NYT Op-Ed: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
[Nice history lesson] URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13SMIT.html February 13, 2004 Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge By JEAN EDWARD SMITH H UNTINGTON, W.Va. In pulling out of the Democratic presidential race, Gen. Wesley Clark ended what was once a promising quest to join the long line of men who converted battlefield prominence into political victory. The military is one of the traditional springboards to the White House: 12 former generals have been president, six of them career military men (only lawyers have done better). Yet no general has ascended to the Oval Office for half a century. So is the demise of the Clark campaign another sign that in the urban, affluent, white-collar America of today the armed forces no longer hold enough respect to sell their best and brightest to the electorate? Probably not. Wesley Clark was never an heir to the tradition of Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant. Rather, his military career and personality fit neatly into a different military category: generals who became political also-rans. First, consider the qualities of the six career generals who won the White House. They were national icons swept into office on a tide of popular enthusiasm. George Washington was a unanimous choice of the Electoral College. Andrew Jackson, victor at New Orleans, led the crusade for democratic reform. William Henry Harrison won enduring fame at the Battle of Tippecanoe, as did Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower led citizen armies to victory in the two greatest wars the nation has faced. In each case, the office sought the man, not vice versa. Yet, surprisingly, these men shared a gift for managing men quietly. Their warm personalities cast a glow over their subordinates. They took their jobs seriously, but not themselves. Eisenhower, Taylor and Grant were ordinary men who did extraordinary jobs. They commanded unobtrusively, did not posture for the press or pronounce on matters of public policy. All were highly intelligent but resisted putting their intelligence on display. Their military dispatches were crisply written in unadorned English. And if given orders they disagreed with, they complied without complaint. Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, rarely wore a uniform. Grant was most at ease in the blouse of a private soldier. The Ike jacket of World War II was designed for comfort, not ceremony. All three identified with the citizen-soldiers they led, and each was adored by the armies they commanded. They worked easily with their superiors and their skill at human relations transferred readily from war to politics. By contrast, famous generals who lost the presidency including Winfield Scott, John C. Frémont, George McClellan, Winfield Scott Hancock, Leonard Wood and Douglas MacArthur ran to prove themselves right. All had clashed with their civilian superiors, and their campaigns imploded for the same reasons that led to those clashes: assertions of intellectual superiority, moral certitude and the lack of a common touch. They were men who made a point of standing apart. They possessed messianic confidence in the correctness of every position they adopted, and had difficulty adjusting to views contrary to their own. To put it simply: they took themselves very seriously. Temperament tells the difference. The also-rans were singular achievers. MacArthur finished first in his class at West Point, McClellan second. MacArthur and Leonard Wood won the Medal of Honor. Frémont mapped the Oregon Trail. Scott, a major general at 27, was the Army's general in chief for two decades. (Only Hancock seems in temperament more like those who won the presidency thus it is not surprising that he came closest to getting the job, losing to James A. Garfield by 7,000 votes in 1880.) Each of the also-rans shared the distinction of having been relieved of his command or placed on the shelf by higher authority. Winfield Scott, after capturing Mexico City and subduing the Mexican army, was summarily relieved by President James Polk in 1848; he suffered a crushing electoral defeat at the hands of Franklin Pierce four years later. Frémont was not only relieved of his command, but court-martialed and convicted for insubordination and mutiny in 1848 (Polk granted him clemency). He became the Republican nominee for president in 1856, losing to James Buchanan. After Lincoln removed McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac, the Young Napoleon became an outspoken critic of Lincoln's conduct of the war and ran against the president in 1864. Winfield Scott Hancock was relieved by Grant as military governor of Louisiana for being too lax in enforcing Reconstruction. Leonard Wood charged up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt in the
Re: Disability
Hi All, Sabri says it well. We would very much appreciate what you think is important to say Michael. I think the most exciting part of the program is how pioneering it is. There are many areas in disability where no one has really said something in a left perspective before. The amount of heat that comes from all sides in the disabled community is an important sign about how much hunger there is for substance in our community. I hope you feel welcomed by us to contribute how the left understands what is happening to the working class. Because I am currently subscribed so I don't receive email I can't reply directly Michael Yates. Rather than give the advertising spam bots more reasons to send spam to me by publishing my address on the list could someone do me a favor and send my email address to Michael Yates? Michael P? Or tell me (Michael's email address) what I can do to communicate off list with Michael Y. thanks, Doyle Saylor
US: pension rules and interest rates
[Federal Register: February 13, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 30)] [Notices] [Page 7265-7266] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr13fe04-128] === --- PENSION BENEFIT GUARANTY CORPORATION Required Interest Rate Assumption For Determining Variable-Rate Premium; Interest Assumptions for Multiemployer Plan Valuations Following Mass Withdrawal AGENCY: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. ACTION: Notice of interest rates and assumptions. --- SUMMARY: This notice informs the public of the interest rates and assumptions to be used under certain Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation regulations. These rates and assumptions are published elsewhere (or can be derived from rates published elsewhere), but are collected and published in this notice for the convenience of the public. Interest rates are also published on the PBGC's Web site (http://www.pbgc.gov). The PBGC notes that the provisions of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 that temporarily increased the required interest rate to be used to determine the PBGC's variable-rate premium to 100% (from 85%) of the annual yield on 30-year Treasury securities expired at the end of 2003. Thus, the required interest rate announced in this notice for plan years beginning in February 2004 has been determined under prior law. Legislation has been proposed that would further change the rules for determining the required interest rate. If such legislation is adopted, and the change affects the required interest rate for plan years beginning in February 2004, the PBGC will promptly publish a Federal Register notice with the new required interest rate and post the change on the PBGC's Web site. DATES: The required interest rate for determining the variable-rate premium under part 4006 applies to premium payment years beginning in February 2004. The interest assumptions for performing multiemployer plan valuations following mass withdrawal under part 4281 apply to valuation dates occurring in March 2004. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Harold J. Ashner, Assistant General Counsel, Office of the General Counsel, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, 1200 K Street, NW., Washington, DC 20005, 202-326-4024. (TTY/TDD users may call the Federal relay service toll-free at 1-800- 877-8339 and ask to be connected to 202-326-4024.) SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Variable-Rate Premiums Section 4006(a)(3)(E)(iii)(II) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and Sec. 4006.4(b)(1) of the PBGC's regulation on Premium Rates (29 CFR part 4006) prescribe use of an assumed interest rate (the ``required interest rate'') in determining a single-employer plan's variable-rate premium. The required interest rate is the ``applicable percentage'' (currently 85 percent) of the annual yield on 30-year Treasury securities for the month preceding the beginning of the plan year for which premiums are being paid (the ``premium payment year''). (Although the Treasury Department has ceased issuing 30-year securities, the Internal Revenue Service announces a surrogate yield figure each month--based on the 30-year Treasury bond maturing in February 2031--which the PBGC uses to determine the required interest rate.) The required interest rate to be used in determining variable-rate premiums for premium payment years beginning in February 2004 is 4.23 percent (i.e., 85 percent of the 4.98 percent yield figure for January 2004). The PBGC notes that the provisions of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 that temporarily increased the required interest rate to be used to determine the PBGC's variable-rate premium to 100% (from 85%) of the annual yield on 30-year Treasury securities expired at the end of 2003. Thus, the required interest rate announced in this notice for plan years beginning in February 2004 has been determined under prior law. Legislation has been proposed that would further change the rules for determining the required interest rate. If such legislation is adopted, and the change affects the required interest rate for plan years beginning in February 2004, the PBGC will promptly publish a Federal Register notice with the new required interest rate and post the change on the PBGC's Web site. The following table lists the required interest rates to be used in determining variable-rate premiums for premium [[Page 7266]] payment years beginning between March 2003 and February 2004. The required For premium payment years beginning in: interest rate is:
