date:20021121


- Original Message -
From: Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: PEN-L [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ALIST
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 12:22 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:32423] Sounds like surreal, doesn't it?


Please tell me that this news is a hoax. Sabri

+++



Nope, sorry, it is not  a hoax.

Ian

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hi Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot

In a message dated 11/20/02 9:36:10 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

In a message dated 11/20/02 3:53:26 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a message dated 11/18/02 7:23:29 PM Pacific Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

Monster, butcher, mass murderer? I have an opinion about monsters in
American history and previous to this history hundreds of years of
extreme human depravity. You know in your heart that Stalin was a
monster. O.K., I have not the time to unravel the constituent components
of your heart, although it is a simply question that can be answered if
you provided the raw data that traces your historical and political
linkage.

Umm, in case you did not notice, I was defending Stalin on that
particular issue - saying he made the best choice of those actually
available to him; the other choices open to the Soviets at that point
would have helped Hitler. As it happens Stalin was "Stallin" at a time
wnen "Stallin" was the right thing to do. I mean was he supposed to take
on Hitler without allies? Or let Hitler take all of Poland instead of
half? He would have been an idiot not to have stalled at that point. He
chose the least evil of the bad alternatives available in those
circumsances.

As to Stalin being a mass murderer, a butcher a monster - I didn't know
anyone still argued it. And I don't know why recogizing that Stalin was
a monster would keep anyone from recognizing the monstrosity in U.S.
Capitalism. I don't want to argue the point. I just want to note that
someone who very anti-Stalin can recognize that he made the right choice
in Poland.

I am not anti-Stalin. Stalin wasa Great.

I do claim a Marxist analysis on every major issue and have discussed my views -- without fundamental refutation of any major point, for some time.

My point is that most of the - how can I say this, ideologist don't quantify the evolution of industrial society as murder of human beings, but scream Stalin!

You have not understood the industrial phase of society and the human toil or made any concrete comparison between different countries. This means examining the transition from agriculture to industry and the manufacturing phase and then industrial evolution. I have look at his question from the standpoint of the gallons of blood expended in the creation of the industrial infrastructure.

I mean . . . I know the monsters.

Melvin P.

Re: Stallin Stalin

2002-11-21 Thread Sabri Oncu

 Nationalism helped create France, Italy, and 
 a lot of other nations out of a mish-mosh of a 
 variety of ethnicities, often at the expense of 
 minoritie ethnicities. Though elite groups clearly 
 benefit more than the masses, it's more than just a 
 elite-serving ruse.

 Jim
==

 What is the *more*?

 Ian

Being a Greko-Armenio-Arabo-Kurdo-Turkish, I have no idea Ian.

Best,
Sabri

Privatization of information

2002-11-21 Thread michael perelman

Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 21, 2002; Page E01


The Energy Department has shut down a popular Internet site that
catalogued government and academic science research, in response to
corporate complaints that it competed with similar commercial services.

Department officials said abandoning PubScience, an electronic service
that cross-indexed and searched roughly 2 million government reports and
academic articles, will save the government $200,000 a year because two
equivalent services exist in the private sector.

The decision alarmed researchers in and out of the federal government,
who worry that services operated by other federal agencies might be
forced to give way to private gatekeepers that would control access to
information and research, much of which was created with public money.
Government agencies maintain extensive databases and search engines for
information on medicine, agriculture, finance and other disciplines.

What we worry about is what's next, said Charles A. Hamaker, associate
librarian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

PubScience, which began on paper in the late 1940s and went online in
1999, offered one-stop shopping for people looking for literature on
energy and science topics.

Searching on PubScience was free, and the service provided brief
summaries of articles or reports that related to requested topics. The
service would link either to full texts that were or to a payment
systems for information that was for sale.

Two commercial equivalents, Scirus and Infotrieve, operate much the same
way. They are owned by database companies that publish or make available
academic literature for a fee, but the search function is free.

Energy Department officials acknowledge that they were lobbied
frequently by the sites' owners and their trade group, the Software and
Information Industry Association. But officials said they had been
tracking the development of private-sector services carefully to be sure
that similar services were offered at no cost before closing PubScience.

From DOE's point of view, this is a success, said Walter L. Warnick,
director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, which
put together and managed the site. We have created a model that others
are now pursuing. Our Web patrons are now being served without
additional expense to the government.

Hamaker and others disagreed. They said they fear that offering search
functions free is a way for the database companies to lure users to
become dependent on their services.

It's the heroin pusher's approach to marketing, said Martin Blume,
editor in chief of the American Physical Society, which publishes
several journals on physics.

In the case of Scirus, Hamaker said the search engine pushes users
toward content owned by its corporate parent Elsevier Science, part of a
European database company. An Elsevier spokesman referred questions to
the industry trade association. Infotrieve did not return phone calls
seeking comment.

Researchers acknowledge that sophisticated research institutions
generally would rely on premium databases such as ISI Web of Science,
operated by Thomson Corp. of Canada. The service can cost as much as
$100,000 a year.

But they say that for the general public and researchers at small
institutions such as public libraries, PubScience was an invaluable tool
for surveying what information existed on a given topic.

For general awareness of what was available, it was a bargain to the
world, a gift to the world, Hamaker said.

Researchers also wonder why companies that sell information would want
to diminish the number of search opportunities that lead to articles
that people might purchase.

David LeDuc, public policy director of the SIIA, said the issue is
whether there should be publicly funded competition for commercial
search services.

LeDuc said free government services could drive out corporate
competition, thus reducing the choice available to consumers. He said he
doubts that Scirus or Infotrieve intend to start charging for searches.

That's not how the Internet works, he said, arguing that an increasing
amount of information is available online free. But ultimately, he said,
the market should decide.

LeDuc said the software association is looking at other publicly funded
Web sites after its success with PubScience, whose closing was reported
last week by Federal Computer Week. We monitor what governments do,
LeDuc said. There are two [services] that we've been made aware of. . .
. They are both in the proposed stages.

Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library
Association's Washington office, said the software group's philosophy
will lead to more expensive access to information already paid for by
taxpayers. Our fear is that this is the beginning of privatizing
government services for profit, she said.

In addition to government reports, many academic studies and journals
are enabled by public funding of public

Re: Re: Re: Birds of a feather

2002-11-21 Thread ken hanly

I intersperse comments after selected passages. We have had long discussions
about Peter Singer before. The discussions are in the LBO archives I believe
but it could be Pen-L. Just a few questions first for Doyle:

1) Do you agree that a woman has a right to abort. That is are you
pro-choice? If you answer is yes then:
i) Does this right apply when the woman aborts because the fetus is
deformed or has some disabillity?
  ii) Does this right apply when the woman aborts because she wants a son
and it is a daughter or vice versa?
2) If you agree that a woman has a right to abort why is there not a right
also to kill the newborn? What is the big difference that creates such a
huge moral gap between the term fetus and the newborn.

I think that Peter SInger is one of the pre-eminent 20th century
philosophers in terms of bringing important social issues back into the
philosophcial arena and making philosophical discussion of these problems
important issues in public discussion. This is just a fact no matter what
you might think of his particular views.

Personally I think his arguments for a more equitable distribution of wealth
are sound and his critique of lifeboat ethics people such as Garret Hardin
are compelling. Also, his speciecism arguments are not easy to meet but are
easy enough to ignore and marginalise by epithet as Easterbrook and others
do without showing the slightest comprehension even of what the issues are.
I do not agree with some aspects of his arguments re infants with
disabilities.

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Doyle Saylor [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]I
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 7:55 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:32388] Re: Re: Birds of a feather


 Greetings Economists,
 Peter Dorman writes,
 There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about a year ago
 that was fair-minded, I thought, on Singer and his critics.  The man is
 not a monster...

 Doyle,
 Writings on an Ethical Life, Peter Singer, Harper Collins books, 2000,

 page 163,
 We might think that we are just more civilized than these primitive
 peoples.  But it is not easy to feel confident that we are more civilized
 than the best Greek and Roman moralists.  It was not just the Spartans who
 exposed their infants on hillsides: both Plato and Aristotle recommended
the
 killing of deformed infants.   Romans like Seneca, whose compassionate
moral
 sense strikes the modern reader (or me, anyway) as superior to that of the
 early and medieval Christian writers, also thought infanticide the natural
 and humane solution to the problem posed by sick and deformed babies.

 Doyle,
 So is that what we ought to do Peter expose babies on the hillside above
the
 towns to show our moral superiority we've gained from an ethical insight?

COMMENT: Singer's point is that infanticide is not some unnatural, far out
kookie ethical notion but one that some societies as well as some eminent
philosophers have adopted. So are you saying SInger is not correct? What is
your evidence against him?

 attitudes.  But there are some questions that are more difficult.  Among
 them are questions concerning the treatment of infants with Down syndrome.
 ...
 When Down syndrome is detected and abortion available, the overwhelming
 majority of women, in most countries in excess of 90 percent, choose
 abortion.  The fact that so many women carrying fetuses with Down syndrome
 choose not to give birth to the child surely tells us something about
their
 attitude to life with Down syndrome, and their desire to avoid, if
possible,
 being the mother of such a child.

COMMENT: Just what is your point that women who have fetuses with Downs
syndrome have no right to abortion?

