Endorse the 3rd North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement -- Register Now
--- please distribute widely --- * Third North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement October 10-12, 2003 - Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ Register Now Online: http://www.divestmentconference.com/ Endorse Now Online: http://www.njsolidarity.org/conference/confendorse.html Email registration: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Email endorsements: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Together, we have defeated attempts to destroy the conference and silence Palestinian voices and the voices of those who stand in solidarity with them. We have defended freedom of organization and expression, and our right to organize and stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation. We can build on this victory by building the conference - register, endorse, and become involved! We will come together in unity for action and resistance, and we will build the Palestine solidarity movement, expanding our links of solidarity and action with Palestine and looking towards justice, equality and liberation! Following in the path set by the first two conferences of the student/community Palestine solidarity movement, we are proud to announce that the Third North American conference will be held from October 10-12, 2003 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Divestment movements have sprouted across the country, International Solidarity Movement activists have traveled to Palestine, and at campuses and in communities throughout the United States, organizers have taken action, rallied, demonstrated, spoken and educated--to bring the truth about Palestine to a broad audience and build a mass movement for action. The Third Conference will seek to build on our successes, analyze our tactics and develop strategies, skills and knowledge for the future. We will engage in educational sessions and workshops, activist skill-sharings and trainings, collective decision-making, public speaking events, rallies and direct action; we will come together as a movement to build unity and action, recognize and act upon diverse voices, and encourage collective involvement and expression. We will celebrate Palestinian resistance and work to build our own voices of resistance; we will strategize for divestment from Israeli apartheid. As Israel continues its oppression and occupation of Palestinian people and Palestinian land, we will raise our voices to demand an end and call for meaningful peace with justice in Palestine. As a solidarity movement, we will work to act in full support of and solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation movement. At a time when Palestine and the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people are under attack by forces of Zionism and imperialism, it is imperative that we come together to build a student movement that unites with our brothers and sisters in Palestine to uphold Palestinian rights and Palestinian liberation. We look to the purposes of the conference as enabling people to work with others to learn and put into practice how to run a group, teaching and strategizing ways which groups can go about a divestment campaign, empowering people and communities, including recognizing and building diversity, recognizing and building on successes, dealing with and handling opposition, and strategizing for media and community outreach, as well as becoming educated about the right of return, the history of the occupation and the resistance, and the fight for full equality under law and the end of Israeli apartheid and discrimination, as well as other relevant political/historical topics. Any organizations that believe divestment from Israeli apartheid is a necessary and worthwhile strategy, that stand for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the full right of return for all Palestinian refugees to their homes and homeland, and full equality under law and the abolition of Israeli apartheid; and that reject racism and all forms of oppression are welcome to be part of the organizing process for the Third Conference! Please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] to become a part of the organizing process. Get involved in organizing the Third Conference--bring your experiences, strategies and ideas to the table to work towards building a mass movement for divestment from Israeli apartheid and for justice in Palestine! REGISTER NOW! http://www.njsolidarity.org/confregister.html ENDORSE NOW! http://www.njsolidarity.org/conference/confendorse.html For more information about the conference, please visit http://www.divestmentconference.com/. For more information about New Jersey Solidarity, please visit http://www.njsolidarity.org/. * -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio:
The Economic Reality Tour
The Economic Reality Tour: http://65.110.67.200/ -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://solidarity.igc.org/
Wall Street's role in Argentina collapse
