Re: Weber & the 'Euroslackers'
Yes, total rubbish. To add insult to injury, Ferguson mentions "vindication of Weber" several times. To judge from the article, Ferguson either never read Weber's book or read it so long ago as an undergrad that he has only the vague idea that it had something to do with the work ethic and protestantism. Weber's concluding quotation from Goethe (I believe it was) is apt: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." Ian Murray wrote, [lord what rot] [NYTimes] June 8, 2003 Why America Outpaces Europe (Clue: The God Factor) By NIALL FERGUSON Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Asian auto production
The Japan Times: June 7, 2003 Chinese competition will hurt Japan car firms: World Bank SINGAPORE (Kyodo) Japan's automobile industry will shrink in the long run due to fierce competition from China, the World Bank said in a report released Thursday. "Our analysis projects a contraction of automobile production in Japan and the newly industrializing economies," the World Bank said in its report "East Asia Integrates." The 264-page report released by the World Bank's Singapore office says China's current plan to restructure its auto industry following its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization is expected to make it a more efficient assembler of vehicles and eventually an exporter, leading to a contraction in production in other newly industrializing economies of the region as well as Japan. "This prospect could provoke a major reorganization of the industry across the region," it says. In addition, the report says China will also make inroads into Japan's position as a key center of production-sharing operations in East Asia. It notes that although Japan will maintain its position as a hub, originating about one-third of all regional exports of components for assembly, "China is finding niches," with its exports of parts and components rising by almost $20 billion from 1996 to 2001. Another sector to be hard hit is the textile and apparel industry. It says the garment industries in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong "will be squeezed," especially in the North America and European Union markets. The report says the abolition of import quotas on Chinese textiles and apparel in key markets in 2005 will make China a formidable competitor. It says the growth of these countries' textile exports to India and Southeast Asia, including to Vietnam and the Philippines, are also expected to drop as their garment industries are also hit by competition from China in third markets. However, the report also says that a major impact of China's entry into the WTO is that China will become a more attractive location for Japanese investments, mainly because "some of the concerns about China's weak legal and administrative environment for foreign investment are likely to be addressed in line with WTO accession." It says that overall, the industrialized and newly industrialized economies in East Asia will benefit from China's accession to the WTO. The report does not take into account the expected impact of the SARS epidemic. "We are currently viewing SARS as a temporary shock whose impact has been more on the demand side and therefore affected service, tourism, retail," said Homi Kharas, the World Bank's chief economist. "But it's much too early to think whether SARS has affected supply-side and investment decisions. "Right now, that impact would be quite small compared with the demand-side impact."
Re: Fwd: Waiting for Godot
>From Michael's response I will single out two sentences: > I think that Sabri's note suggests that we don't have > a great difference among us. Yes. This is what I think. In details maybe you differ but, in my opnion, it is not the details but the "totality" what matters. This is why I call myself an anarcho-Leninist with a touch of Yunus Emre, the sufi humanist, or, the anarcho-sufi as I once introduced him to this list. Now, some anarchist and some Leninist friends will get angry with me because I said this but what the heck. I even respect many reformists and even had been accused by many of my "revolutionary" friends of being a social democrat. What is most bothersome to me is that I am none of these. > At the same time, Clinton clearly demonstrated the hollowness > of the minimalist strategy, significantly helping to move the > center of gravity to the right. For reasons similar to the one above and more, at this point I have no hope from the Democrats in the US. Maybe you American progressives, whatever this means, should look beyond the existing two party system and try to build a party which is not only an alternative to the Republicans and the Democrats to but also to the existing Greens. Clearly, such a party should neither be Leninist nor Zapatistaist. It is up to you, of course, to decide what kind of a party to build so I stop here. Keep in mind however that whatever you do here will greatly affect what happens to us, that is, the rest of the world. Best, Sabri
Weber & the 'Euroslackers'