You actually quote stuff from SInger but rather than analysing you
go on an emotional rant. So you feel he is a monster. At least you could
learn from him just as we learn from Plato and Aristotle who  would equally
be monsters to you I guess.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hi Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot

In a message dated 11/20/02 3:53:26 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a message dated 11/18/02 7:23:29 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:


Monster, butcher, mass murderer? I have an opinion about monsters in 
American history and previous to this history hundreds of years of 
extreme human depravity. You know in your heart that Stalin was a 
monster. O.K., I have not the time to unravel the constituent components 
of your heart, although it is a simply question that can be answered if 
you provided the raw data that traces your historical and political 
linkage.



Umm, in case you did not notice, I was defending Stalin on that 
particular issue - saying he made the best choice of those actually 
available to him; the other choices open to the Soviets at that point 
would have helped Hitler. As it happens Stalin was "Stallin" at a time 
wnen "Stallin" was the right thing to do. I mean was he supposed to take 
on Hitler without allies? Or let Hitler take all of Poland instead of 
half? He would have been an idiot not to have stalled at that point. He 
chose the least evil of the bad alternatives available in those 
circumsances.

As to Stalin being a mass murderer, a butcher a monster - I didn't know 
anyone still argued it. And I don't know why recogizing that Stalin was 
a monster would keep anyone from recognizing the monstrosity in U.S. 
Capitalism. I don't want to argue the point. I just want to note that 
someone who very anti-Stalin can recognize that he made the right choice 
in Poland.



Acknowledged and read. 


Melvin P.

Re: Re: Privatization of information


- Original Message -
From: Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  Jonathan Krim
  Washington Post Staff Writer
  November 21, 2002; Page E01

 =

 The technology transfer provisions in HR 5005 as well as many other facets
 of that bill should give fans/critics of information economics the
 willies.One mere example is the fact that the Lawrence Livermore
 Labs computers and computer research programs are now in the hands of Tom
 Rich and his friends..

 Ian


==

Make that Tom Ridge; damn fingers.

Re: Privatization of information

- Original Message -
From: michael perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 8:31 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:32414] Privatization of information

 Jonathan Krim
 Washington Post Staff Writer
 November 21, 2002; Page E01

=

The technology transfer provisions in HR 5005 as well as many other facets
of that bill should give fans/critics of information economics the
willies.One mere example is the fact that the Lawrence Livermore
Labs computers and computer research programs are now in the hands of Tom
Rich and his friends..

Ian

Re: Re: Stallin Stalin

In a message dated 11/20/02 6:19:04 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002 at 16:17:51 (-0800) Devine, James writes:
...
1) while it makes sense for Stalin to make a deal with Hitler from a
nationalist perspective given the circumstances, does it make sense on the
basis of socialist principles? probably not, which suggests that socialist
principles had long before been subordinated to those of Russian
nationalism, just as the Comintern became subordinated to Russia's foreign
policy needs.

2) while Stalin's stallin may make sense in terms of nationalist military
strategy, we should look at other elements of his strategy at about the same
time. did invading Finland make sense? maybe. But did purging the military?
no. There was an element of irrationality in Stalin's policy, even from a
nationalist perspective.

"Nationalist" meaning that which benefits a small elite that fancies
itself "the nation".

Bill

Actually, nationalist can only mean a class conception of the nation. The nation or modern nation in the time frame in which we speak is a specific market. The nation is of course predicated upon the fundamentality of its mode of production and in this instance we are speaking of a specific generation of industrial production.

The question of an elite - what ever that means, is actually a question of administration, which is in turn dependent upon the technological state of development of the material power of the productive forces.

Then of course the word nationalist refers to the bourgeoisie. Here is an example. The proletariat in Cuba is not nationalist but patriotic, because the plight of their country is inexplicable fused with the question of property relations and secondarily, with the ruling "elite."

Elite is not a bad word once one study the historical evolution of the administrative function in society. The real question is not "the elite" but privileges based on administrative functions.

My grip is not having labored in heavy industry for over 30 years, as opposed to being say an academician. All contributions of labor is honorable. I seek to contribute because it is healthy and good. Privilege is another question altogether, but one cannot confuse it with the issue of the "elite."

Nationalist does not mean that which benefits a small elite that fancies itself the nation. Elites do not represent nations as such but rather states and multinational states. The national ideology one espouses is another matter altogether.

In terms of the Soviet Union there is of course the elite and the elite. There is the elite that is or rather was the organization called the CPSU and the elite that was the bureaucracy charged with the industrialization of the country. The former was defeated and the latter evolved into wht exists today.

What of the bureaucracy in the USA and its expansion?

Melvin P.

Re: Bank of England paralysed by fear of property crash

2002-11-21 Thread Chris Burford

The morning breakfast television commentators have got nothing about Gordon 
Brown's warning. Not even a warning that the market might be subdued.

This no doubts illustrates the vital role of news management in finance 
capitalism: He leaked the story to the Financial Times, to give context to 
the gloomy Bank of England mpc minutes. Then he carefully avoided giving 
any briefing to the popular financial journalists.

The defense for this manipulation is that nothing should be done to alarm 
consumer confidence. We shall see in his autumn statement next week whether 
he moves to raise taxes on business or on consumers. Or whether he follows 
Will Hutton's advice is that it is essential to control the property market 
directly.

It is a subtle, deadly important, and precarious game.

Chris Burford
London

Re: Stallin Stalin

2002-11-21 Thread soula avramidis

one can take a "history make all" position and absolve stalin sort of a al louis althusser. if there are real objective heavily weighing historical conditions that leave not much room for soviet policy manouevre than that is correct. stalin or anyone else in power in the cccp would act in very much the same way. if the cccp had much room to play than stalin is to blame. in hind sight socialism in one country was a sort of desparate measure at wait and see politics. they waited it out and we saw.
the only time the cccp was in a position to be really effective on an international scale was when nuclear parity was achieved and even then when they played strong the americans played crazy and for real too (Gus hall seems to have said that Marcuse was on the payroll of the american intelligence). sort of the americans said if our class rule sinks, we take the planet with us. i think one has to gauge developemnts in light of a global balance of forces.
one thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. no one to compete with.
"Devine, James" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

[was: RE: [PEN-L:32406] Re: Re: Re: Re: Hi Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot]
Gar writes: I just want to note that someone who very anti-Stalin can recognize that he made the right choice in Poland.
two points:
1) while it makes sense for Stalin to make a deal with Hitler from a nationalist perspective given the circumstances, does it make sense on the basis of socialist principles? probably not, which suggests that socialist principles had long before been subordinated to those of Russian nationalism, just as the Comintern became subordinated to Russia's foreign policy needs.
2) while Stalin's stallin may make sense in terms of nationalist military strategy, we should look at other elements of his strategy at about the same time. did invading Finland make sense? maybe. But did purging the military? no. There was an element of irrationality in Stalin's policy, even from a nationalist perspective.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now

Re: Stallin Stalin

2002-11-21 Thread soula avramidis

one can take a "history make all" position and absolve Stalin sort of a al Louis althusser. if there are real objective heavily weighing historical conditions that leave not much room for soviet policy maneuver than that is correct. Stalin or anyone else in power in the cccp would act in very much the same way. if the cccp had much room to play than stalin is to blame. in hind sight socialism in one country was a sort of desperate measure at wait and see politics. they waited it out and we saw.
the only time the cccp was in a position to be really effective on an international scale was when nuclear parity was achieved and even then when they played strong the Americans played crazy and for real too (Gus hall seems to have said that Marcuse was on the payroll of the american intelligence). sort of the americans said if our class rule sinks, we take the planet with us. i think one has to gauge developments in light of a global balance of forces.
one thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. no one to compete with."Devine, James" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Re: Stallin Stalin

2002-11-21 Thread soula avramidis

Bob Fine's Democracy and the Rule of Law again available

2002-11-21 Thread Andrea Herbert

In his groundbreaking work, Democracy and the Rule of Law: Marx's Critique
of the Legal Form, Professor Bob Fine explores afresh the relation between
jurisprudence, Marx and Marxism.

In the first section, he examines the tradition of modern natural right
theory that preceded Marx and informed his writings, demonstrating that
jurisprudence is as important as political economy in understanding Marx's
work. Here he focuses on the theories of right in Hobbes, Rousseau, Smith
and Hegel.

In the second section, he reconstructs the critique of classical
jurisprudence in the early Marx, how this developed in his political
writings, and the connection between the analysis of economic and legal
forms in his mature writings. Fine reconstructs the legal forms of right,
law and the state based on Marx's analysis of the economic forms of value,
money and capital.

In the third section, Fine addresses strategic ways in which Marx's critique
of the legal form has been received in contemporary social theory: as
'law-from-below' according to the Marxist humanist, Edward Thompson; as 'the
withering away of law' according to the bolshevic, Evgeni Pashukanis; and as
'historical anachronism,' according to the post-structuralist, Michel
Foucault.

Originally published in 1984 as Democracy and the Rule of Law: Liberal
Ideals and Marxist Critiques, this book contains a new preface relating the
original text to current political and intellectual debates. It has been
brought back into print by The Blackburn Press.

Fine deserves considerable praise for developing a detailed argument which
deals with the essence of the problems raised by the nature of law.  Prof.
Dennis Davis

It will become an instant replacement on reading lists for turgid
jurisprudential texts on Marxist theory of law, and deservedly so.
Prof. Steve Redhead

Democracy and the Rule of Law: Marx's Critique of the Legal Form by Bob
Fine. ISBN 1-930665-65-2, paperback, 242 pages, $24.95.
http://www.blackburnpress.com/demandrulofl.html

The Blackburn Press is a relatively new publishing company, founded with the
mission of keeping in print and available for purchase at reasonable prices
book titles that larger publishers have lost interest in and have declared
to be out of print. It specializes in scientific and technical books that
are classics in their field and provides a service to the academic community
by bringing back classic books that are out-of-print, making them available
again for research, reference and teaching. (See www.blackburnpress.com).

