Singh on a tightrope
The Telegraph - Calcutta: Opinion Sunday, May 23, 2004 SINGH ON A TIGHTROPE Can the Congress please its allies and also keep India Inc. happy? Partha Chatterjee The author is director and professor of political science, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta It is no longer fashionable to talk about class. But without taking into account the changing relations between social classes in India in recent times, I believe it is impossible to understand the larger picture behind the recent elections. Until the Eighties, it was widely accepted that the capitalist class in the cities shared power with the dominant land-owning classes in the countryside. Some analysts included the professional and salaried upper-middle class as a third element within this coalition of ruling classes. They shared power within the federal structure of the Indian state - capitalists had more influence over the Central government, the rural landlords over the state governments. They also shared power by virtue of the ability of the ruling Congress party to make complex, and often shifting, alliances between different social groups and classes at local, state and national levels. An important mechanism here was the position of the supreme leader - Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. While individual Congress leaders were often identified with this or that caste group or local interest or business lobby, the supreme leader was like Caesar - standing above all particular interests, representing the party as a whole and, in the days when the Congress was the ruling party, claiming to represent the nation itself. Even though it produced an autocratic decision-making structure within the party and a culture of fawning sycophancy, the Caesarist leadership was crucial for the Congress to play its role as the political body managing the contradictory interests of the three dominant classes and steering their agenda through the treacherous terrain of electoral democracy. This structure fell into crisis after 1989. Since then, the Congress has never secured a majority in parliament. Between 1991 and 1996, it ruled as a minority government. In 1996, it got a mere 140 seats in the Lok Sabha, slipping down even further in 1999. As a party capable of ruling on behalf of the dominant classes, the Congress seemed to have lost all credibility. In 1999, the Bharatiya Janata Party successfully staked its claim to this role by devising a series of alliances. Even though it had only 182 seats, it managed to secure enough allies to command a majority in parliament. But how was it able to hold together and act on behalf of the dominant class coalition? How could it put together a combination of policies that would keep all of them happy? Apparently, there was a sea change in the balance of social forces in India in the Nineties. Manmohan Singh, taking over in 1991 as finance minister of the minority Congress government against the backdrop of an acute foreign exchange crisis, initiated the process of structural reforms of the economy by telling parliament: We have to accept this. There is no alternative. Government controls were gradually removed; the economy was opened up to foreign goods, capital and services. Not all sections of Indian capitalists were initially enthusiastic about foreign competition. But the neo-liberal economic doctrine was now globally ascendant. Buoyed by the rising tide of the new consumer economy, the print and visual media assiduously purveyed the message that rapid growth was the panacea for all social ills: get the annual growth rate to seven or eight per cent and poverty will vanish, inequalities will be reduced, everyone will have a chance to get rich and, who knows, people might even forget to hate their caste or communal rivals. Running a coalition government in the last five years, the BJP settled perfectly into the rhythm of this game. Those in charge of the economic ministries deregulated and privatized with the zeal of revolutionaries. * * * * The question has now begun to be whispered: can a rapid growth rate be sustained in this political climate, or will the capitalist class have to make compromises with farmers and the government-dependent middle class? Sonia Gandhi as prime minister would have been an unsettling reminder of Indira Gandhi's Congress and its soap-opera populism. With Manmohan Singh at the helm, business circles are hoping that somehow he will keep charging ahead, regardless of Laloo Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan or the left. But the Congress refuses to think of life without Caesar. It has made an astounding constitutional innovation by electing Sonia Gandhi as chairperson of its parliamentary party and authorizing her to nominate the leader of the parliamentary party. It sounds as though the prime minister of the country will hold office at the pleasure of Sonia Gandhi who is, of course, formally speaking, just another member of parliament. So the old structure is
the great economic disparity
Also from The conservative web site http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Top of their list of recommended books The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability by William W. Lewis List Price: $28.00 Price: $19.60 6 used new from $14.00 Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Lewis, founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute and former partner at McKinsey Company, offers a detailed look at the local economies in several parts of the world including the U.S., Japan, India and Brazil. Based on the Institute's 12-year survey and analysis, Lewis concludes that the great economic disparity between rich and poor countries will ultimately have a negative impact on all nations. But the review does not suggest how conservative reformists would narrow the great economic disparity between rich and poor countries - perhaps because it arises from the unequal accumulation of capital on a world scale? Or should I buy the book??? Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 3:41 AM Subject: [PEN-L] nasty stuff The conservative web site http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ actually has some interesting stuff.
