Canadian Exports to the US
Dear Pen-Lers: One of the unacknowledeg benefits of NAFTA? Note: "...revenues estimated at anywhere from $400 million to more than $3 billion." Canada Exports Potent Pot to US By David Crary Associated Press Writer Friday, April 17, 1998; 1:44 p.m. EDT TORONTO (AP) -- In the past, Canada's high-profile exports to the United States featured hockey players and comedians. Now there's a cash crop on the list -- homegrown marijuana that ranks among the priciest and most potent in the world. The pot is so coveted on the West Coast that it sometimes trades pound-for-pound for cocaine, officials say. Stepped-up searches for it have led to vexing backups at some border crossings. Although the United States' border with Mexico remains its No. 1 smuggling zone, U.S. customs agents are devoting increasing attention to the northern border, particularly in Washington state. In the past year, the Customs Service has nearly doubled its enforcement effort there because of a surge of marijuana smuggled in from British Columbia. ``The price of B.C. marijuana has become very high,'' said Gene Kervan, customs director at the busy border crossing at Blaine, Wash. ``It's the drug of choice in many locations.'' Much of the prized pot is grown indoors by the increasingly popular hydroponic method -- using bright artificial light and nutrient-laced water, but no soil. Kervan said the product can earn as much as $6,000 a pound in parts of California -- 10 times the typical price for marijuana from Mexico. Kervan's officers have been searching more and more vehicles coming south from the Vancouver area, and uncovering more and more pot -- a change that has sometimes resulted in two-hour backups for motorists trying to enter the United States. The border crackdown in Washington has pushed some traffickers east into Idaho. Customs officers there conducted a two-week operation in March that resulted in eight drug arrests -- about the number usually made in a year. Farther east, police say hydroponic marijuana-growing is on the upswing in Ontario, some of it apparently destined for export to upstate New York. ``You don't hear of boatloads or airplane shipments of weed coming into the country,'' said Bryan Baxter, a drug-squad detective in Hamilton, Ontario. ``Pot is being exported from Canada -- particularly B.C. and Ontario -- instead of being imported.'' Marijuana is believed to rank now as British Columbia's most lucrative agricultural product -- with illegal revenues estimated at anywhere from $400 million to more than $3 billion. Some of the growing operations are elaborate. Officers on Vancouver Island last week seized 2,400 marijuana plants from an indoor pot farm and arrested a couple who were covertly diverting electricity to power 62 1,000-watt lights. Several thousand British Columbians are believed to be growing pot commercially. Smugglers range from amateurs to professional, well-equipped couriers recruited by Asian-linked crime gangs in Vancouver. Kervan said there is no typical pot smuggler. ``That's the toughest part for us,'' he said, recounting one border bust involving a husband and wife carrying 17 pounds of marijuana along with their two young children. That same day, a couple in their 70s was arrested for carrying 24 pounds of marijuana in their truck. ``They looked like a normal grandma and grandpa coming down to go shopping,'' he said. Mike Lovejoy, director of anti-smuggling efforts at the Customs Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., said border drug seizures in Washington state more than tripled from 1996 to 1997 -- and the amount seized this year already has surpassed the 1997 total of 1,486 pounds. But Kervan says his officers are lucky if they are intercepting even 10 percent of the marijuana coming in. ``We have to learn how to do this smarter than we're doing it now -- we can't back the traffic up to Alaska,'' he said. ``We get 5 million cars a year at Blaine. Even if 99 percent of those people are OK, that's still 50,000 bad guys coming through.'' Although experts are trying to find new technologies to make border searches quicker and more effective, the backups at Blaine are likely to get worse during the peak summer season. ``It has the potential for being really ugly,'' said Val Meredith, a federal member of Parliament who represents suburban Vancouver. © Copyright 1998 The Associated Press Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[no comment]
Clinton Honors Chile's Restored Democracy By Thomas W. Lippman Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, April 18, 1998; Page A16 [snip] Clinton, accompanied by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and senior White House officials, was effusively welcomed by Senate President Andres Zaldivar Larrain and his applauding colleagues. "Nothing was unhappier for our people than the interruption of democracy," Zaldivar said, "and nothing more gratifying than its restoration." He thanked the United States for its "support in those difficult moments." Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Icebergs, was The Chilean Model? <13624.43300.566883.9740@lisa.zopyra.com>
Bill, you'd defintely know about it if I started in on you for real, so take it easy. You're a smart guy. Your article on Butler's NLR piece was good and I'm still awaiting the follow-up. As for Doug, who is a friend of mine, he really doesn't need your help. As for evidence of your own myopia it is, like his, clear enough. But let's not personalise, let's debate, yes? Do me the favour of deconstructing my work; or just ignore me. I'm happy either way. Mark William S. Lear wrote: > On Sat, April 18, 1998 at 09:02:22 (+0100) Mark Jones writes: > >William S. Lear wrote: > > > >> Nothing like a little exaggeration to help one's argument, is there? > > > >Oh, yeah? Try this for size, from today's London Times (note the final > >optimistic sentence). As for Doug Henwood's false optimism, since you share the > >same disease (myopia) to an even greater degree, you naturally don't even notice > >it: besides, Doug is subtle. > > I just knew you would totally avoid my challenge and resort to ad > hominem attacks. > > I asked you for a simple quote from Doug, whose opinions you have > blatantly exaggerated; just one measly quote from him, which would > show Doug "praising to the skies the technologies and heavy industries > and growth trajectories", as you claimed. > > I might ask for even a sliver of evidence showing that I "share the > same disease (myopia)", but I suppose that would be asking too much, > and would probably provoke another irrelevant post from you. > > Bill
Do androids dream of anything?
