transfer pricing redux

[Ian Murray]

[yet another reason methodological nationalism has to go]



Plastic bucket: $972.98

Big companies and rich individuals run rings round the Inland Revenue. The
government should act

Prem Sikka
Monday June 30, 2003
The Guardian

One thing has been missing from the fuss over Peter Hain's remarks on tax
policy - an analysis of the impact of tax policy on social inequalities.

Consider the plight of workers on a minimum wage of £4.50 per hour (from
October 2003), working 40 hours per week for an annual salary of £9,360.
This is barely enough for the necessities of life, but workers lose £809
on income tax and £520 on national insurance contributions, leaving just
£8,031 for food, clothing, housing, travel to work, health, education,
payment of council tax and pension contributions.

Tax policies are exacerbating poverty and deepening social exclusion and
inequalities. Any caring government should aim to ensure that workers on
the minimum wage are exempt from income tax and national insurance
contributions. The tax foregone could be spread over higher income
earners. Attacking the highly organised tax-avoidance industry would also
dramatically increase tax yields, but the government has shown little
interest in tackling its business friends.

Multinational companies avoid corporate taxes by deliberately overpricing
imports and underpricing goods and services for export. The technique goes
under the name of "transfer pricing" and the game is to allocate profits
to various parts of a multinational group of companies.

Here are some examples of the prices actually charged by US multinational
companies, including those with operations in the UK, to shuffle profits
and avoid taxes. Overpriced imports include plastic buckets from the Czech
Republic at $972.98 each, fence posts from Canada at $1,853.50 each, a
kilo of toilet paper from China for $4,121.81, a litre of apple juice from
Israel for $2,052, a ballpoint pen from Trinidad for $8,500, and a pair of
tweezers from Japan at $4,896 each. Underpriced exports include a toilet
(with bowl and tank) to Hong Kong for $1.75, prefabricated buildings to
Trinidad at $1.20 each, bulldozers to Venezuela at $387.83 each, and
missile and rocket launchers to Israel for just $52.03 each.

Such practices make a dramatic difference to tax yields. The UK subsidiary
of a multinational company constructs a bulldozer at a cost of £27,000 but
sells it for £300 to another subsidiary in the same group of companies
based, say, in Venezuela, which then sells it on for its market price of
£60,000. For tax purposes, the UK subsidiary could claim a loss of £26,700
and pay no corporation tax, even though the group made a global profit of
£33,000. That profit is generated by using British infrastructure, but is
recorded in another country with a more favourable fiscal regime.

Transfer pricing policies should be based on open market prices, but
multinational corporations use accountancy and legalistic arguments to
justify almost any price. Big accountancy firms play a major role in
developing transfer pricing policies for multinational companies and then
audit their accounts, declaring them to be "true and fair" None has ever
had its accounts qualified for tax avoidance.

There are plenty of opportunities for shuffling profits and tax avoidance:
the world's largest hundred corporations control 20% of global foreign
assets and some 60% of world trade is internal to multinational
corporations. Studies have estimated that as a result of transfer pricing
policies, the US treasury alone has lost some $175bn of tax revenues
during the last three years.

The US evidence points the finger firmly at the UK companies as well.
Transfer pricing policies are likely to be causing a huge hole in
government revenues. But this is not the full extent of organised tax
avoidance. Companies and rich individuals also use offshore tax havens to
avoid taxes, estimated to be between £25bn and £85bn a year. On top of
that some 100,000 rich foreign individuals (shipping millionaires, America
n heirs) have (or had) special agreements with the Inland Revenue under
which they either pay no taxes (for example Tetra Pak millionaire Hans
Rausing) or their liability is capped to only a tiny fraction of their
income (as it was for Mohamed Al Fayed). Altogether this amounts to a huge
wealth transfer from ordinary people to corporate elites, bigger than the
pensions, endowment mortgage and Equitable Life scandals put together. In
its bleatings about the corporate tax burden, the Confederation of British
Industry remains silent about organised tax avoidance.

By attacking corporate tax avoidance the government can exempt the poor
from taxes and also make investment in crumbling social infrastructure.
But the government has shown little interest in tackling the problem. It
has failed to publish any estimates of tax avoidance by wealthy
individuals and companies even though the tax yield from corporation tax
has declined from t

Iraq: the full colonial press

[Ian Murray]

And now for the really big guns

War is one thing, but can Iraq survive full-on assault by Wall Street? Ed
Vulliamy and Faisal Islam report

Sunday June 29, 2003
The Observer

After the war, the corporate invasion. Bechtel, the US construction giant,
now leads the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure with the chutzpah of a
twenty-first century East India Company. Yet other invasions are planned
for Iraq over the coming months - in the shape of oil concessions, health
privatisation plans and even mobile phone licences.

Despite the worsening security situation, the White House and Pentagon are
marshalling these corporate battalions into Iraq - insurance companies,
construction firms, commercial health managers and behemoth banks - in the
name of free enterprise. The project: to privatise Iraq, a country where
30 per cent of the workforce is employed by the state, and the population
is used to food rations and cheap petrol.

Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, spent most of his time
last week at theWorld Economic Forum in Amman, Jordan, talking economics.
Bremer is a veteran of Reagan-era diplomacy. Critics wonder if he plans to
bring Reaganomics to the Middle East.

Amnesty International has warned that the 'occupying powers must make an
explicit commitment to involving Iraqis in decision-making related to
reconstruction. Iraqis themselves, ideally through representative
institutions, ought to make decisions on rebuilding, on foreign
investment, and on the selling of state assets'.

The 'invasion' is an ideological as well as commercial enterprise. George
Bush has said that he envisions a 'US-Middle East free-trade area' within
10 years, 'replacing corruption and self dealing with free markets'. Most
of the US companies contracted or bidding to open up those free markets
happen to enjoy direct or indirect connections to members of the Bush
administration. The US has, meanwhile, drafted sweeping plans to establish
a free-market economy in Iraq, including privatisation of state-owned
industries and the formation of a stock market.

In a leader article in the Wall Street Journal last month Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pledged the US's determination to pursue
policies that 'favour market systems' and 'encourage moves to privatise
state-owned enterprises'.

British officials are a little more circumspect, suggesting Iraqis must
decide for themselves.

The American government's development agency, USAID, has said it will
spend $1.7 billion (£1bn) on reconstruction in Iraq. But the battered
nation's damaged infrastructure will need, according to US Treasury
estimates, somewhere between $25-$60bn. Some independent analysts have
said that an investment of $200bn would be needed to convert the former
state infrastucture, now largely dilapidated or destroyed, into a market
economy.

Washington is abuzz with corporate lobbyists and trade lawyers, business
consortia and US-approved Iraqi exiles, preparing for the next phase: the
all-private corporate scramble for Iraq beyond even the Pentagon's system
of contract favouritism.

The US Treasury joined a group of companies at a forum on May Day which
was organised by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington. John Taylor, Under Secretary for International Affairs,
assured his audience there that it was 'very important to get a good
system of rule [of] law, and property rights, in a way very conducive to
foreign investment'. One of the first targets, added Taylor, would be the
oil-for-food programme.

Standing to the fore in the preparations of the economic ground are the
neo-conservatives, who have been plan ning the invasion of Iraq for a
decade. They are led by Richard Perle - who was chairman of the powerful
Defence Policy Board until recently when he had to resign over a conflict
of interest - and the former CIA chief James Woolsey.

'We have a responsibility, a stewardship,' Perle told a forum of the
American Enterprise Institute, 'not to turn [Iraq] over to institutions
incapable of seeing this through to a successful conclusion ... the last
thing the Iraqis need is French statism or German labour practices.'

Woolsey told a conference organised by the consulting firm Booz Allen
Hamilton: 'The United States is going to do this alone.' In his audience
were executives from Halliburton (of which Vice President Dick Cheney was
CEO until he took office in 2001), as well as from Kellogg Brown Root (the
Haliburton subsidiary already handsomely contracted in Iraq), the
construction giant Babcock International, and Goldman Sachs. The military
contractor DynCorpa, also present, was already signed up for a $50m
contract to organise law enforcement in Iraq.

Both Perle and Woolsey have a direct commercial interest in America's 'war
on terrorism'. Woolsey is a principal of the Paladin Capital Group, which
invests in companies specialising in anti-terrorist equipment. Perle has
many ties to firms that consult on security issues. And, for 

competitive States

[Ian Murray]

http://www.latimes.com
Competition Heats Up for Slice of Biotech Industry
Marketing themselves as cut-rate alternatives to California, other states
and nations hope to tap the sector's potential.
By Denise Gellene
Times Staff Writer

June 29, 2003

WASHINGTON - Joining the usual swarm of lawyers, bankers and executives at
the biotechnology industry's annual convention last week was a new deal
maker: the governor of Delaware.

Citing cheaper labor, bargain land prices and lower taxes, Gov. Ruth Ann
Minner touted Delaware as a cut-rate alternative to California, home to
the world's largest biotech companies, Amgen Inc. and Genentech Inc. In
fact, she was one of eight governors personally promoting their states at
the convention, called BIO 2003.

Minner's pitch: "We have four seasons, none of the traffic that goes with
big cities and outstanding corporate laws."

She hosted a reception aboard the Kalmar Nyckel, a replica of the tall
ship that first brought Swedish settlers to Delaware. Guests nibbled on
smoked salmon and crab cakes as the ship's crew sang old sailing songs.

Missouri's boosters took over Washington's International Spy Museum, where
state VIPs talked business amid displays of sleuthing devices. The
Pennsylvania contingent threw a party at the Library of Congress. Virginia
bused 300 prospects to Mount Vernon, where they dined on roast beef and
Virginia ham.

Wisconsin got help from its former governor, Health and Human Services
Secretary Tommy Thompson. Now the drug industry's top regulator, he worked
the crowd at a reception featuring polka music and Wisconsin cheese. "I
may be the secretary, but I'm still Badger Red," he said, referring to the
University of Wisconsin mascot.

Why such ardent pursuit of a relatively small industry that isn't creating
many new jobs?

Aiming to diversify, states reliant on manufacturing and agriculture are
romancing new industries. Biotechnology looks promising as a sector
because it stands ready to supply high-tech medicines for an aging
population and disease-resistant crops to feed the world's hungry. Many
states think they can tap the expertise of their universities to form
clusters of start-up firms.

In Virginia, for instance, Gov. Mark Warner envisions clusters near the
University of Virginia, George Mason University and Virginia Tech. "We're
at the dawn of the life sciences decade," he said as he strolled the
convention floor.

Europe, Asia and Australia also sent recruiting missions to the
convention. Scotland - which gave the world Dolly the cloned sheep - held
a malt whiskey-tasting reception. Singapore unveiled a scale model of an
elaborate biotech center whose tenants include Swiss pharmaceutical
company Novartis. Japan marked its first appearance at the event by
cracking a cask of sake.

Japan, in the throes of a prolonged economic slump, turned to
biotechnology "almost by default," said trade official Jun Okumura. "There
is a real sense of urgency in Japan right now." His immediate goal was to
find business partners for the six Japanese biotech firms showcased at the
convention. "I like what I see," said Okumura, president of the Japan
External Trade Organization.

Wall Street has shown some renewed excitement about biotechnology. Last
month after Genentech released its report on successful human tests of an
experimental cancer drug, investors poured billions into the South San
Francisco-based company's stock. The market value of the entire industry
stood at $301 billion at the end of May, up 34% from the end of 2002.

For biotechs not part of the top tier, however, the outlook remains grim.
One-third of the 318 publicly traded biotechs have less than 12 months'
worth of cash remaining, according to Ernst & Young. Without fresh
financing, half of all biotech firms will run out of funds in two years,
the consulting firm said. And hiring in the biotechnology industry is at a
virtual standstill.

States believe the industry will recover and are eager to participate. But
experts attending the convention doubted that the industry would grow
large enough to expand beyond the places where they already are
well-established, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and San
Diego. The entire industry in the U.S. employs about 200,000 people, and
the jobs pay very well. In California the average salary is $65,000,
according to the California Healthcare Institute, an industry group.

A mix of top-flight academic centers, ready access to venture capital and
an entrepreneurial climate led to formation of such leading California
biotechs as Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City, Idec Pharmaceuticals
Corp. of San Diego and Chiron Corp. of Emeryville. In the Bay Area,
spinoffs from Stanford University, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley found
seed money on Palo Alto's Sand Hill Road. To the south, in La Jolla, an
active venture community financed discoveries from UC San Diego and
Scripps Institute.

Few regions have the smarts or the stomach for biotech, an industr

free mercantilism

[Ian Murray]

"It may be bad accounting and marginally more expensive," says Thomas
Donnelly, an American Enterprise Institute defense expert who backs the
[Boeing] deal. But "anybody that can game the system, more power to 'em."


[the latest issue of Business Week, page 88]

class warfare USA redux

[Ian Murray]

Forced Down or Out in Grand Rapids
In Manufacturing-Heavy Region, Economy Is Disrupting Thousands of Careers

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 28, 2003; Page E01


GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- For many people these days, keeping a job has been
a lesson in downward mobility.

Bill Van Luyn had worked for Steelcase Inc., the world's largest business
furniture maker, for 26 years, scrambling up the company ladder from
summer substitute laborer to machine operator, to shop floor supervisor
and finally to the white-collar stability of new-product development.

When the business furniture industry began its devastating slide 21/2
years ago, Van Luyn held his breath as five rounds of layoffs passed him
by. Then, this past October, he was offered a choice: Leave now, with six
months' severance pay, or go back to the assembly line making file
cabinets on the dusk-to-dawn shift for a salary 30 percent below his
white-collar pay.

Lean and fit at 6-foot-4 and 180 pounds, a swimmer by hobby and risk
averse by nature, Van Luyn figured he could handle the work. But at 51, he
proved himself wrong. Tendinitis in both elbows quickly set in. Then
tendons locked in his thumbs, a hazard of the trade known as trigger
finger. Now, Van Luyn is on workers' compensation, waiting to heal from
his recent right-hand surgery and preparing for July 11, when his left
thumb goes under the knife.

Van Luyn's occupational fall may seem extreme, but workers here and across
the country are making similar compromises to avoid joining the
unemployed. The stubborn 7.3 percent unemployment rate around Grand Rapids
is itself a shock for an area accustomed to the success that residents
figure comes naturally from hard work and a conservative lifestyle. But
unemployment rates understate the tumult and tragedies of a labor market
that has forced workers to give up hours and overtime, lose pensions and
health benefits, and trade down stable, well-paid jobs for uncertain,
increasingly lower-paid ones.

It is difficult to track such turmoil in statistics, but labor economists
point to one number watched by the federal government to illustrate what
they call "underemployment." Between the trough of July 2000 and this May,
the last month for which statistics are available, the number of workers
who say they have unwillingly taken part-time jobs because of slack work
conditions or because no full-time work was available has risen nearly 47
percent, to 4.6 million from 3.1 million.

Among them are people like Amber Hester, 48, who lost a job with a
furniture maker in 2001, was hired in 2002 to make tracks for car seats,
and was laid off again in February. Now she boxes Amway orders on the
swing shift for a temporary agency paying her little more than half her
original salary with no benefits.

"You kind of get used to it," Hester said Tuesday evening as she prepared
to go to work. "You do what you have to do these days. What else can you
do?"

Then there's Van Luyn's brother Dick, who has seen his 55- to 60-hour
workweek and $60,000-a-year salary at Steelcase shaved to 32 hours and
$38,000. But the house and boat on a lake still take money, so Dick Van
Luyn leaves Steelcase in the evening for a cleaning-service job on the
night shift.

Even many full-time workers consider themselves employed beneath their
worth or dignity.

At 57, Nancy Miller lost her $15.13-an-hour engine parts job at W.A.
Thomas Hy-Lift last year when the plant was shuttered without warning. But
Miller quickly took a far tougher, manual labor position at Supreme
Machined Products Co. in nearby Spring Lake for $9 an hour, with no
pension benefits. Money was not all she had to sacrifice. She recently
lost the tip of an index finger under the crush of a metal press.

"We've gotten knocked down so many times," sighed Miller over coffee at
Carmen's, a diner in Muskegon's down-on-its-heels downtown. "Most of us
can bounce back up, but it's a tough world out there."

By the standards of past recessions, even by the standards of the nation's
hardest-pressed areas today, the labor market in the Grand
Rapids-Muskegon-Holland triangle does not appear that bad.

But joblessness here is higher than the national 6.1 percent rate. Since
the beginning of 2001, the area's once thriving office furniture business
has shed nearly 5,000 jobs -- 44 percent of the industry's local work
force -- while the region's small tool-and-die makers have continued their
long slide toward oblivion. Jobs in durable-goods manufacturing in the
region have plunged nearly 29 percent in the same period, to 95,500 in
March, from 135,100.

"As far as Grand Rapids is concerned, an unemployment rate of 6 or 7
percent is just terrible," said Joseph Ross, a workforce analyst for
temporary-employment giant Manpower who focuses on West Michigan. "For the
people of Grand Rapids, they just have never experienced anything like
this."

Here, as across the nation, the job malaise is affecting white-collar
workers a

Re: Bush & Africa

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Chris Burford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> At 2003-06-26 21:32 -0700, you wrote:
> >[perhaps Dubya is afraid folks might draw comparisons between the Repugs.
> >version of warlord capitalism and Charles Taylor's.]
> >
> >
> >
> >[New York Times]
> >June 27, 2003
> >Bush Calls for Changes in Africa to End Wars and Promote Trade
> >By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
>
> I like Ian's shrewd selection of clippings but on this occasion I think the
> significance is even greater than the comment above suggests.


=

On that I have little doubt. The neo-Malthusian enviro-security factions in the 
Pentagon and State
Dept. are having their work expropriated by Dubya's gang of racketeers and free trade 
will be their
rhetorical cover.


Ian

Bush & Africa

[Ian Murray]

[perhaps Dubya is afraid folks might draw comparisons between the Repugs.
version of warlord capitalism and Charles Taylor's.]



[New York Times]
June 27, 2003
Bush Calls for Changes in Africa to End Wars and Promote Trade
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON


WASHINGTON, June 26 - President Bush outlined an ambitious agenda today
for advancing peace and prosperity in Africa. He demanded that Liberia's
leader step down to avert further bloodshed in his country, called for a
change of government in Zimbabwe and for the dispatching of an envoy to
broker an end to the long civil war in Sudan.

Speaking to a group of African leaders, business executives and investors
here, Mr. Bush also pledged $100 million to help Kenya and other countries
fight terrorism and made a case for expanded trade as the most powerful
engine for fighting poverty on the continent.

Mr. Bush is to leave in 11 days on his first trip as president to
sub-Saharan Africa, and his speech today was his most expansive statement
of policy on the continent to date. It was particularly striking for his
blunt calls for change in nations that have been wracked by violence.

Among them was Liberia, where there has been heavy fighting between rebels
and forces loyal to President Charles Taylor, who has been indicted on war
crimes charges in a court run jointly by the neighboring nation of Sierra
Leone and the United Nations.

"President Taylor needs to step down," Mr. Bush said, "so that his country
can be spared further bloodshed."

But he gave no indication that he would respond to calls from people in
Liberia to send American troops to stop the fighting there, which has
intensified in recent days after Mr. Taylor reversed a promise earlier
this month to yield power as part of a cease-fire agreement.

Mr. Bush made clear his willingness to use the diplomatic influence of the
United States in an effort to transform some of Africa's worst
battlegrounds, including Liberia, Sudan and Congo, but he suggested that
he would not seek to exert power unilaterally. He called on regional
governments and pan-African organizations to end a "cycle of attack and
escalation" among the warring parties and build effective peacekeeping
forces.

"It is Africans who will overcome these problems," Mr. Bush said. "Yet the
United States of America and other nations will stand beside them."

Most recent presidents have dipped from time to time into Africa's
problems. But, in part because there is limited domestic political
pressure to do so, they have rarely shown a lasting commitment to dealing
with the continent's deeply rooted troubles.

Congress has also proven reluctant to provide large-scale economic aid or
to make trade concessions that would extract a price from domestic
constituencies.

But to the surprise of many advocacy groups who have long called on the
United States to do more to fight disease and poverty in Africa, Mr. Bush
has taken an increasing interest in the region, and has proposed
substantial increases in spending to fight AIDS and promote economic
development.

In doing so, aides said, he has been pushed along by a diverse group of
advisers, from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, an early and forceful
advocate of increased engagement in Africa, to religious organizations,
who have cited the humanitarian imperative, to his national security team,
which has called for action to keep some African nations from harboring
and breeding terrorists.

In his half-hour speech, to the U.S.-Africa Business Summit, he laid out a
vision of an Africa policy built on a moral duty to address suffering, a
national interest in promoting stability in failed states and an
ideological belief in spreading democracy and capitalism.

"This is a long term commitment," Mr. Bush said. "And I know there are
serious obstacles to overcome. Introducing democracy is hard in any
society. It's much harder in a society torn by war, or held back by
corruption. The promise of free markets means little when millions are
illiterate or hungry, or dying from a preventable disease."

The United States, he said, would stand with and aid those nations that
showed a willingness to tackle their problems.

"Corrupt regimes that give nothing to their people deserve nothing from
us," he said. "Governments that serve their people deserve our help, and
we will provide that help."

Following up on Mr. Powell's call this week for South Africa and other
African nations to do more to oust President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe,
whose increasingly authoritarian rule is driving the country into economic
and political chaos, Mr. Bush said it was time "to encourage a return to
democracy" in that country.

Mr. Bush also pledged an active role in bringing peace to Sudan, where, he
said, two million people have died over the last two decades in Africa's
longest-running civil war. He said he had asked his special envoy to
Sudan, John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, to
travel to the country in two weeks 

Russia, Britain, oil

[Ian Murray]

http://www.themoscowtimes.com
Wednesday, Jun. 25, 2003. Page 1
Oil Deals and Gas Pipeline on the Table
By Catherine Belton
Staff Writer


The last time a Russian leader visited Britain for a state visit was for
the marriage of Tsar Alexander II's daughter to Queen Victoria's son. This
time, President Vladimir Putin's visit will herald a relationship of a
different kind: a burgeoning partnership between the energy kings of Foggy
Albion and the oil and gas boyars of Russia.

One of the first fruits of Britain's courtship of Russia's fast growing
oil industry is expected to be sealed before the week is out: British
Petroleum is set to finalize its groundbreaking $6.75 billion 50-50 merger
deal of its Russia assets with the Tyumen Oil Co.

That investment, together with another landmark deal announced this year
by Royal Dutch Shell, whose headquarters are in London, to invest $10
billion into the Sakhalin 2 oil and gas venture with an eye to supplying
Asian markets, will make Britain the single largest foreign investor in
Russia.

Furthermore, during Putin's visit, talk of building a natural gas pipeline
to link up the Baltic coast of Russia with Britain's east coast and send
Russian gas to heat British homes will likely dominate a Britain-Russia
energy conference Thursday.

Even as Putin winged his way across Europe for his meeting with the queen,
Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko was touting the first sign of
solid support in Europe for the pipeline, called the North European
pipeline.

"I can say that as a result of negotiations the European Union is ready to
take part in financing a feasibility study for this route. Europe is
counting on Russia, and Russia is counting on Europe as its long-term
strategic partner, and this really is the case," Khristenko told reporters
in Brussels on Thursday, following a round of talks with EU Commissioner
Chris Patten and the EU's director-general for transport and energy,
Francois Lamoureux, Interfax reported.

Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller has been trawling Europe for months
looking for potential partners and financing to help construct the $5.7
billion pipeline, which will have a capacity of 30 billion cubic meters
and will cross Germany and the Netherlands on its way to Britain. No
concrete deals, however, have been clinched yet.

Khristenko's statements Tuesday mark the first time any type of foreign
financing for the deal has been forwarded. Even though the sums involved
in a feasibility study are much smaller than any real investments, an
agreement could help nudge the project forward.

A spokesman for the EU transport and energy department, Gilles Gantelet,
could not say how much funding the EU might stump up for the study, but he
said the project has been given priority in the EU-Russia energy dialogue.

Britain also is talking up its prospects, although it is still hedging its
bets on concrete backing. In a wide-ranging interview with Kommersant
published Tuesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the pipeline was
"one of the most interesting projects" that "could open one of the most
important ways for sending Russian gas to Britain."

He said Britain and Russia were ready to sign "a number of declarations on
bilateral relations and on energy ties" during Putin's four-day visit, but
he did not elaborate.

Putin's deputy chief of staff Sergei Prikhodko, however, was more
forthcoming. He told Interfax before Putin's departure that Russia and
Britain would sign "a memorandum of cooperation on the north European gas
pipeline."

Even if these documents are signed and Blair gives strong backing for the
plan, analysts said supplies of Russian gas to Britain could still be at
least a decade away.

"It would be a great symbolic gesture by the U.K. to talk about the
pipeline during Putin's visit," said Jonathan Stern, director of gas
research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. "It's even possible
that the U.K. will take some gas from Russia, but that may not be until
2015, 2020."