A rightwing brat pack in Iraq
In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime Managing a $13 Billion Budget With No Experience By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01 BAGHDAD -- It was after nightfall when they finally found their offices at Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace -- 11 jet-lagged, sweaty, idealistic volunteers who had come to help Iraq along the road to democracy. When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop. Occupied Iraq was just as Simone Ledeen had imagined -- ornate mosques, soldiers in formation, sand blowing everywhere, just like on TV. The 28-year-old daughter of neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen and a recently minted MBA, she had arrived on a military transport plane with the others and was eager to get to work. They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis. Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars. But within their group, inside the Green Zone, the four-mile strip surrounded by cement blast walls where Iraq's temporary rulers are based, their seven months at the CPA was the experience of a lifetime. It was defined by long hours, patriotism, friendship, sacrifice and loss. The CPA was designed to be a grand experiment in nation-building, a body of experts who would be Iraq's guide for transforming itself into a model for democracy in the Middle East. Unlike previous reconstruction efforts, it was to be manned by civilians -- advisers on politics, law, medicine, transportation, agronomy and other key areas. They were supposed to be experts, but many of the younger hires who filled the CPA's hallways were longer on enthusiasm than on expertise. L. Paul Bremer, Iraq's top civil administrator, may have been the public face of the CPA, but it is these rank-and-file workers who defined the occupation at the ground level. This account of the budget team's time in Baghdad is drawn from direct observation and interviews with more than three dozen civilian and military members of the occupation government. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48543-2004May22.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Brazil responds to global demand
NY Times, May 23, 2004 Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope By LARRY ROHTER RECIFE, Brazil When Alberty Jos da Silva heard he could make money, lots of money, by selling his kidney, it seemed to him the opportunity of a lifetime. For a desperately ill 48-year-old woman in Brooklyn whose doctors had told her to get a kidney any way she could, it was. At 38, Mr. da Silva, one of 23 children of a prostitute, lives in a slum near the airport here, in a flimsy two-room shack he shares with a sister and nine other people. As a child, I can remember seven of us sharing a single egg, or living for day after day on just a bit of manioc meal with salt, Mr. da Silva said in an interview. He recalled his mother as a woman who sold her flesh to survive. Last year he decided that he would, too. Now, a long scar across his side marks the place where a kidney and a rib were removed in exchange for $6,000, paid by middlemen in an international organ trafficking ring. Among poor men like Mr. da Silva and others who have migrated to slums here from Brazil's parched northeastern backlands, word of the market to sell their organs spread quickly. Some who had done so were already buying houses, businesses, cars and refrigerators. The sums being offered seemed a fortune. The minimum wage here is barely $80 a month, and work is hard to find. Many men struggle to exist on odd jobs that pay barely a dollar a day. Initially, the organ brokers paid as much as $10,000 for a kidney more than a decade's wages. Donors and recipients were not related, in contrast to the usual preference for legal and medical reasons. In fact, they did not even know each other. But they were linked by a trafficking ring that the authorities now say exploited two very different sets of needs for money and for life itself at opposite ends of a tangled chain thousands of miles long. Tracing the journey of Mr. da Silva's kidney through that chain, which spanned four continents and ended in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, reveals the inner workings of a network that human rights groups say is by no means unique. Rather, they say, it is representative of a global black market for organs, including livers, kidneys and lungs, that touches dozens of countries and generates many millions of dollars a year. In Alberty da Silva's case, the authorities here say, the organ's odyssey began with two middlemen based in this gritty port city of 1.5 million people: Gedalya Tauber, a former Israeli police officer, and his partner, Ivan Bonifacio da Silva, a retired Brazilian military police officer. The pair, since jailed on organ trafficking charges, not only handed out cash payments, the authorities say, but also arranged for the medical exams to weed out unqualified donors. They then obtained passports and airline tickets for the donors to travel to South Africa, where the transplants took place. Both countries have laws against commercial trade in organs. Six grand is a lot of money, especially when you don't have any, Mr. da Silva said when asked why he had given up his kidney. No one here warned us that what we were doing was illegal. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Newsday: Iran wanted US to invade?
That is bazaar class, farsi racism and mini imperialist ambitions, which goes to show that the real reasons behind the rise of the mullahs and the iraqi iranian war was a resurrection of the farsi nationalism.Michael Pollak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [If this is true, I think I'm just going to through in the towel anddecide that covert intelligence is an oxymoron. Is there no country witha spy agency who can divine their own long-term interests? Are they allwilling to shipwreck their country just for the chance to say they madesomething happen? Maybe when another spook says you do good work it's asign you've lost your mind.]http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uschal0522,0,340595.story?coll=ny-top-span-headlinesMay 21, 2004NEW YORK NEWSDAYChalabi aide is suspected Iranian spyBY KNUT ROYCEWASHINGTON BUREAUMay 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDTWASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that aU.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been usedfor years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the UnitedStates and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according tointelligence sources."Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States throughChalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Programinformation to provoke the United States into getting rid of SaddamHussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on theDefense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review ofthousands of internal documents.The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed aboutwhat we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and othersensitive information, he said. The program has received millions ofdollars from the U.S. government over several years.An administration official confirmed that "highly classified informationhad been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel."The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month toChalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon'scivilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passedon sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle Eastbranch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence communitythat Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons ofmass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligenceoperation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he said.He described it as "one of the most sophisticated and successfulintelligence operations in history.""I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about hisagency's internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But hesaid some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. "Some of theinformation was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high valuetargets and on force protection issues," he said. "And some of theinformation wasn't so great."At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according toadministration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during araid on Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest.Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of theinformation collection program.The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency'sconclusions said that Karim's "fingerprints are all over it.""There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and theIranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government,inadvertently," he said.The Iraqi National Congress has received about $40 million in U.S. fundsover the past four years, including $33 million from the State Departmentand $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency.In Baghdad after the war, Karim's operation was run out of the fourthfloor of a secure intelligence headquarters building, while theintelligence agency was on the floor above, according to an Iraqi sourcewho knows Karim well.The links between the INC and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992,when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and militaryoperations.Indications that Iran, which fought a bloody war against Iraq during the1980s, was trying to lure the U.S. into action against Saddam Husseinappeared many years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 thatousting Hussein was a national priority.In 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq'snuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bombprogram in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave UN nuclearinspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program.Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed up with Chalabi after his escape.The documents, which referred to results of experiments on
Re: Newsday: Iran wanted US to invade?
