored by a group calling itself the Balkans Action Committee calling for Nato ground forces in Yugoslavia. It is signed by an odd mixture of neoconservatives and "leftists" including Bianca Jagger and "Rabbi" Michael Lerner, the portly editor of Tikkun and erstwhile 1960s radical. Lerner was "spiritual adviser" to the Clintons for a brief time about 5 years ago, urging "communitarian" values upon the thuggish Arkansas president and his wife. They are window-dressing, however. The real forces behind Balkans Action are the hardline anticommunists who emerged during the Reagan era. This is the executive committee, as announced on their website (www.balkanaction.org). Morton Abramowitz Saul Bellow Zbigniew Brzezinski Richard Burt Frank Carlucci Dennis DeConcini Paula Dobriansky Geraldine Ferraro Robert Hunter Philip Kaiser Max M. Kampelman Lane Kirkland Jeane Kirkpatrick Peter Kovler Ron Lehman John O'Sullivan Richard Perle Eugene Rostow Donald Rumsfeld Stephen Solarz Helmut Sonnenfeldt William Howard Taft Elie Wiesel Paul Wolfowitz Elmo Zumwalt Except for Geraldine Ferraro, this is basically the same group that made up the Committee on the Present Danger, which was chaired by the atrocious Jeane Kirkpatrick and flourished under Reagan. It promoted Star Wars, intervention in Central America, Afghanistan and Angola and all sorts of other militantly counterrevolutionary adventures. The point of this is to remind us that the war in the Balkans is not a "progressive's" war. The most important sector of reactionary opinion in the United States is represented by this executive committee and should remind us that the war is a continuation of the anticommunist crusade launched by Reagan 20 years ago. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:6749] Re: Imagine...
Hi Jim, There are two one year full-time appointments teachiong MPA next year. Tell your friend to apply.Last time his application was not complete so he wasn't considered. The school is quite bureaucratic in that the apllication must inlcude all things requested before anybody looks at it. For more information, call Linda Moon Stumpff, head of MPA; Julie Stone, administrative assistant to MPA or Debra Blodgett, administrative assistant, coordinator of Evergreen hiring, Peter "Craven, Jim" wrote: Bear Chief, Perhaps for the next edition of the Pikanii Sun? Imagine... by James M.S. Craven There is a great deal of sensitivity to one of the most notorious of the many Holocausts humankind has suffered: the Nazi Holocaust against Jews, Gypsies and others. Movies like Schindler's List are a constant reminder of massive suffering that must never be forgotten and historical lessons that must be learned. Most believe that something like the Holocaust of the Nazis against Jews or Gypsies or other victims tageted by the Nazis could never happen here in America or in Canada. Imagine that something like what happened to Jews in Germany happened in America or Canada. Imagine that Jewish children were forced to repeat Christian prayers and were beaten or even murdered if they spoke or prayed in Hebrew or Yiddish and spoke or prayed Jewish prayers. Imagine if Jewish children were forced to eat pork that was not only forbidden for religious reasons but was also rotten, insect-infested and of the lowest quality so that many children could be "fed" cheaply and very profitably. Imagine if vulnerable and trusting Jewish children were routinely sexually and physically abused by clergy and when the sexual and physical abuse was discovered, those who reported it were beaten or murdered while those who committed the ugly deeds were protected by powerful and rich churches and sent elsewhere to do more crimes to other Jewish children. Imagine that Jewish children were used for medical experiments or used to test new drugs or surgical procedures. Imagine if Jewish children were used as sexual objects for powerful pedophiles when visiting the isolated institutions in which the Jewish children were kept away from their families and communities. Imagine if Jewish children were sterilized through coercion or decption. Imagine if Jewish children were registered and controlled by a BJA (Bureau of Jewish Affairs) that had a long history of fraud, theft, abuse and dereliction of trust responsibilities with respect to traditional Jewish lands and resources. Imagine if throughout the Jewish Ghettos, corrupt and sell-out Jews were selected or elected through fraudulent elections to control other Jews in the interests of non-Jews bent on the eventual elimination--through murder, intermarriage, redefinition, assimilation or sterilization--of all Jews.Imagine if Jewish children were forced into special Boarding/Residential Schools designed to