A genetic engineer has created a mouse with ears that glow in the dark, by splicing firefly genes into mouse DNA. More practically, transgenic pigs that freeze to death if left in the open because the human genes they've got don't let them accumulate fat, already make our bacon. Coming soon: bespoke pig heart transplants in case the fat-free pig didn't help us avoid coronaries. I have been reading up on genes and transgenic science, and how the media handle it all. The stories and images arrive by stealth in our unconcscious from inside the labs where evolution is being undone. They ought to make your hair stand on end (when the journal Nature broke the story of Dolly the cloned sheep -- 'More important than Darwin, Einstein and Copernicus together!' -- its graphic designers airbrushed one leg black, to make the thing look more cuddly. They forgot a cloned sheep whose 'parent' has four white legs can itself only have four white legs). These images of biotech at work are mostly like that: not stark tekno, but homely flesh-tones: a bowl of rice, an ear of wheat, cheerful rodents made literally anthropomorphic, like the mouse with a human ear growing on its back. Oh, cute! These images condition us to accept something more terrible than anything Himmler, Pol Pot or Mengele did. None of them managed to rob their victims of their humanity. We can feel pity and terror for the hollow-eyed, numbered prisoners of Tuol Sleng, but a mouse with luminous ears? You cannot pity the loss of something that was never there in the first place. This not a living thing, it is quasi-alive, it is just an agglomeration of high-spec cells which happens to move around and stare vacantly. Now, just as the first slaves were modelled on the first domesticated animals (hunter-gatherers do not enslave) so the first not-human humans, or bits of humans, will be modelled on the mice with the ears. Headless humans grown from our own nail parings for our own transplants. Androids like in Dick's 60's classic, the basis of Blade Runner. They have no rights _by design_. That's different from just *saying* to someone: 'You have no rights,' as the Nazis did. Sometimes they will just be bits of protein-computer embedded in domestic appliances but sometimes they will be just like us. Then Scientology will rule the world, because how will we imagine ourselves, distinguish ourselves from the Wogs, except as trillion-year old Thetans inhabiting living corpses, as Scientologists think they are (everyone else is a 'Wog', in L. Ron Hubbard-speak. Andrei Kiriyenko, the new Russian prime minister-designate with the robotic voice, is said to be a Scientologist, so his was an inspired choice of Yeltsin's, now all Russians are Wogs). The Nazis were a colourful, queer flop. Denying the humanity of victims ludicrously achieved nothing except a lurid posterity and fashions for patent knee boots and black jodhpurs. You could not actually efface a Jew's humanity (of course, people can get used to anything: During WW2, a popular brand of soap in Polish shops was labelled 'RJF', meaning 'Pure Jewish Fat'). On the contrary; the camps affirmed the value of life. E P Thompson said the Prussian goose-step always made him think of a boot descending on a face. The face becomes our own kin, the boot makes the victim the centre of our world. If only they'd figured a way to make Jewish ears flash like diodes in the night. All a mouse wants is the right to BE a mouse. You can kill it in a trap but at least you know it was a mouse. With ears that glow in the dark, this is not-mouse, nothing more, an aberration, a pathological joke at nature's and our expense. Tthe joke won't stop there. It started long ago, during the LAST global warming when the seas rose, the ice melted and the present interglacial began. Tides flooded the land bridges, the permafrost turned to impassable sludge and made our free- roaming ancestors into miserable, arthritic swamp-dwellers who had to cultivate grain and domesticate animals to survive (check out Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'). That was when the comedy started. Peter Dickens in his 1992 book 'Society And Nature: Towards A Green Social Theory', describes the moral universe of the Yanomani, with its spirit-world that is coterminous with the tribe, with its rites and shamans, its two-hour working day, its playfulness. Anyone who has consulted the literature on shamanism sees the same themes everywhere where humans lived immersed within nature, not trying to domesticate it and themselves. The hunter apologises to the animal he kills, propitiates the anger of its departing soul, promising it will return stronger and more beautiful next time around. The shaman dresses in the animal's skin, becomes it and forgives the tribe. The webs that connect all living things are rendered whole and seamless. The anger of the ancestors is propitiated and the spirits of each tree, river, rock,
Re: The Chilean Model?