That is bazaar class, farsi racism and mini imperialist ambitions, which goes to show that the real reasons behind the rise of the mullahs and the iraqi iranian war was a resurrection of the farsi nationalism. A few meaningless words!Bazaar class? Farsi racism? resurrection of the farsi nationalism? What are these at all? The mullahs in Iran are a continuation of Arabian fundamentalism with other mask. The real reasons behind the iraqi iranian war can be found in Saddam phenomenon rather than the illusory resurrection of the farsi nationalism. MM _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Collective wisdom
NY Times Book Review, May 22, 2004 'The Wisdom of Crowds': Problem Solving Is a Team Sport By SCOTT McLEMEE THE WISDOM OF CROWDS Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations. By James Surowiecki. 296 pp. New York: Doubleday. $24.95. Generations of advertisers and business gurus have banked on the premises of Sigmund Freud's ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,'' a slender volume with a big argument: when people assemble en masse, all the raw material making up the individual psyche (libido, aggression, whatever) is also present, but on a gigantic scale. And the power for rational thought is thereby dwarfed. The crowd is considerably dumber than its smartest members. This explains, for example, Britney Spears, irrational economic exuberance and the occasional episode of public yearning for an authority figure to do the superego's job, whether by seizing state power (the fascist dictator model) or by going on television to say ''You're fired'' (the reality TV version). Freud merely translated the Victorian era's darkest suspicions about democracy into psychoanalytic jargon; the profound irrationality of ''the mass'' was already a cliché in 1921. In ''The Wisdom of Crowds,'' James Surowiecki, who writes a column called The Financial Page for The New Yorker, challenges that received wisdom. He marshals evidence from the social sciences indicating that people in large groups are, in effect, better informed and more rational than any single member might be. The author has a knack for translating the most algebraic of research papers into bright expository prose -- though the swarm of anecdotes at times makes it difficult to follow the progress of his argument. His thesis is that society is able to get along from day to day because people exercise a kind of rationality as a group that allows them (or us, rather) to handle three kinds of problems. Surowiecki defines the first as cognition problems: questions that have ''definitive'' or factual solutions. If you ask a group of people to estimate how many jelly beans are in a jar, for example, the average of their answers is likely to be much more accurate than any given individual's guess. This seems counterintuitive, but there is a considerable body of experimental evidence to support it. Aside from tests involving college sophomores, there are data from ''Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?'' -- where, as Surowiecki puts it, ''random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.'' Slightly less eerie are the accounts of how groups solve questions of coordination -- for example, how pedestrians on a busy sidewalk account for one another's movements well enough to avoid collisions (most of the time, anyway). By the time the author comes to the topic of cooperation, we are not just in the middle of the book but at its core. There is a certain notion of rationality that starts from the assumption that each of us is, in essence, a monad designed to maximize profit and pleasure. Our interactions with one another are, by that light, a means of self-aggrandizement. If you do not kill me for my wallet at the first opportunity, or vice versa, that is because we are afraid of certain consequences we predict might be bad, like being arrested. But research consulted by Surowiecki indicates that we do in fact have prosocial tendencies. Given the chance to cheat, lie and freeload, fewer people do so than one might expect. (I, for one, am relieved.) A socialist might draw some optimistic conclusions from all of this. But Surowiecki's framework is decidedly capitalist. The market is a mechanism for translating ''the wisdom of crowds'' into optimal results, though things would probably improve if business leaders were a little less prone to thinking that, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, ''There is no such thing as society.'' Whether Surowiecki's book will prevent another Enron is very much to be doubted, but his worldview is at least less cynical than Victorian notions that humanity, as a group, is a dumb herd. Scott McLemee is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: NY Review of Books
--- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the New YoIrk Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/), which is considered the premier intellectual print journal outside of academia. [ In the 80s the NYRB shifted to the right, but some say it has shifted back . . . ] . . . In trying to explain the New York Review's alleged shift to the left, [which Louis disputes, for various good reasons, mostly about foreign policy.] No one would argue today that the NYRB is a journal of the left, or that it is as comparatively radical as it once was. What it does have is some diversity of opinion, and a fair number of good articles. Even Louis -- maybe especially Louis -- should like Elizabeth Drew's article in the current issue about how the rudderless Democrats are working hard to blow what many even on the left consider to be an election that (a) they could and should win, and (b) is the most important in a generation. It also publishes Gary Wills a lot. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Domains Claim yours for only $14.70/year http://smallbusiness.promotions.yahoo.com/offer
Re: NY Review of Books
andie nachgeborenen wrote: No one would argue today that the NYRB is a journal of the left, or that it is as comparatively radical as it once was. What it does have is some diversity of opinion, and a fair number of good articles. Even Don't get me wrong. I dispute the Nation Magazine's suggestion that the magazine has become radicalized but I do check in on it regulary on the website and even included on the Marxmail recommended links. It is one of the few places where you can read a truly discursive treatment of some thorny question without concerns about length. In contrast, when the awful Tina Brown took over the New Yorker, the first thing she did was cut the articles down to suit a readership presumed to be weaned on MTV, etc. I absolutely cherish Frederic Crews's items on Freud that have appeared there frequently. I also would highly recommend a review by Bill McKibben that appears in the current issue, which is the first time they've published him as far as I know. McKibben is a New Yorker regular. Both magazines seem shifting back to mainstream Democratic Party values, which in this day and age might appear to the untutored as a kind of molotov cocktail. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Collective wisdom
James Surowieki wrote: Generations of advertisers and business gurus have banked on the premises of Sigmund Freud's ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,'' a slender volume with a big argument: when people assemble en masse, all the raw material making up the individual psyche (libido, aggression, whatever) is also present, but on a gigantic scale. And the power for rational thought is thereby dwarfed. The crowd is considerably dumber than its smartest members. This explains, for example, Britney Spears, irrational economic exuberance and the occasional episode of public yearning for an authority figure to do the superego's job, whether by seizing state power (the fascist dictator model) or by going on television to say ''You're fired'' (the reality TV version). This isn't Freud's argument. The result only occurs in a psychological group. A random collection of individuals put together in a room and asked factual questions has nothing to do with the idea. Ditto for the beans in a jar experiment and the rest of the allegedly refuting evidence. A group that does illustrate the idea is a lynch mob. By the time the author comes to the topic of cooperation, we are not just in the middle of the book but at its core. There is a certain notion of rationality that starts from the assumption that each of us is, in essence, a monad designed to maximize profit and pleasure. Our interactions with one another are, by that light, a means of self-aggrandizement. If you do not kill me for my wallet at the first opportunity, or vice versa, that is because we are afraid of certain consequences we predict might be bad, like being arrested. But research consulted by Surowiecki indicates that we do in fact have prosocial tendencies. Given the chance to cheat, lie and freeload, fewer people do so than one might expect. (I, for one, am relieved.) This is consistent with a Freudian interpretation of the mistaken notion of rationality as pychopathological. The market is a mechanism for translating ''the wisdom of crowds'' into optimal results This isn't true. The mania induced by psychological group formation does periodically dominate financial markets. Even when this isn't so, financial markets can't produce optimal results in this sense because much of the relevant future is unknowable. The actual prices reflect conventional psychopathological ways of denying this fact. Freud at least has the advantage that in his psychology persons aren't treated as lifeless externally related fragments of matter in motion completely determined by imposed laws. The latter ontology, which is the starting point of most of his critics (e.g. the Darwinian human sociobiologists, the mind is a brain is a computer psychologists, the behaviourists, the orthodox psychiatrists etc.), is the product of unmastered hateful sadistic destructiveness. We murder to dissect. On the left, this reappears in the interpretations of Marx as a materialist in this sense and in the immunity of such interpretations to rational refutation by the abundance of textual evidence that contradicts it. Ted
Re: Newsday: Iran wanted US to invade?
