Re: Mark Jones
It has been my lot - and I'm sure no-one in Leftopia is alone in this - to become deeply fond of fellows who ended up hating each other. Mark loudly and eloquently despised a few blokes I persist in rating most highly, and each of those despised him right back. That's why the left is so thoroughly fucked, I suppose. Anyway, I bloody loved Mark Jones. I loved his way with words, I loved his humour, I loved his passion, and I loved his erudition. Most of all, I loved his point-stretching, chance-taking, future-grasping, totality-embracing, norm-despising, diplomacy-abjuring, neck-on-the-block, bollocks-under-the-guillotine, damn-the-torpedoes courage. He had all of that long before sentence was passed, so it was all The Essential Mark Jones. Rare stuff. I've had people die on me with whom I've grown up, played football, drained pints, and lost elections - with whom I've shared all the visceral joys and sorrows of corporeal life du jour. I never even met Mark in the flesh. Yet I feel his passing as deeply as any of those, and I've decided it's not nearly good enough merely to drink myself unto maudlin stupor. Nope. This is a sad torpidity I feel obliged to share with all. Sorry.
Re: Re: Re: the emporer
G'day Michael, anti-war movement was never going to stop war here but it (and public opinion globally is anti-war) forced u.s. to alter certain plans and, consquently, may have prevented mass iraqi slaughter, may limit u.s. ability to operate its own protectorate in post-war period, and may keep u.s. hands from expropriating ol fields for itself... There's still room for a mass slaughter, as you allow, but anti-war agitprop may yet make it hard for the neocons to go to phase two (humanely MOABing Syrians, Iranians, Saudi Arabians and Egyptians). Bovverboy Rumsfeld and co have had to take their knickers off in public just to get this far - going on the recent words of the likes of Woolsey and Ledeen, they haven't deemed their path unto the new Reich blocked yet, and we must not allow the likes of Alterman and the 'support-the-troops-in-time-of-war' crowd to dampen enthusiasm until the PNAC mob (and the AEI mothership) are well and truly put back in their box. Cheers, Rob.
Re: John Pilger article
k hanly wrote: I thought Basra was a much larger city than 600,000. Cheers, Ken Hanly Three times larger, according to the Beeb. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Press Lapdogs for Coalition Forces
G'day Michael, Rendon - apparently the inventors of the Iraqi National Congress - is another that comes to mind.. There's plenty on that via Google. Cheers, Rob. Michael Hoover wrote: embedding - pentagon-speak for new policy of attaching journalists to particular military units - has resulted in overwhelmingly pro-war/pro-military coverage thus far... any listers know which firms were contracted to create public support in months preceding war, wirthlin group (founded by one-time prez raygun consultant richard wirthlin) and Hill Knowlton (who did work for right-wing el salvador arena party in 80s) did bulk of propaganda prior to gulf war 1... michael hoover Reporters Respond Eagerly to Pentagon Welcome Mat March 23, 2003 By TODD S. PURDUM and JIM RUTENBERG WASHINGTON, March 22 - Last fall, the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., likened the Bush administration's drive to build support for the possible war with Iraq to a product-marketing campaign. That effort produced mixed results, but so far the war itself is selling like beer on a troopship, thanks in part to compelling news accounts from reporters bunking with frontline units. Carefully devised by the Pentagon to counter years of complaints by news organizations about restrictions on combat coverage, the new policy of embedding more than 500 reporters with invading troops has produced riveting images of fighter jets on carriers and tanks plowing across the Iraqi desert, accompanied by household faces like Ted Koppel of ABC's Nightline, and of surrendering Iraqi soldiers with their hands held high. Like the most sophisticated Madison Avenue marketers, Pentagon planners have also reached out to diverse outlets where public opinion is shaped, by including reporters from MTV, Rolling Stone, People magazine and Men's Health, and foreign journalists running the gamut from Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television channel, to Russia's Itar-Tass news agency. But for all the military's orchestration, news organizations have so far expressed satisfaction with the arrangements, which offer much greater access in exchange for relatively few restrictions. And the bulk of the coverage has been so positive as to verge on celebratory. Dave Sirulnick, the executive in charge of MTV News, whose correspondent Gideon Yago recently asked a young marine, Dude, how was it to tell your wife that you were going off to the Iraqi border? said he was not sure of the Pentagon's motivation. But I do know that by allowing their soldiers to speak openly and freely to us, they are coming off a lot more credibly, Mr. Sirulnick said. Instead of thinking of these guys as G.I. Joes and Robocops, you get to meet them and see they are young guys and girls just like the folks who are watching. Some reporters have been given extraordinary access, allowed to sit in on secret briefings, watching computerized maps of the battlefield with the latest satellite photos, in the middle of the Kuwait desert, for example. The cardinal rule: No reporting, not even any phone calls to their editors, that might divulge details of future operations, and no private satellite telephones, cellphones or sidearms. Showers are scarce, hot meals spotty, but reporters assigned to military units recount friendly, open conversations with G.I.'s, surgeons, drivers, dentists and communications experts, described by one correspondent as quite talkative and extremely interested in what I do. The new policy has only begun to be tested in battle, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the allied commander in the Persian Gulf, was said by associates to have been upset to read too many details about planes and missiles in the war's opening-night raids in his morning newspaper. The Pentagon's chief spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, warned editors in a conference call on Wednesday that some reports had already provided too much specific information about troop locations and movements, and that even if commanders on the scene divulged such information, it was up to news organizations to withhold it under detailed guidelines to which each agreed in exchange for the reporting berths. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld delivered his first briefing on the war on Thursday in front of an image of a little girl in pigtails and the warning: Don't kill her Daddy with careless words. But there have been no reports of serious disputes on the scene, and by the end of the week Mr. Rumsfeld went so far as to praise the robust reporting as historic and said, I doubt that in a conflict of this type, there's ever been the degree of free press coverage as you are witnessing in this instance. The CNN anchor Aaron Brown made a similar point on the air as tanks sped across the desert late Thursday. No matter how you slice this thing, this is an
Re: Rumsfeld's happy little blunder
Quoth Doug, He said the U.S. might attack Iraq without the UK. Was it a blunder, or did he really mean it? I think it was the PNAC mob's knickers showing through. In their ideal world, Uncle Sam would go this alone. Any sharing of the hard yards might lead to pressure for complicated compromises later on, and Wolfowitz's simple (nay, simplistic) plan of unqualified world domination would seem, to those too naively arrogant to realise America has frittered away the 'soft' (Nye's term?) component of its power - two centuries worth of brownie points as well as a tide of apre-911 sympathy carelessly binned in the space of half an 'administration'. It's only Colin Powell and 60 per cent of the electorate who wants those ghastly foreigners sticking their oars in, anyway. Or so it looks from a distance ... Cheers, Rob.
Oops: Rumsfeld's happy little blunder
... hadn't finished ... Quoth Doug, He said the U.S. might attack Iraq without the UK. Was it a blunder, or did he really mean it? I think it was the PNAC mob's knickers showing through. In their ideal world, Uncle Sam would go this alone. Any sharing of the hard yards might lead to pressure for complicated compromises later on, and Wolfowitz's simple (nay, simplistic) plan of unqualified world domination would seem an irksomely unnecessary muddying of the new world order to those too naively arrogant to realise America has frittered away the 'soft' (Nye's term?) component of its power (two centuries worth of brownie points as well as a tide of apre-911 sympathy carelessly binned in the space of half an 'administration'), an irksomely unnecessary complication . It's only Colin Powell and 60 per cent of the electorate who wants those ghastly foreigners sticking their oars in, anyway. It didn't help poor Tory Blur, either. There he is strutting the world stage, being all relevant and stuff, and now it transpires the US don't care either way. Kinda makes his moralistic High Noon routine look a little thin. 'An irrelevant little island's gotta do what an irrelevant little island's gotta do' just doesn't cut it in the context of British politics du jour. Robert Muller's on to something when he announces that there are two superpowers: the United States and the merging, surging voice of the (peace-waging) people of the world. Or so it looks from a distance ... Cheers, Rob.
Re: The ideological implications of Scorcese's latest film
I dare guess you don't agree with Rosenbaum, Louis. I've not seen the film yet, although see it I shall. But I'd not be surprised if Rosenbaum has a point when he writes the film's 'blockbuster dimensions ... tend to overwhelm ironic subtexts and morose afterthoughts'. Producers can do that to a film, after all. Indeed, a significant slice of the history of US film might be characterised as that of writers and or directors necessarily taking the curse off hopefully durable subtexts and morose afterthoughts with seat-filling spectacle. After all, Spartacus could conceivably have pleased the socialists and homosexuals of the time as much as it did a McCarthy-infected and typically homophobic 'mainstream'. Anyway, taking advantage of the notoriously tendentious and superficial 'history' to which so many Americans are subjected (virtuously heroic history-changing statesmen, frontiersman and entrepreneurs) to offer a gap-filling narrative that effectively transforms the whole picture has got to be the stuff of art, no? To explain the birth of the American Dream in terms of marginalised and objectified women, eloquently absent Amerindians, sectarian hatreds uncomfortably redolent of the very Old World in opposition to which the US defines, nay glorifies, itself, and the material dependence of propertyless young men on the predeccessors of Veblenian Robber-Barons (The Hands That Built America') - well, it all sounds like a potent counter-hegemonic tour de force to me. It's all about balance, of course, and Rosenbaum may have hit that particular nail on the head for all I know, but I'm even keener to see the film now than I was half an hour ago. What's your take? Cheers, Rob. Louis Proyect wrote: Blood on His Hands Gangs of New York Directed by Martin Scorsese By Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader For almost the first two-thirds of Martin Scorsese's 168-minute Gangs of New York, I was entranced. I felt like I was watching a boys' bloodthirsty adventure story ... after we've spent a good quarter of an hour watching massive crowds of Irish Catholics and American nativists hack one another to pieces on a huge foreign-looking turf identified as Manhattan's Lower East Side, each group trying to eliminate the other ... The Irish Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) emerges from 16 years in the Hellgate House of Reform and ingratiates himself with nativist William Bill the Butcher Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) ... the movie seems hollow and affectless -- as if all the spectacular bloodletting has drained the story of its raison d'etre ... The film becomes downright offensive during the final credits, over which the U2 anthem The Hands That Built America plays. If these are the hands that built this country, as the song triumphantly claims, why don't we ever see them building something instead of slashing, smashing, severing, gutting, burning, and mauling everyone and everything in sight? ... Scorsese couldn't allude even once to Native Americans to throw some ironic backlighting on the label? But who knows? Maybe some real Native Americans got lost in the final edit. After all, when you're playing big-money games of this kind, the thoughtful footnotes often get lost ...w
Re: finals
G'day Ian, It sounds very much like JK Galbraith, but as you do like to surprise us, I'm going to guess Milton Friedman. Cheers, Rob. [who wrote/said it?] When corporate capitals become so large that they can control markets instead of being controlled by them, it can no longer be said that the market automatically treats buyers and sellers equally, or that every exchange is by definition a just exchange. Thus with the 20th century decline of competition, the market could no longer claim exemption from non-market ethical standards: the way was opened for some revival of commutative justice...The present allocation is indeed still done largely *through* markets, but it is not done *by* markets: the part that is done through markets is done by the state and corporate power blocs, not by autonomous markets. Google won't help. Ian
Keen on road to debt deflation
In Australia, a miserabilist is never alone ... http://www.prudentbear.com/archive_comm_article.asp?category=Guest+Commentarycontent_idx=16477 Steve Keen is the author of Debunking Economics and Professor of Economics Finance, University of Western Sydney, Australia Debunking Economics With books like Dow 36,000, theories like the Capital Assets Pricing Model, and commercial ventures like Long Term Capital Management, academic economists have been both cheerleaders and handmaidens to the economic catastrophe formerly known as the New Economy. So as an academic economist, I must have a hide making a commentary on these pages: why should you bother reading what I've got to say? I'll give you two reasons. Firstly, I belong to a different camp of economists to the ones who for so long hogged the public's attention during the Millenium bubble. I have always been a critic of mainstream economic theory, especially as it relates to finance, and I have also helped developed alternative theories that far more accurately describe how the economy and finance markets operate. Secondly, my calls on the market establish me as a veteran, paid-up member of the Bear clan. The earliest was written in July 1995 and published in an academic journal (Money and Production) in 1996. I was clearly wrong about the immediate behaviour of the market: far from the sudden, sharp correction I expected, it rocketed skywards for another five years under the power of the credit bubble that Doug Noland has so clearly elucidated on the Credit Bubble Bulletin page. But there was no error in calling it a bubble, even seven years ago: As I write this sentence, the Dow Jones Index hovers about 4750its highest level in history. At the same time, the average price-to- earnings ratio is also a record, indicating that a sudden, sharp correction to the Index is imminent. When it occurs, it will be the third time since 1987 that the Index has fallen suddenly by 10 per cent or more. 4750 is a long way below the 11750 peak that the DJIA hit on January 14th 2000, but it's not so far from todays 8,275. To this long-term academic Bear, only a question of time before it is back in the vicinity of its 1996 valuedespite this weeks huge upwards spike. If deja vu to Dow 5000 simply restored the status quo of 1996, then there would be no problem: after the party of the Millenium, America could simply shake off its hangover and return to business as usual. But the post-Bubble economy is likely to be profoundly different to the pre-Bubble economy because of one simple factor: the accumulation of debt. Doug has done a superb job of outlining the distinctive mechanisms by which debt has grown in this particular Bubble, and I wont try to duplicate his analysis here. Instead, Ill explain a non-mainstream theory that predicts the periodic occurrence of financial bubbles, and gives some indication of what can be expected in their aftermath. This theory is the Financial Instability Hypothesis developed by the late American economist Hyman Minsky. Writing as long ago and in such comparatively tranquil times as the 1960s, Minsky argued that capitalism is inherently flawed, being prone to booms, crises and depressions. This instability, in my view, is due to characteristics the financial system must posses if it is to be consistent with full-blown capitalism. Such a financial system will be capable of both generating signals that induce an accelerating desire to invest and of financing that accelerating investment. (Minsky 1969b [1982]: 224) This far-from-Polyannic view of capitalism can be summarised in one simple statement: investors borrow money during booms, and attempt to repay debt during slumps. The cash flows that they expected to have when they entered into debt commitments arent there when repayments are due, so that debts are not fully repaid. Debt can therefore ratchet up over a series of booms and busts to reach levels that are ultimately unsustainable. Japan found itself at the end of this particular hilly road in 1990, and I share Dougs belief that America has reached the edge of the same precipice now. Ahead lies not more of the walking on air of the last six years, nor even a return to pre-Bubble normality, but at best a severe recession and at worst a fall into the uncharted territory of a debt-deflation. Stability is destabilizing Minskys key insight was that a period of stable economic growth leads to rising expectations. This relationship is what makes financial crises an inevitable side-effect of a sophisticated market economy. Since a market economy is always cyclical, and has always experienced periodic financial crises, any period of relative stability will have been preceded by a
Question re. work time
G'day all, Was it here I read the other day that when Britain was moved to a 3-day week by the energy crisis of '74, they found that productivity did not decrease? If so, I'd love a cite and/or anything else that comes to mind. Potent datum, if it's true, no? Cheers, Rob.
Re: debunking greenspan redux or, finance asbubble gum and duct tape
G'day all, Quoth Doug: This is one of the weird things that happen when lefties cite right-wing bears as sources. Right-wing bears are very often Austrians and/or libertarians of some stripe, and believe that state economic policy is impotent or destructive. Lefties who do this are probably happy to cite someone on the other side, as if this adds more weight to the argument, but they're implicitly borrowing a set of political assumptions they'd probably want to part of if they were made more explicit. I think Prudentbear do this, too, after a fashion. They are slavish publishers of Morgan Stanley bear Stephen Roach, who has long been suggesting that the dollar needs a good tanking to stop consoomers buying foreign goods on tick, the 5 or 6% CAD rising any further, and, concomitantly, the rest of the world delaying 'reform' in their own economies as they hang off the US teat. I'm guessing, but ain't the printing of megabucks the best way to do that? Or am I confused again? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: bubble watch
G'day Eugene, People will keep making house payments while the credit card debt piles up, then default on the mortgage at the end. Amazing how much sheer misery a concise analytical sentence can contain, eh? Best, Rob.
Re: Sueddeutsche Zeitung builds up JD's ego
No poophead references, Jim. They reckon you're preparing yourself to be indignant because you doubt you will be accorded your rightful place in history as author of 'dubya-recession'. Now that your intellectual property is internationally recognised, the Devine name is but a protracted dip in US and world fortunes away from immortality. I am consequently bound to predict lasting renown for the Devine Intervention. Cheers, Rob. Devine, James wrote: the following article comes from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, today. Since I don't know German, I don't know what it says, so it might be that I'm a poop-head (as someone once called me when I was being interviewed on Pacifica). But I see neither scheiss nor kopf appearing below. George W. Bush macht sich wieder zum Gespött der Medien: Es ist traurig, dass ich nicht öfter joggen kann Der Sommer des Missvergnügens Langer Urlaub, kurzer Atem - ein Jahr nach dem Schock steht der US-Präsident als ein entzauberter Führer da, der nicht mehr die Debatte bestimmt ... Der Schatten des Vaters ist lang, und immer öfter wird bereits spekuliert, ob der 43. US-Präsident nicht ebenso über die Wirtschaft stolpern wird wie Nummer 41, Poppy Bush. Denn niemand will so recht glauben, dass die Rezession in den USA wirklich schon ausgestanden ist, und die Experten streiten in erster Linie darüber, ob der Einbruch die Form eines U (flach und lang) oder eines V (steil und kurz) hat. Was aber, wenn auf das erste V ein zweites folgt? Das wäre dann die W- Rezession, wie in W für Dubya. Der Wirtschaftsprofessor James Devine von der Loyola Marymount Universität in Los Angeles, der den Begriff geprägt hat, ärgert sich schon jetzt, dass er keine Urheberrechte darauf angemeldet hat. Denn er ist überzeugt davon, dass sie in die Wirtschaftsgeschichte eingehen wird: die Dubya-Rezession. JD
Re: Re: RE: Japan
Michael Perelman wrote: I understand that there has been a terrible overbuilding of golf courses in some parts of the country -- at least my father tells me that it has happened in Florida. Country clubs are having difficulty in keeping a sufficient membership. Jim Devine may have uncovered the crucial economic indicator. Why has the Left Business Observer dropped the ball? I do remember a chat we had on LBO a couple of years back concerning the inverse relationship between ball-size and player-wealth. It'd be no bad thing if a few thousand golf-courses were to go under in sympathy with, um, the post-wealth effect, as golf courses are fearful wastes of clean water. Anyway, one possible silver lining to the bad times might be the civilisation of America, as footbal (I believe you call it something like sarker) creeps in to fill the void. Cheers, Big-Balls-Bob
Rumours of war on Iraq
I'm with Michael Pollack on this one. No realistic discernable strategic goal. No reliable staging posts. No enduring alliance. No conceivable solution to the Palestine question. No decisive good will in the region. No hard evidence to defend pretext #1 (Baghdad links to al Qaeda), pretext #2 (capacity and intention to deploy weapons of mass destruction against 'west'), or the desperately shrill pretext #3 (Saddam is worse than any other despot in the world and it's worth killing tens of thousands of people who aren't Saddam to depose him). So what support there is even at home for a unilateral first strike is likely a mile wide and an inch deep (even if enough support for November, that support would be wider than it is deep, and likely to damage 2004 chances). Anyway, if the attack was to be a full scale November invasion, would they not already have to be landing armour, logistics and troops in discernable quantities? Cheers, Rob. Michael Pollak wrote: On Sat, 17 Aug 2002, Michael Perelman wrote: I suspect that the war is directed at the Nov. elections. Michael, if it will cheer you up, I'll bet you there's no war before the elections. In fact I'll give you 2 to 1. And if you'll give me 2 to 1, I'll bet you they will be no war in next 365 days. Michael
generous offer from Ravi
G'day all, If it's any easier, I've a rightly unheralded blog dawdling fitfully along at http://blogorrhoea.blogspot.com/ and would be honoured to put up anything penpals might like to write for the common weal. Er, as long as no technical knowledge other than cutting and pasting is required on my part, anyway. technoretardedly yours, Rob.
