Top Japan banks seen posting 01-02 net loss
The Economic Times Saturday, April 06, 2002 Top Japan banks seen posting 01-02 net loss REUTERS TOKYO: All top Japanese banking groups are likely to bleed red ink for the 2001-02 business year that ended last week as they aggressively boosted loan-loss provisions against risky borrowers, analysts said today. Two of them - Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group Inc (MTFG) and Sumitomo Trust and Banking Co Ltd - have forecast group net profits but would likely fall prey to a worsening economy and higher risks of corporate failures. Stepped-up government inspections on lending to troubled firms have forced banks to be more strict in their lending assessment, thus increasing bank credit costs, the analysts said. To compound damage to their earnings, the stock market's close at an 18-year low for a fiscal year-end last week left many banks with big losses on their shareholdings, though the damage was not as bad as feared due to a market rebound. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily said today MTFG, which has forecast a net profit of 20 billion yen ($150 million), is expected to cut its projection to a deficit of more than 100 billion yen on losses from bad-debt clean-ups. The daily said Sumitomo Trust is expected to report a consolidated net loss of tens of billions of yen and reduce its seven yen annual dividend for common shares. The paper said Sumitomo Trust, which so far has forecast a group net profit of 22 billion yen, is expected to cut its earnings forecasts as early as this week. Spokesmen at both banks said nothing had been decided yet. Analysts said it was evident banks were under pressure to conduct a better assessment of lending risks when the Financial Services Agency last autumn began special inspections into Japan's top banks to improve its grasp of the bad-debt problem. When banks announced interim earnings in November, top banks sharply raised their full-year credit costs to a total of 6.447 trillion yen ($48.58 billion), triple the original estimates. Because of deepening deflation and rising bankruptcies since then, analysts said the tally for top-bank credit costs could increase by another one trillion yen. Prospects that all top banks will post full-year losses have already been factored in, said Arito Ono, senior economist at Fuji Research Institute. Banks have taken a preventive step (by boosting provisions) and forecast conservative earnings, but I don't think this would significantly affect their capital adequacy ratios, he said. Preliminary estimates by the top banks showed they secured a capital adequacy ratio of at least 10 percent for 2001-02, well above the eight percent required for globally operating banks. Financial services minister Hakuo Yanagisawa has said the FSA plans to release the results of the special inspections it conducted over the past several months by mid-April. The Nihon Keizai said the FSA could publicise the results on April 12. On the same day, top banks would likely release key financial data incorporating the effects of the FSA's special inspections, including bad-debt clean-up costs, capital adequacy ratios, latent securities losses, net operating profit, current profit or loss and net profit or loss, the newspaper said. Banks and the FSA would not comment on the timing or content of the expected disclosure. MTFG, seen as one of the healthiest among the top four banks, had expected its loan-loss charges to total 480 billion yen while Sumitomo Trust, one of the smaller top banks, had expected about 80 billion yen in losses from the clean-up of bad debts. The newspaper said MTFG's loan-loss charges would increase by more than 120 billion yen and for Sumitomo Trust the costs would expand by about 20 billion yen. Mizuho Holdings Inc, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, UFJ Holdings Inc, Daiwa Bank Holdings Inc and Chuo Mitsui Trust and Banking Co Ltd have already said they expect net losses for the full year. The banks also took in their stride an end to the national blanket guarantee on deposits from April 1. According to a Reuters poll of 63 market players, only eight percent said they expected the change in deposit protection to trigger bank failures due to runs on deposits. MTFG shares closed Thursday trade up 1.38 percent at 807,000 yen. Copyright © 2002 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.
BLS Daily Report
BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 2002: RELEASED TODAY: Both payroll employment and the unemployment rate were little changed in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Manufacturing and construction each lost nearly 40,000 jobs, but services employment grew substantially. Both the manufacturing workweek and overtime hours rose over the month. The nation's unemployment rate nudged up to 5.7 percent in March, although employment added 58,000 new positions to payrolls, the Labor Department said today. The discrepancy signaled that the strengthening economy hasn't completely filtered down to the job market The March rate was an increase of 0.2 percentage points from the previous month. Economists had been expecting a rise to at least 5.6 percent. Employment gains in services and local government tempered job losses in construction and manufacturing, and overall, U.S. businesses added 58,000 new jobs last month. That's the first gain in 7 months and it compared with a revised loss in February of 2,000 payroll jobs. As it did during the last recession that ended in 1991, the nation's unemployment rate still could rise in coming months as businesses regain financial strength. Some economists predict the rate will climb to more than 6 percent before a prolonged drop-off occurs (Leigh Strope, Associated Press, http://www.nandotimes.com/business/story/344838p-2840005c.html). The pace of retail job cuts, which increased dramatically after September 11, has accelerated in 2002, and this year's cuts may be the worse in at least 2 decades, as the industry consolidates, according to a major employment study to be released Monday. During the first 3 months of this year, 51,078 retail job cuts have been announced, including the 22,000 job losses that Kmart Corp. announced in the wake of its bankruptcy filing, according to a survey by Challenger, Gray Christmas, Inc. an employment research and recruiting firm. That is already half way toward matching last year's record of 96,741 cuts, Challenger says. Based on the first-quarter figures, merchants are eliminating an average of 17,026 jobs per month, and John Challenger, chief executive, expects that pace will continue, with this year's total estimate to exceed 200,000. This is going to be the year in which retailers come to terms with changes of consumer behavior that was precipitated by the recession, Challenger said. He said the job losses will be the worst since the early 1980s. Challenger believes the retail category could be ranked among the top two industries, rivaling the telecommunications and automotive sectors, as having the largest downsizing this year. Last year, retailing didn't make it to the top 10 industries hardest hit by layoffs (Anne D'Innocenzio, Associated Press, http://www.nandotimes.com/business/story/344122p-2835397c.html). American workers now put more money into pensions and retirement savings plans sponsored by their employers than the companies themselves do, writes Edward Wyatt in The New York Times (page 1). That remarkable milestone, determined by pension researchers reviewing the most recent data, shows just how far companies have moved away from the system of decades past, in which employers alone financed the retirement savings of their workers and toward 401(k) and similar retirement plans financed mostly by workers. application/ms-tnef
RE: Bureacracy: Forwarded from Jurriaan
For what it's worth, I agree with Jurriaan on all of the below (unless I've missed something). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, April 07, 2002 2:59 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:24719] Bureacracy: Forwarded from Jurriaan Hi Michael, I notice with interest some discussion about bureaucracy on PEN-L. As someone who has worked as tutor, education officer, research officer and archivist/documentalist for various public service institutions, I have often had occasion to think about this topic. From personal experience, I've concluded that the study of bureaucracy is crucial for socialists and Marxists. There are at least two good reasons for that: Firstly, one of the chief targets of neoliberal ideology today is precisely bureaucracy, the claim being that public services based on a redistribution of income by the state are inefficient and necessarily degenerate bureaucratically, hence should be replaced by market-mechanisms as much as possible. The bureaucratic characteristics of corporations in the private sector are conveniently ignored,as is the despotism of the market, which drives those lacking disposable income straight back into the arms of various state bureaucracies who cannot cope with them adequately. The concept of economic efficiency used by neo-liberals is of course largely ridiculous - it is efficiency from the standpoint of the few as against the misery of the many. The second reason is that, insofar as socialists want to regulate markets (a la Diane Elson or Alec Nove) or do away with them altogether (a la Mandel), they have to invent some other allocative devices instituted by law (a legal framework) and operated through democratic political processes (workers councils, parliaments, consumer associations, planning institutes, the Internet or whatever). In other words, specific socialist institutions are necessary which consciously seek to match the supply of society's resources with social needs. Now unless one is totally naive, it is obvious that as soon as some institutions are in put in charge of allocating resources and judging what the social needs for particular resources are, there is at least the possibility that they may abuse their position in a bureaucratic sense, asserting their sectional interest against the interest of society as a whole. This applies to socialism just as much as to capitalism. Hence the need for a profound Marxist analysis. There does actually exist a small amount of Western Marxist literature on bureaucracy, as somebody already mentioned, including: - Hal Draper's study of