Argentina Didn't Fall on Its Own Wall Street Pushed Debt Till the Last By Paul Blustein Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, August 3, 2003; Page A01 BUENOS AIRES -- Ah, the memories: Feasting on slabs of tender Argentine steak. Skiing at a resort overlooking a shimmering lake in the Andes. And late-night outings to a gentlemen's club in a posh Buenos Aires neighborhood. Such diversions awaited the investment bankers, brokers and money managers who flocked to Argentina in the late 1990s. In those days, Wall Street firms touted Argentina as one of the world's hottest economies as they raked in fat fees for marketing the country's stocks and bonds. Thus were sown the seeds of one of the most spectacular economic collapses in modern history, a debacle in which Wall Street played a major role. The fantasyland that Argentina represented for foreign financiers came to a catastrophic end early last year, when the government defaulted on most of its $141 billion debt and devalued the nation's currency. A wrenching recession left well over a fifth of the labor force jobless and threw millions into poverty. An extensive review of the conduct of financial market players in Argentina reveals Wall Street's complicity in those events. Investment bankers, analysts and bond traders served their own interests when they pumped up euphoria about the country's prospects, with disastrous results. Big securities firms reaped nearly $1 billion in fees from underwriting Argentine government bonds during the decade 1991-2001, and those firms' analysts were generally the ones producing the most bullish and influential reports on the country. Similar conflicts of interest involving analysts' research have come to light in other flameouts of the bubble era, such as Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. In Argentina's case, though, the injured party was not a group of stockholders or 401(k) owners, it was South America's second-largest country. Other factors besides optimistic analyses impelled foreigners to pour funds into Argentina with such reckless abandon as to make the eventual crash more likely and more devastating. One was Wall Street's system for rating the performance of mutual fund and pension fund managers, who were major buyers of Argentine bonds. Bizarrely, the system rewarded investing in emerging markets with the biggest debts -- and Argentina was often No. 1 on that list during the 1990s. Within the financial fraternity, some acknowledge that this behavior was a major contributor to the downfall of a country that prided itself on following free-market tenets. That is because the optimism emanating from Wall Street, combined with the heavy inflow of money, made the Argentine government comfortable issuing more and more bonds, driving its debt to levels that would ultimately prove ruinous. The time has come to do our mea culpa, Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of the executive committee at Barclays Capital, said at a conference of bank and brokerage executives in London a few months ago. Argentina obviously stands as much as Enron in showing that things have been done and said by our industry which were realized at the time to be wrong, to be self-serving. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15438-2003Aug2.html Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Mad Mel
NY Times, Aug. 3, 2003 Mel Gibson's Martyrdom Complex by Frank Rich The Jews didn't kill Christ, my stepfather was fond of saying. They just worried him to death. Nonetheless, there was palpable relief in my Jewish household when the Vatican officially absolved us of the crime in 1965. At the very least, that meant we could go back to fighting among ourselves. These days American Jews don't have to fret too much about the charge of deicide or didn't, until Mel Gibson started directing a privately financed movie called The Passion, about Jesus' final 12 hours. Why worry now? The star himself has invited us to. Asked by Bill O'Reilly in January if his movie might upset any Jewish people, Mr. Gibson responded: It may. It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. . . . Anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability. Fears about what this truth will be have been fanned by the knowledge that Mr. Gibson bankrolls a traditionalist Catholic church unaffiliated with the Los Angeles Roman Catholic archdiocese. Traditionalist Catholicism is the name given to a small splinter movement that rejects the Second Vatican Council which, among other reforms, cleared the Jews of deicide. The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages, which have lavished praise on Mr. Gibson and his project, reported in March in an adulatory interview with the star that the film's sources included the writings of two nuns: Mary of Agreda, a 17th-century Spaniard, and Anne Catherine Emmerich, an early-19th-century German. Only after Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, among others, spoke up about the nuns' history of anti-Semitic writings did a Gibson flack disown this provenance. Emmerich's revelations include learning that Jews had strangled Christian children to procure their blood. It's hard to imagine a scenario that bald turning up in The Passion. Indeed, it's hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles). Its real tinder-box effect could be abroad, where anti-Semitism has metastasized since 9/11, and where Mr. Gibson is arguably more of an icon (as his production company is named) than he is at home. He shot The Passion in Italy, where a recent cartoon in the newspaper La Stampa showed Israeli tanks about to roll over the baby Jesus' manger. Do you want to kill me once more? read the caption. In recent weeks Mr. Gibson has started screening a rough cut of his film to invited audiences, from evangelicals in Colorado Springs to religious leaders in Pennsylvania to celebrities in Washington. But the attendees are not always ecumenical. At the Washington screening, they included Peggy Noonan, Kate O'Beirne, Linda Chavez and David Kuo, the deputy director of the White House's faith-based initiative. Like the membership lists of restricted country clubs that let in a minority member or two to deflect charges of discrimination, the screening guest list did include a token Jew: that renowned Talmudic scholar Matt Drudge. No other Jewish members of the media were present, said one journalist who was there. That journalist must remain unnamed as a result of signing a confidentiality agreement a practice little seen at movie screenings. Since then, some of those present, including Mr. Drudge, have publicly expressed their enthusiasm for The Passion without legal reprisal, anyway. One invitee, the radio host Laura Ingraham, gave Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post a sense of the event's tone when she told him why she was sorry she couldn't get to the screening in time: I want to see any movie that drives the anti-Christian entertainment elite crazy. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/arts/03RICH.html Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Endorse the 3rd North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement -- Register Now