Mark Jones wrote: >So, just as you find my cassandra-ism risible, I am mystified >at the self-deception you are stricken with. Actually, I >find you schizoid -- on one e-list you can be seen expressing deep fears >for the globally-warmed, asphalted-over future; on another you are praising >to the skies the technologies and heavy industries and growth trajectories >which create the problem (and BTW, not only E Asia is polluted: so is >Japan now one of the world's most polluted places, and I've just been >reading some scary stuff connecting the toxic slum the Japanese have made >of their habitat, with the collapse of the Japanese birthrate, ie, Japan's >industrial model is eating the nation). Hey, having multiple personalities is an antidote to loneliness, Mark! Ok, let me try to resolve this contradiction. I hate cars and auto-centered civilization. I think the ecological crisis is real; I'm with John Bellamy Foster on this one, rather than David Harvey (to allude to an exchange in the current Monthly Review). But I still believe that some kind of industrialization is essential to build a decent (i.e., socialist) society. You need industry to provide the material standard of living necessary to a decent (i.e., socialist) society, and you need an educated, skilled population to run society by and for themselves. (They must be industries that are kind to people and the earth rather than destructive, of course.) I think the Chilean model - with crappy privatized schools, a surprising lack of industrial development, an an ecologically destructive reliance on intensified primary production - is about as anti-socialist as you can get. Even if their salmon and strawberries are wonderfully tasty. Doug
Keeping a Russian focus
The future will pay heavy bills for what's happening in Russia today. The occasional injection of David Bacon's writing is fine and well, but this list should have regular reporting from people on the spot or nearby. I could suggest as much re Germany as well. There should be a space for Germany-watchers, especially now, in the run-up to one of the most crucial elections anywhere this decade. valis "Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. I have never thought much of the courage of a lion-tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat." -- George Bernard Shaw
Re: Icebergs, was The Chilean Model? <13623.62927.243766.611480@lisa.zopyra.com>
William S. Lear wrote: > Nothing like a little exaggeration to help one's argument, is there? Oh, yeah? Try this for size, from today's London Times (note the final optimistic sentence). As for Doug Henwood's false optimism, since you share the same disease (myopia) to an even greater degree, you naturally don't even notice it: besides, Doug is subtle. Mark Antarctic unleashes a titanic iceberg BY NICK NUTTALL, ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT AN ICEBERG 25 miles long and three miles wide is floating in the Southern Ocean as an Antarctic ice shelf falls apart. The break-up was predicted by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey two months ago, but the speed of the change has taken experts by surprise. Some blame global warming. The climate of the Antarctic peninsula has become 2.5C warmer since the 1940s, causing the ice shelves to start melting. In February, the British team predicted that the Larsen B shelf, measuring 7,500 square miles, was nearing its stability limit and could begin to break up. Photographs taken from a polar-orbiting satellite operated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have now confirmed that a large portion of the shelf has vanished. A spokeswoman for the British Antarctic Survey, which based its predictions on computer models, said: "The Antarctic peninsula is experiencing a regional warming, but that's not happening in the rest of the continent, and no-one understands why. "It doesn't mean that we are immediately going to see sea levels rise. The world is not in any danger.
Some that might interest
Dear Pen-L and Pkt If any one is interested you can read the paper I am giving at Ed Nell's conference in New York on Monday at http://econ-www/economics/research/bse-openeconomy.pdf it is in pdf. it explores the open economy considerations of my Buffer Stock Employment model of Full employment kind regards bill ##William F. Mitchell ### Head of Economics Department # University of Newcastle New South Wales, Australia ###*E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ### Phone: +61 49 215065 # ## ### Fax: +61 49 216919 Mobile: 0419 422 410 ## WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/economics/bill/billeco.html
Re: Icebergs, was The Chilean Model?