Marx in Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol. 1 - Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, and other writings - Christian Rakovsky, The Professional Dangers of Power - Isaac Deutscher, The roots of bureaucracy - Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist analysis of bureaucracy (and other writings). - Catherine Samary, Plan, Market Democracy - Agnes Heller, Dictatorship over Needs This type of literature by no means constitutes an exhaustive analysis of bureaucracy, but it is a useful starting point. Its weakness is that it provides very few guidelines and principles on how to prevent bureaucratic evils, beyond a few rules modelled on what Marx already said in his writings on the Paris Commune. That is, it often lacks positive theories of socialist organisation and management. Odes to democratic participation are well and good, but how to create durable democratic institutions and methods of information management which reduce, rather than increase, bureaucracy is another matter. Al Szymanski made an interesting point once (I think in his book Is the Red Flag Flying ?). He said that if you compared the proportion of bureaucratic functionaries relative to the population in the USSR and the USA, you would actually find that there were proportionally more bureaucrats in the USA than the USSR. I don't know if this is true, not having the necessary statistical information to hand, but I think it's plausible. The Marxist critique of Weber is not that his descriptive typology of bureaucratic forms is in itself wrong or inaccurate. It is rather that Weber lacks a political and class analysis of bureaucracy and fails to explain satisfactorily where bureaucracy comes from, its origins. He regards it more or less as an inevitable product of the growing complexity of society (i.e. ultimately as an inevitable product of the division of labour and specialisation). That is basically why bureaucracy is the iron cage of the future according to Weber (leaving aside the inherent tendency of bureaucracy, if unchecked, to expand its field of operation). But this is essentially a technocratic interpretation of bureaucracy, which
RE: RE: Timor and More
Andrew writes:Debord saw this as a manifestation of the society of the spectacle. The reporting on each crisis is the same or near same as the previous, with the content of each forgotten with the next and so on. what is the basis for the society of the spectacle? Is it just a description or is it a product of the development of capitalism? or what? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Austin, Andrew [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, April 07, 2002 5:36 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [PEN-L:24722] RE: Timor and More Debord saw this as a manifestation of the society of the spectacle. The reporting on each crisis is the same or near same as the previous, with the content of each forgotten with the next and so on. -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, April 07, 2002 5:43 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:24720] Timor and More The flurry of articles about E. Timor was interesting, reminding us about the importance of not being caught up in the most recent CNN crisis -- Palestine being the latest. The flip side of that syndrome is that we forget each crisis just as soon as a new one appears, leaving us with no sense of continuity and context. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Venezuela
Put Venezuela on the list, where now some labor leaders seem to be taking their turn in following a script out of CIA headquarters. Gene Coyle while the CIA is probably involved, I think it's a mistake to see this solely in terms of CIA machinations. Venezuela is a country with a social system (classes, etc.) and this is what both CIA and Chavez have to work with. Simply pointing to the CIA is superficial. (In any event, history -- i.e., the 1973 Chilean coup -- doesn't repeat itself.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Economic Reporting Review, 4/8/02
Economic Reporting Review, 4/8/02 By Dean Baker You can sign up to receive ERR every week by sending a subscribe ERR email request to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or you can send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] m. You can find the latest ERR at http://www.cepr.net/Economic_Reporting_Review/ index.htm. All ERR prior to August 2000 are archived at http://www.fair.org/err/ Outstanding Stories of the Week Do You Plan to Retire? Think Again Louis Uchitelle New York Times, March 31, 2002, Section 4 Page 1 This article examines the savings and pensions accrued by the cohort of workers that is currently approaching retirement age. It points at that most workers have managed to accumulate very little money in defined contribution pension plans. This means that the vast majority of workers, who lack traditional defined benefit plans, will be mostly dependent on Social Security for their retirement income. Home as Shield From Creditors Is Under Fire Philip Shenon New York Times, April 4, 2002, Page C1 This article examines how many of the prominent figures in the Enron scandal may be able to shield millions of dollars of assets, even if they are forced into bankruptcy. A provision in several state bankruptcy laws allows a person to have unlimited wealth in their own home, even while their debts are voided by bankruptcy. Outrage Is Rising as Options Turn to Dust Gretchen Morgenson New York Times, March 31, 2002, Section 3 Page 1 This article reports on how many employees of tech or telecom companies saw fortunes that they accumulated in stock options disappear, due to the fact that they were were not allowed to sell their stock before the price collapsed. In many cases, top executives did not face the same restrictions in selling their stock. Social Security How the Democrats Might Come Out Fighting Richard L. Berke New York Times, March 31, 2002, Section 4 Page 3 This article discusses the Democrats' political prospects in the fall elections. At one point it discusses the possibility that the Republicans may be vulnerable on Social Security, because Mr. Bush broke his vow to protect the Social Security trust fund. His budget uses surpluses to pay for other programs through 2013. It is worth noting that using the Social Security surpluses to pay for other programs has no effect on the Social Security program. Under the law, the surplus is used to buy government bonds. The Social Security trust fund holds the exact same number of bonds, regardless of whether the trust fund is saved or spent. The Budget Critics Say Budget Plans Ignore Reality Glenn Kessler Washington Post, March 31, 2002, Page A4 This article presents assessments of the budget over the next decade. At one point it discusses the probability that the alternative minimum tax will be adjusted in the near future to avoid a sharp tax increase on middle-income families. This is described as one of several important budget issues, which could blow a $300 billion hole in the budget over the next decade. Later it refers to the possibility that Congress will adopt some sort of Medicare prescription drug benefit. This is described as politically important. This framing of issues seems to imply that the treatment of the alternative minimum tax is of greater consequence for the budget than a Medicare prescription drug benefit. In fact, both items will only appear as budget issues because of prospective political pressure. The treatment of prescription drugs over the next decade is of much greater consequence for the budget and the nation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, spending by Medicare beneficiaries on prescription drugs is projected to rise at a rate of more than 10 percent annually over the next decade. By 2012, the average expenditure is projected to be $5,820 ($4,550 in today's dollars). This will be unaffordable for the vast majority of seniors. For comparison, the median income of a woman over age 65 living alone is currently less than $17,000. As a result, there is going to be enormous pressure to have the government pick up some of these costs, if it fails to hold down drug prices. If it is assumed that the government pays for just 20 percent of projected prescription drug costs over the next decade, the budgetary impact would be larger than the $300 billion impact from the adjustment of the alternative minimum tax and other technical provisions of the tax code. At one point the article comments that the long-term challenge of preparing the nation for the baby boom generation's retirement has been sidelined. There is no obvious reason that the nation, or at least the federal government, should be preparing for the retirement of the baby boom generation. The projected increase in expenditures for retirement programs over the next three decades is approximately the same as the increase (measured as a share of GDP) over the last three decades (approximately 3.0 percentage points).The government did not prepare in advance for
Re: Water