Re: NYT Op-Ed: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
This article was interesting, but unlike the other generals, Clark was briefly the head of an hardly heroic mission in the Balkans. Comparison between the efforts of McClellan or MacArthur seems to be a bit exaggerated. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Stephen Roach on worship
[at least he's confessed] http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/latest-digest.html#anchor0 Global: Offshoring Backlash Stephen Roach (New York) It's economics versus politics. The free-trade theory of globalization embraces the cross-border transfer of jobs. Political systems do not - especially as election cycles heat up. That heat is now being turned up in Washington, as incumbent politicians in both parties come face to face with the angst of America's jobless recovery. Jobs could well be the hot button in Campaign 2004. And offshoring - the transfer of high-wage US jobs to the low-wage developing world - could quite conceivably be the most contentious aspect of this debate and one of greatest risk factors for ever-complacent financial markets. Like most economists, I worship at the high altar of free-market competition and the trade liberalization that drives it. But that doesn't mean putting a positive spin on the painful dislocations that trade competition can spawn. Unfortunately, that was the mistake made recently by the Bush administration's chief economist, Gregory Mankiw, in his dismissive assessment of white-collar job losses due to offshoring. Like most economic theories, the optimal outcomes cited by Mankiw pertain to that ever-elusive long run. Over that timeframe, the basic conclusion of the theory of free trade is inarguable: International competition lowers costs and prices, thereby boosting the purchasing power and standard of living of consumers around the world. The practical problem in this case - as it is with most theories - is the concept of the long run. Sure, over a long enough timeframe, things will eventually work out according to this theoretical script. But the key word here is eventually - the stumbling block in presuming that academic theories map neatly into the shorter time horizons of financial markets and politics. Lord Keynes put it best in his 1923 Tract on Monetary Reform, cautioning, In the long run, we're all dead. History, of course, tells us that a lot can happen between now and that ever-elusive long run. That's precisely the risk in the great offshoring debate, in my view. As always, context defines the issues of contention. And in this case, the context is America's jobless recovery - an unprecedented hiring shortfall in the first 26 months of this recovery that has left private nonfarm payrolls fully 8 million workers below the path of the typical hiring upturn. This is where the offshoring debate enters the equation. One of the pillars of trade theory is that wealthy industrial economies like America' s can be broken down into two basic segments of activity - tradables and nontradables. International competition has long been confined to the tradable goods, or manufacturing sector. By contrast, the nontradables sector was largely shielded from tough competitive pressures, thereby providing shelter to the 80% of America's private sector workforce that toil in services. Consequently, as competitive pressures drove down prices in tradable goods, the bulk of the economy and its workforce benefited from the resulting expansion of purchasing power. Advanced, knowledge-based economies thrive on this distinction between tradables and nontradables - manufacturing and services. That critical distinction has now been blurred. In days of yore, it used to be that services had to be delivered in person, on site. Cross-border trade in services was unheard of. Now, courtesy of the Internet, that critical assumption has been turned inside out. There is now real-time connectivity between the knowledge content of offshore white-collar workers and parent companies in the West. That is a truly transforming event - it essentially converts many nontradables into tradables. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it turns out that the private services sector has accounted for 5.3 million jobs of the cyclical shortfall in total private hiring, by our reckoning. That underscores the extraordinary pressures that are now bearing down on what had long been the most powerful element of the Great American Job Machine. Not surprisingly, at the same time, the IT-enabled services export industry has sprung to life in places like India. Meanwhile, US businesses, still operating in a no-pricing-leverage climate, have little choice other than to continue in their unrelenting efforts to take out excess costs. The IT-enabled global labor arbitrage provides high-wage companies in the developed world with a new and very powerful means to execute that option. That means is offshoring. Offshoring is seen as but a bump in the road for theorists like Mankiw. The presumption in this case is that an innovation-led, flexible US economy is able to uncover new sources of job creation that can fill the void left by this cross-border labor arbitrage. Yet that may be a heroic assumption for the foreseeable future. As nontradables become tradable, America's once
Re: Stephen Roach on worship
Mankiw's comments were totally stupid -- at least in a political context. The Wall Street Journal had a brief piece quoting ex-list member, Brad Delong, and Janet Yellen, both of whom were actually supportive of Mankiw. My own intuition is that the momentum for protecting jobs that Roach described will mutate into an anti-Chinese tirade preventing a reasonable discussion of the issues. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
This article was interesting, but unlike the other generals, Clark was briefly the head of an hardly heroic mission in the Balkans. Comparison between the efforts of McClellan or MacArthur seems to be a bit exaggerated. -- Michael Perelman My father, who served in the China/Burma/India theater during World War II ( the infamous 490th Bomb Squadron known as the Burma Bridge busters--94 missions in B-25s against the Japanese fascists; low-level bombing so low they didn't carry parachutes) had an abiding hatred of MacArthur. His own hatred came from MacArthur having appropriated several air transports to take out his personal valuables during the fall of the Philippines--transports that could have been used to save some who wound up on the Batan death march. He also ordered air strikes against gold mines owned by his family that had been played out in order to collect reparations for bomb damages. But in addition to being a malignant narcissist, megalomaniac, manipulator, pathological liar and hypocrite, Mac Arthur had a direct role in the attempted overthrow of FDR in 1934 and attempts to set up a fascist state by members of the Committee For a Sound Dollar and the American Liberty League who attempted to recruit Maj. Gen Smedley D. Butler (three times awarded Medal of Honor, twice given as the first time in 1905 the Medal of Honor was not presented as Butler was ineligible as the medal was not awarded to officers until 1914) who was revered by veterans (they wanted Butler to organize an army of 500,000 veterans from the 1932 bonus marches to act as shock troops to take the white house and hold it) as those same veterans absolutely hated MacArthur for his role in opening fire against the bonus marchers (against the direct orders of Herbert Hoover). See History Channel film The Plot to Overthrow FDR or Jules Archer's The Plot to Seize the White House. Of course MacArthur and his fellow conspirators (J.P. Morgan, John Davis, Al Smith, Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker, Irenee Du Pont et al) were never tried; the plot was exposed by General Butler himself. Jim C.