Terror threat overblown
G'day Ken, Strange the article doesnt mention that there doesnt seem to have been a significant Al Qaeda terrorist act in the US since Sept. 11, almost a year now. None of the periodic warnings have been followed by attacks. I may sound a bit nutso here, but it seems to me that the authorities were torn at the time of the Brooklyn crash. It might suit certain people's purposes to keep the population mobilised against an external threat, but it's also important not to create panic/loathing to uncontollable market-deadening and polity-upheaving degrees. So might it have been with those poor buggers over Brooklyn. The way I heard it at the time (certainly never heard again), that plane's last stop before NY had been the recently troubled Boston, and I can't bring myself to believe a modern airliner is wont to break into four neat pieces just because it passes through the turbulance created by a jet four minutes gone. I'd never leave the ground again if I believed that. Yet the media left the story alone as soon as decency allowed. Anyway, for what it's worth ... Cheers, Rob.
Cookie-cutter Economics
G'day all, ABC talk-backer and Age columnist Terry Lane squeezes ol' Karl into every column these days, bless him. Cheers, Rob. Room for only one big bickie maker By Terry Lane THE AGE August 11 2002 The Spouse is in a frenzy. Again. This time it's Arnott's closing the Burwood factory. Look at it this way, my precious. It must mean that your one-woman boycott of Arnott's bickies is starting to bite. She thinks it highly unlikely. While it is true that not a single Tim Tam has passed our lips since the infamous compulsory acquisition of her shares in the Campbell's takeover, she doubts that this, of itself, has rendered the Burwood factory unprofitable. We have sampled every Australian-owned, Australian-made Tim Tam substitute and we discovered an entirely satisfactory ersatz TT called Romeos. No sooner had we congratulated ourselves on finding a life after Arnott's than they disappeared from the supermarket shelves. The Spouse cranks up her e-mail - she is a sort of corporate cyber terrorist - and fires off a please explain to the manufacturers in Queensland. It turns out that the makers of Romeos couldn't afford the shelf-space rental in the duopoly supermarkets, so they retired hurt from the sweet-bickie business, wiser and poorer. So much for the cherished capitalist theory that if the product is any good it will find its place in the market. Dear heart, do not fret. As a shareholder in one of the big two supermarket chains, you should be applauding this development. This is what the International Chamber of Commerce calls the perfect outcome of the Darwinian struggle 'in the fires of the tough and unforgiving marketplace'. There is no place for worthy tiddlers in capitalism, my dear. You are suffering from a bad case of cartelphobia. Er? The International Chamber of Commerce, in its submission to the government's review of competition law, says that monopolies and cartels are good for us. The ICC wants to get the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and pesky Professor Allan Fels off the back of big business because those (usually large) companies perceived as a potential threat to competition are in fact its most obedient servants. Karl Marx would have agreed. He said that the logic of laissez faire capitalism is oligopoly and collusion at the best and straight-out monopoly at the very best. He would have seen the Trade Practices Act and the ACCC as pathetic attempts to make capitalism behave in ways that are antithetical to its very nature. He might also suspect that there is an element of window-dressing involved. And this must be a real headache for the present capitalist government. If you have a supporting constituency that is partly made up of predatory cartels and monopolies and partly of petit bourgeois small-business persons, how do you keep them all happy? Critics of Marx reckoned that his monopoly predictions were ridiculous because you cannot suppress the urge in people to open up a little shop and be their own boss. Marx's critics pointed to the proliferation of grocers and butchers across the land. Their tenacity and dynamism would be more than a match for any grocery monopolist. Ha! Now look - you can choose between two grocery hyper-shops. There are no butchers in our shopping strip, where a few years ago there were three. There are no grocers, where once there were two. There are now coffee shops in what were once the butchers and grocers. And the coffee shops will last just as long as it takes Starbucks to get a toe-hold in the suburbs. The Spouse is one seriously confused capitalist. I explain to her that, as a shareholder in Woolworths, she should be cheering every time another little grocer, greengrocer or butcher - or biscuit maker, for that matter - puts up the shutters. This is what the ICC calls a sort of Darwinian evolution in business. One day soon, Woolworths and Coles-Myer will merge, and then, by the end of the week, the whole enterprise will be swallowed up by an American global supermarket monopoly. And that, my dear, is the full flowering of capitalism. It simply doesn't get any better than that. Ask the ICC.
liberalism
Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: Is this discussion or the elitism thread going anywhere? Not really, but does any thread ever go anywhere? It's the journey, dudes, not the destination. Right now, I think liberalism'd be a lovely idea. I'm sure we'd've got there years ago if the plutocrats hadn't hit on the idea of pinching the term for their preferred option - but then imperialist-mercantilist-socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-socially-reactionary-polity-dissolving-militarist-corporatism is a tad unwieldy, I guess. Don't some recent thought-pieces coming outa the states sound a bit like people are starting to wonder where the 'democratic' bit of 'democratic capitalism' has gone (a Benjamin Barber the other day, and, if memory serves, even Tom Friedman a little while back)? Not very good articles (neither identifies a tension between the forces and the relations, for instance, but then this ain't Fantasy Island), but symptomatic of anything out there in popular sentiment, d'ya think? And ain't Latin America looking a treat just now? This is the first time in twenty years I haven't really badly wanted to go there (mebbe that's just coz I'm not in Africa). And how long before we find out what sorta smelly junk bonds those big investment banks are hiding under the ledger books? And is there a single Dow member trading anywhere near what 'value' used to mean yet? How goes the current account? How travels that latter-day saviour, the consoomer? Plenty to thread aimlessly about in the months to come, methinks. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Radio Henwood
G'day Doug, * Ruy Teixeira of The Century Fund, talking about public opinion on the corporate scandals Ask him if it's true Cisco aren't about to sign off on their statements, and that some of ther head-suits might be opting for more time with the families. Dark rumours are a material force, or at least so the NASDAQ reckons just now. Cheers, Rob.
Expertise
G'day Justin, The left should have learned by now to flee--as ordinary working people will--from the idea of the Vanguard Party as the expert repository of Political Expertise. It's not a menace any more, as it once was, but it's political suicide to advocate it. Whilst I agree entirely and enthusiastically with you on all that old vanguard party stuff, I'd add that a variety of this has been creeping into our polity (in the Anglo-Saxon world anyway) for a quarter of a century now. Governance as technical management ... the political as the economic ... it's all part of what Postman might call 'technopoly', what Bourdieu might dub 'the autonomy of the economic', and what Habermas might see as the colonisation of the lifeworld by the system. Australian election campaigns are much more clearly so than American ones (John Howard, funnily enough self-styled neoliberal philosopher-king par excellence, succeeded with a bit of American-style rallying vacuous patriotica at the last election, but that'd be the first time since Menzies carried it off back in '49), but there's little of the democracy of contending visions anywhere these days. It's all about who's the better management team - who'd better preside over a society as the invisible hand wrought its transforming magic. Competition as uncritiqued end rather than moot means and all that stuff. The Mt Pelerin mob were, in fact, a vanguard looking for a moment, and the early seventies was that moment. Wisely, Mises, Hayek and Friedman did not call themselves a vanguard party (as far as I know) - they just sorta crept up on us and filled the crisis with a plethora of 'thinktanks', position papers for friendly pollies on the Hill, a billion's worth of international advertising campaigns, and a flurry of international tours and 'Nobel Prizes' for its champions. With them came the 'public-choice' theorists, who did the work of providing an economic theory of the political whilst logically marginalising political theories of the economic. All in the seventies. By the eighties, governments everywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world were divesting themselves of their industrial presence, of regulatory clout, of sufficient funding options and, consequently, of a good deal of their capacity to keep proles and peebees securely quiet. Part of what's been keeping us quiet so far is a combination of the thrall in which we hold smart-looking economists and the feeling that we're just not knowledgeable enough in the secret ways of the economist to take part in debate. If politics is economics and government is professional management, there's no place for us. Ergo a vanguard did indeed occasion the social revolution it sought, and Huntington's 1975 Trilateral Commission highlighting the need to divest The State of the irksome burden that was democracy has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the menace lives. Waddyareckon? Cheers, Rob.
Efficiencies
Today's news here is about a fatal crash - on the ground at a metropolitan airport, mind - of two light planes at 6.30 in the evening. After a recent decision, the control tower is no longer manned from 6.00pm on account of typically low traffic after dinner. And a dirty great tanker has just run into the Great Barrier Reef. The pilot was on the bridge so may be in serious trouble. Hardly fair, I suggest, as it transpires he was enduring the 50th (I shit thee not) hour of his shift at the time! And I still feel for that poor control tower chappie - by himself in the middle of Europe, tasked with the little job of keeping jet liners full of people from running into each other. Does anyone keep a list of, er, unfortunate incidents on the criterian of 'efficiencies' like this? It'd be a bastard of a big job, and getting bigger exponentially, but surely The Lord's Work? Cheers, Rob.
short-selling
G'day Doug, Oh yes, blame the short-sellers, not the idiots who bought stuff on the way up. This is almost American in its stupidity. Were they idiots? Technoboosters (Negropontes, Gilders and Malones come to mind), professional researchers, leading journos and auditors alike - all boasting PhDs, nice suits and smug certainty - misled 'em. No-one else got near a mass media channel for half a decade. And, if a pension they were going to have, they'd have had to invest somewhere, and stay invested until retirement. A lot of 'em just never had a chance, for mine. Asymmetric information is not just unavoidable, it's built into the DNA of our society - to the extent the best-rewarded in our society produce anything - it is precisely and deliberately info asymmetry, no? Cheers, Rob.
Re: rejecting a school
G'day Jim, Can someone name the main achievement of one author who has been dubbed post-structuralist? Speaking as a reader of English translations, I dare suspect only Foucault could write such that he might be understood and enjoyed - and even he had many a moment. That said, and although Foucault was ever pretending to be doing away with a Marx of his own tendentious construction, I thought Discipline and Punish had some beaut stuff in it on the regulation of symbolism - not just the ruling ideas of the ruling class, but also the struggle to tame desire (which has the irksome attribute of sometimes escaping the corridors of discourse - it not always being born of consciousness) and the body and its errant symbolism - civilised incarceration, for instance, taking the resistance - the political - out of transgression, in favour of a manageably subjectivist/individualist and pathologised frame of simple wrongdoer. I reckon the likes of Kristeva, Baudrillard and Butler (if I come anywhere near understanding any of 'em - reading 'em is a bit like mugging Mike Tyson for a buck) go waaay too far with the theoretical and (when they deign to discuss them) material implications of this. I'm honestly not sure any of them achieved any Rob-enlightenment whatsoever (although I do get a profound sense of nihilism out of Baudrillard in his more apparently Althussarian absolutelyall-of-our-being-is-captured-by-regulating-symbilism moments - I guess that may be seen as dawning wisdom by some). Doug's or Christian's probable outrage at the above effortlet might help clarify or correct ... It is much better to talk about one specific thing than to go on and on about abstractions such as post-structuralism. Abstraction is the level at which postie talk is most often and most uselessly engaged in. That's why I have a little time for Foucault's spotty but provocatively engaging attempts at history (or 'genealogy'). Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Query: WorldCom and Internet
That was beaut, Ravi! As for Worldcom's chances - UUNET might ultimately get 'em through, but it seems it all depends how much corporate clientele they lose in the (very) mean time. Many thanks, Rob. hi rob, i will attempt an answer to some of your questions. yes, if uunet ceases to function there will be significant disruption of the internet. the term 'backbone' is a bit old. in the days when the NSF ran the internet there was a single backbone that at various times was built/run by merit/sprint/bbn/mci/others. now, various high level network service providers have their own backbones which they connect to the backbones of other NSPs using private peering arrangements or using public exchange points. nonetheless, uunet being a pioneer (the uu part - unix to unix - shows their history back to the days when at end points you often connected systems to the internet through them using uucp), a lot of traffic runs on their network and this can cause disruption in connectivity between various endpoints of the internet. additionally MCI still runs the MAE* exchange point facilities which are exchange points for ISPs to interconnect: http://www.mae.net/mae_services1.htm and the above is used by a significant number of tier2 network providers. here's a really good page that provides info on the internet backbone ISPs etc: http://navigators.com/isp.html from a technology point of view, network backbones do seem to be a natural monopoly. new technologies that attempt to use redundant bandwidth by moving traffic around, are emerging, but suffer limitations. you are also right about the excessive capacity now available. while thats true for network capacity (fibre layout etc) i am not sure about exchange points and switches. so, transferring the usage from UUNET to other carriers and switching points might be a difficult process. which makes uunet an attractive acquisition i suppose and hence perhaps it will survive the bankruptcy? for uunet's coverage: http://www1.worldcom.com/us/about/network/maps/ http://www1.worldcom.com/global/about/network/maps/northam/ here's an interesting if crowded map of net coverage: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/ches/map/ the place to look for internet data: http://www.caida.org/ http://www.nanog.org/ hope i touched on some useful stuff in my long-winded response! --ravi
Query: WorldCom and Internet
G'day all (perhaps especially Ravi), There was a bit of indignation in parts European when KPNQwest went under, as parts of their Ebone operation (referred to as 'internet backbone') were duly shut down. Why won't this happen to WorldCom's UUNet (also referred to as 'intenet backbone' and credited with accommodating half the world's net-traffic)? Is there enough redundancy in the otherwise bloated telecommunications infrastructure of metropolitan America to take the slack? What is the technical nature of this backbone (do they refer to the switches, proprietory protocols ... )? Are any arguments about consigning basic infrastructure to the vagaries of 'the market' (eg. a couple of executives, a finance engineer or two, mebbe a pet auditor and a few million 'investing' ignorami)? Have words like 'natural monopoly' and 'public good' come up? And am I over-reacting? Cheers, Rob.
Back to the future of Australian industrial relations
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/06/1025667073364.html Abbott: a boon to the dark satanic mills By Terry Lane July 7 2002 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/06/1025667073364.html Is it possible that Mr Tony Abbott MHR is a time traveller? Could he really belong in another era and place but has somehow slipped through a warp and has found himself wandering bewildered in the 21st century? One asks the question because one is determined to understand his quaintly archaic philosophy of human relations. You know his statement: Most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults you find that he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss, but at least he's employing someone ... Here's my proof for my time-traveller theory. Once upon a time I visited a dark satanic mill on the outskirts of Manchester. The British National Trust has spruced the place up and Disneyfied it to within an inch of its life, but you can still get an inkling of what went on there in the early days of the industrial revolution. This particular DSM manufactured cotton goods, spinning the yarn and weaving it on huge looms. These looms were so noisy that we take it for granted that industrial deafness was the norm for everyone. The air was filled with flying cotton fibre, so we must also assume that the workers' bronchials were taking a hammering. But there is something that makes this particular DSM special, even among the taken-for-granted horrors of the pre-trade union industrial revolution. There was an orphanage attached to the mill. The owner had the bright idea of buying up an asylum for parentless children in metropolitan Manchester and transporting the contents to his mill. Lots of little kids, given board and lodging and forced to work in the factory. At the mill today, stuck up around the walls, are extracts from Hansard of a parliamentary inquiry into child labour. Little children were well-suited to work in the weaving room. They scuttled around under the moving looms clearing out the cotton fluff. Every now and then one would get squashed and killed by the fast-moving loom. This would bring the entire factory to a standstill while the little corpse was extracted from the works. Other workers directed their hatred at the dead child because they lost wages, such as they were, while the plant was idle. Many children developed rickets due to malnutrition and the unnatural strains placed on young bodies by the demands of the job. Nevertheless, the owner of the DSM argued before the parliamentary inquiry that, although he might be a bad boss, he was better than no boss at all. There were many who believed him. Good people tut-tutted about the rigours of child labour, but it was better than having the little blighters running wild in the streets with the arse out of their pants. Others reckoned that 10 hours toil six days a week, followed by four hours in chapel on the Lord's day, would do them the world of good. The mill owner saw himself - and was seen by others of his class - as a regular philanthropist. Karl Marx blew away the spurious argument that bosses do the proletariat a favour when they give them jobs. Capitalists can only be capitalists if they are in a position to command the surplus value created by workers' labour, so if anyone should be grateful it is the owner of the mill. Mind you, when boss and worker are bound together in mutual loyalty and respect it is a beneficial symbiosis. Marx foresaw the day when, under the self-serving dogmas of globalisation and free trade, the owners of capital would be able to draw on such a vast global reservoir of unemployed people for their labour that any poor sod lucky enough to get a job would be so pathetically grateful he would forget his dignity. Mr Abbott reckons that that is the way God intended it to be. He is from another age. QED.