Louis, I utterly agree with you. Years back, I was fortunate enough to meet and become a close friend of a great Spanish Marxist philosopher, named Manuel Sacristán Luzón, the translator and introducer of Lukacs, Gramsci, and many others into Spanish. Manuel was one of the first marxists to ever anticipate that the next wars would revolve around water. He made a tremendous effort to bring Marxism close to what he called the new problems of contemporary capitalism. Through him I learned that Marx did not ignore the ecological aspects of class struggles. For instance, in Capital, paid a great deal of attention to the fact that capitalism has an inherent tendency to destroy ecosystems, beginning with the labour force. Manuel conducted an interesting debate with Wolfgang Harich, a noted German Marxian ecologist philosopher, aimed at linking ecological issues with democracy, pacifism, socialism and freedom. I strongly you to have a look at these guys' works. Ignacio At 08:15 p.m. 05/04/02 -0500, you wrote: (For many on the left, the terms ecological crisis or vulnerable planet are interpreted either as millenarian diversions from tasks facing the working class or as a failure to embrace supposedly orthodox Marxist concepts of the relationship between man and nature--which boil down to a kind of leftish version of Atlas Shrugged. In fact these terms not only are intrinsic to the kind of analysis Marx was developing during a time of crisis around soil fertility, they also relate to the class struggle unfolding at this moment. (Here are three items worth considering. First, a report from In These Times about the role of water in the most recent conflicts between Israel and Palestinian. Next, an excerpt from an article in the latest New Yorker (Leasing the Rain) by William Finnegan about the recent revolt in Cochabamba, Bolivia over the government's decision to charge money for water. Finally, an excerpt from an article in the latest Harpers (Eternal Winter) by Tom Bissell about the disastrous consequences of cotton farming on Lake Aral, a vitally important resource that cannot be replaced. The New Yorker and the Harpers article are not online, but definitely worth tracking down if you are interested in such matters, as all clear-thinking radicals should be.) In These Times, August 21, 2000 Water Wars By Charmaine Seitz A botched deal leaves Palestinians high and dry As temperatures in the West Bank hover just above 100 degrees, water is on everyone's mind. Three years of scant rain have dried out the area and now a previously scarce resource has become paltry. But reports of the drought's severity pale in comparison with preliminary studies showing that crucial Palestinian water resources, as accorded by Israeli-Palestinian agreements, are already overexploited. The United States, in an overzealous effort to provide Palestinians with water and improve the climate for peacemaking, may be partly at fault. When Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, all control of local water resources was turned over to the Israeli military administration. By the time Palestinians and Israel signed an initial peace agreement in 1993, the Israeli water carrier was pumping 80 percent of underground reserves to Israeli citizens in Israel and the West Bank settlements. The rest of the water resources were channeled to Palestinians, allotting them only one third of Israeli per capita use. During interim peace talks, the two sides agreed in 1995 that Palestinians had the right to use a limited amount of water from the eastern aquifer, the only underground aquifer lying completely inside the West Bank. The other two West Bank aquifers were left until final status talks, which were underway at Camp David as In These Times went to press. At the time of the initial agreement, Israel said that these other aquifers were already overexploited by its own pumping and hence, not much use to Palestinians anyway. Israeli engineers hypothesized that the eastern aquifer could produce up to 21 billion gallons of water annually, in addition to the water already being extracted. But that amount still would not bring the 2 million West Bankers up to World Health Organization standards for healthy living. Further, Palestinian engineers suspected that the Israeli estimates of the aquifer's possibilities were too high, but their resources were limited -- all real data remained classified by Israel throughout the negotiations. The Palestinians eventually accepted the data and agreed to Israel's terms. Since then, Palestinians slowly have discovered that the eastern aquifer has little to offer them, and may already be overused. Soon after the agreement, Palestinian tests found that as much as 60 percent of the aquifer's water is contaminated by salty springs near the Dead Sea. A July report by the Millennium Engineering Group, a U.S. firm, estimates that only 25 percent of the water from the eastern aquifer can be used safely. The
Re: ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ TO TALK ON GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS @SACRAMENTO MARXIST SCHOOL
Can her talk be put on the webv? April 6, 2002 News Release For more information: Call John Rowntree, (916) 446-1758 P.O. Box 160406 Sacramento, CA 95816 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.marxistschool.org ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ TO SPEAK ON INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS AT THE MARXIST SCHOOL OF SACRAMENTO Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, activist, author and professor, will give a talk International Human Rights on Thursday, April 18 at 7 p.m. in the Green Room at the Sierra 2 Center, 2791 24th Street, Sacramento. Dunbar-Ortizí talk is part of the Point of View: Challenging Perspectives on Current Issues speaker series sponsored by The Marxist School of Sacramento. Dunbar-Ortiz will focus on how global freedom movements have worked with the United Nations to build international human rights law. She will suggest how this work can help U.S. activists challenge U.S. globalization and militarization. Dunbar-Ortiz is a professor of ethnic studies and womenís studies at CSU, Hayward. The Great Sioux Nation, Roots of Resistance is one of the many books she has written. This event is free and open to the public. Donations are welcome. For more information call John Rowntree at (916) 446-1758. ### _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. Dr. W. Robert Needham DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 Tel: 519-888-4567 ext 3949 Home: 519-578-4143 http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/ECON/faculty/needham.html [We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. - Herman Melville] [Fascism should be more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. Benito Mussolini]
Re: Venezuela
Jim, I don't see what you are saying here. Chile too ... is a country with a social system (classes, etc) ... So what? Nebraska has a social system, classes, etc. -- does that mean the CIA can't depose the governor? Or that it can? The steps unfolding in Venezuala are reminiscent of Chile. Coups are supported by outside forces -- whether it is anchoring a warship off the harbor or orchestrating various and successive elements -- military, labor, or however the support is expressed. Did you think I meant that the CIA walked in and decided to replace Chavez without a fertile local setting? I didn't. Gene Coyle Devine, James wrote: Put Venezuela on the list, where now some labor leaders seem to be taking their turn in following a script out of CIA headquarters. Gene Coyle while the CIA is probably involved, I think it's a mistake to see this solely in terms of CIA machinations. Venezuela is a country with a social system (classes, etc.) and this is what both CIA and Chavez have to work with. Simply pointing to the CIA is superficial. (In any event, history -- i.e., the 1973 Chilean coup -- doesn't repeat itself.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
re: Bureaucracy
If I reply to one message per day in this thread (as I'm constrained to do), it will continue until 2010. I haven't even read Miychi's missives yet... JD I wrote:But wasn't Earl Browder -- a long-term leader who was quite popular with the CPUSA's rank and file members -- kicked out of the leadership of the CPUSA for disagreeing with the Party Line handed down by Moscow? Charles Brown writes:On Browder, I was going to use him as an example of the ability to remove the very top leader in the CPUSA . He was General Secretary. In most historical interpretations, the top leader of the CPUSA wasn't the real top leader, since the CPUSA was subordinate to the COMINTERN or COMINFORM... (Note: I do not believe that the CPUSA was simply a puppet of the USSR. It had to also keep its own rank and file happy and so reflected their wishes to some extent. When they didn't as with the Hitler/Stalin pact or the secret speech of 1956, they lost members in droves. Though the organization involved bureaucracy, it was not purely so, because of the role of the member's exit option, and to a lesser extent their votes and statements of opinion.) CB:There was a letter from a French, not Moscow, Communist , named DeClou (sp.) criticizing Browder's proposal that the CP become an educational organization rather than a political party. In general, that was termed liquidationism, liquidating the party... Most interpret that letter as a statement of the opinion of the leadership of the COMINTERN/FORM. That opinion had a very strong impact, indicating the power of that international, Moscow-centered, organization. JD
Love me I'm a neoliberal
New from EPI: The unremarkable record of liberalized trade After 20 years of global economic deregulation, poverty and inequality are as pervasive as ever by Christian E. Weller, Robert E. Scott and Adam S. Hersh http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/sept01inequality.html juicy excerpt: . . . Finally, the World Banks conclusion that the lot of the poor has improved during the era of increasing trade and capital flow liberalization relies substantially on data from China and India, but the experiences of both countries are anomalies. In reality, the facts in these countries undermine the case for a connection between greater deregulation of capital and trade flows and falling poverty and inequality. While in China the percentage who are poor has fallen, there has been a rapid rise in inequality (World Bank 2001a). Most notably, inequality between rural and urban areas and provinces with urban centers and those without grew from 1985 to 1995. Also, a large number of Chinas workers labor under abhorrent, and possibly worsening, slave or prison labor conditions (USTDRC 2000; U.S. Department of State 2000, 2001). This situation not only means that many workers are left out of Chinas economic growth, it also makes China an unappealing development model for the rest of the world. Thus, improvements in China are not universally shared and leave many workers behind, often in deplorable conditions. Using India to illustrate the benefits of unregulated globalization is equally problematic to the World Banks position, since Indias progress was accomplished while remaining relatively closed off to the global economy. Total goods trade (exports plus imports) was about 20% of Indias gross domestic product in 1998, or 10 percentage points less than in China and only about one-fifth the level of such export-oriented countries as Korea (IMF 2001a). Moreover, that the IMF (1999, 2000) continuously recommended further liberalization of Indias trade and capital flowsthe only large developing economy for which this was the casesuggests that the IMF viewed India as a laggard in deregulating its economy. . .