Gazprom, however, has said the pipeline could be up and running by 2007 if
an agreement is reached on supplies and financing.

Stern said Gazprom might have to put its plans on the backburner for a
while as the British government haggles over rival pipeline proposals from
other gas producers and weighs its forecast demand. The government has
been bombarded with pipeline proposals from energy giants in Norway and
the Netherlands as Britain's own reserves in the North Sea peter out.
Britain is the world's third largest consumer of natural gas and set to
become a net importer of gas by 2005.

Norsk Hydro and Statoil have been lobbying for a $2 billion pipeline,
dubbed Britpipe, to ship gas from Norway's massive Ormen Lange offshore
gas field, which contains estimated gas reserves of 400 bcm. Marathon Oil
Corp., meanwhile, has been peddling the $1.3 billion 24 bcm per year
Symphony pipeline from Norway. Not far behind them is Gasunie, which wants
to build a 8 bcm per yea

the Fed

[Ian Murray]

Fed Set to Cut Rates to 45-Year Lows
By Glenn Somerville
Reuters
Tuesday, June 24, 2003; 2:33 AM


WASHINGTON - The U.S. Federal Reserve, seeking to rev up a slow recovery
while keeping price deflation at bay, is universally expected to cut
interest rates to 1958 lows this week.


=

What was going on in 1958 that necessitated low rates?



Ian

Re: Monbiot on the WTO

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 10:02 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Monbiot on the WTO


> isn't the WTO run according to the principle of one country/one vote,
while
> the IMF and World Bank are controlled by their big stockholders (mostly
the
> US)? If so, then the WTO is a relatively democratic organization (though
of
> course the "voters" represent those in power in their countries) -- and
> Monbiot is more correct than those who want to abolish the WTO. It
suggests
> that the Seattle anti-WTO demos were poorly aimed, that they should have
> been aimed at the IMF/World Bank/US Treasury axis of weasels.
>

===

There was criticism of the entire neoliberal institutional matrix in
Seattle. The IMF/WB/Treasury axis of exploitation, extraction and
appropriation were not in town to take part in the festivities. We would
have been happy to lock them down.


Ian

Re: FW: Scientific socialism: A reply to Joseph Green

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Chris Burford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> I suspect the really difficult debate is about whether there is a single
> scientific socialism now, and what it is in today's context. Or whether
> marxism is a method of science, rather than a definitive body of
science.
>
> Chris Burford
> London

=

Or whether the sciences of the 21st century *need*
marxism


Ian

contracts and the meta-markets

[Ian Murray]

washingtonpost.com
Federal Contracts
States News Service
Monday, June 23, 2003; Page E09


Saft America Inc. of Cockeysville, Md., won a $20 million contract from
the Air Force for a lithium-ion battery development program.

Management Assistance Corp. of Middleburg won a contract worth up to $10
million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service
for management organizational and business improvement services.

Bowhead Support Services of King George, Va., won a $8 million contract
from the General Services Administration for management, organizational
and business improvement services.

Allstate Professional Movers Inc. of Temple Hills won a $7.91 million
contract from the Army for post-wide refuse and recycling collection and
disposal services.

Science Applications International Corp. of McLean won a $6.46 million
increment against a previously announced $16.74 million contract from the
Defense Contracting Command for homeland defense, advanced concept
technical demonstrations, the Joint Forces Command Liaison Office,
international test and evaluation agreements and reliance, emerging
technology test requirements and technology transfer analysis support.

Thomas & Herbert Consulting LLC of Silver Spring won a contract worth up
to $6 million from the General Services Administration for management
organizational & business improvement services.

DDL OMNI Engineering LLC of McLean won a contract valued at up to $5.12
million from the Naval Sea Systems Command for technical services in
engineering development model fabrication and qualification and factory
transition for the SSN688 class submarine tactical local area network.

SETA Co. of McLean won a $4.23 million contract from the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Service for an independent testing contract.

Motorola Inc. of Hanover, Md., won a $3.61 million contract from the Army
for communication, detection and coherent radiation equipment.

Northrop Grumman Systems Co. of Linthicum Heights won a $2.8 million
contract from the Air Force Materiel Command for anti-tamper software
protection initiative technology.

Warner Construction Consultants Inc. of Rockville won a contract worth up
to $2.25 million from the General Services Administration for management
organizational and business improvement services.

Raven Services Co. of Manassas won a $2.07 million contract from the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing for facility operation and maintenance
support services at a Bureau of Engraving and Printing office.

Mobius Management Systems Inc. of Linthicum won a $2.06 million contract
from the Postal Service for a print reduction solutions package and
right-to-use-license.

Sciences International Inc. of Alexandria won a $2.05 million contract
from the Health and Human Services Department for work associated with the
Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction.

Ruchman & Associates of Jessup, Md., won a $1.54 million contract from the
Navy for office moving and package delivery services.

Subtractions LLC of Jessup, Md., won a $1.5 million contract from the
General Services Administration for environmental services.

Enterprise Resource Performance Inc. of Leesburg won a $1.2 million
contract from the General Services Administration for management,
organizational and business improvement services.

Xpedx Co. of Hanover, Md., won a $1.09 million contract from the Justice
Department for roll paper.

Zodiac of North America Inc. of Stevensville, Md., won a $856,900 contract
from the Naval Inventory Control Point for inflatable boats.

Northrop Grumman Information Technology's Defense Enterprise Solutions
Division of McLean won an $835,630 contract from the Air Force Materiel
Command for information technology services.

Admiral Elevator of Baltimore won a $787,740 contract from the Social
Security Administration for elevator and escalator maintenance and repair
services.

Northrop Grumman Systems' Electronic Systems of Linthicum Heights won a
$499,999 contract from the Air Force Materiel Command to improve weapons
system manufacturing processes.

Litton Systems Inc. of Blacksburg, Va., won a $494,001 contract from the
Naval Inventory Control Point for a slip ring assembly.

Northrop Grumman Systems Co. of Linthicum Heights won a $483,945 contract
from the Defense General Supply Center for elect mounting bases.

AAI Co. of Hunt Valley won a $299,577 contract from the Air Force Materiel
Command for portable test systems.

Motorola Inc. of Hanover, Md., won a $253,689 contract from the Army for
generic equipment.

Prestige Construction Group of Richmond won a $218,298 contract from the
Air Force to repair box drains at an alert facility at Langley Air Force
Base.

Vehicle Control Technologies Inc. of Reston won a $200,000 contract from
the Navy's Office of Naval Research for modeling and simulation of
advanced buoyancy propelled glider vehicles.

Area 16B Associates Limited Partnership of Baltimore won a contract worth
up to $2

PK

[Ian Murray]

[and when will he write TRAGEDY?]



[NYTimes]
June 24, 2003
Denial and Deception
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Politics is full of ironies. On the White House Web site, George W. Bush's
speech from Oct. 7, 2002 - in which he made the case for war with Iraq -
bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials
deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential
people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.

About the deception: Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who
are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more
complete picture of how America went to war. Thanks to reporting by my
colleague Nicholas Kristof, other reports in The New York Times and The
Washington Post, and a magisterial article by John Judis and Spencer
Ackerman in The New Republic, we now know that top officials, including
Mr. Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was
not supported by actual intelligence reports.

In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al
Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of
a link. Supposed evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was
thoroughly debunked by the administration's own experts; yet
administration officials continued to cite that evidence and warn of
Iraq's nuclear threat.

And yet the political and media establishment is in denial, finding
excuses for the administration's efforts to mislead both Congress and the
public.

For example, some commentators have suggested that Mr. Bush should be let
off the hook as long as there is some interpretation of his prewar
statements that is technically true. Really? We're not talking about a
business dispute that hinges on the fine print of the contract; we're
talking about the most solemn decision a nation can make. If Mr. Bush's
speeches gave the nation a misleading impression about the case for war,
close textual analysis showing that he didn't literally say what he seemed
to be saying is no excuse. On the contrary, it suggests that he knew that
his case couldn't stand close scrutiny.

Consider, for example, what Mr. Bush said in his "denial and deception"
speech about the supposed Saddam-Osama link: that there were "high-level
contacts that go back a decade." In fact, intelligence agencies knew of
tentative contacts between Saddam and an infant Al Qaeda in the early
1990's, but found no good evidence of a continuing relationship. So Mr.
Bush made what sounded like an assertion of an ongoing relationship
between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but phrased it cagily - suggesting that he or
his speechwriter knew full well that his case was shaky.

Other commentators suggest that Mr. Bush may have sincerely believed,
despite the lack of evidence, that Saddam was working with Osama and
developing nuclear weapons. Actually, that's unlikely: why did he use such
evasive wording if he didn't know that he was improving on the truth? In
any case, however, somebody was at fault. If top administration officials
somehow failed to apprise Mr. Bush of intelligence reports refuting key
pieces of his case against Iraq, they weren't doing their jobs. And Mr.
Bush should be the first person to demand their resignations.

So why are so many people making excuses for Mr. Bush and his officials?

Part of the answer, of course, is raw partisanship. One important
difference between our current scandal and the Watergate affair is that
it's almost impossible now to imagine a Republican senator asking, "What
did the president know, and when did he know it?"

But even people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from confronting
the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want to
face the implications.

After all, suppose that a politician - or a journalist - admits to himself
that Mr. Bush bamboozled the nation into war. Well, launching a war on
false pretenses is, to say the least, a breach of trust. So if you admit
to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to
demand accountability - and to do so in the face not only of a powerful,
ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to
believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain. It's a
scary prospect.

Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk - to face the truth
and act on it - what will happen to our democracy?

Re: Monbiot on the WTO

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Sabri Oncu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> Why can't we be againts both Bush and the WTO?

=

Most definitely we can. It's how to create collective action-imagination
for designing institutions for the 21st century that is at issue given
lefty norms.


>
> And don't ask me what the third alternative is. Sometimes, there
> are only two, sometimes there are more than two.
>
> If only I knew which is when! But this time, I choose to look for
> the third or the forth or the fifth or 
>
> Best,
>
> Sabri

=

What is the 3cubed way? :-)


Ian

Re: FW: [PEN-L] On free trade Re: Query from a Venezuelan

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] FW: [PEN-L] On free trade Re: Query from a Venezuelan


> You might have said CERTAIN males, since their system was hardly
> egalitarian.
>
===

What, are you saying intra-gender inegalitarianism was worse than the
inter-gender inegalitarianism?

Ian

Re: FW: [PEN-L] On free trade Re: Query from a Venezuelan

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> Besides tariffs, Germany developed the finest educational system in the
> world.



For males.

Ian

Argentina

[Ian Murray]

IMF Chief Meets with Troubled Argentina
Reuters
Monday, June 23, 2003; 11:05 PM
By Hugh Bronstein

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - The head of the International Monetary Fund began
talks with Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner Monday, as the country's
new government made a fresh start at pulling the economy out of its debt
crisis.

IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler also met Economy Minister Roberto
Lavagna, as well as bankers and businessmen.

The two-day meetings come 18 months after Argentina staged the world's
biggest debt default and were seen by Wall Street as a preliminary step in
the country's financial rehabilitation.

"We would hope that the IMF encourages Argentina to move quickly on the
debt restructuring and presses upon the Argentine authorities the need to
make more of a fiscal effort," said Abigail McKenna, a portfolio manager
at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and member of the steering panel
of the Argentina Bondholders Committee.

As the meetings took place, several hundred protesters from left-wing
groups gathered in downtown Buenos Aires to protest Koehler's presence.
Some demonstrators burned a U.S. flag.

Officials in the government, the IMF and the United States -- the top IMF
shareholder -- have said the country would benefit from a long-term
lending deal to replace an intermediate accord set to expire in August.

But the Kirchner government is keen to protect its citizens from IMF-style
austerity after a four-year recession pushed millions of middle class
workers into poverty and joblessness.

Lavagna, under a previous government last year, engaged in a war of words
with the IMF over his softly-go-softly approach to austerity programs.

In a possible sign of progress, the government said on Monday it would
give state help to thousands of poor Argentines unable to make mortgage
payments. That may allow the government to end an emergency measure that
prevents banks from foreclosing on mortgages -- a measure that irked the
IMF.

With bond restructuring talks yet to start and the economy just beginning
to grow, expectations were muted as Koehler made the rounds in Buenos
Aires. Market players did not expect a new IMF program for Argentina to be
announced this week.

Koehler was expected to speak publicly about his trip late Tuesday
afternoon after meeting with legislators, provincial governors and Central
Bank chief Alfonso Prat Gay.

Considered a star pupil of free-market policies in the 1990s, Argentina
fell from grace with the IMF and United States after mismanagement led to
economic collapse at the end of 2001 when the country defaulted on $95
billion in debt.

The IMF drew heavy fire for its role in the crisis -- with many Argentines
saying their country made a major mistake by following the lender's
advice -- and for its failure to bail out the country. But six months ago,
the two sides managed to strike a $6.8-billion debt rollover deal, which
expires in August.

Latin America's No. 3 economy is one of the largest debtors to
multilateral lenders. Argentina owes $14 billion to the IMF and $31
billion to multilaterals as a whole.

Re: Monbiot on the WTO

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> I would rather call for the strengthening of the International Labor
> Organization than the WTO.  Any organization that emphasizes trade rather
> than people's lives is not likely to do much good.

=

I would second that as long as we can encourage people to ask about what kinds of 
freedom trade
facilitates in order to 'dig a bit deeper' into how we produce/create [un]freedoms. 
When lefties frame
the trade issue in terms of poverty eradication, democracy and ecological sanity, we 
can win the argument
every time. This is an issue that should play to our strengths.




> On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 08:27:06PM -0700, Sabri Oncu wrote:
> > Monbiot:
> >
> > I am not sure if I agree with this. It would have been nice of
> > course if we can transform the World Trade Organization (WTO)
> > into a Fair Trade Organization (FTO), but one question I have is
> > this:
> >
> > Is the WTO transformable into an FTO?

==

As I live in 'the North' I would rather hear from others even as I think that many in 
'the South' are
vehemently against the Bretton Woods paradigm, given my limited sampling of opinions. 
There's a new
cosmo-eco-politics struggling to be born that's not like what happened between 
1873-1918 and we need to
understand and help create it


> > Who knows where the road may lead us, only a fool would say
> > Who knows what's been lost along the way
> > Look for the promised land in all of the dreams we share
> > How will we know when we are there? How will we know?
> > <<
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Sabri



There is no promised land, there's evolution and us; an open-ended 
adventure.


Ian

Re: Saving the advertising industry in a fractured media-verse? Biz 2.0

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Tom Walker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> Carrol Cox wrote,
>
>
> > This "high and higher efforts" that Danto speaks of, leading to chaos,
> > must owe something to Laurel and Hardy as well. And of course Chaplin's
> > Modern Times. In fact to much of the great slapstick, 1915-1940.
>
> Yes, also constructivism and dada. As Walter Benjamin wrote: "Modernity; the
> time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going in
> this domain. What is at issue is not that "the same thing happens over and
> over" (much less is it a question here of eternal return), but rather that
> the face of the world, the colossal head, precisely in what is newest never
> alters --  that this "newest" remains, in every respect, the same"

==


Colossal Head -- by Los Lobos [a great cd which opens with wistful yearning about the 
revo, btw]

(David Hidalgo/Louie Pérez)


What big eyes you have
What big lips you have
What a nice hat
I love you

(Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya.)
What you said
I can't hear you
(Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya.)
(What you said)
(What you said)
Do the colossal head
(What you said)
(What you said)
Do the colossal head

(Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya.)
(Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya.)
(Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya.)
(Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya.)

Monbiot on the WTO

[Ian Murray]

I was wrong about trade

Our aim should not be to abolish the World Trade Organisation, but to
transform it

George Monbiot
Tuesday June 24, 2003
The Guardian

A few years ago I would have raised at least two cheers. The US
government, to judge by the aggressive noises now being made by its trade
negotiators, seems determined to wreck one of the most intrusive and
destructive of the instruments of global governance: the World Trade
Organisation. A few years ago, I would have been wrong.

The only thing worse than a world with the wrong international trade rules
is a world with no trade rules at all. George Bush seems to be preparing
to destroy the WTO at the next world trade talks in September not because
its rules are unjust, but because they are not unjust enough. He is
seeking to negotiate individually with weaker countries so that he can
force even harsher terms of trade upon them. He wants to replace a
multilateral trading system with an imperial one. And this puts the global
justice movement in a difficult position.

Our problem arises from the fact that, being a diverse movement, we have
hesitated to describe precisely what we want. We have called for fair
trade, but have failed, as a body, to specify how free that trade should
be, and how it should be regulated. As a result, in the rich world at
least, we have permitted the few who do possess a clearly formulated
policy to speak on our behalf. Those people are the adherents of a
doctrine called "localisation". I once supported it myself. I now accept
that I was wrong.

Localisation insists that everything which can be produced locally should
be produced locally. All nations should protect their economies by means
of trade taxes and legal barriers. The purpose of the policy is to grant
nations both economic and political autonomy, to protect cultural
distinctiveness and to prevent the damage done to the environment by
long-distance transport. Yet, when you examine the implications, you soon
discover that it is as coercive, destructive and unjust as any of the
schemes George Bush is cooking up.

My conversion came on the day I heard a speaker demand a cessation of most
forms of international trade and then, in answering a question from the
audience, condemn the economic sanctions on Iraq. If we can accept that
preventing trade with Iraq or, for that matter, imposing a trade embargo
on Cuba, impoverishes and in many cases threatens the lives of the people
of those nations, we must also accept that a global cessation of most
kinds of trade would have the same effect, but on a greater scale.

Trade, at present, is an improbable means of distributing wealth between
nations. It is characterised by coercive relationships between
corporations and workers, rich nations and poor. But it is the only
possible means. The money the poor world needs has to come from somewhere,
and if our movement rejects trade as the answer it is surely duty-bound to
find another.

The localisers don't rule out all international transactions. As Colin
Hines, who wrote their manifesto and helped to draft the Green party's
policy, accepts, "Some long-distance trade will still occur for those
sectors providing goods and services to other regions of the world that
can't provide such items from within their own borders, eg certain
minerals or cash crops". To earn foreign exchange from the rich world, in
other words, the poor world must export raw materials. This, of course, is
precisely the position from which the poor nations are seeking to escape.

Raw materials will always be worth less than manufactured products. Their
production also tends to reward only those who own the primary resource.
As the workers are unskilled, wages remain low. Every worker is
replaceable by any other, so they have no power in the marketplace. The
poor world, under this system, remains trapped in both the extractive
economy and - as a result - in its subordinate relationship to the rich
world.

Interestingly, Hines's prescription also damages precisely those interests
he seeks to protect. To earn sufficient foreign exchange to import the
goods they cannot produce themselves, the poor nations would need to
export more, not less, of their natural wealth, thus increasing their
contribution to climate change, soil erosion and the loss of biodiversity.
His policy also wipes out small farmers, who would be displaced from their
land by mechanised cash-cropping.

A still greater contradiction is this: that economic localisation relies
entirely upon enhanced political globalisation. Colin Hines's model
invents a whole new series of global bodies to impose localisation on
nation states, whether they like it or not. States would be forbidden, for
example, to "pass laws that diminish local control of industry and
services". Hines, in other words, prohibits precisely the kind of
political autonomy he claims to promote.

But above all, this doctrine is entirely unnecessary. There is a far
better means of protecting the

Re: FW: [PEN-L] On free trade Re: Query from a Venezuelan

[Ian Murray]

> Chris Burford writes:
> >The so-called free trade of the present period is no more than
> >international capital giving itself the freedom to price fix unhindered,
> >the freedom to exercise its plans without let, the freedom to use one
> >group of workers to compete against another on a world scale.
> >There is a historically progressive side to this and abstract opposition
> >or support is niether here nor there.

===

I would simply add that it is not so much international capital giving itself freedom, 
but the enormous commodification of
international law in order to trump law-policy making in a whole host of settings by 
nation-states. As Susan Sell points out
in a forthcoming book that expands on an essay she wrote a couple of years ago, the 
TRIPS agreement was designed by the
CEO's-legal staff of 12 US corps., handed to the US negotiators as they went to Punta 
del Este, given the free riding
blessing of Japanese and European corps. and then rammed down the throats of the 
world's peoples. It is this kind of behavior
that calls for making methodological nationalism -as one of the main assumptions 
behind free trade arguments- a much more
problematized concept than has hitherto been explored in political economy and 
international relations theory.


Ian

watching Greenspan

[Ian Murray]

Applause, please, for Alan the acrobat

Larry Elliott
Monday June 23, 2003
The Guardian

Actions speak louder than words, so we should know by Wednesday just how
seriously the Federal Reserve is taking the risk of deflation in the
United States.

The fact that financial markets are debating whether Alan Greenspan will
cut interest rates to 0.75% or "merely" to 1% tells its own story. The Fed
is taking the threat very seriously indeed.

Nor do the markets believe that the anti-deflation package will end there.
They are looking for Greenspan to signal that the US authorities will
start buying back government bonds, a move that would reduce bond yields
and so bring down long-term interest rates for companies and individuals.
As John Shepperd of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein said last week, the Fed
is insisting that the US should be safe from deflation yet is prepared to
act to make sure that it is right.

"The acrobat should not fall, implies Greenspan, but the safety net has
been taken out, fully checked, and has been firmly tied in place."

Deflation threat
This is a sensible move. Winning the war against Saddam Hussein was the
easy bit; the right image for the global economy is not that of a formula
one car with the pedal to the metal - rather a trick cyclist wobbling
across a high wire. A safety net seems a very good idea.

The DKW team thinks it quite possible that interest rates in the US will
stay below 1% for the next two years, that rates in the eurozone will hit
1% once the European Central Bank realises the extent of the deflationary
threat, and that rates in the UK will come down to 3.25%. These rates are
extraordinarily low by any standards, but rather than being evidence of a
global economy in glowing health are a sign of how close it is to severe
trouble.

"We are not quite at deflation but we are close," eminent American
economist Lester Thurow said in London last week. Computerisation,
offshore production, outsourcing, deregulation, privatisation - the full
nine yards of globalisation, in other words - had resulted in excess
capacity in every industry in the world, he said.

In an environment where inflation is already low, excess capacity plus
inadequate demand equals a big risk of deflation, the biggest since the
depression. Given that the 1930s have left an indelible mark on the
conduct of US economic policy ever since, it is hardly surprising that
Greenspan should be worried.

He dropped a pretty broad hint about his concerns earlier this month, when
he said he had "not yet seen any major impetus to a pick up", adding that
the Fed was "far more inclined... to be taking out insurance against
economic weakness" and saw the need for a "wider firebreak" to contain
deflationary forces. The warning signs are certainly there. Japan's
descent into deflation was presaged by its measure of core inflation,
excluding food, shelter and housing costs, with a broader measure of price
changes following it down after a lag. The US seems to be following a
similar pattern, with core inflation excluding housing and medical care
rising only marginally above zero in recent months.

This may seem strange at a time when the US economy is still expanding,
but the problem is that it is not living up to its potential. There is
downward pressure on prices all the time that actual output falls short of
potential output, and the size of this output gap is growing. At some
point disinflation - ever lower levels of inflation - turns into deflation
unless something stops it.

Greenspan rightly appears unconvinced by those who argue that Japan was a
special case and that therefore it could not happen in the west. As Graham
Turner explains in his timely new book about the Japanese descent into
deflation, the root cause of its difficul ties lay in "unbridled
speculation, excessive borrowing and overinvestment". The US has had all
three. Personal sector borrowing in the US is now well above the levels
witnessed at the time of the Wall Street crash of 1929, and falling
interest rates have not resulted in lower debt servicing costs because the
level of borrowing has risen so quickly.

And, as Japan showed, once inflation turns negative, the real cost of
borrowing rises because nominal interest rates cannot fall below zero. In
those circumstances, the real value of debt increases, consumers stop
spending in anticipation of even lower prices and companies go bust
because the "stickiness of wages" means the cost of labour falls far less
quickly than prices, thereby leading to big falls in profitability. Even
when prices were falling at 15% a year in the depression, wages - for
those lucky enough to be employed - were still going up, Thurow said last
week.

Various reasons have been put forward to explain why the US will not be
the new Japan, but Turner argues that none of them is especially
convincing. While it is true that the Fed has moved more rapidly to bring
down short term interest rates, US companies have not seen any fal

Cancun

[Ian Murray]

Can-do at Cancun is actually can't

Duncan Green
Monday June 23, 2003
The Guardian

The world's trade bureaucrats seem gripped by acute historical amnesia as
they prepare for September's global trade summit in Cancun, Mexico.

Both short and long term memory have been affected. Just 18 months ago, at
the previous summit of the World Trade Organisation in Doha, they fell
over themselves in promising a "development agenda" that would bring real
benefits to poor countries.

They undertook to sort out global agriculture, which sees subsidised crops
from Europe and America dumped on the world market with devastating impact
for the 97% of the globe's farmers who live in developing countries; they
would ensure that the poorest countries were not forced to pay through the
nose for essential medicines; and they would deal with a long list of
developing country complaints about WTO rules.