Re: Good analysis of WCOM and Credit Bubble
G'day Penpals, Just to lend a little flavour to the WorldCom saga, here's a little note from Xmas 2000 - poignant and, with respect to the likely state of other telcos', possibly significant : G'day Doug, In light of your note that ... Naomi Klein says that high marketing costs essential to support a brand put immense pressure on firms to cut costs, esp wages. That's one relation between IP and the real wage we haven't brought up really. The below looks interesting. Amazing stats, no? Cheers, Rob. Marketing costs double WorldCom network prices By Ellen Messmer, Network World 05/11/2000 NEW YORK At BusinessWeek's daylong e-Networks conference, MCI WorldCom Inc. Vice Chairman John Sidgmore was given the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to hundreds of corporate CEOs and chief information officers during the keynote address. Sidgmore used his golden hour at the podium to complain about how much MCI WorldCom spends on marketing its network services. According to Sidgmore, an astonishing 49% of the telecom giant's service costs to customers can be traced to marketing. In contrast, 34% of cost stems from paying local-access charges, 6% for switching and transport equipment and 11% for operational support systems. Everyone assumes network cost is connected to technology, Sidgmore said during his keynote. But it's all selling and marketing. It also costs twice as much to bill the service as it does to provide it. But despite spending all this money on print, TV and phone marketing, Sidgmore is dissatisfied with the results. In the future, as more people are connected to the Internet, MCI WorldCom intends to place more emphasis on somehow getting consumers and businesses to tune into Web advertising, which could be cheaper, Sidgmore said. He also is hopeful that advertising is one day going to be pushed out to customers carrying the new generation of Web phones. But, Sidgmore pointed out, only 27% of families in the U.S. regularly use the Internet, according to recent data from New York-based Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. The myth is that everyone is on the Internet, while the reality is that hardly anyone is on the Internet. Sidgmore told the BusinessWeek conference audience he spends half his time trying to convince regulators to let MCI WorldCom operate around the world. MCI WorldCom has acquired 75 companies in the past few years, so regulatory agencies tend to be treat it as a dominant player. Thank God for Microsoft, Sidgmore exclaimed. If it weren't for Microsoft, we would be the most hated company at the Justice Department. MCI WorldCom's vice chair ended his keynote on an upbeat note. I really believe that 40 years from now, everyone will look back and say this was the Golden Age of communications. We're lucky to be part of it, because it doesn't get any more exciting than this.
specifics from ANTHRO-L critics re: LTV
G'day Nancy, 1. Supply and demand is the constraint [on the amount of value in the world at any given time, since it isn't labor]. It doesn't matter how much something cost, in labor, materials, etc. if there is no demand for the item. It's just supply and demand. I've seen two recent examples of this that illustrate that idea very well. The first is mud pies. If value is a function of labor then a mud pie will have some value based on that labor, but then a mud pie that took someone 5 times as long to create should have 5 times the value. We all know that's not the case because mud pies have no value (outside the world of art subsidized by grants). Yes, value isn't realised until an exchange is made. But I think it's also worth remembering Marx's distinction between concrete and abstract labour. Socially necessary labour time is the smallest investment of labour capable of producing a mud pie in that time and place (ie at that level of technology and organisation), so however much each particular mudpie took ain't the decisive variable. 2. The other is gold. If value was a function of labor a gold nugget that had to be dug out of a mine would be worth proportionately more than an identical nugget found on the ground. Same as above, I think. Mind you, the use value component is variable, seeing as how it depends on how people are feeling about alternative investment options - and the prospects of a fiat-money-based economic system in general ... 3. A few years ago Coca Cola was looking at a smart vending machine where the price of a soft drink actually fluctuated on the basis of supply and demand. On hot days the price would rise as more people were thirsty, while on cold/low demand days it would drop below it's (sic) regular price, though the cost of producing the drink never changed. Yeah, but I think that might mean that a particularly hot summer would occasion a marked excess of price over exchange value in the Coke sector, and a concomitant pressure elsewhere in the economy for the price to fall below exchange value. For across the economy as a whole, Marxist political economy has it, aggregate prices should gravitate towards aggregate exchange value - else the economy is destabilising itself by way of taking bits out of future value. Er, or not? Cheers, Rob.
Good analysis of WCOM and Credit Bubble
And another from Red Herring: http://www.redherring.com/columns/2002/friday/lastword062802.html Blame Newt Gingrich for WorldCom The former speaker of the house and his fellow Republican Revolutionaries of 1994 are responsible for today's accounting scandals. by Jason Pontin June 28, 2002 I am like one of those monomaniacs who button-hole you at parties--ranting about bird-watching, say, and jabbing you in the chest. I can't stop writing about corporate malfeasance. But I can add something new, and controversial: I know who's responsible for the fraudulent accounting that allowed WorldCom, Enron, Global Crossing, and others to deceive investors. It was Newt Gingrich--Newt, and the ideologically over-heated, maniacally anti-government, anti-regulatory House Republicans who came to office in the fall of 1994. Here's why. In three specific cases--tort reform, the accounting of options, and the separation of an accounting firm's audit and consulting services--House Republicans successfully sought to block regulation that would have made corporations transparent. Without Newt Gingrich, there would have been no crisis in business and accounting, at least in this form. Take torts, for example. Tort-reform legislation to curb shareholder lawsuits against companies and accountants was at the top of the agenda of the pro-business Gingrich Republicans. Silicon Valley high-tech firms aligned with the accounting industry to lobby the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass a bill that would discourage frivolous lawsuits. President Clinton vetoed the bill, called the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act of 1995, saying that it would penalize investors with legitimate claims. However, the Senate (although Democratic, eager to appease the then-powerful House Republicans and show the nation that they were both pro-business and anti-government) overturned the president's veto in December 1995. Supporters of the legislation maintain that it was a much-needed brake on runaway lawsuits, which threatened to damage accounting and high-technology businesses. But fear of shareholder lawsuits would have provided an important disincentive to the accounting irregularities that allowed companies to misrepresent their earnings. Or consider options accounting. In 1993, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) proposed closing an accounting loophole that allowed companies to avoid recording stock options on their balance sheets. The proposal, needless to say, both alarmed and outraged corporations. According to a Merrill Lynch study, expensing stock options would have slashed profits among leading high-tech companies by 60 percent on average. Corporate America aligned with the accounting industry to fight the FASB proposal. In 1994, both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate voted down the proposal 88 to 9. And because stock options were not (and are not still!) accounted for as expenses, companies like Enron and WorldCom felt emboldened to misrepresent their operating costs as off-the-books capital expenses. This little loophole was the start of a kind of open season, one where FASB would not reform the commonly accepted accounting principles; it said that the SEC would not closely scrutinize audits; it was the start of a deregulatory free-for-all. Indeed, it was the wild west. As Jim Leisenring, the vice chairman of FASB from 1988 to 2000, recently said on National Public Radio, We switched from talking about 'Have we accurately measured the option?' or 'Have we expensed the option on the proper date?' to things like 'Western civilization will not exist without stock options' or 'There won't be jobs anymore for people without stock options.' ... People tried to take the argument away from the accounting to be just plainly a political argument. So, too, when Arthur Levitt, the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2000, proposed separating the consulting and auditing business of accountants because they constituted a clear conflict of interests, he was defeated by Gingrich-ite elements in the Congress. Mr. Levitt has called this the greatest mistake in his years at the SEC. The Senate has proposed a tough-minded reform of FASB and America's so-called generally accepted principles of accounting. But will it pass? Unlikely. A Gingrich-ite president has said that he supports
increasing US inequality
G'day all, For a while, the booming 1990's restored a fixed range, raising hopes of a lasting solution to income inequality. And now we are learning that the solution failed to last even as long as the boom. And so die all hopes that technology can fix social problems ... if the problems be social, the solution is social. If the problems be radical, the solution is radical. One optimistic thought is that as technological change becomes more rapid, we shall become more inured to the blandishments of the technoboosters. Maybe the problem was that a society without history simply could not remember the traumatic contradictions that attended the coming of rail, telegraph, electricity and internal combustion - if several technologically 'revolutionary' moments occur in a single lifetime, it might be that a little wisdom comes with it, eh? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Global unequal exchange
G'day Penpals, This beaut bleat from the Melbourne AGE: Howard is sacrificing our interests By Kenneth Davidson June 13 2002 Is John Howard mad, or is he just looking for an excuse during his visit to Washington to bask in the reflected glory of George Bush and his unilateral war on terror? What, precisely, does Howard expect to gain for Australia out of an Australia-US free-trade agreement (AUSFTA)? Is there anything in the words or actions of Bush, his administration or the US Congress that suggests Washington would make any trading concessions to Australia that might hurt some domestic US interest? Based on actions, not words, the present US administration is the most protectionist since the Republican Hoover administration presided over the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930 that played as big a role as the Wall Street crash in 1929 in precipitating the Great Depression. The $340 billion assistance package to US agribusiness is not designed as social welfare for struggling US farmers. It is designed to ensure that US agribusiness can undercut in export markets the most efficient farmers in the world in countries such Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the most heavily subsidised farmers from the European Union. So we have a choice. If agriculture is in the AUSFTA then the US can swamp the domestic Australian market with temperate-zone agriculture products as well as Australian export markets. The subsidies are worth 30 to 50 per cent of the value of US output. This means Australian farmers would have to be 30 to 50 per cent more efficient than their US competitors to stay in business. In terms of our non-agricultural trade between the two countries, protection levels are already so low that there are no major economic benefits to either country from the abolition of what amounts to small revenue tariffs. The question becomes: which taxes have to be raised to cover the revenue shortfall? Tradewise, Australia is on a hiding to nothing from AUSFTA. So what does the US want from free trade with Australia? The US wants the abolition of the Foreign Investment Review Board (a paper tiger, but it could conceivably be resurrected by a nationalist government) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (which curbs profiteering in the Australia market by US and other pharmaceutical multinationals), and full access to the local film and television market (television networks would be opened up to foreign ownership, local-content rules for free-to-air TV networks would be abolished, and film subsidies for Australian film companies to make Australian films would be extended to foreign film companies). But this is the small beer in the US objectives. To pursue the proposed AUSFTA, Bush has to get Congress to delegate to him a six-year fast track authority to negotiate free-trade agreements with more than 30 countries, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean. The fast track authority, rebadged by Bush as the Trade Protection Authority, is modelled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which takes in Canada, the US and Mexico. This has been sold as a free-trade agreement; in fact it is more of an investment agreement designed to give investors unprecedented legal rights that they can exercise against government through tribunals set up under the NAFTA. Such tribunals have the effect of bypassing the national courts and nullifying local laws and regulations designed to enforce local planning, health, and environmental policies. Democratic governments have the power to appropriate private property for public purposes, provided they give just compensation that shields private property from direct expropriation. But chapter 11 of NAFTA goes further. Expropriation is broadly defined to include any government administrative measures, policies or laws that are tantamount to expropriation. The losses, which must be compensated, include the loss of future or potential earnings. The implications of chapter 11 were not understood when they were first implemented in 1992. The provisions were sold as relatively benign safeguards necessary to protect investors from state seizure of private property, such as the Mexican nationalisation of foreign oil refineries in 1938. But the examples of how these provisions are being used to assert the interests of foreign investors over democratically elected governments are truly hair-raising. For example, an American company, United Parcel Service, has filed a suit challenging the government provision of parcel and courier services by the Canadian postal service, and a Canadian steel fabrication company has
Re: Bono the useful idiot
Nice forward, Louis. I am what has become the uncoolest of creatures, a U2 fan of 22 years' standing, but I find that Marsh's article has given true voice to the ache this whole drawn-out business has occasioned deep in my expansive gut. Felt a few twinges when Attanborough saved the South Africans, and a few more when Swayze saved Calcutta, but it's pestering me summat chronic these days ... Ta, Rob.
Markets and Diversity
I think Steiner discovered in 1951 that when a second TV station went to air in a market, it invariably felt obliged to emulate the schedule of the first - sorta ensuring a shot at half the going market. He then discovered a third station did precisely the same thing - better to chase 33% of a proven market than actually be worthwhile. It was around entrant number four that a few schedule disparities would first become evident. On that reading, a monopolist with four licences would proffer more variety than four competitors with a channel each. Makes sense to me. And not particularly dangerous for news and current affairs either, as it'd be hard finding a more harmonised quartet than the big US networks, no? I hear MSNBC is the last word in daring TV leftism over there ... Heh heh, Rob. Bill Lear wrote: On Monday, June 3, 2002 at 14:39:44 (+) Justin Schwartz writes: [Doug Henwood writes:] Bourdieu argues in his book On Television http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Why_TV_sucks.html that competition produces sameness, not diversity. Doug What's his reasoning? Or is it just an observation? I would expect it to depend on the circumstances. jks It is also highly dependent upon what definition of competition one uses, n'est-ce pas? If by competition, Bourdieu means modern Western state-supported large- (very) and small- firm market mechanisms, that's one thing. If he means classic individualistic competition which drives prices to approach marginal costs, that's entirely another thing. With the latter, we would have zero diversity, since we'd all still be living in caves. With the former we would have a high degree of phylogenic differentiation, but a large degree of sympatry (been reading Gould's book, in his honor, you see:-). Didn't Thomas Frank also remark somewhere that the United States is a very dynamic society going nowhere? Bill
Gould again
G'day Carrol, David Hawkes is an English professor at Lehigh -- where one of his colleagues I just discovered is the Intelligent Design biologist Behe. (This knowledge from a post to Science for the People list, which I will fwd shortly.) He is also on the Milton-L list, to which I am subscribed, and that list has recently had the most bizarre series of posts on evolution etc., to which Hawkes has contributed. The _Nation_ review is, in my estimation, quite slimy, and whoever is currently book review editor there should be deeply ashamed of him/herself -- and if he/she isn't, I hope there are enough letters to the Nation to shame the dolt. I don't blame Hawkes. He believes what he believes. I blame the Nation for selecting him to review Gould. Er, which are the slimy bits? The bits Hinrich forwarded seem okay to my innocent eye ... Cheers, Rob.
Re: Gould again
Having said: Er, which are the slimy bits? The bits Hinrich forwarded seem okay to my innocent eye ... ... and having now read further down the list of Pen-Lisms, I might save some heat by mentioning I don't see 'intelligent design' following on from any of what Hinrich posted. I certainly agree there's no reason to go there, because no tenable path that gets us there. I did think the geologists (Hutton and, later, Lyell) had introduced the deep-time/gradual-change mindset into the scientific mainstream - if memory serves, the sadly overlooked Wallace was to take his cue from them. Lamarck's progressivism had been around for a while, too. Grand-Daddy Darwin had been toying with notions of competition and winners and losers at about the time Hutton and Lamarck were doing their things, no? And Smith was writing at about the time Hutton, Lamarck and Grandpa were. I know connections look obvious, what with the blindeness of hindsight, but I think Hawkes's point on this is tenable, at least. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Price Discrimination on Internet
G'day Sabri, But when you visit a website that dropped that cookie on your computer, the website has access to the cookie and can process that information on your computer. Why is this not also a violation of privacy according to the US law? I was under the (unusually optimistic) impression that cookies could in fact not do that. It records browser info, but doesn't penetrate your HD, I thought. Am I to be disillusioned yet again? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Re: Question about the economics of information
G'day Ian, Just what is a *unit* of information, anyway? A sentence, a hypothesis, a theory-paradigm? The notion that we can apply marginalism to any of these questions just seems silly. This is exactly how scientists attack Dawkins' 'meme'. Is a pair of flared trousers one meme or a hundred? Every time natural science tries to cram its numbers into the field of human communication, they fall out, I reckon. I'd love to know how much we're all paying for the constant struggle to make excludable the practically unexcludable, too ... Sigh, Rob.
Re: UN World Food Programme calls for a massive response
G'day Diane, Timely article, comrad; this is going to be very big, I'm afraid. I do note though that the otherwise worthy article appended fails to remind us that in both Malawi and Zimbabwe (and probably others - I just don't know about those) the IMF is at the root of it. And directly. There's nought new in droughts. Southern Africa has long profound droughts once every two decades or so these days. What's new now is that in the early nineties, the IMF restructuring suits moved in and demanded the government empty the reserve granaries. Apparently their very existence was upsetting the price mechanism. Millions of tonnes of food (roughly the amount now needed to avoid a famine by late October) duly got disappeared. And now they have their price mechanism. A fat lot nature cares ... Cheers, Rob. MALAWI Unfolding Crisis: With more than 70 percent of the population facing food shortages, the president of Malawi made his country's food crisis a State of Disaster on February 27. Malawi's current food shortages stem from the worst floods on record in 2001, last season's low maize production, the depletion of the strategic grain reserve and high maize prices on all local markets. The situation has been worsened by a dry spell, a lack of seeds fertilisers and, most significantly, families consuming vast amounts of their harvest when it is still green. Many now risk running out of their own food soon. Malawi's lean season usually falls in October. This year, it is expected to start in June.
Re: Re: Hutton's declaration of war 2
But of course Chris did not write the words attributed to him, as the thread title and his preamble showed. The failure to show respect to the opposing argument and actually deal with it, but to dismiss the individual with disrepect, is symptomatic of this approach to marxism. Onya, Chris. Although I suspect it's symptomatic of the medium rather than lefties alone. If I had to judge the human species on nought but the strength of its mailing list intercourse, I'd give up on it forthwith. Keep on keeping on, mate! Rob.