Turkey
http://www.eurasianet.org EURASIA INSIGHT April 8, 2002 TURKEY: ECONOMY SPELLS TROUBLE FOR RUSSIA, IRAN, AZERBAIJAN Michael Lelyveld: 4/4/02 New economic figures from Turkey are raising some old questions about energy planning that could soon cut into gas exports from Russia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. On Sunday, Turkey's State Institute of Statistics announced that the country's gross domestic product fell 7.4 percent last year, while its gross national product, which includes foreign income, plunged 9.4 percent. The numbers were far lower than the forecasts of the International Monetary Fund, which has consistently overstated the pace of Turkey's recovery from an economic crisis that started 13 months ago. Last October, the IMF forecast that Turkey's GDP would drop 4.3 percent. In December, it raised the figure to 6.1 percent. But Turkey's long-delayed official results suggest that the economic decline kept accelerating toward the end of the year. Reuters reported that GDP in the fourth quarter fell 10.4 percent from the year-earlier period. Most recently in February, the IMF estimated that Turkey's GNP would grow 3 percent this year, a goal that may be hard to achieve. The fund has committed $31 billion in loans to Turkey since December 1999. Impatience is growing, not only with the slow progress but with the forecasts. In an angry editorial Tuesday, the Turkish Daily News slammed a group of economists who were surveyed last week and predicted slightly better numbers than those announced on Sunday. The paper said, The same people, who could not predict anything and drew rosy pictures, today, are once again spearheading a campaign saying we are out of the crisis and well on our way to recovery. Absolute rubbish! The editorial added, but this is Turkey. You can always twist and bend figures, toy around with regulations and declare a positive growth. Turkey has also invested heavily in its own energy forecasts, which call for stellar growth despite steep economic downturns in two of the past three years. In January, Energy Minister Zeki Cakan predicted an 8 percent rise in energy demand this year, far more than the most optimistic growth rate for the economy as a whole. Cakan said the demand could not be met without rapid moves to increase competition in the power sector, leaving some doubt about whether the figures were real or meant only to accelerate reforms. Suspicions about Turkey's gas projections have troubled analysts for years. Despite recent cuts in the forecasts, the Turkish state pipeline company Botas still says that gas demand will climb 25 percent this year to 20,000 million cubic meters and more than double again by 2005. The accuracy is hard to judge because of years of lagging electrification and bureaucratic delays. But past predictions have already proved wildly high, prompting further questions about whether forecasting has been seen as a way to promise economic growth. In recent years, other countries have also invested in the Turkish growth forecasts by committing billions of dollars for gas pipelines to serve a fast-growing market that has yet to appear. Russia already pipes gas to Turkey by two routes and is due to open a third with the Blue Stream project across the Black Sea this year. Iran opened a pipeline in January, and Azerbaijan is planning a Caspian line by 2005. While Ankara insists it will not face a glut, it is working on underground storage, and last month it signed a protocol with Greece to build a 285-kilometer pipeline linking the two Mediterranean rivals to ease the pressure of oversupply. But there are already signs that the same political pressures are being applied to the pipeline and energy forecasts in Greece. According to the Turkish Daily News, the $300-million pipeline will initially carry 500 million cubic meters of gas annually when it is built in about two years. Botas figures indicate that Turkey will have 5,000 million cubic meters in oversupply this year, or 10 times as much as the pipeline would carry, although it insists that demand will wipe out the surplus by 2003. Analysts have been skeptical. According to IBS Research Consultancy in Turkey, the plans for a 36-inch pipeline date back to a meeting in 2000, when Greece's gas demand was forecast to reach 7,500 million cubic meters this year. But figures this month from the Paris-based International Energy Agency indicate that Greece's gas consumption was only 2,000 million meters in 2001, up just 1.1 percent from the previous year. Earlier this month, Georgios Agrafiotis, the head of Greece's Development Ministry, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had promised to double the capacity of the Russian pipeline connection to Greece from 3,000 million cubic meters to 6,000 million annually. Russia already supplies nearly all of Greece's gas, but it appears to be in a race with Iran which hopes to use the Turkish link as an opening to Europe. Despite the talk of growth, Greece
Re: Venezuela
Jim writes: In any event, history -- i.e., the 1973 Chilean coup -- doesn't repeat itself. I would say it does but each time differently. There seems to be lots of CIA involvement in Venezuela. Of course, this is not to deny that Venezuela is a country with a social system with which Chavez, CIA and other social actors have to work. Below is from Stratfor, from those former CIA agents, that is. Sabri Venezuela: Oil Strike Situation Becoming Critical 22 March 2002 Dissident managers at Venezuelan state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) said that 75 percent of white-collar workers participated in a sick-out March 21. PDVSA employees have for three weeks been protesting against the appointment of new company president Gaston Para and five directors they view as unqualified and as having got their jobs only due to their ties with President Hugo Chavez. Chavez threatened to militarize PDVSA if strikers interfere with the country's oil exports. National guard presence has increased at oil installations around Venezuela. However, the military lacks the technical skills to run a major oil concern. Most PDVSA workers are protesting Chavez's politicization of the oil industry. Their tactics include slowing domestic gasoline deliveries and crude exports to Cuba, home of Chavez's ideological ally Fidel Castro. Chavez's fear is that PDVSA employees will damage the firm's infrastructure through sabotage. Strikers have not yet targeted production capacity. The situation is becoming critical. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States triggered a global recession that sent oil prices -- and Caracas' income -- plummeting. PDVSA's oil sales supply 80 percent of Venezuela's foreign hard-currency earnings. A drop in such income would be problematic for any oil state, but this is doubly true for Venezuela. The president's sagging Bolivarian revolution has led him to milk PDVSA of its investment capital to bolster his own flagging popularity. That in turn has diminished the oil giant's long-term production and refining capacity to the point that it has resorted to purchasing Ecuadorian oil to fulfill supply contracts. STRATFOR estimates it would take five years to repair the damage. But the threat to Venezuelan oil infrastructure would not necessarily end if Chavez were removed from power, which could very well happen by the end of the year. The president is a strong backer of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group. Should Chavez be succeeded by a more pro-U.S. and anti-FARC leadership, Colombia's rebels could find Venezuelan oil infrastructure an attractive a target.