Why would Iran want more US bases next door? On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 04:22:19PM +, Mohammad Maljoo wrote: That is bazaar class, farsi racism and mini imperialist ambitions, which goes to show that the real reasons behind the rise of the mullahs and the iraqi iranian war was a resurrection of the farsi nationalism. A few meaningless words!Bazaar class? Farsi racism? resurrection of the farsi nationalism? What are these at all? The mullahs in Iran are a continuation of Arabian fundamentalism with other mask. The real reasons behind the iraqi iranian war can be found in Saddam phenomenon rather than the illusory resurrection of the farsi nationalism. MM _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Collective wisdom
James Surowieki wrote: Generations of advertisers and business gurus have banked on the premises of Sigmund Freud's ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,'' a slender volume with a big argument: when people assemble en masse, all the raw material making up the individual psyche (libido, aggression, whatever) is also present, but on a gigantic scale. And the power for rational thought is thereby dwarfed. The crowd is considerably dumber than its smartest members. This explains, for example, Britney Spears, irrational economic exuberance and the occasional episode of public yearning for an authority figure to do the superego's job, whether by seizing state power (the fascist dictator model) or by going on television to say ''You're fired'' (the reality TV version). Response Jim C: Here we can get into what the bourgeois economists call--and only lightly touch on if at all in most textbooks--social capital (institutions, power structures/relations designed to foster trust, hope, social cohesion, allowable forms of cooperation and values of the dominant class shared on mass levels, etc.) so that under capitalism for example: a) individual forms and levels of competition do not aggregate to socially destructive levels and forms; b) individual propensities--biological and social-- are harnessed and utilized to produce manageable, predictable and optimal forms and levels of behavior--on individual as well as mass levels--from the perspective of expanded reproduction of the essential elements of the whole system and the system itself; c) individuals and groups buy into the system and buy into the notion that anyone can make it in that system with right and requisite values, attitudes and behaviors; d)core values, survival imperatives, myths, traditions, power structures/relations, institutions etc will be seen as natural and inevitable--and superior to any others--rather than products of the historical level of development and specific mode of production dominant in the social formation of a given nation; e) human behavior--individually and collectively--is more manageable, predictable, controllable and changeable from the perspective--and in accordance with interests--of the dominant class; f) the types of values and personality-types necessary for mass markets, profits for power and power for profits, saving, investment, mass consumption, etc (Homo Oeconomicus) on the one hand and yet--and contradictorily--the type of social person who can be counted on--and manipulated--to join-in collective jingoistic nationalism and mass participation in pseudo/anti-democratic processes and institutions; etc.; g) individual and mass acceptance of the notion of the destiny and natural order of global hegemony and dominance by a particular social formation or mode of production; Social formations undergoing socialist transformation and construction, especially when surrounded by other social formations dominated by capitalism or monopoly capitalism or imperialism, especially when integrated into a global economy run on capitalist principles/relations/institutions, especially when relatively poor and having to develop productive forces rapidly to handle myriad accumulated social needs and to be competitive in global markets, will inevitably have to make some concessions to capitalist-based activities and forces--domestic and global--to survive, trade and develop.But such capitalist-based institutions and forces, and their accompanying and requisite social capital, will inevitably constitute subversive and corrosive weeds in the garden of socialist construction; The lamb can only lie down and 'coexist' with the lion if the lion becomes a vegetarian... Within any given social formation, with remnants of old modes of production and embryonic forms of new and emerging modes of production, capitalism and socialism cannot ultimately co-exist.. It is the nature of real socialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, and in order to survive, to seek and attempt to progressively extinguish all remnants (weeds in the garden) of capitalism as they are fundamentally inconsistent with socialist construction, social capital, relations and institutions; similarly, it is the nature--and requirement of expanded reproduction of capitalism as a system and those who run it--to regard all non-capitalist relations, values, institutions and practices as inherently subversive, threatening, contradictory and inimical to capitalism and to seek to subvert and destroy such whenever possible. Markets are not simply [potentially] value-free or purely technical systems/mechanisms for posing and determining the answers to the What How/For Whom questions in the course of price determination, signaling and information, resource allocation, rationing, clearing surpluses and shortages and generalized commodification. They require certain requisite social capital characteristic of capitalism in order to function. The types of individuals or personality
Re: Newsday: Iran wanted US to invade?