Pearl Harbor Eagleton
G'day Gene, Bush's INTENT, if such it was, to get us into a hot war with Iraq, and the Muslim world, has not yet been addressed publically. Well, msnbc's Jim Miklaszewski reckons game plan to remove al-Qaida from the face of the Earth, was afoot before 911. Indeed, al Qaidea had been the subject of an inter-agency committe for many months by then. Here's the NBC account: ... the directive ... outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans off the shelf, Miklaszewski said. The United States first would have sought to persuade other countries to cooperate in the campaign by sharing intelligence and using their law enforcement agencies to round up al-Qaida suspects. The plans also called for a freeze on al-Qaida financial accounts worldwide and a drive to disrupt the group's money laundering. The document mapped out covert operations aimed at al-Qaida cells in about 60 counties. In another striking parallel to the war plan adopted after Sept. 11, the security directive included efforts to persuade Afghanistan's Taliban government to turn al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden over to the United States, with provisions to use military force if it refused. ... The couching of the plans as a formal security directive is significant, Miklaszewski reported, because it indicates that the United States intended a full-scale assault on al-Qaida even if the Sept. 11 attacks had not occurred. Such directives are top-secret documents that are formally drafted only after they have been approved at the highest levels of the White House, and represent decisions that are to be implemented imminently. ( http://www.msnbc.com/news/753359.asp ) As for what was known and who knew it, I dare say we should not assume that the FBI has suddenly become a generous and timely donor of intelligence to its fellow agencies. But a cursory peek through Cursor's resources tell me that we do know that the interagency Hudson Report (THE SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF TERRORISM: WHO BECOMES A TERRORIST AND WHY?) told everyone who'd listen in 1999 that Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House. http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Sociology-Psychology%20of%20Terrorism.htm 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef was quoted as telling interrogators in 1995 that he planned to fly a liner into Langley. Also in 1995, suspect Abdul Hakim Murad admitted to the Philippinos that a plot was afoot to hijack and crash a passenger plane into something: [the hijacker would] board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then, he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters. There will be no bomb or explosive that he will use in its execution. It is simply a suicide mission that he is very much willing to execute. Then there's the FAA warning to US airlines and airports on April 18 2001 that: ... some of the currently active groups are known to plan and train for hijackings and have the capability to construct sophisticated (bombs) concealed inside luggage and consumer products ... The FAA encourages all U.S. carriers to demonstrate a high degree of alertness. Then there's the June warnings from the German BND and the Egyptian security service that hijacked planes might soon be running into selected targets. Then there's the July warning from the Phoenix FBI agent, in which links between al Qaida and flying schools is made very explicitly indeed. Then there's Zacarias Moussaoui's arrest, at a flying school, in August, who was arrested at a flight school in August. Didn't he actually say something about planes and World Trade Centres? The Russian intelligence services also told the CIA that terrorist-pilots were training for such missions, and Putin says that warning was couched in the strongest possible terms, and that threats to airports and large public buildings were mentioned. Also in August, Mossad warned both the FBI and CIA that a major assault on vulnerable targets in America was being planned. The LA Times is clear that these warnings were duly received. been received. And Bush copped a CIA daily briefing to that very effect. So the anti-terrorism forces are stood down in April and the CIA red alert cancelled in late August ... And this from Cheney on Russert's *Meet The Press* RUSSERT: No specific
Terry Eagleton
G'day Christian, You wrote: I appreciate Eagleton's felicity with language and ability to turn a phrase. But don't you think that the point is misplaced? I mean, Eagleton conflates historical socialism with the socialism in his head, and then concludes that actually existing socialism somehow would or could have kept a lid on the forces that brought us 9-11. (And that, despite his admission that AES was basically an extravagant barbarity.) Hence, the anti-globalization movement is the world's best defense against OBL etc. I find that hard to believe, whatever the anti-globalization movement's strengths. He does make points that can't be made often enough, though. I think one is that the tragically Orwellian turn in Soviet transition were decisively a function of concerted external hostility in the context of socialism-in-one-peasant-based-economy-and-traditionally-authoritarian-culture. I think another is that, whilst no system can guarantee the absence of 911s, it can militate against the chances of their success. And if success is unlikely, the initial outrage is all the less likely, too. What I'm getting at is the possibility that 911 was about unleashing the US dogs-of-war. The US ruling class and state elite - with its record of bluntly massive and/or often poorly targeted responses to acts of belligerence, and in the throes of both a political legitimacy problem and an incipent economic crisis, at that - could be relied upon to react with a cyclone of offensively ethnocentric rhetoric, carpet civilian-killing interventions on Muslem territory and internal consolidations that effectively expose the fragility, nay inherent contradictions, of the legitimatiing basics of formal liberal democracy. This, in turn, would weaken the popularity of compromising pragmatists and pro-northern advocates within political elites in the Muslem world. And, or so do I read the strategy behind 911, a consequent strengthening of neo-Wahabbist theocratic zealotry in those polities. So if 911 wasn't quite the revenge of the weak, marginalised and offended, it was, I think,the act of a contending regional elite in search of highlighting and exacerbating that dynamic ... to aid and abet the potential of the Huntington thesis of a clash of civilisations to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think those latter transformations could be relied upon under a system whereby wealth, security and recognition were more evenly spread around the world and across its peoples. Whatever sense 911 made to its perpetrators, would have been way undermined in such a world. So, whilst Eagleton may be stretching a point, perhaps thinking his advocacy should addresan issue currently exercising the public mind, there is a point there to be stretched. Waddyareckon? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: reform and rev
G'day Christian, Michael wrote: Also, interest rates are a very, very weak determinant of investment. Are you speaking generally? If so, do you know of any good empirical stuff that supports this? Reckon pen-l has hit a very rich vein of late - gratitude to all. Anyway, if memory serves, the cable buy-up/roll-out frenzy of the late eighties was all done amidst seemingly sobering interest rate numbers. LJ Davis's *The Billionaire Shell Game* makes something of this as he traces Malone et al's predatory path to the crunch of the early 90s (not that all those chooks have come to a rest even now). A romping read, too, btw. Cheers, Rob.
Re: RE: Re: Re: reform and rev
G'day Running Dog And Carrol, it is Tienamen. I may be off on my spelling but, I'm closer, I betcha! Cf. The Tienamen Papers, edited by Andrew Nathan. Michael Running Dog Pugliese, Woof, Woof! It was always rendered Tianenman here at the time. I still remember those poor young folk singing The Internationale to absolutely no effect: Beijing and Washington both treating them as counter-revolutionary aspiring cappos - and neither allowing for the possibility that their call for democracy might be for something represented by neither ... a lot of dying in vain, alas. Cheers, Rob.
LMD on neoliberal strategy: today Mont Pelerin; tomorrow the world
G'day all, The history of the war on social democracy , as per the latest LMD. http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/01/11alternative United States neo-liberalism seems to have triumphed: the US now dominates military and diplomatic affairs; Europe is on its way to being a mere free-trade zone. In December the US House of Representatives (narrowly) granted President George Bush increased powers to negotiate trade agreements (fast track) the same powers it had denied President Clinton in 1997. And the anti-globalisation movement is on the defensive, just as neo-liberals were 30 years ago. After financial crises in Russia, Southeast Asia and Latin America in 1998, a rightwing pundit gloomily said: Global capitalism, whose triumph once seemed inevitable, is now in full retreat, perhaps for many years. Business Week asked: Is the American model of free-market capitalism, the de facto ideology of the post-cold war period, in retreat? Countries are opting out of a free-market system everyone took for granted (1). Japan's finance minister described himself as an outdated Keynesian (2). Capitalism's decline proved illusory: events, and commerce, resumed their course. Yet the prevailing economic system, based on beliefs that validated public policy, had once been overthrown. This was neither a fluke, nor the predictable result of social or historical shifts. Rick Perlstein's new book on Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, reminds us of the power of politics; it recalls an era when the losers unexpectedly rewrote the history books thanks to their ability to mobilise, popularise ideas and found movements. They went on to win the bigger war (3). Contrary to the beliefs of most pollsters and journalists, charting the best course of action does not automatically mean accepting current trends and the prevailing spirit of the times, or acquiescing to the media. At times political activists try to modify trends before reversing them. This calls for patience and tenacity, and may involve battling advocates of fashionable ideas. Ideological labour, political will and activism may create demand for new political agendas. In 1964 Goldwater, with the support of only 38% of the US electorate, lost to Lyndon Johnson. Commentators were quick to write Goldwater off and proclaim the triumph of the Democrats' centrist, Keynesian ideology. Radical conservatism was finished. Goldwater's famous call to arms Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue offered voters a counter-revolutionary message grounded in social divisiveness. The Republicans supposedly learned their lesson in defeat. The 1964 elections were won in the centre-ground: radicalism was too frightening, progress was assured and the New Deal appeared invincible. Ideologies were converging, technology was paramount and thinking was monolithic: there was no alternative (4). In 1958 the Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, had acknowledged that the gradually expanding federal government was the price of rapidly expanding national growth. In 1960 the Democratic party declared that the final eradication of poverty was in reach. Johnson devoted himself to this task, secure in the knowledge that we can do it all. We have the wherewithal (5). Once in Washington, he launched his war on poverty by increased taxation and a vastly expanded civil service. Although his war on poverty did achieve some of its social objectives (6), in political terms it was the Keynesians' swansong. In Goldwater's words, it was a war on your pocketbooks. No longer monolithic The political ground was already starting to shift. The New Deal's durability was not guaranteed
Re: Re: Bankruptcies Residential debt in Oz
G'day Doug, You wrote: hmm, so what's with this? ASIA-PACIFIC: New data show strong growth in Australia Financial Times; Jan 8, 2002 By REUTERS: AGENCY MATERIAL and STEPHEN WYATT Well, good retail stats accompany bad residential debt and bankruptcy stats pretty snugly, and good construction stats (not counting plummetting commercial space markets (once considered a nasty indicator all by itself) accompany gigantic government giveaways to first-home builders (the election induced a $23 billion government pork frenzy - hardly ideologically sound, but sometimes you do have to go against the theory to convince the people it's right, eh?). The election is over now, and the budget has fallen into deficit, so construction is going to cop it hard shortly. And anyway, the Wyatt piece looks like a puff-piece to me; just see what this fabled 'consensus' was saying yesterday: Business picture looking gloomy By IAN McPHEDRAN of The Australian in Canberra 07jan02 SALES and profits fell during the last quarter and most firms expect lower investment and growing unemployment, a new survey shows. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's January survey of investor confidence paints a gloomy economic picture. The quarterly survey asks companies of all sizes across the nation to assess the economy and their own business. The results from about 280 respondents are compiled into a series of indexes rating economic factors. Overall the index for economic activity jumped from 49.2 in July last year to 51.3 but remains well below the peak of January, 2000. The investment outlook remains soft with more firms putting off investment decisions. They also expect unemployment to rise with 51.4 per cent predicting higher jobless levels. ACCI's chief economist Steven Kates said the most telling result was that 40 per cent of firms recorded lower-than-expected sales before Christmas. ACCI's acting chief executive Lyndon Rowe said: That there is some indication of a slow down of activity and a fall off in confidence should not be surprising, he said. Cheers, Rob.
Bankruptcies Residential debt in Oz
2001 record year for bankruptcy THE AGE CANBERRA, Jan 8 AAP|Published: Tuesday January 8, 5:55 PM A record number of people declared themselves bankrupt in 2001, figures released today showed. More than 26,000 people filed for bankruptcy in 2001, making it the worst year on record. The figures released by the Insolvency and Trustee Service of Australia (ITSA) showed bankruptcies were higher in every quarter of 2001 compared to 2000. These figures reveal the enormous pressure that Australian families have been under over the past 12 months, Labor treasury spokesman Bob McMullan said. With record credit card debt in the months leading up to Christmas, rising unemployment and concerns about exports and investment, these bankruptcies figures sound yet another wake-up call for the Howard government. While the number of people declaring themselves bankrupt dropped towards the end of last year, the number of bankruptcies in the December quarter of 2001 was 13 per cent higher than the same quarter in 2000. The ACT recorded the biggest jump in bankruptcies during the quarter, an increase of 54 per cent, followed by NSW which rose 21 per cent. The majority of new bankruptcies were in the non-business (consumer credit) area. Business bankruptcies represented 15.2 per cent of those recorded in the December 2001 quarter. Attorney-General Daryl Williams said the December quarter figures showed the GST was not having a significant impact. Over the three months to December, less than 0.5 per cent of all bankrupts mentioned the GST as a cause. It was mentioned by only 30 bankrupts - 20 in NSW, three in Queensland, three in Western Australia, two in South Australia, one in Victoria and one in Tasmania. On the basis of the figures, it appears that the GST has had no significant impact on people becoming bankrupt, Mr Williams said. In the September quarter 36 bankrupts mentioned the GST as a cause. In the December quarter, the GST was mentioned as a cause in 3.4 per cent of business bankruptcies.
Re: Re: underconsumption undertow question
G'day Doug'n'Jim, Sez Doug: Must dissent here. The confidence numbers are a good leading indicator of the bizcycle. They generally bottom about 3 months ahead of the cyclical trough (and top out about 1-2 months ahead of the peak). And the confidence numbers themselves - at least the Conference Board's version - are composites based on consumer evaluations of incomes and the job market. The recent pickup could reverse, but if it doesn't, then it should be taken seriously. We do live in funny times, though. As Jim says, we're all in unprecedented debt, for a start. What I'd like to know is would I be considered a confident consumer if I expected consumer prices to stay low and money to stay cheap for the foreseeable future? Whatever I'd be expressing confidence in, I'd suggest an investor wouldn't want to take to rosy a view of such a datum. Sez Doug also: Things got murkier during the bull market, as no one had any incentive to doubt the numbers. How much notice did we get of the SL and LTCM debacles? Not rhetorical questions - I just dunno - but certainly their books were being compiled without the benefit of a punter-blinding decade of bubblemania. Australia has certainly been shocked by sudden megabankruptcies lately (HH Insurance - which actually put itself in the poo by buying a very-probably-already-broke FAI Insurance; Ansett Airlines - which had endured months of maintenance scandals, but still apparently caught major owners Air New Zealand by surprise; and One-Tel - a telco backed right up to the jour-du-merde by the Packer and Murdoch boys, who insist their frat-buddy directors had been misleading them). As Wozza Buffet reckons, it's only when the tide goes out we get to find out who's swimming naked, eh? I fully expect 2002 to be yet another grim bastard of a year, of course, but fondly wish all penpals the very best of what is on offer. All the very best, Rob.
Re: FW: Re: RE: No recognition for Enduring Freedom!
G'day Jim, I've lost your answer to the below, but if I remember my original point, the idea of Caligula naming himself Germanicus isn't that different from Reagan being dubbed Granadicus, Bush Panamacus, or Clinton Sudanicus. (They're a bunch of cusses, too.) If memory serves, Caligula was all that was left of the loinfruit of Germanicus Caesar (brilliant and popular general, serial kicker of Rhineland butt, son of Nero, and probably ultimately victim of Tiberius's chemists). Hence Caligula's full name (the Caligula bit - little boots - being a nickname attached to him in childhood, when he was given to swanning about in custom-made military footware). Mind you, the commander of eight legions in the Rhineland would have had a much harder time of it (the northerners were quite capable of exterminating the odd legion) than would Unca Sam's Commander-in-Chief with the likes of Granada, Panama and the Sudan ... Merry Xmas from a smoky NSW, Rob.
'War on Terror': PR problems in non-Anglo-Saxon world #x to the nth power
South Korean school kids singing praises of bin Laden SEOUL, Dec 26 AFP|Published: Wednesday December 26, 2:41 PM http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/2001/12/26/FFX3IEEZNVC.html School children in South Korea are singing the praises of Osama bin Laden to the dismay of school authorities, newspaper reports said today. School authorities in the southern city of Pusan and its surrounding province of South Kyongsang said they were wracking their brains to think of a way of discouraging children from singing the bin Laden worship song, the Joongang daily said. Police in Pusan and the city's education office asked elementary schools there to stop students singing the song and educate them as to why the man suspected of masterminding the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US is not someone to be admired. The police and education authorities have also been searching for the origin of the song, without success. The song, which is sung to the tune of a popular cartoon's theme song, goes as follows in its English translation: Osama bin Laden, the person I admire most. I will be a terrorist when I grow up. President Bush, the person I detest the most.
The New Economy Goes Bust
Table of international business operating costs LONDON, Dec 11 AAP|Published: Tuesday December 11, 10:33 PM http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/2001/12/11/FFX674JKCQC.html The Economist Intelligence Unit today released a report on business operating costs in 31 key countries around the world, rating the most expensive with a score of 100 and the cheapest with 1: 1 Japan 100.0 2 US 66.3 3 Germany 66.0 4 UK 64.0 5 Belgium 58.7 6 Sweden 54.5 7 France 54.4 8 Netherlands 54.0 9 Canada 45.6 10 Italy 45.5 11 Spain 39.5 12 Australia 38.3 13 Argentina 36.8 14 Hong Kong 27.3 15 South Korea 27.1 16 Taiwan 26.6 17 Singapore 22.4 18 Venezuela 21.3 19 Russia 21.0 20 Mexico 19.6 21 Brazil 15.7 22 South Africa 15.0 23 Czech Rep 13.4 24 Poland 13.1 25 Malaysia 11.1 26 Chile 10.4 27 India 8.7 28 China 7.7 29 Thailand 7.3 30 Indonesia 1.7 31 Hungary 1.0
Trade and Corporations: free trade as strategic trade
Truss disappointed with US subsidies deals CANBERRA, Dec 12 AAP|Published: Wednesday December 12, 7:49 AM http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/ The United States will not cut billions of dollars in farm subsidies despite a plea in Washington from a high-level group of Australians, including Agriculture Minister Warren Truss. And in a further blow to Australia, it appeared the White House had done a deal with Congress to exclude key commodities such as sugar and citrus in any free trade agreements. Mr Truss, in Washington to lobby for cuts to the $A340 billion financial support package for US farmers, said the deal took US farming to a new low. From the point of view of our delegation, we have therefore been, I guess, disappointed, that it seems that the US will indeed put in place a significant farm subsidy program for the years ahead, Mr Truss told ABC radio. The government was especially concerned with the clear intent of the farm lobby to seek to entrench a mentality of farm subsidies in the USA, Mr Truss said. It is obvious, that the US, which was once proudly boasted to be the most efficient farmers in the world, have now degenerated to a situation where US farmers are dependent upon the taxpayers for around half their income, he said. Yesterday US farmers said Australia's bid for the US to cut support for American farmers had as much chance at success as snow falling in summer. American National Farmers Union president Leland Swenson (Leland Swenson) said the US would comply with world trade rules but its prime concern was to look after its farmers. Today Mr Truss said some of the US deals done to secure votes to ensure the subsidies proposal would become law meant it would be almost impossible to include key commodities in any free trade agreement with Australia. Things like textiles and steel have been identified as areas where particular procedures will have to be followed before any administration will be able to negotiate arrangements, Mr Truss said. The laws are to be debated in the US Senate this week.
Aboriginal arrest rates ...
One-third of indigenous men have been arrested: study SYDNEY, Dec 10 AAP|Published: Monday December 10, 1:45 PM http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/2001/12/10/FFXL41YZDQC.html Nearly a third of Australia's indigenous men were arrested over a five-year period, according to report released today. The Australian National University (ANU) report, produced on behalf of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, is the first of its kind analysing the detention of indigenous people. Its analysis of data found one in five indigenous Australians were arrested at least once in the five years before the 1994 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSIS). The report found that 31.6 per cent of males and 9.4 per cent of females aged over 13 years had been arrested over the five-year period. The average number of arrests per person was approximately three for males and 2.3 for females. Youths aged between 18 and 24 tend to have the highest incidence of arrest with the youngest and oldest age groups having very low arrest rates. Generally, males are four times more likely to have been arrested than females in each age group. The exception to this is males under 18 who are over five times more likely to have been arrested than underaged females. Indigenous Australians who were unemployed, drank alcohol or had been physically attacked or verbally threatened were much more likely to be arrested. Those factors were also important predictors of the number of times an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander was arrested over five years. Alcohol consumption was a particularly important risk factor, with the risk of arrest being about 13 percentage points higher for an indigenous person who drank. Other significant factors which increased risk of arrest included being male, living in a crowded house, being taken away from natural family as a child, limited education and sharing a house with other people who have been arrested. The unprecedented NATSIS analysed socioeconomic and cultural data after a canvass gathered information from 10,235 respondents aged 13 years and over. Bureau director Don Weatherburn said the report highlighted the need to tackle the underlying causes of crime in indigenous communities. He said these were social dysfunction, economic disadvantage and alcohol abuse. If we want to reduce indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system we need to create jobs for Aboriginal people, improve educational outcomes for Aboriginal children and help Aboriginal communities overcome the problem of alcohol abuse, he said. By Maureen Dettre
Trusting The State To Protect The Marginalised And Downtrodden
So Murdoch's *Australian* and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have on the strength a gentle-voiced left-of-centre (and consequently lonely-voiced) old chap called Phillip Adams. A bit of an institution is our Phil. Anyway, so our Phil wrote in October that the US citizenry was not always as conscious of the dodginess of its race relations at home and the spottiness of its foreign policy abroad as perhaps might be in its best interest. Wrote our Phil, in a particularly strongly worded paragraph: If Australia is to be a true friend of the American people we must try to rein them in, not urge them on. The US has to learn that its worst enemy is the US. Harsh stuff. So, naturally, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is investigating him for racial vilification. Cheers, Rob.