Join us in Jo'burg, mid-May, to fight services privatisation
(International enquiries to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) (Apologies for cross-posting) CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT -- SEE ALSO http://www.queensu.ca/msp Services for All? Water, Electricity and other State Responsibilities of the New South Africa and the World Summit on Sustainable Development *** The Municipal Services Project and our Partners invite you to join leading local intellectuals and activists, and global-justice strategists Dennis Brutus (SA/US), Oscar Olivera (Bolivia), Vandana Shiva (India), Njoki Njehu (Kenya/US), Camille Chalmers (Haiti), Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (Canada), and Colin Leys (Britain), for: A Conference of Local International Research Relevant to Social-Justice Strategies Struggles of Labour, Communities, Women and Environmentalists *** 16-18 May 2002, Johannesburg at Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management in Parktown, and Funda Centre in Soweto *** Until liberation in 1994, South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle was often fought out over specific problems that ordinary people experienced in state services delivery. Whether mandatory Afrikaans in the schools of Soweto (1976), racially-biased services in Port Elizabeth (late 1970s), inadequate housing in Durban (early 1980s), forced removals and oppressive public-sector labour relations (throughout), or rent and services boycotts across the country's townships (mid-1980s-early 1990s), local-level grievances generated intense political mobilisation and visionary demands for change. Since the late 1990s, resistance has emerged to what some term class apartheid. Evidence is found in the resurgence of mass-popular social movements, isolated eruptions of anger (and state repression), persistent trade union campaigns, rural people's protests, non-payment of bills, illegal reconnection of water and electricity, fury over new public-health epidemics, and many other forms of advocacy, activism and social anger. These remind us that South Africa is still not free-certainly not until the essential state services guaranteed in the Constitution are finally available to all. But with privatisation, corporatisation, service cut-offs, full-cost recovery policies, broken electoral promises, bureaucratic obstruction, corruption, political demobilisation and repression of legitimate dissent, that day sometimes appears further away than ever before. So we are compelled to come together to reflect upon these and other questions: . What progress has been made to assure the society's constitutional rights to state services, and to empower workers, communities and women to bring those services to all our people in ways that are affordable, humane, pro-women and environmentally sensitive? . How does the unequal distribution of essential municipal services--especially water, sanitation, electricity, waste removal, as well healthcare, housing and others-afflict our society, and in particular, our women, children and elderly, our health (and especially the health of our five million HIV+ citizens), our municipal workers, our communities, our natural environment? . Is the privatisation of those essential services so far advanced that we will now send a large portion of our services payments to a Paris or London corporation, instead of circulating those scarce resources back into our municipalities and communities? . Will the free lifeline services promised in the 1994 election (and again in 2000) finally become a reality, or remain a public-relations gimmick? . What has driven the South African government to cut off the water and electricity supplies of more than ten million of our 42 million people, and what can we do to prevent any further cuts? Are the courts effective? What kinds of social protests safeguard social rights? . Are other cities in Southern Africa, and across the world, similarly affected, and how are progressives in these places reacting? . Is the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development-to be held in Johannesburg's wealthy Sandton suburb in August-September--a useful venue for aggrieved communities, workers, women and environmentalists to make their case for `Services for All!', or just another money-eating elite talk-shop? Will the New Partnership for Africa's Development's commitment to privatised infrastructure make it part of the problem? . Who are our international allies-and opponents--in campaigns to decommodify essential services? . What arguments are emerging, locally and globally, against our rights to essential services, and how do we rebut these? . What analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances will allow us to achieve economic, social and environmental justice? The Johannesburg conference sponsored by the Municipal Services Project--and many of our labour, community, environmental and think-tank allies--will educate, inspire and ready us for the next stages of
Earl Browder, Liquidationist
From Daniell Aaron's history of the Left and the literary intelligentsia. Preface by Alan Wald, Columbia Univ. Press. M.P. ...Maltz's article bristled with heresies. Had he written it during the united-front days of 1935-39 or in the war years of Soviet-American co-operation, when everybody from Monsignor Fulton Sheen to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker had kind words for the Stalin regime,27 it might have slipped by without commercial censure. It appeared, however, well after the famous Jacques Duclos letter of May 1945 presaged the end of peaceful collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union and the bankruptcy of Browderism. William Z. Foster now headed a reorganized Communist Party, which Browder had dissolved in May 1944 and had reconstituted as the Communist Political Association. A week before the publication of Maltz's article, Browder, once hailed as the beloved leader of our movement, was expelled from the party as a social imperialist. Maltz, in his innocence, had expressed his scorn for a historian he knew of who after reading the Duclos letter felt obliged to revise completely the book he was engaged upon. But Howard Fast did not agree with him, nor did Joseph North, Alvah Bessie, Mike Gold, John Howard Lawson, Samuel Sillen, or William Z. Foster, each of whom sharply reprimanded Maltz for his dangerous revisionism. Maltz's article, it seemed, was liquidationist, anti-progressive, and reactionary. In effect, he argued for a split between the citizen and the writer in saying that art and politics don't mix. Were this true, the Communist Party, the most political of movements, would be the most detrimental to the writer. In fact his description of the Duclos letter as another headline, and his plea that writers place human experience above politics, simply invited the writer to dispense with the party altogether. Most reprehensible to his critics was Maltz's conception of the self-contained writer, who irrespective of his social views might produce a work of true literary value.28 These counterarguments were advanced firmly and sometimes harshly be fellow writers, but no one was more anti-Maltzian than Maltz himself when he acknowledged his errors a few months later in the party press. His one-sided, non-dialectical approach, he confessed, had been revisionist in the worst sense. For what is revisionism? he asked. It is distorted Marxism, turning half-truths into total untruths, splitting ideology from its class base, denying the existence of the class struggle in society, converting Marxism from a science of society and struggle in apologetics for monopoly exploitation. Because of his mistaken zeal, the enemies of the Left had once more been able to raise the cry of artists in uniform. Clearly his fundamental errors indicated a failure to break deeply old habits of thought. He had severed the organic connection between art and ideology. He should have explained, as the histories of Céline, Farrell, and Dos Passos did so well, how a poisoned ideology and an increasingly sick soul can sap the talent and wreck the living fibre of a man's work. Although he thought his article better suited to the slanderous social-democratic New Leader than to The New Masses, he saw at least one merit in its publication: the intense answers it provoked marked a return to sound Marxist principles, which under the misleadership of Browder had been abandoned. Unable to attend a New Masses symposium on the subject of Art As a Weapon, at which his mistaken ideas were once again dissected, he sent a message of congratulation from California.29 Foster, who spoke at the symposium, had already pronounced the last words on the Maltz case in The New Masses. The evil genius, he said, was really Browder. Just as his imperialist theories set the party to tailing after the capitalists in the field of politics, so Maltz accepted the bourgeois propaganda to the effect that art is 'free' and has nothing to do with the class struggle. His views, said Foster, happily being corrected by Maltz himself, would make the artist merely an appendage and servant of the decadent capitalist system and its sterile art. Of course the party did not want to regiment the artists, but Maltz's incorrect assumptions had to be discussed with all the sharpness necessary to achieve theoretical clarity.30 If Foster's tone was benevolent, his words indicated plainly enough what the party expected from its artists. Isidor Schneider notwithstanding, political correctness was more important than being faithful to reality. The novelist and Spanish Civil War veteran Alvah Bessie expressed Foster's mind faithfully when he told Maltz: We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class-theory. Fosterism in 1946 doomed any hopes that Schneider and other New Masses editors may have entertained about the liberating of Left culture. Political tactics were elevated into
Rabbi Lerner's Call for Civil Disobedience