and didn't the US say to Saddam let's you and him fight, encouraging Iran Iraq to have a war? Jim D. -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sun 5/23/2004 11:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Newsday: Iran wanted US to invade? Why would Iran want more US bases next door? On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 04:22:19PM +, Mohammad Maljoo wrote: That is bazaar class, farsi racism and mini imperialist ambitions, which goes to show that the real reasons behind the rise of the mullahs and the iraqi iranian war was a resurrection of the farsi nationalism. A few meaningless words!Bazaar class? Farsi racism? resurrection of the farsi nationalism? What are these at all? The mullahs in Iran are a continuation of Arabian fundamentalism with other mask. The real reasons behindthe iraqi iranian war can be found in Saddam phenomenon rather than the illusory resurrection of the farsi nationalism. MM _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: Collective wisdom
In his classical contribution Condorcet (1785) described a committee as a mechanism that eciently aggregates decentralized information. In his famous jury theorem he argues that (i) increasing the number of informed committee members raises the probability that an appropriate decision is made and (ii) the probability of making the appropriate decision will converge to one as the number of committee members goes to infnity. (from http://www.ecb.int/pub/wp/ecbwp256.pdf.) Despite this, my feeling is that the group is always right, except when it isn't. Just as the individual is always right, except when he or she isn't. But for any collective decision, only the democratic body of the collective has any legitimacy. (One problem with this theorem is that the larger the group, the harder it is to come to a decision.) Jim D. -Original Message- From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sun 5/23/2004 9:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: [PEN-L] Collective wisdom NY Times Book Review, May 22, 2004 'The Wisdom of Crowds': Problem Solving Is a Team Sport By SCOTT McLEMEE THE WISDOM OF CROWDS Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations. By James Surowiecki. 296 pp. New York: Doubleday. $24.95. Generations of advertisers and business gurus have banked on the premises of Sigmund Freud's ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,'' a slender volume with a big argument: when people assemble en masse, all the raw material making up the individual psyche (libido, aggression, whatever) is also present, but on a gigantic scale. And the power for rational thought is thereby dwarfed. The crowd is considerably dumber than its smartest members. This explains, for example, Britney Spears, irrational economic exuberance and the occasional episode of public yearning for an authority figure to do the superego's job, whether by seizing state power (the fascist dictator model) or by going on television to say ''You're fired'' (the reality TV version). Freud merely translated the Victorian era's darkest suspicions about democracy into psychoanalytic jargon; the profound irrationality of ''the mass'' was already a clich in 1921. In ''The Wisdom of Crowds,'' James Surowiecki, who writes a column called The Financial Page for The New Yorker, challenges that received wisdom. He marshals evidence from the social sciences indicating that people in large groups are, in effect, better informed and more rational than any single member might be. The author has a knack for translating the most algebraic of research papers into bright expository prose -- though the swarm of anecdotes at times makes it difficult to follow the progress of his argument. His thesis is that society is able to get along from day to day because people exercise a kind of rationality as a group that allows them (or us, rather) to handle three kinds of problems. Surowiecki defines the first as cognition problems: questions that have ''definitive'' or factual solutions. If you ask a group of people to estimate how many jelly beans are in a jar, for example, the average of their answers is likely to be much more accurate than any given individual's guess. This seems counterintuitive, but there is a considerable body of experimental evidence to support it. Aside from tests involving college sophomores, there are data from ''Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?'' -- where, as Surowiecki puts it, ''random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.'' Slightly less eerie are the accounts of how groups solve questions of coordination -- for example, how pedestrians on a busy sidewalk account for one another's movements well enough to avoid collisions (most of the time, anyway). By the time the author comes to the topic of cooperation, we are not just in the middle of the book but at its core. There is a certain notion of rationality that starts from the assumption that each of us is, in essence, a monad designed to maximize profit and pleasure. Our interactions with one another are, by that light, a means of self-aggrandizement. If you do not kill me for my wallet at the first opportunity, or vice versa, that is because we are afraid of certain consequences we predict might be bad, like being arrested. But
Re: Collective wisdom
Jim Devine wrote: In his classical contribution Condorcet (1785) described a committee as a mechanism that eciently aggregates decentralized information. In his famous jury theorem he argues that (i) increasing the number of informed committee members raises the probability that an appropriate decision is made and (ii) the probability of making the appropriate decision will converge to one as the number of committee members goes to infnity. (from http://www.ecb.int/pub/wp/ecbwp256.pdf.) Despite this, my feeling is that the group is always right, except when it isn't. Just as the individual is always right, except when he or she isn't. But for any collective decision, only the democratic body of the collective has any legitimacy. (One problem with this theorem is that the larger the group, the harder it is to come to a decision.) Is Condorcet's theorem true of a group of believers in the certainty that they are soon to be carried off in Rapture? How about the group composed of believers in neoclassical economics? In the case of the latter group, the basis for certainty of belief is described by Roy Weintraub as follows: mathematical (economic) models are rigorous (and 'true' in the only useful scientific sense of the word) if they are built on a cogent axiom base - like von Neumann and Morgenstern, and Debreu. (Weintraub, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science, p. 100) The Arrow-Debreu model was a major accomplishment; it presented an economy composed of individual, self-interested agents - both utility-maximizing households and profit-maximizing firms - pursuing their own self-interest and whose actions produced an equilibrium in which all choices were potentially reconciled. Put briefly, the pursuit of individual self-interest could lead not to social chaos but to a coordinated social order. But how did a piece of work in mathematical economics actually settle an economic question? How did it come to pass that a particular paper, in a journal at that time read by very few economists, came to be accepted as having established a foundational truth about market economics? These are not questions economists typically ask. The theorem proves that ...' is enough information to persuade economists that knowledge associated with the theorem is secure knowledge. Professional economists are confident about the result and the implications of the equilibrium proof, and no one needs to attend to the means of its construction: the validity of the equilibrium proof in incontrovertible. Economists-in-training must learn that the existence of a competitive equilibrium has been proved. All economists can make use of the proof of that result without subjecting it to incessant challenge and reassessment. Scientists take some components of their research as given; intellectual paralysis awaits the scientist who seeks to reopen every foundational issue every day. For most economists the competitive equilibrium proof is a tool to use with little regard to how the tool was constructed. Those who study science use the idea of a 'black box' for settled results that are locked up and impenetrable, and thus closed to current investigation. For every science, black boxes are both healthy and necessary. (p. 184) Ted
Re: New Imperialism and beyond