Imperialism and Empire (by John Bellamy Foster)
G'day Greg, Please take note that Meszaros correctly notes as does Empire, that we are past classic imperialism as described by Lenin - this is the criticial point. Now the question is whether US Global Hegemonic Imperialism is a contingent and passing episode or the logical end product of capital's socialisation. What is Global Hegemonic Imperialism, except Super-Imperialism (Lenin/Kaustky) or Empire (Negi/Hardt)? At this level (and based only on the review) Meszaros analaysis seems to support the general concept of Empire. My difficult-to-articulate feeling is that we are falling from a never-quite-realised functionalist-integrationist Kautsky world (which may have needed contending expansionist blocs to provide what glue there was) into something with much in it that concerned the likes of Lenin and Orwell. 'US Global Hegemonic Imperialism' is so essentially contradicted/self-defeating a notion, I reckon we're at the historical point where stability is not to be gained by the making of omelettes but can be maintained only by the continual breaking of eggs. One giant military power, a couple of hundred desperate nations, scarce essential resources and a concomitant zero-sum dynamic (with uneven development and incipient underconsumption written all over it), and all this in the context of a set of organising principles that confront a legitimacy crisis at the level of its basic system-legitimating premises (the nation state, the citizen, and 'economic reality'). Fragmentation, polarisation, politics as the war of all against all (between and within nations), and all under the auspices of a hegemon that can prevail only where politics and economics come from the barrel of a gun. I go for the latter being more compatible to theory in general and observable history. Bush has been pugnacious since his first day, has everyone forgotten his tearing up of treaties, and his growing agrression (with no provocation) against China. The US was looking for a fight long before S11 and no-one seems to be askling why. Is this another act of Imperialism as we know it, the assumption it seems of our entire movement? Meszaros seems to be saying no and Empire says no (ie via the logic of their positions regardless of the opinions of the authors). I agree with you right up to the bit about Meszaros, Greg - his 4th, 5th and 6th contradictions, and the hegemon's response to their bite, marks Bush's presidency, for mine. Yes, a consciously urgent integrated policy of hegemonic restructuration and consolidation is under way - Mark Jones calls our moment 'world-historic' and I agree with him. The oft-unremarked fragmentations (that inevitably attend the over-hyped global integration in train) are feeding back into the system as pretexts for more fragmentation-inducing integration on the part of a desperate hegemon. The project is essentially contradicted, and the manufactured coalitions still necessary to that project are torn asunder by the very moments of their apparent triumph. Even during the Cold War, Washington was, in times of stress, prepared to undermine Europe and Japan (eg its role in creating an oil crisis in 1973 hit those economies harder than its conjuncturally crisis-ridden own). This seems to be what we are doing, grasping at straws not to take on the challenge of understanding our period for what it is. Desperate military and diplomatic attempts to cover the hegemon's loss of economic competitiveness, to wrest control over the world's diminishing energy reserves and sectors of extant effective demand, to commodify information and control its economic exploitation, and to persist in social and environmental destruction such that the absolute economic advantages in the benighted world to come accrue to the hegemon. That's how I'm seeing my children's world just now. An international state of artifice in which the lives of nations and people alike are solitary brutish and short ... And, no, I can make neither shape nor hope out of that, Greg. So please put me right where you can. Yours losing his head when all about him are keeping theirs, Rob.
Comparative education survey
It's typical of Ozzie media to blow up the good bits (and hasn't the US gone down the shit chute?!) but that Oz's education is undergoing class and gender crises is a long-held suspicion that now enjoys that all-important official statistical verification. Despite Australia's egalitarian ethos, it had one of the strongest relationships between reading ability and social background and was classed, along with the UK, as one of the least equitable countries on this score. 60 % of Aboriginal 15-year-olds don't have the literacy to function as adults. This survey took place during the first year of the Australian government's reallocation of public funds to private, ergo typically richer, schools. So it'll be interesting indeed to have a look at the next survey, scheduled for 2004. And, while girls have reached traditional male levels (or boys have met traditional female levels ... ) in science and maths, boys are actually going backwards on the criterion of literacy (something I've actually had to factor into changing parts of my own unit's reading lists - and this in perhaps the world's most fortunate and literate territory - 60% of ACT parents holding uni qualifications). Cheers, Rob. Aussie students among the best, but boys are a worry MELBOURNE, Dec 4 AAP|Published: Tuesday December 4, 9:02 PM Australia's 15-year-olds are among the best in the world and well above the average among wealthy nations for reading, maths and science skills, according to a major new international study. However the OECD-sponsored survey also shows that boys lag behind girls in reading skills, and social class makes a big difference to the educational success of Australians. More needs to be done for indigenous students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, it says. The first major study of its kind, the 2000 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tested how well 265,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries applied their knowledge and skills to real life situations. Australia's performance was well above the average among the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which groups most of the world's rich nations. Finnish students were the best readers, scoring higher than Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the UK and the US. In maths, Japanese students beat those from Australia, Canada, Finland, Korea, New Zealand, Switzerland and the UK. In science, Japanese and Korean students led Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK. PISA's Australian national project manager, Jan Lokan, said over 6,000 Australian students from all states and territories took part in the survey. All states, except the Northern Territory, scored highly for reading. The ACT and Western Australia scored high for both maths and science, and South Australia did well in science. I think a fairly strong message coming from these results is that if Australia was to lift the level of the struggling students we'd probably be top of the world, Dr Lokan said. Despite Australia's egalitarian ethos, it had one of the strongest relationships between reading ability and social background and was classed, along with the UK, as one of the least equitable countries on this score. A telling statistic came from the ACT where more than 60 per cent of the students' parents were university educated. In reading, 25 per cent of ACT students had reached the highest level - the best score for any Australian state. A total of 500 indigenous students were surveyed and while average results were lower, 40 per cent scored level three or above - indicating skills adequate for adult life. However indigenous students would continue to need extra support, the survey found. Internationally, boys performed better than girls at maths but Australian students showed no significant gender differences in either science or maths. In every country including Australia, girls outscored boys in reading. Boys from poorer backgrounds tended to score worse at reading than girls and many boys failed questions related to narrative texts. That leads me to think `do they read fiction?' and they don't, Dr Lokan said. Forty per cent of boys and 25 per cent of girls did not read for enjoyment; 35 per cent of boys thought reading a waste of time and only 23 per cent of boys read fiction once a week compared to 41 per cent of girls. The message is that we have got to do something to get the boys to read, she said. Maybe Harry Potter? Federal Education minister Brendan Nelson said the results confirmed Australia's education system was among the best in the world but boys' literacy was a major problem. We've got boys in Australia at the moment who are feeling disengaged, disillusioned and demoralised in middle school and in many cases are disengaging from the educational system, Dr Nelson said. The study will be repeated every three years and more countries will be
Little Finance Terminology Question
Hey Doug, What's this 'fair value' stock exchange pre-opening reports are always on about. Never been able to make hide nor hair of it. Whatever it means lots of big numbers are opening well below it this week, I notice. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Little Finance Terminology Question
Onya, Doug! Although I hadn't realised enough NASDAQ companies were projecting dividends to allow the calculation. And would that be Fisher Black, the dude you chide in WS for calculating risk in terms of deviation from an expected return, rather than factoring in a notion inferred by the rest us when we hear the word; ie. 'loss'? A dark morn on the street, eh? G'Night, Rob.
Project for Pen-l
Subject: [globalization] Network 2002 - December 2001 Issue To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Globalization ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Posted: 11/30/2001 By [EMAIL PROTECTED] Network 2002 - December 2001 Issue Trade rules: It's déjà vu all over again Ten years ago, the Earth Summit finished with a long laundry list of promises from governments. High on the list were reforms to make rules on the global economy fairer and more sustainable. But the promises were forgotten a year later when the same governments signed the Uruguay Round trade agreements. The aspirations of the Rio Principles, Agenda 21 and the Convention on Biological Diversity were trumped by enforceable rules on agriculture, services and intellectual property rights. Ten years later, governments have set a new agenda for WTO negotiations. The outcome will provide a straightjacket for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg. Again, the principles of equity, social justice, and environmental sustainability are set to be relegated to the realms of rhetoric and exhortation. If WSSD is to make a difference, it must influence the outcomes of WTO negotiations. After the Seattle debacle, developing countries and civil society groups went to the Doha Ministerial meeting last month with expectations of reform. The speeches of politicians have been positively dripping with the importance of making trade rules fairer and more sustainable. The reality was depressingly familiar. The outcome resulted from four major failings in the trade system. Firstly, trade rules are deeply unfair to the poor. The World Bank calculates that rich countries' tariffs on imports from the developing world are four times higher than tariffs on imports from other rich countries. One key reason is that the rich countries broke their promises made in the Uruguay Round. For example, agricultural subsidies in the rich countries have actually increased since 1994 and few textile quotas have been phased out. These broken promises are set to continue. In Doha, the aim of phasing out export subsidies for agriculture, responsible for wrecking farming systems and the lives of millions of rural communities in developing countries, was strongly resisted by the EU. Even though the Common Agriculture Policy is clearly unsustainable in the EU as well as to developing countries, the EU's negotiator inserted a get-out clause at the last minute, to say that this aim is without prejudging the outcome of negotiations. The scene is set for more broken promises. The second failing is that governments do not give priority to aims such as sustainable development in trade talks. The clear priority is to gain advantages for their companies. This strong influence of corporate lobbying was expressed eloquently by the former Director of the WTO's Services Division, David Hartridge: without the tremendous pressure generated by the American financial services sector, particularly companies like American Express and Citicorp, there would have been no services agreement. The General Agreement on Services (GATS) is one of the most important examples of the elevation of corporate rights above sustainable development. It aims to remove barriers to trade. However, these barriers may be environmental laws or regulations to ensure that essential services such as water are affordable to the poor. GATS is developing a necessity test on whether domestic regulations are necessary. To date, ten out of eleven WTO cases have ruled in favour of unrestricted trade over public health or environmental restrictions. Much is made of the voluntary commitments that countries make under GATS. But even though most countries have made commitments to open up tourism to foreign companies, few countries have reserved the rights to limit new development that threaten ecosystems, to impose conditions related to environmental impact or to require sharing of benefits with local communities. These core environmental principles could be prohibited as unnecessary barriers to trade. Moreover, when countries make commitments, it is for keeps. The WTO has described GATS as effectively irreversible. There has been no proper assessment of the impact of GATS on the poor and the environment, as called for in the agreement. The third failing is that efforts to deal with conflicts between trade and the environment are likely to result in even further undermining of environmental agreements. The apparent success in Doha to starting talks on the relationship between WTO rules and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) includes a dangerous get-out clause: the negotiations shall not prejudice the WTO rights of any member that is not a party to the MEA in question. This provides an escape route for the US on the Kyoto Protocol and the Bio-safety Protocol. It also fails to give environmental and trade agreements equal status - the wording makes it clear that trade rules take
postmodernism?
G'day Jim, Maybe Taliban is (was?) polycentric, but that doesn't make it post modern. Polycentrism is as old as the hills. If memory serves, EP Thompson made a big deal of the Luddites being polycentric (although he wrote it in English). Maybe 'postmodernism' is a handy tag in the field of aesthetics, but I don't know what it might mean in any other respect. It's a bit like 'globalisation' I reckon. Means whatever one wants it to mean, so it pretty well means nothing. Doncha reckon? Cheers, Rob.
Re: A project for Pen-L
G'day Paul, What I do not have is a comprehensive critique of so-called free trade, all the agreements etc. What I would like to see is pen-l put together a comprehensive critique of 'free trade' (sic) that we could use in classes, public protests, media, etc. with all the appropriate academic references to studies, reports, etc. I know of a number of studies (such as the excellent one by CEPR) on globalism and (the failure of) growth. But I don't know them all. Nor do I know of all of the studies on NAFTA and job destruction such as the one by EPI/CCPA. What I would like to see is a series of reports, not overly long, by interested pen-l members of the evils of 'free trade' and its effects. Something that we could put together and download (or get students to download) that would give a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the 'free trade conspiracy' with all the appropriate footnotes/URLs to relevant studies/reports/websites. I suppose Ricardo might be a good place to embark. If it's a first-year course (beyond which level I'd have nothing to contribute) we could contextualise Ricardo's moment, juxtapose ours, and ask some currently pressing questions. (Apologies for disorganised thoughts, but I'm in a monstrous hurry). If post-Napoleonic-War Britain produced just about everything more cheaply than the rest of the world, why did trade persist? Ricardo, as all here know, proposed that, even in conditions of across-the-board absolute advantage, a national economy (and every other participating national economy) would be best served if it confined the allocation of its productive resources to the production of goods at which it was most efficient in comparison to other economies, leaving the least blessed economies to concentrate on producing stuff at which it was least relatively inefficient. As Paul Ormerod pointed out in his critical romp *The Death Of Economics*, Ricardo very explicitly qualified this assertion with the observation that 'every man' is disinclined to entrust himself and his assets to 'a strange government and new laws'. Furthermore, he expressed approval of the spatial inertia of capital, saying he'd be 'sorry' to see such restrictions weakened. Anyway, by way of formal kick-off; some things I'd like to hear penpals on include the following considerations: * The 'that was then' argument: Under the 'free trade' environment envisaged by the mainstream media and the US State Department, capital dances around the world instantly and costlessly, with governments everywhere dropping their knickers to attract FDIs. * The Galbraithian institutionalist argument projected into a Marxian value argument: Even if markets tend to efficiency in the abstract, the capacity of big corporations in the real world (whose particular access to capital affords them an absolute advantage in both information expoitation and capital-mobility exploitation) to make, rather than take, prices has (inevitably) distorted the free-market ideal. Where goods trade at way above exchange value (eg M$), other goods in play must sell below their exchange value, creating debt-dependence, political distortion, uneven development, and incipient underconsumption. * The M$ example also reminds us of Frank Graham's (and Ethier's 60 years later) comparative economies of scale argument. A national economy doing the right Ricardian thing, and concentrating on producing something at constant return to scale (as many LDCs would be encouraged to do, given their current comparative advantage location) would be bound to protect its rent by through protection if it were confronted by a trading partner specialising in a good of increasing return to scale. * There actually being no such thing as 'free trade', the question is really one of mode of regulation. Keynes' International Clearing Union argument (that both deficit and surplus national economies needed to be disciplined) implies that incentives are all wrong under Bretton Woods institutions if free trade's advantages are to be optimised, because investors are not encouraged to develop. Keynes would be even less comfortable with the chaoplexic charges and retreats of capital around the world, as the dangers of this were precisely whatthe Bretton Woods talks were initiated to avoid. And the greenback as international currency affords the hegemon unfair advantages (hence Keynes' bancor: http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/bwi-wto/2001/braithwa.htm ). *The Martin Wolf 'you don't and can't have free trade until labour is as mobile as capital' argument Ian just posted. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: postmodernism?
G'day Doug,
polycentric (although he wrote it in English)
poly = a prefix meaning many
therefore:
polycentric = having many centers
polyamory = having many lovers
polymorphous = exhibiting many types or stages
polygon = having many sides
Poly Styrene = a punk singer from the late 70s
Yeah, but:
centre = middle point - of which one entity may have a maximum of but one.
So I prefer, as EPT did, poor frustrated old General Maitland's rendering ('no
real bottom') or Cobbet's ('They can find no agitators. It is a movement of
the people's own'). I'm not saying these observations apply to Al Qua'ida
itself, although it may apply to the social motion of which it is now part,
but I am saying 'polycentric' is a shitty word - ugly, useless and
nonsensical.
Was Poly Styrene any good? Never heard of him/her out here!
Cheers,
Rob.
Re: .csuch@Î
G'day all, Mark writes: JP Morgan is considered to be in the early stages of crashing. http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=15139 I know nothing about this, but don't see why the notion is so ridiculous. Many of the Net's finance sites have been whispering for a year about one or two leading investment banks holding dangerously unpromising junk. I remember sending something to Mark's Crashlist about that in December. I don't think clever hedging was the order of the decade in the 90s, and I don't know how much opportunity there's been since, say, April 2000 to recover, say, dotcom-heavy positions. Or not? Cheers, Rob.
Sabri on Turkey
Nasilsin sevgili Sabri? Finally I am back home and just saw this: Why does America, or as Chris keeps calling it, Empire, although I am not sure if he is aware of that America and Empire are the same thing, do that? The Canada, the EU, and Japan, what are they, chopped liver? Doug Interesting categorization Doug. Never thought about this. It all depends on what you mean by the word Empire. If by Empire what is meant is the current global capitalist order, then like the US, Japan, Canada, the EU and, of course Rob, OZ, are also at the core but if what is meant by Empire is the current hegemon of the global capitalist order then Empire is the US, however declining its hegemonic powers may be. These are very confusing times and I am no less confused than anyone else. Well, I'll certainly accept that Australia dwells in the periphery of the core, yoldas. Confusing and dizzying as our times are, I think some things are indeed clearer than 'usual'. Washington has definitely decided to make the most of the moment, and, foresaking all others, has gone for the line. Every step it takes is part of a strategy to adjust to, and take lasting national advantage of, the post-Wall tumult. The problem lies with the 'foresaking all others' bit, of course. US unilateralism has annoyed traditional allies just as the reasons for those alliances has waned. Bilateral deals can't help but offend others. Its multilateral deals expose its own duplicity, as the champion of free trade protects its Big sugar, Big Tobacco, Big wheat etc, slams the door on third world primary and secondary industry, and prises open wherever Big finance, IP privateers and the culture industry might want to go in, and the champions of globalisation repudiates international accord after accord. Its military adventures are either unapologetically unilateral (eg. bombing above the line in Iraq without notice to formal allies and directly affected friendlies) or embarrassingly one-sided liberties (Uncle Sam dressed up as 'NATO' over Novi Sad or in the role of 'The Coalition' over Kabul). But those decisions are made by and for US interests. Australia et al are neither subject nor object; just being 'for' where the only option is 'against'. Our uniforms, yet again, are in the unconditional and indefinite control of another power (so are our expensively fancy new subs, btw); our currency lies twitching at the mercy of those who have taken possession of our diverse productive assets and confined us to our old roles of granary, woolshed and mine; both our major parties check with Washington and Wall St before they get up in the morning (or don't, as Whitlam didn't); our social policy options are constrained by Moody's and SP ratings as much as they are by the most conservative prime minister since Wellington; our film industry has been reduced to little more than relatively cheap backlots for Star Wars, Mission Impossibles and Matrices; and our public sector has 'outsourced' its strategic data and corporate knowledge to the likes of IBM, M$, PWC, KPMG and the US State Department. Foreign direct investment is drying up, unemployment is heading for 8%, and in the last four months alone seriously major insurance, telecommunications and airline companies have gone bust to the tune of tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs - no wonder the electorate was so insecure as to accept the scapegoats John Howard so notoriously served up for 'em at the election ... Anyway, core of the core we're not ... Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Sabri on Turkey
G'day Doug, Michael Perelman wrote: Why does America, or as Chris keeps calling it, Empire, although I am not sure if he is aware of that America and Empire are the same thing, do that? The Canada, the EU, and Japan, what are they, chopped liver? As Oz isn't on your list of exemplary liberal democratic virtue, I can only guess you've been keeping an eye on our election campaign and its issue. Don't forget NZ, though. Sigh, Rob.