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 11:57:29 -0700 From: Michael Lerner [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Would you please send this out to all your email lists--because some people on those list may wish to join us, or be strengthened in their resolve to make public statements. Thanks. Rabbi Michael Lerner The TIKKUN Community Invites you to participate with us in CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN PROTEST OF US FAILURE TO INTERVENE in the Middle East -- AND CALLS FOR U.S. governement TO TAKE LEAD IN CREATING A UN INTERNATIONAL PEACE KEEPING FORCE TO INTERVENE, SEPARATE AND PROTECT PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELIS FROM EACH OTHER. ACTIONS IN D.C., NYC, AND SF ON THURSDAY, APRIL 11 Here is the overview of the coming days. Wednesday, April 10: 7:30 p.m. Talk by Michael Lerner about the need for an International Force to Intervene in the Middle East. Temple Shalom, 8401 Grubb Road (corner of East/West Highway), Chevy Chase Md. Thursday, April 11th 10:30 assemble at State Dept. 2201 C Street, N.W., Washington DC (meet at corner of 22nd C) 11:00 a.m. demonstration and possible civil disobedience--with Cornel West and Michael Lerner and others from the Tikkun Community. Civil disobedience will depend on events in the Middle East and the US stance--we are calling for the US, working through the UN, to constitute an Internation Force to Intervene. PLEASE NOTE: you don't have to get arrested to help make this demonstration important. Just come--there may not be arrests, but if there are, they will need lots of support. [WOULD YOU HELP US PLEASE BY CALLING NATIONAL MEDIA AND ASKING THEM TO COVDER THIS STORY OF A DEMONSTRATION DEMANDING US TO CONSTITUTE THROUGH THE UN AN INTERNATIONAL PEACE KEEPING FORCE TO MILITARILY INTERVENE AND SEPARATE AND PROTECT ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS FROM EACH OTHER. They can call Liat or Deb at 415 575 1200 for more information ] Here is the concrete information you may need: For Washington, D.C.: Meet Wednesday night, April 10, 2002. 7:30-9 p.m. Michael Lerner will speak on the topic Prophetic Witness: Direct Action to Stop the Killings in the Middle East at Temple Shalom, 8401 Grubb Road, Chevy Chase, Maryland (on East-West Highway close to 16th Street). Contact Judith Lelchook at (202) 782-4319 [daytime] or Yael Flusberg at (202) 745-2630 [evenings] for more information. Bring your friends. We look forward to seeing you there. **Thursday morning: April 11 Nonviolent Protest (and possibly civil disobedience) at The U.S. State Department (near Foggy Bottom subway station) Be there at 10:30 a.m. Action begins: 11 a.m. Only people committed to non-violence are welcome. Let us know if you are coming: [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you know you are planning to participate in nonviolent civil disobedience, please send us your name, name of contact person should you be arrested and their phone number and email, your driver's license or other i.d. number, your home address, and your home phone and email. Do not resist arrest. And come on Wednesday night to the event at Temple Shalom if that is at all possible for you. Contact us: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or call 415 575 1200 *** In NEW YORK CITY Thursday, April 11: Vigil at Israel Consulate with possible non-violent civil disobedience. Tikkun Community will follow thelead of John Deats,. of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. More info:Rev. Richard Deats Editor, Fellowship magazine Box 271 Nyack, NY 10960 845.358-4601. Fax 845-358-4924 Then, that evening, April 11, Rabbi Lerner will speak and meet with people interested in The Tikkun Community at the Church of St Paul and st. Martin, northeast corner of 86th and West End Ave, 7 p.m. Spread the word, please! And bring dessert! San Francisco: Thursday April 11 Israeli Consulate this Thursday at Noon at 456 Montgomery Street between Sacramento and California in downtown San Francisco, where we will hold a press conference during which we will present officials at the Consulate with a DECLARATION OF BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN END TO THE OCCUPATION AND FOR AN IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Possible non-violent civil disobedience,depending on world circumstances. Then, Sunday, April 21st: 1:30-6 p.m. West Coast Teach-In on The Middle East. Sponsored by The TIKKUN COMMUNITY in San Francisco (check the Calendar part of The TIKKUN COMMUNITY home page--screen down on www.tikkun.org-- in a few days for more details). *** Boston: Sunday April 14 Rabbi Lerner and Cornel West speak to The Tikkun Community of'New England. 1 p.m. at Belmont Methodist Church. Spiritual Transformation and Social Change American Jews and Christians Together Rabbi Michael Lerner - Responses by Harvard Professor Cornel West 7 Workshops on: Reform of the Catholic Church, Peace in the Middle East, Mandates for Peace and Justice
Re: Soweto anti-privatisation protesters shot/wounded and now in jail
Hi, Speaking of South Africa, I am trying to contact Mojalefa Ralekheto, a very valuable militant of the SouhAfrican Congress, and a former classmate of mine, now residing in South africa. If you happen to know his e-mail address please let me know. thanks. Ignacio
RE: re: Bureaucracy
Again Charles, read some sources like, The Communist Movement, 2 volumes, translated in the late 70's by Monthly Review Press, author is Spanish Communist Fernando Claudin and/or, Stalin and the European Communists, by Italian Communist historian, Paulo Spriono, published by Verso Books in the mid-90's. It has a chapter on one of your canonical works, The Short Course, of the CPSU, which as Eric Hobsbawm remarks was manditory reading for Communist cadre. Michael Pugliese Date Index RE: RE: Bureaucracy by michael pugliese 05 April 2002 01:04 UTC Thread Index Earl Browder, was ejected from the CPUSA after the publication in a French Communist journal of the, Duclos Letter, which accused Browder after the Teheran conference of '44 of being a liquidationist lackey of US imperialism. See the biographies/studies of Browder by James Ryan and Maurice Isserman. The latter has blurbs from Victor Navasky, hardly a Cold war Liberal, so I'd assume, it doesn't carry the virus of anti-Sovietism. Michael Pugliese P.S. George Charney's, Dorothy Healey's, Al Richmond's and Junius Scale's autobiographies as well as '56 reformist John Gate'es memoir are valuable in placing Browderism in the CPUSA in context.--- Original Message --- From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 4/4/02 3:39:30 PM I wrote: Applied to the CPUSA, the phrase democratic centralist involves an abuse of the word democratic. cb: Are you saying that the majority's votes were ignored in some election of Gus Hall ? Earl Browder ? John Reed ? Henry Winston ? Sam Webb ? on a provision of the Constitution ? Give me specific examples of where the vote of the majority was not followed in the CPUSA ? Actually, that was a typo. I meant to write the CPSU -- specifically referring to the period of the 1920s and after, since I have limited knowledge of the inner workings of the CPUSA. (That it was a typo makes sense in the context of the larger message: it was followed by the sentence The elections in the old USSR were a sham, while the members of the CP didn't have real democratic control over the leaders or over the Party Line.) But wasn't Earl Browder -- a long-term leader who was quite popular with the CPUSA's rank and file members -- kicked out of the leadership of the CPUSA for disagreeing with the Party Line handed down by Moscow? gotta go... Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Date Index Progressive Economists Network List Archives at CSF Subscribe to Progressive Economists Network Thread Index --- Original Message --- From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 4/8/02 8:45:17 AM If I reply to one message per day in this thread (as I'm constrained to do), it will continue until 2010. I haven't even read Miychi's missives yet... JD I wrote:But wasn't Earl Browder -- a long-term leader who was quite popular with the CPUSA's rank and file members -- kicked out of the leadership of the CPUSA for disagreeing with the Party Line handed down by Moscow? charles brown writes:On Browder, I was going to use him as an example of the ability to remove the very top leader in the CPUSA . He was General Secretary. in most historical interpretations, the top leader of the cpusa wasn't the real top leader, since the cpusa was subordinate to the comintern or cominform... (note: i do not believe that the cpusa was simply a puppet of the ussr. it had to also keep its own rank and file happy and so reflected their wishes to some extent. when they didn't as with the hitler/stalin pact or the secret speech of 1956, they lost members in droves. though the organization involved bureaucracy, it was not purely so, because of the role of the member's exit option, and to a lesser extent their votes and statements of opinion.) cb:There was a letter from a French, not Moscow, Communist , named DeClou (sp.) criticizing Browder's proposal that the CP become an educational organization rather than a political party. In general, that was termed liquidationism, liquidating the party... Most interpret that letter as a statement of the opinion of the leadership of the COMINTERN/FORM. That opinion had a very strong impact, indicating the power of that international, Moscow-centered, organization. JD
Re: Bureaucracy
http://www.frontpagemag.com/archives/leftism/two_evils.htm .,..The Soviet tie, according to Schrecker, along with the outrageous orders that the Party issued to its cadres, did not interfere with its ability to play a progressive role in American society and culture. The small but cunning word seems turns up frequently in Schrecker's account. She uses it to imply a distinction between appearance and reality, so that she can claim that in reality the Communists were not serving the needs of the Kremlin first and foremost. When it comes to specifics, however, the ludicrous nature of her argument becomes plain. Consider her discussion of the Duclos letter--a missive to the American Communist Party published in the French Communist Party's theoretical journal in April 1945, under the French Communist leader Jacques Duclos's name. In that letter, Duclos condemned Earl Browder; the leader of the American Communist Party since the 1930s, for revisionism, for abandoning the class struggle, and for preaching a doctrine of peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union at a time when imperialist war was looming on the horizon. Browder was quickly removed from his post. The broad Communist Political Association that he had created, as a social-democratic alternative to traditional Communist parties, was dissolved, and the official Communist Party was reconstituted. The Party leaders quickly condemned their recent hero in the harshest of terms. Browder himself was to argue that the Duclos letter was the first public declaration by Moscow of the coming Cold War. Schrecker writes that the so-called Duclos letter...--a supposedly Moscow- inspired criticism of the American party that the French Communist Jacques Duclos published in his party's theoretical journal in April 194--prompted the CP's leaders to change their line and drop Earl Browder. The speed of the about-face ... seemed to demonstrate Moscow's control. There's that word again: seemed. Schrecker- goes on to note that the FBI and witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee regularly referred to this document, as if this is all you need to know. Her intention, clearly, is to denigrate the notion of Soviet control. Unfortunately for Schrecker, Klehr and Haynes found conclusive evidence in the Party archives in Moscow that, as long suspected, the Duclos letter was conceived and written in Moscow. It was given to Duclos by the Comintern, most likely by Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian head of the Comintern in the 1930s and 1940s who was tried (and acquitted) for the Reichstag fire in 1933, or by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's right-hand man; and he was ordered to publish it. Klehr and Haynes present the documents that prove, as they write, that the article was not only written but published in Moscow in Russian; it was then translated into French and given to Duclos for attribution. The significance of the letter, as Klehr and Haynes explain, was that the party reversed its strategy from cooperation with established liberal and labor leaders to a policy of opposition to anyol1e who did no support American accommodation of Stalin's postwar goals. They speculate that, by having the French Communists appear to be the authors of the condemnation of Browder, the Soviets may have hoped to avoid alerting American leaders prematurely to the anticipated change in Soviet policy. They write that this new proof of the Duclos letter's Soviet origins does indeed lend additional weight to the view that it constituted the first salvo in Stalin's confrontation with the West.