Every deadline set in Doha has been missed, not one issue has been
resolved, and the trade negotiators at the WTO headquarters in Geneva seem
to have forgotten the "development agenda" entirely, reverting to business
as usual horse trading based on economic and political clout. Long term
memory loss seems even more acute. Blithely ignoring how they themselves
developed, the EU - and in particular the British government - is now
proposing a new WTO agreement on investment that would restrict other
countries' abilities to follow the path to development.

A survey published today* of the history of now developed countries in
North America, the EU and East Asia shows that when they were poor nations
setting out on the road to prosperity, all of them imposed regulations on
foreign investment in order to ensure that it contributed to their long
term development.

These findings are particularly important because the main "demandeurs" of
investment negotiations in the WTO - the EU and Japan - insist that the
WTO "core principle" of national treatment (that is, that treatment of
foreign investors should be no less favourable than that for domestic
firms) should be a central aspect of any agreement.

Almost all of the now developed countries once restricted foreign
investment. When it was permitted, governments placed requirements on
incoming firms, such as obliging them to form joint ventures with local
companies.

Only once domestic industry had reached a certain level of sophistication
and competitiveness did governments move towards a greater degree of
non-discrimination and deregulation. Such liberalisation is an outcome of
development, not a cause.

British and European commission officials counter that any WTO investment
agreement will be flexible, with developing countries allowed to
discriminate in favour of locally owned industries where they need to. But
since non-discrimination is a "core principle" of the WTO, however much
flexibility is initially provided, there will be an inevitable tendency to
chip away at developing countries' national policy space.

Despite the lessons of history and widespread opposition from developing
countries, the EU is trying to bludgeon them into accepting an expansion
of trade talks at Cancun to include investment and a number of other new
issues. The danger is that this will provoke a collapse of the entire Doha
round of trade talks - taking with it the crucial development gains that
were promised in Doha but never delivered.

The WTO seems incapable of reaching agreement outside the diplomatic
pressure cooker of summit meetings. The answer therefore has to be "shrink
or sink". The EU should ditch its demands for the WTO's expansion and call
for the Cancun summit to concentrate on agriculture, patents on medicines,
and special treatment for developing countries. Until those issues are
resolved, nothing else should be allowed on to the table.

A switch to this two-stage approach would stand a much better chance of
delivering on development, could introduce new momentum into the
negotiations and would be a clear signal of the commitment to making this
a genuine "development round".

* The Northern WTO Agenda on Investment: Do as we say, not as we did,
Ha-Joon Chang and Duncan Green, South Centre/Cafod, June 2003.

· Duncan Green is a public policy analyst at the Catholic aid agency,
Cafod

Re: WTO--hypocrisy, yada yada yada

[Ian Murray]

[yet more ridiculous EU bashing; only a matter of time before everyone
outside the USA is considered a threat]


washingtonpost.com
How Europe Sows Misery in Africa
By Kevin A. Hassett and Robert Shapiro
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page B03


The average person in sub-Saharan Africa earns less than $1 a day. The
average cow in Europe -- thanks to government subsidies -- earns about $2
a day. And therein lies a tale of the power of European farm interests,
and the weakness of African economies.

A burgeoning volume of economics literature argues that the largest
factors stunting African economic development include not only disease,
drought, warfare and mismanagement, but also the European Union's "Common
Agricultural Policy," or CAP. Why? Because the EU's policy has spawned
subsidies and tariffs that have richly rewarded European farms and swollen
European food output, while depressing world food prices and undercutting
African exports.

Yet the economic evidence of harm in Africa has elicited nary a peep,
squawk or moo from the EU. Over the past two weeks, European agriculture
ministers have been haggling over changes in the CAP, which now consumes
some 40 billion euros, roughly half of the EU budget. The EU farm
commissioner has proposed trimming subsidies, but France rejected the deal
with Germany's support, and the proposal was shelved.

This deadlock in Europe spells misery in Africa. Take Malawi, for example.
Its economy is in shambles: CAP tariffs and quotas keep its chief exports,
corn and sorghum, out of European markets; CAP export subsidies help
European producers crowd out Malawi sales in third-country markets; and
CAP price supports drive down the prices that Malawi crops can fetch
abroad by driving up European production.

President Bush has blamed Europe's policies barring imports of genetically
modified food for prolonging famine in Africa by discouraging Africa's use
of such food varieties. But the suffering in Africa goes on and on because
of a more conventional chain of distortions caused by the CAP. Economic
development stalls without investment; investment usually won't expand
unless demand rises first; and demand won't expand in sub-Saharan Africa,
where more than 60 percent of the labor force works in agriculture, unless
agricultural income grows. By preventing much of Africa from developing
its agricultural resources, the CAP hurts the continent's ability to
attract the financial, technological and human capital to drive economic
and social progress.

Africa is particularly vulnerable to EU farm subsidies because proximity
and decades of colonial and post-colonial relations make Europe and Africa
efficient trading partners, in the same way the United States naturally
dominates trade with Latin America. While the U.S. government can also be
faulted for subsidizing farm products, EU farm subsidies dwarf our own in
most areas. The result is that while once-poor Asians and Latin Americans
grow more prosperous, more than 659 million people in sub-Saharan Africa
(excluding South Africa) are stuck with annual incomes averaging $320,
life expectancies of less than 50 years, and little prospect of ever doing
much better.

Driving this dynamic is a tawdry system of large agribusinesses thriving
on government largess at the expense of the world's most vulnerable
people. This injustice is sustained because politicians receive their
share of the profits. It is a perfect money machine. The CAP sets price
guarantees far higher than world prices or production costs. So
agribusinesses produce as much as they can and dump whatever is left over
on markets in developing countries. To be certain that low-cost countries
don't undercut them abroad, European producers also receive hefty export
subsidies to add to their fat domestic profits. To close the circle,
politicians seeking reelection know whom to call for financial support.

The dairy market is one of the starkest examples of EU excess. Thanks to
CAP subsidies for cows, milk production dominates Europe's agricultural
sector and European milk products flood many developing markets. A French
or German agribusiness produces a ton of butter and, under CAP price
guarantees, receives more than 3,250 euros (currently about $3,800) while
the wholesale price of a ton of butter in America today is less than
$1,400. The 3,250 euros belong to those agribusinesses regardless of
market prices or conditions, so it's no surprise that European dairy
production far outstrips European demand.

CAP subsidies also guarantee that butter from dairy-producing African
nations such as Botswana or Gabon can't compete with Europe's high-priced
spreads. Europe's "butter mountains" weigh heavily on international
markets. As a result of the CAP , which places a 153 percent tariff on
foreign-produced butter, Botswanan and Gabonese dairy producers never get
more than a small slice of the EU market.

Even though population density, weather, and the cost of capital and labor
all 

Re: property rights

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> very interesting, but this sort of crap did not interest the right wing
> when Blacks were moved out.



Nor any other non-WASP groups.

property rights

[Ian Murray]

In Ohio, a Test for Eminent Domain
Rights vs. Renewal at Stake in Case

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page A03


LAKEWOOD, Ohio -- The mayor of this aging Cleveland suburb knows that her
plan looks heartless.

Still, Mayor Madeline A. Cain wants to demolish the handsome house where
Jim and Joann Saleet have lived for 38 years, where they reared four
children and where, on fine summer evenings, they sit on the porch and
listen to their beloved Indians play baseball. The house, said Joann
Saleet, 72, has "all our memories in it."

The mayor and the city council want the house razed, along with about 50
other houses and four apartment buildings, to make way for a $151 million
shopping, movie and townhouse complex. If they get their way, a Wild Oats
organic market will rise on the Saleet's bulldozed memories, and pay taxes
that Lakewood desperately needs.

"No one wants to see people lose their homes, but this is absolutely
necessary for our future," Cain said.

Echoing the views of many national experts on urban development, Cain said
suburbs such as Lakewood can either break a few hearts by using the power
of eminent domain or they can go the dismal way of Cleveland, the
overtaxed, depopulated city next door.

Lakewood's scheme to deepen its future tax base, however, is up against
more than just the heart-rending tale of Jim and Joann Saleet and their
little house. This suburb of 58,000 people is locking legal horns with a
Washington-based libertarian think tank that is leading a nationwide
crusade against eminent domain.

The Institute for Justice, fortified with $6 million to pursue the case,
has jumped on the Lakewood development plan as a test case to challenge
what the institute describes as a growing national outrage: Towns using
eminent domain to take private property from middle-class homeowners and
businesses to turn it over to rich private developers.

"Everybody's home would produce more tax revenue as an office building,"
said Dana Berliner, senior attorney at the institute. "And I am sure that
criminal prosecutions would be more efficient if we got rid of the Bill of
Rights. But that is not the way we do things in this country."

Berliner is the author of a nationwide study that gathers together what
she says are 10,000 examples of municipalities misusing eminent domain. In
about 3,700 of these cases, she writes, homeowners and small businesses
have been forced to sell their property to private developers.

The Institute for Justice is representing 17 families in Lakewood without
charge. It has asked a local court to halt the condemnation of their
property. Berliner said she would love to take this case to the Ohio
Supreme Court and to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It is so obviously an excuse by the town to take property and give it to
a developer," she said.

The Constitution and most state constitutions grant municipalities the
right to compel the sale of private land at a fair price, if it is for
public use.

But the definition of public use has changed substantially in the past
half century, according to Gideon Kanner, professor emeritus at Loyola Law
School in Los Angeles and editor of a newsletter that reviews eminent
domain cases.

The change began slowly, Kanner said, after a 1954 Supreme Court ruling on
slum removal in the District of Columbia. The court ruled that the
District, to clean up blight in Southwest Washington, could use its power
of eminent domain on an area-wide basis and did not have to engage in a
house-by-house assessment of blight.

Before the decision, eminent domain was primarily used to make way for
highways, courthouses and schools. But since the high court ruling,
according to Kanner, who has reviewed tens of thousands of these cases,
the power has increasingly been used to demolish private houses and small
businesses for the construction of townhouse complexes, skyscrapers and
big-box retailers. Private newcomers almost always pay substantially
higher taxes than their demolished predecessors.

"It is a racket," said Kanner, who over the years has become what he calls
an angry critic of the process. "Towns are misusing the power of eminent
domain in an effort to raise money, which they should properly be doing
with taxes."

Experts on urban development strongly disagree with Kanner. They are
alarmed by what they see as a growing movement by libertarians and
conservatives to ratchet back eminent domain.

"Cities only have so many options," said Bruce Katz, director of the
Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution.
"Eminent domain is a critical tool for cities that are depopulated. It is
a way for them to protect the interests of all the citizens in a community
by ensuring that the future tax base is secure."

Katz and other experts say that Lakewood is a national example of how to
manage an older, inner-ring suburb. The schools and library are highly
rated, services are considered good and housing values

Re: Query from a Venezuelan

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Hoover" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

<<<>>>

primary sources:
alexander hamilton, 'report on manufacturing'...

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/text/civ/1791manufactures.html



henry clay, _papers of henry clay_ (there's a number of volumes, i'm away
from my stuff so can't direct you to which of them contains his writings
on economic nationalism, government subsidies, high tariffs)...

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1851-1875/carey/harmxx.htm

Enronization and oxymorons

[Ian Murray]

Sherron Watkins, one of the world's best known whistleblowers, takes a wry
view of corporate morality. "I don't think Enron is that unusual," she
says of one of the biggest corporate scandals of recent years. "After all,
we have a chief executive class which act like dictators of small Latin
American countries."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,982216,00.html

crony capitalism redux [protection rents]

[Ian Murray]

Economic Strengths Belie Area Weakness
Sectors Without Government Ties Mirror U.S. Slump

By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2003; Page A01


By many measures, the Washington area has the strongest economy in the
nation. The region has the lowest unemployment rate of any major city, a
lower proportion of empty office buildings than most and is gaining jobs
at a steady clip even as the rest of the nation loses them.

Yet many local businesses say conditions remain lousy, discouraging them
from hiring and dampening their plans to expand.

That's because the portion of the local economy tied to government
agencies is booming, while the rest is suffering as badly as the rest of
the nation and faring worse in some industries, according to economists,
businesspeople and employment figures.

Government spending appears to be almost solely responsible for keeping
the region above water in the economic slump of the past three years.
Hiring by governments and contractors is the main reason for the area's
relatively low jobless rate of 3.4 percent, just over half the national
rate in April, the most recent month for which data were available.

"We've grown dramatically," said Robert Epstein, president of AboutWeb
LLC, a Vienna firm that provides technology services mainly to government
agencies. Epstein has doubled his staff in the past year to 40 workers.

Meanwhile, local businesses without ties to government sound like they are
in a different town.

Only 7 percent of Washington area companies plan to hire more workers this
summer, compared with 20 percent nationwide, according to a recent survey
by Manpower Inc. Local employment offices report that the number of people
filing for unemployment benefits at roughly at the same elevated level as
a year ago.

Conditions for many firms that market products to other businesses remain
tough. Sales of office furniture and business equipment in Northern
Virginia were down 13 percent in the first three months of the year,
compared with the same period of 2002, according to sales tax records.

"This is the worst I've ever seen it," said Charles Voith, chairman of
District Lithograph Co. in Forestville, Md., and a commercial printer
since 1947, voicing a sentiment echoed by businesspeople in a variety of
industries.

Local telecommunications employers, still suffering through a prolonged
slump in demand, trimmed their payrolls by 9.5 percent in the year ended
in April, according to the Labor Department. Telecom employment nationwide
dropped by only 5.8 percent in that span. Area manufacturers cut their
payrolls by 5 percent, compared with a 4.1 percent reduction nationally.

Washington area accounting, tax-preparation and payroll-service firms cut
7.8 percent of their jobs, even as such companies expanded 5.8 percent
nationwide.

In contrast, jobs in industries tied to the government are multiplying
much faster in Washington than elsewhere. Direct employment by government
rose 2.1 percent in this area but only 0.4 percent nationally. Employment
in computer system design and related services, a category that is
dominated by the region's vast supply of federal computing systems
contractors, grew 4.9 percent in the Washington area but shrank 1.7
percent nationally.

Government contracting is also helping to prop up some parts of the local
economy, such as commercial banking.

SunTrust Bank has seen an increase in technology companies borrowing money
to expand their staffs in order to fulfill government contracts, said
Peter F. Nostrand, Washington area president of SunTrust Bank and chairman
of the Greater Washington Board of Trade. "We haven't seen double-digit
loan growth in this area for quite some time, but we're seeing it this
year," he said.

The commercial real estate business has also benefited from recent
government spending. The local office vacancy rate of 12.8 percent, while
higher than two years ago, is lower than the rate in many other
metropolitan areas. In Northern Virginia, the glut of office space has
been eased slightly by several big leases to government contractors in the
past several months. BAE Systems, Unisys Corp. and Titan Corp. have leased
a combined 723,000 square feet of office space in Reston since April.

"Tenants are still being very cautious, but finally some demand is out
there, especially from users that are driven by the government," said
Joseph Stettinius Jr., director of brokerage at Trammell Crow Co.

According to the George Mason University Center for Regional Analysis,
federal spending in the region rose 10.4 percent last year, pumping an
additional $8.4 billion into the local economy. Not surprisingly, spending
on homeland security and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is part of the
reason for government-related businesses' gains. Much of that came through
procurement, including an extra $1.8 billion in technology and
professional services.

But overall, the ripple effects of government spending have been
disappoint

misrepresenting China

[Ian Murray]

Goodbye to China

Rapid change in Beijing is about to shatter our crude cold war cliches

John Gittings
Saturday June 21, 2003
The Guardian

I thought for a moment that I was going to be "liberated by the masses"
from my temporary jail in the north Chinese countryside. The wooden doors
to the courtyard where I was being held were flung open by three or four
broad-shouldered peasants who advanced upon my captors: a crowd of
murmuring villagers followed them. Their advance slowed to an uncertain
halt. Faced with the village policeman and some junior police officers
from the nearby town, my new friends hesitated and, without a word on
either side, drifted back outside again.

I was left to contemplate my crime: I had not applied for permission
(which I knew I would be refused) to visit this village. I would have to
wait for more senior officials to arrive so that I could be interrogated,
sign a ritual confession, and be put back on the night express to Beijing.
It was dark before they came, and we had to do the stern questioning and
the confession by candlelight. When I finally left, the peasant crowd was
still milling restlessly outside under the stars,

The villagers' silent protest reflected the deep hostility felt by many
rural Chinese towards the cadres who so often bully and over-tax them.
They did not know whether I had broken the law or not, but they were on my
side.

Yet the lesson is not that China is ruled by a totalitarian machine with
an all-powerful grip. If I had not lingered in the village too long and
been caught by the local cop, no one in Beijing would have complained
about the story that I wrote afterwards. Chinese bureaucrats usually do
not want to be bothered - and many believe the rules are outdated anyhow.
One young official with the job of monitoring what the British press
writes about China regularly tones down his summaries: "There's no point
in upsetting some old guy among the top leaders," he explains.

A quarter of a century after Mao Zedong died (and since I began to report
regularly from China) the country is still in a process of uneven
transition where the reality is often not what it seems. Trying to
understand this is made harder by the wooden propaganda in which the
Communist party is always "great, glorious and correct". It is equally
complicated by the crude stereotypes - often dating back to the cold war -
that still mould many western perceptions of China.

Too often the complexities of life in China are reduced to what I came to
call, during my last five years' reporting from Hong Kong and Shanghai,
the "babies-in-ditch" cliche. Yes, babies, especially unwanted female
ones, do get abandoned: they also get sold. (The village where I was
arrested was a baby-selling centre: the story had already been exposed in
the Chinese press.) Yet babies also get rescued from ditches and from the
dealers, by passers-by and by dedicated welfare officials and police. Many
of them get adopted too - often by couples who "want a girl". In a village
outside Beijing, disabled children from a city orphanage were fostered by
rich farming families who did not really need the modest subsidy they
gained. Once the kids reached 16, they were supposed to go back to the
city, but the house mothers had a different idea. "They've become part of
the family now: we can't let them go!"

The foreign media exposes - rightly - the plight of the millions of
Chinese workers laid off with miserable benefits from failing state-owned
industries. Yet for years western diplomatic sources, quoted by the same
media, have insisted that China's readiness to dismantle its
"unprofitable" state industrial sector is a key test of its "commitment to
reform". We have drawn attention - correctly - to the pitiful state of
China's rural medical services which would be quite unable to cope if the
Sars virus spread deep into the countryside. Yet when China took the
quasi-capitalist road under the rule of Deng Xiaoping, there was
widespread applause for its wholesale rejection of the socialist values of
the past - including the rural "barefoot doctors" whose absence is now
deplored.

In judging Chinese foreign policy too, Beijing's "rationality" is too
often measured by a partisan pro-US yardstick. In 1999 it was accused of
stirring up xenophobia when many Chinese objected loudly to the American
bombing of their embassy in Belgrade. Their genuine anger at the US
spy-plane episode in April 2001 was also said to have been orchestrated.
The real surprise should have been the speed with which Beijing patched up
the dispute with a new US administration that had already sounded an
unfriendly note towards China.

On the night of September 11, China was accused of reacting callously
because the state TV did not carry live coverage from New York (though
several provincial stations that I watched in Shanghai pirated CNN to do
so). The reality was that China joined the US-led "war on terror" very
quickly, and has kept its criticism of the I

Walden Bello on WTO/Cancun

[Ian Murray]

http://www.flonnet.com
Volume 20 - Issue 13, June 21 - July 04, 2003
WORLD AFFAIRS
A round of uncertainty
WALDEN BELLO

As the next ministerial of the WTO approaches, schisms have begun to
surface between contending parties. The Cancun meet is shaping up to be
another Seattle.

ONLY a little over 12 weeks remain before the tourist haven of Cancun in
Mexico plays host to the Fifth Ministerial of the World Trade Organisation
(WTO) in early September. But the negotiations, which have been going on
in Geneva, are practically at a stalemate. A feeling is taking hold that
Cancun will not be another Doha, where cooperation between the United
States and the European Union in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks
helped the acceptance of an agenda for limited trade negotiations.

The current state of affairs is reflected in the polarised situation in
the negotiations on agriculture. The controversial Harbinson Draft for a
new Agreement on Agriculture (prepared by Agricultural Negotiations
Chairman Stuart Harbinson) remains an orphan. The U.S. and the Cairns
Group of developed and developing country agro-exporters consider the
tariff reductions it has proposed too shallow while the E.U. and Japan see
them as too deep. Developing countries are concerned that the draft
requires substantial tariff cuts from them. They are also demanding a
broadening of Harbinson's "strategic products" proposal, which currently
reserves just a few staple foods for shallower tariff cuts.

A negative development is that the E.U. and the U.S., in pushing for
negotiating advantage, have split the ranks of the developing world. The
developing countries in the Cairns Group, such as Brazil, Uruguay and
Thailand, are siding with the U.S. against the E.U. and Japan. The E.U.
has hit back by gaining the support of India and many other developing
countries for a counter-proposal for agricultural liberalisation that
would replicate the allegedly more flexible liberalization formula of the
Uruguay Round.

The long and short of it is that it is very unlikely that there will be an
agreement on the modalities of the agricultural negotiations before
Cancun.

In the controversy over Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) and public health, there has been no give on the part of
the U.S. In defiance of the Doha Declaration, it continues to maintain its
position that only in the case of drugs for three diseases - Human
Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection-Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
(AIDS), malaria and tuberculosis - should patent rights be loosened. In
its negotiating discourse, Washington is now talking about loosening
patent rights for "public health crises" instead of "public health
problems". U.S. negotiators have reportedly told their developing country
counterparts that they cannot change their positions, and if the latter
want any movement in the negotiations, they should talk directly to the
pharmaceutical giants! Another disturbing occurrence is that WTO
Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi himself is spreading the blame for
the stalemate from the U.S. to Brazil and India, whose manufacturers, he
alleges, will be the ones that will principally benefit from looser patent
rights.

On the controversial "new issues" - investment, competition policy,
government procurement, and trade facilitation - the E.U. is trying to
delink the decision to commence negotiations on these issues from the
moves on the part of the E.U. to liberalise agriculture. The governments
of rich countries have intensified their campaign to convince the
governments of developing countries, which are wary of negotiating these
issues, that liberalisation in these areas is for their own good. To bring
about some movement, the U.S, has reportedly proposed to "unbundle" the
four areas so that negotiations could proceed on them separately. The E.U.
has publicly agreed with the U.S., but its preference is still to take the
four areas together.

The E.U. is also sidestepping developing countries' concerns about
substantive modalities, preferring to narrow down the negotiations on
modalities to be agreed on in Cancun to procedural ones - how many
meetings should be held, and so on. Not surprisingly, this has been
criticised by developing countries as an attempt to elicit from them a
blank cheque to start negotiations without first agreeing on the substance
of these negotiations.

In two key negotiating areas of great interest to developing countries,
there has been absolutely no movement. These are the issues of Special and
Differential Treatment and Implementation. On the latter, interestingly,
at a meeting with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangkok a few
weeks ago, Pascal Lamy, Trade Commissioner of the E.U., placed the blame
squarely on developing countries, whom he accused of not being able to
agree on what the two or three top priorities regarding implementation
were that need to be tackled were.

What does all this add up to? What doe

the Beltway bubble

[Ian Murray]

washingtonpost.com
A Beltway Bubble About To Burst?
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, June 20, 2003; Page E01


Haven't we seen this before?

Industry gets hot. Big companies buy up medium- size ones, egged on by
Wall Street investment bankers peddling the idea that only the big will
survive. Sky-high prices are justified by predictions of double-digit
growth and economies of scale that never quite materialize. To meet
projections, merged companies take on low-margin business and more risk.
Market tanks.

This time, it's not the Internet or telecom but government contracting.
Things got going last year with a couple of hot IPOs and Northrop's dogged
pursuit of TRW. Then Computer Sciences Corp. joined in with its surprising
play for Dyncorp, a company much better known for running supply depots
than CSC-like computer works. Now the latest sign of this Beltway Bubble
is General Dynamics' purchase of Veridian for $1.5 billion, a rich 35
times earnings.

Certainly the government is egging on this consolidation not only by
outsourcing more of its work but by doing it in bigger chunks. The larger
contracts are driven by the government's push to have compatible
technology across entire agencies and a desire to use a single contractor
to manage all the little contracts it used to manage itself. But the jury
is still out on whether all this bigness is a good idea.

For one thing, when things go wrong it results in big-time screw-ups, like
EDS's costly nightmare trying to network the Navy or CSC's continuing
travails at the IRS.

It is also not clear whether bigness beyond a certain point delivers any
economies of scale. Mid-size firms more often have lower overhead costs
and higher profit margins while retaining the ability to adjust more
quickly to changing technology and customer requirements. Some experts
also warn that if the current trend continues, the government will be left
with a contractor base consisting of a small-business set-aside ghetto and
a handful of expensive, lumbering giants.