beat, torture, intimidate and brainwash the "Jewishness" out of them. Imagine if there were football teams with names like the "Kansas City Kikes", the "San Francisco Sheenies" or the Jersey City Jew Boys" and at half-time some caricature of what the bigoted and ignorant consider to be a "typical Jew" came out to do the "money-grubbing tango". Imagine if Jews were forbidden to celebrate Jewish holidays or to wear traditional Jewish yamulkas or prayer shawls. Imagine if all the precedents of Nuremberg and International Law (Treaties) were routinely broken by non-Jews while Jews were expected to keep all promises and responsibilities under those laws. You say it could not happen to Jews in America or Canada what was done in Nazi Germany? You say that especially after Nuremberg and the horrors that were revealed there "Never Again" anywhere? With respect to Jews in America and Canada, perhaps all of the above and more could happen and perhaps not. But there is no "perhaps" that all of the above and much more was done--and is being done--in America and in Canada and elsewhere in the world to Indigenous Peoples. When do Indians and first Nations Peoples get movies like "Schlinder's List" that expose the past and present of the American and Canadian Holocausts? When do non-Indians care about the American and Canadian Holocausts against Indigenous Peoples as much as many non-Jews do --and should--care about the Nazi Holocaust? When do Indians get the precedents, legal protections and demands for justice of Nuremberg applied in and to the very Nations that so piously and hypocritically sat in judgment at Nuremberg? Jim Craven
[PEN-L:6747] Embassy Bombing Fallout
Thursday May 13 1999 SCMP Beijing vows to beat back Nato WILLY WO-LAP LAM Beijing is to abandon Deng Xiaoping's low-profile foreign policy to beat back the challenges of a fast-expanding Washington-led Nato. The rethink came about since the bombing of the Belgrade Embassy, when leading Politburo members and their advisers discussed how to counter what they regarded as a deliberate trampling of Chinese sovereignty. "The Politburo Standing Committee has decided that if the Washington-led Nato has its way in Europe, it will next target China," a diplomatic source in Beijing said. "The elite body has endorsed a number of measures to seize the initiative through asserting itself in foreign policy." Among the recommendations given preliminary approval are: Playing a more aggressive role in the United Nations. Sensing that President Bill Clinton is considering using a UN-backed peace plan as a face-saving measure to retreat partially from Yugoslavia, Beijing has insisted Nato ends air strikes before endorsing the scheme. But should a UN peace-keeping force that meets Beijing's approval be formed, the Jiang leadership has signalled its willingness to dispatch PLA officers. Analysts said this was a rare gesture of commitment given Beijing's traditional reluctance to join international peace-keeping efforts. Developing a world-class arsenal, particularly missiles, to counter the "Nato military machine". Beijing has served notice on the US that unless Nato reins in its aggressive tendencies, it will delay ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Diplomats said Chinese strategists had engaged in vague talk about the resumption of an active nuclear development programme. Forming a potential anti-Nato alliance. Beijing is working with Moscow to ensure the "multi-polar nature" of the new world order. Further "anti-hegemonistic" plans are to be worked out in a November summit between President Jiang Zemin and President Boris Yeltsin. A Western diplomat said Beijing had made veiled threats about resuming or upgrading "nuclear co-operation" with Iran and Pakistan. Serving warning on America's Asian allies not to abet a Nato-initiated anti-China containment policy. It is understood Beijing recently warned Japan not to provide a launch pad for US or Nato weaponry should the alliance target China. A Chinese source said Mr Jiang, who is de facto diplomat-in-chief, had, in effect, jettisoned Deng's well-known dictum. In the wake of the post-Tiananmen Square embargoes, the late patriarch said that in foreign policy: "China will keep a low profile, maintain a cool head, and never take the lead." The source said the outburst of anti-Nato feelings since the embassy bombing had put pressure on Beijing. "National People's Congress deputies and students have written to the leadership asking why China always abstains in the UN Security Council," the source said. "In internal talks, Politburo members expressed the fear that the students would next stage protests against a 'weak central Government' unless Beijing counters threats to national security."