Re: Re: Bureaucracy
Michael Pugliese cites Ronald Radosh: http://www.frontpagemag.com/archives/leftism/two_evils.htm They speculate that, by having the French Communists appear to be the authors of the condemnation of Browder, the Soviets may have hoped to avoid alerting American leaders prematurely to the anticipated change in Soviet policy. They write that this new proof of the Duclos letter's Soviet origins does indeed lend additional weight to the view that it constituted the first salvo in Stalin's confrontation with the West. Stalin's confrontation with the West? This is unreconstructed cold war nonsense from the turncoat Radosh. This dreadful review also includes the following observation: The Communists, who were an appendage of the Soviet Unions, were indeed a threat to American national interests. Those secret Communists who held high positions in the United States government, as well as key spots in the upper echelons of the Roosevelt administration could be expected to use their positions to further serve the interests of Moscow. In fact, even by Klehr's own account, the New Dealers and the Communists AGREED COMPLETELY about what constituted the American national interest, namely the election of Democrats to municipal, state and federal office. They had the same relation to the Democrats that DSA'ers have today, in fact. In chapter six of Klehr's Secret World of American Communism, you can read an NKVD document that comments on the cozy relationship established between Earl Browder and Franklin Roosevelt. FDR has congratulated Browder and the CP for conducting its political line skillfully and helping US military efforts. Roosevelt is particularly pleased with the battle of New Jersey Communists against a left-wing Labor Party formation there. He was happy that the CPUSA had been able to unite various factions of the Democratic Party against the left-wing electoral opposition and render it ineffectual. The crazed anticommunist Radosh interprets CP presence in the New Deal as boring away from within. In reality, these were not termites but steel rods holding up the whole rotten liberal edifice. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Venezuela
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/662026/posts yahoo.com | Mon Apr 8, 2002 - 3:01 PM ET | Pascal Fletcher,Reuters CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan troops tightened security at oil facilities on Monday as stoppages by state oil workers halted exports, jolting the world's No. 4 oil exporter and throttling the economic lifeblood of President Hugo Chavez's government. Armed Forces chief Gen. Lucas Rincon said that National Guard soldiers who routinely protect oilfields, refineries and oil export ports in Venezuela were being reinforced by other units of the armed forces. What we want to do is guarantee peace and quiet, Rincon told a news conference. The military protection was stepped up as shipping and trade sources said the escalating six-week-old dispute by executives and employees of the state oil giant PDVSA had halted Venezuelan oil shipments. Production was also being cut as storage facilities were full to the brim, they added. However, Energy Minister Alvaro Silva and PDVSA president Gaston Parra insisted oil industry operations were normal. The revolt by the dissident PDVSA staff, who oppose management changes made by Chavez, put intense pressure on the president a day ahead of a 24-hour national strike called by opposition labor and business chiefs. The disruption of oil exports, which account for a third to a half of Venezuelan government revenues, clamps a heavy economic squeeze on the left-wing populist leader, who is battling a wave of opposition to his three-year-old rule. But Chavez, a pugnacious former paratrooper, has shown no sign of backing down and Sunday used a live television broadcast to sack seven dissident executives in PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela), and to forcibly retire 12 more. The government has promised to guarantee both international oil deliveries and internal gasoline supplies. Most gas stations appeared to be still operating normally Monday. The president, who has threatened to send in troops if PDVSA, Latin America's biggest oil company, is brought to a complete halt, accused the protesters of subversion bordering on terrorism and said security forces were on the alert. Chavez's words have thrown more fuel on the fire, one local shipping agent, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. The abrupt sackings, announced by Chavez on television as he blew a soccer referee's whistle, infuriated the disgruntled state oil company employees, who said they would intensify protests and stoppages. Today, tomorrow and the next day, our actions are going to be even more radical, Eddie Ramirez, one of the PDVSA staff sacked Sunday, told reporters in Caracas, surrounded by a crowd of protesting colleagues chanting, We are not afraid. Three years after he won elections with widespread support, Chavez is confronting a storm of criticism from political foes, business and labor chiefs, dissident military officers, and the opposition- dominated media. The president, who in 1992 tried unsuccessfully to seize power in a botched military coup, defends his self-proclaimed revolution as a noble campaign to help the poor. But critics accuse him of trying to introduce a Cuban-style leftist regime in Venezuela. OIL INDUSTRY IN TURMOIL Chavez has repeatedly rejected demands that he revoke the appointment of five new PDVSA board members named in late February. The dissidents complain the appointments were based on political loyalty to the president, not on merit. Local shipping and trade sources said the revolt in PDVSA was severely hitting production, refining and exports although there were conflicting reports of the precise impact. Nothing is going out (in shipments), one private trader told Reuters, saying exports had been halted from the main loading terminals at Puerto La Cruz, El Palito and Paraguana. Other estimates said shipments had been reduced to around 15 percent to 20 percent of normal levels. There isn't a complete halt yet, although it looks as though it's headed that way, the Caracas-based shipping agent said. Venezuela's oil production, which normally runs at 2.6 million barrels per day (BPD), was also being cut back, the sources said. You can't produce for long if you're not exporting, the trader said. Storage facilities are full to the brim, he added. But PDVSA president Gaston Parra insisted oil output and exports were being maintained. There will be no stoppage in the country and especially not in PDVSA, Parra said. He's lying, the shipping agent said. PDVSA chief Parra told state television that the 960,000 bpd Amuay Cardon refinery complex, Venezuela's largest and a key supplier of gasoline and heating oil to the United States, was working normally. But a PDVSA spokesman from the refinery in the Paraguana Peninsula told Reuters the complex was reducing its throughput to minimum levels and that oil shipments had been halted. What are we going to load up? There are no ships and no business, he added. FEARS OF STREET VIOLENCE On top of
RE: Re: Venezuela
I wasn't criticizing you, but rather some folks on the left who are too pat in their analyses. I just think we have to (1) realize that the CIA is important while (2) being clear that sometimes leaders like Chavez antagonize important constituencies independent of the CIA's efforts. Of course, both sides of this equation play a role. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Eugene Coyle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, April 08, 2002 9:39 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:24741] Re: Venezuela Jim, I don't see what you are saying here. Chile too ... is a country with a social system (classes, etc) ... So what? Nebraska has a social system, classes, etc. -- does that mean the CIA can't depose the governor? Or that it can? The steps unfolding in Venezuala are reminiscent of Chile. Coups are supported by outside forces -- whether it is anchoring a warship off the harbor or orchestrating various and successive elements -- military, labor, or however the support is expressed. Did you think I meant that the CIA walked in and decided to replace Chavez without a fertile local setting? I didn't. Gene Coyle Devine, James wrote: Put Venezuela on the list, where now some labor leaders seem to be taking their turn in following a script out of CIA headquarters. Gene Coyle while the CIA is probably involved, I think it's a mistake to see this solely in terms of CIA machinations. Venezuela is a country with a social system (classes, etc.) and this is what both CIA and Chavez have to work with. Simply pointing to the CIA is superficial. (In any event, history -- i.e., the 1973 Chilean coup -- doesn't repeat itself.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