[lord what rot] [NYTimes] June 8, 2003 Why America Outpaces Europe (Clue: The God Factor) By NIALL FERGUSON OXFORD, England - It was almost a century ago that the German sociologist Max Weber published his influential essay "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." In it, Weber argued that modern capitalism was "born from the spirit of Christian asceticism" in its specifically Protestant form - in other words, there was a link between the self-denying ethos of the Protestant sects and the behavior patterns associated with capitalism, above all hard work. Many scholars have built careers out of criticizing Weber's thesis. Yet the experience of Western Europe in the past quarter-century offers an unexpected confirmation of it. To put it bluntly, we are witnessing the decline and fall of the Protestant work ethic in Europe. This represents the stunning triumph of secularization in Western Europe - the simultaneous decline of both Protestantism and its unique work ethic. Just as Weber's 1904 visit to the United States convinced him that his thesis was right, anyone visiting New York today would have a similar experience. For in the pious, industrious United States, the Protestant work ethic is alive and well. Its death is a peculiarly European phenomenon - and has grim implications for the future of the European Union on the eve of its eastward expansion, perhaps most economically disastrous for the "new" Europe. Many economists have missed this vindication of Weber because they are focused on measures of productivity, like output per hour worked. On that basis, the Western European economies have spent most of the past half-century spectacularly catching up with the United States. But what the productivity numbers don't reveal is the dramatic divergence over two decades between the amount of time Americans work and the amount of time Western Europeans work. By American standards, Western Europeans are astonishingly idle. According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average working American spends 1,976 hours a year on the job. The average German works just 1,535 - 22 percent less. The Dutch and Norwegians put in even fewer hours. Even the British do 10 percent less work than their trans-Atlantic cousins. Between 1979 and 1999, the average American working year lengthened by 50 hours, or nearly 3 percent. But the average German working year shrank by 12 percent. Yet even these figures understate the extent of European idleness, because a larger proportion of Americans work. Between 1973 and 1998 the percentage of the American population in employment rose from 41 percent to 49 percent. But in Germany and France the percentage fell, ending up at 44 and 39 percent. Unemployment rates in most Northern European countries are also markedly higher than in the United States. Then there are the strikes. Between 1992 and 2001, the Spanish economy lost, on average, 271 days per 1,000 employees as a result of strikes. For Denmark, Italy, Finland, Ireland and France, the figures range between 80 and 120 days, compared with fewer than 50 for the United States. All this is the real reason that the American economy has surged ahead of its European competitors in the past two decades. It is not about efficiency. It is simply that Americans work more. Europeans take longer holidays and retire earlier; and many more European workers are either unemployed or on strike. How to explain this sharp divergence? Why have West Europeans opted for shorter working days, weeks, months, years and lives? This is where Weber's thesis comes up trumps: the countries where the least work is done in Europe turn out to be those that were once predominantly Protestant. While the overwhelmingly Catholic French and Italians work about 15 to 20 percent fewer hours a year than Americans, the more Protestant Germans and Dutch and the wholly Protestant Norwegians work 25 to 30 percent less. What clinches the Weber thesis is that Northern Europe's declines in working hours coincide almost exactly with steep declines in religious observance. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, less than 10 percent of the population now attend church at least once a month, a dramatic decline since the 1960's. (Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the population go to church on a monthly basis.) In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of religious attitudes, 49 percent of Danes, 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes said God did not matter to them. In North America, by comparison, 82 percent of respondents said God was "very important." So the decline of work in Northern Europe has occurred more or less simultaneously with the decline of Protestantism. Quod erat demonstrandum indeed! Weber's vindication has profound implications for the next year's enlargement of the European Union, when the Baltic States, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and t
another free marekteer looking for handout