Re: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
I don't disagree with Jim C. about McArthur, but in the popular mind he was a hero. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
The Punk in Chief:Oh what a tangled web we weave...
Title: Message So now the handlers of L'il George have come up with "dental records" from 1973 supposedly showing he had a dental exam in Alabama. So he managed to get a dental exam in 1973, and didn't need his own personal dentist, but from May to September 1972, didn't manage to get a flight physical, as he was ordered to do, saying his "personal physician" (not a flight surgeon) wasn't available. Interestingly, it was in April of 1972 that random drug testing was instituted, and apparently the "personal physician" of Bush's buddy James R. Bath (then, principal representative of the Bin Laden family in Huston, fellow Guard member in the "Champaigne Squadron" full of politician's kids who went on to be heavily involved in the BCCI scandals and give evidence of longstanding CIA connections) was also not available; all of this when there was a Guard pilot shortage domestically and Bush never went on to return to flight status but instead "worked it out with the Guard" to get out 8 months early to go to Harvard Business School (after being denied entrance to the Univ. of Texas law school for horrible grades from Yale). Here's the story from a previous post entitled "The Punk in Chief" -Original Message- From: Craven, Jim Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 2:41 PM To: Campus Master List; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; Subject: The "Punk in Chief" From: "Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President", by J.H. Hatfield, Soft Skull Press, N.Y. 2001 "Junior lost his deferment from induction into compulsory military service. Four years at Yale had helped him avoid the draft, but now he was suddenly faced with the possibility that he would join the ranks of the other half-million American youth in Vietnam, who were dying at the rate of 350 a week..." During the 1960s, however, many of George W's generation who joined considered it an option to outright evasion of the draft. Overall, National guard members had only a remote chance of ending up in Vietnam. Throughout the war, only 15,000 of the more than 1,000,000 of the Guard and reserves were sent to fight in the Southeast Asian country... Speaking of himself in the third person, Bush later said, ' Yeah, I mean one could argue that he was trying to avoid being the infantryman but my attitude was I'm taking the first opportunity to become a pilot and jumped on that and did my time.'.. Junior told Roland Betts, one of his classmates from Yale, that while he wasn't particularly enthusiatic about enlisting in the Guard, he 'felt that in order not to derail his father's political career he had to be in military service of some kind.'.. In 1968, the national waiting list for Guard slots contained approximately 100,000 names. Although there are no records of how long the Texas waiting lists were at the time, Retired Major General Thomas Bishop, who was the state's adjutant general in the late 60s, stated there were lengthy waiting lists in Texas. ' We were full', he flatly stated. In addition, Dale Pyeatt, associate director of the National Guard Association of Texas, was quoted in the press as stating: 'There were definately waiting lists. There wasn't any question about that.'.. Although pilots were in demand in Vietnam, Tom Hail, a historian for the Texas Air National guard noted that records from the era did not show a pilot shortage in the Guard squadron. Hail, who reviewed the unit's personnel files for a special Guard museum display on Bush's service, stated that his unit had 27 pilots at the time he initiated his application for enlistment. While that number was two short of its authorized strength, the unit had two other pilots who were in training and another waiting a transfer. Hail asserted that there was no need to fast-track applicants... Four months before enlisting, Bush reported to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, a recruiting office near the Yale campus, to take the Air Force Officers Qualification Test. While scoring 25 percent for pilot aptitude on the screening test--'about as low as you could get and still be accepted', according to Retired Colonel Rufus G. Martin, a former Guard personnel officer--and 50 percent for navigator aptitude in his initial enlistment test, Bush scored 95 persent in the 'officer quality' section, compared with the current-day average of 88 percent... His Guard application form asked for 'background qualifications of value to the Air force.' Bush wrote 'None". Another question he had to answer was whether he was interested in an overseas assigment. Bush checked the box that said: 'do not volunteer...' However Staudt [former Guard commander, Retired Brigadier General General Walter "Buck" Staudt] did admit to the "Houston Chronicle" in 1988 that George W's wealthy background 'indirectly' helped him qualify for one of the hard-to-fill officer slots, noting that most young men didn't have the financial 'flexibility that would
military Ricardianism redux
http://www.latimes.com COMMENTARY More Arms Are Not What India and Pakistan Need Washington should delay planned military sales to avoid poisoning delicate peace talks and destabilizing the region. By Selig S. Harrison Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy, is a former South Asia bureau chief for the Washington Post. February 13, 2004 Washington wants to encourage the search for a South Asian peace that was launched by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan at their January summit. But the Bush administration could poison the atmosphere for India-Pakistan talks that start Monday if it goes ahead with imminent plans for major military sales to both countries. President Bush promised Musharraf $1.5 billion in new military aid last June on top of $400 million that had been set aside for military sales to Islamabad after Pakistan signed up as a U.S. ally against Al Qaeda. In the name of bolstering military operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghan border areas, Pakistan is pressing for immediate military deliveries instead of the five-year program envisaged by the White House. But most of the desired hardware - such as 80 attack helicopters, 1,000 armored personnel carriers and two squadrons of F-16 aircraft - would be used on the Indian border, not in Afghanistan. Giving them to Pakistan now would rekindle tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad just when the fragile peace process is getting underway. The United States should freeze military transfers indefinitely to Pakistan and India until domestic political support for a detente is solid enough in both countries to neutralize the tensions that would be touched off by new military aid. This should include a delay in authorizing Israel's pending sale to New Delhi of the Arrow antimissile system, which was developed in cooperation with the United States. Musharraf's domestic political position is shaky in the aftermath of the recent scandal over illicit nuclear deals by Pakistani scientists with North Korea, Iran and Libya, and the sale of the Arrow would strengthen the opponents of detente. In the case of India, Vajpayee is campaigning for a new five-year term in April elections. His opponents would use U.S. military sales to Pakistan to fan fears of Islamabad and rekindle