Of the various reasons given for the likely failure of the new US imperialism the economic analysis is relatively long term and independent of particular politics:- Fourthly, as suggested by world-systems analysis, new imperialist direct rule is too expensive and forceful economic exploitation is an inefficient form of economic appropriation. Imperialist wars and excessive military spending in combination with unhealthy military-Keynesianism -i.e. a policy that utilizes military spending as a counter-cyclical tool against economic recession- increase the federal public debt of the United States. When military spending is combined with taxation policies offering tax-cuts to the rich, whose increased income is not necessarily channeled into growth- creating consumption, and to the costly effects of the ageing population, it is easy to understand that these policies are not economically viable in the middle and long term. However, it is the middle and long term negative development of public and private debt that is believed to expose the US economy to a major corrective adjustment. Moreover, this is in line with the more general downward trend of the US position in the world-economy, as suggested by the WSA. As for the rest of the world being able to punish the USA, I am sceptical that this would be done openly, whatever schadenfreude there may be over USA's problems. I think the objective reason for this is that late finance capitalism is too interdependent to promote national blocs. The subjective reason is that all these government officials are conscientious opportunists by conviction and methodology. In terms of the dollar losing its place and all the benefits of being accepted as world money, I would have thought the most likely path of least resistance would be some sort of accounting device based on a basket of currencies, and a formula for issuing IMF special drawing rights. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2004 3:50 PM Subject: [PEN-L] New Imperialism and beyond (This article contains some interesting insights, but lapses into reformist illusions about old Europe and multilateralism in the conclusion.) New Imperialism and beyond. Why the New Imperialism will fail and unseat the Bush Administration? Petri Minkkinen After the shock of S-11-2001 terrorist attacks the administration of George W. Bush launched a full scale global military operation supposedly to deter and root out international terrorism. Peoples around the world were shaken by the scale and arrogance of the attacks and by the equally arrogant nature of the counter-attack of the Bush administration. Immediately after the terror attacks many began to pose irritating questions and observations on the nature of attacks[1]. It seemed obvious that things were not necessarily as self-evident as supposed by the mainstream media and political pundits. It also became evident that a terror operation of this magnitude required a level of skill, resources and planning no ordinary terrorist organization could have possessed. Therefore some kind of backing by a state level actor was evidently involved. Two possibilities emerged out of this presupposition: either the act was backed and/or ordered by an 'unfriendly' state supporting terrorist activities, or the US government itself was or some 'friendly' states were involved in one way or another. The Bush administration acted on the mixed state-terrorist organization assumption: the attacks were executed by a dangerous and skillful terrorist organization -al-Qaida run and financed by Osama bin Laden- and one or several states hostile to US interests supported the terrorists. There is also another possibility: Bush administration or its ideologues preaching for the US global supremacy knew about these attacks and did not act accordingly to stop them. A more damaging, dangerous and demoralizing version of this alternative -or subversive, if you wish- line of thought is that the government, its ideological backers, some 'friendly' state or some other actors connected to them were more directly involved with these cruel acts. Be it as it may, this is the central question related to the attacks and the world political events following them. The article at hand does not try to resolve this still unanswered question. Interesting as it is, the arguments presented here are independent of this crucial question. They rest upon the assumption that irrespective of the Bush administrations relationship to the attacks proper, the New Right ideologues of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC)[2] and its predecessors had planned for a heavy militarization program and for the maintenance and enhancement of US world supremacy -militarily, if necessary- well before the sad events of S-11-2001. Interestingly enough, in a report published a year before the
The Feminism of Fools
If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, as August Bebel said, and anti-Americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudices (which tend to go hand in hand, due to the stereotypical equation of Arabs with Muslims) today are the feminism of fools. . . . The rest of the posting is at http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/05/feminism-of-fools.html. -- Yoshie * Critical Montages: http://montages.blogspot.com/ * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/
The State of the World
NY Times, May 23, 2004 For Home Sales, Spring Fever By DENNIS HEVESI HOME home buyers are rushing into the market because mortgage rates have inched up by a percentage point since March, brokers throughout the New York region say. For precisely the same reason, they say, other buyers particularly skittish fledglings are cringing from taking the plunge. And at the same time, some sellers who had been holding onto their properties to maximize a seemingly inexorable rise in prices have now made that phone call to a listing agent, suddenly wary that the housing market a reliable piston of the nation's economy even during recent sluggish times might go into a grind should interest rates take too many more upward ticks. As a result, listings have lurched up a bit in the last two months. Or is it just spring? People are affected by sunlight, said Sari Kingsley, president of the Staten Island Board of Realtors. Listings have started to pour in. Then, maybe, it was just the lousy winter we had. From the heights of Manhattan's towers to the capes of the New Jersey coast, the market remains on an inventory-squeezed, high- and higher-priced roll, a boon to sellers (at least until they have to find new digs) and a bane to buyers. One Brooklyn broker says buyers these days seem to move in flocks the same faces showing up at every open house; some people submitting defensive bids for a home not quite of their dreams, then slipping into buyer remorse and sometimes, just sometimes, backing out of the deal. The primary angst for buyers, of course, stems from still-rising prices. The average cost of a Manhattan apartment set a record during the first quarter of this year, coming in just short of $1 million at $998,905. Manhattan's median price of $625,000 also set a record during the first quarter, bounding up 21.4 percent from $515,000 in the first quarter of 2003. In the not-quite-as-rarefied environs along the southern tier of Brooklyn, the median home price during the first quarter of 2004 was $495,000, a 13 percent increase from the same period in 2003. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/realestate/23COV.html NY Times, May 23, 2004 STAVING OFF STARVATION When Real Food Isn't an Option By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. ALL the mukhet bushes near the refugee camps in eastern Chad have been picked clean, the World Food Program warns in its latest appeal on behalf of more than 100,000 Sudanese who have fled fighting in their country and now face starvation. Mukhet berries are poisonous, and must be soaked for days to leach toxins out. After drying, they are ground up, but the flour has little nutritive value. In Haiti's slums, round swirls of dough can be found baking in the sun. They look almost appetizing until you learn the ingredients: butter, salt, water and dirt. In a world where the rich spend millions on ways to avoid carbohydrates and the United Nations declares obesity a global health threat, the cruel reality is that far more people struggle each day just to get enough calories. In Malawi, children stand on the roadsides selling skewers of roasted mice. In Mozambique, when grasshoppers eat the crops, people turn the tables and eat them, calling the fishy-tasting bugs flying shrimp. In Liberia during the 1989 civil war, every animal in the national zoo was devoured but a one-eyed lion. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets of the capital. But all that is, at least, fresh protein. During the siege of Kuito, Angola, in the early 1990's, Carlos Sicato, a World Food Program worker, described a man producing an old chair and promising his family, If we don't die today, we can survive for four more. He soaked its leather for 15 hours to soften it and remove the tanning chemicals. Then, with boiling water, he made lamb soup. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/weekinreview/23mcne.html -- Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Collective wisdom
I am just now getting started on getting caught up on my back reading. Daniel Kahneman's Nobel lecture (American Economic Review, December 2003) is relevant to this article and he distinguishes between two types of mental process: reasoning and intuition. One works on an emotional level; the other on a rational level. The argument of this book that more people can reach a more rational conclusion does not rule out the irrational behavior of crowds. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: The USSR and the economy of politics . . . the politics of economy.