For more information, see:
http://www.blackburnpress.com/demandrulofl.html  or

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930665652/qid%3D1037198754/sr%3D11-1
/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/104-2406716-6394327

Andrea Herbert
The Blackburn Press
Publishers of classic scientific and technical books
P.O.Box 287, Caldwell, N.J. 07006
973-228-7077  Fax: 973-228-7276
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Explore the latest additions to our list at http://www.BlackburnPress.com

Stalin's fascination.

Title: Stalin's fascination.





[was: RE: Re: Rx6: Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot]


Michael asks why we should give a sh*t about Stalin. It's simple. One way to figure out how to arrange for socialist success in the future is to try to understand the failures of the broadly-defined socialist movement in the past. In addition to such debacles as German social democrats voting to support a war against French workers in 1914, there are lots of examples of socialist failure, but Stalin stands out as one of the major ones. (As I've noted, however, he can be seen as successful from the nationalist perspective.)

Jim

Re: Privatization of information

2002-11-21 Thread Bill Lear

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002 at 20:31:43 (-0800) michael perelman writes:
...
David LeDuc, public policy director of the SIIA, said the issue is
whether there should be publicly funded competition for commercial
search services.

LeDuc said free government services could drive out corporate
competition, thus reducing the choice available to consumers. He said he
doubts that Scirus or Infotrieve intend to start charging for searches.

That's not how the Internet works, he said, arguing that an increasing
amount of information is available online free. But ultimately, he said,
the market should decide.

So, in competition with for-profit services, a spokesman for the
industry admits that government is more efficient and would win a fair
fight.  Therefore, we must let the market ... decide, by removing
the government from the equation by fiat.


Bill

Re: Re: Easterbrook's claims

2002-11-21 Thread ian hudson

In fact, the Mexican government is attempting to hold on to much of the capital
that is fleeing northern Mexico's high wages by setting up a sort of poor man's
maquiladora in the south of the country in regions like Chiapas.  Their
development plan for the region, Plan Pueblo Panama, seeks to use the fact that
wages in this region are only half of the level in the north to keep companies
that are currently moving to places like Guatemala in the country.

Michael Perelman wrote:

 It is amazing what sort of nonsense passes for wisdom in this world.  In
 so far as Mexico is concerned, I understand that many of the jobs are in
 danger because even the miserable Mexican wage is too high in the world
 economy today.

 As for inequality being a statistical artifact due to immigration, that
 sounds nuts -- but I bet that someone at Heritage or some such place has
 proven it.

 On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 03:30:47PM -0500, F G wrote:
  I followed the link posted by Lou where Easterbrook review's Singer's new
  book:
  http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0211.easterbrook.html
 
  Much of the article is not worth responding to, since it argues that
  globalization is good without bothering to define it.  However, I was
  interested in the following claims:
 
  And he notes that the main effect of NAFTA, denounced by the
  anti-globalization left as a tool of corporate oligarchs, has been the
  creation of relatively high-paying jobs in Mexico
 
  I've read in several places that this not true or at least misleading (in
  particular in a book on NAFTA written by Mexican economist Alberto Arroyo
  and others), that many new jobs do not provide benefits and are of a
  precarious nature, and there continues to be high unemployment.  Also the
  real minimum wage is down from 1993.  Anyone know more about this?  I
  suppose it depends partly on the meaning of relatively high-paying, and
  how many jobs have actually been created.  As usual, it also needs to be
  argued that things could not have been better without NAFTA.
 
  Also:
  Average incomes there [in the developing world] almost doubled from 1975 to
  1999; even if you subtract for oil-enriched developing nations with
  unusually high GDPs per capita, global average income rose
 
  (Don't know about the data, but if you exclude India and East Asia, I
  suspect the story is much worse)
 
  and:
 
  (And the endless widening gap between rich and poor in the United States?
  This is an artifact of the huge rise in legal immigration in the last two
  decades. Factor out the low incomes of the newly arrived foreign-born, and
  the gap between rich and poor Americans is shrinking. But that's a story for
  another day.)
 
  Any comments on this?  Note that the massive rise in immigration is at least
  in part due to global inequality and third world regression.
 
  -Frank G.
 
 
  _
  Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
  http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
 

 --
 Michael Perelman
 Economics Department
 California State University
 Chico, CA 95929

 Tel. 530-898-5321
 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Law Order in the Golden State

Title: Law Order in the Golden State

Welcome to L.A., Chief Bratton...

ORDER:
130 Arrested in Sweep of Skid Row
Many are parole violators, say police, who add that homeless were not the target. The operation involves more than 250 officers.

By Andrew Blankstein and Richard Winton
Times Staff Writers
November 21 2002

More than 250 officers moved through downtown Los Angeles' skid row in raids that began before dawn Wednesday, arresting more than 130 people, including many ex-convicts who had violated parole, Los Angeles police said.

Some homeless people sleeping outdoors were rousted in the operation. Police said the move had been planned for two months, but it came just 48 hours after business organizations complained about the number of homeless people in the area, saying the concentration threatened efforts to improve the downtown economy. The number of arrests quickly overwhelmed the jail facilities at Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters, and forced police to use buses as temporary detention housing.

Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said Wednesday's operation was a move by Chief William J. Bratton and Mayor James K. Hahn, along with other agencies, to deal with the soaring number of parole violators downtown.

The message, said McDonnell, is that violators cannot avoid prison by living on skid row. People either behave or go elsewhere, he said.

Police searched the blocks bounded by 1st, Spring and 7th streets and the Los Angeles River. Many of those detained were arrested on the streets and in low-cost hotels around 5th Street, an area known as the Nickel.

As McDonnell spoke, parolees in handcuffs could be seen being led into a tented area behind Parker Center, where buses waited to take them to County Jail facilities for hearings.

LAPD officials said police did not approach people at random. Instead, accompanied by parole officers and working with information about parolees gleaned from several days of surveillance in the area, they questioned several hundred people Wednesday to determine their identities and whether they were in violation of their parole terms.

Of those taken into custody, about half were found inside buildings, while the others were on the streets
For more see: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sweep21nov21.story

LAW:
Legal Aid to the Poor Falls Short
The state has made improvements, but the unmet need for help in civil matters remains large, state bar finds.
By Henry Weinstein
Times Staff Writer
November 21 2002

Nearly 1.5 million poor families in California do not have access to lawyers when they confront disputes involving education, employment, health care or other needs, according to a report issued Wednesday by a special state bar commission.

The state has increased its spending on legal services for the poor in recent years. But it still spends considerably less than several other major industrial states and has many fewer lawyers available to serve the poor.

California has one lawyer available for every 10,000 poor residents, and spends $13 per eligible person for civil legal services.

By contrast, Minnesota and New Jersey provide $39 per person. Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states that also outspend California.

Total public and private expenditures for civil legal services for California's poor come to $149 million, a significant hike from the 1996 level of $101 million. But completely meeting the need for legal representation among poor people would require $533 million, said San Francisco attorney Jack Londen, past chair of the California Commission on Access to Justice, which issued the report.

As a practical matter, there can be no access to justice without access to legal assistance, Londen said.

The commission was created in 1997 after a State Bar task force issued a study that said the quality of justice in the state was being seriously undermined by inadequate efforts to address the legal needs of the poor.

The statistics may seem cold, but it's impossible to remain complacent about this situation after meeting a family made homeless by an illegal eviction, a senior who lost his home to foreclosure from a crooked loan transaction or a domestic violence victim unable to navigate the courts to get a restraining order, said Karen A. Lash, associate dean at USC Law School who co-chairs the commission. ...

for more, see http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nolaw21nov21.story

[these stories appear next to each other in the print edition of the L.A. TIMES today.]

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

RE: Re: Stallin Stalin

Title: RE: [PEN-L:32428] Re: Stallin Stalin





I hope no-one thinks that talking about Stalin as an individual is productive. The question is about the societal situation that propelled people like Stalin -- and policies like Stalin's -- to the top of the social heap. (If Stalin had been replaced by some other individual, I doubt that the USSR/CCCP's government would have changed very much.)

As noted, competition from the USSR/CCCP did allow the (temporary) success of social democracy in W. Europe, the US tolerance toward alternative models of economic development in capitalist east Asia and Latin America, etc. (Similarly, competition between capitalists sometimes means that good products are sold at low prices.) The US war against Viet Nam -- a central event of the US vs. USSR rivalry -- meant abundant military spending that pumped up the world economy and allowed Japan to succeed on a world scale. 

But I wouldn't give the USSR/CCCP all the credit. Popular struggles in Western Europe and what used to be called the third world were also very important. The Vietnamese effort to attain national liberation was not a simple result of US vs. USSR superpower rivalry. Further, the USSR often wanted to control or limit such struggles, as when Stalin lived up to his agreement with Churchill to end the movement in Greece after World War II.