memories of the massive Cold War infusion of U.S. military hardware to earlier military regimes there. The Pentagon spin that U.S. military help for Islamabad would relate only to the war on terror sounds to Indian ears like President Eisenhower's 1954 reassurances that a program of limited U.S. weapons aid to Pakistan would be solely for use against the Soviet Union and China. By 1965, the United States had poured $3.8 billion in military hardware into Pakistan. This encouraged the Pakistani military dictator, Gen. Ayub Khan, to stage cross-border raids in Kashmir that touched off a wider war in which his forces freely used its U.S. planes and tanks. No sooner had India begun to forgive and forget than the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan led to another outpouring of weapons aid to pay off Islamabad for serving as a front-line state. With its new F-16 aircraft and heavy tanks, this second aid package was clearly not intended for use on the mountainous Afghan border but rather to bolster Pakistan's balance of power in plains warfare with India. Still more U.S. weapons channeled through Pakistan to Afghan resistance forces were skimmed off for Pakistani use. In a striking repeat of history, the type of military aid that Pakistan is now seeking has less to do with Afghanistan than India. Islamabad's wish list includes the Predator aerial spy plane used by the United States in Afghanistan, Hawkeye mini-AWACs, AIM-9 missiles and P3 anti-submarine aircraft. In addition to military aid, Bush's promises in June included $1.5 billion in economic assistance. This aid should be provided, but with two conditions: Musharraf's cooperation with the United States in preventing the leakage of nuclear material and weapons to terrorist groups and rogue states - so far refused - and a commitment to negotiate confidence-building measures relating to India-Pakistani nuclear weaponry in the peace talks. India, eight times larger than Pakistan, is much more important to long-term American interests, and the two nations should not be equated in U.S. policy. The Bush administration's January announcement that it plans to expand high-tech cooperation with India, including cooperation in civilian nuclear and space technology, was a welcome recognition of what the White House called a new strategic partnership with New Delhi. On military matters, however, the United States should proceed with caution, especially while peace talks are still at a delicate stage.
Chinese workers strike in Hubei
http://www.china-labour.org.hk/iso/article.adp?article_id=5235 Over 20 workers detained in bloody clash after massive protests continue in Tieshu Textile Group Factory China Labour Bulletin has learned that since 8 February 2004, an estimated 2,000 workers and retired workers from the Tieshu Textile Factory in Suizhou, Hubei Province have been staging further public protests in their ongoing struggle to recover unpaid benefits and against corruption at the factory. CLB has been monitoring and reporting on the case since the end of 2002, when the factory announced its bankruptcy. According to eyewitnesses interviewed by CLB, on 8 February some 1,200 workers blocked the local railway for most of the morning. They were then joined by several hundred more workers. Later that morning, some 800 armed police and regular police from neighboring towns arrived to disperse the protestors and block the arrival of hundreds more who were heading toward the scene. In the violent confrontation that followed, according to eyewitnesses, scores of demonstrators were injured; the police are claiming that over ten police officers and no workers were injured. A staff person at the local hospital has confirmed to CLB that at least one worker and two police officers were admitted with head injuries, including a 65 year-old woman. CLB managed to speak to the daughter of the elderly woman, Wang Xuping, who stated that police had hit her mother over the head from behind with a police baton. According to the interview, the police were randomly hitting the demonstrators regardless of whether or not they were actively resisting the polices attempts to disperse them. As workers left the scene of the confrontation, several among the last of them to leave were apprehended by the police. Further detentions of workers took place that afternoon and during 9, 10 and 11 February. . According to workers interviewed by CLB, the police were rounding up workers arbitrarily from the local streets and markets, and among those taken away were people who had not even been present at the demonstration. We were also informed that several officers of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) who had been present at the confrontation and had verbally reprimanded the police for their brutal treatment of the demonstrators. One PLA officer reportedly has since been taken into police custody on charges of inciting workers to cause trouble. Reports vary as to where the detained workers are being held. Some workers interviewed believed that they were being held in a local hotel for special re- education sessions organized by the local ACFTU, the Womens Federation and the police. Another interview stated that over 20 detainees were being held at the Suizhou No.2 Detention Centre. However, when contacted by CLB, officials from both the ACFTU and the detention centre denied any knowledge of the detainees. Since the initial blocking of the railway line on 8 February and the bloody confrontation with police that followed, some 1,000 workers have continued to gather each day outside the gates of the Suizhou Municipal Government buildings. On 11 February, when the workers attempted to enter the Town Hall to seek dialogue with the local government, another worker leading the demonstration was apprehended. As of 11 February, several hundred protestors were said to be maintaining their vigil outside government buildings. Causes of conflict The 8 February demonstrations were sparked by the Tieshu workers receipt the previous day of an official notification, issued jointly by the factorys Bankruptcy Audit Committee and its Communist Party branch, which reversed a series of earlier pledges that had been made to the workers. According to the notification, only a small proportion of the funds invested by the workers themselves in the factory in 1993 and 1997 would be returned to them. Many of the current workers and those recently retired (from about 1999 onwards) had been encouraged to buy shares in the factory in order to support it financially. It later emerged that the factory director had issued warnings, as early as 1999, to a number of private shareholders and personal friends that the shares were going to fall in value as the factory moved towards bankruptcy. The workers however did not know of the warnings until it was too late and bankruptcy was declared, and in the recent official notification they learned that their 1993 shares were now worth only one fourth of their original value. Second, the Bankruptcy Audit Committee informed the Tieshu workers that two formerly distinct categories of laid-off workers would henceforth be merged and that all existing benefits for both groups were to be withdrawn. Previously, the company had some 3,500 workers who were still classified as employed (despite not actively working) who were supposed to receive some 130 Yuan each month as a living subsidy, while some 835 internally-retired workers received benefits
Re: Stephen Roach on worship