[yet another iteration on the socialization of risks/costs and the corporatization of gains] [NYTimes] June 9, 2003 The Man Pushing America to Get on the Internet Faster By MATT RICHTEL SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 3 - The United States, where the Internet was invented, now falls behind Japan, Korea and Canada in deploying high-speed Internet access in homes and businesses. But advocates for quicker transfer of e-mail, Web site content and music files, take note: Peter K. Pitsch is on the case. Mr. Pitsch is a self-described staunch free-market Republican who once served as chief of staff for the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Today, he is the top lobbyist for the Intel Corporation and a coalition of the technology companies in their efforts to press the government for a national policy as crucial to general economic growth - one that would accelerate the spread of broadband, or high-speed, Internet access. Of course, the technology industry has a particular interest in this issue, aside from wanting to see increased American productivity. It sees much of its future growth connected to the deployment of high-speed access, and the entertainment, music and software that will be able to reach consumers on upgraded networks. The topic of a national broadband policy will be central to discussions held at the annual conference and trade show of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association in Chicago, which ends June 11, with participants including executives like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Richard D. Parsons of AOL Time Warner and Mel Karmazin of Viacom. The industry coalition had a recent success in persuading the F.C.C. to modify its rules so that telecommunications companies will not be forced to lease their high-speed access lines to competitors. But it continues to face a difficult battle to get Congress to grant tax credits to companies building next-generation Internet access networks. For telecommunications companies, making the investment in broadband access is not without risk. The costs for building high-speed networks are enormous, whether through wires on the ground or through wireless networks. Moreover, the companies must market the concept to consumers who are already paying monthly fees for home telephone, cellphone and cable television service and may not want to pay yet more for high-speed access. To mitigate the risk, the industry has turned to the government for help, and Mr. Pitsch has led the charge. "He is the godfather of telecom policy among technology companies in Washington," said Bruce P. Mehlman, the assistant secretary for technology policy in the Commerce Department, and a former lobbyist for Cisco Systems Inc. People who know Mr. Pitsch say he is point man in the lobbying push because of his Washington background, personality and energy. But his ability to lead can also be credited to Intel's neutral role in this competitive field. Whereas cable, telephone and wireless companies are competing against one another to deploy high-speed access, Intel has no stake in which particular technologies will thrive. Thus it appears to have more credibility with federal regulators. But that does not mean broadband growth is less important to Intel's future. For Intel, more high-speed access means more consumer demand for fast computers and that means greater demand for the microprocessors that Intel makes. "One of the fundamental drivers for faster and faster microprocessors will be high-quality, affordable broadband," Mr. Pitsch said during a recent interview at Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara. The bottom line, he said, is that Intel thinks high-speed Internet users will make up its future customer base. "The effect on us is indirect. But its huge," he said. Today, about one-third of American households with Internet access have high-speed service - an increase of 50 percent over a year ago, according to a report issued last month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group. But the report also found that the rate of adoption of broadband was unlikely to remain as high as it has been because many people are content with the slower telephone dial-up connections to the Internet. Whether the current rate of adoption is fast enough depends on whom you ask. The F.C.C., which is charged by Congress with reporting periodically on the status of technology adoption, concluded in its most recent report, in February 2002, that high-speed Internet adoption was on pace. "Over all, we find that advanced telecommunications is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely manner," the report said, adding that subscriber levels had increased "significantly." As of the end of 2002, the cable industry had invested some $70 billion in upgrading its networks to provide advanced digital service, including high-speed Internet access. And it is expected to invest an additional $10 billion this year, said Robert Sa
Re: outsourcing the State redux
- Original Message - From: "k hanly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 7:14 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] outsourcing the State redux > Hmmm. Fighting terrorism by terrorising workers. > Fighting terrorism by removing legal rights. Fighting terrorism by > destroying the UN and International Law. > What's next? > > Cheers, Ken Hanly > Invading Canada to stop BC bud from destroying young WASP's. Ian
Re: outsourcing the State redux
Hmmm. Fighting terrorism by terrorising workers. Fighting terrorism by removing legal rights. Fighting terrorism by destroying the UN and International Law. What's next? Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: "Ian Murray" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 11:41 PM Subject: outsourcing the State redux > [yet more evidence that Conservative is a pretty meaningless label...] > > > Overhaul of Federal Workforce Sought > By Christopher Lee > Washington Post Staff Writer > Sunday, June 8, 2003; Page A01 > > > The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, is pressing > Congress to enact the biggest overhaul of the federal civil service system > in a quarter-century. > > In the name of reshaping the federal bureaucracy to better counter global > terrorism, administration officials are seeking the authority to rewrite > long-standing pay and personnel rules governing 746,000 civilian employees > at the Department of Defense. The powers would be similar to those won by > the administration last year in a contentious battle over the formation of > the Department of Homeland Security, which has about 180,000 employees. >