[PEN-L:6746] Diplomacy and Force
According to NATO authorities, Milosevic only understands force. It seems to me that the situation is the other way around. Milosevic is at least trying to get some diplomatic negotiations going whereas NATO makes demands and sees bombing, force, as the only means of getting them met. NATO refuses to negotiate. NATO only understand force as a solution to the Kosovo crisis. Diplomacy for NATO is subsequent to capitulation. Cheers, Ken Hanly
[PEN-L:6745] Fw: Concerning my brother Peter: Reply to Barkley
-Original Message- From: James K. Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, May 12, 1999 6:14 PM Subject: Concerning my brother Peter: Reply to Barkley Barkley's remark concerning the role my brother Peter, then U.S. Ambassador, played at the time of the Croatian sweep through the Krajina deserves clarification, not through any fault of Barkley's but because these complicated events are often distorted and simplified in hindsight. In fact, Peter waged a furious last-minute diplomatic effort to forestall the Croatian sweep, and had reason to believe until near the very end that he might succeed. His reason, well foreseen beforehand, was that the subsequent depopulation of the Krajina would be the entirely predictable outcome. When the Serb population did evacuate following the sweep, Peter joined the convoy of refugees in order to publicize their situation and to protect them from abuse by Croatian security forces along the way. This earned him the epithet of "tractor diplomat" from Croatian President, Franjo Tudjman, and turned him from hero to pariah in the Croatian press overnight. It is also worth noting that in another section of Croatia, Eastern Slavonia, a diplomatic solution was achieved after huge efforts, that left most of the Serb population in place. It is by no means wholly successful, but at least an improvement on the alternatives. Peter deserves more recognition for this obscure and limited but important success than he has been given. Those who saw Peter on the Lehrer News Hour last night also know that he opposes the bombing of civilian and infrastructure targets outside of Kosovo, which have no relation to any military or humanitarian objective inside that province. James Galbraith. * James K. Galbraith LBJ School of Public Affairs The University of Texas at Austin Austin TX 78713 Phone: 512-471-1244 (o) Fax: 512-471-1835 (o) 512-480-0246 (h) Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] See the UTIP web-site at http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/ See the ECAAR web-site at http://www.ecaar.org/
[PEN-L:6753] BLS Daily Report
BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 1999: Today's News Release: "U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes -- April 1999" indicates that the U.S. Import Price Index rose 0.8 percent in April. The increase was attributed to the upswing in imported petroleum prices and followed a 0.1 percent rise in March. The price index for U.S. exports also rose in April, increasing 0.2 percent after decreasing in each of the prior 2 months. Labor productivity, the basic source of improving standards of living in the United States, is rising strongly as American workers collectively produce even more goods and services while working relatively few additional hours to do so. For instance, in the first 3 months of the year, productivity -- technically output per hour worked -- at nonfarm businesses rose at a rapid 4 percent annual rate. That allowed production to rise at a 5 percent rate while hours worked went up less than 1 percent (John M. Berry, in The Washington Post (page E1). __The productivity of the nation's workers surged in the first 3 months of this year, highlighting the economy's continued competitiveness in its ninth year of expansion and easing fears of inflation (The New York Times, in a Reuters dispatch, page C2). __The productivity of American workers outside of agriculture surged at a 4 percent annual pace in the first quarter, compared with the fourth quarter, adding more evidence to the case that productivity is perking up after a 25-year snooze. Growth in productivity, or output per hour of work, is "just about the single most important measurement of economic prosperity and how the economy performs," said a Columbia Business School economist (The Wall Street Journal, page A2. The Journal's page 1 graph is of nonfarm productivity, 1994 to the present). The National Coalition on Health Care, a bipartisan group headed by former presidents Bush, Carter, and Ford has put out its latest report "The Erosion of Health Insurance Coverage in the United States", David S. Broder writes in The Washington Post (page A27). In 1992, when the plight of the uninsured became a major issue in the presidential campaign, there were 38 million non-covered Americans below Medicare age. Five years later, the number had growth by 5 million. And the rate of increase is accelerating from an average of half a million annually in the first 2 years to an average of 1.2 million annually in the 3 most recent years. The report's authors, Steven Findlay and Joel Miller -- who had the assistance of Tulane University's Kenneth Thorpe, probably the country's leading authority on this question -- say the legions of the uninsured are rising because of fundamental economic and demographic forces, which, by themselves, are certain to make the problem worse. The authors say that "even if the rosy economic conditions prevalent since 1992 prevail for another decade, a projected 52 million to 54 million non-elderly Americans -- one in five -- will be uninsured in 2009." If a recession occurs, that number will jump to 61 million -- one in four. Most of the uninsured have jobs, but increasingly they work in small businesses or in service sectors that either do not cover employees or require them to pay so much for health insurance that they cannot afford it. the growing numbers of self-employed, part-timers and contract workers swell the totals. It is a double whammy. Between 1996 and 1998, the percentage of small firms (with fewer than 200 employees) offering health insurance dropped from 59 percent to 54 percent. On average, their employees were required to pay almost half (44 percent) of the policy premiums for themselves and their families. Faced with those costs, more workers are declining health insurance. application/ms-tnef