On Sat, April 18, 1998 at 09:02:22 (+0100) Mark Jones writes: >William S. Lear wrote: > >> Nothing like a little exaggeration to help one's argument, is there? > >Oh, yeah? Try this for size, from today's London Times (note the final >optimistic sentence). As for Doug Henwood's false optimism, since you share the >same disease (myopia) to an even greater degree, you naturally don't even notice >it: besides, Doug is subtle. I just knew you would totally avoid my challenge and resort to ad hominem attacks. I asked you for a simple quote from Doug, whose opinions you have blatantly exaggerated; just one measly quote from him, which would show Doug "praising to the skies the technologies and heavy industries and growth trajectories", as you claimed. I might ask for even a sliver of evidence showing that I "share the same disease (myopia)", but I suppose that would be asking too much, and would probably provoke another irrelevant post from you. Bill
Re: Dollars Break, the Yen Bends
Dennis, Can *you* borrow money at 2 percent interest? 4 percent? That money is so cheap it's almost free. Besides, what business does a democratic government have handing over a lot of cash to corporate fat-cats? Do you think the managements of Mitsubushi and Sony are socialists or something? If they are, why don't they give their companies to the workers and get the hell out of the way? These are the people, after all, who have screwed up the Japanese economy. peace
Re: The Chilean Model?
I didn't detect any forced choices, Doug. My starting point is that world capitalism is in a deep hole, and the gaudy spectacle -- the vast anomic architecture, the bright lights and shrill, inhuman sexiness of it all, all that hypnotic stuff -- is just a chimera. The more I read the more certain I am: the next 2 or 3 decades are going to be highly unpleasant, as the energy-entropy bill at last comes in. I can understand why no-one wants much to talk about this, but I am fascinated by the mass pyschology of business-as-usual that can even extend as far the business of _forecasting the future_, which is pretty much what we are doing, is it not? Here are a bunch of guys paid to inspect entrails and read runes, and even they, engrossed by arcane, scholastic discussions, do not notice calamity creeping and rushing up and enfolding us all. Now THAT is what I call weird. So, just as you find my cassandra-ism risible, I am mystified at the self-deception you are stricken with. Actually, I find you schizoid -- on one e-list you can be seen expressing deep fears for the globally-warmed, asphalted-over future; on another you are praising to the skies the technologies and heavy industries and growth trajectories which create the problem (and BTW, not only E Asia is polluted: so is Japan now one of the world's most polluted places, and I've just been reading some scary stuff connecting the toxic slum the Japanese have made of their habitat, with the collapse of the Japanese birthrate, ie, Japan's industrial model is eating the nation). It is common to sneer at Cassandras (as if the original was not a citizen of Troy) -- you yourself mock easy targets like Jeremy Rifkin, and why not? It's true, he's over the top, as are most deep-eco people. But his lack of science is compensated for by one great insight. The great gamble on which industrial capitalism was based: that you could turn one planet into four by means of fossil fuels -- has not paid off and -- this is what matters -- WILL NOT now pay off -- there just isn't the time left-- if by meaningful payoff is meant transition to a sustainable civilisation. I think it is quite lightminded of us not to take with desperate seriousness the impending -- and not even impending, the ACTUAL - disintegration of the oil-economy, which is already gnawing the first two capitalist planets around the edges. No-one gives a solitary fuck, do they? There is no evidence whatever that dematerialisation or virtualisation have reduced or will reduce either energy consumption, per capita or gross, or total materials throughput, per contra, all the indicators are the other way. So we now have the paradox that just when oil production is peaking, the entire intimidating and formidable array of technologies based on oil and exploitings fossil fuels, including chem feedstocks and fertilisers, is reaching its apogee of productivity and technical range: so we are not heading for a slow, managed transition, we are heading for overshoot and die-off. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer, the tornadoes tell their own story about anthropogenic climate change, and the most likely result of the next century will be ecosphere collapse, the untimely deaths of BILLIONS of people, and the retreat of the survivors inside the machinery. What was that you were saying about T-Bills, discount rates and the Yen? Sorry, I just wasn't paying attention Mark Doug Henwood wrote: > Mark Jones wrote: > > >Doug, tell me as a Marxist: is it better for the world if people pick > >strawberries or make 4x4's? > > I suppose having tried to impose a forced choice on you I deserve one in > turn. But like you I'm not going to play. So I'll say this: I hate 4x4s and > everything they come with/stand for. I wouldn't want life to revolve around > strawberries though. Can we have some poets and DJs too? > > Doug