One company that has managed to get big without getting caught up in the
frenzy or taking on too much bureaucratic baggage is Science Applications
International Corp. Although little known outside the industry, SAIC is
greatly feared and respected within it, with nearly two-thirds of its $6
billion in revenue coming from government contracts. Although based in San
Diego, it has 14,000 Washington area employees.

SAIC's range is extraordinary. It is currently organizing security for the
2004 Olympic Games in Athens, conducting medical research at the National
Cancer Institute, designing the Army's next-generation combat systems,
tracking nasty biological agents for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, and getting radio and TV stations up and running in Iraq.

SAIC scored big time by buying Network Solutions, the official registrar
of Internet addresses, and then selling it off over the next few years for
a profit in excess of $3 billion. But for the most part, SAIC's technique
is to pick up a couple of dozen small companies each year and let them
operate independently, while tapping into their technology and government
contacts. As a result of this decentralization, it has not been uncommon
for several SAIC units to compete for the same contract.

SAIC is also employee-owned, with large blocks of private stock handed out
as bonuses each year and employees free to buy and sell shares. The result
is a driven, entrepreneurial culture that is the source of SAIC's ability
to attract top talent, stay close to its customers and turn in consistent
growth. According to industry executives, it is also the source of a
ruthlessness that makes other firms think twice before signing on as a
subcontractor for SAIC or joining with it in bidding on a contract.

For 34 years, the man responsible for setting the tone has been SAIC's
charismatic founder, J. Robert Beyster. Now, at 78, Beyster has announced
his retirement, with no obvious successor in the wings. Many in the
industry wonder whether anyone will else will be able to hold together his
far-flung empire and resist the allure of Wall Street while maintaining
SAIC's place in the top tier of government contractors.

Steven Pearlstein can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Boeing fashion apparel

[Ian Murray]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/ [front page]

you can enlarge the photo too.

Re: market competition fails again

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 9:57 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] market competition fails again


> I wrote:
> > > it would be a useful to create a list of all of the
> > different situations
> > in
> > > which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts.
>
> Ian wries:
> > Bad results for who? Didn't the networks make some serious $ from
> > advertisers?
>
> for whom? for everyday people (i.e., consumers and/or workers), of
course.
>

=

Well if we're moving beyond the case suggested from your quoting of the
Guardian piece, wouldn't the list be as long as all the things that go
wrong with the human body as a result of living?



Ian

Re: market competition fails again

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> From "The war, brought to you by the White House" by John Willis, Friday
> June 20, 2003, The Guardian: >The lesson from America is that, if news
and
> public affairs are left purely to the market, it will most likely give
the
> government what it wants.<

===

Doesn't the above assertion naively imply that news 'makers'  [the
networks] ought not have Machiavellian motivations themselves, some which
mesh with Gov. policies and some which don't?



> it would be a useful to create a list of all of the different situations
in
> which market competition leads to bad results of various sorts.
>



Bad results for who? Didn't the networks make some serious $ from
advertisers?


Just askin'


Ian

Re: Query from a Venezuelan

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 6:57 AM
Subject: [PEN-L] Query from a Venezuelan


Dear Louis Proyect,

I am an Argentinean friend of Néstor Gorojoski. I am working for the
Government of Venezuela.

Venezuela is in the middle of a process of industrialization, and the
government is taking an active and protectionist economic policy to
achieve this objective (high import tariffs, control exchange rate,
substitutions of major imports...).

We need to explain the Venezuelan people that we are just copying the
American historic protectionist policy to achieve economic development.

We are looking for BIBLIOGRAPHY that explains how the United States
develop its industries through protectionism since 1770 (specially
during its first years -1770 to 1810-).

Thanks very much Louis,

FC

===

See:

"Opening America's Markets: US Foreign Trade Since 1776" by Alfred Eckes
Jr. [ a meticulous history of protectionism/free trade policies and public
debates with loads of references ]

"Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective"
by Ha-Joon Chang [for a somewhat larger perspective]


Ian

biotech trade talks

[Ian Murray]

[NYTimes]
June 20, 2003
Talks Collapse on U.S. Efforts to Open Europe to Biotech Food
By DAVID LEONHARDT


WASHINGTON, June 19 - Talks between the United States and the European
Union over opening up Europe to genetically modified foods broke down in
Geneva today, the Bush administration announced, heightening
trans-Atlantic tensions.

American officials said they would soon request that the World Trade
Organization convene a panel to hear their case, in an effort to end a ban
that farm groups say is depriving agricultural businesses of hundreds of
billions of dollars a year.

The Bush administration called Europe's policy illegal, saying that
scientific research had shown genetically altered crops to be safe. The
European Union "denies choices to European consumers," Richard Mills, a
spokesman for the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick,
said in a statement today.

European officials said the long-term effects of altered food remained
uncertain. They said they were disappointed by the administration's
publicizing of the dispute.

The food dispute is one of a handful of trade fights between the United
States and Europe and comes as tensions linger over the war in Iraq, which
many European countries opposed. Trade officials also continue to haggle
over steel tariffs imposed by the Bush administration last year, farm
subsidies on both sides of the Atlantic, and an American law that reduces
taxes for companies with overseas operations, among other issues.

"There have never been more of these litigations than there are right
now," Robert E. Lighthizer, a trade lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate,
Meagher & Flom in Washington, said of the disputes. He said the
relationship was "extremely contentious."

American and European officials met in Geneva today for a round of
negotiations, known as a consultation, after the United States filed suit
at the W.T.O. over the issue last month. Today's announcement means that
the trade organization will soon begin selecting a panel of judges to hear
 the case, although a decision is likely to take months.

Genetically modified food - which can grow more quickly than traditional
crops and can be resistant to insects - has caused scant controversy in
the United States, where people eat it every day. Almost 40 percent of all
corn planted in this country in genetically modified.

In Europe, however, the environmental movement is more powerful, and a
series of food problems, including mad cow disease, have made people far
more skeptical of assurances of safety from governments and businesses.
Some food packages there bear the label "GM free," and the initials are
well enough known to be used regularly in headlines in British newspapers.

The European Commission has permitted the use of some genetically modified
foods, like soybeans, in the last decade, but has effectively placed a
moratorium on most new products.

The Bush administration and agricultural businesses view the policy as
simple protectionism because American companies, which dominate the
biotechnology industry,would benefit most from lifting the ban. Without
it, American companies would export about $300 billion more in corn each
year than they do now, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Scientific research has generally shown that genetically modified foods do
not cause health problems.

"Countries shouldn't be able to erect barriers for nonscientific reasons,"
Don Lipton, a spokesman for the farm federation, said. "That's a very
important principle in international trade."

In a speech last month, President Bush escalated the dispute by saying
that Europe's policy was undermining efforts to fight hunger in Africa.
African nations, fearing their products would be shunned by Europe, are
avoiding developing genetically modified food that might help feed the
continent, he said. "European governments should join, not hinder, the
great cause of ending hunger in Africa," he said in the speech.

European diplomats reacted angrily to Mr. Bush's comments, saying that
their health concerns were serious and noting that European nations spend
a greater part of their budget on foreign aid than the United States.

European officials have also said that they are surprised that the United
States has highlighted the dispute recently. This summer, the European
Parliament is scheduled to consider a measure that would establish strict
labeling rules for genetically modified products, which could allow more
of them to be sold.

Europe's resistance to modified crops received a political lift last week
when a global treaty restricting them was approved. Although it is not
clear what effect the treaty, known as the Cartagena Protocol on
Biosafety, will have on the trade dispute, it is likely to make it easier
for countries to restrict importing the crops, trade experts say.

The United States, worried about the treaty's impact on American
exporters, agreed only reluctantly to support it when it was negotiated in

Re: against Chandler's Visible Hand

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> Bryce, Robert. 2002. Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, Jealousy and the Death of
> Enron with What Went Wrong at Enron Today (PublicAffairs).
> 222: "Skilling was able to convince a nearly constant parade of
reporters
> that Enron's trading business was invincible.  Other companies were
going
> to explode as Enron figured out how to buy and sell every part of an
> individual company's traditional business.  Enron was going to
> intermediate everything, commoditize everything.  Just as Ford Motor
> Company didn't have to own the steel mill to build cars, Enron was going
> to speed the breakup of business in the world into its individual parts.
> "We believe that markets are the best way to order or organize an
> industrial enterprise, " Skilling told the Financial Times in June 2000.
> "You are going to see the deintegration (sic) of the business systems we
> have all grown up with." Durgin and Skinner, "Inside Track: The Guru of
> Decentralisation."



Which is why Harvard Business School is a greater threat to capitalism, on
its own terms, than any English Dept. ever could be.


Ian

Re: Complexity

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Sabri Oncu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> Barkley:
>
> > Today, chaos theory is just normal science.
>
> Exactly! And a good one I would say.
>
> This has been my point all along.
>
> I am sick and tired of hearing about the soliton revolution,
> chaos revolution, complexity revolution and the like.
>
> These are not revolutions. These are "natural/normal" qualitative
> turns in the progress of science, which is hardly linear.
>
> Best,
>
> Sabri



But revolution sells; normal is boring in the land of Hype and Lies.


Ian

Re: Remotely destroy computers if music pirates persist, Hatch says

[Ian Murray]

The guy retired in the mid 80's after messing with computers for 30 years.
He was pretty sick of them and only got a pc last xmas. He was no dummy
and my friend' [MS with honors in enviro. engineering, Johns Hopkins] only
lack of judgement is his relationship with me.

Ian




- Original Message -
From: "Barkley Rosser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 1:08 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Remotely destroy computers if music pirates persist,
Hatch says


> The really bizarre twist in this tale is that this
> guy's dad was still unaware of google's capabilities
> as recently as last Christmas?  This guy does not
> appear to have been one of the CIA's leading lights.
> Barkley Rosser
> - Original Message -
> From: "ravi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 6:53 PM
> Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Remotely destroy computers if music pirates
persist,
> Hatch says
>
>
> > Ian Murray wrote:
> > >
> > > Btw, my college roommate's father used to work for the CIA. In the
60's
> he
> > > and some others went to IBM requesting a Google like technology. The
> folks
> > > at IBM told them it was impossible to build and they didn't mean it
in
> > > 'not with current technology' sense. My friend showed his dad Google
> when
> > > he was home this past Xmas holiday, his dad was freakin'...
> > >
> >
> >
> > that's pretty surprising. after all, afaik, there is nothing rocket
> > science in google's search technology, and the guys at t.j.watson
> > weren't idiots...
> >
> > --ravi
> >

tax competition/arbitrage

[Ian Murray]

States expected to flood Boeing with 7E7 bids
Thursday, June 19, 2003

By PAUL NYHAN AND CHARLES POPE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

States will blanket The Boeing Co. with proposals tomorrow -- everything
from $100 million in tax breaks in Palmdale, Calif., to decades of tax
abatements in Michigan -- in the battle for the next U.S. manufacturing
prize: the 7E7 jet.

Tomorrow is the deadline for any town, city or state to file proposals for
Boeing's proposed 7E7 final assembly plant. While the process is clouded
in secrecy, lawmakers are compiling perks to win the prestige and
thousands of jobs that will accompany the project.

"It's very difficult for governors and mayors to resist playing the game,"
said William Schweke, research director at the Corp. for Enterprise
Development.

Washington wasn't shy about playing, publicizing much of its offer last
week when state lawmakers approved billions of dollars in Boeing-related
tax breaks, unemployment system reforms and other perks.

"We're trying to anticipate what the other states might offer -- what they
(other states) have typically offered, whether it's a Mercedes-Benz plant
or a Toyota plant," Gov. Gary Locke said yesterday after signing into a
law a package that could save Boeing and its Washington contractors a
projected $3.2 billion over 20 years.

Now, the rest of the nation gets a crack at the nation's largest
commercial aircraft maker.

Michigan, for example, will try to boost its chances by proposing three
sites and enticing Boeing with its existing menu of tax breaks. The state
can abate state business taxes for 20 years, while local communities can
roll back taxes for 12 years, according Jennifer Owens, a spokeswoman for
the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Two thousand miles away in Palmdale, Calif., the region highlighted its
tax breaks -- enterprise zones and foreign trade assistance -- a former
Boeing facility and a near-perfect flying weather.

In fact, California is investigating a range of incentives that could
alleviate utility costs and help employee training, according to Jason
Kimbrough, a spokesman for California Technology, Trade and Commerce
Agency.

Tomorrow, California may offer Boeing at least the widest range of
options, with as many as 10 communities, including Long Beach and
Palmdale, interested in assembling the 7E7.

But California and Michigan offered only a sample of what will be roughly
35 proposals. Most states declined to discuss anything they might use to
lure Boeing.

The entire process is designed to be confidential, with some of
Washington's biggest potential rivals, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina
saying little or nothing about the competition.

Regions will file their proposals with Boeing's consultant, South
Carolina-based McCallum Sweeney, which is expected to quickly narrow the
list down to several serious contenders. Boeing's 7E7 site-selection team
will perform a thorough analysis of each. A decision will be made before
the end of the year.

What local officials are not discussing may be the most interesting. They
could decide to tuck juicy incentives into their offers.

Or the sweetest offers may not come until well after tomorrow's deadline.

In Fort Worth, Texas, officials are discussing incentives, but the debate
will intensify if Boeing selects the city as a finalist, according to Bob
Farley, one of the authors of Fort Worth's proposal and executive vice
president at the Fort Worth Chamber Commerce.

Current and future incentives, however, are only so useful as bait.

"Our priority is to make sure the process is fair and rigorous, " said
Boeing spokeswoman Mary Hanson. "The proposals are going to be weighed
against all criteria,"

In May, the company outlined that criteria, such as a 24-hour port, which
appeared to place Fort Worth and other candidates at a disadvantage.

The absence of deep water, though, didn't discourage Fort Worth lawmakers.

Members of Congress from the area sent a letter to Boeing last month all
but begging the company to build the plane there. The city is considered a
serious candidate because it was one of the finalists for Boeing's
corporate headquarters.

In the letter, Texas lawmakers highlighted the area's central location and
its existing network of aviation companies.

Despite expressing confidence in their offer, Texas officials remain
concerned.

The biggest concern, they say, is Fort Worth's distance from a seaport.
Houston is the closest at 270 miles and Corpus Christi is 400 miles. Texas
lawmakers and economic development officials have been struggling in the
final days to find a way to minimize that deficiency, said two officials
who asked not to be identified.

They are not alone. One California official wondered how the state could
match Washington's billions of dollars in promised aid.

"Clearly it's impressive what Washington has been able to come up with.
Given California's fiscal crisis it is going to be a challenge to come up
with something lik

lazy Germans!

[Ian Murray]

The new German stereotype: holiday-addicted and out to lunch

Jeevan Vasagar in Berlin
Thursday June 19, 2003
The Guardian

The German worker's reputation for being eager and industrious is under
attack, not from a xenophobic British tabloid but from the country's
economics minister.

Far from the stereotype of being diligent drudges, employees enjoy too
much time off and should work longer hours if the country is to be rescued
from recession, Wolfgang Clement said.

In a stinging criticism of Germany's holiday-addicted culture, he warned
the country was "at the very limit" as far as time off is concerned.

"If you compare our calendar of public holidays with other countries, it
is something that could make you start to worry," the minister told the
magazine Stern.

Next year a number of public holidays will fall at weekends, he said, and
because of that forecasters estimate there will be increased growth of
about 0.5%. "Now that could be something to celebrate - and to make you
think."

As visitors to Germany soon discover, the 35-hour working week is only the
tip of the iceberg in a country which appears hooked on taking time off.

Depending on where they live, Germans enjoy between 11 and 13 public
holidays a year, compared with eight bank holidays in Britain.

Callers to German offices at any time from late morning to mid-afternoon
regularly encounter the phrase: "He is at lunch." A call back in the
afternoon is often foiled by the "coffee and cake break".

It is common for public sector employees to leave work as early as
possible on Friday afternoons. There is even a saying to justify the
practice: "Freitag nach eins, macht jeder Seins" ("After 1pm on Friday,
it's me-time.") And when a public holiday falls on a Thursday, the usual
custom is to take Friday off as well.

The British work the longest hours in Europe, an average of 43.6 hours a
week.

In eastern Germany, members of the trade union IG Metall are on strike,
demanding their working week be reduced from 38 hours to match the west's
35. Mr Clement's remarks followed questions about the strike, which he
called "a conflict at the wrong time in completely the wrong place". In
his view, the east needs "local advantages" if it is to thrive.

But Klaus Zwickel, head of IG Metall, said: "Not a single new job will be
created by the scrapping of holidays and public days off, or bringing in
longer working hours."

Many of the public holidays mark Christian festivals, and the Catholic
church was also critical of Mr Clement.

The Guardian rang the press office of the German Employers' Federation for
a reaction. "They are all at lunch," the receptionist said at 11.55am.
"Call back in an hour."

oops

[Ian Murray]

Rate Cut Looking Like a Sure Thing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/business/?nav=hptoc_b

CORRECTED: Dollar Up; Chance of Fed Rate Cut Fades Reuters, June 18, 2003;
11:40 PM [a technical correction of paragraph 11 of the article; not the
article above]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/business/?nav=hptoc_b

education/centralization

[Ian Murray]

Research fund plans 'threaten 8,000 jobs'

Will Woodward, education editor
Thursday June 19, 2003
The Guardian

University lecturers and learned societies made stinging attacks yesterday
on the government's plan to concentrate research funding on elite
institutions.

The Association of University Teachers gave the Guardian a study which
predicts that 8,000 jobs are endangered by the threat to the funding of
departments graded 4 in the most recent research assessment.

And in a rare joint letter 11 leading academic associations wrote to the
education secretary, Charles Clarke, to express their "dismay on moves to
focus government funding for research in only a small number of higher
education institutions or departments".

Funding for departments graded 4 - classified as having "national
excellence in virtually all research and some international excellence" -
has fallen from £208m in 2001 to £118m this year, accompanied by a small
drop in the numbers of staff working in them.

The government has warned that it cannot guarantee future provision for
grade 4s as it concentrates more on those rated 5, 5* and the new 6*,
which already receive the lion's share.

The letter is signed by Ian Forbes (Academy of Social Sciences), David
Clarke (British Computer Society), Michael Bassey (British Educational
Research Association), Roger Trigg (British Philosophical Association),
Peter Morris (psychology education board of the British Psychological
Society), Joan Chandler (British Sociological Association), Nicholas
Sims-Williams (Philological Society), Wyn Grant (Political Studies
Association), Rita Gardner (Royal Geographical Society), Kenneth Fincham
(Royal Historical Society), and Peter Green (Royal Statistical Society).

It says: "Progress in research in the natural sciences, social sciences,
and humanities depends on diversity. Focusing research in only a small
number of institutions or departments would be profoundly damaging for the
sector, the economy, and society as a whole.

"Pre-eminent departments need to be strongly supported to allow them to
compete internationally, but not at the expense of other departments and
institutions... concentration of research funding in a few institutions
will cause ossification across the sector."

Last night statements supporting the joint letter were issued by the
British Medical Association and the organisation of vice-chancellors,
Universities UK.

The AUT study says there is a threat to the long term future of 8,000
staff in 500 grade 4 departments. Sally Hunt, its general secretary, said:
"Our nation's research is being concentrated in a handful of universities
with no regard for diversity or regional balance."

In education, business and management studies, environmental sciences, and
built environment, fewer than a fifth of researchers were rated 5 or 5*.

The study says that some regions have no assessed research in particular
subjects. In the north-east, for instance, there is no research in
pre-clinical studies, anatomy, or pharmacology. Education research in the
east Midlands, environmental sciences in London, and geography and
philosophy in the north-west are all under threat.

A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "In the next
three years we will increase the money going into research by 30% in real
terms, but our main international competitors are strongly concentrating
resources in order to build their own world class research bases. To
compete we must do the same."

· Oxford has broken with 900 years of tradition by selecting an outsider
as its vice-chancellor. John Hood has been vice-chancellor of Auckland
University in New Zealand since 1999, after having spent 18 years in
business. He is the first vice-chancellor who is not a member of
congregation, the university's parliament of academics and senior staff.

EU subsidies redux

[Ian Murray]

Rebels reject farm subsidy reform
France and Germany lead dissent against compromise deal reducing link to
production

Charlotte Denny and Andrew Osborn in Brussels
Thursday June 19, 2003
The Guardian

Europe's agricultural commissioner Franz Fischler issued a
take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum yesterday to farm ministers over Brussels'
plan for the future of the common agricultural policy, as France won
allies in its attempt to scupper his reforms.

Farm ministers were today expected to resume their heated debate after
Paris rejected Mr Fischler's concessions over decoupling subsidies from
production.

"The only thing I can say is that this so-called final compromise paper is
still not acceptable to France," French agriculture minister Herve Gaymard
said.

Mr Fischler had proposed a complete break between subsidies and production
in his mid-term review of the CAP, published last year. The European
commission believes payments linked to farm output encourages Europe's
farmers to over produce, swamping world markets with subsidised food.

France and Germany said the proposal was unacceptable, forcing the
agricultural commissioner to table a revised plan yesterday. The
compromise deal restores the link to production in sensitive sectors for
up to 30% of payments, less than the 50% level Paris and Berlin are
holding out for.

Last night EU diplomats confirmed Spain, Portugal and Ireland had swung
behind the Franco-German axis, giving them enough votes to block Mr
Fischler's compromise.

"They are all still camping on their positions and keep presenting fresh
shopping lists," said one frustrated diplomat.

An agreement on cutting the link between subsidies and production is
crucial to give Brussels room to negotiate when trade ministers gather at
the world trade organisation meeting in Cancun in September.

Europe's trading partners are demanding substantial cuts to
production-linked subsidies which they argue distort world agricultural
markets.

With developing countries increasingly mutinous over the $350bn the West
spends each year paying its farmers, the success of the new round of talks
hinges on a deal. Radical reform of the CAP, the world's largest subsidy
system, is seen as the key to resolving the deadlocked negotiations.

"If the EU goes empty handed to Cancun the whole trade round will grind to
a halt," said Brian Gardiner, an agricultural trade policy analyst. "The
least developed countries will walk out."

Even if ministers agree a deal today, agriculture experts warned the
proposed compromise could be even worse than the current system.

"If this plan goes ahead, the administrative costs will rocket," said Sean
Ricard, an agricultural economist at Cranfield University. "We will be
back at the table trying to reform the CAP in a few years' time with the
EU's 10 new members complicating the chances of a deal."

A spokesman from the commission said the onus was now in the member
states' court.

"France and others have come a long way but not far enough," said Gregor
Kreuzhuber, a spokesman for Mr Fischler.

"It is clear that slowly, steadily the member states have to get their act
together. If not we will be here until Christmas. We have almost exhausted
our flexibility and taken a major step in the direction of the member
states so the ball is now in their court."

the Repugs.

[Ian Murray]

http://www.theonion.com/onion3923/gop_reports_record.html [check the
photos.]
GOP Reports Record Second-Quarter Profits

WASHINGTON, DC-At a stockholders meeting Monday, the Republican Party
announced record profits for the second quarter of 2003, exceeding
analysts' expectations by more than 20 cents per share.

The gain marks the GOP's third consecutive profitable quarter, and puts
the party on track for its best 12-month cycle since 1991, the year of the
first Gulf War.

"Obviously, we're ecstatic," said Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert
(R-IL), who celebrated with other high-ranking GOP members at a champagne
brunch in his chambers Tuesday. "This is heartening news for our party,
especially coming as it does during such a sluggish overall period for the
American economy."

The GOP posted a net profit of $3.48 per share, outperforming financial
analysts' predictions in the $3.25 range. It ended the quarter with a
market cap of $340 billion-a 17 percent gain attributed to a war-related
rise in emotional investment in the party by the public and a rise in
financial investment by such major corporations as Lockheed Martin and
Halliburton.

"Quarters like this don't come along very often," Republican Party CFO
Dick Cheney said. "In a three-month span, we inked deals with more than
1,300 corporations, signing contracts to build everything from oil
pipelines to surveillance equipment to aircraft carriers. We've also
aggressively expanded into some lucrative new overseas markets. I honestly
haven't seen a boom like this since the go-go early '90s."

In spite of such successes, the GOP continues to look for new ways to
improve its bottom line.

"We still have to streamline certain divisions of our company, there's no
question about that," Cheney said. "We're still, for example, spending way
too much in our Health and Human Services and our Education departments.
Once we get those areas and a few others under control, our balance sheet
will look like a million bucks."

Added Cheney: "Or, I should say, a trillion bucks."

The Republican Party's financial health stands in stark contrast to its
biggest business rival. The Democratic Party, which suffered its 10th
straight fiscal quarter in the red, is expected to miss its earnings mark
for the third year in a row. The losses have prompted party leaders to
consider the possibility of early retirement for some of its high-ranking
legislative-branch officers.