destructive creation
Title: destructive creation after a slow start, the following article is pretty good, except for its constant mis-use of the word "efficiency" to mean "lowest private costs of business" (short-term profit maximization). June 8, 2003/New York TIMES Magazine The Sink-or-Swim Economy By HARRIS COLLINGWOOD What is it with this economy, anyway? Going strictly by the numbers, the most recent recession has been mild in comparison to previous downturns. Since the economy peaked in March 2001, the major markers of economic health -- industrial output, personal income and wholesale and retail sales -- have all traced smaller declines than in the average post-World War II recession. That's why many economists, among them Jeffrey Frankel, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, are inclined to dismiss today's complaints about economic stress and anxiety. ''People got spoiled by the 90's boom,'' Frankel says. ''They forgot what recessions are like.'' But Frankel concedes there's something odd about this latest economic decline. After a short-lived retreat in 2001, gross domestic product after adjustment for inflation actually grew throughout 2002 and managed a 1.9 percent gain in the first quarter of 2003. Yet the economy shed more than 500,000 jobs between January and April. And as Frankel notes dryly, ''Wages are not doing so well, either.'' The latest evidence of wage stagnation: the Labor Department's report last month that the average weekly paycheck, once inflation and seasonal factors are considered, shrank 0.3 percent from March to April of this year. All the contradictory signals have economists wondering what manner of beast stands before them. ''In recent economic history,'' says Robert Hall, an economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, ''there's been nothing quite like this continued modest G.D.P. growth combined with continuing declines in employment.'' Different economic indicators have pointed in opposite directions before, of course, but something other than the usual short-term statistical noise is at work here. What's weird, and deeply unsettling, about today's economy is that the big picture bears so little resemblance to the small picture, that is, to everyday life. The big picture shows the economy tracing a gentle, rather lazy slope -- a few tenths of a percentage point up or down, nothing too drastic. Closer to ground level, meanwhile, the action is nonstop and frenetic. At any given moment, some people and businesses are enjoying outrageous good fortune. Others are falling under a rain of slings and arrows. But when the people making money faster than they can count it are placed, statistically speaking, alongside the people reduced to counting every penny, all that up-and-down activity averages out to something that looks like stability. Economists have a term for the local-level volatility that affects individual firms but doesn't show up in the big-picture statistics. They call it ''idiosyncratic volatility,'' and it is the signature of our economic age. Not to mention the source of much of our anxiety. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, noted our idiosyncratically volatile time in a 2002 speech in which he reviewed the behavior of the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Technological innovation, as well as deregulation and trade liberalization, ''fostered a pronounced expansion of competition and creative destruction,'' he observed. ''The result through the 1990's of all this seeming-heightened instability for individual businesses, somewhat surprisingly, was an apparent reduction in the volatility of output and in the frequency and amplitude of business cycles for the macroeconomy.'' Translated from Fed-speak, that means that for the past 20 years, individual companies have prospered or failed, entire industries have grown up while others have vanished and, when all that frantic sinking and swimming in the economic waters is plotted as a graph of overall output, it looks like a gently rising curve. Meanwhile, the periods of economic expansion keep getting longer, while the recessions get shorter and less severe. That's the sign of a robust system, says Michael Mauboussin, who is paid by Credit Suisse First Boston to think big thoughts about markets and financial behavior. ''It takes two essential features to make a system robust,'' he says. ''You need diversity, and you need interaction. That describes the American economy. You have diversity, a lot of local agents doing their own thing based on local information. And these agents interact in the marketplace; at some point, two agents will meet at a price. Then you have a big diversity in outcomes -- some buy, some get bought, some win, some lose -- and that makes for a robust, stable system.'' A few lines of John Ashbery's seem to apply: ''The whole is stable within/Instability . . . /a Ping-Pong ball/Secure on its jet of water.'' Recent economic and technol