In response to my request that UFPJ endorse the Third National Student Conference on the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, Nadia Hijab of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (@ http://www.endtheoccupation.org/) has brought to my attention that at least seven Arab NJ Solidarity steering committee members resigned in protest of the practice of the other steering committee members and issued a public statement indicting their unwise choices and undemocratic means -- see below for both Nadia's postings and the public statement in question. Given the problems in NJ Solidarity, I put my request for endorsement on hold, pending a major change in NJ Solidarity's practice. Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2003 07:45:33 -0400 From: Nadia Hijab Subject: Re: [ufpj-pal] Endorse the 3rd North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement Thanks Yoshie for all your hard work on the draft and on keeping members of this group informed about different events. I look forward to seeing the draft after Rania and Josh have had a chance to go over it. Re the upcoming conference at Rutgers below, I would not support recommending it for SC endorsement because New Jersey Solidarity is now a splinter group of the original. The remaining members reportedly used non-democratic means to push a platform that divided the group (pasting a new statement on the website and locking out the other members), and the Arab and Palestinian members had no option but to leave the group. We at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation have removed NJ Solidarity from our list. My understanding is that ISM has also done so. I'm pasting below the public statement by the members who left the group. Best, Nadia Public Statement from former NJ Solidarity Steering Committee Members We the undersigned, former steering committee members of NJ Solidarity, would like to publicly and officially sever any and all ties with the current leadership of NJ Solidarity. Recently, NJ Solidarity has taken a very radical turn towards something akin to militancy. We, the majority of its steering committee, have resigned to protect ourselves from what we have been advising others to avoid. The NJS Mission Statement was originally crafted to provide a safe environment for activism and dialogue on issues affecting Palestine and its people. The few members which remain with NJS have far different visions for the organization. NJS members have recently been involved in actions that have been thoughtless and immoral with regards to administrative matters. A window on this pattern of incident shows that the foundation of NJS, its mission statement, remains in theory but has been cast aside in practice by a number of its members. Those who prefer reckless rhetoric have tried amending the Mission Statement to include Israel has no right to exist and have openly welcomed the idea of inviting Hamas to events. We have had debates against Steering Committee persons who hold tight to the idea that there are no Israeli civilians and when confronted with even the kids? the reply was yes, everyone's fair game. This has been escalating for a number of months now. It has gone well past the point of return. After a final week of attempted dialogue with the aforementioned, we have been received with an increased pattern of deception. A series of deception now aimed at Steering Committee members, who held tight to upholding the Mission Statement, has forced us to resign our services to the organization for our own safety and for fear of the future principles of this organization. We expect those who remain on the NJS Steering Committee to displace blame for these incidents, or perhaps deny they ever occurred. Hopefully this will not be the case as we are all here to work for truth and justice. But if this comes to light we remind people that under the original NJS policy of complete transparency, we are comfortable in knowing that those who scrutinize our position will find it thoroughly upheld with quality materials. We are passionate about Palestine and its people and dedicated to truth and empowerment, but we realize that there is a right and just way or a wrong and treacherous way to do things. We have chosen not to follow the latter. We will, however, continue to work within our communities and with one another to build similar mechanisms to continue to educate and empower our communities on issues of relevance. Mona Abdallah Basem Hassan Iman Mohammed Abeer Mustafa Enam Saadeh Summer Sharaf Jamal Al Din Talib Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2003 10:30:51 -0400 From: Nadia Hijab Subject: Re: [ufpj-pal] Endorse the 3rd North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement Yoshie, I agree that it is important for the information to get out as widely as possible. Just for a bit more background: when we were discussing this on the US Campaign Steering Committee, I checked the NJ Solidarity website and it contained language that said the Palestinians had the right to resist using
Gary Becker makes sense?