"Right now, we've got some organizational problems that need to be worked
out," Democratic Party CEO Dick Gephardt said. "To be successful in this
game, you need an internal leadership structure that gives your company a
top-to-bottom sales vision, and I'll be the first to admit we've got room
for improvement in that area. It certainly doesn't help that the market
for some of our core businesses, like public housing and health care, are
in the toilet."

A majority of the GOP's 7,500 employees work on the support end of the
organization. Approximately 1,200 of these workers handle "professional
services," such as helping voters choose the right Republican products for
their home or business.

The party is traded on the NYSE under the symbol USGOP.

Re: Modest Michael

[Ian Murray]

[speaking of intellectual property]



In Focus: Intellectual Property
Monday, June 16, 2003
Written description: a looser requirement?
The Federal Circuit has been edging away from the heightened standard that
it set out in the 1997 'Lilly' case.
By Janet E. Reed, Felicity E. Groth and Scott E. Scioli
SPECIAL TO THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL


In its most recent treatments of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112, the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has edged away from the
heightened written description requirement for biotechnology patents
articulated in Regents of the Univ. of Calif. v. Eli Lilly & Co., 119 F.3d
1559 (Fed. Cir. 1997). This process has revealed dissenting opinions among
the Federal Circuit judges, which may only be resolved by en banc review
of the written description requirement as a whole. As a result, the
standard for satisfying the written description requirement remains
elusive, leaving practitioners struggling to determine the level of
written description that will be deemed "adequate" to support
biotechnology patent claims.

The first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112 provides: "The specification shall
contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and
process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact
terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or
with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and
shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out
his invention."

In Lilly, the Federal Circuit invalidated claims to human and vertebrate
insulin-encoding DNAs for lack of adequate written description under 35
U.S.C. 112, even though the patent's specification described the related
rat DNA sequence and methods for obtaining the human DNA sequence. The
court held that a claim to a DNA will not meet the written description
requirement absent a description of the DNA's structural or physical
characteristics, as would be accomplished by a recitation of its
nucleotide sequence. 119 F.3d at 1566-67. The Lilly rule has been
criticized as establishing a uniquely rigorous, technology-specific
written description requirement for inventions related to new genes and,
indeed, to biotechnology patents generally.

The Federal Circuit appeared to reach high tide on the Lilly rule in Enzo
Biochem Inc. v. Gen-Probe Inc., 285 F.3d 1013 (Fed. Cir. 2002) (Enzo I).
There the court held that a biological deposit of nucleic acid probes
having a known functionality, but whose sequences were not disclosed, may
not satisfy the written description requirement for claims directed to the
deposited probes.

The tide began to turn in Enzo Biochem Inc. v. Gen-Probe Inc., 296 F.3d
1316 (Fed. Cir. 2002) (Enzo II), when the same three-judge panel that
decided Enzo I vacated its earlier decision and specifically acknowledged
that not all functional descriptions of genetic material necessarily fail
to satisfy the written description requirement. Id. at 1324. The court
remanded the case to the district court for further consideration
consistent with its revised opinion.

Of significance to patent practitioners, the court's decision in Enzo II
was based in part on deference to the Guidelines for Examination of Patent
Applications Under the 35 U.S.C. 112, ¶ 1 "Written Description"
Requirement (66 Fed. Reg. 1099 (Jan. 5, 2001)), in which the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office (PTO) has determined that a written description
requirement can be met by disclosing functional characteristics when
coupled with a known or disclosed correlation between function and
structure.

Concurrently with its revised decision in Enzo II, the Federal Circuit
denied Enzo's petition for rehearing en banc of Enzo I. 42 Fed. Appx. 439
(Fed. Cir. 2002). Judges Alan D. Lourie and Pauline Newman concurred in
the denial, defending a robust written description requirement. In a
dissent joined by judges Richard Linn and Arthur J. Gajarsa, Judge Randall
R. Rader asserted that, outside the context of resolving priority, there
is no statute or precedent supporting a heightened written description
requirement. Though agreeing that en banc review was not warranted in the
case at bar, Judge Timothy B. Dyk in his concurrence recognized that
questions raised in the Rader dissent regarding Lilly might merit future
en banc review.

In the biotechnology field, Amgen Inc. v. Hoechst Marion Roussel Inc., 314
F.3d 1313 (Fed. Cir. 2003), marked a further departure by the Federal
Circuit from rigorous application of the Lilly rule. The claims at issue
in Amgen were directed to expression of exogenous erythropoietin (EPO)-a
hormonal substance that stimulates red blood cell formation-in vertebrate
and mammalian cells, but the specification disclosed methods of producing
EPO only in hamster and monkey cells. The defendants in Amgen relied upon
Lilly and Enzo II to support their position that Amgen's patents lacked
adequate written description for the generic claims c

Re: Remotely destroy computers if music pirates persist, Hatch says

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Kenneth Campbell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> I wrote:
>
> >> I never knew Hatch was such a Renaissance Man... Wonder
> >> what the tunes were? $18,000 in 2002 royalties...
>
> And Ian replied, and very very quickly, by the way:
>
> > http://www.hatchmusic.com/songs.html
>
> I do not want to know why you have that URL so close at hand, Ian.

=

Hello, Google, Hello.

Btw, my college roommate's father used to work for the CIA. In the 60's he
and some others went to IBM requesting a Google like technology. The folks
at IBM told them it was impossible to build and they didn't mean it in
'not with current technology' sense. My friend showed his dad Google when
he was home this past Xmas holiday, his dad was freakin'...

Ian

Re: Remotely destroy computers if music pirates persist, Hatch says

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Kenneth Campbell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 3:24 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] Remotely destroy computers if music pirates persist,
Hatch says


> I never knew Hatch was such a Renaissance Man... Wonder what the tunes
> were? $18,000 in 2002 royalties...



http://www.hatchmusic.com/songs.html


>
> Poor music industry fighting the Internet... now making allies with Tin
> Pan Alley Hatch... and becoming a government sanctioned virus
> propagator.
>
> Ken.

==

Hatch is also heavily invested in vitamins and 'nutraceuticals' thus
keeping the FDA away from them is just part and parcel of his role in the
war on some drugs.


Ian

Re: Complexity

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Barkley Rosser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

>  I think Ralph Abraham is a genius.  He is also
> a great coiner of phrases, including the "blue
> bagel catastrophe" and "chaostrophe" and
> "morphodynamics." He also discovered "chaotic
> hysteresis," although I am the one who coined that
> term.  His book with Marsden is hardly his farthest
> out, and he has become rather metaphysical in
> more recent years.  Anybody who wants to see a
> really far out example should check out his _Chaos,
> Gaia, Eros_, 1994, New York: Harper Collins.
> But I like all his funky figures the best.
> Barkley Rosser

===

RA is proof academics on acid can do interesting and funny
things...

Re: Straussians

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> * The Moon belongs to America because we got there first, and our space
> program should make good this claim

===

As the USSR was the first to reach extra-earth space, shouldn't all of
non-earth space-time belong to the fSU?

Ian

Re: From JK Galbraith's 60s to Enron

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "michael perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


Pipe Dreams is a very nice book.

==

See, folks, there's just no way to catch up with him..

Ian

Re: WTO--hypocrisy, yada yada yada

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Peter Dorman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 9:52 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] WTO--hypocrisy, yada yada yada


> How can this absurdity be peddled so openly and repeatedly?  EU ag
> subsidies "the biggest single contributor to Third World poverty"?
Unreal.
>
> Peter
>
===

Europe-bashing is in full swing and sells newspapers, no?

Ian

WTO--hypocrisy, yada yada yada

[Ian Murray]

[speaking of methodological nationalism...]



The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Europe's trade hypocrisy: The West pays to keep the rest poor
Philip Bowring IHT
Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Europe's trade hypocrisy

GENEVA The Doha round of trade negotiations is rapidly approaching a
crisis. The behavior of some European countries is proving so selfish and
shortsighted that key developing countries may soon come to the conclusion
that it would be better to walk away from the table than carry on with
wrangling over secondary issues while progress on the crucial one of
agriculture is sabotaged.

Last week France and Germany cut a side deal that appears to rule out the
fundamental reform of European agriculture, without which progress at the
World Trade Organization is impossible. The deal aims to stop some subsidy
cuts and perpetuate the absence of links between overproduction and the
level of subsidies. In return for helping French farmers, Germany will get
support on nonfarm issues dear to it.

So much for President Jacques Chirac's oft-touted concern for the poor
world. Having missed an opportunity as host of the Group of Eight summit
meeting in Evian to lead Europe away from its annual agricultural
subsidies of $50 billion - the biggest single contributor to Third World
poverty - France is now stitching up the European Union's reform plans. In
the process, the Europeans are throwing away gains in influence that they
expected from the global unpopularity of U.S. policies of preemption and
military intervention.

The reform plans devised by the EU farm commissioner, Franz Fischler, did
not go very far toward meeting the demands of the developing world that
the free trade touted by the rich should apply to sugar and cotton as much
as to cars and computers. But they would have given the EU trade
commissioner, Pascal Lamy, something to work with in negotiations with the
United States, whose farm lobby is second only to the EU as a global
poverty generator.

The deal is a sure way to sink prospects for the September ministerial
meeting of world trade ministers in Cancun, Mexico, supposedly the
half-way point of the Doha round. That meeting was in enough trouble
already, as deadlines had been missed at the end of May for agreements by
the Trade Negotiations Committee in Geneva on proposals to be put to the
ministers in Cancun. If many issues are left hanging, the ministers will
have scant time for the crucial ones that require ministerial input.

To underscore African anger, President Blaise Compaore Burkina Faso went
to the WTO in Geneva last week to plead the case of African cotton
farmers. He noted that many African countries opened their markets and
ended farm subsidies in response to advice and pressure from the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now the poor but efficient
farmers of Benin, Mali and Chad, as well as Burkina Faso, for whom cotton
was a key crop, are being ruined by U.S. cotton subsidies.

Cotton subsidies in rich countries are 60 percent higher than the gross
domestic product of Burkina Faso, and total farm subsidies six times
greater than development aid. And there will be no farm subsidy reform in
the United States unless there is also reform in the EU.

Burkina Faso does not need charity, President Compaore said. It just wants
WTO members to live up to the organization's principles. His eloquent plea
for free trade unfortunately received very much less publicity than
President Chirac's hypocritical and condescending recent statements about
help for Africa.

Further evidence of the damage done by farm subsidies has also come from
an unlikely place - a study published recently by the International Labor
Organization. It found that globalization had not set in motion any "race
to the bottom" by developing countries in terms of quality and income
levels of industrial employment. Freer trade in manufactured goods had
helped development. It was the producers of primary agricultural products
who were the global losers, through their exclusion from free,
unsubsidized trade.

Western political leaders need to stop treating trade issues as boring
technicalities and recognize how threats to the WTO system threaten their
own prosperity. Failure to achieve farm trade reform is a greater threat
to world harmony and prosperity than any single disease or weapon of mass
destruction.

US/Mexico: what's the beef?

[Ian Murray]

June 16, 2003, 9:54PM
Border trade ties coming undone
U.S. seeks decision in beef, rice dispute
By JENALIA MORENO and DAVID IVANOVICH
Houston Chronicle

Trade ties between the United States and Mexico grew more tense Monday as
the Bush administration turned to the World Trade Organization to settle a
dispute over rice and beef exports to Mexico.

Agriculture has proved to be a sensitive part of the North American Free
Trade Agreement, with U.S. farmers complaining about Mexican imports of
tomatoes, sugar and avocados since the accord went into effect in 1994.

This latest quarrel results from two anti-dumping actions taken by the
Mexican government.

Last June, Mexico ruled American farmers were selling long-grain milled
rice cheaper in Mexico than they did in the United States, a practice
called dumping. And in April 2000, Mexico imposed anti-dumping duties on
U.S. beef.

Pressured by farmers who complain they cannot compete with efficient
American operations after many tariffs were eliminated this year, the
Mexican government in recent years has slapped dumping duties on several
U.S. agricultural exports, including beef, rice and apples.

This issue is important to the U.S. agricultural industry because Mexico
is the largest export market for both rice and beef in terms of quantity.

In these cases, U.S. trade officials question Mexico's methods for
determining whether its beef and rice producers were injured by American
exports. Mexico, for instance, was supposed to collect data from three
years but provided information from only parts of three years.

Washington also complained about the age of the trade data in question,
noting the information was collected more than a year before the actual
dumping investigation was launched. And U.S. trade officials questioned
whether the information collected really supports the conclusions Mexico
has reached.

U.S. beef producers shipped 350,000 metric tons or $829 million worth of
beef products to Mexico last year. Mexico imports about 20 percent of its
beef consumption, according to the Mexican government.

When investigating the dumping charges, Mexican officials required
American producers to provide pricing data. Those that did not respond,
typically the smaller producers, were deemed guilty of dumping.

"Just because they didn't have the wherewithal to supply the price data to
Mexico, they were essentially guilty by association," said Gregg Doud,
chief economist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

In what Doud called a "preposterous" finding, companies that weren't even
in business at the time of the investigation are deemed guilty of dumping,
because they didn't demonstrate during the probe that they had not been
dumping onto the Mexican market.

Re: Fwd: FW: Sad News about NICHD/NIH: The Deconstruction of America's Sci entific

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 9:33 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Fwd: FW: Sad News about NICHD/NIH: The Deconstruction
of America's Sci entific


> I am sorry that nobody has picked up on Martin's post, which just
arrived
> tonight.  I doesn't matter if the second coming is going to occur in a
> year or so, but it if does not... Is this happening with all government
> supported science?

==

Nah, they still spend lots of cash funding astronomy-cosmology, looking
for god in quantum foams/plasmas etc.

neuroeconomics redux

[Ian Murray]

[NYTimes]
June 17, 2003
Brain Experts Now Follow the Money
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

People are efficient, rational beings who tirelessly act in their own
self-interest. They make financial decisions based on reason, not emotion.
And naturally, most save money for that proverbial rainy day.

Right?

Well, no. In making financial decisions, people are regularly influenced
by gut feelings and intuitions. They cooperate with total strangers,
gamble away the family paycheck and squander their savings on investments
touted by known liars.

Such human frailties may seem far too complicated and unpredictable to
fold into economic equations. But now many neuroscientists are beginning
to argue that it is time to create a new field of study, called
neuroeconomics.

These researchers are busy scanning the brains of people as they make
economic decisions, barter, compete, cooperate, defect, punish, engage in
auctions, gamble and calculate their next economic moves. Based on their
understanding of how fluctuations in neurons and brain chemicals drive
those behaviors, the neuroscientists are expressing their findings in
differential equations and other mathematical language beloved by
economists.

"This new approach, which I consider a revolution, should provide a theory
of how people decide in economic and strategic situations," said Dr. Aldo
Rustichini, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota. "So
far, the decision process has been for economists a black box."

Dr. Jonathan D. Cohen, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Princeton,
agreed. "Most economists don't base their theories on people's actual
behavior," he said. "They study idealized versions of human behavior,
which they assume is optimal in achieving gains."

To explore economic decision making, researchers are scanning the brains
of people as they engage in a variety of games designed by experimental
economists. The exercises are intended to make people anticipate what
others will do or what others will infer from the person's own actions.

The games also reveal some fundamental facts about the brain that
economists are just beginning to learn and appreciate:

¶In making short-term predictions, neural systems tap into gut feelings
and emotions, comparing what we know from the past with what is happening
right now.

¶The brain needs a way to compare and evaluate objects, people, events,
memories, internal states and the perceived needs of others so that it can
make choices. It does so by assigning relative value to everything that
happens. But instead of dollars and cents, the brain relies on the firing
rates of a number of neurotransmitters - the chemicals, like dopamine,
that transmit nerve impulses. Novelty, money, cocaine, a delicious meal
and a beautiful face all activate dopamine circuits to varying degrees;
exactly how much dopamine an individual generates in response to a
particular reward is calibrated by past experience and by one's own
biological makeup.

¶Specific brain circuits monitor how people weigh different sources of
rewards or punishments and how they allocate their attention. A region
called the anterior cingulate reacts when people make mistakes or perform
poorly; some neuroscientists say it also registers gains and losses,
financial and otherwise. A small structure called the insula detects
sensations in the body. It is also involved in assessing whether to trust
someone offering to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.

These structures and neurotransmitter systems are activated before a
person is conscious of having made a decision, Dr. Cohen said.

In a study published the current issue of the journal Science, Dr. Cohen
and his colleagues, including Dr. Alan G. Sanfey of Princeton, took images
of people's brains as they played the ultimatum game, a test of fairness
between two people.

In the ultimatum game, the first player is given, say, $10 in cash. He
must then decide how much to give to a second player. It could be $5, the
fairest offer, or a lesser amount depending on what he thinks he can get
away with. If Player 2 accepts the offer, the money is shared accordingly.
But if he rejects it, both players go away empty-handed. It is a one-shot
game, and the players never meet again.

Most people in the shoes of Player 2 refuse to take amounts under $2 or
$3, Dr. Cohen said. They would rather punish the first player than feel
cheated. "But this makes no economic sense," he said. "You're better off
with something than nothing."

Brain images showed that when players accepted an offer they viewed as
fair enough, a circuit in the front of their brains that supports
deliberative thinking was activated.

But when they rejected an offer, the insula - which monitors bodily
states, including disgust - overrode the frontal circuit. The more
strongly the insula fired, the more rapidly the person rejected the offer,
Dr. Cohen said. Moreover, the insula fired well before the person pushed
the button to refuse an offer.

Economists can use t

conflicts of interests

[Ian Murray]

[who wudda thunk it?]

Dividend Tax Cut Will Benefit Many Members Of House, Reports Show
Some Representatives May Save Thousands

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 17, 2003; Page A03


Dozens of House members stand to save thousands of dollars thanks to the
dividend tax cut that Congress passed last month, according to annual
disclosure records released yesterday.

While many lawmakers reported little or no dividend income in 2002, others
reported dividends ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars.
If they conduct similar transactions this year, they will enjoy
substantial tax savings under the measure that President Bush initiated
and the GOP-led Congress enacted. Retroactive to Jan. 1, the top tax rate
for dividends, now 38.6 percent, will drop to 15 percent.

While many Democratic and GOP lawmakers alike will personally benefit from
the tax cut, it was the nearly unanimous Republican support that made it
law; 224 House Republicans voted for the bill, along with seven Democrats.

In the annual financial disclosures, lawmakers declare their income,
assets and liabilities in broad ranges, making it impossible to assess
their financial situations with precision. Members don't have to list the
value of their primary residence or savings below $5,000. Senators'
reports were released Friday.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who has expressed interest in running for
governor of California -- and whose money has helped finance the effort to
recall Gov. Gray Davis (D) -- reported dividends last year of $100,000 to
$1 million from his Pioneer High Yield Mutual Fund account, and a similar
amount from his Vanguard 500 Index Fund. That same performance this year
would net federal tax savings of $47,200 to $472,000.

Rep. Paul E. Gillmor (R-Ohio) could be another big winner. Last year he
received dividends of $100,000 to $1 million from stock in Gillmor
Financial Services. That would translate into tax savings of between
$23,600 and $236,000 under the new law.

Some GOP House members are considerably less well off. Rep. J.D. Hayworth
(R-Ariz.) reported no financial holdings. "So much for the myth of country
club Republicans, huh?" Hayworth said yesterday.

The architect of the House version of the dividend tax cut, Ways and Means
Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), reported no dividends last
year, along with no investments or other assets.

John Feehery, spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), said such
reports demonstrate that Republicans were motivated by ideology, not
self-interest, when it came to cutting taxes on dividends. "Probably a lot
more Democrats than Republicans get it," Feehery said. "They have a lot
more money than Republicans, especially [House Minority Leader] Nancy
Pelosi [D-Calif.]."

Pelosi called that analysis simplistic. "The Republican tax cut is a
windfall to many of us in the Congress, but it is so wrong," she said in
an interview. "It is so shortsighted and not in the enlightened
self-interest of the country."

Pelosi reported no dividends in 2002 but did list sizable California real
estate holdings. These include a vineyard in St. Helena, worth $5 million
to $25 million; a vineyard in Rutherford, worth $1 million to $5 million;
a townhouse in Norden, worth $1 million to $5 million; an option on San
Francisco commercial property, valued at $1 million to $5 million; and a
condominium in Alpine Meadows, worth $500,000 to$1 million.

Not all House Democrats are so affluent, of course, including the two
running for president. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) reported having as
much as $16,000 in the bank, and a personal loan worth $15,001 to $50,000.
Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) reported a net worth of $153,000
to$545,000. He owed between $50,000 and $100,000 on loans to help finance
his children's education.

The reports indicate that at least three House members struggled with
credit card debt last year. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) owed between $15,000
and $50,000; Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) reported a $30,000 to
$100,000 balance on First USA Mastercard and Visa, plus a boat loan of
$15,000 to $50,000 and a personal line of credit for $10,000 to $15,000;
and Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.) reported owing $50,000 to $100,000 on
various credit cards.

First-term Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) had no such worries. He received
nearly $9.7 million in deferred compensation from Wasserstein Perella &
Co., an investment banking firm.

And Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.) is remarried but still collecting royalties
from pop music hits that her late husband, Sonny, wrote and recorded years
ago, totaling between $105,000 and $1,015,000 in 2002.

The White House also released disclosure reports for senior officials. The
president's chief economic adviser, Stephen Friedman, a former chairman of
Goldman Sachs & Co., had a brokerage account worth more than $55 million,
according to his 90-page report. An administration official said Friedman,
who was named to

the scramble for Africa[n] oil

[Ian Murray]

[fear of corruption? please.]


Scramble for Africa

Fear of corruption and chaos in oil rush

Charlotte Denny, economics correspondent
Tuesday June 17, 2003
The Guardian

Washington's determination to find an alternative energy source to the
Middle East is leading to a new oil rush in sub-Saharan Africa which
threatens to launch a fresh cycle of conflict, corruption and
environmental degradation in the region, campaigners warn today.

The new scramble for Africa risks bringing more misery to the continent's
impoverished citizens as western oil companies pour billions of dollars in
secret payments into government coffers throughout the continent. Much of
the money ends up in the hands of ruling elites or is squandered on
grandiose projects and the military.

Tony Blair will today urge the oil industry to be more transparent in its
dealings with Africa. Openness and accountability are essentials for
stability and prosperity in the developing world, he will tell oil company
executives and oil exporting countries at a meeting in Lancaster House in
central London.

African countries own 8% of world oil reserves. An estimated $200bn
(£125bn) in revenues will flow into African government treasuries over the
next 10 years as new oilfields open up throughout the Gulf of Guinea. Oil
will bring the largest influx of revenue in the continent's history, and
more than 10 times the amount western donors give each year in aid.

But Ian Gary, author of a new report, Bottom of the Barrel, from the US
aid agency Catholic Relief Services (CRS), warned yesterday:
"Petro-dollars have not helped developing countries to reduce poverty; in
many cases they have actually exacerbated it. In Nigeria, for example,
which has received over $300bn in oil revenues over the last 25 years, per
capita income is less than a $1 a day."

Despite the prime minister's backing for the extractive industries
transparency initiative (EITI), aid agencies and MEPs say Britain has let
oil companies off the hook by watering down plans to make publication of
payments to third world governments mandatory.

"The purely voluntary approach will not work in the countries where it is
most needed because many political and business elites have major vested
interests in avoiding transparency," said Simon Taylor, director of Global
Witness, which works to expose links between natural resource exploitation
and human rights abuses.

British oil firms, including Shell and BP, have privately backed calls for
publication of payments to be compulsory because they believe otherwise
honest companies will be undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

BP was nearly kicked out of Angola for disclosing that it had paid a $111m
signature bonus to the government in 2001.

But with the US administration under pressure from American oil companies
to resist new regulations, Britain has abandoned the mandatory approach in
favour of a statement of principles which industry and government
representative can agree on.

"As the initiative is increasingly watered down, the ability of the EITI
to deliver on the promise of increased transparency in African countries
remains seriously in doubt," Mr Gary said.

Campaigners believe that without stronger enforcement, the British-led
initiative will make little difference to helping African countries
benefit from their oil reserves.

The discovery of high-quality offshore fields has attracted interest at
the highest levels of the Bush administration, which is determined to
lessen America's dependence on imports from the Middle East.

A taskforce headed by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, predicted two
years ago that West Africa would become the fastest growing source of oil
and gas for the American market.

"The US geostrategic view is that all crude oil is good, and all non-Opec
oil is especially good. The goal is to take the Saudi hand off the spare
oil capacity spigot," said Duncan Clarke, chairman and chief executive
officer of Global Pacific and Partners International, an independent
energy advisory group.

Next month President Bush is planning to visit Senegal, Nigeria and South
Africa, while the Pentagon is reportedly considering redeploying American
troops to protect key oil reserves in Africa, particularly Nigeria.

Washington is preparing to reopen its embassy in Equatorial Guinea, where
oil revenues have boosted GDP by 60% over the last two years, despite
state department reservations over the country's appalling human rights
record.

"The US has identified increasing African oil imports as an issue of
'national security' and has used diplomacy to court African producers
regardless of their record on transparency, democracy or human rights,"
said Mr Gary.