My own intuition is that the momentum for protecting jobs that Roach described will mutate into an anti-Chinese tirade preventing a reasonable discussion of the issues. Spot on, methinks. And the corporate media will happily fuel it. Dan Scanlan
COINTELPRO lives
By Michelle Goldberg Salon.com Full text: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/11/cointelpro/index_np.html Feb. 11, 2004 | The undercover cop introduced herself to the activists from the Colorado Coalition Against the War in Iraq as Chris Hoffman, but her real name was Chris Hurley. Last March, she arrived at a nonviolence training session in Denver, along with another undercover officer, Brad Wanchisen, whom she introduced as her boyfriend. The session, held at the Escuela Tlatelolco, a Denver private school, was organized to prepare activists for a sit-in at the Buckley Air National Guard Base the next day, March 15. Hurley said she wanted to participate. She said she was willing to get arrested for the cause of peace. In fact, she did get arrested. She was just never charged. The activists she protested with wouldn't find out why for months. Chris Hurley was just one of many cops all over the country who went undercover to spy on antiwar protesters last year. Nonviolent antiwar groups in Fresno, Calif., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Albuquerque, N.M., have all been infiltrated or surveilled by undercover police officers. Shortly after the Buckley protest, the Boulder group was infiltrated a second time, by another pair of police posing as an activist couple. Meanwhile, protesters arrested at antiwar demonstrations in New York last spring were extensively questioned about their political associations, and their answers were entered into databases. And last week, a federal prosecutor in Des Moines, Iowa, obtained a subpoena demanding that Drake University turn over records from an antiwar conference called Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home! that the school's chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a civil libertarian legal group, hosted on Nov. 15 of last year, the day before a protest at the Iowa National Guard headquarters. Among the information the government sought was the names of the leaders of the Drake University Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, its records dating back to January of 2002, and the names of everyone who attended the Stop the Occupation! conference. Four antiwar activists also received subpoenas in the investigation. On Tuesday, after a national outcry, the U.S. Attorney's Office canceled the subpoenas. Still, says Bruce Nestor, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild who is serving as the Drake chapter's attorney, We're concerned that some type of investigation is ongoing. In the early 1970s, after the exposure of COINTELPRO, a program of widespread FBI surveillance and sabotage of political dissidents, reforms were put in place to prevent the government from spying on political groups when there was no suspicion of criminal activity. But once again, protesters throughout America are being watched, often by police who are supposed to be investigating terrorism. Civil disobedience, seen during peaceful times as the honorable legacy of heroes like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., is being treated as terrorism's cousin, and the government claims to be justified in infiltrating any meeting where it's even discussed. It's too early to tell if America is entering a repeat of the COINTELPRO era. But Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Law in Manhattan, says, There are certainly enough warning signs out there that we may be. As a new round of protests approaches -- including worldwide antiwar demonstrations on March 20 and massive anti-Bush actions during the Republican National Convention in August and September -- experts say the surveillance is likely to increase. The government is taking an increasingly hostile stance toward protesters, says Michael Avery, president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor of constitutional law at Suffolk University. In the run-up to the Republican Convention, he says, I'm sure the government will be attempting to infiltrate political groups. They may send agent provocateurs into political groups. They're no doubt compiling reports on people. We have to stand up against that. No one knows the extent of the political spying and profiling currently being carried out against critics of the Bush administration and American foreign policy -- which may be the most disturbing thing about the entire phenomenon. Presumably if they're doing their jobs well, we'll never know, says Fogel. Activists have also been unsuccessful at finding out why they're being watched, and under whose authority. What we do know, though, is that several of the police departments that have been accused of spying on protesters -- including the Aurora, Colo., Police Department, where Hurley works -- are part of Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These are programs in which local police are assigned to work full-time with FBI agents and other federal agents to investigate and prevent acts of terrorism, as the FBI's Web site says. According to the FBI, such JTTFs have been around since 1980, but the total number has almost doubled
east coast gig
I'll be performing at Fat Cat Pie Company in Norwalk CT at 9pm on Feb 27 and 28, and at 3pm on the 29th. Cutting a live album. Fat Cat is at 9/11 Wall Street. (!) If you're in the neighborhood, stop by. Dan Cool Hand Uke Scanlan
Rosenstrasse
Rosenstrasse begins at the home of Ruth Weinstein (Jutta Lampe), a sixty year old German Jew, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where she, family and friends are sitting shiva (a Jewish mourning ritual) for her recently deceased husband. Her nonobservant daughter Hannah (Maria Schrader) is not only turned off by the ritual; she is outraged at the cold reception accorded her fiancé Luis, a non-Jew from Nicaragua. When he arrives at the apartment, her mother bristles: What is he doing here? Eventually Hannah discovers the source of her mother's anger from a guest, who knew her from the time she entered the country immediately after WWII. When Ruth was an eight year old in Berlin, her mother had been divorced by her non-Jewish husband, thus making her eligible for internment in a death camp. The Nuremberg racial laws had protected the Jewish spouses in such marriages, but the Aryan partner often succumbed to enormous social pressure to divorce the untermensch, no matter how long they had been married. Such was the case with Ruth Weinstein's husband. Hannah learns that the only thing that saved her mother was that she had stumbled into the arms of Lena Fischer, a German Aryan aristocrat who was standing in front of a detention center where her own Jewish husband and other spouses from mixed marriages were awaiting their final fate. Fischer takes pity on the abandoned child and takes her home to raise her as Helga. Upon this discovery, Hannah goes to Berlin where she looks up the 90 year old Lena Fischer (Doris Schade) who recounts the remarkable story, based on a true incident, of one of the few public protests in Nazi Germany. Not only was it remarkable for being held at all; it was all the more remarkable that it was successful/ In a series of flashbacks, Lena Fischer tells her story to Hannah. We see the young Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann) falling in love with Fabian Israel Fischer (Martin Feifel). The two play classical piano and violin together professionally and seem poised to enjoy fame and fortune in the waning years of the Weimar Republic, even though her aristocratic parents disown her after she decides to marry a Jewish man. Their Berlin is aglitter with interracial night clubs, champagne and cocaine. In a few years, it would be turned into a grim wartime hellhole, with Jews being rounded up like cattle and German men sent off to die on the Eastern Front. Every day the young Ruth joins her adoptive mother on the sidewalk of the detention center where first a dozen or so, and then over a hundred wives congregate to learn word about their detained Jewish husbands. Eventually they begin to draw upon their own inner resources to challenge the guards at the door and the jailers inside. They shout out We want our husbands and refuse to disburse even when machine guns are directed against them. Although the program notes for director Margerethe von Trotta's film does not mention this, any viewer who has kept track of more recent history in Latin America will be reminded of vigils mounted by Mothers of the Disappeared in countries like Mexico or Argentina. In Argentina, over 8,000 men were disappeared by a junta taking its marching orders from the United States. The rock group U-2 dedicated a song to these women: Midnight, our sons and daughters Were cut down and taken from us Hear their heartbeat We hear their heartbeat In the wind we hear their laughter In the rain we see their tears Hear their heartbeat We hear their heartbeat Night hangs like a prisoner Stretched over black and blue Hear their heartbeat We hear their heartbeat In the trees our sons stand naked Through the walls our daughters cry See their tears in the rainfall Margerethe von Trotta has been both an actress and a director. In the first capacity, she was a frequent star of movies directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the late German director whose open homosexuality and hatred for class injustice was reflected in nearly every film he made. Von Trotta began directing in 1977 and has devoted herself to making politically and socially relevant films, including one based on the life of Rosa Luxemburg. In the program notes, she explains what drove her to make this film: I once, perhaps thoughtlessly, announced that by the end of my film career, I wanted to have described the whole of the 20th century. Rosa Luxemburg had already taken me up to 1919. With Jahrestage I had dealt with the periods before and after the war. I portrayed 1968 and the 1970s in Marianne and Julianne: the German Sisters. The Berlin wall years between 1961 and 1989 were the theme of The Pledge. What was missing from my '20th century collection' was a film dealing with Germany's darkest period. But above all that, the resistance of the women of Rosenstrasse was almost unknown until the 1989; it was a forgotten miracle of the courage of the women's convictions. Sixty years after these events it was
Re: military Ricardianism redux - for scholars: a prophetic comment by Karl Marx on destructive forces
As regards military Ricardianism, for those interested in the finer points of scholarship, here's an 1845-46 comment from Karl Marx on the transformation of productive forces into destructive forces. In German, the text is: In der Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte tritt eine Stufe ein, auf welcher Produktionskräfte und Verkehrsmittel hervorgerufen werden, welche unter den bestehenden Verhältnissen nur Unheil anrichten, welche keine Produktionskräfte mehr sind, sondern Destruktionskräfte (Maschinerie und Geld) - und was damit zusammenhängt, daß eine Klasse hervorgerufen wird, welche alle Lasten der Gesellschaft zu tragen hat, ohne ihre Vorteile zu genießen, welche aus der Gesellschaft herausgedrängt, in den entschiedensten Gegensatz zu allen andern Klassen forciert wird; eine Klasse, die die Majorität aller Gesellschaftsmitglieder bildet und von der das Bewußtsein über die Notwendigkeit einer gründlichen Revolution, das kommunistische Bewußtsein, ausgeht, das sich natürlich auch unter den andern Klassen vermöge der Anschauung der Stellung dieser Klasse bilden kann. http://www.ml-werke.de/marxengels/me03_017.htm#I_I_B_3 The English translation of the passage (together with the context preceding it) is: How little highly developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, given even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians, whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come through the ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by Alexander and its consequent decline. Likewise, for instance, glass-painting in the Middle Ages. Only when commerce has become world commerce, and has as its basis large-scale industry, when all nations are drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces assured. (...) Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under protective duties. Big industry universalised competition in spite of these protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc. and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character. It destroyed natural growth in general, as far as this is possible while labour exists, and resolved all natural relationships into money relationships. In the place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed the crafts and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the victory of the commercial town over the countryside. [Its first premise] was the automatic system. [Its development] produced a mass of productive forces, for which private [property] became just as much a fetter as the guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the developing craft. These productive forces received under the system of private property a one-sided development only, and became for the majority destructive forces; moreover, a great multitude of such forces could find no application at all within this system. (...) from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions: (1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer forces of production but forces of destruction (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class. (...) (4) Both for the production on a
Re: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
Michael Perelman wrote: I don't disagree with Jim C. about McArthur, but in the popular mind he was a hero. ? Popular Mind is a vague concept. Most Pacific vets I knew referred to him as Dugout Doug. Carrol
Re: The Punk in Chief:Oh what a tangled web we weave...
Jim C. was correct. McArthur was an arrogant SOB, but he still was considered a great hero of the Pacific -- whether warranted or not. Nobody would be awestruck that Clark overpowered the Serbs from the air. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
I think that the admiration for MacArthur was restricted to the chattering classes, pundits and the like. In Illinois I remember that rich friends of mine really admired him for his political message (along with that of Churchill). They were big friends of Rumsfeld, who was the congresscritter at the time. Jim D. -Original Message- From: Carrol Cox [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Fri 2/13/2004 2:51 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge Michael Perelman wrote: I don't disagree with Jim C. about McArthur, but in the popular mind he was a hero. ? Popular Mind is a vague concept. Most Pacific vets I knew referred to him as Dugout Doug. Carrol
idiocy!