After trashing affirmative action, Becker makes some sensible points. Becker, Gary S. 2003. How to Level the Playing Field for Young Black Men. Business Week (4 August): p. 24. Moreover, in two disturbing respects the difference between the races has widened during the past few decades. Black families were quite stable until the '60s, if not quite as stable as those of whites. Although divorce and unmarried motherhood have increased throughout American society, they have exploded among blacks. Well under half of black children are in two-parent families, sharply down from about 75% in 1950, although there has been a little improvement since the mid-1990s. The second concern is the huge increase in the number of black men in prison. They make up more than 40% of male prisoners, compared with about 12% of the overall population. For those incarcerated on drug-related charges, the black share is almost 60%. Only a slim majority of young black men are not in prison, on parole, bail, or probation, or have not been arrested at least once. There's reason to believe this shortage of desirable male companions discourages black women from marrying or staying married for long. The downward spiral is self-perpetuating. Studies suggest that the decline in the presence of fathers in black families harms sons more than daughters. As a result, the rapid growth in the number of black men in prisons impairs the following generation of black males as well. A longer-run reform would be to improve the schooling of young blacks, since their earnings still trail those of whites, partly because of the growing economic advantage of a good education. That improvement will not be easy while so many black families are without two parents, but an expanded Head Start program and greater competition among schools in the inner city through vouchers and charter schools would help. Among other things, competition would produce more schools that cater to the special needs of black males. Finally, the time has come to decriminalize drugs. Trafficking in drugs attracts young blacks mainly because it offers much better pay (provided they don't get caught) than do the legal alternatives, which tend to be low-wage jobs. Even conservatives and liberals who are reluctant to make drugs legal have to recognize that the present system does enormous damage to the black community, especially to the many black men who spend years in prison on drug charges. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
question on finance capital
Business Week describes GM becoming almost entirely dependent on its finance unit. I recall seeing something similar about Ford. Does anyone recall a source? Welch, David. 2003. For GM, Mortgages Are the Motor: But How Long Can It Rely On Profits From Its Finance Unit? Business Week (4 August): p. 36. But hang on a second: GM isn't making all that money selling cars. In fact, the auto maker's all-important North American vehicle operation made a paltry $83 million, down from $1.3 billion a year earlier. So where did the other $818 million in second-quarter profits come from? Try General Motors Acceptance Corp., GM's lending arm. And it's not primarily car loans that helped GM bring home the bacon. Half of those finance profits came from GMAC's mortgage business, including its fast-growing Ditech.com online mortgage subsidiary. These days, GM looks a lot more like a financial institution that happens to sell cars and trucks than a successful auto maker. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: question on finance capital
that was the case for GE, I believe. Jack Welch did not build the company by selling refrigerators. mbs -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of michael Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2003 10:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: question on finance capital Business Week describes GM becoming almost entirely dependent on its finance unit. I recall seeing something similar about Ford. Does anyone recall a source? Welch, David. 2003. For GM, Mortgages Are the Motor: But How Long Can It Rely On Profits From Its Finance Unit? Business Week (4 August): p. 36. But hang on a second: GM isn't making all that money selling cars. In fact, the auto maker's all-important North American vehicle operation made a paltry $83 million, down from $1.3 billion a year earlier. So where did the other $818 million in second-quarter profits come from? Try General Motors Acceptance Corp., GM's lending arm. And it's not primarily car loans that helped GM bring home the bacon. Half of those finance profits came from GMAC's mortgage business, including its fast-growing Ditech.com online mortgage subsidiary. These days, GM looks a lot more like a financial institution that happens to sell cars and trucks than a successful auto maker. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Tariq Ali on Iran
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030818c=1s=ali Cheers, Ken Hanly
Re: question on finance capital
Hi Michael; isn't 'finance capital' a problematic phrase, given that Hilferding meant that various fractions of capital would be bought up by the banks -- and this is the opposite? Doug Henwood told me once that the Ford strategy -- which in the 1980s entailed not only a major emphasis on financing but also the purchase of hundreds of failed SLs within its Nationwide (?) SL holding company (making it, at that point, I recall, the world's largest thrift institution) -- had changed by the mid-1990s. My guess is it won't help you because it's probably not online, but I did an article on Ford's SL gambit for Multinational Monitor in July 1989. - Original Message - From: michael [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 4:11 AM Subject: question on finance capital Business Week describes GM becoming almost entirely dependent on its finance unit. I recall seeing something similar about Ford. Does anyone recall a source?