The drive for African oil is taking on a much more American character, the
report says. "New fields are being aggressively pursued by ExxonMobil,
ChevronTexaco and by smaller firms such as Amerada Hess, Ocean and
Marathon."

"The flag is following commerce but the compan

Re: Hobsbawn on the American Empire

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> What should US leftists do about this contradiction -- the
> contradiction that has been ignored by the US branch of the so-called
> "global justice movement"?
> --
> Yoshie

==

Take a couple of steps beyond the State-centric, methodological
nationalism implicit in his statement on the free-trade/protection binary.


Ian

bribes-weapons-rents

[Ian Murray]

Britain need not corrupt itself with dodgy arms deals

New figures show that bribery-induced sales have little effect on UK jobs

David Leigh
Monday June 16, 2003
The Guardian

If Alan Garwood, the former BAE Systems missiles salesman who heads
Britain's controversial arms sales machine, were to collect the
traditional knighthood, trouser the balance of his hefty six-figure
Whitehall contract and simply shove off, would the nation totter?

Even before the latest hair-raising revelations from the public records
office in Kew, people were beginning to think it was time that he and his
whole secretive gang of arms pushers were thrown out of Whitehall.
Garwood, like his predecessors in the job, is undoubtedly a man of
impeccable personal probity, who would not dream of paying bribes inside
Britain to gain an advantage. I expect even if he was given too much
change he would instantly return it. Yet somehow, when it comes to
foreigners, politicians develop a double vision about what even a high
court judge, Sir Oliver Popplewell, referred to rather complacently in his
recent memoirs as "palm-greasing".

The previously secret documents dug up by the Guardian's bribery series
show that the government's arms sales organisation was launched in the
1960s by that old Labour warrior, Denis Healey, in the middle of a
sterling crisis, with the odious battle-cry: "It is often necessary to
offer bribes to make sales."

Yet although times have changed, this still appears to be the motto of the
600-strong defence export services organisation (Deso) inside the Ministry
of Defence, which is controlled by the arms firms, part-funded by the arms
firms and run for the benefit of the arms firms. The current Deso manual,
it transpires, even spells out the rules for handling what it coyly calls
"special commissions". These are, more bluntly put, bribes paid by
companies to foreign rulers, their friends and relations, often in
deplorable regimes, to persuade them to buy weapons they don't want.

In Whitehall, Deso's grubby philosophy of sales at all costs still calls
the shots. Deso staff are able to lobby inside the circle of official
secrecy for export licences to be issued; subsidised credit guarantees
provided; and dubious aid deals to be contrived. Government ministers
trudge round the world to demean themselves by pressing the Czechs, the
Indians or the South Africans to sign up to arms deals that are liable to
further impoverish these countries, whose biggest problem is not that they
have too few guns.

The moral and economic arguments for ceasing to behave this way have
already been piling up, and the latest bribery disclosures substantially
add to them. First, the legal climate has changed. Since the beginning of
last year it has become a criminal offence to bribe foreigners (unless, of
course, you belong to MI6). No one has yet brought any prosecutions under
this law, nor made any serious effort to enforce it; but there is an
embarrassing anomaly between what apparently goes on in Deso and the words
of ministers.

Jack Straw says: "Corruption is like a deadly virus. It has no boundaries.
We need to fight it wherever it is found." Lord Falconer, the new lord
chancellor, repeats ringingly: "Corruption worldwide weakens democracy,
harms economies, impedes sustainable development and can undermine respect
for human rights by supporting corrupt governments with widespread
destabilising consequences." This is all very true, and it does not sit
easily with a political environment in which - as occurred in 1998 - a £7m
"special commission" on a government-to-government arms deal can be paid
by BAE Systems into a secret offshore trust for the benefit of a relative
of the ruler of Qatar. Eventually, ministers will have to rewrite the Deso
rulebook if they are not to stand accused of utter hypocrisy.

Second, a succession of academics and lobby groups are now attacking the
claims that arms sales are vital to the British economy. Defence
economists at York University published a study suggesting that if arms
sales fell, the effect on British jobs would be minor and transient.
Events are tending to bear them out: arms shipments in recent years have
been running at far below their previous peak in the 90s - less than £2bn
a year, rather than £6bn. Yet no economic crisis has followed.

Although BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms firm, has a factory in east
Yorkshire making Hawk fighters and employing some of John Prescott's
constituents, that is not much of a reason for skewing the entire
country's economy. Mr Prescott too, one imagines, condemns corruption as a
"deadly virus".

BAE, far from seeing itself as a national champion, often points out these
days that its shares are majority foreign-owned, as it seeks to negotiate
a merger with a US company to break into the American market.

The influential thinktank, the Institute for Public Policy Research,
together with the lobby group Saferworld, published a study at the end of
last year 

Japan

[Ian Murray]

The Japan Times: June 16, 2003
JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES

Stocks won't recover unless regulators get serious about oversight

By YOSHIO NAKAMURA

Tokyo share prices are on shaky ground. While the Nikkei 225 Stock Average
has managed to recover from the deep slump it was in from March to
mid-May, spending the whole time below 8,000 but trading in the upper half
of the 7,000 range -- the key index remains far below 14,000, the level it
was at when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took office in April 2001.

On May 14, the government came up with a 13-point package of measures for
structurally reforming and revitalizing the stock market. The proposed
steps include moving up the date when corporate employee pension funds can
start returning the pension assets being managed on the government's
behalf, raising the upper limit on contributions allowable under the
defined-contribution pension scheme, and reforming the securities tax.
Efforts are now under way to put those measures into force.

The ruling coalition compiled its own batch of emergency financial and
economic measures on May 6. A group of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers
led by Lower House Representative Koji Omi, in a bid to increase
individual participation in the stock market, launched a campaign called
"Buy Japan's Tomorrow," under which it urged the prime minister and his
Cabinet to invest in stocks and the public to follow suit. In Japan,
individual investors account for a much lower portion of the market action
than in other industrialized nations. Given that Japanese firms are
accelerating efforts to unwind cross-held shares, expectations are high
that individual shareholders will surpass them as the key players in the
market. The lawmakers' campaign seems very timely.

One issue I hope the lawmakers will focus their energy on is building
people's trust in securities. If the general public tends to have a shady
image of the Japanese stock market, it is partly because of the the
practices being followed by securities firms. But the more fundamental
problem is that the nation lacks either the capability or the willpower to
properly monitor market activity.

The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has a staff of only
265, which is equivalent to a mere 8 percent of the 3,285 people employed
by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In fiscal 2002, the SESC
had an annual budget of only $23.33 million, or 5.3 percent of the SEC's
$437.9 million budget.

The government needs to make clear that it is ready to launch an immediate
investigation whenever it discovers possible unlawful conduct detrimental
to the healthy development of the market. It also has to disclose the
results of the investigation and seek public judgment on whether the
matter has been properly handled by the SESC.

In order to make the stock market more trustworthy and successfully
encourage more individuals to invest, the government must first establish
a system -- complete with full capability and willpower -- that can be
used to monitor stock market activity.

Yoshio Nakamura is a senior managing director of Nippon Keidanren.

new economy identity crisis

[Ian Murray]

Posted on Sun, Jun. 15, 2003
Sun Microsystems Deep in Identity Crisis
MATTHEW FORDAHL
Associated Press


SAN JOSE, Calif. - It was the leading supplier of the computer servers
that fueled the dot-com boom, the Silicon Valley star whose name was
nearly synonymous with New Economy chic.

But after two years on the bleeding edge of the bust, Sun Microsystems
Inc. has fallen victim to the commoditization of the computers that do
corporate America's heavy lifting.

Sun is deep in identity crisis as its executives try to reinvent the
company. There's been loose talk of Sun as a possible takeover target, and
some analysts are wondering whether Sun will ever return to the days of
strong revenue growth and record profits.

These days, even co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy's industry-famous
tirades against rivals seem muted.

McNealy, who declined to make himself available for this article, is more
likely to be talking about cutting costs - or how his sales team is now
offering customers a "whole-system" approach. To many ears, such a
strategy sounds strikingly similar to the mantras of International
Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other competitors.

"If you've got to lag at any time, the best time is when people aren't
spending money," said Larry Singer, Sun's vice president of information
systems strategy. "Yeah, we've got a little execution problem, but I think
we've got it taken care of ... at the right time."

Last year, Sun's revenues fell 32 percent from a record $18.3 billion in
2001. Sales are down this year, too.

The obvious reason for Sun's fall is that it relied too much on the very
companies that flamed out so spectacularly. And attempts to capture new
markets have been hurt by the overall economic malaise.

But Sun's woes have been exacerbated by its slow reaction to fundamental
changes in the industry, analysts say.

Sun's servers are being squeezed by the increasing power of so-called
commodity chips from Intel Corp. and low-cost operating systems like Linux
that only a few years ago could not approach the performance of the
company's Sparc microprocessors and Unix-based Solaris operating system.

So when the Screen Actors Guild's health and pension fund decided to
upgrade its servers earlier this year, the contract went to
Hewlett-Packard, which offered competitively priced equipment that not
only runs Linux but also works well with existing servers using multiple
operating systems.

Only recently has Sun switched from publicly bashing Linux and Intel to
launching low-cost Linux servers on Intel chips - a strategy that IBM and
HP jumped on sooner.

Sun, meanwhile, is also continuing the expensive development of Sparc and
Solaris.

"To date, Sun's strategy for switching to these commodities is not
perceived as credible by users," according to the research firm Meta
Group.

Sun is also spending millions pushing Java, a programming language that
provides little in direct revenue to Sun but can be found in millions of
cell phones, personal computers and other devices.

Its campaign, something like "Intel Inside" for Pentiums, included
Christina Aguilera with a Java-enabled phone.

Sun says Java opens markets for its equipment, particularly since it's a
keystone in Web services, in which computers communicate seamlessly with
one another regardless of operating system.

HP, IBM and Microsoft also are heavily touting Web services.

"It seems like McNealy's kind of serving up the strategy du jour and
because of that they've had some lack of conviction in what play they're
going to call," said Jeff Benck, IBM's director of eServer marketing.

Still, it's hard to write off a company that has more than $5.5 billion in
cash and marketable securities. Even in the depressed server market, it
eked out a small profit in its most recent quarter.

And since March, its stock price has jumped 53 percent, though it's still
far from the all-time high of $64 set in 2000.

According to the research firm IDC, Sun gained market share in three Unix
server categories in the first quarter. It's also the leader in Unix
shipments and tied with HP in server revenues.

"They still remain a server power, and they are still selling products,"
said Jean Bozman, an IDC analyst. "That's not nothing."

Though Sun is often criticized for being slow to jump on the
consulting-business bandwagon, the company says it's merely taking a
different tack: focusing on using its software to simplify complex
systems. IBM, Singer says, uses an army of expensive consultants to mask
the complexity.

Keith Horton, executive vice president of operations at TowneBank in
Virginia, said he chose Sun over IBM in part because of its approach.

"Sun reminded us a lot of the old IBM, where you bought the hardware and
system software and they came out and supported it," he said. "We have the
technical expertise here ... We haven't needed a consulting staff to come
in."

At Sun's headquarters, located at the site of an abandoned insane asylum
in

Mexican labor movement

[Ian Murray]

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section:
Business
June 14, 2003, 7:16PM
New grass-roots movement fosters unions, in past discouraged
By JENALIA MORENO


TLIXCO, Mexico -- With vacant looks in their eyes, female workers
furiously remove stray threads from T-shirts emblazoned with "Princess of
Everything."

American girls who wear the garments stamped with this precocious
statement will probably never know about the working conditions at the
Pacific Continental textile factory.

But after touring this plant one afternoon, organizers like Marco Polo
Rodriguez, 27, know all too well. He knows that at the Korean-owned
factory in this central Mexican town, workers labor for about $5 a day,
less than the retail price of a Princess T-shirt sold at a Texas store.

And the Mexican union organizer hears a Korean manager at the plant
explain that the company decided to open a factory in Mexico because of
the cheap labor.

Rodriguez is just one of a half-dozen former Mexican university students
and plant workers trying to give a voice to workers in these maquiladoras,
or assembly line factories. The organizers are part of a fledgling labor
movement in a country where promises of democracy after a historic
election in 2000 go unfulfilled. But it's a difficult struggle,
considering that even if workers succeed in organizing an independent
union, maquiladora owners may relocate their factory to a country with
even cheaper labor.

"I think if a lot of female Mexican workers would demand what's their
right, this would be another Mexico," said Blanca Velazquez, 29, who once
worked at an auto parts factory and helped organize a union there, which
was so successful she co-founded the Worker's Assistance Center to help
maquiladora workers across the state.

For two years these organizers, who are all in their 20s, have visited
factories and the homes of workers to help foster the creation of
independent unions. They write and perform plays for communities so
residents know about working conditions at the maquiladoras and workers
know how to organize.

Piling into the group's battered Chevy Blazer, they drive to remote
villages to discuss organizing with workers who must travel by foot and
bus for hours to reach their workplaces.

"There are no sources of work in Izucar de Matamoros except for in the
fields," said Liliana Tejeda, 22, of her small town 25 miles south of
Atlixco. Even that work dwindles every day because of Mexico's growing
farm crisis.

Impoverished farmers are leaving the countryside, saying small farms are
being squeezed out by bigger, better-funded U.S. competitors, and have
staged protests seeking help to bring the antiquated agriculture industry
up to date. Farm labor leaders have even called for an end to the North
American Free Trade Agreement and sought to keep subsidies and tariff
protection for crops.

Tejeda and her sister worked at Matamoros Garment through March, when the
plant closed. Until she can find another job, she speaks to international
visitors about working conditions at maquiladoras.

The Worker's Assistance Center has had some success in organizing workers
in this cathedral-filled town about 90 miles southeast of Mexico City. The
center formed in 2001 to help organize an independent union for workers at
the Mexmode garment factory.

Mexmode workers complained of worms in the cafeteria food, and a few said
they were forced to perform sexual favors, Velazquez said. Mexmode
officials would not allow reporters or union organizers access to the
plant recently.

The situation ignited in January 2001, when about 800 workers walked off
the assembly line and camped inside the Mexmode factory, demanding the
rehiring of fired workers, cleaner restrooms and cafeteria food that
didn't make them sick. Three days later, hundreds of soldiers stormed the
plant and began beating the mostly female workers.

"Everything was really ugly," said a Mexmode worker who spoke on the
condition of anonymity for fear of losing her $6-a-day job.

The beatings drew international media attention when American college
students found out their schools ordered sweat shirts bearing the Nike
swoosh from Mexmode, formerly called Kukdong.

Students protested with workers in Atlixco, and Mexican students formed
the Worker's Assistance Center, which invited American labor leaders to
help.

Together, they helped the Kukdong workers form an independent union, an
extraordinary action in Mexico. That's because there's no such thing as
voting by secret ballot in Mexico. Instead, in an intimidation tactic,
each worker must vote in front of her boss.

"Here you don't succeed in forming an independent union, and we did it,"
said the 21-year-old worker for Mexmode, which now has a contract to make
NBA uniforms.

She stitches together colorful pieces of material to make basketball
uniforms but can't tell the difference between a jersey for the Houston
Rockets and the New York Knicks.

Although she is pleased an in

Biotech/Trade

[Ian Murray]

[NYTimes]
June 14, 2003
Trade Pact on Gene-Altered Goods to Take Effect in 90 Days
By ANDREW POLLACK


A new global treaty that imposes restrictions on exports of genetically modified 
seeds, animals
and crops is set to take effect, injecting a new element into already heated 
international
disputes over agricultural biotechnology.

The treaty, known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, was agreed upon by more than 
130
nations in January 2000 but could not take effect until formally ratified by 50 
nations. The
50th, Palau, just gave its endorsement, so the protocol will go into effect in 90 
days, on
Sept. 11, the United Nations Environment Program said yesterday.

The treaty allows countries to bar imports of genetically engineered seeds, microbes, 
animals
or crops that they deem a threat to their environments. It also requires international
shipments of genetically engineered grains to be labeled.

The United States reluctantly agreed to the treaty in 2000 after intense negotiations 
pitting
it and a handful of other crop-exporting nations against everyone else. While 
Washington has
not ratified the protocol, American exporters to countries that are parties to the 
agreement
will have to abide by the rules, a senior State Department official said.

This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the effect of the treaty 
would
depend on the rules for carrying it out, which have not been written yet. He and 
others said
that many countries were already putting into place their own rules regulating imports 
or
requiring labeling of genetically modified products, making the treaty less 
significant than it
otherwise might have been.

The United States recently filed suit at the World Trade Organization challenging the 
European
Union's de facto moratorium on approval of new genetically modified crops, arguing it 
is not
based on sound science. The new treaty contains language that could bolster Europe's 
case, at
least morally. It allows countries to bar imports of genetically modified products 
even if
there is not enough information to prove scientifically that the products are 
dangerous.

Recognizing a potential conflict with W.T.O. rules, the framers of the biosafety 
treaty were
careful to state that it neither supersedes nor is subordinate to other agreements.

L. Val Giddings, vice president for food and agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry
Organization, a trade group, said the new treaty would have little effect over all and 
none on
Washington's case against Europe. "There's no way you can possibly read it or construe 
it that
would allow a trumping of W.T.O. obligations," he said.

Kristin Dawkins, vice president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a 
nonprofit
group in Minneapolis that opposes genetically modified foods, said the treaty bolstered
opponents of biotechnology because it establishes that genetically modified foods 
should be
treated differently from other foods.

tax shift redux

[Ian Murray]

Anti-Tax Crusaders Work for Big Shift
White House Wary Of Broad Changes

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 14, 2003; Page A01


After the third tax cut in three years, some Bush administration
policymakers are pushing for more fundamental changes that would largely
shelter investments from taxation, dramatically changing the way Americans
are taxed and how the government is financed.

But they are running into surprising opposition from White House officials
who fear that such prescriptions could have dangerous economic and
political consequences as the budget deficit grows.

At the heart of the matter is an ambition of conservative tax theorists in
and outside of the Bush administration to pursue tax cuts not only to
relieve the burden on taxpayers, but also to create a system that they
believe will make the economy stronger.

Their ambitions outstrip what even some conservative tax-cutting
Republicans think is feasible or wise.

Until now, both camps have pursued tax-cutting in close alliance because
they agreed that lowering taxes was the right policy. But now they are
divided about where to go next and why.

"My look at tax reform tells me, I don't see it," outgoing White House
budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said last week, referring to
certain proposals by the Treasury Department for more tax-cutting. "The
political problems are too intractable. . . . Until [President Bush] sees
a system that has social justice and economic smarts, I don't think he'll
spend any time on it."

Pamela F. Olson, assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy, said she
does not see a division in the administration. She played down the
significance of the next steps toward tax reform advocated by the Treasury
Department. "All we're doing is simplifying things, opening things up,"
Olson said.

But the conservative theorists say they have achieved far more in three
years than they had expected.

Since Bush took office, this decade's federal tax bill has been cut by
more than $1.7 trillion. That amount would more than double if tax-cut
provisions now set to expire are extended. Federal tax revenue, as a
percentage of the overall economy, will fall this year to about 16.5
percent, its lowest level since the Eisenhower administration.

The record federal budget surplus of $236 billion in the last year of the
Clinton administration has turned into a record deficit that is expected
to surpass $400 billion this year, in part because of those tax policies.

Specific changes to the tax code mean the government now depends more on
taxing wages than investment income such as dividends, capital gains and
interest. Because investment income and inheritances tend to flow to the
very rich, the effective federal tax rate on households earning more than
$416,000 will have fallen from 32.7 percent when Bush took office to 26.9
percent by 2010, while their share of federal taxation will have dropped
from 24.3 percent to 22.8 percent.

The architects of the last three tax cuts at the Treasury and the Council
of Economic Advisers say their combined effect will be to push the United
States toward the holy grail of conservative tax theory: a system that
they believe would promote economic efficiency and growth by focusing
taxation on consumption while rewarding investment. These administration
officials argue that taxing returns on investment amounts to unfair and
punitive "double taxation," because the income that was invested was taxed
when it was earned.

Critics have long held that such a system would unfairly shift the tax
burden from the affluent to the working class. Besides, said William Gale,
an economist at the Brookings Institution, by granting businesses tax
breaks on their income then reducing taxes on dividends and capital gains,
administration policymakers are not ensuring that corporate income and
investment gains are taxed only once, they are ensuring that much of it is
not taxed at all.

R. Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic
Advisers, said that for the president, reforming the tax code to eliminate
taxation of investments was never the primary motive. But to others in the
administration, it was always a goal.

"The discussions the president instigated will be a good precursor to tax
reform," Hubbard said, "and that wasn't lost on anybody."

Last year, Ernest S. Christian, a Treasury official in the Reagan
administration and founder of the Committee for Strategic Tax Reform,
devised a plan for stealth tax reform in "five easy pieces."

Placed against the tax cuts of the past three years, Christian's agenda is
beginning to look like a road map: lower marginal income tax rates,
including capital gains tax rates; eliminate taxes on dividends;
accelerate the speed with which businesses can write investment expenses
off their tax bills; expand the Roth Individual Retirement Account to all
personal saving; and exclude export and other foreign trade income of
American

coming soon: anti-WTO legislation

[Ian Murray]

http://www.southbendtribune.com
June 13, 2003
Bayh to introduce WTO legislation
Senator: Trade group's rulings unfair to U.S.

By JAMES WENSITS
Tribune Political Writer


U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh said Thursday there is growing evidence that the World
Trade Organization is neither neutral nor impartial when it comes to
decisions affecting American trade.

In an effort to combat that perceived unfairness, Bayh announced that he
is introducing legislation he says will protect thousands of Indiana and
U.S. jobs by strengthening U.S. trade laws against WTO rulings.

"We can't be patsies," Bayh said in a telephone interview during which he
outlined the new legislation.

According to Bayh, 17 of 20 case decisions made by the WTO since 1997 have
gone against the United States. His legislation would create a panel of
retired federal judges whose job would be to review WTO decisions and
render a "second opinion" regarding their fairness.

Should the judges, over a five-year period, detect a pattern of bias, the
measure calls for the government to take action by suspending trade
promotion authority and requiring the president to present a plan to
achieve WTO reform of its dispute settlement system.

The measure would also strengthen litigation efforts by the U.S. trade
representative, enhance congressional oversight of WTO matters and
"establish specific U.S. negotiating objectives at the WTO to bring about
a dispute settlement system that is more limited, professional and
transparent," according to Bayh.

Bayh said his goal is to protect the jobs of Hoosier farmers, steel
workers, metal casters and others whose products are exported to other
countries. "The stakes are high," he said.

He was particularly incensed by a WTO decision that struck down U.S.
tariffs on imported steel and disallowed a U.S. plan to use money
collected from the tariffs to reimburse injured steel companies.

"The very legitimacy of the international trade system is at stake," Bayh
said.

Bayh blamed WTO dispute panelists for the anti-American decisions and said
he believes it is "very hard for someone employed by a foreign government
to be a neutral judge."

Asked whether foreign governments might not say the same thing about the
panel of American judges envisioned by Bayh, the Hoosier Democrat conceded
that "it might be difficult to achieve absolute purity."

Still, he said, there is a need to assess whether the WTO is operating
fairly, saying that it would not be in the best interests of the United
States to pay judges to rule falsely.

"It is in our interest to have free trade," he said, adding that it would
not be in the nation's interest to set up a biased process.

The WTO incensed the U.S. steel industry when a dispute panel ruled
earlier this year against temporary tariffs imposed by President Bush in
2002.

The United States has appealed the ruling, and the WTO appellate body is
expected to make a decision next fall.

"Senator Bayh's bill would make critical reforms to improve the way we
litigate at the WTO and help rein in abuses in the WTO system," said
Thomas J. Usher, chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. Steel Corp.
"Given the enormous implications of these cases for U.S. manufacturers, we
need to take these common-sense steps now to preserve the integrity of our
laws and to make the WTO process work for Americans."

According to one industry spokesman, the WTO has been used both by those
who have an anti-U.S. bias as well as those who have an anti-trade law
bias.

Because the United States has strong trade laws and enforces them, it is
the target of those who "are anxious to take our laws down," he said.

That procedure usually takes the form of seeking a WTO ruling that U.S.
law doesn't conform with WTO law, the spokesman said.

In addition to rulings adverse to the U.S. steel industry, Bayh cited
decisions regarding a variety of other products, including
semi-conductors, lamb meat, pipe, wheat gluten and clothing as examples of
WTO unfairness.

WTO/Byrd amendment

[Ian Murray]

Posted on Fri, Jun. 13, 2003

WTO Gives U.S. Deadline to Repeal Law
Associated Press

GENEVA - A World Trade Organization arbitrator Friday gave the United
States until Dec. 27 to repeal a U.S. law giving American companies the
fines collected from foreign firms they accused of unfair pricing.

The decision follows an earlier ruling - upheld on appeal - that the law
breaks international trade rules.