irrelevant rate cut
From Morgan Stanley Co. at http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20011109-fri.html#anchor0 Global: Monetary Policy Pitfalls in an Era of Globalization Stephen Roach (New York) The world s major central banks are at it again -- first, Americas Federal Reserve and then the European Central Bank and the Bank of England -- all moving together in early November to reflate an increasingly beleaguered global economy. The key question on everyones mind: Will the medicine work? The financial markets are certainly betting it will. But I continue to have my doubts. Its not that I question the inevitability of economic recovery. Its just that I continue to fear it will be a disappointing one -- later than expected and ultimately lacking in its typical vigor. The vicious circle of a rare, synchronous global recession is exceedingly difficult to break. It does not lend itself neatly to a standard policy fix. Contractionary forces are now reverberating with mounting intensity around the world. First, America exported its IT recession. Now, the US is exporting the shock to consumer demand brought about by the terrorist attacks of 11 September. Feedback effects are also lapping up on American shores, as US exports lose their external-demand underpinnings. Such are the self-reinforcing tendencies of the first recession in the modern era of globalization. But the authorities are on the case, goes the argument in favor of the V-shaped recovery. As the world economy has broken decisively to the downside, the Fed has now eased ten times this year, by a whopping 450 bp, and the ECB has cut its benchmark rate four times by a total of 150 bp. The Bank of Japan, by contrast, has largely been on the sidelines during this global easing cycle -- hardly surprising in that it has effectively run out of basis points. For a global recession made in America, it makes good sense for the Fed to have led the way in the monetary easing cycle. But with the cumulative easing in America now three times that in Europe, these disparate policy moves are sending an important message: A highly disproportionate share of the global stimulus has been concentrated in America. That means a US-dependent global economy is leaning heavily on a re-starting of the American growth engine to break the vicious circle of synchronous recession. Just as America led to the world to the downside, the world is now counting on the United States to lead the global economy back to the upside. Yet it wont be easy for the world to extricate itself from this synchronous recession. Thats largely because cross border linkages have increased dramatically in recent years. Over the 1994 to 2000 interval, world trade expanded by more than twice the growth rate of world GDP. By contrast, over the 1970-93 period, trade growth was only about 45% faster than world output growth. As a result, world trade has risen to a level where it is now approximately 24% of world GDP, well above the 19% share prevailing during the last recession in 1990-91. That suggests cyclical swings in global trade should have a much greater impact on world output growth in this recession than was the case in the last one. For that reason, alone, the current sharp reversal in the global trade cycle -- with world trade growth going from a 12.4% spike in 2000 to only about a 1% estimated increase in 2001 -- is a much bigger deal today than it was in the past. The violent boom-bust cycle now under way in global trade is a key force behind this synchronous worldwide recession. This conclusion is very much consistent with recent research of the IMF, which found evidence of increased correlation in the international business cycle in the late 1990s following a reduction of such correlation in the asynchronous downturns of the early 1990s (see Chapter 2 in the IMFs World Economic Outlook of October 2001). With cross-border reverberations now exacerbating this global recession, recovery is critically dependent on the potential for any policy actions to break this chain of events. With Americas Federal Reserve leading the way in attempting to reflate the world, the outcome hinges critically on the responsiveness of US domestic demand to lower interest rates. As I indicated recently, there are several reasons to be quite dubious of the efficacy of monetary stimulus in the current climate (see my 7 November dispatch, Running Out of Basis Points): First, an economy dealing with the aftershocks of an asset bubble is typically less responsive to lower interest rates. Second, for a country with a strong currency, export weakness is a given in a synchronous global recession -- irrespective of the level of short-term interest rates. Third, the quick response of the refi-cycle may have shortened the lags of the monetary policy transmission mechanism, suggesting that there may be less demand stimulus in the pipeline than widely perceived. Fourth, any whiff
irrelevant rate cut
G'day all, Ten minutes with today's US papers discloses that OPEC's cutting production by a million barrels, rocketing insurance rates and ever more exacting loan conditions are hitting US businesses, earnings reports are yet further down, big business September quarter profits are down monumentally, machine toolmakers have soaring inventories, and mortgages are finally becoming tougher to get. If one is looking for signs of a sustained profit crisis (now in its fourth year, in my book) and an incipient credit crunch, one can find 'em without looking beyond the front pages. But Wall St - which soars at the prospect of a structurally impotent rate cut (other than keeping over exposed and profitless concerns limping unto ever greater bad debts), and plunges skittishly at the news of a downed airliner - persists either in believing none of this matters any more, or that they have no alternative but to be in the game while everybody else is there. Who was it who said there were only two rules on The Street: Don't Panic and Panic First? Cheers, Rob.
Off topic - madmen
Carrol Cox wrote: Doug Henwood wrote: Gar Lipow wrote: Oh well, asshole remains unobjectionable. Why? They're importantly functional and can even give pleasure. Interrogate the term's unacknowledged heteronormativity! I kinda hope my initial impression that Doug was having a dry smile was right. As far as I know, no gay men (or hetero 'sodomists') have indicated that they are indeed hurt by the use of the term. Well, I don't think they could be. It's not a name for them, and they're not the sole possessors of said apertures. Even we straight foreigners have them. Stigma kills. That it does. Sometimes I think lefties help produce offensive terms, though. One example is the word 'Abo'. Now Australians shorten every word they can, so in itself 'Abo' need not have caused offence (I'm not saying it didn't - I can't know - but I'm trying on an idea) but the first time *I* heard of its potential to offend was from the white left. I remember that, because I thought it peculiar at the time that this particular abbreviation was bad, but all the others were okay. Anyway, according to my experience of the process, once the world was told it was offensive, it naturally became offensive, and to use the term now would indeed be obnoxious. I suppose what we, who so carefully avoid this abbreviation in a milieu built on abbreviations, get out of this is the feeling we are expressing our moral superiority over others (we do love to do that, if lefty mailing lists are any guide). Alas, I doubt Aboriginees are the slightest better off for the production of yet one more hurtful tag ... Incidentally, when gays speak among themselves, do they speak of anal sex or asshole sex? Or do they use other expressions altogether? A needless qualifier, I'm sure. Everybody I know selects from the same rich paradigm of terms, regardless of predisposition (the good thing about Anglo-Saxons is how rude body functions are to them, generating almost limitless and unceasingly entertaining euphemisms and dysphemisms). Cheers, Rob.
irrelevant rate cut
G'day Jim, what's the CAD? Sorry, I guess I imagined that's what people'd call the current account defecit. Apropos which, this just in from Doug Noland (excerpted from http://www.prudentbear.com/homepage.htm): ... Quinlan and Chandler make a typical Wall Street error in focusing on revenues and revenue growth, at the expense of the critical examination of cash flows, debt loads, and balance sheets. The dramatic and continuing deterioration of the U.S. balance sheet is todays critical yet conveniently ignored issue. Concluding, they wrote, In the end, U.S. exports and imports neither represent Americas global linkages nor indicate how or where U.S. firms compete. Yet many still view global competition through the 200-year-old eyes of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who saw trade as the chief form of economic exchange. Others harbor equally archaic mercantilist prejudices, assuming that exports are good while imports are bad. These observers regard a trade deficit as a sign of national weakness, a warning signal that something is amiss. But U.S. global engagement involves far more than just trade. If policymakers continue to interpret a large trade deficit as a loss of global competitiveness or a result of unfair trade practices, protectionist backlash could result, which could trigger retaliation around the globe. Under this scenario, there would be no winners only losers. The United States obsession with its trade deficit belies the fact that corporate America has never been better positioned to compete in the global marketplace. It is time to say goodbye to Adam Smiths outdated framework of global competition and to embrace instead a more complex understanding of Americas economic engagement with the world. No thanks. Well stick with Adam Smith, and we absolutely see a $450 billion current account deficit as a warning signal that something is amiss. How can one not? But, then again, Credit Bubble analysis has a penchant for sound and proven economic theory, and a touch of disdain for nebulous and esoteric New Age notions. And while we view these analysts as being off in left field, they have much company with a consensus that is missing the critical issues in regard to trade and the dollar. This is surely no time to throw out Adam Smiths (and Ricardos) framework that incorporates the division of labor, comparative advantage, and mutually beneficial trade relationships. Importantly, however, the trade relationship as envisaged by Smith encompassed trading goods for goods in the context of a sound money regime of currencies convertible to gold fair trade within the auspices of a disciplined and self-regulating monetary system. The current historic aberration of the U.S. trading dollar IOUs for goods while for years accumulating unimaginable foreign liabilities is, in reality, the antithesis of Smiths vision. I view it as more a case of dysfunctional mercantilism in the guise of laissez faire. As a nation we accumulate foreign produced goods by issuing dubious liabilities. There will be backlash and revulsion to such a dysfunctional arrangement. As such, we view the current situation as unsustainable and eventually acutely problematic. Looking at massive trade deficits from a domestic perspective, we see several generally unrecognized problems. During the zenith of the Credit boom, trillions of stock market gains and ultra-easy money flowed freely and briskly, funneling purchasing power through virtually every river, bayou, creek, and brooklet of the economy. There was spending power created aplenty, with more than enough to procure both heady domestic profits and endless demand for foreign sourced goods. The profit bonanza also benefited from the natural lag of employment and other costs. It was wonderful, even magical, but a seductive Credit Bubble illusion all the same. Here, as became all too common in the general euphoric mindset, a major error was committed by extrapolating the Bubble much into the future. Today, a key part of the puzzle (and misdiagnosis by the Fed) of how profits can falter so miserably in the face of what should be considered relatively strong consumer outlays lies in the continued flood of imported goods. Keep in mind we are now importing almost $100 billion of goods each month, imparting keen pricing pressures at the margin throughout the economy (witness todays decline in producer prices). Quinlan and Chandlers musings aside, the unusual confluence of protracted credit and spending excess and a strong U.S. dollar is an unfolding disaster for domestic goods producers and workers. The U.S. has commenced what will be a protracted profit drought. And while consensus opinion believes that this predicament can be rectified by more easy money and stimulated demand, theyve, once again, got it wrong. Its not a demand issue and cutting interest rates will not rectify it. Instead, this is very much a structural problem that has developed from years of failed
Re: Re: Re: Re: America is losing the battle for hearts and minds
Michael Perelman wrote: Leahy did not understand that the bomb was dropped as a message to the USSR. Well, that was certainly a salient component, Michael. I think bloodless technocratic 'ecologically valid field-testing' was tragically part of it, too. But let's have a little empathy for the grunts contemplating the beaches of Japan at the beginning of that August, eh? I don't think that justifies the second bomb, mind, and the question of the site of the first (ensuring massive civilian mortality) certainly remains. But I know how I'd've felt about the issue were I aboard a troopship at the time. Stuff's complicated. And I'm not one to disagree lightly with Bill, but I think Leahy was fundamentally and importantly wrong. Wars can not be fought without destroying women and children (I might also point out that, in our old-fashioned way, some of us think destroying men is no less obscene an act), and therefore cannot be won without same. *When one backs a war, one axiomatically backs the slaughter and maiming of innocents*. Which makes it a thing one does in extremely rare and hideous circumstances, and only in the presence of a state of information commensurate with the unrivalled gravity of the decision at hand. Cheers, Rob.
Australian general election
G'day all, Well, John Howard's social-conservative-yet-economically-neo-liberal-zealot-yet-spending-whatever-marginal-seats-require outfit walked shamelessly into an election with nothing but a firm conviction to keep Afghan and Iraqi refugees off our blessed shores - it was all they went on about for ten weeks, and all the polling booths today were bedecked with his picture (never a pretty sight) and some quote of his to do with 'us' deciding who comes and how. I don't know what the fact that his mob of xenophobic rentier-class shills won not only the election, but an unheard of positive swing (+2%) in a third-term election, says about this globalisation thingy we're supposed to be going through, but it'd have to be something very qualified and complicated, wouldn't it? I doubt we have the resources, nor the regional goodwill, to keep unloading refugees on sinking South Pacific islets. So those kept sleepless by the spectre of a couple of thousand skinny desperate foreigners planting their bare feet on antipodean soil are bound for disappointment. I also suspect there's something of the poisoned chalice about winning government in 2001 (a 'triumph of politics over governance' according to one profoundly Labor pundit). And certainly, Labor ran a gutless prevaricating campaign. None of which, alas, comforts me much ... Cheers, Rob.
Saudi Arabia
We should figure out what [the terrorists] want us to do, and not do it. In which case they should've shut Shrubya before his minders had him blurt out 'war' and 'harbours' at the start. The US has already done what the terrorists wanted 'em to do (continually kill some of the world's poorest Muslems from hidden positions in the stratosphere, pressure their puppet allies in the Muslem world into profoundly antagonising their constituencies, and coalesce many people's self-identities and projects into a belligerent monolith). I dare say the US is gonna advance the terrorists' cause yet more, but they've already done enough, I reckon. I suggest that the problem is that the US military-industrial complex and the terrorists might just be wanting the same thing ... lots more of this. In which case we have the sort of thing we had in July 1914 - something of an irresistable institutional tide. Somme-bound. Cheers, Rob.
Ken Davidson on Oz economy - lotsa familiar themes
The budget surplus obsession is costing us dearly By KENNETH DAVIDSON Monday 22 October 2001 Why are both sides of politics obsessed with the size of the budget deficit or surplus? Is it really the measure of economic success or failure, or is it just another bit of jargon designed to camouflage the brutality of the class war? On this, as on so many issues, John Howard and Kim Beazley are as one. Why? In 1996 the $8 billion Beazley budget black hole provided a cover for a cut in the programs of the previous Labor government, which the Coalition had promised during the election campaign to maintain. None of the cuts in education, health and welfare were justified on their intrinsic merits. The Coalition's failure to maintain its election promises were all explained by reference to the need to balance the budget. For the record, none of the programs cut were restored when budget surpluses replaced budget deficits due to the continuation of the upswing in the business cycle. The Howard Government's proudest boast is that it reduced the accumulated deficit of the previous government from $96 billion to $36 billion. And how? Mainly through the sale of 49 per cent of Telstra and of other public assets, and the surpluses associated with the upswing in the business cycle. So what? Any mug can sell assets to reduce debt. The value of the dividends forgone from the partial sale of Telstra exceeds the savings on the interest paid on government debt retired as a result of the sale. And the sale and leaseback of government offices has been likened to retiring debt costing 6per cent in order to reborrow at 16 per cent. For the most part, public debt is debt that we owe as taxpayers and that we own as superannuants. Without the $69 billion build-up in government debt as a result of the last five Labor budgets, the recession would have been deeper - and unemployment would have been greater as a result. In short, the return on the Labor build-up in government debt was far greater than the interest cost. Arguably, history will show the cost of the debt reduction over the past six years has been greater than the savings on debt interest. The real issue for Australia is the foreign debt. Remember Peter Costello's 1996 election debt truck showing how our foreign debt was ticking over minute by minute? The truck was abandoned, along with the Liberal election promises, immediately after the election. Since then Australia's foreign debt has risen from $280 billion to more than $500 billion and the Australian dollar has dropped from 80 US cents to 50 US cents. This is debt we owe to the rest of the world. Once Western Mining is sold, Australia will have no more significant foreign-currency-earning assets to flog off to the rest of the world. (Control of BHP is in the process of shifting to London via Billiton.) Not to put to fine a point on it, Australia has been sold out by a claque of financiers who have fattened on the commissions earned from financial deregulation and the acquisitions and mergers racket. Their interested preaching about the need for surpluses has played a leading role in freaking the Labor opposition out of a responsible alternative economic policy needed to repair the public infrastructure and improve the human capital necessary to create the new industries that can pay off our foreign debts. The anti-Keynesian, neoliberal right has shown in the US under presidents Reagan in the '80s and Bush now that when their perceived interests are under threat, the size of the budget deficit becomes an irrelevance. Reagan cut taxes and increased defence spending to defeat the Soviet evil empire without destroying the economy. Despite already pushing the US towards budget deficit due to tax cuts, Bush is proposing to spend $150 billion extra to boost US security and offset a terrorist-induced recession since September 11. The question already being asked is whether this will be enough stimulus. Defence spending is pure consumption. Spending an economically equivalent unfunded amount in Australia ($10 billion added to the budget bottom line) would repair most of the damage done to health and education by the Howard Government, and leave some for a more direct attack on industry restructuring, which has failed to materialise through competition policy. Kenneth Davidson is a staff columnist. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Strategy of tension
Bill Rosenberg wrote: None of the New Zealand alerts have proved to have any basis. Same here. Cops, firemen, a closed mailroom and a suddenly switched off air-conditioning system at work today, though. None of it quite tense enough to get anyone the afternoon off, though. Even if things stay at their present satisfactory setting (if you're in Australia, that is), this has gotta be costing all kinds of money and time - and, rather than public panic, the salient risk here is probably one of growing public complacency. Cheers, Rob.
Re: frontiers of free enterprise
G'day Jim, In the meantime, I can't read the newest stuff from pen-l. No problem, Jim. PEN-L has been a fortnight ahead of the mass media on the issue of the day, a decade ahead of the Nobel judges on economic critique, and, in seeking to give actual substance to the 200-year-old ideals that actually serve to legitimate the current order, still well ahead on politics, too. Arrogant of me, perhaps, yet somehow poignant ... Cheers, Rob.
Nobel Laureate Encourages Global Justice Movement
G'day all, Nobel Laureate Encourages Global Justice Movement Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2001 by the Inter Press Service Joseph Stiglitz, whose critiques of free market fundamentalism cost him a senior job at the World Bank in 1999 but won him the Nobel Prize for economics last week, has succinct advice for the global justice movement: Keep it up. He says he first became aware of the imperfections of markets while working as an economist in Kenya in the 1960s. Interesting article. Seems to me JS is pointing to power (and its exploitation in securing unfair contracts and keeping selected sectors protected whilst prising open those they want access to) and assymetrical information (that states of information are generally not equal, and that one party generally tries to keep it just so). I know someone said a few days back that JS underestimates the implications of this, but it does seem to bring the whole discipline to its knees, no? What looks like economics is in fact politics (relations of power), for a start - so, yes, Chas, Marx deserves a Nobel if JS does. And what's information? Its a process in which data, a context and a reader come together, and each of these three constituents theoretically comprise of billions of unique instances. If this be accepted, then it's rather unlikely two traders ever inhabit the same state of information. Ergo, trade is never fair, prices never signals of anything, and markets never efficient. So let's give de Suassure, Wittgenstein and Derrida some economics Nobels, too. To me JS can be taken to be suggesting something of the order Stephen Hawking would if he told us science needs to reject the notions of time and space. Have I gone off the deep end here? Cheers, Rob.