BTW, Marcuse did work for the OSS (the CIA's predecessor) during World War II. As did Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, I believe. Along with that famous leftist, Julia Child. ;-) 

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine 


-Original Message-
From: soula avramidis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 5:36 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:32428] Re: Stallin Stalin



one can take a history make all position and absolve Stalin sort of a al Louis althusser. if there are real objective heavily weighing historical conditions that leave not much room for soviet policy maneuver than that is correct. Stalin or anyone else in power in the cccp would act in very much the same way. if the cccp had much room to play than stalin is to blame. in hind sight socialism in one country was a sort of desperate measure at wait and see politics. they waited it out and we saw. 

the only time the cccp was in a position to be really effective on an international scale was when nuclear parity was achieved and even then when they played strong the Americans played crazy and for real too (Gus hall seems to have said that Marcuse was on the payroll of the american intelligence). sort of the americans said if our class rule sinks, we take the planet with us. i think one has to gauge developments in light of a global balance of forces. 

one thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. no one to compete with.

Antiwar report from Marxmail

2002-11-21 Thread Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:


 Hundreds of students at more than 25 colleges across the country
 walked out of classes or participated in rallies on Wednesday to
 protest a possible U.S. war with Iraq, as part of a National
 Student/Youth Day of Action.


I attended the demonstration in Chicago, at the James R. Thompson
building (state offices), which then marched down the Clark street
sidewalk to Federal Plaza.  I would estimate about 300 people took
part, 70%+ students, the rest a mix of older people.  I also counted
cops, at least 60 of them -- no mounted, just bike and foot, and two
wagons.  It was a little chilly and drizzly.  Since the demo was not
on a college campus, I think that might have hurt turnout since
everyone had to travel into the Loop to attend.

As for the speakers, I do not recall names but there was a wide array
of people.  A student with Voices In The Wilderness (who I have seen
speak at teach-ins at Depaul as well), a teacher and union rep from
UIChicago, a Teamster, an ISO spokesperson.  This is not a complete
list, as I was passing out flyers and collecting names for the CCAWR
Emergency Response contact list and could not follow the podium well.

There were quite a few H.S. students, including one of the more direct
and eloquent speakers, a young man I've met at several flyering and
Critical Mass events, Mickey (sorry can't recall last name).  He was
from Lane Tech H.S. and suggested the students look around at their
classmates, and consider that in a a year or so it would be those
people who would be sent to war and would be coming home in body bags.
He also spoke about the insane military recruitment drive, entire
class periods are taken up by military recruiters, all student contact
info is given to military recruiters as well.  Lastly, he made a point
that it was the public school students who are the target of the
recruitment drive, since it is tied to federal aid, and that it is
public school students who will be sent off to die.

I was also very happy to see a representative of a the local Teamsters
union from UPS, which is the second biggest in the state.  He spoke to
the crowd, describing how at a meeting of 300 people there only one
vote against their resolution condemning the invasion and continued
bombing of Iraq, and that during the meeting several Vietnam vets
spoke out against it.  When moving thru the crowd I saw many other
workers, including a few steel workers from the Loop with their hard
hats.  This is the first demo that I have seen a union rep speak at,
and I think that is a wonderful development.

The march down the sidewalk was a bit pathetic, but the crowd didn't
seem that determined to take the street.  There were two speakers at
Federal Plaza after the march, including one older gentleman who
rambled on quite a bit, and really had no connection to the crowd of
students.

After the last speaker I walked back to my bike, stopping to have a
conversation with a stranger along the way who did not think that any
of the reasons to oppose the war on a factsheet I was handing out
were valid reasons.  When he queried me on wether I thought Iraq had
WMD, I replied that there was no way to prove they didn't, just as
there was no way for Harold Washington to prove he wasn't gay (a
persistent rumor during his administration).  I think he appreciated
that point.  Otherwise, his opposition was based on a feeling that
Bush was being too belligerent and making enemies.

-- Sincerely, Craig Brozefsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Scheme/Lisp 
Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
--

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

guidance for student

2002-11-21 Thread Michael Perelman

A good student wants to know what the possibilities are for doing NGO type
work abroad.  Is there a good source for knowing the available
opportunities?

 -- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Sounds like surreal, doesn't it?

2002-11-21 Thread joanna bujes

No, it's for real.

Joanna

At 12:22 AM 11/21/2002 -0800, you wrote:

Please tell me that this news is a hoax. Sabri

+++

Thursday, November 21, 2002
By Major Garrett

Fox News

WASHINGTON  A massive database that the government will use to
monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a
necessary tool in the war on terror, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of Acquisitions and Technology,
told reporters that the Pentagon is developing a prototype
database to seek patterns indicative of terrorist activity.
Aldridge said the database would collect and use software to
analyze consumer purchases in hopes of catching terrorists before
it's too late.

The bottom line is this is an important research project to
determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and
events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act, he
said.

Aldridge said the database, which he called another tool in the
war on terror, would look for telltale signs of suspicious
consumer behavior.

Examples he cited were: sudden and large cash withdrawals,
one-way air or rail travel, rental car transactions and purchases
of firearms, chemicals or agents that could be used to produce
biological or chemical weapons.

It would also combine consumer information with visa records,
passports, arrest records or reports of suspicious activity given
to law enforcement or intelligence services.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is home to the
Pentagon's brightest thinkers -- the ones who built the Internet.
DARPA will be in charge of trying to make the system work
technically.

Rear Adm. John Poindexter, former national security adviser to
President Reagan, is developing the database under the Total
Information Awareness Program. Poindexter was convicted on five
counts of misleading Congress and making false statements during
the Iran-Contra investigation. Those convictions were later
overturned, but critics note that his is a dubious resume for
someone entrusted with so sensitive a task.

Aldridge said Poindexter will only develop the tool, he will not
be exercising the tool. He said Poindexter brought the database
idea to the Pentagon and persuaded Aldridge and others to pursue
it.

John has a real passion for this project, Aldridge said.

TIAF's office logo is now one eye scanning the globe. The
translation of the Latin motto: knowledge is power. Some say,
possibly too much power. What this is talking about is making us
a nation of suspects and I am sorry, the United States citizens
should not have to live in fear of their own government and that
is exactly what this is going to turn out to be, said Chuck
Pena, senior defense policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Pena and others say the database is an even greater violation of
privacy rights than Attorney General John Ashcroft's nixed
proposal to turn postal workers and delivery men into government
tipsters. No matter what protections Congress requires, Pena
fears a database big enough and nimble enough to track the entire
nation's spending habits is ripe for abuse.

I don't think once you put something like this in place, you can
ever create enough checks and balances and oversight, Pena said.

But proponents say big business already has access to most of
this data, but don't do anything with it to fight terrorism.

I find it somewhat counter intuitive that people are not
concerned that telemarketers and insurance companies can acquire
this data but feel tremendous trepidation if a government
ventures into this arena. To me it just smacks of paranoia, said
David Rivkin, an attorney for Baker  Hostetler LLP.

The database is not yet ready and Aldridge said it will not be
available for several years. Fake consumer data will be used in
development of the database, he said.

When it's ready, Aldridge said individual privacy rights will be
protected. But he could not explain how the data would be
accessed. In some cases, specific warrants would give law
enforcement agencies access, he said. But in other cases the
database might flag suspicious activity absent a specific request
or warrant, and that suspicious activity could well be relayed to
law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

I don't know what the scope of this is going to be, Aldridge
said. We are in a war on terrorism. We are trying to find out if
this technology can work.

Article at:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,70992,00.html

Re: Re: Re: Rx6: Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot

2002-11-21 Thread joanna bujes

Beats me. I don't know. I have no fascinataion with Stalin.

Joanna

At 05:10 PM 11/20/2002 -0800, you wrote:

What is this strange fascination with Stalin?
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

radio show

2002-11-21 Thread Doug Henwood

On my radio show this afternoon, 5-6 PM eastern US time, WBAI, New 
York, 99.5 FM and http://www.wbai.org:

* Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb, a book about 
Yale's Skull  Bones secret society

* Linda Greuen, a former Wal-Mart worker who's now working with the 
UFCW's effort to organize the world's largest corporation, in honor 
of the union's national day of action against Wal-Mart

* Amy Caiazza, editor of a new study by the Institute for Women's 
Policy Research, on the status of women in the 50 U.S. states.

With musical interludes by Pink Floyd  Pink!

It will be up in my radio archive as soon as Friday afternoon, 
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html.

Doug

Re: guidance for student

2002-11-21 Thread Patrick Bond

Global Exchange did a book in cooperation with Joan Hecksher recently that,
when I had a glance at it, seemed about the best around...

- Original Message -
From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 7:53 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:32436] guidance for student

 A good student wants to know what the possibilities are for doing NGO type
 work abroad.  Is there a good source for knowing the available
 opportunities?

  --
 Michael Perelman
 Economics Department
 California State University
 Chico, CA 95929

 Tel. 530-898-5321
 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Re: Privatization of information

2002-11-21 Thread Dan Scanlan

So, in competition with for-profit services, a spokesman for the
industry admits that government is more efficient and would win a fair
fight.  Therefore, we must let the market ... decide, by removing
the government from the equation by fiat.



The fly in the ointment is this:  the government is now controlled by 
the very forces that want to end government, period, and exchange it 
for  total control by themselves, the elite wealthy corporatistas. 
As I see it, the market is a euphemism for corporate control. The 
American electoral process must be seen these days as part of the 
corporate control feedback loop, a kind of quality control litmus 
test for the cultural, capital controllers. In many of the 
bureaucracies -- the US Forest Service comes to mind, especially -- 
the controlling corporate elites are the de facto administrators.

Dan Scanlan

Re: Re: Re: Privatization of information

2002-11-21 Thread joanna bujes

At 12:08 PM 11/21/2002 -0800, you wrote:

The fly in the ointment is this:  the government is now controlled by the 
very forces that want to end government, period, and exchange it 
for  total control by themselves, the elite wealthy corporatistas.