[he starts talking about services, but all of his examples at the end aren't about services but about retail. I remember when this guy was seen as the young genius at Berkeley econ.] February 12, 2004/New York TIMES ECONOMIC SCENE Information Technology May Have Cured Low Service-Sector Productivity By HAL VARIAN PRODUCTIVITY growth took a breather last quarter, slowing to 2.7 percent, after the previous quarter's torrid 9.5 percent growth. Still, by historical standards, 2.7 percent is a respectable number. From 1948 to 1973, productivity grew at close to 3 percent annually, doubling the living standard in that period. Then came the dark age of productivity growth: from 1974 to 1994, it averaged only 1.4 percent a year. From 1995 to 2000, we had something of a productivity renaissance, with growth climbing to more than 2.5 percent a year. When the economy started to slow down in 2000, many economists expected productivity growth to fall back under 2 percent. But contrary to these expectations, productivity has continued to grow strongly. It is difficult to overstate the importance of productivity growth for the long-run health of the economy. Over the years, virtually all economic progress has come from productivity growth. An increase of half a percent a year can make a huge difference over 20 or 30 years. So it's pretty important to understand why productivity growth declined so sharply in the 70's and rebounded so strongly in the 90's. Unfortunately, there is no consensus about why productivity growth slowed in the first place, though there is no shortage of theories. Various factors, including the 1973 oil price shock, the baby boomers' entry into the labor market, an increase in regulation and a slowdown in technological innovation seem to have played a role. But there is an emerging consensus about why productivity growth surged again in the mid-90's: most economists say information technology played a major role. This isn't to say that the productivity renaissance is completely understood. Was the resurgence in productivity growth limited to a few industries, or was it widespread? How long will it continue? How, exactly, has information technology made businesses more efficient? What specific kinds of information technology make a difference? A whole army of economists are digging into these issues, and some interesting findings have begun to emerge. Recently two Brookings Institution economists, Jack E. Triplett and Barry P. Bosworth, have been investigating productivity growth in the services industry and have reached a surprising conclusion: most of the post-1996 growth in productivity has come in services. (A summary of their work is available at http://www.brookings.org/views/articles/bosworth/200309.htm. The numbers in this column are based on their later, unpublished study.) Why is this surprising? Way back in 1967, the noted economist William Baumol diagnosed what has subsequently become known as Baumol's disease. He argued that most services were, by their nature, labor-intensive. Indeed, the perceived quality in service industries often depends on how much labor is involved. No one cares how many workers it takes to build the cars we drive, but the teacher-student ratio is viewed as a critical determinant of the quality of our schools. Or to use one of Mr. Baumol's most striking examples: even after 300 years it still takes four musicians to play a string quartet. As Mr. Baumol pointed out, this is bad news for economic growth. As economies mature, consumption shifts more and more toward services. If productivity growth in services is inherently sluggish, economic growth must inevitably slow. Or at least that's been the conventional wisdom. But the recent evidence compiled by Mr. Triplett and Mr. Bosworth shows that information technology may just be the cure for Baumol's disease. They found that from 1995 to 2001, labor productivity in services grew at a 2.6 percent rate, outpacing the 2.3 percent rate for goods-producing sectors. Furthermore, this phenomenon was widespread: 24 out of the 29 service industries they studied exhibited growth in labor productivity after 1995, and 17 experienced accelerated growth. Interestingly enough, the service industries where overall productivity did not grow were hotels, health, education and entertainment. These are all examples where customers tend to perceive that more labor is associated with higher quality, as Mr. Baumol had originally suggested. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University and others have pointed out that information-technology-producing industries have had a big effect on aggregate productivity growth since they have themselves been extraordinarily productive. Indeed, semiconductor manufacture and the computer and electronics industry lead the pack among manufacturing industries with respect to productivity. But as Mr. Triplett and Mr. Bosworth point out, it's the fact that information technology has become so
Re: Stephen Roach on worship
Roach falls prey to the fallacies that hobble almost all neoclassical economists -- he ignores (a) the static nature of trade/welfare/growth theory, (b) externalities (e.g., the pollution costs of long-distance transport, the lack of environmental protection, worker health and working conditions regulation) (c) the inequalities of economic/political power both between countries and, within countries, between workers and the state/capital (e.g. the suppression of Chinese and Mexican unions, etc.) and (d) the total disregard for the failure of traditional trade theory to include reasonable assumptions rather than utopian ones (such as pure competition, no economies of scale, symetrical and perfect knowledge, yada, yada, yada.) Besides, as a Canadian resident in B.C. where the forest industry is the most important export industry, protectionism by the US has been a dominant force for years now with the soft-wood lumber duties and, more recently, the ban on beef and other meat shipments to the US. As a former Prairie-ite, I am equally enraged by the duties put on our grain exports because of the alleged subsidy involved in the handling of grain by the Canadian Wheat Board -- an allegation that has been made and dismissed by international investigatory bodies 19 or 20 times over the past ten or so years -- but still implemented by the Bush regime. In short, protectionism has always been there to rescue the profits of capital or agribusiness -- Roach is merely concerned because now it might, because of the political pressures of an election year, actually be used to rescue the wages and employment of the working class. Nothing could be more anathama to a neoclassical economist. Paul Phillips Eubulides wrote: [at least he's confessed] http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/latest-digest.html#anchor0 Global: Offshoring Backlash Stephen Roach (New York) It's economics versus politics. The free-trade theory of globalization embraces the cross-border transfer of jobs. Political systems do not - especially as election cycles heat up. That heat is now being turned up in Washington, as incumbent politicians in both parties come face to face with the angst of America's jobless recovery. Jobs could well be the hot button in Campaign 2004. And offshoring - the transfer of high-wage US jobs to the low-wage developing world - could quite conceivably be the most contentious aspect of this debate and one of greatest risk factors for ever-complacent financial markets. Like most economists, I worship at the high altar of free-market competition and the trade liberalization that drives it. But that doesn't mean putting a positive spin on the painful dislocations that trade competition can spawn. Unfortunately, that was the mistake made recently by the Bush administration's chief economist, Gregory Mankiw, in his dismissive assessment of white-collar job losses due