New economy bull
G'day Carl, ... Now there is a global economic recession in the offing. It has become evident that herd behaviour caused by the risk reduction procedures of big institutions can be disruptive and lead to irrational valuations. Dog bites man -- read all about it! It does seem the markets are particularly skittish at the moment. The sad business over the Black Sea and the (now officially denied) rumour of a second anthrax case both occasioned instant dumps. Right now, a bloke with a good tan could leave his briefcase at the office door for a minute, and cause Great Depression II. And Yahoo thinks Argentina will be in the news again over the next couple of days. It's just getting harder and sadder over there and it seems the further cuts those imaginative US economists are demanding just can't be pulled off without some major street action. Starvation is just 'bearish consumer sentiment' until the hungry march, then it gets upgraded to 'uncertainty' ... Oh, one regularity on Wall St is that, mass terrorism or not, the golden rule remains that an Al cut is worth a four-day rally. I really don't know why the man bothers ... Cheers, Rob.
'globalisation' of beaks and peepers
G'day Penpals, Just listening to mellifluous Auntie Beeb whilst going through my evening PEN-L revelations when on comes a spot about thousands of Japanese girls spending their first year's savings on new eyelids and pointy noses. Coulda been interesting, of course - I've long suspected a problem ever since Kimba The White Lion; indeed the whole Japanese Anime corpus, right up to Denis's favourite, Evangelion, is peopled by cuties, hunks and spunks with unbelievably large round eyes and pointy noses. Waddup wit' that? - but the Beeb being the uncritical creature Michael Keaney has been warning us it has become, well, it wasn't. Globalisation they called this self-loathing self-butchering. Look how it's allowing those poor maligned Eurasians back in from the cold, they trumpeted. Suddenly they're trendy! Well, yeah, that's good, natch. But not even a hint of irony as Mr Brit Reporter, Ms Japanese beautician, and Mr American expert called it stuff like successful marketing in the age of globalisation. To none of them apparently, had it occurred that hordes of Caucasian nymphs are not lining up to have folds taken out of their eyelids and points taken off their noses ... Sheesh! Rob.
Re: Informed opinion?
Ken Hanly wrote: The Taliban controls about 95% of the country. Doesn't this show that they have done rather well against the Alliance? Anyone who manages to control 95% of Afghanistan is doing well given its recent history. Pakistan will not be happy if the Northern Alliance are given weapons and support by the US. The Taliban may still be able to get supplies and support from Pakistan surreptitiously. Yeah, that bit about the Taliban's 'rudimentary weapons' doesn't ring true. All the file footage they're driving down our necks at the moment shows Taliban warriors astride bloody great tanks, (admittedly old) MiG fighters, armed personel carriers, and nestled confidently behind surface-to-air batteries and heavy multiple-MG-arrays. The Northern Alliance makes its way to my screen astride donkeys and old Tojos, sporting stuff that looks eerily like the HM 38 mortars and SG 43 machine guns with which Boris gave Fritz a bloody nose a little while back. Kursk I think it was. That's not to say the Taliban weaponry is particularly effective against A10s, mind, but it goes a fair way to explaining the 95% thing. And the Pashtun connection across the Pakistan border has gotta be worth heaps, I'd've thought. The Pakistani army can hardly guard every inch of the Jalalabad/Peshawar fronteir while they're rattling their sabres over Srinagar. Talking of which, the Kashmir business must be a real pain in the fleshy folds of Unca Sam's backside right now; with India giving notice that it sees the Kashmiri independence fighters as part of the universal enemy in the war against terrorism, and Pakistan needing military assistance if it is to make itself a frontline in an unpopular campaign, it is not surprising the allies have upped camp and gone to Uzbekistan, a country where the government really knows how to keep 'social fragility' at bay in the great struggle for democracy. Cheers, Rob.
Did class distinctions aid the bombing
Writes Ann: Even with the open secrets of capitalism I still would like to know about the intentionally of our catastrophic intelligence ( knowledge ) failure Reports disgruntled erstwhile *Times* editor Harold Evans in the *Guardian*: September 11: how the media ignored the warnings By HAROLD EVANS Wednesday 3 October 2001 We were warned. We were warned by some of the best minds in the United States that, without a new emphasis on homeland security, Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers. The warning was spelled out in September 1999 and, when nothing was done, it was emphasised in January this year, this time with a detailed agenda for action to make America safer from terrorism. It is a fair bet that millions of Americans never heard any of this. What happened? On January 31, seven months before the World Trade Centre massacre, former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman looked with satisfaction on the television cameras and journalists assembled in the Senate. They were there as chairmen of the bipartisan United States commission on national security, set up three years before to advise how America could be made safer. The final document of 150 pages, Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change, was signed by their 12 fellow commissioners. They represent the kind of blue-ribbon brains trust Washington is so good at putting together and in the light of what happened to their labors over three years, in which they visited 25 countries and consulted more than 100 academic experts, the weight of their experience against terrorism is maddeningly pertinent. James Schlesinger is a former CIA director and defence and energy secretary, Donald Rice is a former secretary of the air force and president of the Rand Corporation, Norman Augustine is chairman of Lockheed Martin and a former under-secretary of the army. General John Galvin, former commander-in-chief in Europe, and Admiral Harry D.Train II, his counterpart in the Atlantic, provided a military perspective. Two former ambassadors, Andrew Young to the United Nations and Anne Armstrong to Britain, had a good take on resentments of America. Armstrong is a former chairwoman of the president's foreign intelligence advisory board; its executive secretary, Lionel Olmer, was also a commissioner. Two commissioners, Newt Gingrich and Lee Hamilton, know their way around Washington; the commission, intriguingly, was created in a rare moment of agreement between Gingrich and Bill Clinton in 1998. Hart and Rudman had as their executive director the intellectual one-time fighter pilot Charles Boyd, the only graduate of the Hanoi Hilton to reach four-star general. They and their staffs went to great lengths to acquaint the press in advance with the gravity of their findings. Hell, it was the first comprehensive rethinking of national security since Harry Truman in 1947, said Rudman. The conclusions were startling. States, terrorists and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers. We got a terrific sense of the resentment building against the US as a bully, which alarmed us, Hart said. The report was a devastating indictment of the fragmented and inadequate structures and strategies to prevent and then respond to the attacks the commissioners predicted on US cities. Hart specifically mentioned the lack of readiness to respond to a weapon of mass destruction in a highrise building. But the report was not simply alarmist. It was unusually constructive, shedding grandiose language for a step-by-step blueprint of what urgently needed to be done to create a national homeland security agency, revive the frontline public services and pull together the 45 different official bodies that deal with national security. A number of commissioners visited the editorial boards of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. It was all to little avail. Network television news ignored the report; so did the serious evening news on public television. Only CNN did it justice. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal did not carry a line either of the report or the press conference. Boyd said he watched in disbelief as The New York Times reporter left before the presentation was over. The rest of the national news coverage was fair. But what most astonished and then outraged the commissioners was that none of the major newspapers, except the Los Angeles Times briefly, offered any kind of platform or any kind of critical analysis or opinion. None of the network talk shows took it up; only the cable channels CNN and CNBC, briefly. Rather than sensational headlines, the report required elite opinion to engage in a sustained dialogue to probe, improve, explain and then press for action. The commissioners were particularly bewildered
Evidence against bin Laden
Just building on this ObL stuff while I may; isn't there something of a fetish
happening here? I mean, I go a good way with Andy's position on the bloke,
but I keep harking back to EP Thompson's explanation for why the magistrates
couldn't nip the Luddite movement in the bud. Experienced investigators and
military chaps that they were, they kept looking for the head of the snake
('General Ludd'). But there was no head. Just a culture of sullen, socially
sanctioned silence, not to mention a widespread sympathy for the redressers.
What looked organised, was actually a culture - perhaps a subculture - at work
- autonomous bodies of men popped out at night and did their thing and
disappeared back into their milieu by morning.
Which was great for putting pressure on insensitive innovators and nasty
boojies, but no good at carrying through a fancy many had at the time for
marching on London. Anyway, eventually, even hard-headed classical political
economists/businessmen like Francis Place were encouraging the PM to give in
on some big counts. The cost, in Pounds Sterling, of not doing so was just
too great.
Having declared a war so quickly, Bush needed a demon-object to give that war
a focus - I don't say it wasn't ObL's outfit, mind, I just say he's not the
be-all and end-all - money, sympathetic milieus, cultures of resentment,
murderous selflessness and ingenuity are all over the place - interdependent
when it suits, but secretively autonomous at bottom, if I don't miss my guess.
The war to end all wars didn't, and the war to end all terrorism can't.
Without doing for us all, anyway.
Cheers,
Rob.
Re: Event Studies
Rarely do so many dramatic forces bunch together like this. Do any of you have any thoughts about what to expect in the economy? Well, we can't discount the possibility of a big Keynesian splurge under the cover of war and rumours of war, but it does all depend on stuff like how long it is before Washington acts, and how firm the Capitol bipartisanship is at the time (and if the odd thermonuclear plant doesn't go up, and if a few trillion Yen aren't recalled from Wall St, and if ...). Didn't ol' Storm Thurmond (you know who I mean, anyway) take a nasty turn in the House yesterday? Is he okay, or is the House differently balanced today - more or less likely to man the pump? I certainly think rate cuts ain't up to much. Capital just ain't seeing investment opportunities right now, and it doesn't matter how cheap money is while that persists. Failing a return of consumer confidence, a lower buck seems the main hope for US producers and investors. Am I being too simplistic in thinking that printing a few hundred billion of those right now would not only prime some pumps, but also make production in the US profitable again? Cheers, Rob.
Guardian state - identity cards
G'day Chris, Yesterday a government minister, Jeff Rooker, indicated at a fringe meeting that the government had no interest in introducting identity cards. I in fact generally agree with the arguments of Peter Preston. In a radically democratic and humane society our identities should not need to be secret. We should all have as much privacy as in a village. The class that would really be hit by that is the capitalist class, who need their private transactions in the means of production kept secret. I would go further and say that an identity card should be linked with a citizens income, in the form of a positive tax credit. But the Labour Government is very pragmatic and there is probably much more short term hassle and little in the way of short term gains by pursuing this. I take your point, Chris, but we should remember that we do not in fact live in villages, and that computer records and smartcard IDs are not the mode of identification that held at that time. People you don't know, over whom you have no reciprocal knowledge-power, no sanction, and no trust have at least the first three of those over and about you. Mutual knowledge was spread throughout a population you knew and with whom you had to exercise mutual respect - to fail in this was to risk social sanctions. That'll never be the case again. It was also very hard (Martin Guerre aside) to pretend to be someone else - nowadays, anything that depends on computers and cards can be wrong or forged, and difficult to find, check, disprove and correct. You and your real past are up against it trying to question a representation of you and its recorded past. Identification is centralised nowadays, which was much less the case in days of yore, when everybody knew everybody bar the odd (inherently suspect) traveller. So the technology and the interests to distort the power of identification are here, and the radical democracy and humane mutual recognition are not. As an administrator, I might well have you identified across all kinds of categories that could make your life strangely difficult. You may not think it right that I have you down as a Marxist, an anti-globalisation dissentor, an opponent of (officially defined) democracy and freedom, and a potential terrorist (I'm not an administrator and I don't think the last three of these things, natch), but, nevertheless, the surveillance mechanism of which I'd be part would electronically and automatically follow your transactions, reproduce your e-mails, deny you government employment, send warnings to potential employers and communication/transport carriers (who may choose to deny access to avoid risk), add your human contacts to the surveillance file, and have the heavies at your door should anything untoward happen in your neighbourhood. The only word of comfort I have is that an ID card doesn't really add all that much functionality to what the powers-that-be already have at their disposal, and that if this is what the government want to waste their resources on, well, they're probably already doing it ... Cheers, Rob.
War on terrorism
G'day all, Well, it's clearly been decided that the decisive rump of us don't require itemised evidence before our polities enter a war. It also seems that the UN has been well and truly been put in its place; America has a convenient complex of bilateral arrangements in place now, and the ever problematic Security Council is unlikely to be invited back to relevance any time soon. Everything has gone, and is going, swimmingly for bold Unca Sam (and his smirking head prefect at Westminster) - the opportunity has been grasped, and the hegemon dominates more directly than ever before. Of course, nothing's for free; and this campaign had better go well, or be presented as going well, as the authors and henchmen in this adventure are there to be identified and held accountable (across a range of electorates, election schedules, economic vulnerabilities and cultural commitments to Anglo-Saxons). No UN to kick around any more, and no UN to ameliorate any tensions that might pop up as this 'war' against a methodology starts producing real body parts, expenses, uncertainty in real places - and then there are those inevitable little questions about 'exit strategies' still to come ... I'm staying up to listen to The Prefect, as I want to know what a declaration of war in the absence of an actual enemy sounds like. Then another fifty points off the Fed rate a couple of hours after that, in the hope that just because negative real rates didn't do a thing in Japan for years doesn't mean it won't spontaneously create profitability and investment opportunities in America ... and then what? Oh, Blair's on - a moving human interest angle followed by a familiar war-to-end-all-wars refrain ... heh, heh, he's saying 'the fundamentals of the British, US and European economies are strong', now. Is there no end to the man's cheek? And now proof, er, evidence, er, suspicions, er, apparently we're to be in no doubt it's ObL. Well, that's alright, then. Oh, and as we know the Taliban are bad, we 'should seek to destroy' them - no proof of culpability, then - still they 'didn't respond to the ultimatum' and they're 'every bit as guilty' Still, they didn't respond to the ultimatum. Well, that's alright, then. 'We will do all we humanly can to avoid civilian casualties, *but* ... there is no point of understanding ... no compromise is possible'. And, inevitably, hitching one's wagon to an amorphous focusless war, with an impossible stated objective (to end terrorism), is framed as the only alternative to complete inaction. Not quite a declaration of war, but as penultimate as it gets, I thought, and all Afghanistan is in the crosshairs. As there are rumours that ObL is now hiding in Kabul, that 'proportionate and targeted' bit might be a tad problematic. Don't know what I'd do, either, mind, but, all the same, I'd like to know what I was doing before I did it ... Cheers, Rob.
Capitalism's ethic is grow or die.
G'day Penpals, From Stratfor, via LBO's Bryan Atinsky, who asks apposite questions, I think. I agree with the substance of Bryan's reservations, but feel that doesn't so much auger well for Japan as badly for the US (and the rest of us). Short of a fully fledged war economy, hundreds of billions in government contracts (and perhaps sweeping bank nationalisations in Japan), it's still hard to see the source of the 1/02 bounce the scribes are now talking about, isn't it? Oh, and as everyone is now talking about 'recovery', may I take that as official notice that the US is in recession? Cheers, Rob. Japanese Economy in Terminal Decline October 28, 2001 Summary The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did more than just gut American confidence. They also heralded the downfall of the world's second-largest economy, Japan. About the only option left for the Japanese prime minister is to restart massive deficit spending. Analysis New statistics from Japan show that consumer prices dropped 1.2 percent in August, the 24th-straight month of decline. The data indicate Japan's deflationary spiral is intensifying. But Tokyo's problems are far more severe than economically crippling deflation. About the only option left for Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to stop the economic degradation is to restart massive deficit spending, even though it may appear self-destructive, as soon as possible. Japan's economy has been extremely weak for more than a decade. But due to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the country is now locked into an irreversible and terminal decline. With its own people unwilling to spend, Japan is dependent on foreign consumers, particularly Americans, to sustain itself. To keep its exports flowing, Japan also repeatedly intervenes in the currency markets to keep the yen artificially low. Such actions have made Japan hostage to international events. It has already completely tapped out monetary and stimulus policies as viable options. Now its federal debt, a nearly $6 trillion behemoth that makes America's 1980s debt seem small in comparison, is so high that industry-boosting tax cuts are no longer possible either. Adding to the misery, Japan's Nikkei-225 stock exchange is at an 18-year low, having shed 30 percent of its value in the past nine months. The country's banks are helpless as well. Their capital adequacy ratio is estimated at a mere 1.4 percent, the Economist reports, following numerous bailout plans that required no one to take responsibility or truly write off losses. International banking rules require an 8 percent adequacy ratio. The downturn still won't be fatal as long as foreign demand for Japanese goods remains high. Throughout the 1990s the United States, Japan's largest export market, was in the midst of its longest economic boom ever. The 2001 slowdown threatened Japan's precarious perch, but with the United States poised for recovery in the third quarter, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Sept. 11 changed all that. --- Is this prognosis realistic? Dean Baker constantly writes in his EPR that Japan actually has many better economic indicators than any of the countries which followed the U.S. model of economic developement (actually, the US from what I heard didn't really follow the US Model...the US model is what the US forces down the throat of every country except itself): Baker:Japan's per capita GDP growth averaged 4.2 percent annually over the four decades from 1960 to 2000. Baker: In the case of Japan, per capita income grew at annual rate of 4.9 percent from 1960 to 1994 Baker: It is also worth noting, that while the U.S. is currently borrowing more than $1,500 per person per year from abroad, Japan is lending abroad at almost the same rate. (Bryan: I was wondering, how does this relate to the Stratfor statement that [Japan's] federal debt, a nearly $6 trillion behemoth that makes America's 1980s debt seem small in comparison... These statements seem to be making opposite assumptions, but maybe I am missing something. Also, isn't debt as a portion of GDP more important than merely the flat number? Plus, there is always the question of what they are doing with the government spending...in Japan's case, from what I know, they need the government spending to stimulate the economy and raise consumer spending levelsgetting money out of savings and into the economy?) Baker: The U.S. currently has a trade deficit that is close to $400 billion, or 4 percent of GDP. By contrast, Japan is
War on terrorism
G'day Carl, Tony the Terrible is a sight to behold. I think of the UK as the Cheshire Cat of imperialism; the martial might has disappeared, and all that remains is the sanctimonious Attitude hanging disembodied in midair. That nails it! 'Course, I suspect it's an Anglo-Saxon thing. Oz never had that power, but we too are making a singularly good fist of sanctimonious Attitude: as we sombrely declare the Taliban uncivilised brutes, we sombrely declare those who flee them uncivilised brutes and farm them off to Nauru. I predict a time, and not too far away, when this war against terrorism will be enthusiastically supported only by the Anglo-Saxon countries. Such is the fate of History's Chosen Ones, eh? Sigh, Rob.