Interetsting Conference in Turkey
Confrerence to be held in Ankara on september 6-9, 2003. Comradely erdogan Conference web page: www.erc.metu.edu.tr KEYNOTE ADDRESSES Mario Blejer (Bank of England, Former Governor of the Central Bank of Argentina) http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/ccbs/ Kevin Hoover (University of California at Davis, USA) http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/kdhoover/ Adrian Pagan (The Australian National University, Australia) http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/staff/adrian/ Ellen Meiksins Wood (York University, Canada) *** INVITED LECTURES THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GLOBALISATION Aijaz Ahmad (York University, Canada) http://www.yorku.ca/polisci/faculty/ahmad.html Henry Liu (Liu Investment Group, New York, USA) David McNally (York University, Canada) http://www.yorku.ca/polisci/faculty/mcnally.html RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS Al Campbell (University of Utah, USA) http://www.econ.utah.edu/facstaf1.htm George C. Comninel (York University, Canada) http://www.yorku.ca/polisci/faculty/comninel.html Gerard Dumenil (CEPREMAP, France) http://www.cepremap.ens.fr/~levy/ Korkut Erturk (University of Utah, USA) http://www.econ.utah.edu/korkut/index.htm Hannes Lacher (Eastern Mediterranean University) http://ir.emu.edu.tr/astaff/hlacher.htm Peter Meiksins (Cleveland State University, USA) http://www.csuohio.edu/sociology/peter.htm Alfredo Saad-Filho (SOAS, University of London, UK) http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staffinfo.cfm?contactid=52 INVITED SESSION: REVISITING MACROECONOMICS IN THE AGE OF FINANCE Organised by: IDEAs (International Development Economics Associates) C.P. Chandrasekhar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) Prabhat Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) Erinç Yeldan (Bilkent University, Turkey) http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~yeldane/ MACROECONOMICS, GROWTH AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY Pierre-Richard Agénor (TBC)(Yale University and the World Bank, USA) http://www1.worldbank.org/wbiep/macro-program/agenor/index_agenor.htm Alfred Kleinknecht (Technische Universiteit, Delft, The Netherlands) http://www.flexcom.org/myfiles/cv_kleinknecht.htm Daniel Malkin (OECD, France) Branko Milanovic (The World Bank) http://econ.worldbank.org/staff/2500/ Bart Verspagen (ECIS and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) http://www.tm.tue.nl/ecis/bart/ MONEY, FINANCE AND BANKING Pierpaolo Benigno (New York University, USA) http://homepages.nyu.edu/~pb50/ Philipp Hartmann (European Central Bank) Monique Jeanblanc (Université d'Evry Val d'Essonne, France) http://www.maths.univ-evry.fr/pages_perso/jeanblanc/ Graciela L. Kaminsky (George Washington University, USA) http://home.gwu.edu/%7Egraciela/index.htm Ike Mathur (Southern Illinois University, USA) http://www.cba.siu.edu/faculty/profiles/mathuri.htm Paolo Pesenti (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, USA) http://www.ny.frb.org/rmaghome/economist/pesenti/contact.html Liliana Rojas-Suarez http://www.cgdev.org/fellows/rojas-suarez.html ECONOMETRICS Karim Abadir (TBC, York University, UK) http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kma4/abadir.htm Badi H. Baltagi (Texas A&M University, USA) http://econweb.tamu.edu/baltagi/ Anindya Banerjee (European University Institute, Florence, Italy) http://www.iue.it/Personal/Banerjee/Welcome.html Luc Bauwens (Université Catholique de Louvain, CORE, Belgium) http://www.core.ucl.ac.be/econometrics/Bauwens/CV/lb.htm Hans-Martin Krolzig (TBC) (Oxford University, UK) http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/research/hendry/krolzig/default.htm Jan Magnus (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) http://center.uvt.nl/staff/magnus/ Marius Ooms (Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands) http://www.feweb.vu.nl/econometriclinks/ooms/ AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS Hartley W. Furtan (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) http://www.usask.ca/agriculture/agec/people/faculty/furtan.htm Richard S. Gray (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) http://www.usask.ca/agriculture/agec/people/faculty/gray.htm -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
revisionism and history
[They're getting anxious...] "The essence of all power is the right to define with authority, and the major stake of the power struggle is the appropriation or retaining of the right to define." [Zygmunt Bauman] === Powell, Rice Defend U.S. Intelligence on Iraq By Vicki Allen Reuters Sunday, June 8, 2003; 4:01 PM WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Top Bush administration officials on Sunday rejected accusations they exaggerated threats posed by Iraq's weapons, calling the charges "outrageous" and the results of "revisionist history." Appearing on morning news programs, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said there was broad consensus in the intelligence community that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they believe that intelligence was sound. "We have no doubt whatsoever that over the last several years, they have retained such weapons or retained the capability to start up production of such weapons," Powell said on CNN's Late Edition. "We also know they are masters of deceit and masters