[PEN-L:6751] Re: una preguntita
Yep, we are losing manufacturing sector jobs. Most of these are reported because the jobs in most cases are union jobs---and the various unions see that these losses are reported to the authorities. Although this is not always the case with small manufacturers, who plead ignorance of the law. The raise in the minumum wage has brightened things up a bit for the low wage service sector. And has caused some employers interested in holding their employees to raise wages a bit i.e a big box retailer who was paying $6.00 dollars an hour might raise his wage to $6.25 to reflect the rise in the minumum wage and let his employees know what a generous fellow they work for. :~) Your email pal, Tom L. Thomas Kruse wrote: We read: BLS DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, APRIL 23, 1999 RELEASED TODAY: In January 1999, there were 2,209 mass layoff actions by employers as measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month. Each action involved at least 50 persons from a single establishment, and the number of workers involved totaled 211,796. Both the number of layoff events and the number of initial claimants for unemployment insurance were lower in January 1999 than in January 1998. ... And I wonder: Employment may be steady, unemployment low, but these kind of numbers suggest a lot of turn over. I know that when I have to hustle up work, living on year-to-year contracts as I do, it is very stressful. Sennett's recent book illustrates how such hustling makes life pretty miserable. Is turnover/instability something you economists study as part of "standard of living"? Tom Tom Kruse Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242, 500849 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:6762] HOW NATO THE MEDIA MISREPRESENTED THE CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING
I just received this. Some of us who are long-in-the-tooth might recall the author as the leader of the Maoist PL-SDS at Harvard. Back in 1971, when I was a Trot up in Boston, our party and theirs had some memorable brawls (they started it--honest). It is great to see old turkeys still out there squawking loudly. Louis P. Dear people, Please feel free to copy and distribute or post this in any way, to anyone or any group or in any forum or print it - in other words, feel free to get it to as many people as possible! -- jared HOW NATO THE MEDIA MISREPRESENTED THE CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING by Jared Israel Opponents of the war against Serbia argue that much of what passes for news these days is really a kind of war propaganda, that NATO puts out misinformation and the media disseminates the stuff uncritically. A case in point is the coverage of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. I download wire service reports from the AOL world news database (accessible at aol://4344:30.WORLD.338815.464449182 if you are an AOL member. This allows me to see exactly how wire services and newspapers change the news from hour to hour. Very instructive for studying how misinformation is disseminated. Studying misinformation is a special interest of mine. If you'd like to see some of my previous work in this area, send me a note and I'll email you The Emperor's Clothes, which analyzes how the NY Times misinformed its readers about the bombing of a Sudanese pill factory in August, 1998. Before we examine the news coverage of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy, let me recount a very interesting report from a Chinese intellectual, currently at Harvard's Kennedy Institute, who spoke on May 8th at the weekly Boston anti-war rally (held at 3:00 every Sat. in Copley Square). The man had conferred with people overseas and thus had direct knowledge of the attack on the Chinese Embassy. He said three missiles had struck the Embassy compound, hitting three apartments where one or both adult family members was a journalist. The missiles apparently carried a light explosive charge. Why NATO Targeted Chinese Journalists Why, asked the speaker, did all three missiles strike journalists' apartments? Clearly, he said, the goal was to punish China for sympathizing with the Yugoslav people against NATO. More specifically, the intention was to terrorize Chinese newspeople in Yugoslavia, thus silencing yet another non-NATO information source. Does that seem too nightmarish to be true? Keep in mind, NATO has consistently bombed Serbian news outlets with the stated intention of silencing sources of "lying propaganda." Why would it be so far-fetched for them to do the same to Chinese newspeople? Perhaps NATO wants to silence ALL non-NATO reporting on the war, even at the risk of starting WW III. Or perhaps NATO, or a part of NATO, such as the U.S. government, wants to provoke a fight with China before China gets too strong to be crushed? Let's take a look at the "news" coverage. SORRY, WRONG BUILDING NATO spokesman Jamie Shea's first response to the Embassy bombing was a) to apologize and b) to explain that the NATO missiles had gone astray. NATO had intended to hit a building across the street, a building that houses what SHEA called the "Federal Directory for the Supply and Procurement." Said Shea: "'I understand that the two buildings are close together."' (Reuters, May 8) (If they ever catch the terrorists who bombed the US Embassy in Kenya and bring them to trial, could their legal team utilize the Shea Defense which consists of a) first you say I'm very sorry and b) then you say you meant to blow up the building across the street?) But getting back to the "news" -- according to Jamie Shea the Chinese Embassy is close to the "Federal Directory for the Supply and Procurement." But the Chinese Embassy is in fact located in the middle of a large lawn or park in a residential neighborhood and: "The embassy stands alone in its own grounds surrounded by grassy open space on three sides. Rows of high-rise apartment blocs are located 200 (600 feet) metres away and a line of shops, offices and apartments sits about 150 meters (450 feet) away on the other side of a wide tree-lined avenue, [called]...Cherry Tree Street." (Reuters, 5/8) NEARBY BUILDING? WHAT NEARBY BUILDING? Apparently realizing that a "Federal Directory for the Supply and Procurement" would not be placed in an apartment complex -- or on a 1000 foot lawn - NATO spun a new story a few hours later: "Three NATO guided bombs which slammed into the Chinese embassy in Belgrade overnight struck precisely at the coordinates programmed into them, but it was not the building NATO believed it to be. 'They hit bang on the three aim points they were given,' a military source said [NATO military spokesman General Walter] Jertz declined to say what sort
[PEN-L:6764] Re: Re: una preguntita
Thomas Kruse wrote: Employment may be steady, unemployment low, but these kind of numbers suggest a lot of turn over. I know that when I have to hustle up work, living on year-to-year contracts as I do, it is very stressful. Sennett's recent book illustrates how such hustling makes life pretty miserable. Is turnover/instability something you economists study as part of "standard of living"? Doug writes: Most studies of turnover/instability/tenure I've seen for the U.S. show no significant increase from the 1970s. I know this is counterintuitive, and it pisses people off when I say it sometimes, but it seems to be true. What may have happened is that some instability has crept up the social ladder, making middle managers vulnerable to the instability that blue/pink collar workers have long known, which attracts more attention than in the past. Also, behind the flattish average tenure figures, men are falling but women are rising. This disaggregation is crucial: I read what's happening as the gradual end (and sometimes rapid demise) of the primary labor market jobs, which offered some job security, and the spread of secondary labor market type jobs, which don't. Because middle-aged white males hogged the primary-type jobs that existed in the core and unionized sectors of the US economy, they (or rather, people of their demographic category) are the ones who have suffered the most from increased instability of job tenure. Women and "minorities" traditionally had secondary-type jobs and typically had little in the way of security. Thus, there's been a convergence of job experience between the old insiders and the old outsiders in the labor-power market. If we're talking about the bargaining power of the US working class, the fact that increased instability has hit the types of workers who had the most bargaining power in the 1950s and 1960s seems very relevant. It might be useful to calculate measures of job instability holding demographics constant, in order to see the effects of changes in the demographic mix of the US labor force on aggregate stats. Even though it's always useful to pay attention to statistics, we should always be careful with them. This issue reminds me of an article that Bill Lazonick published in the RRPE 25 years ago, on the issue of enclosures in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. He argued against an author who pointed to the stability of workers' physical location after enclosures, which suggested that Marx was wrong to rail against enclosures as disrupting workers' lives, etc. Lazonick argued that despite the author's stats, social relations had changed radically, i.e., that workers had been proletarianized. What's been happening in the US is a smaller version of this: even though actual job tenure may not have fallen much (especially for aggregates), the ability of bosses to threaten their employees with job loss has increased. The partial deproletarianization that many white male workers enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s has been largely reversed. See http://www.mijcf.org/pub03/pub03_workingpapers6.html for a review of the literature. It's not full text, just an abstrat, but you can order the print version for free. Yes, it's from the Milken Institute, but it's a lit review, and one of the authors, Stefanie Schmidt, is a fairly liberal feminist. Just because something comes from the Milken Institute doesn't mean it's bad. But recently, they seem to have focused more on puff pieces and journalism, pulling back from serious research. ... Extreme turbulence is capitalism's norm. But during the "golden Age" of US capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, some of this turbulence had been moderated. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!