Arbitrator Uasuhei Taniguchi decided that 11 months was a "reasonable"
period after the United States and the countries which brought the case
failed to agree on the time needed to repeal the law.

Washington claimed it had to have 15 months from the date in January that
the ruling was adopted by the WTO, while the complaining countries said
six months was enough.

Under legislation passed in 2000, hundreds of millions of dollars in fines
collected by the U.S. government have been handed over to companies that
lodge complaints against foreign exporters judged to be selling products
at artificially low prices.

The U.S. steel industry was the major beneficiary, while other recipients
included makers of pasta and candles.

The law provoked formal complaints from the 15-nation European Union,
Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand,
Canada and Mexico. They claimed that the law punishes exporters to the
United States twice because first they are fined and then those fines are
handed to their competitors.

They said the U.S. rules allow the money to be used for a wide range of
purposes, including purchase of equipment, research, training, health care
and pension benefits

Fw: [PEN-L] Falsifiability and the law of value

[Ian Murray]

I asked Jim D. a ? in response to his statements on the LOV. Here's his
response, which he ok'd to pass on.


- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Ian Murray'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

 I wrote:
 > > We have to consider what the alternative to the LOV is. If
 > > we reject the LOV
 > > heuristic that starts with the notion that society involves  a
 > > collective
 > > labor process, is the alternative that it's simply a matter of
 > > individuals
 > > exchanging with each other (the neoclassical belief)? or
 > > what is your
 > > alternative, JKS?

 Ian writes:
 > I'm not jks [nor will I be playing him on tv any time soon]
>


 I don't think you could make a lot of money playing JKS on TV, so keep
your
 day job!

 > but we
 > wouldn't say we need to replace god once theism is shown to be an
 > untenable account of reality.



 God (or gods and/or goddesses) is at a completely different theoretical
 level.  It's a matter of ontology, what exists. Theism asserts a fact,
i.e.,
 that god(s) exist.

 On the other hand, the LOV is much more an issue of epistemology, i.e.,
how
 can we try to understand the world. If your task is to figure out the
nature
 of the capitalist beast (in order to change or kill it), what's the best
 approach? (I like the word "heuristic" here better than "epistemology,"
but
 the latter makes good contrast to ontology, which is what theism
involves.)

 Clearly, epistemological and ontological issues are interrelated and are
 thus hard to separate. Neoclassicals instinctively apply an
individualistic
 method (an epistemological approach) because they believe that the world
 really is nothing but the sum of the parts (an ontological proposition).
 Marxians apply a holistic method because they believe that the (societal)
 world is an interconnected system.

 How to choose, at least on this abstract level? I'd apply the
completeness
 criterion (what lawyers seem to be referring to as "the whole truth").
Does
 a method leave obvious issues out? Methodological individualism involves
a
 deliberate refusal to ignore the way in which the aggregate or macro
level
 feeds back to determine the character of the individual parts -- in order
to
 focus only on the way in which the parts create the whole. The
mirror-image
 of this should also be rejected. This is sometimes called "Marxism" (but
 could also be structural functionalism, mysticism, or the like) and
involves
 rejecting looking at the way in which individuals create society to focus
 only on the way in which the whole determines the character of the parts.
 (This kind of Marxism rejects any role for the study of psychology, for
 example.)

 In other words, both sides Levins & Lewontin's story in THE DIALECTICAL
 BIOLOGIST (paraphrasing, "the parts make the whole and the whole makes
the
 parts") are important. I think that Marx's LOV represents a major way to
 make sure that we heed the role of the whole making the parts. This
doesn't
 mean, however, that as a matter of principle, we should ignore
microeconomic
 (or microsociological) theory. (If asked to predict individual price
 changes, I'd turn to the "law" of supply and demand before I'd use the
LOV.)



 > Couldn't we jettison the LOV
 > heuristic and
 > just use class analysis in the manner of EO Wright, for instance?

 I am not very familiar with Erik's recent work, so I may end up being
 unfair. But what the hell, he's not here to complain. ;-)

 Lately it seems like he's mostly an empiricist in orientation, one who
takes
 existing theoretical concepts rather than developing new ones and then
tests
 their validity empirically. That's fine as far as it goes and can be
 extremely useful, but it's important to remember that social science
 involves a division of labor. Just because he does generally empiricist
work
 doesn't mean that others should also do that. There can be
 cross-fertilization between different scholars' work. In fact, I'm pretty
 sure that he acknowledges the fact that a lot of his concepts come from
 folks like Marx who don't follow his lead.

 If I remember correctly, these days Erik uses a theory of class derived
from
 Roemer (who adapted Marx). This involves class being defined as a
 characteristic of individuals. I prefer Marx's original, in which class
 first and foremost is defined in terms of positions in a societal
structure
 and process.

 BTW, he recently published an article of mine which followed the
 Levins/Lewontin method, looking at both the micro determination of macro
 phenomena and vice-versa.

 Jim

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

>
> PS: If Ian had been quicker on the draw he might have
> pointed out that Quine thought that it *was* a problem
> for Popper and demanded that you be the one to "explain
> why" you disagreed.  I'm not sure you realise how
> dismissive you're being.  It must be irritating to have
> to revisit ground you thought had been covered and lost
> in the academic literature ages ago, but it's also
> quite annoying for us to be magisterially directed to
> read a 400-page doctoral thesis before we're allowed to
> have opinions.  Everyone on this list has to explain
> the basic material of their own specialist fields every
> once in a while.


=

I enjoy discussing phil of sci. with Justin, but not with Moses. Virtually
all non-Popperians thought the ball was in KP's court and he declared he
didn't want to quibble with words, retreating to his Tarskian bubble.


Ian

Re: Falsifiability and the law of value

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 8:22 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Falsifiability and the law of value


> This was unnecessary. First of all, the reasons that
> have motivated most skeptics who have thought about
> the matter to reject the LOV or LTV -- like me -- are
> not that it is an "unscientific notion" that cannot be
> "falsified," but that it is  a bad scientific notion
> whose time is up bewcause it has not proved to have
> any explanatory value or theoretical use, other than
> employing a shrinking group of true believers
> increasingly arcane defenses. Second, only the crudest
> and most mechanical sort of Popperianism (not
> Popper's) would proceed proposition by propostion
> through a body of theory, testing the "scientificity"
> of each independently of others, so this would be a
> really dumb objection if somewone were to make it.
> Third, no one has. Everyone involved, except Ian, who
> rejects the vulgar interpretation of Popperianism but
> thinks is it is really important to engage with straw
> men, acknowledges that there is no alternative to
> evaluating theories as wholes, which means that it's
> no prob from a demarcation criterion pov if a bit of a
> theory that does important work isn't falsifiable on
> its own. If it's not falsifiable in the context of the
> wholed theory, as with notions like "Oedipus complex,"
> that's a problem.
>
> jks

===

Please don't conjecture that I hold a view which I don't. How many straw
men did you deal with before you came to the Rorty-ization that they were
straw men? The problem with your sfw is the attitude it conveys; disdain
and contempt when disagreement occurs is counterproductive to
communication. It's part of the reason 'regular' folks hate many
scientists, arrogance is a public bad.


Ian

Re: US attacks Iraqi terrorists

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "k hanly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 9:05 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] US attacks Iraqi terrorists


> This seems to be standard terminology now. Any armed resistance to the
> occupation of Iraq is termed terrorism. Although some press reports put
the
> term in scare quotes its effect is not changed. Here we have Orwell in
> 2003.'
>
> Cheers, Ken Hanly

===

It seems like the Iraqi's are trying to kill at least one soldier a day.
And if the press gets used to it and ignores them, they'll go to whatever
number gets the issue back on photos on tv/newspapers unless the risks to
themselves are too high.

Ian

Re: Freud & Assessing Un-Blinded Experimentation

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Hari Kumar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> By the way:
> Is Ian is still reading - thx for your reply! But the poor benighted
> ML-ist [Hereafter PBML-ist] did not get what it/she/he wanted. So - yes
> that quotation was certainly expressive of Popper. What i was driving at
> - was that you you were saying that there was a lot of literature
> 'attacking' [paraphrase of PBML-ist] Popper. ti sounded as you were
> talking that this emanated from "respectable" Philosophical sources.
> Please cite!
> Cheers, H

===

KP's output was pretty huge so he had plenty of detractors as well as
friends; the below are some of what I have that dealt with the debates:


Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence by David Miller [quite
sympathetic]

The Philosophy of Science ed. by Richard Boyd, Philip Gasper & J.D. Trout
[Popper selections with critiques, but mainly a huge compendium of 20th
century phil. of science debate up to 1991, even as it leaves out quite a
bit - only 2 pages on AI, zilch on simulation yada yada]

Evolutionary Epistemology, Theory of Rationality and the Sociology of
Knowledge ed. by Gerard Radnitzky & W.W. Bartley III [the second section
is where Popperians try to come to terms with self-reference even as their
mentor elides the issue in his two contributions]

Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents by Steve Fuller and Social
Epistemology by same [ latter goes into the demarcation/reflexivity
problems in interesting ways]


That'll keep you busy and dizzy; obviously there more dead trees filled
with stuff..

Ian

ECB forecast, etc.

[Ian Murray]

http://www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/mb200306en.pdf

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> I'm not getting that Rortyian. For reasons that are obscure to me, I
still find it worthwile to talk about philosophy of science, even about
Popper. What I'm saying sfw to is the point of a concession I am -- and
Popperwas -- happy to make, but which some critics seem to regard,
mysteriously, as crushing to Popper's whole idea of suggesting
falsifiability as demarcation criterion for what count as science. Yes,
Popper admitted that science is holistic, that you can save any
proposotion by making becesasry changes elses. He admitted that,
therefore, falsification cannot be atomic, proposition by proposition, and
can only be tentative and propvision, not conclusive. He disputed,
however, that this meant that therefore there was no point in talking
about falsifiability, or that it could not be the demarcation criterion,
or that there was no demarcation criterion. I think he was right both in
his concession and his conclusions about its limited effect. If you think
otherwise, explain
>  why. Other it's swf?. Right? jks



What, and perpetuate the interminableness of the issues involved? I think
otherwise on the sfw, that's all. Again the issue was regarding Freud and
the early Popperian reaction which was about the atomicity of assertions
and how many false propositions before a theory was kicked in the
grave-Popper's included via reflexivity, not the subsequent 70+ years of
clarifications...

Btw, the Rorty-izing of law and economics would be a healthy 'research
program' for younger theorists to explore. They could improve upon Wade
Hands somewhat halting first steps.

Ian

Boeing: extortion pays, again.........

[Ian Murray]

Thursday, June 12, 2003
Boeing gets its way in Olympia
By ANGELA GALLOWAY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER CAPITOL CORRESPONDENT

OLYMPIA -- Majority House Democrats acquiesced to business and GOP demands
for sweeping cuts in Washington's unemployment benefits last night, and
the Legislature wrapped up a special Boeing session and finally concluded
work for the year.

Gov. Gary Locke is expected to sign the Senate bill, which will
substantially cut benefits for thousands of seasonal workers, including
some farm and construction laborers. It limits all jobless to 26 weeks of
benefits, rather than the current 30-week cap. And it reduces the state's
maximum benefit amount.

Unemployment insurance reductions, workers compensation and passing a
multibillion-dollar tax break were the substantial measures aimed at
persuading The Boeing Co. to build its next commercial jet here that
dragged lawmakers into a second overtime session early yesterday.

"Today marks a victory for our state," Locke said. "These are tough times;
but this is an opportunity for our state to move forward." But many labor
unions didn't see it that way, including the Washington State Labor
Council and representatives of farm and construction workers.

"This is the day that corporate greed won in Washington state," said Jeff
Johnson of the Washington State Labor Council. "The business community --
along with various Republicans and Democrats, including the governor --
decimated our unemployment insurance system."

Dozens of labor activists picketed the capitol campus this week in protest
of the business-friendly proposals. But the package did divide the labor
community somewhat: Aerospace unions supported the reforms.

Boeing plans to decide later this year where to assemble the upcoming line
of the commercial airliner, the 7E7. Washington is competing with other
states for that work -- and many say the company's future in this state
rides on winning that work. Washington officials must submit a bid for the
plant next week.

To sweeten it, lawmakers this week approved $3.2 billion in tax breaks
Locke sought for Boeing and its contractors if the aerospace giant builds
the new jets in Washington. And lawmakers approved relatively modest
reductions in the state's workers compensation system.

Boeing officials have claimed they spend $20 million a year on the
unemployment insurance system subsidizing seasonal industries -- which
often hit a cap on their tax burdens. Locke has said the change is
projected to save Boeing between $5 million and $7 million a year.

Chuck Cadena, a Boeing spokesman, declined to discuss whether the measures
would help Washington's chances of landing the 7E7 project. However, he
said, "we appreciate the continued focus and effort by the governor and
the Legislature to address the competitiveness of the state."

The unemployment insurance change, which will affect hundreds of thousands
of out-of-work Washingtonians, proved a sticking point.

Politicians wanted to offer the company tax relief to help Washington's
chances of landing the 7E7 project. Many businesses have long sought
changes to the state's unemployment system -- considered among the
nation's most generous and costly to employers.

"This bill will improve Washington's business climate, and it will help in
our effort to land Boeing's 7E7 project," Sen. Jim Honeyford, R-Sunnyside,
said in a written statement. "Without this bill, we have no chance at all
to get the 7E7. This at least keeps us in the game."

But House Democrats felt the Senate unemployment plan unfairly targeted
poor and minority workers. They had offered a counterproposal for
across-the-board benefit cuts in the unemployment program.

"We felt that amendment made this a more balanced approach," Majority
Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, told her House colleagues. "We felt that
it was fairer to our workers."

But Locke, Boeing and other business interests, and majority Senate
Republicans insisted on the plan, which was negotiated among a range of
businesses. The House gave in and approved the upper chamber's version
last evening 57-33.

The Senate version saved businesses, including Boeing, about $167 million
a year, $37 million more than the House plan.The multibillion-dollar tax
break for Boeing is, by some measures, the largest ever given to one
company, said state tax officials.

In 1995, lawmakers approved a sales tax break for manufacturers who buy
machinery and equipment, which is worth more overall. But that break is
open to all Washington manufacturers, from Boeing to tiny machinery shops.

The 7E7 package proposed by Locke is dedicated to aerospace companies. The
phased-in breaks are worth about $400 million over the next six years and
an estimated $3.2 billion over 20 years.

The changes to the state's injured workers compensation system include a
limit on hearing loss claims. Boeing, with noisy factories, stands to be a
major beneficiary.

.Businesses said the Senate unemployment plan better a

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> This is one more reason I am happy to be a lawyer. I don't have to be
respectful to tedious ongoing conversations in philosophy that ought to
have been ended years or decades ago, merely because you can't drive a
stake through their hearts in the journals. I am getting more Rortyian
every day about this sort of thing. Maybe it's sophomoric. But I'll need
to be shown -- briefly please! -- that I've overlooked an important reason
not to say, so fucking what? The fact that illiterates (I don't meany
anyone here) continue to chat about this is not a reason. jks

=

I'll be the first to admit Galileo and Newton got on with their work just
fine without a Carnap or Popper armchair quarterbacking their strategies
of inquiry, but remember, you're the guy who did the stuff professionally
so you oughta know. :-). I left the game before you did, does that give me
the right to say sfw to your take on the issue?

One can always say so fucking what about legal theory as well and the
various institutional messes that have flowed from such theorizing. Let's
Rorty-ize the law [and economics too], shall we? :-)


Ian

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> Popper never through that individual hypotheses could be falsified
atomistically; his discussion of holism in Conjectures and Refutations is
very early and very good. Others got entangled in this dumb debate because
they couldn't read or felt that they needed something to argue about.
Anyway, the issue is conclusively settled now, science is holistic,
falsification is never conclusive. So fucking what? jks
>


===

"Moses, you come down of that mountain right this minute and eat your
supper. I don't care if you've been chiseling tablets with your friend Mr.
YHWH all day. Get down here right this minute."


Really, you'll have to come up with a better conversation stopper than
that as the physicists etc. have been trying that with philosophers of
science for 300 years now to no avail. And we weren't talking about 'now'
we were talking about Freudian Vienna and how philosophers and scientists
wrestled with issues then. But then, 2020 hindsight can always be
sophomorically smug.

Chill dude.


Ian

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews


> Right, but verifiability as a criterion of cognitive meaningfulness is
more susceptible to the reflexivity attack than is falsificationsim as a
criterion of demarcation -- it was never offered as a criterion of any
sort of meaningfulness.

==

Right, but the latter implicitly assumed without explaining/justifying a
distinction between truth/falsity and meaning and set the stage for the
debate over just what was to be falsifiable; individual assertions [and
associated notions of reference of singular terms which re-introduced the
issues of meaning], hypotheses within a theory or whole theories
themselves. The critics jumped on the fact that P.'s explication of
falsification did not adequately address the issues involved, its been a
shitstorm ever since.



>
It would be bad if the verification criterion were not cognitively
meaningful. But falsfiability was never supposed to be a piece of science,
just a test of science. jks

=

Right, but we never test science, anymore than we test capitalism, :-)


Ian

Unocal and the ATCA

[Ian Murray]

[National Law Journal]
9th Circuit spurns U.S. over alien tort claims
A big Unocal case is still to be argued.
By Marcia Coyle
STAFF REPORTER

WASHINGTON-An attempt by the Bush administration and the business
community to halt federal court litigation against corporations sued for
human rights violations abroad appears to have suffered a major blow in
the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The government and major business organizations have filed amicus briefs
in Doe v. Unocal Corp., No. 00-566603 and Roe v. Unocal Corp., No.
00-56628, arguing that the Alien Tort Statute of 1789, more widely known
as the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), does not create a cause of action
permitting foreign nationals to bring human rights claims in federal
courts for conduct occurring in other nations.

The Unocal case-viewed as pivotal by human rights and corporate defense
lawyers in the fight over ATCA-will be heard by the full 9th Circuit on
June 17.

But last week, in an unrelated case also involving claims under the
act-with the United States itself as one of the defendants-the en banc 9th
Circuit ignored the government's request to revisit precedents or an
analysis of the statute has led that court, and many around the country,
to permit these claims to go forward. Alvarez-Machain v. U.S., No.
99-56772, and Alvarez-Machain v. Sosa, No. 99-56880.

The Alien Tort Claims Act provides that "the district courts shall have
original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only,
committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United
States."

In the Alvarez decision last week, the 9th Circuit affirmed a liability
judgment against Francisco Sosa, a former Mexican policeman who was hired
in 1990 by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents to help
kidnap Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Machain and bring him to the United States.

Alvarez-Machain, wanted in the kidnapping and killing of a DEA agent in
1985, was later tried and acquitted. He then sued his captors, the United
States and DEA agents for a number of torts under ATCA and the Federal
Tort Claims Act.

The court upheld the judgment against Sosa, ruling that the "unilateral,
nonconsensual, extraterritorial arrest and detention of Alvarez were
arbitrary and in violation of the law of nations" under the Alien Tort
Claims Act.

The Alvarez decision has "enormous" implications for the Unocal case and
all cases against corporations under the statute, said Paul L. Hoffman of
Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris & Hoffman of Venice, Calif., counsel to
Alvarez and who, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, represents
citizens of Myanmar (formerly Burma) suing Unocal.

The Justice Department in Alvarez, he explained, pressed the same argument
as in Unocal that the act does not apply to claims brought by aliens for
actions occurring in other countries.

"No judge on the en banc court bought that," Hoffman said. "They basically
reaffirmed the ATCA framework that the 9th Circuit has followed for more
than a decade. This is a carefully considered opinion. I say that and we
didn't win everything."

Sosa's counsel, Carter G. Phillips of Chicago's Sidley Austin Brown &
Wood, said that he sees "no sentiment" on the court for revisiting any of
its Alien Tort Claims Act cases.

Phillips, who filed an amicus brief for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and
other business groups in the Unocal case, predicted that it will be fought
over what standard should be applied to the claims against Unocal, not
over whether the claims could be brought in the first place.

The latter question is the most important legal question, said Edwin V.
Woodsome Jr. of Washington's Howrey Simon Arnold & White, counsel to
Unocal.

"Can any lawsuit be brought under the act?" he asked. "The United States
has taken a position, particularly in the Unocal case and as well in other
cases, that the ATCA does not provide a substantive cause of action, but
only confers jurisdiction. The court in Alvarez didn't spend much time on
that issue."

Unocal was sued in 1996 by Burmese villagers who claim that they and their
families were assaulted, raped, tortured and forced into labor by the
Myanmar military, which provided security and other services for the
construction of an oil pipeline by Unocal. The suit was the first against
a corporation under the act.

A 9th Circuit panel last year held that Unocal could be liable under the
law for aiding and abetting the military in forced labor, murder and rape.

In granting en banc review, the 9th Circuit said it was interested
primarily in whether the criminal law-based aiding-and-abetting standard
was correct or, as argued in a concurring opinion in the panel ruling,
whether general federal common law tort principles, such as agency, joint
venture or reckless disregard, should apply to the claims.

New old weapon

On the books since 1789, the Alien Tort Claims Act was rarely used until
1980. In that year, the 2d Circuit held that it gave jurisdiction to
federal

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> Actually, the falsifiability criterion is supposed to be a demarcation
test (to mark out scoence from nonscience), and not itself a piece of
science, so the self-reference critique wouldn't apply. Crews' critique of
psycholanalysis is not vulgar Popperianism. It based on a careful,
exhaustive, and really thorough interrogation of the major psychoanlytrucl
claims and purported evidence for them. And whatever the genearl faults
with Popperianism might be, only an economist or a philosopher of science
would regard immunity to empirical test as irrelevant to whether a theory
counted as science. jks


==

I was thinking of it in terms of the whole dispute over the
verificationist approach to meaning, which was loaded with reflexivity
problems. One can't falsify whether the falsifiability criterion is
sufficient to serve as a demarker.

Ian

weapons and bribes

[Ian Murray]

[obviously the Feds would deny that WA is bribing
Boeing.Governments can't bribe by definition]


US accuses British over arms deal bribery bid

Rob Evans and Ian Traynor in Prague
Thursday June 12, 2003
The Guardian

The US has accused Britain's biggest weapons company, BAE Systems, and its
British government sponsor of "corrupt practice" over a Czech arms deal,
according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

The American government made the accusation after receiving reports from
the CIA and rival firms. A Guardian investigation in Prague has obtained
first-hand evidence confirming bribery attempts on behalf of the BAE deal.

The bribery of foreigners is now a criminal offence under British law.
However, the Ministry of Defence's permanent secretary, Sir Kevin Tebbit,
to whom Washington's accusations were made personally last year, failed to
call in the police to investigate the allegations.

Instead, Sir Kevin claimed in a letter to the US state department
assistant secretary, Anthony Wayne, that the complaint had been
investigated and was groundless. The MoD told the Guardian this week that
the allegation "has never been substantiated by any evidence whatsoever".

In Prague, the allegations are well-documented. The bribery attempts to
promote the BAE deal were confirmed by the Czech police, although BAE
flatly denies authorising any such attempt.

Two senior Czech politicians separately claimed they were offered bribes
last summer in an attempt to prevent them voting against the £1bn deal to
buy Gripen fighter jets from a BAE-Saab joint venture.

Those attempts were directed at opposition politicians, but it is also
claimed in Prague that larger sums of money went to people linked to
politicians in the governing Social Democrat coalition. "I am convinced
that money went to the Social Democrats," a senior Czech government
official said.

BAE admits that it offered corporate financial favours to the head of a
Czech television station which it wanted to support its campaign in 2001.
British laws banning corrupt acts abroad only came into force the
following year.

Prague sources say BAE Systems had a £1.5m annual lobbying budget to
influence Czech opinion.

Four rival companies, two of them American, pulled out of the bidding in
May 2001 in a coordinated protest against what they alleged was a rigged
deal in favour of BAE.

The disclosure of the US confrontation with Britain is particularly
serious because both Tony Blair and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon,
flew to Prague and lobbied the Czechs unsuccessfully on BAE's behalf. The
deal is currently shelved.

An email obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act in the course of
a major Guardian investigation into British arms sales describes the clash
in July last year between Sir Kevin and Mr Wayne, a senior state
department official in charge of US-foreign business deals.

After Mr Wayne made his accusations of bribery, Sir Kevin wrote rejecting
them. On September 6, a commerce department official, Thomas Barlow,
emailed a colleague, William Denk, telling him of Sir Kevin's "sharp
response".

The letter expresses surprise at being "confronted... with repeated but
unsubstantiated allegations of corrupt practice by BAE Systems in the
dealings with the Czech Republic... [and that he] is satisfied that all
reasonable steps have been taken to investigate US claims... [and that]
unless you have any information to provide in the form of firm evidence,
we need to draw a line under this subject".

The MoD could not tell the Guardian of any steps Sir Kevin took to
investigate the claims. It said: "If anyone believes they have evidence to
support this allegation, they should present it to the police. If MoD had
received any such evidence we would certainly have reported it to the
police. We have not."