Right, though you'll notice nobody wants to privatize the army. The 
taxpayers can go right ahead and keep paying for that.

The other sticky thing about privatizing everything is that it makes it 
harder to play the nationalist card.

Joanna

Re: Stalin's fascination.

In a message dated 11/21/02 7:17:58 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

[was: RE: Re: Rx6: Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot] 

Michael asks why we should give a sh*t about Stalin. It's simple. One way to figure out how to arrange for socialist success in the future is to try to understand the failures of the broadly-defined socialist movement in the past. In addition to such debacles as German social democrats voting to support a war against French workers in 1914, there are lots of examples of socialist failure, but Stalin stands out as one of the major ones. (As I've noted, however, he can be seen as successful from the nationalist perspective.)

 Jim 





For those interested - and almost everyone remotely concerned with the ideas of Socialism, Marx theory and doctrine are interested, I am about 20 minutes away from sending a three part article on the fascination with Stalin. For me the issue is the question of the evolution of the value form, the definition of industrial society and the Marxist economic theory of transition from one mode of production to another. 

I know that I have written this too fast and would probably want to edit and rewrite the piece. My standpoint is fundamentally different from 99% of everything written on Soviet socialism. 

Melvin P.

RE: Re: Re: Re: Privatization of information

Title: RE: [PEN-L:32442] Re: Re: Re: Privatization of information





Joanna writes: 
 Right, though you'll notice nobody wants to privatize the army. 


there was an interview of someone from the Brookings Institute on U.S. National Public Radio a couple of days ago that sugested that a significant portion of the U.S. military is already privatized, including the hiring of what we euphemism-impaired would call mercenaries. To his credit, the interviewee said that there was no evidence that this program had saved any money for the government and that the hype about saving billions had turned out to be wrong.

Of course, the use of privately hired soldiers and police officers would never be allowed to conflict with the state's monopoly of the means of violence: they would have to work under the thumb of the government. (Of course, maybe they would end up as the social bases for warlords or warladies when the center can no longer hold and the U.S. collapses into bloody anarchy.)

Jim

Re: Re: Re: Re: Privatization of information


- Original Message -

From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]



 At 12:08 PM 11/21/2002 -0800, you wrote:
 The fly in the ointment is this:  the government is now controlled by the
 very forces that want to end government, period, and exchange it
 for  total control by themselves, the elite wealthy corporatistas.

 Right, though you'll notice nobody wants to privatize the army. The
 taxpayers can go right ahead and keep paying for that.

 The other sticky thing about privatizing everything is that it makes it
 harder to play the nationalist card.

 Joanna

=

Few things in life are funnier than arguing with members of the US military
that they work in a socialist system. As it stands now, significant chunks
of military affairs are being outsourced. Witness the corp. contractors
working in Colombia.

Also, some activists have begun speaking of corporatization rather than
privatization because to concede to the corps. vocabulary is to hobble
ourselves.

Ian

economy in novels: booklist

2002-11-21 Thread David Zimmerman

Here are two book lists. The first lists the major texts of a graduate course I teach on "19th-Century American Literature and the Marketplace" (I am a literature professor). They're not all novels. The second lists books of literary criticism that focus on pre-20th-century American and British literature about economics, markets, exchange, finance, money, etc.  I did not list scholarly treatments of labor and literature.

REQUIRED TEXTS :
Caroline Kirkland, Home as I Found It. Who'll Follow? (1839)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
P. T. Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1855)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig (1859)
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Frank Norris, The Pit (1903)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Penguin edition (1981) [1900]
Mark Twain, "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1898)
course reader materials

RELEVANT LITERARY CRITICISM:
Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy : Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (2002)
Mohamed Zayani, Reading the Symptom: Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and the Dynamics of Capitalism (1999)
Christophe Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Naturalism (1998)
Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1997)

Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997)
Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (1996)
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1997), ch. 6
Da Zheng, Moral Economy and American Realist Fiction (1996)
Richard Godden, Fictions of Capital, the American Novel from James to Mailer (1992)
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (1992), pt. II
Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (1991)
Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1990)
Susan Coultrap-McQuin. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (1990)
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988)
Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987)
Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985)
June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985)
Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (1985)
Roy Male, ed. Money Talks: Language and Lucre in American Fiction (1979)
Lisle Abbott Rose, "A Bibliographical Survey of Economic and Political Writings, 1865-1900." American Literature 15:4 (Jan. 1944), 381-410
Walter F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America (1942)
Claude R. Flory, Economic Criticism in American Fiction, 1792-1900 (1937)

On British and other literature:
Catherine Gallagher. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985)
Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (1996)
John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1984)
James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (1996)
Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England : a Culture of Paper Credit (1998)
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (1985)
Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (1996)
Catherine Gallagher. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (1994)
Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (2000)
Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (1982)
Marc Shell,The Economy of Literature (1979)
Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language (trans. 1994)


David Zimmerman
English Dept.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Re: Stallin Stalin 1 fo 3

In a message dated 11/21/02 5:37:29 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

the only time the cccp was in a position to be really effective on an international scale was when nuclear parity was achieved and even then when they played strong the Americans played crazy and for real too (Gus hall seems to have said that Marcuse was on the payroll of the american intelligence). sort of the americans said if our class rule sinks, we take the planet with us. i think one has to gauge developments in light of a global balance of forces.

one thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. no one to compete with.

Part 1 of 3

The very concept of "socialism in one country" is an ideological category and misunderstands why the Soviet Union was in fact a union - collection of countries/nations, federated into a political union. An old map of the Soviet Union will reveal that it was not one country.

"Socialism in one country" is an ideological category that masks an eclectic economic doctrine that exists outside of the Marxist economic doctrine and Marxist theory. After the Second Imperial World War an actual socialist community took shape on earth, with revolutionary China moving one quarter of the world peoples from being economic, political and military reserves of imperialism to the front line struggle against it. No matter what the outcome of the continuing revolution in China - in the short run, the concept of "socialism in one country" and the "national elite" dominating the area in which socialism existed in one country is - how does one say this?. . . . shallow and ahistorical.

I engage the Stalin debate without reservations because he was a great proletarian leader and to advance a Marxist theoretical conception of Soviet socialism and at what phase of history we are currently living.

Perhaps for the past 10 months I have referenced my discussion concerning property relations and the economic content of the Soviet UNION, in the tradition and economic writings of Karl Marx, specifically a section of his Critique of the Gotha Program, which is why I claim a Marxist presentation of the question.

It is not possible for any society to jump to communism on the basis of politics or on the basis of the industrial production of social implements of production and articles. What describes the various countries that constituted the Soviet UNION and the former Socialist community is not their political orientation but their economic underpinning - mode of production. All of these countries without exception were undergoing the revolutionary transformation from agriculture to industry - not the ideological category called "transition from capitalism to socialism."

This simple and obvious conclusion concerning the industrial epoch is difficult to explain to anyone not familiar with what Marx specifically wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program," or for that matter the programmatic portion of the Communist Manifesto pinned by him and Engels. The transition - according to Marx, is from capitalism to communism, - not capitalism to socialism, and he described the general political shell as a historical abstraction called "the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Then of course Engels wrote in detail about the general stages of evolution of the material power of the productive forces and hammered out a doctrine - policy of action, in his Anti-Duhring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Even the phrase "permanent revolution" has been muddied by the ideologues and really means continued revolution in the mode of production and not the political (shell) revolution. Marx and Engels must be read again, for the first time.

Socialism is generally referred to as the first phase of communism - at least in the writings of Engels. Marx defined the first stage of communism is no uncertain terms. The problem in the realm of theory is that communism has in the past been identified as an industrial system of production with changed "social relations." This concept is incorrect.

If all of earth had a Soviet form of government no industrial society can lead to communism no matter how the mode of accumulation is organized. Engels put forth a conception of socialism as the first stage of communism wherein the law of value still operated and the society had to build the economic foundation for communism.

At the

privatization

Title: privatization





[was: RE: [PEN-L:32445] Re: Re: Re: Re: Privatization of information]


Ian writes:Also, some activists have begun speaking of corporatization rather than
privatization because to concede to the corps. vocabulary is to hobble
ourselves.


Almost no phenomenon is truly private in its impact. Even though ownership of, say, resources used in the military are sometimes privately owned, their impact is hardly private. Since external costs and benefits are so ubiquitous (to use mainstream economists Baumol and Blinder's word), economists should really discuss internalities as the exception and externalities as the rule. 

We should return to the vocabulary of Fred Engels, who contrasted the socialization of production with the individualization of appropriation (of property rights and incomes). 

Jim

Re: Re: Stallin Stalin 2 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Let us attack the question from another side. How can one have a transition to communism without a communist class, which is also in transition? Industrial society has industrial classes. Classes emerge on the basis of the productivity infrastructure and its tools - technology. What creates the communist class is the robot, not ideology or mysterious "social relations." What does the robot demand as a productivity tool? The robot demands the distribution of the social product outside the value relationship. Why? Because robots cannot engage in exchange. What happens when robots begin making robots, a process at its early stages? The value form is torn asunder.

Perhaps 3 billion people exist on earth outside the process of the production of commodities - the value relationship, and the numbers are going to leap in the next 10-20 years. Advanced robotics, computerization and digitalized production process literally destroy the value relationship and create a communist class, which is the concrete transitional form of the proletariat as it is detached from production or kicked out of its material - value, relationship within commodity exchange.