to offshoring. Like most economic theories, the optimal outcomes cited by Mankiw pertain to that ever-elusive long run. Over that timeframe, the basic conclusion of the theory of free trade is inarguable: International competition lowers costs and prices, thereby boosting the purchasing power and standard of living of consumers around the world. The practical problem in this case - as it is with most theories - is the concept of the long run. Sure, over a long enough timeframe, things will eventually work out according to this theoretical script. But the key word here is eventually - the stumbling block in presuming that academic theories map neatly into the shorter time horizons of financial markets and politics. Lord Keynes put it best in his 1923 Tract on Monetary Reform, cautioning, In the long run, we're all dead. History, of course, tells us that a lot can happen between now and that ever-elusive long run. That's precisely the risk in the great offshoring debate, in my view. As always, context defines the issues of contention. And in this case, the context is America's jobless recovery - an unprecedented hiring shortfall in the first 26 months of this recovery that has left private nonfarm payrolls fully 8 million workers below the path of the typical hiring upturn. This is where the offshoring debate enters the equation. One of the pillars of trade theory is that wealthy industrial economies like America' s can be broken down into two basic segments of activity - tradables and nontradables. International competition has long been confined to the tradable goods, or manufacturing sector. By contrast, the nontradables sector was largely shielded from tough competitive pressures, thereby providing shelter to the 80% of America's private sector workforce that toil in services. Consequently, as competitive pressures drove down prices in tradable goods, the bulk of the economy and its workforce benefited from the resulting expansion of purchasing power. Advanced, knowledge-based economies thrive on this distinction between
the other Texas Rangers
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1564
A note on a quantitative effect of the outsourcing of the military industry
We can't have it both ways. We can't be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of arms. Former US President Jimmy Carter, presidential campaign, 1976 EXPORT-LED DEVELOPMENT TO OUTSOURCING World military RD is, by far, the largest single research pursuit on earth. Very few researchers however are researching the economics of the military industry itself. During the 1980s, Elisabeth Sköns notes, world military expenditure was 10 times higher than in 1925-1938. In 1989, the USA spent 36% and the USSR 23% of it. Nevertheless, few governments provide regular and comprehensive information about their national arms industry. The US government does not provide any single comprehensive statistical report on the US arms industry, the largest in the world. I think that in real terms world military expenditure is in 2004 back to the same level as 1988 or has exceeded it. SIPRI staff Elisabeth Sköns, Wuyi Omitoogun, Petter Stålenheim, Catalina Perdomo, Eamon Surry, and Natasza Nazet, who crunched the numbers, suggest by their conclusions must be the case. I was interested to look at this, since Elisabeth Sköns notes that since 1989 there was a sharp drop in demand for military equipment. The global stockpile of nuclear warheads peaked in 1986 at 69,490, equal to an explosive yield of 18 billions tons of TNT, three times the explosive force used in all of world war 2. The Pentagon industry claims the defense industry laid off 795,000 American workers between 1992 and 1997. The corporations responded to this with export-led development, involving many offset agreements - incentives provided to foreign countries in exchange for the purchase of military goods and services. The weapons industry experienced production cuts, privatisation, concentration, internationalisation, commercialisation and intensified competition. More and more weapons are now produced for export, with government assistance. It keeps people in jobs, it has a multiplier effect, and it provides national military capacity should the need arise. About $27 billion of weapons are exported, three quarters to Asia and the Middle East. But offset agreements lead to outsourcing as more and more new players acquire the capacity to produce weapons. The biggies in the arms business are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, British Aerospace, GEC, Northop Grumman, Thomson, Thomson CSF, General Dynamics, TRW, and United Technlogies. But Daimler-Chrysler, Mitsubishi, Rolls Royce, Tenix, ADI and Lucent Technologies also produce military equipment. The programs often include agreements to manufacture some or all of the products in the purchasing country. So Turkey, for example, bought 160 F-16s from General Dynamics in 1987 (for delivery through 1994) for about $4 billion, on the condition that most of the planes be built in Turkey. In turn, Israel's military industry won its biggest contract ever, upgrading Turkey's Patton tanks. Thus, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, while the arms trade declined in 1985-1995, it grew in real terms by 36 percent between 1995 and 1997 through export-led development. It is still growing. CONVENTIONAL ARMS The five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China - are responsible for 90% of reported conventional arms exports. The USA, the UK and France make more money from weapons sales to developing countries than they give them in aid. The top 15 countries in terms of military spending account for over four fifths of total world military spending. Such expenditure estimates of course do not reflect the actual stock of world military hardware accumulated over a longer timespan, and the value of that stock. The total number of small arms, ranging from pistols to shoulder-fired rocket launchers, in civilian and military hands around the world rose to 639 million in 2001, and the USA accounts for 220 to 230 million of those (Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, 2002). 8 million more are produced every year. So there's is one firearm for every 10 people on the planet. According to the UN, of 49 major conflicts in the 1990s, 47 were waged with small arms as the weapons of choice. Small arms are responsible for over half a million deaths per year, including 300,000 in armed conflict (war fatalities) and 200,000 more from homicides and suicides. That's one person every minute. This is merely to say that the amount of usable weapons in the world cannot really be expressed in money terms, you have to look at actual quantities of specific weapons. The weapons of mass destruction waffle of the neo-conservative Bushites is just about profits and economics, not about human lives or the actual use of weapons. MEASUREMENT ISSUES SIPRI adopts a definition of world military expenditure data as all current and capital expenditure used on: (a) the armed forces, including peacekeeping forces; (b) defence
Re: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
I recall that Truman described Macarthur's farewell address to Congress as 100% pure bullsh*t, which was probably accurate. Macarthur was a winner and a bastard.. He's even less favourably remembered in Australia --- for most of 1942, most of his land forces were Aussies, and from his office in Melbourne he rode them hard, considering they were overwhelmingly made up of reservists and/or conscripts (the regular army being mostly in the Middle East and in POW camps in Malaya at the time). Even though Australians achieved the first clear land victory in the theatre (at Milne Bay), as soon as Macarthur gained enough US troops he virtually disregarded his non-US land forces (allegedly reluctant to share the glory). regards, Grant. PS