Re: russia article and sidebar (Part 1 of 2)
Friends, Michael E's post of David Bacon's article on Russian workers is much appreciated. A shorter version of the article is also in last week's Nation magazine. Bacon is a fine labor journalist and photographer. Michael E's own article on the U.S. labor movement appears in the latest issue of Working USA. I think that it is the most radical article to appear in that journal so far. Working USA is one of two new labor-oriented journals. The other is New Labor Forum. Check them out. Michael Yates Michael Eisenscher wrote: > WHERE WORKERS HAVE TO FIGHT FOR A PAYCHECK > U.S. and Russian Unions Move Beyond the Cold War > By David Bacon > > MOSCOW (4/16/98) -- Today 20 million Russian workers, one out of > every four, don't get a check on payday. Their wages aren't just late by a > day or two. People often go months without getting paid. > Giant industrial enterprises make partial payment in car parts, > soap or even sex aids. Workers do informal jobs, depend on other family > members, and grow vegetables in tiny plots where, ironically, they used to > take summer vacations outside the cities. > The wage debt, estimated at $10 billion, is growing by 5% every month. > Timor Timofeyev, director of Moscow's Institute for Comparative > Research into Industrial Relations (ISITO) calls it a sign of "barbaric > capitalism." > For Vic Thorpe, general secretary of the International Federation > of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions non-payment is a > "basic violation of a central principle of civilized relations in the > production process ... a clear and logical result of pursuing policies > advanced by the evangelists of liberalization and the free market." The > ICEM has been world labor's leading voice raising support for Russian > workers. > Non-payment is testing the ability of unions to transform > themselves to fight the worst aspects of the country's economic freefall. > The crisis is putting international labor solidarity to the test as well, > measuring the distance traveled by the AFL-CIO in particular, away from its > old cold-war hostility towards Russia's labor movement. > Few workers in the U.S. or Canada would understand why Russian > workers continue showing up for work with no paycheck in sight for months > on end. The brutal truth is that there's nowhere else to go. There are no > alternatives. > In Moscow's huge Moskvitch auto plant, where a decade ago 25,000 > workers cranked out 200,000 cars a year, a few hundred autoworkers > assembled only 2000 in 1997. They got paid in parts, which they then sold > at cut rates to a cooperative operating inside the factory. > At the Progress aircraft plant in Arsenyev, work stopped completely > last November. The factory makes the Ka-50 Black Shark battlefield > helicopter for export, and the C-Mosquito ship borne missile system. Its > last payday was over a year ago. The workers, some of Russia's most > skilled and productive, got a bread ration twice a week instead. They > suspect the last manager improperly appropriated 2 billion rubles > ($400,). > In Ivanovo, once the bustling heart of the textile industry and a > city that produced some of Russia's first industrial workers and earliest > revolutionary fighters, the mills are mostly silent, the people hungry. > When they work at all, they're paid in bed sheets. > One Russian worker out of every eight last year was paid in kind, > and 40% of those recently surveyed by the ISITO said they hadn't received > their salaries for the last month. Coal miners have been owed over 160 > billion rubles ($27.5 million) in wages since August. Aircraft workers > haven't been paid for nineteen months. > Confounding liberal reformers who predicted that market forces > would unleash consumer demand and greater productivity, industrial > production has dropped much further than in the U.S.'s Great Depression. > Last year Russia's coal mines produced only 244 million tons, a little over > half that produced in the final years of the Soviet Union. > The government collects taxes relentlessly, depriving enterprises > of capital to function or pay salaries. It doesn't pay its own employees. > When it stiffs its suppliers for purchases ranging from coal to airplanes, > they stop paying wages. Meanwhile, revenue is siphoned off in massive > corrupt privatization schemes, and the new owners of privatized enterprises > then refuse to pay workers too. (see sidebar) > > Russian unions find non-payment extremely difficult to resolve > because the problem is so extensive and so integrally a part of the new > economic order. But some of labor's difficulties are also internal - > unions today are in transition themselves. > Under the old Soviet system, Russian trade unions encompassed 95% > of the workforce, but functioned in a way that left them totally unprepared > for