Trying to organize an industrial economy on the basis of communist social relations is the same as trying to rearrange chairs on a sinking ship. However, in real life if one is on a sinking ship it is a practical question to rearrange chairs and determine who should be saved. Generally, we say the women and children should be saved first, if possible, but I think the "women's movement" may have done away with this concept.

The idea of studying Soviet socialism so that we will not make the same mistakes is an interesting proposition.

First of all, this means studying the evolution of the value form and not simply the political shell of Russian society. It is not possible to make the same historical error after a given social formation has passed from one qualitative state to another. What happens is that you make new mistakes, or rather new historical errors. Here is an example or political conclusion that seems obvious to me. It is not possible for anyone on earth to recreate the Leninist form of organization because the conditions that gave rise to this organizational form have passed from the world stage. The configuration of Russian society in 1902 - 1917 - that is the actual class forces, is forever gone to history.

Stalin's doctrine of Leninism and his party policy cannot be applied in a society undergoing transition to electronic computerized production. Stalin's doctrine could be applied to a country of petite bourgeois producers undergoing transition to industrial relations. It is not a question of revolutionaries being careful not to "apply Stalin" because one cannot apply that, which has lost its validity and through application achieve a mass material form for that, which no longer exist.

The Soviet party under Lenin was an insurrectionary force that later evolved into a militarized industrial form of organization. The party was not the state or the administrative (industrial) bureaucracy. In the American context can one imagine a person trying to apply Jeffersonian democracy under conditions where 90% of the population is not tied to the land or rather family farm?

"One thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. No one to compete with"

frames the social question incorrectly. Regression and a certain apparent stagnation is the actual process of transition or the dialectic of the leap.

First the injection of the new qualitative ingredient - robotics, computerization and digitalized production process, begins the transitions and compels society to reorganize itself around new means of production. This new qualitative ingredient is "the big entity," that compels society to leap from one political form of rule to another. A new political form must stand upon new economic relations or it collapses no matter what the policy of a political group or individual.

The period of the overthrow of slavery in America proves this definitively. The slaves where freed but Reconstruction was overthrown and the black was reenslaved as sharecropper until a technological development occurred that kicked him out of the economic category called sharecropping. That is the political revolution needed an economic basis to stand on and as long as hand labor dominated agriculture no policy on earth could free - emancipate, the black and white sharecroppers.

The existence of Soviet power represented an external ingredient so to speak, to the political form in which capital organized the industrial infrastructure and could not force or compel the leap from industrial relations to postindustrial relations. The competition between Soviet power and capital imperial authority did in fact condition a certain democratization in America and

Re: Re: Stallin Stalin 3 of 3

Part 3 of 3

If Stalin would have done this, that or the other: if this leader would have done it "my way": if there was more democracy; if Stalin was not a monster; if this or that agreement was not made, etc. Fine, I will not object to this. Stalin was irrational on this and that policy and such and such doctrine, when compared to what? Policy and doctrine comparison cannot be framed from the standpoint of 50 years later. Within the context of 1925 - 1951, Stalin's program of industrialization -- a policy beaten out of the backs of the Soviet people, was not irrational. From the standpoint of the time frame of say - 1980 through 2002, Stalin's policy may seem irrational to those who pretend they do not live off the backs and blood of the world masses.

Well, I have presented an overview of the most elementary Marxist approach to the question of the revolution in the mode of production and cited the text for the above observation as stated by Marx himself. I have presented my "irrational doctrine," which by definition is historically irrational and in error. I of course challenge anyone to indicate where this line of reasoning is flawed and deviates from the specific theory framework of Marx himself. I will go further and ask that anyone present one piece of evidence - theory, where this stated conception of the value form is not consistent with Marx and Engels writings. Not the mode of accumulation but the value form and the revolutionary significance of advanced robotics.

In referring to the Stalin period I have maintained and use exact language and speak of "bloodletting." The question that has been asked before is would I personally want to live under the economic and political climate of Stalin's Russia? Comrade Melvin do you desire to live in the Gulag or like the great Molotov - brilliant and humble statesmen of the proletariat state authority, have your wife arrested and jailed to ensure compliance and loyalty to the boss? Do you want to be shot in the head? Or stand in long lines?

My answer is simple: no I do not want to be shot in the head, stand in long lines, have my wife arrested or live in a labor camp. Nor do I want to live in any other era of history. To be frank I am catching hell in this era.

Nevertheless, I seriously doubt if the people of America are ready for the bloodletting that was the Soviet Union. Anyway, the forces of counterrevolution have been fundamentally altered since Stalin's time, and in a post revolutionary America reconstruction will occur different.

Engels speak of the intense class struggle in his 1892 preface to "Conditions of the Working Class in England" in the eighth paragraph. It is too lengthy to quote in total.

"So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self emancipation of the working class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working class alone."

The point is that the Stalin period and his policy arose on the basis of the expanding industrial system - preparing, which is the base of the counterrevolution. Repeat: the basis of the counterrevolution was in the industrial system itself because it is a value producing system by definition. This approach is somewhat different from the previous generation of communist who understood the base of counterrevolution to consist in what is called petite (small-scale) production.

The working class no longer have to prepare the social revolution as such and the base of the counterrevolution is very narrow.

Preparing the forces of social revolution operates on two fundamental levels and does not mean teaching people to read books or think correct thoughts. Nor does it mean having the "correct" form of democracy. This is the crux of the issue that a section of our intelligencia cannot understand. The class struggle in the Soviet Union was not simply generated on the basis of the agricultural sector, Stalin's thinking or policy or a struggle for correct forms of thinking and control, but an intense struggle to construct the basis for the final victory of socialism. The final victory of socialism meant the most ruthless struggle for existence - maintaining the Soviet political form, until society begins the evolutionary leap.

Society is being compelled not by political logic or a correct policy to complete the evolutionary leap but by the transition in the mode of production, which has already more than less destroyed the industrial capitalist. The logic of development of the robot and advanced robotics destroyed the industrial capitalist as industrial capitalist and transformed financial-industrial capital. Speculative capital, that is capital increasingly invested detached from the means of production is the form of capital created by who? - the robot or rather advanced robotics.

Over a year ago the attempt was made to explain this from the standpoint of the radical changes in the organic composition

Re: Re: Re: Rx6: Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot

In a message dated 11/20/02 5:11:02 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

What is this strange fascination with Stalin?
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

To a not small degree it is I that periodically challenge those who raise the issue of the Stalin period. My reasoning is not to bore the readers but to examine the economic framework under which Soviet socialism operated and its law of value or the value form.

Then the is the matter of the codification of materialist dialectics and how this conception of process was articulated by a previous generation of Marxist in power. It is true that I am fascinated with the Stalin period but have never had a desire to study his personal life.

Part of my personal intellectual growth was in connection with large scale industrial production during that era of American history when the auto industry was still the classical arena of technological advance. On the level of theory, my framework of Marxism expresses having lived a 30 year period of a massive change in the organic composition of capital - the increasing use of advancing robotics as a machine operator, assembler and union rep.

The frustration was witnessing this change and not being able to unravel its internal logic for the better part of twenty years. This led to studying some writings on tools development and usage within Soviet society and intensive and extensive evolution of machinery. It was exceptionally fascinating. The impulse to revolutionize industrial production under capital is driven by competition in the marketplace and this revolutionizing takes place very different under Soviet socialism.

I always understood that robotics replaced human being and had read the better part of Stalin's 13 volumes at an early age. Most of his writings have to do with industrialization of the country as opposed to political struggle, but most folks don't know that.

This question of the Soviet Union and Stalin has occupied a portion of my daily thinking for 31 years. Not just the internal party struggle, which was ultra complex. It is quite easy to understand a physical reaction resulting from a physical attack. This same "action" and "reaction" becomes much more complex in the social arena when a particular political policy or act may not have any direct result until many years later.

Now it is true that I am a Stalin man in the same way that a person might be a Thomas Jefferson kind of democrat, which does not mean they support implementing slavery. The point is that I began to grasp what was being described by the Marxist in power once I made a leap outside of all the ideological categories.

The Marxist in the Soviet Union were not communist in the sense of the logic of economic development. They were ideological communist based on reading books and a political desire. Actually, the previous generation of Marxist in America were not communist or even revolutionary except in the purely ideological sense. One can only be revolutionary when conditions have ripened for revolution. Historically, the previous generations could only be industrial reformers because of the time framework and evolutionary development in the material power of the productive forces. Joining a political group or espousing a particular doctrine does not make revolutionaries. Fighting the good fight does not make one revolutionary or progressive today either, and this includes me first and foremost.

Sir, the fascination is the unfolding of the value form and defining what is meant by the revolution in the material power of the productive forces. Forget Stalin and call it the Stalin - stallin, Period of time. The "stall" is the recognition that "something is rotten in Rome," and the leap is not possible based on electromechanical means of production.

Hey, the American peoples are very far advanced from the "stallin period" of time.

The communist class has arisen but ideology confuses matters. Here is an example. Comrade Stalin said the American workers could best gauge the advance of Soviet society.

Check this out for a minute: I am not "the American worker" but rather a black worker that is in a "revolutionary position" and all such other crap.

The "stallin (Stalin) period is fascinating because if you check it out it's like the catch 22 proposition.

Mr. Michael Perelman, my commitment is to be interesting and thought provoking. And to remain several steps ahead of the ideologues.