BLS Daily Report
BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2002: The unemployment rate edged up 0.2 percentage points to 5.7 percent in March, but employers added 58,000 workers to their payrolls, further proof that a recovery is under way, according to figures released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manufacturing payroll figures fell by 38,000 in March as hours worked jumped 0.8 percent. Construction payrolls declined 37,000, and small declines were seen in retail, wholesale, transportation, and finance payrolls. Help supply services added 69,000. This was the second consecutive month of job growth in the industry that lost nearly a fifth of its jobs from September 2000 through January 2002 (Daily Labor Report, page D-1, Text E-10). The nation's jobless rate rose last month, but the number of payroll jobs increased and there were other signs that U.S. labor markets are stabilizing after last year's recession. The unemployment rate increased sharply late last year after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The rate reached a peak of 5.8 percent in December, fell to 5.6 percent in January and 5.5 percent in February, before going up to 5.7 percent last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. Meanwhile, non-farm employers added 58,000 jobs to payrolls last month, the first increase in 8 months, after cutting them by 2,000 in February. The February figure was revised downward significantly from the original estimate of a 66,000 gain (John M. Berry, The Washington Post, April 6, page E1). The Labor Department reported yesterday that the unemployment rate rebounded to 5.7 percent last month, erasing the improvement since January and clearly suggesting that the growing economy is not yet benefiting workers. Still, the March numbers were laced with evidence of growth. Employers expanded their payrolls on a seasonally adjusted basis by 58,000 jobs, a relatively meager gain but the first monthly increase since July. Temporary-help agencies added workers at a rapid clip, a signal that companies need people to meet rising demand, but are not yet willing to hire more permanent employees. Manufacturers piled on the overtime, and layoffs declined, suggesting that companies, expecting better times, are becoming more reluctant to downsize (Louis Uchitelle in The New York Times, April 6, page A1). Recession wary employers are beginning to hire again, but with a caution that shows the recovery faces stiff headwinds. Aside from agricultural jobs, payrolls rose 58,000 in March from February, the first increase in 8 months, the Department of Labor said Friday. But while the improvement was encouraging, the overall picture hasn't changed much: Job creation remains tepid (The Wall Street Journal, page A2). The Wall Street Journal's feature Tracking the Economy (page A2) shows import prices for March, due to be released by BLS Thursday, are expected to go up 0.6 percent according to the Consensus Forecast, in contrast to the decline of 0.1 percent last month. The Producer Price Index for March, to be announced Friday, is expected to move up 0.7 percent, compared to a 0.2 increase percent in February. The Producer Price Index excluding food and energy for March is expected to go up 0.1 percent, in compared to the 0.0 percent of the previous month. Carl Steidtmann, chief economist of Deloitte Research, jointly owned by the accounting firm Deloitte Touch and Deloitte Consulting, is said by The Wall Street Journal's The Outlook column (page A1) to have compared changes in consumer confidence and consumer spending over the past 20 years. His finding: There is very little, if any, relationship between confidence and spending. He says that spending and confidence are driven by a different set of factors. Specifically, politics, disasters and war drive confidence, Steidtmann says, while cash flow drives spending. But Ken Goldstein, a economist at the Conference Board which publishes the Consumer Confidence Index, concedes that his index won't tell investors whether spending will rise by 1 or 2 percent in the future, but when it comes to providing an overall sense of whether the consumer market is building or losing momentum, this thing works like a charm. If that's the case, consumer spending could surge in coming months along with the booming confidence numbers. The Conference Board's latest survey surged 15 points in March to 110.2, the highest level since the September terrorist attacks. The Michigan index grew by five points to 95.7, the highest level since December 2000. Salaries for the nation's teachers barely kept pace with living costs in the 1990s, rising 31 percent to about $43,000, the nation's largest teachers union -- the National Education Association -- says in its annual report on state spending on education. The report says teachers' salaries rose 0.5 percent from 1990 to 2000 when inflation is taken into account. In many states, the union said, teachers lost ground to
Re: Top Japan banks seen posting 01-02 net loss
How is this news? I have been hearing for some time now that the Japanese banking system was in disaster mode. And yet it seems to be surprising that they will not make a profit. What am I missing? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Bureaucracy
I'm not sure that we have much to gain by rehashing the old debates about Stalinist bureaucracy. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Iraq-Venezuela-Oil
a 24-hour general strike in support of the Petroleos de Venezuela dissidents. Mexico's Energy Ministry declined to comment Monday on Iraq's decision to suspend crude oil exports for a month. Mexico, one of the top four suppliers of crude oil to the United States, agreed in January to cut its crude exports by 100,000 barrels a day as part of an effort by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other non-OPEC producers to keep prices up amid a drop in global demand. State oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, exported 1.58 million barrels a day in the first two months of this year, of which 1.45 million barrels daily went to customers in the Americas, mostly the United States. Full at: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storycid=506506e=11u=/a p/20020408/ap_wo_en_ge/world_oil_22
Economists vs. IMF???
Mark Weisbrot wrote this letter. They are trying to collect economists' signatures. If you are interested, reply to the address at the bottom, not to me or the list. An Open Letter From Economists on the Crisis in Argentina We, the undersigned economists, express our concern that the IMF is pressuring the Argentine government to adopt fiscal policies that may aggravate the worst economic crisis in that nation's history. Most importantly, at the IMF's urging, the government is about to cut about 14 percent (or 2.7 percent of GDP) out of its central government budget, as well as $3.5 billion (1.3 percent of GDP) from provincial budgets. The effect of such budget cuts could very well aggravate the downturn of Argentina's economy, and delay its recovery. The Argentine economy has been in recession for nearly four years, and unemployment is more than 22 percent and rising. The banking and financial system is also in severe crisis. Rather than insist on draconian spending cuts in this situation, the IMF should arrange, together with other creditors, a moratorium on government debt service payments. This moratorium should continue at least until the economy has returned to normal growth. Since the central government has been running a primary budget surplus, a moratorium on debt service payments would enable the government to live within its means, without having to resort to spending cuts that could prolong the recession and hurt the most vulnerable among the Argentine population. Marya Murray Diaz Center for Economic and Policy Research 1621 Connecticut Ave., NW Ste. 500 Washington, DC 20009 (202) 293-5380 ext. 208 Fax: (202) 822-1199 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.cepr.net -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Turkey
With Turkey qualify as too big to fail within the context of the war on terrorism? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