Evidence against bin Laden
G'day Andy and Jim, BTW, as far as I know, there are NO bin Laden supporters or sympathizers on pen-l. To whom are you referring? The only way that people on pen-l can be seen as supporting bin Laden is if one makes the Osama bin Laden-type assumption that the world is black and white, so if you're not a gung-ho supporter of the war against bin Ladin, you're support him. That's nonsense. Exactement! And, whilst I should register my agreement with Michael and others that the degree of ObL's involvement in 911 is a matter for useless conjecture, I do feel we should register any alterations in Washington's publicity on the business. We were promised the promulgation of specific and decisive evidence, and what we're getting is the assertion that whatever secrets apparently convince Whitehall and the Pentagon should be good enough for us. I understand that there might be evidence that can't be promulgated (exposing sources etc), but the fact is, we're not getting what populations on the verge of war should expect and were told to expect. I append below a note of suspicion by Robert Fisk, not because I've any time for murderous and oppressive zealots (as well Andy knows), but because there are serious question marks hanging in the air as we're on the very verge of committing ourselves to all the dangers and costs that attend the most awful thing people and polities can do: wage war. Ain't it fair enough to demand that such reservations be addressed first? What on earth does the democracy we're (or, rather, the boys and girls of our less wealthy strata) apparently about to fight for mean if we're not to be accorded information and voice, the twin pillars of citizenship on any account of the notion? What Muslim would write: 'The time of fun and waste is gone'? Robert Fisk 29 September 2001 Fearful, chilling, grot-esque - but also very, very odd. If the handwritten, five-page document which the FBI says it found in the baggage of Mohamed Atta, the suicide bomber from Egypt, is genuine, then the men who murdered more than 7,000 innocent people believed in a very exclusive version of Islam - or were surprisingly unfamiliar with their religion. The time of Fun and waste is gone,'' Atta, or one of his associates, is reported to have written in the note. Be optimistic ... Check all your items - your bag, your clothes, your knives, your will, your IDs, your passport ... In the morning, try to pray the morning prayer with an open heart.'' Part theological, part mission statement, the document - extracts from which were published in The Washington Post yesterday - raises more questions than it answers. Under the heading of Last Night'' - presumably the night of 10 September - the writer tells his fellow hijackers to remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 per cent ... Obey God, his messenger, and don't fight among yourself [sic] where [sic] you become weak ... Everybody hates death, fears death ... The document begins with the words: In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate ... In the name of God, of myself, and of my family.'' The problem is that no Muslim - however ill-taught - would include his family in such a prayer. Indeed, he would mention the Prophet Mohamed immediately after he mentioned God in the first line. Lebanese and Palestinian suicide bombers have never been known to refer to the time of fun and waste'' - because a true Muslim would not have wasted'' his time and would regard pleasure as a reward of the after-life. And what Muslim would urge his fellow believers to recite the morning prayer - and then go on to quote from it? A devout Muslim would not need to be reminded of his duty to say the first of the five prayers of the day - and would certainly not need to be reminded of the text. It is as if a Christian, urging his followers to recite the Lord's Prayer, felt it necessary to read the whole prayer in case they didn't remember it. American scholars have already raised questions about the use of 100 percent'' - hardly a theological term to be found in a religious exhortation - and the use of the word optimistic'' with reference to the Prophet is a decidedly modern word. However, the full and original Arabic text has not been released by the FBI. The translation, as it stands, suggests an almost Christian view of what the hijackers might have felt - asking to be forgiven their sins, explaining that fear of death is natural, that a believer is always plagued with problems''. A Muslim is encouraged not to fear death - it is, after all, the moment when he or she believes they will start a new life - and a believer in the Islamic world is one who is certain of his path, not plagued with problems''. There are no references to any of Osama bin Laden's demands - for an American withdrawal from the Gulf, an end to Israeli occupation, the overthrow of pro-American Arab regimes - nor any
Re: Capitalism's ethic is grow or die.
G'day Jim, the grow or die tendency of capitalism isn't always realized. GoD leads to over-accumulation either relative to natural constraints (à la David Ricardo or Mark Jones) or by creating its own barriers (à la Marx). Accumulation can be blocked by excessive debt accumulation, unused industrial capacity, and pessimistic expectations (on the demand side) or by bottlenecks in labor-power or natural-resource or (in the short run) fixed capital-goods markets or environmental disasters (on the supply side). Useful summary, mate. This harbinger of the Great Rethink To Come (which manages to be sobering without recourse to depletion, chronically scarce investment opportunities, and bad debt crunches) just in from Morgan Stanley's Steve Roach (excerpted from http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20011001-mon.html#anchor0 ): Increasingly risk-averse investors may be more satisfied to realize moderate, but safe, returns in a less secure world. In economic terms, this could well reduce the preference for leverage and tilt the balance away from the excesses of spending and back toward a long needed rebuilding of saving. The demographics of an aging population have long been pointing in that direction, and The Shock could represent a real wake-up call for saving-short Americans. A similar jolt might effect the risk-taking mindset of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Defining moments are all that -- and more. There are many that want to frame the debate in black and white, asking if The Shock represents either a cyclical or a secular turning point. I worry this either-or framework oversimplifies the story. To me, its both -- a cyclical event with profound secular implications. Business cycles are always a temporary deviation from norms. In that respect, this one is no different. But there is an important twist to what now lies beyond the cycle. When the vigor of any recovery subsides, I believe that America will converge on a new set of norms that is very different from those, which we had become accustomed to. And I suspect those norms will constrain the US economy to a much slower growth potential than we had previously thought. Its not easy to quantify the new norms that lie ahead. It never is. But I think there are compelling reasons to believe they will be well below those of the roaring nineties. Over the mid-1996 to mid-2000 interval, trend GDP growth in the US economy was 4%. Looking ahead over the next five years, my guesstimate would be for a downshift back into the 2.5% range -- only a slight improvement from the pre-bubble norms of the early 1990s. Like the NASDAQ bubble, I suspect that history will judge the performance of the US economy in the latter half of the 1990s to have been an aberration, not the dawn of a New Era. The Shock is a wake-up call for those still clinging to now-antiquated perceptions of Americas growth dynamic. Call it the end of the New Economy. That suggests a significant re-rating of asset prices still lies ahead.
Capitalism's ethic is grow or die.
G'day all, Well, It doesn't look like too much growing is in the offing (see short report on Japanese consumption projections and consumer sentiment) until some capital eats itself towards new profitability and investment possibilities (look for major indigestion in both the domestic banking sector and the US equity markets, per Kenichi Ohmae's thesis - I reckon they can feed all the Fed electrodes they like into the Wall St cat now; it won't be bouncing after today). And, I suppose, if people are holding onto what money they have, we won't see too much clean'n'green buying transforming the market, either at the capital equipment or consumption levels. Reliance on 'market forces' to get us out of despoliation/depletion crises is exposed right here, I think. If people aren't buying new cars, they're not expressing a preference for new technology, and, as the economy gets quieter, old cars and oil consumption become more entrenched. If we do face a depletion crisis, economists will argue that scarcity will raise prices and encourage alternatives, but raised energy prices cannot help but slow down consumption, production and diffusion, effectively retarding market responses to the crisis. As for the passanger pigeon example, Michael, didn't you argue that one factor keeping the price down through rising scarcity was the PP's similarity to chicken (wish I had the book here at home - sorry if I'm getting you wrong). Oil ain't similar to anything right now ... we depend on it more than ever, but its importance is disguised by its relative decline as proportion of GDP. Or not? Cheers, Rob. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/nat/newsnat-1oct2001-57.htm Japanese economy plunges to two-year low Japanese business confidence has plunged to its lowest level in more than two years. The data is the first major international release to gauge the economic effects of the attacks in the United States. The closely watched Tankan survey shows business confidence in the world's second largest economy is at its lowest level since June 1999, a result worse than the market expected. The survey was conducted after the terrorist attacks in New York and reflects the growing belief that a global recession is now inevitable. The Japanese stock market fell by more than 1 per cent after the data was released. I wasn't making up grow or die. Really! I got it from a certain professor of economics of mine, by the name of Blair Sandler, about 10 years ago. Blair was a great teacher. That's an interesting point about whether capitalism can be sustained with green technologies, and whether non-capitalist pressure is needed to get capitalism to adopt such technologies. I agree with your assessment. I guess I'd like to extend grow or die to the area of territoriality. I'm writing a paper that addresses this, actually. So I prefer to be oblique. Andrew Hagen [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sat, 29 Sep 2001 09:58:19 -0700, Jim Devine wrote: At 11:58 AM 09/29/2001 -0500, you wrote: Capitalism's ethic is grow or die. Blair Sandler (a pen-l alumnus) had an article about this awhile back in RETHINKING MARXISM. He cleverly called it GOD. I think it's definitely true from the individual capitalist's perspective, that given competition, the enterprise must grow or die. That's one reason why the system as a whole grows. The question of whether or not the system as a whole must grow or die a bit more iffy. Blair points out that capitalism doesn't _have to_ destroy the environment, since new green technologies can be developed. My reading of this is that capitalists will resist the development of green capitalism tooth and nail, so that it will happen only if there's massive pressure from non-capitalist forces. So if green capitalism arises, it will be like the late system of social democracy, a compromise with the opposition. Then, as with social democracy, individual capitalists will seek profit opportunities that undermine that compromise. So maybe the system doesn't _need_ to expand (at the expense of nature, etc.) but in general it is driven to do so. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Change of plans?
The weekly news magazine said President George W. Bush's administration concluded that Afghanistan, where prime terror suspect Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding out, has fewer good targets than Kosovo. What was so good about the stuff they obliterated in Yugoslavia, ferchrissakes? Commuters on bridges? Commuter trains? Make-up artists in television studios? Autoworkers in car plants? Chinese embassies? Kosovar refugees? Strategic bombing is always and everywhere mass murder. They knew that in 1943, and they've known it ever since. I'm not one to entertain optimistic thoughts, nor one to ignore what all this might mean for stuff like civil liberties and popular xenophobia, but I am allowing for the possibility that Bush is leaving the military dimension of this campaign to the uniforms, and that professional soldiers might be more aware of the human dimension of said military dimension than politicians, who hitherto seem to have found it all too easy to open fire from hidden positions in the Oval Office. There's talk that many of the lads who slaughtered those conscripts on the Basra Road copped nasty hits to the morale. I can only hope the same goes for some of the pilots who butchered civilians from on high in Yugoslavia. It seems sadly true that every generation needs an actual taste of war to remind themselves of the almost unconfinable horror of it - maybe the Oval Office warmongers who've been sending others to do their scattergun killing for 'em over the last twenty years have accidentally produced a slightly more circumspect military. Here's hoping, anyway ... Cheers, Rob.
query
A couple of months ago, I edited my general news bookmarks down by 90% (it's easier to do than you think, and simply required in this day and age, I suggest), and found myself, for what it's worth, left with the following sites. Must haves: http://www.theage.com.au/ I agree with Eugene; arguably Australia's most thoughtful mainstream daily, Melbourne's broadsheet, *The Age*. Always look out for Ken Davidson and Bob Ellis - Australia's most readable dissentors. http://www.abc.net.au/news/default.htm Australia's public service broadcaster's newspage, replete with heaps of beaut links ranging across the ABC's many news'n'information services. Extremely quick and reliable real-time coverage of developing news - maybe the best coolly impartial as-it-happens teller-like-it-is I know of. http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/ Al Ahram, a dissenting highbrow Cairo-based weekly, is an absolute beaut. Excellent on world stuff, unbeatable on the Middle East. A regular outlet for the likes of Said and Chomsky. http://www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/ As good as it gets, but some stories are denied the free rider. http://www.greenleft.org.au/ Probably the best nakedly Marxist newspaper I know of. On the Trot side of the old arguments, but refreshingly tends to ignore that old infighting stuff. Preaches a little at times, but is usually on the mark, for mine. http://www.independent.co.uk Ya get Fisk and Pilger, and you get a social democratic line less tainted by third-wayist contortions than I think the Guardian tends to serve up. http://pilger.carlton.com/ The Great John Pilger hisself. For Oz-politics buffs, business-buffs and fans of the harshly irreverent: http://www.crikey.com.au/index.html Smartmouth, ear-close-to-the-ground, irreverent, slightly right-of-centre liberal, news'n'analysis of mainly Oz goings-on, but quick to air on big international stories.. For fun: http://www.chaser.com.au/ Mecilessly takes the piss out of absolutely everything - does occasionally assume a pretty Australian grasp of Australian issues. Pithily funny, if not always strictly edifying.
Not good
G'day Doug, For the record, Comrade Coyle, here's what I had to say in LBO #97, written in May. The only way I've changed my tune since then is towards greater gloom. Good article, Doug. 'No ordinary business cycle' nails it, for mine. Core synchronisation, and the triumph of 'shareholder value' over institutional checks and balances, add a new dimension, I reckon. People who call for global recession every other week don't deserve kudos when they turn out to be right. 'Calling for it' is a tendentious way to put it, no? Arguing great lumps of the world were already in it - that and asking how the US, upon which the fortunes of the rest depended so much, was going to avoid same. That's what I saw on PEN-L, anyway. And now I'll really go quiet. Hope you don't, natch. Cheers, Rob.
Not good
Who is we in your response, Rob. Presumptuous of me, I'll admit. I was talking about the ranked economists enliste. I shouldn't be surprised if some of 'em find people suddenly taking notice of 'em, and was idly speculating at the sort of things a newly-fledged left-Keynesian or socdem/socialist pundit might take to the microphone in their capacity as media economic-expert. But if we refers to those whose only potential power is through the influence mass movements can exert, all this rigamarole is rather irrelevant. There are a lot of professional economists on board - such people would have particular talents and roles in the Great Rethink that may come, don't you think? You have to start by first explaining how the mass movement is, given present conditions, to come into existence. I think they're about already, Carrol - and, like me, a tad disappointed with the superficial nay-saying soundgrabs with which the mainstream media were able to represent 'em at the big demos at and after Seattle. Then you have to give an analysis of just how a mass movement's power is exerted. Then you have to fit your advice to that sort of context. My answer (I don't know how many on this list agree with it) is that mass movements, with rare exceptions, must organize around simple negatives. They must say no, and create enough disturbance in the body politic so those who do make policy will have to fit it to that no. That's part of the story, I think. So's the debate that ensues in opinion-leader-land, though. Gotta have a panel-compatible voice in the trenches and fortifications of the bourgeoisie, I think. If this rally has the two-day half-life we've become used to of late - the professional economists among us could be suddenly qualified media-experts by next week. I'm gonna keep watching Lehrer just to find out what some of you dudes look like, anyway. No small price to pay to satisfy idle curiosity, I know ... Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not good
Mark Jones wrote: You still didn't let us know what *you* think we should do about falling markets. Maybe the answer will be in your forthcoming book about the New Economy. Well, I'll take a pop. Let's take another look at 'infrastructure', 'natural monopoly' and 'public good' and 'externalities' - and speak loudly for the public ownership and control of those sectors which meet the definitions - at global (eg. internet, software standards, currency transaction regulation and taxation, intellectual property), national (eg. airline, telecommunications backbone, electricity, interstate transport, libraries, education, incarceration, health insurance, national parks, centralised wage and conditions body, public service broadcasting, public housing), or council level (eg. cable channel allocation, community broadcasting, local thoroughfares, rent controls). Environmental despoliation/depletion oversight and responsibility is sadly especially difficult to allocate - it's tied in with many of the above and a while global body would be ideal (given global implications of local decisions), but then we run the risk of a Summers/Pritchett scenario, I suppose. That little lot would go some way to recognising some Schumpetarian thoughts on monopoly, Keynesian thoughts on cycles, development and amelioration, Polanyian thoughts on the relationship betwen polity and market, Arrowian reservations about information economics, Georgian/dependencista thoughts on development traps, and maybe even a couple of Marxian thoughts on competition and crisis. Whimpering incrementalism in the face of cacophonous urgency, I admit. But a comfy fit between Keynesian nostalgia and logical projection of principles - and fetchingly bold in its bald innocent simplicity, I think. Waddya reckon? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Where are we going????
Michael Perelman wrote: I worry that the worst impacts will be those that were unforseen. That got me to thinking about the fall of the USSR, which I think has made the world worse in more ways that I can imagine. I suspect that the wars in Yugoslavia would not have happened. Nor would the virulent neo-liberalism of today. With a strong USSR, I suspect that the Palestinians would also be in better shape. Has any good come from the fall of the USSR? Good points, but I do remember those first couple of days after the '87 hiccough. Just for a minute, a couple of opedders were expecting the worst, and really taking a good hard look at the basics of our social being (dunno if this was the case Stateside, mind). That quieted down a bit as Wall St recovered, and stopped altogether in the wave of orgasmic self-vindication that followed the downing of the Wall, of course. Still, as you imply, Michael, you never know what comes out of these things ... and it doesn't say anywhere some good can't attend the bad, after all. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Bombing Afghanistan...
G'day all, Don't take me for a Taliban apologist, but where does Rumsfeld get off calling the Taliban's claim they don't know wher ObL is, 'simply not credible'? He probably doesn't know where ObL is himself (indeed, if ObL actually was the culprit, no-one probably knew as at 9/11), and we'd have to believe no-one in Washington knew where 19 other blokes were on 9/10. I think Uncle Sam is overdoing the preemptive justification - which makes one fear that the initial foray is going to be a large-scale affair indeed. I know it must be hard to go in with a stiletto when you're the only bloke on the field with a bloody great spear, but I can't help feel even western support for this adventure is a mile wide and an inch thick, and not too heavily to be relied upon by the 'infinite justice' types ... Cheers, Rob.
Re: The oil nightmare and the terrorist trail
Chris Burford wrote: Another indication that global capitalism has to be dovish, and tie the hands of any politician looking for a quick political solution: Another analyst points out that what would also be bad for the markets is if it was discovered that an oil-producing state was behind the attacks. I think we may be sure that the US will not find any link between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden, an erstwhile Saudi, nor the suspected hijackers, several of whom had Saudi names. Sticking to one's principles is one thing, and, yes, sometimes thousands of innocents have to die, but injecting heightened uncertainty into oil futures is beyond the pale. The price of liberty is vigilance in theory and foreign butt in practice; nowhere does it say anything about crashing core stockmarkets. It is pointless to, I think, to conjecture as to which residual or designated nascent enemies are athwart Mad Uncle Sam's cross-hairs, but I think we can rule out anything that threatens the House of Saud too directly. ObL could do worse than sneak back in, I reckon. Cheers, Rob.
Britain/US split?
Writes Michael: ... And while the focus of this mainly British-sponsored effort is primarily European, of course other similarly-minded folks (as Dubya would say) are welcome to join ... Mark Latham: ex-Whitlam staffer, research contributor to *The Whitlam Government 1972-1975*, self-styled Labor Party back-bench enfant terrible, political hard-arse, traveller of the third way, and author of a 1998 tome called *Civilising Global Capital: New thinking for Australian Labor*, a third-wayist thought-piece on how we live in an exceptional age that renders irrelevant the leftist theory of bygone fordism, and holds that if we encourage difference-respecting 'public mutuality' (but sans the dead hand of big government - it's called 'social devolution'), we can civilise global capital. Some reasonable moments of analysis in it, mind, but, of course, all those hairy-fairy buzzwords can mean anything you want 'em to mean, and my response to the book was that anything that can mean anything means nothing. The politics of floating signifiers, for mine. Cheers, Rob.
Soothing platitudes from Chairman Has-been decoded
I see things are so bad on the Dow just now that Yahoo is referring to telcos as 'a defensive oriented group' ...
Re: Soothing platitudes from Chairman Has-been decoded
I hear they're evacuating Chicago's Sears Tower now ... that true? Rob.