Can I get an honorary degree in self study for unraveling the value form? I want this for me and hard thinking.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Rx6: Joanne- re 2WW - I almost forgot

2002-11-21 Thread Michael Perelman

sure, you can have an honorary degree from me.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 08:45:36PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 In a message dated 11/20/02 5:11:02 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 
  What is this strange fascination with Stalin?
  -- 
  Michael Perelman
  Economics Department
  California State University
  Chico, CA 95929
  
  Tel. 530-898-5321
  E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  
  
 
 
 
 To a not small degree it is I that periodically challenge those who raise the 
 issue of the Stalin period. My reasoning is not to bore the readers but to 
 examine the economic framework under which Soviet socialism operated and its 
 law of value or the value form. 
 
 Then the is the matter of the codification of materialist dialectics and how 
 this conception of process was articulated by a previous generation of 
 Marxist in power. It is true that I am fascinated with the Stalin period but 
 have never had a desire to study his personal life. 
 
 Part of my personal intellectual growth was in connection with large scale 
 industrial production during that era of American history when the auto 
 industry was still the classical arena of technological advance. On the level 
 of theory, my framework of Marxism expresses having lived a 30 year period of 
 a massive change in the organic composition of capital - the increasing use 
 of advancing robotics as a machine operator, assembler and union rep. 
 
 The frustration was witnessing this change and not being able to unravel its 
 internal logic for the better part of twenty years. This led to studying some 
 writings on tools development and usage within Soviet society and intensive 
 and extensive evolution of machinery. It was exceptionally fascinating. The 
 impulse to revolutionize industrial production under capital is driven by 
 competition in the marketplace and this revolutionizing takes place very 
 different under Soviet socialism. 
 
 I always understood that robotics replaced human being and had read the 
 better part of Stalin's 13 volumes at an early age. Most of his writings have 
 to do with industrialization of the country as opposed to political struggle, 
 but most folks don't know that. 
 
 This question of the Soviet Union and Stalin has occupied a portion of my 
 daily thinking for 31 years. Not just the internal party struggle, which was 
 ultra complex. It is quite easy to understand a physical reaction resulting 
 from a physical attack. This same action and reaction becomes much more 
 complex in the social arena when a particular political policy or act may not 
 have any direct result until many years later. 
 
 Now it is true that I am a Stalin man in the same way that a person might be 
 a Thomas Jefferson kind of democrat, which does not mean they support 
 implementing slavery. The point is that I began to grasp what was being 
 described by the Marxist in power once I made a leap outside of all the 
 ideological categories. 
 
 The Marxist in the Soviet Union were not communist in the sense of the logic 
 of economic development. They were ideological communist based on reading 
 books and a political desire. Actually, the previous generation of Marxist in 
 America were not communist or even revolutionary except in the purely 
 ideological sense. One can only be revolutionary when conditions have ripened 
 for revolution. Historically, the previous generations could only be 
 industrial reformers because of the time framework and evolutionary 
 development in the material power of the productive forces. Joining a 
 political group or espousing a particular doctrine does not make 
 revolutionaries. Fighting the good fight does not make one revolutionary or 
 progressive today either, and this includes me first and foremost. 
 
 Sir, the fascination is the unfolding of the value form and defining what is 
 meant by the revolution in the material power of the productive forces. 
 Forget Stalin and call it the Stalin - stallin, Period of time. The stall 
 is the recognition that something is rotten in Rome, and the leap is not 
 possible based on electromechanical means of production. 
 
 Hey, the American peoples are very far advanced from the stallin period of 
 time. 
 
 The communist class has arisen but ideology confuses matters. Here is an 
 example. Comrade Stalin said the American workers could best gauge the 
 advance of Soviet society. 
 
 Check this out for a minute: I am not the American worker but rather a 
 black worker that is in  a revolutionary position and all such other crap. 
 
 The stallin (Stalin) period is fascinating because if you check it out it's 
 like the catch 22 proposition. 
 
 Mr. Michael Perelman, my commitment is to be interesting and thought 
 provoking. And to remain several steps ahead of the ideologues. 
 
 Can I get an honorary degree in self study for unraveling the value form? I 
 want this for me and hard thinking. 

-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California

protection rents, part 3

The Prague racket

Nato is now a device to exert control and extract cash. Those who resist,
like Belarus, are punished

John Laughland
Friday November 22, 2002
The Guardian

At the Nato summit in Prague this week, one man is notable by his absence.
Last Friday, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was refused a visa on
instructions from Washington, an unprecedented diplomatic snub. After a
six-year propaganda campaign waged against Lukashenko by the west, he now
stands isolated. The EU is about to slap a travel ban on him and his
ministers, like the one imposed against the Zimbabwean government.
Meanwhile, some American politicians have started to refer to Belarus as
part of the axis of evil.

The reasons given for the west's hostility towards Belarus are that
Lukashenko is authoritarian and a dictator. This is an odd charge, given
that the losing candidates in last September's presidential elections
conceded that the incumbent president had won more votes than them. It is
also strange for the west to revile Lukashenko when it courts so assiduously
President Putin, whose own election, like all those in Russia since 1991,
was outrageously rigged.

Most of the charges levelled against Belarus are absurd. It is often claimed
that people are beaten for speaking Belarusian; in fact it is the official
state language and Lukashenko himself speaks it frequently. It is also
alleged that Catholics and Jews are persecuted there. But the Catholic
hierarchy was restored under Lukashenko and the Oxford Institute for Hebrew
and Jewish Studies has just confirmed that the Jewish community in Belarus
is flourishing. It is also stated repeatedly, without evidence, that
Lukashenko has had his political opponents murdered: these claims persist in
spite of the fact that one of his alleged victims was discovered alive and
well and living in London.

The real reason why the west hates Lukashenko has nothing to do with concern
for democracy or human rights. It is instead that, as a genuinely popular
politician who has preserved his country from the worst ravages which
economic reform has inflicted on its neighbours, Lukashenko is not given to
taking orders. In this respect, he is unlike any of the other senior former
communist officials currently hobnobbing in Prague. The west's friends in
eastern Europe today have their hands firmly on the commanding heights of
political control in their countries, just as in many cases they personally
did under communist dictatorship.

The west prefers such people because the demands it makes on post-communist
countries are so unpopular. All eastern European states are required to sell
off their national economic assets to foreigners, and close down their
agriculture by accepting the dumping of subsidised EU food imports. This
creates massive social disruption and unemployment. In addition, they must
spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, preferably on arms made in the
US.

Consequently, a small country like Lithuania, whose economy has collapsed so
catastrophically, has just announced the purchase of $34m worth of Stinger
missiles, made by the Raytheon Corporation of Tucson, Arizona. When Tanzania
announced it was spending $40m on a new civilian air traffic control system,
there was an outcry; but Lithuania, whose official GDP is not much larger
than Tanzania's, will have to spend $240m on arms every year as the price
for Nato membership. And Lithuania is just one of seven new member states,
all of which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on arms.

The economic interests driving Nato expansion are so blatant that the man
who co-ordinates US policy on the matter practically has
military-industrial complex as his middle name. Bruce Jackson, president
of the US committee on Nato, is a former military intelligence officer in
the US army who became vice-president of Lockheed Martin, the gigantic US
arms manufacturer and biggest provider of financial control and accounting
services to the Pentagon, from whose accounts trillions of dollars have
disappeared.

Jackson left Lockheed Martin in August to take up his new full-time
political job of promoting democracy in a united Europe. But a good
illustration of the economic agenda which is really behind Nato expansion
was given when Jackson recently told Bulgaria that its membership of Nato
would depend on it selling the national tobacco factory to the right
foreign buyer.

Far from promoting democracy in eastern Europe, Washington is promoting a
system of political and military control not unlike that once practised by
the Soviet Union. Unlike that empire, which collapsed because the centre was
weaker than the periphery, the new Nato is both a mechanism for extracting
Danegeld from new member states for the benefit of the US arms industry, and
also - ever since the promulgation of Nato's New Strategic Concept in April
1999 - an instrument for getting others to protect US interests around the
world, including the supply of primary

The Economics Biz

2002-11-21 Thread michael perelman

Columbia Buys Residence
To House Top Professor

Jon E. Hilsenrath,
Wall Street Journal


NEW YORK -- Columbia University has taken star wars for college
economics professors to a new level with the acquisition of an $8
million townhouse in Manhattan that will house one of its top
economists, Jeffrey Sachs.

In April, the university lured Mr. Sachs away from Harvard University,
where he earned a reputation as a confidant to leaders in developing
countries. He is now head of Columbia's Earth Institute and an adviser
to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, not to mention Bono, the
rock star and activist.

With student enrollment in economics classes booming, universities
across the nation have been engaged in a bidding war to lure star
economists, hoping that the appointments will attract the brightest
students and multimillion-dollar grants from foundations.

Before Mr. Sachs's arrival, the Earth Institute was little known outside
the world of environmental scientists. Its disparate collection of
research organizations, like the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and
the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, focused mostly on issues of
geology and climate. The Institute also runs a 3.5-acre, glass-enclosed
research laboratory in Arizona known as the Biosphere.

Now, Mr. Sachs plans to use the institute to push a broad agenda focused
on what economists call sustainable development. This means the
university is keen to focus not just on the cold-hard formulas of
economics, but also on issues like disease and the environment and how
they affect poor economies.

Jeff Sachs adds hugely to the global believability of a school. He is a
rainmaker who probably brings that much or more in consulting contracts
to Columbia and attracts top international students, says James Smith,
an economics professor at the University of North Carolina's business
school.

Recently, for example, the Earth Institute was awarded participation in
a $10 million joint grant with the World Health Organization from the
Gates Foundation to advise countries like Ghana, China and India on how
to combat infectious diseases.