In a message dated 5/17/2004 12:40:53 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In the end, Soviet workers did built socialist housing for themselves, but it was too late. The little girl died some time in the process. Vadim StolzCommentThe Marx standpoint demands that we learn how to pose every question in its historically concrete setting and unravel the social process so that it makes sense in the realm of political economy.The Soviet proletariat and peasantry (agricultural workers) has written the most glorious chapter in the history of the world working class movement. Its victories are monumental, its defeats painful and its errors historical. Marx of course stated that the proletariat would have to fight 50, 100, 200 years of civil wars and international wars to make ourselves fit as ruling class. The Soviet proletariat - as the advanced detachment of the world proletariat, led us through more than half of the Marx prophecy, as it attempted to weld the best and brightest of humanity into a strike force against bourgeois property. The purpose was to free humanity from the unbounded power of exchange of commodities. Human beings should not live to work and produce products - commodities for exchange and profits. Rather a portion of our lives should include contributing to the social welfare of humanity. What the Soviet proletariat accomplished was to build an industrial society without the bourgeois property relation. The bourgeois property relations means more than contributing ones labor to society. What is meant is that ones labor contributed is only accepted if it promises a profit to an individual or section of society. Profit is a bad word . . . surplus is not. I would venture to say that the majority of humanity in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the so-called Middle East, have to this day not attain the high standard of living, scientific and artistic pursuits and happiness created by the Soviets. This elementary truth is not understood by the ideologists. The former citizens of the Soviet Union are discovering this truth as they slowly emerge from one of the most complex class and political struggle in human history. Lenin described this complexity with his characteristic acute insight: "Why do we do these absurd things? The reason is clear: firstly, because ours is a backwards country; secondly, education in our country is at its lowest level; and thirdly because we are receiving no assistance. Not a single civilized state is helping us. On the contrary, they are all working against us. We took over the old state apparatus, and this was unfortunate for us. In 1917, after we captured power, the situation was that the apparatus sabotaged us. This frightened us very much and we pleaded with the state officials: 'Please come back,' They all came back, but this was unfortunate for us." The danger to the communist revolution has many sides. In the historical sense the danger of counterrevolution is rooted in the development of the material power of production or the productive forces. This is an economic relationship involving the state of development of technology, the degree of utilization of human labor, and the magnitude of products - commodities, produced for exchange. In history the danger to the bourgeois revolution and the bourgeoisie as an economic class of property owners, during the transition from agriculture to industry was abated once society achieved a degree ofevolution - a technological regime, that made it impossible to go back to landed property relations and its political _expression_ as feudalism. In the 21st century we should not confuse political feudalism with its economic content as a property relations where the primary form of wealth is in land. What breaks up this societyand recast landed property relations is a transition in the form of wealth from land to gold andthe growth of manufacture, which sets the basis for the universal emergence of exchange as the way of life of society. Here is the political, economic and theory context to understand the "internal danger" that emerged within the Soviet Power during the time of Mr. Lenin and the complexity of the social struggle that led to the collapse of Soviet Power, the dismantling of the Soviet State and finally the overthrow of its socialist property relations in the industrial infrastructure - a mere seventy years later. The danger of restoration of a decaying and dying social order (class) can only be abated and finally overcome, when its economic basis is liquidated by history. Society cannot return to economic or political feudalism because there no longer exists anything - an economic infrastructure of political infrastructure, to go back to. Gone With The Wind. One is of course referring to the question of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a tricky question and I would like to examine its economic content instead of ones conception of political democracy. Mr. Lenin of course makes it
Yahoo! News - Israeli Leader's WWII Analogy Draws Fire
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storycid=514e=5u=/ap/20040523/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians_17 Israeli Leader's WWII Analogy Draws Fire Sun May 23,12:44 PM ET By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI, Associated Press Writer JERUSALEM - Causing an uproar, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Sunday he was reminded of the suffering of his family under Nazi rule when he saw TV images of an Israeli offensive in a Palestinian refugee camp. Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, insisted he was not likening army actions to Nazi policies. However, he said the picture of an elderly woman searching for medication in the rubble of a home razed by Israel in the Rafah camp reminded him of his grandmother. Infuriated Cabinet colleagues said that even if unspoken, the analogy was clear, and demanded he retract his comments. Lapid's remarks added fire to a debate in Israel over its offensive in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites) camp, which is near the border with Egypt. Some critics said the campaign makes little sense from a military point of view, while others questioned why Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) approved it even though he is pushing for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israel has damaged or demolished dozens of homes in Rafah in its six-day offensive, an attempt to root out militants and uncover arms-smuggling tunnels. The practice has been widely criticized around the world and questioned by Israel's attorney general. Early Sunday, four military bulldozers and three tanks moved back into Rafah's Brazil neighborhood, scene of fighting last week. Hundreds of residents fled the area, with some women loading belongings and young children onto donkey carts. Gunfire crackled in the air, and Israeli helicopters flew overhead. Separately, three members of the Hamas militant group were killed Sunday while handling explosives in the West Bank town of Nablus, Palestinian security sources said on condition of anonymity. The men had pulled their car up alongside an abandoned vehicle used to store their explosives, and the storage vehicle blew up while one of the militants was handling materials inside, the sources said, adding it was unclear whether the explosion had been accidental or carried out by Israel. Lapid, of the centrist Shinui Party, called for a halt in the demolitions