of hiding these things, and so a little patience is required," he said. Powell called it "really somewhat outrageous on the part of some critics to say that this was all bogus." Concerns have been rising worldwide that the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction described by the administration has not been found in the weeks after the war that toppled former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Critics questioning whether the administration used faulty or manipulated intelligence as grounds for war point to a Defense Intelligence Agency report from September of 2002, disclosed last week, that said the agency did not have enough "reliable information" on Iraq's alleged chemical weapons. Powell and Rice said that quote was taken out of context, giving a misleading impression of the report. A line "talked about not having the evidence of current facilities and current stockpiling. The very next sentence says that it had information that (chemical) weapons had been dispersed to units," Powell said on Fox News Sunday. Rice, on ABC's This Week, said a national intelligence estimate in October -- which the DIA signed -- said Iraq likely had as much as 100 to 500 metric tons of chemical agents. "There's a very large body of evidence here that connects together to paint a picture of a very dangerous regime with very dangerous weapons that had deceived the world for 12 years, that had allowed international sanctions to stay on, rather than come clean about what it was doing," she said. Rice several times said critics were using "revisionist history" to question whether Iraq had weapons that threatened the United States. Powell also defended U.S. charges that two mobile laboratories were for biological agents, saying on Fox that "my best justification" for that was "if they were not biological labs, I can assure you, the very next morning, the Iraqis would have pulled them out and presented them" to U.N. weapons inspectors and the international press corps.
Re: Fwd: Waiting for Godot
I think that Sabri's note suggests that we don't have a great difference among us. I myself have offered policy suggestions to Democratic politicians -- but never with any success. Even so, these politicians could never hope to accomplish anything without some sort of militants acting behind them. I don't fully understand what happened in Italy. Up until the time of the Red Brigades, I thought that the left was in control in Italy, although the Christian Democrats were in charge of the government. I was under the impression that the CIA had a hand in the Red Brigades, but such things can never be proven. At the same time, Clinton clearly demonstrated the hollowness of the minimalist strategy, significantly helping to move the center of gravity to the right. In this sense, he helped to make the current Repug strategy seem respectable. Within the context of current electoral politics, Charles Grassley seems like a flaming radical. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Fwd: Waiting for Godot
Aldo in his first mail: > In a years time, a serious Democratic candidate may > be facing down the lonely ranger. We dont know who > the candidate will be. But hell need good economic > programs in a hurry. Someone has to prepare the ammunition, > and keep it dry. FDR had such a team of academic advisors. > We have no FDR (yet but dont worry, the opportunity makes > the man) but we need the programs now. They cannot be > improvised. While I agree with Jim in that neither him nor Ian nor Michael said anything about "mounting tide of revolution," I agree also with Aldo in that if and when such a Democratic candidate emerges he or she will need ammunition. However, I don't think most of the economists on this list are fit for providing him/her with that ammunition. It is highly unlikely that they will make it to the next FDR's team of academic advisors. Put differently, the likelihood of them making it to the next FDR's team of academic advisors is no larger than the likelihood of Louis Proyect making it to his/her team of speech writers. I guess this is why I like the economists on this list better. Best, Sabri
Re: Fwd: Waiting for Godot
Title: RE: [PEN-L] Fwd: Waiting for Godot >Jim, Ian, and Michael in different ways and words all refer to the mounting tide of revolution as a necessary precondition for success. Till then - it seems - it's waiting for Godot. < I never said anything about "mounting tide of revolution," nor did Michael or Ian. It's very simple: without mass protest (notice the word isn't "revolution"), the establishment doesn't provide for the masses. That is, _reform_ isn't possible unless there's some counterpressure to the power of the moneyed interests. It isn't possible unless there's some kind of left mass movement to provide a backbone for the Democrats. Back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the anti-war movement pushed even Nixon to the left, as Michael pointed out. BTW, I think that the mass movement of the right (Rush Limbaugh, the militias, Timothy McVeigh, etc.) provided a similar backbone for the Bushists. In some ways you're right that Bushist ideology is a lot like fascism, though I don't see that f-word as very useful. First, Bushism also _differs_ from classic fascism in important ways (and from Naziism, which was qualitatively different from Mussolini or Franco-fascism). Second, it just encourages hysteria. Jim