University officials say the townhouse will not only serve as Mr.
Sachs's residence, for which he will pay faculty-rate rent, but the
first two floors and basement will also serve as offices and a reception
center, where the Earth Institute will host international dignitaries,
donors and scholars. The arrangement was previously reported in the New
York Observer.

For administrators at Columbia , the Earth Institute is about more than
just forging closer ties to the U.N. It is also about regaining old
glory. Columbia's aspirations are no less than to be among the very top
universities in the world. That means having people of enormous
creativity and talent and we're prepared to compete in that world, said
Lee Bollinger, the university's president.

A half-century ago, the department was among the three top in the
country. It produced Nobel prize winners like Robert Mundell, who laid
the intellectual groundwork for the creation of the euro currency;
policy makers like Arthur Burns, the former Federal Reserve chairman;
and other luminaries, including trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati. But the
department went through a long period of decline in the 1970s and 1980s.
That has been changing in recent years as the university has started to
pay top dollar to hire well-known economists such as Joseph Stiglitz,
the Nobel prize winner. Pay packages can be in the neighborhood of
$300,000 and appointments parceled out among different departments at
the university.

Some are puzzled by the attention being placed on the Earth Institute.
I'm not really sure exactly what [the Earth Institute] does, says
Douglas Gale, chairman of the economics department at New York
University. I know they take a global perspective and they are
interested in the environment and they have this bubble that people live
in for six months in Arizona. It is a strange kind of place because it
has its fingers in so many pies.


--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

protection rents, part 4

[still untold is what bundle of carrots and sticks the Bushies used to get
the French vote.]

Russian 'Interests' In Iraq Recognized
Moscow Neutrality During War Sought

By Michael Dobbs and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 22, 2002; Page A01


Like his father during the run-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, President
Bush is using the lure of money and political respect to persuade a
reluctant Russia not to stand in the way of a U.S.-led war with Iraq.

Russian officials say they have reached an understanding with the Bush
administration on Russia's economic interests in Iraq, including concerns
about the plummeting price of oil as a result of an Iraqi oil boom should
President Saddam Hussein be overthrown. While vigorously denying that there
has been a specific agreement, U.S. officials say they are aware of Russian
concerns and are taking them into account in planning for a post-Hussein
Iraq.

We understand that Russia has got interests there, as do other countries,
Bush told the independent Russian television station NTV in an interview
broadcast last night. And of course those interests will be honored.

On Saturday, Bush will acknowledge Moscow's role in agreeing to a unanimous
United Nations Security Council vote on a stringent new inspections regime
for Iraq, by traveling to the former Russian imperial capital of St.
Petersburg for his seventh meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Over the past few days, Bush has gone out of his way to praise Putin for his
help in the war on terrorism and his handling of a recent hostage crisis in
Moscow, in which 128 civilians were killed by poison gas administered by
government security forces in an attempt to free them from Chechen
guerrillas.

The American wooing of Putin is reminiscent of the diplomatic campaign waged
by President George H.W. Bush in the fall of 1990 to win the support of
then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for U.N. resolutions endorsing the use
of all necessary means to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. In return for
Soviet acquiescence in the use of military force against Baghdad, Bush held
out the prospect of political and economic support for Gorbachev at a time
when he was struggling to hold the Soviet Union together.

The main difference between the two rounds of diplomacy, according to U.S.
and Russian analysts, is that Putin is more realistic than Gorbachev about
what he can get in return for giving Washington a relatively free hand in
Iraq. Rather than demanding a huge infusion of Western aid for a moribund
economy, he has focused his attention on gaining U.S. assurances of respect
for Russian economic interests in Iraq, most of which center on the
country's future as the largest Middle East oil producer, after Saudi
Arabia.

Putin is a very pragmatic politician, said Dmitri Simes, president of the
Nixon Center, a Washington think tank that has focused on U.S.-Russian
relations. Instead of trying to stop things that are going to happen
anyway, he tries to get the most he can, both for his country and for
himself politically.

At the top of Putin's list of economic concerns is the fear of collapsing
oil prices once U.N. trade sanctions against Baghdad are removed and Western
investment begins to pour into the neglected Iraqi oil sector. According to
an estimate by Celeste Wallander of the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a $6 fall in the price of a barrel of
oil would slash Russian economic growth in half. If the price fell to $13 a
barrel, most Russian oil companies would no longer be profitable.

Russian and U.S. officials said Putin is also anxious to protect the
contracts of Russian oil companies in Iraq, including a $3.5 billion deal
for the state-owned Lukoil to develop a giant oil field in southern Iraq,
and would like to recover up to $12 billion in old Iraqi debts. One
possibility believed to be under discussion is to use a portion of Iraqi oil
proceeds to pay off part of the Russian debt.

A high-ranking Russian foreign ministry official involved in negotiations
with the United States over the U.N. resolution told an American visitor to
Moscow this week that a gentleman's agreement had been reached with
Washington on Iraq.

He said the deal centered on maintaining a price of oil at around $21 a
barrel, the price used by Russian government planners for long-term budget
estimates. Oil prices have been hovering around $25 a barrel for much of
this year.

While acknowledging that discussions have taken place with the Russians over
the price of oil, U.S. officials dismissed suggestions that the United
States can influence the market very much. They added, however, that they
have tried to allay Russian concerns about plummeting oil prices in the wake
of a U.S. victory in Iraq, concerns that are described as exaggerated by
many American experts.

Generally, we would like to see stability [in the oil price], said a U.S.
official involved in Russia negotiations.

Frontiers of Scientific Research in the Information Age

2002-11-21 Thread michael perelman

November 22, 2002
Madison Ave. Plays Growing Role in Drug Research
By MELODY PETERSEN


entists leafing through The Journal of the American Dental Association
last May found a study concluding that a new drug called Bextra offered
relief from one of their patients' worst nightmares  the acute pain
that follows dental surgery.

Federal regulators had rejected that conclusion only six months before,
leaving Bextra's marketers, Pharmacia and Pfizer, hard pressed to sell
it as an advance over Celebrex, their earlier entry in a crowded market
for pain drugs.

The new study helped light a fire under Bextra. Its sales soared 60
percent over the three months that followed, according to industry data.
But the research was not conducted by academics. Instead, the lead
investigators were from Scirex, a little-known research firm owned
partly by Omnicom, one of the world's biggest advertising companies.

Madison Avenue  whose television ads have helped turn prescription
medicines like Viagra, Allegra and Vioxx into billion-dollar products 
is expanding its role in the drug business, wading into the science of
drug development.

The three largest advertising companies  Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP 
have spent tens of millions of dollars to buy or invest in companies
like Scirex that perform clinical trials of experimental drugs. One
advertising executive calls it getting closer to the test tube.

Ad agency executives say they do nothing to distort the research
process. But critics worry that science is being sacrificed for the sake
of promotion. You cannot separate their advertising and marketing from
the science anymore, said Dr. Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus at
Harvard Medical School and a former editor of The New England Journal of
Medicine. Ad agencies are not in the business of doing science.

In interviews, advertising executives say their intention is to work
side by side with scientists, directing research toward drugs the
marketers think could be big sellers. Their companies, they say, can
help design  or as in Bextra's case even conduct  studies aimed at
showing that the drugs have the qualities patients most desire.

Armed with the results, ad agencies try to sway doctors' prescribing
habits. Some agencies own companies that ghostwrite articles for medical
journals. They also create the continuing-education courses that doctors
take to maintain their licenses. As new drugs are about to go on sale,
these marketers recruit doctors to speak to peers about the drugs'
benefits, often at expensive dinners the physicians are paid a fee to
attend.

We provide services that go from the beginning of drug development all
the way to the launch of your products, said Joe Torre, chairman and
chief executive of Torre Lazur-McCann Healthcare WorldWide, an
Interpublic unit that is among the biggest health care marketing
companies.

Only a few years ago, drug research and education were the province of
universities. But with pharmaceutical companies counting on instant
blockbuster sales of their new drugs, executives found the university
system too slow. And ad agencies  having built a multibillion-dollar
business selling drugs to consumers  pushed deeper and deeper into the
process.

Federal law prohibits the promotion of drugs before they have been
approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or the promotion of them
for unapproved uses. But published research and medical education are
exempt from those rules, and doctors are free to prescribe approved
drugs for any purpose.

The critics say that marketers are exploiting the loopholes, to begin
building markets for expensive new medicines long before they win
government approval and, later, to prompt physicians to prescribe drugs
for conditions the medications are not approved to treat.

Doctors are led to prescribe drugs that may not be necessarily worth
the money, may not be better than a generic that's already on the market
and that their patients don't need, Dr. Relman said. It's clearly
contributing to the rising costs of prescription drugs and health care.

Moreover, critics worry that the success of drug makers and marketers in
spurring big sales shortly after a drug's approval means that millions
of patients may take a drug before all of its side effects are known.
Just last week, Pharmacia sent letters to thousands of doctors warning
that Bextra can cause a life-threatening skin rash.

Advertising executives note that scientific trials are tightly regulated
and that most medical journal articles get careful review. Doctors, they
say, are hungry for information about new drugs.

The implication that we are going to accentuate the good things and may
bury the bad things  there would be nothing in it for us to do that,
said Lloyd J. Baroody, managing director of Target Research Associates,
a research firm in New Providence, N.J., that Torre Lazur acquired in
March. I can't imagine why anyone in my company would want to break the
law or go against

Re: Frontiers of Scientific Research in the Information Age