BAE said: "BAE Systems did not pay bribes in the Czech Republic in order
to influence any decisions in Gripen's favour. Nor did BAE Systems ever
authorise or direct anyone to pay bribes to that end."

Re: To JD & Ian re Popper: Aid to the poor benighted Marxist-Leninists Amongst Us Please!

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Hari Kumar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 5:27 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] To JD & Ian re Popper: Aid to the poor benighted
Marxist-Leninists Amongst Us Please!


> The conversation went:
> > I noticed that a major element of Crews' critique of Freudianism (in
> the
> >New York REVIEW OF BOOKS a few years ago) is that it can't be falsified
> (following Popper's >criterion). Unfortunately, this seems to apply to
> all_  of social science (and to Popper).
> ==
> Popper deplored the issue of reflexivity and self-reference from the
> moment it was turned on his own conjectures...
> Ian
> COMMENT: Can you both expand? I am aware of Muarice Cornforths's "The
> Open Philosphy & The Open Society" - [not read it for many eyars now] -
> but to what body of work are you two talking about?? -  - ??
> Thx,
> hari

==

[the demarcation problem has been with us since at least Sextus
Empiricus--the problem of the criterion/regress]


>From Chapter 1 of "Conjectures and Refutations"

The problem which troubled me at the time was neither, "When is a theory
true?" nor, "When is a theory acceptable?" My problem was different. I
wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very
well that science often errs, and that pseudo-science may happen to
stumble on the truth.

I knew, of course, the most widely accepted answer to my problem: that
science is distinguished from pseudo-science_or from "metaphysics"_by its
empirical method, which is essentially inductive, proceeding from
observation or experiment. But this did not satisfy me. On the contrary, I
often formulated my problem as one of distinguishing between a genuinely
empirical method and a non-empirical or even a pseudo-empirical
method-that is to say, a method which, although it appeals to observation
and experiment, nevertheless does not come up to scientific standards. The
latter method may be exemplified by astrology with its stupendous mass of
empirical evidence based on observation-on horoscopes and on biographies.

But as it was not the example of astrology which led me to my problem I
should perhaps briefly describe the atmosphere in which my problem arose
and the examples by which it was stimulated. After the collapse of the
Austrian Empire there had been a revolution in Austria: the air was full
of revolutionary slogans and ideas, and new and often wild theories. Among
the theories which interested me Einstein's theory of relativity was no
doubt by far the most important. Three others were Marx's theory of
history, Freud's psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler's so-called "individual
psychology."

There was a lot of popular nonsense talked about these theories, and
especially about relativity (as still happens even today), but I was
fortunate in those who introduced me to the study of this theory. We
all-the small circle of students to which I belonged-were thrilled with
the result of Eddington's eclipse observations which in 1919 brought the
first important confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravitation. It was a
great experience for us, and one which had a lasting influence on my
intellectual development.

The three other theories I have mentioned were also widely discussed among
students at that time. I myself happened to come into personal contact
with Alfred Adler, and even to co-operate with him in his social work
among the children and young people in the working-class districts of
Vienna where he had established social guidance clinics.

It was during the summer of 1919 that I began to feel more and more
dissatisfied with these three theories-the Marxist theory of history,
psychoanalysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious
about their claims to scientific status. My problem perhaps first took the
simple form, "What is wrong with Marxism, psycho-analysis, and individual
psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from
Newton's theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?"

To make this contrast clear I should explain that few of us at the time
would have said that we believed in the truth of Einstein's theory of
gravitation. This shows that it was not my doubting the truth of those
other three theories which bothered me, but something else. Yet neither
was it that I merely felt mathematical physics to be more exact than the
sociological or psychological type of theory. Thus what worried me was
neither the problem of truth, at that stage at least, nor the problem of
exactness or measurability.It was rather that I felt that these other
three theories, though posing as sciences, had in fact more in common with
primitive myths than with science; that they resembled astrology rather
than astronomy.

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and
Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and
especially

Re: Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 2:50 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Skewering stilted language and theory: F. Crews


> I noticed that a major element of Crews' critique of Freudianism (in the
New
> York REVIEW OF BOOKS a few years ago) is that it can't be falsified
> (following Popper's criterion). Unfortunately, this seems to apply to
_all_
> of social science (and to Popper).

==

Popper deplored the issue of reflexivity and self-reference from the
moment it was turned on his own conjectures...

Ian

Re: Stiglitz on central banks

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Doug Henwood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 1:42 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Stiglitz on central banks


> Ian Murray wrote:
>
> >Is acceptance of the crowding out argument a litmus test for econowonks
in
> >DC now?
>
> Maybe, but Stiggy lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I think
> he's motivated more by partisanship - Dems good, Reps bad. Dems
> raised taxes in '93, Reps cut taxes in 2001, 2002, and 2003.
>
> Doug

==

Well if the partisanship over tax policy always trumps fiscal strategies
why was the crowding out argument even brought up during Clintonism? The
Repugs. would never let fiscal policy/legislation get so far that there
could even be a prolonged testing of the argument either way, no?


Ian

Re: Stiglitz on central banks

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Doug Henwood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> Another odd thing about Stiggy's argument is that he implicitly buys
> the crowding out argument, which liberal Keynesians aren't supposed
> to do.
>
> Doug

==

Is acceptance of the crowding out argument a litmus test for econowonks in
DC now?


Ian

the Boeing love-in

[Ian Murray]

some quotes from state gov. officials:


"Washington is not a good state to do business in," said Rep. Brad Benson,
R-Spokane.

Rep. Mike Armstrong, R-Wenatchee, called the tax breaks "a tiny Band-Aid
on a huge cancer."

If the state's business climate were better, Washington wouldn't be
sweating Boeing's decision or even having to compete, said Rep. Glenn
Anderson, R-Fall City.

Rep. Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, said the tax breaks could be "the wow
factor" for Boeing.

"Sometimes you have to feed the 800-pound gorilla. That's what we're going
to do today," DeBolt added.

Re: big bucks for economists

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 10:09 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] big bucks for economists


> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/magazine/08NYU.html
>
> The Times has a nice article about NYU paying big bucks for T. Sargent.
>
> What do you think about it.

=

His marginal productivity must be quite high.


Ian

Re: Fannie and Freddie

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Michael Perelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Fannie and Freddie


> How serious do you think these are?
>

==

I don't know. My guess is Jim Leach is the guy to watch.




Mortgage Giants Stir Congress
By Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 11, 2003; Page E01


Monday's management shake-up at Freddie Mac was a surprise to many
financial experts because the company has been known for its ability to
manage financial risk. The controversy over accounting practices that led
to the dismissal of three top executives will now become a test for how
well the company manages political risk.

Freddie Mac and, to a larger extent, Fannie Mae have been perceived as
powerful in Washington, enjoying widespread support on Capitol Hill in
their efforts to protect their special relationship with the federal
government. But after this week's events, amid an already growing movement
to rein in the mortgage finance giants, some observers said they may be
more vulnerable.

"I've got to believe the people on Capitol Hill are going to look at this
more carefully," said John E. Silvia, chief economist of Wachovia Corp.
and a former congressional staff member.

Rep. Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Financial Services
Committee, announced yesterday that a subcommittee hearing chaired by Rep.
Richard H. Baker (R-La.) will examine accounting issues and regulatory
oversight of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Both are congressionally chartered companies created to assure a stable
market for mortgages.

Freddie Mac is backed by a large team of lobbyists and the accumulated
goodwill of millions of dollars of political donations in recent years.
The McLean company built its political muscle, as did Fannie Mae, in the
face of growing opposition to their power in the marketplace from
government officials, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan,
some members of Congress, and a band of Wall Street rivals.

In the last election cycle, Freddie Mac was the largest corporate
contributor of unlimited "soft money" donations to the political parties,
according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks federal election records.
The company gave slightly more than $4 million in 2001-02, about 58
percent of it to Republican party committees. That was more than several
other prominent corporate political players, including AT&T Corp., Philip
Morris and Microsoft Corp.

District-based Fannie Mae, headed by Clinton administration official
Franklin D. Raines, is also a top corporate giver of soft money, donating
about $1.8 million to party committees in the last cycle, about 53 percent
to the Republicans.

Neither company has a political action committee, though some of its
executives and lobbyists make campaign donations to individual members of
the House and Senate. And both companies spend millions of dollars a year
on lobbyists. In 2000, for example, Freddie Mac spent $5 million on
lobbying and Fannie Mae spent $7 million, according to the Center for
Responsive Politics.

The two companies -- Fannie's legal name Federal National Mortgage
Association and Freddie's is Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. -- buy
mortgages made by banks, savings and loans and other mortgage lenders.
Together, the two firms own or have guaranteed about 42 percent of the $7
trillion home mortgage market, of which $1.29 trillion is owned or insured
by Freddie.

Greenspan and other officials have expressed concern that Freddie and
Fannie are getting so big, and the buyers of their mortgage-backed
securities so sure of their implicit government backing, that any problems
they have could spread to the rest of the capital markets.

Rival banking and insurance companies have focused more on what they
consider the companies' unfair advantage in cheaper financing stemming
from their government ties. They set up a lobby shop now called FM Policy
Focus to attack what it called "mission creep" by the two mortgage
leaders.

J.C. Watts, a former Republican congressman who is the new chairman of FM
Policy Focus, called Monday for passage of the bill that Rep. Edward J.
Markey (D-Mass.) is sponsoring with Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) to
force both mortgage companies to register their debt securities with the
Securities and Exchange Commission. The lobby also endorsed hearings on
the regulatory structure of the two companies. FM Watch spent $2.3 million
lobbying in 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Baker, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee's capital
markets subcommittee, said in a prepared statement announcing his hearing
that "Congress needs to know the true story of what was happening at
Freddie Mac and what top management was really doing to resolve questions
about the company's books."

Baker, who introduced a bill last year to strengthen regulation of the two
mortgage companie

micropolitics

[Ian Murray]

GOP Whip Quietly Tried to Aid Benefactor
Provision Intended To Help Philip Morris

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 11, 2003; Page A01


Only hours after Rep. Roy Blunt was named to the House's third-highest
leadership job in November, he surprised his fellow top Republicans by
trying to quietly insert a provision benefiting Philip Morris USA into the
475-page bill creating a Department of Homeland Security, according to
several people familiar with the effort.

The new majority whip, who has close personal and political ties to the
company, instructed congressional aides to add the tobacco provision to
the bill -- then within hours of a final House vote -- even though no one
else in leadership supported it or knew he was trying to squeeze it in.

Once alerted to the provision, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff,
Scott Palmer, quickly had it pulled out, said a senior GOP leader who
requested anonymity. Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) also opposed what
Blunt (Mo.) was trying to do, the member said, and "worked against it"
when he learned of it.

The provision would have made it harder to sell tobacco products over the
Internet and would have cracked down on the sale of contraband cigarettes,
two practices that cut into Philip Morris's profits. Blunt has received
large campaign donations from Philip Morris, his son works for the company
in Missouri and the House member has a close personal relationship with a
Washington lobbyist for the firm.

It is highly unusual for a House Republican to insert a last-minute
contentious provision that has never gone through a committee, never faced
a House vote and never been approved by the speaker or majority leader.
Blunt's attempt became known only to a small circle of House and White
House officials. They kept it quiet, preferring no publicity on a matter
involving favors for the nation's biggest tobacco company and possible
claims of conflicts of interest.

Several in that circle say they were struck by Blunt's willingness to go
out on a limb for a company to which he has ties. What's more, he did it
within hours of climbing to the House leadership's third-highest rung, a
notable achievement for a man who came to Washington less than six years
ago.

A senior Republican lawmaker who requested anonymity said some GOP members
worried at the time that it would be "embarrassing" to the party and its
new whip if details of the effort were made public. Another Republican
said Blunt's effort angered some leaders because there was "so little
support for" a pro-tobacco provision likely to generate controversy.

In an interview last week, Blunt said he pushed for the tobacco provision
after talking with John F. Scruggs, vice president of government affairs
for Altria Group Inc., Philip Morris's parent company. "It's good policy,"
Blunt said.

Scruggs said in an interview that the provision was "pretty important to
us." Philip Morris, the nation's largest cigarette producer, would have
benefited from the measure more than any other company.

Several Republicans who learned of the November effort have privately
expressed concern that Blunt pushed the provision partly because of his
personal relationship with Philip Morris lobbyist Abigail Perlman. Blunt,
who several Republicans said spends considerable time with Perlman, would
not discuss their relationship or whether the two had talked about the
provision.

"I am just going to talk about policy here," he said. Perlman did not
return two phone calls placed last week requesting comment.

Andrew B. Blunt, one of the lawmaker's sons, is a lobbyist for Philip
Morris in Missouri, where his work is confined to state matters. Andrew
Blunt did not return two phone calls requesting comment. Rep. Blunt did
not talk to his son about the tobacco provision, the congressman's
spokeswoman said.

Philip Morris has contributed more than $150,000 to political committees
affiliated with Blunt since 2001, according to Federal Election Commission
records.

Blunt said he pushed the provision because he thought it was good policy,
much of it drawn from legislation introduced last year by then-Sen. Tim
Hutchinson (R-Ark.). Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.)
recently introduced legislation that would do much of what Philip Morris
was seeking to do, Blunt said. He said the provision was relevant to the
homeland security bill because news reports last year showed that
terrorist groups, such as the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, were profiting from
the sale of contraband cigarettes.

Blunt said his actions were no different than those of a member who
successfully tucked a provision providing liability protections to the Eli
Lilly pharmaceutical company into the same homeland security bill.

The Eli Lilly provision, once discovered, embarrassed the GOP because it
appeared the party was using the cover of homeland security to protect a
big contributor. No one has acknowledged responsibility for adding the Eli

Fannie and Freddie

[Ian Murray]

Any guesses as to how far investigations will go before they're stopped?

Stiglitz on central banks

[Ian Murray]

Too important for bankers

Central banks' ruthless pursuit of price stability holds back economic
growth and boosts unemployment

Joseph Stiglitz
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian

An independent central bank focused exclusively on price stability has
become a central part of the mantra of "economic reform". Like many other
policy maxims, it has been repeated so often that it has come to be
believed. But bold assertions are no substitute for analysis.

Research suggests that if central banks focus on inflation, they do a
better job at controlling inflation. But controlling inflation is not an
end in itself: it is merely a means of achieving faster, more stable
growth, with lower unemployment.

These are the real variables that matter, and there is little evidence
that central banks focusing exclusively on price stability do better in
these crucial respects. George Akerlof, who shared the Nobel prize with me
in 2001, and his colleagues have argued that there is an optimal rate of
inflation, greater than zero. So ruthless pursuit of price stability harms
economic growth and well-being. Research even questions whether targeting
price stability reduces the trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

A focus on inflation may make sense for countries with a long history of
it, but not for others, like Japan. America's central bank, the Federal
Reserve, is mandated not only to ensure price stability, but also to
promote growth and full employment. There is consensus in the US against a
narrow mandate, such as that of the European Central Bank. Today, Europe's
growth languishes because the ECB is constrained by its focus on inflation
from promoting economic recovery.

Technocrats and financial market players who benefit from this
institutional arrangement have done a good job in convincing many
countries of its virtues, and of the need to treat monetary policy as a
technical matter that should be above politics. That might be the case if
all that central bankers did was, say, choose computer software for
clearing payments.

But central banks make decisions that affect every aspect of society,
including rates of economic growth and unemployment. Because there are
trade-offs, these decisions can only be made as part of a political
process.

Some argue that in the long run there are no trade-offs. But, as Keynes
said, in the long run, we are all dead. Even if it were impossible to
lower unemployment below some critical level without fuelling inflation,
there is uncertainty about what that critical level is. Accordingly, risk
is unavoidable: monetary policy that is too loose risks inflation; if it
is too tight, it can cause unnecessary unemployment.

During America's growth boom in the 1990s, the Clinton administration
believed that it was worth the risk of pushing the unemployment rate
lower, especially when the social gains - declining welfare roles, reduced
violence - were added to the economic benefits. By contrast, the IMF urged
tighter monetary policy, because it put far less weight on the cost of
unemployment, seemingly no weight on the ancillary benefits of reducing
it, and greater weight on the costs of potential inflation.

The economic analysis of Clinton's council of economic advisers turned out
to be right; the models of the IMF (and the Fed) were wrong. America
secured a lower rate of unemployment without inflation - eventually
unemployment fell to below 4%.

But that is not the point: the point is that no one could be sure. A
calculated risk is always unavoidable. Who bears it varies with different
policies, and that is a decision that should not be left to central bank
technocrats. While there is a legitimate debate about the degree of
independence accorded to central banks within a democracy, the
perspectives of those whose well-being is affected by the decisions taken
should be represented.

Workers do not have a seat at the table. But financial markets are
typically well represented. And yet financial markets hardly have a
monopoly on technical competence. Indeed, many in the financial community
have little understanding of the intricate workings of the macroeconomic
system - as evidenced by their frequent mistakes in managing it.

Whatever the merits of a common currency, those in Europe deliberating
about adopting the euro should consider whether they should tie their
fortunes to an institutional arrangement whose flaws are apparent.
Likewise, developing countries need to consider not only the central
bank's independence, but also its mandate and representativeness. They
need to balance concerns about economic efficiency with those of
democratic accountability.

In many new democracies, citizens are bewildered. The virtues of the new
regime are first praised, but then they are told that the macroeconomic
policy decisions about which they care most are too important to be left
to democratic processes. Citizens are warned against the risks of populism
(meaning the will of the people?).

There 

Re: The New York Times coverup of ADM

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Eugene Coyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> GE's fines are probably much lower.  Most of the GE convictions were
> decades ago -- though not all.  Maybe a smaller total of fines  is
> evidence of more political clout?
> Part of the ADM story is the judge's sabotage of the civil lawsuits
> on anti-trust damages.  He put the case out to the lowest bidding law
> firm and they quickly settled it to cash it in.  So ADM's lawsuits got
> low-balled along with the fines.  But at least one Andreas went to jail,
> so I guess "the system works."  Not.
>
> Gene

==

GE comes out on top: $982million in fines since 1990.

the Boeing soap opera continues

[Ian Murray]

Tuesday, June 10, 2003, 07:27 A.M. Pacific
Tax breaks could save Boeing $3 billion

By David Postman
Seattle Times chief political reporter

OLYMPIA - What had been a bid for a new Boeing factory became much more
yesterday when Gov. Gary Locke raised the stakes and said his proposed big
gulp of a Boeing tax break "is about the future of the state of
Washington."

It's a future he wants decided soon. The governor gave lawmakers 36 hours
to pass the most lucrative tax break in state history, a package that
could save Boeing more than $3 billion over the 20-year life of the tax
plan, according to the state Department of Revenue.

Officially, it's part of Washington's proposal to win the assembly plant
for Boeing's proposed 7E7 jetliner, which would employ 800 to 1,200
workers. The company can only qualify for the tax cuts if it decides to
put the 7E7 plant in Washington and follows through on building it.

But Locke argued it's not just 7E7 jobs but existing Boeing jobs that are
at stake if the company's next-generation airplane goes elsewhere. Without
the tax break and other concessions, Locke said, up to 80 percent of the
company's 57,000 Washington jobs could eventually go away.

The special legislative session scheduled to end at midnight tonight is
now The Boeing Session. Locke's proposal shook the Capitol like a
low-flying 747, stopping all other work and infusing the plan with meaning
far beyond where an airplane will be put together.

It also shook up what had appeared to be uniformity among political
players backing Boeing.

"The legislative leadership realizes this is about the future of the state
of Washington," Locke said.

It quickly became about a lot of other things, too.

"Now it's a business feeding frenzy, it's extortion by the big B, as in
business, not just Boeing," said Jeff Johnson, a lobbyist for the
Washington State Labor Council. "They want to pile on. It's beyond
economics. It's immoral."

Labor's concern is what would happen to non-Boeing workers under another
big piece of legislation designed to please the company, a proposed
rewriting of the state unemployment-insurance system.

There was criticism from other corners, too. Business lobbyists and some
Republican lawmakers said it's unfair to give Boeing such a deep tax cut
when others are being told the state can't afford tax breaks.

"We are not going to make the state strong with one employer," said
Carolyn Logue, state director of the National Federation of Independent
Business. "We have to have a business climate that is not so dependent on
Boeing."

Even Boeing lobbyists were reportedly uncomfortable.

Rep. Jack Cairnes, R-Kent, said a Boeing lobbyist told him yesterday the
company did not ask for the tax break and is not lobbying for it.

"To their credit, I don't think Boeing asked for this," Logue said. But
she said that Boeing doesn't have to ask, or lobby.

Boeing is one of the few businesses in the state, she said, that can get
what it wants by threatening to leave the state. Her members, small
businesses and sole proprietorships, "can't throw that threat around."

Boeing officials were not commenting yesterday. But the company moved its
corporate headquarters to Chicago two years ago, and since then, Boeing
executives from commercial-airplanes chief Alan Mulally to the 7E7's chief
engineer have bluntly criticized the state's crowded highways, taxes on
businesses and environmental regulations.

In March, Boeing announced it would invite states from around the country
to compete for the 7E7 manufacturing plant, which could mean the first new
Boeing jetliner built outside the Puget Sound area.

State bids for the Boeing plant are due June 20.

The company will not say how many states are vying for the chance. But at
least a half-dozen - including California, Texas, Georgia, Alabama and the
Carolinas - are expected to offer fierce competition.

The competition is driving up Washington's bid, making some legislators
uncomfortable.

"I'm worried about it," said House Appropriations Chairwoman Helen
Sommers, D-Seattle. "Boeing is clearly taking full advantage of this
situation."

Locke told lawmakers last week that a tax break big enough to make them
"gulp" is needed to bring Washington in line with what a consultant's
report said were other states' lower business costs.

Even if the Legislature passes this package, there could be more to come.

Locke told lawmakers that other states may try to outbid Washington if it
makes it to the next round, said Sen. Dino Rossi, R-Sammamish.

Locke told Senate Democrats "we might have to do more" in the next round,
according to Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island.

Martha Choe, director of the Department of Community, Trade and Economic
Development, confirmed that Locke has talked of a possible bidding war
breaking out.

"It's a possibility," she said last night. "But we're trying to avoid that
by putting the best possible package forward now."

No one wants to be blamed for Boeing

Re: The New York Times coverup of ADM

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Eugene Coyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 10:30 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The New York Times coverup of ADM


> ADM and GE  get convicted of crimes more often than Boeing, without
> apparent adverse impacts.  It is hard to put one before the other.  Not
> a student of this, but I think Boeing is well back in third place -- or
> maybe behind even others.
>
> Gene

===

The Project on Government Oversight just released a report showing Boeing
paid $358million in fines/lawsuits in the past decade. Are the numbers for
ADM & GE much higher?

"It's virtually impossible to suspend a major contractor like Boeing,"
[Paul Nisbet]


Ian

Re: Weber & the 'Euroslackers'

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> You think they didn't have crooks and con men in Wilhemine Germany? jks



Not from Mississippi, no..

"It is part of the church's task to remind corporations and businesses
that profit is not the 'bottom line,' that as creatures of God they have
as their divine vocation the achievement of human well-being." [theologian
Walter Wink]


"I came to have a fuller understanding of what my purpose was in life,
what a personal relationship with Jesus Christ really meant and how I
would try to live my life from that point." [Bernie Ebbers, 1996]

Re: Weber & the 'Euroslackers'

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



> You don't understand. They work inefficiently, have too many children,
and piss away their earnings on Dos Equis and tacos instead of saving it
up to start Microsoft, like Bill Gates. jks


===

I wonder what Weber would have thought of Ebbers


Ian

Worldcom

[Ian Murray]

http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/worldcom/bkexmnr60903rpt2d.pdf

[The Bankruptcy report done by Dick Thornburgh]


http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/worldcom/bdspcomm60903rpt.pdf

[Commissioned by Worldcom itself, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering-attorneys and 
PricewaterhouseCoopers-accounting]



=
Anti-Posnerite Law and Economics mavens as well as heterodox price theorists take 
note.


Ian

Re: The New York Times coverup of ADM

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "michael" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 6:14 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] The New York Times coverup of ADM


Eichenwald's book which advertised itself as "a true story," purported
to describe how "the FBI was ready to take down America's
most politically powerful corporation. But there was one thing they
didn't count on. THE INFORMANT" Curiously nowhere on the
book's cover, its dust jacket, or in the full-page advertisements for
the book that later appeared in the Times is "America's most
politically powerful corporation" mentioned by name.

===

Does ADM really have more clout with the Republicrats than GE or Boeing?

Ian

Re: Fwd: Waiting for Godot

[Ian Murray]

- Original Message -
From: "Eugene Coyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


> Sabri, don't worry about reading all those books in the library.  Ian
> has read them all and will tell us about them.
>
> Gene
>

==

I'm on a futile quest to catch up with Michael P. but there's not enough
tea in the world..


Ian