during a Cabinet discussion Sunday, evoking images of his family's suffering during World War II. I am talking about an old woman on all fours looking for her medicine in the rubble of her home and I thought about my grandmother, he later told Israel Army Radio. Lapid, a native of what is now Yugoslavia, spent part of the war in the Budapest ghetto and lost many relatives, including one grandmother and his father, in the Holocaust. He immigrated to Israel in 1948 when he was 17. Many Israelis have relatives who perished in the Nazi genocide, and using the issue in political debate, however heated, is considered taboo. Any comparisons between the Holocaust and other acts are seen as cheapening the memory of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. Can he make such an analogy just because he is a Holocaust survivor? Health Minister Danny Naveh told Army Radio. The comparison, maybe hinted or even unintentional, between the systematic murder of the Jews by the Germans and the army's operations in Gaza ... is not a legitimate analogy. In the radio interview, Lapid also revealed that the army is considering demolishing some 2,000 homes in Rafah to expand a patrol road between the camp and the border with Egypt. Military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed for the first time that they are exploring plans involving the demolition of 700 to 2,000 homes. We look like monsters in the eyes of the world, Lapid told Israel Radio. This makes me sick. Israeli military officials want to widen the patrol road to make it more difficult for weapons smugglers to dig tunnels. The plan has been criticized by the United Nations (news - web sites), the European Union (news - web sites) and the United States. Israeli officials said Attorney General Meni Mazuz believed the road-widening plan would not hold up in local and international courts, and that he told the army to come up with alternatives that would cause less destruction. In a meeting with Mazuz, military chief Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz proposed offering compensation to Palestinians who lose their homes, officials said. No decision was made on the he proposal. Forty-one Palestinians have been killed since Operation Rainbow began last Tuesday. Israel says its offensive has resulted in the arrest of dozens of militants and the killing of a local leader of the armed group Hamas. The army also said it had discovered one arms-smuggling tunnel. The ongoing violence has put new pressure on Sharon, who wants to withdraw from Gaza. Sharon is exploring the possibility of bringing the moderate Labor Party into his government as he tries to push
[Fwd: Swans' Release: May 24, 2004]
http://www.swans.com/ May 24, 2004 -- In this issue: Note from the Editor: Before you begin accusing the French of once more sticking it to America for awarding the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary, be aware that only one out of nine jurors was French. Four were American and one was British...prompting Moore to facetiously quip, more than half came from the coalition of the willing. Anyway, of late, Americans need not the French to stick it to them. They're doing a good job on their own. To understand why a documentary won the top prize, a rarity at Cannes, suffices to read Frank Rich's superb review, Michael Moore's Candid Camera, in the May 23 edition of The New York Times. Says Rich, Subtleties and fine distinctions are not [Moore's] thing. That matters little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell. Ugliness, as this new issue of Swans shows, is very much a part of the American landscape. Whether the whole Muslim and Judeo-Christian fundamentalist caboodle is doing us in, with their respective apocalyptic policies having Armageddon and Rapture written all over them, is a matter of conjecture; but, posits Milo Clark, Wahabism, an extreme and powerful Islamist sect financed by Saudi petrodollars, may well be the most ruthless of all. That the Bushies have aligned their own interests and those of the USA with these fanatics should be exposed with the greatest urgency, suggests Clark in his well-researched historical analysis. Civilization, a word coined by French physiocratic economist Mirabeau in 1756 (in his treatise, L'Ami des hommes), gives Phil Rockstroh serious pause. How can it be, he muses, with a gut- wrenching picture by Graphic Designer Angela Tyler-Rockstroh, that we in the U.S. have reached this ultimate stage in our development, the Wal-Martization of torture? Is this US destiny, the true nature and heart of America, to use Mr. Bush's words? Michael Doliner, for his part, concludes that we now claim we are fighting to make them into us . . . . [But,] to treat [Iraqis] as insects is to declare that we ourselves are insects. And how can it be that the fossilized left and safe-states strategists spend so much energy demonizing and attacking Ralph Nader? Is this phenomenon also an inherent part of American true nature? Louis Proyect submits a clear analysis of the syndrome. Would energy not be better expended bringing potential voters to cast their lot with the ABB candidate? Have these revolutionaries anything to offer, plain and simple, besides trashing Nader? Instead of shooting at the messenger, could they come up with a positive rationale to vote for their candidate and cease emulating Mr. Bush's us vs. them axiomatic moronity? Is this too much to ask? The news cycle is such that one cannot keep up with it. Just reviewing a few events and people who made the news in the past weeks requires a healthy dose of humor, if only to hide an increasing sense of revulsion at the true nature of this utterly debased culture. Gulags, psychoses, paranoid conspiracies, home-grown terror are some of the issues Manuel García and Richard Macintosh (welcome back, Richard!) address in their respective pieces. Philip Greenspan, once again, brings his observations to the fore in regard to the morale in the military and the causes for mutiny. We leave you with Joel Wendland's review of Rahul Mahajan's Full Spectrum Dominance, and a poem by Gerard Donnelly Smith that sums up how this orgy of violence might be viewed in history. As always, please form your OWN opinion, and let your friends (and foes) know about Swans. * Here are the links to all the pieces: http://www.swans.com/library/art10/mgc128.html Wahabi And Saudi Arabia, Islam And America by Milo Clark http://www.swans.com/library/art10/procks27.html Can We Torture Them For You Retail? by Phil Rockstroh With a Graphic by Angela Tyler-Rockstroh http://www.swans.com/library/art10/mdolin02.html The Terrible Shrug by Michael Doliner http://www.swans.com/library/art10/lproy15.html Behind The Anti-Nader Attacks by Louis Proyect http://www.swans.com/library/art10/ga178.html Recent News, Personalities And Definitions by Gilles d'Aymery http://www.swans.com/library/art10/mgarci14.html American Gulag, And A Dogfight Of Psychoses by Manuel Garcia, Jr. http://www.swans.com/library/art10/rmac21.html Walking Wounded by Richard Macintosh http://www.swans.com/library/art10/pgreen42.html A Cancer In The Military by Philip Greenspan http://www.swans.com/library/art10/joelw03.html Rahul Mahajan's Full Spectrum Dominance Book Review by Joel Wendland http://www.swans.com/library/art10/gsmith18.html Twisted Ascension Poem by Gerard Donnelly Smith http://www.swans.com/library/art10/letter42.html Letters to the Editor # You are receiving this E-mail notification for you have