muse and whirled
Chris Chandler is a great performance poet and Anne Feeney is a folk singer Utah Phillips has called the greatest labor singer in North America today. This is their newsletter and a fun read. Dan Scanlan - T h e M u s e a n d W h i r l e d R e t o r t (the monthly news letter of chris chandler and anne feeney) A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 Pittsburgh, PA July 31, 2003 (Volume IV - Issue X) Hey everybody, it's that time of the month again! So, I was thinking since the Count on Sesame Street only has 4 fingers - shouldn't he be counting in base eight? Computers do all their counting in base 2 - they count: Zero, One, One-Zero, One One, One-Zero-Zero, and so on - but we count in base ten...(although I count in base 11 when I have my hands in my pockets but that's a different story). The Mayans - they counted in base 20 - they wore no shoes. (Really.) Oh, the things you think about while riding down the highway counting mile markers and exit signs...ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety- nine... tenity, tenity-one, tenity-two... wait that's not right. But then, I saw a sign at a church that read count your blessings well, naturally I did as I was told - it was a church after all. I think I had gotten to about twelveity-four or five when I realized that - Hey, my blessings are infinite. Then, I thought, this could take a while. Now I know that this sounds like a platitude - but it is true: The kingdom of heaven is spread out before us - but we refuse to see it. That means... THIS is heaven! And heaven, as we all know, is infinite but what the hell IS infinity anyway? If we could better understand the concept perhaps we could better understand heaven. I mean, the way I see it The universe is round and infinity is just one digit shy of nothing. The bible had a little run in with infinity that seems to confirm this notion. Wasn't the goal of the architects working on the tower of Babel to reach the infinite? Shouldn't the subcontractors have realized the problem with this project? Or perhaps the Babylonians actually reached their goal - and that is precisely why it fell. Ya get too close to infinity and poof you're back to zero. Ya get too close to heaven - and ¡poof! you find yourself speaking Spanish in a Chi Chi's in Dubuque, Iowa - trying to order Pollo Guadalajara and having a teenager in a polyester uniform asking - ¿ya want that with beef or chicken? As for me -- I went for years thinking Taco Bell was the Mexican phone company. I know, I am digressing - but, ya, gotta bear with me now. Magellan proved Copernicus right by circumnavigating the globe. Who will prove Einstein right? Einstein maintained that the universe, too, is round. He said every straight line in the universe eventually intersects itself Einstein also said that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will eventually admit that they have always been secretly attracted to each other. They will move to Vermont, volunteer for the Howard Dean campaign, and have a big Greek wedding solemnized by the Bishop formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg. What would Scooby Doo? Today, there are computers that do nothing all day but try to count to infinity. I read about it in the paper. Every couple of years one comes up with another prime number. The latest prime number's exponent was over 600 pages long. If you were to print this number out in 10 point font it would stretch around the world. Infinity would be the number that stretches around the universe - hey, it's only a matter of time. Doesn't it then likely follow that one day a computer counting to infinity will suddenly spit out that the next number in succession is zero? Doesn't this prove that infinity is just one digit less than zero? Hey, maybe I could convince the bank - I am not four-hundred-seventy- eight dollars and thirty seven cents overdrawn - I have nearly 500 bucks more than infinity- it's like the more debt I acquire the closer I am to winning the lottery! Says a lot about our economy. Armed with a credit rating like that - the bank will surely approve my loan for a new Cadillac and I can simply back my way into the two car garage of heaven... Only I find that Satan has his SUV parked on the other side. It's a Ford Explorer with Firestone tires and a bumper sticker that reads - This Machine Kills Fascists. Anyway - the point I am trying to make here is that if I sit around and count my blessings - and my blessings are infinite - will I one day discover that I have none? For most Americans, isn't the idea of a 2 car garage boasting a Cadillac and an SUV our idea of heaven's infinite perfection? Seems we are always trying to reach perfection - like infinity. Throughout human history some new invention comes along that changes us for ever - the wheel, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, the Lay-Z Boy. Civilization is changed and a generation passes and lives in this new normal, with only vague stories of the past that grandpa tells on
